4 takes on Jonathan Gruber's remarks on Obamacare

Gruber, an MIT economics professor who's considered a key architect of Obamacare (and Romneycare), infamously said:

Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical in getting the thing to pass . . . . And I wish Mark was right, we could make it all transparent, but I'd rather have this law than not.

Howard Dean:

The problem is not that he said it. The problem is that he thinks it. The core problem with the damn law is it was put together by a bunch of elitists who don’t really, fundamentally understand the American people. That’s what the problem is.

(That's my own transcription of Dean; the quote at that link is incorrect.)

Ann Althouse (my mom):

MIT prof Jonathan Gruber is sorry he was transparent about the lack of transparency in getting Obamacare passed. . . . He wants his old lack of transparency back. He revealed what he liked so much about it. Now, why can't he have it back? Well, Professor Gruber, it just doesn't work that way. Once you've let us see that you mean to deceive us, we won't get fooled again . . . unless you're right, and we really are stupid.

Tyler Cowen:

It’s a healthy world where academics can speak their minds at conferences and the like without their words becoming political weapons in a bigger fight. . . . I’m simply not very interested in his proclamations on tape, which as far as I can tell are mostly correct albeit overly cynical. (If anything he is overrating the American voter — most people weren’t even paying close enough attention to be tricked.) Criticisms of Gruber are not criticisms of a policy, and it is policy we should focus upon and indeed there is still a great deal of health care policy we need to figure out. It’s hardly news that intellectuals who hold political power, even as advisors, very often do not speak the truth. If anything, I feel sorry for Gruber that he has subsequently felt the need to so overcompensate by actively voicing such ex post cynicism, it is perhaps the sign of a soul not at rest.

In the meantime, I’d like to see more open discourse, not less. Perhaps we should subsidize people who end up looking foolish, rather than taxing them.

Bryan Caplan responds to Tyler Cowen:

Tyler and I start at the same place yet end continents apart. We see the same facts: Lying politicians and the elite intellectuals who craftily decorate their masters' lies. But Tyler starts with a strong moral presumption that Whatever People in Our Society Routine[ly] Do is morally acceptable. Indeed, he bends over backwards to see the world from their point of view.

I, in contrast, start with a strong moral presumption in favor of scrupulous honesty. Unless you have strong reason to believe that lying will have awesome consequences, you shouldn't lie. Instead of bending over backwards to make excuses for liars, we should bend over backwards to tell the truth. The fact that most people fall short of this puritanical standard shows that most people ought to shape up and fly right.

And when people fleetingly realize that every society is ruled by liars, they are right to shudder.

Is Romney wrong about economic mobility in the United States?

In a Washington Post editorial, Ruth Marcus writes that Mitt Romney is presenting a "Fantasyland version of the American Dream." According to Marcus, Romney claims that

all it takes to succeed in this country is determination and hard work. Government merely needs to get out of the way, roust the Entitlement Society slackers and let the Opportunity Society strivers go for it.

“Frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you could have, which is to get born in America,” Romney told donors at the now-famous Florida fundraiser. “I’ll tell you ... 95 percent of life is set up for you if you’re born in this country.”

Describing his own path, Romney noted that he gave away the money his father left him. “I have inherited nothing,” he said. “Everything I earned I earned the old-fashioned way.”

There’s only one thing wrong with this cozy, self-satisfied worldview: It omits the enormous advantages accruing to those born on third base. It ignores the grim reality that those born to less-privileged families are far less likely than the Bushes or Romneys of the world to secure their place in the middle class or above.

It imagines an America where economic mobility is far more fluid than it is in reality. Being born in America is an advantage, to be sure, but some spoons are a lot more sterling than others.

A new study from the Brookings Institution’s Center on Children and Families underscores Romney’s misperception. “The reality is that economic success in America is not purely meritocratic,” write authors Isabel V. Sawhill, Scott Winship and Kerry Searle Grannis. Rather, they say, “It helps if you have the right parents. Those born into rich or poor families have a high probability of remaining rich or poor as adults.”

This seems to be flawed reasoning. The statement in that last paragraph assumes that merit is randomly distributed throughout the population. But that's not the only plausible theory. How about this alternate theory? Parents earn their money through their actions. They took those actions because of some combination of their genes and their environment (including how they were raised by their parents). The parents obviously pass on their genes to their children, and they can also pass on some of their upbringing by raising their kids to share their values and so on. The children will tend to act in similar ways to their parents. In short, parents can pass on their "merit" to their children. If that's correct, then in a meritocracy, you'd expect a person's level of economic success to be fairly similar — although far from identical — to their parents.

And that's what the study shows:

People do move up and down the ladder, both over their careers and between generations, but it helps if you have the right parents. Children born into middle-income families have a roughly equal chance of moving up or down once they become adults, but those born into rich or poor families have a high probability of remaining rich or poor as adults. The chance that a child born into a family in the top income quintile will end up in one of the top three quintiles by the time they are in their forties is 82 percent, while the chance for a child born into a family in the bottom quintile is only 30 percent. In short, a rich child in the U.S. is more than twice as likely as a poor child to end up in the middle class or above.

As Tyler Cowen wrote in a blog post called "Why Economic Mobility Measures are Overrated" (which I've blogged twice before):

How much of immobility is due to “inherited talent plus diminishing role for random circumstance”? Is not this cause of immobility very different — both practically and morally — from such factors as discrimination, bad schools, occupational licensing, etc.? What are you supposed to get when you combine genetics with meritocracy? I do not know how much of current American (or other) immobility is due to this factor, but I find it discomforting that complaints about mobility are so infrequently accompanied by an analysis of this topic.

Why do Americans have less income mobility than Europeans?

I linked to Tyler Cowen's post with 7 points about income mobility yesterday, and I mentioned that he speculates about that question. Here's what Cowen has to say (#4); I think this is a profound insight that doesn't get nearly enough attention:

Why do many European nations have higher mobility? Putting ethnic and demographic issues aside, here is one mechanism. Lots of smart Europeans decide to be not so ambitious, to enjoy their public goods, to work for the government, to avoid high marginal tax rates, to travel a lot, and so on. That approach makes more sense in a lot of Europe than here. Some of the children of those families have comparable smarts but higher ambition and so they rise quite a bit in income relative to their peers. (The opposite may occur as well, with the children choosing more leisure.) That is a less likely scenario for the United States, where smart people realize this is a country geared toward higher earners and so fewer smart parents play the “tend the garden” strategy. . . . “High intergenerational mobility” is sometimes a synonym for “lots of parental underachievers.”

Another thing (Cowen's point #7):

I would like all measurements [of income mobility] to take into account the pre-migration incomes of incoming entrants. Denmark, which doesn’t let many people in, is a much less upwardly mobile society once you take this into account. Sweden deserves more praise, and in general this factor will make the Anglo countries look much, much more supportive of mobility.

Tyler Cowen on Paul Krugman

"Paul Krugman is a great economist. But of all the people in my RSS feed, in terms of his quality and skill as a reader, he is not in the top 90 percent."

That's how Tyler Cowen concludes a reply to Krugman in their debate on income mobility.

(Here's Cowen's original post with 7 interesting points on income mobility, including speculation about why it's higher in Europe than in the US, and here's Krugman's response suggesting that Cowen's post is "anti-American.")

One of Cowen's co-bloggers, Alex Tabarrok, also defends Cowen. He gives three elegant hypotheticals which lead him to conclude that "economic mobility measures are overrated. What we should care about is growth." Whether or not you're not predisposed to agree with that view, I recommend clicking the link and considering Tabarrok's hypos.

Relatedly, here's a column by Thomas Sowell on income mobility. Excerpt:

All sorts of statements are made in politics and in the media as if that top 1 percent is an enduring class of people, rather than an ever-changing collection of individuals who have a spike in their income in a particular year for one reason or another. Turnover in other income brackets is also substantial.

There is nothing mysterious about this. Most people start out at the bottom, in entry-level jobs, and their incomes rise over time as they acquire more skills and experience.

Politicians and media talking heads love to refer to people who are in the bottom 20 percent in income in a given year as “the poor.” But, following the same individuals for 10 or 15 years usually shows the great majority of those individuals moving into higher income brackets.

The number who reach the top 20 percent greatly exceeds the number still stuck in the bottom 20 percent over the years. But such mundane facts cannot compete for attention with the moral melodramas conjured up by politicians and the media when they discuss “the rich” and “the poor.”

There are people who are genuinely rich and genuinely poor, in the sense of having very high or very low incomes for most, if not all, of their lives. But “the rich” and “the poor” in this sense are unlikely to add up to even 10 percent of the population.

For more of this, I recommend the chapter on income in Sowell's book Economic Facts and Fallacies.

Tyler Cowen explains the problem with stories

"What are the stories that no one has an incentive to tell? Start telling yourself those, and see if your incentives change."



(Here's the transcript.)

The problem with books, according to Sam Harris

First of all: they're too long. Harris explains:

I love physical books as much as anyone. And when I really want to get a book into my brain, I now purchase both the hardcover and electronic editions. From the point of view of the publishing industry, I am the perfect customer. This also makes me a very important canary in the coal mine—and I’m here to report that I’ve begun to feel woozy. For instance, I’ve started to think that most books are too long, and I now hesitate before buying the next big one. When shopping for books, I’ve suddenly become acutely sensitive to the opportunity costs of reading any one of them. If your book is 600-pages-long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?

The honest answer to this last question should disappoint everyone: Publishers can’t charge enough money for 60-page books to survive; thus, writers can’t make a living by writing them. But readers are beginning to feel that this shouldn’t be their problem. Worse, many readers believe that they can just jump on YouTube and watch the author speak at a conference, or skim his blog, and they will have absorbed most of what he has to say on a given subject. In some cases this is true and suggests an enduring problem for the business of publishing. In other cases it clearly isn’t true and suggests an enduring problem for our intellectual life. . . .

[W]riters and public intellectuals must find a way to get paid for what they do—and the opportunities to do this are changing quickly. My current solution is to write longer books for a traditional press and publish short ebooks myself on Amazon. If anyone has any better ideas, please publish them somewhere—perhaps on a blog—and then send me a link. And I hope you get paid.

Did Harris find my blog post called "6 ways blogs are better than books," specifically #1 and #6, and steal my idea (which I, of course, took from other people)? Probably not. Most readers have had the same realization. The question is who has the courage to publicly admit it, and act on it.

I'm currently reading a book that has done both: Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. It was originally released exclusively as an eBook, and was later released as a dead-tree book. One of the blurbs is by Matthew Yglesias, calling it "a great innovation in current affairs publishing — much shorter and cheaper than a conventional book in a way that actually leaves you wanting to read more once you finish it."

In the book's introduction, Cowen makes an odd argument for his decision to release it in exclusively digital form:

I meant for [the ebook version] to reflect an argument from the book itself: The contemporary world has plenty of innovations, but most of them do not much benefit the average household. (2)

So, publishing it as a digital book only (until it became so successful that the dead-tree version was a no-brainer) made sense because it didn't help many people! OK. That argument is even more innovative than the book's short length.

But then Cowen realized that eschewing paper was a problem. He writes:

Some readers . . . were frustrated with the Digital Rights Management systems embedded in nearly all published electronic content. These systems mean that you can't pass around an eBook like a paper book. Libraries don't necessarily own eBooks forever; it's possible for the publisher to flip the switch and literally take them back — debate on this topic is raging. Paper books are easier to give as gifts and easier (sometimes) to use in the classroom. On top of all that, Amazon.com, B&N.com [Don't try typing that into your browser. He meant bn.com. — JAC], the iBookstore, and related services do not yet reach into every corner of the globe. Paper books can get to remote places a little more reliably. Personally I like reading books on trips and dropping them somewhere creative, in the hope they will be picked up by a surprised and delighted future reader. (2-3)

I'm convinced by those and other reasons to keep paper books around for good. So I hope Sam Harris is wrong to say that "[t]he future of the written word is (mostly or entirely) digital." I see little reason why authors and publishers can't heed Harris's advice to make books shorter while still publishing paper books. Harris says readers won't be willing to pay for a 60-page book. Well, I paid for Cowen's book, which is 109 pages. It's just 89 pages without the endnotes and index. I think Harris is underestimating people's willingness to buy a reasonably priced, well-supported nonfiction book that gets to the point in 100 pages, as opposed to a 300- or 400-page book that might be even more rigorously supported but also includes more repetition — and will be much less likely to be read in its entirety. As my mom, Ann Althouse, more succinctly put it in her message to writers (particularly one writer who scolded her for not reading every word of her book):

You pad. I skim.

IN THE COMMENTS: My dad, Richard Lawrence Cohen, says:

I don't follow Harris' argument about pricing. Long books are the pricing problem, because they cost much more to print and readers are reluctant to pay an equivalent percent extra to make up for it; thus the tendency of long books to have small, light print and thin paper. Meanwhile, if a book is only 100 pages, you can still charge almost as much as for a 150-page book and save a lot of the printing costs. The relatively higher price on the short book creates perceived value in the reader's mind, justifying the expense. We're all accustomed to paying $15 for a paperback anyway, and page-counting isn't a top priority; the page range consumers accept at that price is pretty wide. It's a mistake to assume that the reader is glad to have more pages for the money; the extra pages are a chore. It's a welcome relief to be able to get the message fast.

Do you give to charity to help people or for other reasons?

Tim Harford wrote (in an old Slate article):

If people really were altruistic, there would be much less volunteering.

It would almost always be more effective to volunteer less, work overtime, and give more. A . . . banker can pay for a lot of soup-kitchen chefs and servers with a couple of hours' worth of his salary, but that wouldn't provide the same feel-good buzz as ladling out stew himself, would it?

In fact, the closer you look at charitable giving, the less charitable it appears to be. A recent experiment by John List, an economist at the University of Chicago, and a team of colleagues, showed that donations are less than magnanimous after all. Using controlled trials to compare different methods of door-to-door fund-raising, professor List's team discovered that it was much more effective to raise funds by selling lottery tickets than it was to raise funds by asking for money. This hardly suggests a world populated by altruists seeking to do the maximum good with their charitable cash. . . .

Even the way we choose to dole out cash betrays our true motives. Someone with $100 to give away and a world full of worthy causes should choose the worthiest and write the check. We don't. Instead, we give $5 for a LiveStrong bracelet, pledge $25 to Save the Children, another $25 to AIDS research, and so on. But $25 is not going to find a cure for AIDS. Either it's the best cause and deserves the entire $100, or it's not and some other cause does. The scattershot approach simply proves that we're more interested in feeling good than doing good.

For that last point, Harford credits Steven Lansburg, who elaborates on why the idea of "diversifying" doesn't make sense with charity the way it does in other areas:

When it comes to managing your personal portfolio, economists will tell you to diversify. When it comes to handling the rest of your life, we give you exactly the same advice. It's a bad idea to spend all your leisure time playing golf; you'll probably be happier if you occasionally watch movies or go sailing or talk to your children.

So why is charity different? Here's the reason: An investment in Microsoft can make a serious dent in the problem of adding some high-tech stocks to your portfolio; now it's time to move on to other investment goals. Two hours on the golf course makes a serious dent in the problem of getting some exercise; maybe it's time to see what else in life is worthy of attention. But no matter how much you give to CARE, you will never make a serious dent in the problem of starving children. The problem is just too big; behind every starving child is another equally deserving child.

That is not to say that charity is futile. If you save one starving child, you have done a wonderful thing, regardless of how many starving children remain. It is precisely because charity is so effective that we should think seriously about where to target it, and then stay focused once the target is chosen. . . .

If your charitable contributions are small relative to the size of the charities, and if you care only about the recipients (as opposed to caring, say, about how many accolades you receive), then you will bullet all your contributions on a single charity.

Tyler Cowen gives another reason to donate to relatively few different charities, though he avoids giving the extreme advice to donate to exactly one, in Discover Your Inner Economist (a great little book which I can't recommend highly enough):

Charities make most of their money off what is called a "house file." The house file consists of donors who have been giving loyally for years. A good house file . . . brings in much more than it costs to maintain. . . .

If a mailing brings in thirty cents for every dollar spent, that mailing probably went relatively well by the standards of the sector. A fifty-cent return per dollar spent is a smashing hit.

Why spend a dollar to get thirty or fifty cents? The answer is simple: the charity is investing in developing its house file. . . .

We now have a new way to make the world a better place. Once we have found some good charities, we should tell them not to rent out our name and address to other mailers. Virtually all charities rent out or swap names and addresses to similar groups; what better way is there to find new donors than to look for people who are already giving to related causes?

"Remove the name" requests save charities thousands of dollars on their mailing costs. (193-194)

A post on Less Wrong argued:

Imagine you are setting out on a dangerous expedition through the Arctic on a limited budget. The grizzled old prospector at the general store shakes his head sadly: you can't afford everything you need; you'll just have to purchase the bare essentials and hope you get lucky. But what is essential? Should you buy the warmest parka, if it means you can't afford a sleeping bag? Should you bring an extra week's food, just in case, even if it means going without a rifle? Or can you buy the rifle, leave the food, and hunt for your dinner?

And how about the field guide to Arctic flowers? You like flowers, and you'd hate to feel like you're failing to appreciate the harsh yet delicate environment around you. And a digital camera, of course - if you make it back alive, you'll have to put the Arctic expedition pics up on Facebook. . . .

[But] when your life is on the line, things like impressing your friends and buying organic pale in comparison. You have one goal - staying alive - and your only problem is how to distribute your resources to keep your chances as high as possible. These sorts of economics concepts are natural enough when faced with a journey through the freezing tundra.

But they are decidedly not natural when facing a decision about charitable giving. Most donors say they want to "help people". If that's true, they should try to distribute their resources to help people as much as possible. Most people don't. In the "Buy A Brushstroke" campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 [about $850,000] to keep the famous painting "Blue Rigi" in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease. Each individual $50 donation could have given a year of normal life back to a Third Worlder afflicted with a disabling condition like blindness or limb deformity.

Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people by preserving access to the original canvas of a beautiful painting. And most of those 11,000 donors, if you asked, would say that a thousand people's lives are more important than a beautiful painting, original or no. But these people didn't have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.

Last year, David Sedaris wrote about how he was able to get people to donate extra money to him, beyond just paying for his books, even when he was already a fabulously successful author (via):

A couple of books ago, I put a tip jar on my signing table and I made over $4,000 on my tour. The problem was then I started hating people who didn’t tip me. I didn’t say anything to them, but I would just sit there thinking, “You cheap son of a bitch. I just signed four books and you can’t even give me a dollar?” And why should they? But I just got so involved in it. I had to stop doing it.

I told people it was all for me to spend on candy. They were delighted because it’s funny to give money to someone who doesn’t need it. If there had been a beggar outside the bookstore, at the end of the evening, he might have had 75 cents where as at the end of my best evening in Dallas–[I had] $530 in tips.

The Political Compass ideology quiz

You can take the quiz here to find out where they place you on economic and social issues.

Based on my scores, I seem to be a moderate libertarian.

Libertarianism is often seen as an extreme ideology, so is "moderate libertarian" an oxymoron? Not according to Tyler Cowen. Writing in 2007, he said that libertarian policies have increased America's economic growth, but added:

The more wealth we have, the more government we can afford. Furthermore, the better government operates, the more government people will demand. That is the fundamental paradox of libertarianism. Many initial victories bring later defeats.

I am not so worried about this paradox of libertarianism. Overall libertarians should embrace these developments. We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don’t have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal.

In short, libertarianism has the seeds of its own destruction.

As with all these kinds of quizzes, I take issue with the premise of some of the questions. The first one is whether you agree with this statement:

If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.

This seems designed to prompt you to think in zero-sum terms about benefitting either "trans-national corporations" or "humanity." I wish there had been an option that would have allowed me to take the position that globalization should benefit both trans-national corporations and humanity at the same time. But the quiz nudges you toward answering that "humanity" should take precedence over "corporations." (The quiz writers should read the section in chapter 1 of Thomas Sowell's Economic Facts and Fallacies about the "zero-sum fallacy" and the chapter on free trade in Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist.)

Also, the quiz results are supposedly about your political views, but several of the social questions don't refer to any role of government. For instance, you could believe that discipline is the most important value to instill in children, and that society has gone too far in allowing people to express sexuality in public (which the quiz would count as "authoritarian" positions), while taking a libertarian position that government should stay out of these issues. You can have a moral objection to the painted nude woman in Times Square the other day without thinking the police should have arrested her. The quiz is supposed to test whether you do have authoritarian political views, but the quiz seems to make an authoritarian assumption that you'll want the government to enforce your morals.

How much of a problem is it that you don't have enough time in your whole life to become "reasonably well-read"?

Linda Holmes observes, on NPR's website:

The vast majority of the world's books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It's just numbers.

Consider books alone. Let's say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That's quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let's say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you're 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you're 80. That's 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot.

Let's do you another favor: Let's further assume you limit yourself to books from the last, say, 250 years. Nothing before 1761. This cuts out giant, enormous swaths of literature, of course, but we'll assume you're willing to write off thousands of years of writing in an effort to be reasonably well-read.

Of course, by the time you're 80, there will be 65 more years of new books, so by then, you're dealing with 315 years of books, which allows you to read about 20 books from each year. You'll have to break down your 20 books each year between fiction and nonfiction – you have to cover history, philosophy, essays, diaries, science, religion, science fiction, westerns, political theory ... I hope you weren't planning to go out very much.

You can hit the highlights, and you can specialize enough to become knowledgeable in some things, but most of what's out there, you'll have to ignore. (Don't forget books not written in English! Don't forget to learn all the other languages!) . . .

We could do the same calculus with film or music or, increasingly, television – you simply have no chance of seeing even most of what exists. Statistically speaking, you will die having missed almost everything.

That's a very quantitative way to look at it, as if the main thing that matters is what percentage of "everything" you've consumed. I don't see why that should be the standard.

It's analogous to the way people marvel at how "insignificant" humanity is because we're so small relative to the entire universe (which, by the way, would seem to imply that physically larger people are more important than smaller people — and surely we don't believe that). How big would we need to be in order to be "significant"? How much would we need to read, view, or listen to in order to be "well-read" or "cultured"?

Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist offers a different way to look at this, which I find more meaningful. In the book's chapter on art, Cowen says we've become "cultural billionaires" — we just need to realize and take advantage of this fact. An overwhelming amount of great art is available to us for amazingly little money via libraries, museums, architecture (which you can see for free by walking down the street), Netflix, YouTube . . .

That doesn't solve the quantity problem. But we have so much access to such an astoundingly high level of quality that it would seem ungrateful to fuss over not having enough hours to get to most of it. We have enough time to live lives that are incredibly rich in literature and other art.

I happily admit there are whole genres of music that I consistently don't pay any attention to. "But that's so close-minded!" Well, it is and it isn't. I'm not making an objective judgment that these genres aren't worthwhile for anyone to spend time on. It's just that I, like everyone, have my own time management strategies. I've listened to Beethoven's symphonies a ridiculous number of times, always knowing there was some other piece of music I hadn't heard before, which I could have spent that time listening to . . . and I'll never hear it now. But I'm confident I've had good reasons for making such choices. I'm not worried I might be a little more ignorant of other musical genres, or novels I could have been reading at the time. I actually like the fact that I know much more about my own tastes than the vast majority of all content, of which I'm ignorant. This is part of the joy of life.

You wouldn't dream of trying to live in every city in the world, or even 10% of them, because that would mean you'd spend less time at home. Quality is more important than quantity.

The fact that everyone experiences such a limited number of books, paintings, songs, and cities adds to each individual's uniqueness. These experiences shape our identities. If we were all somehow able to read every book, and live in every city, we'd be much more similar to each other, and that would be really boring.

ADDED: Mindy Kaling has a related insight:

Don't worry about having perfect taste. People with perfectly curated taste usually have no original voice.

Are stories inherently left-wing?

That's the position taken by Tyler Cowen (who, for the record, is an emphatically moderate libertarian), in response to a liberal reader who wanted to find the definitive left-wing novel as a counterweight to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged:

I would say that the story per se is usually left-wing, in both good and bad ways. It elevates the seen over the unseen, can easily portray a struggle for justice, focuses on the anecdote, and encourages us to judge social institutions by the intentions of the people who work in them, rather than looking at their deeper and longer-term outcomes. Precisely because the story is itself so left-wing, there won't be a definitive example of the left-wing novel. Story-telling encourages context-dependent thinking, although not necessarily in an accurate manner. One notable feature of Atlas Shrugged is how frequently the story-telling stops for a long speech or an extended dialogue, in order to explain some first principles to the reader.

But a commenter on Facebook disagrees:

I don't think the story is a bad form for conservative thinking, even if in practice most novelists have been left-wing. The basic themes of identity, conflicts between good and evil, and personal struggles over adversity, temptation, etc all fit with both the novel and conservative thinking. But the novel is not at all suited to social science thinking, which . . . looks for systemic patterns. Social scientists dismiss as outliers events novelists would see as deeply significant.

Also: "Art is right wing."

Why it's a good thing if people are losing interest in reading books

"If books are more boring than before, it is because one sees the new ideas more quickly on the web." — Tyler Cowen

The "taste" of political and economic ideas

I love this passage, from an old book review in The New Republic, about which I'm deliberately omitting the key details:

It will not do to dismiss [this book] as a farrago of nonsense. Its very quality of not making sense is exactly what gives it effectiveness. We must rid ourselves of the view that only logical ideas can be political weapons. Ideas in politics are much like poetry: they need no inner logical structure to be effective. Edward Lear's nonsense verse merely extends a principle inherent in poetry as a whole. And _____ is, in a sense, the Edward Lear of political thinking. He has taught us that, just as a limerick drives Shakespeare out of our minds, . . . illogical political ideas drive out the logical. And whether or not he makes sense, his book has become the profoundly evocative philosophy of millions of people.

I left out the specific book and author in question because I think the point is worth considering in the abstract before being distracted by the specifics. If you click the link, you'll immediately see who it's about.

Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen have a similar insight in this portion of a Bloggingheads diavlog. (I want to be clear that I'm not at all trying to put down their thoughts by connecting them with the above passage.)



A transcript:

Wilkinson: My own view of intellectual life was influenced by it.* When I consider questions about difficult intellectual issues, I think of them as somehow having to do with taste . . . . There are certain arguments that 'taste' wrong. Because you don't necessarily explicitly see the logical structure of an argument. But you're like, "There's something wrong with this." And a lot of what you do when you're trained in a discipline, whether it's philosophy or economics, is that you're cultivating a kind of epistemic taste. You're not implementing an algorithm to tell whether a certain policy argument violates a fundamental principle of economics. You have to develop what people call economic intuition. But what is that? And it feels like what you have when you can taste the elements in a good Merlot. "Oh, there's a little bit of blackberry in there."

Cowen: Economics and politics are much more about taste and aesthetics, I think, than often we have realized. And there are thinkers that see that, when you go back in the history of ideas. They're not always the most salubrious thinkers, but there's a lot to it.

* This segment explains what Wilkinson means at the beginning of the clip when he says his view of intellectual life was "influenced by it" -- the "it" is Hume's essay "Of the Standard of Taste" (which I've blogged before).

By the way, that whole diavlog is excellent and worth listening to. (You might want to download it as a podcast.) It's structured as an interview with Cowen about his book Create Your Own Economy (which is oddly titled since it's not mainly about business or economics). But the diavlog transcends the promotional interview format and turns out to be an enlightening conversation about the value of outside-the-mainstream thinking styles.

The 12 books that have influenced me the most

Tyler Cowen started this meme, in response to "a loyal reader" who told him:

I'd like to see you list the top 10 books which have influenced your view of the world.

Will Wilkinson, Matthew Yglesias, and many others have given their lists. There's no required number of books, but most people seem to be giving around 10.

Some of the recurring authors are Plato, Nietszche, John Stuart Mill, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Hannah Arendt, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Michael Walzer, Thomas Kuhn, Derek Parfit, Paul Johnson, and Thomas Sowell. This is all slanted by the fact that the meme was started by a libertarian economist, so the people who pick up his meme are going to be disproportionately libertarian.

Here's my list:

1. The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel. (Previously blogged by me and also my dad.) He looks at many of the classic philosophical problems (knowledge, free will, the meaning of life, etc.) in order to illuminate the frustrating interplay between the objective and the subjective, both of which are inescapably real. 

2. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume.
3. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. Kant's book is famously badly written, while Hume's book is pretty clearly written for the 18th century. Both of them have to be confronted by anyone trying to understand the limits of understanding. They didn't create enduring theoretical frameworks, but they still made progress by waking us up from our "dogmatic slumbers" (as Kant said Hume had done to him).

4. Upheavals of Thought by Martha Nussbaum. Emotions aren't the opposite of reason — they contain intelligent thoughts and allow us to rationally interact with the outside world.

5. What's It All About? by Julian Baggini. An argument that the standard solutions to the meaning of life don't work.

6. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Blogged.) How to structure all the activities in your life to maximize happiness.

7. The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell. (Blogged.) You could file this under philosophy or self-help.

8. The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. (Blogged.) I'm sure there are more recent books on evolutionary psychology that are better supported (at least because more research has been done since 1994), and Wright himself admits that the theory has its shortcomings. But this book offers a compelling explanation of human behavior.

9. Mortal Questions by Thomas Nagel. He applies his dryly, lucidly analytical style to the kinds of questions that continental philosophy more often approaches with overwrought extravagance and obscurantism. The famous "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is one of many highlights; others include "Death" (blogged), "The Absurd" (blogged), "Sexual Perversion," and "The Fragmentation of Value."

10. The Mysterious Flame by Colin McGinn. Why we haven't, and aren't going to, solve the mind-body problem.

11. Rationality in Action by John Searle. A refreshing look at the problem of free will. (His shorter follow-up, Freedom & Neurobiology, deals with similar themes but also extends his analysis into political philosophy.)

12. Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. As the back cover says, he makes the case for a revolution in our concern for animals by reasoning from beliefs most people already hold. This is the one book about which I can say it has affected my life every single day for the past 20 years.

Looking over the list, I seem to have been most interested in thinking about thought and its place in our lives, with more emphasis on the inadequacy than the power of rational thought. This emphasis is rather awkward since any such analysis is itself an attempt to think rationally. The View from Nowhere captures this awkwardness explicitly.

Feel free to post a comment either listing the books that have influenced you the most, linking to your blog post with your list, or linking to other people's lists that you've found especially interesting.

"The Internet is supplementing and intensifying real life."

Some common-sense optimism on how the internet is changing our lives by Tyler Cowen, who insightfully compares the rise of online social media to getting married after a long-distance relationship.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)