Neurath's Boat

This is good news...

Via Tyler Cowen, apparently Pakistan is normalizing trading relations with India.  Countries with common borders tend to trade a lot when they're allowed to do so (it's astonishing how much of U.S. trade is with Canada, compared with the trade with China or Japan or Europe that always gets talked about), and when there's a lot of trade going on, there will be a lot of business interests that won't want a war to disrupt that trade.  Anything that reduces the chance of another war between two powers that now both have nuclear weapons is extremely good news indeed!

Changing views

Most people like to think of themselves as flexible and willing to change their minds in response to new evidence.  However, we of course notice that others are very stubborn, and there's some psychological literature suggesting that people in general don't change their minds as much as they'd like to claim to.  On the other hand, there are interesting studies in the other direction, suggesting that people mis-remember their past views as being more similar to their present views than they really are, so that surveys on whether people changed their minds will get misleading results if they rely on comparing remembered views to current views.  So perhaps people are right to think that they change their minds, despite the fact that tricks of their memories leave them without much evidence to back it up.

Anyway, since I tend to have a hard time thinking of examples of changing my mind on demand, I thought I'd write about a significant change in order to increase the chances that I'll continue to remember it when I need an example.  I was originally in favor of the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.  I expected we'd make a mess of it, especially with Bush directing things, but the Taliban were so awful that I thought the mess we'd make would still be a considerable improvement.

I now think we should probably withdraw from Afghanistan.  I do still have some tendency to think that there could be better ways of doing things which would make our intervention helpful, but I can't see any politically realistic path from our current policies to anything which would be significantly more productive.  In particular, I think we'd probably have to give up the goal of suppressing opium cultivation in Afghanistan, and I don't see any chance of that.  I was aware of this issue in the past, but I apparently underestimated other issues and the results of the various problems interacting; I did not imagine that an Afghanistan with a large U.S. military presence would ever end up with the Taliban again controlling most of the country.  Further, the Karzai government is not nearly as much better than the Taliban as I would have hoped; it appears to be quite horribly corrupt, which isn't really a surprise, but it even has some pretty horribly retrogressive policies on women (the big issue where I thought the Taliban were bad enough to make their removal a goal which overrides almost everything else).

Hope for Clinton's campaign

If there turns out to be a set of all sets after all, she may win the nomination, or so says Fafnir. Admittedly, not in so many words (I'm referring to his third scenario, of course).

An idea whose time has come?

Is it time to bring in the robot overlords?  Even the monkeys are suggesting that the answer may be yes.

Diplomatic ambiguity

The issue of what to do about Iran's nuclear program has been much discussed recently; the leftist blogs have extensively discussed the way the top Democratic candidates are going to such lengths to be sure to say that the option of attacking Iran is not "off the table." The diplomatic theory underlying this, of course, is that our negotiating position is stronger if Iran thinks we might actually use military force, so we should never say we would definitely not do that. One problem with this line of thinking, as many have noted, is that constantly reminding Iran that we're willing to attack them is quite likely to make the government of Iran think that they need nuclear weapons to deter such an attack. I'd like to mention another flaw in the reasoning.

We have overwhelming military force. Everybody knows this. Thus, every country in the world knows that, potentially, the United States could use that military force against them. There is no need to say we're going to do that, or make a big deal of our willingness to do things like that, in order to ensure that other countries take this into account in their planning. Paranoia, plus the extreme badness of any outcome which involves us actually attacking, guarantees that countries are always going to take that into account, whatever our public rhetoric. Thus, it is frivolous to engage in saber-rattling in order to prove to our enemies that we're a threat; they know that perfectly well and need no proof.

Instead, the most likely consequence of publicly making threats is to guarantee that any concessions that our enemies make to us appear to the world to be made under duress. Since many of our enemies appear to be as neurotic about "appearing weak" as our own administration, this is only going to make them more reluctant to make any concessions.

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Death penalty test cases

Philosoraptor presents one of those kinds of cases which is often used to justify the death penalty, a case where it is very difficult emotionally not to want a death by slow torture for the perpetrators. Certainly that's my reaction, and I'd even add the same for anyone who has an ounce of sympathy for the perpetrators. But I try to recognize that this is not very productive; burning hate does not tend to produce good public policy.*

It's pretty well established what's actually needed to help improve situations like this. Give women more power, and things like this happen less often; giving women more power seems to make just about everything better, based on comparative studies of various communities and societies, but in particular it definitely helps women. So we should be reaching out to women in the communities where these situations occur, doing what we can to increase their educational and economic opportunities and working to fight all of the oppression they are subject to, not just the most horrifying high profile headline-grabbing examples of oppression.

Further, even from the point of view of satisfying our emotions rather than public policy, the form of death penalty under discussion is virtually never that; the form of the death penalty which is under debate is supposed to be painless and humane. I'm not sure why it's more emotionally satisfying to subject someone to a painless death than to subject them to the horrible conditions in prisons. So I don't really see how test cases like this are particularly informative concerning the death penalty debate.

* One respect in which emotions are very bad guides; I'd like to think that I'd be no less horrified by the case if the victim were not an attractive young woman, but I'd be lying to myself. My emotional reactions are not as politically enlightened as my intellectual responses, though over time my intellectual responses do have some tendency to train my emotional responses to be a little less horribly embarrassing.

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Thoughts inspired by David Charles Stove

I came across a book written by Stove the other day, and it was utterly horrifying.  I know some of my readers are well enough informed to question why this should be any surprise; surely he only wrote bad books, I can hear them thinking.  Indeed, my very first encounter with Stove was when I examined his attempted refutation of Hume's inductive skepticism.  That attempted refutation is sufficiently awful that I feel a little guilty about shooting fish in a barrel when I wrote a term paper criticizing it.  However, the book I just found was a collection of Stove's attempts at writing more popular essays, and disturbingly they do seem to have been somewhat popular.  It disturbed me enormously that the back cover had a favorable blurb from David Armstrong.  The two were apparently friends, but still, I don't see how anyone with a shred of self-respect could even hint at endorsement of the contents of the book.

I think one of the most revealing essays in the book, at least for philosophers, is Stove's criticism of Nozick.  Nozick was, of course, a well-known right-leaning philosopher, and the usual practice of right-wing nuts is to embrace anyone intellectually respectable who seems to agree with them in part, so it seems on the surface odd that Stove should bother to write an essay against someone who was in any way allied with him, when his enemies were so plentiful.  The explanation, however, is relatively straightforward.

Nozick really believed that coercion was wrong, indeed that it was pretty much the worst thing possible.  His libertarian views were founded on that basic principle, that coercion is just not acceptable, when it is performed by anyone for any reason, and so governments, like all other people and institutions, should be stripped of their coercive power as much as possible.  He was, in other words, clearly not one of the typical internet libertarians with wet dreams about how he'd lord it over everyone else with his arsenal of guns once the government stopped pestering him.

As a result, Stove thought Nozick was a pussy.  Admittedly, Stove didn't put it in (quite) such crude terms, but the terminology perfectly captures his intent; Stove was extremely misogynistic.  One of his essays in Against the Idols argues vigorously for the intellectual inferiority of women, and his prudishness (which also comes up in his criticism of Nozick) is also a common trait of misogynists (for those who think women are only for sex, "women are bad" and "sex is bad" tend to get bundled together).  Stove thought feminists and hippies and various other nefarious characters were corrupting the pure, manly intellectual standards of the academy and of political institutions, and clearly thought Nozick had too many such soft-headed, feminine inclinations.  Sure, Nozick said he liked free markets, but he was unaccountably squeamish about sending tens of thousands of soldiers to die and killing hundreds of thousands of foreigners in a dubious effort to slightly weaken the forces of communism worldwide.  Real anti-communists favored having a huge military and using it often, even if the military was hardly a bastion of free market practices and it was paid for by high, market-distortion-inducing taxes.  Real anti-communists were real men, you see.  Nobody who opposed the Vietnam War, as Nozick did, could have been a real man, and so no such person could be a real anti-communist.

I didn't intend this to be such a long post.  Still, it's clearly more relevant to the blogosphere than most of my writings, so maybe it's OK to ramble on a bit.

A thought on Hillary Clinton as candidate

It is well known that people who don't vote are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans; this is why Democrats try so hard to increase voter turnout, while Republicans try to make it harder to vote to prevent non-voters from getting active.  One of the biggest categories of people who usually support liberal ideas but usually don't vote are single women.  Hillary Clinton has more support among women than men, and I wonder if she could make it easier for the Democrats to reach out to that underused potential base of support.  Obviously, if the Democrats could get more single women out to vote, that wouldn't just help Clinton's chances of becoming president; more people inclined toward Democrats voting could help the Democrats in all the other races in 2008 as well.

Of course, Obama might be able to get more black voters out to the polls, so Clinton isn't the only candidate who might have a desirable appeal to people who usually don't vote.  Offhand, I don't think the number of blacks who don't vote but who could plausibly be reached is as great as the number of single women in that position, but I admit to having no numbers or poll data on that.

Now, Edwards has less entrenched opposition to face than either Clinton or Obama, and it's possible that Clinton's benefits for other Democrats would be offset because she'd also encourage insecure Republican men to vote more, while Obama might similarly bring more racists to the polls.  So I'm still not sure who looks best in all of this.  On policies, they all have strengths and weaknesses, and I really can't decide which I think is stronger.

I guess I'm still in the same place; I'd support any of the three major candidates, and I'm willing to leave it up to the primary to select the best one.  I still wish Gore would run.  But I'd like to see more analysis of strategic issues like these.  Has anybody been working on it?

More on tyrants

Plato thought that it was democracy which lead to tyranny in the classical Greek sense; when the mob grew strong enough to oppose all previous concentrations of power, an ambitious leader would take up the cause of the mob and use them to crush the existing institutions and establish their own unrestricted rule.  While the connection with democracy is not so straightforward as Plato suggests, there is an important element of truth in this.  A tyrant in the classical Greek sense certainly did tap into new sources of power and use them to crush existing institutions, rather than simply making deals with existing institutions and thus facing the constant danger that the established powers would decide to back out of the alliances.

One of the reasons for the remarkable performance of the French army during Napoleon's wars was Napoleon's method of replacing losses in the officer corps.  Enlisted soldiers who displayed conspicuous bravery would be promoted to officer rank.  It was possible for any old commoner who joined the army to rise to any rank by such promotions.  Most of Napoleon's enemies had policies of recruiting only aristocrats as military officers, with rank in the army heavily influenced by aristocratic rank.

There were disadvantages to Napoleon's system; aristocrats tended to be better educated, and those who served in the military generally would have had some training in military science.  However, Napoleon's system had much more important advantages.

First, it contributed greatly to the morale of the French soldiers.  Since their officers were generally conspicuously brave (or else they wouldn't have been promoted to become officers), the officers set a strong example for the troops.  They also understood the troops better, having come from among them.  The possibility of becoming an officer encouraged both loyalty generally, since it increased the potential rewards of military service, and courageous effort, since that was the way to gain those potential rewards.

Second, it meant that Napoleon had no trouble replacing losses in the officer corps (or at least no more difficulty than he had in replacing the common soldiers).  Such losses were by no means infrequent, and Napoleon's enemies seem to have been put at a great disadvantage in replacing losses by the fact that they recruited officers only from the aristocracy, and the most martially inclined aristocrats were already in the army, so they had to recruit less promising candidates and in some cases simply get by with fewer officers when they raised new forces after heavy losses against Napoleon.

Still, quite possibly the most important value of the policy for Napoleon is that it meant his officers tended not to be connected to existing institutions of power, and so were less likely to be troubled by divided loyalties.  This also had the disadvantage of making existing institutions of power more hostile to him, since he was further excluding them from power, but the French revolution had already greatly weakened such institutions, and Napoleon preferred to continue that process in order to further concentrate power in his own hands.  Probably the most successful tyrant in history, Augustus, preferred to employ freed slaves in many top-level administrative positions despite his own patrician background, with similar benefits.

What relevance does this have for the modern world?  Well, relying on alliances with institutions of power makes a tyrant weaker.  So tyrants who depend on foreign support, to take one example, are predictably weaker than those who do not.  Thus, even if a dictator can sometimes produce greater political stability, it's generally a bad idea for outsiders to support a dictator with such a goal in mind; by doing so, they reduce the chances that the one they support will turn out to be one of the successful ones, and so that they really will provide stability.  Sadly, U.S. foreign policy does not ever seem to have noticed this, despite providing plenty of empirical evidence for the thesis in the record of its failures.  Given the length this blog post has already reached, I will leave other lessons as an exercise for the reader.

Conservative reading comprehension

I don't know why anything at Powerline should ever surprise me; there's some idiocy in almost every post.  But for some reason, this one stood out for me.  I looked up Lincoln's speech, to make sure it wasn't merely incompetent quoting on Powerline's part, but no, it's not just their quote that seems to say the opposite of what they intend, the original speech does as well.  In Lincoln's speech, the "tribe of the eagle" refers to the potential tyrants.  So what's with the ending, "may the tribe of the Gathering of Eagles increase?"  There's some massive rhetorical incompetence going on there, using the same metaphors for the tyrants and those who (according to Powerline) are the good guys.  This is, of course, consistent with their general attitude that only tyranny can oppose tyranny, so we should have our own brand of tyranny* which is somehow free in order to oppose enemy bad tyranny.   Rather than, say, just opposing tyranny generally, which is what Lincoln advocates.

* Admittedly, "family of the lion"  and "tribe of the eagle" don't seem appropriate to the chickenhawks, and the "genius" Lincoln attributes to tyrants doesn't seem to fit the shrub quite as well as it might fit a Napoleon or Caesar, but I believe that Powerline is not (or at least not openly) of the opinion that it is cowardice and stupidity which distinguishes good leaders from evil tyrants.

Property rights, intellectual and otherwise

An editorial in the New York Times has been making the rounds, and I felt like weighing in.  Most of those I've read agree with me in thinking perpetual copyrights are a very bad idea, including some I often don't agree with, such as Ilya at Volokh.  Ilya makes important points about the difference between intellectual property and physical property; when somebody else uses my physical property, they are interfering with my ability to use it, while when someone else uses my intellectual property, I continue to be able to use it freely.  If there were a method of duplicating land, we probably would treat the creation of duplicates of already occupied land quite differently than we treat invasion of already occupied land.

I would like to add a point I've made before concerning property rights generally.  Any property right is a a monopoly on the use of a resource, enforced by the state.  It only makes sense that people should be charged for the state's services in this area, as in some kind of wealth tax.  If establishing and maintaining intellectual copyrights were more expensive, with a high minimum fee which increases with time, and a percentage of profits if that exceeds the minimum payment, then allowing long copyright terms, even indefinite ones, would not be as egregious.  For one thing, it would obviously raise state revenues.  Also, it would reduce cases where copyrights would be held by people who were not bothering to make the copyrighted material available in any form; holding on to an unused copyright would be expensive, so such copyrights would usually be allowed to lapse, allowing others to make use of the material.

Leni Riefenstahl

The recent photo of Cheney speaking to the troops reminds one blogger of Leni Riefenstahl.  I think not so much. Cheney just looks evil in that shot.  On the other hand, I recently watched Triumph of the Will, and I have to say that in the absence of historical perspective, I don't think Hitler would look particularly sinister in that movie.  I can see why Riefenstahl has the enormous reputation that she does; she managed to make a documentary about a political rally which wasn't dull, a truly astonishing feat.  She also makes Hitler look really good, and not by having the film make crazy and exaggerated claims about his accomplishments.  Mostly, the movie doesn't make claims.  She shows enthusiastic people filled with admiration for Hitler, and actually doesn't let Hitler himself dominate the screen time.  When she does show Hitler, he's being friendly and chatty when possible, and he occasionally looks bored on occasions when it's impossible to imagine someone wouldn't be bored; in other words, he looks human.  On the other hand, he looks very serious and somber when a ceremonial occasion calls for it, and when she does show him speaking, he looks dedicated and passionate.  No doubt, in portraying Hitler as he wanted to be seen, Riefenstahl had the benefit of an actor who was very skilled in playing that role (Hitler was incredibly careful about his public persona), but still, the effect is  impressive.

All in all, it really conveyed to me how people could have been enthusiastic about Hitler, even some very smart people who should have known better.  We have a tendency to think of propaganda as transparent manipulation, which we'd never fall for.  We like propaganda for our own causes, but we don't think it influences us; we already believed that before seeing it, and we mock those of other views for being conned by the propaganda they're fed.  And, indeed, most propaganda is of quite poor quality, and it's surprising and disturbing that despite what we like to think about it, it seems to have a lot of impact.  However, Leni Riefenstahl shows an example of propaganda done with skill and subtlety.  It should present a warning that there is surely more of the same out there, that we don't recognize because of its subtlety and because the causes with which it is associated are not yet discredited.

White Collar Crime

Brad Plumer deplores the low emphasis on white collar crime at the FBI these days, and wonders if more severe prosecution of white collar crime might be even more effective than prosecution of other crimes since the Ken Lays of the world are presumably rational actors, susceptible to incentives, while it is less plausible that this is the case for the typical murderer.

I think that this probably even applies beyond cases like murder where rationality is unlikely to be involved, and into crime motivated by rational or semi-rational economic considerations.  For those in poor, socially marginalized groups, harassment by officialdom is a regular and expected part of life.  Thus, it is not surprising that the fear of such harassment is not as effective as we would like in modifying their behavior; keeping their noses clean is by no means guaranteed to protect them from harassment.  Furthermore, their circumstances being what they are, the potential benefits of criminal activity may be particularly desperately needed goods.

Conversely, it is extremely uncommon for one of higher status to face official persecution for no reason at all.  Even when innocent upper-class types are targets of government harassment, this is usually a product of the actions of an identifiable rival, and not a general background condition which is unavoidable and expected.  Further, it is usually a lot easier for one of higher social class to get by reasonably well without engaging in crime.  Since the benefits of crime are usually less for the white collar criminal (diminishing marginal utility of money, etc.) and the contrast between being prosecuted for criminal activity and the normal state of affairs is greater, it seems that such prosecution and punishment should be a more powerful motivator for a rational white collar criminal than for a rational petty criminal.  Of course, as things actually stand, white collar criminals are hardly ever caught; given these considerations, one must imagine that the reasonable expectation of such criminals that they will avoid punishment contributes greatly to their indifference to such punishment, and so to the disturbing frequency  of white collar crime.

Wealth tax

Amanda has a comment on a link from Ezra that I'd like to endorse and expand upon.  In the face of rising inequality, Amanda asks why we should not tax people in proportion to their share of the national wealth.  Why not indeed?  There are practical problems with imposing such a tax, but there are practical problems with income taxes and the VAT which is so popular in Europe.  It is not clear that a wealth tax faces greater technical obstacles than these other forms of taxes.

Marx said that property is theft.  This is a point on which mainstream economists should actually be less quick to disagree than they are.  Any form of property is a personal monopoly on the use of some resource, denying its use to all others.  It is, furthermore, a government imposed monopoly; while there may be delusional souls who believe their private gun collections are doing some good as well, it's obvious that successful property enforcement relies on fear of the police.

Now, there are obviously huge advantages to allowing people to have property rights, so I won't say the mainstream economists are wrong to think this should be an exception to their usual disdain for monopolies.  Giving people property rights over resources encourages them to gather and produce resources.  Further, as conservative thinkers are constantly emphasizing, people will put effort into improving resources which they own (this is really just a form of the production issue).

However, not only does it seem fair on an intuitive level that those who are deriving the benefits of property rights should pay for their enforcement, and furthermore fair that those who deprive others of access to resources should pay some recompense for so depriving others, but a wealth tax even makes sense on an economic incentive basis.  There are circumstances in which people horde resources of which they are not making particularly productive use.*  If people are taxed on their retention of wealth, this provides them with an incentive to only retain such wealth as they need or can profitably employ, and sell the rest, no doubt to someone else who can profitably employ it.  Thus, a wealth tax would facilitate trade in resources, even as many of our current taxes hinder such trade.

Indeed, it would help sort out one of the thorniest issues in modern property rights, so-called "intellectual property."  It is clear to anyone who is not personally benefiting from the system that the intellectual property system is out of control, with numerous harmful effects.  One effect which produces unmixed harm is that older copyrighted works, on which nobody expects to be able to make much money, are frequently horded nonetheless; the copyright holders do not bother to produce copies of the works for sale, because the profit would be negligible, but others are prevented from making their own copies, so the resources are made unavailable for anybody to productively use for no good reason.  If there were a general tax on the holding of any property whatever, holders of intellectual property would not be so keen to hold on to every last scrap of it; if they were being taxed for continuing to hold on to items which they could not be bothered to exploit, they would surely be motivated to sell those items if they could, or release them into the public domain to escape further taxes if no buyers were available.

Add in the potential of a wealth tax to help alleviate inequality, and it's obvious that a wealth tax is urgently needed.  Let this be my official proposal for how to cover the social security shortfall and reduce the deficit.  Well, some carbon taxes are probably also needed, and there are all sorts of reasons for just abolishing the payroll tax, so this is not the end of my desire for tax tinkering.  But this one is perhaps my favorite utopian scheme.

* Adam Smith discussed the example of rural landowners, who seemed more interested in enjoying their status as virtual feudal lords than in making any changes which might increase their profit but which would require them to change their lifestyles.  Surprisingly, this example is still relevant in many parts of the world; poor countries which engaged in the redistribution of land in the mid 20th century, breaking up large estates and parceling out the land to the peasantry, are considerably more likely than their fellows to be among the no longer all that poor today.

Reid's flip-flop?

I'm not sure how I feel about this line of criticism of Harry Reid.  At present, the Democratic party line is that the PBA ban was a bad law.  He is, at present, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate.  He was not leader of the Democrats in the Senate when he voted for the law (though the then-leader voted for it, interestingly enough).  Thus, in addition to the possibility that he simply changed his mind (four years have passed), there is also the possibility that he feels obligated in his role as spokesman for his party to defend his party's position, in a way that he did not four years ago feel obligated in his role as a rank and file senator to vote against a bill which his own party's  leader was voting for.

Of course, I don't know all of his motivations.  But successful members of congress really can't avoid making compromises (that's why they make rotten presidential candidates; their compromises are quite embarrassing on the presidential campaign trail).  I don't see why anyone who agrees with Reid's present statements should be jumping on him now for being inconsistent with his past positions; surely we should be celebrating that he's taking a stand on the right side now.

The Duke case

This offends me, though I agree with the suggestion that publicizing the names of those accused of crimes is as dubious as publicizing the names of their accusers.  But I don't think anyone knows what really went on.  I still find it impossible to see what her motive could have been if she were simply lying.  It is clear that she was quite confused, and that the investigation was horribly bungled, but investigations of genuine crimes can be horribly bungled (O. J. Simpson case, anyone?)  I find it likely at this point that the particular men she accused are not guilty of what she accused them of, but that is hardly evidence of deliberate malice on her part; the reason eyewitness testimony is so terrible and courts should rely on it far less than they do is not primarily because people lie, but rather because people are much worse than they think they are at re-identifying those they've only seen briefly, and memories are easily conflated and overwritten by later suggestion and contemplation.  However, while she may, I suppose, have experienced some sort of delusion (in which case I'd still question publicizing the name; shaming the mentally ill doesn't strike me as a useful thing to do), it still seems most likely to me that something awful happened to her which she did not remember accurately.

I guess my current view of the case is that it is, of course, unfortunate that some Duke lacrosse players, some of whom seem to have been pretty sketchy, have suffered bad publicity for specific crimes which they probably didn't commit.  However, numbers matter, and extent of harm matters, so I still have far more sympathy for the millions of sex workers who never get any justice for the horrible abuse they suffer, at least partly because of how readily it is assumed they're lying if they try to complain about any of it, than I do for the handful of privileged white boys whose reputations have been damaged by false accusations.  Perhaps I should show more solidarity with my fellow privileged white boys, but hey, I'm privileged.  I don't have to show solidarity; I get the benefits without working for it.  So I'll instead indulge my inclination to be sympathetic to the other.

All's Quiet on the Western Front

Out of some desire to keep track of the wingnuts, I have an RSS subscription to Power Line*, which of course quoted approvingly John McCain's comment about the "definite date for surrender" act.  I find this description problematic on many levels.  For one thing, I have a sense that in order to surrender one must be surrendering something, allowing some tangible possession to be lost to the other party.  So it seems to me that we could only be surrendering in Iraq if we are there as conquerors; if, as the Republicans usually insist, we're liberators, and are now only their to help out the friendly Iraqi government, then we're disloyal friends if we leave, but we're not surrendering anything.

But thinking about this reminded me of another place where the "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" rhetoric was historically very effective.  Remarque's German soldiers, who plausibly represented actual German military attitudes at the time, considered the horrible war they were fighting a pointless waste, for which they directed not a little blame at their own leaders.  But they were glad at least that all the devastation was happening in France, so that whatever they had to face, their families were all right back home.  The Kaiser's government lasted exactly as long as they thought that; it collapsed the moment fighting threatened to enter Germany.  Note that this suggests the cheese-eating surrender monkeys were more dedicated fighters than the Kaiser's Germans, since the French fought on despite the devastation it brought to their homeland.  But giving up was surely the right thing for Germany to do (and for that matter, the world would have been a much happier place if the French had given in early on in WWI; the general effects of that war were to kill tens of millions of people without markedly improving stability, freedom, prosperity, or anything else worth having).

Of course, there is no danger of Iraq invading the U.S. (fortunately).  So some other way of ending the current pointless war is needed.  Here's hoping the good news out of Congress develops into some positive results eventually.

Socialism

In Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, he includes a discussion of justice.  In some ways, it's a discussion to thrill the heart of any modern libertarian; Hume writes as if the right to property was pretty much the only right people have, and his rules concerning acquisition and transfer of property rights were pretty much those later given by Nozick (and earlier given by Locke, of course).  It was, of course, not Hume's intention to be original, and no doubt the brevity of his discussion of the rights in question resulted from his awareness of how thoroughly they'd been covered elsewhere.

However, while Hume was no doubt a believer in the strong property rights he defended (in some respects he was politically quite conservative; he even defended monarchy, after all), in interesting respects his discussion was quite subversive.  Hume insisted that the right to property is not a natural right (he insisted that there were no natural rights whatever, of course), and so that the rules of justice in the distribution of property were only justified on the basis of their usefulness.  This being the case, he was fully aware that principles justified by usefulness could be overridden when it was useful to override them.  Thus, his account has no difficulty explaining such exceptions as there have to be to the basic rules (taxes to pay the enforcers of the rules, for instance), while the likes of Locke and Nozick have to invoke fanciful notions of implicit consent to government authority to justify any exceptions to their absolutist rules.

Of course, while it isn't their first line of defense, libertarian types will turn to consequentialist arguments when pressed (Hume notes the tendency of pretty much everyone to do this, and naturally cites it as evidence that we're all consequentialists deep down).  Often, their arguments will rely on the suggestion that immutable facts of human nature guarantee that socialism could never work, and capitalism is the only realistic system.  In general, conservatives seem to like the idea of immutable human natures.

Hume says some interesting things which strike me as relevant to that, too, though.  In addition to admitting in favor of the cause of the levelers the obvious moral arguments, Hume admits that socialism sometimes works.  He cites examples of close families, newly formed cults, the Spartan Equals, and ancient agrarian laws.*  However, he considers these to be exceptional cases.  Indeed, they do not demonstrate the usefulness of socialism generally, but it seems to me that they are probably sufficient to blunt the "immutable nature" arguments.  If it truly were immutable nature, the exceptions, the cases of socialism working well, should not be rare; instead, they should not exist at all.  Given the frequency with which the libertarian crowd insists on appealing to immutable human nature, I think it's a notable fact that the argument has this problem.

* Agrarian laws are a particularly fascinating case.  Hume does not cite which examples he is thinking of, but Adam Smith would later contrast government policies which encouraged small land holdings (British colonies in the Americas) with government policies that encouraged vast estates (Spanish colonies in the Americas), and note that the latter were economically much less productive.  Policies favoring the large land-holders were of course preferred by the Spaniards in order to maintain an aristocratic class, the same effect such policies had in Rome, where agrarian reform was never very successful (Hume cites it as having succeeded in some Greek cities; he was perfectly aware the Romans didn't manage to do much to put it in practice).  In Rome, they contributed greatly to tension between the aristocracy and the lower classes and the decay and collapse of the democratic elements of the Republic, and eventually the Republic itself.  In modern times, poor countries with aggressive agrarian reform policies in the mid 20th century are disproportionately represented among the counties which successfully became less poor and more democratic by the late 20th century.

Discrimination and fitting in

I missed blog against sexism day, in line with my usual spotty posting habits of late.  I suppose that's fine for this post, which is not especially focused on issues of sexual discrimination, though the sex case does provide some good examples, as I will come to.

Probably the most pernicious form of discrimination is the bias in almost every situation favoring people who fit in.  Everyone wants to deal with people who are to a certain extent like them, as people like that are more predictable, easier to coordinate with, and generally easier to get along with.  This tendency is supported by feedback; similarity is symmetric, so people who seem like my kind of people will likely think of me as their kind of people, and so will be more favorably inclined toward me for the same reasons I'm more favorably inclined toward them.  Naturally, people prefer to have others around them who are favorably inclined toward them.

Thus, any practice that involves personal interaction, say a hiring process that involves interviews, or the process of informal coalition-building within an organization, will tend to automatically favor those who are similar to those already in power, those making the hiring decisions, those who are already part of the powerful coalitions, or whatever the particular case may be.  To make matters worse, fitting in is even relevant to performance.  Being able to coordinate with others is often critical to successfully carrying out projects, so selecting people who fit in will often produce a more effective organization.

Obviously, this process makes things extremely hard on members of marginalized groups.  Even someone from the privileged class who is completely and sincerely convinced that the stereotypes about the inherent capacities of marginal group x are nonsense is going to have a tendency to favor someone he gets along with well, and fellow members of his class are more likely to be such people, just because people from similar backgrounds understand one another better.

Still, there are complicating factors when it comes down to individual interactions, which no doubt contribute to the otherwise astonishing ability some people seem to have to fail to notice all the advantages privileged groups possess.  Perhaps this is a strange point of interaction between the present topic and the occasional nice guy discussions on pandagon (there's another one up now).  If one of the great advantages of privilege is fitting in, in the sense of being able to get along with the already powerful, it interacts in important ways with social skills generally.

Thus, those who are for other reasons lacking in social skills will fail to experience many of the benefits of privilege.  Someone having the same skin color, chromosomes, or having gone to the same school still won't seem like someone I want to work with or cooperate with generally if he also seems to be an obnoxious twit.  Hence the men's rights activists; because nobody likes them, including their fellow men, they don't experience many of the advantages of male privilege.  Further, their concerns about the system, which to an unbiased outsider seem crazy, make more sense in light of their particular circumstances.

To take an example, feminists will (rightly) point out that cases of men getting away with appalling abuses in the case of, say, sexual harassment are far more common than the cases the MRAs complain about where men's reputations are destroyed by false accusations.  But this won't impress the men's rights activist, because he can't get away with anything.  Nobody likes him, so he's overwhelmingly more likely to end up one of the rare cases.  Women are more likely to be uncomfortable with anything he does, because they don't like him, and less likely to try to resolve any discomfort by talking to him rather than taking more serious action, because they don't trust him and assume talking to him is pointless.  Further, if a serious accusation is made against him, everybody else is likely to believe it, because everybody else dislikes him and is ready to believe the worst about him.  Of course, the only solution is for the MRA to not be such a twit, but their whole problem is cluelessness, so they're not going to be able to recognize that this is the necessary response.  Thus, they instead make their absurd claims that the present system is actually biased against men.

Conversely, a member of a marginal group who is adept at social interaction is much less likely to notice the effects of privilege.  Generally, the fiercest defenders of privilege are those who are themselves somewhat marginal (like the men's rights activists); the genuinely powerful tend to think that they have their power because of their own merits, and don't feel as much need to define themselves in terms of their race, gender, or class.  Thus, the powerful are more likely to discriminate solely on the basis of who they get along with, rather than deliberately on the basis of group membership.  As a result, if they get along with somebody from a marginal group, they'll happily accept that person.  This will, of course, have the effect of making both the privileged person in question think of himself as open-minded ("hey, I evaluate people on the basis of their merits; look at A!") and also making the person so accepted think privilege is not such a big deal (A will think "it didn't slow me down to not be white/male/straight/whatever!").  Thus, the attitude that privilege isn't a serious problem, and doesn't need much attention, will tend to be widespread among those with privilege, even among those who have generally good intentions, and even among those from marginal groups who have managed to attain some powerful status.

It is not really clear what to do about these issues.  It is because of factors like these that I don't particularly have a problem with affirmative action, but there are difficulties with affirmative action as a way of correcting these problems.  Still, it is difficult to see a better alternative.  In some ways, one might wish for a world in which discrimination on the basis of social skills were not such a huge factor (I sometimes wish for that myself; I fit in pretty well in an academic environment, but my social skills overall could use some work).  On the other hand, it's probably good to encourage people to try to treat one another well.

In any event, I mostly posted this to address the strange fact that some people don't seem to recognize the networks of privilege which exist everywhere; I think these factors are part of the story of why they are so invisible to some.

Faith in democracy slightly up

Democrats control the house, and as I write this the circling rumors have senate control likely (though not certain; there are recounts, worries about what Lieberman might do, etc.)  Hopefully their period in opposition will have left the Democrats hungry and they'll push an aggressive program.  They need to get some results, as the economy is likely to run into trouble at some point over the next couple of years.

In local news, tax and spend liberalism is almost entirely triumphant in Rhode Island.  A new casino will not be built (I opposed it mostly because tax revenues for the casino were to be earmarked exclusively for property tax relief; if the state were to get more revenues, there'd be plenty of other good things to spend them on).  Affordable housing, education, parks (with one exception), and transportation (sadly mostly roads, but some money for rail and buses) all passed on ballot initiatives.  I was surprised that affordable housing passed by such a solid margin, about two to one; perhaps they should have proposed an even more ambitious housing plan.  Anyway, I voted for lots of causes that won, which always helps make one feel a little better about the process.  To those who voted for losing causes, I guess I can report that victory is possible; try again next time, and don't give up hope.

Health care for poor infants

I've been doing some rather dense and obscure philosophy posts recently, so here's some more straightforward politics; a typical story of conservatives screwing the poorest and most vulnerable.  Feministing has the story.  Quick summary:  there's a new effort to prevent "fraud."  This is, of course, the usual excuse for adding obstacles to access for programs for the poor; the more complicated the process of getting the benefits can be made, the more of the money for the program flows to bureaucrats and the less that manages to trickle down to the people who need it.  As an added bonus, from the conservative perspective at least, these efforts increase the amount of bureaucratic waste they can complain about when trying to tell people the government costs too much money and doesn't do enough for what it costs.

Specifically, it has been decided to make it harder for infants born in the United States to mothers who are here illegally to get medicaid.  I'm sure none of my readers need to be reminded that such infants are U.S. citizens; being born in the U.S. is enough to qualify you for that.  But the cruelty of depriving babies of medical care isn't my topic, since Feministing has that covered.  I will only note that immunizations are among the services which it will now be harder for these babies to receive, and that immunization programs work best when as near as possible to absolutely everyone gets them.  If nearly everyone is immunized, it is potentially possible to wipe out the disease completely, as happened with smallpox.  If large numbers of people are not immunized, on the other hand, the disease is free to continue to spread.  It may then mutate, as viruses are wont to do, perhaps gaining the ability to infect even immunized people.  Given the low cost of immunizations, it's thus very hard to make a selfish case that making it harder for babies to be immunized is a good idea.  The only reason one could oppose immunizing infants is if one thought they deserved to suffer.  Whether the conservatives who came up with this new idea think that, or simply don't understand health care issues, I won't guess.

Lewisian politics

Anybody know much about what the political views of David Lewis were like?  From vague memories of some scattered comments in his writings, as well as the probabilities concerning any given academic, I'd always vaguely put him somewhere on the spectrum from moderate left to not so moderate left, but I don't recall anything solid enough to decisively rule out the possibility that he was either centrist or radical left (it would rather shock me if he were right-wing).  If anybody knows anything definite, I'd appreciate hearing both where they think he was and why.

Issues vs. Character

It should be no secret that most voters decide whether to support a candidate more on their perceptions of the candidate's character than on whether that candidate's positions on the issues are of benefit to them.  This is not to say that issues are irrelevant; positions on some issues are seen as signs of character, and positions on those issues can seriously affect a politician's chances in elections.  But issues that are not seen as indicative of character have far less effect, as seen in the situation all liberals bemoan where vast numbers of people consistently vote for politicians who advocate conservative policies that only benefit a narrow elite.

Now, I'm a highly trained philosopher.  I'm pretty good at evaluating arguments, and the evaluation of evidence in general is something that I've examined closely in my work in epistemology and philosophy of science.  A question I've thought about a bit (motivated somewhat by a conversation with Felicia Nimue some time ago) is whether it's even a good strategy for a more ordinary voter to be as motivated by the issues as I am.  To some extent, I can tell the difference between a good argument and a scam, though even I can be fooled a disturbing amount of the time.  What about somebody who has no background in statistics, hasn't been educated in how scientific studies are conducted and so has no basis for distinguishing the good ones from the bad ones, lacks my knowledge of history for looking at what the consequences of policies have actually been, etc?  If someone prevents them with one of the powerful arguments that, say, single-payer health care is a good idea, should they believe it?  Isn't it quite legitimate for them to suspect they're being snowed?

Now, it's easy to say that they should do the research and learn what the evidence is and how to evaluate it.  That's certainly one reason education needs to be a very high priority.  But not only is it utopian to expect any dramatic shift in voter behavior in this area in the near future, for many voters it is also quite impractical.

It is also important, of course, to recognize that people aren't as good of judges of character as they think they are; perhaps people should be weighing the evidence rather than judging characters, even if they're bad at weighing evidence, because they're also bad at judging character.  For today's purposes, it is enough to note that people are bad at both things, so the standard voter tendency to go with character rather than evidence of the value of positions on issues is not as obviously irrational as some seem to think; looking at issues would not necessarily lead an average voter to better decisions (on the other hand, while I like to think I'm better at evaluating evidence than the average person, I certainly have no advantages when it comes to judging character; I presume I'm as bad at that as anyone.  So issues are the way to go for me).

What are the consequences of this?  Well, I certainly don't think that we should give up on voter education efforts; it would be nice to have more people actually thinking about the issues and voting on the basis of informed deliberation.  But it would seem that focusing on emphasizing the character virtues of liberal candidates and character defects of conservative candidates should not necessarily be seen as merely strategic, merely a way of winning elections.  Perhaps voting on character is not as misguided as some of us often think, and so if we really want to help ordinary voters vote well, we should be devoting more effort to helping voters accurately evaluate character, rather than trying to get them to look at issues instead.

The politics of objectivity IV

The last topic I want to look at is value freedom.  There is a long tradition in the social sciences, as in science generally, of excluding value judgments from our investigations.  In Miller's example, it would be impermissible to explain the fall of the Stuarts by appealing to Stuart injustice (though widespread belief that the Stuarts were unjust could figure in an explanation of the fall of the Stuarts).  Moral features are not to be used in explanations.  Miller identifies Max Weber as the originator of this view in the social sciences; this is surely oversimplified, as the view is surely implicit in earlier theorists than Weber (Adam Smith, anyone?) and adopted by people not much directly influenced by Weber, but Weber is of course pretty huge in the history of the social sciences, and did emphasize this point.

This is not to say that evaluations should play no role in investigations.  Obviously, values determine what scientists will choose to investigate, and it would be absurd to try to do science without allowing values to play that role.  Investigating the prevalence and spread of some terrible disease, or the responses to stress of some material commonly used in constructing human artifacts, not only does but should get vastly more attention than ever more precise measurements of exactly how many grains of sand there are in a particular cubic meter of a Saharan sand dune (to borrow an example from Ernest Sosa).  What other than human values makes the former more worthy than the latter?

However, it is very important, according to the tradition, not to allow values to lead one to cook the books, as it were.  If a scientist feels it would be good to get a particular result, for some reason, and the data doesn't seem to point that way, fudging is generally considered unacceptable.  Richard Miller suggests that this is too closed-minded.  His example involves anthropological investigations of non-white cultures around a century ago.

According to Miller, some anthropologists of the time were highly motivated by opposition to then nearly universal and unquestioned racism, and actively searched for evidence of cultural sophistication in non-white cultures in order to provide a counter to racist inclinations.  It's important to be very careful about what this shows; if they set themselves the task of looking for sophisticated cultural patterns, that's perfectly compatible with Weberian standards.  They only violated the rules if they did or would have fudged the results if their data had turned out to be negative.  Did they do this, and should they have?

On the empirical question of whether they did, I have no clue.  On whether they should have, I say absolutely not.  It undermines their credibility.  Creating an atmosphere in which fudging data is tolerated for any reason undermines science generally.  Further, tolerance for any kind of cheating is going to benefit the entrenched interests more; there are more people willing to cheat for them.  A zero-tolerance policy on cheating immunizes those opposed to the entrenched power structure from being criticized for cheating (sure, their critics will find other ways, or just lie, but while it's idealistic to suppose the truth always wins out, it is an advantage to have it on your side), and also avoids charges of hypocrisy when the radical critic attacks research favoring the status quo for failing to live up to standards of objectivity.

In Miller's own example, simply setting the question, simply deciding to investigate the cultural richness of non-white cultures, already helps the cause of radical politics.  To bring this back to my positivist revival theme, the positivists favored meticulous value-freedom in the social sciences and very careful attention to logic and methodological issues at a time when the social sciences were dominated by Marxists.  Those of Marxist inclination would, of course, be inclined to investigate how the existing capitalist ruling classes maintained power, what conditions were actually like for the poor, what obstacles existed to the poor improving their circumstances, and so forth.  Objectively investigating questions like that would naturally produce results which would be of benefit to those engaged in radical politics.  Again, injecting bias into the investigation beyond this choice of subjects would undermine the benefits of doing carefully chosen objective investigations.  So it seems to me that the positivists were probably taking the optimal stance from the point of view of advancing their radical political agendas in emphasizing objective science and careful methodology.

Of course, just as encouraging particular lines of research can advance political agendas, so can discouraging lines of research.  Furthermore, encouraging one line of research can ipso facto end up discouraging other lines, since the resources available for research are limited.  So, for example, the radical critique Miller makes of contemporary economics, that its obsession with things like GDP growth is politically problematic, seems to me to be likely well founded.  Injecting bias into the investigation of economic problems is not the solution, though; the solution is to find ways to encourage unbiased investigation of more relevant phenomena.

The politics of objectivity III

Richard Miller also condemns a form of reductionism he calls methodological individualism.  This is the doctrine that all group behavior can be reduced to the behavior of individuals.  In one sense, I think individualist reductionism has to be right; surely groups can only do things via individuals doing things.  This does not, however, mean that there is no value in studying groups as such, and Miller thinks methodological individualism involves a stronger form of reductionism which not only says group talk can be reduced, but largely advocated abolishing group talk.

One of Miller's examples of what's wrong with methodological individualism involves attitudes toward slavery in the American South.  He claims that around 1820, there was a dramatic change in such attitudes.  Prior to that point, there was a widespread feeling that slavery was a problematic institution, perhaps necessary for now but something that would eventually die out.  From 1820 on, the southerners became much more inclined to think that slavery was actually a good thing, because it exerted a civilizing influence on the blacks.

Miller argues that this shift occurred because of technological changes; the cotton gin made a form of slavery-based agriculture extremely profitable.  However, of course none of the southern slave owners would have admitted that this was their motive, and Miller suggests that there is no reason to think they were being disingenuous in giving other motives.  Miller concludes that understanding what happened requires looking at the interests of the slave-owning class, rather than focusing on the motives of individual actors.

I find this particular argument stunningly weak, all the more annoying for the fact that I happen to agree with the conclusion.  Economists, surely the worst offenders when it comes to methodological individualism, do not in any way require that the self-interested motives of the agents they hypothesize be consciously pursued.  They don't care about psychology.  And analysis in terms of the self-interest of agents, with self-interest largely inferred on the basis of what people actually pursue, has a good record of success in providing economic explanations.  It is not at all obvious that this pattern of individualist explanation is not adequate to the case Miller describes.  You're welcome to read his actual work, of course, but I don't recall him including any additional detail in the case which would block this response.

Nonetheless, there are clearly anti-individualist theories (not necessarily non-reductivist, but theories that insist on examining groups as groups).  No doubt they are the kinds of theories Miller is interested in.  It is overwhelmingly plausible that the upper classes have class consciousness, and always have had.  Plato thought so.  Marx (obviously) thought so.  Nietzsche thought so.  Adam Smith even thought so.  Pretty much every historian I'm aware of thought so.  The explicit writings of the upper classes themselves support the hypothesis that some kind of group loyalty is an important motive in the behavior of members of the upper classes.  Really anybody who isn't a political libertarian seems to have noticed this.

It is also arguable that the lower classes have often had class consciousness, and of course Marxists of Miller's type would tend to argue that part of the reason modern capitalist institutions get away with so much inequality is because they do a good job of undermining the class consciousness of the lower classes, fragmenting them into mutually hostile groups.

It is quite plausible that any group which is successful and powerful must have mechanisms for encouraging group loyalty, various rewards for supporting the club and punishments for betrayals of the group.  While investigating exactly what those mechanisms are is, of course, a fascinating project in itself, for an old, well-entrenched group, they're likely to be quite diverse and complicated.  Thus, for some purposes it may be more useful to just study the group, noting that it engages in purposeful behavior and that the interests of the group sometimes explain the behavior of individuals more perspicuously than trying to tease out all the little incentives that cause a particular individual to act in the group's interest in a particular case.

This pattern of explanation again particularly makes sense for powerful groups that are effective at perpetuating themselves, and so it seems natural that this form of explanation should work better for ruling classes than for lower classes (which seems to be the pattern in historical explanations).  Still, whether this sort of group-based approach to explanation is overall desirable is clearly an empirical question.  I'm inclined to think this form of explanation probably is desirable, but Miller's example, and his discussion of it, are woefully inadequate to establishing that fact.  Much more wide-reaching investigation, a much greater variety of examples, and ideally examination of a variety of disciplines would be needed to establish that claim.

Which, incidentally, brings up a quick bleg.  Anybody know of any good recent work that's been done in this area?  I'm sure somebody must have a better discussion of these issues than Miller.

The politics of objectivity II

I mentioned in my previous post on this topic that Richard Miller was one of my foes on the issue of politics and objectivity.  He discusses the issues in this book, among other places.  Three dogmas of the social sciences which Miller sets out to slay are the ideal of value freedom (most relevant for our purposes), methodological individualism, and the Hempelian covering-law model of explanation.

To take them in reverse order, Miller rejects the Hempelian covering-law model of explanation in favor of a causal model.  Hempel's model is, uncontroversially, quite oversimplified and does not work in many cases.  Many of us still think it's a useful model, and that one of the best ways of proceeding is to describe this model, describe its problems, and try to understand specific cases in the philosophy of science by applying the model and keeping alert to the known ways it can break down (many introductory philosophy of science books endorse essentially this approach, either openly or implicitly in their practice).  Miller's criticisms are actually a lot weaker than the standard set.

He complains that the covering-law model does not account for the fact that an explanation may be judged satisfactory even if there's no very general law that would account for it.  In one of his examples, he notes that a historian may successfully explain a counter-revolutionary uprising in one region of 18th century France by appealing to a clerical monopoly on access to outside sources of information, even if such a clerical monopoly on outside information did not produce counter-revolutionary uprisings in 9th century Japan.  Conversely, he notes that an explanation may be unsatisfactory even if there is a law that would account for it.  Though being appointed by doddering old coots of heads of state is reliably connected with people becoming heads of government, that Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg would, according to Miller, be an inadequate explanation of his seizure of power if the Nazi's support among the German economic elite would have resulted in their eventually seizing power regardless of Hindenburg's actions.

To summarize this argument of Miller's, sometimes an explanation is acceptable even if it's not very good because it's the best we can do, and sometimes a good explanation isn't good enough because it's possible to do better.  How these obvious points are supposed to show that we need Miller's causal account of explanation (which I won't bother to try to summarize, as it's never stated very clearly) rather than Hempel's model is, to put it mildly, unclear.

The politics of objectivity

So, the dissertation has been making massive progress recently.  I'm feeling very good about the current draft.  It needs some revisions; more cites, a few little fixes, but everything feels like it hangs together nicely in a lovely grand pattern of argument.  I'm feeling so good about it I not only anticipate defending it within a few months, but am contemplating publication prospects.

I do feel, however, that there is one place where the draft is extremely thin, and that is in the realm of political/ethical consequences of the views advocated.  I don't want to make that a major theme of the work at all, and it's probably good to have it be pretty minor for dissertation purposes, but I also think that if I do try to get it published, including slightly more than a passing mention of politics could help sex it up a bit.

So, anyway, some of my biggest philosophical heroes, the boys of the Vienna Circle, idealized and very nearly fetishized objectivity.  They called themselves "logical" postivists because they were obsessed with the new logic, and its potential to help produce truly universal intellectual standards.  They were also obsessed with science (many were scientists) because the dramatic results obtained by scientific methods suggested to them that science had good intellectual standards.

They were also a bunch of commies.  Well, not all of them, but certainly two of the three leaders, Carnap and Neurath, were very far left.  These two facts may seem to be unrelated, but to them, they were not.  First, the Logical Positivists saw truly universal standards as inherently democratic and egalitarian; as defining good inquiry in a way which made it possible for anybody to employ them.  Second, in the context of the time, the social sciences were dominated by Marxist notions.  Marx may not have been a very good scientist, but he stressed heavily the notion that social science should be scientific, in his rhetoric if not in his practice.  Comte, of course, the source of the name "Positivism", equally emphasized the use of science in looking at society.  Since the social sciences were generally left-wing, providing standards which the social sciences could attempt to live up to created the potential that the left-wing results of the social science investigations could be defended as objective, thus hopefully increasing their authority.

In more recent times, there has been a sharp divorce between the radical left and the idealizers of science.  Science and its ideals of objectivity are often portrayed by the radical leftists as tools of oppression, entrenching the values of the privileged Western elite.  The positivists themselves are often accused of having done this (almost always by people who are completely unaware of the actual positivist attitudes toward privilege; they could argue that the positivists tried and failed to be radical, but most of the critics don't actually know positivism well enough to be remotely aware the positivists tried).

In this dispute, I'm almost entirely on the side of the old fashioned positivists.  My dissertation defends the ideas of a unified science and methodological absolutism about truth (though stressing that both are worthy for purely pragmatic reasons, not because of any connection to the fundamental nature of reality).  I would like to include a bit about how the politically motivated criticisms of such ideals are especially misguided, but I'm not quite sure how to do it yet.  Anybody have any good recommendations for work on the political consequences of ideals of scientific objectivity?  I guess recent stuff I have looked at closely which was on my side included Louise Antony's "Quine as Feminist", and I've read some of Richard Miller's stuff for the anti-objectivity side.

Basic Income

One of the idealistic notions I've always supported is the idea of a basic income as an alternative to our current mess of poverty reduction schemes.  An Aussie blogger I read provides some arguments for the basic income here.  I will further note that the present system essentially gives coercive power to employers of low income workers; their continued employment is needed for their survival.  Sure, they have in principle the option of changing jobs, but that's often much harder for the very poor than for others.  Coercion comes in degrees.  Almost any kind can in principle be avoided, and the threat to survival employers have over low income workers in many cases easily reaches a level that is comparable to other obvious cases of coercion.

People like to have coercive power over others, which tends to lead them to employ coercive power even when it is not the optimal method of pursuing their other goals.  Normalizing the use of coercive power has a corrupting effect, especially given the appeal of such power.  Taking away the coercive power of employers would force them to try harder to make the jobs they offer desirable to the workers.  Showing a greater interest in the well-being of workers may well make them more productive; coercion produces resentment, and resentful workers have plenty of ways to undermine a company.  Thus, a basic income may have further economic benefits apart from those already mentioned by Chappell, as well as having profound moral benefits.

EC

This blog post about difficulties obtaining EC has been discussed all over the blogosphere.  It of course makes a good argument for making EC non-prescription.  Though most of the issues raised have been mentioned by others, I thought I'd weigh in about the class issues involved in all these contraceptive debates.  I was at Brown's health services today to have my blood pressure checked, and noted on the table in the waiting room a little poster about emergency contraception.  It basically indicated what EC was, listed a 24 hour number to make an appointment if EC was needed, and mentioned that "anticipatory prescriptions" were available.  Now, it is hardly surprising that an Ivy League school would take the implied attitudes toward its female students (namely, that their health is important and their sex lives none of the school's business).  Still, many in the blogosopher have noted that the various restrictions on reproductive rights which states have squeezed through or which are imposed by self-righteous health care providers or whatever overwhelmingly hurt poor women, which is no doubt why there isn't as much opposition to the various restrictions as there should be.  The restrictions don't affect the privileged much or at all, so they don't see any reason to worry about the restrictions, and when the privileged aren't worried about something, politicians rarely do anything about it.  This is one more bit of data supporting that observation.

Oil shortages won't save us

A number of doomsayers predict that the coming of "peak oil" will cause worldwide economic disruption.  Others, including Amanda Marcotte, look forward to a future where our corrosive commuter culture is undermined by the high cost of fueling cars, and where incidentally we'll be generating fewer greenhouse gasses.  I would love to see those sorts of effects myself.

Sadly, coping with the absence of oil doesn't require new, blue-sky technologies.  We've known how to do it for 80 years.  Estimates I've heard put the point at which FT is an economical competitor to oil at around $80 a barrel.  Even if that's too low, it's pretty clear that it's not at a level where switching over to coal as a way to power cars would result in widespread reduction in use of cars.  And any reduction in greenhouse gasses which might come about from more efficient cars will likely more than be made up for by the energy requirements of the FT process itself.

Causes of homosexuality

So over the summer I'm working at the Brown library.  Some of the tasks they give us student employees involve sorting through the various gifts the Brown library is constantly receiving.  Brown's collection is, of course, vast, so the gifts usually consist of things they already have, and in the rare cases where they don't have something, there's usually a reason (it's the second edition of a textbook that's in it's ninth edition, it's a tourist guide to 1927 Vienna).  So they have lots of stuff that they have to get rid of.  They've got a large gift of largely gay and lesbian connected stuff which I've been looking through.  It's mostly novels with gay and lesbian characters, but also some biographies or autobiographies of gays and lesbians, poetry collections by gays and lesbians, and occasional essays of various kinds.  I presume it was a gift from some deceased gender studies professor or something.

Anyway, one of the books was by one of those self-proclaimed ex-gays, which brought to mind the endlessly, and to my mind tediously, debated topic of whether homosexuality is biologically determined or whether it is a choice.  To my mind, this is an absurd dichotomy anyway, but that won't be my major pressure point today.  I wish instead to press an analogy.

Historically, many people have believed it is wrong to date or marry outside one's race.  There were laws against it all over the U.S., and some of them have only been repealed very recently.  There are surely still more people than one would like to think who still think that racial mixing is a bad thing.

Now, my present (long-term serious) girlfriend is asian.  I certainly don't think that I choose to be attracted to asians, or that I follow any guy-who-dates-asians lifestyle (most of the women I've dated have been white, probably because whites have been a majority everywhere I've lived), but I certainly could have chosen not to pursue Shelly, even if I couldn't have chosen not to be attracted to her.  I could have followed the rules advocated by the old-fashioned racists and only pursued white women, and in my case it wouldn't even have been a great hardship; again, most of my girlfriends have been white, and there are plenty of white women I find attractive.  However, I'm sure all of my readers agree with me that no matter how easy it would have been for me to pursue a life of exclusively involving myself romantically with other whites, it would be wrong and offensive for anybody to tell me that that's what I ought to do.

I see straight vs. gay as a similar issue.  Thus, I don't see that it matters whether homosexuality is a choice or not.  It seems to me to be a matter that's nobody else's business; to the extent that someone can choose it, it should up to them whether to choose it, just as I think it's nobody else's business what other features those people pursue romantically have (assuming the object of the pursuit is a person able to make their own choices and that the pursuit doesn't involve objectionable methods, of course).

Now, it seems obvious to me that attraction is heavily biologically based.  It's possible that I have a mild preference for asians over whites, and if I do it's likely that this is because people are biologically programmed to find the exotic attractive, since mixing races is in fact biologically desirable; mixed-race children tend to be healthier.  It's likely that my strong preference for women over men is also biologically programmed, and it seems equally likely to me that the strong preference homosexuals have for others of their own sex is similarly biologically programmed.  But whether that's true or not (and ex-gays, even if any were genuine, wouldn't be proof that it's not; even strong biologically determined preferences can be overridden, as straight men in prison frequently overcome their strong preference for women when none are available) seems to me to be beside the point; the point is that who one chooses to sleep with, or become romantically involved with, or form a lifetime partnership with is just not the business of anybody else apart from the other person involved.

A good series

There have been a number of good posts recently on Philosophy, et cetera about utlitiarianism, deontology, and libertarians.  The latest is here.  The propertarians are, as people might have noted from earlier posts, something of a pet peeve of mine.  For those who haven't followed enough anti-libertarian blogs, the propertarians are the people who claim that their position is all about protecting people's fundamental rights, who write as if the only right worth mentioning is the right to property.  In other words, most libertarians.

Strategic support and voting

I can understand some cases of strategic voting.  Voting for the less bad candidate because the good candidate doesn't have a chance of winning is probably reasonable (sure, your vote probably won't matter, but I hope Florida voters who voted for Nader in 2000 have spent the last several years hating themselves).

However, I disapprove of strategically supporting the "electable" candidate in primaries.  If it's clear to you who the best candidate is, support them, and do your best to explain to everyone you know and publicize as widely as you can why they're the best.  Then may the best candidate win the primaries.  If, in the primaries, people support the candidate they're enthusiastic about, then in the general election, you'll have a candidate with a lot of enthusiastic supports to evangelize for their cause, and to volunteer and raise money of course.  If they hold their noses and support the "electable" candidate, then they'll get a candidate with a bunch of lukewarm supporters, who can't explain why they're supporting the candidate except with a lame story about how he's at least not as bad as the other guy.

Thus, for example, I think the Democrats would have done a lot better with Dean in 2004, because I think too much of Kerry's support was of this useless, lukewarm kind.  Actually, based on what I now know about Dean and Kerry, I now have some inclination to think Kerry might have made a better president than Dean would have (back when I was supporting Dean, I didn't know enough about Kerry), but his lukewarm supporters didn't seem to bother to learn enough about him to know how to sell him with enthusiasm.  I also think that if Gore, Dean, and/or Kerry want to run again in 2008, more power to them.  If any of them can get more enthusiastic supporters this time around, as they'll need to in order to get the primary victory, then I'm sure that candidate will have a solid shot at winning.  Certainly any of the three would have my enthusiastic support (all of them have good ideas on health care, and they all have other notable strengths as wellm such as Gore's record on the environment, Dean's on fiscal responsibility, and Kerry's on corruption).

Similarly, nobody should support Hillary Clinton because they think she's electable, or oppose her because they think she's not.  If you think there are reasons she'd make a better president than any of the others in the primary, support her for that reason, if not, don't.

The enemy notes an interesting trend

I wonder why this would have been happening in recent years.  Possibly a few people getting left behind by the economy the Republicans insist has been going so swimmingly?  Of course, Hinderaker seems to imply the solution to more poor people needing help is to cut the programs that help them; it seems to me that this has already been tried in recent years, and might have just a bit to do with producing the current situation.

Divine Right of Kings

A noted libertarian blog provides an unusually sophisticated justification for the unlimited authority King George seems to keep trying to claim.

In fairness, the post was of course not intended seriously; it was for opposite day, apparently.  However, it struck me as an opportunity to reflect on the issue that has so consistently annoyed liberals like myself (I consider myself a liberal in both the classical and modern sense, and see no contradiction there whatever); the tendency of so many who call themselves libertarians to make excuses for right-wing big government authoritarians.  I hope that tendency will decline with the general decline of King George's popularity, but it continues to make it very hard for me to have much respect for the libertarian faction.

A stirring proclamation

Thanks to Apostropher over at unfogged I managed to come across this example of a local politician doing something truly worthwhile.  I hope everyone has exciting plans for International Dadaism Month!

South Dakota and all that

I thought I should draw attention to the interesting post by PZ Myers; as another godless liberal who also happens to be a white male, I feel like I also perhaps don't give this issue as much of my attention as it deserves.  I don't even know what the situation is around these parts, but I've heard that the heavy Catholic population has made Rhode Island surprisingly conservative on the abortion issue for a state that is overwhelmingly Democrats.

Perhaps I should do more of this

I try, really, to follow the right wing blogs a bit, to comment on their numerous errors.  They really shouldn't go unchallenged, but it's so tiring.  However, I will do a tiny bit here.  I don't know a liberal who denies that North Korea will sell anything to anyone; I recall hearing stories about North Korea selling missile tech to Iran for the past couple of decades.  This sort of thing is the reason we liberals have been complaining that if the administration had really been concerned with WMDs, North Korea was a far bigger threat than Iraq.  Now, if there were any evidence of Iraq being equally willing to sell weapons (it wasn't; Hussein preferred selling oil, and keeping his weapons for himself, even in the days when he had WMDs)), or more importantly of their being any suspicious buyers (obviously impossible, when they weren't doing any selling), that might have made Iraq a threat.

Legal Punishment

Mark Kleiman advocates retribution, on the basis of reflection on an extreme case.  In general, I am suspicious of conclusions drawn on the basis of extreme cases.  Of course, one could question whether Kleiman is right that the punishment of Pinochet would be useless on the grounds of deterrence (he's on better ground in ruling out incapacitation arguments; it seems unlikely that Pinochet will commit further crimes if not locked up); one could argue that such a public case will provide a reminder of the reach of the law and have some benefit in discouraging other criminals, great or petty.  But perhaps that is unconvincing.

Of course, on utilitarian grounds (the sort of grounds I like to use), it could also be argued that Pinochet's suffering will make the friends and relatives of his victims happier.  Perhaps that's enough justification in this case, since they are so numerous.

Kleiman, however, proposes that making Pinochet suffer is something we owe to his victims, and it sounds like he means the dead ones.  I think the idea that we owe anything to the dead is not only false (on utilitarian grounds; we can't benefit or harm them, so we have no moral duties with respect to them), but also dangerous.  The idea that retribution for long past wrongs is morally required fuels many a cycle of warfare and oppression.  I think we should be trying to break those cycles, starting with the very idea of retribution.

Breaking news

I have never spoken with Bob Woodward about Valerie Plame.

New blog

Somebody has started a new blog devoted to the religious left.  Of course, my personal thinking tends to be the less religion, the better, but politics does require compromise.  If people are going to identify religion with values (and, sadly, I can't force them all to read Euthyphro, much less re-read it until they understand it), it's probably necessary to point out that religion isn't always on the side of the conservatives.

Robo-terrorists

The Medium Lobster is especially disturbing today.  He doesn't sound as much like parody as usual, signalling, of course, the increasing difficulty of being more extreme and sillier than the present administration.

Balancing the federal budget

This is a lot of fun.  With the tax policies that I like, and a few strategic cuts, I was able to get the 2006 budget down to 40 billion even as I doubled spending on a few programs I thought deserved it.  Of course, I have some clue which items are big ticket and which aren't.  I wish some Republicans would play with this game a bit, as by and large they seem confused on that issue, imagining that foreign aid is a big budget item and so forth.

Consumer culture

Battlepanda wins this week's award for best analogy.

Suppressing speech

Will Wilkinson is one of those libertarian types, so I disagree with him about many things.  However, drug policy, and the value of free political speech, are not among our areas of disagreement; he has a great post touching on both topics.  Of course I think, and Will would probably agree, that not only should Karen Tandy be fired, but the whole DEA should just be abolished.  But start with small steps.

Helping people with failed governments

The major power of the sub-saharan region, South Africa, is continuing to treat Zimbabwe with kid gloves, refusing to seriously criticize the government and now apparently stepping in with big money to help out Mugabe and his cronies.  On past evidence, virtually all of the money will be stolen by Mugabe's crowd; after all, the main reason Zimbabweans are starving is that Mugabe has actively worked to keep food away from regions of the country where his opponents are especially numerous (the previous white administration can surely be blamed for how poor Zimbabwe was when white rule ended, but who should be blamed for the country's wealth dropping by at least half since then is equally clear; it's the guy at the top).  There seems no reason to think he'll change his policy of starving the opposition.

Now, I'm not generally in favor of embargoes and similar tactics for weakening corrupt governments.  They have a pretty horrible track record.  To take just one example near and dear to American hearts, Castro is still hanging on after almost half a century now.  But surely actively giving money to a corrupt and evil regime is not likely to do much good.  So I guess my questions are twofold.  First, is there something I'm missing, any hint of reason for thinking South Africa is not making a mistake?  And second, if they are making a mistake, what better alternatives are available?  Is there any effective way to help the starving people there?  Invasion almost seems appealing in this case, as the government is quite unpopular and not all that well armed, so it ought to be a lot easier than the Iraq situation has been.  Of course, Zimbabwe has no oil, and as far as we know no training camps for international terrorists, so there's probably nobody willing to make that kind of effort in this situation.

Being tough on terror

I happened to read the ProJo today, and it did not disappoint; as is usually the case, the editorial page had an item that made me quite angry.  It's also very frustrating, because I don't know what to do about it.  The authors apparently believe that the torture of an unknown number of Iraqis and Afghans, including dozens of deaths by torture, as well as the untold thousands killed during the fighting, constituted "tiptoeing" in the middle east.

They contrast our recent efforts with WWII, when we levelled cities.  Of course, most civilized people now think that was probably not justified, and probably didn't do any good anyway.  Speer, who was in a position to know, seems to have thought that the allied bombing campaigns mostly served to ensure that he had no trouble convincing Germans to work to defend the fatherland, since it made it so clear to all that they were under attack by especially ruthless enemies.

Unfortunately, the message that being brutal to people who may not yet be your enemies is not the way to deal with your actual enemies is very hard to sell.  Though I consider the U.S. treatment of prisoners (and of Iraqis in general) to be a very serious moral issue, I suspect drawing attention to it will only make leftists like myself appear soft on terror.  Is there any way to frame it that won't make this ultimately a vote-winner for the right?  But perhaps it doesn't matter how this influences electoral results in the short term; probably it is necessary to emphasize that some of us are not OK with policies of responding to terror with terror, in order to ensure it doesn't come to be viewed as a universally acceptable practice.

Gore in 2008?

It's awfully early to be deciding on a presidential candidate; probably a half-dozen worthy contenders nobody is presently talking about will have made an appearance by the time of the primary race.  But we have to do something to entertain ourselves.  I haven't changed my mind about Howie; I'd love to see the doc run again.  I think Kerry shouldn't run, partly because I think the last campaign showed how hard it would be for him to win, and partly because I think we'd like to keep him in the Senate (sure, in Massachusetts, if he didn't run for Senate a Democrat would almost certainly replace him, but he's been pretty good in the Senate, and seniority matters there).  I think Hillary is a much better choice than seems to be generally believed.

However, I've been an on and off fan of Gore for a long time (I was hoping he'd be the presidential candidate for the Democrats in '88).  Having now been informed by Ezra that Gore supports single-payer health care, I have to say he's looking a lot more appealing as a possibility.  I think that's an excellent issue for Democrats to rally around.  There is strong evidence that one of the main reasons our health care is so expensive is that vast sums of money are wasted by various parts of the system trying to make other parts of the system pay.  The single-payer model would obviously eliminate all of that waste, so there's reason to think insuring all Americans could end up being cheaper than our present failure to insure tens of millions.  Canada, among many other countries which succeed in covering everyone, spends less per capita on health care than we do.

Further, while the insurance companies could be expected to fight this tooth and nail, there's even cause to hope that other business sectors might support this measure; GM wants relief from the current system, and as I already indicated in an earlier post, Toyota also prefers to operate in an environment free of insurance company extortion.  So this might not be as bad an issue for fundraising as at first appears.

As for those who encourage a more moderate approach, Kerry had the most sensible moderate approach I could possibly imagine.  He proposed national catastropic health care insurance, to intervene and cover the extra costs if a particularly severe health problem ended up costing more than $50,000.  This would, obviously, help greatly with one of the huge weaknesses of the current system; it would mean insurance companies would have less incentive to deny insurance to those at risk of catastrophic illness, because the costs to them would be constrained.  But this eminently sensible, moderate plan got nowhere.  I say it's time we give extremism a shot.  Whether it's Gore or someone else, whoever runs for the Democrats next should advocate single-payer.

Conceptions of political freedom

I've been looking forward to the next post in Elizabeth Anderson's series on freedom, and it is now up.  This one stresses the need for the rule of law in order to protect any kind of meaningful political freedom.

The London shooting

There's a pretty interesting discussion of it here, which I discovered via Crooked Timber.  The more perspectives the better, certainly; I'm surprised an MBA's perspective was so to the point.