Nazi Hypotheticals

Posted on October 8, 2011 by wallaceforman

Godwin’s Law states that as an online debate grows, the odds of one of the participants making a Nazi reference approaches 100%. Many people believe that the person who makes the Nazi analogy loses the argument by default (he has “violated” Godwin’s Law), but I don’t think that is right. Nazi hypotheticals can be used to iron out bad logical premises in an argument, if they are used correctly.

However, it is important to note the distinction between different kind of Nazi comparisons.

1. Sometimes people make completely opaque and unexplained Nazi references. For Example:

Person 1: I think I’ll vote for Rick Perry in the Republican Primary.

Person 2: He’s just like Hitler. What are you, a Nazi?

Here it is almost impossible to understand, without some context, what similarity exists between Rick Perry and Hitler, or between Person 1 and the Nazis. Often, when this kind of unexplained comparison is made, there is no real equivalence, and the comparison is just an unhelpful epithet.

2. Sometimes, people make completely irrelevant comparisons to the Nazis. For example:

Person 1: I think we should build more highway, because they are great.

Person 2: Hitler loved highways. We shouldn’t build Nazi roads here.

Here the comparison to the Nazis is clear, but irrelevant. The fact that Nazis loved the autobahn doesn’t make highways bad. Hitler probably loved pizza and filet mignon too, but that doesn’t make them any less delicious. Nazi references need to be more than valid comparisons, they need to have some substance relevant to a larger discussion.

3. In some circumstances, Nazi references can be used as valid counterexamples to a disputed principle. For example :

Person 1: Citizens should always obey the law.

Person 2: Should German citizens have obeyed laws to turn over their Jewish neighbors to Nazi death camps?

Nazi hypotheticals are useful because they provide a ready body of real world scenarios that most people identify as clearly evil. Almost nobody today is in favor of sending ethnic minorities to death camps or starting vicious aggressive wars for territorial gain. These scenarios can be referenced as obvious counterexamples that force somebody to qualify a logical premise (citizens should always obey the law unless the law is really bad) or discard it (citizens should not always obey the law).

It’s important to remember that such hypotheticals may only be useful when they specifically relate to obviously evil facets of Nazi policy. Everyone agrees that genocide and unprovoked wars of territorial aggression are bad. But comparisons between Swat team drug raids and violent SS house invasions to search for hidden Jews, for example, will still be unhelpful. Although everyone agrees that hunting for Jews is bad, not everyone believes that the tactics used to do so were inappropriate for all ends.

So, if you are going to use a Nazi hypothetical, make sure it’s explained, make sure it’s relevant, and make sure you are referring to something the Nazis did that is clearly evil. And expect to be misunderstood anyway.

Distributional Effects

Posted on October 8, 2011 by wallaceforman

Many of the moral judgments that people term “fairness” seem to implicitly concern distributional effects. Imagine two policies that both affect 10 people. Policy A will cause 9 of the people to gain $10, and 1 to lose $10. Policy A`, an alternative to Policy A, will cause all ten people to gain $5. The average return of Policy A ($8) is greater than that of Policy A` ($5). But many people will say that Policy A is unfair, because, looking at the people who are worse off in each scenario, someone is worst off under Policy A.

This analysis represents a sort of case-by-case, post-hoc Rawlsian difference principle. The analysis is usually applied after the fact of a choice between Policy A and A`. Strangely, perhaps, many people seem not to care who made the choice between the two policies.

For example, imagine ten couples investing their funds for retirement. They choose between one of two investment policies. Under Policy A, they will invest their funds in one of many different sets of stocks. All sets of stocks are expected, with 90% probability, to produce a $10,000 return, and with 10% probability, to produce a $10,000 loss. Alternatively, the couples can choose to invest in Policy A`, which will produce a guaranteed return of $5,000.

Suppose all ten couples freely choose Policy A. We can expect that one of those ten couples will experience a $10,000 loss. People with libertarian sentiments, although they may empathize with that couple, will generally not object, because the couple chose the policy.

However, my impression is that many other people object that this is simply unfair. Even where risks have been chosen voluntarily, they would prefer a more even distribution of losses. Some people will prefer that everyone take Policy A`. They may even support legislation that would force them to do so (such as Social Security).

Whenever you hear an unelaborated claim that some policy or practice is “not fair,” I would suggest that you look for this sort of distributional effect. Does some group of people stand to lose in a big way? Will the unlucky people be worse off under Policy A than under Policy A`?

Some examples of how this “fairness” analysis may color some political debates, high and low:

Social security may produce a very bad rate of return, but it would be unfair to let retirees lose their money on the stock market.
Health care insurance may not be worth the cost of the premiums, but it is unfair to force sick people without insurance to pay for the cost of their care.
Allowing underperforming businesses to fail might aid in the efficient reallocation of labor and capital, but it will be unfair to the unlucky employees of those businesses, who will have to find lower-paying jobs.
Low skill immigrant workers may increase the output of the economy in general, but they compete with the worst off lowest-skilled Americans and may hurt their wages.
High credit card fees for missed payments might lower uncertainty for credit card lenders and decrease the total cost of lending, but they will reallocate most of that cost to chronically late payers.

This analysis – unfairness as greater harm for the unlucky or worst off – may strike some people as rather obvious; however it may not be obvious for everyone. And because, I suspect, it is such a central concept, it seems useful to have a go-to post up on my blog for reference.

Self-Help from the Successful?

Posted on October 8, 2011 by wallaceforman

Megan McArdle reacts to Steve Jobs’s “never settle” advice:

The problem is, the people who give these sorts of speeches are the outliers: the folks who have made a name for themselves in some very challenging, competitive, and high-status field. No one ever brings in the regional sales manager for a medical supplies firm to say, “Yeah, I didn’t get to be CEO. But I wake up happy most mornings, my kids are great, and my golf game gets better every year.”

That’s most people. But what does Steve Jobs have to tell them? I doubt he can imagine what that’s like, much less empathize, or come up with solid advice on finding a great hobby. So he tells them how to be Steve Jobs. Which sounds great, and is of very limited practical value, even to Stanford grads.

My question is: should unsuccessful people just be extremely wary about taking advice from successful people? And what does that say about the self-help industry?

File this under: commencement addresses are about the speakers

Posted on October 6, 2011 by wallaceforman

Now notice: doing what you love, and never settling until you find it, is a costly signal of your career prospects. Since following this advice tends to go better for really capable people, they pay a smaller price for following it. So endorsing this strategy in a way that makes you more likely to follow it is a way to signal your status.

It sure feels good to tell people that you think it is important to “do what you love”; and doing so signals your status. You are in effect bragging. Don’t you think there might be some relation between these two facts?

via Overcoming Bias : ‘Never Settle’ Is A Brag.

Megan McArdle on whether Solyndra was a good investment

Posted on September 26, 2011 by wallaceforman

She says it wasn’t. Snip:

Or as Andrew Samwick said, somewhat more briefly, ”If you have a risk that the private sector won’t take, it is because the private sector does not see it as a profitable risk to take. It does not get more profitable if the government takes it. It only formally shifts the risk of losses to the taxpayers.”

It’s not enough to say that radical basic research often has unexpected payoffs. This was not a grant to a scientist; it was a loan to a company. As such, you can’t just judge whether their technology was interesting–but whether the product had a potential market, and if so, whether the company was capable of manufacturing product to meet that market demand.

T.H. White on Pacifism

Posted on August 26, 2011 by wallaceforman

I just finished reading T.H. White’s The Once and Future King.

In Part 2 of the book, Merlyn defends a pretty thorough-going pacifism, which I assume is some variant of T.H. White’s own.

“There is no excuse for war, none whatever, and whatever the wrong which your nation might be doing to mine – short of war – my nation would be in the wrong if it started a war so as to redress it.”

Really, asks Merlyn’s interlocutor Kay, there’s no reason that could justify starting a war? Even if they were starving you? Even if you had conquered and occupied them?

Apparently not, according to Merlyn. Rebellion in particular is unjustifiable:

“Look at this Gaelic revolt, for example. What reason has the King here for being an aggressor? He is their feudal overlord already. It isn’t sensible to pretend that he is making the attack. People don’t attack their own possessions.”

I wonder what T.H. White would say about the Libyan uprising. Would he, in Caplanian fashion, label it a Tragic Mistake?

The Psychology of Concentrated Interests and Diffuse Costs

Posted on March 10, 2011 by wallaceforman

The standard account of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs suggests that self-interested voters rationally allow themselves to be robbed a penny at a time. The cost of repealing each little wasteful subsidy is greater than the cost of organizing a political campaign against it. Citizens coolly accept the trade-off and focus on more important things – like capturing their own payments from the government.

I worry that the underlying psychology is more complicated than this.

People tend to avoid controversy and disagreement. A classic demonstration is the Asch Conformity Experiment. In the experiment, a test subject is asked to compare the length of one line to several others and determine which two are the same length. Before the test subject gives his answer, several other participants pretending to be test subjects give intentionally incorrect answers. A third of the time, the real test subject conforms to the answers of the fake participants and gives incorrect answers to simple and objectively obvious questions. Only about 25 percent of participants always refuse to conform and only give correct answers.

The Asch Experiment produces only weak (~35 percent) conformity to the group, and only under very strict circumstances (the test subject faces a unanimously incorrect group and has to disagree with them openly). But the Asch test asks an easy question, with an obvious answer that requires no specialized knowledge.

Questions about domestic policy do not have obvious answers. Voters often do not have have the kind of basic knowledge that they would need to participate meaningfully in politics. For example, Ilya Somin tells us that only 38 percent of Americans knew the Soviet Union was not a member of NATO in 1964, 57 percent did not know who Newt Gingrich was in 1994, and, most recently, 22% of Americans now believe that the recent Democratic health care bill has already been repealed. In order to form an intelligent position on domestic policy, people need more than a basic understanding of politics. They ought to have an understanding of the actual effects of policy – preferably an understanding of economics. But ignorance about economics is also common, even among those with a college education.

Political ignorance is rational. In a nation of 300 million people, few people can influence policy, so very few waste their time trying to understand it. If political questions do not have obvious answers for most people, the tendency to conform should be much stronger than in the Asch experiment. Organized interest groups (doctors, farmers, unions, soldiers, the poor, etc.) stand in for the fake test subjects. These groups make loud but false claims about how their narrow interests serve the greater good. The general public can either blindly accept the false claims of interested parties or antagonize them without knowing any reason that they should disagree.

In other words, people do not simply ignore wasteful subsidies just because it is in their self-interest. The passionate claims of interest groups encourage the rationally ignorant to conform to the self-interested beliefs of their neighbors in order avoid controversy over policies they can’t evaluate themselves. Conformity helps explains why even obviously stupid policies that support interest groups remain so popular. When Ezra Klein interviewed Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Vilsack gave a number of absurd justifications for agricultural subsidies, including the moral importance of having rural communities:

There is a value system that’s important to support. If there’s not economic opportunity, we can’t utilize the resources of rural America. I think it’s a complicated discussion and it does start with the fact that these are good, hardworking people who feel underappreciated….

The military service piece of this is important. It’s a value system that instilled in them. But look: I grew up in a city. My parents would think there was something wrong with America if they knew I was secretary of agriculture. So I’ve seen both sides of this. And small-town folks in rural America don’t feel appreciated. They feel they do a great service for America. They send their children to the military not just because it’s an opportunity, but because they have a value system from the farm: They have to give something back to the land that sustains them.

Yet agricultural subsidies are overwhelmingly popular, despite the tiny number of people who benefit from them, and their clear costs. How many public policy battles are really different? Nobody wants to antagonize their neighbors. People have doctor neighbors, union neighbors, unemployed neighbors, and neighbors that belong to a thousand other little interest groups, and they politely adopt their neighbors’ nonsense as if it was their own.

Concentrated Benefits and Diffuse Costs

Posted on March 9, 2011 by wallaceforman

Interest groups tend to lobby the government to redistribute money to them because people face concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.

People in an interest group receive all of the benefits of redistribution to that group: the benefits are concentrated. They only pay a portion of the cost – usually the costs are diffused among taxpayers in general. Because of this, interest groups often favor even subsidies that decrease social welfare, because they receive more in benefits than they pay in costs.

Members of an interest group often will do more to create or defend a subsidy than a taxpayer will do to destroy it. The members of the interest group should be willing to spend as much as they receive in benefits to defend the program. Individual taxpayers should only be willing to spend as much as their tiny share of taxes to challenge the program.

An example:

There is a town with five people in it: a doctor, a farmer, a lawyer, a poor man, and the mayor. The first four men lobby the mayor separately, and each manages to convince him that they are part of an important interest group (doctors, farmers, etc.). The mayor passes a law paying members of their group $1000. The mayor decides that he is an important interest too, so he gives himself a $1000 pay raise. The townspeople pay $5500 in taxes, because each subsidy costs $100 to organize. The men in the town split taxes equally, so they pay $1100 apiece – more than each gains from his own subsidy.

The townspeople would benefit from abolishing all of the subsidies together. But no one wants to abolish his own subsidy. The doctor, for example, receives $1000 from the town but only pays one fifth of its cost: $220. The subsidy is worth $780 to him. While he is willing to spend up to $220 to get rid of any other subsidy, he will spend up to $780 to defend his own subsidy. Only all four of the other townspeople organized together would be willing to spend more than the doctor to repeal his subsidy: $220 per person, or $880.

Money isn’t everything, but it is important. An interest group can use money to defend themselves by paying for positive advertisements, by buying support from politicians, or by lobbying in retaliation against other interest groups that have challenged their subsidies. Interest groups can also spend money lobbying to make their subsidies hard to see. For example, it is harder for consumers to see doctors’ subsidies that are disguised as licensing requirements and restrictions on nurse practitioner drug prescribing.

When the number of taxpayers is large enough, the taxes they pay for each subsidy is tiny. The costs of a program may be diffused so widely that it isn’t worth the cost to organize people against it. If 300 million people pay taxes for a billion dollar subsidy, each pays only a few dollars. It costs money, time, and energy to identify rents, to explain to voters why they should care enough to vote against them, and to convince politicians that they should be removed. Democracies can fall prey to rent-seeking – unwilling to resist a million little bites from a million little parasitic programs. In societies that do not resist rent-seeking, individual success depends on the ability to manipulate government to the detriment of others.

Secession and the Collective Will

Posted on January 28, 2011 by wallaceforman

There is one objection to secession that I want to take a moment to disagree with. In class, a student suggested that secession was not legitimate for individual states, because they had decided to join together as one decision-making unit. Individual states no longer had individual decision-making power.

Parsing votes for some sort of collective will is futile. I certainly never agreed to merge my sovereignty with the collective. I doubt many people have. If all the people of Massachusetts decide tomorrow that they don’t want to be part of our “decision making unit”, we certainly can’t say that they have decided to be part of the United States. If the rest of the United States voted against their secession, most people would say that “we” have decided against secession. I would say that there is no such thing as “we” that has a unified desire of its own. There would just be 49 states voting one way, and one state voting the other.

What do the numbers matter? If the United States voted to annex Iraq, would that be legitimate? Our population can certainly outvote theirs. What if China voted to annex the United States? No one would argue that this is legitimate.

If people never agreed to merge with the collective will, and there is no inherent legitimacy in numbers, the argument must be that within a democracy you can’t secede unless a majority agrees: that’s just how democracy works. Perhaps – but it isn’t necessarily how secession works. It is not obvious that a movement to break away from a government should be bound by the internal logic of that government.

Of course, I’m hardly an advocate of democratic legitimacy, and most people’s moral intuitions are not in sync with mine on this issue.

Secession! Con Law Edition

Posted on January 28, 2011 by wallaceforman

Wednesday in Con Law we discussed the legitimacy of the United States Constitution. The Constitution was adopted contrary to the explicit terms of the Articles of Confederation (the governing document of the United States of America at the time) – which prohibited the separate states from forming any league or treaty between themselves, and which required more votes for amendment than the Constitution required for ratification.

Our professor asked, if people could ignore the Articles, why couldn’t they ignore the Constitution? Why couldn’t states choose to secede today? Was it ok for the southern states to attempt to secede? I argued that it wasn’t, because they were seceding to protect slavery. The professor suggested something to the effect that we should attempt to abstract from our contemporary moral judgments about slavery.

I think this is exactly backwards. Like government, guns, and nuclear energy, secession has no inherent moral force that people can discern in a vacuum from what it’s used for. Seceding to keep millions in slavery was bad. Isn’t that obvious? The southern secession is an ugly blot on our nation’s history, and framing discussions of secession in its shadow obscures things. If you polled people about the secession of Ukraine from the USSR, southern Sudan from greater Sudan, East Timor from Indonesia, or Kosovo from Yugoslavia, they would probably support them. If you asked people about the hypothetical secessions of Quebec from Canada, Catalonia from Spain, Flanders from the Netherlands, Santa Cruz from Bolivia, Australia or Bermuda from the British Commonwealth, Taiwan from China, or the West Bank and Gaza from Israel, they would probably at least be indifferent.

I doubt opinions about these secession movements have anything to do with the sublime legitimacy of the relevant governing charters. People would support these secessions because they think that they are good – that either their consequences are good or their intentions are just. These secessions protect some ethnic group, democracy, or local interests. Or they just break up unobjectionable governments into smaller fragments. Given the list above, I would guess that secessions motivated by a desire to keep large numbers of people in literal slavery are in the minority.

I have argued repeatedly (see here, here, and here) in favor of regulatory competition. The more choices people have about what sort of government they live in, and the easier it is to switch between those choices, then the better government will be. On net, I think that a bloodless secession probably adds to regulatory competition. So on net, I am likely to support secession movements.

Some Con Law Textbook Notes

Posted on January 26, 2011 by wallaceforman

Learning lots of entertaining things from my Con Law book’s hurried history of the constitution’s roots.

The Constitution has been “successful” and showed the “framers’ wisdom” (19). The Articles of Confederation, by contrast, were a “failed federal government”. The authors list as evidence an economic downturn, hyperinflation in state currencies, and fear of invasion by Great Britain (26). I suppose it is true that the Articles failed as a government, but to me that failure could have been a success otherwise. Certainly the Constitution failed to create a significantly federal government.

There is a lot of incoherent discussion of sovereignty resting in “we the people” (21), and government resting upon the “consent of the governed”. What does the book think that this might mean? I realize that most people find reference to a collective’s “will” to be meaningful, but I don’t understand why. Also, if the people are sovereign, why is the present generation bound by our grandparents (22)? Aren’t we a sovereign people too?

Our constitution supposedly mostly protects rights of individuals, not prerogatives of government (23). In theory and text maybe… In reality?

The text claims that Americans embraced Locke’s ideas of consent and the social contract. I can’t disagree with that, though I wonder how coherent those ideas remained once Americans had embraced them. Too much Locke the democratic supremacist, too little Locke the Natural Rights theorist?

The book corroborates a claim I have heard before that the Constitution has some roots in George Washington’s frustration in commanding and paying for the Continental army (27). Isn’t it typical of bureaucrats and politicians always to obsess over the last crisis? I find it fitting that the Federal Government has its roots in George Washington’s ambitions for an American military empire. Leviathan indeed. Also, Washington’s support for the new Constitution was apparently crucial for its success. We can blame Washington for the death of viable regulatory competition in North America – that’s why he’s my third least favorite president.

Interestingly, it claims that Madison intended for the text, and not the drafters’ intentions or interpretations of it, to define the Constitution’s meaning. This was supposedly one of the reasons that the drafters’ did not share notes on their debate (29).

Isn’t the Exclusionary Rule Logical?

Posted on January 25, 2011 by wallaceforman

Covering Mapp v. Ohio, my Criminal Investigation class agonized today over the exclusionary rule. The exclusionary rule prohibits police from using evidence in trial if they gathered it in an unreasonable search. The Fourth Amendment clearly prohibits unreasonable searches, whatever those are, but it does not explicitly endorse the exclusionary rule.

The Supreme Court and my class clearly felt that they had to strain to fit the exclusionary rule into the Fourth Amendment. People hedged about necessity and justice, all, to my mind, unconvincingly.

I don’t think the exclusionary rule is complicated. To me it follows logically:

Premise (Fourth Amendment): The government can’t conduct unreasonable searches.

Premise (Due Process): The government has to convict you based on some investigation.

Conclusion: The government can’t convict you based on investigations that relied on an unreasonable search.

I don’t think there is any problem with the logical combination of the premises, and the second premise seems mostly reasonable. The exclusionary rule follows logically from the Constitution. The only problem is that the first premise is in fact false. The government can conduct unreasonable searches. It does them all the time – that’s why the court has to consider the exclusionary rule. When courts enforce the exclusionary rule they aren’t distorting the Constitution: they are enforcing its logical consequences. They are taking the Constitution seriously even though the police did not.