Our Word is Our Weapon

• The Pernicious Allure of Lead - New York Times
  We need small quantities of various metals and minerals to get by. “But when it comes to lead … the universal minimum daily requirement is zero”. We’ve known that lead can seriously damage children, but we still slather it on toys.
  (tags: environment)

• ID21 - id21 classic: Equality of what?
  Amartya Sen’s classic 1979 lecture, ‘Equality of What?’, in which he suggests focusing on equality of ‘capabilities’ rather than wealth, income or ‘utility’.
  (tags: inequality)

• Global Development: Views from the Center: Debates or Debacles? Stephanopoulos Skates Past Climate Change in ABC Debate
  In a recent debate of Democratic presidential candidates, all eight were asked if they thought prayer could prevent bridge collapses, but none were asked about global poverty, foreign aid, Darfur or global warming.
  (tags: America politics media)
• Criticisms of the Millennium Villages: some thoughts » African Development for the Completely Bloody Ignorant
  Another good post by Rav Casley Gera, this time responding to criticisms of the Millennium Villages Project - accepting some but not all
  (tags: aid africa Development)

It seems a shame to let pass without further comment this post from The Economist’s Free Exchange blog, which from the tone I’m guessing was written by Megan McArdle of “So where are the Iraqi refugees??” fame. Here is the quote from an interview with Paul Krugman that starts things off:

GQ: I know you’re also concerned about the growing gap between rich and poor.

KRUGMAN: I have spent a lot of time looking back at what happened under FDR, when we narrowed the income gaps between rich and poor through stronger unions, wartime wage controls, and a change in tax policy. We can do some of that. …

GQ: Well, what happens if we let the income gap remain?

KRUGMAN: It’s bad for democracy. The ugliness of our politics is closely tied to the inequality of income. You start to get a society in which the elite is just not living in the same material universe as the rest of the population. The people who have the most influence are not interested in having good public services, because they don’t use them. You just get a bad society.

The Economist’s blogger responds thusly:

Is any of this true? Since neither Mr Krugman nor I know how to measure the ugliness of a nation’s politics, let us pass over the matter in silence. It is indisputable that wealthy people have a different material standard of living than the less wealthy. But do they live in a different material universe? (When you’re rich, even the periodic table of elements is different, and better!) What public services is he talking about? Don’t the wealthy drive (or ride) over the publicly financed roads and bridges? Do the upper-crust not use the courts or enjoy the protection of the police? Does Bill Gates now have a private mercenary army protecting his property from Canadian invasion? What is Mr Krugman talking about?

Wow, is any of this not stupid? Let’s see:

1. Anyone who has paid any attention to what Krugman has been saying over the last few years should know that when he talks about the ugliness of politics, he is talking about the partisan bickering, fruitless point-scoring and vicious smear-campaigns that currently characterise politics Washington-style. Look, he’s even written about it, in that little-known journal the New York Times, citing evidence that greater inequality is strongly linked to greater polarisation, which leads to politics that is less about getting things done than about making the other guy look bad. His argument is also supported by cross-national evidence that inequality promotes corruption.

Has Megan/whoever really never heard of any of this? Or is she just ignoring it to score cheap points?

2. “Material universe”, etc. Yeah, that’s what’s called a figure of speech - it’s one of the things that makes him a better writer than you.

3. “What public services is he talking about?”. So, what - public services consist only of transport infrastructure and law ‘n order? I suppose it is rather easy to forget about publicly funded health, education and housing services - especially when, as Krugman would point out, you don’t use them. Kinda proving his point there.

There follows quite a lot of interesting but somewhat tangential material about how people who identify as Democrats don’t all share the same views, rounded off by this line:

If the wealthy bend the results of democracy in any one direction, it is not because they are personally indifferent to public services, but because wealth tends to breed a kind of cosmopolitan tolerance unrepresentative of the broader popultion.

The Caplanesque implication that the wealthy don’t corrupt or even influence political institutions is interesting, and the idea that tolerance comes only from wealth rather than, say, education is asserted rather than actually argued, but even assuming that affluence does cause tolerance, doesn’t that then imply that the solution is to spread affluence as widely as possible, rather than allowing it to concentrate in the hands of an elite while incomes standards stagnate or even fall for the bulk of society?

• Trouble in the village? » African Development for the Completely Bloody Ignorant
  Detailed, reasonable and reasoned criticisms of the Millennium Villages Project.
  (tags: development aid)

• Krugman on inequality and democracy | Free exchange | Economist.com
  We should embrace inequality because only rich people are tolerant. Hmm, could this be the stupidest ‘Free Exchange’ post ever? It’s tough, there are so many to choose from.
  (tags: inequality)

• ‘I was dead - and I was resurrected’ | Rock | Guardian Unlimited Music
  Hurray for Edwyn Collins.
  (tags: music)

• Angkor was a city ahead of its time - Los Angeles Times
  (tags: cities history)

• YouTube - Cheney ‘94: Invading Iraq Would Create Quagmire
  Surprised I haven’t seen this before and yes, it’s neither timely nor original to say this, but still: what a prick.
  (tags: war iraq)

• EconLog, Taking “Looking on the Bright Side” Too Far, Bryan Caplan: Library of Economics and Liberty
  Strange choice of words: “I’m stunned that someone could be upbeat about post-colonial Africa”. Does that mean he thinks things were better under colonialism?
  (tags: africa free-marketeers)

• Marginal Revolution: The economics of street charity
  Stunning insight from Tyler Cowen: maybe giving money to street beggars isn’t that great an idea. I’m really starting to tire of this “Quake as my contrarian economics challenges your most cherished mores!” shite.
  (tags: economics)

• Yangtze river dolphin driven to extinction | Environment | The Guardian
  One for the ‘positive environmentalists’ to explain, I think.
  (tags: environment)

• Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Divide, rule, and placate. That’s not a public service
  Lynsey Hanley: “The BBC, in its wisdom, has decided that anyone with an interest in things beyond puppy weddings and car chases should now watch BBC4″.
  (tags: tv)

In comments, Anthony Evans of The Filter has responded to my intemperate assault on critique of Bryan Caplan’s ‘Myth of the Rational Voter‘ arguments, and has simultaneously posted at The Filter an erudite critique of his own. As ever, AJE’s response is as patient and polite as it is smart, something that unfortunately enough probably applies to my writing too.

Anyway. I’d like to tackle the issue of ‘character assassination’ first of all. I didn’t make a point of commenting on Caplan’s character for the fun of it, or just to be hurtful or make a splash. I did it because he puts individual character at the centre of his explanations of poverty and wealth. In ascribing his own success to his own character and the poverty of the poor to theirs, he is personalising the argument and casually ‘assassinating’ the characters of millions of people. He also seems to think these kinds of claims about poverty require only repeated assertion or anecdote as support, and isn’t, as far as I can see, bothered by any conflict with the evidence on social mobility and the importance of background. I find his views on character and success as odious as they are intellectually sloppy, but I also think they’re an important part of his overall worldview. That’s why I ‘personalised’ it.

As to substance, I take on board some of what Caplan and you have to say about people voting for ’stupid’ policies. But some of what Caplan thinks is stupid is just what Caplan, as a libertarian, disagrees with. I happen to think that some of his favoured policies are insane, and I know I wouldn’t be alone in that. I put some of this insanity down to the intellectual and economic context he inhabits, so I’d suggest that this kind of ‘institutional’ analysis does not necessarily produce clear evidence on what the ‘most optimal outcomes’ are. I’d also suggest that he has focused on a subset of outcomes from the democratic process, ie policies. This is understandable as policies are very important indeed, but political institutions are also important in terms of what they say about social norms, identity, community, voice, equality and power.

I also get the impression, and again correct me if I’m wrong because I haven’t read all of his ‘great work’, that Caplan is keen to promote the idea that people’s decisions in the market are as rational as their decisions in the voting booth are irrational (though excluding the poor, presumably, who are of course always irrational). If so, I think this represents another flaw. It seems to me that a great deal of money and effort is poured into persuasion in both the economic and the political sphere. In each, billions are spent on creating messages that, at best, give an accurate picture of one side of the story and, at worst, spread complete misinformation about every side. Maybe I’m wrong but I think that if people received accurate information about goods, services and politics they would make much better decisions. But at the moment it seems that the resources to communicate are usually matched by incentives to do so accurately.

The funny thing is, Caplan might even agree with me that the political process and political communication in America is corrupt. But his argument seems to me to let politicians and those who seek to corrupt them off the hook, because it implies that people get the government they deserve. This may be quite a nice conclusion for a libertarian to reach, since it saves you having to think about whether any government may be less awful than another when you can just tar them all with the same brush instead, but it’s also empirically false, analytically infantile and morally wrong.

• 161 - Map of the San Francisco Quake and Fire (1906) « strange maps
  Tells me a lot I didn’t know about this event. Three thousand dead, three hundred thousand left homeless. And people set fire to their own homes because their insurance didn’t cover quake damage.
  (tags: art history maps science america)

• iPienso
  Ah, now it all makes sense. Pablo Halkyward was the bloke behind the excellent ‘Pienso …’ blog, and now he’s got a new one. Essential reading once again.
  (tags: blogs)