A fascinating debate. I haven’t had time to read it yet, but I’m going to, and I’ll let my readers have at it anyway. I have great respect for Dennett as a scientist and philosopher, but I think that his (and Dawkins’ and others) war against religion quite misguided, even though I myself am a skeptic. Or perhaps because I am.
[Via Jonah]
Virginia Postrel has thoughts on overregulation, and the corresponding prospects for liberaltarianism.
…continues, with thoughts from Ilya Somin. And this continues to make me crazy:
In a strange way, the Bush record of massive expansions of government has also shifted the goalposts for liberal Democrats. They seem to assume that anything Bush and the Republicans did must have been “laissez faire” (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary) and that the current Democratic agenda represents a needed course relative to failed free market policies rather than a continuation of Bush-era trends of greatly increased government spending and regulation.
I continue to be both appalled and dismayed at this inability of the Democrats to recognize (or to be honest about their recognition) that the last eight years bore no resemblance to free markets, or laissez-faire. We overspend, and overregulate, and when it goes south, it gets blamed on tax cuts and underregulation. Madness.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Randy Barnett follows up.
It’s not new, but I’d never seen it before, and maybe you haven’t, either. Twenty-five inappropriate things that Objectivists say during s3x.
Some thoughts on the potential of mind uploading. Conservatives (both “left” and “right”) will hate this.
Here’s a useful web site for those people who claim that evolution is “only a theory,” an argument that’s so ignorant that it’s not even wrong.
A new web site. Can’t have too many web sites on this topic.
Some thoughts from Joe Katzman. I agree with the commenter who said that ditching the plane safely wasn’t heroic — that was just doing his job. The heroism lay in risking his life to help get all the passengers off the plane.
I don’t understand why people don’t understand this. An ecosystem is a much more accurate (and more useful) analogy. And I’ve always found this amusing/frustrating:
Keynesians on the left are eager to dismiss Intelligent Design (ID) as the creationist afterthought to evolution, but just as eager to embrace its analog in economics. Disciples of Adam Smith know better. Darwin, after all, read Smith. As the late naturalist Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “the theory of natural selection is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith’s basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits.”
It’s particularly ironic (and there must have been some cognitive dissonance) that Gould wrote this, because my understanding was that he was a life-long Marxist. And of course, the opposite applies as well — many free marketeers refuse to believe in biological evolution. They understand that there is a natural emergent order in the marketplace, but can’t believe that life could evolve unguided from above.
I’m one of those weirdos who believes in both free markets, and free nature.
[Update late morning]
Arnold Kling has some thoughts on the myth of the “economic multiplier”:
It is amazing what happens when you assume that you live in a linear world. You say that the multiplier for government spending is 1.57.
Really? Over what range? Think of it this way: at which level of additional government spending would the path of U.S. real GDP be the highest?
(a) $100 billion in spending above the baseline
(b) $1 trillion in spending above the baseline
(c) $100 trillion in spending above the baselineIf you use a constant multiplier of 1.57, the right answer is (c). Yet we know that this is not the right answer. At $100 trillion in additional government spending, the United States would be operating like Zimbabwe, with similar results.
This is similar to the (dumb) argument often made by space advocates that space spending has a high (or higher) “multiplier” effect than other kinds of spending (the study most cited on this is the one done by Chase Econometrics back in the 70s).
Yes, obviously, if you pay engineers to do things, they’ll go out and spend the money on goods and services, and create more jobs for other people. And yes, if you develop technology, some of it is bound to have an economic benefit and improve productivity, or create new products, and grow the economy.
But when one makes these kinds of arguments, it’s all too easy to ignore what you’re spending the primary money on. It really does matter what product the engineers are building with government money. When it comes to space, does anyone think that it makes no difference whether we had continued to employ people building and flying Saturns, or had developed the Shuttle? Or that if we’d developed a better version of the Shuttle (perhaps by starting with smaller prototypes, and continually improving the concept over the past thirty-five years) that it would have made no difference in our prospects for being spacefaring? That it makes no difference whether we spend thirty-billion dollars developing Ares, or instead something that actually reduces the cost of access to space?
To listen to the “multiplier” argument, it doesn’t matter at all. Having the engineers design a machine to bore a hole to the earth’s center has the same economic value as to build a space elevator.
When we are talking about government spending, it isn’t sufficient to talk about how much we’re spending, and whether or not it will “stimulate the economy.” We have to talk about what we’re spending it on, and unfortunately, much of what the Democrats want to spend it on will (relative to letting people decide what to do with their own money) not create wealth, or grow the economy, but rather destroy it. It’s what governments do.
I scored a hundred percent on this quiz. But remember, it’s a test of deductive, not inductive logic (e.g., ignore whether or not the premises are valid — focus on the validity of the syllogism itself).
[Via Paul Hsieh, who got the same score as I did. Or so he says…]