Quick post: Why are there so few universally accepted principles in economics?
It's obvious to many, but is worth stating just for the record.
- Consistent data isn't necessarily easy to come by. There's TONS of data about markets, but the way people react to a certain set of policies can vary with culture, time, zeitgeist, etc.
- People don't always make rational (in the "most likely to help achieve their ultimate goals" sense) economic choices. This makes generalizing difficult.
- There are potentially long lag times between when a policy is enacted and its effects. Policies are also subject to change - and can be changed before the results of the policy are seen. This is another thing that makes getting good data difficult.
- There are many Economists who aren't necessarily using real empirical data or anything resembling the scientific method to decide what principles "work" or are "good"; these Economists have made assumptions about human behavior first, then decided on their principles rather than using actual non-anecdotal data.
If we accept, for the sake of argument, that economics is really 90% mass psychology, 10% math, then isn’t a large part of the issue that many of its professional practitioners have tried to understand problems though a lens where those percentages are reversed? There is perhaps kind of bias that causes many of these people to only see the world using neat models, and discount that what economics is really about trying to understand (once you get beyond the simple cases where said models and standard ideas about incentives work):
what people do and want to do; how many of them do it; and for how long, modified by:
1) geopolitical events
2) the zeitgeist
3) culture (and subculture)
People may go into the field with a love of numbers and an interest in money; what we may really need, however, are people who care about understanding human behavior as it pertains to resources and power within and between societies. A “sociology for money”, as it were.
The three defining ideas about economics in America
Articles on these three ideas have been floating around for the past few months, and I've been thinking about ways to synthesize them. Perhaps at a later date. For now, I thought I'd simply list and summarize them, to serve as a reminder. Understanding these things are extremely important for understanding many of the other problems in the US today:
"...the other main reason Americans seem so unperturbed by the widening chasm between the rich and everyone else is what I like to call the lottery effect. Buying lottery tickets is clearly an irrational act -- the odds are hugely stacked against us. But many millions of us do, because we see the powerful evidence that an ordinary person, someone just like us whose only qualifying act was to buy a ticket, wins our favorite lottery every week.
For many Americans, the nation’s rowdy form of capitalism is a lottery that has similarly bestowed fabulous rewards on the Everyman."
"that poor Americans’ antipathy toward redistribution might be due not to their desire to one day be at the top of the income distribution, but to their fear of falling to the bottom. We show that humans have a deep psychological aversion to being in “last place” -- recall the shame of being picked last in gym class -- such that individuals near the bottom of the income distribution may be wary of redistribution because it could help those just below them leapfrog above them."
"The just-world hypothesis (also called the just-world theory, just-world fallacy, just-world effect, or just-world phenomenon) refers to the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just. As a result, when they witness an otherwise inexplicable injustice they rationalize it by searching for things that the victim might have done to deserve it. This deflects their anxiety, and lets them continue to believe the world is a just place, but often at the expense of blaming victims for things that were not, objectively, their fault."
A hidden reason for US anti-elitism/anti-intellectualism
There are many obvious reasons for US anti-elitism/anti-intellectualism: religious/religion-influenced cultural beliefs, poor education, mass media failures, insular cultural groups that invent alternate explanations for things, and plain old ignorance. This article deals with Agnotology, or "culturally induced ignorance", which is important to understand (and deal with) in the context of this topic.
There is, however, another reason, which may be less obvious than the above. It applies to people who do, in fact, know better, but maintain laughable/ignorant/ridiculous positions about issues regardless. Let's call them "Future Policy Fearers." This brilliant comment on Less Wrong sums these people up perfectly (this particular example uses climate change/AGW, but it could be about Creationism/Evolution or a hundred other things):
"It becomes a signaling game, in which each choice of belief will be understood as exactly how you would communicate a particular choice of political move, and the costs of making the wrong political move feel very high. So the belief decisions and the political actions become tangled up.
Roughly, people have no way of saying:
'I believe that in terms of pure decision theory, the predicted AGW damage and costs of further investigation and costs of delay are high enough that mitigation attempts should start now. But I don't want to give up my {economic privileges / substantive national sovereignty / chance to get the standard of living of past carbon-emitting nations} without a fight, because I don't want groups in the future like {scientists / profit-hating hippie tree-huggers / freedom-hating U.N. environmental bureaucrats / greedy unfair first-world hypocrites} to think I'll just roll over when they try to impose concessions on me, in the name of premises that will feel psychologically as though they might just as well have been made up. In that future situation, it will be important for me to be able to credibly threaten outrage at being forced into such concessions. But as long as nobody else is going to take me for their fool, the sacrifices needed to prevent AGW are fine with me; we could start today.'
So instead, they say:
'I believe that the case for AGW isn't strong enough. I demand clearer proof.'
If it were possible to negotiate separately about AGW action and about precedents of policy concessions to e.g. scientists' claims, then you might see less decision-theoretic insanity around the AGW action question itself."
This group is just as important when dealing with perceived ignorance as those who are victims of Agnotology. Their actions and positions act as a proxy for a future power struggle, and should be understood as such.
Revolution U
Revolution U is an excellent article charting the history of CANVAS, a non-violent revolution organization that has taught resistance and protest movements around the world how to apply the idea of "nonviolent conflict as a form of warfare." They've taught groups in Burma, Egypt, Zimbabwe and others how to use a variety of tactics to weaken, and ultimately overthrow, dictatorial regimes. Their work is very important, and I strongly recommend reading the article.
There are some problems, though.
First, there's the implication that non-violent resistance alone can work. I can't find a source for it at the moment, but there's an argument that basically says that non-violent resistance only works when there's the implied threat of violence behind it. The idea is that things like Gandhi's resistance movement only ultimately worked because there were potentially millions of people willing to do violence on his behalf. This fact remained unstated, but it was always there, silently confronting and confounding the British occupiers. Whether this is true or not is very difficult to say, but I don't think any discussion of non-violent resistance is complete without it.
Second, it's easy to imagine people here in the US attempting to apply these lessons to deal with our current problems. I think it would be extremely worthwhile for activists and organizers here to learn from CANVAS, but should do so knowing that we have a fundamentally different problem in this country. We don't have dictatorship or anything like it. We do have a serious issues with Corporatism and Crony Capitalism (our song "Moussolini's revenge" deals with this very issue) but to think that it is a "dictatorship" implies a fundamental misunderstanding of the things that prop up much of the current power structures. As described in our song "A Graveyard If Elephants" and books like "What's the matter with Kansas?", we have a population of people who continually vote against their own economic interests over social issues; because they've actually bought into an ideology that says that Negative Liberty is the only kind of Liberty, and that the means justify the ends (see "The Washington Consensus") - so even though these people are hurt by these policies, and they often know it, they continue to do it anyway because they actually believe it's justified with that conception of liberty. Here in the US, what we have is a bitter, slow motion civil war with divisions along many different lines. It's nothing like the simple and traditional oppressor/oppressed situation you see in many dictatorships.
Finally, I believe we need to think more about the imbalance between illiberal movements/regimes and liberal ones (in the classical sense.) Liberal regimes tend to only work where there is at least some level of broadly shared prosperity, even if it isn't all that much. Illiberal regimes, on the other hand, can survive (with a powerful enough system for keeping resistance in check) through both economic hardship and prosperity. This fundamental imbalance means that the scales are always tipped against liberalism, and its a constant fight to keep it in place. The only answer here is to improve and maintain living standards and prosperity. Will alone has not, and does not work.
Does everyone need a college degree?
Does everyone need a college degree? is a well-written article on a study of the US education system, and how badly broken it is. It touches on some things which have been floating around a while in the econo- and political blogs. It's worth a read, but I think that it misses a few bigger picture issues, many of which are related to race-to-the-bottom offshoring and, more importantly now, increasing automation:
- Helping people make the connection between higher education and "what they want to do in the future." What people "want to do" may be jobs that do not pay enough to support a living or have disappeared/are on the verge of disappearing. This is made worse by the fact that jobs that seem stable right now may be gone in just a few years. "Making the connection" to something that doesn't/won't exist isn't very useful. It's sometimes hard to predict what's going to be in demand next, but the whole "mess around for years, read the BLS site after they've figured out the next big thing 5 years after it actually starts, then race back to college and incur massive amounts of debt trying to catch up and by the time you're done the industry/job is gone" "system" is just not working.
- Job training for "middle skill" jobs has the same issue as the item above. Are these jobs really safe? Sure, they are hard to offshore, but they too can ultimately be automated, and even if they can't anytime soon, just how many electricians can a country support? This really needs to be thought through.
- Finally, what we really need is to do some more serious big thinking about more than "work", which is too narrow now. We need to figure how how we're going to "occupy" people in the transition from post-industrial/service/information technology society to a roboticized, post-scarcity, arts and leisure society. If handled poorly, "social unrest", mass protests, and outright violence may be become a regular part of the landscape, what with millions of always-idle, impoverished people just sitting on the sidelines, ignored. How long could this last? One hundred years, perhaps? That's a long time to have constant social upheaval.
Of course, this is all from the purely shorter-term economic cost-benefit perspective. A highly educated workforce is extremely valuable for both a properly functioning liberal democracy, and for an innovative society. With a universal, free, distance-learning focused higher education system, this calculus changes a great deal. We should strive for this.
Marxist critiques of the last economic crisis
How much is too much? is a new article which goes into the various critiques and (lack of critiques) of the last crisis, particularly the dearth of Marxist critiques. There's a lot to be said for continuing to do and research critiques from this perspective, as Marx's critiques of Capitalism continue to have value, especially as they pertain to the inevitability of crises (particularly with free-ish markets) and (more recently) natural resource exhaustion. These critiques should be part of, and serve as another useful perspective along with critiques from other perpectives; there's still real value there. That all said, Marxism and the movements it spawned have historically done a remarkably poor job at actual solutions (beyond initial successes in the Soviet Russian experiments), and do not really have anything useful to say about the effects of labor automation; theories of surplus value, owning means of production, and unions don't fit well in a world where human beings are needed for less and less. The other two areas that Marxism (even recent revisions) still has little useful to say about are the increasing moves towards virtualized economies without "real" scarcity and "value-added service" economies.
Marxist thought and critiques are still important for diagnosing some of our problems. Those hoping for a radical comeback of his work in a political context would do well to consider what Marx didn't say, though, as those things are going to prevent anything resembling a real political resurgence from coming about in countries with highly developed economies.
Are committed truthseekers lonelier?
People of a truthseeking bent - rationalists, unbiased scientists, inquisitive non-ideologues - are these types of people likely to be lonelier on average? Those who hold a particular set of positions, tastes, perspectives, worldviews, or preferences to be part of a group, rather than the other way around (being considered part of some group because they hold a particular set of positions) seem like they are at a significant advantage when it comes to the ability to make and keep friends, or at least find tolerant acquaintances compared to the typical truthseeker.
The truthseeker, by virtue of their ability to find, to a particular group they are currently part of or interacting with, uncomfortable truths, seems to put them in the unenviable position of, once they've found a particular uncomfortable truth, having to either keep quiet and have less-than-completely honest or more limited interactions, or speaking their mind and getting ostracized. Along with this, they're far less likely to engage in "false flattery", are more likely to focus on details and nuance (and hence be perceived negatively, due to an aversion to pedantry on certain subjects by some), far more likely to voice disagreement, and far more likely to wind up being a person to defend something considered objectionable by the group (they'd defend the proverbial idiot who says the sun will rise tomorrow - since it will, regardless of the fact that an idiot says it.)
The truthseeker may also confuse their interlocutors, due to what may be perceived as "holding contradictory views" ("how can you think THAT if you also think THIS? You don't know what you're talking about"); they may be accused of being a "plant" from the "other side" ("if you think that particular thing, you must secretly be an X, so all that other stuff you said that I agree with must be a lie"); they may be thought of as a troll or prankster ("you're just saying that thing I consider objectionable to get a negative reaction out of me, but I know you really agree with me on that the way you [honestly] agree with me on all that other stuff"), or that you're playing devil's advocate for its own sake. These things all happen, but due to the (current) inability to know for sure another's motives, it may be easy to confuse the truthseeker with the idiot, the confused/self-contradictory, the plant, the troll, or the advocate, even though the truthseeker's ideas and motives have nothing to do with any of those.
Based on limited observations coupled with a little speculation, I'd say that yes, truthseekers are likely to be lonelier on average. They're likely much rarer, so finding other committed truthseekers would be tough, and there's no guarantee they'd even like each other (for non-truthseeking-related reasons - like not liking the same subjective things (music, fashion, food, etc.)) My personal experience says that one can be professionally and personal well respected, considered extremely friendly, and still have no "real" friends; truthseekers are easy to love, but considered difficult to like.
Perhaps a simpler reason (in the typical case) is that the truthseeker is simply perceived as a whole lot less fun.
Beyond left and right: towards a new political classification system
Many political, social, and economic debates take place using simple framings like left/right and liberal/conservative, framings which, for a variety of reasons, have reached the point of near-complete uselessness. All said terms have become so broad that they can be used to explain everything, which as we know, helps explain nothing. In the interest of pushing this forward, I'd like to propose a richer system, one based on a number of continuum graphs representing a range of positions that governments and people can take. Other attempts have been made at this (things like Nolan charts), but I feel this will be more comprehensive and hopefully more useful, while still allowing for conversational shortcuts. These charts consider only effective policy, not written, as what governments (or de facto governments) do can often be quite different than their charters suggest. Using a system like this will allow us to reveal a great deal more nuance, and allow us to see that attempting to classify one's set of beliefs is harder to quantify than it first appears.
Economic:
High redistribution [-------------------------------------------------] No redistribution
This is the only one where left/right still makes sense. On the far left you have things like Communism, where taxation and redistribution through all mechanisms (social services, direct transfers, etc.) are extremely high, going so far as (theoretically) attempting to give everyone an equal share. On the right you have no taxes or social services, which fits things like Anarcho-Capitalism. In between you have everything from generous Social Democracies (much redistribution, stopping far short of attempts to equalize completely (e.g., Sweden)) down to Minarchist Libertarianism and Objectivism.
High social freedom [-----------------------------------------------] Rigid social laws
On the left here we have systems that do not attempt to regulate non-economic behavior as long as no "direct material harm" is caused, and at the other end, we have systems which attempt to micromanage interactions, sometimes down to the individual level. No real-world examples of the left side of the graph currently; the right side we have many examples, especially Theocracies (like Saudia Arabia) and de facto Theocracies in less-developed countries (rural parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan would fit this bill.)
Invasive domestic security system [--------------] No domestic security system
On the left side we have all-pervasive surveillance states, going so far as to monitor each citizen to the level of individual ankle bracelets, and worn/in-home cameras. Only fictional examples currently exist, but tending toward the left side of the graph would be places like Malaysia, China, and Britain (2007 Privacy International rankings.) There are also no real-world examples of "no-surveillance" societies; even the most unstable, anarchic ones revert to small-scale, local surveillance and enforcement systems.
Aggressive foreign policy [-------------------------------------] Pacifist foreign policy
On the left side we have many of the Imperial powers of the past few centuries, using war to take over, and sometimes run, other countries. On the other side, we have countries which do not even possess armed forces (e.g., Costa Rica, Vatican City)
As we can now see, the simple distinctions in common use imply a picture that is far simpler than the reality. Countries are all over the place on these charts, with examples like Japan (high income equality, somewhat rigid social laws, moderately to fairly intrusive domestic security state, and near-pacifist [officially pacifist, but still has military[-esque] personnel] foreign policy]) vs. the old Soviet Union (high income equality, mixed social laws, very intrusive domestic security state, and [at times] Imperialist) show that a simple designation like "left" doesn't mean much. Though this system cannot show every nuance, it will hopefully allow us to illustrate something more useful when speaking about these subjects.
This is a very basic outline, and I'll likely expand on and flesh out this idea down the line, but it illustrates the direction of my thinking on the subject. It's clear now that the lines we've drawn and the terms we use simply obscure too much to be useful anymore. I hope we can change that.
Illusions of Symmetric Information
Eliezer Yudkowsky has cogently explained the Illusion of Transparency and Double Illusion of Transparency, which define (in very simplified terms - visit the links for a complete explanation) the belief or feeling by an individual that 1) others understand their expressed meaning in communication and 2) the belief by that individual's interlocutors and listeners that they too believe what the original communicator intended to communicate, respectively. I'd like to propose two related concepts: the Illusion of Symmetric Information and the Double Illusion of Symmetric Information. Similar to the original ideas, I'd define them as the belief that others have the exact same information you do, and the belief by said others that, they too, have the same information you do, even though they don't.
Every time we have a conversation, debate, or argument, these two assumptions, if not dealt with carefully, can lead to misunderstanding (obviously) and to endlessly repeated cycles of argument and counterargument, often using cached thoughts, with no attempt to deal with (and correct, in many cases) the underlying beliefs or knowledge that are the cause for disagreement in the first place.
Two honest participants can sit down with the absolute best intentions, but due to disagreements about underlying facts, can sometimes find themselves trapped in an ocean-boiling debate (or worse, meta-debate when it comes to disagreement by fact gathering, fact verification, research methods, or argument style/etiquette) that enlightens no one. As honest seekers of truth, we should in fact strive to, if we find ourselves in these loops, to step back and dig into the underlying ideas or biases causing said loop. In some cases, we should be asking, as Eliezer asks "Is that your true objection?"
Perhaps then we can avoid and correct for the Illusions of Symmetric Information.
Convenient legal fictions
What things do we maintain as true in the realm of law that science (psychology, social science, neurobiology, or otherwise) that we know are false?
1) That psychological damage isn't that big a deal, at least in a way that requires us to mete out punishment. We know it is. We know that abuse, whether physical, verbal, or psychological can have serious, long lasting, and (due to the current state of brain science) incurable effects. We cannot, however, change the way we treat it without destroying the very notion of a free society. When it comes to physical injury or abuse, we can easily gauge who, when, and how much someone will be harmed. Stepping on someone's toe produces the same effect as stomping just about anyone else's toe. We can predict its short, medium, and long term effects. We know what kind of and the degree of damage different levels of force produce. The same cannot be said of psychological damage; its effects vary by person, time, culture, mood, recent experiences, etc. This is an ethical, legal, and logistic minefield. If anyone can credibly claim that hearing these words or seeing those images have caused them irreparable harm, free speech is dead as a doornail. No longer will we be able to say "just don't look", "leave that web site", "turn it off." Instead, we'll be in a situation where anyone's actions are accepted as having the potential to psychologically scar or destroy another."Individualized, non-deterministic harm" is simply incompatible with a system of ordered liberty.
2) We pretend people are rational by default. Just look what happens when we say that people are irrational and aren’t always in control of their actions. If you really dig deeply, and ask a judge or a prosecuting attorney if they think people are always rational, and always responsible, what’s their honest – I mean really honest – answer going to be? “Of course they aren’t, but our whole society falls apart if we don’t maintain that illusion.” Suddenly, anyone can say they weren’t in control. The voices made them do it. Sometimes this is true, other times it isn’t. If our default position isn’t “people are rational” we need to rethink everything, and we wind up starting down the road of things like medicating the population a la THX-1138 (for economics, luckily, the answer is simpler: abandon the idea of Homo Economicus and adopt systems built on the idea that humans aren’t rational. Heterodox economics has a lot to contribute here, and is the place we should start building from, IMO. Trying to apply this in the legal realm is a whole other matter.)
Ultimately, our answer lies in creating systems to allow irrational people to exist and behave whichever way while minimizing harm – societies administered by dispassionate friendly AI or "personal matrixes with voluntary connections to other personal matrixes that are easily severable."
(Based on a previous comment on a post on The Big Picture: Letter from Chicago: F.)
