The Fear of Reason: In defense of rational argument

by Leon Wieseltier

New Republic
June 23, 2011

“I just want to point out,” declared the student at the far end of the seminar table, “that when Maimonides offers a proof of God’s existence, he is not saying that he has really proved it. What he’s saying is: This works for me, and if it works for you, great.” I was teaching a graduate seminar on The Guide of the Perplexed at a fine American university, and I was pleased to see my students warming to my insistence that the old masterpiece is still alive, and one of the most formidable obstacles ever erected against a thoughtless existence. We returned repeatedly to the question of what medievals can teach moderns about the indispensability of a worldview, and about the proper methods for justifying one. But the young man’s comment about the subjectivism of Maimonides’s proof—anyway the least interesting part of the book--startled me. It was so American and so wrong. After explaining why it was not just historically correct, but also philosophically respectable, to conclude from the text that its author really could have believed that a proof was possible, I proposed that we quit the twelfth century and put a little pressure on the talismanic words “and if it works for you, great.” I began a discussion of the shortcomings of pragmatism, which allowed me to launch into a withering—and of course intellectually devastating—analysis of the ideas of Richard Rorty and their poisonous impact upon thinking in America. My students offered surprisingly little resistance; but then they had signed up for a winter of rationalism and religion--this countercultural band was not ashamed of its interest in the idea of truth. Yet the Rortyan shrug was still there in the young man’s comment, and so I asked him for his opinion about reason. He said that it frightened him and discouraged him. The problem with reason, he explained, was that it claimed to settle matters once and for all, and that this was arrogant, and that it left him with nothing more to say. Rationalism made him feel excluded and late. I replied that he had it backward. It is not reason, but unreason, that shuts things down. You cannot argue against an emotion, but you can argue against an argument. That is why we were still contending with Maimonides, and why he was still contending with Aristotle. A reasoned discussion is always open and a reasoned intervention is always timely. Unreason is more arrogant, more impatient, more cruel, than reason. Since reason is general, it is inclusive. Reason, I said, is strict but fragile, forever hounded, forever distracted, the minority cause, provisional, fair, curious, fallible, public—not tyrannical but heroic, in its lonely insurrection against the happy and popular hegemony of passions and interests. I told my students about Maimonides’s life, the persecution, the tragedy, the depression, the paranoia, so that they would see the creatureliness of the rationalist, and honor his confidence in the mind as a human triumph. Reason is even poignant.

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Why Free Trade Matters

by Jagdish Bhagwati

Project Syndicate
June 23, 2011

Contrary to what skeptics often assert, the case for free trade is robust. It extends not just to overall prosperity (or “aggregate GNP”), but also to distributional outcomes, which makes the free-trade argument morally compelling as well.

The link between trade openness and economic prosperity is strong and suggestive. For example, Arvind Panagariya of Columbia University divided developing countries into two groups: “miracle” countries that had annual per capita GDP growth rates of 3% or higher, and “debacle” countries that had negative or zero growth rates. Panagariya found commensurate corresponding growth rates of trade for both groups in the period 1961-1999.

Of course, it could be argued that GDP growth causes trade growth, rather than vice versa – that is, until one examines the countries in depth. Nor can one argue that trade growth has little to do with trade policy: while lower transport costs have increased trade volumes, so has steady reduction of trade barriers.

More compelling is the dramatic upturn in GDP growth rates in India and China after they turned strongly towards dismantling trade barriers in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. In both countries, the decision to reverse protectionist policies was not the only reform undertaken, but it was an important component.

In the developed countries, too, trade liberalization, which started earlier in the postwar period, was accompanied by other forms of economic opening (for example, a return to currency convertibility), resulting in rapid GDP growth. Economic expansion was interrupted in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but the cause was the macroeconomic crises triggered by the success of the OPEC cartel and the ensuing deflationary policies pursued by then-Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

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The Link Between House Prices and Divorce

Wall Street Journal
June 23, 2011

Declining house prices make it less likely that a homeowner will get divorced but more likely that a renter’s marriage will end, a new study finds—probably because a drop in equity traps unhappy couples in their house, while renters can find two affordable apartments.

There’s been anecdotal discussion of the effect of the housing bust on divorces—the authors of the new study cite this post, from WSJ.com’s The Juggle—but the article represents a first cut at studying the issue empirically.

Lacking long-term data including both demographics and housing prices, the researchers combined two data sets: the Bureau of Census’s Current Population Survey, from 1991 to 2010, and Federal Housing Finance Agency figures for house prices in more than 150 metropolitan areas.

The researchers used educational status as a proxy for renters and homeowners (since many more college grads than high-school dropouts are homeowners: 80% versus 58%). The focus was on people ages 25 to 79 who had ever been married. Looking at high-school dropouts, over the full period, the proportion who were divorced was 14.6%. That figure would rise to 17.58% if housing prices dropped 10%, the researchers calculated, after looking at historical patterns.

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Yuan a Kidney?

by Sally Satel

Slate
June 13, 2011

China's record on organ trafficking is by now a well-known international horror story. The vast majority of organs transplanted each year in Chinese hospitals are taken from executed criminals—and allegedly from political detainees, such as members of the the Falun Gong; charges that are currently under investigation by the U.N. Human Rights Council and Amnesty International. Now, paradoxically, China is proposing forward-thinking transplant policies; commendable laws that, if properly carried out, challenge the status quo and major international health organizations.

China's black market is why paying patients—citizens as well as foreigners—can get a new kidney or liver in a matter of days or weeks. Such lightning speed is unheard of in countries without black markets in organs; in countries that rely solely on altruistic giving, the wait for a deceased-donor organ is years long. In major cities in the United States, for example, it is not unusual for patients on dialysis to wait eight or 10 years before a kidney becomes available—a wait that only about half can survive.

Last winter, a 26-year-old migrant worker from Hunan made headlines in the Chinese press because he wanted to sell a kidney to pay off gambling debts. A black-market broker promised him 40,000 yuan (about $6,000), but at the last minute the migrant worker got cold feet. According to the man's story, the broker then took him to a small hospital and bound him to an operating table, where a nurse sedated him and surgeons removed his left kidney. Authorities are now investigating, but China's thriving kidney trade makes accounts like these sound quite plausible.

In 2007, China began licensing transplant centers in an effort to raise standards of practice and regulate performance. Only 163 of the more than 600 centers qualified and are now authorized to perform transplants, the vice minister of health Huang Jiefu, told the Lancet in an article published earlier this month. Huang, who is regarded as uncommonly open about his aversion to using prisoners as the major source of transplantable organs, still acknowledges that the market is far from moribund. Indeed, the same Lancet article notes that transplant specialists in the United States and Europe say they still occasionally see patients who report having purchased their transplants in China.

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Living With Mistakes

by David Brooks

New York Times
June 13, 2011

Some of the blogs I follow—Marginal Revolution, Ezra Klein—have given ample attention to Tim Harford’s new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. So I solipsistically assumed that everybody must be aware of it. But then I happened to glance at this book’s Amazon ranking, which as I write is down on the wrong side of 1,500. This is an outrage, people! For the good of the world, a bigger slice of humanity should be aware of its contents.

So I’m doing my bit to publicize it. (I don’t know Harford in any way, shape or form.)

Harford starts out with the premise that the world is a very complicated and difficult place. At the dawn of the automobile industry roughly 2,000 car companies sprang into being. Less than 1 percent of them survived. Even if you make it to the top, it is very hard to stay there. The historian Leslie Hannah identified the ten largest American companies in 1912. None of those companies ranked in the top 100 companies by 1990.

Harford’s basic lesson is you have to design your life to make effective use of failures. You have to design systems of trial and error, or to use a natural word, evolution. Most successful enterprises are built through a process of groping and adaptation, not planning.

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To Curb Malpractice Costs, Judges Jump In Early

New York Times
June 12, 2011

In Justice Douglas E. McKeon’s fluorescent-lighted chambers in the Bronx, a new way of handling medical malpractice suits was on full, and sometimes gruesome, display. Around a polished wood table, lawyers haggled over the price for a lost nose ($300,000) and the missing tip of a finger ($50,000).

The discussion was like some kind of malpractice bazaar, with lawyers blurting out terrible facts and big numbers.

“Our offer of $500,000 is more than we’ve ever had on a dead baby case,” said Margaret Sherman, a lawyer for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs 11 public hospitals.

The patients were not there, but the lawyers and Justice McKeon — who has better-than-average medical knowledge — were. Cajoling, flattering and arguing, Justice McKeon, of State Supreme Court, worked to bring about settlements long before the cases moved toward trials.

The approach, known as judge-directed negotiation, is seen by the Obama administration as offering states a way to curb liability expenses that have sharply increased health care costs nationally. Getting judges involved earlier, more often and much more actively in pushing for settlements, is its crucial ingredient — evident in the recent session watched by this reporter, one of many that are usually not attended by the public.

New York officials say the program bypasses years of court battles, limiting legal costs while providing injured patients with compensation that is likely to be less than a jury would award but can be paid out years earlier, without lengthy appeals.

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Sealed with a kiss: How the mafia makes a deal

Independent
June 10, 2011

The long and passionate kiss between the two young men continued for several seconds, as onlookers gawped and photographers snapped incessantly. Their lips finally parted when police officers yanked one man away and shoved him into a waiting police car.

Uninhibited public shows of affection between men are seldom seen in Italy. But these two weren't lovers. And the show they put on outside Naples police headquarters on Wednesday evening was something rarer still – a full kiss on the lips between Camorra mobsters as a powerful sign, made very public, that the bonds of the crime syndicate would remain strong and the arrested man would remain silent. Experts say that this particular mob tradition has never previously been filmed or photographed.

The young mobster under arrest, Daniele D'Agnese, 27, a senior figure in the notorious Scissionisti clan of the Camorra, locked lips with not one but two younger male associates in front of press cameras and crowds. La Stampa newspaper said the kisses were a message telling the pair that they would not be left to fend for themselves.

"It was a sign to the weaker members of the group telling them, 'We'll continue to be a group; we'll command the same territory and whatever happens, you won't be abandoned'," it said. The kiss may also have been a sign to rival clans that Scissionisti bonds remained strong.

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Once-in-a-lifetime lunch

by Amy Braverman Puma

University of Chicago Magazine
May-June 2011

I took a spot in the back of the Quad Club solarium, leaving room for A-list guests closer to the luncheon's honoree, Nobel Prize–winning economist Ronald Coase. Still, in the end pretty much everyone who’d come to celebrate Coase’s 100th birthday was A-list, and my out-of-the-way table filled with notables including economist Allen Sanderson, University provost Thomas Rosenbaum, and, sneaking in just after the salad was served, 2007 Nobelist Roger Myerson.

Myerson was still pulling in his chair when economist and New York Times columnist Casey Mulligan shot him a question: “Roger, do you think we should be in Libya?” It took Myerson only a moment to collect his thoughts and respond that, from his perspective, Arab-League and UN approval for the no-fly zone made it a justifiable intervention.

Meanwhile, Sanderson was delighted to be sitting next to Rosenbaum, he told the physicist, because he had a burning question—about the physics of kids’ soccer. “At my granddaughter’s games,” Sanderson said, “whenever the goalie gets the ball, she throws it. Wouldn’t kicking be better?” Yes, Rosenbaum agreed: legs are stronger than arms, so kicking, although less accurate, would get the ball farther down the field.

Ten minutes before the luncheon was scheduled to end, I worried aloud that perhaps no one would speak and I’d have nothing to write about Coase. Myerson generously launched into stories about the Law School professor emeritus, who had turned 100 this past December but whose University celebration had been postponed until late March because it had been too cold for him to venture out. Myerson recalled how, after a 2001 dinner to honor then-incoming University President Don Randel, everyone had left but the Myersons and the Coases, who stayed and talked awhile. On the Myersons' way home, they agreed that, should they live into their 90s, they hoped to be as sharp and interesting as the Coases.

Soon economist Gary Becker, AM’53, PhD’55, a Nobel Prize-winner himself, did get up to speak. He told the room how Coase had been born in England, attended the London School of Economics, and later came to the United States, first to the East Coast but in 1964 settling at the University of Chicago Law School. “It was the first law school, to my knowledge, that had an economist teaching full time,” Becker said. Law School professor Aaron Director had started the Journal of Law and Economics in 1958, and after Director retired in 1965, Coase “really made it into a major and influential journal.” Becker noted that when he first met Coase in 1970, Coase “didn’t say a lot, but I began to realize that every time he did say something, it was really profound.”

Becker discussed Coase’s “four most important papers,” including his 1937 article “The Nature of the Firm" and 1960’s “The Problem of Social Cost,” which was cited when Coase won the 1991 Nobel. When that paper, about bargaining, social costs, and efficiency, was published, Becker said, “I read it, and it seemed revolutionary. I called [George] Stigler [PhD’38] and said, ‘This seems like an important paper.’ George said, ‘Yes, but a lot of people around here don’t think it’s correct.’ I read it again. It seemed correct to me. I assigned it to my class.” The paper laid out what’s now known as the Coase Theorem (although so many people misinterpret it that there's an academic paper on whether economists teach it correctly).

“He’s still working,” said Becker, noting that Coase has coauthored a book coming out later this year, How China Became Capitalist (Palgrave Macmillan).

After a tasty chicken meal, Sanderson remarked that we were having “an intimate lunch with four Nobel Prize winners.” Along with Coase, Becker, and Myerson, 1995 laureate and Chicago professor Bob Lucas, AB’59, PhD’64, was also at the lunch. Intimate indeed: afterward I felt like I knew some of them myself.

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The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1991

Rational After All: Toward an Improved Theory of Rationality in Economics

by Yulie Foka-Kavalieraki and Aristides N. Hatzis

Revue de Philosophie Economique
Vol. 12, No. 1, June 2011

In this paper we critically review the literature on rational choice theory (RCT) and the critical approaches to it. We will present a concise description of the theory as defended by Gary Becker, Richard Posner and James Coleman (as well as others) at the University of Chicago from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, we will discuss its epistemological assumptions and predictions and we will also examine the most important arguments against it. We will give our main emphasis on the critique coming from behavioral economics and we will try to see if humans’ supposed cognitive constraints lead to a failure of rationality or if they constitute rational responses to the scarcity of information, time and energy. In our discussion we will use findings from experimental economics and the sciences of the brain, especially evolutionary psychology and neuroeconomics. Our intention is to present an improved theory of rational choice that, informed from the above discussion, will be descriptively more accurate but without losing its predicting power. Moreover, we will conclude by trying to answer the most important related policy question: when rationality seems to fail, does this necessarily imply that agents should be paternalistically protected against themselves? We will briefly defend the thesis that, in the long-run, it is much better for them and the society at large for the individual decision makers to be let alone to develop rational responses to their cognitive constraints.

Keywords: Rational Choice Theory, Behavioral Economics, Evolutionary Psychology, Rationality, Cognition, Paternalism

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On ‘Jeopardy!’ Women Take Fewer Risks vs. Men

Miller-McCune
June 2, 2011

A study of contestant behavior on the popular game show “Jeopardy!” suggests women tend to hedge their bets when facing male opponents.

The answer is: It’s a game show that provides surprising clues about sex, social rules and risk-taking.

And the question is: What is Jeopardy!?

Two Swedish researchers, writing in the journal Economics Letters, report an intriguing pattern of behavior by contestants on the popular quiz program. Women, it seems, take fewer risks when their Jeopardy! opponents are men.

Gabriella Sjogren Lindquist and Jenny Save-Soderbergh of the Swedish Institute for Social Research looked at 206 episodes of Jeopardy!, focusing on those moments when one of the three contestants must decide how much to wage on a Daily Double.

For those unfamiliar with the Jeopardy!, Daily Doubles pop up at random during the course of play. Rather than wagering a set amount on whether they will know the answer to a question (the show’s usual format), contestants are given the opportunity to bet as much or as little as they like, up to the amount of money they have accumulated to that point.

The researchers tallied the results of 615 Daily Doubles, featuring 251 male and 65 female contestants. (The same contestant can play several Daily Doubles during the course of the show, and still more if he or she wins and returns the next day.)

The researchers found “no systemic gender differences in performance,” either on the Daily Double questions or the final scores. But they also determined that “male players are more likely to give the correct answer when competing against males only.” Perhaps man-to-man competition, which played a vital role in our evolutionary past, sharpens the male mind.

Most intriguingly, the researchers found females “apply a more conservative wagering strategy” when their two opponents are both male. Compared to instances when they’re up against two women, or a man and a woman, “Women wager 25 percent less of their accumulated score on average” when they’re competing against two men.

“Men do not display this behavior,” they add.

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Not So Cool Rules

Wall Street Journal
Editorial
May 28, 2011

In the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the character Jeff Spicoli expresses the Jeffersonian thesis that American democracy required "cool rules . . . pronto," lest our polity become just as "bogus" as the British rule it replaced. Where's Spicoli when you need him in Washington?

The closest thing we have is White House regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, who this week delivered a progress report on Mr. Obama's January announcement that the feds were going to review and then kill unnecessary rules across the bureaucracy. Mr. Sunstein reported some anecdotal success, including the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency has agreed to stop treating milk spills as "oil" spills for the purpose of regulating farms.

You read that right. It took a Presidential-level review to get the EPA to stop treating spilled milk like an oil slick. After we wrote about this folly on January 27 ("Land of Milk and Regulation"), EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson assailed us at a Congressional hearing. We can only imagine the protest she put up against Mr. Sunstein.

More broadly, Mr. Sunstein reports that his review has resulted in "immediate steps to save individuals, businesses, and state and local governments hundreds of millions of dollars every year in regulatory burdens."

Alas, this doesn't begin to ease the economic burden of regulation. In research sponsored by the federal Small Business Administration, Lafayette College economists Mark and Nicole Crain have estimated that Americans were spending more than $1.7 trillion annually just to comply with federal regulations—and that was before Mr. Obama took office.

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More Weather Deaths? Wanna Bet?

by Donald J. Boudreaux

Wall Street Journal
May 28, 2011

Writing recently in the Washington Post, environmental guru Bill McKibben asserted that the number and severity of recent weather events, such as the tornado in Joplin, Mo., are too great not to be the result of fossil-fuel induced climate change. He suggested that government's failure to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases will result in more violent weather and weather-related deaths in the future.

And pointing to the tragedy in Joplin, Mr. McKibben summarily dismissed the idea that, if climate change really is occurring, human beings can successfully adapt to it.

There's one problem with this global-warming chicken little-ism. It has little to do with reality. National Weather Service data on weather-related fatalities since 1940 show that the risks of Americans being killed by violent weather have fallen significantly over the past 70 years.

The annual number of deaths caused by tornadoes, floods and hurricanes, of course, varies. For example, the number of persons killed by these weather events in 1972 was 703 while the number killed in 1988 was 72. But amid this variance is a clear trend: The number of weather-related fatalities, especially since 1980, has dropped dramatically.

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Moscow's Capitalist Manifesto

by Robert Maciejko

Wall Street Journal
May 27, 2011

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev has said he wants to transform Moscow into a global financial center. And he has made this transformation a core element of his plans to modernize the Russian economy. Yet Russia experienced $21 billion of capital outflows in the first quarter of this year. And Mr. Medvedev's own top economic adviser admitted recently that the president believes that "we did not have real progress in improving the investment climate. We need progress now in the short term. Investment is very low and capital flight is high."

The adviser's comments capture just one piece of the larger challenge in Moscow's quest to become a financial center. There are a number of significant obstacles to overcome.

Corruption is a corrosive force in the country. Russia comes in at 154th out of 178 countries on Transparency International's 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index. The country also has a well-deserved reputation for stifling bureaucracy. In a World Bank survey of the process required, in 182 countries, to obtain construction permits, Russia's was found to be the second most difficult in the world. Other obstacles include inadequate infrastructure, which contributes to massive traffic tie-ups, and occasional forced shutdowns of the stock market, a practice that began during the financial crisis.

For these and other reasons, the latest Z/Yen survey of 75 financial centers throughout the world ranks Moscow 68th, behind Manila, Jakarta and Malta.

Moscow's lowly status is also reflected in the local investor base, which is small in terms of both retail and institutional investors. Large Russian companies, even global leaders in their industries, frequently choose to raise capital in London or Hong Kong. Price-earnings ratios in other BRIC countries are, on average, 50% higher than those in Russia. The country's ratio of market capitalization to GDP is two to three times lower than in the most developed G20 countries, and lower also than in Latin America and in Eastern European countries like Poland. The upside potential for Russia, therefore, is large.

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Tim Harford on failure

Interviewed by Ezra Klein

Washington Post
May 27, 2011

Tim Harford is a British economist, a columnist for the Financial Times and author of the new book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure. We spoke last week about why governments have so much trouble failing well, whether voters should prefer indecisive politicians and what we can learn from the Iraq surge. Parts of this interview ended up in my column on the constructive role that failure can, and perhaps must, play in the health-care system.

Ezra Klein: The basic argument of your book is that the only way to solve complex problems is to fail toward the correct solution. But one of the things you suggest is that this is particularly hard for governments to do. Why?

Tim Harford: Let’s think about the balance of risks in the market or the scientific method. In both cases, you could have 50 failures and one success and you’ll still come out ahead. The theory of relativity and Google and penicillin more than make up for all the failed experiments, theories and businesses. The same is true, of course, of biological evolution. The number of failures are orders of magnitude larger than the successes.

Now think about politics. Any politician knows they can have 50 policies going well and one failure the failure will dominate the next campaign. So the politician is just desperate to avoid provable failure. And they can do that either by never doing anything or by refusing to quantify and evaluate what should happen when they do do something, as that way no one can prove it went wrong.

EK: One way this manifests, I think, is that there’s a preference for sweeping, blunt policies that may or may not work as opposed to more modest policies that accumulate over time but require patience and diligence. There’s something more satisfying about a big plan, like the Ryan budget, where you can just say it cuts costs by trillions of dollars by refusing to pay for more health care, than something like the Affordable Care Act, where it’s saying it’ll cut costs through aggressively experimenting with new ways to deliver care and hoping some of them will work.

TH: In politics, we like people who sound like they have a plan. Everyone remembers the Bush-Kerry election. And that election seemed to come down to one guy could make up his mind and one couldn’t. John Kerry’s defenders, as I recall, said he was decisive and that decisiveness just wasn’t coming through. Not that many tried to sell the idea that indecision is a virtue, that the world is uncertain and it makes sense to change your mind. In the U.K., Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair won six elections, and she famously said, “you turn if you want to, the lady is not for turning.” And Blair, after British forces had gone into Iraq, he said, “I don’t have a reverse gear.” Imagine if I tried to sell you a car that didn’t turn or have a reverse gear. Would you want to buy it? Of course not. But we like those politicians.

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21st-Century Regulation: An Update on the President's Reforms

by Cass Sunstein

Wall Street Journal
May 25, 2011

A 21st-century regulatory system must promote economic growth, innovation and job creation while also protecting public health and welfare. Earlier this year, President Obama outlined his plan to create such a system by adopting a simpler, smarter and more cost-effective approach to regulation. As a key part of that plan, he called for an unprecedented government-wide review of regulations already on the books so that we can improve or remove those that are out-of-date, unnecessary, excessively burdensome or in conflict with other rules.

Over the past four months, government agencies and departments have combed through their rules, listened carefully to the public, and developed plans to identify what works and what doesn't. The results of this review are in. Today, 30 agencies are laying out regulatory reforms that will save private-sector dollars and unlock economic growth by eliminating unjustified regulations, including what the president has called "absurd and unnecessary paperwork requirements that waste time and money."

We are taking immediate steps to save individuals, businesses, and state and local governments hundreds of millions of dollars every year in regulatory burdens. The reforms have the potential to save billions of dollars more over time while maintaining critical health and safety protections for the American people.

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The Problems with Precaution: A Principle without Principle

by Jonathan H. Adler

The American
May 25, 2011

It’s better to be safe than sorry. We all accept this as a commonsense maxim. But can it also guide public policy? Advocates of the precautionary principle think so, and argue that formalizing a more “precautionary” approach to public health and environmental protection will better safeguard human well-being and the world around us. If only it were that easy.

Simply put, the precautionary principle is not a sound basis for public policy. At the broadest level of generality, the principle is unobjectionable, but it provides no meaningful guidance to pressing policy questions. In a public policy context, “better safe than sorry” is a fairly vacuous instruction. Taken literally, the precautionary principle is either wholly arbitrary or incoherent. In its stronger formulations, the principle actually has the potential to do harm.

Efforts to operationalize the precautionary principle into public law will do little to enhance the protection of public health and the environment. The precautionary principle could even do more harm than good. Efforts to impose the principle through regulatory policy inevitably accommodate competing concerns or become a Trojan horse for other ideological crusades. When selectively applied to politically disfavored technologies and conduct, the precautionary principle is a barrier to technological development and economic growth.

It is often sound policy to adopt precautionary measures in the face of uncertain or not wholly known health and environmental risks. Many existing environmental regulations adopt such an approach. Yet a broader application of the precautionary principle is not warranted, and may actually undermine the goal its proponents claim to advance. In short, it could leave us more sorry and even less safe.

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Keep the Current Drinking Age?

Wall Street Journal
May 20, 2011

Two economists have concluded that lowering the drinking age to 18 could lead to an 8% increase in deaths among 18-to-20-year-olds, or an additional 8 deaths per 100,000 people. Recent proposals to lower the drinking age—including from college presidents—should therefore face “a very high burden of proof,” they say.

Currently, an 8% jump occurs at 21, the researchers found, using mortality statistics from the National Vital Statistics System, from 1997 to 2003—showing that alcohol laws continue to shape behavior, despite widespread flouting of those laws. Two important categories in which deaths jumped were motor vehicle deaths and suicide.

The researchers also looked at mortality, from 1975 to 1993, in the states that lowered their drinking ages during the 1970s and ’80s, only to raise them back. They compared people born just a few years apart, in each state, who got to drink legally at either 18 or 21. (The idea as that these groups were demographically identical, except for the legality of their drinking.) When 18-to-20-year-olds could drink, the study found, there was a 17% increase in nighttime driving deaths in that category.

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A New Gauge to See What’s Beyond Happiness

by John Tierney

New York Times
May 16, 2011

Is happiness overrated?

Martin Seligman now thinks so, which may seem like an odd position for the founder of the positive psychology movement. As president of the American Pyschological Association in the late 1990s, he criticized his colleagues for focusing relentlessly on mental illness and other problems. He prodded them to study life’s joys, and wrote a best seller in 2002 titled Authentic Happiness.

But now he regrets that title. As the investigation of happiness proceeded, Dr. Seligman began seeing certain limitations of the concept. Why did couples go on having children even though the data clearly showed that parents are less happy than childless couples? Why did billionaires desperately seek more money even when there was nothing they wanted to do with it?

And why did some people keep joylessly playing bridge? Dr. Seligman, an avid player himself, kept noticing them at tournaments. They never smiled, not even when they won. They didn’t play to make money or make friends.

They didn’t savor that feeling of total engagement in a task that psychologists call flow. They didn’t take aesthetic satisfaction in playing a hand cleverly and “winning pretty.” They were quite willing to win ugly, sometimes even when that meant cheating.

“They wanted to win for its own sake, even if it brought no positive emotion,” says Dr. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. “They were like hedge fund managers who just want to accumulate money and toys for their own sake. Watching them play, seeing them cheat, it kept hitting me that accomplishment is a human desiderata in itself.”

This feeling of accomplishment contributes to what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which roughly translates to “well-being” or “flourishing,” a concept that Dr. Seligman has borrowed for the title of his new book, Flourish. He has also created his own acronym, Perma, for what he defines as the five crucial elements of well-being, each pursued for its own sake: positive emotion, engagement (the feeling of being lost in a task), relationships, meaning and accomplishment.

“Well-being cannot exist just in your own head,” he writes. “Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.”

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Democracy Versus Economic Growth

by Richard W. Rahn

Washington Times
May 16, 2011

Is democracy incompatible with long-run economic growth? One’s initial reaction may be that this is a silly question, but in this day of a global debt crisis, it is worth recalling the warnings of America’s Founding Fathers that when the people find they can vote themselves benefits, that will bring along the end of the republic.The Founders understood the problems of democracies and why all of the previous democracies had failed, going back to ancient Athens.

A fundamental flaw with majoritarian democracy is that politicians get votes by promising their constituents benefits, particularly when they can promise those benefits will be paid by others or future generations. As the old line has it, “Any politician who promises Peter benefits to be paid by Paul will always have the vote of Peter.” The inherent problem with this model is that as the number of Peters who must be satisfied grows, more and more costs are shifted to the Pauls, who eventually rebel by not working or leaving. The United States may have reached the tipping point, where half of the population pays almost no income tax and the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay almost 40 percent of the tax revenue. The nation already has about the most progressive tax system in the world, so it is doubtful that the remaining taxpayers can be squeezed much further.

The United States is the world’s oldest continuous democracy, and it succeeded in being so by not being constituted as a democracy but as a federal republic. The American Founders feared the momentary passions of the majority, so they instituted an elaborate set of checks and balances in an attempt to ensure that rapid fundamental change would be most difficult. The system was designed for gridlock to protect individual liberty and economic opportunity. Despite its imperfections, the system basically worked until four years ago, when the political class used the financial crisis (caused by faulty government policies) to ramp up deficit and debt to unsustainable levels.

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Census Data Reveals a Shift in Patterns of Childbearing

New York Times

May 9, 2011

College-educated women are waiting longer to have children than those without a college education, according to new data from the Census Bureau.

In 2000, the portion of women with college degrees between the ages of 25 and 34 who had children was 42 percent, according to the data. Ten years later, the same group of women, now ages 35 to 44 — representing about three million Americans — were far more likely to be mothers: About 76 percent had children, according to the data.

In contrast, women who did not finish high school were more likely to have children earlier. In 2000, about 83 percent of women ages 25 to 34 who did not have a high school diploma had children. The percentage rose to 88 percent by 2010.

The trend of educated women having children later accelerated in the 1980s, along with the rise in women’s educational attainment, said Andrew J. Cherlin, a demographer at Johns Hopkins University.

“College-educated women are following a different path to having children,” Mr. Cherlin said. “They wait until they’ve graduated from college, gotten married and started a career, before having a child.”

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