Cure-alls and Remedies
Liveable4All dropped this video in the comments to my last post . It’s a short recording of Martin Luther King: “We are demanding an emergency to program to provide employment for everyone in need of a job, or if a work program is impractical, a guaranteed annual income at levels that sustain life and decent…
[caption id=”” align=”alignleft” width=”336″] US Customs and Border Protection officers enforce our labor market protections with paramilitary techniques.[/caption] One of my favorite liberal policies is the basic income proposal. The idea is that all citizens have a basic guaranteed income, below which no one may fall. As the argument goes, this supplies more flexibility than…
[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”375″ caption=”The Day of Thugs (Image from Foreign Policy)”] [/caption] It is said that revolution is what happens when a police officer is transformed from a legitimate authority into a man with a gun. If that’s true, then what we witnessed in Egypt yesterday is a classic counter-revolution: irregular hoodlums attacking peaceful…
Will Wilkinson on Bryan Caplan’s (false?) dilemma : Bryan Caplan lays down a challenge to liberaltarians: From what philosophic point of view is “maximizing growth + lots of redistribution + the immigration restrictions lots of domestic redistribution naturally encourage” better than “maximizing growth + no redistribution + free immigration”? Whether you’re concern for the poor is…
Thomas Gregersen quotes Ronald Dworkin on Amartya Sen : It is not helpful, in the world of real politics, only to call for due consideration of a large variety of factors that everyone concedes relevant without also offering some overall scheme to suggest how these different factors should be weighted in a practical decision about…
Responding to the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Socioeconomic Status , Peter Levine discusses some of the difficulties in measuring socioeconomic status : To take another example: you need wealth and family connections to be admitted to certain snobby clubs. But having wealth and family connections might hurt your chances of hanging out with the…
There’s a pretty fantastic exchange happening in the blogosphere right now, started by Freddie DeBoer here and followed-up here . The substance of DeBoer’s criticism is that there are no legitimate “far left” bloggers, only center-left “neo-liberals” and the panoply of social conservatives, partisan Republicans, and libertarians. Thus, DeBoer charges, we have a blind spot,…
On the Diane Rehm Show today, Jill Lepore echoed Richard Hofstadter’s diagnosis of political violence : I went back and — a few years ago and reread an issue of Newsweek magazine that was published a couple of months after the Kent State shootings, which is, in some ways, a similar moment to this pause and…
In his comments on my post last week , Robin Hanson asked about the conceptual work still needed to advance the cause of prediction markets as tools for governance. To my knowledge, Hanson’s definitive statement of futarchy can be found here : When an approved betting market clearly estimates that a proposed policy would increase expected…
Tyler Cowen, a loyal reader of my e-mails, responds to my question on Michel Foucault . In the process, he recommends The Archeology of Knowledge twice, and notes that Foucault …goes astray by assuming, implicitly, explicitly or otherwise, that structural categories somehow interact with each other in the world of ideas. It’s much more micro and disaggregated…