Gary Jason

In this essay, I want to explore one of the most ironic episodes in the history of propaganda, the attempt by various federal agencies to moderate American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda films. My texts will be four films, two produced by the military, and two by Hollywood: December 7th (1943), directed by Gregg Toland and revised by John Ford; Air Force (1943), directed Howard Hawks; Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), directed by Frank Capra; and Betrayal for the East (1945), directed by William Berke. As all of these films are readily available on YouTube, I will be brief in my description of them. Instead, I will focus on how they served to intensify racial hatred of Japanese in general and Japanese-Americans in particular, and how the federal government tried to control that propaganda—but was limited by its own policies regarding Japanese-Americans.

If we accept that purpose is of prime importance in the definition of "propaganda," then it is worth asking whose purpose is important, and, by extension, who the propagandist really is-the technician or his political master? Is the propagandist the originator of the idea or the man who puts the idea into practical effect?

In this essay, I review the movie Good. Good tells the story of the moral corruption of its protagonist, a writer, who is seduced by blandishments and material rewards given to him by the Nazi regime. It is a nice illustration of corruption—the degradation of character wrought by the desire for wealth and fame—what Aristotle would call “pleonexia.

It is amazing that virtually all logic texts ignore computer applications of FOL (first order logic). It is amazing, given the historic linkage between FOL and computer science, and given the continuing importance of mathematical logic in AI and other areas of Computer Science. Of course, there is BERTIE (and its descendants), a large CAI (computer assisted instruction) logic-proof construction software package that some universities have installed on their mainframes. But as yet the computer revolution has not greatly affected the teaching of logic, nor is it in evidence in most logic texts. Messrs. Schagrin, Dipert and Rapaport have sought to correct things with their recent book Logic: A Computer Approach. They attempt to teach the basics of symbolic logic (i.e., sentential and quantificational calculus) by discussing algorithms to carry out various logical tasks (checking well-formedness, generating truth tables, checking natural deduction derivations, etc.). Most of those algorithms are standard in the literature, but it is very nice to see them drawn together in one text. The authors have given us a text with a number of merits. The book is succinct, with good discussions of the history of attempts to mechanize reasoning, of Wang's algorithm, and sub-proof construction (pp. 168ff.). The exercises are numerous and good, as are the suggestions for implementing the various algorithms. Moreover, the appendices (one on switching theory, the other on Turing machines) are very appropriate. However, the drawbacks of this text are numerous, at least from the perspective of the person who teaches FOL with a natural language orientation. For one thing, fully parenthesized notation is used throughout the book, whereas some informal rules regarding dropping parentheses could easily have been discussed and adopted. Also, some of the book's stylistic conventions are pedagogically cumbersome. For example, boldface letters are used as variables, which are difficult to write on the blackboard and too easily confused with constants. Again, the numerals '0' and' 1' are used as truth values, which are mathematically nice but is too far divorced from natural language. More troublesome is the short shrift given to topics so important in a first course in logic. As much time is spent on flowcharts as is spent on models. Worse yet, only 50 of the 340 pages are devoted to quantificational logic! Even from the point of view of computer science this text under review has drawbacks. The algorithms are in many cases very sketchily put (see, for example, p. 139), making implementation rather difficult for the average student. The algorithms given are almost all unstructured, with GOTO's and multiple halts everywhere. Amazingly, none of the algorithms are recursive — very unfortunate, given the role of recursion in modern programming. Thus, many of the algorithms are far more complicated than they need to be. (Compare in this regard, for example, the authors' algorithm for truth value calculation with the one found in Tannenbaum and Augenstein's Data Structures Using Pascal (Prentice-Hall)). Flowcharts are used alongside PDL ("pseudo-code"), resulting in considerable wasted space. And the algorithms do not exploit the Boolean functions present in virtually all higher-level languages. Finally, in the discussion of Wang's algorithm, the concept of a stack is invoked with little discussion of what a stack is and what the stack functions (push, pop, top, etc.) are. As a matter of emphasis, I would suggest that topics such as normal forms, Polish notation and the connectives NAND, NOR, XOR be relegated to the appendices.

In this essay, I use four war movies to explore conflicts of loyalty and how they are resolved, all to illustrate W.D. Ross’ multiple rule deontologism. The films are all fine WWII movies: The Enemy Below; Decision Before Dawn; John Rabe; and The Bridge on the River Kwai. In my analysis of each, I show how the protagonists face conflicts of their loyalty to themselves, their countrymen, their friends, and humanity in general, and resolve them in the face of changing factual backgrounds

This essay is my critical review of Al Gini and Alexei Marcoux’s fine text, The Ethics of Business. Unlike most business ethics texts, Gini/Marcoux recognize that most businesses are small, and that business is not inherently immoral and always in need of reform. And they put their focus on using ethical theory to find action-guiding principles to help guide business behavior. Moreover, they adopt the Schumpeterian view that business is an entrepreneurial activity—one that not merely executes transactions, but seeks them out. I critically probe a number of issues with their book such as their reliance upon virtue ethics as their main ethical theory, and their view that trust plays an overwhelming role in business

This essay is my review of Olaf Gersemann’s book, Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality. Gersemann was a reporter for Germany’s largest business weekly magazine, and he came to America to write an expose of the weakness of the American economy. What he found instead—and argued in detail—is that the American economy was robust, for better off than commonly believed in Europe. I finish the review by pointing out some things he overlooked, such as the fact that the U.S. has paid and continues to pay disproportionately more for joint American/European defense, and that no European nation has allowed in the vast number of poor immigrants that America has

Happiness has been a topic of philosophic discussion since ancient Greece. But more recently, it attracted the attention of behavioral and social scientists. Over the last three decades in particular, there has been an explosion of research on happiness—how to measure it and what relationship it has to national wealth and social policy. Indeed, nearly 4,400 articles on this topic were published in the year 2000 alone. Economists Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod have written a concise and trenchant critique of " happiness economics " as a reliable tool for making policy decisions. They note that strong policy prescriptions are being drawn from the data on happiness. The prime example is one that goes back to the early literature. The happiness data seem to show that over the last several decades, the level of happiness in the developed world has remained constant, while real per capita incomes doubled. This is often referred to as " the Easterlin paradox, " since R. O. Easterlin was the first to provide data that past a certain point, increasing wealth doesn't increase happiness. A number of researchers have explained this paradox by saying that happiness is determined by a person's relative as opposed to absolute level of income. The conclusion all too cheerfully drawn by those of statist inclination is that steep progressive taxation is needed to diminish relative income differences and increase people's happiness. This conclusion also helps justify high levels of state economic intervention. A number of economic studies have shown that high levels of state control lower economic growth rates—but if economic growth doesn't increase happiness, the objection loses much of its force. Johns and Ormerod, however, explore a number of criticisms of this line happiness research and its use to support redistributionist policies. First, they note that while rising GDP doesn't correlate with rising levels of happiness, there are many other relevant factors it doesn't correlate with as well. For example, they point out that in the U.K., during a period when government spending increased by 50%, happiness remained constant. But none of the statist policy wonks drew the conclusion that big government is irrelevant to happiness. More sharply, in the U.S., during a period in which violent crime nearly doubled, then dropped to its earlier level, the happiness level remained constant. During the same period, life expectancy increased, and gender inequality of income decreased, again, while happiness remained constant. It is counter-intuitive (to say the least) to conclude that decreasing crime, increasing longevity and increasing gender equality have no impact on happiness. Moreover, the authors point out, there is no significant correlation between the level of income disparity in a country and the happiness level. A second critique the authors explore is of the idea of replacing the standard measure of economic success as GNP as a policy-making tool by a happiness-based metric, perhaps " Gross National Happiness. " The authors review the history of alternative measures of economic health, such as " the Measure of Economic Welfare " and " the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, " and show that such measures tend to be very subjective and often involve highly dubious empirical assumptions. They note that Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, himself a major player in the happiness research domain, has expressed doubt on its use in policy-making.1 A third area of critique Johns and Ormerod investigate is of the suggestion that some happiness metric would help us better measure welfare than material measures such as GNP. The idea here starts with the obvious fact that certain goods are outside market pricing. Public goods, such as a healthy ecosystem, come to mind here—it is clear that green open spaces are important to human flourishing and happiness, but are not given a price by the free market. Of 1

This essay is my review of economist Mark Skousen’s book, The Big Three in Economics. In it, he discusses the economic work of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. He gives even-handed treatments of the major contributions of each, for example, Smith’s reputation refutation of mercantilist policies and Smith’s crucial insight into the role that division of labor plays in economic growth. My only complaint is that Skousen doesn’t adequately explain his choice of Marx as a great economist. What enduring contributions did he make to the field? Why name him rather than (say) David Ricardo

The last decade has seen a healthy debate regarding the nature of fallacies. The "standard textbook account" has been criticised extensively, and new theoretical approaches have been tried, centering around the formal theory of dialogues. The debate has taken on new importance since the recent widespread adoption of "critical thinking" requirements at many colleges. One aspect of the standard textbook account that has drawn considerable criticism is the claim that fallacies are "commonly made" errors in reasoning. Such a claim has struck some scholars as an exaggeration, or as perhaps merely a motivational remark to induce the student to study harder. Finocchiaro has put this criticism with special sharpness:

In this essay, I explore a documentary about the curious case of Charlie and his Orchestra. While swing music was outlawed in Nazi Germany as “degenerate,” the Nazi regime created a radio program called “Charlie and his Orchestra” for foreign consumption. The propaganda lay in the changes to the original lyrics of the songs played, making them convey the anti-Semitic and other themes of the Nazi ideology. The review discusses just how good the musicians were, and how popular the program was

This essay is my review of Colleen Dyble’s book, Taming Leviathan: Waging a War of Ideas around the World. Dyble is affiliated with the legendary classical liberal British think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs. Her anthology is a collection of essays by people around the world who have been involved with similar free-market think tanks in countries with historically statist economic systems. These writers include Greg Lindsay, founder of the Center for Independent Studies in Australia; Margaret Tse, of the Instituto Liberdade in Brazil; Michael Walker, co-founder of the Fraser Institute in Canada; Cristian Larroulet, of Libertad y Desarrollo in Chile; Giancarlo Ibarguen, of the Center for Economic and Social Studies in Guatemala (which actually founded a free-market-oriented university); Parth Shah, founder of the Center for Civil Society in India; Daniel Doron, co-founder of the Israeli Center for Social and Economic Progress; Alberto Mingardi, of the Instituto Bruno Leoni in Italy; Masaru Uchigama, founder of the Japanese for Tax Reform; Elena Leontjeva, co-founder of the Lithuanian Free Market Institute; Alexander Magno, co-founder of the Foundation for Economic Freedom in the Philippines; and last, Leon Louw, of the Free Market Foundation of South Africa. I then discuss seven important reasons why classical liberal think tanks are so important in modern societies