Republican

Hope for the new year

PNRJ current events, personal, politics , , , , , ,

Jan 4 JDN 2461045

We have just entered 2026. I remember that around this time last year I felt a deep, visceral despair: Trump had just been elected and was about to be inaugurated, and I could only dread what the next year would bring. For the next several weeks I posted sections of my book The Logic of Kindness (at this point, it is probably never actually going to be published?), partly because I felt—and still feel—that these ideas do deserve to be out in the world, but also partly because I had no creative energy to write anything else.

Well, the first year of Trump’s second term was just about as bad as we thought it would be. He has torn apart global institutions that took decades to forge; he has caused thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths; he has alienated our closest allies—seriously, CANADA!?—and cozied up to corrupt, authoritarian dictators around the world, because that is exactly what he aspires to be.

It’s true, he hasn’t collapsed the economy (yet). Inflation has been about as bad as it was before, despite the ludicrous tariffs. (He promised to bring prices down, but we all knew he wouldn’t. I honestly expected them to go up more than this.) He also hasn’t started any wars, though he looks damn close to it in Venezuela. And as he continues to make a mockery of our whole government, the checks and balances that are supposed to be reining him have languished unused, because the Republicans control all three branches.

Trump is still in office, and poised to be for three more years.

Yet, at last, there is some glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Other Republicans are starting to turn against him, in part because of his obvious and undeniable connections to Jeffrey Epstein and his ring of serial rapists. (Let’s be clear about that, by the way: They’re not just pedophiles. “Pedophile” merely means you are sexually attracted to children. Some pedophiles seek treatment. These men were rapists who sexually assaulted actual teenagers. And at this point it strains credulity to imagine that Donald Trump himself wasn’t an active participant on multiple occasions—no amount of incompetent redactions will change that.)

Trump’s net approval is now negative on almost every major issue, especially on inflation. It is now a statistical certainty that more Americans disapprove of him than approve of him.

Both of these things should have happened more than a year ago, if not a decade ago; but hey, better late than never.

Democrats—even very left-wing democrats, like Mamdani—have done very well in elections lately, and seem poised to continue doing well in the 2026 midterm election. If we can actually secure a majority in both houses of Congress, we might finally be able to start undoing some of the damage Trump has done—or at least stop him from doing even more.

I’m sure there will be plenty of bad things that continue to happen this year, and that many of them will be Donald Trump’s fault. But I no longer feel the deep despair I felt last year; it seems like things might finally be turning around for America—and thus for the world.

You call this a hobby?

PNRJ book reviews, critique of neoclassical economics, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nov 9 JDN 2460989

A review of Politics is for Power by Eitan Hersch

This week, there was an election. It’s a minor midterm election—since it’s an odd-numbered year, many places don’t even have any candidates on the ballot—and as a result, turnout will surely be low. Eitan Hersch has written a book about why that’s a bad thing, and how it is symptomatic of greater problems in our civic culture as a whole.

Buried somewhere in this book, possible to find through committed, concerted effort, there is a book that could have had a large positive effect on our political system, our civic discourse, and our society as a whole. Sadly, Dr. Hersch buried it so well that most people will never find it.

In particular, he starts the book—not even on the first page, but on the cover—by actively alienating his core audience with what seems to be the very utmost effort he can muster.


Yes, even the subtitle is condescending and alienating:

How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change

And of course it’s not just there; on page after page he drives the dagger deeper and twists it as hard as he can, repeating the accusation over and over:

This is just a hobby for you. It doesn’t really mean anything.

Today’s hobbyists possess the negative qualities of the amateurs—hyperemotional engagement, obsession with national politics, an insatiable appetite for debate—and none of the amateur’s positive qualities—the neighborhood meetings, the concrete goals, the leadership.

– p.9

You hear that? You’re worse than an amateur. This is on page 9. Page 9.

[…] Much of the time we spend on politics is best described as an inward-focused leisure activity for people who like politics.

We may not easily concede that we are doing politics for fun.[…]

-p. 14

See? You may say it’s not really just for fun, but you’re lying. You’re failing to concede the truth.

To the political hobbyist, news is a form of entertainment and needs to be fun.

-p.19

You hear me? This is fun for you. You’re enjoying this. You’re doing it for yourself.

The real explanation for the dynamics of voter turnout is that we treat politics like a game and follow the spectacle. Turnout is high in presidential elections compared to other US elections in the same way that football viewership is high when the Super Bowl is on. Many people who do not like football or even know the rules of the game end up at a Super Bowl party. They’re there for the commercials, the guacamole, and to be part of a cultural moment. That’s why turnout is high in presidential elections. Without the spectacle, even people who say they care about voting don’t show up.

-p. 48

This is all a game. It’s not real. You don’t really care.

I could go on; he keeps repeating this message—this insult, this accusation—throughout the book. He tells you, over and over, that if you are not already participating in politics in the very particular way he wants you to (and he may even be right that it would be better!), you are a selfish liar, and you are treating what should be vitally important as just meaningless entertainment.

This made it honestly quite painful to get through the book. Several times, I was tempted to just give up and put it back on the shelf. But I’m glad I didn’t, because there are valuable insights about effective grassroots political activism buried within this barrage of personal accusations.

I guess Hersch must not see this as a personal accusation; at one point, he acknowledges that people might find it insulting, but (1) doesn’t seem to care and (2) makes no effort to inquire as to why we might feel that way; in fact, he manages to twist the knife just a little deeper in that very same passage:

For the non-self-identifying junkies, the term political hobbyist can be insulting. Given how important politics is, it doesn’t feel good to call one’s political activity a hobby. The term is also insulting, I have learned, to real hobbyists, who see hobbies as activities with much more depth than the online bickering or addictive news consumption I’m calling a hobby.

-p. 88

You think calling it a “hobby” is insulting? Yeah, well, it’s worse than that, so ha!

But let me tell you something about my own experience of politics. (Actually, one of Hersch’s central messages is that sharing personal experiences is one of the most powerful political tools I know.)

How do most people I know feel about politics, since, oh, say… November 2016?

ABSOLUTE HORROR AND DESPAIR.

For every queer person I know, every trans person, every immigrant, every woman, every person of color, and for plenty of White cishet liberal guys too, the election of President Donald Trump was traumatic. It felt like a physical injury. People who had recovered from depression were thrust back into it. People felt physically nauseated. And especially for immigrants and trans people, people literally feared for their lives and were right to do so.

WHATEVER THIS IS, IT IS NOT A HOBBY.

I’ve had to talk people down from psychotic episodes and suicidal ideation because of this, and you have the fucking audacity to tell me that we’re doing this for fun!?

If someone feared for their life because their team lost the Super Bowl, we would rightfully recognize that as an utterly pathological response. But I know a whole bunch of folks on student visas that are constantly afraid of being kidnapped and taken away by masked men with guns, because that is a thing that has actually happened to other people who were in this country on student visas. I know a whole bunch of trans folks who are afraid of assaulted or even killed for using the wrong bathroom, because that is a thing that actually happens to trans people in this country.

I wish I could tell these people—many of them dear friends of mine—that they are wrong to fear, that they are safe, that everything will be all right. But as long as Donald Trump is in power and the Republicans in Congress and the right-wing Supreme Court continue to enable him, I can’t tell them that, because I would be lying; the danger is real. All I can do is tell them that it is probably not as great a danger as they fear, and that if there is any way I can help them, I am willing to do so.

Indeed, politics for me and those closest to me is so obviously so much not a hobby that repeatedly insisting that I admit that it is starts to feel like gaslighting. I feel like I’m in a struggle session or something: “Admit you are a hobbyist! Repent!”

I don’t know; maybe there are people for whom politics is just a hobby. Maybe the privileged cishet White kids at Tufts that Dr. Hersch lectures to are genuinely so removed from the consequences of public policy that they can engage with politics at their leisure and for their own entertainment. (A lot of the studies he cites are specifically about undergrads; I know this is a thing in pretty much all social science… but maybe undergrads are in fact not a very representative sample of political behavior?) But even so, some of the international students in those lecture halls (11% of Tufts undergrads and 17% of Tufts grads) probably feel pretty differently, I have to imagine.

In fact, maybe genuine political hobbyism is a widespread phenomenon, and its existence explains a lot of otherwise really baffling things about the behavior of our electorate (like how the same districts could vote for both Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). I don’t find that especially plausible given my own experience, but I’m an economist, not a political scientist, so I do feel like I should offer some deference to the experts on this matter. (And I’m well aware that my own social network is nothing like a representative sample of the American electorate.)

But I can say this for sure:

The target audience of this book is not doing this as a hobby.

Someone who picks up a book by a political scientist hoping for guidance as to how to make their own political engagement more effective is not someone who thinks this is all a game. They are not someone who is engaging with politics as a fun leisure activity. They are someone who cares. They are someone who thinks this stuff matters.

By construction, the person who reads this book to learn about how to make change wants to make change.

So maybe you should acknowledge that at some point in your 200 pages of text? Maybe after spending all these words talking about how having empathy is such an important trait in political activism, you should have some empathy for your audience?

Hersch does have some useful advice to give, buried in all this.

His core message is basically that we need more grassroots activism: Small groups of committed people, acting in their communities. Not regular canvassing, which he acknowledges as terrible (and as well he should; I’ve done it, and it is), but deep canvassing, which also involves going door to door but is really a fundamentally different process.

Actually, he seems to love grassroots organizing so much that he’s weirdly nostalgic for the old days of party bosses. Several times, he acknowledges that these party bosses were corrupt, racist, and utterly unaccountable, but after every such acknowledgment he always follows it up with some variation on “but at least they got things done”.

He’s honestly weirdly dismissive of other forms of engagement, though. Like, I expected him to be dismissive of “slacktivism” (though I am not), if for no other reason than the usual generational curmudgeonry. But he’s also weirdly dismissive of donations and even… honestly… voting? He doesn’t even seem interested in encouraging people to vote more. He doesn’t seem to think that get-out-the-vote campaigns are valuable.

I guess as a political scientist, he’s probably very familiar with the phenomenon of “low information voters”, who frequently swing elections despite being either clueless or actively misled. And okay, maybe turning out those people isn’t all that useful, at least if it’s not coupled with also educating them and correcting their misconceptions. But surely it’s not hobbyism to vote? Surely doing the one most important thing in a democratic system isn’t treating this like a game?

In his section on donations, he takes two tacks against them:

The first is to say that rich donors who pay $10,000 a plate for fancy dinners really just want access to politicians for photo ops. I don’t think that’s right, but the truth is admittedly not much better: I think they want access to politicians to buy influence. This is “political engagement” in some sense—you’re acting to exert power—but it’s corrupt, and it’s the source of an enormous amount of damage to our society—indeed to our planet itself. But I think Hersch has to deny that the goal is influence, because that would in fact be “politics for power”, and in order to remain fiercely non-partisan throughout (which, honestly, probably is a good strategic move), he carefully avoids ever saying that anyone exerting political power is bad.

Actually the closest he gets to admitting his own political beliefs (surprise, the Massachusetts social science professor is a center-left liberal!) comes in a passage where he bemoans the fact that… uh… Democrats… aren’t… corrupt enough? If you don’t believe me, read it for yourself:

The hobbyist motivation among wealthy donors is also problematic for a reason that doesn’t have a parallel in the nonprofit world: Partisan asymmetry. Unlike Democratic donors, Republican donors typically support politicians whose policy priorities align with a wealthy person’s financial interests. The donors can view donations as an investment. When Schaffner and I asked max-out donors why they made their contribution, many more Republicans than Democrats said that a very or extremely important reason for their gift was that the politician could affect the donor’s own industry (37 percent of Republicans versus 22 percent of Democrats).

This asymmetry puts Democrats at a disadvantage. Not motivated by their own bottom line, Democratic donors instead have to be motivated by ideology, issues, or even by the entertainment value that a donation provides.

-p.80

Yes, God forbid they be motivated by issues or ideology. That would involve caring about other people. Clearly only naked self-interest and the profit motive could ever be a good reason for political engagement! (Quick question: You haven’t been, uh, reading a lot of… neoclassical economists lately, have you? Why? Oh, no reason.) Oh why can’t Democrats just be more like Republicans, and use their appallingly vast hoards of money to make sure that we cut social services and deregulate everything until the polluted oceans flood the world!?

The second is to say that the much broader population who makes small donations of $25 or $50 is “ideologically extreme” compared to the rest of the population, which is true, but seems to me utterly unsurprising. The further the world is from how you’d like to see it, the greater the value is to you of changing the world, and therefore the more you should be willing to invest into making that change—or even into a small probability of possibly making that change. If you think things are basically okay, why would you pay money to try to make them different? (I guess maybe you’d try to pay money to keep them the same? But even so-called “conservatives” never actually seem to campaign on that.)

I also don’t really see “ideologically extreme” as inherently a bad thing.

Sure, some extremists are very bad: Nazis are extreme and bad (weird that this seems controversial these days), Islamists are extreme and bad, Christian nationalists are extreme and bad, tankie leftists are extreme and bad.

But vegetarians—especially vegans—are also “ideologically extreme”, but quite frankly we are objectively correct, and maybe don’t even go far enough (I only hope that future generations will forgive me for my cheese). Everyone knows that animals can suffer, and everyone who is at all informed knows that factory farms make them suffer severely. The “moderate” view that all this horrible suffering is justifiable in the name of cheap ground beef and chicken nuggets is a fundamentally immoral one. (Maybe I could countenance a view that free-range humane meat farming is acceptable, but even that is far removed from our current political center.)

Trans activism is in some sense “ideologically extreme”—and frequently characterized as such—but it basically amounts to saying that the human rights of free expression, bodily autonomy, and even just personal safety outweigh other people’s narrow, blinkered beliefs about sex and gender. Okay, maybe we can make some sort of compromise on trans kids in sports (because why should I care about sports?), and I’m okay with gender-neutral bathrooms instead of letting trans women in women’s rooms (because gender-neutral bathrooms give more privacy and safety anyway!), and the evidence on the effects of puberty blockers and hormones is complicated (which is why it should be decided by doctors and scientists, not by legislators!), but in our current state, trans people die to murder and suicide at incredibly alarming rates. The only “moderate” position here is to demand, at minimum, enforced laws against discrimination and hate crimes. (Also, calling someone by the name and pronouns they ask you to costs you basically nothing. Failing to do that is not a brave ideological stand; it’s just you being rude and obnoxious. Indeed, since it can trigger dysphoria, it’s basically like finding out someone’s an arachnophobe and immediately putting a spider in their hair.)

Open borders is regarded as so “ideologically extreme” that even the progressive Democrats won’t touch it, despite the fact that I literally am not aware of a single ethical philosopher in the 21st century who believes that our current system of immigration control is morally justifiable. Even the ones who favor “closed borders” in principle are almost unanimous that our current system is cruel and racist. The Lifeboat Theory is ridiculous; allowing immigrants in wouldn’t kill us, it would just maybe—maybe—make us a little worse off. Their lives may be at stake, but ours are not. We are not keeping people out of a lifeboat so it doesn’t sink; we are keeping them out of a luxury cruise liner so it doesn’t get dirty and crowded.

Indeed, even so-called “eco-terrorists”, who are not just ideologically extreme but behaviorally extreme as well, don’t even really seem that bad. They are really mostly eco-vandals; they destroy property, they don’t kill people. There is some risk to life and limb involved in tree spiking or blowing up a pipeline, but the goal is clearly not to terrorize people; it’s to get them to stop doing a particular thing—a particular thing that they in fact probably should stop doing. I guess I understand why this behavior has to be illegal and punished as such; but morally, I’m not even sure it’s wrong. We may not be able to name or even precisely count the children saved who would have died if that pipeline had been allowed to continue pumping oil and thus spewing carbon emissions, but that doesn’t make them any less real.

So really, if anything, the problem is not “extremism” in some abstract sense, but particular beliefs and ideologies, some of which are not even regarded as extreme. A stronger vegan lobby would not be harmful to America, however “extreme” they might be, and a strong Republican lobby, however “mainstream” it is perceived to be, is rapidly destroying our nation on a number of different levels.

Indeed, in parts of the book, it almost seems like Hersch is advocating in some Nietzschean sense for power for its own sake. I don’t think that’s really his intention; I think he means to empower the currently disempowered, for the betterment of society as a whole. But his unwillingness to condemn rich Republicans who donate the maximum allowed in order to get their own industry deregulated is at least… problematic, as both political activists and social scientists are wont to say.

I’m honestly not even sure that empowering the disempowered is what we need right now. I think a lot of the disempowered are also terribly misinformed, and empowering them might actually make things worse. In fact, I think the problem with the political effect of social media isn’t that it has failed to represent the choices of the electorate, but that it has represented them all too well and most people are really, really bad—just, absolutely, shockingly, appallingly bad—at making good political choices. They have wildly wrong beliefs about really basic policy questions, and often think that politicians’ platforms are completely different from what they actually are. I don’t go quite as far as this article by Dan Williams in Conspicuous Cognition, but it makes some really good points I can’t ignore. Democracy is currently failing to represent the interests of a great many Americans, but a disturbingly large proportion of this failure must be blamed on a certain—all too large—segment of the American populace itself.

I wish this book had been better.

More grassroots organizing does seem like a good thing! And there is some advice in this book about how to do it better—though in my opinion, not nearly enough. A lot of what Hersch wants to see happen would require tremendous coordination between huge numbers of people, which almost seems like saying “politics would be better if enough people were better about politics”. What I wanted to hear more about was what I can do; if voting and donating and protesting and blogging isn’t enough, what should I be doing? How do I make it actually work? It feels like Hersch spent so long trying to berate me for being a “hobbyist” that he forgot to tell me what he actually thinks I should be doing.

I am fully prepared to believe that online petitions and social media posts don’t accomplish much politically. (Indeed, I am fully prepared to believe that blogging doesn’t accomplish much politically.) I am open to hearing what other options are available, and eager for guidance about how to have the most effective impact.

But could you please, please not spend half the conversation repeatedly accusing me of not caring!?

Toward a positive vision of the future

PNRJ current events, ethics, inequality, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 22 JDN 2460849

Things look pretty bleak right now. Wildfires rage across Canada, polluting the air across North America. Russia is still at war with Ukraine, and Israel seems to be trying to start a war with Iran. ICE continues sending agents without badges to kidnap people in unmarked vehicles and sending them to undisclosed locations. Climate change is getting worse, and US policy is pivoting from subsidizing renewables back to subsidizing fossil fuels. And Trump, now revealed to be a literal fascist, is still President.

But things can get better.

I can’t guarantee that they will, nor can I say when; but there is still hope that a better future is possible.

It has been very difficult to assemble a strong coalition against the increasingly extreme far-right in this country (epitomized by Trump). This seems odd, when most Americans hold relatively centrist views. Yes, more Americans identify as conservative than as liberal, but Trump isn’t a conservative; he’s a radical far-right fascist. Trump recently gave a speech endorsing ethnic cleansing, for goodness’ sake! I’m liberal, but I’d definitely vote for a conservative like Mitt Romney rather than a Stalinist! So why are “conservatives” voting for a fascist?

But setting aside the question of why people voted for Trump, we still have the question of why the left has not been able to assemble a strong coalition against him.

I think part of the problem is that the left really has two coalitions within it: The center left, who were relatively happy with the status quo before Trump and want to go back to that; and the far left, who were utterly unhappy with that status quo and want radical change. So while we all agree that Trump is awful, we don’t really agree on what he’s supposed to be replaced with.

It’s of course possible to be in between, and indeed I would say that I am. While clearly things were better under Obama and Biden than they have been under Trump, there were still a lot of major problems in this country that should have been priorities for national policy but weren’t:

  1. Above all, climate change—the Democrats at least try to do something against it, but not nearly enough. Our carbon emissions are declining, but it’s very unclear if we’ll actually hit our targets. The way we have been going, we’re in for a lot more hurricanes and wildfires and droughts.
  2. Housing affordability is still an absolute crisis; half of renters spend more than the targeted 30% of their income on housing, and a fourth spend more than 50%.Homelessness is now at a record high.
  3. Healthcare is still far too expensive in this country; we continue to spend far more than other First World countries without getting meaningfully better care.
  4. While rights and protections for LGB people have substantially improved in the last 30 years, rights and protections for trans people continue to lag behind.
  5. Racial segregation in housing remains the de facto norm, even though it is de jure illegal.
  6. Livestock remain exempted from the Animal Welfare Act and in 2002 laboratory rats and mice were excluded as well, meaning that cruel or negligent treatment which would be illegal for cats and dogs is still allowed on livestock and lab rats.
  7. Income and wealth inequality in this country remains staggeringly high, and the super-rich continue to gain wealth at a terrifying rate.
  8. Our voting system is terrible—literally the worst possible system that can technically still be considered democracy.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but these are the issues that seem most salient to me.

2 and 3 both clearly showed up in my Index of Necessary Expenditure; these costs were the primary reason why raising a family of 4 was unaffordable on a median household income.

So it isn’t right to say that I was completely happy with how things were going before. But I still think of myself as center left, because I don’t believe we need to tear everything down and start over.

I have relatively simple recommendations that would go a long way toward solving all 8 of these problems:

Climate change could be greatly mitigated if we’d just tax carbon already, or implement a cap-and-trade system like California’s nationwide. If that’s too politically unpalatable, subsidize nuclear power, fusion research, and renewables instead. That’s way worse from a budget perspective, but for some reason Americans are just fanatically opposed to higher gas prices.

Housing affordability is politically thorny, but economically quite simple: Build more housing. Whatever we have to do to make that happen, we should do it. Maybe this involves changes to zoning or other regulations. Maybe it involves subsidies to developers. Maybe it involves deploying eminent domain to build public housing. Maybe it involves using government funds to build housing and then offering it for sale on the market. But whatever we do, we need more housing.

Healthcare costs are a trickier one; Obamacare helped, but wasn’t enough. I think what I would like to see next is an option to buy into Medicare; before you are old enough to get it for free, you can pay a premium to be covered by it. Because Medicare is much more efficient than private insurance, you could pay a lower premium and get better coverage, so a lot of people would likely switch (which is of course exactly why insurance companies would fight the policy at every turn). Even putting everyone on Medicare might not be enough; to really bring costs down, we may need to seriously address the fact that US doctors, particularly specialists, are just radically higher-paid than any other doctors in the world. Is an American doctor who gets $269,000 per year really 88% better than a French doctor who gets $143,000?

The policies we need for LGBT rights are mostly no-brainers.

Okay, I can admit to some reasonable nuance when it comes to trans women in pro sports (the statistical advantages they have over cis women are not as clear-cut as many people think, but they do seem to exist; average athletic performance for trans women seems to be somewhere in between the average for cis men and the average for cis women), but that’s really not a very important issue. Like, seriously, why do we care so much about pro sports? Either let people play sports according to their self-identified gender, or make the two options “cis women” and “other” and let trans people play the latter. And you can do the same thing with school sports, or you can eliminate them entirely because they are a stupid waste of academic resources; but either way this should not be considered a top priority policy question. (If parents want their kids to play sports, they can form their own leagues; the school shouldn’t be paying for it. Winning games is not one of the goals of an academic institution. If you want kids to get more exercise, give them more recess and reform the physical education system so it isn’t so miserable for the kids who need it most.)

But there is absolutely no reason not to let people use whatever pronouns and bathrooms they want; indeed, there doesn’t really seem to be a compelling reason to gender-segregate bathrooms in the first place, and removing that segregation would most benefit women, who often have to wait much longer in line for the bathroom. (The argument that this somehow protects women never made sense to me; if a man wants to assault women in the bathroom, what’s to stop him from just going into the women’s bathroom? It’s not like there’s a magic field that prevents men from entering. He’s already planning on committing a crime, so it doesn’t seem like he’s very liable to held back by social norms. It’s worthwhile to try to find ways to prevent sexual assault, but segregating bathrooms does little or nothing toward that goal—and indeed, trans-inclusive bathrooms do not statistically correlate with higher rates of sexual assault.) But okay, fine, if you insist on having the segregation, at least require gender-neutral bathrooms as well. This is really not that difficult; it’s pretty clearly bigotry driving this, not serious policy concerns.

Not exempting any vertebrate animals from anti-cruelty legislation is an incredibly simple thing to do, obviously morally better, and the only reason we’re not doing it is that it would hurt agribusinesses and make meat more expensive. There is literally zero question what the morally right thing to do here is; the question is only how to get people to actually do that morally right thing.

Finally, how do we fix income inequality? Some people—including some economists—treat this as a very complicated, difficult question, but I don’t think it is. I think the really simple, obvious answer is actually the correct one: Tax rich people more, and use the proceeds to help poor people. We should be taxing the rich a lot more; I want something like the revenue-maximizing rate, estimated at about 70%. (And an even higher rate like the 90% we had in the 1950s is not out of the question.) These funds could either provide services like education and healthcare, or they could simply be direct cash transfers. But one way or another, the simplest, most effective way to reduce inequality is to tax the rich and help the poor. A lot of economists fear that this would hurt the overall economy, but particularly if these rates are really targeted at the super-rich (the top 0.01%), I don’t see how they could, because all those billions of dollars are very clearly monopoly rents rather than genuine productivity. If anything, making it harder to amass monopoly rents should make the economy more efficient. And taking say 90% of the roughly 10% return just the top 400 billionaires make on their staggering wealth would give us an additional $480 billion per year.

Fixing our voting system is also quite straightforward. Ranked-choice voting would be a huge improvement, and has already been implemented successfully in several states. Even better would be range voting, but so far very few places have been bold enough to actually try it. But even ranked-choice voting would remove most of the terrible incentives that plurality voting creates, and likely allow us to move beyond the two-party system into a much more representative multiparty system.

None of this requires overthrowing the entire system or dismantling capitalism.

That is, we can have a positive vision of the future that doesn’t require revolution or radical change.

Unfortunately, there’s still a very good chance we’ll do none of it.

The CBO report on Trump’s terrible new budget

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

Jun 8 JDN 2460835

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. We’re back to talking about economics, which in our current environment pretty much always means bad news. The budget the House passed is pretty much the same terrible one Trump proposed.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), one of those bureaucratic agencies that most people barely even realize exists, but is actually extremely useful, spectacularly competent, and indeed one of the most important and efficient agencies in the world, has released its official report on the Trump budget that recently passed the House. (Other such agencies include the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. US economic statistics are among the best in the world—some refer to them as the “gold standard”, but I refuse to insult them in that way.)

The whole thing is pretty long, but you can get a lot of the highlights from the summary tables.

The tables are broken down by the House committee responsible for choosing them; here are the effects on the federal budget deficit the CBO predicts for the next 5 and 10 years. For these numbers, positive means more deficit (bad), negative means less deficit (good).

Commitee5 years10 years
Agriculture-88,304-238,238
Armed Services124,602143,992
Education and Workforce-253,295-349,142
Energy and Commerce-247,074-995,062
Financial Services-373-5,155
Homeland Security27,87467,147
Judiciary26,9896,910
Natural Resources-4,789-20,158
Oversight and Government Reform-17,449-50,951
Transportation and Infrastructure-361-36,551
Ways and Means2,199,4033,767,402

These are in units of millions of dollars.

Almost all the revenue comes from the Ways and Means committee, because that’s the committee that sets tax rates. (If you hate your taxes, don’t hate the IRS; hate the Ways and Means Committee.) So for all the other departments, we can basically take the effect on the deficit as how much spending was changing.

If this budget makes it through the Senate, Trump will almost certainly sign it into law. If that happens:

We’ll be cutting $238 billion from Agriculture Committee programs: And most of where those cuts come from are programs that provide food for poor people.

We’ll be adding $144 billion to the military budget, and a further $67 billion to “homeland security” (which here mostly means CBP and ICE). Honestly, I was expecting more, so I’m vaguely relieved.

We’ll be cutting $349 billion from Education and Workforce programs; this is mostly coming from the student loan system, so we can expect much more brutal repayment requirements for people with student loans.

We’ll be cutting almost $1 trillion from Energy and Commerce programs; this is mainly driven by massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid (why are they handled by this committee? I don’t know).
The bill itself doesn’t clearly specify, so the CBO issued another report offering some scenarios for how these budget cuts could be achieved. Every single scenario results in millions of people losing coverage, and the one that saves the most money would result in 5.5 million people losing some coverage and 2.4 million becoming completely uninsured.

The $20 billion from Natural Resources mostly involves rolling back environmental regulations, cutting renewable energy subsidies, and making it easier to lease federal lands for oil and gas drilling. All of these are bad, and none of them are surprising; but their effect on the budget is pretty small.

The Oversight and Government Reform portion is reducing the budget deficit by $51 billion mainly by forcing federal employees to contribute a larger share of their pensions—which is to say, basically cutting federal salaries across the board. While this has a small effect on the budget, it will impose substantial harm on the federal workforce (which has already been gutted by DOGE).

The Transportation and Infrastructure changes involve expansions of the Coast Guard (why are they not in Armed Services again?) along with across-the-board cuts of anything resembling support for sustainability or renewable energy; but the main way they actually decrease the deficit is by increasing the cost of registering cars. I think they’re trying to look like they are saving money by cutting “wasteful” (read: left-wing) programs, but in fact they mainly just made it more expensive to own a car—which, quite frankly, is probably a good thing from an environmental perspective.

Then, last but certainly not least, we come to the staggering $3.7 trillion increase in our 10-year deficit from the Ways and Means committee. What is this change that is more than 3 times as expensive as all the savings from the other departments combined?

Cutting taxes on rich people.

They are throwing some bones to the rest of the population, such as removing the taxes on tips and overtime (temporarily), and making a bunch of other changes to the tax code in terms of deductions and credits and such (because that’s what we needed, a more complicated tax code!); but the majority of the decrease in revenue comes from cutting income taxes, especially at the very highest brackets.

The University of Pennsylvania estimates that the poorest 40% of the population will actually see their after-tax incomes decrease as a result of the bill. Those in the 40% to 80% percentiles will see very little change. Only those in the richest 20% will see meaningful increases in income, and those will be highest for the top 5% and above.

The 95-99% percentile will see the greatest proportional gain, 3.5% of their income.

But the top 0.1% will see by far the greatest absolute gain, each gaining an average of $385,000 per year. Every one of these people already has an annual income of at least $4 million.

The median price of a house in the United States is $416,000.

That is, we are basically handing a free house to every millionaire in America—every year for the next 10 years.

That is why we’re adding $3.7 trillion to the national debt. So that the top 0.1% can have free houses.

Without these tax cuts, the new budget would actually reduce the deficit—which is really something we ought to be doing, because we’re running a deficit of $1.8 trillion per year and we’re not even in a recession. But because Republicans love nothing more than cutting taxes on the rich—indeed, sometimes it seems it is literally the only thing they care about—we’re going to make the deficit even bigger instead.

I can hope this won’t make it through the Senate, but I’m not holding my breath.

The Republicans passed a terrible budget

PNRJ current events, inequality, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

May 4 JDN 2460800

On April 10, the US House of Representatives passed a truly terrible budget bill. It passed on an almost entirely partisan vote—214 Democrats against, 216 Republicans for, 2 Republicans against. So I think it’s quite fair to say that the Republicans passed this budget—not a single Democrat voted for it, and only 2 Republicans voted against it.

So what’s so bad about it?

Well, first of all, in order to avoid showing just how much it will balloon the national debt, the new budget operates on different accounting rules than normal, using what’s called “current policy baseline” instead of the standard method of assuming that policies will end after 10 years.

In addition to retaining $3.8 trillion in tax cuts that were supposed to expire, this budget will cut taxes by $1.5 trillion over 10 years, with the vast majority of those cuts going to the top 1%—thus the real increase in the deficit is a staggering $5.3 trillion over 10 years. This is absolutely not what we need, given that unemployment is actually pretty good right now and we still have a deficit of $1.8 trillion per year. (Yes, really.) That kind of deficit is good in response to a severe recession—I was all in favor of it during COVID, and it worked. But when the economy is good, you’re supposed to balance the budget, and they haven’t.

The richest 1% stand to gain about 4% more income from these tax cuts (which adds up to about $240 billion per year), while the combination of tax cuts and spending cuts would most likely reduce the income of 40% of the population.

They aren’t even cutting spending to offset these tax cuts. This budget only includes a paltry $4 billion in spending cuts—less than 0.1% of the budget. (I mean, sure, $4 billion is a lot of money for a person; but for a whole country as rich and large as ours? It’s a rounding error.) And then it includes $521 billion in spending increases, over 100 times as much.

They are talking about making more cuts, but they’ve been cagey as to where, probably because the only plausible ways to save this much money are the military, Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security. Obviously Republicans will never cut the military, but the other three programs are also enormously popular, even in deep-red states. It would be not only very harmful to millions of people to cut these programs—it would also be harmful to the Republicans’ re-election chances. They could also get some savings by cutting income security programs like SNAP and TANF, which would probably be less unpopular—but it would also cause enormous suffering.

This new budget is estimated to add some $6.9 trillion to the national debt over 10 years—and even more after that, if the policies actually continue.

I am not exactly a “deficit hawk”; I don’t think the budget should always be balanced. But this is not the time to be increasing the deficit. When times are good, we should balance the budget, so that when we have to go into debt during bad times, we can afford to do so.

And bad times are probably on the horizon, since Trump’s tariff policy is already such a disaster. So are we going to borrow even more then? While bond yields are rising? We’re going to end up spending most of our budget on debt payments! And all this injection of money into the system won’t be good for inflation either (and on top of the tariffs!).

The only sensible thing to do right now is raise taxes on the rich. We need that revenue. We can’t just keep going deeper into debt. And the rich are the ones who would be least harmed by raising taxes—indeed, if you focused the hikes on billionaires, they would barely feel anything at all.

But the Republicans don’t care about what’s in the interest of ordinary Americans. They only care about the interests of the rich. And that’s why they passed this budget.

Please, don’t let Trump win this

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 20 JDN 2460604

It’s almost time for the Presidential election in the United States. Right now, the race is too close to call; as of writing this post, FiveThirtyEight gives Harris a 53% chance of winning, and Trump a 46% chance.

It should not be this close. It should never have been this close. We have already seen what Trump is like in office, and it should have made absolutely no one happy. He is authoritarian, corrupt, incompetent, and narcissistic, and lately he’s starting to show signs of cognitive decline. He is a convicted felon and was involved in an attempted insurrection. His heavy-handed trade tariffs would surely cause severe economic damage both here and abroad, and above all, he wants to roll back rights for millions of Americans.

Almost anyone would be better than Trump. Harris would be obviously, dramatically better in almost every way. Yet somehow Trump is still doing well in the polls, and could absolutely still win this.

Please, do everything you can to stop that from happening.

Donate. Volunteer. Get out the vote. And above all, vote.

Part of the problem is our two-party system, which comes ultimately from our plurality voting system. As RangeVoting.org has remarked, our current system is basically the worst possible system that can still be considered democratic. Range voting would be clearly the best system, but failing that, at least we could have approval voting, or some kind of ranked-choice system. Only voting for a single candidate causes huge, fundamental flaws in representation, especially when it comes to candidate cloning: Multiple similar candidates that people like can lose to a single candidate that people dislike, because the vote gets split between them.

In fact, that’s almost certainly what happened with Trump: The only reason he won the primary the first time was that he had a small group of ardent supporters, while all the other candidates were similar and so got the mainstream Republican vote split between them. (Though it looks like the second time around he’d still win even if all the other similar candidates were consolidated—which frankly horrifies me.)

But it isn’t just our voting system. The really terrifying thing about Trump is how popular he is among Republicans. Democrats hate him, but Republicans love him. I have tried talking with Republican family members about what they like about Trump, and they struggle to give me a sensible answer. It’s not his personality or his competence (how could it be?). For the most part, it wasn’t even particular policies he supports. It was just this weird free-floating belief that he was a good President and would be again.

There was one major exception to that: Single-issue voters who want to ban abortion. For these people, the only thing that matters is that Trump appointed the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. I don’t know what to say to such people, since it seems so obvious to me that (1) a total abortion ban is too extreme, even if you want to reduce the abortion rate, (2) there are so many other issues that matter aside from abortion; you can’t simply ignore them all, (3) several other Republican candidates are equally committed to banning abortion but not nearly as corrupt or incompetent, and (4) the Supreme Court has already been appointed; there’s nothing more for Trump to do in that department that he hasn’t already done. But I guess there is at least something resembling a coherent policy preference here, if a baffling one.

Others also talked about his ideas on trade and immigration, but they didn’t seem to have a coherent idea of what a sensible trade or immigration policy looks like. They imagined that it was a reasonable thing to simply tariff all imports massively or expel all immigrants, despite the former being economically absurd and the latter being a human rights violation (and also an economic disaster). I guess that also counts as a policy preference, but it’s not simply baffling; it’s horrifying. I don’t know what to say to these people either.

But maybe that’s a terror I need to come to terms with: Some people don’t like Trump in spite of his terrible policy ideas; they like him because of them. They want a world where rights are rolled back for minorities and LGBT people and (above all) immigrants. They want a world where global trade is shut down and replaced by autarky. They imagine that these changes will somehow benefit them, even when all the evidence suggests that it would do nothing of the sort.

I have never feared Trump himself nearly so much as I fear the people of a country that could elect him. And should we re-elect him, I will fear the people of this country even more.

Please, don’t let that happen.

The Butlerian Jihad is looking better all the time

PNRJ book reviews, cognitive science, computer science, core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, inequality, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 24 JDN 2460395

A review of The Age of Em by Robin Hanson

In the Dune series, the Butlerian Jihad was a holy war against artificial intelligence that resulted in a millenias-long taboo against all forms of intelligent machines. It was effectively a way to tell a story about the distant future without basically everything being about robots or cyborgs.

After reading Robin Hanson’s book, I’m starting to think that maybe we should actually do it.

Thus it is written: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

Hanson says he’s trying to reserve judgment and present objective predictions without evaluation, but it becomes very clear throughout that this is the future he wants, as well as—or perhaps even instead of—the world he expects.

In many ways, it feels like he has done his very best to imagine a world of true neoclassical rational agents in perfect competition, a sort of sandbox for the toys he’s always wanted to play with. Throughout he very much takes the approach of a neoclassical economist, making heroic assumptions and then following them to their logical conclusions, without ever seriously asking whether those assumptions actually make any sense.

To his credit, Hanson does not buy into the hype that AGI will be successful any day now. He predicts that we will achieve the ability to fully emulate human brains and thus create a sort of black-box AGI that behaves very much like a human within about 100 years. Given how the Blue Brain Project has progressed (much slower than its own hype machine told us it would—and let it be noted that I predicted this from the very beginning), I think this is a fairly plausible time estimate. He refers to a mind emulated in this way as an “em”; I have mixed feelings about the term, but I suppose we did need some word for that, and it certainly has conciseness on its side.

Hanson believes that a true understanding of artificial intelligence will only come later, and the sort of AGI that can be taken apart and reprogrammed for specific goals won’t exist for at least a century after that. Both of these sober, reasonable predictions are deeply refreshing in a field that’s been full of people saying “any day now” for the last fifty years.

But Hanson’s reasonableness just about ends there.

In The Age of Em, government is exactly as strong as Hanson needs it to be. Somehow it simultaneously ensures a low crime rate among a population that doubles every few months while also having no means of preventing that population growth. Somehow ensures that there is no labor collusion and corporations never break the law, but without imposing any regulations that might reduce efficiency in any way.

All of this begins to make more sense when you realize that Hanson’s true goal here is to imagine a world where neoclassical economics is actually true.

He realized it didn’t work on humans, so instead of giving up the theory, he gave up the humans.

Hanson predicts that ems will casually make short-term temporary copies of themselves called “spurs”, designed to perform a particular task and then get erased. I guess maybe he would, but I for one would not so cavalierly create another person and then make their existence dedicated to doing a single job before they die. The fact that I created this person, and they are very much like me, seem like reasons to care more about their well-being, not less! You’re asking me to enslave and murder my own child. (Honestly, the fact that Robin Hanson thinks ems will do this all the time says more about Robin Hanson than anything else.) Any remotely sane society of ems would ban the deletion of another em under any but the most extreme circumstances, and indeed treat it as tantamount to murder.

Hanson predicts that we will only copy the minds of a few hundred people. This is surely true at some point—the technology will take time to develop, and we’ll have to start somewhere. But I don’t see why we’d stop there, when we could continue to copy millions or billions of people; and his choices of who would be emulated, while not wildly implausible, are utterly terrifying.

He predicts that we’d emulate genius scientists and engineers; okay, fair enough, that seems right. I doubt that the benefits of doing so will be as high as many people imagine, because scientific progress actually depends a lot more on the combined efforts of millions of scientists than on rare sparks of brilliance by lone geniuses; but those people are definitely very smart, and having more of them around could be a good thing. I can also see people wanting to do this, and thus investing in making it happen.

He also predicts that we’d emulate billionaires. Now, as a prediction, I have to admit that this is actually fairly plausible; billionaires are precisely the sort of people who are rich enough to pay to be emulated and narcissistic enough to want to. But where Hanson really goes off the deep end here is that he sees this as a good thing. He seems to honestly believe that billionaires are so rich because they are so brilliant and productive. He thinks that a million copies of Elon Musks would produce a million hectobillionaires—when in reality it would produce a million squabbling narcissists, who at best had to split the same $200 billion wealth between them, and might very well end up with less because they squander it.

Hanson has a long section on trying to predict the personalities of ems. Frankly this could just have been dropped entirely; it adds almost nothing to the book, and the book is much too long. But the really striking thing to me about that section is what isn’t there. He goes through a long list of studies that found weak correlations between various personality traits like extroversion or openness and wealth—mostly comparing something like the 20th percentile to the 80th percentile—and then draws sweeping conclusions about what ems will be like, under the assumption that ems are all drawn from people in the 99.99999th percentile. (Yes, upper-middle-class people are, on average, more intelligent and more conscientious than lower-middle-class people. But do we even have any particular reason to think that the personalities of people who make $150,000 are relevant to understanding the behavior of people who make $15 billion?) But he completely glosses over the very strong correlations that specifically apply to people in that very top super-rich class: They’re almost all narcissists and/or psychopaths.

Hanson predicts a world where each em is copied many, many times—millions, billions, even trillions of times, and also in which the very richest ems are capable of buying parallel processing time that lets them accelerate their own thought processes to a million times faster than a normal human. (Is that even possible? Does consciousness work like that? Who knows!?) The world that Hanson is predicting is thus one where all the normal people get outnumbered and overpowered by psychopaths.

Basically this is the most abjectly dystopian cyberpunk hellscape imaginable. And he talks about it the whole time as if it were good.

It’s like he played the game Action Potential and thought, “This sounds great! I’d love to live there!” I mean, why wouldn’t you want to owe a life-debt on your own body and have to work 120-hour weeks for a trillion-dollar corporation just to make the payments on it?

Basically, Hanson doesn’t understand how wealth is actually acquired. He is educated as an economist, yet his understanding of capitalism basically amounts to believing in magic. He thinks that competitive markets just somehow perfectly automatically allocate wealth to whoever is most productive, and thus concludes that whoever is wealthy now must just be that productive.

I can see no other way to explain his wildly implausible predictions that the em economy will double every month or two. A huge swath of the book depends upon this assumption, but he waits until halfway through the book to even try to defend it, and then does an astonishingly bad job of doing so. (Honestly, even if you buy his own arguments—which I don’t—they seem to predict that population would grow with Moore’s Law—doubling every couple of years, not every couple of months.)

Whereas Keynes predicted based on sound economic principles that economic growth would more or less proceed apace and got his answer spot-on, Hanson predicts that for mysterious, unexplained reasons economic growth will suddenly increase by two orders of magnitude—and I’m pretty sure he’s going to be wildly wrong.

Hanson also predicts that ems will be on average poorer than we are, based on some sort of perfect-competition argument that doesn’t actually seem to mesh at all with his predictions of spectacularly rapid economic and technological growth. I think the best way to make sense of this is to assume that it means the trend toward insecure affluence will continue: Ems will have an objectively high standard of living in terms of what they own, what games they play, where they travel, and what they eat and drink (in simulation), but they will constantly be struggling to keep up with the rent on their homes—or even their own bodies. This is a world where (the very finest simulation of) Dom Perignon is $7 a bottle and wages are $980 an hour—but monthly rent is $284,000.

Early in the book Hanson argues that this life of poverty and scarcity will lead to more conservative values, on the grounds that people who are poorer now seem to be more conservative, and this has something to do with farmers versus foragers. Hanson’s explanation of all this is baffling; I will quote it at length, just so it’s clear I’m not misrepresenting it:

The other main (and independent) axis of value variation ranges between poor and rich societies. Poor societies place more value on conformity, security, and traditional values such as marriage, heterosexuality, religion, patriotism, hard work, and trust in authority. In contrast, rich societies place more value on individualism, self-direction, tolerance, pleasure, nature, leisure, and trust. When the values of individuals within a society vary on the same axis, we call this a left/liberal (rich) versus right/conservative (poor) axis.

Foragers tend to have values more like those of rich/liberal people today, while subsistence farmers tend to have values more like those of poor/conservative people today. As industry has made us richer, we have on average moved from conservative/farmer values to liberal/forager values. This value movement can make sense if cultural evolution used the social pressures farmers faced, such as conformity and religion, to induce humans, who evolved to find forager behaviors natural, to instead act like farmers. As we become rich, we don’t as strongly fear the threats behind these social pressures. This connection may result in part from disease; rich people are healthier, and healthier societies fear less.

The alternate theory that we have instead learned that rich forager values are more true predicts that values should have followed a random walk over time, and be mostly common across space. It also predicts the variance of value changes tracking the rate at which relevant information appears. But in fact industrial-era value changes have tracked the wealth of each society in much more steady and consistent fashion. And on this theory, why did foragers ever acquire farmer values?

[…]

In the scenario described in this book, many strange-to-forager behaviors are required, and median per-person (i.e. per-em) incomes return to near-subsistence levels. This suggests that the em era may reverse the recent forager-like trend toward more liberality; ems may have more farmer-like values.

The Age of Em, p. 26-27

There’s a lot to unpack here, but maybe it’s better to burn the whole suitcase.

First of all, it’s not entirely clear that this is really a single axis of variation, that foragers and farmers differ from each other in the same way as liberals and conservatives. There’s some truth to that at least—both foragers and liberals tend to be more generous, both farmers and conservatives tend to enforce stricter gender norms. But there are also clear ways that liberal values radically deviate from forager values: Forager societies are extremely xenophobic, and typically very hostile to innovation, inequality, or any attempts at self-aggrandizement (a phenomenon called “fierce egalitarianism“). San Francisco epitomizes rich, liberal values, but it would be utterly alien and probably regarded as evil by anyone from the Yanomamo.

Second, there is absolutely no reason to predict any kind of random walk. That’s just nonsense. Would you predict that scientific knowledge is a random walk, with each new era’s knowledge just a random deviation from the last’s? Maybe next century we’ll return to geocentrism, or phrenology will be back in vogue? On the theory that liberal values (or at least some liberal values) are objectively correct, we would expect them to advance as knowledge does—improving over time, and improving faster in places that have better institutions for research, education, and free expression. And indeed, this is precisely the pattern we have observed. (Those places are also richer, but that isn’t terribly surprising either!)

Third, while poorer regions are indeed more conservative, poorer people within a region actually tend to be more liberal. Nigeria is poorer and more conservative than Norway, and Mississippi is poorer and more conservative than Massachusetts. But higher-income households in the United States are more likely to vote Republican. I think this is particularly true of people living under insecure affluence: We see the abundance of wealth around us, and don’t understand why we can’t learn to share it better. We’re tired of fighting over scraps while the billionaires claim more and more. Millennials and Zoomers absolutely epitomize insecure affluence, and we also absolutely epitomize liberalism. So, if indeed ems live a life of insecure affluence, we should expect them to be like Zoomers: “Trans liberation now!” and “Eat the rich!” (Or should I say, “Delete the rich!”)

And really, doesn’t that make more sense? Isn’t that the trend our society has been on, for at least the last century? We’ve been moving toward more and more acceptance of women and minorities, more and more deviation from norms, more and more concern for individual rights and autonomy, more and more resistance to authority and inequality.

The funny thing is, that world sounds a lot better than the one Hanson is predicting.

A world of left-wing ems would probably run things a lot better than Hanson imagines: Instead of copying the same hundred psychopaths over and over until we fill the planet, have no room for anything else, and all struggle to make enough money just to stay alive, we could moderate our population to a more sustainable level, preserve diversity and individuality, and work toward living in greater harmony with each other and the natural world. We could take this economic and technological abundance and share it and enjoy it, instead of killing ourselves and each other to make more of it for no apparent reason.

The one good argument Hanson makes here is expressed in a single sentence: “And on this theory, why did foragers ever acquire farmer values?” That actually is a good question; why did we give up on leisure and egalitarianism when we transitioned from foraging to agriculture?

I think scarcity probably is relevant here: As food became scarcer, maybe because of climate change, people were forced into an agricultural lifestyle just to have enough to eat. Early agricultural societies were also typically authoritarian and violent. Under those conditions, people couldn’t be so generous and open-minded; they were surrounded by threats and on the verge of starvation.

I guess if Hanson is right that the em world is also one of poverty and insecurity, we might go back to those sort of values, borne of desperation. But I don’t see any reason to think we’d give up all of our liberal values. I would predict that ems will still be feminist, for instance; in fact, Hanson himself admits that since VR avatars would let us change gender presentation at will, gender would almost certainly become more fluid in a world of ems. Far from valuing heterosexuality more highly (as conservatives do, a “farmer value” according to Hanson), I suspect that ems will have no further use for that construct, because reproduction will be done by manufacturing, not sex, and it’ll be so easy to swap your body into a different one that hardly anyone will even keep the same gender their whole life. They’ll think it’s quaint that we used to identify so strongly with our own animal sexual dimorphism.

But maybe it is true that the scarcity induced by a hyper-competitive em world would make people more selfish, less generous, less trusting, more obsessed with work. Then let’s not do that! We don’t have to build that world! This isn’t a foregone conclusion!

There are many other paths yet available to us.

Indeed, perhaps the simplest would be to just ban artificial intelligence, at least until we can get a better handle on what we’re doing—and perhaps until we can institute the kind of radical economic changes necessary to wrest control of the world away from the handful of psychopaths currently trying their best to run it into the ground.

I admit, it would kind of suck to not get any of the benefits of AI, like self-driving cars, safer airplanes, faster medical research, more efficient industry, and better video games. It would especially suck if we did go full-on Butlerian Jihad and ban anything more complicated than a pocket calculator. (Our lifestyle might have to go back to what it was in—gasp! The 1950s!)

But I don’t think it would suck nearly as much as the world Robin Hanson thinks is in store for us if we continue on our current path.

So I certainly hope he’s wrong about all this.

Fortunately, I think he probably is.

How to pack the court

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, personal, politics, public policy , , , , , , ,

Jul 10 JDN 2459790

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump is finally being impeached

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

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?

No, this isn’t like Watergate. It’s worse.

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

May 21, JDN 2457895

Make no mistake: This a historic moment. This may be the greatest corruption scandal in the history of the United States. Donald Trump has fired the director of the FBI in order to block an investigation—and he said so himself.

It has become cliche to compare scandals to Watergate—to the point where we even stick the suffix “-gate” on things to indicate scandals. “Gamergate”, “Climategate”, and so on. So any comparison to Watergate is bound to draw some raised eyebrows.

But just as it’s not Godwin’s Law when you’re really talking about fascism and genocide, it’s not the “-gate” cliche when we are talking about a corruption scandal that goes all the way up to the President of the United States. And The Atlantic is right: this isn’t Watergate; it’s worse.

First of all, let’s talk about the crime of which Trump is accused. Nixon was accused of orchestrating burglary and fraud. These are not minor offenses, to be sure. But they are ordinary criminal offenses, felonies at worst. Trump is accused of fundamental Constitutional violations (particularly the First Amendment and the Emoluments Clause), and above all, Trump is accused of treason. This is the highest crime recognized by the Constitution of the United States. It is the only crime with a specifically listed Constitutional punishment—and that punishment is execution.

Donald Trump is being investigated not for stealing something or concealing information, but for colluding with foreign powers in the attempt to undermine American democracy. Is he guilty? I don’t know; that’s why we’re investigating. But let me say this: If he isn’t guilty of something, it’s quite baffling that he would fight so hard to stop the investigation.

Speaking of which: Trump’s intervention to stop Comey is much more direct, and much more sudden, than anything Nixon did to stop the Watergate investigations. Nixon of course tried to stonewall the investigations, but he did so subtly, cautiously, always trying to at least appear like he valued due process and rule of law. Trump made no such efforts, openly threatening Comey personally on Twitter and publicly declaring on national television that he had fired him to block the investigation.

But perhaps what makes the Trump-Comey affair most terrifying is how the supposedly “mainstream” Republican Party has reacted. The Republicans of Nixon had some honor left in them; several resigned rather than follow Nixon’s illegal orders, and dozens of Republicans in Congress supported the investigations and called for Nixon’s impeachment. Apparently that honor is gone now, as GOP leaders like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham have expressed support for the President’s corrupt and illegal actions citing no principle other than party loyalty. If we needed any more proof that the Republican Party of the United States is no longer a mainstream political party, this is it. They don’t believe in democracy or rule of law anymore. They believe in winning at any cost, loyalty at any price. They have become a radical far-right organization—indeed, if they continue down this road of supporting the President in undermining the freedom of the press and consolidating his own power, I think it is fair to call them literally neo-fascist.

We are about to see whether American institutions can withstand such an onslaught, whether liberty and justice can prevail against corruption and tyranny. So far, there have been reasons to be optimistic: In particular, the judicial branch has proudly and bravely held the line, blocking Trump’s travel ban (multiple times), resisting his order to undermine sanctuary cities, and standing up to direct criticisms and even threats from the President himself. Our system of checks and balances is being challenged, but so far it is holding up against that challenge. We will find out soon enough whether the American system truly is robust enough to survive.