Daesh

How much should we give of ourselves?

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

Jul 23 JDN 2460149

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let me ask you again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Singer writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The War on Terror has been a total failure.

PNRJ current events, ethics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

Sep 11 JDN 2459834

Since today happens to be September 11, I thought I’d spend this week’s post reflecting on the last 21 years (!) of the War on Terror.

At this point, I can safely say that the War on Terror has been a complete, total, utter failure. It has cost over $8 trillion and nearly a million lives, and not only didn’t reduce terrorism, it actually appears to have substantially increased it.

Take a look at this graph from Our World in Data:

Up until the the 1980s, terrorism worldwide was a slow smoldering, killing rarely more than a few hundred people each year. Obviously it’s terrible if you or one of your loved ones happen to be among those few hundred, but in terms of its overall chance of killing you or your children, terrorism used to be less dangerous than kiddie pools.

Then terrorism began to rise, until it was killing several thousand people a year. I was surprised to learn that most of these were not in the Middle East, but in fact spread all over the world, with the highest concentrations actually being in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Notably, almost none of these deaths were in First World countries, and as a result most First World governments largely ignored them. Terrorism was something that happened “over there”, to other people.

Then of course came 2001, and 9/11/2001, in which nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in a single day. And suddenly the First World took notice, and decided to respond with overwhelming force.

We have been at war basically ever since. All this war has accomplished… approximately nothing.

The deadliest year of terrorism in the 21st century was not 2001; it was 2014, after the US had invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, and in fact withdrawn from Iraq (but not yet Afghanistan). This was largely the result of the rise of Daesh (which is what you should call them by the way), which seems to be the most fanatical and violent Islamist terrorist organization the world has seen in decades if not centuries.

Even First World terrorism is no better today than it was in the 1990s—though also no worse. It’s back to a slow smolder, and once again First World societies can feel that terrorism is something that happens to someone else. But terrorism in the Middle East is the worst it has been in decades.

Would Daesh not have appeared if the US had never invaded Afghanistan and Iraq? It’s difficult to say. Maybe their rise was inevitable. Or maybe having a strong, relatively secular government in the region under Saddam Hussein would have prevented them from becoming so powerful. We can at least say this: Since the US withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban retook control, the Taliban and Daesh have been fighting each other quite heavily. Presumably that would have been happening all along if the US had not intervened to suppress the Taliban.

Don’t get me wrong: The Taliban were, and are, a terrible regime, and Saddam Hussein was a terrible dictator. But Daesh is clearly worse than either, and sometimes in geopolitics you have to accept the lesser evil.

If we’d actually had a way to take over Afghanistan and Iraq and rebuild them as secular liberal democracies as the US government intended, that would have been a good thing, and might even have been worth all that blood and treasure. But that project utterly failed, and we should have expected it to fail, as never in history has anyone successfully imposed liberal democracy by outside force like that.

When democracy spreads, it usually does so slowly, through the cultural influence of trade and media. Sometimes it springs up in violent revolution—as we hoped it would in the Arab Spring but were sadly disappointed. But there are really no clear examples of a democratic country invading an undemocratic country and rapidly turning it democratic.

British colonialism was spread by the sword (and especially the machine gun), and did sometimes ultimately lead to democratic outcomes, as in the US, Australia, and Canada, and more recently in India, South Africa, and Botswana. But that process was never fast, never smooth, and rarely without bloodshed—and only succeeded when the local population was willing to fight for it. Britain didn’t simply take over countries and convert them to liberal democracies in a generation. No one has ever done that, and trying to was always wishful thinking.

I don’t know, maybe in the very long run, we’ll look back on all this as the first, bloody step toward something better for the Middle East. Maybe the generation of women who got a taste of freedom and education in Afghanistan under US occupation will decide to rise up and refuse to relinquish those rights under the new Taliban. Daesh will surely die sooner or later; fanaticism can rarely sustain organizations in the long term.

But it’s been 20 years now, and things look no better than they did at the start. Maybe it’s time to cut our losses?

The challenges of a global basic income

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, development economics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457404

In the previous post I gave you the good news. Now for the bad news.

So we are hoping to implement a basic income of $3,000 per person per year worldwide, eliminating poverty once and for all.

There is no global government to implement this system. There is no global income tax to be collected or refunded. The United Nations and the World Bank, for all the good work that they do, are nowhere near powerful enough (or well-funded enough) to accomplish this feat.

Worse, the people we need to help the most, not coincidentally, live in the countries that are worst-managed. They are surrounded not only by squalor, but also by corruption, war, ethnic tension. Most of the people are underfed, uneducated, and dying from diseases such as malaria and schistomoniasis that we could treat in a day for pocket change. Their infrastructure is either crumbling or nonexistent. Their water is unsafe to drink. And worst of all, many of their governments don’t care. Tyrants like Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong-un, King Salman (of our lovely ally Saudi Arabia), and Isayas Afewerki care nothing for the interests of the people they rule, and are interested only in maximizing their own wealth and power. If we arranged to provide grants to these countries in an amount sufficient to provide the basic income, there’s no reason to think they’d actually provide it; they’d simply deposit the check in their own personal bank accounts, and use it to buy ever more extravagant mansions or build ever greater monuments to themselves. They really do seem to follow a utility function based entirely upon their own consumption; witness your neoclassical rational agent and despair.

There are ways for international institutions and non-governmental organizations to intervene to help people in these countries, and indeed many have done so to considerable effect. As bad as things are, they are much better than they used to be, and they promise to be even better tomorrow. But there is only so much they can do without the force of law at their backs, without the power to tax incomes and print currency.

We will therefore need a new kind of institutional framework, if not a true world government then something very much like it. Establishing this new government will not be easy, and worst of all I see no way to do it other than military force. Tyrants will not give up their power willingly; it will need to be taken from them. We will need to capture and imprison tyrants like Robert Mugabe and Kim Jong Un in the same way that we once did to mob bosses like John Dillinger and Al Capone, for ultimately a tyrant is nothing but a mob boss with an army.Unless we can find some way to target them precisely and smoothly replace their regimes with democracies, this will mean nothing less than war, and it could kill thousands, even millions of people—but millions of people are already dying, and will continue to die as long as we leave these men in power. Sanctions might help (though sanctions kill people too), and perhaps a few can be persuaded to step down, but the rest must be overthrown, by some combination of local revolutions and international military coalitions. The best model I’ve seen for how this might be pulled off is Libya, where Qaddafi was at last removed by an international military force supporting a local revolution—but even Libya is not exactly sunshine and rainbows right now. One of the first things we need to do is seriously plan a strategy for removing repressive dictators with a minimum of collateral damage.

To many, I suspect this sounds like imperialism, colonialism redux. Didn’t so many imperialistic powers say that they were doing it to help the local population? Yes, they did; and one of the facts that we must face up to is that it was occasionally true. Or if helping the local population was not their primary motivation, it was nonetheless a consequence. Countries colonized by the British Empire in particular are now the most prosperous, free nations in the world: The United States, Canada, Australia. South Africa and India might seem like exceptions (GDP PPP per capita of $12,400 and $5,500 respectively) but they really aren’t, compared to what they were before—or even compared to what is next to them today: Angola has a per capita GDP PPP of $7,546 while Bangladesh has only $2,991. Zimbabwe is arguably an exception (per capita GDP PPP of $1,773), but their total economic collapse occurred after the British left. To include Zimbabwe in this basic income program would literally triple the income of most of their population. But to do that, we must first get through Robert Mugabe.

Furthermore, I believe that we can avoid many of the mistakes of the past. We don’t have to do exactly the same thing that countries used to do when they invaded each other and toppled governments. Of course we should not enslave, subjugate, or murder the local population—one would hope that would go without saying, but history shows it doesn’t. We also shouldn’t annex the territory and claim it as our own, nor should we set up puppet governments that are only democratic as long as it serves our interests. (And make no mistake, we have done this, all too recently.) The goal must really be to help the people of countries like Zimbabwe and Eritrea establish their own liberal democracy, including the right to make policies we don’t like—or even policies we think are terrible ideas. If we can do so without war, of course we should. But right now what is usually called “pacifism” leaves millions of people to starve while we do nothing.

The argument that we have previously supported (or even continue to support, ahem, Saudi Arabia) many of these tyrants is sort of beside the point. Yes, that is clearly true; and yes, that is clearly terrible. But do you think that if we simply leave the situation alone they’ll go away? We should never have propped up Saddam Hussein or supported the mujihadeen who became the Taliban; and yes, I do think we could have known that at the time. But once they are there, what do you propose to do now? Wait for them to die? Hope they collapse on their own? Give our #thoughtsandprayers to revolutionaries? When asked what you think we should do, “We shouldn’t have done X” is not a valid response.

Imagine there is a mob boss who had kidnapped several families and is holding them in a warehouse. Suppose that at some point the police supported the mob boss in some way; in a deal to undermine a worse rival mafia family, they looked the other way on some things he did, or even gave him money that he used to strengthen his mob. (With actual police, the former is questionable, but actually done all the time; the latter would be definitely illegal. In the international analogy, both are ubiquitous.) Even suppose that the families who were kidnapped were previously from a part of town that the police would regularly shake down for petty crimes and incessant stop-and-frisks. The police definitely have a lot to answer for in all this; their crimes should not be forgotten. But how does it follow in any way that the police should not intervene to rescue the families from the warehouse? Suppose we even know that the warehouse is heavily guarded, and the resulting firefight may kill some of the hostages we are hoping to save. This gives us reason to negotiate, or to find the swiftest, most precise means to deploy the SWAT teams; but does it give us reason to do nothing?

Once again I think Al Capone is the proper analogy; when the FBI captured Al Capone, they didn’t bomb Chicago to the ground, nor did they attempt to enslave the population of Illinois. They thought of themselves as targeting one man and his lieutenants and re-establishing order and civil government to a free people; that is what we must do in Eritrea and Zimbabwe. (In response to all this, no doubt someone will say: “You just want the US to be the world’s police.” Well, no, I want an international coalition; but yes, given our military and economic hegemony, the US will take a very important role. Above all, yes, I want the world to have police. Why don’t you?)

For everything we did wrong in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I think we actually did this part right: Afghanistan’s GDP PPP per capita has risen over 70% since 2002, and Iraq’s is now 17% higher than its pre-war peak. It’s a bit early to say whether we have really established stable liberal democracies there, and the Iraq War surely contributed to the rise of Daesh; but when the previous condition was the Taliban and Saddam Hussein it’s hard not to feel that things are at least somewhat improving. In a generation or two maybe we really will say “Iraq” in the same breath as “Korea” as one of the success stories of prosperous democracies set up after US wars. Or maybe it will all fall apart; it’s hard to say at this point.

So, we must find a way to topple the tyrants. Once that is done, we will need to funnel huge amounts of resources—at least one if not two orders of magnitude larger than our current level of foreign aid into building infrastructure, educating people, and establishing sound institutions. Our current “record high” foreign aid is less than 0.3% of world’s GDP. We have a model for this as well: It’s what we did in West Germany and Japan after WW2, as well as what we did in South Korea after the Korean War. It is not a coincidence that Germany soon regained its status as a world power while Japan and Korea were the first of the “Asian Tigers”, East Asian nations that rose up to join us at a First World standard of living.

Will all of this be expensive? Absolutely. By assuming $3,000 per person per year I am already figuring in an expenditure of $21 trillion per year, indefinitely. This would be the most expensive project upon which humanity has ever embarked. But it could also be the most important—an end to poverty, everywhere, forever. And we have that money, we’re simply using it for other things. At purchasing power parity the world spends over $100 trillion per year. Using 20% of the world’s income to eliminate poverty forever doesn’t seem like such a bad deal to me. (It’s not like it would disappear; it would be immediately spent back into the economy anyway. We might even see growth as a result.)

When dealing with events on this scale, it’s easy to get huge numbers that sound absurd. But even if we assumed that only the US, Europe, and China supported this program, it would only take 37% of our combined income—roughly what we currently spend on housing.

Whenever people complain, “We spend billions of dollars a year on aid, and we haven’t solved world hunger!” the proper answer is, “That’s right; we should be spending trillions.”

Saudi Arabia is becoming a problem.

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

JDN 2457394

There has been a lot of talk lately about what’s going on in the Middle East, particularly in Syria, Iran, and Iraq, where Daesh (I like to call them that precisely because they don’t like it), also known as ISIS or ISIL, has been killing people and destroying things–including priceless ancient artifacts.

We in the United States actually have little to fear from Daesh. Pace Ben Carson and Lindsey Graham, Daesh is absolutely not an existential threat to the United States. We have them completely outnumbered and outgunned—indeed, we have the world outgunned, as we ourselves account for 40% of the world’s military spending and a comparable portion of the world’s nuclear missiles, naval tonnage, and air fleet.
The people who need to worry are those living in (or fleeing from) the Middle East.

Some 17,000 civilians were killed by warfare in Iraq in 2014, the plurality killed by Daesh and only a small fraction killed by US or NATO forces. Contrary to the belief of people like Noam Chomsky who think the US military is comprised of bloodthirsty genocidal murderers, we actually go quite far out of our way to minimize civilian deaths, up to and including dropping pamphlets warning of bombing raids before we carry them out (I love the “admits” in that headline. You keep using that word…). Then there’s Syria, where there have been over 200,000 deaths, though actually more attributable to Bashir al-Assad than to Daesh.

Daesh, on the other hand, has no qualms about killing anyone they consider not a “true Muslim”, which basically means anyone who doesn’t support them—it certainly doesn’t exclude all Muslims. Daesh is so brutal and extreme that Al Qaeda has condemned their tactics. Yes, that Al Qaeda, the one that crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center in 2001. If you really want to know the sorts of things Daesh has been doing (and have the stomach for it), there are plenty of photos and video footage, many of them openly promoted by Daesh itself, including on their Twitter feed which also shows lots of (I am not kidding) kitten photos called “Mewjahideen”.

But today I’m not actually going to focus on Daesh itself. I’m going to focus on a country that is ostensibly our ally in the fight against them—yet the way they’ve been behaving is a lot more like being an ally of Daesh. As I gave away in the title, I mean of course Saudi Arabia.

Between the time that I drafted this post as a Blog From the Future on Patreon and the time that you are now reading this, Saudi Arabia did another terrible thing, namely executing an important Shi’ite cleric and triggering the possibility of war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. (I think it helps support the point I’m about to make shortly that the focus of this article is on the effect on oil prices.)

First, remember what Saudi Arabia is—namely, an absolute theocratic monarchy founded upon the same Wahhabi Islamist ideology that drives Daesh. They teach Wahhabi Islam as their state religion in schools. This by itself should make us wonder whether they are really our allies—they after all agree a lot more with our enemies than they do with us. And indeed, while they speak of joining the “war on terror”, they are actually the leading source of funds for global Islamist terrorism. In theory, with their large, powerful military and a majority-Muslim population (which would help avoid the sense that this is some kind of Christian/atheist versus Muslim neo-Crusade, which it absolutely must not be), Saudi Arabia could be a valuable ally in this war—but they don’t particularly want to be.

Saudi Arabia is now paying to support refugees, but they aren’t actually accepting any refugees themselves. It would make sense for the US to do this, because we are very far away and it would be very difficult to transport refugees here. It does not make sense for Saudi Arabia to do this, except in order to look like they’re doing something while actually doing as little as possible. (Also, I’ve read conflicting reports as to whether they’ve pledged $10 million to Jordan or $10 billion—which is kind of like saying, “The car was either $1,000 or $1,000,000, I’m not sure.” The most credible estimate I’ve seen is $300 million, $10 million to Jordan. In my favorite unit of wealth, they’ve donated a romney. It’s a whopping… 0.04% of their country’s income in a year.) They should be doing what Turkey is doing, and taking on hundreds of thousands of refugees themselves.

As is fairly common among tyrants (look no further than North Korea), Saudi Arabia’s leaders often present some rather… eccentric beliefs, such as the claim that Daesh is actually secretly a wing of the Israeli military. Maybe this is Freudian projection: Knowing that they are secretly supporting Daesh and its ideology, they decide to accuse whomever they most dislike—i.e., Israel—of doing that very thing. And they certainly do hate Israel; Saudi Arabia’s state-run media frequently compare Israel to Nazis because apparently irony is completely lost on them.

One of the things Daesh does to display its brutality is behead nonbelievers; yet Saudi Arabia beheads far more people, including for thoughtcrimes such as apostasy and political dissent, as well as “crimes” such as sorcery and witchcraft. The human rights violation here is not so much the number of executions as the intentional spectacle of brutality, as well as the “crimes” cited. In the summer of 2014, they beheaded about one person per day—in a country of 27 million people, it wouldn’t be that odd to execute 30 people in a month, if they were in fact murderers. That’s about the size and execution rate of Texas. The world’s real execution leader is China, where over 2,000—and previously as many as 10,000—people per year are executed. China does have a huge population of almost 1.4 billion people—but even so, they execute more people than the rest of the world combined.

I mean, one can certainly argue that the death penalty in general is morally wrong (it is certainly economically inefficient); but I never could quite manage to be outraged by the use of lethal injection on serial killers (which is mainly what we’re talking about in Texas). But Saudi Arabia doesn’t use lethal injection, they use beheading. And they don’t just execute serial killers—they execute atheists and feminists.

Saudi Arabia’s human rights record is one of the worst in the world. (And that’s from the US Department of State, so don’t tell me our government doesn’t know this.) Freedom House gives them the lowest possible rating, and lists several reasons why their government should be considered a global pariah. Even the Heritage Foundation (which overweights economic freedom over civil liberties, in my opinion—would you rather pay high taxes, or be executed for thoughtcrime?) gave Saudi Arabia a moderate freedom rating at best.

So, the question really becomes: Why do we call these people our allies?

Why did President Obama cut short a visit to India—which is, you know, a democracy—to see the new king—as in absolute monarch—of Saudi Arabia? (Though good on Michelle Obama for refusing to wear the hijab. You can see the contempt in the faces of the Saudi dignitaries, but she just grins smugly. You can almost hear, “What are you gonna do about it?”) Why was “cementing ties with Saudi Arabia” even something we wanted to do?

 

The answer of course is painfully obvious, especially to economists: Oil.

Saudi Arabia is by far the world’s largest oil exporter, accounting for a sixth of all crude oil exports.

The United States is by far the world’s largest oil importer, accounting for an eighth of all crude oil imports.

As Vonnegut said, we are rolling drunk on petroleum. We are addicts, and they’re our dealer. And if there’s one thing addicts don’t do, it’s rat out their own dealers.

Fortunately, US oil imports are on the decline, and why? Thanks, Obama. Under policies that really were largely spearheaded by the Obama administration such as expanded fracking and subsidized solar power investment, a combination of increased domestic oil production and reduced domestic oil consumptionhas been reducing the need to continue importing oil from other countries.

Of course, the “expanded fracking” and “increased oil production” part gives me very mixed feelings, given its obvious connection to climate change. But I will say this: If we’re going to be burning all that oil anyway, far better that we extract it ourselves than that we buy it from butchers and tyrants. And indeed US carbon emissions have also been steady or declining under Obama.

The sudden crash in oil prices last year has been damaging to both Saudi Arabia and other major oil exporters such as Russia and Venezuela, which are nowhere near as bad but also hardly wholesome liberal democracies. (It also hurt Norway, who didn’t deserve it; but they’re wisely divesting from fossil fuels, starting with coal.) Now is the perfect time to implement a carbon tax; consumers will hardly feel it—it’ll just feel like prices are going back to normal—but oil exporters will have even more pressure to switch industries, and above all global carbon emissions will decrease.

Ideally we would also combine this with what I call a “human rights tariff”, a tariff applied to the goods a country exports based upon that country’s human rights record. We could keep it very simple: Another percentage point added to the tariff every time you execute someone for political, religious, or ideological reasons. A percentage point off every time you go at least a month without executing anyone for any reason except murder.

Obviously that wouldn’t deal with the fact that women can’t drive, or the fact that hijab is mandatory, or the fact that homosexuality is illegal—but hey, it would at least be something. Right now, every barrel of oil we buy from them is basically saying that we care more about cheap gasoline than we do about human rights.

How we can best help refugees

PNRJ core principles, current events, development economics, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457376

Though the debate seems to have simmered down a little over the past few weeks, the fact remains that we are in the middle of a global refugee crisis. There are 4 million refugees from Syria alone, part of 10 million refugees worldwide from various conflicts.

The ongoing occupation of the terrorist group / totalitarian state Daesh (also known as Islamic State, ISIS and ISIL, but like John Kerry, I like to use Daesh precisely because they seem to hate it) has displaced almost 14 million people, 3.3 million of them refugees from Syria.

Most of these refugees have fled to Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and, Iraq, for the obvious reason that these countries are both geographically closest and culturally best equipped to handle them.
There is another reason, however: Some of the other countries in the region, notably Saudi Arabia, have taken no refugees at all. In an upcoming post I intend to excoriate Saudi Arabia for a number of reasons, but this one is perhaps the most urgent. Their response? They simply deny it outright, claiming they’ve taken millions of refugees and somehow nobody noticed.

Turkey and Lebanon are stretched to capacity, however; they simply do not have the resources to take on more refugees. This gives the other nations of the world only two morally legitimate options:

1. We could take more refugees ourselves.

2. We could supply funding and support to Turkey and Lebanon for them to take on more refugees.

Most of the debate has centered around option (1), and in particular around Obama’s plan to take on about 10,000 refugees to the United States, which Ted Cruz calls “lunacy” (to be fair, if it takes one to know one…).

This debate has actually served more to indict the American population for paranoia and xenophobia than anything else. The fact that 17 US states—including some with Democrat governors—have unilaterally declared that they will not accept refugees (despite having absolutely no Constitutional authority to make such a declaration) is truly appalling.

Even if everything that the xenophobic bigots say were true—even if we really were opening ourselves to increased risk of terrorism and damaging our economy and subjecting ourselves to mass unemployment—we would still have a moral duty as human beings to help these people.

And of course almost all of it is false.

Only a tiny fraction of refugees are terrorists, indeed very likely smaller than the fraction of the native population or the fraction of those who arrive on legal visas, meaning that we would actually be diluting our risk of terrorism by accepting more refugees. And as you may recall from my post on 9/11, our risk of terrorism is already so small that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

There is a correlation between terrorism and refugees, but it’s almost entirely driven by the opposite effect: terrorism causes refugee crises.

The net aggregate economic effect of immigration is most likely positive. The effect on employment is more ambiguous; immigration does appear to create a small increase in unemployment in the short run as all those new people try to find jobs, and there is some evidence that it may reduce wages for local low-skill workers. But the employment effect is small temporary, and there is a long-run boost in overall productivity. However, it may not have much effect on overall growth: the positive correlation between immigration and economic growth is primarily due to the fact that higher growth triggers more immigration.

And of course, it’s important to keep in mind that the reason wages are depressed at all is that people come from places where wages are even lower, so they improve their standard of living, but may also reduce the standard of living of some of the workers who were already here. The paradigmatic example is immigrants who leave a wage of $4 per hour in Mexico, arrive in California, and end up reducing wages in California from $10 to $8. While this certainly hurts some people who went from $10 to $8, it’s so narrow-sighted as to border on racism to ignore the fact that it also raised other people from $4 to $8. The overall effect is not simply to redistribute wealth from some to others, but actually to create more wealth. If there are things we can do to prevent low-skill wages from falling, perhaps we should; but systematically excluding people who need work is not the way to do that.

Accepting 10,000 more refugees would have a net positive effect on the American economy—though given our huge population and GDP, probably a negligible one. It has been pointed out that Germany’s relatively open policy advances the interests of Germany as much as it does those of the refugees; but so what? They are doing the right thing, even if it’s not for entirely altruistic reasons. One of the central insights of economics is that the universe is nonzero-sum; helping someone else need not mean sacrificing your own interests, and when it doesn’t, the right thing to do should be a no-brainer. Instead of castigating Germany for doing what needs to be done for partially selfish reasons, we should be castigating everyone else for not even doing what’s in their own self-interest because they are so bigoted and xenophobic they’d rather harm themselves than help someone else. (Also, it does not appear to be in Angela Merkel’s self-interest to take more refugees; she is spending a lot of political capital to make this happen.)

We could follow Germany’s example, and Obama’s plan would move us in that direction.

But the fact remains that we could go through with Obama’s plan, indeed double, triple, quadruple it—and still not make a significant dent in the actual population of refugees who need help. When 1,500,000 people need help and the most powerful nation in the world offers to help 10,000, that isn’t an act of great openness and generosity; it’s almost literally the least we could do. 10,000 is only 0.7% of 1.5 million; even if we simply accepted an amount of refugees proportional to our own population it would be more like 70,000. If we instead accepted an amount of refugees proportional to our GDP we should be taking on closer to 400,000.

This is why in fact I think option (2) may be the better choice.

There actually are real cultural and linguistic barriers to assimilation for Syrian people in the United States, barriers which are much lower in Turkey and Lebanon. Immigrant populations always inevitably assimilate eventually, but there is a period of transition which is painful for both immigrants and locals, often lasting a decade or more. On top of this there is the simple logistical cost of moving all those people that far; crossing the border into Lebanon is difficult enough without having to raft across the Mediterranean, let alone being airlifted or shipped all the way across the Atlantic afterward. The fact that many refugees are willing to bear such a cost serves to emphasize their desperation; but it also suggests that there may be alternatives that would work out better for everyone.

The United States has a large population at 322 million; but Turkey (78 million) has about a quarter of our population and Jordan (8 million) and Lebanon (6 million) are about the size of our largest cities.

Our GDP, on the other hand, is vastly larger. At $18 trillion, we have 12 times the GDP of Turkey ($1.5 T), and there are individual American billionaires with wealth larger than the GDPs of Lebanon ($50 B) and Jordan ($31 B).

This means that while we have an absolute advantage in population, we have a comparative advantage in wealth—and the benefits of trade depend on comparative advantage. It therefore makes sense for us to in a sense “trade” wealth for population; in exchange for taking on fewer refugees, we would offer to pay a larger share of the expenses involved in housing, feeding, and ultimately assimilating those refugees.

Another thing we could offer (and have a comparative as well as absolute advantage in) is technology. These surprisingly-nice portable shelters designed by IKEA are an example of how First World countries can contribute to helping refugees without necessarily accepting them into their own borders (as well as an example of why #Scandinaviaisbetter). We could be sending equipment and technicians to provide electricity, Internet access, or even plumbing to the refugee camps. We could ship them staple foods or even MREs. (On the other hand, I am not impressed by the tech entrepreneurs whose “solutions” apparently involve selling more smartphone apps.)

The idea of actually taking on 400,000 or even 70,000 additional people into the United States is daunting even for those of us who strongly believe in helping the refugees—in the former case we’re adding another Cleveland, and even in the latter we’d be almost doubling Dearborn. But if we estimate the cost of simply providing money to support the refugee camps, the figures come out a lot less demanding.
Charities are currently providing money on the order of millions—which is to say on the order of single dollars per person. GBP 887,000 sounds like a lot of money until you realize it’s less than $0.50 per Syrian refugee.

Suppose we were to grant $5,000 per refugee per year. That’s surely more than enough. The UN is currently asking for $6.5 billion, which is only about $1,500 per refugee.

Yet to supply that much for all 4 million refugees would cost us only $20 billion per year, a mere 0.1% of our GDP. (Or if you like, a mere 3% of our military budget, which is probably smaller than what the increase would be if we stepped up our military response to Daesh.)

I say we put it to a vote among the American people: Are you willing to accept a flat 0.1% increase in income tax in order to help the refugees? (Would you even notice?) This might create an incentive to become a refugee when you’d otherwise have tried to stay in Syria, but is that necessarily a bad thing? Daesh, like any state, depends upon its tax base to function, so encouraging emigration undermines Daesh taxpayer by taxpayer. We could make it temporary and tied to the relief efforts—or, more radically, we could not do that, and use it as a starting point to build an international coalition for a global basic income.

Right now a global $5,000 per person per year would not be feasible (that would be almost half of the world’s GDP); but something like $1,000 would be, and would eliminate world hunger immediately and dramatically reduce global poverty. The US alone could in fact provide a $1,000 global basic income, though it would cost $7.2 trillion, which is over 40% of our $18.1 trillion GDP—not beyond our means, but definitely stretching them to the limit. Yet simply by including Europe ($18.5 T), China ($12.9 T), Japan ($4.2 T), India ($2.2 T), and Brazil ($1.8 T), we’d reduce the burden among the whole $57.7 trillion coalition to 12.5% of GDP. That’s roughly what we already spend on Medicare and Social Security. Not a small amount, to be sure; but this would get us within arm’s reach of permanently ending global poverty.

Think of the goodwill we’d gain around the world; think of how much it would undermine Daesh’s efforts to recruit followers if everyone knew that just across the border is a guaranteed paycheck from that same United States that Daesh keeps calling the enemy. This isn’t necessarily contradictory to a policy of accepting more refugees, but it would be something we could implement immediately, with minimal cost to ourselves.

And I’m sure there’d be people complaining that we were only doing it to make ourselves look good and stabilize the region economically, and it will all ultimately benefit us eventually—which is very likely true. But again, I say: So what? Would you rather we do the right thing and benefit from it, or do the wrong thing just so we dare not help ourselves?