We do seem to have better angels after all

2023-06-19 PNRJ book reviews, core principles, development economics, ethics, futurism, inequality, public policy civilization, colonialism, Culture, history, homicide, imperialism, incarceration, progress, prosperity, Steven Pinker, violence, wealth

Jun 18 JDN 2460114

A review of The Darker Angels of Our Nature

(I apologize for not releasing this on Sunday; I’ve been traveling lately and haven’t found much time to write.)

Since its release, I have considered Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature among a small elite category of truly great books—not simply good because enjoyable, informative, or well-written, but great in its potential impact on humanity’s future. Others include The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, On the Origin of Species, and Animal Liberation.

But I also try to expose myself as much as I can to alternative views. I am quite fearful of the echo chambers that social media puts us in, where dissent is quietly hidden from view and groupthink prevails.

So when I saw that a group of historians had written a scathing critique of The Better Angels, I decided I surely must read it and get its point of view. This book is The Darker Angels of Our Nature.

The Darker Angels is written by a large number of different historians, and it shows. It’s an extremely disjointed book; it does not present any particular overall argument, various sections differ wildly in scope and tone, and sometimes they even contradict each other. It really isn’t a book in the usual sense; it’s a collection of essays whose only common theme is that they disagree with Steven Pinker.

In fact, even that isn’t quite true, as some of the best essays in The Darker Angels are actually the ones that don’t fundamentally challenge Pinker’s contention that global violence has been on a long-term decline for centuries and is now near its lowest in human history. These essays instead offer interesting insights into particular historical eras, such as medieval Europe, early modern Russia, and shogunate Japan, or they add additional nuances to the overall pattern, like the fact that, compared to medieval times, violence in Europe seems to have been less in the Pax Romana (before) and greater in the early modern period (after), showing that the decline in violence was not simple or steady, but went through fluctuations and reversals as societies and institutions changed. (At this point I feel I should note that Pinker clearly would not disagree with this—several of the authors seem to think he would, which makes me wonder if they even read The Better Angels.)

Others point out that the scale of civilization seems to matter, that more is different, and larger societies and armies more or less automatically seem to result in lower fatality rates by some sort of scaling or centralization effect, almost like the square-cube law. That’s very interesting if true; it would suggest that in order to reduce violence, you don’t really need any particular mode of government, you just need something that unites as many people as possible under one banner. The evidence presented for it was too weak for me to say whether it’s really true, however, and there was really no theoretical mechanism proposed whatsoever.

Some of the essays correct genuine errors Pinker made, some of which look rather sloppy. Pinker clearly overestimated the death tolls of the An Lushan Rebellion, the Spanish Inquisition, and Aztec ritual executions, probably by using outdated or biased sources. (Though they were all still extremely violent!) His depiction of indigenous cultures does paint with a very broad brush, and fails to recognize that some indigenous societies seem to have been quite peaceful (though others absolutely were tremendously violent).

One of the best essays is about Pinker’s cavalier attitude toward mass incarceration, which I absolutely do consider a deep flaw in Pinker’s view. Pinker presents increased incarceration rates along with decreased crime rates as if they were an unalloyed good, while I can at best be ambivalent about whether the benefit of decreasing crime is worth the cost of greater incarceration. Pinker seems to take for granted that these incarcerations are fair and impartial, when we have a great deal of evidence that they are strongly biased against poor people and people of color.

There’s another good essay about the Enlightenment, which Pinker seems to idealize a little too much (especially in his other book Enlightenment Now). There was no sudden triumph of reason that instantly changed the world. Human knowledge and rationality gradually improved over a very long period of time, with no obvious turning point and many cases of backsliding. The scientific method isn’t a simple, infallible algorithm that suddenly appeared in the brain of Galileo or Bayes, but a whole constellation of methods and concepts of rationality that took centuries to develop and is in fact still developing. (Much as the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, the scientific method that can be written in a textbook is not the true scientific method.)

Several of the essays point out the limitations of historical and (especially) archaeological records, making it difficult to draw any useful inferences about rates of violence in the past. I agree that Pinker seems a little too cavalier about this; the records really are quite sparse and it’s not easy to fill in the gaps. Very small samples can easily distort homicide rates; since only about 1% of deaths worldwide are homicide, if you find 20 bodies, whether or not one of them was murdered is the difference between peaceful Japan and war-torn Colombia.

On the other hand, all we really can do is make the best inferences we have with the available data, and for the time periods in which we do have detailed records—surely true since at least the 19^th century—the pattern of declining violence is very clear, and even the World Wars look like brief fluctuations rather than fundamental reversals. Contrary to popular belief, the World Wars do not appear to have been especially deadly on a per-capita basis, compared to various historic wars. The primary reason so many people died in the World Wars was really that there just were more people in the world. A few of the authors don’t seem to consider this an adequate reason, but ask yourself this: Would you rather live in a society of 100 in which 10 people are killed, or a society of 1 billion in which 1 million are killed? In the former case your chances of being killed are 10%; in the latter, 0.1%. Clearly, per-capita measures of violence are the correct ones.

Some essays seem a bit beside the point, like one on “environmental violence” which quite aptly details the ongoing—terrifying—degradation of our global ecology, but somehow seems to think that this constitutes violence when it obviously doesn’t. There is widespread violence against animals, certainly; slaughterhouses are the obvious example—and unlike most people, I do not consider them some kind of exception we can simply ignore. We do in fact accept levels of cruelty to pigs and cows that we would never accept against dogs or horses—even the law makes such exceptions. Moreover, plenty of habitat destruction is accompanied by killing of the animals who lived in that habitat. But ecological degradation is not equivalent to violence. (Nor is it clear to me that our treatment of animals is more violent overall today than in the past; I guess life is probably worse for a beef cow today than it was in the medieval era, but either way, she was going to be killed and eaten. And at least we no longer do cat-burning.) Drilling for oil can be harmful, but it is not violent. We can acknowledge that life is more peaceful now than in the past without claiming that everything is better now—in fact, one could even say that overall life isn’t better, but I think they’d be hard-pressed to argue that.

These are the relatively good essays, which correct minor errors or add interesting nuances. There are also some really awful essays in the mix.

A common theme of several of the essays seems to be “there are still bad things, so we can’t say anything is getting better”; they will point out various forms of violence that undeniably still exist, and treat this as a conclusive argument against the claim that violence has declined. Yes, modern slavery does exist, and it is a very serious problem; but it clearly is not the same kind of atrocity that the Atlantic slave trade was. Yes, there are still murders. Yes, there are still wars. Probably these things will always be with us to some extent; but there is a very clear difference between 500 homicides per million people per year and 50—and it would be better still if we could bring it down to 5.

There’s one essay about sexual violence that doesn’t present any evidence whatsoever to contradict the claim that rates of sexual violence have been declining while rates of reporting and prosecution have been increasing. (These two trends together often result in reported rapes going up, but most experts agree that actual rapes are going down.) The entire essay is based on anecdote, innuendo, and righteous anger.

There are several essays that spend their whole time denouncing neoliberal capitalism (not even presenting any particularly good arguments against it, though such arguments do exist), seeming to equate Pinker’s view with some kind of Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism when in fact Pinker is explictly in favor of Nordic-style social democracy. (One literally dismisses his support for universal healthcare as “Well, he is Canadian”.) But Pinker has on occasion said good things about capitalism, so clearly, he is an irredeemable monster.

Right in the introduction—which almost made me put the book down—is an astonishingly ludicrous argument, which I must quote in full to show you that it is not out of context:

What actually is violence (nowhere posed or answered in The Better Angels)? How do people perceive it in different time-place settings? What is its purpose and function? What were contemporary attitudes toward violence and how did sensibilities shift over time? Is violence always ‘bad’ or can there be ‘good’ violence, violence that is regenerative and creative?
The Darker Angels of Our Nature, p.16

Yes, the scare quotes on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are in the original. (Also the baffling jargon “time-place settings” as opposed to, say, “times and places”.) This was clearly written by a moral relativist. Aside from questioning whether we can say anything about anything, the argument seems to be that Pinker’s argument is invalid because he didn’t precisely define every single relevant concept, even though it’s honestly pretty obvious what the world “violence” means and how he is using it. (If anything, it’s these authors who don’t seem to understand what the word means; they keep calling things “violence” that are indeed bad, but obviously aren’t violence—like pollution and cyberbullying. At least talk of incarceration as “structural violence” isn’t obvious nonsense—though it is still clearly distinct from murder rates.)

But it was by reading the worst essays that I think I gained the most insight into what this debate is really about. Several of the essays in The Darker Angels thoroughly and unquestioningly share the following inference: if a culture is superior, then that culture has a right to impose itself on others by force. On this, they seem to agree with the imperialists: If you’re better, that gives you a right to dominate everyone else. They rightly reject the claim that cultures have a right to imperialistically dominate others, but they cannot deny the inference, and so they are forced to deny that any culture can ever be superior to another. The result is that they tie themselves in knots trying to justify how greater wealth, greater happiness, less violence, and babies not dying aren’t actually good things. They end up talking nonsense about “violence that is regenerative and creative”.

But we can believe in civilization without believing in colonialism. And indeed that is precisely what I (along with Pinker) believe: That democracy is better than autocracy, that free speech is better than censorship, that health is better than illness, that prosperity is better than poverty, that peace is better than war—and therefore that Western civilization is doing a better job than the rest. I do not believe that this justifies the long history of Western colonial imperialism. Governing your own country well doesn’t give you the right to invade and dominate other countries. Indeed, part of what makes colonial imperialism so terrible is that it makes a mockery of the very ideals of peace, justice, and freedom that the West is supposed to represent.

I think part of the problem is that many people see the world in zero-sum terms, and believe that the West’s prosperity could only be purchased by the rest of the world’s poverty. But this is untrue. The world is nonzero-sum. My happiness does not come from your sadness, and my wealth does not come from your poverty. In fact, even the West was poor for most of history, and we are far more prosperous now that we have largely abandoned colonial imperialism than we ever were in imperialism’s heyday. (I do occasionally encounter British people who seem vaguely nostalgic for the days of the empire, but real median income in the UK has doubled just since 1977. Inequality has also increased during that time, which is definitely a problem; but the UK is undeniably richer now than it ever was at the peak of the empire.)

In fact it could be that the West is richer now because of colonalism than it would have been without it. I don’t know whether or not this is true. I suspect it isn’t, but I really don’t know for sure. My guess would be that colonized countries are poorer, but colonizer countries are not richer—that is, colonialism is purely destructive. Certain individuals clearly got richer by such depredation (Leopold II, anyone?), but I’m not convinced many countries did.

Yet even if colonialism did make the West richer, it clearly cannot explain most of the wealth of Western civilization—for that wealth simply did not exist in the world before. All these bridges and power plants, laptops and airplanes weren’t lying around waiting to be stolen. Surely, some of the ingredients were stolen—not least, the land. Had they been bought at fair prices, the result might have been less wealth for us (then again it might not, for wealthier trade partners yield greater exports). But this does not mean that the products themselves constitute theft, nor that the wealth they provide is meaningless. Perhaps we should find some way to pay reparations; undeniably, we should work toward greater justice in the future. But we do not need to give up all we have in order to achieve that justice.

There is a law of conservation of energy. It is impossible to create energy in one place without removing it from another. There is no law of conservation of prosperity. Making the world better in one place does not require making it worse in another.

Progress is real. Yes, it is flawed, uneven, and it has costs of its own; but it is real. If we want to have more of it, we best continue to believe in it. And The Better Angels of Our Nature does have some notable flaws, but it still retains its place among truly great books.

My first AEA conference

2019-01-132019-01-13 PNRJ current events, personal academia, academic, bias, conference, Culture, discrimination, hiring, interview, job market, networking, research, ritual

Jan 13 JDN 2458497

The last couple of weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind for me. I submitted a grant proposal, I have another, much more complicated proposal due next week, I submitted a paper to a journal, and somewhere in there I went to the AEA conference for the first time.

Going to the conference made it quite clear that the race and gender disparities in economics are quite real: The vast majority of the attendees were middle-aged White males, all wearing one of either two outfits: Sportcoat and khakis, or suit and tie. (And almost all of the suits were grey or black and almost all of the shirts were white or pastel. Had you photographed in greyscale you’d only notice because the hotel carpets looked wrong.) In an upcoming post I’ll go into more detail about this problem, what seems to be causing it, and what might be done to fix it.

But for now I just want to talk about the conference itself, and moreover, the idea of having conferences—is this really the best way to organize ourselves as a profession?

One thing I really do like about the AEA conference is actually something that separates it from other professions: The job market for economics PhDs is a very formalized matching system designed to be efficient and minimize opportunities for bias. It should be a model for other job markets. All the interviews are conducted in rapid succession, at the conference itself, so that candidates can interview for positions all over the country or even abroad.

I wasn’t on the job market yet, but I will be in a few years. I wanted to see what it’s like before I have to run that gauntlet myself.

But then again, why did we need face-to-face interviews at all? What do they actually tell us?

It honestly seems like a face-to-face interview is optimized to maximize opportunities for discrimination. Do you know them personally? Nepotism opportunity. Are they male or female? Sexism opportunity. Are they in good health? Ableism opportunity. Do they seem gay, or mention a same-sex partner? Homophobia opportunity. Is their gender expression normative? Transphobia opportunity. How old are they? Ageism opportunity. Are they White? Racism opportunity. Do they have an accent? Nationalism opportunity. Do they wear fancy clothes? Classism opportunity. There are other forms of bias we don’t even have simple names for: Do they look pregnant? Do they wear a wedding band? Are they physically attractive? Are they tall?

You can construct your resume review system to not include any of this information, by excluding names, pictures, and personal information. But you literally can’t exclude all of this information from a face-to-face interview, and this is the only hiring mechanism that suffers from this fundamental flaw.

If it were really about proving your ability to do the job, they could send you a take-home exam (a lot of tech companies actually do this): Here’s a small sample project similar to what we want you to do, and a reasonable deadline in which to do it. Do it, and we’ll see if it’s good enough.

If they want to offer an opportunity for you to ask or answer specific questions, that could be done via text chat—which could be on the one hand end-to-end encrypted against eavesdropping and on the other hand leave a clear paper trail in case they try to ask you anything they shouldn’t. If they start asking about your sexual interests in the digital interview, you don’t just feel awkward and wonder if you should take the job: You have something to show in court.

Even if they’re interested in things like your social skills and presentation style, those aren’t measured well by interviews anyway. And they probably shouldn’t even be as relevant to hiring as they are.

With that in mind, maybe bringing all the PhD graduates in economics in the entire United States into one hotel for three days isn’t actually necessary. Maybe all these face-to-face interviews aren’t actually all that great, because their small potential benefits are outweighed by their enormous potential biases.

The rest of the conference is more like other academic conferences, which seems even less useful.

The conference format seems like a strange sort of formality, a ritual that we go through. It’s clearly not the optimal way to present ongoing research—though perhaps it’s better than publishing papers in journals, which is our current gold standard. A whole bunch of different people give you brief, superficial presentations of their research, which may be only tangentially related to anything you’re interested in, and you barely even have time to think about it before they go on to the next once. Also, seven of these sessions are going on simultaneously, so unless you have a Time Turner, you have to choose which one to go to. And they are often changed at the last minute, so you may not even end up going to the one you thought you were going to.

I was really struck by how little experimental work was presented. I was under the impression that experimental economics was catching on, but despite specifically trying to go to experiment-related sessions (excluding the 8:00 AM session for migraine reasons), I only counted a handful of experiments, most of them in the field rather than the lab. There was a huge amount of theory and applied econometrics. I guess this isn’t too surprising, as those are the two main kinds of research that only cost a researcher’s time. I guess in some sense this is good news for me: It means I don’t have as much competition as I thought.

Instead of gathering papers into sessions where five different people present vaguely-related papers in far too little time, we could use working papers, or better yet a more sophisticated online forum where research could be discussed in real-time before it even gets written into a paper. We could post results as soon as we get them, and instead of conducting one high-stakes anonymous peer review at the time of publication, conduct dozens of little low-stakes peer reviews as the research is ongoing. Discussants could be turned into collaborators.

The most valuable parts of conferences always seem to be the parts that aren’t official sessions: Luncheons, receptions, mixers. There you get to meet other people in the field. And this can be valuable, to be sure. But I fear that the individual gain is far larger than the social gain: Most of the real benefits of networking get dissipated by the competition to be better-connected than the other candidates. The kind of working relationships that seem to be genuinely valuable are the kind formed by working at the same school for several years, not the kind that can be forged by meeting once at a conference reception.

I guess every relationship has to start somewhere, and perhaps more collaborations have started that way than I realize. But it’s also worth asking: Should we really be putting so much weight on relationships? Is that the best way to organize an academic discipline?

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is an accurate adage in many professions, but it seems like research should be where we would want it least to apply. This is supposed to be about advancing human knowledge, not making friends—and certainly not maintaining the old boys’ club.

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.

The inherent atrocity of “border security”

2018-06-242018-06-17 PNRJ core principles, ethics, public policy authoritarianism, border, border security, California, coercion, crime, Culture, Donald Trump, ethics, feudalism, George W. Bush, government, ICE, immigration, inequality, law, migration, Obama, poverty, terrorism, United Nations, violence

Jun 24 JDN 2458294

By now you are probably aware of the fact that a new “zero tolerance” border security policy under the Trump administration has resulted in 2,000 children being forcibly separated from their parents by US government agents. If you weren’t, here are a variety of different sources all telling the same basic story of large-scale state violence and terror.

Make no mistake: This is an atrocity. The United Nations has explicitly condemned this human rights violation—to which Trump responded by making an unprecedented threat of withdrawing unilaterally from the UN Human Rights Council.

#ThisIsNotNormal, and Trump was everything we feared—everything we warned—he would be: Corrupt, incompetent, cruel, and authoritarian.

Yet Trump’s border policy differs mainly in degree, not kind, from existing US border policy. There is much more continuity here than most of us would like to admit.

The Trump administration has dramatically increased “interior removals”, the most obviously cruel acts, where ICE agents break into the houses of people living in the US and take them away. Don’t let the cold language fool you; this is literally people with guns breaking into your home and kidnapping members of your family. This is characteristic of totalitarian governments, not liberal democracies.

And yet, the Obama administration actually holds the record for most deportations (though only because they included “at-border deportations” which other administrations did not). A major policy change by George W. Bush started this whole process of detaining people at the border instead of releasing them and requiring them to return for later court dates.

I could keep going back; US border enforcement has gotten more and more aggressive as time goes on. US border security staffing has quintupled since just 1990. There was a time when the United States was a land of opportunity that welcomed “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”; but that time is long past.

And this, in itself, is a human rights violation. Indeed, I am convinced that border security itself is inherently a human rights violation, always and everywhere; future generations will not praise us for being more restrained than Trump’s abject and intentional cruelty, but condemn us for acting under the same basic moral framework that justified it.

There is an imaginary line in the sand just a hundred miles south of where I sit now. On one side of the line, a typical family makes $66,000 per year. On the other side, a typical family makes only $20,000. On one side of the line, life expectancy is 81 years; on the other, 77. This means that over their lifetime, someone on this side of the line can expect to make over one million dollars more than they would if they had lived on the other side. Step across this line, get a million dollars; it sounds ridiculous, but it’s an empirical fact.

This would be bizarre enough by itself; but now consider that on that line there are fences, guard towers, and soldiers who will keep you from crossing it. If you have appropriate papers, you can cross; but if you don’t, they will arrest and detain you, potentially for months. This is not how we treat you if you are carrying contraband or have a criminal record. This is how we treat you if you don’t have a passport.

How can we possibly reconcile this with the principles of liberal democracy? Philosophers have tried, to be sure. Yet they invariably rely upon some notion that the people who want to cross our border are coming from another country where they were already granted basic human rights and democratic representation—which is almost never the case. People who come here from the UK or the Netherlands or generally have the proper visas. Even people who come here from China usually have visas—though China is by no means a liberal democracy. It’s people who come here from Haiti and Nicaragua who don’t—and these are some of the most corrupt and impoverished nations in the world.

As I said in an earlier post, I was not offended that Trump characterized countries like Haiti and Syria as “shitholes”. By any objective standard, that is accurate; these countries are terrible, terrible places to live. No, what offends me is that he thinks this gives us a right to turn these people away, as though the horrible conditions of their country somehow “rub off” on them and make them less worthy as human beings. On the contrary, we have a word for people who come from “shithole” countries seeking help, and that word is “refugee”.

Under international law, “refugee” has a very specific legal meaning, under which most immigrants do not qualify. But in a broader moral sense, almost every immigrant is a refugee. People don’t uproot themselves and travel thousands of miles on a whim. They are coming here because conditions in their home country are so bad that they simply cannot tolerate them anymore, and they come to us desperately seeking our help. They aren’t asking for handouts of free money—illegal immigrants are a net gain for our fiscal system, paying more in taxes than they receive in benefits. They are looking for jobs, and willing to accept much lower wages than the workers already here—because those wages are still dramatically higher than what they had where they came from.

Of course, that does potentially mean they are competing with local low-wage workers, doesn’t it? Yes—but not as much as you might think. There is only a very weak relationship between higher immigration and lower wages (some studies find none at all!), even at the largest plausible estimates, the gain in welfare for the immigrants is dramatically higher than the loss in welfare for the low-wage workers who are already here. It’s not even a question of valuing them equally; as long as you value an immigrant at least one tenth as much as a native-born citizen, the equation comes out favoring more immigration.

This is for two reasons: One, most native-born workers already are unwilling to do the jobs that most immigrants do, such as picking fruit and laying masonry; and two, increased spending by immigrants boosts the local economy enough to compensate for any job losses.

But even aside from the economic impacts, what is the moral case for border security?

I have heard many people argue that “It’s our home, we should be able to decide who lives here.” First of all, there are some major differences between letting someone live in your home and letting someone come into your country. I’m not saying we should allow immigrants to force themselves into people’s homes, only that we shouldn’t arrest them when they try cross the border.

But even if I were to accept the analogy, if someone were fleeing oppression by an authoritarian government and asked to live in my home, I would let them. I would help hide them from the government if they were trying to escape persecution. I would even be willing to house people simply trying to escape poverty, as long as it were part of a well-organized program designed to ensure that everyone actually gets helped and the burden on homeowners and renters was not too great. I wouldn’t simply let homeless people come live here, because that creates all sorts of coordination problems (I can only fit so many, and how do I prioritize which ones?); but I’d absolutely participate in a program that coordinates placement of homeless families in apartments provided by volunteers. (In fact, maybe I should try to petition for such a program, as Southern California has a huge homelessness rate due to our ridiculous housing prices.)

Many people seem to fear that immigrants will bring crime, but actually they reduce crime rates. It’s really kind of astonishing how much less crime immigrants commit than locals. My hypothesis is that immigrants are a self-selected sample; the kind of person willing to move thousands of miles isn’t the kind of person who commits a lot of crimes.
I understand wanting to keep out terrorists and drug smugglers, but there are already plenty of terrorists and drug smugglers here in the US; if we are unwilling to set up border security between California and Nevada, I don’t see why we should be setting it up between California and Baja California. But okay, fine, we can keep the customs agents who inspect your belongings when you cross the border. If someone doesn’t have proper documentation, we can even detain and interrogate them—for a few hours, not a few months. The goal should be to detect dangerous criminals and nothing else. Once we are confident that you have not committed any felonies, we should let you through—frankly, we should give you a green card. We should only be willing to detain someone at the border for the same reasons we would be willing to detain a citizen who already lives here—that is, probable cause for an actual crime. (And no, you don’t get to count “illegal border crossing” as a crime, because that’s begging the question. By the same logic I could justify detaining people for jaywalking.)

A lot of people argue that restricting immigration is necessary to “preserve local culture”; but I’m not even sure that this is a goal sufficiently important to justify arresting and detaining people, and in any case, that’s really not how culture works. Culture is not advanced by purism and stagnation, but by openness and cross-pollination. From anime to pizza, many of our most valued cultural traditions would not exist without interaction across cultural boundaries. Introducing more Spanish speakers into the US may make us start saying no problemo and vamonos, but it’s not going to destroy liberal democracy. If you value culture, you should value interactions across different societies.

Most importantly, think about what you are trying to justify. Even if we stop doing Trump’s most extreme acts of cruelty, we are still talking about using military force to stop people from crossing an imaginary line. ICE basically treats people the same way the SS did. “Papers, please” isn’t something we associate with free societies—it’s characteristic of totalitarianism. We are so accustomed to border security (or so ignorant of its details) that we don’t see it for the atrocity it so obviously is.

National borders function something very much like feudal privilege. We have our “birthright”, which grants us all sorts of benefits and special privileges—literally tripling our incomes and extending our lives. We did nothing to earn this privilege. If anything, we show ourselves to be less deserving (e.g. by committing more crimes). And we use the government to defend our privilege by force.

Are people born on the other side of the line less human? Are they less morally worthy? On what grounds do we point guns at them and lock them away for the “crime” of wanting to live here?

What Trump is doing right now is horrific. But it is not that much more horrific than what we were already doing. My hope is that this will finally open our eyes to the horrors that we had been participating in all along.

The evolution of human cooperation

2018-06-172018-06-13 PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, tribal paradigm altruism, anthropology, cooperation, Culture, evolution, history, identity, intelligence

Jun 17 JDN 2458287

If alien lifeforms were observing humans (assuming they didn’t turn out the same way—which they actually might, for reasons I’ll get to shortly), the thing that would probably baffle them the most about us is how we organize ourselves into groups. Each individual may be part of several groups at once, and some groups are closer-knit than others; but the most tightly-knit groups exhibit extremely high levels of cooperation, coordination, and self-sacrifice.

They might think at first that we are eusocial, like ants or bees; but upon closer study they would see that our groups are not very strongly correlated with genetic relatedness. We are somewhat more closely related to those in our groups than to those outsides, usually; but it’s a remarkably weak effect, especially compared to the extremely high relatedness of worker bees in a hive. No, to a first approximation, these groups are of unrelated humans; yet their level of cooperation is equal to if not greater than that exhibited by the worker bees.

However, the alien anthropologists would find that it is not that humans are simply predisposed toward extremely high altruism and cooperation in general; when two humans groups come into conflict, they are capable of the most extreme forms of violence imaginable. Human history is full of atrocities that combine the indifferent brutality of nature red in tooth and claw with the boundless ingenuity of a technologically advanced species. Yet except for a small proportion perpetrated by individual humans with some sort of mental pathology, these atrocities are invariably committed by one unified group against another. Even in genocide there is cooperation.

Humans are not entirely selfish. But nor are they paragons of universal altruism (though some of them aspire to be). Humans engage in a highly selective form of altruism—virtually boundless for the in-group, almost negligible for the out-group. Humans are tribal.

Being a human yourself, this probably doesn’t strike you as particularly strange. Indeed, I’ve mentioned it many times previously on this blog. But it is actually quite strange, from an evolutionary perspective; most organisms are not like this.

As I said earlier, there is actually reason to think that our alien anthropologist would come from a species with similar traits, simply because such cooperation may be necessary to achieve a full-scale technological civilization, let alone the capacity for interstellar travel. But there might be other possibilities; perhaps they come from a eusocial species, and their large-scale cooperation is within an extremely large hive.

It’s true that most organisms are not entirely selfish. There are various forms of cooperation within and even across species. But these usually involve only close kin, and otherwise involve highly stable arrangements of mutual benefit. There is nothing like the large-scale cooperation between anonymous unrelated individuals that is exhibited by all human societies.

How would such an unusual trait evolve? It must require a very particular set of circumstances, since it only seems to have evolved in a single species (or at most a handful of species, since other primates and cetaceans display some of the same characteristics).

Once evolved, this trait is clearly advantageous; indeed it turned a local apex predator into a species so successful that it can actually intentionally control the evolution of other species. Humans have become a hegemon over the entire global ecology, for better or for worse. Cooperation gave us a level of efficiency in producing the necessities of survival so great that at this point most of us spend our time working on completely different tasks. If you are not a farmer or a hunter or a carpenter (and frankly, even if you are a farmer with a tractor, a hunter with a rifle, or a carpenter with a table saw), you are doing work that would simply not have been possible without very large-scale human cooperation.

This extremely high fitness benefit only makes the matter more puzzling, however: If the benefits are so great, why don’t more species do this? There must be some other requirements that other species were unable to meet.

One clear requirement is high intelligence. As frustrating as it may be to be a human and watch other humans kill each other over foolish grievances, this is actually evidence of how smart humans are, biologically speaking. We might wish we were even smarter still—but most species don’t have the intelligence to make it even as far as we have.

But high intelligence is likely not sufficient. We can’t be sure of that, since we haven’t encountered any other species with equal intelligence; but what we do know is that even Homo sapiens didn’t coordinate on anything like our current scale for tens of thousands of years. We may have had tribal instincts, but if so they were largely confined to a very small scale. Something happened, about 50,000 years ago or so—not very long ago in evolutionary time—that allowed us to increase that scale dramatically.

Was this a genetic change? It’s difficult to say. There could have been some subtle genetic mutation, something that wouldn’t show up in the fossil record. But more recent expansions in human cooperation to the level of the nation-state and beyond clearly can’t be genetic; they were much too fast for that. They must be a form of cultural evolution: The replicators being spread are ideas and norms—memes—rather than genes.

So perhaps the very early shift toward tribal cooperation was also a cultural one. Perhaps it began not as a genetic mutation but as an idea—perhaps a metaphor of “universal brotherhood” as we often still hear today. The tribes that believed this ideas prospered; the tribes that didn’t were outcompeted or even directly destroyed.

This would explain why it had to be an intelligent species. We needed brains big enough to comprehend metaphors and generalize concepts. We needed enough social cognition to keep track of who was in the in-group and who was in the out-group.

If it was indeed a cultural shift, this should encourage us. (And since the most recent changes definitely were cultural, that is already quite encouraging.) We are not limited by our DNA to only care about a small group of close kin; we are capable of expanding our scale of unity and cooperation far beyond.
The real question is whether we can expand it to everyone. Unfortunately, there is some reason to think that this may not be possible. If our concept of tribal identity inherently requires both an in-group and an out-group, then we may never be able to include everyone. If we are only unified against an enemy, never simply for our own prosperity, world peace may forever remain a dream.

But I do have a work-around that I think is worth considering. Can we expand our concept of the out-group to include abstract concepts? With phrases like “The War on Poverty” and “The War on Terror”, it would seem in fact that we can. It feels awkward; it is somewhat imprecise—but then, so was the original metaphor of “universal brotherhood”. Our brains are flexible enough that they don’t actually seem to need the enemy to be a person; it can also be an idea. If this is right, then we can actually include everyone in our in-group, as long as we define the right abstract out-group. We can choose enemies like poverty, violence, cruelty, and despair instead of other nations or ethnic groups. If we must continue to fight a battle, let it be a battle against the pitiless indifference of the universe, rather than our fellow human beings.

Of course, the real challenge will be getting people to change their existing tribal identities. In the moment, these identities seem fundamentally intractable. But that can’t really be the case—for these identities have changed over historical time. Once-important categories have disappeared; new ones have arisen in their place. Someone in 4th century Constantinople would find the conflict between Democrats and Republicans as baffling as we would find the conflict between Trinitarians and Arians. The ongoing oppression of Native American people by White people would be unfathomable to someone of the 11th century Onondaga, who could scarcely imagine an enemy more different than the Seneca west of them. Even the conflict between Russia and NATO would probably seem strange to someone living in France in 1943, for whom Germany was the enemy and Russia was at least the enemy of the enemy—and many of those people are still alive.

I don’t know exactly how these tribal identities change (I’m working on it). It clearly isn’t as simple as convincing people with rational arguments. In fact, part of how it seems to work is that someone will shift their identity slowly enough that they can’t perceive the shift themselves. People rarely seem to appreciate, much less admit, how much their own minds have changed over time. So don’t ever expect to change someone’s identity in one sitting. Don’t even expect to do it in one year. But never forget that identities do change, even within an individual’s lifetime.

Sympathy for the incel

2018-05-062018-04-29 PNRJ current events, ethics, inequality, personal, public policy Culture, Donald Trump, human rights, incel, Islam, Jeff Bezos, Lawyers Guns & Money, Less Wrong, LGBT, masculinity, misogyny, polyamory, poverty, prostitution, psychotherapy, Robert Nozick, Robin Hanson, sex, social norms, taxation, terrorism, Toronto

Post 237: May 6 JDN 2458245

If you’ve been following the news surrounding the recent terrorist attack in Toronto, you may have encountered the word “incel” for the first time via articles in NPR, Vox, USA Today, or other sources linking the attack to the incel community.

If this was indeed your first exposure to the concept of “incel”, I think you are getting a distorted picture of their community, which is actually a surprisingly large Internet subculture. Finding out about incel this way would be like finding out about Islam from 9/11. (Actually, I’m fairly sure a lot of Americans did learn that way, which is awful.) The incel community is remarkably large one—hundreds of thousands of members at least, and quite likely millions.

While a large proportion subscribe to a toxic and misogynistic ideology, a similarly large proportion do not; while the ideology has contributed to terrorism and other violence, the vast majority of members of the community are not violent.

Note that the latter sentence is also entirely true of Islam. So if you are sympathetic toward Muslims and want to protect them from abuse and misunderstanding, I maintain that you should want to do the same for incels, and for basically the same reasons.

I want to make something abundantly clear at the outset:

This attack was terrorism. I am in no way excusing or defending the use of terrorism. Once someone crosses the line and starts attacking random civilians, I don’t care what their grievances were; the best response to their behavior involves snipers on rooftops. I frankly don’t even understand the risks police are willing to take in order to capture these people alive—especially considering how trigger-happy they are when it comes to random Black men. If you start shooting (or bombing, or crashing vehicles into) civilians, the police should shoot you. It’s that simple.

I do not want to evoke sympathy for incel-motivated terrorism. I want to evoke sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of incels who would never support terrorism and are now being publicly demonized.

I also want to make it clear that I am not throwing in my hat with the likes of Robin Hanson (who is also well-known as a behavioral economist, blogger, science fiction fan, Less Wrong devotee, and techno-utopian—so I feel a particular need to clarify my differences with him) when he defends something he calls in purposefully cold language “redistribution of sex” (that one is from right after the attack, but he has done this before, in previous blog posts).

Hanson has drunk Robert Nozick‘s Kool-Aid, and thinks that redistribution of wealth via taxation is morally equivalent to theft or even slavery. He is fond of making comparisons between redistribution of wealth and other forms of “redistribution” that obviously would be tantamount to theft and slavery, and asking “What’s the difference?” when in fact the difference is glaringly obvious to everyone but him. He is also fond of saying that “inequality between households within a nation” is a small portion of inequality, and then wondering aloud why we make such a big deal out of it. The answer here is also quite obvious: First of all, it’s not that small a portion of inequality—it’s a third of global income inequality by most measures, it’s increasing while across-nation inequality is decreasing, and the absolute magnitude of within-nation inequality is staggering: there are households with incomes over one million times that of other households within the same nation. (Where are the people who have had sex one hundred billion times, let alone the ones who had sex forty billion times in one year? Because here’s the man who has one hundred billion dollars and made almost $40 billion in one year.) Second, within-nation inequality is extremely simple to fix by public policy; just change a few numbers in the tax code—in fact, just change them back to what they were in the 1950s. Cross-national inequality is much more complicated (though I believe it can be solved, eventually) and some forms of what he’s calling “inequality” (like “inequality across periods of human history” or “inequality of innate talent”) don’t seem amenable to correction under any conceivable circumstances.

Hanson has lots of just-so stories about the evolutionary psychology of why “we don’t care” about cross-national inequality (gee, I thought maybe devoting my career to it was a pretty good signal otherwise?) or inequality in access to sex (which is thousands of times smaller than income inequality), but no clear policy suggestions for how these other forms of inequality could be in any way addressed. This whole idea of “redistribution of sex”; what does that mean, exactly? Legalized or even subsidized prostitution or sex robots would be one thing; I can see pros and cons there at least. But without clarification, it sounds like he’s endorsing the most extremist misogynist incels who think that women should be rightfully compelled to have sex with sexually frustrated men—which would be quite literally state-sanctioned rape. I think really Hanson isn’t all that interested in incels, and just wants to make fun of silly “socialists” who would dare suppose that maybe Jeff Bezos doesn’t need his 120 billion dollars as badly as some of the starving children in Africa could benefit from them, or that maybe having a tax system similar to Sweden or Denmark (which consistently rate as some of the happiest, most prosperous nations on Earth) sounds like a good idea. He takes things that are obviously much worse than redistributive taxation, and compares them to redistributive taxation to make taxation seem worse than it is.

No, I do not support “redistribution of sex”. I might be able to support legalized prostitution, but I’m concerned about the empirical data suggesting that legalized prostitution correlates with increased human sex trafficking. I think I would also support legalized sex robots, but for reasons that will become clear shortly, I strongly suspect they would do little to solve the problem, even if they weren’t ridiculously expensive. Beyond that, I’ve said enough about Hanson; Lawyers, Guns & Money nicely skewers Hanson’s argument, so I’ll not bother with it any further.
Instead, I want to talk about the average incel, one of hundreds of thousands if not millions of men who feels cast aside by society because he is socially awkward and can’t get laid. I want to talk about him because I used to be very much like him (though I never specifically identified as “incel”), and I want to talk about him because I think that he is genuinely suffering and needs help.

There is a moderate wing of the incel community, just as there is a moderate wing of the Muslim community. The moderate wing of incels is represented by sites like Love-Shy.com that try to reach out to people (mostly, but not exclusively young heterosexual men) who are lonely and sexually frustrated and often suffering from social anxiety or other mood disorders. Though they can be casually sexist (particularly when it comes to stereotypes about differences between men and women), they are not virulently misogynistic and they would never support violence. Moreover, they provide a valuable service in offering social support to men who otherwise feel ostracized by society. I disagree with a lot of things these groups say, but they are providing valuable benefits to their members and aren’t hurting anyone else. Taking out your anger against incel terrorists on Love-Shy.com is like painting graffiti on a mosque in response to 9/11 (which, of course, people did).

To some extent, I can even understand the more misogynistic (but still non-violent) wings of the incel community. I don’t want to defend their misogyny, but I can sort of understand where it might come from.

You see, men in our society (and most societies) are taught from a very young age that their moral worth as human beings is based primarily on one thing in particular: Sexual prowess. If you are having a lot of sex with a lot of women, you are a good and worthy man. If you are not, you are broken and defective. (Donald Trump has clearly internalized this narrative quite thoroughly—as have a shockingly large number of his supporters.)

This narrative is so strong and so universal, in fact, that I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a genetic component. It actually makes sense as a matter of evolutionary psychology than males would evolve to think this way; in an evolutionary sense it’s true that a male’s ultimate worth—that is, fitness, the one thing natural selection cares about—is defined by mating with a maximal number of females. But even if it has a genetic component, there is enough variation in this belief that I am confident that social norms can exaggerate or suppress it. One thing I can’t stand about popular accounts of evolutionary psychology is how they leap from “plausible evolutionary account” to “obviously genetic trait” all the way to “therefore impossible to change or compensate for”. My myopia and astigmatism are absolutely genetic; we can point to some of the specific genes. And yet my glasses compensate for them perfectly, and for a bit more money I could instead get LASIK surgery that would correct them permanently. Never think for a moment that “genetic” implies “immutable”.

Because of this powerful narrative, men who are sexually frustrated get treated like garbage by other men and even women. They feel ostracized and degraded. Often, they even feel worthless. If your worth as a human being is defined by how many women you have sex with, and you aren’t having sex with any, it follows that your worth is zero. No wonder, then, that so many become overcome with despair.
The incel community provides an opportunity to escape that despair. If you are told that you are not defective, but instead there is something wrong with society that keeps you down, you no longer have to feel worthless. It’s not that you don’t deserve to have sex, it’s that you’ve been denied what you deserve. When the only other narrative you’ve been given is that you are broken and worthless, I can see why “society is screwing you over” is an appealing counter-narrative. Indeed, it’s not even that far off from the truth.

The moderate wing of the incel community even offers some constructive solutions: They offer support to help men improve themselves, overcome their own social anxiety, and ultimately build fulfilling sexual relationships.

The extremist wing gets this all wrong: Instead of blaming the narrative that sex equals worth, they blame women—often, all women—for somehow colluding to deny them access to the sex they so justly deserve. They often link themselves to the “pick-up artist” community who try to manipulate women into having sex.

And then in the most extreme cases, they may even decide to turn their anger into violence.

But really I don’t think most of these men actually want sex at all, which is part of why I don’t think sex robots would be particularly effective.

Rather, to clarify: They want sex, as most of us do—but that’s not what they need. A simple lack of sex can be compensated reasonably well by pornography and masturbation. (Let me state this outright: Pornography and masturbation are fundamental human rights. Porn is free speech, and masturbation is part of the fundamental right of bodily autonomy. The fact that increased access to porn reduces incidence of sexual assault is nice, but secondary; porn is freedom.) Obviously it would be more satisfying to have a real sexual relationship, but with such substitutes available, a mere lack of sex does not cause suffering.

The need that these men are feeling is companionship. It is love. It is understanding. These are things that can’t be replaced, even partially, by sex robots or Internet porn.

Why do they conflate the two? Again, because society has taught them to do so. This one is clearly cultural, as it varies quite considerably between nations; it’s not nearly as bad in Southern Europe for example.
In American society (and many, but not all others), men are taught three things: First, expression of any emotion except for possibly anger, and especially expression of affection, is inherently erotic. Second, emotional vulnerability jeopardizes masculinity. Third, erotic expression must be only between men and women in a heterosexual relationship.

In principle, it might be enough to simply drop the third proposition: This is essentially what happens in the LGBT community. Gay men still generally suffer from the suspicion that all emotional expression is erotic, but have long-since abandoned their fears of expressing eroticism with other men. Often they’ve also given up on trying to sustain norms of masculinity as well. So gay men can hug each other and cry in front of each other, for example, without breaking norms within the LGBT community; the sexual subtext is often still there, but it’s considered unproblematic. (Gay men typically aren’t even as concerned about sexual infidelity as straight men; over 40% of gay couples are to some degree polyamorous, compared to 5% of straight couples.) It may also be seen as a loss of masculinity, but this too is considered unproblematic in most cases. There is a notable exception, which is the substantial segment of gay men who pride themselves upon hypermasculinity (generally abbreviated “masc”); and indeed, within that subcommunity you often see a lot of the same toxic masculinity norms that are found in the society as large.

That is also what happened in Classical Greece and Rome, I think: These societies were certainly virulently misogynistic in their own way, but their willingness to accept erotic expression between men opened them to accepting certain kinds of emotional expression between men as well, as long as it was not perceived as a threat to masculinity per se.

But when all three of those norms are in place, men find that the only emotional outlet they are even permitted to have while remaining within socially normative masculinity is a woman who is a romantic partner. Family members are allowed certain minimal types of affection—you can hug your mom, as long as you don’t seem too eager—but there is only one person in the world that you are allowed to express genuine emotional vulnerability toward, and that is your girlfriend. If you don’t have one? Get one. If you can’t get one? Well, sorry, pal, you’re just out of luck. Deal with it, or you’re not a real man.

But really what I’d like to get rid of is the first two propositions: Emotional expression should not be considered inherently sexual. Expressing emotional vulnerability should not be taken as a capitulation of your masculinity—and if I really had my druthers, the whole idea of “masculinity” would disappear or become irrelevant. This is the way that society is actually holding incels down: Not by denying them access to sex—the right to refuse sex is also a fundamental human right—but by denying them access to emotional expression and treating them like garbage because they are unable to have sex.

My sense is that what most incels are really feeling is not a dearth of sexual expression; it’s a dearth of emotional expression. But precisely because social norms have forced them into getting the two from the same place, they have conflated them. Further evidence in favor of this proposition? A substantial proportion of men who hire prostitutes spend a lot of the time they paid for simply talking.

I think what most of these men really need is psychotherapy. I’m not saying that to disparage them; I myself am a regular consumer of psychotherapy, which is one of the most cost-effective medical interventions known to humanity. I feel a need to clarify this because there is so much stigma on mental illness that saying someone is mentally ill and needs therapy can be taken as an insult; but I literally mean that a lot of these men are mentally ill and need therapy. Many of them exhibit significant signs of social anxiety, depression, or bipolar disorder.

Even for those who aren’t outright mentally ill, psychotherapy might be able to help them sort out some of these toxic narratives they’ve been fed by society, get them to think a little more carefully about what it means to be a good man and whether the “man” part is even so important. A good therapist could tease out the fabric of their tangled cognition and point out that when they say they want sex, it really sounds like they want self-worth, and when they say they want a girlfriend it really sounds like they want someone to talk to.

Such a solution won’t work on everyone, and it won’t work overnight on anyone. But the incel community did not emerge from a vacuum; it was catalyzed by a great deal of genuine suffering. Remove some of that suffering, and we might just undermine the most dangerous parts of the incel community and prevent at least some future violence.

No one owes sex to anyone. But maybe we do, as a society, owe these men a little more sympathy?

Believing in civilization without believing in colonialism

2016-06-01 PNRJ core principles, development economics, ethics Aztecs, British Empire, capitalism, China, civilization, colonialism, Culture, democide, democracy, development, empires, exploitation colonialism, Fictional Evidence Fallacy, Gene Roddenberry, genocide, Germany, history, imperialism, India, infant mortality, Iraq, Iroquois, Japan, just war theory, Korea, Kosovo, Libya, Mali, Ming Dynasty, morality, Native Americans, NATO, Ottoman Empire, Pequot, Persia, poverty, Prime Directive, progress, Rwanda, settler colonialism, slavery, social democracy, Star Trek, Tibet, UK, Vietnam, warfare, Western civilization, Zheng He

JDN 2457541

In a post last week I presented some of the overwhelming evidence that society has been getting better over time, particularly since the start of the Industrial Revolution. I focused mainly on infant mortality rates—babies not dying—but there are lots of other measures you could use as well. Despite popular belief, poverty is rapidly declining, and is now the lowest it’s ever been. War is rapidly declining. Crime is rapidly declining in First World countries, and to the best of our knowledge crime rates are stable worldwide. Public health is rapidly improving. Lifespans are getting longer. And so on, and so on. It’s not quite true to say that every indicator of human progress is on an upward trend, but the vast majority of really important indicators are.

Moreover, there is every reason to believe that this great progress is largely the result of what we call “civilization”, even Western civilization: Stable, centralized governments, strong national defense, representative democracy, free markets, openness to global trade, investment in infrastructure, science and technology, secularism, a culture that values innovation, and freedom of speech and the press. We did not get here by Marxism, nor agragrian socialism, nor primitivism, nor anarcho-capitalism. We did not get here by fascism, nor theocracy, nor monarchy. This progress was built by the center-left welfare state, “social democracy”, “modified capitalism”, the system where free, open markets are coupled with a strong democratic government to protect and steer them.

This fact is basically beyond dispute; the evidence is overwhelming. The serious debate in development economics is over which parts of the Western welfare state are most conducive to raising human well-being, and which parts of the package are more optional. And even then, some things are fairly obvious: Stable government is clearly necessary, while speaking English is clearly optional.

Yet many people are resistant to this conclusion, or even offended by it, and I think I know why: They are confusing the results of civilization with the methods by which it was established.

The results of civilization are indisputably positive: Everything I just named above, especially babies not dying.

But the methods by which civilization was established are not; indeed, some of the greatest atrocities in human history are attributable at least in part to attempts to “spread civilization” to “primitive” or “savage” people.
It is therefore vital to distinguish between the result, civilization, and the processes by which it was effected, such as colonialism and imperialism.

First, it’s important not to overstate the link between civilization and colonialism.

We tend to associate colonialism and imperialism with White people from Western European cultures conquering other people in other cultures; but in fact colonialism and imperialism are basically universal to any human culture that attains sufficient size and centralization. India engaged in colonialism, Persia engaged in imperialism, China engaged in imperialism, the Mongols were of course major imperialists, and don’t forget the Ottoman Empire; and did you realize that Tibet and Mali were at one time imperialists as well? And of course there are a whole bunch of empires you’ve probably never heard of, like the Parthians and the Ghaznavids and the Ummayyads. Even many of the people we’re accustoming to thinking of as innocent victims of colonialism were themselves imperialists—the Aztecs certainly were (they even sold people into slavery and used them for human sacrifice!), as were the Pequot, and the Iroquois may not have outright conquered anyone but were definitely at least “soft imperialists” the way that the US is today, spreading their influence around and using economic and sometimes military pressure to absorb other cultures into their own.

Of course, those were all civilizations, at least in the broadest sense of the word; but before that, it’s not that there wasn’t violence, it just wasn’t organized enough to be worthy of being called “imperialism”. The more general concept of intertribal warfare is a human universal, and some hunter-gatherer tribes actually engage in an essentially constant state of warfare we call “endemic warfare”. People have been grouping together to kill other people they perceived as different for at least as long as there have been people to do so.

This is of course not to excuse what European colonial powers did when they set up bases on other continents and exploited, enslaved, or even murdered the indigenous population. And the absolute numbers of people enslaved or killed are typically larger under European colonialism, mainly because European cultures became so powerful and conquered almost the entire world. Even if European societies were not uniquely predisposed to be violent (and I see no evidence to say that they were—humans are pretty much humans), they were more successful in their violent conquering, and so more people suffered and died. It’s also a first-mover effect: If the Ming Dynasty had supported Zheng He more in his colonial ambitions, I’d probably be writing this post in Mandarin and reflecting on why Asian cultures have engaged in so much colonial oppression.

While there is a deeply condescending paternalism (and often post-hoc rationalization of your own self-interested exploitation) involved in saying that you are conquering other people in order to civilize them, humans are also perfectly capable of committing atrocities for far less noble-sounding motives. There are holy wars such as the Crusades and ethnic genocides like in Rwanda, and the Arab slave trade was purely for profit and didn’t even have the pretense of civilizing people (not that the Atlantic slave trade was ever really about that anyway).

Indeed, I think it’s important to distinguish between colonialists who really did make some effort at civilizing the populations they conquered (like Britain, and also the Mongols actually) and those that clearly were just using that as an excuse to rape and pillage (like Spain and Portugal). This is similar to but not quite the same thing as the distinction between settler colonialism, where you send colonists to live there and build up the country, and exploitation colonialism, where you send military forces to take control of the existing population and exploit them to get their resources. Countries that experienced settler colonialism (such as the US and Australia) have fared a lot better in the long run than countries that experienced exploitation colonialism (such as Haiti and Zimbabwe).

The worst consequences of colonialism weren’t even really anyone’s fault, actually. The reason something like 98% of all Native Americans died as a result of European colonization was not that Europeans killed them—they did kill thousands of course, and I hope it goes without saying that that’s terrible, but it was a small fraction of the total deaths. The reason such a huge number died and whole cultures were depopulated was disease, and the inability of medical technology in any culture at that time to handle such a catastrophic plague. The primary cause was therefore accidental, and not really foreseeable given the state of scientific knowledge at the time. (I therefore think it’s wrong to consider it genocide—maybe democide.) Indeed, what really would have saved these people would be if Europe had advanced even faster into industrial capitalism and modern science, or else waited to colonize until they had; and then they could have distributed vaccines and antibiotics when they arrived. (Of course, there is evidence that a few European colonists used the diseases intentionally as biological weapons, which no amount of vaccine technology would prevent—and that is indeed genocide. But again, this was a small fraction of the total deaths.)

However, even with all those caveats, I hope we can all agree that colonialism and imperialism were morally wrong. No nation has the right to invade and conquer other nations; no one has the right to enslave people; no one has the right to kill people based on their culture or ethnicity.

My point is that it is entirely possible to recognize that and still appreciate that Western civilization has dramatically improved the standard of human life over the last few centuries. It simply doesn’t follow from the fact that British government and culture were more advanced and pluralistic that British soldiers can just go around taking over other people’s countries and planting their own flag (follow the link if you need some comic relief from this dark topic). That was the moral failing of colonialism; not that they thought their society was better—for in many ways it was—but that they thought that gave them the right to terrorize, slaughter, enslave, and conquer people.

Indeed, the “justification” of colonialism is a lot like that bizarre pseudo-utilitarianism I mentioned in my post on torture, where the mere presence of some benefit is taken to justify any possible action toward achieving that benefit. No, that’s not how morality works. You can’t justify unlimited evil by any good—it has to be a greater good, as in actually greater.

So let’s suppose that you do find yourself encountering another culture which is clearly more primitive than yours; their inferior technology results in them living in poverty and having very high rates of disease and death, especially among infants and children. What, if anything, are you justified in doing to intervene to improve their condition?

One idea would be to hold to the Prime Directive: No intervention, no sir, not ever. This is clearly what Gene Roddenberry thought of imperialism, hence why he built it into the Federation’s core principles.

But does that really make sense? Even as Star Trek shows progressed, the writers kept coming up with situations where the Prime Directive really seemed like it should have an exception, and sometimes decided that the honorable crew of Enterprise or Voyager really should intervene in this more primitive society to save them from some terrible fate. And I hope I’m not committing a Fictional Evidence Fallacy when I say that if your fictional universe specifically designed not to let that happen makes that happen, well… maybe it’s something we should be considering.

What if people are dying of a terrible disease that you could easily cure? Should you really deny them access to your medicine to avoid intervening in their society?

What if the primitive culture is ruled by a horrible tyrant that you could easily depose with little or no bloodshed? Should you let him continue to rule with an iron fist?

What if the natives are engaged in slavery, or even their own brand of imperialism against other indigenous cultures? Can you fight imperialism with imperialism?

And then we have to ask, does it really matter whether their babies are being murdered by the tyrant or simply dying from malnutrition and infection? The babies are just as dead, aren’t they? Even if we say that being murdered by a tyrant is worse than dying of malnutrition, it can’t be that much worse, can it? Surely 10 babies dying of malnutrition is at least as bad as 1 baby being murdered?

But then it begins to seem like we have a duty to intervene, and moreover a duty that applies in almost every circumstance! If you are on opposite sides of the technology threshold where infant mortality drops from 30% to 1%, how can you justify not intervening?

I think the best answer here is to keep in mind the very large costs of intervention as well as the potentially large benefits. The answer sounds simple, but is actually perhaps the hardest possible answer to apply in practice: You must do a cost-benefit analysis. Furthermore, you must do it well. We can’t demand perfection, but it must actually be a serious good-faith effort to predict the consequences of different intervention policies.

We know that people tend to resist most outside interventions, especially if you have the intention of toppling their leaders (even if they are indeed tyrannical). Even the simple act of offering people vaccines could be met with resistance, as the native people might think you are poisoning them or somehow trying to control them. But in general, opening contact with with gifts and trade is almost certainly going to trigger less hostility and therefore be more effective than going in guns blazing.

If you do use military force, it must be targeted at the particular leaders who are most harmful, and it must be designed to achieve swift, decisive victory with minimal collateral damage. (Basically I’m talking about just war theory.) If you really have such an advanced civilization, show it by exhibiting total technological dominance and minimizing the number of innocent people you kill. The NATO interventions in Kosovo and Libya mostly got this right. The Vietnam War and Iraq War got it totally wrong.

As you change their society, you should be prepared to bear most of the cost of transition; you are, after all, much richer than they are, and also the ones responsible for effecting the transition. You should not expect to see short-term gains for your own civilization, only long-term gains once their culture has advanced to a level near your own. You can’t bear all the costs of course—transition is just painful, no matter what you do—but at least the fungible economic costs should be borne by you, not by the native population. Examples of doing this wrong include basically all the standard examples of exploitation colonialism: Africa, the Caribbean, South America. Examples of doing this right include West Germany and Japan after WW2, and South Korea after the Korean War—which is to say, the greatest economic successes in the history of the human race. This was us winning development, humanity. Do this again everywhere and we will have not only ended world hunger, but achieved global prosperity.

What happens if we apply these principles to real-world colonialism? It does not fare well. Nor should it, as we’ve already established that most if not all real-world colonialism was morally wrong.

15^th and 16^th century colonialism fail immediately; they offer no benefit to speak of. Europe’s technological superiority was enough to give them gunpowder but not enough to drop their infant mortality rate. Maybe life was better in 16^th century Spain than it was in the Aztec Empire, but honestly not by all that much; and life in the Iroquois Confederacy was in many ways better than life in 15^th century England. (Though maybe that justifies some Iroquois imperialism, at least their “soft imperialism”?)

If these principles did justify any real-world imperialism—and I am not convinced that it does—it would only be much later imperialism, like the British Empire in the 19^th and 20^th century. And even then, it’s not clear that the talk of “civilizing” people and “the White Man’s Burden” was much more than rationalization, an attempt to give a humanitarian justification for what were really acts of self-interested economic exploitation. Even though India and South Africa are probably better off now than they were when the British first took them over, it’s not at all clear that this was really the goal of the British government so much as a side effect, and there are a lot of things the British could have done differently that would obviously have made them better off still—you know, like not implementing the precursors to apartheid, or making India a parliamentary democracy immediately instead of starting with the Raj and only conceding to democracy after decades of protest. What actually happened doesn’t exactly look like Britain cared nothing for actually improving the lives of people in India and South Africa (they did build a lot of schools and railroads, and sought to undermine slavery and the caste system), but it also doesn’t look like that was their only goal; it was more like one goal among several which also included the strategic and economic interests of Britain. It isn’t enough that Britain was a better society or even that they made South Africa and India better societies than they were; if the goal wasn’t really about making people’s lives better where you are intervening, it’s clearly not justified intervention.

And that’s the relatively beneficent imperialism; the really horrific imperialists throughout history made only the barest pretense of spreading civilization and were clearly interested in nothing more than maximizing their own wealth and power. This is probably why we get things like the Prime Directive; we saw how bad it can get, and overreacted a little by saying that intervening in other cultures is always, always wrong, no matter what. It was only a slight overreaction—intervening in other cultures is usually wrong, and almost all historical examples of it were wrong—but it is still an overreaction. There are exceptional cases where intervening in another culture can be not only morally right but obligatory.

Indeed, one underappreciated consequence of colonialism and imperialism is that they have triggered a backlash against real good-faith efforts toward economic development. People in Africa, Asia, and Latin America see economists from the US and the UK (and most of the world’s top economists are in fact educated in the US or the UK) come in and tell them that they need to do this and that to restructure their society for greater prosperity, and they understandably ask: “Why should I trust you this time?” The last two or four or seven batches of people coming from the US and Europe to intervene in their countries exploited them or worse, so why is this time any different?

It is different, of course; UNDP is not the East India Company, not by a longshot. Even for all their faults, the IMF isn’t the East India Company either. Indeed, while these people largely come from the same places as the imperialists, and may be descended from them, they are in fact completely different people, and moral responsibility does not inherit across generations. While the suspicion is understandable, it is ultimately unjustified; whatever happened hundreds of years ago, this time most of us really are trying to help—and it’s working.

The Expanse gets the science right—including the economics

2016-04-232016-05-02 PNRJ futurism, public policy asteroid, Battlestar Galactica, Ceres, colonialism, Continuum, Culture, end of history, Firefly, Game of Thrones, inequality, Mars, Palestine, poverty, psychology, science, science fiction, Star Trek, terraforming, The Expanse

JDN 2457502

Despite constantly working on half a dozen projects at once (literally—preparing to start my PhD, writing this blog, working at my day job, editing a novel, preparing to submit a nonfiction book, writing another nonfiction book with three of my friends as co-authors, and creating a card game—that’s seven actually), I do occasionally find time to do things for fun. One I’ve been doing lately is catching up on The Expanse on DVR (I’m about halfway through the first season so far).

If you’re not familiar with The Expanse, it has been fairly aptly described as “Battlestar Galactica meets Game of Thrones”, though I think that particular comparison misrepresents the tone and attitudes of the series, because both BG and GoT are so dark and cynical (“It’s a nice day… for a… red wedding!”). I think “Star Trek meets Game of Thrones” might be better actually—the extreme idealism of Star Trek would cancel out the extreme cynicism of Game of Thrones, with the result being a complex mix of idealism and cynicism that more accurately reflects the real world (a world where Mahatma Gandhi and Adolf Hitler lived at the same time). That complex, nuanced world (or should I say worlds?) is where The Expanse takes place. ST is also more geopolitical than BG and The Expanse is nothing if not geopolitical.

But The Expanse is not just psychologically realistic—it is also scientifically and economically realistic. It may in fact be the hardest science fiction I have ever encountered, and is definitely the hardest science fiction I’ve seen in a television show. (There are a few books that might be slightly harder, as well as some movies based on them.)

The only major scientific inaccuracy I’ve been able to find so far is the use of sound effects in space, and actually even these can be interpreted as reflecting an omniscient narrator perspective that would hear any sounds that anyone would hear, regardless of what planet or ship they might be on. The sounds the audience hears all seem to be sounds that someone would hear—there’s simply no particular person who would hear all of them. When people are actually thrown into hard vacuum, we don’t hear them make any noise.

Like Firefly (and for once I think The Expanse might actually be good enough to deserve that comparison), there is no FTL, no aliens, no superhuman AI. Human beings are bound within our own solar system, and travel between planets takes weeks or months depending on your energy budget. They actually show holograms projecting the trajectory of various spacecraft and the trajectories actually make good sense in terms of orbital mechanics. Finally screenwriters had the courage to give us the terrifying suspense and inevitability of an incoming nuclear missile rounding a nearby asteroid and intercepting your trajectory, where you have minutes to think about it but not nearly enough delta-v to get out of its blast radius. That is what space combat will be like, if we ever have space combat (as awesome as it is to watch, I strongly hope that we will not ever actually do it). Unlike what Star Trek would have you believe, space is not a 19^th century ocean.

They do have stealth in space—but it requires technology that even to them is highly advanced. Moreover it appears to only work for relatively short periods and seems most effective against civilian vessels that would likely lack state-of-the-art sensors, both of which make it a lot more plausible.

Computers are more advanced in the 2200s then they were in the 2000s, but not radically so, at most a million times faster, about what we gained since the 1980s. I’m guessing a smartphone in The Expanse runs at a few petaflops. Essentially they’re banking on Moore’s Law finally dying sometime in the mid 21^st century, but then, so am I. Perhaps a bit harder to swallow is that no one has figured out good enough heuristics to match human cognition; but then, human cognition is very tightly optimized.

Spacecraft don’t have artificial gravity except for the thrust of their engines, and people float around as they should when ships are freefalling. They actually deal with the fact that Mars and Ceres have lower gravity than Earth, and the kinds of health problems that result from this. (One thing I do wish they’d done is had the Martian cruiser set a cruising acceleration of Mars-g—about 38% Earth-g—that would feel awkward and dizzying to their Earther captives. Instead they basically seem to assume that Martians still like to use Earth-g for space transit, but that does make some sense in terms of both human health and simply transit time.) It doesn’t seem like people move around quite awkwardly enough in the very low gravity of Ceres—which should be only about 3% Earth-g—but they do establish that electromagnetic boots are ubiquitous and that could account for most of this.

They fight primarily with nuclear missiles and kinetic weapons, and the damage done by nuclear missiles is appropriately reduced by the fact that vacuum doesn’t transmit shockwaves. (Nuclear missiles would still be quite damaging in space by releasing large amounts of wide-spectrum radiation; but they wouldn’t cause the total devastation they do within atmosphere.) Oddly they decided not to go with laser weapons as far as I can tell, which actually seems to me like they’ve underestimated advancement; laser weapons have a number of advantages that would be particularly useful in space, once we can actually make them affordable and reliable enough for widespread deployment. There could also be a three-tier system, where missiles are used at long range, railguns at medium range, and lasers at short range. (Yes, short range—the increased speed of lasers would be only slight compared to a good railgun, and would be more than offset by the effect of diffraction. At orbital distances, a laser is a shotgun.) Then again, it could well work out that railguns are just better—depending on how vessels are structured, puncturing their hulls with kinetic rounds could well be more useful than burning them up with infrared lasers.

But I think what really struck me about the realism of The Expanse is how it even makes the society realistic (in a way that, say, Firefly really doesn’t—we wanted a Western and we got a Western!).

The only major offworld colonies are Mars and Ceres, both of which seem to be fairly well-established, probably originally colonized as much as a century ago. Different societies have formed on each world; Earth has largely united under the United Nations (one of the lead characters is an undersecretary for the UN), but meanwhile Mars has split off into its own independent nation (“Martian” is now an ethnicity like “German” rather than meaning “extraterrestrial”), and the asteroid belt colonists, while formally still under Earth’s government, think of themselves as a different culture (“Belters”) and are seeking independence. There are some fairly obvious—but deftly managed rather than heavy-handed—parallels between the Belter independence movement and real-world independence movements, particularly Palestine (it’s hard not to think of the PLO when they talk about the OPA). Both Mars and the Belt have their own languages, while Earth’s languages have largely coalesced around English as the language of politics and commerce. (If the latter seems implausible, I remind you that the majority of the Internet and all international air traffic control are in English.) English is the world’s lingua franca (which is a really bizarre turn of phrase because it’s the Latin for French).

There is some of the conniving and murdering of Game of Thrones, but it is at a much more subdued level, and all of the major factions display both merits and flaws. There is no clear hero and no clear villain, just conflict and misunderstanding between a variety of human beings each with their own good and bad qualities. There does seem to be a sense that the most idealistic characters suffer for their idealism much as the Starks often do, but unlike the Starks they usually survive and learn from the experience. Indeed, some of the most cynical also seem to suffer for their cynicism—in the episode I just finished, the grizzled UN Colonel assumed the worst of his adversary and ended up branded “the butcher of Anderson Station”.

Cost of living on Ceres is extraordinarily high because of the limited living space (the apartments look a lot like the tiny studios of New York or San Francisco), and above all the need to constantly import air and water from Earth. A central plot point in the first episode is that a ship carrying comet ice—i.e., water—to Ceres is lost in a surprise attack by unknown adversaries with advanced technology, and the result is a deepening of an already dire water shortage, exacerbating the Belter’s craving for rebellion.

Air and water are recyclable, so it wouldn’t be that literally every drink and every breath needs to be supplied from outside—indeed that would clearly be cost-prohibitive. But recycling is never perfect, and Ceres also appears to have a growing population, both of which would require a constant input of new resources to sustain. It makes perfect sense that the most powerful people on Ceres are billionaire tycoons who own water and air transport corporations.

The police on Ceres (of which another lead character is a detective) are well-intentioned but understaffed, underfunded and moderately corrupt, similar to what we seem to find in large inner-city police departments like the NYPD and LAPD. It felt completely right when they responded to an attempt to kill a police officer with absolutely overwhelming force and little regard for due process and procedure—for this is what real-world police departments almost always do.

But why colonize the asteroid belt at all? Mars is a whole planet, there is plenty there—and in The Expanse they are undergoing terraforming at a very plausible rate (there’s a moving scene where a Martian says to an Earther, “We’re trying to finish building our garden before you finish paving over yours.”). Mars has as much land as Earth, and it has water, abundant metals, and CO2 you could use to make air.Even just the frontier ambition could be enough to bring us to Mars.

But why go to Ceres? The explanation The Expanse offers is a very sensible one: Mining, particularly so-called “rare earth metals”. Gold and platinum might have been profitable to mine at first, but once they became plentiful the market would probably collapse or at least drop off to a level where they aren’t particularly expensive or interesting—because they aren’t useful for very much. But neodymium, scandium, and prometheum are all going to be in extremely high demand in a high-tech future based on nuclear-powered spacecraft, and given that we’re already running out of easily accessible deposits on Earth, by the 2200s there will probably be basically none left. The asteroid belt, however, will have plenty for centuries to come.

As a result Ceres is organized like a mining town, or perhaps an extractive petrostate (metallostate?); but due to lightspeed interplanetary communication—very important in the series—and some modicum of free speech it doesn’t appear to have attained more than a moderate level of corruption. This also seems realistic; the “end-of-history” thesis is often overstated, but the basic idea that some form of democracy and welfare-state capitalism is fast becoming the only viable model of governance does seem to be true, and that is almost certainly the model of governance we would export to other planets. In such a system corruption can only get so bad before it is shown on the mass media and people won’t take it anymore.

The show doesn’t deal much with absolute dollar (or whatever currency) numbers, which is probably wise; but nominal incomes on Ceres are likely extremely high even though the standard of living is quite poor, because the tiny living space and need to import air and water would make prices (literally?) astronomical. Most people on Ceres seem to have grown up there, but the initial attraction could have been something like the California Gold Rush, where rumors of spectacularly high incomes clashed with similarly spectacular expenses incurred upon arrival. “Become a millionaire!” “Oh, by the way, your utility bill this month is $112,000.”

Indeed, even the poor on Ceres don’t seem that poor, which is a very nice turn toward realism that a lot of other science fiction shows seem unprepared to make. In Firefly, the poor are poor—they can barely afford food and clothing, and have no modern conveniences whatsoever. (“Jaynestown”, perhaps my favorite episode, depicts this vividly.) But even the poor in the US today are rarely that poor; our minimalistic and half-hearted welfare state has a number of cracks one can fall through, but as long as you get the benefits you’re supposed to get you should be able to avoid starvation and homelessness. Similarly I find it hard to believe that any society with high enough productivity to routinely build interstellar spacecraft the way we build container ships would not have at least the kind of welfare state that provides for the most basic needs. Chronic dehydration is probably still a problem for Belters, because water would be too expensive to subsidize in this way; but they all seem to have fairly nice clothes, home appliances, and smartphones, and that seems right to me. At one point a character loses his arm, and the “cheap” solution is a cybernetic prosthetic—the “expensive” one would be to grow him a new arm. As today but perhaps even more so, poverty in The Expanse is really about inequality—the enormous power granted to those who have millions of times as much as others. (Another show that does this quite well, though is considerably softer as far as the physics, is Continuum. If I recall correctly, Alec Sadler in 2079 is literally a trillionaire.)

Mars also appears to be a democracy, and actually quite a thriving one. In many ways Mars appears to be surpassing Earth economically and technologically. This suggests that Mars was colonized with our best and brightest, but not necessarily; Australians have done quite well for themselves despite being founded as a penal colony. Mars colonization would also have a way of justifying their frontier idealism that no previous frontiers have granted: No indigenous people to displace, no local ecology to despoil, and no gifts from the surrounding environment. You really are working entirely out of your own hard work and know-how (and technology and funding from Earth of course) to establish a truly new world on the open and unspoiled frontier. You’re not naive or a hypocrite, it’s the real truth. That kind of realistic idealism could make the Martian Dream a success in ways even the American Dream never quite was.

In all it is a very compelling series, and should appeal to people like me who crave geopolitical nuance in fiction. But it also has its moments of huge space battles with exploding star cruisers, so there’s that.

Happy Capybara Day! Or the power of culture

2015-04-18 PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, critique of neoclassical economics altruism, behavior, CAPM, Capybara Day, cooperation, Culture, holiday, January Effect, norms, public goods game, Richard Thaler, stock market, tribal paradigm

JDN 2457131 EDT 14:33.

Did you celebrate Capybara Day yesterday? You didn’t? Why not? We weren’t able to find any actual capybaras this year, but maybe next year we’ll be able to plan better and find a capybara at a zoo; unfortunately the nearest zoo with a capybara appears to be in Maryland. But where would we be without a capybara to consult annually on the stock market?

Right now you are probably rather confused, perhaps wondering if I’ve gone completely insane. This is because Capybara Day is a holiday of my own invention, one which only a handful of people have even heard about.

But if you think we’d never have a holiday so bizarre, think again: For all I did was make some slight modifications to Groundhog Day. Instead of consulting a groundhog about the weather every February 2, I proposed that we consult a capybara about the stock market every April 17. And if you think you have some reason why groundhogs are better at predicting the weather (perhaps because they at least have some vague notion of what weather is) than capybaras are at predicting the stock market (since they have no concept of money or numbers), think about this: Capybara Day could produce extremely accurate predictions, provided only that people actually believed it. The prophecy of rising or falling stock prices could very easily become self-fulfilling. If it were a cultural habit of ours to consult capybaras about the stock market, capybaras would become good predictors of the stock market.

That might seem a bit far-fetched, but think about this: Why is there a January Effect? (To be fair, some researchers argue that there isn’t, and the apparent correlation between higher stock prices and the month of January is simply an illusion, perhaps the result of data overfitting.)

But I think it probably is real, and moreover has some very obvious reasons behind it. In this I’m in agreement with Richard Thaler, a founder of cognitive economics who wrote about such anomalies in the 1980s. December is a time when two very culturally-important events occur: The end of the year, during which many contracts end, profits are assessed, and tax liabilities are determined; and Christmas, the greatest surge of consumer spending and consumer debt.

The first effect means that corporations are very likely to liquidate assets—particularly assets that are running at a loss—in order to minimize their tax liabilities for the year, which will drive down prices. The second effect means that consumers are in search of financing for extravagant gift purchases, and those who don’t run up credit cards may instead sell off stocks. This is if anything a more rational way of dealing with the credit constraint, since interest rates on credit cards are typically far in excess of stock returns. But this surge of selling due to credit constraints further depresses prices.

In January, things return to normal; assets are repurchased, debt is repaid. This brings prices back up to where they were, which results in a higher than normal return for January.

Neoclassical economists are loath to admit that such a seasonal effect could exist, because it violates their concept of how markets work—and to be fair, the January Effect is actually weak enough to be somewhat ambiguous. But actually it doesn’t take much deviation from neoclassical models to explain the effect: Tax policies and credit constraints are basically enough to do it, so you don’t even need to go that far into understanding human behavior. It’s perfectly rational to behave this way given the distortions that are created by taxes and credit limits, and the arbitrage opportunity is one that you can only take advantage of if you have large amounts of credit and aren’t worried about minimizing your tax liabilities. It’s important to remember just how strong the assumptions of models like CAPM truly are; in addition to the usual infinite identical psychopaths, CAPM assumes there are no taxes, no transaction costs, and unlimited access to credit. I’d say it’s amazing that it works at all, but actually, it doesn’t—check out this graph of risk versus return and tell me if you think CAPM is actually giving us any information at all about how stock markets behave. It frankly looks like you could have drawn a random line through a scatter plot and gotten just as good a fit. Knowing how strong its assumptions are, we would not expect CAPM to work—and sure enough, it doesn’t.

Of course, that leaves the question of why our tax policy would be structured in this way—why make the year end on December 31 instead of some other date? And for that, you need to go back through hundreds of years of history, the Gregorian calendar, which in turn was influenced by Christianity, and before that the Julian calendar—in other words, culture.

Culture is one of the most powerful forces that influences human behavior—and also one of the strangest and least-understood. Economic theory is basically silent on the matter of culture. Typically it is ignored entirely, assumed to be irrelevant against the economic incentives that are the true drivers of human action. (There’s a peculiar emotion many neoclassical economists express that I can best describe as self-righteous cynicism, the attitude that we alone—i.e., economists—understand that human beings are not the noble and altruistic creatures many imagine us to be, nor beings of art and culture, but simply cold, calculating machines whose true motives are reducible to profit incentives—and all who think otherwise are being foolish and naïve; true enlightenment is understanding that human beings are infinite identical psychopaths. This is the attitude epitomized by the economist who once sent me an email with “altruism” written in scare quotes.)

Occasionally culture will be invoked as an external (in jargon, exogenous) force, to explain some aspect of human behavior that is otherwise so totally irrational that even invoking nonsensical preferences won’t make it go away. When a suicide bomber blows himself up in a crowd of people, it’s really pretty hard to explain that in terms of rational profit incentives—though I have seen it tried. (It could be self-interest at a larger scale, like families or nations—but then, isn’t that just the tribal paradigm I’ve been arguing for all along?)

But culture doesn’t just motivate us to do extreme or wildly irrational things. It motivates us all the time, often in quite beneficial ways; we wait in line, hold doors for people walking behind us, tip waiters who serve us, and vote in elections, not because anyone pressures us directly to do so (unlike say Australia we do not have compulsory voting) but because it’s what we feel we ought to do. There is a sense of altruism—and altruism provides the ultimate justification for why it is right to do these things—but the primary motivator in most cases is culture—that’s what people do, and are expected to do, around here.

Indeed, even when there is a direct incentive against behaving a certain way—like criminal penalties against theft—the probability of actually suffering a direct penalty is generally so low that it really can’t be our primary motivation. Instead, the reason we don’t cheat and steal is that we think we shouldn’t, and a major part of why we think we shouldn’t is that we have cultural norms against it.

We can actually observe differences in cultural norms across countries in the laboratory. In this 2008 study by Massimo Castro (PDF) comparing British and Italian people playing an economic game called the public goods game in which you can pay a cost yourself to benefit the group as a whole, it was found not only that people were less willing to benefit groups of foreigners than groups of compatriots, British people were overall more generous than Italian people. This 2010 study by Gachter et. al. (actually Joshua Greene talked about it last week) compared how people play the game in various cities, they found three basic patterns: In Western European and American cities such as Zurich, Copenhagen and Boston, cooperation started out high and remained high throughout; people were just cooperative in general. In Asian cities such as Chengdu and Seoul, cooperation started out low, but if people were punished for not cooperating, cooperation would improve over time, eventually reaching about the same place as in the highly cooperative cities. And in Mediterranean cities such as Istanbul, Athens, and Riyadh, cooperation started low and stayed low—even when people could be punished for not cooperating, nobody actually punished them. (These patterns are broadly consistent with the World Bank corruption ratings of these regions, by the way; Western Europe shows very low corruption, while Asia and the Mediterranean show high corruption. Of course this isn’t all that’s going on—and Asia isn’t much less corrupt than the Middle East, while this experiment might make you think so.)

Interestingly, these cultural patterns showed Melbourne as behaving more like an Asian city than a Western European one—perhaps being in the Pacific has worn off on Australia more than they realize.

This is very preliminary, cutting-edge research I’m talking about, so be careful about drawing too many conclusions. But in general we’ve begun to find some fairly clear cultural differences in economic behavior across different societies. While this would not be at all surprising to a sociologist or anthropologist, it’s the sort of thing that economists have insisted for years is impossible.

This is the frontier of cognitive economics, in my opinion. We know that culture is a very powerful motivator of our behavior, and it is time for us to understand how it works—and then, how it can be changed. We know that culture can be changed—cultural norms do change over time, sometimes remarkably rapidly; but we have only a faint notion of how or why they change. Changing culture has the power to do things that simply changing policy cannot, however; policy requires enforcement, and when the enforcement is removed the behavior will often disappear. But if a cultural norm can be imparted, it could sustain itself for a thousand years without any government action at all.

The irrationality of racism

2015-01-162015-04-04 PNRJ core principles, heuristics and biases ancestry, birthday, Black, convergent evolution, Culture, evolution, Flynn Effect, genetics, identity, IQ, irrational, Krugman, Pareto-efficiency, population, privilege, racism, rational, sexism, society, solidarity, tribal paradigm, White, White privilege

JDN 2457039 EST 12:07.

I thought about making today’s post about the crazy currency crisis in Switzerland, but currency exchange rates aren’t really my area of expertise; this is much more in Krugman’s bailiwick, so you should probably read what Krugman says about the situation. There is one thing I’d like to say, however: I think there is a really easy way to create credible inflation and boost aggregate demand, but for some reason nobody is ever willing to do it: Give people money. Emphasis here on the people—not banks. Don’t adjust interest rates or currency pegs, don’t engage in quantitative easing. Give people money. Actually write a bunch of checks, presumably in the form of refundable tax rebates.

The only reason I can think of that economists don’t do this is they are afraid of helping poor people. They wouldn’t put it that way; maybe they’d say they want to avoid “moral hazard” or “perverse incentives”. But those fears didn’t stop them from loaning $2 trillion to banks or adding $4 trillion to the monetary base; they didn’t stop them from fighting for continued financial deregulation when what the world economy most desperately needs is stronger financial regulation. Our whole derivatives market practically oozes moral hazard and perverse incentives, but they aren’t willing to shut down that quadrillion-dollar con game. So that can’t be the actual fear. No, it has to be a fear of helping poor people instead of rich people, as though “capitalism” meant a system in which we squeeze the poor as tight as we can and heap all possible advantages upon those who are already wealthy. No, that’s called feudalism. Capitalism is supposed to be a system where markets are structured to provide free and fair competition, with everyone on a level playing field.

A basic income is a fundamentally capitalist policy, which maintains equal opportunity with a minimum of government intervention and allows the market to flourish. I suppose if you want to say that all taxation and government spending is “socialist”, fine; then every nation that has ever maintained stability for more than a decade has been in this sense “socialist”. Every soldier, firefighter and police officer paid by a government payroll is now part of a “socialist” system. Okay, as long as we’re consistent about that; but now you really can’t say that socialism is harmful; on the contrary, on this definition socialism is necessary for capitalism. In order to maintain security of property, enforcement of contracts, and equality of opportunity, you need government. Maybe we should just give up on the words entirely, and speak more clearly about what specific policies we want. If I don’t get to say that a basic income is “capitalist”, you don’t get to say financial deregulation is “capitalist”. Better yet, how about you can’t even call it “deregulation”? You have to actually argue in front of a crowd of people that it should be legal for banks to lie to them, and there should be no serious repercussions for any bank that cheats, steals, colludes, or even launders money for terrorists. That is, after all, what financial deregulation actually does in the real world.

Okay, that’s enough about that.

My birthday is coming up this Monday; thus completes my 27^th revolution around the Sun. With birthdays come thoughts of ancestry: Though I appear White, I am legally one-quarter Native American, and my total ethnic mix includes English, German, Irish, Mohawk, and Chippewa.

Biologically, what exactly does that mean? Next to nothing.

Human genetic diversity is a real thing, and there are genetic links to not only dozens of genetic diseases and propensity toward certain types of cancer, but also personality and intelligence. There are also of course genes for skin pigmentation.

The human population does exhibit some genetic clustering, but the categories are not what you’re probably used to: Good examples of relatively well-defined genetic clusters include Ashkenazi, Papuan, and Mbuti. There are also many different haplogroups, such as mitochondrial haplogroups L3 and CZ.

Maybe you could even make a case for the “races” East Asian, South Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American, since the indigenous populations of these geographic areas largely do come from the same genetic clusters. Or you could make a bigger category and call them all “Asian”—but if you include Papuan and Aborigine in “Asian” you’d pretty much have to include Chippewa and Najavo as well.

But I think it tells you a lot about what “race” really means when you realize that the two “race” categories which are most salient to Americans are in fact the categories that are genetically most meaningless. “White” and “Black” are totally nonsensical genetic categorizations.

Let’s start with “Black”; defining a “Black” race is like defining a category of animals by the fact that they are all tinted red—foxes yes, dogs no; robins yes, swallows no; ladybirds yes, cockroaches no. There is more genetic diversity within Africa than there is outside of it. There are African populations that are more closely related to European populations than they are to other African populations. The only thing “Black” people have in common is that their skin is dark, which is due to convergent evolution: It’s not due to common ancestry, but a common environment. Dark skin has a direct survival benefit in climates with intense sunlight. The similarity is literally skin deep.

What about “White”? Well, there are some fairly well-defined European genetic populations, so if we clustered those together we might be able to get something worth calling “White”. The problem is, that’s not how it happened. “White” is a club. The definition of who gets to be “White” has expanded over time, and even occasionally contracted. Originally Hebrew, Celtic, Hispanic, and Italian were not included (and Hebrew, for once, is actually a fairly sensible genetic category, as long as you restrict it to Ashkenazi), but then later they were. But now that we’ve got a lot of poor people coming in from Mexico, we don’t quite think of Hispanics as “White” anymore. We actually watched Arabs lose their “White” card in real-time in 2001; before 9/11, they were “White”; now, “Arab” is a separate thing. And “Muslim” is even treated like a race now, which is like making a racial category of “Keynesians”—never forget that Islam is above all a belief system.

Actually, “White privilege” is almost a tautology—the privilege isn’t given to people who were already defined as “White”, the privilege is to be called “White”. The privilege is to have your ancestors counted in the “White” category so that they can be given rights, while people who are not in the category are denied those rights. There does seem to be a certain degree of restriction by appearance—to my knowledge, no population with skin as dark as Kenyans has ever been considered “White”, and Anglo-Saxons and Nordics have always been included—but the category is flexible to political and social changes.

But really I hate that word “privilege”, because it gets the whole situation backwards. When you talk about “White privilege”, you make it sound as though the problem with racism is that it gives unfair advantages to White people (or to people arbitrarily defined as “White”). No, the problem is that people who are not White are denied rights. It isn’t what White people have that’s wrong; it’s what Black people don’t have. Equating those two things creates a vision of the world as zero-sum, in which each gain for me is a loss for you.

Here’s the thing about zero-sum games: All outcomes are Pareto-efficient. Remember when I talked about Pareto-efficiency? As a quick refresher, an outcome is Pareto-efficient if there is no way for one person to be made better off without making someone else worse off. In general, it’s pretty hard to disagree that, other things equal, Pareto-efficiency is a good thing, and Pareto-inefficiency is a bad thing. But if racism were about “White privilege” and the game were zero-sum, racism would have to be Pareto-efficient.

In fact, racism is Pareto-inefficient, and that is part of why it is so obviously bad. It harms literally billions of people, and benefits basically no one. Maybe there are a few individuals who are actually, all things considered, better off than they would have been if racism had not existed. But there are certainly not very many such people, and in fact I’m not sure there are any at all. If there are any, it would mean that technically racism is not Pareto-inefficient—but it is definitely very close. At the very least, the damage caused by racism is several orders of magnitude larger than any benefits incurred.

That’s why the “privilege” language, while well-intentioned, is so insidious; it tells White people that racism means taking things away from them. Many of these people are already in dire straits—broke, unemployed, or even homeless—so taking away what they have sounds particularly awful. Of course they’d be hostile to or at least dubious of attempts to reduce racism. You just told them that racism is the only thing keeping them afloat! In fact, quite the opposite is the case: Poor White people are, second only to poor Black people, those who stand the most to gain from a more just society. David Koch and Donald Trump should be worried; we will probably have to take most of their money away in order to achieve social justice. (Bill Gates knows we’ll have to take most of his money away, but he’s okay with that; in fact he may end up giving it away before we get around to taking it.) But the average White person will almost certainly be better off than they were.

Why does it seem like there are benefits to racism? Again, because people are accustomed to thinking of the world as zero-sum. One person is denied a benefit, so that benefit must go somewhere else right? Nope—it can just disappear entirely, and in this case typically does.

When a Black person is denied a job in favor of a White person who is less qualified, doesn’t that White person benefit? Uh, no, actually, not really. They have been hired for a job that isn’t an optimal fit for them; they aren’t working to their comparative advantage, and that Black person isn’t either and may not be working at all. The total output of the economy will be thereby reduced slightly. When this happens millions of times, the total reduction in output can be quite substantial, and as a result that White person was hired at $30,000 for an unsuitable job when in a racism-free world they’d have been hired at $40,000 for a suitable one. A similar argument holds for sexism; men don’t benefit from getting jobs women are denied if one of those women would have invented a cure for prostate cancer.

Indeed, the empowerment of women and minorities is kind of the secret cheat code for creating a First World economy. The great successes of economic development—Korea, Japan, China, the US in WW2—had their successes precisely at a time when they suddenly started including women in manufacturing, effectively doubling their total labor capacity. Moreover, it’s pretty clear that the causation ran in this direction. Periods of economic growth are associated with increases in solidarity with other groups—and downturns with decreased solidarity—but the increase in women in the workforce was sudden and early while the increase in growth and total output was prolonged.

Racism is irrational. Indeed it is so obviously irrational that for decades now neoclassical economists have been insisting that there is no need for civil rights policy, affirmative action, etc. because the market will automatically eliminate racism by the rational profit motive. A more recent literature has attempted to show that, contrary to all appearances, racism actually is rational in some cases. Inevitably it relies upon either the background of a racist society (maybe Black people are, on average, genuinely less qualified, but it would only be because they’ve been given poorer opportunities), or an assumption of “discriminatory tastes”, which is basically giving up and redefining the utility function so that people simply get direct pleasure from being racists. Of course, on that sort of definition, you can basically justify any behavior as “rational”: Maybe he just enjoys banging his head against the wall! (A similar slipperiness is used by egoists to argue that caring for your children is actually “selfish”; well, it makes you happy, doesn’t it? Yes, but that’s not why we do it.)

There’s a much simpler way to understand this situation: Racism is irrational, and so is human behavior.

That isn’t a complete explanation, of course; and I think one major misunderstanding neoclassical economists have of cognitive economists is that they think this is what we do—we point out that something is irrational, and then high-five and go home. No, that’s not what we do. Finding the irrationality is just the start; next comes explaining the irrationality, understanding the irrationality, and finally—we haven’t reached this point in most cases—fixing the irrationality.

So what explains racism? In short, the tribal paradigm. Human beings evolved in an environment in which the most important factor in our survival and that of our offspring was not food supply or temperature or predators, it was tribal cohesion. With a cohesive tribe, we could find food, make clothes, fight off lions. Without one, we were helpless. Millions of years in this condition shaped our brains, programming them to treat threats to tribal cohesion as the greatest possible concern. We even reached the point where solidarity for the tribe actually began to dominate basic survival instincts: For a suicide bomber the unity of the tribe—be it Marxism for the Tamil Tigers or Islam for Al-Qaeda—is more important than his own life. We will do literally anything if we believe it is necessary to defend the identities we believe in.

And no, we rationalists are no exception here. We are indeed different from other groups; the beliefs that define us, unlike the beliefs of literally every other group that has ever existed, are actually rationally founded. The scientific method really isn’t just another religion, for unlike religion it actually works. But still, if push came to shove and we were forced to kill and die in order to defend rationality, we would; and maybe we’d even be right to do so. Maybe the French Revolution was, all things considered, a good thing—but it sure as hell wasn’t nonviolent.

This is the background we need to understand racism. It actually isn’t enough to show people that racism is harmful and irrational, because they are programmed not to care. As long as racial identification is the salient identity, the tribe by which we define ourselves, we will do anything to defend the cohesion of that tribe. It is not enough to show that racism is bad; we must in fact show that race doesn’t matter. Fortunately, this is easy, for as I explained above, race does not actually exist.

That makes racism in some sense easier to deal with than sexism, because the very categories of races upon which it is based are fundamentally faulty. Sexes, on the other hand, are definitely a real thing. Males and females actually are genetically different in important ways. Exactly how different in what ways is an open question, and what we do know is that for most of the really important traits like intelligence and personality the overlap outstrips the difference. (The really big, categorical differences all appear to be physical: Anatomy, size, testosterone.) But conquering sexism may always be a difficult balance, for there are certain differences we won’t be able to eliminate without altering DNA. That no more justifies sexism than the fact that height is partly genetic would justify denying rights to short people (which, actually, is something we do); but it does make matters complicated, because it’s difficult to know whether an observed difference (for instance, most pediatricians are female, while most neurosurgeons are male) is due to discrimination or innate differences.

Racism, on the other hand, is actually quite simple: Almost any statistically significant difference in behavior or outcome between races must be due to some form of discrimination somewhere down the line. Maybe it’s not discrimination right here, right now; maybe it’s discrimination years ago that denied opportunities, or discrimination against their ancestors that led them to inherit less generations later; but it almost has to be discrimination against someone somewhere, because it is only by social construction that races exist in the first place. I do say “almost” because I can think of a few exceptions: Black people are genuinely less likely to use tanning salons and genuinely more likely to need vitamin D supplements, but both of those things are directly due to skin pigmentation. They are also more likely to suffer from sickle-cell anemia, which is another convergent trait that evolved in tropical climates as a response to malaria. But unless you can think of a reason why employment outcomes would depend upon vitamin D, the huge difference in employment between Whites and Blacks really can’t be due to anything but discrimination.

I imagine most of my readers are more sophisticated than this, but just in case you’re wondering about the difference in IQ scores between Whites and Blacks, that is indeed a real observation, but IQ isn’t entirely genetic. The reason IQ scores are rising worldwide (the Flynn Effect) is due to improvements in environmental conditions: Fewer environmental pollutants—particularly lead and mercury, the removal of which is responsible for most of the reduction in crime in America over the last 20 years—better nutrition, better education, less stress. Being stupid does not make you poor (or how would we explain Donald Trump?), but being poor absolutely does make you stupid. Combine that with the challenges and inconsistencies in cross-national IQ comparisons, and it’s pretty clear that the higher IQ scores in rich nations are an effect, not a cause, of their affluence. Likewise, the lower IQ scores of Black people in the US are entirely explained by their poorer living conditions, with no need for any genetic hypothesis—which would also be very difficult in the first place precisely because “Black” is such a weird genetic category.

Unfortunately, I don’t yet know exactly what it takes to change people’s concept of group identification. Obviously it can be done, for group identities change all the time, sometimes quite rapidly; but we simply don’t have good research on what causes those changes or how they might be affected by policy. That’s actually a major part of the experiment I’ve been trying to get funding to run since 2009, which I hope can now become my PhD thesis. All I can say is this: I’m working on it.

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Human Economics

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

Culture