The Compleat Will Wilkinson

Sharing the spoils

ww@willwilkinson.net (W.W. | IOWA CITY) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:59:16 -0800

JONATHAN HAIDT, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, and one of our most original and stimulating thinkers about the psychology of politics, discusses some recent research on deep-seated human intuitions about distributional fairness. The gist of the experiments with three-year-olds and ropes and cups of marbles which Mr Haidt discusses is that the impulse to equalise unequal shares is activated only when the kids sense that marble production is the consequence of joint effort. "[T]he 'share-the-spoils' button is not pressed by the mere existence of inequality", Mr Haidt notes. "It is pressed when two or more people collaborated to produce a gain. Once the button is pressed in both brains, both parties willingly and effortlessly share."

Mr Haidt then turns to Barack Obama's statement about fairness that I considered in a recent post:

So now let’s look at a key line in President Obama’s State of the Union address: “we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.” The president is making three arguments about fairness in this one sentence, but do any of them press the “share-the-spoils” button? If you think that the economy is like a giant marble dispenser with a single rope, then you’d probably agree that if everyone does their “fair share” and pulls on the rope as hard as they can, then everyone is entitled to a “fair share” in the nation’s wealth. But do Americans perceive the economy as a giant collaborative project?

Mr Haidt surmises that Americans of earlier generations, who experienced the Great Depression and the second world war and the cold war together did see their political economy as "a vast and sustained communal pull". This kept the collective "share-the-spoils" button pressed, Mr Haidt suggests, perhaps accounting for the low-inequality "great compression" decades of the mid-20th century. But it would appear that over the past few decades of rising inequality the national finger has come off the national button. Mr Obama's approach, Mr Haidt argues, isn't helping:

Unfortunately, President Obama promised he would not raise taxes on anyone but the rich. He and other Democrats have also vowed to “protect seniors” from cuts, even though seniors receive the vast majority of entitlement dollars. The president is therefore in the unenviable position of arguing that we’re in big trouble and so a small percentage of people will have to give more, but most people will be protected from sacrifice. This appeal misses the shared-sacrifice button completely. It also fails to push the share-the-spoils button. When people feel that they’re all pulling on different ropes, they don’t feel entitled to a share of other people’s wealth, even when that wealth was acquired by luck.

It's worth emphasising that, in any case, tax progressivity is not a very effective spoils-sharing mechanism, as this chart from Lane Kenworthy's canonical post on the subject illustrates:

Rich countries that succeed in achieving low levels of inequality do so by taxing the whole population rather more heavily than in America, usually through relatively regressive consumption taxes, and then transferring a relatively generous portion of tax revenues to those near the bottom of the income distribution. American inequality is so high not because its taxes aren't progressive enough. It's so high because middle-class Americans are taxed too lightly to finance really serious progressive transfers. And this is why I'm sceptical of Mr Haidt's prescription to Democrats:

If the Democrats really want to get moral psychology working for them, I suggest that they focus less on distributive fairness—which is about whether everyone got what they deserved—and more on procedural fairness—which is about whether honest, open and impartial procedures were used to decide who got what. If there’s a problem with the ultra-rich, it’s not that they have too much wealth, it’s that they bought laws that made it easy for them to gain and keep so much more wealth in recent decades.

Again, suppose significant inequality-reduction requires government taking a higher percentage of overall GDP in taxes, in large part through higher taxes on the middle class. It's hard to see how emphasising the procedural unfairness of the "ultra-rich" rigging the rules to their benefit would help make the American middle class more amenable to paying more in taxes. Indeed, an emphasis on the idea that the rich have benefitted from rigged rules would seem to encourage a sense that the rich have more than they deserve and should pay more back into the system—at least until fairness is restored to the rules of the game. As far as I can tell, Mr Obama has immunised all but the rich from higher taxes because he is focused on procedural injustice. The reason this won't in the end lead to more equal spoils sharing is that it encourages the sense that the middle class has been unfairly exploited by the rule-rigging ultra-rich, which I would think is anathema to the goal of getting the middle class to sign on to a heavy consumption tax.

As a philosophical matter, I believe that we ought to worry primarily about procedural fairness. But procedural fairness is not entirely independent of distributional concerns. Procedural liberal philosophers, such as the late John Rawls, decry large inequalities in wealth not because such unequal patterns of holdings are inherently objectionable, but because unequal economic power translates into unequal political power, rendering unfair the procedures of democratic decision-making which ultimately determine the rules of the game. The ultra-rich are able to "buy laws" that work to their exclusive advantage because they have too much wealth. That's the idea, anyway. But if, as a matter of fact, high American inequality is a consequence not so much of rigged rules that benefit the rich, but because of a general failure to tax the middle-class at a level sufficient to finance significantly equalising progressive transfers, then ultra-rich rule-rigging would seem to be orthogonal to the real question: why the middle-class median voter won't support higher taxes to fund a more egalitarian welfare state. I think part of the answer is that huge numbers of middle-class Americans think downward redistribution from the middle to lower class is unfair precisely because the relatively poor are not perceived to be pulling their weight in the collaborative endeavour of American society.

Super for democracy?

ww@willwilkinson.net (W.W. | IOWA CITY) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 06:55:41 -0800

SHELDON ADELSON, a billionaire casino tycoon, is reportedly set to fritter away another $10m on the Newt Gingrich-affiliated Winning the Future superPAC. Foster Friess, a fabulously rich stock-picker and Santorum-supporting superPac backer, recently made waves with a dumb old joke about the prophylactic qualities of an aspirin held fast between a lady's knees. After weeks of sleepless nights, a heavy-hearted Barack Obama recently endorsed an affiliated superPAC with the greatest imaginable reluctance, and will no doubt bitterly regret every cent it spends on his behalf. Of course you know that Stephen Colbert, America's greatest political satirist, has his own superPAC. And now some folks claiming the mantle of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) have started a superPAC to help support ideologically congenial candidates.

The Citizens United decision, which spawned the superPAC, was hailed by some on the left as the death-knell of democracy. Maybe in the end we'll see mega-bucks buying the election through a barrage of brainwashing TV spots. But so far, Mr Adelson's mega-bucks have helped keep the heat on Mitt Romney, even if it hasn't much helped Mr Gingrich. Rick Perry poured millions into buying prime airtime and came up dry as west Texas. Team Romney has outspent Team Santorum to the tune of tens of millions, but that hasn't kept Mr Santorum from taking the lead both nationally and in Mr Romney's native Michigan. We'll see if Mr Romney's planned anti-Santorum ad blitz in Michigan will help him snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Mr Santorum has rather less baggage to unpack than did Mr Gingrich, so I have my doubts. Thus far, the GOP contest seems to support (the real) Schumpeter's timeless adage that "The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette."

Meanwhile, Mr Colbert's satirical superPAC and the burgeoning OWS superPAC offer us a glimmer of the democratic promise of unlimited spending on political speech. We of the 99% don't have Adelson- or Friess-sized fortunes to throw around. But, as Mr Colbert demonstrated, a bunch of people donating small sums can raise a goodly chunk of change and use it effectively to make a point, even if the point is that Super PACs are absurd. As unaffiliated activists get the hang of their new corporate freedoms, I predict we'll see an efflorescence of creative political speech: documentaries, viral videos, inventively powerful commercials, and plenty more beyond the reach of prediction. The wealthiest among us are always best able to work around onerous regulations. The Citizens United decision's deregulation of spending on campaign-season political speech certainly did make it simpler for billionaires to throw money at candidates, but it also makes it much easier for the rest of us to pool our resources and talents in the service of saying what we want to say, the way we want to say it, about the politicians bidding to rule us. So get cracking, people.

Taming the Wandering Mind

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 17:56:03 -0800

This lovely Hanif Kureishi piece on the often misguided drive to tame the wandering mind struck a chord with me. This is familiar:

My son, who can skip and sing, found it difficult, for a long time, to read and write at the level of others his age. At primary school he was castigated, even insulted and punished, for his inability. After experts were called in, he was investigated and berated some more, and finally labeled dyslexic and dyspraxic.

There is, at least, some relief in diagnosis. One is not alone but belongs to a community of others who seem to have a similar condition. But can the inability to do a particular thing be described as a “condition” at all? Would the fact that I can’t do the tango, read music or speak Russian be considered a “condition”? Is it a failure of my development? Am I ill?

I've been diagnosed with a fairly serious case of "adult ADHD," but I am convinced that this is mostly a hand-waving, pseudo-scientific way of saying that my constitution leaves me ill-suited to perform certain tasks under certain conditions. And it turns out that many of the opportunities available to people with my interests and education require performing those tasks under those conditions. This mismatch between these opportunities and my--what's the gee-whiz word?--my neurotype is the problem, not my neurotype per se. There is nothing really wrong with me. Kureishi is right to suggest that the inability to tango or read music or speak Russian isn't a condition, or a failure of development, or an illness. If you find yourself needing to tango or read music or speak Russian, then it's a problem. The problem goes away if one removes from one's life the need to do what one can't do, or can't do without too much pain. Drugs that make hard things easier can help. But reshaping one's life to work with rather than against the grain of one's constitution can help even more.

In America, however, it's tough to feel at ease with this thought. Self-accommodation often looks too much like failure. Our culture is relentless about self-improvement, makes of it a moral imperative. Can you not pay attention? Well, you'd better! Have some drugs. Do you not work well under deadline pressure? Try harder. Make yourself. Have some grit. Gut it out. Get it done. But why?

As Kureishi says:

For me, now, things do get done; books are finished, and other projects are started that are also finished. They take the time they take, and the breaks are as important as the continuities. Only a fool would think that someone should be able to bear boredom and frustration for long hours at a time and that this would be an achievement.

Also, this:

You could say that attention needs to be paid to intuition; that one can learn to attend to the hidden self, and there might be something there worth listening to. If the Ritalin boy prefers obedience to creativity, he may be sacrificing his best interests in a way that might infuriate him later. A flighty mind might be going somewhere.

Reconciling oneself to the fact that projects "take the time they take" can be a necessary step in finishing projects at all. My mind is not simply prone to distraction, it is prone to rebellion. The wrong kind of pressure makes it resist its own commands, sends it spinning out of its own control. Bearing down, reining in, whipping harder doesn't get "me" back on track so much as set me against myself in a showdown I always lose winning. Better to just glide on the thermal of whim until the destination once again comes into sight and a smooth approach becomes finally possible.

Not to say that one can drift one's way to success. Aims must be fixed and kept in mind, even if one knows it's worse than useless to charge right at them. One must develop a sense of one's attention as one develops a sense of a powerful but skittish horse, calmly riding wide of known dangers. In other words:

In the end, a person requires a method. He must be able to distinguish between creative and destructive distractions by the sort of taste they leave, whether they feel depleting or fulfilling. And this can work only if he is, as much as possible, in good communication with himself — if he is, as it were, on his own side, caring for himself imaginatively, an artist of his own life.

Starting an exciting new "productivity system" or upping the dosage on the Adderall may not hurt, but it also may not help, because these are not, in the end, the methods persons like Kureishi and I require. We need to reconcile ourselves to our own temperaments, stop trying to fight or drug ourselves into submission, and instead, as Kureishi says, get on our own side and allow ourselves to care for ourselves in way the way we need in order to get things done. One virtue of this approach is that one will tend to feel more intimate with, less alienated from, what one finally manages to do.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Young Lennon

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:38:19 -0800

Request from a Twitter follower contest.

Taking welfare and hating it

ww@willwilkinson.net (W.W. | IOWA CITY) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:53:58 -0800

AN ARTICLE in Sunday's New York Times by Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff on the expanding scope of the American "safety net" has generated some interesting comment. Government transfers flowing to middle-income households have increased relative to those going to lower-income households, as Messrs Appelbaum and Gebeloff maintain. However, as Mike Konczal and James Kwak have pointed out, much of the change may be due less to the creeping reach and open-handedness of the welfare state and more due to (a) the mid-1990s reduction in welfare benefits, (b) the fact that the huge baby-boom cohort has aged into Social Security and Medicare eligibility, (c) the rising cost of health care, and (d) the current recession, which accounts for recent, large and putatively temporary increases in the scope and generosity of earned-income-tax-credit and unemployment benefits.

These points are well-taken, though it is important to note, as Casey Mulligan does, that it's a mistake to think that relaxing eligibility requirements and increasing benefits during a recession is just the safety net "automatically" doing its job. This is an elective expansion of the safety net. Moreover, Mr Mulligan notes that eligibility requirements for some programmes have been relaxed generally, and it's seldom politically attractive to ratchet programmes back once they've been ratcheted up. So it appears Mr Kwak is incorrect when he maintains, "The idea that politicians have expanded the safety net is just not true, with the exception of the Medicare prescription drug benefit and an expansion in Medicaid that hasn’t taken effect yet."

More interesting than these wonkish details are Messrs Appelbaum and Gebeloff's miniature portraits of the uneasiness expressed by middle-class Americans who depend on government transfers. Mostly, they depict ordinary folks who would rather go without government assistance, but are anxiously baffled about how they would manage without it. Take the case of Gordy Peterson:

Gordy Peterson, 62, who has used a wheelchair for 30 years since a construction accident, has reluctantly reached a similar conclusion.
“I’m a conservative,” he said by way of introducing himself. He built his own house before his injury and paid for it in cash. He still thinks the government should operate that way. He never intended to depend on federal aid and said he sometimes felt guilty about it.
But for the last three decades, he has received a regular check from the Social Security disability insurance program, and Medicare has helped to pay his medical bills.
[...]
Mr. Peterson, an easygoing man who looks down when he thinks and smiles sheepishly when he offers an opinion, looked down after completing the story of his own dependence on the safety net.
“It’s hard to beat up on the government when they’ve been so good to you,” he finally said. “I’ve never really thought about it, I guess.”

Or take the case of Ki Gulbranson, whose family has benefitted from relaxed earned-income-tax-credit eligibility rules:

Instead [of paying more in taxes, Mr Gulbranson] said he would rather give up the earned-income credit the family now receives and start paying for school lunches for his children.
“I don’t demand that the government does this for me,” he said. “I don’t feel like I need the government.”
How about Social Security? And Medicare? Can he imagine retiring without government help?
“I don’t think so,” he said. “No. I don’t know. Not the way we expect to live as Americans.”

I think some readers detect a lightly mocking tone in this article, a subtle condescension toward the likes of Messrs Peterson and Gulbranson, who would like to do without government help, but can't quite see how that would work. I do think there's a whiff of this, though I doubt it's intentional. Mostly I find a faithful depiction of a common and interesting conflict within many Americans between their de facto dependence on government transfers and their closely-held ideals of independence and self-reliance.

To understand all this, I think it's important to acknowledge that our so-called "social insurance" programmes, such as Social Security and Medicare, produce a sense of dependency by design. Dependency is precisely what makes them politically self-reinforcing and thus dependable—credible as a sort of insurance. But, like it or not, many Americans do find this dependency humiliating. When it is understood that these programmes, as presently constituted, are fiscally unsustainable, the humiliation of dependency is often joined by the fear that one may not be able to really depend on them after all, or by guilt that one is in effect free-riding off future generations, who will have to pay more and get less in return. And then, on top of it all, there is frustration over the fact that one hasn't a clue what to do about any of it.

Defenders of the massive New Deal-Great Society entitlements are inclined to see hypocrisy or thick-headedness in those who oppose in principle programmes on which they in fact depend. A more generous way to understand this phenomenon is to acknowledge that the New Deal-Great Society social insurance institutions have proved successful in engendering economic dependence and, thereby, self-reinforcing political support, but they have failed to engender a corresponding shift in America's culture of self-reliance. This has left many Americans feeling divided against themselves. Instead of giving in to the ideal of in-it-together mutual dependence, millions have instead become almost manically vehement in their profession of the ideals of independence and self-responsibility.

One argument for transforming Social Security and Medicare into Singapore-style forced savings programmes is that a system which relies primarily on intra-personal transfers better suits America's ingrained ethos of individual responsibility and would thus help resolve the cognitive and emotional dissonance created by the status-quo system. We will never be Danes and we might as well accept it. I would add the conjecture that helping Americans find a sort-of inner political peace by redesigning the safety net to go with rather than against our culture's grain would reduce the felt need to lash out against the "socialism" of the residual interpersonal redistribution required to make the safety net really robust for all.

What's America's real crime rate?

ww@willwilkinson.net (W.W. | IOWA CITY) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 06:54:56 -0800

IF YOU start feeling good about America, run don't walk to Adam Gopnik's damning New Yorker feature on the land of the free's penchant for imprisonment:

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

Absolute quantities can be misleading, but the trend in the incarceration rate is equally unsettling. As Mr Gopnik reports, "...in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that." Read Mr Gopnik's essay and see if you don't agree that "The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life."

But what if locking away all these people has made America notably safer for those of us on the sunny side of the razor-wire? Mr Gopnik, drawing on the work of Franklin Zimring, a law professor at Berkeley, tries to debunk the idea that mass imprisonment accounts for more than a small part of the remarkable decline in America's crime rate over the past several decades. While I'm sympathetic to Mr Gopnik's argument that a combination of improved policing tactics and ineffable changes in the culture account for the greater part of the decline in America's crime rate, I'm even more impressed with Christopher Glazek's argument, set forth in a fascinating n+1 essay, that once we've accounted for all the undocumented crime terrorising the denizens of Lockuptown, the crime rate is not really so low. Mr Glazek writes:

Statistics are notoriously slippery, but the figures that suggest that violence has been disappearing in the United States contain a blind spot so large that to cite them uncritically, as the major papers do, is to collude in an epic con. Uncounted in the official tallies are the hundreds of thousands of crimes that take place in the country’s prison system, a vast and growing residential network whose forsaken tenants increasingly bear the brunt of America’s propensity for anger and violence.
Crime has not fallen in the United States—it’s been shifted. Just as Wall Street connived with regulators to transfer financial risk from spendthrift banks to careless home buyers, so have federal, state, and local legislatures succeeded in rerouting criminal risk away from urban centers and concentrating it in a proliferating web of hyperhells. The statistics touting the country’s crime-reduction miracle, when juxtaposed with those documenting the quantity of rape and assault that takes place each year within the correctional system, are exposed as not merely a lie, or even a damn lie—but as the single most shameful lie in American life.

Unfortunately, there is little hard data on the Lockuptown crime rate. According to Mr Glazek, the federal government did not gather data on rape in prisons until just last year. Yet this data, based on official prisoner complaints, is sure to severely undercount the reality of sexual violence in America's prisons. It can be extremely dangerous for a prisoner to get a reputation as a "snitch". In any case, prison authorities seldom do anything about it. Indeed, the authorities seem to accept, and sometimes even affirm, that the savage violence is simply a part of prison life, as do ordinary Americans who chuckle guiltlessly at prison-rape jokes. As Mr Glazek puts it:

[Prisoners] are the victims of an ideological system that dehumanizes an entire class of human being and permits nearly infinite violence against it. As much as a physical space, prisons denote an ethical space, or, more precisely, a space where ordinary ethics are suspended.
...[In prisons] anybody is free to commit rape and be reasonably assured that no state official will notice or care (barring those instances when the management knowingly encourages rape, unleashing favored inmates on troublemakers as a strategy for administrative control). The prison staff is above the law; the prison inmates, below it. Far from embodying the model of Bentham/Foucault’s panopticon— that is, one of total surveillance—America’s prisons are its blind spots, places where complaints cannot be heard and abuses cannot be seen. Though important symbols of bureaucratic authority, they are spaces that lie beyond our system of bureaucratic oversight. As far as the outside world is concerned, every American prison functions as a black site.

What is America's crime rate, really? If America's penal system as a whole amounts to a crime against humanity, maybe that ought to count for something, too.

(Photo credit: AFP)

Men: too Emotional for Military Professionalism

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:53:59 -0800

When asked by CNN's John King what he thinks about the Pentagon's recent decision to allow female troops to serve nearer the front lines of battle, Rick Santorum replied that this could be a problem because of the natural protective valor of men-folk:

I do have concerns about women in front-line combat. I think that could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved. It already happens, of course, with the camaraderie of men in combat, but I think it would be even more unique if women were in combat, and I think that's probably not in the interests of men, women, or the mission.

While it may seem at first blush Santorum is saying something here about lady feelings, he was in fact talking about dude feelings. In an interview on the Today show he clarified his earlier comment, saying:

When you have men and women together in combat, I think men have emotions when you see a woman in harm's way. I think it's natural. It's very much in our culture to be protective. That was my concern. I think that's a concern with all of the militaries.

The problem, then, is that men are too emotional. Santorum says both that "it's natural" and "It's very much in our culture" for men to be so protective. If its simply a cultural matter, then there is no reason why the culture of military professionalism cannot override our male soldiers' dangerous, mission-imperiling emotionality. But if it's natural and, as Santorum suggests in his initial response to John King, the instinct for spirited solidarity and camaraderie is inveterate in the male psyche, then perhaps men are by nature generally ill-suited for the cool professionalism required in the modern combat situation and ought to be replaced by the implacable coolness of the modern military woman.

After all, what better symbol of American supremacy and cultural confidence than an indomitable, steel-nerved, all-lady fighting force? Santorum naturally overlooks this enticing possibility, imagining pregnancy and perhaps sandwich-preparation as the natural and thus appropriate role of the twenty-something woman. But that which gives life can take it, too, with neither malice nor regret.

Seriously, though. Men and women both should be barred from military duties they can't perform at the necessary level of competence. If you can do the work, the job ought to be open to you. So good on the Pentagon, which no doubt has looked into the relevant issues of troop psychology and morale rather more deeply than the former junior Senator from Pennsylvania.

It's really is amazing how far we've come in such a short time, equality-wise. Within the span my own lifetime, it was thought that women ought to be barred from the Olympic marathon due to the inherent fragility of the female. Now we've got Haywire and an unreconstructed, full-on patriarchal, old-school Catholic, Republican office-seeker saying maybe women shouldn't go to the front-lines because men are too hopelessly emotional.

Eudaimonism is False

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:24:51 -0800

My pals over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians are having an interesting conversation about the best justificatory foundation for their brand of classical liberalism. Kevin Vallier argues, correctly in my view, that "Utilitarianism is too consequence-sensitive and self-ownership is too consequence-insensitive." Contractualism, he suggests, offers a third way that gets it just right in the consequence-sensitivity department.

Roderick Long replies by offering an alternative third way: an interesting version of eudaimonism that includes a not-overly consequence-insensitive version of the self-ownership thesis. Vallier responds by embracing eudaimonism himself, while countering that "the content of the virtue of justice is best specified by a contractualist principle rather than the self-ownership principle."

I would like to intervene here to argue that both Long and Vallier are wrong because eudaimonism is false.

The eudaimonist says that eudamonia is the aim of life and the ultimate end of practical reason. Eudaimonia is often translated as "happiness," but it's better understood as flourishing or functioning excellently as the kind of thing one is. Acting in accordance with certain virtues is thought to be both instrumental to and constitutive of flourishing or excellent functioning. Both Long and Vallier accept a version of the unity of the virtues thesis, according to which the content the virtues can be fixed only by reference to the content of the others.

My trouble is that it is hard to make sense of eudaimonia within a Darwinian worldview, and that there is no good argument to the effect that eudaimonia, whatever it is, ought to be the aim of action.

You are not an instance of a natural kind. You are a member of a genetic line. You have no essence. If you can be said to have a natural telos, it is to maximize inclusive fitness. But that is not only not in any sense a rationally mandatory aim, it's a completely stupid aim. Making copies of your genome is, in an important sense, what you are for. But it has next to nothing to do what what you ought to try to do with yourself.

Relatedly, there is no non-stupid natural fact of the matter about what it would mean for you to realize or fulfill your potential, or to function most excellently as the kind of thing you are. Our potentialities are relative not only to individual biological make-up, but to culture and technology as well. Potential for mathematical or hockey greatness is meaningless in a world without mathematical notation or hockey. It may be that the world in which you have the greatest chance for really meaningful achievement and fulfillment, given your particular endowments, is one that does not yet exist. Bummer. What is means to function excellently in the here and now depends on the possibilities for functioning given the current cultural, economic, and technological dispensation.

Why not de-teleologize eudaimonia and stipulate that henceforth eudaimonia will mean "physical and psychological flourishing" or "good all-round health" or something wholesome like that? Good idea! But it's hard to see this as an idea with normative teeth independent of the reasons we already have to seek good all-round health, or whatever. And we may well have reasons to do things that will keep us from really flourishing. What if you're more interested in truth or beauty or justice come what may? What if you think a fixation on happiness and health is the enemy of art? With all due respect to Aristotle, I suspect philosophical contemplation isn't really very good for people. But that doesn't mean it's not worth devoting your life to! Misery can be worth it! It really can be better to burn out than to fade away! Anyway, if I'm not making some huge mistake by saying "To hell with eudamonia!" which is, in fact, what I'm inclined to say about it--if it's an aim one can choose to take on or not--then it doesn't seem well-suited for foundational justificatory work.

Anyway, to say that utilitarianism is too consequence-sensitive is just to say that it is too everything else- insensitive--that it neglects values other than good consequences and it wrongly refuses to acknowledge the fact that we often have good reason to make decisions on the basis of other considerations, like fairness or beauty. To say that the principle of self-ownership is too consequence-insensitive is just to say that if we were to make it our single, supreme, indefeasible political principle, we'd screw over a lot of people and generally make a huge hash of things.

Why not this? There are a plurality of often competing values. There are a plurality of often competing reasons for action. What counts as a virtue depends on what you're trying to do with your life and the kind of society you're trying to do it in. I would suggest to Vallier that contractualism is the best framework for the justification of social morality and political institutions not because it hits the consequence-sensitivity sweet spot, but because pluralism is true, and contractualism, unlike the alternatives, doesn't need it not to be.

Brain-Based Regulation

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:04:00 -0800

Jonah Lehrer reports on new research from Steve Sapra and Paul Zak on the neurochemistry of Wall Street success:

Drs. Sapra and Zak began by analyzing the genes of 60 professional traders working in five major Wall Street firms. (They collected the DNA samples in 2008—only three of the firms are still in business.) The scientists focused on a short list of genes that are known to affect the activity of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain.

In recent years, it's become clear that dopamine helps to regulate decisions involving risk and reward, allowing us to experience both the thrill of getting what we want and the pain of losing it all.

[...]

It turned out that successful traders—Drs. Zak and Sapra measured success in terms of longevity on Wall Street—tended to hit a sweet spot of dopamine activity; their genes kept them from experiencing either very high or very low levels of the molecule. These prosperous professionals were much more likely to have so-called Goldilocks genes, placing them solidly in the middle of the dopamine distribution.

"The best traders are willing to take risks," Dr. Zak says. "They definitely want to make lots of money. But they're also able to take a long-term perspective and check their impulses. Being able to balance these competing interests seems to require a balanced dopamine system."

Dr. Zak notes that it's far too soon to use his genetic assay as a hiring tool—the results still need to be replicated. Still, it's possible to imagine a future in which the financial sector requires less oversight because firms have found a way to hire more prudent employees.

The use of this sort of test as a hiring tool is an interesting possibility, as is the idea that the use of such tools might make financial markets more stable. Indeed, if a financial sector full of dopaminergic moderates would in fact have a stabilizing effect, doesn't this suggest the possibility of legally restricting certain types of trading to those with brains that hit Zak and Sapra's sweet-spot? The FAA doesn't let epileptics fly airplanes.

Of course, it may be that financial markets work best with a certain mix of risk-takers and the risk-averse, and that restricting transactions of a certain type or size or whatever to a single, moderate neurological type would hamper the allocative function of financial markets. But the idea that the kind of correlated error that leads to bubbles and crashes is partly a function of the self-selection of certain neuro-/psycho-logical types into big-risk, big-reward trading is a tantalizing possibility.

A similar idea applied to democratic politics seems to me even more plausible. The psychological types that choose to run for office may lead to deliberative bodies that are far from psychologically representative, and the patterns of decision-making typical of politicos might lead reliably to bad results--to predictable overreaction, or uncompromising stalemate, say--that might be avoided in a deliberative body more representative of the population's psychological diversity. I can also imagine a more demand-side version of the hypothesis. Folks in general tend to prefer candidates of certain psychological types. So we get a government full of people with traits highly-correlated with running for and winning office instead of people with traits correlated with effective group deliberation and cooperation.

Another regulation suggests itself: those who wish to run for office are ipso facto disqualified.

Mutually Beneficial Culture War

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:04:04 -0800

So the Susan G. Komen Foundation has withdrawn its financial support of Planned Parenthood. Wailing and gnashing, wailing and gnashing. Erica Greider, my colleague at The Economist, offers an evenhanded overview of the dust-up, and she concludes:

As for the Susan G. Komen grants, they added up to about $680,000 last year. I wouldn't be surprised if Planned Parenthood raises more than that from private donations in the wake of this announcement.

It seems certain. Planned Parenthood raised 400 large in the 24 hours following the news of Komen's decision. And New York mayor and super-one-percenter Michael Bloomberg has personally pledged $250,000 to PP. So, there you go, just about.

You know, I'm not a big fan of Komen's brandification of breast cancer, I dislike seeing pink ribbons plastered over everything, and I think Planned Parenthood is real swell, abortions and all. So I'm not especially inclined to come to Komen's aid. But I'll be damned if this doesn't look a bit like PP throwing it's weight around, knocking a few pieces of china off the shelves, sending a message to its other donors: "Nice foundation you got there. Wouldn't want anything to, you know, happen to it."

The Susan G. Komen Foundation maintains this has nothing to do with abortion, which is the politic thing to say, and completely ridiculous. It is about abortion. Which is why I have a hard time believing this teacup tornado will put a hitch in the race for the cure. On the contrary. My friend Mollie Hemingway illustrates, with a personal tale, why its Planned Parenthood grants were a fundraising problem for Komen:

Allow me to share a brief story. The woman I called my grandma (out of great affection rather than actual familial ties), died of breast cancer in 2004. Her awesome son made a goal of walking in all 14 3-day Susan G. Komen walks in 2011 (a goal that was almost derailed when Grandpa H. died on the eve of one walk in mid-November). He succeeded in that goal and you can read about it here or watch him talk about it here. When he started his fundraising, I offered some ideas and put a note about the goal on Facebook with a link to his donation site. Instantly, I was bombarded with alarmed notes from friends and family. Did I know, they asked, about Komen’s grants to Planned Parenthood? They gave me links and documentation and I shared them with my friend. He felt that the money offered to Planned Parenthood would not go to support abortions and therefore was not a dealbreaker. I could not in good conscience support a group that supported Planned Parenthood, even though I really wanted to support him in honoring his mother. Now, I can (and already have and will continue to do so). See, Planned Parenthood is an extremely controversial organization that inspires strong feelings from those who support it and those who don’t. If you were familiar with Susan G. Komen for the Cure but weren’t familiar with the fact that this funding arrangement was extremely controversial, something is off.

As Matthew Schmitz summed up Mollie's piece, "As it turns out, killing unborn children is actually really controversial. Who would have thought?"

I'd bet good money Komen rakes in record sums this year as highly motivated abortion foes turn their pockets inside out to ensure everybody knows that deciding to withdraw financial support from abortion providers is not something for which charities should expect to suffer.

By itself, the predictable way this episode has everyone hunkering down in the familiar culture war trenches is completely boring. What's interesting is that Komen and Planned Parenthood are both largely admirable organizations doing necessary and urgent work for women's health, and this controversy is going to work out well for both of them. Had Planned Parenthood and the Komen Foundation colluded to profit by riling our culture's warring tribes, they couldn't have done it much better.

[Preggers belly ribbon image courtesy of Shutterstock]

Bourgeois Virtues

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:00:16 -0800

Speaking of Deirdre McCloskey, Dalibor Rohac offers a nice overview of her recent work in a WSJ profile. Here's the core argument of McCloskey's most recent book, Bourgeois Dignity:

Modern economic growth, she claims, is a result of an ideological and rhetorical transformation. In the Elizabethan period, business was sneered upon. In Shakespeare's plays, the only major bourgeois character, Antonio, is a fool because of his affection for Bassanio. There is no need to dwell on how the other bourgeois character in "The Merchant of Venice," Shylock, is characterized.

She contrasts this with attitudes 200 years later. When James Watt died in 1819, a statue of him was erected in Westminster Abbey and later moved to St. Paul's cathedral. This would have been unthinkable two centuries earlier. In Ms. McCloskey's view, this shift in perceptions was central to the economic take-off of the West. "A bourgeois deal was agreed upon," she says. "You let me engage in innovation and creative destruction, and I will make you rich." A commercial class that was not ostracized or sneered at was thus able to activate the engine of modern economic growth.

Ms. McCloskey insists that alternative explanations for the Industrial Revolution fail, for a variety of reasons. Property rights, she says, could not have been the principal cause because England and many other societies had stable and secure property rights for a long time. Similarly, Atlantic trade and plundering of the colonies were too insignificant in revenue to have made the real difference. There had long been much more trade in the Indian Ocean than in the Atlantic, moreover, and China or India had never experienced an industrial revolution.

By elimination, Ms. McCloskey concludes that culture and rhetoric are the only factors that can account for economic change of the magnitude we have seen in the developed world in past 250 years.

I've never felt secure in any of the main positions of the great debate over the root cause of modern growth, but I find myself inclined toward McCloskey's case, if not fully prepared to abandon my materialist inclinations. (To get a stronger sense of the texture of the debate, take a gander at this stimulating Cato Unbound forum on Bourgeois Dignity.)

Rohac concludes his piece like so:

The danger of our era is that the bourgeois deal is slowly crumbling away. It is under attack from the political left and also from economists whose work revolves around one sole virtue—prudence—thus eroding the public understanding of markets and economic life. Looking at the West's current economic woes, it is easy to share Ms. McCloskey's concern that unless we revive a sense of dignity and approbation for entrepreneurship and innovation, we might easily kill the goose that lays the golden eggs of our prosperity.

I don't think there is really any significant threat to bourgeois ideals "from the left". Respect for business, entrepreneurship, and invention is so thoroughly ingrained in our society, I can hardly imagine grounds for serious worry. Spend fifteen minutes at the Harvard Business Review site and try not to conclude that our culture is so thoroughly invested in the values of innovation, efficiency, costumer/consumer satisfaction, relentless self-improvement and general entrepreneurial go-getterness that it borders on the pathological.

Actually, I just took my own advice. Here's the blog of an energetic gentleman who, in addition to having founded "an agenda-setting advisory boutique that shaped strategies across media and consumer industries," also offers, for our benefit

a five-step program for reimagining and redesigning prosperity — beginning at the biggest of levels, the global economy, through to the micro-level, the organizations we all spend most of our days in — that's composed not merely just of more bigger faster, but of radically better.

This is advertised as "mastering the art of living meaningfully and well." Because if the art of living meaningfully and well is not the art of more, bigger, faster, and radically better living, then what is it? Sure glad it's not six steps!

Anyway, if the commercial ethos of our culture is in any way endangered, it's endangered more by the more-bigger-faster-radically-better vulgarity of the capitalist rubber-chicken circuit than by its leftist critics, who are, if they're any good, busting their asses trying to move units like the rest of us saps.

Chomsky completists aside, the complaints of the left seem to me mild as milk, amounting to little more than a minor refinement in the balance of our bourgeois values, and some welcome resistance to the bad economist's false doctrine that, given the right structure of incentives, self-interest is entirely self-regulating and thus entirely benign. Like unrestrained self-interest, unrestrained egalitarian sentiment can also wreak havoc. But it's an indispensable protective and liberating force, too, spiritedly resisting the sort of concentrations of power required for the worst oppression. A little light class war is part and parcel of the bourgeois liberal bundle. Filter all the OWS hullabaloo through the broader culture and you're left with the complaint that poor people don't get enough help and rich people are too lightly taxed. Whatever you'd call that, it's not an attack on bourgeois values.

The Morality Pill

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:15:46 -0800

Writing in the New York Times, Peter Singer and Agata Sagan ask "Are We Ready for a 'Morality Pill'?" I dunno. Why?

The infamous Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments showed that given the right circumstances, most of us act monstrously. Indeed, given pretty mundane circumstances, most of us will act pretty callously, hustling past people in urgent need in simply to avoid the hassle. But not all of us do this. Some folks do the right thing anyway, even when it's not easy. Singer and Sagan speculate that something special must be going on in those peoples' brains. So maybe we can figure out what that is and put it in a pill!

If continuing brain research does in fact show biochemical differences between the brains of those who help others and the brains of those who do not, could this lead to a “morality pill” — a drug that makes us more likely to help?

The answer is: no. And I think the question invites confusion. Morality is not exhausted by helping. Anyway, help do what?

Singer is perhaps the world's most famous utilitarian, so maybe he's got "help people feel more pleasure and less pain" in mind. Since utilitarianism is monomaniacally focused on how people feel, it can be tempting for utilitarians to see sympathy and the drive to ease suffering as the principal moral sentiments. But utilitarianism does not actually prescribe that we should be motivated to minimize suffering and maximize happiness. It tells us to do whatever minimizes suffering and maximizes happiness. It's possible that wanting to help and trying to help doesn't much help in this sense.

Most contemporary moral psychology begins from the assumption that the primary role of a morality is to solve coordination problems--to facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation, to detect and punish free-riders, to promote a climate of trust through costly signals of adherence to group norms, and so on. If utility is maximized by societies capable of making the crucial transition from small-group to large-group cooperation, the most important moral emotions from a utilitarian perspective will be those that embody and reinforce the norms of the extended order of impersonal exchange. But there are many ways one might be disposed to "help" in this context.

The stability of welfare-enhancing group norms often requires that some among us be willing to harm ourselves punishing norm-violators. "Altruistic punishment" is the term of art. Altruistic punishers might be nasty people. Their willingness to "help" may take the form of streaks of dogmatism and vindictiveness. Or, if Deirdre McCloskey is right that the era of modern economic growth was the product of the rise of specific bourgeois virtues, one way to "help" may be simply to internalize certain commercial norms, which may or may not include and inclination to go out of one's way to help those in need.

Of course, it may be very important that some people, animated by sympathy, go out of their way to help those in need, and to agitate for their interests. But it may be just as important that others not worry too much about these things and instead apply themselves wholly to building successful businesses within the rules.

There is no one morality. There are many ways for humans to live with one another, and each way has a characteristic complement of moral sentiments and norms. If, like Singer, we are utilitarians, we need not be too vexed by the problem of identifying the best morality. The best morality--the one that produces the largest sum of happiness--is the morality of liberal market societies. Call this "bourgeois morality." Bourgeois morality not only has ample space for significant variation in moral personality, it probably requires a division of moral labor. We need some bleeding hearts, some altruistic punishers, some status-driven go-getters, and no doubt much more.

If forcing criminals to huff oxytocin makes for kinder, gentler malefactors, then maybe that's not a bad idea. But we shouldn't confuse morality as such with a single kind of other-regarding, sympathetic, solidaristic helpfulness. That's simple and silly. Like the idea of a "morality pill."

Indeed, it's a mistake to think making people more moral has that much to do with neurochemistry, as opposed to rule-following, norm-internalization, and instinct harnessing. There is little hope for making humans less vain, ambitious, and grasping, and it's not at all clear that doing so would really "help." Moralities that manufacture heaps of happiness don't abolish selfishness, chauvinism, or status-seeking. They civilize and channel our baser drives into useful forms of expression. It doesn't matter if the gal who cures cancer is an asshole only in it for the glory. Indeed, we promise splendid everlasting fame to she who discovers the cure precisely to recruit the talents of glory-motivated assholes. A pill that turns assholes into helpful good sams may make a world where there's more willingness to help, but also fewer and shoddier tools for helping.

There ain't no pill for getting the rules right.

Scroll Through This

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:37:05 -0800

This feels new. Rare.

[via Mike Meginnis]

What's So Special about the 1%?

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:39:30 -0800

My post discussing Brian Leiter's proposal to seize 75% of the 1%'s wealth reminded me of a Michael Kinsley piece I meant to comment on last month, but never got around to. Here's Kinsley:

My problem with Obama’s ["this isn't about class war"] speech is that the president muddles together a variety of very different categories. There are out-and-out crooks and shysters. There are clever financiers who manipulated the rules and took advantage of loopholes -- and ought to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves -- but did nothing illegal. There are the very, very rich -- the notorious 1 percent, or 1 percent of 1 percent -- who have benefited from changes in the economy that they may or may not have had any control over. Then there are the affluent -- annual income of $250,000 or more a year is as good a benchmark as any -- who, before the recession, were doing better and better for reasons no one was entirely sure of.

[...]

For every group Obama takes to task, he also has a “to be sure” passage in which he tries to make clear that he’s not talking about you. But if you listen to the music, not the words, you might well think otherwise. A wish to raise taxes on top-bracket taxpayers doesn’t prove that you “hate the rich” or that you’re trying to stoke the fires of class warfare. It doesn’t mean you define an income of $250,000 as “rich.” It simply means that you believe that the people who’ve been most fortunate in this country are in the best position to contribute more to solving its financial problems. But this distinction is hard to maintain if you’re simultaneously suggesting that there is something ill-gotten about most rich people’s gains.

People really resent this. I have a friend, a banker, who voted for Obama in 2008 but senses that he is being picked on unfairly. Which he is.

This is why I think anti-1% rhetoric is misguided and perhaps politically self-defeating. By failing to distinguish between those who became wealthy primarily by creating wealth and those who became wealthy by appropriating wealth, 1%-er/anti-oligarchy language implicitly sets itself in opposition to the kind of inventive, productive people many of us nobly aspire to become. As Kinsley says, a lot of folks really resent this, and they're not wrong.

Making more money than 99% of one's countrymen is, by itself, no more morally objectionable than scoring in the 99th percentile of the SAT. Indeed, generally, it's much more morally praiseworthy; creating wealth benefits people other than oneself. Of course, some people cheat on the SAT. Cheating is wrong. But high-scorers generally aren't screwing anyone over. Likewise, some people do get rich by cheating and screwing people over. But most people who get rich do it playing by the rules. It's a mistake to base a protest movement on the refusal to acknowledge this.

Now, if the rules are unfair--and many of them are--we ought to fix the rules. But it's not Stephen King's fault that he keeps making money off Cujo because copyright terms are way longer than they ought to be. Maybe it sort of is Bill Gates and Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos et al's fault that our patent law system stifles innovation, entry, and more or less guarantees the concentration of massive wealth on savvy early-movers. Though they're probably not responsible for putting those rules in place, they do fight to keep them. Still, it's much more constructive to focus on specific bad rules, and on building political constituencies for fighting those rules, than to focus on the ill-specified depredations of an arbitrary slice of the income distribution. The so-far successful anti-SOPA/PIPA efforts are a good example of how bad rules meant to lock in gains for a few corporations can be overcome by motivated citizens.

Let's pan out even further.

This excellent New York Times article about why Apple's manufacturing has moved to China, and probably isn't coming back, is provoking a lot of comment. The upshot of the piece is that Chinese manufacturing offers flexibility, speed, and scale that American manufacturing cannot hope to match, and it offers it at a lower price than domestic manufacturers can hope to match, either. Part of the Chinese advantage has to do with the fact that companies like Foxconn not only pay their workers much less than American assembly line workers, but that they can deploy armies of labor at a moment's notice, as they house tens of thousands of factory-workers in on-site dormitories.

Reaping astounding profits on the backs of workers who labor in conditions that would be illegal in the U.S., for compensation below the American minimum wage, looks a lot like exploitation to many of us. And it can also look like a corporate end-run around the wages and working conditions the American labor movement has fought for well over a century to set in place.

However, it's by no means clear that there is actually anything wrong with the rules that allow for this sort of international trade. The most trenchant objection to Apple-style globalization is that it is part of an all-encompassing global economic structure which is exploitative and unjust. Suppose we accept that neo-liberal global capitalism (or whatever you want to call it) amounts to a comprehensive scheme of exploitation. Would that mean all fortunes are therefore ill-gotten -- that the corruption of the global system implies the impossibility of honest accumulation? I very much doubt it, but let's roll with it.

If we're all embedded in a fundamentally unjust, exploitative global economic structure, it's hard to see why the American 1% should be especially salient. Why not the global 1%, or the global 10 or 20%, which would include pretty much the whole American population. If it is morally imperative to confiscate exceptional wealth and use it to meet human needs, then it is imperative to confiscate most of the wealth in all wealthy countries, not just the wealth of the wealthiest of the wealthy, and transfer it to the world's poor, not to the relatively well-to-do poor of the wealthiest countries.

If it's not possible to bring in $600,000 in a year without therefore being guilty of complicity in a exploitative global system, which invalidates one's moral claim to one's income, it's probably not possible to bring in an untainted, secure $60,000 either.

Of course, most complaints about the American 1% are not grounded on the view that the global political economy is a comprehensive web of exploitation. It's based on the supposition that the domestic 1% is guilty of something or other the domestic 10 or 30 or 50% isn't, and therefore deserves to be a target of scorn in a way the 10 or 30 or 50% does not. But, however you slice it, it's going to be true that a lot of people in the top 1% got there in pretty much the same way a lot of people in the top 30 or 50% got there. If there's nothing wrong with a way of making money at the 50th percentile, there's nothing wrong with it at the 99th. And if there's something wrong with it at the 99th, there's something wrong with at the 50th. The unwillingness to identify specific mechanisms of unjust income acquisition, and the insistence on treating income-earners above a arbitrary cut-off point as a unified class deserving special contempt, strike me as symptoms of intellectually laziness and a less than thoroughgoing interest in justice.

[Image of 30%-ers doing Yoga courtesy of Shutterstock]

Free New Book on Happiness Research and Public Policy

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:48:53 -0800

The Institution for Economic Affairs, a free-market British think-tank, has released a freely-downloadable edited volume titled ... and the Pursuit of Happiness, packed with papers summarizing the public-policy implications of recent work in happiness research.

Here are a few highlights gleaned from a quick browse.

Christian Bjørnskov, a professor of economics at Aarhus University in Demark, reports on the relationship between subjective well-being and size of government:

What appears to be the unequivocal conclusion to be drawn from the sober, scientific part of the wellbeing literature is that larger government does not imply a happier population. Indeed, when a growing battalion of social scientists sympathetic to government interventions engage in wellbeing research and fail to find empirical evidence in favour of such interventions, it seems safe to conclude that more or larger government is not associated with better wellbeing. As Ruud Veenhoven honestly concluded againsthis own political preferences more than a decade ago, the characteristics of welfare states neither create wellbeing, nor do they make the distribution of such wellbeing more equal (Veenhoven, 2000). A further decade of research has confirmed this conclusion despite popular claims that government interventions can and do create happiness.

On the contrary, the large and growing literature finds either no consequences of government policies or direct negative effects of large government (cf. Bjørnskov et al., 2008a, 2008b). Yet even if there are no direct effects, there is reason to worry that increasing the size of the government sector and its active role in society could cause losses of happiness in the long run. As documented by Sacks, Stevenson and Wolfers in this volume, economic growth leads to happiness in the long run. Likewise, economic globalisation also tends to contribute to subjective wellbeing (see Tsai, 2009). Activist government policies and a growing public sector are likely to undermine both growth and globalisation (e.g. Fölster and Henrekson, 2001; Bergh and Henrekson,2011), and thus slow down what is already a slow trend towards more wellbeing that may be difficult to track in rich countries.

As such, the apparently popular case for an active government that creates happiness rests on very shaky foundations.

Christopher Snowdon, author of The Spirit Level Delusion, tackles happiness and inequality:

In summary, there is no empirical evidence that people in more egalitarian countries enjoy happier lives, nor is there any credible reason to think they should. Scholars of happiness have identified many factors which improve life satisfaction scores but income equality is not one of them. Furthermore, since none of the factors which have been shown to boost happiness is more abundant in the ‘more equal’ nations, it is unlikely that those societies would be happier even by chance.

Devoid of support in the academic literature, the myth that ‘more equal’ countries are happier is the creation of a political faction Niemietz (2011) terms über-relativists, who have taken the modest observation that some people raise their aspirations in line with people they know as evidence that anxiety about income inequality is the main determinant of happiness in the Western world. Having taken this position, it makes sense to them that countries with the lowest levels of income inequality should be the happiest. The über-relativists have to navigate so many obstacles of logic to arrive at this position that the mere fact that ‘more equal’ societies are not happier by any empirical measure is not enough to make them turn back.

Insofar as ‘happiness studies’ is a ‘new science’ at all, it is not one that offers sustenance to those who pursue an egalitarian agenda. If one is looking for a sound basis for a happier life, one might heed the words of Diener and Biswas Diener (2009), who conclude: ‘Thus: our advice is to avoid poverty, live in a rich country, and focus on goals other than material wealth.’ This might be stating the obvious, but happiness research rarely does otherwise.

There's plenty more good stuff in the volume, including papers by Paul Ormerod, Pete Boettke & Chris Coyne, and Betsy Stevenson, Justin Wolfers & Daniel Sacks.

Internet Stuff I Did

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:10:34 -0800

At The Economist:

Newt and the “food-stamp president”

Myrtle Beach debate live-blog (I am Mr. Blue, W.W. )

The relevance of Romney’s corporate experience

At Big Think:

Does Internet Piracy Really Hurt the Economy?

Justin Wolfers on Money and Happpiness

Is Marxism “Realistic”

What Is an Illusion?

Because this was mislaid in the great blog re-import mishap of 2010, and because his more odious half is lately in the news, here’s Caingrich:

Does Internet Piracy Really Hurt the Economy?

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:38:13 -0800

Large swathes of the Internet today are protesting legislation now pending in Congress that would censor the Internet and burden many sites with impossible-to-meet regulatory demands. What's the rationale behind enormously meddlesome regulations like SOPA/PIPA? Among others reasons, the "piracy" of copyrighted material is alleged to damage the economy. Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute has completely dismantled this allegation in two outstanding recent posts. In his latest, he points out that, content-industry wailing notwithstanding, the movie and music industries are doing pretty damn well:

The International Intellectual Property Alliance—a kind of meta-trade association for all the content industries, and a zealous prophet of the piracy apocalypse, released a report back in November meant to establish that copyright industries are so economically valuable that they merit more vigorous government protection. But it actually paints a picture of industries that, far from being “killed” by piracy, are already weathering a harsh economic climate better than most, and have far outperformed the overall U.S. economy through the current recession. The “core copyright industries” have, unsurprisingly, shed some jobs over the past few years, but again, compared with the rest of the economy, employment seems to have held relatively stable at a time when you might expect cash-strapped consumers to be turning to piracy to save money.

In his previous post, Sanchez exposes content-industry estimates of huge economic loss as dishonest confabulation, and digs toward find a more realistic accounting of the overall economic costs of piracy:

[I]n a fantasy world where U.S. movie pirates don’t just circumvent blockage with a browser plugin, and SOPA actually stops all online movie piracy by American users, we get a $446 million economic benefit to the United States in the form of movie revenues, and presumably comparable benefits in music and software revenues? Well, no. Remember our old friend the Broken Window Fallacy. It’s true that some illicit U.S. downloads displace sales of legal products. But what happens to the money the pirates would have otherwise spent on those legal copies? They don’t eat it! As that same GAO report helpfully points out:

(1) in the case that the counterfeit good has similar quality to the original, consumers have extra disposable income from purchasing a less expensive good, and (2) the extra disposable income goes back to the U.S. economy, as consumers can spend it on other goods and services.

As one expert consulted by GAO put it, “effects of piracy within the United States are mainly redistributions within the economy for other purposes and that they should not be considered as a loss to the overall economy.” In many cases—I’ve seen research suggesting it’s about 80 percent for music—a U.S. consumer would not have otherwise purchased an illicitly downloaded song or movie if piracy were not an option. Here, the result is actually pure consumer surplus: The downloader enjoys the benefit, and the producer loses nothing. In the other 20 percent of cases, the result is a loss to the content industry, but not a let loss to the economy, since the money just ends up being spent elsewhere. If you’re concerned about the overall jobs picture, as opposed to the fortunes of a specific industry, there is no good reason to think eliminating piracy by U.S. users would yield any jobs on net, though it might help boost employment in copyright-intensive sectors. (Oh, and that business about 19 million jobs? Also bogus.)

Censoring the Internet would be the wrong way to protect intellectual property rights even were piracy a big economic problem. But piracy has a negligible impact on the economy and mostly affects who gets what. Though some struggling musicians and writers are undoubtedly harmed by illegal filesharing, it seems likely to me that the net distributive upshot of illegal filesharing is progressive, from large, profitable corporations to ordinary consumers. There's no evidence I'm aware of that supports the idea that piracy has led to an overall decline in the incentive to creative production. My bottom line: SOPA/PIPA is wrong and would mean the end of the open Internet we know and love. If it weren't wrong, it would remain an attempt to solve a largely nonexistent problem. And even if stronger copyright protections would significantly help our economy, this legislation wouldn't actually do that.

If you like, contact your legislators now.

Kenneth Rogoff is Wrong About Growth

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 12:08:28 -0800

So I argue at Big Think.

Proposed: Joe Rogan is the opposite of Kenneth Rogoff.

Around the Webz

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:16:43 -0800

My holiday blogging hiatus is over!

At Democracy in America: Evidence from Iowa that limited government isn’t really a priority for tea-party Republicans.

At Big Think: A free-associative mini-essay against resolutions and the tyranny of the annual.

And, from last week, my Bleeding Hearts Libertarians guest post on “Why I’m Not a Bleeding-Heart Libertarian.” Two of my Economist colleagues comment on aspects of this post, here and here.

I Went to the Caucuses

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:20:38 -0800

My dispatch.

Collecting ballots in a plastic top hat at City High

A little sweet front-page action.

Iowa Nice

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 10:29:08 -0800

When Intellectual Property Is Theft

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:35:12 -0800

I liked Julian’s observation that legislated extensions of copyright terms are more like theft than copyright infringement:

[I]f the defining characteristic of theft is that it deprives the victim of something they were entitled to use and enjoy, then there are things that can accurately be described as “intellectual property theft.” When legislators—many of whom now support censoring the Internet to stop “piracy”—rewrote the copyright bargain with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Exension Act, they retroactively extended the monopoly of rightsholders over existing works by 20 years. That retroactive extension, of course, did nothing to incentivize new creation. And since economists have estimated that the present value of a copyright monopoly was already barely distinguishable from the value of an unlimited term, it’s doubtful that even the prospective extension bought us much additional creativity. But it did mean that the general public would be denied, for another 20 years, the free use of works that had been slated to fall into the public domain under the original copyright bargain. That sounds more like “theft” of intellectual property—and not just theft from a particular creator or industry, but from the whole of the public.

If you’ve ever had a hard time understanding what Prudhon had in mind when he said “Property is theft!” you could do a lot worse than reflect on the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act. To define and assign property rights just is to rig the economic game a certain way. To divide a common meadow into private parcels does deprive the public from the use and enjoyment of the meadow. And this does amount to theft if members of the public cannot see the new assignment of rights to have merit by their own lights. It’s often (but not always) the case that dividing the commons is the only way to satisfy Locke’s requirement that everyone be left with as much and as good. If you’re duly compensated for losing access to a resource that would be otherwise depleted, we tend to think it’s a fair arrangement. Likewise, keeping intangible creative works out of the commons through the assignment of intellectual property rights is justified if it leaves us better off than we would be in a world with no IP.

I happen to think copyright does induce creation and that creators and consumers as classes would be worse off without it. And I think returning creative works to the commons in, say, 20 or 30 years also induces creation and that creators and consumers both are made worse off by longer copyright terms. That’s just a guess, but presumably there’s some vague fact of the matter about optimal terms for various types of creative work. Whatever that is, that’s what we’re entitled to. Extending terms past the optimum, locking down more than a lifetime flow of monopoly rents for a few at the expense of the many, doesn’t strike me as like theft. It’s a straightforward plundering of humankind’s common cultural inheritance.

Like Freddie de Boer, I’d like to have a serious, non-utopian conversation about the regime of intellectual property rights and intellectual property protection that would best encourage creation by making it possible to make a living selling the dearly created but easily and cheaply reproducible. (Unlike Freddie, I think a good place to start would be not to seethe with open contempt for those with whom we mildly disagree and not to preemptively ascribe irritation from those we’ve unfairly impugned to bad-faith tribalism.) One hopeful possibility here is that fair rules inspire respect and respect induces compliance. A more modest and limited scheme of copyright clearly focused on incentivizing and rewarding creators rather than on minting money in perpetuity for corporate copyright owners might make less draconian enforcement mechanisms sufficiently effective.

The Really Real Reality of Reality of TV

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:53:14 -0800

James Wood on John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay collection Pulphead:

One feels that Sullivan shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways: if reality TV is “really real” because it catches people in the act of being on reality TV, it has only a limited, or possibly null, reality, and Sullivan is just being cynical and jokey. On the other hand, if reality TV is really real because it connects us with Poe and Whitman, and displays America for us as we really are, then large claims are being made for reality TV’s (perhaps inadvertent and unwitting) powers of mimesis. It can’t quite be both, and the ambivalence perhaps alerts us to the fact that essays like this one have their own unexamined unreality, too.

Why does Wood say that reality TV has “only a limited, or possibly null, reality” if the reality it presents is how people behave on reality television? This comes as raw assertion, and it wasn’t at first clear to me that he might be right.

I’m familiar with Sullivan’s argument only through the passage Woods quotes, but it strikes me that Sullivan is indeed making a large claim, not at all inconsistent with the fact that reality TV is at best the really real reality of people caught on reality TV. Isn’t the idea that when Americans accept the offer to make their lives public–when they get their fifteen minutes, when they’ve readied for their close-up–they mostly offer tearful confessions of stymied aspiration, outraged entitlement, myopic self-justification, avid but dumb cunning, and an unending parade of hurt feelings?

Of course, the casts of reality shows are manipulated by producers, are often “performing” the words and sentiments they think the producers think makes “good television,” and the final broadcast product has been heavily edited with a view to maximum drama. But what makes a good reality show so gripping is that these people are so willing to be goaded, that their hair-pulling performances of petty emotion are so authentic. And there is a remarkable implied consensus about the humiliations those of us at home most enjoy.

I think Woods’ strongest argument would be that reality shows cannot reveal America’s Freudian Id because we are only ever shown people who thought it was a good idea to appear on a reality show. Reality TV selects for vain, emotionally volatile extroverts. Fear Factor doesn’t prove that, as a general matter, Americans will eat bugs for money. It proves that Americans who won’t eat bugs for money don’t show up at casting calls for Fear Factor. Sullivan’s argument that “There are simply too many of them—too many shows and too many people on the shows—for them not to be revealing something endemic” pretty clearly fails to get around the self-selection objection. But it does suggest that America contains a huge number of vain, emotionally volatile extroverts. That’s significant in itself. And surely the verbal and emotional scripts America’s dim, neurotic, self-infatuated chatterboxes most readily deploy are drawn from and thus indicative of the broader culture. “[T]he test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe,” are the monsters among us who most guilelessly channel and enact the ambient American spirit, and a huge swathe of the rest of us want to watch. It’s hard to see that as a “null” reality.

Keep Drawing

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:24:10 -0800

Via Sullivan, this is great…

keep drawing from studio shelter on Vimeo.

Is Gender Equality a Boudoir Buzkill?

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 04 May 2011 13:34:38 -0700

Image via Wikipedia

Elizabeth Nolan Brown inspects a Psychology Today blog post by Ogi Ogas (no joke!) arguing that “gender equality inhibits arousal” and finds one nugget of pertinent scientific information, on the neurology of dominance and submission, prefaced by a bunch of blustering armchair gender psych speculation.

[I]n order to get to this – in order to get to this in a blog post on Psychology Today, not some lad magazine or MRA-site, mind you – we’ve had to sift through several rounds of feminist bashing, romance-novel-based evidence and bastardized ev-psych theorizing. On behalf of all folks (and feminists!) who truly are interested in the neural components of sexual arousal… it’s just insulting, Ogi.

A response to Ogas reports contrary findings:

Fortunately, Linda Young, also writing for Psychology Today, offers a much less sensationalistic (and idiotic) take:

To say “feminism” is causing loss of desire and damping male arousal is totally misleading. In fact, there is research that supports the opposite. Rudman and Phelan (1) found that men who had feminist partners reported being in more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction.” Brezsnyak & Whisman (2), showed that more egalitarian decision making was associated with elevated levels of sexual desire. Schwartz and Young summarized a number of studies showing a relationship between equitable couples and greater sexual satisfaction (3).

Feminism is about social, economic and political equity and is independent of what turns someone on in a bedroom or fantasy. Ogas, like lots of folks, finds it easier to parse people and ideologies into black and white polarities than to consider the complex grays that don’t fall neatly into categories. A feminist with cleavage in high heels who wants to be ravished in bed is not a contradiction!

And neither is a man who’ll smack you around one minute and beg to be tied up the next. I mean, so I’ve heard …

The whole post is entertaining.

The Order of Public Reason

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 04 May 2011 13:00:34 -0700

Gerald Gaus’ new book The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World is a major event in moral and political philosophy. It is also very long. And stupefyingly expensive. Fortunately for those of us who aren’t billionaires, the political philosophy blog Public Reason is wrapping up a symposium on The Order of Public Reason, and for those of us who don’t have the scholarly leisure to browse the full discussion, Kevin Vallier has provided an excellent summary of Gaus’ concluding summary, from which it is possible to get a gist of the richness of the argument of this book.

Here’s are couple of especially interesting bits from Vallier:

I. Hayek and the Social Contract Tradition

I suggest that if we take Jerry at his word, we can shed light on the deepest themes in the book. First, note that this claim in effect rejects the entire basis of the social contract tradition, a tradition one might easily think that Jerry is defending and extending rather than rejecting. In some sense, Jerry rejects the contract metaphor. The idea that our interest in social morality can ground our reasons to follow social-moral rules (the idea that arguably lies at the heart of the contractarian tradition) must be rejected; and Jerry has tried to show why at great length. Instead, we must adopt an entirely distinct philosophical anthropology, one that is at root deeply Hayekian, for as Jerry says, “Our reason did not produce social order – we did not reason ourselves into being followers of social rules. Rather, the requirements of social order shaped our reason.” This just is Hayek, who wrote:

Man is as much a rule-following animal as a purpose-seeking one. And he is successful not because he knows why he ought to observe the rules which he does observe, or is even capable of stating all these rules in words, but because his thinking and acting are governed by rules which have by a process of selection been evolved in a society in which he lives, and which are thus the product of the experience of generations (LLL, 11).

Many of you know Hayek the classical liberal, but Jerry is following Hayek the social theorist, who attempted to integrate the rationality of rule-following into his philosophical anthropology at the deepest level. Jerry has argued throughout the book that the conception of the person employed within public reason liberalism and liberalism broadly speaking must move in this Hayekian direction. If public reason liberals follow Jerry’s lead, the fundamental structure of public reason and even the nature of the social contract theorists’ project must substantially change. In short, political justification must not begin with deriving the rationality of rule-following from a teleological conception of practical reason. Instead, it must begin with an understanding of the nature of human beings who are already rule-followers and the nature of the moral emotions and cooperative activities that accompany such rule-following. He goes further by arguing that even the Kantian conception of the person he endorses cannot be constructed out of practical reason alone. Instead, human nature contains Kantian elements for thoroughly Humean-Hayekian-evolution reasons. Our rule-following nature is contingent on our social development (though no less contingent than our goal-seeking nature).

[...]

VII. Summary

In sum, OPR defends public reason liberalism without contractarian foundations. It is Kantian without being rationalistic. It is Humean without giving up the project of rationally reforming the moral order. It is evolutionary but not social Darwinist. It is classical liberal without being libertarian. It is Hegelian and organicist without being collectivist or statist. It shows us how political authority can be justified but only by accepting that moral authority limits it. It pushes us to look towards the practical and reject the utopian while simultaneously maintaining that a truly free and equal social order is within our grasp. It rejects the aspiration of political liberalism to neutrality among conceptions of morality while simultaneously retaining its spirit by sectioning off social morality from other normative domains.

I’ve spent many hours in my pre-print copy of The Order of Public Reason. This is as good as contemporary political philosophy gets, folks.

[Update: Here's the schedule for the Public Reason colloquium with links to the discussions of the various book chapters. There's also instructions for contacting Kevin Vallier if you'd like an electronic sample of the book.]

The Debate Over Experimental Philosophy Is Dead

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Wed, 04 May 2011 12:18:59 -0700

Image via Wikipedia

Tammler Sommers writes an obituary:

In my perfect world, experimental philosophers would restrict their discussions to specific studies and the implications they draw from them – even in venues geared towards wider audiences. And this is largely what is happening, which is why this essay is best regarded as an obituary. The debate over experimental philosophy, if it ever really existed, has reached its fitting end. It is time for philosophers everywhere to move on.

The experimental philosophy debate is survived by articles in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Prospect, Slate, many scholarly journals, and countless blog posts, forums, and podcasts

Or maybe it’s just resting. See David Papineau’s caveats.

Educated Women and “Marrying Down”

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:05:30 -0700

Kay Hymowitz notes that this year, 57% of all college grads will be women, which leads her to ponder:

So here’s a question: when the time comes, will these women be willing to marry “down”? Don’t bet on it.

It’s not entirely clear to me why Hymowitz asks this question, but I guess I get the gist of it. So, back when the typical woman had fewer years of college education than the typical man, and women had fewer and worse job opportunities, the typical marriage involved women marrying “up” educationally and socioeconomically. As women’s equality advanced, both altering the economic structure of the household and making it easier to pair off with an opposite-sex peer, it has become more common for like to marry like. And, now, more women than men are graduating college. It stands to reason that some of them are going to have to marry men who don’t graduate college.

My question is: in what sense does this count as marrying “down”? Back in the Mad Men era, a bright college-educated young man who married a sharp non-college-educated young woman of his general social class wasn’t marrying “down”. So why would it count as marrying “down” today if a young woman with a freshly-minted degree in elementary ed from Local U (2.6 GPA!) marries an enterprising chap who dropped out of Regional State after his sophomore year to run a thriving cell-phone kiosk in the mall? Answer: it wouldn’t!

Anyway, let’s talk about this:

[T]he biggest reason we probably won’t see a lot more college-educated women walking down the aisle with their plumber is one we don’t like to say out loud: they want to have smart kids. Educated men and women are drawn to spouses they think will help them produce the children likely to thrive in the contemporary knowledge-based economy. That means high IQ, ambitious, and organized kids who will do their homework and take a lot of AP courses. The preference for alpha kids is the reason there is a luxury market for Ivy League egg and sperm donors. It also explains why, though we don’t have solid research distinguishing between elite and State U mating choices, Ms. Harvard will probably not accept a proposal from Mr. Florida State.

Ridiculous… and personal!

Look, the desire for smart kids is not why most smart women don’t want to get hitched to less smart men. It’s because most women (and, as the old sexual division of labor become increasingly obsolete, most men) don’t want a lifetime with someone who doesn’t understand them, who doesn’t “get” their interests and enthusiasms, who thinks they’re “weird.” Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers are right that our grandparents’ marriages were largely about shared production, but contemporary marriage is largely about shared consumption. If he’s bully for Bay and she’s mad about Malick, it’s probably not going to work out. If your IQ is three standard deviations above the mean, then chances are so are your best friends’–including your romantic partner’s. We like people who are like us. Wild! I bet even gay people, who aren’t out to merge genomes, prefer partners of similar intelligence, physical attractiveness, with similar interests, and the like. You think?

Sometimes it even happens (and I have solid empirical evidence to this effect) that Ms. Georgetown will accept a proposal for Mr. Northern Iowa. Seriously, if Mr. Florida State has gotten so far with Ms. Harvard that a proposal makes sense, he probably stands a fair chance. As Matt Yglesias correctly observes, college quality may be a decent proxy for intelligence, but fellas who graduate from colleges with superior football teams, or who don’t graduate college at all, can nevertheless signal their mental mettle by, say, talking. It works. Believe me.

Mark Pennington on Hayek and Habermas

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 12:54:20 -0700

At Pileus:

Image via Wikipedia

Influential though Habermas has been, his case for deliberative democracy is undermined by its complete failure to address a point that Hayek made on numerous occasions. Though formal argumentation that takes place in democratic forums is one way in which people can learn from each other, it is by no means the most important. Far more significant is the capacity to observe the lived experience of other individuals and groups. Much of what we need to learn cannot be ‘put into words’ – it is ‘tacit knowledge’, which can only be communicated by observing the practical results of what other people do and imitating successful role models even when the ‘reasons’ for this success cannot be articulated verbally. For such knowledge to be transmitted it is imperative that there is a wide range of ‘experiments in living’ – whether in the production or consumption of goods – on which people can draw. The spread of knowledge in markets, the arts and science does not typically proceed via collective deliberation, but advances best when individuals and groups have a ‘private sphere’ that secures the freedom to experiment with projects that do not conform to majority opinions. Then, incrementally, through a process of emulation the prevailing wisdom may change over time. It is not sufficient for people to be able to talk about their ideas. Rather, they must have scope to act on those ideas – and this requires ‘property rights’, not ‘speech rights’. To restrict private property and the right of exit in favour of collective decisions is to reduce the total number of decisions made and hence limits the range of practical, lived experience from which we may all learn.

Neither is deliberative democracy likely to have the egalitarian effects that Habermas claims. On the contrary, procedures that rely on the statement of explicit reasons systematically exclude those individuals who are less able to engage in the articulate persuasion of majorities but who may still possess valuable knowledge embodied in the exercise of entrepreneurship, a practical skill or adherence to a particular ethical code. In markets and other exit based procedures such as competitive federalism, rich and poor, articulate and inarticulate, can act on the basis of relatively easy comparisons between prices, qualities of goods and lifestyles across competing products and jurisdictions. Voice-based institutions, by contrast, give special privilege to those skilled in the use of articulate persuasion alone. The latter point provides perhaps the best explanation for Habermas’s enduring appeal with academics and other professional talkers.

I think this is quite right, though I would stick up for the importance of public deliberation nevertheless. There is no avoiding the need to deliberate over institutions and public policy. Pennington here is engaging in a nice spot of public reasoning, voicing a partial justification for exit-based institutions. Hayekian institutions will prevail only if Hayekians are able to talk others into the need for the liberty to exercise incommunicable embedded and embodied know-how. A constitution of liberty is something you lay out discursively and defend with reasons, not something you dance, which explains Hayek’s abundance of essays and lack of grande jetés.

This is sort of obvious, but it’s worth resisting the obscurantist drift of a certain overemphasis on tacit knowledge and cultural evolution that makes a mystery of Hayek’s own adventures in “constructivist” institutional design. The question isn’t whether we ought to have voice-based or exit-based institutions. The question is how to mix them, and the attempt to answer it is an enterprise in collective deliberation.

Libertarians Can’t Win the Future by Breeding

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:56:06 -0700

Yesterday on Facebook, my friend Bryan Caplan made the following provocative claim:

[T]he most realistic long-run path to liberty is boosting libertarians’ Total Fertility Rate to 3.

That is to say, if libertarians have more kids than everyone else (and those kids have more kids, and so on), libertarians will eventually outnumber their foes and win the day. Bryan has made versions of the “strategic fertility” argument before, and I want to say what’s wrong with it, even if one shares Bryan’s goals and assumptions. I take these to be:

the goal of arriving at a society of full-blown liberty, whatever that amounts to,
the assumption that personality is largely passed along genetically, and
the assumption that ideological inclination is largely determined by personality, and
the assumption that there is a distinctively libertarian psychological profile.

Of course, advocates of any ideology could adopt this strategy. I’m talking about libertarians throughout this post, but I think my argument against the demographic strategy is general.

A libertarian pawn? - Image via Wikipedia

Now, the evidence for the heritability of personality is mixed. If it turns out to be low, the logic of Bryan’s libertarian eugenics is busted. But let’s go with the assumption that when we breed, we do produce little mini-mes.

The evidence that ideological dispositions reflect personality is pretty good. The gist of Jost et al‘s study correlating Big Five personality traits to ideology is that “openness to experience” (liberals are) and “conscientiousness” (conservatives have lots of it) are where the action is. “In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized.”

How do libertarians fit into this? Is there a distinctively libertarian psychological profile? Yes. Haidt et al find that libertarians are pretty much exceptionally thinky liberals with a bit of a sympathy deficit who care a lot about autonomy (my gloss, not theirs). In terms of the Big Five?

[L]ibertarians scored lower than the other two groups on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. They scored low (similar to conservatives) on Neuroticism, and they scored quite high (similar to liberals) on Openness to Experience.

If Jost et al are right, Neuroticism (emotional stability) doesn’t significantly distinguish conservatives from liberals, so don’t get hung up on Neuroticism. In terms of the dimensions of personality that distinguish liberals from conservatives, Openness and Conscientiousness, libertarians look like low-Conscientiousness liberals. (This, by the way, describes me incredibly well.)

Anyway, the point is that there is something it is like to be libertarian. As Haidt and friends sum it up:

We found that, compared to liberals and conservatives, libertarians show 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness.

So let’s assume that these traits, and whatever else it is that inclines libertarians toward libertarianism, are passed along from parent to child. Can libertarians breed their way to libertopia?

No!

Broad ideological dispositions may be stable features of personality passed along genetically, but the content of ideology is an unstable product of history and cultural evolution. The content of conservative and liberal ideology in the middle of last century was a lot different from conservative and liberal ideology now. And “libertarianism” as a going cultural concern didn’t exist in 1950. What did psychological libertarians believe before the advent of libertarianism? Something available. Consider the possibility that had Bryan and I been born in the early 1910s instead of the early 1970s, we might have found that era’s cosmopolitan creed of universal liberation and economic progress very attractive. It was called “communism.”

Ideologies emerge, mutate, evolve, and die. In all likelihood, in another fifty or sixty years, libertarianism of the sort Bryan and I encountered and embraced as young adults will exist only as a historical curiosity. Even if the libertarian label sticks around, the cluster of propositions it designates won’t. The term “classical-libertarian” will have to be coined to distinguish throwbacks attracted to the libertarianism of Bryan Caplan’s youth from those attracted to whatever it is libertarianism eventually becomes. The conception of liberty Bryan’s children will find attractive will be different from his. The conception of liberty his grandchildren find attractive will be more different still. And, despite close psychology similarity to their grandfather, they may well find his politics repellent.

Birthing a horde of children with “libertarian” personalities is not a realistic long-run path to liberty. It is, at best, a realistic long-run path to “liberty”–to a society shaped by whatever unforeseeable future ideology to which individuals with libertarian inclinations find themselves attracted.

I think grasping the inevitability of the cultural evolution of ideology is helpful in clarifying the role of the intellectual. The task is not to discover and promote the true final philosophy. (And certainly not to promote the inclusive fitness of the true final philosophy’s adherents!) The task is to help steer the distributed process of cultural evolution toward truth and/or goodness by acting as a virtuous selection pressure. The attempt to enforce an orthodoxy–to protect a doctrine against cultural evolution–is the religious apologist’s task. The only plausible way of making the content of an ideology stable enough to sustain the hope that our grandchildren will believe what we believe is to make an institutional religion out of it.

Intellectuals who spend their time enforcing ideological orthodoxy as though it were a religion, but without the aid of religious institutions, are wasting it. A high-fertility strategy can work for Mormonism, but if anything resembling contemporary libertarianism is to survive, much less spread, it’s going to take new, better, and more persuasive arguments, not more babies.

Anyway, I left out one of Bryan’s implicit assumptions because it’s too risible to accept even for the sake of argument. It’s this:

Libertarians can be motivated to bear the opportunity costs of large families for the sake of a libertarian future they will not live to see.

!!!

I don’t doubt Bryan’s new book will persuade a few libertarians (and a few conservatives and liberals) to have an extra kid or two, but I’m sure he would do much better campaigning for libertarian sperm and egg donation.

More on Patriotism and Progress

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 22:10:20 -0700

In the course of my skeptical reply over at Democracy in America to Adam Serwer’s progressive apology for American exceptionalism, I briefly addressed what I took to be a related progressive defense of national pride from Richard Rorty. Because Rorty’s argument concerns the moral psychology of progressive political motivation, I thought I’d also take it up here. “[A] nation cannot reform itself,” Rorty wrote, “unless it takes pride in itself—unless it has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it.”

Yesterday, Stanford philosopher Joshua Cohen kindly sent me a draft of a review of Rorty’s book Achieving Our Country that he wrote with Joel Rogers for Lingua Franca. In their review, Cohen and Rogers make the same objections (and more) I made to Rorty’s argument for the necessity of national pride, but much more powerfully:

Though characteristically evasive, Rorty seems to believe that national pride is necessary to political action–that it is impossible to move people to improve their country if they don’t take pride in it. But this claim seems either trivially true or wrong. True, but trivial, if pride amounts simply to the belief that life in the country can be improved. Wrong, if pride means anything more than that.

After all, people are routinely moved to concerted political action by all sorts of motives. A simple sense of injustice–at children’s suffering, imprisoned innocents, subhuman wages, dangerous working conditions, or a night of terror imposed on other peoples–often suffices. So can a perception of material interest. While hatred of one’s country and its institutions may demobilize, and pride may spur efforts at reform, it is also possible simply to care about and act on injustice or cruelty because it hurts persons (not “peoples”) and violates principles (not “nations”). Patriotic appeals need not figure. Indeed, the preening self-involvement of some of Rorty’s own patriotic appeals–”America will create the taste by which it will be judged;” Americans are “the greatest poem because we put ourselves in the place of God”–may repel. Why, given his desire to improve the country, does Rorty restrict the grounds for doing so?

These observations about national pride in general apply with even greater force to Rorty’s particular antifoundationalist brand of patriotism. Although its pragmatic ethos may have some appeal to the 1990s cultural left, and historic resonance with Legal Realists and New Deal staffers, it is very far from the view of those who “achieved” this country. The abolitionists opposed slavery not because it cramped “social learning” but because they thought slaves were human beings and that it was morally wrong to enslave human beings. The Congress of Industrial Organizations was formed not to foster “experimental diversity” but to get workers dignity on the job and greater equality in dealing with bosses. The civil rights movement was inspired not by a faith in “social invention” but by absolutist moral beliefs in human equality. The women’s movement was originally fired not by interests in “reinvention” but by the outrage that women were “human beings in truth but not in social reality” (a remark of Catharine MacKinnon’s that Rorty finds disappointingly “ahistoricist”). Throw away all the American struggles animated by ideas about human equality, and you don’t have much of a democratic history left to tell.

None if this is to say that a desire to see one’s beloved nation live up to its foundational ideals cannot be a powerful inducement to progressive reform. It can be. But we’re not so wicked that we lack sufficient will to overcome injustice without the assistance of our powerful tribal instincts. And those same instincts lead to so much wickedness–from the marginalization of immigrants to the cavalier neglect of the rights and lives of foreigners in war–that the cause of justice seems more likely to be served by emphasizing the moral arbitrariness of national membership than by talking up its moral indispensability.

David Foster Wallace’s Depression: Neurodiversity and Flourishing

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 14:24:54 -0700

David Foster Wallace - Image via Wikipedia

When your undergrad philosophy thesis is posthumously published in a lovely package padded out with admiring commentary, you know you’ve made into some kind of canon. Or you would know it, if you weren’t dead. David Foster Wallace is having a good death. Leland de la Durantaye’s diverting essay in the Boston Review tangles with ideas of freedom, happiness, and love in DFW’s thesis and his celebrated 2005 Kenyon commencement address. La Durantaye’s piece made me wonder whether the fact that an author killed himself adds or detracts from the authority of his meditations on things like freedom, happiness, and love. In Wallace’s case, I think it adds, but we should be careful.

Wallace suffered from relatively severe depression for two decades before his death. He managed, seemingly very well, with the help of medication. According to most reports of Wallace’s last days, his choice to go off his tried-and-true meds, in order to try a new set of drugs recommended by his doctor, spun him into a downward spiral from which he never recovered.

There’s some evidence that the moderately depressed are less self-deceived. “Depressive realism” is said to leave us less disposed to happy illusions about our abilities or our degree of control over our behavior. It’s easy to see how an unblinkered sense of the self could be an asset to a novelist. Moreover, an unshakable sense of dissatisfaction and hopelessness in the face of the forces that control us, even if muted, can act as a powerful prod to serious contemplation of the conditions for happiness and autonomy. Of course, if depression can make seeing the truth about some things easier, it makes doing everything more difficult. And Wallace appears to have adopted, by choice or chance, demanding standards both in literature and life, and these standards seem not to have been unreasonable. He could, sometimes, live up to them.

But a foible of neurology that keeps us from meeting our own high standards consistently can put us in a terrible bind. Our options are to (a) try, fail, and struggle to avoid becoming utterly defeated; (b) fail to try and struggle with self-loathing; (c) try with every ounce of effort we can summon, succeed, and leave ourselves too exhausted to succeed again, or to want to try; (d) lower our standards and meet them, but struggle with the thought that we have cheated ourselves and the world of our best.

There are, in fact, other choices, though they are hard to see or accept. We can (e) come to see the seemingly disordered aspects of our psychologies as part of a bundle of assets and liabilities that make each of us unique — as an expression of our neuro-individuality — and to see our reconciliation with the limits our brains impose upon us not as defeat, or a lowering of our standards, but as practical wisdom in aligning our aims with our inevitably idiosyncratic constitution.

But it’s hard, hard, hard, hard not to see this as (d). Our deepest desires for life precede significant self-knowledge. To arrive early at the ambition to achieve some kind of greatness (or the social recognition of greatness) may be an adolescent point from which we cannot as adults convince ourselves to return. And the prudence of fitting our aims to our natures can seem to many of us to flow from a confusion between a healthy life and a worthy life. It is less pleasant to die trying, than to survive healthily. But it’s not obvious that a short life on fire is a less flourishing one than eight more modest but better-adjusted decades.

I just sort of drifted onto this from the subject of Wallace’s depression. I’m not sure there’s much here to illuminate his life and death. I don’t know that he flamed out reaching for the sun. I think he wanted to be healthy so he could be and do good, but the profundity of his depression finally made it impossible to live. If I were to speculate, I would speculate that Infinite Jest is the product of exhausting option (c). This left Wallace somewhat depleted, but he could not resist the social and personal imperative to outdo himself. He tried for (c) again and may have hit (a). But that he never finished The Pale King is no real failure. It may have been, like Infinite Jest, an almost impossible project. That Wallace managed to do so much so beautifully within the constraints of his depression suggests a higher sort of health that makes more than years.

I started out meaning to comment on the Boston Review essay, and on DFW’s conception of freedom, but it looks like I didn’t. Later.

The Crisis in Moral Psychology

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:04:30 -0700

In an important and unfortunately gated essay, “Family, Community, Trolley Problems, and the Crisis in Moral Psychology,” Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom makes a compelling case that most experimental moral psychology is studying the psychology of making tough decisions about strangers, but most of in-the-wild moral judgment and behavior takes place among familiars–in families, among coworkers, among neighbors and friends.

Paul Bloom - Image via Wikipedia

[There is ] a problem in contemporary moral psychology, which is the field that explores the nature of moral judgment and moral action, including empathetic responses to the pain of others, altruistic behavior, the so-called moral emotions, such as guilt, shame, gratitude, and anger, and considered judgments about what’s morally obligatory, permissible, and forbidden. Psychologists in this area explore our moral sense, looking at how it is instantiated in the brain, how it develops in children, and how it evolved.

The problem is that most research in this field, including my own, focuses almost entirely on how people make sense of, judge, and respond to the interactions of unrelated strangers. We have little to say about how people think of interactions that occur between parent and child, brother and sister, and other closely related individuals. We also often ignore moral judgments and moral feelings that concern spouses, close friends, colleagues, allies, and compatriots. I will argue here that these are the interactions that matter the most, and that our failure to explore them leads us to ask the wrong questions, design the wrong studies, and develop the wrong theories.

Drawing on Joseph Henrich’s idea that most psychologists and their subjects are drawn from WEIRD societies–Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democracies–and Jonathan Haidt’s five foundations theory, Bloom suggests that WEIRD, liberal scholars are fixated on abstract puzzles within WEIRD, liberal moral philosophy.

It’s not that the circumstances under which people are prepared to shove a fat man over a railing or throw a switch to send a trolley on a less deadly course is not interesting or important. (The argument for intervention in Libya sounds a lot like Peter Unger-Peter Singer arguments about the impermissibility of failing to intervene to prevent distant suffering.) It’s just that this stuff in not all that illuminating about the moral psychology of family obligation, moral shame in the face of the disapproval of our friends, or altruistic punishment on the company softball team–the stuff that dominates most of our moral experience as it is lived.

This is a lovely, thoughtful essay. I hope it can come out from behind the paywall. And I look forward to hearing what the psychologists and philosophers working down at the trolley yards have to say about it.

Cougar Dating Expert on Sperm Wars

ww@willwilkinson.net (Will Wilkinson) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:02:17 -0700

Some of my best internet friends sometimes give me a bit of grief for ragging on “vulgar evolutionary psychology.” They say, “What gives, Wilkinson! I thought you were down with Darwin?” (Internet friends speak in a strange non-era-specific patois.) I say, “I said ‘vulgar’.” And “Wait for it… Wait for it…” And, indeed, one day a tidy disquisition explaining why human behavioral ecology is the bees non-vulgar knees will issue forth upon this page, but until that glorious day I present to you Lucia, a “dating/relationship expert specializing in Cougar relationships,” and two of her “12 Reasons Women Can’t Stand Nice Guys.”

How about…

Mother Nature: Women are designed to nurture. However, instead of doing this with children, they often end up doing it with bad boys. They think their love will save them. Nice guys rarely need to be saved.

Or try…

Sperm wars: Women are designed to procreate with the strongest possible genes. Bad boys are sending an unconscious message that they have great genes, so they’re not afraid of losing the woman by misbehaving. Nice guys are sending a message that they don’t think their genes are good enough, so they won’t misbehave.

Maybe you’ll say: “Well, Lucia is just sort of dumb, Will. Some people think global warming means eventually everyone will live on boats. Likewise, methylated yokels who drive their bitchin’ Camaros into ditches mostly send the unconscious message that they have great genes to dames who don’t–to asymmetrical dames. Surely one Cougar dating expert’s unsteady grip on the psychological implications of the neo-Darwinian synthesis cannot blemish the evo psych of more learned men!”

Well said, my friend. But seriously, frankly, I stopped listening because you bore me and I ain’t gonna send an unconscious message that I don’t got great genes by paying attention, see. Anyway, you listen: I don’t send unconscious messages. Either my deafening message tears an excruciating gash in your conscious mind or I am a black hole of virile taciturnity from which no message, conscious or unconscious, may escape. My message is this: my genes are outstanding. For a nice guy.

Where was I? Yes, this is what passes for science among dating coaches and also, I’m afraid to say, among more than a few frustrated engineers who frequent blog comments. Is my claim that a certain strain of evo psych is especially liable to this sort of trickle-down?

Here’s a treat! The lady herself:

Makes ya think twice about being nice, huh fellas?

[HT: The Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee.]