We are lucky to have been born here, in the West.

Here, and now. Of the 100 billion or so people who have ever lived, only about 1-2% have had the good fortune to be born at a time and place that afforded them the opportunity to be anything other than dirt poor.

I still envy those ageless, filthy-rich bastards living in the future, though.

Unless I'm much mistaken, there's some equivocation on the term "default" here.

There's "default" in the narrow sense, which is when the federal government is unable to honor bonds as they come due. Creditors care about this for obvious reasons. This seems implausible, given that interest on the debt is only about 10% of tax revenues.

Then there's "default" in the broad sense, which is when the federal government doesn't have enough money to pay for everything in the budget. I don't see why creditors would care about this. In fact, if the government were to prioritize redeeming bonds over other items in the budget, I would expect this to make creditors more confident in the federal government's commitment to honor its debts.

The beneficiaries of transfer payments would obviously care if they got smaller welfare checks, but what are they going to do? Take their business elsewhere?

And without going too far down this wormhole, their argument for Giffords was way better.

Are you just damning by faint praise? Because it actually came out some time after the fact that Loughner had for some time held a personal grudge against Giffords because she wouldn't give a straight answer to an incoherent question he had asked her at a prior public appearance.

There's really no evidence that Loughner's attacks were motivated by any sort of coherent political ideology.

There's also drug liberalization. I gather that that wouldn't go over so well in Singapore, either.

By the way, is it true that in Singapore prostitution is legal but pornography is not?

Emphasis on "capitalist societies," not so much on "strong government" and "progressive taxation." I mean, yeah, most successful societies have these things, but there's no compelling evidence that they caused the success, rather than the other way around. If you look at the canonical big government states of Western Europe, they're doing all right, but the energy-rich Norway is the only one that's really competitive with the US, Hong Kong, and Singapore on per-capita GDP. Even Taiwan is now richer than France.

I'll say that again: Taiwan is now richer than France.

I mean, if your definition of "success" hinges on a person being able to have a pretty decent standard of living without lifting a finger, then yeah, a big welfare state is going to be a pretty critical part of that. But beyond that, the best you can say of the big-government model is that the evidence that it impedes growth is not yet 100% conclusive. I don't think there's any evidence at all that it actually contributes to growth.

"[H]is killing recalls the old Chinese Communist saying that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down."

That's actually Japanese. Deru kugi wa utareru. Also, the original (and more common, at least in Japanese) form is Deru kui wa utareru: The stake that stands out is hammered down.

According to this Japanese-Chinese dictionary, the Chinese equivalent is Shu da zhao feng: A big tree invites the wind. Apparently this phrase is taken from the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, though it may have gained currency under the communists, for all I know (not much).

I thought that "neoliberal" was what leftists called real liberals (i.e., libertarians). But over the past few weeks I've been seeing it used to refer to a certain kind of leftist. When did this change?

Well, sure, there are other ways you can save money, but saving money isn't really the goal. The goal is to scare people into letting them raise more money.

There's Peter Thiel, but considering the type of people who are likely to be making the cuts, I don't think that even being gay will be sufficient to atone for the sin of being an out-and-proud libertarian.

But kids are a major blind spot for Libertarians.

Are they, really? I think that most libertarians would agree that it's legitimate for government to intervene when it comes to reckless endangerment of children.

Where libertarians tend to object is where there's a perception that the government is overreaching and stepping in where the benefits of regulation don't clearly outweigh the costs.

Insofar as the opinions of parents and nonparents on these sorts of issues differ, it's not at all clear that parents are right and nonparents are wrong. Parents, by and large, just aren't able to perform the sort of dispassionate cost-benefit analysis of child-affecting policies that nonparents can. Emotional investment may make for good parenting, but I suspect that it makes for bad policy.

At the very least, I would say that "Children are a major blind spot for libertarians" is less true than "Adults are a major blind spot for nanny-statists."

If the mouth is sufficiently full, it's likely that a marble will occasionally pop out, with a high probability of landing on the keyboard and introducing an errant keystroke.

Bill Clinton said that? With a straight face?

Didn't he used to be that guy?

The point where we choose what society we want to live in is in the second stage (the constitutional stage) in which more specific information about the society is available.

But knowing that the leximin has the potential to lead us horribly astray in the second stage, why would we agree to it in the first?

Sensitive to this context, of course the difference principle would encourage choosing C over D.

But it would still require us to choose B over A, wouldn't it?

I dont see the point of pointing out that what is the optimal strategy when probabilities are known differs from the optimal strategy when probabilities are unknown.

The point is that leximin encourages us to choose a society in which all are wretched (B) over a society in which one is wretched (A). Knowing this, it is clear that leximin is not, in fact, the decision process that rational people would agree to behind the veil of ignorance.

If I know who I’m going to turn out to be, or have some reasonable probability estimates, then of course I will pick out a principle that is biased in my favour.

But it's not biased in your favor, specifically, since you have the same payoff distribution as everyone else. The reason you choose it isn't that it gives you some special advantage---it's that overall it's a preferable distribution, despite the fact that its minimum payoff is worse than some other lower-variance distribution.

If everyone is willing to make that trade-off ex ante, then isn't it kind of crazy to say that the principles of justice require us all to pick a distribution that nobody really wants while behind the veil?

For it to be biased in your favor, you'd have to be assured of a high relative position in the distribution (e.g., at the 90th percentile). The point of the veil of ignorance is (or should be, anyway) to force people to consider the possibility that they might occupy a low relative position in the distribution, not to obscure important information about what the payoff distribution looks like.

Maximin only becomes rational when all the probabilities are completely unkown.

I'm not sure I'd even go so far as to say that. When probabilities are unknown, there's no basis for rational choice. So maximin isn't even rational then.

Moreover the question is not whether maximin models what we tend to do in situations of uncertainty, the question is whether its optimal. (i.e. the is-ought distinction)

My point is that it is optimal. People don't violate the probability-agnostic leximin decision process irrationally; they do it because the probability-agnostic leximin decision process is flawed.

This is obvious if you push it to extremes. Consider two distributions:

A: 99.9999% chance of payoff of 10, 0.0001% chance of payoff of 0.
B: 100% chance of payoff of 1.

Assuming that 1 is a terrible payoff only slightly better than 0, any reasonable person would choose distribution A. A society with distribution A is clearly a better society to live in than society B.

Or consider:

C: 99.9999% chance of 10, 0.00001% chance of 1.
D: 0.0001% chance of 10, 99.9999% chance of 1.

C is unambiguously preferable to D, but a probability-agnostic veil of ignorance obscures any distinction between the two.

It seems to me that people go behind a veil of ignorance on a regular basis and do not in fact choose a maximin ordering.

For example, I have plans tonight to make a 25-mile round trip solely for the purpose of engaging in a recreational activity. There is a very small but nonzero chance that I will be severely injured, and perhaps even killed, in an automobile accident en route.

Alternatively, I could stay home. I will probably not have as much fun, and I certainly won't meet any pretty girls, but I'll almost certainly be safer. The odds of my being killed or severely injured will be much, much lower.

When deciding whether to make this trip, I find myself behind a veil of ignorance. I don't know which position I will occupy in the set of all possible outcomes.

The maximin principle would suggest that I should stay home. Actually, with a probability-agnostic veil of ignorance, the maximin principle has nothing to say about this scenario at all, because in either case the worst-case outcome is death. Which is part of the reason why a probability-agnostic veil of ignorance is problematic.

Let's suppose for the sake of argument that the probability of death if I stay home falls to zero, so that there is some maximin-based distinction between the two scenarios. The maximin principle suggests that I should stay home. The worst-case scenario if I stay home is that I don't have much fun, which is very strongly preferable to dying in an automobile accident.

But I've chosen to go out, and in doing so accept a very small risk of a very low payoff (injury or death) in exchange for a higher average payoff (fun!) and a small chance of a very high payoff (meet future wife). And people do this all the time.

That Rawls' principles do not accurately model people's revealed preferences is highly problematic. And I think that the two primary reasons they fail to do so is that they don't account for probability and that they give lexicographical superiority to improving the worst-case outcome. There's a margin at which any reasonable person is willing to accept a worse worst-case outcome in exchange for improving other possible outcomes, but where that margin is depends on the probability distribution.

"The War on Poverty reduced abject poverty in this country by about a third, from 17% to 11%"

The poverty rate had already been decreasing rapidly for at least 15 years prior to the War on Poverty. I'm not aware of any particular reason to attribute the continuation of this trend after 1964 to the War on Poverty rather than to the economic boom.

Really, why would you expect welfare programs to lower the poverty rate? Welfare doesn't pay enough to move make poor people not officially poor. If anything, it may have ended the decline in the poverty rate by enabling poor people to have more children.

Huh. The governor's budget claims $6 billion biennial funding for UW, but UW claims funding on the order of $320 million per year. I'm not sure why the discrepancy.

That said, if UW's numbers (which sound more plausible) are correct, there was about a 20% cut in total funding in 2009, from $400M to $320M. I'll give you that, but obviously you can't infer a long-term, nationwide trend from cuts in funding to a single university during the worst recession in 80 years. States can't run huge deficits the way the federal government can, so there have to be cutbacks when the economy slows down. Historically, this has been more than made up for when the economy picks up again.

Also, per-FTE funding is misleading because the denominator includes both in-state (subsidized) and out-of-state (unsubsidized) students. Since the trend at UW at least has been towards a higher percentage of nonresident students, changes in the FTE do not necessarily reflect changes in the subsidy each in-state student receives.

The SHEEHO report shows no discernible long-term trend in inflation-adjusted per-FTE funding, despite a 50% incresae in enrollment.

Again, the fact that schools have chosen to use their increased funding to offer enrollment to more students, rather than to offer greater subsidies to fewer students, is not evidence of disinvestment.

Colleges are getting more money and using it to educate more students. How is this disinvestment?

Sorry; missed the UW link. First, this appears to be the *proposed* budget. Cuts are proposed, often as political theater, much more frequently than they are actually made.

In fact, here's the current version of the governor's proposed budget (table 3). I'm not seeing any major cuts to the UW line item or to higher education generally.

Also, I vaguely remember hearing something a while back about the state government considering taking funding away from UW to give to other schools, so keep in mind that funding cuts to one particular institution, even if they were real, would not necessarily be indicative of even a statewide trend, much less a national one.

More to the point, what evidence is your belief that we are in fact disinvesting in education based on?

I linked to that chart more for the national average than for the Washington State numbers. That said, there was no major discontinuity in the Washington line at 1991, so it seems unlikely that that was a major factor.

"Further, colleges and universities educate more students today then in 1980."

And the population is greater, so the per-capita numbers translate to correspondingly greater totals. But let's suppose that the percentage of the population currently enrolled in college has increased. This may or may not be the case; the percentage of the population aged 16-24 has fallen from 17% to a bit under 13%, but enrollment rates are up.

How can this be considered disinvesting in higher education? "Yeah, but we're sending more students to college!" is not a particularly powerful rebuttal to the thesis that we are not in fact disinvesting in higher education.

Insofar as "de investing" means steadily increasing real per-capita expenditures.

In this world the economic value of a college degree is not in dispute

The private economic value is not in dispute. The anti-college argument (the good version, anyway) is that there's an element of rent-seeking in earning a degree. The degree gives you an advantage over people who don't have it, so it's something that people are rationally willing to expend considerable resources to get. But if it doesn't actually make you more productive, the social economic value is negative. You're just transferring money from other people to you, and expending resources in order to do so.

This is pretty clearly not the full story with most STEM programs, which do teach skills needed to perform certain jobs. But many other programs don't teach skills which are obviously applicable to the sorts of jobs typically held by the people who earn those degrees. That doesn't necessarily mean that they don't improve productivity, but it's certainly a question worth asking.

The earnings chart strikes me as being potentially rather damning. A low-skill job is pretty much by definition a job for which there is no clear reason to expect education to enhance productivity. And yet the college premium for low-skill jobs is not much less than the college premium for medium-skill, managerial, or professional jobs. Someone arguing that the college wage premium is mostly skill-based has a lot of explaining to do.

The answer to the question, "Should I get a bachelor's degree?" is "Yes, if you can." The answer to the question, "Are we subsidizing college too much, or not enough?" is not so clear.

Is it safe to assume that when Rawls said the least advantaged people in society, he meant poor people, and not, say, murder victims and people with severe congenital illnesses? Taken at face value, the difference principle would seem to imply that we should pour huge amounts of resources into cracking down on violent crime and research on diseases that afflict the young.

"And WTF a Rawlsekian is...."

Well, when a political economist and a philosopher love each other very much...

The main problem with the veil of ignorance, or at least with discourse surrounding it, is that people can't agree on what exactly it means.

For example, is inequality resulting from returns to cognitive ability problematic? What about returns to conscientiousness? Some people seem to be endowed with much greater conscientiousness than others, and in a sense this is problematic, but the returns to conscientiousness are mediated through hard work, which it does not seem problematic to reward.

As a result, two people imagining themselves to be behind a veil of ignorance may be imagining two radically different probability distributions. One person may decide that the veil of ignorance means that he's going to be the same sort of person he is in reality, but with a different body and different parents. This person is sure that he's not going to be a good-for-nothing layabout, and thus proposes a society in which the returns to being a good-for-nothing layabouts are very low.

A second person decides that the veil of ignorance means that he might in fact turn out to be the kind of person who becomes a good-for-nothing layabout and thus proposes a society in which the returns to being a good-for-nothing layabout are somewhat higher.