CapitalistImperialistPig

Krugman notes the real reason Conservatives love austerity: So why have so many politicians insisted on pursuing austerity in slump? And why won’t they change course even as experience confirms the lessons of theory and history? Well, that’s where it gets interesting. For when you push “austerians” on the badness of their metaphor, they almost always retreat to assertions along the lines of: “ But it’s essential that we shrink the size of the state .” Now, these assertions often go along with claims that the economic crisis itself demonstrates the need to shrink government. But that’s manifestly not true. Look at the countries in Europe that have weathered the storm best, and near the top of the list you’ll find big-government nations like Sweden and Austria. And if you look, on the other hand, at the nations conservatives admired before the crisis, you’ll find George Osborne, Britain’s chancellor of the Exchequer and the architect of the country’s current economic policy, describin...

R: Obama is the most extreme leftist to ever be President of the US. D: You are one ignorant, stupid, racist MoFo* The above sample dialog is probably not the best way to start a mutually enlightening political dialog - unless you consider fist fights to meet that criterion. Haidt, I think, might suggest a reply more like: Why would you say that? * MoFo - believed to be an abbreviation for Mo ss covered Fo ssil.

A special thread for those reading the book, seeing other versions of Haidt's work, or just wanting to make comments on general principles.

...He loaded the hay into the wagon. ...He poured the water into the glass. These two construction look very similar. We can capture the same concept as the first sentence in the following: ... He loaded the wagon with hay. So what about: ... He poured the glass with water. If you are a native speaker of English, the latter will probably clunk in your head like a bowl full of rocks. So what's up with that? According to Steven Pinker in The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature , the answer tells us a lot about language and even more about how the mind works. I won't try to explain the somewhat complicated answer, at least not at this early stage of my reading, but it has to do with the way our brains model the world. Our minds contain an innate model of the physics of space, time and other matters, he says, and that model has a lot to say about how we think and speak.

One repeated Haidt theme is that our morality makes us team players. Our opinions on a whole range of questions that might seem to be independent are largely determined by what team we see ourselves playing for. Thus opinions on Keynes and Krugman today are largely determined by whether one sees oneself as liberal or conservative. Ditto gay marriage, welfare, civil rights and global warming. Discuss.

Luboš Motl gives us a nice physics problem : Yesterday, I experienced something that I've gone through many times in my life and probably regularly (at several "best points"): when I ride my mountain bike which has a hole in the seat and a metal right underneath (which may probably be in contact with my slightly wet shorts), I am terrified by an electric shock – some tingling comparable to a dozen of stinging ants attacking a square decimeter of my skin – for a second when I am crossing some high voltage power lines – maybe 400 kV or so – perpendicularly. It seems clear that passage under the power lines has induced a charge separation between bike and rider, and that the electric fields induced by the power lines create the charge separation, but what is the mechanism? Ideas? Can the bike be considered grounded?

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is a highly readable yet still scholarly look at the foundations of human morality. His point of view is essentially that of evolutionary psychology: that our moral systems evolved in order for us to live in highly cooperative communities not composed solely of close kin – the only animals who can do that. Haidt describes his starting point as that of essentially a conventional liberal, scornful of conservatives and persuaded that their success was based on fraudulent appeals. His story of scientific discovery, then, is not just a scientific one but of a change of personal perspective, to that of a self-described “centrist” with a lot of admiration for conservative thinkers but not much for the modern Republican Party. He is a story teller, and he weaves together themes from familiar and unfamiliar philosophers – his original major in college was philosophy – to ethnography and especially ex...