The rise and plateau of China’s economy

PNRJ current events, development economics, public policy , , , , , , ,

Sep 3 JDN 2460191

It looks like China’s era of extremely rapid economic growth may be coming to an end. Consumer confidence in China cratered this year (and, in typical authoritarian fashion, the agency responsible just quietly stopped publishing the data after that). Current forecasts have China’s economy growing only about 4-5% this year, which would be very impressive for a First World country—but far below the 6%, 7%, even 8% annual growth rates China had in recent years.

Some slowdown was quite frankly inevitable. A surprising number of people—particularly those in or from China—seem to think that China’s ultra-rapid growth was something special about China that could be expected to continue indefinitely.

China’s growth does look really impressive, in isolation:

But in fact this is a pattern we’ve seen several times now (admittedly mostly in Asia): A desperately poor Third World country finally figures out how to get its act together, and suddenly has extremely rapid growth for awhile until it manages to catch up and become a First World country.

It happened in South Korea:

It happened in Japan:

It happened in Taiwan:

It even seems to be happening in Botswana:

And this is a good thing! These are the great success stories of economic development. If we could somehow figure out how to do this all over the world, it might literally be the best thing that ever happened. (It would solve so many problems!)

Here’s a more direct comparison across all these countries (as well as the US), on a log scale:

From this you can pretty clearly see two things.

First, as countries get richer, their growth tends to slow down gradually. By the time Japan, Korea, and Taiwan reached the level that the US had been at back in 1950, their growth slowed to a crawl. But that was okay, because they had already become quite rich.

And second, China is nothing special: Yes, their growth rate is faster than the US, because the US is already so rich. But they are following the same pattern as several other countries. In fact they’ve actually fallen behind Botswana—they used to be much richer than Botswana, and are now slightly poorer.

So while there are many news articles discussing why China’s economy is slowing down, and some of them may even have some merit (they really seem to have screwed up their COVID response, for instance, and their terrible housing price bubble just burst); but the ultimate reason is really that 7% annual economic growth is just not sustainable. It will slow down. When and how remains in question—but it will happen.

Thus, I am not particularly worried about the fact that China’s growth has slowed down. Or at least, I wouldn’t be, if China were governed well and had prepared for this obvious eventuality the way that Korea and Japan did. But what does worry me is that they seem unprepared for this. Their authoritarian government seems to have depended upon sky-high economic growth to sustain support for their regime. The cracks are now forming in that dam, and something terrible could happen when it bursts.

Things may even be worse than they look, because we know that the Chinese government often distorts or omits statistics when they become inconvenient. That can only work for so long: Eventually the reality on the ground will override whatever lies the government is telling.

There are basically two ways this could go: They could reform their government to something closer to a liberal democracy, accept that growth will slow down and work toward more shared prosperity, and then take their place as a First World country like Japan did. Or they could try to cling to their existing regime, gripping ever tighter until it all slips out of their fingers in a potentially catastrophic collapse. Unfortunately, they seem to be opting for the latter.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that China will find its way toward a future of freedom and prosperity.

But at this point, it doesn’t look terribly likely.

Why are political speeches so vacuous?

PNRJ cognitive science, heuristics and biases, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 27 JDN 2460184

In last week’s post I talked about how posters for shows at the Fringe seem to be attention-grabbing but almost utterly devoid of useful information.

This brings to mind another sort of content that also fits that description: political speeches.

While there are some exceptions—including in fact some of the greatest political speeches ever made, such as Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” or Dwight Eisenhower’s “Cross of Iron”—on the whole, most political speeches seem to be incredibly vacuous.

Each country probably has its own unique flavor of vacuousness, but in the US they talk about motherhood, and apple pie, and American exceptionalism. “I love my great country, we are an amazing country, I’m so proud to live here” is basically the extent of the information conveyed within what could well be a full hour-long oration.

This raises a question: Why? Why don’t political speeches typically contain useful information?

It’s not that there’s no useful information to be conveyed: There are all sorts of things that people would like to know about a political candidate, including how honest they are, how competent they are, and the whole range of policies they intend to support or oppose on a variety of issues.

But most of what you’d like to know about a candidate actually comes in one of two varieties: Cheap talk, or controversy.

Cheap talk is the part related to being honest and competent. Basically every voter wants candidates who are honest and competent, and we know all too well that not all candidates qualify. The problem is, how do they show that they are honest and competent? They could simply assert it, but that’s basically meaningless—anybody could assert it. In fact, Donald Trump is the candidate who leaps to mind as the most eager to frequently assert his own honesty and competence, and also the most successful candidate in at least my lifetime who seems to utterly and totally lack anything resembling these qualities.

So unless you are clever enough to find ways to demonstrate your honesty and competence, you’re really not accomplishing anything by asserting it. Most people simply won’t believe you, and they’re right not to. So it doesn’t make much sense to spend a lot of effort trying to make such assertions.

Alternatively, you could try to talk about policy, say what you would like to do regarding climate change, the budget, or the military, or the healthcare system, or any of dozens of other political questions. That would absolutely be useful information for voters, and it isn’t just cheap talk, because different candidates and voters do intend different things and voters would like to know which ones are which.

The problem, then, is that it’s controversial. Not everyone is going to agree with your particular take on any given political issue—even within your own party there is bound to be substantial disagreement.

If enough voters were sufficiently rational about this, and could coolly evaluate a candidate’s policies, accepting the pros and cons, then it would still make sense to deliver this information. I for one would rather vote for someone I know agrees with me 90% of the time than someone who won’t even tell me what they intend to do while in office.

But in fact most voters are not sufficiently rational about this. Voters react much more strongly to negative information than positive information: A candidate you agree with 9 times out of 10 can still make you utterly outraged by their stance on issue number 10. This is a specific form of the more general phenomenon of negativity bias: Psychologically, people just react a lot more strongly to bad things than to good things. Negativity bias has strong effects on how people vote, especially young people.

Rather than a cool-headed, rational assessment of pros and cons, most voters base their decision on deal-breakers: “I could never vote for a Republican” or “I could never vote for someone who wants to cut the military”. Only after they’ve excluded a large portion of candidates based on these heuristics do they even try to look closer at the detailed differences between candidates.

This means that, if you are a candidate, your best option is to avoid offering any deal-breakers. You want to say things that almost nobody will strongly disagree with—because any strong disagreement could be someone’s deal-breaker and thereby hurt your poll numbers.

And what’s the best way to not say anything that will offend or annoy anyone? Not say anything at all. Campaign managers basically need to Mirandize their candidates: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion.

But in fact you can’t literally remain silent—when running for office, you are expected to make a lot of speeches. So you do the next best thing: You say a lot of words, but convey very little meaning. You say things like “America is great” and “I love apple pie” and “Moms are heroes” that, while utterly vapid, are very unlikely to make anyone particularly angry at you or be any voter’s deal-breaker.

And then we get into a Nash equilibrium where everyone is talking like this, nobody is saying anything, and political speeches become entirely devoid of useful content.

What can we as voters do about this? Individually, perhaps nothing. Collectively, literally everything.

If we could somehow shift the equilibrium so that candidates who are brave enough to make substantive, controversial claims get rewarded for it—even when we don’t entirely agree with them—while those who continue to recite insipid nonsense are punished, then candidates will absolutely change how they speak.

But this would require a lot of people to change, more or less all at once. A sufficiently large critical mass of voters would need to be willing to support candidates specifically because they made detailed policy proposals, even if we didn’t particularly like those policy proposals.

Obviously, if their policy proposals were terrible, we’d have good reason to reject them; but for this to work, we need to be willing to support a lot of things that are just… kind of okay. Because it’s vanishingly unlikely that the first candidates who are brave enough to say what they intend will also be ones whose intentions we entirely agree with. We need to set some kind of threshold of minimum agreement, and reward anyone who exceeds it. We need to ask ourselves if our deal-breakers really need to be deal-breakers.

The Fringe: An overwhelming embarrassment of riches

PNRJ current events, market failure , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 20 JDN 2460177

As I write this, Edinburgh is currently in the middle of The Fringe: It’s often described as an “arts and culture festival”, but mainly it consists of a huge number of theatre and comedy performances that go on across the city in hundreds of venues all month long. It’s an “open access festival”, which basically means that it’s half a dozen different festivals that all run independently and are loosely coordinated with one another.

There is truly an embarrassment of riches in the sheer number and variety of performances going on. There’s no way I could ever go to all of them, or even half of them, even though most of them are going on every single day, all month long

It would be tremendously helpful to get good information about which performances are likely to suit my tastes, so I’d know which ones to attend. For once, advertising actually has a genuinely useful function to serve!

And yet, the ads for performances plastered across the city are almost completely useless. They tell you virtually nothing about the content or even style of the various shows. You are bombarded with hundreds of posters for hundreds of performances as you walk through the city, and almost none of them tell you anything useful that would help you decide which shows you want to attend.

Here’s what they look like; imagine this plastered on every bus shelter and spare bit of wall in the city, as well as plenty of specially-built structures explicitly for the purpose:

What I want to ask today is: Why are these posters so uninformative?

I think there are two forces at work here which may explain this phenomenon.

The first is about comedy: Most of these shows are comedy shows, and it’s very hard to explain to someone what is funny about a joke. In fact, most jokes aren’t even funny once they have been explained. Comedy seems to be closely tied to surprise: If you know exactly what they are going to say, it isn’t funny anymore. So it is inherently difficult to explain what’s good about a comedy show without making it actually less funny for those attending.

Yet this is not a complete explanation. For there are some things you could explain about comedy shows without ruining them. You could give it a general genre: political satire, slapstick, alternative, dark comedy, blue comedy, burlesque, cringe, insult, sitcom, parody, surreal, and so on. That would at least tell you something—I tend to like satire and parody, dark and blue are hit-or-miss, surreal leaves me cold, and I can’t stand cringe. And some of the posters do this—yet a remarkable number do not. I often find myself staring at a particular poster, poring over its details, trying to get some inkling of what kind of comedy I could expect from this performer.

To fully explain this, we need something more: And that, I believe, is provided by economic theory.

Consider for a moment that comedy is varied and largely subjective: What one person finds hilarious, another finds boring, and yet another finds outrageously offensive. And whether or not you find a particular routine funny can be hard to predict—even for you.

But consider that money is quite the opposite: Everyone wants it, everyone always wants more of it, and people pretty much want it for the same reasons.

So when you offer to pay money for comedy, you are offering something fundamentally fungible and objective in exchange for something almost totally individual and subjective. You are giving what everyone wants in exchange for something that only some people want and you yourself may or may not want—and may have no way of knowing whether you want until you have it.

I believe it is in the interests of the performers to keep you in the dark in this way. They don’t want to resolve your ignorance too thoroughly. Their goal is not to find the market niche of people who would most enjoy their comedy. Their goal is to get as many people as possible to show up to their shows. Even if someone absolutely hates their show, if they bought tickets, that’s a win. And even any negative reviews or word-of-mouth they might try to give the comedian is probably still a win—comedians are one profession for which there really may be no such thing as bad publicity.

In other words, even these relatively helpful advertisements aren’t actually designed to inform you. They are, as all advertisements are, designed to get you to buy something. And the way to get you to do that is twofold:

First, get your attention. That’s vital. And it’s quite difficult in such a saturated environment. As a result, all of the posters are quite eye-catching and often bizarre. They use loud colors and striking images, and the whole city is filled with them. It actually becomes exhausting to look at them all; but this is the Nash equilibrium, because there is an arms race between different performers to look more interesting and exciting than all the rest.

Second, convince you to go. But let’s be clear about this: It is not necessary to make you absolutely certain that this show is one you’ll enjoy. It is merely to tip the balance of probability, make you reasonably confident that it is likely to be one you’ll enjoy. Given the subjectivity and unpredictability of comedy, any attendee knows that they are likely to end up with a few duds. That risk effectively gets priced in: You accept that one £10 ticket may be wasted, in exchange for buying another £10 ticket that you’d have gladly paid £20 for.

If the posters tried to give more details about what the shows were about, there would be two costs to this: One, it might make the posters less eye-catching and interesting in the first place. And two, it might (perhaps correctly!) convince some customers that this flavor of comedy really wasn’t for them, making them decide not to buy a ticket. The task when designing such a poster, then, is to make one that conveys enough that people are willing to take the chance on it—but not too much so that you might scare some potential audience members away.

I think that this has implications which go beyond comedy. In fact, I think that something quite similar is going on with political speeches. But I’ll save that one for another post.

The unsung success of Bidenomics

PNRJ core principles, current events, macroeconomics, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 13 JDN 2460170

I’m glad to see that the Biden administration is finally talking about “Bidenomics”. We tend to give too much credit or blame for economic performance to the President—particularly relative to Congress—but there are many important ways in which a Presidential administration can shift the priorities of public policy in particular directions, and Biden has clearly done that.

The economic benefits for people of color seem to have been particularly large. The unemployment gap between White and Black workers in the US is now only 2.7 percentage points, while just a few years ago it was over 4pp and at the worst of the Great Recession it surpassed 7pp. During lockdown, unemployment for Black people hit nearly 17%; it is now less than 6%.

The (misnamed, but we’re stuck with it) Inflation Reduction Act in particular has been an utter triumph.

In the past year, real private investment in manufacturing structures (essentially, new factories) has risen from $56 billion to $87 billion—an over 50% increase, which puts it the highest it has been since the turn of the century. The Inflation Reduction Act appears to be largely responsible for this change.

Not many people seem to know this, but the US has also been on the right track with regard to carbon emissions: Per-capita carbon emissions in the US have been trending downward since about 2000, and are now lower than they were in the 1950s. The Inflation Reduction act now looks poised to double down on that progress, as it has been forecasted to reduce our emissions all the way down to 40% below their early-2000s peak.

Somehow, this success doesn’t seem to be getting across. The majority of Americans incorrectly believe that we are in a downturn. Biden’s approval rating is still only 40%, barely higher than Trump’s was. When it comes to political beliefs, most American voters appear to be utterly impervious to facts.

Most Americans do correctly believe that inflation is still a bit high (though many seem to think it’s higher than it is); this is weird, seeing as inflation is normally high when the economy is growing rapidly, and gets too low when we are in a recession. This seems to be Halo Effect, rather than any genuine understanding of macroeconomics: downturns are bad and inflation is bad, so they must go together—when in fact, quite the opposite is the case.

People generally feel better about their own prospects than they do about the economy as a whole:

Sixty-four percent of Americans say the economy is worse off compared to 2020, while seventy-three percent of Americans say the economy is worse off compared to five years ago. About two in five of Americans say they feel worse off from five years ago generally (38%) and a similar number say they feel worse off compared to 2020 (37%).

(Did you really have to write out ‘seventy-three percent’? I hate that convention. 73% is so much clearer and quicker to read.)

I don’t know what the Biden administration should do about this. Trying to sell themselves harder might backfire. (And I’m pretty much the last person in the world you should ask for advice about selling yourself.) But they’ve been doing really great work for the US economy… and people haven’t noticed. Thousands of factories are being built, millions of people are getting jobs, and the collective response has been… “meh”.

Against deontology

PNRJ core principles, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 6 JDN 2460163

In last week’s post I argued against average utilitarianism, basically on the grounds that it devalues the lives of anyone who isn’t of above average happiness. But you might be tempted to take these as arguments against utilitarianism in general, and that is not my intention.

In fact I believe that utilitarianism is basically correct, though it needs some particular nuances that are often lost in various presentations of it.

Its leading rival is deontology, which is really a broad class of moral theories, some a lot better than others.

What characterizes deontology as a class is that it uses rules, rather than consequences; an act is just right or wrong regardless of its consequences—or even its expected consequences.

There are certain aspects of this which are quite appealing: In fact, I do think that rules have an important role to play in ethics, and as such I am basically a rule utilitarian. Actually trying to foresee all possible consequences of every action we might take is an absurd demand far beyond the capacity of us mere mortals, and so in practice we have no choice but to develop heuristic rules that can guide us.

But deontology says that these are no mere heuristics: They are in fact the core of ethics itself. Under deontology, wrong actions are wrong even if you know for certain that their consequences will be good.

Kantian ethics is one of the most well-developed deontological theories, and I am quite sympathetic to Kantian ethics In fact I used to consider myself one of its adherents, but I now consider that view a mistaken one.

Let’s first dispense with the views of Kant himself, which are obviously wrong. Kant explicitly said that lying is always, always, always wrong, and even when presented with obvious examples where you could tell a small lie to someone obviously evil in order to save many innocent lives, he stuck to his guns and insisted that lying is always wrong.

This is a bit anachronistic, but I think this example will be more vivid for modern readers, and it absolutely is consistent with what Kant wrote about the actual scenarios he was presented with:

You are living in Germany in 1945. You have sheltered a family of Jews in your attic to keep them safe from the Holocaust. Nazi soldiers have arrived at your door, and ask you: “Are there any Jews in this house?” Do you tell the truth?

I think it’s utterly, agonizingly obvious that you should not tell the truth. Exactly what you should do is less obvious: Do you simply lie and hope they buy it? Do you devise a clever ruse? Do you try to distract them in some way? Do you send them on a wild goose chase elsewhere? If you could overpower them and kill them, should you? What if you aren’t sure you can; should you still try? But one thing is clear: You don’t hand over the Jewish family to the Nazis.

Yet when presented with similar examples, Kant insisted that lying is always wrong. He had a theory to back it up, his Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”

And, so his argument goes: Since it would be obviously incoherent to say that everyone should always lie, lying is wrong, and you’re never allowed to do it. He actually bites that bullet the size of a Howitzer round.

Modern deontologists—even though who consider themselves Kantians—are more sophisticated than this. They realize that you could make a rule like “Never lie, except to save the life of an innocent person.” or “Never lie, except to stop a great evil.” Either of these would be quite adequate to solve this particular dilemma. And it’s absolutely possible to will that these would be universal laws, in the sense that they would apply to anyone. ‘Universal’ doesn’t have to mean ‘applies equally to all possible circumstances’.

There are also a couple of things that deontology does very well, which are worth preserving. One of them is supererogation: The idea that some acts are above and beyond the call of duty, that something can be good without being obligatory.

This is something most forms of utilitarianism are notoriously bad at. They show us a spectrum of worlds from the best to the worst, and tell us to make things better. But there’s nowhere we are allowed to stop, unless we somehow manage to make it all the way to the best possible world.

I find this kind of moral demand very tempting, which often leads me to feel a tremendous burden of guilt. I always know that I could be doing more than I do. I’ve written several posts about this in the past, in the hopes of fighting off this temptation in myself and others. (I am not entirely sure how well I’ve succeeded.)

Deontology does much better in this regard: Here are some rules. Follow them.

Many of the rules are in fact very good rules that most people successfully follow their entire lives: Don’t murder. Don’t rape. Don’t commit robbery. Don’t rule a nation tyrannically. Don’t commit war crimes.

Others are oft more honored in the breach than the observance: Don’t lie. Don’t be rude. Don’t be selfish. Be brave. Be generous. But a well-developed deontology can even deal with this, by saying that some rules are more important than others, and thus some sins are more forgivable than others.

Whereas a utilitarian—at least, anything but a very sophisticated utilitarian—can only say who is better and who is worse, a deontologist can say who is good enough: who has successfully discharged their moral obligations and is otherwise free to live their life as they choose. Deontology absolves us of guilt in a way that utilitarianism is very bad at.

Another good deontological principle is double-effect: Basically this says that if you are doing something that will have bad outcomes as well as good ones, it matters whether you intend the bad one and what you do to try to mitigate it. There does seem to be a morally relevant difference between a bombing that kills civilians accidentally as part of an attack on a legitimate military target, and a so-called “strategic bombing” that directly targets civilians in order to maximize casualties—even if both occur as part of a justified war. (Both happen a lot—and it may even be the case that some of the latter were justified. The Tokyo firebombing and atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very much in the latter category.)

There are ways to capture this principle (or something very much like it) in a utilitarian framework, but like supererogation, it requires a sophisticated, nuanced approach that most utilitarians don’t seem willing or able to take.

Now that I’ve said what’s good about it, let’s talk about what’s really wrong with deontology.

Above all: How do we choose the rules?

Kant seemed to think that mere logical coherence would yield a sufficiently detailed—perhaps even unique—set of rules for all rational beings in the universe to follow. This is obviously wrong, and seems to be simply a failure of his imagination. There is literally a countably infinite space of possible ethical rules that are logically consistent. (With probability 1 any given one is utter nonsense: “Never eat cheese on Thursdays”, “Armadillos should rule the world”, and so on—but these are still logically consistent.)

If you require the rules to be simple and general enough to always apply to everyone everywhere, you can narrow the space substantially; but this is also how you get obviously wrong rules like “Never lie.”

In practice, there are two ways we actually seem to do this: Tradition and consequences.

Let’s start with tradition. (It came first historically, after all.) You can absolutely make a set of rules based on whatever your culture has handed down to you since time immemorial. You can even write them down in a book that you declare to be the absolute infallible truth of the universe—and, amazingly enough, you can get millions of people to actually buy that.

The result, of course, is what we call religion. Some of its rules are good: Thou shalt not kill. Some are flawed but reasonable: Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Some are nonsense: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.

And some, well… some rules of tradition are the source of many of the world’s most horrific human rights violations. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live (Exodus 22:18). If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them (Leviticus 20:13).

Tradition-based deontology has in fact been the major obstacle to moral progress throughout history. It is not a coincidence that utilitarianism began to become popular right before the abolition of slavery, and there is an even more direct casual link between utilitarianism and the advancement of rights for women and LGBT people. When the sole argument you can make for moral rules is that they are ancient (or allegedly handed down by a perfect being), you can make rules that oppress anyone you want. But when rules have to be based on bringing happiness or preventing suffering, whole classes of oppression suddenly become untenable. “God said so” can justify anything—but “Who does it hurt?” can cut through.

It is an oversimplification, but not a terribly large one, to say that the arc of moral history has been drawn by utilitarians dragging deontologists kicking and screaming into a better future.

There is a better way to make rules, and that is based on consequences. And, in practice, most people who call themselves deontologists these days do this. They develop a system of moral rules based on what would be expected to lead to the overall best outcomes.

I like this approach. In fact, I agree with this approach. But it basically amounts to abandoning deontology and surrendering to utilitarianism.

Once you admit that the fundamental justification for all moral rules is the promotion of happiness and the prevention of suffering, you are basically a rule utilitarian. Rules then become heuristics for promoting happiness, not the fundamental source of morality itself.

I suppose it could be argued that this is not a surrender but a synthesis: We are looking for the best aspects of deontology and utilitarianism. That makes a lot of sense. But I keep coming back to the dark history of traditional rules, the fact that deontologists have basically been holding back human civilization since time immemorial. If deontology wants to be taken seriously now, it needs to prove that it has broken with that dark tradition. And frankly the easiest answer to me seems to be to just give up on deontology.

Against average utilitarianism

PNRJ core principles, ethics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 30 JDN 2460156

Content warning: Suicide and suicidal ideation

There are two broad strands of utilitarianism, known as average utilitarianism and total utilitarianism. As utilitarianism, both versions concern themselves with maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering. And for many types of ethical question, they yield the same results.

Under average utilitarianism, the goal is to maximize the average level of happiness minus suffering: It doesn’t matter how many people there are in the world, only how happy they are.

Under total utilitarianism, the goal is to maximize the total level of happiness minus suffering: Adding another person is a good thing, as long as their life is worth living.

Mathematically, its the difference between taking the sum of net happiness (total utilitarianism), and taking that sum and dividing it by the population (average utilitarianism).

It would make for too long a post to discuss the validity of utilitarianism in general. Overall I will say briefly that I think utilitarianism is basically correct, but there are some particular issues with it that need to be resolved, and usually end up being resolved by heading slightly in the direction of a more deontological ethics—in short, rule utilitarianism.

But for today, I want to focus on the difference between average and total utilitarianism, because average utilitarianism is a very common ethical view despite having appalling, horrifying implications.

Above all: under average utilitarianism, if you are considering suicide, you should probably do it.

Why? Because anyone who is considering suicide is probably of below-average happiness. And average utilitarianism necessarily implies that anyone who expects to be of below-average happiness should be immediately killed as painlessly as possible.

Note that this does not require that your life be one of endless suffering, so that it isn’t even worth going on living. Even a total utilitarian would be willing to commit suicide, if their life is expected to be so full of suffering that it isn’t worth going on.

Indeed, I suspect that most actual suicidal ideation by depressed people takes this form: My life will always be endless suffering. I will never be happy again. My life is worthless.

The problem with such suicidal ideation is not the ethical logic, which is valid: If indeed your existence from this point forward would be nothing but endless suffering, suicide actually makes sense. (Imagine someone who is being held in a dungeon being continually mercilessly tortured with no hope of escape; it doesn’t seem unreasonable for them to take a cyanide pill.) The problem is the prediction, which says that your life from this point forward will be nothing but endless suffering. Most people with depression do, eventually, feel better. They may never be quite as happy overall as people who aren’t depressed, but they do, in fact, have happy times. And most people who considered suicide but didn’t go through with it end up glad that they went on living.

No, an average utilitarian says you should commit suicide as long as your happiness is below average.

We could be living in a glorious utopia, where almost everyone is happy almost all the time, and people are only occasionally annoyed by minor inconveniences—and average utilitarianism would say that if you expect to suffer a more than average rate of such inconveniences, the world would be better off if you ceased to exist.

Moreover, average utilitarianism says that you should commit suicide if your life is expected to get worse—even if it’s still going to be good, adding more years to your life will just bring your average happiness down. If you had a very happy childhood and adulthood is going just sort of okay, you may as well end it now.

Average utilitarianism also implies that we should bomb Third World countries into oblivion, because their people are less happy than ours and thus their deaths will raise the population average.

Are there ways an average utilitarian can respond to these problems? Perhaps. But every response I’ve seen is far too weak to resolve the real problem.

One approach would be to say that the killing itself is bad, or will cause sufficient grief as to offset the loss of the unhappy person. (An average utilitarian is inherently committed to the claim that losing an unhappy person is itself an inherent good. There is something to be offset.)

This might work for the utopia case: The grief from losing someone you love is much worse than even a very large number of minor inconveniences.

It may even work for the case of declining happiness over your lifespan: Presumably some other people would be sad to lose you, even if they agreed that your overall happiness is expected to gradually decline. Then again, if their happiness is also expected to decline… should they, too, shuffle off this mortal coil?

But does it work for the question of bombing? Would most Americans really be so aggrieved at the injustice of bombing Burundi or Somalia to oblivion? Most of them don’t seem particularly aggrieved at the actual bombings of literally dozens of countries—including, by the way, Somalia. Granted, these bombings were ostensibly justified by various humanitarian or geopolitical objectives, but some of those justifications (e.g. Kosovo) seem a lot stronger than others (e.g. Grenada). And quite frankly, I care more about this sort of thing than most people, and I still can’t muster anything like the same kind of grief for random strangers in a foreign country that I feel when a friend or relative dies. Indeed, I can’t muster the same grief for one million random strangers in a foreign country that I feel for one lost loved one. Human grief just doesn’t seem to work that way. Sometimes I wish it did—but then, I’m not quite sure what our lives would be like in such a radically different world.

Moreover, the whole point is that an average utilitarian should consider it an intrinsically good thing to eliminate the existence of unhappy people, as long as it can be done swiftly and painlessly. So why, then, should people be aggrieved at the deaths of millions of innocent strangers they know are mostly unhappy? Under average utilitarianism, the greatest harm of war is the survivors you leave, because they will feel grief—so your job is to make sure you annihilate them as thoroughly as possible, presumably with nuclear weapons. Killing a soldier is bad as long as his family is left alive to mourn him—but if you kill an entire country, that’s good, because their country was unhappy.

Enough about killing and dying. Let’s talk about something happier: Babies.

At least, total utilitarians are happy about babies. When a new person is brought into the world, a total utilitarian considers this a good thing, as long as the baby is expected to have a life worth living and their existence doesn’t harm the rest of the world too much.

I think that fits with most people’s notions of what is good. Generally the response when someone has a baby is “Congratulations!” rather than “I’m sorry”. We see adding another person to the world as generally a good thing.

But under average utilitarianism, babies must reach a much higher standard in order to be a good thing. Your baby only deserves to exist if they will be happier than average.

Granted, this is the average for the whole world, so perhaps First World people can justify the existence of their children by pointing out that unless things go very badly, they should end up happier than the world average. (Then again, if you have a family history of depression….)

But for Third World families, quite the opposite: The baby may well bring joy to all around them, but unless that joy is enough to bring someone above the global average, it would still be better if the baby did not exist. Adding one more person of moderately-low happiness will just bring the world average down.

So in fact, on a global scale, an average utilitarian should always expect that babies are nearly as likely to be bad as they are good, unless we have some reason to think that the next generation would be substantially happier than this one.

And while I’m not aware of anyone who sincerely believes that we should nuke Third World countries for their own good, I have heard people speak this way about population growth in Third World countries: such discussions of “overpopulation” are usually ostensibly about ecological sustainability, even though the ecological impact of First World countries is dramatically higher—and such talk often shades very quickly into eugenics.

Of course, we wouldn’t want to say that having babies is always good, lest we all be compelled to crank out as many babies as possible and genuinely overpopulate the world. But total utilitarianism can solve this problem: It’s worth adding more people to the world unless the harm of adding those additional people is sufficient to offset the benefit of adding another person whose life is worth living.

Moreover, total utilitarianism can say that it would be good to delay adding another person to the world, until the situation is better. Potentially this delay could be quite long: Perhaps it is best for us not to have too many children until we can colonize the stars. For now, let’s just keep our population sustainable while we develop the technology for interstellar travel. If having more children now would increase the risk that we won’t ever manage to colonize distant stars, total utilitarianism would absolutely say we shouldn’t do it.

There’s also a subtler problem here, which is that it may seem good for any particular individual to have more children, but the net result is that the higher total population is harmful. Then what I think is happening is that we are unaware of, or uncertain about, or simply inattentive to, the small harm to many other people caused by adding one new person to the world. Alternatively, we may not be entirely altruistic, and a benefit that accrues to our own family may be taken as greater than a harm that accrues to many other people far away. If we really knew the actual marginal costs and benefits, and we really agreed on that utility function, we would in fact make the right decision. It’s our ignorance or disagreement that makes us fail, not total utilitarianism in principle. In practice, this means coming up with general rules that seem to result in a fair and reasonable outcome, like “families who want to have kids should aim for two or three”—and again we’re at something like rule utilitarianism.

Another case average utilitarianism seems tempting is in resolving the mere addition paradox.

Consider three possible worlds, A, B, and C:

In world A, there is a population of 1 billion, and everyone is living an utterly happy, utopian life.

In world B, there is a population of 1 billion living in a utopia, and a population of 2 billion living mediocre lives.

In world C, there is a population of 3 billion living good, but not utopian, lives.

The mere addition paradox is that, to many people, world B seems worse than world A, even though all we’ve done is add 2 billion people whose lives are worth living.

Moreover, many people seem to think that the ordering goes like this:


World B is better than world A, because all we’ve done is add more people whose lives are worth living.

World C is better than world B, because it’s fairer, and overall happiness is higher.

World A is better than world C, because everyone is happier, and all we’ve done is reduce the population.


This is intransitive: We have A > C > B > A. Our preferences over worlds are incoherent.

Average utilitarianism resolves this by saying that A > C is true, and C > B is true—but it says that B > A is false. Since average happiness is higher in world A, A > B.

But of course this results in the conclusion that if we are faced with world B, we should do whatever we can to annihilate the 2 billion extra unhappy people, so that we can get to world A. And the whole point of this post is that this is an utterly appalling conclusion we should immediately reject.

What does total utilitarianism say? It says that indeed C > B and B > A, but it denies that A > C. Rather, since there are more people in world C, it’s okay that people aren’t quite as happy.

Derek Parfit argues that this leads to what he calls the “repugnant conclusion”: If we keep increasing the population by a large amount while decreasing happiness by a small amount, the best possible world ends up being one where population is utterly massive but our lives are only barely worth living.

I do believe that total utilitarianism results in this outcome. I can live with that.

Under average utilitarianism, the best possible world is precisely one person who is immortal and absolutely ecstatic 100% of the time. Adding even one person who is not quite that happy will make things worse.

Under total utilitarianism, adding more people who are still very happy would be good, even if it makes that one ecstatic person a bit less ecstatic. And adding more people would continue to be good, as long as it didn’t bring the average down too quickly.

If you find this conclusion repugnant, as Parfit does, I submit that it is because it is difficult to imagine just how large a population we are talking about. Maybe putting some numbers on it will help.

Let’s say the happiness level of an average person in the world today is 35 quality-adjusted life years—our life expectancy of 70, times an average happiness level of 0.5.

So right now we have a world of 8 billion people at 35 QALY, for a total of 280 TQALY. (That’s tera-QALY, 1 trillion QALY.)

(Note: I’m not addressing inequality here. If you believe that a world where one person has 100 QALY and another has 50 QALY is worse than one where both have 75 QALY, you should adjust your scores accordingly—which mainly serves to make the current world look worse, due to our utterly staggering inequality. In fact I think I do not believe this—in my view, the problem is not that happiness is unequal, but that staggering inequality of wealth makes much greater suffering among the poor in exchange for very little happiness among the rich.)

Average utilitarianism says that we should eliminate the less happy people, so we can raise the average QALY higher, maybe to something like 60. I’ve already said why I find this appalling.

So now consider what total utilitarianism asks of us. If we could raise that figure above 280 TQALY, we should. Say we could increase our population to 10 billion, at the cost of reducing average happiness to 30 QALY; should we? Yes, we should, because that’s 300 TQALY.

But notice that in this scenario we’re still 85% as happy as we were. That doesn’t sound so bad. Parfit is worried about a scenario where our lives are barely worth living. So let’s consider what that would require.

“Barely worth living” sounds like maybe 1 QALY. This wouldn’t mean we all live exactly one year; that’s not sustainable, because babies can’t have babies. So it would be more like a life expectancy of 33, with a happiness of 0.03—pretty bad, but still worth living.

In that case, we would need to raise our population over 800 billion to make it better than our current existence. We must colonize at least 100 other planets and fill them as full as we’ve filled Earth.

In fact, I think this 1 QALY life was something like that human beings had at the dawn of agriculture (which by some estimates was actually worse than ancient hunter-gatherer life; we were sort of forced into early agriculture, rather than choosing it because it was better): Nasty, brutish, and short, but still, worth living.

So, Parfit’s repugnant conclusion is that filling 100 planets with people who live like the ancient Babylonians would be as good as life on Earth is now? I don’t really see how this is obviously horrible. Certainly not to the same degree that saying we should immediately nuke Somalia is obviously horrible.

Moreover, total utilitarianism absolutely still says that if we can make those 800 billion people happier, we should. A world of 800 billion people each getting 35 QALY is 100 times better than the way things are now—and doesn’t that seem right, at least?


Yet if you indeed believe that copying a good world 100 times gives you a 100 times better world, you are basically committed to total utilitarianism.

There are actually other views that would allow you to escape this conclusion without being an average utilitarian.

One way, naturally, is to not be a utilitarian. You could be a deontologist or something. I don’t have time to go into that in this post, so let’s save it for another time. For now, let me say that, historically, utilitarianism has led the charge in positive moral change, from feminism to gay rights, from labor unions to animal welfare. We tend to drag stodgy deontologists kicking and screaming toward a better world. (I vaguely recall an excellent tweet on this, though not who wrote it: “Yes, historically, almost every positive social change has been spearheaded by utilitarians. But sometimes utilitarianism seems to lead to weird conclusions in bizarre thought experiments, and surely that’s more important!”)

Another way, which has gotten surprisingly little attention, is to use an aggregating function that is neither a sum nor an average. For instance, you could add up all utility and divide by the square root of population, so that larger populations get penalized for being larger, but you aren’t simply trying to maximize average happiness. That does seem to still tell some people to die even though their lives were worth living, but at least it doesn’t require us to exterminate all who are below average. And it may also avoid the conclusion Parfit considers repugnant, by making our galactic civilization span 10,000 worlds. Of course, why square root? Why not a cube root, or a logarithm? Maybe the arbitrariness is why it hasn’t been seriously considered. But honestly, I think dividing by anything is suspicious; how can adding someone else who is happy ever make things worse?

But if I must admit that a sufficiently large galactic civilization would be better than our current lives, even if everyone there is mostly pretty unhappy? That’s a bullet I’m prepared to bite. At least I’m not saying we should annihilate everyone who is unhappy.

How much should we give of ourselves?

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

Jul 23 JDN 2460149

This is a question I’ve written about before, but it’s a very important one—perhaps the most important question I deal with on this blog—so today I’d like to come back to it from a slightly different angle.

Suppose you could sacrifice all the happiness in the rest of your life, making your own existence barely worth living, in exchange for saving the lives of 100 people you will never meet.

  1. Would it be good for you do so?
  2. Should you do so?
  3. Are you a bad person if you don’t?
  4. Are all of the above really the same question?

Think carefully about your answer. It may be tempting to say “yes”. It feels righteous to say “yes”.

But in fact this is not hypothetical. It is the actual situation you are in.

This GiveWell article is entitled “Why is it so expensive to save a life?” but that’s incredibly weird, because the actual figure they give is astonishingly, mind-bogglingly, frankly disgustingly cheap: It costs about $4500 to save one human life. I don’t know how you can possibly find that expensive. I don’t understand how anyone can think, “Saving this person’s life might max out a credit card or two; boy, that sure seems expensive!“

The standard for healthcare policy in the US is that something is worth doing if it is able to save one quality-adjusted life year for less than $50,000. That’s one year for ten times as much. Even accounting for the shorter lifespans and worse lives in poor countries, saving someone from a poor country for $4500 is at least one hundred times as cost-effective as that.

To put it another way, if you are a typical middle-class person in the First World, with an after-tax income of about $25,000 per year, and you were to donate 90% of that after-tax income to high-impact charities, you could be expected to save 5 lives every year. Over the course of a 30-year career, that’s 150 lives saved.

You would of course be utterly miserable for those 30 years, having given away all the money you could possibly have used for any kind of entertainment or enjoyment, not to mention living in the cheapest possible housing—maybe even a tent in a homeless camp—and eating the cheapest possible food. But you could do it, and you would in fact be expected to save over 100 lives by doing so.

So let me ask you again:

  1. Would it be good for you do so?
  2. Should you do so?
  3. Are you a bad person if you don’t?
  4. Are all of the above really the same question?

Peter Singer often writes as though the answer to all these questions is “yes”. But even he doesn’t actually live that way. He gives a great deal to charity, mind you; no one seems to know exactly how much, but estimates range from at least 10% to up to 50% of his income. My general impression is that he gives about 10% of his ordinary income and more like 50% of big prizes he receives (which are in fact quite numerous). Over the course of his life he has certainly donated at least a couple million dollars. Yet he clearly could give more than he does: He lives a comfortable, upper-middle-class life.

Peter Singer’s original argument for his view, from his essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, is actually astonishingly weak. It involves imagining a scenario where a child is drowning in a lake and you could go save them, but only at the cost of ruining your expensive suit.

Obviously, you should save the child. We all agree on that. You are in fact a terrible person if you wouldn’t save the child.

But Singer tries to generalize this into a principle that requires us to donate all most of our income to international charities, and that just doesn’t follow.

First of all, that suit is not worth $4500. Not if you’re a middle-class person. That’s a damn Armani. No one who isn’t a millionaire wears suits like that.

Second, in the imagined scenario, you’re the only one who can help the kid. All I have to do is change that one thing and already the answer is different: If right next to you there is a trained, certified lifeguard, they should save the kid, not you. And if there are a hundred other people at the lake, and none of them is saving the kid… probably there’s a good reason for that? (It could be bystander effect, but actually that’s much weaker than a lot of people think.) The responsibility doesn’t uniquely fall upon you.

Third, the drowning child is a one-off, emergency scenario that almost certainly will never happen to you, and if it does ever happen, will almost certainly only happen once. But donation is something you could always do, and you could do over and over and over again, until you have depleted all your savings and run up massive debts.

Fourth, in the hypothetical scenario, there is only one child. What if there were ten—or a hundred—or a thousand? What if you couldn’t possibly save them all by yourself? Should you keep going out there and saving children until you become exhausted and you yourself drown? Even if there is a lifeguard and a hundred other bystanders right there doing nothing?

And finally, in the drowning child scenario, you are right there. This isn’t some faceless stranger thousands of miles away. You can actually see that child in front of you. Peter Singer thinks that doesn’t matter—actually his central point seems to be that it doesn’t matter. But I think it does.

Singer writes:

It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards away from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.

That’s clearly wrong, isn’t it? Relationships mean nothing? Community means nothing? There is no moral value whatsoever to helping people close to us rather than random strangers on the other side of the planet?

One answer might be to say that the answer to question 4 is “no”. You aren’t a bad person for not doing everything you should, and even though something would be good if you did it, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should do it.

Perhaps some things are above and beyond the call of duty: Good, perhaps even heroic, if you’re willing to do them, but not something we are all obliged to do. The formal term for this is supererogatory. While I think that overall utilitarianism is basically correct and has done great things for human society, one thing I think most utilitarians miss is that they seem to deny that supererogatory actions exist.

Even then, I’m not entirely sure it is good to be this altruistic.

Someone who really believed that we owe as much to random strangers as we do to our friends and family would never show up to any birthday parties, because any time spent at a birthday party would be more efficiently spent earning-to-give to some high-impact charity. They would never visit their family on Christmas, because plane tickets are expensive and airplanes burn a lot of carbon.

They also wouldn’t concern themselves with whether their job is satisfying or even not totally miserable; they would only care whether the total positive impact they can have on the world is positive, either directly through their work or by raising as much money as possible and donating it all to charity.

They would rest only the minimum amount they require to remain functional, eat only the barest minimum of nutritious food, and otherwise work, work, work, constantly, all the time. If their body was capable of doing the work, they would continue doing the work. For there is not a moment to waste when lives are on the line!

A world full of people like that would be horrible. We would all live our entire lives in miserable drudgery trying to maximize the amount we can donate to faceless strangers on the other side of the planet. There would be no joy or friendship in that world, only endless, endless toil.

When I bring this up in the Effective Altruism community, I’ve heard people try to argue otherwise, basically saying that we would never need everyone to devote themselves to the cause at this level, because we’d soon solve all the big problems and be able to go back to enjoying our lives. I think that’s probably true—but it also kind of misses the point.

Yes, if everyone gave their fair share, that fair share wouldn’t have to be terribly large. But we know for a fact that most people are not giving their fair share. So what now? What should we actually do? Do you really want to live in a world where the morally best people are miserable all the time sacrificing themselves at the altar of altruism?

Yes, clearly, most people don’t do enough. In fact, most people give basically nothing to high-impact charities. We should be trying to fix that. But if I am already giving far more than my fair share, far more than I would have to give if everyone else were pitching in as they should—isn’t there some point at which I’m allowed to stop? Do I have to give everything I can or else I’m a monster?

The conclusion that we ought to make ourselves utterly miserable in order to save distant strangers feels deeply unsettling. It feels even worse if we say that we ought to do so, and worse still if we feel we are bad people if we don’t.

One solution would be to say that we owe absolutely nothing to these distant strangers. Yet that clearly goes too far in the opposite direction. There are so many problems in this world that could be fixed if more people cared just a little bit about strangers on the other side of the planet. Poverty, hunger, war, climate change… if everyone in the world (or really even just everyone in power) cared even 1% as much about random strangers as they do about themselves, all these would be solved.

Should you donate to charity? Yes! You absolutely should. Please, I beseech you, give some reasonable amount to charity—perhaps 5% of your income, or if you can’t manage that, maybe 1%.

Should you make changes in your life to make the world better? Yes! Small ones. Eat less meat. Take public transit instead of driving. Recycle. Vote.

But I can’t ask you to give 90% of your income and spend your entire life trying to optimize your positive impact. Even if it worked, it would be utter madness, and the world would be terrible if all the good people tried to do that.

I feel quite strongly that this is the right approach: Give something. Your fair share, or perhaps even a bit more, because you know not everyone will.

Yet it’s surprisingly hard to come up with a moral theory on which this is the right answer.

It’s much easier to develop a theory on which we owe absolutely nothing: egoism, or any deontology on which charity is not an obligation. And of course Singer-style utilitarianism says that we owe virtually everything: As long as QALYs can be purchased cheaper by GiveWell than by spending on yourself, you should continue donating to GiveWell.

I think part of the problem is that we have developed all these moral theories as if we were isolated beings, who act in a world that is simply beyond our control. It’s much like the assumption of perfect competition in economics: I am but one producer among thousands, so whatever I do won’t affect the price.

But what we really needed was a moral theory that could work for a whole society. Something that would still make sense if everyone did it—or better yet, still make sense if half the people did it, or 10%, or 5%. The theory cannot depend upon the assumption that you are the only one following it. It cannot simply “hold constant” the rest of society.

I have come to realize that the Effective Altruism movement, while probably mostly good for the world as a whole, has actually been quite harmful to the mental health of many of its followers, including myself. It has made us feel guilty for not doing enough, pressured us to burn ourselves out working ever harder to save the world. Because we do not give our last dollar to charity, we are told that we are murderers.

But there are real murderers in this world. While you were beating yourself up over not donating enough, Vladmir Putin was continuing his invasion of Ukraine, ExxonMobil was expanding its offshore drilling, Daesh was carrying out hundreds of terrorist attacks, Qanon was deluding millions of people, and the human trafficking industry was making $150 billion per year.

In other words, by simply doing nothing you are considerably better than the real monsters responsible for most of the world’s horror.

In fact, those starving children in Africa that you’re sending money to help? They wouldn’t need it, were it not for centuries of colonial imperialism followed by a series of corrupt and/or incompetent governments ruled mainly by psychopaths.

Indeed the best way to save those people, in the long run, would be to fix their governments—as has been done in places like Namibia and Botswana. According to the World Development Indicators, the proportion of people living below the UN extreme poverty line (currently $2.15 per day at purchasing power parity) has fallen from 36% to 16% in Namibia since 2003, and from 42% to 15% in Botswana since 1984. Compare this to some countries that haven’t had good governments over that time: In Cote d’Ivoire the same poverty rate was 8% in 1985 but is 11% today (and was actually as high as 33% in 2015), while in Congo it remains at 35%. Then there are countries that are trying, but just started out so poor it’s a long way to go: Burkina Faso’s extreme poverty rate has fallen from 82% in 1994 to 30% today.

In other words, if you’re feeling bad about not giving enough, remember this: if everyone in the world were as good as you, you wouldn’t need to give a cent.

Of course, simply feeling good about yourself for not being a psychopath doesn’t accomplish very much either. Somehow we have to find a balance: Motivate people enough so that they do something, get them to do their share; but don’t pressure them to sacrifice themselves at the altar of altruism.

I think part of the problem here—and not just here—is that the people who most need to change are the ones least likely to listen. The kind of person who reads Peter Singer is already probably in the top 10% of most altruistic people, and really doesn’t need much more than a slight nudge to be doing their fair share. And meanwhile the really terrible people in the world have probably never picked up an ethics book in their lives, or if they have, they ignored everything it said.

I don’t quite know what to do about that. But I hope I can least convince you—and myself—to take some of the pressure off when it feels like we’re not doing enough.

What am I without you?

PNRJ core principles, personal , , , , , , , ,

Jul 16 JDN 2460142

When this post goes live, it will be my husband’s birthday. He will probably read it before that, as he follows my Patreon. In honor of his birthday, I thought I would make romance the topic of today’s post.

In particular, there’s a certain common sentiment that is usually viewed as romantic, which I in fact think is quite toxic. This is the notion that “Without you, I am nothing”—that in the absence of the one we love, we would be empty or worthless.

Here is this sentiment being expressed by various musicians:

I’m all out of love,
I’m so lost without you.
I know you were right,
Believing for so long.
I’m all out of love,
What am I without you?

– “All Out of Love”, Air Supply

<quotation>

Well what am I, what am I without you?
What am I without you?
Your love makes me burn.
No, no, no
Well what am I, what am I without you?
I’m nothing without you.
So lеt love burn.

– “What am I without you?”, Suede

Without you, I’m nothing.
Without you, I’m nothing.
Without you, I’m nothing.
Without you, I’m nothing at all.

– “Without you I’m nothing”, Placebo

I’ll be nothin’, nothin’, nothin’, nothin’ without you.
I’ll be nothin’, nothin’, nothin’, nothin’ without you.
Yeah
I was too busy tryna find you with someone else,
The one I couldn’t stand to be with was myself.
‘Cause I’ll be nothin’, nothin’, nothin’, nothin’ without you.

– “Nothing without you”, The Weeknd

You were my strength when I was weak.
You were my voice when I couldn’t speak.
You were my eyes when I couldn’t see.
You saw the best there was in me!
Lifted me up when I couldn’t reach,
You gave me faith ’cause you believed!
I’m everything I am,
Because you loved me.


– “Because You Loved Me”, Celine Dion

Hopefully that’s enough to convince you that this is not a rare sentiment. Moreover, these songs do seem quite romantic, and there are parts of them that still resonate quite strongly for me (particularly “Because You Loved Me”).

Yet there is still something toxic here: They make us lose sight of our own self-worth independently of our relationships with others. Humans are deeply social creatures, so of course we want to fill our lives with relationships with others, and as well we should. But you are more than your relationships.

Stranded alone on a deserted island, you would still be a person of worth. You would still have inherent dignity. You would still deserve to live.

It’s also unhealthy even from a romantic perspective. Yes, once you’ve found the love of your life and you really do plan to live together forever, tying your identity so tightly to the relationship may not be disastrous—though it could still be unhealthy and promote a cycle of codependency. But what about before you’ve made that commitment? If you are nothing without the one you love, what happens when you break up? Who are you then?

And even if you are with the love of your life, what happens if they die?

Of course our relationships do change who we are. To some degree, our identity is inextricably tied to those we love, and this would probably still be desirable even if it weren’t inevitable. But there must always be part of you that isn’t bound to anyone in particular other than yourself—and if you can’t find that part, it’s a very bad sign.

Now compare a quite different sentiment:

If I didn’t have you to hold me tight,

If I didn’t have you to lie with at night,

If I didn’t have you to share my sighs,

And to kiss me and dry my tears when I cry…

Well, I…

Really think that I would…

Probably…

Have somebody else.

– “If I Didn’t Have You”, Tim Minchin

Tim Minchin is a comedy musician, and the song is very much written in that vein. He doesn’t want you to take it too seriously.

Another song Tim Minchin wrote for his wife, “Beautiful Head”, reflects upon the inevitable chasm that separates any two minds—he knows all about her, but not what goes on inside that beautiful head. He also has another sort-of love song, called “I’ll Take Lonely Tonight”, about rejecting someone because he wants to remain faithful to his wife. It’s bittersweet despite the humor within, and honestly I think it shows a deeper sense of romance than the vast majority of love songs I’ve heard.

Yet I must keep coming back to one thing: This is a much healthier attitude.

The factual claim is almost certainly objectively true: In all probability, should you find yourself separated from your current partner, you would, sooner or later, find someone else.

None of us began our lives in romantic partnerships—so who were we before then? No doubt our relationships change us, and losing them would change us yet again. But we were something before, and should it end, we will continue to be something after.

And the attitude that our lives would be empty and worthless without the one we love is dangerously close to the sort of self-destructive self-talk I know all too well from years of depression. “I’m worthless without you, I’m nothing without you” is really not so far from “I’m worthless, I’m nothing” simpliciter. If you hollow yourself out for love, you have still hollowed yourself out.

Why, then, do we only see this healthier attitude expressed as comedy? Why can’t we take seriously the idea that love doesn’t define your whole identity? Why does the toxic self-deprecation of “I am nothing without you” sound more romantic to our ears than the honest self-respect of “I would probably have somebody else”? Why is so much of what we view as “romantic” so often unrealistic—or even harmful?

Tim Minchin himself seems to wonder, as the song alternates between serious expressions of love and ironic jabs:

And if I may conjecture a further objection,
Love is nothing to do with destined perfection.
The connection is strengthened,
The affection simply grows over time,

Like a flower,
Or a mushroom,
Or a guinea pig,
Or a vine,
Or a sponge,
Or bigotry…
…or a banana.

And love is made more powerful
By the ongoing drama of shared experience,
And the synergy of a kind of symbiotic empathy, or… something.

I believe that a healthier form of love is possible. I believe that we can unite ourselves with others in a way that does not sacrifice our own identity and self-worth. I believe that love makes us more than we were—but not that we would be nothing without it. I am more than I was because you loved me—but not everything I am.

This is already how most of us view friendship: We care for our friends, we value our relationships with them—but we would recognize it as toxic to declare that we’d be nothing without them. Indeed, there is a contradiction in our usual attitude here: If part of who I am is in my friendships, then how can losing my romantic partner render me nothing? Don’t I still at least have my friends?

I can now answer this question: What am I without you? An unhappier me. But still, me.

So, on your birthday, let me say this to you, my dear husband:

But with all my heart and all my mind,
I know one thing is true:
I have just one life and just one love,
And my love, that love is you.
And if it wasn’t for you,
Darling, you…
I really think that I would…
Possibly…
Have somebody else.

Why we need critical thinking

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, education, financial fraud, politics, public policy, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 9 JDN 2460135

I can’t find it at the moment, but awhile ago I read a surprisingly compelling post on social media (I think it was Facebook, but it could also have been Reddit) questioning the common notion that we should be teaching more critical thinking in school.

I strongly believe that we should in fact be teaching more critical thinking in school—actually I think we should replace large chunks of the current math curriculum with a combination of statistics, economics and critical thinking—but it made me realize that we haven’t done enough to defend why that is something worth doing. It’s just become a sort of automatic talking point, like, “obviously you would want more critical thinking, why are you even asking?”

So here’s a brief attempt to explain why critical thinking is something that every citizen ought to be good at, and hence why it’s worthwhile to teach it in primary and secondary school.

Critical thinking, above all, allows you to detect lies. It teaches you to look past the surface of what other people are saying and determine whether what they are saying is actually true.

And our world is absolutely full of lies.

We are constantly lied to by advertising. We are constantly lied to by spam emails and scam calls. Day in and day out, people with big smiles promise us the world, if only we will send them five easy payments of $19.99.

We are constantly lied to by politicians. We are constantly lied to by religious leaders (it’s pretty much their whole job actually).

We are often lied to by newspapers—sometimes directly and explicitly, as in fake news, but more often in subtler ways. Most news articles in the mainstream press are true in the explicit facts they state, but are missing important context; and nearly all of them focus on the wrong things—exciting, sensational, rare events rather than what’s actually important and likely to affect your life. If newspapers were an accurate reflection of genuine risk, they’d have more articles on suicide than homicide, and something like one million articles on climate change for every one on some freak accident (like that submarine full of billionaires).

We are even lied to by press releases on science, which likewise focus on new, exciting, sensational findings rather than supported, established, documented knowledge. And don’t tell me everyone already knows it; just stating basic facts about almost any scientific field will shock and impress most of the audience, because they clearly didn’t learn this stuff in school (or, what amounts to the same thing, don’t remember it). This isn’t just true of quantum physics; it’s even true of economics—which directly affects people’s lives.

Critical thinking is how you can tell when a politician has distorted the views of his opponent and you need to spend more time listening to that opponent speak. Critical thinking could probably have saved us from electing Donald Trump President.

Critical thinking is how you tell that a supplement which “has not been evaluated by the FDA” (which is to say, nearly all of them) probably contains something mostly harmless that maybe would benefit you if you were deficient in it, but for most people really won’t matter—and definitely isn’t something you can substitute for medical treatment.

Critical thinking is how you recognize that much of the history you were taught as a child was a sanitized, simplified, nationalist version of what actually happened. But it’s also how you recognize that simply inverting it all and becoming the sort of anti-nationalist who hates your own country is at least as ridiculous. Thomas Jefferson was both a pioneer of democracy and a slaveholder. He was both a hero and a villain. The world is complicated and messy—and nothing will let you see that faster than critical thinking.


Critical thinking tells you that whenever a new “financial innovation” appears—like mortgage-backed securities or cryptocurrency—it will probably make obscene amounts of money for a handful of insiders, but will otherwise be worthless if not disastrous to everyone else. (And maybe if enough people had good critical thinking skills, we could stop the next “innovation” from getting so far!)

More widespread critical thinking could even improve our job market, as interviewers would no longer be taken in by the candidates who are best at overselling themselves, and would instead pay more attention to the more-qualified candidates who are quiet and honest.

In short, critical thinking constitutes a large portion of what is ordinarily called common sense or wisdom; some of that simply comes from life experience, but a great deal of it is actually a learnable skill set.

Of course, even if it can be learned, that still raises the question of how it can be taught. I don’t think we have a sound curriculum for teaching critical thinking, and in my more cynical moments I wonder if many of the powers that be like it that way. Knowing that many—not all, but many—politicians make their careers primarily from deceiving the public, it’s not so hard to see why those same politicians wouldn’t want to support teaching critical thinking in public schools. And it’s almost funny to me watching evangelical Christians try to justify why critical thinking is dangerous—they come so close to admitting that their entire worldview is totally unfounded in logic or evidence.

But at least I hope I’ve convinced you that it is something worthwhile to know, and that the world would be better off if we could teach it to more people.

Age, ambition, and social comparison

PNRJ core principles, ethics, personal , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 2 JDN 2460128

The day I turned 35 years old was one of the worst days of my life, as I wrote about at the time. I think the only times I have felt more depressed than that day were when my father died, when I was hospitalized by an allergic reaction to lamotrigine, and when I was rejected after interviewing for jobs at GiveWell and Wizards of the Coast.

This is notable because… nothing particularly bad happened to me on my 35th birthday. It was basically an ordinary day for me. I felt horrible simply because I was turning 35 and hadn’t accomplished so many of the things I thought I would have by that point in my life. I felt my dreams shattering as the clock ticked away what chance I thought I’d have at achieving my life’s ambitions.

I am slowly coming to realize just how pathological that attitude truly is. It was ingrained in me very deeply from the very youngest age, not least because I was such a gifted child.

While studying quantum physics in college, I was warned that great physicists do all their best work before they are 30 (some even said 25). Einstein himself said as much (so it must be true, right?). It turns out that was simply untrue. It may have been largely true in the 18th and 19th centuries, and seems to have seen some resurgence during the early years of quantum theory, but today the median age at which a Nobel laureate physicist did their prize-winning work is 48. Less than 20% of eminent scientists made their great discoveries before the age of 40.

Alexander Fleming was 47 when he discovered penicillin—just about average for an eminent scientist of today. Darwin was 22 when he set sail on the Beagle, but didn’t publish On the Origin of Species until he was 50. Andre-Marie Ampere started his work in electromagnetism in his forties.

In creative arts, age seems to be no barrier at all. Julia Child published her first cookbook at 50. Stan Lee sold his first successful Marvel comic at 40. Toni Morrison was 39 when she published her first novel, and 62 when she won her Nobel. Peter Mark Roget was 73 when he published his famous thesaurus. Tolkein didn’t publish The Hobbit until he was 45.

Alan Rickman didn’t start drama school until he was 26 and didn’t have a major Hollywood role until he was 42. Samuel L. Jackson is now the third-highest-grossing actor of all time (mostly because of the Avengers movies), but he didn’t have any major movie roles until his forties. Anna Moses didn’t start painting until she was 78.

We think of entrepreneurship as a young man’s game, but Ray Kroc didn’t buy McDonalds until he was 59. Harland Sanders didn’t franchise KFC until he was 62. Eric Yuan wasn’t a vice president until the age of 37 and didn’t become a billionaire until Zoom took off in 2019—he was 49. Sam Walton didn’t found Walmart until he was 44.

Great humanitarian achievements actually seem to be more likely later in life: Gandhi did not see India achieve independence until he was 78. Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President of South Africa.

It has taken me far too long to realize this, and in fact I don’t think I have yet fully internalized it: Life is not a race. You do not “fall behind” when others achieve things younger than you did. In fact, most child prodigies grow up no more successful as adults than children who were merely gifted or even above-average. (There is another common belief that prodigies grow up miserable and stunted; that, fortunately, isn’t true either.)

Then there is queer time—the fact that, in a hostile heteronormative world, queer people often find ourselves growing up in a very different way than straight people—and crip time—the ways that coping with a disability changes your relationship with time and often forces you to manage your time in ways that others don’t. As someone who came out fairly young and is now married, queer time doesn’t seem to have affected me all that much. But I feel crip time very acutely: I have to very carefully manage when I go to bed and when I wake up, every single day, making sure I get not only enough sleep—much more sleep than most people get or most employers respect—but also that it aligns properly with my circadian rhythm. Failure to do so risks triggering severe, agonizing pain. Factoring that in, I have lost at least a few years of my life to migraines and depression, and will probably lose several more in the future.

But more importantly, we all need to learn to stop measuring ourselves against other people’s timelines. There is no prize in life for being faster. And while there are prizes for particular accomplishments (Oscars, Nobels, and so on), much of what determines whether you win such prizes is entirely beyond your control. Even people who ultimately made eminent contributions to society didn’t know in advance that they were going to, and didn’t behave all that much differently from others who tried but failed.

I do not want to make this sound easy. It is incredibly hard. I believe that I personally am especially terrible at it. Our society seems to be optimized to make us compare ourselves to others in as many ways as possible as often as possible in as biased a manner as possible.

Capitalism has many important upsides, but one of its deepest flaws is that it makes our standard of living directly dependent on what is happening in the rest of a global market we can neither understand nor control. A subsistence farmer is subject to the whims of nature; but in a supermarket, you are subject to the whims of an entire global economy.

And there is reason to think that the harm of social comparison is getting worse rather than better. If some mad villain set out to devise a system that would maximize harmful social comparison and the emotional damage it causes, he would most likely create something resembling social media.

The villain might also tack on some TV news for good measure: Here are some random terrifying events, which we’ll make it sound like could hit you at any moment (even though their actual risk is declining); then our ‘good news’ will be a litany of amazing accomplishments, far beyond anything you could reasonably hope for, which have been achieved by a cherry-picked sample of unimaginably fortunate people you have never met (yet you somehow still form parasocial bonds with because we keep showing them to you). We will make a point not to talk about the actual problems in the world (such as inequality and climate change), certainly not in any way you might be able to constructively learn from; nor will we mention any actual good news which might be relevant to an ordinary person such as yourself (such as economic growth, improved health, or reduced poverty). We will focus entirely on rare, extreme events that by construction aren’t likely to ever happen to you and are not relevant to how you should live your life.

I do not have some simple formula I can give you that will make social comparison disappear. I do not know how to shake the decades of indoctrination into a societal milieu that prizes richer and faster over all other concepts of worth. But perhaps at least recognizing the problem will weaken its power over us.