Jack

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Matt Yglesias cites some polls that suggest that the public favors higher taxes on the rich:

There’s no polling on specific brackets or exactly who counts as rich that I can find, but surveys are very consistent that for some definition of rich the voters would like to see higher taxes:

• The most recent poll on this I can find is an April 2018 Gallup survey which had 62 percent of respondents saying the wealthy do not pay their fair share in taxes, a number that’s been consistently in the high 50s or low 60s in the 21st century.
• Pew found in 2017 that 60 percent of the public said it was bothered “a lot” by the fact that rich people don’t pay their fair share.
• A 2017 CBS poll found that 56 percent of voters said wealthy people should pay higher taxes.

By contrast, I can’t find any poll anywhere that supports the Republican position that high-income families’ tax burdens should be reduced.

Conservative web sites do cite such polls:

“What is the maximum percentage of a person’s income that should go to taxes – that is, all taxes, state, federal, and local?” The mean percentage for 2009 was 15.6 percent, up slightly from 14.7 percent in 2007. A plurality of those polled, 42 percent, felt that the maximum income tax rate should be between 10 and 19 percent. In 2007, a whopping 47 percent of those polled said that the maximum income tax rate should be between 10 and 19 percent.

I recall reading polls suggesting that the public prefers a top tax rate of around 25% or 30%, but I cannot find them.  (Yglesias’s post was in part a defense of 70% tax rates on the very rich.)

I recently did a post explaining why public opinion polls are not reliable.  A good example can be found in an NPR poll that suggests the public favors abolishing the “estate tax”, and favors abolishing the “death tax” by an even greater margin. (Of course these are two names for the same tax.)  The same poll shows a slight 43%-42% plurality also favors abolishing taxes on dividends.

The NPR poll suggests that a big majority of the public believes the rich should pay more in taxes (consistent with Yglesias’s claim), but also suggests that most people believe the rich currently pay a lower rate of federal income tax than the middle class, which is crazy.  They pay a much higher rate.  So it’s not clear that the public believes the rich should pay more than they are currently paying, but it is clear that the public believes the rich should pay more than the extremely low rates of income tax that the public now falsely believes they are paying.  As they already do.

Given the public’s views on estate taxes and dividend taxes, it’s odd to read another NPR poll showing that the public believes the tax rate on wealth should be higher than the tax rate on wage income.

Reading all the various poll results leaves me with the impression that the public is woefully ignorant of the entire subject.  Many answers seem to contradict previous questions, and others suggest a lack of knowledge of basic facts.  The ignorance is so profound that I would not take any of these poll results seriously.  Framing effects probably impact some of the responses.  In the end, it really doesn’t matter what the public thinks about taxes; what matters is how the politicians they elect vote when tax issues come up in Congress.

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0. Introduction

I grew up in the 90s, which meant watching movies about plucky children fighting Pollution Demons. Sometimes teachers would show them to us in class. None of us found that strange. We knew that when we grew up, this would be our fight: to take on the loggers and whalers and seal-clubbers who were destroying our planet and save the Earth for the next generation.

What happened to that? I don’t mean the Pollution Demons: they’re still around, I think one of them runs Trump’s EPA now. What happened to everything else? To those teachers, those movies, that whole worldview?

Save The Whales. Save The Rainforest. Save Endangered Species. Save The Earth. Stop Slash-And-Burn. Stop Acid Rain. Earth Day Every Day. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Twenty-five years ago, each of those would invoke a whole acrimonious debate; to some, a battle-cry; to others, a sign of a dangerous fanaticism that would destroy the economy. Today they sound about as relevant as “Fifty-four forty or fight” and “Remember the Maine”. Old slogans, emptied of their punch and fit only for bloodless historical study.

If you went back in time, turned off our Pollution Demon movie, and asked us to predict what would come of the environment twenty-five years, later, in 2018, I think we would imagine one of two scenarios. In the first, the world had become a renewable ecotopia where every child was taught to live in harmony with nature. In the second, we had failed in our struggle, the skies were grey, the rivers were brown, wild animals were a distant memory – but at least a few plucky children would still be telling us it wasn’t too late, that we could start the tough job of cleaning up after ourselves and changing paths to that other option.

The idea that things wouldn’t really change – that the environment would neither move noticeably forward or noticeably backwards – but that everyone would stop talking about environmentalism – that you could go years without hearing the words “endangered species” – that nobody would even know whether the rainforests were expanding or contracting – wouldn’t even be on the radar. It would sound like some kind of weird bizarro-world.

Just to prove I’m not imagining all this:

This is the volume of Google searches for “rainforests” over time. It goes up each year when school starts, and crashes again for summer vacation. But on average, there are only about 18% as many rainforest-related searches today as in 2004.

“Endangered species”, 25%

“Pollution”, 43%

And these are just since Google started tracking searches in 2004. The decline of 90s environmentalism must be even bigger.

So what happened?

Every so often you’ll hear someone mutter darkly “You never hear about the ozone hole these days, guess that was a big nothingburger.” This summons a horde of environmentalists competing to point out that you never hear about the ozone hole these days because environmentalists successfully fixed it. There was a big conference in 1989 where all the nations of the world met together and agreed to stop using ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, and the ozone hole is recovering according to schedule. When people use the ozone hole as an argument against alarmism, environmentalism is a victim of its own success.

So what about these other issues that have since fizzled out? Did environmentalists solve them? Did they never exist in the first place? Or are they still as bad as ever, and we’ve just stopped caring?

1. Air And Water Pollution

Have you seen what Chinese cities look like on a smoggy day? Trick question: neither have the Chinese. The US used to be like that. I grew up near Los Angeles during the 1990s. My mother tells the story of a time when I was very young and my grandparents came to visit from the Midwest. “It reminds us of home,” they said, “it’s so flat.” “We’re surrounded by mountains”, my mother told them. We were. You couldn’t see any of them.

Environmentalists crusaded against this. Here are the results:

A lot of the credit goes to the Clean Air Act, passed in 1963 and tightened in 1990. Along with its more visible (pun intended) effects, scientists suspect it has prevented about 200,000 deaths from lung disease and a host of other cases of asthma, bronchitis, and even heart attacks.

It’s hard to find great data on water because there are so many different kinds of water and so many different ways it can be polluted. But just to choose a random very bad thing, here’s mercury levels in Great Lakes fish:

I don’t know of anyone claiming this is anything other than a response to stricter environmental laws.

As a result of these victories, people are no longer as concerned about air and water pollution. From Gallup:

This seems like a clear case of good work.

Verdict: Environmental movement successfully solved this problem.

2. Acid Rain

Acid rain is a combination of rain and pollution which gets very acidic and destroys plants and structures. It was a staple of very early 90s environmentalism, and understandably so: the prospect of acid falling from the sky and dissolving everything is very attention-grabbing. I remember the discourse focusing on statues; George Washington’s marble face slowly melting under sizzling raindrops makes a heck of an image.

I am not the first person to notice that Washington’s face remains mercifully unmelted. In 2009, Slate asked Whatever Happened To Acid Rain?. EPA Blog, 2010: Whatever Happened To Acid Rain?. 2012, Mental Floss: What Ever Happened To Acid Rain? By 2018 the Internet had advanced, so here’s the Whatever Happened To Acid Rain Podcast. Even the Encyclopedia Britannica, itself a good candidate for a “Whatever Happened To…” piece, has a What Happened To Acid Rain article.

Most of these sources say environmentalists solved acid rain by cutting down on emission of sulfur dioxide, the main offending chemical. A Bush I era cap-and-trade policy gets a lot of the credit in the US, but it looks like it was a broader effort than that:

There’s less clear data on rain acidity, but all my sources agree it has modestly declined in the US, thought it is still “between 2.5 and eight times more acidic than it should be”. Lakes and rivers are slowly recovering. On the other hand, in newly-industrializing countries like China and India, rain is becoming more acidic and they’re going through some of the same issues we were in the 80s.

This picture is slightly complicated by some people who claim acid rain was always exaggerated and “we solved it” is a convenient retreat from acknowledging this (for what it’s worth, these people tend to be global warming skeptics too). Most of them point to the 1990 National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, a giant government investigation into the acid rain problem. I found a 1990 New York Times article on the report here:

A comprehensive Federal report that was supposed to resolve the issue of how much damage is caused to forests by acid rain has come under criticism from some distinguished scientists who are reviewing it.

The critics said that the report gave an incorrect impression that air pollution was not causing any large-scale problems for forest ecosystems. They also said that the report, still in draft form, ignored a number of studies suggesting serious air pollution problems.

But other experts contend that the general conclusion of the report is essentially right. The report concluded that with the exception of damage to red spruce at high elevations in the East, forests in the United States are not suffering serious damage from acid rain […]

The report now being reviewed is the final draft, completed at a cost of nearly $500 million. It examines the effects of other pollutants, like ozone, as well as acid deposits, and it concludes that air pollution causes far less environmental damage than has been feared.

An interim report issued by the study group in 1987, before Dr. Mahoney became director, was sharply criticized by many scientists. They contended that it tailored research findings into conclusions that matched the political goals of the Reagan Administration, which opposed new controls on air pollution. No such criticism has been leveled at the 28-volume final draft, which has been generally praised as a sound scientific document.

There is, however, some unhappiness among scientists with the volume dealing with forest health and productivity in the United States and Canada.

Dr. Ellis B. Cowling, associate for research at North Carolina State University’s College of Forest Resources, said in a telephone interview: ”The tone is that we don’t have a problem except in southern California, and with red spruce at high altitudes. That is not a fair statement of the state of scientific knowledge.” He added, ”Perhaps the authors were a bit too hasty in reaching conclusions.”

Dr. Cowling, who is highly regarded by colleagues as a conservative, solid scientist, wrote a memorandum to the authors of the forest health volume. He offered a series of suggestions for changing the wording of conclusions in ways that he said would reflect the state of science more accurately.

The first of those would change a finding that stated, ”The vast majority of forests in the United States and Canada are not affected by decline.” To be more consistent with the data, Dr. Cowling said, the conclusion should read: ”Most forests in the United States do not show unusual visible symptoms of stress, marked decreases in the rate of growth or significant increases in mortality.”

Just because symptoms of forest decline are not currently visible, Dr. Cowling argued, does not rule out the possibility that they are under way.

This article also provides a summary of contemporaneous responses to NAPAP, which quotes study director James Mahoney’s summary of his own report: “The sky is not falling, but there is a problem that needs addressing.”

I cannot find anyone really challenging the NAPAP report nowadays, so I provisionally accept that the damage from acid rain, while real, was exaggerated at the time.

There’s a related debate about how much the lakes and streams affected have recovered. Some lakes and streams are naturally acidic; there is some debate over what percent of lake/stream acidity is natural vs. acid-rain-related. In recent years this debate has focused on whether lakes/streams have recovered after the SO2 decline; if they haven’t, this might suggest their problems were never human-activity-related in the first place.

Global warming skeptic blog Watt’s Up With That claims they haven’t:

Possibly the greatest evidence against harmful effects of acid rain is the fact that acidic lakes have not “recovered” after most sulfur and nitrogen pollution was removed from the atmosphere. The 2011 NAPAP report to Congress stated that SO2 and NO2 emissions were down, that airborne concentrations were down, and that acid deposition from rainfall was down, but could not report that lake acidity was significantly reduced. The report states, “Scientists have observed delays in ecosystem recovery in the eastern United States despite decreases in emissions and deposition over the last 30 years.” In other words, the pollution was mostly eliminated, but the lakes are still acidic.

You can find the report here. Like all long government reports, the details are ten zillion different trends in different directions that don’t form a cohesive narrative, and the executive summary is “things are good in all the ways that suggest we deserve more money, but bad in all the ways that suggest we need more money”, It is complicated enough that you shouldn’t trust my excerpting, but at least to me the relevant excerpts seem to be:

Levels of acid neutralizing capacity (ANC), an indicator of the ability of a waterbody to neutralize acid deposition, have shown improvement from 1990 to 2008 at many lake and stream long-term monitoring sites in the eastern United States, including New England and the Adirondack Mountains. Many lakes and streams still have acidic conditions harmful to their biota even though the increases in ANC indicate that some recovery from acidification is occurring in sensitive aquatic ecosystems

And:

Despite the environmental improvements reported here, research over the past few years indicates that recovery from the effects of acidification is not likely for many sensitive areas without additional decreases in acid deposition. Many published articles, as well as the modeling presented in this report, show that the SO2 and NOx emission reductions achieved under Title IV from power plants are not recognized as insufficient to achieve full recovery or to prevent further acidification in some regions.

So Watts seems to be mostly wrong when they say lakes are not recovering, but mostly right when they say ecosystems are not recovering. But NAPAP has some explanations for why ecosystems are not recovering: first, if you poison a lake and kill everything, then even if you remove the poison later everything is still dead. Second, there are complicated natural cycles that gradually wash old deposited land-based pollution into lakes, and it will be a long time before all the pollution deposited on land gets fully washed away. Third, maybe we haven’t fought acid rain hard enough.

I think a lot of the epistemic work here is going to get done by people’s respective stereotypes about the trustworthiness of global warming denialists vs. big government agencies whose budget depends on there being a problem. But my impression is that Watts’ claim that poor recovery suggests acid rain was never a problem don’t hold up very well.

In any case, it’s undeniable that rain has become a lot less acid lately, and likely that this has at least modest positive effects on some ecosystems as well as on the built environment. Anti-Confederate protesters have replaced acid rain as the number one threat to our statues. Our precious, precious statues. Someday they will be safe.

Verdict: A little of everything: partly solved, partly alarmism, partly still going on.

3. The Rainforests

Maybe the most typical image of 90s environmentalism is men in bulldozers clear-cutting a rainforest, while tapirs and tree sloths gently weep.

Or maybe it was the declining-rainforest-coverage-over-time-maps. I feel like about one in every three posters I saw as a child looked something like this:

This is a fake example. Please stop asking me where I am getting the data from.

I thought surely nothing could be easier than digging up a few of them and seeing whether their 2020 predictions were right. But I can’t find them anywhere. According to the Internet, there is no such thing as 90s-era maps showing declining rainforest coverage over time. Can anyone else locate these?

Anyway:

Here’s a graph of the size of the Amazon over time (source, note that the y-axis is not at zero). At 90s levels of deforestation, the Amazon would have disappeared in about 200 years. At current levels, it will disappear in about 400 years.

Here’s the Congo (somewhat dubious source, same caveat). At the rates shown here it will be gone in 250 years – but it seems to have slowed after the period on the graph.

And here’s Southeast Asia (source, same caveat). At this rate, the southeast Asian forest will be gone in 150 years, though some new papers are suggesting we may be underestimating the deforestation rate.

Overall it looks like deforestation may have decreased modestly in the Amazon (and possibly the Congo) since the 1990s. It has not decreased significantly in Southeast Asia, and whatever decreases have happened are not relevant to the scale of the problem.

The only good news is that all those “rainforests will be gone by 2050” posters were just wrong; there is more rainforest than that. But not that much more.

Verdict: The problem still exists, and we are just ignoring it now.

4. Endangered Species

So just find how many species go extinct each year, and whether it’s a lot or a little, and then we’ll know what’s going on with this, right? Ha ha, as if.

On the one hand, the UN Environment Programme says that “150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours.”

On the other, nobody can name more than a single-digit number of species that go extinct in any given year. The 2017 list includes five: a bat, a cat, a flatworm, a lizard, and a snail. This matches longer-term surveys: Ceballos et al (2018) find that about 477 vertebrate species have gone extinct since 1900 – again, about five per year. And a recent survey found only four to eight bird species had disappeared since the turn of the century.

I have no idea where the 150-200 number per day comes from, and neither does anyone else. The closest I can find to a justification is this WWF page, which reminds us that if there are 100 million animals species, and “the extinction rate is just 0.01% per year”, then at least 10,000 species go extinct every year (=200-300/day) – but all of these numbers are completely made up.

One could try to justify these estimates with something like “assume only one in a thousand species has been discovered and is monitored well enough to detect its extinction, so if we detect five extinctions per year then five thousand must be happening” – but I’ve never heard anyone actually say this. Also, with apologies to all the undiscovered species, if they’re so tiny and uncommon as to never get discovered, it doesn’t seem like their extinction is going to change very much.

Five known species going extinct per year may sound like a lot if you’re thinking it’s something like “rhinos, pandas, whales, spotted owls, and leopards”. But realistically there are 385 species of shrews. We could spend our entire yearly extinction budget on shrews for the next sixty years and still have more than enough kinds of shrews left to satisfy basically anybody.

I’m trying to think what the best counterargument to this would be – the best case that we really do need to consider species extinction a dire concern.

Maybe this is too vertebrate-centric, and there are lots of insects and plants and such going extinct all the time? But this List Of Recently Extinct Insects suggests that of about 6000 known insect species, only 50-100 have gone extinct in the past century. And one of those was this giant earwig which I really think the world is better without.

Or maybe we can’t directly predict the future from the past. Imagine 1000 square miles of rainforest with a homogenous distribution of species. Clear-cut 50% of the rainforest, and no extinctions. Clear-cut 90% of the rainforest, still no extinctions. Clear-cut 99%, maybe a few extinctions if you’re unlucky. Then clear-cut the last remaining 1% and everything dies. It seems like something like that might be happening – see for example this report that global animal populations have declined 58% over the past forty years.

But any concept of endangered species that focuses on “many well-known species will be gone soon” doesn’t seem consistent with the evidence.

Verdict: Partly alarmism, partly still going on.

5. More And More Trash Piling Up Until The Whole World Is Just A Giant Mountain Of Trash

Wait, what? Was this really a concern? Did I really spend my primary school years being told that if I didn’t vigilantly recycle everything, one day I would be submerged beneath a sea of trash, breathing by means of a trash snorkel? Am I hallucinating all of this?

As usual, it turns out to be the Mafia’s fault. In the 1980s, mob boss Salvatore Avellino took over New York City’s landfill industry, and in a shocking development which nobody could have predicted, was corrupt. New York City soon ran out of landfill space. Somehow all of its excess trash ended up on a barge called the MOBRO-4000, because the Eighties, and this barge apparently sailed up and down the east coast of North America searching for a place to deposit its trash. In its many exciting adventures it reached the coast of Belize, got involved in a confrontation with the Mexican Navy, and finally went back to New York, where at some point landfill space was found and the crisis was over.

But a giant boat full of trash made a really memorable image, and it got nationwide news coverage, and environmentalists took advantage of this to tell everyone there was no more landfill space anywhere in the world and we all had to recycle right now. According to Wikipedia:

At the time, the Mobro 4000 incident was widely cited by environmentalists and the media as emblematic of the solid-waste disposal crisis in the United States due to a shortage of landfill space: almost 3,000 municipal landfills had closed between 1982 and 1987. It triggered much national public discussion about waste disposal, and may have been a factor in increased recycling rates in the late 1980s and after. It was this that caused it to be included in an episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (season 2, episode 5) in which they debunk many recycling myths.

I’m even absolutely right in remembering primary school lessons centered around garbage covering the Earth and killing everybody. Here’s a New York Times article from 1996 – ie after the crisis had a little bit of time to fade – lightly mocking the new curricula that followed in its wake:

After the litter hunt in Ms. Aponte’s science classroom, it was time for a guest lecturer on garbage. A fifth-grade class was brought in to hear Joanne Dittersdorf, the director of environmental education for the Environmental Action Coalition, a nonprofit group based in New York. Her slide show began with a 19th-century photograph of a street in New York strewn with garbage.

“Why can’t we keep throwing out garbage that way?” Dittersdorf asked.

“It’ll keep piling up and we won’t have any place to put it.”

“The earth would be called the Trash Can.”

“The garbage will soon, like, take over the whole world and, like, kill everybody.”

Dittersdorf asked the children to examine their lives. “Does anyone here ever have takeout food?” A few students confessed, and Dittersdorf gently scolded them. “A lot of garbage there.”

She showed a slide illustrating New Yorkers’ total annual production of garbage: a pile big enough to fill 15 city blocks to a height of 20 stories. ‘There are a lot of landfills in New York City,” Dittersdorf said, “but we’ve run out of space.”

From the same beginning-of-the-backlash period we also get this 1995 Foundation for Economic Education piece, Are We Burying Ourselves In Garbage?:

A popular idea in public discourse today is that the United States produces an overwhelming amount of trash–so much that our landfills will not be able to handle the quantity. The most eloquent symbol of this viewpoint was the “garbage barge,” which in the late 1980s left Long Island and could not find a port or country willing to accept its 3.168 tons of refuse. [But] the actual data (such as they are) on the amount of municipal solid waste produced present us with more questions than answers.

This article also deserves note for hitting on a brilliant solution:

The crisis mentality has distorted judgment of waste disposal. The notion that modern America is especially wasteful is demonstrably wrong, both in terms of the last decades as well as the last 100 years. The idea that our landfills are literally “running out” is even less credible. If in the next century major portions of the United States really need to export their refuse to other states, a “gold mine” for refuse burial does exist: South Dakota. This state is geologically, economically, and politically almost ideal for massive municipal solid waste management.

None of this is a joke. This is how your parents did Discourse, people.

But it turns out capitalism works: if there’s a shortage of landfills, that incentivizes people to create new landfills. Also, the world is very large and it is hard to cover a significant portion of it in trash. There was a brief blip as cities figured out how to pay for more waste disposal, and then nobody ever worried about the problem again. Recycling remained inefficient and of dubious benefit, and never really caught on.

There is still an international problem as Third World countries struggle with infrastructure issues around trash disposal. You still see occasional articles like Huffington Post’s People Are Living In Landfills As The World Drowns In Its Own Trash, from earlier this year. But I think in general nobody in the First World still considers this a major problem.

Well, almost nobody:

The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.

— Pope Francis (@Pontifex) June 18, 2015

Verdict: Alarmist. So, so, alarmist.

6. Peak Resource

Is the earth’s ballooning human population using up resources at an unsustainable rate?

Technically the answer must be “yes”, since by definition nonrenewable resources have to run out at some point. But when? Long after we have escaped to space and gotten access to shiny new resources? Or soon enough that we have to worry about it?

A big part of 90s environmentalism involved worrying that it was the latter. A particular concern was “peak oil”, the point at which we had exhausted so much of the world’s oil that production rates declined every year thereafter and oil started becoming gradually rarer and more expensive. Wikipedia has a helpful table of people’s peak oil predictions. I’ve highlighted the ones that have already passed in red.

Almost everyone working before 2000 thought we would have reached peak oil by now. But here’s world oil production over time:

And the price of oil:

What happened? People discovered fracking and other paradigm-shifting techniques to extract oil from shale, which opened up vast new previously-inaccessible oil fields. The peak oil predictors might call this unfair – they calculated correctly given the technology they knew about – but the whole argument of the people who say we don’t have to worry about peak resource (sometimes called “cornucopians”) is that technology will advance fast enough to satisfy our resource needs. In this case they were right.

What about non-oil resources?

In 1980, leading environmental scientist and peak-resource proponent Paul Ehrlich made a bet with cornucopian economist Julian Simon about how resource prices would change over the next decade. The Simon-Ehrlich Wager has become a famous example of futurology done right – two people with different theories implying different predictions coming together, agreeing on exactly what each of their theories implied, and then publicly committing to put them to the test. According to Reb Wiki:

Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990 as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.

Looks pretty good for Simon and the cornucopians. But the article continues:

Ehrlich could have won if the bet had been for a different ten-year period. Ehrlich wrote that the five metals in question had increased in price between the years 1950 to 1975. Asset manager Jeremy Grantham wrote that if the Simon–Ehrlich wager had been for a longer period (from 1980 to 2011), then Simon would have lost on four of the five metals. He also noted that if the wager had been expanded to “all of the most important commodities,” instead of just five metals, over that longer period of 1980 to 2011, then Simon would have lost “by a lot.” Economist Mark J. Perry noted that for an even longer period of time, from 1934 to 2013, the inflation-adjusted price of the Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index showed “an overall significant downward trend” and concluded that Simon was “more right than lucky”. Economist Tim Worstall wrote that “The end result of all of this is that yes, it is true that Ehrlich could have, would have, won the bet depending upon the starting date. … But the long term trend for metals at least is downwards.”

How about today? An econblogger is still keeping track of the Ehrlich-Simon wager, and finds that as of August 2017, Simon (who is now dead) is still winning; a basket of the five metals involved still costs less than it did in 1980.

Can we zoom out even further? There are a bunch of commodity indices that do for commodities what the Dow Jones does for stocks. I chose the Standard & Poor Goldman-Sachs Commodity Index kind of randomly because they were a familiar name and it was easy to find which goods they included. I’m not quite sure I’m doing this right, but this seems to be the most relevant graph:

The price of commodities in general is still lower than in 1980 (also, with this graph it becomes clear Ehrlich was really unlucky in which year he started his wager).

I have never heard anyone claim that this represents an environmentalist victory: I don’t think there was any large-scale attempt to conserve or recycle chromium/tungsten/whatever that led to its current abundance. I think this was just a victory for resource extraction technology.

There are still theoretical reasons to think we have to run out of stuff eventually. But in terms of how the past 25 years have treated 90s-era concerns about resource depletion, it’s hard to answer anything other than “savagely”.

Verdict: Alarmist

7. Saving The Whales

I remember frequently being told we had to do this. Apparently it paid off, since a global moratorium on whaling was signed in 1982.

The ban is not perfect. Indigenous peoples are allowed to hunt whales in traditional ways. Japan pretends their whaling is for “scientific purposes” and has so far gotten away with it. Norway and Iceland never signed the moratorium and continue to whale.

But overall, things are going pretty well. There aren’t a lot of graphs, but the International Whaling Commission (which despite its name is against whaling) says blue whale populations are increasing at about 8%/year, humpback whales around 10%, and fin whales around 5%. Those sound pretty good, but they have to be taken in context:

Okay, fine. There’s one graph. But it’s really depressing. See that tiny micro-bump at the end? That represents progress.

Verdict: Environmental movement successfully solved this problem.

8. Concluding Thoughts

This was not a very conclusive exercise. When I add these up – as if that were at all an acceptable thing to do! – I get 2⅓ that were solved, 2⅚ that were alarmism, and 1⅚ that continue. So there is not much to be said about them as a group. Some were solved through heroic effort. Some turned out to be completely made up. Some of them are still out there but have stopped capturing the public’s attention.

Victories I can understand. It’s the latter two categories that confuse me.

How did the non-problems fade away? There was no moment when some brave iconoclast posted ninety-five theses to the door of the local recycling center and said “No! There is not a landfill crisis!” I mean, John Tierney wrote things along those lines, and did a great job of it. But he’s not a household name and there was never a time when everyone said “Oh, John Tierney is right, let’s stop worrying about this.” The people who stopped worrying about this never heard of John Tierney. At some point people just went from being very worried about the landfill crisis to shaking their heads and saying “The world getting full of trash? Sounds pretty stupid.”

And the story with peak resources seems entirely different. You will still occasionally see people saying “The Earth can’t support our greed, soon we will run out of everything”, and reasonable people will nod along with this and admit it is very wise. But you hear it like once a year now, as opposed to it being a constant refrain. This idea was never intellectually defeated at all, at least not on the popular level. It just faded away.

Was there some rarified level of intellectual debate where these ideas lost out? And then, denied their support from the commanding heights of the ivory tower, did journalists stop writing about them, schoolteachers stop teaching them, and then eventually the public – who have no will of their own and have to be told what matters – wander off and do something else?

Or was the change bottom-up? Did the public, after the millionth editorial on the trash crisis, say “Okay, whatever”, such that journalists realized this was no longer a good way to sell newspaper subscriptions? Is there a natural news mega-cycle of a decade or so, after which the public gets tired of hearing about a certain story, the intellectuals get tired of talking about it, every possible angle has been explored, and people move on, whether or not it was solved? Does this explain why the rainforests, a real problem that is still going on, similarly lost public attention?

Or maybe climate change took over everything, became so important that everything else faded into the background. This is certainly how it feels to me. Whenever I hear about the rainforests nowadays, it’s as a footnote to some global warming story where they add that we should save the rainforest as a carbon sink. Whenever I hear about landfills or recycling today, it’s in the context of trash giving off greenhouse gases. It feels almost like some primitive barter system has been converted to a modern economy, with tons of CO2 emission as the universal interchangeable currency that can be used to put a number value on all environmental issues. Can’t figure out a way to convert whales into a carbon sink? Guess they’ll have to go.

(I wrote that, then remembered I lived in 21st century America, did a Google search, and sure enough there are dozens of articles arguing that saving whales is an efficient way to neutralize greenhouse gases)

But as attractive as this picture is, it’s hard to find the supporting data. There’s just not hard evidence that we care more about global warming than we did fifteen or twenty years ago:

Here’s the Google Trends. There was a lot of interest in 2006, which I think gets attributed to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in that year, but not a lot of signs of increase today.

Here’s Gallup. It at least shows a spike starting in 2016 – but given its timing and the lack of obvious 2016 global-warming related events, I think it’s probably just another Trump backlash effect.

If global warming is eating all the other environmental issues, it doesn’t seem to be extracting that much nutrition from their corpses. And the ozone hole – probably the most global-warming-like issue of the last generation – managed to gather popular support at the same time that people were worried about a host of other things. I don’t know. Maybe given the public’s tendency to get bored of an issue after a decade or so, global warming has to cannibalize the rest of environmentalism just to survive at all. Depressing if true.

Or maybe it’s a zeitgeist thing. For some reason, it’s hard to imagine 2018 being the Year Of Rainforest Concern. There’s something very 90s Optimism about worrying about the rainforests, something where even the warnings of doom have a cheerful ring to them. I remember a Rainforest Charity Box at my local mall as a kid, promising that if you donated $10, you would save a brightly colored parrot, and if you donated $50, you might save a jaguar. Who thinks that way these days? Now if you donate some amount to stopping global warming, you will have won yourself a lecture from a bunch of people telling you that still doesn’t mean you have the right to feel good about yourself, and the world is going to fry regardless. Have we just passed the point where anybody can care about crisp mountain streams or frolicking snow leopards any more?

The most important thing I take away from the exercise is a sort of postmodern insight into the way environmental issues are constructed. This is definitely not me saying they are all made up; many of them are very real. But the mapping from real crisis to social panic is tenuous, contingent, and historical. Sometimes random things that shouldn’t matter get magnified into the issue du jour; other times giant world-threatening crises manage to slip everyone’s attention.

Imagine that twenty years from now, nobody cares or talks about global warming. It hasn’t been debunked. It’s still happening. People just stopped considering it interesting. Every so often some webzine or VR-holozine or whatever will publish a “Whatever Happened To Global Warming” story, and you’ll hear that global temperatures are up X degrees centigrade since 2000 and that explains Y percent of recent devastating hurricanes. Then everyone will go back to worrying about Robo-Trump or Mecha-Putin or whatever.

If this sounds absurd, I think it’s no weirder than what’s happened to 90s environmentalism and the issues it cared about.

The post 7,648 cracks in Ecuador’s socialist delusion appeared first on Hot Air.

The post Oh, great. Russia takes over Venezuela’s oil industry appeared first on Hot Air.

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria is controversial partly because of the possible consequences for the country’s Kurdish minority. “Among the biggest losers are likely to be the Kurdish troops that the United States has equipped and relied on to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” The New York Times editorialized. “Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, considers many of the Kurds to be terrorists bent on destroying his country. In recent days he has vowed to launch a new offensive against them in the Syrian border region.”

A Wall Street Journal op-ed by Tommy Meyerson, a veteran of the Syria campaign, argues that “the Kurdish-led civil administration does the heavy lifting of guarding hundreds of ISIS’ most dangerous foreign fighters,” asserts that the West “owes them a debt,” and warns that a Turkish invasion into territory they hold “would force Kurdish forces to pull back from the front lines against the remnant of ISIS, allowing the jihadists to regroup and proliferate.”

Joost Hiltermann has more on the Kurds’ grim options. And Noam Chomsky, the leftist academic and outspoken critic of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, has said it makes sense for the United States “to maintain a presence which would deter an attack on the Kurdish areas.”

Proponents of U.S. withdrawal ought to acknowledge and grapple with the fate of the Kurds, as Michael Brendan Dougherty and Stephen Walt do. That Turkey is reportedly massing troops along the border near territory held by Kurdish forces only increases the urgency of the matter. Perhaps there is some action America can take to prevent a slaughter, some leverage it can exert on an ally’s behalf, some time it can buy them.  

But Syria hawks who insist that the United States ought to remain in the country indefinitely to avoid an immoral betrayal of the Kurds are neither acknowledging nor grappling with the full ramifications of their position—nor are they facing up to their part in any betrayal that occurs.

[Kori Schake: Trump just messed up the one thing he did better than Obama]

---

For the foreseeable future, Turkey will be hostile to Syrian Kurds and strong enough to vanquish them militarily if it so chooses. If it is a betrayal for the U.S. to pull out while those conditions hold, that would seem to imply an American presence in the country for years or even decades.

But neither Congress nor the public favors the indefinite occupation of Syria to protect its Kurds from hostility by the Turkish government. Recall that Congress failed to pass an authorization to use military force in Syria even when ISIS was orders of magnitude stronger there than it is today. Would Congress or the public have approved an agreement whereby Kurdish forces helped us fight ISIS and we agreed in return to keep thousands of U.S. troops in Syria as long as Kurds there faced danger? Of course not.

Still, many now say that the United States would be betraying our allies if we leave. It’s reasonable to ask, given the positions of Congress, the president, and the public: Who took on that ostensible obligation on the nation’s behalf? What gave them the right to do so? What other checks are they writing? And is there anything that the public can do to stop them?

Opponents of an indefinite U.S. presence in Syria object in part because the longer U.S. troops stay, the greater the risk that our forces are drawn into an unplanned fight, like the four-hour battle between Russian mercenaries and U.S. commandos, but one that spirals into a larger, potentially catastrophic war between nuclear-armed states. That would be a daunting risk under any circumstances. And the risk is only heightened by Trump’s erratic streak, lack of foreign-policy experience, and penchant for impulsive risk taking that sometimes ends in bankruptcy.

“The world hoped that an Axis of Adults could constrain the juvenile in the Oval Office, but such naive expectations have been dashed repeatedly,” the Syria hawk Max Boot wrote. “Syria offers the latest example of the futility of expecting that lower-level officials can consistently save the world from the commander in chief … Trump does whatever he wants. It could be based on what he had for breakfast or there could be something more sinister going on.” But if Trump is at best an out-of-control juvenile, and plausibly the knowing pawn of America’s enemies, as Boot contends, then isn’t the U.S. safer withdrawing its troops than leaving them stationed in a powder keg, where a misstep by an unfit commander in chief could bring about a global disaster?

Susan Rice, who served as a national-security adviser in Barack Obama’s administration, wrote: “The president couldn’t care less about facts, intelligence, military analysis or the national interest. He refuses to take seriously the views of his advisers, announces decisions on impulse and disregards the consequences of his actions. In abandoning the role of a responsible commander in chief, Mr. Trump today does more to undermine American national security than any foreign adversary.”

[Hassan Hassan: Trump shouldn’t withdraw troops—he should rebrand]

Wouldn’t it be better for a guy like that to preside over troops who are stateside with their families rather than deployed in a volatile war zone that he doesn’t understand, even as he shows a new willingness to micromanage?

The stance many foreign-policy hawks are taking is akin to granting that a reckless incompetent has temporarily taken over as on-duty surgeon and insisting that the hospital proceed with its brain operations anyway.

Now, it may be that there’s a persuasive case for staying in Syria a bit longer, until some specific, achievable, near-term goal is accomplished that improves the prospects of America’s Kurdish allies without incurring a greater risk of a world war or doing more damage to the rule of law or the democratic will or unduly endangering the lives of American troops. If so, let’s hear that plan.

Instead, most Syria hawks offer no alternative withdrawal date or evidence that the Kurds will be safer if our forces withdrew in one or five years. And there is good reason to think that part of the reason some hawks want to stay is to thwart Iran’s ambitions for the foreseeable future.

Even those Syria hawks are still right to fear for the Kurds, help make Americans aware of their plight, and urge reflection on U.S. obligations and a withdrawal’s likely effect, if any, on American credibility. And Syria doves are right to fear that the Kurds are being used as a pretext to advance a forever war in the Middle East and to guard against it.

Syria hawks ought not to invoke the Kurds to call for an indefinite U.S. deployment without addressing (among other things) the unfitness of this commander in chief to preside over a volatile occupation, the risks of wider war, the danger to our troops, the lack of an authorization to use military force in Syria, the illegality of staying in Syria to fight with Iran, and the damage done when any faction helps sever the constitutional mechanisms that keep war subject to democratic accountability.

What’s more, Syria hawks ought to reflect on their role in any future betrayal that Kurdish people in Syria suffer at the hands of the United States.

[Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz: Trump delivers a victory to Iran]

I don’t know whether cooperating to fight ISIS, a common enemy, necessarily conferred an American obligation to protect the Kurds from Turkey. But if representations of that sort were made to Kurdish forces, they were irresponsible promises that could not be reliably kept by whoever made them. Any such promises were made without the backing of Congress or the citizenry in a conflict the U.S. entered without significant debate. It was always easy to see that the American public would eventually sour on having “boots on the ground” in Syria. Only a reckless gambler would’ve wagered that the public would tolerate an indefinite occupation as long as Syrian Kurds faced any danger.

Syria hawks pressed for American boots on the ground anyway. And they got their way in part because they were willing to proceed in spite of a public that was largely ignorant of the intervention—a public likely to stay ignorant longer because foreign allies were minimizing U.S. troop needs and casualties. To urge an intervention despite those factors is to dramatically increase the likelihood of an unpopular deployment, a populist backlash to it, and withdrawal before hawks find it prudent. If anyone told Syrian Kurds that America would always have their backs, that person behaved irresponsibly and probably dishonestly.

Often, the seeds of foreign-policy betrayals are planted at the outset by proponents of interventions who press ahead without adequate buy-in. If hawks are as averse to leaving erstwhile allies in tough positions as they purport to be, they ought to refrain from inserting the United States into future wars of choice without very solid backing from Congress and the public. Those who urge wars of choice absent those marks of legitimacy and relative sustainability all but guarantee that the U.S. will break with some of its battlefield allies, as it has done at least since Vietnam, even when doing so leaves those allies in a very dangerous lurch.

While that is always terrible, overeager interventionists sometimes put the U.S. in a position where the only alternatives are even more terrible. That is plausibly the case in Syria—it is impossible to know for sure.

Talk to almost any academic, and you’ll hear nothing but negative opinions about neoliberalism. Meanwhile, out in the real world this ideology continues to improve the lives of billions of people, at a faster rate than at any other time in human history.

Do you recall how the Soviet Union used to continually suffer from poor harvests due to “bad weather?” During the 1970s, US farmers made lots of money exporting wheat to feed hungry Russians. Guess which country is now the world’s largest wheat exporter:

So how did this miracle occur?

This roaring output is the result of a confluence of short- and long-term factors. Since the Soviet Union’s collapse, farming has undergone a gradual transformation from “a fantastically ineffective collective model to effective capitalism”, says Andrei Sizov, head of SovEcon, an agricultural consultancy in Moscow. Although the state’s overall role in Russia’s economy has grown, agriculture has largely remained in private hands, fuelling competition.

And Russia is one of the few countries that will actually benefit from global warming:

The future also looks bright owing to global trends. As populations grow, so too should food consumption, especially in some of Russia’s largest export markets, such as Turkey. Rising temperatures and improving technologies mean longer growing seasons, higher crop yields and wider swathes of arable land in much of Russia. “Everyone is moving north,” says Yuri. His son has started farming in the Belgorod region, closer to Moscow.

So why don’t most intellectuals understand the beauty of neoliberalism? Because they don’t understand economics. It’s that simple.

PS.  There is no shame in not understanding economics.  The list of fields I do not understand is probably ten times longer than the list of fields I do understand.  Opera, quantum mechanics, French poetry, organic chemistry, etc.  Heck, I couldn’t even explain to my daughter how a TV set works.

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year.

 

(25 COMMENTS)

Flickr/Tomas Del Coro

• J.D. Power recently released the latest edition of its annual North America Airport Satisfaction Study.
• Overall traveler satisfaction with airports is at a 13-year high.
• However, airports serving major cities like New York, LA, Chicago, and Boston all find themselves at the bottom of the rankings. 

J.D. Power recently released the latest edition of its annual North America Airport Satisfaction Study. The 2018 edition of the study found that overall passenger satisfaction is the highest ever recorded in its 13-year history. 

Overall traveler satisfaction increased 12 points on a 1,000-point scale to 761. 

According to the study, travelers surveyed by the consumer data and analytics firm reported improvements in several major areas including check-in; dining and retail; as well as terminal facilities. 

John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California earned the highest score in the study with 815 points.

Read more: The 10 airports in America that passengers love flying into the most.

However, not all of America's facilities fared as well. 

Airports serving major metropolitan areas such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles are all mired once again at the bottom of the rankings. 

Unfortunately, things may get worse before it gets better for many of these cities. 

"Several multi-billion-dollar airport construction projects—such as those in Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago—are reaching phases in which passenger disruption and increased traffic will be incredibly hard to avoid," J.D. Power travel practice lead, Michael Taylor said in a statement. "How well these rapidly expanding airports manage throughout these infrastructure projects will provide valuable insight into what’s in store on a nationwide basis."

The J.D. Power study measures overall traveler satisfaction with mega, large, and medium-sized airports in the US and Canada.

The study takes into consideration six factors — in order of importance — 1) terminal facilities, 2) airport accessibility, 3) security check, 4) baggage claim, 5) check-in/baggage check, and 6) food, beverage, and retail. 

The rankings are based on data gathered between September 2018 and September 2018 from 40,183 respondents who traveled through at least one North American airport during the three months prior to being surveyed. 

Here's a closer look at the 10 lowest scoring airports in J.D Power's 2018 North American Airport Satisfaction Study: 

10. Boston Logan International Airport: 747 points.

AP

9. Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport: 744 points.

AP

8. Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport: 743 points.

Reuters/Jonathan Bachman

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

See Also:

• 40 hot cars we can't wait to see in 2019
• 10 airports to avoid if you're flying during the holiday season
• The 18 most shocking airline stories of 2018

SEE ALSO: Delta's CEO just reignited the nastiest feud in the airline industry by accusing Qatar Airways of violating a deal with Trump administration

FOLLOW US: On Facebook for more car and transportation content!

Thomson Reuters

• The Associated Press has released its list of top 10 news stories of the year.
• Editors and news directors across the country named the Parkland shooting story the top news story of the year. 
• Here are the 10 top news stories of the year:

1. The Parkland school shooting

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

On February 14, 2018, a shooter broke into the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and killed 17. This was the deadliest mass shooting in the country this year. The massacre sparked a pro-gun control movement across the US, led by student survivors of the shooting. On March 24, thousands of students across the world marched in favor of gun control laws in what became known as the "March for Our Lives." 

2. The Trump-Russia probe

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

The Trump-Russia probe dominated headlines this year. The special counsel's team, led by Robert Mueller, continued its investigation into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia ahead of the 2016 election. So far, the investigation has found that several Trump associates made contact with Russian agents. Several former Trump aides have been indicted for lying, including Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. 

3. The #MeToo movement

Thomson Reuters

The #MeToo movement began in 2017 but dominated news stories well into 2018. More powerful men were accused of sexual assault and harassment this year. Bill Cosby was sentenced to prison. Disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was charged with rape. Les Moonves was ousted as top executive at CBS after a dozen women accused him of sexual misconduct.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

See Also:

• From 'very stable genius' to 'very legal & very cool': Here are 32 very real things Trump tweeted in 2018
• Inside Trump's daily routine, which includes 3 to 4 hours of sleep, 'executive time,' and no breakfast
• Bill Clinton was impeached 20 years ago. What was going on in Washington, D.C., that day?

SEE ALSO: A federal judge tosses the Parkland school-shooting lawsuit, says local police had no legal obligation to protect students during the massacre

Hulu

• Mindy Kaling revisited the holiday pun "Wreath Witherspoon," a Christmas wreath with pictures of actress Reese Witherspoon, that first debuted on "The Mindy Project" in 2014.
• This year, Kaling took the pun to the next level by creating other holiday decorations playing off celebrity names.
• There's "Matthew McConau-Tree," "Margaret Cho Flake," and "Chris Pine Tree."
• "I’m throwing a holiday party tonight. It’s going to be very punny...," Kaling wrote on Instagram over the weekend.

Mindy Kaling revisited the spirit of the "Wreath Witherspoon" pun by creating more holiday decorations playing off other celebrities.

"I’m throwing a holiday party tonight. It’s going to be very punny...," Kaling wrote on Instagram over the weekend. See the rest of the story at Business Insider

NOW WATCH: The world's largest cruise ship just landed in Miami — here's what it's like on board

See Also:

• Miley Cyrus performed a revised 'Santa Baby,' and her version of the holiday song is way more empowering for women
• Celebrities mourn the death of beloved actress and director Penny Marshall
• Busy Philipps has been campaigning for a phone call from Oprah, and she sobbed when it actually happened

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Over at Econlog, I have a post discussing the slowdown in US population growth, to 0.6% in 2018 (the slowest growth rate since 1937.)  A WSJ article also had some interesting data on state growth rates:

The footnote on Puerto Rico is rather striking, as its population fell by 4% last year.  That was partly due to hurricane Maria, but its population has been plunging for many years, down about 14% since 2010.  Who’s going to pay off that enormous debt, and will the last Puerto Rican please turn out the lights? Hawaii is also losing people, as are Mississippi and Louisiana.  So the “Sunbelt” phenomenon is more complex than advertised.

Other trends:

1.  Mormons have lots of kids.  The four fastest growing states are all in the top five in terms of percentage of the population that is Mormon, although only in Utah and Idaho are they numerous enough to dramatically impact population growth.  (The other top five Mormon state (Wyoming) is losing people.)

2.  Illinois has been losing about 40,000 people each year, while other Midwestern industrial states like Michigan and Ohio keep growing (albeit slowly).  What makes this surprising is that Illinois is dominated by one of the few Midwestern industrial cities to successfully reinvent itself.  Chicago has a thriving lakefront area full of high paying jobs, while Detroit, Flint, Cleveland, Akron and Dayton have languished.  This Illinois underperformance may reflect the extraordinary incompetence of the Illinois state government, which is driving the state toward a fiscal crisis.  Illinois is dominated by Cook County, which has a corrupt political culture.

3.  As recently as 2013, New York had more people than Florida.  Now Florida has 1.75 million more than New York.  Indeed 35% of US population growth now occurs in Florida and Texas.

4.  The sunny, oil-rich states that border Texas continue to do very poorly, either falling in population or growing much more slowly than the national average.  Texas probably benefits from a mixture of no state income tax, lax zoning, and business friendly regulations.  While other inland states also have cheap housing prices, Texas has cheap housing prices in big urban areas.

5.  It now seems like the lack of a state income tax doesn’t provide much gain to states without a big city, such as Alaska, Wyoming and New Hampshire.  The exception is South Dakota, which is doing modestly better than its neighbors.  In contrast, states with big cities and no state income tax (Texas, Florida, Nevada, Washington, Tennessee (on wages)) tend to grow faster than their neighbors.  I think that’s because the lack of a state income tax is especially attractive for the sort of high paid professionals that live in big cities.

6.  The recent federal tax reform will raise the effective top rate on the California state income tax from about 8% to 13.3%.  Many rich people (like me) will continue to choose California, due to its amenities.  But at the margin, a few more will make the switch to Austin or Seattle or Vegas.  California always used to grow faster than the US as a whole.  Even when whites started leaving for other states, the overall California population kept growing at a good clip due to international migration.  But now its growth rate (0.4%) has fallen below the national average.  Eventually, California may begin losing Congressional seats.

7.  Today, most of our population growth is in three areas.  The southeast (Raleigh to Miami), four big Texas metros, and the non-California west (the Denver/Seattle/Phoenix triangle.)

What are the odds that the world’s two richest guys would live in the same medium size city, in the only liberal state without a state income tax?

 

The Wall Street Journal just reported some new Census data, which shows that the US population grew at the slowest rate in 80 years between July 2017 and July 2018. At first I wondered if this reflected a slowdown in immigration, but that doesn’t seem to be the biggest factor:

As birthrates have dropped and death rates risen, immigration’s role in the nation’s continuing population growth has expanded. Last year, it accounted for 48% of the country’s growth, up from 35% in 2011. Accounting for arrivals and departures, the Census Bureau estimated that the country gained 979,000 people from abroad last year, close to the annual average of 1 million in recent years. The figure accounts for both legal and unauthorized immigration, as well as the movement of Americans moving abroad and back.

As I predicted, the Trump administration is not having a major impact on the overall rate of immigration, even as it makes it harder for certain categories of people to immigrate.  Indeed, I predict that in the long run Trump will have caused immigration to be higher than otherwise, as he pushes the Democrats into a more extreme pro-immigration stance.  Look for the next President to sharply reverse course and increase immigration—especially from Asia.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, the US had a much higher birthrate than Europe.  While the birthrate is still a bit higher, the gap has narrowed sharply.  The US birthrate is still much higher than in Germany and Italy, but lower than in France and about the same as the UK:

The US population has gone from growing about one percentage point faster than the EU in the 1990s, to perhaps a third of a point faster today.

So what other ways is the US becoming more like Europe?

1.  The percentage of Americans who are not religious has been rising dramatically.

2.  Our health care system is increasingly socialized.

3.  Our politics increasingly resembles the populism of places like Hungary and Italy.  The political polarization resembles the Brexit split in the UK.  Anti-immigration nationalism came on the scene in Europe before it hit the US.

4.  The recent criminal justice reform bill slightly (and I emphasize slightly) moves us in the European direction of lower rates of incarceration.  We are also slightly softening the war on drugs.

5.  Walkable shopping areas are increasingly popular.  Some cities are moving to allow dense townhouses in areas previously reserved for single-family homes.

What am I missing?

In terms of monetary policy, the population slowdown makes the US more susceptible to hitting the zero bound in interest rates.  Not surprisingly, one of the few countries to avoid the zero bound during the Great Recession was Australia, which has fast population growth.

(16 COMMENTS)

Elon Musk just gave the media a tour of his 1.5 mile prototype tunnel under Los Angeles, which he spent US$10m to build.  Why are Elon Musk’s tunnels so cheap?  Because they’re tiny.

As media photos of the event will show you, the tunnel is just slightly wider than a car.  That means that if you used it for a train, it might have room for one seat per row. I suppose you could fit two if there was no way to move through the train while it was between stations, but that’s almost unimaginable once you add a required emergency exit plan.

So despite Musk’s occasional noises about using his tunnels for public transit, this thing is for moving cars, which means it is for moving trivially tiny numbers of people.

As we’ve discussed before, a car-based tunnel also requires elevators.  You zip your car into a parking space and it descends to the tunnel.  Cool, but have they run the numbers on how many of these they would need, assuming it takes, say, a minute to do a full cycle of the elevator?  How much real estate would it require to get cars into the subway at a rate that even maximizes the tiny capacity of the subway?

Anyway, those are some questions to ask today.

And yes, it would be great if this dalliance produces genuine improvements in tunnel technologies useful for building actual train-sized tunnels that can move the number of people who need to move.  But Musk’s prairie-dog burrows are mostly hype, confusion, and elite projection.  While delivering almost nothing useful, they are confusing elite opinion about whether we still need to build mass transit, which we do.  Is any marginal benefit worth the resulting delay in getting the infrastructure we really need?

Two lessons to remember: 

• If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t matter.  The media are easily excited by demonstration projects, but this idea doesn’t scale.  You could build lots of tunnels, and they would each move so few people that they wouldn’t make a dent in a city’s transport needs.
• If it doesn’t scale, it’s for the rich.  Or to put it another way:  Inefficiency is inequality.  Anything that spends a lot of money to serve small numbers of people raises the question “why are those people so important, and what about everyone else?”

Does this remind you of other transport fantasies, such as replacing transit with “service to your door”?  These rules about scalability are pretty good tests to bring to all the fun new inventions, including whatever’s coming next.

The post Elon Musk’s Tunnel: It Doesn’t Scale, so it Doesn’t Matter appeared first on Human Transit.

A proposal from an Oregon state representative relaxes land-use regulations for homeowners living in larger cities. It deserves bipartisan support.

Donald Trump has been called a setback for many things. America. The global community. The environment. Civil service. Civil society. Civility. Civilization. The list goes on.

One might think he has at least been useful to his own cause. That he could at least claim to have benefited the ideas of populism, nationalism, immigration control, and protectionism. That if anything could avoid being devastated by Trump, it would be Trumpism.

But here are some polls from the past few years. They’re all on slightly different things, but I think together they tell an interesting story:

Support for global free trade mysteriously spiked around 2016.

So did moral support for immigrants.

…and, less clearly but still there, support for increasing the number of immigrants (though see here for an apparently contrary source).

…and opposition to deporting illegal immigrants.

So did belief in racial discrimination as a major cause of inequality, according to this chart with a completely unbiased title which is willing to let readers decide how to think about this issue for themselves.

And so did trust in the New York Times and other mainstream media sources.

The clearest example I can find of this effect doesn’t come from the US at all. It’s Minkus, Deutschmann & Delhey (2018). They find that a large European poll asked the same question about support for the EU the week before and after Trump’s election. Just after the election, there was a giant spike in support for the EU, “considerable in size, roughly equivalent to three years of education”. They conclude that:

The election of Trump as a right-wing nationalist with a declared aversion to supranational institutions including the EU — did not trigger a domino effect in the same direction in Europe. To the contrary, a rally effect occurred, in which Europe moved closer together, rallying around the EU’s “flag.” This indicates that an event that may at first sight appear to be a global victory for nationalism can immediately trigger measurable sentiments of resistance in another part of the world, actually leading to new impetus for supranationalism.

This kind of analysis is inherently vulnerable to cherry-picking, and I admit I’ve chosen some especially dramatic results. And polls naturally have a lot of variability, and none of these on their own constitute proof of anything. But I think when you put everything together you do get a trend. Some things have stayed the same, or are inconclusive. But there do seem to be a lot of cases where support for Trumpist positions show a sudden and lasting decrease as soon as Trump enters the national stage.

I want credit for predicting this. In my endorsement of anyone except Trump, I told progressives not to vote Trump because they opposed his policy, and conservatives not to vote Trump because he would cause a backlash that was worse than anything they might get from him. I said that the left thrives by imagining themselves as brave rebels fighting an ignorant, regressive, hateful authority, and that “bringing their straw man to life and putting him in the Oval Office” would be “the biggest gift” they could give the Democrats, and would end up pushing an entire generation further to the left.

I think this is a good broad theory of what’s happening, but it might be worth digging deeper to try to distinguish possible mechanisms.

First, maybe Trump is just such an offensive and aversive figure that people switch sides in disgust. This is a little weird; if you were anti-immigration before Trump, can’t you just say “I hate Trump, but I’m still against immigration”? But maybe people’s minds don’t work that way.

Second, maybe Trump made causes like protectionism and nativism so central to the Republican narrative that they became untenable for Democrats. That is, in 2010, it might have been possible to be an anti-illegal-immigration Democrat (remember, in the early 2000s Hillary supported a border fence), but in 2018, that would signal being a Republican, or at least someone of questionable loyalty to the Democratic Party. In order to fit in, moderate Democrats abandoned their anti-illegal-immigration stances. The graphs above seem to provide some evidence for this: they usually show the largest shift among Democrats, with Republicans merely staying where they are.

Third, and kind of opposite that, maybe Trump is such an offensive and aversive figure that conservatives feel a need to maintain their reputation by distancing themselves from him. Maybe in 2010, being anti-illegal-immigration signaled things that you wanted to signal, like patriotism and support for low-paid workers. And now, being anti-immigration signals things you don’t want to signal, like Trump’s particular brand of inflammatory divisiveness. This doesn’t fit the evidence from the graphs above, but it does sort of fit the European study, where further-right Europeans were more likely to switch opinions after the election than further-left ones.

Fourth, maybe Trump’s focus on certain causes shifted the focus of Democrats and the mainstream media to those causes, and Democrats and the mainstream media were better at opposing them than Trump was at supporting them. For example, since Trump the media has been focusing more intensely on negative aspects of ICE and Border Control practices which were less well-covered before his presidency. If this focus has successfully changed minds, that would explain a shift away from Trump.

Fifth, maybe Trump has shifted the goalposts. Maybe identifying as anti-illegal-immigrant before Trump just meant you thought there should be a little better border control, but now you think it means you want a wall and mass deportations, plus you think all Mexicans are rapists. If you felt like the anti-illegal-immigrant cause was getting more extreme, but your positions stayed the same, then you might stop identifying as anti-illegal-immigrant.

Sixth, there have been a lot of studies showing that peaceful protests may increase support for a cause, but violent or disruptive protests usually decrease it (1, 2, 3). It’s easy enough to analogize Trump to a “disruptive protest” – in the sense of an ideological cause getting associated with an unsympathetic proponent – and this would be compatible with any of the explanations above. But I notice that most of the research in this area was done on whites reacting to civil rights protests, adding an identity dimension: maybe disruptive racially charged protests by blacks increase the salience of race as a category for whites, causing them to shift their opinions more towards ones based on their race rather than based on other values. This would also explain the paradoxical Ferguson effect mentioned in Part III here. In the same way, we can think of Trump’s election as a disruptive Republican move that makes Democrats feel threatened and increases the salience of partisanship for them. This would cause a sort of unilateral polarization, where Democrats become more progressive but Republicans don’t necessarily become more conservative, and so the country as a whole shifts to the left. Like the second explanation, this is compatible with the party breakdown on the graphs above. It’s also compatible with this:

These show the familiar 2016 spike. But although Trump has taken positions against fighting climate change or regulating guns, I don’t think of these two issues as “Trumpist” in the same way as illegal immigration, and I’m surprised they seem to show a Trump-related change. This would make more sense if Trump caused a wider-reaching closing of ranks among Democrats rather than just a shift away from his personal hobbyhorses.

I think all of this should increase people’s concern about backlash effects. Contrary to what some of my conflict theorist friends seem to think, civility and honesty are not always pointless own-goals in politics. If you’re sufficiently repulsive and offensive, you can also end up damaging your own cause.

As I’ve pointed out before, backlash can sometimes be a necessary trade-off to energize your base. But as I’ve also pointed out before, people tend to overestimate the importance of turning out the base, and to underestimate the importance of not having everyone hate you. So if I were a Trumpist, I would be very worried right now.

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In White Right: Meeting the Enemy, the filmmaker Deeyah Khan, a Muslim woman of color, recounts a television interview she gave during the summer of 2016. “The fact of the matter is that the U.K. is never going to be white again,” she told the BBC. “Similarly, our parents who have left Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and other Muslim countries, for them to think that they can reestablish those countries and the lives that they had there over here—it’s not gonna happen. We’re together going to have to find out: What does it mean to build a society that includes all of us?” A deluge of hate mail quickly followed.

Rather than silence her, the threats provoked her to go out and meet “the kind of people who sent me this abuse … to get behind the hatred and the extremist ideology to find out what they are really like as human beings.”

What follows is a tense hour of film. The filmmaker managed to secure exclusive access to white-supremacist groups at pivotal moments before and during their infamous march on Charlottesville, Virginia, and she elicited remarkable statements during her interviews with racists.

In one scene in the film, she takes out a photograph of herself, age 6, grimacing during an anti-racism march. “People that represent what you represent made a 6-year-old child feel hated and unwanted and unwelcome and ugly,” she tells one white-supremacist leader as they sit across from each other in a hotel room. “The movement that you are a part of has this type of real-life effect on people like me. How does that make you feel?”

He squirms and swallows. “Uncomfortable,” he finally answers. In the discussion that follows, she presses him to confront the full reality of where his actions invariably lead. A similarly intense interview unfolds in the mountains of Tennessee at a neo-Nazi training camp.

What interested me as much as the film was an interview with Khan just released on Sam Harris’s podcast in which she looks back at her interactions with white supremacists—an interview that sounded the same themes as the Washington Post article “The White Flight of Derek Black” and the fascinating story of the black jazz musician Daryl Davis, who decided that he was going to interview and engage various members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In both of those stories, anti-racists departed from the conventional wisdom that bigots are best excoriated and shunned (if not punched and kicked); engaged prominent, hard-core racists; and managed through civil interactions to persuade some of them to renounce their beliefs.

Khan described similar results from her efforts to combat both jihadism and white-supremacist extremism—an outcome that she didn’t expect.

“I’ve had experiences of racism most of my life,” she said. “As a result, I’ve been an anti-racist, anti-fascist campaigner for most of my life. I’ve done everything that you would imagine. I’ve gone to anti-fascist protests. I’ve shouted at these guys. I have flipped them off. I have thrown stuff at them. I’ve done all of that. And none of that really did anything.”

Judging and condemning jihadists and white supremacists “feels great,” she declared, but yields little. “I made the film to try to understand why people do the things that they do,” she said, “so the fact that some of them started using words like friends for me, the fact that we were able to build a real relationship, was absolutely shocking to me and confusing and something I never would’ve expected. If you would’ve told me a year ago that I was going to be friends with people like this, my God, I would have laughed at you at first. And then, second, I think I would’ve been offended that you think I would do that.”

As it turns out, a few fraught friendships that grew out of her conversations caused some people in deplorable organizations to leave them. About a man who ultimately told her, “I’ve left the group. I’ve left the ideology. And I’m so sorry. The hate was eating me from the inside,” she said:

It tells me that we can’t really afford to give up on people––people like him. You know, he has a massive swastika tattoo, a Klan tattoo, he’s utterly committed to his cause, and today he’s left. In the film he says, “But I’m never going to break bread with a Jew,” and two or three weeks ago I heard that’s exactly what he’s done. And he’s having his tattoo removed.

So there is hope. I’m not saying let’s hug a Nazi and everything is going to be fine. But what I’ve learned is that … no-platforming these people and just completely rejecting them, I think, feeds into their story of victimhood, as if they are speaking some sort of forbidden truth. And I think if anything, we need to expose racism. We need to challenge it.

We need to confront it rather than just allowing it to marinade in its own kind of madness … The judgment and self-righteousness for holding the right opinions and having the correct politics, I think, is just counterproductive … It actually adds to the problem and adds to people’s radicalization rather than not. In speaking to the jihadis that left and to former violent neo-Nazis in this film, what struck me after the fact is that what interrupted people’s hatred and ideology is for someone who represents the other in their eyes to treat them with dignity.

While powerful, Khan’s conclusions aren’t necessarily correct. Perhaps she undervalues the effectiveness of stigma against the far right. Or perhaps the successes of Daryl Davis, Derek Black’s friends, and Deeyah Khan are anomalies. Even if their approach to anti-racism is effective, perhaps it cannot scale, as very few people possess the inclination, let alone the courage and patience, to engage extremists as they do.

Then again, perhaps theirs is the most effective way to combat bigotry. That possibility, bolstered by evidence they can marshal for specific conversions, makes me lament that there are those who want to wield stigma not only against virulent white supremacists—as I still do, too—but also against fellow anti-racists who take a different approach to the problem.

Fighting bigotry by engaging the most odious bigots is more demanding and less comfortable than doing so by denunciation—so much so that it isn’t something one can justly ask of anyone. It may also be the single most significant way that some anti-racists can bring about positive change in this realm, a comparative advantage that would be better celebrated for its fruits than stigmatized as soft on extremism.

I.

Evolutionary psychology is famous for having lots of stories that make sense but are hard to test. Psychiatry is famous for having mountains of experimental data but no idea what’s going on. Maybe if you added them together, they might make one healthy scientific field? Enter Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach by psychology professor Marco del Giudice. It starts by presenting the theory of “life history strategies”. Then it uses the theory – along with a toolbox of evolutionary and genetic ideas – to shed new light on psychiatric conditions.

Some organisms have lots of low-effort offspring. Others have a few high-effort offspring. This was the basis of the old r/k selection theory. Although the details of that theory have come under challenge, the basic insight remains. A fish will lay 10,000 eggs, then go off and do something else. 9,990 will get eaten by sharks, but that still leaves enough for there to be plenty of fish in the sea. But an elephant will spend two years pregnant, three years nursing, and ten years doing at least some level of parenting, all to produce a single big, well-socialized, and high-prospect-of-life-success calf. These are two different ways of doing reproduction. In keeping with the usual evolutionary practice, del Giudice calls the fish strategy “fast” and the elephant strategy “slow”.

To oversimplify: fast strategies (think “live fast, die young”) are well-adapted for unpredictable dangerous environments. Each organism has a pretty good chance of randomly dying in some unavoidable way before adulthood; the species survives by sheer numbers. Fast organisms should grow up as quickly as possible in order to maximize the chance of reaching reproductive age before they unpredictably die. They should mate with anybody around, to maximize the chance of mating before they unpredictably die. They should ignore their offspring, since they expect most offspring to unpredictably die, and since they have too many to take care of anyway. They should be willing to take risks, since the downside (death without reproducing) is already their default expectation, and the upside (becoming one of the few individuals to give birth to the 10,000 offspring of the next generation) is high.

Slow strategies are well-adapted for safer environments, or predictable complex environments whose intricacies can be mastered with enough time and effort. Slow strategy animals may take a long time to grow up, since they need to achieve mastery before leaving their parents. They might be very picky maters, since they have all the time in the world to choose, will only have a few children each, and need to make sure each of those children has the best genes possible. They should work hard to raise their offspring, since each individual child represents a substantial part of the prospects of their genetic line. They should avoid risks, since the downside (death without reproducing) would be catastrophically worse than default, and the upside (giving birth to a few offspring of the next generation) is what they should expect anyway.

Del Giudice asks: what if life history strategies differ not just across species, but across individuals of the same species? What if this theory applied within the human population?

In line with animal research on pace-of-life syndromes, human research has shown that impulsivity, risk-taking, and sensation seeking, are systematically associated with fast life history traits such as early intercourse, early childbearing in females, unrestricted sociosexuality, larger numbers of sexual partners, reduced long-term mating orientation, and increased mortality. Future discounting and heightened mating competition reduce the benefits of reciprocal long-term relationships; in motivational terms, affiliation and reciprocity are downregulated, whereas status seeking and aggression are upregulated. The resulting behavioral pattern is marked by exploitative and socially antagonistic tendencies; these tendencies may be expressed in different forms in males and females, for example through physical versus relational aggression (Belsky et al 1991; Borowsky et al 2009; Brezina et al 2009; Chen & Vazsonyi 2011; Copping et al 2013a, 2013b, 2014a; Curry et al 2008; Dunkel & Decker 2010 […]

And:

Disgust sensitivity is another dimension of individual differences with links to the fast-slow continuum. To begin, high disgust sensitivity is broadly associated with measures of risk aversion. Moral and sexual disgust correlate with higher agreeableness, conscientiousness, and honesty-humility; and sexual disgust specifically predicts restricted sociosexuality (Al-Shawaf et al 2015; Sparks et al 2018; Tybur et al 2009, 2015; Tybur & de Vries 2013). These findings suggest that the disgust system is implicated in the regulation of life-history-related behaviors. In particular, sexual and moral disgust show the most consistent pattern of correlations with other indicators of slow strategies.

Romantic attachment styles have wide ranging influences on sexuality, mating, and couple stability, but their relations with life history strategies are somewhat complex. Secure attachment styles are consistently associated with slow life history traits (eg Chisholm 1999b; Chisholm et al 2005; Del Giudice 2990a). Avoidance predicts unrestricted sociosexuality, reduced long-term orientation, and low commitment to partners (Brennan & Shaver 1995; Jackson & Kirkpatrick 2007; Templehof & Allen 2008). Given the central role of pair bonding in long-term parental investment, avoidant attachment – which, on average, is higher in men – can be generally interpreted as a mediator of reduced parenting effort. However, some inconsistent findings indicate that avoidance may capture multiple functional mechanisms. High levels of romantic avoidance are found both in people with very early sexual debut and in those who delay intercourse (Gentzler & Kearns, 2004); this suggests that, at least for some people, avoidant attachment may actually reflect a partial downregulation of the mating system, consistent with slower life history strategies.

And:

At a higher level of abstraction, the behavioral correlates of life history strategies can be framed within the five-factor model of personality. Among the Big Five, agreeableness and conscientiousness show the most consistent pattern of associations with slow traits such as restricted sociosexuality, long-term mating orientation, couple stability, secure attachment to parents in infancy and romantic partners in adulthood, reduced sex drive, low impulsivity, and risk aversion across domains (eg Baams et al 2004; Banai & Pavela 2015; Bourage et al 2007; DeYoung 2001; Holtzman & Strube 2013; Jonasen et al 2013 […] Some researchers working in a life history perspective have argued that the general factor of personality should be regarded as the core personality correlate of slow strategies.

Del Giudice suggests that these traits, and predisposition to fast vs. slow life history in general, are caused by a gene * environment interaction. The genetic predisposition is straightforward enough. The environmental aspect is more interesting.

There has been some research on the thrify phenotype hypothesis: if you’re undernourished while in the womb, you’ll be at higher risk of obesity later on. Some mumble “epigenetic” mumble “mechanism” looks around, says “We seem to be in a low-food environment, better design the brain and body to gorge on food when it’s available and store lots of it as fat”, then somehow modulates the relevant genes to make it happen.

Del Giudice seems to imply that a similar epigenetic mechanism “looks around” at the world during the first few years of life to try to figure out if you’re living in the sort of unpredictable dangerous environment that needs a fast strategy, or the sort of safe, masterable environment that needs a slow strategy. Depending on your genetic predisposition and the observable features of the environment, this mechanism “makes a decision” to “lock” you into a faster or slower strategy, setting your personality traits more toward one side or the other.

He further subdivides fast vs. slow life history into four different “life history strategies”.

The antagonistic/exploitative strategy is a fast strategy that focuses on getting ahead by defecting against other people. Because it expects a short and noisy life without the kind of predictable iterated games that build reciprocity, it throws all this away and focuses on getting ahead quick. A person who has been optimized for an antagonistic/exploitative strategy will be charming, good at some superficial social tasks, and have no sense of ethics – ie the perfect con man. Antagonistic/exploitative people will have opportunities to reproduce through outright rape, through promising partners commitment and then not providing it, through status in criminal communities, or through things in the general category of hiring prostitutes when both parties are too drunk to use birth control. These people do not have to be criminals; they can also be the most cutthroat businessmen, lawyers, and politicians. Jumping ahead to the psychiatry connection, the extreme version of this strategy is probably antisocial personality disorder.

The creative/seductive strategy is a fast strategy that focuses on getting ahead through sexual selection, ie optimizing for being really sexy. Because it expects a short and noisy life, it focuses on raw sex appeal (which peaks in the late teens and early twenties) as opposed to things like social status or ability to care for children (which peak later in maturity). A person who has been optimized for a creative/seductive strategy will be attractive, artistic, flirtatious, and popular – eg the typical rock star or starlet. They will also have traits that support these skills, which for complicated reasons include being very emotional. Creative/seductive people will have opportunities to reproduce through making other people infatuated with them; if they are lucky, they can seduce a high-status high-resource person who can help take care of the children. The most extreme version of this strategy is probably borderline personality disorder.

The prosocial/caregiving strategy is a slow strategy that focuses on being a responsible pillar of the community who everybody likes. Because it expects a slow and stable life, it focuses on lasting relationships and cultivating a good reputation that will serve it well in iterated games. A person who has been optimized for a prosocial/caregiving strategy will be dependable, friendly, honest, and conformist – eg the typical model citizen. Prosocial/caregiving people will have opportunities to reproduce by marrying their high school sweetheart, living in a suburban tract house, and having 2.4 children who go to state college. The most extreme version of this strategy is probably being a normie.

The skilled/provisioning strategy is a slow strategy that focuses on being good at specific useful tasks. Because it expects a slow and stable life, it focuses on gaining abilities that may take years to bear any fruit. A person who is optimized for a skilled/provisioning strategy will be intelligent, good at learning, and a little bit obsessive. They may not invest as much in friendliness or seductiveness; once they succeed at their chosen path, they will get social status through being indispensible for the continued functioning of the community, and they will have opportunities to reproduce because of their high status and obvious ability to provide for the children. The most extreme version of this strategy is probably high-functioning autism.

This division into life strategies is a seductive idea. I mean, literally, it’s a seductive idea, ie in terms of memetic evolution, we may worry it is optimized for a seductive/creative strategy for reproduction, rather than the boring autistic “is actually true” strategy. The following is not a figure from Del Giudice’s book, but maybe it should be:

There’s a lot of debate these days about how we should treat research that fits our existing beliefs too closely. I remember Richard Dawkins (or maybe some other atheist) once argued we should be suspicious of religion because it was too normal. When you really look at the world, you get all kinds of crazy stuff like quantum physics and time dilation, but when you just pretend to look at the world, you get things like a loving Father, good vs. evil, and ritual purification – very human things, things a schoolchild could understand. Atheists and believers have since had many debates over whether religion is too ordinary or sufficiently strange, but I haven’t heard either side deny the fundamental insight that science should do something other than flatter our existing categories for making sense of the world.

On the other hand, the first thermometer no doubt recorded that it was colder in winter than in summer. And if someone had criticized physicists, saying “You claim to have a new ‘objective’ way of looking at temperature, but really all you’re doing is justifying your old prejudices that the year is divided into nice clear human-observable parts, and summer is hot and winter is cold” – then that person would be a moron.

This kind of thing keeps coming up, from Klein vs. Harris on the science of race to Jussim on stereotype accuracy. I certainly can’t resolve it here, so I want to just acknowledge the difficulty and move on. If it helps, I don’t think Del Giudice wants to argue these are objectively the only four possible life strategies and that they are perfect Platonic categories, just that these are a good way to think of some of the different ways that organisms (including humans) can pursue their goal of reproduction.

II.

Psychiatry is hard to analyze from an evolutionary perspective. From an evolutionary perspective, it shouldn’t even exist. Most psychiatric disorders are at least somewhat genetic, and most psychiatric disorders decrease reproductive fitness. Biologists have equations that can calculate how likely it is that maladaptive genes can stay in the population for certain amounts of time, and these equations say, all else being equal, that psychiatric disorders should not be possible. Apparently all else isn’t equal, but people have had a lot of trouble figuring out exactly what that means. A good example of this kind of thing is Greg Cochran’s theory that homosexuality must be caused by some kind of infection; he does not see another way it could remain a human behavior without being selected into oblivion.

Del Giudice does the best he can within this framework. He tries to sort psychiatric conditions into a few categories based on possible evolutionary mechanisms.

First, there are conditions that are plausibly good evolutionary strategies, and people just don’t like them. For example, nymphomania is unfortunate from a personal and societal perspective, but one can imagine the evolutionary logic checks out.

Second, there are conditions which might be adaptive in some situations, but don’t work now. For example, antisocial traits might be well-suited to environments with minimal law enforcement and poor reputational mechanisms for keeping people in check; now they will just land you in jail.

Third, there are conditions which are extreme levels of traits which it’s good to have a little of. For example, a little anxiety is certainly useful to prevent people from poking lions with sticks just to see what will happen. Imagine (as a really silly toy model) that two genes A and B determine anxiety, and the optimal anxiety level is 10. Alice has gene A = 8 and gene B = 2. Bob has gene A = 2 and gene B = 8. Both of them are happy well-adjusted individuals who engage in the locally optimal level of lion-poking. But if they reproduce, their child may inherit gene A = 8 and gene B = 8 for a total of 16, much more anxious than is optimal. This child might get diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, but it’s just a natural consequence of having genes for various levels of anxiety floating around in the population.

Fourth, there are conditions which are the failure modes of traits which it’s good to have a little of. For example, psychiatrists have long categorized certain common traits into “schizotypy”, a cluster of characteristics more common in the relatives of schizophrenics and in people at risk of developing schizophrenia themselves. These traits are not psychotic in and of themselves and do not decrease fitness, nor is schizophrenia necessarily just the far end of this distribution. But schizotypal traits are one necessary ingredient of getting schizophrenia; schizophrenia is some kind of failure mode only possible with enough schizotypy. If schizotypal traits do some other good thing, they can stick around in the population, and this will look a lot like “schizophrenia is genetic”.

How can we determine which of these categories any given psychiatric disorder falls into?

One way is through what is called taxometrics – the study of to what degree mental disorders are just the far end of a normal distribution of traits. Some disorders are clearly this way; for example, if you quantify and graph everybody’s anxiety levels, they will form a bell curve, and the people diagnosed with anxiety disorders will just be the ones on the far right tail. Are any disorders not this way? This is a hard question, though schizophrenia is a promising candidate.

Another way is through measuring the correlation of disorders with mutational load. Some people end up with more mutations (and so a generically less functional genome) than others. The most common cause of this is being the child of an older father, since that gives mutations more time to accumulate in sperm cells. Other people seem to have higher mutational load for other, unclear reasons, which can be measured through facial asymmetry and the presence of minor physical abnormalities (like weirdly-shaped ears). If a particular psychiatric disorder is more common in people with increased mutational load, that suggests it isn’t just a functional adaptation but some kind of failure mode of something or other. Schizophrenia and low-functioning autism are both linked to higher mutational load.

Another way is by trying to figure out what aspect of evolutionary strategy matches the occurrence of the disorder. Developmental psychologists talk about various life stages, each of which brings new challenges. For example, adrenache (age 6-8) marks “the transition from early to middle childhood”, when “behavioral plasticity and heightened social learning go hand in hand with the expression of new genetic influences on psychological traits such as agression, prosocial behavior, and cognitive skills” and children receive social feedback “about their attractiveness and competitive ability”. More obviously, puberty marks the expression of still other genetic influences and the time at which young people start seriously thinking about sex. So if various evolutionary adaptations to deal with mating suddenly become active around puberty, and some mental disorder always starts at puberty, that provides some evidence that the mental disorder might be related to an evolutionary adaptation for dealing with mating. Or, since a staple of evo psych is that men and women pursue different reproductive strategies, if some psychiatric disease is twice as common in women (eg depression) or five times as common in men (eg autism), then that suggests it’s correlated with some strategy or trait that one sex uses more than the other.

This is where Del Giudice ties in the life history framework. If some psychiatric disease is more common in people who otherwise seem to be pursuing some life strategy, then maybe it’s related to that strategy. Either it’s another name for that strategy, or it’s another name for an extreme version of that strategy, or it’s a failure mode of that strategy, or it’s associated with some trait or adaptation which that strategy uses more than others do. By determining the association of disorders with certain life strategies, we can figure out what adaptive trait they’re piggybacking on, and from there we can reverse engineer them and try to figure out what went wrong.

This is a much more well-thought-out and orderly way of thinking about psychiatric disease than anything I’ve ever seen anyone else try. How does it work?

Unclear. Psychiatric disorders really resist being put into this framework. For example, some psychiatric disorders have a u-shaped curve regarding childhood quality – they are more common both in people with unusually deprived childhoods and people with unusually good childhoods. Many anorexics are remarkably high-functioning, so much so that even the average clinical psychiatrist takes note, but others are kind of a mess. Autism is classically associated with very low IQ and with bodily asymmetries that indicate high mutational load, but a lot of autistics have higher-than-normal IQ and minimal bodily asymmetry. Schizophrenia often starts in a very specific window between ages 18 and 25, which sounds promising for a developmental link, but a few cases will start at age 5, or age 50, or pretty much whenever. Everything is like this. What is a rational, order-loving evolutionary psychologist supposed to do?

Del Giudice bites the bullet and says that most of our diagnostic categories conflate different conditions. The unusually high-functioning anorexics have a different disease than the unusually low-functioning ones. Low IQ autism with bodily asymmetries has a different evolutionary explanation than high IQ autism without. In some cases, he is able to marshal a lot of evidence for distinct clinical entities. For example, most cases of OCD start in adulthood, but one-third begin in early childhood instead. These early OCD cases are much more likely to be male, more likely to have high conscientiousness, more likely to co-occur with autistic traits, and have a different set of obsessions focusing on symmetry, order, and religion (my own OCD started in very early childhood and I feel called out by this description). Del Giudice says these are two different conditions, one of which is associated with pathogen defense and one of which is associated with a slow life strategy.

Deep down, psychiatrists know that we have not really subdivided the space of mental disorders very well. Every year a new study comes out purporting to have discovered the three types of depression, or the four types of depression, or the five types of depression, or some other number of types of depression that some scientist thinks she has discovered. Often these are given explanatory power, like “number three is the one that doesn’t respond to SSRIs”, or “1 and 2 are biological; 3, 4, and 5 are caused by life events”. All of these seem equally plausible, so given that they all say different things I tend to ignore all of them. So when del Giudice puts depression under his spotlight and finds it subdivides into many different subdisorders, this is entirely fair. Maybe we should be concerned if he didn’t find that.

But part of me is still concerned. If evo psych correctly predicted the characteristics of the psychiatric disorders we observe, then we would count that as theoretical confirmation. Instead, it only works after you replace the psychiatric disorders we observe with another, more subtle set right on the threshold of observation. The more you’re allowed to diverge from our usual understanding, the more chance you have to fudge your results; the more different disorders you can divide things into, the more options you have for overfitting. Del Giudice’s new schema may well be accurate; it just makes it hard to check his accuracy.

On the other hand, reality has a surprising amount of detail. Every previous attempt to make sense of psychopathology has failed. But psychopathology has to make sense. So it must make sense in some complicated way. If you see what looks like a totally random squiggle on a piece of paper, then probably the equation that describes it really is going to have a lot of variables, and you shouldn’t criticize a many-variable equation as “overfitting”. There is a part of me that thinks this book is a beautiful example of what solving a complicated field would look like. You take all the complications, and you explain by layering of a bunch of different simple and reasonable things on top of one another. The psychiatry parts of Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach do this. I don’t know if it’s all just epicycles, but it’s a heck of a good try.

I would encourage anyone with an interest in mental health and a tolerance for dense journal-style writing to read the psychiatry parts of this book. Whether or not the hypotheses are right, in the process of defending them it calls in such a wide array of evidence, from so many weird studies that nobody else would have any reason to think about, that it serves as a fantastic survey of the field from an unusual perspective. If you’ve ever wanted to know how many depressed people are reproducing (surprisingly many! about 90 – 100% as many as non-depressed people!) or what the IQ of ADHD people is (0.6 standard deviations below average; the people most of you see are probably from a high-functioning subtype) or how schizophrenia varies with latitude (triples as you move from the equator to the poles, but after adjusting for this darker-skinned people seem to have more, suggesting a possible connection with Vitamin D), this is the book for you.

III.

I want to discuss some political and social implications of this work. These are my speculations only; del Giudice is not to blame.

We believe that an abusive or deprived childhood can negatively affect people’s life chances. So far, we’ve cached this out entirely in terms of brain damage. Children’s developing brains “can’t deal with the trauma” and so become “broken” in ways that make them a less functional adult. Life history theory offers a different explanation. Nothing is “broken”. Deprived children have just looked around, seen what the world is like, and rewired themselves accordingly on some deep epigenetic level.

I was reading this at the same time as the studies on preschool, and I couldn’t help noticing how well they fit together. The preschool studies were surprising because we expected them to improve children’s intelligence. Instead, they improved everything else. Why? This would make sense if the safe environment of preschool wasn’t “fixing” their “broken” brains, but pushing them to follow a slower life strategy. Stay in school. Don’t commit crimes. Don’t have kids while you’re still a teenager. This is exactly what we expect a push towards slow life strategies to do.

Life strategies even predict the “fade-out/fade-in” nature of the effects; the theory specifies that although aspects of life strategy may be set early on, they only “activate” at the appropriate developmental period. From page 93: “The social feedback that children receive in this phase [middle childhood]…may feed into the regulation of puberty timing and shape behavioral strategies in adolescence.”

Society has done a lot to try to help disadvantaged children. A lot of research has been gloomy about the downstream effects; none of it raised anybody’s IQ, there are still lots of poor people around, income inequality continues to increase. But maybe we’re just looking in the wrong place.

On a related note: a lot of intelligent, responsible, basically decent young men complain of romantic failure. Although the media has tried hard to make this look like some kind of horrifying desire to rape everybody because they believe are entitled to whatever and whoever they want, the basic complaint is more prosaic: “I try to be a nice guy who contributes to society and respects others; how come I’m a miserable 25-year-old virgin, whereas every bully and jerk and frat bro I know is able to get a semi-infinite supply of sex partners whom they seduce, abuse, and dump?” This complaint isn’t imaginary; studies have shown that criminals are more likely to have lost their virginity earlier, that boys with more aggressive and dishonest behaviors have earlier age of first sexual intercourse, and that women find men with dark triad traits more attractive. I used to work in a psychiatric hospital that served primarily adolescents with a history of violence or legal issues; most of them had had multiple sexual encounters by age fifteen; only half of MIT students in their late teens and early 20s have had sex at all.

Del Giudice’s work offers a framework by which to understand these statistics. Most MIT students are probably pursuing slow life strategies; most violent adolescents in psych hospitals are probably pursuing fast ones. Fast strategies activate a suite of traits designed for having sex earlier; slow life strategies activate a suite of traits designed for preventing early sex. There’s a certain logical leap here where you have to explain how, if an individual is trying very hard to have teenage sex, his mumble epigenetic mumble mechanism can somehow prevent this. But millions of very vocal people’s lived experiences argue that it can. The good news for these people is that they are adapted for a life strategy which in the past has consistently resulted in reproduction at some point. Maybe when they graduate with a prestigious MIT degree, they will get enough money and status to attract a high-quality slow-strategy mate, who can bear high-quality slow-strategy kids who produce many surviving grandchildren. I don’t know. This hasn’t happened to me yet. Maybe I should have gone to MIT.

Finally, the people who like to say that various things “serve as a justification for oppression” are going to have a field day with this one. Although del Giudice is too scientific to assign any moral weight to his life history strategies, it’s not that hard to import it.

(source)

Life strategies run the risk of reifying some of our negative judgments. If criminals are pursuing a hard-coded antagonistic-exploitative strategy, that doesn’t look good for rehabilitation. Likewise, if some people are pursuing creative-seductive strategies, that provides new force to the warning to avoid promiscuous floozies and stick to your own social class. In the extreme version of this, you could imagine a populism that claims to be fighting for the decent middle-class slow-strategy segment of the population against an antagonistic/exploitative underclass. The creative/seductive people are on thin ice – maybe they should start producing art that looks like something.

(it doesn’t help that this theory is distantly related to an earlier theory proposed by Canadian psychologist John Rushton, who added that black people are racially predisposed to fast strategies and Asians to slow strategies, with white people somewhere in the middle. Del Giudice mentions Rushton just enough that nobody can accuse him of deliberately covering up his existence, then hastily moves on.)

But aside from the psychological compellingness, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. We already know that antagonistic and exploitative people exist in the world. All that life history theory does is exactly what progressives want to do: provide an explanation that links these qualities to childhood deprivation, or to dangerous environments where they may be the only rational choice. Sure, you would have to handwave away the genetic aspect, but you’re going to have be handwaving away some genetics to make this kind of thing work no matter what, and life history theory makes this easier rather than harder. It also provides some testable hypotheses about what aspects of childhood deprivation we might want to target, and what kind of effects we might expect such interventions to have.

Apart from all this, I find life history strategy theory sort of reassuring. Until now, atheists have been denied the comfort of knowing God has a plan for them. Sure, they could know that evolution had a plan for them, but that plan was just “watch dispassionately to see whether they live or die, then adjust gene frequencies in the next generation accordingly”. In life history strategy theory, evolution – or at least your mumble epigenetic mumble mechanism – actually has a plan for you. Now we can be evangelical atheists who have a personal relationship with evolution. It’s pretty neat.

And I come at this from the perspective of someone who has failed at many things despite trying very hard, and also succeeded at others without even trying. This has been a pretty formative experience for me, and it’s seductive to be able to think of all of it as part of a plan. Literally seductive, in the sense of memetic evolution. Like that Hogwarts chart.

Read this book at your own risk; its theories will start creeping into everything you think.

[This post was up a few weeks ago before getting taken down for complicated reasons. They have been sorted out and I’m trying again.]

Is scientific progress slowing down? I recently got a chance to attend a conference on this topic, centered around a paper by Bloom, Jones, Reenen & Webb (2018).

BJRW identify areas where technological progress is easy to measure – for example, the number of transistors on a chip. They measure the rate of progress over the past century or so, and the number of researchers in the field over the same period. For example, here’s the transistor data:

This is the standard presentation of Moore’s Law – the number of transistors you can fit on a chip doubles about every two years (eg grows by 35% per year). This is usually presented as an amazing example of modern science getting things right, and no wonder – it means you can go from a few thousand transistors per chip in 1971 to many million today, with the corresponding increase in computing power.

But BJRW have a pessimistic take. There are eighteen times more people involved in transistor-related research today than in 1971. So if in 1971 it took 1000 scientists to increase transistor density 35% per year, today it takes 18,000 scientists to do the same task. So apparently the average transistor scientist is eighteen times less productive today than fifty years ago. That should be surprising and scary.

But isn’t it unfair to compare percent increase in transistors with absolute increase in transistor scientists? That is, a graph comparing absolute number of transistors per chip vs. absolute number of transistor scientists would show two similar exponential trends. Or a graph comparing percent change in transistors per year vs. percent change in number of transistor scientists per year would show two similar linear trends. Either way, there would be no problem and productivity would appear constant since 1971. Isn’t that a better way to do things?

A lot of people asked paper author Michael Webb this at the conference, and his answer was no. He thinks that intuitively, each “discovery” should decrease transistor size by a certain amount. For example, if you discover a new material that allows transistors to be 5% smaller along one dimension, then you can fit 5% more transistors on your chip whether there were a hundred there before or a million. Since the relevant factor is discoveries per researcher, and each discovery is represented as a percent change in transistor size, it makes sense to compare percent change in transistor size with absolute number of researchers.

Anyway, most other measurable fields show the same pattern of constant progress in the face of exponentially increasing number of researchers. Here’s BJRW’s data on crop yield:

The solid and dashed lines are two different measures of crop-related research. Even though the crop-related research increases by a factor of 6-24x (depending on how it’s measured), crop yields grow at a relatively constant 1% rate for soybeans, and apparently declining 3%ish percent rate for corn.

BJRW go on to prove the same is true for whatever other scientific fields they care to measure. Measuring scientific progress is inherently difficult, but their finding of constant or log-constant progress in most areas accords with Nintil’s overview of the same topic, which gives us graphs like

…and dozens more like it. And even when we use data that are easy to measure and hard to fake, like number of chemical elements discovered, we get the same linearity:

Meanwhile, the increase in researchers is obvious. Not only is the population increasing (by a factor of about 2.5x in the US since 1930), but the percent of people with college degrees has quintupled over the same period. The exact numbers differ from field to field, but orders of magnitude increases are the norm. For example, the number of people publishing astronomy papers seems to have dectupled over the past fifty years or so.

BJRW put all of this together into total number of researchers vs. total factor productivity of the economy, and find…

…about the same as with transistors, soybeans, and everything else. So if you take their methodology seriously, over the past ninety years, each researcher has become about 25x less productive in making discoveries that translate into economic growth.

Participants at the conference had some explanations for this, of which the ones I remember best are:

1. Only the best researchers in a field actually make progress, and the best researchers are already in a field, and probably couldn’t be kept out of the field with barbed wire and attack dogs. If you expand a field, you will get a bunch of merely competent careerists who treat it as a 9-to-5 job. A field of 5 truly inspired geniuses and 5 competent careerists will make X progress. A field of 5 truly inspired geniuses and 500,000 competent careerists will make the same X progress. Adding further competent careerists is useless for doing anything except making graphs look more exponential, and we should stop doing it. See also Price’s Law Of Scientific Contributions.

2. Certain features of the modern academic system, like underpaid PhDs, interminably long postdocs, endless grant-writing drudgery, and clueless funders have lowered productivity. The 1930s academic system was indeed 25x more effective at getting researchers to actually do good research.

3. All the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. For example, element 117 was discovered by an international collaboration who got an unstable isotope of berkelium from the single accelerator in Tennessee capable of synthesizing it, shipped it to a nuclear reactor in Russia where it was attached to a titanium film, brought it to a particle accelerator in a different Russian city where it was bombarded with a custom-made exotic isotope of calcium, sent the resulting data to a global team of theorists, and eventually found a signature indicating that element 117 had existed for a few milliseconds. Meanwhile, the first modern element discovery, that of phosphorous in the 1670s, came from a guy looking at his own piss. We should not be surprised that discovering element 117 needed more people than discovering phosphorous.

Needless to say, my sympathies lean towards explanation number 3. But I worry even this isn’t dismissive enough. My real objection is that constant progress in science in response to exponential increases in inputs ought to be our null hypothesis, and that it’s almost inconceivable that it could ever be otherwise.

Consider a case in which we extend these graphs back to the beginning of a field. For example, psychology started with Wilhelm Wundt and a few of his friends playing around with stimulus perception. Let’s say there were ten of them working for one generation, and they discovered ten revolutionary insights worthy of their own page in Intro Psychology textbooks. Okay. But now there are about a hundred thousand experimental psychologists. Should we expect them to discover a hundred thousand revolutionary insights per generation?

Or: the economic growth rate in 1930 was 2% or so. If it scaled with number of researchers, it ought to be about 50% per year today with our 25x increase in researcher number. That kind of growth would mean that the average person who made $30,000 a year in 2000 should make $50 million a year in 2018.

Or: in 1930, life expectancy at 65 was increasing by about two years per decade. But if that scaled with number of biomedicine researchers, that should have increased to ten years per decade by about 1955, which would mean everyone would have become immortal starting sometime during the Baby Boom, and we would currently be ruled by a deathless God-Emperor Eisenhower.

Or: the ancient Greek world had about 1% the population of the current Western world, so if the average Greek was only 10% as likely to be a scientist as the average modern, there were only 1/1000th as many Greek scientists as modern ones. But the Greeks made such great discoveries as the size of the Earth, the distance of the Earth to the sun, the prediction of eclipses, the heliocentric theory, Euclid’s geometry, the nervous system, the cardiovascular system, etc, and brought technology up from the Bronze Age to the Antikythera mechanism. Even adjusting for the long time scale to which “ancient Greece” refers, are we sure that we’re producing 1000x as many great discoveries as they are? If we extended BJRW’s graph all the way back to Ancient Greece, adjusting for the change in researchers as civilizations rise and fall, wouldn’t it keep the same shape as does for this century? Isn’t the real question not “Why isn’t Dwight Eisenhower immortal god-emperor of Earth?” but “Why isn’t Marcus Aurelius immortal god-emperor of Earth?”

Or: what about human excellence in other fields? Shakespearean England had 1% of the population of the modern Anglosphere, and presumably even fewer than 1% of the artists. Yet it gave us Shakespeare. Are there a hundred Shakespeare-equivalents around today? This is a harder problem than it seems – Shakespeare has become so venerable with historical hindsight that maybe nobody would acknowledge a Shakespeare-level master today even if they existed – but still, a hundred Shakespeares? If we look at some measure of great works of art per era, we find past eras giving us far more than we would predict from their population relative to our own. This is very hard to judge, and I would hate to be the guy who has to decide whether Harry Potter is better or worse than the Aeneid. But still? A hundred Shakespeares?

Or: what about sports? Here’s marathon records for the past hundred years or so:

In 1900, there were only two local marathons (eg the Boston Marathon) in the world. Today there are over 800. Also, the world population has increased by a factor of five (more than that in the East African countries that give us literally 100% of top male marathoners). Despite that, progress in marathon records has been steady or declining. Most other Olympics sports show the same pattern.

All of these lines of evidence lead me to the same conclusion: constant growth rates in response to exponentially increasing inputs is the null hypothesis. If it wasn’t, we should be expecting 50% year-on-year GDP growth, easily-discovered-immortality, and the like. Nobody expected that before reading BJRW, so we shouldn’t be surprised when BJRW provide a data-driven model showing it isn’t happening. I realize this in itself isn’t an explanation; it doesn’t tell us why researchers can’t maintain a constant level of output as measured in discoveries. It sounds a little like “God wouldn’t design the universe that way”, which is a kind of suspicious line of argument, especially for atheists. But it at least shifts us from a lens where we view the problem as “What three tweaks should we make to the graduate education system to fix this problem right now?” to one where we view it as “Why isn’t Marcus Aurelius immortal?”

And through such a lens, only the “low-hanging fruits” explanation makes sense. Explanation 1 – that progress depends only on a few geniuses – isn’t enough. After all, the Greece-today difference is partly based on population growth, and population growth should have produced proportionately more geniuses. Explanation 2 – that PhD programs have gotten worse – isn’t enough. There would have to be a worldwide monotonic decline in every field (including sports and art) from Athens to the present day. Only Explanation 3 holds water.

I brought this up at the conference, and somebody reasonably objected – doesn’t that mean science will stagnate soon? After all, we can’t keep feeding it an exponentially increasing number of researchers forever. If nothing else stops us, then at some point, 100% (or the highest plausible amount) of the human population will be researchers, we can only increase as fast as population growth, and then the scientific enterprise collapses.

I answered that the Gods Of Straight Lines are more powerful than the Gods Of The Copybook Headings, so if you try to use common sense on this problem you will fail.

Imagine being a futurist in 1970 presented with Moore’s Law. You scoff: “If this were to continue only 20 more years, it would mean a million transistors on a single chip! You would be able to fit an entire supercomputer in a shoebox!” But common sense was wrong and the trendline was right.

“If this were to continue only 40 more years, it would mean ten billion transistors per chip! You would need more transistors on a single chip than there are humans in the world! You could have computers more powerful than any today, that are too small to even see with the naked eye! You would have transistors with like a double-digit number of atoms!” But common sense was wrong and the trendline was right.

Or imagine being a futurist in ancient Greece presented with world GDP doubling time. Take the trend seriously, and in two thousand years, the future would be fifty thousand times richer. Every man would live better than the Shah of Persia! There would have to be so many people in the world you would need to tile entire countries with cityscape, or build structures higher than the hills just to house all of them. Just to sustain itself, the world would need transportation networks orders of magnitude faster than the fastest horse. But common sense was wrong and the trendline was right.

I’m not saying that no trendline has ever changed. Moore’s Law seems to be legitimately slowing down these days. The Dark Ages shifted every macrohistorical indicator for the worse, and the Industrial Revolution shifted every macrohistorical indicator for the better. Any of these sorts of things could happen again, easily. I’m just saying that “Oh, that exponential trend can’t possibly continue” has a really bad track record. I do not understand the Gods Of Straight Lines, and honestly they creep me out. But I would not want to bet against them.

Grace et al’s survey of AI researchers show they predict that AIs will start being able to do science in about thirty years, and will exceed the productivity of human researchers in every field shortly afterwards. Suddenly “there aren’t enough humans in the entire world to do the amount of research necessary to continue this trend line” stops sounding so compelling.

At the end of the conference, the moderator asked how many people thought that it was possible for a concerted effort by ourselves and our institutions to “fix” the “problem” indicated by BJRW’s trends. Almost the entire room raised their hands. Everyone there was smarter and more prestigious than I was (also richer, and in many cases way more attractive), but with all due respect I worry they are insane. This is kind of how I imagine their worldview looking:

I realize I’m being fatalistic here. Doesn’t my position imply that the scientists at Intel should give up and let the Gods Of Straight Lines do the work? Or at least that the head of the National Academy of Sciences should do something like that? That Francis Bacon was wasting his time by inventing the scientific method, and Fred Terman was wasting his time by organizing Silicon Valley? Or perhaps that the Gods Of Straight Lines were acting through Bacon and Terman, and they had no choice in their actions? How do we know that the Gods aren’t acting through our conference? Or that our studying these things isn’t the only thing that keeps the straight lines going?

I don’t know. I can think of some interesting models – one made up of a thousand random coin flips a year has some nice qualities – but I don’t know.

I do know you should be careful what you wish for. If you “solved” this “problem” in classical Athens, Attila the Hun would have had nukes. Remember Yudkowsky’s Law of Mad Science: “Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point.” Do you really want to make that number ten points? A hundred? I am kind of okay with the function mapping number of researchers to output that we have right now, thank you very much.

The conference was organized by Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen; they have written up some of their thoughts here.

For more than a decade, the criminal-defense attorney Scott H. Greenfield has been writing about American law and culture at Simple Justice. Among the site’s readers are lawyers, law professors, judges, civil libertarians, and advocates of criminal-justice reform. What keeps me coming back is his zealous advocacy for a consistent set of principles no matter how unpopular their application might be in a given instance.

Whether I agree or strongly disagree with where he comes down on a given matter, I can count on his steadfast commitment to an underlying ethos. And in many instances that helps me to see what is at stake more clearly. Last month, I asked whether he would be willing to do an interview to discuss his growing concern with turns that American culture has taken. Here is a lightly condensed and edited version of our correspondence.

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Conor Friedersdorf: What would be the best way to characterize your career?

Scott Greenfield: When asked, as a matter of personal preference, I use only “criminal-defense lawyer.” I get that people love titles and ascribed credibility, but when someone takes some fluff from my background to build me into someone of sufficient importance to be worthy of other people’s time, I cringe. Is my 35 years of criminal defense not worthy? It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done, and the rest is collateral noise.

Friedersdorf: It’s more than a job for you. It’s an ethos. You comment on matters beyond criminal justice. And your analysis and conclusions are influenced by values—like the importance of presuming innocence, due process, and adversarial proceedings—even when they aren’t strictly required by law. How have your 35 years as a criminal-defense lawyer informed the values and insights you bring to civic commentary?

Greenfield: Stick around long enough, and you may come to appreciate the value of principles in how you view law and life. They provide the defaults for how I approach issues and challenges, even when I might feel as if a particular outcome is more to my liking. Having seen the pendulum swing back and forth, and then side to side (because things rarely fit together simply), I appreciate that the outcomes I prefer aren’t necessarily the best outcomes, or the right outcomes, from a broader perspective.

The problem I have, now that I’m not nearly as smart as I was when I was younger, is that the rationalizations that allowed me to reach my goals often served to cause greater, unintended harm, because they weren’t sound. It’s a painful lesson to realize that you have to look beyond the one problem you’re trying to solve and see how the story plays out.

But without doing so, we’re screwed.

So, I’ve ended up being that guy who reminds others that their glorious and novel approach has issues and defies our foundational principles.

People tend not to appreciate being told their baby is ugly. But sometimes the baby is ugly, and if no one is willing to say so, then bad concepts are embraced and we end up with havoc. I try to adhere to principle, often when I would prefer to be as indulgent as others––and knowing that nobody is going to give me a prize for being that mean old guy who harshes dreams of glory—because principles prevent us from wreaking havoc.

Friedersdorf: What’s an example of a principle that you find yourself advocating for even as you perceive that American society is undervaluing it?

Greenfield: Let’s start with a big one, due process. Advocates for accusers in Title IX campus sexual-assault adjudications have vilified due process as allowing rapists to “get away with it.” This has been amplified as a result of the “Dear Colleague” letter by the Obama administration’s Department of Education Office of Civil Rights bureaucrats and Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s rescission of that letter. It is further complicated by the #MeToo movement.

The laundry list of basic procedural due-process rights—notice, opportunity to defend, cross-examination—have been ripped to shreds as unfair, traumatic weapons to victimize accusers. Of course, these are the same processes that are desperately at risk in non-sex-related criminal cases, where a similar cohort demands they be provided and honored. Why are they good for some accusers and horrible for others?

If cross-examination is an evil because it might “re-traumatize” the victim, is that not the same when the victim is in court for a robbery? If we’re to “believe the victim,” to functionally undermine the presumption of innocence and shift the onus onto the accused to prove they’re not guilty, how do we explain not believing the victim in any other criminal proceeding? And before anyone replies, “But we do,” no, criminal-defense lawyers don’t. No accusation is above challenge.

Either the concept of due process is an inherent virtue in our system or it isn’t. It doesn’t morph from wonderful to horrible based upon the nature of the accusation, or which side is preferred at any moment. As the concept is vilified, procedural fairness is increasingly seen as some technical trick to favor the accused rather than giving the accused a fair opportunity to defend himself. And lest there be any doubt, not only is it an inherent virtue in all proceedings, but without it we’re left with an inquisition. Then again, when it comes to proceedings like Title IX sex policing, that’s pretty much what’s desired by the accusers, even though it’s in fundamental conflict with core premises of our jurisprudence.

Friedersdorf: The most common retort seeks to distinguish criminal proceedings, where the accused faces incarceration, from ostensibly lower-stakes situations, like campus disciplinary hearings where expulsion from one institution is the maximum penalty; workplace complaints, where the stakes end at termination; and name-and-shame efforts, like that story about a bad date with Aziz Ansari, where social stigma and public embarrassment are the main consequences. What’s your counterargument for applying due-process norms beyond criminal proceedings? And how far does the logic extend? Whenever there is official punishment meted out by any institution? What about public allegations of sexual misconduct with no institution or formal penalty attached?

Greenfield: First, let’s separate “official punishment” from social stigmatization. To say Title IX is limited to expulsion, in itself, trivializes the impact. Expulsion from college is a huge punishment to a kid. But that’s not the extent of it by a long shot. He loses years of studying, preparing to get into a decent college. He loses tuition paid for the years preceding expulsion, or carries the debt load into an empty future, plus the opportunity cost of going to three and a half years of college and leaving without a degree.

And he’s tainted for life, as he’s constrained to explain his expulsion, like any sex offender. Except his “guilt” and punishment were derived without the basic safeguards for a valid verdict. This is by no means trivial.

In certain ways, social condemnation has become something even worse, the mere accusation being all that’s required for a mob of unduly passionate people to crush a career. There’s no opportunity to defend and no means to challenge an accusation. While the “punishment” isn’t levied by government, and is therefore beyond any required involvement of such niceties as due process, the net result can be as destructive given the current tide of blind acceptance and capitulation.

While due process is properly thought of as technical legal rules, it didn’t come out of nowhere; it came from the values society decided were worthy and necessary to craft a system of decision making before anyone would be condemned and punished. So although due process doesn’t technically apply, the values underlying due process are still as worthy and necessary as ever. It’s not because the rules require it, but because we, as a society, should value such things as fundamental fairness, opportunity to defend, the presumption of innocence, a neutral fact finder, and the burden of proof, at whatever level it should be, on the accuser.

Friedersdorf: Do you think that the efforts to weaken due-process norms, the presumption of innocence, and the “beyond a reasonable doubt” burden of proof in non-criminal proceedings will ultimately influence the criminal courts too, even given the bulwark that the Constitution provides? For example, will prosecutors or judges or jurors approach their roles differently? Do you have any specific concerns in this regard?

Greenfield: It’s already happening in ways that are somewhat subtle at this point. Prosecutors are calling experts to testify at trial about how an alleged rape survivor’s failure to recall details is proof of trauma and an indicator of truthfulness. Police are being trained in “trauma informed” investigative methods, where they are instructed to ignore inconsistencies, or even flagrant impossibilities, in a complainant’s story so as to believe and avoid re-traumatizing the “victim,” while also ignoring investigative paths that might demonstrate that no crime was committed or that it was committed by someone other than the defendant.

Judges, as in the Bill Cosby trial, are permitting prosecutors to introduce multiple prior-bad-act witnesses, who are offered to prejudice a jury by showing a propensity to commit the crime with little substantive regard for materiality or relevance. The basis is largely informed by narratives around sex crimes rather than anything sufficiently unique about the evidence to overcome its improper, prejudicial effect.

Laws are being rewritten, redefined, based upon vague but trendy notions of harms, such as Governor Andrew Cuomo’s mandate that “affirmative consent” be applied to colleges within the state university system.

Much as that phrase affirmative consent has become ubiquitous, it remains insufficiently defined. What conduct sufficiently conveys enthusiasm to overcome an allegation of rape? How often during a sex act must consent be reaffirmed? What if it’s conveyed, but with secret reluctance? It is based not on the conduct of the accused, but the accuser’s mental state, in contrast with the notice the Constitution ordinarily requires of laws, so that a person can know conduct is prohibited rather than the prohibition hinging on the post-hoc mental state of its “victim.”

Each of these, and more, are happening.

People aren’t necessarily connecting the concrete changes with their due-process component, but they undermine, step by step, the fragile system of minimal fairness that we aspire to maintain in criminal proceedings.

The irony is that people are totally capable of seeing how the system fails to provide sufficient procedural fairness when it comes to certain crimes, most notably murder when someone is subsequently exonerated on DNA evidence after they’ve been identified with “100 percent certainty.” People also see it with false confessions, as with the Central Park Five. And yet, they can’t see it at all when it comes to other crimes with more robust rationalizations for significant failures of proof.

Friedersdorf: Let’s turn from the innocent to the guilty. I’ve wondered what effect #MeToo will have on them. Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein are no longer able to marshal their wealth to transgress with impunity against women after woman. To me, that’s progress, and I celebrate the careful journalism that documented their misdeeds and prompted criminal probes. What concerns me is more complicated.

Back in 2015, my then-colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates published a cover story on mass incarceration. “Our carceral state banishes American citizens to a gray wasteland far beyond the promises and protections the government grants its other citizens,” he wrote, and that banishment “continues long after one’s actual time behind bars has ended, making housing and employment hard to secure.” He went on to argue that freeing only nonviolent offenders was an inadequate solution. “Arguing for leniency toward violent criminals is not easy politically,” he wrote. “The initial impediment to undoing mass incarceration in America is not that we don’t have the answers for how to treat violent crime—it’s that our politics seem allergic to the very question.”

At the time, friends of mine who work on criminal-justice reform were full of hope. They felt there was a chance to reach Americans with the argument that warehousing so many humans for so long wasn’t merely unjust, it was self-defeating—that punishment was necessary, but that redemption was too, and that offering it could turn people who are burdens on the system into men and women who could rejoin society, tap their human potential, and contribute something to their fellow humans.

Today, a “law and order” authoritarian is in the White House. Congressional Democrats are good on some issues and undermining due-process rights on others. #MeToo hasn't touched prisoners in “the gray wasteland,” though they are one of the classes most victimized by sexual abuse. And the college-educated left is a mess of contradictions. A coalition that only recently counted redemption for violent felons as a top priority, and favored laws forbidding employers from asking about bygone crimes on job applications, now advocates for zero-tolerance policies to punish behavior from years in the past and—for example—isn’t necessarily willing to grant that Louis C.K. should ever work again.

Of course, a felon who served his time and a millionaire comedian who never went to jail are different in many ways, and I myself both favor reforms to mass incarceration and believe Louis C.K. behaved in a manner that warrants some social opprobrium. But it seems to me that cultural norms are indivisible—that we’re either going to have a society that embraces law and order, zero tolerance, harsh punishments, and the attitude that transgressors are deplorable and irredeemable, or one oriented toward nuance, moderation, and the attitude that while transgressors ought to face punishment, we all lose if they’re forever banished, and we all gain if there’s a path toward redemption that allows us to benefit from whatever human potential they can tap.

Among #MeToo supporters, I perceive a faction that feels justified in adopting the former, more authoritarian attitudes due to the perception that they’re doing so on behalf of a long-victimized class, and against an oppressor class of privileged white males. Without adjudicating the merits of their two-tiered value system, I regard it as self-evident fantasy to imagine that a society can adopt harsh norms that only affect those at the top. And I worry a lot about the folks at the bottom. You’ve more experience with the incarcerated than me. Am I wrong?

Greenfield: Before turning to your very important question, I’m constrained to challenge your preface. Bill Cosby’s first trial ended in a hung jury. He was convicted only after an extremely problematic ruling allowing five accusers of uncharged crimes to testify before the jury. While he stands convicted, there remains an extremely troubling issue on appeal, so let’s not take his guilt for granted.

And then there’s the poster boy for #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, who has already had the charges based on one accuser dismissed because it was revealed that her allegations were false in that she knowingly engaged in sex to get a role, fully aware of the deal she made with the devil. Other charges have other issues. As he’s yet to be convicted of anything, let’s not assume the verdict by the Court of Ronan Farrow is inviolate.

But moving to your question, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s epiphany was nothing new to criminal-defense lawyers, who’ve spent decades fighting the ratcheting up of punishment and condemnation for those convicted. And hard as we tried to tell people, to explain, it was all too easy for politicians to sell tough-on-crime and fear to their audience. With each new election came a new fear to be exploited, more punishment to be imposed, and people just loved their elected officials for keeping them safe.

Having lived through the crack epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s, the “superpredator” fears, the Satanic Panic, even Enron, I have the misfortune of remembering how each of these things developed, the drama exploited to stoke the public’s anger and embrace the death of redemption. We understood the dilemma it was creating, that there was nowhere for ex-cons to go, and screamed about it. Not only did no one care, but they came up with more ways to destroy lives, like baseless sex-offender registration laws and their impossible demands and restrictions.

While there is a strain, as you properly perceive it, to adopt some new sense of redemption, a second chance, it’s not a return to the old days of a convict having paid his debt to society. It’s not grounded in reason, but emotion.

Redemption isn’t offered on the premise that all people convicted of crime, having completed their punishment, are entitled to return to society free of taint, but with caveats that apply only to those currently favored, and sometimes explicitly favored on the basis of their marginalized identity rather than because they’re a human being. Some of us think of this in terms of the concept that every person should be entitled to return to the chance for a law-abiding, productive life. Some feel that only those who haven’t committed offenses they deem especially repugnant are worthy of a second chance, even after their sentence has been served.

Drugs were a primary driver of the increases in punishment. The crack epidemic wreaked havoc with law, and then Len Bias’s overdose death brought us sentences that under the federal guidelines were astronomical compared with what they were before. Those became the new baseline, only to be increased as the new, higher sentences failed to end the epidemic, as we knew would be the case. And with the epidemic came crime to get the money to pay for the drugs, and guns to protect turf or grab new street corners or just blow away the guy who insulted your girlfriend, as newly minted drug kingpins are wont to do.

Today, all of that is (thankfully) forgotten, but it’s hardly gone. We just have a new epidemic, and those of us who were around for the last few panics are watching history repeat itself, this time with dubious sex offenses.

Will it somehow turn out differently this time? As you note, our current regime has little interest in pursuing reform, but who would have expected otherwise? On the other hand, the last administration, particularly from 2008 to 2010, had the ability to make significant change, and failed miserably. The difference is that we expected the audacity of reform from President Obama, but he kept far away from any serious change. Bear in mind, the Democrats were in perpetual fear of being disdained as the “soft on crime” party, and so they proved their mettle by being as hard, if not harder, than the Republicans.

Because that’s what they perceived Americans wanted.

Even today, criminal law and penal reform are largely fair-weather issues. The next terrible thing that happens, the next squirrel, will make the crowds go running for cover, calling for death sentences. There’s no serious call to end “harsh norms,” only to shift them away from those whom we hated yesterday to those whom we hate today. In the meantime, the old harsh norms remain stagnant, because people are taken mostly by individual sad stories rather than systemic failures that filled prisons and left us with an intractable mess.

It will take years, extremely serious and knowledgeable thought, and some very hard choices to undo the fiasco created over the past 50 years. But the new harsh norms for the latest targets of the panic manage to materialize overnight, while people create hashtags about the old ones, as if that will fix the problem. Not only are cultural norms indivisible, but they defy gravity when it comes to crime. They go up, but they don’t necessarily come down.

Friedersdorf: If I may belabor our tangent: One can grant that Harvey Weinstein has not yet been convicted of any crime, and share your misgivings about accusers of uncharged crimes being allowed to testify in any criminal proceedings, while also recognizing the overwhelming evidence, beyond any reasonable doubt, that both Weinstein and Bill Cosby behaved abhorrently toward many women over many years.

What I regard as their clear villainy is a separate matter from their fate in the courts. For all my contempt for both of them, I want them afforded full due process and the presumption of innocence in criminal court. And I generally favor steps like excluding ill-gotten evidence and statutes of limitations that sometimes result in guilty people going free. As you wrote, “I appreciate that outcomes I would prefer aren’t necessarily the best outcomes, or the right outcomes, from a broader perspective.”

But if we both recognize that actual guilt and the prudence of a criminal conviction aren’t precisely the same thing, doesn’t it follow that people aiming at truth must sometimes talk of perpetrators who’ve never been found guilty at trial? Extreme care should be taken when doing so. It may be that treating people as innocent if they haven’t been convicted of a crime is the least bad cultural default. It is mine.

But surely there is some threshold beyond which the public has enough evidence to reach a contrary judgment. I can’t tell you exactly where that line is. I can cite examples that I regard as clearly on one side of it. I watched video tapes of those Los Angeles cops beating Rodney King. No jury verdict is going to cause me to treat them as innocent of wrongdoing, and if one of them applied to work as a private security guard for an event I was organizing, I would reject him on that basis.

Would I be wrong to do so?

I'll give you the last word on that tangent. And to move things forward, what are you thinking of when you write that “it will take years, extremely serious and knowledgeable thought, and some very hard choices to undo the fiasco created over the past 50 years”? I agree. But I wonder what you think of as the “hard choices” that confront us—and insofar as you know, what you would choose and why.

Greenfield: Ah, the Central Park Five, hated even more than Weinstein, confessing to a heinous crime, the genesis of the superpredator myth. And innocent. There is a joke that there is no appeal from the court of public opinion. There are also no rules of evidence, no burdens of proof and no opportunity to defend, yet people have a right to believe whatever they want to believe. Believing is seeing. And when they see it, they’re certain, absolutely certain, about who’s guilty.

To ask whether you would be “wrong to do so” may be the wrong question. You’re going to do so, regardless, and you have a right to do so, and a right to be wrong. You include the caveat that “extreme care should be taken when doing so,” which is obviously better than the alternative.

But is that enough? Who’s to say if the care taken is extreme, or “care” at all? Once someone believes, “motivated cognition” takes over and we argue our point to the bitter end, no matter how wrong we may factually be.

I have no clue what Weinstein did. I wasn’t there, and I lack the capacity to see into other people’s minds. But then, I’ve come to grips with my limitations long ago, and recognize that there are things I will never know. Many have not, and don’t let the absence of facts, or actual knowledge, get in the way of their believing what they choose to believe, and they do so with a Dunning-Kruger level of certainty. They may not be wrong, but that doesn’t really enter into their equation.

They believe they’re right, and that’s good enough.

The processes we employ are still far from perfect, and wouldn’t it be great if there was a red light that went off over the witness stand every time a person lied? But there isn’t, so we try our best to search for the truth and, recognizing that even due process fails us, have defaults like Blackstone’s ratio to bridge the gap. And still we over-convict the guilty and convict the innocent. Occasionally, we kill them, and that’s with the full panoply of due-process protections. If we can’t be certain we’re getting it right when doing everything possible to provide fair process, can we rely on our certainty of guilt without any process beyond our personal sensibilities?

As for what “hard choices” are before us:  People want a perfect system, as well they should, but neither systems nor people have ever proven up to the task of perfection. Mistakes are made. The guilty walk free and commit new crimes. Innocents are locked away, or killed, and their lives, their families’ lives, are destroyed. Criminal-defense lawyers tend to have a great tolerance for ambiguity, or we would go nuts at the unfairness of outcomes. We confront daily the imperfections of the system, of the people (including ourselves and our clients) in the system.

Is there an answer? Beats me, or at least not one I can offer. I view the criminal legal system as a Rube Goldberg machine, to which we add the occasional boot or tea kettle to fix one problem that flares up, only to find out (sometimes later, more often ignored at the time even though we “told them so”) that it caused some other problem. And then we add another boot to cure the latest symptom, keeping the cycle going.

We need to recognize that the system will invariably leave crimes unpunished and victims without justice, whatever justice means. We can’t react to every sad story of a gap in our latest outrage with the typical “something must be done” syllogism. We’ve seen disaster after disaster result from knee-jerk, simplistic reactions, and we’ve spent decades trying on new boots to fix the old boot problem. In the meantime, real people are harmed by our good intentions.

We need to resist the urge to address the horror du jour with untenable solutions, even when mobs adore them and denigrate anyone who questions them. At the moment, “affirmative consent” is a glaring example. When “no means no” was the test, it was a clear, workable, constitutional line. Sure, there were exceptions such as the incapacitated person, but we could easily accommodate the anomalies. Affirmative consent doesn’t work—its parameters can’t be defined and there are post-hoc excuses built in that undermine its efficacy (“I said yes, but I felt pressured, coerced, so it really wasn’t a yes, but a no.”)

To make a viable system that works the best it can, even recognizing that it will fail on occasion, we need to stop using flawed, aspirational assumptions as its basis. We need to rely instead on cold, hard reality—and a recognition that we cannot come up with a way to cure every ill people manage to cause. We will still fail at times, but we can do better if we get real about it.

Friedersdorf: As we conclude, I wonder if the news is giving us case for a bit more optimism: In Florida, the state that long disenfranchised more adults than any other for bygone felony convictions, a supermajority of voters passed a constitutional amendment that will restore voting rights to more than 1 million people. Does that result, or anything else about the 2018 elections, change your outlook at all?

Greenfield: It’s interesting that you’ve raised Florida’s Amendment 4 as an example. It re-enfranchises about 1.4 million ex-cons who’ve paid their debt to society and deserve to be restored to their rights as citizens––certainly a good thing even if other rights than voting remain denied them.

And yet, Amendment 4 omitted an entire class of defendants convicted of sex offenses. So does it prove that we’re moving toward reform or that we’re just changing the head on the corpse? If there was a principled approach to reform, then it would apply to all rather than selectively. Do the voters understand and appreciate the underlying principles at stake, or is this just pushing their happy button of the moment?

I won’t complain that good things are happening, even if for bad reasons, but if the public had a deeper appreciation of the issues, the principles, the rationale behind the solutions, they wouldn’t leave out unpopular swaths of people. Even worse, this lack of principled understanding is producing a balancing act of reform for the favored and increased harshness for the disfavored. It’s the disfavored who most need of reform, much as it is unpleasant speech most in need of protection.

In response to some questions, I’ve mentioned some examples, such as the Central Park Five. Consider another that I neglected to mention, the Duke lacrosse team, which adds one additional dimension to the problems we’re facing. Even after it was absolutely clear that there was no rape; that the prosecutor, Mike Nifong, was dirty; and that the white male athletes he wrongly charged committed no crime, many members of the Group of 88 Duke professors who placed an ad that appeared to presume the guilt of the players stood by that statement—not because the alleged rape happened, but because the allegations had focused attention on what they alleged was a campus atmosphere of sexism, racism, and sexual violence.

Passion has overcome facts and logic, and reality is no longer a constraint in condemnation. This may be close enough for an academic panel at a philosophy symposium, but real people’s lives are being affected and even destroyed in the process of elevating narrative above reality. They don’t seem bothered by the collateral damage. I value every life, and reject the notion that anyone should be sacrificed for some cause.

I’m increasingly of the view that most of the great evils of human history result from the tendency of people to think in terms of “us and them”, instead of “all 7.3 billion of us.” That includes the past mistreatment of indigenous peoples, slaves, Jews, Roma, gays, landlords, capitalists, immigrants and many other groups. It’s the flaw in imperialism, racism, nationalism, theocracy, fascism, feudalism, communism and lots of other isms. Except utilitarianism, which treats everyone’s well being as having equal worth.

Consider the following intro to a recent Atlantic story:

Kevin Simmers is a former police sergeant in Hagerstown, Maryland. During his tenure as a narcotics officer, he aggressively pursued drug arrests—especially those related to heroin. “I believed my entire life that incarceration was the answer to this drug war,” Simmers says in a new documentary from The Atlantic.

Then his 18-year-old daughter, Brooke, became addicted to opioids.

In the short film, Simmers shares the personal tragedy that led to a radical transformation in his ideology. “I did everything wrong here,” he admits. “I now think the whole drug war is total bull****.”

Could you imagine this anecdote with “bank robberies” replacing drug crimes?  Me neither.  So this is not just about a cop’s views being biased by personal considerations.  Policemen don’t suddenly favor legalizing bank robbery just because their daughter gets caught up in the activity.

This is just another example of the “us and them” problem.  As long as the drug addicts were seen as “them”, Kevin Simmers had no reservations about locking them up.  As soon as it was his daughter, he could see that these were real people, with real feelings.

When considering whom to vote for, the first thing I do is to consider the candidate’s stance toward utilitarianism, not their views on specific issues.  Do they think in terms of “we”, or do they divide society up into good guys and enemies.  Well-intentioned policy mistakes by “we-focused” people can be fixed; bad intentions by “us and them” people are much more dangerous.

(32 COMMENTS)

 

I’ve now finished working my way through the over 1,600 pages of Armen Alchian’s writing. (Note to self: when you agree to write a book review, keep in mind the book you’re reviewing. When I went back to the original email offer, I found that I was asked to review the single-volume 523-page Economic Forces at Work. Oh, well. Not the optimal use of my time, but not that far from optimal: I learned a lot and seeing Armen’s mind at work led to some nice memories of being in his class in 1972.)

One of the pieces in the longer 2-volume work is titled “Customs, Behavior, and Property Rights.” It was presented at the Peking [Beijing] Institute of Foreign Trade in 1982.

The whole thing, which is short, is good, but here’s my favorite. Remember that this was back in 1982:

Fourth, as Chinese trade expands with the United States, American politicians will complain that you are selling us more than we are buying from you. You should ignore our American politicians, who don’t know that international trade involves many countries. No one buys from another exactly the same amount sold. Instead three- or four- or five-way trade—called multilateral trade—occurs, and one country’s imbalance with another country is matched by its opposite balance with still another. But some politicians who understand that fact are really representing some American producers who are being displaced by the foreign imports. We American consumers welcome those imports. So if American politicians complain about your success, you know how to answer them.

[DRH note: If Armen’s statement “one country’s imbalance with another country is matched by its opposite balance with still another” is about the merchandise trade balance or the current account balance, he’s obviously wrong. If it refers to the overall balance, including the capital account, he’s obviously right. But don’t let issue stop you from realizing his prescience about the future in which Chinese would sell us more than they buy from us and U.S. politicians would complain about that.]

Further note: When I thought, just now, to see if I could find his paper on line, I didn’t, but I found that Donald Boudreaux highlighted the same quote over 2 years ago. Great minds, etc.

(4 COMMENTS)

There are many distortions in the US economy.  As a result, a decision by a corporation to move to a new area often has important spillover benefits.  Indeed this is also true of many individuals.  California would gain significant net benefits if Warren Buffett were to move here from Nebraska.  These are not good reasons, however, to oppose a national policy that discourages sweetheart deals that try to induce interstate migration.

Here’s an analogy.  The fact that Barry Bonds hit more home runs after using steroids is not a good argument against a major league ban on steroid use.  (There may be good arguments against such a ban–I’m agnostic.  But the effectiveness of steroids for individual players is not such an argument.)

Suppose that California collects $10 billion in revenue from corporate income taxes.  Also suppose that the optimal corporate tax rate is zero.  Now assume that California raises the tax rate on most corporations, in order to cut the rate on a favored few.  Revenue stays at $10 billion.  If you look at the select few beneficiaries in isolation, it might look like the subsidies make sense.  They may add net benefits to the state, even at the reduced tax rate.  But that ignores what Bastiat called “the unseen”.  The negative effect on non-favored companies.

New York may gain net benefits from attracting Amazon.  But how many firms will leave New York as a result of the higher taxes imposed on other companies, as a result of the subsidies provided to Amazon. In my view, states should compete for business and for individuals by offering an attractive economic climate for all people.

I do understand that other approaches are possible.  You could have state officials in California visit billionaires in New York, offering a 5-year income tax holidays if they moved west.  These billionaires would pay more in sales and property taxes than they’d use in public services. Meanwhile, New York officials could do the same.

Does this make sense from a national perspective?  It’s hard to see how—even if you think state income taxes are a bad idea.  For instance, this type of policy regime tends to encourage corruption.  Resources are wasted on the negotiations.  Individuals will game the system by moving around to earn tax holidays.  Companies will do the same.  Politicians are babes in the woods compared to big corporations—look how Wisconsin’s governor got taken to the cleaners by Foxconn.

Just say no.

To summarize:

1. When considering the benefits from attracting favored firms, one needs to consider the indirect effect on non-favored firms.

2. Even in the rare case where corporate sweetheart deals help a given state after accounting for the negative effect on other firms, it’s still probably in the national interest to a have a policy that discourages such deals.  As an analogy, even if monopsony power means that the optimal tariff for big countries is positive, it probably makes sense for the US and the Eurozone to sign a free trade agreement with zero tariffs.

Let’s adopt a policy of treating individuals equally, and also treating companies equally.  That policy is likely to be best in the long run, even if there are occasions where favoring a certain person or company might produce local benefits. Don’t underestimate the value of simple, clear and transparent tax regimes that treat everyone equally.