Month: January 2008

Dog Language and Political Language

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(I posted this on Photon Courier in 2004–it seems appropriate for the current political season)

When you talk to a dog, you don’t have to worry a lot about using syllogisms, complete sentences, good analogies, or crisply-argued chains of logic. What he’s looking for is keywords…particular words and short phrases…like “nice doggie” or “here” or, especially, “dinner.”

It strikes me that, increasingly, the way in which politicians address the American people is very similar. It’s enough to say the words that are supposed to elicit the conditioned responses…”jobs” or “health care” or “education.” There is increasingly little effort to specify exactly what cause-and-effect relationship will cause these good things to come to pass, and why one approach might be better than alternative approaches. This behavior is most noticeable among Democrats, but is by no means totally absent among Republicans.

Quote of the Day

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In reality, the case for libertarianism is based on the flaws of government as well as the virtues of the market. To justify the modern activist state, it’s not enough to show that the market has shortcomings; you must also prove that the government can A) solve those problems, and B) do so without introducing worse problems of its own. Libertarians contend that government is systematically inferior to the private sector despite the fact that latter has significant flaws. In my view, for example, there is good reason to believe that government is likely to fail more often than the market because the quality of government is greatly undermined by the widespread and rational ignorance of voters; by contrast, market participants have stronger incentives to become informed about the goods and services they purchase and are therefore less likely to make serious mistakes.

–Ilya Somin

Spices and Wine

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Over the holidaze I received two books as gifts. I finally finished the second one yesterday.

The first one I read was The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice. This book is about how cities that gained large shares of the spice trade were able to turn that trade into bigtime wealth, prestige and power. Firstly, the book dives into the tale of Venice, which is by far the most interesting of the three, imho. The author does a good job of describing just what exactly the old maritime empire of Venice did and how they did it to become one of the most powerful middlemen in history. He also does a fine job of describing how folks way back then used spices in their cooking – not an easy task with a small stack of literature to choose from on this topic that is available.

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Pinker on “The Moral Instinct”

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Pinker concludes his lengthy discussion of “The Moral Instinct” in the NYTimes:

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

He treads some ground we’ve seen in his earlier work but as usual his discussion excites – contrasting what appears universal and what doesn’t, optimistic in his belief that the more we know about being human the better humans we can be.

(Thanks, as about always with Pinker, to A&L.)

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