Resurgence of Ayn Rand?

Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead, seems to be popping up everywhere I see her. Here are a few samples of the rekindled interest in Ayn Rand.

• Two recent books on Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand and the world she made by Anne C. Heller and Goddess of America: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns. Burns looks at Rand’s interactions with and influence on the American “right”, a term she uses broadly for all forms of free-market and small-government political philosophies, including libertarianism and conservatism. Heller is more interested in the personal influences on Ayn Rand and how these influences shaped the characters in her novels. For those who want to know more from the authors themselves, check out this Cato Institute Book Forum on the two books.

• An article by Jennifer Burns in Foreign Policy (November 2009) on the surprising popularity of Ayn Rand in India.

• Coverage of Ayn Rand by Reason magazine and the Reason Foundation: An article by Brian Doherty and a special event on November 2 dedicated to Ayn Rand (this has many further links).

• Other reviews of Ayn Rand: New York Magazine, New York Times, Time magazine, The New Republic, and The New Yorker (a blog post). The New Yorker has also dug out two old pieces from its archive.

A conversation about race

I recently came across this interesting video (transcript here), which is a segment from the Jim Lehrer new hour on PBS, a television channel in the United States.

The conversation participants are Matt Welch of Rason magazine (who, along with Nick Gillespie, covered a protest march in Washington D.C. on September 12, 2009), Melissa Harris-Lacewell (associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University), John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute, and Cornell Belcher, a pollster for the Democratic party. The moderator was Gwenn Ifill. As best as I could tell, Matt Welch was the only white person and all the others were black.

What I find interesting about the conversation, as I’ve found about a lot of such conversations, is how it shows the great diversity of viewpoints within the so-called “black community”, and how one’s job and affiliation often reveal more about one’s views than the color of one’s skin. McWhorter’s views are reasonably predicted by the fact that he works for the Manhattan Institute (though, of course, each person has different specific beliefs) — see for instance this very insightful article by him about Harvard or this one about Joe Wilson and opposition to Obama. Harris-Lacewell’s views (as for instance in this article) seem reasonably typical of a person in an African American studies department — a la Henry Louis Gates (who recently acquired fame/notoriety due to a misconception). And Cornell Belcher’s views seem reasonably in line with a pollster for a party who is trying to paint opposition to that party’s agenda as something racist. Finally, Matt Welch’s views seem in line with those of Reason magazine.

Unfortunately, many people try to get away with claiming that the particular political ideology, perspective or viewpoint they hold “represents” their community. It is currently considered taboo in the United States to openly say that something hurts the “white community”, but other equally dubious spokespersons persist — for instance, people who claim to speak for the “black community”, “middle America”, “undocumented workers”, “women”, “the working class”, “Christians”, “Jews”, “ordinary Americans” and so on. The United States is hardly unique in this respect — dubious spokespersonship for religious groups, genders, age groups, racial, ethnic and regional groups exist in plenty. In some cases, conflicting “spokespersons” cancel one another out, leading to the pleasant cacophony of diversity, but in other cases, certain kinds of viewpoints get the upper hand, even though they do not necessarily represent the majority viewpoint within their “minority” community. At times, there may be active ostracism of the minorities within minorities — people within the minority community who fail to toe the line of some self-declared leaders may be considered traitors or sell-outs.

Fortunately, in a free society, such labels cannot be used to suppress such speech. Thus, we see black economists such as Thomas Sowell who works for the Hoover Institution, who describes himself as a libertarian (though he doesn’t toe the libertarian line on torture), is highly critical of the welfare state. Or, Walter Williams of George Mason University, who wrote a book titled The State Against Blacks where he blamed licensing laws, minimum wage legislation, and the welfare state (as opposed to, or much more important than, racism by individuals) for the poverty and crime among blacks (he also made a three-part video series about themes from the book back in the 1980s). This isn’t to say that the views of people like Sowell or Williams are shared by a majority of blacks or whites or any other community, but the existence of such views shouldn’t be viewed as being a “sellout”.

Bonus: Here’s a nice video put together by Reason about a fight for school choice in Los Angeles. Affiliation, rather than skin color, seem to be the determinant of the stand a person takes. Unsurprisingly, teachers and representatives of teacher association are against it, while parents are for it.

Consumerism

In a comment to an earlier post of mine, my friend Anirbit wrote: “… your over-the-board praise of consumerism and people working for self-interest somehow magically resulting in global development”.

This struck me as somewhat strange because that particular post wasn’t intended as a strident defense of consumerism and its virtues or the glory of self-interest. Rather, it was intended as a criticism of the twisting and at times mis-stating of facts in the story of stuff video. In the cases where I was only guessing, or expressing an opinion that was ideologically tinted as opposed to plain facts, I tried to make clear that these were guesses. My hope was that the critique would make sense to people regardless of their specific views about the environment, consumerism, and society. Nonetheless, since there seems to have been a creeping bias in my post, I thought I’ll make my own views on the matter more explicit.

There are some aspects of consumerism, notably “conspicuous consumption”, that I discussed in an earlier blog post, so for brevity I will not repeat those points. But those who think of “conspicuous consumption” when they talk of consumerism are encouraged to read that blog post.

An array of choices

Since “consumerism” comes under lots of criticism, I want to emphasize here what kind of consumerism I really am for. Basically, I am a strong supporter of freedom, choice, and options in how people choose to live. Some of this freedom come through the protection of individual liberties and property rights, where governments play a role. Within that framework of freedom, further choices usually come through a combination of personal wealth and the availability of options in one’s surroundings. Both personal wealth and the diversity of the market are functions of economic prosperity.

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck, who runs a show on Fox News, a talk radio show, publishes a magazine (sort of) on his website and has been publishing top-selling books with provocative titles such as Common Sense and Arguing with Idiots. He appeared on the cover of TIME magazine, was interviewed by Katie Couric of CBS, and answed questions at the Washington Post.

You know who this guy reminds me of? Barack Obama.

Superficially, there are hardly any similarities. Beck is a Christan Mormon libertarian while Obama is a socialist, left-of-center progressive (in the twisted jargon of American politics). Beck has little trust in politicians and the power of government — Obama has had quite a bit, specially since January 2009.

So what are the similarities? Well, what I really have in mind is not the Obama of 2009, but the Obama of the campaign trail of 2008. Obama 08 thinks it is important to take “our” government back. Glenn Beck agrees that “we” need to take “our” country back. Obama believes that “community organizing” and “national service” can “fundamentally transform” America, while Glenn Beck has started the 9-12 project, which was one of the responsible factors in encouraging the massive 9/12 rally in Washington D.C. in 2009. Obama and Beck both believe that with honest people in office, corruption will go away.

I find Beck fascinating and mesmerizing even when I don’t agree with him, much the same way as I found Obama fascinating and mesmerizing even when I knew he was spouting nonsense. [DISCLOSURE: My political ideology aligns me more closely with Beck than with Obama, though I am not really close to either of them.]

ALSO OF INTEREST:

I know a lot of people are put off by Beck’s style that appears over-the-top, exaggerated, and to some, filled with racist overtones. This is quite understandable — however, there seem to be a lot of people who’ve never watched or listened to Glenn Beck but still hate him. See this video by Penn Jillette with an interesting take on the matter.

Some have also argued that Glenn Beck is inciting fringe groups into violence. See an interesting take on this by Reihan Salam.

Norman Borlaug

Norman Borlaug, commonly known as the father of the Green Revolution, died on September 12, 2009.

For those who haven’t heard of him, a quick summary of Norman Borlaug’s main achievement: he pioneered the introduction of High Yielding Varieties (HYV)s of wheat and rice into India, Pakistan and Mexico, doubling food production and dramatically increasing food security in these countries. Some say he has saved more human lives than any other living person. For more, read:

• Borlaug’s Wikipedia entry says “Borlaug’s discoveries have been estimated to have saved over one billion lives worldwide.”

• World Food Prize on Borlaug

• New York Times article on Borlaug, after his death: Excerpt: “Dr. Borlaug’s later years were partly occupied by arguments over the social and environmental consequences of the Green Revolution. Many critics on the left attacked it, saying it displaced smaller farmers, encouraged overreliance on chemicals and paved the way for greater corporate control of agriculture. In a characteristic complaint, Vandana Shiva, an Indian critic, wrote in 1991 that “in perceiving nature’s limits as constraints on productivity that had to be removed, American experts spread ecologically destructive and unsustainable practices worldwide.” Dr. Borlaug declared that such arguments often came from “elitists” who were rich enough not to worry about where their next meal was coming from. But over time, he acknowledged the validity of some environmental concerns, and embraced more judicious use of fertilizers and pesticides.”

• The Wall Street Journal (Opinion Journal) on Borlaug: Excerpt: “Who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970? You may be forgiven for not remembering, given some of the prize’s dubious recipients over the years (e.g., Yasser Arafat). Well, then: Who has saved perhaps more lives than anyone else in history? The answer to both questions is, of course, Norman Borlaug. Who? Norman Borlaug, 92, is the father of the “Green Revolution,” the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s. He is now the subject of an admiring biography by Leon Hesser, a former State Department official who first met Mr. Borlaug 40 years ago in Pakistan, where they worked together to boost that country’s grain production. “The Man Who Fed the World” describes, in a workmanlike way, how a poor Iowa farm boy trained in forestry and plant pathology came to be one of humanity’s greatest benefactors.”

• Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine on Borlaug, after his death.

• An interview Borlaug gave to Reason Magazine in 2000: Excerpt: “Reason: Would you say the Green Revolution was a success? Borlaug: Yes, but it’s a never-ending job. When I was born in 1914, the world population was approximately 1.6 billion people. It has just turned 6 billion. We’ve had no major famines any place in the world since the Green Revolution began. We’ve had local famines where these African wars have been going on and are still going on. However, if we could get the infrastructure straightened out in African countries south of the Sahara, you could end hunger there pretty fast….And if you look at the data that’s put out by the World Health Organization and [the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization], there are probably 800 million people who are undernourished in the world. So there’s still a lot of work to do.”

• DNA India on Borlaug after his death: Excerpt: “Nearly 40 years later, the situation is not too different. Hunger still stalks many parts of the world. We are particularly grateful in India that his successful methods of pest- and drought-resistant wheat seeds have changed the face of Punjab and of the country, and it is this green revolution that made famine a distant memory. It is interesting to remember that Borlaug’s methods were adopted with the same success and around the same time in Pakistan as well. He believed that hunger and poverty caused much strife among nations, and he reached out to many countries in Asia and Latin America.”

• David Boaz of the Cato Institute on Borlaug, after his death: Excerpt: “But that’s not the way journalists and historians see it. Just think of the people who have gone down in history as “the Great“: Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great, Charles the Great (Charlemagne), Frederick the Great, Peter the Great — despots and warmongers. Just once it would be nice to see the actual benefactors of humanity designated as “the Great”: Galileo the Great, Gutenberg the Great, Samuel Morse the Great, Alan Turing the Great. So just for tonight, drink a toast to one of the great benefactors of the poorest people in the world, Borlaug the Great.”

Weblinks for August 29

• Bowled over by Bollywood, an article in the Guardian (UK) about how Bollywood (India’s Bombay-centered Hindi movie industry), and Western television programs are leading people in Afghanistan to increasingly choose love marriages over arranged marriages.

• Who Partitioned India?: India Today looks at the various actors involved in the partition of India.

• Richard Stallman criticises the Spanish Wikipedia for disallowing links to rebelion.org, reports Noam Cohen in the Bits blog of the New York Times. He claimed that this was a political decision, but Spanish Wikipedia administrators contested that assertion, saying that the links were banned because rebelion.org is an aggregator and Wikipedia’s policy is to link to original news sources when possible.

• Are private schools charitable? A discussion centered around the United States: Felix Salmon, Matthew Yglesias, Conor Clarke,Adam Schaeffer.

• Picture worth a thousand words? Depictions of certain cartoons were removed by the Yale University Press from Jytte Klausen’s forthcoming book, The cartoons that shook the world. The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education report. Statement issued by the Yale University Press.

• A study at the University of Chicago shows links between testosterone and women’s choice to enter careers in finance. The links seems to be stronger at lower levels than at higher levels of testosterone.

• The Free Software Foundation sends letters asking companies not to upgrade to the upcoming version of Windows, reports The Register (UK). It has sent letters to all the Fortune 500 companies except Microsoft.

• Talking of hair — the New York Times on hairstyles for black women (US-centric).

• Researchers in India call for more oversight to reduce and punish plagiarism, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Thoughts on human rights

With recent furore in India over the right to education bill and the recent moves in the United States towards “health care for all”, we hear arguments that the right to health care and the right to education are universal rights. So are the right to food, water, employment, reasonable living standards, good amenities, love, peace, security, freedom to pursue one’s hobbies, and many other things. Is there a flip side to this expansive view of human rights?

What can the flip side be? Essentially, the broader we consider the definition of a right, the less serious we make each right. Thus, introducing rights that are more and more peripheral crowds out the rights that we might argue are more basic.

We see different conceptions of rights in different constitutions and charters. Also, different terminology, such as “fundamental right”, “human right”, “natural right”.

For instance, the Constitution of India lists six fundamental rights, each having a number of parts. The six fundamental rights are right to equality (in the sense of equality before law, equality in matters of public employment, etc.), right to freedom, right against exploitation, right to freedom of religion, cultural and educational rights, and right to constitutional remedies. There is also a list of ten fundamental duties that includes strange duties such as “to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises to higher levels of endeavour and achievement” and also “to value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture”. We also have duties such as “to cherish and follow the noble ideals which inspired our national struggle for freedom” and “to abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals and institutions, the National Flag and the National Anthem”.

Weblinks for August 17

Some interesting stories over the past week:

• The Whole Foods controversy: Whole Foods John Mackey writes a piece in the Wall Street Journal titledThe Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare (August 11), discussing his views on health care and the direction of reform the United States should take. Olivia Jane at the Daily Kos urges viewers to sign a petition for boycotting Whole Foods products. Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek sums up the debate and links to other views.

• A fascinating piece by David Goldhill on health in the United States: The author makes a number of fascinating points.

• An interesting article on the self-contradictory transportation policy of the Obama adminitsration in the United States.

• The threat of swine flu grips India’s elite English-language newspapers, even as a hundred times that many people die of respiratory and infectious diseases. Swami takes this on in his Swaminomics column.

• Yet more evidence of the total lack of perspective of the Indian media: front-page coverage of the questioning of Bollywood icon Shahrukh Khan at Newark’s Liberty Airport in the United States. Chidambaram needs to step in. Shahrukh Khan’s distress is understandable, but as a TOI blogger himself points out, this is not exactly front-page news (doesn’t stop TOI, though). A fairly comprehensive summary is available in this blog post. Compare that to the New York Times coverage of India, where the top news headline is violence in Kashmir.

Weblinks for August 11

Some weblinks:

• Is the recession over? Over at the Becker-Posner blog, Becker offers one view while Posner offers another. Krugman is already congratulating the Obama administration, while Arnold Kling offers an interesting perspective.

• Amit Varma blasts Indian mainstream media for not putting tsunami alerts on their websites.

• Malcolm Gladwell on Atticus Finch and southern liberalism: For those of you who don’t know/remember, Atticus Finch is the lawyer for the black accused in To Kill A Mockingbird, a classic by Harper Lee.

• Sasa Vucinic talks at TED about investing in free press across the world.

• Paul Romer’s TED talk on charter cities: See also this blog post on charter cities.

• Socialism and school choice in India: A Cato@Liberty blog post by Swaminathan, saying that Indian legislation may create the world’s largest school choice experiment.

Some notes on “conspicuous consumption” and “people are stupid”

Thorstein Veblen, an economist-cum-sociologist working around 1890-1920, was responsible for coming up with the notion of “conspicuous consumption” — spending on goods and services with the purpose of establishing one’s income and wealth, conveying social status, impressing others, or causing envy. His work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

In more recent times, economist Robert H. Frank, a New York Times columnist and professor at Cornell University, has argued strongly that a lot of goods are positional goods, whose value is determined primarily by what position one is in. Such goods lead to what are called “arms races” — people rush to stockpile more and more of these goods, thus leading to a waste of precious resources.

Similar ideas are found in the theory that education serves primarily a “screening” function — people go in for expensive higher education to prove to potential employers how smart they are to have managed to enter a higher educational institution and survive it, rather than for any intrinsic value such higher education is providing.

“Conspicuous consumption”, “positional good”, and “screening” are different but related ideas. They all share a common theme — a lot of wasteful and destructive expenditure is undertaken simply in order for people to establish their status or rank. Some might argue that this wasteful expenditure shows that “people are stupid” while others may argue that while individuals are making the best decisions given their circumstances, the system as a whole is stupid and wasteful.

Here is just a small sample of things that can be explained through this spectrum of theories:

• People eating too many unhealthy foods? Conspicuous consumption of food. Eating more food may be an indicator of higher status and societal position.

• People eating too little food? An arms race of getting thin in order to appear the most healthy and attractive person around.

• People getting bigger and bigger houses? Conspicuous consumption of housing. One’s house is an indicator of one’s social status, and a bigger house means a bigger social status.

• People traveling in private jets and private cars instead of planes and public transit? Conspicuous consumption of transportation.

• Poor people sending their kids to private schools instead of “free” public schools? Conspicuous consumption of schooling.

While I think there is some truth to both conspicuous consumption and arms race theories, there are a lot of caveats we need to keep in mind before readily applying such an explanation to any phenomenon we do not understand.