I had another dream, I had another life
With the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who coming up and the announcement that Peter Capaldi will be playing the 12th Doctor, I have written a series of posts over at my site Magic and Mutants that explore the different iterations of the character over the past 5 decades of the show. And, of course, as the title indicates, I play favorites.
For Part One, click here.
For Part Two, click here.
For Part Three, click here.
In the December 1958 issue of The Freeman, economics writer and FEE founder Leonard Read published his now-famous essay “I, Pencil.” The essay traced the “family tree” of the modern pencil, demonstrating the complexity of its creation and the numerous people involved. Nobel laureate Milton Friedman was so impressed with the essay that he used it in one of the episodes for his TV series Free to Choose. More recently, science writer Matt Ridley borrowed from the idea by declaring that literally nobody on the face of the planet knows how to build a computer mouse. Despite the individualistic rhetoric that often accompanies markets, Read’s essay provides a much needed reminder that markets on the whole are more communal, more cooperative, and more interdependent than the centralized planning that often employs these rhetorical fronts.
The discussion of the “invisible hand” toward the end is almost spiritual in nature. And with good reason. As Peter Harrison, historian and director of the Centre for the History of European Discourse at the University of Queensland, explains,
[D]uring the early modern period, in addition to increasing frequency of occurrence, we witness the emergence of a more distinct pattern of use or, more correctly perhaps, of two related concepts of the operation of ‘‘the invisible hand.’’ Most commonly the invisible hand was used to refer to the manner in which God exercised providential control over the course of history by subtly influencing human actions in order to bring about his ends. These ends are thus accomplished in spite of the intentions of human actors and without their knowledge. The second pattern of usage also refers to God’s providential action, but in the context of his superintendence of the natural world. Thus God’s invisible hand was glimpsed in the contrivances of the creatures and in the wisdom and foresight evidenced by the laws of nature, which again promote his ends. These two conceptions between them represent the most predominant uses of the expression in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and hence the most relevant background for Smith’s uses of the expression.
Just as the laws of nature were originally seen as “exemplif[ying] design, so too…did the laws of morality.” For Smith and his contemporaries, “the general laws of the moral, as well as of the material world, are wisely and beneficently ordered for the welfare of our species.”
Seems to be working out alright.
In an aptly named blog post, We must stop these crazed half naked psychopaths from feeding their children in front of other people!, one father discusses the country’s crazy aversion to breastfeeding.
Do you feel awkward around a breastfeeding mom? No worries! Our society has conditioned us to think of the breast as a sex object. Sex object + innocent baby + dinner time = weirdness!
In that moment of awkwardness, just remind yourself: this is in no way about sex. This is just a mom caring for her baby. It’s natural and beautiful. Eventually, your neural pathways will reroute and maybe you won’t feel even a twinge of awkwardness.
This Monday’s post for Times And Seasons is based on the story of the blind men and the elephant. It’s an ancient and familiar story, but I’ve got a slightly different take on it. What happens if the blind men can’t step back (metaphorically) and get the complete picture by just aggregating their individual perspectives? What happens when conflicting points of view are irreconcilable? Is there hope for tolerance and progress? I believe there is.
The stereotype of American Mormons (according to socio-demographic data) is true:
However, economist Miles Kimball of the University of Michigan finds that this white, conservative demographic is quite different from the typical white, conservative American. In his post “How Conservative Mormon America Avoided the Fate of Conservative White America” over at Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal, he notes that
Kimball makes several other observations with extended commentary. Check it out. It goes along quite well with some of Megan McArdle’s comments in a recent Bloomberg article (which was covered here at Difficult Run):
The highest income mobility in the country, it turns out, is found in Salt Lake City — almost three times higher than the rate in Atlanta, the lowest-ranked city…Salt Lake City is in the reddest of red state places — not a lot of taxes and transfers going on there. And yet it’s highly mobile, presumably because of the influence of the Mormon Church, which essentially runs the most comprehensive and effective social welfare system in the country…maybe in the world. There’s money and other help to tide you over in bad times, but arguably more importantly, there’s all the efforts of your ward to get you back on your feet. Churches do this sort of thing everywhere, of course, but in few places is it so comprehensive and organized. And unlike the government system, it’s combined with intense social support, and a community whose norms about things like work, marriage and family (and drinking and drug abuse) encourage what you might call a prosperous lifestyle.
Social capital and cultural factors are big players in economic well-being and should not be ignored.
Nathaniel’s recent post on minimum wage touches on a couple of important–if not overlooked–points about the “job creation” debate: (1) innovation vs. job preservation and, implicitly, (2) wealth vs. jobs. If the goal is to create jobs for the sake of creating jobs, then the task is pretty straightforward.
As economist Steven Horwitz says above, “I would argue that creating jobs is easy; it’s the creation of wealth that’s hard.” The creation of wealth is intrinsically linked with innovation and the “creative destruction” it brings about. Even though many have partaken of what Scott Winship of the Brookings Institution calls “technophobia” (remember Jesse Jackson Jr.’s claim that the iPad was “eliminating thousands of American jobs” or the President’s concern that the ATM represented a “structural issue” in the American economy?), the fear is unjustified.
Arguing against technological progress because it “destroy jobs” ignores the mass benefits that will follow, including the rise in absolute standards of living. “In a free-market economy,” explains historian Thomas E. Woods,
businesses invest the vast bulk of their profits in capital goods that make labor more productive…[Different] kinds of machinery can multiply the efficiency of a single worker many times over, sometimes by orders of magnitude…This is how wealth is created: we can produce more with the same (or a lesser) amount of labor…As a result of capital investment, firms can now produce many, many times more goods than before, and at considerably lower cost. Thanks to the pressures of market competition, firms pass on these cost cuts to consumers in the form of lower prices, better quality merchandise, or a combination of both. The ordinary person’s standard of living increases…because business firms can invest in machinery that makes it possible for more and more goods to be produced with fewer and fewer hands, thereby increasing the overall amount of material goods available and rendering them less and less expensive.
A higher minimum wage will not help raise the poor out of poverty. It will simply eliminate jobs for low-wage workers (i.e. high school education and less).
But couldn’t one argue that technological advances eliminate low-wage jobs? Sure. But the difference is that minimum wage laws provide only a slight financial bump for some low-wage workers, while keeping others in the unemployment line. Innovation creates new jobs for low-wage workers, while raising the absolute standards of living for everyone (including the poor). When given these options, I would hope the choice is obvious.
One of the perennial conflicts between left and right in the United States is over minimum wage. The left insists that it’s a crime (at least morally) for companies to pay their employees less than a living wage and lauds companies that have business models based on paying workers well (or “fairly”, as those on the left might insist). The right, for its part, has the general attitude that if you’re expecting a living wage for a minimum wage job, there’s something wrong with you, not with the wage. Minimum wage jobs are for teenagers or retired folks looking for a little spending money or are a way for anyone who wants to work to have easy access to the bottom rung of the job ladder.
Although I always think it’s nice when a company like Costco carves out a niche paying their employees well, I tend to sympathize with the right for simple economics. If you make it expensive for companies to hire employees, they will hire less employees. Thus the impact of minimum wage laws might be to boost salaries in the shot run, but in the long run it has the opposite effect. It reduces the salaries of large swathes of the populace to 0 by taking away their jobs completely.
This whole issue came to mind again when I heard a story about fast food workers striking for better pay. Really, guys?
I couldn’t manage even a dozen pages of Dawkins insufferable smugness in The God Delusions, and his ghastly guerrilla interrogation of Brandon Flowers on a talk show is equally painful to watch, but I had assumed that, being a noted academic and so forth, he still had some handle on basic civility and common sense. Apparently not.
All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.
There’s his Tweet on Eid, the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Responding, Nesrine Malik makes two observations:
Her logic in point #1 is impeccable and as for her feelings in point #2: they are sadly, sadly familiar. Reminds me of trying to respond to counter-cult accusations about my own faith. It’s sad to see another example–and so prominent!–of this kind of lazy bigotry, but nice to take some solace in commiseration with someone else who gets it.
There are already lots of news articles about this story, but why not go to the source? This is Lavabit’s homepage with their entire statement:
Megan McArdle has a piece for Bloomberg that really resonates with me. She starts out with something that I’ve always felt as well:
I care a lot about the absolute condition of the poor…but I don’t care whether Bill Gates is living in a house that cost 19 squintillion dollars. I care whether everyone else in the country has a warm, dry abode with indoor plumbing and all the other mod cons.
But she then goes on to talk about a kind of inequality that really does matter: marriage inequality. Not the kind that’s abut sexuality, but rather the kind that’s about class.