From Professor Cooter’s readings at the PPE Institute last week I learned that J. S. Mill, in “On Coleridge”, says of the Kantians:
They [the school of Locke] in their turn allege that the transcendentalists make imagination, and not observation, the criterion of truth; that they lay down principlesunder which a man may enthrone his wildest dreams in the chair of philosophy, and impose them on mankind as intuitions of the pure reason…
From Professor Cowen’s talk at the PPE Institute last week, in which he talked about cultural diversity and globalization, I learned of the Cajun Bangkok in Alexandria, reviewed here:
This thai-cajun hybrid seemed bizarre when it opened five years ago, but it has established itself as one of Old Town’s most dependable Thai restaurants and is, since the demise of Crescent City, its only remaining Cajun eatery. The link between the two cuisines is seafood and a fondness for hot peppers, both of which are on the menu in abundance. Appetizers are mostly Thai and main courses mostly Cajun.
The Thomas Klocek Affair looks bad. It seems that DePaul University fired an adjunct professor at the school of “New Learning” of over a decade’s standing, after he argued with Moslem students about terrorism at a public display table. At issue is whether he argued too strongly, threatening violence.
From Mike Salinger, currently head of economics at the FTC, via Greg Mankiw:
…the FTC investigation uncovered examples of gas stations that shut down rather than risk a suit under a state price-gouging statute….
Professional economists are, of course, accustomed to giving unheeded advice.
Tyler Cowen discusses whether having a gold standard is costly in real terms because gold must be held in vaults rather than being used for jewelry. He suggests that the gold is not useless there; it has option value. Speculators would always hold some gold in bar form, and this would just replace some of that.
That’s an interesting idea, which probably is difficult enough to need modelling. We must think about why speculators hold gold— about where the option value comes from— and whether the government is just like them. (more…)
The American Spectator tells us that nasty lies by the mainstream media— ones on the scale of the CBS forged Bush National Guard document— are not new.
For Goldwater, the first modern conservative to win a presidential nomination, the unending torrent of abuse verged on the apoplectic. CBS News solemnly reported the week of his nomination that Goldwater’s first act after the convention would be to travel to Germany for a visit to “Berchtesgaden, once Hitler’s stamping ground.” And what will the conservative Goldwater do once there? “There are signs,” CBS reporter Daniel Schorr said ominously, “that the American and German right wings are joining up…” Got that? Barry Goldwater, said CBS in so many words, was really a Nazi. With a presidential nomination in hand, he was literally heading to Hitler’s home to get the international Nazi movement rolling. The story, from the trip to Germany to the visit to Hitler’s estate was, of course, false from beginning to end.
Professor Harbaugh passed this along to me:
One can only give an unbiased opinion about things that do not interest one, which is no doubt the reason an unbiased opinion is always valueless.
The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely
nothing.Oscar Wilde (1856-1900)
A profound thought, worth thinking about. I’ll pair it with this one, equally profound:
It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Please excuse my lack of original sources.
I was just reading the WSJ on Mitt Romney’s Mormonism as it affects his political strength. I don’t think people in the mainstream or other media realize why or how large a liability his Mormonism is. They focus on the conservative social beliefs it implies, something which will actually help him in the Republican primaries. Here are the real concerns he will have to face:
1. If the leadership issues a command, can a Mormon in good standing defy it?
2. Does he believe that Jews came to America and that they turned into Indians?
3. Does he believe that he will become a sort of god in the afterlife, with his own planet to rule? See this site for a hostile discussion of Mormon doctrine, and here
for a somewhat evasive Mormon defense of it.
Another item that may cause Romney trouble is this:
4. Does he believe that before 1978 it was divinely commanded that blacks could not be full Mormons? (”priests”– in 1978 the church leader claimed to have received a divine revelation that the time had finally come when black could be priests).
Steve Sailer’s 2001 “Why are rock bands so racially segregated?” points out something interesting:
Why have mixed race rock bands been quite rare? Even though the popular music of the last 100 years is an intricately entwined hybrid of black and white influences, there have been surprisingly few black-white rock groups. Jazz bands - and even opera companies - have been far more likely to blend blacks and whites together.
In one representative listing of the top rock bands of all time, 90 percent were either all white or all black….
Crooked Timber, amazingly, published these good jokes:
Al Qaeda fathers chatting about their suicide-bomber sons. One says wistfully to the other, “Kids blow up so quickly these days.”
The Irish Alzheimer’s Disease Society used to have the slogan
“Remembering those who can’t”.
I’ve always been partial to the slogan “Stamp Out Landmines!”
And for real, there was the Aus telcom company Optus annoucing in one of their first ads that their dedicated customer focus would “make you feel like the only person in the world with a phone.”
From Pascal’s Thoughts, T.S. Eliot translation, entry 229, I find this item which is quotable for my Concealment Argument paper:
This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred time wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether ; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.
I envy those whom I see living in the faith with such carelessness, and who make such a bad use of a gift of which it seems to me I would make such a different use.
Brian Leiter has the best rankings of law schools and philosophy departments around. What is special are his subjective rankings. But he also is smart enough to provide useful objective rankings (which requires making clear his methodology and providing interpretable numbers, not a mysterious index). What he did was to look at citations per professor in law schools, and then carefully choose the top schools and the top quarter of the faculty in each of those schools. He then reports the minimum, median, and maximum citations in that quarter for each school. The search went like this:
Impact was measured using Westlaw’s JRL database rather than TP-ALL, since the latter includes on-line versions of treatises (for example, Wright & Miller on Federal Practice & Procedure) and thus would artificially inflate the counts for schools at which these treatise authors teach. Names were searched as,
Brian /2 Leiter
except where multiple middle initials or similar factors made necessary a wider scope.
I did that for Eric /2 Rasmusen, and my count was 596.
The top school is Chicago, with 1630,2540,9100.
Georgetown was number 8, with 530,980 4520.
Emory and Penn were tied for number 20, with 370,585,1590 and 340, 590, 1100.
Because of ties, the bottom rank in the top 40 schools is 29, where 4 schools were tied. The figures for one of them, George Mason, are 320, 470, 3390.
Thus, I’d fit right in in the top quartile of faculty at a Number 20 law school, and I’d at least be in the top quartile at Number 8.
Con law is, I hear, the easiest field to get cites in, but apparently I can’t complain: Professor Leiter says that law and economics is one of the better fields for getting cites.
Remember, as noted, that citations are field-sensitive: constitutional law, Critical Race Theory, feminist legal theory, international law, intellectual property, and law and economics, among others, are all high citation fields: schools strong in those areas will fare better than those whose strengths lie elsewhere. By contrast, tax, wills & estates, property, admiralty, legal philosophy, labor law, and comparative law are much lower citation fields; schools with substantial strengths in those areas will not, in virtue of those strengths, fare well in a study like this. Citation counts are also seniority sensitive: it’s hard to break into the top quarter of one’s faculty in citations for younger scholars, easier for someone who has been publishing for 20 years.
Foxit Reader is a useful new free download. It replaces Adobe’s PDF reader. I see that it is better in four ways:
1. It is much quicker to load up.
2. It takes up less space (1M).
3. It has the feel of a well-designed product.
4. It allows typing your own notes onto existing pdf documents.
From Pascal’s Thoughts, T.S. Eliot translation, entry 259, I find this sentence which is quotable for my game theory and theology project:
Ordinary people have the power of not thinking of that about which they do not wish to think. “Do not meditate on the passages about the Messiah,” said the Jew to his son. Thus our people often act. Thus are false religions preserved, and even the true one, in regard to many persons.
But there are some who have not the power of thus preventing thought, and who think so much the more as they are forbidden. These undo false religions, and even the true one, if they do not find solid arguments.
Why does the division of labor—Adam Smith’s pin factory– increase output?
My first thought is that it is due to economies of scale in production– indeed, that they are synonymous.
But they actually are not the same at all. Economies of scale usually arise when there is an underused input, as when we require only one corporate registration tax whether we have one employee or two. The two employees can be doing exactly the same thing, and there are still economies of scale.
The division of labor *can* be helpful for that same reason. We can train one worker to make pinheads, and another to make pinshafts, and they can each specialize and make more pins at lower cost than if we had to train both to make both parts of the pin. Adam Smith talks about something like this reason, I recall. He notes that if workers specialize, they need not keep putting down task A and picking up task B, saving all those transition costs.
Another reason, distinct, however, is *comparative advantage*. Suppose that naturally Smith is better at making pinheads because he has good eyes, and Jones is better at making pinshafts because he has strong hands. Working together, they can make more than twice as many pins as working separately.
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