Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The Capitalist Assault on Children

A shame this issue doesn't get more attention, though given the insanely protective legal regime in the U.S. for so-called "commercial speech," it would be hard to combat this ugliness through the law (so turn off the Idiot Box!):

As the United States and the rest of the world enter into an economic free fall, the current crisis offers an opportunity not only to question the politics of free-market fundamentalism, the dominance of economics over politics, and the subordination of justice to the laws of finance and the accumulation of capital, but also the ways in which children's culture has been corrupted by rampant commercialization, commodification and consumption. There is more at stake in this crisis than stabilizing the banks, shoring up employment and solving the housing problem. There is also the issue of what kind of public spaces and values we want to make available, outside of those provided by the market, for children to learn the knowledge, skills and experiences they need to confront the myriad problems facing the twenty-first century....

 

While the "empire of consumption" has been around for a long time, American society in the last thirty years has undergone a sea change in the daily lives of children - one marked by a major transition from a culture of innocence and social protection, however imperfect, to a culture of commodification. This is culture that does more than undermine the ideals of a secure and happy childhood; it also exhibits the bad faith of a society in which, for children, "there can be only one kind of value, market value; one kind of success, profit; one kind of existence, commodities; and one kind of social relationship, markets." Children now inhabit a cultural landscape in which they can only recognize themselves in terms preferred by the market.

Subject to an advertising and marketing industry that spends over $17 billion a year on shaping children's identities and desires, American youth are commercially carpet-bombed through a never-ending proliferation of market strategies that colonize their consciousness and daily lives. Multibillion-dollar corporations, with the commanding role of commodity markets as well as the support of the highest reaches of government, now become the primary educational and cultural force in shaping, if not hijacking, how young people define their interests, values and relations to others....

 

What is distinctive about this period in history is that the United States has become the most "consumer-oriented society in the world." Kids and teens, because of their value as consumers and their ability to influence spending, are not only at "the epicenter of American consumer culture," but are also the major targets of those powerful marketing and financial forces that service big corporations and the corporate state....Gilded Age corporations, however devalued, and their army of marketers, psychologists and advertising executives now engage in what Susan Linn calls a "hostile takeover of childhood," poised to take advantage of the economic power wielded by kids and teens. With spending power increasing to match that of adults, the children's market has greatly expanded in the last few decades, in terms of both direct spending by kids and their influence on parental acquisitions. While figures on direct spending by kids differ, Benjamin Barber claims that "in 2000, there were 31 million American kids between twelve and nineteen already controlling 155 billion consumer dollars. Just four years later, there were 33.5 million kids controlling $169 billion, or roughly $91 per week per kid." Schor argues that "children age four to twelve made ... $30.0 billion" in purchases in 2002, while kids aged twelve to nineteen "accounted for $170 billion of personal spending"....

According to Lawrence Grossberg, children are introduced to the world of logos, advertising and the "mattering maps" of consumerism long before they can speak: "Capitalism targets kids as soon as they are old enough to watch commercials, even though they may not be old enough to distinguish programming from commercials or to recognize the effects of branding and product placement." In fact, American children from birth to adulthood are exposed to a consumer blitz of advertising, marketing, educating and entertaining that has no historical precedent. There is even a market for videos for toddlers as young as four months old. One such baby video called Baby Gourmet alleges to "provide a multi-sensory experience for children designed to introduce little ones to beautiful fruits and vegetables ... in a gentle and amusing way that stimulates both the left and right hemispheres." This would be humorous if Madison Avenue were not dead serious in its attempts to sell this type of hype - along with other baby videos such as Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby, Sesame Street Baby, and Disney's Winnie the Pooh Baby - to parents eager to provide their children with every conceivable advantage over the rest. Not surprisingly, this is part of a growing $4.8 billion market aimed at the youngest children. Schor captures perfectly the omnipotence of this machinery of consumerism as it envelops the lives of very young children:

At age one, she's watching Teletubbies and eating the food of its "promo partners" Burger King and McDonald's. Kids can recognize logos by eighteen months, and before reaching their second birthday, they're asking for products by brand name. By three or three and a half, experts say, children start to believe that brands communicate their personal qualities, for example, that they're cool, or strong, or smart. Even before starting school, the likelihood of having a television in their bedroom is 25 percent, and their viewing time is just over two hours a day. Upon arrival at the schoolhouse steps, the typical first grader can evoke 200 brands. And he or she has already accumulated an unprecedented number of possessions, beginning with an average of seventy new toys a year....

For the last few decades, critics such as Thomas Frank, Kevin Phillips, David Harvey and many others have warned us, and rightly so, that right-wing conservatives and free-market fundamentalists have been dismantling government by selling it off to the highest or "friendliest" bidder. But what they have not recognized adequately is that what has also been sold off are both our children and our collective future, and that the consequences of this catastrophe can only be understood within the larger framework of a politics and market philosophy that view children as commodities and democracy as the enemy.... 

A traitor to his class...

...probably speaks the truth about how the allegedly prudent wing of the Republocrat Party is handling the current crisis of capitalism:

From the beginning of the recent crisis, starting with Bear Stearns, I have emphasized that nearly all of the financial institutions at risk of insolvency have enough liabilities to their own bondholders to fully absorb all probable losses without any loss to customers or the American public. The sum total of the policy responses to this crisis has been to defend the bondholders of distressed financial institutions at public expense.

Note that in the example balance sheet above, 30% of the liabilities of the institution represent debt to the company's own bondholders. It is these individuals – not homeowners, not the American public – that are being defended by the promise of trillions of dollars in public money.

For example, while Citigroup has approximately $2 trillion in assets, those assets are financed not only by customer deposits, but also by nearly $600 billion in debt to Citigroup's own bondholders. It is these private bondholders who provided the funds for Citigroup to acquire questionable assets.

The bondholders of distressed financial institutions – not the American public – should bear responsibility for the losses of those institutions. This can be accomplished, without harm to customers or the broader financial system, in one of two ways:

1) The bondholders could voluntarily agree to move a portion of their claims lower down in the capital structure, swapping debt for equity (preferred or common), allowing the bank to have a larger cushion of Tier-1 capital, avoiding insolvency, and hopefully allowing the bank to recover by its own bootstraps , preferably assisted by debt restructuring on the borrower side (via property appreciation rights and the like). Alternatively;

2) The U.S. government could take receivership of the financial institution, defend the customer assets, change the management, wipe out the stockholders and a chunk of the bondholders claims entirely, continue the operation of the institution in receivership, and eventually sell or reissue the company to private ownership, leaving the bondholders with the residual. Indeed, this is how the largest bank failure in history – Washington Mutual – was handled so seamlessly last year that it was almost forgettable. This is not Argentina-style “nationalization,” but receivership – a form of “pre-packaged bankruptcy” that protects the customers and allows the institution to continue to operate, followed by re-privatization. This would fully protect all of the customers and depositors at no probable expense to the public.

What should not be done is what was allowed in the case of Lehman Brothers – a disorderly failure, by which the company was allowed to fail with no conservatorship of the existing business. It was not the failure of Lehman per se, but the disorder resulting from its piecemeal liquidation, that caused distress to the financial markets.

That said, it is true that the bondholders of major banks include pension funds, insurance companies, mutual funds, foreign investors and other holders that would be adversely affected by a writedown in bond values. But this is part of the contract – when one lends money to a financial institution, one also assumes the risk and responsibility of bearing the losses. Congress always has the ability to mitigate the losses of some parties, such as pension funds, if it is agreed that this is in the public interest. But to defend all bondholders of financial institutions at public expense is to commit the future economic output of innocent citizens to cover the losses of mismanaged financial institutions. As a result of the intervention by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, even the bondholders of Bear Stearns stand to receive 100% repayment of both interest and principal on their bond investments. This is absurd.

Pathologies of the Ruling Class

This is about as close as the conservative New York Times ever comes to discussing the subject.

"The Epistemic Status of the Human Sciences: Critical Reflections on Foucault"

Here, for anyone who might be interested.

Department of Freudian Slips?

John McCain refers to Americans as "my fellow prisoners."  As gaffes go, this one is rich with layers of possible meanings.

WTO Director Recommends Marx to Understand Contemporary Capitalism

Curious story here.  It seems to me a more robust defense of Marx could, in fact, be given on this score.

Geuss's Skepticism about Rawls

I have been reading around in Raymond Geuss's quite interesting and iconoclastic set of papers, Outside Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2005), and found the essay on Rawls, "Neither History nor Praxis" especially striking.  Responding to Rawls's autobiographic statement that his service in World War II stimulated his interested in the theory of justice, Geuss comments (p. 31):

One can easily imagine a person confronted with the events of the Second World War being motivated to ask various questions, for instance about European history, about the dynamics of political systems under stress, about the economics of competitive international markets, about human social psychology and the structure of collective action.  What, however, would one have to believe about the world to think that "What is the correct conception of justice?" is the appropriate question to ask in the face of concentration camps, secret police, and the firebombing of cities?  Are reflections about the correct distirbution of goods and services in a "well-ordered society" the right kind of intellectual response to slavery, torture, and mass murder?  Was the problem in the Third Reich that people in extermination camps didn't get the slice of the economic pie that they ought to have had, if everyone had discussed the matter freely and under the right conditions?  Should political philosophy really be essentially about questions of fairness of distribution of resources?  Aren't security and the control of violence far more important?  How about the coordination of action, the sharing of information, the cultivation of trust, the development and deployment of human individual and social capacities, the management of relations of power and authority, the balancing of the demands of stability and reform, the provision for a viable social future?

Geuss, to be sure, has specific, substantive doubts about the resulting Theory of Justice.  Why, he asks, think that there would be any agreement in an "original position":  "No matter how long they discussed matters, there might remain at the end different groups with different views" (p. 32).  And even if there were an agreement, why should it "have any relevance whatever to us, who do have concrete 'identities,' parts of which sometimes can be of importance to us, and who live in a concrete situation in a complex real world" (p. 32)?  The "difference principle," Geuss suggests, both (1) helps explain why the theory's "political effects..has been close to zero" (p. 33), since it "turns out to be extremely difficult to assess in practice whether or not a certain existing inequality is or is not allowed by the difference principle" (p. 33), and (2) is itself "morally very repellent" since "increases in the absolute standard of living of the poor can, in principle, justify very great inequalities" (p. 33).

Geuss is no fonder of the argument of the later Law of Peoples, noting that Rawls believes that,

Outlaw states may not be exterminated ad libitum, but "liberal" states have a right to keep and deploy nuclear weapons for deterrent purposes, and may attack outlaw states with military force under certain circumstances if that is necessary to prevent violation of human rights.  This does not even purport to be a view from an anonymous universal "original position," but is, even on the most superficial inspection, a specifically American political position--more enlightened, perhaps, than that of George W. Bush or Condoleeza Rice, but generically the same kind of thing.  Of course, no one can object in principle to citizens helping to elaborate the national ideology (provided it is not actively vicious), but philosophy has in the past often aspired to something more than this.  (p. 34)

Noting that the huge growth of the academic industry surrounding Rawls's A Theory of Justice coincided with increasing inequality and a rightward turn of the Western industrial democracies, Geuss asks (p. 38):

Is it,...or should it be, of any significance that the "normative" moral and political theory of the Rawlsian type has nothing, literally nothing, to say about the real increase in inequality, except perhaps "so much the worse for the facts"?  This is not a criticism to the effect that theoreticians should act rather than merely thinking, but a criticism to the effect that they are not thinking about relevant issues in a serious way.

Geuss favors an approach to political philosophy in which one studies,

history, social and economic institutions, and the real world of politics in a reflective way.  This is not incompatible with "doing philosophy"; rather, in this area, it is the only sensible way to proceed.  After all, a major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one's own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason.  The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias....

One of the great uses of history is to show us what, because it has in the past been real, is a fortiori possible.  This can give rise to various illusions.  Something can be thought to be politically possible now because it actually existed in the past, but it may have been possible in the past because of circumstances that have meanwhile changed.  This is a case in which further development of the very historical consciousness that gave rise to the problem will contribute to clearing it away.  (pp. 38-39)

From the preceding reflections about how to approach political philosophy, Geuss concludes:

For those of us with views like these, Rawls is not a major moral and political theorist, whose work self-evidently deserves and repays the most careful scrutiny.  Rather, he was a parochial figure who not only failed to advance the subject but also pointed political philosophy firmly in the wrong direction.  (p. 39)

I'm curious what philosophers think.  I have given, of course, only excerpts from the Geuss essay, and it is obvious enough how Rawlsians might respond to some of the particulars of Geuss's doubts about the theory of justice.  But what about the more general criticisms of this approach to political philosophy and its relevance and value?  Post only once; posts may take awhile to appear.  Non-anonymous postings preferred, though, anonymous or otherwise, only substantive contributions will be approved.

Draft paper on Continental "Morality Critics": Comments Welcome! (Leiter)

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM DECEMBER 20:  There is a slightly revised version on-line now (changes primarily in the Marx and Foucault sections).  I'd still gratefully receive comments, since I can still make changes at the copy-editing stage.

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You can download the working draft here.  Comments in the next week would be especially welcome, though I will be able to make more minor edits thereafter.  Here is the abstract:

What could be wrong with morality?  Popular, including religious, thinking has long proceeded on the assumption that “morality” as a system of norms deserves our allegiance and that “moral conduct” should earn our praise and admiration.  Modern philosophy has, on this (as other matters) not been far away from the popular consensus.   Hume “discovered,” happily, that “by nature” human beings were disposed to have the sentiments and dispositions constitutive of sound morality; Kant sought to vindicate the deontological moral intuitions of the ordinary German peasant; while Sidgwick found that the “unconscious” morality of the English “peasants” was utilitarian, not deontological (and locked in hopeless conflict, alas, with egoistic considerations).  Most of moral philosophy of the past one hundred years—from Habermas and the adherents of “discourse ethics” (descendants of the Kantian project), to the proliferating Anglophone Kantians, to the earnest utilitarianisms of J.J.C. Smart, R.B. Brandt, Peter Singer, and others--has proceeded on the assumption that morality and a moral life are worth understanding because they are worth having and leading.

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One striking feature of post-Kantian philosophy in Europe has been the emergence of morality critics, philosophers who, contra the popular consensus, dispute the value of morality and the moral life.  Their views find a faint echo in the work of some Anglophone moral philosophers (Philippa Foot and Bernard Williams are the main exemplars), but, as we will see, the “Continental” criticisms of morality generally cut far deeper and more radically.  Whereas the Anglophone skeptics take issue with, for example, the “demandingness” of utilitarian moral theory, or the purported “overridingness” of moral obligations as Kantians understand them, the Continental critics pitch their concerns less at the level of academic theory than at the level of social, political, and cultural life.  These Continental morality critics object that morality in practice is an obstacle to human flourishing itself.

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So understood, this attack on morality raises two immediate questions.  First, the Continental morality critics are plainly not without ethical views of their own—namely, views, broadly, about the good life for (some or all) human beings—since it is on the basis of these views that they criticize “morality.”  Therefore, we need to understand the contours of the “morality” to which these critics object—for ease of reference, we will call it “morality in the pejorative sense” (MPS)—since it must be distinguished from the normative considerations that inform their critiques.  We will refer to this as the “Scope Problem” about morality criticism.  Second, we can usefully divide Continental critics of morality into two camps:  those who see morality as a direct threat to human flourishing; and those who see morality as an indirect threat.  In the first camp are those thinkers who see the individual’s acceptance of morality as such as an obstacle to the individual’s flourishing; in different ways, Nietzsche and Freud are these kinds of morality critics.  In the second camp are those philosophers who see morality as among the “ideological” instruments that sustain socio-economic relations that are obstacles to individual flourishing.  On this second account—most obviously represented by Marx and perhaps some of his descendants associated with the Frankfurt School—it is not allegiance to morality per se that thwarts individual flourishing, but rather the role such allegiance plays in sustaining certain socio-economic relations, the latter of which constitute the immediate obstacle to flourishing.  We will call the former “Direct Morality Critics” and the latter “Indirect Morality Critics.”  (Foucault straddles both approaches, and so we will discuss him in a transitional section.) 

Reaction Formation Watch (Leiter)

Story here:

Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigned from Congress on Friday, effective immediately, in the wake of questions about e-mails he wrote a former teenage male page....

Campaign aides had previously acknowledged that the Republican congressman e-mailed the former Capitol page five times, but had said there was nothing inappropriate about the exchange. The page was 16 at the time of the e-mail correspondence.

The page worked for Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., who said Friday that when he learned of the e-mail exchanges 10 to 11 months ago, he called the teen's parents. Alexander told the Ruston Daily Leader, ''We also notified the House leadership that there might be a potential problem....''

ABC News reported Friday that Foley also engaged in a series of sexually explicit instant messages with current and former teenage male pages. In one message, ABC said, Foley wrote to one page: ''Do I make you a little horny?''

In another message, Foley wrote, ''You in your boxers, too? ... Well, strip down and get naked.''

Foley, as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, had introduced legislation in July to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. He also sponsored other legislation designed to protect minors from abuse and neglect.

''We track library books better than we do sexual predators,'' Foley has said....

"The People Are Unfit to Rule"

This is a sharp cultural analysis of some trends in daytime T.V. broadcasting:

[On the Maury Povich Show] [a] married couple was waiting for Povich’s paternity testers to come in with the verdict on whether or not the husband was the father of his pregnant wife's baby.

The judgment came in a sealed envelope. Povich held the results in the air and proclaimed that the husband “had nothing to worry about. It's your child, Stewart!.”

“Stewart” issued a victorious war whoop and punched the air with his fist. He gave Maury a big hug.

Stewart's wife rolled her eyes. “I told you you were the daddy,” she said with a distinctly southern accent, “you big [bleep].”

The audience roared. 

Maury likes to build his shows around paternity tests. 

The last time I saw him do one of these, things turned out differently. A cuckolded husband collapsed in tears. As he lay sobbing on a couch, a winking Maury pretended to console him. His wife wept as the crowd howled. 

This kind of atrocity has been commonplace on American daytime corporate television for some time.

Povich is neither the first nor the last daytime television host to construct a broadcast around the employment of marginal and poor people as tragic sociological circus freaks. This was how “Jenny Jones” and Sally Jesse Raphael made their talk-who names and how Montel Williams got his start.

The worst is probably Jerry Springer, who loves to pit cheating lower-class couples and their lovers against one another....

Then there’s the real-life judicial shows, wherein small-claims and divorce justices likes “Judge Judy” and “Judge Joe Brown” preside over dysfunctional poor people who can’t stop bitterly arguing with each other. These television judges lace their proceedings and judgments with lectures on proper behavior and values, accompanying their legal verdicts with cutting comments about the rabble’s insufficiently middle-class comportment and conduct and instructing them in the virtues of work, fidelity, family responsibility, and the respect for authority....

Beyond their profitable (for broadcasters) appeal to the public’s most base and voyeuristic instincts, these and other “real—life” television shows...are part of an elitist thought control project: the cultural engineering and enforcement of mass consent to social hierarchy.

Along with numerous other corporate television productions they propagate at least two central authoritarian ideas. The first such idea maintains that poor people –--- it is practically always working- and lower-class people who get held up for ridicule in the human cockfights staged by Maury, Jerry, and the rest –--- deserve their own poverty and related isolation and criminalization in America. A college student who has been mass culturally weaned on Jerry (Springer), Jenny (Jones), Sally (Jesse-Raphael), Judy (the judge), and Maury et al. is not a good candidate to follow his left-liberal sociology, history, or English professor’s discourse on the role that structural forces and elite agents of class, race, and/or gender oppression play in creating mass inequality and misery in the United States. The endless army of stupid, hateful, alienated, and hopeless poor people paraded across her television screen by Maury and his friends strike the student as being oppressed by nobody or nothing so much as themselves.

Of course, Maury and Jerry don’t do shows about the rampant social injustice that produces the people who show up on their stages. Judges Judy and Joe Brown and the authorities on Divorce Court don’t adjudicate on the political-economic abandonment of the inner city or the corporate globalization that destroys jobs, families, and communities....
 
The second richly authoritarian idea “taught” by Maury and Jerry et al. holds that the ordinary populace is too stupid, vile, savage, selfish, atavistic, and ignorant to be trusted with the possession of any particular power in “democratic” America....

Maury, Jerry, and the rest are excellent disseminators of a notion that Chomsky rightly places at the heart of the venerable thought-control project of the corporate master class: “the people who are supposed to run the show” (the society’s power elite) must “do so without any interference from the mass of the population, who have no business in the public arena” (Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World [New York, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2005], p. 21).

“No business in the public arena”…except as angry and tragic circus-freaks who deserve their position at the bottom of America’s steep socioeconomic pyramids.

Feeling Uncertain About Your Masculinity? Support the Iraq War, Buy an SUV, and Hate Gays

Ruchira Paul has the details on this recent study out of Cornell University.

On Gay Marriage

ORIGINALLY POSTED March 27, 2004; recent events in Texas, sadly, make it relevant again.

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This is not bad from Bob Herbert in the New York Times:

In the [1967] Loving case a mixed-race married couple was charged with violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. The judge who sentenced the couple wrote: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangements there would be no cause for [interracial] marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

Now we're told that he doesn't want gays to marry. That there is something unnatural about the whole idea of men marrying men and women marrying women. That it's abhorrent to much of the population, just as interracial marriages were (and to many, still are) abhorrent.

This does get to the heart of the matter. There is no doubt that the idea of two men or two women being married seems strange and unfamiliar (well, it is unfamiliar, after all), that it is upsetting to many, that it provokes hard-to-articulate feelings of unease and, in some, revulsion. It is, in that regard, no different than the feelings very common fifty years ago, and still sometimes found today, regarding interracial marriage. In both cases, it is impossible for anyone to give a rational explanation for their opposition. (A good illustration are the postings at this conservative site.)

It seems to me there have been three general kinds of attempts to offer a rational basis for opposition to gay marriage: appeals to religion, tradition, and the "essential" nature of marriage. Assuming that religious faith can be rationally defended--I will assume, arguendo, that it can be--it's not at all clear that those defenses suffice to underwrite the rationality of claims about God's intentions on matters like gay marriage. Belief in God is one thing; claims to authoritative epistemic access to God's intentions is another. The rationality of claims of the latter sort has never been adequately defended.

Reliance on "tradition" is not rational in the absence of (a) a defense of the rationality of the tradition, or (b) a defense of the rationality of deference to tradition. Obviously if the rationality of the tradition could be defended there would be no need to appeal to the tradition in the first place. And the only defenses of the rationality of deference to tradition--assuming they're successful--establish, at best, that tradition is a defeasible guide to what we should do today, and thus can not themselves fully dodge the question of why tradition should not be defeated in this instance. (Again, I'm assuming, arguendo, that the "tradition" supports the claims of the opponents of gay marriage: for some pertinent doubts, see the interview with Sanford Levinson linked at the end of this posting.)

Finally, arguments based on claims about the essential nature of marriage--like those by John Finnis and Robert George--are, it is fair to say, generally recognized as reductios: the arguments are so tortured and so wrought with bizarre premises as to lead one agnostic on the subject to be highly suspicious. (A thinner version of these arguments from Doug Kmiec is here. Larry Solum [San Diego Law] comments on some of the peculiarities of the Kmiec argument here.)

Thus Spoke Heinrich Heine

As memorably quoted by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents:

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies -- but not before they have been hanged.

Reaction Formation Watch

Details here; an excerpt:

Late last October Dr. W. David Hager, a prominent obstetrician-gynecologist and Bush Administration appointee to the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), took to the pulpit as the featured speaker at a morning service. He stood in the campus chapel at Asbury College, a small evangelical Christian school....

With the autumn sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows, Hager opened his Bible to the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel and looked out into the audience. "I want to share with you some information about how...God has called me to stand in the gap," he declared. "Not only for others, but regarding ethical and moral issues in our country."

For Hager, those moral and ethical issues all appear to revolve around sex: In both his medical practice and his advisory role at the FDA, his ardent evangelical piety anchors his staunch opposition to emergency contraception, abortion and premarital sex. Through his six books--which include such titles as Stress and the Woman's Body and As Jesus Cared for Women, self-help tomes that interweave syrupy Christian spirituality with paternalistic advice on women's health and relationships--he has established himself as a leading conservative Christian voice on women's health and sexuality....

Back at Asbury, Hager cast himself as a victim of religious persecution in his sermon. "You see...there is a war going on in this country," he said gravely. "And I'm not speaking about the war in Iraq. It's a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It wasn't my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It was my faith.... By making myself available, God has used me to stand in the breach.... Just as he has used me, he can use you...."

[O]ut in the audience, Linda Carruth Davis--...his former wife of thirty-two years--was enraged. "It was the most disgusting thing I've ever heard," she recalled months later, through clenched teeth.

According to Davis, Hager's public moralizing on sexual matters clashed with his deplorable treatment of her during their marriage. Davis alleges that between 1995 and their divorce in 2002, Hager repeatedly sodomized her without her consent. Several sources on and off the record confirmed that she had told them it was the sexual and emotional abuse within their marriage that eventually forced her out. "I probably wouldn't have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time," she explained to me. "But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible...."

She intermittently thought of telling her story but refrained, she says, out of respect for her adult children. It was Hager's sermon at Asbury last October that finally changed her mind. Davis was there to hear her middle son give a vocal performance; she was prepared to hear her ex-husband inveigh against secular liberals, but she was shocked to hear him speak about their divorce when he took to the pulpit....

As laid out in his writings, Hager's worldview is not informed by a sense of inherent equality between men and women. Instead, men are expected to act as benevolent authority figures for the women in their lives. (In one of his books, he refers to a man who raped his wife as "selfish" and "sinful.") But to model gender relations on the one Jesus had with his followers is to leave women dangerously exposed in the event that the men in their lives don't meet the high standard set by God Himself--trapped in a permanent state of dependence hoping to be treated well....

Though her marriage had been dead for nearly a decade, [ex-wife Linda] could not see her way clear to divorce; she had no money of her own and few marketable skills. But life with David Hager had grown unbearable. As his public profile increased, so did the tension in their home, which she says periodically triggered episodes of abuse. "I would be asleep," she recalls, "and since [the sodomy] was painful and threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started, just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off.... I would [confront] David later, and he would say, 'You asked me to do that,' and I would say, 'No, I never asked for it....'"

Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn't emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could "buy" peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. "Sex was coinage; it was a commodity," she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. "He would say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to have anal sex with you; I can't feel the difference,'" Davis recalls incredulously. "And I would say, 'Well then, you're in the wrong business.'"

By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn't have otherwise engaged in--for example, $2,000 for oral sex, "though that didn't happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser," Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years....

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

UPDATE:  Originally posted March 23, 2005.

====================

This essay, my contribution to The Future for Philosophy (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 2004), is now available for free download here.  This is from the introduction to the essay:

Paul Ricoeur famously dubbed that great triumvirate of late nineteenth--and early twentieth-century thought--Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud--“the school of suspicion,”[i] by which he meant those thinkers who taught us to regard with suspicion our conscious understandings and experience,[ii] whether the deliverances of ordinary psychological introspection about one’s desires (“I really want to be rich!”), or the moral categories political leaders and ordinary citizens apply to themselves and the social world they inhabit (“an inheritance tax is an immoral death tax!”).  “Beneath” or “behind” the surface lay causal forces that explained the conscious phenomena precisely because they laid bare the true meaning of those phenomena:  I don’t really want lots of money, I want the love I never got as a child; survivors have no moral claim on an inheritance, but it is in the interests of the ruling classes that we believe they do; and so on.

            Recent years have been, in now familiar ways, unkind to Marx and Freud.  For understandable, if philosophically frivolous, reasons the collapse of the Soviet Union has been taken—especially in the media—as signalling the defeat of Marxism qua philosophy.[iii]  Meanwhile, Freud’s theory of the mind fell prey to the combined forces of the philosophical critique launched by Adolf Grünbaum[iv] (especially as popularized by polemicists like Frederick Crews[v]) and market-driven models of medical care (especially in the United States), which disfavored the lengthy investment required by Freudian psychoanalysis.  Only Nietzsche has remained apparently unscathed, his academic reputation and influence at perhaps its highest point ever.[vi]

            Yet instead of a frontal assault on the critiques of the explanatory programs of Marx and Freud, the defense of their legacy in the English-speaking world has gradually fallen to those I will call moralizing interpreters of their thought.  The moralizing readers de-emphasize (or simply reject) the explanatory and causal claims in the work of Marx and Freud, and try to marry more-or-less Marxian and Freudian ideas to various themes in normative ethics and political philosophy.  Explanation of phenomena is abandoned in favor of the more traditional philosophical enterprise of justification, whether of the just distribution of resources or the possibility of morality’s authority. 

So, for example, G.A. Cohen, the most influential of English-language Marx interpreters in recent decades,[vii] has declared that “Marxism has lost much or most of its [empirical] carapace, its hard shell of supposed fact”[viii] and that, as a result, “Marxists...are increasingly impelled into normative political philosophy.”[ix]  (Under the influence of Habermas, the Marxist tradition has taken a similar turn on the Continent.[x])   Similarly, a leading moral philosopher notes that, “Just when philosophers of science thought they had buried Freud for the last time, he has quietly reappeared in the writings of moral philosophers”[xi] and goes on to claim that “Freud’s theory of the superego provides a valuable psychological model for various aspects of [Kant’s] Categorical Imperative.”[xii]  On these new renderings, Marx and Freud command our attention because they are really just complements (or correctives) to Rawls or Korsgaard, really just normative theorists who can be made to join in a contemporary dialogue about equality and the authority of morality.[xiii]

            Yet even Nietzsche has been transformed by moralizing interpreters, though in a somewhat different way.  The crucial development here has been the retreat from the natural reading of Nietzsche as a philosopher engaged in an attack on morality--a reading first articulated by the Danish scholar Georg Brandes more than a century ago[xiv]-- in favor of a reading which presents Nietzsche as fundamentally concerned with questions of truth and knowledge:  the moralistic scruples of interpreters are satisfied by treating Nietzsche as concerned with something else, something less morally alarming than a “revaluation of values.”  Thus, on the European Continent, Heidegger tells us that Nietzsche is the last great metaphysician, advancing claims, like Plato, about the essence of Being,[xv] while in the hands of Foucault and Derrida, Nietzsche becomes the precursor of post-modern skepticism about knowledge and determinate meaning.   

            In Anglophone philosophy, the development has followed a somewhat different trajectory, but arrived, nonetheless, at the same resting point.  The late Walter Kaufmann, a gifted translator but unreliable scholar, saved Nietzsche from the misrepresentations of the Nazis, but added his own by introducing a more straightforwardly moralistic interpretation:  Kaufmann’s Nietzsche turns out to be a congenial secular liberal, committed to self-realization.[xvi]  Since Kaufmann, however, the primary tendency among English-speaking interpreters has been, as on the Continent, to locate Nietzsche’s central philosophical concerns outside of the theory of value:  for example, as a certain sort of philosophical skeptic about truth, knowledge, and meaning.  This approach, which dominated Nietzsche studies beginning with Arthur Danto’s 1965 book Nietzsche as Philosopher,[xvii] received its most sophisticated articulation in Alexander Nehamas’s 1985 study, Nietzsche:  Life as Literature,[xviii] a book which presents a “Nietzsche” that, one suspects, Georg Brandes would not have recognized.

            I shall argue that, in fact, all three of the great practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion have suffered at the hands of moralizing interpreters who have resisted the essentially naturalistic thrust of their conception of philosophical practice.  The resistance, it is important to note at the beginning, has taken different forms.  On Cohen’s reading of Marx, for example, Marx is, indeed, a kind of naturalist, but a failed one:  Marxists are better-served by turning to moral theory, according to Cohen, given the failure of the naturalistic project. On Nehamas’s reading of Nietzsche, by contrast, the naturalism is simply ignored, in favor of a reading that makes Nietzsche morally palatable by reading him as claiming only that the best kind of life is one that displays the coherence of the ideal literary character.  In the case of Freud, finally, recent interpretations have been straightforwardly moralistic:  Freud is, indeed, a naturalist, on these accounts, but one whose central claims either lend support to or require supplementation by claims from—of all sources!—Kantian moral theory.

This paper argues against all three forms of moralizing readings, and in support of the claim that, as a matter of both textual exegesis and intellectual importance, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are best read as primarily naturalistic thinkers, that is thinkers who view philosophical inquiry as continuous with a sound empirical understanding of the natural world and the causal forces operative in it.  When one understands conscious life naturalistically, in terms of its real causes, one contributes at the same time to a critique of the contents of consciousness: that, in short, is the essence of a hermeneutics of suspicion.

            Now admittedly, such a rendering of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” would have seemed strange to Ricoeur, who was in the grips of a fairly crude philosophy of science.  He thought the hermeneutics of suspicion stood in opposition to a “scientific” understanding of phenomena.  “The statements of psychoanalysis are [not] located...within the causal discourse of the natural sciences,” Ricoeur says, then adding that since psychoanalysis is concerned with “motives”--though not motives that “coincide with any conscious process of awareness”-- “its explanations resemble causal explanations, without, however, being identically the same, for then psychoanalysis would reify all its notions and mystify interpretation itself.”[xix]  The talk of “reification” is, shall we say, obscure. Psychoanalysis, as Freud himself understood it, offers causal explanations that appeal to unconscious motives, and while these causes are laden with meaning, they are causes nonetheless.[xx]  To be sure, when philosophers of science thought that all causal explanations had to conform to one model--usually drawn from some idealized version of physics--it seemed that a hermeneutic explanation, one that took seriously the meaningfulness of certain mental states qua causes, was necessarily not part of the causal discourse of science.  But that understanding of causal explanation is now, happily, defunct,[xxi] replaced with a new pluralism that recognizes, as one philosopher of science puts it, that “explanatory adequacy is essentially pragmatic and field-specific”[xxii]  Sciences may all offer consilient explanations of diverse phenomena, and generate true predictions, but beyond that, there is room for a plurality of logical forms and degrees of quantitative precision.

            This last point bears emphasizing:  naturalism in philosophy--certainly as it is relevant to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud--is fundamentally a methodological view, which holds that philosophical inquiry should be both modelled on the methods of the successful sciences, and, at a minimum, consistent with the results of those sciences.[xxiii]  The supernatural finds no place in our best ontology, on this view, simply because the methods of the sciences don’t require positing its existence.  Because naturalism, so understood, gives priority to actual scientific practices, it repudiates the characteristic doctrines of mid-20th-century scientistic philosophy, such as the idea that all genuine sciences must ultimately be reducible to physics, or the claim that all genuine explanations must have a certain logical form or at least the form of the explanations we find in physics.  Physics is a successful science, but so too are evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology and geology, despite the fact that they aren’t reducible to physics, and despite the fact that they explain phenomena in ways that look unfamiliar from the austere ontological and methodological repertoire of physics. 

            Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are more important, to be sure, for their methodological naturalism, brought as it is to bear on questions of great moment, than for all the details of their empirical theories.  We must allow that on many particulars, these three great practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion are not satisfactory--indeed, can not be uniformly satisfactory since they sometimes contradict each other! Of course, empirical progress is the norm in all forms of inquiry that aim for a naturalistic understanding of the world.  And just as evolutionary biologists find it necessary to modify parts of the explanatory framework bequeathed them by Darwin--even as they preserve the main elements of his outlook--so, too, should practitioners of the hermeneutics of suspicion expect to dispense with many of the particular theses associated with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, even as they retain the general explanatory framework that informs their hermeneutics of suspicion.[xxiv]  As one recent researcher, reviewing experimental evidence supporting Freud, wrote:  “To reject psychodynamic thinking because Freud’s instinct theory is his view of women is dated is like rejecting modern physics because Newton did not understand relativity.”[xxv]  To take Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud seriously as philosophical naturalists demands nothing less.

            If we can recover the naturalistic ambitions of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, we will also accomplish two important meta-philosophical goals:   first, it helps make philosophy “relevant”--as the critics of philosophy so often demand--and, second, it bridges the so-called analytic/Continental divide in philosophy.  Philosophy becomes relevant because the world—riven as it is with hypocrisy and concealment—desperately needs a hermeneutics of suspicion to unmask it.  And by taking these three seminal figures of the Continental traditions as philosophical naturalists we show their work to be continuous with the naturalistic turn that has swept Anglophone philosophy over the past several decades.  Such a reconciliation of Continental and Anglophone philosophy may seem to some the wrong one, but it is beyond the scope of this essay to defend the importance of the naturalistic turn.[xxvi]  All I hope to establish here is that the antipathy to naturalism often thought to be constitutive of “the Continental tradition” is simply an artifact of cutting the joints of that tradition in certain places.[xxvii]  Much of that Continental tradition has earned the--sometimes justified--antipathy of Anglophone philosophers, but there is reason to hope that just as German intellectuals of the 1840s and 50s, in the grips of the first great naturalistic turn in philosophy, gave up on Hegel as an obscurantist metaphysician,[xxviii] that we, too, may leave behind Hegel and his progeny.

---

      [i] Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. D. Savage (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1970), p. 32.

      [ii] “If we go back to the intention they had in common, we find in it the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as ‘false’ consciousness.”  Id. at 33. 

      [iii] Marxism had been so long associated with the Soviet Union, that that system’s collapse was taken to coincide with the collapse of its putative intellectual foundations.  Of course, this association is, from a philosophical point of view, a non-sequitur.  Indeed, the Soviet Union arguably collapsed for Marxian reasons:  bureaucratic central planning clearly fettered the development of the forces of production, and thus was eventually supplanted by nascent market forms of production and distribution.

      [iv] Adolf Grünbaum, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis:  A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1984).

      [v] See infra n. 85.

      [vi] Even analytic philosophers like Christine Korsgaard and Thomas Nagel--ones with Kantian sympathies no less!--now refer respectfully to his ideas.

      [vii] See G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History:  A Defense (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1978).

      [viii] G.A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 103.

      [ix] Id. at 109.

[x] See, e.g., Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt:  Suhrkamp, 1981), translated as The Theory of Communicative Action by Thomas McCarthy in two volumes (1984, 1987) published by Beacon Press (Boston).

      [xi] J. David Velleman, “A Rational Superego,” Philosophical Review 108 (1999), p. 529.

      [xii] Id.

      [xiii] One hopeful sign that the tide may be turning with respect to Marx is Jonathan Wolff’s splendid book, Why Read Marx Today? (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002).  At times, to be sure, Wolff expresses a certain uneasiness about the epistemic status of Marx’s claims..  “My point,” he says, “is that we value the work of the greatest philosophers for their power, rigour, depth, inventiveness, insight, originality, systematic vision, and, no doubt, other virtues too.  Truth, or at least the whole truth and nothing but the truth, seems way down the list....There are things much more interesting than truth.  Understood this way, Marx’s works are as alive as anyone’s.”   Id. at 101.  Yet elsewhere--and Wolff makes the case powerfully--he notes that Marx “does say may true and inspiring things.  His work is full of insight and illumination.”  Id. at 125.

      [xiv] Based on lectures first given in the late 1880s, they subsequently appeared in English as Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. A. Chater (London:  Heinemann, 1915).

      [xv] A more compelling reading of Nietzsche along these lines than Heidegger’s is presented in John Richardson, Nietzsche’s System (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1996).  For my own doubts about this interpretation, see my review in Mind 107 (1998):  683-690.

      [xvi] Although long discredited, this reading continues to resurface.  For a recent example, see James Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism:  A Reading of Schopenhauer as Educator,” in R. Schacht (ed.), Nietzsche’s Postmoralism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001).  For discussion of the sloppy scholarship here, see my review in Mind 112 (2003):  175-178.   As Thomas Hurka points out, Conant even quotes selectively from “Schopenhauer as Educator,” and mistranslates a central term in order to support his (mis)reading.  See Thomas Hurka, “Nietzsche:  Perfectionist,” in B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

      [xvii] (New York:  MacMillan, 1965).

      [xviii] (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 1985).  Nehamas does repudiate, correctly, Danto’s attribution of a pragmatic theory of truth to Nietzsche.  But in its overall interpretive orientation, it follows in Danto’s footsteps.

      [xix] Freud and Philosophy, p. 360.

[xx] As Peter Railton eloquently puts the same general point in his contribution to this volume:  “How could any explanation of a human phenomenon be causally adequate if it failed to give us an account that accurately rendered the lived experience or subjectivity of those immersed in a practice?—such experience is surely the primary data to be accounted for.  And how could an understanding of human action be meaning adequate if it failed to locate those ideas, images, or motives that actually played a role in bringing about the behavior and its effects?”

      [xxi] See Nancy Cartwright’s and Philip Kitcher’s essays in this volume.

      [xxii] Richard W. Miller, Fact and Method:  Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and Social Sciences (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 95.

      [xxiii] I have defended this view of naturalism in various places:  see, e.g., my Nietzsche on Morality (London:  Routledge, 2002), pp. 3-6, and my “Naturalism and Naturalized Jurisprudence,” in Analyzing Law:  New Essays in Legal Theory, ed. B. Bix (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 81-84.  Michael Rea, in one of the most careful and systematic (albeit highly critical) considerations of philosophical naturalism, reaches a similar conclusion:  see Michael C. Rea, World Without Design:  The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 2002), esp. chapters 2 and 3. 

[xxiv] Obviously, they shouldn’t retain the framework if it proves empirically unsustainable.  And equally obviously, this way of approaching the hermeneutics of suspicion makes it hostage to empirical fortune:  but as far as I can see, that is what Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud intended, and that is what makes them genuinely interesting and significant.  On recent empirical support for Nietzsche, see my essay on Nietzsche’s theory of the will in The Blackwell Companion to Nietzsche, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson (Oxford:  Blackwell, forthcoming) and the essay by Joshua Knobe and myself on the empirical foundations of Nietzsche’s moral psychology in Nietzsche and Morality, op cit.; on Freud, see infra n. 89; on Marx, see infra nn. 41-46.

[xxv] Drew Westen, “The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud:  Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science,” Psychological Bulletin 124 (1998), p. 334.

      [xxvi] But see the introduction to this volume, and, especially, the contributions by Alvin Goldman and Peter Railton.

      [xxvii] This is not to deny that anti-naturalism is an important theme in post-Kantian philosophy on the European Continent in the 19th- and 20th- centuries; it is to deny that such a theme constitutes an ineliminable element of Continental philosophy.

[xxviii] No one put it better than Schopenhauer, who remarked that the emblem of a university committed to Hegel’s philosophy would be “a cuttle-fish creating a cloud of obscurity around itself so that no one sees what it is, with the legend, mea caligine tutus [fortified by my own obscurity].”  On the Will in Nature, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 24.

Reaction Formation Watch

Story here; an excerpt:

Mayor James E. West of Spokane, a Republican opponent of gay rights, was accused in a newspaper on Thursday of molesting two boys decades ago and the paper also says it caught him using the trappings of his office to try to court a young man online.

Mr. West denied the accusations, but acknowledged he "had relations with adult men."

He admitted offering autographed sports memorabilia and a possible City Hall internship to what he thought was an 18-year-old man on the Web site Gay.com. The man was actually a computer expert hired by the newspaper, The Spokesman-Review, as part of a sting operation.

Mr. West, 54, a former Boy Scout leader and Army paratrooper who was married for five years in the 1990's, denied that the online offers constituted abuse of his office, and he said he would serve out the more than three years remaining in his term....

Mr. West, a conservative, rose to become majority leader of the State Senate during a two-decade legislative career. He consistently opposed efforts to expand civil rights protections for gay men and lesbians and voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, a ban on same-sex marriage, in 1998.

The newspaper had hired a computer expert to create a fictitious identity as an 18-year-old boy to chat with Mr. West, whose online aliases included "RightBi-Guy."

UPDATE:  More commentary and information here:

The West scandal fits a pattern.

As PBS' "Frontline" recently had courage to report, closeted homosexuals help design conservatives' media and political campaigns against such causes as same-sex marriage.

It has been a quarter-century since Washington, D.C., police charged Maryland Rep. Robert Bauman with propositioning a 17-year-old male. Bauman was an original sponsor of an anti-gay bill called the Family Protection Act.

As Karen Dorn Steele reported yesterday in The Spokesman-Review, West championed criminal background checks for jobs involving children, warning that abusers "often try to gain a position of trust and authority."

West proposed making it a misdemeanor for unmarried teenagers 18 or younger to have sexual contact.

He co-sponsored a bill to bar gay men and lesbians from working in schools, day care centers and some agencies: It provided for screening prospective employees on their sexual orientation.

Reaction Formations, a Continuing Saga

Details here (from a conservative Christian magazine); an excerpt: 

For 20 years, churchgoers first in Birmingham, Ala., and then Cincinnati, Ohio, trusted, revered, and believed the impeccable reputation Mr. Burgin built from his pulpit. But beneath the thick varnish of smooth oration and doctrinally sound sermons, this conservative pastor secretly harbored a monster....Mr. Burgin was addicted to internet pornography. For the entirety of his ministry and even before, Mr. Burgin tumbled silently through a cycle of shame, repentance, and broken vows....

Despite [Ed.-or rather, "because of"] a guilt-ridden conscience, Mr. Burgin often preached on sexual purity, slogging through such sermons undetected. "I compartmentalized it in my mind," he said. "I rationalized. I minimized. I would stop while preaching and teaching on it...."

A Barna Research Group study released in November 2003 found four out of five born-again Christians believe pornography to be morally unacceptable. The Bible likens lust to adultery and fornication, both expressly forbidden. Nevertheless, Mr. Burgin's disaster is far from unique:

• A 2003 survey from Internet Filter Review reported that 47 percent of Christians admit pornography is a major problem in their homes.

• An internet survey conducted by Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in 2002 found 30 percent of 6,000 pastors had viewed internet porn in the last 30 days.

• A Christianity Today Leadership Survey in 2001 reported 37 percent of pastors have viewed internet porn.

• Family Safe Media reports 53 percent of men belonging to the Christian organization Promise Keepers visit porn sites every week.

• One in seven calls to Focus on the Family's Pastoral Care Hotline is related to internet pornography.

• Today's Christian Woman in 2003 found that one in six women, including Christians, struggles with pornography addiction.

(For those new to Freud, see here on "reaction formations.")

Center for Naturalism

I've just accepted an invitation to join the Advisory Board of the Center for Naturalism, along with Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, and some other philosophers and scientists.  Do check them out:  lots of good links and information.

"The Black Book of Communism"

ORIGINALLY POSTED July 20, 2004.

=====================================

This book, published by French scholars in 1997, documents the death tolls attributable to communist regimes in different countries. The book is obviously premised on the thought that the fact that these were communist regimes is explanatory: clearly, one could produce similar books like "The Black Book of White Men" or or "The Black Book of Short Dictators" or "The Black Book of Blondes," listing the atrocities committed by regimes with the designated characteristics. But the undertaking would seem peculiar, since there is no reason to think that the highlighted attributes are explanatory.

The Black Book of Communism doesn't actually argue that allegiance to communism is explanatory; it takes it for granted. Someone writing The Black Book of Capitalism, in turn, might start counting corpses attributable to 19th-century European imperialism, Pinochet, Suhatro, Marcos, Somoza, etc. (Should we add Hitler, who on some accounts owes much to the support of the capitalist class, and whose rise to power was, uncontroversially, facilitated by the worldwide capitalist crisis of the late 1920s and 1930s?)

Would such an exercise illuminate anything about capitalism? It is an interesting question, and I do not know the answer. Still, in viewing the Black Book of Communism it is not unreasonable to raise the kinds of questions put--with characteristic Maoist hyperbole and apologetics--by this Maoist organization::

[I]t is an 856 page book and there are no statistical comparisons of premature deaths between capitalist and socialist countries anywhere in the book, just as MIM [Maoist International Movement] charged all along. The reason is simple: the Communists doubled the life expectancies of the people of the Soviet Union and China. That is the overall picture. It does not mean there were not civil wars or executions, including some unjust ones, but overall, the violence of communism is less than that of capitalism, by far.

The simple scientific link missing in the minds of our critics is the link between poverty under a system of private property and death. Poverty under capitalism causes death from lack of food, a decent environment and adequate health care.

Assuming one is a utilitarian about these matters--as the economists usually profess to be (though theirs is typically a sophomoric utilitarianism which equates well-being with preference-satisfaction)--then the only relevant question really is the causal nexus between different forms of socio-economic ordering and human well-being. And thus the Maoists are plainly correct to raise the question: how many lives were cut short by the catastrophe of the Great Depression? how many lives were lost to capitalist exploitation and terror in third world counctries? and so on.

It will not do, to refute the Maoists, to follow the lead of the silly Arnold Kling, and compare per capita life spans today to 100 or 200 years ago. No one was a more vigorous cheerleader for the productive power of capitalism, of course, than Karl Marx. The relevant question is whether that productive power might have been harnessed in ways that would have resulted in greater maximization of human well-being than actually resulted under existing socio-economic arrangements? And then, if we were to be serious about the question, we would have to line up the corpses and human misery (causally) attributable to the imperfections of capitalist forms of socio-economic organization next to those (causally) attributable to the communist societies, to see whose "Black Book" should be the fattest.

Now doctrinaire Marxists will presumably conclude, before the exercise even begins, that of course the ledger sheet of human misery will be longer on the side of the Chinese and the Soviets, since those nations were prematurely communist, and so deprived themselves of decades (or centuries) of development of their productive power which capitalism would have made possible. Such productive power, in turn, would have made possible, even within the pathologies of a capitalist system, improvements in human well-being, as those such as Dr. Kling like to point out.

Fortunately, doctrinaire Marxists are now in short supply! (Too bad the same is not true of doctrinaire libertarians, whose reasoning is not so different.) And so there is a genuine empirical issue here, for which The Black Book of Communism is only a partial contribution. (It focuses disproportionately on intentional killings, though it factors in some non-intentional ones as well, such as the Chinese famine. But it ignores precisely the critique of the Soviets and the Chinese that would be raised by the doctrinaire Marxist, noted above.) I will not be betting, to be sure, on Harvard University Press publishing installments looking at the other side of the ledger sheets, but perhaps other scholars will find other fora in which to address the issues.

At the same time, what is needed is not simply correlations, but some account of causal mechanisms, so that we understand the precise sense in which, e.g., "capitalism" (whatever that is) produces mass murderers like Suhatro, or "communism" (whatever that is) produces mass murderers like Stalin.

These are fascinating issues, of enormous human importance. Is there a pertinent scholarly (as distinct from a popular [e.g., the silly Arnold Kling] or polemical [e.g., the MIM, above]) literature?

UPDATE: My colleague Frank Cross calls my attention to an interesting, small-scale study of the effect of privatization of water rights on child mortality in Argentina.  ANOTHER UPDATE:  A different perspective on water privatization here.  AND ANOTHER:  Reader Tom Barker alerts me to the fact that there is, in French, a Black Book of Capitalism, though it may already be out of print.

The Democracy that wasn't: Chomsky on the U.S. elections

Full text here; an excerpt:

[T]he parties try to exclude the population from participation. So they don't present issues, policies, agendas, and so on. They project imagery, and people either don't bother or they vote for the image. The Gallup Poll regularly asks, "Why are you voting?" One of the choices is, "I'm voting for the candidate's stand on issues." That was 6% for Bush, and 13% for Kerry ­and most of those voters were deluded about the positions of the candidates. So what you have is essentially flipping a coin. Each candidate got approximately 30% of the electorate. Bush got 31%, Kerry got 29%.

The party managers know where the public stands on a whole list of issues. Their funders just don't support them; the interests they represent don't support them. So they project a different kind of image.

If you listen to the presidential debates, you can't figure out what they're saying, and that's on purpose. The last debate was supposed to be about domestic issues. The New York Times commented that Kerry didn't make any hint about possible government involvement in health care programs because that position has, in their words, "no political support." Well, according to the most recent polls, 80% of the population thinks that the government ought to guarantee health care for everyone, and furthermore regard it as a moral obligation. That tells you something about people's values. But there's "no political support."

Why? Because the pharmaceutical industry is opposed, the financial institutions are opposed, the insurance industry is opposed, so there's "no political support." It doesn't matter if 80% of the population regard it as a moral obligation: That doesn't count as political support. It tells you something about the elite conception. You're supposed to vote for the image they're projecting. That's not surprising really. Just ask yourself, "Who runs the elections?"

The elections are run by the same guys who sell toothpaste. They show you an image of a sports hero, or a sexy model, or a car going up a sheer cliff or something, which has nothing to do with the commodity, but it's intended to delude you into picking this one rather than another one. Same when they run elections...Quite naturally, the [advertising] industry uses the same technique to sell candidates that it uses to sell toothpaste or lifestyle drugs. The point is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude and suppressing information­and similarly, to undermine democracy by the same method.

No credit card company left behind

A well-known German philosopher once observed that, "The modern state is merely the executive committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."  Today's management excercise is well-described here:

The bankruptcy bill [the Senate will soon approve] was written by and for credit card companies, and the industry's political muscle is the reason it seems unstoppable....

The bill would make it much harder for families in distress to write off their debts and make a fresh start. Instead, many debtors would find themselves on an endless treadmill of payments.

The credit card companies say this is needed because people have been abusing the bankruptcy law, borrowing irresponsibly and walking away from debts. The facts say otherwise.

A vast majority of personal bankruptcies in the United States are the result of severe misfortune. One recent study found that more than half of bankruptcies are the result of medical emergencies. The rest are overwhelmingly the result either of job loss or of divorce.

To the extent that there is significant abuse of the system, it's concentrated among the wealthy - including corporate executives found guilty of misleading investors - who can exploit loopholes in the law to protect their wealth, no matter how ill-gotten.

One increasingly popular loophole is the creation of an "asset protection trust," which is worth doing only for the wealthy. Senator Charles Schumer introduced an amendment that would have limited the exemption on such trusts, but apparently it's O.K. to game the system if you're rich: 54 Republicans and 2 Democrats voted against the Schumer amendment.

Other amendments were aimed at protecting families and individuals who have clearly been forced into bankruptcy by events, or who would face extreme hardship in repaying debts. Ted Kennedy introduced an exemption for cases of medical bankruptcy. Russ Feingold introduced an amendment protecting the homes of the elderly. Dick Durbin asked for protection for armed services members and veterans. All were rejected....

As Mr. Hacker and others have documented, over the past three decades the lives of ordinary Americans have become steadily less secure, and their chances of plunging from the middle class into acute poverty ever larger. Job stability has declined; spells of unemployment, when they happen, last longer; fewer workers receive health insurance from their employers; fewer workers have guaranteed pensions....

The bankruptcy bill fits right into this picture. When everything else goes wrong, Americans can still get a measure of relief by filing for bankruptcy - and rising insecurity means that they are forced to do this more often than in the past. But Congress is now poised to make bankruptcy law harsher, too.

Warren Buffett recently made headlines by saying America is more likely to turn into a "sharecroppers' society" than an "ownership society." But I think the right term is a "debt peonage" society - after the system, prevalent in the post-Civil War South, in which debtors were forced to work for their creditors. The bankruptcy bill won't get us back to those bad old days all by itself, but it's a significant step in that direction.

There is more on the bankruptcy con here.

Canada at risk of becoming a plutocracy?

So says Osgoode Hall tax professor Neil Brooks:

The C. D. Howe Institute recently set up a "Tax Competitiveness Centre" to recommend far-reaching tax reforms. That spells trouble for most Canadians.

Unless you're a rich investor, hold onto your wallet. Whenever the business-funded institute starts poking around in the tax system, it finds lots of things to change - mostly for the benefit of the rich.

That means the rest of us end up paying more taxes, or face cuts to social programs or benefits.

With the federal government trying to decide what to do with a surplus of $9 billion, the institute has been full of ideas.

Its latest - advocated by Jack Mintz, head of its new Tax Competitiveness Centre - is strikingly similar to one favoured by the Bush administration

Lift the tax burden entirely off income from investments and place the full tax burden on income from labour.

Not surprisingly, this idea is wildly popular among investors, who make up the bulk of C.D. Howe members.

Of course, these investors represent only a tiny proportion of Canada's taxpayers. But they tend to be highly effective at getting their way.

They've been particularly effective in the last few decades, as the power of labour has declined and the power of corporations and investors has risen sharply.

Rich Canadians have benefited enormously.

According to calculations by McMaster University economist Michael Veall, the top-earning 1 per cent of Canadians have almost doubled their share of the national income - from 7.6 per cent in 1980 to 13.6 per cent in 2000.

Osgoode Hall law professor Neil Brooks says the top-earning Canadians haven't enjoyed such a large share of Canada's national income since the 1920s and 1930s, a time when Canada was often regarded as a plutocracy (that is, a society ruled by the wealthy).

"Canada is once again at risk of becoming a plutocracy," says Brooks.

(By the way, when was the last time a major American newspaper described various right-wing think tanks, correctly, as shills for the rich and corporate interests?)

But let's look on the bright side:  if Canada becomes more plutocratic, then Canadians and Americans will have even more in common!

The Social Security Privatization Scam, continued

Remarkably, I actually heard from some poor deluded free market utopian protesting the facts about social security privatization, pointing (as befits anyone suitably indoctrinated) to the putative great success of private pension plans in Chile.  Now, as chance would have it (did he get the same e-mail?) comes Krugman:

Decades of conservative marketing have convinced Americans that government programs always create bloated bureaucracies, while the private sector is always lean and efficient. But when it comes to retirement security, the opposite is true. More than 99 percent of Social Security's revenues go toward benefits, and less than 1 percent for overhead. In Chile's system, management fees are around 20 times as high. And that's a typical number for privatized systems....

A reasonable prediction for the real rate of return on personal accounts in the U.S. is 4 percent or less. If we introduce a system with British-level management fees, net returns to workers will be reduced by more than a quarter. Add in deep cuts in guaranteed benefits and a big increase in risk, and we're looking at a "reform" that hurts everyone except the investment industry....

For the record, I don't think giving financial corporations a huge windfall is the main motive for privatization; it's mostly an ideological thing. But that windfall is a major reason Wall Street wants privatization, and everyone else should be very suspicious.

Then there's the issue of poverty among the elderly.

Privatizers who laud the Chilean system never mention that it has yet to deliver on its promise to reduce government spending. More than 20 years after the system was created, the government is still pouring in money. Why? Because, as a Federal Reserve study puts it, the Chilean government must "provide subsidies for workers failing to accumulate enough capital to provide a minimum pension." In other words, privatization would have condemned many retirees to dire poverty, and the government stepped back in to save them....

So the Bush administration wants to scrap a retirement system that works, and can be made financially sound for generations to come with modest reforms. Instead, it wants to buy into failure, emulating systems that, when tried elsewhere, have neither saved money nor protected the elderly from poverty.

In a plutocracy like the United States, most government policies reflect the interests and objectives of the economically dominant groups.  Krugman may be correct that privatization of social security is an kind of ideological idee fixe among the free market utopians, but that still leaves the question:  why did that idea get fixed in the first place?  Should we really discount the importance of the multi-billion dollar windfall to Wall Street that privatization of social security represents?

The Privatization-of-Social-Security Scam

It continues apace, promising misery and hardship for tens of millions of Americans in the years ahead; economist Dean Baker has some pertinent analysis:

[T]he Bush plan would require a large reduction in the benefits provided by the existing system. A worker who is 20 today would see a cut of approximately one-third in his or her retirement benefit, although workers would theoretically more than recoup this loss by investing a portion of their Social Security taxes in a private account.

The President's main pitch is that these accounts will yield higher returns than Social Security does. The pitch also includes rhetoric about the accounts being "your money," and giving every worker a stake in the "ownership society." These claims are mostly bad math, faulty logic and deception. Advocates of private accounts assume that the stock market will give the same returns in the future as it has in the past, even though price-to-earnings ratios in the stock market are far higher now than in the past, and the Social Security trustees project that profits will grow at about half the rate they did in the past. None of the proponents of privatization have yet passed the "no economist left behind test," which asks them to show the set of dividend yields and stock price increases that add up to the stock returns they assume in their analysis.

Private accounts also have high administrative costs. According to Bush's Social Security Commission, their private accounts will cost about ten times as much to administer as in the current system if they're handled through a single government-managed system. If Wall Street gets its hands on this money, with everyone going to his or her local bank or brokerage house--as is the case with the privatized systems in England and Chile--the costs could be thirty times as high as the cost of our Social Security system [Leiter:  that, of course, is the entire point!]. When the administrative costs are combined with real numbers on stock returns, the individual accounts will provide no better returns on average than the government bonds currently held by the Social Security trust fund. The accounts just add risk--individuals may invest poorly or retire during a market downturn, leaving them with much less money than they'd have under the current system....

Of course, the only reason anyone is even talking about cutting benefits and privatizing the program is that the right has managed to convince the public that Social Security is on its last legs. For more than two decades they have spread stories about the baby boomers bankrupting the system and multitrillion-dollar debts left to our children and grandchildren. In reality the program can pay all scheduled benefits long past the boomers' retirement. According to the Social Security trustees report, it can pay full benefits through the year 2042 with no changes whatsoever. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts the date at 2052....

Social Security is the country's most important and successful social program. It provides a large measure of economic security to the whole country, uniting the interests of the poor and the middle class. The program not only keeps tens of millions of retirees out of poverty, it also provides disability and survivors insurance to almost the entire working population. More children receive benefits from Social Security than from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (the revamped welfare program). Social Security is also extremely efficient and has a minimal amount of fraud and abuse.

It's a hugely popular program. Close to 90 percent of the public regularly affirms that we spend either too little or the right amount on Social Security. While polls also show majority support for private accounts, that's only when the question is asked, Would you like a private account? When the real-world question, Would you like a private account if it means a cut in your Social Security benefits? is asked, substantial majorities say no.

This is one of those cases where there really aren't "two sides" of the issue that have equal epistemic merits; there is the truth, and then there are the lies.  You can guess which side the right-wing is on, of course.  I've even talked to earnest and otherwise intelligent law professors who've been suckered by the Social Security scare stories.  The "big lies" keep getting bigger....

UPDATE:  Reader Barry Lam recommends Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot's 1999 book Social Security:  The Phony Crisis; he notes that it "is highly readable and required reading even today.  I have yet to see any successful refutation of their points."  How could there be?  The crisis is phony, and only the ignorant or the dishonest claim otherwise.

The Social Security Crisis Hoax

Glad to see Krugman saying this in a very public forum.  Of course, since what he says is rational and factual, it will have no impact on the debate.  There are, after all, much more powerful considerations at work.

The Fake Social Security Crisis, i.e., the Latest Government Giveaway to Corporate America

So having been re-elected with the help of the American Taliban, the Bush Administration's first order of business is apparently to bestow a multi-billion dollar windfall on the securities industry, namely, by beginning the privatization of Social Security, that creation of the New Deal in the 1930s that dramatically reduced poverty among the elderly.  Economist Max Sawicky says what needs to be said about this latest giveaway to the super rich:

Workers have paid and will pay enough into the Social Security Trust Fund to finance full benefits until 2042. The Federal government is obligated to redeem its debt to the Trust Fund with its own separate revenues, chiefly the income tax. The fact that G. Bush has gutted the income tax is his own damn fault, and somebody will have to reverse that decision if the debt to beneficiaries is to be honored.

Do you want to make provision now for shortfalls in the program in 2042? Are you an idiot? Nobody knows what kind of economy we will have in 2042. Your geniuses in the Bush Administration forecast a deficit of $525 billion for this past fiscal year in January. It turned out to be $413b.

The increase in Social Security expenses over the next forty years is about two percent of GDP. Since 2000, our tax revenue has declined by over three percent of GDP. Do you think forty years is insufficient time to make adjustments of this magnitude?

...

Note that if you [were to] set up these individual accounts, assume ZERO administrative costs and no bad luck (everybody gets average returns), assume nobody has the misfortune to retire during a years-long down market, you still don't come close to closing the Social Security shortfall, come 2042. The benefits of private equities offset a bit of benefits the Gov would have to pay, over and above the simple shift of benefits from public to private. You defer the year of Trust Fund exhaustion is all.

The fundamental problem, such as it is, is that payroll taxes devoted to the old age benefit component of Social Security are insufficient to cover future legislated benefits at present. This is true whether you maintain the status quo, or switch some of the contributions to a separate account.

The simple answer is that the U.S. Government, by virtue of its power to tax, can easily finance Social Security, indefinitely. There are fair and unfair ways to do it, but the ability to do so is not in doubt. Suppose there was no Social Security? Could the nation's economy provide the retirement consumption of the elderly for the foreseeable future? That's what it has to do anyway, public program or no program, since someone who isn't working is consuming goods and services produced by someone who is.

What would I do, supposing 2042 approached and circumstances were as they are currently projected? I would do a combination of payroll tax increases, increases in the retirement age (ideally voluntary, and with adequate advance notice), a slowdown in benefit indexing, and some general revenue infusions. There is no need to do any of this for some time.

"Nation's Poor Win Election for Nation's Rich"

As funny headlines go, this one could make you laugh till you cry.

Rhetorical Tricks of the Ruling Classes, or False Consciousness 101

Sharp analysis here; an excerpt:

"Ever since formally democratic governments have replaced monarchies, one of the main rhetorical tricks of conservatives of various stripes--including what are called liberals in Europe and are now called Republicans in the US--has been to continually invoke the image of the free individual versus the authoritarian state. Freedom and state power, they say, grow in inverse proportion.

"In the impoverished condition of contemporary American political discourse, this antagonism takes an increasingly simplified and distorted form in conservative rhetoric: state power is defined as intervention into the economy, primarily through taxation. Thus, freedom is diminished whenever the government taxes individuals (or even corporations!) or attempts to regulate private industry.

"Meanwhile, as critics from Marx to Chomsky have pointed out, private power grows and concentrates in fewer hands. Global mega-corporations, which own or set the terms of business for most smaller corporations and businesses, increasingly control more aspects of life.

"Hard working individuals spend years working forty, fifty or more hours per week for companies that increasingly show little commitment to their employees. Private tyranny grows, unabated, while citizens and workers are instructed--by populist rhetoric fashioned by economic elites and their apologists--to fear public tyranny.

"And so it goes. In the final presidential debate last Wednesday, October 13, two former Skull and Bones members who had the same debate coach at Yale sought to distinguish themselves. Chicken Hawk, who was fattened on petroleum, tried to portray Hawk, fattened on ketchup, as a liberal--'a Massachusetts Senator!'--who seeks to replace individual freedom with government tutelage. In a move that would've made their debate professor proud, I'm sure, Chicken Hawk pulled out the old trick:

"'Let me talk to the workers. You've got more money in your pocket as a result of the tax relief we passed and he opposed. If you have a child, you got a $1,000 child credit. That's money in your pocket. It's your money. The way my opponent talks, he said, "We're going to spend the government's money." No, we're spending your money. And when you have more money in your pocket, you're able to better afford things you want.'

"Money in your pocket? Is the Bush campaign trying to buy the vote? Indeed, this is part of the plan, though it should be noted that most of the money received from tax cuts is actually a loan, financed through deficit spending and to be paid for in the future by us and our children ($200 billion of the 2003 deficit according to the Congressional Budget Office).

"Mostly this appeal of Bush, as with his conservative forbears, is rhetorical, meant to invoke the image of struggle between individual freedom and authoritarian government. It can't be exclusively an attempt to buy the vote any more than it can be simply an appeal to the principle that individuals should get to keep their hard-earned money, for these both contradict reality. For most workers, real (inflation adjusted) wages have been stagnating or declining over the last three decades.

"In 1972, the average hourly wage for US private sector, non-supervisory workers was, in 2003 dollars, $17.14. In 2003 it was $15.35, an 11% decrease over 30 years.[1] That's less money in your pocket.

"And the reduction in purchasing power of the average US worker has come not from an increase in the public power of the state, but from an increase in the private power of corporations and wealthy individuals. Corporations, their managers and major stockholders have become fantastically wealthy at the expense of their workers....

"The conservative position is only one view of the relationship between state and individual and, I might add, the view supported by nearly every person who benefits from the status quo. A more complex view of this relationship recognizes that gross economic inequalities, concentrations of power in private hands, pockets of extreme poverty, et cetera, are as potentially damaging to individual freedoms and a healthy democratic society as public tyranny."

Is Economics a "Science"?

I'm going to repost a few items from the summer--when many regular readers were doing better things with their time--which might still be of interest now that we're back in our regular routines. This item was ORIGINALLY POSTED ON JULY 16, 2004. With the pseudo-Nobel Prize in Economics being awarded on Monday, it seems particularly timely to revisit this one.

===============

As fate would have it, an economist has been posting on the topic du jour--the scientific status of economics: see Tyler Cowen here and here. Professor Cowen's perspective on this question (rather typical of economists, I fear) is well-expressed by a colleague of mine:

"I guess the reason that I think economics is a science is that empirical testing is a huge part of economics. I.e., if economics were only about the mathematical models, without falsifiable claims, I would agree it's not scientific. But economics makes falsifiable claims all the time and tests them frequently. And some are confirmed, repeatedly, and they become accepted wisdom. Others are falsified, and they fall by the wayside. Isn't that what science is all about?"

This isn't, however, what "science is all about" on any plausible account. Pest control, for example, would be a science on this account (exterminators operate with evidentiary hypotheses ["ah-ah, tell-tale rat droppings!"], which they test ["since it's rats, we'll lay this kind of poison"], and which are sometimes falsified ["well, I'll be damned, it turns out it's not rats, but field mice"]), which doesn't seem the right conclusion. And lots of paradigmatic scientific propositions ("there are black holes," "there are quantum singularities") wouldn't be "scientific", because they aren't falsifiable (I owe the examples to Larry Laudan). Some philosophers of science go further, and argue that no claims are falsifiable (on evidentiary or logical grounds) because of the underdetermination of theory by evidence (the "Duhem-Quine" thesis as it is known) (Laudan has interesting arguments against this point--a nice presentation is in the so-titled chapter on undeterdetermination in his Science and Relativism [Chicago, 1990], which is still the best introduction to the subject I've read.)

So empirical testing and falsfiability can't be all that's at stake here. So is economics a science?

As it happens, this is a topic I’ve written on a few years ago. What follows is excerpted, with some editing, from my contribution on “Holmes, Economics, and Classical Realism,” in S.J. Burton (ed.), The Path of the Law and Its Influence: The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (Cambridge University Press, 2000). The main subject of this essay was Holmes’s place in an intellectual tradition I denominate “classical realism.” But given Holmes’s prescient (for a lawyer) interest in economics as a predictive science, a section of the essay discussed this topic. There is little original here, mostly a synthesis of the work of others. “PJ,” below, is a reference to Posner’s The Problems of Jurisprudence. Some references and footnotes have been omitted; others have been inserted in to the text. I will be interested to hear from economists where I’ve gone wrong here. Do see the Addendum at the very end too.

================

As Richard Posner observes:

“Economists pride themselves on being engaged in a scientific endeavor. From the basic premise that people are rational maximizers of their satisfactions the economist deduces a variety of hypotheses, of which the best known is the "law of demand"--a rise in the relative price of a product will, other things held constant, cause a reduction in the quantity of the product demanded. These hypotheses are confirmed or refuted by studies of actual economic behavior.” (PJ, 362-363)

It is important to remember that a lot of the credibility of economics depends precisely on its claim to be a science, in the precise sense of generating successful predictions. (Predictive power may be neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for science, but economists generally view it as what makes their discipline "scientific.") Indeed, many economists and lawyer/economists have emphasized the putatively "scientific" character of economic theory. Friedman's classic paper on "The Methodology of Positive Economics" is predicated on the idea that economics is "a positive science [whose] generalizations about economic phenomena. . .can be used to predict the consequences of changes in circumstances." This, of course, is also Posner's view. In his Nobel Lecture, laureate George Stigler puts it this way: "The central task of an empirical science such as economics is to provide general understanding of events in the real world, and ultimately all of its theories and techniques must be instrumental to that task" (emphasis added). Indeed, most economists would probably agree with Mark Blaug that "no time [should] be wasted defending the assertion that economics is a science."

All of these scientistic sentiments about economics co-exist, of course, with a very different picture of the discipline as essentially a pseudo-science. It is better, perhaps, than astrology, but not much more predictively successful than common-sense psychology. It parlays a set of implausible and utterly unrealistic assumptions into tidy, mathematically-expressible theories that have little or no connection to reality. A recent article in The New Yorker captures this sentiment well. "[A] good deal of modern economic theory," says the author, "even the kind that wins Nobel Prizes, simply doesn't matter much.” (“The Decline of Economics,” Dec. 2, 1996, p. 50). The article continues:

A Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican

This is priceless; add it to the annals of false consciousness studies.

Constituents that count get results!

Details here:

"Placing a heavy emphasis on energy production in the American West, the Bush administration has moved aggressively to open up broad areas of largely unspoiled federal land to oil and gas exploration.

"The administration has pressed for approval of new drilling permits across the Rocky Mountains and lifted protections on hundreds of thousands of acres with gas and oil reserves in Utah and Colorado. In the process, it has targeted a number of places prized for their scenery, abundant wildlife and clean water, natural assets increasingly valuable to the region's changing economy.

"Soon after taking office in 2001, the Bush White House set up a little-known task force that acts as a complaint desk for industry, passing energy company concerns directly to federal land management employees in the field. Although the creation of White House task forces is commonplace, experts on the executive branch say it is unusual to have one primarily serving the interests of a single industry.

"In addition, the Bureau of Land Management has been pushed to issue drilling permits at a record pace for three of the last four years, an increase of 70% since the Clinton administration.

"Internal memos and interviews show senior administration officials have directed federal employees to be responsive to industry, commended offices that approved large numbers of drilling permits and chastised those that were slow."

"The Pathology of George Bush"

This is long, but the information adduced midway in on Bush's mental illnesses and pathologies is very striking.

Why Marx Would Have Despised "Critical Legal Studies"

It has long amused me that many inside and outside law think of "Critical Legal Studies" as a Marxist movement. Plainly, within the parochial context of American life, any ideas on the "left" are viewed as Marxist, but in this case the association is particularly wrongheaded. Herewith what I wrote on the subject in my review essay of Neil Duxbury's philosophically feeble Patterns of American Jurisprudence in the summer 1997 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies:

CLS writers...locate the source of "indeterminacy" in law in one of two sources: either in general features of language itself (drawing here--not always accurately--on the semantic skepticism associated with Wittgenstein and Derrida ); or in the existence of "contradictory" moral and political principles that they claim underlie the substantive law, understood at a suitable level of abstraction. Duxbury himself recognizes this strand of CLS, which he aptly describes as claiming,

"...that liberal consciousness is somehow a false or corrupted consciousness, that there exists within liberal thought--liberal legal thought included--a tension so fundamental, so irresolvable, that it must ultimately implode and make way for radical social transformation." (455)

This strategy of argument signals the rather curious intellectual pedigree of CLS, a pedigree that Duxbury does not appear to recognize. [Ed.-Most CLS writers don't appear to recognize it either, though I'm sure Unger knows!] For what CLS has done in American legal thought is to revive a certain strategy of left-wing critique that dates back to the Left Young Hegelians of the 1830's in Germany. Seizing upon the Hegelian notion that ideas are the engine of historical change, the Left Hegelians sought to effect change by demonstrating that the prevailing conservative ideas were inherently contradictory and thus unstable. To resolve these contradictions, it would be necessary to change our ideas, and thus change the world.

This strand of Hegelianism was a dead issue by the 1850's--in part because of Schopenhauer's devastating anti-Hegelian polemics, in part because of Marx's criticisms (about which more below), and in part because of the more general "materialistic" and "positivistic" turn in German intellectual life associated with Feuerbach and the so-called "German Materialists." It was not revived until 1922 when Georg Lukács re-introduced Left Hegelian themes into the Marxist tradition of social critique in History and Class Consciousness, especially in the central chapter on "The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought." CLS, however, acquires the style of argument less from Lukács--though he is a favorite figure in the footnotes of CLS articles--than from Harvard Law School professor and CLS "founding father" Roberto Unger, whose 1975 book Knowledge and Politics is quite obviously a replay of the central arguments and themes of History and Class Consciousness.

What is slightly ironic in this intellectual genealogy--one that most CLS writers seem only vaguely aware of--is that CLS should have revived precisely the tradition in left-wing thought that Marx had so viciously lampooned 150 years earlier! Indeed, with certain obvious emendations, we find Marx and Engels articulating (in The German Ideology ) a critique one often hears, with some cause, of CLS:

"Since [the Crits] consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness...as the real chains of men...it is evident that [the Crits] have to fight only against these illusions of the consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, [the Crits] logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognize it by means of another interpretation....They forget, however, that to these phrases [constituting the old interpretation] they are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world."

Showing the right-wing professors that their ideas are incoherent and demanding that they change their ideas is politically irrelevant for Marx: it is, of course, "contradictions" in the material circumstances of life that are the real engine of historical change. What CLS has done is to revive precisely this discredited strand of critical theory--the critique of ideas or "consciousness"--in the legal domain. It is not obvious that these critiques are any more plausible or relevant now than they were in 1840.

More on Preference-Satisfaction and Well-Being

J.D. Trout, a philosopher of science and epistemologist at Loyola University at Chicago, writes:

"I agree that well-being cannot be preference satisfaction, but I can just hear economists dismissing your examples as mere 'information problems.' In other words, if fully informed, the agent would have known that salmonalla is bad, and that dives are at high risk for hosting salmonella. So your examples are just 'information problems.'

"Orthodox economists may pretend that actors are rational, but they have no serious, subsidiary model to explain the frequent deviations from the ideal. Physics has such models for precisely such occasions (e.g., how to explain departures from the normal consequences of Boyle’s when a gas is under extreme pressures or at high temperatures).

"Sheena Iyengar, at Columbia University’s Business School has done fascinating work on the psychology of consumer choice. Economists typically suppose that having more choices is always better, because it increases the chances of securing utilities. The problem is, there are many cases in which having more choices reduces those chances. Iyengar has shown that people who had fewer rather than more choices when making a purchase were (1) more likely to actually make a purchase, and (2) more likely to be satisfied with the purchase once made.

"Following work in prospect theory, Eric Johnson’s research showed that when faced with actual choices about insurance coverage, people are tyrannized by default options. This hypothesis could be tested because, every now and then serendipity produces a natural experiment. This natural experiment dramatized the human tendency toward cognitive laziness, the inertia produced by the status quo. In the early 1990s, insurance providers gave drivers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey a choice between two coverage options regarding the right to sue. Drivers in both states were given the choice of a reduced right to sue in exchange for lower insurance rates. But the default option was different for each state. In Pennsylvania, the default option was the full right to sue. That is, if they did nothing, they had the full right to sue. New Jersey drivers had to take action, by selecting the alternate option, in order to acquire this right at an additional cost.

"Now, the two states are demographically similar, so we should expect that the two states have the same percentages selecting the same options. But not so. In fact, the results are startling. Motorists’ choices followed the default options in each state. In NJ, where you have to take action for full rights to sue, 20% of the drivers acquired the full right to sue. In PA, where the full right to sue was the default option, 75% of the drivers retained the full right to sue. If New Jerseyans and Pennsylvanians are demographically similar, then either Pennsylvanians paid 200 million more than they needed to or New Jerseyans paid 200 million less than they should have. And this embarrassment is not the result of a choice, but of a norm dictating that a box be checked or not. (The same problem with default options probably explains why the U.S. has a much lower organ donation rate than Europe.)

"Now, an economist might say that this is just another 'information problem,' and that people should make their decisions based upon careful study of all of the available information. But this is not only ineffective normative advice, it is not even good advice to implement since this stance on all relevant issues would crowd out the activities most crucial to happiness, and likely well-being too. If you had to ferret out the health code violations of all of the Mexican restaurants you might eat at, check the information for insurance coverage, identify the ingredients of cans of beans at the grocery, and so on, you wouldn’t be able to drink with friends, spend leisure with your spouse, read to your children at bedtime, etc. Never mind that making the necessary calculations (even if it were advisable) is, for practical purposes, an intractable problem.

"This suggests another reason that well-being isn’t preference satisfaction: Preferences are often complex and ill-formed, and so they are not especially transparent to the agent. We are pretty bad at predicting which courses of actions will satisfy us. Work on affective forecasting by people like Gilbert and by Kahneman displays people chasing instruments to satisfy a preference that, in the end only frustrates them, and alienates them from the activities that makes for satisfied, even happy, people."

"Researchers like Ed Diener, Martin Seligman, and Daniel Kahneman actually study the natural conditions of well-being in a scientifically rigorous way, and not surprisingly it doesn’t look like preference satisfaction (on any of the familiar construals of that notion) is the route to it. In fact, Kahneman and his colleagues have an article in press at American Economic Review on this topic and related ones.

"It should be noted that, with a few exceptions, this voluminous literature on the nature and requirements of happiness and well-being has been largely ignored by philosophers. Does this mean that economists are in good or bad company?

"On the other hand, many of the problems in economic decision-making (such as intergenerational discounting to mention just one) are already widely discussed by a mixture of psychologists, economists, and legal scholars like Kahneman, Thaler, Sunstein, Hastie, Loewenstein, Dasgupta, Hanson and Kysar, Rachlinski, and so on. This work is readily accessible to economists and, if naturalistic work in moral psychology takes root, perhaps it will have an audience in philosophy as well."

Why Well-Being Could Not be Preference-Satisfaction

(Warning: I'm going to pick on economics again, but let me preface this by saying that economists are my favorite people in law schools after philosophers--indeed, some of them are even as smart!)

The most peculiar feature of economics--apart from its scientific pretense--is its view that human well-being can be equated with preference-satisfaction. I understand, methodologically, what drives economics to such a silly view: if well-being is equivalent to preference-satisfaction, and the value of a particular preference-satisfaction is measurable by willingness to pay for its satisfaction, then we have a concrete way to measure well-being, i.e., by what price people are willing to pay for the satisfaction of their preferences.

This is tidy, and makes for well-defined research questions, but as an intellectual matter it is so silly as to be breathtaking. And the silliness begins with the idea that preference-satisfaction tracks well-being. (We won't even touch the familiar worry--familiar even to economists--that willingness to pay is a problematic proxy.)

Why can't well-being be equivalent to preference-satisfaction? Simple answer: there are lots of preferences whose satisfaction makes people worse off, and this happens all the time. Why? Because people are dumb or irrational or lacking in information or addicted, and so on.

Case 1: Anyone in the grips of addiction will have preferences whose satisfaction (another shot of heroin, another whisky, another hand of blackjack, etc.) will make them worse off.

Case 2: Anyone lacking relevant information will have preferences whose satisfaction will make them worse off. Examples:

(a) John wants to be a professional philosopher, so he satisfies his preferences to go to grad school in philosophy and pursue such a career, only to discover too late that he isn't smart or creative enough to pull it off--all this time and effort has been wasted, and he is much worse off (if he had gone, instead, to grad school in economics, where being able to make a rational argument is not necessary, he would have been much better off);

(b) Richard really wants Mexican food, and so goes to a neighborhood dive, to satisfy his preference; he does not know that sanitary conditions at the dive are so poor, that the salsa is full of salmonella, and he dies of food poisoning two days later;

(c) Mona really wants to be a ballerina, but no one has the nerve to tell her that being six feet tall and built like an Amazon is an insurmountable obstacle; as a result, she spends years and years acting on her ballerina preference, only to meet with professional and personal defeat and humiliation;

(d) Jim and Susie, tourists from Idaho, really want to get a feel for New York City, so they decide to take an evening walking tour of non-touristy parts of Brooklyn, which also, unbeknowst to them, are non-touristy because they are dangerous and crime-ridden; when their bodies are pulled from the East River, it is clear that their preference-satisfaction has made them worse off.

These are stylized examples, to be sure, but a moment's reflection ought to call to mind examples from your own life where preference-satisfactions made you worse off. (And notice that we haven't even mentioned the old Frankfurt-School worry about the manufacture of preferences that the market can then satisfy, and what the connection is between those preferences and well-being!)

Since there is no reason to think preference-satisfaction reliably tracks well-being, there is no reason to predicate an analysis of social or legal policies on preference-satisfaction. (This is one of several reasons why Kaplow and Shavell's book Fairness versus Welfare will go down in history as the most ridiculous book by smart people ever written...but more on that another day.)

More on Marx, "the Ruling Class", and the Estate Tax

Stephen Bainbridge (Law, UCLA) raises some interesting issues (some empirical, some analytical) about the estate tax example I had used in this earlier discussion of Marx. I had written:

"[T]he Marxian theory of ideology...predicts that the ruling ideas in any well-functioning society will be ideas that promote the interests of the ruling class in that society, i.e., the class that is economically dominant.

"By the 'ruling ideas' we should understand Marx to mean the central moral, political and economic ideas that dominate discussion in the mass media and in the corridors of power in that society....

"In the United States, for example, a majority of the population favors abolition of the estate tax—what the ideologues of the ruling class now call a 'death tax'—believing that it affects them, and that it results in the loss of family businesses and farms. In fact, only 2% of the population pays the estate tax, and there is no documented case of families losing their farms or businesses as a result of the tax’s operation. Examples like this--in which the majority have factually inaccurate beliefs, that are in the interests of those with money and power--could, of course, be multiplied."

Professor Bainbridge notes, correctly, that this "seems to convert Marxism into a from of interest group analysis," though I think the word "convert" is unnecessary, since--putting aside Marx's different views about "interests" and how they become causally operative in world affairs--Marx was rather self-consciously engaged in what we would now call "interest group analysis." (Public choice theory, for example, is a kind of vulgar Marxism, with a somewhat superficial conception of interests.) Professor Bainbridge, however, takes issue with the particular kind of analysis involved in the estate tax example. Drawing on some remarks by a policy analyst named Bruce Bartlett and an interesting paper by tax scholar Edward McCaffery (USC) (about which more in a moment), Professor Bainbridge argues, in summary form, as follows:

(1) Members of the economically dominant class (e.g., Ted Kennedy, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, George Soros) are public proponents of the estate tax.

(2) This "is not at all surprising" since in fact "some rich people...benefit from [the estate tax] in many ways" (Bartlett).

(3) The tax is, de facto, "voluntary" for the super-rich: they merely have to plan around it (Bartlett, McCaffery).

(4) As a result, "the bulk of the tax is paid by the modestly wealthy--small businessmen, farmers and long-term investors--who...often die not realizing that they were wealthy" and thus who lack "the elaborate tax shelters of the very rich" (Bartlett).

(5) Thus, the estate tax protects established wealth and established businesses from the "nouveau riche" and small businesses that might have become big ones. In sum: "for those who are already wealthy, the estate tax is no barrier to the maintenance of family wealth and may even serve a useful purpose in limiting competition" (Barlett).

This is my reconstruction of the argument; Steve will correct me if I've gotten it wrong.

Chomsky Blog

It appears that Noam Chomsky now has a blog, at the Z magazine web site. Surprisingly, he has activated comments, which have already filled up with the typical brainless abuse one would expect a comments section on a Chomsky blog to have. The consequence, of course, will be that no one will look at the comments.

UPDATE 3/26: Comments have been removed from the Chomsky blog--thank goodness! It's a shame, of course, that one couldn't have a forum for intelligent discussion of the range of issues Chomsky raises, but it is inevitable, it seems, that the comments will be filled with garbage from the hordes of resentful Chomsky haters. Alas. Do see his 3/26 posting on "Electoral Realities."

Bourdieu Meets Non-Cognitivism: On Judgments of Taste

The New York Times, that quintessential arbiter of all things important to the Manhattan bourgeoisie, has recently seen the need to run a column in defense of pinot grigio:

"It's a wine that gets little respect, and perhaps rightly so. But it is also a wine that is damned even in theory, and that's not right at all.

"Part of its problem is that so much pinot grigio is bad wine, watery bland stuff that nonetheless is highly popular at bars, restaurants and parties....

"But even at its best, pinot grigio will never be a weighty, profound wine. It's not meant to be. It is almost by definition an inconsequential wine in an age where anything less than greatness is routinely disparaged. But as in basketball, which has been debased by a focus on high-impact slam-dunks and three-point shots at the expense of the useful midrange jumper, so has the wine world been altered by an unreasonable focus on the profound.

"Great wines are like divas. They demand the spotlight, never subordinating themselves to the greater good of a meal. They can be sublime. Unless you are wealthy, or are best friends with a tycoon, those wines are for special occasions. Instead, most meals will be accompanied by wines of little consequence, wines that are intended to enhance the meal, rather than dominate it."

I laughed out loud upon reading this ridiculous column, which is roughly on a par with a discussion of pistachio versus vanilla ice cream (vanilla, you know "will never be a weighty, profound" flavor of ice cream). I'm partial to white wines. I've had plenty of California Chardonnays, Italian and Pacific Northwest Pinot Grigios and Pinot Gris, New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs (disgusting!), various white Burgundys. I prefer Pinot Grigios, though I regard that as being, cognitively, on a par with "vanilla is better than pistachio."

But not The New York Times. Pierre Bourdieu had this phenomenon correctly pegged decades ago: judgments of taste like this are purely mechanisms of class distinction--and, he might have added, devoid of any cognitive content.

More Worrisome Questions about the U.S. Role in Haiti...

...are raised in this article. The author notes:

"The latest coup is in many ways a repeat of the military coup that overthrew Aristide in 1991. Although many Americans know that President Clinton sent 20,000 troops to restore Aristide to the presidency in 1994, they do not about Washington's role prior to that.

"The United States, which occupied Haiti militarily from 1915-1934 and had plenty of support for the murderous Duvaliers who ruled the country from 1956-1986, had a problem when Haiti held the first democratic election in its history.

"Aristide, a populist priest who preached liberation theology, was elected by a landslide in 1990. After serving seven months in office, he was overthrown by the military. The officers who led the military coup were, as later reported by the New York Times, on the payroll of the CIA. But the Washington connection did not end there.

"A death squad organization known by the French acronym F.R.A.P.H was formed, and murdered at least 3000 of Aristide's supporters over the next three years. The founder of the organization, Emanuel Constant, stated in an interview on CBS' 60 minutes that he was paid by the CIA to create and maintain the organization during the dictatorship. He now lives in New York.

"Constant's second in command, convicted murderer Louis-Jodel Chamblain, was one of the leaders of last week's insurrection. The New York Times report on Tuesday summed up the situation after the coup: 'These men, whom Mr. Powell characterized last week as "thugs," and a few hundred of their followers are for now the domestic face of national security in Haiti.'"

IN MEMORIAM

Paul Sweezy (1910-2004)

The New York Times memorial is here.

What exactly is going on in Haiti?

Has Aristide been kidnapped by the U.S. and thus forcibly deposed? Is this just classic American interventionism in Central America? Economist Jeffrey Sachs--the guy who brought untold human misery to the former Soviet Union with his free-market shock therapy more than a decade ago--is now sounding like Noam Chomsky (i.e., an honest man) in the Financial Times

"The crisis in Haiti is another case of brazen US manipulation of a small, impoverished country with the truth unexplored by journalists.... President George Bush's foreign policy team came into office intent on toppling Mr Aristide, long reviled by powerful US conservatives such as former senator Jesse Helms who obsessively saw him as another Fidel Castro in the Caribbean...Mr Aristide won the [2000] presidential election...[but] Mr Aristide's foes in Haiti benefited from tight links with the incoming Bush team, which told Mr Aristide it would freeze all aid unless he agreed with the opposition over new elections for the contested Senate seats, among other demands. The wrangling led to the freezing of $500m in emergency humanitarian aid from the US, the World Bank, the Inter- American Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund.... Cut off from bilateral and multilateral financing, Haiti's economy went into a tailspin....The ease with which the US thereby brought down another Latin American democracy is stunning. What has been the CIA's role among the anti-Aristide rebels? How much US money went from US institutions and government agencies to help foment this uprising? Why did the White House abandon the Caribbean compromise proposal it endorsed just days before? These questions have not been asked. Then again, we live in an age when entire wars can be launched on phony pretences with few questions asked."

Where is this perspective in the mainstream media in the United States?

More Thoughts on International Comparisons of Poverty

Two readers have written with pertinent observations about the surprising data adduced by Tom Smith purporting to show that one out of three people in Sweden and the UK were impoverished, while a mere 17% in the U.S. were.

Chris Bertram (Bristol Philosophy) writes:

"I think the key line to notice in the Blackburn paper referenced by Tom Smith is 'To the extent that differences across countries in the living conditions of those at the low end of the income distribution are not fully reflected in the LIS measure of disposable income, those poverty comparisons may be misleading .....' (p. 374). See also (and Table 1 gives a very different picture ....), 'Do Social-Welfare Policies Reduce Poverty? A Cross-National Assessment', Lane Kenworthy, Social Forces, Vol. 77, No. 3. (Mar., 1999), pp. 1119-1139."

Meanwhile, Chris Edmond (UCLA Economics) observes:

"1. The paper referred to by Tom Smith comes from the once-a-year *non-refereed* 'papers and proceedings' issue of the AER (some papers from that year's AEA meetings).

"2. The very first footnote of the paper says that because the unit of analysis in the Swedish data is the individual tax unit which treats individuals aged 18+ as separate income-receiving units (when households are typically considered more relevant -- households pool the income of several individuals...) the paper's measures of absolute and relative poverty are likely to be overstated for Sweden relative to other countries."

The second point is surely an understatement--by itself, it may well explain the screwball results for Sweden.

My thanks to the two Chris's for sharing their expertise.

UPDATE: More from Smith here. I'm heading out the door, so my further thoughts--if I have any useful ones on the subject--will have to wait.

Well-Being in Canada and the U.S.

This from yesterday's Los Angeles Times:

"An impressive array of data shows that Canadians live longer, healthier lives than we do. What's more, they pay roughly half as much per capita as we do ($2,163 versus $4,887 in 2001) for the privilege.

"Exactly why Canadians fare better is the subject of considerable academic debate. Some policy experts say it's Canada's single-payer, universal health coverage system. Some think it's because our neighbors to the north use fewer illegal drugs and shoot each other less often with guns (though they smoke and drink with gusto, albeit somewhat less than Americans).

"Still others think Canadians are healthier because their medical system is tilted more toward primary care doctors and less toward specialists. And some believe it's something more fundamental: a smaller gap between rich and poor.

"Perhaps it's all of the above. But there's no arguing the basics."

International Comparisons of Poverty

Tom Smith (San Diego Law) has linked to an American Economic Review article showing the U.S. to have much lower "absolute" poverty than countries like Sweden and the U.K., where, according to this data, one out of three people were in poverty in "absolute" terms. The latter strikes me as rather extraordinary, which leads me to wonder how "absolute" poverty is being measured: I could not tell from the bit of the article I could access, but I will check on JSTOR during the week for the full article (or perhaps, in the interim, some more expert reader, or Tom himself, will clarify). If "relative poverty" measures--which appear to be the ones standardly employed in the literature--have the drawback of making really poor countries look better off than they really are, "absolute" poverty measures may, it appears, obscure the extent to which state subsidies provide for higher quality of life (if one of out three Swedes were really impoverished, how to explain all the other stats suggesting high levels of well-being?). But, at this stage, I'm just speculating, since I don't know the underlying definition of absolute poverty.

More in a bit...

More on Comparative Well-Being and the Superiority of Social Democratic Policies

David Bernstein (George Mason Law) has expressed some skepticism about the import of the statistical data showing that the average person is better off--will live longer, is less likely to have children die at birth, less likely to have them killed in their youth, less likely to be poor, more likely to be highly literate, etc.--in the social democratic nations than in the United States. He offers four primary grounds for skepticism.

First, he says, "if we measure things by revealed preferences, i.e., voting with their feet, this seems false. For example, the number of Canadians moving to the U.S. dwarfs the number moving in the opposite direction, and, anecdotally, despite living in cosmopolitan cities I don't recall any American I've met in my entire life permanently settling in Europe, and I would guess the stats would support my impression that immigration is almost entirely westward." Anecdotal evidence of this kind is not very probative of anything, of course, and invites anecdotal rejoinders (see, e.g., the comments of Chris Bertram (Bristol Philosophy)). More importantly, though, evidence of this kind has no bearing at all on claims about the comparative well-being of the average citizen, absent some showing that the anecdotes are tracking the migratory patterns of average citizens, which seems rather unlikely.

Are People Better Off in Social Democratic Nations? More Replies to Hellie

My former colleague Tom Smith correctly identifies a central issue between Hellie and his critics:

"The problem with the young professor's argument is pretty apparent. It rests squarely on a big, fat empirical claim that he seems not to think is an empirical claim, or is so obvious as to be beyond contention. Namely, that there exists some obvious alternative to standard mainstream American political and economic ideas -- economic freedom, political and religious freedom, relatively small government, etc. etc., which would, first, be better for the vast majority of American humans and second, would be supported by the majority, at least if they were not caught fast in the grip of false consciousness.

"Well, maybe I'm missing something here, but it is hardly obvious that this empirical claim is true. It certainly is not obvious that you would be better off being born randomly (assuming you could avoid getting aborted of course; 25% of fetal American get the chop before they make it through the veil of ignorance) into some European social democracy than into the heart of American darkness."

It is surely true that the Hellie argument depends on this empirical claim, and it is true that Hellie, by his own admission, doesn't spend much time defending it (his point is about the epistemological implications of certain--at least plausible--empirical assumptions). Now it may be true that it "is not obvious that you would be better off being born randomly...into some European [or Canadian, we might add] social democracy than into the heart of American darkness," though in fact it is the case that, by every available measure of well-being standardly employed, one would be better off. The lack of "obviousness" is a function, I take it, of lack of widespread familiarity with what the facts are about comparative well-being. But certainly on the basis of the "natural experiments" being run, e.g., in the U.S., Canada, France, Sweden, and Germany, it should be obvious that the average citizen is better off in the social democratic nations than in the reactionary U.S.

Here's a summary of some of the useful data from this site; this is only a partial listing, but is illustrative of the legacy of apparently unnecessary human misery produced by the American approach:

LIFE EXPECTANCY (female/male)
1. Sweden (83/78)
2. Canada (82/77)
3. France (83/75)
4. Germany (81/75)
5. U.S. (80/74)

INFANT MORALITY (PER 1,000 births, avg for male and females)
1. Sweden (3.5)
2. Germany (4.5)
3. France (5.0)
4. Canada (5.5)
5. U.S. (7.0)

INJURIES RESULTING IN DEATH (PER 1,000), AGES 15-24
1. Canada (56)
2. France (58)
3. U.S. (75)
No data on Sweden and Germany. Only New Zealand, among industrialized nations, was more dangerous for young people than the U.S., due to a remarkably high rate of automobile accidents.

MEAN LITERACY SCORES FOR 16-25 YEAR-OLDS
1. Sweden (311.1)
2. Germany (297.7)
3. Canada (295.1)
4. U.S. (273.3)
No data for France

RELATIVE POVERTY RATES
1. Sweden (6.5)
2. France (8.0)
3. Germany (8.3)
4. Canada (12.8)
5. U.S. (17.0)

These are just a few examples; there are almost no categories where the U.S. leads these social democratic nations.

Defenders of America's reactionary policies, when confronted with this data, typically suggest, cryptically, that there may be "cultural" factors or differences in "ethnic composition" of these countries that explain the results. But without some clear explanation of why having, e.g., more African-Americans per se in the population--as distinct from having more impoverished, badly educated people who also happen to be African-American--should be treated as an explanatory factor, it is hard to take this rejoinder very seriously. The default interpretation, one that relies on clear causal mechanisms, is that, e.g., universal health care, an expansive welfare state, and the like causally produce, unsurprisingly, less poverty, better health, and so on.

So the bottom line is that Hellie's empirical assumption is, indeed, a prima facie plausible one.

UPDATE: More on the subject here.

Replies to Hellie

I had activated comments on Hellie's reply to critics, but it began filling up with various irrelevant comments and just plain garbage; I'm retrieving here some of the better comments that seem to advance the issue.

First up (more to follow) Marcus Stanley, who begins by quoting Hellie:

"Here's the world as Marcus imagines it: 'We're going to destroy Social Security and distribute your property taxes to the colossally wealthy'; 'please sir may I have another'. Right, Marcus."

Stanley replies:

"Yes, if conservatives explicitly badmouth their own policies and act like cartoon villains then people will not like them. But they are not likely to do that; if they saw the world that way then they would be liberals. Try this framing instead: 'we are fighting for a tax system that rewards the entrepreneurs who actually create wealth, instead of punishing them. The progressive tax system is a form of class warfare on the people who really make this nation grow.' Then redistribute payroll taxes to the wealthy through income tax cuts. This kind of language has had surprising success. Do you really think that success is unrelated to the fact that people have a strong tendency to identify with valorized authority figures in a hierarchy (in this case, 'entrepreneurs' and the wealthy), even at the expense of their own direct interests? That identification then affects the way they think about and see the world. See de Tocqueville for the role of wealth in American ideological life.

"By the way, I do think that the Bush agenda in particular relies on direct dishonesty about some issues -- in particular fuzzing up the relationship between tax cuts for the rich, massive deficits, and retirement funding for the baby boom. This is Krugman's point. Bush more or less explicitly lied about this in 2000. But conservative ideology in general does not depend on this kind of direct lying; there are plenty of libertarians out there who will trash social security straightforwardly and directly. They would have a hard time winning an election directly, but their ideology has had a big effect on the discourse nonetheless."

Hellie and His Critics: The Epistemology of Political Commentary Debate Continued

Cornell philosopher Benjamin Hellie has kindly prepared a detailed (and, in my view, decisive) response to the critics on the epistemology of political commentary.
=============

I begin with a rehearsal of the facts; more slowly this time as an aid to those in the audience who don't move "gangasrotagati" (Nietzsche)---that is, for the easily distracted, and those unlikely to correctly supply elided steps if not held by the hand.

Suppose the popular will determines policy (this is obviously a simplification, about which more follows at the end). Then a policy will be adopted just in case, according to the beliefs of the majority, the policy supports the genuine interests of the majority. It follows that if a policy counter to the genuine
interests of the majority is adopted, the majority are ignorant, or have false beliefs, about it.

Suppose that one argues in the public sphere that a certain policy should be adopted. What one is doing is attempting to influence the popular will in a way that will result in the adoption of the policy: that is, to convince the majority that the policy supports their genuine interests.

Suppose that the policy one advocates does not support the genuine interests of the majority. It follows that if one is to advocate successfully---that is, to convince the majority that the policy supports their genuine interests---one must either fail to assert certain important truths about the policy or assert falsehoods about the policy. If one's job or hobby is to find ways to do this, one will attempt to advocate successfully. If one is any good at one's job or hobby, one will regularly end up either failing to assert certain important truths, or asserting falsehoods. One's advocacy writings will be repeatedly marred by sophistry, assertion of falsehood, and misdirection. This would be evidence of slovenly, unreliable habits of thought such as tendencies to employ unreliable patterns of argument; be easily distracted; fail to probe the evidence deeply; and exploit unreliable sources of evidence.

If one is no good at one's job, one will find another line of work; thus, one would expect any seasoned pro in the business of advocating on behalf of policies that harm the interests of the majority to have these sorts of intellectual vices. The pros serve as models for amateurs; so one would expect the same vices in the amateurs.

Now consider right-wing policies: which, just for fun, I will take to be coextensive with the policies of the present Administration concerning taxation, entitlements, health care, the environment, science, and foreign affairs. (*) For all of these policies, there are obvious alternatives which obviously support the interests of the majority rather than harming them. Thus, those who support the
present Administration and its policies either for money or love are likely to have intellectual vices which make them unreliable. By contrast, this argument doesn't apply to those who support the obvious alternatives, since they can advocate on behalf of their policy prescriptions by merely speaking the truth.

The only empirical claims here are the initial supposition and (*): the rest is a priori. Since (*) is so obvious as to be no longer in need of dispute, I will say no more. The initial supposition is a considerable idealization: most policy-making in
the United States is determined by a corporate oligarchy. Still, there is some very indirect influence on policy-making by the popular will, so the argument is worth something. And surely my right-wing opponents wouldn't wish to scotch my argument on the grounds that the popular will has no influence on policy!

================================================

Now, on to the (least unimpressive) complaints brought against my arguments.

1. By far the most popular and least interesting complaint (Oman; Mirchandani; Stanley; Craig; Gressis; Reed; Buck) was the irrelevant red herring concerning whether right-wingers knowingly, in Lawson's morally-loaded terminology, "lie". As Leiter noted in his initial remarks on my For the Record (FtR) post (cf.
BigMacAttack, Wilson), it is irrelevant whether truths are concealed and untruths are asserted deliberately or due to carelessness; whether sophisms are presented deliberately or due to stupidity; whether the subject is changed deliberately or due to a short attention span. This is irrelevant because our topic is not the moral culpability of right-wing commentators, but their reliability. I don't care whether they are nice guys: what matters is that they not be taken seriously, but rather ignored or hooted off the dais. The thermostat in my oven is inaccurate. Whether it is morally culpable is of no interest. What is of interest is that if I want to bake something, I pay it no attention, but rather use a supplemental thermometer.

Reader reaction on The Epistemology of Political Commentary: Lawson v. Hellie

(I've activated comments for this one, and invite further contributions. No anonymous posts. I will also delete idiotic, gratuitously insulting remarks etc. [non-gratuitous polemics are welcome, of course!].)

Leading administrative law expert and distinguished and prolific BU law professor Gary Lawson writes with the following comments:

"I'm puzzled by why you thought it was worthwhile to post Benjamin Hellie's empty screed on bloggers. I say empty because someone could write exactly the same piece, almost verbatim, but switch the characterizations of the left and right simply by defining justice as, e.g., keeping what belongs to you instead of evenly distributing wealth and power. In that case, left-wing bloggers become, on Hellie s reasoning, presumptive liars because they are consistently defending injustice. This does not seem like a very constructive line to pursue.

"The intellectual ball could be advanced by a serious discussion about the nature of justice. (If Hellie does not think that any such discussion is necessary because justice just is, self-evidently, evenly distributing wealth and power, he is in the wrong line of work.) The ball could also be advanced if someone clever could figure out a way objectively to assess the intellectual integrity of various blog sites and then survey a sufficient number empirically to test propositions about left-leaning and right-leaning blogs. But one hardly needs to smear Professor Hellie to harumph at his post. Way below the usual standards, I m afraid."

Philosopher Benj. Hellie from Cornell replies:

"Lawson should deploy the powers of exegesis he learned in law school on uncovering the causal mechanism I lay out in the following paragraph [from the original posting]:

'People do not like injustice. The knowledge that injustice is being done to others offends their sense of morality; the knowledge that injustice is being done to them makes them angry and resentful. Both these emotions contribute to a desire to use the political system in order to counter injustice. So it is very helpful for the right wing to achieve its goal if the existence of injustice, and the unjust effects of the policies it endorses, can be concealed.'

"Lawson alleges that you can substitute in `keeping what belongs to you' for justice rather than `evenly distributing wealth and power' (note I said nothing about the desirability to anyone of absolute equality: my claim is that we are at present in a state of obscene inequality and getting worse, and that it would be desirable to nearly all to make things more equal) and get an argument that left-wingers are liars. He seems to think I argued as follows: * right-wingers support injustice * therefore right-wingers are liars.

"This manoeuvre shows Lawson's grasp of the argument to be on a par with his grasp of psychology and his grasp of the intense degree of suffering the libertarian policies he endorses have caused, both in the third world and at home.

"What I actually argued was A. right-wingers support things that are against the interests of the vast majority B. if the vast majority knew this, what right-wingers support could not exist C. therefore right-wingers are liars.

The Epistemology of Political Commentary: Why the Left and Right Aren't Equal

Cornell philosopher Benjamin Hellie writes:

"[L]eft- and right-wing sources are not symmetrical....[T]he goal of the right wing is perpetuating and increasing injustice, whereas the goal of the left wing is increasing justice.

"People do not like injustice. The knowledge that injustice is being done to others offends their sense of morality; the knowledge that injustice is being done to them makes them angry and resentful. Both these emotions contribute to a desire to use the political system in order to counter injustice. So it is very helpful for the right wing to achieve its goal if the existence of injustice, and the unjust effects of the policies it endorses, can be concealed.

"Providing this concealment is the role of right-wing political writers. Thus, a priori, given that injustice exists and that right-wing policies are unjust, you might expect the ample use of lies, misdirection, and sophistry from these guys.

"By contrast, the role of left-wing political writers is to cause people to believe that there is injustice, and that right-wing policies make it worse. Given, once again, that both these points are true, all that left wing political writers need to do is report the truth.

"Of course, both these arguments rely on the empirical claims that there is injustice, and that right-wing policies make it worse. There's plenty of evidence that this is so, of course."