freedom

Freedom and volition

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 13 JDN 2460597

Introduction

What freedom do we have to choose some actions over others, and how are we responsible for what we do? Without some kind of freedom and responsibility, morality becomes meaningless—what does it matter what we ought to do if what we will do is completely inevitable? Morality becomes a trivial exercise, trying to imagine fanciful worlds in which things were not only other than they are, but other than they ever could be.

Many people think that science and morality are incompatible precisely because science requires determinism—the causal unity of the universe, wherein all effects have causes and all systems obey conservation laws. This seems to limit our capacity for freedom, since all our actions are determined by physical causes, and could (in principle) be predicted far in advance from the state of the universe around us. In fact, quantum mechanics isn’t necessarily deterministic (though in my preferred version, the Bohm interpretation, it is), but a small amount of randomness at the level of atoms and molecules doesn’t seem to add much in the way of human freedom.

The fear is that determinism undermines human agency; if we are part of a closed causal system, how can we be free to make our own choices? In fact, this is a mistake. Determinism isn’t the right question to be asking at all. There are really four possibilities to consider:

  • Acausalism: Actions are uncaused but inevitable; everything is ultimately random and meaningless.
  • Libertarianism: Actions are uncaused and free; we are the masters of our own destiny, independent of the laws of nature.
  • Fatalism: Actions are caused and inevitable; the universe is a clockwork machine of which we are components.
  • Compatibilism: Actions are caused but free; we are rational participants in the universe’s causal mechanism.

Acausalism

Hardly anyone holds to acausalism, but it is a logically coherent position. Perhaps the universe is ultimately random, meaningless—our actions are done neither by the laws of nature nor by our own wills, but simply by the random flutterings of molecular motion. In such a universe, we are not ultimately responsible for our actions, but nor can we stop ourselves from pretending that we are, for everything we think, say, and do is determined only by the roll of the dice. This is a hopeless, terrifying approach to reality, and it would drive one to suicide but for the fact that if it is true, suicide, just like everything else, must ultimately be decided by chance.

Libertarianism

Most people, if asked—including evolutionary biologists—seem to believe something like libertarianism. (This is metaphysical libertarianism, the claim that free will is real and intrinsically uncaused; it is not to be confused with political Libertarianism.) As human beings we have an intuitive sense that we are not like the rest of the universe. Leaves fall, but people climb; everything decays, but we construct. If this is right, then morality is unproblematic: Moral rules apply to agents with this sort of deep free will, and not to other things.

But libertarian free will runs into serious metaphysical problems. If I am infected by a virus, do I choose to become sick? If I am left without food, do I choose to starve? If I am hit by a car, do I choose to be injured? Anyone can see that this is not the case: No one chooses these things—they happen, as a result of the laws of nature—physics, chemistry, biology.

Yet, so much of our lives is determined by these kinds of events: How can Stephen Hawking be said to have chosen life as a physicist and not a basketball player when he spent his whole adult life crippled by amytropic lateral sclerosis? He could not possibly have been a professional basketball player, no matter how badly he might have desired to be. Perhaps he could have been an artist or a philosopher—but still, his options were severely limited by his biology.

Indeed, it is worse than this, for we do not choose our parents, our culture, our genes; yet all of these things strongly influence who we are. I have myopia and migraines not because I wanted to, not because I did something to cause it to happen, but because I was born this way—and while myopia isn’t a serious problem with eyeglasses, migraines have adversely affected my life in many ways, and while treatment has helped me enormously, a full cure remains elusive. Culture influences us even more: It is entirely beyond my control that I speak English and live in an upper-middle-class American family; though I’m fairly happy with this result, I was never given a choice in the matter. All of these things have influenced what schools I’ve attended, what friends I’ve made, even what ideas I have considered. My brain itself is a physical system bound to the determinism of the universe. Therefore, in what sense can anything I do be considered free?

Fatalism

This reasoning leads quickly to fatalism, the notion that because everything we do is controlled by laws of nature, nothing we do is free, and we cannot rightly be held responsible for any of our actions. If this is true, then we still can’t stop ourselves from acting the way we do. People who murder will murder, people who punish murderers will punish murderers—it’s all inevitable. There may be slightly more hope in fatalism than acausalism, since it suggests that everything we do is done in some sense for a purpose, if not any purpose we would recognize or understand. Still, the thought that death and suffering, larceny and rape, starvation and genocide, are in all instances inevitable—this is the sort of idea that will keep a thoughtful person awake at night.

By way of reconciling determinism with libertarian free will, some thinkers (such as Michael Shermer) have suggested that free will is a “useful fiction”.

But the very concept of anything being useful depends upon at least a minimal degree of free will—the ability to choose actions based upon their usefulness. A fiction can only be useful if beliefs affect actions. If there even is such a thing as a “useful fiction” (I’m quite dubious of the notion), free will is certainly not an example, for in order for anything to ever be useful we must have at least some degree of free will. The best one could say under fatalism would be something like “some people happen to believe in free will and can’t change that”; but that doesn’t make free will true, it just makes many people incorrigibly wrong.

Yet the inference to fatalism is not, itself, inevitable; it doesn’t follow from the fact that much or even most of what we do is beyond our control that all we do is beyond our control. Indeed, it makes intuitive sense to say that we are in control of certain things—what we eat, what we say, how we move our bodies. We feel at least that we are in control of these things, and we can operate quite effectively on this presumption.

On the other hand, different levels of analysis yield different results. At the level of the brain, at the level of biochemistry, and especially at the level of quantum physics, there is little difference between what we choose to do and what merely happens to us. In a powerful enough microscope, being hit by a car and punching someone in the face look the same: It’s all protons and electrons interacting by exchanging photons.

Compatibilism

But free will is not inherently opposed to causality. In order to exercise free will, we must act not from chance, but from character; someone whose actions are random is not choosing freely, and conversely someone can freely choose to be completely predictable. It can be rational to choose some degree of randomness, but it cannot be rational to choose total randomness. As John Baer convincingly argues, at least some degree of causal determinacy is necessary for free will—hence, libertarianism is not viable, and a lack of determinism would lead only to acausalism. In the face of this knowledge, compatibilism is the obvious choice.

One thing that humans do that only a few other things do—some animals, perhaps computers if we’re generous—is reason; we consider alternatives and select the one we consider best. When water flows down a hill, it never imagines doing otherwise. When asteroids collide, they don’t consider other options. Yet we humans behave quite differently; we consider possibilities, reflect on our desires, seek to choose the best option. This process we call volition, and it is central to our experience of choice and freedom.

Another thing we do that other things don’t—except animals again, but definitely not computers this time—is feel emotion; we love and hurt, feel joy and sorrow. It is our emotions that motivate our actions, give them purpose. Water flowing downhill not only doesn’t choose to do so, it doesn’t care whether it does so. Sometimes things happen to us that we do not choose, but we always care.

This is what I mean when I say “free will”: experiences, beliefs, and actions are part of the same causal system. What we are affects what we think, what we think affects what we do. What we do affects what we are, and the system feeds back into itself. From this realization I can make sense of claims that people are good and bad, that acts are right and wrong; and without it I don’t think we could make sense of anything at all.

It’s not that we have some magical soul that lives outside our bodies; we are our bodies. Our brains are our souls. (I call this the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science: We are our brains.) Nor is it that neuron firings somehow “make” our thoughts and feelings as some kind of extra bonus; the patterns of neuron firings and the information that they process are our thoughts and feelings. Free will isn’t some mystical dualism; it is a direct consequence of the fact that we have capacities for conscious volition. Yes, our actions can be ultimately explained by the patterns in our brains. Of course they can! The patterns in our brains comprise our personalities, our beliefs, our memories, our desires.

Yes, the software of human consciousness is implemented on the hardware of the human brain. Why should we have expected something different? Whatever stuff makes consciousness, it is still stuff, and it obeys the laws that stuff obeys. We can imagine that we might be made of invisible fairy dust, but if that were so, then invisible fairy dust would need to be a real phenomenon and hence obey physical laws like the conservation of energy. Cognition is not opposed to physics; it is a subset of physics. Just as a computer obeys Turing’s laws if you program it but also Newton’s laws if you throw it, so humans are both mental and physical beings.

In fact, the intuitive psychology of free will is among the most powerfully and precisely predictive scientific theories ever devised, right alongside Darwinian evolution and quantum physics.

Consider the following experiment, conducted about twenty years ago. In November of 2006, I planned a road trip with several of my friends from our home in Ann Arbor to the Secular Student Alliance conference in Boston that was coming in April 2007. Months in advance, we researched hotels, we registered for the conference, we planned out how much we would need to spend. When the time came, we gathered in my car and drove the 1300 kilometers to the conference. Now, stop and think for a moment: How did I know, in November 2006, that in April 2007, on a particular date and time, E.O. Wilson would be in a particular room and so would I? Because that’s what the schedule said. Consider for a moment these two extremely complicated extended bodies in space, each interacting with thousands of other such bodies continuously; no physicist could possibly have gathered enough data to predict six months in advance that the two bodies would each travel hundreds of kilometers over the Earth’s surface in order to meet within 10 meters of one another, remain there for roughly an hour, and then split apart and henceforth remain hundreds of kilometers apart. Yet our simple intuitive psychology could, and did, make just that prediction correctly. Of course in the face of incomplete data, no theory is perfect, and the prediction could have been wrong. Indeed because Boston is exceedingly difficult to navigate (we got lost), the prediction that I and Steven Pinker would be in the same room at the same time the previous evening turned out not to be accurate. But even this is something that intuitive psychology could have taken into account better than any other scientific theory we have. Neither quantum physics nor stoichiometric chemistry nor evolutionary biology could have predicted that we’d get lost, nor recommend that if we ever return to Boston we should bring a smartphone with a GPS uplink; yet intuitive psychology can.

Moreover, intuitive psychology explicitly depends upon rational volition. If you had thought that I didn’t want to go to the conference, or that I was mistaken about the conference’s location, then you would have predicted that I would not occupy that spatial location at that time; and had these indeed been the case, that prediction would have been completely accurate. And yet, these predictions insist upon such entities as desires (wanting to go) and beliefs (being mistaken) that eliminativists, behaviorists, and epiphenomenalists have been insisting for years are pseudoscientific. Quite the opposite is the case: Eliminativism, behaviorism, and epiphenomenalism are pseudosciences.

Understanding the constituent parts of a process does not make the process an illusion. Rain did not stop falling when we developed mathematical models of meteorology. Fire did not stop being hot when we formalized statistical dynamics. Thunder did not stop being loud when we explained the wave properties of sound. Advances in computer technology have now helped us realize how real information processing can occur in systems made of physical parts that obey physical laws; it isn’t too great a stretch to think that human minds operate on similar principles. Just as the pattern of electrical firings in my computer really is Windows, the pattern of electrochemical firings in my brain really is my consciousness.

There is a kind of naive theology called “God of the gaps”; it rests upon the notion that whenever a phenomenon cannot be explained by science, this leaves room for God as an explanation. This theology is widely rejected by philosophers, because it implies that whenever science advances, religion must retreat. Libertarianism and fatalism rest upon the presumption of something quite similar, what I would call “free will of the gaps”. As cognitive science advances, we will discover more and more about the causation of human mental states; if this is enough to make us doubt free will, then “free will” was just another name for ignorance of cognitive science. I defend a much deeper sense of free will than this, one that is not at all threatened by scientific advancement.

Yes, our actions are caused—caused by what we think about the world! We are responsible for what we do not because it lacks causation, but because it has causation, specifically causation in our own beliefs, desires, and intentions. These beliefs, desires, and intentions are themselves implemented upon physical hardware, and we don’t fully understand how this implementation operates; but nonetheless the hardware is real and the phenomena are real, at least as real as such things as rocks, rivers, clouds, trees, dogs, and televisions, all of which are also complex functional ensembles of many smaller, simpler parts.

Conclusion

Libertarianism is largely discredited; we don’t have the mystical sort of free will that allows us to act outside of causal laws. But this doesn’t mean that we must accept fatalism; compatibilism is the answer. We have discovered many surprising things about cognitive science, and we will surely need to discover many more; but the fundamental truth of rational volition remains untarnished.

We know, to a high degree of certainty, that human beings are capable of volitional action. I contend that this is all the freedom we need—perhaps even all we could ever have. When a comet collides with Jupiter, and we ask “Why?”, the only sensible answer involves happenstance and laws of physics. When a leaf falls from a tree, and we ask “Why?”, we can do better, talking about evolutionary adaptations in the phylogenetic history of trees. But when a human being robs a bank, starts a war, feeds a child, or writes a book, and we ask “Why?”, we can move away from simple causes and talk about reasons—desires, intentions, beliefs; reasons, unlike mere causes, can make more or less sense, be more or less justified.

Psychological and neurological experiments have shown that volition is more complicated than we usually think—it can be strongly affected by situational factors, and it has more to do with inhibiting and selecting actions than with generating them, what Sukhvinder Obhi and Patrick Haggard call “not free will but free won’t”; yet still we have volitional control over many of our actions, and hence responsibility for them. In simple tasks, there is brain activity that predicts our behavior several seconds before we actually consciously experience the decision—but this is hardly surprising, since the brain needs to use processing power to actually generate a decision. Deliberation requires processing, not all of which can be conscious. It’s a little surprising that the activity can predict the decision in advance of the conscious experience of volition, but it can’t predict the decision perfectly, even in very simple tasks. (And in true real-life tasks, like choosing a college or a spouse, it basically can’t predict at all.) This shows that the conscious volition is doing something—perhaps inhibiting undesired behaviors or selecting desired ones. No compatibilist needs to be committed to the claim that subconscious urges have nothing to do with our decisions—since at least Freud that kind of free will has been clearly discredited.

Indeed, evolutionary psychology would be hard-pressed to explain an illusion of free will that isn’t free will. It simply doesn’t make sense for conscious volition to evolve unless it does something that affects our behavior in some way. Illusions are a waste of brain matter, which in turn is a waste of metabolic energy. (The idea that we would want to have free will in order to feel like life is worth living is profoundly silly: If our beliefs didn’t affect our behavior, our survival would be unrelated to whether we thought life was worth living!) You can make excuses and say that conscious experience is just an epiphenomenon upon neurological processes—an effect but not a cause—but there is no such thing as an “epiphenomenon” in physics as we know it. The smoke of a flame can smother that flame; the sound of a train is a sonic pressure wave that shakes the metal of the track. Anything that moves has energy, and energy is conserved. Epiphenomenalism would require new laws of physics, by which consciousness can be created ex nihilo, a new entity that requires no energy to make and “just happens” whenever certain matter is arranged in the right way.

Windows is not an “epiphenomenon” upon the electrons running through my computer’s processor core; the functional arrangement of those electrons is Windows—it implements Windows. I don’t see why we can’t say the same thing about my consciousness—that it is a software implementation by the computational hardware of my brain. Epiphenomenalists will often insist that they are being tough-minded scientists accepting the difficult facts while the rest of us are being silly and mystical; but they are talking about mysterious new physics and I’m talking about software-hardware interaction—so really, who is being mystical here?

In the future it may be possible to predict people’s behavior relatively accurately based on their brain activity—but so what? This only goes to show that the brain is the source of our decisions, which is precisely what compatibilism says. One can easily predict that rain will fall from clouds of a certain composition; but rain still falls from clouds. The fact that I can sometimes predict your behavior doesn’t make your behavior any less volitional; it only makes me a better psychologist (and for that matter a more functional human being). Moreover, detailed predictions of long-term behaviors will probably always remain impossible, due to the deep computational complexity involved. (If it were simple to predict who you’d marry, why would your brain expend so much effort working on the problem?)

For all these reasons, I say: Yes, we do have free will.

False equivalence is not centrism

PNRJ core principles, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , ,

False equivalence is not centrism

Feb 4 JDN 2458154

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

~ W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming


 Centrism is not very popular these days, but I believe this is because neither its alleged adherents nor its alleged opponents actually have a clear understanding of what centrism is supposed to be. Most of what is called “centrism” in this polarized era (the US is now more politically polarized than it has been in decades) is actually false equivalence.

Most people who express pride in their “centrism” adopt a heuristic which basically amounts to taking the two positions that are most loudly proclaimed in public and averaging them. One side says “Kill all puppies”, the other side says “Don’t kill puppies”, and they proudly and self-righteously declare that the only sensible policy is to kill precisely 50% of the puppies. Anyone who says “the two parties are the same” or “liberals deny science too” is guilty of this false equivalence—and it’s all too common.

But this is not what centrism is supposed to be. A good centrist isn’t someone who looks at their existing Overton Window and chooses the mean value. A good centrist is someone who understands and appreciates Horseshoe Theory. Horseshoe Theory says that the political spectrum is not actually a straight line from left to right; it’s more of a horseshoe shape, where the far-left and the far-right curl down and toward one another. A good centrist is someone who values the top of the horseshoe, more strongly than they value whatever particular policies might move you toward the left or the right edge.

What does the top of the horseshoe represent? Democracy.

A good centrist is someone who really, truly believes in defending democracy.

What the far-left and the far-right have in common is authoritarianism:

For those on either edge of the horseshoe, people who disagree with (the collectivization of all wealth/the superiority of my master race) aren’t simply wrong, they are evil. Persuading them to vote my way is a waste of time. Freedom of speech is dangerous, because it allows them to spread their evil ideas. It would be better to suppress freedom of speech, so that only people who know the truth (read: agree with me) are allowed to speak.

Along similar lines, Slate Star Codex recently published an excellent blog post on how people seem to separate into two very broad political worldviews: There are Mistake Theorists, who think that most of the world’s problems are due to honest ignorance and error; and there are Conflict Theorists, who think that most of the world’s problems are due to the malign influence of evil enemy factions. The far-left and the far-right are overwhelmingly composed of Conflict Theorists. A good centrist is a Mistake Theorist through and through.

Being a good centrist means fighting to defend the institutions that make freedom possible. Here is a whole list of policies that neither the far-left nor the far-right particularly values that we as centrists must:

  1. Voting rights: We must fight against voter suppression and disenfranchisement wherever it occurs. We must stand up to defend the principle “one person, one vote” wherever necessary.

  2. Equality under the law: We must protect the rights of everyone to have equal representation and equal standing as citizens—including, but by no means limited to, women, racial minorities, LGBT people, and people with disabilities.

  3. Election reform: We must find ways to undermine gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and the campaign finance system that allows corporations and wealthy individuals to exert disproportionate influence.

  4. Freedom of speech: We must protect the right of everyone to speak, including those whose views we find abhorrent. Our efforts should be focused most on those who have the least representation in our discourse.

  5. Individual privacy: We must fight against the creeping rise of the surveillance state and the use of extra-legal means of intelligence gathering, particularly in domestic spying. We should be outraged that the House of Representatives voted to extend the NSA’s warrantless wiretap authority after what Edward Snowden revealed about the NSA.

  6. Demilitarization and deincarceration: We must fight to contain or reverse the expansion of military and penal force that has given the United States not only a military larger than the next ten countries combined, but also the world’s highest rate of incarceration.

On some of these issues we might find agreement with the left or (less likely) the right—but even when we don’t, we must press forward. In particular, the goal of equality under the law often aligns with the goal of left-wing social justice—but there are cases where it doesn’t, cases where hatred of White straight men or a craving for vengeance against past injustice drives the left to demand things that would violate this principle. And the atavistic joy of punching Nazis in the face must never overwhelm our sacred commitment to the principles of free speech.

This doesn’t mean we can’t also adopt detailed policy views that align with the left or the right (or both). I for one support single-payer healthcare (left), progressive taxation (left), renewable energy (left), open borders (left), zoning reform (right), reductions in corporate taxes (right), free trade (right, or so I thought?), and a basic income (both—yet strangely we can’t seem to make it happen).

But being a good centrist means that these detailed policy prescriptions are always less important to you than the core principles of democracy itself. When they find out that the rest of the country is against them on something, a leftist or a rightist starts looking for ways to undermine the public will and get the policy they want. A centrist accepts that they have been outvoted and starts looking for ways to persuade the majority that they are mistaken.

Centrism is about defending the guardrails of democracy. False equivalence is not centrism; it is an obstacle to centrism. It prevents us from seeing when one side has clearly damaged those guardrails much more than the other. So let me come out and say it: At this historical juncture, in the United States, the right wing is a far greater threat to the core principles of democracy than the left. This is not to say that the left is inherently incapable of threatening democracy, or never will do so in the future; but it is to say that right here, right now, it’s the right wing we should be worried about. Punching Nazis will never be as threatening to the core of freedom as warrantless wiretaps or the discrediting of the mainstream press.

9/11, 14 years on—and where are our civil liberties?

PNRJ public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457278 (09/11/2015) EDT 20:53

Today is the 14th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. A lot has changed since then—yet it’s quite remarkable what hasn’t. In particular, we still don’t have our civil liberties back.

In our immediate panicked response to the attacks, the United States passed almost unanimously the USA PATRIOT ACT, giving unprecedented power to our government in surveillance, searches, and even arrests and detentions. Most of those powers have been renewed repeatedly and remain in effect; the only major change has been a slight weakening of the NSA’s authority to use mass dragnet surveillance on Internet traffic and phone metadata. And this change in turn was almost certainly only made because of Edward Snowden, who is still forced to live in Russia for fear of being executed if he returns to the US. That is, the man most responsible for the only significant improvement in civil liberties in the United States in the last decade is living in Russia because he has been branded a traitor. No, the traitors here are the over one hundred standing US Congress members who voted for an act that is in explicit and direct violation of the Constitution. At the very least every one of them should be removed from office, and we as voters have the power to do that—so why haven’t we? In particular, why are Dan Lipinski and Steny Hoyer, both Democrats from non-southern states who voted every single time to extend provisions of the PATRIOT ACT, still in office? At least Carl Levin had the courtesy to resign after sponsoring the act allowing indefinite detention—I hope we would have voted him out anyway, since I’d much rather have a Republican (and all the absurd economic policy that entails) than someone who apparently doesn’t believe the Fourth and Sixth Amendments have any meaning at all.

We have become inured to this loss of liberty; it feels natural or inevitable to us. But these are not minor inconveniences; they are not small compromises. Giving our government the power to surveil, search, arrest, imprison, torture, and execute anyone they want at any time without the system of due process—and make no mistake, that is what the PATRIOT ACT and the indefinite detention law do—means giving away everything that separates us from tyranny. Bypassing the justice system and the rule of law means bypassing everything that America stands for.

So far, these laws have actually mostly been used against people reasonably suspected of terrorism, that much is true; but it’s also irrelevant. Democracy doesn’t mean you give the government extreme power and they uphold your trust and use it benevolently. Democracy means you don’t give them that power in the first place.

If there’s really sufficient evidence to support an arrest for terrorism, get a warrant. If you don’t have enough evidence for a warrant, you don’t have enough evidence for an arrest. If there’s really sufficient evidence to justify imprisoning someone for terrorism, get a jury to convict. If you don’t have enough evidence to convince a jury, guess what? You don’t have enough evidence to imprison them. These are not negotiable. They are not “political opinions” in any ordinary sense. The protection of due process is so fundamental to democracy that without it political opinions lose all meaning.

People talk about “Big Government” when we suggest increasing taxes on capital gains or expanding Medicare. No, that isn’t Big Government. Searching without warrants is Big Government. Imprisoning people without trial is Big Government. From all the decades of crying wolf in which any policy someone doesn’t like is accused of being “tyranny”, we seem to have lost the ability to recognize actual tyranny. I hope you understand the full force of my meaning when I say that the PATRIOT ACT is literally fascist. Fascism has come to America, and as predicted it was wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

In this sort of situation, a lot of people like to quote (or misquote) Benjamin Franklin:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

With the qualifiers “essential” and “temporary”, this quote seems right; but a lot of people forget them and quote him as saying:
“Those would give up liberty to purchase safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

That’s clearly wrong. We do in fact give up liberty to purchase safety, and as well we should. We give up our liberty to purchase weapons-grade plutonium; we give up our liberty to drive at 220 mph. The question we need to be asking is: How much liberty are we giving up to gain how much safety?

Spoken like an economist, the question is not whether you will give up liberty to purchase safety—the question is at what price you’re willing to make the purchase. The price we’ve been paying in response to terrorism is far too high. Indeed, the price we are paying is tantamount to America itself.

As horrific as 9/11 was, it’s important to remember: It only killed 3,000 people.

This statement probably makes you uncomfortable; it may even offend you. How dare I say “only”?

I don’t mean to minimize the harm of those deaths. I don’t mean to minimize the suffering of people who lost friends, colleagues, parents, siblings, children. The death of any human being is the permanent destruction of something irreplaceable, a spark of life that can never be restored; it is always a tragedy and there is never any way to repay it.

But I think people are actually doing the opposite—they are ignoring or minimizing millions of other deaths because those deaths didn’t happen to be dramatic enough. A parent killed by a heart attack is just as lost as a parent who died in 9/11. A friend who died of brain cancer is just as gone as a friend who was killed in a terrorist attack. A child killed in a car accident is just as much a loss as a child killed by suicide bombers. If you really care about human suffering, I contend that you should care about all human suffering, not just the kind that makes the TV news.

Here is a list, from the CDC, of things that kill more Americans per month than terrorists have killed in the last three decades:

Heart disease: 50,900 per month

Cancer: 48,700 per month

Lung disease: 12,400 per month

Accidents: 10,800 per month

Stroke: 10,700 per month

Alzheimer’s: 7,000 per month

Diabetes: 6,300 per month

Influenza: 4,700 per month

Kidney failure: 3,900 per month

Terrorism deaths since 1985: 3,455
Yes, that’s right; influenza kills more Americans per month (on average; flu is seasonal, after all) than terrorism has killed in the last thirty years.
And for comparison, other violent deaths, not quite but almost as many per month as terrorism has killed in my entire life so far:
Suicide: 3,400 per month

Homicide: 1,300 per month

Now, with those figures in mind, I want you to ask yourself the following question: Would you be willing to give up basic, fundamental civil liberties in order to avoid any of these things?

Would you want the government to be able to arrest you and imprison you without trial for eating too many cheeseburgers, so as to reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke?

Would you want the government to monitor your phone calls and Internet traffic to make sure you don’t smoke, so as to avoid lung disease? Or to watch for signs of depression, to reduce the rate of suicide?

Would you want the government to be able to use targeted drone strikes, ordered directly by the President, pre-emptively against probable murderers (with a certain rate of collateral damage, of course), to reduce the rate of homicide?

I presume that the answer to all the above questions is “no”. Then now I have to ask you: Why are you willing to give up those same civil liberties to prevent a risk that is three hundred times smaller?

And then of course there’s the Iraq War, which killed 4,400 Americans and at least 100,000 civilians, and the Afghanistan War, which killed 3,400 allied soldiers and over 90,000 civilians.

In response to the horrific murder of 3,000 people, we sacrificed another 7,800 soldiers and killed another 190,000 innocent civilians. What exactly did that accomplish? What benefit did we get for such an enormous cost?

The people who sold us these deadly wars and draconian policies did so based on the threat that terrorism could somehow become vastly worse, involving the release of some unstoppable bioweapon or the detonation of a full-scale nuclear weapon, killing millions of people—but that has never happened, has never gotten close to happening, and would be thousands of times worse than the worst terrorist attacks that have ever actually happened.

If we’re worried about millions of people dying, it is far more likely that there would be a repeat of the 1918 influenza pandemic, or an accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon, or a flashpoint event with Russia or China triggering World War III; it’s probably more likely that there would be an asteroid impact large enough to kill a million people than there would be a terrorist attack large enough to do the same.

As it is, heart disease is already killing millions of people—about a million every two years—and we aren’t so panicked about that as to give up civil liberties. Elsewhere in the world, malnutrition kills over 3 million children per year, essentially all of it due to extreme poverty, which we could eliminate by spending between a quarter ($150 billion) and a half ($300 billion) of our current military budget ($600 billion); but we haven’t even done that even though it would require no loss of civil liberties at all.

Why is terrorism different? In short, the tribal paradigm.

There are in fact downsides to not being infinite identical psychopaths, and this is one of them. An infinite identical psychopath would simply maximize their own probability of survival; but finite diverse tribalists such as we underreact to some threats (such as heart disease) and overreact to others (such as terrorism). We’ll do almost anything to stop the latter—and almost nothing to stop the former.

Terrorists are perceived as a threat not just to our individual survival like heart disease or stroke, but a threat to our tribe from another tribe. This triggers a deep, instinctual sense of panic and hatred that makes us willing to ignore principles we would otherwise uphold and commit acts of violence we would otherwise find unimaginable.

Indeed, it’s precisely that instinct which motivates the terrorists in the first place. From their perspective, we are the other tribe that threatens their tribe, and they are therefore willing to stop at nothing until we are destroyed.

In a fundamental way, when we respond to terrorism in this way we do not defeat them—we become them.
If you ask people who support the PATRIOT ACT, it’s very clear that they don’t see themselves as imposing upon the civil liberties of Americans. Instead, they see themselves as protecting Americans (our tribe), and they think the impositions upon civil liberties will only harm those who don’t count as Americans (other tribes). This is a pretty bizarre notion if you think about it carefully—if you don’t need a warrant or probable cause to imprison people, then what stops you from imprisoning people who aren’t terrorists?—but people don’t think about it carefully. They act on emotion, on instinct.

The odds of terrorists actually destroying America by killing people are basically negligible. Even the most deadly terrorist attack in recorded history—9/11—killed fewer Americans than die every month from diabetes, or every week from heart disease. Even the most extreme attacks feared (which are extremely unlikely) wouldn’t be any worse than World War II, which of course we won.

But the odds of terrorists destroying America by making us give up the rights and freedoms that define us as a nation? That’s well underway.

Why did we ever privatize prisons?

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JDN 2457103 EDT 10:24.

Since the Reagan administration (it’s always Reagan), the United States has undergone a spree of privatization of public services, in which services that are ordinarily performed by government agencies are instead contracted out to private companies. Enormous damage to our society has been done by this sort of privatization, from healthcare to parking meters.

This process can vary in magnitude.

The weakest form, which is relatively benign, is for the government to buy specific services like food service or equipment manufacturing from companies that already provide them to consumers. There’s no particular reason for the government to make their own toothpaste or wrenches rather than buy them from corporations like Proctor & Gamble and Sears. Toothpaste is toothpaste and wrenches are wrenches.

The moderate form is for the government to contract services to specific companies that may involve government-specific features like security clearances or powerful military weapons. This is already raising a lot of problems: When Northrop-Grumman makes our stealth bombers, and Boeing builds our nuclear ICBMs, these are publicly-traded, for-profit corporations manufacturing some of the deadliest weapons ever created—weapons that could literally destroy human civilization in a matter of minutes. Markets don’t work well in the presence of externalities, and weapons by definition are almost nothing but externalities; their entire function is to cause harm—typically, death—to people without their consent. While this violence may sometimes be justified, it must never be taken lightly; and we are right to be uncomfortable with the military-industrial complex whose shareholders profit from death and destruction. (Eisenhower tried to warn us!) Still, there are some good arguments to be made for this sort of privatization, since many of these corporations already have high-tech factories and skilled engineers that they can easily repurpose, and competitive bids between different corporations can keep the price down. (Of course, with no-bid contracts that no longer applies; and it certainly hasn’t stopped us from spending nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.)

What I’d really like to focus on today is the strongest form of privatization, in which basic government services are contracted out to private companies. This is what happens when you attempt to privatize soldiers, SWAT teams, and prisons—all of which the United States has done since Reagan.

I say “attempt” to privatize because in a very real sense the privatization of these services is incoherent—they are functions so basic to government that simply to do them makes you, de facto, part of the government. (Or, if done without government orders, it would be organized crime.) All you’ve really done by “privatizing” these services is reduced their transparency and accountability, as well as siphoning off a portion of the taxpayer money in the form of profits for shareholders.

The benefits of privatization, when they exist, are due to competition and consumer freedom. The foundation of a capitalist economy is the ability to say “I’ll take my business elsewhere.” (This is why the notion that a bank can sell your loan to someone else is the opposite of a free market; forcing you to write a check to someone you never made a contract with is antithetical to everything the free market stands for.) Actually the closest thing to a successful example of privatized government services is the United States Postal Service, which collects absolutely no tax income. They do borrow from the government and receive subsidies for some of their services—but so does General Motors. Frankly I think the Postal Service has a better claim to privatization than GM, which you may recall only exists today because of a massive government bailout with a net cost to the US government of $11 billion. All the Postal Service does differently is act as a tightly-regulated monopoly that provides high-quality service to everyone at low prices and pays good wages and pensions, all without siphoning profits to shareholders. (They really screwed up my mail forwarding lately, but they are still one of the best postal systems in the world.) It is in many ways the best of both worlds, the efficiency of capitalism with the humanity of socialism.

The Corrections Corporation of America, on the other hand, is the exact opposite, the worst of both worlds, the inefficiency of socialism with the inhumanity of capitalism. It is not simply corrupt but frankly inherently corrupt—there is simply no way you can have a for-profit prison system that isn’t corrupt. Maybe it can be made less corrupt or more corrupt, but the mere fact that shareholders are earning profits from incarcerating prisoners is fundamentally antithetical to a free and just society.

I really can’t stress this enough: Privatizing soldiers and prisons makes no sense at all. It doesn’t even make sense in a world of infinite identical psychopaths; nothing in neoclassical economic theory in any way supports these privatizations. Neoclassical theory is based upon the presumption of a stable government that enforces property rights, a government that provides as much service as necessary exactly at cost and is not attempting to maximize any notion of its own “profit”.

That’s ridiculous, of course—much like the neoclassical rational agent—and more recent work has been done in public choice theory about the various interest groups that act against each other in government, including lobbyists for private corporations—but public choice theory is above all a theory of government failure. It is a theory of why governments don’t work as well as we would like them to—the main question is how we can suppress the influence of special interest groups to advance the public good. Privatization of prisons means creating special interest groups where none existed, making the government less directed at the public good.

Privatizing government services is often described as “reducing the size of government”, usually interpreted in the most narrow sense to mean the tax burden. But Big Government doesn’t mean you pay 22% of GDP instead of 18% of GDP; Big Government means you can be arrested and imprisoned without trial. Even using the Heritage Foundation’s metrics, the correlation between tax burden and overall freedom is positive. Tyrannical societies don’t bother with taxes; they own the oil refineries directly (Venezuela), or print money whenever they want (Zimbabwe), or build the whole society around doing what they want (North Korea).

The incarceration rate is a much better measure of a society’s freedom than the tax rate will ever be—and the US isn’t doing so well in that regard; indeed we have by some measures the highest incarceration rate in the world. Fortunately we do considerably better when it comes to things like free speech and freedom of religion—indeed we are still above average in overall freedom. Though we do imprison more of our people than China, I’m not suggesting that China has a freer society. But why do we imprison so many people?

Well, it seems to have something to do with privatization of prisons. Indeed, there is a strong correlation between the privatization of US prisons and the enormous explosion of incarceration in the United States. In fact privatized prisons don’t even reduce the tax burden, because privatization does not decrease demand and “privatized” prisons must still be funded by taxes. Prisons do not have customers who choose between different competing companies and shop for the highest quality and lowest price—prisoners go to the prison they are assigned to and they can’t leave (which is really the whole point). Even competition at the purchase end doesn’t make much sense, since the government can’t easily transfer all the prisoners to a new company. Maybe they could transfer ownership of the prison to a different company, but even then the transition costs would be substantial, and besides, there are only a handful of prison corporations that corner most of the (so-called) market.

There is simply no economic basis for privatization of prisons. Nothing in either neoclassical theory or more modern cognitive science in any way supports the idea. So the real question is: Why did we ever privatize prisons?

Basically there is only one reason: Ideology. The post-Reagan privatization spree was not actually based on economics—it was based on economic ideology. Either because they actually believed it, or by the Upton Sinclair Principle, a large number of economists adopted a radical far-right ideology that government basically should not exist—that the more we give more power to corporations and less power to elected officials the better off we will be.

They defended this ideology on vaguely neoclassical grounds, mumbling something about markets being more efficient; but this isn’t even like cutting off the wings of the airplane because we’re assuming frictionless vacuum—it’s like cutting off the engines of the airplane because we simply hate engines and are looking for any excuse to get rid of them. There is absolutely nothing in neoclassical economic theory that says it would be efficient or really beneficial in any way to privatize prisons. It was all about taking power away from the elected government and handing it over to for-profit corporations.

This is a bit of consciousness-raising I’m trying to do: Any time you hear someone say that something should be apolitical, I want you to substitute the word undemocratic. When they say that judges shouldn’t be elected so that they can be apolitical—they mean undemocratic. When they say that the Federal Reserve should be independent of politics—they mean independent of voting. They want to take decision power away from the public at large and concentrate it more in the hands of an elite. People who say this sort of thing literally do not believe in democracy.

To be fair, there may actually be good reasons to not believe in democracy, or at least to believe that democracy should be constrained by a constitution and a system of representation. Certain rights are inalienable, regardless of what the voting public may say, which is why we need a constitution that protects those rights above all else. (In theory… there’s always the PATRIOT ACT, speaking of imprisoning people without trial.) Moreover, most people are simply not interested enough—or informed enough—to vote on every single important decision the government makes. It makes sense for us to place this daily decision-making power in the hands of an elite—but it must be an elite we choose.

And yes, people often vote irrationally. One of the central problems in the United States today is that almost half the population consistently votes against rational government and their own self-interest on the basis of a misguided obsession with banning abortion, combined with a totally nonsensical folk theory of economics in which poor people are poor because they are lazy, the government inherently destroys whatever wealth it touches, and private-sector “job creators” simply hand out jobs to other people because they have extra money lying around. Then of course there’s—let’s face it—deep-seated bigotry toward women, racial minorities, and LGBT people. (The extreme hatred toward Obama and suspicion that he isn’t really born in the US really can’t be explained any other way.) In such circumstances it may be tempting to say that we should give up on democracy and let expert technocrats take charge; but in the absence of democratic safeguards, technocracy is little more than another name for oligarchy. Maybe it’s enough that the President appoints the Federal Reserve chair and the Supreme Court? I’m not so sure. Ben Bernanke definitely handled the Second Depression better than Congress did, I’ll admit; but I’m not sure Alan Greenspan would have in his place, and given his babbling lately about returning to Bretton Woods I’m pretty sure Paul Volcker wouldn’t have. (If you don’t see what’s wrong with going back to Bretton Woods, which was basically a variant of the gold standard, you should read what Krugman has to say about the gold standard.) So basically we got lucky and our monetary quasi-tyrant was relatively benevolent and wise. (Or maybe Bernanke was better because Obama appointed him, while Reagan appointed Greenspan. Carter appointed Volcker, oddly enough; but Reagan reappointed him. It’s always Reagan.) And if you could indeed ensure that tyrants would always be benevolent and wise, tyranny would be a great system—but you can’t.

Democracy doesn’t always lead to the best outcomes, but that’s really not what it’s for. Rather, democracy is for preventing the worst outcomes—no large-scale famine has ever occurred under a mature democracy, nor has any full-scale genocide. Democracies do sometimes forcibly “relocate” populations (particularly indigenous populations, as the US did under Andrew Jackson), and we should not sugar-coat that; people are forced out of their homes and many die. It could even be considered something close to genocide. But no direct and explicit mass murder of millions has ever occurred under a democratic government—no, the Nazis were not democratically elected—and that by itself is a fully sufficient argument for democracy. It could be true that democracies are economically inefficient (they are economically efficient), unbearably corrupt (they are less corrupt), and full of ignorant idiotic hicks (they have higher average educational attainment), and democracy would still be better simply because it prevents famine and genocide. As Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst system, except for all the others.”

Indeed, I think the central reason why American democracy isn’t working well right now is that it’s not very democratic; a two-party system with a plurality “first-past-the-post” vote is literally the worst possible voting system that can still technically be considered democracy. Any worse than that and you only have one party. If we had a range voting system (which is mathematically optimal) and say a dozen parties (they have about a dozen parties in France), people would be able to express their opinions more clearly and in more detail, with less incentive for strategic voting. We probably wouldn’t have such awful turnout at that point, and after realizing that they actually had such a strong voice, maybe people would even start educating themselves about politics in order to make better decisions.

Privatizing prisons and soldiers takes us in exactly the opposite direction: It makes our government deeply less democratic, fundamentally less accountable to voters. It hands off the power of life and death to institutions whose sole purpose for existence is their own monetary gain. We should never have done it—and we must undo it as soon as we possibly can.