Current Events

UnKoch My Campus Update: A Concerned Faculty Member at Brown Clarifies Their Letter

Blogger’s Note: This evening I received this following letter from a faculty member at Brown, who desires to remain anonymous to hide the fact that they are fictitious. In accordance with their wishes, I reproduce it in full here:

I recently wrote a letter to the wonderful organization UnKoch My Campus in which I criticized the funding of higher education by the billionaire industrialists and international men of mystery Charles and David Koch. As many are now waking to realize these peddlers of free trade and voluntary transactions are secretly infiltrating American higher education through shadowy front organizations named after themselves.  As a faculty member at Brown I am particularly outraged by their funding of the Political Theory Project at MY university, the place where I drink my Fair Trade coffee and Think Deep Thoughts.

In response to my outrage several Koch operatives/minions/lackeys have dared to criticize my view, thereby demonstrating that they do not understand it. To help them see the light I have deigned to clarify some of my points:

  1. I BELIEVE THAT BROWN FRESHMAN ARE REALLY F*CKING STUPID. I noted that John Tomasi–the “libertarian” professor associated with this “project”–said of his freshman students that “after a whole semester of Hayek, it’s hard to shake them off that perspective over the next four years”. This statement proves just how insidious the Koch approach is. Brown’s Freshmen are just like impressionable new-hatched ducklings, latching on to whichever idea they encounter in college first, unable ever to critically assess it and discard it. That’s why it’s crucial that they be exposed ONLY to the Right (i.e., Left) Ideas, so it will be these that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. If we’re not careful here we’re setting ourselves up for a repeat of the unfortunate events of 2012, when Swift’s *Modest Proposal* was required reading for the entering class.
  2. NANCY MACLEAN IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Some people have objected to my repeating Nancy Maclean’s claim that libertarian ideas owe much to the “bitter resistance of wealthy white southerners to Federal government ‘interference’ in slavery and segregation”. They have noted (in true neoliberal fashion!) that many of her foundational claims are “dubious,” “made up,” and “wrong“. In response to the Koch operatives and shills that draw on such outdated and neoliberal methods as “checking the sources” and “reading the original texts” to press these charges I will point out that these claims do not fit with my preferred narrative, and are therefore false.
  3. I AM NOT AN INTELLECTUAL COWARD! Some people might criticize me for publishing my attack anonymously. But there is a long and distinguished tradition in American political life of publishing arguments anonymously so that their readers can focus on their content, and not be distracted by their source. I thus feel fully justified in anonymously publishing my argument that we should only look at the source of the funding of the Political Theory Project, and refuse to engage with the content of the arguments it presents.

Yours un-collegially,

An Anonymous Faculty Member at Brown

 

 

 

 


Published on: Author: James Taylor
Book/Article Reviews

You Should Read Simler and Hanson’s *Elephant in the Brain*

In case you haven’t heard, Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson have published a remarkable book with Oxford University Press: The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. 

Here is my blurb on the back cover:

“If you want to know what makes people tick, read The Elephant in the Brain. Simler and Hanson have created the most comprehensive, powerful, unified explanation of human nature and behavior to date.” —Jason Brennan, Professor of Business, Georgetown University

I was one of the referees for the book for Oxford, and I’ll share some of my referee comments now:

This is without a doubt the most fascinating and interesting of the 30 or so books I’ve refereed in my career.

Bottom line: This is a fantastic book and I highly recommend publication. It  manages to do what an academic book needs to do, but is written in way that can be understood by a wide audience, and further, thanks to both the style and content, is likely to be widely read.

What makes people tick? If you want to know the answer, this is the book. The authors give us the best, most comprehensive, most powerful theory of human nature so far, an account that rigorously explains almost everything.

What’s especially powerful about this is how well it integrates everything we know in psychology. A major problem with psychology, as a field, is that while psychologists sometimes replicate certain findings and thus discover certain quirks and biases, they don’t have anything like a unified theory of human behavior. While economists can ultimately put everything in terms of supply and demand curves, or chemists can describe bonding and chemistry in terms of electron potentials, psychologists just seem to have a mess of disparate phenomena. This book provides a unifying theory. What’s more, it does so by making sense of biological pressures and thus integrates psychology with biology.

Style-wise, this book is fantastic, and I expect it will be a big seller. It has the level of argumentative rigor needed to satisfy most academics, though one might imagine the authors including technical appendices and the like if that were their primary concern. It reminds me a great deal of Dan Ariely’s and Jonathan Haidt’s books (and to a lesser extent, Ridley, or the Freakonomics books), in that it does a great job of introducing a wide range of background ideas to a popular audience. It’s eminently readable. But while Ariely, Haidt, and the others I mentioned are just popularizing previously existing academic research (including their own), this book does more; it’s adding to our knowledge because it integrates this research to produce a compelling theory of human nature. It’s making a new argument, or, more precisely, making the argument better. It’s not just explaining what the authors already know but adding to our knowledge.

 

Phil Magness and I summarize one of their chapters in our forthcoming book on higher education. (We have a chapter on how academics use moral language as a cover for the pursuit of their self interest, e.g., the adjuncts’ right movement, professors’ arguments for tenure, and the new wave of campus protests):

Our brains are funny. As Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson show, in their fascinating book The Elephant in the Brain, we humans are evolved to engage in self-deception about our own motivations. Our brains trick us into believing we have better motives than we in fact have.

The reason behind this is simple: We all benefit from living with people who generally play by public-spirited moral rules. We’ve evolved in general to play along with such rules. But we also can benefit from cheating those rules on the margins and taking advantage of others’ generosity, fair play, and good will. However, other people are at the same time have evolved to punish rule-breakers. Further, they’ve evolved to read our minds; people are good at discerning our conscious motives. Accordingly, our brains have evolved a defense mechanism: we often subconsciously pursue our self-interest, but at the same time consciously and sincerely believe we are motivated by altruism. Your brain pursues selfish behaviors but hides your own motives from you. You think you mean well, so others think you mean well, but really you’re out for number one.

This is true even of charity. Even charity isn’t about helping. Rather, charity is about conspicuous caring. It’s about signaling to other people—potential business partners, co-workers, neighbors, and mates—that we are successful, have a pro-social orientation, are trustworthy, and have empathy. Just as wearing a Rolex screams, “I’ve made it!,” altruistic giving is mostly about signaling to others, “Deal with me! Partner with me! Have sex with me! I’m good!”[i]

How do we know that? Simler and Hanson suggest we look for the best explanation of their behavior. For instance, it turns out that when people give away money to charity, almost none of them do any homework to determine how much good they’re doing. The amount and rates at which they give turns out to be insensitive to the amount of good the charity does. Fewer than 3% of people will actually change their intended donations in order to do measurably more good. Instead, numerous experiments and studies find that the following factors determine when and how much we give:

 

  • Visibility. We give more when we’re being watched or when others will know how much we give.
  • Peer pressure. We give more when pressured to give, especially by people we know, or who have high status, or who are in our network.
  • Mating motive. We’re give more when we are primed to think about sex or mating opportunities; we give more if the solicitor is sexually attractive.[ii]

In short, giving is explained more by status-seeking and coalition-building, and not so much by the good charity does. But of course, they say, it doesn’t feel like that’s what we’re aiming for; we genuinely believe we want to help.

            Simler and Hanson aren’t saying we’re perfectly selfish. If we were all sociopaths, none of this signaling would work. Rather, a better way to think of it is that we’re mostly selfish, but most of us (except sociopaths) have some genuinely moral motives. We can benefit from tricking others into thinking we have stronger moral motives that we in fact have, but in order to trick them, we first trick ourselves.

If even charitable behavior—that is, giving to others—is better explained by self-interest than by genuine attempts to help others, it sure would be surprising if politics—contests for monopoly rights on coercive and redistributive power—were any different. If charity’s this bad, it’s not surprising politics would be worse.

 

[i] Simler and Hanson 2018, pp. xxx-xxx.

[ii] Simler and Hanson 2018, xxx.


Published on: Author: Jason Brennan
Economics

Efficiency Can Be Redistributive

Many economists advocate a “congestion tax” because it improves allocative efficiency. People who value the use of a road less than the total costs (including external congestion effects on other drivers) “should” put off their use of the road.

But moving from one regime (ration using time) to another (ration using price) has distributional consequences.  It’s tempting to think we are talking Coase Theorem, but in fact we are talking Kaldor-Hicks-Scitovsky, which is another thing entirely.

Should Manhattan charge a congestion tax, or just charge Uber?


Published on: Author: Mike Munger
Academic Philosophy

Class Act

Karl Marx once wrote:

I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was

1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production;

2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat;

3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.

Marx is certainly right that class analysis was a central feature of classical liberalism long before he picked it up. He’s fibbing a bit, though, about (1) and (3); many of his bourgeois predecessors (for example, the Censeur triumvirate of Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and Augustin Thierry) most emphatically thought that class society as they understood it was a temporary phenomenon destined to be displaced. Thierry, for example, announces:

Federations will replace states; the loose but indissoluble chains of interest will replace the despotism of men and of laws; the tendency towards government, the first passion of the human race, will cede to the free community. The era of empire is over, the era of association begins.

The main difference between Marx and the liberals was that Marx took the differentiation between ruling and ruled classes to be grounded in differential access to the means of production, whereas the liberals took the differentiation between ruling and ruled classes to be grounded in differential access to predatory power, and in particular to the power of the state. (To be sure, Marx acknowledged and indeed insisted on the important role of the state in maintaining class division when examining the details of history or current events; but the state quickly receded in importance when he turned to abstract theory.)

All this is by way of noting that I just received in the mail my author’s copy of Social Class and State Power: Exploring an Alternative Radical Tradition, an anthology of libertarian and classical liberal writings on class analysis that I co-edited with David Hart, Gary Chartier, and Ross Kenyon.

The volume includes material by a rather heterogeneous collection of authors:

  • from the 17th century, Richard Overton;
  • from the 18th century, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Vicesimus Knox, and William Godwin;
  • from the 19th century, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, Thomas Hodgskin, John Wade, William Leggett, Richard Cobden, John C. Calhoun, Adolphe Blanqui, Frédéric Bastiat, Charles Renouard, Augustin Thierry, Gustave de Molinari, Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker;
  • and from the 20th century, Franz Oppenheimer, Albert J. Nock, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Roy Childs, Walter Grinder, John Hagel, Hans Hoppe, and your humble correspondent.

I would urge you to go out and buy a copy; but in light of the book’s $100 pricetag, I’ll just urge you to go out and suggest to your local research library that they buy a copy.


Published on: Author: Roderick Long
Academic Philosophy

Religious Exemptions Volume

For people interested in the normative dimensions of religious exemptions, Michael Weber and I have just published a new anthology of articles with Oxford University Press. We’re very happy with the volume, and we have a number of top-notch philosophers and legal theorists writing on these important topics. Another attractive feature of the book is that it engages the question of when religious exemptions are justified, and not just when they are constitutional.

You can buy the book here. If you would like a review copy, please email me privately at kevinvallier-at-gmail-dot-com.

Here’s the jacket description.

Exemptions from legal requirements, especially religious exemptions, have been a major topic of political debate in recent years. For example, bakers in various states have sought the right to refuse to make wedding cakes for gay and lesbian couples, despite the Supreme Court’s validation of same-sex marriage. Many parents are granted exemptions from vaccinating their children, despite public health laws requiring otherwise. Various religious organizations as well as some corporations have sought an exemption from the requirement to provide contraceptive coverage in employee healthcare plans, as required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Religious exemptions have a long history in the United States, but they remain controversial. Exemptions release some people from following laws that everyone else must follow, raising questions of fairness, and exemptions often privilege religious belief, raising concerns about equal treatment. At the same time there are good reasons to support exemptions, such as respect for the right of religious freedom and preventing religious organizations from becoming too closely intertwined with government.

The essays in this volume represent valuable contributions to the complex debate about exemptions from legal requirements. In particular, they contribute to the moral dimensions of religious exemptions. These essays go beyond legal analysis about which exemptions are constitutionally appropriate, and ask instead when religious exemptions are morally required or morally prohibited.


Published on: Author: Kevin Vallier
Academic Philosophy

Two New Publications

My chapter on “Anarchism and Libertarianism” is forthcoming in Nathan Jun, ed., Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2017), at the usual insane Brill price. In the chapter I explore the relationship between libertarianism (in the free-market sense) and the anarchist movement, including the question whether anarcho-capitalism counts as a genuine form of anarchism. (My C4SS colleague Kevin Carson has a chapter in the book as well.)

According to the publisher, I’m only allowed to make 25 hard copies of the chapter – but I’m also allowed to post a copy online, so long as it’s on my personal website. That seems to me a bit like saying “No smoking allowed in this room, but it’s okay to set the bed on fire.” But okay, here’s a link to the chapter.

(My reference to capitalist labour markets as “oligopolistic” was supposed to be “oligopsonistic.” The editors changed it to “oligopolistic,” which of course has the opposite meaning; I changed it back in galleys, but it ended up “oligopolistic” in the final published text nonetheless. Sigh.)

I also have a chapter on “Minarchism on Seasteads” in Victor Tiberius, ed., Seasteads: Opportunities and Challenges for Small New Societies (Zurich: VDF, 2017). I explore options for constraining a seastead minarchy (essentially by incorporating as many anarchist features as possible; those who remember my articles from the FNF/LNF days will find my proposals familiar). Here’s the link.

(The version I’ve posted is the galley proofs with my corrections. No, of course the corrections did not make it into the final published text. Sigh again.)


Published on: Author: Roderick Long