Law & Aesthetics -- So, from Volokh, I see this announcement of the Law & Aesthetics fiction contest. For those skeptical about the intellectual laugh riot that is the Social Change Workshop, I remember having a somewhat drunken conversation about just this idea with what must surely be one of the Boalt organizers. And now it's a reality! Don't you want to come?!
Notes for law and aesthetics....
- Significant formalism - Could Baumgarten and Blackstone have met? Shared a mistress? - The Bloomsbury judicial intuitionists - Legal neutrality and disinterested contemplation - Penumbras and emanations - Weimar School of interpretive absurdism - Cruel, unusual, and sublime punishment
I (Heart) the Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students -- [Warning: I'm trying to sell something here. But only because I care.]
So, I've been busy creating marketing materials for the seminar I've run for the past two summers for the IHS, the Social Change Workshop for Graduate Students (the theme this year is "Rationality & Institutions"), and I found that I'm a bit frustrated by the process because it's just impossible to convey why I love this seminar so much, and why I think its really worth it for grad students to take a week out of their summer to come to UVA and listen to lectures, and talk about their research with a bunch of brilliant strangers. But I've got a blog, so I think I'll just use it to say my piece, and try to convey what gets left out of the usual marketing stuff. If you're a grad student, or about to be one, you should apply. You should come. I should mention that it's free (except for travel costs). [Here's a copy of the email invite to apply; consider yourself invited.]
Let me start here... I got an email a while back from one of last summer's faculty--it was her first time teaching at the workshop. She told me that the workshop was like she'd always hoped grad school would be, but sadly wasn't (having gone to Harvard for grad school and Berkeley for law). And that's really it. That's why I love it. At the Workshop you're surrounded by brilliant people. It's like the united nations of smart. Chinese students from Yale, Russians from Chicago, Poles from Oxford... Africans, Mexicans, you name it, and from some of the best grad programs in the world. (Interestingly, most of the european students come from central/eastern post-communist europe, and not France, Germany, etc, although we get those too.)
There are as many perspectives as people, and somehow everybody manages to get along, to talk and argue at an extremely high level about amazingly interesting and important things: why the rich are rich and the poor are poor, globalization, democracy, justice, religion, methodology, war. And for a week at least, ennervating grad school specialization goes by the board, and everyone talks about everything. One thing you almost never see in grad school are philosophers arguing with economists arguing with historians arguing with anthropologists, and so forth. Some students are inevitably stunned to find out that people in other fields have been talking about exactly the same issues as in their field, and have really useful and insightful thigns to say about it. Data sets get traded. Economists ask political scientists to read dissertation chapters. Ideas are everywhere, and it can be intoxicating. If I actually manage to write my dissertation, it will have a lot of the workshop in it.
That's the students. The faculty is simply stellar. I was looking at the list of faculty, and it occurred to me that if we were going to be ruled by Philosopher Kings, we could do a lot worse. Not only are these guys amazing intellects, they're wonderful people who love to talk ideas with students. You eat lunch with them, play soccer, chess, whatever. You drink with them at the socials at the evening, bouncing ideas off each other. They seem to enjoy themselves as much as the students. I consider everyone on the full-time faculty--Schmidtz, Tomasi, Nye & Munger--to be friends. I know Mike least well, but he's a riot, and razor sharp. Dave and John T. are in my biased opinion two of the best political philosophers of their generation. But I not only admire what they do, I admire how they do it. John N. is a jocular, larger-than-life compendium of knowledge, able to speak about classical music, WWII tanks, and economic history with equal brilliance. I can't wait to spend another week with them.
And the visiting faculty (who pop in and out over the week) are nothing to sneeze at. Doug North and Barry Weingast will stop by. The dapper and brilliant Jack Goldstone will be around much of the week. Melissa Thomas, from IRIS at Maryland, will grace us with her amazing poise and clarity. My man, Pete Boettke, will entertain while explaining his latest heroic theoretical synthesis. UVA's own Gerard Alexander will squeeze more argument in an hour than you thought possible. I'm still working on James Buchanan, Vernon Smith and Avner Greif (who doesn't have a Nobel Prize... yet.) Seriously, there's more than a semester's worth of good stuff, and a lifetime's worth of amazing people, in a week. It's a genuine intellectual adventure.
I really can't adequately convey the social atmosphere--the evening socials, the trips to the bars on "the Corner" in Charlottesville. All I can really say is that I've met people at the workshop who I am sure will be lifelong friends. Workshop friends come to stay at my house in DC, and I seem to have standing invitations to stay with folks in at least two dozen countries (and they always try to say that they're not just saying it.) Preparing for the workshop is a pain in the ass, yes. But when it gets into June, and the workshop is only a week or two away, I really do get excited at not just the possibility, but the certainty, of forging a few genuine friendship with some of the smartest, most interesting people I could ever hope to meet.
Epiphanies -- When do you stop taking them seriously? It's been a few years for me now. Same with breakthroughs, flashes of insight, and the like. I remember when I would have a little breakthrough, and become very excited, as if this, this new insight, completes me. Now I know. Everything's different now. It all makes sense. I am whole.
When I was in college, all my short stories were about a sensitive, intellectual college guy ending in an epiphany. I remember one--it was called "The Conceptual Analysis of the Term 'Love'"--in which a young man, much like myself, ends up wandering through an old college hall in the process of being remodeled, and has an epiphany while sitting at an old fashioned wooden desk watching asbestos motes in a sunbeam. The epiphany was, what? I don't remember. It had to do with love. Or rather 'love'. I think he runs back to his estranged girlfriend and tells her that he "blorgs" her.
Of course it's all bullshit. Either I was wrong about the ultimate nature of myself and my relationship to the universe, or I wasn't, in which case I made some marginal adjustments and everything was otherwise the same. Why am I talking about this? Well, I just noticed that I never had an epiphany about the basic uselessness of epiphanies. I seem to have just given them up. I suppose its like infatuation. It hits you, but you stop being fooled by it. You just accept it, like indigestion, or enjoy it, like a good movie-musical, knowing it to be orthogonal to your deeper concerns.
The Shining Pony City on the Hill -- Since I consider non-utopian libertarian-ish political theory my niche in the world, I figure I should mention the hoopla over the Epstein, Friedman, Barnett (and Pinkerton arguing about something else) debate. Belle Waring is all "pony pony pony!" Sasha defends ideal theory, but falls short of defending ponies. I want to comment on this proposition about ideal theory:
Ideal theory is useful because it helps us to guide reform. You need to know where you're trying to go in order to know whether the next step is in the right direction.
Comment: Quite true! However, the point I insist on emphasizing is: There is no way to pick out the ideal (call it "the target") in abstraction from the status quo. Two reasons, descriptive and normative. Descriptive: if the putative target really is the target, then you can get there from here. Ideal theorizing is utopian in the pejorative sense (rather than utopian in Rawls's sense of "realistic utopianism" -- although he ends up utopian in the pejorative sense despite himself) when it just picks a target out of the air without paying any attention to whether there is any mechanism of social change that could plausibly cause us to arrive there. Normative: and the target is a pony (is pejoratively utopian) unless it is possible to get there from here in a way consistent with the values that led us to pick THAT target to begin with. If hitting the target is possible, but requires a vast system of re-education camps, killing half the population, or what have you, then it's not really the target, assuming a liberal target. So while ideal theory is just fine, the problem with the Epstein, et al. debate is that it's not clear they meet either the descriptive or normative conditions for acceptable ideal theorizing. I think they're ponytalking! It's not enough to be told that a society with such and such attributes is not an empirical impossibility and that if it were realized, it would be a morally good thing. We also need to be told that getting there from here is not an empirical impossibility, and that if it is possible, that the route is morally acceptable.
Comment on the Comment: OK! But then look. Initial conditions plus mechanisms of social change, plus normative constraints pare down the space of acceptable targets. But within THAT space, how can you know which of the possible targets to pick other than by comparing it to, you know, a REAL full blooded ideal, a shining city on the hill. You pick the one within the domain of acceptability that matches most closely the sweetest dreams of philosophers, no?
Comment on Comment on Comment: No! Don't want to kick a dead pony, but we have to have some independent reason to believe that the shining city of ponies REALLY would be worth having, and that short of having it, we'll have to settle for some pale, less shining imitation. The shining city of ponies can only have a normative gravitational tug if it really is what we should be aiming at. But what I'm saying is that there is no knowing what we should be aiming at independent of the constraints we actually face. So we pick our target by browsing through the set of feasible alternatives, and then just pick the one that best satisfies our normative desiderata. You don't design a house by drawing a blueprint of the bestest mansion ever, and then pare it down until it fits the budget. That's insane!
Bush Hatred in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 .... -- Now that Bush has come out decisively in favor of an amendment to the US Constitution that constitutes both an assault on states' rights and an assault on the moral rights of same-sex couples, I am finally pissed off enough to agitate actively in favor of the election of John Kerry (or whoever) for President. (Not that I will vote, DC being a foregone conclusion.) I don't believe any such amendment could be passed, but any President who would push it deserves to be ejected forcefully from office. I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hate Kerry. But where can I get a Kerry button?
WAR IS DECLARED: The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens - and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes. Not since the horrifying legacy of Constitutional racial discrimination in this country has such a goal been even thought of, let alone pursued. Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth.
NO MORE PROFOUND AN ATTACK: This president wants our families denied civil protection and civil acknowledgment. He wants us stigmatized not just by a law, not just by his inability even to call us by name, not by his minions on the religious right. He wants us stigmatized in the very founding document of America. There can be no more profound attack on a minority in the United States - or on the promise of freedom that America represents. That very tactic is so shocking in its prejudice, so clear in its intent, so extreme in its implications that it leaves people of good will little lee-way. This president has now made the Republican party an emblem of exclusion and division and intolerance. Gay people will now regard it as their enemy for generations - and rightly so. I knew this was coming, but the way in which it has been delivered and the actual fact of its occurrence is so deeply depressing it is still hard to absorb. But the result is clear, at least for those who care about the Constitution and care about civil rights. We must oppose this extremism with everything we can muster. We must appeal to the fair-minded center of the country that balks at the hatred and fear that much of the religious right feeds on. We must prevent this graffiti from being written on a document every person in this country should be able to regard as their own. This struggle is hard but it is also easy. The president has made it easy. He's a simple man and he divides the world into friends and foes. He has now made a whole group of Americans - and their families and their friends - his enemy. We have no alternative but to defend ourselves and our families from this attack. And we will.
Bias, Blah, Blah -- Jim Henley's meditation on the leftist academic bias controversy is by far the most interesting thing I've read on the matter.
By the way, I think that a lot of the leftish academic bloggers are simply in bad faith on this one. They know. But they LOVE things they way they are. They're at home. They don't want it to change. They like it. But if they really admitted how systematically shabbily and disrespectfully non-left students are treated, they know they'd have to change. I don't much blame them. But they know.
I've heard professors discuss techniques of subtle psychological manipulation to shame students out of their bourgie prejudices. They know that the cartoons they plaster on the office door make conservative students uncomfortable, and that's part of why they do it. I mean, it's hard to resist. When I was TAing for Intro to Phil, and we were doing theism vs. atheism, it was all I could do to not make faces of exasperation and disapproval at the nuttily religious students. Now and then I caught myself doing it. It's hard work to treat people with respect and to scrupulously address what they've said, even if its a crock. That is, to actually teach them something, and to be an example of clear thinking, and not just emote at them when they run afoul of your little community's norms. I love philosophers because for the most part they feel bad when they fail to be fully respectful and rational. And lots of non-philosophers are like this too. They know it's their job. But they mess up from time to time. And because most academics believe much the same things politically, their mess ups contribute systematically to an atmosphere that is unfriendly to students (and faculty) who believe quite different things. They know. Of course they do.
And if I knew a job candidate liked the same music that I did, I'd probably feel just that much better about her, even if I knew that to be an irrelevant consideration. If several of us felt just that much better about her, it could swing a toss up her way, because we might not know why we felt a bit better about her. It's just impossible that people with detectable politics of which most faculty disapprove don't in general tend to do worse at the margin. I find it just surreal that anyone would bother to deny it.
Also, just curious, does ANYONE really believe that IQ or academic achievement reliably tracks moral or political truth? Because I sure don't!
Disinfopedia -- I just ran across the Disinfopedia. It's a wiki apparently published by the Center for Media and Democracy, the sort of left wing organization dead sure that there is indeed a vast right wing conspiracy (and of course there is!). Anyway, Disinfopedia collects info on corporate shills, PR firms, think tanks, and other sundry sources of "disinformation". Now, this is all fine and good. But I wonder how they think this is going to work well in the long run. Wiki pages can be edited by anyone who looks at them. It's hard to believe that wingers won't soon enough start edit wars. Surely some conservative would love to have a crack at the Ronald Reagan entry. I just edited a paragraph in the think tank page, for the fun of it. See if you can spot the bit I changed (if they haven't already reverted to the previous version). Wikipedia works because of its ethos of neutrality on contentious issues. If somebody writes something biased, somebody comes along and balances it out. It will be interesting to see if an overtly ideological wiki can survive.
It might be especially interesting to men shopping for Valentine's Day gifts, like those widely promoted push-up bras. You know them from the ads showing skinny models with spherical breasts that appear to float in skimpy lace cups. With their shoulder straps thin as ribbon and narrow back bands, the cleavage-baring bras resemble two clam-shell halves looped together with string (similar to what the heroine wears in "The Little Mermaid").
So what's the secret? It's all a sham. The bra is useless for supporting anything of amplitude for more than a few minutes. The breasts are fake — buoyed from within by implants — because women without enough fat for hips or behinds also don't have much in breasts.
Perhaps the embittered author, Jessica Seigel, should consider an alternative explanation: These women are incredibly wealthy professional underwear models because they are genetic anomalies! I for one do not doubt the provenance of Tyra's or Giselle's disproportionate amplitude, although Stephanie Seymour lives under a shadow of suspicion.
Now where phenomena remote from everyday human experience are concerned -- the large-scale structure of spacetime, the microscopic realm of molecules, atoms, and so forth -- it is perhaps not surprising that human beings should for long periods of time have gotten things wrong. But where everyday matters are concerned -- where opinions touch on human nature and the facts about ordinary social interaction -- it is very likely that they would not, in general, get things wrong. Biological and cultural evolution would ensure that serious mistakes concerning such matters would before too long be weeded out. The details of why this is so need not concern us here -- they comprise the conservative justification of tradition and common sense associated most closely with Burke and Hayek, which I have defended elsewhere. Suffice it for present purposes to note that there are powerful reasons to be skeptical of the skepticism about commonsense and traditional attitudes that so permeates modern intellectual life.
I wonder what Feser could possibly be thinking here. Take a random sample of the socially prevalent beliefs about the correct principles of social interaction from the set of human cultures across time and space. We can even limit ourselves to those societies that persisted for some considerable amount of time. My bet is that most of these societies were governed by principles of social interaction that Feser would find... questionable. Exotic patterns of sexual and family relations, bloody competition for social status, approval of the murder of out-group people, etc. Conservative Hayekians, like Feser, badly overestimate the efficacy of cultural evolution in eliminating awful social systems. Because we don't now live in small bands in conditions of irremediable scarcity half-naked on the savanna, it is very likely that we WOULD, in general, get things wrong about ordinary social interaction. The principles of mutually advantageous coordination that I believe must govern a good society are just about as obscure and counterintuitive as the principles that govern the behavior of atoms. Hayek himself recognized the highly counterintuitive nature of spontaneous orders, and recognized our natural but incredibly dangerous disposition to think of the extended order in terms of the family or tribe. Consider the prevalence of atrociously bad thinking about "offshoring." Most people are intellectually crippled by a zero-sum tribalism, which comes naturally, if anything does, and strikes everyone as "common sense" unless you've been coached out of it by economists.
Even if Feser is talking about more mundane social interaction, there is still plenty of reason to belief that we make systematic errors about out own and others' motivations, intentions, beliefs, and so on. So I disagree with Feser. I think that the major goal of education should be to break down some parts of common sense, and then to rebuild it so that our intuitions about cases better reflect the reality of things. This is why I think everybody should be trained to some degree in logic, statistics, and economics, and beginning at a much earlier age.
Libertarian Ideal Theory -- I liked Tyler Cowen's Volokh post on Dan Klein's theory of "The People's Romance." Here's most of it:
Klein writes from a libertarian point of view, asking why people are so attached to government, even when the record of government in an area is a poor one. He suggests that the desire to be part of a collective movement motivates much support for government, that the state is uniquely suited to satisfy such collectivist urges, and that we should resist our psychological tendencies in this direction. This essay is part of Klein's broader research program of developing a sociology and psychology of why libertarian ideas have not met with greater success. Indeed for any libertarian this should be a central question. I find Klein and Jeffrey Friedman (of Critical Review) to be the two most important thinkers on this topic.
While I consider myself a "small l" libertarian, my perspective differs from Klein's in a number of ways. For instance I tend to take "The People's Romance" as a constraint to a greater extent than does Klein. I see politics as a question of trading in one "mythology" for another, but a mythology of some kind is always necessary. This will constrain our ability to attain superior solutions, yet it is a constraint that typically receives little attention from economists. On net, I suspect that our American version of The People's Romance does more to support liberty than damage it. I wonder whether bad policies are often not the price of our highly valuable macro-myths. Klein and I discuss these topics frequently, read his whole essay to see his take on what has gone wrong in Western societies.
I think Tyler is right that our mythologizing is more of constraint on political and economic change (and on good theorizing) than many assume. Libertarians tend to be infatuated with what Rawls called "ideal theory," with conjuring pictures of the best society in abstraction from the "noise" of historical and sociological contingency. (The exchange in the new not-yet-online Reason between Epstein, Barnett, and Friedman brought this home to me. [Addendum: Oh, it's here.]) But, rather like Rawlsian liberals, libertarians often mistake fairly indelible features of social reality for contingencies, thereby overshooting anything that might serve as a feasible ideal. The result is a kind of unwitting utopian theorizing. But no one should be convinced that anything approximating a Nozickian or Randian minimal state, much less, Rothbardian anarchocapitalism, is worth taking seriously unless it can be shown that these theories are compatible with what we know about history and social psychology. Debating whether voluntary mechanisms can or cannot solve all the important collective action problems, or whether there could be a positive net benefit to empowering the state to provide for public goods, given public choice assumptions, is not totally unlike arguing about whether it is possible for the People's Revolution to draw its energy directly from an agricultural rather than an industrial underclass.
Much libertarian ideal theory proceeds on something like the assumption of a entire society of convinced libertarians (or at least the weaker assumption that it is possible to come to the kind of consensus necessary to install a libertarian constitution or basic structure). But this is the same mistake, more or less, that Rawls recognizes he made in Theory of Justice in basing the argument for the stability of "justice as fairness" on the assumption of a fairly universally shared quasi-Kantian conception of personhood. The fact of pluralism is a fact indeed. One of Rawls's most valuable insights is that there is no way of securing homogeneity of fundamental moral world views in a liberal society. Any mechanism likely to produce this kind of thoroughgoing consensus would be coercive and thus illiberal. So we've got to start with the assumption of pluralism. One can dream of an ideal technology of persuasion that would enable voluntary mass conversion. But this is fanciful, too. And there is no reason to believe that any such technology could be sprung on a society and bring about happy consensus on libertarian essentials before others could also begin using the technology to inculcate contrary ideals.
If libertarian ideals are to become more broadly accepted, it may be in part because of more savvy on the part of libertarians in intentionally undermining widespread collectivist impulses. (Don't stop donating to IHS.) But I think it is more likely that success in this direction, insofar as there is any, will have more to do with the amelioration of the social and economic conditions that have fueled collectivist ideals. In this sense, we've got to already be libertarian enough for the dialectic between socio-economic conditions and belief systems to produce more libertarianism. Still, much of the impulse toward collectivism, and toward positing superspecial agentive powers to abstractions like the state, probably runs pretty deep in human psychology, and there is no ameliorating that, short of genetic re-engineering.
So what we need is a theory of just how libertarian a particular society could possibly get, given human psychology, the set of social and economic relations, the available mechanisms of persuasion, and the set of belief systems or "macro mythologies", at a given time, plus the dynamics that govern changes in these things. My guess is that for US society starting today, it's possible to get significantly more libertarian, but not radically more libertarian. What might that society look like?
Boobs n' Beards -- What are you looking at? Janet's feigned expression of horror? Her bizarre nipple accoutrements? Not me! The most interesting thing about this picture is . . . J. Tim's "beard"! Timberlake is but one data point in my embodied argument that the beard is now the height of fashion. Start yours now or be like the guy who finally decided the goatee is "cool" some time in 2002 and ended up looking like some jackass relief pitcher for the Astros.
Reading is Fundamental; Buying is Holy -- Please note some updated books advertised at your bottom right. Though I've just cracked it, the new Gibbard seems outstanding. I'm very much on his wavelength. The Adams bio of Gouverneur Morris so far is also excellent. (G. Mo is a stud!) More comprehensive, but therefore less breezy, than the Brookhiser. I'm excited by the Skyrms book on the Stag Hunt, but it has yet to arrive. And I'm learning a lot from Samuel Bowles's Microeconomics.
I bring this to your attention because, apparently, I have earned seven whole dollars through the Amazon Associates program. However, they don't send the money to my bank until I hit $10. So I'm hoping a couple folks who happen to want some of the books down there will click through and put me over the top. So I'm happily offering this editorial service (I have excellent, I won't myself say "cutting egde," taste) to relieve your anxiety of choice.
Designated Reading -- I'm happy to see that my former advisor, Michael Devitt, has made his book, Designation, available on his website. Designation is one of the best works in the philosophy of language published in the 80's (perhaps the only systematic working through of the Kripke/Donnellan casual theories), yet has been out of print for a number of years, and is almost totally impossible to find through used booksellers. Check it out. Devitt is an exceptionally clear, even punchy, writer who is able to make a very dry subject matter come (somewhat) alive.
Also, check out the many papers on his CUNY website. "There is No A Priori" is nice, and "Worldmaking Made Hard," which begins "In part I of this paper I shall demonstrate the horror of a doctrine I call 'Worldmaking'," gives something of the flavor of a Devitt seminar, wherein he rails against philosophers who would sacrifice the world of stones, cats, and trees for a world of words. (It's always "stones, cats, and trees." If in a more theoretical and scientific bent, we almost always get "electrons, muons, and curved space-time." This comforts me.)
Denis Dutton Fans Rejoice -- Good stuff from the our man at Arts and Letters Daily. A thoughtful discussion of the role of skeptical doubt occurs in Dutton's review of Jennifer Michael Hecht's The Great Doubters and Their Legacy From Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson. Besides being eminently sensible, Dutton slips in a few good swipes at Freudians and Marxists. This, also: "These days, except for a few aging professors who still teach postmodern literary theory, few skeptics reject the overall validity of science." Nice.
Google me This -- I'm jacked about the announcement that Google plans to scan everything in the Stanford library published before 1923. That should make a huge chunk of the important (and unimportant) works in philosophy available for free. Go Google!
This is, by the way, what Microsoft is really good for. It puts the fear of Jesus in the Googles of the world, and makes 'em hustle to make us happy. So what I'm really hoping for is that Microsoft comes close in the search war, and succeeds in creating a superfast integrated search in Windows that allows me to search my own measly 30gb hard drive at something close to the speed that Google manages to search the whole goddam internet, but falls short in the end because of all the glorious innovations the Google geniuses lay at our feet in order to keep us from straying.
Wittgenstein's Poker -- Was Googling my own blog, and found this picture titled "flybottle," which I assume is a depiction of Wittgenstein helping to show Popper the way out.
The Choices! THE CHOICES!! Tyler Cowen excerpts this NYT piece by Barry Schwartz on whether we have too many choices. I found titibits like this pretty damn obvious:
• Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, psychologists at Columbia and Stanford respectively, have shown that as the number of flavors of jam or varieties of chocolate available to shoppers is increased, the likelihood that they will leave the store without buying either jam or chocolate goes up. According to their 2000 study, Ms. Iyengar and Mr. Lepper found that shoppers are 10 times more likely to buy jam when six varieties are on display as when 24 are on the shelf.
If you're optimizing with respect to jam, then an increase in your number of choices increases your search costs. If it looks like the cost of sorting through all the jam is going to be fairly high, and your desire for jam isn't urgent, you're likely to just walk out jamless. You don't have to be optimizing, etither. More likely you'll be happy with anything that passes some threshold. But thresholds like these tend to be context sensitive (the worst jam at Whole Foods might be better than the best jam at Giant, but in both cases, you may aim for the middle of what's on offer), so you won't be sure where it is until you get a sense of your options. This, too, costs.
Tyler presents these cases as "brickbats" for libertarians and economists. Well, OK. To me, this points to the economic importance of "editors". If people get turned off when the choice set gets too big, but people will buy something in the set if its smaller, then the money is in packaging smaller choice sets and knowing who to present them to (like the shoe salesman Tyler mentions). To some extent, this is precisely the difference between a boutique and a department store. Part of what you're paying for in a boutique is the editorial skill of the buyer & salesperson. The trim they choice set so you don't have to.
Methodological digression: Schwartz's results point to an fascinating area of research for experimental economists. The establishment science fiction economics isn't happy to recognize the scarcity of computational resources, and so just assumes that everybody is able to costlessly and immediately represent the entire choice set and come up with some preference-ordering over all those choices. Of course, we don't do this. We represent a tiny fraction of the potential choice set, and the fraction that we do represent seems to be primed by context together with our belief systems (and other stuff). Somebody, please please tell us: HOW DOES THIS WORK?!
Ideology is Infrastructure -- My first, and I hope not last, Tech Central Station column is now up. It was inspired by my December post on the "hierarchy of public goods."
It's, like, the system, man -- Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber drips with disgust at Congressman Billy Tauzin's whoring:
For the last couple of weeks, there’s been a bidding war between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) for Tauzin’s services. The MPAA had paid its outgoing head lobbyist, the unlamented Jack Valenti, more than $1 million a year. Apparently this wasn’t nearly enough for Tauzin, who held out for a substantially larger sum - and got it from PhRMA. As it happens, PhRMA is a particularly unpleasant organization - it played a dishonorable role in the AIDS drugs licensing for Africa controversy a few years ago, and has been up to its eyeballs in other controversies and backroom arrangements, up to and including the recent Medicare porkfest. Needless to say, Tauzin has been assiduous in his efforts to protect the interests of big pharma and the content industry over the last couple of years; it’s hard to believe that his grossly inflated salary is unconnected to services previously rendered. The phenomenon of Congressman-turned-lobbyist is hardly a new one; but the openness and extent of the greed on display is unusual, even for Washington.
I agree: sickening. I do hope Henry will accept this as pointing to a general lesson about the deep structural relationship between the motivations of political leaders and very large governments with vast regulatory powers. I've noticed that some people seem to think that if only the leaders or the regulations were different, then all would be well. Which is, I guess, a cute idea.
