Moana, Complacency, and the Enduring Appeal of Steady-State Economics
(Sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night with a reading of the political economy of Moana, and you just have to write it down. I regret nothing!)
Tyler Cowen
Calm is not Rational
I do think those are basically the right judgments about fossil fuels: they are awesome, we should be glad that they existed, and it really sucks that we’re going to be giving them up, but it’s time to take action. That said, it’s not clear why I can’t also feel: Anger that providence does not supply as good a solution without the costs. Resentment that those who have profited from fossil fuel extraction are willfully denying the evidence that we must change. Frustration that scientific consensus does not bind more of my fellow citizens and their elected representatives. Suspicion of the ways that our current interests cause us to downplay the risks and need for resignation and determination. Those seem perfectly rational to me, too. And we might not be able to hold all those emotions in our mind at the same time, and thus we find that we’re unable to capture the state of perfectly neutral ambivalence that Caplan here suggests is a prerequisite for being considered rational.
The Middle Class is Losing the Race for Second Place
I think about inequality a lot. But I also think about the middle class a lot, which isn’t quite the same thing. Generally, my sympathies lie with the “least advantaged” or “subaltern,” but I also feel the pull of the American cultural commitment to the middle class. There can be little doubt that we are…
Deciding Whether or Not to Tell a Story
When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “Truth and Beauty” with the poet Ann Lauterbach . It was basically a class on reading and writing essays, but I took it because I was a philosophy major and I thought it would be about aesthetics, i.e. about whether judgments about beauty can be…
Sentence Lover
Tyler Cowen writes: I have an irrational fondness for this sentence of Mann’s: The First World War distracted governments from the task of monitoring insect movements. The sentence from Charles C. Mann is quite good, but Cowen’s sentence is better: it encapsulates his exuberance for the written word and for heterodox points of view. (And…
Cowen’s Epistemic Portfolio Theory and Flaubert’s Maxim
A portfolio theory is a way to minimize risk by diversifying one’s commitments or investments, using hopefully countercyclical strategies so that some part of your portfolio is always growing. Tyler Cowen suggests an amusing epistemic portfolio theory : That is, most people have an internal psychological need to fulfill a “quota of dogmatism.” If you’re very…
Advice
Ever since the markets became front page news, I’ve been caught in some sort of economics blog vortex. At this point, most of my reading is no longer directed towards macro-economic issues and institutional critique, but rather focuses on the economics department at George Mason. The problem is that it seems like these people really…
Appreciative Thinking
I’ve been having a debate on a friend’s Facebook page about the value of Martha Nussbaum’s work (I’m a fan) and serendipitously I found this post on “appreciative thinking” via Tyler Cowen . It’s a kind of inverted critical thinking, from Seth Roberts: When it comes to scientific papers, to teach appreciative thinking means to…