Donald Trump

A Socratic open letter to transphobes everywhere

PNRJ core principles, ethics, personal, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 23 JDN 2458903

This post is a bit different than usual. This is an open letter to those who doubt that trans people actually exist, or insist on using the wrong pronouns; above all it is an open letter to those who want to discriminate against trans people, denying trans people civil rights or the dignity to use public bathrooms in peace. Most of my readers are probably not such people, but I think you’ll still benefit from reading it—perhaps you can use some of its arguments when you inevitably encounter someone who is.

Content warning: Because of how sex and gender are tied up together in transphobes’ minds, I’m going to need to talk a little bit about sexual anatomy and genital surgery. If such topics make you uncomfortable, feel free to skip this post.

Dear Transphobe:

First of all, I’m going to assume you are a man. Statistically you probably are, in which case that works. If by chance you’re not, well, now you know what it feels like for people to assume your gender and never correct themselves. You’re almost certainly politically right-wing, so that’s an even safer assumption on my part.

You probably think that gender and sex are interchangeable things, that the idea of a woman born with a penis or a man born without one is utter nonsense. I’m here to hopefully make you question this notion.

Let’s start by thinking about your own identity. You are a man. I presume that you have a penis. I am not going to make the standard insult many on the left would and say that it’s probably a small penis. In fact I have no particular reason to believe that, and in any case the real problem is that we as a society have so thoroughly equated penis size with masculinity with value as a human being. Right-wing attitudes of the sort that lead to discriminating against LGBT people are strongly correlated with aggressive behaviors to assert one’s masculinity. Even if I had good reason—which I assuredly do not—to do so, attacking your masculinity would be inherently counterproductive, causing you to double down on the same aggressive, masculinity-signaling behaviors. If it so happens that you are insecure in your masculinity, I certainly don’t want to make that worse, as masculine insecurity was one of the strongest predictors of voting for Donald Trump. You are a man, and I make no challenges to your masculinity whatsoever. I’m even prepared to concede that you are more manly than I am, whatever you may take that to mean.

Let us consider a thought experiment. Suppose that you were to lose your penis in some tragic accident. Don’t try to imagine the details; I’m sure the mere fact of it is terrifying enough. Suppose a terrible day were to arrive where you wake up in a hospital and find you no longer have a penis.

I have a question for you now: Should such a terrible day arrive, would you cease to be a man?

I contend that you would remain a man. I think that you, upon reflection, would also contend the same. There are a few thousand men in the world who have undergone penectomy, typically as a treatment for genital cancer. You wouldn’t even know unless you saw them naked or they told you. As far as anyone else can tell, they look and act as men, just as they did before their surgery. They are still men, just as they were before.

In fact, it’s quite likely that you would experience a phantom limb effect—where here the limb that is in your self-image but no longer attached to your body is your penis. You would sometimes feel “as if” your penis was still there, because your brain continues to have the neural connections that generate such sensations.

An even larger number of men have undergone castration for various reasons, and while they do often find that their thoughts and behavior change due to the changes in hormone balances, they still consider themselves men, and are generally considered men by others as well. We do not even consider them transgender men; we simply consider them men.

But does this not mean, then, that there is something more to being a man than simply having male anatomy?

Perhaps it has to do with other body parts, or some totality of the male body? Let’s consider another thought experiment then. Suppose that by some bizarre event you were transported into a female body. The mechanism isn’t important: Perhaps it was a mad scientist, or aliens, or magic. But just suppose that somehow or other, while you slept, your brain in its current state was transported into an entirely female body, complete with breasts, vulva, wide hips, narrow shoulders—the whole package. When you awaken, your body is female.

Such a transition would no doubt be distressing and disorienting. People would probably begin to see you as a woman when they looked at you. You would be denied access to men’s spaces you had previously used, and suddenly granted access to women’s spaces you had never before been allowed into. And who knows what sort of effect the hormonal changes would have on your mind?

Particularly if you are sexually attracted to women, you might imagine that you would enjoy this transformation: Now you get to play with female body parts whenever you want! But think about this matter carefully, now: While there might be some upsides, would you really want this change to happen? You have to now wear women’s clothing, use women’s restrooms, cope with a menstrual cycle. Everyone will see you as a woman and treat you as a woman. (How do you treat women, by the way? Is this something you’ve thought carefully about?)

And if you still think that being a woman isn’t so bad, maybe it isn’t—if your mind and body are in agreement. But remember that you’ve still got the mind of a man; you still feel that mental attachment to body parts that are no longer present, and these new body parts you have don’t feel like they are properly your own.

But throughout this harrowing experience, would you still be a man?

Once again I contend that you would. You would now feel a deep conflict between your mind and your body—dare I call it gender dysphoria?—and you would probably long to change your body back to what it was, or at least back to a body that is male.

You would once again experience phantom limb effects—but now all over, everywhere your new body deviated from your original form. In your brain there is a kind of map of where your body parts are supposed to be: Your shoulders are supposed to end here, your legs are supposed to end there, and down here there is supposed to be a penis, not vulva. This map is deeply ingrained into your mind, its billions of strands almost literally woven into the fabric of your brain.

We are presumably born with such a map: By some mindbogglingly complex mix of genetic and environmental factors our brains organize themselves into specific patterns, telling us what kind of body we’re supposed to have. Some of this structuring may go on before birth, some while we are growing up. But surely by the time we are adults the process is complete.

This mental map does allow for some flexibility: When we were young and growing, it allowed us to adjust to our ever-increasing height. Now that we are older, it allows us to adjust to gaining or losing weight. But this flexibility is quite limited: it might take years, or perhaps we could never adjust at all, to finding that we had suddenly grown a tail—or suddenly changed from male to female.

Now imagine that this transformation didn’t happen by some sudden event when you were an adult, but by some quirk of ontogeny while you were still in the womb. Suppose that you were born this way: in a body that is female, but with a mind that is male.

In such a state, surely something is wrong, in the same way that being born with sickle-cell anemia or spina bifida is wrong. There are more ambiguous cases: Is polydactyly a disorder? Sometimes? But surely there are some ways to be born that are worth correcting, and “female body, male mind” seems like one of them.

And yet, this is often precisely how trans people describe their experience. Not always—humans are nothing if not diverse, and trans people are no exception—but quite frequently, they will say that they feel like “a man in a woman’s body” or the reverse. By all accounts, they seem to have precisely this hypothetical condition: The gender of their mind does not match the sex of their body. And since this mismatch causes great suffering, we ought to correct it.

But then the question becomes: Correct it how?

Broadly speaking, it seems we’ve only two options: Change the body, or change the mind. If you were in this predicament, which would you want?

In the case of being transferred into a new body as an adult, I’m quite sure you’d prefer to change your body, and keep your mind as it is. You don’t belong in this new body, and you want your old one back.

Yet perhaps you think that if you were born with this mismatch, things might be different: Perhaps in such a case you think it would make more sense to change the mind to match the body. But I ask you this: Which is more fundamental to who you are? If you are still an infant, we can’t ask your opinion; but what do you suppose you’d say if we could?

Or suppose that you notice the mismatch later, as a child, or even as a teenager. Before that, something felt off somehow, but you couldn’t quite put your finger on it. But now you realize where the problem lies: You were born in a body of the wrong sex. Now that you’ve had years to build up your identity, would you still say that the mind is the right thing to change? Once you can speak, now we can ask you—and we do ask such children, and their answers are nigh-unanimous: They want to change their bodies, not their minds. David Reimer was raised as a girl for years, and yet he always still knew he was a boy and tried to act like one.

In fact, we don’t even know how to change the gender of a mind. Despite literally millennia of civilization trying at great expense to enforce particular gender norms on everyone’s minds, we still get a large proportion of the population deviating substantially from them—if you include mild enough deviations, probably a strict majority. If I seem a soft “soy boy” to you (and, I admit, I am both bisexual and vegetarian—though I already knew I was the former before I became the latter), ask yourself this: Why would I continue to deviate from your so ferociously-enforced gender norms, if it were easy to conform?

Whereas, we do have some idea how to change a body. We have hormonal and surgical treatments that allow people to change their bodies substantially—trans women can grow breasts, trans men can grow beards. Often this is enough to make people feel much more comfortable in their own bodies, and also present themselves in a way that leads others to recognize them as their desired gender.

Sex reassignment surgery is not as reliable, especially for trans men: While building artificial vulva works relatively well, building a good artificial penis still largely eludes us. Yet technological process in this area continues, and we’ve improved our ability to change the sex of bodies substantially in just the last few decades—while, let me repeat, we have not meaningfully improved our ability to change the gender of minds in the last millennium.

If we could reliably change the gender of minds, perhaps that would be an option worth considering. But ought implies can: We cannot be ethically expected to do that which we are simply incapable.

At present, this means that our only real options are two: We can accept the gender of the mind, change the sex of the body, and treat this person as the gender they identify themselves as; or we can demand that they repress and conceal their mental gender in favor of conforming to the standards we have imposed upon them based on their body. The option you may most prefer—accept the body, change the mind—simply is not feasible with any current or foreseeable technology.

We have tried repressing transgender identity for centuries: It has brought endless suffering, depression, suicide.

But now that we are trying to affirm transgender identity the outlook seems much better: Simply having one adult in their life who accepts their gender identity reduces the risk of a transgender child attempting suicide by 40%. Meta-analysis of research on the subject shows that gender transition, while surely no panacea, does overall improve outcomes for transgender people—including reducing risk of depression and suicide. (That site is actually refreshingly nuanced; it does not simply accept either the left-wing or right-wing ideology on the subject, instead delving deeply into the often quite ambiguous evidence.)

Above all, ask yourself: If you ever found yourself in the wrong sort of body, what would you want us to do?

Bernie Sanders may be our next President

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Feb 16 JDN 2458896

It’s too early to say who will win the election, of course. In fact, we’re not even entirely sure what the results of the Iowa caucuses were, because there were so many errors that they are talking about doing a recount.


But Bernie Sanders has taken a commanding lead in polls, and forecasts now have him as the clear front-runner. If we’d had range voting, Sanders probably would have won last time. But even with our voting system as terrible as it is, there’s a good chance he’ll actually win this time.

I would honestly prefer Elizabeth Warren; she shares Bernie’s idealism, but tempers it with a deep understanding of our political and economic system. Her policy plans are spectacularly good; she doesn’t just come up with a vague idea, she lays out a detailed roadmap of how it will be accomplished and how it will be paid for. Her plans cover a wide variety of issues, including a lot of things that most people aren’t even aware of yet nevertheless affect millions of people. Who else is talking about universal child care programs, the corruption in our trade negotiation system, antitrust action against tech monopolies, or reducing corporate influence in the military? Who else includes in their plan for corporate taxes detailed reforms to the accounting system? And who else has a plan for forgiving student debt that actually calculates the effective marginal tax rate induced by the phase-out? Elizabeth Warren is the economist’s candidate: Unlike almost everyone else in politics, she actually knows what she’s doing.

Bernie Sanders, by comparison, has an awful lot of laudable goals, but is often quite short on the details of how they will be achieved. His healthcare plan, in particular, “Medicare for All”, doesn’t seem to include any kind of cost estimate or revenue support. I’m all for single-payer healthcare, but it’s not going to get done for free. And at least in the past, he has made economic forecasts that are wildly implausible.

But we could certainly do a lot worse than Bernie. His most unrealistic ideas will be tempered by political reality, while his unflinching idealism may just shift our Overton Window in a much-needed leftward direction. He is a man of uncommon principle, and a politician of uncommon honesty—he does not have even one “Pants on Fire” rating on Politifact.

To say that he would obviously be better than Trump is a gross understatement: Almost anyone would obviously be better than Trump, and definitely any of the leading Democratic candidates would be.

In fact, Warren is the only candidate I unambiguously prefer to Sanders. Biden is too conservative, too willing to compromise with an uncompromising right wing. As historic as it would be to have an openly gay President, I’m not sure Buttigieg is the one I’d want. (On the other hand, the first gay President is almost certainly going to have to be extremely privileged and milquetoast to break through that glass ceiling—so maybe it’s Buttigieg or nothing.) Yang has some interesting ideas (like his basic income proposal), but no serious chance of winning. Bloomberg would be a good Libertarian Party candidate, but he’s no Democrat. The rest have fallen so far in the polls they aren’t worth talking about anymore.

Like I said, it’s really too early to say. Maybe Biden will make a comeback. Maybe Warren will win after all. But it does mean one thing: The left wing in America has been energized. If one good thing has come of Trump, perhaps it is that: We are no longer complacent, and we are now willing to stand up and demand what we really want. The success of Sanders so far proves that.

The cost of illness

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Feb 2 JDN 2458882

As I write this I am suffering from some sort of sinus infection, most likely some strain of rhinovirus. So far it has just been basically a bad cold, so there isn’t much to do aside from resting and waiting it out. But it did get me thinking about healthcare—we’re so focused on the costs of providing it that we often forget the costs of not providing it.

The United States is the only First World country without a universal healthcare system. It is not a coincidence that we also have some of the highest rates of preventable mortality and burden of disease.

We in the United States spend about $3.5 trillion per year on healthcare, the most of any country in the world, even as a proportion of GDP. Yet this is not the cost of disease; this is how much we were willing to pay to avoid the cost of disease. Whatever harm that would have been caused without all that treatment must actually be worth more than $3.5 trillion to us—because we paid that much to avoid it.

Globally, the disease burden is about 30,000 disability-adjusted life-years (DALY) per 100,000 people per year—that is to say, the average person is about 30% disabled by disease. I’ve spoken previously about quality-adjusted life years (QALY); the two measures take slightly different approaches to the same overall goal, and are largely interchangeable for most purposes.

Of course this result relies upon the disability weights; it’s not so obvious how we should be comparing across different conditions. How many years would you be willing to trade of normal life to avoid ten years of Alzheimer’s? But it’s probably not too far off to say that if we could somehow wave a magic wand and cure all disease, we would really increase our GDP by something like 30%. This would be over $6 trillion in the US, and over $26 trillion worldwide.

Of course, we can’t actually do that. But we can ask what kinds of policies are most likely to promote health in a cost-effective way.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest improvements to be made are in the poorest countries, where it can be astonishingly cheap to improve health. Malaria prevention has a cost of around $30 per DALY—by donating to the Against Malaria Foundation you can buy a year of life for less than the price of a new video game. Compare this to the standard threshold in the US of $50,000 per QALY: Targeting healthcare in the poorest countries can increase cost-effectiveness a thousandfold. In humanitarian terms, it would be well worth diverting spending from our own healthcare to provide public health interventions in poor countries. (Fortunately, we have even better options than that, like raising taxes on billionaires or diverting military spending instead.)

We in the United States spend about twice as much (per person per year) on healthcare as other First World countries. Are our health outcomes twice as good? Clearly not. Are they any better at all? That really isn’t clear. We certainly don’t have a particularly high life expectancy. We spend more on administrative costs than we do on preventative care—unlike every other First World country except Australia. Almost all of our drugs and therapies are more expensive here than they are everywhere else in the world.

The obvious answer here is to make our own healthcare system more like those of other First World countries. There are a variety of universal health care systems in the world that we could model ourselves on, ranging from the single-payer government-run system in the UK to the universal mandate system of Switzerland. The amazing thing is that it almost doesn’t matter which one we choose: We could copy basically any other First World country and get better healthcare for less spending. Obamacare was in many ways similar to the Swiss system, but we never fully implemented it and the Republicans have been undermining it every way they can. Under President Trump, they have made significant progress in undermining it, and as a result, there are now 3 million more Americans without health insurance than there were before Trump took office. The Republican Party is intentionally increasing the harm of disease.

Reflections on Past and Future

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Jan 19 JDN 2458868

This post goes live on my birthday. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to celebrate much, as I’ll be in the process of moving. We moved just a few months ago, and now we’re moving again, because this apartment turned out to be full of mold that keeps triggering my migraines. Our request for a new apartment was granted, but the university housing system gives very little time to deal with such things: They told us on Tuesday that we needed to commit by Wednesday, and then they set our move-in date for that Saturday.

Still, a birthday seems like a good time to reflect on how my life is going, and where I want it to go next. As for how old I am? This is the probably the penultimate power of two I’ll reach.

The biggest change in my life over the previous year was my engagement. Our wedding will be this October. (We have the venue locked in; invitations are currently in the works.) This was by no means unanticipated; really, folks had been wondering when we’d finally get around to it. Yet it still feels strange, a leap headlong into adulthood for someone of a generation that has been saddled with a perpetual adolescence. The articles on “Millennials” talking about us like we’re teenagers still continue, despite the fact that there are now Millenials with college-aged children. Thanks to immigration and mortality, we now outnumber Boomers. Based on how each group voted in 2016, this bodes well for the 2020 election. (Then again, a lot of young people stay home on Election Day.)

I don’t doubt that graduate school has contributed to this feeling of adolescence: If we count each additional year of schooling as a grade, I would now be in the 22nd grade. Yet from others my age, even those who didn’t go to grad school, I’ve heard similar experiences about getting married, buying homes, or—especially—having children of their own: Society doesn’t treat us like adults, so we feel strange acting like adults. 30 is the new 23.

Perhaps as life expectancy continues to increase and educational attainment climbs ever higher, future generations will continue to experience this feeling ever longer, until we’re like elves in a Tolkienesque fantasy setting, living to 1000 but not considered a proper adult until we hit 100. I wonder if people will still get labeled by generation when there are 40 generations living simultaneously, or if we’ll find some other category system to stereotype by.

Another major event in my life this year was the loss of our cat Vincent. He was quite old by feline standards, and had been sick for a long time; so his demise was not entirely unexpected. Still, it’s never easy to lose a loved one, even if they are covered in fur and small enough to fit under an airplane seat.

Most of the rest of my life has remained largely unchanged: Still in grad school, still living in the same city, still anxious about my uncertain career prospects. Trump is still President, and still somehow managing to outdo his own high standards of unreasonableness. I do feel some sense of progress now, some glimpses of the light at the end of the tunnel. I can vaguely envision finishing my dissertation some time this year, and I’m hoping that in a couple years I’ll have settled into a job that actually pays well enough to start paying down my student loans, and we’ll have a good President (or at least Biden).

I’ve reached the point where people ask me what I am going to do next with my life. I want to give an answer, but the problem is, this is almost entirely out of my control. I’ll go wherever I end up getting job offers. Based on the experience of past cohorts, most people seem to apply to about 200 positions, interview for about 20, and get offers from about 2. So asking me where I’ll work in five years is like asking me what number I’m going to roll on a 100-sided die. I could probably tell you what order I would prioritize offers in, more or less; but even that would depend a great deal on the details. There are difficult tradeoffs to be made: Take a private sector offer with higher pay, or stay in academia for more autonomy and security? Accept a postdoc or adjunct position at a prestigious university, or go for an assistant professorship at a lower-ranked college?

I guess I can say that I do still plan to stay in academia, though I’m less certain of that than I once was; I will definitely cast a wider net. I suppose the job market isn’t like that for most people? I imagine most people at least know what city they’ll be living in. (I’m not even positive what country—opportunities for behavioral economics actually seem to be generally better in Europe and Australia than they are in the US.)

But perhaps most people simply aren’t as cognizant of how random and contingent their own career paths truly were. The average number of job changes per career is 12. You may want to think that you chose where you ended up, but for the most part you landed where the wind blew you. This can seem tragic in a way, but it is also a call for compassion: “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Really, all I can do now is hang on and try to enjoy the ride.

On compromise: The kind of politics that can be bipartisan—and the kind that can’t

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Dec 29 JDN 2458847

The “polarization” of our current government has been much maligned. And there is some truth to this: The ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans in Congress is larger than it has been in a century. There have been many calls by self-proclaimed “centrists” for a return to “bipartisanship”.

But there is nothing centrist about compromising with fascists. If one party wants to destroy democracy and the other wants to save it, a true centrist would vote entirely with the pro-democracy party.

There is a kind of politics that can be bipartisan, that can bear reasonable compromise. Most economic policy is of this kind. If one side wants a tax of 40% and the other wants 20%, it’s quite reasonable to set the tax at 30%. If one side wants a large tariff and the other no tariff, it’s quite reasonable to make a small tariff. It could still be wrong—I’d tend to say that the 40% tax with no tariff is the right way to go—but it won’t be unjust. We can in fact “agree to disagree” in such cases. There really is a reasonable intermediate view between the extremes.

But there is also a kind of politics that can’t be bipartisan, in which compromise is inherently unjust. Most social policy is of this kind. If one side wants to let women vote and the other doesn’t, you can’t compromise by letting half of women vote. Women deserve the right to vote, period. All of them. In some sense letting half of women vote would be an improvement over none at all, but it’s obviously not an acceptable policy. The only just thing to do is to keep fighting until all women can vote.

This isn’t a question of importance per se.

Climate change is probably the single most important thing going on in the world this century, but it is actually something we can reasonably compromise about. It isn’t obvious where exactly the emission targets should be set to balance environmental sustainability with economic growth, and reasonable people can disagree about how to draw that line. (It is not reasonable to deny that climate change is important and refuse to take any action at all—which, sadly, is what the Republicans have been doing lately.) Thousands of innocent people have already been killed by Trump’s nonsensical deregulation of air pollution—but in fact it’s a quite difficult problem to decide exactly how pollution should be regulated.

Conversely, voter suppression has a small, if any, effect on our actual outcomes. In a country of 320 million people, even tens of thousands of votes rarely make a difference, and the (Constitutional) Electoral College does far greater damage to the principle of “one person, one vote” than voter suppression ever could. But voter suppression is fundamentally, inherently anti-democractic. When you try to suppress votes, you declare yourself an enemy of the free world.

There has always been disagreement about both kinds of issues; that hasn’t changed. The fundamental rights of women, racial minorities, and LGBT people have always been politically contentious, when—qua fundamental rights—they should never have been. But at least as far as I could tell, we seemed to be making progress on all these fronts. The left wing was dragging the right wing, kicking and screaming if necessary, toward a more just society.

Then came President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration, at least more than any administration I can remember, has been reversing social progress, taking hardline far-right positions on the kind of issues that we can’t compromise about. Locking up children at the border. Undermining judicial due process. Suppressing voter participation. These are attacks upon the foundations of a free society. We can’t “agree to disagree” on them.

Indeed, Trump’s economic policy has been surprisingly ambivalent; while he cuts taxes on the rich like a standard Republican, his trade war is much more of a leftist idea. It’s not so much that he’s willing to compromise as that he’s utterly inconsistent, but at least he’s not a consistent extremist on these issues.

That is what makes Trump an anomaly. The Republicans have gradually become more extreme over time, but it was Trump who carried them over a threshold, where they stopped retarding social progress and began actively reversing it. Removing Trump himself will not remove the problem—but nor would it be an empty gesture. He is a real part of the problem, and removing him might just give us the chance to make the deeper changes that need to be made.

The House agrees. Unfortunately, I doubt the Senate will.

What we can be thankful for

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Nov 24 JDN 2458812

Thanksgiving is upon us, yet as more and more evidence is revealed implicating President Trump in grievous crimes, as US carbon emissions that had been declining are now trending upward again, as our air quality deteriorates for the first time in decades, it may be hard to see what we should be thankful for.

But these are exceptions to a broader trend: The world is getting better, in almost every way, remarkably quickly. Homicide rates in the US are lower than they’ve been since the 1960s. Worldwide, the homicide rate has fallen 20% since 1990.

While world carbon emissions are still increasing, on a per capita basis they are actually starting to decline, and on an efficiency basis (kilograms of carbon-equivalent per dollar of GDP) they are at their lowest ever. This trend is likely to continue: The price of solar power has rapidly declined to the point where it is now the cheapest form of electric power.
The number—not just proportion, absolute number—of people in extreme poverty has declined by almost two-thirds within my own lifetime. The proportion is the lowest it has ever been in human history. World life expectancy is at its highest ever. Death rates from infectious disease fell by over 85% over the 20th century, and are now at their lowest ever.

I wouldn’t usually cite Reason as a source, but they’re right on this one: Defeat appears imminent for all four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Pestilence, Famine, War, and even Death are all on the decline. We have a great deal to be grateful for: We are living in a golden age.

This is not to say that we should let ourselves become complacent and stop trying to make the world better: On the contrary, it proves that the world can be made better, which gives us every reason to redouble our efforts to do so.

Trump is finally being impeached

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Post 310 Oct 6 JDN 2458763

Given that there have been efforts to impeach Trump since before he took office (which is totally unprecedented, by the way; while several others have committed crimes and been impeached while in office, no other US President has gone into office with widespread suspicion of mass criminal activity), it seems odd that it has taken this long to finally actually start formal impeachment hearings.

Why did it take so long? We needed two things to happen: One, absolutely overwhelming evidence of absolutely flagrant crimes, and two, a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

This is how divided America has become. If the Republicans were really a mainstream center-right party as they purport to be, they would have supported impeachment just as much as the Democrats, we would have impeached Trump in 2017, and he would have been removed from office by 2018. But in fact they are nothing of the sort. The Republicans no longer believe in democracy. The Democrats are a mainstream center-right party, and the Republicans are far-right White-nationalist crypto-fascists (and less ‘crypto-‘ all the time). After seeing how they reacted to his tax evasion, foreign bribes, national security leaks, human rights violations, obstruction of justice, and overall ubiquitous corruption and incompetence, by this point it’s clear that there is almost nothing that Trump could do which would make either the voter base or the politicians of the Republican Party turn against him—he may literally be correct that he could commit a murder in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue. Maybe if he raised taxes on billionaires or expressed support for Roe v. Wade they would finally revolt.

Even as it stands, there is good reason to fear that the Republican-majority Senate will not confirm the impeachment and remove Trump from office. The political fallout from such a failed impeachment is highly uncertain. So far, markets are taking it in stride; it may even turn out to be good for the economy. (Then again, a good economy may be good for Trump in 2020!) But at this point the evidence is so damning that if we don’t impeach now, we may never impeach again; if this isn’t enough, nothing is. (The Washington Examiner said that months ago, and may already have been right; but the case is even stronger now.)

So, the most likely scenario is that the impeachment goes through the House, but fails in the Senate. The good news is that if the Republicans do block the impeachment, they’ll be publicly admitting that even charges this serious and this substantiated mean nothing to them. Anyone watching who is still on the fence about them will see how corrupt they have become.

After that, this is probably what will happen: The impeachment will be big news for a month or two, then be largely ignored. Trump will probably try to make himself a martyr, talking even louder about ‘witch hunts’. He will lose popularity with a few voters, but his base will continue to support him through thick and thin. (Astonishingly, almost nothing really seems to move his overall approval rating.) The economy will be largely unaffected, or maybe slightly improve. And then we’ll find out in the 2020 election whether the Democrats can mobilize enough opposition to Trump, and—just as importantly—enough support for whoever wins the primaries, to actually win this time around.

If by some miracle enough Republicans find a moral conscience and vote to remove Trump from office, this means that until 2020 we will have President Mike Pence. In a sane world, that in itself would sound like a worst-case scenario; he’s basically a less-sleazy Ted Cruz. He is misogynistic, homophobic, and fanatically religious. He is also a partisan ideologue who toes the party line on basically every issue. Some have even argued that Pence is worse than Trump, because he represents the same ideology but with more subtlety and competence.

But subtlety and competence are important. Indeed, I would much rather have an intelligent, rational, competent ideologue managing our government, leading our military, and controlling our nuclear launch codes than an idiotic, narcissistic, impulsive one. Pence at least can be trusted to be consistent in his actions and diplomatic in his words—two things which Trump has absolutely never been.

Indeed, Pence’s ideological consistency has benefits; unlike Trump, he reliably supports free trade and his fiscal conservatism actually seems genuine for once. Consistency in itself has value: Life is much easier, and the economy is much stronger, when the rules of the game remain the same rather than randomly lurching from one extreme to another.

Pence is also not the pathological liar that Trump is. Yes, Pence has lied many times (only 22% of his statements were evaluated by PolitiFact as “Mostly True” or “True”, and 30% were “False” or “Pants on Fire”). But Trump lies constantly. A mere 14% of Trump’s statements were evaluated by Trump as “Mostly True” or “True”, while 48% were “False” or “Pants on Fire”. For Bernie Sanders, 49% were “Mostly True” or better, and only 11% were “False”, with no “Pants on Fire” at all; for Hillary Clinton, 49% were “Mostly True” or better, and only 10% were “False”, with 3% “Pants on Fire”. People have tried to keep running tallies of Trump’s lies, but it’s a tall order: The Washington Post records over 12,000 lies since he took office less than three years ago. Four thousand lies a year. More than ten every single day. Most people commit lies of omission or say ‘white lies’ several times per day (depending on who you ask, I’ve seen everything from an average of 2 times per day to an average of 100 times per day), but that’s not what we’re talking about here. These are consequential, outright statements of fact that aren’t true. And these are not literally everything he has said that wasn’t true; they are only public lies with relevance to policy or his own personal record. Indeed, Trump lies recklessly, stupidly, pointlessly, nonsensically. He seems like a pathological liar, or someone with dementia who is confabulating to try to fill gaps in his memory. (Indeed, a lot of his behavior is consistent with dementia, and similar to how Reagan acted in the early days of his Alzheimer’s.) At least if Pence takes office, we’ll be able to believe some of what he says.

Of course, Pence won’t be much better on some of the most important issues, such as climate change. When asked how important he thinks climate change is and what should be done about it, Pence always gives mealy-mouthed, evasive responses—but at least he doesn’t make up stories about windmills getting special permits to kill endangered birds.

I admit, choosing Pence over Trump feels like choosing to get shot in the leg instead of the face—but that’s really not a difficult choice, is it?

Privatized prisons were always an atrocity

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

Aug 4 JDN 2458700

Let’s be clear: The camps that Trump built on the border absolutely are concentration camps. They aren’t extermination camps—yet?—but they are in fact “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.” Above all, it is indeed the case that “Persons are placed in such camps often on the basis of identification with a particular ethnic or political group rather than as individuals and without benefit either of indictment or fair trial.”

And I hope it goes without saying that this is an unconscionable atrocity that will remain a stain upon America for generations to come. Trump was clear from the beginning that this was his intention, and thus this blood is on the hands of anyone who voted for him. (The good news is that even they are now having second thoughts: Even a majority of Fox News viewers agrees that Trump has gone too far.)

Yet these camps are only a symptom of a much older disease: We should have seen this sort of cruelty and inhumanity coming when first we privatized prisons.

Krugman makes the point using economics: Without market competition or public view, how can the private sector be kept from abuse, corruption, and exploitation? And this is absolutely true—but it is not the strongest reason.

No, the reason privatized prisons are unjust is much more fundamental than that: Prisons are a direct incursion against liberty. The only institution that should ever have that authority is a democratically-elected government restrained by a constitution.

I don’t care if private prisons were cleaner and nicer and safer and more effective at rehabilitation (as you’ll see from those links, exactly the opposite is true across the board). No private institution has the right to imprison people. No one should be making profits from locking people up.

This is the argument we should have been making for the last 40 years. You can’t privatize prisons, because no one has a right to profit from locking people up. You can’t privatize the military, because no one has a right to profit from killing people. These are basic government functions precisely because they are direct incursions against fundamental rights; though such incursions are sometimes necessary, we allow only governments to make them, because democracy is the only means we have found to keep them from being used indiscriminately. (And even then, there are always abuses and we must remain eternally vigilant.)

Yes, obviously we must shut down these concentration camps as soon as possible. But we can’t stop there. This is a symptom of a much deeper disease: Our liberty is being sold for profit.

Green New Deal Part 3: Guaranteeing education and healthcare is easy—why aren’t we doing it?

PNRJ current events, ethics, inequality, personal, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 21 JDN 2458595

Last week was one of the “hard parts” of the Green New Deal. Today it’s back to one of the “easy parts”: Guaranteed education and healthcare.

“Providing all people of the United States with – (i) high-quality health care; […]

“Providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States.”

Many Americans seem to think that providing universal healthcare would be prohibitively expensive. In fact, it would have literally negative net cost.
The US currently has the most bloated, expensive, inefficient healthcare system in the entire world. We spend almost $10,000 per person per year on healthcare, and get outcomes no better than France or the UK where they spend less than $5,000.
In fact, our public healthcare expenditures are currently higher than almost every other country. Our private expenditures are therefore pure waste; all they are doing is providing returns for the shareholders of corporations. If we were to simply copy the UK National Health Service and spend money in exactly the same way as they do, we would spend the same amount in public funds and almost nothing in private funds—and the UK has a higher mean lifespan than the US.
This is absolutely a no-brainer. Burn the whole system of private insurance down. Copy a healthcare system that actually works, like they use in every other First World country.
It wouldn’t even be that complicated to implement: We already have a single-payer healthcare system in the US; it’s called Medicare. Currently only old people get it; but old people use the most healthcare anyway. Hence, Medicare for All: Just lower the eligibility age for Medicare to 18 (if not zero). In the short run there would be additional costs for the transition, but in the long run we would save mind-boggling amounts of money, all while improving healthcare outcomes and extending our lifespans. Current estimates say that the net savings of Medicare for All would be about $5 trillion over the next 10 years. We can afford this. Indeed, the question is, as it was for infrastructure: How can we afford not to do this?
Isn’t this socialism? Yeah, I suppose it is. But healthcare is one of the few things that socialist countries consistently do extremely well. Cuba is a socialist country—a real socialist country, not a social democratic welfare state like Norway but a genuinely authoritarian centrally-planned economy. Cuba’s per-capita GDP PPP is a third of ours. Yet their life expectancy is actually higher than ours, because their healthcare system is just that good. Their per-capita healthcare spending is one-fourth of ours, and their health outcomes are better. So yeah, let’s be socialist in our healthcare. Socialists seem really good at healthcare.
And this makes sense, if you think about it. Doctors can do their jobs a lot better when they’re focused on just treating everyone who needs help, rather than arguing with insurance companies over what should and shouldn’t be covered. Preventative medicine is extremely cost-effective, yet it’s usually the first thing that people skimp on when trying to save money on health insurance. A variety of public health measures (such as vaccination and air quality regulation) are extremely cost-effective, but they are public goods that the private sector would not pay for by itself.
It’s not as if healthcare was ever really a competitive market anyway: When you get sick or injured, do you shop around for the best or cheapest hospital? How would you even go about that, when they don’t even post most of their prices and what prices they post are often wildly different than what you’ll actually pay?
The only serious argument I’ve heard against single-payer healthcare is a moral one: “Why should I have to pay for other people’s healthcare?” Well, I guess, because… you’re a human being? You should care about other human beings, and not want them to suffer and die from easily treatable diseases?
I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.

Single-payer healthcare is not only affordable: It would be cheaper and better than what we are currently doing. (In fact, almost anything would be cheaper and better than what we are currently doing—Obamacare was an improvement over the previous mess, but it’s still a mess.)
What about public education? Well, we already have that up to the high school level, and it works quite well.
Contrary to popular belief, the average public high school has better outcomes in terms of test scores and college placements than the average private high school. There are some elite private schools that do better, but they are extraordinarily expensive and they self-select only the best students. Public schools have to take all students, and they have a limited budget; but they have high quality standards and they require their teachers to be certified.
The flaws in our public school system are largely from it being not public enough, which is to say that schools are funded by their local property taxes instead of having their costs equally shared across whole states. This gives them the same basic problem as private schools: Rich kids get better schools.
If we removed that inequality, our educational outcomes would probably be among the best in the world—indeed, in our most well-funded school districts, they are. The state of Massachusetts which actually funds their public schools equally and well, gets international test scores just as good as the supposedly “superior” educational systems of Asian countries. In fact, this is probably even unfair to Massachusetts, as we know that China specifically selects the regions that have the best students to be the ones to take these international tests. Massachusetts is the best the US has to offer, but Shanghai is also the best China has to offer, so it’s only fair we compare apples to apples.
Public education has benefits for our whole society. We want to have a population of citizens, workers, and consumers who are well-educated. There are enormous benefits of primary and secondary education in terms of reducing poverty, improving public health, and increased economic growth.
So there’s my impassioned argument for why we should continue to support free, universal public education up to high school.
When it comes to college, I can’t be quite so enthusiastic. While there are societal benefits of college education, most of the benefits of college accrue to the individuals who go to college themselves.
The median weekly income of someone with a high school diploma is about $730; with a bachelor’s degree this rises to $1200; and with a doctoral or professional degree it gets over $1800. Higher education also greatly reduces your risk of being unemployed; while about 4% of the general population is unemployed, only 1.5% of people with doctorates or professional degrees are. Add that up over all the weeks of your life, and it’s a lot of money.
The net present value of a college education has been estimated at approximately $1 million. This result is quite sensitive to the choice of discount rate; at a higher discount rate you can get the net present value as “low” as $250,000.
With this in mind, the fact that the median student loan debt for a college graduate is about $30,000 doesn’t sound so terrible, does it? You’re taking out a loan for $30,000 to get something that will earn you between $250,000 and $1 million over the course of your life.
There is some evidence that having student loans delays homeownership; but this is a problem with our mortgage system, not our education system. It’s mainly the inability to finance a down payment that prevents people from buying homes. We should implement a system of block grants for first-time homeowners that gives them a chunk of money to make a down payment, perhaps $50,000. This would cost about as much as the mortgage interest tax deduction which mainly benefits the upper-middle class.
Higher education does have societal benefits as well. Perhaps the starkest I’ve noticed is how categorically higher education decided people’s votes on Donald Trump: Counties with high rates of college education almost all voted for Clinton, and counties with low rates of college education almost all voted for Trump. This was true even controlling for income and a lot of other demographic factors. Only authoritarianism, sexism and racism were better predictors of voting for Trump—and those could very well be mediating variables, if education reduces such attitudes.
If indeed it’s true that higher education makes people less sexist, less racist, less authoritarian, and overall better citizens, then it would be worth every penny to provide universal free college.
But it’s worth noting that even countries like Germany and Sweden which ostensibly do that don’t really do that: While college tuition is free for Swedish citizens and Germany provides free college for all students of any nationality, nevertheless the proportion of people in Sweden and Germany with bachelor’s degrees is actually lower than that of the United States. In Sweden the gap largely disappears if you restrict to younger cohorts—but in Germany it’s still there.
Indeed, from where I’m sitting, “universal free college” looks an awful lot like “the lower-middle class pays for the upper-middle class to go to college”. Social class is still a strong predictor of education level in Sweden. Among OECD countries, education seems to be the best at promoting upward mobility in Australia, and average college tuition in Australia is actually higher than average college tuition in the US (yes, even adjusting for currency exchange: Australian dollars are worth only slightly less than US dollars).
What does Australia do? They have a really good student loan system. You have to reach an annual income of about $40,000 per year before you need to make payments at all, and the loans are subsidized to be interest-free. Once you do owe payments, the debt is repaid at a rate proportional to your income—so effectively it’s not a debt at all but an equity stake.
In the US, students have been taking the desperate (and very cyberpunk) route of selling literal equity stakes in their education to Wall Street banks; this is a terrible idea for a hundred reasons. But having the government have something like an equity stake in students makes a lot of sense.
Because of the subsidies and generous repayment plans, the Australian government loses money on their student loan system, but so what? In order to implement universal free college, they would have spent an awful lot more than they are losing now. This way, the losses are specifically on students who got a lot of education but never managed to raise their income high enough—which means the government is actually incentivized to improve the quality of education or job-matching.
The cost of universal free college is considerable: That $1.3 trillion currently owed as student loans would be additional government debt or tax liability instead. Is this utterly unaffordable? No. But it’s not trivial either. We’re talking about roughly $60 billion per year in additional government spending, a bit less than what we currently spend on food stamps. An expenditure like that should have a large public benefit (as food stamps absolutely, definitely do!); I’m not convinced that free college would have such a benefit.
It would benefit me personally enormously: I currently owe over $100,000 in debt (about half from my undergrad and half from my first master’s). But I’m fairly privileged. Once I finally make it through this PhD, I can expect to make something like $100,000 per year until I retire. I’m not sure that benefiting people like me should be a major goal of public policy.
That said, I don’t think universal free college is a terrible policy. Done well, it could be a good thing. But it isn’t the no-brainer that single-payer healthcare is. We can still make sure that students are not overburdened by debt without making college tuition actually free.

What’s going on in Venezuela?

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

Feb 3 JDN 2458518

As you may know, Venezuela is currently in a state of political crisis. Juan Guaido has declared himself President and been recognized by the United States as such, while Nicolas Maduro claims that he remains President as he has been for the last six years—during most of which time has has “ruled by decree”, which is to say that he has been effectively a dictator.

Maduro claims that this is a US-backed coup. I’ve seen a lot of people on the left buy into this claim.

I’m not saying this is impossible: The US has backed coups several times before, and has a particular track record of doing so against socialist regimes in Latin America.

But there are some reasons to be skeptical of it.

Unrest in Venezuela is nothing new, and looks to be quite grassroots. There have been widespread protests against Maduro—and severe crackdowns against those protests—for several years now. Guaido himself got his start in politics by organizing protests against Chavez and then Maduro, starting when he was a college student.

While Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, remains extremely popular, most of the support for Maduro in Venezuela seems to come from the military and other elites. This is looking a lot like the Lenin/Stalin pattern: A charismatic and popular authoritarian socialist revolutionary opens the door for a murderous psychopathic authoritarian socialist who rules with an iron fist and causes millions of deaths. (In China, Mao managed to play both roles by himself.)

Guaido himself rejects all claims that he’s working for the US (but I suppose he would in either case).

And so far, no US troops have been deployed to Venezuela, and at the moment, Trump is currently only threatening for more sanctions or an embargo, not a military intervention. (He’s Trump, so who knows? And he did talk about invading them a year or two ago.)

The best evidence I’ve seen that it could be a US-orchestrated coup is a leaked report about a meeting discussing the possibility of such a coup a few months ago. But at least by the most reliable accounts we have, the US decided not to support that coup. I guess that could be part of the cover-up? (It feels weird when the crazy-sounding conspiracy theorists actually have a point. There totally have been US coups against Latin American governments that were covered up for decades.)

Even if it is actually a coup, I’m not entirely convinced that’s a bad thing.

The American and French Revolutions were coups, after all. When you are faced with a strong authoritarian government, a coup may be your only option for achieving freedom.
Here’s a bit of evidence that this is indeed what’s happening: the countries that support Guaido are a lot more democratic than the countries that support Maduro.

Guaido has already been recognized by most of Europe and Latin America, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru. Among those supporting Maduro are China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey—not exactly bastions of liberal democracy. Within Latin America, only Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, and Uruguay support Maduro. Of those, only Mexico and Uruguay are recognizably democratic.

The average Democracy Index of countries that support Guaido is 7.5, which would be a “flawed democracy”. The average Democracy Index of countries that support Maduro is only 4.4, a “hybrid regime”.

Here is a plot of the Democracy Index by country supporting Guaido:democracy_index_guaido

Here is a plot of the Democracy Index by country supporting Maduro:

democracy_index_maduro

Since the entire EU recognizes Guaido, I could have shown each European country separately and biased the numbers even further, but I decided to specifically stick to major European powers with explicitly stated positions on Venezuela.

And we know that Maduro was a ruthless and autocratic dictator. So this is looking an awful lot like a democratic uprising against authoritarianism. It’s hard for me to be upset about that.

Second, Venezuela was in terrible shape, and largely due to Maduro’s administration.

After Maduro was elected (we’re still not sure how legitimate that election really was), Maduro underwent a total economic meltdown. Depression, hyperinflation, famine, a resurgence of malaria, and a huge exodus of refugees all followed. Millions of people are now starving in a country that was once quite rich. Nearly 90% of the population now lives in poverty. The story of Venezuela’s economy is one of total self-destruction.

Due to the bizarre system of subsidies and price controls in place, oil is now 100 times cheaper in Venezuela than water. Venezuela’s oil production has plummeted under Maduroto its lowest levels in decades, which might be good for climate change but is very bad for a country so dependent upon oil export revenue. It’s pretty much a classic cautionary tale for the Resource Curse.

Maduro, like any good socialist dictator, has blamed US sanctions for all his country’s economic failings. But there have not been strict US sanctions against Venezuela, and we remain their chief purchaser of oil by a wide margin. If you’ve ever bought gasoline at a Citgo station, you have paid for Venezuelan oil. Moreover, if your socialist country is that heavily dependent on exporting to capitalist countries… that really doesn’t say much in favor of socialism as an economic system, does it?

I don’t know what will happen. Maybe Maduro will successfully regain power. Maybe Guaido will retain control but turn out to be just as bad (there’s a long track record of coups against awful dictators resulting in equally awful dictators—Idi Amin is a classic example). Maybe Trump will do something stupid or crazy and we’ll end up in yet another decades-long military quagmire.

But there’s also a chance of something much better: Maybe Guaido can actually maintain power and build a genuinely democratic regime in Venezuela, and turn their economy back from the brink of devastation toward more sustainable growth. When the devil you know is this bad, sometimes you really do want to bet on the devil you don’t.