Links and a Spooky Song for Sunday, October the 28th

Since it's halloween in a few days, here's a slightly darker song. But it's still very nice!


-Andre Picard on how the government has stood up for the interests of the beef industry rather than consumers.

-Josh Barro on the lunacy of Gary Johnson.

-The Des Moines Register has an interview with Obama that he didn't originally want released. Here's a summary: Obama is perfectly willing to bullshit about biofuels, he has a more-or-less plausible defence of his economic policies but he's focusing too much on the deficit, he understands the dynamics of Republican opposition but he's still interested in "bipartisanship", and he doesn't mention drones.

-Speaking of which...

Have a happy Halloween!

Links and A Nice Song for Sunday, October the 21st

Here's a song from a band that's called Feel Alright, so of course, it's very nice:



-Mike Moffatt brings in some hard data to correct stereotypes about economists being right-wingers and not caring about the environment.

-Dean Baker on how to improve quality of life in the United States, given that productivity and growth are very poorly understood.

-Lindsay Beyerstein on Reddit, creepshots, and anonymity.

-Jonathan Bernstein on how Romney's lie about Libya during the debate illustrates the broader problems of the Republican media bubble.

-David S. Bernstein points out that the "binders full of women" remark wasn't just bizarre sounding, it was also based on a lie. That isn't huge news, but it says something that "binders full of women" has become an internet meme indepently of concerns about truthfulness―when Romney lies about basic facts, it's totally unremarkable.

-Irin Carmon catches up with the woman who asked about pay equity, who helpfully clarifies that she is not a feminist(‽)

-Matt Yglesias digs into Romney on women in the workplace.

-Dan Gardner on world hunger and why we shouldn't let ourselves be driven to pessimism.

-Dan Arnold snarks about Liberal Leadership Gossip

Have a wonderful week everyone!

Links and a Nice Song for Sunday, October the 14th

Here's some legitimately nice new music. Well, maybe it's nice: I don't listen to lyrics.



-Yglesias fights the good fight on protecting kids from lead―even though they only have confusing and terrible jobs to look forward to.

-Jonathan Bernstein on what Conor Friedersdorf doesn't get about politics, as well as some caveats

-Dani Rodrik reminds everyone that you might want democracy, sovereignty, and globalization, but you only get to pick two

-The Hulk on the death of cinema.

-Amelia Lester has a nice write-up about Julia Gillard's evisceration of Tony Abbott

-Martin Wolf on how "fiscal famine and monetary necrophilia" screwed up interwar Britain, and it'll screw up Spain. If that sounds like hyperbole, it's just a poetic way of saying "austerity and deflation", which will screw up a country up.

-Adam Serwer drops some real talk about the Libyan embassy attacks.

-Jon Chait teases out the implications of the Republican advantage in the House.



Good luck with the week ahead, everybody!

More Like The Ignobel's, Am I Right?

I have to write a paper for school, so I might have to postpone writing more about socialism—you'll have to find fascinating, thought-provoking content somewhere else. I'll post the paper, which is about Milton Friedman's view on corporate social responsibility, if people are interested.

But I did want to comment quickly on some really stupid sounding news: the European Union has won the Nobel Peace Prize, which apparently was "announced to audible gasps from a roomful of journalists in Oslo".

So the EU is totally terrible and doesn't live up to a lot of basic democratic and technocratic expectations. In particular, the European Central Bank seems actively hostile to both democracy and technical expertise. And the future of the Eurozone is tenuous, to put it mildly.

On the face of it, giving the EU the Nobel is totally ridiculous and makes no sense, much like rewarding Obama with the Nobel peace prize made no sense.

But the charitable interpretation of Obama's Nobel was not they were trying to reward Obama; everyone knows he didn't deserve it. They were trying to influence Obama to promote peace, and to influence American voters by showing their distaste for the ostensibly more bellicose Republicans.

Obama did however, deserve his Grammy, and even though he's too old to play serious basketball, he has hustle.

In the same way, I think the Nobel committee may be trying to push Europeans to renew their commitments to European unification, and that's a very good idea. It's true that the EU isn't an ideal institution, and adopting a common currency for reasons of political symbolism, rather than economic utility, has really exploded in everyone's faces.

But it's easy to forget, when you're here in North America, that we're currently experiencing the longest period of peace along the Rhine since the beginning of the Roman Empire. Europeans are brutal barbarians, and unification has tempered that. And the possibility of EU membership was a really effective carrot to get candidate countries to improve their governance. I don't think it's crazy for the Nobel committee to remind everyone of that.

That's not to say it'll work. I'm not sure anyone would argue that Obama's Nobel achieved anything, either in influencing American opinion-makers or the Obama administration to be less bloodthirsty.

But even if the Nobel committee is completely wrong about the EU, and I don't think that's clear, it's worth understanding their actions.And we don't interpret people charitably just because it's a nice thing to do; charity is what makes understanding possible.

Or maybe the Nobel committee just decides these things by throwing darts at Newsweek covers. That would explain some things too.

"Young man, you have the bravery of a hero and breath as fresh as a summer ham."

Update: Dylan Matthews wrote about the advantages of  European integration with much more detail over at wonkblog.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Socialism

Lately I've been trying to break out of my political bubble and expose myself to views other than those of technocratic, center-left, American bloggers. A good friend recommended Jacobin, a new academic-ish radical journal. It's a kind of Dissent for our generation.

It's exactly what I needed to break out of that bubble, and the latest issue has been spinning around in my head for the past few days, especially this provocative and disorienting essay by James Livingston, a historian at Rutgers.

Livingston thinks the transition from capitalism to socialism will be a gradual change, rather than an upheaval―like the transition from feudalism to capitalism―and he enlists a lot of heavy hitters to make that point, citing Gramsci and Capital: Volume III, a tremendous advantage, given that no one has ever read Capital: Volume III. Specifically, he brings in Gramsci to argue that revolution is a matter of cultural hegemony, rather than seizing state power. And he brings in Marx to argue that modern capitalism, in the form of publicly traded limited liability corporations, is fundamentally different from the capitalism that came before. There's some other junk too about patents and the internet, but I'll have more to say about all of this later.

Most importantly, Livingston is willing to look for socialism in unintuitive places like the U.S. Military and the writings of Irving Kristol because he think that socialism is hiding in plain sight.

Aside from the fact that Livingston is being deliberately provocative, there's one major weakness in Livingston's essay: Livingston thinks that "socialism is our desire" because it's always out of reach, and calling yourself a socialist allows you to categorically reject any ethic of responsibility.

To say you're a socialist is to place yourself at the margin, beyond the pale, on the run, off the reservation, or at sea: you're a mariner, a renegade, a castaway, you march to a different drummer, you're above all a dissenter from the political mainstream.

I can't tell if this is mockery or not; I'd guess that it is not. But counter-culture thinking is a bit like religious fundamentalism, it's hard to tell if it's a joke.

"Why do we want socialism?" strikes me as a strange question. I'm not particularly interested in dismissing socialists as holy fools; A more charitable assumption is that socialists want socialism because they think that it is good and right, regardless of the scowls of anti-humanist Marxists.

Luckily, there's a substantial literature on what is good and right, and Joseph Heath wrote a very good paper on how, and why, both Habermas and the Analytical Marxists have tried to provide Marxism with ethical foundations. I like this paper a lot, so get ready for a long quote!

Purists who denounce analytical Marxists for “selling out” the faith in their move toward liberal egalitarianism have generally failed to consider the possibility that Rawls might have already “sold out” liberalism, by accepting the Marxian critique of early modern social contract theory. The original Marxist objection to social contract theory is that it provided only formal equality in the public sphere, in a way that masked the substantive inequality that was systematically reproduced through the institutional structures of the private sphere, such as the economy, or the family, or the educational system. The standard Marxist strategy of social critique was therefore to take any given social institution and analyze it in terms of its distributive consequences. (Thus, for example, “Marxist feminism” analyzed patriarchy in terms of the exploitation generated by the gendered division of labour.) Rawls however starts out A Theory of Justice by essentially accepting the Marxist analysis of social institutions, arguing that every system of cooperation generates both a common interest (in ensuring that each does better than he or she could do acting alone) and a conflict of interest (because the parties are not indifferent as to how the benefits of cooperation are distributed). If one thinks of "cooperation” in Rawls's view as a correlate of “social labour” in classical Marxism, it is easy to see the parallel. Every social institution, according to this analysis, is going to contain a set of rules that (implicitly or explicitly) determine, not only how much is to be produced, but who gets what portion of the social product. As a result, with Rawls's framework, every institution in the “basic structure” of society can be criticized from the standpoint of distributive justice.

Here we see many of the same contradictions as in Livingstone's essay. It isn't totally clear where bourgeois individualism ends, and where socialist emancipation begins.

There's much more to Heath's essay, but suffice it to say that focusing on the specifically moral deficiencies of capitalism leads to an indictment of inequality, rather than a bald declaration that the abolition of the market is historically inevitable.

And if the abolition of the market is not historically inevitable, it can be evaluated, and we may have reasons to keep markets around.

I think an account of morality makes Livingston's ideas more plausible and coherent, but this kind of account raises the question of whether we're still talking about socialism, i.e: worker's control of the means of production.

I'll try to have an update soonish with an answer, including a scintillating history of central banking.

You can Bank On It.

Bide your time with my hilarious great ape tumblr!

Private Healthcare: What's the Point?

I'm pretty late to the scene, but Shouldice Hospital in Thornhill, is being purchased by Centric Health Corp. The usual suspects are unhappy, but Andre Picard is taking his traditional stance, scorning the guardians of Canada's healthcare system for their sanctimony, and looking down at them from his calm, collected, nonpartisan perch at Canada's newspaper of record.

Picard is right that opponents of private healthcare use somewhat catastrophic rhetoric about private healthcare delivery. Our cherished public health insurance is precisely that: insurance. Canadian healthcare doesn't follow the Beveridge Model common to the UK and Scandinavia, where doctors work directly for the government. We only receive health insurance through the government, the single-payer for healthcare. The really egregious horror stories from the  States center around private insurance, rather than private delivery. The American system of private health insurance really is a clusterfuck―at least until 2014― and Canadians are right to reject it.

A private company running a hospital isn't worth losing your shit over on quite the same level.But Picard is wrong to dismiss concerns about who owns the Shouldice Hospital.

Much of the furor surrounding the sale of the Shouldice depends on the fact that Centric Health Crop. is publically traded, although it isn't immediately clear what's troubling about that, given that the Shouldice is already a for-profit institution.

Keep on hustling for that paper

The hospital wouldn't necessarily change under the ownership of a public company; it isn't exactly true that a public company is required to maximize profit, anymore than a privately held, for-profit company is required to maximize profit. But I do think there's a risk of physicians' professional ethic weakening, and being replaced by an ethic of profit maximization, as Atul Gawande described in his New Yorker piece on the galloping price of care in McAllen, Texas. If you don't want to trudge through thousands of words of the New Yorker, take a quick look at this asshole's website: he's an anesthesiologist and the C.E.O. of a doctor-owned for-profit hospital. I wouldn't want this guy putting me under.

That's not because the miasma of capitalism leads to surgical complications, it's because a doctor-patient relationship is just about the worst information asymmetry imaginable, and a doctor's professionalism is the only thing stopping her from robbing you, or any insurer.

The differences between publicly traded, privately held, and non-profit organizations is less stark than political rhetoric might suggest, but it makes sense to organize healthcare differently than public companies, and it makes sense for healthcare professionals to speak a different language than for-profit companies. It shows a commitment to rejecting profit-maximization. And that commitment is meaningful and important. When an ethical system dies out, it can be very hard to revive it, and regulation can't replace it, given that a doctor will always understand specific situations better than any regulator, and can game regulations as easily as a patient.

So there are definite downsides to allowing an expansion of private medicine, and I've yet to hear any plausible benefit. Conservatives often confuse markets with private ownership, but profits won't sprinkle magic private-sector fairy dust on an institution, and private ownership won't make healthcare markets less messy. So I've gotta ask: what the hell is the point?

At best, the real action in improving outcomes and lowering costs is orthogonal to debates about private versus public care.

Still, public insurance is more important than public delivery, so if you take one lesson from this blog post, it should be that it's fucking insane that public health insurance doesn't cover prescriptions. You kind of need those sometimes.

President Evil

Jill! This nailery is dangerous!

Henry Wiencek's article on the horrors of Monticello really shocked me (h/t Lindsay Beyerstein); I didn't realize the extent to which southern slavery intersected with industrial, and even financial, capitalism. Jefferson's slaves worked in his―very profitable―nail factory, and he used his slaves as collateral for loans. That is to say, he produced nails using brutal violence, and he borrowed money using brutal violence. I have no illusions about the treatment of household slaves in the antebellum South, but the sheer scale of human suffering at Monticello is sickening.

I never understood why Yankee abolitionists focused on how slavery affects the slaveholder, rather than focusing on the injustice of slavery. I figured that even abolitionists were relying on an impoverished morality, because they still failed to recognize blacks as full human beings―and I still think that's true. But it's hard to read about Monticello without the visceral feeling that Jefferson was an evil man, especially in light of Washington's example.

Did Jefferson's experiences of industry and finance, on the backs of slaves, influence his agrarian fantasies? I always figured that it was the other way around: first, a desire for the life of a landed gentleman, along with a distaste for modern capitalism, and a subsequent acceptance of slavery. But the combination of slavery and capitalism sullies both.

Cognitive Illusions and the Study of Philosophy

I recently read Predictably Irrational and the Upside of Irrationality, two books by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist. They're both worth reading, and I enjoyed the bits of autobiography—Ariely was disfigured in a fireworks accident as a young man and he writes compellingly and insightfully about his rehabilitation and about how his injuries have affected his life and his work.

Ariely's academic work is similar to that of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in behavioral economics. Kahneman's recently published Thinking, Fast and Slow, which was excellent. Both of their experiments typically illustrate how human thinking and behavior deviate from the "homo economicus" of Econ 101. And more disturbingly, some of their experiments show that we sometimes deviate from any standard of reasonableness.

You prefer your ideas to other people's ideas, right? That makes sense. But one of Ariely's experiments suggests that you don't like your ideas because they fit your worldview; you like your ideas simply because they're your ideas. Specifically, in a recent study he asked participants to read questions like, "What innovative change could be made to an alarm clock to make it more effective?", and the participants rated potential answers. The control group rated answers from Ariely and his team, while the experimental group were given a list of fifty words and asked to construct their own answers and then rate them.

The trick was that the experimental group constructed the same answers as Ariely, because of the limitations of their lists. And the experimental group liked "their own" answers more than the control group―even though the answers were identical. The participants even rated Ariely's answers higher when they were presented with the words in random order, so that they had to unscramble the answers. In other words, even when it's obvious that the answers are forced upon them, people prefer an idea that they have worked to create.

It's your idea, dude.

"friends it blog this tell your Read and about" is an excellent idea, isn't it? But how do you feel after unscrambling something like this:

"Understanding is, to speak generally, the faculty Of cognitions. These consist in the determined relation of given representation to an object. But an object is that, in the conception of which the manifold in a given intuition is united. Now all union of representations requires unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently, it is the unity of consciousness alone that constitutes the possibility of representations relating to an object, and therefore of their objective validity, and of their becoming cognitions, and consequently, the possibility of the existence of the understanding itself."

That's from the transcendental deduction, the thorniest chapter of The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. The Critique is easily the most difficult book I have ever read. But on a "big-picture" level, I found it to be convincing. However, I'm not sure that Kant's system makes any sense: what the hell does it even mean that the empirical world is shaped by the necessary forms of experience?

It's not only that I'm suspicious of my own opinion of Kant: I doubt that anyone can judge Kant fairly. It just isn't possible to figure out what Kant is saying without "unscrambling" it.  Even if you were to read the―admirably clear―Routledge guidebook you'd still have to  sort out the material conceptually. And every expert on Kant has gone through the same experience; their judgments are equally suspect.

It's quite a bind for someone new to philosophy: do you want to put in the time and effort required to understand a difficult book, when everyone who understands it is biased in its favor—and you too will be biased after reading it?

I have a few heuristics independent of expert opinion for breaking out of that bind: I look for obvious contempt for readers (e.g.: Lacan's claim that the structure of consciousness is literally a rhombus along with his refusal to elaborate) or I look for gratuitous misrepresentations of a subject that I'm familiar with. But heuristics are just inaccurate shortcuts, and it troubles me to think that I'll only see a difficult work of philosophy through rose-colored glasses.