They jacked up spending by quite a bit. Further evidence that gridlock is better than one-party rule (of either party). My comment was about gridlock, not about Republicans.
Better than the alternative, I suspect. Most of the big expansions of the federal government came while Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, didn't they? And the period 1994-2000 was a period of unprecedented restraint in spending growth.
Gridlock creates an industry for special interests and lobbyists to buy legislators and therefore promotes corruption
How so? Seems to me that the easer it is to get legislation passed, the more legislators have available for sale.
There is no "instead." Sweatshops don't interfere with parallel efforts to improve standard of living in third-world countries. And they'll go away (and historically have gone away) when the local economy develops to the point where there are better alternatives for workers. But it's grossly irresponsible to just shut down the sweatshops and hope that something magical happens to make up for it.
As an example of reasonably informed employees choosing to work in an unsafe environment: Smoke-filled bars. There's room for debate regarding exactly how unsafe it is, but the point is that the governments of many cities have banned it on the grounds that it's unsafe for employees.
Well, it's probably really on the grounds that smoking cigarettes is a low-status habit, but the ostensible reason is health-related.
Broadly speaking, businesses should have to follow the same laws the rest of us do. No violence, no fraud, etc. I just don't think there's any reason why they should incur special obligations as penance for the sin of making a profit.
I'm not in favor of broad restrictions on child labor, because generally parents try to do what's best for their children, and in very poor regions, that sometimes means working. I'm not opposed to restrictions on certain types of particularly dangerous or harmful child labor, such as prostitution.
Of course they shouldn't be allowed to commit violence against union activists, though they should be allowed to fire them and remove them from the premises.
Toxic substances: It depends on whether the employees are reasonably well-informed about it. In some cases an informed employee may prefer that money be spent on higher wages rather than on making his working environment a bit safer. If an employer is lying about the safety of working conditions, even by omission, and the dangers are not well-known to the employees, I'd say that's grounds for government intervention.
Sexual abuse: Well..."abuse" is a loaded term, of course. I don't think prostitution should be illegal, so I don't think a job that's 90% manufacturing and 10% sex with the boss should be illegal, either. If the owner is straight-up raping the employees, then that's rape. But if he's explicitly making sex part of the job, then there's no legitimate grounds for government interference. Of course, if it's the manager doing it, and not the owner, then the owner would have grounds for action against the manager.
Why do they feel that profit motive exempts them from the requirements of normal morality?
But that's not what you're talking about at all. You're talking about special obligations that you think employers should have that nobody else has.
To give an example: Suppose Acme pays its workers two dollars a day. You think they should make four dollars a day. Do you believe that you, personally, have an obligation to make up the difference out of your own pocket? If not, then why do you think Acme does?
I don't see what's unfair about it. Anti-sweatshop types have no problem with first-world firms simply not employing third-world workers, leaving them to their current very low standard of living. And they have no problem with them employing third-world workers under conditions which would dramatically improve their standard of living. But they object to the middle ground, which moderately improves workers' standard of living.
A society who (provides basic care for these people) and (forces employers to pay some measure of labor above desperation levels)
Here's you're conflating two completely independent things, which I've added parentheses to separate. Now, what you really want is for third-world workers to have a standard of living high enough that a job in a sweatshop isn't an appealing alternative to the status quo. Sure. So do I.
But banning certain types of employment arrangements doesn't get you there. Maybe employers will go along with it, but maybe they'll just decide that it's not worth it and go back home. Really, it'll probably be some a bit of each, so you end up with fewer third-world workers being employed at higher wages under better conditions. Is that really an improvement? For the lucky one, sure. Not so much for the ones who go back to prostitution or subsistence farming.
What really bugs me about this is the way leftists shift the burden of alleviating their own first-world guilt onto employers. Let's be clear about this: Employers aren't responsible for the fact that the third world sucks. They go in, and they make a bad situation slightly better. And then a bunch of self-righteous leftists who aren't even doing that much have the chutzpah to say that it's not good enough.
But why do employers have any special responsibility to improve third-world standards of living above and beyond what they do through the pursuit of profit? If Nike has a responsibility to give Indonesian workers charity in the form of above-market wages, then why don't you have that same responsibility?
The model I have in my mind is one in which leftists think of making a profit as a sort of venial sin. You can do it, and they probably won't burn you at the stake, at least not until the revolution comes, but you'll have to buy indulgences.
If you want to make the lives of third-world workers better, do it directly. Don't try to fob it off onto someone else.
Redistribution isn't necessarily a zero-sum game, especially over the long run. To assume that you can just pool and redistribute resources with no deadweight loss is to miss the point entirely.
And the fact that Rawls was a philosopher and not an economist doesn't really let him off the hook. If he wants to abstract away the production function, that's fine, but then the principle needs to hold up for a wide variety of production functions. If it leads to bad outcomes under some hypothetical production functions, then that calls into question the validity of the principle under real production functions as well.
So what exactly is the rule around "desperate exchange?" If someone's standard of living is below a certain level, you're not allowed to engage in transactions with that person if they raise his standard of living only a little bit? It's okay to ignore them completely, but if you interact with them at all, you must increase their standard of living by some minimum amount?
How exactly is a person running a sweatshop where people voluntarily, if desperately, choose to work, worse than someone who simply doesn't interact with those people at all?
I’m curious about how you linked the one with the other. It seems like those most desperate for absolution would be pro-war, because they would feel bad about the implied pacifism of not joining up, and they’d seek out compensation.
Some, maybe. But another approach is to say that the war simply isn't worthwhile. It's not that I'm afraid to volunteer. For a worthy cause, I would definitely risk my life. It's just that this isn't a worthy cause.
Honestly, I sometimes wonder if this doesn't play a role in my own (tentative) opposition to the war. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the war, but I'm absolutely sure I don't want to get blown up. So I tend to keep it to myself.
They're all true for different endpoints. A 25-year decline in the real value of the minimum wage was reversed by a 40% increase phased in over the last couple of years.
There have many, many things that have changed in our economy over the last forty years besides for the liberalization of trade. You can't just pick out two things that you don't like and say that one caused the other. It's entirely possible that without trade liberalization, unskilled wages would have fallen further.
Furthermore, most minimum-wage jobs are in the service industry and can't be outsourced. If you want to blame immigration for this, there's a plausible if not necessarily correct argument to be made there. There's no reason at all to think that free trade had anything to do with it.
Also, minimum wage is set by legislative fiat, not by market forces. The minimum wage has not kept up with inflation because Congress has chosen not to adjust it for inflation. Consequently, the percentage of workers making minimum wage or less has fallen from 13.9% in 1979 to 6% in 2010. The fall in the real value of the minimum wage (which goes mostly to young and part-time workers, not necessarily poor ones) doesn't really tell us much about the standard of living of the poor.
And the real value of the minimum wage is now at a 30-year high, FYI.
You're setting the bar too low. A reluctant dictator (one who has power but chooses to use it sparingly) can run an excellent government, better than any majoritarian one. It's the law of large numbers: Democracy tends to produce average governments, because it averages the preferences of voters. But with a dictatorship, you can get extremes, both good and bad.
The problem, of course, is the problem of succession. People don't live forever, and there's no guarantee that the next dictator will be reluctant. He may even be enthusiastic.
So you need a period longer than sixty years to judge the success of a non-democratic government. You need to watch it through several successions.
I'm not saying that leftists are antisemitic. If you replace Jews with a different scapegoat, then it's not really very antisemitic.
I just think that the sort of populist leftism you see in this and similar movements is very strongly remnisicient of traditional antisemitism, with the most significant difference being a different choice of scapegoat.
There's probably a right-wing analogue, too. Anti-immigrant hysteria, for example. Dirty furriners takin' our jobs.
As a counterexample, the People's Park in Shanghai closes at dusk. I can't imagine that lawsuits against the government are much of an issue in China. It could just be that the government is full of control freaks, but they don't impose a general curfew. I'm not sure why there's a problem with people being in the park specifically. Especially when the park belongs to them. It's in the name. Maybe it's about controlling vagrancy.
Wait a minute...People's Park...where have I heard that recently? Oh, right:
Des Moines’ protest started at around noon Sunday. More than 400 gathered west of the Capitol in an area they called “People’s Park,” and agreed to occupy the area.
Fair enough. It's just so contrived a scenario that I'm having trouble seeing any real-world applications, aside from the vanishingly rare situations in which something like this actually does happen.
I actually don't have much of an opinion on the specific scenario in question. Bilateral monopolies are weird. In a unilateral monopoly, prices generally end up above marginal cost, and this is inefficient because output is below where it would be in a competitive market. In bilateral monopolies, the price is indeterminate, but the quantity sold is determinate. So there aren't really any questions of efficiency---just a question of who gets the most out of the deal, and by how much.
And I don't really have a strong opinion regarding what allocation is most fair. You can stack the deck by telling the story in a way that makes one or the other participant more likeable, but I'm not sure that that's a particularly enlightening way to go about it.
By the way, it's not at all clear that the passerby can actually get the prince to give up his kingdom. If the prince refuses to deal, he dies, but if the passerby refuses to deal, then he almost certainly will never again have an opportunity like the one he's just walked away from. A sack of gold may not be as nice as a kingdom, but it's much better than a sack of water.
And if we're really going to take the scenario at face value, it's not clear that the prince has any more a right to his kingdom than the passerby has. I mean, he's a prince. One of his ancestors killed a bunch of people, so now his right to rule over the land those people lived in, and its inhabitants, is sacrosanct? Meh.
Don't know why they're arresting them. That's every protestor's dream. If you want to really get under their skin, the best thing to do is completely ignore them.
What you're describing there is a bilateral monopoly (only the passerby can give the prince water, and only the prince can give the passerby a kingdom). This does model certain types of real-world negotiations, but as I said in my first comment in this thread, it's not a good model for the types of situations people usually have in mind when they talk about power imbalances in market transactions---i.e., the low-skill labor market.
If you're talking about monopolies, that's all well and good. But then you can't apply any conclusions based on reasoning about monopolies to the low-skill labor market, unless you have a good argument for why we should consider a monopoly a good model for this market.
On “Gridlock, Graft and Governance”
What the ’94-’00 Congress did was not screw things too much.
Really, what more could you ask from any Congress?
"
They jacked up spending by quite a bit. Further evidence that gridlock is better than one-party rule (of either party). My comment was about gridlock, not about Republicans.
"
Right. But in the not-even-second-best world, that's not a realistic option. Gridlock is.
"
(How’s that working out by the way?)
Better than the alternative, I suspect. Most of the big expansions of the federal government came while Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, didn't they? And the period 1994-2000 was a period of unprecedented restraint in spending growth.
Gridlock creates an industry for special interests and lobbyists to buy legislators and therefore promotes corruption
How so? Seems to me that the easer it is to get legislation passed, the more legislators have available for sale.
On “Economics and Values”
There is no "instead." Sweatshops don't interfere with parallel efforts to improve standard of living in third-world countries. And they'll go away (and historically have gone away) when the local economy develops to the point where there are better alternatives for workers. But it's grossly irresponsible to just shut down the sweatshops and hope that something magical happens to make up for it.
"
As an example of reasonably informed employees choosing to work in an unsafe environment: Smoke-filled bars. There's room for debate regarding exactly how unsafe it is, but the point is that the governments of many cities have banned it on the grounds that it's unsafe for employees.
Well, it's probably really on the grounds that smoking cigarettes is a low-status habit, but the ostensible reason is health-related.
"
Broadly speaking, businesses should have to follow the same laws the rest of us do. No violence, no fraud, etc. I just don't think there's any reason why they should incur special obligations as penance for the sin of making a profit.
I'm not in favor of broad restrictions on child labor, because generally parents try to do what's best for their children, and in very poor regions, that sometimes means working. I'm not opposed to restrictions on certain types of particularly dangerous or harmful child labor, such as prostitution.
Of course they shouldn't be allowed to commit violence against union activists, though they should be allowed to fire them and remove them from the premises.
Toxic substances: It depends on whether the employees are reasonably well-informed about it. In some cases an informed employee may prefer that money be spent on higher wages rather than on making his working environment a bit safer. If an employer is lying about the safety of working conditions, even by omission, and the dangers are not well-known to the employees, I'd say that's grounds for government intervention.
Sexual abuse: Well..."abuse" is a loaded term, of course. I don't think prostitution should be illegal, so I don't think a job that's 90% manufacturing and 10% sex with the boss should be illegal, either. If the owner is straight-up raping the employees, then that's rape. But if he's explicitly making sex part of the job, then there's no legitimate grounds for government interference. Of course, if it's the manager doing it, and not the owner, then the owner would have grounds for action against the manager.
"
Why do they feel that profit motive exempts them from the requirements of normal morality?
But that's not what you're talking about at all. You're talking about special obligations that you think employers should have that nobody else has.
To give an example: Suppose Acme pays its workers two dollars a day. You think they should make four dollars a day. Do you believe that you, personally, have an obligation to make up the difference out of your own pocket? If not, then why do you think Acme does?
"
I don't see what's unfair about it. Anti-sweatshop types have no problem with first-world firms simply not employing third-world workers, leaving them to their current very low standard of living. And they have no problem with them employing third-world workers under conditions which would dramatically improve their standard of living. But they object to the middle ground, which moderately improves workers' standard of living.
A society who (provides basic care for these people) and (forces employers to pay some measure of labor above desperation levels)
Here's you're conflating two completely independent things, which I've added parentheses to separate. Now, what you really want is for third-world workers to have a standard of living high enough that a job in a sweatshop isn't an appealing alternative to the status quo. Sure. So do I.
But banning certain types of employment arrangements doesn't get you there. Maybe employers will go along with it, but maybe they'll just decide that it's not worth it and go back home. Really, it'll probably be some a bit of each, so you end up with fewer third-world workers being employed at higher wages under better conditions. Is that really an improvement? For the lucky one, sure. Not so much for the ones who go back to prostitution or subsistence farming.
What really bugs me about this is the way leftists shift the burden of alleviating their own first-world guilt onto employers. Let's be clear about this: Employers aren't responsible for the fact that the third world sucks. They go in, and they make a bad situation slightly better. And then a bunch of self-righteous leftists who aren't even doing that much have the chutzpah to say that it's not good enough.
But why do employers have any special responsibility to improve third-world standards of living above and beyond what they do through the pursuit of profit? If Nike has a responsibility to give Indonesian workers charity in the form of above-market wages, then why don't you have that same responsibility?
The model I have in my mind is one in which leftists think of making a profit as a sort of venial sin. You can do it, and they probably won't burn you at the stake, at least not until the revolution comes, but you'll have to buy indulgences.
If you want to make the lives of third-world workers better, do it directly. Don't try to fob it off onto someone else.
"
Redistribution isn't necessarily a zero-sum game, especially over the long run. To assume that you can just pool and redistribute resources with no deadweight loss is to miss the point entirely.
And the fact that Rawls was a philosopher and not an economist doesn't really let him off the hook. If he wants to abstract away the production function, that's fine, but then the principle needs to hold up for a wide variety of production functions. If it leads to bad outcomes under some hypothetical production functions, then that calls into question the validity of the principle under real production functions as well.
"
So what exactly is the rule around "desperate exchange?" If someone's standard of living is below a certain level, you're not allowed to engage in transactions with that person if they raise his standard of living only a little bit? It's okay to ignore them completely, but if you interact with them at all, you must increase their standard of living by some minimum amount?
How exactly is a person running a sweatshop where people voluntarily, if desperately, choose to work, worse than someone who simply doesn't interact with those people at all?
On “Found Conversation”
I’m curious about how you linked the one with the other. It seems like those most desperate for absolution would be pro-war, because they would feel bad about the implied pacifism of not joining up, and they’d seek out compensation.
Some, maybe. But another approach is to say that the war simply isn't worthwhile. It's not that I'm afraid to volunteer. For a worthy cause, I would definitely risk my life. It's just that this isn't a worthy cause.
Honestly, I sometimes wonder if this doesn't play a role in my own (tentative) opposition to the war. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the war, but I'm absolutely sure I don't want to get blown up. So I tend to keep it to myself.
On “The Madness of Crowds”
They're all true for different endpoints. A 25-year decline in the real value of the minimum wage was reversed by a 40% increase phased in over the last couple of years.
"
Alternatively, you suffer from the biases originally identified and perceive those who do not as suffering from the opposite biases.
Nothing personal, but my money's on the people who do this for a living.
"
These are kind of covered by antimarket bias, but it doesn't hurt to call them out separately.
"
There have many, many things that have changed in our economy over the last forty years besides for the liberalization of trade. You can't just pick out two things that you don't like and say that one caused the other. It's entirely possible that without trade liberalization, unskilled wages would have fallen further.
Furthermore, most minimum-wage jobs are in the service industry and can't be outsourced. If you want to blame immigration for this, there's a plausible if not necessarily correct argument to be made there. There's no reason at all to think that free trade had anything to do with it.
Also, minimum wage is set by legislative fiat, not by market forces. The minimum wage has not kept up with inflation because Congress has chosen not to adjust it for inflation. Consequently, the percentage of workers making minimum wage or less has fallen from 13.9% in 1979 to 6% in 2010. The fall in the real value of the minimum wage (which goes mostly to young and part-time workers, not necessarily poor ones) doesn't really tell us much about the standard of living of the poor.
And the real value of the minimum wage is now at a 30-year high, FYI.
On “Greetings Earthlings!”
You're setting the bar too low. A reluctant dictator (one who has power but chooses to use it sparingly) can run an excellent government, better than any majoritarian one. It's the law of large numbers: Democracy tends to produce average governments, because it averages the preferences of voters. But with a dictatorship, you can get extremes, both good and bad.
The problem, of course, is the problem of succession. People don't live forever, and there's no guarantee that the next dictator will be reluctant. He may even be enthusiastic.
So you need a period longer than sixty years to judge the success of a non-democratic government. You need to watch it through several successions.
On “Protests in Des Moines – League Blogger Arrested?”
I'm not saying that leftists are antisemitic. If you replace Jews with a different scapegoat, then it's not really very antisemitic.
I just think that the sort of populist leftism you see in this and similar movements is very strongly remnisicient of traditional antisemitism, with the most significant difference being a different choice of scapegoat.
There's probably a right-wing analogue, too. Anti-immigrant hysteria, for example. Dirty furriners takin' our jobs.
"
Isn't leftism just anti-semitism with "Jews" crossed out and replaced with "the rich" or "bankers?"
"
As a counterexample, the People's Park in Shanghai closes at dusk. I can't imagine that lawsuits against the government are much of an issue in China. It could just be that the government is full of control freaks, but they don't impose a general curfew. I'm not sure why there's a problem with people being in the park specifically. Especially when the park belongs to them. It's in the name. Maybe it's about controlling vagrancy.
Wait a minute...People's Park...where have I heard that recently? Oh, right:
Des Moines’ protest started at around noon Sunday. More than 400 gathered west of the Capitol in an area they called “People’s Park,” and agreed to occupy the area.
Are they putting up swastika banners, too?
On “Coercion (again) and Power”
Fair enough. It's just so contrived a scenario that I'm having trouble seeing any real-world applications, aside from the vanishingly rare situations in which something like this actually does happen.
I actually don't have much of an opinion on the specific scenario in question. Bilateral monopolies are weird. In a unilateral monopoly, prices generally end up above marginal cost, and this is inefficient because output is below where it would be in a competitive market. In bilateral monopolies, the price is indeterminate, but the quantity sold is determinate. So there aren't really any questions of efficiency---just a question of who gets the most out of the deal, and by how much.
And I don't really have a strong opinion regarding what allocation is most fair. You can stack the deck by telling the story in a way that makes one or the other participant more likeable, but I'm not sure that that's a particularly enlightening way to go about it.
By the way, it's not at all clear that the passerby can actually get the prince to give up his kingdom. If the prince refuses to deal, he dies, but if the passerby refuses to deal, then he almost certainly will never again have an opportunity like the one he's just walked away from. A sack of gold may not be as nice as a kingdom, but it's much better than a sack of water.
And if we're really going to take the scenario at face value, it's not clear that the prince has any more a right to his kingdom than the passerby has. I mean, he's a prince. One of his ancestors killed a bunch of people, so now his right to rule over the land those people lived in, and its inhabitants, is sacrosanct? Meh.
On “Protests in Des Moines – League Blogger Arrested?”
Don't know why they're arresting them. That's every protestor's dream. If you want to really get under their skin, the best thing to do is completely ignore them.
"
However, it should be pretty easy to determine the difference between the homeless and a protester.
Eh...
On “Coercion (again) and Power”
What you're describing there is a bilateral monopoly (only the passerby can give the prince water, and only the prince can give the passerby a kingdom). This does model certain types of real-world negotiations, but as I said in my first comment in this thread, it's not a good model for the types of situations people usually have in mind when they talk about power imbalances in market transactions---i.e., the low-skill labor market.
If you're talking about monopolies, that's all well and good. But then you can't apply any conclusions based on reasoning about monopolies to the low-skill labor market, unless you have a good argument for why we should consider a monopoly a good model for this market.
On “Promises Were Broken”
I meant the "amount to nothing" part.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.