Ban the word "incentivise" and stop the monetization of everything

Right from my graduate school days, I have maintained a love-hate relationship with economics and the logic of markets in every aspect of our lives.  My roommate, Avu, who was also from Tamil Nadu, was at USC pursuing a doctoral degree in marketing and was a convert to the Milton Friedman and Hayek way of reducing everything to an utilitarian framework and a bottom-line of the price one is willing to pay.  While I enjoyed the intellectual argument, and often agreed with him, I knew well that it wasn't my religion. 

In my own studies, I opted to work with a professor who was clearly way more in favor of market forces than a couple of others were.  Even to this day, I am puzzled, and profoundly thankful, that he agreed to guide me along in the doctoral process even when it was clear to him that my philosophical preferences were elsewhere.

It is not that I hate the market.  I am no rabid socialist.  I understand what a wonderful tool that is in order to achieve a certain set of outcomes.  But, the logic of supply, demand, and price has its limits, and I detest any limitless application of those into every sphere of our lives.

Not aware of my bounded admiration for the market, faculty colleagues and students erroneously conclude that I am a right-wing free market enthusiast.  Don't judge a book by its cover, they say, and I seem to have one unattractive cover :)

My political position as a Libertarian-Democrat reflects this admiration from a distance of the market and economics.

Which is why I empathize with the sentiments expressed by Michael Sandel (ht):

Today, we often confuse market reasoning for moral reasoning. We fall into thinking that economic efficiency—getting goods to those with the greatest willingness and ability to pay for them—defines the common good. But this is a mistake.

I urge students not to simply mouth the rhetoric from what they have been told about the market or the state or religion, but to instead learn and think about other interpretations as well.  And that is what Dierdre McCloskey notes, while critiquing Sandel's work:

Over the front door of the late-medieval city hall in the Dutch city of Gouda is the motto of the first modern economy, the first large society in which commerce and innovation instead of state regulation and social status were honored. It says, Audite et alteram partem—Listen even to the other side. It's good advice for a society of the bourgeoisie, and for a classroom for students of philosophy. 

I wonder if before I die I will ever settle this love-hate relationship one way or the other.  My guess is that I will carry these mixed feelings with me until the very end, which apparently happens at the eleventh hour :)

I read three wonderful essays/commentaries in two newspapers

Two from the Wall Street Journal, and one from the New York Times.

Two were about sports, and one was about life, liberty, and literature.

The only thing missing--hot coffee as I read them.  If it were at home, or even in my office, I would certainly have been on caffeine as I read them.  But, there I was in the university library, reading the paper the old-fashioned way, occasionally even folding the paper down.

The best of them all was about the reporter watching with Yogi Berra the baseball movie, Moneyball. Who doesn't like Yogi Berra, right?  Jason Gay has written a wonderful piece. In that, Gay notes:

Berra didn't earn a ton of money playing baseball. The game was different then. When Yogi was a 17-year-old prospect from St. Louis, he signed with the New York Yankees for $90 a month. When he returned from World War II, his first major league contract paid him $5,000 a year. Berra worked at Sears, Roebuck & Co. in the winter. He never made more than $65,000 in a season. He never had more than a one-year deal.
But no one squeezed more out of baseball—and gave more back —than Yogi. He played 18 seasons with the Yankees, appearing in 14 World Series, winning ten of them. A catcher, he was a 15-time All-Star, a three-time MVP.
"I was very lucky," Berra says softly.

If only we had more Yogi Berras and his charm and intelligence not only in sports, but in all aspects of life!

The other engaging sports story is as depressing as the Berra essay was uplifting.  It is about the exploding child abuse news out of Penn State.  What an unfortunate irony that the place is Happy Valley!

In contrast to Gay's final comment about Yogi Berra, "Look at the numbers. Look at the life. Yogi Berra is priceless" the equally old and accomplished Joe Paterno seems to be fading fast towards an ugly exit from Penn State:

Paterno has been at Penn State, as an assistant and the head coach, for 62 years, a record. Graham B. Spanier, the university president, was a faculty member and an administrator there from 1973 to 1982 and returned to lead the university in 1995; Curley graduated from Penn State in 1976 and has been the athletic director since 1993; and Schultz graduated from Penn State in 1971 and has worked there ever since. Ultimately, they all serve the monster that rises on 12 Saturdays a year.
The question is, if Paterno heard some ugly stuff about Sandusky in 2002, it is now 2011, and he seems to have not done anything about it since. Maybe he didn’t invite the guy to his house anymore. That I don’t know. But as far as alerting people to the possible predator tendencies of his former assistant, Paterno seems to have been silent. He had a game to coach. He had players to recruit.
...
This seems to be a common malady for big-time coaches. They get so puffed up with trying to go undefeated that they lose sight of reality. Just to run this kind of program demands moral blinkers.

Yes, serving "the monster that rises on 12 Saturdays a year" necessitates moral blinders of various sorts.  How awful!

At Penn State, it was even worse than prostituting education for the sake of a football powerhouse. The entire old-boy system in that university managed to overlook the possibility that children’s lives were being ruined, within the dangerous cocoon of King Football. We need to look beyond the alleged abuses. We need to look at the system that encouraged people to look the other way.
Really, we need to do something about big-time college sports. 

As I often remark in the introductory class that I teach, the market worries not about morals.  Given that we the people are the market, all of us serving this monster that rises up twelve Saturdays are also at fault for having encouraged college sports to become this godawful.

In a wonderful essay about liberty and literature, Mario Vargas Llosa talks up free market and liberty, even while noting that:

There are those who in the name of the free market have supported Latin American dictatorships whose iron hand of repression was said to be necessary to allow business to function, betraying the very principles of human rights that free economies rest upon. Then there are those who have coldly reduced all questions of humanity to a matter of economics and see the market as a panacea. In doing so they ignore the role of ideas and culture, the true foundation of civilization. Without customs and shared beliefs to breathe life into democracy and the market, we are reduced to the Darwinian struggle of atomistic and selfish actors that many on the left rightfully see as inhuman.

Llosa concludes:

The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another's rights. It is a search to which I've dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake.

Indeed.  This is no different from my position as a Libertarian Democrat. More than me, my parents remember all too well my teenage years as a Communist sympathizer before I, and as Llosa writes "abandoned the Marxist myths that took in so many of my generation."

So, there, three wonderful essays.  Read them. Share them.

A Libertarian-Democrat I am

Through the long and winding road of time and geography, I paused at, and passed, quite a few religious and secular isms.  Over the last few years, I have comfortably settled into a Libertarian-Democrat perspective on society.

While the respect and value for the individual and the contempt for intrusion into lives fuel the Libertarian me, I can not see myself signing up ever as a full-fledged Libertarian, primarily because of the concern for the disadvantaged, and the worries over the power that the military-corporate alliance has--the triggers for the Democrat in me.

As is probably the case for many of us in this corner of the political spectrum, two intellectuals helped me a lot in arriving here (even if it was only my half-baked understanding): George Orwell and Robert Nozick.

It was, thus, a pleasure to read this lengthy critique of Nozick's philosophy, and of full-throated libertarianism. The final paragraphs are way too good to summarize:

Calling yourself a libertarian is another way of saying you believe power should be held continuously answerable to the individual's capacity for creativity and free choice. By that standard, Thomas Jefferson, John Ruskin, George Orwell, Isaiah Berlin, Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, and even John Maynard Keynes are libertarians. (Orwell: "The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians." Keynes: "But above all, individualism … is the best safeguard of personal liberty in the sense that, compared with any other system, it greatly widens the field for the exercise of personal choice.") Every thinking person is to some degree a libertarian, and it is this part of all of us that is bullied or manipulated when liberty is invoked to silence our doubts about the free market. The ploy is to take libertarianism as Orwell meant it and confuse it with libertarianism as Hayek meant it; to take a faith in the individual as an irreducible unit of moral worth, and turn it into a weapon in favor of predation.

Another way to put it—and here lies the legacy of Keynes—is that a free society is an interplay between a more-or-less permanent framework of social commitments, and the oasis of economic liberty that lies within it. The nontrivial question is: What risks (to health, loss of employment, etc.) must be removed from the oasis and placed in the framework (in the form of universal health care, employment insurance, etc.) in order to keep liberty a substantive reality, and not a vacuous formality? When Hayek insists welfare is the road is to serfdom, when Nozick insists that progressive taxation is coercion, they take liberty hostage in order to prevent a reasoned discussion about public goods from ever taking place. "According to them, any intervention of the state in economic life," a prominent conservative economist once observed of the early neoliberals, "would be likely to lead, and even lead inevitably to a completely collectivist Society, Gestapo and gas chamber included." Thus we are hectored into silence, and by the very people who purport to leave us most alone.

Thanks in no small part to that silence, we have passed through the looking glass. Large-scale, speculative risk, undertaken by already grossly overcompensated bankers, is now officially part of the framework, in the form of too-big-to-fail guarantees made, implicitly and explicitly, by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, the "libertarian" right moves to take the risks of unemployment, disease, and, yes, accidents of birth, and devolve them entirely onto the responsibility of the individual. It is not just sad; it is repugnant.

Is Nicholas Kristof a Libertarian Democrat?

I have blogging for a while on various issues that place me in a narrow slice of the political spectrum: Libertarian Democrat.

It is an absolutely fascinating political point of view that, unfortunately, does not get enough recognition. 
Here is a recent example of a libertarian-Democrat position--Nicholas Kristoff, who is well known for his coverage of all things painful that we would rather be in denial about, says it is time to legalize pot (I wonder if Kristof would label himself a libertarian Democrat):

on Tuesday, California voters will choose to go further and broadly legalize marijuana. I hope so. Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did, and California may now be pioneering a saner approach.

Unfortunately, it does not look like Californians will begin the end to this insane war on drugs.

Don't vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards

"Politics is a vulgar fucking subject," O'Rourke writes by way of apology for his repeated swearing. "I have resorted to barnyard words because of the amount of bullshit, horseshit and chickenshit involved in politics,"

O'Rourke seems to be channeling his inner George Carlin :)

I heard him earlier this morning on NPR, and absolutely loved the way he described the politics of climate change; I find it at the Guardian, too:

Take his intentionally short chapter on the issue of climate change. It is one page and begins with the words: "There's not a goddamn thing you can do about it." By way of explanation he adds: "There are 1.3 billion people in China and they all want a Buick." He accuses western leftists of being self-deluding hypocrites when they raise taxes on people wealthier than themselves as a way of creating a more just society. It depends on your perspective, he argues, pointing out that even a poor westerner is unimaginably rich to a developing world slum-dweller."You're farting through silk as far as that person in Karachi who's looking for a job as a suicide bomber is concerned ... let he who is without anything anybody wants cast the first vote," he writes.

I have blogged about this many times (like here), and have pointed out the hypocrisy of a few million affluent Westerners telling billions of poorer people around the world that they and their consumption are the problem!

Of course, there are a number of issues where I would part company with O'Rourke.  But, there is a lot of common ground between this libertarian-Democrat and O'Rourke's libertarian-Republican view of the world.

And, BTW, that George Carlin spiel on not voting?  No harm on re-blogging that one; too damn funny and serious all in one

What would a Libertarian-Democrat platform look like?

I suppose I run into problems with unprofessional obnoxious arrogant ideological loud faculty leaders on campus not because I am from the conservative right, but because I am a libertarian-Democrat.  The flavor of libertarianism that runs counter to many of the issues that are near and dear to the social-Democrats and self-professed Socialists ....

What might be in brief the guiding principles of a libertarian-Democrat approach to social organization and governance?  Here is Terry Michael:

The government should assure liberty by staying as far away as possible from our bank accounts, our bedrooms, and our bodies. Spread pluralistic democracy and free markets by example, understanding that neither can be planted by force on political real estate lacking indigenous cultivators for their growth. Restore the moral authority of mid-20th century civil rights, fashioning public policy around individuals, not tribal identity groups.

More here on Michael's manifesto

My favorite libertarian-Democrat public intellectual? Camille Paglia, of course ... too bad for people like me that she has taken time off from public discourses ...