Transparency, again

In this post, I introduced two variations on a definition of transparency:

• How are decisions arrived at? Who has the decision authority? What is the basis of a decision? How may the decision be appealed?
• Authority and responsibility must lie at the same locus.

But depending on the context, transparency also means a few other things. With respect to commercial activities, transparency means that you get what
you pay for and it is known to you what you are paying for it. Seen from this standpoint, surprisingly, one of the more transparent transactions in which you will ever engage is the purchase of gasoline. They put the price on a great big sign out front; the price even includes all federal and state taxes; and you control the trade at every step. You could argue that it is less than transparent since the amounts explicitly going to the state and feds are not usually spelled out. But since everyone in the local area has the same burden built in, what difference does it make where it goes? It's the cost to you that matters.

The opposite of this might be the purchase of a house: first you negotiate with the previous owner, then you negotiate with the bank, then you have to pay title insurance, mortgage insurance, transaction fees, flood insurance, and possibly a few other things before you take possession. Later, you find that there are tax advantages and disadvantages (depending on where you live). Other complex deals are comparable: the purchase of a cell phone with a plan and a car with financing involve bundling, hidden costs, fees, taxes, and so on.

For the most part, though, purchasing stuff in a modern economy has become so much more transparent than it was here in the past, or the rest of the world even now. Most of my daily transactions are closer to the gasoline. They post a price, you select the standardized product, you swipe your debit card, your bank transfers the exact amount to their bank, and everyone is happy. Quite different from the bazaar trade in which you weren't sure of the price or the quality/quantity you were getting, and it was risky just carrying your cash on you.

On the other hand, the modern world has made such transactions the opposite of transparent when looked at from another angle: you don't really have any idea what you are getting or how it got here. How much Nigerian or other blood was spilled bringing that gasoline to market? Were those khakis sewn by kidnapped children in India? How many pesticides and effluent went into the production of your spinach? I'm not going to link examples to each of these or the many other stories we hear on a daily basis. You know them as well as I, perhaps better.

I just thought it was worth pointing out that modern crypto has made the money part of our transactions incredibly secure, so secure that we may soon be able to carry on large swaths of economic activity in cyberspace and outside the surveillance of our insect overlords. However, the actual creation and transport of matter, of things in meatspace, cannot be secured with the intelligent application of prime numbers and collision-free hash algorithms. So, how does one create transparency in the creation of hardware?

There are a few open source hardware movements. The Economist just highlighted some of them (may be a $ link). In it, they mention the Chumby, the Neuros OSD, the RepRap (not mentioned in the article, a comparable project is Fab @ Home), the Tuxphone, OpenMoko, GumStix, and Eric von Hippel's book, Democratizing Innovation. Additionally, I have come across a large number of open source Wi-Fi projects, including this mobile hotspot (but the parts are not OS), this solar-powered grid project to bring the tubes to kids in the developing world (an idea complementary to the $100 laptop), and especially the Linksys WRT54G router. And let's not forget open source automobile projects Oscar, Society for Sustainable Mobility, and c,mm,n (I proposed a framework for how an open source car project might work here).

When you can fire up the matter compiler and build your own car after paying for the matter with a secure transaction, the world is going to be a very different place.

PS: I ran into this article in Wired immediately after posting.

Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that's one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

Food for thought.

Anti-science vs. questionable science

Before my break, over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin was having a go at John Tierney specifically and Republicans generally on their anti-science stance.

In some of the more hilarious comments, they seem to insinuate that agriculture policies are Republican driven; this may perhaps be the result of a number of non-Americans feeling informed enough to comment on American politics. The most egregious of these policies got their start during the Depression (though some pre-date it), and they grew much larger over the years. That roughly corresponds with the approximately 40-year unbroken period in which Democrats controlled Congress. And as Stephen Downes recently reminded us, the more enlightened Left actually prefers these policies because it maintains order among the Morlocks:

Speaking as someone from the left, I understand the need to provide these subsidies to rural and suburban regions. They are necessary because the free market, left to its own devices, would leave these regions completely unserved.

This would greatly exaggerate the 'time warp' effect, whereby rural regions would be decades behind urban regions, not only in technology, but also education and health care, and ultimately, attitudes and behaviours.

...

It turns out - and we have the empirical evidence for this now - that it is much cheaper to provide subsidies to these regions [rural areas in the US and Canada? Or Africa, Asia, and South America? He seems to have wandered around a bit by this point, so the antecedent is no longer clear - EH] rather than to take a 'law and order' approach. Responding to religious fanaticism, tribalism and the like by war and invasion costs hundreds of billions of dollars - a non-productive subsidy that amounts to thousands of dollars per resident. [I don't think he is still talking about Iowa ... but he does now seem to be implying that invasions are the necessary alternative to foreign aid subsidies! That is a false dilemma.]

Essentially, Downes is admitting that he and his enlightened fellows understand the need to do these things, but Republicans should nevertheless be blamed for actually doing them, and please ignore the history of New Deal farm policy. [1] I wouldn't let either party off the hook on this, though. Republicans took over Congress with the intent of rolling back some of these subsidies, and actually did so for a while (under a Democrat president), but then reintroduced them all under the Freedom to Farm Bill (under a Republican president). The Democratic Congress recently passed another horrific farm policy law with broad-based Republican support, and the silence over at DailyKos is deafening, except to continue to propagate the meme that the beneficiaries of the bill are Republican farmers.[2] As I said at CT, ag policy is non-partisan. Perhaps I should have said bipartisan?

There is a large group of people who tend to be unified by a mindset that is anti-Western, anti-industrial, anti-free-market. Not all share all aspects of this, and not all share the same level of venom, but they exist. At one end of the spectrum, you have the ignorant, violent kids who tore up Seattle and join ELF, who think that Hayduke was a pansy. At the other, you have the reserved lobbyists of the Sierra Club.

People in this group have a model of the world which is reinforced by pessimistic scientific claims. Anything which looks like an indictment of Western, industrial, modern society is immediately accepted on its face because it reinforces their moral views. This confirmation bias, however, goes unrecognized and unacknowledged because of the myriad of other biases that occur when looking back at it introspectively.

One of the biases which makes it difficult to identify past errors is hindsight bias, the tendency to believe that one's predictive abilities are better than they are. We tend to forget bad predictions and to remember good ones. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for information that matches our preconceptions. Another is the winners' bias, in which we tend to examine hypotheses that actually turned out to be true in order to determine whether hypotheses are more frequently true, a bias which is in part selection bias and in part the Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy. Selection bias is a distortion created by the manner in which data are collected, in this case resulting from limiting our selection of hypotheses to examine to after the fact rather than before the fact. The Texas Sharpshooter's fallacy is the determination of the hypothesis after the data have been collected. It would be far more constructive if we were to look at all of the hypotheses before the era which was being forecast and to look at which of those were true rather than looking at only the most memorable ones (recall bias?), which are inevitably the ones that eventually come true.

So, for example, we have the historical examples of epicycles, luminiferous aether, and phlogiston. Epicycles were introduced to try to explain the occasional regress of a planet in order to salvage the Ptolemeic or Earth-centric view of the universe. Luminous ether was the medium in which light travelled. Phlogiston was the element which sustained fire. These were important in their day, but are largely unknown today because they were, of course, wrong. These are just a few of the many now-discredited theories of how our world works.

More recently, we had the saccharin scare. Scarcely remembered today, the saccharin controversy was headline news in its day. Having determined that it caused cancer in rats, the FDA wanted to ban it as a carcinogen. They ran into tremendous popular and corporate opposition, since saccharin was the main sugar substitute in diet drinks at the time. They "compromised" by requiring the incorporation of warning labels. Years later, it was determined that saccharin has an effect particular not just to rats, but more specifically to male rats, in a way that does not effect humans. The entire controversy was completely misguided.[3]

Another example is the global cooling scare of the 1970s. It is still well-known that the Earth cooled during the 1940-1970 period, leading to concerns that the trend would continue until we entered a new Ice Age. Pollution was blamed, though it was noted that we are overdue for another Ice Age (in the literature, this is described as the end of the "interglacial period"). Bring this up on a climate change activist website and they will point out that the scare was largely created by articles in Newsweek and National Geographic magazines but was not predicted by scientists. While true that it was brought to the fore of public attention by the popular press, and that few scientists were predicting as opposed to positing the possibility of a new Ice age, the actual history at the time proves my point that these memes achieve some resonance in popular opinion despite the fact that they aren't true.[4] Afterwards, those who believed and advocated strong action claim to have never believed strongly.

It's almost a Lake Wobegon effect: all of today's environmentalists are above average in their ability to have picked only the true environmental scares of the 1970s. How did the belief in global cooling ever get so popular? Was there a die-off among environmentalists in the 1980s? That damn Reagan is probably behind it.

Finally, we have people who accept the claims of Paul Ehrlich:

"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . hundreds of millions of people (including Americans) are going to starve to death." [1968]

"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." [1969]

Far from being ostracised for making a string (or two) of laughably wrong predictions, Ehrlich has received several awards for his "research". People want so badly to believe him that they continue to discount his way-off-the-mark predictions and accept his newer work at face value.
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Most scientists must necessarily be wrong most of the time, at least in published journal articles. This is the nature of science as a search for truth (truth which is as yet unknown): one must submit hypotheses to tests. Either most of those hypotheses must be wrong, or scientists are surprisingly good at guessing right answers, or publication bias is a factor. In fact, those are the findings of scientists researching the results of research: see this article by John Ioannidis and this article by Douglas Allchin for examples.

What is required is a substantial amount of skepticism, even for "accepted" conclusions. At one time in the not-so-distant past, ulcers were thought to be related to nerves, stomach chemistry, and diet. Not until 1979-1981, when two Australian researchers (Warren and Marshall) showed that most peptic ulcers were caused by a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, did we have the truth. It is fortunate that Warren and Marshall rejected the consensus on this. Howard Aiken's assertion that you shouldn't "worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats," summarizes the reception Warren and Marshall's ideas received from the medical community. Humans are not good at identifying truth that is at odds with their world view, or at identifying when falsehoods are confirming their world view.

We must be as skeptical of those who claimed that they always knew that Global Warming was true as of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) itself, even if (or perhaps especially if) we believe it to be true. Skeptical, not hateful, dismissive, and/or obtuse. Not skepticism because we "feel" it isn't true, but skepticism for its own sake. The doctors who doubted Warren and Marshall made them prove their claims; that's as good for all of us as is the skepticism of Warren and Marshall that led to the discovery in the first place. Those who claimed they always knew the truth of AGW (especially the non-scientists), even when the evidence was more scant than at present, likely believed (and continue to believe) every pessimistic prediction, but conveniently forgot those that later turned out to be false. They weren't prescient; they were and remain ignorant. They are also ignorant of their ignorance.

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[1] A while back, I said that the Left may not be in favor of the Police State, but they are in favor of a Police State. They build it and then feign surprise when the other side uses it. They refuse to believe reports that their own guys use it for anything less than righteousness.

[2] This continues to be a vexing problem about which I intend to post sometime in the near future. That is, a completely misguided application of demographics along with confusing correlation with causation. In this case, we have policies which benefit farmers. Farmers are known to live in rural states. Rural states tend to vote Republican. However, less than 2% of the population farms. Furthermore, it is well known that a small portion of farmers receives most of the subsidies. They alone cannot account for the number of votes received by Republicans. Believing that it is Republicans representing Republican farmers that managed to pass a bill 318-106 in the House, and 81-15 in the Senate, defies explanation on any grounds other than partisan blindness. When you further find out that of those 15 voting against it, only two were Democrats while 13 were Republicans, you really must examine your premises. In other words, it is time for Democrats to drop the sanctimony on farm policy.

In other news (and a demonstration of this same misguided approach to demographics), Democrats are the party of the wealthy and they emit most of the greenhouse emissions. More to come on this, eventually.

[3] Curiously, Quiggin's response regarding the saccharin scare was that it was driven by the USDA, which he sees as a Republican creature:

As regards saccharin, a quick look at Wikipedia reveals that the anti-saccharin push came from USDA. I don’t think it would be too hard to look behind the curtain to red-state sugar and corn producers.

In the first place, the Wiki article specifically points out that the USDA opposition was mostly one man acting in accordance with the law, a law written by the meat-packing industry, so I can't completely discount Quiggin's claim. But Quiggin's assertion that red-state farmers were behind it is typical of the partisan blind under which the subjects of this article labor. Yes, some of those farmers were Republican. Some are Democrat, but he is blind to them. The laws were all written, supported, and not repealed by the Democrats even though they have controlled Congress for most of the period since 1907, and the White House for about half of it.

In the second, this doesn't explain how the FDA came to attempt to ban it.

In the third, doesn't this illustrate exactly what many of us have been saying with respect to regulatory capture? Specifically, that the government mostly exists to defend corporations in the guise of defending the average citizen?

[4] In fact, this has become a new interest of mine: How do such ideas get created and transmitted to seats of power? It isn't always via the press, and the locus of power is not always popular opinion. Take, for example, the ideas of the German Historical school, which got mainstreamed under the name of Progressivism by a route that seems to have included Robert Ely, John Commons, Herbert Croly, Robert M. LaFollette Sr., Teddy Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, and finally FDR's cabinet. Why that school of thought? Why that route? Pure chance?

My point here repeatedly escapes the comprehension of the pessimists. I am not saying, "Scientific consensus in the 1970s was in favor of global cooling and impending an Ice Age." I am saying, "Public opinion in the 1970s was tipping toward a belief in an impending Ice Age and a desire to do something about it." It therefore doesn't matter what scientists were publishing in journals, or that there was no scientific consensus predicting the end of the interglacial period. What matters is that a significant number of voters believed it. How did they receive the information? How credible did they perceive it to be? How strong were their beliefs, and how far were they willing to go to act on them?

An example tied to the bold conjecture

So, my not-so-modest conjecture accused pragmatists of deriving ought from is. I don't think that any 21st century pragmatists are going to agree with any of the following, but I wonder whether their 18th and 19th century counterparts would have done so.

If you are going to look at a current state of affairs and conclude that, well, whatever is best for everyone, efficiency, progress, and all of that may be used as the bases for judging a policy (I don't, but then I'm an ideologue in their eyes), then I suggest that you must conclude that certain out-of-style labor policies in US history were good policy. Why?

As Pietra Rivoli relates in The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy, Gavin Wright found institutional failure in the agricultural labor market in the south in the 18th-19th century. Cotton required labor to be available, sometimes on a moment's notice, to hoe weeds and to pick the cotton when it was ready. The weed-hoeing depended on rainfall in the spring, while the harvest went on for four months in the fall. Further, harvesting could not take place while the bolls were wet from rain, but then again, the bolls have a tendency to fall to the ground and/or get spotted and weak from rain, so the labor had to be available during harvest, within about 4-7 days after a rainfall. Markets for such labor could not exist in an era with poor communication and transportation.

Further, cotton yields apparently increased with farm size up to 600 acres. Thus, a large plantation was more efficient than a small farm. However, it would have been difficult for would-be large plantation owners to find white labor because they had to compete with a pesky competitor: land was relatively cheap, and almost no capital was required (not even a mule in the early days), so most white laborers could have run their own family farm. Since the family farm would have needed the same irregular attention as the plantation, no plantation could have gotten off the ground while the family farm existed. [1] Legally sanctioned slavery, practiced by paternalist owners, resolved the failure.

Dr. Rivoli proceeds to find similar issues in the post-slavery era. Sharecropping was another effective method of resolving the labor market problem, but there were two new problems (from the landowners' perspective): first, the tenants might borrow money from someone besides the landowner, breaking the dependency cycle, and second, the tenants might find higher paying work elsewhere. The former was thwarted through the passage of crop lien laws, cutting off the tenants' access to capital markets, while the latter was thwarted through such methods as vagrancy and anti-enticement, what Rivoli calls "alienation of labor", laws. Later, during WWII, the labor shortage created by wartime demand led to the creation of the Bracero program. Once again, the special conditions of cotton growing created institutional failure, which was addressed by (1) having the Department of Labor screen the workers for health, potential productivity, and absence of certain political tendencies; (2) restricting the laborers to only one employer so that they couldn't be bid away to the highest bidder; and (3) having specific numbers of workers ready to be picked up on the farmers' schedules.

In summary, the benefits are quite clear: cotton and then textile production sparked the Industrial Revolution, and later kept the Southern and then the West Texas economy afloat. The institutional failures are also quite clear: large farms reap economies of scale, but in the days when cotton production was labor intensive, there was no way to obtain the labor when and where it was needed, and at a reasonable price, because of the lure of family farms, other farmers, and competitive capital markets. We can see that your average, pragmatic, non-ideological, empiricist would have found the Bracero restrictions, and before them the legal restrictions on sharecroppers, and before them slavery, to be good things and beneficial state policies. Those pragmatists would have included Northern industrialists dependent on the cotton trade (especially the Lowells, but also New York shippers and financiers) as well as those who relied on the South as a market for manufactured goods, but certainly no small number of intellectuals supportive of Hamiltonian means would have defended the policies on the basis of the undeniable outcome. Those people who were committed to certain -- yech! -- Manchesterite, hyperindividualistic ideologies might well have been found in the company of the much-hated, unreasonable abolitionists.

I can hear the protests now: "Oh, but that's not what we mean! We're not in favor of efficiency at all costs."

Really?! Is there some sort of universal moral axiom that was violated by those policies?

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[1] We know from more recent experience that state intervention to increase the effective size of the farm is thought by empiricists to have been a good thing because it increased the percentage which any farmer could have left fallow. See, for example, this review of Tim Egan's The Worst Hard Times.

A Bold Conjecture

I have the germ of an idea that I need to present in three parts today, with an example in the near future. The three parts are An Interpretation, a Reinterpretation, and The Question Begged.

If we look at political economic history, we find that the state, especially the national government of the US, has evolved from a very simple set of rules (the Constitution was a few pages) to a very complex set of interlocking and sometimes contradictory rules, interpretations, agencies, and so on (the CFR is several volumes, best measured in linear inches rather than pages). The growth is due to the fact that at every stage, the rules created conditions for new problems which have to be addressed by new rules. For example, the rules which allowed transnational railroads to prosper led to the industrialization described by Chandler (energy + transportation => scale economy), creating the conditions for labor exploitation and unrest, followed by a new round of rules to constrain the industrialists and protect the workers, creating ... and so on. The explanation provided by the defenders of state intervention is that each of these changes has been largely beneficial, and that the few negative consequences may easily be managed by a new round of regulations that are also largely beneficial. They lay claim to pragmatism and empiricism, setting those in opposition to dogmatism or ideology, noting that they simply want to use the best means for achieving the best ends. We are all better off, so those policies were beneficial.

We could reinterpret this by working backwards. Today, we are better off than a generation ago, and a generation ago was better off than the previous generation, and so on. Thus, in order to get the improvements that we need today, it was good that they enacted those policies a few years ago. In order to get to the preconditions for today's prosperity, the need for previous policy choices are obvious. Thus, we should be grateful for those policies and for the idea of state intervention in general. For example, we need the current transportation system, so it was good that the state built roads. And to get the cars that ply those roads, we needed the railroads, so it was good that national regulations to govern railroads were put in place.

But this begs a question: What do they mean by "need"? In one sense, their argument is circular: in order to have the existing set of social, economic, and political mechanisms that we need to perpetuate the existing system, we had to have made those choices in the past. But why do we need the existing system? Indeed, why did the people in the 19th century need the railroad choices? "Need" means that a person or society can not continue to exist without those things. If anything, the fact that society had existed and evolved for thousand of years to that point without those institutions or policies is proof that those things were not needed in any meaningful sense of the word.

When the word "need" is used or implied, red flags should be raised. Who needs (or needed) it? Why? And is (was) the proposed policy the only way to achieve the need? And what, exactly, is needed? Remember this the next time you encounter one of the world's Polanyist, William Jamesist, pragmatic empiricists, who suddenly seem to have shed their pragmatism in favor of some Platonic ideal toward which their programs are working. Did society "need" the specific policies that were involved in the creation of transnational railroads? The railroad owners would appear to have needed them more than society at large; people wanting to farm profitably further west, further from water routes, markets, and hungry customers needed them; politicians wanting to influence the type of farmer in order to influence the type of state (pro- or anti-slavery) needed them; people wanting to enlarge the market for their manufactured goods and thereby increase profits (McCormick, for example) needed them; but those groups do not come close to comprising a majority of the citizens of the country. And if they had not gotten those policies -- laws regarding incorporation, bankruptcy, interstate regulation, subsidization and land transfers -- they still would have had other options, most of which would simply have been more expensive in the short run, but perhaps less so in the long run. For example, prior to the massive build-out of railroads, private roads and canals were all the rage. Fogel, in his response to Rostow, even noted that a horseless carriage existed in 1830 and that "not only the fundamental internal combustion engine theory, but even that of the diesel engine was published as early as 1824," citing D. C. Field's "Mechanical Road Vehicles" and Orville Charles Cramer's "Internal Combustion Engine" in A History of Technology (Charles Singer, ed., 1958) and Encyclopedia Britannica, (1961), respectively (see also Samuel Morey). As these predated the discovery of oil, they would have led to the creation of a more local, environmentally friendly, efficient (in the sense of having fewer externalities) transportation system and if a national system had evolved, it would have been more organic, i.e. the economies of scale would have driven the system rather than the system driving the economies of scale.

Bold enough?

Mental Health

This news story reminded me about a post I started a few weeks ago.

I have long believed that the existence and treatment of mental illness poses a tough political problem for libertarians generally (including the Civil Libertarians in the ACLU). I once attended a lecture given by Thomas Szasz; I could not accept his claim that mental illness is not really a disease. He claimed that it could not be legitimately called a disease since there was no cell pathology, e.g. no germ had been found to cause schizophrenia. Neither sickle cell anemia nor scurvy is caused by a foreign organism, so that doesn't seem to be the best argument to take. Furthermore, he seems to have fallen into Taleb's round trip error: "no germ found to cause disease" has become "no germs exist to cause the disease" [1]. However, he made a good case that the state has historically been given powers too broad for locking people up on the basis of insanity, for reasons that once included a wife's disobedience.

The problem as I see it with mental illness is that it is tough to construct a mechanism for treating the patient when the patient does not necessarily agree with either the prescription or the diagnosis. It seems easy to say that we should treat patients against their will when they are a danger to others, but what about when they are only a danger to themselves? Who gets to decide that? And on what basis? Is not a mortally obese person a danger to themselves? What about an extreme sport enthusiast? What about bicycle messengers? Abused, this could become a thin veneer for a state that wants to lock up the merely idiosynchratic. These people might include Howard Hughes, most physical science researchers (physicists), and Andy Kaufman. I'm afraid of its abuse by a government that already wants to assert broad powers for locking people up and holding them for indeterminate periods of time without a trial on the basis of secret evidence. [2]

The involuntary treatment solution is also known as Assisted Outpatient Treatment or AOT. The State of New York, among other places, has passed a form of this in Kendra's Law. Kendra's Law failed the gentlemen described in "Free to Die in Iowa" (Michael Judge, WSJ, 22 Dec 2007) (hattip: fashion-incubator) because the doctors apparently didn't know that they could have treated the man involuntarily. Kendra's Law is so-named for a girl killed by a man in the NYC subway. The man apparently had some limited access to treatment (199 treatments in two years and $95k in one year is hardly a lack of access), but he refused treatment on many occasions.

The primary advocate of Kendra's Law is a researcher by the name of Edward Fuller Torrey. Torrey is a former adviser to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), an education and advocacy group. NAMI was founded in 1979 in the wake of the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s. NAMI advocates community treatment, a comprehensive approach involving the "consumer", their family and friends, civil authorities, medical professionals, and other orgranizations.

The deinstitutionalization movement started in the 1950s and 1960s, and achieved success in the 1970s. The Community Mental Health Act (CMHA) of 1963 is said to be a significant milestone in the history of the movement, though it isn't clear whether the measure was taken to address concerns for the rights of patients or for fiscal reasons (probably both). Another significant event in the history of the movement was the success of the book and subsequent movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The movement has elements of Post Modernist Michel Foucault's thoughts on the cultural and social meaning of "sanity" as well as ACLU opposition to involuntary incarceration and the anti-psychiatry movement. The anti-psychiatry movement itself is fueled in part by Scientology and in part by legitimate recognition of some of its shortcomings, such as the fact that homosexuality was listed as a mental illness by the American Psychiatry Association as recently as 1974. More recently, the finding of increasing numbers of children to have ADHD in order to control their behavior with Ritalin seems to have some merit as legitimate criticism. Additionally, it is noted that many clinicians are also stakeholders in pharmaceutical interests.

I think that much of the thinking that goes into this subject is too simplistic. In part, this may be because the entire debate is locked up on the left end of the political spectrum between those who have never met a federal program they didn't like and those who don't believe the state should ever have a police function. There is broad overlap with the former group and socialists, and between the latter group and libertarians. I'm skeptical of both. [3] At the other end of the spectrum, we frequently find people like Michael Medved ranting about the injustice of failing to lock up everyone who poses a danger to anyone without any apparent consideration of whether jail is the appropriate environment for people whose main problem is bad genetic luck.

What are the meta problems?
- Who will watch the watchers?
- How do you take politics out of defining what "risk to oneself" means?
- Where do you draw the line on risk to oneself? 1%? 10%? Imminent danger? Isn't the latter the most obvious category, and one that is mainly detected too late no matter how much we spend on the problem?
- Can we recognize that we are talking about locking people up, but we simply aren't calling it jail? We can call it a hospital, but that doesn't mean it is any less oppressive than jail. The patients are still at the mercy of the staff and to a large extent other patients.

I have very little problem with funding mental health initiatives. As usual, I would rather see it done at the private, then the local, then the state level, but not at the federal level at all.

To some extent, this is exactly what is happening. NAMI is private. The local chapter of NAMI has obtained some sponsorship of temporary communal living quarters. That has been augmented with City and State funding. I think it is underfunded, but that should only drive the creativity of the advocates that much harder (isn't this what they say when they advocate unfunded mandates on various industries?)

We also know that action in the private sphere is moving faster than in the public sphere, due in part to consumers who are demanding more of their employer-sponsored health packages. "During the past three decades, per enrollee spending for a common benefit package has grown at a slightly slower average annual rate for Medicare than for private health insurance," according to this. To be sure, this doesn't help people who are unemployed, but it does help those teenagers whose parents are employed and insured to get early treatment, keeping them off the public programs.

The money is spent on doctors, nurses, support staff, facilities, and medication. Not as much money is required if stabilization can be achieved quickly. That means having a very effective, broad program that directs people into the system quickly.

I doubt social medicine works any better on this score. Homelessness and schizophrenia are significant problems in both Europe and Canada. Recall the recent riots in the Netherlands as homeless people were evicted from squatting in abandoned buildings? Or the recent problems with moving the homeless in Paris?

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[1] E. Fuller Torrey has been looking at the possibility that a parasite found in cat feces may have something to do with schizophrenia.

[2] And if you think secret evidence and holding people without trials started with George W., I have a bridge to sell you. The Clinton Administration also locked up foreign suspects without trial on the basis of secret evidence (see, for example, this article). I doubt this problem started in the 1990s, either. In fact, Wilson's Palmer Raids come to mind.

[3] I am reminded of the claims that Ronald Reagan is primarily responsible and the Republican party partially responsible for the lack of mental health care in the United States. This claim is due to the fact that Reagan happened to sign an 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act that repealed another law, National Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, that had never gone into effect. In fact, that 1980 Law would have reduced federal expenditures on mental health care. In addition, the 1981 Omnibus bill kept the cuts, but "converted them to block grants disbursed with few strings attached. New York State, which used block-grant monies to fund community-based programs, and other states [had] to cut mental health programs." The issue then was not that the Reagan Administration was cutting funding for these programs, but more specifically, they were cutting some funding and then cutting the strings attached to that funding. The local authorities were given broad powers to use the money, and apparently failed to direct it to mental health. The blame for that failure should fall on the entire spectrum, from left to right, but it doesn't.

I think any reasonable person could conclude that Reagan's involvement was incidental since the deinstitutionalization movement preceded him, guided Congressional action on the 1963, 1980, and 1981 Acts, and led to the founding of NAMI, and that furthermore nobody has come along since and proposed replacement legislation at either the state or the federal level despite the fact that Democrats occupied the White House for 8 years and controlled Congress for 15. It seems apparent to me that there is broad recognition of the problems laid out at the beginning of this piece: that involuntary treatment of adults is a difficult problem with no easy solutions.

Defining fascism

When trying to define something like fascism, it is important to keep several distinctions in mind. First, "fascism" was specifically coined by Mussolini in reference to his own views. There are differences between other regimes who either used it to refer to themselves, or to whom it has been applied with general approval. Nazi Germany and (apparently) Falangist Spain would fall in the former class, while arguably Japan in the same era and Chile under Pinochet might fall into the second.

Second, the one-dimensional, number-line model of political parties (below) is not helpful for understanding this controversy. For one thing, you have the libertarians over on the right when they have very left-leaning views on many issues (drug war, immigration, abortion, gay marriage, etc.).

Yoram Bauman notes the libertarian problem in coming up with his political spectrum:

Libertarians-Leftists-Rightists-Libertarians

For another, given that their actual policies and policy applications resulted in nearly identical outcomes, anything that pits Hitler and Stalin as polar opposites is nearly useless.

Communism-Socialism-Progressivism-Center-Conservatism-Libertarianism-Fascism

The Nolan Chart (below) is a better but not perfect model for understanding this issue. For those unfamiliar with it, it is based on the observations of Stuart Lillie and William Maddox that people tend to separate their economic views from their social/cultural views. An example of a quiz based on this was recently posted at Crooked Timber.













Rotating it 45 degrees, we find that the traditional, one-dimensional view lines up from the left to right corners. Other axes might be chosen, such as elitism vs. populism, foreign vs. domestic focus, and so on.












Using this chart, we can illustrate the "traditional" or high school civics version of fascism, which says that fascism is an extreme right wing movement (black).













We can also illustrate the non-traditional view in which statism or collectivism is located along the bottom edge (blue).












In this form, it is contrasted with anti-statists (classical liberalism, libertarianism, and anarchism) at the top. Note that in this view, Hitler and Stalin may be located near each other towards the bottom, having arrived at that point from their positions on the right and left. To me, this is an imperfect but much more satisfactory outcome than the one-dimensional model.

To be sure, many people attempt -- through deliberate attempts to obscure, or through innocent error -- to place fascism on the left (red).












This is one of the strawman versions of Jonah Goldberg's thesis in Liberal Fascism; the other is that he is painting the entire black, red, and blue space as fascism in order to reduce the epithet to meaninglessness. I haven't read the book, so I can't be sure he isn't, but from the interview, that doesn't seem likely (20%). Instead, I think Goldberg is attempting to point out that the blue version of the origins and location of fascism has a left as well as a right side to it. If so, I would agree with him, but I would emphasize that it has two sides to it and they both tend to collaborate or at least feed off of one another. In other words, I would not have given the book the title it has.

Note that everyone wants to define fascism in a self-serving way, i.e. the left wants to paint them as right-wing, libertarians want to paint them as pro-state, and the right (of which Goldberg appears to be a member) wants to paint them as left-wing. The libertarian version of this makes the most sense to me, as it explains much of what has happened and why the other two groups seem to be blissfully unaware of the problems caused by their respective allies.

Having offered this graphical guide as background, I think I can proceed to actually working out a definition, but not before noting those who have come before. First, Mussolini himself. However, George Orwell tells us that fascism as a word had become meaningless by 1944. On the other hand, Eco has worked out a theory which makes them easy to spot -- or has he? Wikipedia offers a list of traits.

I think the best way to work through this is to realize that fascism, if it can be applied to states which have not embraced the term themselves, must account for regimes whose outcomes look like those who have embraced the term regardless of their rhetorical claims. In other words, it is not enough to take someone at face value when he claims to be an enemy of fascism. There seem to be characteristics in fact which are common to states we might term "fascist", but they may be present in different degrees from state to state. By way of illustration, I offer modernism, socialism, and anti-semitism.

Hitler was anti-modern in a number of ways. The pan-Germanism movement was stuck in place at the moment when Germany was trying to come together from a group of loosely attached states in the early 19^th century. They were dominated by their admiration for Prussia, by their Romanticism, and the influence of Rousseau and his Noble Savage. Through the influence of Spengler and others, Hitler subscribed to the Blood and Soil ideals of the Romantics, and with it the yearning for heroes to lead innocent men through the travails of modernism. Accordingly, Hitler idolized the work of Wagner and rejected the modern artists. Mussolini, on the other hand, recognized that if Marx' material dialectic theory of history was to be correct, Italy must be dragged through the capitalist phase of development in order to get to the socialist phase. There were broad overlaps between the Italian futurists and fascism, including the embrace of violence and focus on the future (see this, this, and this [1] for example). That is not consistent with Eco's claim that fascist movements are exclusively backward looking (is mine a fair reading of Eco?).

It is worth pointing out too that the meaning of "left wing" or "liberalism" has changed much throughout the past 200 years. The original denotation of left-right came from the seating in the French Assembly, with the Jacobins, sans-culottes, and their allies on the left and the reactionaries and other pro-monarchy and pro-aristocracy members on the right. The left was in favor of change and justice. Today, at least in the US, both left and right seem to want to return to some idealized past; for the left, it is a past in which The New Deal is still fresh, unions represent a majority of workers, trust-busting is still high on the agenda, the marginal tax rate on high earners is 90+%[2], and a program can be introduced for whatever ails you. For the right, the past is a place where taxes were low so a family of 4 could get by comfortably on a single salary, leaving mom free to raise the kids, the government consisted mostly of a Defense Department to protect us from the forces of evil, and we exported the best goods to the rest of the world because Americans were simply better at stuff and the government wasn't interfering. Neither of those places existed, and we couldn't go back if they did. Today, of the two, the left is largely the more conservative in the sense of being for maintaining the status quo if not returning to some perceived past, while the right is torn between creating a new idyllism and returning to the perceived old one. To some extent, the left is still the one in favor of achieving some measure of justice for both our own poor and for those abroad (though many of their favored policies would either do one at the expense of the other, or achieve neither), while the right wants to achieve justice by being left alone to enjoy their H3 Hummer, ATV, and the house whose 125% mortgage pays for it all.

With regard to socialism, Hitler was an enthusiast, but not a well-informed one. Mussolini, on the other hand, was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist who grew up on it and rose to the heights of the Italian socialist party. It is necessary to distinguish between Marxist "scientific socialism" and other varieties of socialism; so great was the man's influence on subsequent thinking that we forget today that socialism had been around for at least two generations before Karl, and that Karl was a successful polemicist who cowed or outlived his contemporary detractors (in part because Karl was frequently really Engels' interpretation). Germany was the first state with an in-depth experience with socialism thanks to Marx' contemporaries Ferdinand Lasalle and Otto von Bismarck, the former the wildly popular socialist leader in the Bundesrat who died before his time at the hands of a romantic rival, and the latter the classically conservative (pro-aristocracy) empire builder. Hitler grew up in the wake of Bismarckian or State Socialism (though in Austria, not Germany); in Mein Kampf, he consistently and eloquently expresses socialist sentiments while denouncing the Marxist variety (which he identifies by various names such as Communism, Bolshevism, and -- in reference to the specific party -- Democratic Socialism). Mussolini, on the other hand, was steeped in Marxist thought thanks to a father who was a member of the International. Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was named after Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez and Italian revolutionaries Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa. He was the editor of the Socialist party paper, Avanti!. Benito and the Soviet leaders were mutual admirers: Joshua Muravchik notes among other events (in Heaven on Earth) that

British journalist George Slocombe, who interviewed Mussolini at the 1922 Cannes Conference, reported that "Lenin was the only contemporary for whom he would express respect." Meanwhile, Comintern chief Nikolai Bukharin commented that in their methods of combat, the Fascists "more than any other party, have adopted and applied ... the experiences of the Russian Revolution." Later, Mussolini perceived that the Soviet system under Stalin had become a kind of "Slav fascism" or "crypto-fascism."

Mussolini, like the French Vichy government, was forced into deporting Jews to Germany. Franco apparently aided some fleeing Jews. It is perhaps more instructive to look beyond anti-semitism to the larger picture and say that fascists have to divide the world into us and them. I wanted to provide these three areas of contrast regarding their futurism/pastism, relationship with socialism, and anti-semitism to show that even universally acknowledged fascists have differences between them on these key issues.

So here is the list of traits from Wiki offered with a few comments:

Trait	Germany	Fascist Italy	Falangist Spain	Arrow Cross
Nationalism	10	10	10	10
Anti-communism	10	8 (early admiration for Lenin and Stalin, tepid and opportunistic anti-communism)	10 (worth pointing out that the communists helped bring Franco to power by fighting against the anarchists)	10
Anti-liberal	10	10	10?	10?
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	10	7	8?	8?
Militarism	10	10	10?	10?
Totalitarianism	8, though Buccheim and Scherner have pointed out that there was still competition in the letting of contracts and in the methods by which they were fulfilled	10, Mussolini coined the term.	8?	8?
Anti-democratic	8 (came to power by democratic means)	10	10	10
Strong leader	10	10	10?	8?
Total	74	75	76	74?

Totalitarianism does not mean "particularly mean" or "vicious". It means that the state is involved in or wants to control every aspect of a citizen's life for the purpose of coordinating their activities for the benefit of the group.

And of the other states, what can we say about them?

Trait	Tojoist Japan	Stalinist USSR	Pinochetist Chile	Modern USA
Nationalism	10	9	10?	8
Anti-communism	10?	4 (but they were making up what communism was, e.g. not Trotskyite, and not very Marxist)	10	8
Anti-liberal	10	10	5 (the Chicago Boys)	8
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	10	9, against Kulaks and later against other ethnic groups including Jews in the Doctor's Plot	3?	3
Militarism	10	9	10	3
Totalitarianism	8?	10	7	4, but moving that direction
Anti-democratic	10	10	9, until they allowed elections	3
Strong leader	10	10	8 - Junta rather than single strongman	3, both parties believe in the imperial president
Total	78	71	62	40

And more to Goldberg's point?

Trait	Wilson Progressives	FDR	Modern Progressives	Neocons
Nationalism	8 (WWI)	8 (WWII)	4	8
Anti-communism	8 (Palmer raids)	6	6	8
Anti-liberal	7 (many laws passed)	8	9	8
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	8 (support for Jim Crow)	8 (Japanese internment camps)	3 (soft racism, bombing brown people was fine as long as Clinton was doing it)	6 (xenophobia)
Militarism	4	7 Yes, the CCC was a quasi-military	2 (generally supported Clinton's imperialism)	7 (though they failed to support Clinton's imperialism)
Totalitarianism	9 (Efficiency, Technocracy)	8 (controlled the press, controlled prices during the war, supported legislation that controlled wide swathes of economic activity)	9 (Heading that way on efficiency grounds)	9 (Heading that way on moral grounds)
Anti-democratic	3	7 (4 terms? Using social programs to buy votes, machine politics)	6 (judicial activism, anti-change in social programs, gerrymandering, antifederalist)	6 (gerrymandering, judicial activism, antifederalist)
Strong leader	3	8? Corporatism?	8 (belief in Executive Power)	8 (Ditto)
Total	50	60	47	60

And just for fun:

Trait	Cuba	Ba'athist Iraq	Israel	Jihadists
Nationalism	10	10	8	10 for their belief in the caliphate
Anti-communism	2	8	7	10 - look what happened in Afghanistan
Anti-liberal	8	8	7	10
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	5	7	5	10
Militarism	10	10	8	10
Totalitarianism	10	10	3	10
Anti-democratic	10	10	3	10
Strong leader	10	10	2	10
Total	65	73	43	80!

Wow, of all of the groups scored, the jihadists are the only ones to achieve a perfect 80. The United States as a whole is less fascist than Israel which is less fascist than either the neoprogressives or the Wilson Administration, and they in turn are less fascist than the neocons or the US under FDR administration.

Country	Score
Jihadists	80
Tojoist Japan	78
Falangist Spain	76
Fascist Italy	75
Nazi Germany	74
Ba'athist Iraq	73
Stalinist Russia	72
Cuba	65
Pinochetist Chile	62
FDR	60
Neoconservatives	60
Wilson	50
Neoprogressives	47
Israel	43
Modern US	40
Arrow Cross	74?

Obviously, this isn't terribly scientific. My scoring is likely to be skewed by availability bias and my own personal knowledge. I'd love to know how other people would change these scores. I have read quite a bit on the history of Germany's descent into Nazism, a little on the Progressive and New Deal eras, Italy, USSR, Spain, and Cuba, but not so much on the rest.

I think it would also be instructive to try to score the US through its history. I suspect that the racism would score high in the early Republic, but everything else would be quite low. That would change abruptly as we pass through the Civil War era in which the strong leader score would rise. The militarism would also gradually rise; it basically never went down very far after the Spanish-American War. Anti-liberalism, while never quite 0, has been on the rise since the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act. Totalitarianism was near 0 before the Civil War, but has been at least a 5 since the original Progressive Era and rising since then. Nationalism has aways been high; anti-democratic tendencies have been on the wain since the colonial period but have accelerated in step with the totalitarianism. Politicians don't want to be seen as responsible for the rising intrusion into our lives; better leave those decisions to armies of faceless technical experts known as civil servants.

I think the main point here is that fascism is a combination of elements and a group or regime is fascist to the extent that they embrace those elements. It is not a fair deconstruction to look at the elements taken one at a time and out of context with the whole. People taking that approach (which so far has dominated the anti-Goldberg legions) are like the blind men investigating the elephant. By concentrating only on the parts, they conclude that an elephant is like a snake, a wall, a spear, a fan, a rope, or a tree. They will never realize that the elephant has all of those characteristics, but is never entirely like just one of those elements. Few would conclude that an immature elephant is not an elephant because it lacks tusks. Similarly, if a regime is strong in all but one category, I don't see how you can fail to conclude that it is fascistic if not fascist. After all, can we really claim that Hitler was not fascist because he obtained office by democratic means? Or that Pinochet's Junta was not fascist simply because he allowed elections to be held and the democratically elected government to succeed him?

-----------------
[1] Mussolini makes the statements, "Activism: that is to say nationalism, futurism, fascism." and "The State is not only the present; it is also the past and above all the future."

[2] see Rosser's comments here in which he concentrates on the posted marginal rates rather than the actual average rates which were considerably lower due to the complexity of the tax code and the various holes in it.

Local, Action: Issues of Scale

In a recent debate hosted by Cato, Peter Leeson argues

In a recent study I compared Somali welfare under anarchy to welfare under government using all key development indicators for which data allowed comparison. According to the data, of the eighteen development indicators, fourteen show unambiguous improvement under anarchy. Life expectancy is higher today than was in the last years of government's existence; infant mortality has improved twenty-four percent; maternal mortality has fallen over thirty percent; infants with low birth weight has fallen more than fifteen percentage points; access to health facilities has increased more than twenty-five percentage points; access to sanitation has risen eight percentage points; extreme poverty has plummeted nearly twenty percentage points; one year olds fully immunized for TB has grown nearly twenty percentage points, and for measles has increased ten; fatalities due to measles have dropped thirty percent; and the prevalence of TVs, radios, and telephones has jumped between three and twenty-five times.
...
Should we conclude from Somalia's stateless improvement that it is a nice place to live? Of course not. But Somalia's pre- and post-government performance highlights an important point about the desirability of anarchy. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is simply not true that any government is always superior to no government. If state predation goes unchecked, government may not only fail to add to social welfare, but can actually reduce welfare below its level under statelessness. Such was the case with Somalia's government, which did more harm to its citizens than good.

Dani Rodrik responded

I do not have any trouble with the idea that self-enforcing agreements (what Leeson calls "anarchy") can sometimes substitute for third-party (i.e., government) enforcement. Such self-enforcing agreements are maintained through the force of repeated interaction ("if you cheat me now, I will cheat you in the future,") through reputational mechanisms ("see, I am not the cheating kind of guy"), and collective punishment schemes ("if you cheat me, I will bring the wrath of my colleagues on you"). The literature is replete with examination of such informal institutions. See for example Avner Greif's work on medieval merchant guilds, John McMillan and Chris Woodruff's work on commercial dispute settlement in Vietnam, Marcel Fafchamps' work on firms' relations with their suppliers in Africa, and Elinor Ostrom's work on the management of common property resources around the world [1]. Leeson's own account of how pirates have developed self-enforcing arrangements to elicit cooperation fits squarely in this larger literature.

The problem with self-enforcing agreements is that they do not scale up. One of the findings from Elinor Ostrom's extensive case studies is that self-enforcing arrangements to manage the "commons" work well only when the geographic scope of the activity is clearly delimited and membership is fixed. It is easy to understand why. Cooperation under "anarchy" is based on reciprocity, which in turn requires observability. I need to be able to observe whether you are behaving according to the rules, and if not, I have to be able to sanction you. When the size of the in-group becomes large and mobility allows opportunistic behavior to go unpunished, it becomes difficult to maintain cooperation. Imagine that the pirates numbered in the millions and they could easily jump ship to join competing groups mid-voyage; would the arrangements Leeson describes have been sustainable?

Later in the essay, Rodrik concludes, "There is no example of a society that has become prosperous without a state machinery." He doesn't appear to be thinking about the fact that many societies that have not become prosperous in his sense (high GDP) have been sustainable over hundreds of years -- sustainable by definition.

In contrast to Leeson's note that it is not true that any government is better than no government, Rodrik arguees that more government is equivalent to good government. In fact, he is all but saying that state capitalism is the best option we have.

Unlike in pirate societies or pre-colonial Angola, modern economies require an elaborate and ever-evolving division of labor -- among owners of firms, managers, and their employees, among producers up and down the value chain, and between producers and providers of supporting services such as finance, accounting, and legal services. The complexity, fluidity, and geographic non-specificity of these activities leave too much room for opportunistic behavior for self-enforcing arrangements to work well. They require an external backstop in the form of government-enforced rules.
...
Which is why the scatter plot below, showing the relationship between per-capita GDP and the size of the public sector, should not be a surprise. There is a strong, statistically highly significant, and positive association between countries' income levels and the share of their economy that the government consumes. This highlights the complementarity between markets and the state. Those societies in which markets work best are the ones where the reach of the state is longer -- not shorter.

Alas, Rodrik seems committed to conflating the quality of governance to the size and scope of it, as he switches back from size to operation: "Prosperity is achieved when states are effective in setting and enforcing the rules of the game, not when they wither away."

I welcome Rodrik's entry to the blogosphere. So far, he is proving very valuable as a source of material showing that defense of state capitalism is something to which both the Chamber of Commerce Right and Crolyist Left agree. [2] It's a fight between two sides of the same coin, the one side saying that we need government to rationalize the entire economy (by which I mean, "to coordinate everything in accordance with a central plan") while ignoring the side effects (increasing concentration of wealth and power), while simultaneously claiming that it is the other side that is doing this. The other side claims to defend free markets while actually defending the businesses and people benefiting from state policies.

And, in the present essay, Rodrik provides a generous amount of material to help me with the third installment of the Local, Action series. In the first two essays, I explored local commerce and associational activity. In this one, I am more interested in discussing localism as a preferred method for governance. I will gladly concede that dividing the world into loose confederations of local or regional sovereignties will result in a lower rate of growth, but I will simultaneously assert that the median person will not necessarily be worse off, that the least well off will be much better off, and that the society will likely be much more sustainable than the existing system which Rodrik prefers.

It is well-known that interpersonal communications scale poorly with the number of people involved. The most effective means of communication is direct conversation; we evolved to convey and to receive a great deal of information via non-verbal means (gestures, facial expression, voice timbre). People cannot handle the cognitive load of more than a few other people. Anthropologist RIM Dunbar posits

there is a cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships, that this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size. The predicted group size for humans is relatively large (compared to those for nonhuman primates), and is close to observed sizes of certain rather distinctive types of groups found in contemporary and historical human societies. These groups are invariably ones that depend on extensive personal knowledge based on face-to-face interaction for their stability and coherence through time. I argued that the need to increase group size at some point during the course of human evolution precipitated the evolution of language because a more efficient process was required for servicing these relationships than was possible with the conventional nonhuman primate bonding mechanism (namely, social grooming). These arguments appear to mesh well with the social intelligence hypothesis for the evolution of brain size and cognitive skills in primates.

(hattip: Life With Alacrity blog, at which this is an interesting and related post)

Dunbar calculated that humans could effectively socialize in groups of about 150 people. He also notes that modern military organizations are limited to no more than 200, a limit arrived at by trial and error over several centuries.

Once language and then writing was developed, we had the means to communicate to but not with a wider group. Writing can allow one person to reach more people, it is more precise and can possibly unload some of the emotional content, allowing a more rational conversation, but it isn't interactive. Personal relationships maintained by physical interaction are closer than impersonal relationships maintained by broadcast, a difference of kind, not degree. In Human Scale, Kirkpatrick Sale cites research from sociology and anthropology to argue for two types of naturally sized community: the neighborhood, roughly limited to 500 people, and the community of 5,000 to 10,000, roughly corresponding to the two types of communication. A Pattern Language makes similar arguments for the optimal size of regions, towns, neighborhoods in political, economic, and architectural terms.[3]

Not being able to communicate with many people effectively means that our ability to find out about their activities and intents is limited. We might forgive someone for making a mistake if we understood their motivations. We might also allow a mistake to pass if we knew that person was usually very conscientious. So contract breaches can be handled in a very cost-effective way when we have personal knowledge of the deliverer, but contracts become much more costly to enforce as our physical, mental, and emotional distance from the other party increases.

Thus, reputation and other features of self-enforcing contracts are difficult to scale up because it becomes difficult for people to directly observe compliance and to sanction the non-compliant. Rodrik does not seem to be aware, however, that the same problems stalk state enforcement of its own regulations. [4] Not only can the state not monitor everyone, but citizens can not effectively guard the guardians the further removed they are from them. It is difficult (costly) to hold politicians to their promises, to know the content of laws, and to know the quality and activities of the bureaucrats charged with enforcing the regulations. Laws may therefore work to the advantage of the wealthy and powerful, they may not be enforced effectively, or they may be enforced selectively, giving rise to corruption.

Locally, citizens can engage more freely and more securely in give-and-take. One day, the majority may agree to something that puts some at a disadvantage. We all know it and can confirm it personally. Later, we can agree to do something that compensates the victim(s). We have a better handle on who is getting the shaft and who is getting more than their fair share, and when the numbers are small, we are capable of keeping a running balance sheet on the externalities of our collective actions. [5]

In From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State, David Beito describes at length the activities of review committees sent to the homes of the covered. Their direct observation was not only an effective way of weeding out the fakers, but also provided stronger credibility for legitimate cases, so strong that when requesting special grants for hard cases, lodge members gladly forked over. After all, they weren't giving to charity, they were contributing to a mutual fund, one which they themselves might need to draw against one day.

Mancur Olson addresses the scaling issue in The Logic of Collective Action. He argues that small groups are able to use moral and social pressure to maintain group cohesion. The larger the group gets, the more costly it becomes to maintain cohesion. In large numbers, the group must offer some kind of tangible, excludable good in order to maintain he necessary cohesion. Because of the difficulty of herding large numbers to a common goal, small but focused groups may come to dominate the larger groups.

Scaling is the same argument that Tyler Cowen offers against the local food movement (sorry, no link). Sure, it may be possible for a few (usually wealthy or eccentric) individuals to obtain their food locally, and it should be of higher quality, but it becomes more difficult to attempt to feed entire cities from local farms. The Northeast corridor is unlikely to return to self-sufficiency in its current state, though this is interesting.

I would extend the arguments of the local food movement to the state: if you think that government is a good thing, local is better. Just as you can produce inexpensive food products by mass production techniques by giving up nutritional value, loading the environment with pollutants, and allowing national brands to push out local flavor, you can also mass produce your law by giving up legislative quality, loading the legal environment with barriers to entry and regulatory sclerosis, and allowing one-size-fits-all regulations to push out local custom. When your food is produced far away, you have little idea what ingredients or processes are being used. Just so, you have little idea how earmarks are getting into legislation or who stands to benefit from each 30,000 page bill. Transparency does not scale well, publicly or privately.



-----------------------------
[1] Let's also add Lisa Bernstein's study of the diamond industry and Jacob Loshin's delightful piece on how innovation and secrets are kept in the magic industry without Intellectual Property law.

[2] Need evidence of that fact? Check out this blurb for a book advertised on Max Sawicky's site:

In his new book, economist Dean Baker debunks the myth that conservatives favor the market over government intervention. In fact, conservatives rely on a range of "nanny state" policies that ensure the rich get richer while leaving most Americans worse off.

I found it on a post arguing in favor of one of Rodrik's Crolyist, pro-industrial policy posts. Irony was not intended. When I pointed it out, Sawicky nominated me for a Blogalympics Long Jump medal, apparently oblivious to the obvious.

[3] Were the 300 M inhabitants of the US divided into towns of that size (say, 6667), there would be 45,000 such towns. Using Sale's calculation of one square mile per town (admittedly, he only had 5,000 inhabitants) and a 15 square mile green belt around each town, this would require about 720,000 square miles, which he calculated to be less than one-fifth of the nation's total land and less than one-half of the area given over to cropland at that time.

[4] Actually, that's not entirely true. Rodrik himself characterizes federal policies as "targeted on a loosely-defined set of market imperfections that are rarely observed directly, implemented by bureaucrats who have little capacity to identify where the imperfections are or how large they may be, and overseen by politicians who are prone to corruption and rent-seeking by powerful groups and lobbies." So, he seems to recognize it, or perhaps he is just using arguments he has encountered but not really understood or accepted for rhetorical effect?

[5] One way of looking at this is to consider the costs to obtaining consensus and the cost of externalities arising from the decisions. A dictator has nearly zero (0) cost of reaching a decision, but the externality cost is likely to be very high. On the other hand, it would be extremely costly to obtain a 100% consensus of a large group, but there would be no externalities. Given methods of reaching a decision, like log-rolling, the externalities of the final decision may be expensive. The larger the group, the higher the cost of reaching a decision, and given Olson's observations about the ability of small, focused groups to dictate to large, dispersed groups, the cost of obtaining and the external costs grow as the group grows. This is an insanely abbreviated version of one line of analysis in The Calculus of Consent.

Shilling for plutocrats

It is frequently charged that libertarians are shills for plutocracy because they oppose the taxes and government regulation which keep criminals, corporations, and other problems in check. Some of these criticisms are not only entertaining, they are valid and enlightening: wishing for a world in which large multinational corporations are unfettered by regulation is not only inconsistent because corporations rely on the state for their existence, but also dangerous precisely because it fails to recognize the source of their size and scope. A more consistent approach would start with the recognition of the problems created at the state-corporate nexus and then proceed to dismantle it and them. The libertarians who criticize government without this recognition are labeled "vulgar libertarians" by Kevin Carson, and rightly so. The rest of us classical liberals should be as much opposed to them as to the anti-libertarians.

Although anti-libertarians' claims of shilling by libertarians are generally strawmen, there is an element of truth to them both because of the vulgar libertarians and because of the plutocrats who don liberal clothing [1]. I offer as a typical example this essay. In comments on various blogs, the author has been making the claim that because Charles Koch supports the GMU Economics program, then they must be shilling for him. Among other unsupported (and mostly unsupportable) assertions, the author has also been lumping libertarians in with neo-cons and Objectivists and claiming that the super wealthy are libertarian.

I'm not going to make a point-by-point refutation to his numerous claims. I have long been fascinated by the belief that libertarian=rich and vice versa. I'm sure Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Ted Turner would be surprised to hear about their libertarian leanings. Further, there is a high correspondence between voting patterns and the areas in which wealth congregates (New York, California). Yes, there are contrary claims, but the point is that "libertarian" and "wealthy" are not synonymous. Further, an unusually high number of classical liberals are academics, further disrupting the wealth link, but most academics are not libertarian.

Many such anti-libertarians have a strange propensity to vigorously defend even the most indefensible government policy. The only point of contention seems to be whether a "D" or an "R" should follow the name of the Chief Executive. Whether Charles Koch has any real power is a matter of debate; whether the government has any power is not. So I'm pretty sure that defending every action of the government is the definition of "shilling for plutocracy".

Beware when you see statements like this:

The simple fact is that iodized salt has been known to solve goiter for decades, but that's not enough for markets to solve the problem. Why? well, we can speculate a whole bunch, but frankly I'd just point out that it's a historical fact that markets don't solve certain problems well, and that government solves those problems better. Defense, roads, iodization, social insurance, etc.

Note the list at the end, which smuggles plutocratic policies in the same package with public goods. Defense is a clear public good, one that even anarchists will agree is a tough problem [2]. Roads were once provided privately, but in the state-capitalist era they have become publicly provided. The need to do so is dubious; it is largely an populist over-reaction to the excesses of previous eras of such tinkering and in part a subsidy to the oil, trucking, and automobile industries. Iodized salt has been privately provided for nearly a century in the developed world and for decades in parts of the developing world. In some cases it has been prescribed by state authorities, in others it has been over-prescribed. In India, state mandates concerning salt are very controversial due in part to the inherent symbolism of tyranny. In other places, the "market" consists of a state-granted monopoly to manufacture salt. Claiming that "government solves those problems" is a substantially oversimplified and mostly incorrect statement, failing to recognize the complex legal, economic, and social environment in which government policies are carried out. Social insurance is a mixed bag, though it mostly does not benefit plutocrats directly. However, the fact that the government is involved does not mean that private social insurance never existed. It could be argued that the government does a better job now than they did then, but that does not mean that the private institutions that it has displaced would not have improved. A serious comparison will show that private poverty relief programs, being less bureaucratic and more personal, will be better suited to a wide variety of problems. The quoted list discusses none of these issues in the hopes that the reader will accept the idea that since the government claims to deliver those goods, that it (1) does, and (2) should. Beware of such lists being used to smuggle invalid conceptual frameworks under the cover of scoring minor debate points. Remember what they are implicitly arguing for as well as what they are arguing against.


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[1] "Liberal" in all of its senses: the powerful can show sympathy with all manner of politics in order to get where they are going, whether that be to the boardroom, the White House, or the dacha. That doesn't mean that they are actually progressives or classical liberals.

[2] That doesn't mean that the existing military-industrial complex is actually a defensive system.

I, Government

Er, this seems obvious, but I only found two similar references, and nobody actually doing it like this:

1. A government may not injure a citizen or, through inaction, allow a citizen to come to harm.
   
2. A government must obey orders given to it by citizens except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
   
3. A government must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

I think (1) translates as "Don't be a tyranny and don't let citizens face risks." (2) is "be democratic, but break the violence of faction", which is just Federalist X. (3) is "be a strong government, but not too strong", which is Montesquieu. Anarchists would reject all three. I suggest that most non-anarchists will agree with (2) and (3), but there will be considerable disagreement over (1). The second part of (1) sounds either utopian or fascist/paternalist to my ears.

However, does the plot-theme of the Will Smith movie not follow from acceptance of all three?

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Let's not stop with that, though: confirmation bias is the mind-killer.

What if you replace the faceless "government" with "bureaucrat", an individual? I think applying such rules to agents of the state expects too much of them, including taking orders and going beyond the law at their discretion (becoming a rogue).

What if you replace "government" with "corporation" and "citizens" with "shareholders" or "customers" -- does any of it make sense? Or suppose we replace "government" with "market" and "citizen" with "producer or seller"? Again, I think assertions of moral agency by a corporation or market sound flat. I think this shows that we expect the state to be a moral agent, but that we expect corporations and markets to be amoral.

That's interesting ... that's very interesting....

-- Captain Jack Sparrow

What if we replace both "government" and "citizen" with "neighbor"? In that case, (2) sounds like slavery. This suggests that we regard government as a servant. Suppose we use "boss" and "employee" - again, this places too much on the shoulders of the employee.

Like I said, this seems obvious. And pointless. And yet, for those of you who agree with all three rules above, I ask again whether the movie plot does not follow (I'm not providing spoilers, I'm sure you can find the relevant details or write me to ask and I'll explain it). The movie's point was about technology, but I find that many people seem to regard the regulatory state as an engineering problem that simply needs the right tweaks. That's what the whole Scientism/Efficiency Movement/Technocracy thing was about, wasn't it? Ordem e Progresso, my friends, Ordem e Progresso.

Models of models

I understand now why Tyler likes Megan: she is contrarian without being a jackass.

Megan says,

First, your model of the individual is very likely based on you. It is possible that everyone acts just like you, and also that you can accurately predict your own behaviors and motivations. But that is far from certain. When you argue for a policy that would work best for a country of people who are just like you, you should have some reason to believe you are the right model of the individual.

Interesting - is this a self-recursive model? Is your model of the modeling individual "someone who models individuals based on themselves" because *you* model modellers based on your modeling?

Progressives are seduced by this because they like to think conservatives are armed, beer-swilling, uneducated rednecks; libertarians are intelligent middle class white male plutocrats; and progressives are cosmopolitan altruists. Thus, in their narrative, conservatives want to base policies on NASCAR commercials, libertarians want to base policies on intelligent middle class white male plutocrats who can make complex decisions for themselves, and progressives want policies that balance complex issues in favor of multiple outliers in intelligence, culture, race, capability. This ignores basic problems, like the fact that academia is dominated by intelligent middle class white males -- self-identified as progressives -- who largely search for novel arguments in defense of the status quo (state capitalism). Or that many of the policies favored by libertarians are more accessible and democratic than those that involve the selection and navigation of politicians, policies, agencies, and rules to create the required balance.

I'm sure it is tempting for libertarians and others for similar, mirror-image reasons. Libertarians think of conservatives roughly the same way as progressives, except perhaps with more respect for their belief in moral values; of progressives as people who have a propensity to place more weight on intent than outcome and to signal their own morality by spending other people's money; and of themselves as economic literates with a deep sense of the morality inherent in freedom. Thus, in their narrative, conservatives want to base policies on what "everyone" knows from Sunday morning sermons, progressives want to base policies on things which perpetuate the state, and libertarians want to base policies on whatever lets people find the best answer for themselves (emphasis on private action, but accepting state action where it is the least worst solution).

Conservatives think of themselves as highly moral people, of progressives as possibly insane but definitely immoral, and of libertarians as the same, only worse. In their narrative, conservatives want to base policies on what is best for everyone, progressives want to base policies on the worst in man, and libertarians don't want any policies standing between themselves and complete debauchery.

The discussion also begs the question - what should the model of the individual be? When we assume that it should be people of average intelligence and capability, and then make policy decisions on that, we are largely eliminating the needs of both the most and least capable. That's politically palatable because we can speak for the least capable without actually speaking with them, and the most capable will find work-arounds.