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 foe 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 employee 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sharing issues with people that they were unaware of, as in those examples, and suggesting solutions they have no particular reason to oppose, is the easy part of learning from each other; all it requires is being willing to listen to people different from you and consider their ideas on their merits, treat the interaction as a conversation not a debate. Harder is convincing people that something they know might be wrong. How that can happen, if it can, depends on how they know it, their reason for believing it.

There are, broadly speaking, two possible answers.

One is that they favor certain laws, policies, institutions because they believe they have good consequences. There may be some consequences, such as an increase in the birth rate, that some think good, some bad, but they are the exception, not the rule; there are very few libertarians, Abundance liberals, or for that matter progressives or Trump Republicans, who defend their preferred policies on the grounds that they result in people being poorer, hungrier, sicker, more ignorant. As long as the objective is shared there is room for argument, based on theory or evidence, over what policies best achieve it.

From this standpoint, Abundance liberals may be the best faction on the left for libertarians to argue with:

Abundance Progressives aspire to the same egalitarian, multi-racial democracy [As Movement Progressives]. But Abundance Progressives work backwards from target outcomes, and that leads to distinctly different points of emphasis, both in general and on specific policy issues. (Movement vs. Abundance Progressives)

A different possible basis for political views is the belief that certain rules are right or wrong whatever their consequences: Fiat justitia, ruat caelum, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” For libertarians, deontological rules take the form of the doctrine that one should never initiate coercion, should never violate individual rights. People on the left also talk about rights, with a different list, or equality or exploitation.

Different views about what rules are just, what rights people have, mean that the same law can be seen by one side as enforcing rights, by the other as violating them. A fair employment or fair housing law, for example, is seen by someone on the left as enforcing the right of equal treatment, by a libertarian as violating the right of voluntary association.

That is a potential problem, but it may sometimes be possible to alter a belief based on belief in a rule by showing reasons why that rule does not apply to the particular issue in question.

How To Change the Mind Of

A Consequentialist Libertarian

Being a libertarian, even a libertarian anarchist, does not require one to believe that governments can never do things that have good consequences, even things that violate individual rights. It is sufficient to believe that we cannot create a government with the power to do things with good consequences that will not also do things with larger bad consequences, hence that we are better off with either no government or a government limited in the ways minarchist libertarians support. That does not imply that, if we already have a government with such powers, one should oppose all of the ways they can be used. Economics demonstrates a variety of situations in which the consequences of voluntary interaction could be improved, by criteria libertarians agree with, by government action.

Two examples came up in the comment threads to my recent posts. One involved building codes. Some of the legal requirements for rewiring my house can be defended only on the theory that state agents know my interest better than I do, a claim not likely to be persuasive to a libertarian, but some requirements can be defended without that claim. One possible consequence of sufficiently bad wiring is for my house to catch fire and the fire to spread to neighboring houses, doing damage to my neighbors or their property for which I cannot compensate them; that is an argument for restrictions in what I can do with my own property. One consequence of my using an antibiotic is that diseases become more resistant to it, a cost born almost entirely by other people. That is an argument for restricting the use of antibiotics, an argument that a consequentialist should take seriously. In both cases, whether state action produces good consequences and, if so, what state action is best, depends on the details of the situation, but there is no reason why an Abundance liberal could not call the attention of a libertarian to issues of that sort and provide him evidence and argument that would lead him to support policies he would otherwise have opposed.

A Deontological Libertarian

Those two examples work for him as well. No libertarian, or almost none,1 would claim that if someone is pointing a gun at you it is a rights violation to grab it. Arguably both rules against wiring your house in ways likely to start a fire and restrictions on the casual use of antibiotics can be justified on the same basis. How convincing that is depends on details of the deontological rules accepted by the libertarian and on factual details, how large and how likely the damage to others from my action is.

A different line of argument is available in the case of the deontological minarchist, since he already accepts some apparent rights violations in the form of taxes to fund police and national defense.2 If his grounds for accepting that is that the result of no police protection or national defense would be catastrophic, he is open to the same argument for some other apparent right violation. There are, after all, people who argue that unregulated climate change or, more plausibly, AI development would be catastrophic. Whether they are correct is a factual issue.

An Abundance Consequentialist

This is the easiest and most likely case since what distinguishes Abundance liberals from their allies on the left is their focus on consequences. Libertarians are familiar with lots of arguments for why policies supported by the left are likely to have bad consequences, many of them arguments and evidence in their support that someone whose intellectual interactions are almost entirely with fellow left-wingers is likely to be unfamiliar with.

One problem here is the difficulty of accepting conclusions that everyone on your side opposes, of looking like a traitor to your tribe. There are good economic arguments against minimum wage laws, reasons to think they are likely to hurt the people they are intended to help, but coming out against minimum wage laws, even against raising the minimum wage, marks you as a right winger, a capitalist dupe. Better to focus arguments on issues less clearly ideologically branded, such as professional licensing, zoning, or building codes.

A Deontological Abundance Liberal

The reasons to identify as an Abundance liberal are consequentialist but they are likely to have deontological views as well. As with the deontological libertarian, the approach I think likely to work is targeted not at the rule but its implication.

Many supporters of equal pay for men and women support it on the grounds of a norm of equality. A possible response, although one unlikely to convince many supporters in the current ideological environment, is that many men would be willing to accept lower pay in exchange for a longer life, that since female life expectancy in the US is almost five years longer than male a norm of equality not merely permits but requires unequal pay. An argument more difficult to support factually, although probably correct, but one that is more likely to convince at least a few, is that women and men currently receive equal pay for equal work, that the difference in average income is due to different choices of careers and career paths.

A different approach might be to use public choice arguments and evidence to show that even if the objective is correct the means is not, that the legal or administrative tools they support cannot be trusted to produce the morally required goals and to offer economic arguments for different and better means. An example might be proposing insurance requirements or Pigouvian taxes to replace regulation by a regulatory agency likely to be captured by the industry it regulates.

Yes I Am Oversimplifying

My consequentialist/deontological division treats views as simpler than they are. In practice, most people who believe their system is just also believe it has good consequences, most who defend their system for its consequences also approve of its rules. But the division is a useful way of sorting arguments and those who make them in thinking about what sorts of arguments and evidence might change minds.

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 could imagine a political alliance in which leading members of both groups advise their followers to vote for the same candidate or ballot measure, but that is not what I am talking about. What I am imagining is for members of both groups to treat each other as part of the same intellectual community, read, listen to, comment on and think about each other’s writing, teach and learn from each other, perhaps coauthor books or articles. For that to happen productively there have to be issues on which the participants in the conversation believe that their views could be improved by ideas from the other side. My previous post was an attempt to see if there were.

Responses, almost all from libertarians, mostly consisted of stating and defending their (libertarian) answers to my questions, not surprising but not what I was looking for. There were only a few that qualified their answers in a ways implying that they were open to arguments for modifications of the strict libertarian position. My attempt to get answers from the other side by invitations in suitable places online was an almost total failure; the only self-identified Abundance liberal gave answers implying that the commenter was already a libertarian. The most encouraging response was from someone who described himself “with a foot in both camps” and seemed inclined to see libertarian arguments as relevant to achieving Abundance goals, consequentialist arguments to modifying libertarian conclusions.

Almost everyone claims to be open minded but most, left or right, are open only to views close to those they already have, view interaction outside their faction as useful only for converting people to their — obviously correct — position. Substantive argument is mostly intra-faction, libertarians arguing with other libertarians over anarchy vs minarchy or intellectual property, left liberals with left liberals over nimby vs yimby or how to take back Congress. There are, however, exceptions, productive interactions between people from very different parts of the political spectrum. Here are two examples from my experience.

Back when I was a faculty fellow at the University of Chicago Law School, I coauthored an article with Steve Schulhofer. He was one of the furthest left members of the faculty, I was one of the furthest (libertarian) right members. The article dealt with a problem of particular interest to him, a way of solving it of particular interest to me.

The problem was felony defendants who could not afford a lawyer. The existing solution was, still is, a lawyer chosen and paid for by the state, either a public defender or a private attorney appointed to the case. The result is that in a majority of felony trials the prosecution attorney and the defense attorney are working for (different branches of) the same employer.

That struck Steve as a very risky situation. I agreed; neither of us, from right or left, trusted the state. The solution he proposed was a voucher system: Whatever amount the state is willing to spend on a lawyer for an indigent defendant, give the defendant the option of spending it on a lawyer of his choice, working for him. Worrying about the poor is mostly a left wing thing, market solutions mostly a right libertarian thing, but libertarians disapprove of the state mistreating people, including poor people, and leftists want solutions to their problems.1 We had a law school workshop on the idea and I got to hear Steve Schulhofer lecture Judge Posner on the virtues of the free market.

That may have been my first experience of working out ideas jointly with someone from a very different part of the political spectrum. He knew things I didn’t about problems with the legal system, I knew things he didn’t about market economics, and we jointly produced a better article than either could have written alone.

My second example is my interaction with Scott Alexander, largely on his blog Slate Star Codex which was, while it lasted, the best conversation on the Internet. I responded to his webbed criticism of libertarianism and he stopped making some of its arguments, improved others. He wrote friendly but critical reviews of two of my books.2 I am reasonably certain that some of the ideas now in his intellectual toolkit he got from me and he has provided me with ideas and insights on a range of issues along with criticisms of my ideas from someone who understands them.

Both of those cases involved interactions with someone to my left — Scott is hard to classify politically but regards himself as more nearly left than right, even if critical of much of the current left — who was more familiar with libertarian ideas than most. The intellectual alliance I am describing is between individuals not movements, does not have to involve all or even many of the individual adherents. If Scott absorbs an idea from me he can transmit it to people who read him and don’t read me, and similarly in the other direction.

The Other Kind of Alliance

If enough of what I am describing happens, the result might be the two groups allying politically on issues where they find a common cause, as elements of left and right allied on drug policy or as libertarians and traditionalists allied in the fusionist coalition that was the intellectual core of the conservative movement sixty years ago. That would be a political alliance, not what I am describing or what is of most interest to me but one of its possible consequences.

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.

What does “build bridges with” mean in this context? Libertarians have limited political power on the right, Abundance Democrats even less on the left. What I am imagining is not a political alliance but an intellectual one. That means considering ourselves to have enough in common to make it worth listening to each other, taking each other’s arguments seriously, considering that where we disagree the other one might be right, that on some questions we might be able to jointly develop better answers than either of us now have. That is not how people who think of themselves as politically or ideologically on opposite sides usually interact.

One of things I found encouraging in Yglesias’ post:

That should mean progressives learning more from libertarians about economics, but it should also mean libertarians learning about the theory and practice of democratic politics.

So far commentary on my view has been from the libertarian side; it would be useful to know how abundance Democrats see the question. Here, for both sides, are some questions on which we are likely to disagree.

For each, or at least as many as you feel like commenting on, what do you think the other side’s position would be, do you agree with it, disagree but might be convinced by argument or evidence, or disagree and are confident you could not be convinced.

Questions

Should what children are taught be determined primarily by their parents or primarily by the (federal, state, local) government?

Should private citizens have the right to own firearms? To carry them?

Is an economic change which increases everyone’s income but also increases income inequality good or bad? What about the reverse, a change that reduces everyone’s income but that of the rich more than the poor? (Income here is real income; any effect of the change on prices or wages is being allowed for.)

Should government at some level have the power to:

• set or limit prices, in particular rents?

• Set or restrict the terms of contracts, for example by making it illegal to rent an apartment without hot water?

• Set minimum wages?

• Control the characteristics of products, for example the fuel efficiency of cars or the power and water efficiency of dishwashers?

If you have your house rewired (prudent if most of the existing wiring is at least eighty years old, as ours is), it must be done “to code.” Where I live that requires an electric outlet in every wall of every room and a ceiling light in every room. Should there be such requirements?

Should Uber, Lyft and similar structures be legal? Regulated? How about Airbnb?

Should it be legal to practice a profession without a license?

Should a company require permission to provide medical services? Open a school? Provide trucking services? Offer investment advice?

Should it be illegal for a drug company to sell a medical drug that has not been approved by the FDA, assuming it tells doctors and patients that it is unapproved?

Should it be legal to pay an infant’s mother for her consent to its adoption?

Should it be illegal to buy, sell, possess, consume recreational drugs.

Should prostitution be illegal? Regulated? Gambling?

A Digression on “libertarian”

Yglesias in his post was referring to what I would call hard-core or ideological libertarians, people who have a well defined position sharply limiting government power. Most of them are minarchists, support a government that provides police, courts and national defense, collects taxes to pay for them. A significant minority are anarchists, want a society where those functions as well are provided by voluntary transactions on the market.1

A much larger number of people are libertarians in a weaker sense, support a move in the libertarian direction but not all of the way, want a smaller and less invasive government, were likely to agree with pre-Trump Republicans on economic questions, with pre-woke Democrats on social issues.

The intellectual interaction I am proposing would involve mostly the former group, its eventual political effect, if any, the latter. I expect a similar pattern would hold on the other side as well.

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.

Not As Bad As You Think

First, two quotes from Yglesias:

… the basic principles about the positive-sum nature of market exchange and the tendency of regulatory systems to become cesspools of rent seeking are quite general.

…

It is hopefully not too late to pull back from the brink and restore a sane liberal center to American politics. That should mean progressives learning more from libertarians about economics, but it should also mean libertarians learning about the theory and practice of democratic politics.

Then a quote from the post by Ilya Somin that Yglesias was responding to:

The issues where they support major movement towards freer markets - most notably housing, trade, immigration, and nuclear power - are extremely important ones. They have enormous effects on the life, liberty, and happiness of tens of millions of people. (Two Cheers for Abundance Liberalism)

And finally, from Kelsey Piper, possibly the most libertarian of the Abundance faction:

in 1996, Californians voted 55 to 45 for Proposition 209, which, among other things, barred public colleges and universities from considering race or ethnicity in admissions.

Twenty-four years later, Californians voted on whether to repeal the proposition. …

By a margin of 57 to 43, Californians again voted against permitting public institutions to discriminate or grant preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.

I think that the state’s voters got this right in 1996 and again in 2020. (Can a liberal society do affirmative action right?}

How We Differ From You And Why We Might Be Right

Libertarians differ from left liberals, including Abundance liberals, in their view of rights, positive or negative, but I want to argue policy instead. Most libertarians accept the existence of a government that provides courts, law enforcement, and national defense and collects taxes to pay for them. The policy difference between the generic libertarian and the generic left liberal is what the latter adds to that: a welfare state and government regulation of the economy viewed as a correction to market failures and to the failure of individuals to correctly see their own interest and act on it.

Market failures exist and individuals are not perfectly wise, so it is easy to show that there are things a government could do that would produce what most of us would see as benefits. Most people expect a poor person to benefit more by what he can buy with a hundred dollars than a rich person, remember money being of more value to them when they had less of it. Those are arguments, arguments that many, perhaps most, people find convincing, for expanding government beyond the minimum state.

I want to argue policy and I want to argue it in terms of values that left liberals share, since they are the people I am trying to convince. The first step is to recognize that “what should the government do” is the wrong question. The right question is “what powers and responsibilities should the government have.” If we start instead with a list of things we want the government to do, there may be no way of constructing a government that will do those and only those things.

A government with the power to redistribute income by transfers or subsidies could use that power to help the poor. It could also use it to benefit the politically powerful or reward supporters, buy votes. Regulations could be used to correct market failures, could also be gamed by interest groups to benefit themselves, “the tendency of regulatory systems to become cesspools of rent seeking.” To argue for giving government powers, you need reasons to believe that it will be in the interest of the individuals whose choices determine what the government does to act in ways that on net do good. If the market gets things mostly right, as I think abundance liberals would mostly concede, the amount of good the government can produce by fixing its errors is much more limited than the amount of damage it can do.

Consider the biofuels mandate. It was originally created on the theory that turning maize into alcohol to replace gasoline would reduce CO₂ output and slow climate change. It turned out that it didn’t, that when all the steps were considered producing alcohol produced as much CO₂ as the fuel it replaced. We still have the mandate because, although it does nothing to slow climate change, it does raise the price of maize, and farmers vote. It is not a small effect; we are converting about fifteen percent of the world supply of maize to alcohol. Maize is the staple food for some 300 million people in Africa, mostly poor. Think of it as our contribution to world hunger.

That is one example of the amount of damage a government with the powers left liberals want it to have can do. There are others that libertarians can point out, some that left liberals, at least in the abundance faction, are already aware of. Whether the net damage done is more than the good, judged by left liberal values, is an empirical question.

Whether it can be expected to be is a theoretical question. In my previous post I sketched the argument for the libertarian conclusion, that giving the government the powers left liberals want it to have makes us on net worse off. It is an argument not a proof, but combined with examples it should be enough to convince left liberals that it is not obvious that giving government the powers they want makes the world better by their values, that they might be wrong.

One more example of the general point …

Open Borders Or a Welfare State: Pick One

The economic arguments for free trade, the arguments that imply that American tariffs make Americans worse off, apply to immigration as well. They depend, however, on immigrants interacting with members of the existing population only by voluntary exchange. If poor immigrants have the option of coming to America and being supported by transfer payments there is the potential for immigration to make existing residents worse off.

The problem could be solved by a two class society, with immigrants ineligible for welfare for long enough to make immigration unattractive for those not willing to support themselves; that solution is unlikely to be acceptable to left liberals. It could be solved by welfare levels low enough to make work, even unskilled labor, more attractive than welfare; those might be lower than what left liberals in a rich society consider acceptable.

Or the problem might not be soluble, in which case voters in a democratic welfare state will keep out the poor.

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.

while some classical liberals have called the Republican Party home, liberalism has largely been a Democratic Party project.

His view is that “liberals” in the modern American sense, classical liberals and libertarians are all liberals in the same sense. Is he right?

I take the central feature of classical liberalism, as of libertarianism, to be the commitment to individual liberty, the right to do things, to buy, sell, speak, travel, “Laissez faire et laissez passer.” What is now called liberalism — the moderate left of the current U.S. political spectrum — abandoned that negative liberty in favor of what is sometime called positive liberty, the right to an adequate level of food, education, medicine paid for and provided, if necessary, by someone else. The two, both labeled liberty, are not consistent with each other; if you have a right to be fed by me I do not have a right to do something else instead.

Both positions are defensible, both have been held by large numbers of people, but they are not the same

Yglesias on Libertarians

He has two complaints. One is that:

Libertarian intellectual culture, by the same token, at times seems to take for granted that essentially all questions have already been answered because the ideology itself simply contains the answers.

That was probably true of most of the libertarians he argued with at DC poker games. I expect it was also true of most of the people on his side at those poker games. Most people committed to a political ideology take their beliefs for granted.

As evidence that it is even true of him, I offer his other complaint about libertarians:

libertarians are so averse to the distributional conversation that they veer toward denial about the extent to which strong effective states that facilitate transportation networks and electrical grids and stable banking systems are the foundation of economic growth.

The interesting thing is not that he believes in the benefits of government intervention in the economy; many people do. It is that he treats the positive effects of such intervention as a known fact.

The two worst failures of the banking system in US history were the collapse of the (government created) Second Bank of the United States in the 1830’s and the Great Depression a century later. The latter occurred when the Federal Reserve, created to defend the banking system against runs, failed to do so and the system, having relied on it, collapsed — Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football on a larger scale.

Attempts by the railroads of the late 19^th century to cartelize for the most part failed, price fixing agreements collapsing into competition in months. The problem was solved by the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission with the power to enforce their cartels.2 When new transportation technologies developed they too were regulated to prevent, not promote, competition. An airline could not reduce its fare without permission from the CAB or a trucking company run a new route without permission from the ICC, permission that their competitors could and would oppose. That continued until Alfred Kahn, a pro-market economist, persuaded Carter to deregulate transportation.

In Yglesias’ view, that “strong effective states … facilitate transportation networks … and stable banking systems” is a fact which libertarians “veer toward denial” of.

The Economic Case for Negative Liberty

We have two different mechanisms to solve the coordination problem, coordinate the interdependent actions of individuals. The obvious one is central control, someone at the top telling everyone else what to do. It works tolerably well for small groups, scales very badly. The less obvious solution is decentralized coordination, each individual controlling himself and his property, with trade, prices, voluntary exchange transmitting costs and values between individuals. To use inputs I must buy them from willing sellers, which transfers the cost of my using them to me. I sell my output to willing buyers, transferring its value back to me. If value is greater than cost it is in both my interest and our interest for me to produce those outputs from those inputs.

For the decentralized system to work perfectly every actor would have to bear all costs and receive all benefits of his actions, making it in his interest to take those actions and only those that produce net benefits. That does not happen because of what economists call market failures, situations where an individual fails to bear some of the cost or receive some of the benefit of his actions; the result is an imperfect solution to the coordination problem. But the alternative is not a perfect solution produced by wise and benevolent philosopher kings. The alternative is the political market, where individual actors — voters, politicians, lobbyists, government bureaucrats — bear almost none of the cost of their actions and receive almost none of the benefit, making it unlikely for the actions in their interest to be the ones in our interest.

Market failure is the exception on the private market, the rule on the public market.3

Yglesias quotes Churchill’s description of democracy as “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” It may not have occurred to him that if the best form of government is very bad that is a reason not to give government the power to do things even if the alternatives are imperfect, hence that libertarian opposition to government power over the economy may be based on more than being “averse to the distributional conversation.”

There is much more to his post, some of which I agree with; it could be a long argument, to which I may return.

The conclusion of the post, attributed to Ilya Somin, a libertarian, but endorsed by Yglesias, is that libertarians should seek an alliance with the center-left:

The traditional Cold War-era “fusionist” alliance between libertarians and cultural conservatives is, he thinks, dead and should be replaced by an effort to build bridges with the abundance camp on the center-left

That I agree with, have been making at least since 2007, when I wrote:

Since Republicans at the moment support more government—more even than Democrats as of the last time they were in power—it is worth looking for other allies.

It is even more true now. Left liberals, even the abundance faction, may not be classical liberals but they are closer to us and we are closer to them than either of us is to the Maga Republicans on the right or the progressive Democrats on the left.

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.

When I first read the argument it struck me as implausible. Consider two bureaucrats. Abe has a ten million dollar budget and is required to purchase $9,900,000 worth of paper to be sent to the IRS for printing tax forms, leaving him $100,000 for himself, his secretary, and rent for his office. Bernie has a one million dollar budget and is required to do nothing at all. Which would you rather be?

Generalizing the example, I suggest that the size of the budget in Niskanen’s model ought to be replaced with the surplus, the difference between the size of the budget and the lowest cost at which the output the bureau has agreed to can be produced. That difference represents resources that bureaucrats can divert to their own purposes.

When I made that argument on my blog twenty years ago I ended the post by asking whether other people had proposed the same modification to Niskanen’s model, replacing budget maximization with surplus maximization. Coming across that post in a recent reread of my old blog — I am mining it for ideas to incorporate in posts here — it occurred to me to do a quick search online to see if my argument had appeared in the relevant literature. As far as I can tell it has not; there have been criticisms of Niskanen’s approach but I could not find that one.

I offer it as a project to any aspiring public choice scholar in search of a topic.

The theoretical point is simple, as I have just demonstrated. The challenge would be coming up with tests to distinguish the implications of the alternative theories, Niskanen’s and mine.

The Surplus

How might bureaucrats consume that part of their budget not needed to produce the output they have promised the legislature? They could take it in cash but if bureaucrats working for the legislature are paid substantially more than other people doing similar work the legislature might notice. Better, perhaps, to consume the surplus in less transparent ways.

One possibility is leisure:

It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit. If he is naturally active and a lover of labour, it is his interest to employ that activity in any way from which he can derive some advantage, rather than in the performance of his duty, from which he can derive none.

If the authority to which he is subject resides in the body corporate, the college, or university, of which he himself is a member, and in which the greater part of the other members are, like himself, persons who either are, or ought to be teachers, they are likely to make a common cause, to be all very indulgent to one another, and every man to consent that his neighbour may neglect his duty, provided he himself is allowed to neglect his own. In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching. (The Wealth of Nations, Book V chapter 1 part e)

The quote is about salaried professors — Smith thought professors should be paid by their students — but it applies as well to bureaucrats with forty paid hours in which to do twenty hours of work.

If that is how bureaucrats consume their surplus they should take more leisure, produce less per hour, than they could. Niskanen’s theory, on the other hand, implies that a bureau will produce as much as it can with the resources its budget can buy since if it produced more it could get the legislature to give it a larger budget. If you could find an objective measure of output per hour for a government bureaucrat and for someone doing similar work in a private firm that would give you a way of distinguishing between the predictions of the two theories.

The surplus might be used by bureaucrats for their own consumption, luxurious offices, lavish “working meals,” conferences at vacation spots with lots of free time.1 Here again the two theories yield different predictions and one might be able to find a measure of such consumption and use it to distinguish between them.

The surplus might be spent producing output, but output of value to the bureaucrats not the legislature. An example would be material in support of political positions favored by the left produced by a bureau in a Republican state. An example at the federal level would be work in support of gun control at the Center for Disease Control, done under Republican as well as Democratic administrations.

Readers may have others.

One problem with all of these is that they compare government bureaus to other institutions, some of which may for other reasons, ultimately the principal/agent problem, also have a surplus to be appropriated by employees. A broader research project along similar lines would be to look at a variety of institutions for evidence of a surplus controlled by employees, used for their purposes rather than the nominal purpose of the institution.

P.S. A reader more skilled than I am in the use of AI for searching literature points me at an article employing my approach, substantially predating my 2006 blog post, with a response by Niskanen:

Jean-Luc Migué, Gérard Bélanger, William A. Niskanen, Jean-Luc Migué, Gérard Bélanger, “Toward a General Theory of Managerial Discretion [with Comment and Reply],” Public Choice, Spring, 1974.

Blais & Dion, eds., The Budget-Maximizing Bureaucrat: Appraisals and Evidence, 1991, is a book summarizing the literature. I have not yet read it, do not know what sort of evidence it offers, whether it obsoletes my research proposal.

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.

But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about. These gradually furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could consume themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons. For a pair of diamond buckles, perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year, and with it the whole weight and authority which it could give them. The buckles, however, were to be all their own, and no other human creature was to have any share of them; whereas in the more ancient method of expense they must have shared with at least a thousand people. With the judges that were to determine the preference this difference was perfectly decisive; and thus, for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest, and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered their whole power and authority. (The Wealth of Nations, Book III Chapter iv)

In my words:

It is sometime in the early Middle Ages. You are a feudal lord. What can you do with what your territory produces, mostly food? Some goes to feed the peasants who produce it, but not all. You consume some of it yourself. You use the rest to support retainers, people who owe their living to you, look up to you — we all like feeling important — and will, if necessary, fight for you. Every lord has an army more or less for free, since he has nothing better to do with his income. Hence the political system is a decentralized one where the King is not an absolute monarch but the leader of a coalition of lords.

Over time trade develops, along with an increased division of labor. Now the wealthy lord has something else to do with the surplus his land produces. He sells it and spends the money on luxury goods for himself, diamond buckles. His income is still supporting lots of people; someone has to mine, cut and set the diamonds. But the people it supports are dispersed about the world, not assembled in his hall. His private army shrinks because maintaining it now means giving up something else he values. The political system shifts from feudalism1 to monarchy.

It is an interesting conjecture. How might one test it?

Consider two lords. One controls territory best suited to produce local subsistence goods: wheat, beer, cattle. The other controls territory best suited to produce goods for foreign trade: wine, say, or wool. In order for the beer lord to buy diamond buckles he has to bear the cost of exporting produce in exchange. Buying retainers, on the other hand, involves no similar transport costs, since the retainers are where their food, his income, is produced.

The wine lord is already engaged in the export industry, since his land produces more wine than he and his people drink, more wool than they wear. He could use the resulting income to import beer and wheat to support retainers but doing so would require him to pay two transport costs — wine out, wheat back. Diamond buckles involve only one transport cost, since the buckles themselves are high value to weight goods with negligible cost of transportation.

Hence the cost of retainers is higher for the wine lord than for the beer lord. Hence, if Smith is correct, we should have seen feudalism last longest in places poorly suited to produce export goods, well suited to produce subsistence goods. For similar reasons, we should have seen feudalism last longest in places where transport costs were high — most obviously places far from good water transport, which in the Middle Ages was typically much less costly than overland transport.

The theory is, at least in principle, a testable one. It has been waiting more than two hundred years for someone to test it.

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.

Centrifugal acceleration, acceleration away from the sun driven by the pressure of light from the sun, is proportional to the ratio between the area of the sail and the mass of the ship; without additional assumptions about the material the sail is made of I have no way of bounding it. Centripedal acceleration, acceleration towards the sun, cannot use light pressure since it pushes in the wrong direction; the only force available is the sun’s gravity. That makes it possible to calculate how long it would take a spaceship starting at rest to cover a given distance towards the sun, such as the distance from the orbit of Mars to that of Earth.

The Centripedal Calculation

At the Earth’s orbit solar gravity is about .006 m/sec², so that is the maximum acceleration that a spaceship depending on gravity can get in that direction. Multiplying by the number of seconds in a day gives us about 500 m/sec/day. If we assume a ship accelerating towards the sun for a hundred days and ignore the problem of stopping when it gets where it is going — that is centrifugal acceleration which I don’t yet have a limit on — it will reach a top speed of 50,000 m/sec, have an average speed of 25,000 m/sec, and cover a distance of 32.85 million km. Since distance covered at a constant acceleration is proportional to the square of time spent, the time to cover a greater distance at the same acceleration is 100 days times the square root of the ratio of distances.

Mars is about 78 million km farther from the sun than Earth. At a constant acceleration of .006 m/sec², falling from the orbit of Mars to that of Earth would take about 156 days. Solar gravity is weaker the farther out you go, only .43 as high at the orbit of Mars as at the orbit of Earth; at the corresponding acceleration the distance would take about 238 days so the actual time will be between those values; this is an approximate calculation so I am not bothering to find the exact time. I conclude that using a vessel powered only by the solar wind and solar gravity to transport things between Earth and Mars is, on that basis, not quite impossible, not even between Earth and the Asteroid belt, although the return trip for that might take a year or more. Further out it becomes increasingly unworkable.

The Centrifugal Calculation

What about the other direction? The pressure of solar light at the Earth’s orbit is 9.08 μN/m² (micNewtons per square meter) =9.08x10^-6 Newtons/m².2

Start with what it takes to keep the ship from falling into the sun — enough force to accelerate the ship at .006 m/sec², just balancing the acceleration due to solar gravity. That requires a force of .006 Newtons/kg which requires .006/9.08x10^-6 square meters of sail/kg =6000/9.08 = 660m²/kg.

Assume the sail is made of aluminum and all the weight is the sail. The density of aluminum is about 2,710 kg/m³. The thinnest aluminum foil is .oo6mm=6x10^-6 meters thick. So a kg of aluminum has a volume of 1/2,710 = 3.69x10^-5 m³ and, converted into thin foil, an area of 36.9/6 = 6.1 m². It follows that in order to build a solar sail that, starting at Earth’s orbit, will not fall into the sun, you need a material with an area to weight ratio at least a hundred times that of the thinnest aluminum foil.

Actually, it doesn’t matter how far from the sun you start. Both light pressure and solar gravity are proportional to the inverse square of distance from the sun, so if light pressure is less than solar gravity somewhere it is less everywhere.

According to Wikipedia, Eric Drexler proposed panels of thin aluminum film 30 to 100 nanometres thick. 30 nanometers is 3x10^-8m, so could in theory do it, although it has never been done. Actual solar sails are made of aluminized polymers, 2x10^-6m, a little thinner and lighter than the thinnest aluminum foil but not by enough.

I Was Being Stupid

Reading the Wikipedia article on solar sails I realized my mistake. What I calculated, I think correctly, was what it would take for a solar sailboat to hang still in space, the solar light pressure just balancing solar gravity. But there is no reason why it has to be standing still. Earth, after all, is not falling into the sun, the pull of solar gravity being balanced not by light pressure but centrifugal force.3 The same would be true of a solar sailboat moving at the same speed in the same orbit, so it could use solar pressure to accelerate centrifugally. Alternatively it could orient its sail at an angle to the sun’s light, use light pressure to increase its orbital speed and use the resulting increase in centrifugal force to push itself outward. At this point the calculations of optimal orbits and how fast they can get the ship away from the sun gets well beyond what I am inclined to try.

My calculations were answering the wrong question but the answer is still interesting. A solar sail of currently workable materials produces less acceleration away from the sun than solar gravity produces towards the sun. It follows that solar pressure alone is less effective than solar gravity alone, which suggests that the times I calculated for the centripedal problem are probably shorter than the corresponding times for the centrifugal problem, that it probably will take longer to get from Earth’s orbit to Mars’ orbit than the other direction. That would not be true for a solar sail using Drexler’s proposed film, however. And I say “suggests” because I have not worked out the implications of using the solar sail to increase velocity around the sun and the increased velocity to push the boat outward.

So far I have been considering a sail powered only by sunlight. Some variants of the solar sail idea use a laser located on or near Earth to provide additional acceleration to an interstellar spaceship.

That still has the problem of only providing a push in one direction, away from Earth. To solve that you need lasers at both ends of your route.

My favorite solution was offered by Robert Forward.44 His ship has two solar sails, a circle inside a larger circle. When you approach the target system you cut loose the outer ring and angle everything so that the laser beam misses the sail still attached to the ship, hits the other, bounces off it, and is reflected back into the first sail. The detached sail accelerates into space, driven by the beam, while the spaceship is slowed by the reflected beam hitting the sail still attached.

Before the second ship arrives, the first builds a second laser cannon to provide brakes. Nobody could expect a maneuver that complicated to work twice. Once you have a laser at each end of things, traveling back and forth gets a lot easier.

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.

The picture above1 shows a series of concentric circles. As I look at it, I see other patterns. With only a little effort, it turns into a series of clockwise spirals. Or counter-clockwise spirals. Or … . It feels as if my internal software is thrashing around, trying out one pattern after another.

Human beings are equipped with pattern recognition software so good that it can find patterns that are not there. That makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Seeing a hidden tiger that is not actually there is a much less costly mistake than failing to see one that is there, so biasing the software in the direction of more of the first kind of error and fewer of the second, fewer false negatives and more false positives, is good design.

I see the same thing looking at the six digit numbers sent to my email in the process of checking that it is really mine. They are presumably random but don’t look random. Pulling ten out of my email trash:

587150, 795723, 066684, 288355, 492324, 680809, 170602, 208328, 830373, 223445

I have bolded the ones that appear to have a pattern. If the last was the number for your combination lock, cell phone security key or password it would be easy to remember.

That bias in our software may help to explain the popularity of conspiracy theories believed on inadequate evidence. Constellations.

• Hamlet: “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?”

• Polonius: “By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.”

• Hamlet: “Methinks it is like a weasel.”

• Polonius: “It is backed like a weasel.”

• Hamlet: “Or like a whale?”

• Polonius: “Very like a whale.”

Perhaps also religions.

The Use of False Positives.

Numbers can be seen, thought of, in different patterns. One is the counting pattern, exemplar 12345678. If that is a pattern you see numbers in the last of the ten listed above should be easy to remember. Other patterns work for others of the six digit sequences but less well, repeated digits (third and fourth above), repeated runs (fifth). A mind prone to see patterns can remember a number by finding a pattern in terms of which it is memorable and linking it to that pattern. In the same way, someone familiar with several languages could remember a sequence of letters created randomly for a password by finding a word in some language related to it — the password itself, the password backwards, the password with one letter changed.

A real example that started me thinking along these lines.

I was recently staying in a room that unlocked with a four digit number entered on a circular keypad, shown above. The number was 7392. The digits alternate between sides of the circle, the second of the pair on the left larger by two than the first on the left, the second of the pair on the right larger by one than the first on the right. With a little effort that felt like a pattern, easier to remember than four unrelated digits. All I had to remember was the first digit and the pattern.

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.

Spending the night in an airport reminded me of travels as a graduate student a very long time ago, except that then it was a rail station, the Bahnhof im Salzburg, shared with some English students whose reaction to my reciting a bit of Dylan Thomas was “My God, an educated Yank.”

Coke Zero

At home, we buy Coke Zero and Diet Coke in two liter bottles — less expensive and more convenient than 12 oz cans or bottles — and consume several a day. When traveling I try to pick up a couple of two liter bottles for the refrigerator in my hotel room. I discovered on this trip that most of the countries I was in — France, Switzerland, Greece, Poland and Austria — sell bulk soda in 1.5 or 1.25 liter bottles. Only in Spain did I find it available in two liter bottles. I have no idea why.

P.S. On a later trip in a different direction I discovered that the honor of having the largest bottles of Diet Coke and Coke Zero goes not to the US but to Chile.

In both the US and Europe a 12 oz can in the airport, an occasional extravagance when waiting for my plane, costs about three times what it costs in a grocery store. In the Athens airport, however, gelato, not something I seen in US airports,1 is the same price as in the city. That raises an interesting question for further research, next time I am bored waiting for a plane: What categories of food sell in airports for a multiple of their usual price, what don’t, and why?

Hotel Breakfasts

Somewhere in America there may be a hotel whose breakfast buffet matches what I encounter in the average European hotel but I have never encountered it. The best this time was probably the Radisson Red in Krakow, whose buffet is shown below (minus the drinks and, I think, deserts).

The breakfast buffet of a smaller and less luxurious hotel in Athens was less extensive and less elite

but included Halvah. Also a toaster that let you toast the bread on one side or both.

Observing the quantity and quality of European hotel breakfasts and the scarcity of obesity in the European population made me wonder whether European travelers took advantage of the situation by making breakfast their chief meal of the day.

I have, however, one improvement to suggest to European hotels, one inspired by our favorite Nevada restaurant. Hotel breakfast rooms are set up on the assumption that guests will eat by themselves or with the people they are traveling with. For me, part of the fun of traveling to foreign places is conversation with the people who live there. Hotels should mark a table or tables as for people who want to eat with a random selection of fellow guests.

I made the suggestion at one hotel, will be pleasantly surprised if they take it.

Bike Lanes

Walking in Krakow, I discovered that there were two sidewalks, one for walking, one for bicycles, labeled as such:

Also in Vienna:

The market in Athens — I like markets — turned out to be closed, it being Sunday. There was an hour or two wait to get into the Parthenon and I had a talk to give. But I did get to explore a collection of low-end antique shops; some of what they were selling was in one Euro bins.

The detritus of a million lives.

There was also an ornamental telephone, perhaps from a time when only the rich had them. Contrast the phone in my room in Krakow, also ornamental but in a very different style.

My favorite item in the Kunsthistorische museum in Vienna was a watch on a ring. They could not fit the mechanism inside the watch so instead made use of an external time keeping mechanism conveniently located a mere ninety-two million miles away.

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

To check that, I googled [SFO gelato] and “SJC gelato,” those being the airports I usually fly out of, and got no hits. Further research located Gelato machines in the United lounge of San Diego Airport but, judging by the pictures, nothing like the opulent selection in Athens.

(The picture below is from the city but the airport display was similar.)

Not that Republicans in Indiana oppose gerrymandering in the abstract. In fact, they are experts at it: 20 years ago Democrats held five of the state’s nine congressional seats. Today they hold two even as their vote share is 38%. (The Economist)

In the latest presidential election, 36% of the vote in Massachusetts went to the Republican candidate. The state’s congressional delegation is nine Democrats, no Republicans.

That is evidence not of gerrymandering but of the effect of winner-take-all elections, which one would expect an author for The Economist to understand. There is no county in Massachusetts with a Republican majority, almost no precinct or municipality. It would probably be possible to combine dispersed Republican plurality precincts to create a congressional district with a Republican majority but it would not be easy and the map would be a very odd one.

It might be almost as odd as Louisiana’s 6th congressional district, gerrymandered under court orders to produce a second black majority district.

That interpretation of the Voting Rights Act — as not merely permitting but requiring racial gerrymandering — has now been reversed by the Supreme Court.

On which subject the Economist author writes:

Certainly other red states will plough ahead, aided by the Supreme Court’s gutting on April 29th of the Voting Rights Act, which had kept gerrymandering in check. (The Economist, italics mine.)

I am reminded of the same journal’s obituary for Mao:

“In the final reckoning, Mao must be accepted as one of history’s great achievers: for devising a peasant-centered revolutionary strategy which enabled China’s Communist Party to seize power, against Marx’s prescriptions, from bases in the countryside; for directing the transformation of China from a feudal society, wracked by war and bled by corruption, into a unified, egalitarian state where nobody starves; and for reviving national pride and confidence so that China could, in Mao’s words, ‘stand up’ among the great powers.” (The Economist on Mao’s death, 1976, emphasis mine)

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.

Nicotine patches are currently marketed as a cure for smoking. What they actually are, so far as I can tell, is an alternative delivery system for the same drug. …

…

This may be an early and interesting example of an alternative approach to the problems associated with both legal and illegal drugs. The conventional solution is to stop people from using drugs. The alternative is to find ways of providing the effects drug users want while minimizing undesirable side effects, on themselves and others. (Ideas, August 21, 2006)

Rereading my old blog I came across something I wrote twenty years ago. How does my speculation look twenty years later?

Nicotine is still, so far as I know, the only drug for which alternative forms of delivery are common, perhaps because it was the only drug for which most of the danger came from the delivery medium. Nicotine patches and other delivery systems exist but vaping, a technology invented only a few years before I wrote and not then common, is the main alternative to smoking in the US at present.

As of 2024-2025, about 6.9% of U.S. adults use e-cigarettes, with usage highest among young adults (15% of those 18–34). … . Cigarette smoking, though declining, remains at 9.9% for adults… (AI Overview)

Looking for data on risks, I found a page by the FDA. It conceded that vaping is less dangerous than smoking, but :

While e-cigarettes can generally be a lower-risk alternative for adults who smoke cigarettes, the use of e-cigarettes is not risk-free. These products deliver harmful chemicals and contain nicotine, which is highly addictive. Moreover, given the harmful chemicals found in e-cigarettes, further high-quality research on both short- and long-term health outcomes is needed. (The Relative Risks of Tobacco Products)

Despite its title, the page contains no information about how large those risks are, just that they exist. The same is true of the CDC page Health Effects of Vaping. Both pages refer to a variety of risks from vaping but no numbers. The American Heart Association in its article on nicotine pouches, another delivery system, concedes that

no data are available on their cardiovascular or health risks. (Review Article)

Both the FDA and CDC pages make a point of the fact that vaping is not safe while conceding that it is less bad than smoking. That, plus the absence of numbers, made me suspect that they might be exaggerating how dangerous vaping is. If vaping is only a tenth as dangerous as smoking, if the benefit from getting one smoker to switch to vaping is as large as the benefit from persuading nine vapers to quit entirely, putting the emphasis on how unsafe vaping is instead of on how much safer it is than smoking might be counterproductive.

The FDA and CDC, and others, might still do it. I have observed, in other contexts, people reluctant to say anything good about something — smoking, alcohol, ice cream — that everyone knows is bad.

I found more information, and numbers, in an article from Johns Hopkins. It reported on health outcomes for 249,190 individuals, classified as nonsmokers, smokers, vapers, or both followed for 3.7–3.9 years. The results are shown below:

All five health conditions are made significantly worse by smoking, only COPD by vaping.

I found a CDC page with figures on mortality from different effects of smoking. Using that and the Johns Hopkins data I can calculate what mortality from vaping would be if as many people vaped as smoke and take the ratio of that to actual mortality from smoking as an estimate of the relative risk of the two delivery modes.

The figure for mortality from COPD was 100,600. Assuming that a third the effect, as per the Johns Hopkins data, yields a third the mortality, that gives a mortality from vaping of 33,533. Total mortality from smoking (CDC) is 480,317.1 So the data I have imply that a smoker who switches to vaping eliminates more than ninety percent of the problem.

That assumes that COPD is the only major source of mortality from vaping. The one important source of mortality from smoking not covered in the Johns Hopkins Study is cancer. It is easy to find statistics for cancer deaths from smoking but not for vaping. Looking for them, I found:

Some chemicals present in e-cigarette aerosols, such as formaldehyde and acrolein, can cause DNA damage and mutagenesis that can lead to cancer. Long-term exposure to e-cigarette aerosols could increase the risk of cancer and adverse reproductive outcomes; however, given that studies varied, additional research is needed. (Truth Initiative)

I translate that and similar passages on other pages as “vaping could cause cancer but there is no evidence that it does.” The Wikipedia page on nicotine makes that explicit, for the drug if not the delivery system:

Contrary to popular belief, nicotine itself does not cause cancer in humans, although it is unclear whether it functions as a tumor promoter as of 2012. A 2018 report by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concludes, “⁠[w]hile it is biologically plausible that nicotine can act as a tumor promoter, the existing body of evidence indicates this is unlikely to translate into increased risk of human cancer.” (Wikipedia)

I conclude that persuading people who smoke to switch to vaping does almost as much good as persuading them to quit entirely, hence that for anti-smoking groups to emphasize the dangers of vaping, as they do, is probably a mistake if their objective is to reduce the number of smokers.

Warning about the risks of vaping does, however, discourage non-smokers from trying it, so there remains the question of whether vaping, considered on its own merits, it is a bad thing. It has at least one undesirable effect,2 the increased rate of COPD, but smokers report and research supports a variety of desirable effects from smoking, presumably due to the nicotine and so available by vaping as well.

In humans, nicotine acts primarily as a stimulant by binding to and activating nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) in the central nervous system and peripheral tissues. This results in the release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine, producing effects including increased alertness, reduced anxiety, and mild euphoria.

…

A 2010 meta-analysis of 41 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies concluded that nicotine or smoking had significant positive effects on aspects of fine motor abilities, alerting and orienting attention, and episodic and working memory. (Wikipedia)

A further question is whether, if the objective is the positive effect of nicotine, vaping is the best way of getting them. That brings us back to the issue of alternative delivery systems.

Including patches.

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.

Consider some possible legal rules that might be proposed to deal with such an invention:

1. The test is banned; nobody is allowed to use it.

2. Testing is legal. Insurance companies are permitted to make testing a condition of insurance and take account of the result in setting rates.

3. Individuals are permitted to get tested; the results are confidential. Insurance companies are forbidden to make testing a condition of insurance.

4. Individuals are permitted to get tested. Insurance companies are not permitted to require testing as a condition of insurance but are permitted to know whether or not a potential customer has been tested and to take account of that fact in setting the rate they charge him.

What are the consequences of each rule? Is it possible that, under some rules, the invention of the test makes us worse off? Under all rules?

To see why the answer is “yes,” compare rules 1 and 2. Under rule 1, which corresponds to the situation before the test is invented, neither the insurance company nor the customer knows the condition of the customer’s heart, so the risk of having a bad heart is insurable. Under rule 2, if you try to buy insurance and refuse to be tested the company will take that as evidence that you have already been tested and discovered that you have a bad heart. The company will set the price of the insurance accordingly. You can get tested, show the results to the insurance company and insure against whatever uncertainty is left, but the risk of having a bad heart is now uninsurable.

The result of rule 3 is worse still. Since the price is the same whether you have a good or bad heart, insurance against a heart attack is a much better deal for people who know they have bad hearts. The insurance company, realizing that, prices its policies on the assumption that someone who chooses to insure against a heart attack is probably a bad risk. People with good hearts cannot get insurance unless they are willing to pay far more than the actuarial value of their risk, so many of them don’t buy. That leaves an insurance market mainly populated by bad risks. Now nobody can insure against the risk of having a bad heart; you cannot bet on the dice after you have rolled them. People with bad hearts can insure against the residual uncertainty of when their hearts will fail. People with good hearts cannot insure even against that unless they are willing to do it at a bad heart price.

The classic article on the problem is “The Market for Lemons” by George Akerlof. It described the same logic in the context of the used car market. The seller knows if his car is a lemon or a creampuff, the buyer doesn’t. Buyers offer the same price for lemons and creampuffs since they cannot tell which is which. At that price, owners of creampuffs are much less willing to sell than owners of lemons, so if the seller accepts your offer the car is probably a lemon. Knowing that, you offer a lemon price. In the limiting case, the result is a market where only lemons sell.

The problem is called adverse selection. Its origin is asymmetric information: One party to an exchange knows something about the value of the good being sold that the other does not.

Rule 4 provides the best outcome. People who want to insure against the risk that they have a bad heart can buy insurance before being tested. Since the insurer knows that they have not been tested, the price will be based on the cost of insuring a random customer. After they are insured they can decide whether the advantage of better information about what health precautions they should take and how long they can expect to live outweighs the risk of learning something they do not want to know.

Rule 4 may not be an option, especially in a world of many countries. Even if the United States insists that all tests be recorded and successfully suppresses the black market in secret tests, American citizens can still get their genes tested somewhere with less restrictive rules. The same problems apply to rule 1. So it is possible that the invention of the test, by moving us from the world of rule 1 to the world of rule 2 or 3, may make the risk of being born with a bad heart uninsurable, just as the risk of being born poor is now. If that effect is large enough to outweigh the benefits that individuals get from knowing more about their own health risks the invention of the test will have made us worse off.

I was introduced to this problem by a commencement speech proposing rule 3 as a way of protecting people from the use of genetic information by their insurance companies. I concluded that the speaker had never heard of adverse selection.

Suppose we expand our example by assuming that genetic testing provides good information not only on the risk of a heart attack but on the risks of most other causes of mortality. Neither the insurance company nor I can predict the date of my death precisely but we can predict it accurately enough to eliminate much of the benefit of life insurance in case 2, accurately enough so that adverse selection destroys the market for life insurance in case 3.1

I have been assuming a world where mortality is largely determined by genetics and we know enough to use genetics to predict it. The first assumption is at least doubtful, the second, at present, false. But the same issue played an important role in the real world controversy over the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

There are at least two things about a potential customer for medical insurance that tell us a good deal about how much he can be expected to cost the insurance company. One is how old he is; young people are much less likely to require expensive care than old people. The other is his current medical condition. If you have survived one heart attack, the odds that you will have another are high. In an unregulated marketplace for health insurance, insurance companies will take account of those effects. They will be happy to insure everyone — but not at the same price. Young people will be charged much less than old, healthy people less than sick.

Under Obamacare, insurance companies were forbidden to make the price they charged depend on the patient’s state of health; premiums had to be the same for everyone of a given age, independent of pre-existing conditions. They were permitted to charge old people more than young but the ratio of prices could not be more than three to one. That made insurance a bad deal if you were young, a good deal if you were old, a bad deal if you were healthy, a good deal if you already had expensive medical problems. Both customer and insurance companies had the information that predicted how much the insurance company would have to pay for the customer’s medical expenses but the insurance company was forbidden to use it in deciding at what price to sell the customer insurance.

If customers had remained free to decide whether or not to buy insurance, many for whom it was a bad deal at the price, the young and healthy, would have chosen not to. That would have raised the average cost to the insurance companies. Since they had to cover their costs, the price of insurance would rise. The more it rises, the more of the young and healthy choose to go uninsured.

The solution to that problem, obvious to the economists involved in designing the program, was to forbid the customers as well as the companies from using the information both had, to require everyone to buy insurance whether or not he thought it was a good deal for him. So the program included a mandate, a requirement that everyone buy insurance and a penalty for not doing so. That ended up as one of its most controversial elements.

I have simplified the details of ACA in my description but not, I think, in ways that affect its essential logic.

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.