The right-wing vs. rationality and decency

It's a myth that philosophers are supposed to remain all nice and civil, calm and detached and cerebral. There are times that the overwhelming indecency of an opponent calls for taking the gloves off. This is proper and even arguably necessary when an opponent is so intellectually indecent and discreditable that they have removed themselves from the realm of civilized discourse. This is especially so when they use their dishonorable and indecent position to mess with other people's lives.

Sure enough, one could go through the motions, time after time, to refute the silliness and lameness of their arguments, but when it keeps up, it's time to say "Enough is enough." At some point you stop playing touchy-feely-nicey and respectful towards the arguments and call out your opponents for the vicious SOBs they are. We don't sit around continuing to argue and debate over the merits of Al-Qaida's "arguments" for declaring war on the west and rationalizing flying themselves into buildings. At some point, the pretense to argument gives way to their decision to harm us and our values. At that point, you fight back.

And so, here, I want to give today's American right-wing the lashing it richly deserves.

I am fed up with the right-wing of today's America. I've had it up to here with their nonsense masquerading as a pretense to logical argument. Time and time again their anti-logical excuses for arguments are refuted, their non-sequiturs and other myriad fallacies unrooted. And yet they persist. And yet they insist on polluting the discourse. They push forward in undermining reason and science. They decide their intolerant and unthinking bigotry needs to proceed, and they complain when "the left" is no longer so tolerant in response.

The American right-wing, of today, as we know it, is a sorry excuse for anything trying to be an intellectual movement. It does no one any good to enable it and engage it in discourse when it flouts the very principles of rational discourse.

Nowhere is this more evident than the issue one which the Right has made one of its most ridiculous stands: the issue of gay marriage.

In the current politicized manifestation of today's opposition to gay marriage, there is nothing approaching respectability. The "arguments" are lame, the refutations of them easy. The jurisprudence that would back any of this is backwards and reactionary and will be a blot on history just as past jurisprudence in defense of the indefensible was a blot on history. The Right is on the losing side of history on this one. Just as in the past, the Right will go down in history as being of the same sort of unenlightened, backwards, uncivilized mentality as those who wanted to keep slavery going. The political movement to deny rights of marriage to gays is politicized hate and bigotry with lousy rationalizations for cover.

So let's not kid ourselves. Let's not pussy-foot around the issue. Today's American Right Wing stinks to high heaven.

I hold the likes of Limbaugh, Kristol and Coulter personally responsible for the wave upon wave of dishonest argumentation that enables this fiasco. Maybe the rank-and-file just don't know better. But these figures do.

Gay people just want to go about their business of living their lives under legal and civil equality. So why should anyone care so much about whether they want to get married? It's a matter of equality under state laws and decent, thoughtful, logic-respecting people already recognize that church doctrines aren't supposed to dictate state laws. So how has this become such a politically-charged issue? Why does such a large segment of the population care about consenting adults entering into contracts that do not bear in a negative way on the ability of anyone else in society to lead happy and successful lives?

Why is gay marriage such a big issue that it has the right-wing devoting unseemly amounts of time, effort and attention to it? Why, of all issues and problems that we could be focusing on, have they made this into such an issue? (Don't we have things to do like making sure our government doesn't torture people or hype up a case for going to war? Things like that?) Well, they have their Holy Scripture that tells them that homosexuality is a sin and an abomination. Under quite reasonably straightforward interpretations of some passages, it requires that these sinners be put to death. That's not so far-fetched when you consider that in some parts of the world, such insanity is the law of the land. But the right-wing has given up on so much of discredited literal interpretation of Holy Scriptures as it is, so why the adherence to alleged Holy Writ on this issue?

Just what if the Right loses this issue (as it should and, I believe, in time, will)? What will it have to move onto next? What irrationality will it find to foist on us then? What new "hardline stand in the name of traditional values" will they take? This one seems really, really important to them.

Who knows. What we do know is that if the past and present are any indication of the future, it will be the same old nonsense reconstituted to oppose some new piece of progress towards greater human enlightenment.

Let there be no mistaking: it's all fine and good to talk about the kinds of values that genuine conservatives talk about. Family, individual responsibility, moral restraint, respecting the wisdom of traditions: these sorts of things are part and parcel of a well-integrated liberal worldview. These things are great when couched in a proper intellectual context. But to use these ideas as buzzwords and cover for moral, social and cultural backwardness and illogic, is indecent, inhumane, and intolerable, and it is the height of perversity. And it's well past time that we should not be treating this intellectual sickness with kid gloves.

Theocons

As a follow-up to my earlier posting covering Andrew Sullivan's response to a theocon, I want to address a follow-up point he and a reader of his make.

The reader says:

In fact, there is another way, the way chosen by the Mennonites and the Amish: to turn away from some, or even most, elements of the modern world, rejecting them as tools of the Devil, and to live in communities of like-believers allowing at most few contacts with outsiders. Of course, in doing so, that community surrenders any pretensions to remake society at large in their own image. They have to settle for the old fashioned strategy of influencing others to their point of view by persuasion, and let the Devil take the rest. I don't think the theocons would ever settle for that, of course.

Sullivan replies:

Agreed. I think that's where Rod is headed and I respect anyone who chooses it. But it is not a political solution for the whole. It is a spiritual one for the part.

I discuss the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable people of faith here. When we are dealing with folks that flout basic principles of epistemology, we are dealing with folks who differ only in content or degree but not in kind from the religious fanatics who run the Taliban. With no objectively defined principles of epistemology, the operative principle becomes "anything goes." This is the one major valid point shining through in all of Christopher Hitchens's railings against religion (and, of course, Ayn Rand's).

Are we somehow expected to believe that folks who defy objective epistemic principles are going to confine their behaviors to small communities rather than try to impose their vision on a large polity? They Know, after all -- don't ask how they Know -- that they have God on their side and they Know what's best for society (and, heck, the whole world). And they don't see the need to reason things out with skeptics who happen to believe different things, so what's wrong with some force? Sure, historically and contingently, we might well have such religious societies that keep to themselves in their isolated communities. After all, anything goes.

So, it should not come as any kind of surprise whatsoever that the Religious Right in this country is doing just what it is doing: trying to impose their agenda on everyone. That's what unreason is and does, and Hitchens and Rand are exactly right in not pulling any punches.

Sullivan is right to criticize these modern carriers of unreason, and to distinguish those who are basically reasonable (such as himself) from those who reject reason as a principle. However, I don't see him being aggressive enough. Sure, they could go and form their isolated communities and that would be nice of them if they can't learn to live and let live in a wider polity, but how realistic is it to expect this of them? It is only by virtue of contingency and accident that we can expect that of them. The chief, root problem here is the unreason; the force and politicization are just manifestations.

(Hitchens is also onto something as far as religion generally is concerned: what, exactly, distinguishes reasonable religious belief from unreasonable religious belief? Reasonable people can be religious but they are also mistaken in believing that their beliefs mesh well with reason, try as they might to reconcile it all. Sullivan's basic reasonableness is what keeps him humble and his religion privatized, but he's still operating on flawed epistemological foundations. One step removed from the epistemological quicksand is to go the route of the philosophers and attempt to justify a belief in God on the basis of logical argument. One step further removed still is to question the epistemological framework in which arguments for God are presented. Rationalism is not, after all, synonymous with reason.)

We're in the Twilight Zone

I'm thinking it's like a scene out of Luis Buñuel flick:

Oogedy-Boogedy

All of a sudden, the phrase "oogedy-boogedy" is drifting throughout the blogosphere where it hadn't been before. It has something or other to do with the wingnut religious (i.e., religulous) right, but I wanted to get a clean-cut definition. So I Googled it and the first two pages of results is blog entries from the past two days or so. So that doesn't help too much.

So is this a birth of a new meme, or is it just a blip?

(What tags do I even use for this? Do I create a new "oogedy-boogedy" tag just to be ahead of the curve?)

A Daily Dish highlight

Andrew Sullivan has been on a rampage as of late (I thought the election was over?), and while there are a lot of good entries, there are some that are special highlights. This admonishment and olive branch extended today towards the religious right is one such example.

It seems to border on the ludicrous at times that we should even have to be having such a debate. That there should be a clean wall of separation between church and state just sounds like common sense. That gay couples should enjoy the same legal rights, protections, immunities and privileges as straight couples is just common sense. That matters of public policy should be debated on secular levels so as to respect and accommodate people of all faiths or non-faiths is just common sense. (I'll note that in the case of Obama, whatever his professions of faith, they have no bearing on how he wants to conduct policymaking. Perhaps it is this and not some bogus "he's a Muslim" threat that has the Religious Right scared. And what if he were a Muslim rather than Christian -- so what?)

I want to tread carefully here to make sure I'm not lumping dissimilar concretes together, the way that the right-wing might like to lump Obama together with socialists/Marxists/Communists: what I see in the Religious Right's moral-political vision is hard to distinguish, in principle, from the moral vision of the Taliban. The idea that a state is supposed to implement a religious vision for a society is pre-modern and anti-liberal. We were supposed to have outgrown that idea some 230 years ago. Some of our most respected leaders of that time were Deists who thought that this-worldly reason could serve as an adequate guide to knowledge, morality and politics. How are the politicized Christianists different from the Taliban? In terms of the specific content of what they want to impose, it's distinct: the Christianists don't speak of legally confining women to the home, of putting gays to death (though some do believe this!), of persecuting heretics, and so on.

It's useful to ask why these differences are there, because that would best help us to understand whether it's really a difference in degree or in kind.

As best as I can tell, the Christianist movement in this country has a profoundly anti-reason "epistemology." It attacks the integrity of the scientific profession, while hiding subjectively-held religious tenets from a careful, epistemically-responsible public scrutiny. There seem to be, in differing degrees or ways, arbitrary re-readings of the Bible to accommodate for this or that piece of common sense. It was not, however, always so. Before modernity and science became prominent, a number of things considered ugly by post-Enlightenment standards were the prevailing wisdom. Were those things as ugly as the things that the Taliban enforced in Afghanistan? No, but is that just a matter of some more enlightened vision of the Christianists, or a matter of historical accident? If it's a matter of accident, we are dealing in differences in degree and not in kind. When pre-modern, pre-scientific, anti-reason "epistemology" is let loose, what is ruled out, in principle?

Somehow the mainstream of the West realizes the unacceptable, pre-modernist horror of what passes for legally-imposed morality in Islamist societies. It is pre-modern notions of morality that are being used by an influential segment of American society to deny gays equal civil rights, in spite of (hopefully) dominant and prevailing progressive Western trends. Just as a matter of principle, this is unacceptable. As a matter of practicality, this segment of American society is finding itself on the losing side of history, and to what end?

Just as a piece of philosophical advice, it would behoove the religious right to give up on the notion of "eternal truths" that are grounded in dubious interpretations of natural kinds and of teleology. (Again, see Sullivan's blog entry for the reference.) I'm as much a fan of (modernized!) Aristotelianism as anyone, but I like to think that Aristotle was such a progressive thinker that were he alive today, he'd scoff at notions of Platonic Form and all the havoc they have wrought.

FDR and the Great Depression

(Attention directed towards the article discussed from Brian Leiter's Philosophy Blog.)

Paul Krugman was just awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for 2008. I've heard this and that about Krugman from both admirers and critics, and read his column occasionally. One thing I can tell for sure is that he strongly disapproves of George W. Bush. Another is that he tends to favor Democrats and urges a move towards universal health care. He seems pretty standard for a highly intelligent and well-educated liberal pragmatist. Another thing I have read about him is that he bucks the supposed liberal "conventional wisdom" on free trade. But that would just make him quite mainstream for the economics profession. And you'll probably find few economists who approve of Bush as it is.

Anyway, a Nobel Laureate in Economics is not one to be messed with lightly. However, I do think that Nobel Laureates worth their laurels also possess an honorable humility about the limits of their profession to generate the best policy proposals. (One thing that Krugman did correctly "foresee" was the housing-bubble burst, but in retrospect we all probably could have looked at adjusted housing price data and realized the prices were way above fairly steady historical norms.) That being said, Krugman writes this about FDR's New Deal policies, seeing as they now have a renewed relevance with a big recession on the way and a liberal Democrat entering office:

Now, there’s a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse. So it’s important to know that most of what you hear along those lines is based on deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. The New Deal brought real relief to most Americans.

That said, F.D.R. did not, in fact, manage to engineer a full economic recovery during his first two terms. This failure is often cited as evidence against Keynesian economics, which says that increased public spending can get a stalled economy moving. But the definitive study of fiscal policy in the ’30s, by the M.I.T. economist E. Cary Brown, reached a very different conclusion: fiscal stimulus was unsuccessful “not because it does not work, but because it was not tried.”

This may seem hard to believe. The New Deal famously placed millions of Americans on the public payroll via the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. To this day we drive on W.P.A.-built roads and send our children to W.P.A.-built schools. Didn’t all these public works amount to a major fiscal stimulus?

Well, it wasn’t as major as you might think. The effects of federal public works spending were largely offset by other factors, notably a large tax increase, enacted by Herbert Hoover, whose full effects weren’t felt until his successor took office. Also, expansionary policy at the federal level was undercut by spending cuts and tax increases at the state and local level.

And F.D.R. wasn’t just reluctant to pursue an all-out fiscal expansion — he was eager to return to conservative budget principles. That eagerness almost destroyed his legacy. After winning a smashing election victory in 1936, the Roosevelt administration cut spending and raised taxes, precipitating an economic relapse that drove the unemployment rate back into double digits and led to a major defeat in the 1938 midterm elections.

What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.

Now, I'm just an amateur with only an undergraduate degree in economics, but my critical antennae are up when we're told that FDR didn't really do much in the way of fiscal stimulus and yet we also see that GDP was expanding rapidly from its 1933 trough. Unemployment had fallen from 25 to about 15 percent before the '38 recession. Here's that graph I've referenced a few times:















So as I understand it, the economy was expanding pretty well, without much in the way of fiscal stimulus, and when FDR did something inadvisable by cutting back on what stimulus there was, or by increasing fiscal constrictions (raising taxes), the economy didn't do so well. So was the economy in need of the fiscal stimulus for strong recovery to happen, or not? Do the economists of either "right-wing" or "left-wing" orientation have a good answer? Hoover's 1932 tax hikes were a bad idea, and yet the economy started to turn around.

My (admittedly limited) understanding is that the Great Depression was, more than anything, the product of major mismanagement of monetary policy by the Federal Reserve. This seems to be a pretty well-accepted story about what happened, supported at least as definitively and authoritatively as anything else by Milton Friedman's study, A Monetary History of the United States, which was part of the reason Friedman himself was awarded the Nobel Prize. Yes, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was not good, but that did not lead to the wave of bank failures. Yes, Hoover's tax hike was not good, but that had happened well into the depression; it did not precipitate it. Yes, World War II, which involved massive amounts of government borrowing, got the economy kicking in the early '40s, pushing growth quite a bit faster during that period than would have happened otherwise. What is not clear from any of this is that the economy would not have reached its long-term growth path at some point not long after WWII made it happen.

I suppose the fallback argument is that it's just better, in any case, for the government to have guarantees in place in case for when people fall on hard times -- that, for example, it is unacceptable for the government not to do anything while 25 percent of the population is unemployed and government could provided stimulus to lower unemployment faster than the market could. At least that makes some sense. What makes even more sense is to figure out how to avoid a situation of 25 percent unemployment to begin with. I'm not convinced that the economists know how best to ensure that. The "laissez-faire" economists' explanations make about as much sense to me as any of the others'. This leaves arguments for government guarantees on grounds of justice rather than economic efficiency or necessity. There, we have arguments that look more interesting and don't fall prey (at least not obvious prey) to problems of knowledge.

Laissez Faire

My favorite internet hangout is on the "Off-Topic: Medium" forum for politics and religion at Ratebeer.com. I've spoken a bit about this forum previously; it's a good place to get intellectual challenges and it is populated in part by some bright and educated left-liberals (and bright and educated other folks as well). Here's a posting I wrote today to the forum; so far the only response after a few hours is from a poster with a Mises avatar. :-) But I'll wait and see if left-liberals have some good rebuttals and report back.

The posting:

I’m not a hardcore laissez-fairist like I used to be, but I wonder if it has a way of creeping back in when we take a pragmatic look at things and at history.

As I take a look at the growth of real GDP per capita as I note in a blog entry ( http://chriscathcart.blogspot.com/2008/11/partisanship-vs-economy.html ), it seems to be pretty much on a steady upward trend over time, aside from the calamitous Great Depression and the massive WW2 spending. Just taking a pragmatic view of history, there did not seem to be the kinds of depressions like the Great Depression, prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve, a centralized banking institution that was created by our wonderful and friendly bankers, and which subsequently let a whole bunch of banks fail after 1929. Of course, many leaders from Jefferson onward have spoken about how not to trust the bankers and so their move to centralize is probably just more of the same crap we had come to expect from them.

Here’s where I’m headed with this: One chief objection that I can think of against laissez-faire is that "the little people" would not be secure and would be left to fend for themselves in an indifferent and inhuman marketplace where power is consolidated in big businesses who can oppress them. But what I am looking for is some uncontroversial historical backing for this characterization of things. I hear different things coming from every direction. One explanation, which seems as plausible as any, is that government "protections for workers" didn’t become a matter of law early in the 20th century until it became economically feasible. It had required some hundred-plus years of economic growth to make these protections affordable and easy to implement across industries. Not that the big businesses didn’t have some incentive to have these regulations implemented, since they could more easily afford to comply than the smaller ones could and gain a competitive edge that way. (See how we need to be protected from the Big Bad Businesses?)

The history of the 19th century seems to be one that both "apologists for capitalism" and Marxists could agree was one that was (in Marxian terms) historically necessary to advance from a less economically-developed stage to a more economically-developed one. Yes, factory conditions weren’t fun but there’s arguments that it was better than what came before, and this was a necessary stage to go through to advance to where the advances for workers could happen.

So what my question is, aside from the needed and reasonable regulatory framework (one that effectively handles things like externalities, for instance) for there to be any marketplace, what if, rather than placing more and more control of the nation’s economic resources in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats and central bankers, the state had continued to let things run their course in a "laissez-faire" kind of way? Would we have reason to expect or believe that real GDP per capita would be much different than it is now? Would we have reason to believe we’d be better off in some ways but worse in others?

As I do my whole foray into a "pragmatic" view of society’s institutions, I’m just trying to come to grips with the concerns that enlightened folks on "the left" have about unfettered free markets. I think I’m pretty aware of such arguments as "well, it’s just a matter of justice to have safety nets," which is understandable but the institutions that we want to charge with the power of handling those safety nets aren’t going to be so enlightened and benevolent. There is blowback -- both economic and non-economic -- in ceding more powers to the state. GWB, no friend of the left, is just taking advantage of the power-structure situation given to him in order to wreak havoc both economically and non-economically (in the realm of civil liberties, international relations, etc).

I think the concerns of the left should involve looking beyond economics and to the wider picture about the human condition. It seems that strong and powerful people are always going to find ways to gain advantages (sometimes legitimately through their hard work and superior talents, sometimes by screwing people over). It seems people are always going to want to take measures to protect the most vulnerable members in their group. So what’s really the issue here? Is it really one of economic or power structures per se, or is it more about whether humanity is progressing from a less enlightened to more enlightened state? On this count, the left has a lot more going for it than the right, yes, but not so much in virtue of positions on economics per se. Don’t Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan and others on the Right offer plenty to dispel such notions?

A Dying GOP

A couple of the latest signs:

(1) Bush shows up to the G-20 summit and doesn't shake hands with foreign leaders. Neither he nor the other leaders extended their hands to one another, as all the other leaders were doing.

(2) So careful and measured a publication as The Economist lets loose on the GOP, stating that it has devolved from a once-respectable source of ideas to a party that has declared war on brains.

Just look at what gets the Right of today so worked up: gay marriage, Terri Schiavo, zygotes, fears about Obama being a Muslim, evolution being taught in science curricula, a distrust of educated "elites," an un-vetted vice-presidential candidate with little apparent interest in learning, and so on. The GOP is now wrestling with questions about how to be electable while still adhering to these "principles" that appeal most to a certain core constituency. The majority of American don't want their social "conservatism," their sorry excuses for presidential leaders and candidates, their prideful ignorance, or their ideological intransigence mixed with a disdain for logic and reality. On the merits of the constituency and the "principles," what is there to wrestle with?

What "type" is this blog?

This "typealyzer" claims to be able to determine a blog's "type."

Here's what it had to say for this blog:

INTP - The Thinkers
[INTP]
The logical and analytical type. They are especialy [sic] attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

This is followed by a a chart showing "what parts of the brain that were dominant during writing," and shows an upside-down-triangular shaded region in the top "thinking" half, with the bottom point occurring about halfway between "idealist" and "practical." Little of the triangle shows up in the "sensing" and "feeling" areas, though the sensing and feeling seem as important to me as the thinking and intuiting, just as idealism is as important as practicality. Damn false dichotomies! Maybe I just need to think of better ways to integrate thinking and sensing.

Or maybe the blogalyzer can only be so informative . . .

Music break: Beethoven's Op. 132 quartet

From time to time I may want to give props to music or artists I find great but under-recognized. Beethoven certainly isn't under-recognized as an artist, but certain parts of his corpus of work are. He is, of course, most well-known for his nine symphonies, but his "late" string quartets (composed in the last years of his life, around 1824-1826) offer many of his most searching insights into the human spirit. The Cavatina movement from his string quartet No. 13 (op. 130) is the most well-known movement from this set, but my favorite is the middle (third) movement of his quartet No. 15 (op. 132).

Stupid Flying Spaghetti Monster

From the "Is it a parody?" department:

Dear dumb ass folowers of FSMism

Dear dumb ass folowers of FSMism,

There have been a lot of weird things that i have seen in my life before, but this tops them all. Do you really believe that there is/was such a thing as a flying spaghetti monster? Seriously, how fucking old are you? I know there’s such a thing as freedom of speech and expression, but this kinda shit should be banned. Theres is only one God and one Holy Word. Why dont you people get that? How much sense does it make to say that decreasing numbers of pirates lead to an increase in average global temperature? Is that science or some fifth grader trying to sound smart?

You are the kinds of people I dread to meet in public. If I were to ever have the displeasure of meeting your retarded ass, I would probably beat you senseless untill your stupid childish mind thought like a normal person and believed in something that sounds correct instead of just saying “Eh, lets make a new religion..and what the hell, our ‘god’ should be a clump of spaghetti. Oh, and it should have eyes and be able to fly. Lets bow down to it and see how many people follow suit!”

Damn you all to hell!! Better yet, somebody should lock you in a fucking psychiatric ward for further examination because they obviously didnt do that enough when you dumb fucks were born. I hope this web page is taken off the web as quickly as it was put up.

–Sincerly,
ANNONYMOUS

DISCLAIMER: I am not a believer in FSM, dumbass or any other kind.

Gutter journalism

An example of the trash that passes for opinion writing at a leading conservative media outlet:

"Why they hate her"

There isn't even anything resembling a hint of an attempt to understand her critics, and the facts on which they base their assessments. This is just blazing anti-intellectualism that seemingly takes pride in not getting it.

If there is any "hate" going on here, it is not towards Gov. Palin. It is towards idiots like Mark Hyman who act as enablers.

Perhaps it's satire?

Rationality vs. rationalism

I'd like to cull together some points I have made recently about rationality (higher-level vs. cut-rate) and some points I made earlier about rationalism and Hayek.

In my recent posting I used the example of the cruel farming practices of today and how I envision them going away in the not-too-distant future. From the standpoint of a higher-level rationality by which one can direct a critical eye towards present-day institutions, we can say that those who are sufficiently informed and reasonable would call for doing away with certain institutions as soon as possible. This is not, however, to say that they would call for doing away with those institutions immediately. To say that those institutions ought to be done away with immediately is to say that they realistically can be. To ignore this connection is to do moralizing within a vacuum and to pretend that society can be altered on the turn of a dime. This is the fallacy of "constructivist" rationalism as identified by Hayek, and touched upon in various ways by Rand and Peikoff.

In order for societies to take dramatic shifts in direction in a short period of time, a critical mass needs to be reached. This critical mass can be built through intellectual as well as economic factors, to name just two factors at work. For example, I see the abolition of factory farming as something that would require both intellectual and economic factors to have coalesced: the wider and wider recognition of the cruelty of those practices combined with their declining economic efficiency. Wider and wider recognition does not happen overnight: knowledge and information flows take time to spread and take hold. We cannot easily predict, given all the factors pro and con, how long it takes for such information to take hold. If we take the spread of knowledge about evolution as an example, we have factors working against such knowledge taking hold here in the America that are not at work in other advanced nations.

This also informs how I evaluate the qualities of our present political leaders. Seeing as a political ideal is not realistically attainable in the very near future, we need to evaluate our political leaders on the basis of how well they deal with the challenges facing nations here and now. That is why it matters whether we have an Obama or a Palin as a leader. One alternative represents more wisdom, prudence, and humility required for such a job than the other does.

As I also pointed out in an addendum to this posting, in which I note that the level of government involvement in the economy over the last century seems to have had little discernible impact on the growth rate of real GDP per capita, that (in addition to considerations about knowledge and power, like what I've been discussing here) this looks like a case for being a libertarian. Note what point I was not making: that we should ditch the current framework right away in favor of a libertarian one. For that to even be realistic, we need a critical mass to have been reached, and we are far from that. The failure to recognize this is akin to the failure of anti-abortion-rights activists to adjust to the reality of what it takes to effect legal or constitutional change.

I would like to ask another question, the subject of which likely relates to the main subject here: How would the level of government involvement seem to have such little impact on the real GDP growth rate? We do know already that government leaders -- politicians -- aren't, on average, particularly honest, enlightened, reasonable, etc. So how does their increased intrusion into our affairs not generate a drag on economic growth? Here's one suggestion: These politician-types have always been around and amongst us, but they have merely found new outlets for their politician-type behavior. Indeed, these politician-types inhabit both our public and our "private" institutions to this day, scamming people this way and that. Allegedly with increased state power comes increased oversight, with the same politician-types in charge of the oversight.

I think that a proper understanding of rationality takes at once both a moral or ideal perspective about what ought to be, and a realistic perspective about the way humans and institutions operate here and now. The failure of rationalism is to take only one of these perspectives and to attempt to impose a vision upon a recalcitrant world. Many times this has led to astounding levels of death and destruction in practice.

Obama's transition

My cursory impression of Obama's transition is that he is not to be messed with. He is already delivering on the promise of bringing higher-caliber leadership to the office. He isn't slacking during his transition period; he's building up his team with some smart picks (Emanuel) with the aim of hitting the ground running on Jan. 20. I've seen him being likened to a Machiavellian master, and some of his moves (Lieberman) reflect a famous piece of advice many attribute to the Corleones: Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

Perhaps I'm just seeing a bunch of spin from his admirers and that Obama's craftiness should be cause for fear rather than hope. But let's take a couple facts here: He is running on all cylinders, already just two weeks after the election and some 60 days to go until inauguration. He's made a strong impression with the pick of Rahm Emanuel, and the talk is that Bill Clinton -- lauded himself as a very smart political operative -- was not even preparing this much or this well during his interim period.

What should not be surprising in any of this is that Obama already presented as a figure who would bring first-rate intelligence and decision-making to the office. We already saw it in his life story. We already saw it in how well he ran his campaign. It is like Karl Rove's mastery, except a version that actually shows some promise of being decent and human.

He's looking forward, doing what he needs to do to make it a resounding landslide win in '12. He's looked at the Bush record and realized that Bush barely pulled out two election wins against lousy opponents and by promoting lousy policies that alienated the rest of the world. He knows that much better can be done.

Can anyone imagine the flailing incompetence that a McCain/Palin transition team would be displaying by comparison? Can you just imagine?

Reason vs. (unreasonable) faith

Epistemically speaking, I do not consider faith to be reasonable. In fact, faith and epistemology are mutually exclusive: if there is a claim amenable to epistemic analysis, then it not a claim that is, strictly speaking, one made on faith. So let's break things down further:

- Reasonable people of faith
- Unreasonable people of faith

When I say that, epistemically speaking, faith is not reasonable, I am not saying that all people of faith are unreasonable. In order to even qualify for being reasonable or unreasonable, one needs to stand in a particular relation of understanding to how a proposition flies in the face of reason. Now, propositions asserted on the basis of faith, absent justifications, fly in the face of reason in virtue of how the proposition is asserted. It does not mean that the proposition is false, just that the act of asserting the proposition flies in the face of reason, by which I mean that it flies in the face of what we should take to be a good reason for believing (or what counts in favor of believing) a proposition.

I'll explain further: A proposition asserted on faith is a proposition asserted in defiance of what it means to consider a proposition using reason. In order to consider a proposition using reason, one should be able, in principle, to tie the proposition to an existing body of knowledge. It is not merely that a proposition asserted on faith "goes beyond" reason or is consistent with propositions known via reason, such that we could have a realm of faith-based propositions peacefully co-existing with propositions known via reason to be true. It is that reason and faith are at odds. In this epistemically stringent sense, there is no such thing as a reasonable faith.

I think that many people of faith are unaware of the epistemic nature of this tension, hence it is not on this basis alone that we could conclude whether someone of faith is reasonable or not. It is the attitude regarding the relation between reason and faith that distinguishes which of these people are reasonable from those that are not.

The mechanisms of belief, faith-based belief perhaps even more pronouncedly, are complex and varied. One thing we have to be able to pin down is whether someone actually believes a proposition, much less understands what the proposition says. We have to be able to determine whether a person affirming a proposition on faith is really making an affirmation of belief and not something else. Epistemically speaking, a proposition proposed on the basis of faith is one that is disconnected from both (a) known propositions and (b) known means and methods of justifying propositions and placing them within a body of knowledge.

That asserting a proposition on the basis of faith flies in the face of reason (in virtue of flouting means and methods by which a proposition can be justified), does not in itself guarantee that a person asserting such a proposition is being unreasonable. But say that a person, perhaps sensing a conflict between propositions that are already well-supported via reason and a faith-based proposition, decides to deny the reason-supported proposition in favor of the faith-based one. It is difficult to imagine something more unreasonable than this, but that does characterize the behavior of those who, perhaps not even caring what the evidential support for evolution is, deny evolution in the belief that such a theory conflicts with their religion. According to polling, this phenomenon is actually quite widespread in America.

There are other variants on unreasonable faith; this just happens to be a very obvious one. But there are also those who hold some beliefs on the basis of faith but who are basically reasonable in their worldview. Their faith does not significantly impact on how they tend to assess facts and the merits of arguments. They just have what an epistemic perspective would tell us is a blind spot in their cognitive framework. (One glaring problem is interfaith-differences: people of other faiths can affirm any number of things -- even quite ugly and dangerous things -- that are incompatible with that which they themselves affirm.) They might even be quite skeptical towards their own faith and realize that, the object of their faith not being accessible (or "easily accessible") to just any members of the human community, they have little to no legitimate basis for trying to impose their beliefs on others. Most importantly, these people are often basically open to hearing objections and arguments against affirming things on the basis of faith. The fundamental opposition here is not between reason and faith, but between reason and unreason.

Figuring out which people of faith are basically reasonable and which are basically not, can require some time and work determining the facts of each individual case. Otherizing is not advisable here; however, sometimes it is pretty quick and easy to figure who is most likely open to reason and who is not, on the basis of a few questions and answers. From this process, we can determine which people of faith are basically allies in the pursuit of truth, and which of them are not.

Palin vs. the truth

Well, as long as this story keeps sticking around rather than going away as it should, I'll keep commenting on it. By the time of the Gibson interview and certainly by the time of the Couric interview, it was evident that the Palin candidacy was an out-and-out farce and a travesty and only part of the punditry was ready and willing to call it just that. Nothing has changed that fact; the insanity of the fact that she was a candidate for Vice President is not going to be wiped out by any subsequent interviewing and spin, try as some people might.

So when I see this CNN segment in which the talking heads do their analysis, I already expect that it's more of the same from Palin and her apologists. It is just the way that entities of a given nature will act. Two facts that Palin got glaringly and demonstrably wrong in an attempt to portray herself as a victim of the media, while her interviewers (Matt Lauer and Greta van Susteren) treated her with kid gloves:

(1) That Couric had asked her "What do you read up there in Alaska?" Anyone who saw the original video knows that Couric did not word her question that way. This is outright revisionism in order to deceive or spin or deflect.

(2) That the mainstream media had been reporting or speculating or rumoring that Trig was not hers, when it was in fact only certain internet blogs that had circulated the rumor. Again, an outright distortion she just made up out of nowhere and was not called on by her interviewers.

There is no remotely plausible spin that turns these outright revisions into truth. They are flat-out falsehoods.

The media handling of this woman is such a product of epistemic disintegration that perhaps only a public sense of outrage could keep it in check, and apparently the public just isn't outraged enough. There is this mentality that "both sides" have to be heard out for a judgment to be rendered, and yet when Palin's side gets heard -- from Palin herself -- all we get is some version of reality manufactured in her own head, and one that hardly bears a superficial semblance to the actual reality at that. And the interviewers who just let her get away with constructing that reality are her enablers.

This is all so easily checked these days by the blogosphere, too. This suggests to me that some of these media outlets are not only engines of an epistemic disintegration that renders them and their consuming public that much less capable of distinguishing fact from non-stop spin and lies, but that these outlets don't even care whether the "news" they present has any integrity to it. Their method of "checking" themselves is having the epistemically-disintegrated "talking heads" format where any of the good talking heads get equal or less time alongside the hacks (such as the kid-gloves interviewers). Suggested in all this presentation is the subtle reassurance that the other side (Palin, in this case) would come back with a good rebuttal if only there were enough time. That itself is a sham and a farce, masquerading as responsible news coverage.

A good number of well-informed folks out there -- usually to be found on the blogosphere -- have grown sick and tired of this. Either we have institutions and leaders worth respecting, or we don't. Either some of those leaders and institutions are worth respecting, or they're not. When an organization such as CNN cannot do such a simple job as to conduct a challenging interview of a leader who constantly spins and distorts and asserts flat-out falsehoods, it is part of the problem.

Belief vs. "belief"?

Recently, James Whyte wrote a stimulating piece titled, "I don't believe that believers really believe." (The sub-heading is: "How can so many people accept pre-Enlightenment gobbledegook? Actually, they don't.") This notion is hardly at all original to Mr. Whyte, but it raises some good questions and points in a right direction, even if it doesn't go all the way with right answers.

Whyte writes:

The real test for genuine belief is not what people say, but what they do. To believe something is to be disposed to act upon it. The vast majority of Western Christians fail this test. ...

Suppose you believed that Heaven exists and that only some of us will qualify to live in it for ever, as the vast majority of Christians claim to. How would this affect your behaviour?

It would depend on what you thought were the admission criteria for Heaven. But whatever you took these virtues to be, they would utterly dominate your life. When everlasting bliss is on offer, nothing else matters at all. People who believed in Heaven would surely act quite unlike those who do not.

Yet the expected behavioural difference is not to be observed. The vast majority of Christians display a remarkably blasé attitude toward their approaching day of judgment, leading lives almost indistinguishable from those of us open non-believers. Put simply, they fail the behavioural test for belief.

(Whyte's piece is worth reading also for his discussion about the discrepancy between many Christians' belief that a moral equivalent of the Holocaust is happening in abortion clinics and these same Christians' relative complacency in doing something about it.)

One question to ask right off the bat is whether a behavioral test for belief is a good one. This idea also comes up in economics, where we are told that we never "really know" what someone's preference is until that person reveals it through a spending decision. But I'm not prepared to accept behavioral tests for discerning beliefs or preferences. There are too many complicated factors involved in how humans think and act. Sometimes people are just hypocrites, and while hypocrisy is certainly a problem, I do not jump to chalk up the discrepancy between someone's stated beliefs and actions to their not really holding that belief.

However, what I would do, is to question whether the hypocrite is holding beliefs that are rationally justified. Perhaps the reason there is a discrepancy between belief and action is that the belief simply demands too much; it is just not practically rational to abide by those beliefs. Here we come to an interplay between what is rational in a cute-rate sense and what is rational in a higher-level sense. Perhaps for any number of reasons it might be practically "rational" to adopt beliefs about eternal bliss even though there is no higher-level rational justification for those beliefs. One might even have a practically "rational" basis for believing something even though it would not be practically rational, given one's preference set, for following through on those beliefs. Hence why, despite Jesus's exhortations to give away one's earthly possessions, there is an abundance of wealthy Christians. The socially-valuable appearance of piety or the hope that a benevolent and understanding God would grant someone infinite grace might enter into such persons' systems of belief. From the standpoint of a higher-level rationality, however, such a belief-add-on looks very suspiciously like a form of rationalization meant to cover the earlier, unjustified tracks.

There may also be different dimensions of belief that occur before we even look at discrepancies between behavior and action. There may be a lower-level passive acceptance of something that one has done little work to really scrutinize. Do many people really even understand what it would mean for communion wafers and wine to become the body and blood of Christ? Doubtful, but from the standpoint of a community activity or some other set of factors, it "makes sense" to participate in communion. However, as a higher-level cognitive affirmation, the belief in such trans-substantiation requires some odd metaphysics and arguments, raising the question whether even higher-level rationality would command such an affirmation of belief.

There are higher-level-rational justifications for belief in a God that look more plausible, but the conception of God involved seems to get more and more "minimal" the more rigorously we try and pin it down -- by which I mean the God in question looks more and more like "the God of the philosophers" rather than the God of some specific religion or sect. I will have some more to write on this difference soon enough; I think it is this difference which separates those people "of faith" who essentially value rationality (and who are much less likely to put up with discrepancies between their stated beliefs and their actions) from those who hold their faith unreasonably.

Rationality: cut-rate vs. good

In my previous entry I discussed how evolution appears to have given us a cut-rate form of rationality which generates errors and bias that we have the higher-level rational tools to correct via epistemology. It would seem that with some fits and starts (some great, some small), humanity has been on a course of self-evolution, going from a more primitive to more enlightened state. There are ideas and practices that, in more primitive days, we would find at odds with civilized life. There are many countless examples through history.

Some of these advances have occurred more or less "naturally" as technological advances have occurred; sometimes these technological advances render adhering to the cut-rate forms of rationality less advantageous.

Now, I'll take one example of what our higher-level rationality tells us and what our cut-rate-level rationality fails to recognize: how we may properly treat animals.

For those who are informed about the way that animals are treated in today's factory farms, it is recognized for the abomination that it is on a whole number of levels. There is the mistreatment of the animals itself. There is the incredible wastefulness of growing food in this manner when the land and other resources could be used to grow other foodstuffs, and we now have a fast-food diet which is quite unhealthy (probably in part because that food is 93% corn-based).

At the same time, you have a consuming public that is quite indifferent to all these concerns. If they were informed and thoughtful enough on the matter, they would see that (higher-level) rationality dictates that they alter their consumption patterns drastically by reducing as much as feasible their consumption of factory-raised meat. Their decisions, then, are in all likelihood based on their evolutionarily-given cut-rate rationality. There are many contributing factors to such decision-making, one of which is that "the in-group" is engaged in the consumption of meat and it is "safe" to go along with the practices of the group. As long as those fast-food restaurants are all over the place, it probably means that fast food is okay rather than outrageous. The moral questions may not even occur to most of the consumers; best that unpleasantness be kept out of sight and out of mind.

I believe that, as technology advances, these attitudes will have a dramatic turnabout. In the not too distant future, technology will have reached such a stage that our food could be assembled in laboratory-factories. "Meat" would be synthesized from fundamental molecules to just the right flavor and specifications. Either the technology for that does not yet exist, or it is prohibitively expensive. In time, as such food-assembly becomes cost-effective, current practices of raising animals for food will become obsolete. All of a sudden it will no longer be considered necessary by both the food industry and its consumers to raise animals like this. At this point, public awareness of the treatment of animals will have tracked towards a more enlightened understanding, one which many philosophers today already are pushing. (It is economically feasible right now for consumers to alter their habits in a significantly vegetarian or vegan direction.) Cruel factory-farming processes will become a fringe practice and there will be a call to outlaw them as the public will not stand to let these practices go on if they can stop it.

It bears noting that political practices as we know them thrive on cut-rate rationality. (See: The Palin nomination as a marketing ploy.) You don't see today's politicians preaching to our higher natures on the subject of cruel farming practices. Lobbyists for the farming industry procure subsidies in order to more cheaply grow the foods that are worst for our diets.

My thought at the moment is that the reason that "the modern lifestyle" has many people feeling and being so empty spiritually is that a cut-rate rationality is not cut out for handling a lifestyle quite different than a primitive hunter-gatherer one. There's plenty more to be said and thought here . . .

Epistemic "noise" and our hardware

There's a seemingly endless stream of interesting stories being referenced on the Daily Dish. Today, there is an article about the virtual, computer-based mapping of the human brain, which can use a computer program and the right hardware to "behave in essentially the same way as the original brain." They suggest that the problem of free will can be dealt with rather easily by "including sufficient noise in the simulation ... Randomness is therefore highly unlikely to pose a major obstacle to WBE [whole brain emulation]."

Hmmmm.

This sounds like scientists doing their thing without really having a grip on the epistemic background. (I did not mean to apply to the title of this blog to that behavior itself, but it would indeed seem to be an example of epistemic noise.)

What this article led me to think was that I don't see free will as too difficult a subject to approach from a scientific perspective. Given a sufficiently sophisticated structure, you can have a being that is sufficiently self-directing that we can speak in terms of moral responsibility. This structure is, of course, a macro-level structure and so quantum-level indeterminacy would not be an issue. How these scientists figure that you can mimic a macro-level free-willed being by introducing "randomness" or indeterminacy which we only know to be a quantum-level phenomenon (and an orderly and regularly-patterned one!), is hardly clear at all. To successfully mimic the human brain, you need to mimic a being that has free will, and our free will is not accounted for by quantum-level indeterminacy.

I thought this would have been really basic stuff for scientists to realize before they proceed with this project. It is also a fact about human brains that, evolutionarily speaking, they developed and were organized in such a way as to direct a biological organism. The brain isn't stand-alone, but is integrated into a nervous system which is integrated further into the whole system known as the human body. In other words, it is not clear that these scientists are on the right path in knowing how to really mimic a human brain. They do need the "right hardware," indeed, which requires constructing beings very much like us as a whole. Is it just some "accident" of the evolutionary process that it took a certain sort of structure in order for free will to happen?

This also got me to thinking about epistemic "noise" in general. We are indeed structured in a certain way according to our fitness in the evolutionary scheme. On h.p.o., Gordon Sollars says that "[i]t seems that evolution has given us only a cut-rate form of rationality." Here is how I interpret that: evolution has given humanity a rationality good enough to ensure the survival of its members so that they can pass on their genes. But as many studies are now showing, our psychological makeup is such that we are susceptible to all kinds of errors and misfires of judgment. In philosophical terms, this is the issue of our fallibility.

Back in their prehistoric state, humans had to ensure the survival of their kin or group, and this necessity introduced all sorts of pro-group bias. Differences from within or from without were perceived as threats. The threats posed by natural forces would be likened to threats posed by other agents. Agency may be "detected" as a defense mechanism. These factors may explain the origins of much religious belief.

It is when humanity began to enter a philosophical age -- to become more self-aware -- that it began to develop methods and means by which to weed out error and bias, i.e., "the noise," from what is justifiable and true. This is how the discipline of epistemology arose. We have our hardwiring that we cannot do anything about on the one hand, and we have epistemic principles on the other. It is this distinction which serves as the basis for the distinction between "is" and "ought." Epistemology is a normative discipline. Further, it is not mysterious to explain the factual basis of normativity -- the logical "bridge" between is and ought -- in terms of our using our given hardware to weed out its own biases and errors according to methods and standards we can freely recognize and adopt.

Furthermore, it is not merely looking at our hardwired psychological makeup that will give us appropriate epistemic norms. We are, after all, given a bunch of noise along with the signals. The peril of conflating our given hardwired behaviors with what we can take to be a reliable guide to action is a peril of scientism. For those secularists like Sam Harris who want to put morality onto a scientific footing, they are going to have to do essentially the same work that philosophers have been doing: sift out the hardwired behavioral "noise" from what is objectively good for us. In foundational terms, morality is for the purpose of identifying the means and methods of sifting the signals from the noise in our behavioral structure, just as epistemology is for the purpose of sifting the signals from the noise in our cognitive structure.

Scientism -- part of the epistemic "noise" itself -- is not going to give us an understanding of the human good. Scientism can even introduce scientific error, as I think the example of the scientists above who seek to construct a human-mimicking machine shows.

Partisanship vs. the Economy

A piece of "conventional wisdom" floating around amongst left-liberals is that Democrat policies have historically been better for economic growth. The "conventional wisdom" amongst right-conservatives is that Republican policies have been better. And each side throws up all kinds of indisputable data points in support of their respective cases. Before we even know who to believe, we need to set up some parameters for comparison.

Princeton economist Alan Blinder, a former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve and adviser to many Democrat politicians, wrote a New York Times piece back in August laying out various pieces of data to show that the economy has fared better under Democrats than under Republicans. He writes:

The stark contrast between the whiz-bang Clinton years and the dreary Bush years is familiar because it is so recent. But while it is extreme, it is not atypical. Data for the whole period from 1948 to 2007, during which Republicans occupied the White House for 34 years and Democrats for 26, show average annual growth of real gross national product of 1.64 percent per capita under Republican presidents versus 2.78 percent under Democrats.

That 1.14-point difference, if maintained for eight years, would yield 9.33 percent more income per person, which is a lot more than almost anyone can expect from a tax cut.

Such a large historical gap in economic performance between the two parties is rather surprising, because presidents have limited leverage over the nation’s economy. Most economists will tell you that Federal Reserve policy and oil prices, to name just two influences, are far more powerful than fiscal policy. Furthermore, as those mutual fund prospectuses constantly warn us, past results are no guarantee of future performance. But statistical regularities, like facts, are stubborn things. You bet against them at your peril.

Already Blinder is hedging his case by pointing out that presidents have limited leverage over the economy and that all sorts of factors come into play. He does not even touch upon such factors as policy differences between one Republican president and the next, or one Democrat president than the next. For example, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy both cut marginal income tax rates from levels we might today consider beyond reasonable or efficient.

One thing also well-known to most anyone in the community of economists is that a president's policies require some amount of time to take effect from the time he enters office, likely on the order of a year or two. To assume, for example, that we could compare the GDP in 1988 to the GDP in 1980 and determine that the numbers from these years represent "economic performance under Reagan" is very dubious because (a) Reagan did not even enter office until 1981 and (b) his tax cuts did not even begin to be phased in until 1982. And this would not even begin to take into account highly restrictive and recessionary monetary policy under the Fed Chairman at the time, Paul Volcker.

I did some running of the numbers on U.S. real GDP (2002 dollars) and population figures. I then placed the real GDP per capita (well, a close approximation of such based on population growth rates during each decade) at the January following each President's arrival into office. Here is what I came up with, starting in January of 1947 (the beginning of the data set in the link for GDP above):

Jan. 1947: $10,917
Jan. 1954: $12,617
Jan. 1962: $14,445
Jan. 1970: $18,503
Jan. 1978: $21,780
Jan. 1982: $22,356
Jan. 1990: $28,596
Jan. 1994: $29,520
Jan. 2002: $34,617
July 2008: $38,117

These figures yield growth rates in real GDP per capita for each period:

1947-1954: 2.1%
1954-1962: 1.7%
1962-1970: 3.2%
1970-1978: 2.1%
1978-1982: .6%
1982-1990: 3.1%
1990-1994: .8%
1994-2002: 2.0%
2002-2008: 1.5%

The average annual post-war growth rate was 2.05%. The average growth rate coinciding with Democrat administrations (27 years) was 2.2%, and with Republican administrations (34.5 years) it was 2.0%.

One might well say that this difference is negligible if we are trying to compare Democrat administrations with Republican ones, without taking anything else into account.

Already we have a rather different picture of things than Blinder's article had painted.

I have already noted that both Reagan and Kennedy cut taxes, and in the wake of those tax cuts GDP expanded at the most rapid rates in the post-war era. George Bush the Elder, a Republican, broke his no-new-taxes pledge as the economy was headed into recession in 1990-91, arguably creating a dampening effect on the recovery. The current president Bush lowered marginal income tax rates, but from levels that were not comparable to those that Reagan and Kennedy had cut from. If the Reagan and Kennedy tax cuts doubled or tripled the after-tax return on some incomes, it stands to reason that these could have a significantly greater impact than the Bush tax cuts that might increase the after-tax return on marginal incomes by, say, 20%.

You might see where I'm going with this. I've introduced just one factor (tax policy) out of very many that are at work, and used a little bit of economic understanding to explain that one administration's policies, irrespective of party, would have a more favorable impact than another's.

It would also stand to reason -- and empirical studies have borne this out -- that the kinds of tax rate cuts that Kennedy and Reagan implemented would lead to significant increases in tax revenues collected from upper-income taxpayers. It is plainly dishonest for class-warfare-mongers to ignore such facts. And the dynamic-revenue scoring that Lawrence Lindsey did for the 1981 tax cuts -- he didn't use the phrase "dynamic scoring," but his work was a precursor to that -- showed that the net revenue loss was on the order of $33 billion a year, accounting for only about one-third of the increases in annual deficits. Suffice it to say that back in the day I've done my homework on Reagan fiscal policy, and the amount of misinformation and misunderstanding from his opponents on the positive effects of his tax cuts is staggering. And a good number of them really should know better.

The rest of Blinder's article concerns income inequality and how under Democrat administrations there is less of it. This is an area where I have not done my homework so I cannot offer much by way of comment. One thing that does trouble me, however, is how little attention seems to be be paid to the growth of in-kind, non-wage compensation for workers in recent years, particularly with the rise in health costs. Median incomes by traditional measures have not been growing in line with GDP or productivity, but as I understand it the gap is made up considerably taking non-wage compensation into account. And this does not even begin to touch on the shifting composition of families and households which affects how median incomes are even measured.

There are some things under more or less direct presidential control that strike me as rather obviously good or obviously bad for the economy, just based on my economic understanding and ideas about fairness. It is not fair, for example, for someone to have their marginal earnings taxed at a rate of 70 percent during peacetime. In addition, I know of no standard economic analysis that would conclude that such tax rates are a good idea for economic growth. The same goes for protectionist policies, wage and price controls, windfall profits taxes, and other left-wing partisan nonsense. In regard to these things, at least, the economics profession appears to have wised up. (Does it strike any responsible economist as a good idea that, just as we are spiraling into economic crisis, as marginal workers get displaced and unemployment rates rise, that minimum wage rates are going up?) It might also have some effect on the psyche of the nation that a a presidential leader does a very bad job inspiring confidence, as Carter and the current President Bush have done.

But let's not delude ourselves here into thinking that we or the economics profession have a firm grip on all the factors that would go into affecting an economy's growth rate in a given time frame. Recent presidents before the current one did not have to contend with 9/11-type attacks and their fallout. Few recent presidents have had to contend with an OPEC embargo. Obama will have to contend with an economic crisis that may last for years to come that will not have been his doing.

What's telling in all this is how partisan zeal on each "side" thrives on epistemic chaos. The public really has little macroeconomic understanding, and the economics profession has failed to deliver any epistemic model that would significantly improve understanding. For all anyone seems to really know, the whole combination of policies -- harmful and beneficial -- that a president may bring to an economy is about as good or bad as the one that came before him. Perhaps presidential intelligence and wisdom has little to no bearing on a president's ability to macro-manage things. Perhaps the economy will normally chug right along and, with information flows improving over time, economic actors will do just fine to anticipate changes in policy or anything else. In fact, there is a whole school of economics emphasizing just that idea.

Physicists will be more than happy to tell you about all the disagreements that happen in their profession, and how little they all really know or understand. And they are dealing with strictly predictable, testable and measurable phenomena in a controlled environment, no less. On top of that, physicists are reputed to be, on average, the brightest people on the planet. How on earth do economists expect us to think they have a clue about the macroeconomy?

The long-term trend data indicate that short of some major catastrophe -- engineered by bureaucratic bunglers in a centralized institution of control -- the macroeconomy tends to chug right along at a relatively steady clip. This has happened over the past century-plus, irrespective of the growth in the size and scope of government. It suggests to me that even libertarian economists, who speak of the overwhelming value of a very limited government to the health of the economy, don't seem to really have a clue how the macroeconomy works. I close out this entry with this chart, courtesy of the Center for Global Development:
















[ADDENDUM: Based on the chart above, and a disposition to favor a presumption of liberty against the expansion of state powers, and knowing that central-bank bungling was at the heart of the Great Depression . . . on what basis does one not be a libertarian?]