Category: Philosophy

To think more objectively, become less allied.

That is Robin Hanson, the rest of the post is interesting as well.  Don’t forget that: "people ignore info more when they feel powerful."

I also like this (older) sentence from Megan Non-McArdle:

Once you believe your opponents are disproportionately powerful liars, you have completed the Devil Shift.

Here is more.

Let’s say a bunch of poor kids all pay to see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball.  Wilt gets the money, the kids get to see the game.  At the end of the day Wilt is richer and the kids are poorer.  Since we wouldn’t object to any one of these transactions, why should we object to the resulting pattern?  Robert Nozick went further and argued that any "pattern-based" notion of justice would require continual and unjustified interference in personal liberties.  That was one of the most famous claims in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia; here is another summary of the argument. 

I’m all for the NBA but I’ve never been overwhelmed by this approach.  I agree that there is "nothing unjust" about the Chamberlain outcome but still perhaps we can do better in consequentialist terms.  Nozick’s argument defeats egalitarian leveling but does it really refute, say, mildly progressive taxation?  What if we could tax Wilt a bit and make life much better for the kids?  Without invoking public choice skepticism about government (which indeed is important), what’s so bad about that?  Is it morally wrong?  Wilt is still quite free and we get some social good in return.

I’m usually skeptical of moral arguments that don’t confront the question of "at what margin" straight up.  I will, however, buy this (abbreviated) argument:

1. A doctor is not required to devote his entire life, or even a part of it, to helping poor kids in Africa, even if he could create greater good by doing so.  Personal autonomy matters.

2. The right to keep the product of your labor — money! — is a big part of autonomy, even though it is not always recognized as such.

3. Barring end-of-the-civilized-world exigencies, no one should be forced to part with more than a certain percentage of his or her income, even when valuable public goods are at stake.  There is, after all, no end to good ideas for redistribution, not the least of which is the helicopter drop to Malawi.  We all draw the line somewhere, so it’s not enough to cite benevolence to defeat the claims of property rights and the demand for low taxes.

4. Adhering to such a percentage rule will have desirable consequentialist properties, given the public choice problems with government behavior.  Thus a kind of consilience supports this moral view.

That all said, I do not believe we have a very clear or very scientific answer as to what the right percentage is.  Furthermore "the proper percentage" is likely contingent upon historical circumstances.  I take that as representing a partial — but only partial — endorsement of Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument and of course I reject the deontological ("just don’t!") nature of Nozick’s approach altogether.

Warning to extreme libertarians: Don’t even try to argue that zero is the maximum permissible rate of taxation.  Would you abolish all taxation today, immediately, if it meant a rapid collapse into social chaos?

Warning to social democrats: You are used to citing beneficience arguments to argue for raising taxes.  But you reject beneficence arguments yourself, when you refuse to step into the shoes of Peter Singer and call for even more redistribution.  I want to make you feel guilty about this tension.  What you’d like to do is dismiss Singer with a separate argument and then turn your fire to the anti-tax types and feel that beneficence is always on your side.  It isn’t. 

Here is my earlier post on Nozick’s experience machine.  Here is Will Wilkinson with more on Rawls.  Going back to our earlier discussion, Ross Douthat has provided an excellent discussion of notable conservative books.  I am a big fan of Nozick’s book although a) I don’t consider it "conservative," and b) I like the obscure sections best, such as the discussion of anarchy and government in the first part.

I liked these ones:

The true poet reanimates in his work, in abbreviated form, the complete history of poetry.

The rose: how can it be naked and clothed, all at the same time?

In order to read many books, buy just a few.

I am humble among the serious, proud among the vain.

Here is a brief biography.  Here are more of his aphorisms.

The Difference Principle is not so much excessively risk-averse as excessively jerry-rigged.  OK, we can’t aggregate as utilitarians but then we resort to some notion of primary goods with intersubjective validity.  OK, the size of the worst-off group is itself endogenous to the contractarian process.  But just how big is that group supposed to be?  Can it be 99 percent of society?  OK, people behind the veil don’t know their particular identities, but just how "thin" is their knowledge supposed to be?  And must their choices be purely self-interested?  All these criticisms are well-known.  You might try to shore up Rawls on any one of these points but the entire apparatus is simply too wobbly. 

The bottom line is that you can’t get lexical orderings out of a moral theory unless you build them in upfront.  And without lexical orderings, well, Rawls, like many illustrious minds before him, does not succeed in
sidestepping the dirty mess of aggregation.  The critical moral question is how we should compare the interests of some people to others in a real world setting; don’t expect to find an easy way out of that one. 

Rawls’s Principle of Equal Liberty is if anything on weaker ground than the Difference Principle.  Equal Liberty?  Who says?  At what margin?  At what cost?  Lexicality can’t plug all the leaks in this shaky boat, and no it can’t save Robert Nozick either.

The biggest problem is simply why the imaginary agreement behind the veil of ignorance should have moral force.  Now I like preferences as much as the next guy, but imaginary preferences take me only so far.  That is just one piece of information in a much broader comparison of plural values.  I’m not even sure that imaginary preferences should override the very real preferences of very real people in very particular situations.  Why should they?  "Fairness" is just one value of many.

I read Rawls as a very very smart and intellectually honest guy, determined to resurrect Kant, avoid the aggregative problems of consequentialism, and move at least one step beyond Sidgwick.  He knew how hard it was to even attempt such a success and he makes all the requisite moves to get us there, albeit without, in the final analysis, squaring the circle. 

Matt Yglesias adds commentary; he notes, correctly, that for the current Left Rawls doesn’t offer such an inspiring vision.  I’ll put it this way: if you have to work that hard to establish "Sweden is great," you should be spending more money on plane tickets.

Just to clarify, there are at least three Rawls doctrines: "Justice as Fairness," TJ, and Political Liberalism.  I like the first one best, but won’t cast my lot with any of the three.  At the end of the day I come away thinking that it is Sidgwick (and
maybe Kierkegaard?) who is the central moral theorist of the last two
centuries.

If I don’t fly from London to my sister’s
wedding in New Zealand she will be upset, I will cause her pain and so
that’s morally bad. If I do fly to my sister’s wedding in New Zealand I
will put about four tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which
will contribute to climate change, which, according to the World Health
Organisation, already causes about 150,000 deaths every year. Clearly
that’s also morally bad. Which is the morally correct thing to do?

That question is considered by Will Wilkinson.  Don’t argue the facts of carbon emissions (you can choose another scenario if you wish), focus on the moral dilemma.  Will says fly, the plane is going anyway.  That makes my brain hurt with game theory and the probability of threshold effects and triggers.  (Isn’t there some chance that your patronage, eventually, sets another flight in motion, if only stochastically?)  Under an alternative approach, say you are allowed some quota of carbon emissions; otherwise suicide or residence in Iceland as a pedestrian would be required.

Your net carbon impact depends far more on the number of children you will have than any other variable; remember good environmentalism uses a zero rate of discount.  So people with no biological children should be allowed to fly a lot and people with lots of biological children should not get to fly so much at all.  Is that so far from the reality we observe?

Here is a good new piece on our carbon footprints.

A few days ago I was in a London taxicab when I noticed a possibly expensive purse in the seat next to me.  I climbed out of the cab and without much thought (shame on me) gave it to the driver.  I explained someone had left it there.  Of course I was intent on treating the driver like a decent human being.  But wait, I know I am honest and maybe he isn’t.  But wait, maybe I couldn’t have gotten the purse to the woman very easily.  But wait, I could have posted notice on this blog and had you help me track her down.  But wait, isn’t it my obligation to simply leave the woman no worse off than she was in the first place?  But wait, what is the default point for defining "in the first place"?  But wait, what would the driver have thought if he saw me taking the purse out of his cab?  But wait, isn’t a purse really really important?  But wait, what if the purse belonged to the driver?

If you get up late in the morning on weekends, you must think sleep is very valuable.  And if sleep is very valuable, that means we should go to bed early.  Because if you go to bed early, you always have the option of sleeping later — that is sleeping more — and getting even more sleep than if you had gone to bed late.  (You can’t just shift your sleep into any hours block you want, given the coordination issues.)  And if sleep is very valuable, the option to sleep more must be valuable as well.  Therefore it’s time to go to bed.  Now.  Early.

No response was forthcoming.  The argument, of course, gets at whether "sleep" or "postponement" enters the utility function as the final good.  There are some economic papers on procrastination, but overall postponement, or for that matter its closely allied cousin "preemption," is an understudied topic in economics.

The Atlantic Monthly had an interesting story on why women should settle for "Mr. Good Enough."  Eugene Volokh had some insightful comments.  I am sympathetic to the idea of modest expectations but I don’t favor cheerleading for settling.  More precisely I worry about The Paradox of the Underrated (is Shawn Marion still underrated?  Nope, and by the way Phoenix had nothing to lose from that deal).  If this article talks you into the prospect of settling, settling will start to seem pretty good to you.  If your expectations were too high in the first place you’ll keep your old set of unrealistic expectations (personalities and pathologies don’t change so quickly) and simply apply them to a new option, namely a marriage to a dullard.  "Settling" works best when you are stuck on a desert island and you do not expect so much from your surrender to the inevitable.  The AM article would do more good if it tried to convince people how terrible settling would be.  You just have to plant the idea in people’s minds, as they’ll make their own decisions anyway.

In other words, "have modest expectations — it will be great for you!!!" can’t really be winning advice.

The always-interesting Gretchen Rubin offers up this one-minute movie.  I take the point to be that we under-appreciate the routine time we spend with our family and friends.  Cherishing this time would give us better lives, it would seem.  But why is this time so hard to cherish properly?  Don’t we want better lives?  Are we passing up a free lunch?

In the movie the little girl says that she loved that time with her mother, namely doing the routines of taking the bus.  The routines are an investment in later good memories.

Are our memories determined by the value of the average bus trip, or by the value of the marginal bus trip?  (Of course to some extent it is a weighted average of both.)  I suspect the fun of the marginal trip weighs fairly heavily in our backward-looking assessment of our routines.  Most of the bus trips don’t get noticed or perhaps they are even a drag.  But whenever the pressures of the day occasionally slacked off, and the mother had more time with her daughter, that time seemed so wonderful.

So if you want good memories, should you make sure you don’t spend too much time with your kids?  If I ate chicken in mole sauce every day my memories of it wouldn’t be so special.  (Perhaps we measure peaks rather than computing the area under the integral?)  But now the making and tasting of the mole stands as an occasion to remember.  High total value equals low marginal value and perhaps poor memories.  Low total value equals high marginal value and better memories.  Of course if your total time with your kids is truly low, they will hate you and your marginal time with your kids will be crummy as well.

Rereading Tim Harford’s chapter three, this question runs through my mind.  Numerous studies correlate divorce with subpar outcomes for the children, though Justin Wolfers once told me he was not convinced these studies had proved a causal relationship.  Perhaps divorce-prone families have other dysfunctionalities which correlate with the kids having later problems in life and that the divorce is not causing those problems.

My wondering is more fundamental.  Does a marginal (expected) increase in divorce increase or decrease the number of children who end up being born?  On one hand the prospect of divorce may cause some people to limit the number of children they have.  On the other hand, there is a surplus of women on the marriage market.  Divorce, followed by male remarriage or at least siring, tends to increase the total number of children.  I suspect this latter effect predominates.  If divorce is unexpected, this latter effect almost certainly predominates.

If divorce causes more children to be brought into the world, it is hard for me to believe that divorce is bad for "the children" overall.  It’s better to be born, at least for most kids.  You might argue that "children existing now" have a special moral privilege over "children in the abstract."  Sometimes, yes (we don’t value human life at replacement cost), but if we are asking "will divorce be good for children thirty years from now" currently they are all "children in the abstract."

I believe this defense of divorce is consistent with Tim’s overall take.  Of course a person who fears overpopulation might see this as additional reason to oppose divorce or make it more costly.

Here is the opening of the piece, in the latest Mint:

Sometimes my life feels like a series of never-ending frustrations. The
last three products I bought at Best Buy–a large electronics store–had
to be returned because they simply didn’t work. The DVD from Amazon has
a fatal skip. My wife’s new Mac computer doesn’t function on our
wireless network. I dread any call to customer service. A wait is
followed by a transfer, which is followed by two more transfers, which
is in turn followed by a promise to call me back. The return call never
comes. My billing dispute on my AT&T credit card dragged on since
May, mostly because they simply didn’t find it worth their while to
respond to my letters.

But there’s a happy ending, sort of:

If you need consolation, I have two suggestions.

First, count your blessings and read some Buddhist or Stoic philosophy. Second, take your revenge in the form of lower prices.

In
the short run, one supplier can rip you off pretty easily. In the long
run, it is harder for the world as a whole to avoid giving you a pretty
good deal.

Steven Landsburg writes:

Even if you’ve just lost your job, there’s something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that’s elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?

Progressive taxation, some would say in response!

Tim Harford, however, nails it:

…people lose their jobs all the time for reasons that have nothing to do
with foreign trade. I’d argue that they deserve some help. Why are jobs
lost to foreign competition so privileged?

I am most interested in Dani Rodrik on the same, most of all when writes:

The question of how we should respond to a trade-induced
change in income distribution is not one on which economists can offer
any expertise.  This is a question about ethics, values, and norms,
none of which is part of an economist’s training.  Landsburg’s take on
this is as good as mine–which is as good as that of any person on the
street.

Every now and then I feel a deep responsibility to rebut an argument.  In my view anyone doing policy economics has an obligation to learn more about ethics — much more — than the guy in the street would know.  Would someone doing experimental economics feel free of the obligation to learn some empirical psychology?  Would someone doing trade feel free of the obligation to learn some trade law, some history, and some political science?  No.  What’s the difference?  Economists like to separate the "positive" and "normative" aspects of what they do, but this distinction has not much impressed the moral philosophers who have looked at it nor has it impressed Amartya Sen.  The very decision to use economic tools emphasizes some considerations and excludes others.  The final policy analysis is not just pure prediction but rather it is also an implicit presentation and weighting of both different kinds of information and different values.  So if you are doing policy economics, it is imperative that you think about ethics at a very deep level, and read widely in ethics.  You are doing ethics whether you like it or not!  Furthermore I don’t doubt that Dani already has a deeper understanding of ethics than the (often very crude) man in the street.

That said, I don’t agree with the ethics Dani does discuss, noting that he must have felt he had some good reason to put forward the concerns he did and not others.  (As a rule of thumb I’ll note that those who profess the impassability of ethical terrain have just in fact traversed it.)  I don’t worry much about the procedural fairness if a poor country trades at better prices by paying its labor less or by polluting.  Low wages are precisely the wages we want to see bid up, and if there is a concern for the losers I would not call the issue a procedural one but rather one of outcomes.  And pollution can be a moral crime but attacking trade is not usually a good way to go after it.  Tax the pollution, not the trade.

Andrew Olmsted, a blogger who posted at Obsidian Wings as G’Kar, was killed yesterday in Iraq.  He gave one of his co-bloggers a final post in the event of his death.  It’s very painful to read and also funny and sad.  Here is one of the few sections that I can bear to post.

Believe it or not, one of the things I will miss most is not being able to blog
any longer. The ability to put my thoughts on (virtual) paper and put them where
people can read and respond to them has been marvelous, even if most people who
have read my writings haven’t agreed with them. If there is any hope for the
long term success of democracy, it will be if people agree to listen to and try
to understand their political opponents rather than simply seeking to crush
them.