Book Reviews

Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism
by Joseph Heath
 
I'm reading this because I really, really enjoyed Heath's book The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close to Utopia As It Gets


So far 'Filthy Lucre' is making sense but the examples he uses are MUCH too elaborate; One becomes so bogged down in the prose that it takes a four-wheel drive and a winch to get you past some of the pages.

I'll send up a flare when I'm done.

  ! !!^^^^^  fwsssssshhhh ** *  * .... .. .  .
 
(it's a 'flare' noise)

So it turns out that 'hyperbolic discounting' is not actually an annoying debate technique but rather a description of the universal human tendency to over-weight near term costs and to over-discount long term ones.

We already know this about ourselves. We don't stick to our own virtuous long term plans; Yeah, we're better at it as older adults than we were as teenagers, but we 'sign up to show up' and lock ourselves in to accountability because we know; We know the power of appetite; We know that the horizon can seem infinitely far away.

Heath writes:
"A proper understanding of hyperbolic discounting [..] serves to dissolve much of [the] old-fashioned antagonism between liberty and paternalism. Many social policies that force people to act in their own best interests can be understood not as the high-handed intervention of the "nanny state", but rather as a self-binding strategy that individuals themselves may be perfectly happy to support."

Then he gives his usual boat load of examples and explanation, but this is the essence of chapter 11. Every chapter in this book has its own truth, bursting the fallacious bubbles of left and right alike, and every chapter has a lesson about the role of the state in structuring the institutions of civil society and keeping them flexible and responsive to changing circumstance and democratic will. But it is this the penultimate chapter that find myself quoting most often.
 
You should actually read the whole thing.
Now.
Go get it.


Ciao!