Category: Philosophy

So much of political coverage is about generating outrage against other tribes. This outrage is in high demand and easily supplied, but it ultimately leads to a market failure. It satisfies our short-term desire for confirmation bias, but by causing us to think other tribes are more evil than they actually are, it reduces our long-term ability to win people over to our side and make the world a better place.

The Details: What Outrage Looks Like

Whether it’s Democrats against Republicans, Republicans against Democrats, or libertarians against the government, time and energy is consistently diverted from arguing the merits of one’s position to the weaker but more enticing strategy of simply portraying the people who hold the opposing position as embodiments of evil.

Sometimes the outrage focuses on the Evil Opponent’s words as indicators of how “out of touch” the Evil Opponent is (47% are takers! You didn’t build that!). Sometimes the outrage focuses on the Evil Opponent’s actions as indicators of the Evil Opponent’s lack of moral fortitude or love for America (He cut a kid’s hair in college! He “bowed” to a leader of a country I can’t find on a map!). Sometimes the outrage manifests as a remarkable fascination in the details of the Evil Opponent’s personal life (Zimmermann’s boxing! Now he’s not boxing!) Sometimes it doesn’t really matter what the person said or did as merely mentioning his or her name is enough to foment outrage from the appropriate base (Kochs! Obama! Limbaugh! Obama! Palin! Fluke! Obama!)

The mainstream media uses outrage whenever possible, but the most frequent peddlers include websites such as TheBlaze, HotAir, MotherJones, and ThinkProgress. You can generally tell how high HotAir has their Outrage Meter by how many times they mention Reid on their home page (at the moment, it’s 4, accompanied by words like liar, pain, and un-American.) You can generally tell how high ThinkProgress has their Outrage Meter by how many pictures of old white men they have on theirs (at the moment, only 2, but I’ve seen Republican men in every single above-the-fold photograph before). Outrage meters tend to spike as we approach elections, as it becomes more important than usual to expose Evil Opponents to try to prevent them from gaining power.

The Economics: Why Outrage Persists

The proliferation of such outrage can be explained with basic economics. The supply of outrage-inducing material is very high, and the cost of production is lower than it has ever been. No one is perfect; the worst 10% of things any given individual has ever done or said could probably be thrown into the outrage machine to generate results. Additionally, the worst 10% of people in any given political group generate even larger supplies of words and actions that can be thrown into the outrage machine to smear the entire group. Furthermore, thanks to social media, cellphones, YouTube, and more, technology now enables us to discover and promote a greater proportion of the worst things individuals or groups say or do than ever before.

The demand for outrage-inducing material is also very high. People are simply more interested in clicking, reading, and sharing news that makes them excited and angry than news that makes them calm and happy.

When so many people want something that is so easy to supply, we should not be surprised to see so much of it. Websites publish outrageous posts for the same reason politicians create more commercials slinging mud at their opponents than dusting themselves off – it might not change many minds, but it’s more effective at involving people who already have their minds made up.

These incentives create tensions for content creators who don’t necessarily want to get sucked into the outrage machine. My most popular post of all time is also probably the most outrage-inducing post I’ve ever written. I could probably generate more page views by cranking up the Outrage Meter more often, but if I believe outrageous page views ultimately create negative utility, why would I want to maximize that?

The Problems: Why Outrage Is Harmful

One problem with outrage is that, while it may be very effective at reinforcing your side’s existing biases about the other side, it is extremely ineffective at winning people over to your side. While we love to throw outrage at them, we are very good at dismissing outrage against us as irrelevant and actually turning it into another reason to be outraged at them (Oh there they go again bringing up Seamus / Benghazi / whatever).

Sometimes the outrage is so great it produces visible backlash (think 2012’s “legitimate rape“), but even then the accusing side tends to overplay their hand, allowing the defending side to spend less time rationalizing their weakness and more time accusing the other side of exploiting it.

To be sure, there are injustices worthy of outrage, but the worthy outrageous things that don’t outrage us are just as revealing of our biases as the less worthy things that do. I had to stop and ask myself why the TSA terrors and NSA surveillance have outraged me far more than Michael Dunn’s murder and essential acquittal.

Am I more concerned about laws that merely take away liberties than about laws that enable racists to kill people they stereotype as dangerous and get away with it? And is it just a coincidence that my outrage seems to correlate less with the level of injustice and more with how closely the victims match my ethnicity and income level?

The biggest problem with an abundance of outrage is that over time it gives you a very unbalanced impression of your political opponents. You begin to assume your opponents are always acting from malicious intentions rather than good ones, which hampers your ability to understand them or admit errors in your own thinking.

Liberals think virtually all conservatives are racist compassionless homophobes. Conservatives think virtually all liberals are socialist Marxist environmentalists. Libertarians think virtually all government employees are corrupt, power-hungry statists.

A consequence of assuming your opponents are acting in bad faith more than they really are is that it makes you more gullible to believing partially-true (or downright false) stories about something outrageous they did. That’s how anti-government crusaders got outraged about voluntary chicken nuggets and liberals got outraged about a fabricated anti-science memo – they already believed it was something those people were probably doing anyway.

The more boring but more persistent consequence is that it decreases your overall ability to get along with members of the other tribes. If you believe the worst 10% of an opposing tribe is representative of the whole tribe, you’ve probably spent more time reading about them on the Internet than you’ve actually spent with them. But once you believe that, why bother trying to spend time with them?

At times I’ve despaired about whether the United States is getting too big to govern. I see pro-Russian and pro-European factions fighting in Ukraine and it makes me wonder… are we always destined to split off into warring tribes? I don’t know, but if I can get more people to recognize outrage and reduce their demand for it, I’ll feel like I’ve done something to help.

As partisans and ideologues wage their linguistic wars, I’m always looking for ways to cut through the fog and optimize the journey towards truth. There’s a particular type of argument I often see that I think is particularly weak. I’m calling it appealing to the future.

An “appeal to the future” is when a partisan pundit gets really excited about a prediction, proposal, promise, or otherwise unrealized claim, and perfunctorily elevates it to prophetic status. This claim is used as evidence that the other tribe’s policies or politicians are evil personified, or evidence that my tribe’s policies or politicians are gloriously brilliant.

The only ingredient a pundit usually needs for an appeal to the future is a “source.” It doesn’t really matter if the source is a CBO budget analysis, a corporate quarterly forecast, a scientific paper, or an anonymous insider tip. Nor does it matter whether or not the pundit has previously considered the source to be trustworthy. The only purpose of the source is to use its projection as a starter to generate emotional validation of the pundit’s pre-existing worldview. (In fact, the really brash “thought leader” pundits do not even need a source; a gut feeling about upcoming trends tenuously linked to any arbitrary news is good enough.) Generally, the claim does not pan out as predicted, but by then the pundit has moved on to a new appeal to the future to generate the next round of outrage or excitement.

For Example: Obamacare

Obamacare has already been through several rounds of respective “imminent failure” and “imminent success.” Supporters recently seized on a report that insurers planned to spend $500 million on advertising. Pundits like Paul Krugman practically hailed it as the second coming of Obama. I didn’t realize this advertising plan was “the shoe we’ve all been waiting to see drop,” but apparently it was and it’s great news! “Insurers think this is going to work.” Never mind that the same pundits are usually criticizing insurer actions. Never mind that we could just as easily interpret the advertising rush as a ploy of desperation, or that it may not actually happen, or that it may not actually have any significance if it does. Never mind that previous future appeals – por ejemplo, that people would learn to love Obamacare – have thus far failed to materialize. Why worry about present reality when we can always appeal to a newer, hopeful future?

Not that Obamacare critics have been much better. The presently unfolding several million cancelled health plans wasn’t bad enough, so some started appealing to predictions that 80 million people will be seeing their plans cancelled! “Several experts predicted it,” and “the administration estimated” themselves. Never mind that conservative critics laughably dismissed other, rosier predictions from the administration. Never mind that even that prediction requires some creative stretching to interpret it in such a devastating way. Never mind that if this prediction fails to materialize, we’ve already moved on to a new appeal – surely the insurers are bound to start revolting any time now! Why worry about present reality when we can always appeal to a newer, hopeful future?

For Example: Climate Change

The climate change debate is full of this appeal. It seems like I’m always seeing someone tout some new evidence for climate change that, to my surprise, is not actually a new data or observation but a new projection about the loss of some habitat or an increase in some bad weather metric that could occur forty years from now!

In a widely circulated piece on Slate’s Bad Astronomy last year, Phil Plait attempted to debunk the claim that there’s been no global warming for 16 years. In my opinion, he did not prove that it “has not even slowed,” but what’s really ironic is that among the actual observations (like the record low Arctic ice cap in 2012), Phil used an appeal to the future that was just too emotionally validating not to pass up: “It is getting so hot in Australia right now that weather forecasters had to add a new color to the weather maps.” Never mind that the actual temperature ended up being seven degrees cooler than predicted and well within the old color range. Never mind that the “new color on the map!!!” hysteria is still circulating the Internet as evidence of climate change (an interesting example of an appeal to the future from the past!)

Conclusion

The projections that feed appeals to the future are not inherently useless. But they are not generally intended to be used as arguments for an ideological case, and they are often weaker than other types of arguments available for making those cases. All future projections are by definition a type of calculated knowledge, which is generally more likely to be wrong than direct knowledge. But if appeals to the future are so often unreliable, why do partisans keep using them?

The incentive to create appeals to the future stems directly from the ideologue’s exaggerated worldview in which his views are sacred truth and his opponent’s views are evil lies. In the actual present and complicated reality, many of the ideologue’s predictions and prescriptions are not as wonderful as he imagines; neither are his opponent’s quite as harmful as he believes. So the only way to continue to validate a worldview that is not actually validated by the past or the present is to grasp at any potential indication that the future is about to prove it all right.

“The economy under my president may not look so hot now, but just you wait – this new survey shows a confidence uptick that proves the recovery is just around the corner!” Or: “the economy under their president may not look like it’s collapsing yet, but just you wait – the latest Fed statement betrays a weakness that proves the end is just around the corner!” And round and round it goes.

A basic income (also called basic income guarantee, unconditional basic income, universal basic income, universal demogrant, or citizen’s income) is a proposed system of social security in which citizens or residents of a country regularly receive a sum of money unconditionally from the government. (Wikipedia)

When I first heard about “universal income,” I laughably dismissed it as extremely naive leftist thinking that was so patently ridiculous that it bordered on satire. The government gives everybody a standard amount of money? Where does that money come from if not the very people it is being given to? Wouldn’t such a policy totally destroy any incentive to work? And then who is going to pay for it?

However, I have since learned that the idea has some interesting substance to it, and it has actually been promoted by several prominent conservative and libertarian thinkers throughout history. Discussion of the old concept has seen much revival across the Internets lately due to global economic trends and the emergence of experiments in various places that have been providing interesting results.

Continue reading Universal Income

Congress is currently debating how much to cut food stamps in the new omnibus Farm Bill, and whenever liberal websites write about it, they invariably generate upvoted comments about how “unchristian” it is to “cut funding for a much needed social safety net program that provides for the least among us,” or quoting Matthew 25 for its condemnation of alleged Christ-followers who among other things did not feed the hungry.

The implication is that conservative Christians who oppose food stamp benefits are hypocrites who oppose their religion’s teachings for the sake of selfish politics. Now I myself have not spared harsh words for conservatives who hypocritically oppose poor welfare programs while supporting welfare for rich farmers, and I also agree that many conservative Christians who vigorously oppose programs like SNAP do not seem to share an equivalent concern for personally trying to help those who rely on them (although I think there are growing numbers who have a more holistic understanding on both accounts). However, I am not convinced that the moral implications of the government program itself are so clear.

First, blanket statements about cuts being “unchristian” force a gray issue of degrees into an unrealistic black and white world of “feeding the poor” vs. “not feeding the poor.” In the absence of deeper reasoning, someone who was more cynical might be forgiven for wondering if such arguments would be trotted out to oppose any possible cuts to any possible level of benefits. But Jesus did not say “I was hungry and you cut back my bread ration by a couple slices”; surely there is some level of benefits that might be so generous that there would be no moral quandary involved in a slight reduction? I think discussing where currently proposed levels and cuts fall on that continuum requires more nuance and depth.

But even if we could assume there is a proper “Christian” level of food stamp benefits that we can identify, there is a more fundamental issue – conflating the distinction between voluntary giving and forced giving. Maybe this matters for the Christian; Jesus said, “I was hungry and you fed me,” not “I was hungry and the Romans taxed you to feed me.” And what about taxpayers supporting these benefits who are not Christians? Jesus definitely didn’t say, “I was hungry and you had the Romans tax your rich neighbor to feed me.” Political opponents of the “Religious Right” seethe whenever they try to “impose their morality” on others via laws about sexual behavior, yet such progressives seem to have no issue imposing others to be more moral in their financial behavior by forcing them to be more generous. Is this really any better?

Finally, even if we in theory decided that the ends of enforcing such generosity was worth the means and we could determine an acceptable level that met everyone who had need, we would still have to deal with the practical effects of reality that might undermine our good intentions. What about the disincentives that are harder to monitor from such a distance? What about the crowding out of private generosity – if my tax dollars are already facelessly, namelessly feeding the poor, am I less motivated to feed them myself (and maybe get to know them and help them improve their situation)? What about the irritating politics that seem to inevitably show up whenever government gets involved, like cities that ban feeding the homeless on your own because they can’t regulate the food you’re giving away? How “Christian” is that?

One response is to argue away the hyper-individualism about forcing one person to give food to another by claiming that citizens of the United States are all part of a community with a long-standing tradition of supporting each other and caring for our neediest members. A decent family looks out for each other; many of those dynamics extend to a church community; why not an entire country, especially for those who consider it a “Christian nation”?

I guess I can see the idea being presented, and I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s without merit. But I don’t think I’m convinced it applies to that degree. For one thing, it seems a little vague and hand-wavy; how do you decide that a “Christian nation” should mandate feeding its poor but not, say, mandate sex within marriage? For another, the dynamics of a support network within a family or even a church inherently depend on familiarity that allows and even requires expectations, responsibilities, and accountability – the sorts of things that tend to be considered faux pas for humongous top-down government programs that lack the capacity for such local familiarity and even compete with the very organizations and voluntary involvements that can sustain it.

Another possible response would be to ask if there is some contradiction between a support for ending government actions that harm people and a support for cutting government actions that help people. Or, to be more specific, if I want to end government farm subsidies because they end up hurting people, should I not also oppose cutting food stamps because that will end up hurting people also? And if the answer lies in my philosophy about government (the freedom to spend your own money vs. giving people the ability to eat?), is that merely an indictment of the morality of a philosophy that is OK with hurting people? Or does that theoretical question depend on how much programs like SNAP actually help people in practice, especially once we properly consider long-term effects and opportunity costs?

Like most things, it’s a complicated issue. Unfortunately this makes me conflicted about supporting organizations like Bread For The World, which are doing an amazing job lobbying to fix corrupt and harmful food aid practices but also seem to treat any reduction in food stamps as a tragic sin. My own uncertainty is compounded by my regretful (but hopefully transient!) lack of familiarity with food stamp recipients, forcing me to rely on statistics and the dangerous stereotypes by either side. I’m trying to increase my understanding of the opposing arguments, in case I’m missing something important, but I’m not yet convinced that cutting food stamps is “unchristian,” and I definitely don’t think it’s a slam-dunk.

Back during the Great American Gun Control Debate of 2013, the liberal side loved to cite polls showing 83-91% of Americans supporting universal background checks. Republicans opposed it even though a majority of even their own constituents appeared to support such a thing. Similarly, during the government shutdown, the progressive side continually trotted out polls about 72% of Americans opposing a shutdown to prevent Obamacare from going into effect. The point is to emphasize how “out of touch” those extreme obstructionist conservative / Tea Party / Republican / GOP types are.

But it should not surprise you that this strategy cuts both ways. You didn’t hear too many Republicans talking about the above polls. But whenever liberal columnists or politicians talked about their shutdown polls, you almost never heard them also talking about the 70% of Americans who opposed raising the debt ceiling. And now, as Rand Paul is trying to leverage Janet Yellen’s confirmation to get a vote on his Audit the Fed bill, all the people who will likely bloviate about how stupid that is will probably not mention the polls that show 74% of Americans wanting to audit the Federal Reserve.

Both sides of the partisan demagoguery are quite adept at cherry-picking the views of the American people to support whatever they’re trying to do at the moment – not that there’s anything groundbreaking in pointing that out. But that does lead to some deeper thoughts about our continually growing democratic republic. Why are a vast majority of the American people continually thwarted in getting the things they tell poll-makers they want, whether it’s background checks or a balanced budget or a rise in the minimum wage?

Well, it’s important to note that most Americans do get what they want regarding a whole host of issues that have been settled for a long time; by definition, it’s only the rare currently contentious issues that get noticed. But what about those?

The conventional answer might be that the constitutional system of checks and balances was built to prevent the tyranny of majority mob rule. This is true, although some of the issues above are not really failing because they run into the Bill of Rights. The cynical answer might be that the corrupt system of lobbying and special interests play an outsized role in determining policy. There is probably truth to this as well, along with messy realities of Americans not really knowing what they want and changing their minds and definitely not pressuring Congress enough to really try to make some of these things happen.

I’ve been reading Enough: Why The World’s Poorest Starve In An Age of Plenty. I was afraid it might ignore economic and political realities to express naive wishes that we could all just share more, but it actually dives deep into some of those economic and political realities. Among other things, the authors (two long-time Wall Street Journal correspondents) explain how African farmers were left behind by the Green Revolution.

The book recounts efforts to increase yields for Ethiopian farmers in the early 2000’s, leading to a bountiful crop. But unlike previous successes in Central America and Asia, even that good crop paradoxically led to another famine.

First, there was no infrastructure to store or transport the surplus crop to other parts of the country, so it all came on the market in the same place at the same time. Predictably, prices crashed below the cost of production.

Second, there were no commodities markets to allow farmers to lock in prices for the next season, and third, there were no government subsidies to provide price supports. This all left the farmers both unable and unwilling to plant nearly as much the next year, which just happened to have a drought. Cue severe food shortage and calls for food aid.

But it gets worse. The food aid undermined what was left of the fragile market. The free-marketer in me wanted to believe the power of market incentives must have been inspired somebody in the country to try to transport surplus grain to make a profit. A few pages later, I learned that indeed some traders did, but they were met by “free” food aid that made their efforts worthless. There were even traders trying to store up extra grain to sell later at higher prices, but American food trucks rolled right past their storehouses, cornering the market.

It would be sad enough if the food aid was coming from well-intentioned charities. It would be even worse if it was coming from well-intentioned government programs. But what makes it so incredibly tragic is that the food aid essentially comes from the American farm lobby that needs the government to buy up a good chunk of their product, which it then tries to give away to other countries as good-looking aid.

Part of this story could be used to support government involvement in building infrastructure to help goods move or even subsidizing farmers to keep production high enough in the face of low prices to avoid famine. But the irony is that even any theoretically perfect attempt by the Ethiopian government to improve their country’s agriculture would have been completely undermined by the reality of the American government’s extravagant subsidies to its own farmers. The deeper irony is that these extravagant subsidies go to farmers who are generally staunchly conservative and presumably opposed to other farms of welfare.

Congress is currently working on a new farm bill, which is apparently supposed to have a new Five Year Plan for subsidies and price supports and other goodies. I don’t even know what’s up for debate on those aspects because the only news I can find about the bill involves disagreements about cuts to the food stamp program. Now I have few qualms about cutting food stamp benefits; even the recently reduced-from-a-temporary-increase maximums ($347 for 2) are higher than my wife and I spend on food in an average month. And I find the ubiquitous anecdotes of fraud more convincing than pat reassurances that such fraud is rare and taken care of.

But at least that welfare goes to people who are generally poor and only has costs in money and perhaps poor incentives. The welfare to farmers involves hundreds of thousands of dollars in transfers to already-wealthy farmers that essentially get the government to pay them to haphazardly dump their wares on disrupted foreign markets, exacerbating famines and almost certainly killing many people.

I wrote my Congressman to express my disapproval of such policies, although I don’t know if the farmer part of the bills are even up in the air at this point. I can even see an argument for some farmer subsidies, although I suspect Ethiopia might succeed just fine without them if it had the roads and the commodities markets to help. (In a cruel twist of fate, Enough explains how developed countries pressure developing countries to refrain from using such subsidies anyway, in spite of – or more likely, because of – the fact that they themselves are using far more extravagant subsidies on their own farmers, who understandably don’t like the competition.)

So I think it’s perfectly reasonable for conservatives to highlight the recent doubling of food stamp rolls for the poor and all of the problems that entails, but my patience grows thin for any who do not also highlight the welfare for their own farmers that is quite literally killing even poorer people on the other side of the world.

In the wake of the latest United States government shutdown, the punditry is letting loose with all manner of pet theories regarding why our politics seem so dysfunctional these days. Some blame the rise of the Internet and/or ideological media for inducing “epistemological closure,” (i.e. being able to only get news that reinforces your existing biases). Predictably, conservatives blame socialistic Obama policies for undermining the longstanding fabric of our country and liberals blame obstructionist white Tea Partiers for refusing to let go of the control they think they’ve always had.

One interesting theory comes from George Friedman, who blames the decline of corrupt party bosses for the rise in ideological candidates. My own pet theory is that the United States is simply becoming – if I may uncleverly adapt an overused meme – Too Big To Govern.

Friedman thinks Presidents from the Wilson to Kennedy era were more “impressive” than the Carter to Obama era. I think his piece has a bit of “narrative fallacy” (see Taleb’s Black Swan and then Silver’s The Signal And The Noise), which means looking for tidy, simple explanations of complex events, though he may well be explaining an important and overlooked factor.

I wonder, though, if the common thread between all the Presidents listed is that they all pretty much oversaw a century of growth in both government power and, within that, a growth in consolidated power under the executive branch. I wonder how that effects the ideological interests of different yet increasingly larger groups who increasingly have more at stake (or at least think they have more at stake) in what the government does.

People will invariably bring up European countries which often have the appearance of similar levels of “big government,” but they are generally done at smaller scales with populations more equivalent in size to US states – and often more homogenous too. The United States may be unique in trying to increasingly manage the interests of 300 million people through one centralized and increasingly powerful yet also democratic government. Is it any wonder things are starting to get a bit touchy?

Of course, I could simply be wrong. Can you point to any examples of a larger population managed democratically (technically democratic republic yeah yeah blah blah), and by so active a government? The Soviet Union was certainly a “Bigger” government, but it had no democracy. And modern China doesn’t have one yet. The European Union has about 500 million people, but its political influence is neither as broad or deep as the US government’s upon its own citizens. What if we’re in uncharted territory here? What if democracy simply can’t handle this much activity at this large a scale?

Even if only one-third of America is truly against Obamacare, that’s still about one hundred million people having severe disagreements with another one or two hundred million people. Presumably one-third of our leaders have always had the political ability to, say, shut down the government like this… why is it only becoming so apparent now?

As populations grow and as government does more, what if we now have unprecedented levels of disagreement about what the government does? As Friedman notes, we’re nowhere near Civil-War-level acrimony, so maybe things aren’t so unprecedented after all, but one can’t help but wonder if we’re at least taking tiny steps in that direction. (I’m at least updating my Bayesian priors on expecting somebody to attempt secession from, say, 1% to 2%.)

Overall, this is a pessimistic view that I don’t want to hold, and I welcome any rebuttals. I still believe democracy is “the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried,” and I want to believe it’s quite a bit better than the others, too.

It’s easy to say that we could make it work if it just wasn’t for those other guys (i.e. Tea Party obstructionists), but of course you can always make democracy work if you eliminate the people who don’t think like you. The United States has more or less successfully handled diverse viewpoints for a couple hundred years, and the question is whether or not it can continue to do so. Maybe reforms like Congressional term limits, campaign finance limits, or proportional representation can smooth things along for a couple hundred more million citizens. Maybe it can only keep working at this level if the government doesn’t try to do so much. Maybe the current levels of dysfunction and polarization aren’t really so historically unprecedented. Maybe it will keep working anyway. But maybe we’re simply becoming Too Big To Govern.

I’ve been reading some Hayek lately, specifically The Constitution of Liberty, in which Hayek talks about freedom/liberty and what exactly those words mean and why they are so desirable for society.

Hayek believes we should all be “free from coercion.” He is very much concerned with men being able to choose freely between available opportunities and not very concerned at all about what opportunities are available to each one; I feel like a non-libertarian response would involve asserting some equivalence between the two, but I haven’t taken the time to explore that line of thought.

Hayek’s main points, however, rest on the concept of distributed knowledge, or the idea that no individuals have enough knowledge to reliably make coercive decisions that improve the lives of others.

I find these arguments very appealing. It could be argued that, today, computers and the Internet help with the knowledge problem to a useful degree, and I concede there are many instances of coercion that at least appear to have improved lives – such as the airplane smoking ban currently being attributed to the late New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg (due to externalities, that’s something I’m at least ambivalent about).

But I think it’s much easier to find examples of allegedly knowledge-based intervention backfiring and causing unintended consequences, like the ethanol boondoggle, or California’s high speed rail boondoggle, or NYC’s taxicab mess, or the entire War on Drugs, or, oh, almost any time the government has tried to implement price ceilings which led to shortages of the very goods they were trying to make more available.

Incidentally, this is all partially related to why I’m so interested in all the data around climate change. For quite a few years the Smart People have been extremely confident in their predictions about the globe getting warmer and the weather getting worse, but enough time has gone by that I believe we are starting to see results that are beginning to deviate from their earlier oh-so-confident predictions.

Maybe they didn’t have as much knowledge about the way the world works as they thought they did. Maybe the interactions of the Sun and Earth and atmosphere and carbon dioxide and everything else are even less well understood than the reactions of people to artificially suppressed prices.

If true, it would be no surprise to Hayek.

I read a book by Callum Roberts called The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. I read it because I’m not afraid of facts that might support positions I oppose, even though it’s basically an environmentalist tome about how we’re destroying the ocean through overfishing, climate change, chemical pollution, plastic dumping, habitat destruction, invasive species, noisy ships, and a few other things I don’t remember. It’s almost enough to make you wonder how the ocean is still around, tempting you to believe in what the theologians call “common grace.”

These things don’t “keep me up at night” or “scare the pants off me” like they do the author, partly because I suspect some of those bad things cancel out, partly because I have more faith in the general size and resilience of the ocean, and partly because I have more faith in the ability of markets to respond to incentives to reverse and preserve it (and partly I suppose because of more faith in common grace).

But I found the chapter on overfishing very interesting. I had stumbled on info about overfishing in the past, but I had never seen the case presented so starkly and fully. Apparently we’ve been removing fish from the ocean so much faster than they’re being replaced that it’s starting to show pretty badly; despite all the huge advances in technology and productivity in the last hundred-plus years we’re catching far fewer numbers of a whole bunch of species simply because there’s so few of them left.

To catch the most fish in the long run, you should catch at a rate no quicker than the fish are replenished. Even though it might be easy to catch twice as many fish in one year, if you fish at that rate for too long, you are “depleting” the “fish stocks.” There won’t be as many fish left to reproduce next year, and you’ll have fewer fish to catch in the future – killing the proverbial goose that laid the golden egg.

But even if you’re smart enough to leave some easy fish alone this year as an investment that will pay off later, you don’t own the ocean, and you can’t really stop someone else from coming along to take extra fish now for greater short-term profits – even though it diminishes the long-term profits for everyone who’s trying to save those short-term profits for later.

This is a sort of market failure that economists call the “tragedy of the commons,” and I think it’s a reasonable case for some sort of government regulation – perhaps in the form of limits on how many fish are caught each year. There are apparently cases of governments doing that sort of thing and seeing some sorts of successes.

Part of the problem is that no one really owns the ocean, which is hard to do anyway because the water’s always moving, so it’s harder to have the property rights that give people the incentive to consider long-term profits over short-term profits. Callum’s book does mention some government efforts to establish private ownership in the fishing industry, and he hinted at its success, though he expressed skepticism at its broader potential. (I’m a little more biased to be optimistic that it could work quite well, but I doubt it’s a workable solution for the whole ocean.)

I can imagine a self-correcting fish market that would not require government intervention. As depleted fish get harder to find (it’s very hard to kill off all of them), their price goes up until demand drops, allowing the stocks to be replenished until they are plentiful enough to be caught again at a lower price. But the market has produced innovations that allow us to keep finding fish faster than price signals affect their demand, so if self-correction has potential, it hasn’t kicked in yet; supposedly we’ve already “reached a point where there are, by weight, more ships in the ocean than fish.”

There is also potential in private fishing in fish ponds on land, and I could imagine prices favoring them once fish finally get too hard to find in the ocean. But Callum claims that most of these fish are fed quite inefficiently from smaller fish from the ocean, so that’s not really any more sustainable. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the industry figures out how to keep the entire food chain in the ponds.

In short, I see a lot of potential ways for the market to keep fish around even if we keep taking them out of the ocean at what is currently unsustainable levels. But due to what seems to be very obvious negative externalities, I also don’t have a problem with governments trying to help things along with quotas, even as I expect the quotas to often be affected by industry lobbying (and they’d be incorrect due to lack of knowledge anyway even without the lobbyists).

But as far as government regulations go, I don’t think the unintended consequences of fish quotas can get that bad. If they’re set too high (as Callum believes some certainly are), then it won’t be any worse than not having any at all. If they’re set too low, the fish stocks would just replenish so much that they could be adjusted later – it’s only temporarily adding to the public good. Yes, the government is limiting short-term profits, but since the fishers don’t own the fish anyway, that’s not much of an intrusion into personal liberties.

I’m probably missing some things from both sides, and I’m definitely no expert on fish, but these are my thoughts after reading that book and thinking a bit about it.