Ten Years Ago at Grasping Reality: May 19, 2008
- A Spontaneous Order: Women and the Invisible Fist: RadGeek produces what I can only call the intellectual love child of Susan Brownmiller and Friedrich Hayek. Extremely well done: "When a large enough minority of men choose to commit widespread, intense, random acts of violence against a large enough number of women. And it can happen quite naturally without the raping men, or the protecting men, or the women in the society ever intending for any particular large-scale social outcome to come about. But what will come about, quite naturally, is that women’s social being—how women appear and act, as women, in public—will be systematically and profoundly circumscribed by a diffuse, decentralized threat of violence. And, as a natural but unintended consequence of many small, self-interested actions, some vicious and violent (as in the case of men who rape women), some worthwhile in their origins but easily and quickly corrupted (as in the case of men who try to protect women from rape), and some entirely rational responses to an irrational and dangerous situation (as in the case of women who limit their action and seek protection from men), the existence and activities of the police-blotter rapist serve to constrain women’s behavior and to become dependent on some men—and thus dependent on keeping those men pleased and serving those men’s priorities—for physical protection from other men. That kind of dependence can just as easily become frustrating and confining for the woman, and that kind of power can just as easily become corrupting and exploitative for the man, as any other form of dependence and power. (Libertarians and anarchists who easily see this dynamic when it comes to government police and military protection of a disarmed populace, shouldn’t have any trouble seeing it, if they are willing to see it, when it comes to male 'protection' of women)..."
What is worth teaching in graduate macro? My views as of ten years ago: Graduate Macroeconomics @ Berkeley: There are seven slots in the curriculum—four eight-week slots taken by everybody in their first year, and three sixteen-week slots in the second and third years for Ph.D. candidates especially interested in the field. As I understand macro, the slots are: (1) Moral hazard, near-rationality, and coordination failures, (2) Neoclassical growth theory, (3) Keynesian and new-Keynesian models, (4) Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, (5) Monetary theory, policy, and history, (6) Capital markets and macroeconomics, (7) Endogenous growth theories. Plus there are all the "international finance" topics. The question is: are these the right seven slots to teach, and is this the right ordering of them?..."
1870: The Real Game-Changing Industrial Revolution: The most important fact to grasp about the world economy of 1870 is that the economy then belonged much more to its past of the Middle Ages than to its future of—well, of us, and what our successors eventually decide they want to use as an overarching term with which to lable our age of fuel, machine, and digit...
John Stuart Mill teh Malthusian Neocon!!: Dark Satanic Millian Liberalism from... John Stuart Mill!!...
Gains from Trade Once Again: Mark Thoma muses about relative income--that perhaps much of American unease about globalization is the fact that the ability to buy cheap goods at Walmart doesn't balance out the belief that somebody somewhere is unfairly becoming immensely rich as the result of the process. We teach the 2 goods, 2 factors of production, 2 countries model because it is easy--but it has never been clear to me that the intuitions generated there transfer over to the more complicated real world at all...
