Category: Uncategorized

You’re Still Looking for Your Keys Under the Streetlight

Emmett Shear went on the Clearer Thinking podcast and discussed effective altruism among other things. We can split up his points into things I agree with and things that seem incorrect. I’ll do this using Scott Alexander’s Effective Altruism As A Tower of Assumptions for some landmarks. The tower in question:

Scott’s note: “Not intended to be canonical; realistically it would be more of a tree or flowchart than a tower.”

Shear:

…what people want is a place to put money so they can buy indulgences, so they can feel less guilty. And unfortunately, that’s not a thing that exists. No one is printing indulgences that you can just just give money here and you have done your part. That’s, unfortunately, just not how it works. Do your best. Do enough. That’s good. I love that Giving What We Can pledge. I think that’s a hugely beneficial idea like, “Hey, what if we all just took 10% and we said that was enough?” That would actually be way more than people give today. And it would also be enough, I think, if we all did it. Then people could stop beating themselves up over not feeling guilty about not doing enough, which I think is acting from a fear of “I am not good enough.” That’s one of the most dangerous things you can do.

First of all, as always, if you’re critiquing EA, that means you’re doing effective altruism. You’ve agreed that there are multiple ways to do good in the world, and you think some are better than others. You’re already at the base of the tower. Next, Shear agrees donating 10% of your income is good. Giving What We Can seems pretty squarely inside EA. It’s possible Shear doesn’t realize that GWWC is a “…public commitment to give a percentage of your income or wealth to organisations that can most effectively help others“. So either Shear is endorsing effective giving or he didn’t realize what it was, and he’s making a critique about a group of ideas he has apparently little understanding of (I think it’s this).

The part of indulgences makes no sense to me. Perhaps I’m an outlier. I’m a big tent libertarian as well as a big tent EA, so I have zero guilt about the money I make. I like the free enterprise system, and I think it makes the world better. I tend to think EAs are much more accepting of market benefits than other groups in the NGO space which can skew very left-wing, but maybe other EAs actually feel guilty about making money. If they do, I agree with Shear that the point of EA isn’t to make you feel less guilty.

However, I think the point of EA is really obviously not that! Since EA was created out a specific problem actual people like Dustin Moskovitz, Holden Karnofsky, and Elie Hasenfeld actually had which was:

  • I’ve got a ton of money
  • I’d like it to donate it in ways that use the money well, but
  • There’s no data on which charities actually accomplish good things

Indulgences have nothing to do with it. Next, let’s move up the tower to cause prioritizations:

The malaria bed nets thing is the classic like, drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight…It’s a little unfair. There are keys to be found underneath the spotlight of quantifiable, measurable impact. And it is good work to go do that. But like most good that can be done in the world, unfortunately, is not easily measurable by randomized controlled trial or highly measurable, highly quantified, very trustworthy impact statements. To the degree we find good to be done on those, we should fund that stuff.

…You’re reducing the variance on your giving by insisting on high measurability, because you know for sure you’re having this impact. It’s not that doing that kind of low variance giving is bad, it’s just, obviously, the highest impact stuff is going to be more leveraged than that. And it’s also going to be impossible to predict, probably non-repeatable a lot of the time, and so, sure fund the fucking bednets. But, that’s not going to be THE answer. It’s just AN answer.

Obviously Shear is going off the cuff, but it’s clear he’s never heard of Open Philanthropy’s post on Hits Based Giving which is like 8 years old at this point. GiveWell has a fund explicitly to incubate new ideas that haven’t be proven yet. It’s well known that not every opportunity is going to fit into a rigorous RCT scenario. A major benefit of GiveWell is to provide a better baseline compared to what most people donate to. GiveWell really does save more lives than donating to your college. If Emmett thinks donating to Yale (his alma mater) is better, he should make that case!

But sure, I agree that if we gave $100 billion to GiveWell over the next 10 years and even if they knew exactly the most high impact thing to do with it, it’s not like all of humanity’s problems would be solved. There are a lot of very intractable political stability and institutional issues around the world, and bednets won’t necessarily solve that. But check where we are on the tower! GiveWell is there to be better than the generic charitable giving most people do, and I think it’s pretty good at that.

The conversation turns to x-risk, but this also misses a lot of work. OpenPhil gave money to the Institute for Progress which does all sorts of innovation policy work like immigration, biotechnology, and more. OpenPhil gives money to animal welfare, to land use reform work, and global health scientific research. To critique EAs for being too focused on measurable RCTs is just bonkers. But let’s talk about x-risk:

And I’d say on the other side of it, the “Oh, but isn’t it more important to go after nuclear risks and stuff like that, or AI risk or whatever?” More important is the problem. That idea that you can rank all the things by importance and that you could know, in a global sense, which of these things is most important to work on, like what is most important for you to do is contextual to you. It’s driven by where you will be able to have the best impact, which is partly about the problem, but also partly about you, and where you live, and what you know, and what you’re connected to. And if you care about one of these, you think you have an inclination that there’s a big risk over there, learning more about that and growing in that direction might be a good idea.

But, the world is full of unknowns. To think that you’ll have THE correct answer is like, “No, you won’t. You’ll only not know THE correct answer, you won’t even have a full ranking. You’ll just have a bunch of ideas of stuff where your estimates all overlap each other and have high variance… Or how you, in order to get out of analysis paralysis, insist to yourself, “We have found the correct answer: AI x-risk is the most important thing. That is all I’ll devote my life to because nothing else is nearly as important because that’s the thing.” And like, maybe, maybe not. How do you know? You don’t know. You can’t possibly know, because the world is complicated.

As we’ve said earlier, if you’re making a critique of EA, then you’re already admitting that some causes might be better than others. Shear is trying to get around this, by dismissing all prioritization as impossible. It contradicts what he said about bednets, where the argument that the highest impact work is not going to be provable under an RCT regime, but I think we can charitably restate his argument thusly: charitable impact is like a Hayekian information problem where the relevant information is scattered with everyone having specialized knowledge. In this world, you can’t standardize impact because it’s unique to each person.

Again, if Emmett wants to argue that Yale donations are as good as GiveWell, he should do that! I’m not convinced. But let’s talk about individual advice. Does EA just tell everyone to focus on AI only all the time? No, of course not. Shear is just repeating what effective altruists already do as if it’s some fundamental demolition of their core beliefs. 80000 Hours doesn’t tell everyone to go into AI risk. Most EA money doesn’t go towards AI x-risk. The point is that this wasn’t something people worried about at all until effective altruists started talking about it before AI blew up with this big boom after the transformers paper.

And moreover, the EA record here on cause prioritization is really good! It turns out prioritization is possible after all! There’s been a lot of interest in risks from pandemics for a long time. EAs weren’t the only ones talking about it (Bill Gates talk from 2014). But EAs noted this was an important and neglected area before COVID-19 killed millions of people. We need more people being ahead of the curve like this, and we should see who has a good track record of working on problems so that we have solutions on hand when the problems become real.

To Emmett’s credit, he later goes on to say that an AI which makes it easier to build a better AI could in fact be “end-of-the-world dangerous”. But it strikes me as strange to believe AI could end the world and also that it’s impossible to prioritize some resources there.

If there’s a single EA concept that it’s clear Emmett Shear doesn’t understand, it’s “neglectedness”. Doing something good is nice. Doing something good, that no one else has thought of yet, where there’s lots of low-hanging fruit and high payoff: that’s superb.

…What’s the most highly measurable impact that I can have? But you know, the charitable work I’ve done that probably had the biggest impact in terms of leveraged impact has always been opportunistic. There’s a person in a place, and I know because of who I am and who they are that I can trust them and this is a unique opportunity, and I have an asymmetric information advantage. And I am going to act fast with less oversight and give them money to make it happen more quickly. And that’s not replicable. I can’t give that to you as another opportunity to go do because most high impact things don’t look that way…

This sounds plausible until you think about what effective altruists have already done. When Elie and Holden formed GiveWell there was no repeatable, replicable way to give money to save the most lives per dollar. Imagine if they had had this attitude when starting out. They would have thrown up their hands and said “welp, guess we’ll go home and donate our money to Yale!” Instead they built from scratch an organization that tried to understand what global health charities actually did and whether they were helpful. And in 2022 GiveWell raised $600 million and directed it towards places where they expect they can save a life per $5000. Things aren’t replicable and scalable until you recreate the world to make it so. You’d think a Silicon Valley CEO would know better!

Maybe one of the highest impact things you could have done was to invest money in YouTube because YouTube has created this massive amount of impact in terms of people’s ability to learn new skills or whatever. Or donate money to Wikipedia earlier or something. But that’s not replicable. Once it’s done, it’s done. You need to figure out the next thing…

There’s a lot to say here. There’s a big difference between market transactions, which pay for themselves, and charitable work which doesn’t. It’s completely reasonable to ask if there are situations where the free market won’t solve a problem, but altruistic giving could, so I don’t think the YouTube analogy makes any sense.

But setting that aside, I need to shout “NEGLECTEDNESS” loudly into the void until someone hears me. There is no world in which the internet exists, but there’s not a major video focused social media site. For God’s sake, when Google bought YouTube, they already had their own video hosting site in Google Video. If Google had cancelled that project, I’m 100% sure Facebook would have grabbed the free money, as they tried to create a video hosting platform when YouTube already existed. Your investment in YouTube is literally worthless when it comes to altruistic impact, because there’s a vibrant market searching for business opportunities in the space. Distributing bednets that would never have been distributed otherwise actually makes a difference!

And of course, I totally endorse acting fast with less oversight. Fast Grants was good! ACX grants are good! I think this counts as EA, but to the extent that other people don’t, I will agree with Shear on the Silicon Valley mindset of variance and experimentation. I just think effective altruism does this already.

Atop the Tower

Alright, so we’re at the top of the tower. Maybe there are EA orgs which should be criticized more explicitly. Could be. I think the ones I brought up here like GiveWell, OpenPhil, and 80000 Hours are actually already doing the stuff Emmett Shear says they should be doing. And there’s individual projects and focus areas that I don’t actually think are very impactful, but if Shear thinks there are higher impact specific projects, he doesn’t do a good job of conveying that.

I also actually think there probably are some big blind spots in EA as a whole. EA isn’t left-wing, but it’s a lot more left-leaning that I am. I suspect there are real conservative critiques that EA hasn’t internalized. I’m sure there are traditional values that are doing loadbearing work we don’t realize, and since EA is pretty explicitly anti most conservative values, I suspect that could result in some poor outcomes in ways that are hard to predict. It’s a hard problem and I wish someone with more time could think about it more deeply.

But what frustrates me to no end is that EA critics never seem to bring up good points. They are often just like Emmett Shear’s: they criticize a strawman that doesn’t exist, they don’t understand that EA invests in a broad array of cause areas, and they bring up points that EAs have been discussing for years as if they were novel. They say the effective altruists are looking for their keys under a streetlight, because they’ve never bothered to move out from their own streetlights.

Strongman Politics

I’ve discussed extensively the policy choices facing Americans in the 2020 presidential election and why I think Joe Biden’s policies would result in an improved world. However, I believe the best critique of Donald Trump’s candidacy doesn’t just dryly compare policy, but also takes into account all the “extracurriculars” that come with him.

As a warning, this post will be more partisan than other things I’ve written. I’d like to catalog some of the outrageous things Trump has done or said because there is a nebulous concern with Trump’s presidency that pure policy discussions can’t convey. Again, I’ll be aiming towards a center-right audience because that’s who I need to convince, but I also can’t imagine I’ll be saying anything new; Trump is obnoxious, self-serving, and corrupt and this is well known. I admit, I’m not sure why that knowledge hasn’t convinced conservatives to dump Trump, but generally speaking I think it’s true that conservatives have stuck with the president. Thus, in my last post, I mostly ignored these more outrageous discussions in favor of more dry policy comparisons. Nonetheless, for my own sanity, I think it’s worth reiterating just a small fraction of what the president has done over the last four years. Maybe putting it all in one place will prove more convincing than hearing constant headlines for years.

Before I get to Trump, I should point out that the Left has its own nebulous darkness on the horizon. Nothing I say here should be construed to downplay that threat. Manifestations of these bad ideas on the Left include broad attacks on the culture of open discourse and free speech, advancement of racism and segregation, support for radical violence, and aggrandizement of proven failed policies of state control of the means of production.

The reason for my focus in this essay on Donald Trump despite these concerns about the Left is twofold. One is that Donald Trump is tied directly to the worst ideas on the Right. Joe Biden is not similarly bound to the above enumerated problems. Secondly, there is a strong pushback on the Left against these more radical ideas. For example, countervailing groups on the Left established the Neoliberal Project, wrote the Letter on Justice and Open Debate in Harper’s Magazine this year, and most directly, decisively elected Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders in the primary.

On the Right however, conservatism has collapsed in the face of Trumpism. The Republican Party decided to forego writing a party platform this year in favor of stating they will “enthusiastically support the President’s America First agenda”. Meanwhile the Republican National Committee, the national organization that is responsible for electing Republican candidates up and down the ballot, merged its fundraising and spending with Trump’s reelection campaign, an unprecedented move reflecting Trump’s complete domination of the political Right.

Polarization

One of the first things that comes to mind about President Trump is his unpresidential behavior. He constantly interrupted Joe Biden during the first presidential debate, and Chris Wallace entered into several verbal altercations with the president, loudly pointing out that he had agreed to these rules he was constantly breaking. He spends press conferences with foreign leaders complaining about his own petty grievances instead of actually discussing the visit. He lies constantly and retweets conspiracy theories. Does any of this matter?

I would argue that one result is continued pressure on political polarization. At the same debate, Trump was asked to condemn white supremacy and seemed unwilling to denounce anyone who might support him. Joe Biden, on the other hand easily dealt with the issue by broadly condemning violence in any form, something he has done continually since May. Just after the debate, Trump criticized Representative Ilhan Omar, not for policy disagreements, but mostly based on where she was born despite her being an American citizen: “She’s telling us how to run our country. How did you do where you came from? How’s your country doing?” Again, this pushes us further from actual policy discussions, discussions which we should be having.

In fact, last year, Donald Trump told several sitting congresswomen that they ought to “go back” to their countries and fix them before telling “us” how to run “our” country. I have been concerned with the overzealous accusations of racism coming from leftists, but despite their misuse of the accusation, prejudice is still wrong. Attacking people for qualities they do not control, like where they were born, rather than engaging with their ideas is immoral and weak. In fact, three of the representatives were born in the United States, and the last came to America when she was 12. But that doesn’t matter, these are American citizens, elected to represent other American citizens, and it’s disturbing that the president does not identify them as Americans because of what they look like.

This is polarizing and it is bad for our country. The policies and arguments put forward by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar are often terrible, and those policies ought to opposed. But when the president attacks them for where they were born or what they look like, it appears that the choices are bad socialist ideas or bigotry, which alienates Americans and forces a false choice.

I won’t go into more details on other incidents, but it’s worth noting the president’s polarizing behavior here isn’t unique. He said people in the suburbs won’t have “low income housing” built in their neighborhoods. He said John McCain was only a war hero because he got captured and he likes “people who weren’t captured”. He made no attempt to deny the QAnon conspiracy theory when asked about it and instead said he appreciated that they like him, and Trump continued to advocate for hydrochloroquine as a COVID treatment months after the FDA had cancelled clinical trials because of its ineffectiveness.

Trump’s polarizing actions should disqualify him from the presidency. We need to focus on open discussion and debate, not increasing tribalism. Trump is incapable of moving the country in that direction.

Authoritarianism

Donald Trump has authoritarian tendencies. He has praised Kim Jong-un, he’s commended Xi Jinping installing himself as Chinese leader for life, and he’s even publicly sided with Vladimir Putin over American intelligence over whether there was Russian intelligence operations during the 2016 election. Focusing on specific actions, Trump cleared peaceful protesters outside the White House with pepper spray and police in riot gear in order to get an absurd photo op of him holding a Bible outside a church. Police attacked an Australian journalist live on TV. He also attempted to fire Bob Mueller as special counsel when he was being investigated, but White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign and he backed down. Recently, Trump has urged Attorney General Bill Barr to go after his political enemies with the Justice Department.

Trump also has a poor relationship with democratic elections. He has repeatedly sought to undermine his own election in 2016 (the election he won!) claiming, without evidence as usual, that millions of fraudulent votes were cast. Trump established a commission to look into this fraud, which seemingly dissolved without issuing a report or finding any evidence. Looking ahead, Trump has called for the 2020 election to be delayed, and when asked about the election, he has repeatedly refused to say he will accept the results. Note Biden had no problems answering Chris Wallace’s softball question, stating he would wait to declare victory until the election was certified and would concede if he lost. This isn’t particularly difficult or controversial, unless you are Donald Trump! Apparently the rule of law simply does not apply to him. Before and since the debate, Trump has continued to undermine the legitimacy of the election and voting by mail in ballots, even though many states have been voting by mail for years. Given the circumstances of the pandemic and logistical challenges of rapidly expanding mail in voting, Trump ought to be taking steps to make sure the election is legitimate and transparent, yet he has completely failed to do so.

Refusing to accept the principles of the rule of law, peaceful transfers of power, and election legitimacy ought to disqualify Trump from the ballots of voters. These are authoritarian strongman tactics, and they ought to be harshly condemned.

Corruption

It’s hard to distinguish Trump’s corruption from his authoritarian tendencies. Unlike staunchly ideological leaders who might wield state power and abridge the rights of their citizens in the name of communism or ethnic nationalism, Trump seems more comfortable with simply wielding state power for his own personal gain. Regardless of where its categorized, Trump’s administration is deeply corrupt.

Trump has reserved his pardon power almost exclusively for his political allies. Roger Stone was pardoned after lying to investigators to cover for Trump (although his sentence was excessive). Trump also pardoned former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, one of the most abusive law enforcement officers in the country, who was in prison after ignoring many court orders about his inhuman treatment of inmates. Arpaio had endorsed Trump in 2016. Trump has also rewarded his family members with high-ranking offices in the West Wing. On the other hand, Trump fired Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Gordon Sondland after he was acquitted from impeachment charges in February. Both testified against the president.

Speaking of impeachment, Trump was impeached for abusing his office. On a 2019 official diplomatic call, Donald Trump asked the president of Ukraine to look into a wild conspiracy theory about a company in Ukraine having a copy of Hillary Clinton’s email server. Trump also asked the president to look into Joe Biden, his political rival, for wrongdoing. At the same time, foreign aid appropriated by Congress had been held up, according to Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, specifically to put pressure on Ukraine to investigate this email server. Trump’s EU ambassador Gordon Sondlond also testified that a White House visit was offered to Ukraine in exchange for announcing an investigation into the Bidens, and apparently Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton were all aware. The Trump administration however, blocked all three from testifying.

I know that this became a highly political issue and Trump’s senate trial declined to hear any witnesses along party lines, but I have yet to hear any reason to excuse the president’s behavior. Trump’s own hand picked staff all agree that the president used the office of the president to achieve these self-serving political goals which had nothing to do with the the good of the country.

This is wrong, and this is corrupt. The president cannot use the powerful mechanisms of the state for his own personal ends; we must be a nation of laws where authority is strictly bound to rules that apply to all. When the Senate declined to even hear witnesses to discuss the obvious crimes that Trump had committed, they said this ought to be left up to the electorate. The results of this election ought to reflect our opinion of whether the president is above the law.

Incompetence

Trump isn’t great at accomplishing the things he actually wants to accomplish. Trump has over and over again apparently appointed terrible people to work for him who he is then forced to fire. Trump fired Michael Flynn when indicted for lying to the FBI, H.R. McMaster by tweet, Anthony Scaramucci after 10 days, former RNC chair Reince Priebus and retired General John Kelly as chiefs of staff, Omoraosa Manigault from the Public Liaison Office, and Steve Bannon as chief strategist. Gary Cohn resigned because of Trump’s protectionist policies, and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned in protest of Trump’s foreign policy. Tom Price was forced to resign as HHS Secretary after criticism of his use of private charters and military aircraft for travel, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielson was forced to resign when she didn’t stop accepting asylum seekers, Rex Tillerson was fired as Secretary of State after clashing with Trump’s policies for months, and Jeff Sessions was repeatedly abused by President Trump on Twitter for refusing to intervene in the special counsel investigation into Russian interference until Sessions resigned. Such absolute mayhem does not reflect well on the President’s ability to find the “best” people.

Consequently, despite having a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate, Trump was unable to deliver on major pieces of policy like fixing Obamacare or cutting the deficit. Also, we should have a brief reminder of the constant bizarre behavior by the president these past four years. He didn’t have a single policy he could promise when Sean Hannity asked what his second term goals would be. He has also tweeted a conspiracy theory about TV personality Joe Scarborough being involved in a murder in 2001, and most recently that Obama had had Seal Team Six murdered. These do not seem like the actions of a competent leader. Regardless of all this chaos, the economy did fairly well until the biggest story of incompetence happened: COVID-19. Trump campaigned on being a good manager and private sector CEO. I’ve expressed in the past that I didn’t think management skills mattered much in politics compared to policy, but every now and then there’s a crisis that needs managing. We got one this year and Trump has abjectly failed.

200,000 Americans are dead directly from the pandemic and the CDC estimates 250k in excess mortality since February. Trump lied to Americans about what he knew about the virus and played it down instead of sounding the alarm. Trump’s CDC and FDA had major failures that delayed testing. Then, in the summer once cases had finally started to drop, instead of trying to continue that trend, he held and has continued to hold crowded rallies. He mocked people for wearing masks, and most importantly, claimed we only had rising case numbers because of better testing. Later, in August, Trump retweeted a claim that COVID had only killed 9,000 Americans. In an Axios interview in July, Trump literally couldn’t understand the reporter talking to him about rising U.S. deaths, simply declaring that you couldn’t use that metric. Not to mention, the White House held an event in the Rose Garden to promote Amy Coney Barrett as their new Supreme Court nominee without good precautions, infecting several members of the Senate Judiciary Committee as well as the President himself. On Saturday, October 10, just two weeks later, a large rally was held on the White House lawn.

The level of incompetence here and the cost in human lives is simply unspeakable.

Future of Conservatism

Finally, returning to appeal more directly conservatives, the American Right is at a fork in the road. The Cold War anti-communist coalition of social conservatives, libertarians, business interests, and nationalists has completely fallen apart. This process has been long in the works, but the schism accelerated in the 2016 election, and now conservatives can choose to be on the side of individual liberty or authoritarianism.

Donald Trump has pulled the Republican Party towards authoritarian nationalism. He abhors the rule of law and the international liberal order, and he undermines the ideas of peaceful transitions of power or a separation of public and personal interest. The GOP party platform literally doesn’t exist. But these authoritarian ideas don’t stem from Trump alone; there are others working to maintain these ideas and platforms into the future, and it has resulted in some disturbing events. Right wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer was praised by Trump and even endorsed by Representative Matt Gaetz despite her association with InfoWars as well as her openly wishing violence upon immigrants.

On the intellectual side, Adrian Vermuele argues in The Atlantic that conservative legal theory ought not to focus on originalism, but instead read morality into the law along with respect for authority and the importance of social hierarchies since “…the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself.” This has long been a strain in conservative thought, but usually, at least in countries like the U.S. and U.K., conservative defense of institutions has often included individual rights and the market.

The Economist notes that what’s remarkable about Trump’s insurgent brand of “conservatism” is a complete trashing of institutions across the spectrum. The message has been to “beat” the Left at any cost, regardless of Trump’s flagrant disinterest of freedom or morality. I’m not here to say Adrian Vermuele is the future of conservatism, but rather that if the intellectual Right is abandoning individual liberty and limited government under Trump, there are people with actual bad ideas waiting to fill the vacuum. Rejecting Trump is a way to avoid going down that path.

And the stakes are high. The political Left, as I mentioned earlier, is undergoing some disturbing trends. Robert Tracinski writes in The Bulwark that if we take the threat of the Left seriously, this election may be the Anti-Flight 93 Election; it’s the last chance to kick out Trump and get the political Right’s house in order before the leftists come knocking. Now is the time to do this when the cost is relatively low with “sleepy” Joe Biden. We need the alternative to socialism to be a vibrant communicator who can articulate the importance of the rule of law and the free enterprise system; if we are stuck with a self-absorbed authoritarian strongman with no ideology or understanding of economics, the socialists will be ascendant. And moreover, a loss for Biden would be a signal to the radical Left that appeals to the middle are dead; a convincing Biden victory is a way for more moderate parts of the Democratic party to muscle out the Bernie bros.

Finally, I’m not alone in this thought. Conservative columnist George Will, former National Review writer David French, and former editor at National Review Jonah Goldberg are all prominent right wing thinkers who oppose Trump despite being staunchly opposed to the Left. I doubt they’ll vote for Biden, but they definitely won’t be voting for the president. The only path forward for a strong American Right is to reject Donald Trump.

Photo: White House, public domain image.

Electoral Reform

This is the first post in a series on the 2020 U.S. election. The next post will likely be on strategic voting in the U.S. electoral system. But before we get there, this is a short biennial plea to remind you that the current way the U.S. conducts elections and government is not the only way. While you may not always be able to reform the electoral system while you are voting from inside it, sometimes opportunities can arise, and it should always be in the back of our mind.

All democracies have drawbacks of some kind, but the American electoral system seems to have a lot of issues, many of them fixable. I’ve had a lot to say about the issue (and more, and even more).

I’m not just talking about the electoral college, although yes, that is a problem (some good critiques here). Our use of first past the post voting is the worst of all possible voting systems. I’ve often advocated Approval Voting but there are many good alternatives. Nonetheless, all voting systems will trend towards two parties under winner-take-all single member districts like we have today. We might consider multi-member districts, although discussion about such an idea is essentially nonexistent. Worse still, House districts are gerrymandered to create uncompetitive elections. Perhaps you’d hope other parties might be able to enter into uncompetitive elections, but ballot access laws place barriers to entry to alternative parties, sometimes costing thousands of dollars to obtain signatures just to get on the ballot, while requirements are waived for Republicans and Democrats. This also makes it generally more difficult for alternative voting coalitions to arise.

Unfortunately, many general election races are already decided before you even consider who to vote for in November. So perhaps we should focus on voting in primaries as the way to exercise your right to vote? Sadly, primaries themselves have many issues: they also use first past the post, they have an extremely narrow electorate, and their structure incentivizes ignoring moderates because they either can’t vote or are split between the primaries of the two parties. Even if you know of a competitive primary in a state where the general won’t be close (for example, Republicans usually win in the deep south, but the Republican primary might be competitive), in many states you have to either be registered with that party (or sometimes independent) in order to vote in that party’s primary. That often means you have to spend time changing your voter registration while predicting ahead of time whether the primary will be close. Each state is different, so this can be a major headache trying to cast an actual decisive vote. Note, that there are plenty of good primary reform ideas as well; St. Louis Approves is campaigning for a simple blanket primary with approval voting, with the top vote-getters going on the general election.

So far we’ve covered a lot of voting issues and possible reforms, but I want to also emphasize that there are important democratic channels outside of pure voting. For example, voting provides no feedback for specific legislation, so representatives don’t receive direct electoral feedback about how they are voting. A better way to express opinions here would be to call legislators’ offices and complain directly. Note legislators will probably only care if you are a voter, but not that you spent any actual time and effort to research who you were voting for. We’ll revisit that in the next post.

Legislative institutions also have major impact on how policy becomes law, and they have their own problems. Representatives in the House have very little ability to offer amendments on most legislation, which is instead crafted by House leadership from the top down. This discourages broadly popular coalitions in favor of partisan priorities. Moreover, Congress has continually ceded power to the president, which hypercharges the importance of the imperial presidency. This results in division and every presidential election being a winner-take-all high stakes competition. If Congress was powerful and moderate, much less would ride on every presidential election..

In conclusion: the median American voter this year will vote in a uncompetitive non-swing state in the electoral college, have an uncompetitive Senate and House election, and have uncompetitive state legislative elections about which they know very little. This is not great.

All hope is not lost though. Last time I wrote this type of post, I mentioned that Reform Fargo was trying to get an approval voting system implemented for Fargo municipal elections. That effort passed, and they are currently using approval voting, which already resulted in council members getting broad support instead of the tiny fractions of the vote they were getting before. This year, St. Louis is looking at implementing an approval voting system as well. Both of these efforts were helped by the Center for Election Science, which is one of the charities I suggested donating to in my end-of-year charity discussion.

While most of us won’t have a chance yet to vote to improve our election system, it does seem like improvements are possible. And look out for my next post discussing more in depth the electoral landscape we will be facing this year.

Picture credit: David Maiolo licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.

Artificial Intelligence and Existential Risk

The purpose of this post is to discuss existential risk, and why artificial intelligence is a relatively important aspect of existential risk to consider. There are other essays about the dangers of artificial intelligence that I will link to throughout and at the end of this post. This essay is a different approach that perhaps will appeal to someone who has not seriously considered artificial general intelligence as an issue requiring civilization’s attention.

This is a second edition of this post, updated in 2019, streamlining my essay from last year.

Impact as a Function of Resources

This blog is often concerned with political discussions, and political fights are divisive. They also tend to optimize for controversial topics and to overshadow more impactful policy debates. For example, abortion debates are pretty common, highly discussed political issues, but there have been almost no major policy changes since the Supreme Court’s decision 40 years ago.  The number of abortions in the US has declined since the 1980s, but it seems uncorrelated with any political movements or electoral victories. If there aren’t meaningful differences from different political outcomes, and if political effort, labor, and capital is limited, these debates seem to distract from other areas that could impact more people.

One way we might tackle the most impactful decisions we face is number of lives at stake. This immediately points to issues like cancer, suicide, and car accidents, with trade offs like average age (cancers tend to be later than car accidents) and tractability (cancer breakthroughs are rare and expensive, autonomous cars may be closer and relatively underinvested in).

There is also a question of timescale. Over short time periods, the concern about catastrophic events isn’t very high, but over time, the chances may arise to a level we should worry about, especially given the very high costs. For example, nuclear war has thankfully been rare, but even a single event could be quite deadly compared to most modern political concerns. Research into how and why nuclear wars have been rare and how to keep them that way might be an excellent use of resources to avoid a catastrophic event.

Existential Risk

So what about the extreme long term? What about not just catastrophic events, but existential risk, i.e. the death of all people on Earth? This blog’s philosophy takes consequentialism as a founding principle, and if you’re interested in the preceding questions of what policies are the most helpful, and where we should focus our efforts, you’ve already accepted that we should be concerned about the effects of our actions. The worst possible event, from a utilitarian perspective, would be the extinction of the human race, as it would not just kill all the people alive today (making it worse than a catastrophe that only kills half of all people), but also ends the potential descendants of all of humanity, possibly trillions of beings. If we have any concern for the the outcomes of our civilization, we must investigate sources of existential risk.

Restating to make things more intuitive: assume it’s the year 2300, and humans no longer exist in the universe. What is the most likely cause of our destruction, and then how likely is that cause? I’m selecting the year 2300 because it seems highly likely that humanity’s capabilities will be radically different at that point, but it is also far enough into the future that current political discussions or planning will likely not be thinking about many of these threats.

Wikipedia actually has a very good article on Global Catastrophic Risk, which is a broad category encompassing things that could seriously harm humanity on a global scale. Existential risks are a strict subset of those events, which could end humanity’s existence permanently. Wikipedia splits them up into natural and anthropogenic. First, let’s review the non-anthropogenic risks (natural climate change, megatsunamis, asteroid impacts, cosmic events, volcanism, extraterrestrial invasion, global pandemic) and see whether they qualify as existential.

Natural climate change and megatsunamis do not appear to be existential in nature. A megatsunami would be terrible for everyone living around the affected ocean, but humans on the other side of the earth would appear to be fine. Humans can also live in a variety of climates, so natural climate change would likely be slow enough for some humans to adapt, even if such an event causes increased geopolitical tensions.

Previous asteroid impacts have had very devastating impacts on Earth, notably the Cretaceous-Paleocene extinction event some 66 million years ago. This is a clear existential risk, but you need a pretty large asteroid to hit Earth, which is unusual. Larger asteroids can also be more easily identified from further away, giving humanity more time to do something (push it off path, blow it up, etc). Extinction events every few dozen million years are unlikely to occur in the next 300 years, and when adding the ability of humans to alter some asteroid trajectories, it seems highly unlikely that an asteroid impact will destroy humanity in the next 300 years.

Other cosmic events are also low probability. Gamma-ray bursts are pretty devastating, but they’d have to be close-by (with a few hundred light-years at least) as well as aimed directly at Earth. Neither of these is likely within the next million years.

Volcanism is also something that has the potential to be pretty bad, perhaps existential level (see Toba Catastrophe Theory), but it is also pretty rare.

An alien invasion could easily destroy all of humanity. Any species with the capability to travel across interstellar space with military ambitions would mean they are extremely technologically superior. However, we don’t see any evidence of a galactic alien civilization (see Fermi Paradox 1 & 2 and The Great Filter). Additionally, solving this problem seems somewhat intractable; on a cosmic timescale, an alien civilization that arose before our own would likely have preceded us by millennia, meaning the technology gap between us and them would be hopelessly and permanently large. We’ll leave the probability on this one with less certainty, but it’s unclear what we can do today to mitigate this risk.

A global pandemic seems pretty bad, certainly much more likely than anything else we’ve covered in the short term. This is also exacerbated by human actions creating a more interconnected globe. However, it is counterbalanced by the fact that no previous pandemic has ever been 100% lethal, and that modern medicine is much better than it was during the Black Plague. This is a big risk, but it may not be existential. Definitely on our shortlist of things-to-worry-about though.

Let’s talk about anthropogenic risks next: nuclear war, conventional war, anthropogenic climate change, agricultural crises, mineral exhaustion, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology.

A common worry is nuclear war. A massive nuclear exchange seems somewhat unlikely today, even if a regional disagreement in the Korean peninsula goes poorly in the worst possible way. It’s not common knowledge, but the “nuclear winter” scenario is still somewhat controversial, and I remain unconvinced that it poses a serious existential threat, although clearly a nuclear exchange would kill millions. Conventional war is also out as it seems strictly less dangerous than a nuclear war.

For similar reasons to nuclear winter, I’m not quite worried about global warming on purely existential terms. Global warming may be very expensive, it may cause widespread weather, climate, and ecological problems, but I don’t believe humanity will be entirely wiped out. I am open to corrections on this.

Agricultural crises and mineral exhaustion seem pretty catastrophic-but-not-existential as well. These would result in economic crises, but by definition, economic crises need humans to exist; if there are fewer humans, it seems that an agricultural crisis would no longer be an issue.

The remaining issues are largely technological in nature: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology, or technical experiments going wrong (like if the first nuclear test set the atmosphere on fire). These all seem fairly concerning.

Technological Existential Risk

Concern arises because technological progress means the likelihood that we will have these technologies grows over time, and, once they exist, we would expect their cost to decrease. Additionally, unlike other topics listed here, these could wipe out humanity permanently. For example, a bioengineered virus could be far more deadly than what would naturally occur, possibly resulting in a zero survival rate. The cost of DNA technology has steadily dropped, and so over time, we might expect the number of organizations or people who have the knowledge and funding to engineer deadly pathogens to increase. The more people who have this ability, the more likely that someone makes a mistake and releases a deadly virus that kills everyone. An additional issue is that it is quite likely that military research teams are right now researching bioweapons like an engineered pathogen. Incentives leading to the research of dangerous weapons like this are unlikely to change, even as DNA engineering improves, meaning the risk of this threat should grow over time.

Nanotechnology also has the potential to end all life on the planet, especially under a so-called “grey goo” scenario, where nanobots transform all the matter on Earth. This has a lot of similarities to a engineered pathogen, except the odds of any human developing some immunity no longer matter, and additionally all non-human life, indeed, all matter on Earth is also forfeit, not just the humans. Like biotechnology threats, we don’t have this technology yet, but it is an active area of research. We would also expect this risk to grow over time.

Artificial General Intelligence

Finally, artificial general intelligence contains some similar issues to the others: as technology advances, we have a higher chance of creating it; the more people who can create it, the more dangerous it is; once it is created, it could be deadly.

This post isn’t a thesis on why AI is or isn’t going to kill all humans. We made an assumption that we were looking exclusively at existential risk in the near future of humanity. Given that assumption, our question is why will AI be more likely to end humanity than anything else? Nonetheless, there are lingering questions as to whether AI is an actual “real” threat to humanity, or just an unrealistic sci-fi trope. I will outline three basic objections to AI being dangerous with three basic counterarguments.

The first objection is that AI itself will not be dangerous because it will be too stupid. Related points are that AI is too hard to create, or we can just unplug it if it has differing values from us. Counterarguments are that experts disagree on exactly when we can create human-level AI, but most agree that it’s plausible in the next hundred or couple hundred years (AI Timelines). It’s also true that we’ve seen improvements in AI ability to solve more general and more complex problems over time; AlphaZero learned how to play both Go and Chess better than any human without changes in its base code, YouTube uses algorithms to determine what content to recommend and what content to remove ads from, scanning through thousands of hours of video content every minute, GPT-2 was powerful enough to start to translate languages as a side effect of machine learning applied to word prediction. We should expect this trend to continue, just like with other technologies.

However, the difference between other technological global risks and AI is that the machine learning optimization algorithms could eventually be applied to machine learning itself. This is the concept of an “intelligence explosion”, where an AI uses its intelligence to design and create successively better versions of itself. Thus, it’s not just that an organization might make a dangerous technological breakthrough, like an engineered virus, but that once the breakthrough occurs, the AI would rapidly become uncontrollable and vastly more intelligent than us. The intelligence analogy being that a mouse isn’t just less smart than a human, it literally doesn’t comprehend that its environment can be so manipulated by humans that entire species depend on the actions of humans (i.e. conservation, rules about overhunting) for their own survival.

Another objection is that if an AI is actually as intelligent as we fear it could be, it wouldn’t make “stupid” mistakes like destroying all of humanity or consuming the planet’s resources, because that wouldn’t count as “intelligent”. The counterpoint is the Orthogonality Thesis. This simply states that an AI can have any goal. Intelligence and goals are orthogonal and independent. Moreover, an AI’s goal does not have to explicitly target humans as bad (e.g. “kill all the humans”) to cause us harm. For example, a goal to calculate all the digits of pi or solve the Riemann Hypothesis might require as much computing power as possible. As part of achieving this goal, a superintelligence would determine that it must manufacture computing equipment and maximize energy to its computation equipment. Humans use energy and are made of matter, so as a way to achieve its goal, it would likely exterminate humanity, and convert all matter it could into computation equipment. Due to its superintelligence, it would accomplish this.

A final objection is that despite experts believing human level AI will happen in the next 100 years, if not sooner, there is nothing to be done about it today or that it is a waste of time to work on this problem now. This is also known as the “worrying about overpopulation on Mars” objection, comparing the worry about AI to something that is several scientific advancements away.  Scott Alexander has an entire blog post on this subject, which I recommend checking out. The basic summary is that AI advancement and AI alignment research are somewhat independent. And we really need to learn how to properly align AI values before we get human level AI.

We have a lot of theoretical philosophy that we need to figure out how to impart to a computer. Things like how humans actually make decisions, or how to value different moral tradeoffs. This could be extraordinarily complicated, as an extremely smart optimization algorithm could misinterpret almost everything we say if it did not already share our values for human life, health, and general brain state. Computer scientists set out to teach computers how to understand natural human language some 60 years ago, and we still haven’t quite nailed it. If imparting philosophical truths is similarly difficult, there is plenty of work to be done today.

Artificial intelligence could advance rapidly from human level to greater than human very quickly; the best human Go player lost to an AI (AlphaGo) in 2016, and a year later, AlphaGo lost to a new version, AlphaGo Zero, 100 games to none. It would thus not be surprising if a general intelligence achieved superhuman status a year after achieving human-comparable status, or sooner. There’s no fire alarm for artificial general intelligence. We need to be working on these problems as soon as possible.

I’d argue then, that of all scenarios listed here, a misaligned AI is the most likely to actually destroy all of humanity as a result of the Orthogonality Thesis. I also think that unlike many of the other scenarios listed here, human level AI will exist sometime soon, compared to the timescale of asteroids and vulcanism (see AI Timelines, estimates are highly variable, anywhere from 10 to 200 years). Compared to other technological sources of risk, AI is unique because of the introduction of another agent with differing goals. There is also a wealth of work to be done surrounding AI value alignment. Correctly aligning future AI with goals compatible with human values is thus one of the most important challenges facing our civilization within the next hundred years or so, and probably the most important existential threat we face.

The good news is that there are some places doing this work, notably the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, OpenAI, and the Future of Humanity Institute. The bad news is that despite the importance of this issue, there is very little in the way of conversations, money, or advocacy. AI Safety research is hard to calculate in total, as some research is likely done by private software companies, but is optimistically on the order of tens of millions of dollars a year. By comparison, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, which failed to find 95% of test weapons in a recent audit, costs $7.5 billion a year.

Further Reading

I have focused this essay on trying to convey the mindset of thinking about existential risk generally and why AI is specifically worrying in this context. I’ve also tried to keep it short. The following are further resources on the specifics of why Artificial General Intelligence is worth worrying about in a broader context, arranged by length. If you felt my piece did not go in depth enough on whether AI itself is worth being concerned about, I would urge you to read one of the more in depth essays here which focus on that question directly.

Links 2017-02-25

How about this for a defense of free speech? Popehat’s Marc Randazza offers the argument for legalizing child pornography. The article makes a good point that abusing children is quite a distinction from possessing indecent photos of children. Moreover, obscenity can already be banned by the state without a need for an additional legal category. He also makes a good case that the slippery slope is in fact already happening, where parents’ baby pictures are technically child porn, and so are teenagers’ sexting. Very few people are willing to make any sort of case for state overreach in this area, so it makes sense that there would be evidence of overreach. It’s definitely an interesting read.

Also from Popehat, skepticism is an important tool to have when reading the news now, and this is a guide to reading the news like a search warrant application.

This is a cool voting simulation discussion. Each chart displays political candidates as fixed points on a two dimensional voting plane. The shaded areas indicate which candidate would win for every conceivable voter population makeup, and they change based on the five voting systems simulated. Notice that in a plurality voting system, in almost every possible candidate geography, the middle or moderate candidate loses out. Interestingly, this is also true of the the second most popular vote type, Instant Runoff Voting (noted as Hare in the link). The conclusion:

The following images visually demonstrate how Plurality penalizes centrist candidates and Borda favours them; how Approval and Condorcet yield nearly identical results; and how the Hare method yields extremely strange behaviour. Alarmingly, the Hare method (also known as “IRV”) is gaining momentum as the most popular type of election-method reform in the United States (in Berkeley, Oakland, and just last November in San Francisco, for example).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Surveillance Self Defense page that details basic internet security concepts as well as tutorials on how to use several important security software apps, like PGP, OTR, Signal, Tor, etc. Absolutely the best introduction for anyone first learning about security.

Scott Alexander had an interesting review of Eichmann in Jerusalem, which talked about the trial of a former Nazi official in Israel some decades after the Holocaust. Eichmann’s reasoning is bizarre in that he seemed to try and get the audience to sympathize with his hard work and lack of luck while in the Nazi bureaucracy. There are also interesting discussion of the varying success of societies resisting the Nazi regime.

Scott also reposted his Anti-libertarian FAQ, which is still one of the better arguments against extreme libertarianism, detailing the shortcomings of an anarcho-capitalist or minimalist state. It is one of the reasons this blog is postlibertarian, and not libertarian-all-the-way.

Bryan Caplan on limited government as insurance, and his related point that one way to limit government is to have an additional veto chamber legislation must pass through. To be effective, the chamber would have to be populated by government policy skeptics–i.e. libertarians.

Has Trump actually done a ton of things? Well, if you take a look at the VIX volatility index, market volatility is at a relative low at present compared to the last 3 months, pretty low of the last 6 months, and right around its lowest level of the last 5 years. Marginal Revolution muses on explanations for this phenomenon.

This Politico article discusses Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. the well known Neo-reactionary Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin disputes having any connection with Steve Bannon, but this would actually make me less nervous about Bannon as a person if it were true.

There was a big nomination fight for Betsy DeVos. I didn’t get it at all, as school choice is a pretty good idea, adding some very limited market accountability to public schooling. Reason does a good job explaining the benefits of school choice here.

Supply chains are more efficient because they are international. Additionally, supply chains must be international if they want to compete.  This is undeniable. Here we have another article on international supply chains. Trying to create protectionism in international trade is trying to centrally plan complex international supply chains. Central planning doesn’t work.

Bryan Caplan and Ed Dolan of the Niskanen Center had a long discussion of the Universal Basic Income. Ed Dolan’s blog has the whole back and forth, but it’s not the greatest formatting. If you want to see it all with individual links, here is the list. 

Caplan also debated Will Wilkinson at ISFLC about the UBI, and here is his opening statement. Overall, I find Caplan somewhat more convincing, because we just don’t know how many people will reduce their labor output once they can get a UBI. I would like to see federal funding where a state can only take the money if they do a randomized control trial when implementing the program for several years.

Jeffrey Tucker’s old article on Libertarian Brutalism is fascinating to think about nowadays. He divides libertarianism into both a freedom to cooperate and a freedom to say “screw you and leave me alone”. The first type says that the civil rights movement succeeded because people rebelled against the restrictions the state put on people, and while they are wary of using state power to fight prejudice, prejudice itself is obviously wrong. The second says that state imposition of ideas is wrong in every context, and if people want the freedom to discriminate, they ought to do it.

Related: Richard Spencer showed up at ISFLC, and Jeffrey Tucker was seen on camera telling him fascists weren’t welcome at an anti-fascist conference. I’m pretty much ok with this. No one was punched, no physical altercations took place, and many libertarians seemed to express their will to not associate with unsavory people. Bleeding Heart Libertarians covers the incident with the important point that it is no longer a thought experiment of what we should do when Nazis show up to protest our events.

Another simple argument about immigration restrictions: SpaceX can’t hire foreigners because their technology is classified as weaponry. Therefore, they can’t hire the best people to come to the United States and make our private space program better than other countries’ public ones. That’s pretty disappointing if you are even vaguely interested in space travel, free markets, or even American exceptionalism.

I’m not sure what’s going on with Bitcoin. Apparently it’s being pushed higher on the talk of a possible Bitcoin ETF in the works? Either way, I had become really disinterested in Bitcoin at the beginning of last year as the community fight about block size had totally lost me. Yet, now it seems the network is no longer under heavy load. All my recent transactions have gone through pretty quickly. Of course, there are still apparently even tech writers who have no clue what Bitcoin is or why it is useful. Remember, if you like what we do here, you can donate to Postlibertarian with the Bitcoin address at the bottom of the sidebar!

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Flynn and the Deep State

I was listening to the most recent Reason podcast with Nick Gillespie interviewing Eli Lake about Michael Flynn’s ouster as National Security Adviser. I had a couple thoughts on it.

  1. Flynn talking to the Russians about sanctions as lame duck Obama imposes sanctions. This just isn’t that scary to me. Maybe it’s a violation of the Logan Act, but maybe that’s another reason the Logan Act is dumb, not a reason Flynn is bad.
  2. Flynn lying to Mike Pence about what was discussed. This seems pretty bad. However, they must have had transcripts of the conversations, so who knew what and when? Did the President know they had discussed sanctions when Pence told the press they had not? Did Pence know? Flynn took the fall, but he may not have been the real problem. Certainly at some point the President found out and waited until the story was public before sacking Flynn.
  3. Intelligence agencies using information they gathered while spying to conduct political activity and attack political enemies. Really, really bad. This is basically the worst case scenario for how mass surveillance can be misused. Yes, in this case, the spying was done on a line most people would know is tapped, but these intelligence agencies are operating without oversight. Sure, it was nice of them to leak information that Trump was keeping from the public, but what’s to stop them from leaking information on the personal activities of political enemies of the FBI, NSA, and others? Was their interest in the public good or their own political objectives? It seems that a better system where whistleblowers could reach out to (as an example) members of Congress without retribution would be much better, assuring only information relevant to public discourse is released.

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In the Spirit of Thanksgiving, Go Shopping

In 2006 I spent one of my most memorable Thanksgivings with my parents grandparents in small town Virginia. Having just purchased a Wii on launch day, we all sunk hours into playing Wii Sports Tennis and Boxing. A few days later, my father and I collectively combed through Black Friday ads with my father trying to create a strategy to purchase hot items before they disappeared from shelves. We then woke up early in the morning to wait in line together at Best Buy.

As with many Americans, I treasure Thanksgiving as a time to spend with family and friends. However, unlike many, I anticipate the most commercialized parts of this day as a means to foster my connections to those people, not as a violation of the spirit of the holiday. Were it not for the Wii launch, I would be missing dear memories with my grandparents. Without Black Friday, I would have lost a valuable bonding experience with my father.

Capitalism is not an evil structure that obsesses us with material objects and wealth. Think about the last conversation you had with someone important to you. Chances are, it had something to do with a movie, a piece of clothing, technology, or some other commercial product. Tongue-in-cheek discussions like Apple vs. Samsung rely on markets to promote information sharing, while improved consumer photo and video devices allow us to relive memories more vividly than ever before.

So this Thanksgiving, remember the people you love, but also remember the markets that help make those memories special.

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Against Hillary: Healthcare

This is the third post in my series opposing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. See the introduction in Part 1 here. Read my opposition to Trump here. Read why you should mathematically vote for a third party here.

Healthcare

Now we’re turning to a subject where there may be an unavoidable Fundamental Ideological Disagreement. Nonetheless, I think there may be some agreement that the current healthcare system has many problems.

In 2009, the Democrats had complete control of the presidency, the House, and even had a super-majority in the Senate. Their priority was healthcare reform: the American system was prohibitively expensive, spent too much money even when patients were covered, tied your healthcare to your job, denied coverage to people with preexisting conditions and others who could not pay, and did not properly align preventative care incentives. They took a fundamentally left-leaning, centralized, top-down approach to solving these problems. The Obama administration specifically stayed out of the legislative process allowing much of the law to be patched together through Congress. They solved some of the problems in the American health system (and those steps are to be commended), some they tried to solve, but didn’t, and some they ignored altogether. Ironically, for a piece of legislation often called the “Affordable Care Act”, one of the problems Obamacare largely didn’t touch was the lack of market forces and pricing pressures on healthcare, guaranteeing the price problem would worsen.

When it comes to allocating resources, incentivizing cost saving and innovation, and producing the best quality goods for the lowest possible prices, there is no better system than a competitive free market with unregulated prices. Sellers seek to provide the best product at the lowest cost so that buyers will want to purchase them.  I’d hesitate to even call it a system, since, apart from pricing systems and private property, everything is driven by individuals making decisions, according to their own priorities and needs. Markets do have problems, but the biggest one is that poor people won’t have the money to get the product (i.e. healthcare) they need. Unfortunately, instead of just fixing that problem by giving government healthcare subsidies to the poor, Obamacare tried to solve all the problems of the entire healthcare system through legislation. Obama had an unprecedented opportunity to encourage both market reforms and increased coverage for the poor, but instead opted for the (politically easier) increased regulation on a system already heavily strained by bad rules.

Instead of making it easier to purchase healthcare as an individual, Obamacare cemented the relationship between employment and healthcare. Instead of allowing consumers and doctors to figure out some prices with high deductible insurance plans, Obamacare mandated many more items be specifically covered by insurance plans, thus hiding their costs from patients. Instead of allowing insurance and consumers to follow their own incentives to promote preventive care, Obamacare mandates one-size fits all preventative care regulations which encode waste into the system. For more critiques of the system, check out this review in the Cato Journal.

The result is a system that solved the problem of coverage for the poor and people with preexisting conditions, but did not fundamentally solve the lack of market pricing and bad incentives. The mandates on insurance companies and hospitals (besides creating waste) increased the cost of providing care. The increased cost was supposed to be alleviated by subsidies and more young people entering the system, but the costs have been higher than expected and thus fewer people have signed up than had hoped. Perhaps more subsidies would get more people to sign up, but that doesn’t really solve the fundamental issues, just puts the burden of cost onto the taxpayer instead of healthy consumers. As a result of a lack of healthy young people in the system, insurance companies are raising premiums, despite downsloping demand curves (you drop prices to bring people in, not raise them). Clearly, the problems will only continue, and we’re stuck in a political situation where some parts of Obamacare are popular and now can’t be politically taken back, despite them being unsustainable.

Hillary Clinton wants to keep much of this situation intact. This is a terrible policy. We need real market reforms or this cost growth will continue. This isn’t even to suggest that an insurance mandate would be bad policy, or that the poor shouldn’t be able to get healthcare subsidies; but if there is no price competition, no ability for consumers to choose their healthcare provider, then there are no ramifications for patient or doctor’s actions that are inefficient or unnecessary. The costs are just socialized by the system and the problems never fixed. And it’s not like we are out of ideas for fixing the healthcare system: ending healthcare ties to your employer, allowing for more widespread use of HSAs, scaling, split benefits, and reforming scope of practice laws are just some of those. Over the last 15 years, American middle class wages haven’t improved much. Yet healthcare costs (and spending as a part of GDP) has gone way up. Perhaps if these costs were better controlled (and not paid by employers), more of the productivity gains would return to middle class incomes. But we’ll never find out when Hillary is president.

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Picture Credit: Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA-2.0

Against Hillary: Foreign Policy and Trade

This is the second post in my series opposing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. See the introduction in Part 1 here. Read my opposition to Trump here. Read why you should mathematically vote for a third party here.

Foreign Policy

Media coverage might make you think that Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson’s weakest point in comparison to Hillary Clinton is foreign policy. On the contrary, foreign policy is by far the the most important policy reason voters should reject Hillary Clinton, especially in favor of Johnson. News stories might seem to indicate that Johnson knows nothing about foreign policy, but in fact he has an excellent nuanced approach to foreign affairs. Libertarians have a reputation for isolationism, and indeed an important part of Johnson’s policy is a reduction in American military involvement in the middle east. But he is still a proponent of American diplomacy and defending American obligations in NATO. He’s also the only proponent of free trade in this election, a policy which has systematically broken down geopolitical opponents by integrating their economies into global markets and intertwining their economic success with ours. Let’s contrast this with Hillary Clinton’s policies.

The American consensus on the 2003 Iraq War is certainly negative, and I’d go as far as to say that most agree it was a mistake, especially on the left. Hillary Clinton voted to support that war, but so did many politicians on both sides of the aisle (including 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry). Of course, even some blame for a war that had several hundred thousand deaths of civilians and combatants is pretty awful. 4,507 Americans died in the Iraq war. This is significantly higher than the amount of people who died in the September 11th attacks. These are real people that likely would be alive today if not for the actions of American politicians. Yes, Hillary Clinton was not the only person who voted for this war, so perhaps she is only responsible for a fraction of this mistake. But is it that great to be responsible for the deaths of only 100 Americans who died for a mistake? What about the thousands of Iraqi Security Forces who died in the insurgency? What about the estimated five million Iraqi orphans caused by the war, or the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died?

In 2004, Hillary said she had no regrets her Iraq War vote. In 2008, she didn’t want to be flip-flopping and so did not apologize, but she nonetheless lost the nomination to Obama, with the Iraq War support being one of several factors. In her 2014 book, she finally admitted that she regrets her vote backing the Iraq War. Yet, as The Atlantic points out, she was quite sincere in her vote in 2002; this was not simply a political ploy to look strong on national security. And if indeed she has had a change of heart, one would think she would treat future policy decisions differently.

In 2011 as Secretary of State, she faced another policy decision in Libya…and again decided to push for intervention. During a Democratic primary debate a year ago when asked about the intervention, Hillary Clinton began her defense of American involvement in Libya by labeling it as “smart power at its best”. Connor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic harshly criticized Clinton’s full answer stating that her upbeat portrayal of Libya was:

…about as misleading as summarizing the Iraq War by saying that the Iraqis had a terrible leader; they had a free election after the war; and they voted for moderates. It elides massive suffering and security threats that have occurred in postwar Libya.

Also worth noting, as Friedersdorf points out, this war was not declared, and not only violated the War Powers Resolution, but went against the expressed opposition of a Libya intervention Congressional vote. Moreover, the New York Times discusses in-depth how Obama was hesitant to get involved in Libya until Clinton convinced him it was a worthwhile endeavor. This is her war, and it left Libya a failed state.

Clinton’s support of military interventions in the middle east should be very concerning to everyone. Essentially all military interventions she has supported in the middle east have been failures: Libya is most prominently hers; she voted to go to war in Iraq which was a foreign policy disaster; she also supported the Afghanistan surge in 2009 and drone bombing in Pakistan during the first Obama term. Seven years after the surge in Afghanistan, there are still thousands of American soldiers and several times that many contractors in Afghanistan today. The Pakistan drone strikes have been severely criticized, with estimates of civilian casualties varying between 250 to over 900 civilians killed.

Of course, the US hasn’t really had a successful military intervention in the middle east since the Gulf War. Yet Hillary Clinton has continued to favor aggressive hawkish interventions. Her widely touted “experience” during her husband’s administration, as a Senator, and as a member of the Obama administration seems to have created systemic bias towards intervention in her approach to foreign affairs. In the Times piece, Clinton adviser Anne-Marie Slaughter states:

“Mrs. Clinton repeatedly speaks of wanting to be ‘caught trying.’ In other words, she would rather be criticized for what she has done than for having done nothing at all.”

This may sound noble, but it should disturb anyone considering voting for Clinton. The implication that “trying” is always better than “not trying” ignores the possibility that American policy could ever accidentally cause bad outcomes. This isn’t just possible, it’s quite likely, as demonstrated specifically by Iraq and Libya. Now Clinton is proposing additional intervention in Syria, beyond what the Obama administration has pursued. This includes no-fly zones and troops on the ground to create safe zones for refugees.

You might say that Syria is different from Iraq in that the situation literally couldn’t be worse, so perhaps intervention only risks improving one of the bloodiest wars in the last decade. Yet no-fly zones would demand a confrontation with Russia (they are the ones flying the planes) and would require the US to shoot down Russian military aircraft. This is escalation, and thus it’s quite easy for imprecise or incorrect policy to actually make Syria become even worse under Clinton’s policy. A Johnson/libertarian hands-off approach has inherently less risk because there would be no soldiers involved and little to no risk of escalation with Russia. Johnson has specifically advocated working with Russia, which is also basically the policy the Obama administration is taking. Nonetheless, we should acknowledge this approach has done little to end the war in Syria.

But if anything, that’s another point to Johnson: if Clinton’s ideas are so great, it seems that the Obama administration would have already implemented them and succeeded. The implication then is that Clinton differs significantly from Obama in Syria policy. Specifically, she is willing to commit more than pure air support. This sounds suspiciously like a traditional middle eastern military intervention championed by neoconservatives/right-wing hawks. Johnson’s Syria policy is suspiciously similar to Obama’s. So the question is why would Democrats and progressives side with Clinton when the Clinton vs Johnson policies are really right-wing vs Obama Syria policies. It seems siding with Clinton over Johnson in this area means abandoning the left’s positions, including that of the sitting Democratic president.

Moreover, for Clinton’s policies to succeed, she would need to win a middle eastern conflict by building a coalition among international actors who are geopolitically opposed. This war would need to be won against both a strong dictator and a large insurgency, the latter being something the United States has failed at essentially every time in the middle east. These plans are unreasonable, unprecedented, and unlikely to work.

Voting to approve of Clinton’s continual push for war and intervention is to agree not to hold her responsible for her repeated foreign policy mistakes which have lost countless lives. It’s to agree that we can afford to spend another several hundred billion dollars on another middle east intervention. It’s to put faith in a person who has learned nothing, who is hoping her intentions in solving the Syrian conflict will overcome the reality of the middle eastern politics.

Free Trade

Trade is next due to its role in the dynamics of geopolitical relationships. Again, despite the consensus that foreign relations is Hillary’s strong point, this is the second foreign policy area where she is on the wrong side. When it comes to trade, economists are in astounding agreement that free trade is a good thing. The benefits of freer international markets are clear and the results are all around us; today we have global supply chains that reduce the cost and increase the availability of goods of all types. Integration of developing economies has raised the productivity of the global poor and allowed for sustainable, incentivized growth to pull literally billions out of poverty, a feat which government and charities have never come close. The burden is on free trade opponents to explain their position, and in this election, those opponents are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Gary Johnson is the only candidate running this year who is on the right side of perhaps the most important issue when it comes to the degree and number of people helped.

Hillary Clinton may say in private that she supports free trade, but at best then we are hoping she is lying publicly. Unfortunately, whatever political calculations she is making may not necessarily change after election day. At the very least, it seems reasonable to suggest free trade will not be a top priority of the Clinton administration given she is running as far as possible from the TPP. As an aside, the TPP itself has many non-free trade components, including extensive increases in intellectual property protections. But our president should be someone who makes the case to the American people and the to the world of the benefits of trade, cooperation, and commercial interaction (I can’t believe I’m defending Obama). The current presidential administration has created many bad policies, but in foreign affairs, both in war and trade, Clinton is somehow huge steps backwards from where we are today.

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Picture Credit: Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA-2.0

Why Conservatives And Liberals Both Let Police Unions Get Away With Stuff

No one holds police unions accountable because conservatives like police and liberals like unions

I created this hypothesis while observing the events unfolding in my city of St. Louis late last year. I learned that the head of the local police union was a former officer who was fired from a nearby district for falsifying police reports! To me, this looked like classic corruption. The newspapers kept quoting the man about ongoing developments, yet few seemed to question his past.

I found it amusing to think about how well many conservatives can expound upon the problems of teachers unions protecting bad teachers while remaining completely silent about the potential for police unions to protect bad cops. Perhaps it is the loudest and most extreme criticisms from some liberals which provokes this defensive blind spot; it would likely be easy to reverse roles and find similar blind spots in the other direction.

The unfolding events in New York City have me considering this hypothesis further.

Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who brought Eric Garner to the ground in a chokehold, was previously involved in a lawsuit for strip searching a couple African American men. The claims are denied, but the charges against the men were dropped and they got paid instead. Maybe there’s some defense to be made (overly litigious society, etc) but this sort of thing seems to happen a lot, and my unenlightened conclusion is that you only want to hand out money to avoid a trial if you think you might lose the trial. One of the side effects seems to be that the officer is less likely to receive consequences. Normally, incentives would induce the organization to remove officers who become too litigiously costly. Is there a union element standing in the way?

We have seen actions that appear consistent with an organization reflexively resistant to criticism. After Eric Garner, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio made remarks that to my ears were markedly moderate. To the NYPD’s ears, biased by previous developments, the mayor has two murdered officers’ “blood on his hands,” and they’ve taken to turning their backs on him at the officers’ funerals, even against the request of their own police commissioner and the officers’ own wives.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani gets on TV and explains that this is all happening because the mayor “created an impression with the police that he was on the side of the protesters.” Giuliani even admits that “some of those protesters were entirely legitimate,” but when you live in False Choice land, if you don’t align yourself clearly enough with one side then you clearly must be “on” the other “side.”

Frustratingly, the False Choicers are the ones who, with a Smart-People-esque confidence, get to decide how you are aligned. They can even complain that you should “have said” less-outrageous more-on-my-side things that you actually did say but that they maybe didn’t hear due to the biases and discincentives of information flow about things that they and their information flow network consider outrageous/non-outrageous.

Maybe a skeptic would argue that none of this has anything to do with unions. At a minimum I feel like there’s enough circumstantial evidence that I wish more people seemed to care more about looking more into it.

Since you can’t criticize police unions without questioning police, to conservatives this smells too much like the people yelling death threats, and they reflexively block it off. I suspect something similar is at work with liberals and the conservative distaste of unions. Thus both sides develop blind spots against an organization they would otherwise be quick to criticize. Thus the unions are free to protect their members from the accountability they would otherwise receive, while the distracted demagoguery continues…