[T]he world would be better if we praised folks more for what they did than who they are.

The idea is this:

Because the usual focus is on inferring how smart, strong, creative, caring, charismatic, determined, etc. people are, the incentives are more to do things that suggest good things about your character.  If instead we focused on describing the differences a person has actually made to the world, we would get more folks trying harder to actually make a difference.  And they would focus more on acquiring the features that produce results, instead of features that are easy to see.

This is totally sensible. However, I don’t think we can understand the logic of the conventions of praise and blame in isolation from the logic of collective action.

Suppose we’re trying to coordinate to provide some kind of public good for our community. The problem is precisely that it doesn’t make a difference if you alone shirk and free ride. And so it doesn’t make a difference if you willingly bear some of the burden of cooperation, as long as enough others do. But, of course, it makes a big difference if others expect a good deal of non-cooperation. If they do, they’ll be less willing to cooperate, and we may fail to produce the public good.

One way we encourage compliance in collective endeavors is to confer higher status on those who are consistently cooperative, who have a proven record of adherence to cooperative norms, and who publicly participate in community rituals of costly signaling. Good character makes a big difference not because a lot hangs on any isolated individual’s character, but because the widespread adoption of certain norms of behavior and judgment — of certain virtues of character — allow us to accomplish things together that we could not accomplish alone.

A more natural, less economistic way of saying this is that people deserve credit for honoring their obligations and doing right by others whether or not we can detect the difference that has made for society. I don’t know the difference it would make to the world if my (made-up) friend Larry were not a good father to his children. But if Larry is a good father, he deserves to be praised for that.  He owes it to his family, whether or not it makes a difference to the rest of us, which is why he should make the effort. But it is an effort. Many men aren’t good fathers because they’re unwilling to bear the burdens of the task. So Larry’s friends and family should help out by giving him encouragement and an elevated sense of status. Of course, the general practice of good fatherhood does makes a big difference to the rest of us. So praising Larry for being a good father is not only a way to help a friend meet his obligations. It is a way to reinforce an important norm. If we praise Larry publicly, it is a way to signal our own commitment to the norm and to advertise that others who embody it will likewise be rewarded with praise.

So when Robin says, “If we praised results instead of character, maybe we will get more of both,” I worry that he’s overlooking the importance of “character” in producing the happy results of social coordination. Of course, not all norms of behavior make a difference in the right way. Conventions of praise that reinforce bad norms make us worse off. And it’s surely true that individuals who produce extraordinary benefits for others often have to flout certain longstanding social norms to achieve what they do. Innovation requires a good deal of non-conformity. Robin’s proposal to praise results I think amounts to a proposal to encourage the norms and virtues of skeptical independence and non-conformity needed to produce more and better generally beneficial innovation.

This is a great idea! So let us praise those with results-facilitating traits of character! I’m in no position to estimate the results Robin has produced, but I am in a position to know that these are traits Robin doggedly promotes in public and personally has in spades. So I’m happy to join Tyler in praising him for who he is.

I believe that absent the [TARP] bailout, we’d be looking at even higher unemployment today.

I think this is a plausible claim. But I don’t know of a satisfactory way to evaluate it. It’s plausible because some plausible theories about the nature of the financial economy and its interaction with the real economy imply its truth. But other plausible theories do not. My problem is that I don’t know of a satisfactory way to evaluate these theories. I’m not saying that there is no way to evaluate them, only that I don’t know what it is. It would be nice to form a responsible opinion about this sort of thing. Can someone please help?

One position that I think has been too often overlooked is that (i) absent some financial-sector bailout having certain necessary characteristics, the economy would be worse today, (ii) TARP had those characteristics, but (iii) it also had other characteristics irrelevant to the health of the financial and macro-economy that amount to corruption and injustice. I suspect that (iii) is true whatever the truth value of Matt’s counterfactual claim. If I’m right, it is consistent to condemn many of the particulars of TARP while remaining agnostic about its utility as economic policy.

Discussion of income inequality trends generally proceeds as if some sizable fraction of the population were getting richer (the top 10 percent, or the top 1 percent) while everyone else is getting poorer. In reality, the “poorest” 90 percent of the top 10 percent—and even the “poorest” half of the top 1 percent—have not seen outsized income gains over the past 30 years. It is only the top one-half-of-one-percent that has received a rapidly increasing share of income. Furthermore, the increase in concentration at the very top has been smaller than the most-cited figures have implied. For example, using a comprehensive measure of income, the top one percent probably received about 8 percent of income in 1980 and about 12 percent in 2008.

Nor have the poor fallen behind the typical household. Indeed, they may not even have fallen behind the 90th percentile. If this finding holds up, then it would seem that resentment toward the top one-half-of-one-percent should have grown equally among households with contemporary incomes as high as half a million dollars and households below the poverty line. Put another way, if rising inequality is unfair, then it may be that it has been as unfair for the 90th or 95th percentile as it has for the 10th percentile.

It is not immediately clear what to think about income concentration being confined to the very top. Would it be worse if income were becoming increasingly concentrated in the top half of the distribution at the expense of the bottom half or if it were becoming increasingly concentrated in Bill and Melinda Gates’s household at the expense of everyone else? Does the answer change depending on whether the “losers” are experiencing strong income growth or not? On some level, as long as incomes are rising for everyone, it matters little how much more the Gates’s income is rising. They cannot price others out of markets for goods and services by themselves. On the other hand, if the top fifth of the income distribution is pulling away from the bottom 80 percent, then the consequences for those falling behind could be profound. The top fifth might be able to sort themselves into the best neighborhoods with the best schools, and they might bid up the cost of higher education to the point where the best schools become unaffordable to most families.

The evidence indicates that patterns of inequality more closely resemble the Gates scenario than the bifurcation scenario. It is unlikely that the rise in inequality, then, has had much practical impact on the quality of life of middle-income or poor Americans. The exception would be if rising inequality had spawned competitive spending patterns to maintain relative standing in such a way that families end up worse off as a consequence of trying to keep up with the Joneses. For now, however, this possibility remains largely untested.

Please do read the whole thing.

A Veteran’s/ Armistice/ Remembrance Day observed on November 11 in particular shouldn’t just mean a gauzy and somber honoring of live veterans and fallen soldiers. It should be in part a day of anger and horror about the particular war that ended on this day, the stupid brutality of it, and the evil that followed in its wake. Of course, no continuously-existing government (US, UK, Canada) is likely to create a day officially dedicated to pointing out that its predecessor contributed to the deaths of millions for no good cause. But we have the capacity to remember lessons other than the official ones.

John Quiggin strikes the right note here.

And with Quiggin.

Philosophers use the language of “argument” a lot. We tell our students that philosophy is all about learning how to distinguish good arguments from bad arguments, that philosophy will increase their ability to argue well, and so on. But the word “argument” does double-duty as a label for conflict. When one’s parents argue, this is not generally a good thing. Moreover, “argument is war” is one of Lakoff and Johnson’s famous structural metaphors. We defend our position, attack our opponent’s assumptions and so on. Since women tend, on average, to be less aggressive and competitive than men, and to be more inclined to cooperation, then the way philosophers talk about their discipline might be putting them off.

The idea should be readily testable, if any experimental philosopher were inclined to take this up. Two groups of students in a large intro class could be given a promotional flyer describing the philosophy major. The only difference between the two groups would be that one flyer would use “argument” where the other would use “reason” (“philosophy is all about distinguishing good reasons from bad reasons” etc.). The students could be asked to score how attractive they think the philosophy major looks on the basis of the flyer. If there are significant differences between the two groups, then that might suggest that it would be worthwhile making an effort to adopt the language of reason over argument.

It’s not clear to me that women are, on average, less competitive than men. Less aggressive, yes. Anyway, I’d like to see this experiment.

It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the fact that in a unicameral United States of America, we would now have passed both a comprehensive health care reform bill and also the most important piece of environmental legislation in the history of the world. Now that’s not the world we live in. Instead we live in a world where neither of those things has passed and where their prospects aren’t clear. But think back on this point the next time you hear someone say Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not centrist enough, or else that Obama is struggling with his agenda because he’s not left-wing enough.

Health-care reform passed with 50.5 percent of the vote in the House. Cap and trade passed with 50.8 percent. Neither margin would’ve been nearly enough in the Senate. Whether or not you think Nancy Pelosi had a couple more votes in her back pocket, it’s pretty clear that she didn’t have 41 more votes, which is what she would’ve needed to pass health-care reform if the House worked by the Senate’s inane rules. Pelosi really does seem like a great speaker, but a lot of the ire directed at Harry Reid would be more appropriately aimed at the rules he labors under.

This “we’d already have everything we want if only the rules were different” line of argument is just ignorant. Matt’s happy counterfactual implicitly holds fixed the status quo party composition of Congress. But the composition of Congress is endogenous to the rules Matt and Ezra wish were different. If the rules of our democracy were fundamentally different, party electoral strategy would be different, the  composition of Congress would be different, the deals required to pass legislation would be different, and the space of feasible policy would be different. Here’s what one can say about a unicameral United States of America if one chooses not to talk out of one’s ass: it would be different.

I’m all in favor of discussing fundamentally different constitutional structures. I’m even in favor of a new Constitutional convention, like Sandy Levinson. But this kind of procedural whingeing is just stupid and it should stop.

Save the Males, Kathleen Parker’s 2008 polemic on sexual permissiveness and libertinism, contains the following euphemisms for vagina: “inner sanctum,” “familiars,” “you know what,” “very private parlor,” “sacred vessel,” “vestal vestibule,” and “hirsute abyss of God’s little oven.” We will be, laments Parker in her obligatory chapter on Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, so “awash in vaginaism,” that we are nothing beyond “vaginas on the plain seeking out other vaginas with which to hold hands and gaze unlongingly into the silky night of a manless moon.” We have abandoned a better, gentler America, a place where women were “above this sort of thing,” a nation where men did not “talk about vaginas in public.”

For a woman who clearly loves to talk about sex but feels compelled to deride the vulgarization of public discourse, there is perhaps nothing to do but write a book about the hot, wet, carnal sins of Ensler and Lindsay Lohan.

I think “hirsute abyss of God’s little oven” is hard to beat. Anyway, read the whole thing.

Ilya writes:

Kerry’s argument could benefit from greater precision on several key issues. First, some cultural issues might well be an appropriate object of concern for libertarians as thinking individuals, but not a proper focus for libertarianism - which is, after all, a political ideology, not a comprehensive guide to the good life.

Where Ilya sees a lack of precision in Kerry’s argument, I see him struggling to understand Kerry’s clearly and powerfully expressed point. I have to say I was pretty baffled by the volume of what I see as largely uncomprehending responses to Kerry’s argument until I started to realize that Kerry’s argument implicitly predicts that it will be misunderstood by many of the people to which it is addressed.

As I see it, Kerry’s claim is that many libertarians fail to adequately acknowledge the fact (and it is a fact) that people are embedded in and shaped by culture, and that, as a consequence, many libertarians fail to grasp the extent to which cultural norms and social structure can limit individual liberty or work to deny some individuals the opportunity to develop the capacities needed to meaningfully exercise their liberty rights.

Sensibly enough, Kerry is careful to avoid the errors she thinks others are making. So she sees libertarians not as a cadre of uniquely penetrating intellects in communion with a set of timeless truths about the nature of a free society, but as a group of human beings who are, as we all are, historically and culturally embedded. She sees libertarianism not as a single, sharply-defined system of interrelated propositions, but as a syndrome of ideas and attitudes within and responsive to a changing culture around which a political identity and social movement has formed. This will, if she’s right about most libertarians, seem strange to most libertarians. 

Kerry’s argument, at least as I read it, is that if we really care about liberty, and are serious about seeing to it that all are able to enjoy the blessings of liberty, we cannot just assume that everything we need know about cultivating a climate of liberty is already accurately and fully captured by the historically and culturally conditioned ideas and attitudes that have come to characterize most self-described libertarians. Because, again,  many libertarians have tended to underestimate just how thoroughly socialized and culture-bound we all are, and have thus given far too little weight to cultural threats to liberty.

Kerry says nothing that even hints at the idea that libertarianism is “a comprehensive guide to the good life.” Her essay proceeds on the assumption that political ideologies, like people, exist in a cultural context, and that libertarianism, as it has developed in response to the exigencies of history, fails to adequately recognize the influence of cultural context on individual liberty. I think it’s pretty clear that Kerry is arguing that, insofar as a libertarian’s commitment to libertarianism is motivated by devotion to the value of liberty, then cultural constraints on liberty deserve more attention than they’ve traditionally had from libertarians.

If you think cultural products such as political ideologies evolve over time, you won’t see the content of “libertarianism” as sharply defined and fixed once and for all. To assert, as Ilya does, that “some cultural issues might well be appropriate object of concern for libertarians as thinking individuals, but not a proper focus for libertarianism,” pretty much begs the question. The claim is that these cultural issues ought to be objects of concern to libertarians because they are matters of liberty that libertarian have overlooked. Kerry’s asking libertarians to care more about the conditions under which people develop the capacity to meaningfully exercise freedom. She’s asking libertarians to not so blithely assume that social relations of exploitation and domination enforced by state power for hundreds of years are no longer matters of liberty simply because the enforcement of longstanding racist and sexist norms was privatized a few decades ago. She’s not asking libertarians to save the whales.

Ilya’s much more to the point when he directly addresses the questions of cultural restrictions on liberty. It is nice to see him say that he considers an antagonism to nationalism, racism, and sexism to be part of the libertarian tradition. Though I find this passage somewhat odd:

The same could be said with respect to patriarchy, which libertarians such as William Lloyd Garrison and Herbert Spencer, criti­cized back in the 19th century long before it became common to do so, on the grounds that it causes inde­fensible state-sponsored restrictions on the freedom of women.

I’m not quite sure it’s helpful to tag Garrison and Spencer as “libertarians” in the contemporary sense (they were certainly great classical liberals) and I’m not familiar enough with the details of their arguments against patriarchy to gainsay Ilya, but it seems rather roundabout to criticize a set of deeply-held, nearly universal assumptions about the natural inequality of women on the grounds that the law might reflect them. Why shouldn’t it reflect them? If it were true that women are, much like children, incapable of conducting their own affairs without paternalistic guidance, if it were true that women lack the capacities necessary to act competently in commercial and public life, then it would be rather difficult too see why women ought to have equal rights under the law or to enjoy freedom equal to men’s. Patriarchal assumptions of female inferiority and natural dependence are pernicious falsehoods whether or not they are codified. And when private citizens, men and women alike, coordinate to enforce norms based on these assumptions, the liberty of women is abridged. These are manifestly illiberal norms. To locate the main issue of freedom in the fact that legislators and their armed agents might act in ways that reflect what almost everyone believes seems plausible only if one is in the grip of an ideology that makes one hesitant to admit that a near-universal belief in natural inequality can threaten liberty all by itself. If libertarianism is such an ideology, then those of us who care about liberty should consider revising or rejecting it.

Ilya does sensibly concede that “Kerry is probably right to suggest that some extremely restrictive social norms can radi­cally reduce people’s choices and greatly diminish their freedom.” I’m glad to see that he has no principled objection to Kerry’s central claim. But I think he validates Kerry’s worries about libertarian insentivity to cultural constraint when he makes this optimistic conjecture:

However, I think that this problem is unlikely to be a serious one in a modern liberal society that has many different cultures and social institu­tions. People who feel dissatisfied or restricted by the social norms of their communities can seek out alter­native social groups. In the modern United States, any large metropolitan area has an enormous range of subcultures to choose from. Even if you live in a relatively isolated rural area, you can still “vote with your feet” and move elsewhere, as most of the rural population has actually done over the last century. So long as people have exit rights in a liberal society, they are unlikely to be trapped in a set of restrictive social norms that radically constrict their freedom — unless of course they prefer it.

If we in the United States have arrived at a point where its people “are unlikely to be trapped in a set of restrictive norms that radically constrict their freedom” (my emphasis), should we be satisfied with that? I’d submit that one or two steps shy of radically constricted freedom isn’t free enough.

Of course, many countries have much further to go than we do here in the States. Ilya no doubt shares with Kerry the conviction that liberty is for non-Americans too, and he will have noticed that she begins and ends her essay with the example of Min, a young Chinese woman who has enjoyed a meaningful increase in her freedom due to economic and cultural ferment in what remains an authoritarian communist state. The United State isn’t like that, of course. It has been a “modern liberal society” with “many different cultures and social institutions” for a good long time now. Indeed, this description would fit fairly well the U.S. of thirty, fifty, or even one hundred years ago. I’d be interested to hear when exactly Ilya thinks it was that the U.S. finally completed the transition from a society with “extremely restrictive social norms” (which he allows “can radically reduce people’s choices and greatly diminish their freedom”) to a society where the effects of sexist, racist, nativist, etc. policies and norms have ceased to be matters of liberty.

For basically Popperian reasons I don’t think it makes sense for political pundits to spend a lot of time debating the relative difficulty of developing different hypothetical future technologies. Instead, I would just say that the best way to find out whether human ingenuity is better at keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations at a sustainable level by developing artificial trees or by developing better windmills is to . . . implement a binding emissions reduction scheme that puts a price on CO2 emissions.

This isn’t, in other words, an either/or choice. If you had a cap-and-trade system in place, that would put a range of modalities—better efficiency, more clean energy production, more trees & algae, and carbon-scrubbing machines—in a competitive framework. One assumes we’d be looking at some kind of mix. But defining the correct mix in advance seems very hard. Hence the appeal of a basically market-esque mechanism that creates incentives to work on these various ideas without unduly prejudging the appropriate level of investment in speculative technology.

I think the main problem here is that the kind of market for offsets that can be integrated into a cap-and-trade system is going to limit the market incentive for discovery to carbon-related technologies. As I understand the offset provisions in Waxman-Markey, painting a bunch of roofs white doesn’t count as an offset, even if this would offset the predicted warming effect of a certain amount of carbon emissions. And a lot of climate engineering is like this, focused on offsetting warming through channels unrelated to atmospheric carbon levels.

That very significant weakness aside, I think Matt’s suggestion that a cap-and-trade system would create a market-esque discovery mechanism for offsetting technology is probably the best argument I’ve ever heard for cap-and-trade, for what that’s worth. But feeling the force of this argument requires taking the potential of technological fixes a lot more seriously than most proponents of cap-and-trade have tended to do so far. Here’s what I’m thinking…

If the goal is primarily to reduce warming by reducing carbon emission by increasing carbon prices, cap-and-trade seems hopeless. The U.S.’s having a cap-and-trade system makes a dent in warming only if it helps generate an actually effective global emissions reduction scheme. And to my ear “Let’s just implement a globally binding emissions reduction scheme!” sounds even less sensible than “Let’s just invent artificial carbon-capturing trees?”

Look at it this way. Institutions are a kind of social technology. Having observed the horse-trading required to even get Waxman-Markey off the ground, it’s hard to avoid the thought that an actually effective domestic system of CO2 emissions controls is a pretty speculative technology. An actually effective international system of CO2 emissions controls is thus an exceedingly speculative technology. Effective global coordination is the cold fusion of institutional technology. The argument for a U.S. cap-and-trade system grounded on its imagined role in clinching global policy coordination strikes me as assuming a number of questionable judgments about the appropriate level of investment in speculative technology.

I think Matt’s right that we don’t face an either/or choice. But I don’t think he gets the relationship between strategies quite right. The stringency of emissions controls needed to slow warming is inversely related to the probability of success in forging an international agreement. As the expected cost of compliance rises, the credibility of commitments to comply falls. Now, this is an argument for trying for an agreement sooner rather than later, but it is also an argument for reducing the expected costs of compliance. The better the prospects for climate engineering look, the better the now-bleak prospects for global coordination becomes. In other words, the advance of technology technology makes the failure of global institutional technology less certain.

That’s why the cap-and-trade as climate engineering discovery mechanism argument looks better to me than most arguments for cap-and-trade. By stressing the discovery aspect of the system, the U.S. could productively signal a commitment to finding ways of reducing the costs of compliance to level a compatible with a stable international agreement.

Of course, if the parties to an international agreement expect that future technology will vitiate the need for an agreement, there will be no agreement. That this is so I think explains most of the motivation to downplay the potential of climate engineering. But I’m not so sure this makes strategic sense.

Why doesn’t the possibility that techno-optimism will diminish the felt need for an agreement lead thinkers like Ryan and Matt to encourage the U.S. to use its immense advantages in scientific and technical innovation as a bargaining chip? Why not communicate control over the causes of techno-optimism? The official U.S. position could be that it will commit to policies that will create special incentives to bring the U.S.’s world-leading capacity for scientific discovery to bear on finding technological solutions to warming only if other countries commit to reasonable emission reduction targets that reflect an expectation of limited progress on the technological front. It seems to me that the U.S. would be throwing away a good deal of its bargaining power by communicating that it considers the development of climate engineering technology a low priority. Now, I can see why one might think that the U.S. can’t credibly commit to keeping the threat in the event that international negotiation falls apart. But if it can’t succeed in running a conditional tech-as-last-resort strategy, it can’t succeed in running an unconditional tech-as-last-resort strategy either. (I am getting dizzy.)

Anyway, the fact that a cap-and-trade-plus-offsets market offers no incentive for the discovery of non-carbon-based technologies for offsetting warming suggests that we could do rather better than that both in encouraging technological discovery and international coordination.

In a post on “Paying for Health” the philosopher Daniel Little writes:

It seems a bitter but unavoidable truth that there are very substantial inequalities in the provision of health care in our society. One person’s likelihood of surviving a devastating cancer may be significantly less than another person’s chances, simply based on the second person’s ability to pay for premium health care services. Further, it seems unavoidable that these extreme inequalities are flatly unjust in any society that believes in the equal worth of all human beings. And where this seems to lead is to the conclusion that some system of universal health insurance is a fundamental requirement of justice.

Clearly Little is merely gesturing at an argument, but I cannot follow the gesture. That some are able to afford, say, a treatment with very expensive new technology that significantly increases (how much is that?) their chances to survive a devastating cancer compared to the chances of those who cannot afford it does not seem to me unjust, flatly or otherwise. It seems a trivial consequence of the fact that new technology is often much more expensive than older technology. Moreover, it seems plain that any economically feasible scheme of universal health insurance must refuse to cover many expensive treatments (new or otherwise). So a system of universal health insurance will do nothing to eliminate “extreme inequalities” in many kinds of cases. In these cases, the only hope of eliminating the inequality is forbidding access to treatments that cannot be provided to all under the universal health insurance system. But a policy of coercively preventing exchanges that help someone (the doctor, at least!) but harm no one is flatly unjust. Which leads to the conclusion that the attempt to prevent some inequalities in the provision health care is ruled out by the requirements of justice.

If Little limited himself to the much weaker, and much more plausible, claim that justice demands a system of institutions that offers health care that is as good as it gets for the least well-off, then justice might plausibly demand in health services what we have (and Little seems to endorse) in food: a competitive market with means-tested vouchers.

That just about everyone left of center, including philosophers, seem to glide from their moral premises, whatever those might be, to “some system of universal health insurance” will some day be appreciated as the peculiar ideological reflex that it is.

I think it would be irresponsible not to continue studying the issue and looking for potential geoeingineering fixes, but I think that anyone suggesting that we should abandon the effort to cut emissions in favor of a geoengineering approach has not thought the matter through. It should be considered the last ditch effort, only pursued seriously when it is clear that emission cuts will not prevent catastrophic warming.

I’ve thought the matter through, but I still don’t understand this ordering of priorities.  I understand the strategic political motivation to make all potential technological fixes to global warming seem like wacky, hare-brained, mad-scientist schemes to block the sun, but the more I think that through, the less it looks like responsible politics.

Just suppose that some form of climate engineering could (1) do as much or more to slow or halt warming than could regulatory approaches (2) at a much lower cost while (3) posing no special problem of international coordination. Perhaps Avent has already made the case that some technology (or combination of technologies) meeting this description is less likely to emerge in the coming decades than an effective scheme of international carbon emission controls. If he has, I’ve missed it. However, if the success of a primarily technological approach is no less probable than the success of a primarily global political-regulatory approach, it would be egregiously irresponsible to discourage public support of efforts to discover such technology. If the probabilities turn out to favor engineering over politics, then emissions cuts, not engineering, should be considered last ditch.

Of course, the probabilities aren’t independent of public opinion, which isn’t independent of our attempts to persuade. I sense that Avent believes that an increased awareness of and interest in climate engineering would come at the cost of public support for domestic climate legislation and international regulatory coordination. That is, I sense that he believes he is combating a danger to the prospects of his favored policy. But then he’d better convince us that the danger he is combating is not all that serious. If the political prospects of a successful, binding international scheme of emissions cuts depend crucially on success in keeping the public sufficiently ignorant or disapproving of alternatives, then that goes to show just how poor the political prospects really are. In which case, the justification for trying to keep the public ignorant or disapproving of alternatives would seem to be considerably weakened.

To see the world more like Elinor Ostrom is to see each public policy like a real-world experiment. Policies are implemented because they are predicted to have certain beneficial effects. But even experts are fallible. We make mistakes. Multiple, partially redundant jurisdictions make a virtue of inevitability. They allow for simultaneous policy experiments that help us grope toward effective solutions. Successful policy can be easily observed and adapted to other jurisdictions and the damage caused by failed policy is contained.

To see the world more like Elinor Ostrom is to be guided less by ideology and more by the contours of the situation — to use the right institutional tool for the job.

One reason is that existing analyses of consumption inequality suffer from a problem similar to that which, until recently, hindered the study of income inequality: limited data on those at the top. Consumption data come from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX). Like its income counterpart, the Current Population Survey (CPS), the CEX is not designed to effectively capture developments at the top end of the distribution. Since this is where a good bit of the rise in income inequality is centered, researchers may have underestimated the degree to which consumption inequality has increased.

Suppose, though, that the very rich have been consuming relatively little of their additional income. Should we then conclude that the economic inequality we care about hasn’t risen much? No. The fact that income isn’t spent doesn’t render it irrelevant. If my income were to balloon to more than a million dollars, my household might not increase its consumption by much. But it’s not as though the additional income would thereby disappear. I could cut back on teaching and devote more of my time to research, or take an unpaid sabbatical. My wife could quit her job and spend more time with our children or do more volunteer work. Or we could invest the money, which might produce considerable additional income in future years.[4] This could help ensure that, among other things, we’d be able to afford to send our kids to expensive private colleges. Or we could retire early. Or simply accumulate assets and pass them on when we die. None of these uses would show up as consumption in the survey data (except the college payments, though that would come some years down the road). But they surely would enhance our well-being.

The point is that income adds value even if it is not spent right away.

I’ll be responding to all the reaction essays next week, so I’ll wait until then to comment. But I’m definitely interested in hearing what y’all think.

Ostrom’s theories are often seen as an alternative to traditional libertarian thought, which emphasizes the importance of private property and markets. However, it actually fits well with libertarianism defined more broadly as advocacy of the superiority of private sector institutions over government. In some respects, Ostrom’s norm-based approach to dealing with tragedies of the commons is actually less dependent on government than the more traditional libertarian approach of relying on exclusive private property rights. The latter, after all, often depend on enforcement by government. Even where private property rights exist, it is often easier and cheaper to solve some collective action problems by norms rather than relying on the law. And, obviously, Ostrom’s emphasis on the importance of local knowledge is similar to the earlier work of libertarian theorist F.A. Hayek.

Not all tragedies of the commons can be solved by the kinds of mechanisms studied by Ostrom. Her research shows that such approaches usually work well only in groups with no more than a few thousand members. Beyond that point, resource usage norms become hard to enforce and free-riding difficult to suppress. Informal norms and institutions probably cannot solve nationwide collective action problems such as rational political ignorance (the focus of much of my own work), or worldwide ones such as global warming. Still, they can address a great many environmental and economic dangers that most experts once believed required government-imposed solutions.

And here’s 2002 Nobel-winner Vernon Smith:

Relentlessly, Ostrom has pursued answers to two questions:

(1) Since “everybody’s property is nobody’s property,” how is it that there are so many cases where collectives of ordinary people with no education and with none of the economists’ knowledge of “the tragedy of the commons,” in fact discover ingenious rules (institutions) for taking the “tragedy” out of a productive resource they hold in common? If you read her book you will find among the diversity of examples a Swiss village whose people have private property in the plots they plant and harvest, but also have a communal summer meadow for grazing their cows. One rule, still enforced, dating back to 1517 states that “no citizen could send more cows to the alp than he could feed during the winter.” Wintering a cow is costly, and this rule rations access to the commons by tying it to private property rights. Numerous other examples include Japanese lands held by thousands in common under governance structures that avoided “tragedy;” also ancient solutions to communal water and irrigation systems that create effective enough private rights conferring benefits and costs that constrain use. This should not be too surprising, because “property (originally propriety) rights” are about human rights and the challenge of defining them incentive-compatibly for mutual benefit.

(2) As a distinguished political-economic scientist she will be the first to tell you that there are also plenty of commons problems that represent institutional failures and fragilities; she has asked why, and what makes the difference between success and failure? The fragilities include inshore fisheries and groundwater basins with continuing commons problems; failures include salt water fisheries and irrigation systems hamstrung by the complexity of the rules.

Success is associated with clarity in the definition of and bounds on individual rights (and opportunities) to take action, and the geography of the commons; details for monitoring, operations, sanctions and mechanisms for conflict resolution emerge from within the collective and out of motivated people’s direct experience with environmental context and each other. When too many of these problem-solving elements fail, the governance systems fail or require continuing attention to their fragility characteristics. A fatal source of disintegration is the inappropriate application of uninformed external authority, including intervention to prevent application of efficacious rules to political favorites. Also detrimental to good solutions is the OPM (other people’s money) problem.

I spent the weekend after last at a Liberty Fund conference held at Vernon’s Economic Science Institute at Chapman. As cranky as the ignoramus junior applied mathematicians are, Ostrom’s work, like Vernon’s, actually counts as social science. It’s wonderful that the committee has so consistently awarded actual economic scientists. If only the message would get through to the profession.

UPDATE: Ah! Just watch! Via Art Carden…