Me On PhilosophyTV

Here's me doing a video philosophy discussion with political philosopher Jason Brennan. It went pretty well, except that I was trying to compensate for tiredness with caffeine and it made me say "um" and "you know" every fifth word.

The first 35 minutes or so are on Jason's argument that the right to vote and the right to hold office don't usually benefit the individuals who have them. It actually strikes me as a pretty reasonable position once you get clear on exactly what Jason is saying. Since your vote is really unlikely to be decisive in winning the election and generating more policies that help you personally, it doesn't do a lot to improve your life. However, Jason is willing to say that others in your (racial, gender, religious, etc.) group having the vote helps you, because that's really what protects your interests. The point is just that the incremental addition to your personal welfare from your personally having the vote ends up being really small. The right to hold office, meanwhile, is a big thing for a few people who actually are professional politicians, but it doesn't play a big role in the rest of our lives. I think he's thought through a lot of these issues clearly, and as long as his conclusions don't get blown up into something bigger than his arguments can support, they're right.

The second half is my big defense of hedonism about value (the view that pleasure is the only good, which is part of my hedonic utilitarianism). Jason's basically interviewing me about my paper on that. There's also something funny that I'm doing every now and then during the second half of the video, but I'll let you discover that for yourself. Thanks to the nice people at PhilosophyTV for thinking it was amusing.

More philosophy content coming soon -- I'm on a philosophy podcast tomorrow night and the guy has written up some nice questions (including one involving Possible Girls).

Old People

Here's a chart Ezra posted about how different age groups have moved around this year in terms of their Congressional vote.

It brings to mind Matt Taibbi's awesome description from a Tea Party rally of "A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries." Of course, the old people who abandoned Democrats and generated the downward motion at the bottom of the chart are by definition a swing-voting group and not hardened Republican base voters who likely are showing up at the rally. But the contradiction in an elderly group pushing an antigovernment ideology -- well, that's real.

If Republicans win power and limit their attacks to the Affordable Care Act (which, after all, leaves people over 65 in the same condition they were in before) they may not alienate these voters. But there are elements in their party that want to go after Medicare and Social Security. They can't do that and hold on to power, as Newt Gingrich and the Social Security privatizers learned.

Better Than Your Average Ficus

The quality of regulatory oversight provided by some holdover Bush appointees would have been improved had they been replaced by ficus trees.

Readers may dimly recall that the Neil's chart-tastic sidekick does on occasion post here, sometimes on topics that don't even involve charts! One of those was the total awfulness of the former chair of the Office of the Comptroller of Currency, which, while nominally one of the many agencies regulating banking activity, had morphned into an oasis of bankster apologism. Thankfully, the rather odious head of the OCC resigned on August 14th, and even if his replacement had been a ficus, the ficus would probably have been more useful. Happily, John Walsh, the acting head of the OCC, seems to be better than a ficus, and has begun cracking down on the "foreclosure mills" that seem to be popping up to deal with the current wave of distressed mortgages.

Why Atheists Know More About Religion

I've seen a lot of my friends expressing surprise (or pride) at the recent survey result that atheists are more knowledgeable about religion than believers. This result held, as far as Pew could tell, even after controlling for levels of eduction.

A lot of factors go into this, of course. But I'd bet on one of the larger and more boring ones being that self-described atheists tend to think more about religion, on average, than believers. Plenty of people are just Catholic or Baptist or whatever by birth, go through the cultural motions, and don't really think about it. (My mom is this kind of Hindu.) As a mass cultural phenomenon, atheism is new enough that many percentage of its adherents embraced it themselves after personally exploring the issues. There's got to be a much lower percentage of first-generation Baptists than first-generation atheists, and the first generation is the one that cares.

I think this demographic explanation still leaves room for atheist triumphalism in the wake of the survey results.

I Take Credit For TARP

I'm proud of my early support for banking industry bailouts. One of my hopes was that we could buy cheap distressed assets and sell them for a profit while rescuing the economy. That may have happened, and if it didn't, we just about broke even.

Financial industry buddy Ó Coileáin tells me that we could've made even more money if we didn't let AIG renegotiate deals to its benefit and our detriment after we made them.