Assault of Thoughts - 5/22/2010

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" -JMK

- Matthew Yglesias criticizes conservative readings of the Commerce clause. More specifically, he puzzles over why conservatives would think their position is so self-evident. He hits a lot of the points that I often make with respect to the enumerated powers of Congress, but I would differ from him somewhat. I would agree that you have have to do some pretty exhausting mental gymnastics to come out with anything but a broad reading of (1.) the General Welfare clause (the first power granted to Congress), and (2.) the necessary and proper clause. Both of these are deliberately phrased in just about the broadest, most discretionary language you could come up with - the idea that they should be construed narrowly is hard to defend, particularly because they made liberal use of these powers in the early republic, in Congresses and during administrations lead by the founders themselves. However, I would depart from Yglesias on the Commerce clause, and I do agree that the default on this one should be a narrower reading. There's no reason it needs to be impotent, but I think the language of the Constitution makes fairly clear that it is only commerce that has substantial ramifications across states - commerce that would need to be made "regular" - that they have authority over.

- Evan has an interesting post up on how he views working on seemingly irrelevant, antiquarian problems in theology. I liked this insight the best:

"Narratives are things that you live into and out of- they provide conventions
for thought. They are the huge mass under the tip of the iceberg. There is no
urgency to exposing the details of a narrative; no apologetic goals are going to
be directly achieved by it. But the formative effect of forgettable events and
unimportant details is what colors our perception of the world with which we
engage, and in this sense the useless antiquarianisms are essential to the "real
work" of constructive discourse."

History of thought and history in general is always important and illuminating - it shows us how we got where we are. If we're lucky, we can learn lessons from history, but that's not always necessary.

- ThinkMarkets has a great post on the economics of the Twilight series. This also seems like it might be a decent explanation for some wage stickiness, although I'd have to think about it a little more.

- The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has a budget simulator online (HT - Cobb Dug Less). It's a neat exercise. As usual, I have to over-analyze. First, let me say that I stabilized the debt at 60% of GDP by 2024. But that was my first concern - why are we stabilizing the debt at this level? I suppose you have to pick something to make this a game. I reversed some, but not all of the tax cuts (reversed all of the high-income cuts and half of the rest). I did a lot of adjustments to Social Security and Medicare, but didn't really change the health reform too much (the changes I would have made weren't an option except for an all out repeal choice). I chose the VAT which helped me score a lot - you could tell they were pushing that. One question I had was whether your choices affected the denominator (GDP) as well as the debt. After all, I made a lot of my choices precisely because I thought they would improve GDP - a few of the tax cuts and credits, my choices on the stimulus, etc.. I'm not sure if I got "credit" for that or not.

- Sam at Lector et Auditor on the importance of conversation in a liberal education. I think it's a good point. I've realized that I'm not nearly as good expressing myself speaking as I am writing. I think this is probably fairly common, but when you spend so much of your time writing, it can be shocking to get up to speak or present and have such a struggle.

Caplan on Liberalism

Bryan Caplan has an interesting discussion of what he calls "liberal conflation". The discussion wanders, but it seems pretty clear that he is frustrated by how many different views political philosophers call "liberal", he wants to think more narrowly about what we call "liberal", and he wants it to center on some sort of libertarianism. I think he is unnecessarily bothered by this. Caplan is thinking about this in partisan/ideological terms when I think what we're really talking about is a political-philosophical school of thought. From an inherently partisan perspective, of course it seems weird to "lump almost everybody together". From a philosophical perspective this really isn't as problematic.

I see "liberalism" as having a few guiding tenets, including:

1. Individualism - individuals have agency and responsibility distinct from the collective, and they are equals.

2. Negative rights - liberalism is at its base a philosophy of negative rights

3. Freedom - the idea that individuals should be free from coercion

4. Secular, representative, government.

5. Tolerance and pluralism.

6. Private property rights, protected by law.

It's just a list off the top of my head, but I don't think it would be too controversial and I think it covers all the bases. As a philosophical framework, this does have a lot of adherents, at least in the West. But as a philosophical framework, I think it also has to be considered a general foundation rather than a specific or partisan creed. For example, some people put stock in the idea of positive rights as well as negative rights. I'm extremely skeptical of that for all the canonical reasons for being skeptical of positive rights, but I don't think that automatically disqualifies them from being considered "liberals", although that idea itself is not a "liberal" idea. Libertarians are quite good on 1., 2., 3., 5., and 6., but they often at the very least day-dream about (if not actively pursue) sabotaging 4. if there are ever any tensions between 4. and the other tenets. And this point about "tension" is an important one to raise. There are tensions in liberalism precisely because it is a broad philosophical disposition, rather than a partisan position with a platform that can be crafted to minimize internal tensions.

As I've stated on this blog many times, the ideal of 6. is imperfectly implemented in life (and certainly the same can be said of any of these). That leads to tensions between an imperfect implementation of 6. and the ideals of 1. and 3.. My freedom (number 3.) is imposed upon by polluters precisely because 6. (private property rights) has never been and probably can never be perfectly implemented. What is the "liberal" solution? There is no clear liberal solution (this would be a problem if "liberalism" were an ideology). One of the important things about liberalism is that when all six tenets are reasonably well respected, society has a tendency to right itself. The free market is by far the best example, but in more complicated cases like pollution externalities, 4. combined with 5., tempered by reminders of 2. can come up with a solution where 1. and 3. alone might not have been able to. So "liberalism" is an extremely robust philosophical disposition in that sense. But when you start privileging or removing any of these elements, it becomes less robust. This is one of my biggest concerns about libertarianism - not an error of commission so much as an error of omission.

So does this "lump everyone together"? It does and it doesn't. If you restrict the analysis to the West, it lumps an awful lot of us together. But there is differentiation - libertarians stress some elements, "progressives" stress others, and "conservatives" stress others. I think it is quite a strain to fit "socialists" into liberalism, unless we're talking about distinctly non-Marxist/non-Leninist socialists (and even these have pruned liberalism down).

I think the other thing to keep in mind is that this is only even on our radar as a "conflation" because the alternative has been so decisively destroyed so recently. A very popular illiberal political philosophy fell only twenty years ago. That isn't that long ago, and a new one may still emerge. Why splinter victorious liberalism just to pick an internecine fight when in a matter of decades there might be a new challenge? Former illiberal socialists are turning into liberals in droves, and libertarians want to shun them because they want to hijack liberalism and make it in their own likeness? I don't see the point, even if I were to sympathize more with libertarianism.

And what challenges could emerge? Well, with the improvement of data collection and information technology we shouldn't write off illiberal socialism just yet. People could easily come back to the opinion that they can plan society as technology develops. And what's even more scary is that they probably could fake it longer and more successfully than the Soviet Union did. It's doomed to failure, of course - but it could gain adherents. Pre-modern fundamentalism is presenting an increasing challenge to liberalism in many quarters of the world. If any of these threats become more formidable, "liberalism" is going to look less and less like a conflation to Caplan.

Part of me was simply frustrated when I read Caplan. "Liberalism" if anything started with 1., 4., and 5., with 2. being added as 4. and 5. became better defined, and 3. and 6. added as market capitalism began to emerge out of economic nationalism and mercantilism. If 1. and 4. form the basis of "liberalism" (which I think they do), it's not clear at all why libertarianism is the "first among equals" or the "true" liberalism. The more libertarians try to make these claims for themselves, the more someone else is going to get frustrated and push them out of the club (Caplan points out that "modern liberals" have a lot in common with illiberal socialists, but by the same token couldn't we say libertarians have a lot in common with illiberal anarchists?). There's good reason to be frustrated with Caplan in this way - he makes some pretty bad arguments. However, I think the best way to tackle this "liberal conflation" issue is simply to remember that this is a philosophical disposition we're talking about - not an ideology. An ideology that everybody buys into is indeed diluted and might require some purges. A philosophy that everybody buys into, on the other hand, is probably just a very sensible philosophy. After all, Bryan Caplan is well known for aruging that we should limit the franchise based on a person's economic and policy enlightenment. I don't get as apoplectic over that as some people - I can respect speculative, out of the box thinking. But it seems rather strange that an advocate of limiting the franchise should be so bold in claiming the liberal mantle.

Mohammed Day Winners

Reason.com selects some winners... all very clever, and interestingly enough, all playing on the theme of bending over backwards to conform to ridiculous strictures. Each of these pictures begs the question of the fundamentalist: "well is this OK? No? How about this?", and you begin to realize that this isn't about substantive concerns at all - it's about inventing a reason to act out violently. I think the winners are well chosen.

This one is not a pipe... but guess who it is!!!

Where's Mohammed? (poor Mohammed - all those exposed females!!!)

Hmmm... looks more like a Smurf to me, but "A" for effort

A Salutary Servitude

Tim Lacy offers a great quote from Tocqueville on the inability to pursue comprehensive analysis, and the social basis of our beliefs.  I think the wider paragraph is worth quoting, and further, I think it applies to more than simply the philosophers.  This is how we all reason in whatever capacity we do so, and as Tocqueville points out, this isn't a bad thing.  I have for some time been quite interested in the relationship between freedom and constraint, and I think this passage highlights a large part of what is significant about constraint and lack of freedom:

If I now consider man in his isolated capacity, I find that dogmatical belief is not less indispensable to him in order to live alone, than it is to enable him to co-operate with his fellow-creatures. If man were forced to demonstrate to himself all the truths of which he makes daily use, his task would never end. He would exhaust his strength in preparatory exercises, without advancing beyond them. As, from the shortness of his life, he has not the time, nor, from the limits of his intelligence, the capacity, to accomplish this, he is reduced to take upon trust a number of facts and opinions which he has not had either the time or the power to verify himself, but which men of greater ability have sought out, or which the world adopts. On this groundwork he raises for himself the structure of his own thoughts; nor is he led to proceed in this manner by choice so much as he is constrained by the inflexible law of his condition. There is no philosopher of such great parts in the world, but that he believes a million of things on the faith of other people, and supposes a great many more truths than he demonstrates. This is not only necessary but desirable. A man who should undertake to inquire into everything for himself, could devote to each thing but little time and attention. His task would keep his mind in perpetual unrest, which would prevent him from penetrating to the depth of any truth, or of grappling his mind indissolubly to any conviction. His intellect would be at once independent and powerless. He must therefore make his choice from amongst the various objects of human belief, and he must adopt many opinions without discussion, in order to search the better into that smaller number which he sets apart for investigation. It is true that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another, does so far enslave his mind; but it is a salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of freedom.

To the Austrians...

Oh, I had one more macro issue I wanted to pose to my Austrian readers - how do Austrians generally deal with double-dip recessions? It's not that I think it's impossible for Austrian economics to deal with, but it seems tougher.

Is it that malinvestments build up rapidly (perhaps as a result of an expansionary response to the first dip) and then they bust again? This seems like a much weaker way to address it. Presumably, investors will be far more wary after the first bust, the worst culprits of malinvestment will be out of business and not taking loans, and there probably simply isn't enough time for that many malinvestments to build up. New malinvestments can make sense when it comes to the next business cycle, but they don't seem well positioned to explain a double-dip of the same cycle.

The other option, I suppose, is simply that more malinvestments are unearthed that were missed the first time.

I'm also aware that Hayek discussed the prospect of a double-dip caused by the reaction of velocity to the initial downturn.

Is there any other way of addressing these concerns? These are all fine explanations, but it just seems to me they have their limits and shouldn't be considered entirely satisfactory. I would say the same of a Minsky type model of the business cycle, or of a more Keynesian accelerator-oscillator dynamic for much the same reasons, so I'm not trying to pile on the Austrians. It seems to me any sort of "cycle" based theory should have a very hard time dealing with double-dips (as well as a shock-based theory). It seems to me the sort of theory that is best equipped to deal with these episodes is a theory of under-employment equilibrium.

Macro musings

Scott Sumner has an interesting Great Recession/Great Depression comparision:

"It’s worth thinking about where we are in the Great Recession, relative to the same time period in the Great Depression:

1.a October 1929, stocks crash on sharply falling expectations of NGDP [nominal GDP] growth.
1.b October 2008, stocks crash on sharply falling expectations of NGDP growth.

2.a Early 1931, stocks rise on signs of recovery
2.b Early 2010, stocks rise on signs of recovery

3.a May 1931, stocks fall as European banking/sovereign debt crisis begins
3.b May 2010, stocks fall, as European banking/sovereign debt crisis begins

Let’s hope the European debt crisis doesn’t get as bad as in 1931, or if it does, let’s hope the Fed
offsets the effects of the crisis as they should have done in 1931, but didn’t."


He of course has a monetary policy response in mind. I remain somewhat skeptical on unconventional monetary policies like quantitative easing. It makes me worry about asset bubbles. It makes me worry about picking winners (which if it must be done, should be done in a deliberative legislature rather than an opaque board room). It also makes me worry about the liquidity trap. Almost all of my macroeconomics comes from my own reading and thinking - I didn't take that much macro in school - but from this very casual standpoint, it seems to me that the last thing you need in a liquidity trap is more liquidity. Sumner often argues around this simply by asserting that we're not in a liquidity trap - create inflation and there's no zero lower bound problem. That's a fine and reasonable way to deal with Krugman's somewhat problematic definition of a liquidity trap as a zero-lower bound on interest rates, but that's not really what I'm worried about. I'm worried about a Hicksian liquidity trap, where money demand is relatively flat. Sumner's posts are usually extremely long and often above my head, but I still don't quite understand how expansionary monetary policy solves the Hicksian problem.

I see this is as another example of the mistake of acting like all economic downturns are created equally - a mistake I mentioned earlier with respect to wages. Sumner actually provided some good counter-arguments to David Henderson on wages, highlighting the fact that aggregate demand-driven downturns behave differently than other downturns. But he seems to think that from a monetary perspective, all downturns are still created equal.

Anyway, I cite Sumner's chronology here, but anyone that follows the economics blogosphere knows that there are a host of other reasons why I have pulled myself away from calculation and property rights issues and am musing about the macroeconomy today aside from Europe's sovereign debt problems. Deflation worries are on the rise again, and the labor market still isn't looking that chipper. Stocks have taken a dive, and while Steve Horwitz suggests it might have something to do with the financial regulation that just passed the Senate, I have my doubts. (My impression has been that debate over this bill has not been as acrimonious as the health reform bill, and the costs of the bill are considerably less substantial. Moreover, the Senate bill still needs to be reconciled with the House bill. The idea that the market has spoken on a bill that is considerably less controversial and that isn't even through the legislative process seems silly to me. I think Horwitz is reaching. Every business survey you pick up cites consumer demand as a much bigger concern than policy regime uncertainty. Add to that the troubles in Europe, and I think you've got your explanation for stock market behavior).

So my mind is more on macroeconomics lately, and I imagine that will only increase as I pick up Garrison's Time and Money.

After Garrison, I'll have more than enough to read. In fact, I don't think I'm going to be reading much history (the other subject I enjoy) for a while. Like many businesses, the Urban Institute is going through some hard times (my job is fine - we do government research, so it's not like there's any existential threat) and we're shutting down our library. That means that employees have been allowed to go through the library's stacks and take what they want before the rest gets tossed. I rescued many of the economics "Handbooks" so that we still have those resources in our research center. In addition to that, though, I've grabbed a lot of classics that I'm eager to get into:

The Microeconomic Foundations of Employment and Inflation Theory, ed. Ed Phelps
Inflation Policy and Unemployment, by Ed Phelps
Money, Interest, and Prices, by Patinkin
The Optimum Theory of Money, and Other Essays, by Friedman
A Monetary History of the United States, by Friedman
The Theory of Wages, by Hicks
A Program for Monetary Stability, by Friedman
Maintaining and Restoring Balance in International Payments, by Fellner, Machlup, and Triffin (does anyone know if this is the where he first raises the Triffin dilemma? I'm sure he mentions it in here, even if it's not where the concern is raised)
A Revision of Demand Theory, by Hicks
Economic Heresies, by Joan Robinson
A Study in the Theory of Investment, by Haavelmo
Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth, by Joan Robinson
Cost and Choice, by Buchanan

I'm most excited to get into Phelps and Patinkin, which I'll probably read after Garrison. I've read the section of Friedman's monetary history dealing with the Depression, but I should probably read that in its entirety too.

***

Finally, I want to call attention to a post that Evan showed me from An und für sich, a theology blog that he follows. The analysis of monetary policy in the post is kind of standard Yglesias monetary posting: "central bankers don't care about unemployment, just inflation". Insofar as this is a critique of the European Central Bank, I concur. The collective memory of the Weimar hyperinflation is understandable, but its starting to strain credulity. With respect to the Fed, see my concerns above about pursuing more expansionary monetary policy right now. I don't think it's fair to accuse the Fed of not caring about its dual mandate. There are a few things they could be doing (lowering the interest rate they pay on reserves), but not that much more that I would be comfortable with (again, see above). The value added of this post (for me at least), is its citation of Philip Goodchild's Theology of Money, which I had never heard of before. The thesis of the books seems pretty speculative, and I'm not sure what to make of it, but it looks interesting. This is the Amazon blurb:

"Goodchild examines the theory of money in a comparable manner to Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Georg Simmel. However by contrast to the conclusions of these thinkers, he proposes that money is essentially created in excess of reserves, making it a simultaneous credit and debt. Since money is a debt that must be repaid with interest in the form of money, then the creation of money imposes a social demand for an increase in profit and an increase in the creation of money in order to repay debt. This vicious circle drives the expansion of the global economy. In summary, Goodchild argues that money is a promise, a supreme value, a transcendent value and an obligation or a law. He argues that money has taken the place of God. It is the dominant global religion in practice, even if no one believes in it in principle."

I'm not sure about the purpose of looking at Marx. Simmel is an interesting figure to raise. I'm aware of him as one of the first symbolic-interactionist sociologists. I wonder if his Philosophy of Money is an interesting read (Goodchild seems to think it is). Simmel seems to raise concerns about commodification, which I've been interested in as they relate to some of Herbert Marcuse's work. Concerns about what commodificiation does to the value of a thing is an important thing for economists to think about, since our value theory and our understanding of welfare is completely contingent on the assumption of commodification. Markets and exchange optimizes welfare contingent on a good or service's identity as a commodity. But economics offers no guarantee that the commodification of that good or service optimizes welfare relative to its uncommodified state. To state it differently, we have no fundamental welfare theorems guaranteeing us that efficiency will be maximized by the commodification of things - we only know that given the commodification of things, competitive equilibrium guarantees Pareto efficiency.

Mises Institute and Aggregate Demand

For guys that excoriate Keynesians for being skeptical about saving in the rarest and most peculiar of circumstances (ie - really only in a paradox of thrift), and for guys that put little stock in effective demand as a determinant of the business cycle, these guys sure do sell a lot of crap:


...just saying

Reasons, Freedoms, and Offense: the point of drawing Mohammed

Daniel discusses "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" below, and solicits responses.  Here's mine.

My concern about this is the extent to which emotionalism and vague sentiment are being packaged up as reasons and free thought.  I could conceive of a situation where drawing a likeness of Mohammed would serve some useful purpose, despite the fact that it may offend some people.  In these cases, I'd of course advise prudence with regard to the display of such images, but I don't see any reason for one person's conscience to be dictated by another's.  The question, then, is whether such useful purposes are present in the recently declared holiday.

In the poster for the event, and in many statements by organizers, it's claimed that this is about the First Amendment and free expression.  This seems obviously false.  A media corporation censored the South Park episode, not the government.  And, while I'm no expert in the contracts involved with such endeavors, it hardly seems as if the free expression of Parker and Stone has been squelched, even if we set aside the fact that we're not dealing with citizens' rights vis-à-vis their government. There's nothing stopping me from drawing a picture of Mohammed right now, scanning it, and posting it on this blog for all the world to see (or at least all of the places where Google has a grip).  Parker and Stone can surely do the same.  What has been restricted is not their free expression, but rather the extent of corporate backing that would allow them to broadcast their work to millions of viewers in a branded, highly advertised, and moneyed project under the Comedy Central name.  Forgive me if I don't shed any tears for their hardships.  It is a damn shame that they have to express themselves like the rest of us in this case, rather than take for granted the provision of soapboxes and loudspeakers by one of the largest media conglomerates in existence.

So basically, it's absurd to make this into a free expression issue.  This is show business, not a Vietnam War protest, and Parker and Stone knew as much quite well when they signed on for their big fat paychecks, signed over the rights to their creation, etc.  The fact that they decided to be corporate tools and we decided to pay for their cable channel in order to get a good laugh doesn't mean that their artistic or philosophical sensibilities are our burden.  Nor are their sensibilities the burden of Comedy Central or Viacom.  Not to shatter everyone's blissful misconceptions of the matter, but no one who produces or consumes the product that is South Park cares very much about the personal expression of its producers, or what they think about anything. 

But this also doesn't mean that "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" is only about South Park.  In addition to a claim to being about the First Amendment, the poster advertising today's festivities says that they seek to "water down the pool of targets".  Awfully noble.  After all, the big concern is that threats have been made against the creators of South Park, as they have been made (and sometimes even carried out) against cartoonists over the past few years.  This is a serious issue, and while certain offenses may justify violent response (human rights abuses, terrorists attacks or other crimes, imperialism, etc.), the offense of certain images against religious sensibilities (which we shouldn't deny are real) doesn't seem deserving of death, at least for those committed to liberal values.

Daniel wants to embed this liberal sense more objectively, to draw a distinction between whether simply anger or violence is provoked by these actions.  I don't know how helpful this is.  The images only subjectively provoke one thing rather than the other given certain assumptions.  And I share those assumptions, to be sure, but the whole reason why we have a problem here is that some people don't share those assumptions.  Violence is only unprovoked in a situation where the drawing of a likeness of the Prophet doesn't deserve violent punishment.  If it's our contention against those who disagree that no such punishment is deserved- ever- it hardly seems sensible to just assume that everyone take this to be the case on our say-so.  Better to say, perhaps, that (objectively) the comics have provoked anger and violence, that (subjectively) they don't obviously provoke anything, either anger or violence, and that we don't think it's reasonable for people to respond in violent fashion to the offense they entertain at certain images, although we do think it's reasonable (though not necessary) to respond simply with anger and objection.  This, I think, prevents us from hiding our own imperative statements behind the cover of "that's how things are".  We can then take full responsibility for our own values, and push them on people openly.  This strikes me as the only honest way to have an ethical dialogue unless we are prepared to argue from natural law, divine command, or whatever other solid foundation the objective and enduring basis of the free expression of religious blasphemies. Daniel may be prepared to do this, but I'm not.

So much for the reasons for this day.  I've tried to separate the substantive from the non-substantive and clarify how I think a substantive response would best proceed.  Granting that we've made such an argument, though, what of the drawings themselves?  Is this how we should express our concerns?  If, as Daniel says, the founders of this holiday "aren't trying to marginalize or intimidate Muslims in general [...] they're quite clearly singling out a particularly totalitarian and illiberal segment of Islam", it seems questionable to me whether images of the Prophet will serve the intended purpose of the day.  What will it accomplish (for? against?) the totalitarian and illiberal segment?  More anger?  Perhaps a feeling of being cornered?  Marginalization?  Disgust?  Boredom?  Confusion?

If we want to convince people to abandon violent tendencies, or at least stop them from such tendencies, it seems worthwhile to ask how practical it really is to piss them off further.  I don't personally see why someone with goals of alleviating violence would do something to fan the flames (even if they think such flames are unjustified in the first place).

...which is why I suspect that this is one big pissing contest between partisans of a rather unenlightened liberalism and partisans of a rather unenlightened religious despotism.  Which is why I'm not especially interested.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

So what do readers think of this "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" business? A couple weeks ago, I had a quick post supporting the creators of South Park after they were threatened with violence for their satire. Evan was a little concerned about it (I reproduced one of the Danish cartoons in the post), but as a good skeptic of censorship (self-imposed and externally imposed), he was fine with me putting it up. And since the South Park incident the threats and violence keep coming. However "provocative" these artists and writers may be, the worst they provoke is angry words. They are indeed provocative - that's obviously the point. But that doesn't mean this violence is what they've provoked. They have provoked anger, but the violence I think needs to be considered unprovoked, because there is nothing that can even begin to justify it.

Anyway, it's not like I'm going to doodle a cartoon and post it. I have no real objection to that, but no inclination either. However, I am curious what people think about this. Some perspectives are deserving of ridicule. Nobody is plastering mosques attended by peaceful Muslims with these ridiculing cartoons (that I'm aware of). The people involved here - Vilks, van Gogh, Parker, Stone, Rushdie, etc. - aren't trying to marginalize or intimidate Muslims in general. I think they're quite clearly singling out a particularly totalitarian and illiberal segment of Islam, and because they're doing that it's natural for me not only to take their side, but also to have a degree of respect for continued deliberate satirical efforts, like Draw Mohammed Day.

But maybe I'm just a jackass. What do readers think of this effort?

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan linked to this about a month ago. It shows depictions of Mohammed in art by Muslims. Muslims haven't always had the hang-ups that some do today.

Einstein was a socialist

Maybe this was common knowledge, but I didn't realize it until I read an essay of his last night called "Why Socialism?" (1949). He is not an ideologue. The essay essentially runs through a series of problems he sees in the economy and in society, and he wraps it up very quickly at the end saying essentially "socialism is the solution, but we should avoid the totalitarianism of socialism". I suppose that puts Einstein in the New Left, but I do want to stress how casual this analysis was, so that we shouldn't read too much into it or get too excitable over it.
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At the beginning of the essay it wasn't even clear that he would end by advocating socialism. He starts by discussing how important it is for citizens to comment on society and on economics, particularly on socialism. He doesn't share his own views on socialism one way or another at that point (perhaps they were well known enough that he didn't have to). He then goes through a series of concerns he has, the resolution of which does not necessitate an embrace of socialism. The socialist portions of the essay feel like something of an afterthought, and I actually won't be sharing them explicitly here.

Anyway, that's my defense of Einstein, but here are some snippets of what he wrote:

"I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society."

That is the general framing provided to the rest of the essay. A couple paragraphs later he gets into his economics. I found this particularly notable:

"Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment;"

What struck me was (1.) how the first sentence so creatively and decisively addresses Say's Law, and (2.) how the second sentence transitions so smoothly to the full employment implications of that insight. I don't know how much economics Einstein was actually familiar with, but that was a line I enjoyed stumbling across, regardless of whether he realized all the potential interpretations of what he had to say. He goes on, although reveals himself to be thinking more along the lines of older under-consumptionist theories rather than Keynesian ideas:

"An 'army of unemployed' almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before."

He has glimmers of a theory of effective demand here, but attributes it all somewhat haphazardly to "competition among capitalists". Still an interesting read, though.

There were a couple other pieces of the essay that I thought were worth noting. He was also very preoccupied with what has been called "monopoly capitalism". It's hard to overstate the importance of this idea in the public mind in the first half of the twentieth century. I recently read Bertrand Russell's Freedom vs. Organization, which was a history of Europe from 1815 to 1914, and this issue came up again and again with Russell as well. Well informed people who nonetheless thought somewhat casually about the economy, like Einstein and Russell, were very disturbed by the growing size of corporations and the perceived totalizing influence that would have on society. Some reacted more negatively than others, but its a very important thing to note simply because it was such a driving concern back then, while it isn't really a dominant narrative right now. You barely even hear the term "monopoly capitalism" anymore.

The other intriguing element of Einstein's piece was what he wrote on wages. At first I thought he was pedaling a labor theory of value. He wasn't, really. Upon a closer reading, he never came close to a theory of value, but he did quite clearly reveal a preference for piece rates, rather than an hourly wage. It did have the vague trappings of value theorists like Marx - he talked about connecting workers more closely to what they produced. But ultimately it was more a statement about what he thought was the ideal labor contract than anything else. Piece rates, Einstein suggested, would limit the scope for exploitation by employers. He used an interesting term for the current wage system that I liked. He called the wages workers earn "free" wages because they are independent of what the worker produces.

He also notes the difference between economics and physics, and why it's so much harder to draw conclusions in economics than in physics. So it was an interesting and strange read. I'll end with this additional thought from Einstein on the social nature of man:

"The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society - in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence - that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is 'society' which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word 'society'."

UPDATE: Hopefully this won't detract from the post, but while we're on Einstein I was wondering if some Trekkie's could confirm something for me. Kate and I were watching the new Star Trek again this weekend, and something bugged me. Is warp speed supposed to be the same as light speed in the Star Trek universe? When they all leave the assembly to go answer that distress call, they say that they will arrive (from Earth) and come out of warp speed in someting like eight or nine minutes. The way I figure it, that doesn't get them much past Mars if they're going light speed - certainly nowhere near Jupiter. Did I miss something? They didn't mention anything about using a wormhole (indeed - they're surprised when they find out that the bad guys used a wormhole - they made it sound like a shocking thing rather than a routine technology). Am I misunderstanding this, or was that just sloppy writing?