"In the mid-1970s, the tiny Canadian town of Dauphin... acted as guinea pig for a grand experiment in social policy called 'Mincome.'"

"For a short period of time, all the residents of the town received a guaranteed minimum income. About 1,000 poor families got monthly checks to supplement their earnings."

Evelyn Forget, a health economist at the University of Manitoba, has done some of the best research on the results. Some of her findings were obvious: Poverty disappeared. But others were more surprising: High-school completion rates went up; hospitalization rates went down. “If you have a social program like this, community values themselves start to change,” Forget said.

Evelyn Forget is such a great name that I almost want to believe what she's selling. But I'm one of those people who fear the lost incentive to work. I remember a professor here at UW some years ago propounding a guaranteed minimum income of $20,000. He just assumed most people would work so they could have more than that. What if you were just starting out in life and knew you could go work-free if you were willing to live on $20,000?

I'm sure if that deal were offered to me when I was 20, I'd have taken it. I'd have worked at living on that $20,000. Oh, yes, eventually I might have wanted to write a book called "How to Live Well on $20,000 a Year" — because it would have amused me and I wouldn't have minded some extra spending money.

But who knows what the psychology of it all would be? It's one thing to experiment on a tiny town in Manitoba, but what happens when it gets bigger... and less Canadian?

Student newspaper editor extensively explains decision to publish a letter questioning the existence of a "rape culture."

You have to try to imagine the criticism the editor (Katherine Krueger) must have heard. She goes on at such great length. On the blog yesterday, we talked about the letter, here. The newspaper is The Badger Herald, at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

Krueger begins with the assumption that we are living in something that deserves to be called "rape culture":

The existence of ‘rape culture’ on college campuses — the social conditions that allow for the normalization of sexual assault and violence — leads to one in four college women being assaulted before they reach graduation.  For evidence that rape culture is alive, well and thriving on the University of Wisconsin campus, look no further than David Hookstead’s letter to the editor.

So Hookstead is not only a denialist; his denialism is proof of the existence of the culture. There should be a name for the culture where there are articles of faith so strong that if you say X is not true, you are viewed as reinforcing the proposition that X is true.

Krueger condemns her fellow student in language so strong that I had to go back and reread his letter to try to figure out what was so inflammatory. Krueger calls it "morally repugnant, patriarchal... offensive... the embodiment of rape culture... horrifically misguided... repellent... reprehensible... hateful... infuriating... ugly."

Isn't that a little over-the-top? Is no one allowed anymore to muse about the location of the line between bad sex and the crime of rape? Must one become a social pariah for questioning whether the activities of some criminals means their crime is our culture?

As ugly as Hookstead’s version of reality is, this is an actual view held by more than a few UW students. 

"More than a few"... but is that enough to make it our culture? Anyway, Krueger says condemning Hookstead's views is not enough:

If you’re disgusted and angry, this is your starting point. It’s only by opening the dialogue and banishing topics like sexual assault from our list of cultural taboos that we can begin to affect [sic?] a lasting change on campus.

So... does that mean students are supposed to talk about it or not talk about it? I suspect the message to those who have anything even mildly challenging to say is: Shut up or we will ruin you.

Krueger ends by expressing regret for her failure to put a "trigger warning" on Hookstead's letter. Now, there's: "Editor’s Note: trigger warning for sexual assault."

ADDED: I see Hookstead got attention in Jezebel last August, here.

AND: As MadisonMan in the comments tells me, I actually did blog that at the time.

ALSO: I'd just like to say there are so many issues here: 1. I'm not sure who, if anyone, I feel sorry for, but I know I don't feel sorry for any members of my own generation that may have made Ms. Krueger feel she had to talk like that. 2. Young people: Break loose, be free, say new things, dare! 3. What is the meaning of "culture"? How do you define that term? If you use it loosely, but someone else wants to use it narrowly, why are you — especially in a university — fighting instead of having an intellectual conversation about what "culture" is? 4. Who is being repressed and who is repressive, and why doesn't everyone care? 5. In what might be called a "culture of repression," is it any surprise that people are drinking too much and having bad sex? 6. Can we talk about whether we have a "culture of bad sex"? If so, why? 7. Isn't the real rape question: What should be reported to the police for prosecution? And if we put that in a separate category, would we be able to talk about what bad sex is and why we're having it? 8. What about love?

The great-great-great-grandson of Fletcher Christian has died on Pitcairn Island...

... where the population is now 51.

Pitcairn, settled by the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts in 1790, is a rocky speck of about two square miles. (Manhattan, by comparison, is about 24 square miles.) Most of its inhabitants are descended from the mutineers and the Tahitian women they brought with them.

[Tom] Christian, who for his services to Pitcairn was named a Member of the British Empire in 1983, was long considered an elder statesman on the island.

Read the whole obituary for details of the old mutiny and what it's like living in such a tiny and remote place. (It's midway between Peru and New Zealand. There are no cars. A supply ship arrives quarterly.) But let me highlight the legal dispute that occurred in 2004: 7 men were charged with sexually assaulting underage girls. The defense was "that initiating girls into sex was a time-honored South Seas custom and that they were unaware that British law was in effect on Pitcairn." Christian "publicly disputed the defendants’ contention, as did his wife." The men were convicted, and "Mr. and Mrs. Christian were shunned by much of the island for years afterward." He and his wife continued to live there on the island, tending their garden[s].

"The United States is not a nation of black and white people. Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black."

Wrote Albert Murray in his 1970 book "The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture."

America, he maintained, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts,” was a “nation of multicolored people,” or Omni-Americans: “part Yankee, part backwoodsman and Indian — and part Negro.”

The book also challenged what Mr. Murray called the “social science fiction” pronouncements of writers like James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who he said had exaggerated racial and ethnic differences in postulating a pathology of black life. As Mr. Murray put it, they had simply countered “the folklore of white supremacy” with “the fakelore of black pathology.”

Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote a New Yorker article called "King of Cats" about Murray (and Murray's close friend Ralph Ellison), which said:

"Both men were militant integrationists, and they shared an almost messianic view of the importance of art.... In their ardent belief that Negro culture was a constitutive part of American culture, they had defied an entrenched literary mainstream, which preferred to regard black culture as so much exotica — amusing perhaps, but eminently dispensable. Now they were also defying a new black vanguard, which regarded authentic black culture as separate from the rest of American culture — something that was created, and could be appreciated, in splendid isolation."

Murray died last Sunday at the age of 97. The quotes above come from the NYT obituary. You can read the New Yorker article, from 1996, here.

ADDED: Speaking of culture, why wasn't this man in the forefront of American culture all these years?

"[A] national cult of individualism and careerism threatened to turn America into a country of hypercompetitive loners ruled by tyrants."

Wrote Philip E. Slater in the 1970 book "The Pursuit of Loneliness," which sold half a million copies.

Having re-examined his life through the lens of his own book, Mr. Slater decided in 1971 to resign as the chairman of the sociology department at Brandeis University, where he had taught for 10 years, and take a different path. He took up acting, wrote novels and began culling his personal possessions down to the two boxes he left when he died at 86 on June 20 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif....

He gave up his car, learned to live on one-fourth the income he was used to and began pursuing a life he would describe in a 1980 book, “Wealth Addiction,” as “voluntary simplicity."...

“The experience of losing everything and finding I was having a wonderful time,” he said, “opened me to experiences I otherwise would not have had. I would have protected myself from them if I had known.”

Sociology, circa 1970. I guess it couldn't last, this kind of sociology that made you not want to be a sociologist.

"Perhaps the biggest difference between the racers and the randonneurs was socioeconomic."

"Racing was a working-class sport — prize money was a way out of the coal mines or factories."

"You don't have the liberty to say, 'Well, the other guy deserves to win' if your living depends on it," [Jan Heine, editor of Bicycle Quarterly, a Seattle-based magazine about the history, technology and culture of biking].

Randonneuring was more of a refined hobby. "If you're doing this for fun, suddenly the distinction between winner and second becomes meaningless," says Heine.

Also:

"There was a lot of animosity in France, actually, between the tourists and the racers," Heine explains. "Because the tourists said, 'We are going in the mountains, and we are a participatory sport.' " Participatory meaning that women could ride alongside men — and people could ride basically whatever they wanted. This drove innovations in bicycle technology that today are widespread: If you've ever ridden a bike with a derailleur, thank the randonneurs.

Interesting the way the inclusiveness toward women changes things — this particular activity... and everything else. Who wins and who loses? Or... shall we say?... the inclusion of women changes the nature of the activity so that speaking in terms of winning and losing becomes inappropriate and those who play to win and triumph over losers become socially unacceptable oafs?

ADDED: I am reminded of the perennial efforts to restructure law school to suit women. Recently, in the Harvard Crimson:

Harvard Law student Jessica R. Jensen hates the Socratic method. “It’s the worst thing in the world,” she said. “It forces you to talk like a man... It made me feel really uncomfortable and incompetent at first, and it really impacted my performance in classes the first year.... You feel like you don’t know the material really well because you feel like an idiot in class.”

The worst thing in the world? Worse than coal mining or — the coal miner's alternative income source — the Tour de France?

Employed in some form across most classrooms at Harvard Law School, the Socratic method, a teaching style that relies on cold-calling, lies at the heart of the debate over gender issues and serves as a focal point for the Shatter coalition. Today, many students and faculty have raised concerns over the teaching method, saying that men are more likely to participate voluntarily in Law School classes than women....

Yet the root cause of this disparity remains contested, as professors, students, and administrators debate whether the Socratic method—the traditional form of legal pedagogy—needs to be adapted to account for gender disparities in the classroom.

Note that both calling on students and relying on volunteers is bad for women.

“Women take longer to process thoughts before they feel comfortable to say them out loud than men do,” Jensen said, adding that men feel more natural in that kind of classroom atmosphere.

I guess as long as you mean well — which is to say, you think and get others to think you're helping women — you can engage in sex stereotyping even when it's disparaging women. I know you can restate Jensen's stereotype so that it's more flattering to women — a paraphrasing skill you might want to work on. Just say that women are reflecting deeply, forming more refined ideas, and contemplating the social dynamic of the classroom —  while these brutal, competition-addicted men lunge at the first opportunity to dominate and blurt out whatever comes to mind with little concern about what others in the room think about them.

Harvard Law professor Lani C. Guinier ’71, who has authored several articles on legal pedagogy, said... “women’s reaction to law school is an important warning sign, but a warning sign that the problem will not go away simply by focusing on helping the women think more like their male counterparts”....

Inclusiveness toward women changes things.

"Outside the United States (and certainly outside the South), the tyranny of the smile is considerably weaker."

"In France, even women with the most naturally perky of faces seem to purposely cultivate BRF to enhance their je ne sais quoi."

"As Marriage Changes, Should Joint Filing Go The Way Of Ozzie And Harriet?"

Asks Howard Gleckman at Forbes, citing an article by Yale lawprof Anne Alstott:

As Alstott notes, nearly half of American adults are now unmarried, 40 percent of children are born to unmarried parents, and labor force participation among married women is now very close to that of married men... So why even bother with the concept of joint tax filing?

Alstott borrows from Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin, who calls the trend away from formal marriage “new individualism.” This, she says, “has rendered obsolete legal doctrines and policy analyses that treat formal marriage as a proxy for family life … . Joint filing is no longer well-tailored to serve important social objectives.”

The destruction of marriage is set to resume as soon as same-sex marriage becomes the law. We've been pretending that the traditional institution is soooo important that it's terrible to exclude gay people. But you can see the anti-traditionalists itching to move forward — ever forward — with the new! I see we're supposed to call it the "new individualism," because — step into our trap, conservative naifs — conservatives are always touting individualism.

Joint filing makes structuring the family around a single-earner a tax-avoidance strategy. The no-income spouse does all sorts of labor that benefits the family economically without producing taxable income. It's hard for people to do the math and see how valuable this is and how well it works, especially — but not only — when you have children. Those who've set their hearts on women's equality have — for decades — promoted women's entering the workplace and, to do that, they've obscured the benefits of single-earner family structure (even though the male could be the home-based spouse).

Now, after letting 2 or 3 generations mature without understanding the good of this traditional division of labor, they'd like to remove the tax benefit. It's just completely outdated and has nothing to do with the way people live these days. And when that happens, we will all be endlessly in the grip of the all-seeing, all-taxing government, and the days of life centered around the home will be just some old joke about Ozzie and Harriet, ha ha, so old fashioned. So dumb. So naive.

"From what we know so far, Edward Snowden appears to be the ultimate unmediated man."

Writes David Brooks:

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

This lens makes you more likely to share the distinct strands of libertarianism that are blossoming in this fragmenting age: the deep suspicion of authority, the strong belief that hierarchies and organizations are suspect, the fervent devotion to transparency, the assumption that individual preference should be supreme. You’re more likely to donate to the Ron Paul for president campaign, as Snowden did....

For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things....

Read the whole thing. This is an excellent column, and it's related to something I was trying to say here. In Brooks's list of what Snowden betrayed, there is:

He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed. Snowden self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability, putting his own preferences above everything else.

That's related to something I said in the comments on that earlier thread, here. A commenter, gerry, had said:

Humanity tends to be cruel, selfish, and morally confused and weak. If geeks save our asses from collectivists and power vampires like Obama, it likely will be an accident, with all the attendant unintended consequences.

And my response was:

See, that's the kind of thought pattern I suspect is developing out there in the minds of these computer technicians. Look at the contempt, the grandiosity, and the recklessness.

Obama was elected, twice, by the American people. We studied him. We listened to him. He is surrounded by advisers and checked by Congress and the press.

[It's absurd to think] that some self-appointed altruist of the computer-fixated kind is going to save us.

It's like those movie trailers... in a world where etc etc ONE MAN...

You think that's what will save us?!

"What’s interesting is that just because a food is delicious doesn’t necessarily make it popular."

"You enjoy it because, well, people around you seem to enjoy it. This means that items can also change contexts. This is what happened to Pabst Blue Ribbon, which went from a working-class Midwestern beer to Brooklyn’s preferred Hipster beverage. It’s also what happened to Marlboro, a poorly selling women’s cigarette ('Mild as May') before being rebranded to appeal to men. In both cases, nothing about the product itself changed. But if the peer behavior around the product changes, so too does our appreciation of it."

From an essay called "How Lobster Got Fancy/The surprising history—from food for the poor, servants, and prisoners to a soldier’s staple to everybody’s idea of a delicacy—of 'the cockroach of the ocean'" — via Metafilter — which first made me think why would anyone write an essay about lobster after there's already a greatest-essay-ever-written-level essay about lobster, which, by the way, the first-linked essay quotes — how could it not? — but doesn't link. But there's some good info and analysis about the culture of food:

During the Great Depression, impoverished families in Maine would sneak down to the ocean in the dark to empty and reset their lobster traps and take home the day’s haul to feed their families. It was still seen, at least in Maine, as a food for the poor. It was considered embarrassing for children to have to go to school with sandwiches made of lobster meat.

During World War II, however, lobster wasn’t rationed like other foods, and so people of all classes began to eat it enthusiastically, and discover its deliciousness.

Things that are delicious that you're nevertheless disgusted by. Is it because you're disgusted by other people? If you know that's your reason, do you overcome your disgust? If you do, is that because you're ashamed of yourself for looking down on other people or because you think that the food of the common people is usually pretty good and actually just what you're looking for?

But you still won't eat the cicadas, will you?

Young people are driving less and less.

But why? Is it economic pressure?

Online life might have something to do with the change, [suggested Michael Sivak of the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan]. “A higher proportion of Internet users was associated with a lower licensure rate,” he wrote in a recent study. “This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that access to virtual contact reduces the need for actual contact among young people.”

I get the sense that younger people are generally less interested in traveling. The idea that travel is the best thing to do with your free time and extra money... that's fading, isn't it? Something old people do.

There was also this article a few days ago saying "Americans are moving around the country a lot less frequently than they used to." That didn't specifically focus on the young.

So... is something happening to us? We're not so adventurous or not so restless or we've overcome the delusion that moving around changes who you are? We're lazy and the couch potatoism has extended into everything about the way we live? We long for the friends and family that our grandparents and great-grandparents had in the days when everyone — in this nostalgic true/false memory — stayed in one town and you had deep roots and connections to all sorts of people who loved and cared for you (or disliked you but at least knew you).

"Crunchy Cons took a pretty hard line against suburban living..."

Rod Dreher, reconsiders suburbia. 

"Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots" is the name of a book he wrote, back in 2006. As the italics indicate, the quote above refers to what he said in his book, not what the people he labeled "crunchy" did — at least not directly.

In his new article, Dreher describes himself "someone who used to live in big cities, and who now lives in a small town [and therefore] more understanding of why someone with a family would choose to live in the suburbs." The same old reasons people move to the suburbs affected him and his family, so now he sees the point.

While I still believe there are serious objections to the way our suburbs are designed, and ways to design them to be more aesthetically pleasing and human-scaled, I appreciate very much Keith Miller’s critique, and how he urges us to think about whether we are not simply baptizing and moralizing aesthetic preferences. Don’t get me wrong: I do believe that the material order in some real sense reflects, or should reflect, the sacred order. Aesthetics are rarely completely divorced from metaphysics or morals. On a more practical level, though, I think we ought to all give more grace to each other. Not everybody who moves to the suburbs wants to build a gargantuan McMansion and live the full-consumerist lifestyle. Not everyone who chooses to live in the city is driven by morally pure motives; they could be refusing one kind of consumerist narcissism for the sake of embracing a more attractive version of same.

What aesthetic preferences have you tricked up as moral imperatives?

"For black men like us, the feeling of having something to lose, beyond honor and face, is foreign."

"We grew up in communities — New York, Baltimore, Chicago — where the Code of the Streets was the first code we learned. Respect and reputation are everything there. These values are often denigrated by people who have never been punched in the face. But when you live around violence there is no opting out. A reputation for meeting violence with violence is a shield. That protection increases when you are part of a crew with that same mind-set. This is obviously not a public health solution, but within its context, the Code is logical."

"I think though, this is not a time to commit sociology, if I can use an expression."

You can.

"It is not enough to call for measures that stop suburbanization..."

"... the suburbs aren’t going anywhere. If all we do is try to pretend away their radically unequal fortunes, we will just drop a new suburban inequality on top of the old one."

"Lean In, Dad/How Shared Diaper Duty Could Stimulate the Economy."

A NYT Magazine item — worth clicking through for the illustration alone, which is a graphically excellent riff on Rosie the Riveter.

What's the economic theory purveyed in the NYT?

New research suggests that, because it’s primarily women who take advantage of leave and part-time entitlements, work-life accommodations often paradoxically limit career trajectories. 

Ha. This is precisely the point made by critics of the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Clinton Era legislation that was sold as an advancement for women. Senator Nancy Kassenbaum (R — Kansas) said: "Mandating leave will have a negative impact on [employment] opportunities for women... . Employers... will seek to hire workers with lower benefit costs, increasing the pressure to discriminate against women." (139 Cong. Rec. S985 (1993).)

The NYT wheels out a Harvard economist to make the point Kassenbaum made 20 years ago.

“In a regime where anyone can go part time, where it’s hard to get rid of people if they do, employers might sort on the front end and not hire people they think are likely to want to go part time, which usually means women,” said Lawrence F. Katz, an economist at Harvard. “There may be no way a woman can credibly commit to sticking around and not going part time.” The U.S., where these policies do not exist, has the smallest gap between women’s representation in the labor force and their representation in senior management positions.

Except that we do have the Family and Medical Leave Act, and it's hard to imagine getting rid of it. Once a benefit is in place, there are real-live beneficiaries who are going to yell if you try to take it away. Even if it's hurting women, threatening it will be called a war on women.

So what's the solution?

In order to prescribe policies that really allow female workers to “lean in” at work, social scientists are trying to find ones that recast social norms and encourage male workers to “lean in” at home. 

Just change how people think! That should be easy... in the fever dreams of a social scientist.

One area where there seems to be a lot of potential is paternity leave, which still has a stigma in both the United States and Europe. To remedy this bad rap, countries like Sweden and Norway have recently introduced a quota of paid parental leave available only to fathers. 

So! The prescription is outright sex discrimination! Affirmative action for men!

This might not sound like such a big deal...

Uh, yeah, actually it does. It's blatant sex discrimination against women, to be sold as helping women.

... but social scientists are coming around to the notion that a man spending a few weeks at home with his newborn can help recast expectations and gender roles, at work and home, for a long time. 

Oh, the good old social scientists... coming around... Not even a consensus. Just long-headed brooders maundering toward an idea that just might work. Absurd! 

"The Harrad Experiment"/"The Herod Experiment."

That last post, about universal pre-school, led to an in-person conversation with Meade proposing such an extreme change from what we have now that, I said, it would have to be presented in the form of a novel — a utopian/dystopian scenario. People would need to ease into entertaining the idea.  It would have to be like "The Harrad Experiment," which was a novel that was based on a 1960 academic paper written by a couple of married sociologists, "outlining a program designed to achieve sexual sanity."

Essentially, our method consisted of teaching a new sexual ethic and moral code by conditioning and indoctrination throughout a four-year period to a select group of male and female college students of unusually sound character and high creative ability. The paper was the result of ten years of work in family and marriage counseling and years spent studying the sexual habits and mores of man throughout recorded history. My wife and I felt that, in order to survive, Western man must take the long step away from primitive emotions of hate and jealousy and learn the meaning of love and loving as a dynamic process. Such a program would counteract the decadence that is slowly infiltrating our society....

Obviously it would be too startling a change in sex and marriage behavior for the average person in our present culture. The point we made was that the time to begin is now. A start must be made somewhere. Too much is at stake to permit our basic social and family patterns to drift on the currents of haphazard marriage and distorted sex relations.

Our paper proposing a Premarital Living Program at the college level met with a great deal of unfavorable reaction....

So they hooked up with Robert H. Rimmer, who turned their proposal into a novel, and in novel form, people were able to engage with the professors' proposal. [UPDATE: I've now skimmed the book and  see that the sociologists are part of Rimmer's fictional story.]

Meade's idea was: Free and compulsory government schooling to begin at birth and to end at age 10. Meade jokes that his book would be "The Herod Experiment." Sounds gruesome!



The quotes above are from the introduction to the novel, which I just bought on Kindle. I had wanted to read a good summary, but Wikipedia only has a short article about the 1973 movie based on the book. I see Tippi Hedren and the young Don Johnson were in it. It looks amusingly cheesy from the trailer — watch out for the (hilarious) nudity:



Here's a more sedate trailer. No nudity, but I laughed out loud more than once (especially at the oh-so-professorial professor, played by James Whitmore, who "represents the past"):

"Americans are always talking about the American Dream."

"They refer to it in all their books and the concept has become a symbol of American culture. This is what made me want to read more about it. Can we apply its principles in Saudi Arabia and how can we achieve a better way of life?"

I was already in the middle of blogging this Saudi Gazette opinion piece by Samar Fatany, when I got about 2/3 of the way into it and saw:

Since the 1920s, several authors, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, have ridiculed the chase for the American Dream. In his book "The Great Gatsby", Fitzgerald, reflects upon the American Dream’s demise, and the pessimism of contemporary Americans.

Gatsby! He's everywhere!

Cass Sunstein reviews "Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism."

That's a book by Sarah Conly, published by Cambridge University Press. 206 pages, $95. $95! Fortunately, we cannot be coerced to buy that. I will exercise my autonomy and refrain from buying it. I'll just read Sunstein, for free, here.

[A] significant strand in American culture appears to endorse the central argument of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty....

the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.

Sunstein refers to social science research that shows people actually aren't very good at making decisions for themselves. We have "present bias" (and don't pay enough attention to the future), we're bad at assessing probability, and we're "unrealistically optimistic."

Until now, we have lacked a serious philosophical discussion of whether and how recent behavioral findings undermine Mill’s harm principle and thus open the way toward paternalism. Sarah Conly’s illuminating book Against Autonomy provides such a discussion....

To Mill’s claim that individuals are uniquely well situated to know what is best for them, Conly objects that Mill failed to make a critical distinction between means and ends. True, people may know what their ends are, but sometimes they go wrong when they choose how to get them....

If the benefits justify the costs, she is willing to eliminate freedom of choice, not to prevent people from obtaining their own goals but to ensure that they do so....

A natural objection is that autonomy is an end in itself and not merely a means. On this view, people should be entitled to choose as they like, even if they end up choosing poorly. In a free society, people must be allowed to make their own mistakes, and to the extent possible learn from them, rather than facing correction and punishment from bureaucratic meddlers. Conly responds that when government makes (some) decisions for us, we gain not only in personal welfare but also in autonomy, if only because our time is freed up to deal with what most concerns us....

 As for Sunstein himself, he prefers a softer form of government manipulation, described in the article and in his book "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness."

"The other night, when [redacted] asked me why I switched from computer science to sociology, I said..."

"... it was because Computer Science was hard and I wasn’t really good at it, which really isn’t true at all... The real reason is because I want to save the world," wrote Aaron Swartz, quoted in a long article titled "The Idealist: Aaron Swartz wanted to save the world. Why couldn’t he save himself?"