Yikes! I agree with Will Wilkinson about something related to wealth and income inequality. Namely, contra Reihan it depends a great deal as to what to make of Alan Reynolds’ argument that we’ve been mis-measuring inequality by using flawed tax return data. I’m sort of actually not sure why Will (or, for that matter, Reynolds) thinks it matters whether or not our data is flawed, since I think they’re both libertarians who don’t think inequality is, normatively speaking, a problem. But those of us who do think it’s a problem normatively are obviously going to need to know how big a problem it is empirically.

I’m slightly unclear based on the op-ed exactly what Reynolds thinks the truth is once we correct for the flaws in the income tax data. Insofar as the appearance of rapid inequality growth over the past twenty years is incorrect because there turns out to have been more inequality than we previously thought during the fifteen years before that then I’m not going to take a huge amount of comfort from Reynolds’ revisionism but we’ll certainly have to change our thinking about trends and appropriate policy interventions. If, by contrast, there’s actually less inequality than we’d believed, other things might follow. What’s more, if recent trends have been small (which I think is what Reynolds thinks) then the direction of the trend-line still strikes me as important.

Which is just to say that this seems like an important project and I’ll be eager to read the lengthier, non-op-ed form of his argument along with, one hopes, commentary on it from people better-equipped than I to evaluate the work.

K-Drum writes: “Conservatives often accuse liberals of elevating negotiation into an end in itself. It’s a fatuous charge, but its mirror image isn’t: as a matter of principle, contemporary conservatives really do seem to have broadly rejected even the idea of negotiating with our enemies.”

True, and yet I’d press further. Conservatives combine this with an oddly expansive view of who “our enemies” are. Iran is plausibly characterized as an enemy who liberals think we should negotiate with. Our lack of diplomatic relations dates back to the hostage crisis in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic Revolution, and the Revolution was loaded with anti-American rhetoric and ideology from the get-go. It’s a bona fide enemy, and we should negotiate with them.

But in what sense is Syria “our enemy” except in the sense that the Bush administration won’t conduct diplomacy with the Syrian government? Syria isn’t pushing for regime change in the United States. Syria isn’t trying to conquer Mexico as part of a first step to restructure the politics of North America. Syria was part of our coalition during the first Gulf War. Throughout the Clinton administration there were frequent US-Syrian diplomatic talks running parallel to US-Israeli diplomatic talks aimed (unsuccessfully) at resolving the dispute over the Golan Heights and normalizing relations between Syria and Israel. After Operation Grapes of Wrath the US and Syria worked together on the Israel-Lebanon Monitoring Agreement. After 9/11, Syria offered intelligence cooperation against al-Qaeda.

Syria’s not an ally of the United States. But it’s not our enemy in any meaningful sense. It’s just a country the administration more-or-less severed diplomacy with unilaterally for no real reason.

Ezra Klein worries that the dawn of robots will lead to mass unemployment at some point in the future. This theory has a long and distinguished history in our literature. Indeed, this is precisely what occurs in Karel Capek’s R.U.R., the play that gives us the word “robot.” Tim Lee retorts that this is demagoguery: “The more wealth there is in the world, the easier it will be for you to get some of it. Robots would only accelerate the accumulation of wealth, thereby increasing the amount of money a worker is likely to be able to get for a given unit of his labor. True, his wages might shrink relative to the overall economy, but he’ll only get more productive as technology improves, so in absolute terms his wages will only go up.”

I think it’s a little more complicated than that. As in Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel the key issue in the case of a vast robot-driven increase in the labor supply is the availability and distribution of limited capital resources like land. On the Spacer worlds where you have a relatively egalitarian distribution of capital, you get a kind of utopian existence. On Earth, resource constraints have led to the creation of a kind of socialist economy based on the world government’s control of the food supply and the inordinate cost of housing. That seems unlikely for various reasons, so I’m not too worried.

The real risk here is that if you saw very rapid advances in robotics, the dislocations thereby caused could be extremely destabilizing, leading to anti-robot rioting and all manner of trouble that would ultimately stifle growth.