In a recent book on social justice, former Labor politician Gary Johns argues for “a major reconsideration of social justice as a rationale for the welfare state”. In his essay ‘When too much social justice is never enough’ Johns suggests that social justice is primarily about the redistribution of wealth and income while egalitarianism is the pursuit of a more equal distribution of material resources.
Johns also implies that advocates of social justice and equality are opposed to democracy. As he writes in the Australian: “In a democracy, achieving a just distribution of society’s wealth requires permission to take money from some to distribute to others. Often, those others do not agree to hand over the money.” In his essays and articles Johns misconstrues social justice and egalitarianism as well as the relationship of these ideals to democracy.
People fight for equality when they feel they are being bullied or dominated, writes psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Haidt argues that social justice movements not only urge compassion for the poor and disadvantaged, they also “call for people to come together to fight the oppression of bullying domineering elites”. On this view social justice is not fundamentally about an equal distribution of wealth or income, it’s about freedom.
Herewith the text of my talk on Ockham’s Razor this morning. It is from a longer essay which you can find here, boiled down so that it could be read in the 12 minutes or so one gets on Ockham’s Razor.
I.
Shortly after Barack Obama became the first US president to build his campaign around online social media, his new Administration held an online ‘brainstorming’ session seeking ideas for making government “more transparent, participatory, and collaborative”. Participants in the Online brainstorming felt unconstrained by these terms and pursued their own pet ideas, and/or voted others ideas up or down a ladder of popularity.
With a rerun of the Great Depression in the offing, what was uppermost in the public mind? Legalising marijuana topped the pops on the brainstorming site followed by releasing Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
Welcome to Vox Pop democracy. The tendency is intensifying with ‘shock jocks’ spreading a culture of narcissistic entitlement and the internet hosting ideological echo chambers where people nurse their resentment and hostilities to their ideological opponents.
In the US, the conjunction of big money from the top and the bottom up power of the internet is making things worse. In 2000 leading Republican candidates for president paid lip-service to the scientific consensus on global warming. This year the Tea Party has marginalised such views and the remaining candidates wear their intransigence on action against climate change as a badge of honour. Continue reading →
This wasn’t supposed to be the theme of part two (Part One is here) but Jessica Irvine’s recent and timely column on superstardom and One Direction prompted me to add my two cents’ worth – well someone else’s two cents’ worth but at least inserted by me.
First; highlights from Jessica’s column:
US labour market economist Sherwin Rosen in his 1981 paper ”The Economics of Superstars” identified two preconditions that lead to superstardom. First, every customer in the market must want to buy the good supplied by the best producer. The second condition for the birth of a superstar is that the good provided must be able to be distributed cheaply to all customers in the market. You don’t see superstar plumbers, because their services are only available to one geographic area.
Rosen’s theory of superstardom as an efficient outcome of the market was challenged by another US economist, Moshe Adler, who pointed out that whether people preferred one singer over the other was not necessarily determined by how talented they were. There is, after all, no standard unit to measure increments of talent. The key thing about groups like One Direction, according to Adler, is not that they are the most talented – for such a thing can never be measured – but that they are simply the most popular.
According to Adler, consumer desires are not innate preferences – as standard economics assumes – but are influenced strongly by society. We desire the same art, culture and music that is desired by other people.
To which I would only add the graph below which features in Paul Ormerod’s forthcoming book. In a controlled experiment with people listening to music if they were not ‘networked’ which is to say they didn’t know what other people thought was good, there was a fairly big inherent difference between songs. If they were networked, they ‘herded’ strongly.
Typical outcome of the music download experiments; number of each of the 48 songs downloaded over the course of an experiment, participants only know the names of the song and band and can listen to songs before deciding whether or not to download. The average number of downloads is set equal to 100 for comparative purposes
Same experiment as before except the participants know the number of previous downloads of each of the songs before they decide themselves
Of course the upshot of this is that we’re all madly herding from one place to another, but the extent to which there’s signal in the noise of our herding is greatly attenuated. Further; large amounts of rent are being expended trying to get people’s attention with marketing to get into people’s headspace and win the battle for the next hit.
Last week’s ABC QandA debate between uber-atheist Richard Dawkins and Catholic archbishop George Pell generated quite a lot of blogosphere debate, not least here at Troppo. However some might not have realised that the trigger for this existential gabfest was an even bigger one, namely the 2012 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne (it winds up today). Keynote speakers were the three surviving members of the so-called “Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse” namely Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris (Christopher Hitchens may or may not be otherwise occupied on an extended stint of Eternal Damnation).
Other prominent speakers included British celebrity philosopher AC Grayling and expat Oz celebrity QC Geoffrey Robertson. However it was among the second-string speakers that a tittle of tension arose. Disability activist Stella Young tweeted in relation to fellow speaker and Oz philosopher Peter Singer:
I don’t know whether to question Singer on whether or not he thinks I should be alive, or just eat some meat in his direction. #atheistcon
What did she mean? It didn’t take long to find out by some quick Googling. This article by Dinesh D’Souza (on an avowedly Catholic website I should note) explains:
Singer is a mild-mannered fellow who speaks calmly and lucidly. Yet you wouldn’t have to read his work too long to find his extreme positions. He cheerfully advocates infanticide and euthanasia and, in almost the same breath, favors animal rights. Even most liberals would have qualms about third-trimester abortions; Singer does not hesitate to advocate what may be termed fourth-trimester abortions, i.e., the killing of infants after they are born. …
Singer resolutely takes up a Nietzschean call for a “transvaluation of values,” with a full awareness of the radical implications. He argues that we are not creations of God but rather mere Darwinian primates. We exist on an unbroken continuum with animals. Christianity, he says, arbitrarily separated man and animal, placing human life on a pedestal and consigning the animals to the status of tools for human well-being. Now, Singer says, we must remove Homo sapiens from this privileged position and restore the natural order. This translates into more rights for animals and less special treatment for human beings. There is a grim consistency in Singer’s call to extend rights to the apes while removing traditional protections for unwanted children, people with mental disabilities, and the noncontributing elderly. …
However the Catholics have skin in this game, as D’Souza’s argument proceeds to reveal:
Troppo’s patron saint Adam Smith put it thus (note the generous assumption about human nature):
The liberal reward of labor, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people . . .. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than where they are low.
Here’s a more modern restatement.
The Multi-Dimensional Effects of Reciprocity on Worker Effort: Evidence from a Hybrid Field-Laboratory Labor Market Experiment
Date: 2012-03
By: Kim, Min-Taec (University of Sydney)
Slonim, Robert (University of Sydney)
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp6410&r=exp
We examine the gift exchange hypothesis on both the quantity and quality of output using a hybrid field-laboratory labor market experiment. We recruited participants to enter survey data for a well-known charitable organization. Workers were paid either a high or low wage. We find that although the total number of surveys entered did not vary with the wage, high wage workers made fewer errors and entered more surveys after controlling for errors. We further find that for low costs associated with errors, offering the low wage maximizes profits, but for higher costs paying the higher “gift exchange” wage maximizes profits.
No time to read the paper right now, but it looks great.
Kantian Optimization, Social Ethos, and Pareto Efficiency
Date: 2012-03
By: John E. Roemer (Dept. of Political Science, Yale University)
Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that homo sapiens is a cooperative species, the reigning assumption in economic theory is that individuals optimize in an autarkic manner (as in Nash and Walrasian equilibrium). I here postulate an interdependent kind of optimizing behavior, called Kantian. It is shown that in simple economic models, when there are negative externalities (such as congestion effects from use of a commonly owned resource) or positive externalities (such as a social ethos reflected in individuals’ preferences), Kantian equilibria dominate Nash-Walras equilibria in terms of efficiency. While economists schooled in Nash equilibrium may view the Kantian behavior as utopian, there is some — perhaps much — evidence that it exists. If cultures evolve through group selection, the hypothesis that Kantian behavior is more prevalent than we may think is supported by the efficiency results here demonstrated.
A few weeks ago I attended the latest F.H. Gruen lecture at ANU by the terrific English economist Andrew Oswald.* He’s one of those economists who, in addition to being formidable in his (many) fields within the profession, is also a great communicator. Though he has a lower international profile than say John Kay who is also an op ed writing academic, he’s also a master of the art of the clearly written op ed as a visit to his website will convince you. Those who choose the F.H. Gruen lecturers – I’m not sure but I presume Bob Gregory and/or Bruce Chapman have never missed in getting people who are talented economists with something to say at the same time as not being crazy – as quite a number of Nobel Prize winners in economics are.
In any event, Oswald’s topic was herding (and here are his presentation slides). As he suggested, you’d think that economics would have a good theory of herding, or at least that it would be a prominent subject within the discipline. Alas, if you thought that, you’d be mistaken. When Oswald looked at the biology of herding, the canonical article was Hamilton, W. D. (1971). “Geometry for the Selfish Herd”. Journal of Theoretical Biology 31 (2): 295–311.
This theory models herding as a ‘rational’ strategy to avoid predators. The ‘game’ that gets selected for is for each animal to try to avoid being on the outside of the herd so that the predator gets to eat the outsider. It’s a powerful theory which fits (ie ‘predicts’ a lot of of biological data).
IIRC Oswald said that this article had acquired thirty thousand references in subsequent academic journals, many in biology of course, but also in some social science disciplines such as psychology and sociology. You know how many times it’s been cited in the economics literature? Well it’s never been cited – at least when Oswald looked it up – it probably has now. This simple fact is as good an introduction of the theme of this post as you’ll find. As I heard Oswald say this it struck me as itself a dramatic demonstration of herding. At the same time, it’s par for the course. This kind of thing happens all the time in economics. No doubt it happens in other disciplines, but it seems especially the case in economics.
By contrast, the prominent theory of herding in economics is herding as informational learning. Thus for instance people imitate others figuring ‘they must know something I don’t’. In a cinema, someone yells “Fire!”. People start running for the exit. Others up the back don’t hear what the yeller yelled, but they figure they could do worse than follow the herd. The idea is illustrated at the end of this famous scene. This idea can help explain financial bubbles.
But the biological herding idea seems so much more powerful. Because it suggests that a dominant biological mode is one in which each ‘agent’ seeks the local optimum of their own survival, and that this gives the group some holistic coherence, but that no-one is thinking of the group, and the group’s survival and welfare – the global optimum – is therefore the (arbitrary) result of these individual optimisations. The biological theory of herding spells danger for the herd in many situations. Continue reading →
In a recent book on social justice, former Labor politician Gary Johns argues for “a major reconsideration of social justice as a rationale for the welfare state”. In his essay ‘When too much social justice is never enough’ Johns suggests that social justice is primarily about the redistribution of wealth and income while egalitarianism is the pursuit of a more equal distribution of material resources.
