2) Matt Yyglesias makes moderately interesting point about rationing. But it seems to me that things like oil and food are qualitatively different than things like piano lessons and knowledge of history. Because I am not a professional economist, I cannot justify my intuition. Yglesias probably agrees that these are different, and thinks we should lump special health care products in with piano lessons. I’m not sure about this. For one thing, isn’t it much easier to find private piano help than it is medical help? Plus a bunch of other differences.

3) Robert Fisk can use just about anything as a platform for ranting, and here he uses his viewing of the Dead Sea Scrolls. My favorite passage:

So cautious are the dear old Canadians – who should by now have learned that concealing unhappy truths will only create fire and pain – that they do not even mention that “Kando”, the first recipient of the scrolls, was Armenian. Of course not. Because then they would have to explain why an Armenian was in Jerusalem, not in western Turkey. Which would mean that they would have to mention the Armenian Holocaust of 1915 (one and a half million Armenian civilians murdered by Ottoman Turks).

I find almost all of Fisk’s comments here and in the rest of the article on the mark, in terms of the political realities surrounding the scrolls. But really, the purpose of the Dead Sea Scrolls is to put knowledge into my head about the diversity of Judaism in that period, and early Christian and Jewish religion in general. Really, the Dead Sea Scrolls should be brought to Southeast Michigan, where I live.

3) This article is slightly encouraging, but ultimately depressing, since minor economic and cultural improvements in the West Bank are, as always, in the context of Israel allowing them for the sake of politically weakening competing anti-Israeli political parties, plus the realities of the suffocation of Gaza, plus expanding settlement programs in the West Bank itself. Also, there will probably never be general recognition of Israeli crimes; we’ll just have to painfully endure Israeli generals gloating over every time Palestinians are peaceful.

4) Even though I am almost a pacifist, plus don’t like things like the CIA, I can’t help but like reading about spies.

5) Isn’t it interesting how everyone, or at least all governments, hate Al Jazeera?

6) This cheerfully titled piece of Noam Chomsky covers a bunch of happenings in 2009. It begins by attacking Thomas Friedman, always a noble cause.

Will Wilkinson makes extremely bad arguments against Yglesias. I’ll go through the worst ones.

First, he says that Yglesias’s arguments are “especially bad” because Yglesias is a “utilitarian,” and not, presumably, a virtue theorist. I would point out: Utilitarian arguments against greed motivations are legion. But even if they weren’t, Yglesias being inconsistent in his convictions doesn’t mean his arguments are bad, or “especially” bad. In fact, his pro-virtue argument could just as well mean his arguments for utilitarian arguments are “especially bad,” according to Wilkinson’s ad hominem.

Of more substantive relevance: Wilkinson reminds us that “finance is only one of many ways to make money.” To drive the non-sequitur home, he then goes on to ask questions the obvious answers to which are implicit in Yglesias’s post:

How about small entrepreneurs animated by the prospect of hitting it big? Are movie stars, who do not donate the bulk of their massive compensation to charity, off the hook because they are also motivated by fame and self-love?

The easy and correct answer: No, they are not off the hook. Plus, Yglesias is making a systematic critique, not a critique of cherry-picked hypothesized individuals, like Greedy Actor, or Greedy Gym Teacher.

Wilkinson goes on to admonish that “we should reconsider how much those who have become wealthy in these fields have actually enhanced general welfare.” This misses the point, which is personal virtue. In fact, Yglesias indicates that he agrees. Plus, outside of abstract considerations of ideal markets, it’s not at all clear that increases in “general welfare” – and only the ones caused primarily by the financial industry! – outweigh the negative externalities, such as (so the anti-finance arguments go) the environmental harm, income inequality and the stagnation of wages, the decreased bargaining power of labor, the increased reliance of the economy on gambling, and so on.

For the last major point I don’t like, Wilkinson says:

We need to make sure the desire for wealth takes the right shape, and that the institutions within which people pursue wealth tend to actually work to convert “low” aspirations into real social benefits. But we’ve been given no special reason to second-guess the general utility of the desire to become wealthy.

Why should we have to “shape” the desire for wealth in the first place? Oh, I know – because the quest for wealth unscrupulously tends to ignore virtue. Wilkinson is correct that we’ve been given no reason (by Yglesias) to second-guess the general utility of the desire to become wealthy. That’s because, as he himself seemed to notice earlier, Yglesias agrees with this idea.

In any case, given enough restructuring of incentives, Yglesias’s criticism will happily no longer systematically apply to financial industry executives, just like his critique would not (generally) apply to teachers, construction workers, and so on as those incentive systems are currently structured.

A final thought on why I like Yglesias’s argument. He points out that probably most bank executives aren’t where they are because being a bank executive is intrinsically interesting. In other words, they probably wouldn’t be doing it if the salary was comparable to that of car mechanics. It’s much easier to imagine someone going into education, where the primary reason is that teaching is intrinsically valuable and interesting. In fact, this is why, if you’re an education major (or a philosophy major, I’ve discovered), your aunts and uncles will condescendingly question you at parties and such, precisely because there’s “no money” in these areas. They ask asinine questions like, “What do you plan to do with that?” Many financially-oriented people have probably never experienced this obnoxious phenomenon. There of course is money in these areas, and many things to do – which is why teachers and philosophers try to get jobs in their field rather than do pro bono work with other jobs on the side. So why do aunts and uncles make fun of them? We can answer this question by pointing out that they don’t make fun of us when we get business degrees. Everyone knows why you’d want to be a bank executive: that’s where the money is. It’s not an impenetrable mystery why people pursuing finance are not accused of being “idealistic.”