My last lecture, on "Living Lives that Respect Liberty," looms. As I did with my prior two lectures, I'd like to offer supplementary materials. I've posted a copy of the PowerPoint file I'll use, here. I earlier blogged the lyrics to the accompanying song, "Hello, Jonah." If you want to learn the chords to it, please see this PDF file.
Showing posts with label Liberty and Society 2007. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Liberty and Society 2007. Show all posts
Friday, July 13, 2007
Thursday, July 12, 2007
L&S: Tissue Issues
I’m usually very optimistic about new technologies, but I’m not looking forward to this: automatic toilet paper dispensers. Those damnable automatic hand towel dispensers are bad enough. They never dispense enough paper unless you stand there for 5 minutes waving your hand in front of the sensor. But at least wiping my hands on my jeans is a viable substitute for paper towels; the same cannot be said of toilet paper.
Of course, the justification for automatic dispensers is that people overuse paper. And they probably do, given that the marginal cost is zero. (Steve, looking over my shoulder, also observes that risk-averse people are understandably concerned with the risk of having too little paper in one's hand.) But why is that so? Why not charge by the sheet? Presumably because the transaction costs are too high: I don’t want to be depositing nickels in the toilet paper dispenser (and, Steve adds, it’s hard to reach your pocket if your pants are down). Maybe a credit-card swiper (Steve suggests "the sWiper®") would provide a viable alternative. I’d rather run the plastic once than sit there frantically waving my hand in the desperate hope of getting another wad of paper.
[Aside: This really has nothing to do with the L&S seminar, except for Steve being present to watch as I composed this post.]
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
L&S: Things I Didn't Need to Hear
Glen doing his imitation of someone getting a colonoscopy.
Think Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally meets Curly from The Three Stooges.
(Oh yeah, it was in the context of a study of colonoscopy patients reporting their discomfort and how the results linked to behavioral economics.)
L&S: Distinguishing Substance from Process
Tom is discussing various methods of interpreting the Constitution. The first two are original intent (what was in the heads of the Founders) and original meaning (what people at the time understood the words to mean). The fourth is contemporary common sense meaning (what the words mean to us now). The third is that the Constitution means whatever the Supreme Court says it means – which, practically speaking, is the operative method. However, as one student pointed out and Tom agreed, calling this a theory of interpretation is actually dodging the question, because we still need to ask what theory of interpretation should be used by Supreme Court justices.
This exchange highlights a common error of argumentation, and not just with respect to constitutional interpretation. The error is to answer the question “who should be able to make the decision?” or “what process should generate the decision?” when the real question is “what decision should be made?” For instance, I was recently arguing with a friend about drug legalization. I said, among other things, that the drug laws were unjust – and my friend replied by emphasizing that those laws were supported by the majority of the public and had been passed in the proper fashion. He was correct, of course, but he was also changing the subject. The debate was not about the appropriateness of majority rule or democratic governance – it was about the wisdom of drug laws. To put it another way, the question is not what the majority does believe or which laws Congress has passed; the question is what the majority should believe or which laws Congress should have passed.
Another example. In my first lecture, I raised some difficult questions about how property rights should be defined, how much vagueness in property rules should be tolerated, and how much enforcement of property rights is desirable. In response, some students suggested that these questions should be answered through the common law process, or that they should be decided at the state or local level. And I agree. Common law is often superior to statutory law. Decentralization is often superior to centralized decision-making. But once we’ve determined the locus of decision-making, the question of what decision should be made still remains. We could say, for instance, that abortion policies should be decided at the state rather than federal level – but what abortion policy do you want your state to adopt? The substantive question still has to be addressed.
There are, however, some cases in which the question-switching is justified. I can think of two reasons. First, sometimes we don’t know the answer to a question, and we think that a particular decision-making process will do better than others at discovering the answer. For instance, federalism is sometimes justified on grounds that the states provide useful laboratories in which to test different policies. Second, sometimes the correct answer is subjective or specific to a particular person, making it impossible to address the substantive decision without reference to the person who makes it. This is one basis for the libertarian claim that individuals should be able to decide their own diets, types of drug use, sexual practices, and so on. But if justifications like these are in play, they should at least be made explicit.
L&S: Materials for "Writing, Reading, and Respecting a Constitution"
Please allow me to offer some supplementary materials for my upcoming talk, "Writing, Reading, and Respecting a Constitution." I've posted a copy of the PowerPoint file I'll use, complete with a few footnotes, here. For a fuller description of my theory of constitutional justification, please see The Jurisprudence Of Polycentric Law (unpublished manuscript, 1992). What about the music? For this lecture, I plan to perform The Interstate Commerce Blues, (adding the EU verse as a coda).
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
L&S: Cats and Dogs, Living Together...
As Glen said, John has just given a terrific talk on women and industrialization. There's no better feeling than being "lit on fire" by a talk. John has got me thinking about so many ideas for my work on classical liberalism and the family, as well as providing great intellectual ammunition for discussions about the effects of the industrial revolution.
One quick comment on Glen's point below: he's quite right that inequality is increasing looked at in percentage terms, but life for the poorest is clearly getting better. This poses the question of whether we should care about inequality or about how well off the poorest are. In my own view, it's worth more inequality to improve the well-being of the poor.
John's opening slide was a picture of an English family engaged in "putting out." He pointed out that everything in the picture in their home was about their production activities. The home was the workplace, and the contents of the home were almost exclusively capital goods. Toward the end, he had a picture of a home from later in the 19th century. He was using it to illustrate the power that women had gained as it shows a woman buying cloth for the household (which compares favorably to earlier in the century when men ruled the roost). What struck me in that picture was that the household was full of consumption goods. Nothing seemed to better symbolize the increasing wealth that the Industrial Revolution produced.
The latter picture also had a dog and cat in it. This got me thinking about pets and wondering whether early IR families tended to have dogs, and if so, were they much more likely to be working breeds (e.g., herding sheep or hunting game)? I can imagine that pets underwent a transformation process similar to children, beginning as "capital goods" or inputs into household production, and then becoming consumption goods as industrialization took hold.
If that's right, it might suggest that rising wealth increases the commonality of cats as pets, as they are pretty much worthless as capital goods (says Steve the dog lover). Although I suppose in the crummy housing that characterized the early industrial era, having something to catch mice might have been pretty valuable. But still... they're cats, you know?
Update: A cat-loving friend tells me that cats were valued in ancient times for their ability to keep rodents away from stored grain. So a capital good indeed. We might also note the division of labor between cats and dogs - the latter perhaps protecting the livestock and helping find food, while the former helped preserve the value of harvested grain. With the relative demise of those agricultural and hunting needs, both have become (mostly anyway) consumption goods. But still...they're cats.
L&S: Wages and Inequality Through History
John Majewski is now presenting on the Industrial Revolution. We haven't blogged much on John's lectures so far, mainly (I think) because the material has actually been new to the rest of the faculty -- we've been paying close attention instead of blogging reactions.
John just displayed a graph showing the path of real wages, for several different groups, from the latter half of the 1700s to the middle 1800s. As John notes, the graph shows a fairly steady rise in real wages for all groups, from lowly farm workers to white-collar workers, over that period. What John doesn't note is that inequality also increased over the period, as the white-collar workers' wages rose more quickly. Consequently, if we looked only at percentages of income, it would appear that the rich got richer while the poor got poorer. But in fact, everyone got richer in real terms. This theme will come up again when Steve does his lecture on modern-day economic myths.
Monday, July 09, 2007
L&S: Readings for Wednesday
For participants: Here is the list of readings for the discussion groups on Wednesday, along with links to online versions of some readings (in case you don't have your copy of the Reader).
L&S: The Famous PowerPoint
Okay, here's the PowerPoint presentation they've been talking about. Best viewed in slide show to see the animations.
L&S: Creative Uses of PowerPoint
Okay, now Glen has REALLY done it. He's giving a terrific lecture on market failure and government failure, but.... in the background, he has perhaps the funniest PowerPoint ever running. It started with a comment about how the rest of us faculty are using PowerPoint and that he must have missed the memo, and has gone from there to be an ongoing commentary about the uses and abuses of PowerPoint that has nothing to do with his lecture. The picture of Don Knotts as one of the "heroes of liberty" was the clincher. I hope he decides to put it on the web later in the week.
I will point out that one slide said "I think PowerPoint is a crutch for the weak." Of course, here he is actually using it and doing so in a way that makes his lecture more entertaining and memorable than it would have been otherwise. Crutch for the weak indeed.
L&S: Glen Gets Assimilated
Glen just started his presentation by displaying a PowerPoint slide of the title. He didn't use PowerPoint in his first presentation, so I immediately decided to write a post noting that Glen was hitherto the sole holdout to not use PowerPoint slides at this seminar. Now, though, he's running through a series of funny self-referential slides about his having caved in to peer pressure. The present one, for instance, reads, "Personally, I think PowerPoint slides are a crutch for the weak." (Hmm. Does he mean weak speakers or weak listeners?)
Interestingly, when I spoke at a similar seminar last month, at Wake Forest, I was the only speaker to use PowerPoint slides. And even I didn't use PowerPoint slides at IHS events until very recently. Judging from those trends, then, resistance is futile; we will soon all get assimilated into the PowerPoint borg.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
L&S: Freaky Stuff
We just realized that Glen, John Majewski, and I all use the same wallpaper on our laptops - the built-in "red moon desert" one in XP. That's just freaky.
Bell has a Mac, so he's too "special" to be like us.
L&S: Choosing Your Rules
Now Tom is up, describing the origins and nature of law. Tom says (correctly) that we get law from many different sources, and he suggests that we should to think of law as a service industry in which we can choose among service providers – much as we choose between Amtrak and American Airlines (Tom’s example).
What worries me about this approach (aside from the obvious fact, which Tom would never deny, that law is often imposed on us without our consent) is that it relies a bit too much on the model of contract law, in which the people making agreements agree on the rules in advance. The model of tort law, in which the paradigmatic example is an accident between strangers, highlights the difficulty: law, unlike other services, deals fundamentally with relations – often disputes – between two or more people. If they already have an association prior to the dispute, they can potentially agree on a means of resolution beforehand. But if not, they may choose different sources or conceptions of law. Resolution of the dispute after the fact requires choosing between them or reaching a compromise. One typical approach is to rely on hypothetical consent – what rules they would have agreed upon, if they’d had the chance to agree in advance (possibly in conjunction with all the other persons with whom they might have had a dispute like the present one). But as Tom clearly explained earlier in the lecture, hypothetical consent raises its own set of thorny problems.
L&S: Polycentric Law and Expectation Formation
While the students are discussing, Tom's warming up the guitar for the world premiere of Monster.
He's just finished about 40 minutes on the nature of the law, stressing to students the Lon Fuller point that law is ultimately the enterprise of subjecting human behavior to the governance of rules. Thus law is more than what the state produces but rather is the whole set of rules, norms, customs and state law that enables us to coordinate our behavior.
One element of this process that Tom didn't emphasize today is that what it means to coordinate our behavior is to enable us to form reliable expectations of the behavior of others. The law, like every other social institution, operates by providing an agreed-upon set of rules that allows to form expectations about others. For example, the institution of marriage provides us with expectations about people who call themselves "married." (One might note the ways in which "marriage-lite" institutions such as civil unions or domestic partner arrangements undermine the signaling function of marriage - another argument in my book for extending marriage rights to all.) When a person says "I'm married," we can form a set of fairly reliable expectations about his or her behavior, e.g. he or she is unlikely to be potential sexual partner.
This is also the relationship between law and order. From a Hayekian perspective, the notion of order simply refers to increasingly reliable expectations and the complexity it can produce. Good law produces complex orders.
When we link this to polycentric law, two points arise:
1. Having multiple sources of law is beneficial as it allows for competition among sets of rules, which is likely to produce sets of rules that survive by best coordinating behavior by assisting expectation formation.
2. However, the potential problem is whether having multiple systems in play at once makes it harder to form reliable expectations.
This might be a dynamic benefit trading off against a static cost.
L&S: Materials for "The Origins and Nature of Law" Lecture
I'm slated to next give a lecture on "The Origins and Nature of Law." I can hardly do justice to so vast a topic in one brief talk, so please allow me to offer you links to some supplementary materials. You can find a copy of the PowerPoint file I'll use, complete with cites supporting the quoted passages, here. Earlier on this blog, I explained the graphs of the supply and demand of government services qua monopoly. I also earlier introduced the song about that same theme, Monster. If you don't mind listening to a pretty raw version, you can hear the music for Monster in this MP3 file (played with a capo on the second fret). Lastly, if you want to learn how to play the song, yourself, you can download a copy of the lyrics and chords here.
L&S: Incentives and Sexual Substitution
Glen's at it again. He started his talk on the "Economic Way of Thinking" with a discussion of why it's understandable that middle schoolers have, supposedly, gone hog wild for oral sex: they are substituting a lower cost form of sex for a higher cost one. Oral sex has a lower rate of STD transmission and a near-zero chance of pregnancy. If this is really happening, they are responding rationally to incentives.
Chris Martin is hanging in there though, especially since Glen has beautifully transitioned to the main ideas of his lecture.
It's worth noting that there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the stories of wild middle school oral sex orgies ("rainbow parties") are mostly urban legends.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
L&S: Why Rights?
Jan asks, "Why do people recognize rights?" He offers three possible answers: 1) People have an innate moral tendency or capacity to do so; 2) People are socialized to recognize rights; or 3) People can see the benefits of recognizing rights and act accordingly.
Jan dismisses 1) as irrelevant or "awfully dodgy," and 2) as too vague. He opts for 3), arguing that people can see the net benefits of buying into a regime where everyone's rights get equal respect.
I'm not wholly convinced. For one thing, I don't know why we have to choose between these reasons. They might all play some role in explaining why people respect rights. Indeed, I can imagine other reasons that we might add to Jan's list. Rights offer functionally useful social coordination devices, for instance, in a way that mere appeals to utility do not.
For another thing, Jan's third and favored reason surely cannot alone suffice to explain why people respect rights. In that event, the poor would have tend to have less respect for property rights than the rich, and even the rich would tend to steal whenever they could get away with it. Though I recognize it as a question of fact, I don't think that the available evidence supports that result. Rare malefactors notwithstanding, most folks appear to take rights pretty seriously.
L&S: From Hypothetical Consent to Utilitarianism
Jan has just declared that he no longer agrees with utilitarianism, though “some misguided people still do.” I am one of those misguided souls, so I predict some intellectual clash. This is good. The last couple of times I’ve taught at an L&S event, the philosopher in the bunch (James Stacey Taylor) was a utilitarian, and there was altogether too little disagreement for my taste.
However, if I understand him correctly, Jan is advocating instead something like the Pareto criterion: for people to have a particular right, the protection of that right must make each person better off than he would be if society did not protect such a right. I think it’s but a step from here to a form of utilitarianism. Why? Because his analysis is already carried out at a hypothetical level – by people imagining different societies, from some initial position that is privileged (in the sense that any change from that position requires universal agreement). But if we’re already talking about hypothetical consent from a hypothetical initial position, then we could even imagine people accepting trade-offs of the following form: “I might turn out to be a person who loses from the protection of right X. But I will more likely turn out to be someone who benefits from protection of right X.” And this is tantamount to the utilitarian position, in which the losses to some are balanced by the greater gains to others.
L&S: Hobbesian pancakes
The first lecture is usually an overview of central philosophical issues in libertarian thought. Jan Narveson is currently walking us through a discussion of "Why Rights?" (And he just threw down the gauntlet to Glen and me by suggesting that utilitarians are "misguided"! Game on, Jan, game on.) In doing so, he talked about the Hobbesian state of nature where, if people don't respect each other's rights, life will be "mean, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short."
Every time I hear that, I think back to my political philosophy course in college where Professor Peter Railton got to that point in Hobbes and then noted how it reminded him of, what he claimed, was an old Woody Allen routine where Esther and Sadie are eating breakfast at a restaurant in Miami. The following conversation ensues:
E: Those were the worst pancakes I ever ate.
S: Oy, they were awful. Dry.
E: Tasteless.
S: Overcooked.
E: Terrible syrup.
and finally:
S: And the portions were way too small!!
As Railton pointed out, why did Hobbes include "short" on his list? If life in the Hobbesian Jungle is so awful, isn't the fact that it's short a good aspect of life there? Who'd want a long one with all of that misery?
Who wants big portions of terrible pancakes?
L&S 2007 Live-Blogging Event
For the next week, co-blogger Tom and I will be faculty members at the Liberty & Society Seminar, hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies on the campus of Bryn Mawr College. Two years ago, we live-blogged the event with the other three faculty members, and we had such a great time we decided to do it again. So here is your blogging team for the week:
Tom W. Bell, law, Chapman University;Stay tuned for up-to-date commentary as the week unfolds!
Steve Horwitz, economics, St. Lawrence University;
John Majewski, history, University of California, Santa Barbara;
Jan Narveson, philosophy, University of Waterloo, Canada;
Glen Whitman, economics, California State University, Northridge
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