Blogs, Learning and the Minimum Wage

It always intrigues me to read print media pundits writing off blogs as shrill, derivative and poorly informed. It's true that a lot of blogs use articles from the print media as the basis for their posts (and so are, in a sense, derivative). But to me this seems to be a good thing; removing barriers to entry in the ongoing conversation that ought to be democracy and ensuring that large media outlets don't inevitably have the final word on that which matters.

As for being shrill and ill informed, this is very true - of some blogs (and New Zealand, alas, has more than its fair share of these). But, in the same way that the Sun is not the Financial Times, some does not mean all, and there are plenty of bogs out there which are incredibly well informed and also well mannered.

Crooked Timber is a case in point. To give but one example, this recent post on labour markets and the minimum wage by a guest blogger there is simply excellent. The author knows her stuff, as do most of the commenters. Which means that you'll read the post and learn more about the topic than you would in a year's worth of newspaper articles here; or a first year economics text book for that matter.

That does it! I'm leaving!!

Over at Public Address Danyl is contemplating a move across the ditch, tempted by the mountains of money he could be earning. For me the desire to emigrate is driven by something else entirely: the newspaper deficit. Ok, so the Age isn't the Guardian or even the New York Times, but it's

(a) well written
(b) somewhat socially aware
(c) not a pamphlet for the tax cut lobby

...which puts it in a league of its own compared to the Dom and the Herald.

Reminder

Use these posts to write something on Pigouvian taxes (and learn how to spell that word while you're at it!):

http://blog.greens.org.nz/index.php/2006/04/12/the-polluted-hand-of-the-market/
http://tvhe.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/why-is-the-nz-government-buying-the-rail-lines/
http://capitalismbad.blogspot.com/2006/04/invisible-hand.html

Utilitarianism Again

Of the many lists of things to do currently piling up in my life, one of the longer ones is 'Reply to posts on the Visible Hand in Economics'. While I disagree with quite a lot of what I read there, the content is always well written and well argued. And interesting.

But, alas, I speak economics only a little better than Portuguese, which - combined with the substantive nature of much that is blogged there - means that my responses need time; a scarce commodity at present.

Anyhow, a little while ago Matt responded to my post on the problems with utilitarianism*.

It's an interesting post and in the comments below he makes the very worthwhile point that people may actually feel better knowing that they live in a juster world and as such - to some degree - justice can be incorporated in people's utility functions.

In the post itself he makes two points which I don't think are quite right, though**.

1. The first of these is that utilitarianism somehow differs from other political philosophies in that it doesn't involve value judgments (claims that can't be perfectly anchored to deeper claims) about right and wrong. The trouble is that utilitarianism does do this: arguing that we should do what leads to the greatest good is a value judgment just like saying that we should concern ourselves with fairness as it might be reasonably construed behind a veil of ignorance. One of the strengths of utilitarianism is that the value judgment involved seems more intuitively defensible than, say, claims on absolute property rights, but value judgment it remains.

2. Matt suggests that we can mix concerns for justice (equity) with concerns for outcomes (efficiency) in our grand designs. I'm no expert but I just can't think of this - mixing consequentialist and non-consequentialist political philosophy - leading to anything but a philosophical mess. In saying this I'm not making a dig at Matt: in my day to day thinking I do exactly the same; in his ubiquitous first year econ. text book N Gregory Mankiw does it; and, heck, it's throughout our daily political discourse. But I just can't see how the mixture could ever be coherent and consistent.

Maybe I'm wrong and maybe there is a way to soundly mix deontology and consequentialism though. If there is, I'd love to hear it.


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* I'm still a utilitarian, remember - just a troubled one.
**And I'm neither an economist nor a philosopher so it may be me that is wrong here of course.