In hindsight, my recent post on GMU econ blogger culture has one glaring omission. Namely: We are extremely inclusive. Converts are welcome – the more the merrier. But that’s only the beginning. We also cherish our fellow travelers, sympathizers, well-wishers, and tourists. We don’t look for reasons to be angry or reject others. Instead, we search for the intellectual good in everyone. Our views are too unpopular to get upset at people for disagreeing with us, so we build cohesion by not asking for it. As Muawiya puts it, “If there is even one thread binding me to my fellow man, I do not let it break. If he pulls, I loosen. If he loosens, I pull.”
Yes, welcoming outcasts creates an adverse selection problem, but we gladly live with that problem. If your intellectual tribe turns on you, don’t mope. Stroll over to our lunch table. Don’t worry that you’ve somehow offended us or burned bridges. Our bridges are fire-proof – and in our culture, a friendly, informative conversation beats any apology. Saying, “Let’s pretend our past quarrels never happened” is good, but actually pretending the quarrels never happened is even better. Indeed, given the spotlight effect, there’s a good chance that no one else remembers the quarrels that continue to weigh upon you.
Does this whole perspective wrongly assume moral equivalence or moral agnosticism? No, but it does assume that mainstream culture is too quick to anger. Wrath doesn’t merely lead us to treat others unjustly. It also leads us to error by cutting us off from unwelcome information and arguments.
Last point: Most invitations eventually expire. This invitation is open-ended unto ages of ages. Feel free to stay with mainstream culture as long as you like. If and when you tire of it, GMU econ blogger culture will take you in.
READER COMMENTS
Sebastian Benthall
Sep 24 2018 at 3:46pm
I am an academic and have long had respect for the intellectual content from your culture.
How does one accept your invitation without actually being located in GMU? Do you have events? Or is it all about the blog comments?
Kevin Erdmann
Sep 24 2018 at 5:14pm
Reminds me of this:
“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi
Ahmed Fares
Sep 24 2018 at 6:25pm
This is similar:
“If you have lost heart
in the Path of Love,
Flee to me without delay:
I am a fortress invincible.”
—Rumi
Paul
Sep 24 2018 at 7:48pm
That is a very generous sentiment Bryan.
Scott Sumner
Sep 24 2018 at 7:55pm
GMU’s econ department has the best bloggers, and it’s not even close.
Jg
Sep 24 2018 at 8:47pm
Economics is not akin to Christian evangelization, although by their world view (ie bloggers) you get the feeling economics is their religion.
Their utilitarianism is just another form of moral relatavism. This does not deny utility is a useful measure to draw some conclusions.
But there are limits to viewing people as economic units. It is akin to seeing people as x-ray pictures. You can see their chemical make-up, but people and community are much more in fullness and complexity and economics cannot reach this depth.
Mark Z
Sep 25 2018 at 4:25am
Economics no more necessitates moral utilitarianism than any other science or discipline. In economics one makes analytical – not normative – claims. Saying, for example, that a person’s labor is worth $1 an hour on the market, while they need $2 an hour to survive, is not the equivalent of saying the person ‘deserves’ $ 1 an hour, or ‘deserves’ to starve. The analytical claim about the market value of his labor is no more a moral declaration than Thomas Andrew’s assessment, after realizing the damage, that the Titanic will inevitably sink, constituted a moral statement about what all the ship’s passengers did or didn’t deserve.
Jg
Sep 25 2018 at 8:10am
Moral utilitarianism is a Contradiction. Whether somebody deserves $1 / day or $2/ day is irrelevant to my point. Nobody deserves to starve. The fact that markets conclude there is no error that some people starve because their utility is worth less than the minimum to survive is evidence in and of itself that economic analysis (markets) is not by definition ordered to the good. This is my point.
Pierre Lemieux
Sep 25 2018 at 10:43am
Jg: It’s not clear to me what you mean by “their utility is worth less than the minimum to survive.” This statement seems meaningless in economics. Utility is a ranking of alternatives and is not “worth” anything. (If what you refer to is, in a sense, the worth of an individual, you may find interesting the short introduction to Buchanan’s The Limits of Liberty.) And note that markets do not “conclude” anything. It is the individual or group imposing a social welfare function who “concludes” anything–if by “conclude” you mean “decides,” “decree,” or “think.”
Jg
Sep 25 2018 at 8:17pm
pierre, I am not an economist; thus I lack precision in my choice of words. Do the rankings you note presuppose any value ? In other words, is #1 superior , morally or otherwise, to #2?
How about if a different community ranked in the above example #2 superior to #1?
Which is superior or does it depend on the desires or values that exist in each community?
Mark Z
Sep 25 2018 at 10:57am
Someone falling off of a 10 story building may not deserve to die, but gravity will decree it nonetheless. Of course, if one is in the business of trying to keep people from falling or saving them once they do, it is most definitely good (probably necessary) to know the reality of the effect of gravity.
Note that I didn’t imply that the economic analysis implied any normative position. You may well conclude that you, or I, or everyone (through the state) has a moral obligation to make up the difference between the $1 an hour my hypothetical worker’s labor is worth and the $2 he needs to survive. But however much you believe you, I, or anyone else is morally obligated to give him is a normative claim that has no bearing on the fact that his labor is worth $1 per hour.
john hare
Sep 25 2018 at 4:48pm
I think some people do deserve to starve. Thieves and assorted parasites that prey on others and refuse to attempt to try to be an asset to anyone should not be subsidized. In particular I have a problem with those that get charity from having starving children that are only starving because the parents consume the charity. Someone that trades the baby formula for drugs does deserve no help, and the children need a safer environment.
I am not referring to people that have problems and are doing the best they can with what they have. Low capability people are an entirely different group from those that voluntarily choose to be negative value.
Obviously I don’t expect much if any agreement. Personal observations drive my emotions on this one.
Jon Murphy
Sep 25 2018 at 10:10am
Economics plumbs these depths all the time. Adam Smith, David Hume, Frederic Bastiat, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Ronald Coase, Armen Alchian, William Allen, Walter Williams, Don Boudreaux, the bloggers here at EconLog, Gary Becker, Harold Demsetz, FA Hayek, etc all discuss these issues.
Without people and community, economics is meaningless. People who make economic mistakes and fallacies are generally making the mistake that people and communities do not matter at all.
Jg
Sep 25 2018 at 8:21pm
You are correct but these depths I refer to have their source in the Divine order. Economics as a quantitative science is limited by definition to the temporal.
Benjamin Cole
Sep 24 2018 at 11:30pm
I feel welcomed!
As the resident skunk, I look forward to frequently, perhaps daily, guest-posting on:
The virtues of polygamy and the need to legalize same.
In a libertarian world, rolling brothel vans would, well, roll.
No more property zoning.
Legalized street-side vending, for trucks, push-carts, motorcycle sidecars and the like.
No more sexual harassment laws. If your wife comes home in tears as her boss demanded sex or be fired, that is that. She signed a “fire at will” contract in order to get the job. Such contracts are standard fare, as businesses need to avoid open-ended liabilities.
Any business can openly discriminate on the basis of sex, race, religion etc.
On the other hand, religions will taxed as businesses.
If 50 million religious fanatics migrate to the US (open borders) and start up thousands of madrassa-like schools, preaching forceful conversion of infidels, well we have just have to live with that. They also vote.
Well, as the resident skunk I could go on, but I have a serious point: Can libertarianism be taken seriously? Or would true libertarianism rip apart the rather thin social fabric that defines the US today?
Are we only contemplating a sanitized version of libertarianism, the way socialists only ponder rose-colored versions of socialism?
Hazel Meade
Sep 25 2018 at 11:33am
You are assuming that in the absence of government, there would not be informal private mechanisms which would take the place of formal regulation.
For instance, HOA’s love them or not, restrict what homeowners can do with their property (much like zoning). My anarchist friends would go further and advocate vandalism against push carts if they are getting annoying. We already have a thriving social justice culture which would continue to condemn sexual harassers and subject them to all sorts of boycotts and twitter mobbing if sexual harassment laws didn’t exist. And racists (as I’ve been very forthright in advocating), would be subjected to even great levels of social ostracism (as they richly deserve, considering that’s exactly what they want to do to minorities). Would 50 million muslim immigrants be able to get jobs? I think not. Would they be able to find housing? Not if nobody will rent to them. Being a violent extremist, and associating with violent extremists, has consequences, just like being a racist or associating with racists. If those Muslim immigrants harbor and tolerate violent extremists in their midst, then we won’t tolerate them. That’s what private civic culture is all about. If they want to come here and peacefully practice their religion, they are welcome.
Hazel Meade
Sep 25 2018 at 10:47am
This policy has a downside – welcoming some people can make others feel unwelcome. For instance, welcoming racists makes minorities feel like they aren’t welcome. When the minorities walk in the room, the racists will make sure of it.
Philo
Sep 27 2018 at 12:15am
The term ‘racism’ is so vague that it isn’t clearly true that a “racist” would make a member of a minority group feel unwelcome. Anyway, welcoming a racist just means being willing to have a civil discussion with him/her; your doing that need not make anyone else feel unwelcome to engage in discussion with you.
Hazel Meade
Sep 27 2018 at 11:06am
I think there might be a middle ground where you can say … go ahead and show up, but it’s our culture not yours, you don’t get to make other people feel unwelcome. The problem is that cultures don’t work like that. Once someone “identifies” as libertarian, they start defining what libertarianism means. If enough people who are anti-immigration white nationalists start claiming to be libertarians, they get to claim that libertarianism demands white nationalist policies (Ironically, the exact thing that leftists would like to say). Which they actually do say – that we have to save libertarian culture from the foreign brown socialist hordes, because only white people are genetically capable of getting it. Really. They actually say that.
Mark Z
Sep 27 2018 at 2:39pm
Seeking to defend an identity seems to me to validate the flawed identity-based reasoning of those who attack people based on their ‘identity.’ We should encourage people to think about policy matter ‘atomistically’ or from principles, rather than identity. If an angry mob is shouting, “hang that guy, his great grandfather was a murderer,” to respond by trying to convince them his great grand father was in fact innocent indulges and encourages this sort of dangerous thinking; the correct response is: “who cares if his great grandfather was a murderer? He didn’t choose his ancestors and therefore isn’t responsible for what they did or didn’t do.”
I admit ideological identities can be useful in avoiding having to explain everything one believes, as a sort of general starting point. But that’s as far as they should go. If someone identifies as a feminist or a socialist, these are identities that would arouse my suspicion. But if it quickly becomes clear that I’m talking to a Daphne Patai rather than an Andrea Dworkin, or a George Orwell rather than a Vladmimir Lenin, the general identities no longer matter, and most of my suspicion dissipates, since the worst things I associate with feminism and socialism are mostly absent in Patai and Orwell, respectively. Nor would I bother trying to convince them to abandon their identities because the ‘true’ versions of them are really bad, unlike them, because I don’t buy essentialism when it comes to ideologies and identities. To me, the identity game is one that, just by virtue of playing it, one has already lost.
Now, it’s possible that most people are more susceptible to persuasion by logical fallacy than by logical argument, but I if that’s so I don’t think I have the patience for it. If someone shows me a poll clearly demonstrating that the vast majority of libertarians, say, support the gold standard, I’m still just going to say, “so what? I don’t. I’m responsible for defending my opinion, not those of some people who are similar to me in some other way.”
Mark Z
Sep 27 2018 at 1:15am
Admittedly, I live in academia, and have an “old fashioned” definition of racism, but I don’t think anyone I’ve actually seen in my own life deplatformed by discomfited minorities or their putative white vicars was actually racist. In fact disputing whether a particular phenomenon or action was really racist is usually enough to discomfit a lot of people. So absent a better defined term, I’ll remain skeptical. Should it, say, be unacceptable to go up on stage and rant about how much one hates black people? Sure. It should also be socially unacceptable for Sarah Jeong to sit on the editorial board of the New York Times and sitting US congressmen to cavort with someone like Louis Farrakhan, but here we are, and I suspect (well, know to a certainty, actually) that the narrowing of the Overton Window “anti-racists” are demanding will be curiously asymmetrical (if not expanding on one side even as it contracts on the other).
Hazel Meade
Sep 27 2018 at 11:34am
Someone on another message boards laid out some definitions of “types” of racism that went something like this:
Type A racist: Consciously believes in the superiority/inferiority of certain races and advocates formal hierarchies or segregation.
Type B racist: Believes racial stereotypes and acts on them, discriminates against other races, but doesn’t advocate formal segregation.
Type C racist: Believes in the genetic existence of races as such, believes there are average groups differences or genetic phenotypes, but doesn’t consciously act on it in personal interactions with individuals.
Type D racist: Harbors unconscious biases that affect how they interact with people of other races.
I think that’s a pretty good breakdown. I think it’s fairly safe to say that almost everyone is a little bit of type D. By contrast, Type A racists are almost extinct, and I don’t think any of them would be interested in showing up in libertarian circles. But there are a lot of Type B and Type C racists. Type C I could imagine being borderline ok if they can manage to not obsess about race differences in intelligence all the time. The problem is more the type B racists whose primary reason for associating with libertarians is that they want the freedom (both political and social) to actively discriminate and exclude minorities- even if it means that minorities get completely excluded from the economy (for some that is actually the goal).
Mark Z
Sep 27 2018 at 3:25pm
I would prefer to define racism more simply as the belief in the lesser or greater moral worth of one race than another race. I don’t think one’s beliefs about differences between statistical averages of traits of somewhat arbitrarily defined groups should factor into the definition. We don’t think of it as racist to believe that the average height among black people is higher than among white people; nor would that belief become racist if height were a major determining factor in income (height does correlate with income incidentally, but that’s another story).
One might call someone racist who irrationally overestimates innate differences to reach a preconceived prejudicial belief, but don’t think that means the ‘least racist’ position is to believe there can be no correlation between ethnicity and any cognitive ability. Suppose someone believes in a conspiracy theory that women are actually naturally just as physically strong as men, but that observed differences are due to the patriarchy putting chemicals in the drinking water or something: would such a person be less sexist than someone who acknowledges the reality of such differences, because they believe the sexes are more innately equal? If so, then it would seem reality is bigoted (and if in one way, it may be in others as well), and one either has to demand that people disavow true propositions for moral reasons, or one has to abandon the negative connotation of things like sexism or racism per se (in the ‘right quantity’).
I think the ‘moral’ definition is also more concordant with how we think about individuals. Most people don’t think a person with lower than average IQ, or autism, or ADHD, or Tourette’s Syndrome is subhuman or has fewer rights; so why purport to make the imputation that claiming, based on empirical evidence, that such traits disproportionately occur in one group or another constitutes an attempt to degrade that group?
Lastly, I will note that this distinction of moral equality is not some peculiarly right wing concept; it is espoused, for example, by Peter Singer, not exactly a Felangist, and I believe he’s written on the distinction between moral and ‘factual’ equality in the context of race.
Hazel Meade
Oct 1 2018 at 1:00pm
I think the ‘moral’ definition is also more concordant with how we think about individuals. Most people don’t think a person with lower than average IQ, or autism, or ADHD, or Tourette’s Syndrome is subhuman or has fewer rights; so why purport to make the imputation that claiming, based on empirical evidence, that such traits disproportionately occur in one group or another constitutes an attempt to degrade that group?
Firstly, because such argument do have a long history of being use to actually justify treating other groups as inferior. Secondly, because I think you are overrating the average intelligence of people who hold who believe those things. There are some smart people out there who can separate “lower IQ” and “inferior sub-human”, but there are plenty more not so smart people who can’t. Very few people out there in the general public are as intellectually sophisticated as Peter Singer.
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