Canon Fire

It is your right to be a shrinking violet. It is not your right to wilt the rest of the flowerbed.

Disrupting others' exploration of the Western canon to soothe your tender brow was, in another time, another place considered rude and boorish. No longer.

Colleges were once separated by gender and by race. Mandatory segregation is barbaric. Mandatory integration is an improvement, but an imperfect one. Students wishing to study the classic canon without being molested by the Valkyries of feelz deserve their own safe space.

Hume and the Balance of Trade

David Hume. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Part II (1752). Essay V, Of The Balance Of Trade. Liberty Fund Edition. Indianapolis.

Footnotes omitted.

It is well known to the learned, that the ancient laws of ATHENS rendered the exportation of figs criminal that being supposed a species of fruit so excellent in ATTICA, that the ATHENIANS deemed it too delicious for the palate of any foreigner. And in this ridiculous prohibition they were so much in earnest, that informers were thence called sycophants among them, from two GREEK words, which signify figs and discoverer.

Of course, today, "sycophant" means something slightly different, closer to "toady" or "bootlick." We tend to reserve the appellation "snitch" to someone who turns in his fellow for the trafficking of contraband.

There are proofs in many old acts of parilament of the same ignorance in the nature of commerce, particularly in the reign of EDWARD III. And to this day, in FRANCE, the exportation of corn is almost always prohibited; in order, as they say, to prevent famines; though it is evident, that nothing contributes more to the frequent famines, which so much distress that fertile country.

Most economists would look at this essay and see an early (and quite good!) attempt at macroeconomics, specifically the sub-disciplines of monetary and trade economics. Silly sovereign, if you attempt to hoard gold and restrict trade, you'll reap domestic famine. While I'll cop to having a bit of training in economics, I read this essay and see scorn heaped upon the moral intuitions of the public, rather than to the collusive political and commercial elite.

The sycophant, so enamored of the fatuous, flatulent proclamations of the sovereign that he seeks to ingratiate himself to whatever vapid syllables the throne issues will seize any fallacy, no matter how puerile, no matter how delirious, and wield such proclamations as if they were the Word of God to benightedly and gleefully cudgel his countrymen into a pitiful parody of his own obsequious servility. The fig leaf he daintily places over his tumescent organ of toadying is the "rule of law," averring through thought and deed that justice and wisdom flow from the crown uninterrupted as a matter of the very nature of human affairs. The sycophant need never pause to consider the possibility that the temporal ruler of the nation might even for a moment be mistaken.

When the President does it, it's not illegal (people, actual people actually believe this).

If I were more daring, I might suggest that it is in the interest of the sovereign to craft in the nation a sort of factory set to the purpose of manufacturing legions of such sycophants, wrought from the flesh and bone of the free citizens of the country. Such a manufactorium might be at once mandatory, involve the most malleable of the minds of the populace, and remain entirely within the control of the apparatus of the state. I might, if I could muster the courage, suggest that a de facto national "approved" curriculum, perhaps coupled with the carrot of funding and the stick of licensing, would quite naturally be directed to advance the interests of the heads of state and that apostasy would be met with fierce opposition not just by the political elite, but by their self-identified sycophants.

Alas, in this matter, I am a deflated coward. I know too many educators who sincerely believe that they are in no way sycophants, that they reserve just as much scorn and contempt for the Congress as anyone else. They believe that public education serves a truly important role in society, and that anyone who might even suggest that schools exist as factory farms for political indoctrination is not only profoundly silly, but bordering on outright seditious.

And egads, but sedition is a capital crime, you guys. I'm totally not a traitor to a political order that reinforces its own dominion at the expense of the public. Pinky swear.

Twice Upon a Time

I like my moral philosophy like I like my economics: descriptive rather than prescriptive. I see Adam Smith's two big works (Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments) as written in precisely the same manner: Big Daddy Smith observed and reported rather than sermonized. The tradition that proceeded from this approach (which has roots in the Western canon) is reflected in one of the first exhortations breathed in the direction of ruddy-faced first year grad students in economics: economics is a positive science. It's okay to have normative views, but keep them partitioned from your work.

Let's commit a utopian fallacy and say that this advice sticks. Moral philosophy isn't concerned with what should be, but rather with what is. A positive moral philosophy takes intuitions as exogenous. Jon Haidt's half-dozen dimensions lay the foundation for a moral analysis of, for example, voter opinion. And the origins of moral intuitions can be examined with neither approbation nor disapproval.

Ur-morality, the genesis of the thing, may be ultimately inscrutable. It's plausible that a long, arduous guess-and-selection process eliminated those societies with dysfunctional common moralities, and only those with good group preservation characteristics survived to spread their memes far and wide, but this is difficult to test for pre-civilization societies, since they left no record of their stories. But it's an appealing hypothesis. And we can certainly observe what happens to the transmission mechanism under duress.

In that last link, Sarah plucks the heart from what F. Spufford hinted at in chapter 3 (I think it was chapter 3) of Red Plenty: fairy tales are how societies ensure morality survives. Crack open a compendium of bedtime stories and you'll find wee nilla wafers of temperance, prudence, wit, wisdom, courage, excellence, love, harmony, patience, faith, and all nicely resolved in the time it takes a toddler to fall asleep. Under the totalitarian panopticon in Spufford's Soviet dystopia, the fairy tales evaporate, even in the minds of the elders that drifted off to dance in the Dreaming with iron-toothed Baba Yaga beating the sides of her mortar chasing them there when they were but babes in their mothers' arms. Luckily, after the Iron Curtain fell, a number of former Soviet state universities funded efforts to collect and record the many regional folk tales and songs across their lands. The University of Vilnius boasts 1.9 million folk artifacts. And that's just for dinky little Lithuania, a nation of scarcely 3 million people. Granted, not all of those are concerned with the intergenerational transfer of moral foundations, but it's a great relief to find that this sort of lore is at least being preserved.

I'm needled by a concern, however. Fairy tales are nicely adaptive for the purposes of their society. They are cultural capital, if you will. And like ordinary capital, they are suited to the production of a particular output. And like the farriers' foundry optimized to produce horseshoes in the age of the automobile, it could be that some fairy tales have outlived their usefulness. But, and here's the bit that troubles me, how do we know which tales have outlived their usefulness? How do we liquidate old ones? How do we create new ones?

I commiserate with folks who bemoan the bowdlerization of the old stories at the nibs of Disney's screenwriters, but I don't think it follows that the old stories in their original forms are necessarily best suited to the moral challenges of today's social orders. Sure, I'm classicist (and classist) enough to insist that Aristotelian virtue ethics still have a place in modern society, but I'm not so naïve to imagine that parents will read the Ethics to put their children to sleep at night. Nor do I fancy that there exists a silver bullet that will permit the technocratically-minded to develop era-appropriate morality tales ex nihilo. Morality emerges from the complex interplay of history and individual choice. And it has a natural lifespan linked inextricably to the lifespan of the men and women in whose righteous minds it inhabits. The dilemma of the intergenerational exchange in morality is how to make this trade in intuition more euvoluntary without overmuch risking either incoherence or sclerosis. It's a worrying puzzle, one unlikely to become less so as the pace of cultural change increases.

For those of you who can't wait that long, you can pre-order Augie and the Green Knight here.

Intellectual Pork Rinds

In a post heralding the pending Adamularity, The OG excoriates intemperance in media consumption. Just as too many mini-muffins and Funyuns can enporkulate your jiggling posterior, popular media is at once rewarding while you consume it, and destructive the more you indulge and the longer the habit persists.

And in another devious parallel (assuming Straussian intent in Adam is probably not far off the mark), both gorging your corpse and your mind suffer from pretty dreadful pecuniary externalities. To wit, if the taxpayer is obliged to pick up the bill for Corpulent Sam's Eternal Snacking, and if this obligation is exogenous, then there is a public interest in imposing dietary restraint on the less temperate among us. Symmetrically, if constituents suffer political risk from Mad Mike's Media Malingering, then there is a public interest in, say, arresting climate change deniers.

Free speech ain't so free. Or, if you prefer, yikes!

The crux is whether or not the policy is exogenous. If the taxpayer isn't on the hook for my snackological protocols, I'm more generally at liberty to stuff my craw as I see fit (nb, this cuts against farm subsidies [particularly mega agribusiness] a lot harder than against SNAP restrictions). Ditto a free press. A state that restricts its operations to enforcing the natural rule of law rather than disseminating party favors to the mess of tatterdemalions, rogues, pettifoggers, lickspittles, louts, knaves, clods, cluttermidges, churls, and skiddermarks under their weal can far more graciously suffer a clamor of saffron journalists. 'Tis no accident that state-provided media is a staple of dictators.

The press is not euvoluntary in a big, big way. How we approach our moral intuition towards it depends in no small part on the role it plays in forming policy opinion. A sensible, Bayesian precautionary principle hints that perhaps a natural immunity to the shenanigans implied by the First Amendment can be discovered when the sovereign more closely hews to restraint rather than the profligacy that so characterizes its many functions. Small steps to a more euvoluntary world, people.

The APEEmath vol 2: the (Wo)man of System, Vachris on Austen's Emma

Dig, O brethren. And always open with Smith.

TMS VI.II.41:

The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided. Though he should consider some of them as in some measure abusive, he will content himself with moderating, what he often cannot annihilate without great violence. When he cannot conquer the rooted prejudices of the people by reason and persuasion, he will not attempt to subdue them by force; but will religiously observe what, by Cicero, is justly called the divine maxim of Plato, never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear.

Ah, statecraft. Aristotle's highest calling (esp NE Bk I where he also speaks highly of Solon). Smith cautiously advances what we might recognize as a precautionary principle of governance: "never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents." To accommodate (read: tolerate) the habits and prejudices of a constituency would strike the ear of a classical thinker as the virtue of temperance as she is applied to statesmanship. Right on. Nothing our readers here at EE haven't already heard a thousand times before. But your median Smith reader will probably be more familiar with the following passage, and your median armchair libertarian will probably be more familiar with it as filtered through Hayek (not that there's anything wrong with that).

TMS VI.II.42:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

 Mind you, mind you, mind you, these paragraphs appear right in order, one smack dab after the other. So it was with some pain that I wrestled with APEE 2014 Session M2.5, in which a paper by Michelle Vachris argued that Jane Austen's character Emma Woodhouse was an avatar for Smith's Man of System.

So I says to myself, I says: "Man of System? Get outta here. Emma might be a meddler, she might have the conceit of social engineer, but it's all small-scale stuff and nonsense. Why, she's even held to account for her excesses of planning in the text of the novel. Weren't Smith and Hayek (and, yes, even Aristotle on a careful reading) warning against the intemperance of unaccountable political chicanery?"

Those of you who know me in person may be astonished to discover that I held my tongue. I really had to mull my objections. To me, the "great society" phrase there in the second graf is essential to interpreting Smith. Emma was clearly not arranging the chess-pieces of a great society, but rather fiddling with the tender sentiments of her close social network. Her actions may have been intemperate and unconsidered, even worthy of censure, but if you want to level a Public Choice critique at her, what's missing is feedback.

Politicians are vaguely accountable to an ersatz constituent cobbled from opinion polls and loud-voiced, well-organized members who lobby for this policy or that. Emma, contrariwise, is directly accountable to the other characters, face-to-face, so to speak. She is obliged to defend herself to the very objects she wishes to manipulate. And in this sense, I overcame my objections. For it is here that I found my strongest affection for Vachris's interpretation. The Man of System as an aspirational ideal is contained in the person of Emma. Indeed, in the course of the novel, she is roundly upbraided for her meddlesomeness. And how delightful would it be to sit the numb nudgers, prideful paternalists, and solipsistic social shepherds in the academy down and deliver to them a rich tongue-lashing for the conceit they have arrogated themselves in their own ideal plans of government. As escapist fantasy, this should appeal to many of my friends and colleagues.

But there's a larger question squirreled away in there: how euvoluntary is matchmaking? It seems to have some quasi-coercive elements (on occasion, depending on the culture, quite directly coercive), but is it possible that there is such a thing as economically efficient matchmaking institutions? What coordination failures might exist in an unregulated marriage market? What are the costs, benefits, and transfers of, say, the Shidduch? Fodder for a future post. For now, consider it a bug in your ear, something to think about. Over a nice cup of tea.

Edit: I got the author wrong. This was Lynne K, not M. Vachris. Apologies to any offended parties. Applesaucy.