Durham's Bull

Hubris Hits the Homeland

"In essence, households, banks and the government have already spent some of their future earnings. The current crisis marks the point at which the bills begin to get paid. Whereas Britain lumbered under the weight of imperial overreach, as the historian Niall Ferguson has written, the United States will be shackled primarily by its financial overreach."

David Leonhardt has a nice piece in today's Times on U.S. over-extension.  It's time to pay the piper.

Public Theology in America

Tonight I attended a panel on Public Theology in America, hosted by the Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown.  The project is headed up by Patrick Deneen, who also moderated tonight's discussion.  It is the sister project to Princeton's James Madison Program.

The discussants included Father Richard John Neuhaus (Editor of First Things), Darryl G. Hart (Intercollegiate Studies Institute), and my personal favorite, Stanley Hauerwas (Duke Divinity). 

Tonight was truly a treat, as I got there early enough to meet Hauerwas and chat for a few minutes.  In contrast to his often prickly public presence, he was kind and engaging.  Much more so than I expected, given his reputation as a firy Texan who pulls no punches.

As mentioned above, the topic was the role of religion in public life.  Hart was first on-deck, and took an orthodox Presbyterian perspective which landed him firmly in the camp of secularist traditionalist conservative.  His justification was that most presumptions of the value of thelogical grounding in public affairs seek to provide sound footing for virtue, something that has consistently escaped the grasp of secular ideologies.  Yet, there is little inter-denominational agreement about what virtue actually is, and thus Rawls is still correct: religion is inherently sectarian, and not a sound basis for public policy.

Next up was Hauerwas, who wasted little time getting into the act.  He is famous for a number of things: cursing in conversation with God, militant Pacifism, and showmanship to name a few.  Stanley did not disappoint on any of these counts.  Given the nature of the topic, however, his pacifism was on display for all to see. 

He began by following-up on Hart's remarks with the following question: What kind of world are we living in that produces such strange locution as "public theology" ?  He dubbed this "the challenge of the American context," the sizeable task of cultivating a sincere, true Christian faith in a culture so blind to its own religious adherence to the great civil religion of America, "E Pluribus Unum." 

Interestingly, Hauerwas sees war as the mechanism that "makes Unum out of the Pluribus."  It is the one thing that unites all of us in an increasingly fractious Union.  "What is really true in any society is that which will be killed or died for."  People around here don't die for their religious faith; they die for their political faith. For Stanley, militancy, the welfare state, and progress are all bound-up together.

He notes that, "It is easier to be confident in your own righteousness when you are a hegemonic power."  Hauerwas attributes the triumph of Christianity in large part to the "triumph of Christian states."  This was followed by his most insightful comment of the night, "Christians have always had trouble making sense of any empire they acquired."  I've often remarked that a people called to turn the world upside down through radical service will always be tormented by a lust for power. 

Another interesting comparison was that of the military, and the state which it is asked to defend.  The military is one of the last honor cultures that exists.  It requires the willingness to risk ones life, and accordingly requires a belief that the reward outweighs the risk.  As this contrast between the two groups becomes more marked, he belives fewer soldiers will find themselves up to the task of risking their lives so that Americans can fulfill their raison d'etre: "shopping."

Ultimately, he dismissed secularism due to the notion that some private square could exist; it's al public.  Yet, he called for the church and the state to stay as far away from each other as the East is from the West.  The church must be the church, and state must be the state, and any confusion of these roles diminishes the effectiveness of both parties.  While I'm not readily to endorse every word he spoke, I've rarely encountered a more entertaining orator. 

Fr. Neuhaus was hard to sit through after Stanley's routine.  He was a bit of a squish, somewhere in between the secularist Hart, and the radically civil libertarian Hauerwas.  He was th0ughtful, but long-winded, and a bit of a bore. 

All in all, it was a great discussion.  I think I'll dig up my copy of The Hauerwas Reader before I pass-out tonight.

Online Social Exchange

Stanford is hosting a conference for many of the sites hoping to connect information-starved donors looking for social ROI with do-gooders in need of cash.

The key will be one exchange winning out. 

I just wonder how many people really care enough to seek out the information.  The dirty little secret of most philanthropic enterprises is that results aren't so important most of the time - the act of giving is its own reward, and there is usually little demand for accountability.  It's a shame.

Perhaps this is a stupid question, but why can't these projects be bought and sold on eBay?  Does anyone have a good answer?  Leave it in the comments.

HT: Philanthropy 2173

The Micro-Foundations of Rent-Seeking

Spite. 

So says a new experimental economics paper from Benedikt Herrmann and Henrik Orzen at the University of Nottingham.

I wonder what the correlation is between a country's level of spite and their gini coefficient.

Here's another experimental paper on what drives our taste for political profit.

It finds, interestingly, that "punishment is largely ineffective as it induces rich representatives to capture all economic resources." 

This is the same finding predicted in George Stigler's famous "capture theory" of regulation, first expounded in his 1971 landmark work "The Theory of Economic Regulation."

For further proof on the validity of his theory, an interesting application of it was found to have recently occurred in the Department of the Interior.

Pornography as Adultery

Ross Douthat has an incisive piece on a question that is on the minds of too many men.

Charles Taylor on Secularism

"Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed."

Get the rest here.

Leeson Guest-Blogging Freakonomics

GMU Economics Professor Peter T. Leeson, who I have mentioned on this site before, is guest-blogging over at Freakonomics this week.

His first post is on work he has done with Claudia Williamson on the economics of UFO sightings.  It should prove to be an interesting series of posts.

Sentence of the Day

"It's odd to watch a political party arise for no other reason than to prove the existence of public choice theory, then demand to be elected because it's the only party that really understands the implications of public choice theory."

From Ezra Klein, reporting on the Dept of Agriculture's denial of Creekstone's right to test its own livestock for mad-cow disease.

This is just one of the many problems with one-size fits all regulation.  I understand that the trade-offs between economies of scale and the needs of innovators can be hard to balance at times, but this sort of issue could be solved fairly simply by moving from means-based regulation to ends-based regulation. 

Rather than punishing someone for not following your rules, punish them when they actually cause harm. 

Affirmative Action at UCLA

Steve Levitt reports on inappropriately using race-based criteria in the admissions process at UCLA. 

I, like Levitt, favor class-based affirmative-action, relative to race-based.

Does Income Inequality Matter?

Some insights on the mechanisms of inequality:

"The paradox of economic growth is that the same mechanisms that create great wealth –secure property rights and rule of law guaranteed by an independent judiciary — also give rise to great inequalities in its distribution.Private property provides a powerful incentive to produce wealth for oneself while simultaneously denying that same wealth to others. Wealth does trickle down to the rest of the population, but often not fast enough to avoid political strife and worse.

The reason for this is simple: if individuals cannot keep enough of what they earn then they will not produce. If, on the other hand, the most productive do keep what they earn, significant inequalities inevitably result.

Further, in a technologically driven world where an individual’s unique talents can be scaled up to an almost infinite degree, inequality increases dramatically."

Get the rest here as William Bernstein guest blogs at Freakonomics.

He ultimately concludes that inequality is necessarily problematic.  I would concur that at some level, it does feed social unrest, and libertarians ought to be more mindful of this outcome. 

The real question is not whether it matters, but what we ought to do about it.   This is where the problems begin.  As any scholar of public choice will tell you, government failure is far more abundant in the real world than market failure.

 That said, the Earned Income Tax Credit, dreamed up so very long ago by the great Milton Friedman, has been a big step in the right direction.  Why?  While I wouldn't call the statement axiomatic in the way some of my colleagues might, "No one spends someone else's money as wisely as he spends his own," explains a lot of the success of the EITC.