Proving Belief

From C. Stephen Layman, "Faith Has Its Reasons," in God and the Philosophers (Thomas Morris, ed.):

People often think it significant to assert that "God's existence can't be proved." A proof, I suppose, is something that will convince anyone who is intelligent enough to understand it. If so, very little of interest regarding major philosophical issues can be proved. This goes for issues in metaphysics, morality, political philosophy, and aesthetics. All or nearly all of the major positions under these headings are highly controversial. There are brilliant people on either side of the interesting fences. So, if we demand proofs in philosophy, we will wind up as skeptics on all or nearly all of the important issues. Surely that is not the way of wisdom. I often ask my students to imagine themselves giving an antislavery speech to a group of slave owners. What are the chances of convincing the audience? Slim to none. Surely, then, it is possible to have good arguments for a view even though these arguments are not recognized as such by groups of people who do not share our convictions.

James Weldon Johnson

A notable argument from a passage in James Weldon Johnson's book, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912):

[I]f the Negro is so distinctly inferior, it is a strange thing to me that it takes such tremendous effort on the part of the white man to make him realize it, and to keep him in the same place into which inferior men naturally fall. However, let us grant for sake of argument that the Negro is inferior in every respect to the white man; that fact only increases our moral responsibility in regard to our actions toward him. Inequalities of numbers, wealth and power, even of intelligence and morals, should make no difference in the essential rights of men.

Black Flight to Private Schools Is Growing

Via Tim Sandefur, a fascinating New York Times article on the fact that some black parents are fleeing the public school system:

Like the Catholic schools favored by many black parents, the Whitfield School has stuck to instruction in basic skills. The other day, the blackboard in Louise Browne-Jackson's first-grade classroom was equally divided into sections about phonics (sh, en), grammar (contractions) and mathematics (place value in three-digit numbers). Classes routinely recite aloud. Every pupil in pre-kindergarten is required to learn to read.

Such methods defy the favored approaches of many public school systems, including New York's, which downplay or altogether omit drilling and memorization. The traditional style appeals strongly, however, to A. B. Whitfield, who taught in public schools for 17 years before founding Trey Whitfield (named for his late son) in 1983. And the curriculum has helped him attract a corps of experienced immigrant teachers, many of them products of the British-style schools in the Caribbean basin, for salaries one-third lower than those in public schools.

Nobody can argue with the results. On fourth-grade math and reading tests, more than 90 percent of Trey Whitfield students meet state standards, while barely one-third do so in the nearby public schools.

Granted, there might some selection effect, in that the parents who choose this school are precisely those who care deeply about and are involved in their children's education. But still, these educational methodologies seem to produce strikingly different results. What's stopping the public schools from trying an approach that just might work?

New Look

If you haven't noticed, I'm trying out a new look for this blog. Like it? If so, leave a comment. (By the way, I figured out to accept comments from non-Blogger users.)

Historians and Bush

A lengthy article states that an "unscientific" survey shows that academic historians hate Bush, and many think that he is the worst President of all time. I am no Bush apologist, and there are many areas where I disagree with his policies or choices. But I could charge most Presidents with being the worst in history, if I too were cavalier towards the facts, prone to hyperbole and exaggeration, and consumed with partisan prejudice. I only hope that these historians are more restrained by accuracy in their academic work.

Take a look, for example, at what some of them have said:

Indeed, Bush puts Nixon into a more favorable light. He has trashed the image and reputation of the United States throughout the world; he has offended many of our previously close allies; he has burdened future generations with incredible debt; he has created an unnecessary war to further his domestic political objectives; he has suborned the civil rights of our citizens; he has destroyed previous environmental efforts by government in favor of his coterie of exploiters; he has surrounded himself with a cabal ideological adventurers . . . .

Without the tediousness of disputing every item on that list, consider the idea that he "created an unnecessary war to further his domestic political objectives." Given that Bush's own father lost an election after winning a war against the same country, what could have conceivably made Bush think that there was any political advantage to be gained here? And what evidence is there, outside of conspiracy theories, that this was Bush's motivation?

"Suborned the civil rights of our citizens." It is a remarkable lack of perspective that could even begin to compare Bush's administration to Roosevelt's or Lincoln's in this regard, let alone suggest that Bush has somehow been worse.

"Surrounded himself with a cabal of ideological adventurers" -- as opposed to what? How is this a fault? Do other Presidents surround themselves with dissenters, say, members of the opposite party?

Then this:

Among the many offenses they enumerate in their indictment of Bush is that he is, as one of them put it, “well on his way to destroying the entire (and entirely successful) structures of international cooperation and regulated, humane capitalism and social welfare that have been built up since the early 1930s.” “Bush is now in a position,” Another historian said, “to ‘roll back the New Deal,’ guided by Tom DeLay.”

Right. Bush is going to roll back the New Deal. Why, he is so ideologically opposed to entitlements in any form that he pushed through a bill that raised Medicare coverage for prescription drugs. He's "well on his way" to destroying the entire welfare system; he may have left it untouched, mind you, but he's somehow at fault for Clinton's decision to sign welfare reform in 1996.

Then this:

“George W. Bush's presidency is the pernicious enemy of American freedom, compassion, and community; of world peace; and of life itself as it has evolved for millennia on large sections of the planet. The worst president ever? Let history judge him.”

What to say about someone who thinks that a mere political opponent is an "enemy" of "life itself."

Then this:

My own answer to the question was based on astonishment that so many people still support a president who has:

Presided over the loss of approximately three million American jobs in his first two-and-a-half years in office, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.

Overseen an economy in which the stock market suffered its worst decline in the first two years of any administration since Hoover’s.

My astonishment arises from the fact that a historian never seems to have heard of cyclical recessions, who really seems to think that the economy is the entire responsibility of whatever President is in office, and who thinks that Bush's policies caused an economic downturn that began long before he had put those policies into effect.

Or this:

Severely curtailed the very American freedoms that our military people are supposed to be fighting to defend. (“The Patriot Act,” one of the historians noted, “is the worst since the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams.”)

I suspect that whoever said this has never read the Patriot Act, and can't specify the freedoms that have been curtailed, let alone "severely."

* * *

In short, I'd hate to see what this bunch would say about Bush if inflation was as high as it was under Carter, if he rounded up an entire ethnicity and put them in prison camps (Roosevelt), if he just barely avoided nuclear war (Kennedy), if he suspended habeas corpus (Lincoln), if he owned slaves (Jefferson), if our economy was in a Great Depression (Hoover), if it turned out that our federal government was experimenting on black people with syphilis (every President between 1932 and 1972), if he presided over a massive theft of land from an Indian tribe and appointed a Supreme Court Justice who approved of slavery (Andrew Jackson), etc.

If I were going to warn students about the faults that they should especially avoid in their own work, I could do little better than to point to this article. Almost every possible academic fault outside of plagiarism is presented here: Lack of evidence, lack of nuance, lack of perspective, dishonesty, ignorance of historical facts, disguising partisan views as neutral expertise. There is much to criticize in Bush's performance and policies, but not in this fashion.

Sandefur on Chesterton

Tim Sandefur criticizes one of my Chesterton quotes below. I think his criticism is misguided:

The point Chesterton is trying to make is that science cannot tell us whether the soul survives death, therefore scientists shouldn’t express certainty on the subject. This argument is nonsense, as has been shown many times, but Chesterton conveys it with enough stuff to cover that fact.

No, Chesterton's argument doesn't have anything to do with certainty or uncertainty. Rather, it's about authority. If a doctor doesn't believe in the soul, it's not for medical reasons within his area of expertise. It's not that someone can disavow the soul if they have made a careful study of arthritis or heart disease or vascular conditions. Rather, the doctor's belief is for the same philosophical reasons that anyone might accept (or reject, as the case may be). When it comes to those reasons, the doctor might speak with as much certainty as anyone else.

In the absence of such a showing, it’s as irrational to believe that the soul survives death as it would be to believe that there is a teacup orbiting Pluto. No, you can’t prove that it isn’t so, but you can never prove a negative, and no person seriously interested in the truth will suggest that you do so. Rather than confront these epistemological problems, Chesterton simply characterizes this position as insufficiently imaginative: “there is nothing to make a medical man a materialist, except what might make any man a materialist.”

This point is mystifying. Chesterton said nothing about imagination, and he wasn't even trying to confront any "epistemological problems," for the simple reason that he wasn't trying to prove the existence of a soul in the first place. Rather, as stated above, his point was purely concerned whether science can claim any special authority on the subject. Thus, if a "medical man" is a materialist, it's for philosophical reasons that are open to anyone, not because of any specialized scientific expertise. His humorous examples -- about the surveyor and the fourth dimension, or the laborer and the solidity of matter -- make this clear. I.e., when it comes to the philosophical question whether matter is illusory, you can't resolve the issue by bringing in an "expert" laborer who has dealt with a lot of matter.

An Op-Ed

I have an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News here. You might have to register.

More Chesterton

One more quote, this time on the silliness of attributing courage to certain novelists or playwrights:

The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, chap. 22 (1929).

Any man living in complete luxury and security who chooses to write a play or a novel which causes a flutter and exchange of compliments in Chelsea and Chiswick and a faint thrill in Streatham and Surbiton, is described as "daring," though nobody on earth knows what danger it is that he dares. I speak, of course, of terrestrial dangers; or the only sort of dangers he believes in. To be extravagantly flattered by everybody he considers enlightened, and rather feebly rebuked by everybody he considers dated and dead, does not seem so appalling a peril that a man should be stared at as a heroic warrior and militant martyr because he has had the strength to endure it.

More Chesterton

Here's another favorite Chesterton quote:

The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, chap. 10 (1929).

Unless Sir Arthur Keith is very badly misreported, he specially stated that spiritual existence ceases with the physical functions; and that no medical man could conscientiously say anything else. However grave be the injury called death (which indeed is often fatal), this strikes me as a case in which it is quite unnecessary to call in a medical man at all.
* * *
The truth is that all this business about "a medical man" is mere bluff and mystagogy. The medical man "sees" that the mind has ceased with the body. What the medical man sees is that the body can no longer kick, talk, sneeze, whistle or dance a jig. And a man does not need to be very medical in order to see that. But whether the principle of energy, that once made it kick, talk, sneeze, whistle and dance, does or does not still exist on some other plane of existence--a medical man knows no more about that than any other man. And when medical men were clear-headed, some of them (like an ex-surgeon named Thomas Henry Huxley) said they did not believe that medical men or any men could know anything about it. That is an intelligible position; but it does not seem to be Sir Arthur Keith's position. He has been put up publicly to DENY that the soul survives the body; and to make the extraordinary remark that any medical man must say the same. It is as if we were to say that any competent builder or surveyor must deny the possibility of the Fourth Dimension; because he has learnt the technical secret that a building is measured by length, breadth and height. The obvious query is--Why bring in a surveyor? Everybody knows that everything is in fact measured by three dimensions. Anybody who thinks there is a fourth dimension thinks so in spite of being well aware that things are generally measured by three. Or it is as if a man were to answer a Berkeleian metaphysician, who holds all matter to be an illusion of mind, by saying, "I can call the evidence of an intelligent navvy [laborer] who actually has to deal with solid concrete and cast iron; and he will tell you they are quite real." We should naturally answer that we do not need a navvy to tell us that solid things are solid; and it is quite in another sense that the philosopher says they are not solid. Similarly, there is nothing to make a medical man a materialist, except what might make any man a materialist.

More Chesterton

Another Chesterton quote, in which he tears apart someone who made the common claim that theological beliefs should be replaced by love:

The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, chap. 7 (1929).

The message of Christ [said Chesterton's opponent] was perfectly "simple": that the cure of everything is Love; but since He was killed (I do not quite know why) for making this remark, great temples have been put up to Him and horrid people called priests have given the world nothing but "stones, amulets, formulas, shibboleths." They also "quarrel eternally among themselves as to the placing of a button or the bending of a knee." All this gives no comfort to the unhappy Christian, who apparently wishes to be comforted only by being told that he has a duty to his neighbour. "How many men in the time of their passing get comfort out of the thought of the Thirty-Nine Articles, Predestination, Transubstantiation, the doctrine of eternal punishment, and the belief that Christ will return on the Seventh Day?" The items make a curious catalogue; and the last item I find especially mysterious. But I can only say that, if Christ was the giver of the original and really comforting message of love, I should have thought it did make a difference whether He returned on the Seventh Day. For the rest of that singular list, I should probably find it necessary to distinguish. I certainly never gained any deep and heartfelt consolation from the thought of the Thirty-Nine Articles. I never heard of anybody in particular who did. Of the idea of Predestination there are broadly two views; the Calvinist and the Catholic; and it would make a most uncommon difference to my comfort, if I held the former instead of the latter. It is the difference between believing that God knows, as a fact, that I choose to go to the devil; and believing that God has given me to the devil, without my having any choice at all. As to Transubstantiation, it is less easy to talk currently about that; but I would gently suggest that, to most ordinary outsiders with any common sense, there would be a considerable practical difference between Jehovah pervading the universe and Jesus Christ coming into the room.

But I touch rapidly and reluctantly on these examples, because they exemplify a much wider question of this interminable way of talking. It consists of talking as if the moral problem of man were perfectly simple, as everyone knows it is not; and then depreciating attempts to solve it by quoting long technical words, and talking about senseless ceremonies without enquiring about their sense. In other words, it is exactly as if somebody were to say about the science of medicine: "All I ask is Health; what could be simpler than the beautiful gift of Health? Why not be content to enjoy for ever the glow of youth and the fresh enjoyment of being fit? Why study dry and dismal sciences of anatomy and physiology; why enquire about the whereabouts of obscure organs of the human body? Why pedantically distinguish between what is labelled a poison and what is labelled an antidote, when it is so simple to enjoy Health? Why worry with a minute exactitude about the number of drops of laudanum or the strength of a dose of chloral, when it is so nice to be healthy? Away with your priestly apparatus of stethoscopes and clinical thermometers; with your ritualistic mummery of feeling pulses, putting out tongues, examining teeth, and the rest! The god Esculapius came on earth solely to inform us that Life is on the whole preferable to Death; and this thought will console many dying persons unattended by doctors."

In other words, the Usual Article, which is now some ten thousand issues old, was always stuff and nonsense even when it was new. There may be, and there has been, pedantry in the medical profession. There may be, and there has been, theology that was thin or dry or without consolation for men. But to talk as if it were possible for any science to attack any problem, without developing a technical language, and a method always methodical and often minute, merely means that you are a fool and have never really attacked a problem at all. Quite apart from the theory of a Church, if Christ had remained on earth for an indefinite time, trying to induce men to love one another, He would have found it necessary to have some tests, some methods, some way of dividing true love from false love, some way of distinguishing between tendencies that would ruin love and tendencies that would restore it. You cannot make a success of anything, even loving, entirely without thinking.

Working Women and the Economy

I've seen several articles lately noting that more and more women are deciding to stay home with their children. This article sums up several sources of evidence:

According to the U.S. Department of Labor?s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of married working women with children under 3 years of age declined from 61 percent in 1997 to 58 percent in 2002, while the number of married working women with a child under age 1 fell from 59 percent in 1997 to 53 percent in 2002.
* * *
Yet another study, done by the Boston-based Reach Advisors, indicates 51 percent of Generation X mothers were home with their children full time, compared to 33 percent of Baby Boomer mothers.

Or there's this article:

It's a trend being reported by publications from Time and the New York Times magazines to Atlantic Monthly, all backed by U.S. Census figures that indicate a drop among mothers in the work force who have a child under age 1.

That drop, from 59 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2002, is the first time the Census Bureau has seen a decline in that particular statistic since the agency started tabulating the figures in 1976. The biggest change is among well-educated white women over the age of 30, according to Time, which refers to a study that found 22 percent of mothers with graduate or professional degrees have opted to become stay-at-home moms.

I wonder what effect this trend has had on the GDP of the United States? After all, people who work outside the home draw salaries and spend money, all of which counts toward GDP. But people -- men or women -- who spend their time on homemaking and child-raising don't count at all. Their work is unpaid, and unpaid work doesn't count toward official statistics.

According to the Census chart found here, there were about 19.5 million children under 6 in 2002. I don't know how many of these were siblings of each other, but there were a lot of mothers involved. If a substantial number of them move out of the workforce and into household labor, that would have to affect GDP somehow.

How much? Studies show varied values for unpaid household work. An Australian study estimated the value of unpaid work at around 47% of GDP. A British study from 2000 stated that estimates range from 44% of GDP to 104%. This is obviously a wide range, and there must be quite a bit of uncertainty in the valuation mechanism, the time estimates, or both. Even so, the number is substantial.

How does this all play out? I don't know. If a genuine economic study exists, I'd love to hear of it. I'm just saying that it looks like more women have moved into precisely the sort of work whose value is huge but that is not counted toward GDP.

In that case, then, the amount of lost GDP would have to factor into one's assessment of the economic slowdown since early 2001. In other words, a slower economy may be in part due to the fact that more people are choosing to perform unpaid household work.

UPDATE: I found one study that examines the opposite effect: How much economic growth is really due to women moving from unpaid household labor into the marketplace? Here's the opening quote:

If one accounts for the shift of women’s work from the household to the market during the course of economic development, what does the trajectory of growth and structural change look like? Economists do not typically consider this aspect of economic development. But if a significant proportion of growth is propelled by such a shift, then analyses of growth will mistakenly attribute social and economic policies with production expansion when what is really happening is a sectoral shift.

And here's part of the conclusion:

Raising the market labor force participation of women, especially women with high levels of human capital (measured in terms of education and health) was a key feature of the Taiwanese miracle.

The opposite should logically be true as well.

Nichols Trial

It looks like a lot of witnesses at Terry Nichols' trial are saying that they saw McVeigh along with someone who was dark-skinned and who was not Terry Nichols. You can hear some of the witnesses on NPR by going here. As NPR reports, the government prosecutors at trial did not seek the testimony of any of the twenty-something witnesses who saw McVeigh near the time of the bombing; every last one of them would have testified that they had seen McVeigh along with another unidentified man.

This looks like more support for Jayna Davis's theory that one or more Iraqis were involved with the Oklahoma City bombing. Check out her recent book, The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing, which is highly recommended by R. James Woolsey, head of the CIA from 1993-95. She reports and collects an enormous of information that points to Iraqi involvement. There's far too much evidence to summarize here, but while there are a lot of wacky conspiracy theories out there, this is something that any open-minded person should check out.

If it's true that Iraq was involved somehow, what follows? Could the war with Iraq have been justified on that basis? On the other hand, why didn't Bush make use of this evidence when going to war with Iraq? Perhaps that he thought even if the theory was true, the evidence was too circumstantial to prove with certainty, and it would involve targeting not just Iraq but the FBI and the federal prosecutors who seemed determined to ignore even the possibility of any evidence in that direction. Thus, it seemed far better to rely on what the CIA head said was a "slam dunk" case against Saddam, namely, WMDs.

More Chesterton

Another of my favorite quotes appears later in the same essay:

There is one simple test and type of this neglect of scientific thinking and the sense of a social rule; the neglect which has now left us with nothing but a welter of exceptions. I have read hundreds and thousands of times, in all the novels and newspapers of our epoch, certain phrases about the just right of the young to liberty, about the unjust claim of the elders to control, about the conception that all souls must be free or all citizens equal, about the absurdity of authority or the degradation of obedience. I am not arguing those matters directly at the moment. But what strikes me as astounding, in a logical sense, is that not one of these myriad novelists and newspaper-men ever seems to think of asking the next and most obvious question. It never seems to occur to them to enquire what becomes of the opposite obligation. If the child is free from the first to disregard the parent, why is not the parent free from the first to disregard the child? If Mr. Jones, Senior, and Mr. Jones, Junior, are only two free and equal citizens, why should one citizen sponge on another citizen for the first fifteen years of his life? Why should the elder Mr. Jones be expected to feed, clothe and shelter out of his own pocket another person who is entirely free of any obligations to him? . . . Why should he not throw the baby out of the window; or at any rate, kick the boy out of doors? It is obvious that we are dealing with a real relation, which may be equality, but is certainly not similarity.

Some social reformers try to evade this difficulty, I know, by some vague notions about the State or an abstraction called Education eliminating the parental function. But this, like many notions of solid scientific persons, is a wild illusion of the nature of mere moonshine. It is based on that strange new superstition, the idea of infinite resources of organisation. It is as if officials grew like grass or bred like rabbits. There is supposed to be an endless supply of salaried persons, and of salaries for them; and they are to undertake all that human beings naturally do for themselves; including the care of children. But men cannot live by taking in each other's baby-linen. . . . The actual effect of this theory is that one harassed person has to look after a hundred children, instead of one normal person looking after a normal number of them. Normally that normal person is urged by a natural force, which costs nothing and does not require a salary; the force of natural affection for his young, which exists even among the animals. If you cut off that natural force, and substitute a paid bureaucracy, you are like a fool who should pay men to turn the wheel of his mill, because he refused to use wind or water which he could get for nothing. You are like a lunatic who should carefully water his garden with a watering-can, while holding up an umbrella to keep off the rain.

Chesterton

This has always been one of my favorite Chesterton quotes, ever since I read it about 12 years ago. As far as I can tell, it has never appeared on the internet except for this text version. Chesterton explains the seeming paradox that people who don't see the use of a social institution should not be allowed to reform it. Here's the quote:

The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, chap. 4 (1929).

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

Chesterton

I've been re-reading some of Chesterton's collected works, most recently Volume III, which contains several books and essays on religion. I'll be featuring some quotes that caught my eye.

Like this one:

The Catholic Church and Conversion, chap. 5. (1927).

We do not really want [need] a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong. . . . [Modern people] says they want a religion to be social, when they would be social without any religion. They say they want a religion to be practical, when they would be practical without any religion. They say they want a religion acceptable to science, when they would accept the science even if they did not accept the religion. They say they want a religion like this because they are like this already. They say they want it, when they mean that they could do without it.

In a chapter of another book, Chesterton discusses H.L. Mencken's theory that literary criticism is nothing more than catharsis on the critic's part:

The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, chap. 2 (1929).

[H]e appears to state most positively the purely personal and subjective nature of criticism; he makes it individual and almost irresponsible. "The critic is first and last simply trying to express himself; he is trying to achieve thereby for his own inner ego the grateful feeling of . . . a katharsis attained, which Wagner achieved when he wrote Die Walkurie, and a hen achieves every time she lays an egg."

Chesterton vigorously disagreed with Mencken, and demonstrated by writing his own review of a novelist named Theodore Dreiser, whose novels are described in a footnote as rather grim:

If the critic produces the criticism only to please himself, it is entirely irrelevant that it does not please somebody else. The somebody else has a perfect right to say the exact opposite to please himself, and be perfectly satisfied with himself. But they cannot controvert because they cannot compare. . . . Neither I nor anybody else can have a controversy about literature with Mr. Mencken, because there is no way of criticizing the criticism, except by asking whether the critic is satisfied. And there the debate ends, at the beginning: for nobody can doubt that Mr. Mencken is satisfied.

. . .
I can take something or other about which I have definite feelings -- as, for instance, the philosophy of Mr. Dreiser . . . . I can achieve for my own inner ego the grateful feeling of writing as follows:

"He describes a world which appears to be a dull and discolouring illusion of indigestion, not bright enough to be called a nightmare; smelly, but not even stinking with any strength; smelling of the sale gas of ignorant chemical experiments by dirty, secretive schoolboys -- the sort of boys who torture cats in corners; spineless and spiritless like a broken-backed worm; loathsomely slow and laborious like an endless slug; despairing, but not with dignity; blaspheming, but not with courage; without wit, without will, without laughter or uplifting of the heart; too old to die, too deaf to leave off talking, too blind to stop, too stupid to start afresh, too dead to be killed, and incapable even of being damned, since in all its weary centuries it has not reached the age of reason."

That is what I feel about it; and it certainly gives me pleasure to relieve my feelings. I have got it off my chest. I have attained a katharsis. I have laid an egg. I have produced a criticism, satisfying all Mr. Mencksen's definitions of the critic. I have performed a function. I feel better, thank you.

50 Things

Not too long ago, Gideon Strauss praised those who make lists of things that they love, saying that "we know more about people when we know what they love than when we know what they think or profess to believe. And we learn a great deal about ourselves when we reflect on what we love."

The odd thing is the almost subconscious criteria that I find myself using when making a list on that topic. I'm interested in just about everything, especially almost any topic related to the law, philosophy, or economics. But do I love those things? The word "love" somehow doesn't fit. The very word seems to demand answers that fit into a more aesthetic or romantic mold. At least that's how it seems.

So here goes. 50 things I love:

• My wife
  
• My kids
  
• True friends
  
• Conversation with true friends
  
• C.S. Lewis’s books – anything he ever wrote
  
• J.R.R. Tolkien’s books – anything he ever wrote
  
• G.K. Chesterton’s writings – anything he ever wrote
  
• George MacDonald’s books – anything he ever wrote.
  
• Alvin Plantinga – a wry sense of humor and a keen sense of argumentation
  
• Saul Kripke – the sheer competence
  
• Thomas Aquinas – the depth, the clarity, the ability to state opponents’ arguments better than they could themselves.
  
• Cloudy days -- so much better than the sun.
  
• Tree-lined hills
  
• Montana – the purity of the air, the majesty of the mountains
  
• Coffee
  
• White noise (i.e., the sound of an air conditioner or fan running in the background)
  
• Sleep – aaah.
  
• Playing the classical guitar
  
• Lifting weights – the feeling that I’ve pushed hard and overcome something
  
• Basketball – the feeling that comes from mindlessly making a perfect pass, or a shot that drops through the net from 21 feet.
  
• Ham radio – the romance inherent in entering a world where I can talk to people in New Zealand or Eastern Europe or wherever, all using Morse code and a wire that I strung on our roof as an antenna.
• Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
  
• Josquin des Prez
  
• Gregorian chant
  
• Tomas Luis de Victoria, O Magnum Mysterium
  
• Bach’s Art of the Fugue – I like the Canadian Brass’ recording, paired with his last chorale that he couldn’t finish before dying.
  
• Bach’s Goldberg Variations – any of the recordings by Glenn Gould is good, but the live performance from 1959 is stellar.
  
• Brahms’ three Violin Sonatas
  
• Brahms’ two Cello Sonatas
  
• Brahms’ four Symphonies
  
• Copland’s 3d Symphony
  
• Copland’s film music
  
• Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms
  
• Sibelius
  
• Christopher Parkening's recordings, esp. his rendition of Bach's Withstand Firmly All Sin, a cantata that was transcribed for guitar and chamber orchestra.
  
• Sixpence None the Richer’s Divine Discontent – one of my favorite pop albums of all time.
  
• George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice Vol. I -- hands down, the best male vocalist of all time (outside of the classical genre). Such beauty, power, depth, richness of tone, flexibility.
  
• Adiemus’ first album
  
• Any album by Anuna, esp. songs by C.V. Stanford (just heavenly). Their first album was especially good.
  
• Sarah Maclachlan’s Fumbling Without Ecstasy. Her first two albums were good as well.
  
• My sister Sarah LaFon’s album
  
• Maire Brennan’s albums
  
• Big band music
  
• Standard singers (Nat King Cole, Harry Connick, Jr., etc.)
  
• Men’s choruses
  
• Speaking of men’s choruses:
  John Ness Beck’s setting of John Donne’s A Hymn to God the Father – an incredibly powerful piece; and
  
• Wendell Whalum’s setting of the old spiritual Scandalize My Name
  
• U2 (especially A Sort of Homecoming, Pride (in the Name of Love), and Where the Streets Have No Name)
  
• Ivy’s song The Edge of the Ocean
  
• Dido’s first album
  
• Andain’s song Beautiful Things
  
• Jeff Buckley, especially his rendition of Benjamin Britten’s Corpus Christi Carol – what a pure and ringing falsetto! I’ve never heard anything like it.
  
• The Corrs’ first album

Comments

Do the new comments work? Apparently Blogger just added a comment function. We'll see.

Heuristics and Biases in Thinking about Tax

An interesting article:

Heuristics and Biases in Thinking about Tax

EDWARD J. MCCAFFERY
University of Southern California Law School; California Institute of Technology
JONATHAN BARON
University of Pennsylvania - Department of Psychology

Abstract:

The principal findings of behavioral economics and cognitive psychology over the past several decades have been to show that human beings deviate from ideal precepts of rationality in many settings, showing inconsistent judgment in the face of framing and other formal manipulations of the presentation of problems. This paper summarizes the findings of original experiments about subjects' perceptions of various aspects of tax-law design. We show that in evaluating tax systems, subjects are vulnerable to a wide range of heuristics and biases, leading to inconsistent judgment and evaluation. The prevalence of these biases suggests that there is room for skillful politicians or facile political systems to manipulate public opinion, and that tax system design will reflect a certain volatility on account of the possibility of eliciting preference reversals through purely formal rhetorical means. More troubling, the findings suggest the possibility of a persistent wedge between observed and optimal public finance systems.

For example, they performed one experiment that found a framing effect in tax policy: People prefer a "bonus" for married taxpayers (i.e., lower taxes), but don't like a "penalty" for unmarried taxpayers, even though the bonus and penalty are just two sides of the same coin. Another example: People prefer more progressivity in the income tax structure if asked about percentages than if asked about dollar amounts (rich people pay more dollars even under a flat tax, and may look like progressivity to an untrained eye).

Here's another paper by the same scholars:

Masking Redistribution (or its Absence)

JONATHAN BARON
University of Pennsylvania - Department of Psychology
EDWARD J. MCCAFFERY
University of Southern California Law School; California Institute of Technology

Abstract:
Research has shown that people vary widely in their support or opposition to progressive taxation. We argue here that the perception of progressiveness itself is affected by the nature of the tax system and by the way it is framed, or presented. Experiments conducted over the World-Wide Web and using within-subject design demonstrate that subjects suffer from a range of heuristics and biases in understanding and supporting progressive or redistributive taxation. After reviewing some prior results, we report three new studies. Two of them indicate that people do not sufficiently appreciate the reduction of progressiveness that results from the use of tax deductions to partly reimburse private expenditures. The third indicates that people do not fully appreciate the reduction in progressiveness that results from cuts in government services.

Declinism

A fairly popular style of book laments the decline of something or other. The author looks at some social trend, and sees a decline over the past few decades. It could be any number of issues: a decline in healthy families (i.e., from a conservative direction), or a decline in community (a la Robert Putnam and various communitarians), or a decline in presidential debates, or whatever.

Now, there are several responses to declinism. There's the empirical response that the supposed decline hasn't really happened at all. For example, someone might say, "The divorce rate may have risen, but in times past, people used to simply abandon their families. When you take that into account, the so-called decline doesn't really exist." Or there's the philosophical response, which admits the existence of a trend in a certain direction, but says that it's positive rather than a decline. For example, "The rise in the divorce rate is actually a good thing, because it means that more people are choosing to move out of bad relationships."

I don't want to discuss either of those types of responses. Instead, I want to discuss two other responses.

One response says that people have been complaining about declines for decades or hundreds of years, and yet here we are. If society were on a permanent downhill slide, we'd have bottomed out by now. The implication is that anyone who complains about a decline has overestimated how good things were in the past.

For example, in an article on free speech doctrine, Alex Kozinski and Stuart Banner write:

To be fair, Collins and Skover are among the most intelligent members of an entire curmudgeonly school of criticism of popular culture, all of which gains force only by romanticizing the past. See, e.g., NEIL POSTMAN, AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH (1985); ALLAN BLOOM, THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND (1987). This school can trace its pedigree at least as far as Cicero's "O tempora, o mores!," 10 CICERO, The Speeches Against Lucius Sergius Catilina: In Catilinam I, in CICERO IN TWENTY-EIGHT VOLUMES 1, 32 (G.P. Goold ed. & C. MacDonald trans., Harvard Univ. Press 1977) (63 A.D), but we're sure it goes back many millennia before that.

And over at Crescat Sententia, Amy Lamboley writes:

Normally, I prefer to ignore pieces purporting to demonstrate that our youth/country/culture/morals/world is going to hell in a handbasket, for the simple reason that while people have been writing such pieces for the past two thousand years (Cicero's O tempora! O mores! predates Christ), human society has demonstrated a remarkable ability to survive, even flourish.

Many more examples could be added, perhaps referring to the history of declinism ever since Ovid's paeans to the lost "Golden Age" of mankind.

I'm not sure that this is really responsive, though. Yes, it's unlikely that society could be on a permanent downward trend in everything that characterizes a society. But there are thousands of variables that go into making a good society. Clean streets. Clean air. Stable families. People who don't murder each other. Job security. Friendly communities. Peaceful neighboring countries. Plentiful leisure. Parents who spend enough time with their children. The list could go on and on.

The point is, at any given point in time, any society is probably getting better on some of those variables, and getting worse on others. If no society gets worse in every way all the time, neither does any society get better in every way all the time. (No society fulfills Emile Coue's maxim, in other words.)

So, the rest is straightforward. If society is getting worse on at least one variable at any point in time, you could write a declinist book every decade from now until the end of time. Declinist books can all be true, if (admittedly a big if) the authors correctly perceive the thing that's getting worse at the time of writing. It's not enough to say that people have always been complaining about some sort of decline. So what? They might have been mostly right as to their own society at a given point in time.

Or they might not. The only thing that will refute a specific example of declinism is one of the first two responses I discussed: An empirical showing that the decline hasn't happened, or a philosophical argument that the decline is actually a good thing.

A fourth response that you occasionally see goes something like this: "So you think our society has too much divorce compared to the 1950s? Well, the 50s were racist and oppressive. So quit complaining."

The problem with this argument is patently obvious: It assumes that all characteristics of a society necessarily go together. Put another way, it assumes that if you point out the good things about a society, you must secretly want the bad things as well. But that's false. The counter-reply is therefore something like this: "I may say that the 1950s were better in terms of the divorce rate. But that doesn't mean I like everything about the 1950s. There's nothing wrong with wishing that we could keep the good things about our society, yet try to emulate an earlier decade on the one thing that people back then got right."