Re: Public School was a waste of my time (Re: When even a Republican can see it....)

In article <Hf6dnVHn3p5PF13bnZ2dnUVZ_sytnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Dave O'Neill" <daveon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"David Friedman" <ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

....

You need an alternative--some theoretical structure--to support the step
from "I saw some bad things happen due to Thatcher's policies" to
"Things were worse with Thatcher's policies than they would have been
without them."

There were countries which seemed to manage the transition better and with
less "catastrophic" social change than Britain. It suggests that there were
better alternatives, not perfect by any means but better. I had an
economics teacher who at the time was complaining about this. Interestingly
I didn't believe him. It was years later that I actually came across the
problems he had predicted first hand.

But without some theoretical structure you don't know whether:

1. They managed the transition better because their circumstances were
easier.

2. They appeared to manage the transition better, but there were large
non-obvious costs.

3. They managed the transition better because their policy differed from
that of the U.K. for reasons other than how laissez-faire it
was--perhaps even because it was more laissez-faire.

After all, the U.K. had nothing close to complete laissez-faire under
Thatcher.

....

And yet you appear so confident of your conclusion that you think I must
share it and that the only explanation for my supporting a more
laissez-faire policy must therefor be that I don't care about bad things
happening.

Again, not quite.

I really do struggle with how a person can support such measures if they've
seen what can happen and the impact it can have on an entire generation.
It's nice to have a theorectical framework to assuage ones guilt, but quite
another to have to look at the conquences first hand. The thing is, the
consequences are usually quite obvious and I do really struggle to
comprehend a person who doesn't really care about them because of some
"greater good".

I don't see why a theoretical structure is needed to assuage my
hypothetical guilt--without the theoretical structure I wouldn't be
supporting laissez-faire, so could take your position, leaving me with
no hypothetical guilt to assuage. It isn't as if I had any opportunity
to vote for (or against) Thatcher.

And I don't see how you get from my position, which is that a move to
greater laissez-faire is on net a good thing, to "doesn't really care
about them." I expect that if I had known people who were much worse off
because of Thatcher's policies I would have cared about them--since I
wasn't living in the U.K. the issue didn't arise--but I hope that caring
about them wouldn't have prevented me from supporting the policies if I
thought they on net did more good than harm. Do you disagree?

I'm not suggesting that I have a solution at all.

But you have been confidently asserting that my support for
laissez-faire shows I am heartless.

I have been saying that that is what it looks like to me. From these posts
you've admitted that you've not really had to deal with the economic fallout
of liberalisation face-to-face - which makes me wonder if you've ever really
thought about what happens to these people at all.

If you have, then yes, I do struggle with how you manage to do it.

Why? Do you support the existence of a U.K. military? Surely you know
that armies and airforces, when they actually get used, almost always do
things to people, some of them innocent, much worse than anything you
are talking about.

Would you similarly say that a
doctor who recommended turning off life support on a brain dead patient
was heartless? It would certainly look that way if one had no
theoretical structure to explain what was happening. How about a parent
or a physician who insists on a child taking medicine that tastes bad? A
British bomber pilot in WWII?

You equate this to a moral decision or a war?

In all of these cases, someone is doing something that has obvious bad
effects. Without some way of making sense of why he is doing it and what
the effects, including the non-obvious ones, are, you can't tell whether
he should be doing it or not. Yet you seem to think, in the particular
case of liberalization, that you can make such a judgement without any
such theoretical structure.

....

If governments stopped subsidizing higher education quite a lot of them
would face outcomes similar to that.

How about if you weren't the son of a famous economist and just another guy
like them?

Hypothetically, you'd be happy with you never being able to teach again? Or
face the rest of your career packing pizzas?

To begin with, your question was about facing other people.

And I didn't say I would be happy with it--either the effects on them or
on me. Only that I would be in favor of it.

Suppose you were a Russian aristocrat in the 19th century with lots of
serfs. Would you be happy with the abolition of serfdom--which, we may
assume for the sake of arguments, would make you and lots of your
friends much worse off? Does the answer to that tell us anything at all
about whether the abolition of serfdom was a good or bad thing? Do you
really want to argue that northern abolitionists must have been
heartless for ignoring the terrible effects that abolition would have on
southern slaveowners? That's what the logic of your argument implies.

Whether something makes me and my friends worse off, even much worse
off, doesn't tell us whether it is, on net, a good or bad thing.

....

What I find most interesting is you claim to know so little about other
systems and countries and yet you argue so vociferously that Laissez Faire
is the only one true way.

The recent history of the U.K. is very important to you, but it isn't a
very large part of the relevant data.

....

It would be nice if we could consider people globally in all our
decisions,
but I don't think most people can, and the problem I have with the ideas
you're saying is that the evidence of the UK in the 80s doesn't really
match
the reality and our European neighbours handled the transitions better.

France, for instance?

To a certain extent yes.

France has a positive trade balance,

What does that have to do with how well off a country is?

a strong home grown manufacturing base
including French owned aerospace, automotive and consumer goods companies.
They have managed to have all that while actually doing a lot of things very
very badly in terms of liberalising other parts of their economy. I've
worked in France and for French companies and their actual work, when they
get around to it, is excellent.

They also appear, at least as seen from a distance, to have created a
permanent welfare class with high unemployment and a tendency to riot.
And it sounds as though the economy itself is pretty rigid.

There are a lot of problems built up in the economy, but they've managed to
maintain profitable manufacturing and still have a lot of slack in their
economy for growth.

"slack in their economy" being a good thing?

....

I think it's perfectly natural to care more about people one knows than
about strangers, but that one ought to try to compensate for that bias
in forming policy views. Otherwise you end up approving of everything
that helps your kind of people, and supporting the sort of polity where
everyone is trying to tax other people and subsidize himself and his
friends.

Yes, that's wrong too and it's certainly not what I have been advocating.

Thus, for instance, in the U.S. context, most politically liberal
academics support heavily subsidized higher education, despite the fact
that it represents, on net, a large transfer from the poorer to the less
poor and from the less talented to the more talented. The beneficiaries
are themselves, their colleagues, and their students--most of the people
they interact with--and the cost is paid by anonymous taxpayers.

As I've said, the US does a lot of things badly that other places seem to
manage (like healthcare) - it doesn't mean that the only alternative is to
stop tax funded services and let the market decide.

My point was rather about the results of following a policy of "it's
good if it's good for the people most visible to me." It's a very
natural thing to do, and I think a very large mistake.

--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of _Harald_, a fantasy without magic.
Published by Baen, in bookstores now
.

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