Regulation of the Day 201: Playground Chatter

Posted on November 28, 2011 | Comments Off on Regulation of the Day 201: Playground Chatter

Quebec officials are starting to listen in on what children are talking about on school playgrounds during recess. Are they trying to catch wind of terrorist plots? Stamp out juvenile drug use? Put a stop to bullying? None of the above, actually:

Diane De Courcy, the board’s chairwoman, said the approach will be persuasive, not punitive.

“There will be no language police,” she said. Instead, monitors who overhear children using their mother tongue during recess will simply remind them of the rules.

“If they are automatically switching to another language, (the monitor) will gently tap them on the shoulder – not on the head – to tell them, ‘Remember, we speak French. It’s good for you.’

Yes, speak French. It’s good for you.

A kindlier, more tolerant, and more realistic view is that people – even children – are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves which language they shall speak. Let them.

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Isaac Newton’s Funeral

Posted on November 28, 2011 | Comments Off on Isaac Newton’s Funeral

Throughout history, most societies have been based on status. King, noble, and peasant. Brahmin and untouchable. Mandarin and coolie. One of liberalism’s crowning achievements is tearing down those old status societies and replacing them with contract societies. In a liberal society, all people have equal rights, and must deal with each other as equals. No man is forced to grovel before a duke or a king. He may look him in the eye now.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are far richer than I am. But if one of them wrongs me, I get my day in court. They might have better lawyers with shinier suits than me. But we are still equals before the law.

This was a novel phenomenon in the 18th century, mainly confined to England and the Netherlands, and even far more imperfectly than today. Here’s how Isaac Newton’s funeral looked through French eyes:

Having come from a nation where aristocracy and clergy held a monopoly on power and privilege, Voltaire marveled at a society where a scientist was buried with the honors of a king.

Robert Zaresky and John T. Scott, The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding, location 877 in the Kindle version.

Isaac Newton’s life was a landmark event in the history of science. His funeral was, unknowingly, a landmark event in the history of human freedom.

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Posted in Books, History

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Sagan on Certainty

Posted on November 27, 2011 | 1 comment

Wisdom and humility from Carl Sagan:

Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science – by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans – teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude.

We will always be mired in error.

-Carl Sagan, Demon-Haunted World, location 627 in the Kindle edition.

For my own thoughts on this kind of capital-C Certainty, see here, here, here, and here.

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No, Rousseau, Man Is a Social Animal

Posted on November 27, 2011 | 1 comment

No man is an island. Economics is based on that fact. You can’t make an exchange, and markets cannot emerge, with solitary people leading solitary lives. Evolution bears this out. Our predecessors, from at least Australopithecus on down, lived in bands and tribes. Not alone. They lived, loved, ate, fought, and died together. We are evolved to need each other.

Rousseau, who died over 70 years before Darwin’s Origin of Species, thought differently. His Original Man in the state of nature assumes away our innate social tendencies. From his false premises come many of his false conclusions:

He [Rousseau] begins with a portrait of natural man as a solitary animal devoid of reason and speech, a being whose limited needs can be easily satisfied without depending on anyone, whose soul is restricted to the sole sentiment of his existence without any idea of the future, as near as it may be.

Robert Zaresky and John T. Scott, The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding, location 381 in the Kindle edition.

From that miserable Rousseauian Eden, we are fallen. Thank goodness.

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J.B. Bury on the Role of Church and State in History

Posted on November 26, 2011 | Comments Off on J.B. Bury on the Role of Church and State in History

When church and state compete against each other, the people are mostly left alone, and prosper. When they work together, well:

The conflict sketched in these pages appears as a war between light and darkness. We exclaim that altar and throne formed a sinister conspiracy against the progress of humanity.

J.B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought, p. 177.

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The Poor Benefit Most

Posted on November 26, 2011 | Comments Off on The Poor Benefit Most

Deirdre McCloskey’s Great Fact is the leaps and bounds that human well-being has made over the last 200 years. The improvement is a factor of at least 16 in monetary terms, and as much as 100-fold when accounting for the improved quality of goods. Think of the difference between a CD and an iPod. Not 16 or 100 percent; 16 or 100-fold. That’s huge.

The improvement is so huge that she believes the Great Fact is the most important event in human history since the Agricultural Revolution asserted itself around 10,000 years ago. And the best news about the Great Fact should bring cheer to anyone who holds a place in their heart for the poor:

In statistics and in substance the very poorest have benefitted the most. Robert Fogel, a careful student of such matters, notes that “the average real income of the bottom fifth of the [American] population has multiplied by some twentyfold since 1890, several times more than the gain realized by the rest of the population.” The bottom 10 percent have moved from undernutrition to overnutrition, and from crowded slum housing to uncrowded slum housing, and from broken-down buses to broken-down automobiles.

Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeouis Dignity, p. 72.

There’s still a ways to go, obviously. So let’s keep it going. But anyone who denies the significance of the massive gains already made contributes nothing towards the noble cause of eradicating global poverty, and in fact poisons the project.

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Black Friday: Stay Home!

Posted on November 25, 2011 | Comments Off on Black Friday: Stay Home!

CNN reports:

Violence marred Black Friday shopping in at least seven states, including California, where police say a woman doused fellow shoppers with pepper spray in a bid to snag a discounted video game console…

Incidents also occurred in South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, New York, Alabama and Connecticut, with most of the reported incidents happening at or near Walmart stores.

See also an older post on the economics of Black Friday.

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Posted in General Foolishness

How to Lose an Argument

Posted on November 25, 2011 | 1 comment

Thomas Erskine defended Thomas Paine after authorities decided to persecute him for the radical ideas contained in his Rights of Man. Here, Erskine tells a story that explains to Paine’s prosecutors why someone who threatens force during an argument is almost surely wrong:

You must all remember, gentlemen, Lucian’s pleasant story: Jupiter and a countryman were walking together, conversing with great freedom and familiarity upon the subject of heaven and earth. The countryman listened with attention and acquiescence while Jupiter strove only to convince him; but happening to hint a doubt, Jupiter turned hastily around and threatened him with his thunder. ‘Ah, ha!’ says the countryman, ‘now, Jupiter, I know that you are wrong; you are always wrong when you appeal to your thunder.’

Quoted from J.B. Bury, A History of Freedom of Thought, pp. 130-31.

He’s right. An argument can only truly be won on the merits.The world would be a better place if more people realized that.

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A Second Measure of Progress

Posted on November 24, 2011 | Comments Off on A Second Measure of Progress

More good news from Matt Ridley:

In twentieth century oil has been the chief cause of anxiety. In 1914, the United States Bureau of Mines predicted that American oil reserves would last ten years. In 1939 the Department of the Interior said American oil would last thirteen years. Twelve years later it said the oil would last another thirteen years President Jimmy Carter announced in the 1970s that: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade. In 1970, there were 550 billion barrels of oil reserves in the ground and between 1970 and 1990 the world used 6000 billion barrels of oil. So reserves should have been overdrawn by fifty billion barrels by 1990… Shale gas finds have recently doubled America’s gas resources to nearly three centuries’ worth.

Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist, pp. 237-38.

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One Measure of Progress

Posted on November 24, 2011 | Comments Off on One Measure of Progress

This quote from friend-of-CEI Matt Ridley is too good not to share. Something to be thankful for on Thanksgiving:

Ask how much artificial light you can earn with an hour of work at the average wage. The amount has increased from 24 lumen-hours in 1750 BC (sesame oil lamp) to 186 in 1800 (tallow candle) to 4,400 in 1880 (kerosene lamp) to 531,000 in 1950 (incandescent light bulb) to 8.4 million lumen-hours today (compact fluorescent bulb). Put it another way, an hour of work today earns you 300 days’ worth of reading light; an hour of work in 1800 earned you ten minutes of reading light.

Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist, p. 20.

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Posted in Books, Economics, Fun with Statistics

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