Well, this is a little unusual: I basically agree with the gist of Liam Murphy’s response to the Dan Klein essay I discussed in a post below. Coercion is either going to be a strictly descriptive term with, at most, indirect moral significance, or a morally loaded one. But in the latter case, your application […]

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Ross Douthat has a good roundup of the discussion sparked by Christopher Hitchens’ claim that Karl Rove is an atheist who typically characterizes himself (I’ll agree, somewhat condescendingly) as “not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.” I was actually discussing this very issue with a friend over the weekend, and as I said […]

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Speaking of coercion… is that you, Yglesias? The fact of the matter is that older teens are adults and that the essence of adulthood is being put in a position to make decisions – even bad decisions. To be in a position where one has to rely on advice from one’s friends and family rather […]

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Dan Klein has a long and interesting Cato Unbound essay that takes as its starting point the somewhat puzzling finding that more than half of economists in a recent survey believed that minimum wage laws were “not coercive in any significant sense.” Klein takes this result to be explained by the negative connotation of the […]

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That’s how my friend Will describes books that he hasn’t actually gotten around to reading, but about which he’s consumed so much of the secondary literature that he feels as though he has. (A Theory of Justice seems to be in this category for huge numbers of people—which quickly makes sense if you both understand […]

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I realize that the canons of journalistic objectivity preclude interspersing any coverage of the rabid opponents of evolutionary theory with periodic observations that they’re totally fucking crazy, but can we at least get a brief aside when they say something that’s just verifyably gibberish? To wit: “Both Nazism and communism were inspired by Darwinism,” [George […]

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I put together a little vlog to cap off my guest week at Democracy in America — since they’re having some trouble with embedding for the moment, I’ll mirror it here until it’s running there:

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Kerry notes that Garance Franke Ruta has proposed raising the age of consent for “providing erotic content on film” to 21. There’s a tiny part of me that half wants to see this happen just so I can watch the extent of GFR’s “That’s not what I meant!” freakout when some 21 year old woman […]

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This is just a phenomenally well-done music video, though arguably a couple years behind the cutting edge in GAP ads:

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First post is up over at DIA…

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