All Thoughts Being Equal

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician and philanthropist Priscilla Chan, pledged to donate 99% of their wealth (over their lifetimes) to a philanthropic LLC they're setting up, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. There was some rather vitriolic criticism of this endeavor, which seems both somewhat predictable-in-hindsight but also rather strange at first blush. Do the criticisms have merit? What about the "debunking"? As you might expect, I think there's something missing here. I. As philosopher and Effective Altruism guru William McAskill (whose book Doing Good Better I read and reviewed ) noted : “Couple decides to give majority of their earnings to charity” is hardly a headline that you’d expect people to take umbrage at. But when you replace “couple” with “Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan,” suddenly everyone goes crazy. Even though the majority of commentators have been positive, a significant proportion of people have reacted with a...

This post is a follow-up to Diagnosis of an overwhelming fear, pt. 2 , and a partial-follow up to Rhetorical imperialism I. The new hotness in this micro-epoch of the Age of Outrage is at Vox, where a pseudonymous professor touts his liberality but claims that his liberal students are terrifying . "I'm a liberal college professor," cries the headline, "and my liberal students terrify me": I'm a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world-class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching ahead of research, and I take a healthy emotional stake in the well-being and growth of my students. Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes s...

Earlier this month, Jordan Weissmann at Slate 's Moneybox column wrote two interesting—and highly disturbing—pieces on the material nature of poverty in the United States. The first details why poverty is still miserable , and the second includes graphs on how the poor spend their income . Both are well worth the time to read in full. And they're important, because it's not hard at all to hear a curious sort of reasoning in favor of this status quo from the likes of FOX News . On the July 19, 2011 edition of Your World With Neil Cavuto , guest host Stuart Varney and guest Robert Rector discussed the following statistics about America's poor families, and how the "definition of poor families [isn't] what it used to be":

In a previous post I outlined an economic definition of human rights and used that to briefly analyze the current struggle between social conservatives and the LGBT community. Now I want to flip the script and examine the moral choices around society's bottom rungs.

It might be damning with faint praise, but Elizabeth Warren could be the most lucid legislator in D.C. Even if a new Glass-Steagal doesn't end up being a panacea , I think it could have an effect akin to (but not identical to) the Civil Rights Act. That bill didn't end racism, but it did fundamentally change the cultural conversation. Now it's just not okay to be (openly) racist. Glass-Steagal makes it not okay to mash up speculative investments with routine banking. I think it's an important but underlooked principle that while a market may be wild and free to allocate resources as it will, the foundations and fundamentals supporting that market need to be robust. Otherwise there's a greater risk that the whole thing will just go off the rails and collapse.

Matt Yglesias at Slate reports that there's a new dating site on the block, where "generous" guys can bid on first dates with "attractive" women. From the site itself: WhatsYourPrice.com is the only online dating website where money can buy you love or at least a first date. Based on our patent-pending dating system, WhatsYourPrice.com provides the platform for generous members to bid on a first date with attractive members. By offering a little incentive, attractive members are more inclined to take a risk on someone who isn’t their usual type, and if the date goes sour, at least they won’t be going home empty handed. Once you get past the socially squicky concept of bidding for love, I'm a bit confused as to the gender-norm setup here. On the one hand, the site's graphics make it pretty obvious that men are the "generous" ones and women are the "attractive" ones, but in that "About" blurb they try for a little ...

or, Thoughts on a Libertarian Party Convention The Libertarian Party of Washington State (LP-WA) held their party convention in Bellingham this Saturday, 20 April 2013. On a lark—me being a fan of liberty and the event being free if you didn't want food—I decided to go. An afternoon of short speaker presentations followed. This being an event by libertarians, for libertarians, I was treated to a collection of mostly-similar messages; nevertheless, I was intrigued by the nuanced differences embedded in that homogeneity.

A lot of beliefs have been labeled, pejoratively, “secular religions” by their critics. Those who believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution; atheists; liberals; capitalists. I’m going to level this description at two economic/political world-views over the course of two posts. The first will be “capital-S” Socialism as espoused by the Socialist Alternative. The second will be socialism’s nemesis, “capital-L” Libertarianism as espoused by the Libertarian Party and its allies. I should point out that these are specific examples drawn from the vast constellations of belief called “socialism” and “libertarianism.” And in fact the two broad categories find at least some intersection! But, here in America, the political rhetoric places them at opposite ends of a spectrum, and tinged with the moral binary of good (libertarianism*) versus evil (socialism) no less! Back to broad strokes. What do I mean when I say “secular religion”? Well, I take “secular” to mean that such a belief system do...

The other day I decided to skip class in favor of a discussion with my friend. Well, it was worth it: from that discussion came the ideas in my previous post as well as what you'll read below. To summarize the last post: it was an analysis (and meta-analysis) of the classic Dickens fable, "A Christmas Carol." Suffice to say, the negative portrayal of Scrooge enrages free-market fundamentalists and intrigues me, because Dickens implies that it's possible for a person to be "not charitable enough." Enough for whom? Well, for society, I suppose. (And God, if you believe in a god and if your god believes in a certain level of charity from every human being.) This, more or less, segued into a discussion of human rights, and (in my opinion) a very good economic argument for defining them. How? Follow me..

Apparently the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, publishes a perennial blog post called “In Defense of Scrooge.” Yeah, as in Ebenezer Scrooge, the infamous miser from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Scrooge has become a byword for foul-tempered penny-pinching and disdain for those worse off than oneself. Yet the LvMI post claims exactly the opposite: that Scrooge is an exemplar of a free-market employer. Shocking to hear, at first, but this is the Mises Institute’s modus operandi . They are what you might call “market fundamentalists,” and believe that any ‘problem’ with markets is really a problem with government rules restricting market forces and causing inefficiency. Never mind the fact that neoclassical economists (otherwise known as “everyone but the LvMI”)  agree that certain natural markets will always break down if left to their own devices. If anyone can fish for salmon and everyone thinks about himself, the rational thing to do is to catch as many sa...