Lorenzo Warby on the lie of equalitarianism; Nancy Folbre on care services and GDP; Noah Smith on reading classic philosophers; Alice Evans on South Korea
One good reason to read the original philosophers (and some scientists) is that modern summarizers often are either wrong or lying about what they actually say. For a number of years there was an attempt for the left to claim Adam Smith as one of them, which was just silly, but damned if there weren't a lot of articles trying to argue that he supported the welfare state, etc.
In other words, most summarizers can't quite help but try to read into famous writers what they want to be there rather than what is.
Right, and this is a very important point. I have bad vices of curiosity and distraction, and I've gone down many a rabbit hole through a chain of intermediary references to become captivated by original works. As often as not, the modal present summary of the original author's ideas is either hilariously or obscenely distorted from the original content of those ideas, sometimes to the point of utter contradiction! Sometimes it's because someone has been sloppy or negligent or incompetent, and sometimes it's clearly an intentional lie in service to an ideological agenda and abuse of the prominent summarizer's (and publisher's) power of intellectual influence. The phrase, "the commonly believed story about ... turns out to be a total myth" is popping up all the time these days.
In the game of "telephone" or "operator", a bunch of kids in a chain whisper messages to each other, and what the final kid says he heard is always absurdly different from the original messages. In the game, this happens even without foul play, from sincere attempts to relay the message with fidelity and innocent misunderstandings. But imagine that a kid in the middle is a stinker and makes up something different intentionally, knowing no one is going to contradict him.
Now imagine they are all stinkers. That's where we are now.
Exactly. There is a lot to be said about different interpretations of important works, because sure, read the same thing 10 times and you can take away something new every time. Then there are the people who read it and you wonder if they had the same book :D
Re: "Because equalitarianism is untrue, treating people as individuals, rather than members of groups, does not lead to the outcomes that equalitarianism demands."
If most people truly treat people as individuals, then few will focus on group differences in outcomes.
If most people truly treat people as individuals, then all individuals will have reason (incentive) to do their level best (and so to fulfill their potentials).
Who knows, then maybe currently salient group differences would diminish.
"If most people truly treat people as individuals, then few will focus on group differences in outcomes."
You have the arrow pointing the wrong way. If people don't care about group differences, of course they are free to treat people as individuals based on merit, i.e., selection to be a member of a professional sports team.
But how do you make them not care when they obviously should care, because there are enormous political and personal gains to be had by detecting, highlighting, and complaining about the differences and then leveraging both hard and soft power to manipulate the distribution of outcomes?
"If most people perceived they could not obtain such gains ... " then the rest of what you said would follow, but if not, then the rest wouldn't. Unfortunately, whatever the constitution may say about "equal protection", the courts and elite culture in general are steadfastly opposed to such changes to the social framework of incentives. The Fourth Circuit recently ok'd racial preferences for admission to a selective public high school on the basis that, despite what you may read into those few simple words, what judges can discover hidden behind "equal protection" is the fact that the Constitution only bans discrimination against Asians if it reduces the proportion of Asians in the pool of admitted students below their proportion in the overall student population.
If the meritocratic former proportion would be 70% and the population proportion is 20%, then reducing Asian numbers all the way to 20.001% is perfectly Constitutional racial discrimination against them. SCOTUS declined to hear the appeal.
Please read Alito's scathing dissent, and, pardon my incivility, John Roberts is yet again proven to be a shameful coward and a putz.
But the point is, when there is something like "50% of all slots" up for grabs if one can get the government to treat people as members of groups and not individuals, then you better believe people are going to focus on those differences!
That doesn't mean that John Alcorn has the arrow pointing the wrong way. His attitude is the one that most people ought to have, and did have until Obama deliberately re-lit the fires of racism.
The fact that those slots are up for grabs is only going to produce years of rent-seeking and justified resentment against exactly the people affirmative action purports to help.
The raising of children doesn't show up in GDP until twenty years after its investment (which lowers GDP immediately).
Where children do raise GDP immediately at all its because they are enrolled in per child paid care that is too expensive to scale beyond one or two.
Since modern society is centered around the increasing of GDP, this means that children will always be underproduced. Individuals will see not having children as a way to increase relative status in consumption and career, while governments will support GDP increases because it brings political success and stability.
Korea simply took this to an explicit extreme. Partly because East Asians seem to in general, and partly though the governments explicit anti-natal policies.
There is no solution beyond large redistribution of resources and status from non-parents to parents and from people with fewer children to people with more.
I think Arnold chose an unfortunate example that tends to wind up clouding the point he was making.
Children show up immediately in GDP as a measure of economic activity unless you're living in a subsistence society, and even then they would represent mostly a redirection of their parent's efforts. They need food, housing, medical care, etc. which is pretty much all provided by their parent's spending. They are an enormous expense with little immediate benefit.
Arnold's bigger point is that all forms of unpaid labor don't show up in GDP which means that GDP doesn't really capture production despite the name. As Dr Hammer notes, it winds up largely measuring trading.
This article has some interesting analysis and thoughts related to what caused the 1945-1960 Baby Boom and how those influences might be channeled to increase birth rates now.
Whatever reasons one prefers to believe for the baby boom 80 years ago and the baby bust today, things have changed too much in too many ways to expect we can derive much "presently actionable intelligence" from the historical analysis. It's too much of a stretch to say, "We could do what they did in the 40's" unless one is willing to go all the way with, "First, make the world the way it was in the 40's, and THEN do those things." Fat chance.
Re: "I say that GDP should measure economic activity [... .] God only knows what is the value of care services provided outside of the market."
A deep point.
A quibble: GDP and other "measures" of economic activity (e.g., CPI) have an unfounded ambition (or pretense) of precision. God only knows, with coherence and precision, how much economic activity there is, how much inflation there has been since whatever year, and so on.
Along with agreeing with your point about precision, I generally object to defining economic activity as only that activity that involves trade. That seems to ignore the point of economic activity, which isn't trading but fulfilling of human wants and needs. In other words, we are measuring (and studying) the wrong things.
There's an old joke, and I use the term loosely, among economists along the lines of "How can you tell macroeconomists have a sense of humor? They use decimal points."
Another old joke is "Money can't buy happiness but it can buy (fill in the blank as you wish) which is the same thing."
You are correct that we might be studying the wrong things but trade has the advantage of being relatively measurable, and I would trust revealed preferences over other forms of measurement as well.
I always liked "Money can't buy happiness, but the rental agreement for happiness is pretty good."
I think you put your finger on it: trade is more easily measurable, so they measure it. It is a classic case of looking for your keys by the light post because the light is better there. And that is ok, so far as it goes, but it does mean that we want to recognize that GDP as a measure is a very wobbly one, with all that entails. Such as "Don't optimize for it" or "Don't use it for things it isn't meant to be used for" and my personal favorite "Don't give functional value to what it happens to measure while dismissing the things it doesn't." I think that defining non-traded production out of "economic activity" does exactly the latter, as we say economic activity is good, economic activity is only trade, so therefore only production for trade is good. That isn't quite what we should be taking away.
You can object all you want. If it doesn't involve trade it isn't economic activity, just activity. Fulfilling human needs and wants is a worthy goal but it is entirely unmeasurable for multiple reasons.
Go on, please. This doctor of economics would love to hear you expound on the definition of economic activity. Please don't let your boundless ignorance stop you. You never have before.
"What is GDP supposed to measure? I think of it as a measure of economic activity, meaning goods and services bought in the market." (The explanation continues)
From your previous post: "You can object all you want. If it doesn't involve trade it isn't economic activity, just activity."
Your definition is incorrect. Kling is also incorrect in defining economic activity as only that activity involving the buying and selling of goods. Your definition is more incorrect, however, as by your definition any non-sold production that involves trade, such as buying some of the inputs for the production, would in fact be economic activity. You are just too dense to see that your own point doesn't support your argument.
Economic activity is any activity where decisions are made around the production, trade or consumption of goods or services. Being measurable is not one of the requirements.
"any non-sold production that involves trade, such as buying some of the inputs for the production, would in fact be economic activity."
I don't know how there can be buying of non-sold production but I should not have substituted "trade" (which could be barter) for "buying and selling of goods." My apologies.
As for where you say Kling is incorrect, take it up with him. I'm tired of your rudeness.
Newton's laws is a bad example because Newton's laws have (mostly) been superseded. For this analogy to work you would immediately start teaching intro physics students relativity theory and treat Newton's laws as a historical curiosity. Nobody does that of course because you start where the student is, which is also what most philosophers do, including Aristotle.
It's not really true to say that Newton's laws have been superseded. It's true that they are not correct under various special circumstances, but they are still used for almost everything in our everyday lives.
Yes. Absolutely. It is important to recognize that GDP is in no way a measure of human flourishing, well-being, or total economic activity, it is merely a measure of money changing hands. GDP does not provide an apples-to-apples basis for meaningful international comparisons of policy outcomes. That is why Folbre and others should look to meaningful measures such as the Human Development Index for policy analysis purposes. GDP only tells stories about local trends and policies.
For example, the idea of outlawing home gardening as a climate change control measure has apparently gained some traction among the largely urban, predominately female portion of the electorate. If home gardening is outlawed, GDP will increase because people will buy more food rather than produce their own. But all that GDP increase will tell you, just like the child-care example, is that money is now changing hands where money did not before. If we were to define such policies
as Pareto optimal, that is making everybody better off and nobody worse off, because they represent a pure increase GDP, then where to stop. Require licensed professional shoe-tiers with graduate degrees in shoelace science to supervise apprentice shoelace tiers to attend to the wearing and removal of footwear for every individual? Think of the boost to GDP! And with sufficiently open borders there would be no labor market distortions! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
Continuing on the topic of the summarizability of physical laws and the fact that we don’t read Newton et al. The fact that important physical laws can be written on one line tells us something about our attention span for these laws. Using the analogy of a toy—one line physical laws, at least the most common ones used by Mech E, Civil E, Elect E, Optic E—are very simple once you understand them. As a consequence, jobs in these fields “wear out” quickly like simple kids’ toys. At least they don’t seem to hold my attention for very long. Of course there are exceptions. Maxwell’s Equations are difficult and abstract, and easy to forget. They are four coupled equations that describe light matter interactions.
But this brings about a bigger issue with much of earthly physics—it lack the complexity of the human mind and of human markets. Earthly physics and engineering gets boring—at least doing it 40 hours a week, after about 15 years. And in order to make it through 15 years of engineering work, I had to change jobs and industries quite often—too often. So science and engineering have the upside of being able to build and create tangible objects which is really gratifying for a while, but then these objects get boring. Almost sterile. And then what? Philosophy! Religion! Smithian economics! Evolutionary biology and psychology! Anything involving the human mind! Family! Or astronomy and cosmology if one has access to a world class telescope.
And to be fair, part of my estrangement from engineering and science is not by choice. Politics has ruined Silicon Valley for families with children. Similarly “regime uncertainty”—as espoused by Robert Higgs—has made it difficult to focus on highly technical work while raising a family in Silicon Valley. Joyce Benenson and Rob Henderson have helped me see that “regime uncertainty” and “childhood instability” are not that different from war. These are all huge distractions from the tranquil life of wealth accumulation and career focus that was instilled in me as a child. Men are warriors and we respond to instability and uncertainty by “preparing for war.” What this means is still a bit of a mystery to me. Thoughts?
Related to the idea of not reading the original writings of Newton or Maxwell and similar natural philosophers (now known as scientists).
We have better notation or a preferred notation. In order to be “all-on-the-same-page,” it’s better to start and finish with the same notation. It certainly makes creating, grading and taking tests easier. Have you ever tried answering test questions on Maxwell’s equations written by a professor using a very different notation? Not cool. Also, communicating with co-workers that use different notation is an added pain. So it’s better to have standards for notation. Engineers are driving by profit and loss, war, managers, customers—we need to get stuff done. And we can’t mess around. People’s lives are at stake. A sign error can be deadly. So, engineering and the science profession have different demands than philosophers. These demands cause us to learn our fundamentals differently, with standards for efficiency, productivity and safety.
I haven't ever read original Newton or Maxwell, but I have read some works from the early 1900s that had a long list of equations for the various coordinate combinations, which can be replaced by a single tensor equation that is much easier to understand.
The error of "equalitarianism" is not to treat group differences as hypotheses of injustice o correlates of some underlying problem rather than a problem in and of itself.
"I would rather read a summary of an important philosopher than go back to the original. If a summary of Hegel does not suffice, that is because one of the unsettled questions is what the heck Hegel was trying to say. That is Hegel’s problem, not mine."
If you haven't read "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" you are missing something.
Besides that, the value of reading long ago scholars depends on who you are and what your goal is. The amateur philosopher should probably be mostly reading recent writing that summarizes past work. For scholars trying to push the known boundary it is almost a certainty they need to read the most relevant early works.
Ironically the Lorenzo Warby piece sounds like it may have been informed by Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and, the same source is arguably the intellectual progenitor of Dr. Kling's writings on human interdependence. See: https://www.thecollector.com/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel-political-philosophy/ I would be highly surprised if Warby has not read Hegel and a little if he did not confess to having profited from the experience.
And Hegel really should be of more interest to economists since he at least took great interest in economics, reading widely, and incorporating economic thought into his works. Oddly, the great and wonderful, Online Library of Liberty, which makes available for free the work of so many great philosophers and which cannot be praised enough (even if it does not contribute to GDP), does not have any Hegel among the many rich works of philosophy in its extensive catalog. However, Delphi offers a collected works ebook for $1.99 and with a little patience, one might surprise oneself by what one might become engrossed in.
But what the heck, ignore the German philosophic tradition: the Germans can be a bit challenging at times. This is the same rationale that probably explains why so few BA's in economics have actually read The Wealth of Nations cover to cover and why probably only 1 in a 1,000 has read more than a chapter or two in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Not everybody likes to read books, I understand that. However, it seems that there is more to it than that, but rather seems to be a general disdain for autodidacticism rooted in rigid notions of the propriety of an intellectual hierarchy, and that this hierarchy is sustained by posts like Dr. Kling's. However, if one is of a rebellious spirit and does happen to have an inquiring mind and might be open to the experience, a great case for undertaking the reading of classics is made in a new column out today by Jon Gabriel at Discourse Magazine (https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/the-autodidact-to-improve-society ):
"Today, we’re struggling with similar questions about how to do the right thing in a petty, ugly and violent world. Granted, if we choose the wrong side today, we aren’t likely to see our city sacked, but human nature is a pretty consistent thing.
Whether you choose the books mentioned above or pick up something more recent, you’re going to learn a lot more about people, politics and principle than you will from your smartphone. Better yet, you’ll be filling your life with ideas that have stood for centuries.
If I can be an autodidact, anyone can. And I offer this column as one more way to make sense of our current moment, drawing in lessons from history as we prepare for the future."
We had such a competition to love and accept children. The reward was emotional and material support in old age. Most everybody lost, it seems. The state took over the material support, which had obviously failed by the Great Depression; at which point many elderly were destitute. The emotional support has not yet been shouldered by anyone, because the magnitude of the task outsizes the capacity of the market/aggregate supply. This is one of the gaps AI is hoped to fill [ElliQ]. Good luck with that, just like with Social Security. More likely that the population will continue to crash and the elderly to suffer the consequences of family non-formation.
Then you are focusing on something very trivial with GDP. Which is fine, I guess, if trivia is the explicit interest. All those USDA school lunches, mostly chunked in the trash ...
Offhand, to stand in for hundreds of examples one could easily adduce, I think of the unpaid work of the women who saved the Alamo from destruction. An extreme example perhaps, but there are only three pillars to the economy of San Antonio: quarrying/concrete, military, and tourism. The latter entirely flows from the mystique of the Alamo. Yet those women's work doesn't amount in anyone's calculus to babysitting your child.
One good reason to read the original philosophers (and some scientists) is that modern summarizers often are either wrong or lying about what they actually say. For a number of years there was an attempt for the left to claim Adam Smith as one of them, which was just silly, but damned if there weren't a lot of articles trying to argue that he supported the welfare state, etc.
In other words, most summarizers can't quite help but try to read into famous writers what they want to be there rather than what is.
Right, and this is a very important point. I have bad vices of curiosity and distraction, and I've gone down many a rabbit hole through a chain of intermediary references to become captivated by original works. As often as not, the modal present summary of the original author's ideas is either hilariously or obscenely distorted from the original content of those ideas, sometimes to the point of utter contradiction! Sometimes it's because someone has been sloppy or negligent or incompetent, and sometimes it's clearly an intentional lie in service to an ideological agenda and abuse of the prominent summarizer's (and publisher's) power of intellectual influence. The phrase, "the commonly believed story about ... turns out to be a total myth" is popping up all the time these days.
In the game of "telephone" or "operator", a bunch of kids in a chain whisper messages to each other, and what the final kid says he heard is always absurdly different from the original messages. In the game, this happens even without foul play, from sincere attempts to relay the message with fidelity and innocent misunderstandings. But imagine that a kid in the middle is a stinker and makes up something different intentionally, knowing no one is going to contradict him.
Now imagine they are all stinkers. That's where we are now.
Exactly. There is a lot to be said about different interpretations of important works, because sure, read the same thing 10 times and you can take away something new every time. Then there are the people who read it and you wonder if they had the same book :D
Re: "Because equalitarianism is untrue, treating people as individuals, rather than members of groups, does not lead to the outcomes that equalitarianism demands."
If most people truly treat people as individuals, then few will focus on group differences in outcomes.
If most people truly treat people as individuals, then all individuals will have reason (incentive) to do their level best (and so to fulfill their potentials).
Who knows, then maybe currently salient group differences would diminish.
"If most people truly treat people as individuals, then few will focus on group differences in outcomes."
You have the arrow pointing the wrong way. If people don't care about group differences, of course they are free to treat people as individuals based on merit, i.e., selection to be a member of a professional sports team.
But how do you make them not care when they obviously should care, because there are enormous political and personal gains to be had by detecting, highlighting, and complaining about the differences and then leveraging both hard and soft power to manipulate the distribution of outcomes?
"If most people perceived they could not obtain such gains ... " then the rest of what you said would follow, but if not, then the rest wouldn't. Unfortunately, whatever the constitution may say about "equal protection", the courts and elite culture in general are steadfastly opposed to such changes to the social framework of incentives. The Fourth Circuit recently ok'd racial preferences for admission to a selective public high school on the basis that, despite what you may read into those few simple words, what judges can discover hidden behind "equal protection" is the fact that the Constitution only bans discrimination against Asians if it reduces the proportion of Asians in the pool of admitted students below their proportion in the overall student population.
If the meritocratic former proportion would be 70% and the population proportion is 20%, then reducing Asian numbers all the way to 20.001% is perfectly Constitutional racial discrimination against them. SCOTUS declined to hear the appeal.
Please read Alito's scathing dissent, and, pardon my incivility, John Roberts is yet again proven to be a shameful coward and a putz.
But the point is, when there is something like "50% of all slots" up for grabs if one can get the government to treat people as members of groups and not individuals, then you better believe people are going to focus on those differences!
That doesn't mean that John Alcorn has the arrow pointing the wrong way. His attitude is the one that most people ought to have, and did have until Obama deliberately re-lit the fires of racism.
The fact that those slots are up for grabs is only going to produce years of rent-seeking and justified resentment against exactly the people affirmative action purports to help.
The raising of children doesn't show up in GDP until twenty years after its investment (which lowers GDP immediately).
Where children do raise GDP immediately at all its because they are enrolled in per child paid care that is too expensive to scale beyond one or two.
Since modern society is centered around the increasing of GDP, this means that children will always be underproduced. Individuals will see not having children as a way to increase relative status in consumption and career, while governments will support GDP increases because it brings political success and stability.
Korea simply took this to an explicit extreme. Partly because East Asians seem to in general, and partly though the governments explicit anti-natal policies.
There is no solution beyond large redistribution of resources and status from non-parents to parents and from people with fewer children to people with more.
"Since modern society is centered around the increasing of GDP"
While GDP is an important economic indicator, I don't at all agree that means modern society is centered around increasing it.
I think Arnold chose an unfortunate example that tends to wind up clouding the point he was making.
Children show up immediately in GDP as a measure of economic activity unless you're living in a subsistence society, and even then they would represent mostly a redirection of their parent's efforts. They need food, housing, medical care, etc. which is pretty much all provided by their parent's spending. They are an enormous expense with little immediate benefit.
Arnold's bigger point is that all forms of unpaid labor don't show up in GDP which means that GDP doesn't really capture production despite the name. As Dr Hammer notes, it winds up largely measuring trading.
This article has some interesting analysis and thoughts related to what caused the 1945-1960 Baby Boom and how those influences might be channeled to increase birth rates now.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-baby-boom?publication_id=828904&post_id=139974454&isFreemail=true&r=hjvfh
Whatever reasons one prefers to believe for the baby boom 80 years ago and the baby bust today, things have changed too much in too many ways to expect we can derive much "presently actionable intelligence" from the historical analysis. It's too much of a stretch to say, "We could do what they did in the 40's" unless one is willing to go all the way with, "First, make the world the way it was in the 40's, and THEN do those things." Fat chance.
Re: "I say that GDP should measure economic activity [... .] God only knows what is the value of care services provided outside of the market."
A deep point.
A quibble: GDP and other "measures" of economic activity (e.g., CPI) have an unfounded ambition (or pretense) of precision. God only knows, with coherence and precision, how much economic activity there is, how much inflation there has been since whatever year, and so on.
Along with agreeing with your point about precision, I generally object to defining economic activity as only that activity that involves trade. That seems to ignore the point of economic activity, which isn't trading but fulfilling of human wants and needs. In other words, we are measuring (and studying) the wrong things.
There's an old joke, and I use the term loosely, among economists along the lines of "How can you tell macroeconomists have a sense of humor? They use decimal points."
Another old joke is "Money can't buy happiness but it can buy (fill in the blank as you wish) which is the same thing."
You are correct that we might be studying the wrong things but trade has the advantage of being relatively measurable, and I would trust revealed preferences over other forms of measurement as well.
I always liked "Money can't buy happiness, but the rental agreement for happiness is pretty good."
I think you put your finger on it: trade is more easily measurable, so they measure it. It is a classic case of looking for your keys by the light post because the light is better there. And that is ok, so far as it goes, but it does mean that we want to recognize that GDP as a measure is a very wobbly one, with all that entails. Such as "Don't optimize for it" or "Don't use it for things it isn't meant to be used for" and my personal favorite "Don't give functional value to what it happens to measure while dismissing the things it doesn't." I think that defining non-traded production out of "economic activity" does exactly the latter, as we say economic activity is good, economic activity is only trade, so therefore only production for trade is good. That isn't quite what we should be taking away.
I hadn't heard that joke before. It's great!
You can object all you want. If it doesn't involve trade it isn't economic activity, just activity. Fulfilling human needs and wants is a worthy goal but it is entirely unmeasurable for multiple reasons.
Go on, please. This doctor of economics would love to hear you expound on the definition of economic activity. Please don't let your boundless ignorance stop you. You never have before.
Please direct further rudeness toward Kling...
"What is GDP supposed to measure? I think of it as a measure of economic activity, meaning goods and services bought in the market." (The explanation continues)
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-gdp-indicator?utm_campaign=comment&utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack&utm_content=post
From your previous post: "You can object all you want. If it doesn't involve trade it isn't economic activity, just activity."
Your definition is incorrect. Kling is also incorrect in defining economic activity as only that activity involving the buying and selling of goods. Your definition is more incorrect, however, as by your definition any non-sold production that involves trade, such as buying some of the inputs for the production, would in fact be economic activity. You are just too dense to see that your own point doesn't support your argument.
Economic activity is any activity where decisions are made around the production, trade or consumption of goods or services. Being measurable is not one of the requirements.
"any non-sold production that involves trade, such as buying some of the inputs for the production, would in fact be economic activity."
I don't know how there can be buying of non-sold production but I should not have substituted "trade" (which could be barter) for "buying and selling of goods." My apologies.
As for where you say Kling is incorrect, take it up with him. I'm tired of your rudeness.
Newton's laws is a bad example because Newton's laws have (mostly) been superseded. For this analogy to work you would immediately start teaching intro physics students relativity theory and treat Newton's laws as a historical curiosity. Nobody does that of course because you start where the student is, which is also what most philosophers do, including Aristotle.
It's not really true to say that Newton's laws have been superseded. It's true that they are not correct under various special circumstances, but they are still used for almost everything in our everyday lives.
"economic activity (paid for in the market)"
Yes. Absolutely. It is important to recognize that GDP is in no way a measure of human flourishing, well-being, or total economic activity, it is merely a measure of money changing hands. GDP does not provide an apples-to-apples basis for meaningful international comparisons of policy outcomes. That is why Folbre and others should look to meaningful measures such as the Human Development Index for policy analysis purposes. GDP only tells stories about local trends and policies.
For example, the idea of outlawing home gardening as a climate change control measure has apparently gained some traction among the largely urban, predominately female portion of the electorate. If home gardening is outlawed, GDP will increase because people will buy more food rather than produce their own. But all that GDP increase will tell you, just like the child-care example, is that money is now changing hands where money did not before. If we were to define such policies
as Pareto optimal, that is making everybody better off and nobody worse off, because they represent a pure increase GDP, then where to stop. Require licensed professional shoe-tiers with graduate degrees in shoelace science to supervise apprentice shoelace tiers to attend to the wearing and removal of footwear for every individual? Think of the boost to GDP! And with sufficiently open borders there would be no labor market distortions! Why hasn't anyone thought of this before?
"If a summary of Hegel does not suffice, that is because one of the unsettled questions is what the heck Hegel was trying to say."
Well said!
Continuing on the topic of the summarizability of physical laws and the fact that we don’t read Newton et al. The fact that important physical laws can be written on one line tells us something about our attention span for these laws. Using the analogy of a toy—one line physical laws, at least the most common ones used by Mech E, Civil E, Elect E, Optic E—are very simple once you understand them. As a consequence, jobs in these fields “wear out” quickly like simple kids’ toys. At least they don’t seem to hold my attention for very long. Of course there are exceptions. Maxwell’s Equations are difficult and abstract, and easy to forget. They are four coupled equations that describe light matter interactions.
But this brings about a bigger issue with much of earthly physics—it lack the complexity of the human mind and of human markets. Earthly physics and engineering gets boring—at least doing it 40 hours a week, after about 15 years. And in order to make it through 15 years of engineering work, I had to change jobs and industries quite often—too often. So science and engineering have the upside of being able to build and create tangible objects which is really gratifying for a while, but then these objects get boring. Almost sterile. And then what? Philosophy! Religion! Smithian economics! Evolutionary biology and psychology! Anything involving the human mind! Family! Or astronomy and cosmology if one has access to a world class telescope.
And to be fair, part of my estrangement from engineering and science is not by choice. Politics has ruined Silicon Valley for families with children. Similarly “regime uncertainty”—as espoused by Robert Higgs—has made it difficult to focus on highly technical work while raising a family in Silicon Valley. Joyce Benenson and Rob Henderson have helped me see that “regime uncertainty” and “childhood instability” are not that different from war. These are all huge distractions from the tranquil life of wealth accumulation and career focus that was instilled in me as a child. Men are warriors and we respond to instability and uncertainty by “preparing for war.” What this means is still a bit of a mystery to me. Thoughts?
Related to the idea of not reading the original writings of Newton or Maxwell and similar natural philosophers (now known as scientists).
We have better notation or a preferred notation. In order to be “all-on-the-same-page,” it’s better to start and finish with the same notation. It certainly makes creating, grading and taking tests easier. Have you ever tried answering test questions on Maxwell’s equations written by a professor using a very different notation? Not cool. Also, communicating with co-workers that use different notation is an added pain. So it’s better to have standards for notation. Engineers are driving by profit and loss, war, managers, customers—we need to get stuff done. And we can’t mess around. People’s lives are at stake. A sign error can be deadly. So, engineering and the science profession have different demands than philosophers. These demands cause us to learn our fundamentals differently, with standards for efficiency, productivity and safety.
This is a very good point. Modern vector and tensor notation makes physical laws much easier to understand.
Good point. Did the natural philosophers not use it?
I haven't ever read original Newton or Maxwell, but I have read some works from the early 1900s that had a long list of equations for the various coordinate combinations, which can be replaced by a single tensor equation that is much easier to understand.
The error of "equalitarianism" is not to treat group differences as hypotheses of injustice o correlates of some underlying problem rather than a problem in and of itself.
“I would rather read a summary of an important philosopher than go back to the original.” Including Hayek?
"I would rather read a summary of an important philosopher than go back to the original. If a summary of Hegel does not suffice, that is because one of the unsettled questions is what the heck Hegel was trying to say. That is Hegel’s problem, not mine."
If you haven't read "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" you are missing something.
Besides that, the value of reading long ago scholars depends on who you are and what your goal is. The amateur philosopher should probably be mostly reading recent writing that summarizes past work. For scholars trying to push the known boundary it is almost a certainty they need to read the most relevant early works.
“I would rather read a summary of an important philosopher than go back to the original.” Including Adam Smith?
Ironically the Lorenzo Warby piece sounds like it may have been informed by Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and, the same source is arguably the intellectual progenitor of Dr. Kling's writings on human interdependence. See: https://www.thecollector.com/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel-political-philosophy/ I would be highly surprised if Warby has not read Hegel and a little if he did not confess to having profited from the experience.
And Hegel really should be of more interest to economists since he at least took great interest in economics, reading widely, and incorporating economic thought into his works. Oddly, the great and wonderful, Online Library of Liberty, which makes available for free the work of so many great philosophers and which cannot be praised enough (even if it does not contribute to GDP), does not have any Hegel among the many rich works of philosophy in its extensive catalog. However, Delphi offers a collected works ebook for $1.99 and with a little patience, one might surprise oneself by what one might become engrossed in.
But what the heck, ignore the German philosophic tradition: the Germans can be a bit challenging at times. This is the same rationale that probably explains why so few BA's in economics have actually read The Wealth of Nations cover to cover and why probably only 1 in a 1,000 has read more than a chapter or two in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Not everybody likes to read books, I understand that. However, it seems that there is more to it than that, but rather seems to be a general disdain for autodidacticism rooted in rigid notions of the propriety of an intellectual hierarchy, and that this hierarchy is sustained by posts like Dr. Kling's. However, if one is of a rebellious spirit and does happen to have an inquiring mind and might be open to the experience, a great case for undertaking the reading of classics is made in a new column out today by Jon Gabriel at Discourse Magazine (https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/the-autodidact-to-improve-society ):
"Today, we’re struggling with similar questions about how to do the right thing in a petty, ugly and violent world. Granted, if we choose the wrong side today, we aren’t likely to see our city sacked, but human nature is a pretty consistent thing.
Whether you choose the books mentioned above or pick up something more recent, you’re going to learn a lot more about people, politics and principle than you will from your smartphone. Better yet, you’ll be filling your life with ideas that have stood for centuries.
If I can be an autodidact, anyone can. And I offer this column as one more way to make sense of our current moment, drawing in lessons from history as we prepare for the future."
https://www.discoursemagazine.com/p/the-autodidact-to-improve-society
We had such a competition to love and accept children. The reward was emotional and material support in old age. Most everybody lost, it seems. The state took over the material support, which had obviously failed by the Great Depression; at which point many elderly were destitute. The emotional support has not yet been shouldered by anyone, because the magnitude of the task outsizes the capacity of the market/aggregate supply. This is one of the gaps AI is hoped to fill [ElliQ]. Good luck with that, just like with Social Security. More likely that the population will continue to crash and the elderly to suffer the consequences of family non-formation.
Then you are focusing on something very trivial with GDP. Which is fine, I guess, if trivia is the explicit interest. All those USDA school lunches, mostly chunked in the trash ...
Offhand, to stand in for hundreds of examples one could easily adduce, I think of the unpaid work of the women who saved the Alamo from destruction. An extreme example perhaps, but there are only three pillars to the economy of San Antonio: quarrying/concrete, military, and tourism. The latter entirely flows from the mystique of the Alamo. Yet those women's work doesn't amount in anyone's calculus to babysitting your child.