Hungarian Jew from Budapest here, though not a very smart one. I think that Scott Alexander did a fair treatment of the problem, but there is some important context that he missed. Here is some of it:
Why is Budapest special:
Budapest and the rest of Hungary are culturally two very different societies that diverged in 1686 in an event that is taught as "the liberation of Pest and Buda from Ottoman yoke". The united armed forces of the ̶W̶a̶r̶s̶a̶w̶ ̶P̶a̶c̶t̶ Holy League defeated the Ottoman forces in Buda and Pest and subsequently murdered and expelled the entire ethnic Hungarian (and other) population of the (then) two cities, replacing them with German settlers. The reason for this was counter-reformation: the Ottoman empire was (for financial reasons dictated by their interpretation of Islam) the most religiously tolerant state in XVIIth century Europe, offering refuge to non-Catholic Christians and Jews from persecution by Catholics. The Holy League was a Catholic-Orthodox alliance formally against Ottomans (Muslims), but in practice also against Calvinist Protestants and Jews. Hungarians at that time were mostly Calvinists (still about a third of them are). From 1686 till about 1820, Buda (called Ofen) and Pest were entirely German-speaking cities, with the last German-speaking neighborhoods disappearing only in 1945, in a similarly ugly expulsion of Germans shortly after WW2. Even today, Hungarian as spoken in Budapest differs from the literary standard in several German-influenced ways and Budapest slang is full of German expressions. Ethnic Hungarians and Jews moved to Budapest in increasing numbers during the urbanization and industrialization in the XIXth century. While Hungarian-speakers eventually became a majority (around the 1860's), the German language retained its prominent role until WW2. My grandmother was fluent in German and her reason for not passing it on was the Holocaust. After the 1867 Compromise resulting in the Habsburg empire becoming Austria-Hungary, Budapest Jews became increasingly bilingual, but stopped using German entirely only after WW2. Today, Budapest is home to about one fifth of Hungary's population, producing half of its GDP.
Secondary education in Hungary:
Secondary education in Hungary (between ages of 14 and 18) was and still is world-class (though deteriorating), unlike primary and post-secondary education, which have never been particularly good and now are really bad. The key to this is the high degree of freedom of high schools to choose their students and teachers, resulting in a handful of elite high schools for which both the best students and the best teachers compete. It is highly prestigious to teach there as well as to learn. This was very much the case in the first half of the 20th century as well. Regular competitions in academic disciplines are also a very important ingredient. Interestingly, the Tiger Mothers of the Chinese and Vietnamese communities that experienced explosive growth recently due to favorable immigration policies are also pushing their children into these high schools. I disagree with Scott Alexander that they failed to work their magic on gentiles. It is just that normal distributions have this very counter-intuitive property of tiny differences in means and standard deviations result in huge differences in frequency at the extremes.
In agreement with Scott Alexander, I also think it is multiple factors, both genetic and social/environmental coming together in a particularly lucky way. I would bet serious money against "the Martians" being particularly closely related genetically to each other.
Very interesting and very intelligent commentary. Kurt Klappoltz (professor of philosophy of economics at the LSE, a man of breathtaking intelligence and an Ashkenazi Jew) said that Jews are not more intelligent than other men. You are right, we must look elsewhere, with the exception of Budapest.
My wife's (Jewish) family was originally from Austro-Hungary and her grandfather fought for them in WW I.
You can't underestimate Franz Joseph's pro-Jewish policies (The Jews used to affectionately call him "Franz Yosef") which made his Empire a magnet for the most successful, accomplished, Ashkenazi Jews in Europe. Then add two generations of selective breeding within that population.
The reason why so many Martians went into the Hard Sciences was because their status, wealth, and rights were uncertain and it's easier to successfully migrate & succeed in a new country with a Ph.D in physics or chemistry than with a background in banking or Austro-Hungarian law.
Perhaps people who intend to investigate further should register their intent publicly first, otherwise their premature deaths would just appear random bad luck.
I'm all for sequencing all the Martians, and even comment in my recent "short, fun John von Neumann anecdotes" post that the fact that we're NOT studying von Neumann's DNA is a tragedy itself, but if you look at them, it's very hard to posit a half-sibling degree of familial resemblance:
Chased down some of those links and it reminded me of my own personal view of Rawlsism: he assumes an utterly static society, without births, illness, accidents, deaths, weather, and everything else external which changes society. He assumes all people have exactly the same definitions and all agree on what is better and worse, and that not a single person ever thinks of better ways of doing anything. His society has no innovation, inventions, literature, music, art, or anything else which makes us human. He ignores the fact that dropping a stranger into this static society upsets it and changes it.
I don't know if I ever would have gotten as far as yours and other arguments. The whole basis seemed so absurd that I saw no point in pondering it any further. He may as well have started with "Assume 2+2=5" and asked what you get if you add a giraffe to the mix.
It's not even as useful as spherical cows. Even those libertarian purity tests which I scoff at make more sense. (You're thrown off your tenth floor balcony, save yourself by hanging onto the 9th floor balcony, the 9th floor resident says you are trespassing; do you let go? A comet is heading for Earth and the only thing which can save us is a rocket lacking a 25 cent part which is locked away; do you steal it? You come across a man crawling through the desert who wants a drink of water from your canteen; is it moral to sell it to him for all his possessions?)
I thought about this overnight, and "don't interest me" is too simple an answer. I don't like them because they are so artificial that I don't believe anyone "in real life" would ever let go of the 9th floor balcony and voluntarily die, or that anyone would ever refuse to steal the rocket part. If anyone said they would, I would mark them down as either a liar or a naive fool. I just do not believe that any real person in those situations would do so.
I can believe there are people so cold and callous that as the 9th floor resident, they would refuse to help the guy climb over the balcony and even try to pry his fingers loose. If I were on a jury, I would vote for guilty of murder, or attempted murder on him plus trespassing on the other guy.
I can believe there might be people who would try to stop anyone trying to steal the rocket part. If they were facing a crowd trying to break in, I would not mourn their death, only their stupidity for trying to stop the crowd, much as I would mourn someone stupid enough to stand on the tracks to stop a train Superman-style because there wasn't time to free poor Nell where Snidely Whiplash had tied her down.
If I were the only one trying to steal the part and a single person, say the owner, was trying to prevent me from breaking in, would I shoot him? If there were all the time in the world, days and weeks, I'd argue with him, but if there were that much time, the part could be made from scratch if it only cost 25 cents. If there were only seconds to act, I might shoot him, since we'd all die anyway if I didn't. But what if I had only one bullet, and needed it for breaking the lock? I guess we'd all die unless I could pistol whip him, there sure wouldn't be time for a fist fight or strangulation.
The dying guy in the desert is useless because it doesn't explain how the hiker can suddenly show up like that, and again, I don't believe there is a person in the world except a psychopath who would not give the guy water before anything else. What if the hiker were so law on water that only one could survive? That's unrealistic because that means they are either close enough to civilization for rescue or other water, or one is going to die anyway; anyone who said "Yes, I would give away my last water so another could live while I died" I would not believe them. What if the dying guy were Mother Theresa or Albert Einstein? There we go, off into the weeds again with nonsensical situations.
What if I were tied to a tower by a rope which was the only way to rescue someone and if I untied myself to rescue him I'd fall from the tower and die, and so would the guy who couldn't be rescued, but if I didn't untie myself, we'd both starve to death? I guess we'd both die. "But wouldn't you want people to see you had died trying to rescue him rather than watch each other starve to death?" No, I would rather stay alive as long as possible in case those who did show up came while I was still alive. Of course, at some point, starving people can no longer think clearly, and maybe Id hallucinate rescue and untie myself and die anyway.
The end answer is the same. They are too artificial to get honest answers, and that makes them useless to me.
You are missing the point of the scenarios, which is precisely that people would not behave in the way that the usual statement of libertarian principles implies.
Are you familiar with the form of proof called a reductio ad absurdum?
Because they are so artificial that they just don't interest me. I think this came up before, and I said something about trading the harms of death / wiping out humanity with the lesser harms of trespassing / theft, and you said that made me a utilitarian, which I suppose is fair.
It's similar to people claiming rhymes like town-foun(d) aren't real rhymes and just show how shallow pop songs are.
I'm probably some kind of shallow libertarian :-) My principles can sort of be summed up by the pop slogan "Don't hurt people and don't take their stuff". I get more worked up over people making excuses and exceptions for tariffs, and have offended real economists with the inexact remark that dollars in have to equal dollars out, and investments are just more dollars in. Quibbling over which came first, the concept of property or the definition of self-ownership, leave me cold. And I don't understand how any libertarian or individualist can think protection rackets are a natural evolutionary merger of insurance companies and police; they turn into governments as surely as pure anarchy turns into gangs which turn into governments.
I can see a certain usefulness in all those assumptions. Namely, if you make them, and you still end up with a chaotic system, let's say (sensitive to initial conditions), then that's a good argument that our real system, without those assumptions, would be even more chaotic*.
Admittedly, that doesn't seem to be what Rawls or Harsanyi argued.
*Unless, of course, fewer assumptions weirdly leads to homeostatic effects and a more predictable system. I found chaos math pretty frustrating in college...
It seems to me his whole theory rests on the assumption that whatever random position you get dropped into, it will never change. Things will never get better or worse. You can do nothing to improve your position, and what's more, you can't want to improve your position. You won't be human any more, you won't be yourself. You will be some kind of robot who doesn't care what position you've been dropped into.
At first glance, one question here is whether your position is under your control. If it is (and it's not a zero-sum thing), I think all's well. But I think Rawls and Harsanyi are conceding such examples and only addressing the ones where you can't.
For example, a law saying "if you steal, the fine is the cost of what you stole at the time, plus ten percent" wouldn't trouble either of them; all you have to do is not steal. They only enter the chat when the laws are having to handle circumstances of nature (or people outside the society), such as who should pay for repairing the dam upstream if a quake hits, or who should pay for accommodations for people with hereditary diseases.
Hungarian Jew from Budapest here, though not a very smart one. I think that Scott Alexander did a fair treatment of the problem, but there is some important context that he missed. Here is some of it:
Why is Budapest special:
Budapest and the rest of Hungary are culturally two very different societies that diverged in 1686 in an event that is taught as "the liberation of Pest and Buda from Ottoman yoke". The united armed forces of the ̶W̶a̶r̶s̶a̶w̶ ̶P̶a̶c̶t̶ Holy League defeated the Ottoman forces in Buda and Pest and subsequently murdered and expelled the entire ethnic Hungarian (and other) population of the (then) two cities, replacing them with German settlers. The reason for this was counter-reformation: the Ottoman empire was (for financial reasons dictated by their interpretation of Islam) the most religiously tolerant state in XVIIth century Europe, offering refuge to non-Catholic Christians and Jews from persecution by Catholics. The Holy League was a Catholic-Orthodox alliance formally against Ottomans (Muslims), but in practice also against Calvinist Protestants and Jews. Hungarians at that time were mostly Calvinists (still about a third of them are). From 1686 till about 1820, Buda (called Ofen) and Pest were entirely German-speaking cities, with the last German-speaking neighborhoods disappearing only in 1945, in a similarly ugly expulsion of Germans shortly after WW2. Even today, Hungarian as spoken in Budapest differs from the literary standard in several German-influenced ways and Budapest slang is full of German expressions. Ethnic Hungarians and Jews moved to Budapest in increasing numbers during the urbanization and industrialization in the XIXth century. While Hungarian-speakers eventually became a majority (around the 1860's), the German language retained its prominent role until WW2. My grandmother was fluent in German and her reason for not passing it on was the Holocaust. After the 1867 Compromise resulting in the Habsburg empire becoming Austria-Hungary, Budapest Jews became increasingly bilingual, but stopped using German entirely only after WW2. Today, Budapest is home to about one fifth of Hungary's population, producing half of its GDP.
Secondary education in Hungary:
Secondary education in Hungary (between ages of 14 and 18) was and still is world-class (though deteriorating), unlike primary and post-secondary education, which have never been particularly good and now are really bad. The key to this is the high degree of freedom of high schools to choose their students and teachers, resulting in a handful of elite high schools for which both the best students and the best teachers compete. It is highly prestigious to teach there as well as to learn. This was very much the case in the first half of the 20th century as well. Regular competitions in academic disciplines are also a very important ingredient. Interestingly, the Tiger Mothers of the Chinese and Vietnamese communities that experienced explosive growth recently due to favorable immigration policies are also pushing their children into these high schools. I disagree with Scott Alexander that they failed to work their magic on gentiles. It is just that normal distributions have this very counter-intuitive property of tiny differences in means and standard deviations result in huge differences in frequency at the extremes.
In agreement with Scott Alexander, I also think it is multiple factors, both genetic and social/environmental coming together in a particularly lucky way. I would bet serious money against "the Martians" being particularly closely related genetically to each other.
Very interesting and very intelligent commentary. Kurt Klappoltz (professor of philosophy of economics at the LSE, a man of breathtaking intelligence and an Ashkenazi Jew) said that Jews are not more intelligent than other men. You are right, we must look elsewhere, with the exception of Budapest.
A modest proposal: let's just clone Von Neumann and let 2.0 figure it out. We know where he's buried and ofc he'd consent.
My wife's (Jewish) family was originally from Austro-Hungary and her grandfather fought for them in WW I.
You can't underestimate Franz Joseph's pro-Jewish policies (The Jews used to affectionately call him "Franz Yosef") which made his Empire a magnet for the most successful, accomplished, Ashkenazi Jews in Europe. Then add two generations of selective breeding within that population.
The reason why so many Martians went into the Hard Sciences was because their status, wealth, and rights were uncertain and it's easier to successfully migrate & succeed in a new country with a Ph.D in physics or chemistry than with a background in banking or Austro-Hungarian law.
Perhaps people who intend to investigate further should register their intent publicly first, otherwise their premature deaths would just appear random bad luck.
I'm all for sequencing all the Martians, and even comment in my recent "short, fun John von Neumann anecdotes" post that the fact that we're NOT studying von Neumann's DNA is a tragedy itself, but if you look at them, it's very hard to posit a half-sibling degree of familial resemblance:
https://imgur.com/a/ek1j44j
Chased down some of those links and it reminded me of my own personal view of Rawlsism: he assumes an utterly static society, without births, illness, accidents, deaths, weather, and everything else external which changes society. He assumes all people have exactly the same definitions and all agree on what is better and worse, and that not a single person ever thinks of better ways of doing anything. His society has no innovation, inventions, literature, music, art, or anything else which makes us human. He ignores the fact that dropping a stranger into this static society upsets it and changes it.
I don't know if I ever would have gotten as far as yours and other arguments. The whole basis seemed so absurd that I saw no point in pondering it any further. He may as well have started with "Assume 2+2=5" and asked what you get if you add a giraffe to the mix.
It's not even as useful as spherical cows. Even those libertarian purity tests which I scoff at make more sense. (You're thrown off your tenth floor balcony, save yourself by hanging onto the 9th floor balcony, the 9th floor resident says you are trespassing; do you let go? A comet is heading for Earth and the only thing which can save us is a rocket lacking a 25 cent part which is locked away; do you steal it? You come across a man crawling through the desert who wants a drink of water from your canteen; is it moral to sell it to him for all his possessions?)
Why do you scoff at what you call libertarian purity tests? They are a useful way of seeing if you actually believe your stated principles.
I thought about this overnight, and "don't interest me" is too simple an answer. I don't like them because they are so artificial that I don't believe anyone "in real life" would ever let go of the 9th floor balcony and voluntarily die, or that anyone would ever refuse to steal the rocket part. If anyone said they would, I would mark them down as either a liar or a naive fool. I just do not believe that any real person in those situations would do so.
I can believe there are people so cold and callous that as the 9th floor resident, they would refuse to help the guy climb over the balcony and even try to pry his fingers loose. If I were on a jury, I would vote for guilty of murder, or attempted murder on him plus trespassing on the other guy.
I can believe there might be people who would try to stop anyone trying to steal the rocket part. If they were facing a crowd trying to break in, I would not mourn their death, only their stupidity for trying to stop the crowd, much as I would mourn someone stupid enough to stand on the tracks to stop a train Superman-style because there wasn't time to free poor Nell where Snidely Whiplash had tied her down.
If I were the only one trying to steal the part and a single person, say the owner, was trying to prevent me from breaking in, would I shoot him? If there were all the time in the world, days and weeks, I'd argue with him, but if there were that much time, the part could be made from scratch if it only cost 25 cents. If there were only seconds to act, I might shoot him, since we'd all die anyway if I didn't. But what if I had only one bullet, and needed it for breaking the lock? I guess we'd all die unless I could pistol whip him, there sure wouldn't be time for a fist fight or strangulation.
The dying guy in the desert is useless because it doesn't explain how the hiker can suddenly show up like that, and again, I don't believe there is a person in the world except a psychopath who would not give the guy water before anything else. What if the hiker were so law on water that only one could survive? That's unrealistic because that means they are either close enough to civilization for rescue or other water, or one is going to die anyway; anyone who said "Yes, I would give away my last water so another could live while I died" I would not believe them. What if the dying guy were Mother Theresa or Albert Einstein? There we go, off into the weeds again with nonsensical situations.
What if I were tied to a tower by a rope which was the only way to rescue someone and if I untied myself to rescue him I'd fall from the tower and die, and so would the guy who couldn't be rescued, but if I didn't untie myself, we'd both starve to death? I guess we'd both die. "But wouldn't you want people to see you had died trying to rescue him rather than watch each other starve to death?" No, I would rather stay alive as long as possible in case those who did show up came while I was still alive. Of course, at some point, starving people can no longer think clearly, and maybe Id hallucinate rescue and untie myself and die anyway.
The end answer is the same. They are too artificial to get honest answers, and that makes them useless to me.
You are missing the point of the scenarios, which is precisely that people would not behave in the way that the usual statement of libertarian principles implies.
Are you familiar with the form of proof called a reductio ad absurdum?
Well..... I thought I was :-O
To see the argument in context, take a look at Chapter 41 of The Machinery of Freedom.
Well well well ....
I guess I have a lot of egg on my face.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/50/22/d3/5022d389e3e5dd076c14f0d85552ebf2.jpg
Because they are so artificial that they just don't interest me. I think this came up before, and I said something about trading the harms of death / wiping out humanity with the lesser harms of trespassing / theft, and you said that made me a utilitarian, which I suppose is fair.
It's similar to people claiming rhymes like town-foun(d) aren't real rhymes and just show how shallow pop songs are.
I'm probably some kind of shallow libertarian :-) My principles can sort of be summed up by the pop slogan "Don't hurt people and don't take their stuff". I get more worked up over people making excuses and exceptions for tariffs, and have offended real economists with the inexact remark that dollars in have to equal dollars out, and investments are just more dollars in. Quibbling over which came first, the concept of property or the definition of self-ownership, leave me cold. And I don't understand how any libertarian or individualist can think protection rackets are a natural evolutionary merger of insurance companies and police; they turn into governments as surely as pure anarchy turns into gangs which turn into governments.
I can see a certain usefulness in all those assumptions. Namely, if you make them, and you still end up with a chaotic system, let's say (sensitive to initial conditions), then that's a good argument that our real system, without those assumptions, would be even more chaotic*.
Admittedly, that doesn't seem to be what Rawls or Harsanyi argued.
*Unless, of course, fewer assumptions weirdly leads to homeostatic effects and a more predictable system. I found chaos math pretty frustrating in college...
It seems to me his whole theory rests on the assumption that whatever random position you get dropped into, it will never change. Things will never get better or worse. You can do nothing to improve your position, and what's more, you can't want to improve your position. You won't be human any more, you won't be yourself. You will be some kind of robot who doesn't care what position you've been dropped into.
At first glance, one question here is whether your position is under your control. If it is (and it's not a zero-sum thing), I think all's well. But I think Rawls and Harsanyi are conceding such examples and only addressing the ones where you can't.
For example, a law saying "if you steal, the fine is the cost of what you stole at the time, plus ten percent" wouldn't trouble either of them; all you have to do is not steal. They only enter the chat when the laws are having to handle circumstances of nature (or people outside the society), such as who should pay for repairing the dam upstream if a quake hits, or who should pay for accommodations for people with hereditary diseases.