Philosophy – Page 17 – artdiamondblog.com

How Ayn Rand Matters Today

(p. A7) Ayn Rand died more than a quarter of a century ago, yet her name appears regularly in discussions of our current economic turmoil. Pundits including Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli urge listeners to read her books, and her magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged,” is selling at a faster rate today than at any time during its 51-year history.
. . .
Rand . . . noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism — and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention — and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.
Rand offered us a way out — to fight for a morality of rational self-interest, and for capitalism, the system which is its expression. And that is the source of her relevance today.

For the full commentary, see:
YARON BROOK. “Is Rand Relevant?” Wall Street Journal (Sat., MARCH 14, 2009): A7.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The Values of the Belgian Diamond Market

“Orthodox Jews have been at the center of Antwerp’s diamond trade since the late 19th century, when they fled Eastern Europe.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Markets will work better when a critical mass of participants hold certain core values, including those of tolerance and honesty.

(p. A11) ANTWERP, Belgium — Teetering on their bicycles or strolling amiably while chattering into cellphones in Yiddish, Dutch, French, Hebrew or English, the Orthodox Jews of this Belgian port city have set the tone of its lively diamond market for more than a century.

Hoveniersstraat, or Gardener’s Street, is the backbone of the market, where four-fifths of the world’s uncut diamonds are traded. It winds past the L & A Jewelry Factory and the office of Brinks, the armored car company, and on to the World Diamond Center just opposite the little Sephardic synagogue. On any given day but Friday, it is sprinkled liberally with Orthodox Jewish diamond traders, many of them Hasidim.
. . .
Ari Epstein, 33, is the son of a diamond trader, whose father emigrated from a village in Romania in the 1960s. “It’s a typical shtetl environment,” he said, wearing the yarmulke with a business suit. “It’s live and let live. Most important is to do business together and to be honorable.”

For the full story, see:
JOHN TAGLIABUE. “Antwerp Journal; Belgian Market’s Luster Dims, but Legacy Stays.” The New York Times (Tues., January 6, 2009): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“The market employs about 7,000 and creates work indirectly for another 26,000.” Source of the caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

The Future Is “a Whirlpool of Uncertainty”

(p. B1) Nearly all of us try forecasting the market as if each of the past returns of every year in history had been written on a separate slip of paper and tossed into a hat. Before we reach into the hat, we imagine which return we are most likely to pluck out. Because the long-term average annual gain is about 10%, we “anchor” on that number, then adjust it up or down a bit for our own bullishness or bearishness.

But the future isn’t a hat full of little shredded pieces of the past. It is, instead, a whirlpool of uncertainty populated by what the trader and philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “black swans” — events that are hugely important, rare and unpredictable, and explicable only after the fact.

For the full commentary, see:

JASON ZWEIG. “THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR; Why Market Forecasts Keep Missing the Mark.” Wall Street Journal (Mon., January 24, 2009): B1.

The reference for Taleb’s book, is:
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007.

A brief, idiosyncratic review of Taleb’s book, is:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “Review of: Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan.” Journal of Scientific Exploration 22, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 419-422.

Even Dogs “Have a Sense of Fairness”

For the full commentary, see:

Page, Clarence. “Vouchers and Obama Daughters.” Omaha World-Herald (Sat., Nov. 15, 2008): 7B.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“This series of photos from the National Academy of Sciences shows a dog being asked for its paw and obeying, left. In the second photo, the dog watches its partner in the experiment receive a food reward that it didn’t receive. In the third photo, the dog refuses to give its paw and avoids looking at the experimenter.” Source of caption and photos: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

(p. 2A) Ask them to do a trick, and they’ll give it a try. For a reward, they’ll happily keep at it.

But if one dog gets no reward and then sees another dog get a treat for doing the same trick, just try to get the first one to do it again.
Indeed, the animal may turn away and refuse to look at you.
Dogs, like people and monkeys, seem to have a sense of fairness.
. . .
In the experiments described in today’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Range and colleagues experimented with dogs that understood the command “paw” to place a paw in the hand of a researcher. It’s the same game as teaching a dog to “shake hands.”
. . .
The dogs sat side by side with an experimenter in front of them. In front of the experimenter was a divided food bowl with pieces of sausage on one side and brown bread on the other.
The dogs were asked to shake hands and could see what reward the other dog received.
When one dog got a reward and the other didn’t, the unrewarded animal stopped playing.

For the full story, see:
Associated Press. “It’s a Dog’s Life Only When Someone Else Gets Treat.” Omaha World-Herald (Tues., Dec. 9, 2008): 2A.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Schumpeter Poem on People Wanting to Be in Control of Their Lives

A few lines from an unpublished Schumpeter poem (written September 6, 1941) that McCraw quotes at length:

(p. 400) To live the lives which are our own
To manage our affairs
That’s what the people wanted

Source:
McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.

Do Not Apologize for Your Pursuit of Happiness

(p. A17) There is a whiff of hypocrisy here. Mr. Obama, who made $4.2 million last year and lives in a $1.65 million house bought with the help of the indicted Tony Rezko – and whose “elegant suits” and “impeccable ties” made him one of Esquire’s Best-Dressed Men in the World – disdains college students who might want to “chase after the big house and the nice suits.” Mr. McCain, who with his wife earned more than $6 million last year and who owns at least seven homes, ridicules Mr. Romney for having built businesses.

But hypocrisy is not the biggest issue. The real issue is that Messrs. Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is “self-indulgence,” that building a business is “chasing after our money culture,” that working to provide a better life for our families is a “narrow concern.”

They’re wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss. You have a right to seek satisfaction in accomplishment. And if you chase after the almighty dollar, you just might find that you are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do things that improve the lives of others.

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID BOAZ. “Our Collectivist Candidates.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 28, 2008): A17.

Americans Happy with Work if Advancement is Possible

Source of book image: http://www.arthurbrooks.net/images/book-2.gif

(p. A13) In “Gross National Happiness,” Mr. Brooks has assembled an array of statistics to measure the mood of America’s citizens and to discover the reasons they feel as they do. Most often he cites polls that ask for self-described happiness levels, matching up the answers with various beliefs, habits, life choices or experiences.
And what exactly is happiness? Who knows? The term might refer joy or contentment or moral self-approval or material well-being or appetitive pleasure – or some combination of them all. Mr. Brooks is aware of the problem. He says that Potter Stewart, the Supreme Court justice, could have been describing happiness when he said, of pornography, “I know it when I see it.”
. . .
He challenges those partial to tales about long-suffering Wal-Mart workers and surly burger flippers to rethink their victimology creed. The woe is not nearly as widespread as rumored: 89% of Americans who work more than 10 hours a week are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs while only 11% are not very satisfied or not at all satisfied. Most surprisingly, Mr. Brooks writes, there “is no difference at all in job satisfaction between those with below-average and above-average incomes.”
What really makes Americans hate their jobs is a perception that advancement is impossible. And while Mr. Brooks agrees that the nation’s income gap is growing, the national happiness level is steady. Just under one-third of American adults say that they are “very happy”; up to 15% are not too happy; and everyone else is somewhere in the middle. Those numbers have been roughly true since the early 1970s. More government spending doesn’t seem to raise happiness levels, though direct government assistance may diminish it. Charitable giving, Mr. Brooks adds, generally lifts the spirits; Americans do a lot of it.

For the full review, see:
DAVE SHIFLETT. “Bookshelf; How to Be of Good Cheer.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., May 12, 2008): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Blacklisting of Voight Urged in Display of Liberal Hollywood McCarthyism

Source of the images: screen captures from the CNN report cited below.

With self-righteous indignation, the left often accuses the right of “McCarthyism.”
But many on the left are happy to limit free speech when what is spoken is not to their liking.
Jon Voight’s column in the Washington Times has ignited a firestorm, and caused at least one Hollywood insider to openly advocate blacklisting Voight from the movie business. The CNN story cited and linked below, gives some of the details.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated example.
On our campuses, free speech is often violated if the speaker speaks what is not politically correct. For many examples, see some of the cases discussed on the web site of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
Another example is from my own personal experience as a young scholar many decades ago. I had applied to three or four top PhD programs in philosophy and was initially rejected from every one of them, even though I had a nearly perfect GPA, and very high test scores.
I was especially surprised by the rejection from Chicago, because an Associate Dean had visited the Wabash campus the year before and talked with me about applying to Chicago. He had looked at my record and said, ‘with your record, if you score X, or above on the GREs, it is almost certain that you will be accepted.’ (I don’t remember the exact number he said.) Well I scored above X, but was rejected. So I wrote to the Associate Dean, saying I was disappointed and asking if he had any insight about the rejection. He told me that he was dumbfounded and that he would look into it.
Awhile later, I received a letter reversing the decision of the University of Chicago Department of Philosophy. I never learned all the details, but apparently the Dean of Humanities had over-ruled the Department of Philosophy. (This is fairly unusual in academics, and though I do not remember her name, I salute that Dean for taking a stand.)
Years later, the episode came up in a conversation with a member of the philosophy faculty. He said that he had been on the admissions committee the year that I had applied, and that I had been rejected because I had mentioned Ayn Rand in my essay about how I had become interested in philosophy.

For some of the details of the Voight story, see:
Wynter, Kareen. “Bloggers Fire Back at Voight.” CNN Feature, broadcast on CNN, and posted on CNN.com on 8/8/08. Downloaded on 8/8/08 from: http://www.cnn.com/video/?iref=videoglobal
(Note: the clip runs 2 minutes and 27 seconds.)

Voight’s op-ed piece ran in the Washington Times on July 28, 2008 under the title “My Concerns for America” and can be viewed at: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jul/28/voight/

A Little Optimism Goes a Long Way

(p. B1) Far from deforming our view of the future, this penchant for life’s silver lining shapes our decisions about family, health, work and finances in surprisingly prudent ways, concluded economists at Duke University in a new study published in the Journal of Financial Economics. “Economists have focused on optimism as a miscalibration, as a distorted view of the future,” said Duke finance scholar David T. Robinson. “A little bit of optimism is associated with a lot of positive economic choices.”
. . .
Optimists, the Duke finance scholars discovered, worked longer hours every week, expected to retire later in life, were less likely to smoke and, when they divorced, were more likely to remarry. They also saved more, had more of their wealth in liquid assets, invested more in individual stocks and paid credit-card bills more promptly.
Yet those who saw the future too brightly — people who in the survey overestimated their own likely lifespan by 20 years or more — behaved in just the opposite way, the researchers discovered.
Rather than save, they squandered. They postponed bill-paying. Instead of taking the long view, they barely looked past tomorrow. Statistically, they were more likely to be day traders. “Optimism is a little like red wine,” said Duke finance professor and study co-author Manju Puri. “In moderation, it is good for you; but no one would suggest you drink two bottles a day.”

For the full story, see:
Robert Lee Hotz. “Science Journal; Except in One Career, Our Brains Seem Built for Optimism.” Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 9, 2007): B1.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Working Families in France Want to Be Richer”

(p. 1) In proposing a tax-cut law last week, Finance Minister Christine Lagarde bluntly advised the French people to abandon their “old national habit.”

“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”

Citing Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” she said the French should work harder, earn more and be rewarded with lower taxes if they get rich.

. . .

(p. 9) The government’s call to work is crucial to its ambitious campaign to revitalize the French economy by increasing both employment and consumer buying power. Somehow Mr. Sarkozy and his team hope to persuade the French that it is in their interest to abandon what some commentators call a nationwide “laziness” and to work longer and harder, and maybe even get rich.

France’s legally mandated 35-hour work week gives workers a lot of leisure time but not necessarily the means to enjoy it. Taxes on high-wage earners are so burdensome that hordes have fled abroad. (Mr. Sarkozy cites the case of one of his stepdaughters, who works in an investment-banking firm in London.)

In her National Assembly speech, Ms. Lagarde said that there should be no shame in personal wealth and that the country needed tax breaks to lure the rich back.

. . .

“We are seeing an important cultural change,” said Eric Chaney, chief economist for Europe for Morgan Stanley. “Working families in France want to be richer. Wealth is no longer a taboo. There’s a strong sentiment in France that people think prices are too high and need more money. It’s not a question of thinking or not thinking.”

For the full story, see:

ELAINE SCIOLINO. "New Leaders Say Pensive French Think Too Much." The New York Times, Section 1 (Sun., July 22, 2007): 1 & 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

I used to have a photo at the top of Sarokozy running; in contrast to this picture of Mitterrand walking. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article cited above.