inequality

On land acknowledgments

PNRJ ethics, inequality, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 29 JDN 2460674

Noah Smith and Brad DeLong, both of whom I admire, have recently written about the practice of land acknowledgments. Smith is wholeheartedly against them. DeLong has a more nuanced view. Smith in fact goes so far as to argue that there is no moral basis for considering these lands to be ‘Native lands’ at all, which DeLong rightly takes issue with.

I feel like this might be an issue where it would be better to focus on Native American perspectives. (Not that White people aren’t allowed to talk about it; just that we tend to hear from them on everything, and this is something where maybe they’re less likely to know what they’re talking about.)

It turns out that Native views on land acknowledgments are also quite mixed; some see them as a pointless, empty gesture; others see them as a stepping-stone to more serious policy changes that are necessary. There is general agreement that more concrete actions, such as upholding treaties and maintaining tribal sovereignty, are more important.

I have to admit I’m much more in the ’empty gesture’ camp. I’m only one-fourth Native (so I’m Whiter than I am not), but my own view on this is that land acknowledgments aren’t really accomplishing very much, and in fact aren’t even particularly morally defensible.

Now, I know that it’s not realistic to actually “give back” all the land in the United States (or Australia, or anywhere where indigenous people were forced out by colonialism). Many of the tribes that originally lived on the land are gone, scattered to the winds, or now living somewhere else that they were forced to (predominantly Oklahoma). Moreover, there are now more non-Native people living on that land than there ever were Native people living on it, and forcing them all out would be just as violent and horrific as forcing out the Native people was in the first place.

I even appreciate Smith’s point that there is something problematic about assigning ownership of land to bloodlines of people just because they happened to be the first ones living there. Indeed, as he correctly points out, they often weren’t the first ones living there; different tribes have been feuding and warring with each other since time immemorial, and it’s likely that any given plot of land was held by multiple different tribes at different times even before colonization.

Let’s make this a little more concrete.

Consider the Beaver Wars.


The Beaver Wars were a series of conflicts between the Haudenosaunee (that’s what they call themselves; to a non-Native audience they are better known by what the French called them, Iroquois) and several other tribes. Now, that was after colonization, and the French were involved, and part of what they were fighting over was the European fur trade—so the story is a bit complicated by that. But it’s a conflict we have good historical records of, and it’s pretty clear that many of these rivalries long pre-dated the arrival of the French.

The Haudenosaunee were brutal in the Beaver Wars. They slaughtered thousands, including many helpless civilians, and effectively wiped out several entire tribes, including the Erie and Susquehannock, and devastated several others, including the Mohicans and the Wyandot. Many historians consider these to be acts of genocide. Surely any land that the Haundenosaunee claimed as a result of the Beaver Wars is as illegitimate as land claimed by colonial imperialism? Indeed, isn’t it colonial imperialism?

Yet we have no reason to believe that these brutal wars were unique to the Haundenosaunee, or that they only occurred after colonization. Our historical records aren’t as clear going that far back, because many Native tribes didn’t keep written records—in fact, many didn’t even have a written language. But what we do know suggests that a great many tribes warred with a great many other tribes, and land was gained and lost in warfare, going back thousands of years.

Indeed, it seems to be a sad fact of human history that virtually all land, indigenous or colonized, is actually owned by a group that conquered another group (that conquered another group, that conquered another group…). European colonialism was simply the most recent conquest.

But this doesn’t make European colonialism any more justifiable. Rather, it raises a deeper question:

How should we decide who owns what land?

The simplest way, and the way that we actually seem to use most of the time, is to simply take whoever currently owns the land as its legitimate ownership. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law” was always nonsense when it comes to private property (that’s literally what larceny means!), but when it comes to national sovereignty, it is basically correct. Once a group manages to organize itself well enough to enforce control over a territory, we pretty much say that it’s their territory now and they’re allowed to keep it.

Does that mean that anyone is just allowed to take whatever land they can successfully conquer and defend? That the world must simply accept that chaos and warfare are inevitable? Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem.

The Westphalian solution.

The current solution to this problem is what’s called Westphalian sovereignty, after the Peace of Westphalia, two closely-related treaties that were signed in Westphalia (a region of Germany) in 1648. Those treaties established a precedent in international law that nations are entitled to sovereignty over their own territory; other nations are not allowed to invade and conquer them, and if anyone tries, the whole international community should fight to resist any such attempt.

Effectively, what Westphalia did was establish that whoever controlled a given territory right now (where “right now” means 1648) now gets the right to hold it forever—and everyone else not only has to accept that, they are expected to defend it. Now, clearly this has not been followed precisely; new nations have gained independence from their empires (like the United States), nations have separated into pieces (like India and Pakistan, the Balkans, and most recently South Sudan), and sometimes even nations have successfully conquered each other and retained control—but the latter has been considerably rarer than it was before the establishment of Westphalian sovereignty. (Indeed, part of what makes the Ukraine War such an aberration is that it is a brazen violation of Westphalian sovereignty the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Second World War.)

This was, as far as I can tell, a completely pragmatic solution, with absolutely no moral basis whatsoever. We knew in 1648, and we know today, that virtually every nation on Earth was founded in bloodshed, its land taken from others (who took it from others, who took it from others…). And it was timed in such a way that European colonialism became etched in stone—no European power was allowed to take over another European power’s colonies anymore, but they were all allowed to keep all the colonies they already had, and the people living in those colonies didn’t get any say in the matter.

Since then, most (but by no means all) of those colonies have revolted and gained their own independence. But by the time it happened, there were large populations of former colonists, and the indigenous populations were often driven out, dramatically reduced, or even outright exterminated. There is something unsettling about founding a new democracy like the United States or Australia after centuries of injustice and oppression have allowed a White population to establish a majority over the indigenous population; had indigenous people been democratically represented all along, things would probably have gone a lot differently.

What do land acknowledgments accomplish?

I think that the intent behind land acknowledgments is to recognize and commemorate this history of injustice, in the hopes of somehow gaining some kind of at least partial restitution. The intentions here are good, and the injustices are real.

But there is something fundamentally wrong with the way most land acknowledgments are done, because they basically just push the sovereignty back one step: They assert that whoever held the land before Europeans came along is the land’s legitimate owner. But what about the people before them (and the people before them, and the people before them)? How far back in the chain of violence are we supposed to go before we declare a given group’s conquests legitimate?

How far back can we go?

Most of these events happened many centuries ago and were never written down, and all we have now is vague oral histories that may or may not even be accurate. Particularly when one tribe forces out another, it rather behooves the conquering tribe to tell the story in their own favor, as one of “reclaiming” land that was rightfully theirs all along, whether or not that was actually true—as they say, history is written by the victors. (I think it’s actually more true when the history is never actually written.) And in some cases it’s probably even true! In others, that land may have been contested between the two tribes for so long that nobody honestly knows who owned it first.

It feels wrong to legitimate the conquests of colonial imperialism, but it feels just as wrong to simply push it back one step—or three steps, or seven steps.

I think that ultimately what we must do is acknowledge this entire history.

We must acknowledge that this land was stolen by force from Native Americans, and also that most of those Native Americans acquired their land by stealing it by force from other Native Americans, and the chain goes back farther than we have records. We must acknowledge that this is by no means unique to the United States but in fact a universal feature of almost all land held by anyone anywhere in the world. We must acknowledge that this chain of violence and conquest has been a part of human existence since time immemorial—and affirm our commitment to end it, once and for all.

That doesn’t simply mean accepting the current allocation of land; land, like many other resources, is clearly distributed unequally and unfairly. But it does mean that however we choose to allocate land, we must do so by a fair and peaceful process, not by force and conquest. The chain of violence that has driven human history for thousands of years must finally be brought to an end.

More on Free Will

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, inequality, Logic of Kindness, public policy , , , , , , , , ,


Oct 27 JDN 2460611

In a previous post, I defended the existence of compatibilism and free will. There are a few subtler issues with free will that I’d now like to deal with in this week’s post.

The ability to do otherwise

One subtler problem for free will comes from the idea of doing otherwise—what some philosophers call “genuinely open alternatives”. The question is simple to ask, but surprisingly difficult to answer: “When I make a choice, could I have chosen otherwise?”

On one hand, the answer seems obviously “yes” because, when I make a choice, I consider a set of alternatives and select the one that seems best. If I’d wanted to, I’d have chosen something else. On the other hand, the answer seems obviously “no”, because the laws of nature compelled my body and brain to move in exactly the way that it did. So which answer is right?

I think the key lies in understanding specifically how the laws of nature cause my behavior. It’s not as if my arms are on puppet strings, and no matter what I do, they will be moved in a particular way; if I choose to do something, I will do it; if I choose not to, I won’t do it. The laws of nature constrain my behavior by constraining my desires; they don’t constrain what I do in spite of what I want—instead, they constrain what I do through what I want. I am still free to do what I choose to do.

So, while my actions may be predetermined, they are determined by who I am, what I want, what experiences I have. These are precisely the right kind of determinants for free will to make sense; my actions spring not from random chance or external forces, but instead from my own character.

If we really mean to ask, “Could I (exactly as I was, in the situation I was in) have done otherwise (as free choice, not random chance)?” the answer is “No”. Something would have to be different. But one of the things that could be different is me! If I’d had different genes, or a different upbringing, or exposure to different ideas during my life, I might have acted differently. Most importantly, if I had wanted a different outcome, I could have chosen it. So if all we mean by the question is “Could I (if I wanted to) have done otherwise?” the answer is a resounding “Yes”. What I have done in my life speaks to my character—who I am, what I want. It doesn’t merely involve luck (though it may involve some luck), and it isn’t reducible to factors external to me. I am part of the causal structure of the universe; my will is a force. Though the world is made of pushes and pulls, I am among the things pushing and pulling.

As Daniel Dennett pointed out, this kind of freedom admits of degrees: It is entirely possible for a deterministic agent to be more or less effective at altering its circumstances to suit its goals. In fact, we have more options today than we did a few short centuries ago, and this means that in a very real sense we have more free will.

Empirically observing free will

What is really at stake, when we ask whether a person has free will? It seems to me that the question we really want to answer is this: “Are we morally justified in rewarding or punishing this person?” If you were to conclude, “No, they do not have free will, but we are justified in punishing them.”, I would think that you meant something different than I do by “free will”. If instead your ruling was “Yes, they have free will, but we may not reward or punish them.”, I would be similarly confused. Moreover, the concern that without free will, our moral and legal discourse collapses, seems to be founded upon this general notion—that reward and punishment, crucial to ethics and law (not to mention economics!) as they are, are dependent upon free will.

Yet, consider this as a scientific question. What kind of organism can respond to reward and punishment? What sort of thing will change its behavior based upon rewards, punishments, and the prospect thereof? Certainly you must agree that there is no point punishing a thing that will not be affected by the punishment in any way—banging your fist on the rocks will not make the rocks less likely to crush your loved ones. Conversely, I think you’d be hard-pressed to say it’s pointless to punish if the punishment would result in some useful effect. Maybe it’s not morally relevant—but then, why not? If you can make the world better by some action, doesn’t that, other things equal, give you a moral reason to perform that action?

We know exactly what sort of thing responds to reward and punishment: Animals. Specifically, animals that are operant-conditionable, for operant conditioning consists precisely in the orchestrated use of reward and punishment. Humans are of course supremely operant-conditionable; indeed, we can be trained to do incredibly complex things—like play a piano, pilot a space shuttle, hit a fastball, or write a book—and, even more impressively, we can learn to train ourselves to do such things. In fact, clearly something more than operant conditioning is at work here, because certain human behaviors (like language) are far too complex to learn by simple reward and punishment. There is a lot of innate cognition going on in the human brain—but over that layer of innate cognition we can add a virtually endless range of possible learned behaviors.

That is to say, learning—the capacity to change future behavior based upon past experience—is precisely in alignment with our common intuitions about free will—that humans have the most, animals have somewhat less, computers might have some, and rocks have none. Yes, there are staunch anthropocentrist dualists who would insist that animals and computers have no “free will”. But if you ask someone, “Did that dog dig that hole on purpose?” their immediate response will not include such theological considerations; it will attribute free choice to Canis lupus familiaris. Indeed, I think if you ask, “Did the chess program make that move on purpose?” the natural answer attributes some sort of will even to the machine. (Maybe just its programmer? I’m not so sure.)

Yet, if the capacity to respond to reward and punishment is all we need to justify reward and punishment, then the problem of free will collapses. We should punish criminals if, and only if, punishing them will reform them to better behavior, or set an example to deter others from similar crimes. Did we lose some deep sense of moral desert and retribution? Maybe, but I think we can probably work it back in, and if we can’t, we can probably do without it. Either way, we can still have a justice system and moral discourse.

Indeed, we can do better than that; we can now determine empirically whether a given entity is a moral agent. The insane psychopathic serial killer who utterly fails to understand empathy may indeed fail to qualify, in which case we should kill them and be done with it, the same way we would kill a virus or destroy an oncoming asteroid. Or they may turn out to qualify, in which case we should punish them as we would other moral agents. The point is, this is a decidable question, at least in principle; all we need are a few behavioral and psychological experiments to determine the answer.

The power of circumstances

There is another problem with classical accounts of free will, which comes from the results of psychology experiments. Perhaps the most seminal was the (in)famous experiment by Stanley Milgram, in which verbal commands caused ordinary people to administer what they thought were agonizing and life-threatening shocks to innocent people for no good reason. Simply by being put in particular circumstances, people found themselves compelled to engage in actions they would never have done otherwise. This experiment was replicated in 2009 under more rigorous controls, with virtually identical results.

This shows that free will is much more complicated than we previously imagined. Even if we acknowledge that human beings are capable of making rational, volitional decisions that reflect their character, we must be careful not to presume that everything people do is based upon character. As Hannah Arendt has pointed out, even the Nazis, though they perpetrated almost unimaginable evils, nonetheless were for the most part biologically and psychologically normal human beings. Perhaps Hitler and Himmler were maniacal psychopaths (and more recently Arendt’s specific example of Eichmann has also been challenged.), but the vast majority of foot soldiers of the German Army who burned villages or gassed children were completely ordinary men in extraordinarily terrible circumstances. This forces us to reflect upon the dire fact that in their place, most of us would have done exactly the same things.

This doesn’t undermine free will entirely, but it does force us to reconsider many of our preconceptions about it. Court systems around the world are based around the presumption that criminal acts are committed by people who are defective in character, making them deserving of punishment; in some cases this is probably right (e.g. Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson), but in many cases, it is clearly wrong. Crime is much more prevalent in impoverished areas; why? Not because poor people are inherently more criminal, but because poverty itself makes people more likely to commit crimes. In a longitudinal study in Georgia, socioeconomic factors strongly predicted crime, especially property crime. An experiment at MIT suggests that letting people move to wealthier neighborhoods actually makes their children less likely to commit crimes. A 2007 report from the Government Accountability Office explicitly endorsed the hypothesis that poverty causes crime.

Really, all of this makes perfect sense: Poor people are precisely those who have the least to lose and the most to gain by breaking the rules. If you are starving, theft may literally save your life. Even if you’re not at the verge of starvation, the poorer you are, the worse your life prospects are, and the more unfairly the system has treated you. Most people who are rich today inherited much of their wealth from ancestors who violently stole it from other people. Why should anyone respect the rules of a system that robbed their ancestors and leaves them forsaken? Compound this with the fact that it is harder to be law-abiding when you are surrounded by thieves, and the high crime rates of inner cities hardly seem surprising.

Does this mean we should abandon criminal justice? Clearly not, for the consequences of doing so would be predictably horrendous. Temporary collapses in civil government typically lead to violent anarchy; this continued for several years in Somalia, and has happened more briefly even in Louisiana (it was not as terrible as the media initially reported, but it was still quite bad.) We do need to hold people responsible for their crimes. But what this sort of research shows is that we also need to consider situational factors when we set policy. The United States has the highest after-tax absolute poverty rate and the highest share of income claimed by the top 0.01\% of any First World nation—an astonishing 4%, meaning that the top 30,000 richest Americans have on average 400 times as much income as the average person. (My master’s thesis was actually on the subject of how this high level of inequality is related to increased corruption.) We also have the third-highest rate of murder in the OECD, after Mexico (by far the highest) and Estonia. Our homicide rate is almost three times that of Canada and over four times that of England. Even worse, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Yes, that’s right; we in the US imprison a larger portion of our population than any other nation on Earth—including Iran, China, and Saudi Arabia.

Social science suggests this is no coincidence; it is our economic inequality that leads to our crime and incarceration. Nor is our poverty a result of insufficient wealth. By the standard measure Gross Domestic Product (GDP), an estimate of the total economic output a nation produces each year, the United States has the second-highest total GDP at purchasing power parity (China recently surpassed us), and the sixth-highest GDP per person in the world. We do not lack wealth; instead, we funnel wealth to the rich and deny it from the poor. If we stopped doing this, we would see a reduction in poverty and inequality, and there is reason to think that a corresponding reduction in crime would follow. We could make people act morally better simply by redistributing wealth.

Such knowledge of situational factors forces us to reconsider our ethical judgments on many subjects. It forces us to examine the ways that social, political, and economic systems influence our behavior in powerful ways. But we still have free will, and we still need to use it; in fact, in order to apply this research to our daily lives and public policies, we will need to exercise our free will very carefully.

Why is America so bad at public transit?

PNRJ development economics, inequality, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 8 JDN 2460562

In most of Europe, 20-30% of the population commutes daily by public transit. In the US, only 13% do.

Even countries much poorer than the US have more widespread use of public transit; Kenya, Russia, and Venezuela all have very high rates of public transit use.

Cities around the world are rapidly expanding and improving their subway systems; but we are not here in the US.

Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Japan are all building huge high-speed rail networks. We have essentially none.

Even Canada has better public transit than we do, and their population is just as spread out as ours.

Why are we so bad at this?

Surprisingly, it isn’t really that we are lacking in rail network. We actually have more kilometers of rail than China or the EU—though shockingly little of it is electrified, and we had nearly twice as many kilometers of rail a century ago. But we use this rail network almost entirely for freight, not passengers.

Is it that we aren’t spending enough government funds? Sort of. But it’s worth noting that we cover a higher proportion of public transit costs with government funds than most other countries. How can this be? It’s because transit systems get more efficient as they get larger, and attract more passengers as they provide better service. So when you provide really bad service, you end up spending more per passenger, and you need more government subsidies to stay afloat.

Cost is definitely part of it: It costs between two and seven times as much to build the same amount of light rail network in the US as it does in most EU countries. But that just raises another question: Why is it so much more expensive here?

This isn’t comparing with China—of course China is cheaper; they have a dictatorship, they abuse their workers, they pay peanuts. None of that is true of France or Germany, democracies where wages are just as high and worker protections are actually a good deal stronger than here. Yet it still costs two to seven times as much to build the same amount of rail in the US as it does in France or Germany.

Another part of the problem seems to be that public transit in the US is viewed as a social welfare program, rather than an infrastructure program: Rather than seeing it as a vital function of government that supports a strong economy, we see it as a last resort for people too poor to buy cars. And then it becomes politicized, because the right wing in the US hates social welfare programs and will do anything to make sure that they are cut down as much as possible.

It wasn’t always this way.

As recently as 1970, most US major cities had strong public transit systems. But now it’s really only the coastal cities that have them; cities throughout the South and Midwest have massively divested from their public transit. This goes along with a pattern of deindustrialization and suburbanization: These cities are stagnating economically and their citizens are moving out to the suburbs, so there’s no money for public transit and there’s more need for roads.

But the decline of US public transit goes back even further than that. Average transit trips per person in the US fell from 115 per year in 1950 to 36 per year in 1970.

This long, slow decline has only gotten worse as a result of the COVID pandemic; with more and more people working remotely, there’s just less need for commuting in general. (Then again, that also means fewer car miles, so it’s probably a good thing from an environmental perspective.)

Once public transit starts failing, it becomes a vicious cycle: They lose revenue, so they cut back on service, so they become more inconvenient, so they lose more revenue. Really successful public transit systems require very heavy investment in order to maintain fast, convenient service across an entire city. Any less than that, and people will just turn to cars instead.

Currently, the public transit systems in most US cities are suffering severe financial problems, largely as a result of the pandemic; they are facing massive shortfalls in their budgets. The federal government often helps with the capital costs of buying vehicles and laying down new lines, but not with the operating costs of actually running the system.

There seems to be some kind of systemic failure in the US in particular; something about our politics, or our economy, or our culture just makes us uniquely bad at building and maintaining public transit.

What should we do about this?

One option would be to do nothing—laissez faire. Maybe cars are just a more efficient mode of transportation, or better for what Americans want, and we should accept that.

But when you look at the externalities involved, it becomes clear that this is not the right approach. While cars produce enormous amounts of pollution and carbon emissions, public transit is much, much cleaner. (Electric cars are better than diesel buses, but still worse than trams and light rail—and besides, the vast majority of cars use gasoline.) Just for clean air and climate change alone, we have strong reasons to want fewer cars and more public transit.

And there are positive externalities of public transit too; it’s been estimated that for every $1 spent on public transit, a city gains $5 in economic activity. We’re leaving a lot of money on the table by failing to invest in something so productive.

We need a fundamental shift in how Americans think about public transit. Not as a last resort for the poor, but as a default option for everyone. Not as a left-wing social welfare program, but as a vital component of our nation’s infrastructure.

Whenever people get stuck in traffic, instead of resenting other drivers (who are in exactly the same boat!), they should resent that the government hasn’t supported more robust public transit systems—and then they should go out and vote for candidates and policies that will change that.

Of course, with everything else that’s wrong with our economy and our political system, I can understand why this might not be a priority right now. But sooner or later we are going to need to fix this, or it’s just going to keep getting worse and worse.

Housing should be cheap

PNRJ core principles, development economics, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy , , ,

Sep 1 JDN 2460555

We are of two minds about housing in our society. On the one hand, we recognize that shelter is a necessity, and we want it to be affordable for all. On the other hand, we see real estate as an asset, and we want it to appreciate in value and thereby provide a store of wealth. So on the one hand we want it to be cheap, but on the other hand we want it to be expensive. And of course it can’t be both.

This is not a uniquely American phenomenon. As Noah Smith points out, it seems to be how things are done in almost every country in the world. It may be foolish for me to try to turn such a tide. But I’m going to try anyway.

Housing should be cheap.

For some reason, inflation is seen as a bad thing for every other good, necessity and luxury alike; but when it comes to housing in particular—the single biggest expense for almost everyone—suddenly we are conflicted about it, and think that maybe inflation is a good thing actually.

This is because owning a home that appreciates in value provides the illusion of increasing wealth.

Yes, I said illusion. In some particular circumstances it can sometimes increase real wealth, but when housing is getting more expensive everywhere at once (which is basically true), it doesn’t actually increase real wealth—because you still need to have a home. So while you’d get more money if you sold your current home, you’d have to go buy another home that would be just as expensive. That extra wealth is largely imaginary.

In fact, what isn’t an illusion is your increased property tax bill. If you aren’t planning on selling your home any time soon, you should really see its appreciation as a bad thing; now you suddenly owe more in taxes.

Home equity lines of credit complicate this a bit; for some reason we let people collateralize part of the home—even though the whole home is already collateralized with a mortgage to someone else—and thereby turn that largely-imaginary wealth into actual liquid cash. This is just one more way that our financial system is broken; we shouldn’t be offering these lines of credit, just as we shouldn’t be creating mortgage-backed securities. Cleverness is not a virtue in finance; banking should be boring.

But you’re probably still not convinced. So I’d like you to consider a simple thought experiment, where we take either view to the extreme: Make housing 100 times cheaper or 100 times more expensive.

Currently, houses cost about $400,000. So in Cheap World, houses cost $4,000. In Expensive World, they cost $40 million.

In Cheap World, there is no homelessness. Seriously, zero. It would make no sense at all for the government not to simply buy everyone a house. If you want to also buy your own house—or a dozen—go ahead, that’s fine; but you get one for free, paid for by tax dollars, because that’s cheaper than a year of schooling for a high-school student; it’s in fact not much more than what we’d currently spend to house someone in a homeless shelter for a year. So given the choice of offering someone two years at a shelter versus never homeless ever again, it’s pretty obvious we should choose the latter. Thus, in Cheap World, we all have a roof over our heads. And instead of storing their wealth in their homes in Cheap World, people store their wealth in stocks and bonds, which have better returns anyway.

In Expensive World, the top 1% are multi-millionaires who own homes, maybe the top 10% can afford rent, and the remaining 89% of the population are homeless. There’s simply no way to allocate the wealth of our society such that a typical middle class household has $40 million. We’re just not that rich. We probably never will be that rich. It may not even be possible to make a society that rich. In Expensive World, most people live in tents on the streets, because housing has been priced out of reach for all but the richest families.

Cheap World sounds like an amazing place to live. Expensive World is a horrific dystopia. The only thing I changed was the price of housing.


Yes, I changed it a lot; but that was to make the example as clear as possible, and it’s not even as extreme as it probably sounds. At 10% annual growth, 100 times more expensive only takes 49 years. At the current growth rate of housing prices of about 5% per year, it would take 95 years. A century from now, if we don’t fix our housing market, we will live in Expensive World. (Yes, we’ll most likely be richer then too; but will we be that much richer? Median income has not been rising nearly as fast as median housing price. If current trends continue, median income will be 5 times bigger and housing prices will be 100 times bigger—that’s still terrible.)

We’re already seeing something that feels a lot like Expensive World in some of our most expensive cities. San Francisco has ludicrously expensive housing and also a massive homelessness crisis—this is not a coincidence. Homelessness does still exist in more affordable cities, but clearly not at the same crisis level.

I think part of the problem is that people don’t really understand what wealth is. They see the number go up, and they think that means there is more wealth. Real wealth consists in goods, not in prices. The wealth we have is made of real things, not monetary prices. Prices merely decide how wealth is allocated.

A home is wealth, yes. But it’s the same amount of real wealth regardless of what price it has, because what matters is what it’s good for. If you become genuinely richer by selling an appreciated home, you gained that extra wealth from somewhere else; it was not contained within your home. You have appropriated wealth that someone else used to have. You haven’t created wealth; you’ve merely obtained it.

For you as an individual, that may not make a difference; you still get richer. But as a society, it makes all the difference: Moving wealth around doesn’t make our society richer, and all higher prices can do is move wealth around.

This means that rising housing prices simply cannot make our whole society richer. Better houses could do that. More houses could do that. But simply raising the price tag isn’t making our society richer. If it makes anyone richer—which, again, typically it does not—it does so by moving wealth from somewhere else. And since homeowners are generally richer than non-homeowners (even aside from their housing wealth!), more expensive homes means moving wealth from poorer people to richer people—increased inequality.

We used to have affordable housing, just a couple of generations ago. But we may never have truly affordable housing again, because people really don’t like to see that number go down, and they vote for policies accordingly—especially at the local level. Our best hope right now seems to be to keep it from going up faster than the growth rate of income, so that homes don’t become any more unaffordable than they already are.

But frankly I’m not optimistic. I think part of the cyberpunk dystopia we’re careening towards is Expensive World.

How to detect discrimination, empirically

PNRJ core principles, ethics, inequality, mathematical models, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 25 JDN 2460548

For concreteness, I’ll use men and women as my example, though the same principles would apply for race, sexual orientation, and so on. Suppose we find that there are more men than women in a given profession; does this mean that women are being discriminated against?

Not necessarily. Maybe women are less interested in that kind of work, or innately less qualified. Is there a way we can determine empirically that it really is discrimination?

It turns out that there is. All we need is a reliable measure of performance in that profession. Then, we compare performance between men and women, and that comparison can tell us whether discrimination is happening or not. The key insight is that workers in a job are not a random sample; they are a selected sample. The results of that selection can tell us whether discrimination is happening.

Here’s a simple model to show how this works.

Suppose there are five different skill levels in the job, from 1 to 5 where 5 is the most skilled. And suppose there are 5 women and 5 men in the population.

1. Baseline

The baseline case to consider is when innate talents are equal and there is no discrimination. In that case, we should expect men and women to be equally represented in the profession.

For the simplest case, let’s say that there is one person at each skill level:

MenWomen
11
22
33
44
55

Now suppose that everyone above a certain skill threshold gets hired. Since we’re assuming no discrimination, the threshold should be the same for men and women. Let’s say it’s 3; then these are the people who get hired:

Hired MenHired Women
33
44
55

The result is that not only are there the same number of men and women in the job, their skill levels are also the same. There are just as many highly-competent men as highly-competent women.

2. Innate Differences

Now, suppose there is some innate difference in talent between men and women for this job. For most jobs this seems suspicious, but consider pro sports: Men really are better at basketball, in general, than women, and this is pretty clearly genetic. So it’s not absurd to suppose that for at least some jobs, there might be some innate differences. What would that look like?


Again suppose a population of 5 men and 5 women, but now the women are a bit less qualified: There are two 1s and no 5s among the women.

MenWomen
11
21
32
43
54

Then, this is the group that will get hired:

Hired MenHired Women
33
44
5

The result will be fewer women who are on average less qualified. The most highly-qualified individuals at that job will be almost entirely men. (In this simple model, entirely men; but you can easily extend it so that there are a few top-qualified women.)

This is in fact what we see for a lot of pro sports; in a head-to-head match, even the best WNBA teams would generally lose against most NBA teams. That’s what it looks like when there are real innate differences.

But it’s hard to find clear examples outside of sports. The genuine, large differences in size and physical strength between the sexes just don’t seem to be associated with similar differences in mental capabilities or even personality. You can find some subtler effects, but nothing very large—and certainly nothing large enough to explain the huge gender gaps in various industries.

3. Discrimination

What does it look like when there is discrimination?

Now assume that men and women are equally qualified, but it’s harder for women to get hired, because of discrimination. The key insight here is that this amounts to women facing a higher threshold. Where men only need to have level 3 competence to get hired, women need level 4.

So if the population looks like this:

MenWomen
11
22
33
44
55

The hired employees will look like this:

Hired MenHired Women
3
44
55

Once again we’ll have fewer women in the profession, but they will be on average more qualified. The top-performing individuals will be as likely to be women as they are to be men, while the lowest-performing individuals will be almost entirely men.

This is the kind of pattern we observe when there is discrimination. Do we see it in real life?

Yes, we see it all the time.

Corporations with women CEOs are more profitable.

Women doctors have better patient outcomes.

Startups led by women are more likely to succeed.

This shows that there is some discrimination happening, somewhere in the process. Does it mean that individual firms are actively discriminating in their hiring process? No, it doesn’t. The discrimination could be happening somewhere else; maybe it happens during education, or once women get hired. Maybe it’s a product of sexism in society as a whole, that isn’t directly under the control of employers. But it must be in there somewhere. If women are both rarer and more competent, there must be some discrimination going on.

What if there is also innate difference? We can detect that too!

4. Both

Suppose now that men are on average more talented, but there is also discrimination against women. Then the population might look like this:

MenWomen
11
21
32
43
54

And the hired employees might look like this:

Hired MenHired Women
3
4
54

In such a scenario, you’ll see a large gender imbalance, but there may not be a clear difference in competence. The tiny fraction of women who get hired will perform about as well as the men, on average.

Of course, this assumes that the two effects are of equal strength. In reality, we might see a whole spectrum of possibilities, from very strong discrimination with no innate differences, all the way to very large innate differences with no discrimination. The outcomes will then be similarly along a spectrum: When discrimination is much larger than innate difference, women will be rare but more competent. When innate difference is much larger than discrimination, women will be rare and less competent. And when there is a mix of both, women will be rare but won’t show as much difference in competence.

Moreover, if you look closer at the distribution of performance, you can still detect the two effects independently. If the lowest-performing workers are almost all men, that’s evidence of discrimination against women; while if the highest-performing workers are almost all men, that’s evidence of innate difference. And if you look at the table above, that’s exactly what we see: Both the 3 and the 5 are men, indicating the presence of both effects.

What does affirmative action do?

Effectively, affirmative action lowers the threshold for hiring women (or minorities) in order to equalize representation in the workplace. In the presence of discrimination raising that threshold, this is exactly what we need! It can take us from case 3 (discrimination) to case 1 (equality), or from case 4 (both discrimination and innate difference) to case 2 (innate difference only).

Of course, it’s possible for us to overshoot, using more affirmative action than we should have. If we achieve better representation of women, but the lowest performers at the job are women, then we have overshot, effectively now discriminating against men. Fortunately, there is very little evidence of this in practice. In general, even with affirmative action programs in place, we tend to find that the lowest performers are still men—so there is still discrimination against women that we’ve failed to compensate for.

What if we can’t measure competence?

Of course, it’s possible that we don’t have good measures of competence in a given industry. (One must wonder how firms decide who to hire, but frankly I’m prepared to believe they’re just really bad at it.) Then we can’t observe discrimination statistically in this way. What do we do then?

Well, there is at least one avenue left for us to detect discrimination: We can do direct experiments comparing resumes with male names versus female names. These sorts of experiments typically don’t find very much, though—at least for women. For different races, they absolutely do find strong results. They also find evidence of discrimination against people with disabilities, older people, and people who are physically unattractive. There’s also evidence of intersectional effects, where women of particular ethnic groups get discriminated against even when women in general don’t.

But this will only pick up discrimination if it occurs during the hiring process. The advantage of having a competence measure is that it can detect discrimination that occurs anywhere—even outside employer control. Of course, if we don’t know where the discrimination is happening, that makes it very hard to fix; so the two approaches are complementary.

And there is room for new methods too; right now we don’t have a good way to detect discrimination in promotion decisions, for example. Many of us suspect that it occurs, but unless you have a good measure of competence, you can’t really distinguish promotion discrimination from innate differences in talent. We don’t have a good method for testing that in a direct experiment, either, because unlike hiring, we can’t just use fake resumes with masculine or feminine names on them.

Why does everyone work full-time?

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 30 JDN 2460492

Over 70% of US workers work “full-time”, that is, at least 40 hours a week. The average number of hours worked per week is 33.8, and the average number of overtime hours is only 3.6. So basically, about 2/3 of workers work almost exactly 40 hours per week.

We’re accustomed to this situation, so it may not seem strange to you. But stop and think for a moment: What are the odds that across every industry, exactly 40 hours per week is the most efficient arrangement?

Indeed, there is mounting evidence that in many industries, 40 hours is too much, and something like 5 or even 30 would actually be more efficient. Yet we continue to work 40-hour weeks.

This looks like a corner solution: Rather than choosing an optimal amount, we’re all up against some kind of constraint.


What’s the constraint? Well, the government requires (for most workers) that anything above 40 hours per week must be paid as overtime, that is, at a higher wage rate. So it looks like we would all be working more than 40 hours per week, but we hit the upper limit due to these regulations.

Does this mean we would be better off without the regulations? Clearly not. As I just pointed out, the evidence is mounting that 40 hours is too much, not too little. But why, then, would we all be trying to work so many hours?

I believe this is yet another example of hyper-competition, where competition drives us to an inefficient outcome.

Employers value employees who work a lot of hours. Indeed, I contend that they do so far more than makes any rational sense; they seem to care more about how many hours you work than about the actual quality or quantity of your output. Maybe this is because hours worked is easier to measure, or because it seems like a fairer estimate of your effort; but for whatever reason, employers really seem to reward employees who work a lot of hours, regardless of almost everything else.

In the absence of a limit on hours worked, then, employers are going to heap rewards on whoever works the most hours, and so people will be pressured to work more and more hours. Then we would all work ourselves to death, and it’s not even clear that this would be good for GDP.

Indeed, this seems to be what happened, before the 40-hour work week became the standard. In the 1800s, the average American worked over 60 hours per week. It wasn’t until the 1940s that 40-hour weeks became the norm.

But speaking of norms, that also seems to be a big factor here. The truth is, overtime isn’t really that expensive, and employers could be smarter about rewarding good work rather than more hours. But once a norm establishes itself in a society, it can be very hard to change. And right now, the norm is that 40 hours is a “normal” “standard” “full” work week—any more is above and beyond, and any less is inferior.

This is a problem, because a lot of people can’t work 40-hour weeks. Our standard for what makes someone “disabled” isn’t that you can’t work at all; it’s that you can’t work as much as society expects. I wonder how many people are currently living on disability who could have been working part-time, but there just weren’t enough part-time jobs available. The employment rate among people with a disability is only 41%, compared to 77% of the general population.

And it’s not that we need to work this much. Our productivity is now staggeringly high: We produce more than five times as much wealth per hour of work than we did as recently as the 1940s. So in theory, we should be able to live just as well while working one-fifth as much… but that’s clearly not what happened.

Keynes accurately predicted our high level of productivity; but he wrongly predicted that we would work less, when instead we just kept right on working almost as hard as before.

Indeed, it doesn’t even seem like we live five times as well while working just as much. Many things are better now—healthcare, entertainment, and of course electronics—but somehow, we really don’t feel like we are living better lives than our ancestors.

The Economic Policy Institute offers an explanation for this phenomenon: Our pay hasn’t kept up with our productivity.


Up until about 1980, productivity and pay rose in lockstep. But then they started to diverge, and they never again converged. Productivity continued to soar, while real wages only barely increased. The result is that since then, productivity has grown by 64%, and hourly pay has only grown 15%.

This is definitely part of the problem, but I think there’s more to it as well. Housing and healthcare have become so utterly unaffordable in this country that it really doesn’t matter that our cars are nice and our phones are dirt cheap. We are theoretically wealthier now, but most of that extra wealth goes into simply staying healthy and having a home. Our consumption has been necessitized.

If we can solve these problems, maybe people won’t feel a need to work so many hours. Or, maybe competition will continue to pressure them to work those hours… but at least we’ll actually feel richer when we do it.

No, the system is not working as designed

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

You say you’ve got a real solution…

Well, you know,

We’d all love to see the plan.

“Revolution”, the Beatles


Jun 16 JDN 2460478


There are several different versions of the meme, but they all follow the same basic format: Rejecting the statement “the system is broken and must be fixed”, they endorse the statement “the system is working exactly as intended and must be destroyed”.


This view is not just utterly wrong; it’s also incredibly dangerous.

First of all, it should be apparent to anyone who has ever worked in any large, complex organization—a corporation, a university, even a large nonprofit org—that no human system works exactly as intended. Some obviously function better than others, and most function reasonably well most of the time (probably because those that don’t fail and disappear, so there is a sort of natural selection process at work); but even with apparently simple goals and extensive resources, no complex organization will ever be able to coordinate its actions perfectly toward those goals.

But when we’re talking about “the system”, well, first of all:

What exactly is “the system”?

Is it government? Society as a whole? The whole culture, or some subculture? Is it local, national, or international? Are we talking about democracy, or maybe capitalism? The world isn’t just one system; it’s a complex network of interacting systems. So to be quite honest with you, I don’t even know what people are complaining about when they complain about “the system”. All I know is that there is some large institution that they don’t like.

Let’s suppose we can pin that down—say we’re talking about capitalism, for instance, or the US government. Then, there is still the obvious fact that any real-world implementation of a system is going to have failures. Particularly when millions of people are involved, no system is ever going to coordinate exactly toward achieving its goals as efficiently as possible. At best it’s going to coordinate reasonably well and achieve its goals most of the time.

But okay, let’s try to be as charitable as possible here.

What are people trying to say when they say this?

I think that fundamentally this is meant as an expression of Conflict Theory over Mistake Theory: The problems with the world aren’t due to well-intentioned people making honest mistakes, they are due to people being evil. The response isn’t to try to correct their mistakes; it’s to fight them (kill them?), because they are evil.

Well, it is certainly true that evil people exist. There are mass murderers and tyrants, rapists and serial killers. And though they may be less extreme, it is genuinely true that billionaires are disproportionately likely to be psychopaths and that those who aren’t typically share a lot of psychopathic traits.

But does this really look like the sort of system that was designed to optimize payoffs for a handful of psychopaths? Really? You can’t imagine any way that the world could be more optimized for that goal?

How about, say… feudalism?

Not that long ago, historically—less than a millennium—the world was literally ruled by those same sorts of uber-rich psychopaths, and they wielded absolute power over their subjects. In medieval times, your king could confiscate your wealth whenever he chose, or even have you executed on a whim. That system genuinely looks like it’s optimized for the power of a handful of evil people.

Democracy, on the other hand, actually looks like it’s trying to be better. Maybe sometimes it isn’t better—or at least isn’t enough better. But why would they even bother letting us vote, if they were building a system to optimize their own power over us? Why would we have these free speech protections—that allow you to post those memes without going to prison?

In fact, there are places today where near-absolute power really is concentrated in a handful of psychopaths, where authoritarian dictators still act very much like kings of yore. In North Korea or Russia or China, there really is a system in place that’s very well optimized to maximize the power of a few individuals over everyone else.

But in the United States, we don’t have that. Not yet, anyway. Our democracy is flawed and imperilled, but so far, it stands. It needs our constant vigilance to defend it, but so far, it stands.

This is precisely why these ideas are so dangerous.

If you tell people that the system is already as bad as it’s ever going to get, that the only hope now is to burn it all down and build something new, then those people aren’t going to stand up and defend what we still have. They aren’t going to fight to keep authoritarians out of office, because they don’t believe that their votes or donations or protests actually do anything to control who ends up in office.

In other words, they are acting exactly as the authoritarians want them to.

Short of your actual support, the best gift you can give your enemy is apathy.

If all the good people give up on democracy, then it will fail, and we will see something worse in its place. Your belief that the world can’t get any worse can make the world much, much worse.

I’m not saying our system of government couldn’t be radically improved. It absolutely could, even by relatively simple reforms, such as range voting and a universal basic income. But there are people who want to tear it all down, and if they succeed, what they put in its place is almost certainly going to be worse, not better.

That’s what happened in Communist countries, after all: They started with bad systems, they tore them down in the name of making something better—and then they didn’t make something better. They made something worse.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that Marxists are so often Conflict Theorists; Marx himself certainly was. Marx seemed convinced that all we needed to do was tear down the old system, and a new, better system would spontaneously emerge. But that isn’t how any of this works.

Good governance is actually really hard.

Life isn’t simple. People aren’t easy to coordinate. Conflicts of interest aren’t easy to resolve. Coordination failures are everywhere. If you tear down the best systems we have for solving these problems, with no vision at all of what you would replace them with, you’re not going to get something better.

Different people want different things. We have to resolve those disagreements somehow. There are lots of ways we could go about doing that. But so far, some variation on voting seems to be the best method we have for resolving disagreements fairly.

It’s true; some people out there are really just bad people. Some of what even good people want is ultimately not reasonable, or based on false presumptions. (Like people who want to “cut” foreign aid to 5% of the budget—when it is in fact about 1%.) Maybe there is some alternative system out there that could solve these problems better, ensure that only the reasonable voices with correct facts actually get heard.

If so, well, you know:

We’d all love to see the plan.

It’s not enough to recognize that our current system is flawed and posit that something better could exist. You need to actually have a clear vision of what that better system looks like. For if you go tearing down the current system without any idea of what to replace it with, you’re going to end up with something much worse.

Indeed, if you had a detailed plan of how to improve things, it’s quite possible you could convince enough people to get that plan implemented, without tearing down the whole system first.

We’ve done it before, after all:

We ended slavery, then racial segregation. We gave women the right to vote, then integrated them into the workforce. We removed the ban of homosexuality, and then legalized same-sex marriage.


We have a very clear track record of reform working. Things are getting better, on a lot of different fronts. (Maybe not all fronts, I admit.) When the moral case becomes overwhelming, we really can convince people to change their minds and then vote to change our policies.

We do not have such a track record when it comes to revolutions.

Yes, some revolutions have worked out well, such as the one that founded the United States. (But I really cannot emphasize this: they had a plan!) But plenty more have worked out very badly. Even France, which turned out okay in the end, had to go through a Napoleon phase first.

Overall, it seems like our odds are better when we treat the system as broken and try to fix it, than when we treat it as evil and try to tear it down.

The world could be a lot better than it is. But never forget: It could also be a lot worse.

Wrongful beneficence

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, ethics, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , ,

Jun 9 JDN 2460471

One of the best papers I’ve ever read—one that in fact was formative in making me want to be an economist—is Wrongful Beneficence by Chris Meyers.

This paper opened my eyes to a whole new class of unethical behavior: Acts that unambiguously make everyone better off, but nevertheless are morally wrong. Hence, wrongful beneficence.

A lot of economists don’t even seem to believe in such things. They seem convinced that as long as no one is made worse off by a transaction, that transaction must be ethically defensible.

Chris Meyers convinced me that they are wrong.

The key insight here is that it’s still possible to exploit someone even if you make them better off. This happens when they are in a desperate situation and you take advantage of that to get an unfair payoff.


Here one of the cases Meyers offers to demonstrate this:

Suppose Carole is driving across the desert on a desolate road when her car breaks down. After two days and two nights without seeing a single car pass by, she runs out of water and feels rather certain that she will perish if not rescued soon. Now suppose that Jason happens to drive down this road and finds Carole. He sees that her situation is rather desperate and that she needs (or strongly desires) to get to the nearest town as soon as possible. So Jason offers her a ride but only on the condition that […] [she gives him] her entire net worth, the title to her house and car, all of her money in the bank, and half of her earnings for the next ten years.

Carole obviously is better off than she would be if Jason hadn’t shown up—she might even have died. She freely consented to this transaction—again, because if she didn’t, she might die. Yet it seems absurd to say that Jason has done nothing wrong by making such an exorbitant demand. If he had asked her to pay for gas, or even to compensate him for his time at a reasonable rate, we’d have no objection. But to ask for her life savings, all her assets, and half her earnings for ten years? Obviously unfair—and obviously unethical. Jason is making Carole (a little) better off while making himself (a lot) better off, so everyone is benefited; but what he’s doing is obviously wrong.

Once you recognize that such behavior can exist, you start to see it all over the place, particularly in markets, where corporations are quite content to gouge their customers with high prices and exploit their workers with low wages—but still, technically, we’re better off than we would be with no products and no jobs at all.

Indeed, the central message of Wrongful Beneficence is actually about sweatshop labor: It’s not that the workers are worse off than they would have been (in general, they aren’t); it’s that they are so desperate that corporations can get away with exploiting them with obviously unfair wages and working conditions.

Maybe it would be easier just to move manufacturing back to First World countries?

Right-wingers are fond of making outlandish claims that making products at First World wages would be utterly infeasible; here’s one claiming that an iPhone would need to cost $30,000 if it were made in the US. In fact, the truth is that it would only need to cost about $40 more—because hardly any of its cost is actually going to labor. Most of its price is pure monopoly profit for Apple; most of the rest is components and raw materials. (Of course, if those also had to come from the US, the price would go up more; but even so, we’re talking something like double its original price, not thirty times. Workers in the US are indeed paid a lot more than workers in China; they are also more productive.)

It’s true that actually moving manufacturing from other countries back to the US would be a substantial undertaking, requiring retooling factories, retraining engineers, and so on; but it’s not like we’ve never done that sort of thing before. I’m sure it could not be done overnight; but of course it could be done. We do this sort of thing all the time.

Ironically, this sort of right-wing nonsense actually seems to feed the far left as well, supporting their conviction that all this prosperity around us is nothing more than an illusion, that all our wealth only exists because we steal it from others. But this could scarcely be further from the truth; our wealth comes from technology, not theft. If we offered a fairer bargain to poorer countries, we’d be a bit less rich, but they would be much less poor—the overall wealth in the world would in fact probably increase.

A better argument for not moving manufacturing back to the First World is that many Third World economies would collapse if they stopped manufacturing things for other countries, and that would be disastrous for millions of people.

And free trade really does increase efficiency and prosperity for all.

So, yes; let’s keep on manufacturing goods wherever it is cheapest to do so. But when we decide what’s cheapest, let’s evaluate that based on genuinely fair wages and working conditions, not the absolute cheapest that corporations think they can get away with.

Sometimes they may even decide that it’s not really cheaper to manufacture in poorer countries, because they need advanced technology and highly-skilled workers that are easier to come by in First World countries. In that case, bringing production back here is the right thing to do.

Of course, this raises the question:

What would be fair wages and working conditions?

That’s not so easy to answer. Since workers in Third World countries are less educated than workers in First World countries, and have access to less capital and worse technology, we should in fact expect them to be less productive and therefore get paid less. That may be unfair in some cosmic sense, but it’s not anyone’s fault, and it’s not any particular corporation’s responsibility to fix it.

But when there are products for which less than 1% of the sales price of the product goes to the workers who actually made the product, something is wrong. When the profit margin is often wildly larger than the total amount spent on labor, something is wrong.

It may be that we will never have precise thresholds we can set to decide what definitely is or is not exploitative; but that doesn’t mean we can’t ever recognize it when we see it. There are various institutional mechanisms we could use to enforce better wages and working conditions without ever making such a sharp threshold.

One of the simplest, in fact, is Fair Trade.

Fair Trade is by no means a flawless system; in fact there’s a lot of research debating how effective it is at achieving its goals. But it does seem to be accomplishing something. And it’s a system that we already have in place, operating successfully in many countries; it simply needs to be scaled up (and hopefully improved along the way).

One of the clearest pieces of evidence that it’s helping, in fact, is that farmers are willing to participate in it. That shows that it is beneficent.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that it’s genuinely fair! This could just be another kind of wrongful beneficence. Perhaps Fair Trade is really just less exploitative than all the available alternatives.

If so, then we need something even better still, some new system that will reliably pass on the increased cost for customers all the way down to increased wages for workers.

Fair Trade shows us something else, too: A lot of customers clearly are willing to pay a bit more in order to see workers treated better. Even if they weren’t, maybe they should be forced to. But the fact is, they are! Even those who are most adamantly opposed to Fair Trade can’t deny that people really are willing to pay more to help other people. (Yet another example of obvious altruism that neoclassical economists somehow manage to ignore.) They simply deny that it’s actually helping, which is an empirical matter.

But if this isn’t helping enough, fine; let’s find something else that does.

How Effective Altruism hurt me

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

May 12 JDN 2460443

I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way. I still strongly believe in the core principles of Effective Altruism. Indeed, it’s shockingly hard to deny them, because basically they come out to this:

Doing more good is better than doing less good.

Then again, most people want to do good. Basically everyone agrees that more good is better than less good. So what’s the big deal about Effective Altruism?

Well, in practice, most people put shockingly little effort into trying to ensure that they are doing the most good they can. A lot of people just try to be nice people, without ever concerning themselves with the bigger picture. Many of these people don’t give to charity at all.

Then, even among people who do give to charity, typically give to charities more or less at random—or worse, in proportion to how much mail those charities send them begging for donations. (Surely you can see how that is a perverse incentive?) They donate to religious organizations, which sometimes do good things, but fundamentally are founded upon ignorance, patriarchy, and lies.

Effective Altruism is a movement intended to fix this, to get people to see the bigger picture and focus their efforts on where they will do the most good. Vet charities not just for their honesty, but also their efficiency and cost-effectiveness:

Just how many mQALY can you buy with that $1?

That part I still believe in. There is a lot of value in assessing which charities are the most effective, and trying to get more people to donate to those high-impact charities.

But there is another side to Effective Altruism, which I now realize has severely damaged my mental health.

That is the sense of obligation to give as much as you possibly can.

Peter Singer is the most extreme example of this. He seems to have mellowed—a little—in more recent years, but in some of his most famous books he uses the following thought experiment:

To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but it will mean that you get your clothes wet and muddy, and by the time you go home and change you will have missed your first class.

I then ask the students: do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. The importance of saving a child so far outweighs the cost of getting one’s clothes muddy and missing a class, that they refuse to consider it any kind of excuse for not saving the child. Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do.

Basically everyone agrees with this particular decision: Even if you are wearing a very expensive suit that will be ruined, even if you’ll miss something really important like a job interview or even a wedding—most people agree that if you ever come across a drowning child, you should save them.

(Oddly enough, when contemplating this scenario, nobody ever seems to consider the advice that most lifeguards give, which is to throw a life preserver and then go find someone qualified to save the child—because saving someone who is drowning is a lot harder and a lot riskier than most people realize. (“Reach or throw, don’t go.”) But that’s a bit beside the point.)

But Singer argues that we are basically in this position all the time. For somewhere between $500 and $3000, you—yes, you—could donate to a high-impact charity, and thereby save a child’s life.

Does it matter that many other people are better positioned to donate than you are? Does it matter that the child is thousands of miles away and you’ll never see them? Does it matter that there are actually millions of children, and you could never save them all by yourself? Does it matter that you’ll only save a child in expectation, rather than saving some specific child with certainty?

Singer says that none of this matters. For a long time, I believed him.

Now, I don’t.

For, if you actually walked by a drowning child that you could save, only at the cost of missing a wedding and ruining your tuxedo, you clearly should do that. (If it would risk your life, maybe not—and as I alluded to earlier, that’s more likely than you might imagine.) If you wouldn’t, there’s something wrong with you. You’re a bad person.

But most people don’t donate everything they could to high-impact charities. Even Peter Singer himself doesn’t. So if donating is the same as saving the drowning child, it follows that we are all bad people.

(Note: In general, if an ethical theory results in the conclusion that the whole of humanity is evil, there is probably something wrong with that ethical theory.)

Singer has tried to get out of this by saying we shouldn’t “sacrifice things of comparable importance”, and then somehow cash out what “comparable importance” means in such a way that it doesn’t require you to live on the street and eat scraps from trash cans. (Even though the people you’d be donating to largely do live that way.)

I’m not sure that really works, but okay, let’s say it does. Even so, it’s pretty clear that anything you spend money on purely for enjoyment would have to go. You would never eat out at restaurants, unless you could show that the time saved allowed you to get more work done and therefore donate more. You would never go to movies or buy video games, unless you could show that it was absolutely necessary for your own mental functioning. Your life would be work, work, work, then donate, donate, donate, and then do the absolute bare minimum to recover from working and donating so you can work and donate some more.

You would enslave yourself.

And all the while, you’d believe that you were never doing enough, you were never good enough, you are always a terrible person because you try to cling to any personal joy in your own life rather than giving, giving, giving all you have.

I now realize that Effective Altruism, as a movement, had been basically telling me to do that. And I’d been listening.

I now realize that Effective Altruism has given me this voice in my head, which I hear whenever I want to apply for a job or submit work for publication:

If you try, you will probably fail. And if you fail, a child will die.

The “if you try, you will probably fail” is just an objective fact. It’s inescapable. Any given job application or writing submission will probably fail.

Yes, maybe there’s some sort of bundling we could do to reframe that, as I discussed in an earlier post. But basically, this is correct, and I need to accept it.

Now, what about the second part? “If you fail, a child will die.” To most of you, that probably sounds crazy. And it is crazy. It’s way more pressure than any ordinary person should have in their daily life. This kind of pressure should be reserved for neurosurgeons and bomb squads.

But this is essentially what Effective Altruism taught me to believe. It taught me that every few thousand dollars I don’t donate is a child I am allowing to die. And since I can’t donate what I don’t have, it follows that every few thousand dollars I fail to get is another dead child.

And since Effective Altruism is so laser-focused on results above all else, it taught me that it really doesn’t matter whether I apply for the job and don’t get it, or never apply at all; the outcome is the same, and that outcome is that children suffer and die because I had no money to save them.

I think part of the problem here is that Effective Altruism is utilitarian through and through, and utilitarianism has very little place for good enough. There is better and there is worse; but there is no threshold at which you can say that your moral obligations are discharged and you are free to live your life as you wish. There is always more good that you could do, and therefore always more that you should do.

Do we really want to live in a world where to be a good person is to owe your whole life to others?

I do not believe in absolute selfishness. I believe that we owe something to other people. But I no longer believe that we owe everything. Sacrificing my own well-being at the altar of altruism has been incredibly destructive to my mental health, and I don’t think I’m the only one.

By all means, give to high-impact charities. But give a moderate amount—at most, tithe—and then go live your life. You don’t owe the world more than that.

The Butlerian Jihad is looking better all the time

PNRJ book reviews, cognitive science, computer science, core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, inequality, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 24 JDN 2460395

A review of The Age of Em by Robin Hanson

In the Dune series, the Butlerian Jihad was a holy war against artificial intelligence that resulted in a millenias-long taboo against all forms of intelligent machines. It was effectively a way to tell a story about the distant future without basically everything being about robots or cyborgs.

After reading Robin Hanson’s book, I’m starting to think that maybe we should actually do it.

Thus it is written: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

Hanson says he’s trying to reserve judgment and present objective predictions without evaluation, but it becomes very clear throughout that this is the future he wants, as well as—or perhaps even instead of—the world he expects.

In many ways, it feels like he has done his very best to imagine a world of true neoclassical rational agents in perfect competition, a sort of sandbox for the toys he’s always wanted to play with. Throughout he very much takes the approach of a neoclassical economist, making heroic assumptions and then following them to their logical conclusions, without ever seriously asking whether those assumptions actually make any sense.

To his credit, Hanson does not buy into the hype that AGI will be successful any day now. He predicts that we will achieve the ability to fully emulate human brains and thus create a sort of black-box AGI that behaves very much like a human within about 100 years. Given how the Blue Brain Project has progressed (much slower than its own hype machine told us it would—and let it be noted that I predicted this from the very beginning), I think this is a fairly plausible time estimate. He refers to a mind emulated in this way as an “em”; I have mixed feelings about the term, but I suppose we did need some word for that, and it certainly has conciseness on its side.

Hanson believes that a true understanding of artificial intelligence will only come later, and the sort of AGI that can be taken apart and reprogrammed for specific goals won’t exist for at least a century after that. Both of these sober, reasonable predictions are deeply refreshing in a field that’s been full of people saying “any day now” for the last fifty years.

But Hanson’s reasonableness just about ends there.

In The Age of Em, government is exactly as strong as Hanson needs it to be. Somehow it simultaneously ensures a low crime rate among a population that doubles every few months while also having no means of preventing that population growth. Somehow ensures that there is no labor collusion and corporations never break the law, but without imposing any regulations that might reduce efficiency in any way.

All of this begins to make more sense when you realize that Hanson’s true goal here is to imagine a world where neoclassical economics is actually true.

He realized it didn’t work on humans, so instead of giving up the theory, he gave up the humans.

Hanson predicts that ems will casually make short-term temporary copies of themselves called “spurs”, designed to perform a particular task and then get erased. I guess maybe he would, but I for one would not so cavalierly create another person and then make their existence dedicated to doing a single job before they die. The fact that I created this person, and they are very much like me, seem like reasons to care more about their well-being, not less! You’re asking me to enslave and murder my own child. (Honestly, the fact that Robin Hanson thinks ems will do this all the time says more about Robin Hanson than anything else.) Any remotely sane society of ems would ban the deletion of another em under any but the most extreme circumstances, and indeed treat it as tantamount to murder.

Hanson predicts that we will only copy the minds of a few hundred people. This is surely true at some point—the technology will take time to develop, and we’ll have to start somewhere. But I don’t see why we’d stop there, when we could continue to copy millions or billions of people; and his choices of who would be emulated, while not wildly implausible, are utterly terrifying.

He predicts that we’d emulate genius scientists and engineers; okay, fair enough, that seems right. I doubt that the benefits of doing so will be as high as many people imagine, because scientific progress actually depends a lot more on the combined efforts of millions of scientists than on rare sparks of brilliance by lone geniuses; but those people are definitely very smart, and having more of them around could be a good thing. I can also see people wanting to do this, and thus investing in making it happen.

He also predicts that we’d emulate billionaires. Now, as a prediction, I have to admit that this is actually fairly plausible; billionaires are precisely the sort of people who are rich enough to pay to be emulated and narcissistic enough to want to. But where Hanson really goes off the deep end here is that he sees this as a good thing. He seems to honestly believe that billionaires are so rich because they are so brilliant and productive. He thinks that a million copies of Elon Musks would produce a million hectobillionaires—when in reality it would produce a million squabbling narcissists, who at best had to split the same $200 billion wealth between them, and might very well end up with less because they squander it.

Hanson has a long section on trying to predict the personalities of ems. Frankly this could just have been dropped entirely; it adds almost nothing to the book, and the book is much too long. But the really striking thing to me about that section is what isn’t there. He goes through a long list of studies that found weak correlations between various personality traits like extroversion or openness and wealth—mostly comparing something like the 20th percentile to the 80th percentile—and then draws sweeping conclusions about what ems will be like, under the assumption that ems are all drawn from people in the 99.99999th percentile. (Yes, upper-middle-class people are, on average, more intelligent and more conscientious than lower-middle-class people. But do we even have any particular reason to think that the personalities of people who make $150,000 are relevant to understanding the behavior of people who make $15 billion?) But he completely glosses over the very strong correlations that specifically apply to people in that very top super-rich class: They’re almost all narcissists and/or psychopaths.

Hanson predicts a world where each em is copied many, many times—millions, billions, even trillions of times, and also in which the very richest ems are capable of buying parallel processing time that lets them accelerate their own thought processes to a million times faster than a normal human. (Is that even possible? Does consciousness work like that? Who knows!?) The world that Hanson is predicting is thus one where all the normal people get outnumbered and overpowered by psychopaths.

Basically this is the most abjectly dystopian cyberpunk hellscape imaginable. And he talks about it the whole time as if it were good.

It’s like he played the game Action Potential and thought, “This sounds great! I’d love to live there!” I mean, why wouldn’t you want to owe a life-debt on your own body and have to work 120-hour weeks for a trillion-dollar corporation just to make the payments on it?

Basically, Hanson doesn’t understand how wealth is actually acquired. He is educated as an economist, yet his understanding of capitalism basically amounts to believing in magic. He thinks that competitive markets just somehow perfectly automatically allocate wealth to whoever is most productive, and thus concludes that whoever is wealthy now must just be that productive.

I can see no other way to explain his wildly implausible predictions that the em economy will double every month or two. A huge swath of the book depends upon this assumption, but he waits until halfway through the book to even try to defend it, and then does an astonishingly bad job of doing so. (Honestly, even if you buy his own arguments—which I don’t—they seem to predict that population would grow with Moore’s Law—doubling every couple of years, not every couple of months.)

Whereas Keynes predicted based on sound economic principles that economic growth would more or less proceed apace and got his answer spot-on, Hanson predicts that for mysterious, unexplained reasons economic growth will suddenly increase by two orders of magnitude—and I’m pretty sure he’s going to be wildly wrong.

Hanson also predicts that ems will be on average poorer than we are, based on some sort of perfect-competition argument that doesn’t actually seem to mesh at all with his predictions of spectacularly rapid economic and technological growth. I think the best way to make sense of this is to assume that it means the trend toward insecure affluence will continue: Ems will have an objectively high standard of living in terms of what they own, what games they play, where they travel, and what they eat and drink (in simulation), but they will constantly be struggling to keep up with the rent on their homes—or even their own bodies. This is a world where (the very finest simulation of) Dom Perignon is $7 a bottle and wages are $980 an hour—but monthly rent is $284,000.

Early in the book Hanson argues that this life of poverty and scarcity will lead to more conservative values, on the grounds that people who are poorer now seem to be more conservative, and this has something to do with farmers versus foragers. Hanson’s explanation of all this is baffling; I will quote it at length, just so it’s clear I’m not misrepresenting it:

The other main (and independent) axis of value variation ranges between poor and rich societies. Poor societies place more value on conformity, security, and traditional values such as marriage, heterosexuality, religion, patriotism, hard work, and trust in authority. In contrast, rich societies place more value on individualism, self-direction, tolerance, pleasure, nature, leisure, and trust. When the values of individuals within a society vary on the same axis, we call this a left/liberal (rich) versus right/conservative (poor) axis.

Foragers tend to have values more like those of rich/liberal people today, while subsistence farmers tend to have values more like those of poor/conservative people today. As industry has made us richer, we have on average moved from conservative/farmer values to liberal/forager values. This value movement can make sense if cultural evolution used the social pressures farmers faced, such as conformity and religion, to induce humans, who evolved to find forager behaviors natural, to instead act like farmers. As we become rich, we don’t as strongly fear the threats behind these social pressures. This connection may result in part from disease; rich people are healthier, and healthier societies fear less.

The alternate theory that we have instead learned that rich forager values are more true predicts that values should have followed a random walk over time, and be mostly common across space. It also predicts the variance of value changes tracking the rate at which relevant information appears. But in fact industrial-era value changes have tracked the wealth of each society in much more steady and consistent fashion. And on this theory, why did foragers ever acquire farmer values?

[…]

In the scenario described in this book, many strange-to-forager behaviors are required, and median per-person (i.e. per-em) incomes return to near-subsistence levels. This suggests that the em era may reverse the recent forager-like trend toward more liberality; ems may have more farmer-like values.

The Age of Em, p. 26-27

There’s a lot to unpack here, but maybe it’s better to burn the whole suitcase.

First of all, it’s not entirely clear that this is really a single axis of variation, that foragers and farmers differ from each other in the same way as liberals and conservatives. There’s some truth to that at least—both foragers and liberals tend to be more generous, both farmers and conservatives tend to enforce stricter gender norms. But there are also clear ways that liberal values radically deviate from forager values: Forager societies are extremely xenophobic, and typically very hostile to innovation, inequality, or any attempts at self-aggrandizement (a phenomenon called “fierce egalitarianism“). San Francisco epitomizes rich, liberal values, but it would be utterly alien and probably regarded as evil by anyone from the Yanomamo.

Second, there is absolutely no reason to predict any kind of random walk. That’s just nonsense. Would you predict that scientific knowledge is a random walk, with each new era’s knowledge just a random deviation from the last’s? Maybe next century we’ll return to geocentrism, or phrenology will be back in vogue? On the theory that liberal values (or at least some liberal values) are objectively correct, we would expect them to advance as knowledge does—improving over time, and improving faster in places that have better institutions for research, education, and free expression. And indeed, this is precisely the pattern we have observed. (Those places are also richer, but that isn’t terribly surprising either!)

Third, while poorer regions are indeed more conservative, poorer people within a region actually tend to be more liberal. Nigeria is poorer and more conservative than Norway, and Mississippi is poorer and more conservative than Massachusetts. But higher-income households in the United States are more likely to vote Republican. I think this is particularly true of people living under insecure affluence: We see the abundance of wealth around us, and don’t understand why we can’t learn to share it better. We’re tired of fighting over scraps while the billionaires claim more and more. Millennials and Zoomers absolutely epitomize insecure affluence, and we also absolutely epitomize liberalism. So, if indeed ems live a life of insecure affluence, we should expect them to be like Zoomers: “Trans liberation now!” and “Eat the rich!” (Or should I say, “Delete the rich!”)

And really, doesn’t that make more sense? Isn’t that the trend our society has been on, for at least the last century? We’ve been moving toward more and more acceptance of women and minorities, more and more deviation from norms, more and more concern for individual rights and autonomy, more and more resistance to authority and inequality.

The funny thing is, that world sounds a lot better than the one Hanson is predicting.

A world of left-wing ems would probably run things a lot better than Hanson imagines: Instead of copying the same hundred psychopaths over and over until we fill the planet, have no room for anything else, and all struggle to make enough money just to stay alive, we could moderate our population to a more sustainable level, preserve diversity and individuality, and work toward living in greater harmony with each other and the natural world. We could take this economic and technological abundance and share it and enjoy it, instead of killing ourselves and each other to make more of it for no apparent reason.

The one good argument Hanson makes here is expressed in a single sentence: “And on this theory, why did foragers ever acquire farmer values?” That actually is a good question; why did we give up on leisure and egalitarianism when we transitioned from foraging to agriculture?

I think scarcity probably is relevant here: As food became scarcer, maybe because of climate change, people were forced into an agricultural lifestyle just to have enough to eat. Early agricultural societies were also typically authoritarian and violent. Under those conditions, people couldn’t be so generous and open-minded; they were surrounded by threats and on the verge of starvation.

I guess if Hanson is right that the em world is also one of poverty and insecurity, we might go back to those sort of values, borne of desperation. But I don’t see any reason to think we’d give up all of our liberal values. I would predict that ems will still be feminist, for instance; in fact, Hanson himself admits that since VR avatars would let us change gender presentation at will, gender would almost certainly become more fluid in a world of ems. Far from valuing heterosexuality more highly (as conservatives do, a “farmer value” according to Hanson), I suspect that ems will have no further use for that construct, because reproduction will be done by manufacturing, not sex, and it’ll be so easy to swap your body into a different one that hardly anyone will even keep the same gender their whole life. They’ll think it’s quaint that we used to identify so strongly with our own animal sexual dimorphism.

But maybe it is true that the scarcity induced by a hyper-competitive em world would make people more selfish, less generous, less trusting, more obsessed with work. Then let’s not do that! We don’t have to build that world! This isn’t a foregone conclusion!

There are many other paths yet available to us.

Indeed, perhaps the simplest would be to just ban artificial intelligence, at least until we can get a better handle on what we’re doing—and perhaps until we can institute the kind of radical economic changes necessary to wrest control of the world away from the handful of psychopaths currently trying their best to run it into the ground.

I admit, it would kind of suck to not get any of the benefits of AI, like self-driving cars, safer airplanes, faster medical research, more efficient industry, and better video games. It would especially suck if we did go full-on Butlerian Jihad and ban anything more complicated than a pocket calculator. (Our lifestyle might have to go back to what it was in—gasp! The 1950s!)

But I don’t think it would suck nearly as much as the world Robin Hanson thinks is in store for us if we continue on our current path.

So I certainly hope he’s wrong about all this.

Fortunately, I think he probably is.