Category: Philosophy

Does anyone give money to charity efficiently?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Scott Alexander meets up with Robin Hanson and reports from the front:

Then Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias got up and just started Robin Hansonning at everybody.

…One of his claims that generated the most controversy was that instead of donating money to charity, you should invest the money at compound interest, then donate it to charity later after your investment has paid off – preferably just before you die, since donating money after death is legally complicated. His argument, nice and simple, was that the real rate of return on investment has been higher than the growth rate for 3000 years and this pattern shows no signs of changing. If you donate the money today, your donation grows with the growth rate, but if you invest it, it grows with the interest rate. He gave his classic example of Benjamin Franklin, who put his relatively meager earnings into a trust fund to be paid out two hundred years later; when they did, the money had grown to $7 million. He said that the reason people didn’t do this was that they wanted the social benefits of having given money away, which are unavailable if you wait until just before you die to do so.

…Then he started talking about how you should only ever donate to one charity – the most effective. I’d heard this one before and even written essays speaking in favor of it, but it’s always been very hard for me and I’ve always chickened out. What Robin added was, once again, a psychological argument – that the reason this is so hard is that if charity is showing that you care, you want to show that you care about a lot of different things. Only donating to one charity robs you of opportunities to feel good when the many targets of your largesse come up and burdens you with scope insensitivity (my guess is that most people would feel more positive affect about someone who saved a thousand dogs and one cat than someone who saved two thousand dogs. The first person saved two things, the second person only saved one.) In retrospect this is absolutely true and my gibbering recoil at this problem isn’t just Yet Another Cognitive Bias but just good old self-interest.

The post is interesting throughout, and the hat tip goes to Geoffrey Miller, @MatingMind.

The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol

by  Tyler Cowen in

I receive many emails asking me what is my attitude toward guns and gun control.  I would say I wish it worked better than it does (a key point), I don’t think it works very well, I am happy to make those changes which seem to work somewhat, but overall I see an America with lots of guns and a falling crime and murder rate, so let’s focus on what is working, whatever that may be.

I would be happier if advocates of stronger gun control would state up front what percentage of the variation in the murder rate they thought they would be controlling.  I see them as likely to make some dent in the suicide rate, most of all.

I would gladly see a cultural shift toward the view that gun ownership is dangerous and undesirable, much as the cultural attitudes toward smoking have shifted since the 1960s.

I am, however, consistent.  I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.  It is obvious to me that alcohol is one of the great social evils and when I read the writings of the prohibitionists, while I don’t agree with their legal remedies, their arguments make sense to me.  It remains one of the great undervalued social movements.  For mostly cultural reasons, it is now a largely forgotten remnant of progressivism and it probably will stay that way, given that “the educated left” mostly joined with America’s shift to being “a wine nation” in the 1970s.

Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner.  In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.

In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did.  (Admittedly the direction of causality is murky but theory points in some rather obvious directions.)  Our car crash problem – which kills many thousands of Americans each year — is also in significant part an alcohol problem.  There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.

It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.

The people who get this right — it seems to me — are the Mormons.  Compassion, most of all for the poor, means that we should raise the social status of Mormons on this issue.

I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on ideas

by  Tyler Cowen in

What is the scholar, what is the man for, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time?  Have you leisure, power, property, friends? you shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every unproven opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of good will and honest seeking.  All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the highest compliment, man ever receives from heaven, is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels.

That is from Introductory Lecture on the Times.

Eleven weird solutions to the Fermi paradox?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In my group at least half of these don’t count as weird at all.  Yet I had never thought of this one, “They’re All Hanging Out At the Edge of the Galaxy”:

This interesting solution to the Fermi Paradox was posited by Milan M. Ćirković and Robert Bradbury.

“We suggest that the outer regions of the Galactic disk are the most likely locations for advanced SETI targets,” they wrote. The reason for this is that sophisticated intelligent communities will tend to migrate outward through the Galaxy as their capacities of information-processing increase. Why? Because machine-based civilizations, with their massive supercomputers, will have huge problems managing their heat waste. They’ll have to set up camp where it’s super cool. And the outer rim of the Galaxy is exactly that.

Subsequently, there may be a different galactic habitable zone for post-Singularity ETIs than for meat-based life. By consequence, advanced ETIs have no interest in exploring the bio-friendly habitable zone. Which means we’re looking for ET in the wrong place. Interestingly, Stephen Wolfram once told me that heat-free computing will someday be possible, so he doesn’t think this is a plausible solution to the Fermi Paradox.

Once again, air conditioning really does influence location, at least if this is true (which I doubt).  The other ten are here, and the pointer is from George Dvorsky.

Why a coach should be ambiguous

by  Tyler Cowen in

From Jeff:

Remember how Mr. Miyagi taught The Karate Kid how to fight?  Wax on/Wax off. Paint the fence. Don’t forget to breathe. A coach is the coach because he knows what the student needs to do to advance. A big problem for coaches is that the most precocious students also (naturally) think they know what they need to learn.

If Mr. Miyagi told Daniel that he needed endless repetition of certain specific hand movements to learn karate, Daniel would have rebelled and demanded to learn more and advance more quickly. Mr. Miyagi used ambiguity to evade conflict.

An artist with natural gift for expression needs to learn convention. But she may disagree with the teacher about how much time should be spent learning convention. If the teacher simply gives her exercises to do without explanation her decision to comply will be on the basis of an overall judgment of whether this teacher, on average, knows best. To instead say “You must learn conventions, here are some exercises for that” runs the risk that the student moderates the exercises in line with her own judgment about the importance of convention.

The cosmopolitan and civil libertarian core of economics

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is my latest New York Times column, more philosophical than usual, excerpt:

Economic analysis is itself value-free, but in practice it encourages a cosmopolitan interest in natural equality. Many economic models, of course, assume that all individuals are motivated by rational self-interest or some variant thereof; even the so-called behavioral theories tweak only the fringes of a basically common, rational understanding of people. The crucial implication is this: If you treat all individuals as fundamentally the same in your theoretical constructs, it would be odd to insist that the law should suddenly start treating them differently.

At least since the 19th century, the interest of economists in personal liberty can be easily documented. In 1829, all 15 economists who held seats in the British Parliament voted to allow Roman Catholics as members. In 1858, the 13 economists in Parliament voted unanimously to extend full civil rights to Jews. (While both measures were approved, they were controversial among many non-economist members.) For many years leading up to the various abolitions of slavery, economists were generally critics of slavery and advocates of people’s natural equality, as documented by David M. Levy, professor of economics at George Mason University, and Sandra J. Peart, dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, in “The ‘Vanity of the Philosopher’: From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics.”

Professors Levy and Peart coined the phrase “analytical egalitarianism” to describe the underpinnings of this tradition. For example, Adam Smith cited birth and fortune, as opposed to intrinsically different capabilities, as the primary reasons for differences in social rank. And the classical economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill promoted equal legal and institutional rights for women long before such views were fashionable. Their utilitarian moral theories placed individuals on a par in the social calculus by asking about the greatest good for the greatest number.

There is more at the link of course, such as:

Often, economists spend their energies squabbling with one another, but arguably the more important contrast is between our broadly liberal economic worldview and the various alternatives — common around the globe — that postulate natural hierarchies of religion, ethnicity, caste and gender, often enforced by law and strict custom. Economists too often forget that we are part of this broader battle of ideas, and that we are winning some enduring victories.

I did not have the space to cover some additional questions of interest.  These include:

1. Will the move away from rational choice models, and toward a broader and larger empirical social science, including behavioral and neuro elements, nudge economics away from this heritage?

2. How much of the civil libertarian core, common among many economists, stems from the socioeconomic background of (many) current economists rather than from the economic method?

3. How do Indian economists poll on the caste system, relative to their socioeconomic peers?

4. How much will the extreme influx of non-Westerners into American and British graduate programs in economics affect the discipline in the years to come?

J. Coetzee writes to Paul Auster

by  Tyler Cowen in

From a letter:

Finally, a remark by Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: that one goes to bed with a woman in order to be able to talk to her.  Implication: that turning a woman into a mistress is only a first step; the second step, turning her into a friend, is the one that matters; but being friends with a woman you haven’t slept with is in practice impossible because there is too much unspoken in the air.

That is from Here and Now Letters 2008-2011, by Auster and Coetzee.  That excerpt is from the first letter, and I will keep reading.

Questions that are rarely asked

by  Tyler Cowen in

So, my libertarian devotees of evolutionary psychology, you can’t have it both ways.  If feminism is wrong to think we can and/or should resist the dispositions that evolution has given us, then why is it wrong for defenders of the classical liberal order to think we can and/or should resist those dispositions when it comes to our evolved instincts toward the morality of socialism?  Or put the other way around:  if resisting our evolved moral instincts and obeying the rules of just conduct work to generate a civilized, cooperative economic order, why should gender issues be any different?

That is from Steve Horwitz.

What Republicans are thinking on the sequester (one man’s guess)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ezra on Twitter asks for a Republican version of this Jonathan Chait column, which basically suggests the Republicans don’t know what they are doing with their policies on sequestration.  Ezra has himself raised similar questions.  I am not a Republican, but I do like a challenge, so here is a brief attempt.

Correctly or not, many Republicans believe some mix of these propositions:

1. Much of government spending is massively wasteful.

2. Deep historical pessimism is justified, as the United States is sliding into a morass of ever greater statism on the economic, government spending, and taxation fronts, if not right now over the next ten to fifteen years.  Currently a majority of the public does not agree with the conservative Republicans and that is where the pessimism comes from.

3. All recent Republican strategies to stop this slide have been failing (this is evident to the Republicans, although not always admitted publicly so gladly, for obvious reasons).  Furthermore, short-term deal-making and policy trade-offs, even if they represent moderate improvements, will not reverse or even much slow down this slide.

4. There is a long-term dynamic whereby the rich will get taxed more and more in an unstable dynamic, ending in the Frenchification of the American economy or worse.

OK, now let’s go to the sequester.  The upfront costs are not viewed as so high, even on the defense side (see #1).  Furthermore something must be tried (see #2).  Given #1, there is some chance the public might see that government spending can be cut without causing disaster and this gives some chance the public might then support yet further cuts in government spending.  Maybe this chance isn’t so high, but all other approaches have been failing (#3).  Ideally, a big budget deal might be better on paper, but a line must be drawn in the sand on taxing higher earners (#4), especially given recent tax hikes, so right now a big budget deal is out of the question; this isn’t 1986 any more.

Draw up the Venn diagrams, or do the expected utility calculations, and you are left with sticking to the sequester.  Furthermore it allows some Republicans to take a “victory” back to supporters, and that gives a “practical” reason to support the “intellectual” ones.  Keep also in mind that a despairing group is a skeptical group, so how would Republican voters really know or trust that they got a good bargain with the Democrats, especially given the Democrats would have to sell it as a good bargain to their voters?  Who understands baselines anyway?

Here is a related Justin Green piece.

I’m not seeking to debate the points in this post, but rather consider this anthropology.  But if you ask about my views, I largely agree with #1, have mixed feelings about #2 (lately there is evidence of the health care cost curve bending; we will see), agree with the first sentence of #3 (though with a different normative slant), and don’t much agree with #4.  In my view the ranks and influence of the rich are growing, some factions of the Democrats will become more like the old anti-tax Republicans, and I don’t see U.S. tax rates on the rich as having a big chance of reaching unsustainable or catastrophic levels.  (If anything I worry much more about regulation stultifying the economy.)  So I would myself definitely prefer a “grand bargain” to the sequester.  The grand bargain would of course raise taxes further, but I don’t see this as a “slippery-slope-beginning-of-the-end.”

That I said, I have an affinity with #1, over fifty percent of the sequester cuts are obviously good ideas, and we could reverse the worst aspects of the sequester rather easily.  So while the sequester is far from my first choice, I also don’t think it is the end of the world.  I am distressed by the number of blogs posts emphasizing the “seen” costs of the spending cuts rather than the “unseen” benefits.  I am distressed by the notion of agencies which might play the “Washington Monument” strategy.  And I am distressed by the unwillingness of both sides — and possibly Obama will end up as the greater villain here — to make the cuts more flexible.  (It is funny by the way how much Republicans distrust Obama, and yet want to give him that discretion so that he will own the costs of the spending cuts to a greater degree.)  Given all that behavior, is a total shock to think that the public — or at the very least the Republican public in the partially gerrymandered House districts — might not want to trust so much of its money with those institutions?

Would Hayek have favored Obamacare?

by  Tyler Cowen in

In this video Nick Gillespie interviews Erik Angner and Erik is (with qualifications) positively inclined.   A few points:

1. When Hayek wrote, health care costs were quite low as a percentage of gdp.  The same can be said of early Friedman writings (it is startling how little attention Capitalism and Freedom, dating from 1962, pays to “the problems of old people”).  It is not clear how views formed in that era should be extrapolated to the current day.

2. Angner-interpreting-Hayek draws a distinction between mandates — which are allowed — and price controls — which are verboten.  Yet it is hard to have major government involvement in health care without price controls, or should I write “price controls,” in some manner or another.  Third party payments cannot be made at any prices that suppliers might like.  Single payer systems have to bargain over price.  For that matter mandates have to put some limits on what suppliers can charge for the mandated good, including quality limits.  The results may not literally be the same as legally mandated price maximums but a) it is hard for a health care-subsidizing government to avoid interfering with the price mechanism, and b) when viewed in these terms, it is not obvious why interfering with the price mechanism is worse per se than mandates or redistribution.  Mandates and redistribution also interfere with the price mechanism, the former as shown by economic theorems about quantity-price duality and the latter once you think of an income as a price or the result of a set of prices.

3. To make it quite speculative, I believe Hayek — if fast-forwarded into the present — might favor a mix of forced savings into health savings accounts, cash transfers to the poor, and direct government provision of basic health care services for the very needy.  Whether or not I am right, Hayek is far from laissez-faire on health care.  But I doubt Hayek would have come close to supporting ACA.  Most of all, I think he would have been horrified by the lack of legal generality and universality in the different categories of treatment, coverage, prices, subsidies, reimbursement rates, and so on.  I think he would have seen this as a sign of our legal and philosophic barbarism, noting that I am not trying to put the predominance of blame on Obama here.

Here is Eric’s Politico piece on the same topic.

The Browser Book of Quotations

by  Tyler Cowen in

You will find it here (pdf).  There are numerous good bits, here is one of them:

To admire an artist for his own sake, although certainly a compliment, can also be a way of suggesting that he has no place in the larger scheme of things

Jed Perl

They chose a quotation from me:

Effective political ideas are those that can still do good in half-baked form
Tyler Cowen

I enjoyed every page, recommended.  Here is an iPad link, here is a Kindle link.