Category: Philosophy
*The Price of Civilization*
That is the new Jeffrey Sachs book, with the subtitle Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity. Here is one excerpt:
Though I can’t prove that America’s mass-media culture, ubiquitous advertising, and long hours of daily TV watching are the fundamental causes of its tendency to let markets run rampant over social values, I can show that America represents the unhappy extreme of commercialism among the leading economies. To do this, I have created a Commercialization Index (CI) that aims to measure the degree to which each national economy is oriented toward private consumption and impatience rather than collective (public) consumption and regard for the future. My assumption is that the United States and other heavy-TV-watching societies will score high on the CI and that a high CI score will be associated with several of the adverse conditions plaguing American society.
Here is Sachs writing further on TV; here is Steve Johnson on TV.
Capitalist Kibbutz or from Marx to Rawls
The Israeli kibbutzim are surprisingly successful examples of voluntary socialism. Even today about 2% of the Israeli population lives on a kibbutz and they account for a significant share of output; about 4% overall (using data from 2004 from here and here) and much higher in some industries such as agriculture where the kibbutzim account for some 40% of Israeli output.
Nevertheless, the kibbutzim aren’t growing and, under economic and social pressure, many are privatizing in various ways. Most notably, beginning in 1998 many kibbutzim lowered the marginal tax rate from 100% (!) to about the same level as in the rest of Israel, 20-50%. The reduction in taxes meant that for the first time there were large wage differences for members of a kibbutz and, most importantly, there were large potential wage differences for those who increased their productivity.
In How Responsive is Investment in Schooling to Changes in Redistribution Policies and in Returns (free here) Ran Abramitzky and Victor Lavy look at the acquisition of human capital for high school students living on kibbutzim before and after the reduction in taxes (using a dif and dif strategy on early and late adopters). The authors find (from an NBER summary):
…The effects of the reforms were relatively small for students from highly educated families, in contrast to relatively large effects for students from families with lower parental education who had been covered by the pay reform for all of their years in high school. This group’s high school completion rates increased by 4.4 percent, their mean exam score went up by 8.3 points, their qualification rate for the Bagrut diploma increased by 19.6 percent, and the fraction of students with university qualifying scores increased by 16.8 percent….boys were most strongly influenced by the change.
The pay reform produced larger increases in educational outcomes than monetary bonuses for Bagrut diploma qualifying scores, a school choice program that allowed students to choose their high school in seventh grade, or a teacher bonus program that paid teachers of math, English, and Hebrew bonuses when their students did well on the Bagrut.
The authors argue that there are general lessons to be learnt:
Our findings have important implications beyond the Israeli context. First, they shed light on the educational responses that could result from a decrease in the income tax rate, thus are informative on the long-run labor supply responses to tax changes. Second, they shed light on the educational responses expected when the return to education increases. For example, such changes might be occurring in many countries as technology-oriented growth increases the return to skills.
I am less confident that the numerical results can be generalized, although of course the general point that incentives matter is well-taken.
The results, however, raise another issue. The original kibbutz were inspired by a combination of Marxism, socialism and Zionism. In the capitalist kibbutz, there is an opportunity for a new principle. Taxes can be set not according to Marx but according to Rawls and his second principle of justice: inequalities are to be allowed so long as they benefit the least-advantaged members of the society/kibbutz.
Thus, it would be interesting to know if any of the kibbutz have tried to adjust taxes so as to implement a Rawlsian approach to inequality (if not, perhaps Israeli taxes are already above Rawlsian levels.)
Cyclical and countercyclical assets
…recent data show diaper sales are slowing and sales of diaper-rash ointment are rising.
Here is more, and I thank Peter Metrinko for the pointer.
The perspective of the statesman and the perspective of the blogger (or scholar)
Some of you have asked me what I think of the concerted central bank effort to flood European banks with dollars. Ed Harrison noted the Fed is playing it down (no press release, perhaps a fear of treason charges), I believe Roubini viewed it as a hidden forex move.
I find it a striking dilemma and here is why. The blogger in me thinks: “This just postpones all the major decisions. Once the loans are up the banks still will be strapped, and the longer you wait to resolve financial crises, the more they will cost. There is no eurobond and no rapid economic growth at the end of that tunnel.”
If I were Trichet, or some other involved statesman, I would have done what was done, albeit sooner. The statesman in me would think: “This just postpones all the major decisions. But I can’t send everyone to their doom just yet. Maybe there is some way I am wrong and a month or two from now things will look different and we can make another decision then.”
I am never sure how to reconcile these two perspectives. Of course, in real life I am a blogger and not a statesman, for good reasons I might add.
In the meantime, the banks are lobbying the BRICS.
Very good sentences
He was an ironic rationalist who, like all rationalists, had an irrational personal history.
That is from Adam Phillips, on Byron, in a review entitled Stag at Bay, in the latest LRB. From elsewhere, here is an article on how to die a greener death.
Why philosophers should care about computational complexity
In a new paper, Scott Aaronson reports:
One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In particular, I argue that computational complexity theory—the field that studies the resources (such as time, space, and randomness) needed to solve computational problems—leads to new perspectives on the nature of mathematical knowledge, the strong AI debate, computationalism, the problem of logical omniscience, Hume’s problem of induction, Goodman’s grue riddle, the foundations of quantum mechanics, economic rationality, closed timelike curves, and several other topics of philosophical interest. I end by discussing aspects of complexity theory itself that could benefit from philosophical analysis.
Here is some comment on the paper, and whether waterfalls play chess.
Animal rights nationalism
I guess they don’t care about the Turkish animals, a funny position for a group with trans-species (but not trans-national?) concerns:
Animal rights activists in Australia have alleged that Australian sheep and cattle are being mistreated in Turkey and stated they will voice their claims at a Senate hearing on Wednesday, an Australian newspaper said on Wednesday.
According to The Australian, animal rights investigators will present fresh claims of sheep and cattle being mistreated in Turkey to Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig on Wednesday ahead of a Senate hearing into the live export industry.
The daily said Animals Australia, a federation of civil society groups that deals with animal welfare and animal rights issues, has new video footage of livestock being handled and slaughtered in ways that breach international animal welfare standards.
The footage was reportedly taken recently after the group went to Turkey to investigate the treatment of Australian animals for the Senate inquiry into the issue and the independent investigation of the trade being carried out by former diplomat Bill Farmer.
According to the report, investigators said they were unable to confirm that animals documented in the footage were Australian, only that Australian livestock was slaughtered at the Turkish facilities.
The Australians who shipped these animals to Turkey seem oddly exempt from criticism, or did the Turks come, sneak across the border, and capture the sheep and cattle with nets?
Imagine further applications of the principle of animal rights nationalism. Should the nations of the South put “(im)migration restrictions” on the birds coming down from the North each wintertime? Some ideas are too silly to contemplate.
For the pointer I thank Ashok Hariharan.
Very good sentences
…in the wake of the weekend’s downgrade, we need them to govern as though that final victory might never quite arrive.
That is from Ross Douthat, here is more.
Jack Goldstone is now blogging
*The* Jack Goldstone, who by the way is a colleague at GMU. Find his posts here.
Data from Match.com
“Conservatives are far more open to reaching out to someone with a different point of view than a liberal is.” That is, when it comes to looking for love, conservatives are more open-minded than liberals.
The full article is here, interesting throughout.
Addendum: Reihan comments.
Hard Determinism and Punishment
Determinists argue that fault and blame have no place in criminal “justice”. Neuroscientist David Eagleman, for example, made this argument recently in The Atlantic:
The crux of the problem is that it no longer makes sense to ask, “To what extent was it his biology, and to what extent was it him?,” because we now understand that there is no meaningful distinction between a person’s biology and his decision-making. They are inseparable.
While our current style of punishment rests on a bedrock of personal volition and blame, our modern understanding of the brain suggests a different approach. Blameworthiness should be removed from the legal argot. It is a backward-looking concept that demands the impossible task of untangling the hopelessly complex web of genetics and environment that constructs the trajectory of a human life.
Eagleman and other determinists are against punishment but they recognize that incarceration still has a role to play because the public has a right to be safe. Philosopher Saul Smilansky now pounces with a timely paper on determinism and punishment.
It is surely wrong to punish people for something that is not their fault or under their control. (Hard determinists agree with this premise.) But incarceration is a type of punishment so under the hard determinist view, justice
requires that when we incarcerate criminals we must also compensate them to make up for the unjust punishment. Smilansky has a bit of a silly name for punishment with compensation, funishment.
Funishment, however, is very likely to cause a big increase in crime and that is also unjust. Smilansky concludes, therefore, that hard determinists have a problem:
[B]y its nature funishment is a practical reductio of hard determinism: it makes implementing hard determinism impossible to contemplate.
Smilansky has put hard determinists into a corner but I fear that they have a type of escape at least in practice if not in theory–it is the one used by many humanitarians in the past–punish people under the guise or belief that you are really doing them good. The inquisitors surely recognized that it was unjust to torture someone who was controlled by the devil. Nevertheless, if torture is what it takes to get the devil out, then torture is not punishment but treatment…and vice-versa. The record of the psychiatric profession and non-punishing treatment of criminals (and others) is not without blemish.
Eagleman goes to some lengths to distance himself from such conclusions. He says, for example, that
To help a citizen reintegrate into society, the ethical goal is to change him as little as possible while bringing his behavior into line with society’s needs.
The tension, as I see it, is that if free will is a myth then it’s not clear why we should have an ethical goal of changing people as little as possible.
American vs. Russian notions of friendship
Not long ago I attended an evening-long discussion group on this topic, comprised mostly of Russian emigrants and their spouses. The Russians were generally keen to argue that they have deeper and closer friendships than do the Americans. They also dislike that Americans will call their acquaintances “friends.” In response I noted that:
1. Relative to Americans, Russians are far more concerned with defining who is truly a friend, or not. (Though Google+ may change this.)
2. Russians are far more likely to conduct purges of their friends. (“A future enemy” is one good Eastern European definition of a friend, or so the joke goes, thanks to BC.)
3. American geographic mobility has been falling for some time and so we might move back toward some closer and more durable notions of friendship; social networks play a role here too.
Since that evening, I’ve formulated a new version of the question in my mind. Putting aside the so-called “intelligentsia” (a Russian phrase, not one which comes quickly to my tongue), are Russian lower-middle class friendships so much more “life and death” than American lower-middle class friendships, especially among the immobile? What if seven guys grow up together in Somerville, MA, never go to college or leave town, work in auto parts stores, and end up reminding you of characters in a Clint Eastwood movie? Maybe they’re pretty tight, albeit with grudges and perhaps even purges along the way.
The new question is then this: why does the “treatment” of greater education have so much less affect on the nature of Russian friendships, relative to American friendships? Are there other dimensions along which the treatment of education influences Russians less? (Examples would be child-bearing age, taste in sports, taste in food, etc.) Influences Americans less? Other groups?
The Russian intelligentsia will be the first to insist how much education matters in their circles, but perhaps they doth protest too loud.
The Great Fiction
Catherine Rampell, Bruce Bartlett, and Matt Yglesias are all pushing the chart below from a paper by Suzanne Mettler. According to this gang, people who use, for example, the mortgage interest deduction or who have a 529 college savings program are willfully ignorant about how they benefit from government (Rampell’s terminology).
As Bastiat said, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” What Rampell et al. want to do is to make people believe in this great fiction. But there are always taxpayers and taxeaters, even though government has so wormed its way into every organ of the body politic that it is sometimes difficult to tell which are which. (Indeed, part of Mettler’s point is that the government shell game of ‘hide the subsidy, hide the tax’ is often designed to obscure taxpayers and taxeaters.)
Nevertheless, there are dividing lines. In a laissez-faire world we don’t get rid of 529 programs, instead all savings, not just savings for college, become tax-free. A 529 program is not a government program like food stamps, it is the absence of a government tax. (N.B. I am not taking a position here on the best tax structure.)
People who use 529 programs and who think that they have not used a government social program are not willfully ignorant, they are demonstrating a healthy if fading appreciation of the distinction between civil society and government. What Rampell et al. implicitly imagine is that the natural state is slavery and any departure from that state a government benefit. Thus, if the government taxes your saving for a college education less than your other savings, you should be grateful for how government has benefited you and your children.
And if the government doesn’t jail you today, you should be grateful for how government has granted you the benefit of liberty.
This is the attitude of a serf not an American.
*On What Matters, vol. I*, review of Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit is one of my favorite philosophers, and favorite writers at that, so for many years I have been looking forward to his next book, which is now out. The main argument is that rule consequentialism, properly understood Kantianism, and contractualism all can be understood as a broadly consistent moral theory, all climbing up the same mountain from different sides.
The text is recognizably Parfit, but I am not convinced by its major arguments, and I also believe the Parfitian method — any reader of him will understand this reference — does not succeed in all of the new areas under consideration.
The philosophical patron saints of the book are Kant and Sidgwick, and I would suggest also Bloomsbury. Parfit is an extreme rationalist and he thinks (hopes?) we can find, and agree upon, the right answers to moral questions. (At the same time he deeply fears that we cannot, and he is a philosophic conservative as Keynes was.) What’s missing is Hume, not the Hume of is-ought worries but the Hume who came to terms with the tensions between the arguments of philosophy and the experience of everyday human life.
My favorite features of the Parfit book include the early comparison of Kant and Sidgwick and the general concern with the frequency and intensity of moral disagreement.
Parfit at great length discusses optimific principles, namely which specifications of rule consequentialism and Kantian obligations can succeed, given strategic behavior, collective action problems, non-linearities, and other tricks of the trade. The Kantian might feel that the turf is already making too many concessions to the consequentialists, but my concern differs. I am frustrated with this very long and very central part of the book, which cries out for formalization or at the very least citations to formalized game theory.
If you’re analyzing a claim such as — “It is wrong to act in some way unless everyone could rationally will it to be true that everyone believes such acts to be morally permitted” (p.20) — words cannot bring you very far, and I write this as a not-very-mathematically-formal economist.
Parfit is operating in the territory of solution concepts and game-theoretic equilibrium refinements, but with nary a nod in their direction. By the end of his lengthy and indeed exhausting discussions, I do not feel I am up to where game theory was in 1990.
I read the standard game-theoretic results as implying that ethics is a far more indeterminate enterprise than Parfit might like to see. Any particular specification of rule consequentialism tends to require increasingly baroque refinements to cover all the different possible kinds of situations. At the end we’re not left with much in the way of a rule at all, other than a general injunction to tell people to do something good and then to rejigger the rule itself, or complicate it with more contingencies, to cover the required ground.
To pose a simple example: “maximize your marginal impact” won’t as an injunction address a lot of environmental problems. “Maximize your average impact” fails in cases where you are truly decisive. What might other more complex rules be, and what are the expectations those rules are making about the behavior of others, what you infer from their behavior, what they infer from your inference, and so on. The path out of these boxes takes us very far away from a rules concept that say Sidgwick might have found intuitive.
Hume has been locked out of the room and he is not allowed to re-enter in the form of Parfit having a dialogue with Cho and Kreps.
Now maybe, just maybe, that game-theoretic messiness does not have to be fatal for rule-consequentialism. Still, I propose a rewrite. Cut or severely limit the hundreds of pages on this topic, start with what game theory already is showing, describe that mess in philosophic, conceptual terms, and then consider whether that mess is compatible with the analogous messes found in Kantianism and contractualism, Maybe it can be shown that they are (broadly) the same mess. Nonetheless, such a collection of messes may be surrounding the same mountain but they will not scale it and Parfit would have to gaze once again into the abyss of, what is to him, ethical nihilism. (Cut back to David Hume for a different attitude. Perhaps Parfit’s very strong philosophic and personal desire to succeed and solve the whole problem draws him from the path that will get us up the mountain some small degree.)
For these reasons I see the biggest and most central part of the book as a failure, possibly wrong but more worryingly “not even wrong” and simply missing the questions defined by where the frontier — choice theory and not just philosophic ethics — has been for some time.
On other points, the criticisms of subjective and desire-based theories are good, but I view Parfit’s conclusions as already having been established.
The talk of Kantian dignity, and of “treating people as a mere means” I do not think can be well-defined. I kept on wanting to see the Marginal Revolution (the real one, the 1871 one) inform this discussion.
I very much agree with Parfit’s argument that no one — not even evil people — should deserve to suffer. I also agree with Parfit’s notion of the irreducibly normative.
Until the material on consequentialism is nailed, I don’t think the integration with contractualism can work.
I would describe the Parfitian method as “the postulation of bold, minimalist claims, explored by the use of brilliant hypotheticals and counterexamples.” In Reasons and Persons the Parfitian method works because the potential for philosophic vagueness is limited by the vividness of the counterfactual (or real world) examples. Most readers of that book are still thinking about split brains, the Repugnant Conclusion, and Future Tuesday Indifference, among numerous other examples. You could question whether all of the terms were pinned down rigorously, but you still knew that the thought experiment was making you rethink some of your priors. In the subject areas of On What Matters the semantics are too slack, too open to multiple interpretation, and too many of the central concepts cry out for formalization. There are not compelling new metaphors and examples to pin down the discourse. Parfit’s greatest strength is as an imaginer, often outside of traditional philosophic dimensions, and yet here he is so concerned with justifying his disagreements with his peers and colleagues. Their ghosts and comments and discourses are shackling him, and if you visit the best pages of Reasons and Persons you will see they hardly mention the names of other philosophers at all, much less current philosophers.
I do not wish to put you off Parfit. He is a philosopher of major importance and, non-trivially, one of the most philosophical philosophers, perhaps ever. He lives, thinks, feels, breathes, and exudes philosophy in a way which is, in and of itself, a major contribution to human thought and being. Reading him is an unforgettable and illuminating experience. His best arguments have great real world import.
It is stunning to read the last three pages of the preface, which list everybody who gave him comments. It’s a long list, but I’m not sure it was the right list to have chosen.
Addendum: Here is Peter Singer’s review. Here is a review from Constantine Sandis.
The utility function
Wimbledon’s queuing public welcomes the abuse. In fact, the experience is such a delight that some daydream about it all year.
“We get to spend time together—no husbands, no children, no after-school clubs,” said Suzanne Pyefinch, who has queued for 27 years with her sister, Michelle, and seen everyone from Bjorn Borg to Roger Federer. Last weekend she was cooking sausages by her tent.
“Our bacon went off, and we had a bit of a panic,” she said. “The ice melted, and it just went funny in the car. But the important things are done. We’ve got the Pimm’s, so we’re happy.”
Ms. Pyefinch said she was still recovering from an encounter with a snorer. “That guy snoring last night, it was a song—fantastic, absolutely fantastic,” she said. “But you just get on with it. We all look like rubbish at the end of the two weeks, but we’ve had the greatest time ever.”
The article is here (interesting throughout) and for the pointer I thank John Chilton.