core principles

Just how rich is rich?

PNRJ core principles, ethics, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 26 JDN 2458630

I think if there is one single thing I would like more people to know about economics, it is the sheer magnitude of global inequality. Most people seem to have no idea just how rich some people are—and how poor so many others are. They have a vision in their head of what “rich” and “poor” are, and their “rich” is a low-level Wall Street trader making $400,000 a year (the kind of people Gordon Gekko mocks in the film), and “poor” is someone who lives under a bridge in New York City. (They’re both New Yorkers, I guess. New Yorkers seem to be the iconic Americans, which is honestly more representative than you might think—80% of Americans live in urban or suburban areas.)

If we take a global perspective, this is not what “rich” and “poor” truly mean.

In next week’s post I’ll talk about what “poor” means. It’s really appallingly bad. We have to leave the First World in order to find it; many people here are poor, but not that poor. It’s so bad that I think once you really understand it, it can’t but change your whole outlook on the world. But I’m saving that for next week.

This week, I’ll talk about what “rich” really means in today’s world. We needn’t leave the United States, for the top 3 and 6 of the top 10 richest people in the world live here. And they are all White men, by the way, though Carlos Slim and Amancio Ortega are at least Latino.

Going down the list of billionaires ranked by wealth, you have to get down to 15th place before encountering a woman, and it’s really worse than that, because Francoise Bettencourt (15), Alice Walton (17), Jacqueline Mars (33), Yang Huiyan (42), Susan Klatton (46), Laurena Powell-Jobs (54), Abigail Johnson (71), and Iris Fontbona (74) are all heirs. The richest living woman who didn’t simply inherit from her father or husband is actually Gina Rinehart, the 75th richest person in the world. (And note that, while also in some sense an heir, Queen Elizabeth is not on that list; in fact, she’s nowhere near the richest people in the world. She’s not in the top 500.)

You have to get to 20th place before encountering someone non-White (Ma Huateng), and all the way down to 65th before encountering someone not White or East Asian (the Hinduja brothers). Not one of the top 100 richest people is Black.

Just how rich are these people? Well, there’s a meme going around saying that Jeff Bezos could afford to buy every homeless person in the world a house at median market price and still, with just what’s left over, be a multi-billionaire among the top 100 richest people in the world.

And that meme is completely correct. The math checks out.

There are about 554,000 homeless people in the US at any given time.

The median sale price of a currently existing house in the US is about $253,000.

Multiply those two numbers together, and you get $140 billion.

And Jeff Bezos has net wealth of $157 billion.

This means that he would still have $17 billion left after buying all those houses. The 100th richest person in the world has $13 billion, so Jeff Bezos would still be higher than that.

Even $17 billion is enough to spend over $2 million every single day—over $20 per second—and never run out of money as long as the dividends keep paying out.

Jeff Bezos in fact made so much in dividends and capital gains this past quarter that he was taking in as much money as the median Amazon employee’s annual salary—which is more than what I make as a grad student, and only slightly less than the median US individual income—every nine seconds. Yes, you read that correctly: Nine (9) seconds. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, Jeff Bezos probably received more in capital gains than you will make this whole year. And if not (because you’re relatively rich or you read quickly), I’m sure he will have in the time it takes you to read this whole post.

When Mitt Romney ran for President, a great deal was made of his net wealth of over $250 million. This is indeed very rich, richer than anyone really needs or probably deserves. But compared to the world’s richest, this is pocket change. Jeff Bezos gets that much in dividends and capital gains every day. Bill Gates could give away that much every day for a year and still not run out of money. (He doesn’t quite give that much, but he does give a lot.)

I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ann Arbor is a medium-sized city of about 120,000 people (230th in the US by population), and relatively well-off (median household income about 16% higher than the US median). Nevertheless, if Jeff Bezos wanted to, he could give every single person in Ann Arbor the equivalent of 30 years of their income—over a million dollars each—and still have enough money left to be among the world’s 100 richest people.

Or suppose instead that all the world’s 500 richest people decided to give away all the money they have above $1 billion—so they’d all still be billionaires, but only barely. That $8.7 trillion they have together, minus the $500 billion they’re keeping, would be $8.2 trillion. In fact, let’s say they keep a little more, just to make sure they all have the same ordering: Give each one an extra $1 million for each point they are in the ranking, so that Jeff Bezos would stay on top at $1 B + 500 ($0.001 B) = $1.5 billion, while Bill Gates in second place would have $1 million less, and so on. That would leave us with still over $8 trillion to give away.

How far could that $8 trillion go? Well, suppose we divided it evenly between all 328 million people in the United States. How much would each person receive? Oh, just about $24,000—basically my annual income.

Or suppose instead we spread it out over the entire world: Every single man, woman, and child on the planet Earth gets an equal share. There are 7.7 billion people in the world, so by spreading out $8 trillion between them, each one would get over $1000. For you or I that’s a big enough windfall to feel. For the world’s poorest people, it’s more than they make in several years. It would be life-changing for them. (Actually that’s about what GiveDirectly gives each family—and it is life-changing.)

And let me remind you: This would be leaving them billionaires. They’re just not as much billionaires as before—they only have $1 billion instead of $20 billion or $50 billion or $100 billion. And even $1 billion is obviously enough to live however you want, wherever you want, for the rest of your life, never working another day if you don’t want to. With $1 billion, you can fly in jets (a good one will set you back $20 million), sail in yachts (even a massive 200-footer wouldn’t run much above $200 million), and eat filet mignon at every meal (in fact, at $25 per pound, you can serve it to yourself and a hundred of your friends without breaking a sweat). You can decorate your bedroom with original Jackson Pollock paintings (at $200 million, his most expensive painting is only 20% of your wealth) and bathe in bottles of Dom Perignon (at $400 per liter, a 200-liter bath would cost you about $80,000—even every day that’s only $30 million a year, or maybe half to a third of your capital income). Remember, this is all feasible at just $1 billion—and Jeff Bezos has over a hundred times that. There is no real lifestyle improvement that happens between $1 billion and $157 billion; it’s purely a matter of status and power.

Taking enough to make them mere millionaires would give us another $0.5 trillion to spend (about the GDP of Sweden, one-fourth the GDP of Canada, or 70% of the US military budget).

Do you think maybe these people have too much money?

I’m not saying that we should confiscate all private property. I’m not saying that we should collectivize all industry. I believe in free markets and private enterprise. People should be able to get rich by inventing things and starting businesses.

But should they be able to get that rich? So rich that one man could pay off every mortgage in a whole major city? So rich that the CEO of a company makes what his employees make in a year in less than a minute? So rich that 500 people—enough to fill a large lecture hall—own enough wealth that if it were spread out evenly they could give $1000 to every single person in the world?

If Jeff Bezos had $1.5 million, I’d say he absolutely earned it. Some high-level programmers at Amazon have that much, and they absolutely earned it. If he had $15 million, I’d think maybe he could deserve that, given his contribution to the world. If he had $150 million, I’d find it hard to believe that anyone could really deserve that much, but if it’s part of what we need to make capitalism work, I could live with that.

But Jeff Bezos doesn’t have $1.5 million. He doesn’t have $15 million. He doesn’t have $150 million. He doesn’t have $1.5 billion. He doesn’t even have $15 billion. He has $150 billion. He has over a thousand times the level of wealth at which I was already having to doubt whether any human being could possibly deserve so much money—and once it gets that big, it basically just keeps growing. A stock market crash might drop it down temporarily, but it would come back in a few years.

And it’s not like there’s nothing we could do to spread this wealth around. Some fairly simple changes in how we tax dividends and capital gains would be enough to get a lot of it, and a wealth tax like the one Elizabeth Warren has proposed would help a great deal as well. At the rates people have seriously proposed, these taxes would only really stop their wealth from growing; it wouldn’t meaningfully shrink it.

That could be combined with policy changes about compensation for corporate executives, particularly with regard to stock options, to make it harder to extract such a large proportion of a huge multinational corporation’s wealth into a single individual. We could impose a cap on the ratio between median employee salary (including the entire supply chain!) and total executive compensation (including dividends and capital gains!), say 100 to 1. (Making in 9 seconds what his employees make in a year, Jeff Bezos is currently operating at a ratio of over 3 million to 1.) If you exceed the cap, the remainder is taxed at 100%. This would mean that as a CEO you can still make $100 million a year, but only if your median employee makes $1 million. If your median employee makes $30,000, you’d better keep your own compensation under $3 million, because we’re gonna take the rest.

Is this socialism? I guess maybe it’s democratic socialism, the high-tax, high-spend #ScandinaviaIsBetter welfare state. But it would not be an end to free markets or free enterprise. We’re not collectivizing any industries, let alone putting anyone in guillotines. You could still start a business and make millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars; you’d simply be expected to share that wealth with your employees and our society as a whole, instead of hoarding it all for yourself.

Pinker Propositions

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 19 2458623

What do the following statements have in common?

1. “Capitalist countries have less poverty than Communist countries.”

2. “Black men in the US commit homicide at a higher rate than White men.”

3. “On average, in the US, Asian people score highest on IQ tests, White and Hispanic people score near the middle, and Black people score the lowest.”

4. “Men on average perform better at visual tasks, and women on average perform better on verbal tasks.”

5. “In the United States, White men are no more likely to be mass shooters than other men.”

6. “The genetic heritability of intelligence is about 60%.”

7. “The plurality of recent terrorist attacks in the US have been committed by Muslims.”

8. “The period of US military hegemony since 1945 has been the most peaceful period in human history.”

These statements have two things in common:

1. All of these statements are objectively true facts that can be verified by rich and reliable empirical data which is publicly available and uncontroversially accepted by social scientists.

2. If spoken publicly among left-wing social justice activists, all of these statements will draw resistance, defensiveness, and often outright hostility. Anyone making these statements is likely to be accused of racism, sexism, imperialism, and so on.

I call such propositions Pinker Propositions, after an excellent talk by Steven Pinker illustrating several of the above statements (which was then taken wildly out of context by social justice activists on social media).

The usual reaction to these statements suggests that people think they imply harmful far-right policy conclusions. This inference is utterly wrong: A nuanced understanding of each of these propositions does not in any way lead to far-right policy conclusions—in fact, some rather strongly support left-wing policy conclusions.

1. Capitalist countries have less poverty than Communist countries, because Communist countries are nearly always corrupt and authoritarian. Social democratic countries have the lowest poverty and the highest overall happiness (#ScandinaviaIsBetter).

2. Black men commit more homicide than White men because of poverty, discrimination, mass incarceration, and gang violence. Black men are also greatly overrepresented among victims of homicide, as most homicide is intra-racial. Homicide rates often vary across ethnic and socioeconomic groups, and these rates vary over time as a result of cultural and political changes.

3. IQ tests are a highly imperfect measure of intelligence, and the genetics of intelligence cut across our socially-constructed concept of race. There is far more within-group variation in IQ than between-group variation. Intelligence is not fixed at birth but is affected by nutrition, upbringing, exposure to toxins, and education—all of which statistically put Black people at a disadvantage. Nor does intelligence remain constant within populations: The Flynn Effect is the well-documented increase in intelligence which has occurred in almost every country over the past century. Far from justifying discrimination, these provide very strong reasons to improve opportunities for Black children. The lead and mercury in Flint’s water suppressed the brain development of thousands of Black children—that’s going to lower average IQ scores. But that says nothing about supposed “inherent racial differences” and everything about the catastrophic damage of environmental racism.

4. To be quite honest, I never even understood why this one shocks—or even surprises—people. It’s not even saying that men are “smarter” than women—overall IQ is almost identical. It’s just saying that men are more visual and women are more verbal. And this, I think, is actually quite obvious. I think the clearest evidence of this—the “interocular trauma” that will convince you the effect is real and worth talking about—is pornography. Visual porn is overwhelmingly consumed by men, even when it was designed for women (e.g. Playgirl—a majority of its readers are gay men, even though there are ten times as many straight women in the world as there are gay men). Conversely, erotic novels are overwhelmingly consumed by women. I think a lot of anti-porn feminism can actually be explained by this effect: Feminists (who are usually women, for obvious reasons) can say they are against “porn” when what they are really against is visual porn, because visual porn is consumed by men; then the kind of porn that they like (erotic literature) doesn’t count as “real porn”. And honestly they’re mostly against the current structure of the live-action visual porn industry, which is totally reasonable—but it’s a far cry from being against porn in general. I have some serious issues with how our farming system is currently set up, but I’m not against farming.

5. This one is interesting, because it’s a lack of a race difference, which normally is what the left wing always wants to hear. The difference of course is that this alleged difference would make White men look bad, and that’s apparently seen as a desirable goal for social justice. But the data just doesn’t bear it out: While indeed most mass shooters are White men, that’s because most Americans are White, which is a totally uninteresting reason. There’s no clear evidence of any racial disparity in mass shootings—though the gender disparity is absolutely overwhelming: It’s almost always men.

6. Heritability is a subtle concept; it doesn’t mean what most people seem to think it means. It doesn’t mean that 60% of your intelligence is due to your your genes. Indeed, I’m not even sure what that sentence would actually mean; it’s like saying that 60% of the flavor of a cake is due to the eggs. What this heritability figure actually means that when you compare across individuals in a population, and carefully control for environmental influences, you find that about 60% of the variance in IQ scores is explained by genetic factors. But this is within a particular population—here, US adults—and is absolutely dependent on all sorts of other variables. The more flexible one’s environment becomes, the more people self-select into their preferred environment, and the more heritable traits become. As a result, IQ actually becomes more heritable as children become adults, called the Wilson Effect.

7. This one might actually have some contradiction with left-wing policy. The disproportionate participation of Muslims in terrorism—controlling for just about anything you like, income, education, age etc.—really does suggest that, at least at this point in history, there is some real ideological link between Islam and terrorism. But the fact remains that the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists and do not support terrorism, and antagonizing all the people of an entire religion is fundamentally unjust as well as likely to backfire in various ways. We should instead be trying to encourage the spread of more tolerant forms of Islam, and maintaining the strict boundaries of secularism to prevent the encroach of any religion on our system of government.

8. The fact that US military hegemony does seem to be a cause of global peace doesn’t imply that every single military intervention by the US is justified. In fact, it doesn’t even necessarily imply that any such interventions are justified—though I think one would be hard-pressed to say that the NATO intervention in the Kosovo War or the defense of Kuwait in the Gulf War was unjustified. It merely points out that having a hegemon is clearly preferable to having a multipolar world where many countries jockey for military supremacy. The Pax Romana was a time of peace but also authoritarianism; the Pax Americana is better, but that doesn’t prevent us from criticizing the real harms—including major war crimes—committed by the United States.

So it is entirely possible to know and understand these facts without adopting far-right political views.

Yet Pinker’s point—and mine—is that by suppressing these true facts, by responding with hostility or even ostracism to anyone who states them, we are actually adding fuel to the far-right fire. Instead of presenting the nuanced truth and explaining why it doesn’t imply such radical policies, we attack the messenger; and this leads people to conclude three things:

1. The left wing is willing to lie and suppress the truth in order to achieve political goals (they’re doing it right now).

2. These statements actually do imply right-wing conclusions (else why suppress them?).

3. Since these statements are true, that must mean the right-wing conclusions are actually correct.

Now (especially if you are someone who identifies unironically as “woke”), you might be thinking something like this: “Anyone who can be turned away from social justice so easily was never a real ally in the first place!”

This is a fundamentally and dangerously wrongheaded view. No one—not me, not you, not anyone—was born believing in social justice. You did not emerge from your mother’s womb ranting against colonalist imperialism. You had to learn what you now know. You came to believe what you now believe, after once believing something else that you now think is wrong. This is true of absolutely everyone everywhere. Indeed, the better you are, the more true it is; good people learn from their mistakes and grow in their knowledge.

This means that anyone who is now an ally of social justice once was not. And that, in turn, suggests that many people who are currently not allies could become so, under the right circumstances. They would probably not shift all at once—as I didn’t, and I doubt you did either—but if we are welcoming and open and honest with them, we can gradually tilt them toward greater and greater levels of support.

But if we reject them immediately for being impure, they never get the chance to learn, and we never get the chance to sway them. People who are currently uncertain of their political beliefs will become our enemies because we made them our enemies. We declared that if they would not immediately commit to everything we believe, then they may as well oppose us. They, quite reasonably unwilling to commit to a detailed political agenda they didn’t understand, decided that it would be easiest to simply oppose us.

And we don’t have to win over every person on every single issue. We merely need to win over a large enough critical mass on each issue to shift policies and cultural norms. Building a wider tent is not compromising on your principles; on the contrary, it’s how you actually win and make those principles a reality.

There will always be those we cannot convince, of course. And I admit, there is something deeply irrational about going from “those leftists attacked Charles Murray” to “I think I’ll start waving a swastika”. But humans aren’t always rational; we know this. You can lament this, complain about it, yell at people for being so irrational all you like—it won’t actually make people any more rational. Humans are tribal; we think in terms of teams. We need to make our team as large and welcoming as possible, and suppressing Pinker Propositions is not the way to do that.

How do you change a paradigm?

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, current events, personal , , , , , ,

Mar 3 JDN 2458546

I recently attended the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) Young Scholars Initiative (YSI) North American Regional Convening (what a mouthful!). I didn’t present, so I couldn’t get funding for a hotel, so I commuted to LA each day. That was miserable; if I ever go again, it will be with funding.

The highlight of the conference was George Akerlof‘s keynote, which I knew would be the case from the start. The swag bag labeled “Rebel Without a Paradigm” was also pretty great (though not as great as the “Totes Bi” totes at the Human Rights Council Time to THRIVE conference).

The rest of the conference was… a bit strange, to be honest. They had a lot of slightly cheesy interactive activities and exhibits; the conference was targeted at grad students, but some of these would have drawn groans from my more jaded undergrads (and “jaded grad student” is a redundancy). The poster session was pathetically small; I think there were literally only three posters. (Had I known in time for the deadline, I could surely have submitted a poster.)

The theme of the conference was challenging the neoclassical paradigm. This was really the only unifying principle. So we had quite an eclectic mix of presenters: There were a few behavioral economists (like Akerlof himself), and some econophysicists and complexity theorists, but mostly the conference was filled with a wide variety of heterodox theorists, ranging all the way from Austrian to Marxist. Also sprinkled in were a few outright cranks, whose ideas were just total nonsense; fortunately these were relatively rare.

And what really struck me about listening to the heterodox theorists was how mainstream it made me feel. I went to a session on development economics, expecting randomized controlled trials of basic income and maybe some political economy game theory, and instead saw several presentations of neo-Marxist postcolonial theory. At the AEA conference I felt like a radical firebrand; at the YSI conference I felt like a holdout of the ancien regime. Is this what it feels like to push the envelope without leaping outside it?

The whole atmosphere of the conference was one of “Why won’t they listen to us!?” and I couldn’t help but feel like I kind of knew why. All this heterodox theory isn’t testable. It isn’t useful. It doesn’t solve the problem. Even if you are entirely correct that Latin America is poor because of colonial and neocolonial exploitation by the West (and I’m fairly certain that you’re not; standard of living under the Mexica wasn’t so great you know), that doesn’t tell me how to feed starving children in Nicaragua.

Indeed, I think it’s notable that the one Nobel Laureate they could find to speak for us was a behavioral economist. Behavioral economics has actually managed to penetrate into the mainstream somewhat. Not enough, not nearly quickly enough, to be sure—but it’s happening. Why is it happening? Because behavioral economics is testable, it’s useful, and it solves problems.

Indeed, behavioral economics is more testable than most neoclassical economics: We run lab experiments while they’re adding yet another friction or shock to the never-ending DSGE quagmire.

And we’ve already managed to solve some real policy problems this way, like Alvin Roth’s kidney matching system and Richard Thaler’s “Save More Tomorrow” program.

The (limited) success of behavioral economics came not because we continued to batter at the gates of the old paradigm demanding to be let in, but because we tied ourselves to the methodology of hard science and gathered irrefutable empirical data. We didn’t get as far as we have by complaining that economics is too much like physics; we actually made it more like physics. Physicists do experiments. They make sharp, testable predictions. They refute their hypotheses. And now, so do we.

That said, Akerlof was right when he pointed out that the insistence upon empirical precision has limited the scope of questions we are able to ask, and kept us from addressing some of the really vital economic problems in the world. And neoclassical theory is too narrow; in particular, the ongoing insistence that behavior must be modeled as perfectly rational and completely selfish is infuriating. That model has clearly failed at this point, and it’s time for something new.

So I do think there is some space for heterodox theory in economics. But there actually seems to be no shortage of heterodox theory; it’s easy to come up with ideas that are different from the mainstream. What we actually need is more ways to constrain theory with empirical evidence. The goal must be to have theory that actually predicts and explains the world better than neoclassical theory does—and that’s a higher bar than you might imagine. Neoclassical theory isn’t an abject failure; in fact, if we’d just followed the standard Keynesian models in the Great Recession, we would have recovered much faster. Most of this neo-Marxist theory struck me as not even wrong: the ideas were flexible enough that almost any observed outcome could be fit into them.

Galileo and Einstein didn’t just come up with new ideas and complain that no one listened to them. They developed detailed, mathematically precise models that could be experimentally tested—and when they were tested, they worked better than the old theory. That is the way to change a paradigm: Replace it with one that you can prove is better.

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.

If you stop destroying jobs, you will stop economic growth

PNRJ core principles, development economics, futurism, inequality, macroeconomics, Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Dec 30 JDN 2458483

One thing that endlessly frustrates me (and probably most economists) about the public conversation on economics is the fact that people seem to think “destroying jobs” is bad. Indeed, not simply a downside to be weighed, but a knock-down argument: If something “destroys jobs”, that’s a sufficient reason to opposite it, whether it be a new technology, an environmental regulation, or a trade agreement. So then we tie ourselves up in knots trying to argue that the policy won’t really destroy jobs, or it will create more than it destroys—but it will destroy jobs, and we don’t actually know how many it will create.

Destroying jobs is good. Destroying jobs is the only way that economic growth ever happens.

I realize I’m probably fighting an uphill battle here, so let me start at the beginning: What do I mean when I say “destroying jobs”? What exactly is a “job”, anyway?
At its most basic level, a job is something that needs done. It’s a task that someone wants to perform, but is unwilling or unable to perform on their own, and is therefore willing to give up some of what they have in order to get someone else to do it for them.

Capitalism has blinded us to this basic reality. We have become so accustomed to getting the vast majority of our goods via jobs that we come to think of having a job as something intrinsically valuable. It is not. Working at a job is a downside. It is something to be minimized.

There is a kind of work that is valuable: Creative, fulfilling work that you do for the joy of it. This is what we are talking about when we refer to something as a “vocation” or even a “hobby”. Whether it’s building ships in bottles, molding things from polymer clay, or coding video games for your friends, there is a lot of work in the world that has intrinsic value. But these things aren’t jobs. No one will pay them to do these things—or need to; you’ll do them anyway.

The value we get from jobs is actually obtained from goods: Everything from houses to underwear to televisions to antibiotics. The reason you want to have a job is that you want the money from that job to give you access to markets for all the goods that are actually valuable to you.

Jobs are the input—the cost—of producing all of those goods. The more jobs it takes to make a good, the more expensive that good is. This is not a rule-of-thumb statement of what usually or typically occurs. This is the most fundamental definition of cost. The more people you have to pay to do something, the harder it was to do that thing. If you can do it with fewer people (or the same people working with less effort), you should. Money is the approximation; money is the rule-of-thumb. We use money as an accounting mechanism to keep track of how much effort was put into accomplishing something. But what really matters is the “sweat of our laborers, the genius of our scientists, the hopes of our children”.

Economic growth means that we produce more goods at less cost.

That is, we produce more goods with fewer jobs.

All new technologies destroy jobs—if they are worth anything at all. The entire purpose of a new technology is to let us do things faster, better, easier—to let us have more things with less work.

This has been true since at least the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

The Luddites weren’t wrong that automated looms would destroy weaver jobs. They were wrong to think that this was a bad thing. Of course, they weren’t crazy. Their livelihoods were genuinely in jeopardy. And this brings me to what the conversation should be about when we instead waste time talking about “destroying jobs”.

Here’s a slogan for you: Kill the jobs. Save the workers.

We shouldn’t be disappointed to lose a job; we should think of that as an opportunity to give a worker a better life. For however many years, you’ve been toiling to do this thing; well, now it’s done. As a civilization, we have finally accomplished the task that you and so many others set out to do. We have not “replaced you with a machine”; we have built a machine that now frees you from your toil and allows you to do something better with your life. Your purpose in life wasn’t to be a weaver or a coal miner or a steelworker; it was to be a friend and a lover and a parent. You can now get more chance to do the things that really matter because you won’t have to spend all your time working some job.

When we replaced weavers with looms, plows with combine harvesters, computers-the-people with computers-the-machines (a transformation now so complete most people don’t even seem to know that the word used to refer to a person—the award-winning film Hidden Figures is about computers-the-people), tollbooth operators with automated transponders—all these things meant that the job was now done. For the first time in the history of human civilization, nobody had to do that job anymore. Think of how miserable life is for someone pushing a plow or sitting in a tollbooth for 10 hours a day; aren’t you glad we don’t have to do that anymore (in this country, anyway)?

And the same will be true if we replace radiologists with AI diagnostic algorithms (we will; it’s probably not even 10 years away), or truckers with automated trucks (we will; I give it 20 years), or cognitive therapists with conversational AI (we might, but I’m more skeptical), or construction workers with building-printers (we probably won’t anytime soon, but it would be nice), the same principle applies: This is something we’ve finally accomplished as a civilization. We can check off the box on our to-do list and move on to the next thing.

But we shouldn’t simply throw away the people who were working on that noble task as if they were garbage. Their job is done—they did it well, and they should be rewarded. Yes, of course, the people responsible for performing the automation should be rewarded: The engineers, programmers, technicians. But also the people who were doing the task in the meantime, making sure that the work got done while those other people were spending all that time getting the machine to work: They should be rewarded too.

Losing your job to a machine should be the best thing that ever happened to you. You should still get to receive most of your income, and also get the chance to find a new job or retire.

How can such a thing be economically feasible? That’s the whole point: The machines are more efficient. We have more stuff now. That’s what economic growth is. So there’s literally no reason we can’t give every single person in the world at least as much wealth as we did before—there is now more wealth.

There’s a subtler argument against this, which is that diverting some of the surplus of automation to the workers who get displaced would reduce the incentives to create automation. This is true, so far as it goes. But you know what else reduces the incentives to create automation? Political opposition. Luddism. Naive populism. Trade protectionism.

Moreover, these forces are clearly more powerful, because they attack the opportunity to innovate: Trade protection can make it illegal to share knowledge with other countries. Luddist policies can make it impossible to automate a factory.

Whereas, sharing the wealth would only reduce the incentive to create automation; it would still be possible, simply less lucrative. Instead of making $40 billion, you’d only make $10 billion—you poor thing. I sincerely doubt there is a single human being on Earth with a meaningful contribution to make to humanity who would make that contribution if they were paid $40 billion but not if they were only paid $10 billion.

This is something that could be required by regulation, or negotiated into labor contracts. If your job is eliminated by automation, for the next year you get laid off but still paid your full salary. Then, your salary is converted into shares in the company that are projected to provide at least 50% of your previous salary in dividends—forever. By that time, you should be able to find another job, and as long as it pays at least half of what your old job did, you will be better off. Or, you can retire, and live off that 50% plus whatever else you were getting as a pension.

From the perspective of the employer, this does make automation a bit less attractive: The up-front cost in the first year has been increased by everyone’s salary, and the long-term cost has been increased by all those dividends. Would this reduce the number of jobs that get automated, relative to some imaginary ideal? Sure. But we don’t live in that ideal world anyway; plenty of other obstacles to innovation were in the way, and by solving the political conflict, this will remove as many as it adds. We might actually end up with more automation this way; and even if we don’t, we will certainly end up with less political conflict as well as less wealth and income inequality.

The best thing we can do to help them is let them in

PNRJ core principles, current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

 

Dec 23 JDN 2458476

This is a Christmas post, but not like most of my other Christmas posts. It’s not going to be an upbeat post about the effects of holidays on the economy, or the psychology of gift-giving, or the game theory that underlies the whole concept of a “holiday”.

No, today is about an urgent moral crisis. This post isn’t about Christmas as a weird but delightful syncretic solstice celebration. This post is about the so-called “spirit of Christmas”, a spirit of compassion and generosity that our country is clearly not living up to.

At the time of writing, the story had just come out: Jakelin Maquin, a 7-year-old girl from Guatemala died in the custody of US border agents.

Even if it’s true that the Border Patrol did everything they could to help her once they found out she was dying (and the reports coming out suggest that this is in fact the case), this death was still entirely preventable.

The first question we should ask is very basic: Why are there little girls in custody of border agents?
The next question is even more fundamental than that: Why are there border agents?

There are now 15,000 children being held by US Border Patrol. There should not be even one. The very concept of imprisoning children for crossing the border, under any circumstances, is a human rights violation. And yes, this is new, and it is specific to Donald Trump: Bush and Obama never separated children from their families this way. And while two-thirds of Americans oppose this policy, a majority of Republicans support it—this child’s blood is on their hands too.

Yet despite the gulf between the two major parties, the majority of Americans do support the idea of restricting immigration in general. And what I want to know is: Why? What gives us that right?

Let’s be absolutely clear about what “restricting immigration” means. It means that when someone decides they want to come to our country, either to escape oppression, work toward a better life, or simply to live with their family who came here before, men with guns come and lock them up.

We don’t politely ask them to leave. We don’t even fine them or tax them for entering. We lock them in detention camps, or force them to return to the country they came from which may be ruled by a dictator or a drug cartel.

Honestly, even the level of border security US citizens are subjected to is appalling: We’ve somehow come to think of it as normal that whenever you get on an airplane, you are first run through a body scanner, while all your belongings are inspected and scanned, and if you are found carrying any contraband—or if you even say the wrong thing—you can be summarily detained. This is literally Orwellian. “Papers, please” is the refrain of a tyrannical regime, not a liberal democracy.

If we truly believe in the spirit of compassion and generosity, we must let these people in. We don’t even have to do anything; we just need to stop violently resisting them. Stop pointing guns at them, stop locking them away. How is “Stop pointing guns at children” controversial?

I could write an entire post about the benefits for Americans of more open immigration. But honestly, we shouldn’t even care. It doesn’t matter whether immigration creates jobs, or destroys jobs, or decreases crime, or increases crime. We should not be locking up children in camps.

If we really believe in the spirit of compassion and generosity, the only thing we should care about is whether immigration is good for the immigrants. And it obviously is, or they wouldn’t be willing to go to such lengths to accomplish it. But I don’t think most people realize just how large the benefits of immigration are.

I’m going to focus on Guatemala, because that’s where Jakelin Maqin was from.

Guatemala’s life expectancy at birth is 73 years. The life expectancy for recent Hispanic immigrants to the US is 82 years. Crossing that border can give you nine years of life.

And what about income? GDP per capita PPP in the US is almost $60,000 per year. In Guatemala? Just over $8,000. Of course, that’s not accounting for the fact that Guatemalans are less educated; but even the exact same worker emigrating from there to here can greatly increase their income. The minimum wage in Guatemala is 90 GTQ per day, which is about $11.64. For a typical 8-hour workday, the US minimum wage of $7.25 per hour comes to $58 per day. That same exact worker can quintuple their income just by getting a job on the other side of the border.

Almost 60 percent of Guatemalans live in poverty. Over 20% live below the UN extreme poverty line. A full 11% of Guatemala’s GDP is remittances: Money that immigrants pay to help their families back home. A further 7% is exports to the US. This means that almost a fifth of Guatemala’s economy is dependent on the United States.

For comparison, less than 0.5% of Americans live in extreme poverty. (The UN recently claimed almost 6%; the Trump administration has claimed only 0.1% which is even more dubious. Both methodologies are deeply flawed; in particular, the UN report looks at income, not consumption—and consumption is what matters.) The overall poverty rate in the US is about 12%.

These figures are still appallingly high for a country as rich as the US; our extreme poverty rate should be strictly zero, a policy decision which could be implemented immediately and permanently in the form of a basic income of $700 per person per year, at a total expenditure of only $224 billion per year—about a third of the military budget. The net cost would in fact be far smaller than that, because we’d immediately turn around and spend that money. In fact, had this been done at the trough of the Great Recession, it would almost certainly have saved the government money.

Making our overall poverty rate strictly zero would be more challenging, but not obviously infeasible; since the poverty line is about $12,000 per person per year, it would take a basic income of that much to eliminate poverty, which would cost about $3.8 trillion per year. This is a huge expenditure, comparable as a proportion of GDP to the First World War (though still less than the Second). On the other hand, it would end poverty in America immediately and forever.

But even as things currently stand, the contrast between Guatemala and the US could hardly be starker: Immigrants are moving from a country with 60% poverty and 20% extreme poverty to one with 12% poverty and 0.5% extreme poverty.

Guatemala is a particularly extreme example; things are not as bad in Mexico or Cuba, for example. But the general pattern is a very consistent one: Immigrants come to the United States because things are very bad where they come from and their chances of living a better life here are much higher.

The best way to help these people, at Christmas and all year round, literally couldn’t be easier:

Let them in.

How much should we give?

PNRJ core principles, development economics, ethics, inequality, public policy , , , , ,

Nov 4 JDN 2458427

How much should we give of ourselves to others?

I’ve previously struggled with this basic question when it comes to donating money; I have written multiple posts on it now, some philosophical, some empirical, and some purely mathematical.

But the question is broader than this: We don’t simply give money. We also give effort. We also give emotion. Above all, we also give time. How much should we be volunteering? How many protest marches should we join? How many Senators should we call?

It’s easy to convince yourself that you aren’t doing enough. You can always point to some hour when you weren’t doing anything particularly important, and think about all the millions of lives that hang in the balance on issues like poverty and climate change, and then feel a wave of guilt for spending that hour watching Netflix or playing video games instead of doing one more march. This, however, is clearly unhealthy: You won’t actually make yourself into a more effective activist, you’ll just destroy yourself psychologically and become no use to anybody.

I previously argued for a sort of Kantian notion that we should commit to giving our fair share, defined as the amount we would have to give if everyone gave that amount. This is quite appealing, and if I can indeed get anyone to donate 1% of their income as a result, I will be quite glad. (If I can get 100 people to do so, that’s better than I could ever have done myself—a good example of highly cost-effective slacktivism.)

Lately I have come to believe that this is probably inadequate. We know that not everyone will take this advice, which means that by construction it won’t be good enough to actually solve global problems.

This means I must make a slightly greater demand: Define your fair share as the amount you would have to give if everyone among people who are likely to give gave that amount.

Unfortunately, this question is considerably harder. It may not even have a unique answer. The number of people willing to give an amount n is obviously dependent upon the amount x itself, and we are nowhere close to knowing what that function n(x) looks like.

So let me instead put some mathematical constraints on it, by choosing an elasticity. Instead of an elasticity of demand or elasticity of supply, we could call this an elasticity of contribution.

Presumably the elasticity is negative: The more you ask of people, the fewer people you’ll get to contribute.

Suppose that the elasticity is something like -0.5, where contribution is relatively inelastic. This means that if you increase the amount you ask for by 2%, you’ll only decrease the number of contributors by 1%. In that case, you should be like Peter Singer and ask for everything. At that point, you’re basically counting on Bill Gates to save us, because nobody else is giving anything. The total amount contributed n(x) * x is increasing in x.

On the other hand, suppose that elasticity is something like 2, where contribution is relatively elastic. This means that if you increase the amount you ask for by 2%, you will decrease the number of contributors by 4%. In that case, you should ask for very little. You’re asking everyone in the world to give 1% of their income, as I did earlier. The total amount contributed n(x) * x is now decreasing in x.

But there is also a third option: What if the elasticity is exactly -1, unit elastic? Then if you increase the amount you ask for by 2%, you’ll decrease the number of contributors by 2%. Then it doesn’t matter how much you ask for: The total amount contributed n(x) * x is constant.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the elasticity is constant over all possible choices of x—indeed, it would be quite surprising if it were. A quite likely scenario is that contribution is inelastic for small amounts, then passes through a regime where it is nearly unit elastic, and finally it becomes elastic as you start asking for really large amounts of money.

The simplest way to model that is to just assume that n(x) is linear in x, something like n = N – k x.

There is a parameter N that sets the maximum number of people who will ever donate, and a parameter k that sets how rapidly the number of contributors drops off as the amount asked for increases.

The first-order condition for maximizing n(x) * x is then quite simple: x = N/(2k)

This actually turns out to be the precisely the point at which the elasticity of contribution is -1.

The total amount you can get under that condition is N2/(4k)

Of course, I have no idea what N and k are in real life, so this isn’t terribly helpful. But what I really want to know is whether we should be asking for more money from each person, or asking for less money and trying to get more people on board.

In real life we can sometimes do both: Ask each person to give more than they are presently giving, whatever they are presently giving. (Just be sure to run your slogans by a diverse committee, so you don’t end up with “I’ve upped my standards. Now, up yours!”) But since we’re trying to find a benchmark level to demand of ourselves, let’s ignore that for now.

About 25% of American adults volunteer some of their time, averaging 140 hours of volunteer work per year. This is about 1.6% of all the hours in a year, or 2.4% of all waking hours. Total monetary contributions in the US reached $400 billion for the first time this year; this is about 2.0% of GDP. So the balance between volunteer hours and donations is actually pretty even. It would probably be better to tilt it a bit more toward donations, but it’s really not bad. About 60% of US households made some sort of charitable contribution, though only half of these received the charitable tax deduction.

This suggests to me that the quantity of people who give is probably about as high as it’s going to get—and therefore we need to start talking more about the amount of money. We may be in the inelastic regime, where the way to increase total contributions is to demand more from each individual.

Our goal is to increase the total contribution to poverty eradication by about 1% of GDP in both the US and Europe. So if 60% of people give, and currently total contributions are about 2.0% of GDP, this means that the average contribution is about 3.3% of the contributor’s gross income. Therefore I should tell them to donate 4.3%, right? Not quite; some of them might drop out entirely, and the rest will have to give more to compensate.
Without knowing the exact form of the function n(x), I can’t say precisely what the optimal value is. But it is most likely somewhat larger than 4.3%; 5% would be a nice round number in the right general range. This would raise contributions in the US to 2.6% of GDP, or about $500 billion. That’s a 20% increase over the current level, which is large, but feasible.

Accomplishing a similar increase in Europe would then give us a total of $200 billion per year in additional funds to fight global poverty; this might not quite be enough to end world hunger (depending on which estimate you use), but it would definitely have a large impact.

I asked you before to give 1%. I am afraid I must now ask for more. Set a target of 5%. You don’t have to reach it this year; you can gradually increase your donations each year for several years (I call this “Save More Lives Tomorrow”, after Thaler’s highly successful program “Save More Tomorrow”). This is in some sense more than your fair share; I’m relying on the assumption that half the population won’t actually give anything. But ultimately this isn’t about what’s fair to us. It’s about solving global problems.

What really works against bigotry

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, personal, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 30 JDN 2458392

With Donald Trump in office, I think we all need to be thinking carefully about what got us to this point, how we have apparently failed in our response to bigotry. It’s good to see that Kavanaugh’s nomination vote has been delayed pending investigations, but we can’t hope to rely on individual criminal accusations to derail every potentially catastrophic candidate. The damage that someone like Kavanaugh would do to the rights of women, racial minorities, and LGBT people is too severe to risk. We need to attack this problem at its roots: Why are there so many bigoted leaders, and so many bigoted voters willing to vote for them?

The problem is hardly limited to the United States; we are witnessing a global crisis of far-right ideology, as even the UN has publicly recognized.

I think the left made a very dangerous wrong turn with the notion of “call-out culture”. There is now empirical data to support me on this. Publicly calling people racist doesn’t make them less racist—in fact, it usually makes them more racist. Angrily denouncing people doesn’t change their minds—it just makes you feel righteous. Our own accusatory, divisive rhetoric is part of the problem: By accusing anyone who even slightly deviates from our party line (say, by opposing abortion in some circumstances, as 75% of Americans do?) of being a fascist, we slowly but surely push more people toward actual fascism.

Call-out culture encourages a black-and-white view of the world, where there are “good guys” (us) and “bad guys” (them), and our only job is to fight as hard as possible against the “bad guys”. It frees us from the pain of nuance, complexity, and self-reflection—at only the cost of giving up any hope of actually understanding the real causes or solving the problem. Bigotry is not something that “other” people have, which you, fine upstanding individual, could never suffer from. We are all Judy Hopps.

This is not to say we should do nothing—indeed, that would be just as bad if not worse. The rise of neofascism has been possible largely because so many people did nothing. Knowing that there is bigotry in all of us shouldn’t stop us from recognizing that some people are far worse than others, or paralyze us against constructively improving ourselves and our society. See the shades of gray without succumbing to the Fallacy of Gray.

The most effective interventions at reducing bigotry are done in early childhood; obviously, it’s far too late for that when it comes to people like Trump and Kavanaugh.

But there are interventions that can work at reducing bigotry among adults. We need to first understand where the bigotry comes from—and it doesn’t always come from the same source. We need to be willing to look carefully—yes, even sympathetically—at people with bigoted views so that we can understand them.

There are deep, innate systems in the human brain that make bigotry come naturally to us. Even people on the left who devote their lives to combating discrimination against women, racial minorities and LGBT people can still harbor bigoted attitudes toward other groups—such as rural people or Republicans. If you think that all Republicans are necessarily racist, that’s not a serious understanding of what motivates Republicans—that’s just bigotry on your part. Trump is racist. Pence is racist. One could argue that voting for them constitutes, in itself, a racist act. But that does not mean that every single Republican voter is fundamentally and irredeemably racist.

It’s also important to have conversations face-to-face. I must admit that I am personally terrible at this; despite training myself extensively in etiquette and public speaking to the point where most people perceive me as charismatic, even charming, deep down I am still a strong introvert. I dislike talking in person, and dread talking over the phone. I would much prefer to communicate entirely in written electronic communication—but the data is quite clear on this: Face-to-face conversations work better at changing people’s minds. It may be awkward and uncomfortable, but by being there in person, you limit their ability to ignore you or dismiss you; you aren’t a tweet from the void, but an actual person, sitting there in front of them.

Speak with friends and family members. This, I know, can be especially awkward and painful. In the last few years I have lost connections with friends who were once quite close to me as a result of difficult political conversations. But we must speak up, for silence becomes complicity. And speaking up really can work.

Don’t expect people to change their entire worldview overnight. Focus on small, concrete policy ideas. Don’t ask them to change who they are; ask them to change what they believe. Ask them to justify and explain their beliefs—and really listen to them when they do. Be open to the possibility that you, too might be wrong about something.

If they say “We should deport all illegal immigrants!”, point out that whenever we try this, a lot of fields go unharvested for lack of workers, and ask them why they are so concerned about illegal immigrants. If they say “Illegal immigrants come here and commit crimes!” point them to the statistical data showing that illegal immigrants actually commit fewer crimes on average than native-born citizens (probably because they are more afraid of what happens if they get caught).

If they are concerned about Muslim immigrants influencing our culture in harmful ways, first, acknowledge that there are legitimate concerns about Islamic cultural values (particularly toward women and LGBT people)—but then point out that over 90% of Muslim-Americans are proud to be American, and that welcoming people is much more effective at getting them to assimilate into our culture than keeping them out and treating them as outsiders.

If they are concerned about “White people getting outnumbered”, first point out that White people are still over 70% of the US population, and in most rural areas there are only a tiny fraction of non-White people. Point out that Census projections showing the US will be majority non-White by 2045 are based on naively extrapolating current trends, and we really have no idea what the world will look like almost 30 years from now. Next, ask them why they worry about being “outnumbered”; get them to consider that perhaps racial demographics don’t have to be a matter of zero-sum conflict.

After you’ve done this, you will feel frustrated and exhausted, and the relationship between you and the person you’re trying to convince will be strained. You will probably feel like you have accomplished absolutely nothing to change their mind—but you are wrong. Even if they don’t acknowledge any change in their beliefs, the mere fact that you sat down and asked them to justify what they believe, and presented calm, reasonable, cogent arguments against those beliefs will have an effect. It will be a small effect, difficult for you to observe in that moment. But it will still be an effect.

Think about the last time you changed your mind about something important. (I hope you can remember such a time; none of us were born being right about everything!) Did it happen all at once? Was there just one, single knock-down argument that convinced you? Probably not. (On some mathematical and scientific questions I’ve had that experience: Oh, wow, yeah, that proof totally demolishes what I believed. Well, I guess I was wrong. But most beliefs aren’t susceptible to such direct proof.) More likely, you were presented with arguments from a variety of sources over a long span of time, gradually chipping away at what you thought you knew. In the moment, you might not even have admitted that you thought any differently—even to yourself. But as the months or years went by, you believed something quite different at the end than you had at the beginning.

Your goal should be to catalyze that process in other people. Don’t take someone who is currently a frothing neo-Nazi and expect them to start marching with Black Lives Matter. Take someone who is currently a little bit uncomfortable about immigration, and calm their fears. Don’t take someone who thinks all poor people are subhuman filth and try to get them to support a basic income. Take someone who is worried about food stamps adding to our national debt, and show them how it is a small portion of our budget. Don’t take someone who thinks global warming was made up by the Chinese and try to get them to support a ban on fossil fuels. Take someone who is worried about gas prices going up as a result of carbon taxes and show them that carbon offsets would add only about $100 per person per year while saving millions of lives.

And if you’re ever on the other side, and someone has just changed your mind, even a little bit—say so. Thank them for opening your eyes. I think a big part of why we don’t spend more time trying to honestly persuade people is that so few people acknowledge us when we do.

We must stop Kavanaugh now!

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Post 257: Sep 16 JDN 2458378

I realized that this post can’t afford to wait a week. It’s too urgent.

It’s the best news I’ve heard in a long time: Paul Manafort has pled guilty and is cooperating with the investigation. This is a good day for Mueller, a bad day for Trump—and a great day for America.

Manafort himself has been involved in international corruption for decades. It’s a shame that he will now be getting off light on some of his crimes. But prosecutors would only do that if he had information to share with them that was of commensurate value—and I’m willing to bet that means he has information to implicate the Donald himself. Trump is right to be afraid.

Of course, we are still a long way from impeaching Trump, let alone removing him from office, much less actually restoring normalcy and legitimacy to our executive branch. We are still in a long, dark tunnel—but perhaps at last we are beginning to glimpse the light at the other end.

We should let Mueller and the federal prosecutors do their jobs; so far, they’ve done them quite well. In the meantime, instead of speculating about just how deep this rabbit hole of corruption goes (come on, we know Trump is corrupt; the only question is how much and with whom), it would be better to focus our attention on ensuring that Trump cannot leave a lasting legacy of destruction in his wake.

Priority number one is stopping Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh may seem like just another right-wing justice (after Scalia, how much worse can it get, really?), but no, he really is worse than that. He barely even pretends to respect the Constitution or past jurisprudence, and has done an astonishingly poor job of hiding his political agenda or his personal devotion to Trump. The most fundamental flaw of the US Supreme Court is the near-impossibility of removing a justice once appointed; that makes it absolutely vital that we stop his appointment from being confirmed.

It isn’t just Roe v. Wade that will be overturned if he gets on the court (that, at least, I can understand why a substantial proportion of Americans would approve—abortion is a much more complicated issue than either pro-life or pro-choice demagogues would have you believe, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy agrees). Kavanaugh looks poised to tear apart a wide variety of protections for civil rights, environmental sustainability, and labor protections. Sadly, our current Republican Party has become so craven, so beholden to party above country and all else, that they will most likely vote to advance, and ultimately, confirm, his nomination. And America, and all the world, will suffer for it, for decades to come.

If this happens, whom should we blame? Well, first of all, Trump and Kavanaugh themselves, of course. Second, the Republicans who confirmed Kavanaugh. Third, everyone who voted for Trump. But fourth? Everyone who didn’t vote for Clinton. Everyone who said, “She’s just as bad”, or “The two parties are the same”, or “He can’t possibly win”, or “We need real change”, and either sat home or voted for a third party—every one of those people has a little bit of blood on their hands. If the US Supreme Court spends the next 30 years tearing away the rights of women, racial minorities, LGBT people, and the working class, it will be at least a little bit their fault. When the asbestos returns to our buildings, the ozone layer resumes its decay, and all the world’s coastlines flood ever higher, they will bear at least some responsibility. All their claimed devotion to a morally purer “true” left wing will mean absolutely nothing—for it was only our “cynical” “corrupt” “neoliberal” pragmatism that even tried to hold the line. It is not enough to deserve to win—you must actually win.

But it’s not too late. Not yet. We can still make our voices heard. If you have any doubt about whether your Senator will vote against Kavanaugh (living in California, I frankly don’t—say what you will about Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, they have made their opposition to Kavanaugh abundantly clear at every opportunity), write or call that Senator and tell them why they must.

The confirmation vote is this Thursday, September 20. Make your voice heard by then, or it may be too late.