blah_kesto

In an interview you did with Tyler Cowen back when you wrote The Life You Can Save, you were asked what you think about immigration as an anti-poverty tool. At the time you said you need to think about it more. It seems to me that allowing more immigration may be the most effective political change we can make toward reducing poverty, so I'm curious if you've spent more time on that question since then and have an opinion on it?

You receive a message from the future that says: "Market monetarism has been accepted as the mainstream approach by central banks and economists in general. It has done a better job of smoothing the business cycle. But it has its problems, and now a new approach is gaining acceptance to do even better."

If you had to guess: what problem do you think leads these future economists to decide market monetarism is insufficient, and what sort of next-step do you think is being considered?

Hi, I've really enjoyed your blog for a long time now and credit you with curing me of Krugman-fanboyism. One of the things that interests me the most about your writing is your favor for (usually) libertarian policies but justified from utilitarian values. And I was hoping you could answer a question related to that...

As a libertarian, you must believe that the average voter is not very good at choosing the policies that will have the best consequences for themselves. For instance, in this EconLog post you even said there's "no such thing as public opinion".

But when making utilitarian arguments for libertarian policies (such as school choice, minimal regulation, HSAs, etc.), you often put a lot of weight on "revealed preference", where a person's choice in a complex situation reveals what they really want, which you take to indicate that it maximizes their utility.

There seems to be a tension between these two approaches to how we should view a person's ability to make utility-maximizing choices in the face of complex problems. Do you agree? If not, how do you resolve that difference?

From his previous writings on this: it's all about consumption.

Hello! I've been a huge fan of yours since somewhat-randomly deciding to read Practical Ethics a few years ago, and that book has had a huge impact on the way I think ever since.

I was hoping you could explain what you think the right way is to think of our obligations to potentially-existing people. This is the side of utilitarianism that I find the most confusing. It seems that over time, you've transitioned from a prior-existence view to a total view. So you've previously said that, when considering an abortion at a stage when the fetus has no conscious experience, there's nothing at all to give weight to over the preferences of the mother. But if we take a total view instead of a prior-existence view, then we'd have to give weight to the entire life of that fetus that would be cancelled out. And this doesn't just make the ethics of abortion trickier, it also suggests that it's bad for people to simply not choose to have as many children as would maximize total utility.

Now that you seem to be more on board with total utilitarianism, what do you think about all that?