Hayden’s Straw Man Argument on “Interrogation Deniers”

by Roger Koppl

In a Wall Street Journal op ed of 2 June 2011, General Michael Hayden, director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009, compares “interrogation deniers” to “birthers” and “truthers.”  Hayden’s op ed mischaracterizes the basic claim of those who say torture is not effective, substitutes insult for argument, and includes a non sequitur worthy of the old joke that that “military intelligence” is an oxymoron.

Hayden defines “interrogation deniers” as “individuals who hold that the enhanced interrogation techniques used against CIA detainees have never yielded useful intelligence.”  Talk about a straw man!  I suppose there must be some “interrogation deniers” as defined by Hayden, and I suppose some of them are out there floating in the wide waters of the Internet, waiting for someone to cut and paste.  But I don’t know of any examples, and their possible existence at the margins of public discourse has no bearing on the public question.   As Glenn Greenwald noted on May 4th,  “Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers.”  No.  “[T]he point has always been — as a consensus of interrogations professionals has repeatedly said — that there are far more effective ways to extract the truth from someone than by torturing it out of them.”

Confusion Masquerading as Science? Taxes and Spending

by Mario Rizzo

I am always amazed that when many economists give policy advice the sophistication and logical rigor that the discipline so values gets completely lost.

There are many ways to interpret this. One is that the level of precision appropriate to theory and to applied economics is not appropriate to the “art” of economic policy. Of course, I would suggest that maybe this teaches us something about the ultimate value of sophistication in the theoretical product. Do the precise concepts of theory and applied economics have referents in the “real world”? Or is most of the precision lost when we try to understand the world and recommend policies? This is an important question.

However, here I am interested in the sloppiness of the policy-relevant discussions that even very good and respectable economists produce. One interesting example is a recent “Economix” piece in The New York Times by the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt.

I have two points: first, the confusing mix of science and value judgments; and second, the naïve analysis of the political process.

Moral Trial and Error

by Mario Rizzo

The recent discussion-thread at the blog Coordination Problem regarding a Hayekian case for same-sex marriage got me thinking more generally about moral evolution.

In a market there is a process of trial and error. New products or methods of production come into existence. Some fail; others succeed. Some speculators make successful predictions of the future course of prices; others make mistakes. In general, the filter for these decisions is the profit and loss mechanism.

F.A. Hayek famously argued that the evolution of institutions, including moral and legal rules, follows a similar course, that is, trial and error. And yet the analogy with market processes is far from perfect. How do we view the trial and error process of moral rules? What is the filtering mechanism?

Right off, let me say that I do not have definite answers to these questions. I simply have some relevant thoughts.

Risky Behavior at Wittenberg

by Chidem Kurdas

Watching Wittenberg at the Pearl Theater in New York took a group of us back to our graduate school days. This is a surprisingly entertaining comedy, creating merriment out of a mash of classical characters, modern themes and serious philosophy.

The year is 1517.  Two academics at Wittenberg University, Martin Luther and John Faustus, are more or less cordial colleagues but intellectual antagonists.

Both are dissatisfied. Dr. Faustus holds four graduate degrees – in medicine, law, philosophy and theology – but has found all this knowledge lacking. On top of that, the woman he loves leaves him.  Father Luther detests the Church’s selling of indulgences but feels he can’t do anything about it. Their star pupil, a Danish prince named Hamlet, is confused.

The Dilemma of Obamacare

by Mario Rizzo  

The very factors responsible for the passage of Obamacare may make it impossible to fund it adequately. There are certain myths about medical care that make it difficult to contain costs. The central myth, in not very exaggerated form, is that any care less than the best for anyone is the result of a contrived scarcity. If insurance companies were not so greedy for profit people could have the best care they deserve.  

Taxi Tipping: Why?

by Mario Rizzo  

Every so often people become annoyed about tipping expectations, especially in New York. It is hard not to become annoyed because prices here are already so high relative to other parts of the country. And it is also often the case that service, regardless of what you do ex post, is perfunctory.  

Why am I tipping the cab driver whom I shall not see again? I tip cabdrivers very small amounts because they really don’t do anything more than drive the cab. They are not especially careful drivers. Frequently, they don’t know where things are and you then must give them instructions. Furthermore, there are now all sorts of surcharges for evenings, rush hours, and even a tax to support the inefficiently-run mass transit system that I am not taking when I ride in a taxi.  

Bonuses: An Annoyed Analysis

by Mario Rizzo  

I understand why many people feel it is unfair for bailed-out banks to pay big bonuses. But the simple truth is the banks were bailed out on the grounds that their possible failure was an issue of systemic risk. The collapse of the financial system was threatened. So the bailouts, as the story goes, prevented that. 

Thus the “American people” benefitted to the extent that the financial system was saved. And that, if accurate, is an enormous benefit to us all.  

Virtuous Capitalism

by Jerry O’Driscoll 

Over at the Austrian Economists, Steve Horowitz has posted a challenging statement and asked for reactions: “The great virtue of the free market is that it requires so little virtue to work effectively.”  The thrust of the responses is that defenders of free markets have had little to say about virtue (at least since Adam Smith).  

In a brilliant paper for APEE a few years ago, Liberty Fund’s Doug den Uyl asked whether we need ethics if we have free markets. That is a broader question, but on point.  Do markets discipline transactors to act virtuously and ethically?  Many would be tempted to answer affirmatively, but that would be facile. (Doug is not facile.)  

Moral Relativism

by Gene Callahan

I’ve long been chagrined about the fact that, whenever someone points out that it was wrong, say, for the United States to annihilate a quarter of a million civilians in Japan in 1945, that person is accused, by some “patriot,” of “moral relativism,” as if condemning an act equally whoever does it is “relativism”! So I was very happy to see Glenn Greenwald making the same point today:

“Perhaps the ultimate confusion is that ‘the Left’ has long been accused of ‘moral relativism’ for pointing out the use of these terms when the essence of ‘moral relativism’ is judging an act not based on what it is, but on who is doing it. It’s the adolescent self-love of believing that ‘X, by definition, is good when I do it and bad when you do it.’”

The Political Element In Empirical Data?

by Mario Rizzo  

In a recent article in the Financial Times Joseph Stiglitz argues for a more comprehensive measure of social well-being than Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  

As all principles of economics students know, GDP leaves out many interesting things. When I was a student the prime example was: When a man marries his paid housekeeper GDP falls. I am not sure how to adjust this if the housekeeper is also a man and they move to a state with gay marriage. Humor aside, you get the point. GDP misses stuff.  

Nevertheless, Stiglitz has bigger fish to fry. This is just a sample:  

“What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong metrics, we will strive for the wrong things. In the quest to increase GDP, we may end up with a society in which most citizens have become worse off. We care, moreover, not just for how well off we are today but how well off we will be in the future. If we are borrowing unsustainably from this future, we should want to know.” 

Did I get all the “we’s”?