Category: Philosophy

Externalities across monozygotic twins

Suppose you have a right to genetic privacy. You might believe you do. Suppose you have an identical twin. Suppose the identical twin decides to publish his (or her) genetic sequence on the web. Do you have the right to stop this?

That is from Randall Parker.  More generally, how much do identical twins impose Pareto-relevant externalities on each other?

One model is that each twin benefits the other by finding an appropriate niche and pursuing some degree of differentiation.  In this view, too much "sameness" is bad for each twin.  I believe that is the common intuition, and it suggests that twins will in effect pay each other to be more different.  It also suggests that the resulting behavior of each twin is not quite at that twin's ideal point; if not for the deal each twin would prefer to be less different.

An alternative model is that a "doubled" person is more than twice as productive as a singleton.  For instance, positive reputation earned by one twin rebounds to the benefit of the other.  Just as companies and brands and families carry and spread reputations across collectives, so might signals of a common zygote.  If twins can signal that they are quite similar, perhaps more overall trust (or mistrust?) will be produced.  On these grounds, might twins implicitly subsidize each other's transportation into public spaces, to parties, and so on?

How much more easily can identical twins trade with each other?

Katja has a related post on women and swimsuits.

How to think about refugee policy

Dave Bieler, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I see that you've provided some commentary on Marginal Revolution about refugee situations, but I'm curious to know what you think about refugee policies – i.e. what is the role of government? What is the role of private insitutions? How can different types of institutions and organizations improve or make worse various situations? Do you have any thoughts or links to articles or books? I think it would make for an interesting blog post!

This question may be more relevant soon, although Muslim refugees from the Middle East do not have the best chances of getting into America.  I have read that one small town in Sweden has taken in more Iraqi refugees than has the entire United States.  Here is Wikipedia on refugees.  I hold a few views:

1. Refugees are deserving of migration toleration when possible, but they are not more deserving than equally destitute non-refugees.

2. Refugees nonetheless capture the imagination of the public to some extent, albeit for a very limited period of time.  Their beleaguered status provides a useful means of framing, to boost migration for humanitarian reasons.  When it comes to private institutions, refugee issues may be a useful way of raising funds, again for humanitarian aid, although again refugees should not be privileged per se, relative to other needy victims.

3. Legal treatment of refugees is inevitably arbitrary and unfair.  There is not and will not be a clear set of rational standards for who gets in and who doesn't.  There are better and worse standards at the extreme points, but don't expect this to ever get rigorous, not even at the level of ideal theory.

4. There always exists some pool of refugees who will help the migration-accepting country, even if you do not believe that about all pools of refugees.  Let's take in some Egyptian Copts, who possibly are in danger now.  Some groups of African migrants have done quite well in the United States and we can take in more oppressed women from north Africa.  In other words, "immigration skepticism" may redirect the direction of refugee acceptance, but it need not discriminate against the idea of taking in refugees.

5. Optimal refugee policy is most of all an exercise in public relations, as ruled by the idea of the optimal extraction of sympathy.  Explicit sympathy from the public cannot be expected to last very long.  In the best case scenario, sympathy for the refugees is replaced by fruitful indifference, so as to avoid "refugee fatigue."

See my earlier remarks on sovereigntyHere is an argument against admitting refugees; I don't agree with it.

The Pippi Longstocking essay and gay adoption in Sweden

Thanks to Jayme Lemke, it has fallen into my clutches; the previous summary reference was here.  The essay by Henrik Berggren and Lars TrägÃ¥rdh, is interesting throughout.  It has useful insights on Sweden, statism, how collectivism and individualism interact, what architecture reflects, and why many things are not always as they seem.  Here is one good passage with a different slant than what I already covered:

While it is obviously true that gay marriage remains a highly controversial issue in the US, what is often over-looked is that adoption of children by gays is not prohibited but indeed rather common.  In Sweden the opposite is true: gay marriage or partnership is today relatively uncontroversial (although an opposition of course exists there as well), where the adoption of children by single or couples gays remains a problematic issue.

One way of understanding this difference is to see that while in the US marriage is a highly public matter, and the family a sacred institution, children are by and large seen as a kind of private property, or something to which every adult individual has a right.  In Sweden, on the other hand, the family is a private matter, while it is the child who is the public matter.

Can Swede readers attest to this?  This short BBC bit seems to confirm.  Gay adoption was legalized in Sweden in 2002, but in 2000 16 children were put up for adoption in Sweden.  As in the Netherlands, it seems that Swedish gays are not always encouraged to adopt abroad, given that the source countries often object.  There is now a Swedish film comedy about gay adoption.

You can find the essay in this unorthodox and stimulating book.  

Government is raising the value of a life

The Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a life at $9.1 million last year in proposing tighter restrictions on air pollution. The agency used numbers as low as $6.8 million during the George W. Bush administration.

The Food and Drug Administration declared that life was worth $7.9 million last year, up from $5 million in 2008, in proposing warning labels on cigarette packages featuring images of cancer victims.

The article is here.  If the goal is to give current people what they want, arguably this makes sense and perhaps it does not go far enough.  Death is…BAD.  If the goal is to maximize real gdp per capita, or most other macroeconomic indicators, it makes sense to value human life at replacement cost (and here) and this policy change does not make sense.  I'm not arguing for either standard and indeed I think they both lead to absurdities.  Instead the point is this: theoretical ordinal welfare economics and applied welfare economics, as represented by wealth measures, do not coincide as much as many economists like to think.  This gap becomes increasingly important as health care and safety provision increase, relative to the size of the economy as a whole.

What the Chinese have done is to neglect health care investments (until very recently) and basically maximize gdp growth.  They wanted to have fewer people anyway, so why spend money to keep ailing people around?  We find this horrible when presented in such explicit terms, and yet we admire their achievement of the end of growth maximization.

*The Limits of Market Efficiency*

There is a new paper by James M. Buchanan, here is the abstract:

The framework rules within which either market or political activity takes place must be classified in the non-partitionability set under the Samuelson taxonomy. Therefore there is nothing comparable to the profit-loss dynamic of the market that will insure any continuing thrust toward more desirable rules. ‘Public choice’ has at least partially succeeded in getting economists to remove the romantic blinders toward politics and politicians as providers of non-partitionable goods. It is equally necessary to be hard-nosed in evaluating markets as providers of non-partitionable rules.

Hat tip goes to www.bookforum.com.

The Nordic triangle?

Via Conor Friedersdorf, and Bagehot, here is a discussion of Henrik Berggren and Lars TrägÃ¥rdh:

Conor writes:

Here's an interesting frame for the difference between America, Germany, and Sweden: every society has a different relationship to "the triangle formed by reverence for the Family, the State and the Individual." 

Bagehot writes:

Americans favour a Family-Individual axis… suspecting the state as a threat to liberty. Germans revere an axis connecting the family and the state, with a smaller role for individual autonomy. In the Nordic countries… the state and the individual form the dominant alliance.

Here is Reihan on this topic.  Here is my earlier and very directly related post on Sweden and the Swede as individualist.  Does anyone have a link to the Pippi Longstocking paper itself?

Here is Bagehot again:

(Before you scoff, you should perhaps know that the French–a conservative and statist lot–have a very complicated relationship with Pippi Longstocking as a children's book. For many years, the only French translation available was a bowdlerised version, that played down Pippi's wilder, anti-authoritarian side. There is a moral in there somewhere.)

*The Order of Public Reason*

That is the title, the author is Gerald Gaus of U. Arizona, and the subtitle is A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World.  This is a big and ambitious work, broadly in the liberaltarian tradition, mixing Rawls and Hayek, pondering the implications of disagreement, and experimenting with the idea that morality itself has a coercive element.  It is Gaus's attempt to lay out the proper foundations for a liberal society and he summarizes the hard-to-summarize book a bit here.

Also new on the market is Ronald Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs.  I like the title and I like most of his previous books, but I am not finding this one rewarding to read.  Here is one previous debate on related material.

The Ethics of Economics

Ed Glaeser has a good post, The Moral Heart of Economics, on the underlying ethical theories of economics. Tyler and I also discuss this isssue in our chapter on ethics in Modern Principles.

Even though the predictions of economics are independent of any ethical theory, there are ethical ideas behind normative economic reasoning. An economist who rejects the idea of exploitation in kidney purchases, for example, is treating the seller of kidneys with respect–as a person who is capable of choosing for himself or herself even in difficult circumstances.

Similarly, economists don’t second-guess people’s preferences very much. If people like wrestling more than opera, then so be it; the economist, acting as economist, does not regard some preferences as better than others. In normative terms, economists once again tend to respect people’s choices.

Respect for people’s preferences and choices leads naturally toward respect for trade–a key action that people take to make themselves better off. As we saw in Chapter 9 on externalities, economists recognize that trade can sometimes make the people who do not trade worse off. Nonetheless, the basic idea that people can make decisions and know their own preferences leads economists to be very sympathetic to the idea of noncoercive trade.

Economists also tend to treat all market demands equally, no matter which person they come from. Whether you are white or black, male or female, quiet or talkative, American or Belgian, your consumer and producer surplus count for the same in an economic assessment of a policy choice.

None of this it to say that economists are always right in their ethical assumptions. As we warned you in the beginning, this chapter has more questions than answers. But the ethical views of economists–respect for individual choice and preference, support for voluntary trade, and equality of treatment–are all ethical views with considerable grounding and support in a wide variety of ethical and religious traditions.

Perhaps you have heard that Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian-era writer, called economics the “dismal science.” What you may not know is that Carlyle was a defender of slavery and he was attacking the ethical views of economics. Economists like John Stuart Mill thought that all people were able to make rational choices, that trade not coercion was the best route to wealth, and that everyone should be counted equally, regardless of race. As a result, Mill and the laissez-faire economists of the nineteeth century opposed slavery, believing that everyone was entitled to liberty. It was these ethical views that Carlyle found dismal. We beg to differ.

Why do we care so much about sovereignty?

IVV, a loyal MR reader, asks:

With all the talks about sovereign debt and default, the various EU problems, libertarian rumblings and increasing globalization, I'm mightily curious about one thing:

Why do we care so much about sovereignty?

Why are we trying so hard to declare this patch of land one place or another, and not neither nor both? Why are we trying to identify the people on that land as under one or another jurisdiction? What does being under a jurisdiction mean, and why must that choice be kept out of the hands of individuals? What's the economic value of all this?

We need units which produce public goods and we need people willing to declare their income and pay their taxes and, sometimes, fight and die for those units.  Therefore we need some amount of irrational belief in the idea of sovereignty, nation, and the like.  (Read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities.)  Today's distributional pattern of nation-states probably isn't ideal (I would prefer smaller units on the whole), but when it comes to OECD nations it works well enough.  We also don't know of good transition paths to something better, though within an overarching framework such as the EU such paths may be possible. 

Arguably the whole thing is sustained by evolutionary programming.  We cling to small groups, because we once needed to for purposes of survival.  Political entrepreneurs piggyback upon this sentiment to give us a largely illusory attachment to a bigger unit than just a band of hunter-gatherers or however it worked.  The large is made to feel small, through radio, TV, and local organization of political groups, among other methods.

At the margin, policies which "slip out" of sovereignty, without wrecking the entire superstructure of the nation-state, are usually a good idea.  Such as more immigration.  Diverting $1 million from Medicare to a helicopter drop over Haiti is also a good idea, although it cannot be made politically incentive-compatible on a larger scale.  So we have a simple formula for massive gains: subvert sovereignty, at the margin, without subverting belief in sovereignty.

Elsewhere, here is Bryan Caplan on "the stranger":

What fraction of your "fellow citizens" have you actually met?  Virtually zero.  The vast majority of your countrymen are, in fact, utter strangers to you.  When you tell your kid "Don't take rides from strangers," you don't make an exception for anyone who happens to share your citizenship.  Modern government – and most of political philosophy – is just a massive effort to pretend otherwise.

Bryan's right, but he's not facing up to the need for a certain amount of false belief, even though his rhetoric brings him very close to recognizing it.  If we all regard ourselves as nothing more than "strangers," what will happen to "the cement of society"?  The price system does not suffice and in fact the price system itself requires legal and cultural foundations.  Those foundations arise, and are sustained, only when people believe in something, and it can't be just anything they believe in.  Some of those beliefs have to consist of a loyalty to a workable political unit, even to some irrational degree, compared to true cosmopolitanism.

The wisdom of Katja Grace

She puts together some very good points and aphorisms.  It starts with this:

Do what your heart tells you ‘means ‘stop making up excuses and do what my heart tells you’. ‘Clearly’  means ‘so unclearly I don’t want to explain it’. ‘We’ means different things to those with different political leanings, which helps them disagree.

Aphorisms tend to be cynical because only knowledge you don’t want to believe is short and easily verifiable enough to be an aphorism. People are more inclined to praise long, poorly written writing than short well written ones because it is easier for the former to cheat quality heuristics. Thinking is more fun than reading because it is more like ‘chasing’ than ‘searching‘. It’s interesting that reading isn’t better suited to chasing.

There is much more, read the whole thing.

Should we use the price system for evacuation?

From Boettke:

Stigler reports that he received a letter from Tjallling Koopmans asking whether he had in fact advocated the use of the price system to evacuate NYC in case of a bombing during WWII.  Stigler responded that he had never even thought about the problem before, but upon reflecting on the problem that (1) upon the first bombing of NYC any system of evacuation would be chaotic and inefficient, but that (2) if the bombings were repeated, that indeed he would argue that the price system would be the most efficient way to handle the problem.

It depends on the counterfactual.  It is already the wealthy who have the resources to leave afflicted areas, or who had the resources to send their children to the countryside, in the case of bombed London during World War II.  You could pay a relative to take the kids in, rather than having to rely on the charitability of your relatives.  So very often we already are using the price system, and in a fairly orderly manner.

If you are evacuating a city suddenly, along a constrained road or path, ideally (at least by economic standards, which may or may not be your final moral theory) you wish to favor the people who are young, productive to others, and people who value their own lives highly and are risk-averse.  A market auction tends to favor the wealthy and in this context many of the first leavers in line will be inefficiently old, again with the moral caveat noted above.  The wealthy spend money on the basis of "if I die, my wealth is worthless or worth less because my bequest motive is less than full," whereas from a social point of view the wealth survives the death of the wealthy person.

If institutions will enforce the traditional "women and children first," with a minimum of corruption, that solution may be preferable to the auction.  Men are on average more productive than women in the labor force, but the number of replacement children in the longer run is more closely tied to the number of women than to the number of men.  So, indirectly, favoring women favors men too.

The private sector often chooses the rule of "women and children first," at least when the disaster is explicitly seen as such.  This rule was heeded in the case of the Titanic but not the Lusitania, arguably because the latter ship sunk more quickly and with more panic.

In many other settings, especially where dying is non-immediate or stochastic, the market chooses the auction method.  Think of the market for pharmaceuticals.  In the absence of government subsidy, you have to buy the drugs and there is not always price discrimination in favor of women and children.  Also consider allocation procedures for kidneys, hospital rules for triage, and the sale and resale of fresh water during cholera epidemics, among other scenarios.  What's striking is how many different allocation procedures markets use, depending on context. 

One further note on Foucault, concerning methodological individualism

In my previous post, I neglected one point.  Reading Foucault is one useful path out of extreme positions of methodological individualism.  By methodological individualism I mean the view that "method aimed at explaining and understanding broad society-wide developments as the aggregation of decisions by individuals," as Wikipedia puts it.

Foucault understood how actual historical explanation relies on the use of broad categories, classes, and exemplars, and in a manner which is not logically reducible to statements about individual beliefs and desires.  The writer (theorist) has nothing close to a complete mental model of how the interacting categories reduce to component individual parts, and so some or most of the moving parts of the explanation retain their autonomy at a partially macro level.  The Austrians will kick and scream on this one, but if you combine imperfect information and the sense/reference distinction, methodological individualism ends up as more of a slogan than anything else.  There is a reflective equilibrium to the explanatory process, and micro relies on some macro foundations, not just vice versa, and individuals rely on the social for some of their cues.  Atomistic reduction to the level of the individual in general will not succeed.

The denier of strict MI is not committed to extreme Hegelian views about the autonomous existence of collectivities and it is debatable how much even Hegel himself made that mistake.

I grant that Foucault takes his own method too far in the anti-individualist direction, as did Hegel.

Foucault is by no means the only or even the best path out of extreme methodological individualism.  See this article by David Levy or late Wittgenstein or William James on pluralism, for instance, or more recently Geoffrey Hodgson, perhaps the best place to start.  Here is a quick overview of some of the debates, though it does not cover the best criticisms.  Neuroeconomics, and modular models of the mind, also can be read as critiques of MI, suggesting, as did Nozick, there is no particular reason to stop at the level of the individual in doing the explanation.

Oddly, for all their talk about methodological individualism, economists hardly ever engage in the medium for which it is most appropriate: biography.

A while ago I wrote a review essay on biography and economics.  Here's a challenge: if economics is so powerful, and MI is so persuasive, try writing a biography of a person, using economic tools, and see how much of that person's life you can explain.  It is a humbling and instructive experience and you can read my attempt here.

Economics and Michel Foucault

Joshua Miller, a loyal MR reader, asks:

Another cut on local knowledge: what is economics' relationship to Michel Foucault? Often I see folks like you and Hanson making points that the rest of the social sciences and humanities would call Foucauldian, about the role of disciplinary power in knowledge-production, but you don't seem to ever reference or perhaps even read him. Perhaps he is simply not considered very interesting? Given the fact that there is some history of economics in his "Les Mots and les choses," I'd think there'd be more of an attempt to discredit or claim him.

Foucault is interesting, but use him with caution.  Most of his books have not held up very well as history, even if he succeeded in drawing people's attention to some neglected factors.  On top of that, his theoretical framework is incoherent.  Try reading The Archaeology of Knowledge.  I find The Order of Things to be an insightful but skewed account of the seventeenth century; detailed objections aside, it goes astray by assuming, implicitly, explicitly or otherwise, that structural categories somehow interact with each other in the world of ideas.  It's much more micro and disaggregated than he lets on, but still I am glad I read the book.  This volume is a good, readable introduction to his work.

Perhaps Foucault is best on prisons and hospitals, though again caveat emptor on the history.  His most valuable insight, both theoretically and historically, is that what appears to be "enlightenment" (or for that matter "Enlightenment") is often anything but.

Foucault is important, and he deserves to be read, but I am not sure he will be much read fifty years from now.  I also view "engaging with him" as a much overdone and much overrated exercise, carried in large part by the less salubrious tendencies in Continental and U.S. humanities scholarly discourse.  It is better to simply work on the topics he cared about, using his books as a reminder to consider some different angles.

Did you know that Foucault — at least the late Foucault — appreciated Mises, Hayek, and Friedman?