Commentary

0:00I am not going to give equal time to all of these papers since Dr. Edelstein is going to be happy no matter how much time I spend talking about his paper. I will shortchange him slightly. I would ask that we consider carefully what we mean by irrationality. It's a book that I found interesting. I don't think that I agree with all of it, but it was interesting, nonetheless, and thought-provoking. A book called Passions Within Reason by Robert Frank, which attempted to come up with a rationale for what seems like irrational behavior.

0:45I, as I say, I don't agree with much of it, but I did find it thought-provoking and helps, It may help us to understand what we do mean by irrationality. There are certain behaviors which may be dysfunctional, which are quite rational, assuming the knowledge that we have. So there can be poorly informed but rational behavior that looks dysfunctional. Dr. Hamilton's talk was also interesting. I remember the movie very well from seeing it shortly after it came out on DVD. I find it encouraging that socialism, at least the outright socialism, is downplayed in the film even if the capitalist there has clear moral failings and seems to be increasingly corrupted over time, eventually toward the end of the film, engaging in a murder.

1:44But it does seem encouraging, at least because apparently Hollywood feels that the outright socialism of the book might not play very well to the American public. I also found the paper by Dr. Guyott is interesting. In an economy which is searching for superstars, I believe he was saying that women would be at a disadvantage economically, the paper I want to recall to mine a recent discussion at my college over the possibility of a disparity in pay between females and males in the faculty.

2:34The discovery was, after adjusting for things like seniority and discipline, that females were slightly over-compensated, At which point, I think a number of the women on the faculty decided to offer the males on the faculty a cup of coffee in compensation for the slight disparity. Just as a personal anecdote as well, our department, the economics department at Wofford, gives a departmental award each year. and from my recollection over the last 30 or 40 years that the award has been offered about two-thirds of the recipients at least have been female and it seems more than that in recent years after out of the last 10 years I think we may have had two or three male recipients of that award I'd also be interested to know how we determine performance graduation rates and and awards are afflicted by a number of different factors, not only actual ability.

3:52There are a number of other things, political. I wanted to spend a little more time on Mr. Mariano's paper. The free market is not a product to be sold. I think that's the core of my difficulty with his paper. One may sell the ideas as bound up in textbooks or in classes, but we can't sell something that cannot be possessed. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the paper here, but furthermore, what will people give in exchange for this product? Let's not confuse the exchange of products in a market with the attempt to persuade someone of a new way of thinking about things.

4:40How can one make the free market tangible? Markets are necessarily intangible. We might put a seal on a product that says it's free market friendly. Markets are a set of actions, not tangible material goods or services. What I believe Mr. Mariano wants to do is to get people to accept market ideas in the same way that they have accepted the sustainability or green ideas. is, but entrepreneurs are selling in that green or sustainability movement. They are catering to the unique preferences of people who have already been persuaded of an idea. I saw recently when I was buying an airplane ticket at the website offered me an opportunity to offset my carbon footprint from my trip by paying an extra $30 or $40. I have no idea what the money was used for, would have been used for, but it is the service of assuaging a conscience that they are selling. Perhaps one day we will see people offsetting their contributions to tyranny. Maybe when they go to the courthouse to get zoning restrictions

5:51applied to their neighbor, there will be a box outside with a sign offering to offset their statism footprint with a $30 or $40 contribution to the Mises Institute. In such a case, the Institute would be providing a service of assuaging a conscience catering to the preferences of people who have been persuaded that what they are doing at the courthouse creates a cost that must be atoned for in some manner. I think the problem essentially with the Green Movement is a conscience that is badly informed I think I had more concerns with Professor Mulligan's paper than most of the others.

6:41I would find it helpful to have a more concrete definition of religious belief before moving forward in this paper. There are important religions based on essentially a worship of the state, deity of the state. We certainly see kings that have set themselves up as being a form of, some form of God. So I've got a question there about our assumptions on the definition of religion. And there's also an assumption here of the factuality of Darwinian natural selection. I realize that certain assumptions must be made in any paper and we can't expect a whole rendition of the whole Darwinian thesis.

7:35But I think the main problem here is that Professor Mulligan is trying to show a logical path from the germ of Darwinian natural selection He says that even false beliefs, and perhaps even especially false beliefs, might be useful in promoting this low rate of time preference. Now, the problem I see here is that this is not sufficient to reject the alternative that beneficial social orderings are the result of adherence to true religious beliefs. In other words, there is more than one explanation for the survival-enhancing properties of social orders.

8:27Pointing out an evolutionary benefit from religion does not mean that this is the reason for the emergence of that social pattern of religion. Toward the middle of the paper, Professor Mulligan seems to say with Hoppe that time preference can be altered by property rights security or physical security or other social or institutional factors. Maybe religion, as one of those factors, does in fact produce a tendency toward lower time preference by adding a moral imperative to rules about property rights. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not murder. But this does not mean that the religion is not true.

9:14We have, I think, in this paper a hypothesis without a resolution. How do we know that it is not atheistic evolutionary theory, which is emerging as an explanatory narrative that diverges from factual reality? Could it not also meet an urgent psychological need, this evolutionary theory? It's not my intent to get into discussions of possible evolutionary disadvantages of particular religious practices. This is generally unproductive. For instance, a practice which seems to present no reproductive advantage could be argued to have some sort of psychological advantage.

10:00How do we know it has a psychological advantage? Because people do it, and we can't think of any other reason. Why do people do it? Because it presents a psychological advantage. We see a similar problem in parts of Mulligan's paper, I believe. He says some feel religion benefits a species by lowering the cognitive burden through simple, intuitive, though usually objectively false or unverifiable explanations. Others, he says, feel religion imposes a dual burden of simultaneous acceptance of two explanations, a naturalistic one and a religious one, for every event. But this added burden is beneficial because it contributes to the evolution of a more powerful brain.

10:47So if religion makes, and this is me now, not an end quote. So if religion makes thinking easier, it's evolutionarily advantageous. If religion makes thinking more difficult, it is evolutionarily advantageous. If religion emerges, it is evolutionarily advantageous that it do so. If religion declines, it is evolutionarily advantageous that it do so. How would we know if some religious practice is evolutionarily disadvantageous? It fails to survive. Why is it failed to survive? Because it is evolutionarily disadvantageous.

11:32I'm running out of time so I will only mention one of the two cases I have here for which we see a religious activity which seems to work against the perpetuation of the species. In the world, cults would be one, human sacrifice would be another. I think the matter of human sacrifice is, as Dr. Mulligan says, particularly problematic. He makes the relatively easy case for the abandonment of the practice as evolutionarily disadvantageous, but neglects the much more difficult problem of how it would emerge in the first place if it is so disadvantageous. If we resort to the idea that these kinds of practices are simply disadvantageous mutations that are quickly weeded out, like a new virus that kills its host too quickly to transfer offspring to new hosts, then we still run into several problems.

12:34One is that a religion involves a group of humans acting as individuals. Mutations of organisms can occur as a random genetic change in a single organism. Most of those mutations would cause the organism like a virus to suffer a disadvantage. A few would promote the success of the virus. To get a flawed religious practice, we would have to have a number of people simultaneously changing a group practice In this way, it's similar to one of the key problems with Darwinism, that numerous simultaneous random mutations are necessary to create a functional whole. Mulligan seems to be arguing that we can get simultaneous mutations or coordinated changes in individual belief that create a dysfunctional whole, and that the dysfunction survives for at least a while.

13:28Finally, as a side note, I did not see any mention of a book that I would think would be relevant here, and that's Robert Frank's book that I mentioned earlier, Passions Within Reason, Strategic Role of the Emotions, and I think that might help. Again, it's not something I would necessarily agree with, but it's something that I think should be considered. Thank you.