Miscellaneous mini-reviews of books I have read in 2020

(I have not read all of these cover-to-cover, to be clear - 

Aeneid, Virgil (translated by Rolfe Humphries)

I tried reading this couple of years back with a rather archaic translation - I think it was by Dryden - and found it utterly impenetrable. The Humphries translation (available on Gutenberg) is much more accessible and really exposes some of the most lovely passages in Virgil. For example, the description of Dido considering her feelings for Aeneas:

What woman
In love is helped by offerings or altars?
Soft fire consumes the marrow-bones, the silent
Wound grows, deep in the heart.
Unhappy Dido burns, and wanders, burning,
All up and down the city, the way a deer
With a hunter's careless arrow in her flank
Ranges the uplands, with the shaft still clinging
To the hurt side.

 The account of Priam's death is longer than I want to quote here, but very visceral and real. Or the description of the cyclopian shore near Mount Etna:

There is a harbor, safe enough from wind,
But Etna thunders near it, crashing and roaring,
Throwing black clouds up to the sky, and smoking
With swirling pitchy color, and white-hot ashes,{81}
With balls of flame puffed to the stars, and boulders,
The mountain’s guts, belched out, or molten rock
Boiling below the ground, roaring above it.

"The mountain's guts"! Love it.    

The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan

I blasted through this last Saturday, at barely 100 pages you can easily get through it in one or two sessions. Fun enough, nothing profound but a perfectly good way to enjoy a couple of hours.

A Just Zionism: On the Morality of the Jewish State, Chaim Gans

This was recommended to me by Anonymous Mugwump as perhaps the best one-book defence of liberal nationalism for the twenty-first century. It is clear, careful, and thorough, and has helped me to clarify my own thoughts regarding liberal nationalism (i.e. that there is a place for it, but that place is considerably smaller than it was in decades and centuries gone by). The bits I've read so far have had surprisingly little on the actual history of Israel, so I am at present unable to recommend it as a single source on the key issue it is intended to be about; it is possible that the second half of the book rectifies this, unfortunately the e-book on Amazon is appallingly put together (no hyperlinked contents, no options to change the font, etc) so this is difficult to check.

The Sellout, Paul Beatty

This is amusing in a politically incorrect way, but ultimately it feels like a fairly standard farce - if there's a deep message in there, it's well-obscured.

Fateless, Imre Kertesz

A semi-autobiographical account of a Jewish boy surviving the Holocaust, and perhaps the most famous work of Imre Kertesz - to date, the only Hungarian author to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was surprisingly upbeat and optimistic - there are jokes of the kind that teenage boys make, #relatable stories of Jews in the camps feeling too socially awkward to disobey their imprisoners, tales of incredible naivety and incredible gumption, all leading to the quite incredible final paragraphs:

But one shouldn't exaggerate, as this is precisely the crux of it: I am here, and I am well aware that I shall accept any rationale as the price for being able to live. Yes, as I looked around this placid, twilit square, this street, weather-beaten yet full of a thousand promises, I was already feeling a growing and accumulating readiness to continue my uncontinuable life. My mother was waiting, and would no doubt greatly rejoice over me. I recollect that she had once conceived a plan that I should be an engineer, a doctor, or something like that. No doubt that is how it will be, just as she wished; there is nothing impossible that we do not live through naturally, and keeping a watch on me on my journey., like some inescapable trap, I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the "atrocities", whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentrations camps.

If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don't forget.

Fateless is the first part of a trilogy; the third part, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, "explains why he cannot bear to bring a child into a world that could allow such atrocities to happen." I'll be interested to see how he squares this with the above.

The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State, Joseph Heath

I've reviewed this at greater length previously on the blog, and don't have a great deal to add except the chapter on paternalism was every bit as excellent as I expected it to be.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, Toby Ord

There's a Slate Star Codex review which I agree with, and have little to add to; as someone who is already highly familiar with most effective altruist concepts, this shifted my priors a bit but isn't really all that memorable.

A Little History of Poetry, John Carey

A very fine guide to the history of poetry; some of it I was familiar with, much of it I wasn't, and it served as an introduction to some of my favourite discoveries of this year - particularly The Rape of the Lock (discussed below) and Sappho fragment 31. If you're looking for a guided tour of poetry which assumes minimal knowledge as a starting point, this is an excellent choice.

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe, Norman Davies

This is one of the favourite books of some good friends of mine, so I really wanted to like it. I read the account of the Kingdom of Stratchclyde, and it was... OK? Nothing special?

The Trial, Franz Kafka

I got about 40% of the way through this. It's interesting, both in itself and as an account of the world in that period, but it didn't feel in any way like essential reading.

The Miller's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales is one of the many classics which I have attempted and not got very far with. I remember the introduction being all full of long descriptions of the many virtues of the characters, and taking ages over this with nothing happening. Based on a recommendation in A Little History of Poetry (above) I jumped into this individual tale. It's not really all that funny.

Normal People, Sally Rooney

Like The Thirty-Nine Steps this is very readable and has little in the way of depth. I suppose a straussian reading would be that in a broadly meritocratic society, such as the one in which we live, intelligence is the highest form of privilege. It's striking how unsympathetic the characters are - not just Marianne and Connell, but literally everyone except Connell's mum and one of his minor girlfriends.

I watched the first episode of the TV series, too. It struck me how much the whole thing must have had to be written anew - while the broad plot is the same, the novel contains almost no dialogue.

How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region, Joe Studwell

I was astonished at the confidence with which Studwell proclaimed his conclusions, given that he was essentially working with an n of around 6. I think he makes a reasonable case for these conclusions - that the rapid development of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea in the second half of the twentieth century depended upon a combination of land reform, industrial policy focused on increasing industrial exports, and limiting the use of financial capital to "productive" investments - but there are, besides the small number of cases, a number of weak points:

• He can write at length on a topic without being particularly clear about what he sees as the main point. For example, on land reform I think the fundamental problem in his view is that tenant farming means that tenants cannot benefit from investments which would increase agricultural productivity (I believe this is Pseudoerasmus' reading of Studwell too, but can't find the tweets) now.
• He fails to consider some fairly obvious alternatives to the policies he advocates. In the example above, he believes that land reform - i.e. redistributing land so that farms are owned by the people working them - incentivises the investments. But one could equally argue that what is needed is centralisation of land ownership to allow landlords to make these investments - as arguably happened in the English agricultural revolution. (He also fails to consider the question of why landlords themselves did not make these investments and thereby enable the charging of higher rents. I think there are several possible answers which would be perfectly good - maybe the value of these investments is hard to prove to someone not directly involved in making them, or maybe the key issue is simplification of land ownership out of the kind of convoluted systems described by James C. Scott, so the key issue is not tenant ownership so much as unclear and shared ownership. I'm not saying he's wrong on this point, merely that he lacks rigour.)
• In general he seems to advocate an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach: it is not enough to directly subsidise exports, you must also indirectly subsidise them through cheaper credit, must threaten to lock up manufacturers who don't export enough, etc... This all seems incredibly wasteful, surely there will be one or two most efficient ways of incentivising a behaviour and all others are going to create weird distortions and inefficiencies.

In sum - I can believe the broad strokes of his view, but on the details I am thoroughly unconvinced.

Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse, Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth, Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian, Rick Riordan

I blasted through these for light relief over four evenings in January. As a teenager I loved these, they're less fun as a re-read but still good enough. Obviously highly recommended as a way to help your children gain a proper understanding of the crucial topic of Greek mythology.

The School for Wives and The Hypochondriac, Moliere

Marvellous fun! The School for Wives is the play which BBC sitcom episodes wish they were - a bit right-on for my tastes (I'm not in favour of compelling woman to marry their guardians, obviously, but why did the antihero on this metric have to turn out to be awful in almost every other way too?) but otherwise tremendously funny, and surprisingly relatable. For my money if there's one writer who captured the spirit of Online Drama, it's Moliere. I highly recommend The School for Wives and one out of The Hypochondriac or Tartuffe (which I have not read but saw the RSC version of a couple of years ago).

Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science, Stuart Ritchie

Arts and Minds, Anton Howes

I'm not going to go into detail on these, since the authors are my friends and I don't want to offend them. (More seriously: I may write reviews, but will want to cover them properly rather than just dashed-off thoughts at half-past midnight.)

Weird IR, David Bell Mislan and Philip Streich

This is mostly just a set of stories, most of them not with any particular purpose. Maybe they'd be useful for an intelligent International Relations undergrad in thinking about the limits of their theories, although then again many of the stories don't really challenge any particular theory. For example, chapter nine covers some odd cases of international trade which are probably useful to understand for people without any background in economics or international trade law; given my not-especially-advanced background in both, I felt there was nothing particularly substantive in this for me.

The Story of Maps, Lloyd A. Brown

Comparable to the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe: it's impressive how boring they made such an interesting topic.

Dog Fight: Aerial Tactics of the Aces of the First World War, Norman Franks

Tells a good story of the pioneering days of early dogfights, and makes it clear how completely the nature of the air war changed over the course of the First World War. I need to read further into it, but a potential recommendation not just for military history but also for Progress Studies.

The Swamp Dwellers, Wole Soyinka

One of Soyinka's shorter, more accessible, and frankly less deep plays. I enjoyed it enough for it to be worth reading, and love to imagine the drama onstage as Igwezu - whose crop has failed, and whose wife has left him for his brother - holds a shaving knife to the throat of the priest who blessed both the planting and the marriage. I suppose you can read an anti-anti-colonial message into this, as with much of Soyinka's ouvre - Igwezu has been grievously wronged, not by any foreigner or stranger but by those who were closest to him. If you were going to read one Soyinka play, though, then it definitely has to be Death and the King's Horseman.

Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean, Taco Terpstra

Certainly far better than I expected given the author's background in classics and history - this is a deeply learned work engaging in depth with archaeology and with institutional economics. The introduction gives a guide to the long history of ancient Med trade and sets out his key theses that "First, state formation and consolidation had an aggregate positive effect on the economy of the ancient Mediterranean, starting in the Late Iron Age and peaking sometime in the Roman imperial period. Second, we should not ascribe that effect to ancient states acting as third-party enforces of private property rights." This is obviously a provocative pair of theses for a libertarian-sympathiser like myself, and Terpstra makes an excellent case for the importance of ideology and religion in promoting cooperation at a distance.

Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States, Erin Metx McDonnell

A study of some relatively-effective agencies within generally-ineffective governments. I come at this from the perspective of a member of what is, according to the official statistics (whatever they may be worth) a high-performing division in a department of the world's most effective civil service, so perhaps I'm inclined to be cynical here - but one of the most striking facts was that "highest-performing pockets" in the less effective civil services are broadly on a par with the average in more effective civil services. The ways of working which enabled them to be so effective were things like "working longer hours", which can obviously help in a pinch but which we would regard as fundamentally a short-term measure which, if required on a regular basis, would indicate poor prioritisation.

That said, I enjoyed many of the stories (especially the Sino-Foreign Salt Inspectorate, which went from a minor office to providing funding for half the Chinese government, all the while expanding the Chinese domestic salt industry) and it is sociologically interesting to see how these pockets avoid being dragged to the levels around them - including intense control of recruitment to take on good people when they appear rather than fixed numbers, modelling of good practice by leaders, clear and distinct identities, and - of course - a certain insulation from politics. It would be interesting to see this compared with high-performing areas of more advanced civil services.

The Power Broker, Robert Caro

What I can say can hardly add to what has been written about this. It did, however, strike me as much more ideological and willing to make unsupported speculation about Robert Moses' motives than is generally recognised.

Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov

The last play I saw before Covid hit, back when it was a distant rumbling in China. The title character is fascinating - coming across as a bit of a creep, but fundamentally a man who has voluntarily undertaken a bit of a hard life in order to serve something higher, and seen this thrown right back in his face.

In the opening scene Ilya Ilych Telegin describes how his wife cuckolded and deserted him, and made a fool of him in every way, "yet I kept my dignity - and is not that what matters?" It comes across as ironic or as a coping mechanism and he as a figure of fun, yet ultimately the rest of the play could almost be seen as a defence of this statement, that it is better to suffer evil than to do it.

Collective Choice and Social Welfare, Amartya Sen

Far more boring than I remembered from covering the topic in undergrad.

It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet, James Herriot

Various nostalgic stories of being a vet in Yorkshire, back when vets were primarily there to serve farmers rather than pet-owners. Good for light relief; the main thing I took away was how much drink-driving there was. If you've seen how blokes drive in the Yorkshire Dales, you'll understand how crazy that is.

The Plague, Albert Camus

I picked this up in a Berkhamsted charity shop on the recommendation of Ben Sixsmith, and started reading this because in the early days of lockdown everyone had to. I didn't get very far, but intend to pick it back up again.

How Fiction Works, James Wood

A truly excellent book, which inspires in one a strong desire both to read the books it covers and to try some fiction-writing oneself to try out the techniques which Wood analyses. I will be asking for Wood's new book  for Christmas, and frequently dip back into this. Perhaps my favourite book written in the twenty-first century.

Freedom and its Betrayal, Isaiah Berlin

Interesting enough, although the fact of my reading it apparently caused my grandmother to suspect I was going communist.

Collected Poems, Enoch Powell

I spotted this in a Cotswolds bookshop and bought it on the behalf of a notorious mutual on Twitter, who had a desire to read Powell's "tortured homosexual" poems, and in the couple of days between getting home and posting it off I blasted through the poems. The influence of Housman is very clear, as is that of Wagner. They are in many cases genuinely good poems; short and concise, expressing witty and inventive ideas.

(Powell, incidentally, was a local boy to me, having grown up five minutes' walk away on Woodlands Park Road; the other notable politician to have lived in this neck of the woods is Neville Chamberlain.)

Hegel: A Very Short Introduction, Peter Singer

I didn't get far enough into this to get into the properly heavy-duty Hegel; my experience of reading Hegel during my MA was that I would by dint of close reading and careful study make my way through a page of Hegel, and there would be meaning there, but it would be something quite banal which could have been expressed in one single sentence. The discussion of Hegel's Philosophy of History here was, however, quite clear.

Holy Sonnets, John Donne

My introduction to these was not the poetry collection above - though it does mention them - but John Adam's famous setting of the sixteenth sonnet Batter my heart for his opera Doctor Atomic. The sonnets are not easy-going, they typically require more than one reading to properly get the meaning of - but I think they're worth it. Sonnet Four, O, my black soul, was probably my favourite.

Benjamin Britten also set these to music; they are strange pieces, and not particularly pleasant to listen to.

Can Prediction Markets Reduce Sexual Harassment?

Recently the @litenitenoah twitter account observed that:

Prediction markets for sexual harassment accusations don't seem very ethical, but I bet they would successfully expose a lot of real harassers.

— Probably not Noah Smith but you never know (@latenitenoah) May 11, 2018

I'm not certain what ethical objections not-Noah has in mind, and suspect that I probably don't care about them. If prediction markets in sexual harassment (henceforth PMSHs) have the effect of reducing sexual harassment, then this is good and it will take a lot to convince me that the markets are overall not worth having.  (There used to be a prediction market in terrorism, which was shut down after outrage from politicians.) That said, it remains an open question as to whether or not PMSHs actually will have this effect.

After a couple of weeks of on-and-off thinking about this, I want to suggest that any PMSH will have both some specific advantages and some specific disadvantages. At present my fear is that the disadvantages win out; however,  The size of these effects will of course depend upon the precise way in which these prediction markets are implemented. One of my aims with this post, then, is to open up discussion about how exactly these markets can be designed so as to maximise the good and minimise the bad.

It is also worth stating, as a preliminary, a couple of limitations on all of this. Firstly, prediction markets are means of aggregating information, but they are not by themselves a means of governance. They can function as part of a government mechanism, as in Robin Hanson's futarchy, but only as a part. What this means is that while PMSHs may give us a reasonable idea of which men are abusers, it does not in itself provide a means towards actual trying men who may be guilty: any trial will require a concrete accusation from a concrete victim. This does not mean PMSHs can't reduce harassment, however, as we will shortly see.

Second, it is typically assumed in discussions of prediction markets that the existence of and odds given by markets do not affect the outcome being predicted. This may well not hold in this case - a victim might be emboldened to speak out against her harasser if the prediction market says he is probably a harasser, or might alternatively conclude that someone else is likely to come forward and there is no need to subject herself to examination in court. The fact that prediction market odds can affect the outcome is not by itself a problem - one might imagine a prediction market for individuals' health and life expectancies, with individuals buying bullishly on themselves so as to have a financial incentive to eat well and exercise - but it can cause problems, which we will discuss later.

Lastly before getting onto the ins and outs: I shall be proceeding on the assumption that prediction markets are basically efficient at aggregating information. If you disagree with this premise, please take that up elsewhere with Robin Hanson or someone, and accept it for the sake of argument in this post.

The case in favour

In my view, there are two large advantages which any PMSH would have, and two other advantages which PMSHs might have depending upon their design and size, and one other advantage whose size is difficult to gauge.

Firstly, there already exist informal whisper-networks, mostly though by no means entirely between women, about which men are not to be trusted or enabled. These networks can enable women to reduce their vulnerability to potential harassers, and can enable concerned third-parties to jump in to head off and stop harassment at an early opportunity. The effect of a prediction market would be to make this information, in an admittedly less-finely-detailed format, available to all concerned. Women should not have to change their behaviour to avoid being harassed, but since in some cases they can having access to PMSHs would give them a better idea of when this is necessary; concerned friends, similarly would be in a better position to know which men ought not to be left alone with young women for significant lengths of time, and which men really are harmless.

Second, harassers are frequently enabled by the institutions in which they work or serve. Larry Nassar, the former medic at Michigan State University and USA Athletics, was able to abuse over 300 women and girls because of silence surrounding his activities which had been going on since the 1990s. Such silences can only be maintained because institutions and the people within them have plausible deniability about whether they were truly aware of abuse going on. PMSHs would remove that deniability: having a high predicted odds of being accused of harassment would be an instant red flag that would make it much harder for institutions to engage in the kind of motivated ignorance which allows abuse to continue over extended periods of time.

An advantage which I think would be real, but can only speak for anecdotally, would accrue to men with prediction markets on their own odds of being accused of harassment. I do not wish to harass women; being of imperfect social intelligence, however, I frequently struggle to identify which behaviours will be taken as playful flirting or everyday platonic compliments, and which will be experienced as threatening by the women at whom they are directed. Of course I try to err on the side of safety, but I can hardly pretend that I have always succeeded here. Having an external evaluation of how threatening I am seen as would allow me to better calibrate my behaviour - was that girl giving of signs of distress that I didn't pick up on and the other guy did, or did he just want her to dance with him instead? Do I need to reduce the amount of alcohol I consume when going out on the town? Certainly I'm not alone in asking myself these questions - more than one male friend has expressed similar concerns in private conversations.

I wish to mention two other ways in which PMSHs might - might - serve to reduce sexual harassment. One of the biggest problems in tackling sexual abuse is that victims are, entirely reasonably, unwilling to publicly accuse their abusers because doing so will mean exposing deeply personal aspects of their lives to strangers. Whether you consider this to be the Patriarchy in action, an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of having a well-functioning justice system, or a bit of both, this is the constraint within which we have to work. PMSHs would allow women to provide information about their abusers anonymously, by buying bets that the abuser will in fact be accused.

The advantage I am most doubtful about - and which I think a PMSH would ultimately have to jettison - is that it may provide some material compensation to women who do expose their abusers. A woman who has bought bets on the man who harassed her may stand to make money by actually going public, which may make her more likely to go public and/or may alleviate her loss of privacy, for example by allowing her to spend a while in a new location without running down her savings.

The case against PMSHs

There are two issues with this, however, which I suspect mean that a well-functioning PMSH would have to prevent women from financially benefiting by accusing men. Firstly, it is not clear that this incentive would only affect cases where abuse actually did occur. This may therefore create cases where men are falsely accused of harassment by women who want to make money out of the accusation.

This is unlikely to be an especially widespread problem - while false accusations of rape do occur, they are at most a small minority of actual accusations. That said, the prospect of such accusations means that there will be an obvious new brush with which genuine victims can be tarred - any man accused of harassing women may simply claim that his accusers are mercenaries trying to destroy his reputation for money. This will both create extra stress for genuine victims, and may lead courts to wrongly fail to convict a higher proportion of genuine abusers.

It is possible that we may come up with a way to prevent false accusers from financially benefiting from their accusations. Suffice it to say, however, that I have not yet thought up such a way, and this is my greatest worry as to why PMSHs may ultimately be unworkable or counterproductive.

A second major concern is that rich abusers may be able to cover up perceptions of their threat level by buying all bets on their being exposed. This is not the absolute worst possible scenario - it would at least mean that they would pay some price for their misdeeds - but it might allow them a pretence of harmlessness which the informal whisper-networks would have quickly dissipated. We all know stories of rich artists who have raped young women and got away with it; while it might be better that they were in prison, at least their reputations provide a warning to other young women who fall into their orbits. These men might be able to counteract or upend these reputations by betting financially on their not being accused.

There are other, smaller, objections, mostly of the form that PMSHs do not go far enough or are insufficient - that they would only take into account abuse of women with money, or that only men who are already in some way notable would have PMSHs surrounding them. These objections might well be correct, but they are not reasons to oppose PMSHs, merely to think that they must serve as part of a whole package of measures we might take to reduce abuse.

Conclusion

My current suspicion is that the disadvantages win out - that PMSHs might well, on balance, make it easier for men to get away with abuse. There are ways to combat this - for example, by preventing men from betting on their own behaviour, and by preventing people from both holding bets that a person will be accused and accusing that same person. If these are even achievable, however, they may undermine the advantages that are supposed to make PMSHs useful.

This should not be the final word. I would welcome any suggestions as to how PMSHs can be designed so as to avoid incentivising false accusations - and as importantly, to avoid giving the impression of incentivising false false accusations - and as to how they can prevent rich abusers from rigging their own reputations. But it seems clear to me that such suggestions are sorely needed before PMSHs can serve as a tool for making women safer.

How Serious are Northern Irish Nationalists?

When what is now the Republic of Ireland seceded from Britain in the early 1920s, six of the thirty-two traditional Irish counties remained part of the UK. These six were judged to have more Protestant inhabitants than Catholic, and so to be sustainable for the Empire against the rising tide of generally small-scale but widespread and well-targeted violence that had rendered much of Ireland utterly ungovernable for the British government. 95 years later, the situation remains in the most basic facts the same: Northern Ireland remains a mixture of Catholics and Protestants, with the Protestants holding a slim plurality of the population. The Catholics are still mostly Irish nationalists, wanting the six counties to leave the UK and join the Republic; the Protestants are still mostly unionists, fiercely resistant to this suggestion. In past decades there was significant violence over this issue, resulting in over 3500 deaths; however, since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, there has been very little fighting and pressure has been exerted through the controlled violence of electoral politics.

One question we may ask of the Irish nationalists who live in Northern Ireland is: given that they claim to have a strong preference for living in the Republic of Ireland, why don't they? Rather than pushing for Irish unification politically, a cause which is no closer to success than it was 95 years ago, why don't they just move 50 miles south to live in the existing territory of the Republic? I shall consider various reasons they might have for not moving, and ultimately conclude that in general they just don't care that much. The preference of Northern Irish Catholics for Irish unification is not a preference that we should take especially seriously.

It is worth making it clear that I am not arguing that by living in Northern Ireland, Catholics consent to British rule. David Hume savaged consent theory quite comprehensively back in 1748. In any case, the idea that living in a state constitutes consent to that state presupposes that the state already has legitimate ownership of its territory. Nor would I claim that Northern Irish Catholics lack strong feelings about which state ought to possess sovereignty over Northern Ireland. But such feelings are produced by a need for group identity rather than any intellectual case or any experience of being oppressed.

The costs of moving to Eire

Let's be fair: there are substantial costs involved in moving house, especially between countries. But for most people in Northern Ireland, I shall show that this is not a convincing explanation. Most of the costs involved in such a move are small, negative, or inevitable.

Let us divide the costs into four categories: material costs, social costs, legal barriers, and transitional costs. By material costs I mean long-lasting reductions in one's standard of living as a result of moving geographically. An example of a material cost would be moving but being unable to find a job similar to the one you had back home, with the result that one is permanently poorer. These are the kind of costs that explain why people who are still in work do not tend to move from higher-income countries to lower-income countries. For much of the last century, this would have provided a plausible reason for not moving to the south: at the time of partition, Belfast was the only significant industrialised area in the island of Ireland, and most of the Republic was dirt-poor. But since around 1990 Ireland has undergone rapid economic growth, to the point where its GDP per capita is much higher not only than that of Northern Ireland, but of the UK as a whole. Nationalists moving to Ireland nowadays would most likely improve their standard of living.

Social costs are the long-term changes to one's social life that are necessitated by moving. These can exist in both losing old friends, and losing access to activities that one enjoyed but no longer has access to. Such costs can indeed be substantial - but they are not plausibly especially large for most Northern Irish Catholics contemplating a move south. They would not be moving far - Belfast and Dublin are only two hour's drive apart, absolutely fine for regular weekend visits home to see family and friends. The cultural life available to a Northern Irish Catholic is not tremendously different from that available to a citizen of the Republic of Ireland. If people really care, you might well persuade a lot of people to move south with you!

The legal barriers are close to non-existent. UK citizens born in Ireland are entitled to Irish citizenship, and do not have to give up their British citizenship to acquire it. The border is unguarded, indeed in most places unmarked. Perhaps there might be some problems for former IRA members, given that the Republic was generally quite successful in keeping the IRA out of Ireland. That said, I'd guess that since 1998 with the general amnesty available, this should not have been an issue. In any case, most Northern Irish Catholics were not members of the IRA.

Finally, the transitional costs. There are genuine costs to finding a new house and a new job, even if you are moving into a higher standard of living. But what proportion of Northern Irish Catholics have lived in the same house for all of the last twenty years? Perhaps members of the older generations have significant attachments and no reason to move beyond nationalist sentiment, but for any adult below the age of forty (and probably most above that age) they have surely had an opportunity to move to the Republic of Ireland at no permanent material cost, minimal social cost, with no legal barriers, and no transitional costs beyond those which they would have faced anyway in moving between two houses in Northern Ireland.

In sum, the revealed preference of Northern Irish Catholics is that they don't care all that much about whether they live in the UK or the Republic of Ireland. The overwhelming majority could have moved south at minimal cost, perhaps even at a gain, and have chosen not to do so.

Listening to American Pop Music and Buying Their Blue Jeans

One of my favourite Marginal Revolution posts is "The Baffling Politics of Paid Maternity Leave in India". Alex Tabarrok, currently making use of his sabbatical from GMU to teach in Mumbai, observes that Indians often favour policies which make sense in an American context, but not at all in India. Quoting directly:

When I gave a lecture at a local university, for example, I apparently shocked the students when I said matter-of-factly:

India would be a better country if it were richer and more unequal.

I think India’s extreme poverty makes this obviously true in a utilitarian sense, i.e. better for Indians, but it wasn’t so obvious to the students some-of-whom discussed inequality in terms that could easily have been duplicated at Berkeley. The inequality conversation has jumped the pond in ways that seem to me to be completely inappropriate.

Writing in the Times of India, Rupa Subramanya gives another example, a bill for paid maternity leave that has just passed the Indian parliament (waiting only on the president’s signature). As I pointed out earlier, by far the majority of Indians are self-employed and in the informal sector. The very idea of paid maternity leave, therefore, is bizarre.

I'll stick with the example of inequality. The USA, having one of the highest GDP-per-capita-s on Earth, can afford significant redistribution and may find it appropriate to do so even if this harms growth. (This is a moral mistake, of course, but we'll bracket that for now). India, being around 9 or 10 times poorer than the US, should be concerned with achieving greater wealth first and foremost; if this increases inequality, then so be it. Become rich now and redistribute later is immensely preferabe to redistributing now and never becoming rich. This ought not, one would hope, to be too controversial when presented in its entirety.

(I am of course presuming that there is a trade-off between redistribution and economic growth. This is not a claim to which I am married, we're just taking it for the sake of argument here.)

(Also, note that the UK is distinctly at the lower end of high-income countries. If we were part of the US, we would be the poorest state. Does this mean that, although not to the same extent as India, we ought also to prioritise growth over combating inequality?)

Yet because inequality is an issue in the US, other countries follow the lead. Tabarrok attributes this to a desire for positive PR: these policies are not aimed at combating the objective problems faced by India, but at showing to the west that India is an enlightened, modern and progressive nation. This, I think, attributes too much intelligence and strategic thought to the Indian political class. Is it not simpler to model most people as having a one-size-fits-all view of politics: the policies which suit the US must also be the policies which suit the India, with perhaps an allowance for past history and the dangers of changing too quickly?

I think similar dynamics are at play in the UK: people hear or read things which were true or at least plausible when describing the US, but are simply false on this side of the Atlantic. This seems the most charitable way to understand talk of "rising inequality": by the best measure we have, the Gini coefficient, UK income inequality fell sharply following the crash of 2008, rose ever so slightly for a couple of years, and then went back to falling quickly. Admittedly the data only goes up to 2012, but that which we have is emphatic. Duncan Weldon, no right-winger, has commented that "insisting that UK inequality rose in the last decade is basically the intellectual equivalent of climate change denial". It seems fair to suspect that many people who learn their politics from US sources implicitly assume that US institutions, norms, and indicators must be universal - or at least, fail to explicitly consider different countries separately. This is especially bad in countries such as the UK and India where English is a main language of politics.

No More Heroes

The name of Stephen Jay Gould is still widely cited as an authority on a wide variety of topics. In particular his book The Mismeasure of Man is currently fashionable as an antidote to Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein's The Bell Curve. I'm certain that I've heard him cited by an Oxford academic, and think though am less certain that I've heard him cited by one of my professors at CEU.

The problem is that, politically useful though his ideas may be, they range between the trivial, the utterly false, and the downright fraudulent. The most academically-weighty refutation of his claims is that of Arthur Jensen; the most sharply worded description of his crimes is Eliezer Yudkowsky's. Also, from the comments on that post:

• He formed a reading group specifically to criticise E. O. Wilson's book, and published these criticisms; despite Wilson being 30 seconds' walk from where this group was held, he was never invited to come along to hear and respond to their counterarguments.
• He fudged a historical dataset to support his conclusions in The Mismeasure of Man, then accused Samuel Morton, the long-dead creator of the dataset, of having himself manipulated the data. Reanalysis proved Morton innocent and Gould guilty.

Among those who know what they're talking about, he exists only as a punchbag (and, to be fair, the source of a couple of nice terms). But few among the wider population are aware that Gould was a fraud, and so he goes on, year after year, as the People's Expert on Intelligence.

Economics is understood by a larger proportion of the population than evolutionary biology, so John Kenneth Galbraith is no longer celebrated in the way that Gould is. In these days, after Friedman's great victories in the intellectual debates of the 60s and 70s, it is perhaps hard to imagine how economists were perceived in the 1950s. But back then, they were seen not as unhinged free marketeers (not that that's a fair description now, or even that it was for anything more than a short period in the 80s) but as some of the leading technocrats pulling us toward socialism. At their head were Paul Samuelson (who, since I'm not only mentioning him alongside Galbraith but also linking to a key error, I should clarify was a genuinely great academic who contributed crucial concepts to our understanding of economics, engaged seriously and honestly with those he disagreed with at a deep level, etc) and Galbraith. Although Galbraith fell out of what was regarded as economics, and is now read primarily by his son and by sociologists, the fact remains that as late as 2000 he was able to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom. (It's true that he didn't commit any academic crimes in the way that Gould did; his crimes were rather more mundane, like endorsing policies that killed millions of Indians, no biggie really).

These two men dominated the public discourse of their time, were widely respected, and have yet to receive the pissing-over that they both thoroughly deserve. This raises the question: who are today's Goulds?

One person who I unfortunately can't find now is an academic "researching" obesity, who served as a White House advisor, and was observed to have multiple "surveys" in which despite different numbers of letters being sent out, and some offering rewards for response and others not, there would always be the exact same number of responses.

An academic who is currently overrated, but nevertheless genuinely very good and worth reading, is Daniel Kahneman.

Aslund on the Post-Soviet Transition

ArtirKel has been writing a series of posts on the economy of the Soviet Union, including a set of "brief remarks on the transition". For anyone entirely new to the topic, the conventional wisdom is that following the fall of communism eastern Europe underwent a massive economic depression. This was not a recession of the sort that we experienced in 2008; rather, we're talking Greece-times-two double-digit-recession-for-several-years-on-end. For those of us who advocate capitalism, then, this seems like evidence either for the superiority of communism or at the very least for the need for gradualism. Immediate moves risk severe collapse.

The main point of Artir's article is that while shocks resulting from transitions to capitalism may very well exist and in the short-run be quite significant, they do little to disrupt long-run trends - and in the long-run we are all dead communism is as we all know a terrible system.

At the time I mentioned Anders Aslund's doorstopper Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc. Aslund makes the case in a section entitled "The Myth of Output Collapse" that the conventional wisdom is actually quite wrong about the magnitude of the collapse. Moreover, the countries which weathered the transition best were those which were swiftest to reform. Now that I have access to my copy again, it seemed worthwhile to write this post summarising Aslund's arguments in this section.

Economies were already in chaos (p. 122)

Aslund argues that the conventional wisdom ignores how weak the communist economies were at the time of their collapse. During the years 1989-91, the average former Soviet republic (FSR) economy contracted by around 11%. So to claim that without the transition there would have been no turmoil is straightforwardly false.

Changes in the way output was recorded (p. 122-4)

It's commonly believed - though I don't know if José himself would accept this - that Soviet economies had a persistent problem with over-reporting of output. The prospects for promotion of many people in the production chain depended not upon profitability but on recorded output, so there was a strong incentive to make over-exhuberant claims about the total product of one's empire. Aslund estimates, quoting some of his other research, that added around 5% to the reported GDP of the USSR.

More significantly, under capitalism there was significant under-reporting of output. There were two key reasons for this: firstly, massive expansion of the black market, which had been severely repressed under communism. Secondly, the splintering of industries into large numbers of small firms often left government statisticians unable to keep up. For example, for many years Hungarian statistics left out all firms with fewer than 50 employees, with the result that through the late 80s into the mid 90s the unrecorded economy never went below 27% of GDP.

Move to measuring Consumption over Production (p. 125-6)

When measuring GDP in market economies, we have a simple way to assess the value of a good: we look at how much people are willing to pay for it. Where the good is one that people do not pay for - policing, for example, or education, we move instead to looking at how much is spent.

The USSR had this for everything. The problem was that this allowed and even encouraged the production of many things that nobody wanted. Similarly, it encouraged excessive processing of products even when this failed to make the end-product any more useful or enjoyable. These useless products were counted as output in Soviet statistics, but if we are honest they were sheer waste. The move to capitalism merely exposed this.

Shocks to foreign trade (p. 126-31)

Communist countries traded almost entirely with each other. This meant that the distorted trade patterns which they had on a domestic level were amplified at the level of international trade. For example, under communism Hungary had a nice little export industry in machinery and buses. After the collapse of communism, suddenly no-one wanted to buy these - for reasons which will be obvious to anyone who has travelled on the Budapest Metro Line 3 (right).

Furthermore, much of the trade involved "implicit subsidies" from one Soviet nation to another, and particularly from energy producers to non-energy producers. The end of these subsidies didn't hurt the Soviet bloc as a whole, and indeed the central case of Russia it meant a substantial gain (amounting, if I'm reading Aslund right, to 17.7% of its GDP!). But it does add more knots to post-Soviet statistics.

Collapse of Military Spending (p. 131-2)

How to achieve full employment:
conscript the unemployed!

As mentioned above, when assessing the contribution of government spending to GDP we have no better option than simply to look at the amount being spent. The USSR spent an inordinate amount of its resources on the military - Aslund suggests 22% of GDP, Artir thinks it was probably about 18%. Either way, this was several times the international norm of around 3%, to which Russia reduced its spending following the collapse of communism (most other countries reduced their military spending even further).

This would lead to a massive fall in measured GDP, possibly as high as 20%. Yet with the exception of those directly employed by the military, it will have had no effect at all upon people's standard of living. This is one of the weaknesses of GDP - it is perhaps the best proxy we have for living standards, but it is ultimately only a proxy.

Wasteful Investment (p. 132-3)

The otherwise great economist Paul Samuelson predicted in 1961 that, since the USSR was pouring a greater proportion of its output into investment in further capital, it would overtake the US GDP some time in the 1980s or 90s. In hindsight this is an amusing story, but it also poses an important question: why didn't the USSR overtake the USA?

The answer is that much of the investment was simply wasted. Apart from the vast problems of co-ordination (section III), there were vast problems of theft and of managers demanding more inventory stocks than they really needed. For this reason, a lot of what was counted as investment was failing to contribute at all to future productive capacity.

How much did GDP fall? (p. 136-7)

Aslund produces a chart giving his estimates of GDP across the former USSR in 1995, indexed to 1989 levels.

There's decline in many countries. However, this decline is highly variable, and some of the most reforming countries - especially what would later be the Visegrad Group of Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, and Hungary - even grow. This strongly suggests that to whatever extent there was indeed a collapse in the economies of the former USSR following the fall of communism, whatever caused it was neither capitalism nor the shock of transition.

Tax Avoidance: Government Policy in Action

Since tax avoidance is currently in the news, I'm linking to a couple of interesting articles that I have recently read on this topic. First, Gaps and holes: How the Swiss cheese was made is an account of how the modern system of tax havens developed. The story is basically that during decolonisation, former colonial powers - and especially the UK - were happy to let their former colonies become tax havens because the colonies commonly had no major industries. This didn't impact too much during the formation of welfare states because globalisation hadn't gone all that far, which meant that it was difficult to protect your wealth all that much. As the world shrunk, though, it became vastly easier to earn money in one country but register it elsewhere. Tax avoidance existed prior to globalisation, and was a major source of income for tax havens before globalisation, but it was globalisation which made it the major political issue that it now is.

Second, India's Curry Tax Exclusion Goes Awry is the story of a very fun avoidance scheme in India. The government declared that, in an attempt to lure international food companies to India, all businesses producing curry would face a specially lowered tax rate. Unfortunately, it defined curry not by its function but by its content - with the result that all sorts of companies have been able to access this reduced rate. The extreme end of this is that steel producers have been mixing in peppercorns and declaring the resulting steel to be curry. In a victory for enforcing the law as it is actually written, the courts have upheld this.

The point common to both of these - tax avoidance is not simply something that greedy rich people and corporations do. It is a result, intended or otherwise, of government policy. The fact of tax avoidance is yet another reason why taxes should, above almost all else, be simple.

PS. To be clear, in this piece I am talking entirely about tax avoidance (which is legal) and not about tax evasion (which is illegal). These are related but separate issues and require separate treatment.

What Causes International Differences in CEO-to-worker Wage Ratios?

CEO-to-worker pay ratios vary massively across the developed world. In the US, the average CEO earns 354 times more than the average worker; by comparison, in Germany the figure is 147, in the UK 84, and in Denamrk only 48. This raises a puzzle for those of us who hold, however loosely, to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis: why is the marginal productivity of US CEOs so much higher?

I'm not going to be able to answer that here, but I will set out a few hypotheses and perhaps at some point try to establish which, if any, are correct.

(1) EMH is completely wrong or doesn't apply, and CEO salaries bear no relation to productivity.
This is possible, but fails to actually explain the key puzzle. Instead it just pushes us to the second question of why US investors are so uniquely unable to restrain salaries. (Or, perhaps, why US investors find it so useful to give rewards to CEOs in the form of salary).

(2) Tax distortion. Progressive income taxation may be expected to lead to higher pre-tax income inequality, since the incidence of income tax will almost never fall entirely upon the individual - instead they will on some margin demand higher pre-tax wages to compensate. This seems to make predictions which are opposite to reality, however - the US has relatively low income taxes, while Denmark is highly taxed.

(3) The US is bigger, tends to have correspondingly larger firms, and correspondingly higher payouts for CEOs. We could test this by comparing CEO-to-worker ratios of similar-sized firms across countries.

(4) Perhaps the corporate ladder is a tournament game, where the benefits of massive payouts to the winners (i.e. CEOs) come not from increased productivity by the CEOs, but instead through greater effort by those competing to become CEOs. If the competition to become a CEO is fiercer in the US - something which seems highly plausible (e.g. more competitors since everyone speaks English whereas relatively few people speak Danish, hence the US can import business-people more easily than Denmark) then we would expect to see higher payouts to winners of the US tournament.

(5) Cultural pressures towards income equality. These pressures need not be intrinsically egalitarian: for example, if being a CEO is highly respected, then we would expect to see CEOs receive lower wages than they otherwise would since they are in effect trading income for social status.

(6) Differences in the income of low-earners. I daresay that France would have a rather higher CEO-to-worker earning ratio were it not for its very high minimum wage. An economy in which almost all jobs involve the use of physical capital (e.g. an industrial manufacturing-based economy) would be expected to have higher wages than one based almost entirely around services. Eyeballing the figures I would guess that this plays at least a partial role - Denmark does have an unusually high average worker income, for example - but it cannot be the full story, given that the average US CEO earns almost six times the wage of the average Danish CEO.

The Liberal-Egalitarian Case Against Income Tax, Inheritance Tax, and VAT Exemptions

Liberal Neutrality is the belief that the state ought not, so far as is possible, to promote one conception of the good over another. In layman's terms, that means that people should be allowed to choose how they live their lives without being punished, rewarded or fined for it. (Obviously this excludes things where they harm other people. Then you have to work out what counts as a morally relevant form of harm, and it all becomes very complicated.) It is a view that, broadly speaking, I agree with.

In economics, there is a concept of "tax distortion". If you tax apples, then people change their behaviour: apples are essentially more expensive, so people eat fewer apples and eat more pears instead, and people have less money due to paying the extra tax, so they reduce their consumption of everything. A non-distortionary tax is one which has an income effect (that is, people becoming poorer and so reducing consumption) but no substitution effect (so there is no change in the relative prices of any goods).

There are three types of non-distortionary taxes. The first is the taxation of goods with an absolutely fixed supply, such as land. The tax does not affect demand, and cannot affect supply, so the price has to stay the same. A second non-distortionary tax is the poll tax, the tax on being alive. Finally, a consumption tax can raise the price of all goods equally, so that there is no change in the relative prices of goods.

I'm not aware of anyone previously having connected up these notions. It's worth noting that they are not the same: in my view liberal neutralism is also consistent with Pigovian taxes - that is, taxes on what economists call "negative externalities" - things like pollution, where one person unintentionally harms another in a way that is hard to enforce a legal right against.

For a state to fulfil liberal neutralism, then, requires it to abolish income taxation, inheritance taxation, sin taxes on sugar and alcohol, and move towards a consumption-tax system. This would of course be controversial, but I maintain that all objections which do not end up rejecting liberal neutralism are ultimately based upon misunderstandings.

Objection One: Consumption taxes are regressive

That depends upon what kind of equality you care about. It's true that philosophers tend to talk about wealth and income, but that's because they haven't really thought about what it means to have money which you don't spend.

Moreover, surely it's not important that the tax system be progressive so much as that the social system as a whole be progressive? If someone proposed a law to make "Jerusalem" the national anthem, you wouldn't object that the law failed to promote equality. Similarly, it's fine to have a possibly-regressive tax system if you combine it with a basic income; the combined effect will be similar to a negative income tax, and so will overall be progressive.

Objection Two: Okay, but there should at least be exemptions for staple foods and other essentials

Think about it this way: if everyone had plenty to live on, and there was no poverty, would it be a problem that tax was charge on these essentials? Surely it would no more of a problem than taxation of any other goods. This points us to the real problem here: that some people are in poverty and don't have enough to live on. But we can solve that problem by giving them money, such as through the basic income I suggested above. Compared to uniform taxation and giving poor people money, the effect of removing consumption taxes is to give a tax break to the well-off. If you're not convinced, read Joseph Heath (or listen to his interview on Rationally Speaking, which covers this ground).

Objection Three: This removes democratic choice

This is partly a question of how valuable you take democracy to be as an end in itself. If you believe that immoral things can be made moral by a democratic vote, then sure. Communities can have the right to levy whatever destructive and illiberal taxes they like. But if you think that democratic choice is constrained by justice, then liberal neutrality does indeed restrict the right of polities to tax in whatever way they choose.

Note, however, that we're still leaving room for a fair amount of democratic choice. Countries can still choose to nationalise industries. If you believe that state provision of education and healthcare free at the point of usage is consistent with liberal neutralism, which I think is highly plausible, then you can have that. And once you've decided exactly what services and benefits you want the state to provide, what exactly is left to decide? The actual rate of tax is just the government's budget divided by the total GDP, so it's not like there's a great deal of choice going on under any system (unless that choice is "let's have lets of spending now, put it onto the national debt, and our grandchildren can pay for it.")

Is Economics a Science?

Based upon the fact that this was submitted to /r/science, I would guess that economics is a science if and only if it supports the political goals of the speaker.

(This is not, of course, to say that the article linked to is wrong. Indeed, it seems entirely plausible to me that the phenomenon it describes is real. Monarchs were not renowned for their generosity, the welfare state - or its precursors - is/were not about redistribution, and in general it seems likely that higher segregation by income will lead to lower social cohesion and trust, which are likely to play a large role in determining how generous people are. Or indeed, perhaps higher inequality means that it's harder for rich people to comprehend that there are other people who are considerably worse off than they are).

Reading the Best of 2015: Part Four

(Previous instalments)

Fare Trade: Breaking Down London's Taxi Debate by John Bull is an engaging, balanced, meticulously researched discussion of the London Black Cabs and the challenges they currently face, in particular from Uber. Bull eventually concludes that "there are no easy answers", but unfortunately for him there are. If people want Black Cabs to stick around they can pay for them to stay around, and if they don't need Black Cabs then TfL should just let the Cabs go. I could write a long essay explaining this point by point, but I really have better things to do with my time. Nevertheless, this essay is quite plausibly the best essay of the year that happens to be demonstrably wrong.


After the snide jab that was the last article I read about Trump, I was not looking forward to Scott
Adams' Clown Genius. Instead, I was pleasantly surprised. The article is neither an endorsement nor a mockery of Trump, it simply explains a plausible account of why Trump is doing so well in polling. My prior is to be sceptical that anyone in a sufficiently demanding occupation really knows what they're doing, so I'm not really convinced, but Adams is nevertheless persuasive and demonstrates both a grasp of important psychological concepts, and intellectual humility. At the moment the topic feels a bit too facile to go beyond the shortlist, but if Trump does somehow go on to win nomination or even the presidency, I will be ready to posthumously declare this the winner.


A more unusual topic was covered by Howard Shulman in an abridged excerpt from his autobiography, Running from the Mirror. Having lost his face to a bacterial infection at three days old and having been abandoned by his parents shortly after, Shulman endured a difficult childhood with multiple foster parents and numerous operations. Eventually he traced down his biological mother - his father having since died - and confronted her about it, after which the narrative ends.

The writing is fluent, if unexceptional.

I can't say I liked the author as a person. Sure, the problems he endured while growing up were caused to a considerable extent by other people and by his infection, but there's no sense of responsibility. And while he has a genuine case for anger at his parents, there's no attempt to empathise, no attempt to interpret their actions in anything approaching a charitable light. He finds out that she - mistakenly - believed him to have been adopted, and doesn't rethink his judgement of her in the slightest. He may have had an unpleasant start, but that doesn't justify or excuse the person he has become. If I may be unkind for a moment, I find it not in the least bit surprising that he is 38, still single, and seems somewhat insecure about it.


It's hard to assess Andrew Schwarz's The Illiad and the IPO without reading the article it summarises. Schwarz begins by observing that many publicly-traded companies have defences against takeovers, despite this leading to lower share prices. He theorises, with reference first to the Illiad and then to other, less mythical, historical greats, that this is due to the desire of founders to achieve a place in history.

I'm not going to read the article, so I'm hardly in a position to say that he's wrong. That said, Schwarz fails in the summary to explain what would count as evidence for this claim, much less provide it. But without this, his article is at best providing a different possible model for companies, and not an informative one given that it is constructed purely in order to merge existing data with an unsubstantiated theory.

As a side note: why is immortal fame better than fame in one's lifetime? Sure, they go together to some extent, but if it were a choice between the two then I'll note that there's only one of them which you can exploit for money, power and sex.

Clothes

Back when I lived in Manchester, I used to take coffee with a retired bishop. Once, when describing what it had been like to be a student - some sixty years earlier - he mentioned having owned only two sets of clothing. That is, two pairs of socks, two underwear, and so on. It struck me as incredible that in the mid-20th Century people in Britian might have struggled to afford clothing.

More recently, the thought occurs to me: what if the issue was less one of money, and more one of the time required to wash extra clothes? Washing machines would have been starting to become commonplace at that time, but for many people - especially students in temporary accommodation - they would still have been an unaffordable luxury. Perhaps people simply did not think it worth spending an extra hour or so each work cleaning socks and underwear in order to have a new set of underclothes each day.

The Uses and Abuses of Signalling

Epistemic Status: I wrote this between about 10pm-2am on Tuesday, and have decided that I'm unlikely to find the motivation to go over it. Hence I'm publishing it, with a proviso that it is more than usually likely to contain mistakes and is undoubtedly too long.

BD Sixsmith has a post discussing the nature of virtue signalling. There's much to agree with and little if anything that I directly disagree with, but the notion of signalling which he inherits is less precise than signalling in the Hansonian sense. This post, then, is my attempt to reintroduce that precision.

What is signalling?

Signalling, in  Robin Hanson's sense, is spending resources in order to communicate information about oneself. There are two differences between this definition and that which Sixsmith* inherits from James Bartholomew ("the way in which many people say or write things to indicate that they are virtuous.") First, Hanson's account covers a wide range of actions, rather than being restricted to speech. (To be fair, Sixsmith makes the observation in his own post that signalling is hardly a property solely of verbal communication). Second, crucial to Hanson's account is the idea that resources are consumed by signalling.


Why and what do people signal?

Or more precisely, what information are they trying to convey about themselves? So far as I am aware, the traits which we signal fall into two categories: commitments/values, and abilities.

When one is aiming to signal a particular trait, it is crucial to the value of one's signalling that someone who did not possess the trait in question could not perform the behaviour which constitutes signalling. If anyone could do it, then there is no way for the signalling behaviour to mark you out as someone who possesses this valuable trait.

The behaviour one chooses in order to signal a trait, then, will depend heavily upon whether the trait in question is an ability or a commitment. If the trait is an ability, then the signalling behaviour should be one that is easy to perform only if one possesses the trait. This is at the heart of Bryan Caplan's signalling model of education: a degree is relatively easy to obtain if one is intelligent, whereas if one is of average or below-average intelligence then the cost is far higher**.

If the trait is a commitment, on the other hand, then the behaviour should be one that is costly to perform, even if one does possess the trait. The logic here is that if one did not place so much import on this commitment, one would not be willing to make the sacrifice which is entailed by the signalling behaviour. A perhaps out-of-date example of this might be buying an expensive engagement ring: one would only be willing to spend so much money if one really did want to be married to the beloved. Back in the days when becoming pregnant out of wedlock was considered shameful, the engagement ring functioned as a signal that the man did not intend to run away if his fiancée did indeed become pregnant.

What is costly varies hugely from person to person. For example, suppose Jim earns £25,000 per annum but manages to donate more than £10k to charity each and every year. Wow! one might think, What a generous guy! Jim's charitable donations successfully signal generosity. But now, suppose that he in fact earns more than a million pounds per annum. Now he looks positively miserly, because £10,000 is no longer a significant cost to him. If Jim wishes to signal generosity, he really needs to up his game.

Thus the cost of a signal may be either high or low. Whether or not it ought to be depends upon the nature of the trait being signalled.


So is virtue an ability or a commitment?

This is a tough question, one that philosophers have been debating for more than two millenia. (Admittedly, that's actually a fairly low standard). Clearly there is some extent to which it is an ability - i.e. the ability to recognise what is the morally right thing to do in a range of situations - but there's an ongoing debate as to whether one needs motivation to act morally, beyond the simple knowledge of which actions are moral.

Fortunately I solved meta-ethics one day on the bus a couple of weeks back, and so can tell you the answer. For perfectly rational, ideal agents: yes, moral beliefs are inherently motivating (though this is actually a rather misleading way of putting it, since something's being motivating comes prior to its being moral). However, humans are not perfectly rational. Most pertinently we suffer from "Akrasia", or weakness of the will. The fact that we recognise we in some sense "should" do something does not mean that we actually will do it. The ability to resist akrasia and perform moral actions, then, is a type of commitment - in this case a commitment to doing good.


Real-world Virtue Signalling

So let us take what a left-wing person might think of as "the virtue of progressivism". How is one to signal this virtue? Progressivism seems less like an ability than a commitment, so the key to a successful signal will be that it is a signal one will make only if one is truly committed to the cause. Such signals might include: long hours of unpaid labour, spent knocking on doors or stuffing envelopes; taking the time to read long and often incomprehensible Marxist tracts (also a way of signalling intelligence); saying things which induce non-progressives to take you less seriously.

There are also a variety of things which one can do to suggest that one is progressive, but which involve lower costs and will therefore be taken less seriously. Mocking the Daily Mail is a British national pastime, and serves poorly as an indication of one's progressivism. Ditto expressing concern for the poor, which can be done equally well by Tories. These are simply too commonplace.

Alternatively, suppose one wishes to signal that one cares for the global poor. The most obvious way to help them is to give money to a charity which works in the third world, but this is not the most visible activity. Since signalling is an act of communication, it must of necessity be visible to the desired audience. Hence instead of doing overtime at work and donating one's extra pay, one might perform an impressive, embarrassing, or otherwise unusual activity and solicit donations.

An even more extreme way to demonstrate one's commitment to helping the people of the third world is to actually travel there to help. Some students do this, and we talk about it "builds moral character". (Yeah, Bryan Caplan might say, it builds moral character in exactly the same way that going to university builds intelligence.) In recent years there has been increasing suspicion that these trips are actually more leisure than work, and the status of the people who go on these trips has taken a corresponding hit.


Is everything signalling?

No. Sixsmith is of course correct to note that "When teenagers get involved in musical subcultures and buy new clothes, and cut their hair, and paint their nails or pierce their lips it is informed by their need to appeal to their peers, yet it would be foolish to think that they don’t like the music." Perhaps one might try to salvage more of the signalling view by claiming that appreciation for a particular aesthetic is in fact an ability of sorts, but this is surely pushing the model too far.


Socially Useful Signalling

Sixsmith claims that "The problem of virtue signalling in the modern age is in large part a problem of scale. When the world was not so criss-crossed with roads, flights and wireless connections one demonstrated one’s virtues in one’s own community. On such a local scale, one’s beliefs regarding, say, the proper treatment of poor people in one’s neighbourhood had to be actualised in one’s behaviour. Modest and productive virtues could take precedence." 

Perhaps this was true among the general populace. I imagine it varied from community to community, since while the principles behind signalling are the same across communities, the specific acts which are socially accepted as signals vary greatly. My concern here is with signalling as it was (and still is) practised by aristocrats and nations. The principle "virtues" these actors have traditionally sought to convey are power, wealth***, sophistication, and piety. Hence they have built large palaces, commissioned great cathedrals and works of art, and many other things besides. Some of these (such as many of the Oxbridge colleges, or the Szechenyi Chain Bridge) have been of great use to society. (Though how much of that is post hoc rationalisation? If we could send money back into the Middle Ages, would we want it spent upon founding Elizabeth College Oxford, or would we want it spent upon bringing peasants out of dire poverty?) Much of it, however, was spent upon buildings that are nice to look at, but don't really serve any purpose other than attracting tourists.

Perhaps the world's most beautiful COMPLETE WASTE OF RESOURCES.

I really don't know what gets us out of this trap of socially-wasteful signalling, perhaps other than unilateral action by people already recognised as possessing certain virtues. Effective Altruism appears to be achieving a beneficial form of wealth-signalling, but there are many other things which we signal using behaviours which are wasteful if not outright damaging. Sixsmith suggests "spending more time in our communities and less on Twitter," but this is of course reliant upon his belief that signalling within communities is usually socially beneficial. This is not to say that he is wrong, merely that I reserve judgement either in favour or against.

A second problem with signalling is that it is inevitably a positional good: my signal makes yours less useful, either by showing that it's easy enough that I can also perform it or sufficiently low-cost that I am also willing to perform it. Again I don't know how to tackle this: the ideal solution is a Pigovian tax, and indeed this provides the most solid justification for heavy taxation of luxuries. But such taxes are difficult to implement (Marathon-running tax, anyone?) and easy to mess up. Nor does this give us any guidance upon what to do as individuals (apart from thinking up new ways of signalling which have yet to be exploited by all and sundry).




* I would use his first name, but am uncertain as to his preference between Ben, Benjamin, or BD.

** For purposes of simplicity, I'm leaving out the extent to which (in Caplan's view) a degree also signals conscientiousness and/or conformity.

*** Wealth signalling: also known as Conspicuous Consumption.

On Jeremy Corbyn

The Parliamentary Labour Party are currently very flustered by the possibility that their next leader could be militant hard-leftist Jeremy Corbyn, a man who saw the 1983 election manifesto as poorly presented but otherwise tremendous in every way. The Conservative Party are torn between those who see it as a guaranteed third term, and those who are concerned about the effect this will have upon the government.

I hold no position upon whether Corbyn being elected as the Labour leader would be good for the country. However, I feel that it is worth explaining precisely why I hold no position.

Like most observers, I think that Corbyn's election would be a disaster for the Labour party as it currently exists. Some have suggested that either he will get knifed by some upstart or there will be a schism with many members leaving to form a new party. I wouldn't count on this, largely because no-one ever looked at all like doing this to Ed Miliband despite him facing many of the same criticisms of being too left-wing and union-dominated. The Green Party will probably lose a lot of voters, given that Corbyn appeals to the same demographic that they rely on (i.e. white, public sector, high self-perception of intelligence).

But that's not something I especially care about. The Labour Party will fix itself or it won't, and if it doesn't then it will be shut out of power until the next major crisis. (By "major crisis" I mean something sufficient to render a government party unelectable, such as the Suez Crisis or one of those European-style debt crises).

The effect on the governing Conservative party is what worries me. I really don't know how they will behave, because I really lack a model for the behaviour of political parties.

As an analogy to my difficulty in modelling parties, let's go into how economists model firms. This is a field which was opened by the late Ronald Coase in a 1937 paper called "The Nature of the Firm". Coase assumed that, just as individuals were until recently taken to maximise their utility, firms would act so as to maximise their profit. It's a plausible assumption, clearly true to at least some extent (firms which fail to make profits will go out of business) and above all it makes models tractable.

But then William Baumol came along and pointed out that many firms are owned by shareholders but managed by people who may not themselves be shareholders. Under these conditions, especially in uncompetitive markets, firms may act so as to achieve other ends unless the shareholders can effectively exercise control over the managers' actions - and if they could, then what would be the point of having managers? Baumol suggested that firms act so as to raise the prestige of managers, which may be done less by maximising profit so much as maximising market share or sales.

Later, Oliver Williamson came along with yet another theory. He thought that managers face pressure to "satisfice" on profit - to acheive a certain minimum level of profitability for the firm. Beyond this, he thought, money can be frittered away in all kinds of ways, generally with minimal real effect upon the actual productivity of the firm (chauffeur-driven cars, fancy offices, charity programs, etc).

When modelling the behaviour of a firm, an economist must choose one of these models (or one of the presumably many others - there were only the ones covered in first-year microeconomics). Similarly, when modelling the actions of a government one needs a model for how it behaves.

One possibility is that parties act so as to maximise vote share. In a two-party system this leads to virtually indistinguishable parties; once you add in more parties it becomes more complicated, but I think that this is a plausible model for most actions. This would imply that in response to Labour unilaterally moving to the left, the Tories would also move left. I would view this as bad.

Alternatively, perhaps parties satisfice on votes and maximise ideological purity. This is another plausible theory, and suggests that the government may become more right-wing economically (maybe yay?) and/or more authoritarian (boo!). (This is of course assuming that politics follows the two-axis model of economic left-right and social liberal-authoritarian. I actually think that, in terms of practical politics, this does a reasonable job, even though in the world of ideas it is grossly inadequate).

Perhaps parties simply reflect the feelings of those in charge of determining policy. In which there is no particular reason to think that Corbyn's election would change the actions of the government, but would make a Tory third term more likely than a Labour takeover of government. This is maybe good?

If I put more thought in, I daresay I could come up with a whole bunch of other models and look at their implications. The problem is that I don't know which of them is most accurate (indeed, if Corbyn were actually elected and ran a far-left opposition then this would seem like a severe challenge to at least two of the models I have suggested, whereas rebellion against him would severely undermine the remaining one). So I really have no idea what the effects of Corbyn being elected would be.

All that said, it would be funny if he won.

Diminishing Marginal Returns is not known A Priori

Taken from an online discussion of Austrian economics, in which someone is attempting to prove that the law of diminishing marginal returns can be known a priori.

The law of marginal utility is indeed universally true. Any person will value less of a good more than if he had large quantities of it. For instance, the cigarette addict will value his last two cigarettes higher than if he had all twenty in his pack. He would also value two cigarettes far less if he had a whole carton of them at his disposal. Of course he would prefer to have more of them, which is your point and actually a consequence of the law. The law of marginal utility states that with an increase in quantity, the value of each individual item decreases. Thus, he can put each one to its next best use: 

A.) Smoking one now.
B.) Smoking one in an hour.
C.) Magic tricks with a cigarette.
D.) Having a cigarette for a friend.
E.) Smoking one in two hours.
...

Or, if he's down to his last two, all other uses will be put aside so that he will prefer to smoke one now and the other in an hour, instead of using one for a magic trick, saving one for a friend, etc. The reason he would want more is so that he could achieve all of his desired ends.

Counterexample: suppose your friend will be visiting in an hour and you would like to smoke with him. If you have two cigarettes, you hold onto them so that in an hour each of you will smoke one. If you have only one cigarette, you prefer to smoke it immediately.

Thus, we have a case where your preferred use for your first cigarette is different across the cases where you have differing numbers of cigarettes. Hence, a possible counterexample to the law of diminishing marginal returns, meaning that it cannot be known a priori.

I'm not familiar enough with Austrian economics to know if this is the argument that Mises would use to "prove" diminishing marginal returns, but in any case this argument is bunkum.

(Neoclassical economists have a far better way of establishing the law of diminishing marginal returns: we simply assume it. But at least we're honest about the fact that we're assuming it and have the tools to relax that assumption if necessary. Fortunately it seems to hold up pretty well in the real world).