Tag: Friendly Fire
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Unions versus Women
Literacy is one of the major factors in female empowerment: As female education rises, fertility, population growth, and infant and child mortality fall and family health improves. Increases in girls’ secondary school enrollment are associated with increases in women’s participation in the labor force and their contributions to household and national income. Women’s increased earning…
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Ideology and Self-Sealing Arguments
From Understanding Arguments by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin, which I use in my critical thinking course: Ideologies and worldviews tend to be self-sealing. The Marxist ideology sometimes has this quality. If you fail to see the truth of the Marxist ideology, that just shows that your social consciousness has not been raised. The very…
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Marginal Revolutions on Democracy: The Game Show
I asked Tyler Cowen what he thought of the public policy game show idea. He posted my request for comments, and there has been some helpful stuff from his readers: Sandeep notes that Scott Adams already thought of it: As president, I would solve all the world’s problems by creating a reality TV show where…
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Meliorism versus Perfectionism
Consider two courses of action: One has a low probability of success but promises to mildly increase welfare (however defined). Call this “meliorism.” Rawlsian liberals, Burkean and Oakshottean conservatives, and Hayekian libertarians frequently identify with this view. Another has an unknown probability of success, but promises to massively increase welfare (however defined). Call this “perfectionism.”…
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Bleg: Honor, Status, Esteem
I’m preparing a version of my review of Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code for publication, and I was hoping that folks might give me their favorite articles, cites, and quotes on esteem and honor. If any other reviews of Appiah’s book really stood out to you, I’d love to read them, too. In my expanded…
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Jonathan Haidt’s Conflation of the Personal and the Partisan
There’s been a conflict running through Jonathan Haidt’s work that it’s time for him to address. On the one hand, he asserts that there are characteristic moral intuitions that distinguish partisan liberals from partisan conservatives. He recently argued that these moral intuitions are demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of social psychologists identify…
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Is more illegal immigration the best we can do?
Will Wilkinson on Bryan Caplan’s (false?) dilemma: Bryan Caplan lays down a challenge to liberaltarians: From what philosophic point of view is “maximizing growth + lots of redistribution + the immigration restrictions lots of domestic redistribution naturally encourage” better than “maximizing growth + no redistribution + free immigration”? Whether you’re concern for the poor is Rawlsian,…
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Left for Dead: Equality of What, Equality for Whom?
There’s a pretty fantastic exchange happening in the blogosphere right now, started by Freddie DeBoer here and followed-up here. The substance of DeBoer’s criticism is that there are no legitimate “far left” bloggers, only center-left “neo-liberals” and the panoply of social conservatives, partisan Republicans, and libertarians. Thus, DeBoer charges, we have a blind spot, an…
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Psychologizing Politics
On the Diane Rehm Show today, Jill Lepore echoed Richard Hofstadter’s diagnosis of political violence: I went back and — a few years ago and reread an issue of Newsweek magazine that was published a couple of months after the Kent State shootings, which is, in some ways, a similar moment to this pause and this…
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Cowen on Foucault
Tyler Cowen, a loyal reader of my e-mails, responds to my question on Michel Foucault. In the process, he recommends The Archeology of Knowledge twice, and notes that Foucault …goes astray by assuming, implicitly, explicitly or otherwise, that structural categories somehow interact with each other in the world of ideas. It’s much more micro and disaggregated than…