Privileges

I hear a lot of feminists talk about things like "white privilege" and "male privilege," and then act all surprised when white guys get offended.

Of course, the term "male privilege" sounds to someone who hasn't heard it before like men are a distinct class with only advantages, that it's never hard to be a man, etc. The usual response is something like this: that it's not about who's better off, but that there are some things men experience that women never get to, and some things men don't have to put up with that women do, and that these are male privileges.

The problem is that the singular term, privilege, really does carry the connotation that the relation is one-sided and a moral failing on the part of those who have privilege, and I've noticed plenty of people after they give the standard explanation go right back to using the word the way it sounds like it means, rather than the way it's defined explicitly.

If the terms sexism and racism and white and male privilege are injustices, then it's proper to condemn them generally -- and also proper to be offended when someone either calls you a sexist or racist, or privileged. But if you're claiming that people shouldn't be offended when you call them privileged, then you're implicitly claiming that it's a fact judgment, and not necessarily an injustice. That is, it may be desirable to remove privilege, but it is not a wrong committed against anyone.

It's not necessarily unjustifiable to use these terms in both senses, but that ambiguity is often abused. We'd be improving the discourse greatly if we'd be clearer about what we mean, and less self-assured that we know which things are injustices and which are merely inequities.

Pace

So a couple of good friends took me to a shooting range in VA, and I fired a gun for the first time.

1) It was an NRA range, and they require a gun safety test, after which you pay for a range card to show you've taken the test. Since I'm not a member, I got an NRA range card that says "non-member" on it. This means that I am now a card-carrying non-member of the NRA.

2) Some hobbies and jobs require you to be quick on your toes. But at the range, people were slow as molasses. I wonder if that's necessary for something like shooting, where if you do it too wrong, people can get very seriously injured. So you have to make sure all the steps are followed in sequence. I wonder what the broader applications of this are. Perhaps there's a whole range of activities for which slowness, and not quickness, is requisite.

Only Timely Truths are True

“People say, “What is the sense of our small effort?” They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.” - Dorothy Day

“What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.” - G.W.F. Hegel

As Hegel and Dorothy Day both tell us, the environment to which we have access is the environment of the present, a finite moment within history. Knowledge of the past is not readily convertible into present know-how, in those fields -- especially politics, economics, and technology -- where the fundamentals change.

The difference between the practical conditions of the past and the present may be sufficient to prevent a single social science from encompassing both. Machiavelli was wrong to advocate the reintroduction of the footsoldier in Discourses on Livy, not because he was wrong about their relation to classical virtue -- he was right about that. What he was wrong about was the possibility or desirability of returning to that earlier system. The needs of a newly mercantile and diversely pious age called for new virtues, in many respects unlike the old civic virtu. The opportunity cost of manly bravery is higher in an age which calls for the virtues of thrift, punctuality, and honesty. Similarly, common property was an old form of mutual insurance and community, but incompatible with the wealth-generating practices of modernity. Consequently if we wish to retain the benefits of the virtue of the Jeffersonian farmer, we must consider the economic conditions that render the small farm a less and less viable form of enterprise: capitalism's tendency to concentrate resources where they are used most efficiently. The "lessons" of economic history cannot be expected to hold true in new circumstances, even while the underlying nature of mankind remains the same.

There are two primary reasons that America should consider nationalizing the farms.

1) Force is the only method left for restoring a class of independent land-cultivators. These small farmers are the only class with sufficient attachment to locality, pride of ownership, and live-and-let-live instincts sufficient to keep our liberal political system functioning. (Cf. Tocqueville's Democracy in America) The process of subsidization has been effectively dominated by large agribusinesses. Joseph Stalin was right about many things, and he was especially clear-eyed about what was necessary to reinstitute collective farming: massive coercion, and the liquidation of the kulaks. The preservation of liberal civic virtue -- which is, unlike collective farming, an urgent social need -- likewise requires retrograde motion, hopefully less forcible. Communization on a broad scale can no longer be a voluntary enterprise, and neither can the de-concentration of any class of economic resources. We have three options moving forward. We can abandon the civic virtue of small farmers, for the sake of economic growth. But this would jeopardize the very political liberty that enables that growth. Second, we could try to eliminate the incentives driving the concentration of farmable land. But this would essentially destroy capitalism, sending us backwards just as surely as the first option. Lastly, we can make farming a special vocation, protected from the rest of the economic system, by means of government-owned and administered single-family homesteads.

2) Government is already involved with the administration of farms, by means of a massive system of subsidies. The federal government has its finger in the pie, but doesn't accept any responsibility for the consequences. Complete privatization might have been the best option twenty years ago, but we now have the information technology to govern using Hayekian decentralized information without decentralizing ownership. We just need a few good agriculture blogs, and a department of agriculture that reads them. "Voice" is gaining relative to "exit" as a force for positive change. It's about time we forgot the tired old lessons from history, and let the State -- the march of God through history -- assume its rightful place among the yeoman farmers.

This is the motivation for this post.

RAND health care study vindicated?

Alex Tabarrok:

Joseph Newhouse and the other RAND researchers have responded to Nyman's paper arguing that attrition bias biased their results. The RAND researchers were aware of these issues and in fact designed the experiment to avoid incentives for non-random attrition. Most importantly, the basic RAND findings have now been replicated in many other studies (smaller and not always experiments but the results are solid). I call it a knockout for RAND.

But the linked response says:

In fact, it was always in the financial interests of the
Experiment’s participants to remain enrolled because the Experiment made
unconditional monthly side payments to the participants in cost sharing plans
that held them harmless against their worst case (the “Participation Incentive”)
and in addition paid them a lump sum if they completed the experiment (the
“Completion Bonus.”) Thus, there is no a priori reason to expect financially
motivated attrition occurred.

It seems to me that, while an adequate response to the incentive concerns, this casts other doubts on the applicability of the study: in order to prevent the participants from opting out, the study made them significantly richer. It seems then that all it proves is that rich people don't benefit from the marginal health care dollar, not that typical people don't. That's far from proof that we as a nation buy too much health care.

Comment of the Day

From this Marginal Revolution post:

Your mechanics has a poster of a half dress woman in the wall.His vocabulary only reach 100 words, and cant use 3/4 of them in front of a woman.Still he knows how to make your car ignite on again.And you ,a phd , if your car stop ,will have to call the dropout you dispice because you dont even know wher the breake release is located.His knowledege is wider than yours, more useful but of low status.So you begin to think iq dont measure what Williamson refered as idiosincratic knowledege ,it cant no be expressed in words still is knowledge.Of course an aristocrat that never worked in his life, Wittestein,know nothing about it.

Posted by: jean at Oct 11, 2007 10:43:54 AM

That's just awesome.

Moral vs. Political Obligation

Will Wilkinson's just written another in his series of very good posts challenging the idea of preferring the good of one's countrymen to the good of foreigners.


I can't help but suspect, though, that he's missing (or ignoring) an important consideration here. The relative consideration I owe the interests of different people may depend on the kind of decision I am making.

Perhaps I personally should not value the lives of Americans over those of foreigners. But as an American I should -- that is, when participating in deliberations about national policy. After all, in advocating a policy, I am making a claim on my fellow citizens -- they are expected to cooperate in its implementation -- that I am not making on citizens of other countries.

I think this justifies caring more -- when talking about, for instance, free trade -- about the welfare of my own country than that of another.

Of course, I may choose to include within my own interests an interest in the well-being of people in general, and I may seek to convince other people to do likewise.

constructive conversation

Megan @ From the Archives has an interesting post on tone in responding to others' obvious errors. It makes some good amount of sense -- conversations should be about constructively reaching the truth, rather than scoring points.

But along the same lines, is it really productive to spend a lot of time talking about tone? I suspect that energy is better spent on being the most constructive converser you can be, rather than correcting others.