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TELLING RIGHT FROM WRONG The Pitfalls of Democracy – The Armchair Economist (revised and updated May 2012): Economics & Everyday Life – Steven E. Landsburg

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Punti chiave: Chi giudica fa filosofia – Il democraticismo come filosofia morale e la sua impossibilità – Criteri minimali: Pareto e simmetria – Il velo d’ignoranza e i suoi problemi – La morale degli economisti: l’efficienza, ovvero fare un passo indietro –

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My dinner companion was passionate in her conviction that the rich pay less than their fair share of taxes. I didn’t understand what she meant by “fair,”

Note:IL SIGNIFICATO DI GIUSTO

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What she lacked was a moral philosophy.

Note:FILOSOFIA MORALE

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Which is better: A world where everyone earns $40,000 a year, or a world where three-fourths of the population earns $100,000 a year while the rest earn $25,000?

Note:LA DOMANDA DA FARE AI POLITICI

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One of the first rules of policy analysis is that you can never prove that a policy is desirable by listing its benefits…And if you are going to argue that a program does more good than harm, you must at least implicitly take a stand on a fundamental philosophical issue…

Note:GIUDICARE È FILOSOFEGGIARE

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any meaningful policy proposal must entail a huge number of trade-offs

Note:DILEMMI OVUNQUE

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It is easy to get carried away making long lists of pros and cons, all the while forgetting that sooner or later we must decide how many cons it takes to outweigh a particular pro.

Note:IL LATO OSCURO DELL’ANALISI COSTI BENEFICI

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During his presidency, George Bush was particularly fond of saying that it would be good to lower interest rates..Everybody also knows that lower interest rates can devastate people who are saving for their retirement….

Note:ESEMPIO: INTERESSI

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I do not yet know what justice is. But I do believe that economics illuminates the possibilities.

Note:L’ECONOMIA COME PREMESSA

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One approach to justice is the extreme democratic view that the majority should always rule.

Note:DEMOCRATICISMO

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I do not know anyone, or expect to know anyone, or want to know anyone, who believes that the majority should prevail when 51% of the populace vote

Note:ASSURDO

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A problem with majority rule is that it provides no guidance on what to do about multiple options, none of which garners a majority…Any voting procedure must include rules for what to do when there are many options….To choose randomly among these alternatives would be at best unsatisfying….

Note:PROBLEMA DELLE OPZIONI MULTIPLE

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it seems uncontroversial to require that if everybody unanimously prefers Tinker to Chance, then Chance should not be able to win

Note:PRIMO REQUISITO X DEFINIRE LA DEMOCRAZIA

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Second, the outcome of a vote ought not depend on arbitrary choices about the order in which things are carried out.

Note:SECONDO REQUISITO: NEUTRALIZZARE LA FORTUNA

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Third, a third-party candidate with no chance of winning should not be able to affect the outcome of a two-way race.

Note:TERZO REQUISITO IRRILEVANZA DEL TERZO CANDIDATO

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In the early 1950s, the economist Kenneth Arrow (subsequently a Nobel prize winner) wrote down a list of reasonable requirements for a democratic voting procedure…Arrow was able to prove—with the inexorable force of pure mathematics—that the only way to satisfy all of the requirements is to select one voter and give him all the votes….

Note:ARROW E L’IMPOSSIBILITÀ DEMOCRATICA

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a moment of pause to anybody who imagines it is possible to conduct an ideal democratic voting system.

Note:IL SISTEMA IDEALE DI VOTO

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we have absolutely no justification for the expectation that democracy leads to good outcomes.

Note:UNA RAGIONE PIÙ FONDAMENTALE PER RESPINGERE IL DEMOCRATICISMO

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It is often asserted that our system of republican government works well in this regard, because the passionate minority can organize

Note:ANTIDOTO

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Any assertion of “rights” appeals to our preferences for specific rules as opposed to the consequences of those rules.

Note:DIRITTI

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Economics offers no objection to a philosophy of rights. But consequences matter also

Note:CONSEGUENZE

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If happiness is measurable, then it is easy to list a menu of consequentialist moral philosophies

Note:FELICIOMETRO

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Pursue the greatest good for the unhappiest person.

Note:ESEMPIO DI CRITERIO NORMATIVO

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happiness can be equated with income

Note:ASSUNTO

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Maximize the sum of human happiness.

Note:ALTRO CRITERIO

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“seek the greatest good for the greatest number.”

Note:UN CRITERIO AMBIGUO DA SCARTARE

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The problem with all these criteria is that the choice among them seems entirely arbitrary.

Note:IL PROBLEMA

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we might require that whenever there is an opportunity to make everybody better off, our normative criterion ought to approve it…

Note:REQUISITO DI PARETO PER IL CRITERIO DI EQUITÀ

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our normative criterion treat everyone symmetrically

Note:REQUISITO DELLA SIMMETRIA

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Which of your reasonable requirements are you most willing to abandon?

Note:PASSO SUCCESSIVO

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we seem to have deep visceral preferences for requirements like symmetry.

Note:VISCERALITÀ

Second approach to the problem

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we must imagine ourselves behind a veil of ignorance…According to Rawls, the just society is the one we would choose to be born into if forced to choose from behind the veil….

Note:VELO D’IGNORANZA

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We know that when people can insure at fair odds against catastrophic diseases, they typically do so. It is reasonable to infer that if we could insure against being born untalented or handicapped or otherwise unlucky, we would do that as well.

Note:CATASTROFI

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Harsanyi gave an argument—just slightly too technical for reproduction here—demonstrating that under certain reasonable conditions we would be forced to agree on a sum-of-happiness formula.

Note:HARSANYI

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Should abortion be legal? My answer behind the veil might well depend on whether “aborted fetus” was one of the identities I thought I might be assigned.

Note:MA CHI STA DIETRO AL VELO?

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I suspect though that the choice of a normative criterion is ultimately a matter of taste.

Note:GUSTO

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If you took a poll of economists, you would probably find a clear preference for a normative criterion that I have not yet mentioned. The criterion goes by the deceptively calloussounding name of economic efficiency

LA MORALE DEGLI ECONOMISTI: L’EFFICIENZA

L’anticorpo del disordine

Resilience – Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World
Tim Harford

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Punti chiave: Cio’ che fa male fa anche bene (se produce diversità) – Diversificare il rischio produce resilienza – L’impulso burocratico a uniformare – Una triste notizia: noi confondiamo povertà e disordine – Altra triste notizia: confondiamo diversità e disordine – 

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Two centuries after Johann Gottlieb Beckmann had been tidying up messy ancient woodlands into neat rows of Norwegian spruce, the German forests were dying.

Note:LO SPORCO SEGRETO DEI BOTANICI

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merely removing fallen logs and dead trees would result in the loss of almost a third of non-bird wildlife species in a forest…over time they altered the ecology of the forest and exposed the trees to fungi

Note:SOTTOBOSCO

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None of this was anticipated by the foresters of yesteryear.

Note:ESPERTI

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In nature, mess often indicates health – and not only in the forest.

Note:SALUTE E COMPLESSITÀ

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stomach ulcers, which were thought to be caused by stress.

Note:ULCERE E STRESS

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ulcers weren’t caused by stress at all, but by a corkscrew-shaped bacteria, Helicobacter pylori.

Note:L’IDEA DI MARSHALL

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Barry Marshall drank a flask full of H. pylori…Finally Marshall and Warren had the attention of the medical profession….

Note:SPERIMENTAZIONE

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Blaser found that Americans who had H. pylori in their guts were far less likely to suffer from asthma…H. pylori helps prevent obesity by regulating a stomach enzyme called ghrelin…

Note:COLPO DI SCENA: IL BATTERIO FA BENE

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The view used to be that the human body was under assault from bacteria, and that antibiotics were an unalloyed good, albeit one to be used with care lest bacteria evolve resistance.

Note:ORTODOSSIA SUI BATTERI

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Some bacteria are dangerous, some are harmless passengers and some are beneficial. Some, such as H. pylori, can be dangerous or beneficial depending on the situation.

Note:AMICI O NEMICI?

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Martin Blaser has become one of the leading champions of the view that our bacterial guests are starting to become less diverse and that this thinning of the microbiome is doing us harm.

Note:L’ALLARME DI BLASER

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it was easier to stay slim in the 1980s…people today seem to be heavier than their forebears, even when they eat the same and are equally active….

Note:OBESITÀ

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people today have denuded gut bacteria

Note:SPIEGAZIONE

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Lactobacillus sakei – another of those bacteria we have cluttering up our bodies – appears to prevent sinusitis

Note:SINUSITI

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The most disgusting example concerns the treatment of Clostridium difficile gut infections…C. difficile itself is increasingly resistant to antibiotics. But now a near-miraculous cure has been discovered…The treatment in question was faecal microbiota transplantation – which is a polite way to describe blending a healthy person’s excrement with a little salty water, and injecting the mixture into the patient via the obvious orifice….

Note:CLOSTRIDUM

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Why, then, are our microbes going missing? The most obvious culprit is the routine use of antibiotics.

Note:IL DANNO DEGLI ANTIBIOTICI

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A third explanation is the rise of the caesarean section, which is now how almost a third of American babies come into the world. Babies collect a rich broth of microbes from their mothers, but this transfer does not occur in the womb as one might expect. Instead, they are smeared with bacteria as they pass through the birth canal

Note:COLPA DEL CESAREO?

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It is worth acknowledging that these ideas have already become a fad – a great deal of nonsense is now being talked by quacks and purveyors of probiotic yoghurt aiming to promote a ‘healthy microbiome’.

Note:CIARLATANI

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if you try to control a complex system, suppressing or tidying away the parts that seem unimportant, you are likely to discover that those parts turn out to be very important indeed.

Note:CONSEGUENZE NON INTENZIONALI

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Jane Jacobs, urban writer and campaigner, made the case for neighbourhood diversity in The Death and Life of Great American Cities…Diversity at street level was made possible by a mix of offices and homes, stores and workshops. It was also made possible, Jacobs argued, by a mix of old and new buildings….

Note:LA DIVERSITÀ NELLE CITTÀ

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It is preferable, she argued, to have an inefficient hodgepodge of different industries than to specialise in a single industry, however efficient that might seem in the short term. One of her favourite examples was the unromantic mess of Birmingham, the second-largest city in England. Birmingham is famous for making nothing in particular

Note:BIRMINGHAM

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When Jane Jacobs was admiring Birmingham in the early 1960s, her view seemed odd. Detroit, the quintessential one-industry town, was booming…specialised cities were fragile….

Note:DETROIT VS BRMNGHAM

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AnnaLee Saxenian, an economist and political scientist, published a study comparing two famous technology clusters, Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128.

Note:SILICON VALLEY

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the technology companies of Route 128 – companies such as Wang, Raytheon and Sun – kept themselves in tidy silos, specialising in narrow fields of excellence. The fledgling companies of Silicon Valley sprawled into each other, engineers constantly gossiping with one another

Note:BOSTON ROUTE: ORDINE E STANDARD

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Hidalgo has discovered that there is a strong correlation between being a diversified economy, a complex economy and a rich economy…highly diversified economies also tend to be rich…

Note:RICCHEZZA E DIVERSITÀ

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Diverse economies, like diverse German forests, are more resilient.

Note:CAPACITÀ DI RISPONDERE ALLE CRISI

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The old proverb ‘jack of all trades, master of none’…Perhaps that is true of an individual; it’s not true of a city or a country….

Note:PROVERBI VALIDI PER LE PERSONE MA NON PERLE COMUNITÀ

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If people prefer to live near similar people – perhaps people of the same race, class, ethnicity or income – then even quite mild preferences can lead to marked social segregation.

Note:MA DIVERSIFICARE È UN PROBLEMA

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a bureaucratic desire for tidy, segregated cities is expressed in zoning and planning

Note:IL DESIDERIO DI SEGREGAZIONE DELLA BUROCRAZIA

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Recall how Jane Jacobs’s ballet of Hudson Street relied on the fact that the street was active at any time of day, because so many different kinds of people used it. In contrast, thoroughly zoned neighbourhoods are unbalanced. They are too busy at certain times, deathly quiet at others

Note:DORMITORI

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I had published a study which showed that messy streets lead to greater intolerance. In a messy environment, people are more likely to resort to stereotypes of others…But within a few months of publication, social psychologists received some unsettling news: Diederik Stapel was a fraud….

Note:CASINO E INTOLLERANZA… L’ORDINE CI RENDE PIÙ BUONI? UNO STUDIO FRADOLENTO

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Stapel, the newspaper reported, ‘had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions’. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results

Note:L’EDITORE VOLEVA RISULTATI CHIARI

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It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty – instead of the truth.’

Note:BELLEZZA CONTRO VERITÀ

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The story of the ‘broken windows’ theory of urban decay is another example of how we instinctively overestimate the benefits of tidying up certain kinds of urban mess.

Note:BROKEN WINDOW SOPRAVVALUTATA

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The truth is that social science has not been able to muster much support for the broken windows theory of policing

Note:POCO SUPPORTO

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four factors seemed to explain the timing, extent and geographical pattern of the fall in crime: more police; a larger prison population (this may deter crime, and will also prevent crimes because would-be criminals are locked up); the waning of an epidemic of crack use; and the legalisation of abortion in the 1970s,

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LEVITT... FATTORI PIÙ INFLUENTI

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Thacher is right – certain kinds of mess are worth tidying up for their own sake. But it’s striking how easily we fall for the old-fashioned idea that ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’

Note:BIAS: DISORDINE => MALE

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Sampson and Raudenbush conducted a survey of thousands of Chicago residents, asking them about their own perceptions of disorder…Then they compared the subjective perceptions…with the objective observations…

Note:DISORDINE PERCEPITO

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Neighbourhoods with many poor families, or with a high proportion of African American residents, or both, were perceived as being more disordered…If we want to predict whether a city block’s residents think that it’s a mess, we would learn more from looking at data on race and poverty…

Note:POVERTÀ SCAMBIATA PER DISORDINE

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Academics with Jewish ancestry found their careers in ruins. The best of them left, seeking less intolerant cultures in Britain and the United States. A torment for those that fled, this policy was also a self-inflicted wound. German science was crippled. Despite a formidable industrial base and engineering tradition, Germany was unable to keep pace with the innovations that emerged from Britain and the United States – often from the very people who had been driven out.

Note:LA RICERCA DEPURATA DAGLI EBREI

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he compared it to the impact of bombing raids on university departments during the war. He found the damage from losing Jewish or dissident scientists was far greater and longer lasting than the damage to offices or laboratory facilities.

Note:WALDINGER

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Ottaviano and Peri found that cities which hosted a complex patchwork of nationalities prospered as a result.

Note:MELTING POT

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Recall that Katherine Phillips and her colleagues found that small student groups disliked having a stranger in their midst, even as the stranger was helping them solve the murder-mystery problem they faced.

IL CORPO ESTRANEO