Causation: A Political Imposition

As I admitted two days ago, during my vacation I did some trawling in MEN'S JOURNAL for blog topics. This will be my second and last entry drawing upon that source.

There's a fascinating though brief item about contemporary changes in van design. For purposes of historical perspective, the author [Jamie Lincoln Kitman, portrayed above] mentions an action of President Johnson in 1963. The new President, unhappy that France and Germany had imposed duties on US poultry exports, retaliated with a tariff of his own, one that amounted to a 25% increase in the price of imported vans. Kitman refers to this act of retaliation as the "chicken tax."

What Kitman didn't say was whether this was something Johnson did by slipping a relevant amendment into some omnibus tax bill that then became law, or whether it was something accomplished by executive order (pursuant to some earlier mandate) or ... what. He writes as if Jonson unilaterally decreed the chicken tax, which leaves me a bit puzzled, though it isn't the sort of thing that would cause me to cross the road for an answer. (Get it?)

Anyway, let's continue with Kitman's story. he believes that the chicken tax killed US vans, that is, it is an industry that has only quite recently resurrected itself.

"American carmakers sensed an opportunity to coast, and they took it, denying American consumers the latest van technology for more than a quarter of a century. Where an ordinary car or a minivan (which are based on passenger cars) went four or five years between redesigns, some full-sized American vans went essentially unchanged for 30 years. Old-fashioned body-on-a-frame construction, crude suspensions, lousy fuel economy -- if it's what they did in 1975, it's pretty much what they did in 2005."

Now, that at first seemed a wonderful microcosmic confirmation of how I see the world. Government action on some unrelated issue (protecting chicken exports) produces unintended but quite negative consequences of a godawful sort for a long period. Insert libertarian or anarcho-capitalist sermonizing for yourself here. I don't know anything about Kitman's politics. He's an automotive journalist, a blogger for Car Talk among much else. Even better -- a neutral source confirming my political prejudices with the facts from his field of expertise.

But then I started thinking about the time line. Kitman is saying that an action in 1963 had certain consequences in the period 1975-2005. In another place in the piece he describes the early 70s as the "heyday" of the US manufactured van, putting them at the height that made such coasting possible. But what was going on in the model years from 1964 to 1974? There was already a chicken tax, the foreign competition was absent but ... things kept getting better for awhile before they started getting worse.

Something about this cause-effect claim seems off. Was there a progressive momentum in the design world that continued for a decade until companies decided they could coast?

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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