I heard a talk recently by Jal Mehta on his new book Allure of Order, where he says how he’d reform US (pre-college) schools. He wants the US to do like Finland where schools are great: select smarter folks as teachers, train them more, and give them more respect, time to prepare, and freedom to structure classes. When I asked him directly how he would pay for all this, he said to cut administration.
Lemonade stands: So one would think, but in my experience most stands either don't stock them, or are down to just lemonade and maybe cookies by the time I swing by..
The fact that you've managed to negotiate social life and pursue your interests without ever seriously contemplating killing anyone is cause for celebrating civilization. I doubt, though, that the distinction is as simple as "good people" and "bad people". Murder rates--diachronically within a single population, mind you--are too highly variable to be explained in terms of good guys and bad guys; something like Nesbitt and Cohen's honor/law model would seem to be a better fit.
The immediate corollary is that most of us are probably not unusually resistant to the temptation of violence-- we just happen to inhabit a low-violence equilibrium where a centralized state can manage most of the conflict resolution that otherwise gets resolved via murder. (About 90% of all murders constitute "self-help justice" from the perspective of the murderer).
So, I'd say the law really is there to prevent you and me from murdering. Or, at least, to give us a credible pre-commitment not to murder, which can be just as valuable.
I hope you never get to confirm this personally, but if a loved one of yours becomes a victim of a profound crime, I suggest you might find that the thought of life in prison is the only persuasive argument against taking justice into your own hands. And that you might be surprised at how resistant to persuasion you might find yourself even then. It wasn't until I became personally involved in such a thing that it occurred to me how the purpose of the criminal justice system might be less to satisfy abstract requirements of justice than to prevent the victim's kinsmen, e.g. me, from starting a blood feud.
Interesting, but I think there's an asymmetry. Liberals are more consequentialist; they think of morality as trying to achieve social goals. Conservatives are deontologists; they think of morality as following a traditional code of rules. From that view, placing social goals, no matter how desirable they may seem, over traditional rules like not allowing marriage between people of the same gender or of different races, is immoral by definition. Conservatives seek laws, of a kind that need little oversight. Liberals seek goal-oriented regulation. So I would expect liberals to want more regulation of the private sector and of government, and conservatives to want less of both.
While I'm very interested in the discussion and the main points of the article that spawned it, I cannot get over the incongruity of the first sentence of the second paragraph with the paragraph before it. "Mehta proposed the mass-adoption of automated busses by city transit systems. When pressed for how any city could afford this, he suggested cutting tourist information centers. Mehta's main complaint is that our cities are oversaturated by tourists." It seems like you've seized on a side-effect of his main complaint: that schooling would be more successful if teachers had better status.
Then you're only left with another puzzle: why are lawyers so influential in the U.S?
The answer lies in the American constitutional system, which makes "checks and balances" its centerpiece. The American system inherently favors small changes that preserve balance over sweeping reforms. [See Checking and balancing a country until it disintegrates. — http://tinyurl.com/qhbr55l ] (The civil-law system in most of Europe, where the legislature reigns supreme, not sharing power with the courts so overtly, avoids some of this defect. — see "Lessons from civil law" http://tinyurl.com/puj3yq8 ) So, one group lobbies for measures favoring it, which disadvantage another group. That group lobbies for modification restoring balance. This produces a high complexity. In effect, the system evolves more than being designed, and evolution is inelegant.
Lawyers aren't the U.S. ruling class, only its faithful servants. They have more the appearance of power than its essence. (See "Legalese: Pomposity ritualized" regarding lawyer psychology. http://tinyurl.com/yjaghbh )
It seems American law degrees are sold at lemonade stands considering all the mentally challenged politicians (foreign politicians aren't always the brightest bunch but Americans take the cake). Lawyers being overrepresented occurs in most democracies though it's taken to an extreme in the US and the US is also on the extreme end when it comes to having few scientists in politics.
It's certainly not original, but my suspicion is that a significant (and perhaps the dominant) contributor to American over-regulation is lawyers.
In the U.S., lawyers represent a hugely disproportionate fraction of our legislators and politically influential individuals; and not surprisingly, they tend to favor complex legalistic, lawyer-intensive solutions.
There aren't enough hours in a day to "earn" as much as those CEOs are getting, not even if Stephen Hawking was your dumber brother.
A fair point but not directly relevant. I will more than agree with you that a CEO doesn't create these superhuman use-values (to use Marx's term). But that doesn't mean choice of CEO isn't responsible for a share of profit larger than the CEO's salary! The CEO's worth to a corporation isn't based primarily (if at all) on his creation of use values. The status his name lends the corporation, the connections he has cultivated, these are his contribution. (Still, the spike in salaries is suspect, and I think that's what needs to be explained, as I don't think the hypotheses you mention succeed in explaining.)
Is it a market failure? I think the concept itself is ambiguous. Is market failure relative to use values? Then you're doing moral philosophy rather than economics. Is it relative to profitability? Then it serves as no moral criterion; but that would seem the better usage. Whether corporations would be more profitable if CEO salaries were lower seems an open question, although I'm inclined to see a bubble: but this has no adverse relevance to my socialist sympathies.
[Added 6/27.] This is to say there's a temptation—I've fallen for it myself—to identify the concept of "capitalist market failure" with "defects of capitalism," but they're not the same. Market failure means capitalism isn't working on its own terms, which may have nothing to do with whether it is working for the societal coalitions that best represent human interests. Political philosophy doesn't reduce to capitalist economics.
Yeah, did GM lose to Toyota because its CEO wasn't being paid enough?
I admit I'm socialist enough that I have trouble justifying why anyone should get to own more than $400 million, say. Especially in terms of incentives. A full-time working might get $40,000. Is someone getting $400,000 working 10x harder? $4 million, 100x harder? Gets to be not possible.
Granted, tournament theory (I think) says the CEO prize is actually motivating the underlings, but I'm still not sure it works.
No, in that case the problem is colleges being allowed to set prices to whatever they like (to make a big fat profit) and the government than slavishly paying grants to students. How those grants are being paid precisely does not matter, what matters is that the government spends money on things they have no control over, until it has been sucked dry.
"nobody knows for sure if CEOs are paid "too much" "
There aren't enough hours in a day to "earn" as much as those CEOs are getting, not even if Stephen Hawking was your dumber brother. As Damien pointed out the POTUS makes (far) less than the average CEO, while the POTUS is in more danger, has more responsibilities and runs a larger, more complex organization, in fact the average American CEO makes more than the leaders of the G20 combined. Furthermore there are large differences between nations: Japanese and German CEOs make significantly less than American CEOs but their companies still kick ass. As to why CEO pay gets to be so high, there are theories about that, I'd say it's part corruption (via those perfect triangles), part tournament theory and part misconception (stock went up 20% after you became CEO therefore you made the company 20% richer, and similar BS ways of thinking).
POTUS isn't paid nearly as much as CEOs and faces a much higher risk of being killed in office. Situations doesn't seem nearly as abusive. Being able to vote on other issues, like going to war or suspension of civil liberties, might well be beneficial.
A huge problem of the US education system is that money flows through burocratic grants instead money being simply payed to the school for educating students.
Lemonade stands: So one would think, but in my experience most stands either don't stock them, or are down to just lemonade and maybe cookies by the time I swing by..
Thanks for this thought provoking response (so much so that I intend to follow up on the refs:-)
The fact that you've managed to negotiate social life and pursue your interests without ever seriously contemplating killing anyone is cause for celebrating civilization. I doubt, though, that the distinction is as simple as "good people" and "bad people". Murder rates--diachronically within a single population, mind you--are too highly variable to be explained in terms of good guys and bad guys; something like Nesbitt and Cohen's honor/law model would seem to be a better fit.
The immediate corollary is that most of us are probably not unusually resistant to the temptation of violence-- we just happen to inhabit a low-violence equilibrium where a centralized state can manage most of the conflict resolution that otherwise gets resolved via murder. (About 90% of all murders constitute "self-help justice" from the perspective of the murderer).
So, I'd say the law really is there to prevent you and me from murdering. Or, at least, to give us a credible pre-commitment not to murder, which can be just as valuable.
I hope you never get to confirm this personally, but if a loved one of yours becomes a victim of a profound crime, I suggest you might find that the thought of life in prison is the only persuasive argument against taking justice into your own hands. And that you might be surprised at how resistant to persuasion you might find yourself even then. It wasn't until I became personally involved in such a thing that it occurred to me how the purpose of the criminal justice system might be less to satisfy abstract requirements of justice than to prevent the victim's kinsmen, e.g. me, from starting a blood feud.
Interesting, but I think there's an asymmetry. Liberals are more consequentialist; they think of morality as trying to achieve social goals. Conservatives are deontologists; they think of morality as following a traditional code of rules. From that view, placing social goals, no matter how desirable they may seem, over traditional rules like not allowing marriage between people of the same gender or of different races, is immoral by definition. Conservatives seek laws, of a kind that need little oversight. Liberals seek goal-oriented regulation. So I would expect liberals to want more regulation of the private sector and of government, and conservatives to want less of both.
While I'm very interested in the discussion and the main points of the article that spawned it, I cannot get over the incongruity of the first sentence of the second paragraph with the paragraph before it. "Mehta proposed the mass-adoption of automated busses by city transit systems. When pressed for how any city could afford this, he suggested cutting tourist information centers. Mehta's main complaint is that our cities are oversaturated by tourists." It seems like you've seized on a side-effect of his main complaint: that schooling would be more successful if teachers had better status.
It seemed to me that Mehtra’s main complaint is that - See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.c...It seemed to me that Mehtra’s main complaint is that - See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.c...It seemed to me that Mehtra’s main complaint is that - See more at: http://www.overcomingbias.c...
Then you're only left with another puzzle: why are lawyers so influential in the U.S?
The answer lies in the American constitutional system, which makes "checks and balances" its centerpiece. The American system inherently favors small changes that preserve balance over sweeping reforms. [See Checking and balancing a country until it disintegrates. — http://tinyurl.com/qhbr55l ] (The civil-law system in most of Europe, where the legislature reigns supreme, not sharing power with the courts so overtly, avoids some of this defect. — see "Lessons from civil law" http://tinyurl.com/puj3yq8 ) So, one group lobbies for measures favoring it, which disadvantage another group. That group lobbies for modification restoring balance. This produces a high complexity. In effect, the system evolves more than being designed, and evolution is inelegant.
Lawyers aren't the U.S. ruling class, only its faithful servants. They have more the appearance of power than its essence. (See "Legalese: Pomposity ritualized" regarding lawyer psychology. http://tinyurl.com/yjaghbh )
It seems American law degrees are sold at lemonade stands considering all the mentally challenged politicians (foreign politicians aren't always the brightest bunch but Americans take the cake). Lawyers being overrepresented occurs in most democracies though it's taken to an extreme in the US and the US is also on the extreme end when it comes to having few scientists in politics.
It's certainly not original, but my suspicion is that a significant (and perhaps the dominant) contributor to American over-regulation is lawyers.
In the U.S., lawyers represent a hugely disproportionate fraction of our legislators and politically influential individuals; and not surprisingly, they tend to favor complex legalistic, lawyer-intensive solutions.
There aren't enough hours in a day to "earn" as much as those CEOs are getting, not even if Stephen Hawking was your dumber brother.
A fair point but not directly relevant. I will more than agree with you that a CEO doesn't create these superhuman use-values (to use Marx's term). But that doesn't mean choice of CEO isn't responsible for a share of profit larger than the CEO's salary! The CEO's worth to a corporation isn't based primarily (if at all) on his creation of use values. The status his name lends the corporation, the connections he has cultivated, these are his contribution. (Still, the spike in salaries is suspect, and I think that's what needs to be explained, as I don't think the hypotheses you mention succeed in explaining.)
Is it a market failure? I think the concept itself is ambiguous. Is market failure relative to use values? Then you're doing moral philosophy rather than economics. Is it relative to profitability? Then it serves as no moral criterion; but that would seem the better usage. Whether corporations would be more profitable if CEO salaries were lower seems an open question, although I'm inclined to see a bubble: but this has no adverse relevance to my socialist sympathies.
[Added 6/27.] This is to say there's a temptation—I've fallen for it myself—to identify the concept of "capitalist market failure" with "defects of capitalism," but they're not the same. Market failure means capitalism isn't working on its own terms, which may have nothing to do with whether it is working for the societal coalitions that best represent human interests. Political philosophy doesn't reduce to capitalist economics.
Those grants produce burocracy that not useful.
Yeah, did GM lose to Toyota because its CEO wasn't being paid enough?
I admit I'm socialist enough that I have trouble justifying why anyone should get to own more than $400 million, say. Especially in terms of incentives. A full-time working might get $40,000. Is someone getting $400,000 working 10x harder? $4 million, 100x harder? Gets to be not possible.
Granted, tournament theory (I think) says the CEO prize is actually motivating the underlings, but I'm still not sure it works.
No, in that case the problem is colleges being allowed to set prices to whatever they like (to make a big fat profit) and the government than slavishly paying grants to students. How those grants are being paid precisely does not matter, what matters is that the government spends money on things they have no control over, until it has been sucked dry.
"nobody knows for sure if CEOs are paid "too much" "
There aren't enough hours in a day to "earn" as much as those CEOs are getting, not even if Stephen Hawking was your dumber brother. As Damien pointed out the POTUS makes (far) less than the average CEO, while the POTUS is in more danger, has more responsibilities and runs a larger, more complex organization, in fact the average American CEO makes more than the leaders of the G20 combined. Furthermore there are large differences between nations: Japanese and German CEOs make significantly less than American CEOs but their companies still kick ass. As to why CEO pay gets to be so high, there are theories about that, I'd say it's part corruption (via those perfect triangles), part tournament theory and part misconception (stock went up 20% after you became CEO therefore you made the company 20% richer, and similar BS ways of thinking).
POTUS isn't paid nearly as much as CEOs and faces a much higher risk of being killed in office. Situations doesn't seem nearly as abusive. Being able to vote on other issues, like going to war or suspension of civil liberties, might well be beneficial.
A huge problem of the US education system is that money flows through burocratic grants instead money being simply payed to the school for educating students.
If you want to look at the incentives of an agency think about how a person can make a career in the organisation.
An FDA official could make a career in the FDA by successfully putting E-cigarettes under regulations.
As a result it's plausible that the FDA pushes to regulates them.
You can't make a career in the FDA by standing up to big business and as a result that doesn't get regulated as strongly.