The Bet by Paul Sabin - Introduction

Introduction

Paul Ehrlich, a thirty-seven-year-old biology professor at Stanford,Read more at location 109

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Ehrlich had made his name two years earlier with a blockbuster jeremiad, The Population Bomb.Read more at location 110

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Ehrlich warned in his book, predicting that hundreds of millions of people “are going to starve to death.”Read more at location 111

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a new environmentalism was dawning.Read more at location 114

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Nixon was about to create the Environmental Protection Agency.Read more at location 116

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in Urbana, Illinois, a little-known business administration professor named Julian Simon, also thirty-seven, watched Ehrlich’sRead more at location 121

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Carson asked Ehrlich about the relation between population growth and the food supply.Read more at location 122

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Ehrlich said it was “already too late to avoid famines that will kill millions.”Read more at location 123

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Yet to Julian Simon, the relation between population and food was anything but simple.Read more at location 125

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processed fish, soybeans, and algae could “produce enough protein to supply present and future needs, and at low cost.”Read more at location 126

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Simon and Ehrlich represented two poles in the bitter contest over the future that helped define the 1970s.Read more at location 131

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Simon’s increasing skepticism helped fuel a conservative backlash against federal regulatory expansion.Read more at location 133

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Ehrlich commented broadly on nuclear power and endangered species, immigration and race relations. He readily denounced “growthmanic economists and profit-hungry businessmen”Read more at location 136

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Meanwhile, Simon for years played the role of frustrated and largely ignored bystander.Read more at location 139

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in the late 1960s, Simon too had argued urgently in favor of slowing population growth.Read more at location 141

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Simon argued that more people meant more ideas,Read more at location 145

Note: il cambio di rotta Edit

Rather than sparking the world’s crises, population growth would help resolve them.Read more at location 145

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Simon titled his landmark 1981 tome, were The Ultimate Resource.Read more at location 146

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In 1980, Simon challenged Ehrlich in Social Science QuarterlyRead more at location 148

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Ehrlich agreed to bet Simon that the cost of chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten would increase in the next decade.Read more at location 150

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thousand-dollar wager:Read more at location 151

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five industrial metals, ten years, prices up or down.Read more at location 151

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Ehrlich’s conviction reflected a more general sense after the 1973 Arab oil embargoRead more at location 153

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Simon argued that markets and new technologies would drive prices down,Read more at location 154

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The outcome of the bet would either provide ammunition for Ehrlich’s campaign against population growth and environmental calamity or promote Simon’s optimism aboutRead more at location 156

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their bet resonated with the cultural clash occurring in the country as a whole.Read more at location 159

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The bet also captured the starkly different paths of Democrat Jimmy Carter and his Republican challenger Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election.Read more at location 159

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Ehrlich’s widely publicized fears about population growth revived the arguments of the Reverend Thomas Malthus,Read more at location 176

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Early critics of Malthus, however, such as the English philosopher William Godwin, anticipated Julian Simon’s critique of Ehrlich, mocking Malthus’s conviction that humanity was doomed to misery.Read more at location 185

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Other nineteenth-century critics of Malthus, such as Friedrich Engels, thought that agricultural productivity could be “increased ad infinitum by the application of capital, labour and science.”Read more at location 189

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What is the purpose of humans on earth? How should we measure the success of human societies?Read more at location 197

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Simon was influenced by the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham,Read more at location 197

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Julian Simon welcomed continued population growth because it meant that more people could live productive and meaningful lives.Read more at location 199

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Simon did not speak in the elementary terms of “pain and pleasure.” But he also placed human welfare at the center of his moral universe.Read more at location 201

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Humanity, Ehrlich thought, could not serve as the measure of all things.Read more at location 204

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Humans needed to accept their proper role in a larger balance of nature on earth.Read more at location 204

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the bet epitomized the increasingly polarized rhetoric of American politics.Read more at location 208

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Underlying differences in social values and attitudes toward societal risk also often were left unacknowledged.Read more at location 212

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prominent political debates over climate change, for example, starting in the 1990s slipped into rhetorical ruts established in earlier debates over population growthRead more at location 213

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Instead of reading Paul Ehrlich’s clash with Julian Simon as a simple white hat–black hat morality tale, their story can move us beyond stereotyped portrayals of environmentalists and conservatives

IntroductionRead more at location 107

Note: ehrluch: fisso al carson show ad evocare la catastrofe diventando celebrities simon: a casina a mangiarsi le dita problema: la sovrapopolazione ci pirterá a carestie rovinose eh converte nixon che fonda l epa il legame tra cibo e demografia la controidea di simon: benvenuta la crescita di uomini: piú upmini più idee simon il convertito: temeva la bomba demogr la scommessa semplice: 5 materie 10 anni prezzi su o prezzi giù? 1000 dollari il great divide delk ambientalismo anni 70. vince simon e i conservatori prendono coraggio i precursori di eh: malthus quelli di simon: goodwin e engels reaganvs carter il dilemma filisofico: cosa conta nella vita? simob: solo l uomo e la sua felicitá. debito vs bentham eh: la natura. l uomo è solo una parte il dibattito attuale sul riscaldamento. cosa nn riproporre: la contrapposizione frontale. cosa riproporre: la passione il rigore e la chiarezza. imho: anche la scommessa come strumento epistemologico

I problemi della diseguaglianza

Tyler Cowen is asked a good question: are there any goods someone on a median income can afford which are the very best of their kind? The answer, as Tyler shows, is plenty – including some important ones such as books and recorded music. To this we might add that even where the very best goods are unaffordable, the median income earner can afford pretty decent ones, such as cars, TVs and sound systems.

Which poses the question: if someone on a median income can afford such a luxurious cornucopia, what can’t he buy?

The obvious answer, in the UK, is a decent house. The average house costs over £208,000, equivalent to 7.5 times median annual earnings. Given that the bestschools tend to be in the most expensive areas, this means that our median earner can’t afford the best education for his kids either.

However, I suspect that most of the best things that the median income-earner can’t buy are non-material goods.

One is financial security. 49% of people, and most 35-44 year-olds live in households with less than £5000 of net financial wealth (pdf). They are only a pay cheque or two away from trouble.

Another is status. Our wages are related to our sense of worth – which is one reason why most people would prefer (pdf) a lower but above-average income to a higher but below-average one. A median income, by definition doesn’t provide much status.

You might reply that this problem would be solved if we could shake off envy. Not entirely. Status is one mechanism whereby income leads to political power:

2 What Supermarkets Don’t Want You to Know

Undercover Economist’ di Tim Harford - 2 What Supermarkets Don’t Want You to Know

• The scarcity power is clearly considerable, but it is not unlimited...the Dome proved a commercial disaster because uniqueness alone wasn’t enough to persuade people to pay enough to cover the vast costs of its construction
• Businesses with scarcity power cannot force us to pay unlimited prices for their products, but they can choose from a variety of strategies to make us pay more. ... .
• They could simply double the price of a cappuccino. Some people would pay the new price, but many would not.
• Alternatively, they could cut prices and sell much more coffee.
• That’s the dilemma: higher margins per cup, but fewer cups; or lower margins on more cups....by charging 60p to people who are not willing to pay more and £5 to people who are willing to pay a lot to enjoy the coffee and the view.
• How to do it, though? Have a price list saying, ‘Cappuccino, £5, unless you’re only willing to pay 60p’?... coffee bars have to be more subtle.
• Costa Coffee, who in the early 2000s used to have an elegant strategy: Costa offered ‘Fair Trade’ coffee to anyone willing to pay an extra 10p.
• Charging an extra 10p gave the impression that that was the cost of the fair trade coffee, but a customer who reached that conclusion would have been wrong.
• But why was it profitable to charge a higher mark-up on the cost of production on fair trade coffee than on normal coffee? ... The reason has nothing to do with fair trade at all: it’s because fair trade coffee allowed Costa to find customers who are willing to pay a bit more if given a reason to do so. By ordering a fair trade cappuccino, you sent two messages to Costa. One message may or may not have interested them:..‘I think that fair trade coffee is a product that should be supported.’ The second message is the one that they were straining to hear: ‘I don’t really mind paying a bit extra.’
• Starbucks isn’t merely seeking to offer a variety of alternatives to customers. It’s also trying to give the customer every opportunity to signal that they’ve not been looking at the price.
• Does this mean that Starbucks is overcharging all of its customers? No. If so, a regular cappuccino or hot chocolate would cost £3.30,
• There’s one born every minute: two ways to find him
• There are three common strategies for finding customers who are cavalier about price.
• The first is what economists call ‘first degree price discrimination’, but we could call it the ‘unique target’ strategy: to evaluate each customer as an individual and charge according to how much he or she is willing to pay. This is the strategy of the used-car salesman ...cars and houses, of course, but also souvenirs in African street stalls, where the impoverished merchant will find it worth bargaining for some time to gain an extra pound.... companies are trying to automate the process
• For instance, supermarkets accumulate evidence of what you’re willing to pay by giving you ‘discount cards’, you allow the stores to keep records of what you buy .......internet retailers such as Amazon can identify each customer by putting a tracing device called a ‘cookie’ on her computer. In Amazon’s case, customers started to realise that if they deleted the cookies on their computers, they were offered different, often lower prices.
• it must be reasonable for coffee shops to offer a discount to people who work nearby, and for tourist attractions to let locals in for a lower rate? It often seems reasonable because people in groups who pay more are usually people who can afford more....But we shouldn’t forget that this is a convenient coincidence. Companies ...are interested in who is willing to pay more, rather than who can afford to pay more.
• when I raise the price, how much do my sales fall? ...Economists tend to call this ‘own-price elasticity’... Tourists visiting Florida are less price-sensitive than locals... Being rich is sometimes connected with being insensitive to prices, but not always.
• The AMT coffee bar in Waterloo station in London used to knock 10 per cent off the cost of your coffee if – as I did at the time – you worked locally. ...The discount reflected the fact that local workers are price-sensitive despite being rich.
• The third way: turkeys voting for Christmas
• the company has to sell products that are at least slightly different from each other. So they offer products in different quantities (a large cappuccino instead of a small one, or an offer of three for the price of two)... even in different locations,
• Because the products are different, you never quite know whether the firm is using a price-targeting trick or merely passing on added costs. ... If it looks like price-targeting, it probably is.
• How far would you walk to save 30p?
• It was harder to find examples of identical products selling for different prices, although by no means impossible. Does this mean that Sainsbury’s doesn’t price-target as much as M&S? Not at all.
• It wasn’t that these products were more expensive in Tottenham Court Road than in Dalston (only the Vittel was), it was just that in Dalston cheaper substitutes sprang into view far more readily.
• Price-gouging the natural way
• It’s also good business to offer discounts to the elderly and to students (translation: charge higher prices to people likely to have jobs).
• The favoured game at the moment has to be price-gouging the natural way, riding the bandwagon of organic food. ...The supermarkets have come to the rescue with a plentiful supply of organic products that happen to be marked up far above their additional costs
• fruit and vegetable section contains both organic and conventionally grown produce side by side … but always side by side with a completely different product. The organic bananas are next to the ‘conventional’ (that is, non-organic) apples; the organic garlic is next ...The price-comparison would be too sobering.
• My recommendation, if you are convinced of the merits of organic food, is not to let food retailers exploit your enthusiasm: vote with your wallet by supporting any retailer – or direct supplier – who brings the price of organic and non-organic food closer together.
• Bargain shopping and bargain stores
• Wholefoods ...On hearing this, people would comment on how wonderful the store is... But my acquaintances also complain about how expensive Wholefoods is. But … is it really expensive?
• Safeway just five blocks away, a store known to the locals as ‘Soviet Safeway’ because of the small range of products and the harsh decor.
• when you compare the prices for the same goods, Wholefoods is just as inexpensive as Safeway.
• That doesn’t quite fit with our common-sense belief that some places are cheap and some places are expensive. But that belief never made much sense.
• Wholefoods is more fun to shop in... Wholefoods is not expensive in the sense that it charges more for the same goods. It is expensive because of where its price-targeting policies are focused: prices for the basics may be competitive, but the selection in Wholefoods is aimed at customers with a different view of what ‘basics’ are.
• So here’s my advice: if you want a bargain, don’t try to find a cheap store. Try to shop cheaply. Similar products are, very often, priced similarly. An expensive shopping trip is the result of carelessly choosing
• Mix it up!
• Another very common pricing strategy is sale pricing. ...But why knock 30 per cent off many of your prices twice a year, when you could knock 5 per cent off year-round?
• One explanation is that sales are an effective form of self-targeting.  If some customers shop around for a good deal and some customers do not, it’s best for stores to have either high prices to prise cash from the loyal (or lazy) customers, or low prices to win business from the bargain hunters.
• if prices were stable, then surely even the most price-insensitive customers would learn where to get particular goods cheaply.
• two supermarkets ...it’s hard for one to be systematically more expensive than the other without losing a lot of business, so they will charge similar prices on average, but both will also mix up their prices.
• The price-targeting strategy only works because the supermarkets always vary the patterns of their special offers, ...is too much trouble to ....comparing the price of each good
• But this is an example of a universal truth about supermarkets: they are full of close (or not so close) substitutes, some cheap, some expensive, and with a strong random element to the pricing. The random element is there so that only shoppers who are careful to notice,
• Reality check number one: does the company really have scarcity power?
• When we talk about big companies it is easy to get carried away with notions of how they are infinitely powerful ...often that scarcity is something we give them through our own laziness.
• what is the answer to the question we posed in the previous chapter: why does popcorn cost so much at cinemas?
• Customers may be dumb, but they’re not that dumb. People expect to be charged a lot for wine in restaurants and for popcorn and sweets in cinemas before they walk in the door. Now we have a better answer: it’s likely to be a price-targeting strategy.
• one of the big costs in a restaurant business is table space. Restaurateurs would therefore like to charge customers for dawdling, but because they cannot do that, they charge higher prices for products that tend to be consumed in longer meals: not just wine but also starters and desserts.
• Reality check number two: can the company plug leaks?
• sometimes it is more difficult to prevent the price-insensitive customers from buying the cheaper one. Some of the most extreme examples come from the travel industry: travelling first class by train or air is much more expensive than buying a standard ticket, but since the fundamental effect is to get people from A to B, it may be hard to wring much money out of the wealthier passengers.
• French economist Emile Dupuit pointed to the early railways as an example: It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches … What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from travelling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich …
• The shoddy quality of most airport departure lounges across the world is surely part of the same phenomenon.
• In the supermarkets, we see the same trick: products that seem to be packaged for the express purpose of conveying awful quality. ... It wouldn’t cost much to hire a good designer and print more attractive logos.
• Starbucks offers a splendid example: the world’s most famous coffee company will serve you a better, stronger cappuccino if you want one, and they will charge you less for it. ... why does this cheaper, better drink – along with its sisters, the short latte and the short coffee – languish unadvertised? The official line from Starbucks is that there is no room on the menu board,
• Price targeting provides a far more convincing answer: while some companies make their cheap products look unattractive, Starbucks simply makes them invisible to those who don’t ask around.
• The first ‘leak’ in a price-targeting strategy, then, is that rich customers may buy cheap products, unless the products are deliberately sabotaged.
• The second ‘leak’ is ...that the customers who are being offered a discount buy the product and then resell it at a profit to the customers who are being charged a higher price. ... some products are inherently leaky: they’re expensive, easy to transport and non-perishable. The obvious examples are digital goods – music, video and software – and pharmaceuticals.
• For instance, the DVD industry agreed on a system of regional coding so that DVDs bought in the United States would not work in Europe.
• the same popular opinion that despises the DVD industry for trying to sell their products at different prices in different markets also believes that the big pharmaceutical companies should supply drugs to poor countries at discounted prices.
• When price-targeting is a good thing
• Imagine a hypothetical pharmaceutical company called PillCorp, which has developed a uniquely powerful new treatment for HIV/ AIDS. Assume that it doesn’t engage in any price-targeting and charges the same price across the globe.
• That looks like bad news. PillCorp is using its scarcity power to charge a high price for a life-saving drug. As a result, people in poor countries don’t get the drug.
• PillCorp could be making more money and serving the world better.... a taxi driver in Cameroon might be willing to pay only $50 a year for treatment;l... Because of PillCorp’s global price policy, the taxi driver loses out on the treatment, and PillCorp loses out on the chance to make some profit. But if PillCorp were able to make a onetime discount to the taxi driver ... That is what economists mean when we say a situation ‘could be better’.
• This assumes the cheap pills don’t ‘leak’ back, which in practice is a massive concern for pharmaceutical companies. .....Americans buy prescription drugs from across the border in Canada – a practice that can be illegal but is typically tolerated. Perhaps it is the Canadian policymakers who should worry: if the leakage becomes unbearable, the risk is that drug companies will simply refuse to offer discounts to Canada any more.
• When price-targeting is a bad thing
• Consider another hypothetical organisation, TrainCorp, a passenger train company. TrainCorp owns a train that always travels full. Some of the seats go at a discount of £50 to leisure travellers who booked in advance, to senior citizens, to students or to families. The other tickets cost the full price of £100
• We know at once – if we are economists – that this is inefficient. In other words, we can think of something that would make at least one person better off without making anyone else worse off. That something is to find a commuter who was willing to pay a little less than £100, say £95, and who decided to travel by car instead, and offer him a seat for £90. Where does the seat come from, since the train is full? Well, you take a student who is in no great hurry and was willing to pay a little more than £50, say £55, for the seat and politely throw him off the train. .... But of course, that’s not what happens, because if TrainCorp tried it, commuters who were willing to pay £100 would hang around for the £90 tickets,
• summary: the group price-targeting strategy is inefficient because it takes seats away from customers who are willing to pay more, and gives them to customers who are willing to pay less. .......individual price-targeting isn’t feasible.
• this book was published in hardcover at a high price, and then the paperback edition emerged later, at a lower price. The aim is to target a higher price at people impatient to hear what I have to say and at libraries. One good result is that the publisher will be able to sell paperbacks more cheaply, because some costs will be offset by the hardcover sales, and so the book will reach more people. One bad result is that the early version is much more expensive than it would be if there was only a single paperback edition, and some buyers will be put off.
• What if you had all the information you needed to never miss a sale? Would the world be a better place?...Can we say anything more generally about when private greed will serve the public interest? For the answers to all these questions, and more … read on.

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Behind Bars in the Land of the Free - James Wilson e John Lott

Behind Bars in the Land of the Free - James Wilson e John Lott

• Reforms that Ignore the Black Victims of Crime John R. Lott Jr
• Charges of racism flow freely in Professor Loury's recent book and this essay. 
• But Loury forgets an important fact: for violent and property crime there is always an individual victim who gets hurt —for black criminals that victim is overwhelmingly black.
• He also neglects acknowledging that we can't determine if the number of people in prison is "too high" without discussing the benefit from prison... system.  Looking at only the cost of imprisonment seems a very strange way to answer the question
• Why Focus on the Race of the Criminals and Not Also the Race of the Victims?
•  Blacks overwhelmingly commit crime against other blacks.... 90.2% of black murder victims were murdered by blacks....poor blacks commit crimes against poor blacks.
•  If we punish black criminals a lot, isn't it possible that the reason we are doing it is because we care about the black victims?
• When Are There Too Many People in Prison?
• So the United States puts more people in prison than other countries?  By itself that isn't evidence that something has gone wrong.
•  The evidence that punishment deters criminals is overwhelming.
• United States also appears to have a relatively low violent crime rate compared to most other developed countries. 
• Changes in arrest rates account for up to about 18 percent of the variation in murder rates (see Lott, 2007, Chapter 4).  Conviction rates explain up to another 12 percent.  Prison sentences another 10 percent and the death penalty another 10 percent. 
• I don't put much weight in the cross-sectional analysis apparently favored by Loury simply because it is much easier to control for differences across countries with panel data, but the United States' high prison rate is at least balanced off by a relatively low violent crime rate. 
• The International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS) indicates that for the violent crime categories of sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault, the U.S. looks remarkably safe.
• The U.S. white murder rate is comparable to many countries in Europe, and is just a fraction of Russia's, one country that Loury compares the US to.  The difference is driven blacks. 
• Even for the death penalty the vast majority of published refereed academic work finds that the death penalty deters crime
• Why Focus on Prison as the Only Penalty?
• The fact that blacks go to prison at relatively high rates is not the same thing as saying that they disproportionately bear the lion's share of criminal penalties.  Prison represents only one part of the penalties
• The criminal justice system discriminates against higher-income criminals
• Take the case of a bank embezzler with an income one standard deviation above the mean: he or she faces a total monetary penalty that is 4.94 times greater than that for an average income embezzler.
• it isn't clear why an economist would advocate having greater penalties for a criminal simply because he has a higher income.  Economists normally view criminal penalties as making the criminal bear the harm that he is imposing on others. 
• If Loury is after more equality in society, why not instead use the income tax to redistribute wealth?
• There are at least 32 different types of collateral penalties... Overall these penalties are greater for higher-income criminals....
• Another Type of Criminal Penalty
• : The Death Penalty From 1976 to 2004, 65 percent of executions involved whites, but whites committed only 47 percent of murders.
• it is hard to look at this data and claim that the death penalty is obviously adversely applied against minorities.  
• Affirmative Action and Police
• By eliminating or reducing standards on basic intelligence tests, police departments appear to have lowered the quality of new hires across the racial spectrum and made police less effective in solving crime.  These lower quality recruits have increased crime rates,
• Addressing the Problems that Lead to Prison James Q. Wilson
• we have put into prison a large fraction of our citizens... Loury says little about why this happened
• He looks askance at those who speak about the "purported net benefits to 'society' of greater incarceration." I am one of those,
• social scientists who have worked hard to understand...Let me summarize what Daniel Nagin, David Farrington, Patrick Langan, Steven Levitt, and William Spelman have shown... a higher risk of punishment reduces crime rates.
• results of prison in America: It helps explain why this country has a lower rate of burglary than Australia, Austria, Canada, England, Germany, and the Netherlands, and a lower rate of auto theft than Australia, Austria, Canada, England, and Sweden. On the other hand, America's homicide rate remains much higher... America is more punitive, but except for homicide, it is also safer.
• The central question is why blacks commit these crimes in such high numbers. My research, like that of Orlando Patterson and others, suggests that slavery and Reconstruction deeply harmed African American culture by making intact families rare and denying to black victims the same degree of police protection that was afforded to whites.
• many black children have grown up in father-absent families.... 70 percent of black males in prison did not grow up with a resident father.
• We can, of course, wait until men get in trouble and then try to rehabilitate...But the gains, on the average, are small: recidivism rates are reduced by about 10 percent.
• If we knew how to make street gangs less attractive to boys we could reduce dramatically
• The best approach is to invest in crime prevention programs aimed at young children... They include the Perry Pre-School program, nurse home visitations, various parent-child training programs, and certain school-based programs.
• many of the best prevention programs cost a lot of money... defining some children as "at-risk" means talking specifically about black and Hispanic children in welfare homes,
• the programs that work are typically small, intense efforts that may or may not work if they are scaled... good programs often lose out to bad ones because the latter, though equally devoted to prevention, lack supportive evidence but have political muscle.

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Le origini della vita - Panspermia

Le origini della vita - Panspermia

• Il caso Galileo è noto ai più per la persecuzione a cui la scienza puo' essere sottoposta da parte della chiesa cattolica, eppure le teorie professate da galileo, ovvero le teorie copernicane erano insegnate anche nelle università cattoliche. Come mai tanto accanimento da un lato e tanta tolleranza dall'altro? Mi viene un possibile parallelo contemporaneo. Alcuni scienziati hanno messo in dubbio che i meccanismi dell'evoluzione siano in grado di spiegare la vita sulla terra, alcuni di loro si sono raggruppati sotto le insegne dell' Intelligent Design e il loro scetticismo è stato combattuto aspramente. Eppure il loro stesso scetticismo è condiviso anche da chi propugna l'ipotesi della paspermia come ipotesi più probabile circa le origini della vita. Al fondo c'è la medesima considerazione: l'ipotesi evoluzionistica non è in grado di spiegare la nascita della vita sulla terra. Verso gli argomenti di costoro c'è molta più tolleranza, anzi, l'ipotesi della panspermia ormai è quasi maggioritaria nell'accademia.
• Fewer Harder Steps
• Somewhere between 1.75 billion and 3.25 billion years from now, Earth will travel out of the solar system’s habitable zone
• life appeared on Earth from 0.0 to 0.7 billion years after such life was possible
• (Earth is now 4.5 billion years old.)
• Earth being very lucky to originate intelligence life.
• “hard steps,”like inventing life, sex, multi-cellular bodies, and intelligence.
• the steps could have very different difficulties...if all these steps were hard.......the actual distribution of durations observed between the steps...
• Considerazioni
• this pushes us to give up the idea that life evolved on Earth at all, or that the origin of life was a hard step. If life evolved elsewhere, that could give a lot more time for hard steps to be achieved. After all, the universe is now 13.8 billion years old.
• this also pushes us, if a bit more weakly, to give up the idea that the evolution of intelligence was a hard step. Intelligence seems to have appeared only 0.6 billion years after the appearance of multi-cellular animals,
• there seems to be only room for one or two hard steps so far in the history of Earth.
• Panspermia Confirmed
• meteorite from Mars suggests it may show signs of life after all.   …
• The possibility that the rock contains fossilised microbes received another boost
• Two Kinds of Panspermia
• Caleb A. Scharf...argument against interstellar panspermia:
• The sequence of events involved in panspermia will weed out all but the toughest or most serendipitously suited organisms...
• Life driven by cosmic dispersal will probably end up being completely dominated by the super-hardy, spore-forming, radiation resistant, chemical-eating, and long-lived organism.
• if evolved galactic panspermia is real it’ll be capable of living just about everywhere.... So if galactic panspermia exists why haven’t we noticed it yet?
• 2 scenari possibili
• 1. Space-centered... life might mainly drift from one harsh space environment to another.... Under this scenario life must on average grow in common space environments, and so we should see a lot of life
• 2. Planet-centered – Alternatively, space life might usually die away, and only grow greatly in special rare places like planets... effetto semi del cocco: seeds die away during ocean journeys, and then multiply on islands.
• Scharf’s argument weighs against a space-centered scenario, but not a planet-centered scenario.
• Pondering Panspermia
• panspermia is no longer a marginalized view....It may not yet be the majority opinion, but it shows up often in journal articles
• Academia is often run by an old guard ensuring that its public face reflects their old views... while younger folk quietly bite their tongues waiting for their chance
• Most academic patrons just want to affiliate with the high status old guard,l....... no matter what its views,

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An Economist's Rational Road to Christianity By Eric Falkenstein

An Economist's Rational Road to Christianity By Eric Falkenstein

• Most ex-atheists who become deists turn to Buddhism, so I thought I'd be clear why they are all wrong (Robert Wright!).
• I came to Christ via rational inference, not a personal crisis.
• A Rational Argument for Christianity
• Bertrand Russell...discusses many arguments for the existence of God—first cause, natural law—and finds them all logically defective, except the argument from design... He found the theory of evolution adequate to rebut this theory, but a lot has been discovered since then.
• Evolution Just Like Abiogenesis
• from the beginning, evolutionary theorists conceded that the appearance of initial life forms had yet to be explained.
• Just as his grandfather did, Darwin believed that the discovery of the first life form would occur soon.
• The more we learn about the minimum necessary components of life, the more complicated it gets.
• ... The most basic cell requires at least a hundred proteins, each of which has approximately 300 amino acids , and all need to be able to work with each other.
• The inevitable conclusion is that showing how a natural process can create a set of letters used in typesetting does not go far in showing how natural processes create words, let alone novels.[ 4] The origin of life is one of those puzzles that has been right around the corner, for the past two centuries.
• The problem is that natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but not how novel tissues arose,
• looking at many thousands of generations of fruit flies and bacteria, we see only a handful of minor mutations.
• microevolution does not imply macroevolution,
• From Deism to Christianity
• after I accepted that a creator exists...I experienced a strange consilience, as various facts all began to make much more sense.
• Things that work as if they are true, are often really true.
• The science behind evolution is essential to understand why it is rational to believe in a creator, and psychology, neurology, and economics tell us about human nature
• In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins wrote that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist... A little knowledge led us away from God, and now a considerable amount of knowledge has led us back.
• Unlike what the atheists say about God turning one off to science, it engaged me, because it is much more exciting to search for patterns if you think they exist objectively, rather than something I merely might be able to convince someone is important. The mathematician, Paul Erdos, used to become excited about determining not just mathematical proofs, but ones that were beautiful: inevitable, concise, and unexpected;
• basic problems of survival, the search for meaning is the essence of being human.
• The Christian Consilience
• Once you accept that we were created, it becomes easier to understand our common drive to find meaning and purpose, because it is more likely that we have an objective purpose
• Love is the only end in itself, and the love of God is the key to any Christian purpose,
• The most profound truth is that some being created us, and that created things have a purpose. Our purpose is hard-wired into our biology, and creates a longing to love something greater than ourselves, and following this simple purpose generates a social optimum via invisible hand.
• Christianity...its bottom-up focus encourages decentralized decision-making and individual liberty. Christianity neither legislates nor demands virtue; it merely encourages
• The modesty that comes from Christianity is not weakness, but rather, a combination of honesty and intelligence.
• A Christian purpose aligns with our nature so well that it is useful to believe and behave “as if”it were true, and in the history of science, many assumptions that were chosen because they worked were later found to be true.
• Una teoria dell'egoismo. Your attitude towards yourself is paramount because we really love our neighbor as ourselves...... those without any self-interest find it much easier to be cruel when acting selflessly...(e.g., ants are selfless animals, yet they are also the most warlike and take slaves)?
• making yourself a better person, not out of narcissism, but rather, in order to look better to someone beautiful who loves you. In contrast, Freudian psychoanalysis centers on fixing oneself for oneself
• the more we thought about ourselves, the more we thought about how others had wronged us. The motivation, the heart, is key.
• The progressive inspired ‘positive’rights for healthcare, food, education, and housing, are claims on the resources of others backed by coercive bureaucracies.
• Il welfare degrada i caratteri. Goods and services received without struggle—and the sense of insecurity that motivates it— leads to resentment, and this leads to a vicious circle of hating the 1% even more;
• The Bible is prescient in orienting an individual’s focus in concentric circles from him/ herself, to family, etc.,
• In Christianity....assumes that all people are imperfect, that such is the crooked timber of humanity. A Christian does not expect heaven on Earth,
• God.... Compared to his incredible powers, we are incredibly dumb so our greatest objective achievements in science and art are relatively lame... why God is more interested in our faith and love than any other aspect of our character.
• Status. If you find a community of people with a shared sense of purpose, whose values inspire virtuous conduct, and whose relationships provide support, guidance, and encouragement, your life will be better.
• people who attend religious services on a weekly basis are nearly twice as likely to describe themselves as “very happy”(45%) than are people who never attend (28%).[ 16]
• Poor areas tend to be more religious...Relatively prosperous people are also happier, yet within these prosperous cohorts, religious people are happier.... given any level of prosperity, religion increases happiness.
• Coda
• In Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, he writes “the battle [for evolution] is part of a wider war, a war between rationality and superstition.
• Wars, alas, are not known for their rationality, rather their propaganda to maintain popular support.
• The focus on the will over reason, classical liberalism, classical virtues, love as the primal motive, that humans are by nature base, shows that the New Testament is right on all the issues that really matter.... for creating a thriving society, Christianity works.
• we can infer transcendent forces indirectly, and most of our knowledge is inferential, not deductive. That is, we see a universal desire for purpose, the benefits in this world of living for the next
• If you estimate rationally, there is a sufficient probability (e.g., 73%) that Christianity is true, with this probability it makes sense to act as if Christianity has a 100% probability of being correct. This is because, in any strategy that takes persistence, once you make the choice to do it you should be “all in.”In the words of a famous short green deist, “Do, or do not, there is no try.”
• My previous attempts to create meaning within the secular humanist worldview were not failures because I did not try hard enough, but rather because you need a lot of luck to do this without God.
• I will not find my purpose by adopting the worldview of some village in Costa Rica. That would not work primarily because I have no social connections in such a village, and without those relationships, the whole thing does not work at all, even if it works for them.

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GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY Christian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di JEREMY WALDRON - seconsa parte cap. 3 Species and the Shape of Equality

GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY Christian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di  JEREMY WALDRON -     seconda parte cap. 3 Species and the Shape of Equality

• the importance that Locke attaches to the dividing line between human and non-human species
• "The entire cosmos is the work of God....It is an ordered hierarchy, a `great chain of being', in which every species has its station, its rank."...
• Locke's human egalitarianism depends crucially on the clarity and intelligibility of the species-boundaries.
• we turn to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. standing. What Locke says there about species is almost entirely at odds with the conception of species-hierarchy
• Locke envisages ages a series of created beings, ascending from the lowest entity to the highest... But it ascends up from us "by gentle degrees"... this chain of being forms a continuous series of entities..."no Chasms, or gaps" between beings
• We language-users have no choice but to confront this continuum with words............difference between this particular cat and that particular dog. Nothing in nature shows that these resemblances and differences categorize themselves into essences.... there is no reason to think that our tendency to organize resemblances into clusters under the auspices of general species-terms reflects anything other than our propensity as language-users to make use of general words.
• I think this offers little in the way of assistance for our use of the concept species in moral and political theory....Locke's account of real essences is far from straightforward...I believe it is basically a pragmatic one:
• Sometimes Locke presents the unavailability to us of objective real essences as a reflection of the limitations on our knowledge.
• In general, we seem to have here a pretty thorough-going anti-realism, so far as species are concerned.
• the putative boundaries between humans mans and other animals are blurred in a number of ways. Fetuses are sometimes oddly shaped, familiarly shaped humans often vary enormously mously in their rational abilities, some allegedly non-human animals have been rumored to have the power of speech, humans have been known to interbreed with apes (Locke alleges), and so on:
• The fact is, says Locke, that you are likely to get disagreement among people as to how to draw the boundaries of the species:
• which internal features caught our attention would be a matter ter of which were inherently interesting to us....it is our interests that would dictate what revisions we made in (what we called) the essence of man.
• when he talks about fetal monstrosities, Locke says that there is a question about whether the entity is entitled to baptism.....I think this shows the absurdity of the Laslett suggestion that we have, on the one hand, Locke the philosopher (uninterested in normative implications) and, on the other hand, Locke the political theorist (uninterested in philosophy).
• On the face of it, the implications of Locke's skepticism about species are pretty serious. If the boundaries of species are made by men and not given by our Creator... "the same individual will be a true Man to the one [party], which is not so to the other"... Locke's comment in Book IV of the Essay, on how an English child might "prove" that a negro is not a man, is really quite disconcerting in this regard.4°
• by rejecting essentialism, Locke is undercutting those theories of human inequality that depend on "essentializing" superficial characteristics like skin color or sex organs. Kathy Squadrito says, for example, that Locke's rejection of external form as real essence means that he doesn't really think there is an important portant difference between men and women.4'
• the point about Locke's anti-essentialism is that it leaves the field wide open for anyone to draw the boundaries...It leaves him with no naturalistic basis whatsoever for distinguishing those creatures
• Maybe this should boost the morale of anti-speciesist defenders of animal rights; but it is hardly calculated to cheer those who think there is something special about humans and human equality.
• Locke is also supposed to have committed himself to a fundamental principle of equality: members of the same species are naturally equal in authority, whatever the other differences between them. But now that species-based notion has collapsed...Locke seems to have deprived himself of the resource he needs to limit
• My strategy in this chapter is to show the indispensability for Locke's theory of equality of the religious aspect of his argument
• In biblical revelation, the only direct intimation of a basis for the distinction of the human species is descent from Adam.... Anyway, a purely genealogical basis for equality and inequality would be practically inadequate.
• Locke says in his political philosophy that any basis for inequality must be evident, clear, and mmnifest.
• Senso comune. So what is to be done? I think that in order to make Locke's account of equality in the Two Treatises consistent with his discussion in Book III ofthe Essay, we have to forget about real essences, and abandon the emphasis on species altogether. I think we should focus instead on   real resemblances between particulars:... We must ask which resemblances are actually doing the crucial work... That will give us his definition of humanity...
• .The emphasis now is on characteristics not on species or ranks of species. The domain of equality will simply be the domain of relevant similarity ity i.e. the possession of faculties that can be regarded as the same or (relevantly) similar.
• Our heuristic now is emphatically...we have to start from the idea of a similarity among faculties that would be robust enough to sustain
• focusing moral attention not on species, but on the complex property of corporeal rationality.... the detail of the issue about species can be left as a purely speculative problem for the naturalists and philosophers.
• Locke. The key, he says, is corporeal rationality...It is intriguing, though, that corporeality is also invoked... This little point, I believe, is quite unintelligible apart from the moral theology. ogy. Locke speculates that there are all sorts of rational beings in the cosmos
• .I don't think he is attempting to commit the naturalistic fallacy by inferring our normative equality from some factual similarity. He says in the Second Treatise that the connection is "evident" (2nd T: 4), but that this is not the same as saying that it is logically implied... like angels, for instance,
• Let us turn now to the rationality criterion....Unfortunately,...non-human animals have minds,... Since they are "not bare Machins (as some would have them), we cannot deny them to have some Reason"
• There are degrees of rationality, both among those we are pre-theoretically inclined to call humans and in a broader class of animals...On this gradual scale, who gets the benefit of equality?
• There is, for example, the human fetus, which, Locke says, "dfers not much from the State of a Vegetable...lunacy, idiocy.......Infants are a slightly different case,.... Locke's argument is that they are to be treated as beings destined for equality, though not our equals at present.... And finally there are the familiar distinctions between the wise and the silly,
• If there is, as Locke says, "a difference of degrees in Men's Understandings...there is a greater distance between some Men and others in this respect than between tween some Men and some Beasts" (E: 4.20.5), then how can we work with or justify any notion of basic equality?
• that, considered as tabulae rasae, our minds are all the same, and that the intellectual differences between us are simply a matter of input and exercise.
• In Book II of the Essay, he argued that what distinguishes humans from other animals is not their capacity to reason per se - for brute animals have some sort of reason - but rather the "power of Abstracting," the capacity to reason on the basis of general ideas.... So, maybe this is Locke's equality-threshold.
• But he quickly indicates that many who bear the nominal essence of man lack the ability to abstract. Many of those we call idiots
• Locke is not offering this capacity to abstract as the real essence of the species human. He is offering it as an interesting resemblance among all the beings
• for Locke the real resemblance on which basic equality rests the ability to form and work with abstract ideas must work rather like what modern political philosophers call a range property....A range property may be understood in terms of a region on a scale.... we may use the binary property of being within the range,l... In John Rawls's own use of the idea, the relevant range property is the capacity for moral personality.
• Relative to the interest driving the specification of the range property, the precise location tion of an entity on the scale is uninteresting. That it is Within the range is all we need to know...Is there anything which can do this work for Locke?
• No matter how inadequate the average human intellect is for a "universal, sal, or perfect Comprehension," it yet secures their great Concernments, that they have Light enough to lead them to the Knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own Duties... The existence of God, Locke believes, is something that can be established by the unaided human intellect, whatever that intellect's other limitations.
• God .... He has conferred on those whom He intends to serve Him the rational power that is required for easy recognition of His existence.... Anyone with the capacity for abstraction can reason to the existence of God... he has the minimal capacity to think of himself as a person.
• The fact that a being can get this far, intellectually, by whatever route, shows that he is a creature with a special moral relation to God.
• if I catch a human in full possession of his faculties, I know I should be careful how I deal with him. Because creatures capable of abstraction can be conceived as "all the servants of one Sovereign Master,
• That, it seems to me, is the interest that is driving and shaping Locke's moral conception of "man," and motivating the interest in the particular range of capacities that forms the basis for Lockean equality.
• Someone in denial of or indifferent to the existence of God is not going to be able to come up with anything like the sort of basis for equality that Locke came up with.
• There is no reason for an atheist to recognize such a threshold... The atheist has no basis in his philosophy for thinking that beings endowed with the capacity that Locke emphasizes are for that reason to be treated as special and sacred in the way Locke thought.
• Locke's equality claims are not separable from the theological content that shapes and organizes them. The theological content cannot simply ply be bracketed off as a curiosity
• Lockean equality is not fit to be taught as a secular doctrine; it is a conception of equality that makes no sense except in the light of a particular account of the relation between man and God.

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Incontro presso la scuola Arca di Legnano con Romana Koech e Andrea Bianchessi. AVSI a Nairobi

Incontro presso la scuola Arca di Legnano con Romana Koech e Andrea Bianchessi. AVSI a Nairobi

• Per Avsi la persona è al centro.
• Avsi ha deciso di investire in kenya sulle scuole.
• I risultati sono "pazzeschi".
• Scuola AVSI: nn solo istitruzione.
• Priorità: investire sugli insegnanti.
• Puntare sulla responsabilità: la famiglia deve dare un contributo per evitare dipendenza e pretese.
• Scuola: vaccino contro corruzione e terrorismo.
• Un percorso personalizzato x ogni bambino. Un paese in cui nella scuola statale ci sono 80 bimbi x classe.
• Motto: ogni bimbo è unico.
• I tre problemi del Kenya: tribalismo, corruzione e radicalismo fondamentalista. Il Papa li ha evidenziati. Ma ha parlato anche del bene: tradizione, famiglua e solidarietà.

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Changing the guard di Alex Tabarrok

Changing the guard di Alex Tabarrok

• Il pericolo delle carceri private: troppo efficienti. Rischio di mass incarceration visti i bassi costi e l'efficienza di gestione. Rischio zero amnistie.
• Altro rischio: scarsa trasparenza.
• Vantaggio: i privati nn scaricano sui contribuenti i costi delle risse, dei processi per maltrattamento ecc.
• Intro - tabarrok
• 3 vantaggi del privato. 1 costruisce più in fretta 2 opera a costi inferiori 3 la qualità è almeno pari a quella pubblica.
• La scarsa qualità delle prime prigioni?semplice: hai quello che chiedi. Nei primi contratti il governo aggiudicava solo in base ai costi. Solo ora esistono contratti multivariabile.
• Se il governo è inefficiente nel gestire le prigioni perchè mai dovrebbe essere efficiente nello scrivere i contratti o nel controllarne l'applicazione?
• Analogia: sicurezza negli aeroporti: l 11 settembre costituì un fallimento nella sicurezza ma in realtà tutti i servizi richiesti furono implementati. Era il contratto ad essere sbagliato. L'aeroporto più esposto ad attentati è quello di Tel Aviv e guarda caso la sicurezza è privata
• Bruce Benson: la privatizzazione delle carceri nn è auspicabile poichè rende più efficiente un servizio malvagio. Sarebbe come rendere più efficiente l'esazione delle tasse.
• Cap2  economics of prison kenneth avio
• I carcerati sono quadruplicati dagli 80 ai 90. Ma la prigione paga?
• La prigione riabilita? Martinson 1974: no (nothing work). Conclusione confermata dal the panel of research on rehabilitative techniques.
• Lattimore-Witte: molti programmi sono concepiti male. Recentemente Witte però si è portato sulle posizioni di Martinson. Forse qualche programma particolarmente accurato potrebbe avere qualche effetto nel breve termine. E forse anche nel lungo. Si passa al principio: "nulla funziona bene".
• E i programmi per chi è fuori, quelli almeno funzionano?
• meglio aiutare cercando lavoro che insegnando un lavoro.
• per mallar e thornton dare soldi è più efficace che fornire un lavoro, almeno se misuriamo il recidivismo
• conclusione: 1 la riabilitazione è estremamente costosa 2 nn abbiamo ancora capito cosa funzione 3 il one fits all non esiste.
• la prigione rende alla società? Le risorse dovrebbero essere concentrate per reprimere i giovani più pericolosi
• Donohue e siegelman calcolano un elasticità di deterrenza di 0.15. Considerati i costi sembrerebbe poco conveniente aumentare la popolazione carceraria usa. Ad ogni modo serve un termine di confronto verosimile per trarre conclusioni.
• Prison privatizzazione public policy di samuel brakel e kimberly gaylord
• tesi: privatizzare parte della macchina carceraria. L efficienza crescerà ovunque.
• opposizione alla privatizzazione. Motivi:1 deteriora l'immaginario simbolico 2 ci sono problemi legali
• l importanza di un buon contratto.
• il problema delle carceri statali:1 costi 2 sovra popolazione.
• oggi negli usa la maggior parte dei servizi di giustizia (prigioni, tribunali, polizia) è privata.

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Governare i beni collettivi di Elinor Ostrom

Governare i beni collettivi di Elinor Ostrom

• Che differenza c è tra i beni comuni e i beni pubblici?
• I beni comuni sono difficili da delimitare anche se l esclusione e cmq possibile.
• Tesi ostrom: nn esiste una dicotomia pubblico/privato ma un continum. Spesso le scelte sono cooperative e le istituzioni che governano i beni comuni sono flessibili e non eteroimposte.
• Gli utenti spesso hanno tra loro una vicinanza familiare e collaborano in un processo partecipativo. Il localismo è esaltato, così come l autogestione
• Esempi di risorse comuni: banchi di pesca, pascoli, co,tivazioni open fields, risorse idriche
• Le consuetudine spesso s impongono sull esclusiva perchè quest'ultima è troppo costosa da applicare, pensiamo ai banchi di pesca. Del resto la socializzazione è talmente inefficiente...
• Spesso le soluzioni ottimali sono state abbandonate perchè ritenute anti moderne. Le riforme agrarie hanno snobbato le so,uzioni open field per favorire la frammentazione artificiosa o la concentrazione. Anche la tecnica e le macchine hanno remato contro.
• Tesi: soluzioni open field tornano dove le istituzioni sono sufficientemente elastiche.
• SoLuzioni open fields sembrano limitare i rischi.
• L open field è nella pratica una proprietà privata sottoposta a vincoli d uso. Esempio: la rotazione triennale grano orzo maggese scelta dal paese, i privati si adeguano. A ciò si associava il diritto di spigolatura e l obbligo di seminare tutti insieme. Anche il bestiame era privato ma soggetto a regole collettive. Spesso esisteva poi una quota di terreno più collettivizzata delle altre.
• Esempio italiano: i boschi dell alto cadore. La legna come combustibile. I pascoli comuni cuscinetto evitavano l investimento in staccionate. Dopo la raccolta i campi venivano aperti per spigolatura e pascoli.
• Il bene comune nn era poi tanto comune visto che la restrizione di sfruttamento assegnava privilegi ad una ristretta cerchia di nobili
• Il common prevede una chiara definizione della comunità degli aventi diritto. Spesso anzi è necessario appartenere alla cerchia dei patri. Per questo forse i maggiori successi si colgono nelle aeree alpine e impervie in generale. La terra veniva difesa ferocemente dall arrivo degli outsider.
• L' esclusività è più efficace dei common per garantire sfruttamenti di lu go periodo. D altro canto favorendo la concentrazione favorisce anche l abbandono contro delle terre.
• Anche internet potrebbe essere trattata come un common.

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GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY Christian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di JEREMY WALDRON - prima parte cap. 3 Species and the Shape of Equality

GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY Christian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di  JEREMY WALDRON -     prima parte cap- 3 Species and the Shape of Equality

• xchè nn possiamo omettere la dimensione religiosa in locke?
• rawls ha bisogno di premettere il valore dell uguaglianza ma nn vuole compromissioni religiose
• relazione comando/comandante
• es. nn uccidere l altro... xchè anch esso è a immagine di dio... che relazione c è tra la prima e la seconda parte (quella religiosa)
• le ragioni di un comando ci consentono di capirlo meglio? sì quando il predicato è astratto e indeterminato
• nel precetto dell eguaglianza tra uomini il termine umano riceve il suo contenuto dall affermazione religiosa
• contenuto del comando e ragioni del comando nn sono sempre separabili ma interagiscono specie nei comandi astratti: siate onesti. questo fatto mette in crisi i nn cognitivisti
• "gli uomini sono uguali"... il concetto di uomo è in parte determinato dal comando e nn solo viceversa
• la necessità di definire l umano spiazza rawls e i laici
• @@@
• il principio di eguaglianza fa della specie umana qualcosa di speciale
• una filosofia che nn distingue tra specie crea grave danno alla filosofia ma x distinguere occorre introdurre l elemento religioso
• il dominio dell uomo sul creato
• .....
• Macintyre's observation:... arguments of John Locke concerning basic equality and individual rights were so imbued with religious content that they were not fit, constitutionally, stitutionally, to be taught in the public schools
• Why are we not able to bracket off the theological dimension of Locke's commitment to equality?
• Why can't we put the religious premises in parentheses?...this hope is crucial for modern secular liberalism.... Rawls's system definitely requires a premise of equality... but I am doubtful that this Rawlsian strategy will work.
• Rawlsian strategy... religious content has a purely external relation to the equality principle. By an external relation, I mean a relation that does not go to the meaning
• Consider, for example, the relation of some proposition about a commander to the content of his command.
• For example, the Sixth Commandment has a content "Thou shalt not kill" which seems logically quite independent of any proposition about... what one might call the preface to the Decalogue "I am the Lord thy God,
• The commandment to Noah prohibiting murder cites as a reason the fact that potential victims of murder are made in the image of the person (God) who has issued the commandment.... There the religious aspect seems to have an internal relation to the commandment,
• Someone might object that this confuses content with reasons....the fact that P is cited as a reason for Q doesn't mean that P is indispensable for understanding the meaning of Q
• Now this is sometimes true, especially where the reasons in question establish nothing but an instrumental relationship.....I think the Rawlsians overestimate the extent to which it is true generally,
• Abstract principles of justice and rights characteristically need to be filled
• I have argued this elsewhere with regard to John Stuart Mill's "Harm Principle."8
• I think this is particularly the case where a moral principle involves predicates whose extension is not given determinately apart from the principle in question.
• I believe this is also true of the predicate "human" in the principle of basic human equality.
• in Locke's account, the shape of human.....is not in the end separable from the religious reasons... If someone arrives at what purports to be a principle of human equality on other grounds (e.g., non-religious grounds), there is little reason to believe that that principle will have the same shape or texture as the Lockean principle....
• Many non-cognitivists assume that moral positions are subjective responses to factual features
• They think this is true not just of moral positions like "Causing pain is wrong," where it is clear that we can use the descriptive words "causing pain" to identify the actions concerned... but also that it is true of moral positions involving "thick" moral concepts, positions tions like "Honesty is the best policy" and "Courage cannot be taught."... concepts like honesty and courage can be analyzed into descriptive components referring to some fact about the world
• John McDowell and others have expressed doubts about the general applicability of this pattern of analysis. What, asks McDowell, makes us so confident that we can always disentangle the descriptive properties from the evaluative response?
• The descriptive features underlying a given normative attitude might well seem weird or "shapeless""
• I think a version of McDowell's point may apply to the concept human embedded in our commitment to equality.... But our concept human may be partly shaped by our commitment to equality,
• Locke's religious premises help to make sense of or give shape to a certain cluster of human characteristics
• shapelessness point deprives the Rawlsians and others who favor the bracketing approach
• All men are equal...These are familiar egalitarian propositions. To whom do they apply?...I shall devote the rest of this chapter to an exploration of some of the extraordinary difficulties thatJohn Locke gets into as he tries to answer these questions,
• John Locke asserts as a matter of principle the fundamental equality of all members of the human species. Members of this species have a special status, or occupy a special moral position quite unlike that of any other animal....any parallel for the co-members of any other species.
• But in his philosophy of science...Locke comes very close to saying that there are no such things as species....species are at best just human conventions... The danger that this poses to the moral and political argument is enormous.
• Locke is not a pragmatist, like (say) Richard Rorty, proposing to keep a whole moral system tem afloat by using some conventional commitments to evaluate others.13 His approach in the Two Treatises and in his other political writings is explicitly plicitly foundationalist,
• A causa di qs difficoltà... we have been taught by historians of the Cambridge school- in particular ular Peter Laslett and his followers to assume that Locke's politics can and should be studied in more or less complete isolation from the rest of his philosophy...."Locke is, perhaps, the least consistent of all the great philosophers,
• Ma... The actual evidence cited for Locke's having contradicted himself was always quite slight
• Well, I believe they are wrong...it is not just a matter of noticing the difficulty and then winching down God to resolve it.
• Locke talks about God's decision to "make a Species of Creatures, that should have Dominion over the other Species

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GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY Christian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di JEREMY WALDRON - 2Adam and Eve

GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY Christian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di  JEREMY WALDRON - 2 Adam and Eve - nn finito

• uomo donna
• 1 entrambi a immagine di dio 2 entrambi dotati di ragione => la diseguaglianza prospettata è quindi di ruolo
• ....
• There is, first, an awkwardness...at having to make explicit... that humans are special and that some of the more obvious differences between them are irrelevant to the fundamentals of moral
• Secondly, we are discomfited at the prospect of having to take seriously, even if only for the sake of clarity and refutation, racist and sexist positions
• Filmer sottolinea... The biblical subordination of Eve to Adam
• women as much as men are created in the image of God and endowed with the modicum of reason that is, for Locke, the criterion of human equality.

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Presentazione de La bellezza disarmata a Rho. Intervengono: Fausto Bertinotti, Eugenio Borgna, Julián Carrón

Presentazione de La bellezza disarmata a Rho. Intervengono: Fausto Bertinotti, Eugenio Borgna, Julián Carrón - appunti

• Borgna
• L amicizia. Un miracolo, come la bellezza. Sintonia dei cuori.
• La tristezza. Nostalgia dell assente ed emersione della domanda.
• Interiorità. È lì che abita la verità. Agostino. La voce dell infinito passa di lì. Cuore: parola biblica x indicare la ricchezza interiore.
• Solitudine. Da distinguere dall isolamento (prigionia)
• Speranza. Una zattera su cui imbarcarsi. Il treno dell eterno si ferma grazie a lei. Da separate dalle speranze concrete.
• Umanità. Passione: comunicazione del cuore che alimenta la ragione.
• Mistero. Il confine della ragione. Imho: complessità e scoperta infinita.
• Incontro. Testimonianza reciproca. Luogo dell attenzione.
• Bertinotti
• Il libro: un corpo a corpo tra la fede e il potere.
• Altra opposizione: morte e resurrezione
• La domanda politica: la crisi aiuta la rinascita? S intende una crisi di civiltà.
• B.  è pessimista... la catastrofe dell umano è possibile... a meno che... accada un evento. Un imprevisto. Una scintilla.
• Nume: Benjamin, marxista triste: il capitalismo è una religione disumana.
• L attesa nn deve essere inerte.
• Dal dialogo verrà la scintilla decisiva. Un dialogo che coniughi fede e dubbio. La fede da sola è violenza che s'impone ma temperata dal dubbio è confronto aperto.
• Altra endiade: libertà e comunità. La comunità può diventare una corazza (per fare la guerra). È la libertá che ti salva.
• Eclisse del popolo. Altra faccia della perdita di evidenze.
• Perchè tanta sordità della sinistra verso il dialogo con Carron? Perchè la sconfitta ci rende individualista.
• Muraro: la ragione moderna è disumana nn dialoga e nn parla dell uomo.
• Il dialogo implica un rischio. Abbiamo coraggio?
• La novità: lo scarto. La migrazione. Il migrante è l altro e ci chiede dialogo.
• Il potere oggi è impersonale. Il dialogo deve sfuggire al potere.
• Carron
• Il mistero dell essere. Ci serve una ragione che lo renda.
• Cultura americana: per dialogare lasciamo perdere la ricchezza. Dubbio: ma allora che gusto c è?
• La crisi e la paura si auto alimentano. Occorre uno scatto. Un ergersi x il dialogo.
• Il dialogo oggi è più probabile. Prima eravamo troppo sicuri nella propria fede.
• Ma la fede chiude o apre alla realtà?
• La fede nn si oppone alla ricerca.  Più incontro più desidero conoscere. La fede scatena la ricerca. E la fede cristiana ancora di più. Perchè nn è un insieme di dottrine ma è carne.
• Se la fede è ricerca il fondamentalismo che la impone è contrario alla sua natura.
• Appartenenza: per appartenere devo rinunciare o usare la libertà? I figli come appartengono alla famiglia.
• Ci aspettiamo troppo dalle regole. Dobbiamo invece motivare con l esempio e la testimonianza.
• Metodo di dio: sceglie un uomo per cambiare il mondo: Abramo.

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GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITYChristian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di JEREMY WALDRON - Introduction

GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITYChristian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di  JEREMY WALDRON - Introduction

• messaggio cristiano: creati eguali...eg. di base...raccolto da locke
• domanda consueta: quale uguaglianza?
• nostra domanda: xchè l uguaglianza
• Dworkin: l eguaglianza data x scontata (il dibattito è su quale). Ma xchè tanta sicumera?
• xchè giustificare l uguaglianza?: nessuno la nega.
• ai tempi di locke era negata: filmer
• x locke l assioma dell eg. è un assioma teologico
• che fatica tradurre locke nel linguaggio di oggi
• il ponte: anche x noi l eguaglianza è un valore difficilmente relativizzabile... col relativista qui casca l asino
• il ponte: l uguaglianza come valore pre politico
• il fondamento cristiano: secondo l a. è necessario x difendere la causa dell e.
• alternative:isaia berlin e la difesa utilitaristica... argomento circolare
• confutazione di filmer: 1 primo trattato: sulla base delle scritture 2 sec. trattato: sulla base della ragione
• 1 trattato: fissa l eguaglianza 2 trattato: spiega l eguaglianza
• filmer e aristotele... inegalitarismo particolare e generale... diritto divino dei re contro schiavi naturali
• l argomento religioso x la libertà è spesso caricaturizzato... cpn locke c è l occasione di prenderlo sul serio
• .......
• equality: the proposition that humans are all one another's equals created equal,
• I propose to explore in the company ofthe seventeenth-century English political philosopher John Locke.
• Testo. The Reasonableness of Christianity is as well-worked-out a theory of basic equality as we have in the canon of political philosophy.
• Philosophers ask whether we should be aiming for equality ofwealth, equality ofincome, equality of happiness, or equality of opportunity... mitigation of poverty;
• La questino del libro. Not "What are its implications?" but "What does this foundational equality amount to?"... "What is the character of our deeper commitment to treating all human beings as equals
• Il silenzio degli egalitaristi. Distinction between basic equality and equality as an aim is fundamental to Dworkin's work. Yet Dworkin has said next to nothing... He has devoted very little energy to the task of considering what that principle amounts to in itself... He maintains that it is an obvious and generally accepted truth
• .If he is right and I think he is then there is a failure of argument on a very broad front indeed.
• No doubt part of the reason for reticence here has to do with the unpleasantness or offensiveness of the views - sexist and racist
• Esperimento mentale. In philosophy generally erally one sometimes has to pretend to be a weirdo... In political philosophy, one has to appear to take seriously positions that in other contexts would be dismissed out of hand as offensive...
• By contrast John Locke and his contemporaries...were confronted with such denials,
• Sir Robert Filmer, the great proponent of patriarchalism... and the divine right of kings...in the same Multitude ... there is one Man amongst them, that in Nature hath a Right to be king
• It was the contrary position the principle of equality that seemed radical, disreputable, beyond reason, valid only as a philosophical hypothesis
• Locke, beyond doubt, was one of these equality-radicals... Political correctness argued the other way,
• Locke accorded basic equality the strongest grounding that a principle could have: it was an axiom of theology, understood as perhaps the most important truth about God's way
• Locke attempting to think through the consequences of this radicalism.... holding fast to what he knew was a counter-intuitive position,
• We are not accustomed to debate public controversies about equality using Old Testament sources;
• "Creatures of the same Species and rank"... "there is no appeal but to Heaven"
• Even if we say it is "just" a metaphor, it is a forbidding enough task to explain to a modern student what makes the metaphor apt,
• potential for anachronism and misunderstanding,
• many of us believe that this business of respecting one another as equals might have to be referred, in turn, to the idea of something important in or about human nature.
• Locke was exploring the possibility that humans were by nature worthy of respect as one another's equals, not just one another's equals in the politics of late seventeenth-century England,
• The title of my Carlyle Lectures and the sub-title of this book refer to the Christian foundations of Locke's political thought......Why "Christian"? Why not just "Religious Foundations of Equality"?...Locke was intensely interested in Christian doctrine...Dunn has argued that the whole frame of discussion in the Two Treatises of Government is "saturated with Christian assumptions..... Jesus Christ (and Saint Paul) may not appear in person in the text of the Two Treatises but their presence can hardly be missed
• I want to ask, not only whether we can discern the influence of Christian teaching... but also whether one can even make sense of a position like Locke's.........apart from the specifically biblical and Christian teaching that he associated with it.
• For Dunn, I suspect, the theological logical and specifically biblical and Christian aspects ofLockean equality are features of Locke's theory that make it largely irrelevant to our concerns. Locke's political theory of its theological foundations is a way of confining Locke to the seventeenth century.
• the deep philosophical commitments ments of a modern theory would likely be oriented to secular values such as autonomy or dignity or human flourishing,
• Tesi. I actually don't think it is clear that we now can shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation.
• Isaiah Berlin, for example, imagines that there might be a utilitarian defense of basic equality.... But that is hopelessly confused.
• "Every man to count for one, nobody for more than one"32 is partly constitutive of utilitarianism, and so cannot be defended on utilitarian grounds except in a question-begging way.
• Locke confronted the claim, put forward in his own time, that these fundamental, apparently transcendent positions, could be understood on a purely secular basis. He had grave reservations about these claims,
• To treat Locke's argument as though it were a secular argument.... is one sort of anachronism.
• One has only to read the first of Locke's Two Treatises to become aware that we are in a quite different intellectual world
• Every Locke scholar, and not just those of a secular bent, views the methods and substance of the First Treatise as strange and disconcerting... "reason" part of the argument is mostly presented in the Second Treatise... So it is tempting to say that the First Treatise is just irrelevant to our modern concerns.
• Of course, part of John Locke's interest in the specifically biblical part of his argument is connected with the determination, driving his work in the Two Treatises, to refute the specific claims of Sir Robert Filmer,
• the most familiar philosophic defense of general inegalitarianism, namely Aristotle's theory of natural slavery.
• Filmer's primary interest is in identifying specific individuals who have authority over others, rather than classes or types of individual in some general hierarchy.4° A theory of the divine right of kings is particularistic... So this too seems to deprive Filmer's theory and its refutation of most of its interest for us.
• as Locke points out, Filmer is not consistent in his particularism....but much ofthe time he seems to be arguing for absolute authority in the abstract... Locke's attack at this point is one of the most powerful
• nobody in particular could possibly have the authority that Filmer says Adam and his heirs have had because of the relation that God has established among people in general.
• dispel the impression, which John Dunn's article might leave us with, that Locke is so different from us... Locke like us is interested in the meta-theoretical question
• First Treatise is an indispensable resource in the reconstruction of Locke's theory of equality... The First Treatise is nothing but a defense of the proposition that humans are, basically, one another's equals; it is a defense of the basis on which the Second Treatise proceeds.
• Secular theorists often assume that they know what a religious argument is like........a crude prescription from God,l.......they contrast it with the elegant complexity of a philosophical argument by Rawls (say) or Dworkin.... I suspect that it might be as caricatural.... ma.... Religious arguments ments are more challenging
• One virtue, then, of devoting all this time and all this space to an analysis and elaboration of Locke's religious case for equality is that it promises not only to deepen our understanding

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Praise: Substitution versus Income Effects, Bryan Caplan

Praise: Substitution versus Income Effects, Bryan Caplan

• Touchy-feely parents shower praise on their kids.   "Great job!"   "You're super smart!"   "Wonderful."   Old-school parents do the opposite.   "You could have done better."
• I suspect, is emotional rather than strategic. Parents praise or withhold because that's what feels right to them.
• accordingly.The pro-praise story: Praise is a form of reward.
• The anti-praise story: Yes, praise is a form of reward. But the more rewards kids rack up , the more satisfied they feel. The more satisfied they feel, the less effort kids exert.Framed
• pro- and anti-praise debate boils down to the intermediate micro analysis of the substitution and income effects.
• Touchy-feel parents also typically avoid shaming their kids.   Old-school parents, in contrast, shame freely.  
• Here, then, old-school parents seem to rely on the substitution effect - the greater the cost of bad behavior, the smaller the quantity.  
• Touchy-feely parents, in contrast, seem to tacitly appeal to the income effect: A shamed kid will act even worse because he has so little left to lose.
• Personally, my parenting style embraces the substitution effect in both directions.....That's definitely more consistent

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License parenting. Parenting Failure and Government Failure di STEVE HORWITZ martin gurri andrew cohen

License parenting

• Parenting Failure and Government Failure di STEVE HORWITZ
• public choice: licenza? ma quali sono le alternative alla famiglia?
• possiamo scrivere l esame del buon genitore?
• xchè la patente: 1 il bambino è debole 2 non c è competizione
• adam gurri: il problema affrontato dai 3 liberalismi (diritti utilitarismo hayekiani)
• la famiglia: l istituzione più ricca di tradizione
• gli amish e il test del buon genitore
• ......
• I also draw on some material from my forthcoming book on classical liberalism and the family.
• If one believes that the state’s job is to prevent harm to third parties, and that’s a key part of Andrew’s argument, it is not a priori out of bounds to ask what the state could do to protect children from harm by parents and others.
• the argument Andrew makes is a perfect example of what can happen when philosophers (and others) make arguments about what government should do in the absence of serious consideration of the way in which the state actually works.
• “if the state worked just the way we philosophers say it should…”
• That is, government failure is just as real as market failure and parenting failure.
• we can ask in the case of “parenting failure”whether there are other institutions
• There is enough empirical evidence on the problems with foster care, especially short-term placements where the incentive to really behave as a steward for the child is weaker
• Andrew says children of parents who fail the license test should be “put up for adoption by someone licensed.”
• In short, everyone with a pet issue or a financial gain to be made will be lobbying the process to see their particular concern added to the test of adequate parenting.... One need only think of the controversy over Lenore Skenazy’sFree Range Kids
• I would argue that in the case of parenting licenses, the imperfections of politics raise a much greater danger than do the imperfections of parenting,
• The Organic Body Politics and Parental Licensure BY ADAM GURRI
• the storied divide between “first principles” libertarians, who usually subscribe to some theory of natural rights, and consequentialist libertarians.... Rarely discussed is a third, more Hayekian approach,
• Because children don’t have the power to pick who their parents are, and there’s no similar competitive mechanism to make sure they’re more likely to end up with good parents, he argues that parenting should be licensed for the sake of children’s safety.
• Personally, I found Cohen’s proposal quite shocking. The family is the oldest, most durable institution that humanity has.
• Responding to a thick and rich history with something as simple as the harm principle is to do injustice to that history.
• To think that the people who inherit that system today can be directed by the motivations of one man, a philosopher-designer
• Cohen’s plan requires an army of evaluators
• Il progetto:
• First, a means test—that is, no one that cannot afford to raise a child should have a child... The second, and more important, test would be a psychological exam
• specify what it means to “understand how to parent”or “handle the stress a child brings”. And this isn’t a problem that can be solved with oversight—
• Such top-down enforced monoculture of ethics and lifestyles ought to be anathema to libertarians and liberals of all sorts,
• never put all your eggs in one basket...
• to force a society into monoculture is to plant a time bomb under its feet... positive externalities will be lost when the long tail of lifestyles is cut off?
• Does anyone seriously think that such a central body would tolerate radically different parenting styles such as the Amish
• What I’m suggesting here is that the only way to affect change of human systems is as a participant, not an architect.
• Licensing Parents
• @@@@IMHO@@@@@@
• Plausibilità della richiesta:
• 1il genitore può fare molti danni
• 2 diamo patenti x meno
• argomenti contro
• 1 differenze tra famiglia e nazione: 1 i valori famigliari sono autentici, tanto è vero che nn richiedono coercizione 2 la famiglia è + morale, nn richiede doppio standard
• 2 fallisce la f. ma anche lo s. specie laddove la  centrale: meglio che la disciplina sia insegnata da chi ama
• 3 nel dubbio privilegiare ciò che rende felice genitori e figli nel breve periodo ovvero f.
• 4 stili educativi. Tipico ambito a ipotesi nulla
• 5 guidare una macchina è complicatissimo ma nn complesso: nn dobbiamo scoprire come si fa. Sull'educazione di un figlio siamo invece perennemente alla ricerca di soluzioni.

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