Meanderings

Something which has always fascinated me is how productive some people are. I don't mean that they are hard-working - although they undoubtedly are - but that there are people who can produce thousands, even millions, of pounds worth of value in just a few minutes. Meanwhile, the vast majority of us live in a single house, drive a single car, and visits to nice places (the theatre, foreign climes, etc) are an occasional treat.

I should say that I have never had any moral objection to this. While I envy the super-rich (after all, who honestly doesn't?) my response to seeing things like the One Hyde Park apartments and their owners is "Good for them. I hope I become rich enough to live there someday."

A related issue is that of political leaders. I have always thought it strange that we assume in our political system that the best party to manage the national economy will also be the best party to manage the foreign affairs brief, or to determine education policy. (This is actually a large part of why I am an anarchist - I will openly admit that there are problems, most obviously small-but-widespread externalities, which would in theory be best solved by government intervention; however, the democratic system requires us to vote on so many issues at once, that there is basically no reward to a politician for having an honest, intelligent position on this kind of problem). And yet we invest vast amounts of power in small numbers of people, perhaps rightly so.

But what is it that makes these people so much more productive than you or I? Intelligence is obviously part of it, but are they really so much more intelligent that this makes sense of the orders of magnitude of difference in our incomes? Luck is presumably a large part of it - after all, where luck plays a large role you can generally expect lopsided payoffs. I find this rather depressing. I also wonder: where are all the failures?

Eurovision Song Contest Entries 2014

I have been looking over some of the videos for entries to the Eurovision Song Contest, and thought that I would note some of my reactions here. It should be noted that I adore the contest, even though I consider the vast majority of music it produces to be absolute dross. My recommendation is at best very week evidence that a song will do well, since my tastes do not seem to chime with those of the European public as a whole.

Basim (Denmark) Cliche Love Song

Seems to be a Bruno Mars impersonator. The song has little if anything to reccommend it. I assume it's supposed to be a satire, but the lyrics don't really suggest it. If only they'd enlisted Weird Al as a co-writer.

Ruth Lorenzo (Spain) Dancing in the Rain

What a boring song.

Emma Marrone (Italy) La Mia Citta

Better than the last two - it could have made a perfectly reasonable 90s rock song. Listenable, but you can probably find some better way to occupy your time.

Twin Twin (France) Moustache

Another satirical song - their profile at the contest website describes them as "firmly of the YOLO... generation" which is annoying enough to start. The lyrics are better than the others songs so far, and it's quirky enough that it could score a fair few points. I don't know how well it'll do without the music video, however, since the music itself is eminently forgettable.

Molly (United Kingdom) Children of the Universe

Actually a pretty good song. Unfortunately, the arrangement is absolutely dire. Honestly, it would be better with no backing than with this mess.

Elaiza (Germany) Is It Right

One of the things I love about Eurovision is the crazy combinations of instruments which get pulled out each year, and this does not disappoint with Accordion, Drums and Double Bass. The song is alright, but I really can't see it winning, again, it's just too forgettable.

Aram (Armenia) Not Alone

There's only so much intensity you can build up when you have only three minutes, and this goes from calm singing (accompanied by some incredibly hammy acting) to screeching violins to screaming voice far too quickly.

Aarzemnieki (Latvia) Cake to Bake

A very fun song - certainly my favourite so far. Clever lyrics, clever chordal progressions, well worth a listen.

Tanja (Estonia) Amazing

I was expecting more club-dance-numbers, given the success of Euphoria in 2012 and Only Teardrops in 2013; surprisingly, this is the first one so far. It's not a particularly interesting song.

Sanna Nielsen (Sweden) Undo

Rather dull. That said, the singer appears to be the First Lady of the United States.

Pollapoenk (Iceland) No Prejudice

The last two Icelandic entries were both very good; this fails to live up to those, instead competing with France for the Strangest Music Video award. It's not a terrible song by any means, but the politically-correct lyrics are very boring and it feels a bit disjointed.

Hersi (Albania) One Night's Anger

There's a solid twenty seconds of good song before it goes the same way as Spain.

Tolmachevy Sisters (Russia) Shine

Yet another non-descript song, not really going anywhere, and without any particular musical merit.

Dilara Kazimova (Azerbaijan) Start a Fire

At two-and-a-half minutes in, I thought this a reasonable quiet song which - unusually for Eurovision - resisted the temptation to head for a big climax. Then, a climax came out of nowhere, but at least it didn't go too overboard - the piano was unnecessary.

Maria Yaremchuk (Ukraine) Tick-Tock

In the wake of massive international sympathy this is an excellent chance for Ukraine to take advantage of the massive political aspect to voting in Eurovision, and the song isn't half bad. I would not be at all surprised to see a Ukrainian victory.

Axel Hirsoux (Belgium) Mother

Another high-pitched, quiet and forgettable song - the only difference being that, rather than having a female singer, it uses a male castrato.

Cristina Scarlat (Moldova) Wild Soul

Yet more overwritten modern claptrap.

Valentina Monetta (San Marino) Maybe

A respectable song, but certainly one that would not get significant exposure without this kind of event. (I do not regard giving arbitrary exposure to songs as a good thing). I would pick on the lyrics, but the sad thing is that by modern standards they're not all that bad.

Suzy (Portugal) Quero Ser Tua

It's getting very hard to think of new ways to describe the phenomenon of songs with no particular musical merit using modern arrangements. Basically, rather boring.

The Common Linnets (Netherlands) Calm After the Storm

Most of this is pretty good. The problem is with the singing, which is entirely wrong for this and clashes with the rest of the music - something far more subdued is called for.

Sergej Cetkovic (Montenegro) Moj Svijet

Another good song, but one which could do with another couple of minutes to develop towards a climax. I understand the desire to bring things to a climax, but three minutes simply isn't long enough to do that in without just sounding pretentious. (Incidentally, I've always wondered why we never try to enter Muse - they'd be perfect for Eurovision stylistically, where the whole flamboyant and over-the-top thing that is there shtick is the generally accepted norm). That said, I genuinely enjoyed this song.

Kallay-Saunders (Hungary) Running

Another serious contender to win. That is to say, it's catchy, modern, and I found it tolerable rather than enjoyable.

Firelight (Malta) Coming Home

Mumford and Sons have defected to Malta! I enjoyed this song, although it could have done with some classical references rather than the same-old platitudes which make up the lyrics to most pop songs.

Mei Finegold (Israel) Same Heart

I would mark this as a possible contender, were it not the Israeli entry. (That is, I don't expect other countries to vote for Israel, not that I personally dislike it more than I hate states in general and therefore am biased against it). Again, it's modern, and fairly bland but not completely so.

Carl Espen (Norway) Silent Storm

Another respectable song that I can listen to but generally wouldn't choose to.

Possibly to be continued. That's most of them anyway.

Sketch for an attack on a self-interest view of the basis of morality

1. We cannot be worse off for having more information.

For the purposes of this premises, X is defined as a constant level of utility.
2. If we have a choice between helping one person to an extent X, or helping 100 people to the extent X, with both of these options incurring equal cost to ourselves, we should help the 100 people.
3. If we have a choice between helping an extremely utility-poor person to extent X, and helping a considerably better-off person to extent X, with both of these options incurring equal cost to ourselves, we should help the utility-poor person. This holds regardless of our own level of well-being.

4. According to a self-interest view of the basis of morality, if given a choice between helping two sets of people, we should help the one we would expect ourselves to fit into. (e.g. helping family/country before foreigners)

It is my contention that, for a well-off person, premises, 3 and 4 are inconsistent - a well-off person would expect themselves to be helped more by a strategy of helping well-off people than one of helping the downtrodden. The objection that our principles should be devised at a level where we are ignorant of our positions within society conflict with my first premise. This will need a lot of tightening up, and I'm far from convinced that premise 1 is indeed true; however, it's something perhaps worth thinking about.

(This occurred to me while reading Jan Narveson's paper "We Don't Owe Them A Thing!"

Response to MacFarlane and Kolodny on Modus Ponens

One of the most interesting arguments I have encountered recently is John MacFarlane and Niko Kolodny's argument that modus ponens is not actually a valid formulation in logic. They present it in a paper entitled Ifs and Oughts and provide some apparent counterexamples to the rule. I shall take their key example, and demonstrate that it relies upon false premises.

Ten miners are trapped either in shaft A or shaft B, but we do not know which. Flood waters threaten to flood the shafts. We have enough sandbags to block one shaft, but not both. If we block one shaft, all the water will go into the other shaft, killing any miners inside it. If we block neither shaft, both shaft will fill halfway with water, and just one miner, the lowest in the shaft, will be killed.

Action                               if miners in A               if miners in B

Block shaft A                    All saved                     All drowned

Block shaft B                    All drowned                All saved

Block neither shaft            One drowned              One drowned

We take it as obvious that the outcome of our deliberation ought to be:

(1) We should block neither shaft

Still, in deliberating about what to do, it seems natural to accept:

(2) If the miners are in shaft A, we should block shaft A

(3) If the miners are in shaft B, we should block shaft B

We also accept:

(4) The miners are in shaft A or they are in shaft B

But (2), (3) and (4) seem to together entail:

(5) Either we should block shaft A or we should block shaft B

And this is incompatible with (1). So we have a paradox.

Taken from MacFarlane, J. & Kolodny, N (2010), Ifs and Oughts, accessed at http://johnmacfarlane.net/ifs-and-oughts.pdf ; the thought experiment they credit to Donald Regan in Utilitarianism and Cooperation, via Derek Parfit in What We Together Do

The authors argue that the best resolution of this paradox is to reject the assumption that modus ponens is a valid logical formation. I shall disarm their argument by demonstrating the falsity of premises (2) and (3), which removes the necessary support for (5) and so avoids the paradox.

My disproof runs as follows:

(1) We cannot act upon facts of which we are not aware. [I take this as obvious]
(2) That we should do something implies that we "can" do it. [The classic "ought" implies "can", a generally accepted principle]
(3) That we should act upon a fact implies that we are aware of the fact. [from (1) and (2)]
(4) If we are not aware of a fact, it is not the case that we should act upon it. [from (3)]
(5) If the miners are in shaft A, we are not aware of this fact. [from the original problem]
(6) If the miners are in shaft A, we should not act based on this fact. [from (4) and (5)]
(7) If the miners are in shaft B, we are not aware of this fact. [from the original problem]
(8) If the miners are in shaft B, we should not act based on this fact. [from (4) and (7)]

(9) Hence premises (2) and (3) in MacFarlane and Kolodny's argument are false. [from (6) and (8)]

I believe that MacFarlane and Kolodny confuse the false premises "If the miners are in shaft A, we should block shaft A" and "If the miners are in shaft B, we should block shaft B" with the true premises "If we are aware that the miners are in shaft A, we should block shaft A" and "If we are aware that the miners are in shaft B, we should block shaft B".

HT: Nathan Duckett

Natural Rights are insufficient for political libertarianism

A somewhat simplified version of the natural rights view of political morality associated with Rothbard and Nozick would run roughly along the following lines:

1. People have natural rights of life, liberty and property, and anything which breaches these rights is impermissible.
2. The state (or at least, anything more than the minimal state) inevitably breaches these rights.
3. Therefore, the state (or at least, anything more than the minimal state) is impermissible.

I shall demonstrate that this argument is unsound, on the grounds that we can within a natural rights framework justify a state vastly larger than the minimal state given certain empirical assumptions. I make no comment as to whether these assumptions actually hold in the real world.

Suppose there are two societies, living side-by-side. They start off with equal allocations of resources, neither is subject to significant outside interference, and in fact the only difference between them is that one, Ancapistan, has no government at all while the other, Trotskygrad, has a government which interferes in many different activities. Contrary to all previous human experience, this massive government intervention works and people in Trotskygrad enjoy a remarkable standard of living - so much that the most well off inhabitant of Ancapistan (itself a pretty pleasant place to live) is still worse off than the least well-off person in Trotskygrad. Given a choice between the two, would you rather be born into Trotskygrad or Ancapistan?The answer should, quite obviously, be Trotskygrad. (Any fellow libertarians who might be reading this: admitting you'd rather live in Trotskygrad doesn't harm your pro-liberty credentials one jot.)

Now, I should go into a bit of the history of Trotskygrad. It was formed by a socialist collective of a few thousand people who grouped together to buy some land and form their own nation, under an explicit social contract carved out of granite and displayed in the central square. Every individual member of the collective signed a paper copy of this social contract, and any person wishing to become a citizen of Trotskygrad must sign the contract. This commits them to paying heavy income taxes, to remaining a citizen of Trotskygrad for at least five years, and to obeying all the laws agreed by the General Assembly - some of which can be quite onerous. In exchange they are guaranteed a job, healthcare, education for their children, and various other benefits of many different natures.

It seems then that anyone with the mental capabilities of an adult may then be compelled either to sign the contract, or to live elsewhere. The argument that one has grown up in Trotskygrad does not compel the community to allow one to stay, any more than an adult may compel his parents to allow him to continue living in his childhood home. Signing the contract represents consenting to being dominated by a state, with all that that implies. If an individual does not sign the contract, then Trotskygrad is no more obliged to accept the individual than homeowners are obliged to let strangers into their house.

Perhaps there are certain inalienable rights, which a person may not transfer to another person or to a group such as Trotskygrad? Perhaps there are, but it seems far from clear to me what these might be. In any case, it is hard to see how many activities of the state could fall into that category. Taxation can be seen as a way of paying for a bundle of services - protection against crime, education, healthcare etc - and while having the price of a good based upon your income is a very strange idea, and a highly inefficient way of paying, it does not seem particularly morally different from paying a fixed fee. Committing to live in a place? Perhaps it might not be possible to commit to this indefinitely (in which case the planned mission to Mars is already morally scuppered) but I don't see why committing to live somewhere for a few years is different to either working on an oil rig (where you're stuck on a platform in the middle of nowhere for a couple of months) or for a football club (where you sign a contract to play for them for several years). Making decisions for your children about education and such? Well, that applies to private education, not just state education.

Most people believe that we have certain obligations to others who are not so well off as ourselves. Indeed, a couple of months back the Manchester chapter of GWWC hosted a talk by an ethicist who went through pretty much every moral system which is still taken seriously by mainstream philosophers, and concluded that with a single exception they all led to the conclusion that we are obliged to give at least 10% of our income to effective charities. Now what if the most effective way of giving to charity were through the state?

Suppose that, by consenting to the welfare state, I make myself slightly worse off but in doing so bring several beggars off the streets. Then, assuming there is nothing better I could do with the money, it seems sensible to conclude that I have a moral obligation to consent to the welfare state. (Alternatively, I could of course not consent and instead make a private charitable donation with the same effect, but why would I given that by stipulation I would be better off compared to this had I simply consented?)

And so, it might be that I must consent to the state even though I am worse off for so doing. If this is the case, is the state justified in presuming that I consent and acting as though I already had? I'm really not certain - I have a vague intuition that it would be, but this is of course no substitute for systematically thinking the problem through. And as I intend to explain tomorrow, the question is in any case moot.

To conclude, even within a natural rights framework, individuals may consent to the state and indeed may have a moral obligation to do so - however, this relies on certain assumptions about the state improving people's lives.

Links, April 2014

Foreign policy is of course an area ripe for being affected by cognitive biases; however, when I saw this article (original paper here) claiming that "all of the cognitive biases in our [complete list of known cognitive biases] all of them favour hawks" I was suspicious - it seems implausible to me that in a list of forty of so biases, all of them would push in one direction. My prior in favour of the article has been raised by this article however, which describes combining a survey of attitudes regarding Russia and Ukraine with a test to see if people could place Ukraine on a map.

It was found that there was a statistically significant (for what that's worth) relationship between being unable to accurately place Ukraine on a map, and favouring military intervention. (Is this evidence that cognitive biases can really be overcome?)

Elsewhere, Robin Hanson observes that, since cognitive biases developed because they were effective ways of thinking, perhaps this is not really a problem.

I don't know how accurate this representation of the spectrum of political beliefs is - and I'm not entirely certain I even understand it - but it's interesting enough to be worth linking to.

A while back a quiz comparing your political views to those of the major parties of the UK was floating around Facebook; my results are here. The correlations with the parties seem to have changed since I took the quiz, and so they may well change in the future, but as of the time of writing I am in 1% agreement with the BNP. This is something I am (mildly) proud of.

I don't know what my views would have been had I been born 80 years ago, but now I know what Superman thought back then.

Get in! Possible contributing factor: bra are generally designed for right-handed women, which makes it difficult to operate them for left-handed women and for right-handed men standing in front of the woman but very easy for a left-handed man.

Bra from the perspective of the presumably right-handed Randall Munroe.

Short video on love and attraction. To my romantic mind it's sad to see how much this seems to be associated with looks, but then again I guess looks are by far the easiest thing to assess about a potential partner.

Speaking of shallow romance, consider this fascinating theory about the Twilight series. It certainly threw the whole series into a different light for me. (On a somewhat related note, if you have read and enjoyed HPMoR then you should read Luminosity, its Twilight-equivalent, which can also be found here).

While I'm still talking about fiction: Harry Potter and the Brokeback Mountain, a video splicing together footage from across the films so as to imply Harry to have had affairs with both Ron and Cedric Diggory.

The first time I was exposed to the debate between Determinism and Free Will, compatibilism didn't seem like a sensible position and I couldn't really face the absence of free will because it would seem to remove all grounds for morality, so by default I adopted libertarianism (in the free-will sense rather than the political sense - that ought to be clear, but I'll just make certain) and started hacking away in a controlled fashion - could one have morality despite determinism? Would it really be so bad if there were no genuine moral rules or injunctions? This post at Practical Ethics suggests that a lot of people share my concern, since there is a strong correlation between belief in free will and desire to punish wrongdoers. To me this seem strange from a logical standpoint, since most of our moral intuitions serve as limitations compared to economically efficient punishment and moral irrealism doesn't forbid us from punishing people - it gives us license to punish whoever we like, whenever we like (although this may come into conflict with our other goals, so it may not be a good idea except in certain circumstances).

Recently, a group of us tried to recreate the foundations of microeconomics while assuming that all agents are perfectly rational utility minimisers. This course in Buddhist Economics is probably somewhere around the same level as a model of good economics.

The Swiss and their trains.

Now I want to hold a music concert inside a giant cello. It has that fantastic old-timey, warm-and-reliable look about it.

There is a vast amount of fanart being produced relating to Frozen; all of the pictures I've seen, this is my favourite. And have some music to go with it.

A fascinating statistic regarding immigration. If nothing else, it ought to put to bed any concerns about "native culture being overwhelmed".

Despite my extreme political distance from the BNP, I think I'd still be wary of wearing this t-shirt. But I very much hope that someone would wear it.

Market cost-pressures, finding new and unusual ways to save fuel and thus protect the environment since forever.

Econ 101 is in good health

Robert Atkinson and Michael Lind have an article at Salon.com entitled "Econ 101 is killing America", which complains that economists are presenting the public with an oversimplified and largely erroneous view of economics. They present 10 complaints, or "Myths", of economics, which I shall debunk here.

Myth 1: Economics is a science
Problem number one: what do they mean by science? It seems like they mean "the conclusions of economics are uncertain, as opposed to the conclusions of the sciences which are firmly known to be true." As evidence, they cite the fact that there is missive disagreement over whether an increased minimum wage would have a severe negative impact upon employment.

But this is far from being a fair picture of either economics or the natural sciences. The whole history of science is one of erroneous theories being replaced by other theories which better fitted the facts - Newtonian mechanics being replaced by Einsteinian mechanics, for example, or "group selection" being replaced by the idea that group selection takes place on the level of genes rather than organisms. The conclusions of science are not absolute, unyielding certainties - they are simply the explanations which best fit the facts. Hence, where there is no clearly-best theory, scientists have disputes. Does the fact the string theory is highly controversial mean that physics is not a science? Of course not. Equally, there are many things in economics which we are near-certain of. Giffen goods aside, the higher the price of a good is the less of that good people will want to buy. (And even with Giffen goods, we're pretty confident that we know exactly when and why they exist). The wealthier you are, the happier you tend to be. International trade is a Good Thing. These conclusions are things we would tend to reason out from first principles, but they have extensive empirical backing. Yes, we don't agree on everything, but a) neither do "real scientists" and b) a lot of the disagreement over economics arguably comes down to politics - if quantum gravity really did have progressive implications then I would expect it to be rather more controversial than it is.

To be fair, there is an important difference between economics and the natural sciences. Economists - especially macroeconomists - struggle to conduct experiments due to the absence of "controlled conditions" in the real world and so have far weaker data than natural scientists. But this is something which is made quite explicit by economists, and it's not a point which Atkinson and Lind even raise. Indeed, the quote they choose suggests the opposite, asserting that economists will continue to disagree "no matter how sound their data".

The real question here is why Atkinson and Lind feel the need to argue this. I doubt the average educated person, let alone the typical person in the street, cares strongly about whether the basis of knowledge is human reason or empirical investigation (note from a philosophy professor wannabe: it's both, but mainly the latter). They aren't making an actual argument about economics, they're simply trying to reduce its status by disassociating it and then comparing it negatively with a field-name - "science" - which educated people tend to have a great deal of respect for.

Myth 2: The goal of economic policy is maximising efficiency
This is another case of them being slippery with words in order to pretend they are making a point. A slightly modified version of this sentence would be: "The goal of economic policy is maximising static efficiency." This is the statement they are attacking, and they are quite right to do so. But in the process they are beating a dead horse: economics clearly distinguishes between productive efficiency (minimum average cost of production), allocative efficiency (price equals marginal cost of production) and Pareto efficiency (no-one can be made better-off without making someone else worse-off) plus probably a whole host of others the I haven't come across or can't remember right now. The first book on economics that I read - indeed, the book that got me interested in economics and left me impatiently waiting for the next four or five years until I could study it - was Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist (seriously, if you haven't read it then do so) and while I can only remember Harford mentioning Pareto efficiency, he clearly demonstrates that it is not the only thing we aim to improve with an example using train commuters.

Myth 3: The economy is a market
It is true that economists have put far more study into the private sector than into either the public sector or the voluntary sector. However, any basic economics course will introduce the concept of market failures, where markets lead to an inefficient allocation of goods, and will discuss remedies the government can attempt to put into practice - Pigou taxes on negative externalities, government provision of public goods, etc.

Myth 4: Prices reflect value
Sigh. In a free market, prices do reflect value - more accurately, they reflect the value of the good to the marginal consumer, the consumer who is indifferent between buying and not buying the good in question. This is basic economics, firmly part of any introductory economics course.

Atkinson and Lind argue that because some financial assets turn out to be worthless, this must be wrong. But they are guilty of conflating values from different moments in time and epistemic states. If I offer to sell you a bet whereby I roll a die, and on a 1-5 you get nothing but on a 6 I give you £10, then clearly this bet is worth somewhere in the region of £1.66. Suppose you buy it for £1.60, I roll the die, and it comes up as a three. Were you wrong to buy the bet? Was the bet actually worthless, and you fell for a trick? Of course not - there was uncertainty as to the payoff of the bet, and you paid an amount which reflected the value of the average outcome of that uncertainty. This is the case with many goods - not just financial products traded in the City of London and on Wall Street, but houses, collectibles, start-up companies... The fact that, in hindsight, one would have been better off not buying a product is not proof that one was ripped off when one bought it

Myth 5: All profitable activities are good for the economy
The authors damage their credibility with anyone familiar with the foundations of neoclassical microeconomics by describing this as an "axiom" of economics. An axiom is a starting assumption, taken as a given in order to derive its consequences. Neoclassical microeconomics has a number of axioms, but this is not one of them (the abstract of this article which I haven't read suggests there is some disagreement over what they are; the key axioms I learned were those of completeness [a consumer, given the choice of two bundles of goods, either prefers one of them to the other or is indifferent between them], transitivity [if bundle A is preferred to bundle B, and bundle C is not preferred to bundle B, then bundle A is preferred to bundle C], non-satiation [given the choice of two bundles of goods, one of which is unambiguously larger than the other, the consumer prefers the larger one] and convexity [if a consumer is indifferent between two different bundles, she will prefer a weighted average of them to either of them; this isn't always going to be true, but it's a reasonable assumption due to diminishing marginal returns]).

Indeed, basic microeconomics courses present at least one obvious example of a profit-making activity which is not necessarily good for society as a whole: one with negative externalities. A factory which produces neat goods but pollutes the entire town may or may not be a net boon to the economy, but if the factory owner does not have to pay the cost of the pollution it is considerably more likely to turn a profit than if he does have to bear this burden.

Myth 6: Monopolies and oligopolies are always bad because they distort prices
Sigh. Distorting prices is a bad thing. They may have good side effects - higher R&D investment is one touted example, although I'm sceptical - why can't outside investors spend money researching improvements to a product or process? Why must the funding come from inside the existing industry? How would completely new industries emerge if this were the case? In any case, the obvious conclusion is that this is something of a trade-off, but the distortion of prices is definitely a bad thing since it leads to a dead-weight loss. (It also transforms some of the consumer surplus into producer surplus, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that).

Myth 7: Low wages are good for the economy
Ah, yes. Low wages are good, high wages are bad, and yet we are at loggerheads over the minimum wage even though its key effects are universally agreed to be to raise wages (which is of course bad) and possibly to reduce employment (also bad). Do they seriously think anyone actually believes this?

Myth 8: Industrial Policy is bad

Well, it kinda is.

The argument here is that private and public returns from certain industries differ by substantial amounts, and therefore that the government should subsidise those with substantially higher rates of return to the public. It's true that certain projects will have a higher social benefit, relative to the private benefit, than others, and there are two reasons why this might be. The first is the existence of externalities, but as discussed above this is well covered in basic economics courses and it would be an abuse of the term to label internalising externalities as "industrial policy". The second would be that certain industries would have abnormally large consumer surpluses as compared to their producer surpluses, due to highly elastic supply or highly inelastic demand with respect to price. But for the government to promote businesses of this type would require it to be able to work out which markets had supply or demand curves like this. It's pretty well established that businesses can't work out what the price elasticity of demand is, and there are few a priori  reasons to suspect that certain markets will have more elastic or inelastic demand than others. The only one I can think of is the case of addictive goods, which would tend to have price-inelastic demand and therefore large consumer surpluses. There we go, the best industrial policy is to subsidise cigarettes and alcohol.


       Pictured: the future

(This is quite serious: at first I thought the argument led to discouraging them and wrote that, but then realised I'd mislabelled the axis on my graph and that a subsidy was indeed called for).

Myth 9: The best tax code is one that doesn't pick winners
Again, the issue of externalities! What is it with these people? The best response to externalities is well-enforced property rights and Coasian bargaining, or failing that either a Pigou tax or nothing at all depending upon how confident you are that the regulator will act in the public interest. They talk about certain industries making higher contributions to "long-run growth", without explaining why these industries would not therefore earn higher long-run profits and therefore be favoured by investors.

Myth 10: Trade is always win-win
By this, they mean international trade. And quite simply, international trade is always win-win. They claim that nations such as America, Britain, Germany and Japan have used trade protection to become powerhouses, conveniently ignoring the fact that the industrial revolution in Britain occurred precisely when we moved toward free trade, that in the USA it was always the rich, industrialised north which wanted free trade and the agriculture-based south which wanted trade protection (this was a contributing factor towards the civil war) and that the Japanese move towards becoming rich (1950 onwards) coincided with the end of a long, long period of protectionism. It is true that Germany had certain protective measures in place while they industrialised, but they are very much the exception. Everywhere else you look, it is the free-trading nations - Stolypin's Russia, Hong Kong - which have become rich and prosperous, and the protectionist nations - India between WWII and 1990, for example - which have condemned their people do poverty, hardship and misery. When Paul Krugman claimed that an economists' creed would contain the words "I advocate free trade" he was not guilty of oversimplifying: it really is that clear-cut.


It's a great shame, though perhaps not a surprise, that anyone takes this kind of bunk seriously. Just to drive a nail of two in, I feel like an ad hominem is called for. (Is this really an ad hominem? In the words of Murray Rothbard:

First of all I want to launch a pre-emptive strike against any critics who might accuse this talk of being ad hominem. The ad hominem fallacy is that instead of attacking the doctrine of a person you attack the person, and that is fallacious because that doesn’t refute the argument. I’ve never been in favour of that. I’ve always been in favour of refuting the doctrine and then going on to attack the person.

I'd also note that many great works of analytic philosophy not only refute an opposing argument, but attempt to diagnose why someone might be so confused as to make this argument - see, for example, G.E. Moore's attack on the Doctrine of Instrinsic Relations.)

In any case, let's have a look at the economic-educational backgrounds of Atkinson and Lind. Atkinson possesses a Master's in Urban and Regional Planning and a PhD in City and Regional Planning. His doctoral course may have changed in the years since he took it, but it looks like you could go through it without any serious study of economics. I doubt he avoided it completely, but I highly doubt this course involves any rigorous coverage of modern economics or economic modelling.

Lind has an honours degree in History and English, a Master's in International Relations, and a Juris Doctor from Texas Law School. Any of those could have an economics course somewhere in them as a free-credit module, so there's certainly a reasonable possibility that he took an economics course at some point. However, it would at most have been a tangentially related part of any of those qualifications.

It's certainly possible that one or both of them have done extra, informal study of economics since they finished university. However, given the misuse of terminology and the reliance on appeals to authority over actual analysis I suspect they haven't - certainly, if they have they it is not shown in this piece hack-job.