Updating your moral software

2022-10-232022-10-16 pnrj core principles, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm ableism, abortion, arc of history, argument, atheism, bigotry, Critical Race Theory, disability, fatphobia, feminism, gay marriage, history, LGBT, misogyny, morality, neurodivergence, psychopath, QALY, racism, slacktivism, transphobia

Oct 23 JDN 2459876

I’ve noticed an odd tendency among politically active people, particular social media slacktivists (a term I do not use pejoratively: slacktivism is highly cost-effective). They adopt new ideas very rapidly, trying to stay on the cutting edge of moral and political discourse—and then they denigrate and disparage anyone who fails to do the same as an irredeemable monster.

This can take many forms, such as “if you don’t buy into my specific take on Critical Race Theory, you are a racist”, “if you have any uncertainty about the widespread use of puberty blockers you are a transphobic bigot”, “if you give any credence to the medical consensus on risks of obesity you are fatphobic“, “if you think disabilities should be cured you’re an ableist”, and “if you don’t support legalizing abortion in all circumstances you are a misogynist”.

My intention here is not to evaluate any particular moral belief, though I’ll say the following: I am skeptical of Critical Race Theory, especially the 1619 project which seems to be to include substantial distortions of history. I am cautiously supportive of puberty blockers, because the medical data on their risks are ambiguous—while the sociological data on how much happier trans kids are when accepted are totally unambiguous. I am well aware of the medical data saying that the risks of obesity are overblown (but also not negligible, particular for those who are very obese). Speaking as someone with a disability that causes me frequent, agonizing pain, yes, I want disabilities to be cured, thank you very much; accommodations are nice in the meantime, but the best long-term solution is to not need accommodations. (I’ll admit to some grey areas regarding certain neurodivergences such as autism and ADHD, and I would never want to force cures on people who don’t want them; but paralysis, deafness, blindness, diabetes, depression, and migraine are all absolutely worth finding cures for—the QALY at stake here are massive—and it’s silly to say otherwise.) I think abortion should generally be legal and readily available in the first trimester (which is when most abortions happen anyway), but much more strictly regulated thereafter—but denying it to children and rape victims is a human rights violation.

What I really want to talk about today is not the details of the moral belief, but the attitude toward those who don’t share it. There are genuine racists, transphobes, fatphobes, ableists, and misogynists in the world. There are also structural institutions that can lead to discrimination despite most of the people involved having no particular intention to discriminate. It’s worthwhile to talk about these things, and to try to find ways to fix them. But does calling anyone who disagrees with you a monster accomplish that goal?

This seems particularly bad precisely when your own beliefs are so cutting-edge. If you have a really basic, well-established sort of progressive belief like “hiring based on race should be illegal”, “women should be allowed to work outside the home” or “sodomy should be legal”, then people who disagree with you pretty much are bigots. But when you’re talking about new, controversial ideas, there is bound to be some lag; people who adopted the last generation’s—or even the last year’s—progressive beliefs may not yet be ready to accept the new beliefs, and that doesn’t make them bigots.

Consider this: Were you born believing in your current moral and political beliefs?

I contend that you were not. You may have been born intelligent, open-minded, and empathetic. You may have been born into a progressive, politically-savvy family. But the fact remains that any particular belief you hold about race, or gender, or ethics was something you had to learn. And if you learned it, that means that at some point you didn’t already know it. How would you have felt back then, if, instead of calmly explaining it to you, people called you names for not believing in it?

Now, perhaps it is true that as soon as you heard your current ideas, you immediately adopted them. But that may not be the case—it may have taken you some time to learn or change your mind—and even if it was, it’s still not fair to denigrate anyone who takes a bit longer to come around. There are many reasons why someone might not be willing to change their beliefs immediately, and most of them are not indicative of bigotry or deep moral failings.

It may be helpful to think about this in terms of updating your moral software. You were born with a very minimal moral operating system (emotions such as love and guilt, the capacity for empathy), and over time you have gradually installed more and more sophisticated software on top of that OS. If someone literally wasn’t born with the right OS—we call these people psychopaths—then, yes, you have every right to hate, fear, and denigrate them. But most of the people we’re talking about do have that underlying operating system, they just haven’t updated all their software to the same version as yours. It’s both unfair and counterproductive to treat them as irredeemably defective simply because they haven’t updated to the newest version yet. They have the hardware, they have the operating system; maybe their download is just a little slower than yours.

In fact, if you are very fast to adopt new, trendy moral beliefs, you may in fact be adopting them too quickly—they haven’t been properly vetted by human experience just yet. You can think of this as like a beta version: The newest update has some great new features, but it’s also buggy and unstable. It may need to be fixed before it is really ready for widespread release. If that’s the case, then people aren’t even wrong not to adopt them yet! It isn’t necessarily bad that you have adopted the new beliefs; we need beta testers. But you should be aware of your status as a beta tester and be prepared both to revise your own beliefs if needed, and also to cut other people slack if they disagree with you.

I understand that it can be immensely frustrating to be thoroughly convinced that something is true and important and yet see so many people disagreeing with it. (I am an atheist activist after all, so I absolutely know what that feels like.) I understand that it can be immensely painful to watch innocent people suffer because they have to live in a world where other people have harmful beliefs. But you aren’t changing anyone’s mind or saving anyone from harm by calling people names. Patience, tact, and persuasion will win the long game, and the long game is really all we have.

And if it makes you feel any better, the long game may not be as long as it seems. The arc of history may have tighter curvature than we imagine. We certainly managed a complete flip of the First World consensus on gay marriage in just a single generation. We may be able to achieve similarly fast social changes in other areas too. But we haven’t accomplished the progress we have so far by being uncharitable or aggressive toward those who disagree.

I am emphatically not saying you should stop arguing for your beliefs. We need you to argue for your beliefs. We need you to argue forcefully and passionately. But when doing so, try not to attack the people who don’t yet agree with you—for they are precisely the people we need to listen to you.

How to pack the court

2022-07-102022-07-03 pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, personal, politics, public policy abortion, Dobbs v Jackson, Donald Trump, Loving v Virginia, Obergefell v Hodges, Republican, Roe v Wade, Supreme Court

Jul 10 JDN 2459790

By now you have no doubt heard the news that Roe v. Wade was overturned. The New York Times has an annotated version of the full opinion.

My own views on abortion are like those of about 2/3 of Americans: More nuanced than can be neatly expressed by ‘pro-choice’ or ‘pro-life’, much more comfortable with first-trimester abortion (which is what 90% of abortions are, by the way) than later, and opposed to overturning Roe v. Wade in its entirety. I also find great appeal in Clinton’s motto on the issue: “safe, legal, and rare”.Several years ago I moderated an online discussion group that reached what we called the Twelve Week Compromise: Abortion would be legal for any reason up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, after which it would only be legal for extenuating circumstances including rape, incest, fetal nonviability, and severe health risk to the mother. This would render the vast majority of abortions legal without simply saying that it should be permitted without question. Roe v. Wade was actually slightly more permissive than this, but it was itself a very sound compromise.

But even if you didn’t like Roe v. Wade, you should be outraged at the manner in which it was overturned. If the Supreme Court can simply change its mind on rights that have been established for nearly 50 years, then none of our rights are safe. And in chilling comments, Clarence Thomas has declared that this is his precise intention: “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.” That is to say, Thomas wants to remove our rights to use contraception and have same-sex relationships. (If Lawrence were overturned, sodomy could be criminalized in several states!)

The good news here is that even the other conservative justices seem much less inclined to overturn these other precedents. Kavanaugh’s concurrent opinion explicitly states he has no intention of overturning “Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965); Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U. S. 438 (1972); Loving v. Virginia, 388 U. S. 1 (1967); and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015)”. It seems quite notable that Thomas did not mention Loving v. Virginia, seeing as it was made around the same time as Roe v. Wade, based on very similar principles—and it affects him personally. And even if these precedents are unlikely to be overturned immediately, this ruling shows that the security of all of our rights can depend on the particular inclinations of individual justices.

The Supreme Court is honestly a terrible institution. Courts should not be more powerful than legislatures, lifetime appointments reek of monarchism, and the claim of being ‘apolitical’ that was dubious from the start is now obviously ludicrous. But precisely because it is so powerful, reforming it will be extremely difficult.

The first step is to pack the court. The question is no longer whether we should pack the court, but how, and why we didn’t do it sooner.

What does it mean to pack the court? Increase the number of justices, appointing new ones who are better than the current ones. (Since almost any randomly-selected American would be better than Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, or Brent Kavanaugh, this wouldn’t be hard.) This is 100% Constitutional, as the Constitution does not in any way restrict the number of justices. It can simply be done by an act of Congress.

But of course we can’t stop there. President Biden could appoint four more justices, and then whoever comes after him could appoint another three, and before we know it the Supreme Court has twenty-seven justices and each new President is expected to add a few more.

No, we need to fix the number of justices so that it can’t be increased any further. Ideally this would be done by Constitutional Amendment, though the odds of getting such a thing passed seem rather slim. But there is in fact a sensible way to add new justices now and then justify not adding any more later, and that is to tie justices to federal circuits.

There are currently 13 US federal circuit courts. If we added 4 more Supreme Court justices, there would be 13 Supreme Court justices. Each could even be assigned to be the nominal head of that federal circuit, and responsible for being the first to read appeals coming from that circuit.

Which justice goes where? Well, what if we let the circuits themselves choose? The selection could be made by a popular vote among the people who live there. Make the federal circuit a federal popular vote. The justice responsible for the federal circuit can also be the Chief Justice.

That would also require a Constitutional Amendment, but it would, at a stroke, fundamentally reform what the Supreme Court is and how its justices are chosen. For now, we could simply add three new justices, making the current number 13. Then they could decide amongst themselves who will get what circuit until we implement the full system to let circuits choose their justices.

I’m well aware that electing judges is problematic—but at this point I don’t think we have a choice. (I would also prefer to re-arrange the circuits: it’s weird that DC gets its own circuit instead of being part of circuit 4, and circuit 9 has way more people than circuit 1.) We can’t simply trust each new President to appoint a new justice whenever one happens to retire or die and then leave that justice in place for decades to come. Not in a world where someone like Donald Trump can be elected President.

A lot of centrist people are uncomfortable with such a move, seeing it as ‘playing dirty’. But it’s not. It’s playing hardball—taking seriously the threat that the current Republican Party poses to the future of American government and society, and taking substantive steps to fight that threat. (After its authoritarian shift that started in the mid 2000s but really took off under Trump, the Republican Party now has more in common with far-right extremist parties like Fidesz in Hungary than with mainstream center-right parties like the Tories.) But there is absolutely nothing un-Constitutional about this plan. It’s doing everything possible within the law.

We should have done this before they started overturning landmark precedents. But it’s not too late to do it before they overturn any more.

Moral disagreement is not bad faith

2020-06-072020-05-31 pnrj cognitive science, core principles, current events, public policy abortion, argument, bad faith, belief, belief in belief, Bible, Black Lives Matter, Christianity, ethics, good faith, Jesus, morality, Oxfam, UNICEF, war

Jun 7 JDN 2459008

One of the most dangerous moves to make in an argument is to accuse your opponent of bad faith. It’s a powerful, and therefore tempting, maneuver: If they don’t even really believe what they are saying, then you can safely ignore basically whatever comes out of their mouth. And part of why this is so tempting is that it is in fact occasionally true—people do sometimes misrepresent their true beliefs in various ways for various reasons. On the Internet especially, sometimes people are just trolling.

But unless you have really compelling evidence that someone is arguing in bad faith, you should assume good faith. You should assume that whatever they are asserting is what they actually believe. For if you assume bad faith and are wrong, you have just cut off any hope of civil discourse between the two of you. You have made it utterly impossible for either side to learn anything or change their mind in any way. If you assume good faith and are wrong, you may have been overly charitable; but in the end you are the one that is more likely to persuade any bystanders, not the one who was arguing in bad faith.

Furthermore, it is important to really make an effort to understand your opponent’s position as they understand it before attempting to respond to it. Far too many times, I have seen someone accused of bad faith by an opponent who simply did not understand their worldview—and did not even seem willing to try to understand their worldview.

In this post, I’m going to point out some particularly egregious examples of this phenomenon that I’ve found, all statements made by left-wing people in response to right-wing people. Why am I focusing on these? Well, for one thing, it’s as important to challenge bad arguments on your own side as it is to do so on the other side. I also think I’m more likely to be persuasive to a left-wing audience. I could find right-wing examples easily enough, but I think it would be less useful: It would be too tempting to think that this is something only the other side does.

Example 1: “Republicans Have Stopped Pretending to Care About Life”

The phrase “pro-life” means thinking that abortion is wrong. That’s all it means. It’s jargon at this point. The phrase has taken on this meaning independent of its constituent parts, just as a red herring need not be either red or a fish.

Stop accusing people of not being “truly pro-life” because they don’t adopt some other beliefs that are not related to abortion. Even if those would be advancing life in some sense (most people probably think that most things they think are good advance life in some sense!), they aren’t relevant to the concept of being “pro-life”. Moreover, being “pro-life” in the traditional conservative sense isn’t even about minimizing the harm of abortion or the abortion rate. It’s about emphasizing the moral wrongness of abortion itself, and often even criminalizing it.

I don’t think this is really so hard to understand. If someone truly, genuinely believes that abortion is murdering a child, it’s quite clear why they won’t be convinced by attempts at minimizing harm or trying to reduce the abortion rate via contraception or other social policy. Many policies are aimed at “reducing the demand for abortion”; would you want to “reduce the demand for murder”? No, you’d want murderers to be locked up. You wouldn’t care what their reasons were, and you wouldn’t be interested in using social policies to address those reasons. It’s not even hard to understand why this would be such an important issue to them, overriding almost anything else: If you thought that millions of people were murdering children you would consider that an extremely important issue too.

If you want to convince people to support Roe v. Wade, you’re going to have to change their actual belief that abortion is murder. You may even be able to convince them that they don’t really think abortion is murder—many conservatives support the death penalty for murder, but very few do so for abortion. But they clearly do think that abortion is a grave moral wrong, and you can’t simply end-run around that by calling them hypocrites because they don’t care about whatever other issue you think they should care about.

Example 2: “Stop pretending to care about human life if you support wars in the Middle East”

I had some trouble finding the exact wording of the meme I originally saw with this sentiment, but the gist of it was basically that if you support bombing Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and/or Syria, you have lost all legitimacy to claiming that you care about human life.

Say what you will about these wars (though to be honest I think what the US has done in Libya and Syria has done more good than harm), but simply supporting a war does not automatically undermine all your moral legitimacy. The kind of radical pacifism that requires us to never kill anyone ever is utterly unrealistic; the question is and has always been “Which people is it okay to kill, when and how and why?” Some wars are justified; we have to accept that.

It would be different if these were wars of genocidal extermination; I can see a case for saying that anyone who supported the Holocaust or the Rwandan Genocide has lost all moral legitimacy. But even then it isn’t really accurate to say that those people don’t care about human life; it’s much more accurate to say that they have assigned the group of people they want to kill to a subhuman status. Maybe you would actually get more traction by saying “They are human beings too!” rather than by accusing people of not believing in the value of human life.

And clearly these are not wars of extermination—if the US military wanted to exterminate an entire nation of people, they could do so much more efficiently than by using targeted airstrikes and conventional warfare. Remember: They have nuclear weapons. Even if you think that they wouldn’t use nukes because of fear of retaliation (Would Russia or China really retaliate using their own nukes if the US nuked Afghanistan or Iran?), it’s clear that they could have done a lot more to kill a lot more innocent people if that were actually their goal. It’s one thing to say they don’t take enough care not to kill innocent civilians—I agree with that. It’s quite another to say that they actively try to kill innocent civilians—that’s clearly not what is happening.

Example 3: “Stop pretending to be Christian if you won’t help the poor.”

This one I find a good deal more tempting: In the Bible, Jesus does spend an awful lot more words on helping the poor than he does on, well, almost anything else; and he doesn’t even once mention abortion or homosexuality. (The rest of the Bible does at least mention homosexuality, but it really doesn’t have any clear mentions of abortion.) So it really is tempting to say that anyone who doesn’t make helping the poor their number one priority can’t really be a Christian.

But the world is more complicated than that. People can truly and deeply believe some aspects of a religion while utterly rejecting others. They can do this more or less arbitrarily, in a way that may not even be logically coherent. They may even honestly believe that every single word of the Bible to be the absolute perfect truth of an absolute perfect God, and yet there are still passages you could point them to that they would have to admit they don’t believe in. (There are literally hundreds of explicit contradictions in the Bible. Many are minor—though still undermine any claim to absolute perfect truth—but some are really quite substantial. Does God forgive and forget, or does he visit revenge upon generations to come? That’s kind of a big deal! And should we be answering fools or not?) In some sense they don’t really believe that every word is true, then; but they do seem to believe in believing it.

Yes, it’s true; people can worship a penniless son of a carpenter who preached peace and charity and at the same time support cutting social welfare programs and bombing the Middle East. Such a worldview may not be entirely self-consistent; it’s certainly not the worldview that Jesus himself espoused. But it nevertheless is quite sincerely believed by many millions of people.

It may still be useful to understand the Bible in order to persuade Christians to help the poor more. There are certainly plenty of passages you can point them to where Jesus talks about how important it is to help the poor. Likewise, Jesus doesn’t seem to much like the rich, so it is fair to ask: How Christian is it for Republicans to keep cutting taxes on the rich? (I literally laughed out loud when I first saw this meme: “Celebrate Holy Week By Flogging a Banker: It’s What Jesus Would Have Done!“) But you should not accuse people of “pretending to be Christian”. They really do strongly identify themselves as Christian, and would sooner give up almost anything else about their identity. If you accuse them of pretending, all that will do is shut down the conversation.

Now, after all that, let me give one last example that doesn’t fit the trend, one example where I really do think the other side is acting in bad faith.

Example 4: “#AllLivesMatter is a lie. You don’t actually think all lives matter.”

I think this one is actually true. If you truly believed that all lives matter, you wouldn’t post the hashtag #AllLivesMatter in response to #BlackLivesMatter protests against police brutality.

First of all, you’d probably be supporting those protests. But even if you didn’t for some reason, that isn’t how you would use the hashtag. As a genuine expression of caring, the hashtag #AllLivesMatter would only really make sense for something like Oxfam or UNICEF: Here are these human lives that are in danger and we haven’t been paying enough attention to them, and here, you can follow my hashtag and give some money to help them because all lives matter. If it were really about all lives mattering, then you’d see the hashtag pop up after a tsunami in Southeast Asia or a famine in central Africa. (For awhile I tried actually using it that way; I quickly found that it was overwhelmed by the bad faith usage and decided to give up.)

No, this hashtag really seems to be trying to use a genuinely reasonable moral norm—all lives matter—as a weapon against a political movement. We don’t see #AllLivesMatter popping up asking people to help save some lives—it’s always as a way of shouting down other people who want to save some lives. It’s a glib response that lets you turn away and ignore their pleas, without ever actually addressing the substance of what they are saying. If you really believed that all lives matter, you would not be so glib; you would want to understand how so many people are suffering and want to do something to help them. Even if you ultimately disagreed with what they were saying, you would respect them enough to listen.

The counterpart #BlueLivesMatter isn’t in bad faith, but it is disturbing in a different way: What are ‘blue lives’? People aren’t born police officers. They volunteer for that job. They can quit if want. No one can quit being Black. Working as a police officer isn’t even especially dangerous! But it’s not a bad faith argument: These people really do believe that the lives of police officers are worth more—apparently much more—than the lives of Black civilians.

I do admit, the phrasing “#BlackLivesMatter” is a bit awkward, and could be read to suggest that other lives don’t matter, but it takes about 2 minutes of talking to someone (or reading a blog by someone) who supports those protests to gather that this is not their actual view. Perhaps they should have used #BlackLivesMatterToo, but when your misconception is that easily rectified the responsibility to avoid it falls on you. (Then again, some people do seem to stoke this misconception: I was quite annoyed when a question was asked at a Democratic debate: “Do Black Lives Matter, or Do All Lives Matter?” The correct answer of course is “All lives matter, which is why I support the Black Lives Matter movement.”)

So, yes, bad faith arguments do exist, and sometimes we need to point them out. But I implore you, consider that a last resort, a nuclear option you’ll only deploy when all other avenues have been exhausted. Once you accuse someone of bad faith, you have shut down the conversation completely—preventing you, them, and anyone else who was listening from having any chance of learning or changing their mind.

The “market for love” is a bad metaphor

2019-02-142019-02-10 pnrj core principles, critique of neoclassical economics abortion, Antifa, Bayesian, China, climate change, dating, democracy, Electoral College, equivocation, fascism, feminism, love, market, motte and bailey, range voting, rationality, relationships, sex work

Feb 14 JDN 2458529

Valentine’s Day was this past week, so let’s talk a bit about love.

Economists would never be accused of being excessively romantic. To most neoclassical economists, just about everything is a market transaction. Love is no exception.

There are all sorts of articles and books and an even larger number of research papers going back multiple decades and continuing all the way through until today using the metaphor of the “marriage market”.

In a few places, marriage does actually function something like a market: In China, there are places where your parents will hire brokers and matchmakers to select a spouse for you. But even this isn’t really a market for love or marriage. It’s a market for matchmaking services. The high-tech version of this is dating sites like OkCupid.
And of course sex work actually occurs on markets; there is buying and selling of services at monetary prices. There is of course a great deal worth saying on that subject, but it’s not my topic for today.

But in general, love is really nothing like a market. First of all, there is no price. This alone should be sufficient reason to say that we’re not actually dealing with a market. The whole mechanism that makes a market a market is the use of prices to achieve equilibrium between supply and demand.

A price doesn’t necessarily have to be monetary; you can barter apples for bananas, or trade in one used video game for another, and we can still legitimately call that a market transaction with a price.

But love isn’t like that either. If your relationship with someone is so transactional that you’re actually keeping a ledger of each thing they do for you and each thing you do for them so that you could compute a price for services, that isn’t love. It’s not even friendship. If you really care about someone, you set such calculations aside. You view their interests and yours as in some sense shared, aligned toward common goals. You stop thinking in terms of “me” and “you” and start thinking in terms of “us”. You don’t think “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” You think “We’re scratching each other’s backs today.”

This is of course not to say that love never involves conflict. On the contrary, love always involves conflict. Successful relationships aren’t those where conflict never happens, they are those where conflict is effectively and responsibly resolved. Your interests and your loved ones’ are never completely aligned; there will always be some residual disagreement. But the key is to realize that your interests are still mostly aligned; those small vectors of disagreement should be outweighed by the much larger vector of your relationship.

And of course, there can come a time when that is no longer the case. Obviously, there is domestic abuse, which should absolutely be a deal-breaker for anyone. But there are other reasons why you may find that a relationship ultimately isn’t working, that your interests just aren’t as aligned as you thought they were. Eventually those disagreement vectors just get too large to cancel out. This is painful, but unavoidable. But if you reach the point where you are keeping track of actions on a ledger, that relationship is already dead. Sooner or later, someone is going to have to pull the plug.

Very little of what I’ve said in the preceding paragraphs is likely to be controversial. Why, then, would economists think that it makes sense to treat love as a market?

I think this comes down to a motte and bailey doctrine. A more detailed explanation can be found at that link, but the basic idea of a motte and bailey is this: You have a core set of propositions that is highly defensible but not that interesting (the “motte”), and a broader set of propositions that are very interesting, but not as defensible (the “bailey”). The terms are related to a medieval defensive strategy, in which there was a small, heavily fortified tower called a motte, surrounded by fertile, useful land, the bailey. The bailey is where you actually want to live, but it’s hard to defend; so if the need arises, you can pull everyone back into the motte to fight off attacks. But nobody wants to live in the motte; it’s just a cramped stone tower. There’s nothing to eat or enjoy there.

The motte comprised of ideas that almost everyone agrees with. The bailey is the real point of contention, the thing you are trying to argue for—which, by construction, other people must not already agree with.

Here are some examples, which I have intentionally chosen from groups I agree with:

Feminism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “women are people”; the bailey is abortion rights, affirmative consent and equal pay legislation.

Rationalism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “rationality is good”; the bailey is atheism, transhumanism, and Bayesian statistics.

Anti-fascism can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “fascists are bad”; the bailey is black bloc Antifa and punching Nazis.

Even democracy can be a motte and bailey doctrine. The motte is “people should vote for their leaders”; my personal bailey is abolition of the Electoral College, a younger voting age, and range voting.

Using a motte and bailey doctrine does not necessarily make you wrong. But it’s something to be careful about, because as a strategy it can be disingenuous. Even if you think that the propositions in the bailey all follow logically from the propositions in the motte, the people you’re talking to may not think so, and in fact you could simply be wrong. At the very least, you should be taking the time to explain how one follows from the other; and really, you should consider whether the connection is actually as tight as you thought, or if perhaps one can believe that rationality is good without being Bayesian or believe that women are people without supporting abortion rights.

I think when economists describe love or marriage as a “market”, they are applying a motte and bailey doctrine. They may actually be doing something even worse than that, by equivocating on the meaning of “market”. But even if any given economist uses the word “market” totally consistently, the fact that different economists of the same broad political alignment use the word differently adds up to a motte and bailey doctrine.

The doctrine is this: “There have always been markets.”

The motte is something like this: “Humans have always engaged in interaction for mutual benefit.”

This is undeniably true. In fact, it’s not even uninteresting. As mottes go, it’s a pretty nice one; it’s worth spending some time there. In the endless quest for an elusive “human nature”, I think you could do worse than to focus on our universal tendency to engage in interaction for mutual benefit. (Don’t other species do it too? Yes, but that’s just it—they are precisely the ones that seem most human.)

And if you want to define any mutually-beneficial interaction as a “market trade”, I guess it’s your right to do that. I think this is foolish and confusing, but legislating language has always been a fool’s errand.

But of course the more standard meaning of the word “market” implies buyers and sellers exchanging goods and services for monetary prices. You can extend it a little to include bartering, various forms of financial intermediation, and the like; but basically you’re still buying and selling.

That makes this the bailey: “Humans have always engaged in buying and selling of goods and services at prices.”

And that, dear readers, is ahistorical nonsense. We’ve only been using money for a few thousand years, and it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that we actually started getting the majority of our goods and services via market trades. Economists like to tell a story where bartering preceded the invention of money, but there’s basically no evidence of that. Bartering seems to be what people do when they know how money works but don’t have any money to work with.

Before there was money, there were fundamentally different modes of interaction: Sharing, ritual, debts of honor, common property, and, yes, love.

These were not markets. They perhaps shared some very broad features of markets—such as the interaction for mutual benefit—but they lacked the defining attributes that make a market a market.

Why is this important? Because this doctrine is used to transform more and more of our lives into actual markets, on the grounds that they were already “markets”, and we’re just using “more efficient” kinds of markets. But in fact what’s happening is we are trading one fundamental mode of human interaction for another: Where we used to rely upon norms or trust or mutual affection, we instead rely upon buying and selling at prices.

In some cases, this actually is a good thing: Markets can be very powerful, and are often our best tool when we really need something done. In particular, it’s clear at this point that norms and trust are not sufficient to protect us against climate change. All the “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” PSAs in the world won’t do as much as a carbon tax. When millions of lives are at stake, we can’t trust people to do the right thing; we need to twist their arms however we can.

But markets are in some sense a brute-force last-resort solution; they commodify and alienate (Marx wasn’t wrong about that), and despite our greatly elevated standard of living, the alienation and competitive pressure of markets seem to be keeping most of us from really achieving happiness.

This is why it’s extremely dangerous to talk about a “market for love”. Love is perhaps the last bastion of our lives that has not been commodified into a true market, and if it goes, we’ll have nothing left. If sexual relationships built on mutual affection were to disappear in favor of apps that will summon a prostitute or a sex robot at the push of a button, I would count that as a great loss for human civilization. (How we should regulate prostitution or sex robots are a different question, which I said I’d leave aside for this post.) A “market for love” is in fact a world with no love at all.

What really works against bigotry

2018-09-302018-09-23 pnrj cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, personal, public policy, Uncategorized abortion, bigotry, Brett Kavanaugh, Culture, Donald Trump, immigration, LGBT, persuasion, politics, race, racism, sexism, women

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.

We must stop Kavanaugh now!

2018-09-162018-09-16 pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, public policy abortion, Antonin Scalia, Brett Kavanaugh, corruption, Dianne Feinstein, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Paul Manafort, politics, Robert Mueller, US Supreme Court

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.

Why is redistribution of wealth so difficult to achieve in the US?

2018-01-282018-01-21 pnrj current events, inequality, public policy abortion, alcohol tax, corporate tax, crime, Donald Trump, income, inequality, partisanship, polarization, politics, pollution, redistribution, tax reform, taxes, wealth

Jan 28 JDN 2458147

Income and wealth in equality is much higher in the US than in other First World countries. Within the OECD, only Mexico, Turkey, and Chile have higher income inequality than we do. Over 60% of Americans agree that the distribution of wealth in the US is unfair. Furthermore, the majority of Americans support the use of taxes and transfers to directly redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.

Why, then, is it so hard to actually get any meaningful wealth redistribution in the United States?

Part of it is surely partisan differences: While about 70% of Democrats favor redistributive taxes, about 70% of Republicans oppose them. So one would not expect a move toward redistribution when Republicans control all three branches of government, and indeed we have seen quite the opposite. (Then again, one would also not expect a government shutdown under one-party rule, and yet that is what we have.)

But even most Republicans say they would like to see a much more equal distribution of wealth than the one we actually have. In fact, when I as an inequality economist look at the distribution of wealth people say they want, it looks a little too equal! Even Denmark and Sweden aren’t that egalitarian! I know more or less how to get from here to Denmark; but from here to “Equalden” looks like an awful long way. So if this is really the distribution of wealth people want, we need to be doing a huge amount of wealth redistribution—but we’re hardly doing any at all.

Indeed, we didn’t actually see all that much redistribution of wealth when Democrats more or less controlled all three branches in the period from 2008-2010. We may have seen a little bit shortly thereafter, and tax policy typically does come with a delay of a year or two. But as you can see in this graph, the Great Recession did more to reduce the top 1% income share than any tax policy changes:

US_top_income_share_1pct

The biggest changes made to our tax code under Obama were actually the handling of capital gains; the increase of the top rate on capital gains from 15% to 20%, plus the 3.8% capital surtax from the Affordable Care Act raised the tax bill for the top 0.1% by tens of billions of dollars. Surprisingly, Trump’s tax cuts don’t actually remove these provisions, though they did dramatically cut the corporate tax rate, which will probably have a similar effect on the income distribution.

To be honest, I’m not as disappointed with Trump’s tax cuts as I thought I would be. Some genuinely good ideas (like the reduction of the mortgage interest deduction, tighter restrictions on carried interest, and increase of the personal standard deduction) and some reasonable but debatable ideas (like cuts to the corporate tax rate, switching to a territorial corporate tax system, limits to deductions on corporate debt payments, removal of the deduction of state taxes, and extensions of 529 savings plans to private primary and secondary schools) were mixed in with the absolutely ludicrous and terrible ideas (like eliminating the Obamacare mandate, doubling the estate tax threshold, cutting the alcohol tax, and allowing offshore drilling in Alaska [One of these things is not like the other ones….]). Some of the terrible ideas, like ending the deduction of student loan interest and tuition waivers, were actually removed in the final version of the bill. Of course, you won’t be surprised when I tell you that the overall US tax system became a lot less progressive as a result of this bill. And even if cutting the corporate tax while raising the capital gains tax is probably a good idea (as I and many economists believe), cutting the corporate tax without raising the capital gains tax probably isn’t.

(An aside: For how much they claim to be “tough on crime”, it’s always kind of baffling to see how often Republicans like to cut alcohol taxes and pollution regulations, which are pretty much the only things that have ever been empirically shown to actually reduce crime. There is some evidence that maybe more policing also helps, but if so, it does so in a far less cost-effective way—indeed, the direct cost of alcohol taxes and pollution taxes is negative. Even if they didn’t work at all, they’d still be worth it just because they raise revenue. I begin to suspect that Republicans don’t actually want to reduce crime, because they know they can use the fear of crime to win votes; they simply want to appear tough on crime, and so they press as hard as they can for more policing and incarceration in the country that already has the highest incarceration rate in the world. This may be a more general phenomenon: While Democrats want to actually solve problems, Republicans want to appear to solve problems while actually exacerbating them, thus insuring their own job security. Compare how Bush kept talking about Osama bin laden while invading Iraq, and Obama actually killed Osama bin Laden. Is this too cynical? Can anything be too cynical in the era of Trump? There were 50,000 Russian bots on Twitter trying to tilt our election! Mueller’s FBI investigation is already implicating several of Trump’s top officials! Everything that seemed like paranoia or cynicism just a few years ago is turning out to be entirely true.)

This is what seems to happen: Year after year, we raise some taxes, then we cut some taxes. Then when raise some taxes, then we cut some taxes. The tax system gets a little more progressive for a few years and inequality begins to fall, and then those changes are removed and inequality begins to rise again. Back and forth and round and round we go.

Is there some way to lock in these tax changes for a longer period of time? The only way I can see would be a change in voter behavior: Keep voting in Democrats to all branches of government consistently for 20 years, and then maybe we would see a serious reduction in income and wealth inequality. Or at least stop voting in Republicans; aside from the Democrats, there are some third parties that would also support redistribution, like the Green Party. And yes, it really is about voting behavior: As prevalent as gerrymandering has become, as terrible as the Electoral College is, as widespread as voter suppression has gotten, Trump only won because 63 million Americans voted for him. Even after everything he’s done, Trumps’ approval rating is still about 39%. As long as there are enough people in this country whose partisan loyalty so strongly outweighs any rational assessment of policy, we are going to continue to see such travesties continue.

It would certainly help if our voting system were fairer, so that third parties had a better chance at taking seats. But it’s also difficult to see how that could happen any time soon. For now, the best I can come up with is trying to show people two things:

First, most Americans favor redistribution of wealth. You’re not alone in wanting that. It’s not some fringe opinion.

Second, there is a real difference between Democrats and Republicans on this issue. The canard “The two parties are the same” is the most untrue it has been in at least twenty years.

I would even understand if there are other issues you consider more important than wealth redistribution. Ecological sustainability is the most defensible—you can’t eat GNP—though that would push you even harder toward the left. Among things that might push you right, I can understand being concerned about higher taxes hurting economic growth, and while I think the view that abortion is murder is ludicrous, given that as your belief I can understand why you would want to prioritize fighting abortion. (If I thought we were murdering millions of babies every year, I’d be pretty mad too! Of course, you should be glad, then, that the US abortion rate has been falling. Right? You know about that, right?)

What I don’t get, however, is people who thought that voting for Donald Trump would help working people. I don’t understand how you can see someone who epitomizes everything that is wrong with the billionaire rentier class and think, “Yeah, he seems like he’s definitely a populist. That guy who was born insanely rich and made even more mind-boggling amounts of money by lying and screwing people over is definitely going to look out for folks like me.”

If I understood that, maybe I would know where to go from here. But people’s political beliefs can be astonishingly intransigent to evidence. Politics is the mind-killer.

Building a wider tent is not compromising on your principles

2017-08-202017-08-13 pnrj core principles, current events, public policy abortion, DINO, ideology, legislation, median voter theorem, Nazis, partisan, politics, voting

August 20, JDN 2457986

After humiliating defeats in the last election, the Democratic Party is now debating how to recover and win future elections. One proposal that has been particularly hotly contested is over whether to include candidates who agree with the Democratic Party on most things, but still oppose abortion.

This would almost certainly improve the chances of winning seats in Congress, particularly in the South. But many have argued that this is a bridge too far, it amounts to compromising on fundamental principles, and the sort of DINO (Democrat-In-Name-Only) we’d end up with are no better than no Democrats at all.

I consider this view deeply misguided; indeed, I think it’s a good portion of the reason why we got so close to winning the culture wars and yet suddenly there are literal Nazis marching in the streets. Insisting upon ideological purity on every issue is a fantastic way to amplify the backlash against you and ensure that you will always lose.

To show why, I offer you a simple formal model. Let’s make it as abstract as possible, and say there are five different issues, A, B, C, D, and E, and on each of them you can either choose Yes or No.

Furthermore, let’s suppose that on every single issue, the opinion of a 60% majority is “Yes”. If you are a political party that wants to support “Yes” on every issue, which of these options should you choose:
Option 1: Only run candidates who support “Yes” on every single issue

Option 2: Only run candidates who support “Yes” on at least 4 out of 5 issues

Option 3: Only run candidates who support “Yes” on at least 3 out of 5 issues

For now, let’s assume that people’s beliefs within a district are very strongly correlated (people believe what their friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors believe). Then assume that the beliefs of a given district are independently and identically distributed (each person essentially flips a weighted coin to decide their belief on each issue). These are of course wildly oversimplified, but they keep the problem simple, and I can relax them a little in a moment.

Suppose there are 100 districts up for grabs (like, say, the US Senate). Then there will be:

(0.6)^5*100 = 8 districts that support “Yes” on every single issue.

5*(0.6)^4*(0.4)*100 = 26 districts that support “Yes” on 4 out of 5 issues.

10*(0.6)^3*(0.4)^2*100 = 34 districts that support “Yes” on 3 out of 5 issues.

10*(0.6)^2*(0.4)^3*100 = 23 districts that support “Yes” on 2 out of 5 issues.

5*(0.6)^1*(0.4)^4*100 = 8 districts that support “Yes” on 1 out of 5 issues.

(0.4)^5*100 = 1 district that doesn’t support “Yes” on any issues.

The ideological purists want us to choose option 1, so let’s start with that. If you only run candidates who support “Yes” on every single issue, you will win only eight districts. Your party will lose 92 out of 100 seats. You will become a minor, irrelevant party of purists with no actual power—despite the fact that the majority of the population agrees with you on any given issue.

If you choose option 2, and run candidates who differ at most by one issue, you will still lose, but not by nearly as much. You’ll claim a total of 34 seats. That might at least be enough to win some votes or drive some committees.

If you want a majority, you need to go with option 3, and run candidates who agree on at least 3 out of 5 issues. Only then will you win 68 seats and be able to drive legislative outcomes.

But wait! you may be thinking. You only won in that case by including people who don’t agree with your core platform; so what use is it to win the seats? You could win every seat by including every possible candidate, and then accomplish absolutely nothing!

Yet notice that even under option 3, you’re still only including people who agree with the majority of your platform. You aren’t including absolutely everyone. Indeed, once you parse out all the combinations, it becomes clear that by running these candidates, you will win the vote on almost every issue.

8 of your candidates are A1, B1, C1, D1, E1, perfect partisans; they’ll support you every time.

6 of your candidates are A1, B1, C1, D1, E0, disagreeing only on issue E.

5 of your candidates are A1, B1, C1, D0, E1, disagreeing only on issue D.

5 of your candidates are A1, B1, C0, D1, E1, disagreeing only on issue C.

5 of your candidates are A1, B0, C1, D1, E1, disagreeing only on issue B.

5 of your candidates are A0, B1, C1, D1, E1, disagreeing only on issue A.

4 of your candidates are A1, B1, C1, D0, E0, disagreeing on issues D and E.

4 of your candidates are A0, B1, C1, D0, E0, disagreeing on issues E and A.

4 of your candidates are A0, B0, C1, D1, E1, disagreeing on issues B and A.

4 of your candidates are A1, B0, C1, D1, E0, disagreeing on issues E and B.

3 of your candidates are A1, B1, C0, D0, E1, disagreeing on issues D and C.

3 of your candidates are A1, B0, C0, D1, E1, disagreeing on issues C and B.

3 of your candidates are A0, B1, C1, D0, E1, disagreeing on issues D and A.

3 of your candidates are A0, B1, C0, D1, E1, disagreeing on issues C and A.

3 of your candidates are A1, B0, C1, D0, E1, disagreeing on issues D and B.

3 of your candidates are A1, B1, C0, D1, E0, disagreeing on issues C and E.

I took the liberty of rounding up or down as needed to make the numbers add up to 68. I biased toward rounding up on issue E, to concentrate all the dissent on one particular issue. This is sort of a worst-case scenario.

Since 60% of the population also agrees with you, the opposing parties couldn’t have only chosen pure partisans; they had to cast some kind of big tent as well. So I’m going to assume that the opposing candidates look like this:

8 of their candidates are A1, B0, C0, D0, E0, agreeing with you only on issue A.

8 of their candidates are A0, B1, C0, D0, E0, agreeing with you only on issue B.

8 of their candidates are A0, B0, C1, D0, E0, agreeing with you only on issue C.

8 of their candidates are A0, B0, C0, D1, E0, agreeing with you only on issue D.

This is actually very conservative; despite the fact that there should be only 9 districts that disagree with you on 4 or more issues, they somehow managed to win 32 districts with such candidates. Let’s say it was gerrymandering or something.

Now, let’s take a look at the voting results, shall we?

A vote for “Yes” on issue A will have 8 + 6 + 3*5 + 2*4 + 4*3 + 8 = 57 votes.

A vote for “Yes” on issue B will have 8 + 6 + 3*5 + 2*4 + 4*3 + 8 = 57 votes.

A vote for “Yes” on issue C will have 8 + 6 + 3*5 + 4*4 + 2*3 + 8 = 59 votes.

A vote for “Yes” on issue D will have 8 + 6 + 3*5 + 3*4 + 3*3 + 8 = 58 votes.

A vote for “Yes” on issue E will have 8 + 0 + 4*5 + 1*4 + 5*3 = 47

Final results? You win on issues A, B, C, and D, and lose very narrowly on issue E. Even if the other party somehow managed to maintain total ideological compliance and you couldn’t get a single vote from them, you’d still win on issue C and tie on issue D. If on the other hand your party can convince just 4 of your own anti-E candidates to vote in favor of E for the good of the party, you can win on E as well.

Of course, in all of the above I assumed that districts are homogeneous and independently and identically distributed. Neither of those things are true.
The homogeneity assumption actually turns out to be pretty innocuous; if each district elects a candidate by plurality vote from two major parties, the Median Voter Theorem applies and the result is as if there were a single representative median voter making the decision.

The independence assumption is not innocuous, however. In reality, there will be strong correlations between the views of different people in different districts, and strong correlations across issues among individual voters. It is in fact quite likely that people who believe A1, B1, C1, D1 are more likely to believe E1 than people who believe A0, B0, C0, D0.

Given that, all the numbers above would shift, in the following way: There would be a larger proportion of pure partisans, and a smaller proportion of moderates with totally mixed views.

Does this undermine the argument? Not really. You need an awful lot of pure partisanship to make that a viable electoral strategy. I won’t go through all the cases again because it’s a mess, but let’s just look at those voting numbers again.

Suppose that instead of it being an even 60% regardless of your other beliefs, your probability of a “Yes” belief on a given issue is 80% if the majority of your previous beliefs are “Yes”, and a probability of 40% if the majority of your previous beliefs are “No”.

Then out of 100 districts:

(0.6)^3(0.8)^2*100 = 14 will be A1, B1, C1, D1, E1 partisans.

Fourteen. Better than eight, I suppose; but not much.

Okay, let’s try even stronger partisan loyalty. Suppose that your belief on A is randomly chosen with 60% probability, but every belief thereafter is 90% “Yes” if you are A1 and 30% “Yes” if you are A0.

Then out of 100 districts:

(0.6)(0.9)^4*100 = 39 will be A1, B1, C1, D1, E1 partisans.

You will still not be able to win a majority of seats using only hardcore partisans.

Of course, you could assume even higher partisanship rates, but then it really wasn’t fair to assume that there are only five issues to choose. Even with 95% partisanship on each issue, if there are 20 issues:
(0.95)^20*100 = 36

The moral of the story is that if there is any heterogeneity across districts at all, any meaningful deviation from the party lines, you will only be able to reliably win a majority of the legislature if you cast a big tent. Even if the vast majority of people agree with you on any given issue, odds are that the vast majority of people don’t agree with you on everything.

Moreover, you are not sacrificing your principles by accepting these candidates, as you are still only accepting people who mostly agree with you into your party. Furthermore, you will still win votes on most issues—even those you felt like you were compromising on.

I therefore hope the Democratic Party makes the right choice and allows anti-abortion candidates into the party. It’s our best chance of actually winning a majority and driving the legislative agenda, including the legislative agenda on abortion.

The facts will not speak for themselves, so we must speak for them

2016-08-032016-08-03 pnrj cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, heuristics and biases, public policy abortion, argument, bias, climate change, Donald Trump, election, facts, feelings, Hitler, immigration, Islam, John Oliver, media, mercantilism, Muslims, NATO, natural disasters, nuclear weapons, persuasion, politics, Politifact, racism, reality, terrorism, trade, trade policy, truth

August 3, JDN 2457604

I finally began to understand the bizarre and terrifying phenomenon that is the Donald Trump Presidential nomination when I watched this John Oliver episode:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-l3IV_XN3c

These lines in particular, near the end, finally helped me put it all together:

What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. Because if anything, that was the theme of the Republican Convention this week; it was a four-day exercise in emphasizing feelings over facts.

The facts against Donald Trump are absolutely overwhelming. He is not even a competent business man, just a spectacularly manipulative one—and even then, it’s not clear he made any more money than he would have just keeping his inheritance in a diversified stock portfolio. His casinos were too fraudulent for Atlantic City. His university was fraudulent. He has the worst honesty rating Politifact has ever given a candidate. (Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton are statistically tied for some of the best.)

More importantly, almost every policy he has proposed or even suggested is terrible, and several of them could be truly catastrophic.

Let’s start with economic policy: His trade policy would set back decades of globalization and dramatically increase global poverty, while doing little or nothing to expand employment in the US, especially if it sparks a trade war. His fiscal policy would permanently balloon the deficit by giving one of the largest tax breaks to the rich in history. His infamous wall would probably cost about as much as the federal government currently spends on all basic scientific research combined, and his only proposal for funding it fundamentally misunderstands how remittances and trade deficits work. He doesn’t believe in climate change, and would roll back what little progress we have made at reducing carbon emissions, thereby endangering millions of lives. He could very likely cause a global economic collapse comparable to the Great Depression.

His social policy is equally terrible: He has proposed criminalizing abortion, (in express violation of Roe v. Wade) which even many pro-life people find too extreme. He wants to deport all Muslims and ban Muslims from entering, which not just a direct First Amendment violation but also literally involves jackbooted soldiers breaking into the homes of law-abiding US citizens to kidnap them and take them out of the country. He wants to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, the largest deportation in US history.

Yet it is in foreign policy above all that Trump is truly horrific. He has explicitly endorsed targeting the families of terrorists, which is a war crime (though not as bad as what Ted Cruz wanted to do, which is carpet-bombing cities). Speaking of war crimes, he thinks our torture policy wasn’t severe enough, and doesn’t even care if it is ineffective. He has made the literally mercantilist assertion that the purpose of military alliances is to create trade surplus es, and if European countries will not provide us with trade surpluses (read: tribute), he will no longer commit to defending them, thereby undermining decades of global stability that is founded upon America’s unwavering commitment to defend our allies. And worst of all, he will not rule out the first-strike deployment of nuclear weapons.

I want you to understand that I am not exaggerating when I say that a Donald Trump Presidency carries a nontrivial risk of triggering global nuclear war. Will this probably happen? No. It has a probability of perhaps 1%. But a 1% chance of a billion deaths is not a risk anyone should be prepared to take.

All of these facts scream at us that Donald Trump would be a catastrophe for America and the world. Why, then, are so many people voting for him? Why do our best election forecasts give him a good chance of winning the election?

Because facts don’t speak for themselves.

This is how the left, especially the center-left, has dropped the ball in recent decades. We joke that reality has a liberal bias, because so many of the facts are so obviously on our side. But meanwhile the right wing has nodded and laughed, even mockingly called us the “reality-based community”, because they know how to manipulate feelings.

Donald Trump has essentially no other skills—but he has that one, and it is enough. He knows how to fan the flames of anger and hatred and point them at his chosen targets. He knows how to rally people behind meaningless slogans like “Make America Great Again” and convince them that he has their best interests at heart.

Indeed, Trump’s persuasiveness is one of his many parallels with Adolf Hitler; I am not yet prepared to accuse Donald Trump of seeking genocide, yet at the same time I am not yet willing to put it past him. I don’t think it would take much of a spark at this point to trigger a conflagration of hatred that launches a genocide against Muslims in the United States, and I don’t trust Trump not to light such a spark.

Meanwhile, liberal policy wonks are looking on in horror, wondering how anyone could be so stupid as to believe him—and even publicly basically calling people stupid for believing him. Or sometimes we say they’re not stupid, they’re just racist. But people don’t believe Donald Trump because they are stupid; they believe Donald Trump because he is persuasive. He knows the inner recesses of the human mind and can harness our heuristics to his will. Do not mistake your unique position that protects you—some combination of education, intellect, and sheer willpower—for some inherent superiority. You are not better than Trump’s followers; you are more resistant to Trump’s powers of persuasion. Yes, statistically, Trump voters are more likely to be racist; but racism is a deep-seated bias in the human mind that to some extent we all share. Trump simply knows how to harness it.

Our enemies are persuasive—and therefore we must be as well. We can no longer act as though facts will automatically convince everyone by the power of pure reason; we must learn to stir emotions and rally crowds just as they do.

Or rather, not just as they do—not quite. When we see lies being so effective, we may be tempted to lie ourselves. When we see people being manipulated against us, we may be tempted to manipulate them in return. But in the long run, we can’t afford to do that. We do need to use reason, because reason is the only way to ensure that the beliefs we instill are true.

Therefore our task must be to make people see reason. Let me be clear: Not demand they see reason. Not hope they see reason. Not lament that they don’t. This will require active investment on our part. We must actually learn to persuade people in such a manner that their minds become more open to reason. This will mean using tools other than reason, but it will also mean treading a very fine line, using irrationality only when rationality is insufficient.

We will be tempted to take the easier, quicker path to the Dark Side, but we must resist. Our goal must be not to make people do what we want them to—but to do what they would want to if they were fully rational and fully informed. We will need rhetoric; we will need oratory; we may even need some manipulation. But as we fight our enemy, we must be vigilant not to become them.

This means not using bad arguments—strawmen and conmen—but pointing out the flaws in our opponents’ arguments even when they seem obvious to us—bananamen. It means not overstating our case about free trade or using implausible statistical results simply because they support our case.

But it also means not understating our case, not hiding in page 17 of an opaque technical report that if we don’t do something about climate change right now millions of people will die. It means not presenting our ideas as “political opinions” when they are demonstrated, indisputable scientific facts. It means taking the media to task for their false balance that must find a way to criticize a Democrat every time they criticize a Republican: Sure, he is a pathological liar and might trigger global economic collapse or even nuclear war, but she didn’t secure her emails properly. If you objectively assess the facts and find that Republicans lie three times as often as Democrats, maybe that’s something you should be reporting on instead of trying to compensate for by changing your criteria.

Speaking of the media, we should be pressuring them to include a regular—preferably daily, preferably primetime—segment on climate change, because yes, it is that important. How about after the weather report every day, you show a climate scientist explaining why we keep having record-breaking summer heat and more frequent natural disasters? If we suffer a global ecological collapse, this other stuff you’re constantly talking about really isn’t going to matter—that is, if it mattered in the first place. When ISIS kills 200 people in an attack, you don’t just report that a bunch of people died without examining the cause or talking about responses. But when a typhoon triggered by climate change kills 7,000, suddenly it’s just a random event, an “act of God” that nobody could have predicted or prevented. Having an appropriate caution about whether climate change caused any particular disaster should not prevent us from drawing the very real links between more carbon emissions and more natural disasters—and sometimes there’s just no other explanation.

It means demanding fact-checks immediately, not as some kind of extra commentary that happens after the debate, but as something the moderator says right then and there. (You have a staff, right? And they have Google access, right?) When a candidate says something that is blatantly, demonstrably false, they should receive a warning. After three warnings, their mic should be cut for that question. After ten, they should be kicked off the stage for the remainder of the debate. Donald Trump wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. But instead, they not only let him speak, they spent the next week repeating what he said in bold, exciting headlines. At least CNN finally realized that their headlines could actually fact-check Trump’s statements rather than just repeat them.
Above all, we will need to understand why people think the way they do, and learn to speak to them persuasively and truthfully but without elitism or condescension. This is one I know I’m not very good at myself; sometimes I get so frustrated with people who think the Earth is 6,000 years old (over 40% of Americans) or don’t believe in climate change (35% don’t think it is happening at all, another 30% don’t think it’s a big deal) that I come off as personally insulting them—and of course from that point forward they turn off. But irrational beliefs are not proof of defective character, and we must make that clear to ourselves as well as to others. We must not say that people are stupid or bad; but we absolutely must say that they are wrong. We must also remember that despite our best efforts, some amount of reactance will be inevitable; people simply don’t like having their beliefs challenged.

Yet even all this is probably not enough. Many people don’t watch mainstream media, or don’t believe it when they do (not without reason). Many people won’t even engage with friends or family members who challenge their political views, and will defriend or even disown them. We need some means of reaching these people too, and the hardest part may be simply getting them to listen to us in the first place. Perhaps we need more grassroots action—more protest marches, or even activists going door to door like Jehovah’s Witnesses. Perhaps we need to establish new media outlets that will be as widely accessible but held to a higher standard.

But we must find a way–and we have little time to waste.

Beware the false balance

2015-01-242015-04-05 pnrj public policy abortion, atheism, balance, balance fallacy, bias, climate, climate change, debt, Democrat, embryo, evolution, fetus, fracking, global warming, inequality, Jimmy Carter, John Boehner, Marxism, minimum wage, national debt, nonpartisan, Overton window, partisan, Paul Ryan, Republican, science, taxes, voting, war crime

JDN 2457046 PST 13:47.

I am now back in Long Beach, hence the return to Pacific Time. Today’s post is a little less economic than most, though it’s certainly still within the purview of social science and public policy. It concerns a question that many academic researchers and in general reasonable, thoughtful people have to deal with: How do we remain unbiased and nonpartisan?

This would not be so difficult if the world were as the most devoted “centrists” would have you believe, and it were actually the case that both sides have their good points and bad points, and both sides have their scandals, and both sides make mistakes or even lie, so you should never take the side of the Democrats or the Republicans but always present both views equally.

Sadly, this is not at all the world in which we live. While Democrats are far from perfect—they are human beings after all, not to mention politicians—Republicans have become completely detached from reality. As Stephen Colbert has said, “Reality has a liberal bias.” You know it’s bad when our detractors call us the reality-based community. Treating both sides as equal isn’t being unbiased—it’s committing a balance fallacy.

Don’t believe me? Here is a list of objective, scientific facts that the Republican Party (and particularly its craziest subset, the Tea Party) has officially taken political stances against:

Global warming is a real problem, and largely caused by human activity. (The Republican majority in the Senate voted down a resolution acknowledging this.)
Human beings share a common ancestor with chimpanzees. (48% of Republicans think that we were created in our present form.)
Animals evolve over time due to natural selection. (Only 43% of Republicans believe this.)
The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. (Marco Rubio said he thinks maybe the Earth was made in seven days a few thousand years ago.)
Hydraulic fracturing can trigger earthquakes.(Republican in Congress are trying to nullify local regulations on fracking because they insist it is so safe we don’t even need to keep track.)
Income inequality in the United States is the worst it has been in decades and continues to rise. (Mitt Romney said that the concern about income inequality is just “envy”.)
Progressive taxation reduces inequality without adversely affecting economic growth. (Here’s a Republican former New York Senator saying that the President “should be ashamed” for raising taxes on—you guessed it—”job creators”.)
Moderate increases in the minimum wage do not yield significant losses in employment. (Republicans consistently vote against even small increases in the minimum wage, and Democrats consistently vote in favor.)
The United States government has no reason to ever default on its debt. (John Boehner, now Speaker of the House, once said that “America is broke” and if we don’t stop spending we’ll never be able to pay the national debt.)
Human embryos are not in any way sentient, and fetuses are not sentient until at least 17 weeks of gestation, probably more like 30 weeks. (Yet if I am to read it in a way that would make moral sense, “Life begins at conception”—which several Republicans explicitly endorsed at the National Right to Life Convention—would have to imply that even zygotes are sentient beings. If you really just meant “alive”, then that would equally well apply to plants or even bacteria. Sentience is the morally relevant category.)

And that’s not even counting the Republican Party’s association with Christianity and all of the objectively wrong scientific claims that necessarily entails—like the existence of an afterlife and the intervention of supernatural forces. Most Democrats also self-identify as Christian, though rarely with quite the same fervor (the last major Democrat I can think of who was a devout Christian was Jimmy Carter), probably because most Americans self-identify as Christian and are hesitant to elect an atheist President (despite the fact that 93% of the National Academy of Sciences is comprised of atheists and the higher your IQ the more likely you are to be an atheist; we wouldn’t want to elect someone who agrees with smart people, now would we?).

It’s true, there are some other crazy ideas out there with a left-wing slant, like the anti-vaccination movement that has wrought epidemic measles upon us, the anti-GMO crowd that rejects basic scientific facts about genetics, and the 9/11 “truth” movement that refuses to believe that Al Qaeda actually caused the attacks. There are in fact far-left Marxists out there who want to tear down the whole capitalist system by glorious revolution and replace it with… er… something (they’re never quite clear on that last point). But none of these things are the official positions of standing members of Congress.

The craziest belief by a standing Democrat I can think of is Dennis Kucinich’s belief that he saw an alien spacecraft. And to be perfectly honest, alien spacecraft are about a thousand times more plausible than Christianity in general, let alone Creationism. There almost certainly are alien spacecraft somewhere in the universe—just most likely so far away we’ll need FTL to encounter them. Moreover, this is not Kucinich’s official position as a member of Congress and it’s not something he has ever made policy based upon.

Indeed, if you’re willing to include the craziest individuals with no real political power who identify with a particular side of the political spectrum, then we should include on the right-wing side people like the Bundy militia in Nevada, neo-Nazis in Detroit, and the dozens of KKK chapters across the US. Not to mention this pastor who wants to murder all gay people in the world (because he truly believes what Leviticus 20:13 actually and clearly says).

If you get to include Marxists on the left, then we get to include Nazis on the right. Or, we could be reasonable and say that only the official positions of elected officials or mainstream pundits actually count, in which case Democrats have views that are basically accurate and reasonable while the majority of Republicans have views that are still completely objectively wrong.

There’s no balance here. For every Democrat who is wrong, there is a Republicans who is totally delusional. For every Democrat who distorts the truth, there is a Republican who blatantly lies about basic facts. Not to mention that for every Democrat who has had an ill-advised illicit affair there is a Republican who has committed war crimes.

Actually war crimes are something a fair number of Democrats have done as well, but the difference still stands out in high relief: Barack Obama has ordered double-tap drone strikes that are in violation of the Geneva Convention, but George W. Bush orchestrated a worldwide mass torture campaign and launched pointless wars that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. Bill Clinton ordered some questionable CIA operations, but George H.W. Bush was the director of the CIA.

I wish we had two parties that were equally reasonable. I wish there were two—or three, or four—proposals on the table in each discussion, all of which had merits and flaws worth considering. Maybe if we somehow manage to get the Green Party a significant seat in power, or the Social Democrat party, we can actually achieve that goal. But that is not where we are right now. Right now, we have the Democrats, who have some good ideas and some bad ideas; and then we have the Republicans, who are completely out of their minds.

There is an important concept in political science called the Overton window; it is the range of political ideas that are considered “reasonable” or “mainstream” within a society. Things near the middle of the Overton window are considered sensible, even “nonpartisan” ideas, while things near the edges are “partisan” or “political”, and things near but outside the window are seen as “extreme” and “radical”. Things far outside the window are seen as “absurd” or even “unthinkable”.

Right now, our Overton window is in the wrong place. Things like Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Social Security and Medicare are seen as reasonable when they should be considered extreme. Progressive income taxes of the kind we had in the 1960s are seen as extreme when they should be considered reasonable. Cutting WIC and SNAP with nothing to replace them and letting people literally starve to death are considered at most partisan, when they should be outright unthinkable. Opposition to basic scientific facts like climate change and evolution is considered a mainstream political position—when in terms of empirical evidence Creationism should be more intellectually embarrassing than being a 9/11 truther or thinking you saw an alien spacecraft. And perhaps worst of all, military tactics like double-tap strikes that are literally war crimes are considered “liberal”, while the “conservative” position involves torture, worldwide surveillance and carpet bombing—if not outright full-scale nuclear devastation.

I want to restore reasonable conversation to our political system, I really do. But that really isn’t possible when half the politicians are totally delusional. We have but one choice: We must vote them out.

I say this particularly to people who say “Why bother? Both parties are the same.” No, they are not the same. They are deeply, deeply different, for all the reasons I just outlined above. And if you can’t bring yourself to vote for a Democrat, at least vote for someone! A Green, or a Social Democrat, or even a Libertarian or a Socialist if you must. It is only by the apathy of reasonable people that this insanity can propagate in the first place.

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Human Economics

Cognitive development economics: Understanding the mind in order to feed the world

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