Fighting the zero-sum paradigm

2018-12-022018-11-25 PNRJ development economics, ethics, heuristics and biases, inequality, public policy, tribal paradigm authoritarianism, China, climate change, democracy, economic growth, growth, nonzero-sum, politics, progress, racism, sexism, trade, zero-sum

Dec 2 JDN 2458455

It should be obvious at this point that there are deep, perhaps even fundamental, divides between the attitudes and beliefs of different political factions. It can be very difficult to even understand, much less sympathize, with the concerns of people who are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, and authoritarian.
But at the end of the day we still have to live in the same country as these people, so we’d better try to understand how they think. And maybe, just maybe, that understanding will help us to change them.

There is one fundamental belief system that I believe underlies almost all forms of extremism. Right now right-wing extremism is the major threat to global democracy, but left-wing extremism subscribes to the same core paradigm (consistent with Horseshoe Theory).

I think the best term for this is the zero-sum paradigm. The idea is quite simple: There is a certain amount of valuable “stuff” (money, goods, land, status, happiness) in the world, and the only political question is who gets how much.

Thus, any improvement in anyone’s life must, necessarily, come at someone else’s expense. If I become richer, you become poorer. If I become stronger, you become weaker. Any improvement in my standard of living is a threat to your status.

If this belief were true, it would justify, or at least rationalize, all sorts of destructive behavior: Any harm I can inflict upon someone else will yield a benefit for me, by some fundamental conservation law of the universe.

Viewed in this light, beliefs like patriarchy and White supremacy suddenly become much more comprehensible: Why would you want to spend so much effort hurting women and Black people? Because, by the fundamental law of zero-sum, any harm to women is a benefit to men, and any harm to Black people is a benefit to White people. The world is made of “teams”, and you are fighting for your own against all the others.

And I can even see why such an attitude is seductive: It’s simple and easy to understand. And there are many circumstances where it can be approximately true.
When you are bargaining with your boss over a wage, one dollar more for you is one dollar less for your boss.
When your factory outsources production to China, one more job for China is one less job for you.

When we vote for President, one more vote for the Democrats is one less vote for the Republicans.

But of course the world is not actually zero-sum. Both you and your boss would be worse off if your job were to disappear; they need your work and you need their money. For every job that is outsourced to China, another job is created in the United States. And democracy itself is such a profound public good that it basically overwhelms all others.

In fact, it is precisely when a system is running well that the zero-sum paradigm becomes closest to true. In the space of all possible allocations, it is the efficient ones that behave in something like a zero-sum way, because when the system is efficient, we are already producing as much as we can.

This may be part of why populist extremism always seems to assert itself during periods of global prosperity, as in the 1920s and today: It is precisely when the world is running at its full capacity that it feels most like someone else’s gain must come at your loss.

Yet if we live according to the zero-sum paradigm, we will rapidly destroy the prosperity that made that paradigm seem plausible. A trade war between the US and China would put millions out of work in both countries. A real war with conventional weapons would kill millions. A nuclear war would kill billions.

This is what we must convey: We must show people just how good things are right now.

This is not an easy task; when people want to believe the world is falling apart, they can very easily find excuses to do so. You can point to the statistics showing a global decline in homicide, but one dramatic shooting on the TV news will wipe that all away. You can show the worldwide rise in real incomes across the board, but that won’t console someone who just lost their job and blames outsourcing or immigrants.

Indeed, many people will be offended by the attempt—the mere suggestion that the world is actually in very good shape and overall getting better will be perceived as an attempt to deny or dismiss the problems and injustices that still exist.

I encounter this especially from the left: Simply pointing out the objective fact that the wealth gap between White and Black households is slowly closing is often taken as a claim that racism no longer exists or doesn’t matter. Congratulating the meteoric rise in women’s empowerment around the world is often paradoxically viewed as dismissing feminism instead of lauding it.

I think the best case against progress can be made with regard to global climate change: Carbon emissions are not falling nearly fast enough, and the world is getting closer to the brink of truly catastrophic ecological damage. Yet even here the zero-sum paradigm is clearly holding us back; workers in fossil-fuel industries think that the only way to reduce carbon emissions is to make their families suffer, but that’s simply not true. We can make them better off too.

Talking about injustice feels righteous. Talking about progress doesn’t. Yet I think what the world needs most right now—the one thing that might actually pull us back from the brink of fascism or even war—is people talking about progress.

If people think that the world is full of failure and suffering and injustice, they will want to tear down the whole system and start over with something else. In a world that is largely democratic, that very likely means switching to authoritarianism. If people think that this is as bad as it gets, they will be willing to accept or even instigate violence in order to change to almost anything else.

But if people realize that in fact the world is full of success and prosperity and progress, that things are right now quite literally better in almost every way for almost every person in almost every country than they were a hundred—or even fifty—years ago, they will not be so eager to tear the system down and start anew. Centrism is often mocked (partly because it is confused with false equivalence), but in a world where life is improving this quickly for this many people, “stay the course” sounds awfully attractive to me.
That doesn’t mean we should ignore the real problems and injustices that still exist, of course. There is still a great deal of progress left to be made. But I believe we are more likely to make progress if we acknowledge and seek to continue the progress we have already made, than if we allow ourselves to fall into despair as if that progress did not exist.

How much should we give?

2018-11-042018-10-28 PNRJ core principles, development economics, ethics, inequality, public policy charity, donation, elasticity, poverty, Richard Thaler, Save More Tomorrow

Nov 4 JDN 2458427

How much should we give of ourselves to others?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to respond to dog whistles

2018-10-212018-10-14 PNRJ current events, ethics, public policy dog whistle, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, politics, social justice

Oct 21 JDN 2458413

Political messaging has grown extremely sophisticated. The dog whistle technique is particularly powerful one: it allows you to say the same thing to two different groups and have them each hear what they wanted to hear. The term comes from the gadget used in training canines, which emits sounds at a frequency which humans can’t hear but dogs can. Similar concepts have been around for a long time, but the word wasn’t used for this specific meaning until the 1990s.

There was once a time when politicians could literally say different things to different groups, but mass media has made that effectively impossible. When Mitt Romney tried to do this, it destroyed his (already weak) campaign. So instead they find ways to convey two different meanings, while saying the same words.

Classic examples of this include “law and order” and “states’ rights”, which have always carried hidden racist connotations, yet on their face sound perfectly reasonable. “Family values” is another one.

Trump is particularly inelegant at this; his dog whistles often seem to drop into the audible frequency range, as when he called undocumented immigrants (or possibly gang members?) “animals” and tweeted about “caravans” of immigrants, and above all when he said “they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists”. (Frankly, does that even count as a dog whistle?) He’s a little less obvious in his deployment of “globalist” as a probable anti-Semitic slur.

How should we respond to this kind of coded language?

It’s not as simple as you might think. It’s not always easy to tell what is a dog whistle. Someone talking about crime could be trying to insinuate something about minorities… or, they could just be talking about crime. Someone complaining about immigration could be trying to dehumanize immigrants… or, they could just want a change in our border policy. Accusations of “globalism” could be coded anti-Semitism… or they could just be nationalism.
It’s also easy to accuse someone of using dog whistles even if they probably aren’t: It is now commonplace for the right wing to argue that “common-sense gun control” means confiscating all handguns (when it in fact means universal background checks, mandatory safety classes, and perhaps assault weapon bans and magazine limits, all of which are quite popular even among gun owners), or to argue that “safe, legal, and rare” is just a Trojan horse for unrestricted free abortion (when in fact “safe, legal, and rare” is the overwhelming majority view among Americans). Indeed, it’s quite probable that many of the things that the left wing has taken as dog whistles by Trump were actually overreactions—Trump is bigoted, but not especially so by the standards of old White Republican men. The best reasons to want Trump out of office involve his authoritarianism, his corruption, and his incompetence, not his bigotry. Foreign policy and climate change should be issues that overwhelm basically everything else—these are millions of lives on the line—and they are the two issues that Trump gets most decisively wrong.

The fact that it can be difficult to tell which statements are dog-whistles is not a bug but a feature: It provides plausible deniability.

If you can structure your speech so that it will be heard by your base as supporting a strong ideological platform, but when the words are analyzed they will be innocuous enough that no one can directly prove your extremism, you can have your cake and eat it too. Even if journalists go on to point out the dog whistles in your speech, moderates on your side of the fence might not hear the same dog whistles, and then just become convinced that the journalists are overreacting. And they might even be overreacting.

Instead, I think there are two things we need to do, which are distinct but complementary.’

1. Ask for clarification.

Whether you are in a personal conversation with a friend who is spouting talking points, or a journalist interviewing a politician running for office, there will come opportunities where you can directly respond to a potential dog whistle.
Do not accuse them of using a dog whistle—even if you are confident that they are. That will only make them defensive, and make you appear to be the aggressor. Instead, ask them firmly, but calmly:

“What exactly do you mean by that statement?”

If they ignore the question or try to evade it, ask again, a little more firmly. If they evade again, ask again. Keep asking until they answer you or literally force you to shut up. Be confident, but calm and poised. Now they look like the aggressor—and above all, they sound like they have something to hide.

Note also that if it turns out not to be a dog whistle, they will likely not be offended by your request and will have a perfectly reasonable clarification. For example:

“What did you mean when you said you’re worried about Muslim immigrants?”

“Well, I mean that Muslim societies often have very regressive norms surrounding gender and LGBT rights, and many Muslim immigrants have difficulty assimilating into our liberal values. I think we need to spend more effort finding ways to integrate Muslims into our community and disabuse them of harmful cultural norms.”

“What did you mean when you said you are worried about law and order?”

“I mean that gang violence in several of our inner cities is really out of control, and we need to be working on both investing more in policing and finding better methods of crime prevention in order to keep these communities safe.”

“What ‘states’ rights’ are you particularly concerned about, Senator?”

“I don’t like that the federal government thinks it can impose laws against marijuana based on an absurdly broad reading of the Interstate Commerce Clause. I don’t think it’s right that legitimate businesses in California and Colorado have to operate entirely in cash because federal regulations won’t let them put their money into banks without fear of having it confiscated.”

You may even find that you still disagree with the clarified statement, but hopefully it can be a reasonable disagreement, rather than a direct conflict over fundamental values.

2. State your own positive case.

This is one you can probably do even if you don’t actually get the opportunity to engage directly with people on the other side.

I was actually surprised to learn this, but apparently the empirical data shows that including messages of social justice in your political platform makes it more popular, even among moderates.
This means that we don’t have to respond to innuendo with innuendo—we can come out and say that we think a given policy is bad because it will hurt women or Black people. Economic populism is good too, but we don’t need to rely entirely upon that.

To be clear, we should not say that the policy is designed to hurt women or Black people—even if we think that is likely to be true—for at least two reasons: First, we can’t actually prove that, except in very rare cases, so it makes our argument inherently more tendentious; and second, it makes our whole mode of argumentation more aggressive and less charitable. We should always at least consider the possibility that our opponent’s intentions are noble, and unless the facts utterly force us to abandon that view it should probably be our working assumption.

This means that we don’t even necessarily have to come out and challenge dog whistles. We just need to make a better positive case ourselves. While they are making vague, ambiguous claims about “cleaning up our cities” and “making America great”, we can lay out explicit policy plans for reducing unemployment, poverty, and carbon emissions.

Hillary Clinton almost did this—but she didn’t do it well enough. She relied too heavily on constituents being willing to read detailed plans on her website, instead of summarizing them in concise, pithy talking points to put in headlines. Her line “Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?” was indeed taken out of context—but she should have pushed harder by making an actual slogan, like “End coal burning—save coal communities.” (I literally came up with that in five minutes. She had hundreds of professional campaign staff working for her and they couldn’t do better?) The media did butcher her statements—but she didn’t correct them by putting slogans on yard signs or giving stump speeches in Appalachia.

Indeed, the news media didn’t do her any favors—they spent literally more time talking about her emails than every actual policy issued combined, and not by a small margin. But we can’t rely on the news media—and we don’t have to, in the age of blogs and social media. Instead of assuming that everyone already agrees with us and we will win because we deserve to, we need to be doing what actually works at conveying our message and making sure that we win by the largest margin possible.

If you really want grad students to have better mental health, remove all the high-stakes checkpoints

2018-10-142018-10-08 PNRJ education, ethics, heuristics and biases, personal, public policy academia, advancement to candidacy, cognitive dissonance, dissertation, graduate student, hazing, mental health, PhD, pressure, stress

Post 260: Oct 14 JDN 2458406

A study was recently published in Nature Biotechnology showing clear evidence of a mental health crisis among graduate students (no, I don’t know why they picked the biotechnology imprint—I guess it wasn’t good enough for Nature proper?). This is only the most recent of several studies showing exceptionally high rates of mental health issues among graduate students.

I’ve seen universities do a lot of public hand-wringing and lip service about this issue—but I haven’t seen any that were seriously willing to do what it takes to actually solve the problem.

I think this fact became clearest to me when I was required to fill out an official “Individual Development Plan” form as a prerequisite for my advancement to candidacy, which included one question about “What are you doing to support your own mental health and work/life balance?”

The irony here is absolutely excruciating, because advancement to candidacy has been overwhelmingly my leading source of mental health stress for at least the last six months. And it is only one of several different high-stakes checkpoints that grad students are expected to complete, always threatened with defunding or outright expulsion from the graduate program if the checkpoint is not met by a certain arbitrary deadline.

The first of these was the qualifying exams. Then comes advancement to candidacy. Then I have to complete and defend a second-year paper, then a third-year paper. Finally I have to complete and defend a dissertation, and then go onto the job market and go through a gauntlet of applications and interviews. I can’t think of any other time in my life when I was under this much academic and career pressure this consistently—even finishing high school and applying to college wasn’t like this.

If universities really wanted to improve my mental health, they would find a way to get rid of all that.

Granted, a single university does not have total control over all this: There are coordination problems between universities regarding qualifying exams, advancement, and dissertation requirements. One university that unilaterally tried to remove all these would rapidly lose prestige, as it would not be regarded as “rigorous” to reduce the pressure on your grad students. But that itself is precisely the problem—we have equated “rigor” with pressuring grad students until they are on the verge of emotional collapse. Universities don’t seem to know how to make graduate school difficult in the ways that would actually encourage excellence in research and teaching; they simply know how to make it difficult in ways that destroy their students psychologically.

The job market is even more complicated; in the current funding environment, it would be prohibitively expensive to open up enough faculty positions to actually accept even half of all graduating PhDs to tenure-track jobs. Probably the best answer here is to refocus graduate programs on supporting employment outside academia, recognizing both that PhD-level skills are valuable in many workplaces and that not every grad student really wants to become a professor.

But there are clearly ways that universities could mitigate these effects, and they don’t seem genuinely interested in doing so. They could remove the advancement exam, for example; you could simply advance to candidacy as a formality when your advisor decides you are ready, never needing to actually perform a high-stakes presentation before a committee—because what the hell does that accomplish anyway? Speaking of advisors, they could have a formalized matching process that starts with interviewing several different professors and being matched to the one that best fits your goals and interests, instead of expecting you to reach out on your own and hope for the best. They could have you write a dissertation, but not perform a “dissertation defense”—because, again, what can they possibly learn from forcing you to present in a high-stakes environment that they couldn’t have learned from reading your paper and talking with you about it over several months?

They could adjust or even remove funding deadlines—especially for international students. Here at UCI at least, once you are accepted to the program, you are ostensibly guaranteed funding for as long as you maintain reasonable academic progress—but then they define “reasonable progress” in such a way that you have to form an advancement committee, fill out forms, write a paper, and present before a committee all by a certain date or your funding is in jeopardy. Residents of California (which includes all US students who successfully established residency after a full year) are given more time if we need it—but international students aren’t. How is that fair?

The unwillingness of universities to take such actions clearly shows that their commitment to improving students’ mental health is paper-thin. They are only willing to help their students improve their work-life balance as long as it doesn’t require changing anything about the graduate program. They will provide us with counseling services and free yoga classes, but they won’t seriously reduce the pressure they put on us at every step of the way.
I understand that universities are concerned about protecting their prestige, but I ask them this: Does this really improve the quality of your research or teaching output? Do you actually graduate better students by selecting only the ones who can survive being emotionally crushed? Do all these arbitrary high-stakes performances actually result in greater advancement of human knowledge?

Or is it perhaps that you yourselves were put through such hazing rituals years ago, and now your cognitive dissonance won’t let you admit that it was all for naught? “This must be worth doing, or else they wouldn’t have put me through so much suffering!” Are you trying to transfer your own psychological pain onto your students, lest you be forced to face it yourself?

What really works against bigotry

2018-09-302018-09-23 PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, personal, public policy, Uncategorized abortion, bigotry, Brett Kavanaugh, Culture, Donald Trump, immigration, LGBT, persuasion, politics, race, racism, sexism, women

Sep 30 JDN 2458392

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We must stop Kavanaugh now!

2018-09-162018-09-16 PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, public policy abortion, Antonin Scalia, Brett Kavanaugh, corruption, Dianne Feinstein, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Paul Manafort, politics, Robert Mueller, US Supreme Court

Post 257: Sep 16 JDN 2458378

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For labor day, thoughts on socialism

2018-09-092018-09-02 PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, inequality, market failure, public policy capitalism, Charles Stross, debt, Donald Trump, equity, feudalism, inequality, Kickstarter, labor, Labor Day, May Day, Patreon, redistribution, socialism, wealth, worker co-ops

Planned Post 255: Sep 9 JDN 2458371

This week includes Labor Day, the holiday where we are perhaps best justified in taking the whole day off from work and doing nothing. Labor Day is sort of the moderate social democratic counterpart to the explicitly socialist holiday May Day.

The right wing in this country has done everything in their power to expand the definition of “socialism”, which is probably why most young people now have positive views of socialism. There was a time when FDR was seen as an alternative to socialism; but now I’m pretty sure he’d just be called a socialist.

Because of this, I am honestly not sure whether I should be considered a socialist. I definitely believe in the social democratic welfare state epitomized by Scandinavia, but I definitely don’t believe in total collectivization of all means of production.

I am increasingly convinced that shareholder capitalism is a terrible system (the renowned science fiction author Charles Stross actually gave an excellent talk on this subject), but I would not want to abandon free markets.
The best answer might be worker-owned cooperatives. The empirical data is actually quite consistent in showing worker co-ops to be as efficient if not more efficient than conventional corporations, and by construction their pay systems produce less inequality than corporations.

Indeed, I think there is reason to believe that a worker co-op is a much more natural outcome for free markets under a level playing field than a conventional corporation, and the main reason we have corporations is actually that capitalism arose out of (and in response to) feudalism.

Think about it: Why should most things be owned by the top 1%? (Okay, not quite “most”: to be fair, the top 1% only owns 40% of all US net wealth.) Why is 80% of the value of the stock market held by the top 10% of the population?

Most things aren’t done by the top 1%. There are a handful of individuals (namely, scientists who make seminal breakthroughs: Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Rosalind Franklin, Alan Turing, Jonas Salk) who are so super-productive that they might conceivably deserve billionaire-level compensation—but they are almost never the ones who are actually billionaires. If markets were really distributing capital to those who would use it most productively, there’s no reason to think that inequality would be so self-sustaining—much less self-enhancing as it currently seems to be.

But when you realize that capitalism emerged out of a system where the top 1% (or less) already owned most things, and did so by a combination of “divine right” ideology and direct, explicit violence, this inequality becomes a lot less baffling. We never had a free market on a level playing field. The closest we’ve ever gotten has always been through social-democratic reforms (like the New Deal and Scandinavia).

How does this result in corporations? Well, when all the wealth is held by a small fraction of individuals, how do you start a business? You have to borrow money from the people who have it. Borrowing makes you beholden to your creditors, and puts you at great risk if your venture fails (especially back in the days when there were debtor’s prisons—and we’re starting to go back that direction!). Equity provides an alternative: In exchange for giving them the downside risk if your venture fails, you also give your creditors—now shareholders—the upside risk if your venture succeeds. But at the end of the day when your business has succeeded, where did most of the profits go? Into the hands of the people who already had money to begin with, who did nothing to actually contribute to society. The world would be better off if those people had never existed and their wealth had simply been shared with everyone else.

Compare this to what would happen if we all started with similar levels of wealth. (How much would each of us have? Total US wealth of about $44 trillion, spread among a population of 328 million, is about $130,000 each. I don’t know about you, but I think I could do quite a bit with that.) When starting a business, you wouldn’t go heavily into debt or sign away ownership of your company to some billionaire; you’d gather a group of dedicated partners, each of whom would contribute money and effort into building the business. As you added on new workers, it would make sense to pool their assets, and give them a share of the company as well. The natural structure for your business would be not a shareholder corporation, but a worker-owned cooperative.

I think on some level the super-rich actually understand this. If you look closely at the sort of policies they fight for, they really aren’t capitalist. They don’t believe in free, unfettered markets where competition reigns. They believe in monopoly, lobbying, corruption, nepotism, and above all, low taxes. (There’s actually nothing in the basic principles of capitalism that says taxes should be low. Taxes should be as high as they need to be to cover public goods—no higher, and no lower.) They don’t want to provide nationalized healthcare, not because they believe that private healthcare competition is more efficient (no one who looks at the data for even a few minutes can honestly believe that—US healthcare is by far the most expensive in the world), but because they know that it would give their employees too much freedom to quit and work elsewhere. Donald Trump doesn’t want a world where any college kid with a brilliant idea and a lot of luck can overthrow his empire; he wants a world where everyone owes him and his family personal favors that he can call in to humiliate them and exert his power. That’s not capitalism—it’s feudalism.

Crowdfunding also provides an interesting alternative; we might even call it the customer-owned cooperative. Kickstarter and Patreon provide a very interesting new economic model—still entirely within the realm of free markets—where customers directly fund production and interact with producers to decide what will be produced. This might turn out to be even more efficient—and notice that it would run a lot more smoothly if we had all started with a level playing field.

Establishing such a playing field, of course, requires a large amount of redistribution of wealth. Is this socialism? If you insist. But I think it’s more accurate to describe it as reparations for feudalism (not to mention colonialism). We aren’t redistributing what was fairly earned in free markets; we are redistributing what was stolen, so that from now on, wealth can be fairly earned in free markets.

Is a job guarantee better than a basic income?

2018-08-052018-08-12 PNRJ ethics, futurism, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy basic income, income effect, inequality, inflation, job guarantee, John Danaher, meaning, Milton Friedman, poverty, public goods, retirement, unemployment, William Aberhart

Aug 5 JDN 2458336

In previous posts I’ve written about both the possibilities and challenges involved in creating a universal basic income. Today I’d like to address what I consider the most serious counter-argument against a basic income, an alternative proposal known as a job guarantee.

Whereas a basic income is literally just giving everyone free money, a job guarantee entails offering everyone who wants to work a job paid by the government. They’re not necessarily contradictory, but I’ve noticed a clear pattern: While basic income proponents are generally open to the idea of a job guarantee on the side, job guarantee proponents are often vociferously opposed to a basic income—even calling it “sinister”. I think the reason for this is that we see jobs as irrelevant, so we’re okay with throwing them in if you feel you must, while they see jobs as essential, so they meet any attempt to remove them with overwhelming resistance.

Where a basic income is extremely simple and could be implemented by a single act of the legislature, a job guarantee is considerably more complicated. The usual proposal for a job guarantee involves federal funding but local implementation, which is how most of our social welfare system is implemented—and why social welfare programs are so much better in liberal states like California than in conservative states like Mississippi, because California actually believes in what it’s implementing and Mississippi doesn’t. Anyone who wants a job guarantee needs to take that aspect seriously: In the places where poverty is worst, you’re offering control over the policy to the very governments that made poverty worst—and whether it is by malice or incompetence, what makes you think that won’t continue?

Another argument that I think job guarantee proponents don’t take seriously enough is the concern about “make-work”. They insist that a job guarantee is not “make-work”, but real work that’s just somehow not being done. They seem to think that there are a huge number of jobs that we could just create at the snap of a finger, which would be both necessary and useful on the one hand, and a perfect match for the existing skills of the unemployed population on the other hand. If that were the case, we would already be creating those jobs. It doesn’t even require a particularly strong faith in capitalism to understand this: If there is a profit to be made at hiring people to do something, there is probably already a business hiring people to do that. I don’t think of myself as someone with an overriding faith in capitalism, but a lot of the socialist arguments for job guarantees make me feel that way by comparison: They seem to think that there’s this huge untapped reserve of necessary work that the market is somehow failing to provide, and I’m just not seeing it.

There are public goods projects which aren’t profitable but would still be socially beneficial, like building rail lines and cleaning up rivers. But proponents of a job guarantee don’t seem to understand that these are almost all highly specialized jobs at our level of technology. We don’t need a bunch of people with shovels. We need engineers and welders and ecologists.

If you propose using people with shovels where engineers would be more efficient, that is make-work, whether you admit it or not. If you’re making people work in a less-efficient way in order to create jobs, then the jobs you are creating are fake jobs that aren’t worth creating. The line is often credited to Milton Friedman, but actually said first by William Aberhart in 1935:

Taking up the policy of a public works program as a solution for unemployment, it was criticized as a plan that took no account of the part that machinery played in modern construction, with a road-making machine instanced as an example. He saw, said Mr. Aberhart, work in progress at an airport and was told that the men were given picks and shovels in order to lengthen the work, to which he replied why not give them spoons and forks instead of picks and shovels if the object was to lengthen out the task.

I’m all for spending more on building rail lines and cleaning up rivers, but that’s not an anti-poverty program. The people who need the most help are precisely the ones who are least qualified to work on these projects: Children, old people, people with severe disabilities. Job guarantee proponents either don’t understand this fact or intentionally ignore it. If you aren’t finding jobs for 7-year-olds with autism and 70-year-olds with Parkinson’s disease, this program will not end poverty. And if you are, I find it really hard to believe that these are real, productive jobs and not useless “make-work”. A basic income would let the 7-year-olds stay in school and the 70-year-olds live in retirement homes—and keep them both out of poverty.

Another really baffling argument for a job guarantee over basic income is that a basic income would act as a wage subsidy, encouraging employers to reduce wages. That’s not how a basic income works. Not at all. A basic income would provide a pure income effect, necessarily increasing wage demands. People would not be as desperate for work, so they’d be more comfortable turning down unreasonable wage offers. A basic income would also incentivize some people to leave the labor force by retiring or going back to school; the reduction in labor supply would further increase wages. The Earned Income Tax Credit is in many respects similar to a wage subsidy. While superficially it might seem similar, a basic income would have the exact opposite effect.

One reasonable argument against a basic income is the possibility that it could cause inflation. This is something that can’t really be tested with small-scale experiments, so we really won’t know for sure until we try it. But there is reason to think that the inflation would be small, as the people removed from the labor force will largely be the ones who are least-productive to begin with. There is a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that inflationary effects of a basic income would be small. For example, data on cash transfer programs in Mexico show only a small inflationary effect despite large reductions in poverty. The whole reason a basic income looks attractive is that automation technology is now so advanced is that we really don’t need everyone to be working anymore. Productivity is so high now that a policy of universal 40-hour work weeks just doesn’t make sense in the 21st century.

Probably the best argument for a job guarantee over a basic income concerns cost. A basic income is very expensive, there’s no doubt about that; and a job guarantee could be much cheaper. That is something I take very seriously: Saving $1.5 trillion a year is absolutely a good reason. Indeed, I don’t really object to this argument; the calculations are correct. I merely think that a basic income is enough better that its higher cost is justifiable. A job guarantee can eliminate unemployment, but not poverty.

But the argument for a job guarantee that most people seem to be find most compelling concerns meaning. The philosopher John Danaher expressed this one most cogently. Unemployment is an extremely painful experience for most people, far beyond what could be explained simply by their financial circumstances. Most people who win large sums of money in the lottery cut back their hours, but continue working—so work itself seems to have some value. What seems to happen is that when people lose the chance to work, they feel that they have lost a vital source of meaning in their lives.

Yet this raises two more questions:

First, would a job guarantee actually solve that problem?
Second, are there ways we could solve it under a basic income?

With regard to the first question, I want to re-emphasize the fact that a large proportion of these guaranteed jobs necessarily cannot be genuinely efficient production. If efficient production would have created these jobs, we would most likely already have created them. Our society does not suffer from an enormous quantity of necessary work that could be done with the skills already possessed by the unemployed population, which is somehow not getting done—indeed, it is essentially impossible for a capitalist economy with a highly-liquid financial system to suffer such a malady. If the work is so valuable, someone will probably take out a loan to hire someone to do it. If that’s not happening, either the unemployed people don’t have the necessary skills, or the work really can’t be all that productive. There are some public goods projects that would be beneficial but aren’t being done, but that’s a different problem, and the match between the public goods projects that need done and the skills of the unemployed population is extremely poor. Displaced coal miners aren’t useful for maintaining automated photovoltaic factories. Truckers who get replaced by robot trucks won’t be much good for building maglev rails.

With this in mind, it’s not clear to me that people would really be able to find much meaning in a guaranteed job. You can’t be fired, so the fact that you have the job doesn’t mean anyone is impressed by the quality of your work. Your work wasn’t actually necessary, or the private sector would already have hired someone to do it. The government went out of its way to find a job that precisely matched what you happen to be good at, regardless of whether that job was actually accomplishing anything to benefit society. How is that any better than not working at all? You are spending hours of drudgery to accomplish… what, exactly? If our goal was simply to occupy people’s time, we could do that with Netflix or video games.

With regard to the second question, note that a basic income is quite different from other social welfare programs in that everyone gets it. So it’s very difficult to attach a social stigma to receiving basic income payments—it would require attaching the stigma to literally everyone. Much of the lost meaning, I suspect, from being unemployed comes from the social stigma attached.

Now, it’s still possible to attach social stigma to people who only get the basic income—there isn’t much we can do to prevent that. But in the worst-case scenario, this means unemployed people get the same stigma as before but more money. Moreover, it’s much harder to detect a basic income recipient than, say, someone who eats at a soup kitchen or buys food using EBT; since it goes in your checking account, all everyone else sees is you spending money from your debit card, just like everyone else. People who know you personally would probably know; but people who know you personally are also less likely to destroy your well-being by imposing a high stigma. Maybe they’ll pressure you to get off the couch and get a job, but they’ll do so because they genuinely want to help you, not because they think you are “one of those lazy freeloaders”.

And, as BIEN points out, think about retired people: They don’t seem to be so unhappy. Being on basic income is more like being retired than like being unemployed. It’s something everyone gets, not some special handout for “those people”. It’s permanent, so it’s not like you need to scramble to get a job before it goes away. You just get money automatically, so you don’t have to navigate a complex bureaucracy to get it. Controlling for income, retired people don’t seem to be any less happy than working people—so maybe work doesn’t actually provide all that much meaning after all.

I guess I can’t rule out the possibility that people need jobs to find meaning in their lives, but I both hope and believe that this is not generally the case. You can find meaning in your family, your friends, your community, your hobbies. You can still work even if you don’t need to work for a living: Build a shed, mow your lawn, tune up your car, upgrade your computer, write a story, learn a musical instrument, or try your hand at painting.

If you need to be taking orders from a corporation five days a week in order to have meaning in your life, you have bigger problems. I think what has happened to many people is that employment has so drained their lives of the real sources of meaning that they cling to it as the only thing they have left. But in fact work is not the cure to your ennui—it is the cause of it. Finally being free of the endless toil that has plagued humanity since the dawn of our species will give you the chance to reconnect with what really matters in life. Show your children that you love them in person, to their faces, instead of in this painfully indirect way of “providing for” them by going to work every day. Find ways to apply your skills in volunteering or creating works of art, instead of in endless drudgery for the profit of some faceless corporation.

How (not) to destroy an immoral market

2018-07-292018-07-22 PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, current events, ethics, market failure, public policy black market, China, cognition, Donald Trump, elephants, ethics, ethology, intelligence, ivory, Kenya, poaching, regulation, Tanzania, violence

Jul 29 JDN 2458329

In this world there are people of primitive cultures, with a population that is slowly declining, trying to survive a constant threat of violence in the aftermath of colonialism. But you already knew that, of course.

What you may not have realized is that some of these people are actively hunted by other people, slaughtered so that their remains can be sold on the black market.

I am referring of course to elephants. Maybe those weren’t the people you first had in mind?

Elephants are not human in the sense of being Homo sapiens; but as far as I am concerned, they are people in a moral sense.

Elephants take as long to mature as humans, and spend most of their childhood learning. They are born with brains only 35% of the size of their adult brains, much as we are born with brains 28% the size of our adult brains. Their encephalization quotients range from about 1.5 to 2.4, comparable to chimpanzees.

Elephants have problem-solving intelligence comparable to chimpanzees, cetaceans, and corvids. Elephants can pass the “mirror test” of self-identification and self-awareness. Individual elephants exhibit clearly distinguishable personalities. They exhibit empathy toward humans and other elephants. They can think creatively and develop new tools.

Elephants distinguish individual humans or elephants by sight or by voice, comfort each other when distressed, and above all mourn their dead. The kind of mourning behaviors elephants exhibit toward the remains of their dead family members have only been observed in humans and chimpanzees.

On a darker note, elephants also seek revenge. In response to losing loved ones to poaching or collisions with trains, elephants have orchestrated organized counter-attacks against human towns. This is not a single animal defending itself, as almost any will do; this is a coordinated act of vengeance after the fact. Once again, we have only observed similar behaviors in humans, great apes, and cetaceans.

Huffington Post backed off and said “just kidding” after asserting that elephants are people—but I won’t. Elephants are people. They do not have an advanced civilization, to be sure. But as far as I am concerned they display all the necessary minimal conditions to be granted the fundamental rights of personhood. Killing an elephant is murder.

And yet, the ivory trade continues to be profitable. Most of this is black-market activity, though it was legal in some places until very recently; China only restored their ivory trade ban this year, and Hong Kon g’s ban will not take full effect until 2021. Some places are backsliding: A proposal (currently on hold) by the US Fish and Wildlife Service under the Trump administration would also legalize some limited forms of ivory trade.
With this in mind, I can understand why people would support the practice of ivory-burning, symbolically and publicly destroying ivory by fire so that no one can buy it. Two years ago, Kenya organized a particularly large ivory-burning that set ablaze 105 tons of elephant tusk and 1.35 tons of rhino horn.

But as economist, when I first learned about ivory-burning, it seemed like a really, really bad idea.

Why? Supply and demand. By destroying supply, you have just raised the market price of ivory. You have therefore increased the market incentives for poaching elephants and rhinos.

Yet it turns out I was wrong about this, as were many other economists. I looked at the empirical research, and changed my mind substantially. Ivory-burning is not such a bad idea after all.

Here was my reasoning before: If I want to reduce the incentives to produce something, what do I need to do? Lower the price. How do I do that? I need to increase the supply. Economists have made several proposals for how to do that, and until I looked at the data I would have expected them to work; but they haven’t.

The best way to increase supply is to create synthetic ivory that is cheap and very difficult to tell apart from the real thing. This has been done, but it didn’t work. For some reason, sellers try to hide the expensive real ivory in with the cheap synthetic ivory. I admit I actually have trouble understanding this; if you can’t sell it at full price, why even bother with the illegal real ivory? Maybe their customers have methods of distinguishing the two that the regulators don’t? If so, why aren’t the regulators using those methods? Another concern with increasing the supply of ivory is that it might reduce the stigma of consuming ivory, thereby also increasing the demand.

A similar problem has arisen with so-called “ghost ivory”; for obvious reasons, existing ivory products were excluded from the ban imposed in 1947, lest the government be forced to confiscate millions of billiard balls and thousands of pianos. Yet poachers have learned ways to hide new, illegal ivory and sell it as old, legal ivory.

Another proposal was to organize “sustainable ivory harvesting”, which based on past experience with similar regulations is unlikely to be enforceable. Moreover, this is not like sustainable wood harvesting, where our only concern is environmental. I for one care about the welfare of individual elephants, and I don’t think they would want to be “harvested”, sustainably or otherwise.
There is one way of doing “sustainable harvesting” that might not be so bad for the elephants, which would be to set up a protected colony of elephants, help them to increase their population, and then when elephants die of natural causes, take only the tusks and sell those as ivory, stamped with an official seal as “humanely and sustainably produced”. Even then, elephants are among a handful of species that would be offended by us taking their ancestors’ remains. But if it worked, it could save many elephant lives. The bigger problem is how expensive such a project would be, and how long it would take to show any benefit; elephant lifespans are about half as long as ours, (except in zoos, where their mortality rate is much higher!) so a policy that might conceivably solve a problem in 30 to 40 years doesn’t really sound so great. More detailed theoretical and empirical analysis has made this clear: you just can’t get ivory fast enough to meet existing demand this way.

In any case, China’s ban on all ivory trade had an immediate effect at dropping the price of ivory, which synthetic ivory did not. Before that, strengthened regulations in the US (particularly in New York and California) had been effective at reducing ivory sales. The CITES treaty in 1989 that banned most international ivory trade was followed by an immediate increase in elephant populations.

The most effective response to ivory trade is an absolutely categorical ban with no loopholes. To fight “ghost ivory”, we should remove exceptions for old ivory, offering buybacks for any antiques with a verifiable pedigree and a brief period of no-penalty surrender for anything with no such records. The only legal ivory must be for medical and scientific purposes, and its sourcing records must be absolutely impeccable—just as we do with human remains.

Even synthetic ivory must also be banned, at least if it’s convincing enough that real ivory could be hidden in it. You can make something you call “synthetic ivory” that serves a similar consumer function, but it must be different enough that it can be easily verified at customs inspections.

We must give no quarter to poachers; Kenya was right to impose a life sentence for aggravated poaching. The Tanzanian proposal to “shoot to kill” was too extreme; summary execution is never acceptable. But if indeed someone currently has a weapons pointed at an elephant and refuses to drop it, I consider it justifiable to shoot them, just as I would if that weapon were aimed at a human.

The need for a categorical ban is what makes the current US proposal dangerous. The particular exceptions it carves out are not all that large, but the fact that it carves out exceptions at all makes enforcement much more difficult. To his credit, Trump himself doesn’t seem very keen on the proposal, which may mean that it is dead in the water. I don’t get to say this often, but so far Trump seems to be making the right choice on this one.

Though the economic theory predicted otherwise, the empirical data is actually quite clear: The most effective way to save elephants from poaching is an absolutely categorical ban on ivory.

Ivory-burning is a signal of commitment to such a ban. Any ivory we find being sold, we will burn. Whoever was trying to sell it will lose their entire investment. Find more, and we will burn that too.

The injustice of positional goods

2018-07-152018-07-09 PNRJ ethics, inequality, market failure air travel, airlines, Disneyland, inequality, positional good

July 15 JDN 2458315

At Disneyland, you can now buy a special pass that will let you skip ahead in line. On several airlines including American, Delta, Spirit, and Southwest, you can pay extra to be allowed to board before other passengers (which has been particularly salient for me on the many flights I’ve been taking this summer). This is only an extreme form of a long-standing phenomenon: Since the beginning of commercial ship and train travel, there have been first-class and second-class tickets.

I don’t have any formal survey data on the matter, but just about everyone I have spoken to about such policies is at least vaguely uncomfortable with them, if not totally outraged. The exception is other economists, who typically don’t express any concern whatsoever. “People are willing to pay for this service because they value it,” they say; “so what’s the problem?”

On this one, I think the economists are wrong and everyone else is right. There is something different about this sort of service.

Part of the difference between first-class and second-class is in actual quality of services that actually incur additional costs (I hate to break it to you, but legroom on an aircraft is just such an example; every inch of legroom on each seat is another row of seats they can’t have, which is another $2000 or so they don’t get in revenue on each and every flight). But part of it is something else, something that costs the company literally nothing.

This makes early boarding a clearer example. What are you buying when you pay for early boarding? On most airlines, it’s not even a better seat; your seat is pre-assigned (Southwest is an exception). We could say you are paying for extra time, but that’s not really even true; the plane leaves at the same time for everyone. From your perspective, you are paying for convenience; you get to settle in on the plane, maybe get started working or whatever, before everyone else. Maybe you’d rather wait on the plane than wait in the airport (though frankly I’m not sure why; the airport has restaurants and comfortable restrooms).

What you are really buying is position. Early boarding is a positional good. Every person who gets bumped forward in the queue is someone else who is bumped backward. The net benefit for all customers as a whole is precisely zero, as is the cost for the company to provide it—and yet, it still has a positive price! This is impressive economic alchemy: The airline has managed to take something with zero marginal cost and zero marginal benefit, and still make money off of it. They have transmuted the lead of something costless and worthless into the gold of profit.

They achieve this by pitting customers against one another. In a post awhile back I talked about rent-seeking, such as lobbying and advertising. Usually it’s the corporations doing the rent-seeking, but early boarding and queue-jumping are examples of corporations intentionally generating a circumstances where they can obtain revenue from the rent-seeking of others.

To be fair, there might be some welfare gains to be had from auctioning off order in a queue. Some people have genuinely higher costs of time than others (a cardiac surgeon’s time is particularly important, for example), and an auction could potentially order people who have very high cost of time first.

But this argument is much weaker than it may at first appear, because people also have very different marginal utility of wealth, and indeed I think the correlation between your willingness to pay for time and your total wealth is considerably higher than the correlation between your willingness-to-pay for time and your actual real cost in terms of pain and suffering.

This is a more general problem, as I’ve discussed in previous posts; but I think it’s especially acute in the case of time, because real cost of time doesn’t actually vary all that much between most people. The reason poor people take buses and rich people take limousines isn’t because poor people don’t care about their time; it’s because they can’t afford limousines. A cardiac surgeon and an economist could very well have the same salary and the same willingness-to-pay for time, but people rarely die when an economist turns up an hour late. (It’s not that our work isn’t important—actually a good development economist can save far more lives than any cardiac surgeon—but it’s not nearly so urgent.) Also, consider the fact that teachers and social workers generally contribute a good deal more to society than derivatives traders (and thus, from a social welfare perspective, their time should be considered more valuable), but they are far less likely to pay for first-class seats. In fact, a first-come, first-served method actually seems better than an auction from a social welfare perspective: If your time is really important to you, you’re more likely to go out of your way to check in as soon as you can. That costly signal provides a sorting mechanism which relies directly upon real costs of time, rather than indirectly via monetary willingness-to-pay.

And of course when it comes to Disneyland, this argument utterly fails; I see little reason to think that a cardiac surgeon’s vacation time is substantially more valuable to society. (Don’t get me wrong; surgeons need and deserve vacation time—but if they get too much, their performance actually suffers!) So maybe paying for a place in queue isn’t completely rent-seeking, but it’s pretty close.

That is why paying for positional goods feels unjust to most people: Because it is. Charging a price for positional goods is a means of extracting profit from customers without providing any (net) real service. It’s a way of applying price discrimination without even having much monopoly power. If another airline doesn’t let you pay to skip ahead in the queue, you have a slightly lower expected wait time on that other airline, but any revenue they lose from charging a bit less for economy tickets can be easily made up by charging more for the front of the line.

For example, if the first 10% of the line on airline A is decided by selling spots, while airline B chooses at random, and the average time waiting in line to board is 30 minutes, the expected wait times are as follows. Fly airline A and don’t buy a spot: 16.5 minutes. Fly airline A and buy a spot: 1.5 minutes. Fly airline B: 15 minutes. Those 10% are paying for, on average, 13.5 minutes; but you’re only gaining 1.5 minutes. Of course, there are more people waiting that extra 1.5 minutes than saving those 13.5 minutes (9 times as many, in fact). If the per-minute willingness-to-pay were exactly the same, the airline would break even; but they know of course that the willingness-to-pay of that top 10% is considerably higher than that of most of the bottom 90%. If they have any market power at all (which they generally do, by being the only airline serving certain routes, offering loyalty benefits, etc.), they can squeeze out even more profit.

They may even sometimes go out of their way to make life miserable for those who don’t pay extra, increasing the incentive to pay extra. This requires some market power to pull off, but as I said, they often have that. Most airlines don’t offer power outlets at every seat, for example. This is not a serious question of installation cost or even power consumption. We’re talking about a few hundred dollars on an aircraft that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, or a few kilowatts from a system that can generate over one hundred megawatts (of course most of it is used for propulsion, but adding an alternator that would generate an extra few kilowatts of electrical power would still not be difficult or expensive). This is a way of making life worse for the economy-class passengers so they have a stronger incentive to pay for upgraded tickets.

It’s not always easy to tell what is a positional good: First-class seats are ambiguous, for example. But I think a good heuristic is to ask, “Could everyone benefit from this?” If the answer is “No, even in principle”, then you are definitely dealing with a positional good. Not everyone can be first in line at Disneyland. Not everyone can board the plane first. In theory at least, everyone could be provided the same legroom and meal service as a first-class ticket (it would be expensive, but not impossible), so that is at least in part not a positional good.

The “pay-to-win” effect of some video game downloadable content (DLC) is also a positional good, which we can see by the above heuristic: If everyone pays to have the best gun in the game, there’s no point in having the best gun in the game. This is why gamers are rightfully outraged by “pay-to-win” effects, but typically have no objection to paying for DLC that provides them with extra game content (such as new characters, locations, or missions) or cosmetic upgrades (hats, decorations, and “skins”). Personally I tend to think that most DLC is overpriced, and succeeds at being so due to a kind of monopoly power (Mass Effect DLC doesn’t work on Skyrim or vice-versa) but I certainly don’t object to the basic idea of charging additional money for additional content. The reason we object to “pay-to-win” is not that winning the game is so important; it’s that this business model is so obviously a form of rent extraction. (It’s interesting that gamers in China don’t seem to be as bothered by “pay-to-win” as gamers in the US; this runs counter to the standard narrative that American people are competitive capitalists and Chinese people are collectivist socialists, don’t you think?)

There may be some circumstances in which we have no choice but to allow corporations to charge prices for positional goods—especially if we can’t tell whether we are dealing with a positional good or not. But it would not be very difficult to draft legislation that would at least reduce such business practices: We could simply use my “Could everyone benefit?” heuristic. If a business charges money for something that even in principle they could not possibly provide all of their customers, they are charging a price for a positional good, and should be penalized. The benefits of such a policy would be relatively small, but the costs would be even smaller. If we are really concerned about letting cardiac surgeons board aircraft faster (we should really be concerned about deboarding faster—and especially faster security screening!), we could make such a rule that applies to particular classes of high-urgency professions; we don’t need to allow airlines to extract millions of dollars in rent by pitting their customers against each other.

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