JayB

Yes. Say there sport, when your aren't boning up on the counterhegemonic subtexts in meta-critical discourses and whatnot, you should dedicate yourself to finding a means of coordinating supply and demand that does so more efficiently than the price mechanism, and that enables one to quantify and restrain the missallocation of productive resources more effectively than profits and losses. Should keep you busy for a semester or two. That aside, glad to see that everyone completely missed the guy's point - but in a way, the responses here have been a more concrete vindication of his arguments and perspective than anything that I could have come up with.

What I find most interesting about Economics is even among the presumed masters of the craft, not to mention the mere literate, there is a substantially disparate group of ferociously defended opinions on the relative merit of various policies. How people pick and choose those is terribly amusing Kind of like the creationists presuming that technical disagreements about the particulars of evolution amongst scientists vindicate their contention that it never occured. Or the great lament that the great unwashed choose to align themselves with a vocal minority that disputes the informed consensus on climate change. Sorry - but trade barriers, subsidies, price controls, etc. are the economic equivalent of creationism. Biology had Lysenko, economics has its equivalents. I agree though, who people align themselves with is revealing.

Did either of you listen to the speech? Hard to tell from the comments. I'm sorry - although most people are probably quite relieved to hear - that I am just too busy to respond to anything at length today. Some of the Islamist activity fits into neat framework of political violence motivated by concrete grievances that are amenable to negotiated settlements by national powers. Others - like the murder of Theo Van Gough and the "Mohammad Cartoon," episode clearly are not - unless you were to frame the editor of the paper that published them as "the occupier" and Muslim sensibilities as "the occupied" - and Rushdie makes the fact that his commentary in the speech is concerned with the latter of the two phenomena quite clear. I think that you could probably listen to half of the mp3 in the time that it took to crank out a single post. Carl - I could think of no more effective means to discredit Von Hayek than for Sach's to embrace his ideas. Most scientists, like most doctors, are economically illiterate, yet presume otherwise, so it's no surprise that he chose to publish this essay in SciAm as opposed to "The American Economic Review."

You're welcome. It just sounded to me like you were responding to a set of talking points from the Project for a New American Century, instead of what someone who is intimately familiar with the subject on a personal level, and would probably agree with most of your points, has to say.

The ideas under discussion in this thread are those of Salman Rushdie, who is emphatically not a neocon nor a professional apologist for America. Instead of addressing his arguments, you provided a "Yeah, but the Neocons...." response, which I think is rather telling. If you care to acquaint yourself with what the guy is actually saying, and respond to those, I've provided the links.

I think that if you have some time to plug this url: http://libsyn.com/media/pointofinquiry/10-27-06.mp3 into your browser and let the podcast play in the background while you are at work, or in Prole's case - writing fan mail to bell hooks asking for an 8.5x11 glossy during recess/between lectures - you will probably hear Rushdie's answers to most of the questions that you've posted. The lead-in features Ibn Warraq, and Rushdie comes in about 15-20 minutes into the podcast.

I happened to come across this speech by Rushdie the other day where he holds forth on this subject for a half-hour or so. Rushdie MP3 There's a ton of other great audio content available on this site that should appeal to quite a few folks on this site. Check it out here: http://www.pointofinquiry.org/?page_id=72"

Not state sanctioned slavery. But if you want to use that as a measure, a labor contractor for farm workers was convicted of slavery within in the late 1990's right here in the good ole' U.S. of A. The 'other kind' happens here, too. Slavery was abolished in these nations in these years: Sweden, including Finland: 1335 (but not until 1847 in the colony of St Barthélemy) Portugal: 1761 England and Wales: In practice, 1772, as a result of Somersett's case; although the legal effect of this was much more limited; see Slavery at common law Scotland: 1776 as a result of Wedderburne's case[1] Vermont: 1777, Commonwealth of Vermont, an independent republic created after the American Revolution, on July 8th 1777. Vermont joined the United States of America in 1791. Haiti: 1791, due to a revolt among nearly half a million slaves Upper Canada: 1793, by Act Against Slavery France (first time): 1794-1802, including all colonies (although abolition was never carried out in some colonies under British occupation) Chile: 1811 partially, and in 1823 for all who remained as slave and "whoever slave setting a foot on chilean soil". Argentina: 1813 Gran Colombia (Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela): 1821, through a gradual emancipation plan (Colombia in 1852, Venezuela in 1854) Mexico: 1829 British Empire: 1833, including all colonies (with effect from 1 August 1834; in East Indies from 1 August 1838) Mauritius: 1 Feb 1835, under the British government. This day is a public holiday. Denmark: 1848, including all colonies France (second time): 1848, including all colonies Peru: 1851 Romania: 1855 The Netherlands: 1863, including all colonies, but kept using 'Recruits' from Africa until 1940 The United States: 1865, after the U.S. Civil War (Several states abolished slavery for themselves at various dates between 1777 and 1864) Puerto Rico 1873 and Cuba: 1880 (both were colonies of Spain at the time) Brazil: 1888 Korea: 1894 (hereditary slavery ended in 1886) Zanzibar: 1897 (slave trade abolished in 1873) China: 1910 Burma: 1929 Ethiopia: 1936, by order of the Italian occupying forces (see Second Italo-Abyssinian War). After Ethiopia regained independence in 1942 during World War II, Emperor Haile Selassie did not re-establish slavery. Tibet: 1959, by order of the People's Republic of China Saudi Arabia: 1962 Mauritania: July 1980 (still formally abolished by French authorities in 1905, then implicitly in the new constitution of 1961 and expressly in October of that year when the country joined the United Nations), actually still practiced

I'd encourage you to learn why Phelps and others of his standing oppose minimum wage laws and think that there are better mechanisms for achieving the same goal. My "plan" was more of a thought experiment to get people to think about who actually bears the brunt of the costs imposed by this policy. Swap Microsoft programmers getting a minimum of $200K for burger flippers getting $15 an hour if you like, the key problem remains the same - forcing employers to pay wages that exceed the economic value generated by their employees will not benefit the employer or the employee. Not so sure this is a strawman. Just ask the guys working for GM. As far as the price of gas and the gas-pump jockey is concerned, this is an interesting case. For the sake of simplicity, assume fixed gas consumption and mandatory full-service. Prices go up, people pay more, and no gas-jockeys lose their jobs. However, just because gas jockeys have a protected job, this doesn't mean that increasing prices will lead to no job losses. When non-discretionary spending goes up, discretionary spending goes down - unless real wages increase by the same amount as expenses - and people are left with the choice of either assuming more debt, putting less money away in savings, or reducing their discretionary spending. Folks who make their living in industries fueled by discretionary spending will eventually sustain job losses that are proportional to the reduction in the amount of money that people have to spend on whatever it is that they produce. And even though the gas jockey might have a protected job, most or all of the nominal increase in his salary will be wiped out by the higher prices that he'll pay for the consumer goods that he spends most of his meager income upon. I actually don't support the idea of a minimum income, but it seems like this is the idea behind most people's support for minimum wage laws. I think Phelps has a better idea, and although his Nobel Prize doesn't make him infallible, I hope it will at least give him a wider audience.

Glad we settled that.

You're kidding right? Is this really how power works in the real world!? I really hope this is a typo. If not, you're better off sticking to supply/demand diagrams and Milton Friedman quotations. If the recognition of minority rights was only contingent upon their power to assert them in direct contravention of a ruthless majority's wishes, then people who found themselves in the numerical minority would never succeed in securing them. When they succeed it's not because those in power lack the capacity to subjugate them, but because they lack the desire to do so. They lack the desire to do so only when subjugating them entails political costs that they are unwilling to bear, namely those which undermine the continuation of their particular party's, class', family's, cabal's, tribe's, etc. power. It is when minority wishes threaten to become mainstream demands that entrenched power takes notice. This, and the fear of this: has provided more incentive for "moral reawakening" than enlightened despots suddenly "seeing the light". You are obviously an intelligent guy, so I hope that one day you aspire to use your intelligence for something more worthwhile than serving as the intellectual equivalent of the towel-boy, or more aptly - the cookie - in Foucault's ideological S&M dungeon where nothing matters except "power relations." Thankfully the leaders of the civil rights movement heeded wiser council than your own and correctly predicted the outcome of an all-out race war waged against the other 90% of society, and chose a moral crusade over a millitant suicide mission. History is full of examples of ruthless minorities that have held subject populations in check indefinitely, but none that I am aware of where a ruthless majority has been brought to heel by a determined minority. If the only perogative that the white majority in this country responded to was power and they were as ruthless and machiavellian as you suggest and seem to believe, then Jim Crow laws would have never gone away. Clearly,and thankfully, MLK did not believe this. How to explain this perspective? Perhaps these political revenge-fantasies are some kind of an intellectual hangover from a youth spent getting one's ass stuffed into a locker - which might explain their enduring popularity amongst academics Have fun playing with words, living the life of the cloistered parlor-radical, and "transgressing the heteronormative boundary conditions" and all that. Yawn.

Good to make the distinction about groups who use violence. In each of these three groups history, they had violence brought upon them. In each of these three cases, it was our government who orchestrated that violence. And I am not sure what your second point is: that dumb girls, stupid niggas, and lazy workers (or, gasp, middle easterners) would have never thought that all people were created equal and should have equal say in how they are governed if they hadn't read that shit that these brilliant white guys wrote? Come on. The fact that it was a bunch of white guys was an accident of history, rather than any particular merit associated with their race. If the orientation of the continents relative to the poles had been different, the distribution of relatively docile herd animals had been different, Roman millitary had been less ruthless and efficient, etc, etc, etc, then the conglomeration of historical accidents that lead to the evolution of these ideas may never have happened, or the people who happened to be around at the time and place where they had their long genesis probably would have been sporting a different complexion. You were the one who originally pointed out their race, not me, so I suspect I'm less fixated on this point than you. As for your second point - who knows whether they would have discovered them or on their own or not - but they were conspicously absent from the globe prior to their genesis in the West, which suggests that they were not entirely self-evident to all peoples at all times. Unless you think that polygamy, genital mutilation, and the female ninja-suit are halmarks of enlightened equality, present evidence suggests that even though people all over the world are aware of these ideas, their enthusiasm for translating them into a legally binding moral code that they impose on themselves varies widely. Pretending that women had nothing to do with their own liberation belittles the role of women in bringing about this outcome, but pretending that the social context that they were able to liberate themselves within belittles the role of society in this process.

The loss of employment will be proportional to the increase. I don't think anyone would argue that when an employer has to pay an employee $15 an hour for work that only generates $10 worth of value per hour, the employer will have to find a way to increase the value of the said person's output to a level that yields a profit, or fire the worker. The higher the wage, the more education and training is required to generate value that exceeds it. If anyone were to mandate a minimum wage for computer programmers of $200,000 per year, Microsoft would probably get rid of all but the most brilliant, highly educated, highly trained folks and source the work to people living somewhere where their pay reflected the true economic value of their contributions. For someone that's marginally literate and has no marketable skills, the hourly wages that most people are positing as "living wages" might as well be $200,000 per year, because under these circumstance the odds that that the cost of their labor will exceed its economic value are quite high. For folks at the very bottom of the economic ladder this is often true already. People who have been filling their gas tanks lately are probably also no strangers to the notion that as the price of something increases, so does the incentive to find ways to use less of it. Increasing the cost of labor and de-linking it from its real economic value will have this effect, and it will increase in direct proportion to the gap between what their forced to pay and what the labor-input is worth. Of the two alternatives, I like the subsizided wages better than a mandatory minimum wage because the costs become clear, and are no longer concentrated amongst the least employable people and small business owners. If the costs are clear and are at least partly coming out of the activist class's wallet, they'd have to ask some hard, concrete questions instead of thinking about these issues in terms of quasi-moral nebulosities like "economic justice." We'd have to ask who should get the benefit of a minimum income. Everyone, or just those with dependents under the age of 18? Is it really an economic injustice if the kid working at McDonald's to save up for an iPod is not paid an hourly-wage sufficient to sustain a family of four? What about the person who is working part time at a retail shop in order to keep busy and get out of the house, but is married to someone making $90K? I think if people had to think about these questions, and knew that they'd be footing the bill, they'd think mighty hard about who they wanted to extend this benefit to, just what constituted an acceptable minimum income, and how to increase real wages for the folks at the bottom.

The cost would be the difference between the sum total of wages earned by the people who earn less than the minimum income. The existing welfare bureacracy could administer the program. The employers that pay wages lower than those necessary to generate the minimum income report the wages, the government calculates the difference between the said wages and the minimum income, and issues a check for the difference. I didn't say that the program would be without costs or consequences, but those would be clear from the outset. If you want to establish a minimum income, be prepared to pay for it through higher taxes or fewer services, or both. This would probably focus people's thinking on ways to help people gain the skills and education necessary to earn a "living wage" on their own, rather than passing laws that make it harder for them to earn any wage at all.

Edmund S. Phelps says... Read Me And me... And Me... The main benefits from my perspective is that it makes the cost of these policies clear, which should foster some clear thinking about the costs and benefits associated with guaranteeing a minimum income, and transfers the costs away from the poorest, least skilled people and onto society as a whole.

This would only affect employers who offer wages that result in an income below the minimum, and could pretty easily be addressed by leaving the minimum wage where it is.

You are assuming that there are no costs associated with regulating the labor market in this manner. I don't think that most economists would agree with you. The costs associated with fixing the price of labor above the real value of the said labor are significant, but are not easy to measure because they are obscured by other variables and widely dispersed. The costs are also disproportionately borne by the poorest and least educated people in society. The benefit of my idea is that it makes it easy to directly calculate these costs. If people who see the real bill for this policy think it's too expensive, then they'd have the opportunity to asses whether or not they think that mandating a minimum income is still a good idea, and if so, how much they are personally willing to pay for it through higher taxes on themselves. People might also take an interest in figuring out how to raise real wages for people at the bottom of the social ladder, instead of advocating for policies that make them less employable and quickly inflate away the nominal value of their increased wages.

A minority encountering violence while conducting a campaign to achieve political ends is one thing, a minority conducting a violent campaign to achieve a political goal is quite another. If all that women or blacks or whoever had going for them was the power to coerce or intimidate, they would have gained nothing. The only reason that they ultimately succeeded in gaining recognition of their political rights is that their leaders recognized that appealing to the moral framework outlined in the nation's founding documents would be the most effective strategy. This made sense, sense they themselves were inspired by the ideals outlined in these documents. Take the same women, armed with the same documents, and transport them to 19th century Arabia and they'd have endured considerably more violence to considerably less political effect. Go one step further and ask yourself whether or not they'd have even been literate, much realize that such ideas existed, if they had born anywhere other than the West.

The Roth IRA limits were set under the Clinton administration in conjunciton with the Republican Congress, not the current Congress. The current democratic wave was a strong repudiation of the hardball, right wing tactics of the current administration. Pombo and Santourm are my favorite ousters. Some decent moderate Republicans got caught up in the tidal wave, but they did not have the stomach to stand up to their party leaders when it counted, so the public wanted a big change. The strangle hold that the republicans had on the legislative process was what allowed them to pass some really crummy laws and blow up the budget while keeping the party lockstep. And it was their ultimate downfall. I think the dems proposed laws for their early days, minimum wage, negoiated drug prices for Medicare, and stem cell research are good starts. Lets see if the republicans go along with the modest proposals and if Bush still wants to appeal to the Christian base with a veto. And hoorah!!! I have a good compromise on the minimum wage issue would be for the people who believe this actually results in a sustained increase in total real-wages to the least skilled and educated people, and has no effect their ability to get jobs. Since the real issue here is income, rather than wages, stipulate what you think the minimum income for anyone working a full-time job should be. Instead of forcing employers to pay higher wages, establish a minimum income, and have the government kick-in the difference between the minimum income and what the people who earn the lowest wages actually make. This would accomplish the social goals that most well-intentioned people who support a minimum wage are after, without directly resulting in a bunch of unintended consequences that actually hurt the people that a minimum wage is supposed to help, and would help overcome some of the social objections to welfare. It would also make the bill for this kind of policy clear and concrete, and this would make it easier for people to weight the costs and benefits of the policy.

Thanks for the recommendation. Try downloading the "pomposity filter" and "Plain english language interpreter". They're real time savers. Seems to be stuck in a recursive loop. This is a too bad, because I was actually looking forward to reading its "Secret History of the Petticoat Jihad." Tashwhatever as lead author, Prole as editorial assistant and towel-boy.

I yield to the mighty Quipatron.

You must have the model that doesn't come with the "effective counterargument" upgrade. Way to make the most of what you've got, though. Good job.

The only posture befitting the father of the dictionary.

He was making vague references to his favorite johnson, and I returned the favor by incorporating a vague reference to my own favorite Johnson.

Hey - it's the electronic version of "the radio game," - being played by an adult. Clever stuff. "He thought he was a Lord amongst wits, but it turned out that he was only a wit amonst Lords."