Of course, the argument against allowing such contracts---that no reasonable person would want them anyway---is also the argument for why it doesn't do much harm to allow it---no reasonable person would want to do it anyway.
Sorry – who wants to “force their stuff on me” again? How is the absence of coverture marriage in modern society “forcing their stuff” on anybody?
That might not have been entirely clear. I was referring to the economic and regulatory agenda of the feminist left, not to the absence of coverture, which is just fine with me.
I know what FYIGM means. I was proposing FYGMY as the left-wing version, which I elaborated on in the comment directly above the FYGMY comment. As I said, this fits the data better than the FYIGM smear, though obviously it's not entirely fair in all cases.
I'm an outsider to the left. That is, I can recognize left-wing dumbassery as such because I haven't accepted it myself.
That said, I think the role of differing norms in politics is overstated. For example, whether we should increase taxes on the rich to increase welfare spending is sometimes considered a normative questions, but while values do play a role, people also have very different assumptions about what the effects of this would be.
I don't trust the government to make an unbiased peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It was more idle speculation than an actual proposal. What I meant by non-ideological is that the questions would have to be abstract enough not to be directly relevant to any political issues. Maybe apolitical would have been a better word. Giving both parties veto power over any particular question would help. Though I suppose they could find a way to sneak in some nonobvious, indirect bias. Government types can be surprisingly resourceful when the incentives are there.
That said, I kind of would like to see this happen, just because it would be entertaining to see one party, faced with an actual incentive to take an honest look at the question, realize that they have the dumber constituency.
How do we get to a place where the marketplace of ideas is truly open for business, but the accuracy of what is reported does not play second fiddle to the various Truths we all want to believe are infallible?
Short of a New Rationalist Man, I don't think we can. The market is working exactly how it's supposed to---i.e., it's giving consumers what they want. The problem is that most consumers don't want the truth, they want to read/hear stuff that makes them feel good. I don't see a way around this. Sites like FactCheck.org help, but only if people actually read them. Censorship just means that people hear want the censors want them to hear and not what they hear, and the censors are subject to biases of their own.
The best solution I can see is to mitigate the negative externalities caused by the misinformed by disenfranchising the voters most susceptible to bias using some objective, non-ideological test.
Generally, the prosecutor only brings a case to trial when he thinks he has enough evidence for a reasonable chance at conviction. I'm not privy to the details of the investigation, so I can't say whether a trial is warranted. It's not clear why the prosecutor originally declined to charge Zimmerman.
My main complaint is that, to listen to many on the left, you would think that this were an open-and-shut case and that the only reason Zimmerman isn't in jail right now is that the police are a bunch of racists (because if there's one thing racists love to do, it's cover for Latino murderers).
Stand Your Ground isn't relevant here. If Zimmerman's telling the truth, he didn't have the opportunity to escape, and he doesn't need SYG. If he's lying, SYG doesn't help him.
Of course he's being accused of a crime: Battery. He won't be charged, since he's dead, but Zimmerman's defense rests on his claim that Martin had committed the crime of battery.
I think what you’re presenting as a symmetry in outliers isn’t the case. A higher percentage of libertarians say dumbassed things than liberals or conservatives (well, maybe not conservatives…).
I submit that you merely believe this because you don't recognize your own side's dumbassery. As an outsider, I can assure you that it's endemic.
I don’t mean that as a criticism, actually. Libertarianism has been coopted by a bunch of FYIGM types that are already in positions of privilege, and who think that further government intervention will only undermine it.
The FYIGM smear doesn't fit the data. Disagreements between the left and libertarians are largely about how much we should tax the wealthy to subsidize the lower and middle classes. The vast majority of people in both groups are not particularly wealthy. If anything, it's the leftists who appear to be motivated by naked self-interest.
It's worth noting that with very few exceptions, said least do not actually live in the United States. My impression---though I could be wrong about this---is that conservative Christians are actually pretty good about giving to the third-world poor.
This is only tangentially related to the post, but...are anthology shows dead now? By which I mean shows like The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where each episode was an entirely self-contained story, with no recurring characters or regular actors. I remember the new Twilight Zone series several years back, but I can't recall any new anthology shows in recent years.
Also, does anyone know anything about the advent of multi-threaded sitcom plots? It used to be standard for a sitcom to have one plot thread. Now this is almost never the case---there are two or more plot threads interwining throughout each episode. When did this happen? Was it something that people remarked on at the time?
No one really supports coverture in the sense of thinking that it's a great thing that everyone, or even anyone, should do.
Rather, Caplan is rejecting the doctrine of inalienability---the idea that there are certain rights that you can't sign away. The argument for inalienability is, essentially, that no one could ever have any legitimate reason for wanting to sign away those rights, and that anyone choosing to do so must ipso facto be incompetent to make that decision.
This isn't necessarily wrong, but it's disturbingly close to the kind of thinking that leads to a lot of left-wing bullshit and very real restrictions on our freedoms. In the case of kidney sales, this sort of thinking has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
Now, there are important differences between coverture or slavery contracts on the one hand and kidney sales on the other, and there are legitimate arguments for banning the former but not the latter. But it is a legitimately slippery slope, so I don't think it's entirely irrational just to say that, barring externalities, we don't want government to be in the business of deciding what sort of transactions and contracts are legitimate and what sort are not.
You mean if someone said that I should have the option to enter into a contract? Caplan just did. Again, he didn't say anyone should be coerced into it. He didn't say that it's a great thing that we should all go back to. He said it should be an option because people should have the right to enter into any kind of contracts they want. It's a specific aspect of a very general principle. Now, Jason has a point about how under common law specific performance can't be compelled, and maybe there are good reasons for that. But while that might make Caplan's argument wrong, it doesn't make it morally beyond the pale.
I really can't see taking personal offense at the suggestion that I should have an option that I don't have now.
Think about what might happen if, for example, there was violence and who would automatically be assumed to be the initiator of the trouble.
I think you're trying to describe some hypothetical parallel universe, but...that's kind of the case for men now. I used to read a feminist blog pretty regularly, so I've seen most of the above said in earnest. Whatever. No skin off my nose. What I do find offensive is that they want to force their stuff on me---to limit my options.
It's also worth noting that Caplan wants to give women radically more freedom on several other dimensions. I don't think he should get less credit for that just because he also wants to extend it to men as well.
To be clear, Caplan never endorsed coverture as the legal default. He just said that--given the ability to opt out--it wasn't as bad as the non-optional regulations and taxation to which women (and men) are subjected today. He said that the first-best option would be separation of marriage and state.
And his more recent post was explicitly not gender-specific.
That's not how it actually works. As I understand it, Girls Around Me used your phone's GPS to determine your location, and Foursquare's API to find people who had checked in to nearby venues. I haven't used Foursquare myself, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't have an automatic check-in option. You have to make a conscious choice to check in each time you do it.
That said, the Foursquare API has a "herenow" function which allows you to query to determine who is currently checked in to a particular location. Now, this is throttled to prevent you from scanning the whole city to find a particular person, but it's done on an opt-out basis. This strikes me as something that ought to be done on an opt-in basis, as it doesn't really seem intuitive that strangers would have access to this information. In Foursquare's defense, they probably didn't anticipate that people would use this to scan several nearby venues instead of just the one the user is currently at. In the latter case, it's really not that much different from just taking a look around the room.
Also, I suspect that this is partly in response to the utterly asinine way in which the left uses the Gilded Age as a rhetorical device. Any time someone suggests rolling back federal regulations or spending, it's a pretty good bet that some leftist who thinks he's clever is going to say, "You mean like in the Gilded Age? When [insert complaint about the Gilded Age that has no causal relationship whatsoever to the topic]? What are you, some kind of [insert appropriate accusation]?"
Obviously the best response here is to point out that the leftist is a fishing moron and that the two things are severable. But I can see it leading to "Well, how big a deal was coverture, really?"
It's not clear to me that any reasonable person would take personal offense from Caplan's post. It's not as though he said that women should be forced into coverture. If his wife were the kind of person who would take this sort of thing the wrong way, I doubt she would have married him.
And it kind of sounds like you're saying that he should be less concerned with the truth than with signaling that he's on the side of the angels. Criticizing an argument because it's logically wrong is fine, but criticizing it because it's socially wrong strikes me as problematic.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Coverture and Liberty”
Of course, the argument against allowing such contracts---that no reasonable person would want them anyway---is also the argument for why it doesn't do much harm to allow it---no reasonable person would want to do it anyway.
"
Sorry – who wants to “force their stuff on me” again? How is the absence of coverture marriage in modern society “forcing their stuff” on anybody?
That might not have been entirely clear. I was referring to the economic and regulatory agenda of the feminist left, not to the absence of coverture, which is just fine with me.
"
Or the other way around, I guess. I haven't accepted it because I recognize it as dumbassery.
"
I know what FYIGM means. I was proposing FYGMY as the left-wing version, which I elaborated on in the comment directly above the FYGMY comment. As I said, this fits the data better than the FYIGM smear, though obviously it's not entirely fair in all cases.
I'm an outsider to the left. That is, I can recognize left-wing dumbassery as such because I haven't accepted it myself.
On “On “Truth” and Its Consequences – Why We Need A New Business Model for 21st Century Journalism”
That said, I think the role of differing norms in politics is overstated. For example, whether we should increase taxes on the rich to increase welfare spending is sometimes considered a normative questions, but while values do play a role, people also have very different assumptions about what the effects of this would be.
"
Positive vs. normative.
"
I don't trust the government to make an unbiased peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It was more idle speculation than an actual proposal. What I meant by non-ideological is that the questions would have to be abstract enough not to be directly relevant to any political issues. Maybe apolitical would have been a better word. Giving both parties veto power over any particular question would help. Though I suppose they could find a way to sneak in some nonobvious, indirect bias. Government types can be surprisingly resourceful when the incentives are there.
That said, I kind of would like to see this happen, just because it would be entertaining to see one party, faced with an actual incentive to take an honest look at the question, realize that they have the dumber constituency.
"
How do we get to a place where the marketplace of ideas is truly open for business, but the accuracy of what is reported does not play second fiddle to the various Truths we all want to believe are infallible?
Short of a New Rationalist Man, I don't think we can. The market is working exactly how it's supposed to---i.e., it's giving consumers what they want. The problem is that most consumers don't want the truth, they want to read/hear stuff that makes them feel good. I don't see a way around this. Sites like FactCheck.org help, but only if people actually read them. Censorship just means that people hear want the censors want them to hear and not what they hear, and the censors are subject to biases of their own.
The best solution I can see is to mitigate the negative externalities caused by the misinformed by disenfranchising the voters most susceptible to bias using some objective, non-ideological test.
On “I Knew It! I Knew It!”
Generally, the prosecutor only brings a case to trial when he thinks he has enough evidence for a reasonable chance at conviction. I'm not privy to the details of the investigation, so I can't say whether a trial is warranted. It's not clear why the prosecutor originally declined to charge Zimmerman.
My main complaint is that, to listen to many on the left, you would think that this were an open-and-shut case and that the only reason Zimmerman isn't in jail right now is that the police are a bunch of racists (because if there's one thing racists love to do, it's cover for Latino murderers).
"
Stand Your Ground isn't relevant here. If Zimmerman's telling the truth, he didn't have the opportunity to escape, and he doesn't need SYG. If he's lying, SYG doesn't help him.
"
Of course he's being accused of a crime: Battery. He won't be charged, since he's dead, but Zimmerman's defense rests on his claim that Martin had committed the crime of battery.
On “Coverture and Liberty”
I think what you’re presenting as a symmetry in outliers isn’t the case. A higher percentage of libertarians say dumbassed things than liberals or conservatives (well, maybe not conservatives…).
I submit that you merely believe this because you don't recognize your own side's dumbassery. As an outsider, I can assure you that it's endemic.
"
FYGMY (Give Me Yours), I guess.
"
I don’t mean that as a criticism, actually. Libertarianism has been coopted by a bunch of FYIGM types that are already in positions of privilege, and who think that further government intervention will only undermine it.
The FYIGM smear doesn't fit the data. Disagreements between the left and libertarians are largely about how much we should tax the wealthy to subsidize the lower and middle classes. The vast majority of people in both groups are not particularly wealthy. If anything, it's the leftists who appear to be motivated by naked self-interest.
On “Bible Verse and Commentary”
I guess. How else would you interpret it, if not to mean the world's poorest? Demographics which lean strongly Democratic?
"
It's worth noting that with very few exceptions, said least do not actually live in the United States. My impression---though I could be wrong about this---is that conservative Christians are actually pretty good about giving to the third-world poor.
On “Coverture and Liberty”
...And Sam delivers the goods at 11:30 PM, not 45 minutes after I posted this comment.
On “Classic TV is Bad TV”
This is only tangentially related to the post, but...are anthology shows dead now? By which I mean shows like The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents, where each episode was an entirely self-contained story, with no recurring characters or regular actors. I remember the new Twilight Zone series several years back, but I can't recall any new anthology shows in recent years.
Also, does anyone know anything about the advent of multi-threaded sitcom plots? It used to be standard for a sitcom to have one plot thread. Now this is almost never the case---there are two or more plot threads interwining throughout each episode. When did this happen? Was it something that people remarked on at the time?
On “Coverture and Liberty”
No one really supports coverture in the sense of thinking that it's a great thing that everyone, or even anyone, should do.
Rather, Caplan is rejecting the doctrine of inalienability---the idea that there are certain rights that you can't sign away. The argument for inalienability is, essentially, that no one could ever have any legitimate reason for wanting to sign away those rights, and that anyone choosing to do so must ipso facto be incompetent to make that decision.
This isn't necessarily wrong, but it's disturbingly close to the kind of thinking that leads to a lot of left-wing bullshit and very real restrictions on our freedoms. In the case of kidney sales, this sort of thinking has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
Now, there are important differences between coverture or slavery contracts on the one hand and kidney sales on the other, and there are legitimate arguments for banning the former but not the latter. But it is a legitimately slippery slope, so I don't think it's entirely irrational just to say that, barring externalities, we don't want government to be in the business of deciding what sort of transactions and contracts are legitimate and what sort are not.
"
You mean if someone said that I should have the option to enter into a contract? Caplan just did. Again, he didn't say anyone should be coerced into it. He didn't say that it's a great thing that we should all go back to. He said it should be an option because people should have the right to enter into any kind of contracts they want. It's a specific aspect of a very general principle. Now, Jason has a point about how under common law specific performance can't be compelled, and maybe there are good reasons for that. But while that might make Caplan's argument wrong, it doesn't make it morally beyond the pale.
I really can't see taking personal offense at the suggestion that I should have an option that I don't have now.
Think about what might happen if, for example, there was violence and who would automatically be assumed to be the initiator of the trouble.
I think you're trying to describe some hypothetical parallel universe, but...that's kind of the case for men now. I used to read a feminist blog pretty regularly, so I've seen most of the above said in earnest. Whatever. No skin off my nose. What I do find offensive is that they want to force their stuff on me---to limit my options.
It's also worth noting that Caplan wants to give women radically more freedom on several other dimensions. I don't think he should get less credit for that just because he also wants to extend it to men as well.
"
Perhaps it's no coincidence that one of his hobby horses is how great a job being a tenured economics professor is.
This seems apropos.
"
To be clear, Caplan never endorsed coverture as the legal default. He just said that--given the ability to opt out--it wasn't as bad as the non-optional regulations and taxation to which women (and men) are subjected today. He said that the first-best option would be separation of marriage and state.
And his more recent post was explicitly not gender-specific.
On “Privacy and Girls Around Me”
That's not how it actually works. As I understand it, Girls Around Me used your phone's GPS to determine your location, and Foursquare's API to find people who had checked in to nearby venues. I haven't used Foursquare myself, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't have an automatic check-in option. You have to make a conscious choice to check in each time you do it.
That said, the Foursquare API has a "herenow" function which allows you to query to determine who is currently checked in to a particular location. Now, this is throttled to prevent you from scanning the whole city to find a particular person, but it's done on an opt-out basis. This strikes me as something that ought to be done on an opt-in basis, as it doesn't really seem intuitive that strangers would have access to this information. In Foursquare's defense, they probably didn't anticipate that people would use this to scan several nearby venues instead of just the one the user is currently at. In the latter case, it's really not that much different from just taking a look around the room.
On “Coverture and Liberty”
Also, I suspect that this is partly in response to the utterly asinine way in which the left uses the Gilded Age as a rhetorical device. Any time someone suggests rolling back federal regulations or spending, it's a pretty good bet that some leftist who thinks he's clever is going to say, "You mean like in the Gilded Age? When [insert complaint about the Gilded Age that has no causal relationship whatsoever to the topic]? What are you, some kind of [insert appropriate accusation]?"
Obviously the best response here is to point out that the leftist is a fishing moron and that the two things are severable. But I can see it leading to "Well, how big a deal was coverture, really?"
"
It's not clear to me that any reasonable person would take personal offense from Caplan's post. It's not as though he said that women should be forced into coverture. If his wife were the kind of person who would take this sort of thing the wrong way, I doubt she would have married him.
And it kind of sounds like you're saying that he should be less concerned with the truth than with signaling that he's on the side of the angels. Criticizing an argument because it's logically wrong is fine, but criticizing it because it's socially wrong strikes me as problematic.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.