Philosophy quotes

The unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates

 

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know. Bertrand Russell

 

Dubito ergo cogito; cogito ergo sum. (I doubt, therefore I think; I think therefore I am) Rene Descartes

 

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honourably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honourably and justly without living pleasantly. Epicurus

 

Philosophy is the stray camel of the faithful; take hold of it wherever ye come across it. Muhammad

 

In this war of every man against every man; nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues. Thomas Hobbes

 

Man is condemned to be free. Jean Paul Sartre

 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. William Shakespeare

 

Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. Karl Popper

 

Philosophy is the highest music. Plato

 

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Arthur Schopenhauer

 

I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex. Karl Marx

 

 

 

 

My media week 15/03/09

Spiked has this provocative piece called Whatever happened to ‘affluenza’? Here is a little flavour of the article:

There’s something strange in all this. Until recently, government officials and their happiness advisers claimed that having too much made us mentally ill; now, in a 360-degree turnaround, they argue that having too little is the real threat to psychological stability…. Misery, instead of being an understandable reflex to losing one’s job, is transformed by the political elite into an internally produced disorder needing psychotherapy. 

 

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the birth and growth of Wikipedia. He talks about the role of Hayek’s insights into the design of Wikipedia, how Wikipedia deals with controversy, the reliability of Wikipedia relative to traditional reference sources and the future possibilities for projects that rely on voluntary contributions of time and creativity.

 

In an extended article in The New York Review of Books, Capitalism Beyond the Crisis Amartya Sen argues that we don’t need a new capitalism. What we need is to go back to a truer, deeper understanding of Adam Smith, A.C. Pigou, and other thinkers.

 

In this Analysis podcast Kenan Malik asks if the web is rewiring the brains of young people – and if so, whether we should be worried.

 

I am a half-baked libertarian but if you want to read from a fully-fledged one try out New Zealander Jamie Whyte, who has an occasional column in The Times. This one is Business is not responsible for social justice.

 

Jerry Rogers sent me this link to the keynote address delivered by  author Philip Pullman at the Convention on Modern Liberty, London on 28 February 2009. It’s called We are a better people.

 

 

 

Some movie one-liners

Here is a list of some classic movie one-liners:

 

Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not every man for himself. A Fish Called Wanda

At my signal, unleash Hell  Gladiator

Do you feel lucky punk? Well, do you? Dirty Harry

Face it, girls, I’m older and I have more insurance. Fried Green Tomatoes

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn Gone With The Wind

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!  Dr Strangelove

Go ahead, make my day Sudden Impact

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good Wall Street

Hasta la vista, baby.  Terminator 2

Here’s Johnny! The Shining

Houston, we have a problem Apollo 13

I am big…it’s the pictures that got small. Sunset Boulevard

I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner. The Silence of the Lambs

I love the smell of napalm in the morning.  Apocalypse Now

I see dead people The Sixth Sense

I’m the king of the world. Titanic

I’ll be back The Terminator

I’ll have what she’s having When Harry Met Sally

I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse. The Godfather

I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore! Network

I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way. Who Framed Roger Rabbit

I’m not going to be ignored, Dan.  Fatal Attraction

Infamy, infamy! They’ve all got it in for me! Carry on Cleo

Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.  Arsenic and Old Lace

Look at me, jerking off in the shower… This will be the high point of my day; it’s all downhill from here.  American Beauty

Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.  Casablanca

My mama always said life was like a box a chocolates, never know what you’re gonna get.  Forrest Gump

Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above. The African Queen

Remember, you’re fighting for this woman’s honour, which is probably more than she ever did. Duck Soup

Say hello to my little friend.  Scarface

Show me the money! Jerry Macguire

The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t exist. The Usual Suspects

They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom! Braveheart

Well, nobody’s perfect. Some Like it Hot

We’re on a mission from God The Blues Brothers

You can’t handle the truth A Few Good Men

You don’t understand, I could’ve been somebody, I could have been a contender On The Waterfront

You talkin’ to me? Taxi Driver

Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries! Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

When incentives go wrong

      A while back I reproduced that Steven Landsburg quote: “Most of economics can be summarised in four words. People respond to incentives. The rest is commentary.” I want to come back to that quote because it is very relevant to many things going on now. First it is necessary to define what we mean by incentive. Wikipedia states: In economics an incentive is any factor (financial or non-financial) that enables or motivates a particular course of action, or counts as a reason for preferring one choice to the alternatives. “It is an expectation that encourages people to behave in a certain way.” Incentives matter. They are often based on money but not always. When something gets more expensive, people buy less of it. When it gets less expensive, people buy more of it. This idea seems fairly straightforward but many people only pay lip service to it. One of my favourite examples of the role of incentives occurred in Britain in 1996 at the height of the mad cow crisis. Surely when people’s health is at stake, they are not going to respond to such crude incentives. The supermarket chain just couldn’t sell any beef and were forced to sell it at half price. Suddenly people couldn’t get enough beef in their trolleys. Of course not everyone changed their decision but enough people will change so that the overall effect is an important increase in demand. Likewise, if the price of petrol goes up, people will respond in different ways. Some will carry on as before, others will engage in car pooling and if the high price remains long enough some will buy a more fuel efficient car.

People do respond to incentives but actually designing them can prove to be a minefield; trying to predict all the myriad ways in which people will respond to them is not so easy. When talking about incentives it is also important to consider targets and the influence they exert both in the public and private sector. The big problem with setting targets is that they become an end in themselves at the expense of other objectives. This is an example of Goodhart’s law (The law was named after Charles Goodhart, a chief economic advisor at the Bank of England.). This states that any measure adopted as a target changes its meaning. Targets create particular incentives: what’s measured is what matters. This can have tragic consequences. 25 people lost some of their sight because managers at an eye hospital on meeting waiting time targets for new patients rather than following up existing patients. This accusation was made by Dr Richard Harrad, clinical director of the Bristol Eye Hospital. He gave one particularly horrific account:

“One particularly sad case was that of an elderly lady who was completely deaf and relied upon signing and lip-reading for communication. She lives with her disabled husband who like her is completely deaf. Her follow-up appointment for glaucoma was delayed several times and during this time her glaucoma deteriorated and she became totally blind.” In a striking parallel of what has happened in the private sector, figures such as operation waiting times become subject to creative accounting.

There is another important theoretical framework that we need to take into account – what is known as the principal-agent problem. In a corporate context the shareholders are the principals and the managers are the agents. In politics the electors are the principals and the politicians are the agents. There  is a problem because there is incomplete and asymmetric information when a principal hires an agent to do something for him. Because the interest of each of the parties may not be aligned the principal has to use different mechanisms in order to get the agent to do what they want. The tool is often performance related pay such as stock options piece rates and commissions. This can be satisfactory if what you want is easy to measure. But you can get a situation where the managers pursue their own agenda and the last few years have shown it can be difficult to control them. One problem is that there may be a lot of small shareholders who have neither the time nor the inclination to control what the managers are doing. The same thing can happen in politics where voters may spend more time considering the pros and cons of buying a new computer than in deciding the best political option. The boards of directors, auditors regulators, supervisors, large shareholders, and the financial media were also unable to control what these managers were doing.

The question of incentives and the principal-agent problem are very important when trying to understand the current outcry over executive remuneration and the disastrous consequences for the banking sector. Alan Greenspan was in a state of shock last year: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity are in a state of shocked disbelief.” If you want a simple answer the just say greed – put it all down to those avaricious bankers and investors. I do not find this explanation particularly satisfying. Of course people on Wall Street are greedy. They are, always have been and always will be greedy. The real problem is how that greed was channelled by the system of incentives that the banks had in place. The banks had to choose what incentives to offer their managers in order to get them to produce higher profits for the institution. Many of these policies which provided lavish remuneration for the bosses led to perverse incentives that made these bosses drive their companies into the ground.

Stock options show the danger of some incentives. On the surface what could be more logical than to reward those managers who create value for the shareholders. Of course raising the stock price can be done in two ways. You can, of course, genuinely make the company more profitable. Or if that sounds too much like hard work you can fabricate the accounting information to give the illusion of economic success, and create fictitious profits from an artificially inflated  share price. Then all you have to do is sell up before the truth comes out and the and the market capitalisation implodes. Once again we see how if you give an actor a target, you may well find that they will meet this target bit to the exclusion of every other goal.

My media week 08/03/09

The Guardian has an article by Joe Moran called The golden Allegro age.

 

The New Scientist has this article: Born believers: How your brain creates God

 

ABC’S The Philosopher’s Zone takes a rear view of Alfred Hitchcock.

 

In this Analysis podcast from BBC Radio 4Chris Bowlby asks if thrift is coming back into fashion – and whether in tough economic times it’s the solution or the problem. It comes with a transcript.

 

In this article John Kay argues that “an interlude of nationalisation, followed by the reflotation of narrowly focused retail banks, is now the least bad route to the principal public objective – allowing real bankers to get on with their real jobs.”

 

My favourite links #30

My first favourite link back in April 2008 when I started this blog was for EconTalk a weekly hour-long discussion that applies the economic way of thinking as to a vast range of subjects. EconTalk is part of a larger website called The Library of Economics and Liberty. I particularly recommend The Concise Encyclopaedia of Economics. The articles, which are free of charge, are written by the most respected economists in their fields, including many Nobel Prize winners. They also have a Guides page, which explains basic economic concepts.

 

http://www.econlib.org/index.html