That's the first time in a while...

that there hasn't been even one political theory article in an issue of the American Political Science Review, at least to the best of my recollection. Flukes happen; I just hope a fluke is all it is.

Update: the thinness of the issue overall and the editors' note confirm that it's a fluky issue all around-- odd effects of the transition in editorial teams.

To change behavior you have to change incentives watch, continued

In point of fact, the dirty little secret of the banking industry is that it has no intention of using the money to make new loans.

See prior installment here.

Today: Jon Elster and Marie-Claude Smouts at 50th Anniversary of Political Science Department at Université de Montréal

Science politique a 50 ans

Les célébrations du 50e anniversaire auront lieu les 22 et 23 octobre 2008. Nous avons invité des sommités mondiales de notre discipline pour les entendre et discuter avec elles des nouvelles frontières et des idées provocantes que soulève la recherche de pointe en science politique. Programme du 22 octobre: Marie-Claude Smouts CERI, Paris "Les idées dangeureuses en science politique: l'exemple des études postcoloniales " Jon Elster Columbia University "La rationalité en politique" 1

4h à 17h, salle JAB-1035, Pavillon J.-Armand-Bombardier

Espressotarianism

I've made pretty plain that I'm not voting Libertarian in this presidential election, though I wish Barr and the LP well and wish them many votes. I've voted Libertarian for President several times, and will vote Libertarian downticket when possible this year. I'd be thrilled to see Barr win 49.9% of the vote and crush McCain for second place. But I don't will that Barr be elected president, and that prevents me from voting for him.

But this sure does warm the cockles of my heart, and is the sort of thing that couldn't be allowed to go unnoticed on this blog.

He is fifty-nine but has the stamina of a college freshman—he consumes up to fifteen shots of espresso a day, typically in five-shot installments.

By contrast, the guy I'm actually voting for sometimes smokes cigarettes. If I were voting with the "people who remind me of me" standard that, for example, people invoke when explaining their support of Sarah Palin, then the fact that Obama and I have both taught courses at Chicago Law might well be trumped by the difference between cigarettes and 15 shots of espresso per day.

(At some point I'd like someone to ask some voter who invokes the "people who remind me of me" standard about the arrogance and narcissism of it-- what makes you so great that similitude to you is a relevant criterion for the presidency? I know that there are answers to the question and defensible reasons for identity-politics voting: "people who remind me of me are more likely to take the interests of people like me into account, and I think people like me are unjustly neglected by a system dominated by liberal elites/ whites/ Christians/ the professional class/ etc." But even when those reasons are adequate ones, there's often also a level of narcissism that goes unexamined. But now I've wandered far off-topic.)

How to paint yourself into a corner

Draft of an introductory paragraph for remarks to the "liberal and libertarians: common cause or separate agendas?" panel at Princeton.

Now, the timing of our session is odd, for this argument. On the one hand, I have arguments I’ve been developing for many years about why libertarians belong not in a great fusionist alliance with conservatives but rather in common cause with our fellow liberals. I think that’s been an interestingly hard argument to make, but we meet at a time, a few weeks before an election, when I think the immediate conclusion to draw is boringly easy. No libertarian can hope to see the party of torture, denials of habeas corpus, indefinite detention without trial, and boundless unsupervised executive power returned to office. If our core root liberalism, if our roots in the struggles of common law against absolutist king or in John Locke or in Montesquieu or in the American Revolution mean anything at all, then it means a four percentage-point difference in marginal income tax rates is less important than removing the party of torture and detention without trial from power. That’s morally so overwhelmingly important as to make my traditional arguments about libertarians leaving the fusionist alliance seem kind of silly.

"Therefore, I now sit down and thank you for your attention"? Doesn't seem quite satisfactory.

Hither and yon: "Liberals and Libertarians" at Princeton

"Liberals and Libertarians: Common Ground or Separate Agendas?"

"Liberals and Libertarians: Common Ground or Separate Agendas?" will be the subject of a panel discussion at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 23, held at the Woodrow Wilson School in Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall, on the Princeton University campus.

Panelists will include a mix of self-described liberals and libertarians, including:

-- Douglas Massey, the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Woodrow Wilson School;
-- Paul Starr, the School’s Stuart Professor of Communications and a Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs; and
-- Jacob T. Levy *99, the Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory at McGill University;
-- Brink Lindsey ’84, Vice President for Research at the Cato Institute; and
-- Will Wilkinson, Cato Research Fellow and Managing Editor of Cato Unbound.

Two “undeclared” scholars will join the discussion: Paul DiMaggio, a Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at the School, and John Tomasi, Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University

Unfortunately, it appears that we're scheduled against Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

State size follow-up

I speculated last week that the way the financial crisis swamped Iceland and seems to show the need for deep pockets and deep capital reserves within a financial system ("seems"-- I have no view about whether that's an economically true lesson to draw) probably did some damage to small-nation secessionists such as Quebec or Scottish nationalists.

From yesterday's Washington Post:

The massive bailout of banks has been widely received as welcome and necessary across the United Kingdom. But it has not been lost on Scots that the largest shareholder in Scotland's two largest banks is now the British government.

[...]

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a native Scot but an outspoken advocate of keeping Scotland in the U.K. fold, seemed to go out of his way Tuesday to tweak advocates of independence, especially the SNP.

Brown said the $65 billion bailout of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the bank formed by the merger of Lloyds TSB and the Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) proved that the United Kingdom was "stronger together."

"We were able to act decisively with 37 billion pounds; that would not have been possible for a Scottish administration," said Brown, whose own political fortunes have been boosted by his handling of the crisis.

Others have pointed out that the bailout for eight major British banks -- including capital for banks and government loan guarantees -- is worth a total of almost $700 billion, which is about five times Scotland's annual gross domestic product.

Brown particularly seemed to taunt Alex Salmond, the SNP chief and head of the Scottish government, who has said he wants an independent Scotland to be part of an "arc of prosperity" stretching from Iceland to Ireland to Norway.

The SNP Web site speaks admiringly of Iceland as "the sixth most prosperous country in the world," words that were written before last week's massive banking and economic crash, which nearly bankrupted the country.

"We've seen the problems in Iceland; we've seen the problems in Ireland. We were able to put the whole strength of the United Kingdom's resources behind these two banks" in Scotland, Brown said, provoking an irritated response from Salmond. [...]

Things not to say...

when you're debating a law professor who's much, much better than you are at packing a lot of information into a 90-second answer:

"All of the details need to be known."

Obama clearly had his Ayers and ACORN monologues memorized, but McCain set them up with a helluva softball straight line. "We need to hear the full extent." "All of the details need to be known."

However many minutes later, Obama looked like the opposite of someone engaged in a cover-up. Rattling off the resumes of the Annenberg Board was a nice touch.

More generally, as Matt Yglesias notes here,

McCain had some okay jabs at Obama that I think impressed some of the CNN panelists and, especially, got the conservative ones jazzed up. But he used a lot of right-wing echo-chamber jargon, never explaining what he meant about trial lawyers and scare-quote “health” and so forth.

As a result, we sometimes had the very weird dynamic of McCain sputtering out an attack that the average voter didn't understand at all, because it was all phrased in conservative-political-insider shorthand, and then Obama giving one of his dense information-packed answers in which he first had to explain to the audience what the hell McCain was talking about before rebutting it. The CNN pundits, in their down-on-Obama period before the poll results came in and told them to be up-on-Obama, kept using "professorial" as an insult. (Compare also: McCain's use during the debate of "eloquent" as an insult.) Now, I recognize all the ways in which "professorial" isn't the ideal mode for political discourse. You wouldn't want a lecture as an inaugural address. But Obama's ability to pack every sixty- or ninety-second unit full of information and explanation, compared with McCain's almost Palin-like or Bush-like repetition of the two or three keywords he had for any answer ("spread the wealth!") was professorial, and, I thought, devastatingly effective.

Canadian Conservatives and Quebec secession

I don't think I say anything that's not pretty obvious, but for what it's wort, I take part in a colloquy with Ilya Somin and others chez Volokh about why the Tories don't support the secession of a province thatseems so determined to keep them out of a governing majority.

Libertarians for Obama, continued

Dan Drezner.

If markets are supposed to let failures fail — not the trendiest idea right now, I know — then the Republicans have no right to be rewarded for their performance over the past eight years. Let the GOP have its comeuppance and come back under new management.

Blog-quotes of the day

Brad DeLong:

So what to do? We don't want to let the banking sector collapse into bankruptcy--Lehman Brothers was bad enough, and we don't want to replicate the Great Depression. But we also don't want to repeat Japan's mistakes of the 1990s, with zombie banks neither alive nor dead failing to do their job for the economy as they focused on getting back above water to create some value for shareholders and executives.

And here is my worry about the current plan to buy preferred rather than common stock of the banks. Preferred stock runs a risk of creating zombies--if shareholders and executives conclude that the preferred has all the equity value if they continue business as usual, then they will not continue business as usual but will instead start behaving like the Japanese banks of the 1990s. And we don't want that.

By mighty spells the Head Voodoo Priest Henry Paulson has raised the corpses of America's biggest banks from the graves to which the financial crisis was consigning them, but has he restored them to life, or just to zombiehood? Will they do their job for the economy, or will they begin wreaking destruction, all the while crying out: "BBRRAAIINNS! BBRRAAIINNSS!"

[NB: That's a funnier way of expressing my point below about changing forward-looking behavior. I'd rather hear that my worries are the uninformed results of undereducation in economics, but I still like hearing from Brad DeLong that I've kind of understood something relevant to the current mess correctly..]

Julian Sanchez:

And certainly it’s got to be much easier, much more comfortable, to give your self-selecting audience precisely what they want to hear and bask in their accolades. I don’t know if I’ve named it here before, but I’ve long observed a phenomenon in the blogosphere I call “audience capture,” where a once-interesting writer becomes rather dull and predictable, each post another jab at the lever, predictably rewarded with a tasty pellet.

For what it's worth, that phenomenon is one reason why I've never turned comments on. I do think that comments sections sometimes provide all the wrong kinds of feedback to a blogger.

Sentences that scare me

“The needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take this new capital to hoard it, but to deploy it,” Mr. Paulson said, who offered some details of the plan along with the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila C. Bair. [sic-- should be "said Mr. Paulson, who..."]

If the bailout were working properly, no exhortation or bully pulpit would be required-- right? The banks would think that it was again in their interest to make short-term commercial loans. This has been one of my worries for a while now-- that we were deploying backward-looking tools to solve a problem of forward-looking incentives. If the banks say, "thanks for the new funds; they'll look lovely on our balance sheet!" then nothing productive has happened; the taxpayers have just propped up the stock price of financial firms.

I'm enjoying...

the tributes to new Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman from libertarian and libertarianish economists. Some sharply distinguish the pre-NYT real economics Krugman did from the post-NYT public commentary. Others count Krugman's ability to explain things to a lay audience as one of his virtues-- which is of course appropriate given that they remember it as one of Milton Friedman's virtues, too.

See: Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan, Alex Tabarrok, and of course Tyler Cowen. Note that the plaudits for Krugman's new trade theory/ economic geography contributions themselves have to be based on a genuine admiration for their intellectual importance, since those contributions were traditionally taken as being unfriendly to free trade, insofar as they showed at least the theoretical possibility of productivity-enhancing protectionism. (Krugman understands the difference between that possibility result and any likelihood that actually-adopted protectionism would be of the right sort.)

Autumn in Montreal

Being my very first experiment in multimedia on this here blog; but I hear that the interwebs are now capable of handling things that aren't even text. (In my day, we browsed the interwebs on lynx in UNIX and read e-mail on Pine and we liked it!)

Anyway: two previous autumns in Montreal and 21 in New England and I've still never seen anything like this year's color.

Brettschneider reading group at Public Reason

Following up on last year's very successful Estlund reading group, Public Reason is hosting a reading group on Corey Brettschneider's Democratic Rights.

On the other hand...

I've linked (approvingly) to several posts elsewhere about why libertarians and classical liberals ought to be supporting Obama, however reluctantly, this election. And I've by and large failed to link to stuff (including by my friend Todd Seavey on the other side. But I do feel compelled to point to this Ilya Somin post.

My core reasons for preferring any Democrat to any Republican this election are backward-looking. After the catastrophic (in policy terms and in moral terms) Bush Administration, the Republican Party needs to go to the penalty box, for its health and for the health of American democracy. A party must not be able to run eight years of policy-failing, power-grabbing, deficit-ballooning, separation-of-powers-shredding, torturing, detaining-without-charge government without consequence or punishment-- and, since presidents are term-limited out, the punishment must be partisan.

But I am deeply worried, in a forward-looking way, about the new historical moment the financial crisis brings about, and Ilya hits some important forward-looking worries. I've never been persuaded by the scare-tactic view that says Obama is, deep in his heart, some kind of nutty socialist. But that's not what Ilya stresses-- it's that a Democratic President, an expanded majority Democratic Congreess, and an economic crisis coinciding could lead to much longer-term damage to economic liberalism than libertarians-for-Obama like me are comfortable admitting.

I'm not changing my mind-- but I'm also not denying that I share some of his worries.

Federalism, parties, and institutional support for decentralization

I've had occasion to argue that federalism provides an institutional weight to decentralization in a polity, and that Canadian federalism in particular is well-anchored by the dynamic of Quebec seeking greater decentralization, then other provinces seeking to keep up with Quebec. This helps prevent the dynamic of one or another party of the ethnocultural majority being unrelentingly centralist-- even anti-Quebec animus gets channeled into the protection of other provinces rather than into support for a stronger center. The entrenched character of federalism, the way in which it creates provincial-level sites for politics and parties, gives decentralization an institutional weight that helps to stabilize a constitutional order.

From today's Globe & Mail:

ANDREW STEELE

Globe and Mail Update

October 7, 2008 at 11:27 PM EDT

Miles' Law states that "where you stand depends on where you sit."

Nothing could be truer for Canada's premiers. Each is grappling with the federal election based on their local political dynamic, rather than partisan labels. And those individual political calculations will have a profound impact on the next federal government, regardless of who wins.

Let's start in the West.

Facing the voters in eight months and tied in the polls, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell has kept his powder dry.

While the Liberal label of his party might make one think he should support Stephane Dion automatically, the B.C. Liberals in fact draw support from both the federal Tories and Grits. Getting into a scuffle with either federal party's leader would divide Mr. Campbell's own house.[...]

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach has been playing defence. He feels a re-elected Conservative government is best for his jurisdiction, but also wants to avoid a Ralph Klein-style interjection that helps the Liberals with their "hidden agenda" attacks on Mr. Harper.

Mr. Stelmach took a swing at NDP leader Jack Layton when the tar sands came under direct attack, but mostly he is leaving it to others to do the heavy lifting. [...]

Ontario's Dalton McGuinty is playing a careful game. Despite his own brother running for re-election as a federal Liberal MP, Mr. McGuinty has avoided any endorsement of the Mr. Dion's Liberals.[...]

Despite the brand name, Jean Charest's Quebec Liberal Party is made up of supporters of every federalist party: Conservative, Liberal, NDP, Green. Attacking one at the expense of another only divides his coalition and diminishes his chances in an election that could be held on a moment's notice. Instead, he has played a more traditional role for a Quebec premier, attacking policy elements that threaten to intrude on the province's jurisdiction.[...]

Then there is Danny Williams of Newfoundland and Labrador - a Conservative who legally registered his "Anyone But Conservative" campaign with Elections Canada, calls the Conservative Prime Minister "intolerant" and predicts a "dark age" if the Conservatives get a majority.

Degenerate federalism happens when the provinces are captured by the center and become local sites for patronage and corruption-- pillars of the majority at the center rather than potential bulwarks against it. (Mexico for most of the 20the century or Moscow under Putin, for example.) Canada is about as far from that outcome as it's plausible to be.

Too clever by 31%

Canadian Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper won enactment of a bill moving Canada to a fixed term for Parliament, unless the Prime Minister loses a vote of confidence. This ostensibly limited the Prime Minister's ability to call an election just to grab a favorable moment on the political calendar.

Then he called an election for this fall, explaining that the restriction didn't apply to minority governments, which is what he has. (Explanation for Americans: Harper's party has a plurality but not a majority of seats in the House. This means that all of his proposals require at least the acquiescence if not the active support of at least one opposition party in order to become law.) He was widely thought to have timed this both to grab a moment of personal popularity and to come before the U.S. election, lest pro-Obama, pro-left, pro-"change" sentiment spread north of the border and doom him in two years' time. At the beginning of the abbreviated campaign, he seemed likely to finally get his wish and be re-elected with a parliamentary majority.

Now: Not so much. As Matt Yglesias has been discussing, an economic crisis has a funny tendency to sweep all the bums (of whatever political complexion) out of office, and perhaps to entrench a prejudice in favor of the other party just because it's there when things return to normal. Yglesias quotes Larry Bartels:

Considering America’s Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to “throwing the bums out” than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter.

On one hand, it's of course not Harper's fault that the financial systems of the world are in a tailspin-- and indeed Canada has yet to be hit hard by the results (notwithstanding a very rapid decline in the value of the loonie as currency traders indulge the perverse 'flight to safety' that means rushing into the US dollar even when it's the US that's leading the way off the cliff). On the other hand, it certainly is his fault that he's standing for re-election right now. If he'd waited until the election due date prescribed in his own legislation, he wouldn't be fighting to save even his minority government against the headwinds of [what we can only hope will turn out to be] a Schumpeterian "gale of creative destruction." Now, with less than a week before the election, he's at 31% in the polls and falling, with the Liberals at 27% and rising. So much for cleverly gaming the system...

The financial crisis and secession

Since 1990, the world has seen something of a proliferation of new independent states: 15 from the old Soviet Union, 2 from Czechoslovakia, 6 or so from Yugoslavia, plus Eritrea and East Timor. This has not ben caused by, but has certainly been aided by, a sense that the minimum size for state viability wasn't very large in an era of peace and free trade. The Baltics couldn't militarily survive the late 30s/ early 40s, but that's not our world anymore; the Czech and Slovak Republics had no economic need to stay unwillingly joined if they could trade across an international boundary almost as easily as within a common one. Regional defense organizations and regional trade unions-- prominently NATO and the EU-- made a huge difference here.

The Russia-Georgia war perhaps marks the end of the "peace" described above. Being in line for NATO membership someday is nice and all, but it's not remotely the same as being part of a great power that protects you as part of its own territory.

And the financial crisis may-- may-- mean that minimum viable state size ratchets back up on the economic side as well. Being Singapore or Switzerland or Luxembourg or a banking haven in the Caribbean has been a pretty good deal in an age of easy trade in goods and easy capital mobility. But now: Iceland gets caught in the financial crisis having to bail out a bank with assets many times its GDP, and without the deep capital or foreign currency reserves that a place like the US or Germany or Japan or Britain has.

This suggests great trouble for Quebec nationalism as a project, maybe somewhat less for Scottish or Catalan-- Iceland has a separate currency that's taking a beating; Scotland and Catalonia would be in the EU and probably in the euro zone. But the lack of capital depth would have hit Iceland now even if it were inside the EU and the euro zone.

Small-country wealth within free trade has been one of the virtues of the broadly liberal era we've been living through. When states are dominant economic actors, it's far more important what state (and how strong a state, and how big a state) you live in.

The new Times Higher Education Supplement world university rankings...

have been released. McGill at #20 is the highest ranked in Canada and the second-highest (behind Michigan) public university in North America.

Update:
McGill ranked 14th in the world in social sciences, as well as 13th in humanities.

Dynamic Amazon ads...

sometimes freak me out.

If I'm at Chris' Invincible Super-blog, it's just weird to see a sidebar ad trying to get me to buy:

Is Democracy Possible Here?
Ronald Dworkin

Roman Law: an Historical Introduction
Hans Julius Wolff

Roman Law in European History
Peter Stein

The Constitution of Equality
Thomas Christiano

I go there for a few minutes of escapism, not to be reminded of my to-do list-- but Amazon doesn't know that, it just reads the Amazon cookies in my cache and responds appropriately.

I'msurprised...
that the NYT adopts the dour attitude of the principals in this article about a possible split in the ANC. Democratic consolidation in South Africa requires the possibility of genuinely contested elections and viable bi- or multi-partyism-- and, a decade and a half after the end of apartheid, it remains clear that only the ANC itself can generate enough support to win elections, so for there to be two parties that could win, they'd both have to be ANC descendants. (I'll bet the smaller parties start merging with one or another ANC descendant very quickly.) The possible fissure is good news. It would have done Mbeki good to have a serious opposition watching over him, it's certainly desirable that Zuma have one, and it will be a sight worth seeing when a majority-elected government in South Africa peacefully surrenders power to a rival majority elected-government.

As a political scientist living under minority governments in both Quebec and Canada...

I feel like a physicist watching Wile E. Coyote running on air. Seems like someone should point out to them that our predictions say such things aren't possible, but also it's also kind of fascinating to watch the damn things stubbornly stay in the air anyway. Looks like we're headed for another one at the federal level, as the Tories have stalled out in Quebec, where they'd hoped to pick up seats.

(Duceppe rules out coalition, Montreal Gazette, today.)

Steven Pinker on the coming turn to regulation

here.

Many leftist commentators have gleefully interpreted the financial crisis as proof of the failure of free-market capitalism. Libertarianism and laissez-faire will be out; regulatory command-and-control will be in. Everyone agrees that targeted regulation is needed in the domains of finance that brought us to this disaster, where a mad incentive structure and poorly understood dynamics combined to produce a catastrophic outcome. It is less clear that a general philosophy that "regulation is good" will be helpful across the board. The past decade has shown us that unplanned, bottom-up, productive activity can lead to huge advances in social well-being, such as Linux, Wikipedia, YouTube, and the rest of Web 2.0. And many segments of the old-fashioned economy are still distorted by excessive regulation, like the artificial scarcity created by government-rationed taxi medallions. But the winds of change are clearly blowing in the direction of increased regulation, and I suspect that not all of the effects will be good.

If so, libertarians and economic conservatives will have themselves to blame. In recent decades they have turned the benefits of deregulation and tax-cutting into a religious dogma--less is always better--rather than a consideration that has to be weighed against other goods and submitted to evidence-based evaluation. Worse, they have allied themselves with (or at least failed to distance themselves from) the know-nothing conservatism represented by Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin. Libertarianism and moderate intellectual conservatism have discredited themselves with this disastrous alliance, and whatever contributions they have to offer the national conversation will be blown off. There's some rough justice in this, but it would be a shame if the result is a pro-regulation monoculture.

I'd say that the blame is less with turning "the benefits of deregulation and tax-cutting into a religious dogma" and more with a failure to distance those benefits firmly, at every turn, from corrupt and regressive corporatism. "Deregulation" and "letting the corporations write the regulations" are not synonyms. Neither are "cutting spending" and "increasing spending on wealthy special interests." There's been a thoroughly baleful and stupid path that went something like this:

The apparently morally- and intellectually-powerful cases for regulation or greater spending come from the left.
We wish to resist regulation and greater spending.
Therefore obviously-indefensible regulation and spending coming from the right is the lesser of two evils (even if greater in magnitude!), because it's unprincipled and so can be written off as a temporary aberration.

The fact that *any* libertarians or market-oriented conservatives supported George W. Bush for re-election, after his first term had made clear what his governance was like, is an embarrassment. And now it's not just a personal embarrassment; it's a damaging embarrassment to market-liberal ideas.

Does the free market corrode moral character?

Amon those writing essays for a Templeton Foundation "Big Questions" symposium on this topic: Michael Walzer, Jagdish Bhagwati, Tyler Cowen, Garry Kasparov, BHL, Michael Novak, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, John Gray. The responses are just two pages each, which means that they don't allow for the kind of depth and seriousness some of these writers are known for, but still: worth a look.