Laura Stevenson and The Cans - The Healthy One

Laura Stevenson's voice makes me imagine her as the doting mother of all my favorite indie rock stars. Cheery music, dark lyrics.

Does this happen often in books on ancient philosophy?

Sometimes your copy editor requests that you include an author's first name in the bibliography. But you have already included the author's full name, and it is "Aristotle".

Peter Railton meets fan

To conclude my talk in Belgium, I asked: what kind of normative ethics do you get if you base constitutivism on my Humean account of agency instead of a Kantian one? And then I stripped off my shirt to reveal my jersey and said: "You get Peter Railton's view!" It was my first time giving a talk with Peter in the audience and I was going to make the most of it. Thanks to Maarten Steenhagen for taking this picture of us!

Bentham on bestiality

Apparently there are credible allegations that British Prime Minister David Cameron had sexual relations with a dead pig as a member of a secret society in college. This provides a nice occasion to note Bentham's sensible discussion of bestiality in 1785:

Bestiality
An abomination which meets with as little quarter as any of the preceding is that where a human creature makes use in this way of a beast or other sensitive creature of a different species. A legislator who should take Sanchez for his guide might here repeat the same string of distinctions about the vas proprium and improprium, the imaginations and the simultaneity and so forth. Accidents of this sort will sometimes happen; for distress will force a man upon strange expedients. But one might venture to affirm that if all the sovereigns in Europe were to join in issuing proclamations inviting their subjects to this exercise in the warmest terms, it would never get to such a height as to be productive of the smallest degree of political mischief. The more of these sorts of prosecutions are permitted the more scope there is given for malice or extortion to make use of them to effect its purpose upon the innocent, and the more public they are the more of that mischief is incurred which consists in shocking the imaginations of persons of delicacy with a very painful sentiment. 

Burning the animal
Some persons have been for burning the poor animal with great ceremony under the notion of burning the remembrance of the affair. (See Puffendorf, Bks. 2, Ch. 3, 5. 3. Bacon's Abridg. Title Sodomy. J.B.) A more simple and as it should seem a more effectual course to take would be not to meddle or make smoke [?] about the matter.

Election special in my political philosophy class

Singapore holds elections on Friday! After the election timing was announced in August, I changed the syllabus for my honors political philosophy seminar so that the students could do 5-minute presentations on election-related topics of interest to them, with 5 minutes for discussion.

So today students presented on the various parties' manifestos, lowering the voting age, Max Weber, gerrymandering, Singapore's (awful) treatment of single mothers, and many other things -- some concrete and some abstract. There was a pretty even split of support for the ruling PAP and the opposition coalition, with a few people arguing forcefully for one party or another and many people in the middle or making broader points. I'm proud that my class can be a venue for smart students in a young democracy to discuss important issues before an election.

Google logo thoughts

This was a good redesign. Google likes to present itself as brilliant and innocent like a genius kindergardener. The primary school primary colors and Google Doodles are part of that image. Now the logo is a bit more elementary school to match. I'm not sure about the tilted 'e', which looks out of place, but it does have a bit of a happy and optimistic vibe. The old 'g' never seemed right to me, and now it's fixed. 

Liquidity

The Bank of Japan prints Yen, so the Yen falls against the Singapore dollar, so it's cheap to fill my fridge with Asahi and have a party! Germans take note: the role of central banks is to provide cold smooth delicious liquidity.

When my head of department came to the party, he remarked that this was less like taking advantage of a sale and more like commodities trading.

Chuck Schumer would be a nuclear disaster as Senate Democratic Leader

A few months ago, some lobbyists told me that Chuck Schumer was likely to become Senate Democratic Leader after Harry Reid steps down. This had me deeply disappointed. A lot of Schumer's rise to the leadership has involved getting money from Wall Street (his home state is New York) and using it to buy power within the Democratic Party. But it didn't look like there was any way to stop his rise. I'm generally a look-on-the-bright-side kind of guy, so I tried to content myself with the thought that we might make progress on other issues by using his ill-gotten money to maintain control of the Senate, even if he blocked financial regulation and higher taxes on the financial sector. It didn't really work -- those issues are important.

Now he's announced that he's going to vote against President Obama's astoundingly good Iran treaty. And he's spreading misinformation that originated on Fox News and other right-wing media sites against the treaty. His claim that "you have to wait 24 days before you can inspect" is highly inaccurate -- there are lots of ways for inspections to happen faster than 24 days even if Iran doesn't want them to, and if Iran tries to delay the inspections repeatedly, there are mechanisms for the international community to reimpose sanctions. As arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis writes,

Some of us might think it’s good that the agreement puts defined limits on how much Iran can stall and explicitly prohibits a long list of weaponization activities. Opponents, like Schumer — apparently for want of anything better — have seized on these details to spin them into objections. A weaker, less detailed agreement might have been easier to defend against this sort of attack, perhaps. 

... The claim that inspections occur with a 24-day delay is the equivalent of Obamacare "death panels." Remember those? A minor detail has been twisted into a bizarre caricature and repeated over and over until it becomes "true."

This treaty isn't just important for eliminating the threat that Iran will use nuclear weapons -- it's important for preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East where nations like Saudi Arabia build nuclear weapons to deter Iran. In such an unstable region, the fall of a nuclear-armed state could easily put nuclear arms in the hands of some people who could do a great deal of harm. Perhaps Schumer's solution to those problems will be along the lines of his 2002 vote of support for the Iraq War. (Hillary Clinton, who also voted for the Iraq War, supports the Iran nuclear treaty.)

Fortunately, the Democratic wing of the Democratic party is mobilizing against his ascension to the party leadership. I don't know whether they'll be able to stop him, as he looked certain to succeed Harry Reid until recently. But it matters a great deal, and I'm more confident in the need to keep Schumer out of the leadership than in my opinions on the Democratic primary. I'll explain why.

I think Bernie Sanders has a small but real chance of defeating Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary. If both sides play perfectly, she wins by coming out with enough interesting left-wing policy that she doesn't alienate the Democratic primary electorate on substantive issues, and electability issues and her enormous funding put her over the top. But campaigns don't always do a perfect job, and she fails to make reasonable-looking leftward moves, she could lose. Obviously we need to see a lot more general election polling to figure out whether Sanders could defeat Walker or Bush or (this probably won't happen, but...) Trump in a general election, but if the polling doesn't make a good case for Sanders, I can see a lot of Democrats being worried about whether he can win when the time comes. And it's so terrifying to imagine a national version of what Scott Walker did to Wisconsin that it could be a rational decision to play it safe with Hillary rather than going for the big risk/reward with Sanders.

But set all that aside. Suppose we're watching a Bernie Sanders inauguration in January 2017, and we have a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress! This would be an utterly spectacular outcome. You'd expect awesome legislation to follow. Except it turns out that Bernie can't get meaningful financial regulation through Congress, and also can't make progress on a variety of foreign policy issues, because Schumer is obstructing financial regulation and peace in the Middle East as Senate Majority Leader. As far as I can tell, this is what ends up happening in a Sanders administration, if the Schumer ascension goes through as planned and the Senate is in the hands of someone more conservative than Hillary Clinton with oceans of Wall Street money behind him. And that's why it's so important -- perhaps more important than the Clinton/Sanders primary -- that Schumer be stopped. 

The 10 most harmful jobs

My friends at 80,000 Hours try to calculate what the most socially beneficial jobs are, for career advising purposes. The site is called 80,000 Hours because that's the amount of time the average person spends on work over their lifetime. 

They recently put up a post about the 10 most harmful jobs. The list includes weapons research, tax minimization for super-rich people, and patent trolling. (These and the others strike me as sensible choices.) Also interesting is their discussion of jobs that they considered but didn't put on the list.

Singapore's government built transit infrastructure, and the infrastructure built Singapore

Today is the 50th anniversary of Singapore's founding, and a day of massive celebration. As part of the festivities, everyone gets free rides on public transit today. The government keeps buses and subways very cheap here by any other First World city's standards, so it doesn't make much of a difference. You can go from one end of the island to the other on the subway for under 2 US dollars, with shorter journeys under $1. But it's been fun to watch people board city buses and smile a little about getting something literally for free.

Western media sometimes describes Singapore as having a fundamentally capitalist economy. I wish they'd tell people that everyone rides elephants to work here instead. That would be equally false, but much more entertaining. From transit to health care to food to housing, the best things about this island have been built with a great deal of government involvement and planning -- often at levels unheard of in the US. Going into detail about health care, food, and housing (80% of Singaporeans live in government-owned public housing!) would prevent me from watching National Day festivities with my friends and drinking whiskey, so I'll just talk about transit for now.

Public transit systems everywhere are government projects, and Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit system (the subway) is no different. As far as I can tell, the hero of the MRT was a Minister named Ong Teng Cheong, who convinced the government to spend billions of dollars building it in the early 1980s. Here's Mr. Ong at the time, talking about what was to come:

"this is going to be the most expensive single project to be undertaken in Singapore. The last thing that we want to do is to squander away our hard-earned reserves and leave behind enormous debt for our children and our grandchildren. Now since we are sure that this is not going to be the case, we'll proceed with the MRT, and the MRT will usher in a new phase in Singapore's development and bring about a better life for all of us."

I also like his quote about positive externalities:

"the Government has now taken a firm decision to build the MRT. The MRT is much more than a transport investment, and must be viewed in its wider economic perspective. The boost it'll provide to long term investors' confidence, the multiplier effect and how MRT will lead to the enhancement of the intrinsic value of Singapore's real estate are spin-offs that cannot be ignored."

That's what happens when you build good transit. Lots of the stuff around major transit nodes becomes much more valuable, because people can easily access it and interact with it in positive-sum ways. They say that the three most important determiners of real estate values are location, location, and location. By building good transit, you can put huge immobile structures in a better location! Who knew that you could do that? Well, Mr. Ong did, and he made it a focus of Singaporean government policy.

If anyone wants to see a map of the MRT system, here it is in all its interconnected subway glory:

There's basically no way to get everyone where they're going in this place with cars. The island is basically 20 miles east-west and 15 miles north-south with 5-6 million people, so if everyone had a car you'd probably have to pave the entire island for them to get anywhere. That's why Singapore imposes car taxes of epic proportions. To buy a car, you have to pay a tax that's usually around 100% of the car's value. On top of that, you have to buy a "Certificate of Entitlement" to own the car for ten years, and those usually go over $50K apiece in USD. In the end, owning a Toyota Prius will cost you over a hundred thousand US dollars. The government rakes in the revenue from rich people who have lots of money to blow on cars, and then pours it back out into building transit for people who don't have cars.

I'd say that Singaporean transit is every US lefty urban planner's dream come true, but that isn't quite accurate. Their wildest dreams fall far short of the Singaporean reality.