Training in Economics...

provides no basis for wisely choosing political policies: 'To assume the economist who is trained in theory and statistical techniques must be an expert in economic policy is similar to assuming that a chemist must be a good cook.' --David Colander

OK, So What Have I Been Up to These Last Four Years?

Well, by the end of this week I will be handing in the penultimate draft of my PhD dissertation to my advisor (penultimate in that I will revise it according to his comments before it is submitted to my examination committee). In keeping with his dictum to 'write the introduction last,' I have just completed my introductory synopsis of my work tonight. So, what the heck, let me put this synopsis out here -- I'm not sure what you can make of it, but a lot of my readers are very bright people, and might have something worthwhile to say about whether or not this summary conveys to the reader an initial sense of what the work is about. Comment away!

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Chapter I explores Oakeshott’s concept of rationalism, and specifically rationalism in politics, in more depth. In particular, we will trace, in a way that I am not aware of having been done previously, how we can see the idea of rationalism forms a continuous thread running from his earliest book to his latest writings, and show how the idea of the rationalist conceit, while always present in his work, was developed and refined as Oakeshott’s thought matured.

In Chapter II, we will survey a number of criticisms of Oakeshott’s thesis on rationalism, with special emphasis as to how those various critiques present us with questions upon which our later historical analysis may shed some light.

Chapter III was motivated by two different, but interrelated, issues. The first of these is that, in presenting earlier versions of various parts of the present work at conferences, a number of commentators questioned whether Oakeshott’s ideas on rationalism are of contemporary relevance. These commentators’ scepticism about this matter generally was phrased along the following line: ‘True’, they would say, ‘this whole rationalism business was a major issue at the time Oakeshott was writing his chief essays on the topic, in the 1940s and 1950s, in the era of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. But surely today, the whole notion of designing a society from the top down has been discredited to the extent that this is no longer really a live issue, is it?’ So, one impetus behind the inclusion of this chapter is to show that, while rationalism in politics has been taught some modesty by the events of the last few decades, it is far from moribund. The second motive is that it became apparent to the author, while dealing with the historical material offered by the Roman and the American Republics, that a crucial differentia between their approaches to politics, and one of which the American founders were keenly aware, has to do with how efficacious it is to plan out the basic form of a polity in advance—in other words, is there some distinct advantage a polity can gain by declaring the principles upon which it is to operate in written form, and, further, elevating that written statement of those principles to some plane seen as resting above the tumult of day-to-day politics? Because the American founders saw doing so as a prophylactic against the fate that befell the Roman Republic, and because their view is still prevalent in both contemporary political theory and practice (as evidenced by the case of Iraq with which we opened this work), this chapter is somewhat of a lynchpin tying together the previous, more theoretical chapters with the subsequent, more empirical ones.

Chapter IV is chiefly concerned with how justified Oakeshott was in his forwarding of the Roman Republic as an exemplar of the pragmatic style of politics that he opposed to rationalism. It is a fairly short chapter, chiefly because the consensus of historians of the period so overwhelmingly supports Oakeshott’s view. It would be quite possible to continue piling up witness after witness making Oakeshott’s case, but as this work already is hard up against the length limits of what its readers can be expected to endure, I have deemed the material assembled sufficient to the cause at hand.

Chapter V takes up the more controversial topic of the cause of the Roman Republic’s demise and whether or not additional dollops of rationalist design might, as the American founders suspected they might, have buttressed the Republic against the historical forces that were acting towards its dissolution. Here it is important to assert my modesty in examining this material, since several commentators on presentations of this chapter wondered just how it was that the author, who is far from being a professional historian specializing in this period, could be so immodest as to put forward his own explanation of the Republic’s downfall? My response is to protest that my work here has no pretension of historical originality whatsoever; the only claim to originality present, the warrant of which I leave it to my critics to judge, lies in employing the findings of the historians deemed most authoritative on this era as evidence weighing for or against Oakeshott’s thesis on rationalism, as well as for or against the American founders’ notion that the fate of the Roman Republic could have been forestalled by rational design.

Chapter VI surveys the development of republican thought between the classical era and the American Revolution. The intent of this chapter is to show how the American founders, while looking to Rome as their paragon, came to understand the activity of politics so differently than did the participants in their model republic. As such, it sets the stage for Chapter VII, which examines to what extent Oakeshott was on target in seeing the American founding as a salient instance of political rationalism. Chapter VII is, like Chapter IV, fairly brief, and for much the same reason: I find the testimony of the expert historians of this period fairly clear-cut, and, while it would be easy to amass much more evidence supporting my conclusion here, space limitations lead me to believe that any additional words I am granted are better spent elsewhere.

Chapter VIII examines some post-founding American history in light of Oakeshott’s contention that the rationalist can never really proceed as he purports to do. This chapter presents evidence suggesting that the ‘failure to follow the letter of the Constitution’ is not, as some contemporary, ‘strict constructionists’ contend, a peculiarly modern phenomenon, beginning, depending on which strict constructionist to which one is attending, with Lincoln and the American Civil War, with Roosevelt and the New Deal, with the Cold War, or with George W. Bush and the ‘War on Terror’, but is, instead, something that began almost as soon as the U. S. Constitution was adopted, and is not (primarily) a symptom of bad faith, but, rather, an inevitable consequence of the fact that no such rationalist design can ever dictate subsequent practice in the way that it is meant to do.

In our conclusion, besides summarizing the conclusions of the previous chapters, we will also briefly survey a handful of cases that, we suggest, add credence to the notion that rationalist designs can never operate as advertised. Once again, it is worth noting that there is no pretension here of being exhaustive in our survey or of presenting knock-down evidence defeasing any alternative hypothesis. Any work that attempted to achieve either of those goals would have to encompass many volumes and could easily occupy a lifetime and more of labour. Rather, our aim is only to offer evidence that Oakeshott’s thesis has some plausibility, and to suggest avenues for further research. While such a goal is far more modest than attempting to set forth a conclusive theory of politics, or attempting to ‘prove’ that Oakeshott was correct, I hope that it may be worthy in its own right, as well as, perhaps, being more in keeping with Oakeshott’s own programme of research than would be either of the above-mentioned alternatives.

UPDATE: It occurs to me I should note here a profound comment my advisor made to me while we were discussing this dissertation, which was to the effect that, "Oakeshott's thesis isn't really about what we should try to achieve through politics at all, is it? It's really about the limits, whatever we want to achieve, of the extent to which we can design in advance what really will be achieved by our programme, whatever it is."

Saving the Fregean Theory of Propositions?

Gottlob Frege developed a theory of propositions that assert the elements of propositions are concepts, or modes of presentation. (I'm not sure 'concept' really captures 'mode of presentation', but no worries about that for now.) Steven Schiffer offers the following objection to the Fregean theory of proposition, which he attributes to Adam Pautz:

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(1) If the Fregean theory is true, then (α) 'Fido' occurs in 'Ralph believes that Fido is a dog' as a singular term whose referent is a concept of Fido.
2) If (α), then the following inference is valid:
________Ralph believes that Fido is a dog
________∴∃x( x is a concept and Ralph believes that x is a dog).
3) But the inference isn't valid; given the truth of the premise, the conclusion is also true only in the unlikely event that Ralph mistakes a concept for a dog.
4) ∴The Fregean theory is not true.
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(Source: Shiffer (2003) The Things We Mean, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 27.)

But is the problem here an incomplete shift into the realm of concept talk? Yes, for Fregeans, all propositions are about concepts. But sometimes the concepts are being used translucently, as if we are simply seeing through them to the 'real world,' while at other times we are focusing on them as concepts. 'Fido is a dog' is an instance of the first type of usage. What Pautz seems to have done here, to me, is shift part of the sentence to the second type of usage. And, of course, where we are focusing on the conceptual aspect of the first term, but the real world aspect of the second, the result looks quite odd. If we complete the transition, then what I think we get is something like:

∃x( x is a concept [named by 'Fido'] and Ralph believes that x is a member of a class of concepts [named by 'dog'])

This new conclusion to our inference makes perfect sense, as far as I can see.

Any comments? Did I go wrong somewhere?

UPDATE: Did Frege's first name derive from his prowess at tennis? ('Man, Frege done got lob!')

Another Tragic Drug Death

As reported by Jacob Sullum.

Rationalism in Architecture

And its spectacular design failures. (Hat tip to Radley Balko.)

Callahan Versus Murphy Throwdown on Counterfeiting

I wrote this to Bob about a recent article of his:

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In the case of counterfeiting, this charge against the Fed takes as the essential component of counterfeiting to be using a printing press to produce money, i.e., it is the physical means used to produce an object that are in question. So, if that's the case, let us look at counterfeiting a painting. Hmm, a counterfeiter used brushes, oil paints and a canvas to counterfeit the Mona Lisa... therefore, since Leonardo produced the original in the same way, he was a counterfeiter as well!

Something has gone horribly wrong here, and it was in step one -- the essence of counterfeiting has nothing to do with the physical process used -- in fact, that process will probably be as close to the one used to produce the original as possible. No, the essence of counterfeiting is to take an original item of value, try to copy it as closely as possible, and then fraudulently try to pass off your copy as the original -- and in the case of fiat money, every single piece of this essence is missing. There is no 'original', there is no copying process, and there is no attempt to pass off the end product as something other than it is.

*****

Bob has allowed me to post his response here. His items are numbered and in quotes, and my snappy comebacks follow each numbered point, unquoted:

"1) On the very narrow point, is the Fed (or the US Treasury) a counterfeit operation, no, it's not, because, as Gene points out quite correctly, you could ask, "OK then, what is a $20 bill a counterfeit of?" I have in print disagreed with Walter Block on this very point (when I critiqued his defense of the "heroic" private counterfeiter), so point Callahan."

The crowd cheers!

"(2) OK for the purposes of a pop article in today's environment, I have no problem saying the Fed is a giant counterfeiting operation. And indeed, Jeff Hummel--hardly a wishy-washy guy who is fuzzy on the details--tells that to his students to get them to see the big picture."

Then Jeff is mistaken also. One does not get students to "see the big picture" by feeding them bad metaphors.

"(3) Why? Because when you go through the reasons that a two-bit counterfeiter of money is hurting society, you find that the exact same reasons apply to the Fed's operations."

So Bob wants to call this counterfeiting because of its effects. But this strikes me as a very bad idea. Because, if that is our criterion, then, for instance, in a commodity money world, someone who suddenly finds a huge amount of gold in his backyard is also a "sort of counterfeiter." And someone who skydives out of an airplane, has their chute fail to open, and lands on someone else, killing them, is a "sort of murderer," since they had the same effect as a murderer would have.

"(4) Gene is wrong when he thought I was looking at the physical operations and concluded, 'Hey, counterfeiter!!' The whole point of my article was that the complex open market operations to buy Treasury debt looks nothing like the monarch rolling out the printing press to pay his bills. I was saying that despite the superficial differences in mechanics, these two activities were equivalent economically."

I am glad I was wrong about the physical process being the key to Bob's metaphor.

However, the criterion actually being used is problematic as well, since "counterfeiting" is not an economic category -- it is a legal and moral category. The claim seems to be, "The Fed is morally a counterfeiter, and should legally be seen as one, since its activities have the same economic effects as those of a counterfeiter."

But, first of all, if counterfeiting were legal, its effects would be monstrously worse than the effects of Fed actions, because counterfeiters would simply print money without any restraint whatsoever, so long as the value of a bill was higher than the cost of printing it up, while Bob admits the Fed does not and has a motive not to do so. (The counterfeiters would, of course, put themselves out of business in doing so, but they'd be in a prisoner's dilemma here -- it would be better for all of them if all of them exercised restraint in printing money, but no one could count on anyone else to do so.)

And, secondly, as above, same effects != same action. I can drive up the value of one of Bob's books either by relentlessly promoting it, or by killing him. That would not make killing him a sort of marketing, or marketing a species of murder.

UPDATE: Bob had points 5 and 6, as he notes in a comment. I did not include them because, since I don't concede 2-4, they no longer have any relevance. (They were along the lines of, "So, Gene accepts X (2-4), but still objects Y.")

Protestant Versus Catholic Heaven

Pretty funny:

Video Games | | Simpsons Protestant Vs. Catholic He

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

(Hat tip to mpolzkill.)

Why Do Philosophers Do That?

I've been reading a lot of philosophical papers lately. Now, I must say, pretty universally, these folks are very smart people. But modern, analytical philosophers have this weird habit of wanting to express everything in mathematical-looking variables. So the papers I'm reading often begin with something like, "Let us say we have a speaker." But then they stipulate that "a speaker" will henceforth appear as 'S'. OK, and this speaker makes some statements... but henceforth these are to be designated as σ₁ to σ_n. And there are reasons for σ₁ to σ_n, which are truth conditional on ρ₁(t) to ρ_n(t), depending upon circumstances C.

And eventually, you're reading something like "When τ is in the set ρ₁(t) to ρ_n(t), the χ value of the ι^th of the μ² matrix of the N^X to the N^{X + N} meaning subset of the n-invariant dominatrices of the set of all philosophers, is, of course, truth invariant."

Now, as someone who was a software engineer for 17 years, I'm pretty much all down with the value of formalism. But statements like the above are not statements in a formal language, they are ordinary English littered with pseudo-formal obscurities.

Why, oh why, philosophers, do you write like that?

When Camouflage Fails

Do they realize we can see them?

Worst Game by a QB Ever?

My younger son and I were looking at this page, of quarterbacks who have had a passer rating of 0 in a game. Now, it turns out that the NFL artificially caps how low you can go by not letting anything you do count for less than zero, no matter how bad it is. (For instance, part b of the formula is ((yards / attempt) - 3) * .25. Clearly, if you have three yards per attempt, you get a zero -- but even if you have -20 per attempt, you also get a zero.

Well, we didn't do all the calculations to see how low anyone would have gone were the zero floor removed, but here's our candidate:

Versus the Bengals, on 12/12/1976, Joe Namath went 4 for 15 passing, for 20 yards with 4 interceptions, which we figure earned Joe a whopping -848 passer rating for the game, if there was no floor.

Interestingly, the Jets yanked Namath, and his replacement, Richard Todd, also had a zero passer rating that game!

You Learn Something New Everyday!

My kids just told me that Joe Montana



is not actually the father of Hannah Montana



whose real father is Joe's half brother, Billy Ray Cyrus



who changed her name in honor of Joe's retirement.

Chrome, You Are the One

Just started using Google Chrome as my web browser.

I had no idea it was possible for the browser to speed up one's Internet experience so much.

Ooh, My Head Hurts!

Driving home from teaching my class today, I heard an ad on CBS News Radio from the Rent Stabilization Association. The purported speaker in the ad was a "small" landlord, who, with her husband, owned a 16-unit building in New York City. She noted how hard she and her husband worked to maintain their building, how they employed many local contractors, and how people like her were vital to the NYC economy. Then she mentioned a bill intended to freeze rents for... I can't quite remember... the unemployed? The underemployed? But something like that. So, I thought, coming up will be a pitch for how this rent freeze would punish small landlords like her.

But no! The next thing she said was (I quote from memory, probably nothing close to verbatim, but I think with the gist correct), "And this bill is vital to the well-being of both me and my tenants."

OK, I thought, this must be a ruse of some sort, put forward by some tenants' advocacy group, because clearly, any landlord who wanted to "freeze rents" could simply, all on her own... not raise the rent!

However, after arriving home and looking up the RSA on line, this group actually does appear to be some sort of landlord advocacy organization. So, now I'm totally befuddled. (I admit that my research into what's going on here has been relatively minimal, but still...) OK, is there a group of landlords significant enough to buy time on a major New York radio station who are worried that their insatiable desire to self-destructively raise rents can only be checked by a city ordinance preventing them from doing so? Have I fallen down the rabbit hole into Justin Raimondo's "Bizzaro Universe"? What the heck is this about?

Are Childhood Vaccines Dangerous?

The researcher who perhaps did the most to promote this idea seems to have been almost entirely discredited.

Pride (In the Name of Happiness)

Alasdair MacAIntyre makes a very interesting point in an essay entitled "Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?" He cites a paper that contends that Italians "are less committed to and identified with the actions of their government than are Germans or Englishmen..." The evidence the authors present is survey answers as to how much "pride" the respondents have in the actions of their governments... to which the answer, it seems, is much less for Italians.

But, as MacIntyre notes, the words for "pride," although somewhat translatable, just do not mean the same things to Italians, Germans, and Englishmen. In particular, Italians are most fiercely proud of things that it would not even occur to the other folks to be proud of.

I think "happiness" surveys are largely worthless for the same reason -- happiness just does not mean the same thing across cultures. If you doubt this, think of what an ancient Greek would say about happiness -- "One does not know if a man was happy until he is dead."

Stunning Photographs of Our Universe...

taken by an amateur astronomer from his garden shed.

Those Idiotic Ancients!

Over at Reason.com, Tim Cavanaugh writes:

"As surely as Earth rests at the center of a finite series of interlocking crystalline polyhedrons within the compass of a benevolent prime mover, so Ben Bernanke will clear all challenges and have his woeful career extended by the U.S. Senate."

Tim is clearly trying to mock the stupidity of pre-Enlightenment views of nature, but it seems all of philosophy and science before the Enlightenment (TM Voltaire) is mushed together in Tim's head as an undifferentiable swamp of falsehood, because:

1) The idea of "interlocking crystalline polyhedrons" was put forward by Johannes Kepler, who was a pioneering advocate of heliocentrism, not geocentrism (so the Sun, and not the Earth, was at the center of those polyhedra), and Kepler is supposedly one of the early heroes of "modern," scientific thought.

2) The idea of the "prime mover" came from Aristotle, who certainly did not see that mover as "benevolent."

But hey, those dumbasses came before the Enlightenment, so who can even be bothered to get their stupid ideas straight?

Greenwald on Obama's "Legal Black Hole"

Democrats kept complaining that Bush had sent Guantanamo detainees into a "legal black hole" where the evidence against them would never be weighed in court. But now that a Democratic president has adopted the same policy? Fugedaboudit! It's all hunky-dory!

Adam and Elijah in the big shorts contests

Oh Stimulus, Oh Stimulus!

When the most recent stimulus bill was being touted as being a life-or-death measure, some of Obama's advisors claimed that unemployment might rise as high as 8% unless it was passed.

Given that unemployment is now at 10%, can we taken it as given that we were sold a bill of goods? (Non-partisan note: the Bush bills were probably even worse. But both parties "efforts" were just ways to pay off political supporters with our money.)

Oh Paul, Ye Were Great When in the Opposition!

Now if we could just get yer nose dislodged from Obama's bum, ye might be great again!

(For some reason, I hear the above being spoken by Ewan McTeagle:
Eric Idle's Shakespearean performance is apparently a spoof of Ian McKellan!)

Any Guesses?

I just received an e-mail on a list I'm on reading:

"Dear Colleague

"We are now finishing an application for a European numismatic network European monetary unification, from Antiquity to modern times (EMU)."

Man, I can't read the phrase "an application for a European numismatic network" in any way that makes sense to me. Are they writing a software application that will run on a European numismatic network? But what's a 'numismatic network'? Or are the applying for a grant to work on a "a European numismatic network"? But if that's the case, I think they're a little late -- the Euro has been in place for a number of years now.

So what could they mean?

OK, Bob...

so now is the truce over?

I mean, really, the reason you wouldn't agree to my proposal was that you knew it would only be a matter of days before the rabid dogs of LRC were attacking other libertarians, wasn't it?

ADDENDA:
1) Boaz's comic intention was so obvious here that it's pretty hard to believe Block and DiLorenzo could have missed it. No, I think they just thought, "Hey, I haven't attacked a 'Beltway libertarian' in a week or two -- let me find something to go after."
2) And yes, neither of them agreed to the "truce." But Rockwell published Mario's peace offering, implying he supported it. He certainly could say, "Guys, not on my blog." After all, he squahed one of my articles for LRC, after he had accepted it, when he noticed it contained a very mild criticism of Rothbard. So, he certainly does exercise editorial discretion. But no, what he meant by peace was "Let's get them to stop attacking us!"

Aristotle, Augustine...

Abelard, Aquinas, Anselm, Albertus, Anaxagoras, Avicenna, Archimedes, Averroes, Albert Einstein, Anaximander, Aristarchus, Anaximenes...

Does it help to be really smart to have your name begin with 'a'? Was it because these people all got called on in class first?

(Yes, yes, I know 'Avicenna' and 'Averroes' are Latinizations -- it's a joke, OK?)

Smokey Robinson on 'Black'

Wonderful:


(Hat tip to Wilton Dale Alston.)

The Stray Dogs of Moscow

Have learned to ride the subway. (Well, at least about twenty of them have. And no, that doesn't mean randomly -- they got off at particular stops.) Hat tip to John Goes.

Dumbest Interview Question?

"Please tell our viewers, what exactly is an enlarged heart?"

A: "...which means the heart is bigger than usual..."

Who could have guessed?

OK, So Then What?

Listening to sports radio yesterday, I heard a former football coach (didn't catch his name) say, "The Cowboys and the Vikings are such great defensive teams, I think they should just let the two defenses go out and play, and keep the offenses out of it."

OK, clearly he didn't mean that the two defenses should play and one of them should get the ball, because then you'd have one great defense and one really crappy offense on the field, not two great defenses. So, then, there's no ball involved at all. What then? Is there some way these two defenses can play some sport? Please discuss.