— On Assholes

As according to Immanuel Kant, who is closely following J.J. Rousseau, in a nice (albeit longish) passage:

The predisposition to humanity can be brought under the general title of self-love which is physical and yet compares…  that is to say, we judge ourselves happy or unhappy only by making comparison with others. …

Capitalism induces morally questionable motives–of assholery, greed, or at least self-interest.  Does that gravely imperil the larger good that capitalism aims for–things such as reducing poverty and want; enabling science, the arts, and leisure time; promoting freedom, and so on?  Faust, in Goethe’s telling, bets his soul to Mephistopheles for greater earthly powers, in hopes of never being satisfied with earthly pleasures, but then does terrible things and barely escapes damnation (because he had nevertheless “striven greatly”).  Are the moral risks we face in modern capitalist societies comparably grave?

Some possible answers (roughly stated):

And the AJ Award goes to…(envelope please)…Kanye West!  For his consistent performances, and this breath-taker:

I am God’s vessel. But my greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.

See here.  (Notice Kanye’s implicit recognition of our fundamental inability to wholly escape our own personal perspectives.  Grandiosity that beautifully, if reluctantly, acquiesces to the human condition.  So he’s not God, but merely God’s vessel.)

A stern verdict by Skidelsky&Skidelsky after a long and measured argument (from p. 181 of their book, here):

Our leaders can offer no more than a continuation of economic growth for ever and ever; and this despite the plentiful evidence that the capitalist system in our part of the world is entering its degenerative phase.  The chief sign of this is the dominance of

I’m enjoying Skidelsky&Skidelsky’s defense of leisure (in contrast with both work and idleness) as the goal of advanced capitalism.  (The book is here.)  Yet I’m not sure *idleness* gets a fair shake. As George Carlin put it:

When does a kid ever get to sit in the yard with a stick anymore? You know? Just sit there with a fucking stick. Do today’s kids even know what a stick is? You sit in the yard with a fucking stick… and you dig a fucking hole. You know? And you look at the hole, and you look at the stick…

Why Hobbes and Rousseau justify tax hikes: If assholes are motivated largely by status comparisons, you can raise their taxes without discouraging work or investment. (You can be richer than your neighbor on the new, lower playing field.)  But the point may hold for (most) everyone: if people are generally motivated by “vaine glory” (Hobbes) or by “amour propre” (Rousseau), then tax increases will reduce deficits without hurting overall productivity.

Has economic theory ever provided a shred of evidence (i.e., a study, not just a high-theory conjecture, based on questionable views about rationality) that status preferences are unreliable motivators, or less effective than preferences for absolute magnitudes?  Nope.  And there’s lots of social science to the contrary.

It is often argued that status competition will drive growth even among rich people who have ever-less to gain from working more (for the rich, as one elite put it, “money is just a way of keeping score”).  The neglected point is that this also holds in reverse: status competition for relative rewards can equally drive growth when absolute rewards are reduced.  Which may explain why the past three US tax hikes coincided with an increase in growth.

By the way, if you go with Hobbes’s dark view that people have a natural and insatiable desire for domination, then tax hikes can be very steep without curbing effort.  Perhaps we can’t hike taxes quite as steeply if you go with Rousseau’s view that concerns for relative standing can be substantially assuaged when people are publicly recognized as equals.  But the hikes can still be pretty steep, since we surely lack the necessary ethos of equality.