In Due Course

This is a long-standing pet peeve of mine. Many people, and most noticeably many journalists, do not seem to have a clear understanding of what hypocrisy is. To keep things simple, let’s go with the everyday definition of hypocrisy as “saying one thing, while doing another.” This is fine, except that it’s important, when accusing people of hypocrisy, to pay careful attention to what they are saying. In particular, it is important to pay careful attention to the distinction between what people would like the general rule to be, and what their preferences over their own actions are, given the existing rules. (Viktor Vanberg and James Buchanan introduced the term “constitutional preferences” and “action preferences” to distinguish the two, which is maybe not the best terminology, but their discussion of the distinction is invaluable.)

Let me give a concrete example. I was reading a little article the other day about Bill Gates’s five favorite books of 2014.… Continue reading

One of the things that I look forward to in The Economist is that they have a little “Canada beat” with usually one article per issue on something that’s been going on here. It’s never something that I don’t already know the details of. What is interesting is just hearing an outsider’s perspective. Sometimes what’s interesting is seeing what people outside the country consider the biggest news story going on here. Often, however, what’s interesting is that they describe events in ways that Canadians never would, because we’re too wrapped up in things, or because our own national discourse is somewhat distorted. (For example, The Economist will typically describe the Liberal Party of Canada as a centre-left party, or even just a left-wing party, because any party that is, on most issues, to the left of the U.K. Labour Party strikes them as appropriately designated “left-wing.” Canadians, by contrast, tend to situate the national political parties by comparing them to one another.)

Anyhow, I got a chuckle this week, when they chose to describe the federal government’s income-splitting proposal in the following terms:

The prime minister, Stephen Harper, defends traditional family values and recently announced tax incentives for women to look after their kids at home.

Most of us have probably heard, over the years, an enormous number of arguments against capitalism. This is not all that surprising. Looking around, it’s easy to find irrationality and waste in the way that our economy is organized. But turning this into an argument for wholesale change in the system – as opposed to just an argument for regulation and readjustment – is much more difficult. Because in order to argue that “the system” needs to go, you need to be able to provide at least some reason to think that some imagined alternative system is going to be better.

And yet lots of people ignore this obligation. There are many egregious examples of this, with Naomi Klein’s recent book being a typical example. (It’s a 500+ page denunciation of capitalism, without any serious attempt to explain what the alternative is supposed to look like.)

On the other hand, the way that economists have presented the basic argument for capitalism, over the past half century, has tended to invite this style of criticism.… Continue reading