I have more of a request for an elaboration of the position of others.
In very broad terms, what do you support the government doing? I’m not looking for a list as much as a rule governing your approval.
For example, I’m basically a small government geolibertarian. I’d have the government primarily protect your negative rights, set up laws and courts to resolve disputes as an alternative to the private resort to violence, and as major part of those laws enforce private property as the rules governing enjoying the fruits of your labor, or exchanging those fruits or that labor with others. The geo part comes from the belief that property in natural resources is not similarly justified by labor, and so requires compensation to others if you want sole use of some resource. I’m generally hostile to intellectual property and the mixing of corporate limited liability and free markets.
I’m against the government treating you, your labor, or the fruits of your labor as a resource to draw upon for purposes other than those stated above.
Briefly, I support the government creating rules of the road so that we can live in proximity without violence, otherwise free to pursue our own interests.
The major alternatives I hear from people are approving of whatever the majority decides through free and fair elections, or approving of doing what is good, or the above plus the legally enforced right to a list of “needs”, to be supplied by treating others as resources to supply those needs.
I’m requesting that others similarly elaborate what they approve of the government doing, particularly where you approve of different things than I do.
To hijack this thread a bit, please don’t upvote or downvote based on agreement with my preferences on government.
I support the government acting as a solver of coordination and lack-of-information problems.
To reuse an example I brought up in another discussion, suppose that a company is using a chemical in some manufacturing process which is highly toxic, and that toxic chemical is making its way into the population in harmful quantities. 0.2% of the population knows about this and understands the danger, and of these, all who do not work for the company oppose the practice. The remaining 99.8% of the population has no opinion.
In such a situation, a boycott is highly unlikely to be useful (getting a boycott to work even under favorable conditions is a formidable coordination problem, and it’s much worse in a situation where most of the population is unaware of the relevant information, since any attempt to raise awareness has to compete with every other source of information jockeying for the target audience’s attention.) However, if the concerned parties can go to the government and say “this is the evidence that this manufacturing process is harmful, we all agree that it’s too dangerous to allow,” then the government can review the information and decide whether the process should be banned or not. By having a body which can engage in full time review of public concerns, the population can address more issues than if individuals had to research all the issues that might be relevant to them all the time (they have other things to do which put constraints on their time,) with a greatly reduced opportunity cost compared to every member of the public having to address all those issues for themselves.
I do not think that rights, negative or positive, are a particularly useful way of framing what the government should or should not treat as within its purview. I think that there are some ethical injunctions the government should follow against certain actions even if they may seem like good ideas at the time, when we know that there are certain things that tend to appear to be good ideas at the time and then lead to bad consequences anyway, thus warranting a policy based on the outside view. But I think that framing issues in terms of rights is a bad way to sort out what are and aren’t good policies to pursue. I’m going to be the second person to reference Yvain’s work here, and quote from his Non-Libertarian FAQ (rights and heuristics section)
Third, when push comes to shove the Non-Aggression Principle just isn’t strong enough to solve hard problems. It usually results in a bunch of people claiming conflicting rights and judges just having to go with whatever seems intuitively best to them.
For example, a person has the right to live where he or she wants, because he or she has “a right to personal self-determination”. Unless that person is a child, in which case the child has to live where his or her parents say, because...um...the parents have “a right to their child” that trumps the child’s “right to personal self-determination”. But what if the parents are evil and abusive and lock the child in a fetid closet with no food for two weeks? Then maybe the authorities can take the child away because...um...the child’s “right to decent conditions” trumps the parents’ “right to their child” even though the latter trumps the child’s “right to personal self-determination”? Or maybe they can’t, because there shouldn’t even be authorities of that sort? Hard to tell.
Another example. I can build an ugly shed on my property, because I have a “right to control my property”, even though the sight of the shed leaves my property and irritates my neighbor; my neighbor has no “right not to be irritated”. Maybe I can build a ten million decibel noise-making machine on my property, but maybe not, because the noise will leave my property and disturbs neighbor; my “right to control my property” might or might not trump my neighbor’s “right not to be disturbed”, even though disturbed and irritated are synonyms. I definitely can’t detonate a nuclear warhead on my property, because the blast wave will leave my property and incinerates my neighbor, and my neighbor apparently does have a “right not to be incinerated”.
If you’ve ever seen people working within our current moral system trying to solve issues like these, you quickly realize that not only are they making it up as they go along based on a series of ad hoc rules, but they’re so used to doing so that they no longer realize that this is undesirable or a shoddy way to handle ethics.
In general, I think that the government should act according to a decision process of “what, within the ethical injunctions we’re restricted by, are the most positive impacts we can make on society, according to our best understanding of the public’s preferences should they have the information available to us?”
In general, I think that the government should act according to a decision process of “what, within the ethical injunctions we’re restricted by, are the most positive impacts we can make on society, according to our best understanding of the public’s preferences should they have the information available to us?”
The problem is that attempting to optimize subject to deontological/ethical restrictions tends to result in finding creative loopholes in said restrictions, i.e., attempting to obey the letter but not the spirit of the ethical injunction.
That is a risk, but some restrictions are easier to find loopholes in than others. Obviously, I think that injunctions where the letter accurately encapsulates the spirit are better than ones where it does not.
I do not think that rights, negative or positive, are a particularly useful way of framing what the government should or should not treat as within its purview. … But I think that framing issues in terms of rights is a bad way to sort out what are and aren’t good policies to pursue
The fundamental political question is who does what to whom. Who gets to decide and enforce what on whom? Rights as prerogatives of choice and control that answer that question. How do you answer it?
In general, I think that the government should act according to a decision process of “what, within the ethical injunctions we’re restricted by, are the most positive impacts we can make on society, according to our best understanding of the public’s preferences should they have the information available to us?
Positive, according to whom? As decided by whom? I note that people I disagree with on politics like to say “We” and “Us” a lot, but in fact it’s still individual whos doing to individual whoms, and they don’t like to point out the individuals too often, and certainly don’t like to point out the element of force in that relationship.
What are you ethical injunctions? They seem all important to evaluating your view of government, as without them, you’re granting unlimited license to the government to make “positive impacts”.
One clear difference I’m noting between US libertarian traditions and progressive viewpoints is the null hypothesis on government power, with libertarians holding that government should only do what it is specifically empowered to do, and progressives holding that government is empowered to do whatever isn’t specifically prohibited. Progressives want the government to force people to do whatever is good for society, and libertarians want government to protect rights and provide conflict resolution, but otherwise leave people to spend their lives on their own view of what is good.
Rights as prerogatives of choice and control that answer that question. How do you answer it?
This doesn’t help much in practice, since legal and political disputes virtually always involve conflicting rights. The political answer is that we should find workable compromises and perhaps “deals” involving conflicting rights. Referring to “positive impact we can make on society” is just a way to say that we should evaluate such “deals” and choose optimal ones.
Conversely, a “positive impact” perspective can easily account for constitutional commitments, such as limited government powers, checks-and-balances and upholding individual rights. “Governments” are social institutions, and any institution needs some kinds of grounding rules (and incentives) to channel its actions into desirable directions. Political and government agents are not magically benevolent.
What are you ethical injunctions? They seem all important to evaluating your view of government, as without them, you’re granting unlimited license to the government to make “positive impacts”.
Honestly, I don’t think I can answer that off the cuff. I’ll try to get back to you on that later, but as Eugine Nier already pointed out, such things are highly susceptible to loophole exploitation. I certainly wouldn’t plan to establish a government on a set of restrictions that I’ve only spent a few minutes formulating (It’s not as if I have a ready set worked out in case it comes up in a political discussion, because I don’t think there’s any realistic way I’ll ever be in a position to meaningfully affect the implementation of a new system of government.)
I do think, though, that the usual libertarian conception of rights is not a good way to narrow down issues that I care about (when it comes to protecting our country from attack, for instance, there are government initiatives I would pay for them to stop doing, not just because they’re ineffective but because trying to address those issues at all sends a bad message which even the best case outcome of those initiatives doesn’t make worthwhile) and I think most people care about some issues which they are not effectively able to address without outside intervention due to coordination problems.
When you have an answer on your ethical injunctions, please elaborate them in terms of “who does what to whom”. That’s where the rubber meets the road.
The whole Dictatorship of the Proletariat could have been punctured with a simple question—“How exactly is that supposed to work?” When you get down to concrete individuals, you see quickly that individuals have different interests. “We” aren’t going to be the Dictator. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
I certainly wouldn’t plan to establish a government on a set of restrictions that I’ve only spent a few minutes formulating
Can you see how libertarians would find that disturbing? “I want the government to positive impacts, subject to some ethical injunctions, but I haven’t really spent any time thinking about the ethical injunctions.”
Libertarians have spent more than a few minutes on questions of who does what to whom.
I do think, though, that the usual libertarian conception of rights is not a good way to narrow down issues that I care about
Well, I’ll go back to Thomas Sowell, and ask “compared to what?” Compared to what conception is the libertarian concept of right deficient? You don’t seem to have alternative conceptions that answer “who does what to whom”.
As for coordination problems, it’s a lot easier to coordinate people who have the same goals and want to cooperate voluntarily than force those who don’t want to cooperate to do what you want. The Libertarian way is to have the government ensure that people are free to cooperate with others to spend their lives as they choose, instead of the dominant paradigm of a government where we fight to control others, and make them spend their lives as we wish they would.
Can you explain what negative rights you think the government needs to protect? That is, a list, such that everyone could agree what are and aren’t legitimate negative rights to protect, and no important rights which society would suffer for not having defended are left out?
I’m aware that what I have is only the rough shape of a form of government, which needs a lot of work to convert into something practicable, but I think you overestimate the degree to which the hard work needed to formulate libertarianism as a system that could actually stand to improve on our current one has already been done.
As for coordination problems, it’s a lot easier to coordinate people who have the same goals and want to cooperate voluntarily than force those who don’t want to cooperate to do what you want.
It’s certainly easier to get people to cooperate with a strong central authority whose goals are in accordance with their own than one which is trying to force them into something they don’t think is in their interests. But when we look at examples of coordination problems like depleting fisheries, there’s an ample history of people who had a shared vested interest in their resources not being exhausted failing to work out amongst themselves and implement a scheme that would preserve their interests in the long term, whereas governments have had significantly greater success dealing with this sort of problem. Governments have certainly demonstrated a lot of failings, but it seems that the answer to the question of “how good are people at solving coordination problems to improve their shared interests over the long term, without a central authority to arbitrate,” is “pretty bad, compared to when they do have such an authority.”
To start off briefly, I don’t see the FAQ as a serious point of departure for discussion. It is a self conscious attack on a straw man.
To the first type of libertarian, I apologize for writing a FAQ attacking a caricature of your philosophy, but unfortunately that caricature is alive and well and posting smug slogans on Facebook.
This is true, but I think that the specific point with respect to the usefulness of “rights” in determining what actions are permissible is still relevant. People’s negative rights can easily come into conflict with each other. I’m also not convinced that “positive” and “negative” rights hold up well as a distinction. Is a right to clean water a positive right (some body has to take action to ensure that the water is provided) or a negative right (nobody is allowed to take actions which corrupt the supply)?
I reject the idea that it is my duty to have political opinions. Conscription into the de-facto government is barbaric. Further, I don’t have the power to tell them what to do anyways, so the question is low-value. Therefor I have no official opinion on what the GoC ought to be doing.
However, for the purposes of our entertainment in this thread, if I had a magic button that could make one small change to the government, I would require all MPs to read Yvain’s consequentialism FAQ, and possibly something to kick some statistical sense into them.
The Conservative Party is already pretty good at talking the consequentialist talk, it would just be nice if they believed it too. On the other hand, they occasionally make stupid comments like “we don’t make decisions based on numbers” (their excuse for scrapping the mandatory long bonus census). I’m also not sure they’ve got their values straight, or if they’re pursuing lost purposes (they do an awful lot of selling “pieces of Canada’s future” to China), and delusion (Christianity).
I reject the idea that it is my duty to have political opinions. Conscription into the de-facto government is barbaric. Further, I don’t have the power to tell them what to do anyways, so the question is low-value. Therefor I have no official opinion on what the GoC ought to be doing.
I like this a lot. As a personal example, I was recently reading about the debate over allowing women to be in combat jobs in the US military, and trying to decide where I stood. Egalitarianism is good, definitely, and they’ve proved themselves capable as de facto combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But can they meet the physical standards? What about unit cohesion? Ahhh!
And then I shook myself, and realized that I am hugely unqualified to make that decision, not being in the military or a position of power in the government, or an expert in this field or any related field at all. And luckily, no one is seeking out my opinion! I do not have to know the answer or even care. It’s okay. This will not be on the test. It was tremendously liberating.
I like this a lot. As a personal example, I was recently reading about the debate over allowing women to be in combat jobs in the US military, and trying to decide where I stood. Egalitarianism is good, definitely, and they’ve proved themselves capable as de facto combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But can they meet the physical standards? What about unit cohesion? Ahhh!
Think about it this way: Why are sports segregated by gender once one gets to a high enough level that people care who wins? What would happen if both genders competed in the same competition?
Well, the top level would still be dominated by one gender, mostly male with the possible exception of things like gymnastics. Also in violent sports like (American) football you’d create awkward situations due to the fact that our culture still has a strong taboo against male on female violence. Now apply the same logic to combat.
I reject the idea that it is my duty to have political opinions.
I reject that idea as well. I even have some questions about the basic rationality of having political opinions.
But I do have political opinions, and a lot of other people do as well, so I’m asking.
if I had a magic button that could make one small change to the government, I would require all MPs to read Yvain’s consequentialism FAQ
I’ve got a briefer one. Ask Thomas Sowell’s 3 questions. Compared to what? At what cost? What evidence do you have?
Or Dan’s 3 Fair Questions: When you say “It is unfair”, what does “It” refer to, who are all the people effected by your solution to this unfairness, and how is your solution fair to everyone effected?
possibly something to kick some statistical sense into them.
Dare to dream.
they occasionally make stupid comments like “we don’t make decisions based on numbers”
I’d like to question what counts as “government” here. Everything tax-supported? Only the legislature, courts, and agencies with regulatory or law-enforcement powers?
Take schooling, for instance. I see a pretty big difference between ① requiring citizens to pay taxes that fund state schools, and ② requiring kids to go to state schools instead of autodidacticism, homeschooling, or other unregulated education. Not just a difference of degree, but a qualitative one — because the latter forbids alternatives.
I’d like to question what counts as “government” here.
Is it a mystery where you live? I grant that you get boundary cases like government approved guilds that control licensing and access in certain industries. Is a doctor a government agent? Increasingly so.
To answer you questions directly. No. Yeah, probably.
And I see 1 and 2 as different as well and for similar reasons. In general, I see regulation and criminal law as more onerous than taxation because it entirely removes options.
I think the most important task for the government is to handle oncoming automization in a good way.
The current trend with robotics and automization is fewer and fewer workers being necessary for the functioning of society. The end-point as I see it is one of two societies—either the fruits of automization are used to bribe the unemployed masses from rioting, or they’re used to wall off safe places so that the people who own and run the robots don’t care about riots.
Obviously, I’d much rather have the first case than the second.
We’ve lost, by my count, 1,394,100,000 jobs in the US in the last two hundred years. You may notice that is a larger number of jobs than people actually exist; this is because, if all those jobs actually existed, we’d still be farmers. (Value calculated by dividing current median income in the US by an estimation of sustenance income necessary to a lifestyle appropriate to, say, the 1700′s. Not terribly accurate, as it doesn’t account for the increased value of leisure time, or the automation of non-economic tasks; the actual figure in these terms may be as much as 30x rather than 9x the labor force. Additionally, I didn’t include the massive reduction in work hours over the past two hundred years, which could as much as double that figure again)
The challenge isn’t to figure out how many jobs automation will eliminate; it’s already eliminated nine times more jobs than there are people doing jobs in this country. That’s what permits our high standards of living; each person is enjoying the fruits of the labor of at least eight additional counterfactual people whose jobs are being performed by automation.
The challenge is to figure out to what extent this trend can continue; there’s obvious room for improvement in that most of the world still has substantial improvements to be made to its standard of living. The challenge is to figure out whether or not the most fundamental tenet of economics—that demand is unlimited—holds true.
The challenge is to figure out whether or not the most fundamental tenet of economics—that demand is unlimited—holds true.
Even if demands are unlimited, the problem is that automation will drive down the costs of a lot of labor to where regulatory and transaction costs make hiring most people more trouble than it’s worth. It’s not that there won’t be labor people want done, it’s that machines will out compete most people in those tasks, making then economically unviable.
Which is exactly what happened for the other 1.4 billion jobs that don’t exist anymore in the United States.
What you fear has been feared for a hundred and fifty years, since automation started to seriously replace workers. Instead of driving us to a dystopia, however, it’s pushed us into a relative utopia.
What you’re proposing isn’t new. The implication you aren’t addressing is that the trend of -new- jobs, previously not worth employing someone to do, but rising at the margins with increased specialization, arising as workers were freed from old ones will suddenly cease.
Machines used to compete on brute strength and endurance. Mankind always used to have advantages in intelligence, communication, sensation, and precision control. All of those are under attack in ways they have not before.
In short, people are rapidly losing a comparative advantage versus machines. The real problem comes when the opportunities for profit from using machines overcomes the opportunities for profit by employing people. The accelerating rates of improvement in technology will make that more and more the case.
Actually, machines used to compete on strength. They required constant maintenance, however; many people were mutilated fixing the machines while they were still running. That was last century.
Then they began competing on precision control; that’s been on the rise for the past century.
Communication has been the story of the last thirty years. Sensation, similarly, has been rising for the past twenty years. Intelligence is still in the works.
At no point in this process did machines lead to mass unemployment; indeed, employment has -increased- over the past century, as women have begun entering the workforce.
Your proposition ultimately comes down to this: You can’t imagine what we’ll be doing next. I have only this to say: The person who -can- imagine, that person will be the next billionaire, or possibly even the first trillionaire. It shouldn’t surprise you that you can’t imagine what jobs will keep billions occupied over the next century, if you could you would be the extremely exceptional case.
Your proposition ultimately comes down to this: You can’t imagine what we’ll be doing next.
No, my proposition comes down to this:
In short, people are rapidly losing a comparative advantage versus machines.
What comparative advantage will people still have? How big is that market? How many people likely to be out of work can fill that market?
Really good robotic hookers and “escorts” are a ways off. There will be work there for a while, but not everyone would be in demand in that market.
There’s no reason every person has to have economically viable capabilities, particularly in a regulated economy where there is a minimum cost threshold through regulations. Some people now, don’t. Babies don’t.
I always thought demand was limited by factors such as the size of one’s stomach the speed at which clothes wear out or go out of fashion, and most importantly income among other things. I’m actually kind of surprised to hear that unlimited demand was a fundamental tenet of economics.
I always thought demand was limited by [..] and most importantly income [..] I’m actually kind of surprised to hear that unlimited demand was a fundamental tenet of economics.
The problem seems to be confusion as to what economists mean by demand and “unlimited demand”. What they mean by demand is not a static number but a demand curve relating how much of something you would buy depending on its price, i.e., not just what you’re buying now but also what else you would buy if you could. Thus by “unlimited demand” they mean that there is always more you would buy if you could afford it.
Historically it has never worked out that way. When a society gets richer the people eat more and better food, buy more clothes, live in bigger houses, buy cars and appliances, travel more, and so on. Based on the behavior of rich people we can see that a x10 or even x100 increase from current wealth levels due to automation would just continue this trend, with people spending the excess on things like mansions, private jets and a legion of robot servants.
Realistically there’s probably some upper limit to human consumption, but it’s so far above current production levels that we don’t see much hint of where it would be yet. So for most practical purposes we can assume demand is infinite until we actually see the rich start systematically running out of things to spend money on.
There are probably lots of examples of coffee-table “damned leeches, living off my tax-dollars” conversation getting proven wrong, or at least grossly simplified, but this is probably one of the most damning examples.
There really ought to be a means of conveying information like this to the public, en masse. News outlets have stories like this on their websites, though I haven’t found any live TV reports. Just imagine how any political debate down in the United States would go if every rhetorical comment and argument was shot down with articles like this, on both sides. In fact, there ought to be a repository for scientific findings that have immediate political and sociological consequences.
In fact, there ought to be a repository for scientific findings that have immediate political and sociological consequences.
A few years back, Aaron Swartz & Peter Eckersley tried this with a website called Science That Matters (now down), which revealed a couple of potential problems with this idea.
The first is pretty minor: the people running the repository might stop updating it after a while. STM got updated quite a lot through 2007, a couple of times in 2008, and never again after that.
The second is that scientific findings might not be as weighty as they sometimes look. They turn out to be wrong, get over-interpreted, get under-played, or prove less relevant than they first appear.
The last post on STM was titled “There is No Satisfactory Form of Utilitarianism”, based on a paper arguing that any sane way of aggregating the welfare of many into a single measure leads to at least one of “The Repugnant Conclusion”, “The Sadistic Conclusion”, and “The Very Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion”. This appears to force utilitarianism into an agonizing trilemma, as each of these three conclusions seems appalling. But the Repugnant Conclusion is arguably not so Repugnant after all, in which case the trilemma loses its force and the paper loses its urgency.
Another STM post discussed the RAND Health Insurance Experiment. The post first went one way, exaggerating the study’s results with the over-the-top title “Is the net effect of health care zero?”, and then swung the other way, warning readers in an update that JohnNyman highlighted a “terrible flaw” in the experiment that “would seem to severely throw these findings into question”. (Families given free healthcare were less likely to drop out of the experiment than families that had to pay some healthcare costs, introducing a bias.) Half a decade after Nyman, it turns out that some of the experiment’s results still stand after accounting for the flaw.
A similar issue crops up for the proposed lead-and-crime link you mention. Although the effect of high lead exposure on mortality and mental test performance is well established (quasi-)experimentally, the effect of low lead exposure on violent behaviour isn’t, so it’s not clear how much we should trust the quantitative estimates of the latter.
If this was intended as a response to me, I don’t see the relevance to what I said.
As for the lead story, that’s been going around for a long time, and don’t really see the relevance to most US political discussions. Childhood lead exposure can cause developmental problems leading to adult behavioral changes. Believable to me.
Sorry about that, it wasn’t. I misclicked, and the retract button’s line crossing seemed even worse than just leaving it there.
The relevance to US political discussion is in policy decisions. With the information we have in this article, it’s a better long term investment to get rid of lead usage in industrial and commercial settings that risk such exposure, if one is trying to reduce crime in cities, instead of building more prisons, “cracking down on crime”, etc.
Quite recently under Obama the EPA did make a decision to limit mercury polution which got opposed by the Republicans.
If you accept that lead should be regulated then why not mercury? The EPA did a pretty good calculation that estimated the costs and benefits of mercury regulation.
I approve of the government considering and honestly stating the repercussions of their actions rather than acting only on principle and disregarding what their principles do, or considering the repercussions of their actions and then lying about them for political gain.
When that occurs and when I’ve tried to pick through to the actual repercussions of the government policy when it far more often doesn’t, then I tend to pick the government representative or policy whose repercussions I like better, bearing in mind the overall trustworthiness from the previous assessment.
This is similar to “I approve of government doing what is good” except that there is an obvious counter argument to that “What if the government doing what is good has bad reprecussions?” and I think this formulation attempts to address that.
non-exclusive enforcement of contracts non-exclusive protection of private property national defense sensible redistribution which would never actually happen so I’m agin it most importantly, none of these should be open to the democratic process
I have more of a request for an elaboration of the position of others.
In very broad terms, what do you support the government doing? I’m not looking for a list as much as a rule governing your approval.
For example, I’m basically a small government geolibertarian. I’d have the government primarily protect your negative rights, set up laws and courts to resolve disputes as an alternative to the private resort to violence, and as major part of those laws enforce private property as the rules governing enjoying the fruits of your labor, or exchanging those fruits or that labor with others. The geo part comes from the belief that property in natural resources is not similarly justified by labor, and so requires compensation to others if you want sole use of some resource. I’m generally hostile to intellectual property and the mixing of corporate limited liability and free markets.
I’m against the government treating you, your labor, or the fruits of your labor as a resource to draw upon for purposes other than those stated above.
Briefly, I support the government creating rules of the road so that we can live in proximity without violence, otherwise free to pursue our own interests.
The major alternatives I hear from people are approving of whatever the majority decides through free and fair elections, or approving of doing what is good, or the above plus the legally enforced right to a list of “needs”, to be supplied by treating others as resources to supply those needs.
I’m requesting that others similarly elaborate what they approve of the government doing, particularly where you approve of different things than I do.
To hijack this thread a bit, please don’t upvote or downvote based on agreement with my preferences on government.
I support the government acting as a solver of coordination and lack-of-information problems.
To reuse an example I brought up in another discussion, suppose that a company is using a chemical in some manufacturing process which is highly toxic, and that toxic chemical is making its way into the population in harmful quantities. 0.2% of the population knows about this and understands the danger, and of these, all who do not work for the company oppose the practice. The remaining 99.8% of the population has no opinion.
In such a situation, a boycott is highly unlikely to be useful (getting a boycott to work even under favorable conditions is a formidable coordination problem, and it’s much worse in a situation where most of the population is unaware of the relevant information, since any attempt to raise awareness has to compete with every other source of information jockeying for the target audience’s attention.) However, if the concerned parties can go to the government and say “this is the evidence that this manufacturing process is harmful, we all agree that it’s too dangerous to allow,” then the government can review the information and decide whether the process should be banned or not. By having a body which can engage in full time review of public concerns, the population can address more issues than if individuals had to research all the issues that might be relevant to them all the time (they have other things to do which put constraints on their time,) with a greatly reduced opportunity cost compared to every member of the public having to address all those issues for themselves.
I do not think that rights, negative or positive, are a particularly useful way of framing what the government should or should not treat as within its purview. I think that there are some ethical injunctions the government should follow against certain actions even if they may seem like good ideas at the time, when we know that there are certain things that tend to appear to be good ideas at the time and then lead to bad consequences anyway, thus warranting a policy based on the outside view. But I think that framing issues in terms of rights is a bad way to sort out what are and aren’t good policies to pursue. I’m going to be the second person to reference Yvain’s work here, and quote from his Non-Libertarian FAQ (rights and heuristics section)
In general, I think that the government should act according to a decision process of “what, within the ethical injunctions we’re restricted by, are the most positive impacts we can make on society, according to our best understanding of the public’s preferences should they have the information available to us?”
The problem is that attempting to optimize subject to deontological/ethical restrictions tends to result in finding creative loopholes in said restrictions, i.e., attempting to obey the letter but not the spirit of the ethical injunction.
That is a risk, but some restrictions are easier to find loopholes in than others. Obviously, I think that injunctions where the letter accurately encapsulates the spirit are better than ones where it does not.
The fundamental political question is who does what to whom. Who gets to decide and enforce what on whom? Rights as prerogatives of choice and control that answer that question. How do you answer it?
Positive, according to whom? As decided by whom? I note that people I disagree with on politics like to say “We” and “Us” a lot, but in fact it’s still individual whos doing to individual whoms, and they don’t like to point out the individuals too often, and certainly don’t like to point out the element of force in that relationship.
What are you ethical injunctions? They seem all important to evaluating your view of government, as without them, you’re granting unlimited license to the government to make “positive impacts”.
One clear difference I’m noting between US libertarian traditions and progressive viewpoints is the null hypothesis on government power, with libertarians holding that government should only do what it is specifically empowered to do, and progressives holding that government is empowered to do whatever isn’t specifically prohibited. Progressives want the government to force people to do whatever is good for society, and libertarians want government to protect rights and provide conflict resolution, but otherwise leave people to spend their lives on their own view of what is good.
This doesn’t help much in practice, since legal and political disputes virtually always involve conflicting rights. The political answer is that we should find workable compromises and perhaps “deals” involving conflicting rights. Referring to “positive impact we can make on society” is just a way to say that we should evaluate such “deals” and choose optimal ones.
Conversely, a “positive impact” perspective can easily account for constitutional commitments, such as limited government powers, checks-and-balances and upholding individual rights. “Governments” are social institutions, and any institution needs some kinds of grounding rules (and incentives) to channel its actions into desirable directions. Political and government agents are not magically benevolent.
Honestly, I don’t think I can answer that off the cuff. I’ll try to get back to you on that later, but as Eugine Nier already pointed out, such things are highly susceptible to loophole exploitation. I certainly wouldn’t plan to establish a government on a set of restrictions that I’ve only spent a few minutes formulating (It’s not as if I have a ready set worked out in case it comes up in a political discussion, because I don’t think there’s any realistic way I’ll ever be in a position to meaningfully affect the implementation of a new system of government.)
I do think, though, that the usual libertarian conception of rights is not a good way to narrow down issues that I care about (when it comes to protecting our country from attack, for instance, there are government initiatives I would pay for them to stop doing, not just because they’re ineffective but because trying to address those issues at all sends a bad message which even the best case outcome of those initiatives doesn’t make worthwhile) and I think most people care about some issues which they are not effectively able to address without outside intervention due to coordination problems.
I hope you do get back to me.
When you have an answer on your ethical injunctions, please elaborate them in terms of “who does what to whom”. That’s where the rubber meets the road.
The whole Dictatorship of the Proletariat could have been punctured with a simple question—“How exactly is that supposed to work?” When you get down to concrete individuals, you see quickly that individuals have different interests. “We” aren’t going to be the Dictator. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Can you see how libertarians would find that disturbing? “I want the government to positive impacts, subject to some ethical injunctions, but I haven’t really spent any time thinking about the ethical injunctions.”
Libertarians have spent more than a few minutes on questions of who does what to whom.
Well, I’ll go back to Thomas Sowell, and ask “compared to what?” Compared to what conception is the libertarian concept of right deficient? You don’t seem to have alternative conceptions that answer “who does what to whom”.
As for coordination problems, it’s a lot easier to coordinate people who have the same goals and want to cooperate voluntarily than force those who don’t want to cooperate to do what you want. The Libertarian way is to have the government ensure that people are free to cooperate with others to spend their lives as they choose, instead of the dominant paradigm of a government where we fight to control others, and make them spend their lives as we wish they would.
Can you explain what negative rights you think the government needs to protect? That is, a list, such that everyone could agree what are and aren’t legitimate negative rights to protect, and no important rights which society would suffer for not having defended are left out?
I’m aware that what I have is only the rough shape of a form of government, which needs a lot of work to convert into something practicable, but I think you overestimate the degree to which the hard work needed to formulate libertarianism as a system that could actually stand to improve on our current one has already been done.
It’s certainly easier to get people to cooperate with a strong central authority whose goals are in accordance with their own than one which is trying to force them into something they don’t think is in their interests. But when we look at examples of coordination problems like depleting fisheries, there’s an ample history of people who had a shared vested interest in their resources not being exhausted failing to work out amongst themselves and implement a scheme that would preserve their interests in the long term, whereas governments have had significantly greater success dealing with this sort of problem. Governments have certainly demonstrated a lot of failings, but it seems that the answer to the question of “how good are people at solving coordination problems to improve their shared interests over the long term, without a central authority to arbitrate,” is “pretty bad, compared to when they do have such an authority.”
To start off briefly, I don’t see the FAQ as a serious point of departure for discussion. It is a self conscious attack on a straw man.
Not exactly an instance of Steel Manning.
This is true, but I think that the specific point with respect to the usefulness of “rights” in determining what actions are permissible is still relevant. People’s negative rights can easily come into conflict with each other. I’m also not convinced that “positive” and “negative” rights hold up well as a distinction. Is a right to clean water a positive right (some body has to take action to ensure that the water is provided) or a negative right (nobody is allowed to take actions which corrupt the supply)?
I reject the idea that it is my duty to have political opinions. Conscription into the de-facto government is barbaric. Further, I don’t have the power to tell them what to do anyways, so the question is low-value. Therefor I have no official opinion on what the GoC ought to be doing.
However, for the purposes of our entertainment in this thread, if I had a magic button that could make one small change to the government, I would require all MPs to read Yvain’s consequentialism FAQ, and possibly something to kick some statistical sense into them.
The Conservative Party is already pretty good at talking the consequentialist talk, it would just be nice if they believed it too. On the other hand, they occasionally make stupid comments like “we don’t make decisions based on numbers” (their excuse for scrapping the mandatory long bonus census). I’m also not sure they’ve got their values straight, or if they’re pursuing lost purposes (they do an awful lot of selling “pieces of Canada’s future” to China), and delusion (Christianity).
I like this a lot. As a personal example, I was recently reading about the debate over allowing women to be in combat jobs in the US military, and trying to decide where I stood. Egalitarianism is good, definitely, and they’ve proved themselves capable as de facto combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. But can they meet the physical standards? What about unit cohesion? Ahhh!
And then I shook myself, and realized that I am hugely unqualified to make that decision, not being in the military or a position of power in the government, or an expert in this field or any related field at all. And luckily, no one is seeking out my opinion! I do not have to know the answer or even care. It’s okay. This will not be on the test. It was tremendously liberating.
Think about it this way: Why are sports segregated by gender once one gets to a high enough level that people care who wins? What would happen if both genders competed in the same competition?
Well, the top level would still be dominated by one gender, mostly male with the possible exception of things like gymnastics. Also in violent sports like (American) football you’d create awkward situations due to the fact that our culture still has a strong taboo against male on female violence. Now apply the same logic to combat.
I reject that idea as well. I even have some questions about the basic rationality of having political opinions.
But I do have political opinions, and a lot of other people do as well, so I’m asking.
I’ve got a briefer one. Ask Thomas Sowell’s 3 questions. Compared to what? At what cost? What evidence do you have?
Or Dan’s 3 Fair Questions: When you say “It is unfair”, what does “It” refer to, who are all the people effected by your solution to this unfairness, and how is your solution fair to everyone effected?
Dare to dream.
“If it saves even one life...”
Sowell’s questions sound like a prime candidate for the rationality quotes thread.
I’d like to question what counts as “government” here. Everything tax-supported? Only the legislature, courts, and agencies with regulatory or law-enforcement powers?
Take schooling, for instance. I see a pretty big difference between ① requiring citizens to pay taxes that fund state schools, and ② requiring kids to go to state schools instead of autodidacticism, homeschooling, or other unregulated education. Not just a difference of degree, but a qualitative one — because the latter forbids alternatives.
Is it a mystery where you live? I grant that you get boundary cases like government approved guilds that control licensing and access in certain industries. Is a doctor a government agent? Increasingly so.
To answer you questions directly. No. Yeah, probably.
And I see 1 and 2 as different as well and for similar reasons. In general, I see regulation and criminal law as more onerous than taxation because it entirely removes options.
I think the most important task for the government is to handle oncoming automization in a good way.
The current trend with robotics and automization is fewer and fewer workers being necessary for the functioning of society. The end-point as I see it is one of two societies—either the fruits of automization are used to bribe the unemployed masses from rioting, or they’re used to wall off safe places so that the people who own and run the robots don’t care about riots.
Obviously, I’d much rather have the first case than the second.
We’ve lost, by my count, 1,394,100,000 jobs in the US in the last two hundred years. You may notice that is a larger number of jobs than people actually exist; this is because, if all those jobs actually existed, we’d still be farmers. (Value calculated by dividing current median income in the US by an estimation of sustenance income necessary to a lifestyle appropriate to, say, the 1700′s. Not terribly accurate, as it doesn’t account for the increased value of leisure time, or the automation of non-economic tasks; the actual figure in these terms may be as much as 30x rather than 9x the labor force. Additionally, I didn’t include the massive reduction in work hours over the past two hundred years, which could as much as double that figure again)
The challenge isn’t to figure out how many jobs automation will eliminate; it’s already eliminated nine times more jobs than there are people doing jobs in this country. That’s what permits our high standards of living; each person is enjoying the fruits of the labor of at least eight additional counterfactual people whose jobs are being performed by automation.
The challenge is to figure out to what extent this trend can continue; there’s obvious room for improvement in that most of the world still has substantial improvements to be made to its standard of living. The challenge is to figure out whether or not the most fundamental tenet of economics—that demand is unlimited—holds true.
Even if demands are unlimited, the problem is that automation will drive down the costs of a lot of labor to where regulatory and transaction costs make hiring most people more trouble than it’s worth. It’s not that there won’t be labor people want done, it’s that machines will out compete most people in those tasks, making then economically unviable.
Which is exactly what happened for the other 1.4 billion jobs that don’t exist anymore in the United States.
What you fear has been feared for a hundred and fifty years, since automation started to seriously replace workers. Instead of driving us to a dystopia, however, it’s pushed us into a relative utopia.
What you’re proposing isn’t new. The implication you aren’t addressing is that the trend of -new- jobs, previously not worth employing someone to do, but rising at the margins with increased specialization, arising as workers were freed from old ones will suddenly cease.
It’s not exactly what has happened.
Machines used to compete on brute strength and endurance. Mankind always used to have advantages in intelligence, communication, sensation, and precision control. All of those are under attack in ways they have not before.
In short, people are rapidly losing a comparative advantage versus machines. The real problem comes when the opportunities for profit from using machines overcomes the opportunities for profit by employing people. The accelerating rates of improvement in technology will make that more and more the case.
Actually, machines used to compete on strength. They required constant maintenance, however; many people were mutilated fixing the machines while they were still running. That was last century.
Then they began competing on precision control; that’s been on the rise for the past century.
Communication has been the story of the last thirty years. Sensation, similarly, has been rising for the past twenty years. Intelligence is still in the works.
At no point in this process did machines lead to mass unemployment; indeed, employment has -increased- over the past century, as women have begun entering the workforce.
Your proposition ultimately comes down to this: You can’t imagine what we’ll be doing next. I have only this to say: The person who -can- imagine, that person will be the next billionaire, or possibly even the first trillionaire. It shouldn’t surprise you that you can’t imagine what jobs will keep billions occupied over the next century, if you could you would be the extremely exceptional case.
No, my proposition comes down to this:
What comparative advantage will people still have? How big is that market? How many people likely to be out of work can fill that market?
Really good robotic hookers and “escorts” are a ways off. There will be work there for a while, but not everyone would be in demand in that market.
There’s no reason every person has to have economically viable capabilities, particularly in a regulated economy where there is a minimum cost threshold through regulations. Some people now, don’t. Babies don’t.
I always thought demand was limited by factors such as the size of one’s stomach the speed at which clothes wear out or go out of fashion, and most importantly income among other things. I’m actually kind of surprised to hear that unlimited demand was a fundamental tenet of economics.
The problem seems to be confusion as to what economists mean by demand and “unlimited demand”. What they mean by demand is not a static number but a demand curve relating how much of something you would buy depending on its price, i.e., not just what you’re buying now but also what else you would buy if you could. Thus by “unlimited demand” they mean that there is always more you would buy if you could afford it.
Historically it has never worked out that way. When a society gets richer the people eat more and better food, buy more clothes, live in bigger houses, buy cars and appliances, travel more, and so on. Based on the behavior of rich people we can see that a x10 or even x100 increase from current wealth levels due to automation would just continue this trend, with people spending the excess on things like mansions, private jets and a legion of robot servants.
Realistically there’s probably some upper limit to human consumption, but it’s so far above current production levels that we don’t see much hint of where it would be yet. So for most practical purposes we can assume demand is infinite until we actually see the rich start systematically running out of things to spend money on.
There are probably lots of examples of coffee-table “damned leeches, living off my tax-dollars” conversation getting proven wrong, or at least grossly simplified, but this is probably one of the most damning examples.
There really ought to be a means of conveying information like this to the public, en masse. News outlets have stories like this on their websites, though I haven’t found any live TV reports. Just imagine how any political debate down in the United States would go if every rhetorical comment and argument was shot down with articles like this, on both sides. In fact, there ought to be a repository for scientific findings that have immediate political and sociological consequences.
A few years back, Aaron Swartz & Peter Eckersley tried this with a website called Science That Matters (now down), which revealed a couple of potential problems with this idea.
The first is pretty minor: the people running the repository might stop updating it after a while. STM got updated quite a lot through 2007, a couple of times in 2008, and never again after that.
The second is that scientific findings might not be as weighty as they sometimes look. They turn out to be wrong, get over-interpreted, get under-played, or prove less relevant than they first appear.
The last post on STM was titled “There is No Satisfactory Form of Utilitarianism”, based on a paper arguing that any sane way of aggregating the welfare of many into a single measure leads to at least one of “The Repugnant Conclusion”, “The Sadistic Conclusion”, and “The Very Anti-Egalitarian Conclusion”. This appears to force utilitarianism into an agonizing trilemma, as each of these three conclusions seems appalling. But the Repugnant Conclusion is arguably not so Repugnant after all, in which case the trilemma loses its force and the paper loses its urgency.
Another STM post discussed the RAND Health Insurance Experiment. The post first went one way, exaggerating the study’s results with the over-the-top title “Is the net effect of health care zero?”, and then swung the other way, warning readers in an update that John Nyman highlighted a “terrible flaw” in the experiment that “would seem to severely throw these findings into question”. (Families given free healthcare were less likely to drop out of the experiment than families that had to pay some healthcare costs, introducing a bias.) Half a decade after Nyman, it turns out that some of the experiment’s results still stand after accounting for the flaw.
A similar issue crops up for the proposed lead-and-crime link you mention. Although the effect of high lead exposure on mortality and mental test performance is well established (quasi-)experimentally, the effect of low lead exposure on violent behaviour isn’t, so it’s not clear how much we should trust the quantitative estimates of the latter.
If this was intended as a response to me, I don’t see the relevance to what I said.
As for the lead story, that’s been going around for a long time, and don’t really see the relevance to most US political discussions. Childhood lead exposure can cause developmental problems leading to adult behavioral changes. Believable to me.
Sorry about that, it wasn’t. I misclicked, and the retract button’s line crossing seemed even worse than just leaving it there.
The relevance to US political discussion is in policy decisions. With the information we have in this article, it’s a better long term investment to get rid of lead usage in industrial and commercial settings that risk such exposure, if one is trying to reduce crime in cities, instead of building more prisons, “cracking down on crime”, etc.
Quite recently under Obama the EPA did make a decision to limit mercury polution which got opposed by the Republicans.
If you accept that lead should be regulated then why not mercury? The EPA did a pretty good calculation that estimated the costs and benefits of mercury regulation.
I approve of the government considering and honestly stating the repercussions of their actions rather than acting only on principle and disregarding what their principles do, or considering the repercussions of their actions and then lying about them for political gain.
When that occurs and when I’ve tried to pick through to the actual repercussions of the government policy when it far more often doesn’t, then I tend to pick the government representative or policy whose repercussions I like better, bearing in mind the overall trustworthiness from the previous assessment.
This is similar to “I approve of government doing what is good” except that there is an obvious counter argument to that “What if the government doing what is good has bad reprecussions?” and I think this formulation attempts to address that.
non-exclusive enforcement of contracts
non-exclusive protection of private property
national defense
sensible redistribution which would never actually happen so I’m agin it
most importantly, none of these should be open to the democratic process