The Moral Sciences Club | Big Think

Adam Gopnik vs. Jonathan Gotschall on Stories

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 19 May 2012 17:51:44 -0400

As I've written before, I'm a skeptical of claims, like Jonathan Gottschall's, about the power of stories to make us better people. Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker is skeptical too. Gopnik argues that

Gotschall's more central claim—that stories increase our empathy, and “make societies work better by encouraging us to behave ethically”—seems too absurd even to argue with. Surely if there were any truth in the notion that reading fiction greatly increased our capacity for empathy then college English departments, which have by far the densest concentration of fiction readers in human history, would be legendary for their absence of back-stabbing, competitive ill-will, factional rage, and egocentric self-promoters; they’d be the one place where disputes are most often quickly and amiably resolved by mutual empathetic engagement. It is rare to see a thesis actually falsified as it is being articulated.

This seems glib, doesn't it? It also seems that it might be a good point.

If stories prime our sympathetic capacities, why aren't literature professors saints? Moral philosophers aren't especially moral, but that's probably because thinking with precision about morality has no obvious connection to moral motivation. I can have excellent ideas about good free-throw-shooting form without being able to accurately shoot free throws myself. But the idea about stories and morality is that stories exercise our moral muscles in a way that makes us readier to sympathetically inhabit the perspective of others. As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't think this idea takes the situationist evidence seriously enough. The presence or absence of hunger, a sense of hurry, loud noises, or disgusting smells is more likely to affect our behavior than having read a lot of stories.

Anyway, advanced "mind-reading" skills are just as likely to be used to see further down the game tree, to out-strategize our competitors for stuff or status or consorts or kingdoms. No, scratch that. More likely. Any extra mind-reading capacities we manage to develop are way more likely to be harnessed to our non-moral motives, simply because most motivation is non-moral, and we use the tools we have at hand.

In any case, behaving morally in the moment has little to do with sympathy and a lot to do with one's immoral options simply not coming to mind. The norms we internalize edit our options and rank them. Stories are a powerful medium for moral propaganda, and surely have a great deal to with the way in which humans pass along moral culture. But stories can teach us to despise and destroy just as well as they can teach us to love and create. I'd say literature professors are no better than we vulgar plebes because we shouldn't expect stories, as such, to make us better people.

Of course, Gottschall won't like that explanation. Perhaps he'll answer that literature professors don't in fact spend more time consuming stories and exercising their moral capacities than do ordinary folk. We're all reading and watching and hearing stories all the time. That we have lit professors at all just goes to show we're a story-obsessed culture.

But this line of defense plays into another of Gopnik's complaints:

The interesting questions about stories, which have, as they say, excited the interests of readers for millennia, are not about what makes a taste for them “universal,” but what makes the good ones so different from the dull ones, and whether the good ones really make us better people, or just make us people who happen to have heard a good story. This is a case, as with women’s fashion, where the subtle, “surface” differences are actually the whole of the subject. Questions about those small differences seem not to have occurred to Gottschall. There is not a single reference in Gottschall’s book to such students of the mechanics of storytelling as William Empson, Samuel Johnson, Lionel Trilling, Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, or Randall Jarrell, all of whom brooded long and hard upon stories and their subjects.

On Facebook, Gottschall says he tried to reply to Gopnik in the comments at The New Yorker, but it wasn't working, so he posted his reply on Facebook in the mean time:

You sum up my book as a story “that tells us only that we like all kinds of stories.” Unkind. Unjust. And you dislike my emphasis on universal patterns in storytelling. You think universals are boring, and that—in fiction or women’s fashion—“’surface’ differences are actually the whole of the subject.” This reminds me of William Blake’s, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit—General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess." But Blake was himself being an idiot. Not all merits lie in particulars. Trees are really interesting. But so are forests. The question of why one story outstrips another is interesting. But so is the question of how we became storytelling animals in the first place."

I agree with Gottschall that the question of how we became storytelling animals is interesting. But if the answer turns out to be something in the neighborhood of the idea that narrative is the medium of human thought -- that thinking just is the imposition of narrative order on experience -- then, well, that's not actually a very interesting answer. (This is sort of like asking how consciousness is possible in a material world, and then answering that it's possible because matter was conscious in the first place!) But I'm not sure Gottschall argues any such thing. Indeed, this seems to be the sort of thing he thinks it's unfair and unkind of Gopnik to have attributed to him. I guess I need to actually read this book.

Does Andrew Sullivan's Obamaphilia Make Sense?

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 18 May 2012 01:00:36 -0400

Conor Friedersdorf doesn't understand why Andrew Sullivan gushes so much about President Obama given the heavy importance Sullivan seems to place on a number of issues on which Obama has been objectively awful. Andrew sticks up for himself, noting that he is often very harshly critical of Obama on civil liberties, executive power, torture, medical marijuana, and so on. He writes:

I try to see the whole picture - and explain why I think this president has achieved far more than his critics on the right and left believe. Politics is not just about purism, or demonstrating one's own independence; it's about prudential judgment. I made my case here.

I would simply ask: which other blog or commentator has the same balance of harsh criticism on specifics andserious praise for the long-term achievements of this president?

Conor basically replies that he is delighted to admit, once again, that Andrew's criticism on these issues is not only extensive but solid. His problem is that he can't square Sullivan's articulate ire over Obama's stance on these particular issues with his gag-inducing habit of fawning exaltation when it comes time to judge the Obama's presidency more comprehensively. Conor writes:

No other commentator. That is partly because Sullivan is more committed than the vast majority of pundits to the importance of those issues. Seriously. His blog is indispensable for folks who care about these issues. But there is another reason that no other blog or commentator has had the same mix of harsh criticism and serious praise: the mix makes no sense.

He goes on:

I understand why he praises Obama for various achievements, and why he prefers Obama to Romney. I don't begrudge Sullivan arguing for Obama's reelection versus Romney. But how can you think Obama is an accessory to war crimes who should be prosecuted for his illegal behavior... andthat he hasn't yet had a scandal to his name? How can you think that he willfully lied in his campaign pledges on civil liberties... and that he is a man of praiseworthy integrity, which was "reaffirmed" by his changing stand on gay marriage? How can you think his drug policy is so bad that it causes sickness and death - so bad that his supporters ought to stop cooperating with his fundraising appeals - and that he deserves to be running for a "triumphant" reelection?

How can you explicitly articulate all the ways Obama has been as bad or even worse than the Bush Administration, which you regard as criminal and catastrophic, and regularly end Obama posts with "know hope"?

... [T]he appropriate tone to take while writing in favor of Obama's reelection is uncomfortable, grudging support, not soaring praise and admonitions to more fully appreciate his transcendent character. You can think that civil liberties are extremely important, or that Obama is a praiseworthy man of honor who deserves our respect, esteem and gratitude, but not both.

I agree with Conor that Andrew's mix of criticism and praise does not exactly "make sense" if our standard is a certain ideal of dispassionate reasonableness. But Andrew's writing is not and never has been much about making sense in this way. Andrew is a man of enormous feeling capable of reacting to public figures with ferocious hostility or flushed adoration. His reactions are often completely unhinged, wildly inapposite, and rarely stable over time. Andrew falls in and out of love like a bipolar fourteen year-old diarist. Yet he proceeds -- and this is as maddening as it is riveting -- as if he were not an overheated, fickle instrument, as if his vehement mutable passions about public persons made perfect sense, were the unimpeachable output of a judicious internal process of cool analysis sensitive only to the objective features his subjects. But just when Andrew's infuriating audacity or blindness or whatever it is has you ready to punch your laptop, he teases you with fluent erudition, penetrating insight, subtle analysis and measured intellectual judgment. This mix is fascinating. It can be addictive. No, it does not make sense.

I don't know anyone who does long-suffering, even-keeled reasonableness better than Conor. And I think it's a fair point to observe that Andrew is not, on the whole, either even-keeled or reasonable. But I don't know how much good it does to press Andrew to concede this. It's completely sensible to question the inner logic of Andrew's romance with his imaginative construction of Obama, given Andrew's own beliefs about Obama's egregious failings. Yet its worth asking if it doesn't make its own kind of rhetorical sense.

Andrew's heartfelt loving admiration seems to me to immunize his censure of Obama's manifold crimes against suspicion of low ideological opportunism. Andrew loves Obama. Apparently it does really pain him that Obama has not able to find the courage to, say, oppose the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens. (Just think of the poor man's sleepless nights!) I don't see this as a higher form of concern trolling so much as the pure form of rhetorical entreaty which the concern troll mimics in bad faith.

Now, when one adds up all the things about Obama which it sincerely pains Andrew to consider, one does sort of wonder why he doesn't just conclude now rather than later that the man is politician and thus a self-aggrandizing amoral rat who is, at best, better than the other guy. But this just isn't how Andrew rolls, and I'm glad. I like to think he'll make sense of his outsized passions about the president by reminding himself that we are all of us of crooked timber hewn; that politics, like life, is a tragic game; that the most the good prince can hope is that the stain comes out; that, yes, Obama is flawed, because he is human, but he is also farseeing, bends toward justice, and can be encouraged to goodness by our love. And maybe it's all true.

Yet, if history has taught us anything, a great Sullivanian reversal looms. When will Andrew's ardor subside? When will he, jilted, finally fix on Obama with a jaundiced eye? Or maybe this crazy little thing can last. Can it? Oh, I don't know. It seems impossible. He has to end it! He has to! I am on tenterhooks, friends.

Know hope!

Diagnostic Inflation: Do You Really Have a Mental Disorder?

Will Wilkinson — Sun, 13 May 2012 15:28:19 -0400

This lecture on "diagnostic inflation" or the over-diagnosis or mental disorder by Allen J. Frances, the chair of the DSM-IV task force, is important. Watch it. Frances lays out absolutely staggering levels and rates of change in the recent diagnosis of mental disorder and argues that there is nothing other than diagnostic inflation capable of accounting for it. Rates of diagnosed anxiety disorder, mood disorder, childhood bipolar disorder, autism, ADD and more have boomed in just a few years. Consider ADD. Frances says:

The diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder used to be about 3 - 3 1/2%. Now it's 10%. And 4% of kids in American schools are getting medication. A recent Canadian study really indicates the nature of the problem. It was found that -- and this was a very large number of kids, in Canada -- it was found that one of the strongest predictors of whether you had ADD or not was your birthday. If you were born in December, you are much more likely to have ADD than if you were born in January. The only reason for this could be the school year. That the kids who were younger in the classroom, less mature, instead of being accepted as less mature are being medicalized as having attention-deficit disorder and are all too frequently given medication. A tripling of ADD in just ten years.

The ADD birth lottery example nicely captures how perfectly normal variation -- the fact that slightly younger kids will tend to be less mentally and emotionally developed than slightly older kids -- is now regularly interpreted as evidence of pathology. Frances goes on the explain how very small changes in the diagnostic criteria can lead to an explosion in diagnosis. Even very small proposed but rejected changes can create an inflationary shift in diagnostic norms.

Even if you want to squelch the [tendency toward over-diagnosis in the] system as much as possible, it leaks. Diagnostic inflation is like economic inflation: it's very hard to keep under control; it has many causes; not all of those causes are within your control. The book as written may be very different than the book as used. And once the genie is out of the bottle and the book is published, people can use it their own way, which may be radically different from what you intended.

Frances goes on to explain why he thinks the new DSM-V, focused on prevention, will only make things worse and lead to millions more people being misdiagnosed with mental disorders for perfectly normal and totally healthy psychological conditions. This is a terrific talk stuffed with interesting facts and important insights about the nature of the psychiatric diagnostic system and the incentives at play in the definition of diagnostic categories and the application of these categories to healthy people. Highly recommended, especially if you or someone you care about has been diagnosed with a mental disorder.

If you're interested in these issues, I discuss them further in my Reason review of The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder, by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield.

Arthur Brooks and Ayn Rand on the Moral Case for Free Enterprise

Will Wilkinson — Tue, 08 May 2012 18:41:22 -0400

Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wants to help you, a stalwart supporter of the free enterprise system, to prevail in the coming Thanksgivings' dinner table debates. Here's how he thinks the debate will go if you're ill-prepared:

You’ll say something intelligent about how it was never markets that caused all the pain in this country over the past four years, but rather the growing government and corporate cronies who gamed the system. Maybe you’ll throw in some facts about how realfree enterprise rewards entrepreneurs--the only true job creators—and how current leaders are actively hurting them with needless regulation and punitive, uncertain taxation. For color, you might throw in the fact that the U.S. corporate tax rate is now the highest in the OECD countries.

And then your liberal sister-in-law will stare at you. “You want to cut taxes for millionaires while working families lose their homes.” she’ll say. “I saw a little girl living in her car yesterday. That’s what free enterprise looks like.”

Guess what? You just lost the argument.

All the colorless, cold data in the world won't overcome a moral/emotional appeal, Brooks says. So...

If you want to win the argument, you have one choice, and only one: You have to make your own moral case for free enterprise, right from the beginning. No data, no appeals to stats from the Congressional Budget Office. You can bring that stuff in later. When you first open your mouth, it better be to say what’s written on your heart about the country you love and the system that makes us strong and free.

Brooks' claim that one must win the moral argument for free enterprise if one is going to win it at all recalls Ayn Rand, who wrote, "No social system (and no human institution or activity of any kind) can survive without a moral base." Here's one of Brooks' model moral arguments:

“I want to help the little girl, and the poor all around the world as well. Since 1970, the world’s worst poverty—living on $1 a day or less—has fallen by 80%! Why? Was it the United Nations, U.S. foreign aid, or the World Bank that achieved this? Of course not. It was globalization, trade, and entrepreneurship. Welfare can lift up the poor a few at a time. Free enterprise is the only system that will lift them up by the billions, which is why every Good Samaritan must support it, at home and all around the globe.”

Brooks appeals directly to the welfare of the poor, suggesting that the moral case for free enterprise just is the case that free enterprise does more to improve the welfare of the least well-off. This seems to fit the mold of a "social justice" argument. According to Jason Brennan, a philosopher at Georgetown, social justice is

... a moral standard by which some people judge political and economic institutions. Advocates of social justice believe the moral justification of our institutions depends on how well these institutions serve the interests of the poor and least advantaged. The basic institutions of society must sufficiently benefit all, including the least advantaged and most vulnerable members of society.

I've not seen Brooks use the language of social justice. There's good rhetorical reason for him to avoid it. First, conservative hero F.A. Hayek famously argued that the whole idea of social justice is hopelessly confused. Second, conservative hero Ayn Rand and her devotees aren't having it. Here's Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, and Don Watkins complaining specifically about Arthur Brooks' brand of moral argument:

The real battle for capitalism is the battle over the question: Is it moral to pursue our own happiness? If so, then why should we ever be forced to sacrifice for the needs of others? Is the moral call to sacrifice, which we’ve had drummed in our heads since childhood, right?

If you're dying of suspense, the answer is: "No." But it's interesting that Rand, despite the vehemence of her rhetoric, seems to go out of her way to communicate that under capitalism, as she conceives of it, Brooks' little homeless girl will do well. She writes:

The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve “the common good.” It is true that capitalism does—if that catch-phrase has any meaning—but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is: justice. [Emphasis added.]

Capitalism achieves the common good, by the way. But it's real justification is that capitalism is just, which Rand understands to mean, more or less, it gives people what they deserve. It's telling, though, that the rhetorically fearless Rand in this instance gave into the rhetorical pressure to note that capitalism is justified on "altruist" common-good grounds. In Free-Market Fairness, John Tomasi points to some other similar Rand passages in his effort to show that even the most hard-headed of ethical egoists gives weight to "social justice" modes of justification. For example:

America’s skyscrapers were not built by public funds nor for a public purpose: they were built by the energy, initiative and wealth of private individuals for personal profit. And, instead of impoverishing the people, these skyscrapers, as they rose higher and higher, kept raising the people's standard of living – including the inhabitants of the slums, who lead a life of luxury compared to the life of an ancient Egyptian slave or of a modern Soviet Socialist worker.

Or:

Capitalism, by its nature, entails a constant process of motion, growth and progress. It creates the optimum social conditions for man to respond to the challenges of nature in such a way as best to further his life. It operates to the benefit of all those who choose to be active in the productive process, whatever their level of ability.

This shouldn't be so surprising, really. If you're an egoist, the only relevant consideration is whether the system is good for you. Of course, you might have been born poor and without talent. If capitalism is to be justified to the less advantaged, it must be good for the less advantaged. And Rand thinks it is. She doesn't put much weight on this, but she does put weight on it.

Despite their differences, Arthur Brooks and Ayn Rand aren't really so far apart. I think this is clearest in the fact that they both actively contrast capitalism, or the free enterprise system, with the welfare state. When Brooks writes that "Welfare can lift up the poor a few at a time. Free enterprise is the only system that will lift them up by the billions ..." it is implied that we must choose one or the other. And here we have him saying this:

If we fail to make this moral case right now, you and I both know that we probably don’t have more than about 10 years left before we truly are a European-style social welfare state. And then it’s kind of all over for free enterprise.

Of course, Rand had nothing nice to say about the welfare state. This is representative:

Morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull. Morally, the chance to satisfy demands by force spreads the demands wider and wider, with less and less pretense at justification. Economically, the forced demands of one group create hardships for all others, thus producing an inextricable mixture of actual victims and plain parasites. Since need, not achievement, is held as the criterion of rewards, the government necessarily keeps sacrificing the more productive groups to the less productive, gradually chaining the top level of the economy, then the next level, then the next. (How else are unachieved rewards to be provided?)

The problem with both Brooks' and Rand's claims is that they're totally spurious. Both seem to have accepted a version of Hayek's "road to serfdom" slippery slope argument. If this were true, then one would expect that it would be impossible for the world's most generous welfare states to have "free enterprise" systems with high levels of economic freedom. But just compare OECD social spending as a % or GDP with the Heritage Foundation's economic freedom ranking.

By this measure (looking specifically at the public spending portion of the bars), Denmark has the fourth largest welfare state in the OECD, while America's public social spending is in the neighborhood of Israel's, near the bottom, and is a bit less than that of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the other major Anglophone ex-British colonies.

But look here!

In terms of "economic freedom", Canada, with its terrifying socialist health-care system has left America in the dust, as have Australia and New Zealand. But even more damning to Rand and Brooks is that fact that the U.S. is in a statistical dead heat with Denmark, which has one of the world's largest welfare states. Sweden's is even larger, and comes 21st in economic freedom -- well within the ranks of Heritage's "mostly free" economies, with the U.S.

The fact is, there is no clear trade-off between the size of a country's welfare state and its level of economic freedom. Denmark's free enterprise system is as free as ours, and Canada's, New Zealand's, and Australia's are freer while also having more generous welfare states. One may heartily endorse Brooks' moral argument for free enterprise while also endorsing the moral argument for the welfare state. Randians, on the other hand, have at their disposal other property-rights-based arguments against redistribution, even after the slippery-slope argument above has been refuted on empirical grounds. Still, the facts leave the force of those arguments greatly reduced.

Good luck with Thanksgiving dinner!

Facebook and False Consciousness

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 05 May 2012 18:22:32 -0400

Rob Horning, one of my favorite writers to disagree with, has undertaken a stimulating neo-Marxist analysis of Facebook. In this March post he argues that the conception of social relations promoted by social networking sites blinds us to the reality of social class and conflict between classes:

This interpretation of how society is organized — the one that anything labeled as “social” by the tech world helps sustain — precludes an interpretation that acknowledges the possibility of class, of concrete groups with shared interests that they work to construct and then use as the basis for forcing concessions from capital. In the network, you are on your own; its ideology suggests we are all equally points on the great social graph, no different from anyone else save for the labor we put in to establishing connections. This obviates the issues of pre-existing social capital and class habitus that facilitate the formation of better connections and the ability to reap their value instead of being exploited by them.

[...]

But to forge a social class, a different sort of work is required, called forth by a different conception of society, based on antagonisms between blocs (and ongoing fights that require long-term strategies), not antagonisms between individuals (whose spontaneous skirmishes require more or less ad hoc tactics). Think E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, which treats class not as a statistical artifact but as something that’s as much forged deliberately by members than ascribed by outside forces. The social graph purports to passively record social arrangements that emerge organically and thus reflect some sort of true and undistorted account of how society works. That conception discourages the possibility of those plotted on the graph from making a social class. Social media users don’t take advantage of their connectedness to undertake the work of finding the bases by which they can see their concerns as being shared, being in some way equivalent. Instead, their connectedness drives them to preen for attention and personal brand enhancement. One must work against social media’s grain to use it to develop lasting, convincing political groupings.

The idea that social classes are intentional constructions built and reinforced for strategic purposes is appealing because no other idea of social class makes much sense to me. But I'm a little confused by the way this idea functions in Horning's passage. If class is a deliberate construction, then it seems that "the bases by which [social media users] can see their concerns as being shared" aren't so much objective economic or sociological facts about people, in virtue of which they really share fundamental interests, but are instead traits nominated by intellectuals for self-identification so that individuals with objectively diverse concerns can come to see themselves primarily in terms of concerns and aims they share with others. In which case, there isn't a fact of the matter "out there" about "antagonisms between blocs". If the blocs have to be invented, then so do the inter-bloc antagonisms.

In this light, we can see writers like Horning as hustling social entrepreneurs trying to revive a political brand, and an identity associated with that brand, around which people can coalesce and then fight. But fight for what? For those aspects of their assumed identity which they have chosen to regard as essential: their class interests.

But obviously this isn't what Horning wants to say. Horning seems strongly committed to the objective reality of class antagonism, and thus to the objective reality of classes. Maybe the bit about class as something "deliberately forged" is meant to pertain not to the fact of objectively existing classes with objectively opposed interests, but is meant to pertain to class consciousness. If class consciousness is constitutive of class, then we run into "Why constitute the class like this?" questions. But not if class consciousness is just consciousness of an independent, preexisting fact about class.

Anyway, social media and neoliberalism both are alleged to obscure the fact of class, whatever the ontology of that fact. Horning writes:

Neoliberalism has generally proceeded by disguise class antagonism, the existence of conflictual classes, and replacing them with individuals battling other individuals, whether over matters of taste or broader employment qualifications. Neoliberalism freed us, invited us, to think of everybody as being middle class by default; whatever work went into building working-class solidarity, “establishing equivalence” among disparate people so they could participate in common struggles has been lost. Instead, we get to be unique idiosyncratic selves with special unique talents, and our main political problem is getting that specialness properly recognized. “Someone tell me how authentic I am, damn it!” And accordingly, we all need to negotiate our wages on an individual basis; no reason to be unionized. It’s all about social and cultural capital, about your human capital. We are all capitalists, at last.

I have questions.

(1) We aren't unique, idiosyncratic selves with special unique talents?

(2) Who considers "getting [individuals'] specialness properly recognized" a political problem, much less "our main political problem"? (I thought it was unemployment, or maybe entitlement reform.)

(3) If the quest for an elusive sense of individual authenticity amounts to a sort of solidarity-busting false consciousness, does class consciousness and solidarity promise to deliver an authentic sense of authenticity (dignity?), or just higher wages and better benefits?

(4) Are higher wages and better benefits the objective interests of an objectively-existing class?

I guess you can tell I'm one of them neoliberals because my inclination is to cast Horning as just another dude with just another brand with which he's trying to get you to identify by promising the authenticity that neoliberalism never manages to deliver so that he can use your self-conception as a member of the whatever class as a handle by which he, an aspiring voice of the whatever class, can influence you. That's cynical!

Anyway, I don't think I'll be able to accept that Facebook or neoliberalism or pet portraits or whatever function to disguise class antagonisms without a persuasive independent account of classes and their interests. What should I read?

The Metaphysics of Taxation

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:23:10 -0400

A couple weeks back, I wrote a post for the Economist trying to get my head around the circumstances in which tax deductions and credits, and tax cuts generally, do and don't count as government spending. Conflicting answers to these questions are, I think, at the center of the current impasse over fiscal reform, so it might be helpful to try to make our assumptions about income and taxation more explicit. But this isn't easy. I find the whole thicket of questions quite confusing. In my earlier post, I ran through a cartoon model of what I take to be the right's implicit worldview. (Libertarians pretty clearly count as part of the right on this issue, by the way.) In this post, I'd like to begin to offer a model of the left's implicit worldview. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that anyone actually believes all the following things. This is my attempt to reconstruct a coherent position that might help illuminate some of the things folks on the left do tend to say.

Here we go...

To start, it helps to think of the nation-state as something like a massive firm. The combined economic efforts of the nation's population generates a certain "national income," the national firm's gross revenues. Then, our political institutions divvy up the pie and determine who gets paid what. Because the analytical baseline is common ownership of all income, the baseline income-tax rate is 100%. Now, there is a widespread illusion that income flows from labor-market agreements, investments, and government transfers. This misperception is an unfortunate side-effect of a political decision not to first collect all national income in the central treasury before allocating it to individuals and households. To first pool the entire national product and only then to cut checks to households would be an unwieldy and terribly inefficient process which would senselessly reduce national income. So we wisely don't do that. Nevertheless, strictly speaking, all income is a government transfer. The income the government lets us "keep" is best thought of as a grant from the fisc which the state, in its wisdom, happened to choose not to touch before letting you have it.

Thinking about fiscal policy in this world would be simple matter if the quantity and quality of labour supplied by the population were the same under every scheme of tax rates. In that case, any tax rate less than 100% would count as a sort of spending. Unfortunately, the revenue-maximizing tax rate is not 100%—revenue is suppressed at growth super-high rates—so matters aren't that simple. Starting from the 100% baseline, tax cuts toward the revenue-maximizing rate are revenue raising moves. (You don't have to be a nutty supply-sider to think so. Everybody thinks so.) It's only when we start down the left half of the Laffer curve that it makes sense to see tax cuts as outlays. The cleanest way to deal with the endogenous determination of national income by the tax scheme is I think to treat the revenue-maximizing schedule of rates in the revenue-maximizing scheme whatever it might be, as a kind of ideal baseline. Starting from the baseline, changes in rates in either direction count as spending.

Of course, the scheme of taxation is only one among money determinants of growth and revenue. For instance, an extensive, high-volume trade network requires physical infrastructure. Often private parties are unwilling to finance, or are unable to coordinate with other private parties, to finance the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure. In that case, government financing makes sense; the return in revenue will more than compensate for the outlay. Indeed, in that case, the failure to spend can be seen as a form of spending relative to the ideal, revenue-maximizing baseline of an overall ideal scheme of policy. It's in this sense in which it makes good, literal sense to say that "We can't afford not to spend on infrastructure!" And on education, on basic scientific research, and so forth.

It can be easy to get too simplistic about this, though. Public spending is by no means guaranteed to do more than private investment. Indeed, if private investment would do better, and public spending crowds it out, then public spending is indeed spending in the ultimate sense. But the expense isn't the first-order outlay. It's the difference in the return of the actual policy and the ideal baseline, whatever it is. [?]

Now, we're still stuck with crazy endogeneity problems. Whether public spending or private investment will do better in a particular case may be a function of shared beliefs, trust, public-spiritedness, etc. If we treat mental models, belief systems, cultural values, ideologies, etc. as fixed points, we may be able to determine whether public or private investment is more "expensive." But if we don't, and acknowledge that belief systems and policy systems are reciprocally influencing, it may be impossible to identify in any clear way the ideal baseline, in which case there may be no identifiable fact of the matter about whether public spending on this or that costs money or makes money. We're going to have to guess a lot of the time, and hope.

Okay, that's as far as I got. I think I really started to feel the internal logic of it, but then I started complicating things for myself, probably because I find most real-life "We can't afford not to toss money at X" arguments naive. At the same time, I think it's probably true that every political-economic worldview when pushed really does sort of drift off into vague, indefensible intuitions about what is endogenous to what.

So who's going to see The Avengers this weekend?

Social Justice without Nationalism

Will Wilkinson — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:10:50 -0400

I started a version of this post a couple weeks ago, but since then the dispute between libertarians about the place of "social justice" in their philosophy has become white-hot, and I might as well jump in. The debate kicked off with the responses to Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi's lead essay in the April Cato Unbound, especially David Friedman's. Zwolinski and Tomasi of course stood up for themselves at Cato Unbound, but the debate has spread far and wide--farther and wider than I'm able to follow, I'm afraid. Thankfully, the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog is your online one-stop-shop for the great libertarian war over social justice. On Monday, Jacob Levy wrote a typically insightful post, "Against Social Justice," which comes close to much of what I was going to say, especially this:

The Rawlsian definition of social justice is constructed on the idealized model of a closed society, entered only by birth and exited only by death. The sense in which both Jason and John use “social justice” bears the legacy of that deep moral mistake.

The basic institutions of society must sufficiently benefit all, including the least advantaged and most vulnerable members of society.

Like Bryan Caplan and Will Wilkinson (different as those two are!), I think that we who care about freedom should be deeply outraged by the wrongs done by the system of border controls to keep people in poverty. I think this is a central, defining issue for bleeding-heart libertarianism. And the language of social justice renders it invisible, because the poor people being hurt are not already “members” of the “society” whose institution are being evaluated. It doesn’t just say that the harm done to the non-members is less important than the effect on the poorest members; it denies that the former is a consideration at all. When combined with the “justice is the first virtue of social institutions” mindset, that leaves my bleeding-heart libertarian colleagues in the paradoxical position of hiding from view arguably the greatest-magnitude source of state harm to impoverished human beings.

Yet I agree entirely with Jason Brennan's reply to Jacob:

1. You can think social justice matters without claiming that social justice (or even justice more broadly) is the first virtue of institutions.

2. I don’t take it for granted that “society” is co-extensive with the modern nation-state. Contrary to Rawls or Sam Freeman, I think immigration restrictions violate social justice. Immigration restrictions impose poverty, suffering, pain, and death on some of the most vulnerable people in the world. From my point of view, if you oppose free immigration (or something very close to it), then it had better be because you have an empirical disagreement with me about the expected consequences of free immigration. Otherwise, any claim to be concerned about social justice or the well being of the poor is mere pretense.

Jacob says the language of social justice renders invisible the profoundly immiserating injustice of the status quo system of border controls. I don't think this is quite right. I'd say the assumption of "analytical nationalism" -- taking it for granted that the nation state is the relevant level of socio-political analysis -- not the language of social justice, renders the injustice of immigration policy invisible. Now, it's certainly true that almost all contemporary conceptions of social justice are built atop the error of analytical nationalism. As for Rawls specifically, he's guilty of a nationalist conception of "the basic structure" of institutions to which the principles of social justice are to apply.

I agree with Jason (and Kevin Vallier) that social justice and analytical nationalism can come apart. That is to say, there is nothing unintelligible about a non-nationalist, cosmopolitan conception of basic structure and social justice. The obvious difference between nationalist and cosmopolitan conceptions of social justice is that, according to cosmopolitan conceptions, the basic structure encompasses the institutions that shape international patterns of trade and migration, and principles governing those institutions must be justified to the international motley who act within them. This is messy. Analytical nationalism is neat; it's nice to pretend that the basic structure fits inside the jurisdiction of the nation-state like a hand fits inside a glove. It's easier that way. But this sort of analytical convenience is bought at the price of irrelevance to the messy real world, even if we see ourselves as doing "ideal theory".

In Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi calls the libertarian aversion to social justice "social justiticis." The present controversy shows that this is the perfect term. The aversion is more an allergy than anything. For those who continue to sneeze at every mention of "social justice," Kevin Vallier's latest post might help.

Fiction Isn't Good for You

Will Wilkinson — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:45:44 -0400

Jonathan Gottschall says stories are good for us. I’ll soon apply myself full-time to story-writing, so you might suppose I’d find this an encouraging thought, but I don’t. It’s an annoying thought. And (therefore?) I find myself pretty skeptical of the idea that fiction is morally improving.

I don’t mind if fiction is instructive or edifying. It’s hard to see how time spent inhabiting fictional worlds and fictional minds can fail to expand our powers of sympathetic imagination. I don’t mind if fiction does that, nor do I mind if there’s some profit in it for readers/viewers and their social relations. But if a story is entertaining or stimulating or gripping or beautiful, that’s good enough.

This guy, who complains that the contemporary Anglophone novel fails to combat injustice, is the enemy of art. The story may well be the most powerful weapon in the propagandist’s arsenal, but it is rarely to the aesthetic credit of a piece of fiction that it functions as propaganda. Stories don’t need non-aesthetic justification, even if it turns out there are moral dimensions to literary quality. “Art is good for you” arguments almost always get my hackles up. Because what if it isn’t?

Gottschall’s main claim is that "Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds.” Gotschall also notes that fiction can “warp our sense of reality,” and that the lessons learned from fiction can be either bad or good. Let’s talk about ambiguous moral valence of fiction first. Gothschall writes:

[S]tudies reliably show that when we watch a TV show that treats gay families nonjudgmentally (say, “Modern Family”), our own views on homosexuality are likely to move in the same nonjudgmental direction. History, too, reveals fiction’s ability to change our values at the societal level, for better and worse. For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” helped bring about the Civil War by convincing huge numbers of Americans that blacks are people, and that enslaving them is a mortal sin. On the other hand, the 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation” inflamed racist sentiments and helped resurrect an all but defunct KKK.

I think it’s undeniably true that story is a powerful instrument of norm inculcation. The question is whether there is something inherent in the nature of stories that lend them a morally progressive bias. If fiction is equally capable of promoting and reinforcing “good” and “bad” moralities, then it would seem to be a neutral force. If “Modern Family” is making Americans more sympathetic to gay folk, and it is, that’s because it's amplifying and accelerating an already existing push for progressive social change. Stories radically out of sync with the status quo morality will not find purchase in our story-loving minds; we reject these with disgust, like rancid pieces of meat.

Now, I think it is likely that the stories available in our mass media do have a left-leaning bias, which one may or may not see as a bias toward a desirable morality. But my guess is that this bias has to do primarily with the fact that the people most likely to opt into creative careers are unusually high in “openness to experience,” a personality trait highly correlated with liberal political sympathies. These will be people disinclined to help others, through the exercise of their imaginative sympathy, to finally see just how beautiful, noble, and good the aims of the Nazis were to the Nazis. (A pity?) If storytelling attracts a certain moral personality -- if there is something inherent in stories a certain moral personality likes -- that may enough to give storytelling a fairly reliable moral bias, but it's important to correctly identify the operative mechanism.

According to Gottschall, the progressive moral bias baked into fiction flows not from a selection effect but from the way stories as such encourage the development of empathy. “[V]irtually all storytelling, regardless of genre, increases society’s fund of empathy and reinforces an ethic of decency that is deeper than politics,” he says.

Again, I’ve no beef with the idea that stories call upon our perspective-shifting capacities. But the evidence presented that this has a significant positive effect seems weak:

Washington & Lee psychologist Dan Johnson recently had people read a short story that was specifically written to induce compassion in the reader. He wanted to see not only if fiction increased empathy, but whether it would lead to actual helping behavior. Johnson found that the more absorbed subjects were in the story, the more empathy they felt, and the more empathy they felt, the more likely the subjects were to help when the experimenter “accidentally” dropped a handful of pens — highly absorbed readers were twice as likely to help out.

I’m not impressed. In light of the situationist literature, which calls into question the existence and/or behavioral relevance of moral virtue, it’s easy to doubt that this sort of boost in helpfulness to pen-droppers will survive the walk out of the lab. Moreover, even if fiction expands our empathic capacity, everything depends on our willingness to deploy it “in the wild.” If we just won’t put ourselves in the shoes of of those we see as the “other” when it really counts, when the game is on, then our highly cultivated capacity for imaginative empathy when reading books may be of slight moral consequence. Virtuosity at Super-Mario Cart does not a race-car driver make.

What about the ways in which stories distort our sense of reality? As Gottschall writes:

[F]iction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.

Should we be so sure this is helpful? If stories generally encourage us to believe that we all eventually get what we have coming, won’t this interfere with our ability to sympathize with the plight of, say, the poor? "Get a job!" If social justice just is, as Ronald Dworkin has it, our indemnifying each other against the risk of ill fortune, won’t fiction’s bias toward karmic moral balance stand in the way of justice?

Finally, what if stewing in stories makes us inclined to reduce everything to a simplified narrative? Samuel McInerny, riffing off Tyler Cowen’s cautionary tale about stories, writes:

This is one of the reasons we humans love narratives; they summarize the important information in a form that’s familiar and easy to digest. It’s much easier to understand events in the world as instances of good versus evil, or any one of the seven story types. As Daniel Kahneman explains, “[we] build the best possible story form the information available… and if it is a good story, [we] believe it.” The implication here is that it’s how good the story is, not necessarily its accuracy, that’s important.

But narratives are also irrational because they sacrifice the whole story for one side of a story that conforms to one’s worldview. Relying on them often leads to inaccuracies and stereotypes. This is what the participants in Brenner’s study highlight; people who take in narratives are often blinded to the whole story – rarely do we ask: “What more would I need to know before I can have a more informed and complete opinion?”

The “stories are good for you” argument, in addition to wrongly suggesting that stories ought to be good for you, promotes complacency about the cognitive dangers of naive narrative. Writing about politics every day has made me painfully aware of just how pathetically idiotic the “good-and-smart vs. stupid-or-evil” stories inside of which even some of our smartest commentators seem to be helplessly trapped. Better stories would certainly help. (There’s probably no non-narrative mode of thinking available to us.) But stories as such don’t look so great once we begin to see moral progress -- Careful! History has not a plot -- as a process of replacing bad stories with slightly less bad ones.

Game of Thrones image courtesy of HBO

Why Re-unionization Won't Happen

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:17:11 -0400

Matt Yglesias and Timothy Noah are having an interesting dialogue about Noah's new book about income inequality, The Great Divergence. (As are Brink Lindsey and Mark Schmitt at Washington Monthly.) Noah thinks the breakdown of labor unions is to a significant degree responsible for increasing inequality. What's more, "I don’t think it’s possible to make much headway reversing the inequality trend without it," he says. Without re-unionization, that is. Matt seems pessimistic about the prospects of a great American union revival, and Noah really seems pretty pessimistic, too, though he's holding out hope for a few of Andy Stern's ideas and a longshot strategy to "extend legal protections under the Civil Rights Act to union membership." I'm pessimistic, too. In fact, thinking about Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory, a super-pessimistic hypothesis about the prospects for re-unionization just occurred to me.

So the point of a labor union is to prevail in conflict with capitalists over the distribution of the surplus from economic cooperation through the power of collective action. Solidarity is the prime union value because the strength of a union rests in the willingness of individuals to join together, potentially at great personal cost, in order to create a unified force capable of meeting head on the power of concentrated capital. What just occurred to me is that this is precisely the sort of thing Haidt's conservative "binding foundations" -- loyalty, authority, and sanctity -- are good for.

In the heyday of unionization, the Democratic Party was full of conservatives. Indeed, the most temperamentally conservative people in America, pro-Jim Crow Southern whites, were a huge and indispensable part of the Democratic coalition. This required that the Democratic Party remain effectively conservative on social issues. As a consequence, not only could conservative Southerners feel comfortable in the party, but so could conservatives in the Northern, urban, industrial hotbeds of unionization. And these are the people--such is my conjecture--who were the muscular beating heart of the labor movement at its height. Solidarity comes naturally to those whose moralities are built on the conservative binding foundations. In-group do or die! Rally around our great leaders! The brotherhood is holy! Scabs are literally disgusting lowlife!

As Haidt notes in The Righteous Mind, left-right polarization was pretty much inevitable once LBJ backed the Civil Rights Act, leading to the great migration of conservative Southern whites to the GOP. This actually took a good long while to work itself out, but at this point folks have pretty well sorted themselves into parties according to moral temperament. The main exceptions are that the Democratic Party still contains a fair number of relatively psychologically conservative African-Americans and Hispanics, as well as a good handful of lower-income conservative whites. And the GOP contains a handful of relatively psychologically liberal libertarian and free-market types.

The upshot is that an overwhelming majority of Americans with conservative moral psychologies, the Americans best at loyalty, are loyal to the GOP. And the GOP is officially hostile to the labor movement. Which is to say, America's native supply of solidaristic sentiment is now overwhelmingly arrayed against all the pro-union reforms Tim Noah would like to see put in place. Which does not bode well for the prospects of getting it re-arrayed against capital. And I don't think it's going to get any better.

Minorities and low-income Americans offset to some extent the socially progressive pressure of liberal young folk and well-schooled white-collar professionals, but it remains that the Democratic Party is becoming increasingly inhospitable to temperamental conservatives. So those of us with especially strong solidaristic instincts increasingly dislike the Democratic Party, while those of us inclined to like the Democratic Party have relatively weak solidaristic instincts. Finding the idea of solidarity absolutely splendid probably won't cut it.

The bottom line seems to me that any realistic prospect of American re-unionization would require the labor movement to abandon its alliance with social liberals and bid America's nativist xenophobe sexists back to the fold. I don't think anybody's interested in this. So I suspect the future of organized labor will look a lot like the present: sanitation workers and social studies teachers not-quite-viciously fighting America's nativist xenophobe sexists for the right to continue to collect rents from taxpayers.

Invest in Memorable Social Experience

Will Wilkinson — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:54:14 -0400

Garrett Jones, guest-blogging for Megan McArdle, classifies memorable experience as a "consumer durable," since the satisfaction lasts and lasts. Jones writes:

People often shrink from driving to a distant, promising restaurant, flying to a new country, trying a new sport--it's a hassle, and the experience won't last that long. That's the wrong way to look at it. When you go bungee jumping, you're not buying a brief experience: You're buying a memory, one that might last even longer than a good pair of blue jeans.

Psych research seems to bear this out: People love looking forward to vacations, they don't like the vacation that much while they're on it, and then they love the memories. Most of the joy--the utility in econospeak--happens when you're not having the experience.

... A corollary: if memory really is a durable, then you should buy a lot of it when you're young. That'll give you more years to enjoy your purchase.

So it's worth a bit of suffering to create some good memories, since the future lasts a lot longer than the present.

This is good advice. A number of recent studies bear out the idea that spending on experience is more likely to boost satisfaction with life than spending on stuff. What's so great about experience? Elizabeth Dunn, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson's instant-classic study, "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right," contains an excellent discussion worth quoting at length:

Experiences are good; but why are they better than things? One reason is that we adapt to things so quickly. After devoting days to selecting the perfect hardwood floor to install in a new condo, homebuyers find their once beloved Brazilian cherry floors quickly become nothing more than the unnoticed ground beneath their feet. In contrast, their memory of seeing a baby cheetah at dawn on an African safari continues to provide delight. Testing this idea in an experimental context, Nicolao, Irwin, and Goodman (2009) randomly assigned participants to spend several dollars on either a material or experiential purchase, tracking participants' happiness with their purchase over a 2 week period. Over time, participants exhibited slower adaptation to experiential purchases than to material purchases. One reason why this happens is that people adapt most quickly to that which doesn't change. Whereas cherry floorboards generally have the same size, shape, and color on the last day of the year as they did on the first, each session of a year-long cooking class is different from the one before.

Another reason why people seem to get more happiness from experiences than things is that they anticipate and remember the former more often than the latter. Surveying a sample of Cornell students, Van Boven and Gilovich (2003) found that 83% reported “mentally revisiting” their experiential purchases more frequently than their material purchases (p. 1199). Things bring us happiness when we use them, but not so much when we merely think about them. Experiences bring happiness in both cases—and some (e.g., climbing a mountain or making love to a new partner) may even be better contemplated than consummated (Loewenstein, 1999). We are more likely to mentally revisit our experiences than our things in part because our experiences are more centrally connected to our identities. In a survey of 76 adults, Van Boven and Gilovich (2003) found that the vast majority of adults viewed their experiential purchases as more self-defining than their material purchases. What's more, because experiences often seem as unique as the people who are having them, it can be difficult to compare the butt-numbing bicycle ride we decided to take through the Canadian Arctic to the sunny Sonoma wine tour we could have taken instead—thereby saving us from troubling ruminations about the road less travelled (Carter & Gilovich, 2010).

Jones makes a great point about investing in memorable experiences early in life, since you'll then be able to enjoy them longer. (Hey STEM fetishists! Maybe this is what college is for.) When Jones mentions that "complaining about [a stressful travel experience] with your sibling years later will be a ton of fun," he slips past perhaps the most important complement to memorable experience: other people. Experience-sampling studies show that spending time with people we like is our most reliable source of good feeling, and happiness surveys show that sociality generally is the most important factor in global life satisfaction. When we invest in memorable experience with friends and family, the experience is not only more likely to be memorable, because it is shared, but is more likely to actually be remembered, because it will be relived again and again in conversation. Perhaps most importantly, sharing memorable experience binds us closer one another, and makes our ongoing relationships even more meaningful.

It's helpful to know that buying experience will do more for your sense of well-being than buying stuff. But Jennifer Aaker, Melanie Rudd, and Cassie Mogilner suggest we may do even better to think less in terms of how to spend our money and more in terms of how to spend our time. Here's the bottom line:

To get maximum happiness out of time, people need to use it in ways that cultivate personal meaning and social connections. Although the time spent strengthening your relationships with friends and family is likely to bring the greatest happiness, it is also possible to derive pleasure from 1) spending time with people not typically associated with happiness (e.g., workplace friends); 2) engaging in activities that are high in personal meaning or with a strong prosocial component, such as volunteering; 3) imagining happy experiences; 4) increasing your discretionary time; and 5) designing a life that allows your temporal expenditures to shift over the course of life—as the meaning of happiness itself shifts

Spend your money on time doing memorable stuff with people, people.