Mini-Wars
So many responses to our Crooked Timber piece I can barely keep up (see my last post for an initial round-up). And now the responses are generating their only little mini-wars.
These Bleeding Hearts
Let’s start with the Bleeding Hearts themselves. Kevin Vallier has a lengthy reply, in which he concludes that the Bleeding Hearts “can have it all.” (I initially wanted to title our post “The Bleeding Hearts Can’t Have It All.” So at least we’re all the same kitschy page.)
Jason Brennan has some interesting statistics on Denmark and France that I know we’ll want to come back to.
Proving once again that he’s the menschiest of the menschen, Matt Zwolinski wonders “why are employers so mean?” Though I’ll admit I was given pause by this phrase: employers “prevent them [workers] from peeing too often.” What, pray tell, is “peeing too often?” Most libertarians are indebted to the subjective turn in Austrian economics, yet here we have one of them announcing that when it comes to nature’s call, there’s some kind of objective measure.
Though I already posted Jessica Flanigan‘s response in my last roundup, I have to cite this comment she added:
I’m friends with Alex and he calls himself a Marxist all the time. Chris Bertram has written a lot on Marx and seems to endorse some version of what the Analytical Marxists believe in his work. Corey Robin, who knows?
Tyler Cowens of the World, Unite!
Tyler Cowen continues doing whatever it is Tyler Cowen does, which apparently involves coming up with formulations like “mood affiliation,” whatever the fuck that is.
Henry Farrell nails him to the wall:
What would the world look like if GMU economics professors were treated similarly to workers in low-paid jobs with little protection? No offices – at best open cubicles, so that a supervisor could stroll by, making sure that the professors were doing the job that they were supposed to be doing. Monitoring of computers to prevent random websurfing. Certainly no air conditioning. Compulsory random drug testing. Body searches, in case professors were sneaking office supplies back home. Monitoring – at best – of bathroom breaks, and written demerits and termination of employment for professors who took too many of them. Perhaps Tyler might want to argue that such pervasive distrust and supervision would hurt productivity rather than help it – but it would seem difficult plausibly to reconcile such an argument with his prior claim that mooching, slacking and skiving off is endemic among his colleagues.
Matt Yglesias takes umbrage, claiming that Farrell and the rest of us are pie-in-the-sky airy-fairy theorists.
The in-the-clouds conceptual argument about libertarianism, freedom, and coercion is semi-interesting in an academic sense, but as policy analysis it doesn’t show much. In an important sense freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, but it doesn’t follow that we should want everyone to be a small-holding subsistence farmer merely because that would make him hard to coerce.
Farrell then nails Yglesias to the wall.
Matt’s alternative – which is to come up with a bunch of just-so stories about how we oughtn’t regulate work rules, because there’s a hypothetical high paying firm that searches its workers to stop theft and then there’s a hypothetical low paying firm that doesn’t, and we shouldn’t be punishing the hypothetical high paying firm because it might hurt workers is about as up-in-the-clouds as you can get. It abstracts away the shitty conditions that people have to endure, the politics of why they have to endure them, and any possible politics of collective action and reform. Albert Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction is right on target here – it deals at length with the bogus standardized responses (it will only make things worse) that people come up with in response to reform. There’s a more general sound principle here. One should always be very suspicious when someone proposes that others endure nasty sounding conditions for their own good, which the someone proposing would never dream of countenancing for himself or herself. The proposal may not be made in bad faith, but it’s not likely to be made with any very great imaginative sympathy for its intended subjects.
Brad DeLong chimes in. Yglesias responds to Farrell.
And speaking of Cowen, Aaron Swartz has a hilarious parody of Cowen’s associate Alex Tbarrok’s response to us, which I mentioned in my previous post.
Odds and Ends
Belle Waring has a bracing intervention—spawning a vigorous and eye-opening comments thread—which I hope everyone will read. Will Wilkinson has some things to say, as does someone going by the moniker “Supply Side Liberal.”
Some interesting interventions, pro and con (I think), from Noah Smith and an unidentified graduate student (“I’m glad Corey Robin has been keeping a list of absurd abuses about people pissing their pants, but empirics 101 demands more. There’s maybe 100 solid links in this piece. But there’s 300 million Americans.”)
And, lastly, poor old Arnold King, whose original post I did feature in my previous post, doesn’t feel like he’s any getting any love. So…show him some love!
Jonah!
And in the midst of all, this story of a lifeguard fired for saving someone’s life is getting a lot of play. Jonah Goldberg uses it as an opportunity to rail against liability law and union regulations. Even though no unions were involved and the major culprit here, it seems, is the privatization of public services.