Dan Davies

Evening Must-Read: Daniel Davies: D-squared Digest–FOR Bigger Pies and Shorter Hours and AGAINST More-or-Less Everything Else by DeLong

Daniel Davies has unlocked his weblog. Plus: Daniel–Crooked Timber: “I’ve had a life event recently. As of today (I’m posting this from the WiFi at Geneva airport) and for the next year, I am doing less of the stockbroking, and more of the travelling round the world with my family…” | And: “The single most sensible thing said in political philosophy in the twentieth century was JK Galbraith’s aphorism…

…that the quest of conservative thought throughout the ages has been ‘the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness’. Some rightwingers are not hypocrites because they admit that their basic moral principle is ‘what I have, I keep’. Some rightwingers are hypocrites because they pretend that ‘what I have, I keep’ is always and everywhere the best way to express a general unparticularised love for all sentient things. Then there are the tricky cases where the rightwingers happen to be on the right side because we haven’t yet discovered a better form of social organisation than private property for solving several important classes of optimisation problem…. 

Hypocrisy doesn’t really enter into the equation with rightwing politics; you don’t (or shouldn’t) get any extra points for being sincere about being selfish. So where does that leave our students? Well, they’re young. They’re most likely insecure. They don’t actually have a lot, and it’s hardly surprising that they’re a bit precious about what they have…. People in general seem to be horribly uncomfortable with the idea that, by the standards they use to judge political situations, they themselves don’t come out as moral heroes. At base, this is a fairly childish and decidedly illiberal attitude; childish because it demands a sort of moral perfection which everyone intellectually knows can’t exist outside fairy stories (unless you count the way that parents appear to their children) and illiberal because it suggests that you’re only prepared to have normal social interactions with people who pass your own personal moral examination…

Philosophies of economic policymaking - a comment which growed by Daniel Davies

...And (I think I'm making my own position clear here) I think this is why Friedmanism fails.  Because actually, the buck does have to stop somewhere, and pretending that you can manage a complex system via a simple rule is basically impossible (it falls foul of Stafford Beer's Principle Of Sufficient Variability).  In practice, in a system based on a Taylor Rule, an Evans Rule or even an NGDP target, the buck stops with whoever it is that is responsible for maintaining the model which generates the forecasts of the control parameter.  And this person is always going to deny that he's making activist policy and claim that he's a technocrat who simply goes where the data takes him.  Friedmanism in economic policy, in the general sense I'm talking about here, is nothing more nor less than a distributed responsibility avoidance system.