Happy Independence Day

A great day for barbeque, baseball, and remembering one of the most significant documents in history. I've seen a few references this year to the rough draft of the Declaration which among other things contains a remarkable attack on slavery:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating
it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of
a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying
them to slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable
death in their transportations thither. this piratical warfare,
the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian
king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN
should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for
suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain
this excrable commerce

Pretty amazing. I'd also like to echo a point made by a commenter on Volokh that we were not Americans fighting the British. We were British, and we were fighting our own people and our own government. I cannot imagine what courage and principle it took to sign one's name to such a document, but we owe a lot to them and part of what we owe is to preserve what they fought for.

Choose Responsibility

Five years ago, near Charlottesville, a woman threw a birthday party for her son. To insure that none of the guests drove home drunk, she insisted that (1) the guests not drive to the party and (2) that they spend the night. No one at the party drank above the legal limit for driving and no one left the house as agreed...until the police showed up. For their good faith efforts, Elisa Kelly and her now ex-husband were sentenced to over 2 yrs in jail a piece on 9 counts of providing alcohol to a minor.

In fairness, Kelly definitely screwed up for "[misleading] parents who called to ask about alcohol [and for trying] to get the kids to cover it up after police got there." There are certainly different ways of looking at this case: Radley Balko of Reason (here) and Charlottesville's Daily Progress (here). Along these lines, Balko has also written about a group called Choose Responsibility headed by John McCardell, a former college president. As first reported in this article of the Chronicle of Higher Education, McCardell argues for a plan which would lower the drinking age to 18 with a "catch." People between the ages of 18 and 20 would be given a provisional license to drink alcohol, but it would be revoked if they screwed up. People under the age of 18 would lose access to the provisional license if they screwed up before turning 18. The idea is that this gives kids under 18 an incentive not to drink until they turned 18. It also gives people between 18 and 20 an incentive to drink responsibly. Some Q&A here.

Arms to Lebanon and its converage in the US media

This is an email I received from my brother Kurt, posted here with his consent.

************************************************************
I know this is everyones favorite subject: politics and what the US does abroad (or at home for that matter), but this article kind of stuck out to me because I was happy that someone was answering the obvious question that comes up when browsing the headlines about whats going on in Lebanon these days: why does the US need to make emergency military arms shipments to the Lebanese army so it can fight a tiny militant group in a refugee camp?

I don’t know why I am sending it to you all in particular, I guess because its something interesting and a bit different maybe from what we usually think about as a family.

Is anyone following this at all? Is there any discussion in the news about why the US needs to send arms to Lebanon? I’m curious.

Why are Americans so Fat?

This article in the nyt last month makes a good argument as to one cause. Agricultural subsidies are primarily directed towards a few crops, including corn and soybeans. This makes the goods derived from these crops, such as high fructose corn syrup, cheaper, while making other produce, such as carrots, oranges, etc more expensive. This means that healthier food ends up being a luxury good.

So why are we subsidizing farmers at all? As technology advances, fewer people can grow more crops, which lowers demand for farmers overall. Of course this has been true forever, and job churning, while painful to the individual, is exceedingly good for society as a whole (or else 90% of us would still be farmers). These subsidies probably have an adverse impact on immigration also, as poorer countries like Mexico depend more on agriculture and can have difficulty competing with subsidized US crops, which pushes Mexican workers across the border.

Ah, the government, encouraging illegal immigration and obesity in one fell swoop. But hey, ban trans fats, because that's a lot easier than acknowledging where the real problems come from.

SelectSmart

Well, we're back, after a great weekend. We didn't have any incredible discussions, unless you're curious why you need to regress statistical projections to the mean. Still, it's political season (even though elections aren't for another 18 months) so you can take this quiz to find out who you should vote for. Answers to the questions are a bit limited, but in the end they nailed me pretty well (not that it's difficult).

Identity Theft MySpace Style

To make a long story short, a random guy named Joe Anthony started a myspace page about Barack Obama. Initially he and Obama worked together to update the site but when the campaign decided it wanted total control, Anthony asked them for $39,000 in return. Obama's campaign decided to have MySpace intervene instead, and took control of the name (Joe Anthony got the 160,000 friends though). It's really interesting how politics is changing these days with the advent of myspace, youtube and blogging popularity. It reminds me of the episode of the Simpsons in which Lisa starts the Red Dress Press after Mr. Burnes buys all the mass-media outlets :-)

A similar thing happened to my brother, jazz guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel. A fan started a MySpace page about Kurt and was responding to people's messages as if he was Kurt. Eventually MySpace intervened there too, and transferred control of the site to Kurt's management team.

The Moral Basis of an Athiest

I thought I'd flash us back to an old column at Volokh. It asks how irreligious people justify believing that certain things are morally right or wrong. There are some good comments, and I think you can make quite a convincing argument. One comment summed it up nicely, I believe:

MarmotEsq:

It would be logically inconsistent, essentially crazy, for someone to say they really do want others to force them to do things that in fact they do not want to do.

In effect, I am challenging your premise. I believe that this is logically self-evident, practically a tautology... But it is the foundational fact that leads my fundamental beliefs about how to act and how to expect others to act.

—————
Crazy Craig: I don't want to do it.

Sane Sam: OK. I won't force you to.

Crazy Craig: I want you to force me to do it.

Sane Sam: You mean you really do want to do it but can't bring yourself to do it without someone to providing additional motivation to get you to do it?

Crazy Craig: No. I really don't want to do it. This is not the sort of situation where I really do want to do it but can't bring myself to do it on my own.

Sane Sam: Well, if you really don't want to do it then I won't force you to.

Crazy Craig: No! I don't want to do it AND I want you to force me to do it.

Sane Sam: That's crazy.

Crazy Craig: Exactly.
——————

There is no logical basis for any person to claim that she gets to be the only person out of six billion who gets to force other people do what she wants even while still being free from anybody else forcing her to do what they want.

—————
Meglomanical Meg: I don't want you to force me to do things I don't want to do.

Sane Sarah: The same is true for me. I suggest that we agree that I won't try to force you to do things you don't want to do and you won't try to force me to do things I don't want to do.

Meglomanical Meg: No. I want to be able to force you to do things you don't want do, but I don't want you to be able to do the same to me.

Sane Sarah: So you'd be my master and I'd be your slave?

Meglomanical Meg: Yes. I believe that it is possible to live in a world where others can't force me to do things I don't want to do while I get to force them to do things I want to do.

Sane Sarah: Only a meglomaniac would expect a world where they are the master and everyone else is their slave.

Meglomanical Meg: Exactly.
——————

The only sane conclusion to me seems to be that no one, not even me, should be allowed to initiate force against anyone else. (Of course, there's nothing wrong with defending yourself or others from being forced to do things we don't want to do.)

Call it "libertarianism" or "the golden rule", but to me it is just the way things are.

I happen to like the incidental consequences as well. Without the initiation of force there would be no murder, rape, kidnapping, mugging, etc.

12.1.2005 4:01pm

Well played.

Flat Tax

Since we were starting a bit of a discussion on the flat tax in my previous post, I'll expound some here.

First, my shorthand in the original post left things confusing, but the phrase "flat tax" usually refers to a single rate with one single deduction. It is possible to eliminate deductions without having a single rate, and to have a single rate with a bunch of deductions, but the ideas generally go hand in hand, and it's this combination that I'm supporting.

It is true that the system of deductions is probably a bigger problem than the graduated scale. It encourages rent-seeking behavior, since it may be cheaper to lobby congress for a tax loophole than to pay the tax you would otherwise owe. Furthermore, it's a playground for the government to attempt to manipulate the market in ways that I think it is ill-suited for. (For instance, you may get a tax deduction for buying a Toyota Prius. Think that's a worthy thing for the government to encourage? Well how about a Ford Expedition? Once the gov't uses tax policy to engineer social change, everything is fair game.)

So if you get rid of the deductions, isn't that good enough? Well I'd be pretty happy, assuming we lowered tax rates across the board so that the effective tax rate didn't go up. Of course we wouldn't, though - because lowering the upper rates benefits "the rich". The graduated tax system provides ample means to engage in counter-productive class warfare. Politically, it's easy to increase taxes on the upper fraction of wage-earners, to the point where the top 10% pay 50% of taxes. If you try to scale those taxes back, you'll be accused of only helping the rich. Politically we're not interested in achieving the most economically efficient state (for whatever our goals are) but simply in what a given law does to change the status quo. This also makes it harder to reduce the size of government, since a program directed at low income people can be presented as paid for by, again, "the rich". The nasty little catch to all of this is that the tax brackets (and deductions) aren't generally indexed to inflation, so what starts out as a tax on the rich ends up punishing more and more of us as time goes on, such as with the alternative minimum tax.

Beyond the rent-seeking and the manipulation, I still don't think a graduated tax makes sense. We can argue about which tax is more "fair", but I think a flat tax results in a better use of resources. As Alan pointed out, the marginal value of a dollar earned decreases. If you increase the tax on that dollar, then you increase the difference between the value to society of the work done to earn that dollar, and the value of the compensation to the worker. People at the upper end won't want to produce as much income, which means they also won't produce that good to society. The contribution of the 200,000th dollar earned is no less than the 50,000th; there's no reason as a society for us to want someone to earn 50,000 but stop before 200,000.

To put it more clearly, a flat tax (at least the ones commonly proposed), even on income, is a "consumption tax". That is, it equally taxes all money spent on goods and services, but not that spent on capital investment. This is a good thing, since capital investment increases productivity, allowing more to be made for less, and making us all richer.

To me, the ideal tax would have a generous standard deduction - perhaps $20k for a head of household, with $5-10k for each other member, indexed to inflation. This deduction makes the tax somewhat progressive - if all your income goes to the necessities of life, you pay no tax - but you pay a flat rate on all your disposable income.

Another intriguing option is to replace the income tax with a national sales tax. In some ways I think this is a spectacular idea. It's clearly a consumption tax; it can be quite fair if, as many states do, you exempt necessities; it would even tax the underground economy, since drug dealers don't pay income tax but would pay sales tax if they wanted to buy anything (except drugs I suppose). I'd be worried that we'd end up with an income tax and a sales tax though. And that would be even worse than the system we have now.

Some Radical Ideas

Let's add one for law enforcement:
Get rid of the exclusionary rule as well as qualified immunity.

Until some real news picks up, here's a list of some ideas that will probably never pass but I think would go a long way to solving what are perceived to be the most pressing problems. This was just a quick list so if I think of more I'll add them.

Mandatory health insurance to cover catastrophic emergencies
Eliminate employer deductions for health insurance
Flat income tax with a large per-person deduction
- Alternatively, replace the income tax with a sales tax, with exemptions for necessities
Term limits for congressmen
Balanced budget amendment
Phase out social security and the associated taxes
Allow parents to use the tax money spent on their child to send them to a private school
Legalization of drugs, prostitution, gambling
Line-item veto
Replace all government recognized marriage with civil unions
Extremely large increases in allowed legal immigration
High penalties for employers of illegal immigrants
Elimination of all corporate subsidies
Removal of all federal highway funding mandates

If anyone wants more details on what I mean, or why I think a particular idea would be good, let me know and perhaps I'll expand it into a full post. Otherwise you can be thankful that with this list I'd never get elected for anything.

You reap what you sow

I'm not a big fan of lawyers. Of course they serve a legitimate purpose, but they also fit Richard Dawkin's definition of a meme - that is that they create a world in which their propagation is favored. Put simply, lawyers create situations that can only be solved by other lawyers.

A lawyer can take a part of the constitution that has a very plain meaning, and not only twist it around so it says something different, but make it written in a language that only other lawyers can interpret. Thus the 2nd amendment does not protect the right to bear arms, the 5th amendment allows for private property to be taken for something other than public use, and the 10th amendment doesn't limit the federal government to its enumerated powers.

One reason the federal government's power is virtually unlimited is the supreme court's interpretation of the commerce clause. "Congress shall have the power... To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes." What exactly qualifies as interstate commerce? Running a hotel in Atlanta? Of course. Firing unionized employees at a Pennsylvania steel corporation. Sure! Growing wheat on your farm, to feed your own family? Ummm, this is getting weird, but ok.

A short time ago the 9th circuit tossed a nice one back to the supreme court - does the federal government have a right to criminalize growing marijuana for your own medical use? (Some people speculated this idealogically difficult case was a big fuck you to the supreme court, which often overturned the 9th circuit.) The conservatives had a choice - continue to limit the scope of federal power, and in so doing allow for some drugs to be legalized. The liberals faced one of their own - allow terminally ill patients access to a drug that eases their pain, and in so doing threaten environmental law, labor law, and a host of other laws near and dear to their hearts. Score another one for unlimited federal power.

Now the supreme court has handed down a decision validating the federal law outlawing partial birth abortion. Plaintiffs sought (and failed) to overturn the law based on abortion rights, not on the commerce clause. However, Justice Thomas hinted that from a federalist viewpoint this law was an overbroad application of commerce clause power. If the court had, at some point in the last 65 years, limited the power of the federal government claimed through the commerce clause, states could be free to experiment with medical marijuana, partial birth abortion, and many other things as they saw fit.

This is also further demonstration that, contrary to many people's (uninformed) opinion, Justice Thomas has emerged as the most principled member of the court. He wrote a scathing dissent in Kelo v New London, allowing an eminent domain taking for private use. ("I do not believe that this Court can eliminate liberties expressly enumerated in the Constitution and therefore join her dissenting opinion. Regrettably, however, the Court’s error runs deeper than this. Today’s decision is simply the latest in a string of our cases construing the Public Use Clause to be a virtual nullity, without the slightest nod to its original meaning.") I doubt Thomas is a pot-head, and we know he's not in favor of abortion, but he voted to uphold California's medical marijuana law ("Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything–and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.") and he indicated he would overturn the partial birth abortion ban if anyone had bothered to make the commerce clause argument.

I think we could stand to have a scientist or two on the supreme court, but lacking that, we could use more lawyers like Clarence Thomas.

(Thanks to volokh.com for thoughts on the PBA case, including the title of this post.)

Duke/Nifong Case

The case of three white Duke lacrosse players who were falsely accused of gang-raping a black exotic dancer has drawn national attention, but perhaps the most interesting coverage is from Harvard educated historian KC Johnson (not a lawyer or journalist). His blog, Durham-In-Wonderland, is widely accepted as one of the best sources of independent research and information about the case. For almost a year Johnson has been exposing the inept handling of the situation, both by the Durham County District Attorney (Nifong) and Duke University. In fact, his first post, on April 23, 2006, sites evidence which pretty much exonerates one of the three defendants, only 360 days before being officially declared innocent by the North Carolina State Attorney General. It's scary to think how cases like this play out for defendants of lesser means, who cant afford to combat rough district attorneys.

Libertarians and the Environment

I've considered posting on global warming, but thought better of it. Instead, I'm going to outline how I think environmental problems should be addressed in general. Hopefully this will demonstrate how a libertarian perspective can not only work smoothly, but bring about substantial environmental protection.

Most environmental problems - pollution, global warming, overfishing - fall into a category best represented as a tragedy of the commons. That is, when multiple parties use a public resource, it is to the benefit of each to use as much as possible, since they get reap all the profits but the costs are shared among the whole. Of course in the end, they are all worse off as the public resource is depleted or destroyed. The quote attributed to Aristotle sums it up nicely: "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it".

One solution proposed by most traditional environmentalists is for governments to regulate the resource. For instance, they may set a cap on how many fish a given person can catch in a year. There are two fundamental problems with this. First, it is difficult or even impossible for the government to know how to best allocate fish. Perhaps one person is better at keeping fish fresh from the sea to market. Under a free market, it would be beneficial for him to catch more fish, which would earn him more money and provide a better product for the consumer. A central planner allocating fishing licenses has a great deal of difficulty quantifying this, which is the fundamental problem with communism (not the oft-quoted "people need incentives to work").

The second problem is that it will often be more beneficial for one party to spend money trying to influence governmental decisions, rather than actually improving the social welfare by doing a better job than his competitors (referred to as rent-seeking behavior). We see this behavior in eminent domain takings, the Kyoto protocol, and even with interior decorators in Nevada.

The reason a complete free-for-all doesn't work is that an individual entity doesn't pay all of the costs of a particular decision (or necessarily collect all the benefits) - this is referred to as an externality. A particular action may have a positive marginal benefit for a single party, and therefore be pursued, while it has a a negative marginal benefit for society as a whole. In the case of common resources, the costs to the individual may be small while the externalities are large.

So how do we ensure that decisions truly do maximize social welfare? We eliminate the externalities - everyone pays the costs incurred by their actions. The first step to doing this is to strongly enforce private property rights. It's counterintuitive to many, but strong property rights lead to strong environmental protection. If you don't own the water downstream from your power plant, or the air downwind, you are infringing on the rights of the people who do when you pollute it.

It's actually a relaxation of property rights to allow some pollution so as to not completely cripple the ability to do anything. The second step is to ensure that this is not taken advantage of by making people pay for the damage they do to another's property. In the case of global warming, this could be done through any number of mechanisms that charge anyone for releasing greenhouse gases outside of their property. Of course, figuring out the cost associated with global warming is a difficult problem in its own right, but it's something that must be estimated for any mitigating process. The receipts collected from emitters should then be given to the people who are paying the actual costs.

Even though libertarians are generally hostile to government, they can still believe in a strong environmental policy - just not one where the government is in charge of picking winners and losers.

How do you get on the terrorist watch list?

One professor claims you do it by criticizing the Bush administration. This story has been going around for a few days, and I thought I'd collect a few more details. (I originally found this through volokh, which has a number of posts on the topic.)

The story is that a Princeton professor tried to fly somewhere, and was flagged for screening. When he asked why, the person at the counter asked if he had been in any peace marches, and he said no but he had given a speech critical of Bush. The employee said, "That'll do it." On the way back he didn't have any extra screening but his luggage didn't arrive until the middle of the night.

The professor claims that he was put on the watch list to punish him for his speech, and he's received a good deal of support from various blogs (as well as some skepticism). I think when it comes down to it, if someone said "Bush ate my kittens with his bare hands" some people will believe it no-questions-asked, because you know, Bush is the kitten-eating type. But let's think about this in detail, and let's even assume that the administration is willing to pursue this sort of retribution. They decide to punish dissidents, and they pick out a professor that no one outside his field has really heard of, because Cindy Sheehan, Jon Stewart, and Howard Dean would be too obvious. Then they let word pass down to random ticket agents at American Airlines that they put people on the list for peace marches and speeches. They don't harass him on the way back though - because they have something better planned for him. They're going to instruct the baggage handlers to lose his luggage! Muwahahahaha. Well, for a few hours anyway; they'll deliver it to his house overnight.

Seriously? We're supposed to believe this, because of what this guy says a ticket agent told him when he was selected for extra screening? Occam's razor, anyone? The moral of the story: the terrorist watch list is really annoying. It should be handled much better, if it all. However, you lose all your credibility to address the actual problems if you complain about situations like these that are very likely exaggerations. Show a little skepticism, people!

(An article in Slate a while back did a good job explaining the watch list. He came to what I think is a wacky conclusion - "Let's suppose—just suppose—that the No-Fly List has caused only one terrorist not to board an airplane with a sharp tool or explosive shoes. Wouldn't that still be worth these mild inconveniences? Of course it would." To which many people have replied with something to the effect, "What else should we be willing to do to prevent just one terrorist from boarding a plane? Fly naked? Every time we are asked to remove our shoes at the airport, we should be thankful that Richard Reid wasn't known as the underwear bomber.")

Liberal Media Bias?

According to UCLA political science professor Tim Groseclose, there is a systematic leftward bias among major US media outlets. Groseclose came to this conclusion by basically counting how many times a particular paper refers to work by conservative think tanks and policy groups vs liberal ones, ending up with something called an ADA score, where 100 is very liberal and 0 is very conservative. His results show that of all the major US media outlets, only Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume was right-of-center.

Media Outlet	ADA Score
ABC Good Morning America	56
ABC World News Tonight	61
CBS Early Show	67
CBS Evening News	74
CNN NewsNight with Aaron Brown	56
Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume	40
LA Times	70
NBC Nightly News	62
NBC Today Show	64
New York Times	74
Newshour with Jim Lehrer	56
Newsweek	66
NPR Morning Edition	66
Time Magazine	65
U.S. News and World Report	66
USA Today	63
Wall Street Journal	85
Washington Post	67
Washington Times	35

There are a lot of interesting details, so if you're interested I suggest reading the full text. Thanks to Matt for a heads up on the article, years ago.

Women In Science

Once in my new lab, when discussing Caltech, I said that to admit more women, they'd have to lower their standards. This is unquestionably true, just as if they wanted to admit more men, or baseball players, or saxophonists, they'd also have to lower their standards in every other category. Being unquestionably true is not sufficient to keep people from getting upset about it, I've found.

Correspondingly, if you talk about ideas that may or may not have merit, but still evoke the same kinds of emotion, you get in even bigger trouble. Such is the position that Larry Summers found himself in a couple years ago. He spoke about the reasons that women are underrepresented relative to the population-at-large in tenure-track faculty positions in the sciences. Famously, one reason he gave was the possibility that there are "innate differences" between men and women. He explicitly said what he meant by this: even if the mean aptitude of men and women were the same, if the variance in the male population is greater than the variance in the female population then there will be more men at the extremes (both high and low). Since faculty are drawn exclusively from one extreme, men would be overrepresented.

He mentioned two other explanations - that the different responsibilities in child-bearing could make women less likely to thrive in a career that requires long hours from ages 25-35, and the generally accepted social factors (discrimination - the bad kind). Though he guessed at which factors may be more important, at no point did he say that any of it was unquestionably true. He never said women were dumber than men, or that any individual women could not succeed in science. Still, he was essentially forced to resign.

Several articles were published about the talk; some supportive and some not. I'm going to address one particular criticism - that we should not even discuss the possibility that differences between the sexes account for some of the underrepresentation. To do so, it is claimed, propagates stereotypes which are harmful to women considering or already involved in science.

Which furthers stereotypes more? To discuss the ideas that Summers put forward, or to assume that young women are so fragile that they cannot even hear alternative viewpoints? To assume that they cannot differentiate between someone saying that women as a whole are less likely to be well-suited for scientific careers, and someone saying that they individually are not cut out for it?

The solution to this problem (and I agree that all things being equal, it would preferable to have many more women in science) is not to refuse to have the conversation. If women are less likely to be in science because of family (Summer's guess at the top reason) then institutions could adopt more family friendly policies, as some are already doing. And if social biases are found to be truly a contributing factor, than we can more adeptly and confidently address these biases.

Instead, we are left not with searches for truth, but for what people want to hear. I believe this is only part of a disturbing trend on college campuses towards the stifling of dissent. SFSU students faced disciplinary action for flag-burning. Check out the news at FIRE, a college free speech advocacy group, for many other instances.

A common theme in my posts is that while our intuition is in many cases useful, it is often not the truth, but what we wish were true. If we are not allowed to question it, we will never tell the difference.

I can't find the exact quote, but I remember reading an exchange a short while ago. One person, a politician or civic leader or such, told a scientist (an evolutionary psychologist, perhaps) that his research implied things that were uncomfortable and disheartening to people. His response was something to the effect, "It's what the experiment shows. What would you have me do, fiddle with the results?"

Crime in Philadelphia

As even those of you not living in Philadelphia probably know, the city's violent crime rates have risen dramatically in the last few years. (There were over 2000 shootings and over 400 murders in Philadelphia in 2006) The factors driving the rise are complex, but many point to the combination of poverty and easy access to guns. Of the 10 largest us cities, Philly has the highest murder rate (27 per 100,000 people) and highest poverty rate (25%). Even more telling is the localization of the crime in the poorest neighborhoods.





There is obviously an extremely high correlation between the average income and crime rate in different regions of the city. Complicating the situation further, areas of high poverty in the city also tend to have a predominately African-America population.






Amung the growing list of porblems is that witnesses are unwilling to testify in court, for fear getting killed themselves. "Snitch or Die" tee-shirts have even become the new fashion trend. The situation is so dire that one Mayoral candidate has suggested declaring a state of emergency, although he doesn't include that in his official 14-point plan.

So what's the solution? Beats me. Jobs and gun control, I guess. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Social Change Driven by Free Markets

Being a pretty adamant libertarian (there, it's out), I'm often forced to explain how free markets can bring about a particular desired result. Usually I just dodge the question by asking, "desired by whom?" However, there have been a couple recent articles on the subject that I think are pretty interesting. The NYT talks about Burger King's decision to phase in cage-free eggs and crate-free pork. In this case, public pressure - I don't believe there was a sniff of government action here - was sufficient to get one major company on board. Burger King simply believes that enough people prefer a more socially conscious choice to justify the increased cost.

Do these people really just prefer the good that comes out of these changes? A WSJ editorial (subscription - see an extended blurb at the Volokh Conspiracy here) suggests that people make these choices in part to display to others that they're socially conscious, and therefore gain status. A prime example of this is the Prius - part of its success was probably that it looked different, and therefore you could easily be identified as driving a hybrid. But here's the best part - it doesn't matter! Theory A - Someone values animal welfare, and therefore supports businesses who use cage-free eggs. As more people agree, businesses are forced to respond, and animal welfare increases. Theory B - Someone values what other people think about them, and those people value animal welfare... In fact, Theory B is just a way for the effects of Theory A to be amplified, which in many cases is a good thing. (Humans display a great deal of pack thinking, which presumably was very useful in prehistoric times when information was limited. Perhaps more on this another time.)

Someone in my lab refuses to eat chocolate that is derived from child slave labor. The remainder of us haven't exactly followed suit, but I've certainly changed my behavior somewhat - I buy the non-slave labor chocolate when it's an alternative. It's a small step but I'm optimistic that in the end, Hershey, Nestle, and the others will pay the increased cost (and pass it on to a willing consumer) to be socially conscious.

Virtue is not only possible because we value being good to those around us. It's also because we have all evolved, to some extent, to get along in the group, and that includes making choices that benefit the group at a cost to the individual. Government isn't required, just the ability to remember a face (and even monkeys can do that).