Stultitia Delenda Est

“There are people who think that plunder loses all its immorality as soon as it becomes legal. Personally, I cannot imagine a more alarming situation. However that may be, one thing is certain, and that is that the economic results are the same…

Moral: To use force is not to produce, but to destroy.” – Frédéric Bastiat

Found via Coyote Blog

As someone who is neither a Reactionary nor a Progressive, I found this article an engaging, well-crafted overview of Reactionary philosophy. I strongly recommend that you read and, whilst reading it, keep in mind that the author is not a Reactionary. This author gives an exceptionally even-handed and well-crafted overview of Reactionary philosophy while not, himself, subscribing to it.

I think that the core of all philosophy and, indeed, of all human knowledge, is intellectual humility. I think that a corollary to this is that you should always be able to both fairly describe the best arguments against your own position and give an intellectually honest accounting of positions with which you disagree. The article linked about is the finest example of the latter endeavor that I have read in years. I strongly recommend you read it.

First, a video:

The article mentioned in the video above made the rounds of most of the popular gun blogs a month or so ago when it was written, so any firearms enthusiasts in the audience will probably have already read it. If you haven’t, though, I highly recommend you do.

I tend to stay out of online firearms debates for the intellectually selfish reason that they got boring for me a some time ago. This is because everyone arguing on the Internet is, as a rule, already as informed as they are going to permit themselves to be. At this point, arguing about guns on the Internet can only ever aspire to a frustrated argument about priors, and that’s the extremely unusual best case.

But I think that, wherever you fall on the gun debate, you can watch the video above and marvel at the stunning ignorance of the people attempting to ban “assault-style weapons”. And while I’m absolutely okay with people on the Internet not knowing what a barrel shroud is, to see our government servants trying to outlaw them out of pure ignorance is maddening.

But what’s particularly crazy-making is that this kind of ignorance isn’t the exception, but rather the rule in modern American governance. I would be willing to bet that of all the people involved with writing the currently proposed assault weapon ban, not a single one of them could accurately describe all of the features that it proscribes. No matter how you feel about the substance of the current law, that regulations are drafted under such ignorant conditions should make you sore afraid.

Because let’s face it, the second amendment may not be an issue you care about one way or the other, but even the most apolitical among us has something we care deeply about that the government is trying to regulate. And the ignorance at work in crafting this horrid ban on “assault weapons” isn’t limited to firearms issues. The same levels of ignorance are at play screwing up the regulatory regime around whatever issue it is you do care about, whether it’s educational policy, abortion rights, immigration reform, etc. etc. etc.

So why is this ignorance able to persist? Because most people only see it when exposed to it in the context of their own area of expertise or passion. If you know about firearms, you can look at the AWB and see it for the ignorant pandering that it is. But when the same people suggest an immigration reform bill that flatters your priors, suddenly you just assume that they know what they’re talking about.

Or, to use a more current example: I have a lot of friends in the tech industry who, being fairly typical, garden-variety American liberals, are completely in favor of an Assault Weapons Ban. It seems sensible and common-sensical to them, and they have a hard time understanding how anyone can disagree with them. As such, the proposed legislation seems on-point, well-crafted, and long overdue.

But present them with the fact that it is now illegal to decouple your cellphone from your provider in the United States without express carrier permission, and they will instantly rail against the stupidity and ignorance that went in to crafting the legislation that permitted that to happen. The same legislative bodies that they assumed were well-reasoning and well-informed about gun rights, are suddenly seen for the ignorant charlatans they are.

Of course the punch line is that all topical regulation is equally bad, it’s just bad in domain-specific ways that only the informed will see or care about.

This phenomenon isn’t novel or limited to government. The name for this effect is “Gell-Mann Amnesia”, named for the physicist Murray Gell-Mann and first articulated (as near as I can tell) by author Michael Crichton in his 2002 essay “Why Speculate?”. (Note: I can’t seem to find a copy of the original essay online any longer. If anyone does track down a copy, please drop me a link to it either by comment or by email.) Crichton pointed out that he and Gell-Mann often marveled at the stupidity of newspaper articles about the areas of their expertise. Such articles were often so wrong and confused as to completely reverse causal relationships (“wet streets cause rain” in Crichton’s words) or to be so muddled as to be completely non-sensical to someone in the know. Both men would then turn to an article outside their domain knowledge and read on in happy credulity.

In the context of newspapers, Gell-Mann Amnesia might lead to a bad broadsheet surviving a few months longer than it otherwise would. In the context of modern panarchic democracy, Gell-Mann Amnesia leads bad laws, curtailed freedoms, and a regulatory regime in which good people become felons because they own politically incorrect sheet metal or twiddle the wrong bits on their phone.

This image really should be called “TSA Logic”.

The TSA is costing us billions of dollars a year, making us less free, and doing not a damn thing to actually make us any safer.

But thank God no one will get any unbagged nasal sprays onto a plane on their watch.

I mean to comment on this when I found the article a few months ago, but Reason reported back in November that new research calls casts some doubt on the Easterlin Paradox. The Easterlin Paradox is the theory that countries don’t get happier as they get wealthier, beyond some (usually fairly low) GDP per Capita threshold. Quote from Reason:

In recent years, however, additional research has called the Easterlin Paradox into question. Maybe more cash does make people happier. Especially salient are analyses done by University of Pennsylvania economists Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers. In their updated 2010 study, “Subjective Well-Being, Income, Economic Development and Growth,” the three compare subjective well-being survey data from 140 countries with those countries’ income and economic growth rates. The researchers find that within individual countries richer people are happier than poorer; people in richer countries are happier than people in poorer countries; and over time increased economic growth leads to increased happiness. “These results together suggest that measured subjective well-being grows hand in hand with material living standards,” they conclude.

Interestingly, the researchers find that “a 20 percent increase in income has the same impact on well-being, regardless, of the initial level of income: going from $500 to $600 of income per year yields the same impact on well-being as going from $50,000 to $60,000 per year.” Obviously, this means that at higher levels of income it takes more money to buy an extra bit of happiness, but the three researchers find no point at which more money will not buy more happiness—certainly not at Layard’s $15,000 per capita income.

I’m fascinated by happiness research, although I think it is given way too much emphasis in modern policy and social sciences. It’s interesting to see continuing research into what makes us tell researchers that we’re happier on a ten point scale, especially when that violates the fairly narrow consensus that has been developing in the field the past ten years or so.

Why has that consensus been developing?

There is one outlier in the trend data collected by Stevenson and Wolfers—the United States. As average per capita incomes have increased from around $20,000 in 1972 to $42,000 today, average American happiness has hardly budged. On the other hand, according to their data from the General Social Survey, 86 percent of Americans in 1972 said they were either pretty happy or very happy. The figure was 89 percent in 2006.

Sampling bias is probably a huge part of it. There are many ways in which modern social sciences (especially new ones) are really the study of middle class American post-teens in the environment of college campuses. There’s some evidence that this is improving, but the populations studied by many emerging fields of psychology and sociology are still severely hampered by selection bias. (This is, of course, to say nothing of the other profound problems inherent with studying such complex phenomena as human beings, most of which are only sporadically mitigated or controlled for.)

It’s always good to hear a minority report in research sciences, especially one as politically loaded as sociology.

It takes us over an hour and a half to get home. Normally, this drive would take maybe twenty minutes.

But we have to circle round and double back countless times in order to avoid choked arteries, major intersections where madness reigns—traffic lights are ignored—and then there are unknown side streets that cause Karen to observe:

“We’ll never get out of there alive.”

Listening to the radio, we hear about the Rodney King verdict. So that’s the grievance du jour.

The fire department, we learn, is not being deployed because their men have come under intense gunfire.

We hear—and I have trouble believing this report—that the Los Angeles Police Department has been “pulled back for their own safety.”

Huh?

I thought that was part of the job description.

Dopey me.

Definitely worth reading the whole thing.

The great Arnold Kling has an excellent post up outlining one productive way to argue with Progressives, Conservatives, and Libertarians. Excerpt:

I wish that people would begin political conversations by conceding that the generic way that their opponents view the world is sometimes correct. Start by saying, “It is sometimes appropriate…”

My hypothesis is that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians view politics along three different axes. For progressives, the main axis has oppressors at one end and the oppressed at the other. For conservatives, the main axis has civilization at one end and barbarism at the other. For libertarians, the main axis has coercion at one end and free choice at the other.

Kling’s argument that political ideologies argue from different axes flatters my priors, of course. I am a big fan of Charles Taylor, Jonathan Haidt, etc. Taylor and Haidt’s arguments (about hypergoods and moral foundations, respectively) both describe these kinds of differences pretty well.

So Kling’s premise isn’t exactly new, but where his post excels, I think, is his practical advise for discussing politics partisans of the three camps he identifies. Starting our arguments by conceding the instances in which a person’s model of politics is clearly correct is one way of productively structuring an argument to discover the limits of that particular world view for the topic at hand.

As a libertarian Urbanist, I have a love/hate relationship with the Atlantic Cities blog. On the one hand, it does often alert me to interesting new urban developments or deliver me my daily dose of city-porn. On the other hand, many of the posts are so ignorant, sophistic, and biased towards deeply flawed priors that they make eyes hurt just reading them.

Allison Arieff’s recent interview with Alex Marshall definitely landed in that other handed.

To be fair, Ms. Arieff’s interview was actually excellent. She did a great job of giving her subject ample space to elucidate his ideas and asked simple, pointed questions to steer the interview onto novel ground not directly related to her subject’s new book. The fault of this terrible post lies not at Ms. Arieff’s feet, but at those of her interlocutor, Mr. Alex Marshall. Mr. Marshall manages to cram impressive volumes of ignorance and bad thinking into a fairly brief conversation.

The ignorance begins right from the off when he states this deeply flawed premise: “Well, obviously cities are economic entities. To survive, a city or a region has to make money; it has to export more than it imports, in dollar terms.” This just an urban distillation of the classic protectionist horseshit that economists have been fighting against for hundreds of years. Mr. Marshall, let me introduce you to the principle of Comparative Advantage. Free trade improves economic conditions for both parties, even in the presence of “trade imbalances”. Put a different way, imports are not costs and exports are not benefits, rather both are trades that, in a free system, improve the lot of both people engaging in the trade.¹

Mr. Marshall also commits a compositional fallacy here, apparently attributing to cities the sort of economic capabilities and requirements that human beings have. Cities, after all, are incapable of trade. What we mean to say when we talk about trade between cities or countries is that trades occur between the citizens of one such entity and the citizens of another. The “trade” that a city does is not on behalf of the city, but on behalf of some resident thereof. The benefits derived accrue to the people involved in the trade. The city thrives not as a result of the trade, but as a result of the prosperity of its citizens.

A more intellectually offensive notion occurs somewhat later in the interview when Marshall asserts the central thesis of his book: “Sure, this human interaction [in city economies] takes place, but it shouldn’t obscure what makes it possible, which is government. … Both cities and economies emerge as overt political acts. They are constructed things.”

Except that trade and “economic activity” predate government as we know it by tens of thousands of years. Evidence of trade in the Mediterranean (in the form of the shells of the snail genus Nassarius²) goes back at least 82,000 years. The trade in regional goods probably goes back farther. In fact, there’s good evidence and compelling arguments that patterns of specialized trade are one of the primary advantages that allowed human beings survive and thrive from their very earliest days.

So markets predate government and effects cannot predate causes. Additionally, markets exist and flourish even today outside government control. Black and gray markets (or “informal economies” if you prefer) makes up almost half the economic activity in some parts of the developing world (such as Pakistan) and over a fifth in many of the developed nations.

So not only do market economies predate their supposed cause, but even today they outside the purview of the entity which is supposed to be necessary for their existence. So far from being necessary for the existence of markets, governments are neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of healthy markets.³

The final damning argument against Marshall’s thesis though, is that he commits the category error of assuming that governments have the ability to design markets. No person or organization has such an ability because the informational problems involved are completely intractable. Per Hayek, the information encoded in prices in a free market cannot be accurately replicated or divined in any other way. Any attempt to do so will, at best, make markets less efficient and may actually prevent them from functioning at all.

Marshall’s poor reasoning isn’t limited to markets, though. On the topic of cities, Marshall is in equally poor form. He makes much ado about the fact that cities are corporations, ignoring that, until very recently, the incorporation of a city was nothing like the incorporation of a company and that even today, the various “city corporations” like that of London, differ in both structure and intent from the sort of corporations Marshall seems to be talking about.

This kind of equivocation again leads Marshall to imagine government possessing far more power than it does, when he says: “I would like us, the electorate, to remember that corporations are entities created by the state, and which can be rearranged and reconstructed however we the polity decide.” Never mind that such a statement carries with it a morally repugnant endorsement for the tyranny of the majority, it has a deeper problem that he conflates the legal entity with the physical one. He then simply asserts that since the government controls the legal entity that we can restructure the physical entity (the city) to our whim. Marshall seems to think that incorporation breathes some kind of life into the golem that is the polis, giving the bestower of such life control over its actions.

Again, Marshall misses that the event that he wants to ascribe to government (the creation of cities) postdates the alleged cause by thousands of years. The city of London’s “corporation” (again, this meant something very different from economic corporation until very recently) was formed over a thousand years after the founding of Londinium by the Romans. When it was formed (by charter from William the Conqueror) is was explicitly a recognition of rights and powers already in place.

Markets and cities do not exist at the behest and behalf of government. Both, though they undoubtedly profit from good governance, need only the voluntary human interactions for which Mr. Marshall has so little apparent regard.

¹ For more excellent refutations of this kind of protectionist claptrap, please checkout Don Boudreaux’s writings over at Cafe Hayek.

² Cf. Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist, pp. 53, 56 in the first Harper Collins hardcover edition.

³ Governments can improve the efficacy of markets in a variety of ways, but these ways do not include the direct control or regulation of the market. Governments that, e.g., ensure equal treatment under the law, strong protections for personal and property rights, and access to public institutions free of corruption do massively improve the health and functioning of markets.