In his 1651 book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that, in order to protect its subjects, the state—“Leviathan”—need to be all-powerful. The problem, others noted and history showed, is that a non-democratic Leviathan is a recipe for tyranny. But a democratic state will respect every citizen’s interests because we love ourselves. The democratic Leviathan loves you because he is you. This theory took many forms up to the present day. James Sensenbrenner, a former congressman who was instrumental in the adoption of the “Patriot” Act of 2001, is part of the legions who implicitly support this theory. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he complains that this Hobbesian law now threatens parents who object to the teachings of public schools (“The Patriot Act Wasn’t Meant to Target Parents,” October 12, 2021): When debating the Patriot Act and other federal antiterrorism laws, nobody in either chamber of Congress could have imagined these laws would be turned against concerned parents at local school board meetings. Probably so, but it is more a reflection of their political naïveté than a proof of anything else. The Patriot Act surprised its well-meaning supporters in numerous other ways, not to speak of the many banana republics in the world that imitated it. Starting in the 18th century, it was discovered, both theoretically and in reality, that virtuous intentions of politicians, bureaucrats, and even voters are not what mainly fuels the democratic state. Classical liberals realized that, as individuals have different preferences and interests, it is impossible for even well-meaning politicians and bureaucrats to satisfy all with ad hoc interventions. This discovery was buttressed in the 20th century by the development of the public choice school of economics and related theories. The same century provided many illustrations. The Leviathan that started Word War II and ran the Holocaust was, half a century before, viewed as the paragon of civilization. (For more on this point, see my “Progressivism’s Tainted Label,” review of Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers, Regulation 39:2 [Summer 2016], pp. 51-55; and my “Where Are We on the Road to Serfdom?” review of Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Regulation 44:3 [Fall 2021], pp. 56-59.) Another example: who could imagine that the Communist state, which was meant to end the “exploitation of man by man,” would kill its own citizens by the tens of millions? To summarize the whole story in a few words: Give Leviathan an inch and he will take a mile. (0 COMMENTS)

How much richer is the First World than the Third?  If you simply compare nominal GDP per capita, the ratio is staggering.  By this measure, Americans are over twenty times richer than Haitians.  The standard view in macro, however, holds that these ratios are overstated.  Largely due to non-traded goods, the cost of living is higher in rich countries.  To properly compare the First World to the Third, this argument goes, one must do a Purchasing Power Parity adjustment.  When you do so, the ratios shrink.  The US/Haiti income ratio turns out to be more like 15:1. The insight that poor countries aren’t as poor as they seem has a technical name: the Penn Effect.  As Wikipedia puts it: The Penn effect is the economic finding that real income ratios between high and low income countries are systematically exaggerated by gross domestic product (GDP) conversion at market exchange rates. It is associated with what became the Penn World Table, and it has been a consistent econometric result since at least the 1950s. This all makes sense, but there’s a major offsetting factor: CPI bias.  In rich countries, standard price indices fail to fully account for rising product quality, variety, and more.  As a result, they overstate inflation year in, year out.  (Except during Covid, where the opposite is true with a vengeance).  A typical estimate of CPI bias is one percentage point per year.  Might not seem like much, but over the course of fifty years, that translates to 64% higher living standards. What does this have to do with the income gap between the First World and the Third?  Simple: There are strong reasons to believe that CPI bias becomes more severe as countries grow richer. In primitive economies, CPI bias is roughly zero.  Product quantity stays the same; product quality stays the same; product variety stays the same.  And when primitive economies finally get growing, consumers initially focus on acquiring a larger quantity of familiar goods.  They consume more calories.  They get a car.  They get a TV.  After a while, they get another car and another TV. Traditional GDP measures capture such development quite well. Once consumers possess an ample quantity of goods, however, they focus more and more on quality and variety.  They don’t want more calories; they want a dozen different cuisines.  They don’t want three cars; they want two cool cars.  They don’t want five TVs.  They want one or two mind-blowing TVs. As far as I know, the CPI bias literature continues to neglect the evolution of CPI bias.  The further you go back in the past, the harder it is to find data – and the harder it is to make other scholars care about your results.  But there is every reason to think that CPI bias has been getting worse over time in rich countries.  And so has the disparity between real and measured living standards.  (Again, Covid aside!)  Verily, our problem is not in our stuff but in ourselves. The key qualification, however, is “in rich countries.”  In the world’s poorest countries, CPI bias has probably remained very low.  They’ve got smartphones now, and that’s a genuine great leap forward.  Otherwise, however, living standards in the poorest countries remain ultra-low.  In middle-income countries, CPI bias matters more – but still a lot less than in the richest countries.  They’re materializing as we’re dematerializing. None of this means that the Penn Effect doesn’t exist.  What it means, rather, is that there’s a big, neglected offsetting factor.  Once you properly account for CPI bias around the world over the last century, you could easily discover that naive estimates of the income gap between the First and Third Worlds are actually accurate.  Or even understated. P.S. If we’re so rich, why aren’t we happy?  Asked and answered! (0 COMMENTS)

In the last 10 years or so, when the Nobel Committee announces the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, it also simultaneously release a lengthy document, obviously written by an informed economist or informed economists, presenting and explaining in detail the work of the winners. That document always helps me write my op/ed for the Wall Street Journal. This year was no exception. I actually thought the document this year was better than average. I mentioned one highlight from the document in my op/ed about how two years after winners in a Medicaid lottery didn’t have better physical health than those who lost out. I didn’t see any other article mentioning that, although I might have missed it. In my post on parts of my op/ed that the Journal editor cut, I also mentioned the natural experiment in Austria in which those a little over 50 years of age who qualified for a 4-year unemployment benefit were unemployed for an average of 15 weeks more than those who were just under 50. I would bet dollars to doughnuts that no U.S. reporter mentioned this. There was more to mention, though, much of it on the famous Card/Krueger study on the minimum wage increase in New Jersey. There are two things to highlight. First, the author  (I’ll use the singular from now on) pointed out that the counterintuitive Card/Krueger result was criticized by Neumark and Wascher, something I pointed out in my WSJ piece. Here’s the specific wording, which, unfortunately, is in a footnote (on page 15): The quality of the data in Card and Krueger (1994) was criticized by Neumark and Wascher (2000). Card and Krueger (2000) thus redid the analysis using administrative data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They found a positive estimate on an indicator for New Jersey, but it was not statistically significant. Given the extent to which the report highlighted the Card/Krueger result, I think the author should have pointed out two things. First, it should have mentioned the specific problems that Neumark and Wascher pointed out with the data: the one I noted in my WSJ piece, which is that it was all data gathered over the phone, and the criticism that Card and Krueger didn’t measure labor hours but settled for measuring the number of people employed. Second, it should have pointed out that Neumark and Wascher, using payroll data, got the traditional textbook results. The other thing I want to highlight about the treatment of the Card/Krueger result is that the author understood that if we take that result at face value (and we shouldn’t, by the way), then we need to understand why it happened. One factor that UC San Diego labor economist Jeffrey Clemens discussed in a recent article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives is that when the wage is raised by law, other non-pecuniary parts of the pay package will fall. This makes the job-destruction effect of a minimum wage increase less than otherwise. So, sure enough, the author does mention that, writing on page 17: Compensation packages have more components than wages. In response to a minimum wage increase, firms may reduce the value of other parts of the package, which implies that total labor costs do not rise one-for-one with the minimum wage. It would have been appropriate, though, given the extensive bibliography at the end, for the author to mention the Clemens paper. (0 COMMENTS)

Matt Yglesias has an excellent post discussing Ibram X. Kendi’s attempt to redefine the term ‘racism’ from personal animosity against another racial group to advocacy of policies that widen the gap between two racial groups: When the book was first published in 2019, that’s not how it was received. Kelefa Sanneh’s excellent review in the New Yorker heads straight for what I think is the core weirdness of Kendi’s ideas. If we accept the definition that a racist is a person who supports racist policies, and what makes a policy racist is that it “produces or sustains racial inequity,” then determining which policies are racist requires exhaustive analysis of controversial empirical questions. Sanneh uses the example of “ban the box” laws which prohibit employers from asking about past criminal convictions. Many activists and the National Employment Law Center regard this as an important anti-racist measure since African Americans are more likely to have prior convictions and thus be disadvantaged by this question. But Jennifer Doleac and Benjamin Hansen find that “ban the box” laws lead to worse employment outcomes for Black men because absent specific information about past criminal records, employers engage in statistical discrimination.1 “Are these laws and their supporters racist?” Sanneh asks. “In Kendi’s framework, the only possible answer is: wait and see.” Just to be clear, there are public policies that have a disparate impact and are also motivated by racism.  That is probably true of our crack cocaine laws, and also some zoning regulations.  Nonetheless, Yglesias points out that it is a very odd definition of racism where a person might end up being called racist for advocating laws that they thought were anti-racist—such as “ban the box” or “defund the police”. In fact, I think it’s even worse than Yglesias suggests.  Why should we worry about how laws affect inequality?  Isn’t the actual goal to maximize aggregate utility?  And if that’s not the goal, if you have a Rawlsian value system, then surely a public policy that improves the utility of disadvantaged minorities is not racist, right? In 1959, Mao implemented an egalitarian program called the Great Leap Forward, which equalized the pay of Chinese peasants regardless of their productivity.  Unfortunately, that program also reduced the incentive to work hard and output fell sharply, resulting in the death of roughly 30 million people from starvation.  Not good.  Indeed, maybe the worse disaster ever. This example might seem pretty far removed from our society.  Don’t most actual policies that increase economic disparities also make the poor worse off?  Actually, not as often as you’d think. If you polled most American economists they would probably agree that: 1.  Capitalism makes the poor better off than socialism. 2.  Capitalism results in more income inequality than socialism. And I don’t think it’s just economists that have this view.  Over the years, I recall reading a number of studies suggesting that African-American voters tended to be skeptical of candidates that advocated socialism, and often voted for more centrist Democratic candidates. I agree with Yglesias that it’s a bad idea to define “racist” as someone who advocates programs that increase racial disparities.  (And who gets to make that judgment?  Kendi?  Trump?)  But I would go even further.  Reducing racial disparities should not be the primary goal of public policy.  I don’t want to live in a country where everyone is paid the same, because in that country the average level of real wages will fall to a very low level.  Instead, the goal of antiracists should be raising the utility level of disadvantaged groups. Lots of obvious policy initiatives like decriminalizing crack cocaine or eliminating residential zoning restrictions can do this without making society worse off.  But I would go even further.  There are non-obvious policy initiatives that can improve the well being of disadvantaged groups, such as lower tax rates on capital income and free trade agreements.  Those initiatives won’t necessarily reduce racial disparities; they might even widen them.  But they will improve the well being of disadvantaged groups. To summarize, the anti-racist movement is not merely off track in redefining racism from personal animosity to economic disparity, it is also infected with zero sum mentality, which assumes that any policy that widens disparities reduces the welfare of the lowest paid groups.  And that’s just false. PS.  This is a good example of someone motivated by anti-racism, taking an action that makes racism worse. (0 COMMENTS)

The Biden administration is intent on forcing large private businesses to have their employees vaccinated against Covid-19 or to produce weekly test results. The governor of Texas issued an executive order forbidding private businesses from mandating the vaccine for their employees. (See Eric Boehm, “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Bans Private Businesses from Mandating Vaccines for Workers,” Reason Magazine, October 12, 2021.) This illustrates a trend that has been developing for some time whereby anything affected by a so-called “public interest” is either banned or compulsory. In the process, what was deemed private becomes public. Note that the process has no built-in stopping mechanism. On the contrary, as more areas of life become matters of dirigiste democratic decision, more and more people want their democracy to intervene. For reasons well-known to students of public choice, politicians and bureaucrats are happy to oblige. The left and the right both become more authoritarian. And the process continues. One depiction of this scenario is given in the last chapter of Anthony de Jasay’s The State on “state capitalism.” One objection to all that is that the condition of mankind has been worse before. The featured image of this post comes from a reenactment of the Battle of Hattin in 1187, during the Second Crusade. (It does not look as terrible as it was.) With the unsteady advance of individual liberty, it took time for religion and other areas of life to be recognized as private matters. My point is that the direction of the trend seems to have reversed during the 20th century and the new century. On that reversal, two books by Friedrich Hayek are enlightening: The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Fatal Conceit (1988). (0 COMMENTS)

The latest Huemer Book Club has been a long and storied journey.  Here’s the full set of entries. Announcement #1 Announcement #2 Part 1 Caplan Replies on Part 1 Huemer Replies on Part 1 Part 2 Caplan Replies on Part 2 Huemer Replies on Part 2 Part 3 Caplan Replies on Part 3 Huemer Replies on Part 3 Part 4 Caplan Replies on Part 4 Huemer Replies on Part 4 Part 5 Caplan Replies on Part 5 Huemer Replies on Part 5 My Rejoinder to Huemer, Part 1 My Rejoinder to Huemer, Part 2 Huemer’s Last Word, Part 1 Huemer’s Last Word, Part 2   P.S. Buy this book! (0 COMMENTS)

The editor at the Wall Street Journal cut more meat than usual from my op/ed on the Nobel Prize winners. This isn’t a criticism. The Journal has its constraints and the editor told me that the piece needed to be shortened to fit on the page. I would rather have a short article than no article. Still, I think many readers might find what was cut interesting. So here, I’ll post the relevant paragraphs. Then I’ll post a criticism of the Card/Krueger study on the minimum wage that was made at the time but that I forgot. (An economist reminded me of it on Facebook.) Finally, I’ll quote from an informative comment made by the reader of the Journal on the Journal‘s page. On how politicians use the Card/Krueger minimum wage study: Unfortunately, many politicians use the Card/Krueger findings about a 20-percent increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage to argue for a 107-percent increase in the federal minimum wage (from the current $7.25 an hour to $15.) In a 2015 New York Times op/ed, though, Krueger wrote that “a $15-an-hour national minimum wage would put us in uncharted waters, and risk undesirable and unintended consequences.” On David Card’s Mariel Boatlift study: Another natural experiment in labor markets was the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, which quickly expanded the Miami labor force by 7 percent. Card found no effect on wage rates or unemployment of unskilled non-Cuban workers in the Miami market, a finding that bolsters the case for immigration. On Italy’s natural experiment with unemployment insurance: Finally, the Nobel committee’s report cites economist Rafael Lalive’s 2008 study of an Austrian government extension of unemployment insurance benefits from 7 months to 4 years. The benefit went only to workers above age 50. By comparing those just below age 50 with those just above, Lalive concluded that the massive increase had caused people to be unemployed for an extra 15 weeks. The criticism I left out: Isn’t the biggest knock on Card and Krueger that they asked about the effects of minimum wage increases on total employment rather than on hours of labor supplied and demanded, along with changes in non-wage employee compensation? In citing Neumark/Wascher, I implicitly cited that criticism, but should have ideally mentioned it explicitly. Finally, on the WSJ site, commenter Richard Kelly stated: New Jersey fast food restaurants had two years to prepare for the minimum wage increase. They did not have to fire people because those two years allowed them to let natural attrition do the job for them. The increase had a most definite negative impact on employment. I don’t have data on this, but this is quite plausible. If you know a major change is coming and you have 2 years to prepare for it, you won’t typically wait 2 years to act.     (0 COMMENTS)

The accelerating and increasingly successful effort of private enterprise to bring humans to space are often derisively described as a “billionaires’ space race”. News of Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos’ flights demonstrating the capabilities of their respective spacecraft triggered much discussion about (i) tax-avoiding practices of the rich; (ii) how money should be spent on charity instead; (iii) whether private space flight was ethical in the face of inequality, climate crisis, etc; and (iv) whether we should even care. Contrast this with the excitement and fascination with which, say, the Met Gala, at which the rich and famous fundraise for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, is routinely met. Such events are, as Megan McArdle has rightly pointed out, one of those tax-avoidance practices, of course. We doubt, moreover, that the Costume Institute—to which we mean no slight—is quite the sort of charitable endeavour that the critics of the spacefaring billionaires have in mind as an appropriate recipient of the 1%’s largesse. And of course, John Q. Public has no more of a prospect of ever making it to the Met Gala than to orbit in the foreseeable future. In the long term, spaceflight may well become rather more accessible, because, unlike hobnobbing with the rich and famous, it need not be a positional good. The billionaires dabbling in it now are not only self-promoting and giving a handful of worthy strangers the time of their lives. By absorbing the enormous costs of the early development of a new technology, they are, in effect, making a down-payment on our collective behalf. Yet their ventures are met with acrimony in the same quarters where the sartorial sloganeering of a self-proclaimed socialist, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at the Met Gala, arouses keen interest and admiration. This, sadly, is a reflection of a worldview that deprecates entrepreneurial success and admires the use of government power to rein it in. Thus the creation of new businesses, indeed of an entirely new category of business, is suspicious, while a call to “tax the rich” is supposed to be an act of courage. Unlike private spaceflight, this worldview is no innovation. In The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek pointed out that a desire “to take from the rich as much as we can” was the lowest common denominator of mindless egalitarianism. He decried “the deliberate disparagement of all activities involving economic risk and the moral opprobrium cast on the gains which make risks worth taking but which only few can win,” and lamented the fact that “[t]he younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable.” We still live in this lamentable world. Yet we should remain hopeful. The opprobrium visited on entrepreneurs has not stopped the free-flowing creative energies of new space race’s competitors. Perhaps the excitement of this competition can remind us that entrepreneurial success is always shared, unlike political victories. While the immediate gains rebound to the owners of the successful venture, the long-term benefits flow to the consumers who can eventually enjoy what was once only available to the super-rich. And if economic arguments such as this are too dismal for the scolds, we think that the fiery imagery of the night launch of the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission, and the smiles of its all-civilian crew, can outshine any flashy dress.   Leonid Sirota will be Associate Professor at the Reading Law School from 2022; he is the creator of the Double Aspect blog Dr. Akshaya Kamalnath is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University College of Law.  (0 COMMENTS)

Here’s Part 2 of Huemer’s final word on our recent Book Club. 9) On consent and my paradox for moderate deontology: BC:      How is this different from a person who foolishly refuses to consent to a vaccination, even though he admits that the benefit of the vaccine greatly exceeds the pain of the needle? As you explain in The Problem of Political Authority, we have no right to benefit him given his explicit refusal to consent. I’m on board with the idea that it’s wrong to harm one person without his consent in order to benefit someone else. But I balk at the idea that it’s wrong to stop harming a person without his consent, in order to benefit someone else. In particular, if someone is being unjustly tortured (which they also didn’t consent to!), I think you can just turn off the torture device. It would be weird to think that it’s wrong to stop torturing someone unless they consent to the non-torture. Similarly, if the best you can do is to turn down the torture device, you can also do that without consent. Given that, in my example, no consent is required to reduce both people’s torture. But consent would be required (on common deontological views) to increase one person’s torture while decreasing the other’s. So that’s how you can get a case where A and B are each impermissible, but (A&B) is permissible. 10) On an immoral pool project BC:      … the mice lose their home due to your pool construction, then slowly die of starvation and exposure while they hunt for another home. … And unless you’re doing a “No True Vegan” thing, I really doubt that even many vegans would actually consider this a morally strong reason not to build a pool. You must not know very many vegans. I think almost no one initially sympathetic to veganism would find your example persuasive. First, I think you’re underestimating how horrible factory farms are. After leaving their current home, the mice would be in a pretty normal position for wild animals. Sometimes, indeed, wild animals starve; nevertheless, factory farm life is, in general, much worse than a normal situation in the wild. At least, that’s what all or nearly all vegans believe. We could debate how bad life in the wild is, but that’s unproductive. This argumentative strategy in general can’t help, because either you give an example that vegans will think is less bad than factory farming, or you give an example that they see as just as bad as factory farming. In the first case, the example will be irrelevant. In the second case, pretty much every vegan will have exactly the same reaction to your example that they have to factory farming. Here’s an analogy to explain how I and other ethical vegetarians will see your arguments. Imagine arguing with a Trump-supporter about immigration. You claim to be concerned about the welfare of potential migrants. The Trumpster can’t believe that you care about foreigners, and he tries to prove to you that you don’t. So he gives thought experiments like this: “Obviously, you’d agree that it was fine to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. But this was more harmful to those foreigners than merely denying people entry to the U.S. today.” Why would that not be a productive line of discussion for the immigration debate? First, it’s not obvious on its face that the atomic bombing and the immigration restrictions are analogous actions. You’d have to have a lengthy debate about that. But that debate would be a time-waster because, second: if the atomic bombing was analogous, then of course you would also be opposed to the atomic bombing. There is no way that thinking about the atomic bombing will help to resolve the immigration issue. The best I can make of it is that you (Bryan) can’t believe that anyone really cares about other species; you think everyone is like you on the fundamental level, but maybe some just got confused when thinking about a few kinds of cases. Similarly, the hypothetical Trumpster assumes everyone is like himself. Both are mistaken. Some people are in fact different from the Trumpster and the meat-eater. Some people do in fact care. 11) Does potential/species intelligence make your pain bad? BC:      Does it even slightly reduce your confidence to learn that only 10% of respondents to this survey say that I’m definitely wrong? "The suffering of beings who will normally develop intelligence is much more morally important than the suffering of beings who will never develop intelligence, though probably not as important as the suffering of beings who are already intelligent." — Bryan Caplan (@bryan_caplan) September 30, 2021 Does it reduce your confidence to learn that only 22% of respondents think you’re definitely right? This survey does not significantly change my opinions. I note a few points: This isn’t a random sample; respondents are people who follow you on Twitter, which means they are disproportionately likely to agree with you. I already knew that the overwhelming majority of people are meat-eaters. That’s most likely driving their response. Respondents may have said that potential intelligence is morally significant because they know that they’re going to have to say this in order to defend their meat eating. R’s may even have actually read your earlier post. In other words, they’re rationalizing. The survey gives no information about why (other than the rationalization theory) 52% of R’s picked “probably”. I can’t right now think of any other reasons why someone would think that. I’m also not sure that R’s understood the sentence. It’s pretty complex. Moreover, when asked to judge the goodness or badness of something, people generally start thinking of possible instrumental reasons why the thing would be good or bad. They almost never think that you’re asking about intrinsic value. But the relevant interpretation of the quote would be that a given painful experience is more intrinsically bad, all other things being equal, if the subject is a type of being that would normally become intelligent later. Besides the intrinsic/instrumental distinction, one would have to emphasize that the being in question is not in fact intelligent, and will never be intelligent; then ask, with that understood, does the intelligence of other members of its species make this individual’s pain worse? Once properly understood, the proposition strikes me as absurd. To me, it’s like doing a survey about whether the shortest path between two points is a curve. If 52% of people said “Probably yes”, I would suspect that R’s didn’t understand the question or made some other error. But even if I couldn’t figure out why they said what they did, I would not give significant credence to the claim that curves are shorter than straight lines, since I can just see that that’s false. For a closer analogy, the proposition strikes me as sort of like someone saying that painting A is more beautiful than painting B, because there are some other paintings that cost a lot of money that were painted by a member of the same race as the painter who painted A. There’s no further explanation; the person claims this is just a self-evident axiom of aesthetics. I would have ~0 credence in that. 12) On plant interests: BC:      Imagine a conversation between you and someone who believes in the rights of plants. You tell him, “Plants don’t feel pain,” and he says, “That’s an arbitrary difference. Plants are still alive. They have interests, and we shouldn’t do immense harm to their interests to slightly advance our own.” You probably consider this an obtuse position – and I agree. There is in fact an argument in the ethics literature like that – that all living things have interests (something can be “bad for a plant”, “good for the plant”, etc.), and interests are what really matters. I would try two lines of argument against this. One line of argument would be to compare a single cell in your body to a single-celled organism. They are intrinsically very similar. If the person agrees that the cell in your body doesn’t merit intrinsic moral consideration, then it’s plausible to generalize to single-celled organisms. The other line of argument would start by thinking about what counts as in your interests or against your interests (for us people). One can argue plausibly that this is determined by one’s mental states (such as enjoyment/suffering, or desires), rather than by pure biological functioning. E.g., it’s good to frustrate normal biological functioning when this clearly satisfies a person’s desires, causes overall happiness, etc. About interests: I think talk about what is “good for” plants is analogous to talk about what is good for your car (like frequent oil changes). It’s a non-moral use of “good”. Having said that, of course if someone has sufficiently strong and different intuitions, then one can’t convince them. 13) On the Argument from Conscience: BC:      Attacks on sincerity seem more futile, but how about a direct appeal to sincerity, a la my Argument from Conscience? (The link goes to a post about how Bill Dickens claims to be a utilitarian, and is generally highly conscientious, yet he fails to come close to maximizing utility in his actions.) I don’t find this persuasive, even though I’m not a utilitarian. The overwhelming majority of people have strong emotional motivations apart from their ethical beliefs. There is good evidence that these emotions are the main motivators for most seemingly ethical behavior. One particularly strong source of motivation has to do with the practices and norms of one’s own society, which have a powerful effect on people’s emotions and desires. But there are probably other emotional mechanisms, possibly genetically programmed, which lead people to act in accordance with deontological rules. With that in mind, it’s entirely plausible that Bill Dickens’ emotions and desires would mostly conform to the non-utilitarian norms of his society in most circumstances, despite his belief in utilitarianism. It is then plausible that his actions would mostly be non-utilitarian. (I say “mostly”, because I expect utilitarian beliefs to have some influence. For instance, they probably make him give more to charity than most non-utilitarians do.) It’s not weird that Dickens’ behavior appears highly conscientious by conventional standards. That just means that he is naturally high in the sort of emotional dispositions that produce that type of behavior, esp., cooperative & respectful behavior. What is the alternative hypothesis? That he’s lying – he doesn’t think utilitarianism is true, and he’s been playing a weird hoax for the past 25 years? Or perhaps he thinks that he believes utilitarianism, yet he doesn’t believe it? Try to fill that in a little more. When he thinks about arguments for utilitarianism, what happens? Those arguments seem right to him, or they don’t? If they do, then it’s kind of bizarre that these arguments didn’t convince him of utilitarianism (which they support) but merely convinced him of the false proposition that he believes utilitarianism (which they don’t support). If the arguments don’t seem right to him, then it’s kind of weird that he would affirm them, and that he would think he agrees with them. Another hypothesis might be that there are two different kinds of beliefs, or belief-like states. Maybe he consciously believes utilitarianism, but unconsciously believes deontology? (The reverse wouldn’t make sense.) But then, how would this give you an argument against utilitarianism? Suppose Dickens has an unconscious belief that conflicts with his conscious belief. What’s the argument that the unconscious belief is more likely to be true? Surely in most such cases, the conscious belief is more likely to be correct. . . . I’m going to conclude with this YouTube video link. This is a five-year-old child who recently learned that meat is made from animals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Npv2Mpbd3w I include this because it is extremely difficult to doubt this child’s sincerity. She hasn’t had time to come up with the sorts of rationalizations that adults come up with, nor is she repeating propaganda from other people. It’s just the natural reaction of an innocent, compassionate person. (0 COMMENTS)

Why do natural experiments matter? One of the toughest problems in economic research is figuring out whether a relationship between two variables is causal or coincidental. So, for example, economists find that the lifetime earnings of people who go to school for 12 years are higher than those of people who go to school for 11 years. But what if those who stay in school longer are more motivated or smarter than those who are in for only 11 years? Then the earnings of the more-schooled would be higher even if schooling per se doesn’t add much to earnings. What one would ideally like is to compare the earnings of people whose motivations and intelligence don’t differ. Enter compulsory schooling. In 1991, Mr. Angrist and the late Alan Krueger noted that under compulsory-schooling laws, students born in the first quarter of the calendar year would be able to leave school earlier than students born in the fourth quarter. Sure enough, they found, those born in the fourth quarter had an average of 0.15 year more in school. And the earnings of those in the fourth quarter were 1.4% higher than the earnings of those born in the first quarter. Extrapolate that to a full-year difference in schooling, and you can conclude that one extra year of schooling raises earnings by about 9%. This is from David R. Henderson, “‘Natural Experiments’ Lead to an Economics Nobel,” Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2021. (The print edition will be tomorrow, October 12.) I would quote more, especially about the controversial Card/Krueger finding on the minimum wage, but my contract with the Journal allows me to quote only 2 paragraphs until 30 days is up. I’ll post the whole thing on November 11. Thanks to Alex Tabarrok for taking a look at the draft, although the section he wisely suggested I add, on Card’s study on the Mariel Boatlift, was cut. I’ll publish a couple of the deleted sections tomorrow. (0 COMMENTS)