Alternatives to Benthamesque normatives?

Garrett Hardin's essay, Tragedy of the Commons, revolves around a critique of the Bethamesque formula: the greatest good for the greatest number. Unfortunately, it fails on two counts: the first, that Hardin mistakes the meaning of the word "number", and the second, that Hardin is incorrect even when you stipulate to his "number." For the latter, Hardin assumes that humanity tends to increase exponentially, but we know that this is not the case since wealthier societies tend to level off and some ("Old" Europe) may even be in decline. After subtracting immigrants, the population of the US has leveled off. But it is the first error that I would like to address.

By "greatest number," Bentham means the largest portion of an existing population. He is not suggesting that we should try to maximize the number of people on Earth, and this is the strawman around which Hardin bases his case. As Hardin proceeds, he "shows" that the population cannot be maximized (a statement that probably doesn't mean what he thinks it does), and sets about then to describe the sub-optimal world as he has already found necessary.

I know there are lots of problems with utilitarianism, but it retains its inherent intuitive appeal. One problem is that it is difficult to add and subtract the results for everyone, so I prefer those actions that I perceive to result in the greatest good for the average person. Is that reasonable? What about alternatives? What about, for example, a person who judges the effect of policies for their effect on the least well-off in society rather than just the average members?

I think that the policies I prefer would minimize the number of poor (let's leave it at poor, though there may be worse fates). I could be wrong, but I think there is at least an argument to be made along those lines for the policies I prefer. On the other hand, people who concentrate on the effect of policies on the poor don't seem to give priority to minimizing the number of the poor, but rather to increasing the good for that group. One view concentrates on reducing the portion of the population with few "goods" (utilitarian, not economic), while the other concentrates on supplying goods to those that don't have any. Don't they both seek to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number?

Take for example the policy mix of workman's comp, welfare, and national health care. Those countries that have such entitlements claim to be free of poverty. Haven't they therefore used measures to alleviate the effects of poverty and achieved the goal sought by the other group? I don't think so. By many measures (Alm and Cox Exhibit 12, living space), many people (though not all) suffering from poverty in America are better off than the average person in those countries, especially after you compare apples to apples and consider the spending rather than the income of American poor. By that measure, we may not have many truly poor after all. Furthermore, the countries with those policies don't seem to be reducing the number of people dependent on those programs – to the contrary, they seem to be increasing. Unemployment in France, Germany, Sweden? In Arnold Kling's formulation, instead of reducing poverty by redistributing income, such programs tend to reduce income and redistribute poverty.

But the important question from my perspective is what things will look like 15 years or more from now. Tyler points out that if American growth rates had been 1% lower from 1870 to 1990, American GDP would be the same as Mexico's. He also asks what Sweden will look like in relation to America after many years in which American growth is higher than theirs. I believe that policies intended to reduce the amount of relative poverty actually make a country absolutely poor, especially when practiced for a long time or when taken to extremes. If they are absolutely poor, then the country as a whole may be relatively poor compared to other countries or compared to what it might have been like without such policies. When the country is absolutely poor, everyone tends to be equally poor.

It may also be worth clarifying another aspect to this debate: the fact that those who would like to alleviate poverty by eliminating it look for policies that do not require, or at least minimize, income transfers, while those who would like to alleviate the effects of poverty do so primarily by income transfers and secondarily by resisting trade and technological progress (the latter could still be considered a transfer: from foreign competitors and technological innovators to their domestic and more-labor-based competitors). Thus, poverty minimizers are also coercion minimizers, while poverty effect miminizers are not coercion averse (at least with respect to welfare policy).

Finally, it is frustrating to those of us on the poverty minimization side that we are told that we don't care, we are heartless, and so on, because we tend to take a longer look and favor the elimination of poverty over the alleviation of effects. This is not to suggest that some long-term policies won't have some short-term effects, or that some poverty activists don't favor policies that will reduce poverty. Education is widely perceived by both camps as a solution: the long termers would like to improve the education system by instilling motivations to innovate and to concentrate on results rather than process, while - as far as I can tell - the short termers would simply like more spending of any type on education.

I don't think I've covered any new ground here. I think that many authors have written extensively much better than I about these issues in many guises. Here are the line-ups as I see them:

View
Bentham applied to poverty	Increase the number of people with access to the "good"	Increase the amount of good accessible by those who have least
Coercion	averse	Not averse
Time horizon	Long term	Short term
Policy goals	growth	Minimize suffering
Education	Improve results through correct mix of incentives (competition, testing)	Increase funding
Trade	Free	Protectionist
Technological progress	Free	Subject to control, planning, approval

But I still haven't gotten around to the issue which started this: what do you call a normative prescription which judges policies on its effect on the least well off rather than on the average (my application) or the aggregate (Bentham's original formulation)? It's not necessarily utilitarian, though it could be in a way in which I am unaware. Here is what I mean:

Example 1, The Don't Call list: Since the poor don't have phones, this is a neutral policy. Don't care.

Example 2, Tax Cuts (any, not necessarily federal income): Since the poor don't pay taxes, and the wealthy do, and this is the fuel for the welfare state, oppose all tax cuts vigorously and support new and more taxes, even if 95% of all economists say they are beneficial.

Example 3, Social Security reform: Despite the fact that SS is regressive, despite the fact that everyone recognizes the system is headed for problems as the Boomers retire, etc., oppose any talk of reform- any! - because there might be some poor retirees who get some money out of it.

Now, there are good arguments to be made on both sides of tax cuts and SS reform, but the kind of people I am describing won't hear any of the pro arguments as a matter of principle. Their entry point to any debate is how it effects the poor, which is a non-starter with most politicians because they have to orient themselves to the broadest cross-section of their potential constituents - the proverbial average voter. I suppose this is Rawls' viewpoint, but he at least makes an attempt at appealing to utilitarians by saying that everyone would be better off vs. what they might have been if they had been born poor. This least-well-off viewpoint, though, doesn't even attempt that.

What would society look like if we elected a government based on this? I suspect it would look a lot like a communist state, where the justification for every arbitrary totalitarian act was its effect on the proletariat. Hey, the place has gone to shit, but at least we have 100% employment, universal health care, and the trains run on time!

My Travels

bold the states you've been to, underline the states you've lived in and italicize the state you're in now...

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

Yeah, I've been around a little bit.

Schiavo Rorschach

I believe that events like this Schiavo tale are more important for showing us how to think rather than what to think. I haven't studied on this very hard because I think this debate is as intractable as abortion. A few thoughts:

• If she had actually indicated a wish not to live like this, then it is her right to die. Right to live one's life in freedom implies that much.
  
• I am bothered by the manner in which they are proposing to kil ... I mean termin ... ah ... assist her ... suicide? If murderers on death row deserve a "humanitarian" means of death like lethal injection, doesn't she warrant that, at least?
• If her parents are willing to continue taking care of her, morally (though perhaps not legally) there is justification in letting them do so. What does her husband stand to gain? I have heard that he does stand to gain something, but I have not heard what it is.
• There is some reason for saying that courts should not be allowed to remove the woman from her husband and forcibly return her to the parents. What if he is right, and that it is her wish to die? Also, what if the parents (not in this case, but in a hypothetical case) were known to have been abusive? The principle is the sanctity of marriage, a voluntary association between two people that supersedes the involuntary association of parents to their children. That's something the secular left should consider as they seek to undermine marriage. It is, also, something the hyperreligious right should consider when they ban certain men and certain women from freely associating themselves with one another in ways that a 4 thousand year old book doesn't countenance.
• What is this costing? Lawyers (either in fees or in opportunity cost), courts, legislators, etc., protestors' lost wages? It seems that if we could add it all up and either support Mrs. Schiavo or distribute it to poor people, we would be better off.
  

Question for utilitarians: given that most of the pain is that being suffered by the interested parties and not necessarily by Mrs. Schiavo herself, would the best solution be for a vigilante to sneak into Terry's room tonight and shoot her up with a lethal dose of morphine?

Question for absolutists: To what limits should society go to keep this woman alive? I heard a doctor/lawyer on Fresh Air talking about how a lawyer pressed Terry's father to find out how far he would go. What if she developed gangrene and we had to remove an arm? Both arms? Both legs, too? What if she develops heart disease and we have to cut into her abdomen? His answers were consistently "yes" to the point of absurdity. The proverbial preserved brain from Star Trek lore.

Evolutionary psychology - 2 interpretations

In the past 48 hours, I read two things which referenced evolutionary psychology. The first was the interview with Jay Hanson, in which he had this to say:

Q: [...] You felt the political process was warping you?

A: Several things change in yourself when you get into politics. One of them is, you become part of the political tribe. You start seeing other politicians as not such bad guys or as good guys -- they're just like you. And you start compromising with them. That's reciprocal altruism [[interviewer's note:] genetic propensity to cooperate provisionally with others]. When you get across from somebody, you automatically start liking them. You can't stop it. The only kind of person who could stop that would be a psychopath or a sociopath. Those are the only kind of people who could be good elected officials! They wouldn't care about anybody around them. They'd be like computers, which is what you'd want. You'd need psychopaths as elected leaders; otherwise you are just going to get compromise and corruption. Because that's what people naturally do.

Q: That's what happens in any group right? Like with cops there's a "blue wall" and so forth.

A: Yes. It is automatic, that's what people do. That's how they get along with each other. So there's that, then there's also the fact that you can't tell people the truth. When you want to get elected you have a constituency. You start making speeches to them -- I made a lot of speeches -- and they start asking you questions. And you begin to give evasive answers, or change the subject, because you can't tell them the truth.

The bottom line for Jay?

Q: Is there anything we haven't covered that you like our readers to know about?

A: American politics. Our Founding Fathers created a plutocracy, with all the trappings of democracy. And it was smart, it was a stroke of utter brilliance, and given the circumstances, the best possible political system. People who argue that democracy is a good political system simply haven't tried it.

What is the bottom line for the interviewer? Keep in mind that the interviewer buys Jay's nonsense hook, line, and sinker:

The discussion that follows ranges wide and digs deep -- Jay Hanson is not really a suitable menu item for beginners. Some knowledge and background reading in genetics, economics, physics, evolutionary psychology, fundamentals of the hydrocarbon energy regime, and the political and military history of Europe and North America is assumed on the reader's part.

and

For all his preoccupation with this grim and analytically eye-glazing subject matter, Jay has attracted his large Internet following in part due to his humorously mercurial, combative, edgy, and generally witty style (in cyberspace, as the Matrix series subliminally reminds us, Style Is All). Unlike the stodgy ruminations of the original Malthus, or the dull, dead hand of contemporary writers on ecology, economics, and population, Jay can make you laugh through your tears. Jay Hanson "Does Doom" better than anybody, masterfully shaping the discussion with a Faustian literary Èlan that helps the medicine go down. See the end notes of this interview for a list of links to Jay's essays.

So he buys Jay's ultimate scenario, which is

Beginning with tireless investigations and reading in "soft" fields such as philosophy, psychology, and sociology (most of which Hanson now views as unscientific) and extending to the history and practice of economics as an academic discipline, up to his present interest in genetics and evolutionary psychology, Hanson has concluded that human beings are biological robots -- programmed for irrationality (i.e. not fitting the economists’ ideal Bayesian models) and possessing not so much as a snowball's chance in Hell of controlling or escaping their own self-conjured Doom.

Jay, of course, is best known for his devotion to Malthusian (y'know, Malthus before he recanted) doom and gloom scenarios that assume that men cannot adapt and to Hubbert's Peak as the ultimate dogma. The interviewer even intuits the problem that leads him to make the following intellectual backtrack:

The key trigger event Jay has identified for precipitating the collapse of the Globalized Hypermart, and its political and social culture, is the looming certainty of Peak Oil. This idea traces back to the brilliant and prescient 20th century energy analyst M. King Hubbert, who was able to set out accurately the year of USA domestic oil production peak (implying rapid onset of decline thereafter) decades before it actually occurred. When Hubbert's attitudes and methodology are applied to the world oil scene, many analysts come up with a World peak either right now (2003/4), or a years from now, perhaps 2010 - but not much beyond.

Yeah, that's right: "setting out accurately" means 2003, 2004, 2010, or maybe beyond, but not much. In fact, Jay's original postings had the peak before 2000.

So, apparently what Jay and The Only Man On Earth Able To Keep Up With The Other Smartest Man On Earth glean from evolutionary psychology is that men can't adapt. Well, they can't adapt except to each other, but that's a bad thing because it means compromise and corruption, which is also known as democracy, which leads to (or is a cover for) plutocracy. We can only guess as to what they consider to be a feasible counteroffer to democracy. Can I have Centrally Planned State for $500?

Will Wilkinson's exploration of evolutionary psychology is the kind of even-handed and honest application I like to read. He wonders whether freedom and capitalism are the natural states of man as discovered through the science of evolutionary psychology. He answers that they are not - hardly what you would expect if you read reviews of Cato publications from the extreme left or right. Instead, Wilkinson, whose blog is also worth reading, finds that capitalism seems to run counter to what evolutionary psychologists would expect. And that is why the American Experiment is even more fragile and more interesting than we sometimes acknowledge.

Oil Peak and overhype

This is funny: three posts in a row dealing with oil. Not intended, I swear.

Okay, today I'm looking around for things related to my VW Golf TDI. I come across a couple of sites specifically called something like "Peak Oil Awareness Group." More information here. According to a post in one, you should sell your SUV because in a couple of years or months, you won't be able to give it away. No kidding! Someone actually believes that.

One of them (maybe the same poster) referred readers to this, the Oil Endgame. I've read about this book before, maybe even tried to tackle this online version. 330 pages on the computer monitor isn't my idea of fun, though. Although it seems relatively even tempered (the foreward is by George Schultz, not exactly the Marxist-in-environmentalist's-clothing of-the-week), there are a few breathless moments:

The Prius is a 5-passenger, near-zero-emission, 55-mpg, ~$20,000 midsize sedan

Near zero emission? Um, no, it burns gasoline and gets about the same mileage (50) as my car. In any case, there is another bit of misdirection in that same section:

Unpopular? Ever since it went on sale in October 2003, the Wall Street Journal has listed it as the fastest-selling automobile in the United States, flying off dealers’ lots in 5–6 days ....

Well, not really. When it first went on sale, I easily test drove it and found it to be a complete dog. The dealer even smirked when I asked to take it out on a test drive. The original model had no cruise control (the Prius, unlike the Insight, was built more for urban than for highway travel). It was only in the next model year that they started "flying" off of dealers lots.

The other misdirection to that statement has to do with the amount of time they sit on the lot. Toyota is not only a lean manufacturer, they are the lean manufacturer. I think it takes Toyota less than 2 weeks to build a car to order, and they don't build until they are ordered. The whole point is to minimize the amount of time a car sits on the lot. As soon as someone buys that one, the dealer orders another, and it shows up 2 weeks later. This is as opposed to, say, Ford or GM, where they order dozens at a time just to get into the chain. They all show up at once and then sit on the lot for months.

As an aside, I have been charting my performance. I noticed that the cost per mile for fuel finally tipped up from $0.03, where it has been for several years, to $0.04. Upon further investigation, I found that it had tipped from $0.033 up to $0.035, which Excel rounded up. The reason? More aggressive driving, perhaps? No. Starting in Fall '04, the price of fuel started going up and stayed up long enough to have an effect on my long-term costs. If I was driving an SUV, my mileage would be about 1/3 of what it is, but gasoline hasn't stayed up as high as diesel, either. Still, it would cost you about $0.10 per mile to run an SUV, meaning you spend about $10k in fuel for every 100k miles you drive, while I only spend about $3k. You buy another car, I buy a good computer.

Sustainment

Wanna see something funny? Look up some of Jay Hanson's oldest posts in Dejan... I mean Google groups. There, you may find references to his predictions of oil production topping out in the last century (I mean, "last" referenced to now) and the impossibility of methane hydrates. He has since changed the hallmark graphic on dieoff.org with a chart that predicts the peak sometime near the beginning of the 21st century. But you can find even more references to the impossibility of methane hydrate as a potential energy source.

Then this:

Japanese and Canadian research in the Arctic has proven that economically viable quantities of methane can be obtained from onshore hydrates, he said. While Alaska's land-based Arctic methane hydrates are limited, the amount of offshore marine hydrates there and elsewhere is far greater.

Oh, well. The neo-malthusians never have to quit because their theories have so much intuitive appeal. Consider this exchange:

Q: There are books on that like 'How many people can the earth support' [by Joel E. Cohen [13]. I read it but by the end I didn't feel any wiser. It seems there are too many dials on that panel.

A: Well, the guy was comparing ecologists to economists and so on. It was just a rotten book. A stupid book -- I think it was written by somebody who wanted to get everybody to stop worrying about it. There's a lot of that going on, it's like Julian Simon's work. I have no respect for those guys at all. I mean, you can be a businessman without being a lying son of a bitch. Well, Simon was nuts, he wrote a book about it. He was crazy. This Lomberg guy ['The Skeptical Environmentalist' by Lomberg [sic][14] is probably just a sleaze -- I don't know him. [emphasis added by EH]

That's right - Julian Simon, regarded as perhaps the most overproductive empiricist of our time, is a lying nut, and Lomborg is probably just a sleaze. Based on...? Yet you can easily find Jay criticizing others for not having read a book before criticizing it.

One of Jay's favorite ruses in usenet was to post one of his "irrefutable" parables. My favorite was the rocket: astronauts are travelling through space in a rocket, and they begin to remove rivets and whatnot from the rocket in order to sustain a hedonistic lifestyle. Obviously, one day the rocket is going to fall apart. This is supposed to show that man should not deplete the Earth's resources, because the Earth is simply a rocket speeding through space, right?

Um, well, except that a manmade rocket is made to have just enough material in it to keep it together and just enough supplies on board to get you safely to your destination. Any more than the minimum and you are introducing wasted weight, which requires larger motors, which requires more fuel, which requires .... Nobody designed the Earth (or is Jay a creationist?). The materials that are here just happen to be here. They have no intrinsic value unless and until man gives them value. It was regarded as bad luck to have an oil pond on your property in the pre-industrial era. Silicon was just so much sand.

Accelerating long-term dependence on Arab Oil

I can't remember when and where I saw it - a couple of years ago in The Economist, I think. Anyhow, it was a graphic that showed proven reserves in each country. Saudi Arabia has so much more than even the second place country that it's not even close. 6:1, I think. Anyhow, the point was made that anyone who decides to cut himself off from Saudi Arabia is simply going to speed up the day when his own reserves are gone, and Saudi Arabia will be all the more dominant.

The Pump ANWR fervor will only lead to faster depletion of the stocks within our own territory, at the expense of what is supposed to be untouched country. Yeah, it's probably pretty desolate up there. Yeah, there's probably less than a gross of people who have ever visited. But what's the point? We're better off in the long run letting oil prices rise so that people will shift their spending habits.

And after looking at the Energy Bills spewing forth from both parties a while back, I suspect there's no small amount of pork in the offing.

The Poverty of Management

I just finished reading Paco Underhill's Call of the Mall. He reminded me of why I was so skeptical of the passage in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in which Schumpeter seems to say that there is no longer any need for the entrepreneur, that we need only manage the existing industries. Basically, Underhil says that the original retail giants, the people who founded Saks, Macys, Neiman-Marcus, and so on, were people who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with titans like Vanderbilt and Carnegie. They had a vision and built an empire on that vision. Today, retail is boring and dull, punctuated only occasionally by someone with enough vision to come up with something truly unique. As an example of this, Paco gives us window displays, which are no longer the realm of creative designers but are now developed by a bunch of MBAs in an office in New York and then packaged in three-ring binders and sent out as orders through a bureaucratic army. Yuck.

To me, this only emphasizes that despite her overthetop fictional portrayal, Rand's thesis in The Fountainhead was essentially correct.

Open Source Automobile

For a long time I've thought that there could be an Open Source automobile. There would be many benefits, but also many problems. Here are my two starting points for thinking about this: the VW Beetle (old one) and RedHat.

The Bug was an incredibly versatile platform for a true People's Car (Volks Wagen). From the Baja Bug to chop tops, lowriders to ragtops, you can still find dozens of websites devoted to the car. It nearly was an open source vehicle in the sense that you could buy nearly any part (with the possible exception of the pan) from an aftermarket manufacturer. There were even shops dedicated to selling those parts, usually complete with a knowledgeable salesman/mechanic who can advise you on modifications, a rarity even at most factory-authorized dealerships these days.

The other model in my thinking has been RedHat. How do they make money selling something you can download for free? The way I understand it is that they make money three ways: first, they combine the free stuff into an easy-to-install package, saving you the time and effort to download and burn it all. Besides, if it's free off the internet, but you need to get on the internet to access it, you have to have something already running to access the free stuff - that's either a waste (buying an OS just to download a free OS) or an incredibly nerdy thing to do (having multiple computers in your house or using your friend's computer to download). The other ways RedHat makes money is by selling documentation and training. Some of the founders even work on custom applications.

Okay, so how do you transfer those models into brick and mortar manufacturing? Also, how do you deal with regulatory, quality control, and profitability concerns?

Here's a rough sketch of how I think it can be done.

1. Get a design made at a design house to your specifications. I'd want something that was fairly plain but that invited customization, like a WRX.
2. Build several of them and work the kinks out.
3. Build a short production run and have them tested at the Insurance Institute.
4. Resolve all of the problems and test them until you have a high rating.

Great, now you've got a well-designed car. What about the open source part?

1. Get a website and publish the full drawing package. The drawings are available contingent on the user's agreement not to use them for profit unless he has been certified by you to manufacture the parts or vehicles.
   
2. Begin building your own vehicles.
3. Offer a certification service and charge money for it. Perhaps charge a percentage per part or car.
   

Anyone could use the drawings for free to make their own car. Anyone wishing to make parts or cars for profit would have to become certified.

The certification service would have two stages: one for the manufacture of parts, and another for assembly of completed vehicles. It would consist of an initial inspection of their plant and processes, and subsequent sampling of their products. Heck - you might want to use the better manufacturers for your own cars. People receiving such certification are getting the benefit of aready-made, proven, safety-tested design and the right to use your name or logo as a way of conveying the mark of quality to consumers. Once a network of certified parts manufacturers pops up, consumers will know that they can get high quality replacement parts. Small machine shops could use this to supplement their income, and a network of certified assemblers would make a ready-made network of repair shops.

By the way, this is almost an ideally Lean manufacturing process. Dozens of small shops located near their customers, each building one at a time. The certifying team should probably include a lean sensei to advise each shop on the latest poka yoke benchmarks.

The great thing about open source software is that dozens of small tinkerers can work on code to improve and/or customize it. I haven't talked about that aspect, yet. Basically, I envision a similar type of arrangement as Netscape has for Mozilla: anyone can tweak the code, but only the official version can be called Mozilla. If you want to make a new fender, that's fine, but it will not be certified. The Open Source Auto car company should establish a discussion forum on their website to allow people to introduce and trade new parts ideas. When something appears to be really popular, build a car with it, crash test it, and certify the new part and/or assembly.

I can see where version control would become a major challenge. The other possible avenue is that you have a few certified assemblies, but many parts certified for aftermarket use only (not manufacturing). Manufacturers who want to use the uncertified parts for original equipment manufacture are on their own - it's no longer a certified vehicle they are selling. Which brings up the problem of watering down the brand for everyone else.

You could possibly control this by phasing out older certifications and announcing up front that their would only be a few alternative assemblies allowed. Let's say you allow five powerplants (gas, turbodiesel, turbo gas, hybrid, electric), five body styles (plain, convertible, off road, hot rod, utility), who cares about color (not a safety issue), three interior designs (cloth, leather, performance). I think it's important right up front to attract two crowds: the street rodders and the enviromentalists. Once they find out about a company that encourages people to tinker with their cars, you're going to end up with a very creative design team.