Does Capitalism Rest on a Mistake? July 9, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Political Philosophy.Tags: Adam Smith, Jonathan Wolff, the invisible hand
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Adam Smith famously provided the rationale for capitalism:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantage.”
Each individual pursues her own self-interest. But the invisible hand of the market distributes wealth in such a way that in the end it serves the greatest good.
When each producer and consumer is allowed to buy and sell freely, the market will settle on prices that benefit the whole community. Producers trying to maximize their profit will adopt the most efficient methods of production, but will charge the lowest possible prices in order to undercut competitors, and investors will put their money in areas of the economy that are most urgently needed because increasing demand will increase their profit. Everybody wins.
Philosopher Jonathan Wolff has a nice explanation of why this doesn’t always work out.
But here comes the flaw. This is all very well when shopping for tonight’s dinner. If the butcher sells you rotten meat, you’ll go somewhere else tomorrow, if still alive. It is this that keeps the butcher honest. But suppose you are buying meat that won’t be supplied for 20 years? Still want to rely on the greed of the butcher? Thought not. By the time you have found out if he is cheating you, it will be too late to switch supplier. When there is a substantial time lag between purchase and consumption, as there is for pensions, savings schemes and sub-prime debt, the market loses its magic and the purchaser is vulnerable. Regulation might not be a bad idea after all.
Sound familiar? With all those exotic financial instruments peddled by banks and investment houses, there was no way to tell if the meat was rotten.
On the face of it, it is absurd to think that an economic model that explains transparent, short-term transactions between people who are familiar with each other could possibly apply to a global market of distant, opaque others engaged in long term transactions.
Modern capitalism appears to rest on a mistake.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
The “Values” of Global Warming Deniers July 8, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Current Events, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics.Tags: climate change skeptics, environmental ethics
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The “logic” of those who deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change is hard to follow.
As Darksyde writes:
If we invest in energy efficiency, alternative technologies, and green jobs, and for whatever reason global warming turns out to be much adieu [sic] about nothing, we as a nation are left with greater energy independence and whole new industries right here at home. Not a bad outcome. But if climate change deniers are wrong, and we do nothing, we’re left depending on foreign oil, stuck with a growing, potentially catastrophic environmental disaster, and little or no immediate solutions to any of it. The better scenarios should be readily apparent.
As I have argued in the past, the consequences of not doing anything if the predictions about climate change are accurate are overwhelmingly, catastrophically bad. And the consequences of doing something if it turns out not to be a problem are not horrible. There are costs but not catastrophic costs.
So from a pragmatic point of view, the only rational policy is to do something about global warming.
This equation makes one wonder about the values of climate change deniers. They are either huge risk takers, willing to sacrifice the lives of others for their gamble, or they simply do not care about the planet earth and its inhabitants.
Neither of these is morally praiseworthy.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
Religion, Science and the New Atheists July 7, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Philosophy, Science, religion.Tags: Chris Mooney and the new atheists, conflict between religion and science, new atheism
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Chris Mooney has done yeoman work rescuing science from the know-nothings in the Bush Administration. Now he has a new book (with co-author Sheril Kirshenbaum) devoted to scientific illiteracy, in which he takes on the so-called “new atheists”.
The “new atheists” (a term I don’t like) write books that defend, without reservation or compromise, the view that religion is false, incompatible with science, and unworthy of belief. Atheists have always argued this so I’m not sure what the difference is between “new atheists” and “old atheists” except that the new ones write really popular books. (They include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Dan Dennett.)
At any rate, Mooney thinks the “new atheists” are too uncompromising and that public acceptance of science would benefit if atheist authors would be more accommodating and less confrontational toward religious believers.
I haven’t read Mooney’s book but I’ve been following some of the debates about it on-line. Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels excerpts passages that condemn the new atheists:
They’re hardly a monolithic group…But the broad tenor of the movement they’ve impelled is clear: It is confrontational. It believes religious faith should not be benignly tolerated but, rather, should be countered, exposed, and intellectually devastated.
The most outspoken New Atheists [sic] publicly eviscerate believers…If the goal is to create an America more friendly toward science and reason, the combativeness of the New Atheism is strongly counterproductive. [p 97]
And so on and so on, for another eleven pages.
America is a very religious nation, and if forced to choose between faith and science, vast numbers of Americans will select the former. The New Atheists err in insisting that such a choice needs to be made. Atheism is not the logically inevitable outcome of scientific reasoning…A great many scientists believe in God with no sense of internal contradiction…[pp 97-98]
Benson disagrees with Mooney and takes him to task for this accommodationist approach.
See what I mean? That’s asking a lot. It’s asking a great deal too much. We’ve had that – we’ve had years and years of nearly everyone being deeply sensitive to the millions of religious believers among our citizenry, and we don’t want to be deeply sensitive any more. We want to talk freely. The millions of religious believer can toughen up a little and get used to disagreement.
I have to agree with Benson here. If atheists believe there is no God and belief in God is incompatible with religion, why not say it? Conflict is at the heart of intellectual inquiry. It is in the very nature of intellectual inquiry that opposing sides put their cards on the table and we hash out, by looking at the evidence, who has the best argument. When one side cannot make its view heard and must pussyfoot around for propriety’s sake in order not to offend, intellectual inquiry is stymied because the conflict that forces better and clearer answers to questions is suppressed.
And Benson is quite right that in our culture religion has always had a free ride because of the taboo against challenging religious beliefs.
The culture wars are not going to go away if the so-called “new atheists” tone down their rhetoric. There is a reason why these books are popular—there is an audience for them. Many people are deeply troubled by the dogmatism and public consequences of excessive religious fervor. That disquiet will not lessen if its standard-bearers in the public square mute their voices.
Religion speaks to the values and aspirations of billions of people. If it is to continue to do that effectively, it must accommodate itself to a modern world which includes, not only science as the dominant form of inquiry, but disquiet about belief systems that seem to conflict with science. If the illusion of compatibility is allowed to persist, religion is never forced to confront the deep conflict between religion and science—and that will be a gargantuan incoherence at the center of modern belief systems.
The task of explaining how human values and meaning fit within the world that science describes is one of the most important intellectual tasks of our time. Thoughtful religious people can check out of this debate and refuse to engage, but that will leave them unable to contribute to this task. Reticence on the part of the “new atheists” only encourages that head-in-the-sand approach.
And Mooney’s hypothesis that, in the face of obstreperous confrontation, religious people will simply ignore science is preposterous. You can’t really ignore science—it pervades every nook and cranny of modern life and consists of stubborn facts that cannot be wished away.
The plain fact of the matter is that there are deep conflicts between religion and science. As a culture we will not resolve the disagreement by hiding those conflicts.
Of course, that does mean that as citizens we have to agree to live with the conflict. We have to find ways of coming to political agreement about various policies without debating metaphysics. That is not easy but it is made no easier by silencing one side of the debate.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
The End of California Dreamin’ July 6, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: California’s social imaginary, cause of California’s budget crisis, starve the beast
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The United States is enjoying a resurgence of Democratic, liberal politics with Obama and congress tackling economic recession, health care, and climate change, while reviving our global image
The conservative revolution, ushered to power by Ronald Reagan, has been stymied, its advocates confused, and its standard bearers performing incredible acts of self-destruction.
California is the exception.
In California, conservatism has succeeded in imposing its vision of a society run by oligarchs serviced by government, while the rest of the population is left to fend for themselves. For perhaps the first time in recent memory, California is no longer the leading edge of innovation and change.
The facts of the debacle are well known—a $25-$30 billion state budget deficit, collapsing revenue streams, a decades long refusal to find new revenue sources, and a state government so completely paralyzed that ordinary budgeting tasks were submitted to a public referendum that was soundly defeated. As a consequence, school and university funding is plummeting, public health and safety is endangered, social support services are shutting down, and local governments are starved of the funds needed to keep basic services intact.
Our state is a basket case. But this is no accident; this is what conservatives sought.
Conservatives have long held that cutting taxes was good because it will ultimately paralyze and force reductions in the size of government. This is the so-called “starve the beast” strategy imagined by Ronald Reagan and vigorously defended by activists such as Grover Norquist. By cutting taxes and refusing to go along with any proposal to enable revenue to keep up with growth, California Republicans have succeeded over the long run in implementing this strategy. Of course, they cannot take full credit for the success of their strategy. The economic meltdown and collapse in home values account for much of the decline in tax revenues. But conservatives made sure that the state government has no way of responding to the loss of revenue except through massive spending cuts. I doubt that it matters to them how we got here—what matters is that we have finally arrived. California government is as powerless as any advocate of small government could want.
But this strategy, although abetted by Republican politicians, was implemented largely by the people themselves through ballot initiatives. Proposition 13, passed by votors in 1978, not only capped most property taxes, it also imposed a “2/3 rule” that requires supermajorities to pass tax and budget legislation. Polls have shown that these government-strangling rules are still popular, and attempts to modify these rules or to find new sources of revenue are routinely beaten back.
What is puzzling is that this conservative revolution happened in the bluest of blue states. Despite occasional flirtations with conservatism, California remains comparatively liberal. The state legislature has been dominated by Democrats for years, and California tends to vote Democratic in national elections. When Republicans win statewide elections they must avoid appearing excessively conservative. (Recent Republican governors, Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger, campaigned as moderates.) To their credit, most Californians never bought the nostrums of the religious right. Majorities have rejected the kind of immigrant bashing and know-nothing, anti-environmentalism that characterizes conservative discourse in other states. And, Californians have been reasonably progressive on worker’s rights and gay rights, despite the recent success of an anti-gay marriage initiative.
So why, in California of all places, did conservatives achieve their ultimate victory?
The answer lies in the social imaginary of California culture.
California has always been a dream merchant, the land of milk and honey, the home of Hollywood, Disney, and the technological dreamscape of Silicone Valley. It was the destination of choice for those wishing to escape the dustbowl, harsh Northern winters, or stifling Eastern social norms—a place where the impossible dream was not quite impossible. And its’ people understand themselves as the keeper of such illusions.
But as “keeper of illusions” we are too willing to believe that constraints on human aspiration are temporary, chains are easily sundered, and facts merely inconvenient obstacles to be overcome. If you’re committed to making dreams come true, you must be less than fully committed to reality as it is. Thus, liberal, caring Californians came to believe that our world-class schools, gleaming infrastructure, and commitment to public health and safety could be maintained without cost. We came to believe that property is protected by low taxes rather than police and fire services, that public health can be maintained while the homeless wander our streets, that schools are someone else’s responsibility. And we need supermajorities to pass a budget just in case reality begins to intrude on the reverie.
The public didn’t want poor schools or a porous safety net. They just wanted to preserve their fantasy of California exceptionalism. Conservatives who don’t care much for public schools or safety nets were all too willing to play along. Howard Jarvis, Darrel Issa, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the rest of the crowd who have destroyed the quality of life in California knew what they were doing. They were lucky enough to have a public sufficiently delusional to play along.
It is often claimed that conservatives are adept at taking advantage of the public’s irrational fears—fear of crime, communism, Islam, and people of color defines much of their agenda. But they are equally good at taking advantage of the public’s irrational hopes.
We now confront the consequences of those irrational hopes.
The big question is whether the free lunch crowd has been sufficiently chastened to take seriously the process of governance, or are they still too busy fashioning Hollywood endings out of tragedy and mayhem to notice that the milk is curdled and the honey spoiled.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
Plants Can Recognize Kin July 5, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Science.Tags: consciousness and plants
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It is well known that animals act preferentially toward members of their own family or group. Now there is evidence that plants do as well.
Experiments show that a sagebrush plant can recognise a genetically identical cutting growing nearby.
What’s more, the two clones communicate and cooperate with one another, to avoid being eaten by herbivores.
The findings, published in Ecology Letters, raise the tantalising possibility that plants, just like animals, often prefer to help their relatives over unrelated individuals.
Here is a brief account of the experiment:
They took cuttings of Artemisia tridentata, a species of sagebrush that does not normally reproduce by cloning itself.
They placed each cutting either near its genetic parent, essentially its clone, or near an unrelated sagebrush, and let the plants grow in the wild in the University of California Sagehen Creek Natural Reserve. The researchers clipped each clone they planted, feigning damage that might be caused by natural herbivores such as grasshoppers.
After one year, they found that plants growing alongside their damaged clones suffered 42% less herbivore damage than those growing alongside damaged plants that were unrelated.
Somehow, the clipped plants appeared to be warning their genetically identical neighbours that an attack was imminent, and the neighbour should somehow try to protect itself. But clipped plants didn’t warn unrelated neighbours.
Of course, this does not mean that plants are conscious, aware, or feel empathy:
Karban suspects the plants are communicating using volatile chemicals. When one plant is clipped, or comes under attack from herbivores, it emits these chemicals into the air, warning those around it to put up a defence, either by filling their leaves with noxious chemicals, or by physically moving their stems or leaves in some way to make themselves less palatable.
The use of the words “recognize” “preferences” and “warning” are a bit misleading. Apparently some plants have evolved in such a way that they are sensitive to particular chemical changes in their environment that cause them to react with their own chemical changes, which confer protection.
Plants don’t “know” their kin or “know” they are being warned just as a thermometer doesn’t “know” it is 70 degrees outside.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
Friday Food Blogging July 3, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Art and Music, Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: disgust, haute cuisine, Singapore’s the Clinic
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I absolutely do not know how to think about this.
In Singapore there is a restaurant, called The Clinic, which is designed to look and feel like a hospital.
According to a review at designboom,
the restaurant is designed from top to bottom in a medical theme. wheelchairs, hospital beds, operating lights, test tubes and more, the design is completely off the wall.
There website is here.
Patrons sit in wheelchairs and drink out of IV’s.
I am searching for some aesthetic principle here. Please help me out!
In haute cuisine, there is sometimes an element of disgust—eating eyeballs or entrails—that is supposed to invoke one’s will in overcoming pre-dispositions and focus attention on what one is eating. To enjoy the disgusting is to achieve a measure of self-control.
But this is not about being more in touch with the food and its meaning—something else is going on.
Something perhaps I don’t want to know about.
Obama’s First Big Mistake July 2, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: bipartisanship, Paul Krugman on economic stimulus, when will the recession end
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The economic news is not good.
The American economy lost 467,000 more jobs in June, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in a sobering indication that the longest recession since the 1930s had yet to release its hold.
And although the rate of the price decline in the housing crash has slowed, housing prices are still falling at an 18% yearly rate.
According to Business Insider’s Henry Blodget:
So the folks who use this slight moderation in the rate of decline to spin tales of a “bottom” or, worse, a “recovery” are smoking something. Prices have at least another 10%-15% to fall, and they’ll likely be falling for at least another year or two.
Oh, and the financial health of states is sharply declining:
As of June, more than 30 states faced deficits totaling a projected $40 billion, or more than triple the gap of the previous year, according to the NCSL.
The recession is not over and many economists predict that when growth does return, it will not produce many jobs. Paul Krugman tells ABC News:
“The fact of the matter is that the unemployment rate is much worse than the administration contemplated or that most people expected,” Krugman told ABC News. “So the economy is much weaker than we thought it’d be, meaning, in fact, it could use more stimulus.”
It is becoming obvious that it was a mistake for Obama to bow to political realities and dial back the stimulus package that was passed in February, ignoring the advice of Krugman and other economists who called even then for a larger stimulus package. In particular money should have been made immediately available to the states to help balance their budgets and avoid the massive layoffs and furloughs that will make the employment picture even worse.
Granted, Obama may not have been able to get a larger package through congress given the obstruction of Republicans and the handwringing of centrist Democrats. But, at the very least, Obama should have made clear that he was signing an inadequate stimulus package under duress, thereby setting up an argument for more stimulus later on. All the cheerleading about bipartisanship might have felt good at the time but the drugs are quickly wearing off.
As I have argued in the past (here and here) occupying a centrist position in order to seem reasonable to the opposition is a mug’s game when you are negotiating with people who want you to fail and don’t have the public interest in mind.
And this mistake will cost Obama big time.
X-posted at Reviving the Left
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
or Visit the Website: www.revivingliberalism.com
Defense of Gay Marriage July 1, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Political Philosophy.Tags: gay marriage, gay rights, Martha Nussbaum on gay marriage
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Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has a wonderful, comprehensive defense of gay marriage, concise and devastating to opponents of this fundamental right. Anyone who wants a thorough summary of all the arguments for and against should read this.
Again, the issue turns on equality. What the cases consistently hold is that when the state does offer a status that has both civil benefits and expressive dignity, it must offer it with an even hand. This position, which I’ve called “minimal,” is not so minimal when one looks into it. Laws against miscegenation were in force in sixteen states at the time of Loving.
In other words, marriage is a fundamental liberty right of individuals, and because it is that, it also involves an equality dimension: groups of people cannot be fenced out of that fundamental right without some overwhelming reason. It’s like voting: there isn’t a constitutional right to vote, as such: some jobs can be filled by appointment. But the minute voting is offered, it is unconstitutional to fence out a group of people from the exercise of the right.
And she goes on to argue that there is no overwhelming reason to forbid gay marriage.
The idea that same-sex unions will sully traditional marriage cannot be understood without moving to the terrain of disgust and contamination. The only distinction between unworthy heterosexuals and the class of gays and lesbians that can possibly explain the difference in people’s reaction is that the sex acts of the former do not disgust the majority, whereas the sex acts of the latter do. The thought must be that to associate traditional marriage with the sex acts of same-sex couples is to defile or contaminate it, in much the way that eating food served by a dalit, (formerly called “untouchable,”) used to be taken by many people in India to contaminate the high-caste body. Nothing short of a primitive idea of stigma and taint can explain the widespread feeling that same-sex marriage defiles or contaminates straight marriage, while the marriages of “immoral” and “sinful” heterosexuals do not do so.
The only surprising feature of the argument is her lukewarm endorsement of the slippery slope argument that if we permit gay marriage there will be no principled reason to reject polygamy.
Whatever one thinks about the moral issues involved in polygamy, our constitutional tradition has upheld a law making polygamy criminal, so it is clear, at present, that polygamous unions do not have equal recognition. (The legal arguments against polygamy, however, are extremely weak. The primary state interest that is strong enough to justify legal restriction is an interest in the equality of the sexes, which would not tell against a regime of sex-equal polygamy.)
I disagree. In a marriage, structurally, each spouse has equal obligations and privileges. This is not the case with polygamy which is inherently unjust to the plural partners. The state has a compelling interest in preserving the equality and autonomy of individuals. So I see no reason why permitting gay marriage makes the case for polygamy stronger.
People Are Strange June 30, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, Science.Tags: ethics and emotions, free will
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Research reported in the Journal of Consumer Research demonstrates that when a customer is perceived to share a characteristic with a salesperson, even something as trivial as a birthdate, this perception increases the probability that the customer will purchase something.
If that sounds irrational consider this (via Ars Technica):
It has been well established that people are not coldly rational when money is at stake. They will make financial sacrifices in order to punish behavior deemed to be unfair.
One person is given a stack of cash, and told to divide it between themselves and a second party. That second party is then given the chance to accept or reject the offer; if it’s rejected, neither of them get any money. Clearly, any of this free money should be better than nothing, so under assumptions of strictly rational behavior, you might expect all offers to be accepted.
They’re not. Things in the neighborhood of a 50/50 split are accepted, but as the proportions shift to where the person issuing the ultimatum tries to keep seventy percent of the total, rejections increase. By the time they hit an 80/20 split, nearly 70 percent of the offers are rejected, even though that 20 percent of the total cash would leave the recipient better off than where they started.
New research shows that people will reject unfair transactions even when they punish only themselves. In this new research:
…the person making the offer gets their share of the cash regardless of whether the offer is accepted or not. In this game, the only consequence is the potential for guilt caused by the knowledge that an offer was rejected. Rejection rates do drop, but they remain substantial—offers of an 80/20 split got rejected over 40 percent of the time (down from around 70 percent) despite the lack of real economic consequences.
To really nail things down, the authors conducted tests of a Private Impunity Game, in which the person who made the offer wasn’t even informed of whether it was rejected or not—they simply walked away with their share of the cash. Here, even the nebulous hope that the person making the offer would feel pangs of guilt from its rejection was removed. Rejection rates were essentially unchanged. People keep rejecting offers they perceived as unfair, even if, like the proverbial tree in the forest, no one will hear their rejection.
Even when participants were forced to think through the logic of their behavior through a series of if/then statements, their behavior was unchanged.
What is the explanation for this strange behavior?
The lack of objective analysis is also demonstrated by a number of results that indicate that changes in the levels of hormones and neurotransmitters—testosterone, serotonin, and oxytocin, for example—can all skew the statistics by changing the average response to unfair offers.
Given the fact there’s essentially no way to provide a rational actor gloss to these results, the authors attempt to explain it through an emotional response that sounds much like a gorilla’s chest beating. Our emotions commit us to these sorts of displays despite their irrational nature, and force us to follow through on them often enough to make sure everyone knows it’s not an idle threat. Nine times out of 10, the chest beating may just be a display, but is anyone willing to risk the chance that a given instance will turn out to be the exception?
The problem with this explanation is that it adds a layer of complexity—a mechanism that ensures a degree of commitment to an emotional response—on top of what’s essentially a simple situation: people act without thinking. Earlier this year, I attended a discussion entitled “Evolution and the Ethical Brain” in which researchers argued that our ethical decision making (such as how to respond to unfair financial offers) is performed by a system that operates in much the same way as those that respond to sensory input: they make snap judgments that allow us to respond quickly and get on with things. The more elaborate ethical debates that we engage in are largely attempts at post-hoc rationalizations of our earlier decisions.
Within this perspective, the snap judgment is that an offer is unfair. Sometimes, we can engage the post-hoc rationalization, in this case involving the economics of the situation, and override our ethical calculations. But, in a substantial fraction of the cases, we never get the chance, as we act on our snap decisions before that process can occur.
Yet my students keep insisting we have free will!
Women in Science June 30, 2009
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Philosophy of Gender.Tags: Women in science
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Via Ars Technica:
A new study commissioned by Congress and carried out by the National Academies of Science shows that, in 2005, women received nearly 38 percent of the doctorate degrees in science and engineering, but only between six and 29 percent of associate and full professors in these fields were women.
However, women were hired and granted tenure at a rate roughly equal to men. Thus, the disparity has to do with the small number of women applying for these jobs. In biology, 45 percent of the PhDs awarded went to women, but they only accounted for 26 percent of the tenure track applications.
The study found that both sexes have comparable access to institutional resources such as start-up packages, travel funds, and grad students and postdocs to employ. Nevertheless, in all six fields, women were underrepresented at all three levels of the tenure track. On the positive side, those who were up for tenure were at least as likely to receive it as men.
Women are getting degrees in science but not going into academia. What explains this?
The obvious hypothesis is that the tenure clock is unfavorable to women who want to have families.
