The solution is price discrimination, selling the drug at a high price to customers who are willing to pay it, at a low price to customers who are not. In practice this usually means selling the drug at a high price in rich countries and a low price in poor countries.

The problem is preventing resale. If the same pill sells for five dollars in Nigeria and fifty in France, what prevents an enterprising Nigerian from buying in Nigeria and selling in France, costing the drug company the high price sales that were paying for its fixed costs? If too many enterprising Nigerians do so, making the present drug more available may prevent the development of future drugs.

There are two quite different arguments for why it would do so, one that is obvious and intuitive and one that is correct.

The first argument takes the form “If the drug companies don’t have enough money from drugs produced by past research they cannot afford to finance future research to produce new drugs.” That sounds right but isn’t. If future research looks to be profitable drug companies don’t need to finance it from past profits; that’s what capital markets are for. If future research looks unprofitable then however much money drug companies have from past research they can find somewhere else to put it. That too is what capital markets are for.

The argument that makes sense to an economist is about incentives, not resources. Anything that makes future research less profitable, such as extensive resale, means that some projects go from just worth doing to not quite worth doing, reducing the amount of future research.

The other argument is the wrong one from the standpoint of an economist but while economically wrong it is rhetorically right. With that argument the drug companies are claiming that they would like to develop new drugs to save lives but can’t do it if resale of drugs deprives them of the needed resources. That sounds a lot more attractive than saying that, while they could develop new drugs to save lives they won’t unless it pays.

One solution to the problem is to monitor consumption, make sure that every pill sold in Nigeria is consumed there. Drug companies do not have the resources or expertise to set up mass distribution in every poor country in the world and make sure that every pill they hand out is consumed on the spot. The poor country’s government or a rich country NGO that is distributing the drug might be able to do it — but can all the employees of either be trusted to resist the temptation to divert some of the pills to a more profitable market?

A Modest Proposal

I have another solution. Let charitable donors in rich countries buy out the patent on the second best drug or combination of drugs and public domain it, let anyone make it. Buying the second best drug should not be that expensive since it is not making much money any more. And even if the same company owns the first best drug, it should not lose too many sales, since most customers who can afford the best drug will keep taking it.

This proposal has one large advantage over the alternative of forcing drug companies to make their drugs available at a low price in poor countries with the threat that if they don’t the countries in question will refuse to enforce their patents. That makes the development of new drugs less profitable and so buys a short run gain in availability at the long run cost of slowing the development of new drugs. It could be a very large long run cost if the practice spreads from very poor countries up to less poor countries. My proposal, on the other hand, makes the development of drugs more profitable. You can make money on your drug until a competitor brings out something better then make a little more selling it to the Gates Foundation or some similar organization.

While on the subject, I have a second suggestion, this one intended to make drugs more available for both rich people and poor people. FDA rules on testing should be designed to encourage drug companies to make not yet approved drugs available abroad in order to use the information so generated to meet the requirements for approval in the U.S. That would bring down the cost of finding out whether new drugs are safe and getting them approved. At the same time it would provide low cost, albeit somewhat risky, drugs for people in poor countries.

Here again, there may be a conflict between good economics and good rhetoric, between an argument that is right and one that is persuasive. Opponents will argue that it is unjust for rich people to get the best drugs and poor people the second best, even if the realistic alternative is poor people not getting any drugs at all. They will make good demagogic use of the idea that it is wicked to use human beings as guinea pigs for potentially dangerous drugs, despite the fact that using humans as guinea pigs is the only way we have of finding out whether or not drugs are safe.

When I made this proposal on my old blog, I got an interesting comment:

Because Japan has a socialized medical system, they’re desperate to cut costs in any way possible. One way they do it is to use second-rate drugs. If you get a prescription from a doctor in Japan, check it out on the Internet. You sometimes find that it was obsoleted by a new drug in the U.S. The U.S. pharmaceutical company then sold the rights to a Japanese pharmaceutical company, and the obsolete drug is manufactured and routinely prescribed in Japan. Japanese doctors complain that they can’t get access to the best drugs. It means there’s a fairly strong demand even for out-of-date U.S. drugs.

That was twenty years ago. I have no idea if it is still true but with luck at least one of my readers does and can tell us in the comment thread.

I have seen the claim that drug companies sometimes release a new variant on a drug in order to extend the patent, when the new version is at most a marginal improvement on the old. If so, the Japanese doctors may have been making the right choice.

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That point is also relevant to women’s choice between their two alternative mating strategies, long term and short term. The long term strategy is to pair up with the most desirable man she can get and jointly produce and rear children. The short term strategy is to get pregnant by the most desirable man she can and then rear the child herself, perhaps with the assistance of brothers and other blood relatives, a sister’s child being half as good, genetically speaking, as a child of your own. There seems to be good evidence that both women and men are equipped for their roles in both strategies, with different preferences among potential mates according to which is being followed. The long term strategy implies a preference for good fathers behaviorally, the short term for good fathers genetically.

In a very poor society, the short term strategy is not viable because a woman cannot afford to bring up a child without the assistance of its father: It’s long term or nothing. So we would expect that rising incomes would be associated with an increasing number of women choosing the short term strategy. That, allowing for substantial time lags in social institutions, might help explain the large changes in observed behavior in developed societies over the past seventy years or so.

Wright cites anthropological evidence that dowry, payments by the bride’s family to the groom, is almost always associated with socially enforced monogamy. His explanation is that without enforced monogamy, the very desirable, most obviously the wealthy, man can trade half of himself for all of a bride. If he can’t do that, he trades all of himself for all of a bride plus some cash. (My summary of Wright’s analysis, not his)

I think he is missing something. As I argued long ago in my Price Theory chapter on love and marriage, polygyny, by letting some men bid for more than one wife, bids up the price of a wife on the marriage market. If women own themselves the result is more favorable terms in marriage. If their parents own them the result is higher bride price or lower dowry, since a dowry (ignoring lots of complications) is a negative bride price. Enforced monogamy lowers the price of a wife not merely to the man who would otherwise have had two wives but to all men, hence makes bride price less likely and dowry more likely.

Both Wright’s analysis and mine treat polygyny as a consumption decision by the husband, hence more likely in the rich, but Edward Lane in The Modern Egyptians, an account of Egyptian life in the early nineteenth century, reports that:

Polygamy, … is more rare among the higher and middle classes than it is among the lower orders; and it is not very common among the latter. A poor man may indulge himself with two or more wives, each of whom may be able, by some art or occupation, nearly to provide her own subsistence; but most persons of the middle and higher orders are deterred from doing so by the consideration of the expense and discomfort which they would incur. … I believe that not more than one husband among twenty has two wives.

Lane’s “higher classes” probably did not include the very rich, who on other evidence had multiple wives and concubines, but his report suggests the possibility of polygamy not as a consumption activity but as a firm structure, with three or more adults sharing a household. That fits the pattern of the only polygamous (polyamorous) household I have observed, with multiple adults sharing the work of running and supporting a household and rearing children. The Oneida commune in the 19^th century was a much larger version of that pattern with several hundred members all married to each other. A commenter on a post on my old blog cited an article about the poorest poor in Bombay that said that men who work street sweeping there frequently join in pairs to support a woman because they do not have enough money to support a woman on their own. An arguably superior version is fraternal polyandry, practiced in Tibet and some other resource poor societies. Having the two (or more) husbands be brothers is a partial solution to the problem of men wanting to spend their resources on their own children since a child of the shared wife by one husband is a nephew or niece of the others.

In a modern society the combination of contraception and paternity testing would provide a different solution to that problem; some modern polyamories are polyandrous.

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I was wrong. Reading the comments it became clear that what I was observing was not a difference between historical recreation in the U.S. and in the U.K. but between two versions of historical recreation. My experience was with one version, my correspondent’s with the other, but both existed in both countries.

Both are educational; the difference is whom they are intended to educate. The version I am familiar with is mainly targeted at the participants. If there are classes at an SCA event — there are more than a thousand at the annual Pennsic War,^[1]1 much smaller numbers at smaller events — they are by and for the participants. The audience at an SCA tournament is a medieval audience, dressed in some attempt at period clothing. A spectator at the tournament may be one of the people cooking the evening’s feast or, later in the evening, teaching renaissance dance.

The form of recreation my correspondent described is also educational, but educational mainly for the audience. In England, by his description, it is tied much more closely to the official educational system than are similar activities in the U.S., with performances to some degree designed to fit into the standard curriculum. At one point in the conversation he appeared to take fitting into the official curriculum as part of the definition of educational, although when pressed on the point he denied it. What was clear was that he thought of “educational” as meaning “educating the audience,” while I thought of the activity’s primary educational role as educating the participants or, perhaps more precisely, encouraging them to educate themselves. His version is (modestly) subsidized by the state; some of the customers for the performances are state schools. Participants are sometimes paid but not very much, with luck enough to cover their expenses and perhaps a beer after the performance is over.

The difference in educational target is not complete. SCA groups occasionally do demos for an audience, usually as a recruiting device, occasionally for a school. Participants in performing groups must educate themselves in order to perform. And one of the benefits, for a British group, of a performance at a historical site is the opportunity, after the performance is over, to enjoy the site for themselves.

So, what do we get out of it? The enjoyment of history for its own sake; the opportunity to rediscover lost skills and crafts; a chance to educate people (sometimes); oh and the biggest draw of all to the events at historic sites is the chance to be there after 5 o’clock when the public have gone away so we can live the life in a real place for a while. (A U.K. reenactor commenting on my blog.)

The British groups described to me had a high level of required physical authenticity. The SCA, in contrast, has a minimal level of required authenticity — some attempt at pre-17th century garb. But while physical authenticity is not required it is admired and there is a lot of it at a high standard. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that our best armorers or costumers are as good as theirs although our average is somewhat lower and our minimum much lower.

If an event is a performance to educate an audience it makes sense to require all participants to have consistent period garb. If we are educating ourselves participants will be at various levels of authenticity, may be, in the SCA are, recreating characters from different times and places. Civil War recreation in the U.S. is, like the SCA, primarily aimed at educating the participants but, unlike the SCA, maintains a high level of physical authenticity and, within a unit, consistency. That suggests a different distinction, between recreation tied to specific places and events and recreation of a broader period. Another difference is that a Civil War group, American or British, that is recreating a battle knows who is going to win it. In an SCA battle, at Pennsic with hundreds of fighters on each side, both sides are trying to win. It is in that respect more authentic, a contest, as a real battle was, not an act.

Civil War groups in the U.S. are recreating particular military units in particular battles. British groups recreating their civil war are, I gather, doing the same thing. British groups recreating earlier periods may not recreate a particular battle but are often tied to a particular place — they, unlike Americans doing medieval recreation, have real castles to do it in. All of that pushes in the direction of garb and gear from a specific time.

Some American groups recreating American history are similarly tied to a place and time — Old Sturbridge village, for example, recreates a Massachusetts village from the early 19^th century. It is a living museum with forty reconstructed buildings and more than two hundred acres of land, a very much more professional project than anything the SCA does. The staff is a mix of professionals and volunteers; the SCA has a few paid employees at the corporate level dealing with membership and the like but everything below that is volunteers. As best I can tell, Sturbridge and similar sites are the equivalent of the castles British recreators perform at — in a society richer in money than Britain, poorer in surviving structures.

There are other forms of historical recreation which I know much less about and which might tell us more about the reasons for the differences among different forms. It would be interesting to compare Europeans recreating the American wild west with Americans recreating the culture of medieval Europe.

Sent from Pennsic

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It occurred to me that the difference may have been explained by Kipling:

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast (The Female of the Species)

Infants are much more vulnerable than adults so it makes sense for women, who have primary responsibility for the care of infants, to be much more cautious about environmental hazards than men.

Does the poem explain anything else about m/f differences? The political implication

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her

were true in England in 1911 but changed a few years later.

What about the behavioral claim?

She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great 
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate. 
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim 
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.

She is wedded to convictions—in default of grosser ties; 
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies!— 
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild, 
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

It describes the behavior of many partisans; I have not noticed it to be especially common among unmarried female partisans but your experience may differ; Vance’s comment on “childless cat ladies,” later retracted under fire, suggests that his may.

Other Lessons

That is not the only thing in Kipling that might be of interest to moderns. Consider the explanation of the Afghan advantage in “Arithmetic on the Frontier.”

With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem.
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.
The “captives of our bow and spear”
Are cheap, alas! as we are dear.

That lesson might have been useful to the US, before that to the USSR, before that …

Kipling’s argument is a counter to Adam Smith’s, more than a century earlier. Smith argued that the invention of gunpowder was favorable to civilization because it made warfare more capital intensive (his concept but not his terminology). Before that, the barbarians were a threat to the civilized. After, the civilized were a threat to the barbarians.

It will be interesting to see the effect of the introduction of drones to that balance. Do they strengthen high-tech cultures against low tech or reduce the advantage of richer countries by introducing a cheaper weapon, cheaper than tanks at least, to the battlefield? Their use in the Ukraine war seems to be strengthening the rich — Ukraine is not rich but its allies are — against the populous.

The chief effect may be on the balance between populations that are more or less technologically sophisticated; buying weapons is easier than training people to use them. Parkinson, in one of his books, describes the advantage of the British over the Malays. Both had similar artillery. The Malay soldiers in charge of the guns said prayers that they not burst, the British had noncoms who made sure the guns were cleaned. The Russians and the Ukrainians are in that respect peer opponents but if drones had become important in warfare a little earlier they might have changed the balance in Afghanistan.

A Code of Morals, discussed in an earlier post, warned of the dangers of conversing on an open channel — a century before the technologies that made that a live issue.

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[Apology: I normally post every 3 days at noon PST. I am currently attending Pennsic, a historical recreation event, camped out in a medieval pavilion, sleeping on a rope bed out of an early medieval carving, teaching classes on medieval Muslim law, how to make hardened leather armor, how to cook from medieval recipes, … . As a result I have now twice lost track of my posting schedule and put a post out a day late.]

They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair

Which side are you on?
Which side are you on ...

Some people view the world, at least major parts of it, as a zero sum game where one person gains only to the extent that another loses. Starting with this point of view, it is natural enough to see all disagreements as questions of which side you are on. Do you favor workers or employers, landlords or tenants? The alternative is to see disagreements as not only about how to divide up the pie but about how to change its size. It then becomes not only a question of us vs them but also of our arguments vs their arguments, with some hope that one set of arguments will eventually persuade almost everyone.

These different viewpoints are reflected, in political rhetoric and political thinking, in the difference between relative and absolute measures. If we define the poor as the bottom ten percent of the income distribution we can be confident that they will always be with us. If we define the poor by the real income of the tenth percentile as of the US in1900 the problem of poverty has been solved for developed countries, since the number of people in them with incomes that low is now close to zero.

Economists mostly reject the zero sum point of view since they routinely deal with issues of how to expand the size of the pie, how to increase economic efficiency. One plausible criticism of their approach is that although economists may care only about absolute outcomes people care also, and a care lot, about relative ones. How much one employee is paid is often less important to him than how his pay compares with that of other employees. Robert Frank, an original and interesting economist, has written a whole book (Choosing the Right Pond) on incorporating the fact that people care about relative status into economics.

It seems obvious that, if one’s concern is status rather than real income, we are in a zero sum game, that if my status increases relative to yours, yours must have decreased relative to mine. That point of view seems to support the approach to politics that sees it mainly as a question of who gets to benefit at the expense of whom, of which side who is on.

Like many things that seem obvious, this one is false. It is true that my status is relative to yours. It does not, oddly enough, follow that if my status is higher than yours, yours must be lower than mine, or that if my status increases someone else’s must decrease. Status is not, in fact, a zero sum game.

This point was originally made clear to me when I was an undergraduate at Harvard and realized that Harvard had, in at least one interesting way, the perfect social system: Everyone at the top of his own ladder. The small minority of students passionately interested in drama knew that they were the important people at the university; everyone else was there to provide them with an audience. The small minority passionately interested in politics knew that they were the important ones; their friends were there to be herded into meetings of the Young Republicans and Young Democrats in order to get them elected to positions in those organizations that were the stepping stones to further political success. The small minority ... .

I exaggerate; no doubt there were some students who regarded themselves as at the bottom. But what was clear from that experience was that status was not a simple objective ordering on which everyone agrees. We all value status. But what matters to me is my status as I perceive it and as it is perceived by people important to me; what matters to you is your status as you perceive it and as it is perceived by people important to you. Since each of us has his own system of values and his own set of people important to him, it is possible for my status as I view it to be higher than yours and yours as you view it to be higher than mine.

The point has been born home to me repeatedly since then in other contexts. There are quite a lot of people in science fiction fandom, the Society for Creative Anachronism, and I am sure many other social circles, who work at a not very high status and not very highly paid job while putting their real passion and energy into their hobby. One reason to do so, although not the only reason, is that it lets them buy status. They may succeed in their hobby because they are really talented in it, they may succeed because they are willing to put much more of themselves into the hobby than other people are.

Being a male nurse is not a terribly high status job but that may not much matter if you are also King of the Middle Kingdom. And the status you get by being king does not reduce the status of the doctors who know that they are at the top of the medical ladder and the nurses at the bottom.

Consider, for another example, teachers. Elementary school teachers have a positive public image but not much status outside the classroom. But in the classroom, where they spend quite a large part of their time, they are king, queen, mother, father, alpha wolf, wise mentor, ultimate figure of authority for fifty minutes out of every hour, or at least can be those things if they want to be and are competent at the job. That may be one of the most important fringe benefits of teaching. Professors get it too, along with more status outside of the classroom. That may be part of the reason that both professors and schoolmarms have a reputation for being bossy sorts who are sure they know best; they spend a large part of their lives in an environment where they probably do know best and are entitled, to a considerable degree, to boss the other people in the room around. It may also be part of the reason that people are willing to take those jobs even when they can make more money doing something else.

For a third example, consider advertising designed to confer status on products: clothes, perfumes, automobiles. People it convinces buy the products and get status with other people it convinces. People who do not see the ads or see them but are unconvinced do not associate the goods with status and so do not lose status by not buying them.

If status is not a zero sum game, one way of evaluating a society is by the degree to which it expands the size of the status pie, allows practically everyone to be above average. It follows that the last thing we want is a system for objectively ranking people, for defining status in a way that everyone agrees on. A second conclusion is that if we are so unfortunate as to get such a system, rational individuals in search of status will promptly subvert it, create their own subgroups with their own rankings. It is, after all, easier to increase your status if you can find a way of dong so that does not decrease anyone else’s.

I do not know if my description of Harvard in the early sixties is true of Harvard today but my guess is that it is, of Harvard and many other schools. Perhaps if one of my readers is a current Harvard student or a recent graduate …

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People keep moving to Texas. CNBC says they should think twice.

CNBC ranked Texas among the worst states for living in 2026. (Emma Weidmann, San Antonio News)

It occurred to me, but apparently not to the author of the article or the authors of the CNBC ranking it was based on, that the conflict between the CNBC rating of states by quality of life and the movement of workers into the states that CNBC thought they should be moving out of was a puzzle.

There were two explanations. One:

The state scored an F on quality of life due to crime, low access to healthcare and reproductive rights and a lack of inclusiveness and worker protections.

While Texas came in at No. 2, Tennessee took the top spot. CNBC’s ranking says Tennessee has “a rash of state laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community, including a so-called ‘bathroom law’ requiring transgender people to use the facilities designated for their sex at birth.” Texas has a similar bill.

(Oklahoma has) one of America’s strictest bans on abortion. The Sooner State ranked 40th for worker protections last year, according to Oxfam America,1 which said that the state’s $7.25 minimum wage …

(Alabama) also ranks at the bottom for its worker protections, which include only two of the 16 measures that Oxfam America considers critical…

Georgia offers few protections for LGBTQ+ people, making it one of America’s least inclusive states. The Peach State offers minimal worker protections, particularly when it comes to the right to organize.

The ranking on quality of life, part of a measure of attractiveness to business, was based in part on how well the state conformed to progressive policy preferences. It apparently did not occur to the authors that while a law allowing an MTF transsexual to use the women’s room may be a plus for transsexuals it might be a minus to parents with daughters, and a lot more workers are the latter than the former. Laws unfavorable to “the LGBTQ community” are a negative feature of a state to some workers but a positive feature to others, that being the reason such laws get passed. It also may not have occurred to the authors that since a high minimum wage does not guarantee a job at that wage, workers who are not worth that much to anyone would prefer to live in a state with a lower one.

Part of the explanation of the conflict between the CNBC measure of the quality of life and the observed behavior of workers is that the CNBC authors are progressives and most of the workers are not. The authors are either blinded by ideology or engaged in deliberate propaganda; the fact that workers are moving out of blue states and into red states is evidence against their views that needs to be obscured or explained away.

All of the ten states CNBC rated lowest have Republican governors and Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature.

Political bias is one explanation of the conflict between the CNBC ranking and the observed pattern of interstate migration but there is another. Imagine two states, A and B. A has a high level of public services and good public schools funded by high taxes, restrictive zoning designed to favor single family homes, regulations and legal precedents that set a high minimal standard for rental housing. It offers a high quality of life at a high price, making it attractive to high income residents.

B has low levels of services, poor schools, low taxes, housing that is low quality — and inexpensive. Poor people would rather live in A if they could afford it but they can’t. They would prefer to live the life of the rich in other ways, eat better food, work pleasanter jobs, live in bigger homes, if they could afford those too. A is a state for rich people, B for poor. Statistics show that life is better in A. The crime rate is lower; crime is mostly committed by the poor. Health care is better; richer people can afford medical insurance and better doctors.

“The Lone Star State has America’s highest rate of people without health insurance at 16.7%, according to the United Health Foundation, more than twice the national average. More than 17% of Texas adults said they had to forgo a doctor visit that they needed in the past year because of the cost. Even those who do have health insurance can have trouble finding a doctor. The state finishes dead last in primary care physicians per capita.”

(Arkansas) but nearly 19% of its households lack the resources to put adequate food on the table, placing the Natural State dead last for food insecurity, according to the United Health Foundation.

The CNBC authors were confusing characteristics of a state with characteristics of its population, implicitly assuming that the reason A’s residents were rich was that they lived in A instead of that the reason they lived in A was that they were rich, and similarly for the residents of B. Of the ten states that CNBC rated with the lowest quality of life, five were, measured by average income, among the ten poorest states.

It is not exactly political bias — high crime rates and poor medical care are unambiguously bad in a sense in which low minimum wages and trans-friendly bathroom laws are not — but it is an error that fits a pattern.

For an application of economics to a different part of the law, consider the nonwaivable warranty of habitability, a legal doctrine under which some courts hold that apartments must meet court-defined standards with regard to features such as heating, hot water, sometimes even air conditioning, whether or not such terms are provided in the lease —indeed, even if the lease specifically denies that it includes them. The immediate effect is that certain tenants get services that their landlords might not otherwise have provided. Some landlords are worse off as a result; some tenants are better off. It seems as though supporting or opposing the rule should depend mainly on whose side you are on.

In the longer run, the effect is quite different. Every lease now automatically includes a quality guarantee. This makes rentals more attractive to tenants and more costly to landlords. The supply curve, the demand curve, and the price, the rent on an apartment, all shift up. The question, from the standpoint of a tenant, is not whether the features mandated by the court are worth anything but whether they are worth what they will cost.

The answer may well be no. If those features were worth more to the tenants than they cost landlords to provide, landlords should already be including them in their leases — and charging for them. If they cost the landlord more than they are worth to the tenant, then requiring them and letting rents adjust accordingly is likely to make both landlord and tenant worse off. It is particularly likely to make poorer tenants worse off, since they are the ones least likely to value the additional features at more than their cost. A cynical observer might conclude that the real function of the doctrine is to squeeze poor people out of jurisdictions that adopt it by making it illegal, in those jurisdictions, to provide housing of the quality they can afford to rent. (Law’s Order, Chapter 1)

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Why do European and South American soccer fans riot more often and more violently than American ones? What about Asian, African, and Australian soccer fans? What about fans of other sports?

When I raised the question online, one response I got was that American fans riot too, it just doesn’t get as much attention. Another was that the European problem was the fault of the British, a consequence of the class system, with teams identified as either working class or bourgeois, their rivalry fueled by class conflict. Any British readers are invited to confirm or rebut.

Looking at accounts online, violence in US sports is spontaneous, sometimes a result of an upset win, with the loser’s fans angry, sometimes the result of a team winning something important and the fans celebrating, some of them violently. Soccer violence in Europe is, for a significant minority of the fan base, what they are there for, part of the product. Fans identify with a fan club, the clubs often identify with a political faction, extreme left or right, linking the violence to right/left political rivalry. It looks as though European soccer has acquired a double role, both a sport and a context in which people who enjoy violent conflict, mostly young men, can engage in it.

I participated for more than forty years in a much tamer version. I was an active participant in the Society for Creative Anachronism, one of whose activities is medieval combat as a sport, most commonly with (nonlethal) sword and shield. Much of it is single combat but there are battles with hundreds of fighters on a side.

As best I can tell by a web search, the combination of a sport with recreational violence is now only found in soccer and only in Europe; commenters are welcome to offer other examples. The closest historical example that occurs to me is the chariot races of the Byzantine Empire; fans identified with teams, frequently rioted, often played a role in politics.

There is soccer violence elsewhere:

At a recent soccer match in Nzérékoré, Guinea, a controversial refereeing decision led to unrest, resulting in crowd violence that claimed more than 50 lives.

In 2022, violence at Indonesia’s Kanjuruhan stadium during a match led to the deaths of 135 people, as security forces responded to pitch invasions with tear gas, triggering chaos and ultimately a crowd crush.

Port Said Stadium Riot (2012, Egypt) – After a match between Al-Masry and Al-Ahly, fans attacked each other with weapons while exits were blocked. Seventy-four people died and hundreds were injured.

The most notable case in Australia was the chaotic Melbourne Derby in 2022, when fans stormed the pitch at AAMI Park after a flare was thrown back into the stands. Melbourne City’s goalkeeper, Tom Glover, was struck with a metal bucket, leaving him concussed and bleeding.

All from Why is soccer fandom so linked to violence?

Judged by those incidents, it not the same sort of violence. The same is true of riots that occur in other sports; none seem to fit the pattern of violence as part of what some fans go to the game for.

Climate Change vs AI

Why is climate change treated as an urgent problem and AI not? Despite the popular talk about warming as an existential risk, the IPCC projections imply temperature change within the lifetime of present adults of two or three degrees C, comparable to the difference between adjacent states in the US or countries in Europe. AI, on the other hand, has had visible effects on life within the last two or three years, can be plausibly argued1 to pose a threat to our species by creating smarter competitors within a decade or two. National governments adopt policies costing billions of dollars in the attempt to slow climate change, do nothing substantial to slow AI or make its consequences less threatening.

Is the difference only that climate came first, already occupying the niche of “threatened catastrophe to obtain clicks and use to argue for policies” when AI came along? It would be interesting to plot the pattern of previous threatened catastrophes to see if the decline of one leads to the rise of another. The previous ones that occur to me are nuclear annihilation and population growth, the other current candidate population decline, but:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” (H. L. Mencken, 1918)

Which provides one possible explanation.

Low Cost Cooling

A common hot weather strategy, especially for people living in big old houses without air conditioning, is to open windows at night when it is cool out, close them in the morning. It should be straightforward to automate the procedure, using windows or vents that can be set to open when the temperature outside is cooler than the temperature inside, close when it is warmer, with fans to increase the airflow when desired. I would expect both the capital cost and the operating cost of such a system, used to replace or supplement air conditioning, to be trivial relative to the cost of air conditioning itself. Yet I do not think I have ever seen such a system.

Have I missed it? Or is there some non-obvious problem with the idea?

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

Past posts, sorted by topic

A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing

A draft of my next book, Consequences of Climate Change, webbed for comments.

One such proposal could be genuine, a worthwhile project for creating online conversations about interesting books. I think this is the third I have received in the past year. Considered as a scam, it makes sense only if targeting multiple authors, since it does not seem likely to get much money from any single author. Targeting multiple authors requires multiple versions of the emails, since they contain moderately detailed references to the author’s work, hardly likely to be worth the cost of hiring someone to compose them.

Unless they are written by an AI.

What made me suspicious the first time was the flattery. I am a big fish in several small ponds but the message did not feel as though it was coming from any of them. It felt like the sort of thing a not very successful author would like to be told about the intellectual importance of his work. My suspicion increased when a payment by me was finally mentioned.

While writing this post it occurred to me that I too have access to AI.

The “flattery scam” is a phishing tactic where scammers use AI to scrape your book’s details (like Amazon reviews) to craft highly personalized, complimentary emails. They often impersonate famous authors, publishers, or book clubs, offering deals like mentorship, foreign rights sales, or podcast interviews, only to demand upfront fees or gain unauthorized access to your accounts. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] (Google response to the search string [email flattery scam author])

From the first link I discovered that I had underestimated the potential return from a single victim. Once he falls for the first stage there are apparently ways of continuing the scam that cost him, and get the scammer, substantial sums.

From the last link my favorite comment:

None of it works without one thing. Your instinct to say yes when it appears that someone finally notices your work.

Other Versions

That started me thinking about other offers, apparently tailored to me, that I have received from multiple email addresses, I assumed from multiple people.

One is to fix problems with my web site. I interpreted it as a real offer. My site was originally constructed by me using an early HTML editor, later modernized by the teenage daughter of a fan. It would not be surprising if it contained code that violated current standards, could be fixed by a competent web editor. I assumed that the motive was being paid for services; it had not occurred to me that once I trusted someone with temporary control of my site he could take advantage of the situation with consequences costly for me and profitable for him.

Another and similar offer is to revise my site to raise its ranking in search engines. That also I interpreted as an honest offer, probably based on the reasonable assumption that a site that already got a fair amount of traffic was a commercial enterprise selling goods or services. Mine isn’t; it exists for me to link to in online conversations and for people looking for something I have written to find it, for which purposes it is adequate. It probably gets found occasionally by someone searching on a topic I have written on, which is a nice bonus now that search engines exist to do that, but not what I created the site for.

A third offer is to revise my Wikipedia page for me. Looking at the current version I find one minor error that I have no reason to correct^[1] , a more accurate description of my first novel than I would have expected, nothing I much want to change.

Further googling in search of information on scams found:

How to Identify the Severn House Scam

Suspicious Email Domains: Scammers typically use unofficial or spoofed domains (e.g., @severnhouse.uk) or free email providers. All genuine communication from Severn House and the Joffe Books Group will only come from an official @joffebooks.com

I spent some time two months ago trying to figure out whether an email purportedly from a Severn House editor expressing interest in my next book was genuine. Apparently not; her email provider was aol.com. I only got one such offer so it did not occur to me that it might be AI, only that it might be a scam.

Which makes me wonder whether the multiple messages that first drew my interest were from one source or from multiple sources copying a scam that one had pioneered.

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

Past posts, sorted by topic

A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing

A draft of my next book, Consequences of Climate Change, webbed for comments.

^[1] One version of the story of my role in the creation of Pennsic. I have avoided putting the correct version online since one of the more authentically period features of the SCA is the inaccuracy of its oral history.

A polygraph, often incorrectly referred to as a lie detector (Wikipedia)

My novel Salamander is a fantasy in which some mages are truthtellers. I did not put as much thought as I should have into the question of how a society would be different if it was possible to tell when someone was (subjectively) lying, a question relevant to fictional worlds but also to possible futures. A better understanding of how the mind works might produce a real lie detector, one that reliably reported whether a speaker believed that what he said was true.

What effects would it have on our society, assuming the lie detector was inexpensive and available to almost everyone?

Firm Size

The size of firms is determined by the tradeoff between the transaction cost of market transactions and the inefficiency of hierarchical coordination; a profit-maximizing firm does things in-house until it gets big enough that the cost of increased inefficiency from a larger firm outweighs the cost of doing them on the market.¹ A reliable lie detector would reduce some of the problems of market transactions. You would still not know if a potential suppliers product was as good or he was as reliable a source as he claimed but you would at least know if he thought it was. It would also reduce the inefficiency due to hierarchy, since one source of that is the loss of information transmitted up and down the hierarchy due to workers, or employers, saying what they want believed instead of what they believe is true. That makes the net effect on firm size indeterminate, but since both effects are reductions in cost it ought to make the society richer.

Government Size

I do not know of a theory of government size, measured by population, area,2 or power, as well worked out and convincing as Coase’s theory of the firm. One approach might be to look at factors that make a government more likely to become large, another to look at factors that might make a larger government more likely to be overthrown.

If one believes that political mechanisms tend to produce the optimal size of government, Whig History writ large, the Coasian logic carries over; a lie detector improves both hierarchical production by government and its market alternatives, making the net effect uncertain. If one believes that the size of government is largely determined by how easy it is to collect, or to evade, taxation, then a lie detector would produce a bigger government. If, on the other hand, one believes that size is a function of how easy it is for politicians to lie to their population, a lie detector should have the opposite effect.

Torture Works

“Magister Coelus once spoke to me of the limits of magery to extract information without destroying the mage one used it against. It had not occurred to him that the combination of torture with truth telling, a simple magery familiar to our enemies as to us, provides a means of extracting information from a prisoner with no injury to his mind, only his body.” (Prince Kieron in Salamander)

That was one effect of truthtelling that I did include in my novel. The existence of truthtelling might reduce public distaste for torture, since the authorities can argue that if the suspect is innocent he only has to say so.

Further effects to be considered are those on law courts — defendants and witnesses may still say things that are not true but only if they believe them. Also on dating and on marital fidelity.

There are sometimes things one doesn’t want to know; there might be questions you never ask amongst friends and family.

The lie detector is judging subjective truth. That opens up opportunities for people who are good at believing what they want to believe, a talent that could be especially valuable to politicians.

It might even get one elected president.

Evidence

We have some evidence on the question. There have been societies, such as the Commanche,3 whose members believed that an oath taken in a particular form had supernatural consequences, that perjurers would die. In 17^th century England one argument against allowing hearsay testimony in a trial was that the person being quoted had not been sworn so could not be trusted, implying that those who had been to some degree could be. A residue of such a belief survives in our society in the practice of testifying under oath.

By looking at a society where such beliefs were strong and nearly universal, one ought to be able to learn a good deal about what consequences reliable truth telling would have, whether in a fantasy society or our own high tech future.

Arguably, the effect of a lie detector would be to make the society higher trust, so one could get some evidence by observing how existing high trust societies differ from others.

Additional ideas welcome.

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

Past posts, sorted by topic

A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing

A draft of my next book, Consequences of Climate Change, webbed for comments.

A restaurant provides me two different products: Food and a place to eat it. Both are valuable to me, both are costly to the restaurant. Yet restaurants price only the food. The table is free, however long I use it. Why?

Imagine a restaurant designed by an economist. At each table there is a clock; it starts running when the waiter shows up to take your order. When you get your bill, one of the items is table rental, based on the number of seats at the table and the length of time for which you used them.

The advantage of this approach is that it can give diners the right incentives on both margins. Diners who want to spend an hour and a half in conversation are free to do so, with no dirty looks from the waiters since they are paying for the privilege. Under current circumstances they are imposing a cost on the restaurant and the patrons waiting to be served and, social pressure aside, have no incentive to take account of that cost in deciding whether or not to move the conversation to some less costly space, perhaps someone’s living room.

Since the restaurant is recovering part of its cost from table rentals, the price of its food can be correspondingly lower; patrons will not be discouraged from choosing soup or salad by the fact that their price includes an implicit charge for tying up a table. Economist readers should be able to fill in the argument for themselves; it is the usual argument in favor of using prices as incentives to make it in the interest of individuals to take proper account of the costs and benefits of their choices.

I have, of course, oversimplified a bit. When a restaurant is half empty the marginal cost to it of my sitting at the table is essentially zero, so a restaurant should only run its table clocks during the hours when it expects to be operating at capacity. That will give diners who like leisurely conversation an incentive to fit their conversational meals into the times when they do not impose costs on others.

One can imagine special reasons why a restaurant would not adopt such a policy. Perhaps it almost never operates at capacity. Perhaps the nuisance of keeping track of table time is greater than the gains. Perhaps a clock at the table would interfere with the aesthetic experience of fine dining for its patrons.

Each of these reasons would apply to only some restaurants. So we would expect to observe a world in which some restaurants price only the food, some price only the table and give away the food — all you can eat buffets come close, although they charge a fixed price for the table, not a price per minute — and some price both. So far as I know, no restaurant follows what I have just argued is the most natural and obvious pricing strategy, separately pricing food and table rental.

Lines

Consider a restaurant whose patrons know that if they come for dinner on Friday or Saturday they will have to wait forty-five minutes for a table. The long line does not increase the number of people the restaurant can serve^[1] but does impose an additional cost on customers in waiting time, raising the total cost of the meal enough to reduce quantity of meals demanded to the quantity the restaurant can produce.

Suppose the wait is for the customers equivalent to a ten-dollar increase in price. If the restaurant raised its price for nights it was busy by ten dollars the line would shrink to close to zero. Customers on average would be no worse off, paying the extra price in money instead of time, and the restaurant would be better off by ten dollars per diner. In the longer run, the increase in the amount restaurants charged on busy nights would increase the supply of restaurants, bringing down the price and transferring some of the benefit back to the customers.

Restaurants do, to some extent, vary their price in this way, usually by announcing special discounts for low-demand nights rather than special surcharges for high-demand nights. Nonetheless, predictable long lines are a familiar feature of the restaurant world, which suggests some significant constraint limiting the degree to which they can vary their prices. A similar pattern is observed in other contexts, concerts, opening nights of popular films, and the like. Producers frequently follow pricing polices that lead to wasteful competition for underpriced goods. Doing so appears to make the producer worse off, contrary to what we would expect from the usual economic assumption of rationality.

One explanation consistent with casual observation is that a rock group or movie theater that routinely charged a price sufficient to ration demand down to supply for high-demand events would offend its customers, lose more in the long run than it gained. But this explanation raises a second puzzle: the behavior of the customers. The average customer is no worse off in the short run as a result of such a policy, since it merely converts cost in time into cost in cash. And he is better off in the long run. So why should customers be offended? Why should they choose not to patronize producers who price their goods in the way that economic theory suggests they should?

Another explanation I have seen is that a long line is advertising, evidence that the food must be good since lots of people want to eat it. It also advertises a long wait. A shorter line and a reputation for a high price should do the former without the latter.

Waiting in line costs some people more than others. Perhaps the function of the line is to change the mix of customers, more poor students, fewer rich businessmen. I have a hard time thinking of a version of that that makes sense for a firm trying to maximize its profits but not all firms are; a singer might prefer some fans to others, perhaps identify more closely with the poor students.

A final explanation, more plausible for rock concerts than for restaurants, is that the line is part of the product, benefit not cost for the people in it flirting and gossiping with fellow fans.

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

Past posts, sorted by topic

A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing

A draft of my next book, Consequences of Climate Change, webbed for comments.

^[1] A short line increases the number served, since it provides an inventory of customers that allows the restaurant to produce at full capacity in the face of unpredictable demand. The puzzle is why there are predictable lines beyond those required for that purpose, which a forty-five minute line surely is.

In the US, low and mid-priced hotels usually provide a free breakfast; I am told that ones priced above $200 often do not. The breakfast at the low end is pretty minimal but the better ones, such as the Hampton Inns that are one of our standard choices when traveling, struck me as more than adequate — until I experienced the breakfast buffets of Europe and South America. The American ones usually include a waffle machine operated by the guest, a few kinds of dry cereal, oatmeal, bagel shaped rolls, a few varieties of obviously mass-produced pastries, bread, a toaster, apples, bananas, juice. Also scrambled eggs or machine made “omelets,” hard boiled eggs, bacon or sausage, tea and coffee.

The pastries in European and South American breakfast buffets were freshly baked, the bread recently out of an oven not a supermarket shelf. One of the Nero Wolfe novels contains a diatribe by Wolfe on the scrambled eggs served in the American household, followed by a demonstration by Wolfe, cook and epicure as well as detective, of how they should be made. I am not sure the scrambled eggs I was served in Krakow or Buenos Aires would meet Wolfe’s standards but they came a lot closer than anything I have had from a Hampton inn.

European hotel breakfasts—often included with your stay —tend to be more substantial, higher-quality, and less processed than US free breakfasts. While US buffets feature packaged muffins, waffles, and processed meats, European spreads typically highlight unwrapped local cheeses, artisan bread, cold cuts, fresh fruit, and espresso. (A well informed AI in Google’s employ)

My observations raise three questions:

1. Why do many hotels provide breakfast as an all-you can eat buffet instead of pricing items separately as restaurants usually do?

2. Why do many of them include breakfast in the price of the room instead of pricing it separately?

3. Why are the hotel breakfast buffets in Europe and South America so much better than those in the US?

The answer to the first question, like the answer to the more general question of all-you-can-eat buffets, hinges on the tradeoff between transaction costs and inefficiency costs, the latter depending in turn on the marginal cost of food. The advantage of the all-you-can-eat buffet is that it saves the cost of serving food to the customer and monitoring how much of what he eats. The disadvantage is that the customer may consume food past the point where its value to him is more than its cost to the restaurant, reducing the gain from the transaction, some of which goes to the restaurant as profit. A further disadvantage is that the restaurant is unable to distinguish the heavy eater from the light eater and charge him more for a meal of greater value to him and greater cost to the restaurant. The first problem is more of an issue the greater the cost to the restaurant of the food, more of an issue for steak or sushi than for salad or spaghetti.1 The second is more of an issue the more customers vary in how much they eat. Breakfast buffets in US hotels mostly consist of food with inexpensive ingredients and for which labor inputs, converting bread to toast or batter to waffles, are largely provided by the customer. That helps explain US breakfast buffets but not the more luxurious buffets elsewhere.

I have come across an answer to the second question, do not know if it is true: Tax evasion. Meals paid for by an employer are taxable fringe benefits, since if he was not working he would still be eating. If he was not on a trip for his employer he would also still be sleeping but could sleep in his own bed at no additional cost, so a hotel room paid for by the employer does not count as a taxable fringe benefit. Include the breakfast in the price of the room and it is no longer taxable. I have been unable to find clear evidence of whether the explanation is true but it fits a general pattern: Anything odd on the market is either tax evasion or price discrimination. Price discrimination would work as an explanation if value to guest of room and value of breakfast anti-correlated but I do not see any reason why they would. I also do not know whether, if the explanation is true, it would be true under the different tax systems of Europe or South America.

I do not know the answer to my third question, but potential explanations of the quality difference exist for both the demand and supply side of the transaction. The obvious demand side explanation is that the less civilized Americans care less about the quality of what they eat. An alternative explanation is that the hard working Americans devote less time to breakfast than lazier and more self-indulgent travelers from other lands because the Americans have work to do or if tourists sights to see. One of the two explanations should be popular with almost everyone.

The supply side explanation is that most Americans can’t cook, which makes hiring the few who can expensive.

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

Past posts, sorted by topic

A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing

A draft of my next book, Consequences of Climate Change, webbed for comments.

Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League

…

“Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education,” explains the 61-year-old professor … (El Pais)

It was a closed book take-home exam; the problems were designed to test the student’s ability but proved doable by an AI. After Serrano changed the final from take-home to in-person about half the students who had gotten perfect scores on the midterm chose not to take the final.

The existence of AI, like the earlier problem of students buying papers online, reduces the ability of teachers to test their students but does not eliminate it, is inconvenient but not catastrophic. It makes some kinds of testing more difficult but not impossible; Serrano could have asked students whose midterms were suspiciously good to explain some of their answers and failed any obviously unable to do so. That would have been additional work for him and, judging by the article, not a policy Brown would have endorsed. Unwilling or unable to do that that he can base his future grading on work done in-person and adequately monitored.

Who Are Exams For

The story raises the question of the function of exams, more generally of grading. There are at least three possible answers.

The first is that the purpose of grading is to generate information used by potential employers or by academic officials current or future, information many students would like to distort in a way favorable to themselves. That creates a conflict of interest between the school and professor, trying to generate accurate information, and the student, trying to distort the information with AI or older technologies.

Another function of testing is producing information for the student, telling him which parts of what he is supposed to have learned he has learned. This is, in my experience, especially important in economics courses. Economics deals with things students believe they understand, uses terms such as “competition” and “efficient” whose meaning they believe they know, with the result that students sometime badly overestimate how much of what the course has covered they have learned. Graded quizzes reduce that problem; if they do not contribute to the final grade there is no incentive to cheat.

A third reason to test students is to produce information for the professor; if most of my students turn out not to know something I have covered I might want to cover it again, perhaps differently. Here again, as long as the results of the testing are not used for grading there should be no incentive to cheat.

I conclude that forms of testing for which it is hard to prevent cheating, such as Professor Serrano’s take-home exam, are appropriate for generating information for students and professor, provided that they are not used, and students know they will not be used, for grading. Testing used for grading should either be in-person and monitored or with cheating deterred by serious efforts to detect and punish it.

What Should Count as Cheating and What Is Wrong With It?

It is not immediately obvious what is wrong with using AI on a test. If the purpose of the test is to generate information for potential future employers, why should they want the student tested without a tool that, if they hire him, he will have? A basketball coach does not evaluate potential team members by how well they can play with one hand tied behind their back.

Arguably the skills the employer wants tested are those that an AI cannot replace and it was up to Professor Serrano to find ways of testing for them. His take-home midterm, taken without the assistance of AI, might have provided information for him and his students about how far they had come along a path that would eventually produce skills an AI could not substitute for but not information for a future employer about the skills of the students taking the exam.

An older version of the same issue was the use of calculators on tests, permitted in some contexts, forbidden in others. If what is being tested is grade school arithmetic it makes no sense to allow calculators but, in a world where anyone doing arithmetic has a calculator to do it on, that looks like evidence that being able to do arithmetic is no longer a useful skill hence no longer something worth testing.

The argument the other way, the argument for the conventional approach to grading, is that the information being generated is not what the student has learned but how well he can learn, some combined effect of intelligence, willingness to work, and whatever else makes a successful student and a valuable employee. Specific skills are different for different jobs, the ability to acquire skills valuable for all.

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

Past posts, sorted by topic

A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing

A draft of my next book, Consequences of Climate Change, webbed for comments.

I have thought a good deal about the question in the American context. At a broad level the answer is the same. Since voters are rationally ignorant, what the government of a democracy finds it politically profitable to do depends in large part on free information, what everyone knows, true or false. To change the political outcome, change the mix of free information. Different people, with different interests and abilities, can do that in different ways.

Some of the applications of that approach are the same in Chile as in the US but not all. Chile is one of a substantial group of generally similar countries and both the most liberal — in the Chilean sense — and one of the richest. That fact by itself is some evidence for liberalism, so making Chileans more aware of it is one way of making them more liberal. Movies, television shows, novels set in other Latin American countries and giving an accurate picture could do it, which provides one approach for Chilean libertarians with the relevant talents to use.

Another approach is to make libertarian ideas available in attractive forms, movies or TV shows that people will enjoy watching, books, essays, blogs they will enjoy reading. The slow way is to create them, the fast way is to use what already exists, make it available to the Chilean population. My standard example is the television series Yes Minister. It was created by British libertarians, demonstrates in entertaining ways some of the reasons governments do the wrong things, and was massively popular.2 Creating it required talent and effort but that has already been done. Yes Minister is available on Amazon in Spanish in Spain and some Latin American countries, also in some countries on Netflix or Apple TV. I do not know if it currently is available in Chile or Argentina but if not it could be. Making it available in Spanish and publicizing it would let libertarianism in Latin America benefit by the talent and effort of British libertarians. Another British example would be books by C. Northcote Parkinson, originator of Parkinson’s Law, who is good at using humorous essays to make serious points.3 Those are examples I happen to know of but there must be many other works conveying a libertarian message in an entertaining form not currently known, perhaps not available, in Chile.

I am told that the choice in Chile is between bad public schools, very expensive private schools, and partly public schools that are less expensive than the private schools but not much less bad than the public. I presume that all of them, like almost all US schools, follow the same pattern: Choose from the large number of things worth learning a largely arbitrary subset and make all children pretend to learn it. Children enjoy learning things they are interested in more than things that adults have decided they should be made to learn. That plus the widespread availability of the internet suggests a tactic for spreading ideas: create online classes, games, stories in things kids are interested in and embed your ideas in them. History and economics are the subjects that first occur to me but science fiction and fantasy can, often do, contain ideas relevant to libertarianism.

Humans classify other people as ingroup or outgroup, “us” or “them,” in multiple ways. The same person who is in your ingroup as a fellow fan of the same football team might be in your outgroup as a supporter of a different political party; which way you think of him affects how you interact with him, including how willing you are to listen to him. One friend of mine from my medieval hobby is professionally involved in regulatory issues; I am more willing to take his arguments about those issues seriously when they disagree with my views than I would be for the same arguments from a stranger.

That suggests that one way to get people to take libertarian arguments seriously would be to have them offered by someone they see as a member of their ingroup, especially a prominent and respected member. G.K. Chesterton was both a libertarian and a prominent Catholic apologist, someone well-read Catholics are likely to have heard of and think well of. Libertarian ideas presented in quotes from his essays are likely to get a more sympathetic hearing from Catholics than the same ideas in quotes from me or my father. The same approach should work for other writers and other groups; a libertarian argument from George Orwell should be more likely to get through to a socialist than the same ideas from Ayn Rand.

It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of. (George Orwell, “Grounds For Dismay,” The Observer, April 9, 1944)

I do not read Spanish; someone who does should be able to find prominent Spanish speaking figures with libertarian views worth quoting, perhaps Borges, who described himself as a classical liberal, perhaps O’Higgins or San Martín, liberal revolutionaries in Chile and Argentina.

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

Past posts, sorted by topic

A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing

A draft of my next book, Consequences of Climate Change, webbed for comments.

I was told that the Libertarian Party of Chile got 14% of the votes in the recent presidential election. That sounds impressive since the best the US Libertarian Party has managed is 3.3 %, but part of the reason is that Chile has its elections in two rounds, with the second round between the two parties that did best in the second round. A libertarian in Chile can vote for the libertarian party in the first round and his preferred major party in the second. A libertarian in America who votes for the LP gives up his chance to vote for one of the major party candidates. That suggests an advantage for the Chilean system: It provides a way in which a minor party can show its strength and by doing so grow into a major party. Argentina has the same system, which may explain how Milei was able to create what is now the strongest party in the country.

Chile currently has an unemployment rate of over nine percent. I was told that among the reasons are an increase in the minimum wage rate and an increase in an employment tax, something like our social security tax but paid entirely by the employer. That those two changes would increase the unemployment rate is not surprising; the interesting part is their interaction.

Our social security tax is paid half by the employer, half by the employee. I have always viewed the division as purely ornamental, believed that the effect of the tax would be exactly the same if it was paid entirely by the employer or entirely by the employee. If I pay you ten dollars and the government takes one dollar of it, it does not matter whether they take the dollar before I pay it or after. Either way I end up paying ten and you end up getting nine.

In the presence of a minimum wage law it does matter. With a ten dollar an hour minimum wage and a one dollar tax paid by the employee, if I hire you for ten dollars an hour you cost me ten dollars an hour and get nine. If the tax is on the employer and I hire you for ten dollars an hour you cost me eleven and get ten. If your work is worth more than ten to me but less than eleven, I hire you in the first case but not the second. So putting the employment tax on the employer, as Chile does, increases the effect of the minimum wage law, pushes unemployment higher than if the tax was on the employee or split between them.

The national drink, but not exactly a drink, of Chile is the Mote con Huesillo. The mote part is cooked, husked grains of wheat. The huesillo is a dried peach cooked in water, sugar (slightly caramelized according to my local informant) and cinnamon. The grains end up at the bottom of the glass along with the rehydrated peach, both eaten after the liquid has been drunk. Quite tasty. I dry our peaches in slices or as peach leather, do not know how hard it would be to dry a whole peach.

Our peaches will be coming ripe soon.

I chatted in the plane to Buenos Aires with a woman from Argentina who told me that Millei was crazy and crazy was what Argentina needed. I told that story to some Millei supporters. They agreed.

The airport in Buenos Aires has the usual large room where arriving passengers have their passports checked. There was the usual barrier intended to form hundreds of passengers into a zigzag line. I believe it is the only such room, possibly the only such zigzag barrier I have seen where, when there were ten or twenty in the line rather then hundreds, someone had the sense to open gaps in the barrier to let people go straight.

My first breakfast in Buenos Aires provided another example of sensible behavior. Restaurants usually serve butter at refrigerator temperature, which looks nice but doesn’t spread. The breakfast buffet at the HN Lancaster hotel, of which I will write more below, has it at room temperature.

Those are two small ways in which people in Argentina appear to be more sensible than most.

The elevator in my hotel requires a room card to go up, a common security precaution, but also to go down, a requirement that serves no purpose I can think of. The turnstile controlling entrance to the university where I gave a talk requires a university ID card not only to go in but also to go out. It is the same mistake in two different dimensions, one vertical, one horizontal.

Score so far: two plus, two minus.

In Buenos Aires, local streets separate the part for driving from the part for walking more effectively than they do where I live.

In Argentina even the Nachos are political.

The breakfast buffet in Santiago was good by American standards but not up to the level of the best European hotels. The one in Buenos Aires, on the other hand …

The Argentines like sweets. The breakfast buffet is largely deserts; scrambled egg and sausage are squeezed down to pots at the end, so unobtrusive that I only discovered them the second morning. It is the only one I can remember with honeycomb as well as honey (see below). The honey is next to Dulce de Leche, a sweet spread offered in multiple forms, at every meal and with almost everything. A croissant is sprinkled with powdered sugar; in case that is not sweet enough there is a dab of Dulce on top. They eat four meals a day, the extra between lunch and (very late) dinner, their equivalent of the English tea but with pastries instead of tea and sandwiches.

Concerning “Marmalade”

The original meaning of “Marmalade” was quince preserves, possibly quince paste, exported from Portugal where the word for quince is “Marmela.” In the US marmalade is a jam made with citrus, in Argentina any kind of jam. Browsing the breakfast buffet I noticed an unlabeled stack of what looked very much like rectangles of quince paste, something I had made from a recipe published in England at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century. It was indeed dulce de membrillo1 — quince paste. Later that day I noticed quinces in a grocery store, something you would almost never see in the U.S.2 The price came to about a dollar a pound, clearly not an exotic luxury. I am writing this in the plane flying home; my checked luggage contains a membrillo pie, a gift from one of the Argentine libertarians.

The quinces on my tree should be coming ripe in about three months.

Showers

There are three desiderata for hotel showers:

1. A sprayer that you can hold in your hand or attach to a vertical pipe as a second shower head of adjustable height. Positioning it to spray the wall lets you adjust the water temperature without getting scorched or frozen.

2. Rapid response of water temperature to the control.

3. Water temperature that, once adjusted, is stable.

The NH Lancaster in Buenos Aires had all three. My hotel in Santiago had the first two but the water temperature, once adjusted, occasionally had fits of alternating between too hot and too cold. It seemed to happen less if I showered early, which made me suspect that it might be due to the effect of other guests taking showers.

The Hilton in Montevideo did not have the first, although it did have an enclosure large enough to make it possible to adjust the shower temperature while not under the shower. It lacked either the second or the third, I am not sure which; one night did not provide enough data to tell whether the problem was variable water temperature or the slow response of the temperature to the controls leading me to repeatedly over-compensate.

In about another fifteen hours I will be home.

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I have a conjecture about part of the answer.

The world is a complicated place. One way in which we deal with that complication, in law and thought, is by representing a complicated reality with a much simpler model. There are lots of examples; here are two:

Some people are more mature than others, physically, emotionally, intellectually. For many purposes we lump all those differences, along with the continuous range of ages, into two categories: children and adults. Doing it that way makes it easier, in law and in conversation, to deal with issues where maturity matters. The cost, as with any simplification, is sometimes getting the wrong answer.

If we define gender by genitals, hermaphrodites are both male and female, eunuchs in some sense neither. If we define it by DNA, some apparent males are female, some females male. Some are neither XX nor XY, some both. Nonetheless, we continue to classify people, in the law and inside our heads, as either men or women. Most of the time the simplification fits the reality. Occasionally it doesn’t.

Someone who does not fit our categories is a problem not because he is doing anything to us but because his existence makes it harder for us to use our simplified models to make sense of the world. The problem only exists if we are aware of it; XXY genetics existed a century ago but nobody knew about them. Hermaphrodites existed and were known to exist but nobody you knew was a hermaphrodite or, if someone was, you didn’t know about it,1 so there was no problem for your day to day attempt to use a simplified map to navigate social space.

One example of the breakdown of a simplified map is the breakdown of the concept of marriage. It used to be that people could usefully be classified as married or not married, which simplified a good deal of social calculation. As it became increasingly common for couples to openly live together without being married, the classification began to break down. That made it harder to figure out whether you had to invite A to dinner if you invited B, whether you were free to court C, how to briefly sum up your knowledge of the status of A and B when describing it to D.

The breakdown of the English class system may be another example, one I am familiar with mostly through literature.2 The population could for most purposes be sorted into three classes: working, middle, and upper. Knowing what class someone was in did not precisely describe anything about him; a successful businessman might be richer than most of his class superiors, a poor clergyman was upper class. It approximately described many things about him: accent, income, profession, education. Knowing which class someone was in gave you at least a first guess at how you should interact with him, how he would expect you to. People who didn’t fit the pattern, such as the rich landowner who “made it in trade” or the American professor visiting at Cambridge who mowed the lawn of his rented house, are a problem. Cambridge professors, being upper class, don’t mow lawns.

That example is first hand, or almost; it happened to my father some seventy years ago, spending a year at Cambridge.

Transsexuals are a particularly striking example of the problem. If you knew him as a male and now know her as a female, there is a real problem fitting him/her into your mental picture of the world, a problem that shows up in my discomfort with using either gendered pronoun. I can see how other people might find similar difficulties in fitting into their heads polygamous families, same sex married couples, a chil with two mommies, and much else.

Other people have no obligation to make their lives fit my picture; maintaining my map of the world is my problem, not theirs, reality has no obligation to conform to it. But I think the discomfort which comes when reality changes in ways that make obsolete what used to be an adequate set of simplifications provide at least a partial explanation for the strength of the response.

I do not feel entitled to change people to fit my preferred picture but some people could and did. James Scott, in Seeing Like a State, describes ways in which states try to alter the territory to fit the map, to change people to make them easier to rule. It is easier to keep track of people, to know who has paid his taxes or been drafted, if they all use the same naming system, to tax their land if they all use the same system for land tenure and land measurement. If you are sending agents from the capital out to the provinces it helps if the language is the same in both, ideally the same across the whole country.

James Scott describes how, in these and other ways, the human territory was altered to fit the rulers’ map in the process of building the modern nation of France.

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To people skeptical of the rational model, that conclusion is less clear. To see the problem, consider an extreme version. Larry Niven, in some of his stories, describes wireheads, people who have had a wire inserted into the pleasure center of their brain and stimulate it with a mild electric current. The intense pleasure that results dominates all other concern, making it possible for a wirehead to die of hunger and thirst because getting food or drink is simply more trouble than it is worth.

For a more homely example, consider a pleasure drug that many of us have overdosed on: Chocolate bars. If you have more elevated tastes, substitute dinner at a four star restaurant in Paris. While it is true that food is useful to keep us alive, sufficient food for that purpose — lentils, powdered milk, vitamin pills, rice or potatoes — does not cost very much or taste very good. Most of what we spend on food buys pleasure. In modern societies, calories, even moderately tasty calories, are cheap. People like to eat. Voila: An obesity “epidemic.”

I might like to be thinner, have not always been very good at getting that way. Considering the situation as an economist, I conclude that if I cannot lose weight the benefit of lost weight must be less than the cost. Introspection provides a less complimentary picture of my role in the situation. It looks rather as though I am, like Niven’s wireheads, irrationally willing to sacrifice my long term welfare to my short term pleasures. A rational wirehead, after all, should be willing to take brief breaks from intense pleasure to eat and drink in order to to stay alive for more pleasure.

For a different angle on the issue, consider a question I raised in another post: Does consumer sovereignty, the principle of accepting individual actions as proof of what we value, apply if we have good reason to regard the actions as due to evolutionary mistakes, adaptations to a past environment very different from the one we now live in? In most past environments eating when you had the chance, eating enough to get fat if you could, was a sensible strategy since next month might be famine. From an evolutionary standpoint, current obesity is simply a case of humans being poorly adapted to their current environment.

Following out the logic of that argument, one would conclude that greater choice sometimes makes us worse off. If so, is that an adequate reason to abandon libertarian conclusions, to, for example, support government restrictions on fat in food and cheap junk food in restaurants and grocery stores? Is it a good argument, following out the line other economists have taken with regard to pollution or fossil fuels, to support high taxes on chocolate bars and other tasty foods to compensate not for externalities but for irrational tastes?

If we had a government run by benevolent philosopher kings, that might make sense. The problem with it in the world we live in is that although I may sometimes be a bad judge of my own welfare, sometimes even a bad judge in predictable ways, I have one large advantage over any one else for decisions about my own welfare. Unlike almost everyone else in the world, I can be trusted to put my own welfare very high in my priorities. Once we shift the decision to someone else, however rational, we can expect him to make decisions for me in his interest rather than mine.

Which brings us back to the old libertarian argument for certifying doctors instead of licensing them. Patients, however rational, are imperfectly informed about the competence of doctors. Why not solve that problem by having some competent authority decide who is allowed to practice as a physician?

That is the theory of medical licensing. The practice, as shown long ago, is that the medical profession uses licensing to hold down the number of physicians, sometimes in ways unrelated to their professional competence. It would be better to allow the competent authority to certify doctors and let the patients decide for themselves whether to accept the authority’s judgement.

If you do not find that description of licensing and that conclusion convincing, you might consider the wide range of other professions that also require licensing: yacht salesmen, egg graders, barbers, hair braiders and the like. How likely is it that medical licensing exists for an entirely different reason than all the others?

The Other Argument

So far I have assumed that the argument for restrictions on individual liberty is that constraints on me help me get what I want, with some ambiguity between short and long-run wants. That is why we describe such policies as paternalism, the state playing the role of a father guiding his children in their own interest. One alternative is to view the state as controlling my actions for your benefit and your actions for mine. That, the standard economist’s justification for state action, still assumes that the objective of state action is to give people what they want.

Suppose we reject that assumption, as many would, and assume instead that the proper objective of state action is not giving people what they want but what they should want. We might reject wireheading, ban the drugs that are its nearest real world equivalent, not on the grounds that it will fail to give users the life of pleasure that they expect but that a life of pleasure and nothing more is not the life proper to man. Views about what The Good is vary a great deal, but the view that it is not merely giving people what they want is widely held.

Many years ago I heard a talk by Friederich Hayek whose point was the difference between an organization and a self-generating order. An organization has a purpose, can be judged by how well it achieves it. A self-generating order is a way in which multiple individuals, each with his own purposes, can interact. It has no purpose of its own. A corporation or a football team is an organization. A market is a self generating order.

The political system is another. It has no vision of The Good. It is a way in which individuals interact. Perhaps, in a world where different people have different, sometimes incompatible, visions of The Good, letting each pursue his own vision is the best we can do.

Think of it as the liberal compromise. Old meaning of liberal.

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Neckties are an obsolete technology. Their purpose was to seal the shirt at the neck to help keep the wearer warm in unheated rooms. They have been made obsolete twice, first by central heating and a second time by elastic. They are still worn, although less often than when I was young.

Neckties are a fossil. There are others.

One common pattern in schooling is the mass lecture, a professor speaking to an audience in the hundreds with students taking notes. In the fourteenth century that was a low cost way of spreading knowledge but why did it survive the invention of the printing press?

The author of a book can do a much more careful job of presenting information than a lecturer can. A student is lucky to attend a class by the best lecturer at his school, can choose to read the best book on the subject that has ever been written. Lectures must be attended at a fixed time, books can be read on the reader’s schedule. A lecture goes at the same speed for everyone in the audience, when reading a book you can go quickly over the obvious parts, slowly over the parts you find difficult. A small class permits a substantial amount of interaction between teacher and students, but with a mass lecture that is reduced to at most a few questions followed by responses; the author of a book can include in it responses to the usual questions.

Another fossil is the US biofuels policy. In my view it was a mistake from the beginning but at least when it was created there were arguments for it, to hold down CO₂ and reduce America’s dependence on foreign sources of fuel. America became an oil exporter; more careful calculation of the amount of CO₂ produced in the process of growing maize and turning it into alcohol found that it was as much as would be produced by the petroleum it replaced. We still have the policy; turning maize into alcohol reduces the supply of maize, which raises its price, and farmers vote.

Maize is the chief food for more than three hundred million people in Africa. Think of it as America’s contribution to world hunger.

Libraries originated as places to store books and let people access them at a time when books were copied by hand and correspondingly expensive. After the invention of the printing press made books something that ordinary people could afford, libraries remained useful as places to access a much wider variety of books than anyone had at home, taking advantage of the fact that one book could be read by hundreds of people, each returning the book after reading it.

If a book is on a computer instead of a shelf, a hundred people can read it at once. A library of books can be stored on a single hard disk and accessed by anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world. Buildings called libraries can still be useful as places for students to study or children to play but for their old function they are obsolete, fossils.

Watches were worn to make it easy for the wearer to know the time. Now that almost everyone has a smartphone which also tells time, they are unnecessary.

The same is true of cameras for the same reason. I suppose they must have some advantage over the cameras built into high end phones since professional photographers still use them, but on after I photographed the medieval jewelry in the Wallace collection with my phone because I had forgotten to recharge my camera and came back the next day with the camera and did it again, I could not see any difference in the quality of the pictures. That digital camera is now a fossil sitting in a drawer in my bedroom with one or two older ones that used film.

While on the topic of jewelry… . In “Rings and Promises” Margaret Brinig argues that the custom of giving an expensive engagement ring originated as a performance bond for the promise to marry, supports the claim with data on diamond sales. They increased when state courts stopped allowing damage suits for breach of promise, declined when changing sexual mores reduced the value of virginity on the marriage market and so the cost of its loss.

Recycling

Something that loses its primary function can still retain secondary ones. Neckties no longer are used to keep us warm but they are still useful to convey information. Wearing one signals a serious, conservative, attitude or role; people who work in banks wear ties. You wear one at a funeral or a wedding. They can be used as flags, to signal loyalty or affiliation, a regimental tie or college tie. On the rare occasions when I wear one it is ornamented with busts of Adam Smith. I own, but have never worn, a tie ornamented with dinosaurs, inherited from a geologist father in law.

Libraries are no longer needed to store large numbers of books but a room of children’s books is a convenient place for mothers to bring children to look at books and play with each other. Watches are no longer needed to keep track of time now that everyone has a smart phone in his pocket but they can still keep track of your pulse or count steps, signal you silently that time is up by vibrating against your wrist. A school full of kids may no longer make sense for educating them in a world where they all have access to an internet full of classes and, in the near future, AI teachers who can devote full attention to each student as human teachers with a roomful of kids cannot. But it remains a place where kids can meet each other, make friends. It would work better for that purpose if we did not insist on age segregation; potential friends are not necessarily the same age. Colleges may be becoming obsolete as places to learn but they are an ideal environment for finding a mate and mate search is one of the chief activities of young adults.

Mass lectures may serve some purpose; we still give them more than five hundred years after the invention of the printing press but I don’t know what. A possible guess is that many students can learn by hearing and not by reading, but textbooks can be audiobooks as two of mine are. An alternative guess is that a lecture class is a commitment strategy for someone who would procrastinate on learning from a book until it was too late to do it before the final exam. Neither seems an adequate explanation.

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What characteristics are selected for, hence what characteristics make you fit, are different in a welfare state than under laissez-faire, in a society with reliable birth control than in one without, in a polygamous society than in a monogamous one, in a rich society than a poor one. A rich society with reliable birth control produces very nearly the same selective pressures as a welfare state, since in both how many children you produce and bring to adulthood depends mostly on how many you want not on how many you can afford.

Implicit in the complaint that a welfare state, or anything else, is distorting evolution is the idea that the result of evolution is desirable, that evolution is on our side. In one sense it obviously is. We, like all other living things, are elaborate machines produced by evolution, depend on the machinery it designed to stay alive.

But there are three other senses in which it is false.

To begin with, evolution is not on the side of our species as against others; it designed both me and the squirrels that most years eat my apricots before they get ripe — this year we got lucky. It also designed the disease organisms that eat me.

Second, my evolution optimizes me not my species. A characteristic that increases my extended reproductive success at the cost of yours is selected for, not against, even if the benefit to me is less than the cost to you. This is the biological equivalent of market failure, the fact that rational for each is not necessarily rational for all.

Third, what evolution is optimizing me for is reproductive success. That is, metaphorically speaking, the objective of my genes — but not my objective. I would like to have lots of children and grandchildren, an objective I share with my genes, but that objective trades off against other things I value that my genes don’t.

It follows that evolution is not our friend — or our enemy. It selects for some traits I approve of, some I do not. In evaluating political or social changes one should take account of their effects on what is selected for. One might support some policies specifically for their effects on what is selected for, eugenic policies with the decision made by a government or parents.

From the eugenic standpoint the three alternatives are to do nothing intended to effect the genetics of the population, to have government make decisions intended to affect it, to have parents make such decisions and government allow them to. How does either eugenic approach compare with the alternative of doing neither and leaving the decision to nature, evolution unguided by human efforts to control its results?

One argument I have seen is that evolution, a decentralized optimizing mechanism like the market, can be expected to do a better job than a government in improving the genetics of the population just as the free market does a better job of coordinating economic activity than central planning. The problem with that argument is that we expect to approve of the outcome of a market because what it is maximizing is the extent to which people get what they want. What evolution is maximizing is reproductive success, the ability of the individual to get copies of his genes into later generations. That is what my genes “want” but not what I want for myself, still less what I want other people to maximize.

In a welfare state, even in a sufficiently rich laissez-faire economy, being too stupid to use birth control competently might increase reproductive success. I don’t want to be surrounded by stupid people. Male reproductive success is increased by being good at getting women pregnant and then dumping them; I don’t want to be surrounded by skilled con men either. The government can be expected to do a bad job of eugenics for the same reasons it can be expected to do a bad job of economic planning but evolution cannot be expected to do a good job of eugenics for the reasons the market does a good job of economic coordination.

Libertarian eugenics, eugenics driven by the decisions of individuals or couples, looks like a closer analogy to the market. It shares the market failure problem with other forms of evolution — I will be making choices based on my welfare and that of my descendants, choices which could lower the welfare of you and your descendants. It targets the goals of humans not of their genes; that is, for humans, an advantage over “natural” evolution. Market decisions are sometimes made by parents for their children but usually by individuals for themselves; eugenic decisions are partly for the people making them but also in large part for their descendants. But when the decisions are made the descendants are not present to make them; the parents are the best proxy available since people value the welfare of their children and grandchildren.

I conclude that libertarian eugenics is likely to produce better results than either alternative.

Is There An Alternative To Evolution?

For all of the alternatives I have discussed so far the genetics of the population are controlled by evolution, maximize individual fitness. They produce different results only because what characteristics increase fitness depends on the environment.

Is there an alternative?

There might be. If we develop sufficiently advanced genetic engineering we could have a future in which the genetics of the population are determined not by what genes produced reproductive success for their bearers but by what genes some people chose for other people to have, with the choice made in either a centralized manner by government or a decentralized manner, probably by parents for their children.

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Getting parents the children they want, like getting other people what they want, is best done by leaving the choice up to them. If making it easier for parents to affect the genetics of their children seems to you an odd form of eugenics, consider the equivalent issue in economics. Some people imagine that the way to improve an economy is by having the government decide how much of what is produced and invested and how, but they are wrong, as demonstrated by the countries that tried it.

My favorite example of what I refer to as libertarian eugenics is in Beyond This Horizon, an early Heinlein novel. The fictional technology lets a couple separately select on egg and sperm, combine an egg that has my wife’s musical ability but not her bad circulation with a sperm that contains my memory for poetry but not my APOE4 gene or bad heart, and implant it in my wife’s womb1.

We do not have that technology but we can and do have libertarian eugenics. Sperm and ova are sold; the price is higher if the source has characteristics the buyers want for their child. Couples produce multiple embryos and choose which to implant. Men and women choose mates based in part on the children they expect them to produce. These are all eugenic decisions made by parents, not governments.

A government can make it easier, mostly (as in most other contexts) by getting out of the way.

Legal rules effect what decisions are legal and on what terms. A law banning gestational surrogacy means that a couple who want their own child and cannot produce it has to try to adopt instead. A law making it illegal to test for genetic defects and if found abort result in fewer parents having the children they prefer. Legal restrictions on producing multiple embryos and selecting the best have the same effect at an earlier stage of the process.

One of the constraints on egg and sperm donation is the risk of being held liable for child support. Donors in the US can protect themselves by a contract with the parents signed in advance; that is one of the things those governments get right. Some others, such as the German, do not; the mother can waive her rights but not the child’s. Similar issues arise with other forms of assisted reproduction such as surrogacy, gestational or traditional.

Legalizing the Adoption Market

My previous post raised the possibility of legalizing the adoption market, permitting adoptive parents to pay a woman for the right to adopt her baby. An issue I did not raise there was the possibility of women going into the baby business, becoming pregnant in order to be paid to give the child up.

The price will depend on the baby. The competition from women who would otherwise have aborted should drive the payment for the right to adopt a random baby down to a level at which it covers the cost to the mother of bringing a baby to term but not much more, not enough to be an incentive to get pregnant. But not all babies are random.

If the cost to adopt a random baby is twenty thousand dollars I would expect some couples to be willing to pay a hundred thousand or more to adopt the child of parents with a list of desirable characteristics: healthy (no APOE4 genes), intelligent (signaled by graduation from a top college, tall (people have odd tastes).

Consider a woman who has those characteristics and wants to avoid the rat race of professional or corporate employment. Perhaps her ambitions lie along less remunerative lines: music, art, writing. If she is good at bearing children, as some women are, and has a husband or lover with a similar list of characteristics who does not mind having children of his adopted, she could make a comfortable living producing a baby a year, a somewhat less comfortable living producing one every two years. If no suitable husband or lover is available there are always sperm banks.

This has a eugenic effect not only in my sense, giving (adoptive) parents more nearly the children they want, but also in the sense imagined by the original supporters of eugenics since the result is to increase the number of people descended from parents who were smart and healthy (unfortunately also tall).

Legalizing the adoption market might have a dysgenic effect as well from that standpoint, however, since the children who are adopted instead of aborted will be children of mothers who got pregnant and didn’t want to be and fathers unwilling or unable to support them.

Eugenics vs Eugenics

Eugenics broadly defined is the use of selective breeding to improve the human race. I have been discussing it with “improvement” defined in terms of giving parents the children they want. Most people think of it in terms of a broader and fuzzier definition, as giving humans the characteristics we want them to have. Most of them assume that if it is to be done, the way to do it is to have governments encourage the reproduction of the sort of people we want more of, subsidize, or in the extreme mandate, it, discourage or ban the reproduction of the sorts of people we want fewer of.

I agree with the objective, would like to live in a world where more people were smart, honest, kind. Not only are the means largely, in my view, immoral, violations of individual rights, they are employed by governments likely to use them to do more harm than good. My observation of population policy fifty-some years ago and climate policy more recently left me with a low opinion of the ability of the political mechanism to deal with complicated issues.

That raises the question of to what extent eugenics in my sense, libertarian eugenics, can achieve the objective of eugenics more broadly defined. In some cases, as we have just seen, they might be in conflict, with a policy that promotes the former hindering the latter. But, as a general rule, the characteristics that people want for their children are ones I want for my neighbors and fellow citizens. So while libertarian eugenics may not be a perfect way of achieving the broader objective it may be the best available.

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But correlation is not causation; there are other plausible reasons for low birth rates, some discussed in my earlier post. There are better reasons.

Marriage is a serious, often life changing, step; some people might be unwilling to take it if the other party was free to back out later; willingness to marry is a stronger signal of intent to stay married if divorce is not an option, one reason eliminating or restricting divorce might result in more people getting married. If that seems wrong to you, consider the effect on the mortgage market of a legal change that made it easy for borrowers to default.

Producing a child is much riskier if you are not sure the marriage will last, so making divorce more difficult might also make married couples more willing to have children, a second reason to expect it to raise birth rates. The shift in US states to no fault divorce seems to have been associated with a mild decline in birth rates, which is at least a little evidence for such an effect.

Other Ways

Another way of increasing the birth rate would be to legalize the adoption market. Currently, the cost of adopting a healthy baby is from $40,000 to $85,000, paid to various middlemen. Some women who get pregnant might choose to bear the child rather than aborting it if they could get paid to do so.

One biotech possibility is developing ways of converting other cells into eggs and sperm. That would allow ff and mm couples and older women to have children. Add artificial wombs and most of the biological cost is gone.

Another approach would be to improve mate search. Fifty or sixty years ago I expected computer technology to make it easier to find a compatible mate just as it makes it easier to find books or articles or the fastest route to where you are going; for reasons I do not entirely understand, that has not happened. One possible explanation is that while computer dating made it easier to find a spouse it also made it easier to find a partner for casual sex and the increased availability of casual sex reduced the incentive for marriage.

Law and custom could change to make search easier. Currently there are substantial barriers to prevent dating among fellow employees; dating among fellow students is permitted, between professors and their students mostly not.1 These are all contexts where people get the sort of information about each other relevant for mate search. There are obviously potential conflicts of interest if a professor dates a student he grades or an executive his secretary, other problems if a breakup clutters classroom or office with an inconvenient emotional residue. But relaxing such restrictions should increase marriage rates.

One thing that affects the willingness to have children is the cost of rearing them; there are a possible changes in law or custom that might reduce those costs. One is a shift away from helicopter parenting. I occasionally see news stories where parents have been questioned by the authorities for letting their children do things, such as walking to school by themselves, that the parents did when they were children. Less of that might mean more parents willing to let their children entertain themselves instead of requiring constant, and expensive, adult supervision.

Other legally or socially enforced requirements on parents affect the cost of being one. An example is the rule specifying up to what age and/or height a child requires a car seat; that varies by state, currently ranges from five to ten years, often with an additional height restriction. The higher the age, the more likely it is that a third child requires three car seats and a larger car to fit them in.

I have not been the parent of a small child for a very long time. If I was I would probably be familiar with other costly requirements and have opinions on which of them I approved of.

The Darwinian Solution

Humans vary in, among other things, their taste for having children. It seems likely that some of that variation is genetic. We are now in an environment where reproductive success is limited mainly by parental choice not resource constraints; most people in developed societies could afford to rear many more children than they do. So people with more of a taste for having children, those who are more phyloprogenitive, will out-reproduce those who are less, increasing the share of their descendants in the population and, eventually, bringing average birth rates back up. The process should continue until reproductive success is again constrained by resources, a Darwinian version of Malthus’ old argument for why a society rich enough so that the cost of children was low could not be in long term equilibrium.

It is a persuasive argument but there are problems with it. Human generations are long so human evolution is slow. If we maintained the world more or less as it is for five or ten generations, fertility rates might begin to rise but we are not going to maintain the world more or less as it is for that long; we live in a time of rapid change driven by technological progress.

That makes all long term predictions highly uncertain, one of the reasons I am skeptical of expensive precautions intended to prevent long term consequences of global warming or anything else.

Fertility, Religion and Politics

More religious people tend to have more children, both across societies and within societies. The tendency to religious belief may be in part genetic and heritable; whether or not it is, children tend to follow their parents religion. While religious belief, like fertility, as declining at present, that might be reversed by the greater fertility of believers.

That argument too has problems. The selective reproduction of the religious might be balanced by selective conversion in the other direction, on net away from religion. Technological change might produce reproductive technologies, cloning for example, less acceptable to the more religious.

Conservatives tend to be more religious than average and have higher birth rates, so a similar argument applies there; the same problems apply. Biological evolution might be outweighed by memetic evolution in the other direction, arguably what has been happening in the U.S. over the past century. An online acquaintance, conservative and Catholic, who expects his opponents to breed themselves out of existence may be being optimistic; it has not been happening so far.

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

Past posts, sorted by topic

A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing

A draft of my next book, Consequences of Climate Change, webbed for comments.

[1] The woman I have been married to for the past forty-three years was a grad student and I a professor when we met, but fortunately in different departments.