Your country is being invaded by evil barbarians. They intend to steal anything portable of value that they can, which includes people that have value as slaves.
Should you volunteer to join your country’s army? Would you?
Should your country institute conscription, if it will increase the chances of successfully fighting off the invaders?
If you answered “yes” to the previous question, would you vote to institute conscription, if it meant that you personally will be one of those people conscripted?
The unpacking of the word ‘should’ here is more complicated than the remainder of the question by far.
Would you?
No. I don’t unilaterally cooperate on commons problems. I also note that some people choosing to cooperate unilaterally can reduce the incentive for others to find away to enforce a more effective and complete solution. For example, an army of 1,000,000 naive altruists may be expected to beat the barbarians but with 900,000 casualties. In that case the others have an incentive to free-load. However an army of 10,000,000 conditional cooperators who constructed an enforcement mechanism may be expected to crush the enemy with overwhelming force, losing a mere 50,000 casualties. In this case volunteering is an evil act, not a good one.
Should your country institute conscription, if it will increase the chances of successfully fighting off the invaders?
If the choice is between using a volunteer army of the most altruistic and gullible and a conscripted army then yes, I prefer the conscription option particularly if it increases the chances of success. But it isn’t my preferred mechanism.
The best way to get people to do a job is to pay them enough that they choose to. If people are not choosing to join the army that means they are not getting paid enough. The government has the power to coerce people into doing things and the preferred way of doing this in this case is taxation. Make everyone contribute to the war effort and let the market choose who pays in cash and who pays in risk of bodily harm but is compensated financially.
If you answered “yes” to the previous question, would you vote to institute conscription, if it meant that you personally will be one of those people conscripted?
Yes. Unless the country is sane enough that the conscription vote failing would result in a superior solution being constructed.
For good or ill, many people in my country have a hard time thinking of themselves as part of a cooperative enterprise with much wealthier people who are cooperating through money while they cooperate through risking bodily harm.
Of course, I’ve never suggested that my country is particularly sane.
For good or ill, many people in my country have a hard time thinking of themselves as part of a cooperative enterprise with much wealthier people who are cooperating through money while they cooperate through risking bodily harm.
Fortunately your country is also not being invaded by evil barbarians intent on pillaging and enslaving you.
I suspect you are confused but the intended connotations are hidden behind too much indirection to be sure. I acknowledge the social benefit of strategic vagueness (I believe you refer to it as ‘hint culture’) but in this case I do not consider it a behaviour to be encouraged.
Here’s another dilemma, somewhat related. I don’t know if it was here or somewhere else that I came across this.
A construction company wants to undertake a project that it expects to be profitable. However, this project will be dangerous and, if it is undertaken, some employees are going to die during its construction. The company has come up with two possible plans for building the project. In one plan, one employee, named John, is certain to die. In the other, there will be exactly three fatalities out of a group of 100, although nobody knows which employees it will be (and cannot know until it happens). The company can’t legally force its employees to work on the project, but it can offer them money to do so. John will not accept any amount of money in exchange for certain death, but the company does have 100 employees that it can pay to accept a 3% chance of death. You, as a government decision maker, now have three choices:
1) Compel John to sacrifice himself so the project can be completed with the fewest number of deaths. 2) Allow the company to implement its second plan, in which three employees, randomly selected from a group of of 100, will die. 3) Deny the construction company permission to construct the project.
1) Compel John to sacrifice himself so the project can be completed with the fewest number of deaths.
2) Allow the company to implement its second plan, in which three employees, randomly selected from a group of of 100, will die.
3) Deny the construction company permission to construct the project.
Either two or three, depending on whether applying this as a general rule would cripple the economy.
If I worked for the company, however, I would probably choose number one, assuming I don’t have the power to prevent the project or it would provide benefits that outweigh his death..
In the American Civil War, you could avoid conscription by paying $300 and hiring a substitute. This was widely regarded as unfair, as only fairly wealthy people could afford to pay, and was a major agitating factor in the New York City draft riots.
In the American Civil War, you could avoid conscription by paying $300 and hiring a substitute. This was widely regarded as unfair, as only fairly wealthy people could afford to pay, and was a major agitating factor in the New York City draft riots.
If my understanding of US history serves me one of the sides in that war was also fighting for slavery. I am more than willing to defy the ‘fairness’ intuitions that some people have got up in arms about in the past.
As a purely practical matter of implementing an economically sane solution with minimal hysterics by silly people I observe that implementing conscription and allowing people to buy out of it will tend to trigger entirely different ‘fairness’ instincts than implementing a wartime tax and paying soldiers the market rate. The latter solution would likely produce far less civil unrest than the former and the fact that the economic incentives are equivalent is largely irrelevant given that the objection wasn’t rational in the first place.
Bizarrely enough I would expect more unrest from the wealthy in the “war tax and pay market rates” scenario (“It isn’t fair that you are taking all this money from me! How dare you use my money to pay these low status people $500,000 a year. They do not deserve that.”) and objection from (people affiliating with) lower classes in the case of the “conscript and trade” scenario (“It isn’t fair that rich people can buy their way out of fighting but poor people can’t!”). Complete reversal of political support due to terminology change in an implementation detail. People are crazy; the world is mad. Not even biased self-interested political influence can be trusted to be coherent.
The best way to get people to do a job is to pay them enough that they choose to. If people are not choosing to join the army that means they are not getting paid enough.
This strikes me as correct in many cases, but I worry about applying the general rule to military service in particular. Soldiers who see themselves as working for pay have a lot less incentive to take on risk for the sake of their employer. And from what I remember from a few studies, offering people one kind of prominent incentive drowns out others: offer a kid a dollar for doing something he otherwise enjoyes and not only will he be less willing to do it without the dollar in the future, but he’ll often do a worse job, taking no pleasure in it.
I was objecting to the claim that the best way to get people to fight for their country was to pay them a lot of money. I think this is really quite a bad way to get people to do this particular job, and forcible conscription is pretty bad too. If those are your only two options, I don’t really know which is worse. I’m sure that depends on the circumstances.
The best way to get people to do a job is to pay them enough that they choose to. If people are not choosing to join the army that means they are not getting paid enough. The government has the power to coerce people into doing things and the preferred way of doing this in this case is taxation. Make everyone contribute to the war effort and let the market choose who pays in cash and who pays in risk of bodily harm but is compensated financially.
In fact, the neither the central government nor coercion are (in principle) required. A sane country could rely on the country purely for it’s role as a contract enforcer and solve such cooperation problems through normal market forces and assurance contracts. “Military Kickstarter” as it were. This of course generalises to an outright weirdtopia.
The best way to get people to do a job is to pay them enough that they choose to. If people are not choosing to join the army that means they are not getting paid enough. The government has the power to coerce people into doing things and the preferred way of doing this in this case is taxation. Make everyone contribute to the war effort and let the market choose who pays in cash and who pays in risk of bodily harm but is compensated financially.
Hmm. What if the economy can’t support the level of taxation required to encourage enough soldiers? There’s got to be a point at which this isn’t the answer. (Libertarians would say it’s the point at which you start taxing people.)
A variant:
Your country is being invaded by evil barbarians. They intend to steal anything portable of value that they can, which includes people that have value as slaves.
Should you volunteer to join your country’s army? Would you?
Should your country institute conscription, if it will increase the chances of successfully fighting off the invaders?
If you answered “yes” to the previous question, would you vote to institute conscription, if it meant that you personally will be one of those people conscripted?
The unpacking of the word ‘should’ here is more complicated than the remainder of the question by far.
No. I don’t unilaterally cooperate on commons problems. I also note that some people choosing to cooperate unilaterally can reduce the incentive for others to find away to enforce a more effective and complete solution. For example, an army of 1,000,000 naive altruists may be expected to beat the barbarians but with 900,000 casualties. In that case the others have an incentive to free-load. However an army of 10,000,000 conditional cooperators who constructed an enforcement mechanism may be expected to crush the enemy with overwhelming force, losing a mere 50,000 casualties. In this case volunteering is an evil act, not a good one.
If the choice is between using a volunteer army of the most altruistic and gullible and a conscripted army then yes, I prefer the conscription option particularly if it increases the chances of success. But it isn’t my preferred mechanism.
The best way to get people to do a job is to pay them enough that they choose to. If people are not choosing to join the army that means they are not getting paid enough. The government has the power to coerce people into doing things and the preferred way of doing this in this case is taxation. Make everyone contribute to the war effort and let the market choose who pays in cash and who pays in risk of bodily harm but is compensated financially.
Yes. Unless the country is sane enough that the conscription vote failing would result in a superior solution being constructed.
For good or ill, many people in my country have a hard time thinking of themselves as part of a cooperative enterprise with much wealthier people who are cooperating through money while they cooperate through risking bodily harm.
Of course, I’ve never suggested that my country is particularly sane.
Fortunately your country is also not being invaded by evil barbarians intent on pillaging and enslaving you.
Yes, that is fortunate.
I suspect you are confused but the intended connotations are hidden behind too much indirection to be sure. I acknowledge the social benefit of strategic vagueness (I believe you refer to it as ‘hint culture’) but in this case I do not consider it a behaviour to be encouraged.
Here’s another dilemma, somewhat related. I don’t know if it was here or somewhere else that I came across this.
A construction company wants to undertake a project that it expects to be profitable. However, this project will be dangerous and, if it is undertaken, some employees are going to die during its construction. The company has come up with two possible plans for building the project. In one plan, one employee, named John, is certain to die. In the other, there will be exactly three fatalities out of a group of 100, although nobody knows which employees it will be (and cannot know until it happens). The company can’t legally force its employees to work on the project, but it can offer them money to do so. John will not accept any amount of money in exchange for certain death, but the company does have 100 employees that it can pay to accept a 3% chance of death. You, as a government decision maker, now have three choices:
1) Compel John to sacrifice himself so the project can be completed with the fewest number of deaths.
2) Allow the company to implement its second plan, in which three employees, randomly selected from a group of of 100, will die.
3) Deny the construction company permission to construct the project.
What choice do you make?
2.
Either two or three, depending on whether applying this as a general rule would cripple the economy.
If I worked for the company, however, I would probably choose number one, assuming I don’t have the power to prevent the project or it would provide benefits that outweigh his death..
In the American Civil War, you could avoid conscription by paying $300 and hiring a substitute. This was widely regarded as unfair, as only fairly wealthy people could afford to pay, and was a major agitating factor in the New York City draft riots.
If my understanding of US history serves me one of the sides in that war was also fighting for slavery. I am more than willing to defy the ‘fairness’ intuitions that some people have got up in arms about in the past.
As a purely practical matter of implementing an economically sane solution with minimal hysterics by silly people I observe that implementing conscription and allowing people to buy out of it will tend to trigger entirely different ‘fairness’ instincts than implementing a wartime tax and paying soldiers the market rate. The latter solution would likely produce far less civil unrest than the former and the fact that the economic incentives are equivalent is largely irrelevant given that the objection wasn’t rational in the first place.
Bizarrely enough I would expect more unrest from the wealthy in the “war tax and pay market rates” scenario (“It isn’t fair that you are taking all this money from me! How dare you use my money to pay these low status people $500,000 a year. They do not deserve that.”) and objection from (people affiliating with) lower classes in the case of the “conscript and trade” scenario (“It isn’t fair that rich people can buy their way out of fighting but poor people can’t!”). Complete reversal of political support due to terminology change in an implementation detail. People are crazy; the world is mad. Not even biased self-interested political influence can be trusted to be coherent.
This strikes me as correct in many cases, but I worry about applying the general rule to military service in particular. Soldiers who see themselves as working for pay have a lot less incentive to take on risk for the sake of their employer. And from what I remember from a few studies, offering people one kind of prominent incentive drowns out others: offer a kid a dollar for doing something he otherwise enjoyes and not only will he be less willing to do it without the dollar in the future, but he’ll often do a worse job, taking no pleasure in it.
How about soldiers who see themselves as being forcibly conscripted?
I was objecting to the claim that the best way to get people to fight for their country was to pay them a lot of money. I think this is really quite a bad way to get people to do this particular job, and forcible conscription is pretty bad too. If those are your only two options, I don’t really know which is worse. I’m sure that depends on the circumstances.
It just struck me as odd that you didn’t address the analogous argument for the other side.
Of course, you’re right, ideally people should be joining out of the goodness of their hearts.
No, wait, ideally we should find the best soldier and clone them.
Or we could just do it with flying assassin robots.
… clearly my ideal was not ideal enough compared to, say, reality.
In fact, the neither the central government nor coercion are (in principle) required. A sane country could rely on the country purely for it’s role as a contract enforcer and solve such cooperation problems through normal market forces and assurance contracts. “Military Kickstarter” as it were. This of course generalises to an outright weirdtopia.
Hmm. What if the economy can’t support the level of taxation required to encourage enough soldiers? There’s got to be a point at which this isn’t the answer. (Libertarians would say it’s the point at which you start taxing people.)