public policy

The most dangerous idea you’ve probably never heard of

PNRJ current events, ethics, futurism, public policy , , , , , , , ,

May 31 JDN 2461192

They call themselves effective accelerationists, co-opting the acronym EA from Effective Altruism despite being about as diametrically opposed as it is possible to be.

They rally behind the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which I admit makes a lot of good points and has a very seductive quality to it; but when you get to the end and reach the conclusions they draw from many reasonable-sounding premises, the result is absolute horror.

What do they want?

Totally unrestricted artificial intelligence produced as fast as possible.

Let’s be clear about this: They not only want to develop artificial intelligence (many people want that). They not only want to replace humanity with artificial intelligence (serious philosophers have suggested that this might be a long-term evolution for our civilization). They want to do it right now, without restrictions.

Their reasoning seems to go something like this:

  1. Artificial intelligence has tremendous potential.
  2. Improved computing has already been a tremendous boon to humanity, Applications of artificial intelligence to many fields such as scientific research and biotechnology could continue to be so.
  3. Free-market capitalism is the most efficient economic system yet devised.

Therefore,

  1. We should allow (or even incentivize) corporations to make artificial intelligence as powerful as possible as quickly as possible.

If we were to apply their same reasoning to other technologies, it would be obvious what’s wrong here. Consider the following argument:

  1. Nuclear energy is tremendously powerful and very environmentally-friendly.
  2. Cleaner, more powerful energy has been a boon to humanity, and would continue to be so if improved further.
  3. Free-market capitalism is the most efficient economic system yet devised.

Therefore,

  1. We should grant unrestricted access to nuclear material to anyone who is rich enough to afford it.

From three entirely reasonable premises (that honestly should be uncontroversial, even though they aren’t), we have made some kind of leap of logic to derive a conclusion that is utterly insane, and could literally result in the destruction of our entire civilization.

(And, if you’re not horrified enough yet, this isn’t even hypothetical after all: The US government is seriously considering giving weapons-grade plutonium to tech startups, apparently based on this exact reasoning.)

I agree that artificial intelligence has tremendous potential. That is why it must be kept on a tight leash.

In the near term, it is already poised to severely disrupt our economy and education system. But sufficiently-powerful AI genuinely could result in harms that could kill billions of people or even destroy human civilization. (I don’t think this will happen; but if the effective accelerationists have their way, that outcome becomes a lot more likely.)

Part of their argument seems to be that delaying new medical treatments and solutions to global problems will cost lives. This is true. But it’s far fewer lives than we would be putting at risk by pulling out all the stops and letting corporations do whatever they feel like doing.

I, too, want to see a glorious future where humanity transcends our current limits through biotechnology or cybernetics or truly-sentient artificial general intelligence. But the benefits of doing that a few years—or even decades, or even centuries—sooner are simply not worth the risk of destroying our entire civilization.

When dealing with a technology this powerful and a change this radical, the most important thing is to do it correctly—not to do it quickly. We need to make sure that the artificial intelligence we create is wise and benevolent so that its great power benefits humanity—and with this much at stake, it’s worth taking a long time to get it right if we have to.

A world run by copies of Lieutenant Commander Data would be a paradise. A world run by copies of Grok would be a hellscape. It’s worth spending some time to make sure we get the former and not the latter.

Why “bullshit jobs” exist

PNRJ inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, mathematical models, public policy , , , , , ,

May 24 JDN 2461185

Content warning: Algebra

In 2018, David Graeber published a book called Bullshit Jobs, positing that the transition of our economy from industrial manufacturing to ‘post-industrial’ services was in fact largely a transition from meaningful jobs that do actual work to meaningless jobs that employ people without contributing to society.

He made the point vividly in this article for Strike magazine:

For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

I think his claim is a little overstated, but the basic pattern does seem valid: Less and less labor is spent actually making things (or even really doing things) and more and more is spent on selling things and advertising things and suing over things.

While the pattern seems genuine, it’s a little hard to verify empirically, as the usual BLS categories include both useful and useless work in the same categories: “Sales and office occupations” includes far too many things to be useful.

But I think Graeber’s explanations of where the pattern comes from are pretty much totally wrong. He attributes it to “office feudalism” where bosses want to act like lords and “make-work” from government policy trying to create jobs without regard for whether those jobs are useful. I’m not saying these things never happen, but it’s not enough to explain a massive economic transition.

Rather, with a little bit of economic theory, I think it’s not hard to see that these “bullshit jobs” are actually rent-seeking; they don’t produce anything for society, but they are genuinely profitable for the companies that hire them—and thus it’s perfectly rational for a profit-maximizing corporation to behave in this way.

Here’s a simple model to demonstrate the idea.

Suppose there are two corporations, Zero Inc. and One Corp, which both produce cars.

Each factory worker produces r cars. (Presumably they really produce some fraction 1/n of n r cars, but it works out the same.) The labor productivity of factory workers is thus r.

Each factory worker receives a wage wf, which is outside the control of these two corporations (it’s set by a larger labor market).

This means that the marginal cost of producing a car is wf/r. As productivity increases, producing cars becomes cheaper.

The two corporations are in Cournot competition, so they face a total demand for cars that looks like this:

p = a – b (q0 + q1)

where q0 is how many cars Zero produces and q1 is how many cars One produces, and a and b are parameters. This is exogenous; it’s determined by broader market conditions, not by anything the corporations can control.

I’ll spare you the algebra, but this has a well-known equilibrium solution; the two corporations produce the same amount and charge the same price:

q0 = q1 = (a – wf/r)/(3b)
p = (a + 2wf/r)/3

Their profits are also the same, naturally:

F0 = F1 = (p – wf/r)q0 = (a – wf/r)2/(9b)

The number of workers employed making cars is:

L = q/r = 2(a – wf/r)/(3br)

Because the numerator increases with r but so does the denominator, it isn’t obvious whether this is increasing or decreasing in r; more productivity may result in either more or fewer factory workers employed.

By taking the derivative, this can be shown:

dL/dr > 0 iff a > 2w/r

This means that at relatively low levels of productivity, more productivity will increase employment of factory workers; but at high levels of productivity, it will decrease it.

Since profits are proportional to (a – wf/r)2, the higher profits are, the more likely it is that additional productivity will reduce employment of factory workers.

But what if factory workers aren’t the only workers each corporation can employ?

Suppose now that there is another kind of worker they can employ, salesmen.

Zero employs s0 salesmen, while One employs s1. Salesmen are paid a wage ws.

Salesmen don’t actually make anything. They produce no real output. Instead, they allow each firm to take a larger share of the market.

To model this, I’ll use a contest function (I used a similar model in some posts in 2020), where the actual quantity each corporation produces and sells is proportional to the relative number of salesmen employed at each corporation:

q0 = (s0)/(s0 + s1) q

I’ll assume that the total amount of cars produced and sold is the same as before. (Dropping this assumption makes the model much more complicated and hard to solve, without significantly changing the overall conclusions.)

Each corporation’s profits now depend on both how many cars they produce and how many salesmen they hire:

F0 = p q0 – wf/r q0 – ws s0

Again I will spare you the algebra, but it comes out like this:

s0 = s1 = (a – wf/r)2 / (18 b ws)

Unlike employment of factory workers, which may increase or decrease as productivity increases, employment of salesmen always increases.

Thus, as productivity gets higher and higher, we should expect employment of factory workers (“real jobs”) decreasing as employment of salesmen (“bullshit jobs”) increases—even though corporations are being completely rational and maximizing their profits.

Let’s put some numbers on this to make the example more concrete.

Suppose at the start that wf = 1, ws = 2, a = 10, b = 1, and r = 1. (Consider production in cars per day, wages as annual salaries, and money in units of $10,000.)

Then each corporation produces 3 cars per day:

q0 = q1 = (10 – 1/1)/(3*1) = 3

The price of a car is $40,000:

p = (10 + 2*1/1)/3 = 4

The number of factory workers employed is 6:

L = q/r = (3+3)/1

The number of salesmen employed is 4.5 (maybe one is employed half-time):

s = s0 + s1 = (10 – 1/1)2 / (9*1*2) = 81/18 = 4.5

So the majority of workers are factory workers.

But now suppose that productivity greatly increases, to r=10, with everything else the same:

The number of cars produced at each corporation per day increases to 3.3:

q0 = q1 = (10 – 1/10)/(3*1) = 3.3

The price of a car falls to $34,000:

p = (10 + 2*1/10)/3 = 3.4

The number of factory workers employed falls dramatically; there isn’t even one full-time job available, only part-time jobs:

L = (3.3+3.3)/10 = 0.66

But the number of salesmen increases to 5.445 (one additional full-time worker):

s = (10 – 1/10)2 / (9*1*2) = 5.445

Thus, while factory workers used to be 6/(6+4.5) = 57% of the workforce, now they are only 0.66/(0.66+5.445) = 10.8% of the workforce. And this happened because they got more productive!

This is of course a very simple model, but the basic pattern fits:

The share of employment that’s in manufacturing has greatly declined since 2000:

Yet manufacturing output hasn’t really changed:

The reason is that labor productivity has continued to rise:

In my model I assumed that factory worker wages haven’t changed, and, well, they really haven’t, despite large increases in productivity. In real terms, a factory worker today makes about 70% more than one in 1950, despite producing nearly six times as much output.

Producing the same amount of stuff now requires fewer people—so fewer people are employed in making stuff. They then end up employed somewhere else; and one of the more profitable ways to employ them these days is in rent-seeking activities like sales and advertising.

What should we do about this?

I already said what I wanted to do years ago: Tax advertising.

A letter from the real singularity

PNRJ computer science, critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, ethics, futurism, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 5 JDN 246136

I’ve been unable to find it, but several years ago someone famous wrote a sci-fi work entitled something like “A letter from the post-singularity” about how great life is after AI takes over everything. Today I thought I’d write a more realistic take on the path we actually seem to be on.

The year is 2073. Technically we still don’t have true AGI; as far as we can tell, AI still isn’t actually sentient and AIs aren’t people. (Some of us wonder, though. Philosophers debate it.) But that doesn’t really matter, because all white-collar work has been completely automated, and so has any blue-collar work that doesn’t require fine dexterity or unusual expertise. Plumbers and electricians are still doing all right (though they do more of their work at data centers than homes these days); sometimes I wish I’d apprenticed to be an electrician. Then again, the world can still only support so many electricians. AI managers command AI-run asteroid mines to extract ores to transport with AI-run spacecraft to Mars where AI-run factories process those ores and fabricate chips for more AIs that more AI-run spacecraft carry to Earth to be installed in AI-run data centers. And each time one gets sold, some trillionaire’s number goes up, and that’s the only thing people like him have ever cared about in their lives.

There are of course a handful of super-brilliant, super-creative, or just super-lucky individuals who manage to get rich making art or music or books or video games or whatever, but the vast majority of people who do art are still starving artists, just as they’ve always been, I guess. And the AI-generated stuff is good enough now that most of the time people will just use that instead of paying extra for the “authentic” “artisanal” stuff. (And most people can’t even tell the difference anyway.)

Harvard and Oxford still have professors, but most universities have fully automated teaching and most of their administration—and yet somehow tuition is barely any cheaper now than it was in your time, even adjusted for inflation. And if you were thinking of becoming a professor yourself? You should probably just go play prediction markets or something; you’d have better odds. The number of research papers published every year is astronomical, but they’re all written and reviewed by AI, rarely if ever even read by any human being, and so it seems like the actual progress of scientific knowledge has pretty much ground to a halt. (Seriously, how are there still string theorists? It’s been a century.) I guess corporate R&D still keeps on improving those graphics cards somehow; maybe they’ve discovered something important, but if they have, they’re keeping it to themselves. And I keep reading about amazing advancements done by AIs (especially in pure math that I’m not sure anyone understands), but none of it actually ever seems to affect anyone’s actual lives.

As for me, I live on UBI. Like 90% of people do. It’s enough to rent a cheap apartment (but own a home? Are you serious? Only millionaires own homes.), buy basically-adequate food (as long as you don’t eat out too much anywhere that’s not fast food), and pay for all the subscriptions to media services and home assistants and whatnot. What you make on UBI will only buy you the ad-supported versions, so while my fridge will order milk for me (delivered by drone in a couple of hours) and my robot maid will cook breakfast, fold the laundry and put the dishes in the dishwasher, my fridge is also constantly running ads and my maid will intersperse targeted sales pitches into its casual conversation. Sometimes I think I should just get rid of it (her?) and do my own cooking and cleaning myself, so I would never be able to sell it for half what I paid for it. If I could make some extra money, maybe I could at least upgrade to the ad-free subscription for my maid. (The Pro subscription and hardware addons to make her your girlfriend are just gross, but I’m sure they make tons of money.)

Every year, some politician makes a big deal about how the UBI trust fund is draining and will be gone in ten years or whatever; but it’s obvious that all they’d have to do to fix that would be raise the taxes on trillionaires a little bit, yet somehow that never seems to happen. But they also don’t cut UBI payments either, except sometimes to reduce our cost-of-living adjustments. I dunno; maybe they will really cut UBI payments in a few years. Or maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll actually raise taxes for once.

At least I wasn’t dumb enough to move to Mars, where “employment is guaranteed!” but you have to pay a subscription for your oxygen.

My worst days are probably… about as bad as your worst days. Frankly they couldn’t be much worse, because sometimes I just want to die. Like a lot of people on UBI, I feel like a burden on society, like the world would be better off without me. Medicaid won’t cover neuroregulator implants, so I still take pills for my depression; they’re probably better than the pills you could get, but they’re still far from perfect.

My best days are maybe better than yours, maybe worse; it depends, I guess. If you’ve got cancer, your days are probably worse than mine, because we can pretty easily treat most cancers now. But if you’re healthy and you’ve got a steady job and a tight-knit community where you live, I’m guessing your days are better.

I have access to faster computers and faster Internet than you can probably imagine; my understanding was that back in the day you had to wait for downloads sometimes? Or even sometimes wait for webpages to load? What was that like? And your storage was measured in gigabytes, not petabytes? Humanity has never been so connected; human beings have never been so isolated. I theory I can contact anyone in the Solar System at the speed of light, but in practice my friends and I always seem to have trouble keeping in touch. (Oddly, it’s my best friend who lives on a station over Ganymede that I seem to stay in touch with best; we have to write full-length emails, because there’s no way to have a conversation on a ping of an hour and a half. It feels like being an old-timey pen pal, I guess.)

It’s not all bad. Some things are definitely better these days.

People often live to be 110 or even 120 nowadays. (So you might still be alive when I write this.) Rarely does anyone seem to make it past that, though; aging is just… really hard to beat. (The Boomers are finally almost gone, but Gen X is still gonna be with us for awhile yet.) We’ve cured a lot of the diseases that were bad in your time, but not all of them. And sometimes only people rich enough to pay for their own healthcare can afford the cures.

Language barriers are pretty much gone. If I wanna read something that was written in Japanese or Xhosa, I just have an AI translate it, and the translations are good enough now that you’d have to be really deeply-versed in the language to find any problems with it. Like, okay, maybe I’m not getting all the subtle connotations of Japanese literature, but was I ever going to actually learn kanji to read the originals? No. That kind of thing is for people with crazy obsessions.)

Our video games are definitely way better than yours. Characters with AI personalities that adapt in real time to how you behave. Procedurally-generated open worlds that can literally expand to the size of entire planets. (Actually, I vaguely remember reading you had a couple games that did something like the second one? Minecraft and Factorio​, I think they were called? Impressive that you could pull that off on a gigaflop processor.) Worlds and factions that adapt to your actions and provide realistic consequences so that no two players’ experiences of the game are exactly the same. It’s easy to lose yourself in a game like that (especially if you’ve got a VR setup), and when you’re playing in such a rich, interesting world for hundreds of hours. you can sometimes forget how bleak things are back in the real world your flesh-and-blood body lives in. (But then you get hungry or have to pee and you get forced back into reality.)

Economists keep telling us that per-capita GDP and productivity have never been higher, and that we have access to all these wonderful goods and services that previous generations could scarcely even imagine.

But if that’s true, why do I sometimes just want to die?

The United States has stopped creating jobs—maybe forever?

PNRJ current events, futurism, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , ,

Mar 29 JDN 246129

When the preliminary data for our job markets over the past few months were released, they looked all right. But after more careful analysis and better data has allowed us to revise the figures and do more accurate seasonal adjustments, the results are really quite shocking:

The United States has lost more jobs than it created for the last six months.

That is certainly something we’ve done before; it is indeed what tends to happen during recessions. But no recession has been declared, GDP seems to be growing normally, and unemployment still stands at a perfectly-reasonable 4.4%.

What’s going on here?

If you look at the employment level—the absolute number of people employed—it looks shockingly flat since 2023.

From 2009 to 2019, US employment grew from 138 million to 159 million, growing at 1.4% per year. Obviously it collapsed during the 2020 recession, but then it recovered to 158 million by the end of 2022. It now stands at 163 million, only 0.7% growth per year since 2022. Since January 2025 it has actually fallen from a peak of 164 million.

Because our population is growing (albeit not as much as it once was, because immigration has collapsed after Trump’s crackdowns), this actually looks even worse when you consider the employment rate, the ratio between the number of people employed and the total population:

US employment peaked at 61.1% just before the 2020 recession, and has still not recovered to that level. It reached 60% in 2022, stayed around there through 2024, and then since then has actually declined, now to 59.3%. In fact, it was even higher in 2007 before the other big recession of my adult life (you know, it’s starting to feel like the economy hates Millennials in particular), reaching 63.3% before crashing and never recovering.

Yet our GDP growth looks fine!

Sure, it had a huge drop in the 2020 recession, but it grew very fast in the recovery, and since then has fluctuated a bit, but generally averaged about 2.5% per year—which is pretty good for a highly-developed country. We had negative growth in the first quarter of 2025 and slow growth in the fourth quarter, but the second and third quarter both had strong growth to make up for it. Overall real GDP growth for 2025 as a whole was a perfectly respectable 2.1%.

Even our unemployment rate looks fine—though with employment falling, it suggests more people are leaving the labor force instead of looking for jobs at all.

The only major industry that has actually shown strong employment growth over the last year is healthcare, growing 2.4%. Every other major industry grew 1% or less, or even shrank.

What would cause something like this?

This actually looks like what you’d expect to happen under technological unemployment: Productivity-enhancing technology allows GDP to increase even as employment falls.

But we haven’t actually had a surge in productivity. The massive—utterly irresponsible—rollout of AI technology has shown little, if any, effect at improving productivity. 3% of effort saved really isn’t that much, especially since a lot of people seem to overestimate how much AI tools help them.

Overall, our productivity growth looks… pretty normal, by historical standards:

Instead, what actually seems to be happening is what we might call techno-hype unemployment: Employers think that a massive productivity surge is around the corner, and they’ve already stopped hiring in anticipation of that.

Maybe they’re not even wrong about that! There is now some evidence that while initial adoption of AI reduces productivity, eventually it may increase productivity. (But we really haven’t had it long enough to be sure.)

Unemployment isn’t rising very much, not because people are finding jobs, but because people who already have jobs are generally keeping them, while people who don’t have jobs are basically giving up.

The hiring rate is now the lowest it has been since the 2020 recession—and not much higher than it was at the trough of the 2020 recession!

As far as I can tell, on our current path, one of two things will happen:

  1. The current paradigm of AI will work, and genuinely increase productivity.
  2. The current paradigm of AI will fail, and expected productivity gains will not materialize.

It turns out that neither possibility looks good for workers.

If AI succeeds, then businesses seem like they’re gonna just… stop hiring, especially entry-level positions that can be more readily replaced. People who already have senior positions may do just fine, or even make more money; but anyone fresh out of college, or even anyone whose career got derailed and is trying to start again, looks like they’ll just be… out of luck.

It’s every capitalist’s dream: To buy a machine that lets you never have to hire anyone ever again. And maybe, at last, they’ve found that Holy Grail.

On the other hand, if AI fails, the bubble will burst, the huge amount of investment that was previously driving the economy will suddenly dry up, and we will have a financial crisis and a recession. Businesses that were so sure they could replace their workers with AI will want to start hiring again, but won’t be able to, because no one can afford to buy anything and so nobody is making any revenue to pay employees with.

In many ways, the second one appears to be the preferable outcome, because at least it’s temporary. We would, sooner or later, recover from that recession and bring things back to normal. If AI ever actually works even half as well as most of the tech industry claims it will any minute, the most likely outcome seems to be launching us fully into a cyberpunk dystopia where a handful of trillionaires own everything and the rest of us struggle for scraps because our skills can now be replaced by machines.

This didn’t have to happen.

Even if AI is really going to be a transformational technology, we could have prepared for it better. We could have implemented policies that would ensure that people would continue to be provided for even as their labor was more and more replaced by machines. But that would have made the billionaires slightly less rich, and it sounded like “socialism” to ideologues, and the right-wing media convinced millions of people that even moving slightly in that direction would destroy all they held dear.

It’s not even too late! We could still turn it around, if those same people who stopped us from doing the right thing before weren’t still in charge of everything and richer than ever and just as effective as they ever were at deluding the masses.

I don’t know how to be optimistic about the future anymore. It feels like I’m watching the collapse of our entire civilization live in real time.

What would a world without poverty look like?

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, education, ethics, futurism, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 22 JDN 2461122

In my previous post I reflected on the ways that conventional measures of poverty seem inadequate—and that a richer understanding of poverty suggests that it is far more ubiquitous than such measures suggest.

In this post, I will ask: Given this richer understanding of poverty, what would a world without poverty look like? Is it something we can realistically hope to achieve?

In techno-utopian circles (looking at you again, Scott Alexander), it is common to speak of “post-scarcity”: A world where there is no poverty because resources are effectively unlimited.

I don’t think that’s possible.

Not for humans as we know them. Perhaps in a future where greed is a recognized and treatable psychiatric disorder, we could genuinely have an economy where people really just take whatever they want and it works out because nobody wants an unreasonable amount.

But the fact that there are people with hundreds of billions of dollars tells me that among humans as we know them, some people’s greed is just literally insatiable. Give them a moon and they’ll demand a planet; give them a planet and they’ll demand a solar system. Whatever they are getting out of more wealth (status? power? the dopamine hit of number go up?), they’re never going to stop getting it from even more wealth, no matter how much we give them. For if they were going to stop at a reasonable amount, they would have stopped four orders of magnitude ago.

So let’s try to imagine what a world would look like if it really had no poverty, but not by somehow producing such staggering amounts of wealth that everyone could literally take whatever they want.

I think the key is that it would require all basic material needs to be met.

Everyone would have, at minimum:

  • Clean air to breathe
  • Clean water to drink
  • Nutritious food to eat
  • Shelter from the elements
  • Security against theft and violence
  • Personal liberty and political representation
  • A basic education
  • A basic standard of healthcare

(I will note that these resonate quite closely with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)

Some of these needs can probably never be completely satisfied—there is an inherent tension between liberty and security which requires us to balance them against each other. A society with zero crime is a horrific totalitarian police state; a society with complete liberty is an equally horrific Hobbesian nightmare. But we have achieved, in most of the First World at least, a reasonable standard of security along with a great deal of liberty, and preserving that balance should be of a very high priority.

Even clean air and water would be difficult to satisfy perfectly: even if we pivot our whole economy to solar, wind, and nuclear power (as we very definitely should be doing!), some amount of pollution is probably necessary just to have a functioning industrial society. So we need to establish reasonable standards for what amounts of pollution exposure are safe, and effective mechanisms for ensuring that people are not exposed to pollution outside those standards—we have largely done the former, but seriously fail at the latter.

But probably the most difficult needs to satisfy are actually difficult to even define.

Just what constitutes a basic standard of education, and a basic standard of healthcare?

These seem like moving targets.

Let’s start with education:

Someone who is illiterate and can barely add two numbers together would be considered to have very poor education today, but would be considered completely average among peasants in the Middle Ages. Someone like me with a PhD has education well beyond what anyone had in the Middle Ages: While Oxford was already graduating doctors in the 12th century, those doctors didn’t have to write dissertations, and didn’t know nearly as much about the world as you must to earn a modern PhD. (Most of the mathematics required to get an economics PhD specifically literally had not been invented.)

So it’s conceivable that educational standards will continue to rise over time, especially if we are able to radically improve learning via new technologies. In the most extreme case, if everyone can just download knowledge like in The Matrix, then it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the average person to know as much as a typical PhD today in dozens of fields.

Suppose that such technology did exist. Would it be fair to consider someone poor if they didn’t have access to it?

Yes, I think it would.

Because if it’s really cheap and easy to give breathtakingly vast knowledge on a variety of subjects to anyone instantly, then letting some people have that while others do not puts those others at a severe disadvantage in life. If you must know how to solve partial differential equations to get a job, then someone who only made it through high school algebra isn’t going to be able to find jobs.

So I think what we’re really concerned about here is inequality: The education of a rich person should not be too much better than the education of a poor person, lest “meritocracy” simply reinforce the same generational inequality it was supposed to eliminate.

Now consider healthcare:

This, too, has radically improved over time. Indeed, I’m not really sure it’s fair to call Medieval doctors doctors at all; they lacked basic knowledge of human physiology and their intervention was as likely to hurt patients as to help them. Surgeons certainly existed: They knew how to amputate a gangrenous limb or suture a wound. (They did so without antiseptic, let alone anaesthetic!) But should you come to them with a fever or a headache, they would likely do you as much harm as good.

So we could imagine a world of Star Trek medicine, where you lie in a bed, get scanned for a few moments, and the doctor immediately knows what’s wrong with you and what kind of painless injection to give you to fix it.

Once again, we must ask: If you don’t have that, are you poor?

And again, I’m going to say yes.

If the technology exists to heal people this effortlessly, and some people get access to it while others do not, the latter are being allowed to suffer when their suffering could be easily alleviated.

But now we must consider: what if the technology exists, but it’s too expensive to use routinely?

Most technologies are like this when they are first invented. Over time, the technology improves (and the patents expire!) and they become cheaper and more widely available.

Unlike education, healthcare doesn’t usually impose large advantages on those who receive it—though it can, especially in a society where disabilities are not adequately accommodated.

So I think I’m prepared to allow “early adopters” of new medical technology, people who are rich enough to pay for advanced treatments before they are available to everyone—within certain limits. If some new treatment grants radically higher productivity or lifespan, then in fact I think we have a moral obligation to wait until it can be universally shared before we give it to anyone—precisely because of the risk of reinforcing generational inequality.

Once again, in our effort to define poverty, we end up returning to inequality: The rich should not be allowed to be too much healthier than the poor.

This definitely makes education and healthcare more complicated than the others.

While we can pretty clearly define how much food and water a human being needs to live, and we could provide it to everyone, and then nobody would be poor in terms of food or water.

But making nobody poor in terms of education and healthcare requires meeting a standard that may in fact increase over time, and it is no contradiction to imagine that someone living in the 31st century could be receiving better healthcare than I ever will and yet is still not receiving adequate healthcare based on the technology available.

Furthermore, that person demanding better healthcare is not being ungrateful or envious—they are quite reasonably demanding that society fairly allocate healthcare so that there aren’t some people who live in eternal youth while other people still die of old age.

Are they richer than I am? In some sense, perhaps. We could stipulate that in every material way they are better off than I am now. But there’s a treatment that could extend their life by centuries, and nobody’s giving it to them, because they can’t afford it—and that’s wrong. That makes them poor, and it makes their society unfair and unjust. It isn’t just a question of how many QALY they have; it’s also a question of what it would cost to give them a lot more.

But with all that said, I do believe that a world without poverty is possible.

In fact, I believe that technologically we could already provide that world, if we had the political will to do so. Maybe we don’t quite have the economic output to support it worldwide, but even that is not as far off as most people seem to think.

Providing an adequate standard of food and water, for example, we could already do with existing food supplies. It would cost about one-eighth of Elon Musk’s wealth per year, meaning that, with good stock returns (as he most certainly gets), he could very likely afford it by himself!

Clean air for all would be harder, but we are moving the right direction now that solar power is so cheap.

Universal liberty and security would require radical shifts in government in dozens of countries, so that one seems especially unlikely to happen any time soon—yet it is very definitely possible, and by construction only requires political change.

Universal education and healthcare would be very expensive, and most countries are too poor to really provide them on their own. They are not simply poor in money, but poor in skills: There aren’t enough doctors and teachers, and so we would need to use the ones we have to train up a new generation, and perhaps a new generation after that, before the world’s needs would really be met. (Fortunately, there are people trying to do this. But they don’t have enough resources to really achieve these goals.) So this is not a technological limitation, but it is an economic one; it will probably be at least another generation before we can solve this one.

What about universal shelter? Now there’s the rub. Even in prosperous First World countries, housing shortages and skyrocketing prices are keeping homeownership out of reach for tens of millions of people, and leaving hundreds of thousands outright homeless. We clearly do have the technology to produce enough homes, especially if we are prepared to build at high density; but the economic cost of doing so would be substantial, and our policymakers don’t seem at all willing to actually pay it. I think as long as housing is viewed as an asset one invests in rather than a good that one needs, this will continue to be the case.

The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough stuff. It’s that we are not sharing it properly.

The housing affordability crisis in one graph

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

The housing affordability crisis in one graph

Mar 8 JDN 2461108

The graph below, constructed from FRED data, provides a simple measure of housing affordability: How many years of median earnings does it take to afford the median home?

From a low of 4.4 in 1982, this rose to about 5.5 and was relatively stable in the 1990s. Then in the 2000s, it began to rise, peaked at 7.2 just before the housing crisis, and then rapidly dropped to back to 5.5 again.

Then in the 2010s it began to rise again, peaked even higher at 7.6 in 2017, and then dropped down to 6.0 in 2020 before beginning to rise anew. In 2023 it reached a yet higher peak of 8.0, and then has been slowly declining ever since—but is still about 6.5, well above its 1990s level.

I honestly expected worse than this, but I think part of what’s happening is that new homes have gotten a bit smaller in the past few years: median square footage of homes sold has fallen from a peak of 1997 in 2019 to 1788 today. (Unfortunately, FRED doesn’t have this data series going back any earlier than 2016.)

If we adjust for that, the price a typical 2019 home today would be about 7.2 years of median earnings, which is about what it was at the peak of the housing crisis in 2007.

Note of course this isn’t actually how many years you need to save up to buy a house. You clearly can’t save your entire earnings, but you also don’t need to come up with the full price, only the down payment. And what you can afford also depends upon interest rates and such. But still, it’s a pretty clear sign that housing is radically more expensive now than it was in the 1980s or even 1990s.

In my view, this is the affordability crisis.

Gas prices really aren’t that important. Car prices are relatively stable. Food prices are volatile but don’t have a bad long-term trend. We do still have serious problems with affordability in education and healthcare, but we have obvious solutions available (that several other countries are already doing successfully); we’re just not doing them because Republicans don’t like them. But housing? We have no clear solutions on the table, certainly not anything that would be politically viable. Fundamentally, we need to build more housing in places people want to live—a lot more housing—and force the price of housing down.

And with our society structured the way it is, when you price people out of housing, you price them out of adulthood. Millennials are not having kids at anywhere near the rate of previous generations, because raising kids requires living space. Especially with immigration collapsing after Trump, this housing affordability crisis is going to turn into a population crisis.

I guess what I’m hoping for at the moment is just consciousness-raising, making people see that this is actually a problem. For some reason, everyone agrees that rising prices of goods are a bad thing, except when it comes to housing.

Inflation in food? An urgent crisis that must be immediately resolved.

Inflation in gas prices? So terrible it’s worth invading other countries over.

Inflation in housing? No, somehow that’s good actually, because it makes homeowners feel richer (even though they actually owe more in property taxes). We treat housing like an asset instead of a good, which is something we should absolutely never, ever do with a good that people need to live.

How could we make job search less of a nightmare?

PNRJ core principles, market failure, personal, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 1 JDN 2461101

This has been my “career” for the last two years:

I search through thousands of job postings, which, despite various filters and tags on my searches, almost none of which are actually good fits for me—in part because the search engines simply do not contain a great deal of information that would be vital, like “LGBT friendly”, “supportive of neurodivergent employees”, or “good at accommodating disabilities”. Instead it’s all sorted by “job title”, which at this point is clearly an arms race of search-engine optimization, because I keep getting listings called “tutor” which are actually some sort of interactive training of yet another large language model nobody actually needs. (Actual tutoring of actual human students often is a good fit for me—though it pays much better if you’re freelance than if you work for a company, because the companies take a huge cut of what the customers pay.)

But, after an hour or two of searching, I find a few that seem like they might be worth applying to. They’re never a perfect fit, but beggars can’t be choosers, so I decide I’ll go ahead and apply to them.

They ask for a resume. No problem. Perfectly sensible, I have one handy; maybe I’ll tweak it a bit, but if it’s an industry I often apply to, I may already have a tweaked version ready to go.

They ask for a cover letter. Okay, I guess. There usually isn’t much I can really say there that isn’t already in my resume, but occasionally there’s something worth adding, and it’s only maybe half an hour of work to update an existing cover letter for a new application.

Then, they ask me to input my work history in their proprietary format on their website. WHAT!? WHY!? I just gave you a resume! You aren’t even willing to read it? You want to be able to automate the reading of my resume, so I have to enter into your proprietary database? But okay, fine; beggars can’t be choosers, I remind myself. So I enter everything that’s in my resume again.

Then, they ask me what salary I want. I know this game. You’re trying to make me reveal my preference in this bargaining game so you can gain bargaining power. So I look up what kind of salaries companies like them usually offer for jobs like this, and then I hike it up a bit as the opening bid in a negotiation.

Then, they ask me to fill out some questions that are supposed to assess… something. Some kind of personality test, or “culture fit”, or something similarly fuzzy. I try to interpolate my answers between my genuine feelings and the kind of hyper-obedient corporate drone they’re probably looking for, because I’m not an idiot who would answer honestly (I’m not that autistic), butI wouldn’t actually want to work for anyone who required the very topmost corporate-drone answers.

And then, what happens?

Absolutely nothing.

No response. Weeks pass. At some point, I have to assume that they’ve filled the position or closed it, or maybe that the vacancy was never real at all and they posted it for some other reason—likely to give some sense of searching when they in fact already have someone in mind. (Apparently over a third of online job postings are fake.)

I have done this process over two hundred times.

And in doing so, I have chipped off pieces of my soul. I feel like a shell of the person I was. And I have absolutely nothing to show for it all.

I am not even unusual in this regard: Recruiters often complain that they are swamped because they get 200 applicants per posting—but that means, mathematically, that an average job-seeker must apply to 200 postings before they can expect to get hired. (And which is more work, do you think: Writing a cover letter, or reading one?)

How could we make this better?

There are a lot of problems to fix here, but I have one very simple intervention that would only slightly inconvenience recruiters, while making life dramatically better for applicants. Here goes:

Require them to show you the resume of the person they actually hired.

There should be a time window: Maybe 30 days after you applied; or if it’s a position like in academia where they don’t do interviews for a long time after the application deadline, within 7 days of them starting interviews.

Anonymize the resume appropriately, of course; no photos, no names, no contact information. We don’t want the new hire to get harassed by their competitors. (And this takes, what, 5 minutes to do?)

But having to send that resume solves several problems simultaneously:

  1. It means they have to actually respond—they cannot ghost you. It can be a two-line form letter email with a one-page attachment that’s the same for all 200 applicants—but they have to send you something.
  2. It means they have to actually hire someone—the posting cannot be completely fake. If they are for some reason unable to fill the vacancy and have to close it, they should have to tell you that, and give a reason—and that reason should be legally binding such that if you ever find out it’s not true, you can sue them.
  3. It means that person had to actually apply—they couldn’t have been someone’s nephew who was automatically given the job and the posting was only made to make it look like there was a hiring process. At the very least, said nephew had to actually cough up a resume like the rest of us.
  4. It allows you to compare qualifications—you can see how you stack up against the new hire. If they are genuinely far more qualified? Well, fair enough; perhaps this job was a stretch for you, or it’s a very rough market. If they are about as qualified, or better in some ways, worse in others? Well, you surely were to apply, but you can’t win ’em all. But if they are far less qualified? You now have the basis for a lawsuit, because that looks like nepotism at best and discrimination at worst—and they had to give you that evidence, in writing, in a timely fashion.

The penalty for failing to comply with this regulation could be a small fine, perhaps $100—per applicant. The more people you ghost, the more you have to pay up.

This is clearly a very small amount of extra effort for the recruiters. They already have the resume—hopefully—and all they need to do is anonymize it, grab a standard form letter rejection email, BCC all the applicants to this position (which are—again, hopefully—already stored in one place in the company’s database), attach the anonymized resume, and click Send. We’re talking 15 minutes of work here, regardless of the number of applicants. In fact, it could probably be automated so as to require almost zero marginal effort for each new job: Just check the box next to the name of the person who was hired in the applicant tracking system, and it does the rest. (And if the person you hired wasn’t in the applicant tracking system? That sounds like a you problem, because you’re clearly not treating the other applicants fairly.)

What if we just banned banks?

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, financial fraud, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 22 JDN 2461094

I got a mailer from Wells Fargo today offering me a new credit card. The offer seemed decent, but the first thing that came to my mind was: Why is this company still allowed to exist?

In case you didn’t know, Wells Fargo was caught in 2016 creating millions of fraudulent accounts. They paid a fine of $185 million—which likely was less than the revenue they earned via this massive fraud scheme. How am I supposed to trust them ever again? How is anyone?

It’s hardly just them, of course. Almost every major bank has been implicated in some heinous crime.

JP Morgan Chase helped Jeffrey Epstein conceal assets, rigged municipal bonds transactions, and of course misrepresented thousands of mortgages in a way that directly contributed to the 2008 crisis.

Bank of America also committed mass fraud that contributed to the 2008 crisis.

A case against Citi is currently being tried for failing to protect its customers against fraud.

Capital One is being sued for failing to pay the interest rates it promised on savings accounts.

And let’s not forget HSBC, which laundered money for terrorists.

If these were individuals committing these crimes, they would be in prison, probably for the rest of their lives. But because they are corporations, they get slapped with a fine, or pay a settlement—typically less than what they made in the criminal activity—and then they get to go right back to work as if nothing had happened.

I think it’s time to do something much more radical.

Let’s ban banks.

This might sound crazy at first: Don’t we need banks? Doesn’t our whole financial system rest upon them?

But in fact, we do not need banks at all. We need loans, we need deposits, we need mortgages. But we already have a fully-functional alternative system for providing those services which is not implicated in crime after crime after heinous crime:

They are called credit unions.

Credit unions already provide almost all the services currently provided by banks—and most of the ones they don’t provide, we probably didn’t actually need anyway. There are already nearly 5,000 credit unions in the US with over 130 million customers.

Credit unions almost always fare better in financial crises, because they don’t overleverage themselves. They are far less likely to be involved in fraud. They don’t get involved in high-risk speculation. They offer higher yields on savings and lower rates on loans and credit cards. Basically they are better than banks in every way.

Why are credit unions so much better-behaved?

Because they are co-ops instead of for-profit corporations.

Customers of credit unions are also owners of credit unions, so there are no extra profits being siphoned off somewhere to greedy shareholders whose only goal in life is number go up.

Free markets are genuinely more efficient than centrally-planned systems. But there’s nothing about free markets that requires the owners of capital to be their own class of people who aren’t workers or customers and make their money by buying, selling, and owning things. That’s what’s wrong with capitalism—not too little central planning, but too concentrated ownership.

As I’ve written about before, co-ops are just as efficient as corporations, and produce much lower inequality.

For many industries, transitioning to co-ops would be a major change, and require lots of new organization that isn’t there. But for banking, the co-ops already exist. All we need to do is ban the alternative and force everyone to use the better, safer system. Come up with some way to transfer all the accounts fairly to credit unions, and—very intentionally—leave the shareholders of these criminal enterprises with absolutely nothing.

In fact, since credit unions are more likely to support other co-ops, forcing the financial system to transition to credit unions might actually make the process of transitioning our entire economy to co-ops easier.

It may seem extreme, but please, take a look again at all those crimes that all these major, highly-successful, market-dominating banks have committed. They’ve had their chance to prove that they can be honest and law-abiding, and they have failed.

Get rid of them.

How to be a deontological consequentialist

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, heuristics and biases, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 7 JDN 2461017

As is commonly understood, there are two main branches of normative ethics:

  • Deontology, on which morality consists in following rules and fulfilling obligations, and
  • Consequentialism, on which morality consists in maximizing good consequences.

The conflict between them has raged for centuries, with Kantians leading the deontologists and utilitarians leading the consequentialists. Both theories seem to have a lot of good points, but neither can decisively defeat the other.

I think this is because they are both basically correct.

In their strongest forms, deontology and consequentialism are mutually contradictory; but it turns out that you can soften each of them a little bit, and the results become compatible.

To make deontology a little more consequentialist, let’s ask a simple question:

What makes a rule worth following?

I contend that the best answer we have is “because following that rule would make the world better off than not following that rule”. (Even Kantians pretty much have to admit this: What maxim could you will to be an absolute law? Only a law that would yield good outcomes.)

That is, the ultimate justification of a sound deontology would be fundamentally consequentialist.

But lest the consequentialists get too smug, we can also ask them another question, which is a bit subtler:

How do you know which actions will ultimately have good consequences?

Sure, if we were omniscient beings who could perfectly predict the consequences of our actions across the entire galaxy on into the indefinite future, we could be proper act utilitarians who literally choose every single action according to a calculation of the expected utility.

But in practice, we have radical uncertainty about the long-term consequences of our actions, and can generally only predict the immediate consequences.

That leads to the next question:

Would you really want to live in a world where people optimized immediate consequences?

I contend that you would not, that such a world actually sounds like a dystopian nightmare.

Immediate consequences say that if a healthy person walks into a hospital and happens to have compatible organs for five people who need donations, we should kill that person, harvest their organs, and give them to the donors. (This is the organ transplant variant of the Trolley Problem.)

Basically everyone recognizes that this is wrong. But why is it wrong? That’s thornier. One pretty convincing case is that a systematic policy of this kind would undermine trust in hospitals and destroy the effectiveness of healthcare in general, resulting in disastrous consequences far outweighing the benefit of saving those five people. But those aren’t immediate consequences, and indeed, it’s quite difficult to predict exactly how many crazy actions like this it would take to undermine people’s trust in hospitals, just how much it would undermine that trust, or exactly what the consequences of that lost trust would be.

So it seems like it’s actually better to have a rule about this.

This makes us into rule utilitarians, who instead of trying to optimize literally every single action—which requires information we do not have and never will—we instead develop a system of rules that we can follow, heuristics that will allow us to get better outcomes generally even if they can’t be guaranteed to produce the best possible outcome in any particular case.

That is, the output of a sophisticated consequentialism is fundamentally deontological.

We have come at the question of normative ethics from two very different directions, but the results turned out basically the same:

We should follow the rules that would have the best consequences.

The output of our moral theory is rules, like deontology; but its fundamental justification is based on outcomes, like consequentialism.

In my experience, when I present this account to staunch deontologists, they are pretty much convinced by it. They’re prepared to give up the fundamental justification to consequences if it allows them to have their rules.

The resistance I get is mainly from staunch consequentialists, who insist that it’s not so difficult to optimize individual actions, and so we should just do that instead of making all these rules.

So it is to those consequentialists, particularly those who say “rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism”, to whom the rest of the post is addressed.

First, let me say that I agree.

In the ideal case of omniscient, perfectly-benevolent, perfectly-rational agents, rule utilitarianism mathematically collapses into act utilitarianism. That is a correct theorem.

However, we do not live in the ideal case of omniscient, perfectly-benevolent, perfectly-rational agents. We are not even close to that ideal case; we will never be close to that ideal case. Indeed, I think part of the problem here is that you fail to fully grasp the depth and width of the chasm between here and there. Even a galactic civilization of a quintillion superhuman AIs would still not be close to that ideal case.

Quite frankly, humans aren’t even particularly good at forecasting what will make themselves happy.

There are massive errors and systematic biases in human affective forecasting.

One of the post important biases is impact bias: People systematically overestimate the impact of individual events on their long-term happiness. Some of this seems to be just due to focus: Paying attention to a particular event exaggerates its importance in your mind, and makes it harder for you to recall other events that might push your emotions in a different direction. Another component is called immune neglect: people fail to account for their own capacity to habituate to both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. (This effect is often overstated: It’s a common misconception that lottery winners are no happier than they were before. No, they absolutely are happier, on average; they’re just not as much happier as they predicted themselves to be.)

People also use inconsistent time discounting: $10 today is judged as better than $11 tomorrow, but $10 in 364 days is not regarded as better than $11 in 365 days—so if I made a decision a year ago, I’d want to change it now. (The correct answer, by the way, is to take the $11; a discount rate of 10% per day is a staggering 120,000,000,000,000,000% APR—seriously; check it yourself—so you’d better not be discounting at that rate, unless you’re literally going to die before tomorrow.)

Now, compound that with the fact that different human beings come at the world from radically different perspectives and with radically different preferences.

How good do you think we are at predicting what will make other people happy?

Damn right: We’re abysmal.

Basically everyone assumes that what they want and what they would feel is also what other people will want and feel—which, honestly, explains a lot about politics. As a result, my prediction of your feelings is more strongly correlated with my prediction of my feelings than it is with your actual feelings.

The impact bias is especially strong when forecasting other people’s feelings in response to our own actions: We tend to assume that other people care more about what we do than they actually care—and this seems to be a major source of social anxiety.

People also tend to overestimate the suffering of others, and are generally willing to endure more pain than they are willing to inflict upon others. (This one seems like it might be a good thing!)

Even when we know people well, we can still be totally blindsided by their emotional reactions. We’re just really awful at this.

Does this just mean that morality is hopeless? We have no idea what we’re doing?

Fortunately, no. Because while no individual can correctly predict or control the outcomes of particular actions, the collective action of well-designed institutions can in fact significantly improve the outcomes of policy.

This is why we have things like the following:

  • Laws
  • Courts
  • Regulations
  • Legislatures
  • Constitutions
  • Newspapers
  • Universities

These institutions—which form the backbone of liberal democracy—aren’t simply arbitrary. They are the result of hard-fought centuries, a frothing, volatile, battle-tested mix of intentional design and historical evolution.

Are these institutions optimal? Good heavens, no!

But we have no idea what optimal institutions look like, and probably never will. (Those galaxy-spanning AIs will surely have a better system than this; but even theirs probably won’t be optimal.) Instead, what we are stuck with are the best institutions we’ve come up with so far.

Moreover, we do have very clear empirical evidence at this point that some form of liberal democracy with a mixed economy is the best system we’ve got so far. One can reasonably debate whether Canada is doing better or worse than France, or whether the system in Denmark could really be scaled to the United States, or just what the best income tax rates are; but there is a large, obvious, and important difference between life in a country like Canada or Denmark and life in a country like Congo or Afghanistan.

Indeed, perhaps there is no better pair to compare than North and South Korea: Those two countries are right next to each other, speak the same language, and started in more or less the same situation; but the south got good institutions and the north got bad ones, and now the difference between them couldn’t be more stark. (Honestly, this is about as close as we’re ever likely to get of a randomized controlled experiment in macroeconomics.)

People in South Korea now live about as well as some of the happiest places in the world; their GDP per capita PPP is about $65,000 per year, roughly the same as Canada. People in North Korea live about as poorly as it is possible for humans to live, subject to totalitarian oppression and living barely above subsistence; their GDP per capita PPP is estimated to be $600 per year—less than 1% as much.

The institutions of South Korea are just that much better.

Indeed, there’s one particular aspect of good institutions that seems really important, yet is actually kind of hard to justify in act-utilitarian terms:

Why is freedom good?

A country’s level of freedom is almost perfectly correlated with its overall level of happiness and development. (Yes, even on this measure, #ScandinaviaIsBetter.)

But why? In theory, letting people do whatever they want could actually lead to really bad outcomes—and indeed, occasionally it does. There’s even a theorem that liberty is incompatible with full Pareto-efficiency. But all the countries with the happiest people seem to have a lot of liberty, and indeed the happiest ones seem to have the most. How come?

My answer:

Personal liberty is a technology for heuristic utility maximization.

In the ideal case, we wouldn’t really need personal liberty; you could just compel everyone to do whatever is optimal all the time, and that would—by construction—be optimal. It might even be sort of nice: You don’t need to make any difficult decisions, you can just follow the script and know that everything will turn out for the best.

But since we don’t know what the optimal choice is—even in really simple cases, like what you should eat for lunch tomorrow—we can’t afford to compel people in this way. (It would also be incredibly costly to implement such totalitarian control, but that doesn’t stop some governments from trying!)

Then there are disagreements: What I think is optimal may not be what you think is optimal, and in truth we’re probably both wrong (but one of us may be less wrong).

And that’s not even getting into conflicts of interest: We aren’t just lacking in rationality, we’re also lacking in benevolence. Some people are clearly much more benevolent than others, but none of us are really 100% selfless. (Sadly, I think some people are 100% selfish.)

In fact, this is a surprisingly deep question:

Would the world be better if we were selfless?

Could there be actually some advantage in aggregate to having some degree of individual self-interest?

Here are some ways that might hold, just off the top of my head:

  • Partial self-interest supports an evolutionary process of moral and intellectual development that otherwise would be stalled or overrun by psychopaths—see my post on Rousseaus and Axelrods
  • Individuals have much deeper knowledge of their own preferences than anyone else’s, and thus can optimize them much better. (Think about it: This is true even of people you know very well. Otherwise, why would we ever need to ask our spouses one of the most common questions in any marriage: “Honey, what do you want for dinner tonight?”)
  • Self-interest allows for more efficient economic incentives, and thus higher overall productivity.

Of course, total selfishness is clearly not optimal—that way lies psychopathy. But some degree of selfishness might actually be better for long-term aggregate outcomes than complete altruism, and this is to some extent an empirical question.

Personal liberty solves a lot of these problems: Since people are best at knowing their own preferences, let people figure out on their own what’s good for them. Give them the freedom to live the kind of life they want to live, within certain reasonable constraints to prevent them from causing great harm to others or suffering some kind of unrecoverable mistake.

This isn’t exactly a new idea; it’s basically the core message of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (which I consider a good candidate for the best book every written—seriously, it beats the Bible by a light-year). But by putting it in more modern language, I hope to show that deontology and consequentialism aren’t really so different after all.

And indeed, for all its many and obvious flaws, freedom seems to work pretty well—at least as well as anything we’ve tried.

What we still have to be thankful for

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, futurism, inequality, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 30 JDN 2461010

This post has been written before, but will go live after, Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is honestly a very ambivalent holiday.

The particular event it celebrates don’t seem quite so charming in their historical context: Rather than finding peace and harmony with all Native Americans, the Pilgrims in fact allied with the Wampanoag against the Narragansett, though they did later join forces with the Narragansett in order to conquer the Pequot. And of course we all know how things went for most Native American nations in the long run.

Moreover, even the gathering of family comes with some major downsides, especially in a time of extreme political polarization such as this one. I won’t be joining any of my Trump-supporting relatives for dinner this year (and they probably wouldn’t have invited me anyway), but the fact that this means becoming that much more detached from a substantial part of my extended family is itself a tragedy.

This year in particular, US policy has gotten so utterly horrific that it often feels like we have nothing to be thankful for at all, that all we thought was good and just in the world could simply be torn away at a moment’s notice by raving madmen. It isn’t really quite that bad—but it feels that way sometimes.

It also felt a bit uncanny celebrating Thanksgiving a few years ago when we were living in Scotland, for the UK does not celebrate Thanksgiving, but absolutely does celebrate Black Friday: Holidays may be local, but capitalism is global.

But fall feasts of giving thanks are far more ancient than that particular event in 1621 that we have mythologized to oblivion. They appear in numerous cultures across the globe—indeed their very ubiquity may be why the Wampanoag were so willing to share one with the Pilgrims despite their cultures having diverged something like 40,000 years prior.

And I think that it is by seeing ourselves in that context—as part of the whole of humanity—that we can best appreciate what we truly do have to be thankful for, and what we truly do have to look forward to in the future.

Above all, medicine.

We have actual treatments for some diseases, even actual cures for some. By no means all, of course—and it often feels like we are fighting an endless battle even against what we can treat.

But it is worth reflecting on the fact that aside from the last few centuries, this has simply not been the case. There were no actual treatments. There was no real medicine.

Oh, sure, there were attempts at medicine; and there was certainly what we would think of as more like “first aid”: bandaging wounds, setting broken bones. Even amputation and surgery were done sometimes. But most medical treatment was useless or even outright harmful—not least because for most of history, most of it was done without anesthetic or even antiseptic!

There were various herbal remedies for various ailments, some of which even have happened to work: Willow bark genuinely helps with pain, St. John’s wort is a real antidepressant, and some traditional burn creams are surprisingly effective.

But there was no system in place for testing medicine, no way of evaluating what remedies worked and what didn’t. And thus, for every remedy that worked as advertised, there were a hundred more that did absolutely nothing, or even made things worse.

Today, it can feel like we are all chronically ill, because so many of us take so many different pills and supplements. But this is not a sign that we are ill—it is a sign that we can be treated. The pills are new, yes—but the illnesses they treat were here all along.

I don’t see any particular reason to think that Roman plebs or Medieval peasants were any less likely to get migraines than we are; but they certainly didn’t have access to sumatriptan or rimegepant. Maybe they were less likely to get diabetes, but mainly because they were much more likely to be malnourished. (Well, okay, also because they got more exercise, which we surely could stand to.) And they only reason they didn’t get Alzheimer’s was that they usually didn’t live long enough.

Looking further back, before civilization, human health actually does seem to have been better: Foragers were rarely malnourished, weren’t exposed to as many infectious pathogens, and certainly got plenty of exercise. But should a pathogen like smallpox or influenza make it to a forager tribe, the results were often utterly catastrophic.

Today, we don’t really have the sort of plague that human beings used to deal with. We have pandemics, which are also horrible, but far less so. We were horrified by losing 0.3% of our population to COVID; a society that had only suffered 0.3%—or even ten times that, 3%—losses from the Black Death would have been hailed as a miracle, for a more typical rate was 30%.

At 0.3%, most of us knew somebody, or knew somebody who knew somebody, who died from COVID. At 3%, nearly everyone would know somebody, and most would know several. At 30%, nearly everyone would have close family and friends who died.

Then there is infant mortality.

As recently as 1950—this is living memory—the global infant mortality rate was 14.6%. This is about half what it had been historically; for most of human history, roughly a third of all children died between birth and the age of 5.

Today, it is 2.5%.

Where our distant ancestors expected two out of three of their children to survive and our own great-grandparents expected five out of six can now safely expect thirty-nine out of forty to live. This is the difference between “nearly every family has lost a child” and “most families have not lost a child”.

And this is worldwide; in highly-developed countries it’s even better. The US has a relatively high infant mortality rate by the standards of highly-developed countries (indeed, are we even highly-developed, or are we becoming like Saudi Arabia, extremely rich but so unequal that it doesn’t really mean anything to most of our people?). Yet even for us, the infant mortality rate is 0.5%—so we can expect one-hundred-ninety-nine out of two-hundred to survive. This is at the level of “most families don’t even know someone who has lost a child.”

Poverty is a bit harder to measure.

I am increasingly dubious of conventional measures of poverty; ever since compiling my Index of Necessary Expenditure, I am convinced that economists in general, and perhaps US economists in particular, are systematically underestimating the cost of living and thereby underestimating the prevalence of poverty. (I don’t think this is intentional, mind you; I just think it’s a result of using convenient but simplistic measures and not looking too closely into the details.) I think not being able to sustainably afford a roof over your head constitutes being poor—and that applies to a lot of people.

Yet even with that caveat in mind, it’s quite clear that global poverty has greatly declined in the long run.

At the “extreme poverty” level, currently defined as consuming $1.90 at purchasing power parity per day—that’s just under $700 per year, less than 2% of the median personal income in the United States—the number of people has fallen from 1.9 billion in 1990 to about 700 million today. That’s from 36% of the world’s population to under 9% today.

Now, there are good reasons to doubt that “purchasing power parity” really can be estimated as accurately as we would like, and thus it’s not entirely clear that people living on “$2 per day PPP” are really living at less than 2% the standard of living of a typical American (honestly to me that just sounds like… dead); but they are definitely living at a much worse standard of living, and there are a lot fewer people living at such low standard of living today than there used to be not all that long ago. These are people who don’t have reliable food, clean water, or even basic medicine—and that used to include over a third of humanity and does no longer. (And I would like to note that actually finding such a person and giving them a few hundred dollars absolutely would change their life, and this is the sort of thing GiveDirectly does. We may not know exactly how to evaluate their standard of living, but we do know that the actual amount of money they have access to is very, very small.)

There are many ways in which the world could be better than it is.

Indeed, part of the deep, overwhelming outrage I feel pretty much all the time lies in the fact that it would be so easy to make things so much better for so many people, if there weren’t so many psychopaths in charge of everything.


Increased foreign aid is one avenue by which that could be achieved—so, naturally, Trump cut it tremendously. More progressive taxation is another—so, of course, we get tax cuts for the rich.

Just think about the fact that there are families with starving children for whom a $500 check could change their lives; but nobody is writing that check, because Elon Musk needs to become a literal trillionaire.

There are so many water lines and railroad tracks and bridges and hospitals and schools not being built because the money that would have paid for them is tied up in making already unfathomably-rich people even richer.

But even despite all that, things are getting better. Not every day, not every month, not even every year—this past year was genuinely, on net, a bad one. But nearly every decade, every generation, and certainly every century (for at least the last few), humanity has fared better than we did the last.

As long as we can keep that up, we still have much to hope for—and much to be thankful for.