Trump

Reckoning costs in money distorts them

pnrj core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 7 JDN 2460072

Consider for a moment what it means when an economic news article reports “rising labor costs”. What are they actually saying?

They’re saying that wages are rising—perhaps in some industry, perhaps in the economy as a whole. But this is not a cost. It’s a price. As I’ve written about before, the two are fundamentally distinct.

The cost of labor is measured in effort, toil, and time. It’s the pain of having to work instead of whatever else you’d like to do with your time.

The price of labor is a monetary amount, which is delivered in a transaction.

This may seem perfectly obvious, but it has important and oft-neglected implications. A cost, one paid, is gone. That value has been destroyed. We hope that it was worth it for some benefit we gained. A price, when paid, is simply transferred: One person had that money before, now someone else has it. Nothing was gained or lost.

So in fact when reports say that “labor costs have risen”, what they are really saying is that income is being transferred from owners to workers without any change in real value taking place. They are framing as a loss what is fundamentally a zero-sum redistribution.

In fact, it is disturbingly common to see a fundamentally good redistribution of income framed in the press as a bad outcome because of its expression as “costs”; the “cost” of chocolate is feared to go up if we insist upon enforcing bans on forced labor—when in fact it is only the price that goes up, and the cost actually goes down: chocolate would no longer include complicity in an atrocity. The real suffering of making chocolate would be thereby reduced, not increased. Even when they aren’t literally enslaved, those workers are astonishingly poor, and giving them even a few more cents per hour would make a real difference in their lives. But God forbid we pay a few cents more for a candy bar!

If labor costs were to rise, that would mean that work had suddenly gotten harder, or more painful; or else, that some outside circumstance had made it more difficult to work. Having a child increases your labor costs—you now have the opportunity cost of not caring for the child. COVID increased the cost of labor, by making it suddenly dangerous just to go outside in public. That could also increase prices—you may demand a higher wage, and people do seem to have demanded higher wages after COVID. But these are two separate effects, and you can have one without the other. In fact, women typically see wage stagnation or even reduction after having kids (but men largely don’t), despite their real opportunity cost of labor having obviously greatly increased.

On an individual level, it’s not such a big mistake to equate price and cost. If you are buying something, its cost to you basically just is its price, plus a little bit of transaction cost for actually finding and buying it. But on a societal level, it makes an enormous difference. It distorts our policy priorities and can even lead to actively trying to suppress things that are beneficial—such as rising wages.

This false equivalence between price and costs seems to be at least as common among economists as it is among laypeople. Economists will often justify it on the grounds that in an ideal perfect competitive market the two would be in some sense equated. But of course we don’t live in that ideal perfect market, and even if we did, they would only beproportional at the margin, not fundamentally equal across the board. It would still be obviously wrong to characterize the total value or cost of work by the price paid for it; only the last unit of effort would be priced so that marginal value equals price equals marginal cost. The first 39 hours of your work would cost you less than what you were paid, and produce more than you were paid; only that 40th hour would set the three equal.

Once you account for all the various market distortions in the world, there’s no particular relationship between what something costs—in terms of real effort and suffering—and its price—in monetary terms. Things can be expensive and easy, or cheap and awful. In fact, they often seem to be; for some reason, there seems to be a pattern where the most terrible, miserable jobs (e.g. coal mining) actually pay the leastand the easiest, most pleasant jobs (e.g. stock trading) pay the most. Some jobs that benefit society pay well (e.g. doctors) and others pay terribly or not at all (e.g. climate activists). Some actions that harm the world get punished (e.g. armed robbery) and others get rewarded with riches (e.g. oil drilling). In the real world, whether a job is good or bad and whether it is paid well or poorly seem to be almost unrelated.

In fact, sometimes they seem even negatively related, where we often feel tempted to “sell out” and do something destructive in order to get higher pay. This is likely due to Berkson’s paradox: If people are willing to do jobs if they are either high-paying or beneficial to humanity, then we should expect that, on average, most of the high-paying jobs people do won’t be beneficial to humanity. Even if there were inherently no correlation or a small positive one, people’s refusal to do harmful low-paying work removes those jobs from our sample and results in a negative correlation in what remains.

I think that the best solution, ultimately, is to stop reckoning costs in money entirely. We should reckon them in happiness.

This is of course much more difficult than simply using prices; it’s not easy to say exactly how many QALY are sacrificed in the extraction of cocoa beans or the drilling of offshore oil wells. But if we actually did find a way to count them, I strongly suspect we’d find that it was far more than we ought to be willing to pay.

A very rough approximation, surely flawed but at least a start, would be to simply convert all payments into proportions of their recipient’s income: For full-time wages, this would result in basically everyone being counted the same, as 1 hour of work if you work 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year is precisely 0.05% of your annual income. So we could say that whatever is equivalent to your hourly wage constitutes 50 microQALY.

This automatically implies that every time a rich person pays a poor person, QALY increase, while every time a poor person pays a rich person, QALY decrease. This is not an error in the calculation. It is a fact of the universe. We ignore it only at out own peril. All wealth redistributed downward is a benefit, while all wealth redistributed upward is a harm. That benefit may cause some other harm, or that harm may be compensated by some other benefit; but they are still there.

This would also put some things in perspective. When HSBC was fined £70 million for its crimes, that can be compared against its £1.5 billion in net income; if it were an individual, it would have been hurt about 50 milliQALY, which is about what I would feel if I lost $2000. Of course, it’s not a person, and it’s not clear exactly how this loss was passed through to employees or shareholders; but that should give us at least some sense of how small that loss was for them. They probably felt it… a little.

When Trump was ordered to pay a $1.3 million settlement, based on his $2.5 billion net wealth (corresponding to roughly $125 million in annual investment income), that cost him about 10 milliQALY; for me that would be about $500.

At the other extreme, if someone goes from making $1 per day to making $1.50 per day, that’s a 50% increase in their income—500 milliQALY per year.

For those who have no income at all, this becomes even trickier; for them I think we should probably use their annual consumption, since everyone needs to eat and that costs something, though likely not very much. Or we could try to measure their happiness directly, trying to determine how much it hurts to not eat enough and work all day in sweltering heat.

Properly shifting this whole cultural norm will take a long time. For now, I leave you with this: Any time you see a monetary figure, ask yourself: “How much is that worth to them?” The world will seem quite different once you get in the habit of that.

Rethinking progressive taxation

pnrj core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, inequality, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 17 JDN 2459687

There is an extremely common and quite bizarre result in the standard theory of taxation, which is that the optimal marginal tax rate for the highest incomes should be zero. Ever since that result came out, economists have basically divided into two camps.

The more left-leaning have said, “This is obviously wrong; so why is it wrong? What are we missing?”; the more right-leaning have said, “The model says so, so it must be right! Cut taxes on the rich!”

I probably don’t need to tell you that I’m very much in the first camp. But more recently I’ve come to realize that even the answers left-leaning economists have been giving for why this result is wrong are also missing something vital.

There have been papers explaining that “the zero top rate only applies at extreme incomes” (uh, $50 billion sounds pretty extreme to me!) or “the optimal tax system can be U-shaped” (I don’t want U-shaped—we’re not supposed to be taxing the poor!)


And many economists still seem to find it reasonable to say that marginal tax rates should decline over some significant part of the distribution.

In my view, there are really two reasons why taxes should be progressive, and they are sufficiently general reasons that they should almost always override other considerations.

The first is diminishing marginal utility of wealth. The real value of a dollar is much less to someone who already has $1 million than to someone who has only $100. Thus, if we want to raise the most revenue while causing the least pain, we typically want to tax people who have a lot of money rather than people who have very little.

But the right-wing economists have an answer to this one, based on these fancy models: Yes, taking a given amount from the rich would be better (a lump-sum tax), but you can’t do that; you can only tax their income at a certain rate. (So far, that seems right. Lump-sum taxes are silly and economists talk about them too much.) But the rich are rich because they are more productive! If you tax them more, they will work less, and that will harm society as a whole due to their lost productivity.

This is the fundamental intuition behind the “top rate should be zero” result: The rich are so fantastically productive that it isn’t worth it to tax them. We simply can’t risk them working less.

But are the rich actually so fantastically productive? Are they really that smart? Do they really work that hard?

If Tony Stark were real, okay, don’t tax him. He is a one-man Singularity: He invented the perfect power source on his own, “in a cave, with a box of scraps!”; he created a true AI basically by himself; he single-handedly discovered a new stable island element and used it to make his already perfect power source even better.

But despite what his fanboys may tell you, Elon Musk is not Tony Stark. Tesla and SpaceX have done a lot of very good things, but in order to do they really didn’t need Elon Musk for much. Mainly, they needed his money. Give me $270 billion and I could make companies that build electric cars and launch rockets into space too. (Indeed, I probably would—though I’d also set up some charitable foundations as well, more like what Bill Gates did with his similarly mind-boggling wealth.)

Don’t get me wrong; Elon Musk is a very intelligent man, and he works, if anything, obsessively. (He makes his employees work excessively too—and that’s a problem.) But if he were to suddenly die, as long as a reasonably competent CEO replaced him, Tesla and SpaceX would go on working more or less as they already do. The spectacular productivity of these companies is not due to Musk alone, but thousands of highly-skilled employees. These people would be productive if Musk had not existed, and they will continue to be productive once Musk is gone.

And they aren’t particularly rich. They aren’t poor either, mind you—a typical engineer at Tesla or SpaceX is quite well-paid, and rightly so. (Median salary at SpaceX is over $115,000.) These people are brilliant, tremendously hard-working, and highly productive; and they get quite well-paid. But very few of these people are in the top 1%, and basically none of them will ever be billionaires—let alone the truly staggering wealth of a hectobillionaire like Musk himself.

How, then, does one become a billionaire? Not by being brilliant, hard-working, or productive—at least that is not sufficient, and the existence of, say, Donald Trump suggests that it is not necessary either. No, the really quintessential feature every billionaire has is remarkably simple and consistent across the board: They own a monopoly.

You can pretty much go down the list, finding what monopoly each billionaire owned: Bill Gates owned software patents on (what is still) the most widely-used OS and office suite in the world. J.K. Rowling owns copyrights on the most successful novels in history. Elon Musk owns technology patents on various innovations in energy storage and spaceflight technology—very few of which he himself invented, I might add. Andrew Carnegie owned the steel industry. John D. Rockefeller owned the oil industry. And so on.

I honestly can’t find any real exceptions: Basically every billionaire either owned a monopoly or inherited from ancestors who did. The closest things to exceptions are billionaire who did something even worse, like defrauding thousands of people, enslaving an indigenous population or running a nation with an iron fist. (And even then, Leopold II and Vladimir Putin both exerted a lot of monopoly power as part of their murderous tyranny.)

In other words, billionaire wealth is almost entirely rent. You don’t earn a billion dollars. You don’t get it by working. You get it by owning—and by using that ownership to exert monopoly power.

This means that taxing billionaire wealth wouldn’t incentivize them to work less; they already don’t work for their money. It would just incentivize them to fight less hard at extracting wealth from everyone else using their monopoly power—which hardly seems like a downside.

Since virtually all of the wealth at the top is simply rent, we have no reason not to tax it away. It isn’t genuine productivity at all; it’s just extracting wealth that other people produced.

Thus, my second, and ultimately most decisive reason for wanting strongly progressive taxes: rent-seeking. The very rich don’t actually deserve the vast majority of what they have, and we should take it back so that we can give it to people who really need and deserve it.

Now, there is a somewhat more charitable version of the view that high taxes even on the top 0.01% would hurt productivity, and it is worth addressing. That is based on the idea that entrepreneurship is valuable, and part of the incentive for becoming and entrepreneur is the chance at one day striking it fabulously rich, so taxing the fabulously rich might result in a world of fewer entrepreneurs.

This isn’t nearly as ridiculous as the idea that Elon Musk somehow works a million times as hard as the rest of us, but it’s still pretty easy to find flaws in it.

Suppose you were considering starting a business. Indeed, perhaps you already have considered it. What are your main deciding factors in whether or not you will?

Surely they do not include the difference between a 0.0001% chance of making $200 billion and a 0.0001% chance of making $50 billion. Indeed, that probably doesn’t factor in at all; you know you’ll almost certainly never get there, and even if you did, there’s basically no real difference in your way of life between $50 billion and $200 billion.

No, more likely they include things like this: (1) How likely are you to turn a profit at all? Even a profit of $50,000 per year would probably be enough to be worth it, but how sure are you that you can manage that? (2) How much funding can you get to start it in the first place? Depending on what sort of business you’re hoping to found, it could be as little as thousands or as much as millions of dollars to get it set up, well before it starts taking in any revenue. And even a few thousand is a lot for most middle-class people to come up with in one chunk and be willing to risk losing.

This means that there is a very simple policy we could implement which would dramatically increase entrepreneurship while taxing only billionaires more, and it goes like this: Add an extra 1% marginal tax to capital gains for billionaires, and plow it into a fund that gives grants of $10,000 to $100,000 to promising new startups.

That 1% tax could raise several billion dollars a year—yes, really; US billionaires gained some $2 trillion in capital gains last year, so we’d raise $20 billion—and thereby fund many, many startups. Say the average grant is $20,000 and the total revenue is $20 billion; that’s one million new startups funded every single year. Every single year! Currently, about 4 million new businesses are founded each year in the US (leading the world by a wide margin); this could raise that to 5 million.

So don’t tell me this is about incentivizing entrepreneurship. We could do that far better than we currently do, with some very simple policy changes.

Meanwhile, the economics literature on optimal taxation seems to be completely missing the point. Most of it is still mired in the assumption that the rich are rich because they are productive, and thus terribly concerned about the “trade-off” between efficiency and equity involved in higher taxes. But when you realize that the vast, vast majority—easily 99.9%—of billionaire wealth is unearned rents, then it becomes obvious that this trade-off is an illusion. We can improve efficiency and equity simultaneously, by taking some of this ludicrous hoard of unearned wealth and putting it back into productive activities, or giving it to the people who need it most. The only people who will be harmed by this are billionaires themselves, and by diminishing marginal utility of wealth, they won’t be harmed very much.

Fortunately, the tide is turning, and more economists are starting to see the light. One of the best examples comes from Piketty, Saez, and Stantcheva in their paper on how CEO “pay for luck” (e.g. stock options) respond to top tax rates. There are a few other papers that touch on similar issues, such as Lockwood, Nathanson, and Weyl and Rothschild and Scheuer. But there’s clearly a lot of space left for new work to be done. The old results that told us not to raise taxes were wrong on a deep, fundamental level, and we need to replace them with something better.

In search of reasonable conservatism

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, politics, public policy , , , , ,

Feb 21JDN 2459267

This is a very tumultuous time for American politics. Donald Trump, not once, but twice was impeached—giving him the dubious title of having been impeached as many times as the previous 45 US Presidents combined. He was not convicted either time, not because the evidence for his crimes was lacking—it was in fact utterly overwhelming—but because of obvious partisan bias: Republican Senators didn’t want to vote against a Republican President. All 50 of the Democratic Senators, but only 7 of the 50 Republican Senators, voted to convict Trump. The required number of votes to convict was 67.

Some degree of partisan bias is to be expected. Indeed, the votes looked an awful lot like Bill Clinton’s impeachment, in which all Democrats and only a handful of Republicans voted to acquit. But Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial was nowhere near as open-and-shut as Donald Trump’s. He was being tried for perjury and obstruction of justice, over lies he told about acts that were unethical, but not illegal or un-Constitutional. I’m a little disappointed that no Democrats voted against him, but I think acquittal was probably the right verdict. There’s something very odd about being tried for perjury because you lied about something that wasn’t even a crime. Ironically, had it been illegal, he could have invoked the Fifth Amendment instead of lying and they wouldn’t have been able to touch him. So the only way the perjury charge could actually stick was because it wasn’t illegal. But that isn’t what perjury is supposed to be about: It’s supposed to be used for things like false accusations and planted evidence. Refusing to admit that you had an affair that’s honestly no one’s business but your family’s really shouldn’t be a crime, regardless of your station.

So let us not imagine an equivalency here: Bill Clinton was being tried for crimes that were only crimes because he lied about something that wasn’t a crime. Donald Trump was being tried for manipulating other countries to interfere in our elections, obstructing investigations by Congress, and above all attempting to incite a coup. Partisan bias was evident in all three trials, but only Trump’s trials were about sedition against the United States.

That is to say, I expect to see partisan bias; it would be unrealistic not to. But I expect that bias to be limited. I expect there to be lines beyond which partisans will refuse to go. The Republican Party in the United States today has shown us that they have no such lines. (Or if there are, they are drawn far too high. What would he have to do, bomb an American city? He incited an invasion of the Capitol Building, for goodness’ sake! And that was after so terribly mishandling a pandemic that he caused roughly 200,000 excess American deaths!)

Temperamentally, I like to compromise. I want as many people to be happy as possible, even if that means not always getting exactly what I would personally prefer. I wanted to believe that there were reasonable conservatives in our government, professional statespersons with principles who simply had honest disagreements about various matters of policy. I can now confirm that there are at most 7 such persons in the US Senate, and at most 10 such persons in the US House of Representatives. So of the 261 Republicans in Congress, no more than 17 are actually reasonable statespersons who do not let partisan bias override their most basic principles of justice and democracy.

And even these 17 are by no means certain: There were good strategic reasons to vote against Trump, even if the actual justice meant nothing to you. Trump’s net disapproval rating was nearly the highest of any US President ever. Carter and Bush I had periods where they fared worse, but overall fared better. Johnson, Ford, Reagan, Obama, Clinton, Bush II, and even Nixon were consistently more approved than Trump. Kennedy and Eisenhower completely blew him out of the water—at their worst, Kennedy and Eisenhower were nearly 30 percentage points above Trump at his best. With Trump this unpopular, cutting ties with him would make sense for the same reason rats desert a sinking ship. And yet somehow partisan loyalty won out for 94% of Republicans in Congress.

Politics is the mind-killer, and I fear that this sort of extreme depravity on the part of Republicans in Congress will make it all too easy to dismiss conservatism as a philosophy in general. I actually worry about that; not all conservative ideas are wrong! Low corporate taxes actually make a lot of sense. Minimum wage isn’t that harmful, but it’s also not that beneficial. Climate change is a very serious threat, but it’s simply not realistic to jump directly to fully renewable energy—we need something for the transition, probably nuclear energy. Capitalism is overall the best economic system, and isn’t particularly bad for the environment. Industrial capitalism has brought us a golden age. Rent control is a really bad idea. Fighting racism is important, but there are ways in which woke culture has clearly gone too far. Indeed, perhaps the worst thing about woke culture is the way it denies past successes for civil rights and numbs us with hopelessness.

Above all, groupthink is incredibly dangerous. Once we become convinced that any deviation from the views of the group constitutes immorality or even treason, we become incapable of accepting new information and improving our own beliefs. We may start with ideas that are basically true and good, but we are not omniscient, and even the best ideas can be improved upon. Also, the world changes, and ideas that were good a generation ago may no longer be applicable to the current circumstances. The only way—the only way—to solve that problem is to always remain open to new ideas and new evidence.

Therefore my lament is not just for conservatives, who now find themselves represented by craven ideologues; it is also for liberals, who no longer have an opposition party worth listening to. Indeed, it’s a little hard to feel bad for the conservatives, because they voted for these maniacs. Maybe they didn’t know what they were getting? But they’ve had chances to remove most of them, and didn’t do so. At best I’d say I pity them for being so deluded by propaganda that they can’t see the harm their votes have done.

But I’m actually quite worried that the ideologues on the left will now feel vindicated; their caricatured view of Republicans as moustache-twirling cartoon villains turned out to be remarkably accurate, at least for Trump himself. Indeed, it was hard not to think of the ridiculous “destroying the environment for its own sake” of Captain Planet villains when Trump insisted on subsidizing coal power—which by the way didn’t even work.

The key, I think, is to recognize that reasonable conservatives do exist—there just aren’t very many of them in Congress right now. A significant number of Americans want low taxes, deregulation, and free markets but are horrified by Trump and what the Republican Party has become—indeed, at least a few write for the National Review.

The mere fact that an idea comes from Republicans is not a sufficient reason to dismiss that idea. Indeed, I’m going to say something even stronger: The mere fact that an idea comes from a racist or a bigot is not a sufficient reason to dismiss that idea. If the idea itself is racist or bigoted, yes, that’s a reason to think it is wrong. But even bad people sometimes have good ideas.

The reasonable conservatives seem to be in hiding at the moment; I’ve searched for them, and had difficulty finding more than a handful. Yet we must not give up the search. Politics should not appear one-sided.

This attack on the postal service must not stand

pnrj current events, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 23 JDN 2459085

Trump has done so many unprecedented and terrible things that we can become numbed by it all, unable to process each new offense because we are already overwhelmed by the others. Perhaps this is a kind of strategy on his part: Keep doing so many outrageous things that we lose our capacity to be outraged. Already it is fair to say that at least half of the 160,000 (and counting) Americans killed by COVID-19 would still be alive if a better President had been in office.

But the attack on the US Postal Service deserves particular attention, because the disruption of mail-in voting during a pandemic could radically alter the results of the election. Indeed, Trump has all but said that this was his goal in defunding the post office.

Trump has long hated the postal service (perhaps because it is a clear example of federal government doing things well and helping people), but his full-scale war upon it started with the appointment of Louis DeJoy as Postmaster General, whose main qualifications appear to be that he has given millions of dollars to Republican campaigns and hates everything the post office stands for. I am quite certain that if there were a Director of Henhouse Affairs, Trump would appoint the Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The White House chief of staff claims that there have been no mail sorting machines decommissioned aside from those that were normally scheduled for replacement. Yet it’s easy to find a number of different sources claiming that there have been far more machines shut down than usual. Postal workers have also spoken out about other kinds of restructuring in the postal system that claim to be about “reducing costs” but seem to be systematically impairing the speed and reliability of service.

Trump claims that mail-in voting is insecure, which has a kernel of truth: Mail-in voting certainly doesn’t have the ironclad security against fraud that in-person voting has. (Unlike in-person voter fraud, mail-in voter fraud actually exists.) But not only is his concern obviously overblown, the USPS has even taken measures to upgrade their security using blockchain encryption. Bitcoin has always been a stupid idea (though a very lucrative one for anyone who bought in early), but blockchain does have some major advantages for voting security, because it is one of the few ways to make a remote system that is simultaneously secure and anonymous. Indeed, I think blockchain encryption (combined with more standard SSL encryption that most web pages already use) might well be a way to implement full-scale online voting—though surely not in time for this election.

The US Postal Service is the most popular federal agency in the United States, followed by the CDC, the Census Bureau, and the Department of Health and Human Services, all of which deservedly have strong bipartisan majority support among voters. It may surprise you to learn that the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, and the Department of Justice also have strong majority support—though with substantial partisan differences. The most divisive federal agency is ICE, which is beloved by Republicans but hated by Democrats.

Some 91% of Americans approve of the USPS—and why shouldn’t they? It is objectively rated one of the best postal systems in the world—and if anything this isn’t even fair, because most of the other top-rated postal services, particularly Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Singapore, have far smaller areas to cover than the US does. If we restrict ourselves to countries of at least 10 million people and territory of at least 100,000 square kilometers, there are only four postal services rated higher than the US: Japan, Germany, France, and Poland. If we restrict to countries of at least 100 million people, only Japan remains.

Thus, attacking the postal service is clearly not a winning proposition if your goal is to advance the interests of your constituents or even gain more votes. But during a pandemic, mail-in voting is likely to be—and well should be—a very large proportion of all votes. Sabotaging the mail system is a highly effective way to make it much harder to vote in general. And that seems to very much be Trump’s intention.

It is a general pattern that when voting gets harder, Republicans become more likely to win. Liberal voters are more likely to be young adults, poor people, or people of color, all of whom generally have a harder time making it to the polls. This may be less true in this election in particular, because against Trump in particular people who are highly educated and live in cities have been far more likely to vote against Trump—and these are groups of people with particularly high voter turnout. Empirical estimates of how a switch to mail-in voting will affect the election results have been highly ambiguous.

Indeed, perhaps this makes the Republican vote suppression campaign even more sinister: Perhaps they have moved beyond simply trying to tilt the scales in elections and are now willing to actively suppress democracy itself. It sounds radical, if not outright crazy, to assert such a thing—but many of the things that Trump and his Republican lackeys have done would have sounded crazy to me just a few years ago. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I honestly don’t know that Trump will concede defeat when he loses the election—he may refuse to accept the election results and try to stay in office via some sort of coup d’etat. Why do I think this could happen? Because he said so himself on national television. Vladimir Putin must be so embarrassed; his protege doesn’t even know how to be subtle about his authoritarianism.

FiveThirtyEight is currently giving Biden a 72% chance of victory, which is about 27% too low for my taste. That isn’t much better than the margin Hillary Clinton had four years ago. We can only hope that Trump attacking the most popular agency in our federal government will tilt those odds a little further.

This is not just about selfishness

pnrj current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , ,

Aug 2 JDN 2459064

The Millennial term is “Karen”: someone (paradigmatically a middle-aged White woman) who is so privileged, so self-centered, and has such an extreme sense of entitlement, that they are willing to make others suffer in order to avoid the slightest inconvenience.

I recently saw a tweet (which for some reason has been impossible to find; I think I must have misremembered its precise wording, because putting that in quotes in Google yields nothing) saying that Americans are not simply selfish, we are so selfish that we would gladly let others die to avoid mildly inconveniencing ourselves. Searching Twitter for “Americans are selfish” certainly yields plenty of results.

And it is tempting to agree with this, when it seems that re-opening the economy and so many people refusing to wear masks has given us far worse outcomes from COVID-19 than most other countries.

But this can’t be the whole story. Perhaps Americans are a bit more self-centered than other cultures, because of our history of libertarian individualism. But if we were truly so selfish we’d gladly let others die to avoid inconvenience, whence the fact that we donate more to charity than any other country in the world? I don’t simply mean total amount or per-capita dollars (though both of those are also true); I mean as a fraction of GDP Americans give more to charity than any other country, and by a wide margin.

How then do we explain that so many Americans are not wearing masks?

Well, first of all, most of us are wearing masks. The narrative about people not wearing masks has been exaggerated; the majority of Americans, including the majority of Republicans, agree that wearing masks is a matter of public health rather than personal choice. There are some people who refuse to wear masks, and each one adds a little bit more risk to us all; but it’s really not the case that Americans in general are refusing to wear masks.

But I think the most important failings here come from the top down. The Trump administration has handled the pandemic in an astonishingly poor way. First, they denied that it was even a serious problem. Then, they implemented only a half-hearted response. Then, they turned masks into a culture war. Then, they resisted the economic relief package and prevented it from being as large as it needed to me. At every step of the way, they have been at best utterly incompetent and at worst guilty of depraved indifference murder.

From denying it was a problem, to responding too slowly, to disparaging mask use, to pushing to re-open the economy too soon, at every step of the way our government has made things worse. Above all, a better economic relief package—like what most other First World countries have done—would have done a great deal to reduce the harm of lockdowns, and would have made re-opening the economy far less popular.

Republican-led states have followed the President’s lead, refusing to implement even basic common-sense protections. But even Democrat-led states have suffered greatly as well. New York and California have some of the most cases, though this is surely in part because they are huge states with highly urbanized populations that get a lot of visitors and trade from other places. The trajectory of infections looks worst in Lousiana and Missouri, surely among the most conservative of states; but it also looks quite bad in New Jersey and Hawaii, which are among the most liberal.

I think what this shows us is that America lacks coordination. Despite having United in our name and E pluribus unum as our motto (“In God We Trust” was a Cold War change to spite the Soviets), what we lack most of all is unity. Viruses do not respect borders or jurisdictions. More than perhaps any other issue aside from climate change, fighting a pandemic requires a unified, coordinated response—and that is precisely what we did not have.

In some ways the pluralism of the United States can be a great strength; but this year, it was very much a weakness. And as the many crises around us continue, I fear we grow only more divided.

Can we have property rights without violence?

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 23, JDN 2457867

Most likely, you have by now heard of the incident on a United Airlines flight, where a man was beaten and dragged out of a plane because the airline decided that they needed more seats than they had. In case you somehow missed all the news articles and memes, the Wikipedia page on the incident is actually fairly good.

There is a lot of gossip about the passenger’s history, which the flight crew couldn’t possibly have known and is therefore irrelevant. By far the best take I’ve seen on the ethical and legal implications of the incident can be found on Naked Capitalism, so if you do want to know more about it I highly recommend starting there. Probably the worst take I’ve read is on The Pilot Wife Life, but I suppose if you want a counterpoint there you go.

I really have little to add on this particular incident; instead my goal here is to contextualize it in a broader discussion of property rights in general.

Despite the fact that what United’s employees and contractors did was obviously unethical and very likely illegal, there are still a large number of people defending their actions. Aiming for a Woodman if not an Ironman, the most coherent defense I’ve heard offered goes something like this:

Yes, what United did in this particular case was excessive. But it’s a mistake to try to make this illegal, because any regulation that did so would necessarily impose upon fundamental property rights. United owns the airplane; they can set the rules for who is allowed to be on that airplane. And once they set those rules, they need to be able to enforce them. Sometimes, however distasteful it may be, that enforcement will require violence. But property rights are too important to give up. Would you want to live in a society where anyone could just barge into your home and you were not allowed to use force to remove them?

Understood in this context, United contractors calling airport security to get a man dragged off of a plane isn’t an isolated act of violence for no reason; it is part of a broader conflict between the protection of property rights and the reduction of violence. “Stand your ground” laws, IMF “structural adjustment” policies, even Trump’s wall against immigrants can be understood as part of this broader conflict.

One very far-left approach to resolving such a conflict—as taken by the Paste editorial “You’re not mad at United Airlines; you’re mad at America”—is to fall entirely on the side of nonviolence, and say essentially that any system which allows the use of violence to protect property rights is fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate.

I can see why such a view is tempting. It’s simple, for one thing, and that’s always appealing. But if you stop and think carefully about the consequences of this hardline stance, it becomes clear that such a system would be unsustainable. If we could truly never use violence ever to protect any property rights, that would mean that property law in general could no longer be enforced. People could in fact literally break into your home and steal your furniture, and you’d have no recourse, because the only way to stop them would involve either using violence yourself or calling the police, who would end up using violence. Property itself would lose all its meaning—and for those on the far-left who think that sounds like a good thing, I want you to imagine what the world would look like if the only things you could ever use were the ones you could physically hold onto, where you’d leave home never knowing whether your clothes or your food would still be there when you came back. A world without property sounds good if you are imagining that the insane riches of corrupt billionaires would collapse; but if you stop and think about coming home to no food and no furniture, perhaps it doesn’t sound so great. And while it does sound nice to have a world where no one is homeless because they can always find a place to sleep, that may seem less appealing if your home is the one that a dozen homeless people decide to squat in.

The Tragedy of the Commons would completely destroy any such economic system; the only way to sustain it would be either to produce such an enormous abundance of wealth that no amount of greed could ever overtake it, or, more likely, somehow re-engineer human brains so that greed no longer exists. I’m not aware of any fundamental limits on greed; as long as social status increases monotonically with wealth, there will be people who try to amass as much wealth as they possibly can, far beyond what any human being could ever actually consume, much less need. How do I know this? Because they already exist; we call them “billionaires”. A billionaire, essentially by definition, is a hoarder of wealth who owns more than any human being could consume. If someone happens upon a billion dollars and immediately donates most of it to charity (as J.K. Rowling did), they can escape such a categorization; and if they use the wealth to achieve grand visionary ambitions—and I mean real visions, not like Steve Jobs but like Elon Musk—perhaps they can as well. Saving the world from climate change and colonizing Mars are the sort of projects that really do take many billions of dollars to achieve. (Then again, shouldn’t our government be doing these things?) And if they just hold onto the wealth or reinvest it to make even more, a billionaire is nothing less than a hoarder, seeking gratification and status via ownership itself.

Indeed, I think the maximum amount of wealth one could ever really need is probably around $10 million in today’s dollars; with that amount, even a very low-risk investment portfolio could supply enough income to live wherever you want, wear whatever you want, drive whatever you want, eat whatever you want, travel whenever you want. At even a 5% return, that’s $500,000 per year to spend without ever working or depleting your savings. At 10%, you’d get a million dollars a year for sitting there and doing nothing. And yet there are people with one thousand times as much wealth as this.

But not all property is of this form. I was about to say “the vast majority” is not, but actually that’s not true; a large proportion of wealth is in fact in the form of capital hoarded by the rich. Indeed, about 50% of the world’s wealth is owned by the richest 1%. (To be fair, the world’s top 1% is a broader category than one might think; the top 1% in the world is about the top 5% in the US; based on census data, that puts the cutoff at about $250,000 in net wealth.) But the majority of people have wealth in some form, and would stand to suffer if property rights were not enforced at all.

So we might be tempted to the other extreme, as the far-right seems to be, and say that any force is justified in the protection of fundamental property rights—that if vagrants step onto my land, I am well within my rights to get out my shotgun. (You know, hypothetically; not that I own a shotgun, or, for that matter, any land.) This seems to appeal especially to those who nostalgize the life on the frontier, “living off the land” (often losing family members to what now seem like trivial bacterial illnesses), “self-sufficient” (with generous government subsidies), in the “unspoiled wilderness” (from which the Army had forcibly removed Native Americans). Westerns have given us this sense that frontier life offers a kind of freedom and adventure that this urbane civilization lacks. And I suppose I am a fan of at least one Western, since one should probably count Firefly.

Yet of course this is madness; no civilization could survive if it really allowed people to just arbitrarily “defend” whatever property claims they decided to make. Indeed, it’s really just the flip side of the coin; as we’ve seen in Somalia (oh, by the way, we’re deploying troops there again), not protecting property and allowing universal violence to defend any perceived property largely amount to the same thing. If anything, the far-left fantasy seems more appealing; at least then we would not be subject to physical violence, and could call upon the authorities to protect us from that. In the far-right fantasy, we could accidentally step on what someone else claims to be his land and end up shot in the head.

So we need to have rules about who can use violence to defend what property and why. And that, of course, is complicated. We can start by having a government that defines property claims and places limits on their enforcement; but that still leaves the question of which sort of property claims and enforcement mechanisms the government should allow.

I think the principle should essentially be minimum force. We do need to protect property rights, yes; but if there is a way of doing so without committing violence, that’s the way we should do it. And if we do need to use violence, we should use as little as possible.

In theory we already do this: We have “rules of engagement” for the military and “codes of conduct” for police. But in practice, these rules are rarely enforced; they only get applied to really extreme violations, and sometimes not even then. The idea seems to be that enforcing strict rules on our soldiers and police officers constitutes disloyalty, even treason. We should “let them do their jobs”. This is the norm that must change. Those rules are their jobs. If they break those rules, they aren’t doing their jobs—they’re doing something else, something that endangers the safety and security of our society. The disloyalty is not in investigating and enforcing rules against police misconduct—the disloyalty is in police misconduct. If you want to be a cop but you’re not willing to follow the rules, you don’t actually want to be a cop—you want to be a bully with a gun and a badge.

And of course, one need not be a government agency in order to use excessive force. Many private corporations have security forces of their own, which frequently abuse and assault people. Most terrifying of all, there are whole corporations of “private military contractors”—let’s call them what they are: mercenaries—like Academi, formerly known as Blackwater. The whole reason these corporations even exist is to evade regulations on military conduct, and that is why they must be eliminated.

In the United case, there was obviously a nonviolent answer; all they had to do was offer to pay people to give up their seats, and bid up the price until enough people left. Someone would have left eventually; there clearly was a market-clearing price. That would have cost $2,000, maybe $5,000 at the most—a lot better than the $255 million lost in United’s stock value as a result of the bad PR.

If a homeless person decides to squat in your house, yes, perhaps you’d be justified in calling the police to remove them. Clearly you’re under no obligation to provide them room and board indefinitely. But there may be better solutions: Is there a homeless shelter in the area? Could you give them a ride there, or at least bus fare?

When immigrants cross our borders, may we turn them away? Now, here’s one where I’m pretty strongly tempted to go all the way and say we have no right whatsoever to stop them. There are no requirements for being born into citizenship, after all—so on what grounds do we add requirements to acquire citizenship? Is there something in the water of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River that, when you drink it for 18 years (processed by municipal water systems of course; what are we, barbarians?), automatically makes you into a patriotic American? Does one become more law-abiding, or less capable of cruelty or fanaticism, by being brought into the world on one side of an imaginary line in the sand? If there are going to be requirements for citizenship, shouldn’t they be applied to everyone, and not just people who were born in the wrong place?

Yes, when we have no other choice, we must be prepared to use violence to defend property—because otherwise, there’s no such thing as property. But more often than not, we use violence when we didn’t need to, or use much more violence than was actually necessary. The principle that violence can be justified in defense of property does not entail that any violence is always justified in defense of property.