Everyone interested in economic growth and the industrial revolution should read The Great Breakthrough and Its Cause by Julian Simon. A much underappreciated book:
One of Julian Simon’s last works-in-progress--cut short just before completion by his death in early 1998--The Great Breakthrough and Its Cause explores the question of why human progress accelerated in Western Europe starting around 1750. Why did life expectancy, the household consumption level, speeds of travel and communication, the literacy rate, and other aspects of the standard of living leap above those in the previous centuries and millennia? What forces caused this extraordinary development to occur when it did--or even to occur at all--rather than centuries or millennia earlier or later?
Simon answers this question by arguing persuasively that the total quantity of humanity--and the nexus of human numbers with technology--has been the main driving force behind what he calls "Sudden Modern Progress." Further, he continues, if population numbers had risen more rapidly than they did, the "Great Breakthrough" would have occurred earlier. He also asserts that institutional changes, phenomena often credited for human progress, are from a very long-run perspective a result of population growth. And finally, he seeks to refute two seeming counterexamples, China and India, that reached high population densities prior to the modern period without accelerated growth in consumer welfare.
The European Commission does not like Microsoft. It sees the company as a predator destroying their cherished model of competition. A model which unfortunately is not very realistic. The model says that a company with a dominant market share obviously has done something wrong. So it hase to be fined and kept on a very short leash. But why should that be, if the main beneficiaries of Microsoft’s behaviour are consumers?
in spite of Microsoft’s vast size and reach, the company has always been reluctant to exploit its market power at the expense of consumers—probably far too reluctant if the only goal was maximizing the short-term bottom line—because it fears giving rivals the chance to gain traction with new technologies that leave the software giant in the dust. Indeed, the company’s determination to spend more for wheezing Yahoo! than the market capitalization of Ford and General Motors combined suggests that Microsoft believes that the barbarians have finally reached (the) Gates.
The European Commission seems to think it has to protect the competitors of Microsoft, at the expense of consumers. The problem is that market power is very short lived in high tech, and that the Commissions’ actions are increasingly becoming out of date, as well as bad for consumers:
The real story here is the ever-briefer period in which companies with clear leads in technology and marketing seem able to sustain their advantages. As a consequence, antitrust policy built around traditional tests of market power are at best a way to keep lawyers well remunerated and, more likely, a significant barrier to productive change.
While Microsoft’s ongoing disputes with regulators are many and varied, they generally follow from the company’s past successes achieved at the expense of faltering rivals. Thus, Microsoft broke the grip of slow-moving Netscape in browser software by adding Internet Explorer at no extra cost to its ubiquitous PC operating system. It shouldered its way past fat-and-happy Sun Microsystems in server software by pricing low and minimizing the hassle of linking servers to desktop computers running Windows. By the same token, it has challenged virtually every major purveyor of digital technology, spending huge sums to remain a player in markets ranging from instant messaging to video game consoles.
Ironically, though, whatever market power Microsoft possessed was already ebbing by the time the company became mired in battles with regulators over which software applications could be bundled with operating systems, and what sorts of proprietary information must be shared with rivals.
Start with the revenge of the nerds—the startling rise of free, “open source” software, which helped to put Microsoft on the defensive in its traditional areas of strength. For example, Linux has become a formidable rival in operating systems for the server computers that power the Web, even as the Firefox browser has largely been responsible for pushing Internet Explorer’s usage share below two-thirds.
Meanwhile, the company is looking more like Clark Kent than Superman in other markets. It has never managed to become top dog in software for cell phones. It has made no headway against Apple in MP3 players. And it must run just to stay in place in the battle with Sony and Nintendo in game machines. Perhaps more dispiriting, the Vista operating system software that was meant to replace Windows as a cash cow has been greeted with a yawn. Indeed, thanks largely to corporate resistance to moving to Vista, just 100 million of the 270 million PCs sold worldwide in 2007 were licensed to run the successor to Windows.
The nightmare on the horizon, though—the one that prompted Microsoft to offer a 62% premium to Yahoo! shareholders—is Google and the Internet "cloud." While the immediate goal in merging with the none-too-vibrant Yahoo! is to add some bulk to its Internet advertising muscle to prevent the market leader Google from taking it all, much more is at stake. Microsoft (and just about everyone else in the business these days) apparently thinks that computing is about to move away from the desktop and toward servers that manage information flows for devices ranging from cell phones to laptops to game machines.
By this reckoning, most of the digital memory and all the heavy lifting in data manipulation will eventually be done online by a jillion servers. And the profits that temporarily made Microsoft the most valuable company in the world will go to firms with Web portals offering services ranging from Internet search engines to social networking to word processing to music and video downloads.
If the cloud is, in fact, The Next Big Thing, Microsoft’s troubles have barely begun. Google commands both the technology and the marketing momentum to dominate online services. Indeed, it has introduced free office productivity software designed to draw users to other Google services online—much the way Microsoft trumped Netscape by adding the Internet Explorer browser to Windows. If Microsoft is to successfully defend the profitability of its desktop software or to go on to present a major challenge to Google in Internet-based services, it will have to claw its way back up a very slippery information technology pole.
It’s hard to say whether the prediction that Google will be the next king of the hill and that the Microsoft Windows/Office gravy train will run off the tracks sooner rather than later will prove correct. For all we know, a new crowd of IT samurai will soon displace Google—just as Microsoft displaced IBM in the 1980s. What is clear, though, is that technology in general and information technology in particular is changing faster than government competition policies have adapted.
This should matter a lot for policy toward information technology giants. The focus on market share and profitability has made antitrust authorities in both Europe and the United States all too willing to take the complaints of Microsoft’s rivals at face value. Microsoft certainly has the deep pockets to defend itself, and even to pay some whopping penalties without feeling much pain. However, if it is to face hostile regulators at every strategic turn, it will have little chance of remaining a full-bore competitor against the likes of Google.
Of course, what goes for Microsoft goes for every successful corporation whose dominance is constrained by the threat of rapid technological change rather than conventional competitive forces. Treating Google and its successors like the monopolists of yore would undermine their ability to stay ahead of rivals, slowing innovation in the process. And it would be a real loss to advanced industrial economies, which are increasingly dependent on rapid technological change to sustain growth.
A solution to the food crisis: increase agricultural subsidies
Ivan
It’s quite amazing that until this day no one (at least nobody I know off) has proposed this rather obvious solution to the food crisis: increase agricultural subsidies, at least export subsidies. You see, at the time that Europe and the United States were the developing countries, they were net-producers of agricultural products. Because of subsidies there even was an oversupply of, for instance, milk, grain and butter. Products we dumped on the world market with export subsidies. Supply rose faster than demand. As a result the problem was low food prices. I call it a problem, because some third world producers could not survive the compitition. But at the same time low prices were a boon for net food-importing countries, mostly the poorest of the poor. Indeed, even many poor farmers are net food buyers. We never saw riots against low prices, didn’t we? No, the only protestors were third world governments that needed to protect their inefficiënt and state-owned agricultural companies. But the people themselves? Now, with high prices, we have riots.
The situation indeed has changed. The developing country of today, China, is a net-consumer of fuel and agricultural products. It’s exports consist of industrial products. So it’s demand that is rising with the supply that cannot keep up. A problem made worse by our manic disposition for biofuels. The U.S. actually produced a record maize harvard last year, but one third of that harvard went to ethanol production. That’s downright insane and immoral. Of course biofuels get massive subsidies, in Europe and the United States. That make their production so profitable so more and more farmers are switching away from producing food. It’s a rational reaction to a silly policy. Not all subsidies are good. But making farmers respond to subsidies that increase the production of food that can be dumped on the world market could lower prices insteand of raising them. Maybe we should use the money from biofuel subsidies and use it to increase export subsidies.
Trade with China, if anything, cancels out rising inequality:
In his recent Brookings paper, Princeton economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman tried to find out how low-wage workers were affected by rising trade with cheap-labor countries like China. His working assumption was that this type of trade should reduce the wages of less-educated workers and increase inequality.
Research done in the 1990’s, however, indicated that this effect was relatively small, somewhere between 1 and 7 percent. But, as an anonymous Economist columnist points out in his/her/its review of Krugman’s paper, there’s a growing sense of doubt in America about the benefits of globalization, so it’s worth taking a look at the question anew.
Unfortunately, Krugman throws up his his hands in the end and complains that the data we have doesn’t give a good picture of the real trade patterns that could affect inequality: Current figures show emerging economies have been exporting greater quantities of sophisticated manufactured goods. This move up the value chain means that, theoretically, most economic classes in the U.S. should be getting hurt by roughly the same amount. In other words, trade shouldn’t have had an impact on inequality.
But Krugman argues that the data aren’t detailed enough to capture what’s really going on: The Chinese segment of many manufacturing chains are the most labor-intensive and the least knowledge-intensive parts. For example, the iPod is assembled in China, but components like the screen and hard drive parts are made elsewhere. So, what on paper looks like a sophisticated Chinese import masks a more complicated process which leaves low-wage Americans who might otherwise do this work at risk to competition from China and other low-cost countries.
Still, using the data that we do have, the, Harvard economist Lawrence Katz found that "trade with poor countries can account for about 15% of the growth in the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers since 1979." That’s a sizable amount, but far from being a major driver of inequality.
But all of this worry could be misplaced. Another way of investigating the relationship between inequality and trade with poor countries implies that China may actually help the poor, suggests new work from University of Chicago economists Christian Broda and John Romalis.
Instead of focusing purely on what’s produced outside of the country, Broda and Romalis turn their attention to an interesting but obvious relationship between imports and consumption within our border: The goods exported by poorer countries are typically consumed by lower-income Americans. Our typical methods of quantifying inequality, however, don’t take this into account.
At the same time, inflation in the price of these goods has fallen behind inflation in services, which make up a greater portion of what wealthier people buy. Taken together, these trends imply that official measures may be overstating the rise in inequality.
Looking at trade data between 1994 and 2005, Broda and Romalis construct inflation rates for different income groups and find that rates for the richest outpaced rates for the poorest by about 4 percent over the period. Since income inequality between the top and bottom 10 percent of earners grew by about 6 percent, the different inflation rates among income groups wipes out about two-thirds of the rise in inequality.
China’s role in this new way of analyzing inequality is large, accounting for about 50 percent of the total reduction.
(A very interesting aside. Broda and Romalis also find that the poor are more likely than the rich to buy newer goods. Because of the lag in how quickly the CPI tracks new products, the researchers argue that once this "new goods bias" which serves to keep official inflation rates higher than they actually are since newer goods are typically cheaper, is factored out, inequality between the rich and the poor between 1994 and 2005 may not have changed at all.)
Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent.
And Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are expected to put into operation about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.
In the United States on the other hand:
fewer new coal plants are likely to begin operations, in part because it is becoming harder to get regulatory permits and in part because nuclear power remains an alternative. Of 151 proposals in early 2007, more than 60 had been dropped by the year’s end, many blocked by state governments. Dozens of other are stuck in court challenges.
This is downright serious. Even if you are not a believer in human-caused global warming, you cannot deny that coal is a very dirty form of energy production. A solution is down the corner: can you spell n.u.c.l.e.a.r?
Enel and many other electricity companies say they have little choice but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure, particularly in countries like Italy and Germany that have banned the building of nuclear power plants. Fuel costs have risen 151 percent since 1996, and Italians pay the highest electricity costs in Europe.
But coal it will be:
The European Union, through its emissions trading scheme, has tried to make power plants consider the costs of carbon, forcing them to buy “permits” for emissions. But with the price of oil so high, coal is far cheaper, even with the cost of permits to pollute factored in, Enel has calculated.
Richard Dawkins in 2002 defending atheïsm. In fact he has a very strong argument. We are almost all atheïsts with respect to most Gods (Zeus, Apollo...) the human race once believed in. Only some of us have gone one God further.
...is not a secret it appears. Some species seem to be immortal already. Terence Kealey points to the hydra and the sea anemone. So why not humans? Why could we not become "immortal"? It seems we can, at least, we can make life much much longer than it is. The problems are not scientific but moral. As Homer Simpson would say: boring! The guy we have to thank for eternal boredom and the end of inheritance taxes (the wet dream of conservatives, so they should be for tinkering with our DNA!), is Craig Venter:
it was reported that Dr Venter had created, artificially, the first living copy of a bacterium. In keeping with his sinister reputation, he did not choose a friendly bacterium to copy; instead he copied Mycoplasma genitalium. M. genitalium lives, as its name suggests, in our genital tracts and it is easily transmitted during sex. Currently, it is assumed to be relatively harmless, but who knows what Dr Venter intends to do next with it, was the subtext of some news reports?
On closer examination of Dr Venter’s paper, the work is not as dramatic as some reports suggested. He selected M. genitalium not for malign reasons but simply because its DNA is shorter than that of most bacteria. Nonetheless, it still comprises 582,970 chemical units or “base pairs”, strung along as a filament.
And Dr Venter has not yet actually copied the bacterium itself. Instead, he has only synthesised its DNA in the test tube. A number of virus DNAs have already been synthesised artificially, so although the synthesis of the DNA of M. genitalium represents a technical tour de force (it is over 10 times longer than the longest virus DNA synthesised to date) it represents no fundamental breakthrough, biologically. It is not the first living DNA to have been synthesised artificially.
But Dr Venter will shortly turn his DNA into a living breeding bacterium, and because viruses are parasites whereas bacteria can be self-sufficient, he is on the point of creating a life form that can live and breed autonomously.
Dr Venter is a great self-publicist (he announced his achievement at the World Economic Forum in Davos) but he is simply the latest in a long line of biochemists who have punctured life’s claims to specialness. Until 1828 it was believed that life, with its so-called “vital forces”, owed nothing to science, but in that year Friedrich Wöhler synthesised urea in the test tube. Since then, chemistry’s invasion of biology has been unstoppable.
So it is not science fiction, it is inevitable, that within our children’s lifetimes, molecular biologists will tweak the human genome. If we can re-create existing bacterial genomes, we will be able to create new improved human ones. The ills that flesh is heir to are many, but thanks to DNA chemistry they will be abolished. Diseases such as cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy will be eliminated as thoroughly as smallpox. And the greatest ill of all - ageing - will also be conquered.
It was Sir Francis Bacon, the Father of the Scientific Method, who wrote in his Valerius Terminus of 1603 that the purpose of science was the “discovery of all operations and possibilities of operations from immortality (if it were possible) to the meanest mechanical practice” - and immortality is possible. We know that some animal species such as the hydra and the sea anemone are apparently immortal, and we are beginning to understand the chemical operations by which they achieve that. Indeed, those mechanisms may already operate within our own testes and ovaries.
So one day a successor of Dr Venter will discover how to render all our cells as immortal as the hydra’s or the sea anemone’s. That day will see the beginning of the end of cancer, coronary heart disease and the other horrors that are largely caused by ageing, and though it could introduce new horrors such as terminal boredom and the end of inheritance taxes, it will be memorable.
Ageing is a planned process. The main cause is oxygen which, as it is consumed during ordinary metabolism, produces dangerous side-products called free radicals. These side-products cause cancer, atherosclerosis, and - by destroying brain cells - dementia. But free radicals can be countered by enzymes that mop them up. Unfortunately, such damage limitation is expensive in terms of energy.
In his book Time of our Lives Professor Tom Kirkwood explained that evolution trades ageing against speed. Nature realises that the average mouse, say, will live for only two or three years in the wild because it is so vulnerable to predators. But the average elephant will live for half a century before succumbing to a fatal mishap.
So Nature does not provide mice with enzymes to protect them from ageing, because mice will not last long anyway. Nature, instead, provides mice with fast metabolisms, to help them flee danger. Consequently, mice naturally age fast. But elephants move ponderously, because Nature has given them little energy for running around. Instead, Nature pours energy into their anti-free radical enzymes, protecting them from ageing.
Most of us feel that our lives are too short but one day, thanks to the work of Dr Venter and others, we will introduce better anti-ageing enzymes into our DNA. The consequence will be a slower, more chilled species, but we will live longer.
Craig Venter’s autobiography reveals a driven man. He expends a lot of energy, so he may not live long. But thanks to him our children will. Not so evil after all.
Ah. I’ve noticed that there is a debate on intellectual property rights from an Austrian perspective. Now we all know that Austrian economists are great defenders of property rights. So if from those corners doubts spread about the fact that intellecutal property really is property that would be of some significance. Now Austrian Stephen Kinsella does argue against intellectual property. He did it at the Austrian Scholars Conference 2008. Here you can find his paper. But of course he got some disagreement. Another Autrian, someone called Paul F. Cwik, wrote a paper arguing that from the perspective of John Locke and Murray Rothbard it is possible to defend at least copyright as a right to property. And if someone calls upon Rothbard for a good argument I’d listen. However, as William Sepp writes:
The crux of Prof. Cwik’s paper is that IP is a public good, based on a natural right to property, and can be fenced off, just as Austrians argue that other public goods can be. His defense of a natural right to IP (he uses copyright as the paradigmatic example, and follows Murray N. Rothbard in claiming that anything created, including an invention, can be copyrighted) essentially consists of the assertion that the created thing, say the word order of a book, is the product of one’s labor and should therefore be protected against anyone else’s copying it.
Without getting into the public goods debate, which is secondary to the natural rights argument anyway, why does Jones’ application of labor to newly homesteaded or otherwise justly owned property give him the right to block Smith or anyone else from making and/or selling or otherwise commercially using their justly acquired copies of his creation? Merely asserting that he has this right, as Prof. Cwik does, doesn’t make it a sound argument. After all, neither Smith nor anyone else claims the right to prevent Jones from using his copies of his new creation. Everyone agrees that Jones has the right of first disposal of his property, including the right to sell copies of it. Contrary to what Prof. Cwik thinks, Jones’ first mover advantage and the ability to sell complementary and derivative services based on his creation gives him a powerful edge over potential competitors (which of course he is free to squander, hello WebVan and Pets.com--meet Fresh Direct and Petsmart), and enables him at least to have a shot, if not a guarantee, at earning back his cost of capital in a competitive market.
Also, I have a beef with John Locke, Murray Rothbard, and Prof. Cwik. Locke held that a laborer owns his labor; Rothbard et al. have followed him over this cliff. No one owns labor per se, which is an action. How do you own an action? What laborers sell is their labor services; an actor sells his acting services, an assembly line worker sells laborer services, say building a car or at least some action along the assembly line.
So much, then, for the doctrine that he necessarily owns the fruits of his labor, if this is meant literally. If an auto worker tried to walk out at the end of the week with a car that just rolled off the assembly line, I’m guessing he wouldn’t get far. His compensation is a wage and contractually attached benefits.
This is also true for Crusoe, laboring on a deserted island. He isn’t selling his labor services in a labor market, but he is applying them to whatever he is making, perhaps a fishing net.
From the current food crisis we can learn two hard lessons:
1) high food prices are bad for poor countries, not good. So eliminating rich countries dumping practices and export subsidies, because it will raise prices, shall not help poor countries. Maybe the food crisis is the final nail in the coffin of this theory. 2) the food crisis is not the result of global warming as such but of our manic disposition to mitigate emissions whatever it takes. People are dying at the moment not from global warming but from that manic disposition. Ironic, isn’t it?
Now the West can take it’s responsability for this. We caused it. So what to do? Open the borders:
Invite the world’s most precious resource - human labor - to leave a dirt-based economy and get an entry-level job in the modern economy. It’s called doing well while doing good. And unlike everything else the world has ever done for (poor countries), it works.
Public charity - taxes distributed to the poor - crowds out private charity. And those who think that those in need should not depend on public charity - on state support - do tend to give more. You see paying taxed makes them miserable, and giving voluntary makes them happy. They actually want that poor people take care of themselves instead of relying on the state. Take for instance, owners of guns. Arthur Brooks writes:
According to the 2006 General Social Survey, which has tracked gun ownership since 1973, 34% of American homes have guns in them. This statistic is sure to surprise many people in cities like San Francisco – as it did me when I first encountered it. (Growing up in Seattle, I knew nobody who owned a gun.)
Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden group.
Nor are they "bitter." In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were "very happy," while 9% were "not too happy." Meanwhile, only 30% of people without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.
In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners feeling "outraged at something somebody had done." It’s easy enough in certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and miserable fringe group. But it just isn’t true. The data say that the people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns are generally happier than those people in households that don’t have guns.
The gun-owning happiness gap exists on both sides of the political aisle. Gun-owning Republicans are more likely than nonowning Republicans to be very happy (46% to 37%). Democrats with guns are slightly likelier than Democrats without guns to be very happy as well (32% to 29%). Similarly, holding income constant, one still finds that gun owners are happiest.
Why are gun owners so happy? One plausible reason is a sense of self-reliance, in terms of self-defense or even in terms of the ability to hunt their own dinner.
Many studies over the years have shown that a belief in one’s control over the environment dramatically adds to happiness. Example: a famous study of elderly nursing home patients in the 1970s. It showed dramatic improvements in life satisfaction from elements of control as seemingly insignificant as being able to care for one’s plants.
A bit of evidence that self-reliance is at work among gun owners comes from the General Social Survey. It asked whether one agrees with the statement, "Those in need have to take care of themselves." In 2004, gun owners were 10 percentage points more likely than nonowners to agree (60% to 50%).
That response is not evidence that gun owners only care about themselves, however. In 2002, they were more likely to give money to charity than people without guns (83% to 75%). This charity gap doesn’t reflect their somewhat higher incomes. Gun owners were also more likely to give in other ways, such as donating blood. Are gun owners unsentimental? In 2004, they were more likely than those without guns to strongly agree that they would "endure all things" for the one they loved (45% to 37%).
For a long time I have been pondering over this puzzle: why is it that the U.S, the most libertal (libertarian) country internally is at the same time one of the most aggresive in foreign affairs?
One answer - from the right - is to deny that the U.S. follows an agressive and immoral foreign policy. At least totalitarian countries like the Soviet Union were much more agressive. This answer can be summerarily dismissed. See for instance this book for a very small sample of U.S. attempts at regime change and foreign interventions. These examples can easily be multiplied. The Soviet Union, which of course did intervene also, does not compare. America is in another league altogether.
Another answer - from the left - is to deny that the U.S. is the freeest country in the world. This answer can be dismissed as well. Noam Chomsky, one of the fiercest critics of U.S. foreign polici, emphatically insists that important liberal rights, like freedom of speech, are effectively garanteed only in the United States. And of course it has one of the highest level of economic freedoms. But it’s the combination of liberal political rights and economical freedoms that is, I think, unique in the world.
It’s rather extraordinary that we used to think that liberal countries are peacefull countries. In fact we have a rather classic example as well: compare Athens with Sparta for instance. Or think about the Dutch and the British: internally liberal but externally very agressive empires. So if they aren’t what should we do then? Should we insist that the United States becomes less liberal and more social-democratic? Indeed, generalising an insight of the Belgian libertarian anarchist Gustave de Molinari, Hans-Herman Hoppe points out that economic liberalisation makes war more likely. Roderick Long writes:
For Hoppe, “the lower the tax and regulation burden imposed on the domestic economy,” the more prosperous the society will become, with the result that “the amount of domestically produced wealth on which the state can draw in its conflicts with neighboring competitors” will be larger. Consequently, “states which tax and regulate their economies comparatively little – liberal states – tend to defeat and expand their territories or their range of hegemonic control at the expense of less-liberal ones.” This Molinarian insight helps to render intelligible what from a purely Spencerian point of view might seem anomalous – the external bellicosity of domestically liberal states. In particular, it addresses the puzzle of “why the United States, internally one of the most liberal states, has conducted the most aggressive foreign policy,” while during the Cold War the Soviet Union, massively illiberal domestically, “engaged in a comparatively peaceful and cautious foreign policy.” (Comparison with the historical case of Athens and Sparta might also be instructive.) For Hoppe, the fact that a less regulated population will tend to be more productive, and so to generate more wealth for its government to expropriate, explains “why Western Europe came to dominate the rest of the world,” and more specifically “why it was first the Dutch, then the British and finally, in the 20th century, the United States, that became the dominant imperial power.” The United States has been externally aggressive because, thanks to its domestic liberality and resulting wealth, it “knew that it could militarily beat any other state,” while the Soviet Union was all too aware that, thanks to its internal regimentation and consequent poverty, it “was bound to lose a military confrontation with any state of substantial size unless it could win within a few days or weeks.”
However the answer is not to turn back the clock. The answer is to go all the way:
When we combine the Molinarian insight that domestically liberal states are more likely to be externally aggressive with the Spencerian insight that external aggression tends to make states less domestically liberal – insights dramatically reinforced by the belligerent foreign and repressive domestic policies of the United States since 9/11 – we reach the conclusion that domestically liberal states are inherently unstable, bearing within them the seeds of their own subversion as their militant and monopolistic aspect grows in virtue of, and at the expense of, the industrial and competitive aspect on which it feeds. If that is so, the only long-term way to secure the liberal values of peace abroad and freedom at home may be, as Spencer and Molinari advised us, to abolish the state apparatus entirely.
I must confess I like the answer. I genuinly find the militant and agressive behaviour of the U.S. quite disturbing. How can we defend that country when it’s more vastly more belligerent than the Soviet Union ever was? And that for the most libertarian country in the world! The answer is easy: it’s still not libertarian enough...Always the most satisfying answer one can give.
Left-wing bloggers are up in arms against ABC News. See for instance here and here. They deplore the conduct of ABC at the latest Democatic Presidential debate. They accuse co-ankers George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson of tabloid journalism, not interested in questions of public policy. Stephanopoulos by the way is Democrat and was once Bill Clinton’s communications director, which says a lot, I would think, about Bill Clinton. Wikipedia, bless them, has already a short introduction to the case:
Recently, Stephanopoulos became a subject of public controversy after serving as co-moderator, with Charles Gibson, of a debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the 21st debate among Democratic candidates for President in the 2008 election cycle, broadcast live on Wednesday, April 16, 2008, by ABC News from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Both Gibson and Stephanopoulos were chided for focusing most of the first hour of the debate on issues critics regarded as trivial, intentionally incendiary, and slanted toward Republican political views. Obama was challenged, for, among other things, associating with Jeremiah Wright, his pastor, who espouses some positions of Black Theology, and with William Ayers, a supporter of his who had been a member of the Weather Underground during the 1970s. Obama was also challenged for his purportedly conspicuous failure to wear a flag pin. Clinton was challenged for being perceived as untrustworthy. Both were questioned pointedly and at length about their perceived willingness to raise taxes and restrict gun ownership. Tom Shales wrote in The Washington Post, "For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with." The New York Times’s David Brooks, however, took a different view: "I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that." Stephanopoulos defended himself the following day, saying, “The questions we asked were tough and fair and appropriate and relevant and what you would expect to be asked in a presidential debate at this point."
The reaction of Stephanopoulos it telling. We only asked the questions the public wanted us to ask. There was no bias here. We would have done the same thing if the candidates were Republicans. But should give the media the public what it wants? The debate unfolds here.
The U.S. stock market was affected only momentarily by the attacks of 9/11. True, between September 10 and September 21, 2001, the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined by as much as 14 per cent. Within just over two months, however, the Dow had regained its pre-9/11 level. Moreover, although 2002 was a disappointing year for U.S. equity investors, the market surged ahead thereafter, exceeding its previous peak (at the height of the “dot com” mania) in the fall of 2006. By October 9, 2007, the Dow stood at nearly double the level it had reached in the trough five years before. This was an impressive performance in time of war. Nor was the U.S. stock market by any means the star performer in the period after 9/11. In the five years to July 31, 2007, all but two of world’s equity markets delivered double digit returns on an annualized basis. Among the ten best performers were Egypt (+69 per cent), Turkey (+44 per cent) and Indonesia (+39 per cent). The United States was in fact among the two worst performers (+9.9 per cent). The other was Israel’s non-domestic market (9 per cent).3 If, as devotees of Samuel Huntington believed, a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West was raging during this period, then Western investors did well to back the other side.
American presidents used to be very smart people. Consider a statement like this:
Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Obviously no one would think that G.W. Bush would have uttered such words. They are, in fact, from Thomas Jefferson.
Many people find paying for organs repugnant. In Belgium, even liberal parties who are generally pro-market are against it. Donating organs should be an act of charity only, not part of the market. But what if it actually saves lives? Alex Tabarrok reports:
Only one country in the world has eliminated the shortage of transplant kidneys. Only one country in the world has legalized financial payments to kidney donors. That country is Iran.
In an important report, transplant surgeon nephrologist Benjamin Hippen argues that the Iranian system has saved thousands of lives and it should be used if not as model then to inform America’s efforts to eliminate its deadly shortage.
In the Iranian system organs are not bought and sold at the bazaar. Instead a non-profit, volunteer-run Dialysis and Transplant Patients Association (DATPA) mediates between recipients and donors. Recipients who cannot be assigned a kidney from a deceased donor and who cannot find a related living donor may apply to the DATPA. The DATPA identifies a possible donor from a pool of people who have applied to the DATPA to be donors. Donors are medically evaluated by transplant physicians, who have no connection to the DATPA, in just the same way as are non-financially compensated donors.
The government pays donors $1,200 plus limited health insurance coverage. In addition, charitable organizations also provide renumeration to impoverished donors. Thus demonstrating that Iran has something to teach the world about charity as well as about markets. Will wonders never cease? Recipients may also contribute to donor remuneration.
Hippen reports that the system works well, although better follow-up of donors would be an improvement. He concludes with a call to legalize financial compensation in the United States.
That an islamic country has the West something to teach about a market economy is quite asthonishing.
One of the more exotic premieres at this year’s Sundance Film Festival is “Invisible Threads.” It’s not a movie, but a virtual sweat shop that exists only on Second Life, the online virtual world, yet produces real-life, custom-ordered, personalized blue jeans.
Stephanie Rothenberg, a new media performance artist, and her collaborator, Jeff Crouse, a digital artist and programmer, started Invisible Threads a year ago while at Eyebeam, an art and technology center in New York. Invisible Threads is intended as art, but they see it as a window into so-called telemetric manufacturing methods of the future.
So Ms. Rothenberg was invited to Sundance as an artist who incorporates film and video. The jeans are being shown and sold for the first time at Sundance, in a beta version. Customers tell the Invisible Threads staff the size and style of jean they would like, the instructions are sent to the virtual factory inside Second Life, where workers push buttons that generate an image. From that image, a pattern is created and sent to an industrial printer, made by Hewlett-Packard, which spits out the custom-printed canvas cotton patterns. The patterns are then cut and assembled on the spot (at a Sundance Festival venue, that is) with a glue gun and a little stitching for reinforcement. They cost around $35.
The margins are pretty good. The Invisible Threads “factory” has sixteen workers, who are paid 200 Lindens an hour – about 90 cents, which is pretty good pay by Second Life standards. Factory workers are also granted 500 square meters of Second Life “land” on which to build a house. “What I think is fascinating about her work is that it is a step towards what our future is going to be,” said Jeffrey Winter, a panel programmer for the Sundance Festival who focuses on media, art and technology. “It’s called art now, but in the future it’s going to be how you get your jeans. It will be daily life. So often what you call art is just people who see the future before the rest of us do.”
Ms. Rothenberg, who has an interest in the politics of labor, agreed. She said the project is evolving into something less about art and “more about telematic labor.”
Does foreign occupation really cause suicide terrorism?
Ivan
Here is someone who questions the link between foreign occupation and suicide bombing. It’s widely known that Robert Pape has shown that there exist a link and that foreign occupation will lead to more suicide terrorism. The argument also leads to the conclusion that the United States has done it’s share to increase terrorism by invading Iraq. But that conclusion appear to be on shaky ground:
Robert Pape’s work on suicide terrorism — notably, this book — has attracted a lot of attention (e.g., here). He was also — and here is a fact I did not know until today — an advisor on Ron Paul’s campaign team.
Pape analyzes data on all 188 suicide terror attacks between 1980 and 2001. He concludes that almost all of these attacks shared one common feature: they targeted a country believed to be a foreign occupier. This, not religious extremism, was the motivation of those who committed these suicide attacks.
Now a soon-to-be-published paper argues that Pape’s data cannot support that conclusion. The paper is here, authored by Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay. In short, they argue, the problem is this. To know whether X causes suicide terrorism, we need to know how the propensity to use suicide terrorism varies with X. That is, we not only need data on when suicide terrorism occurs, we need data on when suicide terrorism does not occur — i.e., when groups choose other tactics besides suicide terrorism. Analyzing only instances when suicide terrorism occurred is not sufficient.
Ashworth et al. conclude:
The data Pape collects do not speak to the correlates of suicide terror, and the policy conclusions he advocates cannot be justified by appealing to the data he collects.
I think Matthew Yglesias is right on the mark here concerning bilateral free trade agreements. These agreements are a travesty. They have nothing to do with free trade at all. Mostly they are used to force developing countries into protecting the intellectual monopoly rights of big businesses from rich countries. The end result is a rather big flow of financial means from developing countries to developed countries, while it should be the other way around.
"God said so" is not a good guide for moral behavior:
I mentioned that believers can resort to a quick and easy way with difficult questions that secular thinkers and atheists can’t, and that this lack is perhaps one reason students are always moral relativists. We can offer reasons for thinking X is better than Y, or for thinking Z is entirely unacceptable in any moral universe we can think of (executing gays for being gay, genocide, murdering women for talking to an unrelated man), but we can’t hand out anything as brisk and simple and conversation-stopping as ’God said so.’ Believers* have a short cut which unbelievers don’t have. Believers have an answer that is both quick and easy, while unbelievers have to spend time and effort if they want to explain to skeptics why executing gays for being gay is unacceptable.
Believers have an answer that is both quick and easy, and that’s why it’s such a crap answer. Quick and easy answers are worthless for such disagreements. They’re worthless because they have no content. They’re empty. Saying ’God said so’ is exactly the same thing as saying nothing. It’s like holding up a street sign rather than saying anything. Why shouldn’t we execute gays for being gays? Why shouldn’t we kill women for talking to an unrelated man? Because Galer Street. That tells you just as much as ’God said so.’ Just saying a name doesn’t tell us anything. All ’God said so’ really means is ’it’s what I think and "God" is like an official stamp on what I think’ - which leaves us exactly where we started. ’God’ is just the label people put on what they already think is good. They don’t put that label on what they already think is bad. They don’t punch ’God’ into a good-bad computer they have so that they know which goes with what. They just take God to endorse what they think is right, and that absolves them from the work of testing what they think is right.
This is one of the great appeals of theism, of course, but it’s a snare and a delusion. The shortcut is a shortcut because it leaves out so much, and that’s not a good thing. It may be needed in an emergency, as ’because I said so’ is sometimes with children, but for the long haul, it’s necessary to do better than that. The answer from authority is impoverished, and morality is not a subject that thrives on impoverished answers.
Texas : the state were G.W. Bush once was governor, is not only addicted to oil. It’s also addicted to wind. It produces the most wind power of all the states in the US of A (take that, California). And like any addiction it leads to problems:
drop in wind generation late on Tuesday, coupled with colder weather, triggered an electric emergency that caused the Texas grid operator to cut service to some large customers, the grid agency said on Wednesday.
Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said a decline in wind energy production in west Texas occurred at the same time evening electric demand was building as colder temperatures moved into the state.
The grid operator went directly to the second stage of an emergency plan at 6:41 PM CST (0041 GMT), ERCOT said in a statement.
System operators curtailed power to interruptible customers to shave 1,100 megawatts of demand within 10 minutes, ERCOT said. Interruptible customers are generally large industrial customers who are paid to reduce power use when emergencies occur.
No other customers lost power during the emergency, ERCOT said. Interruptible customers were restored in about 90 minutes and the emergency was over in three hours.
ERCOT said the grid’s frequency dropped suddenly when wind production fell from more than 1,700 megawatts, before the event, to 300 MW when the emergency was declared.
In addition, ERCOT said multiple power suppliers fell below the amount of power they were scheduled to produce on Tuesday. That, coupled with the loss of wind generated in West Texas, created problems moving power to the west from North Texas.
ERCOT declares a stage 1 emergency when power reserves fall below 2,300 MW. A stage 2 emergency is called when reserves fall below 1,750 MW.
At the time of the emergency, ERCOT demand increased from 31,200 MW to a peak of 35,612 MW, about half the total generating capacity in the region, according to the agency’s Web site.
Texas produces the most wind power of any state and the number of wind farms is expected to increase dramatically as new transmission lines are built to transfer power from the western half of the state to more populated areas in the north.
Expert Herman Göring explains the mechanism, which is the same in totalitarian dictatorships and democracies:
"Why, of course, the people don’t want war," Göring shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Non other than Robert Nozick seemed to be in favor. From his Anarchy, State and Utopia:
Utopia will consist of utopias, of many different and divergent communities in which people lead different kinds of lives under different institutions...many particular communities internally may have restrictions unjustifiable on libertarian grounds.
A frightening report from the International Humanist and Ethical Union:
For the past eleven years the organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), representing the 57 Islamic States, has been tightening its grip on the throat of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yesterday, 28 March 2008, they finally killed it.
With the support of their allies including China, Russia and Cuba (none well-known for their defence of human rights) the Islamic States succeeded in forcing through an amendment to a resolution on Freedom of Expression that has turned the entire concept on its head. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression will now be required to report on the “abuse” of this most cherished freedom by anyone who, for example, dares speak out against Sharia laws that require women to be stoned to death for adultery or young men to be hanged for being gay, or against the marriage of girls as young as nine, as in Iran.
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan saw the writing on the wall three years ago when he spoke of the old Commission on Human Rights having “become too selective and too political in its work”. Piecemeal reform would not be enough. The old system needed to be swept away and replaced by something better. The Human Rights Council was supposed to be that new start, a Council whose members genuinely supported, and were prepared to defend, the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Yet since its inception in June 2006, the Human Rights Council has failed to condemn the most egregious examples of human rights abuse in the Sudan, Byelorussia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China and elsewhere, whilst repeatedly condemning Israel and Israel alone.
Three years later Annan’s dream lies shattered, and the Human Rights Council stands exposed as incapable of fulfilling its central role: the promotion and protection of human rights. The Council died yesterday in Geneva, and with it the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose 60th anniversary we were actually celebrating this year.
There has been a seismic shift in the balance of power in the UN system. For over a decade the Islamic States have been flexing their muscles. Yesterday they struck. There can no longer be any pretence that the Human Rights Council can defend human rights. The moral leadership of the UN system has moved from the States who created the UN in the aftermath of the Second World War, committed to the concepts of equality, individual freedom and the rule of law, to the Islamic States, whose allegiance is to a narrow, medieval worldview defined exclusively in terms of man’s duties towards Allah, and to their fellow-travellers, the States who see their future economic and political interests as being best served by their alliances with the Islamic States.
Yesterday’s attack by the Islamists, led by Pakistan, had the subtlety of a thin-bladed knife slipped silently under the ribs of the Human Rights Council. At first reading the amendment to the resolution to renew the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression might seem reasonable. It requires the Special Rapporteur:
“To report on instances in which the abuse of the right of freedom of expression constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination …”
For Canada, who had fought long and hard as main sponsor of this resolution to renew the mandate of the Special Rapporteur, this was too much. The internationally agreed limits to Freedom of Expression are detailed in article 19 of the legally binding International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and are already referred to in the preamble to the resolution. If abuse of freedom of expression infringed anyone’s freedom of religion, for example, it would fall within the scope of the Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion. To add it here was unnecessary duplication, and “Requesting the Special Rapporteur to report on abuses of [this right] would turn the mandate on its head. Instead of promoting freedom of expression the Special Rapporteur would be policing its exercise … If this amendment is adopted, Canada will withdraw its sponsorship from the main resolution.”
Canada’s position was echoed by several delegations including India, who objected to the change of focus from protecting to limiting freedom of expression. The European Union, the United Kingdom (speaking for Australia and the United States), India, Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala and Switzerland all withdrew their sponsorship of the main resolution when the amendment was passed. In total, more than 20 of the original 53 co-sponsors of the resolution withdrew their support.
On the vote, the amendment was adopted by 27 votes to 15 against, with three abstentions. The Sri Lankan delegate explained clearly his reasons for supporting the amendment: “.. if we regulate certain things ‘minimally’ we may be able to prevent them from being enacted violently on the streets of our towns and cities.”
In other words: Don’t exercise your right to freedom of expression because your opponents may become violent. For the first time in the 60 year history of UN Human Rights bodies, a fundamental human right has been limited simply because of the possible violent reaction by the enemies of human rights.
The violence we have seen played out in reaction to the Danish cartoons is thus excused by the Council – it was the cartoonists whose freedom of expression needed to be regulated. And Theo van Gogh can be deemed responsible for his own death.
Freedom of expression is that right which – uniquely – enables us to expose, communicate and condemn abuse of all our other rights. Without freedom of expression and freedom of the press we give the green light to tyranny and make it impossible to expose corruption, incompetence, injustice and oppression.
But however important freedom of expression may be for us who live in the West, its overwhelming importance for those who live under the tyranny of Islamic law was highlighted by a courageous group of 21 NGOs from the Islamic States who issued a statement yesterday appealing to delegations to oppose the amendment. (...)
Incredibly, following the vote on the amendment, the Council descended even further into chaos. At the very last moment, Cuba introduced an oral amendment – clearly against the rules of procedure. When Canada objected they were overruled by the President. When Slovenia – on behalf of the European Union – tried to intervene on a point of order and ask for a ten-minute adjournment, they were ignored. When they tried to protest in another point of order their right to do so was challenged by Egypt, and the Egyptian objection was upheld.
The main resolution was then put to the vote and was adopted by 32 votes in favour, none against, with 15 abstentions.
Is Antarctica warming or cooling? To be sure, West-Antarctica, a peninsula sticking out from the continent, is warming. But Antarctica as a whole is cooling. Look here for a picture from NASA.
Liberals feel that they already donated to the poor through their taxes, whereas conservatives believe that it is their (emphasis in the original) duty, not the government’s, to assist those in need.
Michael Schermer on why conservatives give more than liberals: they donate 30% more money, give more blood and log more volunteer hours.
Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests.
The drink has already been linked to a lower risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, and a study by a US team for the Journal of Neuroinflammation may explain why.
A vital barrier between the brain and the main blood supply of rabbits fed a fat-rich diet was protected in those given a caffeine supplement.
UK experts said it was the "best evidence yet" of coffee’s benefits.
Oh by the way, I don’t each much chocolate either, but maybe I should. A piece or two per week has major health benefits aswell. Chocolate with coffee should be a rather cheep but effective medication for a lot of complaints. Fortunately nobody has a patent claim on this medicine.
The Pew Institute has been running a large scale survey effort across the world. In their latest 2007 survey, their sample is roughly 45,000 people worldwide. In India, they have roughly 2,000 people, with an urban bias.
They have three key questions that measure economic liberalism, covering attitudes towards international trade, attitudes towards foreign companies and attitudes towards free markets. The results contain many surprises. As an example, in urban India, they find 89% are supportive of international trade, 73% are supportive of foreign companies and 75% are supportive of free markets.
This does not fit well with the stereotype of liberal Anglo-Saxon economics being prevalent in the US and the UK and nowhere else. If anything, poor countries have even more liberal values when compared with rich countries.
Urban India is at rank 9 out of 46 countries. China is at rank 11. I guess both countries have seen socialism first hand and support for liberal economics is strong.
The report also shows sharp changes over the last five years. On page 16, they show support for foreign companies in India went up from 61% in 2002 to 73% in 2007, a gain of 12 percentage points. On the question People are better off in free markets, support went up from 62% in 2002 to 76% in 2007, a gain of 14 percentage points. Most interesting is page 20, where the fraction that believes that government has too much control has risen from 52% in 2002 to 71% in 2007 - a rise of 19%.
If all mankind plus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one opinion than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
From a novel of Kingsley Amis, but could have com from John Stuart Mill. A lesson to be learnt by both all the critics of Geert Wilders’film Fitna and by Geert Wilders himself.
The first part of the answer seems to be: journalists an academics don’t trust free markets. The other part of the answer is: our own history as a species:
In his magnum opus on the power of free markets, Human Action, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises noted: “The truth is that capitalism has not only multiplied population figures but at the same time improved the people’s standard of living in an unprecedented way. Neither economic thinking nor historical experience suggest that any other social system could be as beneficial to the masses as capitalism. The results speak for themselves. The market economy needs no apologists and propagandists. It can apply to itself the words of Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph in St. Paul’s: Si monumentum requires, circumspice.” If you seek his monument, look around.
Capitalism may not need apologists and propagandists, but it does need a vigorous scientific and rational defense as evidenced by the fact that so many people still distrust free markets. Market solutions to social problems are generally received with skepticism. Businessmen are distrusted, corporations looked at askance, and there is a well-known resentment against those who have most benefited from markets. (As one New Yorker cartoon featuring two people in conversation reads: “I hated Bill Gates before it became so fashionable.”) Why do people distrust free markets?
Part of the answer can be found in our history. Because we lived for so long in small groups of a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred people in hunter-gatherer communities in which everyone was either genetically related or knew one another intimately, most resources were shared, wealth accumulation was almost unheard of, and excessive greed and avarice was punished. Thus, we naturally respond to a free market system in which conspicuous wealth is paraded as a sign of success with envy and anger. Call it evolutionary egalitarianism.
Throughout most of the history of civilization as well, economic inequalities were not the result of natural differences in drive and talent between members of a society equally free to pursue their right to prosperity; instead, a handful of chiefs, kings, nobles, and priests exploited an unfair and rigged social system to achieve gains best described as ill gotten.
People also have a remarkably low tolerance for economic ambiguity. Free markets are chaotic and uncertain, uncontrollable and unpredictable. Most of us have little tolerance for such environments, and we have learned to expect that social institutions such as the government will bring a level of certainty to society. People who cannot afford (or who choose not to purchase) insurance against acts of God typically expect acts of government to save them.
As well, there is well-documented liberal bias in the academy and the media against free markets. A 2005 study by the George Mason University economist Daniel Klein, for example, found that at two of America’s leading institutes of higher learning Democrats outnumbered Republicans among the faculty by a staggering ratio of 10 to 1 at the University of California, Berkeley and by 7.6 to 1 at Stanford University. Measuring political attitudes through voter registrations among faculty in twenty different departments, in the humanities and social sciences the ratio was 16 to 1 at both campuses (30 to 1 among assistant and associate professors), and in some departments, such as anthropology and journalism, there wasn’t a single Republican to be found.
In another 2005 study on “Politics and Professional Advancement Among College Faculty,” Stanley Rothman, S. Robert Lichter, and Neil Nevitte discovered that only 15 percent of those teaching at American colleges and universities describe themselves as conservative while 72 percent said they were liberal, and that figure climbed to 80 percent in such departments as English literature, philosophy, political science, and religious studies, with only five percent labeling themselves as conservative. In a 2005 publication in the Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern Law Professor John McGinnis reviewed the faculties of the top 21 law schools rated by the 2002 U.S. News & World Report graduate-school rankings and found that politically active professors at these top law schools overwhelmingly tend to be Democrats — 81 percent contributed “wholly or predominantly” to Democratic campaigns while just 15 percent did the same for Republicans.
In a manner and potency matching academia, the bias in the media is against free market economics. A comprehensive 2005 study conducted by UCLA political scientist Tim Groseclose and University of Missouri economist Jeffrey Milyo, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, measured media bias by counting the times that a particular media outlet cited various think tanks and policy groups, and then compared this with the number of times that members of Congress cited the same groups. “Our results show a strong liberal bias: all of the news outlets we examine, except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times, received scores to the left of the average member of Congress.” Not surprisingly, the authors discovered that CBS Evening News and the New York Times “received scores far to the left of center” and that “the most centrist media outlets were PBS NewsHour, CNN’s Newsnight, and ABC’s Good Morning America.” Interestingly, USA Today — that ne plus ultra of pop print media — was closest to political center of all newspapers.
The strongest reason for skepticism of capitalism, however, is a myth commonly found in objections to both the theory of evolution and free market economics, and that is that they are based on the presumption that animals and humans are inherently selfish, and that the economy is like Tennyson’s memorable description of nature: “red in tooth and claw.” After Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer immortalized natural selection in the phrase “survival of the fittest,” one of the most misleading descriptions in the history of science and one that has been embraced by social Darwinists ever since, applying it inappropriately to racial theory, national politics, and economic doctrines. Even Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, reinforced what he called this “gladiatorial” view of life in a series of essays, describing nature “whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.”
If biological evolution in nature, and market capitalism in society, were really founded on and sustained by nothing more than a winner-take-all strategy, life on earth would have been snuffed out hundreds of millions of years ago and market capitalism would have collapsed centuries ago. This is, in fact, why WorldCom and Enron type disasters still make headlines. If they didn’t — if such corporate catastrophes caused by egregious ethical lapses were so common that they were not even worth covering on the nightly news — free market capitalism would implode. Instead it thrives, but just as eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, so too must it be for free markets, since both are inextricably bound together.
