Monthly Archives: April 2009

Falsity: Not a Hill Worth Dying On

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If I read him right, Robert Stacy McCain’s argument for state-enforced marriage inequality (“a hill to die on”!) is that there is a DEEP TRUTH about inequalities between men and women that must continue to be observed:

Feminist ideologues insist that men and women are not merely equal in the Lockean sense — having the right to life, liberty and property — but are radically equal in the sense of being inherently identical.

The differences between men and women, according to the egalitarian view, are so trivial that the law must forbid any recognition of such differences, so that the sexes are treated as interchangeable. As I argued in January, it is from a careless acquiescence to this egalitarian falsehood that Americans have been steadily — one might well say “progressively” — marched to the point where the Iowa Supreme Court mandates gay marriage and anyone who questions that ruling is dismissed as an ignorant, hateful bigot suffering from the mental disorder of “homophobia.”

What did McCain argue in January?

Are men and women equal in the fullest sense of the word? If so, then equality implies fungibility — the two things are interchangeable and one may be substituted for the other in any circumstance whatsoever. (La mort à la différence!) Therefore, it is of no consequence whether I marry a woman or a man.

[…]

This is why so many of those who would defend traditional marriage find themselves unable to form a coherent argument, because traditional marriage is based on the assumption that men and women are fundamentally different, and hence, unequal. Traditional marriage assumes a complementarity of the sexes that becomes absurd if you deny that “man” and “woman” define intrinsic traits, functions, roles.

To declare men and women unequal, however, puts one outside the law — you are guilty of illegal discrimination if you say that there is any meaningful difference between men and women. Yet if you refuse to argue against sexual equality, you cannot argue effectively against gay marriage, and find yourself subjected to lectures about “accessing the positive social norms” with nothing important to say in reply.

I suppose one could say this is refreshingly frank. But let’s think about the argument (setting aside McCain’s risible claims to membership in some legally and socially persecuted class of put-upon sexist homophobes).

Like many conservatives, McCain makes libertarian noises when it suits him, but when it comes right down to it, he believes the role of the state is to reinforce “traditional” social forms though the law. The “libertarian” conservative rarely wants the state to leave people alone. He wants social change to leave state-enforced legal inequality alone, which is, after all, a proud tradition, sanctified by history. As McCain says, “traditional marriage”—and the state that ensures the exclusivity of its privileges—assumes certain “intrinsic traits, functions, roles” for men and women. He wants the state to police these imagined distinctions. And he very clearly recognizes that there is an alternative “egalitarian” view according to which the there is no relevant difference between men and women—as far as a just scheme of laws is concerned. So he recognizes that there is a stark moral disagreement between egalitarians and anti-egalitarians. McCain clearly has no problem with the state taking sides in this disagreement. He demands that the state take sides with anti-egalitarians. Indeed, he thinks the conservative movement ought to be willing to die fighting to ensure the state keeps taking the side of inequality.

Now, the conservative tends to make two arguments in this kind of dispute. First, that the inequality they wish to preserve in law is an inequality that has been there a long time. Second, that the inequality reflects a DEEP TRUTH about humanity. Generally, these are linked. The inequality in question is embedded in law and tradition because it reflects a DEEP TRUTH. So the fundamental issue is the DEEP TRUTH’s truth. McCain seems to accept that everything turns on this. He seems to know that if he’s wrong about this, he has no case against marriage equality.

The problem for McCain is that you don’t need to be a feminist ideologue to see that the alleged DEEP TRUTH is in fact an especially vulgar instance of the naturalistic fallacy. From the point of view of a decent morality, men and women are equal in all morally relevant respects. Marriage is important to men and women. Family is important to men and women. So a morally decent set of laws ought to maintain the conditions under which men and women are able to express their love and commitment through marriage and realize their desires to raise families. The problem is precisely that the law fails to do this. The reason it fails is that the law (in most states; not here in Iowa!) reflects the still-popular but intellectually bankrupt view that biological regularities establish binding moral guidelines.

Now, no two individuals are identical, and differences in capacities and preferences are relevant to differences in individual reasons and plans. The capacities and preferences of average men and average women mostly overlap, but sometimes they starkly diverge. But the divergence in capacity and preference between an average man and an average women is no more interesting morally than the differences between two individuals of the same sex. If I like brunettes and McCain like blondes, so be it. And if I like women and McCain likes men, so be it. The fact that an individual’s capacities and preferences diverge from the statistical norm for their sex has no interesting moral implications, either. 

It is a fact that most men and women find something deeply meaningful in the complementarity of masculinity and femininity. It is a fact that most couples who marry will form families in the usual mammalian way. But recognizing  equality under the law with respect to marriage does nothing to change this. It does nothing whatsoever to keep statistically average men and women from doing what they will do anyway. It is also a fact that the law, as it now stands in most states, prevents certain men and women from enjoying the legal privileges of marriage and protection for their less conventional families. To see the move to rectify this injustice as itself some kind of injustice simply because men are convex and women are concave is an embarrassing absurdity, not a hill worth dying on.

Ladies Still Not Taxpayer Dispensers

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At Slate, Kerry Howley talks sense to Michelle Goldberg about the doubtful feminist wisdom of using population panic as a pretext for putatively “feminist” policies. Goldberg has clearly neglected Howley’s powerful Reason feature on natalist policy from which I offer this concluding excerpt:

But as pro-baby policies are inevitably sold as pro-mother, and by extension pro-woman, it’s worth recalling the sentiment behind the Australian birth premiums and Singaporean matchmaking schemes. At the heart of any fertility incentive lies an attempt to encourage a particular group of women to orient their bodies in a traditional way. Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation. From Poland to Singapore, swollen wombs are a bulwark against change.

There is a reason we speak of “Mother Russia” and “Mother India.” Feminist sociologists such as Nira Yuval-Davis refer to women as the “boundary markers” of a state or society. While men may leave, fight, and be compromised, women represent purity and continuity. Yuval-Davis points out in her book Gender and Nation that the Hitler Youth Movement had different mottos for girls and boys. The boys’ motto was: “Live faithfully; fight bravely; die laughing.” For girls: “Be faithful; be pure; be German.” Girls simply had to be. They were the collective.

In times of great social anxiety, we see new calls for women to return to home and hearth—calls alternately cast as a return to tradition and as a progressive leap forward, but efforts, nonetheless, to enlist women in a national project while defining the boundaries of national inclusion. Depopulation is not a given, but ideologically fraught and scientifically questionable debates about gender, race, and culture will be with us no matter which way the population swings. “To know what demography is, we need to know what a population is,” the French social scientist Herve Le Bras wrote in The Invention of Populations. “That is where the trouble begins.” 

[Full disclosure: K.L. Howley and I co-own a rumbustious vizsla.]

Doherty Defends "Folk Activism"

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In today’s installment of Cato Unbound, Reason senior editor Brian Doherty defends “folk activism” (that’s we do here at Cato, in case you’re wondering) against Patri Friedman’s complaints of ineffectuality. 

Doherty argues, in effect, that Friedman’s effort to simply go out and float a boat on which one can do whatever floats one’s boat is parasitic on earlier “folk activist” aimed at persuasion. It is hard to find 20,000 people who will commit to moving to New Hampshire for the cause of liberty and, as Brian points out, it’s even harder to find people who will now commit to moving to a man-made island. The viability of projects like Seasteading seems to depend on the success of prior evangelism. 

That said, one of the merits of Friedman’s “dynamic geography” is that it is not really a “libertarian” project at all. As he writes in his Unbound lead essay:

Because we have no a priori knowledge of the best form of government, the search for good societies requires experimentation as well as theory — trying many new institutions to see how they work in practice.

I think there’s good reason to expect competing sea-top jurisdictions to settle on a scheme of governance more libertarian than what the world’s current nation states have to offer. But I also think there’s little reason to expect a seastead to embody the system of most libertarians’ dreams unless a lot of libertarians coordinate and settle there. In that case, it’s really clear that creating a libertarian society from whole cloth depends on the prior existence of libertarians, which depends on the success of the folk activism that produces them.

For more on seasteading, check out yesterday’s Cato Policy forum with Patri Friedman.

[Cross-posted at Cato@Liberty]

How the Promise of Future Subsidies Can Freeze Markets

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I think Casey Mulligan nails it:

The [Chicago city] council has debated mandating hybrid purchases. But the rumor among taxi drivers is that in addition, or perhaps instead, the city or other government agency will eventually subsidize the purchase of a hybrid.

Drivers have decided that they should not purchase a Prius or other hybrid until the subsidy arrived. Buying one now would mean over-paying.

Regardless of whether it is realistic to expect Chicago to someday subsidize purchases of hybrid taxis, the fact is that some cab drivers are considering the possibility. If taxi drivers consider future subsidies in their industry, then so must bank executives.

Last fall the public learned that banks were not selling many of their legacy mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, despite the impression that ownership of the assets were hindering the banks’ lending. A variety of theories have been put forward to explain this failure, and to suggest what the government might do to fix it.

But the lack of trade in mortgage-backed securities may have something in common with the lack of trade in hybrid Chicago taxicabs. The secondary market for legacy mortgages may have stagnated largely because of the (ultimately correct) anticipation of a huge government subsidy.

Taleb's Ten Principles

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To prevent future crashes. I think most of these are pretty good. Explanations for each principle in Taleb’s FT piece. 

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small.

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.

4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning . 

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”.

8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.

9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement.

10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs.

Classical Liberalism Is Not Colorblind

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Jonah Golberg argued last week that there is something “unlibertarian” in pointing out, as I did, that 

American drug prohibition and sentencing policies hit poor black men the hardest, devastating already disadvantaged black families and communities—a tragic, mocking contrast to the achievement of Obama’s election. 

Jacob Sullum has replied in much more detail than I could have, concluding:

From a libertarian perspective, the war on drugs would be unjust even if its victims were a statistically precise cross-section of the American population. But the fact that it disproportionately harms members of a racial minority that was long subject to official discrimination in this country is additional cause for concern, especially since the laws it enforces grew out of explicitly racist anxieties.

But I’d like to single out this claim of Jonah’s:

It seems to me that the classical liberal is supposed to see people as autonomous and sovereign moral actors, not identity politics groups.

This sounds to me like Jonah thinks the classical liberal is supposed to play stupid. Jonah is fully aware that this is a country that for most of its history has been dominated by “identity group politics,” if you want to call it that. Blacks have been legal slaves. Jim Crow established legal racial segregation. We’ve not overcome the legacy of this. We live with urban policies that were initiated as thinly veiled attempts to reinforce residential segregation. We live with education policies that create a de facto segregated and highly unequal system of education. And, as Jacob emphasizes, drug policy has never been color-blind. To point out that it burdens blacks disproportionately is simply to point out that American public policy has never stopped being racist, has never stopped reinforcing a shameful structure of racial stratification squarely at odds with the classical liberal ideal of equal freedom under the law. Classical liberalism is not the stupid idea that there is no history. Nor is it the stupid idea that individuals who are members of groups that have been, and continue to be, victims of discriminatory state action are as fully free as individuals who are not. Classical liberalism is the demand that the state treat mature individuals as equally autonomous and sovereign moral agents, which is why it is necessary to point out the disturbingly discriminatory nature of American drug policy.

[Update: Please also see John Schwenkler and Mark Thompson. Update update: Also and especially John Holbo. How did I miss all this stuff I apparently started.]

America's Next Top Hayekian Public Intellectual

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Greg Ransom is running a silly poll. It’s silly because I’m on it, and there are apparently 16 people — putting me somewhere between my heroes Vernon Smith and Douglass North — who think I’m tops. Eat it Taleb. The volume of voting seems to be low, so we could take this, sports fans. Thomas Sowell? Don Boudreaux? Russ Roberts? Who are these people? Have you ever seen Israel Kirzner in public? I can’t say that I have.

Update: My office wall:

Government, Civil Society, and the Utility of Cooperativeness

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Here is a point that I’m sure I’ve made before but I want to make again. There is a kind of higher-order public good you can call “trust,” “cooperativeness,” or something else. The idea is that some communities are able to overcome certain kinds of challenges involved in coordinating group behavior. The capacity successfully to solve collective action problems at a large scale, with a large population, is the Holy Grail of human society. If you can do this, you can do anything… which is a point I don’t think ideologues have really been able to get their heads around.

Suppose you have a super-cooperative, high-trust society. This is the kind of society where the need for coercion to solve collective action problems is least necessary. Voluntary civil society associations will thrive. But if you’ve got the super-cooperative, high trust conditions for a thriving voluntary civil society, you’ve also got the conditions for a really effective government in which corruption will be minimal and power will tend not to be abused. If there are limits to non-coercive social coordination even in super-cooperative, high-trust societies, states in those kinds of societies will tend to do a pretty good job in deploying coercion responsibly to secure the otherwise foregone gains from successful collective action.

So: The world in which there is little need for state coercion, states will tend to be pretty effective and non-abusive. And worlds in which states work pretty well are worlds where states don’t need to do all that much. Reduce the level of cooperativeness and trust, and the quality of government gets worse. But then civil society gets worse, too. So whatever you want, whether it be good government or a flourishing voluntary civil society, you want the conditions for the other thing.

The trick is that in large modern states jurisdictional boundaries cover many communities with highly variable levels of cooperativeness. So here’s a question. Will the quality of the government of widest scope tend to average out unequal levels of cooperativeness, such that high-cooperativeness communities will tend to get worse governance than they could provide alone (maybe even worse than they could do without a state) and low cooperativeness communities will tend to get better governance than they could provide alone? It seems that the answer has to be “yes,” but what does this imply?

The Moral Psychology of David Brooks

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David Brooks’ column on neo-sentimentalist moral psychology is as exasperating as most of his columns drawing on science. They usually go like this:

Scientists have discovered X. Mostly X vanquishes my intellectual bugbears and confirms me in my prejudices. To the extent it doesn’t, science isn’t really an authoritative source of wisdom, now is it?

Here’s this week’s variation:

The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality is an epochal change. It challenges all sorts of traditions. It challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people. It challenges the Talmudic tradition, with its hyper-rational scrutiny of texts. It challenges the new atheists, who see themselves involved in a war of reason against faith and who have an unwarranted faith in the power of pure reason and in the purity of their own reasoning.

Finally, it should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central. The evolutionary approach also leads many scientists to neglect the concept of individual responsibility and makes it hard for them to appreciate that most people struggle toward goodness, not as a means, but as an end in itself.

Let’s look more closely at a couple of these claims.

  • The rise of "the emotional approach to morality” … “challenges the new atheists.”

What? Pure silliness. There is nothing whatsoever about the new sentimentalism in moral psychology that begins to imply a vindication of faith relative to reason. This is scientific work that uses the rationalist methods of science to understand the centrality of sentiment in humans. It takes the power of reason for granted, and if it is successful work, then it validates the power of reason.

If, say, Haidt is right that most moral judgments are ex post rationalizations of prior emotional responses, then he has not shown that all judgments are ex post rationalizations of prior emotional responses. For example, scientific judgments aren’t like that, or else he wouldn’t have discovered this about moral judgment, he’d just be asserting it. It’s not like Haidt, in showing just how deeply feeling-laden our moral judgments are, has also shown that everything, including the techniques of scientific rationality, is an expression of prejudice. By providing yet another well-grounded scientific explanation, he has demonstrated once again that techniques of scientific rationality are successfully explanatory. In this case, a successful explanation of human moral judgment shows just how prone we are to argue reflexively on behalf of our enculturated moral intuitions. This should decrease our confidences in our intuitions relative to scientific rationality. There is no reason whatsoever to think this will make faith look rosier.

Now, if we think that the lesson here is that most people, who aren’t scientists, don’t change their minds due to good arguments, but because of some kind of socialization or cultural pressure, then it seems to me that the efforts of the “new atheists” have been shown to be all the more necessary. The norms of reason are not native. They are fragile cultural achievements, which makes them all the more precious, and all the more important to vigorously promote. It seems we ought to create social pressure to adopt and respect them, as the “new atheists” do, if we wish to continue to reap the enormous blessings of applied rationality. Brooks is right to see the “new atheists” as apostles of  reason, but their “faith” in it isn’t “unwarranted.” As Brooks seems to recognize when it is convenient for him, science — the institutions of applied reason — works.

  • The rise of “the emotional approach to morality” … “should also challenge the very scientists who study morality. They’re good at explaining how people make judgments about harm and fairness, but they still struggle to explain the feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central.”

First, everything I just said. Second, they just got good at explaining judgments about harm and fairness, so why not expect them to get good at this other stuff? Everything Brooks has said up to this point assumes that the science is good, so one would expect that. But this is where Brooks kicks up a cloud of mystery to leave space for his own prejudices after he has finished using a bit of science to serve his ideological purposes. It’s a good trick: Grant science just enough authority to make it say what you need it to, and then throw that authority into doubt, lest someone else come along and try to make it say something else. Third, I don’t think Brooks has been paying attention even to the people he cites, such as Haidt, who has gone a good way in explaining the religious emotions, the emotions of in-group solidarity (i.e., patriotism) and more.

Making a Virtue of Altruism

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Sketchpad post…

The creature moved solely by instrumental, self-regarding rationality has a name: sociopath. A sociopath with supernatural epistemic and computational capacities is called homo economicus or “economic man.”  A handful of sociopaths exist, but gods live only in myths and textbooks. Flesh and blood human animals are, like the naked mole rat, “hypersocial.” The idea of a species of hypersocial sociopaths is as close as one comes to biological contradiction, which may be why homo economicus has not been observed in the wild. Normal humans are born cooperators — “strong reciprocators” in the language of Gintis and Bowles. “Homo reciprocans” is a conformist beast freighted with culture. A norm sponge. But we humans are not socially programmed robots. We are clever conformists. We can glimpse the advantages in “defection,” in pretending to pull our weight and writing our own rules when it suits us. But why can we do this? Why can we defect? Why aren’t we socially programmed robots? Maybe this: the point of such high-fidelity conformism is the ability to adapt to our environments (or to adapt our environments to us) at the speed of cheetahs compared to natural selection’s dumb glacial grope. The point of high-fidelity conformism is to take advantage of adaptive innovation. So we are equipped with the ability to imagine a better way, which happens to include the ability to imagine shirking or bucking the norm. Sociopathy is not our problem. Imagination—the engine of adaptive conformism—is. Nature’s solution is our taste for “altruistic punishment,” the disposition to hammer norm shirkers despite the personal cost. How not self-interested are we? This not self-interested: We are so obsessed with conformity that we will hurt ourselves to hurt those who refuse to conform. And we don’t even need to know the point of conforming, or whether or not it helps. The stone heaved through the window of the suspicious gentlemen bachelors: this too is altruism. To learn that humans are not sociopaths, are capable of other-regarding acts, are willing to sacrifice ourselves to keep hearts and minds in harmony, is not to discover there is no problem. A main lesson of the Scottish Enlightenment is the possibility and necessity of recruiting potentially destructive self love into the service of public happiness. But if self love is not in fact the mainspring, or the only spring, of human action, then maybe their lesson for us now is that we must also learn to civilize the capacity for norm-enforcing self-sacrifice. What matters is not how we are motivated. What matters is how our higher-order norms (our institutions?) channel and coordinate our various motives to produce the elements of flourishing. What matters is which norms we’re willing to pay dearly to enforce.

Outing Myself (from the Cannabis Closet)

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In my latest column for The Week, I argue that the drug war is stupid, deadly, and unjust and try to do my small part to normalize marijuana use. My favorite reaction so far comes from Jossip:

Holy shit Wilkinson, you’re really putting yourself on the line buddy! A upper-class, white Libertarian admits to smoking pot. (But does he listen to NPR? Even better: He’s on it!) Since this might actually (god we hope) take off as the next P.C. activist trend (that would be hysterical), here are the next media figures to emerge from the cannabis closet.

And then there’s a list of Hollywood types I am embarrassed to be flattered to be listed among. It’s true I don’t have a lot to lose. My employer’s response to a column titled “I smoke pot, and I like it,” is to send it out to a list of thousands as a “Cato Daily Commentary.” But you’ve got to expect people in a safe place to make the not-especially-brave early moves in the de-stigmatization game. Neverthless, I think the demonstration effect is important. I’m no “stoner” (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I’m an overeducated, relatively successful professional with a closet full of suits. How freaking square do I look in my byline picture at The Week? The stigma can’t last long when that’s the picture of a typical marijuana user. If this would “take off as the next P.C. activist trend” that would be terrific as well as hysterical. But I know for a fact that tons of P.C.-bashing Republican types smoke weed too, and it would be even better if they would stand and be counted.

Secularizing America

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The U.S. is surely and steadily becoming a less religious place. USA Today has a groovy interactive graph illustrating the following:

The 2008 results [of the American Religious Identification Survey], to be released today, are based on 54,000 interviews with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.5%. It finds that, despite population growth and immigration adding nearly 50 million more adults, almost all denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS data was released in 1990.

Here’s the picture of state-by-state growth in the number of people identifying as atheists, agnostics, or without a religion:

But go to the real graph for the groovy interactivity.

Secularization is part of a long trend toward moral liberalization. That the Iowa Supreme Court would unanimously rule prohibition of gay marriage illegal when a decade ago this would have seemed impossible is just one example of this very welcome trend.

Pulped Intentions

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The Nation’s Chris Hayes has written a great story illustrating how Washington and environmental policy work together to create wasteful stupidity. 

Thanks to an obscure tax provision, the United States government stands to pay out as much as $8 billion this year to the ten largest paper companies. And get this: even though the money comes from a transportation bill whose manifest intent was to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, paper mills are adding diesel fuel to a process that requires none in order to qualify for the tax credit. In other words, we are paying the industry–handsomely–to use more fossil fuel. “Which is,” as a Goldman Sachs report archly noted, the “opposite of what lawmakers likely had in mind when the tax credit was established.”

What happened?! Read the whole thing. It’s a terrific example of unintended consequences. Chris says, “I’ve come to expect that even nobly conceived laws will be manipulated and distorted for private ends. But once in a while I hear a story that gives me the queasy feeling that I’m nowhere near cynical enough.”

Some Technocrats Are Ideologues

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Felix Salmon says:

I do have some sympathy for Dani Rodrik’s skepticism when it comes to technocrats, but surely a government of technocrats — which is what I think we now have — is nearly always to be preferred to a government of idealogues.

Perhaps Felix should consider that a large part of the set of technocrats is always a subset of the set of ideologues. I think he means that one prefers technocrats who share one’s ideology. Of course!