Is the damage done by ignorance of basic economics and of (classical) liberal philosophy reparable? Consider Angelina Jolie. She is now in the fashion business, which she wishes to be “sustainable,” ethical, and “circular-design.” (Whatever the latter means, I gather that it has nothing to do with body curves nor with always wearing the same clothes.) Like so many people, she seems to have bought wholesale the fashionable ideas and simili-altruistic shibboleths that run around and are typically devoid of serious economic and philosophical foundations. About her new business, she asks (“Angelina Jolie Is Rebuilding Her Life,” Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2023):
Can we avoid doing real damage—not only to the earth, but the garment workers? … Is it possible that I could go somewhere and enjoy making clothes, enjoy wearing clothes and not hurt anybody? And actually maybe treat people well?
The economic way of thinking as well as liberal philosophy give a clear answer to these questions: Yes. Two formally equal parties who voluntarily exchange something must each benefit compared to their respective pre-exchange situation; if one doesn’t, he will decline the exchange. “Formally equal” means that the parties have an equal liberty to interact with others although, of course, their circumstances may be, and in fact always are, different. Each one estimates his own benefit compared to his pre-exchange situation. The evaluation is not made by an external observer according to the latter’s preferences. Anyway, external observers typically have different views of what nirvana would require for others. Not surprisingly, it is with free exchange that ordinary people have become rich starting with the Industrial Revolution, after millennia of dire poverty. Free exchange is not a zero-sum game.
The sweatshop worker is happy to indirectly work for her. That is how he is striving to improve his own situation, instead of submitting to, and putting his faith in, exploitative governments. Destroying his liberty, dignity, and employment to please rich intellectuals in rich countries is the opposite of ethical. (See my “Defending Sweatshops,” a review of Benjamin Powell’s Out of Poverty, in Regulation, Summer 2015, pp. 66-68.)
It is sad that the ideas echoed by Jolie implicitly deny not only what is conducive to general prosperity, but also the underlying liberal ideal of equal individuals engaging in reciprocally beneficial interactions, each one according to his own evaluation. Of course, Ms. Jolie is free to help other people, and I have no reason to doubt that she is a caring, benevolent person. But she would quite probably be more efficient by trading with her business partners on a business basis (as she has done in her movie career), making as much honest profit as she can, and devoting part of her profits to her chosen charitable endeavors.
She is apparently not a very political person. One of her remarks suggests that she has some good instincts, although it could also reflect the common illusion that collective choices—some people’s choices that are coercively imposed on others—are compatible with individualism and liberty: “I love individuality and I love freedom,” she said.
READER COMMENTS
Roger McKinney
Dec 6 2023 at 10:37am
She is driven by emotions. Hers is an attitude problem, not a knowledge problem. Attitudes are extremely difficult to change.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 6 2023 at 10:59am
Roger: Without minimizing the import of your comment, part of my claim is that self-defeating emotions and attitudes often come from mistaken, unexamined ideas.
Roger McKinney
Dec 6 2023 at 8:16pm
It could be an information issue. But it is usually something like envy. Young people are more open minded, but adults tend to be impervious to facts. That’s why brilliant writers since Bastiat have had little impact.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 6 2023 at 10:37pm
Roger: I agree that the older a person is, the less likely it is that new arguments can change his or her opinion.
Roger McKinney
Dec 7 2023 at 9:59am
Keep in mind that’s it’s common knowledge in public relations that most people choose what is true for emotional reasons, what they want to be true, then rationalize it. Facts won’t change their minds. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind supports that.
PR research also tells us that such attitudes are extremely difficult to change. It takes a major crisis or three years of counseling to change, which is why PR professionals avoid it.
Libertarians want to change people’s minds on the main issues. But we need to pay more attention to PR research, the field dedicated to changing people’s minds.
Craig
Dec 6 2023 at 1:12pm
“She is driven by emotions. ”
I just got done reading, “How Not To Be A Dad” – by Jon Voigt.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 6 2023 at 3:46pm
Craig: What’s the message of the book?
Craig
Dec 6 2023 at 5:18pm
I suppose the message would be why sacrifice and be a dad when you can live the typical bon vivant lifestyle?
Truth
Dec 6 2023 at 12:40pm
I would like to remind the author of the piece that one of Jolie’s favorite authors, of whom she would gladly play one of the iconic characters, Dagny Taggart, is a certain Ayn Rand. I don’t know why, but it clashes so much with what was stated about Angelina in the article…
Truth
Dec 6 2023 at 1:11pm
Non vedo più il mio commento su Angelina e la sua ammirazione per Ayn Rand, che sembra stonare con i toni dell’articolo e il giudizio sulla Jolie. Che strano. Da un articolo di qualche anno fa:
Jolie has long been an admirer of Rand, and the character of Taggart would seem to have a lot in common with Jolie’s image as a defier of conventions. Taggart is a strong character who is as good as a man. It is a great role for a Hollywood actress,’ said Kelley. Movie insiders say it was Jolie who sought out the film’s backers. ‘She has the book. It is not a passing thing for her. She has a real interest in Rand and her way of thinking,’ said one film executive .
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 6 2023 at 3:45pm
Truth: Interesting. Can you provide the link to the article you are quoting? Do you know other articles (with links) on this topic? Why didn’t she get or accept the role?
Craig
Dec 6 2023 at 6:47pm
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jan/28/books.film
Looks like a quote from the Guardian
Truth
Dec 6 2023 at 3:54pm
Link:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2007/jan/28/books.film
Truth
Dec 6 2023 at 3:58pm
Another one:
https://www.mtv.com/news/k8zkl7/angelina-jolie-calls-atlas-shrugged-once-in-a-lifetime-film
David Seltzer
Dec 6 2023 at 4:04pm
Pierre said, “Like so many people, she seems to have bought wholesale the fashionable ideas and simili-altruistic shibboleths that run around and are typically devoid of serious economic and philosophical foundations.” Curiosity and skepticism, meaning doubt towards knowledge claims, are necessary but not sufficient conditions for critical thinking and scientific inquiry.
It takes years of training and ongoing effort to achieve some degree of competence if one is willing to make the effort. As Miss Jolie’s instincts are noble, it would be rewarding if she grounded herself in the serious study of economics and critical reasoning.
Truth
Dec 6 2023 at 4:23pm
“As Miss Jolie’s instincts are noble, it would be rewarding if she grounded herself in the serious study of economics and critical reasoning.”
She could ask for help at the London School of Economics where, in May 2016, she was appointed a visiting professor to contribute to a postgraduate degree program at the university’s Centre on Women, Peace and Security.
David Seltzer
Dec 6 2023 at 4:55pm
Truth/Angelina. I meant no disrespect. Your appointment to LSE is commendable. May I assume your pedagogy emphasized critical reasoning and Ayn Rand’s philosophy?
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 6 2023 at 8:52pm
Truth: I fear your citations are not very informative: MTV is entertainment and the Guardian/Observer‘s article does not tell us anything about Agelina Jolie’s opinions, except for the journalist’s affirmation that she “has long been an admirer of Rand.” The quotations at the end of the piece seem to be all from Ayn Rand; “her own words” are Rand’s, not Jolie’s. Moreover, as you know, the project of her starring in Atlas Shrugged never materialized, if it was anything else than a rumor. I hope you are right and that she is a closet libertarian, but I will trust what she said to the Wall Street Journal until proof of the contrary.
Truth
Dec 7 2023 at 2:27am
So you think that a character like Dagny Taggart, intelligent, courageous, even a pilot, couldn’t have interested Jolie? Do you think this is a fake news? When I read Atlas Shrugged I saw Angelina on every page.
Jose Pablo
Dec 7 2023 at 5:11pm
I see Angelina on every page of every book I read / have read.
Here she is just providing a book example of “social desirability bias”. It is pure “folklore” no real harm on that. Many well regarded economist are also victims of this illness, so there is no cure on getting more acquainted with the dismal science.
From my side I am finding myself a victim of the “halo effect” (nobody is free from our very human biases): anything that Angelina says, must, necessarily be true. I would rather doubt Hayek than Angelina.
Richard W Fulmer
Dec 6 2023 at 4:27pm
According to the Interaction Design Foundation, “circular design is the practice of creating durable, reusable, repairable and recyclable products that generate zero waste to support a circular economy” – that is, an economy which “keeps materials, products, and services in circulation for as long possible.”
While this sounds economically efficient, it probably isn’t. For example, a long-cited “market failure” is the fact that common incandescent light bulbs don’t last forever even though “forever” bulbs are technically possible to make. Decades ago, I purchased a few such bulbs and found them to be undesirable. While they were, indeed, long lasting, they were also very expensive and very dim compared to shorter-lived bulbs using the same wattage. Which is more “sustainable” – an incandescent bulb that never burns out or a shorter-lived bulb that uses less power?
As Thomas Sowell is fond of pointing out, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Saving input A may mean using more of input B. Is it efficient to save A at the expense of B, or should we use more B to save A? Without market pricing, anyone’s guess is as good as another’s.
Truth
Dec 6 2023 at 4:44pm
Oh, and you should see “First They Killed My Father”, the film written and directed by Angelina, a very powerful film about the genocide of Cambodians by the communist regime of Pol Pot. Collectivism? No, thank you.
Craig
Dec 6 2023 at 6:44pm
From a modern American point of view, the employment of children under the age of 18 to make garments is superficially unseemly. I see my babies @ 12 and surely I wouldn’t want them working in a garment factory in Midtown, right? Well, I suppose it is fortunate that I can afford their childhood. That’s the reality of the world. In many spots in the world, the labor of children is used because the labor of children is neccessary for survival.
“The sweatshop worker is happy to indirectly work for her.”
Not sure about happy but surely better off than available alternatives including, potentially, subsisitence.
Matthias
Dec 6 2023 at 7:46pm
For many teeneagers an apprenticeship would be a happier and more productive use of their time than rotting in school.
Jose Pablo
Dec 7 2023 at 7:48pm
it is fortunate that I can afford their childhood
Yes, it is, among many other reasons because nobody closed down or boycotted (as Angelina seems to pretend), the many sweatshops that populated the garment district in New York (an many other cities around the country) in the late XIX and early XX centuries
https://blogs.shu.edu/nyc-history/2020/04/26/garment-district-3/
And Mathias is right, equaling “school” and “happiness” for children (and even more so for teenagers, particularly boys) can only be understood as a bad definition of “happiness” (which never should be understood as “to be retained in a room and bored to death by adults”)
Try to retain these teenagers in their “happy place” after the school, and see what happens. It is impressive how fast kids can run from “happiness”!
Someday into the future, sending kids to school will be considered a unbelievably degrading form of parental cruelty.
Craig
Dec 10 2023 at 12:15pm
“Try to retain these teenagers in their “happy place” after the school, and see what happens. It is impressive how fast kids can run from “happiness”!”
My children are now tweens about to become teenagers and they have undergone the transition from a more parent-focused existence to a friend-centric existence and I must say that from my point of view, it hurts a bit, it stings. I understand it, but it DOES sting. So instead of a ‘guy’s night out’ the ‘guy’s night out’ was more like a dad to dad to dad dinner discussion. My neighbor said something which I really took to heart which was, paraphrasing, that this is nature’s way to make the children move on. No matter how hard I work, no matter how well I provide as a dad, no matter how comfortable I am capable of making their circumstances, nature compels them to leave and to do this nature makes whatever their childhood circumstances are insufficient for their future happiness.
“Someday into the future, sending kids to school will be considered a unbelievably degrading form of parental cruelty.”
Don’t get me wrong, if you are in the home-school camp, I’m not opposed to home-schooling at all.
Jose Pablo
Dec 10 2023 at 8:22pm
it DOES sting
Sure it DOES! And “sting” is an understatement!
And I am not in the home-schooling camp. I don’t think it is more fun for the kids and sure is not more fun for me (although Caplan has some interesting insights on this topic).
I just think / suspect that school or home schooling is not the most “natural” / “fun” / “effective” way of learning whatever humans need to learn (which sure is not what they are learning in the school).
I learnt nothing/ very little useful in my 20 years of formal education. All my much useful (and fun and rewarded) learning has been “by doing”. Formal schooling was an extremely ineffective way of wasting my time (a lot of my time!)
2.- After more than 15 years and lots and lots of hours in the classroom, most young adults have no clue on how to open a bank account, understand a French amortization, understand a lease contract, get car insurance, built credit scoring, organize their personal finance … so, the basic things they do need. And, even worse, they will soon realize that what they did learn is mostly irrelevant for their internships / first jobs.
And they have already forgotten most of the things they worked so hard to learn about trigonometry, the chlorophyll function or when a relation between two variables is (or isn’t) a function.
At some point it will be crystal clear, that this school system is (mostly) about:
a) providing something to do to otherwise unemployable primary (and secondary) schoolteachers (I wonder what an alternative employment can my kids’ “Critical Thinking” teacher get)
b) providing our politicians with a socially acceptable excuse to extract taxes and pretend that they are doing something useful with them
c) babysitting the kids while the parents work
Somebody will then come up with a most sensible, fun, enjoyable and effective way of training our kids for (real) life.
Sending kids to school (or home schooling them) the way we do it now, will be then considered a waste of their time and a form of cruelty.
Mactoul
Dec 6 2023 at 8:49pm
It is no use railing against the fundamental political facts. Like egalitarians who rail against unequal distribution of wealth, you rail against unequal distribution of power.
This inequality in power is inevitable and as inevitable a feature of complex organizations as spontaneous order.
Men differ in their drive to power, their strength of will and which ultimately results in some being the rulers and the rest being the ruled.
This fundamental fact is discussed by Mosca, Sorel, Pareto etc
Jose Pablo
Dec 7 2023 at 7:59pm
This inequality in power is inevitable
This inequality is the product of our “inner gorillas” and it is as “evitable” as harassing and abusing the females or killing other humans in fights for food, territory or mating rights.
Some of us do evolve.
unequal distribution of wealth
This inequality, on the other hand, is of a completely different nature. It is the product of our creativity and imagination (not of our despicable inner animal). Wealth can not be unequally distributed among gorillas (“power” can) because they lack the imagination and ingenuity to create wealth in the first place.
Men differ in their drive to power, their strength of will and which ultimately results in some being the rulers and the rest being the ruled.
Yes, and as soon as a the “drive to power” of a “ruler to be” is detected he (it is almost always a “he”) should be put behind bars and not allowed to see the light of the sun never again. He is just a extremely dangerous not properly evolved gorilla!
Craig
Dec 7 2023 at 11:34pm
“It is the product of our creativity and imagination”
It is….
(not of our despicable inner animal).
If it weren’t for women, I’d be out in a studio co-op apartment out in Long Island City somewhere with a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling.
Joe Rogan recounted a story once of how a person had a chimp for a pet but then brought the chimp to live with other chimps and bringing the one chimp a birthday cake (or bananas?) the other chimps, feeling sleighted and treated unequally apparently attacked the man and ripped his face to pieces.
Sounds awful, right? Indeed, animalist. Let me tell you a little secret about humans though, we’re worse.
There are WAY too many young hot women with old ugly rich men for me to completely discount what you’re referring to as the ‘despicable inner animal’
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 8 2023 at 12:36am
Craig: Your last paragraph reflects your usual humor?
Craig
Dec 8 2023 at 1:03pm
Happy Friday! Hopefully I am good for a chuckle now and then, right?
Mactoul
Dec 8 2023 at 5:10am
It is the drive to power that produces public-spirited men
Even in a neighborhood or a condominium there are people that care about the common aspects. These people are essential.
I have heard that the ancient Greeks used to call idiots entirely private men, who were entirely unconcerned about public affairs,
Jose Pablo
Dec 9 2023 at 2:08am
It is the drive to power that produces public-spirited men
It is the drive to power that produces tyrants, and holocausts, and wars, and the killing of dissidents by the hundreds of thousands.
It is the drive to power that produces people telling you how many children you are allowed to have, what drugs you are allowed to use, what ideas you are allowed to think.
There is no such a thing as “public-spirited” men. That’s just a clumsy excuse. There are only men whose ego is boosted by controlling others. We don’t need them. They are useless and extremely dangerous.
Jose Pablo
Dec 9 2023 at 3:08pm
Even in a neighborhood or a condominium there are people that care about the common
And, by the way, this is, indeed, a very good example of what “public-spirited men” with drive to power are really after: egotism, the power to retaliate and corrupt personal enrichment.
https://kbindependent.org/2023/06/02/podcast-expert-says-condo-retaliation-against-residents-is-common/
An extract:
The story is 100% incontrovertible truth that once you become that unit owner that’s requesting and questioning what the operation is and what’s happening, you are going to be a target,” Goldman said. “And the incumbent board and council will use the full brunt and the force of their authority to make sure that happens.”
https://www.miamihomegoals.com/blog/hoa-corruption-changes-florida-law
in recent years, allegations of fraud and corruption among HOA board members have become increasingly prevalent, prompting state lawmakers to take action.
So great the “public-spirited pantomime”, right?
Mactoul
Dec 8 2023 at 5:17am
And who is going to deal with a would-be ruler?
Another man with a well-developed drive to power.
By the way, Wrangham does discuss this as a part of human self-domestication and concomitant decrease in violence from the ape past. Groups of beta males club up and eliminate any alpha male.
Jose Pablo
Dec 9 2023 at 1:30am
And who is going to deal with a would-be ruler?
They will turn themselves in, so ashamed of their low instincts.
When we, finally, properly evolve, feeling the urge to tell other people what to do (instead of devoting your time to be the best you you can be) will, finally, be widely recognized as the most despicable vice.
Serial killers will avoid being seen hanging out with would-be rulers.
Truth
Dec 9 2023 at 1:23pm
“She is apparently not a very political person.”
In 2007 She has been elected a member of an exclusive Washington foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations.
Pierre Lemieux
Dec 9 2023 at 5:15pm
Truth: I know little about the CFR, except that it is generally seen (and excoriated by conservatives) as a Democratic-leaning think tank. At any rate, it is certainly not Galt’s Gulch. I understand that anybody, corporation or individual, who is not too far from the ideological mainstream, can become a member of the CFR, by paying membership dues. Looking at the Board of Directors and at the Global Board of Advisors (on which Angelina Jolie isn’t), I don’t find anyone who has made a name (even a small name) in the defense of the free society. So if to be a member of the CFR made somebody a political person, it would be a very mainstream (soft-tyranny) political person.
Note that I don’t doubt that Ms. Jolie is an interesting person. But what I know of her (mainly the WSJ story that inspired my post) suggests that she has no idea what individual liberty is.
Truth
Dec 9 2023 at 6:39pm
In 22 years of missions all over the world, believe me, Prof. Pierre Lemieux, Angelina Jolie knows much more about the value of freedom than me, than you, and all those who have spoken so far.
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