By taking away bad options, one creates pressure for the creation of better options. In the short-term this is presumably bad, but in the longer term this may lead to the actual creation of better options, which may be good.
Disclaimer: I don’t know to what extent I buy this steelman. But also I’m concerned about your post from a Chesterton’s fence perspective. How did people develop the aversion to exploitation? Are we sure there isn’t a good reason?
The problem is that you create pressure for the creation of better options, but if the people involved had the ability to create better options, they would have already done it. I guess you could say the idea is to create political pressure to make better options, but it seems unnecessarily complicated to use politics to create political pressure. If you have political control, just do the good thing immediately?
Thanks for a steelman. Can you give any real life example of where taking away bad options has led to the creation of better options? Or conversely, can you think of any real life examples where a government said something like “we’ve allowed sex for rent, now we can ignore the housing crisis”?
I notice that the large majority of the bad options I can think of are ultimately the result of poverty. But even in the current world there are few governments strongly focused on reducing poverty among their own citizens and none I know of focused on reducing poverty internationally. So the existing long list of people not being allowed bad options isn’t really leading to good options.
Internationally, what help there is often comes from charities—do you think it likely that MSF or Oxfam would say “OK, Indian people can sell kidneys now, I guess they don’t need us?” I doubt it.
The canonical example of this is minimum wage laws. There is a lot of economic theory about how (reasonable-level) minimum wages create unemployment. And many people continue to insist that this is in fact the case, based on pretty solid supply/demand reasoning.
But in most circumstances, big empirical studies persistently fail to show any evidence that the predicted unemployment actually occurs. Why? I can tell some just-so stories about it, but the real answer I think is “geez, I don’t know, real life is much more complex than simple supply/demand models.”
Research on this seems to go back and forth, but my understanding of the latest was that it’s just hard to measure but at a high level the evidence largely points in the way theory predicts (minimum wages reduce employment). https://www.nber.org/papers/w28388
Related to the original post, this is why I think the Earned Income Tax Credit is good while a minimum wage is bad.
No I didn’t estimate the effect myself. I don’t think that’s a reasonable bar for commenting in this context. I also doubt it would make a difference if I had, since as a non-expert, my opinion of any given study’s methods is probably not going to convince anyone.
Admittedly I have not. TBH I’m not sure i could tell even if I did. But I’m very confident just by looking at the world around me that predictions by minwage opponents of imminent mass unemployment every time it’s raised are wrong.
What I also know is that the ultimate effect is controversial among respected economists. What I deduce from this is that if there’s an effect it must be small, because if it was big it would be obvious.
But is the free tuberculosis treatment in India because kidney selling was banned? Or because countries which get to a certain development level try to give at least some basic free healthcare to their people? In a counterfactual where India had legalised kidney selling for the last twenty years, do you think they would not have free treatment for tuberculosis?
I mean a few years ago, I could have felt like writing a similar post to what you wrote. But somewhere along the line I realized that others may have personal experiences that their heuristics such as “exploitation is bad” work out well, and that my disagreement may simply be because I lack those experiences.
This is particularly critical to me because I am autistic and introverted so I have had fairly few social experiences and until recently have not paid so much attention to the precise details of those experiences. Maybe if you are allistic and extraverted, this stuff is less of a problem for you.
But in such a case, I think I would be more interested in you drawing on experiences from your personal life and giving example of cases there where exploitation has been good/would have been good. I assume they’d be more representative and that you’d know more details about them than about big political topics which affect many people.
I’m also introverted and nerdy bordering on autistic, so I can’t make a claim that my experiences are different from yours in that sense. I think some of my perspective comes from growing up in developing countries and knowing what real poverty looks like, even though I haven’t experienced it myself. And some of my perspective is that I value my own personal autonomy very highly, so I oppose people who want to take autonomy away from others, and that feeling seems to be stronger than it is for most people.
Upvote for paragraph one, agree for paragraph two.
It’s a very narrow (but admittedly compelling) perspective to realize that in particularly bad situations, regulations can compound the badness. But there is plenty of room to debate regulations when it comes to typical cases, and it’s probably a better basis on which to evaluate them.
As a steelman of taking away bad options:
By taking away bad options, one creates pressure for the creation of better options. In the short-term this is presumably bad, but in the longer term this may lead to the actual creation of better options, which may be good.
Disclaimer: I don’t know to what extent I buy this steelman. But also I’m concerned about your post from a Chesterton’s fence perspective. How did people develop the aversion to exploitation? Are we sure there isn’t a good reason?
The problem is that you create pressure for the creation of better options, but if the people involved had the ability to create better options, they would have already done it. I guess you could say the idea is to create political pressure to make better options, but it seems unnecessarily complicated to use politics to create political pressure. If you have political control, just do the good thing immediately?
Thanks for a steelman. Can you give any real life example of where taking away bad options has led to the creation of better options? Or conversely, can you think of any real life examples where a government said something like “we’ve allowed sex for rent, now we can ignore the housing crisis”?
I notice that the large majority of the bad options I can think of are ultimately the result of poverty. But even in the current world there are few governments strongly focused on reducing poverty among their own citizens and none I know of focused on reducing poverty internationally. So the existing long list of people not being allowed bad options isn’t really leading to good options.
Internationally, what help there is often comes from charities—do you think it likely that MSF or Oxfam would say “OK, Indian people can sell kidneys now, I guess they don’t need us?” I doubt it.
The canonical example of this is minimum wage laws. There is a lot of economic theory about how (reasonable-level) minimum wages create unemployment. And many people continue to insist that this is in fact the case, based on pretty solid supply/demand reasoning.
But in most circumstances, big empirical studies persistently fail to show any evidence that the predicted unemployment actually occurs. Why? I can tell some just-so stories about it, but the real answer I think is “geez, I don’t know, real life is much more complex than simple supply/demand models.”
Research on this seems to go back and forth, but my understanding of the latest was that it’s just hard to measure but at a high level the evidence largely points in the way theory predicts (minimum wages reduce employment). https://www.nber.org/papers/w28388
Related to the original post, this is why I think the Earned Income Tax Credit is good while a minimum wage is bad.
Have you read through the studies and methods yourself and checked that they estimate the effects correctly?
Why did you decide that this isolated demand for rigor belongs on my comment and not the parent, or dozens of other comments?
I posted it on the parent comment too. Is there some reason you find it more difficult to answer my question than the parent commenter does?
No I didn’t estimate the effect myself. I don’t think that’s a reasonable bar for commenting in this context. I also doubt it would make a difference if I had, since as a non-expert, my opinion of any given study’s methods is probably not going to convince anyone.
I tend to think social science is untrustworthy, so if you haven’t double-checked their methods yourself you should probably assume they are wrong.
But would you trust the methods if I had checked, or would you still want to check it yourself?
If you had checked, that would be a filter, which would make it more worth paying attention to and maybe checking myself.
Thanks, that’s a good example. I’ll think about it.
Have you read through the studies and methods yourself and checked that they estimate the effects correctly?
Admittedly I have not. TBH I’m not sure i could tell even if I did. But I’m very confident just by looking at the world around me that predictions by minwage opponents of imminent mass unemployment every time it’s raised are wrong.
What I also know is that the ultimate effect is controversial among respected economists. What I deduce from this is that if there’s an effect it must be small, because if it was big it would be obvious.
I guess one possible example would be that the government started providing free tuberculosis treatment in India?
But is the free tuberculosis treatment in India because kidney selling was banned? Or because countries which get to a certain development level try to give at least some basic free healthcare to their people? In a counterfactual where India had legalised kidney selling for the last twenty years, do you think they would not have free treatment for tuberculosis?
I don’t know.
I mean a few years ago, I could have felt like writing a similar post to what you wrote. But somewhere along the line I realized that others may have personal experiences that their heuristics such as “exploitation is bad” work out well, and that my disagreement may simply be because I lack those experiences.
This is particularly critical to me because I am autistic and introverted so I have had fairly few social experiences and until recently have not paid so much attention to the precise details of those experiences. Maybe if you are allistic and extraverted, this stuff is less of a problem for you.
But in such a case, I think I would be more interested in you drawing on experiences from your personal life and giving example of cases there where exploitation has been good/would have been good. I assume they’d be more representative and that you’d know more details about them than about big political topics which affect many people.
I’m also introverted and nerdy bordering on autistic, so I can’t make a claim that my experiences are different from yours in that sense. I think some of my perspective comes from growing up in developing countries and knowing what real poverty looks like, even though I haven’t experienced it myself. And some of my perspective is that I value my own personal autonomy very highly, so I oppose people who want to take autonomy away from others, and that feeling seems to be stronger than it is for most people.
Upvote for paragraph one, agree for paragraph two.
It’s a very narrow (but admittedly compelling) perspective to realize that in particularly bad situations, regulations can compound the badness. But there is plenty of room to debate regulations when it comes to typical cases, and it’s probably a better basis on which to evaluate them.