Freedom

There are positive and negative rights.

That's not precisely what I'm going to talk about, however.

What I'm going to talk about is the idea of freedom.  What exactly does freedom mean?  What does it entail?  What can we do with it, why should we value it?  Yeah, those would be great questions to answer.  Not really going to specifically address them, either.

Rather, I'm just going to attack a particular and flawed notion of freedom, expressed in condensed format in a single phrase - "wage slave."  The idea that the fact that we have to eat gives employers power over us, that our society forces us to behave in particular ways in order to survive.

There are easy ways of attacking this.  I'm going to come at it sideways.

What exactly does somebody who wants freedom on those terms want?

Fairly simple: They want to be free of deeply negative consequences for their decisions.  Maybe they'll accept a little punishment, a little price, but they don't want that price to be too high.  What they want is for their decisions to be, in a word, trivial.

They don't want their decisions to cost them too much.  And by the same token, yours shouldn't reward you too much either, you should share some of your good fortune.

This isn't an Orwellian horror.  This isn't 1984.  It's A Brave New World, it's soma, it's mindless consumption and a trivial and meaningless society.  It's the other side of the same coin.  And it's not freedom at all.

Freedom requires, not just that you get to make some decisions.  Decisions are merely the trappings of freedom, the holy raiment in which it walks the earth.  Freedom is self determination.  If you cannot fail, you cannot determine your own destiny.  Somebody has already ruled out part of your future; they've mapped out a path you are not allowed to walk.

Such a concept of freedom bears as much resemblance to true freedom as a carefully controlled safari theme park bears to the jungle.  If the lions cannot eat you, you're not in the wild, you're in a playground, a zoo.

Freedom is not just the ability to make choices, but the ability to make choices that -matter-.  If your choices no longer matter, you are in no meaningful sense free.

So make meaningful decisions.  The trivial ones are mere placations.

Working at Home...

Captain Capitalism argues that staying at home is the ideal situation for men.

Actually, I agree with him.  More, I think modern men are, on average, better at stay-at-home work than modern women.

Why?  Because about half the work that needs to be done in the house, few women will actually do.  And the remaining half they insist on splitting, because doing a quarter of the work is the new half.

Cleaning and cooking are only part of the work.  Cars need oil changes and maintenance.  Yards need to be cared for.  The plumbing needs to be kept in working order.  Garbage needs to be taken out.  Drywall sometimes needs to be put up.  (And if you're a woman who will do all of those things, skip your complaints that not all women are like that, and just marry me.)

I just got back from a two week trip to a wall which is soaking wet.  Upstairs bathroom plumbing has developed a leak I need to track down and fix.  I've never met a woman who would do this - even my last girlfriend, who once broke a squirrel's neck to keep it from suffering after running it over (which is to say, she had absolutely no issue doing dirty work), left most of these kinds of tasks to me; she had no issue installing carpet or painting walls, but plumbing and electrical work were my jobs.

In a society in which there's no such thing as women's work, men's work has continued to be a thing.  So arranging things so that men aren't pulling double-duty only makes sense.

Fixing the Welfare State

If I said the biggest thing standing in the way of poor people getting out of poverty is the welfare system, would you believe me?

You'd better.

As much as the left rails on about regressive taxation, the -really- regressive thing in this nation is the welfare system.  For a single mother making less than $69,000 a year, on average a pay raise costs her money.

An unemployed single mother is better off than a single mother making $45,000 a year.

Why is this?  Because of the way the welfare system is organized.  Each benefit has a cut-off point - make less than this amount, you get the benefit.  Make more than this amount, you don't.

Around twenty years ago, this wasn't the case.  Welfare reform restructured the welfare system so that every dollar you earned improved your life.  Welfare rates started declining - and Clinton famously declared that his was the last presidency of the welfare state.

Unfortunately, these fixes weren't permanent.  They flattened the slope, but did so by adjusting benefits.  Benefits have since risen - significantly.  Which has recreated several "welfare cliffs" - that is, earning levels at which a raise will cost its earner money.

The community I grew up in was -filled- with people sitting at the welfare cliff.  Mechanics who refused to take any new customers, clerks who refused any additional hours, mothers who -did not want- child support, because all of these things would result in a dramatic reduction in their standard of living.  (Unreported income, of course, was a rampant thing there.)

The cost of welfare cliffs isn't just in the dollars of welfare.  It's in billions if not trillions of dollars of lost productivity from people who can't afford to make any more money, can't afford to do any more work.

The UK isn't much better; the marginal value of additional wages for somebody in poverty is 4%.  Because of the reduction in their benefits, additional work doesn't pay.

I don't care if you support welfare, or oppose welfare - what we have today -sucks-.  It's a system which -literally- traps somebody in poverty - if you have to make $20,000 more than you make today, -just to avoid being any worse off-, you have no incentive, whatsoever, to make a dollar more.

So whether you support welfare, or oppose it, one thing we -should- be agreed upon is to fix the broken system that exists.  A fixed system will cost us less money, will increase the productivity of the nation, and for those who care about such things, will improve tax revenues.

The simplest fix is a systematic overhaul to produce incremental reductions, rather than eliminations, of benefits.  The fix should ensure that, even after taxes, a person still keeps at least fifty cents of each new dollar they earn.  And it should require that any changes to benefits also update the fixes so we aren't fixing this problem yet again in another twenty years' time.

I oppose the welfare system, incidentally.  But if we must have one, I'd rather have one that doesn't make things worse for poor people.  It should incentivize the right behaviors, rather than punishing them.

And hell.  Maybe we'll actually see the end of the welfare state in our lifetimes if it doesn't primarily work to perpetuate itself.

Optimism!

So, to get away from the utilitarian stuff for a bit, a bit of unmitigated optimism:

Link (I have no idea if this link will continue to work or not, but here's hoping it does)

What the hell is that, you ask?  It's a logarithmic representation of adjusted GDP, divided by population, over time.  I graphed the US, Poland, Russia, and Germany.

Guess what?  Regardless of the short term, they all normalize to a line.  The Weimar Republic, the Soviet Union, the Great Depression and the New Deal - none of them have more than short-term effects on the economy.  At best/worst, it looks like governments can seriously destabilize the economy in the short-term, creating massive fluctuations up and down.

Regardless of what governments do, in the end, they're irrelevant as far as the economy goes.  The economy "wants" to grow at a particular and logarithmic rate, and any deviations from that rate get eaten up in the long haul.  Which shouldn't really surprise us, because it's technological innovation, not government, which determines what happens to the economy, and innovations don't care about national borders.  As long as there's one place in the world where free innovation still occurs, the rest of the world benefits.  Free rider problem indeed.

The economy, it would seem, can look after itself.  I suggest social issues - by which I mean personal liberty, not the contradictory mess of nonsense that passes for social issues among most of the left - might be more pertinent to our consideration.  It doesn't matter if the economy will improve if you get locked in jail because some government official decides you are part of some Problem to be Fixed.

So - Enjoy the Decline.  It won't last, if history is any judge of character.

Utility Fungibility

Link raised an interesting concern for me regarding utilitarianism, which I'm currently doing a lot of contemplation on - is utility fungible?

Let's assume for the purposes of writing something useful that my last post doesn't apply; we'll assume utility exists in a quantifiable measure.  Should I, as a utilitarian, choose a universe in which I and everyone I love is tormented for all eternity, in exchange for a billion people living in perpetual bliss?  Is this a fair utilitarian exchange?  Should I choose a minute of extraordinary pain over a hundred years of minor inconvenience?

Utilitarianism, in point of fact, -depends- upon the idea that utility is to some extent fungible.

An argument in favor of the fungibility of utility is that, if some circumstance forced me to choose between two things (abstract or real, it doesn't matter), I would choose one.

An argument against the fungibility of utility is that, absent circumstances forcing me to choose, there are things which I would not exchange for anything that does not include the thing itself or a means of recreating that thing.

I am forced to conclude that utility is incompletely fungible, something which in fact already implied by marginal utility.  There are flavours of utility which cannot be freely converted.  No amount of sleep, no matter how good, can make up for a lack of food.  No amount of food can make up for a lack of sleep.

The utility function is no such thing; there's no one value which can represent how well-off you are, nor how well-off the universe is in terms of your values.  I can envisage a function which could -approximate- this value, but in extreme situations it would cease to present any meaningful information; should I prefer an existence in which I'm going to starve together in .0001 seconds, but that fraction of an instant will be filled with such utility through other means as to dwarf my life utility as it stands today?  What does that even -mean-?  The utility, whatever it is, isn't fungible with the utility of not starving to death, unless maybe it is - maybe I am strapped into a machine that gives me subjective eons in that .0001 seconds - but that's just it: There's some utility which -can- be exchanged with other utility, and some utility which can't.  There are, as previously mentioned, different flavours of utility, and they don't map to a single value representing how desirable anything is.

Another thing that suggests the non-fungibility of utility flavours is the existence of cyclic preferences - where I prefer universe A to universe B to universe C to universe A.  A>B, B>C, C>A - which do you choose?

A moment of thought permits me to construct a cyclic preference list for myself:
A: Restaurant with bad-tasting food, plenty of drink
B: Restaurant with salty (but delicious) meals, no drinks
C: Restaurant with boring meals, limited drinks

Maybe you don't find this preference sequence cyclic; I do.  Perhaps you can construct a cyclic list of preferences in your daily life, perhaps you can't - personally, I can, on a number of things.  In utilitarian logic, this means my preferences are irrational.  So I suppose it's a good thing I don't use utilitarian logic!

(Note, incidentally, that I wouldn't actually choose any of those options, had I any other choices.  A necessary ingredient in cyclic preference is a trade-off between different values, different flavours of utility.  In practice, I'd find somewhere else to eat.  Those are based on real restaurants, actually, and no I won't tell you which ones.  The actual cyclic preference list of restaurants with flaws is really long; the entire time I lived in that region I found exactly one restaurant that didn't have a flaw)

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Picking the ideas of the last post back up again:

The issue ultimately comes down to this: The idea of "Utility" is a -very- crude and clumsy way of representing "desirability" of a state of affairs, desirability being both multivariate and indeterminate.  The "utility function" is an abstraction which serves to permit utilitarians to pretend that their philosophy can account for everything while not actually having to account for everything.  Can it account for love?  "Yes, it's utility input #17 in our list of known utility inputs."  Okay, how does love compare to having enough food to eat?  "Well..."  Okay, that's pretty hard, how about this: At which point should we resort to cannibalism if we're trapped somewhere with our loved ones?  Who should be eaten first - should it be one of the parents, or one of the children?  Should we wait for somebody to starve first, and eat the dead, or eat somebody sooner that that?  "Uh..." You have no idea how to even begin answering these questions in terms of utility, do you?  I mean, it's a bit of an extreme circumstance, sure, but you're over there trying to decide whether theoretical universe A is superior to theoretical universe B, can't you spend some time trying to figure out what your philosophy has to say about the real world and the circumstances people occasionally find themselves dealing with?

I don't necessarily take marks away from utilitarianism for not having a prepackaged answer to the question of cannibalism, mind.  I don't think any nontrivial moral philosophy has a good answer to those questions.  I -do- take issue with utilitarianism's implicit claim that there is a simple answer if you can just substitute in these utility values for your loved one's lives and their odds of survival and the odds of rescue and this and that and that.  It -sounds- simple, when you put it in those terms, but if you actually try to do the math, you start having to account for the unknowns and the unknown unknowns and you come up with an answer that, if you're lucky, has some bearing on the actual universe, but is probably wrong anyways.  In the end utilitarianism doesn't actually help you make any decisions; it doesn't provide any kind of tangible framework in which to evaluate anything.  It's like having the C specification when all you have to work in is assembly; you can sort of make your assembly code look the way you imagine C specifies it should look, but ultimately the specification has no bearing on how you actually code anything.  You're not a C programmer because your assembly was written while your were imagining how C code would compile; you're not a utilitarian because you think about utility while you figure things out for yourself.

Because nobody actually performs the math.  The idea of utility is an illusion, a handwave, a massive blank space in the -middle- of the map on which is written "There be mathematics here."

Utility versus Preference

My rejection of utilitarianism is as follows: Nobody actually follows it.

What do I mean by this?  There are all these people out there who claim to subscribe to utilitarianism, Scott Alexander included!  Yes, this is more fall-out of that post.  In this case, the result of more research on the prospective idea that I was straw-manning his arguments.  As it transpires, I may have been.  This post elaborates why.

I will recall to you, however, that Scott Alexander argues that people are irrational.  Quoting section three-point-one-one of the Anti-Libertarian FAQ:

Old-school economics assumed choice to be "revealed preference": an individual's choices will invariably correspond to their preferences, and imposing any other set of choices on them will result in fewer preferences being satisfied.

...

But the past fifty years of cognitive science have thoroughly demolished this "revealed preference" assumption, showing that people's choices result from a complex mix of external compulsions, internal motivations, natural biases, and impulsive behaviors. These decisions usually approximate fulfilling preferences, but sometimes they fail in predictable and consistent ways

Revealed preference is actually a concept originating in Utilitarianism: Link

So people are irrational only with respect to Utilitarian philosophy.  Which is because people don't actually -follow- Utilitarian philosophy.

Quick question: Has Scott Alexander actually constructed a utility function?  Has any Utilitarian?  "Revealed Preference" was the Utilitarian answer to the question "Well, given that we haven't defined a Utility function, what should we substitute in its place?"  The answer: Preference.

This is where our expectations on preference to diverge.  According to Revealed Preference, preference should demonstrate an individual's underlying utility function; to the extent that it doesn't, Revealed Preference is in fact wrong.  Scott Alexander argues that this demonstrates that people are irrational; alternatively, it demonstrates that Revealed Preference isn't a valid mechanism by which to reconstruct people's utility function.  The argument that non-utilitarians aren't rational because their behavior doesn't conform to utilitarianism is... well, judge for yourself.

Utilitarianism is sophistry at its finest; a philosophy of morality which draws its validity from the mathematical and logical principles it is built on - that isn't operating on mathematical constructs.  Again, do you, our putative utilitarian, have a utility function?  If not, none of those mathematical or logical principles apply: They're rationalizations for the behavior you want to engage in anyways.  You're not balancing value A against value B against value C to compute the sum utility of some set of considered actions, you're pretending your brain has already done all that and the outcome of that is that your preferences already do the work that your philosophy says needs to be done.  That's what "Revealed Preference," as an idea, is really all about.

So I guess my response on section 3.1.1 was off the mark: I was in fact revealing my irrationality, because my preferences didn't take into account the utility the different options offered me.  But it's a conditional irrationality, conditioned upon the idea that utility is the rational thing to predicate my preferences upon.  In practice, I simply didn't care about either the utility or the option.

The million-dollar question then becomes, however, given that preferences don't reveal an underlying utility-calculation node in my brain (which I didn't expect to be there anyways), what exactly is revealed utility, and how do we calculate it?

If preferences aren't revealing, then preference-based logical arithmetic is just building castles on sand.

Not that there's anything wrong with a preference-based moral philosophy, mind.  You just lose out on how official and well-reasoned utilitarianism sounds.

Freedom isn't a Value - More Follow-up

Elaborating on the idea that freedom isn't a terminal value, freely exchangeable for other things of value -

Consider, for a moment, that you have four choices of peanut butter.  Now imagine you can only have jelly if you give up your freedom - somebody else will make the choice for you.

Seems like it might be a fair trade, right?  This is kind of the way some people think about freedoms - that they're this commodity, which can be bought and sold and traded for things worth more to them.  And in a limited sense, they're right.  If I want jelly pre-mixed with my peanut butter, I can "give up" my choice between the other brands, because as far as I know only one such brand offers such a thing.

But you haven't actually traded anything away.  Your freedoms were in no way reduced by adding the option of getting jelly with your peanut butter - you were offered an additional choice.  The idea that you've lost freedom, because you've been offered a choice you prefer over the others, is an illusion.  Your freedom was increased.

Now suppose that the city government has declared that choice paralysis is a problem, and economy of scale will make things cheaper if there's only one brand, and declared that only one brand of peanut butter may be sold, and they've chosen you, yes you, to decide which brand of peanut butter everybody has to consume.

-You- haven't lost any freedoms, in a sense.  Supposing the advantages of just having the one brand are real, you've traded nothing away; your choice still gets exercised.  You traded away -everyone else's- freedoms, not your own.

Suppose they ask me.  Well, I like my peanut butter to taste like -peanuts-, so I opt for the "Natural" Smucker's peanut butter.  Okay, some of you approve, some of you will never buy peanut butter again.  Again, my choices aren't really constrained, I've really just pre-committed to a choice.  It's everybody else who gets screwed on the bargain.

Democracy doesn't resolve this issue.  It's the conceit of some statist types that if a bunch of people agree to abridge a bunch of other people's freedoms, somehow that's their right; to forbid people from abridging other people's freedoms is just wrong.  They wrap it up in nicer language, but that doesn't change the substance.

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Now, all of that doesn't actually establish that freedom isn't a value, it's the forward - my basic point being here that the people who believe freedom can be traded away are wanting to trade away -your- freedom to disagree with them.  Nobody advocates that their own sacred cows be sacrificed on somebody else's altar.  At best they're willing to part with a few of their own herd for something they consider worth more.  Think of it as trickle-down politics; give up some things you want now, and maybe you'll get something of value later.

Which starts to get at my real point here: What is being traded away isn't the best brand of peanut butter.  It's the ability to choose the best brand of peanut butter -for yourself-.

"But isn't the consequence of that trade just trading away the best brand of peanut butter?"

No.  You're also trading away the right to introduce your own competing brand of peanut butter.  You're trading away the market protections which keep each brand of peanut butter high enough quality to maintain market share.  You're trading away competitive pricing.  Not to mention all the subtler things, like government indifference to the companies - do you think the city will stand idly by while its reputation is tarnished when a contaminated batch of peanut butter gets through?  Do you think it will leave the media unharrassed and free to pursue the story?

You're trading away a lot more than your favorite brand of peanut butter (or somebody -else's- favorite brand of peanut butter, as the case may be).  And that's just for a really stupid and trivial example.  You are trading away an undefined quantity - you're signing a blank check whose value will be filled in for you later.  Maybe you won't lose much in the bargain.  Maybe you'll be dead of contamination the city government refused to let the media publish.  Those are the two extremes; the point is that what you give up is completely and totally -unpredictable-.  If the freedom were a value, we could attach a price tag on what giving it up will cost us.  We can't, because it's not a value, it's part of the system by which values are determined - each of us individually making choices determines the market value of peanut butter.  And the results of eliminating this part of the system is unpredictable.

You don't want to know what you trade away when you give up something like free speech.

So no.  Freedoms aren't values, to be traded like common goods - and certainly not by people who are invariably interested in selling -your- freedoms for -their- interests, whatever the altar they wish to sacrifice your cows upon may be.  They're an integral part of the system by which values are assigned.