A Retraction and An Apology

Several months ago I wrote a mostly-serious essay arguing the cosmopolitan case for #SpendTheSix. In one line I claimed that:

Typical practice during the days of the old Empire, as best we can tell, was to spend around 7% of GDP on the military.

I can't remember if I made any attempt to check this claim at the time, but it seems unlikely. It was half-remembered from a book I read sometime in my teenage years - most probably Niall Ferguson's Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. As my memory records it, the book was briefly discussing whether continuing US military dominance across the planet was financially viable, and argued that the US spends around 3.5% of its GDP on its military compared to the 7% or so which the old British Empire spent. Hence whatever barriers there were to continued US hegemony would not be financial, etc etc. It should be noted that not only I am only about 70% confident that Colossus was the book in question, it is entirely possible that either I misread it at the time or that in the seven or eight years since my memory of the factoid has become confused. Certainly I do not wish either to accuse Mr. Ferguson of making this claim, or to suggest that my failure to properly check the claim when I wrote the essay was in any way excusable.

My attention was drawn again to this claim when, browsing Andrew Sabisky's Curious Cat, I discovered that he had cited this essay for the claim that "we did in fact historically spend the six, & not just during the cold war either". It occurred to me that I perhaps ought to check the veracity of this claim, so quickly googled "historical british military spending". From the results it seems clear that I could not have done this when I wrote the original essay. First, this article on the BBC website:

"It's often thought the British army in the 19th Century just mowed down natives with a machine gun. This is a myth," says military historian Nick Lloyd.

"The most remarkable thing is that they often had no technical advantages and we managed it by spending only 2.5% of GDP on defence, which is not much higher than we have today."

Second, ukpublicspending.co.uk:

Defence began in 1900 at 3.69 percent of GDP but quickly expanded during the Boer War to 6.47 percent. After the war it contracted down to about 3 percent of GDP.

Third, this fascinating graph from ourworldindata.org:

The first part of Sabisky's statement is supported - we have historically spent the six. Technically the second holds up in that we also spent the six during various wars, but I think that it would be fair to characterise this as misleading.

For what it's worth, I don't think the overall thrust of either Sabisky's or my argument is hurt to any great extent by this fact turning out to have been false - neither of us was arguing that we ought to spend the six because the Empire spent the six, merely trying to suggest that in historical perspective the claim would sound less absurd than it does to people who have only known the world of today. Nevertheless, it is entirely clear that I ought firstly to retract that claim, and secondly to apologise - to anyone who read my piece, to Andrew Sabisky, and to anyone else who encountered the claim indirectly through him or some other intermediary. It was not my intention to mislead, but I ought to have practised higher standards of scholarship - and hope that in the future I will 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.

Should the UK #SpendTheSix?

EDIT 2017/10/07: A claim made in this essay has been subsequently found to be untrue - specifically, that the British Empire routinely spent 7% of GDP on the military even during peace. I do not think this affects the general thrust of the argument, but it was remiss of me to make the claim without checking it at the time - and I apologise for this - and would be even more remiss of me were I to let it go uncorrected.

Sabisky's campaign for the UK to #SpendTheSix - that is, to spend 6% of our GDP on the military - gained some mainstream coverage today when he presented a short film defending it for the Daily Politics show on BBC2. I've tweeted a few times about it before, generally positively, so I feel I should express my misgivings too. Hence this post, setting out in brief what I see as the best case for #SpendTheSix, and why it might be problematic.

Isn't this proposal utterly ridiculous?
It's bold and eccentric, but I don't think it's ridiculous. True, 6% is more than any other developed nation, in most cases by a long way - most European countries spend under 2%, the mighty US military consumes only 3.3% of the world's largest economy. Even Israel, threatened on several sides, spends only 5.4% of GDP on the military (although in less peaceful decades gone by, the figures was considerably higher).

But by historical standards, it's not at all unprecedented. Typical practice during the days of the old Empire, as best we can tell, was to spend around 7% of GDP on the military. True, back then Britain was exercising global influence if not dominance, whereas we can now hope to be at best a second-rate power. But the point is hopefully made: 6%, while high by peacetime standards, is not utterly ridiculous from a historical perspective.

What does this have to do with defending the United Kingdom and its interests?
I'll be honest: not a great deal. The UK faces no imminent danger of invasion by any foreign power, and protection of UK business abroad is a service to big business whose cost there is no particularly good reason for passing on to the taxpayer. Terrorism is a salient threat to the UK, but not a very dangerous one, representing a trifling number of domestic deaths each year. (Moreover, the stated aim of Jihadism in Europe is to separate European powers from the US, so it is at least plausible that a more isolationist UK would not suffer Islamic terrorism at all).

If you see the purpose of Her Majesty's Government as being the promotion of British interests, you should probably favour lower defence spending. I do not hold such a view however, being rather more cosmopolitan in my moral perspective.

So why should we #SpendTheSix?
There are two plausible reasons in favour. First, liberalism is an ideal worth fighting to defend and indeed spread. Forcing countries to be more peaceful and liberal is not oppressing them, as anti-colonial activists would claim: rather, it is preventing local elites from oppressing their fellow countrymen. Compelling Egypt by force to adopt liberalism would be no more an attack on Egyptian freedom and self-determination than preventing Serbians from killing Bosnians and Albanians (or at least trying to do so, and not very hard) was an attack on Yugoslavian freedom and self-determination.

Second, one can appeal to the importance of collective self-defence between the countries of NATO. Estonia and Latvia in particular are threatened by Russian expansionist nationalism, and our current best estimates are that, even with the NATO forces currently stationed in these countries, they would be overrun within a mere 36 hours. These countries cannot defend themselves, so it is our duty to aid them - which requires a larger defense budget.

Two other points fold into this. Firstly, the EU in general is very poorly equipped to handle a Russia that goes properly on the warpath: the only significant EU militaries are those of the UK and France. (On paper, the German army is numerically very large; however it is - and has been for many years - poorly funded, poorly supported among the public, and known for drunkenness more than competence). Given that the UK is currently in dire need of both goodwill and bargaining chips with the rest of the EU, pledging towards the military defence of the Balkan states is a genuine way in which UK interests may be served through higher military spending.

Secondly, if Russia actually does go on the warpath, we will very likely be spending rather more than 6% of GDP on the military. During WWI, UK defence spending peaked at around 47% of GDP; during WWII, it at one point exceeded 50%. I doubt we would go so high again, but it would not be at all astonishing to see perhaps 15-20% of GDP going to the fighting of a major war. Putin starting a war in the Balkans is unlikely, but genuinely possible, and it will be easier to mobilise properly if we already have a large and well-established military program.

Then what's the problem?
If, several centuries ago, you had asked me to make the case for Britain colonising various parts of the world, the argument I would have made would not be so very different from the arguments above. I would have stressed the need to spread liberalism, common law, and individual self-ownership across the world - in contrast to Napoleonic civil law, Chinese absolutism, and a whole host of tribal despotisms. This is not a modus tollens of the argument: the British Empire remains, among non-Britons, underrated. (Among Brits, it is of course vastly overrated).

But it should give us pause that despite the existence of people making such arguments - John Stuart Mill, Rudyard Kipling, arguably John Locke - the actual considerations which motivated it were self-interested, and practice reflected this. Cecil Rhodes talked a fine talk about how we were spreading civilisation and governing other peoples for their own good, and I daresay he believed it - the Rhodes Scholarship and his advocacy of the Cape to Cairo Railway are both pretty consistent with such a view - but do we really think that, in his heart of hearts, he passed the Glen Grey Act (which displaced numerous black farmers) or escalated the Second Boer War because he honestly thought it would be good for the natives? I don't think so.

Similarly, we can point to numerous figures back home, from a range of periods including the last decades of the Empire, who advocated deliberate maintenance of colonial poverty in order to enrich Britain. Britain does not bear sole responsibility for the continuation of grinding poverty in India - Gandhi and Nehru bear as much blame, if not more - but British imperialism in India is certainly nothing to be proud of.

Similarly, one can defend British militarism on universalistic grounds of the promotion of liberal democracy and peace and freedom and all that, and it's not that the argument is wrong. It's that in practice, there is a severe danger of providing intellectual cover for people who have thoroughly despicable goals in mind. Mill's defence of colonising barbarous peoples wasn't wrong, morally speaking, but it was deeply naive about the way in which colonialism was practiced.

This is not at all a knockdown argument. Firstly we are (I think?) more moral than we were 150 years ago, so one would expect a British military publicly justified by universalistic values to stick more closely to those values than did the military of the old Empire. Second, while the British Empire was in many ways an awful thing, it is far from clear that the world was left worse off for it: apart from the places which clearly benefited from it (e.g. Hong Kong), the years 1815-1914 were by historical standards remarkably peaceful. But one should not advocate such policies without at least some unease.

Also, why specifically six per cent?
No idea. Ask Sabisky.

Christian Ethics and Sexbots

Sex robots are com... approaching rapidly. You can already get bespoke sex dolls. The normal response to this prospect is a mixture of titillation, disgust, and mockery of the people likely to need them. I'm interested in this from a theological perspective, though: is sex with a robot, strictly speaking, forbidden to Christians?

It seems useful to compare such acts to masturbation. Masturbation is generally disapproved of within Christianity, but there is not universal agreement on the rationale for this prohibition. This opacity has a lot to do with the Bible saying almost nothing about masturbation. Wikipedia mentions the story of Onan in Genesis 38, but the relevance of this passage (in which Onan is pressed by his father to sleep with his brother's widow, but refuses to impregnate her) seems dubious.

Leviticus 15 discusses the way a person may be made ceremonially unclean due to discharges of semen. However, I would presume that this no more applies to Christians than the Old Testament regulations concerning women's periods. Jesus' death removed the need for this kind of ceremonial purity, substituting his purity in the place of men.

So much for attempting to get an answer directly out of scripture. I am aware of four arguments as to why masturbation is usually or always sinful, which we shall refer to as the Purity, Radically Pro-Life, Teleological and Lust arguments. Note that accepting one does not entail the rejection of the others, and masturbation might be sinful for multiple reasons. There are, though, good reasons for rejecting at least the first two of these arguments.

Purity Argument

This is broadly the argument I suggested referring to Leviticus. The claim would be that masturbation in some way defiles or profanes the body. The Christian's body being a temple to the Holy Spirit and all, masturbation is therefore wrong.

Why, however, would we think that masturbation is profane in this way? As Paul writes in Romans 15:14:

I am convinced, being fully persuaded in the Lord Jesus, that nothing is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for that person it is unclean.

Masturbation might on this view be wrong for some people. But there's nothing here to justify a blanket prohibition.

Radical Pro-Life Argument

Life, many Christians claim, begins at conception. (I think a better way to put this would be that "the distinctively valuable feature of life - i.e. being part of God's plan - begins at conception", but that's a debate for another time). Why not go further, then? Why not argue that not merely a fetus, but even a sperm, has moral importance and should be treated with the same reverence as a person?

The first thing to note is that this would only establish a prohibition on masturbation by men. (And indeed, men would be perfectly entitled to masturbate so long as they did not ejaculate), Female masturbation is hardly going to kill an egg.

But even with that restriction, the argument seems dubious. An embryo will, in the right conditions, grow into a person: it is, one might well believe, a person who has yet to fully develop. A sperm is not like this, however, since it needs not only the right nourishment and protection to become a person, but also to be united with an egg.

Moreover, even when an act of sex does lead to procreation, there are hundreds of millions of sperm which do not fertilize the egg but instead die within a few days. If God had imbued sperm with intrinsic moral value, would He really allow 99.999999% of them to die even in the best case?

Teleological Argument

This was for a long time - perhaps still is, I don't know - the official view of the Catholic Church. According to this view, the purpose of sex is procreation within marriage. All acts of sex which do not aim towards this purpose are sinful.

I'm not going to challenge this as an argument, given that it has been developed and defended over hundreds of years by minds greater than my own. Perhaps it succeeds, perhaps it does not, and it would be the height of arrogance to think that I can refute its strongest form without ever having looked into it before now.

Two things are worth noting, however. First: if you accept this argument you should also oppose a wide range of other sexual acts, including not only familiar sins such as sex outside of marriage and homosexual sex but also sex using contraception, ejaculation into any orifice other than the vagina, sex between couples in which the woman is post-menopausal or already pregnant, etc.

Second, one can reject this argument while maintaining that sex has a particular purpose of procreation within marriage. It is mainstream doctrine in many denominations that sex is intended not only for procreation but also for pleasure, just as food is intended both for our pleasure and for our sustenance. Moreover, unless one thinks that whatever serves God's purposes is mandatory and whatever does not serve His purposes is forbidden, there remains work to be done in the move from "sex is intended by God for procreation by married couples" to "all sexual acts which cannot lead to procreation are forbidden."

Lust Argument

This, I think, is by far the most plausible argument against masturbation. Consider Matthew 5:27-28:

27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Masturbation is not in itself sinful. However, it is usually predicated upon, or at the very least assisted by, a sinful lust. Masturbating to thoughts of someone to whom you are not married is a violation of the Seventh Commandment. If one is able to masturbate without thinking of anyone, then sure, go ahead; if one masturbates thinking of one's spouse, then again go ahead (although procreative sex is perhaps better!).


What does this mean for sex with robots?

The Purity argument would presumably apply to robots as well as masturbation. But as we saw, this will make you impure only if you think it does and decide to go ahead anyway.

The Radical Pro-Life argument would establish a prohibition upon men ejaculating as a result of sexual relations with robots. We might think that for men to engage in sex with robots at all is therefore spiritually unhelpful and conducive to sinning, even if not sinful in itself. But as noted, this argument seems highly dubious and could not in any case establish an objection to women making use of sex robots.

The Teleological argument would presumably establish a prohibition on the use of sex robots, except where such usage is conducive to procreation. Again, though, the argument seems dubious.

What of the Lust argument? Does lust towards a robot constitute adultery? If the robot is intended to represent a particular person to whom one is not attracted, then it seems that it should: one would not be excused lusting over a pornographic actress merely because technically one lusted over a picture of her on a screen, so it should hardly be different if we replace the screen with a 3D representation.

Following this, I think it makes sense to think that any sexual act with a robot in which the act is reliant upon the robot's being representational of a person to whom one is not married should be considered sinful. Sex with a stranger is adultery just as much as sex with a known person. That said, a robot which is representational of one's spouse does not seem to fall foul of this rule: if sexting and sending of naked selfies between married couples is permissible, then masturbation to 3D representations of each other ought also to be permissible. Additionally, robots which produce sexual pleasure without being representational of any person would not fall foul of the lust argument.

In conclusion

I'm not here to set your doctrine for you. Perhaps you think I am wrong to reject the Teleological argument, in which case sex robots can be almost completely ruled out. Even the Lust argument that I think succeeds sets some strong limits on what kinds of sex robots can be used without sin. But it seems mistaken to argue that Christians should accept a blanket prohibition upon all such uses of robots.

Preparing the Ground for Tyrants

(See also: How Good Has Obama's Presidency Been?)

I've seen a couple of libertarians sharing the following graphic on Facebook, commenting upon how much sillier it looks a year later now that Donald Trump is the president-elect:

I'm not certain how useful this video is to my general point, but it feels kind-of related: Obama mocking Mitt Romney during the 2012 debates for viewing Russia as the "number-one threat to America":

These are statements which were made with utter confidence by Democrats at the time, which they now are very eager to repudiate. A related phenomenon has been the inflated stature, under Obama of the executive order. Obama has not, by the standards of modern presidents, issued an especially large number of executive orders: indeed, the last president to issue fewer orders during two terms of presidency was Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century. But by using them to cause the enforcement of laws which Congress had rejected, he has prepared the ground for Trump to do whatever he likes, even beyond the probably Democrat landslides in the 2018 midterm elections.

This brings us to a general point, one made frequently by libertarians and classical liberals: that designers of political systems rarely stop to think what will happen if the wrong people are able to take charge of the country. But this is an inevitable fact of politics: democracies elect bad men, great leaders make poor choices of successor, and revolutionary governments are almost by definition founded by men with a taste for violence. This fact is one that we should take into account when setting up our laws and institutions, and there are three basic responses you can give:

(1) The freedom of action of political actors must be severely curtailed, firstly by checks and balances upon what can be done and secondly by limiting the range of actions which any government is able to do, no matter how internally united it may be.

(2) Yes, there are risks to a powerful executive, but they are risks worth taking. There are bad governments, but (at least in the context of a well-functioning liberal democracy) these are very much the exception.

(3) Embrace the hypocrisy, and accept that ultimately what matters is not the meta-level process of how you determine what governments should be able to do but simply what side you are on, i.e. whether these vast powers are being used for a (by your lights) good cause or a bad one.

The people who talk about this problem explicitly seem almost universally to give answer (1). Answer (3) is closer to most people's unconsidered instincts, and I don't actually think it's obviously wrong. (It's uncomfortable for Democrats to oppose Trump doing the very things they championed under Obama, sure, but is it objectively any easier for him merely because Obama did it? I don't know.) I'd be interested to see a defence of (2), which seems to be the option most applicable to the UK.

Various splurges on localism, devolution, state-building, and standardisation

NB: quite possibly conflating issues which are superficially related but really ought to be kept separate. Anecdotal evidence and guys with blogs remain anecdotal evidence and guys with blogs, and should be treated as such.
Also, names have been changed.

Back for Christmas, I've recently been catching up with various people I grew up with. In particular, the half a dozen or so lads who are my age or slightly older at the church in which I grew up. Lucias is my oldest friend, who was my best friend in primary school. He studied Maths at Bristol, did a one-year Masters, and is now doing a Ministry Traineeship at his church there. In a few months he will be getting married to a girl he met there.

Jason and Thomas are a pair of brothers who studied Engineering at Cambridge and Geography at Durham respectively; again, I believe they both have Masters' Degrees. They are now both living in London - Jason putting his degree into direct use in designing things, while Thomas (who was a keen athlete in school, having once placed in the top 30 of the Birmingham half-marathon) is now working in sports marketing - he enthused that next year's World Athletics Championship, which he is involved in promoting, will be Usain Bolt's last race as a professional.

Simon and John are the two older siblings of their family. I can't remember exactly what Simon studies, but am fairly confident that Spanish was part of it; he now works in London. John did Geography and French at Manchester, and is now working for the council there while angling towards going for a Master's.

Finally, there's me. PPE at Manchester, then jetted off to Budapest to study for a Master's in Philosophy. Currently applying for PhD programs, with an eye on Toronto. Long-term, intending to move back to the UK and very vaguely hoping to find a job at Oxbridge.

What, apart from our Christian upbringings, do we have in common? We're all bright, well-educated young men who remember Birmingham fondly and want it to do well. But none of us see our futures here.

This is, I think, the kind of thing Tom Forth likes to go on about on Twitter. We'll come back at holidays, maybe chip in to things - my own contributions are primarily playing piano and organ at church, but people really like hearing that organ played, mind you - but in terms of the lasting contributions that any of us could make to our communities, those contributions will be made elsewhere. Thomas noted that of his friends from Durham, "like 99% of them" have also moved down to London. That's simply where the jobs are.

This doesn't seem good for Birmingham. I don't endorse brain drain as a reason to compel people to stay in the third world, and nor do I endorse it as a reason to compel people to stay in Birmingham. But we've received a lot - of the six people I describe, five of us went to schools run by the King Edwards Foundation - and it's hard to see what, if anything, our home city is getting back.



An interesting essay linked to yesterday by Byrne: "The Strange Death of Municipal England". Key claims:
-government should be doing lots of things
-however, these should be done specifically by local government
-in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was what actually happened
-however, since WWII local authorities have increasingly had powers nationalised
-the tendency is now towards privatisation of such things, to the detriment of quality/equality of service

The essay is good and worth reading, but at the end I was left with a feeling that if you asked the author why (say) libraries should be government-run but food shops should not, you would not get any kind of a convincing answer. Most egregious is the following passage:

In truth, Britain no longer has a government, but rather a system of governance, the term political scientists use to describe ‘the relationships between governmental and non-governmental forces and how they work together’. This is another way of saying that we live in a half-democracy. 

David Schmidtz has the most articulate and developed response to this way of thinking, which is (roughly) that the fact that we aim to realise particular principles with our institutions does not mean that the institutions ought to aim specifically at the realisation of those principles. This is a line of thought going all the way back to Adam Smith, with the immortal line (and also the only line of The Wealth of Nations that I actually remember):

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, baker, or brewer that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.

That's my key point of disagreement with the essay: I don't think the changes it herald are necessarily bad. But that's not why I bring it up here. It's because of the tension it argues for between the national and the local, and the argument (which I am entirely open to, perhaps even favourable to) that nationalisation of politics is bad for most local areas.



The other evening, I had an exchange with Tom Forth on Twitter. We agreed that there are many types of policies which, in terms of total impact, are bad, but are good (or at least perceived as good) by the communities which make them. Examples include import tariffs, US cities bribing sports teams to stay in town, favouring domestic companies for fulfilling government contracts, etc. We agreed it is good that the EU prevents member governments from such practices. Our disagreement, I think, is whether the UK government should prevent localities from such practices. (I'm not certain what these would be, but let's assume that they exist and that more powerful councils would practise them). I, motivated by an overriding moral commitment to the wellbeing of individuals, think that it should. He, motivated by a belief in democracy and in particular local democracy, thinks that it should not. (At least, this is how I understand the disagreement).

If such beggar-thy-neighbour policies exist at the city level, it seems at least plausible that the success of London relative to the rest of the UK is to a fair extent due to it being the only city able to pursue them. Let us suppose that this is a good model for how the UK actually works. In that case, there are three obvious choices we could attempt:
(a) No-one, including London, gets to play beggar-thy-neighbour
(b) Everyone gets to play beggar-thy-neighbour
(c) The status quo: London, and no-one else, may play beggar-thy-neighbour

(a) and (b) have the advantages of moral consistency: (c) is desperately unfair on everywhere except London. But (a) may be entirely impossible to practice, and (b) is surrendering to the collective action problem. So (c) may well be the best option available; indeed, given this empirical model of the world, I would take (a) to be impossible and so advocate (c): in practice, clamping down on decentralisation.




A discussion of the increase in federal power, in particular since WWII, in the US. Worth reading for itself, but a real "huh, that seems obvious in retrospect" moment for me was the point that what we think of as common law bears little to no relation to law as experienced by most people for most of Anglo-American history. Rather, there was a whole mess of conflicting local norms, which in the early 20th century were standardised and codified by reformers.

On a related note, the professor in a Gender Studies course I audited this semester noted that we have records of men in 19th century England selling their wives. Clearly this wasn't a common thing, but it happened in certain places. Legal standardisation, of course, put a stop to that.



The point that I'm getting towards, I think, is an attempt at rebutting the arguments made by James Scott and Jacob Levy against centralisation of power. Or rather, I want to accept all of their claims about what High Modernism causes, and say that it was probably worth it. Or maybe it wasn't. The problem is perhaps inherently unsolvable, since it is very difficult to know what the average state of society was prior to the building of the nation-state. The standardisation which destroyed local knowledge and practice was also what made it possible, even in principle, to assess how individual people's lives were going.

Some people - including people I know personally - would argue that communities ought to be protected and preserved, even if they are what we would regard as backward. But again, I state my belief in moral individualism: people are what matters, and communities are only a means towards the flourishing of people. Perhaps they are important, even crucial means, but when society holds its members back, society is to be cast into the fire.

Does legal standardisation relate to modern devolution? I think it does, in a sense. Forcing the young men formerly of St. Stephen's Church to stay in Birmingham would have been good for Birmingham, and quite possibly good for the other people of Birmingham. But it's no way to treat individuals, it's no way to turn London into the growth engine which will eventually realise the post-scarcity society (or as near to that as possible), and... I don't know. The world is complicated, I don't know. I don't know.

Wherefore Christmas Cards?

There is a familiar economistic critique of Christmas presents, arguing that the practice of spending money upon each other (as opposed to each spending money on ourselves) destroys large amounts of value. More recently, Mike Bird has launched a crusade against the various deserts that we traditionally serve at Yuletide. If these puddings were really so good as to ever be worth eating, Bird asks, why do we not eat them year-round?

Let's suppose that these arguments go through. Should we in addition to dropping present-giving and Christmas puddings also cease to exchange Christmas cards? If the average person spends £15 and an hour or two writing cards, many of which will be noted for a few seconds only and thrown into the rubbish shortly after Christmas, can this really be an efficient use of our limited time and money?

It should be noted that, as with presents, the waste is probably at a Molochian social level rather than an individual level. For an individual to unilaterally cease giving Christmas cards could invite negative social consequences, at least in cases where one has a previously established habit of sending cards. But if we could all agree not to send cards and to recognise that failure to send a card does not mean one does not care, would we be better off?

I see two possible defences of cards. The first is that they can serve as nice decorations. But if this is really the value they give, then why do we outsource the choice of cards to people who neither have to live in our houses, nor have any idea of what other cards there will be?

The second defence, and I think the much more plausible one, is to suggest that while Molochian zero-sum status games exist and showing-you-care can lead to such traps, there is also a need for, or at an advantage to having, a bare minimum standard of showing-you-care. Saying "I hope you have a good morning" to people doesn't lead to a race for the most generous greeting, ending phone conversations with "goodbye" rather than just hanging up shows basic respect without creating long-winded rituals. Perhaps abolishing Christmas cards would create a need for a new, and more costly, way of intermittently recognising and appreciating people who you like but don't often go out of your way to talk to.

(Why then would we give cards to people who we do go out of our way to see? Because if we didn't, it would be clearer to people who did receive cards that they're not in the inner circle. In many cases this wouldn't cause any offence, but in some it's better to maintain plausible deniability. Plus, the fact that you consider someone part of your inner circle doesn't mean that they think of you in the same way. Better to avoid the risk of discovering that.)

I don't know how you'd test this without actually abolishing Christmas cards. If you did, perhaps you would avert a quite considerable waste. Perhaps you would see the development of an alternative ritual for recognising people. Perhaps such an institution would be needed but fail to develop, and you would harm our valuable, valuable social trust.

Nonetheless, E-cards seem a quite significant step forward. The decorative function is lost, but we can maintain the signalling while reducing resource consumption.

More ambitiously: perhaps Christmas cards keep us trapped in an inferior recognising-others ritual? Instead of sending people cards, make more of an effort to spend time with them. Assuming you actually enjoy someone for who they are rather than what they can do for you, why would you think that a cheap-but-still-overpriced piece of paper is a good way to interact with them?

Patriarchy is the Radical Notion that Men are People

Anne has a post arguing in favour of a libertarian feminism. It's well worth reading, not least because she's right. But as a persistent contrarian and well-meaning intellectual troll, I want to express some worries, hopefully mixed in with some encouragements, about the project.

To begin with a note of important agreement: libertarians should be more feminist, and should be open to revising their notion of coercion along feminist lines. The NAP is an insufficient framework for understanding oppression, and we should recognise that ideas can contribute towards material coercion even when they are just words. If we can recognise Marxism as a harmful ideology that oppressed the people of the Soviet Union, then we ought to be able to recognise the possibility that patriarchy is a harmful ideology that oppresses women.

Second, she is right that libertarians frequently ignore non-state sources of coercion. This is an accusation which can be made in a number of contexts - nostalgia for the clan systems which states displaced, private crime, etc - but which is not made often enough with regard to the household. The suffering of a citizen compelled to pay the wages of a social worker he will never need to access, while genuine and regrettable, is pretty trivial when compared to the suffering of a woman trapped with an abusive partner. Protesting the former situation while coldly observing that the woman is bearing the consequences of her foolish choice of partner makes it hard for libertarians to be taken seriously by anyone who gives compassion a role in their politics.

My main concern with the libertarian-feminism project is not that these ideologies are incompatible, but that their motivations might be. Libertarianism goes hand-in-hand with methodological individualism, the belief that the primary (perhaps only) actors in society are individual people. This is hardly surprising: if your political theory places great weight upon the choices of the sovereign individual, then you'd better be pretty sure that that individual exists.

By contrast, Marxists view the individual as insignificant when compared to the great movers of history: the economic classes. I'm not going to go into the details of this, not least because I don't know them. These are not the only ways of viewing the world - one might think human behaviour is best explained at the level of communities, of families, of genes, and probably many other levels besides - but they are both popular ways, and they are fundamentally incompatible. Hence individualists struggle to make sense of class conflict, while Marxists view all ideology as ultimately a cover for class interest.

Feminism, it seems to me, has a tendency to view the sexes in much the same way that Marxists view the economic classes. Men collectively oppress women in the same way that the bourgeoisie collectively oppress the proletariat. If Marxism is the attempt to understand the oppression of the proletariat and to unite them for the overthrow of the ruling class, feminism is the attempt to understand the oppression of the female sex and to unite women for the overthrow of men. (This is an exaggeration of most feminists' views, but there was indeed a strain in the 1970s, connected to the Wages for Housework campaign, arguing that the only way for women to escape male oppression is to disassociate from them entirely and adopt lesbianism en masse). They even suffer from the same inconvenience of having to explain why the state, which has hitherto acted only to promote the interests of capital/patriarchy, can suddenly be turned to the advantage of the working class/women.

It's hard for me to tell how far Anne subscribes to this view. For the most part she seems to endorse it: "The sort of radical feminism I’m interested in, and that I see as fitting quite well with libertarianism, sees that society is a patriarchy in which the class of ‘men’ oppress the class of ‘women’." At the same time, she observes that "Women are of course not uniformly oppressed or exclusively victims, and most definitely not a homogenous group with unitary concerns." Perhaps the tension between the positions is smaller than I think, perhaps she has a tension in her views. I don't know.

The picture of feminism I have presented is of course not the only vision of the movement. Intersectional feminism pays a great deal of attention to how different oppressions can interact, and (from my fairly cursory knowledge of feminism) seems like the kind of thing Anne might well be interested in. There are dangers with this view: firstly, that you end up in a kind of "Oppression Olympics" in which different minorities engage in interminable arguments over who has it worst. Secondly, one may ask in what sense this actually remains feminism, rather than merely a "coalition of the oppressed". Such a coalition is unstable, relying as it does upon nebulous judgements about what is oppression and what is merely misfortune (or indeed, self-inflicted harm). It also raises the question of why one cares about the things one does: if your aim is simply to make the world a better place, it seems highly unlikely that this is most effectively achieved by feminist activism. If your aim is to promote the interests of women, it seems equally unlikely that one will achieve this by allying with groups selected for being unsympathetic to mainstream society.

Once again, I don't wish to say that libertarianism and feminism are incompatible. Methodological individualism is compatible with all sorts of theories about why people behave the way they do, including a recognition of the power that ideas, whether or not they are consciously held, can have on society (ctrl-f "idealism"). Patriarchy may just be one such (harmful) idea. But the existence of such a tension may prove a barrier both for libertarians sympathetic to the oppression of women and for feminists leery of relying upon the state for their salvation.

Trolling Should Be Equal-Offender

A couple of weeks ago, Vox.com released an article entitled "Pokémon Go is everything that is wrong with late capitalism". The article argued that Pokémon Go will lead to greater inequality of income and wealth, even if in terms of people's quality of life it is a significant boost to many people and especially those on low incomes. The solution to this, the article continued was looser housing policy, demand management, and perhaps increased redistribution of income. The article took a fair bit of criticism at the time, including this by Rob Wiblin. At the risk of flogging a dead horse, I'm going to add my own criticism of the piece.

Let's be clear: the article is highly tongue-in-cheek. The title alone should be enough to make it clear that they are comically exaggerating the importance of and the scale of their opposition to the Pokémon game. Indeed, I think that for this reason they can shrug off some of the other criticisms. My question is: why, if this is a light-spirited article, is its conclusion identical to those of Vox's serious pieces?

When you start a political argument with an absurdity, there should be no inherent tendency to reach any particular conclusion. (Perhaps there will be a greater tendency towards extreme conclusions, but that doesn't help Vox given that they're arguing for standard centre-left positions). If you consistently reach the same end-point regardless of your premises, then the suspicion has to be that you are starting with your political preferences and then working backwards to see how they might be justified by any particular set of circumstances. What you are showing when you argue, then, is not the strength of your political position but rather your ability to make arguments sound plausible.

This has a knock-on effect for your more serious arguments, too. If I know you can convince me that anything at all is evidence for X, regardless of whether it actually is, then I should not take your arguments for X as strong evidence for its truth - if I take them as evidence at all. Moving from the meta-level to the concrete, if Vox will argue convincingly that Pokémon Go is evidence for why we need to be more left-wing, then they will do that in any situation - and hence should not be trusted in any situation.

There's actually a real lesson to be learned here, which is that if you want to make both serious and joking arguments about the same topic, and you want your serious arguments to be taken in a serious manner, the conclusions of your joking arguments (and ideally your serious arguments too) should not always be for the same conclusion. If you're going to argue that libertarians should be taxed less than leftists, you should also talk about how the UK should invade other countries and take their wealth. If you're going to talk about how Trump should be assassinated, you should also argue that women should face longer prison sentences than men for the same crime.

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.

Burn of the Day

From Stuart Ritchie's review of The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee:

"This disappointing failure to grasp the genetic nettle can be illustrated by a quotation from Mukherjee’s section on IQ tests. ‘Is g [general intelligence] heritable? In a certain sense, yes.’ Alas, the ‘certain sense’ here really means ‘after much qualification’; in fact, after so much qualification that you’ll go away thinking the answer is actually ‘no’, and not worrying too much about it. So, in the same spirit: isThe Gene worth reading? In a certain sense, yes."

The Shift from Polyamory to Monogamy

Today the following paper abstract has being going around Twitter:

The original paper, The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage by Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson, is here. I intend to read the paper in full, but before doing so I intend to write out my own theory of why there has been a transition from polyamory to monogamy. This theory is one I have held for a while, and which is probably not original to me, but I have not seen it made fully explicit anywhere. (It is heavily influenced, however, by my reading of Matt Ridley's The Red Queen). The general thrust of my argument is that household structures are for the most part chosen by individuals - and especially by women - in a way that seeks (roughly) to maximise their genetic footprint. The key changes which cause different choices to be made are essentially economic: hence the dominant cause for the move to monogamy is the industrial revolution and associated rise in the incomes of the general population.

What do women want?

Females of sexually reproducing species require a male contribution in order to pass on their genes to the next generation. The contribution of males can be neatly divided into two parts: the genes, and what we will call "paternal investment".

Genes make a contribution firstly in the obvious sense that reproduction is sexual. But it is also important to not that not all genes are created equal: some are more useful than others for passing on genes, in that these genes will lead to stronger, healthier offspring. If a female is able to assess which of two prospective mates will give her more vigorous young, then this is a strong reason for her to favour reproducing with that one.

Anything which is passed on genetically from parents to children is a potential source of assessment for males. Height is a good example of this: if it is advantageous for a woman to have tall children, then she will be more attracted to tall men.

Paternal investment represents a vast array of things a male might provide for a female in exchange for her bearing his young; what he offers varies massively according to species and environment. If the female will be vulnerable while raising his child he might offer her protection against predators; if the environment is harsh then he might supply her with food; in humans, a considerable part of paternal investment consists in emotional support for the mother.


How do these affect family structure?

The more important genes are to the choice of male partner,the more likely a species or society is to be polyamorous. Imagine a group of women are asked to vote on who, in their personal opinions, is the most attractive out of a group of men - none of the men or women ever having previously met each other. The women will come to their personal choices based on a variety of metrics - height, looks, intelligence, charisma - and while it is unlikely that they will unanimously agree on the most attractive men, it is unlikely that they will disagree wildly either. In species where genes are the only contribution of the male to his children, the average "family" consists of a man, his harem, and their children.

In many species, however, there is some measure of paternal investment. The nature of this investment will effect how far the species moves away from monogamy. In particular, investments which are difficult to provide for multiple females tend to push in a monogamous direction.

An investment which is relatively easy to provide for multiple females is protection. Species where the sole contribution of the male after conception is protection are typically not so different from those where the male contributes only genes. Examples of this include many mammals, such as lions.

Resources such as food are rather harder to provide for multiple females. Food provided to one mate is food which cannot be provided to another mate; hence environments in which food is scare are often conducive to monogamy. Indeed, in some extremely barren environments, where multiple men are needed to support a single woman, we have seen polyandry: wives having multiple husbands. To give you a preview, my claim will be that changes in the availability of food and other such resources are the key reason for societies moving from polyamory to monogamy.


The changing economic environment

Prior to industrialisation, famine was an ever-present threat. A bad harvest might kill all of your children. This meant that your wealth could have a very considerable impact upon your ability to raise children to maturity. Since a lord or king could be hundreds of times richer than an ordinary peasant, then, he could maintain hundreds or even thousands of times more wives or concubines. These men would maintain harems consisting not only of their wife but also of servants and "ladies-in-waiting" - and perhaps also, to some extent, the wives of the men around them. Ordinary peasant men might not marry at all, and if they did it would frequently be only once they had been earning for some years.

Then, between the late eighteen century and the mid twentieth century, there developed what we now refer to as the first world: the wealth of the average man shot up, and in the 1900s there emerged welfare states which defrayed many of the financial costs of raising children. It was no longer important for a woman to marry a rich man, so long as she married a man who was gainfully employed. The choice between men, then, would be made on a number of metrics: men with good genes would typically have the first pick of women, but even those with poor genes obtained a wife. Wealth did not cease to be important, but higher wealth would now get you a more attractive wife rather than getting you multiple wives. Furthermore, paternal investment could take non-monetary form: being an interesting person to be around, for example, might aid a man in obtaining a woman of his choice.

One prediction I will make based upon this theory is that, as women increasingly come to out-earn men in the workplace, paternal investment in general will become less of a factor. Consequently, genes will rise in relative importance, and so we will see an increase in polyamory.


Advantages of my theory

My theory has, as I see it, two big advantages over the theory of Henrich et al. First, I avoid postulating group selection. Second, I have an explanation for why polyamory used to exist. Going by the abstract, Henrich and his collaborators have an explanation for why monogamy emerged but not one for why it took until a relatively recent point in history to emerge instead of being the natural human condition. Or perhaps they do - I'll have to read the article and update based on that.

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.

On #FreeKesha: Why You Can't Skip Due Process

NB: This article was written as an attempt to persuade social-justice types. As such, while there is nothing here that I actually disagree with, the emphasis on certain issues is different. This notice may be removed if I become happy enough with the state of the article to publicise it at all. Currently I feel that it needs more feminist shibboleths. It could perhaps do with an actual defence of the presumption of innocence rather than merely its assertion, but I'm wary to include that since the way that I think about this (roughly: how much sense does it even make to speak of this once you accept a Bayesian epistemology, in which all beliefs are probability distributions?) is so radically different from the way in which most people, including most intelligent people, do.

I

Currently in the news: pop singer Kesha (formerly Ke$ha) has attempted to get her contract revoked by court. The contract obliged her to work with producer Dr. Luke, who she alleges raped her on several occasions. The court, however, found that she is still bound by the contract which has predictably resulted in great uproar across the social justice movement under the hashtag #FreeKesha.

If you accept the claim that she was raped, this is entirely appropriate. If he is a rapist, then Dr. Luke ought to be in prison and the contract torn up entirely. But there's a large problem with this, in the form of a thing called "the presumption of innocence". We can't just assume he is guilty of rape - and in this case, that means we have to assume that any alleged intercourse between the pair was consensual, or at least in a sufficiently grey area that Dr. Luke cannot be held legally culpable. This is hard to do, but in the case of every crime except rape the presumption of innocence is held to be a fundamental part of living in an enlightened, civilised society.

Time for a musical break!

II

Let's clarify exactly what is at stake. #FreeKesha is not about a woman being forced to work with her rapist, it is about money.

One of the basic legal limitations on contracts is that while a party may be entitled to compensation, they cannot be entitled to specific performance. That is to say, if Ana agrees to pay Bob £50 in exchange for Bob mowing Ana's lawn, she pays him the £50 and he then decides that he really doesn't want to mow the lawn (for whatever reason): Ana will usually be entitled to get her £50 back, often with extra money on top since she has lost out by not knowing that she would need to employ someone else to mow her lawn. What she is not entitled to, however, is to force Bob to actually mow the lawn.

So while the question of whether Dr. Luke raped her is about whether he ought to go to prison, the question of whether the contract should be rescinded is really about money: it is about whether or not Kesha should have to pay compensation in order to be free of the contract, or whether Sony and Dr. Luke should be obliged to release her for free.

This isn't to say that money is unimportant. Is Kesha was raped, there's no reason why she should have to pay her rapist in order to be released from the contract. But it's important to be clear about exactly what the issue is.

III

Now it's obvious how the presumption of innocence applies to the question of whether or not Dr. Luke raped her. While we ought to express sympathy for every person who claims to have been raped, this does not mean we should skip the procedure of going through a fair trial before we declare the accused party guilty and imprison them. Imprisoning someone merely on the basis of an accusation is a clear breach of their basic civil rights - indeed, their basic human rights - but merely having a contract rescinded? What harm can that do?

In this individual case, not much. As I have already said, all this is about is the matter of a few million dollars. If we rescind the contract without a court case Kesha is a bit richer, if we maintain the sanctity of the contract until Dr. Luke is proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt in front of a jury of his peers, he and Sony are a bit richer. Unless there's some inherent reason why one of them deserves the money more - a topic about which there will be a thousand and one arguments, all of them awful - there's no way to answer the question of which ought to get it without first answering the question of whether Dr. Luke did indeed rape Kesha. Which takes us back to the presumption of innocence.

To be honest I'm not really familiar with Kesha's music, so here's a

cover of one of her songs by one of my actual favourite bands.

What about the wider effects, though? Rescinding the contract without a full trial would send a clear and public message that if you're in a contract which you want to get out of, rape accusations - whether true or not - will do that for you. False rape accusations are not something we should want to encourage, since quite apart from the effects on those who are falsely accused (overwhelmingly, by the way, men from ethnic minorities) their stories, when they fall apart, cause actual rape victims to be taken less seriously. Anti-feminist articles like "13 women who lied about being raped" are short on genuine statistics about the low incidence of false rape accusations, but nevertheless they are only made possible by the fact these incidents do happen.

Might such accusations become common? I don't know enough about the music industry to know if this might happen more widely, and there aren't that many other industries where a single individual is likely to be bound by a contract for years on end. But you can think of other cases. A woman wants to move out of her rented apartment at a single day's notice, contrary to a contract requiring her to let the landlord know a month before so her can sort out the next tenant. Most women would never even think of making a rape accusation here. But, as much as we may dislike this fact, there are some who will. And if we decide to support every alleged rape victim, we will end up supporting these people among them.

IV

What can we do then? Play whist from the side while Kesha has to endure a painful trial to obtain justice? Well, first I think we should be conscious of how little most of us can do in this one case. The fact that there's no way to short-cut the legal process in this particular case doesn't mean that there aren't a whole load of other good causes that we absolutely know the right side of: FGM, implicit bias and racial prejudice, and Islamophobia, to name just three. These are causes which we absolutely can and should protest about loudly, where there simply aren't the same contentious legal cases which have to resolved before we know exactly what we should advocate.

Secondly, if you feel so strongly about Kesha's situation, I daresay you could help crowdfund her to buy out of her contract. Presumably (NB: I am not an expert!) this would be returned to her if Dr. Luke were indeed found guilty, and then it could be returned to the crowdfunders. Maybe Kesha could put her first independent album on Kickstarter, with proceeds being used to buy her independence and contributors receiving advance copies of the album as a reward. This is what the internet is for.

The key point I hope I've made is this: you can't circumvent the need for legal process. Taking the presumption of innocence seriously means making hard choices - the urge to advocate for Kesha is the urge for justice, the very noblest urge of all - but it is a cost we have to bear for being a civil society.

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.

Quote of the Day

"A policy of conciliation makes sense only if both sides take it seriously. In relation to communist power, whose political vocabulary lacks the word conciliation, such a policy has meaning only if it is conducted from a position of strength. Otherwise, conciliation turns into capitulation, and the policy of conciliation into a march toward political self-annihilation."

- Adam Michnik in A New Evolutionism from his Letters from Prison and Other Essays (1986), p.141

In the context of discussing why previous reform movements within Poland had not only failed to achieve anything, but had in many cases ended up as shills for the Marxist régime.

How to assault human rights like a shitlord

Sarah Conly advocates a One Child policy - officially on environmental grounds, but the Straussian reading is that she's actually really concerned about dysgenics and wants a way to impose fines which will limit poor people's ability to reproduce while not significantly reducing procreation among the middle and upper classes.

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).

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.