public policy

What do we mean by “obesity”?

PNRJ development economics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 25 JDN 2458448

I thought this topic would be particularly appropriate for the week of Thanksgiving, since as a matter of public ritual, this time every year, we eat too much and don’t get enough exercise.

No doubt you have heard the term “obesity epidemic”: It’s not just used by WebMD or mainstream news; it’s also used by the American Heart Association, the Center for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and sometimes even published in peer-reviewed journal articles.

This is kind of weird, because the formal meaning of the term “epidemic” clearly does not apply here. I feel uncomfortable going against public health officials in what is clearly their area of expertise rather than my own, but everything I’ve ever read about the official definition of the word “epidemic” requires it to be an infectious disease. You can’t “catch” obesity. Hanging out with people who are obese may slightly raise your risk of obesity, but not in the way that hanging out with people with influenza gives you influenza. It’s not caused by bacteria or viruses. Eating food touched by a fat person won’t cause you to catch the fat. Therefore, whatever else it is, this is not an epidemic. (I guess sometimes we use the term more metaphorically, “an epidemic of bankruptcies” or an “epidemic of video game consumption”; but I feel like the WHO and CDC of all people should be more careful.)

Indeed, before we decide what exactly this is, I think we should first ask ourselves a deeper question: What do we mean by “obesity”?

The standard definition of “obesity” relies upon the body mass index (BMI), a very crude measure that simply takes your body mass and divides by the square of your height. It’s easy to measure, but that’s basically its only redeeming quality.

Anyone who has studied dimensional analysis should immediately see a problem here: That isn’t a unit of density. It’s a unit of… density-length? If you take the exact same individual and scale them up by 10%, their BMI will increase by 10%. Do we really intend to say that simply being larger makes you obese, for the exact same ratios of muscle, fat, and bone?

Because of this, the taller you are, the more likely your BMI is going to register as “obese”, holding constant your actual level of health and fitness. And worldwide, average height has been increasing. This isn’t enough to account for the entire trend in rising BMI, but it reduces it substantially; average height has increased by about 10% since the 1950s, which is enough to raise our average BMI by about 2 points of the 5-point observed increase.

And of course BMI doesn’t say anything about your actual ratios of fat and muscle; all it says is how many total kilograms are in your body. As a result, there is a systematic bias against athletes in the calculation of BMI—and any health measure that is biased against athletes is clearly doing something wrong. All those doctors telling us to exercise more may not realize it, but if we actually took their advice, our BMIs would very likely get higher, not lower—especially for men, especially for strength-building exercise.

It’s also quite clear that our standards for “healthy weight” are distorted by social norms. Feminists have been talking about this for years; most women will never look like supermodels no matter how much weight they lose—and eating disorders are much more dangerous than being even 50 pounds overweight. We’re starting to figure out that similar principles hold for men: A six-pack of abs doesn’t actually mean you’re healthy; it means you are dangerously depleted of fatty acids.

To compensate for this, it seems like the most sensible methodology would be to figure out empirically what sort of weight is most strongly correlated with good health and long lifespan—what BMI maximizes your expected QALY.

You might think that this is what public health officials did when defining what is currently categorized as “normal weight”—but you would be wrong. They used social norms and general intuition, and as a result, our standards for “normal weight” are systematically miscalibrated.

In fact, the empirical evidence is quite clear: The people with the highest expected QALY are those who are classified as “overweight”, with BMI between 25 and 30. Those of “normal weight” (20 to 25) fare slightly worse, followed by those classified as “obese class I” (30 to 35)—but we don’t actually see large effects until either “underweight” (18.5-20) or “obese class II” (35 to 40). And the really severe drops in life and health expectancy don’t happen until “obese class III” (>40); and we see the same severe drops at “very underweight” (<18.5).
With that in mind, consider that the global average BMI increased from 21.7 in men and 21.4 in women in 1975 to 24.2 in men and 24.4 in women in 2014. That is, the world average increased from the low end of “normal weight” which is actually too light, to the high end of “normal weight” which is probably optimal. The global prevalence of “morbid obesity”, the kind that actually has severely detrimental effects on health, is only 0.64% in men and 1.6% in men. Even including “severe obesity”, the kind that has a noticeable but not dramatic effect on health, is only 2.3% in men and 5.0% in women. That’s your epidemic? Reporting often says things like “2/3 of American adults are overweight or obese”; but all that “overweight” proportion should be utterly disregarded, since it is beneficial to health. The actual prevalence of obesity in the US—even including class I obesity which is not very harmful—is less than 40%.

If obesity were the health crisis it were made out to be, we should expect that global life expectancy is decreasing, or at the very least not increasing. On the contrary, it is rapidly increasing: In 1955, global life expectancy was only 55 years, while it is now over 70.

Worldwide, the countries with the highest obesity rates are those with the longest life expectancy, because both of these things are strongly correlated with high levels of economic development. But it may not just be that: Smoking reduces obesity while also reducing lifespan, and a lot of those countries with very high obesity (including the US) have very low rates of smoking.

There’s some evidence that within the set of rich, highly-developed countries, obesity rates are positively correlated with lower life expectancy, but these effects are much smaller than the effects of high development itself. Going from the highest obesity in the world (the US, of course) to the lowest among all highly-developed countries (Japan) requires reducing the obesity rate by 34 percentage points but only increases life expectancy by about 5 years. You’d get the same increase by raising overall economic development from the level of Turkey to the level of Greece, about 10 points on the 100-point HDI scale.

 

Now, am I saying that we should all be 400 pounds? No, there does come a point where excess weight is clearly detrimental to health. But this threshold is considerably higher than you have probably been led to believe. If you are 15 or 20 pounds “overweight” by what our society (or even your doctor!) tells you, you are probably actually at the optimal weight for your body type. If you are 30 or 40 pounds “overweight”, you may want to try to lose some weight, but don’t make yourself suffer to achieve it. Only if you are 50 pounds or more “overweight” should you really be considering drastic action. If you do try to lose weight, be realistic about your goal: Losing 5% to 10% of your initial weight is a roaring success.

There are also reasons to be particularly concerned about obesity and lack of exercise in children, which is why Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign was a good thing.

And yes, exercise more! Don’t do it to try to lose weight (exercise does not actually cause much weight loss). Just do it. Exercise has so many health benefits it’s honestly kind of ridiculous.

But why am I complaining about this, anyway? Even if we cause some people to worry more about eating less than is strictly necessary, what’s the harm in that? At least we’re getting people to exercise, and Thanksgiving was already ruined by politics anyway.

Well, here’s the thing: I don’t think this obesity panic is actually making us any less obese.

The United States is the most obese country in the world—and you can’t so much as call up Facebook or step into a subway car in the US without someone telling you that you’re too fat and you need to lose weight. The people who really are obese and may need medical help losing weight are the ones most likely to be publicly shamed and harassed for their weight—and there’s no evidence that this actually does anything to reduce their weight. People who experience shaming and harassment for their weight are actually less likely to achieve sustained weight loss.

Teenagers—both boys and girls—who are perceived to be “overweight” are at substantially elevated risk of depression and suicide. People who more fully internalize feelings of shame about their weight have higher blood pressure and higher triglicerides, though once you control for other factors the effect is not huge. There’s even evidence that fat shaming by medical professionals leads to worse treatment outcomes among obese patients.

If we want to actually reduce obesity—and this makes sense, at least for the upper-tail obesity of BMI above 35—then we should be looking at what sort of interventions are actually effective at doing that. Medicine has an important role to play of course, but I actually think economics might be stronger here (though I suppose I would, wouldn’t I?).

Number 1: Stop subsidizing meat and feed grains. There is now quite clear evidence that direct and indirect government subsidies for meat production are a contributing factor in our high fat consumption and thus high obesity rate, though obviously other factors matter too. If you’re worried about farmers, subsidize vegetables instead, or pay for active labor market programs that will train those farmers to work in new industries. This thing we do where we try to save the job instead of the worker is fundamentally idiotic and destructive. Jobs are supposed to be destroyed; that’s what technological improvement is. If you stop destroying jobs, you will stop economic growth.

Number 2: Restrict advertising of high-sugar, high-fat foods, especially to children. Food advertising is particularly effective, because it draws on such primal impulses, and children are particularly vulnerable (as the APA has publicly reported on, including specifically for food advertising). Corporations like McDonald’s and Kellogg’s know quite well what they’re doing when they advertise high-fat, high-sugar foods to kids and get them into the habit of eating them early.

Number 3: Find policies to promote exercise. Despite its small effects on weight loss, exercise has enormous effects on health. Indeed, the fact that people who successfully lose weight show long-term benefits even if they put the weight back on suggests to me that really what they gained was a habit of exercise. We need to find ways to integrate exercise into our daily lives more. The one big thing that our ancestors did do better than we do is constantly exercise—be it hunting, gathering, or farming. Standing desks and treadmill desks may seem weird, but there is evidence that they actually improve health. Right now they are quite expensive, so most people don’t buy them. If we subsidized them, they would be cheaper; if they were cheaper, more people would buy them; if more people bought them, they would seem less weird. Eventually, it could become normative to walk on a treadmill while you work and sitting might seem weird. Even a quite large subsidy could be worthwhile: say we had to spend $500 per person per year to buy every single adult a treadmill desk each year. That comes to about $80 billion per year, which is less than one fourth what we’re currently spending on diabetes or heart disease, so we’d break even if we simply managed to reduce those two conditions by 13%. Add in all the other benefits for depression, chronic pain, sleep, sexual function, and so on, and the quality of life improvement could be quite substantial.

How do we get rid of gerrymandering?

PNRJ public policy, statistics , , , , , ,

Nov 18 JDN 2458441

I don’t mean in a technical sense; there is a large literature in political science on better voting mechanisms, and this is basically a solved problem. Proportional representation, algorithmic redistricting, or (my personal favorite) reweighted range voting would eradicate gerrymandering forever.

No, I mean strategically and politically—how do we actually make this happen?

Let’s set aside the Senate. (No, really. Set it aside. Get rid of it. “Take my wife… please.”) The Senate should not exist. It is fundamentally anathema to the most basic principle of democracy, “one person, one vote”; and even its most ardent supporters at the time admitted it had absolutely no principled justification for existing. Smaller states are wildly overrepresented (Wyoming, 580,000 people, gets the same number of Senators as California, 39 million), and non-states are not represented (DC has more people than Wyoming, and Puerto Rico has more people than Iowa). The “Senate popular vote” thus doesn’t really make sense as a concept. But this is not “gerrymandering”, as there is no redistricting process that can be used strategically to tilt voting results in favor of one party or another.

It is in the House of Representatives that gerrymandering is a problem.
North Carolina is a particularly extreme example. Republicans won 50.3% of the popular vote in this year’s House election; North Carolina has 13 seats; so, any reasonable person would think that the Republicans should get 7 of the 13 seats. Under algorithmic redistricting, they would have received 8 of 13 seats. Under proportional representation, they would have received, you guessed it, exactly 7. And under reweighted range voting? Well, that depends on how much people like each party. Assuming that Democrats and Republicans are about equally strong in their preferences, we would also expect the Republicans to win about 7. They in fact received 10 of 13 seats.

Indeed, as FiveThirtyEight found, this is almost the best the Republicans could possibly have done, if they had applied the optimal gerrymandering configuration. There are a couple of districts on the real map that occasionally swing which wouldn’t under the truly optimal gerrymandering; but none of these would flip Democrat more than 20% of the time.

Most states are not as gerrymandered as North Carolina. But there is a pattern you’ll notice among the highly-gerrymandered states.

Alabama is close to optimally gerrymandered for Republicans.

Arkansas is close to optimally gerrymandered for Republicans.

Idaho is close to optimally gerrymandered for Republicans.

Mississippi is close to optimally gerrymandered for Republicans.

As discussed, North Carolina is close to optimally gerrymandered for Republicans.
South Carolina is close to optimally gerrymandered for Republicans.

Texas is close to optimally gerrymandered for Republicans.

Wisconsin is close to optimally gerrymandered for Republicans.

Tennessee is close to optimally gerrymandered for Democrats.

Arizona is close to algorithmic redistricting.

California is close to algorithmic redistricting.

Connecticut is close to algorithmic redistricting.

Michigan is close to algorithmic redistricting.

Missouri is close to algorithmic redistricting.

Ohio is close to algorithmic redistricting.

Oregon is close to algorithmic redistricting.

Illinois is close to algorithmic redistricting, with some bias toward Democrats.

Kentucky is close to algorithmic redistricting, with some bias toward Democrats.

Louisiana is close to algorithmic redistricting, with some bias toward Democrats.

Maryland is close to algorithmic redistricting, with some bias toward Democrats.

Minnesota is close to algorithmic redistricting, with some bias toward Republicans.

New Jersey is close to algorithmic redistricting, with some bias toward Republicans.

Pennsylvania is close to algorithmic redistricting, with some bias toward Republicans.

Colorado is close to proportional representation.

Florida is close to proportional representation.

Iowa is close to proportional representation.

Maine is close to proportional representation.

Nebraska is close to proportional representation.

Nevada is close to proportional representation.

New Hampshire is close to proportional representation.

New Mexico is close to proportional representation.

Washington is close to proportional representation.

Georgia is somewhere between proportional representation and algorithmic redistricting.

Indiana is somewhere between proportional representation and algorithmic redistricting.

New York is somewhere between proportional representation and algorithmic redistricting.

Virginia is somewhere between proportional representation and algorithmic redistricting.

Hawaii is so overwhelmingly Democrat it’s impossible to gerrymander.

Rhode Island is so overwhelmingly Democrat it’s impossible to gerrymander.

Kansas is so overwhelmingly Republican it’s impossible to gerrymander.

Oklahoma is so overwhelmingly Republican it’s impossible to gerrymander.

Utah is so overwhelmingly Republican it’s impossible to gerrymander.

West Virginia is so overwhelmingly Republican it’s impossible to gerrymander.

You may have noticed the pattern. Most states are either close to algorithmic redistricting (14), close to proportional representation (9), or somewhere in between those (4). Of these, 4 are slightly biased toward Democrats and 3 are slightly biased toward Republicans.

6 states are so partisan that gerrymandering isn’t really possible there.

6 states are missing from the FiveThirtyEight analysis; I think they couldn’t get good data on them.

Of the remaining 9 states, 1 is strongly gerrymandered toward Democrats (gaining a whopping 1 seat, by the way), and 8 are strongly gerrymandered toward Republicans.

If we look at the nation as a whole, switching from the current system to proportional representation would increase the number of Democrat seats from 168 to 174 (+6), decrease the number of Republican seats from 195 to 179 (-16), and increase the number of competitive seats from 72 to 82 (+10).

Going to algorithmic redistricting instead would reduce the number of Democrat seats from 168 to 151 (-17), decrease the number of Republican seats from 195 to 180 (-15), and increase the number of competitive seats from 72 to a whopping 104 (+32).

Proportional representation minimizes wasted votes and best represents public opinion (with the possible exception of reweighted range voting, which we can’t really forecast because it uses more expressive information than what polls currently provide). It is thus to be preferred. Relative to the current system, proportional representation would decrease the representation of Republicans relative to Democrats by 24 seats—over 5% of the entire House.

Thus, let us not speak of gerrymandering as a “both sides” sort of problem. There is a very clear pattern here: Gerrymandering systematically favors Republicans.

Yet this does not answer the question I posed: How do we actually fix this?

The answer is going to sound a bit paradoxical: We must motivate voters to vote more so that voters will be better represented.

I have an acquaintance who has complained about this apparently paradoxical assertion: How can we vote to make our votes matter? (He advocates using violence instead.)

But the key thing to understand here is that it isn’t that our votes don’t matter at all—it is merely that they don’t matter enough.

If we were living in an authoritarian regime with sham elections (as some far-left people I’ve spoken to actually seem to believe), then indeed voting would be pointless. You couldn’t vote out Saddam Hussein or Benito Mussolini, even though they both did hold “elections” to make you think you had some voice. At that point, yes, obviously the only remaining choices are revolution or foreign invasion. (It does seem worth noting that both regimes fell by the latter, not the former.)

The US has not fallen that far just yet.

Votes in the US do not count evenly—but they do still count.

We have to work harder than our opponents for the same level of success, but we can still succeed.

Our legs may be shackled to weights, but they are not yet chained to posts in the ground.

Indeed, several states in this very election passed referenda to create independent redistricting commissions, and Democrats have gained at least 32 seats in the House—“at least” because some states are still counting mail-in ballots or undergoing recounts.

The one that has me on the edge of my seat is right here in Orange County, which several outlets (including the New York Times) have made preliminary projections in favor of Mimi Walters (R) but Nate Silver is forecasting higher probability for Katie Porter (D). It says “100% of precincts reporting”, but there are still as many ballots uncounted as there are counted, because California now has almost twice as many voters who vote by mail than in person.

Unfortunately, some of the states that are most highly gerrymandered don’t allow citizen-sponsored ballot initiatives (North Carolina, for instance). This is likely no coincidence. But this still doesn’t make us powerless. If your state is highly gerrymandered, make noise about it. Join or even organize protests. Write letters to legislators. Post on social media. Create memes.
Even most Republican voters don’t believe in gerrymandering. They want to win fair and square. Even if you can’t get them to vote for the candidates you want, reach out to them to get them to complain to their legislators about the injustice of the gerrymandering itself. Appeal to their patriotic values; election manipulation is clearly not what America stands for.

If your state is not highly gerrymandered, think bigger. We should be pushing for a Constitutional amendment implementing either proportional representation or algorithmic redistricting. The majority of states already have reasonably fair districts; if we can get 2/3 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate to agree on such an amendment, we don’t need to win North Carolina or Mississippi.

How much should we give?

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

Nov 4 JDN 2458427

How much should we give of ourselves to others?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to respond to dog whistles

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

Oct 21 JDN 2458413

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

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

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

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

How should we respond to this kind of coded language?

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

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

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

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

1. Ask for clarification.

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

“What exactly do you mean by that statement?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. State your own positive case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PNRJ education, ethics, heuristics and biases, personal, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Post 260: Oct 14 JDN 2458406

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MSRP is tacit collusion

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, heuristics and biases, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 7 JDN 2458399

It’s been a little while since I’ve done a really straightforward economic post. It feels good to get back to that.

You are no doubt familiar with the “Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price” or MSRP. It can be found on everything from books to dishwashers to video games.

The MSRP is a very simple concept: The manufacturer suggests that all retailers sell it (at least the initial run) at precisely this price.

Why would they want to do that? There is basically only one possible reason: They are trying to sustain tacit collusion.

The game theory of this is rather subtle: It requires that both manufacturers and retailers engage in long-term relationships with one another, and can pick and choose who to work with based on the history of past behavior. Both of these conditions hold in most real-world situations—indeed, the fact that they don’t hold very well in the agriculture industry is probably why we don’t see MSRP on produce.

If pricing were decided by random matching with no long-term relationships or past history, MSRP would be useless. Each firm would have little choice but to set their own optimal price, probably just slightly over their own marginal cost. Even if the manufacturer suggested an MSRP, retailers would promptly and thoroughly ignore it.

This is because the one-shot Bertrand pricing game has a unique Nash equilibrium, at pricing just above marginal cost. The basic argument is as follows: If I price cheaper than you, I can claim the whole market. As long as it’s profitable for me to do that, I will. The only time it’s not profitable for me to undercut you in this way is if we are both charging just slightly above marginal cost—so that is what we shall do, in Nash equilibrium. Human beings don’t always play according to the Nash equilibrium, but for-profit corporations do so quite consistently. Humans have limited attention and moral values; corporations have accounting departments and a fanatical devotion to the One True Profit.

But the iterated Bertrand pricing game is quite different. If instead of making only one pricing decision, we make many pricing decisions over time, always with a high probability of encountering the same buyers and sellers again in the future, then I may not want to undercut your price, for fear of triggering a price war that will hurt both of our firms.

Much like how the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma can sustain cooperation in Nash equilibrium while the one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma cannot, the iterated Bertrand game can sustain collusion as a Nash equilibrium.

There is in fact a vast number of possible equilibria in the iterated Bertrand game. If prices were infinitely divisible, there would be an infinite number of equilibria. In reality, there are hundreds or thousands of equilibria, depending on how finely divisible the price may be.

This makes the iterated Bertrand game a coordination game—there are many possible equilibria, and our task is to figure out which one to coordinate on.

If we had perfect information, we could deduce what the monopoly price would be, and then all choose the monopoly price; this would be what we call “payoff dominant”, and it’s often what people actually try to choose in real-world coordination games.

But in reality, the monopoly price is a subtle and complicated thing, and might not even be the same between different retailers. So if we each try to compute a monopoly price, we may end up with different results, and then we could trigger a price war and end up driving all of our profits down. If only there were some way to communicate with one another, and say what price we all want to set?

Ah, but there is: The MSRP. Most other forms of price communication are illegal: We certainly couldn’t send each other emails and say “Let’s all charge $59.99, okay?” (When banks tried to do that with the LIBOR, it was the largest white-collar crime in history.) But for some reason economists (particularly, I note, the supposed “free market” believers of the University of Chicago) have convinced antitrust courts that MSRP is somehow different. Yet it’s obviously hardly different at all: You’ve just made the communication one-way from manufacturers to retailers, which makes it a little less reliable, but otherwise exactly the same thing.

There are all sorts of subtler arguments about how MSRP is justifiable, but as far as I can tell they all fall flat. If you’re worried about retailers not promoting your product enough, enter into a contract requiring them to promote. Proposing a suggested price is clearly nothing but an attempt to coordinate tacit—frankly not even that tacit—collusion.

MSRP also probably serves another, equally suspect, function, which is to manipulate consumers using the anchoring heuristic: If the MSRP is $59.99, then when it does go on sale for $49.99 you feel like you are getting a good deal; whereas, if it had just been priced at $49.99 to begin with, you might still have felt that it was too expensive. I see no reason why this sort of crass manipulation of consumers should be protected under the law either, especially when it would be so easy to avoid.

There are all sorts of ways for firms to tacitly collude with one another, and we may not be able to regulate them all. But the MSRP is literally printed on the box. It’s so utterly blatant that we could very easily make it illegal with hardly any effort at all. The fact that we allow such overt price communication makes a mockery of our antitrust law.

What really works against bigotry

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, personal, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 30 JDN 2458392

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How we can actually solve the housing shortage

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

Sep 16 JDN 2458378

In previous posts I’ve talked about the housing crisis facing most of the world’s major cities. (Even many cities in Africa are now facing a housing crisis!) In this post, I’m going to look at the empirical data to see if we can find a way to solve this crisis.

Most of the answer, it turns out, is really not that complicated: Build more housing.

There is a little bit more to it than that, but only a little bit. The basic problem is simply that there are more households than there are houses to hold them.

One of the biggest hurdles to fixing the housing crisis comes ironically from the left, in resistance to so-called “gentrification”. Local resistance to new construction is one of the greatest obstacles to keeping housing affordable. State and federal regulations are generally quite sensible: No industrial waste near the playgrounds. It’s the local regulations that make new housing so difficult.

I can understand why people fight “gentrification”: They see new housing going in as housing prices increase, and naturally assume that new houses cause higher prices. But it’s really the other way around: High prices cause new construction, which brings prices down. By its nature, new housing is almost always more expensive than existing housing. Building new housing still brings down the overall price of housing, even when the new housing is expensive. Building luxury condos does make existing apartments more affordable—and not building anything most certainly does not.

California’s housing crisis is particularly severe: California has been building less than half the units needed to sustain its current population trend since the crash in 2008. It’s worst of all in the Bay Area, where 500,000 jobs were added since 2009—and only 50,000 homes. California also has a big problem with delays in the permit process: Typically it takes as long as three or four years between approval and actual breaking ground.

We are seeing this in Oakland currently: The government has approved an actually reasonable amount of housing for once (vastly more than what they usually do), and as a result they may have a chance at keeping Oakland affordable even as it grows its population and economy. And yet we still get serious journalists saying utter nonsense like “The building boom and resulting gentrification are squeezing the city’s most vulnerable.” Building booms don’t cause gentrification. Building booms are the best response to gentrification. When you say things like that, you sound to an economist like you’re saying “Pizza is so expensive; we need to stop people from making pizza!”

Homeowners who want to increase their property values may actually be rational—if incredibly selfish and monopolistic—in trying to block new construction. But activists who oppose “gentrification” need to stop shooting themselves in the foot by fighting the very same development that would have made housing cheaper.

The simplest thing we can do is make it easier to build housing. Streamline the permit process, provide subsidies, remove unnecessary regulations. Housing is one of the few markets where I can actually see a lot of unnecessary regulations. We don’t need to require parking; we should provide better public transit instead. And while requiring solar panels (as the whole state is now doing) sounds nice, it makes everything a lot more expensive—and by only requiring it on new housing, you are effectively saying you don’t want any new housing. I love solar panels, but what you should be doing is subsidizing solar panels, not requiring them. Does that cost the state budget more? Yes. Raise taxes on something else (a particularly good idea: electricity consumption) if you have to. But by mandating solar panels without any subsidies to support them, you are effectively putting a tax on new housing—which is exactly what California does not need.

It’s still a good idea to create incentives to build not simply housing, but affordable housing. There are ways to do this as well. Denver did an excellent job in creating an Affordable Housing Fund that they immediately spent in converting vacant apartments into affordable housing units.

There are also good reasons to try to fight foreign ownership of housing (and really, speculative ownership of housing in general). There is a strong correlation between current account deficits and housing appreciation, which makes sense if foreign investors are buying up our housing and making it more expensive. If Trump could actually reduce our trade deficit, that would drive down our current account deficit and quite likely make our housing more affordable. Of course, he has absolutely no idea how to do that.

Victor Duggan has a pretty good plan for lowering housing prices in Ireland which includes a land tax (as I’ve discussed previously) and a tax on foreign ownership of real estate. I disagree with him about the “Help-to-Buy” program, however; I actually think that was a fine idea, since the goal is not simply to keep housing cheap but to get people into houses. That wealth transfer is going to raise prices at the producer side—increasing production—but not at the consumer side—because people get compensated by the tax rebate. The net result should be more housing without more cost for buyers. You could have done the same thing by subsidizing construction, but I actually like the idea of putting the money directly in the pockets of homeowners. The tax incidence shouldn’t be much different in the long run, but it makes for a much more appealing and popular program.

We must stop Kavanaugh now!

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Post 257: Sep 16 JDN 2458378

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For labor day, thoughts on socialism

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

Planned Post 255: Sep 9 JDN 2458371

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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