public policy

Reckoning costs in money distorts them

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

May 7 JDN 2460072

Consider for a moment what it means when an economic news article reports “rising labor costs”. What are they actually saying?

They’re saying that wages are rising—perhaps in some industry, perhaps in the economy as a whole. But this is not a cost. It’s a price. As I’ve written about before, the two are fundamentally distinct.

The cost of labor is measured in effort, toil, and time. It’s the pain of having to work instead of whatever else you’d like to do with your time.

The price of labor is a monetary amount, which is delivered in a transaction.

This may seem perfectly obvious, but it has important and oft-neglected implications. A cost, one paid, is gone. That value has been destroyed. We hope that it was worth it for some benefit we gained. A price, when paid, is simply transferred: One person had that money before, now someone else has it. Nothing was gained or lost.

So in fact when reports say that “labor costs have risen”, what they are really saying is that income is being transferred from owners to workers without any change in real value taking place. They are framing as a loss what is fundamentally a zero-sum redistribution.

In fact, it is disturbingly common to see a fundamentally good redistribution of income framed in the press as a bad outcome because of its expression as “costs”; the “cost” of chocolate is feared to go up if we insist upon enforcing bans on forced labor—when in fact it is only the price that goes up, and the cost actually goes down: chocolate would no longer include complicity in an atrocity. The real suffering of making chocolate would be thereby reduced, not increased. Even when they aren’t literally enslaved, those workers are astonishingly poor, and giving them even a few more cents per hour would make a real difference in their lives. But God forbid we pay a few cents more for a candy bar!

If labor costs were to rise, that would mean that work had suddenly gotten harder, or more painful; or else, that some outside circumstance had made it more difficult to work. Having a child increases your labor costs—you now have the opportunity cost of not caring for the child. COVID increased the cost of labor, by making it suddenly dangerous just to go outside in public. That could also increase prices—you may demand a higher wage, and people do seem to have demanded higher wages after COVID. But these are two separate effects, and you can have one without the other. In fact, women typically see wage stagnation or even reduction after having kids (but men largely don’t), despite their real opportunity cost of labor having obviously greatly increased.

On an individual level, it’s not such a big mistake to equate price and cost. If you are buying something, its cost to you basically just is its price, plus a little bit of transaction cost for actually finding and buying it. But on a societal level, it makes an enormous difference. It distorts our policy priorities and can even lead to actively trying to suppress things that are beneficial—such as rising wages.

This false equivalence between price and costs seems to be at least as common among economists as it is among laypeople. Economists will often justify it on the grounds that in an ideal perfect competitive market the two would be in some sense equated. But of course we don’t live in that ideal perfect market, and even if we did, they would only beproportional at the margin, not fundamentally equal across the board. It would still be obviously wrong to characterize the total value or cost of work by the price paid for it; only the last unit of effort would be priced so that marginal value equals price equals marginal cost. The first 39 hours of your work would cost you less than what you were paid, and produce more than you were paid; only that 40th hour would set the three equal.

Once you account for all the various market distortions in the world, there’s no particular relationship between what something costs—in terms of real effort and suffering—and its price—in monetary terms. Things can be expensive and easy, or cheap and awful. In fact, they often seem to be; for some reason, there seems to be a pattern where the most terrible, miserable jobs (e.g. coal mining) actually pay the leastand the easiest, most pleasant jobs (e.g. stock trading) pay the most. Some jobs that benefit society pay well (e.g. doctors) and others pay terribly or not at all (e.g. climate activists). Some actions that harm the world get punished (e.g. armed robbery) and others get rewarded with riches (e.g. oil drilling). In the real world, whether a job is good or bad and whether it is paid well or poorly seem to be almost unrelated.

In fact, sometimes they seem even negatively related, where we often feel tempted to “sell out” and do something destructive in order to get higher pay. This is likely due to Berkson’s paradox: If people are willing to do jobs if they are either high-paying or beneficial to humanity, then we should expect that, on average, most of the high-paying jobs people do won’t be beneficial to humanity. Even if there were inherently no correlation or a small positive one, people’s refusal to do harmful low-paying work removes those jobs from our sample and results in a negative correlation in what remains.

I think that the best solution, ultimately, is to stop reckoning costs in money entirely. We should reckon them in happiness.

This is of course much more difficult than simply using prices; it’s not easy to say exactly how many QALY are sacrificed in the extraction of cocoa beans or the drilling of offshore oil wells. But if we actually did find a way to count them, I strongly suspect we’d find that it was far more than we ought to be willing to pay.

A very rough approximation, surely flawed but at least a start, would be to simply convert all payments into proportions of their recipient’s income: For full-time wages, this would result in basically everyone being counted the same, as 1 hour of work if you work 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year is precisely 0.05% of your annual income. So we could say that whatever is equivalent to your hourly wage constitutes 50 microQALY.

This automatically implies that every time a rich person pays a poor person, QALY increase, while every time a poor person pays a rich person, QALY decrease. This is not an error in the calculation. It is a fact of the universe. We ignore it only at out own peril. All wealth redistributed downward is a benefit, while all wealth redistributed upward is a harm. That benefit may cause some other harm, or that harm may be compensated by some other benefit; but they are still there.

This would also put some things in perspective. When HSBC was fined £70 million for its crimes, that can be compared against its £1.5 billion in net income; if it were an individual, it would have been hurt about 50 milliQALY, which is about what I would feel if I lost $2000. Of course, it’s not a person, and it’s not clear exactly how this loss was passed through to employees or shareholders; but that should give us at least some sense of how small that loss was for them. They probably felt it… a little.

When Trump was ordered to pay a $1.3 million settlement, based on his $2.5 billion net wealth (corresponding to roughly $125 million in annual investment income), that cost him about 10 milliQALY; for me that would be about $500.

At the other extreme, if someone goes from making $1 per day to making $1.50 per day, that’s a 50% increase in their income—500 milliQALY per year.

For those who have no income at all, this becomes even trickier; for them I think we should probably use their annual consumption, since everyone needs to eat and that costs something, though likely not very much. Or we could try to measure their happiness directly, trying to determine how much it hurts to not eat enough and work all day in sweltering heat.

Properly shifting this whole cultural norm will take a long time. For now, I leave you with this: Any time you see a monetary figure, ask yourself: “How much is that worth to them?” The world will seem quite different once you get in the habit of that.

The idiocy of the debt ceiling

pnrj current events, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 23 JDN 2460058

I thought we had put this behind us. I guess I didn’t think the Republicans would stop using the tactic once they saw it worked, but I had hoped that the Democrats would come up with a better permanent solution so that it couldn’t be used again. But they did not, and here we are again: Republicans are refusing to raise the debt ceiling, we have now hit that ceiling, and we are running out of time before we have to start shutting down services or defaulting on debt. There are talks ongoing that may yet get the ceiling raised in time, but we’re now cutting it very close. Already the risk that we might default or do something crazy is causing turmoil in financial markets.

Because US Treasury bonds are widely regarded as one of the world’s most secure assets, and the US dollar is the most important global reserve currency, the entire world’s financial markets get disrupted every time there is an issue with the US national debt, and the debt ceiling creates such disruptions on the regular for no good reason.

I will try to offer some of my own suggestions for what to do here, but first, I want to make something very clear: The debt ceiling should not exist. I don’t think most people understand just how truly idiotic the entire concept of a debt ceiling is. It seems practically designed to make our government dysfunctional.

This is not like a credit card limit, where your bank imposes a limit on how much you can borrow based on how much they think you are likely to be able to repay. A lot of people have been making that analogy, and I can see why it’s tempting; but as usual, it’s important to remember that government debt is not like personal debt.

As I said some years ago, US government debt is about as close as the world is ever likely to come to a perfect credit market: with no effort at all, borrow as much as you want at low, steady interest rates, and everyone will always be sure that you will pay it back on time. The debt ceiling is a limit imposed by the government itself—it is not imposed by our creditors, who would be more than happy to lend us more.

Also, I’d like to remind you that some of the US national debt is owned by the US government itself (is that really even “debt”?) and most of what’s left is owned by US individuals or corporations—only about a third is owed to foreign powers. Here is a detailed breakdown of who owns US national debt.

There is no reason to put an arbitrary cap on the amount the US government can borrow. The only reason anyone is at all worried about a default on the US national debt is because of this stupid arbitrary cap. If it didn’t exist, they would simply roll over more Treasury bonds to make the payments and everything would run smoothly. And this is normally what happens, when the Republicans aren’t playing ridiculous brinkmanship games.

As it is, they could simply print money to pay it—and at this point, maybe that’s what needs to happen. Mint the Coin already: Mint a $1 trillion platinum coin and deposit it in the Federal Reserve, and there you go, you’ve paid off a chunk of the debt. Sometimes stupid problems require stupid solutions.

Aren’t there reasons to be worried about the government borrowing too much? Yes, a little. The amount of concern most people have about this is wildly disproportionate to the actual problem, but yes, there are legitimate concerns about high national debt resulting in high interest rates and eventually forcing us to raise taxes or cut services. This is a slow-burn, long-term problem that by its very nature would never require a sudden, immediate solution; but it is a genuine concern we should be aware of.

But here’s the thing: That’s a conversation we should be having when we vote on the budget. Whenever we pass a government budget, it already includes detailed projections of tax revenue and spending that yield precise, accurate forecasts of the deficit and the debt. If Republicans are genuinely concerned that we are overspending on certain programs, they should propose budget cuts to those programs and get those cuts passed as part of the budget.

Once a budget is already passed, we have committed to spend that money. It has literally been signed into law that $X will be spend on program Y. At that point, you can’t simply cut the spending. If you think we’re spending too much, you needed to say that before we signed it into law. It’s too late now.

I’m always dubious of analogies between household spending and government spending, but if you really want one, think of it this way: Say your credit card company is offering to raise your credit limit, and you just signed a contract for some home improvements that would force you to run up your credit card past your current limit. Do you call the credit card company and accept the higher limit, or not? If you don’t, why don’t you? And what’s your plan for paying those home contractors? Even if you later decide that the home improvements were a bad idea, you already signed the contract! You can’t just back out!

This is why the debt ceiling is so absurd: It is a self-imposed limit on what you’re allowed to spend after you have already committed to spending it. The only sensible thing to do is to raise the debt ceiling high enough to account for the spending you’ve already committed to—or better yet, eliminate the ceiling entirely.

I think that when they last had a majority in both houses, the Democrats should have voted to make the debt ceiling ludicrously high—say $100 trillion. Then, at least for the foreseeable future, we wouldn’t have to worry about raising it, and could just pass budgets normally like a sane government. But they didn’t do that; they only raised it as much as was strictly necessary, thus giving the Republicans an opening now to refuse to raise it again.

And that is what the debt ceiling actually seems to accomplish: It gives whichever political party is least concerned about the public welfare a lever they can pull to disrupt the entire system whenever they don’t get things the way they want. If you absolutely do not care about the public good—and it’s quite clear at this point that most of the Republican leadership does not—then whenever you don’t get your way, you can throw a tantrum that threatens to destabilize the entire global financial system.

We need to stop playing their game. Do what you have to do to keep things running for now—but then get rid of the damn debt ceiling before they can use it to do even more damage.

Will hydrogen make air travel sustainable?

pnrj current events, futurism, public policy , , , , , , ,

Apr 9 JDN 2460042

Air travel is currently one of the most carbon-intensive activities anyone can engage in. Per passenger kilometer, airplanes emit about 8 times as much carbon as ships, 4 times as much as trains, and 1.5 times as much as cars. Living in a relatively eco-friendly city without a car and eating a vegetarian diet, I produce much less carbon than most First World citizens—except when I fly across the Atlantic a couple of times a year.

Until quite recently, most climate scientists believed that this was basically unavoidable, that simply sustaining the kind of power output required to keep an airliner in the air would always require carbon-intensive jet fuel. But in just the past few years, major breakthroughs have been made in using hydrogen propulsion.

The beautiful thing about hydrogen is that burning it simply produces water—no harmful pollution at all. It’s basically the cleanest possible fuel.


The simplest approach, which is actually quite old, but until recently didn’t seem viable, is the use of liquid hydrogen as airplane fuel.

We’ve been using liquid hydrogen as a rocket fuel for decades; so we knew it had enough energy density. (Actually its energy density is higher than conventional jet fuel.)

The problem with liquid hydrogen is that it must be kept extremely cold—it boils at 20 Kelvin. And once liquid hydrogen boils into gas, it builds up pressure very fast and easily permeates through most materials, so it’s extremely hard to contain. This makes it very difficult and expensive to handle.

But this isn’t the only way to use hydrogen, and may turn out to not be the best one.

There are now prototype aircraft that have flown using hydrogen fuel cells. These fuel cells can be fed with hydrogen gas—so no need to cool below 20 Kelvin. But then they can’t directly run the turbines; instead, these planes use electric turbines which are powered by the fuel cell.

Basically these are really electric aircraft. But whereas a lithium battery would be far too heavy, a hydrogen fuel cell is light enough for aviation use. In fact, hydrogen gas up to a certain pressure is lighter than air (it was often used for zeppelins, though, uh, occasionally catastrophically), so potentially the planes could use their own fuel tanks for buoyancy, landing “heavier” than they took off. (On the other hand it might make more sense to pressurize the hydrogen beyond that point, so that it will still be heavier than air—but perhaps still lighter than jet fuel!)

Of course, the technology is currently too untested and too expensive to be used on a wide scale. But this is how all technologies begin. It’s of course possible that we won’t be able to solve the engineering problems that currently make hydrogen-powered aircraft unaffordable; but several aircraft manufacturers are now investing in hydrogen research—suggesting that they at least believe there is a good chance we will.

There’s also the issue of where we get all the hydrogen. Hydrogen is extremely abundant—literally the most abundant baryonic matter in the universe—but most of what’s on Earth is locked up in water or hydrocarbons. Most of the hydrogen we currently make is produced by processing hydrocarbons (particularly methane), but that produces carbon emissions, so it wouldn’t solve the problem.

A better option is electrolysis: Using electricity to separate water into hydrogen and oxyen. But this requires a lot of energy—and necessarily, more energy than you can get out of burning the hydrogen later, since burning it basically is just putting the hydrogen and oxygen back together to make water.

Yet all is not lost, for while energy density is absolutely vital for an aircraft fuel, it’s not so important for a ground-based power plant. As an ultimate fuel source, hydrogen is a non-starter. But as an energy storage medium, it could be ideal.

The idea is this: We take the excess energy from wind and solar power plants, and use that energy to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. We then store that hydrogen and use it for fuel cells to run aircraft (and potentially other things as well). This ensures that the extra energy that renewable sources can generate in peak times doesn’t go to waste, and also provides us with what we need to produce clean-burning hydrogen fuel.

The basic technology for doing all this already exists. The current problem is cost. Under current conditions, it’s far more expensive to make hydrogen fuel than to make conventional jet fuel. Since fuel is one of the largest costs for airlines, even small increases in fuel prices matter a lot for the price of air travel; and these are not even small differences. Currently hydrogen costs over 10 times as much per kilogram, and its higher energy density isn’t enough to make up for that. For hydrogen aviation to be viable, that ratio needs to drop to more like 2 or 3—maybe even all the way to 1, since hydrogen is also more expensive to store than jet fuel (the gas needs high-pressure tanks, the liquid needs cryogenic cooling systems).

This means that, for the time being, it’s still environmentally responsible to reduce your air travel. Fly less often, always fly economy (more people on the plane means less carbon per passenger), and buy carbon offsets (they’re cheaper than you may think).

But in the long run, we may be able to have our cake and eat it too: If hydrogen aviation does become viable, we may not need to give up the benefits of routine air travel in order to reduce our carbon emissions.

What happens when a bank fails

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics, current events, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 19 JDN 2460023

As of March 9, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has failed and officially been put into receivership under the FDIC. A bank that held $209 billion in assets has suddenly become insolvent.

This is the second-largest bank failure in US history, after Washington Mutual (WaMu) in 2008. In fact it will probably have more serious consequences than WaMu, for two reasons:

1. WaMu collapsed as part of the Great Recession, so there was already a lot of other things going on and a lot of policy responses already in place.

2. WaMu was mostly a conventional commercial bank that held deposits and loans for consumers, so its assets were largely protected by the FDIC, and thus its bankruptcy didn’t cause contagion the spread out to the rest of the system. (Other banks—shadow banks—did during the crash, but not so much WaMu.) SVB mostly served tech startups, so a whopping 89% of its deposits were not protected by FDIC insurance.

You’ve likely heard of many of the companies that had accounts at SVB: Roku, Roblox, Vimeo, even Vox. Stocks of the US financial industry lost $100 billion in value in two days.

The good news is that this will not be catastrophic. It probably won’t even trigger a recession (though the high interest rates we’ve been having lately potentially could drive us over that edge). Because this is commercial banking, it’s done out in the open, with transparency and reasonably good regulation. The FDIC knows what they are doing, and even though they aren’t covering all those deposits directly, they intend to find a buyer for the bank who will, and odds are good that they’ll be able to cover at least 80% of the lost funds.

In fact, while this one is exceptionally large, bank failures are not really all that uncommon. There have been nearly 100 failures of banks with assets over $1 billion in the US alone just since the 1970s. The FDIC exists to handle bank failures, and generally does the job well.

Then again, it’s worth asking whether we should really have a banking system in which failures are so routine.

The reason banks fail is kind of a dark open secret: They don’t actually have enough money to cover their deposits.

Banks loan away most of their cash, and rely upon the fact that most of their depositors will not want to withdraw their money at the same time. They are required to keep a certain ratio in reserves, but it’s usually fairly small, like 10%. This is called fractional-reserve banking.

As long as less than 10% of deposits get withdrawn at any given time, this works. But if a bunch of depositors suddenly decide to take out their money, the bank may not have enough to cover it all, and suddenly become insolvent.

In fact, the fear that a bank might become insolvent can actually cause it to become insolvent, in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once depositors get word that the bank is about to fail, they rush to be the first to get their money out before it disappears. This is a bank run, and it’s basically what happened to SVB.

The FDIC was originally created to prevent or mitigate bank runs. Not only did they provide insurance that reduced the damage in the event of a bank failure; by assuring depositors that their money would be recovered even if the bank failed, they also reduced the chances of a bank run becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.


Indeed, SVB is the exception that proves the rule, as they failed largely because their assets were mainly not FDIC insured.

Fractional-reserve banking effectively allows banks to create money, in the form of credit that they offer to borrowers. That credit gets deposited in other banks, which then go on to loan it out to still others; the result is that there is more money in the system than was ever actually printed by the central bank.

In most economies this commercial bank money is a far larger quantity than the central bank money actually printed by the central bank—often nearly 10 to 1. This ratio is called the money multiplier.

Indeed, it’s not a coincidence that the reserve ratio is 10% and the multiplier is 10; the theoretical maximum multiplier is always the inverse of the reserve ratio, so if you require reserves of 10%, the highest multiplier you can get is 10. Had we required 20% reserves, the multiplier would drop to 5.

Most countries have fractional-reserve banking, and have for centuries; but it’s actually a pretty weird system if you think about it.

Back when we were on the gold standard, fractional-reserve banking was a way of cheating, getting our money supply to be larger than the supply of gold would actually allow.

But now that we are on a pure fiat money system, it’s worth asking what fractional-reserve banking actually accomplishes. If we need more money, the central bank could just print more. Why do we delegate that task to commercial banks?

David Friedman of the Cato Institute had some especially harsh words on this, but honestly I find them hard to disagree with:

Before leaving the subject of fractional reserve systems, I should mention one particularly bizarre variant — a fractional reserve system based on fiat money. I call it bizarre because the essential function of a fractional reserve system is to reduce the resource cost of producing money, by allowing an ounce of reserves to replace, say, five ounces of currency. The resource cost of producing fiat money is zero; more precisely, it costs no more to print a five-dollar bill than a one-dollar bill, so the cost of having a larger number of dollars in circulation is zero. The cost of having more bills in circulation is not zero but small. A fractional reserve system based on fiat money thus economizes on the cost of producing something that costs nothing to produce; it adds the disadvantages of a fractional reserve system to the disadvantages of a fiat system without adding any corresponding advantages. It makes sense only as a discreet way of transferring some of the income that the government receives from producing money to the banking system, and is worth mentioning at all only because it is the system presently in use in this country.

Our banking system evolved gradually over time, and seems to have held onto many features that made more sense in an earlier era. Back when we had arbitrarily tied our central bank money supply to gold, creating a new money supply that was larger may have been a reasonable solution. But today, it just seems to be handing the reins over to private corporations, giving them more profits while forcing the rest of society to bear more risk.

The obvious alternative is full-reserve banking, where banks are simply required to hold 100% of their deposits in reserve and the multiplier drops to 1. This idea has been supported by a number of quite prominent economists, including Milton Friedman.

It’s not just a right-wing idea: The left-wing organization Positive Money is dedicated to advocating for a full-reserve banking system in the UK and EU. (The ECB VP’s criticism of the proposal is utterly baffling to me: it “would not create enough funding for investment and growth.” Um, you do know you can print more money, right? Hm, come to think of it, maybe the ECB doesn’t know that, because they think inflation is literally Hitler. There are legitimate criticisms to be had of Positive Money’s proposal, but “There won’t be enough money under this fiat money system” is a really weird take.)

There’s a relatively simple way to gradually transition from our current system to a full-reserve sytem: Simply increase the reserve ratio over time, and print more central bank money to keep the total money supply constant. If we find that it seems to be causing more problems than it solves, we could stop or reverse the trend.

Krugman has pointed out that this wouldn’t really fix the problems in the banking system, which actually seem to be much worse in the shadow banking sector than in conventional commercial banking. This is clearly right, but it isn’t really an argument against trying to improve conventional banking. I guess if stricter regulations on conventional banking push more money into the shadow banking system, that’s bad; but really that just means we should be imposing stricter regulations on the shadow banking system first (or simultaneously).

We don’t need to accept bank runs as a routine part of the financial system. There are other ways of doing things.

The role of police in society

pnrj core principles, current events, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb12 JDN 2459988

What do the police do? Not in theory, in practice. Not what are they supposed to do—what do they actually do?

Ask someone right-wing and they’ll say something like “uphold the law”. Ask someone left-wing and they’ll say something like “protect the interests of the rich”. Both of these are clearly inaccurate. They don’t fit the pattern of how the police actually behave.

What is that pattern? Well, let’s consider some examples.

If you rob a bank, the police will definitely arrest you. That would be consistent with either upholding the law or protecting the interests of the rich, so it’s not a very useful example.

If you run a business with unsafe, illegal working conditions, and someone tells the police about it, the police will basically ignore it and do nothing. At best they might forward it to some regulatory agency who might at some point get around to issuing a fine.

If you strike against your unsafe working conditions and someone calls the police to break up your picket line, they’ll immediately come in force and break up your picket line.

So that definitively refutes the “uphold the law” theory; by ignoring OSHA violations and breaking up legal strikes, the police are actively making it harder to enforce the law. It seems to fit the “protect the interests of the rich” theory. Let’s try some other examples.

If you run a fraudulent business that cons people out of millions of dollars, the police might arrest you, eventually, if they ever actually bother to get around to investigating the fraud. That certainly doesn’t look like upholding the law—but you can get very rich and they’ll still arrest you, as Bernie Madoff discovered. So being rich doesn’t grant absolute immunity from the police.

If your negligence in managing the safety systems of your factory or oil rig kills a dozen people, the police will do absolutely nothing. Some regulatory agency may eventually get around to issuing you a fine. That also looks like protecting the interests of the rich. So far the left-wing theory is holding up.

If you are homeless and camping out on city property, the police will often come to remove you. Sometimes there’s a law against such camping, but there isn’t always; and even when there is, the level of force used often seems wildly disproportionate to the infraction. This also seems to support the left-wing account.

But now suppose you go out and murder several homeless people. That is, if anything, advancing the interests of the rich; it’s certainly not harming them. Yet the police would in fact investigate. It might be low on their priorities, especially if they have a lot of other homicides; but they would, in fact, investigate it and ultimately arrest you. That doesn’t look like advancing the interests of the rich. It looks a lot more like upholding the law, in fact.

Or suppose you are the CEO of a fraudulent company that is about to be revealed and thus collapse, and instead of accepting the outcome or absconding to the Carribbean (as any sane rich psychopath would), you decide to take some SEC officials hostage and demand that they certify your business as legitimate. Are the police going to take that lying down? No. They’re going to consider you a terrorist, and go in guns blazing. So they don’t just protect the interests of the rich after all; that also looks a lot like they’re upholding the law.

I didn’t even express this as the left-wing view earlier, because I’m trying to use the woodman argument; but there are also those on the left who would say that the primary function of the police is to uphold White supremacy. I’d be a fool to deny that there are a lot of White supremacist cops; but notice that in the above scenarios I didn’t even specify the race of the people involved, and didn’t have to. The cops are no more likely to arrest a fraudulent banker because he’s Black, and no more likely to let a hostage-taker go free because he’s White. (They might be less likely to shoot the White hostage-taker—maybe, the data on that actually isn’t as clear-cut as people think—but they’d definitely still arrest him.) While racism is a widespread problem in the police, it doesn’t dictate their behavior all the time—and it certainly isn’t their core function.

What does categorically explain how the police react in all these scenarios?

The police uphold order.

Not law. Order. They don’t actually much seem to care whether what you’re doing is illegal or harmful or even deadly. They care whether it violates civil order.

This is how we can explain the fact that police would investigate murders, but ignore oil rig disasters—even if the latter causes more deaths. The former is a violation of civil order, the latter is not.

It also explains why they would be so willing to tear apart homeless camps and break up protests and strikes. Those are actually often legal, or at worst involve minor infractions; but they’re also disruptive and disorderly.

The police seem to see their core mission as keeping the peace. It could be an unequal, unjust peace full of illegal policies that cause grievous harm and death—but what matters to them is that it’s peace. They will stomp out any violence they see with even greater violence of their own. They have a monopoly on the use of force, and they intend to defend it.

I think that realizing this can help us take a nuanced view of the police. They aren’t monsters or tools of oppression. But they also aren’t brave heroes who uphold the law and keep us safe. They are instruments of civil order.

We do need civil order; there are a lot of very important things in society that simply can’t function if civil order collapses. In places where civil order does fall apart, life becomes entirely about survival; the security that civil order provides is necessary not only for economic activity, but also for much of what gives our lives value.

But nor is civil order all that matters. And sometimes injustice truly does become so grave that it’s worth sacrificing some order in order to redress it. Strikes and protests genuinely are disruptive; society couldn’t function if they were happening everywhere all the time. But sometimes we need to disrupt the way things are going in order to get people to clearly see the injustice around them and do something about it.

I hope that this more realistic, nuanced assessment of the role police play in society may help to pull people away from both harmful political extremes.We can’t simply abolish the police; we need some system for maintaining civil order, and whatever system we have is probably going to end up looking a lot like police. (#ScandinaviaIsBetter, truly, but there are still cops in Norway.) But we also can’t afford to lionize the police or ignore their failures and excesses. When they fight to maintain civil order at the expense of social justice, they become part of the problem.

Home price targeting

pnrj inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 29 JDN 2459973

One of the largest divides in opinion between economists and the general population concerns the question of rent control. While the general public mostly supports rent control (and often votes for it in referenda), economists almost universally oppose it. It’s hard to get a consensus among economists on almost anything, and yet here we have one; but people don’t seem to care.

Why? I think it’s because high rents are a genuine and serious problem, which economists have invested remarkably little effort in trying to solve. Housing prices are one of the chief drivers of long-term inflation, and with most people spending over a third of their income on housing, even relatively small increases in housing prices can cause a lot of suffering.

One thing we do know is that rent control does not work as a long-term solution. Maybe in response to some short-term shock it would make sense. Maybe you do it for awhile as you wait for better long-term solutions to take effect. But simply putting an arbitrary cap on prices will create shortages in the long run—and it is not a coincidence that cities with strict rent control have the worst housing shortages and the greatest rates of homelessness. Rent control doesn’t even do a good job of helping the people who need it most.

Price ceilings in general are just… not a good idea. If people are selling something at a price that you think is too high and you just insist that they aren’t allowed to, they don’t generally sell at a lower price—they just don’t sell at all. There are a few exceptions; in a very monopolistic market, a well-targeted price ceiling might actually work. And short-run housing supply is inelastic enough that rent control isn’t the worst kind of price ceiling. But as a general strategy, price ceilings just aren’t an effective way of making things cheaper.

This is why we so rarely use them as a policy intervention. When the Federal Reserve wants to achieve a certain interest rate on bonds, do they simply demand that people buy the bonds at that price? No. They adjust the supply of bonds in the market until the market price goes to what they want it to be.

Prices aren’t set in a vacuum by the fiat of evil corporations. They are an equilibrium outcome of a market system. There are things you can do to intervene and shift that equilibrium, but if you just outlaw certain prices, it will result in a new equilibrium—it won’t simply be the same amount sold at the new price you wanted.

Maybe some graphs would help explain this. In each graph, the red line is the demand and the blue line is the supply.

Here is what the market looks like before intervention: The price is $6. We’ll say that’s too high; people can’t afford it.

[no_intervention.png]

Now suppose we impose a price ceiling at $4 (the green line). You aren’t allowed to charge more than $4. What will happen? Companies will charge $4. But they will also produce and sell a smaller quantity than before.

Far better would be to increase the supply of the good, shifting to a new supply curve (the purple line). Then you would reduce the price and increase the amount of the good available.

[supply_intervention.png]

This is precisely what we do with government bonds when we want to raise interest rates. (A greater supply of bonds makes their prices lower, which makes their yields higher.) And when we want to lower interest rates, we do the opposite.

Of course, with bonds, it’s easy to control the supply; it’s all just numbers in a network. Increasing the supply of housing is a much greater undertaking; you actually need to build new housing. But ultimately, the only way to ensure that housing is available and affordable for everyone is in fact to build more housing.

There are various ways we might accomplish that; one of the simplest would be to simply relax zoning restrictions that make it difficult to build high-density housing in cities. Those are bad laws anyway; they only benefit a small number of people a little bit while harming a large number of people a lot. (The problem is that the people they benefit are the local homeowners who show up to city council meetings.)

But we could do much more. I propose that we really use interest-rate targeting as our model and introduce home price targeting. I want the federal government to exercise eminent domain and order the construction of new high-density housing in any city that has rents above a certain threshold—if you like, the same threshold you were thinking of setting the rent control at.

Is this an extreme solution? Perhaps. But housing affordability is an extreme problem. And I keep hearing from the left wing that economists aren’t willing to consider “radical enough” solutions to housing (by which they always seem to mean the tried-and-failed strategy of rent control). So here’s a radical solution for you. If cities refuse to build enough housing for their people, make them do it. Buy up and bulldoze their “lovely” “historic” suburban neighborhoods that are ludicrous wastes of land (and also environmentally damaging), and replace them with high-rise apartments. (Get rid of the golf courses while you’re at it.)

This would be expensive, of course; we have to pay to build all those new apartments. But hardly so expensive as living in a society where people can’t afford to live where they want.

In fact, estimates suggest that we are losing over one trillion dollars per year in unrealized productivity because people can’t afford to live in the highest-rent cities. Average income per worker in the US has been reduced by nearly $7000 per year because of high housing prices. So that’s the budget you should be comparing against. Keeping things as they are is like taxing our whole population about 9%. (And it’s probably regressive, so more than that for poor people.)

Would this destroy the “charm” of the city? I dunno, maybe a little. But if the only thing your city had going for it was some old houses that are clearly not an efficient use of space, that’s pretty sad. And it is quite possible to build a city at high density and have it still be beautiful and a major draw for tourists; Paris is a lot denser than far-less-picturesque Houston. (Though I’ll admit, Houston is far more affordable than Paris. It’s not just about density.) And is the “charm” of your city really worth making it so unaffordable that people can’t move there without risking becoming homeless?

There are a lot of details to be worked out: How serious must things get before the federal government steps in? (Wherever we draw the line, San Francisco is surely well past it.) It takes a long time to build houses and let prices adjust, so how do we account for that time-lag? Where does the money come from, actually? Debt? Taxes? But these could all be resolved.

Of course, it’s a pipe dream; we’re never going to implement this policy, because homeowners dread the idea of their home values going down (even though it would actually make their property taxes cheaper!). I’d even be willing to consider some kind of program that would let people refinance underwater mortgages to write off the lost equity, if that’s what it takes to actually build enough housing.

Because there is really only one thing that’s ever going to solve the (global!) housing crises:

Build more homes.

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There should be a glut of nurses.

Jan 15 JDN 2459960

It will not be news to most of you that there is a worldwide shortage of healthcare staff, especially nurses and emergency medical technicians (EMTs). I would like you to stop and think about the utterly terrible policy failure this represents. Maybe if enough people do, we can figure out a way to fix it.

It goes without saying—yet bears repeating—that people die when you don’t have enough nurses and EMTs. Indeed, surely a large proportion of the 2.6 million (!) deaths each year from medical errors are attributable to this. It is likely that at least one million lives per year could be saved by fixing this problem worldwide. In the US alone, over 250,000 deaths per year are caused by medical errors; so we’re looking at something like 100,000 lives we could safe each year by removing staffing shortages.

Precisely because these jobs have such high stakes, the mere fact that we would ever see the word “shortage” beside “nurse” or “EMT” was already clear evidence of dramatic policy failure.

This is not like other jobs. A shortage of accountants or baristas or even teachers, while a bad thing, is something that market forces can be expected to correct in time, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to simply let them do so—meaning, let wages rise on their own until the market is restored to equilibrium. A “shortage” of stockbrokers or corporate lawyers would in fact be a boon to our civilization. But a shortage of nurses or EMTs or firefighters (yes, there are those too!) is a disaster.

Partly this is due to the COVID pandemic, which has been longer and more severe than any but the most pessimistic analysts predicted. But there shortages of nurses before COVID. There should not have been. There should have been a massive glut.

Even if there hadn’t been a shortage of healthcare staff before the pandemic, the fact that there wasn’t a glut was already a problem.

This is what a properly-functioning healthcare policy would look like: Most nurses are bored most of the time. They are widely regarded as overpaid. People go into nursing because it’s a comfortable, easy career with very high pay and usually not very much work. Hospitals spend most of their time with half their beds empty and half of their ambulances parked while the drivers and EMTs sit around drinking coffee and watching football games.

Why? Because healthcare, especially emergency care, involves risk, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. If the number of severely sick people doubles—as in, say, a pandemic—a hospital that usually runs at 98% capacity won’t be able to deal with them. But a hospital that usually runs at 50% capacity will.

COVID exposed to the world what a careful analysis would already have shown: There was not nearly enough redundancy in our healthcare system. We had been optimizing for a narrow-minded, short-sighted notion of “efficiency” over what we really needed, which was resiliency and robustness.

I’d like to compare this to two other types of jobs.

The first is stockbrokers.Set aside for a moment the fact that most of what they do is worthless is not actively detrimental to human society. Suppose that their most adamant boosters are correct and what they do is actually really important and beneficial.

Their experience is almost like what I just said nurses ought to be. They are widely regarded (correctly) as very overpaid. There is never any shortage of them; there are people lining up to be hired. People go into the work not because they care about it or even because they are particularly good at it, but because they know it’s an easy way to make a lot of money.

The one thing that seems to be different from my image may not be as different as it seems. Stockbrokers work long hours, but nobody can really explain why. Frankly most of what they do can be—and has been—successfully automated. Since there simply isn’t that much work for them to do, my guess is that most of the time they spend “working” 60-80 hour weeks is actually not actually working, but sitting around pretending to work. Since most financial forecasters are outperformed by a simple diversified portfolio, the most profitable action for most stock analysts to take most of the time would be nothing.

It may also be that stockbrokers work hard at sales—trying to convince people to buy and sell for bad reasons in order to earn sales commissions. This would at least explain why they work so many hours, though it would make it even harder to believe that what they do benefits society. So if we imagine our “ideal” stockbroker who makes the world a better place, I think they mostly just use a simple algorithm and maybe adjust it every month or two. They make better returns than their peers, but spend 38 hours a week goofing off.

There is a massive glut of stockbrokers. This is what it looks like when a civilization is really optimized to be good at something.

The second is soldiers. Say what you will about them, no one can dispute that their job has stakes of life and death. A lot of people seem to think that the world would be better off without them, but that’s at best only true if everyone got rid of them; if you don’t have soldiers but other countries do, you’re going to be in big trouble. (“We’ll beat our swords into liverwurst / Down by the East Riverside; / But no one wants to be the first!”) So unless and until we can solve that mother of all coordination problems, we need to have soldiers around.

What is life like for a soldier? Well, they don’t seem overpaid; if anything, underpaid. (Maybe some of the officers are overpaid, but clearly not most of the enlisted personnel. Part of the problem there is that “pay grade” is nearly synonymous with “rank”—it’s a primate hierarchy, not a rational wage structure. Then again, so are most industries; the military just makes it more explicit.) But there do seem to be enough of them. Military officials may lament of “shortages” of soldiers, but they never actually seem to want for troops to deploy when they really need them. And if a major war really did start that required all available manpower, the draft could be reinstated and then suddenly they’d have it—the authority to coerce compliance is precisely how you can avoid having a shortage while keeping your workers underpaid. (Russia’s soldier shortage is genuine—something about being utterly outclassed by your enemy’s technological superiority in an obviously pointless imperialistic war seems to hurt your recruiting numbers.)

What is life like for a typical soldier? The answer may surprise you. The overwhelming answer in surveys and interviews (which also fits with the experiences I’ve heard about from friends and family in the military) is that life as a soldier is boring. “All you do is wake up in the morning and push rubbish around camp.” “Bosnia was scary for about 3 months. After that it was boring. That is pretty much day to day life in the military. You are bored.”

This isn’t new, nor even an artifact of not being in any major wars: Union soldiers in the US Civil War had the same complaint. Even in World War I, a typical soldier spent only half the time on the front, and when on the front only saw combat 1/5 of the time. War is boring.

In other words, there is a massive glut of soldiers. Most of them don’t even know what to do with themselves most of the time.

This makes perfect sense. Why? Because an army needs to be resilient. And to be resilient, you must be redundant. If you only had exactly enough soldiers to deploy in a typical engagement, you’d never have enough for a really severe engagement. If on average you had enough, that means you’d spend half the time with too few. And the costs of having too few soldiers are utterly catastrophic.

This is probably an evolutionary outcome, in fact; civilizations may have tried to have “leaner” militaries that didn’t have so much redundancy, and those civilizations were conquered by other civilizations that were more profligate. (This is not to say that we couldn’t afford to cut military spending at all; it’s one thing to have the largest military in the world—I support that, actually—but quite another to have more than the next 10 combined.)

What’s the policy solution here? It’s actually pretty simple.

Pay nurses and EMTs more. A lot more. Whatever it takes to get to the point where we not only have enough, but have so many people lining up to join we don’t even know what to do with them all. If private healthcare firms won’t do it, force them to—or, all the more reason to nationalize healthcare. The stakes are far too high to leave things as they are.

Would this be expensive? Sure.

Removing the shortage of EMTs wouldn’t even be that expensive. There are only about 260,000 EMTs in the US, and they get paid the apallingly low median salary of $36,000. That means we’re currently spending only about $9 billion per year on EMTs. We could double their salaries and double their numbers for only an extra $27 billion—about 0.1% of US GDP.

Nurses would cost more. There are about 5 million nurses in the US, with an average salary of about $78,000, so we’re currently spending about $390 billion a year on nurses. We probably can’t afford to double both salary and staffing. But maybe we could increase both by 20%, costing about an extra $170 billion per year.

Altogether that would cost about $200 billion per year. To save one hundred thousand lives.

That’s $2 million per life saved, or about $40,000 per QALY. The usual estimate for the value of a statistical life is about $10 million, and the usual threshold for a cost-effective medical intervention is $50,000-$100,000 per QALY; so we’re well under both. This isn’t as efficient as buying malaria nets in Africa, but it’s more efficient than plenty of other things we’re spending on. And this isn’t even counting additional benefits of better care that go beyond lives saved.

In fact if we nationalized US healthcare we could get more than these amounts in savings from not wasting our money on profits for insurance and drug companies—simply making the US healthcare system as cost-effective as Canada’s would save $6,000 per American per year, or a whopping $1.9 trillion. At that point we could double the number of nurses and their salaries and still be spending less.

No, it’s not because nurses and doctors are paid much less in Canada than the US. That’s true in some countries, but not Canada. The median salary for nurses in Canada is about $95,500 CAD, which is $71,000 US at current exchange rates. Doctors in Canada can make anywhere from $80,000 to $400,000 CAD, which is $60,000 to $300,000 US. Nor are healthcare outcomes in Canada worse than the US; if anything, they’re better, as Canadians live an average of four years longer than Americans. No, the radical difference in cost—a factor of 2 to 1—between Canada and the US comes from privatization. Privatization is supposed to make things more efficient and lower costs, but it has absolutely not done that in US healthcare.

And if our choice is between spending more money and letting hundreds of thousands or millions of people die every year, that’s no choice at all.

What is it with EA and AI?

pnrj cognitive science, computer science, ethics, futurism, inequality, public policy, science and academia , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 1 JDN 2459946

Surprisingly, most Effective Altruism (EA) leaders don’t seem to think that poverty alleviation should be our top priority. Most of them seem especially concerned about long-term existential risk, such as artificial intelligence (AI) safety and biosecurity. I’m not going to say that these things aren’t important—they certainly are important—but here are a few reasons I’m skeptical that they are really the most important the way that so many EA leaders seem to think.

1. We don’t actually know how to make much progress at them, and there’s only so much we can learn by investing heavily in basic research on them. Whereas, with poverty, the easy, obvious answer turns out empirically to be extremely effective: Give them money.

2. While it’s easy to multiply out huge numbers of potential future people in your calculations of existential risk (and this is precisely what people do when arguing that AI safety should be a top priority), this clearly isn’t actually a good way to make real-world decisions. We simply don’t know enough about the distant future of humanity to be able to make any kind of good judgments about what will or won’t increase their odds of survival. You’re basically just making up numbers. You’re taking tiny probabilities of things you know nothing about and multiplying them by ludicrously huge payoffs; it’s basically the secular rationalist equivalent of Pascal’s Wager.

2. AI and biosecurity are high-tech, futuristic topics, which seem targeted to appeal to the sensibilities of a movement that is still very dominated by intelligent, nerdy, mildly autistic, rich young White men. (Note that I say this as someone who very much fits this stereotype. I’m queer, not extremely rich and not entirely White, but otherwise, yes.) Somehow I suspect that if we asked a lot of poor Black women how important it is to slightly improve our understanding of AI versus giving money to feed children in Africa, we might get a different answer.

3. Poverty eradication is often characterized as a “short term” project, contrasted with AI safety as a “long term” project. This is (ironically) very short-sighted. Eradication of poverty isn’t just about feeding children today. It’s about making a world where those children grow up to be leaders and entrepreneurs and researchers themselves. The positive externalities of economic development are staggering. It is really not much of an exaggeration to say that fascism is a consequence of poverty and unemployment.

4. Currently the main thing that most Effective Altruism organizations say they need most is “talent”; how many millions of person-hours of talent are we leaving on the table by letting children starve or die of malaria?

5. Above all, existential risk can’t really be what’s motivating people here. The obvious solutions to AI safety and biosecurity are not being pursued, because they don’t fit with the vision that intelligent, nerdy, young White men have of how things should be. Namely: Ban them. If you truly believe that the most important thing to do right now is reduce the existential risk of AI and biotechnology, you should support a worldwide ban on research in artificial intelligence and biotechnology. You should want people to take all necessary action to attack and destroy institutions—especially for-profit corporations—that engage in this kind of research, because you believe that they are threatening to destroy the entire world and this is the most important thing, more important than saving people from starvation and disease. I think this is really the knock-down argument; when people say they think that AI safety is the most important thing but they don’t want Google and Facebook to be immediately shut down, they are either confused or lying. Honestly I think maybe Google and Facebook should be immediately shut down for AI safety reasons (as well as privacy and antitrust reasons!), and I don’t think AI safety is yet the most important thing.

Why aren’t people doing that? Because they aren’t actually trying to reduce existential risk. They just think AI and biotechnology are really interesting, fascinating topics and they want to do research on them. And I agree with that, actually—but then they need stop telling people that they’re fighting to save the world, because they obviously aren’t. If the danger were anything like what they say it is, we should be halting all research on these topics immediately, except perhaps for a very select few people who are entrusted with keeping these forbidden secrets and trying to find ways to protect us from them. This may sound radical and extreme, but it is not unprecedented: This is how we handle nuclear weapons, which are universally recognized as a global existential risk. If AI is really as dangerous as nukes, we should be regulating it like nukes. I think that in principle it could be that dangerous, and may be that dangerous someday—but it isn’t yet. And if we don’t want it to get that dangerous, we don’t need more AI researchers, we need more regulations that stop people from doing harmful AI research! If you are doing AI research and it isn’t directly involved specifically in AI safety, you aren’t saving the world—you’re one of the people dragging us closer to the cliff! Anything that could make AI smarter but doesn’t also make it safer is dangerous. And this is clearly true of the vast majority of AI research, and frankly to me seems to also be true of the vast majority of research at AI safety institutes like the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

Seriously, look through MIRI’s research agenda: It’s mostly incredibly abstract and seems completely beside the point when it comes to preventing AI from taking control of weapons or governments. It’s all about formalizing Bayesian induction. Thanks to you, Skynet can have a formally computable approximation to logical induction! Truly we are saved. Only two of their papers, on “Corrigibility” and “AI Ethics”, actually struck me as at all relevant to making AI safer. The rest is largely abstract mathematics that is almost literally navel-gazing—it’s all about self-reference. Eliezer Yudkowsky finds self-reference fascinating and has somehow convinced an entire community that it’s the most important thing in the world. (I actually find some of it fascinating too, especially the paper on “Functional Decision Theory”, which I think gets at some deep insights into things like why we have emotions. But I don’t see how it’s going to save the world from AI.)

Don’t get me wrong: AI also has enormous potential benefits, and this is a reason we may not want to ban it. But if you really believe that there is a 10% chance that AI will wipe out humanity by 2100, then get out your pitchforks and your EMP generators, because it’s time for the Butlerian Jihad. A 10% chance of destroying all humanity is an utterly unacceptable risk for any conceivable benefit. Better that we consign ourselves to living as we did in the Neolithic than risk something like that. (And a globally-enforced ban on AI isn’t even that; it’s more like “We must live as we did in the 1950s.” How would we survive!?) If you don’t want AI banned, maybe ask yourself whether you really believe the risk is that high—or are human brains just really bad at dealing with small probabilities?

I think what’s really happening here is that we have a bunch of guys (and yes, the EA and especially AI EA-AI community is overwhelmingly male) who are really good at math and want to save the world, and have thus convinced themselves that being really good at math is how you save the world. But it isn’t. The world is much messier than that. In fact, there may not be much that most of us can do to contribute to saving the world; our best options may in fact be to donate money, vote well, and advocate for good causes.

Let me speak Bayesian for a moment: The prior probability that you—yes, you, out of all the billions of people in the world—are uniquely positioned to save it by being so smart is extremely small. It’s far more likely that the world will be saved—or doomed—by people who have power. If you are not the head of state of a large country or the CEO of a major multinational corporation, I’m sorry; you probably just aren’t in a position to save the world from AI.

But you can give some money to GiveWell, so maybe do that instead?

Charity shouldn’t end at home

pnrj core principles, current events, futurism, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It so happens that this week’s post will go live on Christmas Day. I always try to do some kind of holiday-themed post around this time of year, because not only Christmas, but a dozen other holidays from various religions all fall around this time of year. The winter solstice seems to be a very popular time for holidays, and has been since antiquity: The Romans were celebrating Saturnalia 2000 years ago. Most of our ‘Christmas’ traditions are actually derived from Yuletide.

These holidays certainly mean many different things to different people, but charity and generosity are themes that are very common across a lot of them. Gift-giving has been part of the season since at least Saturnalia and remains as vital as ever today. Most of those gifts are given to our friends and loved ones, but a substantial fraction of people also give to strangers in the form of charitable donations: November and December have the highest rates of donation to charity in the US and the UK, with about 35-40% of people donating during this season. (Of course this is complicated by the fact that December 31 is often the day with the most donations, probably from people trying to finish out their tax year with a larger deduction.)

My goal today is to make you one of those donors. There is a common saying, often attributed to the Bible but not actually present in it: “Charity begins at home”.

Perhaps this is so. There’s certainly something questionable about the Effective Altruism strategy of “earning to give” if it involves abusing and exploiting the people around you in order to make more money that you then donate to worthy causes. Certainly we should be kind and compassionate to those around us, and it makes sense for us to prioritize those close to us over strangers we have never met. But while charity may begin at home, it must not end at home.

There are so many global problems that could benefit from additional donations. While global poverty has been rapidly declining in the early 21st century, this is largely because of the efforts of donors and nonprofit organizations. Official Development Assitance has been roughly constant since the 1970s at 0.3% of GNI among First World countries—well below international targets set decades ago. Total development aid is around $160 billion per year, while private donations from the United States alone are over $480 billion. Moreover, 9% of the world’s population still lives in extreme poverty, and this rate has actually slightly increased the last few years due to COVID.

There are plenty of other worthy causes you could give to aside from poverty eradication, from issues that have been with us since the dawn of human civilization (the Humane Society International for domestic animal welfare, the World Wildlife Federation for wildlife conservation) to exotic fat-tail sci-fi risks that are only emerging in our own lifetimes (the Machine Intelligence Research Institute for AI safety, the International Federation of Biosafety Associations for biosecurity, the Union of Concerned Scientists for climate change and nuclear safety). You could fight poverty directly through organizations like UNICEF or GiveDirectly, fight neglected diseases through the Schistomoniasis Control Initiative or the Against Malaria Foundation, or entrust an organization like GiveWell to optimize your donations for you, sending them where they think they are needed most. You could give to political causes supporting civil liberties (the American Civil Liberties Union) or protecting the rights of people of color (the North American Association of Colored People) or LGBT people (the Human Rights Campaign).

I could spent a lot of time and effort trying to figure out the optimal way to divide up your donations and give them to causes such as this—and then convincing you that it’s really the right one. (And there is even a time and place for that, because seemingly-small differences can matter a lot in this.) But instead I think I’m just going to ask you to pick something. Give something to an international charity with a good track record.

I think we worry far too much about what is the best way to give—especially people in the Effective Altruism community, of which I’m sort of a marginal member—when the biggest thing the world really needs right now is just more people giving more. It’s true, there are lots of worthless or even counter-productive charities out there: Please, please do not give to the Salvation Army. (And think twice before donating to your own church; if you want to support your own community, okay, go ahead. But if you want to make the world better, there are much better places to put your money.)

But above all, give something. Or if you already give, give more. Most people don’t give at all, and most people who give don’t give enough.

In defense of civility

pnrj cognitive science, core principles, ethics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 18 JDN 2459932

Civility is in short supply these days. Perhaps it has always been in short supply; certainly much of the nostalgia for past halcyon days of civility is ill-founded. Wikipedia has an entire article on hundreds of recorded incidents of violence in legislative assemblies, in dozens of countries, dating all the way from to the Roman Senate in 44 BC to Bosnia in 2019. But the Internet seems to bring about its own special kind of incivility, one which exposes nearly everyone to some of the worst vitriol the entire world has to offer. I think it’s worth talking about why this is bad, and perhaps what we might do about it.

For some, the benefits of civility seem so self-evident that they don’t even bear mentioning. For others, the idea of defending civility may come across as tone-deaf or even offensive. I would like to speak to both of those camps today: If you think the benefits of civility are obvious, I assure you, they aren’t to everyone. And if you think that civility is just a tool of the oppressive status quo, I hope I can make you think again.

A lot of the argument against civility seems to be founded in the notion that these issues are important, lives are at stake, and so we shouldn’t waste time and effort being careful how we speak to each other. How dare you concern yourself with the formalities of argumentation when people are dying?

But this is totally wrongheaded. It is precisely because these issues are important that civility is vital. It is precisely because lives are at stake that we must make the right decisions. And shouting and name-calling (let alone actual fistfights or drawn daggers—which have happened!) are not conducive to good decision-making.

If you shout someone down when choosing what restaurant to have dinner at, you have been very rude and people may end up unhappy with their dining experience—but very little of real value has been lost. But if you shout someone down when making national legislation, you may cause the wrong policy to be enacted, and this could lead to the suffering or death of thousands of people.

Think about how court proceedings work. Why are they so rigid and formal, with rules upon rules upon rules? Because the alternative was capricious violence. In the absence of the formal structure of a court system, so-called ‘justice’ was handed out arbitrarily, by whoever was in power, or by mobs of vigilantes. All those seemingly-overcomplicated rules were made in order to resolve various conflicts of interest and hopefully lead toward more fair, consistent results in the justice system. (And don’t get me wrong; they still could stand to be greatly improved!)

Legislatures have complex rules of civility for the same reason: Because the outcome is so important, we need to make sure that the decision process is as reliable as possible. And as flawed as existing legislatures still are, and as silly as it may seem to insist upon addressing ‘the Honorable Representative from the Great State of Vermont’, it’s clearly a better system than simply letting them duke it out with their fists.

A related argument I would like to address is that of ‘tone policing‘. If someone objects, not to the content of what you are saying, but to the tone in which you have delivered it, are they arguing in bad faith?

Well, possibly. Certainly, arguments about tone can be used that way. In particular I remember that this was basically the only coherent objection anyone could come up with against the New Atheism movement: “Well, sure, obviously, God isn’t real and religion is ridiculous; but why do you have to be so mean about it!?”

But it’s also quite possible for tone to be itself a problem. If your tone is overly aggressive and you don’t give people a chance to even seriously consider your ideas before you accuse them of being immoral for not agreeing with you—which happens all the time—then your tone really is the problem.

So, how can we tell which is which? I think a good way to reply to what you think might be bad-faith tone policing is this: “What sort of tone do you think would be better?”

I think there are basically three possible responses:

1. They can’t offer one, because there is actually no tone in which they would accept the substance of your argument. In that case, the tone policing really is in bad faith; they don’t want you to be nicer, they want you to shut up. This was clearly the case for New Atheism: As Daniel Dennett aptly remarked, “There’s simply no polite way to tell someone they have dedicated their lives to an illusion.” But sometimes, such things need to be said all the same.

2. They offer an alternative argument you could make, but it isn’t actually expressing your core message. Either they have misunderstood your core message, or they actually disagree with the substance of your argument and should be addressing it on those terms.

3. They offer an alternative way of expressing your core message in a milder, friendlier tone. This means that they are arguing in good faith and actually trying to help you be more persuasive!

I don’t know how common each of these three possibilities is; it could well be that the first one is the most frequent occurrence. That doesn’t change the fact that I have definitely been at the other end of the third one, where I absolutely agree with your core message and want your activism to succeed, but I can see that you’re acting like a jerk and nobody will want to listen to you.

Here, let me give some examples of the type of argument I’m talking about:

1. “Defund the police”: This slogan polls really badly. Probably because most people have genuine concerns about crime and want the police to protect them. Also, as more and more social services (like for mental health and homelessness) get co-opted into policing, this slogan makes it sound like you’re just going to abandon those people. But do we need serious, radical police reform? Absolutely. So how about “Reform the police”, “Put police money back into the community”, or even “Replace the police”?

2. “All Cops Are Bastards”: Speaking of police reform, did I mention we need it? A lot of it? Okay. Now, let me ask you: All cops? Every single one of them? There is not a single one out of the literally millions of police officers on this planet who is a good person? Not one who is fighting to take down police corruption from within? Not a single individual who is trying to fix the system while preserving public safety? Now, clearly, it’s worth pointing out, some cops are bastards—but hey, that even makes a better acronym: SCAB. In fact, it really is largely a few bad apples—the key point here is that you need to finish the aphorism: “A few bad apples spoil the whole barrel.” The number of police who are brutal and corrupt is relatively small, but as long as the other police continue to protect them, the system will be broken. Either you get those bad apples out pronto, or your whole barrel is bad. But demonizing the very people who are in the best position to implement those reforms—good police officers—is not helping.

3. “Be gay, do crime”: I know it’s tongue-in-cheek and ironic. I get that. It’s still a really dumb message. I am absolutely on board with LGBT rights. Even aside from being queer myself, I probably have more queer and trans friends than straight friends at this point. But why in the world would you want to associate us with petty crime? Why are you lumping us in with people who harm others at best out of desperation and at worst out of sheer greed? Even if you are literally an anarchist—which I absolutely am not—you’re really not selling anarchism well if the vision you present of it is a world of unfettered crime! There are dozens of better pro-LGBT slogans out there; pick one. Frankly even “do gay, be crime” is better, because it’s more clearly ironic. (Also, you can take it to mean something like this: Don’t just be gay, do gay—live your fullest gay life. And if you can be crime, that means that the system is fundamentally unjust: You can be criminalized just for who you are. And this is precisely what life is like for millions of LGBT people on this planet.)

A lot of people seem to think that if you aren’t immediately convinced by the most vitriolic, aggressive form of an argument, then you were never going to be convinced anyway and we should just write you off as a potential ally. This isn’t just obviously false; it’s incredibly dangerous.

The whole point of activism is that not everyone already agrees with you. You are trying to change minds. If it were really true that all reasonable, ethical people already agreed with your view, you wouldn’t need to be an activist. The whole point of making political arguments is that people can be reasonable and ethical and still be mistaken about things, and when we work hard to persuade them, we can eventually win them over. In fact, on some things we’ve actually done spectacularly well.

And what about the people who aren’t reasonable and ethical? They surely exist. But fortunately, they aren’t the majority. They don’t rule the whole world. If they did, we’d basically be screwed: If violence is really the only solution, then it’s basically a coin flip whether things get better or worse over time. But in fact, unreasonable people are outnumbered by reasonable people. Most of the things that are wrong with the world are mistakes, errors that can be fixed—not conflicts between irreconcilable factions. Our goal should be to fix those mistakes wherever we can, and that means being patient, compassionate educators—not angry, argumentative bullies.