Why do we need “publish or perish”?

2019-06-232019-06-16 PNRJ ethics, personal, public policy, science and academia academia, academic, Daryl Bem, income, publish or perish, publishing, research, salary, tenure

June 23 JDN 2458658

This question may seem a bit self-serving, coming from a grad student who is struggling to get his first paper published in a peer-reviewed journal. But given the deep structural flaws in the academic publishing system, I think it’s worth taking a step back to ask just what peer-reviewed journals are supposed to be accomplishing.

The argument is often made that research journals are a way of sharing knowledge. If this is their goal, they have utterly and totally failed. Most papers are read by only a handful of people. When scientists want to learn about the research their colleagues are doing, they don’t read papers; they go to conferences to listen to presentations and look at posters. The way papers are written, they are often all but incomprehensible to anyone outside a very narrow subfield. When published by proprietary journals, papers are often hidden behind paywalls and accessible only through universities. As a knowledge-sharing mechanism, the peer-reviewed journal is a complete failure.

But academic publishing serves another function, which in practice is its only real function: Peer-reviewed publications are a method of evaluation. They are a way of deciding which researchers are good enough to be hired, get tenure, and receive grants. Having peer-reviewed publications—particularly in “top journals”, however that is defined within a given field—is a key metric that universities and grant agencies use to decide which researchers are worth spending on. Indeed, in some cases it seems to be utterly decisive.

We should be honest about this: This is an absolutely necessary function. It is uncomfortable to think about the fact that we must exclude a large proportion of competent, qualified people from being hired or getting tenure in academia, but given the large number of candidates and the small amounts of funding available, this is inevitable. We can’t hire everyone who would probably be good enough. We can only hire a few, and it makes sense to want those few to be the best. (Also, don’t fret too much: Even if you don’t make it into academia, getting a PhD is still a profitable investment. Economists and natural scientists do the best, unsurprisingly; but even humanities PhDs are still generally worth it. Median annual earnings of $77,000 is nothing to sneeze at: US median household income is only about $60,000. Humanities graduates only seem poor in relation to STEM or professional graduates; they’re still rich compared to everyone else.)

But I think it’s worth asking whether the peer review system is actually selecting the best researchers, or even the best research. Note that these are not the same question: The best research done in graduate school might not necessarily reflect the best long-run career trajectory for a researcher. A lot of very important, very difficult questions in science are just not the sort of thing you can get a convincing answer to in a couple of years, and so someone who wants to work on the really big problems may actually have a harder time getting published in graduate school or as a junior faculty member, even though ultimately work on the big problems is what’s most important for society. But I’m sure there’s a positive correlation overall: The kind of person who is going to do better research later is probably, other things equal, going to do better research right now.

Yet even accepting the fact that all we have to go on in assessing what you’ll eventually do is what you have already done, it’s not clear that the process of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal is a particularly good method of assessing the quality of research. Some really terrible research has gotten published in journals—I’m gonna pick on Daryl Bem, because he’s the worst—and a lot of really good research never made it into journals and is languishing on old computer hard drives. (The term “file drawer problem” is about 40 years obsolete; though to be fair, it was in fact coined about 40 years ago.)

That by itself doesn’t actually prove that journals are a bad mechanism. Even a good mechanism, applied to a difficult problem, is going to make some errors. But there are a lot of things about academic publishing, at least as currently constituted, that obviously don’t seem like a good mechanism, such as for-profit publishers, unpaid reviewiers, lack of double-blinded review, and above all, the obsession with “statistical significance” that leads to p-hacking.

Each of these problems I’ve listed has a simple fix (though whether the powers that be actually are willing to implement it is a different question: Questions of policy are often much easier to solve than problems of politics). But maybe we should ask whether the system is even worth fixing, or if it should simply be replaced entirely.

While we’re at it, let’s talk about the academic tenure system, because the peer-review system is largely an evaluation mechanism for the academic tenure system. Publishing in top journals is what decides whether you get tenure. The problem with “Publish or perish” isn’t the “publish”; it’s the “perish”. Do we even need an academic tenure system?

The usual argument for academic tenure concerns academic freedom: Tenured professors have job security, so they can afford to say things that may be controversial or embarrassing to the university. But the way the tenure system works is that you only have this job security after going through a long and painful gauntlet of job insecurity. You have to spend several years prostrating yourself to the elders of your field before you can get inducted into their ranks and finally be secure.

Of course, job insecurity is the norm, particularly in the United States: Most employment in the US is “at-will”, meaning essentially that your employer can fire you for any reason at any time. There are specifically illegal reasons for firing (like gender, race, and religion); but it’s extremely hard to prove wrongful termination when all the employer needs to say is, “They didn’t do a good job” or “They weren’t a team player”. So I can understand how it must feel strange for a private-sector worker who could be fired at any time to see academics complain about the rigors of the tenure system.

But there are some important differences here: The academic job market is not nearly as competitive as the private sector job market. There simply aren’t that many prestigious universities, and within each university there are only a small number of positions to fill. As a result, universities have an enormous amount of power over their faculty, which is why they can get away with paying adjuncts salaries that amount to less than minimum wage. (People with graduate degrees! Making less than minimum wage!) At least in most private-sector labor markets in the US, the market is competitive enough that if you get fired, you can probably get hired again somewhere else. In academia that’s not so clear.

I think what bothers me the most about the tenure system is the hierarchical structure: There is a very sharp divide between those who have tenure, those who don’t have it but can get it (“tenure-track”), and those who can’t get it. The lines between professor, associate professor, assistant professor, lecturer, and adjunct are quite sharp. The higher up you are, the more job security you have, the more money you make, and generally the better your working conditions are overall. Much like what makes graduate school so stressful, there are a series of high-stakes checkpoints you need to get through in order to rise in the ranks. And several of those checkpoints are based largely, if not entirely, on publication in peer-reviewed journals.

In fact, we are probably stressing ourselves out more than we need to. I certainly did for my advancement to candidacy; I spent two weeks at such a high stress level I was getting migraines every single day (clearly on the wrong side of the Yerkes-Dodson curve), only to completely breeze through the exam.

I think I might need to put this up on a wall somewhere to remind myself:

Most grad students complete their degrees, and most assistant professors get tenure.

The real filters are admissions and hiring: Most applications to grad school are rejected (though probably most graduate students are ultimately accepted somewhere—I couldn’t find any good data on that in a quick search), and most PhD graduates do not get hired on the tenure track. But if you can make it through those two gauntlets, you can probably make it through the rest.

In our current system, publications are a way to filter people, because the number of people who want to become professors is much higher than the number of professor positions available. But as an economist, this raises a very big question: Why aren’t salaries falling?

You see, that’s how markets are supposed to work: When supply exceeds demand, the price is supposed to fall until the market clears. Lower salaries would both open up more slots at universities (you can hire more faculty with the same level of funding) and shift some candidates into other careers (if you can get paid a lot better elsewhere, academia may not seem so attractive). Eventually there should be a salary point at which demand equals supply. So why aren’t we reaching it?

Well, it comes back to that tenure system. We can’t lower the salaries of tenured faculty, not without a total upheaval of the current system. So instead what actually happens is that universities switch to using adjuncts, who have very low salaries indeed. If there were no tenure, would all faculty get paid like adjuncts? No, they wouldn’t—because universities would have all that money they’re currently paying to tenured faculty, and all the talent currently locked up in tenured positions would be on the market, driving up the prevailing salary. What would happen if we eliminated tenure is not that all salaries would fall to adjunct level; rather, salaries would all adjust to some intermediate level between what adjuncts currently make and what tenured professors currently make.

What would the new salary be, exactly? That would require a detailed model of the supply and demand elasticities, so I can’t tell you without starting a whole new research paper. But a back-of-the-envelope calculation would suggest something like the overall current median faculty salary. This suggests a median salary somewhere around $75,000. This is a lot less than some professors make, but it’s also a lot more than what adjuncts make, and it’s a pretty good living overall.

If the salary for professors fell, the pool of candidates would decrease, and we wouldn’t need such harsh filtering mechanisms. We might decide we don’t need a strict evaluation system at all, and since the knowledge-sharing function of journals is much better served by other means, we could probably get rid of them altogether.

Of course, who am I kidding? That’s not going to happen. The people who make these rules succeeded in the current system. They are the ones who stand to lose high salaries and job security under a reform policy. They like things just the way they are.

Valuing harm without devaluing the harmed

2019-06-162019-06-09 PNRJ core principles, ethics, public policy disability, happiness, life expectancy, QALY, quality of life, utility, value

June 9 JDN 2458644

In last week’s post I talked about the matter of “putting a value on a human life”. I explained how we don’t actually need to make a transparently absurd statement like “a human life is worth $5 million” to do cost-benefit analysis; we simply need to ask ourselves what else we could do with any given amount of money. We don’t actually need to put a dollar value on human lives; we need only value them in terms of other lives.

But there is a deeper problem to face here, which is how we ought to value not simply life, but quality of life. The notion is built into the concept of quality-adjusted life-years (QALY), but how exactly do we make such a quality adjustment?

Indeed, much like cost-benefit analysis in general or the value of a statistical life, the very concept of QALY can be repugnant to many people. The problem seems to be that it violates our deeply-held belief that all lives are of equal value: If I say that saving one person adds 2.5 QALY and saving another adds 68 QALY, I seem to be saying that the second person is worth more than the first.

But this is not really true. QALY aren’t associated with a particular individual. They are associated with the duration and quality of life.

It should be fairly easy to convince yourself that duration matters: Saving a newborn baby who will go on to live to be 84 years old adds an awful lot more in terms of human happiness than extending the life of a dying person by a single hour. To call each of these things “saving a life” is actually very unequal: It’s implying that 1 hour for the second person is worth 84 years for the first.

Quality, on the other hand, poses much thornier problems. Presumably, we’d like to be able to say that being wheelchair-bound is a bad thing, and if we can make people able to walk we should want to do that. But this means that we need to assign some sort of QALY cost to being in a wheelchair, which then seems to imply that people in wheelchairs are worth less than people who can walk.

And the same goes for any disability or disorder: Assigning a QALY cost to depression, or migraine, or cystic fibrosis, or diabetes, or blindness, or pneumonia, always seems to imply that people with the condition are worth less than people without. This is a deeply unsettling result.

Yet I think the mistake is in how we are using the concept of “worth”. We are not saying that the happiness of someone with depression is less important than the happiness of someone without; we are saying that the person with depression experiences less happiness—which, in this case of depression especially, is basically true by construction.

Does this imply, however, that if we are given the choice between saving two people, one of whom has a disability, we should save the one without?

Well, here’s an extreme example: Suppose there is a plague which kills 50% of its victims within one year. There are two people in a burning building. One of them has the plague, the other does not. You only have time to save one: Which do you save? I think it’s quite obvious you save the person who doesn’t have the plague.

But that only relies upon duration, which wasn’t so difficult. All right, fine; say the plague doesn’t kill you. Instead, it renders you paralyzed and in constant pain for the rest of your life. Is it really that far-fetched to say that we should save the person who won’t have that experience?

We really shouldn’t think of it as valuing people; we should think of it as valuing actions. QALY are a way of deciding which actions we should take, not which people are more important or more worthy. “Is a person who can walk worth more than a person who needs a wheelchair?” is a fundamentally bizarre and ultimately useless question. ‘Worth more’ in what sense? “Should we spend $100 million developing this technology that will allow people who use wheelchairs to walk?” is the question we should be asking. The QALY cost we assign to a condition isn’t about how much people with that condition are worth; it’s about what resources we should be willing to commit in order to treat that condition. If you have a given condition, you should want us to assign a high QALY cost to it, to motivate us to find better treatments.

I think it’s also important to consider which individuals are having QALY added or subtracted. In last week’s post I talked about how some people read “the value of a statistical life is $5 million” to mean “it’s okay to kill someone as long as you profit at least $5 million”; but this doesn’t follow at all. We don’t say that it’s all right to steal $1,000 from someone just because they lose $1,000 and you gain $1,000. We wouldn’t say it was all right if you had a better investment strategy and would end up with $1,100 afterward. We probably wouldn’t even say it was all right if you were much poorer and desperate for the money (though then we might at least be tempted). If a billionaire kills people to make $10 million each (sadly I’m quite sure that oil executives have killed for far less), that’s still killing people. And in fact since he is a billionaire, his marginal utility of wealth is so low that his value of a statistical life isn’t $5 million; it’s got to be in the billions. So the net happiness of the world has not increased, in fact.

Above all, it’s vital to appreciate the benefits of doing good cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis tells us to stop fighting wars. It tells us to focus our spending on medical research and foreign aid instead of yet more corporate subsidies or aircraft carriers. It tells us how to allocate our public health resources so as to save the most lives. It emphasizes how vital our environmental regulations are in making our lives better and longer.

Could we do all these things without QALY? Maybe—but I suspect we would not do them as well, and when millions of lives are on the line, “not as well” is thousands of innocent people dead. Sometimes we really are faced with two choices for a public health intervention, and we need to decide which one will help the most people. Sometimes we really do have to set a pollution target, and decide just what amount of risk is worth accepting for the economic benefits of industry. These are very difficult questions, and without good cost-benefit analysis we could get the answers dangerously wrong.

How much should we value statistical lives?

2019-06-092019-06-02 PNRJ core principles, current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, market failure, public policy Disneyland, environment, foreign aid, poverty, QALY, value of a statistical life, war

June 9 JDN 2458644

The very concept of putting a dollar value on a human life offends most people. I understand why: It suggests that human lives are fungible, and also seems to imply that killing people is just fine as long as it produces sufficient profit.

In next week’s post I’ll try to assuage some of those fears: Saying that a life is worth say $5 million doesn’t actually mean that it’s justifiable to kill someone as long as it pays you $5 million.

But for now let me say that we really have no choice but to do this. There are a huge number of interventions we could make in the world that all have the same basic form: They could save lives, but they cost money. We need to be able to say when we are justified in spending more money to save more lives, and when we are not.

No, it simply won’t do to say that “money is no object”. Because money isn’t just money—money is human happiness. A willingness to spend unlimited amounts to save even a single life, if it could be coherently implemented at all, would result in, if not complete chaos or deadlock, a joyless, empty world where we all live to be 100 by being contained in protective foam and fed by machines. It may be uncomfortable to ask a question like “How many people should we be willing to let die to let ourselves have Disneyland?”; but if that answer were zero, we should not have Disneyland. The same is true for almost everything in our lives: From automobiles to chocolate, almost any product you buy, any service you consume, has resulted in some person’s death at some point.

And there is an even more urgent reason, in fact: There are many things we are currently not doing that could save many lives for very little money. Targeted foreign aid or donations to top charities could save lives for as little as $1000 each. Foreign aid is so cost-effective that even if the only thing foreign aid had ever accomplished was curing smallpox, it would be twice as cost-effective as the UK National Health Service (which is one of the best healthcare systems in the world). Tighter environmental regulations save an additional life for about $200,000 in compliance cost, which is less than we would have spent in health care costs; the Clean Air Act added about $12 trillion to the US economy over the last 30 years.

Reduced military spending could literally pay us money to save people’s lives—based on the cost of the Afghanistan War, we are currently paying as much as $1 million per person to kill people that we really have very little reason to kill.

Most of the lives we could save are statistical lives: We can’t point to a particular individual who will or will not die because of the decision, but we can do the math and say approximately how many people will or will not die. We know that approximately 11,000 people will die each year if we loosen regulations on mercury pollution; we can’t say who they are, but they’re out there. Human beings have a lot of trouble thinking this way; it’s just not how our brains evolved to work. But when we’re talking about policy on a national or global scale, it’s quite simply the only way to do things. Anything else is talking nonsense.

Standard estimates of the value of a statistical life range from about $4 million to $9 million. These estimates are based on how much people are willing to pay for reductions in risk. So for instance if people would pay $100 to reduce their chances of dying by 0.01%, we divide the former by the latter to say that a life is worth about $1 million.

It’s a weird question: You clearly can’t just multiply like that. How much would you be willing to accept for a 100% chance of death? Presumably there isn’t really such an amount, because you would be dead. So your willingness-to-accept is undefined. And there’s no particular reason for it to be linear below that: Since marginal utility of wealth is decreasing, the amount you would demand for a 50% chance of death is a lot more than 50 times as much as what you would demand for a 1% chance of death.
Say for instance that utility of wealth is logarithmic. Say your currently lifetime wealth is $1 million, and your current utility is about 70 QALY. Then if we measure wealth in thousands of dollars, we have W = 1000 and U = 10 ln W.

How much would you be willing to accept for a 1% chance of death? Your utility when dead is presumably zero, so we are asking for an amount m such that 0.99 U(W+m) = U(W). 0.99 (10 ln (W+m)) = 10 ln means (W+m)^0.99 = W, so m = W^(1/0.99) – W. We started with W = 1000, so m = 72. You would be willing to accept $72,000 for a 1% chance of death. So we would estimate the value of a statistical life at $7.2 million.

How much for a 0.0001% chance of death? W^(1/0.999999)-W = 0.0069. So you would demand $6.90 for such a risk, and we’d estimate your value of a statistical life at $6.9 million. Pretty close, though not the same.

But how much would you be willing to accept for a 50% chance of death? W^(1/0.5) – W = 999,000. That is, $999 million. So if we multiplied that out, we’d say that your value of a statistical life has now risen to a staggering (and ridiculous) $2 billion.

Mathematically, the estimates are more consistent if we use small probabilities—but all this assumes that people actually know their own utility of wealth and calculate it correctly, which is a very unreasonable assumption.

The much bigger problem with this method is that human beings are terrible at dealing with small probabilities. When asked how much they’d be willing to pay to reduce their chances of dying by 0.01%, most people probably have absolutely no idea and may literally just say a random number.

We need to rethink our entire approach for judging such numbers. Honestly we shouldn’t be trying to put a dollar value on a human life; we should be asking about the dollar cost of saving a human life. We should be asking what else we could do with that money. Indeed, for the time being, I think the best thing to do is actually to compare lives to lives: How many lives could we save for this amount of money?

Thus, if we’re considering starting a war that will cost $1 trillion, we need to ask ourselves: How many innocent people would die if we don’t do that? How many will die if we do? And what else could we do with a trillion dollars? If the war is against Nazi Germany, okay, sure; we’re talking about killing millions to save tens of millions. But if it’s against ISIS, or Iran, those numbers don’t come out so great.

If we have a choice between two policies, each of which will cost $10 billion, and one of them will save 1,000 lives while the other will save 100,000, the obvious answer is to pick the second one. Yet this is exactly the world we live in, and we’re not doing that. We are throwing money at military spending and tax cuts (things that many not save any lives at all) and denying it from climate change adaptation, foreign aid, and poverty relief.

Instead of asking whether a given intervention is cost-effective based upon some notion of a dollar value of a human life, we should be asking what the current cost of saving a human life is, and we should devote all available resources into whatever means saves the most lives for the least money. Most likely that means some sort of foreign aid, public health intervention, or poverty relief in Third World countries. It clearly does not mean cutting taxes on billionaires or starting another war in the Middle East.

Just how poor is poor?

2019-06-022019-05-24 PNRJ core principles, current events, development economics, ethics, inequality, public policy Congo, dehydration, disease, extreme poverty, inequality, Jeff Bezos, malnutrition, poverty, smartphones, United Nations, United States, World Bank

June 2 JDN 2458637

In last week’s post I told you about the richest of the rich, the billionaires with ten, eleven, or even twelve-figure net wealth. My concern about them is only indirect: I care that we have concentrated so many of the resources of our society into this handful of people instead of spreading it around where it would do more good. But it is not inherently bad for billionaires to exist; all other things equal, people having more wealth is good.

Today my topic is the poorest of the poor. Their status is inherently bad. No one deserves it, and while for much of history we may have been powerless to prevent it, we are no longer. We could help these people—quite substantially quite cheaply, as you’ll see—and we are simply choosing not to. Perhaps you as an individual are not making this choice; perhaps, like me, you vote for candidates who support international aid and donate to top-rated international charities. But as a society, we are making this choice. Voters in the First World could all agree—or even 51% agree—that this problem really should be fixed, and we could fix it.

If asked, most people would say they care about world hunger, but either they are deeply ignorant about the solutions we now have availble to us, or they can’t really care about world hunger, or they would have voted for politicians who were committed to actually implementing the spending necessary to fix it. Maybe people would prefer to fix world hunger as long as it didn’t cost them a cent; but ask them to pay even a little bit, and suddenly they’re not so sure.

At current prices, the official UN threshold for “extreme poverty” is $1.90 in real consumption per person per day. I want to be absolutely clear about this: This is adjusted for inflation and local purchasing power. They account for all consumption, including hunting, fishing, gathering, and goods made at home or obtained through bartering. This is not an artifact of failing to adjust for prices or not including goods that aren’t bought with money. These people really do live on less than $700 per year.

Shockingly, they are not all in Third World countries. While the majority of what we call “poverty” in the United States is well above the standard of living of UN “extreme poverty”, there are exceptions to this; th ere are about 5 million people in the US who are genuinely so poor that they are accurately categorized as at or near that $1.90 per day threshold.

This is such a shocking and horrifying truth that many people will try to deny it, as at least one libertarian think-tank did in a propagandistic screed. No, the UN isn’t lying; it’s really that bad. Extreme poverty in the US could be fixed so quickly, so easily that the fact that it remains in place can only be called an atrocity. Change a few numbers in the IRS code, work out a payment distribution system to reach people without bank accounts using cash or mobile payments, and by the end of the year you would have ended extreme poverty in the United States with no more than a few billion dollars diverted—which is to say, an amount that Jeff Bezos himself could afford to pay, or an amount that could be raised by a single percentage point of capital gains tax applied to billionaires only.
Even so, life is probably better for a homeless person on the street in New York City than it is for a child with malaria whose parents died in civil war in Congo. The New Yorker has access to clean water via drinking fountains, basic sanitation via public toilets (particularly in government buildings, since private businesses often specifically try to exclude the homeless), and basic nutrition via food banks and soup kitchens. The Congolese child has none of these things.

Life for the very poorest is a constant struggle for survival, against disease, malnutrition, dehydration, and parasites. Forget having a refrigerator or a microwave (as most of the poor in the US do, and rightly so—these things are really cheap here); they often have little clothing and no reliable shelter. The idea of going to a school or seeing a doctor sounds like a pipe dream. Surprisingly, there is a good chance that they or someone they know has a smartphone; if so it is likely their most prized possession. Though in Congo in particular, smartphones are relatively rare, which is ironic because the most critical raw material for smartphones—tantalum—is quite prevalent in Congo and a major source of conflict there.

Such a hard life is also typically a short one. The average life expectancy in Congo is less than 65 years. This is mainly due to the fact that almost 15% of children will die before the age of five, though fortunately infant and child mortality in Congo is rapidly declining (though that means it used to be worse than this!).

A disease that is merely inconvenient in a rich country is often fatal in a poor one; malaria is the classic example of this. Malaria remains the cause of over one million deaths per year, but essentially no one dies of malaria in First World countries. It can be treated with quinine, which costs no more than $3 per pill. But when your total consumption is $1.50 per day, a $3 pill is still prohibitively expensive. While in rich countries antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis is a real danger, for the world’s poorest people it doesn’t much matter if the bacteria are resistant to antibiotics, because nobody can afford antibiotics.

What could we do to save these people? A great deal, as it turns out.

Ending extreme poverty worldwide wouldn’t be as easy as ending it in the United States; there’s no central taxation authority that would let us simply change a few numbers and then start writing checks.
We could implement changes through either official development aid or by supporting specific vetted non-governmental organizations, but each of these options carries drawbacks. Development aid can be embezzled by corrupt governments. NGOs can go bankrupt or have their assets expropriated.

Yet even with such challenges in mind, the total cost to end extreme poverty—not all poverty, but extreme poverty—worldwide is probably less than $200 billion per year. This is not a small sum, but it is well within our means. This is less than a third of the US military budget (not counting non-DoD military spending!), or about half what the US spends on gasoline.

Frankly I think we could safely divert that $200 billion directly from military spending without losing any national security. 21st century warfare is much less about blowing up targets and much more about winning hearts and minds. Ending world hunger would win an awful lot of hearts and minds, methinks. Obviously we can’t eliminate all military spending; those first two or three aircraft carrier battle groups really are keeping us and our allies safer. Did we really need eleven?

But all right, suppose we did need to raise additional tax revenue to fund this program. How much would taxes have to go up? Let’s say that only First World countries pay, which we can approximate using the GDP of the US and the EU (obviously we could also include Canada and Australia, but we might not want to include some of Eastern Europe, so that roughly balances out). Add up the $19 trillion of European Union GDP and $21 trillion of US GDP together and you get $40 trillion per year; $200 billion is only 0.5% of that. We would only need to raise taxes by half a percentage point to fund this program. Even if we didn’t make the tax progressive (and why wouldn’t we?), a typical family making $60,000 per year would only need to pay an extra $300 per year.

Why aren’t we doing this?

This is a completely serious question. Feel free to read it in an exasperated voice. I honestly would like to know why the world is willing to leave so many people in so much suffering when we could save them for such little cost.

Just how rich is rich?

2019-05-262019-05-16 PNRJ core principles, ethics, inequality, public policy Ann Arbor, Bill Gates, billionaires, capital, capital gains, capitalism, GiveDirectly, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, millionaires, Mitt Romney, poor, Queen Elizabeth, rich, Scandinaviaisbetter, socialism, wealth

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.

Green New Deal Part 4: Guaranteeing employment and housing is very hard—but we should still try (public policy)

2019-04-282019-04-21 PNRJ ethics, public policy basic income, homeless, housing, job guarantee, poverty, unemployment

Apr 28 JDN 2458602

In previous posts I have talked about the “easy parts” of the Green New Deal (infrastructure, healthcare and education), as well as one of the “hard parts” (net-zero carbon emissions). But today it’s time for the “very hard parts”: guaranteed employment and housing.

“Guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.”

“Providing all people of the United States with – […] (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; (iii) economic security; […].

Let me start by giving you a sense of how difficult this is: No country on Earth has ever successfully guaranteed employment and housing. Even Scandinavia’s extensive social safety nets and active labor market programs are not sufficient to eliminate homelessness or unemployment (though they do dramatically reduce them).

The Soviet Union came close to guaranteed employment, but only as part of a labor system that was extremely inefficient and unproductive. Effectively, they guaranteed everyone a job by not even firing people who didn’t actually do the jobs they were given. This is clearly not a sustainable solution.

There are serious proposals on the table for a job guarantee program, but they are extremely ambitious.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a proposal that would add 9.7 million people to the federal workforce and cost over $500 billion per year to operate. For comparison, the current non-postal federal workforce is only 2.1 million. The postal service has about another 600,000. So we are talking about quintupling the federal workforce, at a cost comparable to the entire (bloated) military budget. That’s a huge number of people and a lot of money.

The basic idea of such a program is that we can (hopefully) find various forms of public service that need to be done, and pay people to do that public service at a certain minimum level of pay and benefits. These jobs would be available to anyone who wanted them, and any time you lost a private-sector job you could always take the guaranteed job. This would effectively create a floor on wages and benefits; any job that offered a worse deal than the government job would be competed out of existence.

I’ve written before about why I’m skeptical of such programs. If there is all this work that needs done, why aren’t we already doing it? If people have the skills they need to do this work, why is no one currently employing them?

Maybe there is a way to solve these problems. Maybe I’m underestimating the public goods that could be produced by people with low levels of skill. But at the very least we need to face up to the fact that it is a problem. We need to actually find work that it makes sense to guarantee—we can’t just wave our hands and say that “obviously” there is plenty of valuable work to be done that will happen to line up exactly with the skills of the people who are currently unemployed.

And then we need to think about the fact that we can’t really guarantee it, not the way the Soviet Union did. We do need to be able to fire people. We need to be able to fire them for not showing up to work, for being drunk at work, for sexually harassing co-workers, or simply for being incompetent. We need to be have some sort of policy in place for what happens to people who get fired: How long before they can get another guaranteed job? And being fired should hurt: It’s supposed to be an incentive to do your job correctly. We don’t need to punish laziness or incompetence with homelessness—but we do need to punish it with something.

Ultimately what I would like to see is not guaranteed jobs but guaranteed income: A basic income that everyone gets, no questions asked. And then I would hope that our norms about work would change, and people would stop defining themselves by their paid employment and start defining themselves by other things, like creating art, supporting their family, or contributing to their community.

What about guaranteed housing? On that front I am more optimistic.

Housing is quite expensive, particularly in major cities. But homelessness is also very expensive from a societal perspective. In the long run, free housing might actually pay for itself.

One of the most successful programs at reducing homelessness is called Housing First. Rather than going through the usual machinations of shelters and transitional housing, the program just takes people off the streets and gives them homes. Like a basic income, it sounds ludicrously simple; it’s the sort of thing a five-year-old would suggest. Surely it can’t be that easy?

Well, the results speak for themselves. Implementation of Housing First programs in several major US cities has resulted in reductions in homeless of over 30% and reductions in the social cost of homelessness of over 50%.

The current population of about 80,000 chronically homeless Americans each cost taxpayers about $40,000 per year in social costs, via emergency room visits, shelter maintenance, crime, court costs, and so on. This is about $3 billion per year. For that same amount of money—or potentially even less—we could have put all those people into homes.

There is an additional population of about 500,000 transient homeless—people who are homeless for a short period after an adverse life event (such as losing a job, having a divorce, or getting their mortgage foreclosed) but will find housing within a few weeks or months. Their situation is not as dire, and the costs they impose on society are not as large. But standard estimates are still generally over $10,000 per person per year—which, if given to them in cash, would probably be enough to get most of these people into homes.

So this is not a question of affordability: We are already paying these costs, but doing so in a way that doesn’t actually solve homelessness.

The real challenge is subtler than that: How do we make this fair and politically feasible?

When we’re talking about chronically homelessness, I think we can make a pretty strong case: These people are in a really bad way and they need our help. Since we’re already spending all this money anyway, we may as well spend it in a way that would actually help them.

But transient homelessness gets a bit more complicated. Many people who are transiently homeless are not all that poor. They may be college students, or recent divorcees, or failed entrepreneurs, or people who could afford a home but not the expensive home they actually tried to buy. Once they get back on their feet, they will probably go on to maintain a middle-class standard of living. So it really does seem unfair to just hand these people free homes that other people would not get.

And making housing in general completely free is simply a pipe dream. No country has ever even gotten close to that. Housing is such a huge part of a country’s expenditures that even a country like Denmark where the government is half the economy still can’t afford to put everyone in public housing.

I think what I would do instead is provide guaranteed subsidized loans—much as we do for student loans. These loans could be used to pay rent, to pay a mortgage, or even to make a down payment. They would be available to any adult US citizen, regardless of credit history, in relatively large amounts (the average down payment in the US is about $14,000, but as high as $50,000 is not unusual), at very low interest rates (I’d say aim for 0% real interest, so target the nominal interest rate to inflation) and very generous repayment terms (like student loans, you would never be required to pay more than a certain percentage of your adjusted gross income on the loan). If someone did try to avoid paying, their wages could be garnished or their taxes could be increased—this would make the default rates very low.

This policy would allow people who are temporarily homeless to get back into a home immediately, rather than having to wait until they can get more income—which can become a paradox as most employers will require a permanent address. But it wouldn’t be a free home; this policy would cost taxpayers next to nothing. The only costs would come from subsidizing interest rates and bearing defaults, which wouldn’t be more than about 5% of the outstanding balance—even if we loaned out as much as $100 billion, that still wouldn’t be more than what we’re currently losing in social costs of homelessness.

Had this policy been in place during the 2008 crash, people who lost their homes to foreclosure would have been able to immediately re-borrow and buy new homes. This would have blunted the financial crisis and maybe even done as much as the far more expensive stimulus package and quantitative easing programs.

These policies would not, unfortunately, eliminate unemployment and homelessness. Maybe that’s not even possible. But they would at least greatly reduce the harm caused by unemployment and homelessness, and that alone makes them worth doing.

Green New Deal Part 3: Guaranteeing education and healthcare is easy—why aren’t we doing it?

2019-04-212019-04-13 PNRJ current events, ethics, inequality, personal, public policy Australia, Cuba, Donald Trump, education, France, Germany, healthcare, income, Obamacare, socialism, student loans, Sweden, UK

Apr 21 JDN 2458595

Last week was one of the “hard parts” of the Green New Deal. Today it’s back to one of the “easy parts”: Guaranteed education and healthcare.

“Providing all people of the United States with – (i) high-quality health care; […]

“Providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States.”

Many Americans seem to think that providing universal healthcare would be prohibitively expensive. In fact, it would have literally negative net cost.

The US currently has the most bloated, expensive, inefficient healthcare system in the entire world. We spend almost $10,000 per person per year on healthcare, and get outcomes no better than France or the UK where they spend less than $5,000.

In fact, our public healthcare expenditures are currently higher than almost every other country. Our private expenditures are therefore pure waste; all they are doing is providing returns for the shareholders of corporations. If we were to simply copy the UK National Health Service and spend money in exactly the same way as they do, we would spend the same amount in public funds and almost nothing in private funds—and the UK has a higher mean lifespan than the US.

This is absolutely a no-brainer. Burn the whole system of private insurance down. Copy a healthcare system that actually works, like they use in every other First World country.

It wouldn’t even be that complicated to implement: We already have a single-payer healthcare system in the US; it’s called Medicare. Currently only old people get it; but old people use the most healthcare anyway. Hence, Medicare for All: Just lower the eligibility age for Medicare to 18 (if not zero). In the short run there would be additional costs for the transition, but in the long run we would save mind-boggling amounts of money, all while improving healthcare outcomes and extending our lifespans. Current estimates say that the net savings of Medicare for All would be about $5 trillion over the next 10 years. We can afford this. Indeed, the question is, as it was for infrastructure: How can we afford not to do this?

Isn’t this socialism? Yeah, I suppose it is. But healthcare is one of the few things that socialist countries consistently do extremely well. Cuba is a socialist country—a real socialist country, not a social democratic welfare state like Norway but a genuinely authoritarian centrally-planned economy. Cuba’s per-capita GDP PPP is a third of ours. Yet their life expectancy is actually higher than ours, because their healthcare system is just that good. Their per-capita healthcare spending is one-fourth of ours, and their health outcomes are better. So yeah, let’s be socialist in our healthcare. Socialists seem really good at healthcare.

And this makes sense, if you think about it. Doctors can do their jobs a lot better when they’re focused on just treating everyone who needs help, rather than arguing with insurance companies over what should and shouldn’t be covered. Preventative medicine is extremely cost-effective, yet it’s usually the first thing that people skimp on when trying to save money on health insurance. A variety of public health measures (such as vaccination and air quality regulation) are extremely cost-effective, but they are public goods that the private sector would not pay for by itself.

It’s not as if healthcare was ever really a competitive market anyway: When you get sick or injured, do you shop around for the best or cheapest hospital? How would you even go about that, when they don’t even post most of their prices and what prices they post are often wildly different than what you’ll actually pay?

The only serious argument I’ve heard against single-payer healthcare is a moral one: “Why should I have to pay for other people’s healthcare?” Well, I guess, because… you’re a human being? You should care about other human beings, and not want them to suffer and die from easily treatable diseases?

I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.

Single-payer healthcare is not only affordable: It would be cheaper and better than what we are currently doing. (In fact, almost anything would be cheaper and better than what we are currently doing—Obamacare was an improvement over the previous mess, but it’s still a mess.)

What about public education? Well, we already have that up to the high school level, and it works quite well.

Contrary to popular belief, the average public high school has better outcomes in terms of test scores and college placements than the average private high school. There are some elite private schools that do better, but they are extraordinarily expensive and they self-select only the best students. Public schools have to take all students, and they have a limited budget; but they have high quality standards and they require their teachers to be certified.

The flaws in our public school system are largely from it being not public enough, which is to say that schools are funded by their local property taxes instead of having their costs equally shared across whole states. This gives them the same basic problem as private schools: Rich kids get better schools.

If we removed that inequality, our educational outcomes would probably be among the best in the world—indeed, in our most well-funded school districts, they are. The state of Massachusetts which actually funds their public schools equally and well, gets international test scores just as good as the supposedly “superior” educational systems of Asian countries. In fact, this is probably even unfair to Massachusetts, as we know that China specifically selects the regions that have the best students to be the ones to take these international tests. Massachusetts is the best the US has to offer, but Shanghai is also the best China has to offer, so it’s only fair we compare apples to apples.

Public education has benefits for our whole society. We want to have a population of citizens, workers, and consumers who are well-educated. There are enormous benefits of primary and secondary education in terms of reducing poverty, improving public health, and increased economic growth.

So there’s my impassioned argument for why we should continue to support free, universal public education up to high school.

When it comes to college, I can’t be quite so enthusiastic. While there are societal benefits of college education, most of the benefits of college accrue to the individuals who go to college themselves.

The median weekly income of someone with a high school diploma is about $730; with a bachelor’s degree this rises to $1200; and with a doctoral or professional degree it gets over $1800. Higher education also greatly reduces your risk of being unemployed; while about 4% of the general population is unemployed, only 1.5% of people with doctorates or professional degrees are. Add that up over all the weeks of your life, and it’s a lot of money.

The net present value of a college education has been estimated at approximately $1 million. This result is quite sensitive to the choice of discount rate; at a higher discount rate you can get the net present value as “low” as $250,000.

With this in mind, the fact that the median student loan debt for a college graduate is about $30,000 doesn’t sound so terrible, does it? You’re taking out a loan for $30,000 to get something that will earn you between $250,000 and $1 million over the course of your life.

There is some evidence that having student loans delays homeownership; but this is a problem with our mortgage system, not our education system. It’s mainly the inability to finance a down payment that prevents people from buying homes. We should implement a system of block grants for first-time homeowners that gives them a chunk of money to make a down payment, perhaps $50,000. This would cost about as much as the mortgage interest tax deduction which mainly benefits the upper-middle class.

Higher education does have societal benefits as well. Perhaps the starkest I’ve noticed is how categorically higher education decided people’s votes on Donald Trump: Counties with high rates of college education almost all voted for Clinton, and counties with low rates of college education almost all voted for Trump. This was true even controlling for income and a lot of other demographic factors. Only authoritarianism, sexism and racism were better predictors of voting for Trump—and those could very well be mediating variables, if education reduces such attitudes.

If indeed it’s true that higher education makes people less sexist, less racist, less authoritarian, and overall better citizens, then it would be worth every penny to provide universal free college.

But it’s worth noting that even countries like Germany and Sweden which ostensibly do that don’t really do that: While college tuition is free for Swedish citizens and Germany provides free college for all students of any nationality, nevertheless the proportion of people in Sweden and Germany with bachelor’s degrees is actually lower than that of the United States. In Sweden the gap largely disappears if you restrict to younger cohorts—but in Germany it’s still there.

Indeed, from where I’m sitting, “universal free college” looks an awful lot like “the lower-middle class pays for the upper-middle class to go to college”. Social class is still a strong predictor of education level in Sweden. Among OECD countries, education seems to be the best at promoting upward mobility in Australia, and average college tuition in Australia is actually higher than average college tuition in the US (yes, even adjusting for currency exchange: Australian dollars are worth only slightly less than US dollars).

What does Australia do? They have a really good student loan system. You have to reach an annual income of about $40,000 per year before you need to make payments at all, and the loans are subsidized to be interest-free. Once you do owe payments, the debt is repaid at a rate proportional to your income—so effectively it’s not a debt at all but an equity stake.

In the US, students have been taking the desperate (and very cyberpunk) route of selling literal equity stakes in their education to Wall Street banks; this is a terrible idea for a hundred reasons. But having the government have something like an equity stake in students makes a lot of sense.

Because of the subsidies and generous repayment plans, the Australian government loses money on their student loan system, but so what? In order to implement universal free college, they would have spent an awful lot more than they are losing now. This way, the losses are specifically on students who got a lot of education but never managed to raise their income high enough—which means the government is actually incentivized to improve the quality of education or job-matching.

The cost of universal free college is considerable: That $1.3 trillion currently owed as student loans would be additional government debt or tax liability instead. Is this utterly unaffordable? No. But it’s not trivial either. We’re talking about roughly $60 billion per year in additional government spending, a bit less than what we currently spend on food stamps. An expenditure like that should have a large public benefit (as food stamps absolutely, definitely do!); I’m not convinced that free college would have such a benefit.

It would benefit me personally enormously: I currently owe over $100,000 in debt (about half from my undergrad and half from my first master’s). But I’m fairly privileged. Once I finally make it through this PhD, I can expect to make something like $100,000 per year until I retire. I’m not sure that benefiting people like me should be a major goal of public policy.

That said, I don’t think universal free college is a terrible policy. Done well, it could be a good thing. But it isn’t the no-brainer that single-payer healthcare is. We can still make sure that students are not overburdened by debt without making college tuition actually free.

SESTA/FOSTA: oppression through moral panic

2019-03-312019-03-25 PNRJ current events, ethics civil liberty, constitution, forced labor, FOSTA, free speech, Internet, law, moral panic, PATRIOT ACT, SESTA, sex, sex trafficking, sex work

Mar 31 JDN 2458574

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

The “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act” and “Fight Online Sex Traffickers Act”. Who could disagree with that? Nobody wants to be on the side of sex traffickers.

Beware bills with such one-sided names; they are almost never what they seem. The “USA PATRIOT Act” was one of the most authoritarian and un-American pieces of legislation ever produced.

The bill was originally two bills, SESTA and FOSTA, which were then merged. For the rest of this post I’m just going to call it SESTA for short.

SESTA passed with overwhelming support; the vote totals were 388 to 25 in the House and 97 to 2 in the Senate. Apparently members of Congress fall for that sort of one-sided naming, because they also passed the USA PATRIOT Act 357 to 66 in the House and 98 to 1 in the Senate. This is the easiest way to take away our freedoms: Make it sound like you are doing something obviously good that no sane person could disagree with. If fascism comes to America, it will be called the “Puppies Are Cute Act” and it will pass with overwhelming support.

Of course I’m against sex trafficking. Almost everyone is against sex trafficking. The problem is that SESTA doesn’t actually do much to fight sex trafficking, may in some cases make sex trafficking worse, and sets a precedent that could undermine fundamental civil liberties.

So, what does SESTA actually do? At its core, it changes the way the Internet is regulated. It has been a basic principle of Internet regulation from the beginning that websites aren’t responsible for the actions of their users; unless a site is actively designed for an illegal purpose, the fact that it is used for illegal purposes is not the website’s fault.

This is how we regulate other forms of communication. If a mob boss calls a hit man on the phone, we don’t sue the phone company. If banks exchange emails to collude on manipulating interest rates, we don’t put the email sysadmin in jail. If terrorists send messages through the mail, we don’t arrest the postal workers.

There may be some grey areas, but generally courts have leaned toward greater liberty: The Anarchist’s Cookbook sure looks an awful lot like a means for conducting acts of sabotage and terrorism, but we’re so loathe to ban books that we allow it to be sold.

That is, until now. Because it’s about sex crime, we went into moral panic mode and stopped thinking clearly about the real implications of the policy. We don’t react the same way to gun crime—if we did, we’d have re-instituted the assault weapons ban a decade ago. This is clearly part of our double standard between sex and violence. Sex trafficking is horrible, to be sure; but I think that gun homicides clearly worse. (Yes, it is horrible to be forced into sexual slavery; but would you rather be shot to death?) But we wildly overreact to the former and do basically nothing to stop the latter. And the scale of the two problems is not just comparable, it’s almost identical: About 18,000-20,000 people are trafficked into the US each year for sex, and there were precisely 19,362 homicides in the US last year, of which 14,415 were committed with firearms.
Indeed, why focus specifically on sex trafficking? The majority of forced labor trafficking is not sex. I suppose it seems worse to become a sex slave than to become a slave at a diamond mine or a tobacco plantation… but not that much worse. Not so much worse that the former merits an overwhelming response and the latter barely any response at all.

SESTA breaks the usual principles applied to regulating communication and instead allows the government to penalize websites that are used to facilitate any kind of sale of sexual services.

Note, first of all, that this suddenly changes the topic from sex trafficking to sex work; the vast majority of sex workers are not trafficking victims but voluntary participants. In countries where brothels are legal and regulated, job satisfaction of sex workers is not statistically different from median job satisfaction overall.

Second, the bill doesn’t really do anything to target sex trafficking. It was already illegal to use websites for sex trafficking and already illegal to advertise sex trafficking via the Web. In fact, there is reason to think that pushing sex trafficking further into the Dark Web will only make the job of law enforcement harder.

Part of the liability protections for websites which will now be stripped away included a “right to moderate”: using moderation tools to remove illegal content would not result in additional liability. Under SESTA, this has changed; sites will now want to avoid moderating illegal content, because in so doing they would be effectively admitting that they knew it existed. Since there can never be any guarantee of removing 100% of all illegal content without shutting the entire site down, sites may choose instead to not moderate, so they have more plausible deniability when illegal content is ultimately found.

Instead, the main effect of SESTA will be to put more sex workers in danger. Where previously they could use websites to screen clients, they now have to return to in-person contact that is much more dangerous. It pushes them from the relative security of working indoors and online to the extreme danger of walking the street or working for a pimp. SESTA also removes the opportunity for sex workers to communicate with each other, because now any content related to sex work is banned; and these kinds of communication networks can be literally a matter of life and death.

Make no mistake: People will die over this. Mostly women and queer men (because the vast majority of sex work clients are male). The homicide rate of female victims dropped an astonishing 17 percent when Craigslist iSmplemented its Erotic section that allowed sex workers to use the Internet to screen clients. SESTA is taking that away, so we can expect homicides of female victims to rise.

SESTA is also blatantly Unconstitutional. The original form of the bill included an ex post facto clause, which violates one of the most basic principles of the Constitution.

Even with that removed, SESTA is obviously in violation of the First Amendment; this is censorship. It has already been used to justify Tumblr’s purge of all sexual content, which caused a 20% drop in user base and an exodus of erotic artists and sex workers to other platforms, and will disproportionately harm queer youth because Tumblr had previously been one of the Internet’s safest spaces for exploring sexual identity.

And now that the precedent has been set to hold websites responsible for their users, expect to see more of this. We already see sites being held responsible for copyright infringement; but we could soon see similar laws passed punishing sites for “facilitating” illegal drug use, hacking, or hate speech. Operators of communication platforms will be forced to become arms of law enforcement or face prison themselves.

Of course we all want to stop sex trafficking. Everyone agrees on that. But a bill that targets bad things can still be a bad bill.

The double standard between violence and sex in US media

2019-03-242019-03-17 PNRJ ethics, public policy art, censorship, film, media, sex, television, video games, violence

Mar 24 JDN 2458567

The video game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion infamously had its ESRB rating upgraded from “Teen” to “Mature”, raising the minimum age to purchase it from 13 to 17. Why? Well, they gave two major reasons: One was that there was more blood and detailed depictions of death than in the original version submitted for review. The other was that a modder had made it possible to view the female characters with naked breasts.

These were considered comparable arguments—if anything, the latter seemed to carry more weight.

Yet first of all this was a mod: You can make a mod do just about anything. (Indeed, there has long since been a mod for Oblivion that shows full-frontal nudity; had this existed when the rating was upgraded, they might have gone all the way to “Adults Only”, ostensibly only raising the minimum age to 18, but in practice making stores unwilling to carry the game because they think of it as porn.)

But suppose in fact that the game had included female characters with naked breasts. Uh… so what? Why is that considered so inappropriate for teenagers? Men are allowed to walk around topless all the time, and male and female nipples really don’t look all that different!

Now, I actually think “Mature” is the right rating for Oblivion. But that’s because Oblivion is about a genocidal war against demons and involves mass slaughter and gruesome death at every turn—not because you can enable a mod to see boobs.

The game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas went through a similar rating upgrade, from “Mature” to “Adults Only”—resulting it being the only mass-market “Adults Only” game in the US. This was, again, because of a mod—though in this case it was more like re-enabling content that the original game had included but disabled. But let me remind you that this is a game where you play as a gangster whose job is to steal cars, and who routinely guns down police officers and massacres civilians—and the thing that really upset people was that you could enable a scene where your character has sex with his girlfriend.

Meanwhile, games like Manhunt, where the object of the game is to brutally execute people, and the Call of Duty series graphically depicting the horrors of war (and in the Black Ops subseries, espionage, terrorism, and torture), all get to keep their “Mature” ratings.

And consider that a game like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, rated “Everyone 10+”, contains quite a lot of violence, and several scenes where, logically, it really seems like there should be nudity—bathing, emerging from a cryonic stasis chamber, a doctor examining your body for wounds—but there isn’t. Meanwhile, a key part of the game is killing goblin-like monsters to collect their organs and use them for making potions. It’s all tastefully depicted violence, with little blood and gore; okay, sure. But you can tastefully depict nudity as well. Why are we so uncomfortable with the possibility of seeing these young adult characters naked… while bathing? In this case, even a third-party mod that allowed nudity was itself censored, on the grounds that it would depict “underage characters”; but really, no indication is given that these characters are underage. Based on their role in society, I always read them as about 19 or 20. I guess they could conceivably be as young as 16… and as we all know, 16-year-olds do not have genitals, are never naked, and certainly never have sex.

We’re so accustomed to this that it may even feel uncomfortable to you when I suggest otherwise: “Why would you want to see Link’s penis as he emerges from the cryonic chamber?” Well, I guess, because… men have penises. (Well, cis men anyway; actually it would be really bold and interesting if they decided to make Link trans.) We should see that as normal, and not be so uncomfortable showing it. The emotional power of the scene comes in part from the innocence and vulnerability of nudity, which is undercut by you mysteriously coming with non-removable indestructible underwear. Part of what makes Breath of the Wild so, er, breathtaking is that you can often screenshot it and feel like you are looking at a painting—and I probably don’t need to mention that nudity has been a part of fine art since time immemorial. Letting you take off the protagonist’s underwear wouldn’t show anything you can’t see by looking at Michelangelo’s David.

And would it really be so traumatizing to the audience to see that? By the time you’re 10 years old, I hope you have seen at least one picture of a penis. If not, we’ve been doing sex ed very, very wrong. In fact, I’m quite confident that most of the children playing would not be disturbed at all; amused, perhaps, but what’s wrong with that? If looking at the protagonist’s cel-shaded genitals makes some of the players giggle, does that cause any harm? Some people play through Breath of the Wild without ever equipping clothing, both as a challenge (you get no armor protection that way), and simply for fun (some of the characters do actually react to you being “naked”, or as naked as the game will allow—and most of their reactions would make way more sense if you weren’t wearing magical underwear).

Of course, it’s not just video games. The United States has a bizarre double standard between sex and violence in all sorts of media.

On television, you can watch The Walking Dead on mainstream cable and see, as Andrew Boschert put it, “a man’s skull being smashed with a hammer, people’s throats slit into a trough, a meat locker with people’s torsos and limbs hung by hooks and a man’s face being eaten off while he is still alive”; but show a single erect penis, and you have to go to premium channels.

Even children’s television is full of astonishing levels of violence. Watch Tom and Jerry sometime, and you’ll realize that the only difference between it and the Simpsons parody Itchy & Scratchy is that the Simpsons version is a bit more realistic in depicting how such violence would affect the body. In mainstream cartoons, characters can get shot, blown up, crushed by heavy objects, run over by trains, hit with baseball bats and frying pans—but God forbid you ever show a boob.

In film, the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated shows convincingly that not only are our standards for sexual content versus violent content wildly disproportionate, furthermore any depiction of queer sexual content is immediately considered pornographic while the equivalent heterosexual content is not. It’s really quite striking to watch: They show scenes with the exact same sex act, even from more or less the same camera angles, and when it’s a man and a woman, it gets R, but if it’s two men or two women, it gets NC-17.

The movie Thirteen is rated R for its depiction of drugs and sex, despite being based on a true story about actual thirteen-year-olds. Evan Rachel Wood was 15 at the time of filming and 16 at the time of release, meaning that she was two years older than the character she played, and yet a year later still not old enough to watch her own movie without parental permission. Granted, Thirteen is not a wholesome film; there’s a lot of disturbing stuff in it, including things done by (and to) teenagers that really shouldn’t be.

But it’s not as if violence, even against teenagers, is viewed as so dangerous for young minds. Look at the Hunger Games, for example; that is an absolutely horrific level of violence against teenagers—people get beheaded, blown up, burned, and mutilated—and it only received a PG-13 rating. The Dark Knight received only a PG-13 rating, despite being about a terrorist who murders hundreds and implants a bomb in one of his henchmen (and also implements the most literal and unethical Prisoner’s Dilemma experiment ever devised).

Novels are better about this sort of thing: You actually can have sex scenes in mainstream novels without everyone freaking out. Yet there’s still a subtler double standard: You can’t show too much detail in a sex scene, or you’ll be branded “erotica”. But there’s no special genre ghetto you get sent to for too graphically depicting torture or war. (I love the Culture novels, but honestly I think Use of Weapons should come with trigger warnings—it’s brutal.) And as I have personally struggled with, it’s very hard to write fiction honestly depicting queer characters without your whole book being labeled “queer fiction”.

Is it like this in other countries? Well, like most things, it depends on the country. In China and much of the Middle East, the government has control over almost every sort of content. Most countries have some things they censor and some things they don’t. The US is unusual: We censor very little. Content involvingviolence and political content are essentially unrestricted in the US. But sex is one of the few things that we do consistently censor.

Media in Europe especially is much more willing to depict sex, and a bit less willing to depict violence. This is particularly true in the Netherlands, where there are films rated R for sex in the US but 6 (that’s “minimum age of viewing, 6 years”) in the Netherlands, because we consider naked female breasts to be a deal-breaker and they consider them utterly harmless. Quite frankly, I’m much more inclined toward the latter assessment.

Japan has had a long tradition of sexuality in art and media, and only when the West came in did they start introducing censorship. But Japan is not known for its half-measures; in 1907 they instituted a ban on explicit depiction of genitals that applies to essentially all media—even media explicitly marketed as porn still fuzzes over keys parts of the images. Yet some are still resisting this censorship: A ban on sexual content in manga drew outrage from artists as recently as 2010.

Hinduism has always been more open to sexuality than Christianity, and it shows in Indian culture in various ways. The Kama Sutra is depicted in the West as a lurid sex manual, when it’s really more of a text on living a full life, finding love, and achieving spiritual transcendence (of which sex is often a major part). But like Japan, India began to censor sex as it began to adopt Western cultural influences, and now implements a very broad pornography ban.

What does this double standard do to our society?

Well, it’s very hard to separate causation from correlation. So I can’t really say that it is because of this double standard in media that we have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and homicide in the First World. But it seems like it might be related, at least; perhaps they come from a common source, the same sexual repression and valorization of masculinity expressed through violence.

I do know some things that are direct negative consequences of the censorship of sex in US media. The most urgent example of this is the so-called “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act” (it does more or less the exact opposite, much like the “PATRIOT ACT” and George W. Bush’s “Clean Air Act”). That will have to wait until next week’s post.

Defending yourself defends others

2019-03-102019-03-03 PNRJ ethics crime, externalities, feminism, grant theft auto, public goods, self-defense, violence

Mar 10 JDN 2458553

There’s a meme going around the feminist community that is very well-intentioned, but dangerously misguided. I first encountered it as a tweet, though it may have originated elsewhere:

If you’re promoting changes to women’s behaviour to “prevent” rape, you’re really saying “make sure he rapes the other girl”.

The good intention here is that we need to stop blaming victims. Victim-blaming is ubiquitous, and especially common and harmful in the case of sexual assault. If someone assaults you—or robs you, or abuses you—it is never your fault.

But I fear that there is a baby being thrown out with this bathwater: While failing to defend yourself doesn’t make it your fault, being able to defend yourself can still make you safer.

And, just as importantly, it can make others safer too. The game theory behind that is the subject of this post.

For purposes of the theory, it doesn’t matter what the crime is. So let’s set aside the intense emotional implications of sexual assault and suppose the crime is grand theft auto.

Some cars are defended—they have a LoJack system installed that will allow them to be recovered and the thieves to be prosecuted. (Don’t suppose it’s a car alarm; those don’t work.)

Other cars are not defended—once stolen, they may not be recovered.

There are two cases to consider: Defense that is visible, and defense that is invisible.

Let’s start by assuming that the defense is visible: When choosing which car to try to steal, the thieves can intentionally pick one that doesn’t have a LoJack installed. (This doesn’t work well for car theft, but it’s worth considering for the general question of self-defense. The kind of clothes you wear, the way you carry yourself, how many people are with you, and overall just how big and strong you look are visible signs of a capacity for self-defense.)

In that case, the game is one of perfect information: First each car owner chooses whether or not to install a LoJack at some cost L (in real life, about $700), and then thieves see which cars are equipped and then choose which car to steal.

Let’s say the probability of a car theft being recovered and prosecuted if it’s defended is p, and the probability of it being recovered if it’s not defended is q; p > q. In the real world, about half of stolen cars are recovered—but over 90% of LoJack-equipped vehicles are recovered, so p = 0.9 and q = 0.5.

Then let’s say the cost of being caught and prosecuted is C. This is presumably quite high: If you get convicted, you could spend time in prison. But maybe the car will be recovered and the thief won’t be convicted. Let’s ballpark that at about $30,000.

Finally, the value of successfully stealing a car is V. The average price of a used car in the US is about $20,000, so V is probably close to that.

If no cars are defended, what will the thieves choose? Assuming they are risk-neutral (car thieves don’t seem like very risk averse folks, in general), the expected benefit of stealing a car is V – q C. With the parameters above, that’s (20000)-(0.5)(30000) = $5,000. The thieves will choose a car at random and steal it.

If some cars are defended and some are not, what will the thieves choose? They will avoid the defended cars and steal one of the undefended cars.

But what if all cars are defended? Now the expected benefit is V – p C, which is (20000)-(0.9)(30000) = -$7,000. The thieves will not steal any cars at all. (This is actually the unique subgame-perfect equilibrium: Everyone installs a LoJack and no cars get stolen. Of course, that assumes perfect rationality.)

Yet that isn’t so impressive; everyone defending themselves results in everyone being defended? That sounds tautological. Expecting everyone to successfully defend themselves all the time sounds quite unreasonable. This might be what people have in mind when they say things like the quote above: It’s impossible for everyone to be defended always.

But it turns out that we don’t actually need that. Things get a lot more interesting when we assume that self-defense can be invisible. It would be very hard to know whether a car has a LoJack installed without actually opening it up, and there are many other ways to defend yourself that are not so visible—such as knowing techniques of martial arts or using a self-defense phone app.

Now the game has imperfect information. The thieves don’t know whether you have chosen to defend your car or not.

We need to add a couple more parameters. First is the number of cars per thief n. Then we need the proportion of cars that are defended. Let’s call it d. Then with probability d a given car is defended, and with probability 1-d it is not.

The expected value of stealing a car for the thieves is now this: V – p d C – q (1-d) C. If this is positive, they will steal a car; if it is negative, they will not.

Knowing this, should you install a LoJack? Remember that it costs you L to do so.

What’s the probability your car will be stolen? If they are stealing cars at all, the probability of your car being one stolen is 1/n. If that happens, you will have an expected loss of (1-p)V if you have a LoJack, or (1-q)V if you don’t. The difference between those is (p-q)V.

So your expected benefit of having a LoJack is (p-q)V/n – L. With the parameters above, that comes to: (0.9-0.5)(20000)/n – (700) = 8000/n – 700. So if there are no more than 11 cars per thief, this is positive and you should buy a LoJack. If there are 12 or more cars per thief, you’re better off taking your chances.

This only applies if the thieves are willing to steal at all. And then the interesting question is whether V – p d C – q (1-d) C is positive. For these parameters, that’s (20000) – (0.9)(30000)d – (0.5)(30000) + (0.5)(30000)d = 5000 – 12000 d. Notice that if we substitute in d=0 we get back $5,000, and at d=1 we get back -$7,000, just as before. There is a critical value of d at which the thieves aren’t sure whether to try or not: d* = 5/12 = 0.42.

Assuming that a given car is worth defending if it would be stolen (n <= 11), the equilibrium is actually when precisely d* of the cars are defended and 1-d* are not. Any less than this, and there is an undefended car that would be worth defending. Any more than this, and the thieves aren’t going to try to steal anything, so why bother defending?

Of course this is a very stylized model: In particular, we assumed that all cars are equally valuable and equally easy to steal, which is surely not true in real life.

Yet this model is still enough to make the most important point: Since presumably we do not value the welfare of the car thieves, it could happen that people choosing on their own would not defend their cars, but society as a whole would be better off if they did.

The net loss to society from a stolen car is (1-q)V if the car was not defended, or (1-p)V if it was. But if the thieves don’t steal any cars at all, the net loss to society is zero. The cost of defending a proportion d* of all cars is n d* L.

So if we are currently at d = 0, society is currently losing (1-q)V. We could eliminate this cost entirely by paying n d* L to defend a sufficient number of cars. Suppose n = 30. Then this total cost is (30)(5/12)(700) = $8,750. The loss from cars being stolen was (0.5)(20000) = $10,000. So it would be worth it, from society’s perspective, to randomly install LoJack systems in 42% of cars.

But for any given car owner, it would not be worth it; the expected benefit is 8000/30 – 700 = -$433. (I guess we could ask how much you’re willing to pay for “peace of mind”.)

Where does the extra benefit go? To all the other car owners. By defending your car, you are raising d and thereby lowering the expected payoff for a car thief. There is a positive externality; this is a public good. You get some of that benefit yourself, but others also share in that benefit.

This brings me at last to the core message of this post:

Self-defense is a public good.

The better each person defends themselves, the riskier it becomes for criminals to try to victimize anyone. Never feel guilty for trying to defend yourself; you are defending everyone else at the same time. In fact, you should consider taking actions to defend yourself even when you aren’t sure it’s worth it for you personally: That positive externality may be large enough to make your actions worthwhile for society as a whole.

Again, this does not mean we should blame victims when they are unable to defend themselves. Self-defense is easier for some people than others, and everyone is bound to slip up on occasion. (Also, eternal vigilance can quickly shade over into paranoia.) It is always the perpetrator’s fault.

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