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Yesterday I griped at length over at The Economist about Rick Santorum's so-called "economic freedom agenda." One point of Santorum's ten-point plan includes tripling the tax-code subsidy for kids. I can't for the life of me see what this has to do with economic freedom. Reihan Salam, for my money the most knowledgeable wonk in America, sort of comes to Santorum's defense:
Some non-trivial share of the expenses associated with child-rearing can be understood as investments in human capital akin to investments in business enterprises. Most advanced market democracies give preferential tax treatment to capital income on the understanding that doing so will encourage productivity-enhancing investment. This kind of tax policy is necessarily more fraught in the context of human capital, as there is a great deal of heterogeneity in how parents deploy resources and, thankfully, human capital is not terribly “liquid.” So I completely understand that why some might question the notion that a well-designed child tax credit might actually be a sensible growth-enhancing measure.
It may not be not be obvious that growth-enhancing measures have anything to do with economic freedom, but freedom has a number of meanings, and one of them is "ability to do stuff." Economic growth does increase the means, the doing-stuff power, of those who gain from growth. So I accept that in this sense growth-enhancing measures might have something to do with economic freedom. But given the "negative," non-interference conception of freedom which conservatives and libertarians usually claim to prefer, it's not clear how optimal corporate tax rates have anything to do with it. Persons, natural or legal, are either coerced or they aren't. Mugged people with fat wallets aren't coerced or wrongly interfered with more than mugged people with thin wallets. They just lose more money. That conservatives and libertarians always ultimately do treat tax increases as losses of freedom suggests to me that they're really proponents of positive liberty after all, but haven't thought the implications through. In that case, they're right to see growth as a matter of freedom. But then they'e also are quite wrong to think that a well-functioning welfare state isn't a matter of freedom. I digress.
Back to kids. I'm glad Reihan concedes that it's reasonable to be skeptical about child tax credits as a way to boost growth. But it's not just there's "a great deal of heterogeneity in how parents deploy resources." More fundamentally, there's a great deal of heterogeneity in the amount different sorts of people contribute to economic growth. If growth is really the justification for government paying people to breed, then people likely to produce kids who will grow up to consume more than they produce ought to pay tax penalties for their precious, pitter-pattering economic dead-weight. Generally, people more likely to produce growth-enhancing kids should be subsidized more heavily than people who aren't. Pro-growth tax policy ought to especially reward those who produce kids exceedingly high in conscientiousness and IQ, which is to say, tax policy ought to reward people who are themselves very conscientious and highly intelligent. Of course, this sort of Grade A human livestock is likely to do quite well economically without special tax breaks. So perhaps it would be better to reward them medals for fecundity, as the Soviet Union used to do. Anyway, hardy is the supply-sider who does not break a tooth biting the eugenic bullet. But the logic of the pro-growth argument for the child tax credit really does require biting it.
If the idea is to promote growth through human capital, the obvious freedom-enhancing solution is to offer work visas to any highly-skilled foreigner who would like to live in the States. Effects on growth aside, this policy increases economic freedom in a straightforward way: it lifts coercive barriers to U.S. labor markets for a large class of people, allowing economic exchange previously forbidden to take place. Notably, nothing along these lines appears in Rick Santorum's "economic freedom agenda."
Of course, it would do even more for both economic freedom and human welfare to lift barriers to free movement and free exchange altogether. That would be fairer, too. There's something more than a little perversely self-serving about selectively enhancing freedom of movement and association just for those already relatively well-to-do foreigners whose industry would benefit us most. But the wheel of progress turns slowly; we can't have it all and have it now. Anyway, human-capital subsidy enthusiasts should note that a policy of welcoming large numbers of high-skilled workers is pretty straightforwardly eugenic. A lot of these folks are going to have kids. That is to say, we could achieve more or less the same result of too-odious-to-contemplate child-quality tax credits by selectively reducing barriers to American labor markets--a policy that really would enhance economic freedom, whether or not it enhanced growth.
Reihan goes on:
[L]et’s acknowledge that something like an expanded child tax credit and income-splitting (which aren’t quite what Santorum has in mind, but bear with me) does represent social engineering of a kind [as I claim my original post]. Social engineering through fiscal policy is unavoidable, as I suspect Will would agree. Short of a head tax, which has its own problematic implications, almost any imaginable income tax will shape the choices of individuals and communities along a number of dimensions: Do we concentrate on market or non-market production? Do we privilege those with a proclivity towards asset-building over those with a proclivity towards consumption?
I don't actually agree that social engineering through fiscal policy is unavoidable. Of course, every effective legal rule shapes choice. That's the point of rules. The philosophically liberal ideal is to have rules that more or less everyone can affirm from within their own moral perspective. The illiberal idea is to have rules that compel everyone to conform to a substantive idea of how people should live that some of us reasonably reject. To live within such an order defined by such rules is largely what it means to be free, politically and economically. Social engineering or "choice architecture" in the vacuous sense of having rules that shape choice is indeed inevitable. Social engineering in the sense of wheedling and bullying people into living their lives according to a conception of the good life they don't share is a predictable consequence of democratic politics in a less than ideally liberal culture, but it's not by no means logically inevitable. It's worth noting that this bad, illiberal sort of social engineering is pretty much the only thing Rick Santorum cares about.
Reihan and I are incredibly close to each other on the nature and value of economic freedom. Our disagreement I think is largely confined to the question of how to understand the implications of the platitude that the rules of the game shape our choices. I don't think you can get from there to a defense of child tax credits on grounds of anything resembling economic freedom. Maybe pro-natal policies are pro-growth. But do you think we'd be freer economically if we levied heavy excise taxes on birth control?
[UPDATE: Reihan tells me over Twitter that "I thought it was so obvious that the Santorum agenda wasn't pro-freedom that I didn't even mention it!" Whoops! So this post is based on a bit of a confusion. Still, I think the discussion's useful, so I'll just leave it as is.]
U.S. Navy controls inventions that claim to change "fabric of reality"
Inventions with revolutionary potential made by a mysterious aerospace engineer for the U.S. Navy come to light.
U.S. Navy ships
- U.S. Navy holds patents for enigmatic inventions by aerospace engineer Dr. Salvatore Pais.
- Pais came up with technology that can "engineer" reality, devising an ultrafast craft, a fusion reactor, and more.
- While mostly theoretical at this point, the inventions could transform energy, space, and military sectors.
The U.S. Navy controls patents for some futuristic and outlandish technologies, some of which, dubbed "the UFO patents," came to life recently. Of particular note are inventions by the somewhat mysterious Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais, whose tech claims to be able to "engineer reality." His slate of highly-ambitious, borderline sci-fi designs meant for use by the U.S. government range from gravitational wave generators and compact fusion reactors to next-gen hybrid aerospace-underwater crafts with revolutionary propulsion systems, and beyond.
Of course, the existence of patents does not mean these technologies have actually been created, but there is evidence that some demonstrations of operability have been successfully carried out. As investigated and reported by The War Zone, a possible reason why some of the patents may have been taken on by the Navy is that the Chinese military may also be developing similar advanced gadgets.
Among Dr. Pais's patents are designs, approved in 2018, for an aerospace-underwater craft of incredible speed and maneuverability. This cone-shaped vehicle can potentially fly just as well anywhere it may be, whether air, water or space, without leaving any heat signatures. It can achieve this by creating a quantum vacuum around itself with a very dense polarized energy field. This vacuum would allow it to repel any molecule the craft comes in contact with, no matter the medium. Manipulating "quantum field fluctuations in the local vacuum energy state," would help reduce the craft's inertia. The polarized vacuum would dramatically decrease any elemental resistance and lead to "extreme speeds," claims the paper.
Not only that, if the vacuum-creating technology can be engineered, we'd also be able to "engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level," states the patent. This would lead to major advancements in aerospace propulsion and generating power. Not to mention other reality-changing outcomes that come to mind.
Among Pais's other patents are inventions that stem from similar thinking, outlining pieces of technology necessary to make his creations come to fruition. His paper presented in 2019, titled "Room Temperature Superconducting System for Use on a Hybrid Aerospace Undersea Craft," proposes a system that can achieve superconductivity at room temperatures. This would become "a highly disruptive technology, capable of a total paradigm change in Science and Technology," conveys Pais.
High frequency gravitational wave generator.
Credit: Dr. Salvatore Pais
Another invention devised by Pais is an electromagnetic field generator that could generate "an impenetrable defensive shield to sea and land as well as space-based military and civilian assets." This shield could protect from threats like anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles that evade radar, coronal mass ejections, military satellites, and even asteroids.
Dr. Pais's ideas center around the phenomenon he dubbed "The Pais Effect". He referred to it in his writings as the "controlled motion of electrically charged matter (from solid to plasma) via accelerated spin and/or accelerated vibration under rapid (yet smooth) acceleration-deceleration-acceleration transients." In less jargon-heavy terms, Pais claims to have figured out how to spin electromagnetic fields in order to contain a fusion reaction – an accomplishment that would lead to a tremendous change in power consumption and an abundance of energy.
According to his bio in a recently published paper on a new Plasma Compression Fusion Device, which could transform energy production, Dr. Pais is a mechanical and aerospace engineer working at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD), which is headquartered in Patuxent River, Maryland. Holding a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, Pais was a NASA Research Fellow and worked with Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. His current Department of Defense work involves his "advanced knowledge of theory, analysis, and modern experimental and computational methods in aerodynamics, along with an understanding of air-vehicle and missile design, especially in the domain of hypersonic power plant and vehicle design." He also has expert knowledge of electrooptics, emerging quantum technologies (laser power generation in particular), high-energy electromagnetic field generation, and the "breakthrough field of room temperature superconductivity, as related to advanced field propulsion."
Suffice it to say, with such a list of research credentials that would make Nikola Tesla proud, Dr. Pais seems well-positioned to carry out groundbreaking work.
A craft using an inertial mass reduction device.
Credit: Salvatore Pais
The patents won't necessarily lead to these technologies ever seeing the light of day. The research has its share of detractors and nonbelievers among other scientists, who think the amount of energy required for the fields described by Pais and his ideas on electromagnetic propulsions are well beyond the scope of current tech and are nearly impossible. Yet investigators at The War Zone found comments from Navy officials that indicate the inventions are being looked at seriously enough, and some tests are taking place.
If you'd like to read through Pais's patents yourself, check them out here.
Laser Augmented Turbojet Propulsion System
Credit: Dr. Salvatore Pais
Do you worry too much? Stoicism can help
How imagining the worst case scenario can help calm anxiety.
Stoicism can help overcome anxiety
- Stoicism is the philosophy that nothing about the world is good or bad in itself, and that we have control over both our judgments and our reactions to things.
- It is hardest to control our reactions to the things that come unexpectedly.
- By meditating every day on the "worst case scenario," we can take the sting out of the worst that life can throw our way.
Are you a worrier? Do you imagine nightmare scenarios and then get worked up and anxious about them? Does your mind get caught in a horrible spiral of catastrophizing over even the smallest of things? Worrying, particularly imagining the worst case scenario, seems to be a natural part of being human and comes easily to a lot of us. It's awful, perhaps even dangerous, when we do it.
But, there might just be an ancient wisdom that can help. It involves reframing this attitude for the better, and it comes from Stoicism. It's called "premeditation," and it could be the most useful trick we can learn.
Practical Stoicism
Broadly speaking, Stoicism is the philosophy of choosing your judgments. Stoics believe that there is nothing about the universe that can be called good or bad, valuable or valueless, in itself. It's we who add these values to things. As Shakespeare's Hamlet says, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Our minds color the things we encounter as being "good" or "bad," and given that we control our minds, we therefore have control over all of our negative feelings.
Put another way, Stoicism maintains that there's a gap between our experience of an event and our judgment of it. For instance, if someone calls you a smelly goat, you have an opportunity, however small and hard it might be, to pause and ask yourself, "How will I judge this?" What's more, you can even ask, "How will I respond?" We have power over which thoughts we entertain and the final say on our actions. Today, Stoicism has influenced and finds modern expression in the hugely effective "cognitive behavioral therapy."
Helping you practice StoicismCredit: Robyn Beck via Getty Images
One of the principal fathers of ancient Stoicism was the Roman statesmen, Seneca, who argued that the unexpected and unforeseen blows of life are the hardest to take control over. The shock of a misfortune can strip away the power we have to choose our reaction. For instance, being burglarized feels so horrible because we had felt so safe at home. A stomach ache, out of the blue, is harder than a stitch thirty minutes into a run. A sudden bang makes us jump, but a firework makes us smile. Fell swoops hurt more than known hardships.
What could possibly go wrong?
So, how can we resolve this? Seneca suggests a Stoic technique called "premeditatio malorum" or "premeditation." At the start of every day, we ought to take time to indulge our anxious and catastrophizing mind. We should "rehearse in the mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck." We should meditate on the worst things that could happen: your partner will leave you, your boss will fire you, your house will burn down. Maybe, even, you'll die.
This might sound depressing, but the important thing is that we do not stop there.
Stoicism has influenced and finds modern expression in the hugely effective "cognitive behavioral therapy."
The Stoic also rehearses how they will react to these things as they come up. For instance, another Stoic (and Roman Emperor) Marcus Aurelius asks us to imagine all the mean, rude, selfish, and boorish people we'll come across today. Then, in our heads, we script how we'll respond when we meet them. We can shrug off their meanness, smile at their rudeness, and refuse to be "implicated in what is degrading." Thus prepared, we take control again of our reactions and behavior.
The Stoics cast themselves into the darkest and most desperate of conditions but then realize that they can and will endure. With premeditation, the Stoic is prepared and has the mental vigor necessary to take the blow on the chin and say, "Yep, l can deal with this."
Catastrophizing as a method of mental inoculation
Seneca wrote: "In times of peace, the soldier carries out maneuvers." This is also true of premeditation, which acts as the war room or training ground. The agonizing cut of the unexpected is blunted by preparedness. We can prepare the mind for whatever trials may come, in just the same way we can prepare the body for some endurance activity. The world can throw nothing as bad as that which our minds have already imagined.
Stoicism teaches us to embrace our worrying mind but to embrace it as a kind of inoculation. With a frown over breakfast, try to spend five minutes of your day deliberately catastrophizing. Get your anti-anxiety battle plan ready and then face the world.
Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.
Study: People will donate more to charity if they think something’s in it for them
A study on charity finds that reminding people how nice it feels to give yields better results than appealing to altruism.
How to get people to want to give you money, literal balls of cash not gaurenteed.
- A study finds asking for donations by appealing to the donor's self-interest may result in more money than appealing to their better nature.
- Those who received an appeal to self-interest were both more likely to give and gave more than those in the control group.
- The effect was most pronounced for those who hadn't given before.
Even the best charities with the longest records of doing great fundraising work have to spend some time making sure that the next donation checks will keep coming in. One way to do this is by showing potential donors all the good things the charity did over the previous year. But there may be a better way.
A new study by researchers in the United States and Australia suggests that appealing to the benefits people will receive themselves after a donation nudges them to donate more money than appealing to the greater good.
How to get people to give away free money
The postcards that were sent to different study subjects. The one on the left highlighted benefits to the self, while the one on the right highlighted benefits to others.List et al. / Nature Human Behaviour
The study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, utilized the Pick.Click.Give program in Alaska. This program allows Alaska residents who qualify for dividends from the Alaska Permanent Fund, a yearly payment ranging from $800 to $2000 in recent years, to donate a portion of it to various in-state non-profit organizations.
The researchers randomly assigned households to either a control group or to receive a postcard in the mail encouraging them to donate a portion of their dividend to charity. That postcard could come in one of two forms, either highlighting the benefits to others or the benefits to themselves.
Those who got the postcard touting self-benefits were 6.6 percent more likely to give than those in the control group and gave 23 percent more on average. Those getting the benefits-to-others postcard were slightly more likely to give than those receiving no postcard, but their donations were no larger.
Additionally, the researchers were able to break the subject list down into a "warm list" of those who had given at least once before in the last two years and a "cold list" of those who had not. Those on the warm list, who were already giving, saw only minor increases in their likelihood to donate after getting a postcard in the mail compared to those on the cold list.
Additionally, the researchers found that warm-list subjects who received the self-interest postcard gave 11 percent more than warm-list subjects in the control group. Amazingly, among cold-list subjects, those who received a self-interest postcard gave 39 percent more.
These are substantial improvements. At the end of the study, the authors point out, "If we had sent the benefits to self message to all households in the state, aggregate contributions would have increased by nearly US$600,000."
To put this into perspective, in 2017 the total donations to the program were roughly $2,700,000.
Is altruism dead?
Are all actions inherently self-interested? Thankfully, no. The study focuses entirely on effective ways to increase charitable donations above levels that currently exist. It doesn't deny that some people are giving out of pure altruism, but rather that an appeal based on self-interest is effective. Plenty of people were giving before this study took place who didn't need a postcard as encouragement. It is also possible that some people donated part of their dividend check to a charity that does not work with Pick.Click.Give and were uncounted here.
It is also important to note that Pick.Click.Give does not provide services but instead gives money to a wide variety of organizations that do. Those organizations operate in fields from animal rescue to job training to public broadcasting. The authors note that it is possible that a more specific appeal to the benefits others will receive from a donation might prove more effective than the generic and all-inclusive "Make Alaska Better For Everyone" appeal that they used.
In an ideal world, charity is its own reward. In ours, it might help to remind somebody how warm and fuzzy they'll feel after donating to your cause.
160-million-year-old ‘Monkeydactyl’ was the first animal to develop opposable thumbs
The 'Monkeydactyl' was a flying reptile that evolved highly specialized adaptations in the Mesozoic Era.
