Month: February 2019

Impostor Syndrome

PNRJ education, personal , , , , ,

Feb 24 JDN 2458539

You probably have experienced Impostor Syndrome, even if you didn’t know the word for it. (Studies estimate that over 70% of the general population, and virtually 100% of graduate students, have experienced it at least once.)

Impostor Syndrome feels like this:

All your life you’ve been building up accomplishments, and people kept praising you for them, but those things were easy, or you’ve just gotten lucky so far. Everyone seems to think you are highly competent, but you know better: Now that you are faced with something that’s actually hard, you can’t do it. You’re not sure you’ll ever be able to do it. You’re scared to try because you know you’ll fail. And now you fear that at any moment, your whole house of cards is going to come crashing down, and everyone will see what a fraud and a failure you truly are.

The magnitude of that feeling varies: For most people it can be a fleeting experience, quickly overcome. But for some it is chronic, overwhelming, and debilitating.

It may surprise you that I am in the latter category. A few years ago, I went to a seminar on Impostor Syndrome, and they played a “Bingo” game where you collect spaces by exhibiting symptoms: I won.

In a group of about two dozen students who were there specifically because they were worried about Impostor Syndrome, I exhibited the most symptoms. On the Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale, I score 90%. Anything above 60% is considered diagnostic, though there is no DSM disorder specifically for Impostor Syndrome.

Another major cause of Impostor Syndrome is being an underrepresented minority. Women, people of color, and queer people are at particularly high risk. While men are less likely to experience Impostor Syndrome, we tend to experience it more intensely when we do.

Aside from being a graduate student, which is basically coextensive with Impostor Syndrome, being a writer seems to be one of the strongest predictors of Impostor Syndrome. Megan McArdle of The Atlantic theorizes that it’s because we were too good in English class, or, more precisely, that English class was much too easy for us. We came to associate our feelings of competence and accomplishment with tasks simply coming so easily we barely even had to try.

But I think there’s a bigger reason, which is that writers face rejection letters. So many rejection letters. 90% of novels are rejected at the query stage; then a further 80% are rejected at the manuscript review stage; this means that a given query letter has about a 2% chance of acceptance. This means that even if you are doing everything right and will eventually get published, you can on average expected 50 rejection letters. I collected a little over 20 and ran out of steam, my will and self-confidence utterly crushed. But statistically I should have continued for at least 30 more. In fact, it’s worse than that; you should always expect to continue 50 more, up until you finally get accepted—this is a memoryless distribution. And if always having to expect to wait for 50 more rejection letters sounds utterly soul-crushing, that’s because it is.

And that’s something fiction writing has in common with academic research. Top journals in economics have acceptance rates between 3% and 8%. I’d say this means you need to submit between 13 and 34 times to get into a top journal, but that’s nonsense; there are only 5 top journals in economics. So it’s more accurate to say that with any given paper, no matter how many times you submit, you only have about a 30% chance of getting into a top journal. After that, your submissions will necessarily not be to top journals. There are enough good second-tier journals that you can probably get into one eventually—after submitting about a dozen times. And maybe a hiring or tenure committee will care about a second-tier publication. It might count for something. But it’s those top 5 journals that really matter. If for every paper you have in JEBO or JPubE, another candidate has a paper in AER or JPE, they’re going to hire the other candidate. Your paper could use better methodology on a more important question, and be better written—but if for whatever reason AER didn’t like it, that’s what will decide the direction of your career.

If I were trying to design a system that would inflict maximal Impostor Syndrome, I’m not sure I could do much better than this. I guess I’d probably have just one top journal instead of five, and I’d make the acceptance rate 1% instead of 3%. But this whole process of high-stakes checkpoints and low chances of getting on a tenure track that will by no means guarantee actually getting tenure? That’s already quite well-optimized. It’s really a brilliant design, if that’s the objective. You select a bunch of people who have experienced nothing but high achievement their whole lives. If they ever did have low achievement, for whatever reason (could be no fault of their own, you don’t care), you’d exclude them from the start. You give them a series of intensely difficult tasks—tasks literally no one else has ever done that may not even be possible—with minimal support and utterly irrelevant and useless “training”, and evaluate them constantly at extremely high stakes. And then at the end you give them an almost negligible chance of success, and force even those who do eventually succeed to go through multiple steps of failure and rejection beforehand. You really maximize the contrast between how long a streak of uninterrupted successes they must have had in order to be selected in the first place, and how many rejections they have to go through in order to make it to the next level.

(By the way, it’s not that there isn’t enough teaching and research for all these PhD graduates; that’s what universities want you to think. It’s that universities are refusing to open up tenure-track positions and instead relying upon adjuncts and lecturers. And the obvious reason for that is to save money.)

The real question is why we let them put us through this. I’m wondering that more and more every day.

I believe in science. I believe I could make a real contribution to human knowledge—at least, I think I still believe that. But I don’t know how much longer I can stand this gauntlet of constant evaluation and rejection.

I am going through a particularly severe episode of Impostor Syndrome at the moment. I am at an impasse in my third-year research paper, which is supposed to be done by the end of the summer. My dissertation committee wants me to revise my second-year paper to submit to journals, and I just… can’t do it. I have asked for help from multiple sources, and received conflicting opinions. At this point I can’t even bring myself to work on it.

I’ve been aiming for a career as an academic research scientist for as long as I can remember, and everyone tells me that this is what I should do and where I belong—but I don’t really feel like I belong anymore. I don’t know if I have a thick enough skin to get through all these layers of evaluation and rejection. Everyone tells me I’m good at this, but I don’t feel like I am. It doesn’t come easily the way I had come to expect things to come easily. And after I’ve done the research, written the paper—the stuff that I was told was the real work—there are all these extra steps that are actually so much harder, so much more painful—submitting to journals and being rejected over, and over, and over again, practically watching the graph of my career prospects plummet before my eyes.

I think that what really triggered my Impostor Syndrome was finally encountering things I’m not actually good at. It sounds arrogant when I say it, but the truth is, I had never had anything in my entire academic experience that felt genuinely difficult. There were things that were tedious, or time-consuming; there were other barriers I had to deal with, like migraines, depression, and the influenza pandemic. But there was never any actual educational content I had difficulty absorbing and understanding. Maybe if I had, I would be more prepared for this. But of course, if that were the case, they’d never let me into grad school at all. Just to be here, I had to have an uninterrupted streak of easy success after easy success—so now that it’s finally hard, I feel completely blindsided. I’m finally genuinely challenged by something academic, and I can’t handle it. There’s math I don’t know how to do; I’ve never felt this way before.

I know that part of the problem is internal: This is my own mental illness talking. But that isn’t much comfort. Knowing that the problem is me doesn’t exactly reduce the feeling of being a fraud and a failure. And even a problem that is 100% inside my own brain isn’t necessarily a problem I can fix. (I’ve had migraines in my brain for the last 18 years; I still haven’t fixed them.)

There is so much that the academic community could do so easily to make this problem better. Stop using the top 5 journals as a metric, and just look at overall publication rates. Referee publications double-blind, so that grad students know their papers will actually be read and taken seriously, rather than thrown out as soon as the referee sees they don’t already have tenure. Or stop obsessing over publications all together, and look at the detailed content of people’s work instead of maximizing the incentive to keep putting out papers that nobody will ever actually read. Open up more tenure-track faculty positions, and stop hiring lecturers and adjuncts. If you have to save money, do it by cutting salaries for administrators and athletic coaches. And stop evaluating constantly. Get rid of qualifying exams. Get rid of advancement exams. Start from the very beginning of grad school by assigning a mentor to each student and getting directly into working on a dissertation. Don’t make the applied econometrics researchers take exams in macro theory. Don’t make the empirical macroeconomists study game theory. Focus and customize coursework specifically on what grad students will actually need for the research they want to do, and don’t use grades at all. Remove the evaluative element completely. We should feel as though we are allowed to not know things. We should feel as though we are allowed to get things wrong. You are supposed to be teaching us, and you don’t seem to know how to do that; you just evaluate us constantly and expect us to learn on our own.

But none of those changes are going to happen. Certainly not in time for me, and probably not ever, because people like me who want the system to change are precisely the people the current system seems designed to weed out. It’s the ones who make it through the gauntlet, and convince themselves that it was their own brilliance and hard work that carried them through (not luck, not being a White straight upper-middle-class cis male, not even perseverance and resilience in the face of rejection), who end up making the policies for the next generation.

Because those who should be fixing the problem refuse to do so, that leaves the rest of us. What can we do to relieve Impostor Syndrome in ourselves or those around us?

You’d be right to take any advice I give now with a grain of salt; it’s obviously not working that well on me. But maybe it can help someone else. (And again I realize that “Don’t listen to me, I have no idea what I’m talking about” is exactly what someone with Impostor Syndrome would say.)

One of the standard techniques for dealing with Impostor Syndrome is called self-compassion. The idea is to be as forgiving to yourself as you would be to someone you love. I’ve never been good at this. I always hold myself to a much higher standard than I would hold anyone else—higher even than I would allow anyone to impose on someone else. After being told my whole life how brilliant and special I am, I internalized it in perhaps the most toxic way possible: I set my bar higher. Things that other people would count as great success I count as catastrophic failure. “Good enough” is never good enough.

Another good suggestion is to change your comparison set: Don’t compare yourself just to faculty or other grad students, compare yourself to the population as a whole. Others will tell you to stop comparing altogether, but I don’t know if that’s even possible in a capitalist labor market.

I’ve also had people encourage me to focus on my core motivations, remind myself what really matters and why I want to be a scientist in the first place. But it can be hard to keep my eye on that prize. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to do the things I originally set out to do, or if it’s trying to fit other people’s molds and being rejected repeatedly over and over again for the rest of my life.

I think the best advice I’ve ever received on dealing with Impostor Syndrome was actually this: “Realize that nobody knows what they’re doing.” The people who are the very best at things… really aren’t all that good at them. If you look around carefully, the evidence of incompetence is everywhere. Look at all the books that get published that weren’t worth writing, all the songs that get recorded that weren’t worth singing. Think about the easily-broken electronic gadgets, the glitchy operating systems, the zero-day exploits, the data breaches, the traffic lights that are timed so badly they make the traffic jams worse. Remember that the leading cause of airplane crashes is pilot error, that medical mistakes are the third-leading cause of death in the United States. Think about every vending machine that ate your dollar, every time your cable went out in a storm. All those people around you who look like they are competent and successful? They aren’t. They are just as confused and ignorant and clumsy as you are. Most of them also feel like frauds, at least some of the time.

The “market for love” is a bad metaphor

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 14 JDN 2458529

Valentine’s Day was this past week, so let’s talk a bit about love.

Economists would never be accused of being excessively romantic. To most neoclassical economists, just about everything is a market transaction. Love is no exception.

There are all sorts of articles and books and an even larger number of research papers going back multiple decades and continuing all the way through until today using the metaphor of the “marriage market”.

In a few places, marriage does actually function something like a market: In China, there are places where your parents will hire brokers and matchmakers to select a spouse for you. But even this isn’t really a market for love or marriage. It’s a market for matchmaking services. The high-tech version of this is dating sites like OkCupid.
And of course sex work actually occurs on markets; there is buying and selling of services at monetary prices. There is of course a great deal worth saying on that subject, but it’s not my topic for today.

But in general, love is really nothing like a market. First of all, there is no price. This alone should be sufficient reason to say that we’re not actually dealing with a market. The whole mechanism that makes a market a market is the use of prices to achieve equilibrium between supply and demand.

A price doesn’t necessarily have to be monetary; you can barter apples for bananas, or trade in one used video game for another, and we can still legitimately call that a market transaction with a price.

But love isn’t like that either. If your relationship with someone is so transactional that you’re actually keeping a ledger of each thing they do for you and each thing you do for them so that you could compute a price for services, that isn’t love. It’s not even friendship. If you really care about someone, you set such calculations aside. You view their interests and yours as in some sense shared, aligned toward common goals. You stop thinking in terms of “me” and “you” and start thinking in terms of “us”. You don’t think “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” You think “We’re scratching each other’s backs today.”

This is of course not to say that love never involves conflict. On the contrary, love always involves conflict. Successful relationships aren’t those where conflict never happens, they are those where conflict is effectively and responsibly resolved. Your interests and your loved ones’ are never completely aligned; there will always be some residual disagreement. But the key is to realize that your interests are still mostly aligned; those small vectors of disagreement should be outweighed by the much larger vector of your relationship.

And of course, there can come a time when that is no longer the case. Obviously, there is domestic abuse, which should absolutely be a deal-breaker for anyone. But there are other reasons why you may find that a relationship ultimately isn’t working, that your interests just aren’t as aligned as you thought they were. Eventually those disagreement vectors just get too large to cancel out. This is painful, but unavoidable. But if you reach the point where you are keeping track of actions on a ledger, that relationship is already dead. Sooner or later, someone is going to have to pull the plug.

Very little of what I’ve said in the preceding paragraphs is likely to be controversial. Why, then, would economists think that it makes sense to treat love as a market?

I think this comes down to a motte and bailey doctrine. A more detailed explanation can be found at that link, but the basic idea of a motte and bailey is this: You have a core set of propositions that is highly defensible but not that interesting (the “motte”), and a broader set of propositions that are very interesting, but not as defensible (the “bailey”). The terms are related to a medieval defensive strategy, in which there was a small, heavily fortified tower called a motte, surrounded by fertile, useful land, the bailey. The bailey is where you actually want to live, but it’s hard to defend; so if the need arises, you can pull everyone back into the motte to fight off attacks. But nobody wants to live in the motte; it’s just a cramped stone tower. There’s nothing to eat or enjoy there.

The motte comprised of ideas that almost everyone agrees with. The bailey is the real point of contention, the thing you are trying to argue for—which, by construction, other people must not already agree with.

Here are some examples, which I have intentionally chosen from groups I agree with:

Feminism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “women are people”; the bailey is abortion rights, affirmative consent and equal pay legislation.

Rationalism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “rationality is good”; the bailey is atheism, transhumanism, and Bayesian statistics.

Anti-fascism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “fascists are bad”; the bailey is black bloc Antifa and punching Nazis.

Even democracy can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “people should vote for their leaders”; my personal bailey is abolition of the Electoral College, a younger voting age, and range voting.

Using a motte and bailey doctrine does not necessarily make you wrong. But it’s something to be careful about, because as a strategy it can be disingenuous. Even if you think that the propositions in the bailey all follow logically from the propositions in the motte, the people you’re talking to may not think so, and in fact you could simply be wrong. At the very least, you should be taking the time to explain how one follows from the other; and really, you should consider whether the connection is actually as tight as you thought, or if perhaps one can believe that rationality is good without being Bayesian or believe that women are people without supporting abortion rights.

I think when economists describe love or marriage as a “market”, they are applying a motte and bailey doctrine. They may actually be doing something even worse than that, by equivocating on the meaning of “market”. But even if any given economist uses the word “market” totally consistently, the fact that different economists of the same broad political alignment use the word differently adds up to a motte and bailey doctrine.

The doctrine is this: “There have always been markets.”

The motte is something like this: “Humans have always engaged in interaction for mutual benefit.”

This is undeniably true. In fact, it’s not even uninteresting. As mottes go, it’s a pretty nice one; it’s worth spending some time there. In the endless quest for an elusive “human nature”, I think you could do worse than to focus on our universal tendency to engage in interaction for mutual benefit. (Don’t other species do it too? Yes, but that’s just it—they are precisely the ones that seem most human.)

And if you want to define any mutually-beneficial interaction as a “market trade”, I guess it’s your right to do that. I think this is foolish and confusing, but legislating language has always been a fool’s errand.

But of course the more standard meaning of the word “market” implies buyers and sellers exchanging goods and services for monetary prices. You can extend it a little to include bartering, various forms of financial intermediation, and the like; but basically you’re still buying and selling.

That makes this the bailey: “Humans have always engaged in buying and selling of goods and services at prices.”

And that, dear readers, is ahistorical nonsense. We’ve only been using money for a few thousand years, and it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that we actually started getting the majority of our goods and services via market trades. Economists like to tell a story where bartering preceded the invention of money, but there’s basically no evidence of that. Bartering seems to be what people do when they know how money works but don’t have any money to work with.

Before there was money, there were fundamentally different modes of interaction: Sharing, ritual, debts of honor, common property, and, yes, love.

These were not markets. They perhaps shared some very broad features of markets—such as the interaction for mutual benefit—but they lacked the defining attributes that make a market a market.

Why is this important? Because this doctrine is used to transform more and more of our lives into actual markets, on the grounds that they were already “markets”, and we’re just using “more efficient” kinds of markets. But in fact what’s happening is we are trading one fundamental mode of human interaction for another: Where we used to rely upon norms or trust or mutual affection, we instead rely upon buying and selling at prices.

In some cases, this actually is a good thing: Markets can be very powerful, and are often our best tool when we really need something done. In particular, it’s clear at this point that norms and trust are not sufficient to protect us against climate change. All the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” PSAs in the world won’t do as much as a carbon tax. When millions of lives are at stake, we can’t trust people to do the right thing; we need to twist their arms however we can.

But markets are in some sense a brute-force last-resort solution; they commodify and alienate (Marx wasn’t wrong about that), and despite our greatly elevated standard of living, the alienation and competitive pressure of markets seem to be keeping most of us from really achieving happiness.

This is why it’s extremely dangerous to talk about a “market for love”. Love is perhaps the last bastion of our lives that has not been commodified into a true market, and if it goes, we’ll have nothing left. If sexual relationships built on mutual affection were to disappear in favor of apps that will summon a prostitute or a sex robot at the push of a button, I would count that as a great loss for human civilization. (How we should regulate prostitution or sex robots are a different question, which I said I’d leave aside for this post.) A “market for love” is in fact a world with no love at all.

Moral luck: How it matters, and how it doesn’t

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 10 JDN 2458525

The concept of moral luck is now relatively familiar to most philosophers, but I imagine most other people haven’t heard it before. It sounds like a contradiction, which is probably why it drew so much attention.

The term “moral luck” seems to have originated in essay by Thomas Nagel, but the intuition is much older, dating at least back to Greek philosophy (and really probably older than that; we just don’t have good records that far back).

The basic argument is this:

Most people would say that if you had no control over something, you can’t be held morally responsible for it. It was just luck.

But if you look closely, everything we do—including things we would conventionally regard as moral actions—depends heavily on things we don’t have control over.

Therefore, either we can be held responsible for things we have no control over, or we can’t be held responsible for anything at all!

Neither approach seems very satisfying; hence the conundrum.

For example, consider four drivers:

Anna is driving normally, and nothing of note happens.

Bob is driving recklessly, but nothing of note happens.

Carla is driving normally, but a child stumbles out into the street and she runs the child over.

Dan is driving recklessly, and a child stumbles out into the street and he runs the child over.

The presence or absence of a child in the street was not in the control of any of the four drivers. Yet I think most people would agree that Dan should be held more morally responsible than Bob, and Carla should be held more morally responsible than Anna. (Whether Bob should be held more morally responsible than Carla is not as clear.) Yet both Bob and Dan were driving recklessly, and both Anna and Carla were driving normally. The moral evaluation seems to depend upon the presence of the child, which was not under the drivers’ control.

Other philosophers have argued that the difference is an epistemic one: We know the moral character of someone who drove recklessly and ran over a child better than the moral character of someone who drove recklessly and didn’t run over a child. But do we, really?

Another response is simply to deny that we should treat Bob and Dan any differently, and say that reckless driving is reckless driving, and safe driving is safe driving. For this particular example, maybe that works. But it’s not hard to come up with better examples where that doesn’t work:

Ted is a psychopathic serial killer. He kidnaps, rapes, and murder people. Maybe he can control whether or not he rapes and murders someone. But the reason he rapes and murders someone is that he is a psychopath. And he can’t control that he is a psychopath. So how can we say that his actions are morally wrong?

Obviously, we want to say that his actions are morally wrong.

I have heard one alternative, which is to consider psychopaths as morally equivalent to viruses: Zero culpability, zero moral value, something morally neutral but dangerous that we should contain or eradicate as swiftly as possible. HIV isn’t evil; it’s just harmful. We should kill it not because it deserves to die, but because it will kill us if we don’t. On this theory, Ted doesn’t deserve to be executed; it’s just that we must execute him in order to protect ourselves from the danger he poses.

But this quickly becomes unsatisfactory as well:

Jonas is a medical researcher whose work has saved millions of lives. Maybe he can control the research he works on, but he only works on medical research because he was born with a high IQ and strong feelings of compassion. He can’t control that he was born with a high IQ and strong feelings of compassion. So how can we say his actions are morally right?

This is the line of reasoning that quickly leads to saying that all actions are outside our control, and therefore morally neutral; and then the whole concept of morality falls apart.

So we need to draw the line somewhere; there has to be a space of things that aren’t in our control, but nonetheless carry moral weight. That’s moral luck.

Philosophers have actually identified four types of moral luck, which turns out to be tremendously useful in drawing that line.

Resultant luck is luck that determines the consequences of your actions, how things “turn out”. Happening to run over the child because you couldn’t swerve fast enough is resultant luck.

Circumstantial luck is luck that determines the sorts of situations you are in, and what moral decisions you have to make. A child happening to stumble across the street is circumstantial luck.

Constitutive luck is luck that determines who you are, your own capabilities, virtues, intentions and so on. Having a high IQ and strong feelings of compassion is constitutive luck.

Causal luck is the inherent luck written into the fabric of the universe that determines all events according to the fundamental laws of physics. Causal luck is everything and everywhere; it is written into the universal wavefunction.

I have a very strong intuition that this list is ordered; going from top to bottom makes things “less luck” in a vital sense.

Resultant luck is pure luck, what we originally meant when we said the word “luck”. It’s the roll of the dice.

Circumstantial luck is still mostly luck, but maybe not entirely; there are some aspects of it that do seem to be under our control.

Constitutive luck is maybe luck, sort of, but not really. Yes, “You’re lucky to be so smart” makes sense, but “You’re lucky to not be a psychopath” already sounds pretty weird. We’re entering territory here where our ordinary notions of luck and responsibility really don’t seem to apply.

Causal luck is not luck at all. Causal luck is really the opposite of luck: Without a universe with fundamental laws of physics to maintain causal order, none of our actions would have any meaning at all. They wouldn’t even really be actions; they’d just be events. You can’t do something in a world of pure chaos; things only happen. And being made of physical particles doesn’t make you any less what you are; a table made of wood is still a table, and a rocket made of steel is still a rocket. Thou art physics.

And that, my dear reader, is the solution to the problem of moral luck. Forget “causal luck”, which isn’t luck at all. Then, draw a hard line at constitutive luck: regardless of how you became who you are, you are responsible for what you do.

You don’t need to have control over who you are (what would that even mean!?).

You merely need to have control over what you do.

This is how the word “control” is normally used, by the way; when we say that a manufacturing process is “under control” or a pilot “has control” of an airplane, we aren’t asserting some grand metaphysical claim of ultimate causation. We’re merely saying that the system is working as it’s supposed to; the outputs coming out are within the intended parameters. This is all we need for moral responsibility as well.

In some cases, maybe people’s brains really are so messed up that we can’t hold them morally responsible; they aren’t “under control”. Okay, we’re back to the virus argument then: Contain or eradicate. If a brain tumor makes you so dangerous that we can’t trust you around sharp objects, unless we can take out that tumor, we’ll need to lock you up somewhere where you can’t get any sharp objects. Sorry. Maybe you don’t deserve that in some ultimate sense, but it’s still obviously what we have to do. And this is obviously quite exceptional; most people are not suffering from brain tumors that radically alter their personalities—and even most psychopaths are otherwise neurologically normal.

Ironically, it’s probably my fellow social scientists who will scoff the most at this answer. “But so much of what we are is determined by our neurochemistry/cultural norms/social circumstances/political institutions/economic incentives!” Yes, that’s true. And if we want to change those things to make us and others better, I’m all for it. (Well, neurochemistry is a bit problematic, so let’s focus on the others first—but if you can make a pill that cures psychopathy, I would support mandatory administration of that pill to psychopaths in positions of power.)

When you make a moral choice, we have to hold you responsible for that choice.

Maybe Ted is psychopathic and sadistic because there was too much lead in his water as a child. That’s a good reason to stop putting lead in people’s water (like we didn’t already have plenty!); but it’s not a good reason to let Ted off the hook for all those rapes and murders.

Maybe Jonas is intelligent and compassionate because his parents were wealthy and well-educated. That’s a good reason to make sure people are financially secure and well-educated (again, did we need more?); but it’s not a good reason to deny Jonas his Nobel Prize for saving millions of lives.

Yes, “personal responsibility” has been used by conservatives as an excuse to not solve various social and economic problems (indeed, it has specifically been used to stop regulations on lead in water and public funding for education). But that’s not actually anything wrong with personal responsibility. We should hold those conservatives personally responsible for abusing the term in support of their destructive social and economic policies. No moral freedom is lost by preventing lead from turning children into psychopaths. No personal liberty is destroyed by ensuring that everyone has access to a good education.

In fact, there is evidence that telling people who are suffering from poverty or oppression that they should take personal responsibility for their choices benefits them. Self-perceived victimhood is linked to all sorts of destructive behaviors, even controlling for prior life circumstances. Feminist theorists have written about how taking responsibility even when you are oppressed can empower you to make your life better. Yes, obviously, we should be helping people when we can. But telling them that they are hopeless unless we come in to rescue them isn’t helping them.

This way of thinking may require a delicate balance at times, but it’s not inconsistent. You can both fight against lead pollution and support the criminal justice system. You can believe in both public education and the Nobel Prize. We should be working toward a world where people are constituted with more virtue for reasons beyond their control, and where people are held responsible for the actions they take that are under their control.

We can continue to talk about “moral luck” referring to constitutive luck, I suppose, but I think the term obscures more than it illuminates. The “luck” that made you a good or a bad person is very different from the “luck” that decides how things happen to turn out.

What’s going on in Venezuela?

PNRJ current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 3 JDN 2458518

As you may know, Venezuela is currently in a state of political crisis. Juan Guaido has declared himself President and been recognized by the United States as such, while Nicolas Maduro claims that he remains President as he has been for the last six years—during most of which time has has “ruled by decree”, which is to say that he has been effectively a dictator.

Maduro claims that this is a US-backed coup. I’ve seen a lot of people on the left buy into this claim.

I’m not saying this is impossible: The US has backed coups several times before, and has a particular track record of doing so against socialist regimes in Latin America.

But there are some reasons to be skeptical of it.

Unrest in Venezuela is nothing new, and looks to be quite grassroots. There have been widespread protests against Maduro—and severe crackdowns against those protests—for several years now. Guaido himself got his start in politics by organizing protests against Chavez and then Maduro, starting when he was a college student.

While Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, remains extremely popular, most of the support for Maduro in Venezuela seems to come from the military and other elites. This is looking a lot like the Lenin/Stalin pattern: A charismatic and popular authoritarian socialist revolutionary opens the door for a murderous psychopathic authoritarian socialist who rules with an iron fist and causes millions of deaths. (In China, Mao managed to play both roles by himself.)

Guaido himself rejects all claims that he’s working for the US (but I suppose he would in either case).

And so far, no US troops have been deployed to Venezuela, and at the moment, Trump is currently only threatening for more sanctions or an embargo, not a military intervention. (He’s Trump, so who knows? And he did talk about invading them a year or two ago.)

The best evidence I’ve seen that it could be a US-orchestrated coup is a leaked report about a meeting discussing the possibility of such a coup a few months ago. But at least by the most reliable accounts we have, the US decided not to support that coup. I guess that could be part of the cover-up? (It feels weird when the crazy-sounding conspiracy theorists actually have a point. There totally have been US coups against Latin American governments that were covered up for decades.)

Even if it is actually a coup, I’m not entirely convinced that’s a bad thing.

The American and French Revolutions were coups, after all. When you are faced with a strong authoritarian government, a coup may be your only option for achieving freedom.
Here’s a bit of evidence that this is indeed what’s happening: the countries that support Guaido are a lot more democratic than the countries that support Maduro.

Guaido has already been recognized by most of Europe and Latin America, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru. Among those supporting Maduro are China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey—not exactly bastions of liberal democracy. Within Latin America, only Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, and Uruguay support Maduro. Of those, only Mexico and Uruguay are recognizably democratic.

The average Democracy Index of countries that support Guaido is 7.5, which would be a “flawed democracy”. The average Democracy Index of countries that support Maduro is only 4.4, a “hybrid regime”.

Here is a plot of the Democracy Index by country supporting Guaido:democracy_index_guaido

Here is a plot of the Democracy Index by country supporting Maduro:

democracy_index_maduro

Since the entire EU recognizes Guaido, I could have shown each European country separately and biased the numbers even further, but I decided to specifically stick to major European powers with explicitly stated positions on Venezuela.

And we know that Maduro was a ruthless and autocratic dictator. So this is looking an awful lot like a democratic uprising against authoritarianism. It’s hard for me to be upset about that.

Second, Venezuela was in terrible shape, and largely due to Maduro’s administration.

After Maduro was elected (we’re still not sure how legitimate that election really was), Maduro underwent a total economic meltdown. Depression, hyperinflation, famine, a resurgence of malaria, and a huge exodus of refugees all followed. Millions of people are now starving in a country that was once quite rich. Nearly 90% of the population now lives in poverty. The story of Venezuela’s economy is one of total self-destruction.

Due to the bizarre system of subsidies and price controls in place, oil is now 100 times cheaper in Venezuela than water. Venezuela’s oil production has plummeted under Maduroto its lowest levels in decades, which might be good for climate change but is very bad for a country so dependent upon oil export revenue. It’s pretty much a classic cautionary tale for the Resource Curse.

Maduro, like any good socialist dictator, has blamed US sanctions for all his country’s economic failings. But there have not been strict US sanctions against Venezuela, and we remain their chief purchaser of oil by a wide margin. If you’ve ever bought gasoline at a Citgo station, you have paid for Venezuelan oil. Moreover, if your socialist country is that heavily dependent on exporting to capitalist countries… that really doesn’t say much in favor of socialism as an economic system, does it?

I don’t know what will happen. Maybe Maduro will successfully regain power. Maybe Guaido will retain control but turn out to be just as bad (there’s a long track record of coups against awful dictators resulting in equally awful dictators—Idi Amin is a classic example). Maybe Trump will do something stupid or crazy and we’ll end up in yet another decades-long military quagmire.

But there’s also a chance of something much better: Maybe Guaido can actually maintain power and build a genuinely democratic regime in Venezuela, and turn their economy back from the brink of devastation toward more sustainable growth. When the devil you know is this bad, sometimes you really do want to bet on the devil you don’t.