People who pick political teams often have inconsistencies or biases that aren’t transparent. The advantage of a good social science/economic analysis should be to make these transparent 🙂

I could not work out what Jobs actually achieved on his own. Jobs was portrayed as a thoroughly unlikable fellow who was a terrible CEO who deserved to be fired in the mid-1980s.

If he had been hit by a bus in 200, no one would remember Jobs now.

Good to see that having a winning personality gets you a pass on your membership of the top 0.01% of income earners in the eyes of the Twitter Left.

Yeah, I think that is indicative of the way we can sometimes value each other – people just like Job’s personality more, deserved or not.

We are group creatures in the end, and if we were honest about our moral judgments we may feel uncomfortable about them. The thing I’d give Mankiw is that at least he puts them out there, even if they are disagreeable and open to being attacked as a result.

That might be arguable for hard-out utilitarians. But Nozick is like, totally off the hook.

One I enjoy is when you say to people that part of the justification for progressive taxation is “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”. People nod. Then they hear it is a Marx quote. Then they panic about being communist!

Ultimately, normative issues be complicated – and social preconceptions help to drive how a description of normative principles is taken, and even what normative principles people assume “matter”. However, without some explicit discussion of this any policy conclusion economists give is implicitly assuming them – a key point methinks!

Hi,

Indeed, out of the three it is closest to the precautionary principle – I don’t think we need Mill’s harm principle here, as I don’t think we are talking about externalities (or public goods being akin to externalities). If the discussion did go in that direction it would be very interesting.

I think it is a little separate from the precautionary principle though (I’d say that what I follow is the precautionary principle), I was under the impression that “first do no harm” as a principle also states something about the “certainty” of harms – weigh an certain harm more highly than a uncertain benefit.

With the precautionary principle both harms and benefits are uncertain, we have a situation of symmetry. But the “first do no harm” principle applies to situations where there is an asymmetry in certainty around costs and benefits – as it is to avoid “speculative” treatments on patients.

Whether Mankiw’s examples fall into that category are questionable – especially what the “treatment” is, and what the certain harms and uncertain benefits are.

With regards to “initial point” my terminology could simply be a mess. It is with an eye to treatment I’m stating that – so what we define as treatment (change) with corresponding forms of benefits and costs (with varying degrees of certainty) depends on what we define as our “natural position”, which is no so obvious to me.

Cheers for the conversation though, it is very useful. If you have more comments I will keep replying – as that is what I do 🙂

Probably not as explicitly as you would like but it’s a NYT article, not a philosophical treatise. Maybe you could point to specific elements of Mankiw’s piece that you disagree with and cite authors who disagree?

Should there be an eye lottery for the benefit of the blind.

Once you concede eyes can be taken behind the veil of ignorance, what other concessions must be made on a slippery slope to capitalism.

The NYT readers can do without these higher insights from academic philosophers.