Comments | paulhope: Critical Critical Review Review

paulhope

Critical Critical Review Review

Jul 27, 2005 22:27

Ok, I've put this off for a while--I wonder why? The Critical Review (henceforth CR) seminar was full of smart people and was pretty much non-stop thought about important things. I expected that it would all spill over into a giant post immediately when I came back. But I guess instead I faced some burnout, or maybe just made the appropriate ( Read more... )

milton friedman, critical review

Comments 53

polishcyclist July 28 2005, 13:54:53 UTC

glad to hear that you enjoyed it/thought it was worthwhile. I was slightly worried when you didn't post an immediate reaction. I haven't actually read through your reactions, but I've copied them to my laptop for later reading. Seemed quite interesting and I'd encourage a part 2.

paulhope July 29 2005, 01:48:04 UTC

I look forward to your indignant defense of postlibertarianism :)

polishcyclist July 30 2005, 12:45:34 UTC

quick note: Living wage does not equal negative income tax, unless by living wage you mean something entirely different than some arbitrary min. wage.

paulhope July 30 2005, 17:59:22 UTC

Yes, I realize this--where did you get the impression that I meant differently? It must have been something I said unwittingly, because somebody else who read this thought I was mixing up the two as well.

What I meant by both livable income/wage and negative income tax was direct payments by the government to people that would raise total income in all cases to be above some (alas, arbitrary) standard of good living. (The relevant passage of the Green Party was a little unclear, but I think they include this on their platform).

Minimum wage is a price floor on labor. (I realized after I wrote the above post that the Green Party also wants a higher minimum wage--which immediately gave me doubts about the coherence of their overall position. But anyway, maybe that (the Green Party wanting both) is the source of your confusion?)

Is that clearer now?

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polishcyclist August 1 2005, 10:28:47 UTC

To simplify things, I’ve just noted areas of sharp disagreement; you can assume I more or less agree unless otherwise noted ( ... )

polishcyclist August 1 2005, 10:29:09 UTC

re: your comments in response to his "rebuild political theory with pro-market foundations" arguments ( ... )

Humanity (1) paulhope August 3 2005, 16:00:40 UTC

re: your comments in response to his "rebuild political theory with pro-market foundations" arguments
Firstly, I'd like to get an idea of your conception of human nature. Personally, although I accept people aren't perfectly rational or selfish (myriad of motivations), I think that they are generally rational and broadly self-interested (for example, I'd say that lack of information is a bigger cause of not-rational actions than irrational intentions...stymied by ignorance rather than irrational by design). My conception of human nature...hmmm ( ... )

Humanity (2) paulhope August 3 2005, 16:02:53 UTC

Meanwhile, we are smart. Well, smarter than lions and tigers and bears. But not that smart. Some things we do about as good as anyone can figure out (causal reasoning, for example, is a task people perform on about as well as the best normative models). Other things we evolved short cuts for. We simply didn't have the computing power or the proper hardware on which we could take an integral over "pleasure"--"pleasure" doesn't mean anything, anyway. So we develop the peak-end rule. It's faster. Similarly, rather than considering all available hypothesis about the world and check for empirical confirmation, we pick one and stick to it until long after it would be discredited by any sort of normatively-operating induction robot ( ... )

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