Muslim Welcome

Jacques Delacroix History , , ,

Here is a nice little story, I think.

I was once a pretend hippie. It was only “pretend” because my drug consumption was moderate and limited and I never dropped acid. Also, I never dropped out as recommended. I attended graduate school and I even worked quite a bit.

At the end of a work interlude in France from graduate school in the US, I thought I deserved a reward. (I often think I deserve a reward; it does not take much.) I was a big-time free-diver (no SCUBA) for most of my life, not so much for the beauty of it but always in search of something good to eat. I decided to leave gray Paris for a diving vacation in sunny Algeria.

It was only nine years after the end of the bloody war by which Algerians won their independence from France. Practically, the whole French population was gone. There were tensions between the French and the Algerian governments although hundreds of thousands of Algerians were working and living in France. I thought my good manners and my smiling face would get me through any difficulty. Also, I thought that with the French gone, there must have been precious little spear fishing in Algerian waters. I half-believed that big groupers would practically jump at me

I packed my VW bus I had outfitted for camping and I put a small borrowed plastic boat on its roof. My then-future ex-wife (“TFEW”) and I drove to Marseilles where we checked in bus and boat. We spent the night-long crossing of the Med on deck. There was a moving moment in the middle of the crossing when all the portable radios on board suddenly tuned them selves to Arab music from Radio Algiers. The dolphins accompanied our ship into the light blue waters of Algiers Bay.

One thing the Algerians had learned from the French and had not yet forgotten was running a non-corrupt bureaucracy. (I believe corrupt is good, that it expedites bureaucratic processes.) It took hours to clear us because the TFEW had an American passport, something unusual then and there. Clearing the bus and the boat through customs took even more time. By the time we were out of the harbor building, the sun was setting. We did not want to spend the night in some shabby overpriced hotel in the big city so, we drove on out of town in a general eastward direction.

After a couple of hours in deep-darkness, we were on a dirt road climbing some hills which made me admit that it was probably not the main coastal highway. I couldn’t see much with the weak VW headlights and there was a little mist. The torchlight I had packed was not much more useful. I ended up stopping the bus more or less at random. We stepped outside for a leak. There were not house lights, not street lights, and no sound except the song of the cicadas. We figured we might just bed down in the van till morning.

The sun was fairly high in the sky when we woke up. I saw some blue through a window of the bus. I opened the door to take out the equipment necessary for a cup of Nescafé. I discovered we were parked right in the middle of a low farmhouse courtyard. And old man in a djellaba was quietly sitting on a rock outside our door with an earthenware jar of cool water at his side and a basket of figs on his lap. “Bonjour, Salaam” he said pleasantly.

BC’s weekend reads

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. Cairo’s Chinatown
  2. Informational post on Turkish grand strategy
  3. Free speech for me, but not for thee (SPLC edition)
  4. Experts and the gold standard and, really, a big key to continued economic development
  5. A bunch of new earth-like planets have been found. The Long Space Age (peep the dates)

Simple economics I wish more people understood

Bruno Gonçalves Rosi Economics , , , ,

Economics comes from the Greek “οίκος,” meaning “household” and “νęμoμαι,” meaning “manage.” Therefore, in its more basic sense, economy means literally “rule of the house.” It applies to the way one manages the resources one has in their house.

Everyone has access to limited resources. It doesn’t matter if you are rich, poor, or middle class. Even the richest person on Earth has limited resources. Our day has only 24 hours. We only have one body. This body starts to decay very early in our lives. Even with modern medicine, we don’t get to live much more than 100 years.

The key of economics is how well we manage our limited resources. We need to make the best with the little we are given.

For most of human history, we were very poor. We had access to very limited resources, and we were not particularly good at managing them. We became much better in managing resources in the last few centuries. Today we can do much more with much less.

Value is a subjective thing. One thing has value when you think this thing has value. You may value something that I don’t.

We use money to exchange value. Money in and of itself can have no value at all. It doesn’t matter. The key of money is its ability to transmit information: I value this and I don’t value that.

Of course, many things can’t be valued in money. At least for most people. But it doesn’t change the fact that money is a very intelligent way to attribute value to things.

The economy cannot be managed centrally by a government agency. We have access to limited resources. Only we, individually, can judge which resources are more necessary for us in a given moment. Our needs can change suddenly, without notice. You can be saving money for years to buy a house, only to discover you will have to spend this money on a medical treatment. It’s sad. It’s even tragic. But it is true. If the economy is managed centrally, you have to transmit information to this central authority that your plans have changed. But if we have a great number of people changing plans every day, then this central authority will inevitably be loaded. The best judge of how to manage your resources is yourself.

We can become really rich as a society if we attribute responsibility for each person on how we manage our resources. If each one of us manages their resources to the best of their knowledge and abilities, we will have the best resource management possible. We will make the best of the limited resources we have.

Economics has a lot to do with ecology. They share the Greek “οίκος” which, again, means “household.” This planet is our house. The best way to take care of our house is to distribute individual responsibility over individual management of individual pieces of this Earth. No one can possess the whole Earth. But we can take care of tiny pieces we are given responsibility over.

Against Guilt by Historical Association: A Note on MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains”

Zachary Woodman Books, Comments, History, Links , , , , , ,

It’s this summer’s hottest pastime for libertarian-leaning academics: finding examples of bad scholarship in Nancy MacLean’s new book Democracy in Chains. For those out of the loop, MacLean, a history professor at Duke University, argues in her book that Nobel-prize winning public choice economist James Buchanan is part of some Koch-funded vast right-libertarian conspiracy to destroy democracy as inspired by southern racist agrarians and confederates like John Calhoun. This glowing review from NPR should give you a taste of her argument, which often has the air of a bizarre conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, to make these arguments she’s had to cut some huge corners in her federally-funded research. Here’s a round-up of her dishonesty:

  • David Bernstein points out how MacLean’s own sources contradict her claims that libertarian Frank Chodorov disagreed with the ruling in Brown v. Board.
  • Russ Roberts reveals how out-of-context Tyler Cowen was taken by MacLean, misquoting him to attribute to Cowen a view which he was arguing against.
  • David Henderson finds that she did the same thing to Buchanan.
  • Steve Horwitz points out how wildly out-of-context MacLean took a quote from Buchanan on public education.
  • Phil Magness reveals how much MacLean needed to wildly reach to tie Buchanan to southern agrarians with his use of the word “Leviathan.”
  • Phil Magness, again, reveals MacLean needed to do the same thing to tie Buchanan to Calhoun.
  • David Bernstein finds several factual errors about MacLean’s telling of the history of George Mason’s University.

I’m sure there is more to come. But, poor scholarship and complete dishonesty in source citation aside, an important question needs to be asked about all this: even if MacLean didn’t need to reach so far to paint Buchanan in such a negative light, why should we care?

I admittedly haven’t read her book yet (so could be wrong), but from the way even positive reviewers paint it and the way she talks about it herself in interviews (see around 15:30 of that episode), one can infer that she is in no way interested in a nuanced analytical critique of Buchanan’s public choice models or his arguments in favor of constitutional restrictions on democratic majorities. Her argument, if you can call it that, seems to be something like this:

  1. Democracy and majority rule are inherently good.
  2. James Buchanan wants stricter restrictions on democratic majority rule, and so did some Southern racists.
  3. Therefore, James Buchanan is a racist, evil corporate shill.

Even if she didn’t need to establish premise 2, why should we care? Every ideology has elements of it that can be tied to some seedy elements of the past, it doesn’t make the arguments that justify those ideologies wrong. For example, the pro-choice and women’s health movement has its roots in attempts to market birth control to race-based eugenicists (though these links, like MacLean’s attempts, aren’t as insidious as some on the modern right make them out to be), that does not mean modern women’s health advocates are racial eugenicists. Early advocates of the minimum wage argued for wage floors for racist and sexist reasons, yet nobody really thinks (or, at least, should think) modern progressives have dubious racist motives for wanting to raise the minimum wage. The American Economic Association was founded by racist eugenicists in the American Institutionalist school, yet nobody thinks modern economists are racist or that anyone influenced by the institutionalists today is a eugenicist. The Democratic Party used to be the party of the KKK, yet nobody (except the most obnoxious of Republican partisans) thinks that’s at all relevant to the DNC’s modern platform. Heidegger was heavily linked to Nazism and anti-Semitism, but it’s impossible to write off and ignore his philosophical contributions and remain intellectually honest.

Similarly, even if Buchanan did read Calhoun and it got him thinking about constitutional reform, that does not at all mean he agreed with Calhoun on slavery or that modern libertarian-leaning public choice theorists are neo-confederates, and it has even less to do with the merits of Buchanan’s analytical critiques of how real-world democracies function. In fact, as Vincent Geloso has pointed out here at NOL, Buchanan has given modern scholars the analytical tools to critique racism.

Intellectual history is messy and complicated, and can often lead to links we might—with the benefit of historical hindsight—view as situated in an unsavory context. However, as long as those historical lineages have little to no bearing on people’s motivations for making similar arguments or being intellectual inheritors of similar ideological traditions today (which isn’t always the case), there is no relevance to modern discourse other than perhaps idle historical curiosity. These types of attempts to cast guilt upon one’s intellectual opponents through historical association are, at best, another intellectually lazy version of the genetic fallacy (which MacLean also loves to commit when she starts conspiratorially complaining about Koch Brothers funding).

Just tell me if this sounds like a good argument to you:

  1. Historical figure X makes a similar argument Y to what you’re making.
  2. X was a racist and was influenced by some racists.
  3. Therefore, Y is wrong.

If it doesn’t, you’re right, 3 doesn’t follow from 2 (and in MacLean’s case 1 is a stretch).

Please, if you want to criticize someone’s arguments, actually criticize their arguments; don’t rely on a tabloid version of intellectual history to dismiss them, especially when that intellectual history is a bunch of dishonest misquotations and hand-waving associations.

The importance of understanding causal pathways: the case of affirmative action.

Michelangelo Landgrave Liberty , , , , ,

Let us put aside the question of whether affirmative action is a desirable goal. Instead I wish to ponder how to implement affirmative action, given that it will be implemented in some form regardless.

The logic of most affirmative action programs is that X vulnerable community’s outcomes (Y) are significantly below the average. For the sake of example let us say that X is Cherokees and Y is the number of professional baseball players from that ethno-racial group.

Y = f(X) 

A public policy analyst who simply noted the under representation of Cherokees in the MLB, without digging deeper into the causal pathway, may propose that quotas be implemented requiring teams to have a certain share of Cherokee players. Such a proposal would be a bad one. It would be bad because it could lead to privileged Cherokees gaining spots in the MLB at the expense of less privileged individuals from other ethno-racial groups.

A better public policy analysis would note that Cherokees are less likely to enter professional baseball because they are malnourished (Z). This analyst, recognizing the causal pathway, may instead propose a program be implemented to deal with malnourished individuals regardless of their ethno-racial identity.

Y = f(X); X = f(Z) 

Most affirmative action programs that I have come across are of the former type. They recognize that X ethno-racial group is performing poorly in Y outcome, and propose action without acknowledging Z. We need more programs that are designed with Z in mind.

I do not say any of this because I am an upper class white male who resents others receiving affirmative action. To the contrary. I have benefited from this type of affirmative action several times in my life. On paper I am a gold mine for a human resources worker looking to fulfill diversity quotas: I am a undocumented Hispanic of Black-Jewish descent who was raised in a low income household. I am not however vulnerable. I come from a low income household, but my Z is not low. Not really.

Despite my demographic group, I am not malnourished. I could stand to lose weight, but I am not unhealthy. I attended a state university, but my undergraduate education is comparable to that of someone who attended a public ivy. My intelligence is on the right side of the bell curve. Absent affirmative action I am confident I would achieve entry into the middle class.

Nor am I a rarity among beneficiaries. My observation is that many beneficiaries of affirmative action programs are not low on Z and left alone would achieve success on their own. Affirmative action programs are often constructed in such a way that someone low on Z could not navigate their application process. It may seem egalitarian to require applicants to submit course transcripts, to write essays, or present letters of recommendations. However these seemingly simple tasks require a level of Z that the truly under privileged do not have.

Good public policy analysis requires us to understand causal pathway of why X groups do not achieve success at similar rates as other groups. We must design programs that target undernourishment instead of simply targeting Cherokees. If we fail to do so we may have more Cherokees playing for the Dodgers, but will have failed to solve the deeper program.

Note that I say vulnerable as opposed to ‘minority’ in the above passage. This is to acknowledge that many so-called minority groups are nothing of the sort. Hispanics, Blacks, and Asians form majorities in various parts of southwest, south, and the pacific (e.g. Hawaii). Women likewise are not a minority, but are often covered by affirmative action programs. Jews are in many instances minorities, but in contemporary life are far from under represented in society’s top professions. This distinction may seem too obvious to be worth making, but it is not. Both sides of the political spectrum forget that the ultimate goal of affirmative action is to aid vulnerable individuals.  Double emphasize on individuals.

James Buchanan on racism

Vincent Geloso Economics, History , , , , , , ,

McLean

Ever since Nancy MacLean’s new book came out, there have been waves of discussions of the intellectual legacy of James Buchanan – the economist who pioneered public choice theory and won the Nobel in economics in 1986. Most prominent in the book are the inuendos of Buchanan’s racism.  Basically, public choice had a “racist” agenda.  Even Brad DeLong indulged in this criticism of Buchanan by pointing that he talked about race by never talking race, a move which reminds him of Lee Atwater.

The thing is that it is true that Buchanan never talked about race as DeLong himself noted.  Yet, that is not a sign (in any way imaginable) of racism. The fact is that Buchanan actually inspired waves of research regarding the origins of racial discrimination and was intellectually in line with scholars who contributed to this topic.

Protecting Majorities and Minorities from Predation

To see my point in defense of Buchanan here, let me point out that I am French-Canadian. In the history of Canada, strike that, in the history of the province of Quebec where the French-Canadians were the majority group, there was widespread discrimination against the French-Canadians. For all intents and purposes, the French-Canadian society was parallel to the English-Canadian society and certain occupations were de facto barred to the French.  It was not segregation to be sure, but it was largely the result of the fact that the Catholic Church had, by virtue of the 1867 Constitution, monopoly over education. The Church lobbied very hard  in order to protect itself from religious competition and it incited logrolling between politicians in order to win Quebec in the first elections of the Canadian federation. Logrolling and rent-seeking! What can be more public choice? Nonetheless, these tools are used to explain the decades-long regression of French-Canadians and the de facto discrimination against them (disclaimer: I actually researched and wrote a book on this).

Not only that, but when the French-Canadians started to catch-up which in turn fueled a rise in nationalism, the few public choice economists in Quebec (notably the prominent Jean-Luc Migué and the public choice fellow-traveler Albert Breton) were amongst the first to denounce the rise of nationalism and reversed linguistic discrimination (supported by the state) as nothing else than a public narrative aimed at justifying rent-seeking attempts by the nationalists (see here and here for Breton and here and here for Migué). One of these economists, Migué, was actually one of my key formative influence and someone I consider a friend (disclaimer: he wrote a blurb in support of the French edition of my book).

Think about this for a second : the economists of the public choice tradition in Quebec defended both the majority and the minority against politically-motivated abuses. Let me repeat this : public choice tools have been used to explain/criticize attempts by certain groups to rent-seek at the expense of the majority and the minority.

How can you square that with the simplistic approach of MacLean?

Buchanan Inspired Great Research on Discrimination and Racism

If Buchanan didn’t write about race, he did set up the tools to explain and analyze it. As I pointed out above, I consider myself in this tradition as most of my research is geared towards explaining institutions that cause certain groups of individuals to fall behind or pull ahead.  A large share of my conception of institutions and how state action can lead to predatory actions against both minorities and majorities comes from Buchanan himself!  Nevermind that, check out who he inspired who has published in top journals.

For example, take the case of the beautifully written articles of Jennifer Roback who presents racism as rent-seeking. She sets out the theory in an article in Economic Inquiry , after she used a case study of segregated streetcars in the Journal of Economic History. A little later, she consolidated her points in a neat article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. She built an intellectual apparatus using public choice tools to explain the establishment of discrimination against blacks and how it persisted for long.

Consider also one of my personal idols, Robert Higgs who is a public-choice fellow traveler who wrote Competition and Coercion which considers the topic of how blacks converged (very slowly) with whites in hostile institutional environment. Higgs’ treatment of institutions is well in line with public choice tools and elements advanced by Buchanan and Tullock.

The best case though is The Origins and Demise of South African Apartheid by Anton David Lowenberg and William H. Kaempfer. This book explicitly uses a public choice to explain the rise and fall of Apartheid in South Africa.

Contemporaries that Buchanan admired were vehemently anti-racist

Few economists, except maybe economic historians, know of William Harold Hutt. This is unfortunate since Hutt produced one of the deepest and most thoughtful economic criticism of Apartheid in South Africa, The Economics of the Colour Bar.  This book stands tall and while it is not the last word, it generally is the first word on anything related to Apartheid – a segregation policy against the majority that lasted nearly as long as segregation in the South.  This writing, while it earned Hutt respect amongst economists, made him more or less personae non grata in his native South Africa.

Oh, did I mention that Hutt was a public choice economist? In 1971, Hutt published Politically Impossible which has been an underground classic in the public choice tradition. Unfortunately, Hutt did not have the clarity of written expression that Buchanan had and that book has been hard to penetrate.  Nonetheless, the book is well within the broad public choice tradition.  He also wrote an article in the South African Journal of Economics which expanded on a point made by Buchanan and Tullock in the Calculus of Consent. 

Oh, wait, I forgot to mention the best part. Buchanan and Hutt were mutual admirers of one another. Buchanan cited Hutt’s work very often (see here and here) and spoke with admiration of Hutt (see notably this article here by Buchanan and this review of Hutt’s career where Buchanan is discussed briefly).

If MacLean wants to try guilt by (inexistent) association, I should be excused from providing redemption by (existent) association.  Not noting these facts that are easily available shows poor grasp of the historiography and the core intellectual history.

Simply Put

Buchanan inspired a research agenda regarding how states can be used for predatory purposes against minorities and majorities which has produced strong interpretations of racism and discrimination. He also associated with vehement and admirable anti-racists like William H. Hutt and inspired students who took similar positions. I am sure that if I were to assemble a list of all the PhD students of Buchanan, I would find quite a few who delved into the deep topic of racism using public choice tools. I know better and I did not spend three years researching Buchanan’s life. Nancy MacLean has no excuse for these oversights.

BC’s weekend reads

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. “[…] many Chinese people believe it should be the United States, European states, or at least Arab states that resettle Middle Eastern refugees, based on the logic of ‘punishing’ those who caused the problem in the first place.“
  2. ‘It was the biggest explosion I have ever experienced.’
  3. Why Saudi Arabia hates Al-Jazeera
  4. “The money spent on Aboriginal language television programming could have been spent on something else, and that something else would also have created jobs. What is special about Aboriginal language television programming?“
  5. Cool map, bro

The Old Deluder Satan Act: Literacy, Religion, and Prosperity

Kevin Kallmes Culture, Economics, History, Law, Liberty, Religion , , , , , , ,

So, my brother (Keith Kallmes, graduate of the University of Minnesota in economics and history) and I have decided to start podcasting some of our ideas. The topics we hope to discuss range from ancient coinage to modern medical ethics, but with a general background of economic history. I have posted here our first episode, the Old Deluder Satan Act. This early American legislation, passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colonists, displays some of the key values that we posit as causes of New England’s principal role in the Industrial Revolution. The episode: 

We hope you enjoy this 20-minute discussion of the history of literacy, religion, and prosperity, and we are also happy to get feedback, episode suggestions, and further discussion in the comments below. Lastly, we have included links to some of the sources cited in the podcast.

Sources:

The Legacy of Literacy: Continuity and Contradictions in Western Culture, by Harvey Graff

Roman literacy evidence based on inscriptions discussed by Dennis Kehoe and Benjamin Kelly

Mark Koyama’s argument

European literacy rates

The Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution: England, 1500-1912, by Gregory Clark

Abstract of Becker and Woessman’s “Was Weber Wrong?”

New England literacy rates

(Also worth a quick look: the history of English Protestantism, the Puritans, the Green Revolution, and Weber’s influence, as well as an alternative argument for the cause of increased literacy)

Immigration and States’ Rights

Rick Weber Law, Liberty , , ,

Bryan Caplan (arguing the affirmative) and Christopher Wellman recently debated whether immigration is a human right.

Wellman won the debate according to audience votes, but I think his argument was significantly weaker. He made confused arguments that, when given second thought lend credence to Caplan’s position. But through hand waving he transitioned to “and therefore states’ rights!” I am far from convinced that state’s rights are valid, but I do want to explore an interesting issue he raised: the moral weight of collective phenomena.

Markets generate economic information more intelligently than any individual participant. Competition and collaboration in cultural spaces generate more and better art than any individual on their own. Society is the outcome of individual choices, but the collective is something apart from those individuals.

We have various collectives (e.g. cultural regions, markets, local communities, families, national identities, sports fandom, science, etc.), many of which are special. They provide club goods (sometimes club bads), and require the support of their members. These networks exhibit emergent properties–the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

So surely those members should have some say in the management of the collective?

This is where Wellman went off track. Yes, these collectives are important. Yes, they require some form of governance. But that doesn’t unambiguously imply involvement of government.

Consider an excellent example Wellman gives: families. Families are an essential part of the structure of society and one we are each deeply familiar with. If there’s a collective entity with moral weight, surely it’s the family.

Wellman posed the hypothetical around the 32:45 mark: what if he returned home and found that his wife had unilaterally adopted a new child? Clearly this is freedom of association run amok! But the example doesn’t imply the need for state involvement; it implies the need for couples therapy! If he and his wife together decide to adopt, then the question remains, “why should the government have a say in this?” Currently it does, which means that whatever the median voter is cool with is acceptable, even if that means preventing this adoption that clearly doesn’t affect them. That seems untenable unless we have strong evidence that adoptions tend to create large negative spillovers.

The moral weight of a family doesn’t imply either state involvement or democratic decision making. Members can be added to a family through birth or marriage. The decision is made by the one or two individuals most directly involved (perhaps with some role for other family members). And those decisions are made non-coercively. Parents may intervene to prevent teenage Romeos and Juliettes from getting married, but adults are basically allowed to make their own decision.

I’m guessing here, but I’d bet that 90% of people would agree that the way we do freedom of association in families is basically the right way to do things.

Polycentrism!

The scope of a family does not fit neatly into the boxes drawn on a map, nor do most other collective phenomena. Red Sox Nation isn’t just Boston. Regional cultures overlap. Languages cross borders.

We want the collective decision making institutions to reflect the area of spill-overs. Decisions affecting a family should be made within the family. I shouldn’t be directly involved in decisions about how to provide local public services in San Diego. Global spillovers justify global decision making, but local spillovers don’t.

When it comes to immigration, we have to ask:

  1. What collectives will they affect? (certain labor markets, local communities)
  2. Are they likely to create large negative spillovers?
  3. What is the current form of institutions governing those collectives?

There are high stakes for many potential immigrants (especially those coming from places typical Americans are most afraid of), so we should probably go a step further: if there’s a solution to some potential spillover problem that isn’t significantly more costly than immigration restrictions, we should feel obliged to use that solution. For example, it should be easier to come here to live and work than it is to get welfare benefits (although getting that policy to work raises a host of other questions).

Rights imply action

Let’s agree on this: there are collective phenomena that are special. We want to take care of these phenomena which means figuring out the appropriate form of governance for each case.

Wellman gives another family example that blows his own argument out of the water: what if he was put in an arranged marriage? This would deny him important scope for self-determination. And therefore (he argues) states, being important collective phenomena, have a right to self-determination.

How did the audience not notice this?! Immigration restrictions deny me choice over who to voluntarily associate with and so deny me scope for self-determination.

Even if it feels weird from a rational-individualist perspective, there is something special about (e.g.) a country. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon methodological individualism. We know that only individuals make choices, even if they make those choices for the sake of collectives. A collective can have moral weight but still lack the ability to choose. To my mind, this kills the idea of states’ rights (as in “right to do x” or “right to self-determination”) in general.

What we’re left with is the original question: how do we manage the collective? What decisions do we make collectively, and what do we decide piecemeal?

For many (most?) collectives, including the most important ones, we allow freedom of (dis)association and leave the state out of it. Wellman did not answer the question of “why should immigration be different?” I suspect there are strong arguments to be made, but the closest I heard in this debate is that we can think of this as a question of governance, and that government sometimes provides governance.

As Wellman points out (around the 30:00 mark) there is (sometimes) a tension between rules favoring individual freedom and rules requiring collective decision making. There are plenty of examples of scenarios where we uncontroversially prefer to limit some individual rights–we do this automatically with negative rights by denying you the freedom to murder in support of your right to life.

It’s not clear to me that the expected effects of immigrants are widespread enough to justify as sweeping a policy as “only the following people are allowed in these particular thousands of square miles.” For immigration (but not access to the welfare state), the presumption of liberty seems the way to go.

tl;dr: We have various collective goods that are special (e.g. the “character” of a community). This calls for some form of governance to allow the individuals directly involved to manage collective goods. This frequently calls for constraints on individual freedoms for the benefit of the community, but that doesn’t mean that the special collective identity of a country justifies a presumption of closed borders.

The debate over whether the nation state is violating human rights by restricting immigration (with caveats made for “obviously” reasonable restrictions like keeping out known murderers) is not closed by pointing out that there is a collective good associated with the nation state. States can be special without having states’ rights.

A Right is Not an Obligation

Ash Navabi Liberty, Philosophy , , ,

Precision of language in matters of science is important. Speaking recently with some fellow libertarians, we got into an argument about the nature of rights. My position: A right does not obligate anyone to do anything. Their position: Rights are the same thing as obligations.

My response: But if a right is the same thing as an obligation, why use two different words? Doesn’t it make more sense to distinguish them?

So here are the definitions I’m working with. A right is what is “just” or “moral”, as those words are normally defined. I have a right to choose which restaurant I want to eat at.

An obligation is what one is compelled to do by a third party. I am obligated to sell my car to Alice at a previously agreed on a price or else Bob will come and take my car away from me using any means necessary.

Let’s think through an example. Under a strict interpretation of libertarianism, a mother with a starving child does not have the right to steal bread from a baker. But if she does steal the bread, then what? Do the libertarian police instantly swoop down from Heaven and give the baker his bread back?

Consider the baker. The baker indeed does have a right to keep his bread. But he is no under no obligation to get his bread back should it get stolen. The baker could take pity on the mother and let her go. Or he could calculate the cost of having one loaf stolen is low to expend resources to try to get it back.

Let’s analyze now the bedrock of libertarianism, the nonaggression principle (NAP). There are several formulations. Here’s one: “no one has a right to initiate force against someone else’s person or property.” Here’s a more detailed version, from Walter Block: “It shall be legal for anyone to do anything he wants, provided only that he not initiate (or threaten) violence against the person or legitimately owned property of another.”

A natural question to ask is, what happens if someone does violate the NAP? One common answer is that the victim of the aggression then has a right to use force to defend himself. But note again, the right does not imply an obligation. Just because someone initiates force against you, does not obligate you or anyone else to respond. Pacifism is consistent with libertarianism.

Consider another example. Due to a strange series of coincidences, you find yourself lost in the woods in the middle of a winter storm. You come across an unoccupied cabin that’s obviously used as a summer vacation home. You break in, and help yourself to some canned beans and shelter, and wait out the storm before going for help.

Did you have a right to break into the cabin? Under some strict interpretations of libertarianism, no. But even if this is true, all it means is that the owners of the cabin have the right, but not obligation, to use force to seek damages from you after the fact. (They also had the right to fortify their cabin in such a way that you would have been prevented from ever entering.) But they may never exercise that right; you could ask for forgiveness and they might grant it.

Furthermore, under a pacifist anarchocapitalist order, the owners might not even use force when seeking compensation. They might just ask politely; and if they don’t like your excuses, they’ll simply leave a negative review with a private credit agency (making harder for you to get loans, jobs, etc.).

The nonaggression principle, insofar as it is strictly about rights (and not obligations), is about justice. It is not about compelling people to do anything. Hence, I propose a new formulation of the NAP: using force to defend yourself from initiations of force can be consistent with justice.

This formulation makes clear that using force is a choice. Initiating force does not obligate anyone to do anything. “Excessive force” may be a possibile injustice.

In short, justice does not require force.

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Paradoxical Geniuses: “Let us burn the ships”

Kevin Kallmes Culture, History, Liberty , , , ,

In 1519, Hernán Cortés landed 500 men in 11 ships on the coast of the Yucatan, knowing that he was openly disobeying the governor of Cuba and that he was facing unknown numbers of potential enemies in an unknown situation. Regardless of the moral implications, what happened next was strategically extraordinary: he and his men formed a local alliance, and despite having to beat a desperate retreat on La Noche Triste, they conquered the second largest empire in the New World. As the expeditionary force landed, Cortés made a tactically irrational decision: he scuttled all but one of his ships. In doing so, he hamstrung his own maneuverability, scouting, and communication and supply lines, but he gained one incredible advantage: the complete commitment of his men to the mission, for as Cortés himself said, “If we are going home, we are going in our foes’ ships.” This strategic choice highlights the difference between logic and economists’ concept of “rationality,” in that illogical destruction of one’s own powerful and expensive tools creates a credible commitment that can overcome a serious problem in warfare, that of desertion or cowardice. While Cortés certainly increased the risk to his own life and that of his men, the powerful psychology of being trapped by necessity brought out the very best of the fighting spirit in his men, leading to his dramatic victory.

This episode is certainly not unique in the history of warfare, and was not only enacted by leaders as a method of ensuring commitment, but actually underlay the seemingly crazy (or at least overly risky) cultural practices of several ancient groups. The pervasiveness of these psychological strategies shows that, whether each case was because of a genius decision or an accident of history, they conferred a substantial advantage to their practitioners. (If you are interested in how rational choices are revealed in the history of warfare, please also feel free to read about hostage exchanges and ransoming practices from an earlier blog!) I have collected some of the most interesting examples that I know of, but the following is certainly not an exhaustive list and I encourage other episodes to be mentioned in the comments:

  • Julian the Apostate
    • Julian the Apostate is most famous for his attempt to reverse Constantine the Great’s Christianization of the Roman Empire, but he was also an ambitious general whose audacity gained him an incredible victory over Germanic invaders against steep odds. He wanted to reverse the stagnation of Roman interests on the Eastern front, where the Sasanian empire had been challenging the Roman army since the mid-3rd century. Having gathered an overwhelming force, he marched to the Euphrates river, took ships from there to the Sasanian capital, while the Sasanians used slash-and-burn tactics to slow his advance. When Julian found the capital (Ctesiphon) undefended, he worried that his men would want to loot the capital and return homeward, continuing the status quo of raiding and retreating. To prevent this, in a move much like that of Cortés, he set fire to his ships and forced his men to press on. In his case, this did not end with stunning victory; Julian overextended his front, was killed, and lost the campaign. Julian’s death shows the very real risks involved in this bold strategy.
  • Julius Caesar
    • Julian may have taken his cue from a vaunted Roman historical figure. Dramatized perfectly by HBO, the great Roman general and statesman Julius Caesar made huge gamble by taking on the might of the Roman Senate. Despite being heavily outnumbered (over 2 to 1 on foot and as much as 5 to 1 in cavalry), Caesar committed to a decisive battle against his rival Pompey in Greece. While Pompey’s troops had the option of retreating, Caesar relied on the fact that his legionaries had their backs to the Mediterranean, effectively trapping them and giving them no opportunity to rout. While Caesar also tactically out-thought Pompey (he used cunning deployment of reserves to stymie a cavalry charge and break Pompey’s left flank), the key to his victory was that Pompey’s numerically superior force ran first; Pompey met his grisly end shortly thereafter in Egypt, and Caesar went on to gain power over all of Rome.
  • Teutones
    • The impact of the Teutones on the Roman cultural memory proved so enduring that Teutonic is used today to refer to Germanic peoples, despite the fact that the Teutones themselves were of unknown linguistic origin (they could very well have been Celtic). The Teutones and their allies, the Cimbri, smashed Roman armies which were better trained and equipped multiple times in a row; later Roman authors said they were possessed by the Furor Teutonicus, as they seemed to posses an irrational lack of fear, never fleeing before the enemy. Like many Celtic and Germanic peoples of Northern Europe, the Teutones exhibited a peculiar cultural practice to give an incentive to their men in battle: all of the tribe’s women, children, and supplies were drawn up on wagons behind the men before battles, where the women would take up axes to kill any man who attempted to flee. In doing so, they solved the collective action problem which plagued ancient armies in which a few men running could quickly turn into a rout. If you ran, not only would you die, but your wife and children would as well, and this psychological edge allowed a roving tribe to place the powerful Roman empire in jeopardy for a decade.
  • The Persian emperors
    • The earliest recorded example of paradoxical risk as a battle custom is the Persian imperial practice of bringing the women, children, and treasure of the emperor and noble families to the war-camp. This seems like a needless and reckless risk, as it would turn a defeat into a disaster in the loss of family and fortune. However, this case is comparable to that of the Teutones, in that it demonstrated the credible commitment of the emperor and nobles to victory, and used this raising of the stakes to incentivize bravery. While the Persians did conquer much of the known world under the nearly mythical leadership of Cyrus the Great, this strategy backfired for the last Achaemenid Persian emperor: when Darius III confronted Alexander the Great at Issus, Alexander’s crack hypaspist troops routed Darius’ flank as well as Darius himself! The imperial family and a great hoard of silver fell into Alexander’s hands, and he would go on to conquer the entirety of the Persian empire.

These examples show the diversity of cultural and personal illustrations of the rational choice theory and psychological warfare that typified some of the most successful military leaders and societies. As the Roman military writer Vegetius stated, “an adversary is more hurt by desertion than slaughter.” Creating unity of purpose is by no means an easy task, and balancing the threat of death by frontline combat with the threat of death during a rout was a problem that plagued leaders from the earliest recorded histories forward (in ancient Greek battles, there were few casualties on the line of battle and the majority of casualties took place during flight from the battlefield. This made the game theoretical choice for each soldier an interesting balance of possibly dying on the line but living if ONLY he ran away, but having a much higher risk of death if a critical mass of troops ran away–perhaps this will be fodder for a future post?). This was a salient and even vital issue for leaders to overcome, and despite the high risks that led to the fall of both Julian and Darius, forcing credible commitment to battle is a fascinating strategy with good historical support for its success. The modern implications of credible commitment problems range from wedding rings to climate accords, but very few modern practices utilize the “illogical rationality” of intentional destruction of secondary options. I continue to wonder what genius, or what society, will come up with a novel application of this concept, and I look forward to seeing the results.

P.S.–thanks to Keith Kallmes for the idea for this article and for helping to write it. Truly, it is his economic background that leads to many of these historical questions about rational choice and human ingenuity in the face of adversity.

Adam Smith: a historical historical detective?

Nick Cowen Books, History , , , ,

9781107491700

Adrian Blau at King’s College London has an on-going project of making methods in political theory more useful, transparent and instructive, especially for students interested in historical scholarship.

I found his methods lecture, that he gave to Master’s students and went onto publish as ‘History of political thought as detective work’, particularly helpful for formulating my approach to political theory. The advantage of Blau’s advice is that it avoids pairing technique with theory. You can be a Marxist, a Straussian, a contextualist, anything or nothing, and still apply Blau’s technique.

Blau suggests that we adopt the persona of a detective when trying to understand the meaning of historical texts. That is, we should acknowledge

  • uncertainty associated with our claims
  • that facts of the matter will almost certainly be under-determined by the available evidence
  • that conflicting evidence probably exists for any interesting question
  • that interpreting any piece of evidence through any exclusive theoretical lens is likely to lead us to error

To make more compelling inferences in the face of these challenges, we can use techniques of triangulation (using independent sources of evidence together). This could include arguing for an interpretation of a thinker’s argument based on a close reading of their text, while showing that other people in the thinker’s social milieu deployed language in a similar way (contextual), and also showing how helpful that argument was for achieving a political end that was salient in that time and place (motivation).

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Is the U-curve of US income inequality that pronounced?

Vincent Geloso Economics , , , , , , , , ,

For some time now, I have been skeptical of the narrative that has emerged regarding income inequality in the West in general and in the US in particular. That narrative, which I label UCN for U-Curve Narrative, simply asserts that inequality fell from a high level in the 1910s down to a trough in the 1970s and then back up to levels comparable to those in the 1910s.

To be sure, I do believe that inequality fell and rose over the 20th century.  Very few people will disagree with this contention. Like many others I question how “big” is the increase since the 1970s (the low point of the U-Curve). However, unlike many others, I also question how big the fall actually was. Basically, I do think that there is a sound case for saying that inequality rose modestly since the 1970s for reasons that are a mixed bag of good and bad (see here and here), but I also think that the case that inequality did not fall as much as believed up to the 1970s is a strong one.

The reasons for this position of mine relates to my passion for cliometrics. The quantitative illustration of the past is a crucial task. However, data is only as good as the questions it seek to answer. If I wonder whether or not feudal institutions (like seigneurial tenure in Canada) hindered economic development and I only look at farm incomes, then I might be capturing a good part of the story but since farm income is not total income, I am missing a part of it. Had I asked whether or not feudal institutions hindered farm productivity, then the data would have been more relevant.

Same thing for income inequality I argue in this new working paper (with Phil Magness, John Moore and Phil Schlosser) which is a basically a list of criticisms of the the Piketty-Saez income inequality series.

For the United States, income inequality measures pre-1960s generally rely on tax-reporting data. From the get-go, one has to recognize that this sort of system (since it is taxes) does not promote “honest” reporting. What is less well known is that tax compliance enforcement was very lax pre-1943 and highly sensitive to the wide variations in tax rates and personal exemption during the period. Basically, the chances that you will report honestly your income at a top marginal rate of 79% is lower than had that rate been at 25%. Since the rates did vary from the high-70s at the end of the Great War to the mid-20s in the 1920s and back up during the Depression, that implies a lot of volatility in the quality of reporting. As such, the evolution measured by tax data will capture tax-rate-induced variations in reported income (especially in the pre-withholding era when there existed numerous large loopholes and tax-sheltered income vehicles).  The shift from high to low taxes in the 1910s and 1920s would have implied a larger than actual change in inequality while the the shift from low to high taxes in the 1930s would have implied the reverse. Correcting for the artificial changes caused by tax rate changes would, by definition, flatten the evolution of inequality – which is what we find in our paper.

However, we go farther than that. Using the state of Wisconsin which had a tax system with more stringent compliance rules for the state income tax while also having lower and much more stable tax rates, we find different levels and trends of income inequality than with the IRS data (a point which me and Phil Magness expanded on here). This alone should fuel skepticism.

Nonetheless, this is not the sum of our criticisms. We also find that the denominator frequently used to arrive at the share of income going to top earners is too low and that the justification used for that denominator is the result of a mathematical error (see pages 10-12 in our paper).

Finally, we point out that there is a large accounting problem. Before 1943, the IRS provided the Statistics of Income based on net income. After 1943, there shift between definitions of adjusted gross income. As such, the two series are not comparable and need to be adjusted to be linked. Piketty and Saez, when they calculated their own adjustment methods, made seemingly reasonable assumptions (mostly that the rich took the lion’s share of deductions). However, when we searched and found evidence of how deductions were distributed, they did not match the assumptions of Piketty and Saez. The actual evidence regarding deductions suggest that lower income brackets had large deductions and this diminishes the adjustment needed to harmonize the two series.

Taken together, our corrections yield systematically lower and flatter estimates of inequality which do not contradict the idea that inequality fell during the first half of the 20th century (see image below). However, our corrections suggest that the UCN is incorrect and that there might be more of small bowl (I call it the Paella-bowl curve of inequality, but my co-authors prefer the J-curve idea).

InequalityPikettySaez.png

Highly recommended work on Ayn Rand

Edwin van de Haar Books, Philosophy , ,

Most scholarship on Ayn Rand has been of mediocre quality, according to Gregory Salmieri, the co-editor of A Companion to Ayn Rand, which is part of the series “Blackwell Companions to Philosophy.” The other co-editor of the volume is the late Allan Gotthelf, who died during it’s last preparatory stages.

The reasons for the poor scholarship are diverse. Of course Rand herself is a large element. She hardly ever participated in regular academic procedures, did not tolerate normal academic criticism on her work and strictly limited the number of people who could authoritatively ‘explain’ her Objectivist philosophy to herself and Nathaniel Branden. Before her death she appointed Leonard Peikoff as ‘literary heir’. She inspired fierce combat against the outside world among her closest followers, especially when others wrote about Rand in a way not to their liking. The result was that just a small circle of admirers wrote about her ideas, often in a non-critical way.

blog ayn rand

On the other hand, the ‘rest of the academy’ basically ignored her views, despite her continued popularity (especially in the US), her influence, particularly through her novels, and large sales, especially after the economic crisis of 2008. For sure, Objectivists remain a minority both inside and outside academia. Yet despite the strong disagreement with her ideas, it would still be normal to expect regular academic output by non-Randians on her work. Suffice it to point to the many obscure thinkers who have been elevated to the academic mainstream over the centuries. Yet Rand remains in the academic dark, the bias against her work is strong and influential. This said, there is a slight change visible. Some major presses have published books on Rand in the past years, with as prime examples the books by Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009), and Anne C Heller, Ayn Rand and the World She Made (2010). And this volume is another point in case.

One of the strong points of The Blackwell Companion on Ayn Rand is that the contributions meet all regular academic standards, despite the fact that the volume originates from the Randian inner circle. It offers proper explanation and analysis of her ideas and normal engagement with outside criticism. The little direct attack on interpretations or alleged errors of others is left to the end notes, albeit sometimes extensively. Let us say, in friendly fashion, that it proves hard to get rid of old habits!

It should not detract from the extensive, detailed, clearly written and plainly good quality of the 18 chapters in this companion, divided in 8 parts, covering overall context, ethics and human nature, society, the foundations of Objectivism, philosophers and their effects, art and a coda on the hallmarks of Objectivism. The only disadvantage is the large number of references to her two main novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which makes some acquaintance with these tomes almost prerequisite for a great learning experience. Still, as a non-Randian doing work on her political ideas, I underline that this companion offers academically sound information and analysis about the full range of Rand’s ideas. So, go read it if you are interested in this fascinating thinker.