tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-139027262024-03-23T11:16:50.697-07:00Preservation Institute BlogUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger255125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-34538716686621867092022-01-24T16:42:00.007-08:002022-01-24T16:44:27.617-08:00More Work Or More Free Time - 2<p> Here is the second chapter of my new book <i>More Work Or More Free Time: The Crucial Political Issue No One Is Talking About</i>. The book is available at <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1941667406">https://www.amazon.com/dp/1941667406</a></p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Chapter 2: </h1><h1 style="text-align: left;">From Scarcity to Surplus </h1><p>In the course of the twentieth century, the United States and the other developed nations moved from scarcity economies to surplus economies. We still have not thought through the implications of this profound change. </p><p>Earlier human history was the story of economic scarcity. Though a small minority was rich, the overwhelming majority lived at a subsistence level, and economies devoted most of their effort to producing basic food, clothing, and shelter. </p><p>In nineteenth century America, the great majority still lived at a near-subsistence level, though industrialization was increasing the amount the nation produced. In cities, many workers lived in tenements where there was little sunlight and only one shared toilet per floor—or shared outhouses in the back. In the countryside, many farmers lived in sod houses or log cabins. Even in the late nineteenth century, when wages had begun to go up, average income for all Americans was what we now consider the poverty level; even if all income had been distributed equally, everyone would still have lived in what we now call poverty.3 And America was relatively prosperous: Europeans immigrated to America in search of economic opportunity. <br /></p><p>In the course of the twentieth century, production increased to the point where we moved from scarcity to surplus. In addition to food, clothing, and shelter, most working people can afford cars, appliances, entertainment, high school education, routine health care—things that most of us take for granted today but that were far beyond the reach of working people in Dickens’ England or of working people throughout history.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Postwar Affluence</h3><p>During the 1930s, many said that the Great Depression occurred because there was not enough demand to absorb everything that the economy could produce. Technology created more wealth, but it also created the problem of technological unemployment as machines did the work that people used to do. </p><p>The government dealt with this problem by stimulating the economy to create jobs. The word “boondoggle” was invented to describe programs that the government funded to make work for the unemployed though they did not produce anything useful. <br /></p><p>During the postwar years, there were fears that the economy would fall back into depression because of lack of demand. Everyone agreed that we needed to promote consumption to stimulate the economy. <br />The Gross National Product (GNP), which has since been replaced by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), became the measure of national well-being.4 The economist Simon Kuznets first calculated the GNP in 1934, and he warned against using these numbers as a measurement of well-being. Yet, during the postwar period, growth of the GNP became the main measure of economic success, and today’s politicians all want to promote rapid economic growth.</p><p>During the postwar decades, prosperity was widespread. Median income grew about as rapidly as the GNP, which means the middle class was getting a fair share of increased prosperity. The nation felt optimistic and affluent, but there were also social critics at the time who wrote best-selling books pointing out the problems with our unparalleled material prosperity. </p><p>John Kenneth Galbraith published his book The Affluent Society in 1958, and it was at the top of the best-seller list for six months. He wrote that economic theory was invented in scarcity economies, when more production was needed to satisfy people’s wants, but in our affluent economy, corporations create the wants that their products satisfy, for example through advertising, marketing and easy consumer credit. (He did not put enough emphasis on government creating wants through programs like freeway construction to encourage automobile use.) For example, Galbraith said, “Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted,” because most people spent their incomes on food, clothing and shelter that they needed to survive; if economic problems forced them to consume less, people suffered real hardships. But in the affluent economy, if there is a recession, people who defer their purchases of new cars or refrigerators for a year of two do not suffer in any significant way. The ones who suffer are the workers who lose their jobs producing cars or refrigerators and who have trouble surviving without any income. So, Galbraith said, in scarcity economies, people worked because they needed the products, but in an affluent economy, people must consume more products in order to create more work.5 </p><p>Of course, this same attitude persists today. President Biden named his early proposal to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure “The American Jobs Plan,”6 because he knows that Americans care less about the infrastructure itself than about jobs building the infrastructure.<br />Shortly after Galbraith published The Affluent Society, William H. Whyte, who was famous for writing The Organization Man, invented the term “suburban sprawl”7 to describe the extreme suburbanization that was destroying farmland and open space around all of America’s cities. Jane Jacobs wrote that automobiles were eroding cities, as traffic engineers demolished vast amounts of housing to clear the rights of way for new urban freeways, blighting older neighborhoods to let more people drive in from the new suburbs.8 <br /></p><p>These criticisms had practical political effects. In the 1950s, New York’s master builder, Robert Moses, proposed building a road through Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, and neighborhood residents stopped him. In 1961, San Francisco stopped a massive plan to build freeways throughout the city, and there were similar “freeway rebellions” in many other cities in the 1960s and 1970s. Though the freeways were mainstays of postwar economic growth, there were many people who thought they made their neighborhoods worse places to live. </p><p>There were even some important politicians who criticized the cult of the Gross National Product. During his presidential campaign, Robert Kennedy give a speech on March 18, 1967 (not long before his assassination) saying:</p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;">Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product … counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. ... Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.9<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Unfinished Business</h3><p>At that time, it seemed possible that American progressives would develop a new politics that would deal with the profound shift from a scarcity economy to a surplus economy—politics that would let us make good human use of our prosperity rather than devoting ourselves to the Gross National Product. <br /></p><p>But as it turned out, progressives focused on social issues rather than on these economic issues during the late twentieth century. They make immensely valuable strides in promoting equality for excluded social groups. In the 1950s, there was de jure racial segregation in the south and de facto racial segregation throughout the country. If women had jobs at all, they were expected to be nurses or secretaries, subordinate to men who were doctors or lawyers. Gays had to stay in the closet to protect themselves from losing their jobs or worse: Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who developed the theory behind computer science and who helped us win the war by breaking the Germans’ code, was prosecuted and convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952 because he was a homosexual, he accepted chemical castration as an alternative to prison, and he committed suicide two years later. <br /></p><p>We certainly owe progressives of the late twentieth century a debt of gratitude for fighting against this sort of bigotry and cruelty, but they were wrong to let these social issues distract them from economic issues. As they promoted equality for excluded social groups, economic inequality kept getting worse. In the 1960s, economic inequality in the United States was about average for the developed nations, but now the United States has the worst inequality of any developed nation.10 <br />Because we ignored economic issues in favor of social issues, we failed to create the new politics needed to deal with the surplus economy—and as inequality increased, we even lost the economic gains that we had won earlier in the century. Almost all the benefits of growth since the 1970s have gone to the top 10%, while median income has stagnated. Average Americans today no longer feel as affluent as they did during the 1960s—even though the nation as a whole is more than three times as wealthy now as it was in the “affluent society” of 1960.11 <br /></p><p>Things have become so bad that progressives have started to focus on economic issues again. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns of 2016 and 2020 concentrated on economic inequality, with the goal of taxing the very rich and using the money to help the poor and the middle class. But today’s progressives are trying to recover the ground that they lost during the late twentieth century as inequality increased, and they are not focusing on the deeper long-term issue of how to make good human use of a surplus economy. </p><p>This issue has become overridingly important because it is essential to long-term efforts to deal with global warming and other ecological challenges that will become increasingly urgent during this century. We would have done well to shift to the Dutch model during the postwar decades, because it would have given us more satisfying lives. But now, we urgently need to shift to the Dutch model to counter the ecological crises that will occur if we keep pursuing the highest possible GDP rather than the highest possible level of well-being. <br /> <br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-59467917822489566152021-12-29T12:18:00.005-08:002021-12-29T12:25:02.080-08:00More Work Or More Free Time<p> Here is the first chapter of my book <i>More Work Or More Free Time: The Crucial Political Issue that No One Is Talking About</i>, to be published next month. </p><h1 style="text-align: left;">Chapter 1: The Dutch Model</h1><p>American progressives often use the Scandinavian countries as models for us to imitate, because they have prosperous economies and policies that let everyone share in the prosperity. But the Netherlands is a better model: it also has a prosperous economy and policies to spread the prosperity widely—and in addition, it has pioneered policies that let employees choose shorter work hours. The average Dutch employee produces about as much in an hour as the average American employee, but works only about 80% as many hours.1</p><p>By law, Dutch employees have the right to choose part-time work, and about half of them do choose to work part time. Allowing this choice challenges fundamental assumptions of America’s economy. <br /></p><p>It challenges our belief that we are better off if we have the fastest possible economic growth. The Dutch would have faster economic growth if they worked as much as Americans, but many choose part-time work because they believe they are better off with more free time rather than more income. Most Americans do not have this choice: they have to work full time to keep their jobs, even if they think they would be happier working part-time. <br /></p><p>It challenges our belief that government must promote rapid economic growth to provide more jobs. The Dutch model shows that we can create jobs either by promoting growth or by shortening work hours—or by some combination of the two. Since the end of World War II, America has avoided unemployment by producing more and more to create more and more work. The Dutch model shows that we can also avoid unemployment by letting employees work shorter hours to spread the needed work among more people. <br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Compulsory Consumption</h3><p>In postwar America, the government promoted massive development of freeways and automobile-dependent suburbs to stimulate the economy and provide jobs. The Federal government funded freeways and FHA mortgages for suburban houses, and local governments used zoning to create suburbs with low-density housing and strip-mall shopping. Many of the new suburban neighborhoods did not even have sidewalks because they did not expect people to get around by walking. The nation was transformed in just a few decades, as Americans moved to these sprawl suburbs. <br /></p><p>This is an example of compulsory consumption: in these suburbs it is almost impossible to get around without a car. Having a car is compulsory, no matter how great a financial burden it is. <br /></p><p>Anyone who goes to the Netherlands immediately sees one reason why they can work shorter hours than Americans: Dutch neighborhoods are filled with pedestrians and with bicyclists but have relatively few cars. On narrower streets, cars drive slowly behind bicyclists and wait patiently when pedestrians spill out from the crowded sidewalks onto the street; American drivers would be leaning on their horns. <br /></p><p>Postwar America promoted automobile use to stimulate economic growth and provide jobs. But the Dutch created a prosperous economy with low unemployment without promoting automobile dependency. </p><p>Though they work less and make less money than Americans, the Dutch have higher average levels of happiness, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and higher educational achievement than Americans—in part because they have much lower levels of inequality than we do, so they do not have a large number of very poor people who bring down the average.2 </p><p>Their policies to reduce inequality also help them to work shorter hours. In the United States, median income has stagnated for many decades, despite rapid economic growth, because most of the benefits of growth have gone to the very rich. In the Netherlands, there is less inequality, so people with moderate incomes earn enough per hour to work part-time. </p><p>The Dutch model of low inequality and shorter work hours gives people better lives than the American model of higher inequality, longer work hours, and faster economic growth.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The Global Environment</h3><p>Shorter work hours and slower growth would make it easier to deal with global warming and other pressing ecological problems. They are essential to environmental sustainability in the long run. <br /></p><p>In this century, much of the world could become affluent, and the model that the developing nations follow will obviously have a powerful effect on whether the global economy can be sustainable. If most of the world follows the postwar American model, keeping their work hours long and promoting rapid economic growth to provide more jobs, it will be hard to avoid environmental crisis. If the world follows the Dutch model, choosing more free time and slower growth, it will be much easier to protect the global environment. </p><p>In the long run, following the Dutch model could lead to dramatic changes in the way people live. As improved technology makes it possible to produce what people want in less and less time, most people’s work hours could become so short that their lives center on what they do with their free time rather than what they do at their jobs. We would need changes in education to teach people to make good use of their free time. And we would need to reexamine our ideals: in order to decide how to use that free time, we would have to think about what is a good life. </p><p>The choice between more work and more free time is crucial to protecting the environment and to improving people’s lives, but no prominent mainstream American politician has talked about it since the Roosevelt administration.<br /><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-26053528937930386212021-11-21T21:16:00.004-08:002022-01-24T15:28:09.957-08:00Animism and Industrialism<p>Primitive animists treated objects as if they were people. </p><p>Modern industrial societies treat people as if they were objects. <br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-73263214265615924832021-09-24T13:55:00.001-07:002021-09-24T14:01:32.283-07:00Fully Automated Luxury Consumerism<p>Aaron Bastani has made a bit of a splash with his book <i>Fully Automated Luxury Communism</i>. It pretends to be brave new thinking, but really it just combines two old ideas. </p><p>One idea is extreme technological optimism. He talks about innovations like cultured meat and mining asteroids as if there had never been technological progress before this era. He apparently doesn't realize that technology has been progressing steadily since the beginning of the industrial revolution. He doesn't realize that some of his ideas are not practical in the foreseeable future, such as mining asteroids, which will not be possible until there is a virtually limitless source of cheap, clean energy. And he doesn't realize that, to keep the planet livable, we need to limit destructive technologies as well as to develop beneficial technologies. </p><p>The other is the old Communist idea that capitalism can produce this wealth but we need Communism to make it available to most people. He apparently doesn't realize that many European countries have vigorous capitalist economies and welfare states that use their wealth to benefit everyone. He doesn't realize that world poverty has already declined dramatically, with 70% of the world's population living in extreme poverty at the beginning of the twentieth century and only 10% today, and that the majority of the world's population now is either affluent or "global middle class." He doesn't realize that Communist economies tend to be stagnant and not to produce the wealth that is needed to make life better. </p><p>He doesn't realize that world poverty could end during this century, if we avoid ecological collapse - and the real challenge we fact is to save avoid collapse so technology can keep improving people's lives as it has in the past. <br /></p><p>Far from being new, his attitude is something that I often encountered at the beginning of the 1970s, when people were still impressed by 1960s affluence and attracted by 1960s leftist politics. I have never known what to call this attitude, but Bastani has given me the name. </p><p>The common attitude at that time can be called Fully Automated Luxury Consumerism. The capitalist economy would keep providing everyone with more and more consumer goods, as it had already provided almost everyone with big cars and big freeways to drive them on. The future would be hog heaven for those who love to consume. <br /></p><p>A more extreme version of the same attitude can be called Fully Automated Luxury Communism. The government has an obligation to run the economy to create hog heaven for everyone. </p><p>In the early 1970s, I was talking about building walkable neighborhoods, and I ran into people who called themselves Communists and said the government should build automobile-centered sprawl suburbs for everyone. I was talking about recycling, and I ran into one person who called herself a Communist and said that it is inconvenient to have to separate recyclables, and the government should set things up so we can just use them once and throw them away. </p><p>I realized that one form of Communism was just an extreme form of consumerism. Consumerists believe the technological economy should produce everything for us, and our role is just to passively consume. These Communists raised their dependency to the level of principle and said that being a passive consumer is a human right. </p><p>I even remember one Communist orator on campus who was talking about earthquake proofing and took the standard of living so much for granted that he said, "Earthquake-proof freeways are a human right." <br /></p><p>This attitude made some sense in scarcity economies, where people go without necessities. It makes no sense when you reach the level of affluence that makes you claim that better freeways are a human right. <br /></p><p>If we manage to avoid ecological collapse, the world will achieve widespread affluence during this century. At that point, we will have to focus on how to use our affluence to live good lives rather than on demanding that the fully automated economy produce more and more luxuries for us to consume. <br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-9026877316890614772021-08-10T13:33:00.001-07:002021-08-10T13:34:15.935-07:00Tesla Is Not Enough<p> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgCSr5KH4_lLJkbQIaKoFTCRiPp_cjydycqd1QBBmZ2lqeHmLd7SGT8SBR85yXYMxP5odq1CNRNogbwDdlQGeeooeoXkMqIDxhU2nTr0zew_LYg28K7j4UsPlPvMikBb6FXeo-Mg/s360/TeslaBuyers.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="202" data-original-width="360" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgCSr5KH4_lLJkbQIaKoFTCRiPp_cjydycqd1QBBmZ2lqeHmLd7SGT8SBR85yXYMxP5odq1CNRNogbwDdlQGeeooeoXkMqIDxhU2nTr0zew_LYg28K7j4UsPlPvMikBb6FXeo-Mg/w400-h225/TeslaBuyers.jpg" width="400" /></a></p>What is wrong with this picture of two young, affluent Tesla buyers from today's <i>New York Times</i>?<p></p><p>Though they are young, they are noticeably overweight. They obviously would be healthier if they drove less and walked and bicycled more. Automobile dependence contributes to America's epidemic of obesity, and switching to a Tesla does nothing to help that problem. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-1017592739698592252021-07-23T11:49:00.006-07:002021-07-23T11:54:31.400-07:00A Second Copernican Revolution<p>We have all heard this many times: In the middle ages, people believed that the Earth was in the center of the universe and the sun and stars revolved around it. But Copernicus showed that the Earth revolves around the sun, taking it out of its central position. Now we know that it is 13 billion lights to the furthest stars, there are hundreds of billions - possibly trillions - of galaxies in the universe, and a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. Many of these stars have planets, there must be an immense number of planets that can support life, and intelligent life has probably evolved elsewhere. Far from being in the center of the universe, the Earth is the satellite of an undistinguished star at the edge of an undistinguished galaxy. </p><p>But does that really make the Earth unimportant? Humans have consciousness, reason, and the ability to have some understanding of the nature of the universe, and that is more important than the sheer size and number of inanimate objects in the universe. Despite its small size, the human brain is the most complex object we know of. </p><p>We talk about the number of stars in the universe to show that intelligent life must have evolved on other planets, which itself implies that intelligent life is the important thing, rather than size and number of inanimate objects.</p><p>We can test this implication by imagining what the universe will ultimately be like. Based on what we know, it seems that the universe will keep expanding forever, and that all the stars will ultimately burn out, leaving a much more immense but completely dead universe, unable to support life. There is much we do not know about the nature of the universe - we do not understand dark energy or dark matter - so this idea of the fate of the universe may be wrong. But right or wrong, comparing today's universe with this dead universe should show us that sheer size is not the important thing: the dead universe would be much vaster than today's universe, but it would contain much less complexity, without life and without even the nuclear reactions that power the stars. And I think everyone would agree that that this vast, dead universe has less to offer than today's smaller and more complex universe. </p><p>The Copernican revolution happened when scientists convinced us that the Earth is not in the center of the universe. We need a second revolution that happens when humanists convince us that physical location and size are not the most important thing. </p><p>Pascal got it right in the seventeenth century, as modern science became dominant, when he said: "Man is only a reed ..., but he is a thinking reed. ... Even if the universe should crush him, man would still be more noble than that which destroys him, because he knows that he dies and he realizes the advantage that the universe possesses over him. The universe knows nothing of this."<br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-8731125553081285612021-05-23T15:01:00.011-07:002021-05-23T15:52:44.160-07:00The Mystery of Göbekli Tepe<p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQpETW7BTL8fxGD-RXTwufSIOYsv12ykiMrdS6kCBSYXyWFJr_O0GGqKI3Ubhersdyg6t1js6CYpm23ENDJcXoss5QNPapy-eeRMUVZfAU8lJK98sUAm6vTj81bo2r9YJb4UyXPQ/s1024/1024px-G%25C3%25B6bekli_Tepe%252C_Urfa.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="1024" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQpETW7BTL8fxGD-RXTwufSIOYsv12ykiMrdS6kCBSYXyWFJr_O0GGqKI3Ubhersdyg6t1js6CYpm23ENDJcXoss5QNPapy-eeRMUVZfAU8lJK98sUAm6vTj81bo2r9YJb4UyXPQ/w400-h265/1024px-G%25C3%25B6bekli_Tepe%252C_Urfa.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p></p><p>Göbekli Tepe, in southeast Turkey, is the oldest monument in the world. The earliest layer dates back to 9000 BC, making it more than twice as old as the oldest pyramid. The pillars are up to twenty feet high and weigh up to ten tons. <br /></p><p>Yet it was not discovered until 1994 because it was buried under debris some time after 8000 BC. Scientists do not know why is was buried, but the solution to this mystery should become clear when we think about how it fits into the history of religion.</p><p>This monument was built by the Natufian culture. In general, fixed settlements began when agriculture began, and the nomadic hunting and gathering people who lived earlier did not build permanent houses or monuments. But the Natufian culture was an exception. They were hunters and gatherers, and the mainstay of their diet was wild wheat, which was so abundant at the time that they were able to build permanent or semi-permanent settlements where it was found. This monument is so ancient because it was built before agriculture began.<br /></p><p>After thousands of years of gathering wild wheat, people in the area began cultivating wheat - the earliest farming in the world. Farming probably began gradually. They carried wheat back to their settlements for processing and noticed that more wheat grew where they dropped grains by mistake. Then they began dropping grains deliberately. Then they realized that the grain was even more likely to grow if they dug the ground before dropping it and watered it in dry times - at which point they were farmers. It probably took so long for them to begin farming because it was so much extra work that they did it only after population pressure made the supply of wild wheat inadequate for them. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX47C-9_w7-EQb9gmMLqCCYaaQCq_Rnqk0UXLMfMfEmV3caouKdmGjkDUq6Hp_kJfYZHRPJTZbREUtYJ7e7xQF9A4Qk3QaC1h8Id7ZU0tcKtV4pnntN89z9L9VDjufNiFvKNW4qA/s800/800px-Vulture_Stone%252C_Gobekli_Tepe%252C_Sanliurfa%252C_South-east_Anatolia%252C_Turkey.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="561" data-original-width="800" height="280" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjX47C-9_w7-EQb9gmMLqCCYaaQCq_Rnqk0UXLMfMfEmV3caouKdmGjkDUq6Hp_kJfYZHRPJTZbREUtYJ7e7xQF9A4Qk3QaC1h8Id7ZU0tcKtV4pnntN89z9L9VDjufNiFvKNW4qA/w400-h280/800px-Vulture_Stone%252C_Gobekli_Tepe%252C_Sanliurfa%252C_South-east_Anatolia%252C_Turkey.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>The religions of hunter and gatherer societies generally center on animals, who are treated as gods or totems. The pillars at Göbekli Tepe have many pictures of animals on them, such as this picture of a vulture, who may have been considered a god of the dead. <p></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisJq3iZDiWF2-cDAte0wAZMpBvaatOm7oCbTuUhNo5SMcz6AUKbOuJSrFey848_-KXHxGnyJq95ZC4RxmJs9PtiJfMBktcjDU2EAp40Qn8XetLQwpcJzQuPnTUC86cieR3Z_J4xw/s1067/800px-mother+goddessit.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="800" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisJq3iZDiWF2-cDAte0wAZMpBvaatOm7oCbTuUhNo5SMcz6AUKbOuJSrFey848_-KXHxGnyJq95ZC4RxmJs9PtiJfMBktcjDU2EAp40Qn8XetLQwpcJzQuPnTUC86cieR3Z_J4xw/w300-h400/800px-mother+goddessit.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>But most early agricultural societies have religions that center on a mother goddess, representing the fertility of the earth. Çatalhöyük, an agricultural proto-city west of Göbekli Tepe that dates back to 7000 BC, is known for the many statues of mother goddesses found there, such as the goddess sitting on a throne flanked by two lionesses that is shown above. <p></p><p>What is the most obvious reason that a religious site would be obliterated, as Göbekli Tepe was? Some new religion has taken over and wants to destroy all traces of the old religion, which it considers a heresy. </p><p>Göbekli Tepe seems to be the earliest surviving evidence of a religious reformation that destroyed the old idols to promote the worship of its new idols. </p><p>They must have been dedicated to their new religion, since it was hard work to bury the old religion: archeologists estimate that they covered it with about 500 cubic yards of rubble. But it was successful: the site remained hidden and unknown for 9,000 or 10,000 years. </p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;">photos of Göbekli Tepe by:<br />Teomancimit - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17377542<br />Sue Fleckney - https://www.flickr.com/photos/96594331@N03/20385309880/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93559558</span><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-71739242114128884592021-04-28T10:52:00.004-07:002021-04-28T10:55:18.265-07:00GDP and Well-Being<p class="MsoNormal">Poorer nations obviously need economic growth, but the
evidence shows that economic growth itself does little or nothing to increase
well-being after a nation reaches the level of middle-class economic comfort
that America reached decades ago. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In 1974, the economist Richard Easterlin was the first to
notice that surveys showed Americans had not become any happier since the
1950s, despite decades of growth and rising income across all economic classes.
This finding still holds up today: American’s self-reported happiness peaked in
1958, and it has jogged up and down a bit but has never reached that peak
again. Our per capita GDP has more than tripled since the 1950s, but we are no
happier than we were then. In other developed countries, also, economic growth
does not increase happiness over the long term.<a href="#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"></span></span></a>
</p><p>International comparisons let us
see what income level is needed before growth stops increasing happiness.
Beginning in 1990, the World Values Survey asked people in many nations how
happy they are and how satisfying their lives are, and Gallup began asking a
similar question in 2012. The graph compares the results of recent Gallup
surveys with the per capita GDP of each nation. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtR4uEgwsFaoM4r3oyiVeONzjzAR_pTVTyHYLe2k2FVdxeDv4L2hlvFCCZHBvNVCzv-qC_qZ5pyb88B_wFttg8MDV_X-qssNKf2Q1wr96Ckp4szjl49nlH9ccPZNgnQXqxj2qHrQ/s886/04GDPHappiness.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="608" data-original-width="886" height="258" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtR4uEgwsFaoM4r3oyiVeONzjzAR_pTVTyHYLe2k2FVdxeDv4L2hlvFCCZHBvNVCzv-qC_qZ5pyb88B_wFttg8MDV_X-qssNKf2Q1wr96Ckp4szjl49nlH9ccPZNgnQXqxj2qHrQ/w375-h258/04GDPHappiness.jpg" width="375" /></a></div><p> We can see that, in lower
income countries, the happiness rating generally increases as income increases:
there is a strong increase when per capita GDP is less than $20,000 per year
and a modest increase between $20,000 and $40,000 per year. But above $40,000
per year or so, happiness does not increase significantly as per capita GDP
increases. There are still very small increases of happiness at these high
income levels, and some economists have used mathematical tricks to make them
visible,
but they are so small that they are not visible at all on an ordinary graph
like this one. At this point, it seems people would increase their happiness
more by increasing their free time than by increasing their income.
</p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">This result is not surprising. In poor countries, more
income is needed to provide people with decent housing, food, education, health
care, and other essentials; it makes sense that people will become happier as
they can afford more of the necessities and basic comforts of life. But when
people reach about two-thirds of America’s per capita GDP, they have enough to
make them comfortable, and there is relatively little benefit to consuming even
more.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-13109399489782219022021-03-29T11:33:00.004-07:002021-03-29T11:38:24.589-07:00The Affluent World<p>We are used to thinking of the world as a sea of poverty with just a few islands of affluence in the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and so on - but that has begun to change and will change dramatically in the coming decades. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAwVKrqkxZx3A8mIbto4rs1bFSDTBjz4HfP4S98GpEiOgW2uWwFt78rry8-UmDGPzKO3jz_UGwupDEoIhkhL3zgs7U_ZeoRqr5z4GyVn0IKnjF5fGXm0f13xT7MwSLwFrADM5q1A/s885/14GWPThisCentury.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="604" data-original-width="885" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAwVKrqkxZx3A8mIbto4rs1bFSDTBjz4HfP4S98GpEiOgW2uWwFt78rry8-UmDGPzKO3jz_UGwupDEoIhkhL3zgs7U_ZeoRqr5z4GyVn0IKnjF5fGXm0f13xT7MwSLwFrADM5q1A/w400-h272/14GWPThisCentury.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>This graph projects the growth of per capita Gross World Product in recent decades to the end of this century. Notice that, in about ten years, the world will reach the level that the United States reached in 1960, a time when we were calling ourselves "The Affluent Society" and when we were building freeways and oversized cars with tail-fins to absorb consumers' surplus purchasing power. And before the end of this century, the world on the average will reach the level of the United States today. </p><p>The change is already well under way. The "global middle class" is large and
is growing rapidly. According to a
<a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2018/09/27/a-global-tipping-point-half-the-world-is-now-middle-class-or-wealthier/" target="_blank">study</a> by the Brookings Institution, we recently reached the tipping point
where, for the first time in history, more than 50% of the people in the world
are either rich or "global middle class," defined as people who have
discretionary income to spend on entertainment, household appliances, motorcycles
and possibly vacations and who are confident they can get through economic
disruption without falling into extreme poverty. Currently, 3.59 billion people
are in the global middle class, and Brookings projects that will grow to 5.3
billion by 2030, well over
half of the world’s population. </p><p>It will put immense strain on the global environment if the world goes the way that the United States went in the 1960s, rebuilding cities around the automobile to promote rapid economic growth. Most likely, ecological collapse would throw much of the world back into poverty. </p><p>But if the world tries to achieve the best possible quality of life rather than the fastest possible rate of economic growth, people will be able to emerge from poverty, have all the middle class comforts needed to live a good life, and have abundant free time. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-6094363768355162942021-01-26T11:12:00.002-08:002021-01-26T11:12:44.523-08:00Multiple Emission Offsets<p> From my new book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/ABCs-Global-Warming-Everyone-Solutions-ebook/dp/B08SNMFPDD/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1" target="_blank">The ABCs of Global Warming: What Everyone Should Know About the Science, the Dangers, and the Solutions</a>: </p><h2 style="text-align: left;">Multiple Emission Offsets</h2><p>Multiple emission offsets can reduce emissions more quickly by letting businesses get out of paying the price for one ton of their own emissions if they reduce emissions somewhere in the world by, say, two tons or five tons. </p><p>Multiple emission offsets are economically feasible, since the costs of offsets are well below the costs that are charged by plans that put a price on emissions. For example: </p><p>● Under California’s cap-and-trade plan, it costs businesses $17.45 to emit one ton of carbon dioxide equivalent.167 </p><p>● Under the European Union’s emission trading system, it costs over $25 to emit one ton of carbon dioxide from larger factories and power plants.168 </p><p>● A recent German law begins by charging 10 Euros (about $11) to emit one ton of carbon dioxide from transportation and heating, with the price increasing to 35 Euros by 2025.169 </p><p>By contrast, the average price in the private market for carbon offsets is $3.30 per ton,170 though prices vary. </p><p>A government program to let business avoid paying fees would have to set standards for projects that qualify as offsets171 and presumably would have stricter standards than some of these private programs, so let’s assume that offsets would initially cost $5 per ton. And let’s assume that, to give businesses an incentive to use offsets, they should cost about 80% to 90% as much as paying the fee for emissions. California could require businesses to buy offsets that reduce emissions by 3 tons to avoid paying for 1 ton of emissions, the EU could require 4.5 tons of offsets, and Germany could begin with 2 tons and work its way up to 6 tons of offsets to avoid paying the fee for 1 ton of carbon dioxide emissions. </p><p>This sort of program could jump-start global emission reductions, as businesses rush to pay for the cheapest emission reductions all over the world in order to avoid paying fees. They would still have a strong incentive to reduce their own emissions, since the offsets would cost almost as much as the fee, but they would also be reducing global emissions dramatically by paying for offsets. </p><p>It is not possible to offset all emissions. If it were, we could shift to net-zero emissions immediately, but there are obviously not enough offsets available to balance all of the world’s emissions. Initially, we might let businesses offset, say, 10% of their emissions by reducing emissions anywhere in the world. </p><p>Over time, allowing offsets would have two opposite economic effects: </p><p>● Cheaper opportunities to offset emissions would be used up, driving up the price of offsets. For example, one cheap source of offsets involves sealing landfills and burning the methane that escapes, so the landfill emits carbon dioxide rather than methane. But there are only so many landfills in the world, and if a major economy let business use offsets, it would not be long before methane emissions were eliminated from all these landfills. </p><p>● Businesses would invest in developing emission-negative technologies, potentially driving down the price of offsets. Currently there is no economic incentive to develop these technologies, but once the emission reduction can be sold to businesses to use as offsets, we would expect many start-ups to begin developing these technologies and reducing their costs. </p><p>Because these two effects are opposite and because we cannot predict what technologies will be developed, we do not know whether offsets would become more or less available over time and whether their cost go up or go down.</p><p>As years go by and the price of offsets changes, governments would have to vary the multiple so businesses always have to buy offsets that cost 80% or 90% of the fees they are avoiding. As the availability of offsets changes, governments would also have to change the percent of their emissions that businesses can offset. </p><p>In the longer run, as the fee for emissions goes way up and emissions go way down, we will have to set the multiple at a level that avoids hardship and severe economic dislocation. For example, we would not want to set the price for emissions from nitrogen fertilizer so high that we drive up the price of food to the point where we cause hunger, so we would set the multiple for these emissions so offsets cost less than the full 80% or 90% of the emissions fee. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-5425652507428583482020-12-28T11:36:00.001-08:002020-12-28T11:44:32.166-08:00Empiricism and Proprioception<p>There is a long tradition of British empiricist philosophy, going back to Locke, Berkeley and Hume, that claims that the only direct knowledge we have is of our own sense perceptions and that is often skeptical about whether there are objects outside of us that cause these perceptions. These philosophers ignore our proprioceptions: we have direct knowledge about our own bodies that is as certain as our direct knowledge of our sense perceptions.</p><p>For example, Bertrand Russell was working in the empiricist tradition when he wrote:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 24px;">Anything intervening between ourselves and what we see must be invisible: our view in every direction is bounded by the nearest visible object. It might be objected that a dirty pane of glass, for example, is visible although we can see things through it. But in this case we really see a spotted patchwork: the dirtier specks in the glass are visible, while the cleaner parts are invisible and allow us to see what is beyond. Thus the discovery that the intervening medium affects the appearances of things cannot be made by means of the sense of sight alone. [Our Knowledge of the External World, Allen & Unwin, 1922 p.78]</span></p></blockquote><p>This is an accurate description of how we see things if we have one eye closed, but it is clearly wrong about how we see with both eyes.</p><p>If I am near a window with some dirt on it and I am looking out the window with both eyes open, my actual experience is that I can focus my eyes on the specks of dirt on the window and see a blurry, unfocused version of the scene outside, or I can focus on the scene outside and see a blurry unfocused version of the specks. If I want, I can deliberately shift my focus from one to the other, and I have a direct proprioception that I am shifting my focus. If I keep coming closer to the window, it becomes harder to focus on the specks, and I can feel the strain in my eyes. If I keep coming closer, I will eventually come too close to focus on the speck: at first, I will feel the strain increasing as I come closer and keep my eyes focused, and finally I will reach a point where I cannot focus and will see two specks. Then, if I close one eye, I will see only one speck, and if I close the other eye I will see one speck in a different position; I will be able to close one eye and then the other and see the speck move from one position to another or to open both eyes and see the speck in both positions. </p><p>It is not true, as the empiricists claim, that we only have direct knowledge of our sense perceptions and deduce from our perceptions that there is an external world causing them. In the case of vision, we focus on objects in the external world that are more or less distant in order to have the sense perception. The proprioception that we are focusing on objects outside ourselves is just as basic a bit of knowledge as the visual perceptions. </p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-35073644646719809332020-11-10T12:09:00.002-08:002020-11-10T12:10:47.078-08:00 The Blank Slate: Steven Pinker Stuck in the Seventies<p>Steven
Pinker became a celebrity when he published How the Mind Works, a book that
explains the human mind using evolutionary biology (which explains why we
evolved the emotional biases and intellectual capabilities that we have) and
cognitive science (which uses computer models to explain human thought). It is
an excellent book that is about 95% science and is only about 5% physicalist
dogma claiming that there is nothing to the human mind except what these
sciences can explain.</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Once
you are a celebrity, publishers are eager to bring out anything you write.
Pinker continued to write some books that explain his scientific work to the
public, such as The Language Instinct. But he was also able to publish works
that are more dogma than science. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">The
most dogmatic is The Blank Slate. This diffuse, disorganized book devotes some
time to Pinker's valuable scientific work, but it devotes much more time to
Pinker's amateurish attempts at philosophy and to political opinions that he formed
in the 1970s and has not rethought since. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Beating
Dead Horses</span></h1>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Pinker
begins the book by saying that colleagues always told him that he was beating a
dead horse when he told them that he was working on a book about the theory
that the mind is a blank slate that our experience writes upon, a theory that
goes back to the seventeenth-century writings of John Locke. No, Pinker says,
it is still central to the intellectual debate today.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">But the
first example he discusses at length to show that the blank slate is still
central is behaviorist psychology-the theory, most famously expounded by B.F.
Skinner, that our behavior is entirely the result of conditioning and not of
human nature. Skinner believed that we could condition people to produce a
utopian society, and he replied to criticism that he would reduce human freedom
by saying we are already the products of conditioning, so we are "beyond
freedom and dignity." <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">This is
an unfortunate way for Pinker to make his point that the blank slate is central
to today's intellectual debates, because the influence of behaviorist
psychology peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, and virtually no one believes in it
today. Today, the most common theory among the public is that our psychology
depends on brain chemistry-which is why we try to restore the normal chemical
balance in the brain by giving Ritalin to school children and Prozac to adults.
How can Pinker possibly use behaviorism to show that the blank slate is
important today?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Pinker
also argues for the relevance of this book by providing a long series of
quotations from anthropologists who are cultural relativists, claiming that
every culture is equally valid because there is no human nature, just a blank
slate. Yet the quotations range from the 1930s through the 1970s. The influence
of this sort of thinking has declined dramatically in the face of evolutionary
psychology, which shows that there is an evolved human nature. How can Pinker
use a series of quotations that ends in the 1970s to show that the blank slate
is important today?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Radical
Marxists and Feminists</span></h1>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">The
reason becomes clear later in the book, when Pinker begins to talk about his
own personal introduction to these issues: Pinker is still fighting against the
ideas that were popular when he was a graduate student in the 1970s. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">At that
time, politics in the academy was dominated by Marxists, who believed there is
no human nature and our behavior is the result of economic factors, and by
radical feminists, who believed there is no human nature and that differences
between men and women are purely the result of social stereotypes. Pinker
compares these thinkers to modernist urban planners, such as Le Corbusier, who
created utopian designs for cities that failed because they ignored human
nature. In later chapters of the book, he adds deconstructionists to the crew
he attacks. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Yet the
influence of these schools of thought among academics peaked in the 1970s. The
influence of Marxism has waned dramatically since the collapse of communism in
eastern Europe in 1989, and the influence of the most extreme radical feminists
has waned dramatically since feminism entered the mainstream. The influence of
modernist planning in the style of Le Corbusier peaked in the 1960s, and today
modernist planning has been eclipsed by New Urbanism, with its neo-traditional
urban design. As one sign of this change, over 96,000 units of public housing
in the modernist style were torn down under the federal government's HOPE VI
program and replaced with neo-traditional urban neighborhoods. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Pinker
is quite right to say that these schools of thought are dehumanizing. He is
particularly good in later chapters of the book, where he adds
deconstructionism to the enemies' list and refutes it using his own theories
about language rather than just attacking his opponents rhetorically. But
throughout, he is beating horses that are either dead or dying:
deconstructionism was still on the rise in the 1970s, but its influence peaked
in the 1980s and has been declining since. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">He
complains about scientists who wanted to make their work serve "hard-left
ideology," some calling themselves the "radical science
movement," and his leading example is the first lecture he attended as an
graduate student at Harvard in 1976. It was true in the 1970s, but how many
scientists are there today who say they are part of the "radical science
movement"?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">1970s
Environmentalists</span></h1>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Environmentalists
were also very influential when Pinker was a graduate student, and in The Blank
Slate, he parrots conventional conservative arguments against environmentalism,
focusing on environmental issues that were current in the 1970s and ignoring
those that are most important today. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">He
attacks environmentalists for what he calls their "Malthusian"
predictions that there are limits on resources, criticizing the Club of Rome
Report named The Limits of Growth, which focused national attention on the
issue when it was published in 1972. To refute this report, he mentions the
famous wager between Paul Ehrlich, an early environmentalist, and Julian Simon,
a fellow at the free market Cato Institute, about whether the price of natural
resources would rise in real terms between 1980 and 1990; they bet about the
price of five strategic metals, and Ehrlich lost all five bets, because (Pinker
says) "Malthusian prophesies ignore the effect of technological change in
increasing the resources that support a comfortable life." Pinker mentions
in passing that The Limits of Growth said that uncontrolled growth would
ultimately cause both resource shortages and more pollution than the earth
could absorb-but he goes on to ignore pollution and only discuss resources. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Yet
elementary economics tells us that the free market gives businesses an
incentive to increase the supply of a resource when shortages drive its price
up, but that the market has no mechanism that gives businesses an incentive to
reduce pollution. Environmentalists are clearly right to say that government
must control pollution. In 1990, the United States set up a cap-and-trade
program to reduce the emissions that caused acid rain, and it worked: acid rain
is no longer killing our forests and lakes, as it was in the 1980s. By the time
Pinker wrote The Blank Slate, environmentalists considered global warming to be
the greatest environmental threat and were calling for cap-and-trade to control
it also. In fact, California passed a law using cap-and-trade to control
greenhouse gas emissions just four years after this book was published.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">When it
comes to global warming and other problems caused by pollution, Pinker is
clearly wrong to attack environmentalists and claim that new technology in
itself will solve the problems. Yes, we do need to develop new clean energy
technologies to control global warming, but the market does not provide the incentive
needed to shift to clean energy quickly enough. It will remain cheaper for
quite a while to keep existing dirty power plants than to replace them with
clean energy, so we need the government to provide incentives to shift to clean
energy in time to avoid the worst effects of global warming. The entire world
realizes this, with the exception of the Trump administration, which is why the
world adopted the Paris agreement in 2016 and governments worldwide pledged to
limit greenhouse gas emissions. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">This is
elementary economic theory-the market does not account for what economists call
"externalities"-but Pinker simply ignores it and keeps repeating the
claim that technology alone will solve our problems. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Pinker
attacks environmentalists of the 1970s, such as Paul Ehrlich and the Club of
Rome, and he ignores what environmentalists are saying today. The resource
shortages and economic disruption of the 1970s led many environmentalists to be
overly pessimistic during that decade and to think that environmental crisis
was inevitable. Today, as we face the problem of global warming, most
environmentalists are guardedly optimistic: we can avoid the worst effects of
climate change if world governments can agree to limit greenhouse gas emissions
and to transition to clean energy, as they did in the Paris Agreement, and then
can move quickly enough to limit emissions. Yet the Paris agreement would never
have been signed if we listened to the right-wing slogan that we do not need to
control pollution because technology will solve all our problems. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Since
global warming is the biggest environmental issue that the world faces today
and was the biggest at the time he wrote, we would expect Pinker to look at
what environmentalists say about this issue, rather than focusing on what Paul
Ehrlich and the Club of Rome were saying during the 1970s. With the
overwhelming majority all climate scientists agreeing that human-caused global
warming is a significant threat, we would expect Pinker to look at scientific
evidence and economic realities that exist today, but instead he restates the
political prejudices that he formed in the 1970s. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Materialist
Moral Philosophy</span></h1>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Though
his philosophy is amateurish, Pinker does know more about the subject than most
evolutionary psychologists, and he does a better job of justifying morality
than the usual account of how altruism evolves. He understands how altruism
evolved, but he also understands that he would be committing the naturalistic
fallacy if he tried to justify morality on the basis of how it evolved. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Instead,
he justifies morality by reproducing a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin
says he does not believe in morality and Hobbes shoves him so he falls in the
mud. Pinker comments: <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">The
brain may be a physical system made of ordinary matter, but that matter is
organized in such a way as ... to feel pleasure and pain. And that in turn sets
the stage for the emergence of morality. ... since one is better off not
shoving and not getting shoved than shoving and getting shoved, it pays to
insist on a moral code, even if the price is adhering to itself oneself."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Pinker
is saying that morality is a matter of expediency: we want to have pleasure and
avoid pain, and we invent morality because it helps us get what we want,
sacrificing some pleasures to avoid greater pains. This is similar to the
social contract theory of philosophers beginning with Hobbes. It is also
similar to the evolutionary psychologists' theory of reciprocal altruism, but
it presented in a way that justifies morality rather than explaining how it
evolved. Yet there are obvious problems with this theory. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">If
morality is just a matter of expediency, then it makes sense to cheat. If I go
along with my society's morality just because it helps me to get pleasure and avoid
pain, then I will also cheat if it helps me to get pleasure and avoid pain. In
most cases, I will not cheat, because being detected would hurt my reputation
and make my life less pleasant, but if I am sure that my cheating will never be
detected (or if I think the benefits of cheating outweigh the risk of being
detected) then I will cheat. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">If
morality is just a matter of expediency, then I will not help the poor and
powerless unless it also helps me. The powerless generally cannot retaliate for
any damage I do to them and cannot repay me adequately for any benefits I give
them. I will help them only if I think it will make my own life better by
giving me a reputation for charity, which will make people admire me and will
make my own life more pleasant. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">If
morality is just a matter of expediency, then it does not apply to people
outside of my society. I go along with my society's morality because my life
will be more pleasant if everyone I encounter accepts this morality, but if my
society discovers some new part of the world where primitive people live, then
I will decide what to do with those people by asking myself whether my own life
will be more pleasant if my group treats them morally or if my group enslaves
or exterminates them. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">If
morality is just a matter of expediency, then it certainly does not apply to
animals. Animals cannot join in the social contract by accepting society's
morality, so there is no benefit to me in treating animals kindly. I will treat
them in the way that is most expedient for me, and if treating animals cruelly
saves me a bit of money when I buy food, that is what I will do. Why should I
do anything for animals, when animals will not do anything for me in return? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Notice
that all of these examples talk about what I "will" do, rather than
about what I "ought" to do. Pinker understands the naturalistic
fallacy, so he should agree with me that, if ethics is based on expediency, it
is logically impossible to get from "is" to "ought." It "is"
true that I desire to have pleasure and to avoid pain and that I am more likely
to satisfy this desire if my society has a moral code, but it is impossible to
get from those "is" statements to the statements that I ought to obey
the moral code. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Epicurus,
the earliest materialist philosopher whose writing survives, was the first to
advocate Pinker's idea that morality is just a matter of expediency. Like
Pinker, he believed that only matter exists, that we try to seek pleasure and
avoid pain, and that we invent morality as a matter of expediency, to avoid
being harmed by others. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Despite
all of his scientific knowledge, Pinker is not able to do a better job of
justifying morality than Epicurus did over two millennia ago. No materialist
can. They can only appeal to expediency, because they live in a world of
"is statements" where there cannot be any justification for
"ought statements." <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Physicalism
and Freedom</span></h1>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Pinker
blames the blank slate for the totalitarian ideologies of Marxism and radical
feminism: if there is no human nature, then we can manipulate people in any way
that is needed to reach our utopian goals. He doesn't mention that John Locke,
his earliest example of the blank slate, inspired the liberal ideals of the
American Revolution-that Jefferson had a bust of and Locke in his study and
based the argument of the Declaration of Independence on Locke's ideas. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">As
usual, Pinker's argument is out of date. Utopians used to claim that there was
no limit to their ability to manipulate people because there was no human
nature, but the technology being developed today gives us more power over
nature. Even if there is a human nature, utopian totalitarians can potentially
use drugs and genetic engineering to change human nature. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Totalitarians
potentially have much more power than they had in the past. In the past, they
ignored human nature, so their utopias ultimately failed, as Pinker says.
Today, they are on the edge of being able to manipulate human nature to make
humanity fit into their utopias. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">In the
days of B.F. Skinner and the behaviorists, educators talked about conditioning
children, but today, educators are more likely to get drug prescriptions for
children: instead of trying to condition children who are disruptive, they say
the children have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and give them
prescriptions for Ritalin. Some children can benefit from psychiatric drugs,
but the fact that we in the United States prescribe psychiatric drugs more than
twice as often as the Netherlands and more than three times as often as Germany
shows that we are over-using drugs to control children who do not fit in.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Utopian
totalitarians will welcome new drugs that control behavior more effectively and
will also want to use genetic engineering to change human nature. How can we
justify resistance to these new forms of totalitarianism? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">The
usual justification is that controlling people in these ways would violate
their freedom, but Pinker says explicitly that we have no freedom, and our
behavior is determined. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">He
spends a chapter of The Blank Slate talking about the conflict between
determinism and free will. He says that his physicalism is deterministic, but
we should not worry about determinism because it does not undermine personal
responsibility. We make people responsible for their actions, for example, by
punishing criminals, and people take these consequences into account when they
plan their actions. The possibility of punishment is one of the factors that
determines their behavior, so they are held responsible for their behavior even
though it is determined. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">But he
does not notice a deeper implication of his view: if we are nothing more than
computers whose behavior is determined, rather than humans who have freedom,
then we can no longer say that utopians who control our behavior are violating
our freedom. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">It is
odd that Pinker believes in determinism, which is based on classical physics,
rather than seeing that modern physics allows for randomness as well as
determinism. We have seen that Daniel Dennett uses twentieth-century physics to
argue that freedom is worthless, because it can only be random behavior, which
is no better than determined behavior. By contrast, Pinker sticks with the old
debate between freedom and determinism, based on the nineteenth-century physics.
This is one more example of how amateurish his philosophy is. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Either
way, physicalists like Pinker or Dennett do not believe in freedom, so they do
not believe in the most important reason to resist totalitarian use of drugs
and genetic engineering. Our minds are just evolved computers, so why shouldn't
redesign and improve them, just as we constantly redesign and improve the
computers on our desktop? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">A
dualist or new-physics materialist can believe that evolution took advantage of
some unknown property of matter to create freedom-the ability to make
deliberate decisions-and can believe that freedom is so valuable that we should
not allow utopian social planners to control us. But physicalists do not
believe in freedom. Though Pinker himself seems to be a decent person who would
resist totalitarianism, he is promoting a theory that implies there is nothing
wrong with totalitarian control of human behavior. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">In The
Blank Slate, he argues at length for genetic engineering of food, and some of
arguments would also support genetic engineering of people. It seems that he
overlooks human genetic engineering because it is unthinkable in our
society-but if our society accepted Pinker's physicalism, human genetic
engineering would be thinkable, there would be no coherent argument against it,
and we would be heading straight for Brave New World. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">Pinker
doesn't realize what today's real problem is. The theory of the blank slate
promoted totalitarianism in the past, when human nature was an obstacle to
utopian schemes. But today, we are developing the ability to control human
nature, and Pinker's physicalism removes the best reason to stop totalitarians
from changing human nature to fit it into their utopian schemes.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho";">In the
future, as we gain more and more power to control human nature, Marx's
dialectical materialism will not be as great a threat to freedom as Pinker's
physicalist materialism. <o:p></o:p></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-36818925761442063822020-10-15T15:33:00.004-07:002020-10-19T11:17:25.202-07:00Cherry-Picked Data in Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now<p class="MsoNormal">Steven Pinker’s book <i>Enlightenment Now</i> says that
progress occurs because people continually solve problems, but Pinker himself
gets in the way of progress by cherry-picking the data to deny that problems
exist.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The two exceptions are nuclear war and global warming, which
could both have such disastrous consequences that he suggests solutions to
them. But on other issues, <i>Enlightenment Now</i> minimizes or denies one
problem after another. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Pinker refers to one study that says we are not going
through the sixth mass extinction in the history of the Earth, as if it were
more important than the many studies that say we are experiencing this mass
extinction. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Pinker repeats a standard conservative talking point by
saying that poverty is not a big problem in America because most of the poor
have color televisions, cell phones, and appliances. But he does not mention
the standard liberal response: the price of these consumer goods has gone down,
but the price of housing, education, and medical care has gone up. People who are saddled with massive student
debt or who cannot afford to go to college at all would undoubtedly prefer
black-and-white televisions and free or very-low-tuition public colleges, which
is what we had in the 1960s. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Pinker says that increasing inequality is not a problem,
citing international comparisons showing that equality is not correlated with
happiness, but this defense of inequality contradicts his defense of
economic growth. To defend inequality, he says that people need enough to live
full and satisfying lives, and it doesn’t hurt them if others are extremely
wealthy. But to defend economic growth,
he says that international comparisons show that higher income continues to
increase happiness regardless of how wealthy a nation is. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Which one is it? If people just need enough to live full and
satisfying lives to be happy, then growth beyond that point does not make
people happier. If growth beyond that
point makes people happier, then reducing inequality by redistributing income
from the top 10% to the lower 90% would make the great majority of people
happier at the expense of a small minority. Pinker has obviously never thought
this through: he cherry-picks the data that defends the status quo, inequality
and economic growth, without realizing that he is contradicting himself.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6pcmFYLAT864uY-XXDCQgkxW9HmG4eJSv9Sv3OgHZob-PnMD-NYpFdVMmmEB-DqcHgb898nGPeC0e9QXcTvozbikxrA-U63_nVn8MtM46GrqcrocUS-MoYbHTWdwNNc06jllXIA/s1389/PinkerWorkHours.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="927" data-original-width="1389" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6pcmFYLAT864uY-XXDCQgkxW9HmG4eJSv9Sv3OgHZob-PnMD-NYpFdVMmmEB-DqcHgb898nGPeC0e9QXcTvozbikxrA-U63_nVn8MtM46GrqcrocUS-MoYbHTWdwNNc06jllXIA/s320/PinkerWorkHours.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Graph from <i>Enlightenment Now</i>, page 249</div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But Pinker's strangest abuse of data is what he says about
work hours. He has a graph that shows very clearly that work time has been
going down in Europe but that it has gone up since 1970 in the United State and
is now about the same as it was in 1950 - something that anyone who studies
work hours knows. He writes a lot about the benefits of shorter work hours, and
one paragraph looks briefly at the historic benefits of shorter work hours in
the United States and then says that shorter work hours, longer life expectancy
and other factors mean that “the fraction of a person’s life that is taken up
by work has fallen by a quarter just since 1960” (p. 251). How can he say this about shorter work hours in a paragraph about the United States, when his own graph just two pages
earlier shows that work hours are rising in the United States? It is enough to make one look at the footnote,
which refers to a study and says, “Data for the UK.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It seems that Pinker pulled in the graph and did not think
much about it, because noticing that work hours in the United States have been
going up for the last fifty years would contradict his preconceptions about progress.
When he wrote the paragraph about the benefits of shorter work hours in the
United States, which comes two pages later, rather than looking at his own
graph and seeing that work hours in the United States are not falling, he
looked for a reference that would confirm his idea about progress, could not
find one for the United States, and cherry-picked one about the UK instead,
pulling it into the book even though it is totally out of place in this
paragraph about the United States.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It is enough to cast doubt on the entire book. The book is very wide ranging, and it presents
enough data about all the different subjects it covers to make Pinker look like
an expert on everything, but when we see these examples of cherry-picked data, we have to wonder about how impartial Pinker is and about how honest the data
is throughout the book. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Pinker says there is progress because we are always solving
problems; if so, this book is an obstacle to progress because it is in denial
about many of our problems. Extinction and poverty in America are not such big
problems as people think. Rising inequality is not a problem at all. The fact
that Americans’ work hours have gone up for the last fifty years is not a
problem - because Pinker does not even notice that it is a fact. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Pinker also seems to know relatively little about the
Enlightenment authors that he professes to admire. He does quote directly from
Kant’s essays (without mentioning his philosophy, which is actually critical of reason), but all of the rest of his
chapter about the Enlightenment is based on recent books about the Enlightenment, and Pinker shows no sign of having studied the authors themselves.
He includes Rousseau in a list of Enlightenment authors on page 10 and in a
list of anti-Enlightenment Romantic authors on page 30, presumably relying on
two different secondary sources without thinking about which period Rousseau actually
belongs to. He includes Hume in a list of authors who believed in “deliberate
application of reason” (p. 11), but the first thing you learn when you start to
study Hume is that he was an empiricist who criticized Enlightenment
rationalism. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Pinker sprinkles this book with gratuitous insults directed
at “literary intellectuals,” but literary intellectuals at least study
the old authors whom they comment on. Some of us even take the ideas in old
books seriously and believe they help us to think about what is a good society
and what is a good life. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Apart from cherry-picking the data, in the section of the book about progress, Pinker refuses to look
beyond the data and think about the good life. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Instead, in this section, he adopts the view that philosophers sometimes call
“preference utilitarianism” - the idea that everyone’s preferences are equally
valid, so a society is good if it satisfies as many of those personal
preferences as possible. He gives this view a progressive veneer by referring
to Amartya Sen’s book <i>Development as Freedom</i> (p. 248), but it is also the view
underlying all market economics: consumers choose freely what they want to buy,
and for this to lead to the optimum result, consumers’ preferences must all be
valid. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Sen is talking about the developing nations, where people
are badly in need of food and housing, so they do not have much room for
choice. But in the wealthier nations
(and in the world as it becomes wealthier), most people already have the
basics, so it is more problematic for them do decide what to do with their
increasing wealth and the shorter work hours that Europeans have and Americans would
have if we dealt with our long work hours rather than ignoring them. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of course, people should make this choice for themselves,
but they should also think about what is the best choice to make. It does not help when Pinker, as an expert
on progress, tell them that all choices are valid, any more than it
would help people to choose a good diet if an expert on nutrition told them
that all choices of food are valid. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In classical times, there were four major schools of
philosophy with different visions of the good life - the Platonists, the
peripatetics, the stoics, and the Epicureans - and the small number of male
aristocrats who were privileged enough to choose their own way of life looked to philosophies to help them make an informed
decision. If any philosopher told them
that all choices are equally valid, they would not have been interested, since
it would not have helped them to decide how to use their freedom. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Progress gives us more and more freedom, which we can use
badly or well. In a conceivable future,
many people might choose to use their greatly increased amount of leisure time
watching a high-tech virtual reality version of television, where the action
movies are more thrilling and the porno movies are more erotic than they could
possibly be in two-dimensional television.
Or, conceivably, there might a drug that has the same effect as heroin
but with no harmful side effects, so many people might spend all their leisure
time in an intensely pleasurable stupor. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Would Pinker say that these consumer choices are as valid as
any others? If he lived in this future, would he write that even the poor are
better off than ever before because most of them have virtual-reality
televisions, which are even better than color televisions, and have all the
heroin they want, which is even better than whiskey?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Progress means movement toward some goal. We cannot say we
are progressing without thinking about the goal we are moving toward. </p>
<p>When Pinker defends progress by relying entirely on data and
refusing to think about the good life, he is like a man driving down the road
who is convinced he is making great progress because his car has elaborate
instrumentation that shows its engine is working better every day - but who has
never thought about where he intends to go. <span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-19842020337189788842020-09-26T20:26:00.005-07:002020-09-26T20:31:26.529-07:00Defining Normal Down<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuh-TSvwUn_b9ooKNP7ekr2cte6WPhfoY_-JdNv27kVjXfjuH_5w7ArmMfmmXA5UK6dKzOQ4oEMzohk6NTSwNrXHku_po_xImXhfy7oXJ7Y51y1KDygSbPD1byZ8bSD_0eAtAD4g/s1024/NakedDenmark.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="1024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuh-TSvwUn_b9ooKNP7ekr2cte6WPhfoY_-JdNv27kVjXfjuH_5w7ArmMfmmXA5UK6dKzOQ4oEMzohk6NTSwNrXHku_po_xImXhfy7oXJ7Y51y1KDygSbPD1byZ8bSD_0eAtAD4g/s320/NakedDenmark.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>A children's television program in Denmark has adults with a variety of different types of bodies strip, including overweight and obese bodies, strip naked in front of a group of children, telling the audience, "I hope you will understand that normal bodies look like this." The avowed goal is to show children that "people are different and have different bodies."</p><p>When they say "normal bodies look like this," they are playing with the ambiguous meaning of the word "normal." The word has a normative sense, meaning healthy or acceptable, and it has a descriptive sense, meaning common or usual. </p><p>Often the two meanings are close. For example, 98.6 is the normal temperature, meaning the temperature that is healthy, and it is also the temperature that almost all people have.</p><p>But the ambiguity becomes dangerous when destructive or self-destructive behavior becomes common - for example, when it becomes common for people to be obese. If we teach children that different people have different bodies and obese bodies are just another type of normal body, then when those children grow up, they are less likely to make the effort needed to avoid obesity. </p><p>This is a familiar habit of the modern left. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it "Defining Deviancy Down." As the amount of deviant or destructive behavior in a community increases, behavior that would have been considered deviant in the past is redefined as normal. </p><p>We can see how destructive this misuse of the word normal is, if we imagine people applying it to other issues in the past. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they would have reasoned that slavery is common, which means it is normal, with means it is acceptable. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they would have reasoned that subordination of women is common, which means it is normal, which means it is acceptable. It is no stranger than reasoning at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when obesity is a major public health problem, that obesity is common, which means it is normal, which means it is acceptable.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-14105235871273194332020-08-06T14:49:00.005-07:002020-08-06T15:15:24.072-07:00Free Will by Sam Harris<p style="text-align: left;">In this book, Sam Harris argues that the idea of free will
is not only unsound; it is also contrary to our experience. For example, he
says that, in the morning, he sometimes drinks coffee and sometimes tea, and
when he makes the decision, it is just based on how he feels at the moment,
which is caused by his genetic inheritance and life history, so it is not
really a free choice.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Here and throughout the book, he fails to distinguish free
will from volition (which is just will, without the freedom), so he fails to
see that his examples involve volition. We can make this distinction by giving
examples. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A dog following a trail sniffs in one place for a time and
then decides which direction to go in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is volition without free choice; once the dog figures out which way
the trail goes, it necessarily wills to go in that direction, rather than
making a free choice of which direction to go in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Volition evolved to let animals gather more information before
acting, which lets them act more effectively: the delay lets the dog spend
enough time to figure out which direction the trail goes, so it is more likely
to find the prey it is tracking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Likewise, Harris’ delay lets him figure out whether he is really in the
mood for coffee of for tea before deciding which to do, and the decision is
determined by his mood rather than being free. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">By contrast, free will involves making a deliberate decision
based on reasoning about evidence in the world or about our own experience. For
example, when I was in my twenties, I read some books about nutrition, so I
decided to eat whole grain bread and pasta rather than the refined grains I
grew up on. I have generally followed that decision ever since, though I
occasionally give in to my impulses and have some particularly delicious
looking bit of bread made with white flower. When I made that decision, I was
not being controlled by my mood: I decided that I should eat whole grains based
on the scientific evidence that they are healthier. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Sometimes we make this sort of decision by reflecting on our
own experience. For example, I might spend an hour reading comments on Twitter
and realize that it is a waste of time and that I shouldn’t do it in the future - but occasionally, I might give in to temptation and binge on Twitter
comments again.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">After we have made this sort of decision, we can sometimes
limit our volition based on it. For example, Harris gives in to his mood when
he decides whether to have coffee or tea for breakfast, but if he were in the
mood to have a few shots of whiskey for breakfast, he probably would resist
that impulse. But sometimes we cannot limit our volition based on our
decisions: for example, I occasionally have white bread.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Some people are chronically unable to limit their volition
based on their decisions. For example, an alcoholic may realize that his
drinking is destroying him, based both on scientific evidence and on his own
experience, but he may not be able to stop drinking. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In cases like this, people traditionally said that the
person was not free, that he was a slave to his impulses, unable to do what he
himself had decided that he should do. The old-fashioned way of putting it was that he was a slave to his passions; the word "passion" was originally the opposite of "action," and it implied that the passions were not your own actions but things that happen to you and that you accept passively. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of course, Harris cannot make this sort of distinction. He
would say that both this man's moods and his deliberate decisions were caused by his genetic
inheritance and his past experiences and environment. Though he claims that our
experience does not support the idea of free will, his examples don’t include
any experience more complex than his decision to have coffee or tea on the
morning, which depends on the impulse of the moment. He cannot deal with the
experience we have all had of conflicts between our deliberate decisions and
our impulses: we make deliberate decisions about what we should do and are tempted
to give into the impulses of the moment rather than abiding by our own deliberate
decisions. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The underlying problem is that Harris believes uncritically
and unthinkingly in what philosophers call “physicalism,” the belief that the
laws of physics that we currently know can explain everything. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Sometimes, he seems to go backward to the deterministic
physics of the nineteenth century. For example, he says we cannot blame
criminals for their crimes because “…if I were to trade places with one of
these people atom for atom, I would be him: there is no extra part of me that
could decide…to resist the impulse to victimize other people” (p.4).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Usually, he recognizes that some physical
events are random, as twentieth-century physics showed, but he says that, if we
act based on some random physical event, then we are not acting freely any more
than if we act on based on determined physical events.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But he doesn’t consider the possibility that matter has some
other property, which physics has not yet discovered, that lets us make
deliberate decisions freely. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In the nineteenth century, physicists believed that the
phenomena they observed were determined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the twentieth century, physicists believed that the phenomena the
observed were either determined or random. It is possible that some day,
physicists will discover that matter can also behave in some other way that
lets us make deliberate decisions. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Physicalism is an occupational hazard of cognitive
scientists and of neuroscientists like Harris, because they create models of
the mind or study the brain using today’s physics, so they have an intellectual
vested interest in believing that today’s physics can explain everything. But
physicalism is a completely irrational position, because we know that
contemporary physics is not complete. Today’s physicists have not developed a
theory that reconciles relativity and quantum mechanics. They do not understand
dark energy, which makes the expansion of the universe accelerate. They do not
understand dark matter, which makes up most of the matter in the universe.
Physicist recognize what they don’t know, but cognitive scientists and
neuroscientists don’t. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">At one point, Harris claims that his argument doesn’t depend
on materialism: “even if the human mind were made of soul-stuff, nothing about
my argument would change. The unconscious operation of a soul would grant you
no more freedom than the unconscious physiology of your brain does” (p. 12). </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">He is just showing how out of touch with our actual
experience. Just as we can observe that our decision about drinking coffee or tea in the morning is based on our mood, we can observe the operation of our mind making
deliberate decisions, which is conscious and which is the basis of our freedom.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-20950404972258028842020-07-29T14:50:00.005-07:002020-07-29T16:57:20.269-07:00Steven Pinker, Progress and "Climate Alarmism"<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-lh2TQKv43VfJJNOIbXEVK0rl7VpF9Fi3Z4dtp3Gjml2P0kyQbM3B4XZywGKSta6gnv4yFfi1wlWLTN2pnPuo0OpwSF5i7JCUD-HqhBHS8MeTZusrb3BwUbZP2-BcbH8FUSdObg/s586/PinkerTweet.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="586" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-lh2TQKv43VfJJNOIbXEVK0rl7VpF9Fi3Z4dtp3Gjml2P0kyQbM3B4XZywGKSta6gnv4yFfi1wlWLTN2pnPuo0OpwSF5i7JCUD-HqhBHS8MeTZusrb3BwUbZP2-BcbH8FUSdObg/w400-h321/PinkerTweet.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Steven Pinker recently tweeted against what he calls "climate alarmism" and in favor of two books by opponents of effective climate action who have been thoroughly debunked by climate scientists. This sort of science denial seems odd coming from someone who claims to be a supporter of enlightenment and reason, but it is actually consistent with what he has said in the past and with what he is saying now about history being the story of progress. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In his book <i>The Blank
Slate</i>, he parrots conventional conservative arguments against environmentalism,
focusing on environmental issues that were current in the 1970s, when he was a graduate student and formed his political opinions, and ignoring
those that are most important today. He attacks environmentalists for what he calls their
“Malthusian” predictions that there are limits on resources, criticizing the
Club of Rome Report named <i>The Limits of
Growth</i>, which focused national attention on the issue when it was published
in 1972. To refute this report, he mentions the
famous wager between Paul Ehrlich, an early environmentalist, and Julian Simon,
a fellow at the free market Cato Institute, about whether the price of natural
resources would rise in real terms between 1980 and 1990; they bet about the
price of five strategic metals, and Ehrlich lost all five bets, because (Pinker
says) “Malthusian prophesies ignore the effect of technological change in
increasing the resources that support a comfortable life.”<i> (Blank Slate</i>,
p.237) Pinker mentions in passing that <i>The
Limits of Growth</i> said that uncontrolled growth would ultimately cause both
resource shortages and more pollution than the earth could absorb - but he goes
on to ignore pollution and only discuss resources.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Yet elementary economics tells us that the free market gives
businesses an incentive to increase the supply of a resource when shortages
drive its price up, but that the market has no mechanism that gives businesses
an incentive to reduce pollution. Environmentalists are clearly right to say
that government must control pollution. In 1990, the United States set up a
cap-and-trade program to reduce the emissions that caused acid rain, and it
worked: acid rain is no longer killing our forests and lakes, as it was in the
1980s. By the time Pinker wrote <i>The Blank Slate</i>, environmentalists
considered global warming to be the greatest environmental threat and were
calling for cap-and-trade to control it also. In fact, California passed a law
using cap-and-trade to control greenhouse gas emissions just four years after
this book was published.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">When it comes to global warming and other problems caused by
pollution, Pinker is clearly wrong to attack environmentalists and claim that
new technology in itself will solve the problems. Yes, we do need to develop
new clean energy technologies to control global warming, but the market does
not provide the incentive needed to shift to clean energy quickly enough. It
will remain cheaper for quite a while to keep existing dirty power plants than
to replace them with clean energy, so we need the government to provide
incentives to shift to clean energy in time to avoid the worst effects of
global warming. The entire world realizes this, with the exception of the Trump
administration, which is why the world adopted the Paris agreement in 2016 and
governments worldwide pledged to limit greenhouse gas emissions.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">More recently, Pinker has finally joined the entire world and realized that it is necessary to control global warming, but he obviously is still reluctant to admit how big a problem it is and to support putting a price on carbon, the most effective way to deal with it. Instead, he supports writers who say that nothing is needed but more technological breakthroughs, consistent with his belief that the world is inevitably getting better, as he argues in his book <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i>. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">He is right to argue in this book that people have become more humane over the long course of history, but he doesn't seem to understand the cause - and he doesn't understand the difference between that long course of history and our situation today. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Over the course of history, technology improved, so people became more prosperous and could afford to be more humane. They didn't have to be like the Vikings or the Mongol Horde, who had no way to improve their own situation apart from invading, pillaging, and killing others. Military technology also improved, but before the twentieth century, it did not improve enough to cause mass destruction. Technology that improved production had destructive side-effects, but before the twentieth century, they were just local - polluted air or water that just killed people nearby. In both cases, the costs of improved technology were clearly outweighed by the benefit of increased production. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Today, we have gone further. We have reached the point where we have weapons of mass destruction such as hydrogen bombs, poison gas, and bioweeapons that can wipe out entire populations. Everyone agrees they should be controlled, and we have done a good job of controlling gas and germ warfare, but we are not doing a very good job of controlling nuclear weapons, as rogue states like North Korea and Iran develop nuclear bombs. If we project current trends, we have to expect that there will ultimately - perhaps in a few centuries - be widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons that will probably be used in wars between small nations, with radiation spreading around the world. And if we project historic trends, we can also expect new military technologies to eventually be developed that are even more destructive than any we have today. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Likewise, we have reached the point where the side effects of technologies that increases production have side effects that can effect the whole planet rather than just being local, for example by destroying the ozone layer or causing global warming. We have done a good job of protecting the ozone layer, but we are not doing as good a job of controlling global warming. It seems inevitable that we will have more than 1.5 degrees of warming, though we still have some chance of limiting warming to 2 degrees, avoiding its worst effects and avoiding feedback loops that would make warming much worse, such as melting of the worlds permafrost, which would release more carbon than is already in the atmosphere - and release it in the form of methane, which causes much more warming than carbon dioxide. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Pinker's optimistic faith that progress is inevitable makes him reluctant to deal with global warming - and so makes it less likely that we will avoid its worst effects. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">We have reached a point where there is a very obvious answer to the question of whether or not the world will continue to become better - and the answer is that it depends on what decisions we humans make. Our technology has become so powerful that it can cause immense good or immense destruction. If we limit destructive technologies, we can eliminate the poverty that has stultified most people since the beginning of history and have a world with unprecedented prosperity and peace. If we fail to limit destructive technology, we can have nuclear war or environmental breakdown that causes billions of deaths and leaves a miserable world for those who remain alive. This is the permanent situation of the human race in the future: whether or not we do deal with global warming and nuclear weapons successfully, we will continue to develop new technologies that are even more powerful than those we have today and that can bring even greater benefits or even greater destruction. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The irony is that people like Steven Pinker, who hesitate to control destructive technologies because they think history is the story of progress, make it more likely that future generations will look back on history as the story of misery and destruction. </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-70825266241803383712020-06-30T10:06:00.002-07:002020-06-30T10:08:47.412-07:00Which Country Is the Model?Liberals often cite the Scandinavian countries as model Social Democratic nations, because they have prosperous capitalist economies and use taxes and other policies to reduce inequality and make sure everyone gets a share of the prosperity.<br />
<br />
I cite the Netherlands as the model. It not only has a prosperous capitalist economy and Social Democratic policies that spread the prosperity widely. It also has the shortest work hours of any nation in the world.<br />
<br />
People in the Netherlands have the right to choose part-time work. About half of all workers are part time. The average Dutch employee works only 80% as many hours as the average American employee. Though they produce about as much per hour of work as Americans, they choose to use their prosperity to have more free time as well as to produce more.<br />
<br />
Clearly, they are better off than Americans, even though they consume less. People choose to work part-time only if they think they would be happier working part-time than full-time and having more free time rather than more income.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-79790079223815489052020-05-28T14:37:00.002-07:002020-05-28T14:38:53.933-07:00Is the Green New Deal Sustainable? It seems like an odd question. The Green New Deal is a proposal to invest in clean energy to provide economic stimulus and good jobs, and the shift to clean energy is obviously needed to make the economy sustainable.<br />
<br />
But I would say that the underlying assumption that the government should stimulate the economy to provide jobs is not sustainable. It has been the basic assumption of American politics since the end of World War II, but it is obviously not sustainable to stimulate the economy and promote economic growth forever.<br />
<br />
As I have said many times, progressives ignore the underlying question of why we need economic growth to provide jobs.<br />
<br />
New technology makes workers produce more, doing away with jobs. During the twentieth century, the amount that a worker produces in an hour increased roughly tenfold--which means that, in 2000, we would have had about 90% unemployment if we produced as much per capita as we did in 1900.<br />
<br />
After World War II, we adopted the policy of dealing with this techological unemployment by stimulating the economy, so people would consume more and more and would keep up with the economy's capacity to produce more and more. But this is not sustainable.<br />
<br />
Instead, we should be creating jobs by shortening work hours. If people could choose their work hours based on how much money they want to earn and spend, they we could match the amount the amount the economy produces to the amount that people want to consume - rejecting the unsustainable policy that we must make consumption keep up with productivity to avoid unemployment.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-15705195813013413072020-04-26T13:07:00.001-07:002020-04-26T13:12:15.529-07:00Lyndon Johnson and ProgressivismRecent opinion pieces have said that progressives may end up liking Biden as president, because they also had doubts about Lyndon Johnson at first but he turned out to be one of the two most progressive presidents in history (along with Franklin Roosevelt).<br />
<br />
This claim shows that today's progressives have not learned from the successes and failures of 1960s progressivism.<br />
<br />
One of the great successes was Medicare. For the first time, everyone more than 65 years old could afford health care.<br />
<br />
One of the great failures was public housing. Federal funding let cities demolish existing neighborhoods in the name of slum clearance and replace them with public housing. Yet studies showed that the public housing had higher crime rates than older neighborhoods nearby with the same demographics, and things were so bad that hundreds of housing projects were later demolished under the HOPE VI program.<br />
<br />
Progressives should have learned that:<br />
<ul>
<li>The Federal government is good at making transfer payments, taxing the wealthy and distributing income or vouchers to the poor. In addition to Medicare, examples of successful federal anti-poverty programs are Social Security and Food Stamps (now called SNAP food benefits). What these programs have in common is that they give income or vouchers that people can spend more-or-less as they choose. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The Federal government is not good at micromanaging the lives of the poor. Centralized programs are likely to use the sort of impersonal, mass-production methods that are so obvious in the design of mid-century housing projects. And when centralized programs make mistakes, they make them on a vast scale; decentralization has the advantage of letting us try many different methods, so we can imitate the successful ones and abandon the unsuccessful ones without very widespread damage. </li>
</ul>
<div>
Yet progressive have not learned this second lesson. They seem to be able to think about only one thing at a time - that they want to help the poor - and can't think at the same time about what sort of program to help the poor is most likely to be successful. Most self-styled progressives have not even learned the most obvious lesson of the 1960s and still want housing projects for low-income people. </div>
<br />
To give the most striking example, almost all progressives support universal preschool. But what if the federal government makes an error in designing this universal program, as they made an error in designing mid-century housing projects? The housing projects were built for decades before this error became apparent to everyone, and the universal preschool would continue for decades before any errors that it makes become apparent when the children grow up.<br />
<br />
The housing projects blighted low-income urban neighborhoods physically. Errors in designing universal preschool could do much worse damage: they could blight an entire generation of Americans psychologically.<br />
<br />
The obvious alternative it to give an allowance to all parents of pre-school children that they could use to pay for preschool or to supplement their income so they could stay at home and care for their own children, at least part-time. This is the sort of transfer payment that has been successful in helping the poor, rather than the sort of micromanaged system that has been a failure. But I don't hear any progressives advocating it. They all want a centralized, top-down system of universal preschools.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-72576871495177026212020-03-19T12:05:00.003-07:002020-03-19T12:12:34.296-07:00Bernie Sanders: Electability and PolicyMany say that they like Bernie Sanders' policies, but they are not voting for him in primaries because they think he is not electable.<br />
<br />
I think he is not electable - and I also think he would be a bad president both because of his policies and because of his rigid, dogmatic character.<br />
<br />
Sanders is the only major Democratic candidate during this primary season who has said he is against putting a price on carbon emissions. Instead, he proposes spending trillions of federal dollars on a a top-down remake of much of our economy.<br />
<br />
A price on carbon emissions is the lowest-cost method of controlling global warming. Some of Sanders' proposals seem very expensive and wasteful. For example, he wants to spend over $500 billion creating a national smart grid. Twenty years ago, a smart grid seemed like a good idea, despite the cost, because it was the best way to deal with the intermittency of solar and wind power: the sun is always shining and the wind is always blowing somewhere, and if solar or wind power are not available in one place, a smart grid would bring them there from somewhere else. But today, the cost of battery storage is so low and declining so rapidly, that it seems that local generation with battery storage is more cost effective than shuttling electricity back and forth across the country.<br />
<br />
Just as important, if we passed legislation putting a price on emissions, with the price increased steadily over the years, the policy would last long enough to control global warming, since it is difficult to pass new legislation that would change it. But budget allocations are made each year, and if there were one Republican president before we reach net-zero emissions, he would derail Sanders' plan.<br />
<br />
Sanders really does think like a socialist. He believes in top-down command-and-control economics rather than in the market.<br />
<br />
In the 1960s, when Sanders came of age, many believed that socialism could out-perform capitalism. But the world became disillusioned with socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as it became clear that it led to economic stagnation: socialism collapsed in Russia and eastern Europe; China kept talking about socialism but added a large private sector that is responsible for its economy's dynamism; India and other countries with moderate forms of socialism privatized their state-owned industries. It takes extraordinary ideological rigidity to live through this and still believe in top-down socialist economics, like Sanders.<br />
<br />
This rigidity would prevent Sandeers from being effective as a president, since he is incapable of the compromises that are needed to get anything done. Elizabeth Warren campaigned for Medicare for All but also said that in the first couple of years, she would focus on smaller policy changes to extend health insurance to more people, since Medicare for All is not feasible immediately. Bernie Sanders has not said anything like this, and he seems to be incapable of thinking like this. As a result, he would fritter away all of his political capital as president demanding Medicare for All, which Congress will not pass, rather than working on smaller measures that Congress would pass.<br />
<br />
Sanders and his young supporters remind me of a saying from the old days when socialist still seemed economically viable: If you are not a socialist at age twenty, you do not have a heart, but if you are still a socialist at age forty, you do not have any common sense.<br />
<br />
But that saying applies much more strongly to Sanders. He lived through the world-wide collapse of socialism without learning anything from it, which requires an almost unbelievable absence of common sense. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-82210115039145610052020-02-11T13:53:00.005-08:002020-02-11T17:33:55.447-08:00Michael Kimmelman versus TrumpDonald Trump is considering an executive order that would require classical or traditional styles for almost all federal buildings, and <i>New York Times</i> architecture critic Michael Kimmelman rushed to the opposite extreme and produced the worst architecture criticism to appear in the <i>Times </i>since his predecessor Nicolai Ouroussoff left.<br />
<br />
He used Thomas Phifer's United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City as an example of one of his favorite federal civic buildings, which this regulation would not allow. It is the building to the left in this picture, and it is obviously a forbidding, sterile monolith. Architects loved it, but ordinary people hated it and named it the "Borg Cube" after a villainous alien race in Star Trek that used cubical space ships.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglhmeXnBPIWRw8ZxGmk12aSSoD0vOPFsonC9r-OvH4lTWidvLnssTo6ys0Zs4s53l4YRwggZezQmD9G4IpNRqP2RG2ZFJBAOghqdolPfXsvHvC5xCNIZRTGRPxCd95n8Uvhd3HDw/s1600/UtahCourthouse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="547" data-original-width="705" height="310" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglhmeXnBPIWRw8ZxGmk12aSSoD0vOPFsonC9r-OvH4lTWidvLnssTo6ys0Zs4s53l4YRwggZezQmD9G4IpNRqP2RG2ZFJBAOghqdolPfXsvHvC5xCNIZRTGRPxCd95n8Uvhd3HDw/s400/UtahCourthouse.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
Kimmelman's article uses a picture that looks at this building head-on, so it looks like a free-standing minimalist sculpture in the middle of its grassy grounds.<br />
<br />
Here, we use a picture showing the face it turns to the street, to make it obvious how completely it ignores its urban context. Across the street, there is a older building with stores and restaurants facing the sidewalk, creating an attractive place for pedestrians. But the courthouse has a blank wall facing the sidewalk, then a lawn, and then set back behind the lawn, the forbidding blank wall of the courthouse building, creating a miserable place for pedestrians.<br />
<br />
Anyone who admires this building either doesn't care about or doesn't know anything about placemaking.<br />
<br />
The building is a typical example of the most obvious fault of modernist architecture: it tries to create a sculptural object in space rather than creating a good place for people to be.<br />
<br />
The architects who admire it have a post-romantic view of the architect as an artist whose only obligation is to his own creative genius, rather than thinking of architects as professionals who have an obligation to create good places for their clients. It is as if a lawyer speaking in court only cared about his own flowery rhetoric and did not care about his client.<br />
<br />
Trump's new guidelines would replace guidelines adopted in 1962, the heyday of mid-century modernism, which say that design should, "flow from the architectural profession to the government, and not vice versa." This is just another way of stating the modernist ideal of the architect as an artist with obligations to his own creative genius rather than to his clients.<br />
<br />
I don't think the government should require a specific style, but it should adopt architectural guidelines that require buildings to break up their massing, to have human-scale fenestration, and to relate to their urban context, so we don't get more forbidding monoliths that turn their backs to the street like this Salt Lake City Courthouse. These guidelines would be something like form-based codes, so they would replace the mid-twentieth-century ideal of the architect as an artist creating sculptural objects with a twenty-first century ideal of the architect as a professional who should create human-scale places for the community.<br />
<br />
Things might be different if Trump had considered an executive order that required the style that he really likes best - the glitzy modernism of Trump tower. Then the critics might rush to the opposite extreme and call for a humanistic architecture rather than sterile glass monoliths.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">See Kimmelman's article <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/arts/design/federal-building-architecture.html" target="_blank">here</a> </span><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-71796398202040801422020-01-26T13:01:00.001-08:002020-01-26T13:03:29.221-08:00Mnuchin Should Study EconomicsAt Davos, US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin dismissed Greta Thunberg by saying,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Is she the chief economist, or who is she? I'm
confused. It's a joke. After she goes and
studies economics in college she can come back and explain that to us."</blockquote>
If Mnuchin really cared about the economics of global warming, he would talk about the special IPCC study of 2018 which showed that the present value of the damages avoided by limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is at least four times as great as the cost.<br />
<br />
But Mnuchin has shown over and over again that he cares more about ideology than about economics.<br />
<br />
He has said that tax cuts will pay for themselves by stimulating growth, though it hasn't ever happened since Ronald Reagan first made that claim. In Reagan's day, they called it "voodoo economics." Now, it is zombie economics - a theory that should be dead but that is kept alive, despite all the evidence against it, purely because right-wingers want it to be alive. Mnuchin ignores the empirical evidence in favor of his ideology.<br />
<br />
He has said that we don't need government regulations to control global warming because businesses can do it on their own, ignoring a fundamental principle of economics, the idea of external costs. Basic economic theory tells us that the market benefits producers and consumers, but that their transactions can impose costs on third-parties who are "external" to their transactions. In theory (though not always in practice), the best response is to impose a tax on products that reflects their external costs - called a Pigovian tax. Mnuchin ignores basic economic theory in favor of his ideology.<br />
<br />
In reality, Mnuchin is the one who needs to study economics. He needs to review the economic theory and the evidence that he has been ignoring. Then he needs to take a look at himself and to think about how much damage he is causing to future generations.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-68663854561158436402019-12-20T12:09:00.002-08:002019-12-20T12:22:54.545-08:00Jason Farago Reveals Himself<i>New York Times</i> art critic Jason Farago inadvertently revealed something about himself in his review of Maurizio Cattelan’s work "Comedian," which consists of a banana duct-taped to the wall and which sells for $120,000.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgshDVJRzD9FKpJVrHUQBjk8m6dQyriKskqcjDdBWe-xc_PSQcmxninP3gy2wWv8x1vVYWkhsgfGkniCItvzU8FVXVsQYJqjGdGgtZ334DWRv5KUqmeG9BTInYh7CK0jt3RL8jVxA/s1600/maurizio-cattelan-banana-1024x600.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="1024" height="233" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgshDVJRzD9FKpJVrHUQBjk8m6dQyriKskqcjDdBWe-xc_PSQcmxninP3gy2wWv8x1vVYWkhsgfGkniCItvzU8FVXVsQYJqjGdGgtZ334DWRv5KUqmeG9BTInYh7CK0jt3RL8jVxA/s400/maurizio-cattelan-banana-1024x600.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Farago says this work is ironic and is a satire of the contemporary art world. But he prefers it to more direct criticism of the art world, such as "I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy this Shit" by the British graffiti artist Banksy. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinoETMQIgnu13CK6HM9VTiH_LbLdtAHR9U8z4VVgJpr-OK3Cqbpk10VkHyO5AXde2JauAHLjM1H6NGvUBpixncb7z4glq1txzUpPG51CMYn-OO9i-_mirUFDuBQrwR9v_lRN-Ewg/s1600/I-can%25E2%2580%2599t-believe-you-morons-actually-buy-this-sht-1024x730.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="730" data-original-width="1024" height="285" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinoETMQIgnu13CK6HM9VTiH_LbLdtAHR9U8z4VVgJpr-OK3Cqbpk10VkHyO5AXde2JauAHLjM1H6NGvUBpixncb7z4glq1txzUpPG51CMYn-OO9i-_mirUFDuBQrwR9v_lRN-Ewg/s400/I-can%25E2%2580%2599t-believe-you-morons-actually-buy-this-sht-1024x730.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Why does Farrago prefer Cattelan? He compares "Comedian" to an earlier work by Cattelan, where he duct-taped his dealer to the wall, writing: </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"The banana should be seen in the context of this earlier
work, which places the art market itself on the wall, drooping and pitiful. … Mr.
Cattelan directs these barbs at art from inside the art world, rather than
lobbing insults from some cynical distance. His entire career has been a
testament to an impossible desire to create art sincerely, stunted here by
money, there by his own doubts."</blockquote>
This is the end of the review: he doesn't go on to explain why it is better to remain in an art world that stunts you rather than leaving it and acting independently, as Banksy does.<br />
<br />
A look at art history is enough to show us that this claim is completely implausible. For example, the Impressionists and the Vienna Succession left the mainstream academic art world that stunted them and produced fresh new art. Would they have done better to stay in the mainstream art world, paint in the academic style that they found stultifying - but include subtle ironies in these paintings showing how much they hate the academic art world as a testament to their impossible desire to create art sincerely? Obviously, this sort of hypocrisy is much more "cynical" than acting independently so you can forthrightly say what you really mean.<br />
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Farago's claim is so implausible that the only explanation is that it reflects his view of himself. His job as <i>New York Times</i> art critic is to produce admiring reviews of works in mainstream avant-gardist art world. But here he reveals that he really hates those works and considers them insincere and stunted by money - showing that his own work as a critic is also insincere and stunted by the money and prestige he gets from being an art critic of a major newspaper.</div>
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By saying he admires Cattelan's stunted work because Cattelan is an insider, he justifies his own choice of being an art-world insider. </div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">The review is at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/arts/design/a-critics-defense-of-cattelan-banana-.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/08/arts/design/a-critics-defense-of-cattelan-banana-.html</a></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-70985292281564209112019-11-28T12:14:00.001-08:002019-11-28T12:18:56.994-08:00Patriotic and Politically Correct Thanksgiving MythsThe old patriotic Thanksgiving myth says that the Pilgrims suffered through a hard winter, and then a Native American named Squanto acted as translator and let them make contact with his Wampanoag tribe, which taught them to plant corn. After a prosperous year, they had the first Thanksgiving, a feast with the Wampanoags, who became their miliary allies.<br />
<br />
The new politically correct myth says that, in the years that followed, the Pilgrims deliberately wiped out the Wampanoags to take their land, just one example of Europeans wiping out Native Americans.<br />
<br />
The facts are more complex. The Wampanoags made this military alliance because their population dropped when they caught infectious diseases that the Europeans brought to America, and their weakness led the Narragansett tribe to their west to invade their territory. They formed a military alliance with the Europeans because they needed their help to defend themselves from being wiped out by another tribe of Native Americans!<br />
<br />
All through human history and prehistory, groups of people have expanded their own territory by wiping out or driving away other groups of people. It goes beyond human history: populations of chimpanzees expand their territories by ambushing and killing individuals from other nearby populations, and populations of ants war with any nearby ants that are not genetically related to them.<br />
<br />
The evolutionary reason is obvious: if a population of humans or animals increases the size of its territory, it is able to grow larger. Populations that have a genetic predisposition to take over land from weaker neighbors grow faster than those who don't, so this disposition spreads through the gene pool.<br />
<br />
The politically correct seem to think that this tendency to expand is a trait of Europeans and not of their innocent victims, but it is actually a tendency of humans, chimpanzees, ants, and many, many other species of animals.<br />
<br />
Rather than politically correct recriminations about the past, we need to realize that we are all have this same potential, so we can all rise above tribalism and see that our loyalty to humanity as a whole is more important than our loyalty to our own group.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13902726.post-65988868895513643162019-10-02T13:29:00.000-07:002019-10-02T13:29:52.119-07:00UtilitarianismJeremy Bentham, the founder of Utilitarianism, based his
philosophy on this claim: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of
two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out
what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. The said truth
is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure
of right and wrong."<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
As an empiricist, he had to base his moral philosophy on
observations of people’s actual behavior, falling into the error of claiming
that what people actually do is a basis for deciding what people should
do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there is an even more obvious
error here.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nature impels us to seek pleasure and avoid pain for
ourselves and for a small number of relatives and friends, but nature obviously
does not impel us to believe that everyone else’s pain and pleasure is as
important as our own. In fact, hedonist philosophers before Bentham’s time,
such as the Epicureans, based their ethics on pain and pleasure one’s acts
cause to oneself, not to others.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
How does Bentham jump from the empirical observation that
people seek pleasure and avoid pain to themselves to the moral judgment that
people should maximize pleasure and minimize pain for everyone?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is obviously another principle that we
do not know empirically added to the empirical observation that we people seek
pleasure and avoid pain - something like “we should consider all people to be
equally important” or “we should do unto others as we would have others do unto
us” - and this added principle is not known by empirical observation of
people’s usual behavior.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If this moral principle can be known by other means than observation,
then it is plausible that other moral principles might be known by other means
than observation - including principles that override the idea that the goal of
life is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0