The Fictional Evil Utilitarian N.I.C.E. And The Actual Utilitarian U. K. N.I.C.E. WTF?

I was talking with my partner one morning about the vexing modern problem of putting numbers on amorphous things so you can measure the unmeasurable. And because I've been immersed in a research project on philosophical issues in Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, I brought up the example of quantification in health care resource allocation.

I said something like "They quantify health through QALYs, which evaluate the burdensomeness of health states on a scale from 0 to 1, to prioritize potential treatments according to how many QALYs they produce per dollar. Or sometimes they use a threshold: a specific cost-per-QALY value -- say, $30,000 per QALY. Treatments producing too few QALYs per dollar won't be funded." 

My partner, being an interesting person and not a philosopher, said "Hold on, who is 'they?'"

And I said, "Oh, well in the UK it's N.I.C.E." The National Institute for something something. Care and Excellence. Or something."

"Did you say "N.I.C.E"? Because N.I.C.E. is also the name of the dystopian evil utilitarian organization in C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength."

Wait. What? Are you telling me that an actual utilitarian U. K. organization founded in the late 20th century has the same acronymic name as a fiction evil utilitarian organization in a 1945 book by a famous U.K. author? How is that possible?

At the time we had this conversation, I had never read That Hideous Strength, but it had long figured in our family imaginary. For my partner and his daughter, it occupied a  space in the overlap zone between "brilliant" and "problematic" -- problematic because sexist, homophobic, and shot through with imperialism. Despite their warnings, of course I had to read the book immediately.


The author, C. S. Lewis, is the British Christian fantasy writer who also produced the Narnia chronicles. So when I say that N.I.C.E. in Lewis's book is "evil," that's not an exaggerating synonym for "committing bad acts." They're literally evil.

In the novel, N.I.C.E. -- "The National Institute of Coordinated Experiments" -- is publicly a scientific and social planning agency weaning us from sentimental attachments to usher in an era of objective social improvements. Behind the scenes, N.I.C.E. is furtively pursuing its evil program for the exploitation of nature and the annihilation of humanity.  

If you've ever encountered the arguments utilitarians use to defend their idea that the right action is the one that rationally brings about the best consequences, passages from (fictional) N.I.C.E.'s representatives will sound eerily familiar. Their aim is "the scientific reconstruction of the human race in the direction of increased efficiency." Other value judgments based on justice, beauty, or love are "essentially subjective and instinctive." Ethical beliefs turn out on inspection "to be simply an expression of emotion."

Readers of Peter Singer's 1995 "Ethics and Intuitions" may be reminded of his idea that common moral judgements conflicting with utilitarian outcomes are a "biological residue of our evolutionary history." We evolved to have "intuitions" about justice only because punishing wrongdoers was an evolutionary success.

As Singer explains, the status of moral judgments -- especially those reflecting justice -- is significant because these judgments have long been used to discredit utilitarianism. "H. J. McCloskey, writing at a time when lynchings in the U.S. South were still a possibility, thought it a decisive objection to utilitarianism that the theory might direct a sheriff to frame an innocent man in order to prevent a white mob lynching half a dozen innocents in revenge for a rape" (Singer 343-345). That is, our judgment is that framing an innocent person is wrong, regardless of the consequences, because it is unjust. But "bringing about the best consequences" seems to entail that preventing the riot could be the right thing to do. Thus judgments based on justice seem to undermine utilitarianism.

But Singer says not so. Unlike utilitarian judgments like "five deaths is worse than one," which is "rational," our justice-based "intuitions" should have no standing in our figuring out what is right. As with the fictional N.I.C.E., Singer urges that they reflect an "instinctive" sense of reciprocity -- and should be discarded.  

In retrospect, it's not surprising that Lewis would put into the mouths of N.I.C.E.'s representatives talking points familiar from utilitarianism. The rough idea Singer is presenting goes back at least to the British philosopher Sidgwick in the late 19th century. And it's obvious why a Christian ethics would be deeply at odds with utilitarian thinking and why Lewis would be tempted to depict utilitarianism as a manifestation of evil.

The U.K.'s actual real life N.I.C.E. isn't exactly utilitarian, but it does use the utilitarian principles of Cost-Effectiveness Analysis to decide which treatments should be publicly funded. Proposed treatments are evaluated according to how many QALYs they are likely to produce per unit cost: decisions are thus based on bringing about aggregated good consequences. 

Like utilitarianism, CEA leads to outcomes conflicting with our moral judgments. The process can lead to discrimination against people with disabilities, as people with disabilities are often judged to have a lower quality of life than non-disabled people; thus interventions extending their lives may be seen as less effective. Since "a QALY is a QALY," the process is insensitive to distribution and equity, with no priority for younger people or the worse off, and no amelioration of existing health inequities. Because of aggregation, low-cost interventions that benefit many people may be more cost-effective than those bringing enormous benefits to small numbers of people: in one famous example, the state of Oregon carried out a large-scale CEA that resulted in part in the conclusion that paying for capping teeth would be more cost-effective than paying for appendectomies.

How to respond to these problems with CEA is part of my current research project on Cost-Benefit Analysis and its offshoots, but this post isn't about that, it's about ACRONYMS. Who thought it was a good idea for an actual utilitarian U. K. organization promoting social progress and rationality to have the same name as a fictional evil utilitarian organization promoting social progress and rationality?

Did no one on the original board of directions pipe up and say "Hey, I know we're not the evil kind of utilitarians. But don't you think it's going to look weird if we say we're N.I.C.E, for progress, science, and rationality, and that other N.I.C.E. also says it's for science, progress, and rationality -- and the other one is EVIL?"

The only discussion of the acronym issue I could find on the internet was from "LifeSite," describing the case of Leslie Burke, a man with degenerative motor neurone disease who sued the UK government for the right not to be denied nutrition and hydration when his illness rendered him unable to swallow or communicate. The U.K. government appealed an initial ruling in his favor, with a representative for the government explaining that N.I.C.E. guidelines combine considerations of efficacy, quality of life judgments, and economics. "If the principle that "clinicians should be able to follow NICE guidelines without being obliged to accede to patient demands" were undermined, the government argued, then "there would be considerable risk of inefficient use of NHS resources."

Describing the principles of the fictional, evil N.I.C.E. as "a mechanistic and ultra-utilitarian, anti-life philosophy that regards human beings as merely a disposable means to an end," LifeSite says "it seems beyond a coincidental irony that a real-life, government-funded organization that bases its decisions on the same utilitarian principles, could be known by the same acronym: N.I.C.E." With this last part, I agree. It does seem beyond a coincidental irony.

As to the broader question of the status of moral judgments or "intuitions," in his article Singer doesn't say what he thinks about framing an innocent person to prevent a riot -- whether he thinks there is some way that contrary to first appearances framing the innocent person actually doesn't produce the best consequences, or whether he thinks framing an innocent person could be the ethical right action.

As a non-utilitarian, I can say more simply that framing an innocent person is wrong, because it's unjust, and I think that is true partly because moral judgments reflect what we care about, which can include values like justice.

In the spirit of this post you may be wondering: could you modify CEA so that instead of measuring QALYs it quantifies and takes into account these other values and thus becomes a new and improved decision-making method? I am so glad you asked! That is what I am working on. It's complicated, but the short answer seems to be "no."

Metaphysics and Politics Of "A Calorie Is A Calorie"

I've always been fascinated by the staying power of "a calorie is a calorie" and the way people enjoy deploying this phrase.

In some literal sense, this statement is true -- but that sense is the one in which it is also a tautology, which means that it is true but empty of content. It may be true by definition, but it doesn't tell you anything about the way the world is.


When people say "a calorie is a calorie," though, they definitely mean to say something about the way the world is. They mean to say that what foods you eat doesn't matter for your weight, as long as you eat the same number of calories. Or they mean that your weight can be calculated through finding the difference between the calories you consume in food and the calories you burn in exercise and living. Or they mean that if two people eat the same way and move the same way, they will have the same experience in terms of weight gain or weight loss.

Stated this way, these things seem obviously false. I have an acquaintance who was in a bad car accident years ago. His digestive system was damaged, and he had to have a lot of surgeries. Now he is fine, but for a long time he struggled to keep his weight up, even when eating a lot of food, because his system didn't work well. Obviously, his condition contradicts the previous statements.

Maybe you're thinking, Well, those are exceptional circumstances. But there are many ordinary examples. Regular readers know that I'm a fan of the work of Dr. Jason Fung, whose book The Obesity Code proposes that weight is a matter of hormones and biology, not thermodynamics, so that you have to look at how your body is reacting to food and not just at its caloric content. Roughly speaking, frequent small meals mean your body produces a lot of insulin; this can cause insulin resistance, which causes the body to produce more insulin, which changes how your body responds to food. Even short periods of fasting can counter these effects.

Right at the start of his book Dr. Fung mentions several obvious examples of the how the calories-in-calories-out model obviously fails. Prior to puberty, boys and girls have the same body fat percentage. After puberty, women have almost 50 percent more body fat, despite eating less. Pregnancy induces weight gain, beyond the effect of eating more. Various drugs are known to cause weight gain, regardless of food intake. If you give people insulin, they gain weight; in fact there's a thing called "diabulemia" where people with Type 1 diabetes deliberately give themselves less insulin than they need, in order to lose weight.

Given all of these complicated factors, what is the point of "a calorie is a calorie"? I wrote before about why this strange tautology might be so attractive to people. But there's also an interesting kind of metaphysical way to look at it. I was recently reading Philip Mirowski's More Heat Than Light, about the relationship of economics and physics. In an early chapter, he discusses the work of Emile Meyerson, who Mirowski says proposed that "a sweeping postulate of the identity of things in time" was "central to all human thought." Things are always changing, but we can't understand things unless we take them as, in some sense, fixed.

In a passage I really like, Mirowski says that the story goes like this: "Someone proposes some hypothesis, and then a mathematical savant constructs an "equivalent" statement H*(x) of the hypothesis, highlighting some mathematical quantity x. The Meyersonian tendency then exerts its sway, and x begins to be treated analogously to the general philosophical category of substance: Namely, it is thought to obey some conservation laws [e. g., -- "a calorie is a calorie!"]... These conservation laws, in turn, provide the accounting framework that enables quantitative manipulation. Somewhere along the line, entity x gets conflated with object x', which becomes associated with all sorts of metaphysical overtones, such as the permanence of natural law, the bedrock of phenomenological reality, the identity of mind and body, and so forth."

That is, the whole concept of a calorie might just be a reifying projection of the fact that the science of thermodynamics works well with one mathematical formalism rather than another. We then make the leap, possibly unjustified, to the idea of reality that is conserved and unchanging, so that a calorie is a calorie. 

Of course, statements like "a calorie is a calorie" also take on a life of their own because they fit into people's social and political commitments and allow them to blame "individual responsibility" for things that, as Dr. Fung elegantly explains, have nothing to do with choices and everything to do with the social and political aspects of food and nutrition science -- for example, the fact that "eat small frequent meals" and "a calorie is a calorie" both allow for nutrition "advice" that doesn't harm the bottom line of large food corporation.

In fact, in "The Foreign Policy of the Calorie," historian Nick Cullather traces the emergence of the calorie framework through its use as a social, political and cultural tool, arguing that the calorie framework "popularized and factualized a set of assumptions that allowed Americans to see food as an instrument of power, and to envisage a 'world food problem' amenable to political and scientific intervention."

Well. After decades of calorie-is-a-calorie bullshit, the New York Times just ran an article saying it might not be just "what" you eat, but also "when" you eat that matters. In my opinion, the focus of the article on circadian rhythms makes no sense -- as commenters pointed out, many cultures have late night dining habits and excellent health. But at least they will willing to break away from the ridiculous metaphysics and get into the fact that there are, in fact, many variables in play, and they may well interact in complicated ways that we just don't understand. 

How Is It Possible That Several-Hundred Dollar Handbags Feel Essential To Adulthood?

For me, one of the most striking things in the aftermath of Kate Spade's suicide was learning how many other people thought of her bags -- and her bags' general price range, of several hundred dollars -- as lying in what was seen as sort of modal zone of "grown-up."

The sentiment runs throughout this piece in The New York Times:

"At midrange prices of several hundred dollars, they were aspirational but within reach of some women who were starting their careers."

"for so many women, buying that first kate spade bag was your first grown-up purchase."

"A Kate Spade handbag was the very first 'nice' 'grownup' thing I ever had."

I realize I am out of step with the nation along several dimensions. But really? You have to spend hundreds of dollars on a bag to count as a modern grown-up? 

No doubt my life in academia helps explain how off-trend I am. The most expensive bag I ever bought was one of those collapsible Longchamps nylon bags, at 70 dollars. The nicest bag I own is a Coach bag I got at a thrift store for 25 dollars. I've looked at Kate Spade, and I've thought to myself, "Hm, kind of pricey." I'm so off-trend I don't even carry a bag most of the time. I'm just throwing everything into my backpack.

In many ways, my ability to use a backpack and carry a cheap bag are manifestations of my privileged position in society. Back in 2013, Tressie MC wrote a great piece about how poor people have to buy, and wear, expensive accessories in order to gain respect from the fellow citizens, and thus to be employable. Many people need nice accessories, because they're literally a job requirement.

I would also like to emphasize that I am not saying there is something wrong with buying nice bags because you like them. I buy and love other expensive things, and I am not criticizing the purchasing of expensive bags for fun.

However, what I am saying is just that in a society where $15/hr is an aspirational minimum wage for most places, the idea that a few hundred dollars is considered an entry-level adulthood bag is strange and fucked up.

Of course, it's significant that this sentiment was appearing in The New York Times, and so you might think "Well, what did you expect"?

It's true that when I started reading the New York Times I was an easily bored college student sitting with some eggs-over-medium with friends. The fact that the homes were millions of dollars and "cheap" wines were my weekly paycheck didn't bother me, because I just thought of that part of the paper as written for aliens. I could just read the news, and ignore all that.

But newspapers have changed. The fact that Kate Spade's bags were accessibly aspirational is now intertwined with everything else. Newspapers want to be relevant, they want to reach us in different ways, and they want to reflect our concerns.

Like so many people, I have been prompted by this to obsess over the question of who the news thinks it is for. The answers are frequently disturbing. The New York Times is obviously for people with the kind of financial background in which spending hundreds of dollars on a bag is part of the baseline of what's just normal in life.

The creepiest aspect of the whole thing is the use of that word "grown-up." So: you can't be an adult if you're poor? Minimum wage earners are condemned to eternal childhood? WTF? If that's the way expectations are set up, it's not surprising that young people are stressed out of their minds.

The Culture Theory Of Labor Economics

Given the role that the issue played in the US election last year, I've been really interested to follow the recent news about the coal mining industry. You may remember Clinton cheering about how they were going to put a lot of coal mining companies out of business, with the tone-deaf assumption that everyone would regard this as a Good Thing. I'm sure you remember Trump talking about bringing it back.

From one point of view, the issue might seem to be relatively simple. A shift to other energy forms would be good for the environment, and what the former coal miners then need is new jobs in other industries. As long as economic growth is happening, it can be a win-win. From this point of view, reluctance on the part of coal miners might be seen as irrational and obstreperous.

But it's interesting in this context to consider a few recent articles discussing the miner's point of view. This Reuters article describes miners who are resisting retraining and discusses their reasons. Among them: Mining pays well. Other industries are unfamiliar. There’s no income during retraining. Even if you put in all that effort to learn something new, there is no guarantee of a job afterward.

When it comes to replacements, they point out that coal jobs are seen as preferable to those in natural gas, because the mines are close to home, while pipeline work requires travel. One government official is quoted as hoping for "big companies like Amazon or Toyota."

These are all real reasons. And given what we know about working in an Amazon warehouse, it is any wonder people are resistant to that?

A deeper discussion of worker preferences and their implications for the economy is found in this New York Times piece about mining and environmentalism in Minnesota. It's complicated, but the basic story is that miners want mining jobs while environmentalists want to turn the area into a tourism location and beauty spot -- preserving the natural landscape and also providing new and different jobs.

I was struck both by the miners' calculations about their alternatives and by their cultural commitment to their way of life. For one thing, tourism jobs are really different from mining jobs. Tourism jobs are seasonal, and unreliable, and often not well-paid, while mining jobs -- at least so far -- have been solid and remunerative.

But it's not all cold calculation. Mining jobs are also seen as respectable and masculine, work you can take pride in, while tourism jobs are seen as subservient. One politician summed it up this way:

"[The miners] see it as fundamentally a question of dignity for families that have worked blue-collar jobs for generations ... 'I don’t want to be anybody’s Sherpa.'"

When I first read that I felt a little defensive. There's an implication that cooking, cleaning, and showing people around are somehow not "manly" -- the implication being that their OK work for women but that men are somehow above all that.

But I can also understand it. Especially in our society, where workers' rights and protections have been eroding, cooking, cleaning, and showing people around jobs often do have aspects associated with low status. Often you have to take orders, do things you otherwise wouldn't want to do, act nice, act happy to see people. Women in these jobs have had to put up with that kind of bullshit forever. It's not surprising that someone who hasn't had to doesn't want to have to start.

There are no easy answers, but I think one thing these articles show is that understanding the decisions of workers can't happen in a cultural vacuum. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that rational self-interested economic agents will do what seems to make "economic" sense. But even economics doesn't really tell us that. It tells us that people will maximize their own preference satisfaction.

As everyone has known forever, preferences are not just for things like "have more money" and "work fewer hours." They're also for amorphous things like respect, status, and community. Far from being squishy considerations that affect only the non-economic realm, these preferences affect the most starkly economic decisions there are.

So an analysis of labor has to include not only the obvious economic factors like money, but also cultural factors. I know "way of life" is not an easy variable to put into a quantitative analysis, but until we find a way to factor it in, we're just going to keep getting things wrong.

The Opioid Epidemic As A Crisis Of System, Not Individuals

Like a lot of people I was gripped by this New Yorker story about the Purdue Pharma company and its role in creating and perpetuating the opioid epidemic. And, presumably like a lot of people, I was appalled by various aspects of the story -- like massive efforts to hide the addictive nature of the drug even in the face of massive harm.

But as I read along, I was also a bit weirded out by the focus on the individual family members who run Purdue Pharma. One reason this weirded me out is that a lot of the story seemed to involve examples of people doing everything they can to defend and preserve their company and their product. But isn't the way capitalism works in our society predicated on the idea that this is what people do?

We've known forever that if you create a system in which some of the methods you can use to get ahead will be collectively destructive, people will be incentivized to use those methods. And I would say recent history supports the idea that if you want that not to happen, you can't rely just on some vague notion like individual responsibility. You need systems in place.

That's why we have things like the FDA, and policies about conflicts of interest, and so on. Why wasn't more of this story about that?

The article describes various kinds of factors leading to the crisis. Sales reps were trained in "overcoming objections" from clinicians, sometimes with exaggerated or false information, where doctors were vulnerable because of "wishful thinking" -- they wanted a pill that would help their patients.  Purdue paid clinicians to attend medical conferences and give presentations about the merits of the drug -- in places like Boca Raton. The marketing thus involved a deadly circularity: "the company convinced doctors of the drug’s safety with literature that had been produced by doctors who were paid, or funded, by the company." They "duped" the FDA into thinking the drug lasted 12 hours and wasn't addictive. They created a concept of "pseudo-addiction," which they said explained addiction-like symptoms in terms of under-treatment  of pain.

Yes -- there is a lot of bad behavior here. But what was supposed to prevent this from happening? Modern capitalism is a cut-throat business. In a society where American Airlines can be criticized for raising pay for pilots and flight attendants, there are huge incentives in place to do whatever's necessary to make your product sell. If other people are behaving badly, you may have to behave badly too, just to stay in business.

I had always thought that this is why we have rules and systems in place. Isn't the FDA supposed to work on principles that make it extra difficult for an individual company to "dupe" it? Didn't there used to be stronger rules about conflicts-of-interest? This is one reason in the past that advertising wasn't allows for drugs -- as the article says, "advertising has always entailed some degree of persuasive license." What happened to that idea?

The company -- and the family who run it -- have been sued in court, but have settled, often for sums said to be small compared to the cost of righting the wrongs in question. In some cases, they have been ordered to pay fines, but again, the amounts won't make a dent in their profits. The article quotes Arlen Specter, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania, remarking that such fines amounted to "expensive licenses for criminal misconduct."

These all reflect problems with the system. Regular readers may remember a previous post on this issue discussing Sam Quinones's excellent book Dreamland. One thing that Quinones says is how often the people mitigating disaster and finding solutions come from some kind of governmental or collective institution or agency: they are in the court system, or the health care system, or whatever. Yes, there are people doing bad things and good things but everyone is ultimately caught up in a web of conflicting societal needs and pressures. This is a very different -- and I think more enlightening -- perspective.

The article lambasts the individual family members who run Purdue Pharma, asking how they can possibly live with themselves. I get that. But so many of us are complicit in some kind of awfulness -- buying gadgets with conflict minerals, depositing carbon into the air for holidays, enjoying the fruits of energy from companies engaging in global exploitation. In our society, complicity in harm is not restricted to a few bad actors.

As we've said before in this space, blaming corporate "greed" is often naive and misplaced, because in our corporate world, if you're not as cut-throat as the next guy, you're going to fail. It's not an "individual responsibility" sort of thing. It's a system thing. Sometimes, the framing of individual actors as good or bad loses some of its usefulness. Modern capitalism may be one of those times.

Nothing Human Is Just Biology: Kid And Food Edition

About a year and a half ago, the New York Times ran this story by a mother whose baby girl Violet was born with a heart defect and who, as a result of complex treatments for that, ended up with another problem: she didn't eat.

You should read the whole story, because it is emotionally moving, intellectually sophisticated, and philosophically interesting. Basically, her daughter needed a temporary nasogastral feeding tube, and after that were various struggles to get her to eat. But she was so weak, she never could get more calories than she spent, and she grew to associate eating with pain and suffering. This aversion to eating was so severe that they had to continue with the tube.

Heartbreakingly, the tube intensified Violet's aversion to eating. Once a week it had to be changed; her parents had to hold her down while she screamed and cried and then they had to wait til she stopped to breath to try to get it down her throat. Horrible. Of course, after that, Violet didn't want anything near her mouth, ever. When Violet was around six months old, they put in a permanent tube directly into her stomach. As her mother says, "devastating." And also "a relief."

Not surprisingly, given modern medicine, Violet's story is common, and the essay discusses the various approaches experts take to try to reintroduce children to the feeling that eating is something they can and want to do. Many take a behavioral approach. Because a big part of "oral aversion" is the association between pain and food, a lot of this involves creating positive external associations with foods -- for example, associating successful eating with toys -- and reinforcement that eating is going to happen. When another child in treatment eats she gets rewarded; but when she spits out her food, the therapist feeds it back to her.

A slightly different approach involves trying to reconnect the child with the internal cues of hunger and pleasure. Of course, this is tricky and potentially dangerous, since you have to let the child feel hunger, which means you have to feed them, through the tube, less food than they need, which must be terrifying with a child whose health is already a bit shaky.

One of the interesting aspects of the latter approach is the idea that to associate food with pleasure, you have to let kids spit out food and not worry about it. Violet's mother describes how, when they were beginning, Violet would put a bit of food, and then eventually more food, into her mouth, and then -- instead of swallowing, she'd spit it all out. Frustrating! but the therapist says that spitting is an essential part of the process: it lets Violet know that she can spit it out, so it is safe to experiment with another bite.

The first time through, at this point in the story, I didn't really know how it was all going to turn out. Was Violet going to be able to eat? Before I got to the textual resolution of this question, I came across a photo accompanying the story. The photos before had all been of Violet with her tubes. But in this one, she had chocolate avocado pudding all over her face, with a huge smile because -- yes, she was eating it! The image brought tears to my eyes the first time, and then it did again an hour ago when I reread the story.

After getting Violet to disassociate food and pain and associate food with pleasure -- or, at least, curiosity -- they had to let Violet get hungrier and hungrier. But in the end, it worked. Like a month later, they're all out at a diner and Violet is scarfing down a grilled cheese sandwich.

This story came out in early 2016 but I think about it regularly, even now. Partly I guess it's because it's interesting and happy, which so few things are these days. But partly I think it's because it shows something important about human nature. That everything -- even something so seemingly straightforward as eating, transcends biology. Everything is social and environmental.

In some philosophy I was doing with a student recently we were talking about the idea of idealizing people as if they were "mushroom men" -- people who sprang from the earth as fully formed adults, ready to make decisions, form goals, and negotiate with others for what they need. This was in the context of talking about economics, where sometimes the metaphor is used to explicate models of economic rationality and exchange. But of course it's long been central to philosophy as well, for example in the contractarian and contractualist traditions in historical philosophers like Hobbes and, to a certain extent, in more contemporary ones like Rawls.

Like all idealizations, this one might work better in some contexts and worse in others, it might capture or obscure what we want to see in certain settings, it might be more or less of a misrepresentation depending on what we're using it for.

Still, I found the story a great reminder of how far from that we really are. It's not just that when we're small, we're temporarily unable to forage for food or work at jobs. It's also that everything we do -- even something like eating! -- depends on a fragile and contingent network of things happening and people who love us there to make sure those things work the way they're supposed to.

A Few Philosophical Thoughts On "Taxation Is Coercion"

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, "Paying the Tax (The Tax Collector)," via Wikimedia Commons

I feel like there's been an uptick in people in the US using "taxation is coercion" or "taxation is theft" to support their given point of view. The topic is obviously enormous and too large to be dealt with in a short blog post, but these are just some thoughts that come to my mind about this idea from the philosophical perspective.

Taxation is only coercive against a backdrop of a very specific theory of ownership -- one in which you have full property rights to whatever you gained in a voluntary transaction. But as we've discussed before, this theory of ownership faces several serious and well-known problems.

First, contemporary economic activity is now enmeshed in complex webs of social, cultural, and political structures and relationships. Many modern voluntary exchanges would be impossible without infrastructure, education, etc. etc. etc. As is often pointed out, the question isn't whether we have to pay for these things -- it's just how much.

Second, if we actually tried to follow a principle in which everyone has full property rights to whatever they gained in a voluntary transaction, we'd run immediately into the difficulty that vast wealth and holdings in western countries derives partly from utterly non-voluntary transactions.

This is because in a theory where you have full property rights to whatever you gained in a voluntary transaction, you do not have rights to whatever you gained through a non-voluntary transaction, and you do not have rights to what was stolen or taken by force. If A steals a diamond ring from B, then A doesn't own the ring -- B does. If A sells the ring to C, C also does not own the ring: justly speaking, B owns the ring, C owns the money they were going to trade for the ring, and A doesn't own anything.

But the land and wealth in rich western countries is enmeshed with a violent history of colonialism, slavery, war, and theft. Under the theory of ownership being proposed, who would own the land in North America? Presumably, Native Americans and Indigenous people and no one else. So the theory leads to very different consequences from the ones it's typically taken to support.

Third, when the full ownership theory is used in ways people don't like, there's a lot of uproar about it, suggesting most people do not endorse or agree with that theory. When Martin Shkreli bought the rights to life-saving drugs and then radically raised the prices, what he did was well within his rights in the full-ownership theory of property. It's his -- he gets to do what he wants.

I've been surprised by the degree of hate against this guy from all sides. I mean, I think the outcomes are bad, but then I'd endorse a different health care system entirely. It's the lack of supporters from other sides I'm struck by.

As I mentioned before, on Reddit there was general applause when a doctor pressed Shkreli on what improvements in the drug "warranted" the price increase. But that's not how our system works. I actually thought Shkreli made a valid point when he said in 2015, “Our shareholders expect us to make as much money as possible ... That’s the ugly, dirty truth.” That's true. The problem is with the system, not with one specific guy.

Anyway, moving beyond the full ownership theory, it seems to me that whatever theory of ownership you adopt, a claim about "coercion" is a moral claim, and once you're in the realm of morality, things are never straightforward. As I discuss in my 2015 book, many people endorse multiple values. In our society, that range of values often includes some right to be free of certain kinds of interference. But it also often includes other values like justice, benevolence, honesty, fidelity, and so on.

So whether taxation is "coercive" isn't the end of a discussion. It's the beginning of a larger discussion, about ownership and what is and isn't coercive, but also about how all the various values we endorse should be implemented and prioritized in some sensible way. Obviously, this is something the citizens can, and do, disagree about, and that's one reason politics is complicated and fraught. 

I don't endorse the kind of full ownership theory that would be necessary to conclude that taxation is coercive, partly because, as this book review explains, taxes are "part of the entire system of property relations, not something that happens after property accrues in private hands." That is, there's no "A owns X and B owns Y" and then you have taxes. Rather, taxes are part of the system of property relations that entails what, exactly, A and B own.

And if property relations are a system of which taxes are one part, then I also believe that other values, like justice and fairness, should play a rule in structuring that system. 

In Praise Of Workplace Inefficiency

It's always bothered me the way you can open a newspaper like the New York Times and find completely different perspectives depending on what part of the paper you're in. In the Science page, you might read about how to lower your carbon footprint by taking fewer trips, while in the Travel section you're reading about how it can be a new kind of fun to fly to Europe just for the weekend, and in the Business section you're reading about how to get extra airline miles by making pointless extra stops while you travel -- first class, of course.

One of the main offenders in this regard, I think, has to do with the workplace. In one part of the news, you're likely to read about the importance of having a super-efficient company, with a super-efficient workplace. You might read about strategies to prevent workers from chit-chatting, or looking at the internet, or taking too long in the bathroom.

In another part of the news, though, you might see a completely different take on things, with basically the opposite message -- namely, how to avoid having work completely ruin your life. You might read about strategies for stress relief, like taking frequent small breaks and getting up to walk around.

Personally, I love to see workers being inefficient. This morning I happened to be staying at a hotel, while on a trip to visit my mother, and when I came down to get coffee, there were three hotel employees -- room cleaners, by the look of things -- and they were hanging out, chatting, laughing, and eating pastries from the hotel breakfast room. Yesterday another worker gestured for us go first up the stairs, and when we gestured that he should go first, he said, "Nah. You go ahead first. I'm on the clock!"

I was so happy to see workers in a seemingly relaxed workplace, enjoying themselves a bit. I thought to myself, "This hotel is awesome."

People spend a lot of time at work. And work that requires you to be always on, always pushing forward, never just slacking off -- it's awful. Maybe you saw the news stories about bankers in Canada who were pushed to upsell products in order to meet targets. The described "panic attacks," and "insomnia," "nausea," "anxiety" and "depression."


What must it be like to work as an Amazon picker, where you can never sit down, you can't chat with co-workers, and "if five minutes ever passes without you accomplishing a task, the scanner informs management"? Or in a store in the mall with unrealistic quotas and high pressure consequences like being fired? Or on a chicken conveyor belt, cutting up 45 chickens per minute?

Conversely, just having a bit of a relaxed feeling at work is such a huge component of feeling like things are OK. Those moments between tasks when you can share a joke, or take a look outside, or whatever. Before I became a professor I worked as a waitress, mostly in small, locally owned, low-key diner-type places. I didn't make much money, but I always appreciated it as decent work, mostly because -- unless it was super-busy -- you could chat and joke with your co-workers and customers as the workday rolled along.

This somewhat relaxed feeling at work -- it flies in the face of standard business norms in favor of efficiency, and in a competitive environment, employers might not even be able to afford to make their workplaces more relaxed than other workplaces.

And on top of that, it's not even something that would be easy to regulate. I mean, you can regulate a fifteen minute break. But you can't regulate that feeling that hey, it's OK, we all have plenty of time, if you want to stop and chat or rest your hands or whatever -- it's OK.

It's more like one of those things that has to do with amorphous matters like how it's OK for one person to treat another, and how much you're willing to yell at other people and make their lives miserable on a day to day basis, and how much other people are willing to yell at other people and make their lives miserable on a day to day basis.

Amorphous, shifting, hard to describe -- but very, very real.

Hot Housing Markets And The Dutch Tulip Bubble Of 1637

Ambrosius Bosschaert  (1573–1621), Flower Still Life [with a yellow tulip]. Via Wikimedia Commons.

A friend of mine sent me this article about the "overheated" condo market in Toronto. I own a condo in Toronto, so I guess issue is certainly relevant to my interests. Personally, the price fluctuations don't matter much to me. Partly, this is because we bought our place before prices got so high, and we are using it more as an actual place to live, rather than an investment, so who cares? Partly, this is because I'm the sort of person whose eyes glaze over when we talk about money.

So, sure, I open the unsolicited mailings that real estate agents send us, with their reports on what sold for what and their endless rhetoric of optimism. And sometimes I'm like OMG, how much?? But who knows what's going to happen next? I don't get too excited. From a personal point of view, it's more like entertainment or a spectator sport than anything else.

Of course more generally, I worry about rising housing prices, because I want people to be able to afford housing. Housing prices are one of the weirdest things to read about in the news. When housing prices go up too fast, it's considered bad. When housing prices fall, it's also considered bad, because people use housing as a way of saving for the future. When I see the news about falling housing prices, I sometimes think, "Yeah, I know. But isn't this also a good thing? For people who want to be able to afford homes?"

You might think that rising housing prices would be a reason to create more housing, the theory of supply and demand suggesting that the more supply there is, the more the cost would go down. But in the article my friend sent me, the chief economist at Bank of Montreal is cited saying this isn't so. Creating supply in response to more demand, he said, creates more demand. Prices will then go even higher.

He mentions the example of the example of the Dutch Tulip Bubble in 1637, when people starting paying more and more for tulip bulbs, with prices reaching obscene levels, before a sudden crash in the market. The economist asks rhetorically, "Do you think that the best response to the Dutch Tulip Bubble in 1637 was to cultivate more land and grow more tulips?"

Later he makes the same point with the example of the dot-com bubble of the 90s, asking whether the right response would have been an increased supply of shares of Pets.com or Toys.com.

I don't know if he's trying to simplify a complicated point or something, but these struck me as peculiar analogies. I mean, tulips and dot-coms shares are something no one needs. Housing is something everybody needs. I know, not everyone needs housing in a particular place. But still, tulips and shares are like the opposite of homes: the former you can buy and sell easily and there's no point to owning them beyond making money and impressing people. The other is a huge pain to buy and sell and most people use them for something essential to life. It doesn't add up.

Perhaps the implication is that housing prices are surging in Toronto not for normal supply-and-demand related reasons, but because people are doing with condos what they did before with tulips and dot-com shares, namely buying them not to live in, but more to make money and impress people.

I have no idea if this is true -- in fact, I'm not even sure how someone would know whether it is true. But if it is, even a bit, true, then I guess this means that there are a lot of people with a lot of extra money to throw around and a lot of leeway with respect to how they're throwing it. Are there really so many people who can afford to buy a whole condo just as an investment for the future? In addition to the home they're actually, you know, living in? Tossing them around the way you might throw around a tulip?

I've always thought these kinds of discussions were haunted by the old idea of a "just price." As I've written about before, a long time ago there was the idea that there was a "just" or "fair" or "appropriate" price for something. This makes it easy to explain how a tulip costing ten times someone's annual salary is insane. In some basic sense, a tulip just isn't worth that much.

But as economics developed, the idea of a just price started to seem unscientific and impossible to define. What would it mean, to say one thing is "worth" a certain amount? All the data we have just concern prices: what it's "worth" in modern parlance is just what people think it is worth, which is basically what people are willing to pay. The idea that there is "worth" inherent in objects, that transcends what people want to pay, seems peculiar, like some kind of weird bad metaphysics or voodoo science. 

But if worth is just what people are willing to pay, then it's difficult to say that things are costing "too much." You can't say that tulips were insanely overpriced, and by extension, you can't say that the housing market's pricing is out-of-whack. At most, you could say something about the future: that you think prices are going to come crashing down. But you'd have to refrain from saying anything about which price is what the housing is really worth.

The reason I say just price theory "haunts" these discussions is just that I think certain intuitive but hazy background ideas about worth are sometimes in play. When the pharmabro guy wanted to put skyrocketing prices on his drugs, people said he wasn't charging a "fair price." When people talk about housing prices being out-of-whack, there's a suggestion that there is something a condo is actually worth, generally speaking.

So when someone says it would be silly to make more tulips in response to demand, I think one reason this rings true is because we feel, in some inchoate sense, that tulips just aren't worth that much. After all, if tulips were found to have some cancer-curing chemical we could use to treat people, then a rational response to skyrocketing tulip costs would be -- of course, for God's sake, make more tulips.

It wouldn't be surprising if judgments of whether housing has some inherent worth varied along with wealth: if you think of housing as a think you use to live, like those life-saving tulips, then it seems to have some hazy inherent value relative to other goods in your life and so on. And a rational response to demand is to make more.

But if you think of housing in terms of a thing people just buy and sell, then it's hard to see how its "value" can be understood in any way except what people are willing to pay. And in that case, it might seem that the creation of supply would be, on balance, not a good thing.

I don't know all the ins and outs, so I can't say what will cause what to happen overall. But as someone thinking of housing as a good thing, the analogy to the tulip market doesn't ring true to me. If you have a good thing, and costs for it go up, then why not make more?

The Modern Condition: No Slack In The System

There was maybe going to be a transit strike this past Monday in the area where I work, starting this Monday. It didn't happen, because of a tentative agreement reached late Sunday night. But it got me thinking about the ways that systems of modern life are so tightly wound that any disruption is like the end of the world.

Of course, having a major bus system stop functioning is a big deal no matter what the time and place. But it feels like these days, especially, a lot of people have employment that is particularly inflexible, precarious, and high-pressure. Work schedules can be posted late. Failure to obey the schedules can result in reprimands and dismissals. Quotas are set for a range of criteria and if you can't meet them, well -- you're screwed.

I don't know if you've been following the news about the Amazon warehouses, and how the pickers are under constant surveillance, not allowed to sit ever, forced to aim for a "target rate" of 100-120 items an hour. This story describes how Mail UK deals with employees as independent contractors, so that if they get sick, they not only don't get paid, they have to pay for replacement workers; a worker was charged £216 per day of absence after got hit by a car while delivering packages. Bankers across Canada are told if they can't upsell enough products to people who don't need them, they'll be fired.

But it's not only labor where there's no slack in the system. If you ever fly these days, you know that if something goes wrong with your plane, or a crew member gets sick, or there's bad weather or whatever, there's no "Oh, we'll get another plane' or "Oh, we'll put you on the next one." The planes are all in use; the crew are all maxed out; the planes are all full. There is no duplication, or overlap, or plan B, or whatever.

One thing about this that interests me is that although I have used a negative formulation to describe the phenomenon I am talking about, there is another description of the same thing, a positive one, one you'd probably find more often in the Business Section of the paper, and that is: "It's efficient."

It's efficient in one ordinary sense of the word: you're doing as much as you can with the "resources" you have. Amazon moves a ton of stuff for low financial cost. Planes fly a ton of people with lower fares. UK Mail made a profit of £16m last year when it was bought out by the Deutsche Post DHL Group.

You can ask the question of why "no slack in the system" seems to be so dramatically on the rise, but once you notice that "no slack" is also "financially efficient," you start to wonder about other things, like why this didn't happen earlier, or why there used to be so much flexibility, easy-goingness, and duplication, or why this is all happening now.

To these questions I do not have answers. Is it that electronic communication made possible a tightness that wasn't possible before? Is it that globalization and the financial crisis made everyone focus their attention on the bottom line? Is it a cultural thing involving negative attitudes toward labor and consumer protections? Or maybe it's actually been a really gradual thing that just seemed dramatic to me?

There's a point of view from which an important part of the explanation of things like this involves "corporate greed." The idea is that in a normal world, corporations are happy to make a moderate amount of money, and prioritize other things like worker well-being and so on. So the problem is that "greedy" corporations are trying to make a lot of money, instead of a moderate amount of money. And so they can't prioritize anything else.

As I've explained before, I think this explanation is inaccurate and possibly naive. In a modern capitalist marketplace context, the pressures toward efficiency are enormous. If you're less efficient, you'll just get run out of town by some other organization that can offer the same product for a lower price. In fact, this is just what we've seen over and over again, with smaller retailers going out of business because Amazon, Walmart, and so on are so hyper efficient. So: often it's efficiency or die.

I don't know whether we ought to do anything about the slack-freeness involved in things like having no planes sitting around unused. Fewer and more packed airplanes is actually better from the environmental point of view.

But when it comes to workers, my sense is that the slack-free workplace is horrible for people. It creates jobs that are massively stressful and ruin people's health and well-being. It illustrates something we've talked about before: that what is efficient when you're measuring money is not always what is "efficient" at producing good outcomes overall -- assuming "good outcomes" includes personal well-being and happiness of people.

Given the competitive nature of capitalism, it seems to me any solution will have to be systemic, and will have to involve labor laws, worker organizations and so on. Given that the bus driver's union Unifor Local 4303 retweeted a link to this webpage, about fairness in labor laws, including a comment about how "fair work schedules" means "2 week's notice," I'm guessing they're thinking the same sort of thing.

Nudge Versus Trust In Modern Politics

Maybe you're encountered the concept of "Nudge," in which framing choices in various ways can push people toward doing certain things without directly forcing them to do those things. In a relatively innocuous example, you might notice that in a cafeteria setting, people choose more vegetables when vegetables, instead of desert, are placed right up front, and as the cafeteria director you might decide that is a Good Thing.

Nudge grows out of the theory of behavioral economics. Behavioral economists noticed that not only are people irrational, they are systematically irrational -- they fail to do things that seem in their otherwise best interest, because they don't have great impulse control, or because they're not good reasoners, and so on -- and they fail in predictable ways. Nudging exploits that predictability to shape outcomes.

I consider myself a progressive and a lefty, and you might think that this political orientation and the idea of nudging would go hand in hand. Progressives want to bring about change on big complicated things like protecting the environment, where collective action is really difficult -- maybe nudging people toward energy conservation would be a good idea? Progressives often see people as influenced by context and culture, rather than as atomic and autonomous individuals creating their own self-made way in the world -- if people are affected by context and culture, why not try to make that work for us rather than against us? And examples like the cafeteria speak to me. I am just the kind of person who wants to be nudged toward eating more vegetables, and I'm just the kind of person who recognizes that nudging could work.

But nudging is often creepy. For one thing, it's described as "value-neutral" -- nudgers are just helping you do what you would do if you weren't so systematically irrational. But this is just implausible. How do you know what what people would do if they weren't so systematically irrational? In fact, you have no idea.

As we've discussed before, the person who eats a lot of desert may be irrational. But they might also be rationally satisfying a strongly felt preference for cake over the things that you get from foregoing cake. People have priorities other than living longer, and as Paula Poundstone says: What part of Ring-Dings make my life worth living do you not understand? As has been pointed out (e. g. in this book by my friend Mark White), the risk is that policy makers are projecting their own sense of what matters onto the situation.

As time went on, and the more I saw nudges in action, the more suspicious I became. And then a couple of weeks ago I read this New Yorker article about the use of behavioral economics and nudging in the context of the Flint water crisis. When I first saw the topic, I was like, WTF? The people who behaved badly in the Flint water crisis weren't the citizens. They were the government agencies and representatives who made a terrible decision to divert the water sources to save money, then covered it up and lied about it, then blamed one another, then failed to do anything to fix it. Was the author going to talk about nudging top-level decision-makers? Now that would be interesting!


No, of course that wasn't it. The article was about how you could create structures that would get people to do things like get and believe up to date information, and act on that information by doing things like changing filters and so on.

I guess filter changing reminders are reasonably innocuous in the circumstances. But, as the author of the article kept bringing up, the real problem between the citizens and the government Flint wasn't about information and facts and "rational behavior." It was about trust. The citizens didn't trust official representatives to tell them the truth about the water situation. And FFS, why would they? They'd been lied to and manipulated from this end to that. And now someone shows up saying they're from the government and they're there to get you to do some things rather than some other things and believe this thing rather than that?

Reading this story I just felt what a profound disconnect there seemed to be between the nature of the problem and the proposal on offer. Trust was destroyed. And the situation in Flint is still fucked up. And yet people want to use brain science to figure out a "strategy" for getting the citizens to do one thing rather than another? 

There's a fascinating exchange toward the end of the piece, when the behavioral team meets with a local activist. There are immediate cultural disconnects -- like where the activist offers to share some special fried chicken and the team members decline because they're vegetarians. But eventually the activist asks the team to just talk about how they're feeling since the election, and the main point person sort of breaks down and talks about how shitty and frightened she feels. And this is what creates some connection, and some trust, between them. Because it's people being honest with each other.

I think trust -- and its erosion -- has played an important and complicated role in a lot of recent politics. Obviously people have started getting their information from different sources, and it's often been noted that the body of shared facts and background we can all rely on in talking with one another is getting smaller and smaller.

This is often described as if some people, and not others, are just failing to judge in accordance with the evidence, willfully ignoring the facts in favor of their own opinions. And sure, there is some of this going on. But at a deeper level the problem is also a problem of trust. People don't trust the same sources as sources of evidence and facts, and they don't trust each other. 

It's frustrating to me to hear people talk about the lack of shared belief like it's a relatively straightforward (if difficult) problem -- where people just have to be brought around to proper belief formation. Maybe we can all get better at how we figure out what to believe. But this start to this process won't be a top-down nudge style step. In fact, a top-down nudge-style step can be just the thing that erodes trust, evoking, as it does, an I-know-the-story-and-you-don't kind of mood.

I don't know what the answer is, but I think it will have to involve openness, honesty, and maybe even mutual vulnerability -- things that nudges don't really have anything to do with.

The Rising Price Of Cars In A Pedestrian Wasteland And The Complexity Of Measuring Well-Being

This week I am visiting family in one of those places in the United States where you really have to have a car to get around -- not because it's like rural farmland or anything, but just because everything is sprawly and spread out and there isn't much in the way of pubic transport.

I am fortunate enough to be able to rent a car (and to be able to know how to drive, for that matter), but when I'm here I often think about how the landscape illustrates something important about how economic quality of life is something that transcends simple measures like "how much money you have."

Because to have a job, a family, or even a life at all here, you pretty much have to have access to a car. And "access to a car," while it sounds like something sort of straightforward is actually one of those things that is complicated and very contextual.

It's complicated and contextual, I think, because cars are one of those things where there's a minimum buy-in price -- and it's a price that is relative to the context. It's amazing how expensive cars have become, and how the effect of that has trickled down so that buying used cars is expensive and fixing cars is expensive.

As is often pointed out, cars have gotten expensive for reasons: modern cars are typically way safer than cars of the past, and they are more energy efficient, and they have more features and so on and so forth. So it's not just inflation, and it's not that cars just happened to get expensive. It's that cars got better. But cars got better in a kind of March of the Penguins kind of way -- that is, they got better all at the same time -- options to buy a cheap, less safe, less good car just disappear as time goes on.

If you look at the landscape in terms of how much money people have, it might look like they're doing pretty well. People who own these cars, after all, own something that not only costs a lot, but also has a lot of value. They own something that is genuinely worth something.

But if you look at the landscape in terms of how much people are able to do the things they need to do, it might look very different. A family with two adults and two grown children and one car, for example, owns something of great value -- and yet that family would be seriously constrained with respect to doing things. It would be hard to more than one of them to work, and maybe impossible for two of them to work, and even if they drive each other around and pick each other up, it'd be impossible for them to do all kinds of other things.

Obviously they don't have the scaling-down option that people often, unthinkingly, associate with constrained economic circumstances. It's easy to think that in a modern consumer economy that offers a lot of choices and options, people can sort of ratchet down their quality of life to fit their economic situation. If you can't afford beef, at least you can have pasta. If you can't afford Nikes, at least you can get some knock-offs at T. J. Maxx.

But with somethings, and especially electronics and appliances and large scale items, this isn't always the case. Sometimes they all improve at the same time, and if you can't afford the expensive version, you're just screwed.

For example, years ago my mother needed a new TV. A few months before, I had noticed the price of TV's falling dramatically, and I thought: no problem. I'd seen a medium-sized tube TV for sale for like 75 dollars. But when we went out shopping, there were no tube TVs. Now all TVs were flat screen, and the cheapest medium-sized one was like 250 dollars. If you're the person whose TV budged was 75 dollars -- well, you just got screwed, TV-wise.

And it's the same thing with cars. Once they all improve, the old ones go away. Sure -- you can buy a used car. But even fixing a car has become astronomically expensive. What you can't do is go back to the old fashioned car that someone could fix in their garage with cast off parts and a manual.

If you live in a place where cars are a necessity, this is a big, big, deal.

I guess the moral of the story is that when you're evaluating how people are doing, you can't just count money. Of course, that's long been known, and a related idea forms the cornerstone of the "capabilities approach": that you have to look not only at what people have but also at what they are enabled to do. I think that's right, but I also think the parable of the rising costs of cars shows that you don't need to take on board any fancy theoretical apparatus to see that measuring well-being is actually very complicated.

Economics Policies Have Losers and Winners. Why Don't Experts Talk About It?

Often, economic policies are justified by appeal to the fact that they will increase overall economic growth. And sometimes, resistance to those policies is framed as ignorance or lack of understanding about how economies work.

For example, in discussions of free trade and globalization, it is said in their favor that in certain contexts they are a kind of win-win: economic activity goes up, so things are just better overall.

Of course, as has been long understood, there's a problem: things being "better overall" is compatible with some people being made worse off -- perhaps even dramatically worse off. If a change in policy creates winners and losers, then as long as the winners gain more than the losers lose, this is making things "better overall."

Just as a simple example, policies that facilitate free trade might allow a commodity to be produced in a different country at lower cost. Shareholders of the company making the commodity might be made better off, and consumers who want to buy it might be made better off, while workers who used to produce that commodity at home will be made worse off -- because they will lose their jobs.

So, sometimes there are winners and losers. In a society committed to democracy, justice, and respect for persons, how is it OK to just create winners at the loser's expense?

You wouldn't know it to read the news, but this is something people have actually given quite a bit of thought to, and there are a couple of potential answers.

One answer is that they way things are should be evaluated not for being "best overall" but rather for being what's called "Pareto optimal": this means that no one could be made better off without making someone else worse off. "Pareto improvements" make some people better off without making anyone else worse off. One way to think about "Pareto improvements" is that since they are changes that make someone better off without making anyone worse off, they are changes that everyone would consent to -- at least in the abstract.

Personally, I'm skeptical about this idea of abstract consent. If you're a member of a historically oppressed and marginalized group, and a policy could create improvements for people in the dominant group and no improvements for people in your group, why would you consent in the abstract? I wouldn't.

But what's more directly relevant here is that insisting that a change make a Pareto improvement is a high bar and a restrictive criterion. In essence, Pareto improvements create winners with no losers. How many economic policies or changes in society are going to do that? (Freakonomics blog says: "Extremely few"). Our imaginary example wouldn't qualify, because the workers are losing out and being made worse off.

A less restrictive criterion is "Kaldor-Hicks" efficiency, with the corresponding notion of a Kaldor-Hicks improvement. A change is an improvement in this sense "if those that are made better off could hypothetically compensate those that are made worse off (thus leading to a Pareto-improving outcome)."

Now, maybe we're getting somewhere. In our imaginary example, the change would be a Kaldor-Hicks improvement if the amount by which the winners would gain would be greater than the amount by which the losers would lose. If the winners' gains were used to compensate the losers, they'd still have gains left over, and then, bracketing the problem of historical injustice, we are at least approaching the idea of the change being a "win-win" and something that could be an improvement for everyone. There would effectively be no losers after all.

And here, finally, we arrive at the question of this post. Why do you never hear about this idea of compensation? Never mind the fact that it never happens in practice -- why does no one ever even talk about it? When's the last time you heard a policy-maker, public intellectual, or economist quoted in the news talking about how policies like free trade and changes like increased globalization are OK because, although they create winners and losers, the winners could compensate the losers so everyone is made better off?

The answer is never. I'd never heard of this criterion until I started studying philosophy of economics. So, what's up with that?

Is it: 1) that, appearances to the contrary, the criterion has nothing to do with "compensation," and is just a nice-sounding way to say that the benefits exceed the costs? So "it is justifiable for society as a whole to make some worse off if this means a greater gain for others"? So it's OK that losers lose out, and who cares?

If this is it, I think we're back at square one. Suppose a policy change will add massive wealth to the rich and take resources away from the poorest people. What if the wealth of the rich is ill-gotten gains in the first place. Does the fact that the massiveness of the wealth is massive enough make this change OK? I don't think so, and I expect a lot of other people don't think so either.

Is it 2): that policy-makers and people talking about these things know and believe in the abstract about the compensation idea, but think that talking about it publicly is gauche or dangerous? Remember how Mitt Romney said it was OK to talk about inequality, but only in "quiet rooms"?

If this is it, I take it the problems are obvious. In a democracy, you can't expect experts to work out policy solutions in quiet rooms behind closed doors and expect people to put up with it. As people are making increasingly clear, they will not put up with it.

Is it 3): that, ultra-cynically, there's a hope that the losers will just somehow die off, and leave the winners winning with all their gains intact? It might sound extreme. But if you're living in one of the areas of the US decimated by opiate addiction, job loss, and no health care, it might seem completely plausible.

Anyway, I expect that if you talk to people about these matters, most people don't know or care about abstractions involving optimality and cost-benefit-analysis, they just think that people who work hard should be able to live a decent life, and things like that. There are also people who are committed to free trade on other grounds -- absolute liberty rights, or something. My question is not about these people, but rather about the public experts who tow the party line about overall economic growth and who are immersed in this sort of thinking.


The next time such an expert is interviewed by a reporter about trade policies and economic growth, wouldn't it be great if they stopped and said, "You know, the really important thing about economic growth is that for a policy to be a good one, the winners have to compensate the losers, and so we need clear mechanisms to make that happen"?

Is Giving Away More Money Easy Or Hard?

Sometimes in discussions about poverty, taxation, charity and inequality, I encounter a very specific debate over whether choosing to give money away is more difficult in some way than paying a required tax. If yes, the suggestion goes, that'd be an argument for a system involving taxes to move money around. If not, things are less clear. 

Some people seem to suggest that it's no more difficult to give your money away than to have it taxed. I remember that this thought comes up in Cohen's book If You're an Egalitarian Why Are You So Rich?  It's not really harder to give money away voluntarily, the thinking goes. If you're the kind of person who has trouble being motivated or who tends to get distracted and spend your money on other things, you can just automate the process. You know, monthly auto-pay or something. By pre-committing to donation, you can lock yourself in.

Let me say first that while I appreciate the debate over voluntary action and alternatives, it seems to me first that this is the wrong framework to apply to questions of poverty, charity, and taxation. As I've said before, the real problem is the theory of ownership that implies -- falsely IMO -- that what we end up with after some exchange is uncomplicatedly "ours" -- as if our interaction were happening outside of history and outside of a social structure with vast historical and contemporary injustices already built in. From my point of view, moving money around isn't a matter of charity but rather a matter of justice. So it's a different kind of thing altogether.

The other reason this framework seems to me wrong for this problem is that there are vastly different effects from individual voluntary giving than from general taxation. If everyone at my income level is taxed in the same way, all those people have less money, and this will affect prices and which goods are available and whether or not I can afford various things. With individual giving, you're just individually making yourself financially worse off than other people with none of the ameliorating effects.

But let's leave all those problems aside for the moment and just consider this question about difficulty. Is it difficult to give away more? For me, I would say that the answer is yes. The pleasures that money can buy speak to me just as they speak to anyone else, and it's not news that in our version of capitalism the forces encouraging you to buy things are relentless. When I have discretionary income, I want to spend it. More treats for me! More gifts for my people!

It's interesting to me that the question of automation comes up in this domain. I see the point: if you automate the process of giving, then the giving happens automatically and there's a sense in which you don't have to "make a decision" about it over and over. It just happens. You're locked in.

But you know what? For me, there's locked-in, and then there's locked-in. Voluntary automated systems that take money away from me are just not the same as involuntary systems like taxation. They're not the same because I can simply change my mind any time. And knowing I can change my mind any time, continuing to give requires the same mental energy and the same motivation and the same -- let's be honest, struggle -- that non-automated giving entails.

I don't know what it's like for everyone else, but I'd say there are some reasons to think my feelings are not uncommon. We're constantly reading that people are not saving enough for retirement, or saving enough for emergencies, or allowing their credit card debt to pile up. If automating a payment system solved the problems of motivation and commitment, then dealing with these problems would be a no-brainer for most people. But obviously that is not the case.

So, while I don't buy the framework of comparing voluntary giving to taxation in addressing poverty and inequality, I will say this: within that framework, my answer to the question of whether giving away more money is easy or hard is clear: it's hard, not easy.

A Few Philosophical Reflections On Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

I just finished reading Sam Quinones's astonishing book Dreamland. Dreamland tells the story of the story of America's recent opiate epidemic, but it is also about a million other things like modern American culture, the ethics of health care, late capitalism, the role of government, the nature of pain, and the timeless dilemma of human existence: can you make things better for people without also, somehow, making them worse?

This post isn't an overview of important themes from Dreamland. For that you'll have to read the book. And you should read the book. If you're not sure, start by listening to the author talk about it on the WTF podcast or check out more info here.

Anyway, this is just a discussion of a few things I personally found philosophically interesting, relevant, and thought-provoking.

1. Philosophy of science: evidence and social epistemology

One of the central aspects of the epidemic was the sudden rise in prescriptions for opioid pain relievers and particularly Oxycontin. For a long time it was part of health care orthodoxy that opioids are highly addictive and thus dangerous, and so should only be prescribed in special circumstances like after surgery or when someone is near death. But Oxy tried to change all that.

Oxycontin was formulated as a time-release pill made up of the opioid oxycodone intended to eliminate the euphoria and make the drug non-addictive. It is not surprising that Oxycontin was aggressively marketed as non-addictive: in the nature of things, the makers of the drug stood to make more money the more it was prescribed, and this is what companies do.

What is surprising, and indeed utterly shocking, is how many people went along with it -- with a belief that challenged everything they thought they knew -- on the basis of virtually no evidence. Doctors believed it, med school profs started to teach it, massive health care decisions were made on its basis. And, of course, it turned out to be wildly false. So: what the hell?

As with so many things, it turns out that the answers are complex. The drug arrived in the middle of a shift away from thinking of pain as something to be endured no matter how awful and toward thinking of pain as something that ought to treated. That shift probably would have been a good thing, except that at the same time, insurance companies didn't want to pay for the multidimensional treatments known to help with pain. The producers of Oxy spent a fortune conducting huge conferences that trained drug reps and reinforced the message.

These reps were trained to cite, as evidence, a text known as "Porter and Jick." This text, which was refereed to as a study and sometimes described as a large or important study, was supposed to show that opiods aren't so addictive after all. But Porter and Jick isn't a study at all. In fact, it turned out to be a one-paragraph letter to the editor, written in 1980, to the New England Journal of Medicine, in which a doctor with a taste for data wrote out an informal observation of patients at the hospital where he worked. Not only wasn't it a study, it described patients in a highly controlled environment receiving drugs before the rethinking of pain treatment was underway.

No one questioned "Porter and Jick" -- at least for a long time. People shared the info, passed it along. Quinones points out that everyone thought everyone else had read it; before the journal archives were put online in 2010, finding out what Porter and Jick really was would have required going to the library and looking it up -- something doctors just didn't have time to do. Interestingly, when I tried to use PubMed to view Porter and Jick, I saw the image at the top of this post -- no associated abstract even! -- and Google Scholar offers only a citation. It is still not an easy text to find!

Don't you find it profoundly disturbing that people can cite something crucial, and build on it, and teach it, and share it, without really knowing what it is? I do. And yet, I expect that this -- or something like it -- happens a lot. We know that science proceeds in a highly social way, and that scientists trust one another. People appropriately subject some beliefs to much more crucial scrutiny than others, because they are relying on a sense of what is, and isn't, already known and what is, or isn't, important to revisit. You couldn't require everyone to check everything going back all the way at every stage, or nothing would move forward. It's complicated.

Of course, when it comes to actual pharmaceuticals, you could build in specific checks on things. This article points out that the current US scheme -- in which advertising has to be submitted to, but not reviewed by, the FDA before it can be used -- is a big part of the problem.

2. Capitalism and philosophy of economics

The story of the opiate epidemic is, in some ways, the story of capitalism going where capitalism had never gone before. If you leave out the "people dying in droves" problem, the story of Oxy is a story of business success. And Dreamland describes how a guys from one town in Mexico create a kind of pizza-delivery model for black tar heroin, where you call and there's a guy, and there's quality control and customer service and so on.

I'm constantly trying to convince people that economics is not value-free: that our definitional choices affect our conclusions, that this process is not value-neutral, that assumptions about what is and is not important are hidden behind seemingly objective principles.

The opiate situation is a perfect illustration. The story we always hear about capitalist exchange is that when A and B  make a voluntary transaction, overall well-being improves: since A and B are both getting what they prefer, they are both better off.

As Adam Smith well knew, this is true only in certain contexts and against certain backdrops, and ethical questions and economic ones are deeply intertwined. If you allow that people buying Oxy and black tar heroin, becoming addicted, and often dying is a "bad thing," then you immediately face several deep questions: How is this exchange unlike others? What is the theory of "well-being" in which Coca-Cola makes you better off but Oxy doesn't? What is the theory of "voluntary" that makes addiction incompatible with free choice?

In her wonderful 1962 book Economic Philosophy, the economist Joan Robinson uses the example of addiction to showcase the problems with the standard economic view in which the theory of revealed preferences -- whatever the person chose must, tautologically, be what they wanted -- comes together with the theory of well-being as preference-satisfaction -- whatever the person preferred must, tautologically, have been what would improve their well-being.

"But [addicts] should be cured," she writes, "[and] children should go to school. How do we decide which preferences should be respected and what restrained unless we judge the preferences themselves"

Sure, highly addictive drugs are an extreme example. But you can't rule them out without a some thinking about what preferences matter and why, that is, about what is good for people and what isn't. And once you're going down that road, well -- pretty soon you're asking what is a good life and what matters and why. You're far from rational choice theory and revealed preferences, and there's no telling where you'll end up.

3. Is the human experience essentially a pain?

When it comes to the pains of human existence, there are two types of people in the world. There are people who think things are naturally OK and only become fucked up when bad things happen, and there are people who think that the human experience itself is essentially a problem. In case you haven't noticed, I'm the second type.
   
In Dreamland, Quinones talks about the dilemma of all attempts to kill pain: can you have the heaven of pain-killing without the hell of addiction? The thing I'm talking about is related to that but goes beyond pain and pleasure into general human existence questions.

As the opiate crisis deepened, many of the people who got addicted were young privileged white people from well-to-do families -- kids growing up in leafy suburbs, with their own bedrooms and cars and TVs and so on. In some cases they started because of sports injuries, but a lot of them were just looking for a good time.

If you think things are naturally OK and become fucked up only when bad things happen, it seems difficult to explain these kids deciding to take drugs. Why take those risks? For what? But if you think human existence is naturally difficult, exhausting, irritating, and boring, it makes all the sense in the world. People are constantly trying to escape their own consciousness, and they always have.

What this ultimately shows, I think, is that while freedom and autonomy are wonderful things, desires don't just come out of nowhere, and most people aren't going to do very well when left alone to their own devices.

Please, Move Money Around -- But Don't Call It "Redistribution."

Ever since I started studying distributive justice, income inequality, and philosophy of economics, one of my biggest pet peeves has been the term "redistribution." I get why conservatives and free-marketers use this terminology, since it supports the ideas they support: that you have a full entitlement to whatever our current system says you "own." But why do liberals and progressives use it? It seems to me like it undermines their position.

Liberals regularly do use the term. In his criticisms of Mitt Romney in 2012, Krugman described Medicare as "strongly redistributive." George Soros has argued that "redistribution" is important because without it, wealth accumulates in the hands of a few.

But it seems to me that these remarks buy into the very ideology that liberals would, and should, oppose. Outside of the trivial sense in which all economic activity involves a change in who has what, to call a tax-funded program "redistributive" makes sense only within a certain kind of libertarian or fiscally conservative framework.

As this very apt article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) points out, the problem is the problem of the baseline. The whole concept of "redistribution" assumes that there is a baseline from which things have been redistributed. To say that governmental economic programs are "redistributive" establishes this baseline by appeal to what one would own in the absence of taxation and government.

But this way of establishing a baseline must say that people are fully and justly entitled to full ownership of their pre-tax income, and that from this baseline funds are "redistributed." And this is true only within a particular theory of individual ownership rights: that they are determined outside of societal structures and in the absence of government. Such a theory of property rights is usually associated with conservative and free-market thinking.

Liberals and progressives should disavow these kinds of theories of property rights for several reasons. For one thing, seeing ownership rights as the only kind of rights, or as rights that cannot be overridden or compromised, doesn't fit with liberal values.

But more importantly, it seems to me that these approaches to property rights are an uncomfortable fit for the modern world, since all contemporary economic activity is now enmeshed in complex webs of social, cultural, and economic relationships. Corporations depend on international banking systems; social networking companies depend on the content produced by armies of users. After the financial collapse of the last few years resounded throughout the entire globe, how can we trust a model that requires viewing people as economically independent actors?

Finally, who can say that their ownership of money, land, or things has an untainted history that would justify simple and full entitlement? If you get something fairly through exchange, but that thing was itself stolen, your entitlement to it is murky at best. But not only does America have an ownership history of violence and fraud -- including, most obviously, that perpetrated against Native Americans -- any nation with a history that includes wars, slavery, political coercion, corruption, and organized crime will be one in which an untainted history of ownership will be impossible. That covers the entire world.

Needless to say, there are sophisticated alternatives to the free-market theory of property rights and distributive justice. Just as one example, the 20th-century philosopher John Rawls argued that just distributions are ones we would agree to from behind a "veil of ignorance," not knowing whether we were rich or poor, educated or not, disabled or able-bodied. In Rawls's view, from this perspective we would tolerate only limited inequality.

From the point of view of these alternative theories of property, just policies do not move money from a pre-existing baseline; they establish a baseline. Taxation is not coercive taking; it's not a taking at all. The beneficiaries of government programs are not recipients of kindness or charity; they are entitled to what they receive, as a matter of justice.

As the author of the SEP article says, using concepts associated with "redistribution" "smuggles in associations of forceful takings and rights infringements, which are not obviously appropriate in the context of evaluating social programs funded through taxation, or to discussions of reforms of the global economy."

That is to say, when liberals talk of "redistribution," they're sort of undermining their own position. If you want to talk social justice, and you want to support programs to bring it about, maybe the word you want is not "redistribution," but rather just "distribution." It couldn't hurt to occasionally also use words like "fairness" and "equality" too -- just so no one forgets they exist.