- Mourning in place Edwidge Danticat, NY Review of Books
- Is working hard good? Jason Brennan, 200-Proof Liberals
- When hard work doesn’t equal productive work Mary Lucia Darst, NOL
- “The actual work of trying to formulate truly alien conceptions of life, consciousness, and thought is mostly yet to be done” Nick Nielsen, GSA
Forthcoming: Reviving the libertarian interstate federalist tradition
One of my papers was accepted for publication in the libertarian journal The Independent Review. Here’s an excerpt:
This essay aims to fill that gap by making four arguments:
1. Prominent classical liberals and libertarians have long recognized the importance of interstate federalism for not only individual liberty but security for liberal polities in the international arena as well.
2. The American federalists of the late 18th century faced the same problems we face, and the distinct interstate order that they patched together to solve those problems is not an outmoded Leviathan; it is the missing piece of the puzzle to the libertarian and classical liberal tradition of interstate federalism.
3. The piecemeal federation of political units under the U.S. constitution would achieve more freedom for more people, and this interstate federalism should be enthusiastically embraced as the foreign policy principle for libertarians and classical liberals.
4. The American Proposal would solve the security (and cost-sharing) dilemma for liberal polities, but it would also contribute to a decline in the worrisome trend of presidential government in the United States.
I gotta give props to the editors and the referees of the journal. I know they didn’t like my argument, but they were fair, helpful, and a whole lotta fun. I’ll have more on this soon. In the mean time, here’s a sneak peak (pdf).
Nightcap
- Schumpeterian enigmas David Glasner, Uneasy Money
- Is John Roberts the new Anthony Kennedy? Damon Root, Reason
- “Economics of Federalism” (pdf) Inman & Rubenfield
- Gray mists & ancient stones Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, New Criterion
Nightcap
- A meditation on suffering Paul Komesaroff, Hedgehog Review
- What art scolds have in common Aeon Skoble, RCL
- Coping with bullshit Richard Gunderman, Law & Liberty
- Paid sick leave and Schelling focal points Rick Weber, NOL
Wats On My Mind: I for one welcome our Venusian overlords
Reading the headlines, this was my thought process, almost exactly. Is xkcd evidence of alien mind probes? Also, “Venus?? I thought they said Venice!”
Nightcap
- Why have we been recycling plastic? Gonzalez & Sullivan, Planet Money
- The literary scene in the Great Depression Ben Terrall, CounterPunch
- Stealing from the Saracens Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times
- The long road to reaction Thomas Meaney, New Statesman
Nightcap
- Hypocrisy, racism, and MBA candidates Natalie Solent, Samizdata
- Naive realism and the pandemic Arnold Kling, askblog
- A brief chat on world government Evan Huus, Grand Unified Empty!
- Portrait of an ordinary Nazi Malcolm Forbes, American Interest
Nightcap
- Another Arab state has recognized Israel Mark Landler, NY Times
- Why can’t Seoul and Tokyo get along? Sung-Yoon Lee, Origins
- Is this how the American Century ends and China’s begins? Tom McTague, Atlantic
- Charles Murray reviews Ross Douthat Claremont Review of Books
Nightcap
- 9/11 + 19: Lessons Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
- Misinformation and foreign policy Scott Sumner, EconLog
- The Hayek question Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
- Why not anarchy? Daniel McCarthy, Modern Age
Nightcap
- On press freedom Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling
- Remembering David Graeber Nicholas Haggerty, Commonweal
- Selling the revolution to Iran’s next generation Suzanne Maloney, WOTR
- How Europeans viewed the Turks Margaret Meserve, TLS
Interpretation is Everything
I’ve got a thing for models. And COVID has meant a lot of cool little models of disease transmission have been coming across my desk. This has been fun for me. But it’s also an intellectual minefield. Models help us tell stories and think through versions of the world that haven’t happened, but could. And they leave us feeling confident that we understand the world we’re operating in.
But it’s worth remembering a key inescapable fact: you always have to use your best judgment. There are no straightforward conclusions you can get for free without taking a risk of being wrong. A model showing that masks are worth it misses knock on effects. That doesn’t mean the model is useless, just that it only captures one part of the world.
Take the humble supply and demand model. We take a couple of lines, add in some other conditions (e.g. taxes, transaction costs, price controls, etc.), do a little algebra, and voila! You’ve got yourself a conclusion: subsidizing a good will result in people buying more (despite the private benefits of those extra units being less than the private costs). If you find some reasonable estimates of the elasticity of supply and demand for a product you can figure out how much impact a subsidy would have. Ceteris paribus.
All models rely on the ceteris paribus assumption in some form. If a model didn’t hold something constant it wouldn’t be a model anymore, it would just be a copy of reality.
In the case of supply and demand we’re rolling pretty much all the interesting things into that all-else-held-equal assumption. Language, history, legal structure, current events, politics, technology, and all the infinite possible interactions between things. Subsidizing face masks in 2019 would have seemed like a mistake, holding constant the state of affairs in 2019. Sure, we could have figured out that there was some sort of positive spill-over for masks even without a pandemic. But we could have also identified any number of other threats competing for scarce resources.
My advice to students: maintain humility. (My advice to non-students: maintain a student mindset.) Economics provides an incredibly powerful set of tools, but it doesn’t make you a god. There’s no getting around the fact that you’ve got to simplify reality to understand it and there’s no fool-proof formula for identifying things that make sense to hold constant in a constantly changing world.
Nightcap
- A murder in outer space? What about the Arctic? Sam Kean, Slate
- Russians, racism, and international relations Lisa Gaufman, Duck of Minerva
- Implicit and structural witchery Bryan Caplan, EconLog
- An anthropology of childhood The Whole Sky
Nightcap
- Gold buggers Nathan Lane, Los Angeles Review of Books
- The fractured land hypothesis (pdf) Koyama et al, NBER
- Territoriality and beyond (pdf) John Gerard Ruggie, Int’l Org
- Revenge of the nation-state Helen Thompson, New Statesman
Nightcap
- Cancel Culture and the discourse of Ad Hoc-ery Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
- Should we admire the Vikings? Rebecca Onion, Slate
- A new theory of Western civilization Judith Shulevitz, Atlantic
- Our brave new remote work world Robin Hanson, Overcoming Bias
A short note on great journalism
I recently linked to an excellent piece on colonial history the other day that I thought was worth your time. Not because it was going to blow you away with facts or knowledge, but because it represented what I think good journalism is.
Now, the fact that good journalism is difficult to find in the Anglo-American press is noteworthy. It’s not that we don’t have great public intellectuals, or even a great media ecology and access to all of the knowledge in the world. We do. It’s that our traditional media institutions have thought of themselves as truth-tellers and centrists since World War II. This conceit has allowed journalists to move steadily to the Left without having to qualm morally about doing so. The problem with Anglo-American journalists is that they think their worldview represents the center of everything.
Notes On Liberty 