She on the saner side among the wingnuts, at least supposed to.
The discussion of why inequality is bad seems to have gone off the rails in the exchanges that I've been reading. The libertarians were saying egalitarianism was motivated by envy, and then DeLong defended himself by saying that he was motivated by a hatred of spite, which hardly seems like a firm ground for a tax code.
Really, the cleanest argument for income egalitarianism and a progressive tax code is that an extra dollar gives less happiness to the rich than to the poor. So, for example, $10,000 dollars might make a poor person happy but wouldn't make an appreciable difference to a rich person's life. This is why the rich spend more and more readily than the poor: dollars mean less to them.
This is just cribbed from "Harrison Bergeron."
I'm voting Republican
Right decision, wrong reason.
I'm sure this is a naive question to people in the field, but is it really true that weath is relative? Obviously to some extent -- somebody at the top of the heap can hire someone lower down to clean their house/cook their dinner/whatever. But once you get up into the higher levels...eh? Really?
I mean, there having enough to buy your way out of doing unpleasant tasks (which IS relative) and then there is having enough money to basically do whatever you want, all day every day. Once you reach that point, are there any meaningful distinctions between hugely rich and hugely, hugely rich? Bill Gates still gets 24 hours in his day, and he still has only three-score years and ten. If we're talking about redistributing from the top 1%, what on earth are they really going to lose?
Or is this just the kind of political argument that blurs filthy-rich and middle-class aspirational, so that everyone feels equally attacked?
Harrison Bergeron doesn't have the seething anger or glorious lunacy of Galt's post.
4- really, Idealist? Because of all the (bad) reasons one might vote republican, this is at least (arguably) sensible. If this is the wrong reason, what on earth is the right one?
Because of all the (bad) reasons one might vote republican, this is at least (arguably) sensible
Throwing acid in Cindy Crawford's face?
Do I really have to be the one to link to this?
good teeth, long thick hair, and all the other accoutrements of an upper-middle-class upbringing
Where do you even begin to argue with someone who thinks like this?
9: Not the seething anger, but it does have the glorious lunacy. My memory is faulty (read it twenty years ago), but: that bit where a family is watching a ballet on TV in which some of the dancers are loaded down with weights?
Also, this: the cleanest argument for income egalitarianism and a progressive tax code is that an extra dollar gives less happiness to the rich than to the poor. So, for example, $10,000 dollars might make a poor person happy but wouldn't make an appreciable difference to a rich person's life.
makes perfect sense to me but most economists would fight you on it tooth and nail. You're reading too much into the declining marginal utility of income. The idea is that (all else equal) each dollar means less to any given individual, so my $1,000,000th dollar this year will mean less to me than my first, but this does not mean that my $1,000,000th dollar will mean less to me than your first will mean to you. We simply don't have any way to do inter-personal utility comparisons in that way. It could theoretically be the case that I experience orgasmic waves of utility buying my 6th porsche this year, while your internal utilometer barely budges when you scrape together a dollar in change to buy yourself a biscuit, the only thing you'll eat all day.
I'm making an argument I don't myself buy, mind you, but it's the standard economic argument nonetheless (at least insofar as one sticks with positive economics).
15 is an even better illustration of why I could never be an economist.
Or is this just the kind of political argument that blurs filthy-rich and middle-class aspirational, so that everyone feels equally attacked?
I think this is the right answer. I remember reading some time ago that people in all economic castes tend to identify with wealthier cases when it comes to their perceived tax burden, but identify with the middle class (or lower castes) when assessing their own wealth. I'd have an even bigger boat than Mr. Jones, but for the incredible tax squeeze on middle-class guys like myself.
I thought the cleanest argument for taxing the rich was that old radical Adam Smith's:
[t]he subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state....
isn't the problem just that beauty isn't purely relative?
She on the saner side among the wingnuts, at least supposed to.
She's really not. She's just less self-consciously mean-spirited about it.
I expect this from Labs, LB, but not from you.
Rawls thought that the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons was just like the problem of other minds. If so, it's just as unpersuasive, from a practical point of view. It's not like it's impossible to figure out whether someone is happy. Anyway, no axiom in economics is more plausible than the principle that (ceteris paribus) $100 makes more difference to a pauper than to a billionaire.
Didn't LB once have a post wondering what libertarians really think? This is what libertarians really think.
I see 20 was unnecessary. Sorry.
I'm not even sure why I linked this. I just read it and was rocked back a bit: You think I want to scar Cindy Crawford's face? You think that a related impulse has anything to do with redistribution of wealth?
Wow.
You think that a related impulse has anything to do with redistribution of wealth?
Snark aside, this really is more or less what libertarians think.
Acid, in its finite chemistry, scars the faces of rich and poor alike.
26
You think that a related impulse has anything to do with redistribution of wealth?
Of course she does- your real worth is directly proportional to your net worth, don't you know? Your redistribution schemes are tantamount to defacing the beautiful edifice of the wealth of the wealthy... uh... not sure I can continue in this vein.
I'm pretty much with 18. Redistributional policy isn't primarily a good idea because of marginal curves, it's a good idea because helping people that need help is the right thing to do. Of course, there's little defending that beyond "cause I said so".
15 is certainly right in what is stated, but makes the huge omission of not recognizing that there's lots of good, useful social science that's not economics. And you can look at those sorts of interpersonal questions with tools like psychology. (Or some other flaky field. heh.)
Snark aside, this really is more or less what libertarians think.
I don't think that's true. I think Mike J is right that DeLong took the conversation down a strange road (AFAIK; I haven't really followed it). It is a pretty weak argument for redistribution, and I think there are better arguments available. (I suspect that the conversation started on a narrow point, and then moved, untethered.) And I suspect that Jim Henley would agree with the point the Galt is making about this argument without agreeing as to the force of her rhetoric.
(NB: I'm slightly in the tank for libertarians (rather than schmibertarians) post-Padilla.)
The argument from marginal utility is strong, and can be backed up by plenty of evidence from empirical psychology, but it still concedes too much to the libertarians.
The impulse to fairness is not some indirect way of calculating utility, it is a deeply rooted part of moral psychology. We have an instinctive sense that cooperative ventures should be designed so that they benefit everyone involved. If someone is working in a cooperative operation, and not gaining from it, we intuitively think they are exploited. This instinct can be refined by different rules--should people be compensated according to their effort? Their actual results? None of these refinements can keep us from thinking, though, that radical disparities in benefits are evidence of exploitation. Without this kind of moral instinct, cooperation, and with it human society would be largely impossible.
Wealth redistribution is motivated by the simple fact that the economy is a cooperative enterprise, and thus should benefit all involved. Libertarians short circuit this argument by pretending the wealthy attain their wealth entirely on their own. Jane’s fictional hero John Galt became wealthy because he invented and marketed a better metal, without any help from anyone else ever. In the Randian world, there are no real cooperative ventures. Even families are despised. As a result, fairness simply ceases to be a moral principle.
Beauty, like wealth, is relative--it benefits its possessor only insofar as they are lovelier than the women...
I appreciate writers who pause once and awhile to reflect on what they have written. You know, just to check for embarrsingly wrong statements.
I'm slightly in the tank for libertarians (rather than schmibertarians) post-Padilla.
Don't get me wrong, libertarians are great on civil liberties. But on economic issues this sort of thing is where they're coming from (although I grant that not every libertarian is going to put it the way Galt does).
My kids like me to read themthis book about a beautiful fish with shiny scales, who finds happiness by sharing his shiny scales with the other fish. It seems like a really basic lesson, but one that anyone who references Ayn Rand novels in their blog titles misses.
The difference between the story of Rainbow Fish and the demented story of throwing acid on Cindy Crawford’s face is that the other fish actually become prettier through his generosity. An important premise in Galt's argument against redistribution is that the government can do absolutely no good with the money it gets from taxation. They might as well be taking money and setting it on fire. But this premise is obviously false.
Honestly, I don't understand how libertarians ever manage to raise children. Don't they tell their children to share their toys?
But this premise is obviously false.
False, but, again, rather important to libertarianism.
36: The children of libertarians can end up with severely fucked-up lives. Trust me on this.
John Galt became wealthy because he invented and marketed a better metal, without any help from anyone else ever.
Hank Rearden is the metal baron. Galt is the physicist who sets up the nerd hideway in CO where he and the other wankers hide from the cruel world behind a magic cloud and wait for the women to show up to do their housework and beg to fuck them.
39: Jesus. I'm glad I never read the thing.
32: By and large, I would rather have the primary aim of the government be to make its citizens happy than to make them get what they deserve. Suppose the citizens of a certain country were all happier than they deserve to be, and one policy would make them happier and another less. Which policy should their government adopt?
I don't mean to defend every utility-maximizing principle that runs contrary to desert. But even the undeserving poor should pay lower taxes.
39: Oops. My point still stands.
The view Jane Galt espouses is completely morally depraved.
Paging Jacqueline Passey- is there something about being an objectivist chick that makes their self-descriptions so cringe-inducing?
I understand what she means by wealth being relative- if we declared tomorrow that all dollars were actually worth a thousand dollars (and all other currencies in the world as well to keep things even), it wouldn't help that poor people now make 10 million a year because the median wage is now 50 million.
However, she seems to think that wealth redistribution give poor people joy due to seeing rich people put in their place, rather than due to the fact that it allows said poor to eat. Maybe she's describing some middle class psychosis, where once you have enough to meet basic needs you'd feel richer if there weren't other obscenely rich out there and you'd be closer to the top.
43: It is, because it involves surprising a basic moral instinct, something that is probably an evolved psychological module.
Of course, by that standard, my moral views are depraved as well, because I basically favor surprising all intuitions that come from a feeling of moral disgust (at homosexuality, for instance.) It's all reflective equilibrium.
Libertarian economics are pure wankery. In their mind the market is moral, and there's no possibility of exploitation. If owners of capital can get a worker to make something for 15 cents, and turn around and sell it for 10 dollars, well, the owner "deserves" every penny of that profit.
The other reason I can't take libertarians seriously on economics is the complete historical vacuum in which they operate. Hey fuckers, we tried your way already. It's called feudalism, childrern working textile factories, and coal miners dying by 45 of black lung.
Let's query "upper-middle-class." In particular, while I understand why a correlation could exist between good (defined as (non-racially) white, (non-sexually) straight, and all present) teeth, by what causal chain would socio-economic status effect the length or thickness of one's hair?
46: Shit, a spell check mistake
should be "suppressing"
I meant to replace a typo with the second option the computer gave me, but accidentally used the first.
I'm having a rough day over here.
While reading this thread I have been listening to ABBA's "Money, Money, Money." Awesome.
48- What, you've never seen all those hair-care commercials and the crap they sell in the salon? Or maybe she's just talking about affording nice extensions.
47- Presumably that would include slavery as well? If you can pay someone $1/hr to beat the crap out of 10 people so they make something for free, and you can then sell it for $100, it's all good? Although where does the libertarian objection to government involvement come in- do they object to laws enforcing ownership of slaves, or do they object to laws saying you can't hire people to whip and chain others? (I suspect the latter- the only government libertarians approve of is enforcement of contracts and ownership rights, yes?)
39: You forgot his magical free-energy device. That's important, damn it.
36 - No, libertarians say things like "So, both your children want to use toy X at the same time? Well, obviously the answer is to buy another X." And then look at you blankly when you point out that toy X is in fact a computer, and you can't just buy one. Surely if someone really *wanted* to have enough money to buy unlimited pcs for their family, they'd get it!
I'm on a mailing list about a libertarian theory of education. They honestly do say things like that.
Jane Galt's thoughts are bizarre. Yes, I love the idea of higher taxation for the very rich simply because it would make me happy to see them with less money. That's fucked up.
47: Not being a libertarian, take what I say with a grain of salt, but given the extent to which libertarians privilege property rights and view civil liberties as essentially stemming from same, I'd expect that most of them would object to the ownership of slaves in that it's an abrogration of one's ownership of oneself and one's products. Hayek, f'rinstance, doesn't seem like he'd be down, although John Norman does.
Hayek wasn't really a libertarian, was he.
55,
Slavery = Bad.
Indentured Servitude = teh awesome.
The commenters are too fast: Harrison Bergeron and Jackie 'too many names' Passey came to mind immediately.
so is Vonnegut a good antidote for Randian 'thought?' I've not read much of him: I wonder if lovers of the stiff Randian style can handle the more playful/less direct style of Vonnegut?
Brad DeLong responds to Galt and Mankiw
The best thing in this post in James Galbraith channeling Veblen in the comments.
DeLong followed with a subtle attack on Marxism. Or not so subtle, or I shouldn't characterize the post, just a very selective excerpt with little editorial addition. His commentere were displeased.
Could the Terror or Whites vs Reds happen here? I don't doubt it.
how the fuck was feudalism anything like libertarian paradise? 'gold rush boom town wild west' seem more like what they're going for.
#18 Smith said that, but the argument was originally from Sir William Petty.
Inequality is bad because it means that some people have very little control over how their life goes, which is a state of being which is known to have bad mental and physical health consequences. If we were all floating around on lilypads eating the grapes brought to us by flower fairies, then I would not be in favour of progressive taxation to redistribute the nicest fairies and the biggest lilypads.
However, we actually live in a capitalist economy, where the very richest of the rich are rich because they have a legal claim on goods produced by the labour of others, a claim which is in the final analysis preserved by the threat of state violence. To dramatise this matter somewhat (and to adapt Marx's famous vampire metaphor), it is rather as if Ms Crawford were preserving her radiant beauty by bathing every day in the blood of 40 virgins. In which case I presume we would ask her to cut down on the virgins' blood, even if this meant that she ended up not being as beautiful as she wanted to be.
The problem is that she's treating wealth as a brute fact, similar to Cindy Crawford's good looks -- but the amount of money in one's bank account is not determined by DNA in the same way as one's height, metabolism, etc.
People should resent rich people, because the best way to become extremely rich is to get people to waste the better part of their adult life working for you and paying them less than they're work, then congratulating yourself on how hard you've worked to become rich. Oh, you can also talk a lot about how all labor contracts are freely entered into, even though such ideas have only a tenuous relationship to reality.
I've been reading liberation theology, and now I'm reading Marx. My incivility is unlikely to let up any time soon.
i've always assumed libertarians & conservatives & other people with funny ideas have different psychologies for people 'out in the world' from those they actually interact with, like family or coworkers. its just never occured to them that people in palestine or poor people or whatever migh actually be like the people they intereact with daily.
btw, McArdle herself is the primary proof that Brad DeLong is right here; you only have to read a few pages of her output to be very sure indeed that she gets quite a lot of psychological pleasure from knowing that there is a poor underclass in existence that she can feel superior to (because she made good life choices stemming from a superior character, natchurally). The primary reason I stopped reading her blog was that I became disgusted with the oleaginous pleasure she seemed to be taking in her descriptions of inner city squalor and fecklessnes. It's positively Lovecraftian.
62: Cindy Bathory had the knights and the castle, and was stopped only because of the usual competitions and power struggles of the nobles.
"Her crimes, arrest, and imprisonment can be seen in the context of a financial wartime power struggle she and her family eventually lost to the Habsburgs. The Bathory family's influence had declined in its base, Transylvania, after their involvement in the Long War with the Turks and subsequent betrayal at the hands of their allies. After her husband's death, the Emperor had refused to pay debts owed to the late "Black Beg". Elizabeth's relative Gabriel Bathory (listed as a brother, cousin, or nephew depending on the source) was involved in anti-Habsburg intrigue following the Long War and she was said to have been linked to these activities[3][4]."
Peasants be damned, ya know. Just food.
Note that the "marginal utility" argument isn't a prime motivator of redistribution, but rather a counter to a specfic anti-redistribution argument. That is, we want to redistribute income because we find that some people are living in squalor, and yes "squalor" is hand-waving. The objection to redistribution is that you're just stealing from the rich to give to the poor; and the counter to this is that it's ok because, at some margin, it helps poor people far more than it hurts rich people. But this last point is not the reason that we want to redistribute, but a reason that it's allowable. Please insert "some say" as appropriate throughout.
And that's why we're not throwing acid at anyone, nor do we want to.
#18 Smith said that, but the argument was originally from Sir William Petty.
Fair enough, but if you tell a member of the Federalist Society that Sir William Petty favored income taxes, and for what reasons, he will glaze over. Whereas if you remind him that Smith said it, and why, it will make your point.
I grant that there are some cases of redistribution which maximize utility but aren't permissible. It isn't permissible to tax the glum and give to the cheerful, even if that maximizes glee. Nor would it be permissible to start throwing acid, even if the citizenry would enjoy the spectacle.
Still, I would take the 'prime motivator' here to make the citizenry happier. The point about marginal utility explains, in abstract, how this is possible through redistribution, not why it is allowable. I would want to redistribute to the poor in order to make them happier, not for the sake of something else (e.g. justice). Even if there were no squalor, and everyone were living a minimally decent life, it would be permissible to tax the rich more heavily than the poor.
69: Even flat-tax advocates seem to grant that it's permissible to require the rich to pay more tax money in absolute terms, as opposed to there being a "citizen's fee" of a defined monetary value that everyone must pay regardless of income.
Of course, our taxophobia has led to more and more government services being financed through fees and fines, which disproportionately affect the poor. I'm sure that if we looked at the actual financing of government, with taxes, fees, and fines all taken into account, the lower classes would be paying a disproportionately large amount, compared with their collective wealth. In this, government has decided to follow capital's example -- perhaps that's what's meant by "running government like a business."
#68: you are of course right. Petty is an incredibly obscure figure even to economists and I wouldn't have heard of him myself except he's in "Fifty Major Economists" by Stephen Pressman which is a jolly excellent book.
This post from DeLong sure has generated the responses...
On Inequality ...Yglesias
Fear of a Populist Planet ...Sawicky
Hey, folks I think, tho I can't speak for him, that DeLong is a historical economist and sincerely fears the Terror. We must incrementally achieve justice,with the caution of scientists.
Now darn, seems to me that the Terror is so unlikely in this country...well, perhaps I should stop before my inner Marat shows. But I fear stasis, an irrevocable economic structure of injustice more than I fear the guillotine. Thirty years of stagnant wages and little political outcry or establishment outrage. We are on our way.
You know who was an interesting guy? Pareto.
Isn't there a version of or corollary to Godwin's Law that deals with mention of the story "Harrison Bergeron"?
What, something like "as liberals discuss libertarian economic views the probability of someone mentioning HB approaches 1"?
Not quite -- I meant something more like "as libertarians discuss progressive taxation the likelihood of a HB-esque scenario being spun approaches 1" -- but I see I misspoke by writing "mention of the story", making your reading more in keeping with what I wrote, and your reading is probably valid across some subsets of USENET or what have you.
BTW: children of libertarians can end up with severely fucked-up lives -- is this intended as an introduction to some personal revelations?...
I really like the frank admission that wealth is only enjoyable because the rich know other people are in poverty.
(35: Actually I hate that book, and am appalled that you read it to your kid. Sharing is all well and good, but the fish mutilates herself so that the other fish won't be envious? I'd be cooler with the lesson if the fish didn't actually have to take scales from her very body. Even though I realize it's supposed to be a Christian metaphor and everything, but, still. Ick.)
is this intended as an introduction to some personal revelations?...
Not personal per se, but similar. I might do a post on this.
Sharing is all well and good, but the fish mutilates herself so that the other fish won't be envious? I'd be cooler with the lesson if the fish didn't actually have to take scales from her very body. Even though I realize it's supposed to be a Christian metaphor and everything, but, still. Ick.
I bet you hate The Giving Tree too.
The Giving Tree always struck me as creepy.
Can anyone recommend anything short and interesting on the apparent fundamental lack of empathy that characterizes conservative and libertarian political thought?
Aw jeez, teofilo, I think you just linked me to five years of work. I gor EH.net, I got Austrians, I got this page, I got the vast Marxists.org. Thru Marxists somehow Saturday I found a Critical Theory page. I this week downloaded Keynes (3 books, including the bigun) and Dialectic of Enlightenment. I got more Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas than I can shake a mouse at.
Dilettantes have it rough you know. Philosophical Pessimism is attractive because you can say technology, and the social sciences are technology, is irrelevant and read about Medieval Castles and Troubadours and pretend to be educated.
I though I told everybody I stopped reading in 1983. I had my reasons.
I forgot my good line. There is as much economics online as porn. I swear.
Dilettantes have it rough you know.
(grin)
I keep trying to figure out how much of her schtick is ambition-driven and how much is quasi-Randoid true belief.
77. Mmm, I didn't think of reading it as self mutilation that does mute things a bit. But isn't the fish male?
I have long recognized The Giving Tree as creepy, though, and I believe that is part of the intent of the author. This is the same man who wrote "A Boy Named Sue"
But isn't the fish male?
I fail to see how this matters.
This is the same man who wrote "A Boy Named Sue"
I believe this also comes up in the thread I linked in 81. That was a good thread.
87: I thought it was a she, but who knows. It doesn't really matter--I'm just bugged by the idea of giving things away to buy friends, which seems to be what the story advocates.
When PK was littler, I used to just change the ending, so that the fish, when it discovered everyone else envied it, said something like, "oh! but i get my pretty scales from eating a particular kind of seaweed, i'll show you where it is." Of course, he was too little to realize that the fish was progressively less shiny.
I became disgusted with the oleaginous pleasure she seemed to be taking in her descriptions of inner city squalor and fecklessnes.
This seems to be right of a whole range of libertarian/schmibertarian thinkers.
The irony being, of course, that none of them could cope for 10 minutes if actually placed in that squalor and left to better themselves through their own brilliance.
It's all much of a muchness with their deluded self-belief that they've succeeded in their lives through sheer talent rather than through living in a society structured to their benefit and in which they've been given every advantage.
It's hard to think of a group I despise more.
It's hard to think of a group I despise more.
What about Nazis? Or rapists? Or Republicans?
When PK was littler
I totally read this as "When PK was Hitler" and was about to invoke Godwin on your ass.
Shel Silverstein was a Southern Baptist? That goes oddly with my image of him as a songwriter.
The fish is male. I'm looking at the book now.
It is relevant because generosity to the point of self mutilation is coded female in our culture, a fact which The Giving Tree leans on. The fact that Rainbow Fish is male makes me think that there is less weirdness intended by the author, to the extent that he might just say "its only a story about sharing; you're reading into it." Not that he should have the final word, or anything
re: 91
Well, obviously there are individuals and behaviours I despise more. However, I'm not sure rapists form a proudly self-identifying class in *quite* the same way as libertarians.
Shel Silverstein was not a Southern Baptist.
"The trees are all kept equal... with hatchet.. axe.. and SAW!"
And I appear to have been hallucinating, because nobody claimed that the songwriter who came up with The Father of the Boy Named Sue was a Baptist. Mea culpa.
RE: "This does not mean that my $1,000,000th dollar will mean less to me than your first will mean to you. We simply don't have any way to do inter-personal utility comparisons in that way."
I do. It hurts me more to have to wait five extra minutes for the butler to bring me my mojito than it hurts you to be waterboarded and then disemboweled by Donald Rumsfeld.
Capiche?
norbizness is banned -- and weren't the oaks really hurting the other plants by blocking the light? Is it really so wrong to trim them, so that all may live?
Also, isn't a hatchet just a small axe?
Don't ask me, Matt, Neil Peart's Illusionist-era handlebar moustache was writing lyrics for the group back then.
isn't a hatchet just a small axe?
Isn't an island just a small continent?
They look similar, but they are wielded for different purposes (mainly, trimming branches vs. splitting logs).
I think you could probably split a log with an island, provided you handled it right.
You could, sure, but proper shillelagh technique gets tricky with something so small.
I think "ax" is a pretty broad category and encompasses a number of implements of destruction, some of them verging into hatchet territory but generally larger, and that "hatchet" denotes a particular tool.
Don't tomahawks have stone heads? I thought they did anyway. Will go look and find out.
Wikipædia describes a tomahawk as "a type of axe native to North America, traditionally resembling a hatchet with a straight haft". (This suggests to me that Weiner's 104 is approximately correct.) They originally had stone heads but later on brass and iron were common.
Also: is 'hache' French for 'ax' as this Wikipædia page suggests? Cause if so that makes the notion that a hatchet is "just a small ax" pretty much out-and-out accurate.
Even a small axe is still used for cutting down trees rather than trimming them.
(For those keeping track at home, Rush sucks, and Marley is actually great even though Marley fans are annoying. So the pro-equality side wins.)
My former roommate was a really by-the-book Ayn Rand libertarian type, now he's literally on public assistance. Ironic?
Speaking of The Giving Tree, a book I love, have you seen this? http://www.worth1000.com/emailthis.asp?entry=13824
This argument itself is idiotic, but there are plenty of colorable libertarianish arguments focusing on the problems of "redistribution" rather than the distribution itself, I.E. regulatory capture and the like. I think what gets you from that to this is a sort of argumentative creep--admitting that the current distribution is borked grants a lot to your adversery, so it's easier to make shitty arguments about how the distribution is really fine rather than the hard technical arguments about how redistribution will make a shitty situation even worse.
These type threads always wierd me out because I have pretty substantial libertarian instincts and I don't *feel* like a wanker. Although I suppose that perception is infinitely susceptable to self-delusion.
So Glenn, you aren't in theory opposed to throwing acid in pretty people's faces, you just worry that it will end up backfiring in some way -- acid splashback on the throwers, that sort of thing?
You do not, ideally, use a hatchet for splitting logs. For that you want a maul.
I was wondering why we didn't seem to have any libertarians here; they're legion elsewhere on the the internet. Honestly, there's nothing wrong with libertarianish tendencies, and the libertarians do make some good points (not very many imo, but reasonable people can differ). The problems come when you take it to insane lengths, as a rather large number of libertarians do.
119 -- I think 106 was suggesting that the proper use for a hatchet was trimming branches, not splitting logs.
"The trees are all kept equal... with hatchet.. axe.. and SAW!"
As a pimply kid I heard this as a rallying cry for Marxist revolution. Rush will lead us in the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie!
No, I'm worried that if we acknoweldge the legitimacy of acid-throwing we risk having some very unsavory characters wrest control of the vats and start throwing acid in the wrong direction. Which is pretty much what bush has done, see his tax cuts exhibit one.
That's what makes the Reynolds style of "libertarianism"(needs scarier scare quotes) especially grotesque. Libertarianism is supposed to be about opposing the expansion of governmental power, even if that power could be used to do good things in the short term. Reynolds et. al. are favoring the expansion of governmental power to do unilaterally bad things. That's bad.
123 -- chainsaw seems like a really clumsy tool for splitting -- doesn't it work much better crosscutting?
I confess that I've never split a log with anything. Or crosscut one, for that matter.
I was wondering why we didn't seem to have any libertarians here
They smell funny.
Wouldn't it really blow this Jane Galt's mind if someone explained to her that the beauty regime in which Cindy Crawford (as well as Galt herself) exists and hypothetically might attract the ire of potential vitrioleurs or vitrioleuses is itself dependent on patriarchy and capitalist control of the means of production?
I'm about to go to sleep now, but I'm hoping taht tomorrow we can have a discussion of Brad deLong's post in which he talked about being a sensible center-left technocrat who wanted to engage with sensible reality-based center-right technocrats. I was particularly struck by Atrios's reply, though Max Sawicky had some interesting responses too. (I refuse to wade into the comment section at eschaton.)
What I really liked about what Atrios said was that he acknowledged the way that being anti-ideological was itself an ideology.
So, Sisyphus Shrugged (linking here), links to this Jon Swift dude, who apparently fits the mold:
So what is it that I see in Mrs. Swift? Well, I cannot tell you what exactly, except perhaps it's because she laughs at all of my jokes. For some reason, and I may be wrong about this, I get the distinct impression that there would come a day when [Jacqueline Passey] would turn to me and say, "I don't get it. Is that supposed to be funny?"
Beauty, like wealth, is relative--it benefits its possessor only insofar as they are lovelier than the women, or handsomer than the men, around them.
This is just such a fucking stupid question that I find it hard to focus on anything else, or even, honestly, on this comment thread. So, so, so stupid. So priviledged, so the work of somebody who's never actually had to worry about food or shelter.
There is not one damn thing relative about wealth as we know it in the US. Wealth is an absolute ability to NOT HAVE YOUR CHILDREN'S BRAINS POISONED BY LEAD. It is good, nourishing food, it is warm beds, it is educations in schools with smaller class sizes and more qualified teachers. It is your children not having to sign up to be send to the Iraqi meat grinder to pay for higher education. It is time, time with your spouse, with your children, with the things in your life that you find fine.
Taking Mazzaratis and yachts and third homes away from the stupidly rich in order to pay for food, shelter, schooling, and, yes, a civilized amount of lesiure time so that you can have a life with your family, friends, and hobbies is not the same as spoiling Cindy Crawford's looks with acid. It's not even a little like it. I can scarcely imagine the perspective that produces such an assertion.
For the Humor thread referenced in 133:
one link you guys missed is that high-status(cool) guys are both attractive to women, and able to get laughs consistently. bosses & professors are examples, but actually physically attractive guys who are just cooler than the other people they hang out with are laughed at, because they're the leaders of their group, and people follow along when they say something with 'laugh cues'. so some girl likes the guy, and attributes it to humor. then a bunch of other guys try to be funny but shortcircuit out the step of being cool and important.
134: yeah, but even poor people buy status symbol stuff. i'd like a culture where that was discouraged, instead of actively encouraged (for rich&poor both).
The irony being, of course, that none of them could cope for 10 minutes if actually placed in that squalor and left to better themselves through their own brilliance.
ahhh but there's always a just so story about how "there but for the grace of God I too could have gone, had it not been for my intelligence, character and good old-fashioned pluck. I lived among these people for a while, did I tell you that? Just like Diane Fossey".
The really idiotic thing about that Rush song is that this is the whole principle of forestry management. If someone hadn't been planning to harvest the timber at a roughly equal rate, there probably wouldn't have been a forest there in the first place.
Also, maples grow faster than oaks, for fuck's sake. If you planted maples and oaks side by side, it would have been the maples that shaded the oaks. Oak is one of the slowest-growing trees there is.
136: To the extent that that's true, it's like saying, 'We have big problems in our culture in how teenagers and parents interact. Too many teens sass back at their parents and too many parents commit incest with their teenage daughters and knock them up.' Seriously, we have, on the one hand, (I emphasize again) poor children being poisoned with lead paint and pipes because their parents can't afford to move, and then, on the other hand, we have shallow people buying status symbols. These are not comparable problems. They are dissimilar in more ways and more important ways than they are similar.
re: 137
Yeah, there are often those just-so stories. I love them. Getting into one of those 'come-up hard' pissing contests with libertarians is like taking sweeties from a baby. I've never gotten into one of those competitions I didn't win.
All very infantile of course since their personal narrative is totally irrelevant to the truth of their political position. Still fun though.
re:137
The question is whether the libertarian *aesthetic* can be seperate from liberterian theory. The aesthetic is what gets you all the ayn rand, horatio alger, and technology-as-eschaton crap.
but its the same people who can't move who fall into status seeking behaviour. thats like exactly whey i'm not a libertarian: status just isn't something the rich pursue, we all fall for it. its what everyone is doing, even when it means lead pipes for the kids.
re:139
I think you have the direction of causality reversed. The personal narrative isn't cover for the odious political positions, the political positions are a way of sustaining the coherence of the narrative.
its probably more of an outgrowth of the narrative that happens when the person starts thinking abotu politics.
re: 142
Yes, I suspect there is something to that. Libertarianism for some of these people does seem to be a way of sustaining a certain heroic self-regard.
heroic self-regard usually seems stunningly effortlessly achieved though.
re: 145
I don't know. I had to set aside a 'self-regard' hour, spent in front of the mirror, every morning for years before I got really good at it.
Even now, if I let my guard slip and my 'chops' weaken through lack of practice, I find myself admitting that lots of good things about my life are a matter of pure blind luck and many of the rest, the result of help from, and cooperation with, other human beings. The price of heroic self-regard is constant vigilance!
well, the reason politics is such a natural foundation to build on is that it appears natural. The substrate of the self-regard is so deeply buried that they themselves are not conscious of it, especially since they are so resistant to any excavation.
I guess my point here is that assholes are assholes. Libertarians may possess a greater ratio of assholes for various sociological reasons, but they are assholes because they are assholes, not because they are libertarians. If a libertarian is not an asshole, he may be right, he may be wrong, but he is worth engaging. This contrasts with most subtypes of modern american conservative, who are assholes in essence as well as in fact.
So libertariansare generally more benign than conservatism? I can't agree with that.
Libertarians may possess a greater ratio of assholes for various sociological reasons, but they are assholes because they are assholes, not because they are libertarians. If a libertarian is not an asshole, he may be right, he may be wrong, but he is worth engaging.
Agree entirely. I used to write off libertarians as hopelessly naive engineering nerds whose lack of exposure to actual people limited their ability to understand the various issues that arose in the affairs of actual people. But when they (here distinguished from the "schmibertarians") stepped up on civil liberties (in a way that no Republican organization and not that many Democratic organizations did), I started reading some of them, and I realize that my characterization was a caricature. At a minimum, those are people with whom I feel comfortable in political deals.
Worth noting that Jane's all-but-expressly a schmib (or propertarian or whatever). Lumping her in with libertarians like Henley is unfair.
John Holbo very effectively covers some of the 'aesthetics of self-reliance vs. the policies of self-reliance' in an entry over at his (and his wife's) blog. I think it's a very good point that what a lot of libertarians, especially the conservative ones, seem to be more interested in is an aesthetic outcome than a strictly pragmatic one.
Lumping her in with libertarians like Henley is unfair
as with failures of policies of appeasement other than 1938, successful English football teams other than 1966 and Australian pop groups other than INXS, the reason that people always talk about Jim Henley and Julian Sancheze when the subject is "reasonable, humane libertarians" is that they're basically the only examples.
more benign? No. more variable, yes. Conservatives, in their modern republican form, represent a dull, plodding, and predictable type of evil. You know what you are getting with a conservative. You can safely deliver the bphd/dsquared double barreled mixed metaphor broadside to them with little fear that you are gonna hit innocent bystanders.
With a libertarian you have no such guarentee. He might be a Henley-type or he might be a Reynolds type, so you don't get the intellectual freefire zone. I think this is why libertarians piss liberals off so much. They want them to either get with the program or be entirely villifiable. Threads about libertarians at the big liberal blogs are often even nastier than the ones about conservatives. Conservatives are acknowledged as in-theory worse, but they don't earn the same degree of visceral oppobrium.
re: 151
What about reason and the various blogs associated with them? Also, say, Will Wilkinson. Those are the ones I read, and I could come up with others if you asked me.
I think you are suffering from a bad case of sample bias. On the national stage, Libertarians are only gonna get the microphone when they borrow the republicans, which is naturally gonna bias towards the schmibs. The internet is also skewed because of the first mover advantage associated with reynolds and co. and the fact that the whole singularity-techno-eschaton thing predisposes certain subsets toward being early adopters with blogs.
Also, there are libertarians who split the difference between wanker and legit. Tierney is an asshole some, but not all, of the time for example.
I'm with dsquared on this. The vast majority of libertarians are wankers of the schmibertarian school. People like Henley are in a tiny minority.
A neat rhetorical trick the libertarians have pulled is to identify themselves as the party of 'liberty'; when, of course, you find a robust defence of civil liberties from old-school liberals, left-libertarians, anarcho-socialists, anarcho-capitalists, council communists, mutualists, municipalists, some strands of Tory opinion, and huge swathes of old-school social democratic opinion among many others. Without, in many of these cases, the crushing Randian self-delusion and the enthusiastic sucking of capital's cock.
Also, re:
On the national stage, Libertarians are only gonna get the microphone when they borrow the republicans, which is naturally gonna bias towards the schmibs.
Dsquared and I are British. I don't know about dsquared but in my own case I'm fairly sure that the connection between libertarianism and access via republicanism to a particular national stage isn't really a factor since it isn't my nation's stage in question.
Levy and Silber too...
But when we get a dem president, at least a liberal one, you might come to think Henley, et al are really evil nutcases.
I am unfamiliar with the british political scene, so I wanted to avoid generalizing where I wasn't sure I could. I've seen dsquared tool on plenty of american schmibs, plus he cited american libertarians, so I figured I should constrain my comment to the context I was familiar with, where I think it holds.
I also think your comment about the "trick" elides the very distinction I am trying to pinpoint. If we want to define libertarian as being equivilent to propertarian or schmib, that's fine, but then we have a whole bunch of people we need a new term for because they don't fit in any of the existing categories.
That's quite wrong, Matt. I discussed this w a friend just recently. Conservatarian nutcase think tanks are influential all over Europe, despite being completely out of the mainstream, and they that position in large part because they've been so heavily subsidized by corporations. The more consistently antigovernemnt elements are politically marginal. They're in eclipse here and in the UK, but not on the continent or esp. Central Europe.
Merkel flirted w flat taxes in freaking Germany for chrissakes.
Google the Stockholm network.
Glenn might be right about "Reason"; I've never read that blog because I really (no *really*) can't get past the Matt Furey "Combat Conditioning" ads they have at the top. I don't know who Wil Wilkinson is either.
Personally, I'm pretty comfortable setting the bar of Taking Them Seriously pretty high for case-by-case personal interactions with self-described libertarians. It's not just that 80%+ of them are wankers, which is certainly true. But then there's the fact that the remainder, who would otherwise be reasonable people, feel the need to self-identify as part of a group of people, the vast majority of whom are wankers. Usually, I find, otherwise-reasonable libertarians of the latter stripe have some serious intellectual idea about how liberals want to run your life and big government and taxes and have a strong attraction to the idea of 'limited government' without a concurrent strong idea of what precisely the practical meaning of the phrase is. These are serious oversights if one is to have a conversation about politics and public policy, and so it's an uphill battle for a self-described libertarian to convince me that it's worth my time to talk to them about such things.
I haven't read much Reason but my impression is they're wankers.
151: Unfair, sir! What about the Go-Betweens? (Or twee-pop band the Cat's Miaow, although I'm willing to accept "schmaustralian" in that case.)
151: I think dsquared's overstating it. To the extent that we're talking about libertarians who do not insist in pointing out, with every reference, that taxes are theft, then it seems to me we're really talking about people who (a) are very good on civil liberties, (b) want every government program to be pass a very high justificatory bar, and (c) want a general presumption against the government as Nosey Parker or nanny. That puts them on the wings of the two major parties (which depends on emphasis).
If we're talking about people who insist on voting for Libertarians out of Principle!, yes, they're often annoying and idiotic. That's pretty true of Principled! Dems who are leftier than thou and end up voting for Nader. (A principled Republican being such a rarity, it's more charming than annoying.) I admit that there seem to be a high number of idiots among the libertarians, but I think that's a function of their relative lack of power; no need to conform utopian fantasies to actual governing if you are never going to govern.
I think this thread largely takes flight from a mistake.
McCardle doesn't think the value of beauty is relative. She think's it's like wealth in this way -- the more of it in the world, the better. She's stipulating the opposite for the purpose of her hypothetical, which admittedly, was rhetorically extreme, but which I am surprised was too much for weaker stomachs here. Her point is directed solely against a certain kind of egalitarianism. Namely, one that thinks that reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor. Maybe this view is so crazy that no one here holds it. But I doubt it, frankly.
How framing this hypothetical shows that McCardle herself takes pleasure from the existence of the poor (as suggested by D^2, who really ought to know better) I really can't say.
Also, I think the line suggested by Rob H-C as a justification for redistribution is a mistake: "Wealth redistribution is motivated by the simple fact that the economy is a cooperative enterprise, and thus should benefit all involved."
That's not what motivates me. I think wealth should be redistributed to people who lack the necessities for a flourishing human life even if they have never participated in the economy in any appreceable way (refugees in the Sudan, Amazon tribes, poor people on the moon, should we find them). Maybe I should independently find compelling the proposition that Bill Gates made his money via a collaboration with the nation's homeless, but I hope one need not believe this in order to support significant transfer payments (be they private or public).
reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor
Who then, pray tell, would it benefit?
one that thinks that reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor
The argument actually made by the people she linked is that reducing the wealth of the rich might be a good thing even if it doesn't increase the wealth of the poor, because the wealth of the rich harms the wealth of the poor; so reducing the wealth of the rich would be a benefit to the poor. I really doubt that anyone here thinks the wealth of the rich should be reduced if it's of absolutely no benefit to anyone.
Consider the DeLong sentence she blockquotes:
I'm enough of a touchy-feely sociology-lover to believe that a good chunk of the utility the rich derive from their conspicuous consumption is transferred to them from the poor.
Utility transferred from the poor = the poor have less utility = the poor are harmed.
JG may have in mind a different position, but it wouidn't be the first time the position she'd attacked wasn't quite the one her opponents held.
Namely, one that thinks that reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor. Maybe this view is so crazy that no one here holds it. But I doubt it, frankly.
Yeah, see, that's what makes you and McArdle both kind of terrifyingly hostile. Is that really what you think you're arguing against?
Any sane person who advocates redistribution advocates it because it benefits the recipients of the redistribution. You may not agree with their understanding of what benefits the recipients are likely to reap, or how they will come into play, but to suggest that redistribution is in anyone's mind valuable because of the damage it inflicts on the rich rather than because of any benefit to anyone else is a horrifying accusation, and one which reflects a complete misunderstanding of everything liberals stand for.
Ah, ignore 165, 166 makes it clear what is being addressed.
Wait, LB actually said 'quite' in the post. Was that on purpose?
168, 170: I'm not following you. What's the question?
How framing this hypothetical shows that McCardle herself takes pleasure from the existence of the poor (as suggested by D^2, who really ought to know better) I really can't say.
I don't think that dsquared is making that charge on the basis of this post alone. He says,
"you only have to read a few pages of her output to be very sure indeed that she gets quite a lot of psychological pleasure from knowing that there is a poor underclass in existence that she can feel superior to (because she made good life choices stemming from a superior character, natchurally).It looks like he's characterizing her worldview based on various previous readings. Best not to misread someone's charge if you're going to scold them for a willful misreading of someone else, baa.
171: Ever since I read this post the little man inside my head has been saying "You're quite hostile" in the voice of the honky dude from It takes a nation of millions to hold us back. Who is the bigger honky, me for gratuitously quoting Public Enemy or you for not getting it, I will leave to the readership.
Ah. I really hardly listen to music at all, regardless of the genre. Think of it like a learning disability.
Speaking of Public Enemy, I recently, for no reason that I can recollect, wanted to make a t-shirt that says "World War I is a joke in your town."
Boo! Sorry to terrify, LB. (the hostility, I can assure you is in your imagination).
I think people support redistribution and equality for lots of reasons, most of which they have a hard time articulating, and some of which are bad. Alas, the justification for redistribution which you support is not the only sane one, nor the only one actually in fact held. For example, a lot of the discussion of CEO compensation, e.g., does not focus on how the money should be used to benefit the poor, but rather the sense that it is simply *unjust* that they are getting such outsized returns. That's just a fact of the political rhetoric. There are lots of good reasons to think outsized CEO compensation is bad, of course, but it is simply a fact that envy, or a sense of disproportion, to put it less pejoratively, is a large part of the opposition. Likewise a sane person could favor redistribution because it is just, even if it had no net benefit to the recipient. For example, if poor guy X deserves the rich guy Y's money because they participated together in a cooperative endeavor, I don't need any additional calculation to know the distribution should take place. And again, arguments like this (or that might be like this if spelled out) are actually quite thick on the ground in egalitarian theory, and even here on this thread.
On the actual meat of the matter, DeLong's main point -- a Matt and others point out -- is a view of extreme wealth having intrinsically bad effects because it generates envy and spite. This view is a *long* way away from wanting to give Bill Gates' surplus blankets to cold poor people. It's also, I think, an unusual position, because it does suggest that it might make sense simply to destroy wealth even if it doesn't make anybody else *richer*. Of course, it could make poor people (or middle class people) happier. So maybe that's the hypothetical she should have asked: would people destroy wealth simply to make the less wealthy happy?
For example, a lot of the discussion of CEO compensation, e.g., does not focus on how the money should be used to benefit the poor, but rather the sense that it is simply *unjust* that they are getting such outsized returns.
Kevin Drum, the blogger I read who most consistently discusses this issue, is always talking about (or linking to his own old posts talking about) structural features of the market which lead to CEO compensation being higher than it would be if better (less self-dealing) incentives were present in that arena.
For example, a lot of the discussion of CEO compensation, e.g., does not focus on how the money should be used to benefit the poor, but rather the sense that it is simply *unjust* that they are getting such outsized returns. That's just a fact of the political rhetoric.
This is incredibly far from "reducing the wealth of the rich would be a good thing even if it had no benefit for the poor". Really, trust me that if you're interested in communicating with liberals at all, the fact that you could say what you did means that you aren't understanding our arguments.
Likewise a sane person could favor redistribution because it is just, even if it had no net benefit to the recipient. For example, if poor guy X deserves the rich guy Y's money because they participated together in a cooperative endeavor, I don't need any additional calculation to know the distribution should take place.
No. They couldn't. If there's no net benefit to the recipient, you're saying that justice might demand taking a benefit away from one guy X and destroying it because he worked with guy Y? That's insane. You might do that as a punishment for X, but it couldn't possibly be required by justice to Y.
And again, arguments like this (or that might be like this if spelled out) are actually quite thick on the ground in egalitarian theory, and even here on this thread.
Here, I think, is where you go wrong. I think you're looking at arguments of the form "Redistribution will benefit person A in fashion B", deciding that 'fashion B' is so transparently implausible that it can't form a genuine part of the argument, and believing that the argument is "Redistribution is good despite the fact that it does not benefit person A". If that's what you're doing, it is leading you astray. You need to focus on why you think the mechanism for benefit proposed is wrong, not dismiss it as not a part of the argument.
It's also, I think, an unusual position, because it does suggest that it might make sense simply to destroy wealth even if it doesn't make anybody else *richer*. Of course, it could make poor people (or middle class people) happier. So maybe that's the hypothetical she should have asked: would people destroy wealth simply to make the less wealthy happy?
What, in your view, is the economic distiction between wealth and happiness? Isn't wealth merely that which is capable of changing someone's utility function for the better? I'm not getting the sharp distinction you're drawing here.
Really, trust me that if you're interested in communicating with liberals at all, the fact that you could say what you did means that you aren't understanding our arguments.
Is it not a very common progressive position that income inequality per se is bad. That is, even if people on the poor end of the distribution are not suffering, the mere existence of a big gap in wealth between the poor and the rich is a bad thing.
envy and spite
This is difficult to pick up on if you haven't read all the posts, so to clarify: the spite at issue here is the rich's spite toward the poor
,That is, even if people on the poor end of the distribution are not suffering, the mere existence of a big gap in wealth between the poor and the rich is a bad thing.
The usual justification is that this will have pernicious effects. Absent such effects, why would we care?
Depends on what you by 'per se', and 'suffer'. Too much inequality have various negative consequenses. Poor people may suffer more than is necessary, if they don't suffer by Idealist's patented absolute standard.
The usual justification is that this will have pernicious effects.
Too much inequality have various negative consequenses.
What are they?
There's a severe disconnect of sensibility between thoughtful Left- and Right-leaning people.
My favorite summary was by Hilary Putnam, in course of a debate with Robert Nozick:
"But what of the fundamentals on which one cannot agree? It would be dishonest to pretend that one thinks that there are no better and worse views here. I don’t think that it is just a matter of taste whether one thinks that the obligation of the community to treat its members with compassion takes precedence over property rights; nor does my co-disputant [Robert Nozick]. Each of us regards the other as lacking, at this level, a certain kind of sensitivity and perception. To be perfectly honest, there is in each of us something akin to contempt, not for the other’s mind - for we each have the highest regard for each other’s minds - nor for the other as a person -, for I have more respect for my colleague’s honesty, integrity, kindness, etc., than I do for that of many people who agree with my ‘liberal’ political views - but for a certain complex of emotions and judgments in the other."
That 'contempt' is on display at Brad DeLong's and Greg Mankiw's sites ... as well as at Jane Galt's, and in this thread.
LB, I disagree about the claims of sanity. Some philosophers probably do make that kind of argument about justice, though philosophers don't necessarily count as sane. And there are interesting studies about allocation games; if I get $10 to divide between us, and then you get to accept (in which case we both get the distribution) or reject (in which case we get nothing), people will reject the distribution if it's blatantly unfair, even though it makes them monetarily worse off.
Mind you, I think this is eminently sensible for non-envy reasons; if there's a widespread norm that this will happen, then the first player will tend to give the second more money to avoid having the distribution rejected. But it's not crazy to interpret there as being views in the vicinity where justice requires taking a benefit away from one person out of fairness.
OTOH, I think there are perfectly good reasons to destroy wealth even if it doesn't make anyone else richer. If there weren't so many rich people driving up real estate prices it might be easier for middle-class people to live in New York. Liberts like to talk about distortions in the CPI as making up for this, but there are a lot of goods (places and time) that are limited, and super-wealthy people disproportionately soak these up. [On preview: Ideal, take this as an answer to 184.]
184: At the far margins, you can say that wealth is power, power concentrated in the hands of the very small wealthy few is an oligarchy, and that is antithetical to American notions of democracy. (Please assume a shot at you and Bush supporters generally for being essentially anti-America; I'm having coffee issues.) There are more limited gatekeeper arguments--where do you go to college, what is its price, etc.--that I find compelling. In fact, IIRC, baa once posted a link to a study that purported to find a positive correlation between cost of college and later life earnings, independent of the quality of the school involved.
OTOH, I think there are perfectly good reasons to destroy wealth even if it doesn't make anyone else richer. If there weren't so many rich people driving up real estate prices it might be easier for middle-class people to live in New York. Liberts like to talk about distortions in the CPI as making up for this, but there are a lot of goods (places and time) that are limited, and super-wealthy people disproportionately soak these up. [On preview: Ideal, take this as an answer to 184.]
This ties in perfectly to what I was about to say. If we actually just destroyed monetary wealth of the rich, it would actually be a form of redistribution. After all, actual physical wealth (goods, services, etc.) would not be destroyed. Thus the value of every one of the far fewer dollars remaining in the economy would go up relative to the goods (i.e. prices fall and the poor get relatively richer).
Of course there will be bad effects at the top end, since no one person will be able to afford a luxury yacht equivalent to 300 people's annual production, but overall the economy shouldn't shrink by too much immediately. It would be as if all those dollars were seized, then redistributed to every person in the US in proportion to the number of dollars they had remaining.
So a one-time elimination of paper/electronic wealth of this sort would actually help out the poor, though nowhere near as much as it would help the upper-middle-class and rich-but-not-that-rich. So it would be a fairly crappy redistribution when compared to current poverty-focused programs paid for by progressive taxes.
Any rational expectations of future wealth seizures puts a crimp in economic growth, thus creating the fundemental trade-off that crazy libertarians and crazy commies each refuse to accept in their own way.
There's a raft of research that suggests that relative as well as absolute poverty has pernicious effects on those at the low end of the income distribution. Even when those people's basic needs are being met.
A lot of libertarians just choose to ignore this. As has already been remarked, 'liberals' are concerned about inequality at least in part because inequality has bad effects. Those effects don't go away when everyone in a society meets a certain minimum income threshold. As has been remarked repeatedly, money just ain't like beauty.
Now, as an aside: on a purely emotional level, I'd be quite happy to take shit away from the rich irrespective of global effects on well-being. Why? Because a grossly unequal distribution is deeply unfair. I suspect the fact is that a lot of libertarians are aware of the emotional force of this unfairness and this is the source of a lot of the just-so stories in which they and their successful friends deserve their success.
I'd be quite happy to take shit away from the rich irrespective of global effects on well-being. Why? Because a grossly unequal distribution is deeply unfair.
I don't understand why a sense that the world is "deeply unfair" is not folded into "global effects on well-being."
re: 190
Of course, you're right, it is.
However, I wanted to separate out the effects. The point isn't that grossly unequal distributions hurt the poor because they make them feel bad about themselves or because 'boo hoo, it's unfair' -- which is how the libertarian lobby often characterises the debate -- but those unequal distributions hurt the poor by actually physically killing them earlier even when certain minimum thresholds for physical sustenance are met.
I agree, though, I'd be happy to argue that the other stuff -- the stuff dismissed by some libertarians -- is important, too.
I just feel sick that the rich get to have ponies.
Damn straight. We need to close the pony gap.
LB,
I think you're just wrong about what (many) advocates of redistribution think. Heck, *I* think there might be cases where justice requires a wealth-destroying redistribution. I know there are liberals who say this. Justice is this powerful a consideration. Maybe you don't think it's a good position to take. All this means is that you're more of a consequentialist than me and than many liberals.
And, no kidding, I get the point of destroying one kind of good to create another (destroying wealth to increase happiness via reducing spite/envy). See the last paragraph of 176. Nor do I find it an entirely implausible position. Indeed, re-reading McCardle again, it seems like exactly the intuition she was trying to test. I take it you do indeed think that simply *destroying* wealth might be OK simply because it makes some people happier. So now I am not sure what exactly your beef against McCardle is. She posed the hypothetical in a polemical way, which was unhelpful, but it seems like it's directly salient.
And Tim, yes, you're right that was an unfair summary of D^2 -- what he said was silly enough, and I should have been careful to depict it accurately.
I can chirp in here with a little history, out of Tuchman. Bear with me. The 14 century was extremely fractionated, with hundreds of principalities. Any 3 or 4 (Savoy + Florence vs Milan) could threaten another with conquest. The constant displays of wealth in holidays, weddings, construction, tournaments were outrageous and simply hard to comprehend.
Yet there was a purpose. Political and military defense depended on a nobleman's ability and willingness to raise and spend money: on mercenaries, arms, horses, etc. A cheap or poor Seigneur became an instant target.
So my point, I guess, is that the concentration and display or wealth, personal or national, has been and is an essential signaling mechanism. Sweden is perhaps as little a military threat as Bangladesh, for different reasons. That America is able to create wealth without wide distribution signals a large military capacity, materially, socially, politically.
A thesis.
A corollary:This (195) could possibly generate an argument for taking wealth without a charitable or benevolent purpose. If the concentration of wealth signals a military capacity, politically as well as materially, forced redistribution or confiscation would signal unilateral disarmament and peaceful intentions.
196 cont:And in fact, in the 14th century, those areas, free cities and the textile manufacturers of Flanders for examples, were the least aggressive and the least disturbed.
That is all.
197:umm, sorry "those areas of greatest economic distribution and equality"
what he said was silly enough
Disagree mildly. I think he overstated it a bit as regards the Galt, but it's not as if there isn't something there. If you believe that blogs get commenters that reflect the personality of the blog owners, then trawling the comments there should make clear that his reading is not unreasonable. (I am assuming that the commenters are roughly the same as about a year and a half ago.)
If there weren't so many rich people driving up real estate prices it might be easier for middle-class people to live in New York.
Doesn't that actually make the middle-class people 'richer'? I mean, that's the point.
>If you believe that blogs get commenters that reflect the personality of the blog owners
So Kevin Drum is actually the hollywood strangler?
Heck, *I* think there might be cases where justice requires a wealth-destroying redistribution. I know there are liberals who say this. Justice is this powerful a consideration.
I think that in any circumstance where you believe you think this, or that a liberal is making such an argument, that you are defining 'wealth-destroying' in a way that I wouldn't agree with.
Doesn't that actually make the middle-class people 'richer'? I mean, that's the point.
Yeah, that's exactly what my 188 is about. Taking money from the rich and just destroying it makes everyone in society whose dollars weren't taken richer in a certain way. It just adds the most to the wealth of the people who were richest after the money destruction, so it's a very blunt tool for helping the poor and middle class.
And, no kidding, I get the point of destroying one kind of good to create another (destroying wealth to increase happiness via reducing spite/envy). See the last paragraph of 176. Nor do I find it an entirely implausible position. Indeed, re-reading McCardle again, it seems like exactly the intuition she was trying to test. I take it you do indeed think that simply *destroying* wealth might be OK simply because it makes some people happier. So now I am not sure what exactly your beef against McCardle is. She posed the hypothetical in a polemical way, which was unhelpful, but it seems like it's directly salient.
Okay. I think your concept of 'wealth-destroying' is off here -- I don't understand what you mean my it, and I'd be interested in examples of when destroying wealth in a manner that benefits no one would be required by justice. But whatever it is, you seem to think that there are times when that is the case.
McArdle's comparing that belief (which you hold and I don't) to a desire to maim models out of envy for their beauty. If you think that belief is reasonable, don't you think the comparison goes beyond polemical into, as I said, horrifying?
203: I dislike the discussion of money as if it were an object. I should grab my Marx to be articulate about this, but "taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor" equals "taking power and/or physical wealth from the rich etc" I have no idea what "destroying money" might actually mean.
204:"...and I'd be interested in examples of when destroying wealth in a manner that benefits no one would be required by justice"
Savaronella thought he was doing something good in Florence, and Botticelli (Boccaccio?) threw his paintings into the bonfire with a purpose.
Required by God would be an interesting answer, but not one that I think anyone is likely to come up with in the current context.
Savonarola Sorry. But it was Botticelli.
LB, the acid splashing is an extreme analogy which Galt later in that post acknowledges as such. But in the focus on that extreme analogy, I am still not exactly sure what your position is. The question I think Galt wants to know is the answer to is: would we destroy wealth people happy? (not for reasons of justice. To make people happy) Not a redistribution of money from X to Y to make Y wealthier, but a destruction of some of X's money because this will make Y happier.
I *think* you answer this question in the affirmative, and support a government role in redistribution for this purpose. That's a powerful position, and one that is, at least to my knowledge, rare in past egalitarian thought and one that has been gaining prominance. And, yes, it does legitimately raise the question of why wealth is the only good subject to this logic. It's an open 'in principal' embrace of the Harrison Bergeron scenario, and a invitation for the state to do redistribution for very different reasons than it usually does. Hence McCardle's last four paragraphs.
The question I think Galt wants to know is the answer to is: would we destroy wealth people happy?
I don't think that's the question she had in mind.
Ned, don't make me come over there. ('to make' is missing. Probably stolen by leftists)
So what she's saying is that Eisenhower, with his top tax rate of roughly 90%, was throwing acid in Cindy Crawford's face.
Wait. Is she even old enough to have been around during the Eisenhower administration?
Lex: Ms. Crawford certainly is not.
The question I think Galt wants to know is the answer to is: would we destroy wealth [to make] people happy?
I don't know what you mean by destroying wealth. Saying that you're going to destroy money isn't meaningful -- money is a fiction created for the purpose of exchange. Wealth is, to coin a definition that I don't think would be too far off economic orthodoxy, goods or services which people value -- that increases their utility functions. Taking actions that make people happier at some monetary cost does not destroy wealth (say, a free ballet performance. Money, effort, and physical damage to the performers (muscle strain, etc.) was spent - destroyed - and only happiness in the spectators was created. Are you thinking of that as 'wealth destruction'?)
Your separation between happiness and wealth seems entirely incoherent to me.
Wealth is, to coin a definition that I don't think would be too far off economic orthodoxy
Yours is, in fact, essentially the orthodox definition.
205: There are two ways of looking at destroying wealth:
You can destroy monetary wealth by, for example, collecting taxes but then not doing anything with them. In other words, just selectively take money away from some people. This has the results I talked about in 188. Everyone gets "richer" in a very real sense, as each dollar becomes worth a greater fraction of the unchanged national product. This isn't that big of a deal, economically. Friedman, in one of his wackier ideas, proposed we should actually pull money slowly out of circulation in order to cause a slow, steady deflation and eliminate the opportunity costs of holding cash (whcih is basically the same idea, with no redistribution).
You can destroy physical wealth by actually destroying buildings and factories, eliminating important technologies and knowledge, taking cars and yachts from the rich, and so on. This can make everyone closer to one another in wealth, but it will always make everyone poorer due to the smaller national product.
201: I think he's in the OC, so I'd guess East Area Rapist. Also, no fair using counter-examples. I think blogs of certain sizes could be excluded from the rule, but I also think (a) that is pretty convenient for me, (b) that doesn't really point out the difference I think exists, and (c) it may be true that looking to the commenters rather than the poster is the wrong method of analysis (though this says nothing, one way or another, about dsquared's characterization of the Galt or his methodology in arriving at his conclusion).
"...Servants who imitated the long pointed shoes and hanging sleeves of their betters were severely disapproved, more because of their pretensions than because their sleeves slopped into the broth when they waited on table and their fur-trimmed hems trailed in the dirt. “There was so much pride amongst the common people,” wrote the English chronicler Henry Knighton, “in vying with one another in dress and ornaments that it was scarce possible to distinguish the poor from the rich, the servant from the master, or a priest from other men.”
Expenditure of money by commoners pained the nobles not least because they saw it benefiting the merchant class rather than themselves. The clergy considered that this expenditure drained money from the Church, and so condemned it on the moral ground that extravagance and luxury were in themselves wicked and harmful to virtue. In general, the sumptuary laws were favored as a means of curbing extravagance and promoting thrift, in the belief that if people could be made to save money, the King could obtain it when necessary. Economic thinking did not embrace the idea of spending as a stimulus to the economy."
Tuchman on Sumptuary Laws. "The King could obtain it" for purposes of war, either offensive or defensive. Now from the big stash in the Parthenon, to the forbidding of Spartans to own gold, it does strike as possible that the social/political purpose of wealth concentration is martial.
Perhaps the "Democratic Theory of Peace" is discredited; and I certainly hope those who think we will not attack Iran or China because of business interests reexamine those assumptions in the light of 20th century history...
but I am not sure a "Socialist Democratic Theory of Peace" is not worth exploring. And perhaps Rosa Luxemborg or Norman Angell has explored it. But intuitively, it seems to me that a society where wealth and power were generally equally distributed would be less likely to go to war.
Eat the rich for peace! Covers several campaign themes. Must email Rahm immediately.
Yeah, LB's definition of wealth is the technically correct one, but people tend to conflate wealth and money very often. Plus, any actual policy discussion pretty much has to center on money, since that's all we can really control through tax policy.
Wait, now I'm a little confised. LB
I find such a view, how to say this - revolting?, but I can't imagine that's really what you mean. But it seems to be what you said.
Sorry, 220 should have said:
Wait, now I'm a little confised. LB, are you trying to maintain that there is no distinction between wealth and happiness? That wealth and happiness are indeed the same thing, and therefore that neither one can fall or rise without the other?
I find such a view, how to say this - revolting?, but I can't imagine that's really what you mean. But it seems to be what you said.
221: She's saying (I think) that the technical definition of wealth equates it with happiness. ("Wealth is...goods or services...that increases [people's] utility functions.")
I don't think you should be revolted; you may be misunderstanding me.
Wealth is not the same thing as money. Wealth is those goods and services people want. People want those goods and services because they think that the goods and services will make them happy, or in economic terms, increase their utility functions. Money is merely a means of exchange for those goods and services -- if all the money in the world disappeared tomorrow, we'd still have wealth, we'd just need to figure out how to trade it.
I'm not saying that money is happiness or that happiness is limited to what money can buy (which is I'm guessing what revolted you), I'm saying that wealth is those things, material (a new car) or immaterial (a ballet performance) that people believe will increase their happiness.
221 - I don't think that's the "technical" definition of wealth, even in purely theoretical welfare economics. An increase in wealth certainly would be assumed to cause an increase in utility (happiness), but the two are not at all the same. Wealth is the net ownership of material possessions and productive resources.
Now I am super-confused, and really not in a playing confused because I think I have all the answers sense.
Here's an argument I understand:
1. Great wealth/fancy mansions/etc. induces bad feelings (envy generated by conspicuous consumption, feelings of inadequacy, etc)
2. That's bad, because envy/feeling low on the totem pole/etc. makes people unhappy
3. It's bad for people to be unhappy, so we should take actions to reduce that those bad feelings
4. One way to reduce those bad feelings is to reduce the great wealth/fancy mansions that occassion the bad feelings
5. And one method to do 5 would be to structure the economy so that it's harder to get really rich. This would be good even if it doesn't make the poor wealthier (even let us stipulate, in indirect ways like makin real estate more affordable), but just because it makes the rich less rich, and thus removes an occassion for envy/bad feelings
6. Another way to achieve 5 would be to destroy some fancy mansions. Again, this would be good independently of whether it made the poor richer.
I think 1-5 is a reasonable egalitarian position. I think most people who accept 1-5 will reject 6, but I am personally less certain about whether that's so obviously correct (maybe if you accept 1-5 you should also accept 6 in some circumstances). The questions I think 1-5 raise are:
a) is this an argument we like and accept?
b) if yes to a, does it seem different in kind from redistributing money in order to make the poor richer? (different moral justification, different moral implications, e.g.)
c) if yes to a, are there new and different concerns about the role of government in this kind of activity than 'standard' redistribution of money from rich to poor
d) it seems like people are envious of lots of things besides money, how does this argument apply to other types of goods people are envious of?
Okay, if you were saying wealth == happiness, then, no, not an orthodox definition. From my Macmillan Dictionary of Modern Economics:
wealth. Anything which has a market VALUE and can be exchanged for MONEY or goods can be regarded as wealth. It can include physical goods and ASSETS, financial assets and personal skills which can generate an income. These are considered to be wealth when they can be traded in a MARKET for goods and money. Wealth can be subdivided into two main types; tangible, which is referred to as CAPITAL or non-human wealth; and intangible which is HUMAN CAPITAL. All wealth has the basic property of being able to generate INCOME which is the return on wealth. Thus, whereas wealth is a stock, income is a flow concept. The PRESENT VALUE of this income flow represents the VALUE of the stock of wealth.
It’s more like, Cindy Crawford is so gosh darn pretty. Gee. Gosh! You, you’re not nearly as pretty as her. So why can’t we cut your liver out, Jane, and put it on deep-freeze so that if necessary we can transplant it into her? Who knows, it’s possible that maybe her original liver will give out, and without a stock of spares harvested from the less-than-beautiful members of “society,” this medical crisis might end up depriving the world of her peerless beauty. So stop whining about your own meaningless needs, you lumpy old frump, and lie down on this here operating table.
Hm. What was revolting? I'd cop to not hitting the economic definition squarely correctly, but I'm not getting the revoltingness. (And doesn't the valuation of material possessions depend on the utility function of the possessor? A rare baseball card isn't valuable because of anything intrinsic to the piece of cardboard, it's valuable because of the possessor's beliefs and emotional state about it's history.)
223- LB, I think you've misunderstood something in basic econ somewhere along the way. Wealth and utility are not the same thing. If I take some of my wealth (which I understand is not money), and buy something (other than a piece of capital), then I will have less wealth and (presumably) greater utility (happiness). If Bill Gates sells all his Microsoft stock and puts on the world's biggest ballet performance with the proceeds, he may wake up the next morning happier, but he will be less wealthy.
Wealth and happiness are quite separable. I still find it odd I'm even having to say that, that anyone could assert otherwise.
223:Use-value vs exchange-value?
Yosemite, Yellowstone are wealth; time to spend with family is wealth; freedom from fear is wealth.
I am playing with the Cindy Crawford analogy in light of a Beauty and Misogyny analysis. There are some who seek to devalue Cindy's relative "wealth"...or I need to drastically rephrase that. It is not envy of Cindy, but a recognition that certain cultural standards, artifacts, are universally damaging and destructive.
Like the admiration of accumulation.
I took LB's point to be that point of wealth is happiness; that is, we wouldn't seek it or care about it in any way except as it effected our happiness. So in a very real sense, Gates has traded something for something else, and ends up either in an equivalent position or happier than he was before.
226:Major tenet of Marxism is that the monster overlords want to reduce everything to exchange-value. I read definitions like that and I find no room for dog walks and children hugging.
Oh wait, I can sell those things for a wide-screen TV, and if I am a good American, and not a commie-symp, i don't even hesitate.
231- yes, assuming Gates is a fully-rational actor who has traded something for something else, he ends up in an equivalent position or happier than he was before. But he ends up less wealthy. That's my point: wealth and happiness are not the same thing. When LB says to baa "Your separation between happiness and wealth seems entirely incoherent to me", I have no idea what she is talking about, unless she in fact has a worldview so impossibly shallow and materialistic that she deserves to have acid thrown on her face. I don't believe she has such a worldview, thus I'm trying to figure out what on earth she was saying.
233:You don't know what she is talking about? Maybe I don't either, but the fact is in Amrtica every minute of our time, and everything we value has been reduced to a monetary decision. For most working folk, time for kids costs money.
Happiness is a fucking commodity.
The key point is, happiness is non-tradeable. Title cannot be transferred. So except in some metaphorical sense, happiness cannot qualify as wealth or a commodity.
232- you don't need to make room for dog walks and children hugging in your definition of wealth, unless you equate "all good things in life" with "wealth". You can broaden the notion of "intangible wealth" beyond human capital, to include things like social capital, etc., so that every time I read a novel or listen to one of my favorite CDs or hug one of my children or smell a flower I am becoming "wealthier". But then we've stopped talking about "wealth" in any commonly understood economic sense at all, and have started to talk simply about happiness. Maybe this is what LB was doing, althought the context in which she did it (a conversation on wealth redistribution) suggests otherwise.
"wealth" in any commonly understood economic sense at all"
As I said, everything has been reduced to exchange value. "Intangible wealth is not transferable" Give me a break. Give me a million dollars, and ler me share it with my family and friends.
Fucking neo-classical economics.
225: Okay. First, I'd say that 1-5 beg the question slightly in two separate ways. First, and more importantly in my view, while this isn't unrecognizable, I think that few people advocating a restructuring of the economy to make riches less attainable are doing so purely on this basis -- everyone I've ever engaged with thinks of redistribution as primarily about providing tangible benefits to the poorer. Any purely intangible emotional benefit is generally viewed as a minor accompaniment to the major tangible benefits.
Second, the characterization of the relevant emotion as 'envy' of the poor for the rich, and McArdle's comparison of it to the desire to fling acid in Cindy Crawford's face, both beg the question in the same manner, by making the assumption that the emotion is one that most people would characterize as morally wrong. DeLong was talking about conspicuous consumption, in which the rich consume in a manner intentionally designed to communicate a sense of inferiority to those poorer than themselves. Reframing that as the envious poor wanting to spitefully damage the rich in a manner that does not benefit themselves at all takes a very strong position on whether it can be regarded as just.
We do not have to far here. This is a large part of the argument.
France, the entire country, takes August off and conservative economists consider the decision completely pathological. Because that "social good" is not quantifiable except as a destruction of exchange-value.
PS:There is, IIRC, some work on "preferences" and such in modern economics, but it is faltering and vague. Not quantifiable, ya kno.
236: I get you now. I probably misspoke above, but let me try it again: Wealth is anything tangible capable of increasing your utility function -- if you can't use it to make yourself happier, it's not wealth.
In that context, destroying wealth to increase happiness is an absolutely conventional thing to do -- I have a sandwich, and an appetite. I am wealthy in that I have the sandwich. If I eat the sandwich, I have become less wealthy, but happier. What I'm cavilling baa about at (unclearly and incorrectly -- I think I've gotten myself straightened out a bit now) is the idea that the destruction of wealth to increase happiness is in any way an unconventional or unusual way to treat wealth, that needs to be discussed as if it were a moral problem.
If there's a moral problem he wants to talk about, it has to be something much more particular than the destruction of wealth for the purpose of increasing happiness, because that is something we all do every day.
I am leaving. God I hate this stuff. The fact is, economics, as defined and practiced, has absolutely no explanation for why Bill Gates at one billion, would seek another five billion, that is not tautological. And yet seems to make some sort of normative claim that the motivation is unimportant.
If a relation between wealth and happiness is outside the scope of economics, then economics is useless and pointless.
the destruction of wealth to increase happiness is in any way an unconventional or unusual way to treat wealth
I think your sandwich example is a bit off. In your example, you engage in consumption (literally); that is, you get the benefit of your wealth. The discussion here of destroying the wealth of the very rich is about depriving them of the opportunity to benefit from their wealth. That is, the question is (in a rough sense) whether throwing your sandwich away makes a hungry person happier.
But throwing away the sandwich is a form of consumption if it makes someone happier. If it doesn't make anyone happier, there's no point to it. But there's no economic distinction between whether the sandwich makes someone happier by being eaten or by being thrown away.
there's no economic distinction between whether the sandwich makes someone happier by being eaten or by being thrown away.
Surely you are not claiming that it makes no economic difference to you whether you sell your apartment or someone burns it down (and you get no insurance coverage). To the owner of the sandwich, I think it makes a significant difference if the owner of the sandwich is given no say in the matter.
That is, the question is (in a rough sense) whether throwing your sandwich away makes a hungry person happier.
Actually I think the question is, postulating that your throwing your (third) sandwich away does indeed make a hungry person happier (which at least some research seems to back up), would that alone be grounds enough to force you throw away your sandwich? (Of course it would be better still if you could actually give your sandwich to the hungry person, but that's not the discussion here, if I'm understanding it correctly.)
>the destruction of wealth for the purpose of increasing happiness
Yes, we do this, in the sense of "$20 dollars buys many peanuts." What we do not usually do is limit production of valuable things (or destroy currently existing valauble things) because the existance of those valuable things cause bad feelings. The implication of 1-5 in 225 above, however, is that we should be doing this. I took McCardle to be concerned with argument 1-5 above, which is not a usual justification for egalitarian policies. (whether it is really an on point response to DeLong is another question) And I am still not sure if anyone here thinks 1-5 above represents a compelling egalitarian argument.
[[More usual justifications for worrying about extremes of wealth include: a) the mechanism which produces these extremes of wealth is unjust/unfair b) that money could be better used increasing the material well-being of poor people, c) some important social goals are damaged by extremes of wealth.]]
Sure. If you want to talk specifically about the justice of redistributing wealth from the rich, and whether the amount of happiness that will produce, either directly or indirectly, in the poor is worth the injury to the rich, that's cool. It appears clear to me that redistribution can be either just and effective, or unjust and ineffective, depending on the particular circumstance.
But that doesn't make "You want to take things away from the rich just to make the poor happy" an argument against any particular form of redistribution unless you oppose redistribution generally -- that's all any form of redistribution does. If you want to make a justice argument, you need to argue that the rich specifically deserve not to have that particular item of wealth taken away (for example, Cindy Crawford's face), or that the poor are not entitled to that form of happiness (the desire McArdle imputes to the rest of us to see Crawford mutilated).
245: That seems right. I think part of what is motivating the animus to this specific post of the Galt's (I don't really have any feelings about the post myself) is that she's hiding the point: she's saying, "How does it make sense to destroy something toward no end?" when, in fact, there is an end.
248: Or, even more so, that she's assuming an end that most people would define as unambiguously evil.
But there's no economic distinction between whether the sandwich makes someone happier by being eaten or by being thrown away.
Yes, there's a big difference. There's a big difference in how much happier the hungry person becomes (quite a bit if fed the sandwich, less so if you merely are deprived of the sandwich). Insofar as the sandwich constitutes wealth, one case is the destruction of wealth and the other is the consumption of wealth. Most advocates of redistribution favor the consumption of all teh wealth our economy can generate, they would just like to see some of the wealth redistributed - many with many sandwiches gives a few to the man with none. A different question is -- is the destruction of wealth justified in order to increase the happiness of the poor? I think that's the distinction you're missing LB -- the destruction of wealth (which is basically pure economic waste, even if people are made happier by it -- because they would have been equally as happy had the wealth not been created in the first place, so the resources that went into its creation are wasted) vs. the consumption of wealth (which of course makes it "dissappear", but not in a way that increases someone's utility beyond what it would have been had the wealth never existed in the first place.)
Among various other typos, 251 should have the last "not" removed.
Yeah, I think 247 is a much too quick.
We might take money from Bill Gates and give it to poor people for lots of reasons. The reason turns out to matter a lot.
"To prevent people from starving" is not identical to "to make people happy"; "to ensure people get what they are owed by an implicit contract" is not identical to "to make people happy"; "to insure that they have the requirements for a good life" is not identical to "to make people happy." Now, maybe acheiving all the former goals *also* makes people happy, but that mean increasing happiness is the motivation. It doesn't mean you want government assessing people's happiness (as oppossed to their poverty) and making decisions on that basis, it doesn't mean that you think envy is a good basis for policy decisions. Supporting redistribution just doesn't necessarily mean these things. It rarely has.
There's a big difference in how much happier the hungry person becomes (quite a bit if fed the sandwich, less so if you merely are deprived of the sandwich).
Sure. I don't think there's anyone arguing for the destruction of wealth in preference to redistributing it to the needy -- the strongest argument that I think DeLong could reasonably have been read to have been making is that where the rich are engaged in conspicious consumption, that the prevention of that can be an additional benefit to the targets of the conspicious consumption.
But throwing away a sandwich isn't a particularly effective way of making people happy with it, compared to eating it. I'd absolutely buy that as an empirical claim.
253: I think you're reading too much into 'happiness' -- I'm using it merely as a synonym for utility, and to make the point that I made above, that destroying wealth in the name of increasing utility is something we all do constantly under the name of consumption.
If you have two children, and one has a particular toy that the other cannot enjoy -- say child 2 is paralyzed, and child 1 has a tricycle -- and child 1 is using the toy to lord it over child 2, saying "Ha ha! I have this tricycle you can't ride" -- would it not be sensible to take away the tricycle from child 1, even though so doing would not give child 2 the use of a tricycle? At least until child 1 grew up a little more?
That seems to me like what DeLong is getting at, given that his idea is that the conspicuous of the wealthy is designed at putting the less wealthy in our place.
And IIRC this started with the evaluation of the economic policies that have led to stagnant real purchasing powers for white nonsupervisory males and incredible increases in wealth for the richest.
LB, to be clear, I don't think we disagree here. Certainly, on policy, I think we come out in the same place. But when you are saying things like any separation of happiness and wealth is "incoherent", and then clarifying that by saying "destroying wealth to increase happiness is an absolutely conventional thing to do", well, you've totally lost me. Both of these statements are nonsensical. Again, there's a distinction to be drawn between destroying wealth and consuming wealth. (And between the happiness that poor people feel when the wealth of the rich is destroyed vs. when the wealth of the rich is transferred to them so that they can consume it.)
Given that, I honestly don't see Megan's post as all that outrageous. (full-disclosure, I haven't read anything but what you excerpted, but still...) When she says 'While I am much more sanguine than most libertarians about redistributing material wealth from the richer to the poorer ... I cannot believe in this sort of redistribution--"cutting down the tall poppies", as I believe the Australians call it," I take "this sort of redistribution" to mean improving the welfare of the poor by simply destroying some of the wealth of the rich. It's not a redistribution of "wealth", it's a destruction of "wealth", but it is a redistribution of "welfare" (the rich have less, the poor have more). I don't think her objections to this sort of "redistribution" are wholly without force, and furthermore it's not a straw-argument -- you are crazy if you don't think there are some people who would be willing to support policies with that end. Many are, and many do.
Right, so I totally agree with 256. It might make sense. What I think is worrisome is this as a generalized argument for redistribution. It seems to build in way more utilitarian assumptions than redistribution usually requires, and if done by the government (as opposed to a parent) raises obvious concerns about scope and process. We don't generally have the government making decisions about when a purchase is spiteful and when it isn't, just as a for instance.
LB, now that I understand you better, I think you are missing the force of the point. "Increasing utility" just is not why many people favor redistribution of a good. DeLong focuses on spite, but a thoroughgoing utilitarian position really does empower envy. If I envy your nice apartment, and trashing that apartment will make me happier than it will make you sad, a utilitarian argument says "trash that apartment." That's not, in my view, good moral philosophy, but it seems even worse public policy. Most redistributionists agree with this. They don't think being in favor of redistribution means that we should intentionally choose a world with fewer goods in it to increase utility (Defined as subjective well being? As more people having their preferred state?). And maybe (?) this is just another way of saying Brock's comment.
Again, there's a distinction to be drawn between destroying wealth and consuming wealth.
Here, I think you're wrong -- I think the only distinction is in how much utility is gained from the action (that is, if it's enough utility, you're going to want to call it consumption rather than destruction). Can you spell out for me what the clear distinction is? Does it break down when the consumption is in the form of performance (that is, if you push a piano off a building as an art project, was the piano destroyed, or consumed? Does it matter if it was good art?)?
I take "this sort of redistribution" to mean improving the welfare of the poor by simply destroying some of the wealth of the rich. It's not a redistribution of "wealth", it's a destruction of "wealth", but it is a redistribution of "welfare" (the rich have less, the poor have more).
I think it's a straw man to say that anyone advocates this in preference to non-destructive redistribution; that anyone thinks of the destruction as positively preferable.
The whole 'cutting down the tall poppies' is just a stupid straw-man.
We may advocate wealth redistribution and may believe that inequitous societies are worse than egalitarian ones and we may wish to act upon that. However, anyone, as a matter of policy genuinely advocates wealth-destruction.
If the wealth is being taken away, it's going to be *used* for something.
Furthermore, as Matt Weiner's nice 'smug tricyclist' example shows, the idea that conspicuous consumption can be actively harmful is perfectly coherent.
However, anyone oughtto read 'However, no-one...'
258: Are you saying more than that there are interests of justice that apply beyond increasing total utility? Because that I completely accept -- that it's wrong to let someone trash your apartment even if they'd enjoy it more than you'd enjoy having your untrashed apartment because it's unjust.
But there's nothing innately distinct between the transfer of welfare from the rich to the poor through the prevention of spiteful conspicuous consumption and the transfer of welfare from the rich to the poor through a direct transfer of monetary assets. You could argue that any redistribution is unjust, and I'd disagree with you (and I don't understand anyone here to be making that argument). You could argue that some particular redistribution would be unjust, and I might agree with you and might disagree with you. But you'd have to make the argument for its injustice specifically, not just say "Any sort of redistribution of this nature is just like wanting to throw acid in Cindy Crawford's face," because really, it isn't.
>If the wealth is being taken away, it's going to be *used* for something.
I don't think that's true, ttaM. One could institute policies that reduced wealth creation. And this would be a good idea if you wanted to give moral and political weight to envious feelings.
And to LB, you are of course correct that everyone would prefer not to destroy wealth, given the option or redistributing it. The idea functions here more as a limit case to test intuitions/explore the rationales for redistribution. And if one wants to empower envy or punish spite, one really ought to support pure destruction (or enormously inefficient transfers).
LB:
I think the only distinction is in how much utility is gained from the action (that is, if it's enough utility, you're going to want to call it consumption rather than destruction). Can you spell out for me what the clear distinction is?
The difference is whether any net utility is gained. (Simplifying by assuming perfect information and rationality). The poor man gains utility when the rich man throws away his sandwich, but no more than he would have gained had the rich man never had that sandwich in the first place -- had it never been created. The whole argument here hinges on the fact that the wealth of the rich in fact creates negative externalities for the poor -- it makes them worse off, because it makes them relatively more poor (and people seem to care about their relative wealth nearly as much as their absolute wealth). "Conspicuous consumption" is a part of this and feeds into the effect, but it is only a part -- the wealth itself is the heart of the problem.
If the rich man instead lights his sandwich on fire because he enjoys watching it burn (or pushes a piano off a building as art, if you prefer), we wouldn't say wealth has been destroyed, but consumed. He couldn't have experienced this utility/happiness if the sandwich or piano hadn't been created in the first place.
And: I think it's a straw man to say that ... anyone thinks of the destruction as positively preferable.
Okay, of course it's not preferable, but is it alone sufficient? That's the dispute. Is it ever okay to destroy some of the wealth of the rich (or, more realistically, enact policies to keep them from benig as rich as they otherwise could be), insofar as that is divorced from any effort to transfer their wealth to the poor, but just because it makes the poor feel better to not have so many rich people around (because it makes them relatively more wealthy)? That's a legitimate dispute.
264: I'm not following you here -- you seem to be comparing utility interpersonally, between the rich guy and the poor guy, which I don't know that you can reasonably do.
Is it ever okay to destroy some of the wealth of the rich (or, more realistically, enact policies to keep them from benig as rich as they otherwise could be), insofar as that is divorced from any effort to transfer their wealth to the poor, but just because it makes the poor feel better to not have so many rich people around (because it makes them relatively more wealthy)? That's a legitimate dispute.
It's not a legitimate dispute until it gets more specific. At one extreme case, which McArdle offers, no, it's not legitimate to maim Cindy Crawford for the malicious pleasure it would give you, and honestly you're an ass for thinking that that statement illuminates anything else about redistributionist policy. At another, which Weiner offered above, certainly the mean child should have his tricycle taken away rather than being allowed to taunt the other child with it. In terms of any actual policy, you'd have to look at the policy and make an argument about that policy.
you're an ass
s/b McArdle's an ass.
Sorry, LB, cross-posted with 263. I am saying that the *motivation* of maximizing utility (which is one hell of a hard concept to define) is bad motivation as a matter of ethics and a matter of politics.
Your 263 was really clairfying for me, thank you. The crux is, I just think this sentence below is completely wrong:
But there's nothing innately distinct between the transfer of welfare from the rich to the poor through the prevention of spiteful conspicuous consumption and the transfer of welfare from the rich to the poor through a direct transfer of monetary assets.
Here are ways these seem really different to me:
1. Different goals. Preventing spiteful conspicuous consumption could be about the emotional state of the poor, the goal being to make them happier by removing the feeling of being pissed on. Preventing spiteful conspicuous consumption could also be about punishing or instructing the rich: this isn't behavior we tolerate or want to encourage. These could, I suppose, be the goals of merely transferring money from rich to poor. But it doesn't at all seem likely. Money in the hands of the poor allows them to buy goods and services. Preventing rich people from buying yachts does not.
2. Different 'scopes of concern': in transferring money, we "take into account" only meaurable states of affairs and absolute levels of well being. Maybe we think everyone should be able to have a certain set of baseline goods, and will redistriubute untill that point is met, e.g. In preventing spiteful behaviour, or recognizing envy, by contrast, we are taking a stance on what motivations/emotional states are ethically salient. We may, in certain cases, be validating an *error* (you should not feel bad because Donald Trump has a Yacht. You shouldn't let him make you feel bad). Maybe, upon reflection, this turns out to be similar to 1, but I think the difference could be elaborated.
3. A radically different role for government: How do we determine when a purchase is spiteful? That seems hard to determine uncontroversially. Everyday we all spend money on things that would shock and horrify the average citizen of the Congo. I just bought a cup of coffee that was equal to a day's wage there. This really wasn't motivated by spite. Heck, I bet a there are a lot of my fellow citizens from New Orleans right now who would look pretty askance at a $3.25 latte purchase. It might make them mad as hell. Is that enough to judge the purchase spiteful? Or if not, what? By contrast, it's much less controversial ascertain whose income is >150,000, tax it at a higher rate, and use the monies to double everyone's EITC.
By contrast, it's much less controversial ascertain whose income is >150,000, tax it at a higher rate, and use the monies to double everyone's EITC.
And I'm all for that, and similar policies.
264: I'm not following you here -- you seem to be comparing utility interpersonally, between the rich guy and the poor guy, which I don't know that you can reasonably do.
265: I'm not following you here -- you seem to think that I'm comparing utility interpersonally, between the rich guy and the poor guy, which I don't know how you can reasonably think. I'm not comparing anyone's utility.
What this comes down to is this:
In terms of any actual policy, you'd have to look at the policy and make an argument about that policy.
We're not talking about anyone actually advocating sinking yachts -- this whole thing started with Brad DeLong musing:
I'm enough of a touchy-feely sociology-lover to believe that a good chunk of the utility the rich derive from their conspicuous consumption is transferred to them from the poor.
He's not advocating wealth destruction, he's pointing out that the rich enjoy and the poor suffer from their comparative inequality. That's a far cry from advocating policies that make the rich worse of and no one anywhere any better off. If you want to worry about how immoral and ill-advised that would be, find someone advocating such a policy, and argue with them.
268. Well yay for us on that. But do you acknowledge that "the transfer of welfare from the rich to the poor through the prevention of spiteful conspicuous consumption" is really different from "the transfer of welfare from the rich to the poor through a direct transfer of monetary assets?" That's the point here that I care about.
269: Well, given that I'm not understanding you, and you're not clarifying, I guess I'm not going to understand you. Pity.
271: What's really different? Harder to measure, harder to design a just policy around, sure. That's why we don't design policy purely to damage the rich without doing anyone else any tangible good, and why no one I've ever heard of has advocated such a policy. But it's not innately immoral in any way different from any other transfer of welfare from one party to another -- if the transfer of welfare is just, it's just. The mechanism isn't morally important.
the astounding thing is how successful the right has been in declaring that any response to their acts of aggression against the poor and middle class should be considered class warfare.
It's like a few lame Belgians fire back at the invading Nazis and suddenly Goering is all "that's not fair! Those Belgians are using Blitzkrieg against us!"
Here the Frists and Bushs and Cheneys and Norquists have been throwing acid in the faces of the middle class for a generation. Throwing acid in the faces of the poor. Throwing acid in the faces of anyone who cares more about the minimum wage than about the estate tax.
And all Brad DeLong has to do is speculate about whether maybe we should respond to this unbelievable aggression by the wealthy against the rest of us, and he is accused of starting class warfare.
So now I'm starting to feel you're just being difficult, and I don't understand the motivation. It seems that on your view the two policies are the same except that they have different goals, are implemented differently, recognize different concerns as morally salient, require vastly different governmental capabilities, and could be (and likely are) justfied by entirely different moral principles. Oh, also, one of them requires the government to assess people's feelings and motivations, and judge them as legitimate or illegitimate. The other does not. So it seems to me like they are pretty different.
I am really amazed you don't recognize the magnitude of those differences, or how failing to give these differences appropriate weight might lead one to support policies that other adovcates of redistribution don't.
I think what you're missing is that NO ONE IS ADVOCATING POLICIES THAT DAMAGE THE RICH WITHOUT HELPING ANYONE ELSE. What we're arguing about is, originally, a remark noting that the rich derive utility directly from inequality, and the poor lose utility in the same manner. A consequence of that is that policies that justly redistribute wealth may also have a beneficial effect in that the reduction of inequality caused by the redistribution of wealth may also increase utility for the poor. And I don't think that that such a beneficial effect is immoral in any way that requires that it be actively avoided as a consequence of a redistributive policy.
But you're right, that it would be difficult to justly design a policy intended to reap the benefits of reducing inequality without actually making anyone at all any better off -- such a policy would probably end up being poorly designed and unjust. WHICH IS WHY NO ONE (that I'm aware of) IS OUT THERE DESIGNING POLICIES TO DAMAGE THE RICH WITHOUT DOING ANYONE ELSE ANY GOOD. If you find someone advocating a policy like that, go disagree with them. Point me to it -- my guess is that I'll probably disagree with you on your assessment of whether it does anyone else any good, but there's a good shot that if I agree with your factual evaluation, I'll agree with you that it's a bad policy.
272- sorry, LB, I was being an ass. I just don't have the energy to to and clarify this any further, especially as I don't really even think we disagree about anything of substantive importance. It's entirely possible I'm being very unclear -- I was accused of that on more than one occassion when I used to teach this stuff, even when I thought I was being exceptionally clear.
Since I like you, one last attempt (although the non-snarky point of 269 was that I don't really know what I should try and clarify, since I really don't see how exactly you think I'm comparing utilities): Rich man R and Poor man P exist. Traditional arguments for redistribution say that if R buys a new yacht that he doesn't really need that much and P happens to be starving to death, then maybe we could make R's yacht a 55 footer instead of a 60 footer and give P a bit of food to eat, and as a result the world would be a better place. (There are many different reasons why this might be so, most or all of which I'm sure you are familiar with.) A different argument is derived from newer research that suggests that people care about their relative wealth as much or perhaps even more than their absolute wealth, and therefore that the riches of R negatively affect P (perhaps even moreso if they are "conspicuously" consumed, though this is not of fundamental import). Therefore, if R gets a new yacht, P's happiness is decreased, even though P's material goods have not been affected. In reverse, if we destroy R's new yacht, P is made better off and his happiness increased, even though he gets none of the wreckage to eat and even though he is still hungry. But the key point here is that in this last case P is not made better off because of the creation and destruction of the yacht -- the destruction of the yacht merely puts P in as good a position as he would have been in had the yacht never been created in the first place. (Because it puts him in the same position w/r/t relative wealth. To rephrase, if initially P has a baseball and R has ten baseballs, P is made worse off -- because he becomes relatively more poor -- if R then gets 10 baseballs and a yacht. P would be better off -- because relatively more wealthy -- if R's yacht were destroyed and both P and R were back to just having baseballs. But we've just wasted a lot of resources building and destroying a yacht.) Wealth is not being translated into positive utility - the destruction of the yacht puts neither P nor R in a better place than he would have been had it never been created.
This is very different than if R enjoys buying yachts and firing cannonballs into them to sink them. In that case, R is getting utility from sinking his yachts, and so his wealth is being translated into utility. Assuming he is a rational actor, he must be getting more utility from buying and sinking the yachts than he would have in the absence of such a spectacle. And this utility is therefore higher than that which would have existed in a world without the yacht. This is the difference between destroying wealth and consuming wealth. In one case no one is any better off than they would have been had that wealth never existed (and, assuming scarce resource, society as a whole is worse off, since the resoucres devoted to creating that wealth have been wasted). In the other case someone was made better off by their enjoyment of the wealth -- they consumed it and their utility was increased thereby.
A non-traditional but not-straw egalitarian impulse is to redistribute some social welfare by destroying some of R's wealth, in cases where it perhaps cannot practically be transferred to P. (Or, as I said above, more realistic is not the destruction of wealth but the enactment of policies that prevent its accumulation in the first place -- and yet waste social resources in ways akin to its destruction -- which will increase the relative wealth of the poor but without otherwise making the poor any better off.) This is what I take Megan to be arguing against, and in fact it's not wholly dissimilar from throwing acid on the face of the beautiful. (It's not wholly similar, either, but...)
And as I said, I don't think any egalitarians would think this the ideal form of redistribution, but the question is whether it alone can ever stand as a sufficient justification for any particular egalitarian policy.
Still unclear?
To put it another way: I understood McArdle's criticism of DeLong to be a claim that believing that reducing inequality was a positive good in itself (separate from analysing the flaws in any policy purporting to reduce inequality) was immoral in the same manner that flinging acid in Cindy Crawford's face was. I think that claim is nonsense -- reducing inequality is a transfer of welfare from one party to another, and it may be just under the same circumstances that any transfer of welfare is just.
I think your criticisms of the difficulty of designing good and just policy to achieve only this goal, without actually redistributing wealth, are fair ones, but they're only relevant if someone is trying to reduce inequality without redistributing wealth, by simply taking things away from the rich and destroying them. When you find someone who wants to do that, call me.
276- LB, no one is designing policies with the explicit goal of hurting the rich while doing the poor no good, but that's not really the point. The question is whether or not the world would be better off with less wealth/consumption at the hands of the very rich, assuming the material welfare of the poor was held completely constant. This has been an open question since at least Veblen, and people really do disagree about it.
Are we really talking past each other so much? One question at stake is what reasons for redistribition we should take seriously. You think (I believe) that we should take seriously the motivation of reducing "bad feelings" that stem from inequality. DeLong speaks of spite (rich people inflicting bad feelings), others speak of envy (poor people having, through whatever mechanism, bad feelings) -- but the point is the same. Someone (like me, maybe) who thinks this is a really bad motivation for egalitarian policy, says "gosh, when we form a hypothetical to really test what that conception of egalitarianism implies, it seems to imply a really problematic theory about the role of government and the scope of our ethical concern." If you agree that it implies a really probelmatic politics and ethics, it is evasive to say "no one is advocating the hypothetical." That's not the point of the hypothetical. The point is to clarify the principles involved.
278 was to 275 again.
To 277, oh, I was being an ass too. (Pretty much any comment including the one-word sentence, 'Pity.', involves me being an ass.) The utilities I thought you were comparing were the rich man's utility gained from sinking his yacht for fun, versus the poor man's utility gained from having the rich man's yacht sunk -- you seemed to be arguing as if they were important relative to each other.
I'm still not quite getting your argument. In the thought experiment world: best, the poor man gets the resources that would have been devoted to the yacht. Second best, something else useful is done with the yacht, and the poor guy isn't being taunted with it. If the two remaining possibilities are (1) yacht is destroyed, and poor man feels better because he doesn't need to look at it and (2) rich man lounges on the yacht, jeering at poor man? I'd have to know an awful lot about the utility functions of the rich man and the poor man to want to sink the yacht, which is why I think this would generally be bad policy, but if I knew enough I don't think it would necessarily be immoral.
In terms of realistic public policy though, this is, I think (although I'm sure unintentionally) a strawman:
(Or, as I said above, more realistic is not the destruction of wealth but the enactment of policies that prevent its accumulation in the first place -- and yet waste social resources in ways akin to its destruction -- which will increase the relative wealth of the poor but without otherwise making the poor any better off.)
Really, I've never heard of anyone advocating a policy because they believed that it was a pure waste of social resources that reduced inequality by injuring the rich. Maybe there's someone out there who advocates this sort of thing in the policy, rather than the thought-experiment, arena, but I've never seen it.
The question is whether or not the world would be better off with less wealth/consumption at the hands of the very rich, assuming the material welfare of the poor was held completely constant. This has been an open question since at least Veblen, and people really do disagree about it.
Two things to note:
(1) To the extent this is the issue--and I suspect it is--it's a silly issue. Nobody, nobody, nobody wants to tax the rich to (apparently) burn the money. This is a bit like arguing about whether it would be better to be ruled by a dog or a dolphin. (The answer is "dolphin.")
(2) "Material welfare" is the critical phrase, I think, and, leaving aside Veblen-issues, you can get to "reduce the income/wealth inequality" for just political purposes without transferring the money. For example, you can restrict the way in which the rich use their money in politics by limiting the amount they can give. The reason we might want to do that (leaving aside other arguments against either the policy or the legality of such a move) is pretty straightforward and ends up effecting the material welfare of people without being a part of their material welfare.
You think (I believe) that we should take seriously the motivation of reducing "bad feelings" that stem from inequality. DeLong speaks of spite (rich people inflicting bad feelings), others speak of envy (poor people having, through whatever mechanism, bad feelings) -- but the point is the same.
To speak of things in terms of 'bad feelings' is lumping an awful lot of things together. Most discussion of relative inequality I've seen relates to concrete benefits and injuries from relative inequality -- for example, if education is used to rank people for access to power in adult life, it matters less what you are actually taught in school, than whether you are in a comparatively good or a comparatively bad school. So first, I want to claim that my strong interest in reducing relative inequality cannot be limited to reducing envy and spite; relative inequality is tangibly bad, regardless of how people feel about it. (DeLong's remark does not clearly separate the tangible effects of relative inequality from the pure 'bad feeling' effects -- I can't speak for him.)
I wouldn't put significant policy effort into reducing 'bad feeling' for its own sake -- it's a difficult policy target. But I do think that reducing relative inequality for the tangible reasons I advocate would tend to reduce bad feelings as well, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
281:I think I need to visit some recent Sweden threads over at hilzoy's, because I do seem to vaguely remember things that might approach the functional equivalent of sumptuary laws.
For instance, and I am not saying this is the case:a legal prohibition against establishment of private expensive schools providing significantly improved educational opportunities. But again, I think, according to the logic expressed here, this would have a definite impact on the relative opportunities and outcomes for the less advantaged, and thereby such a law could be justified.
But I do think something was mentioned by a Swede.
>relative inequality is tangibly bad
If these are because of outcomes in terms of things we care about, then I would agree. I think the important point is to optimize around things we care about. DeLong's comments suggest a scope of egalitarian concern that I find, for lack of a better term, creepy. I'm glad you don't share it. I took McCardle's criticism to be that it's inappropriate to regard bad feelings resulting from envy or spite as an appropriate concern of government. No, redistributing money isn't like throwing acid, obviously (and indeed, it seems clear from her post she saw this merely as a shocking dramatization of destructive envy). The distinction between envy and spite, is, however, often in the eye of the beholder, so it does not comfort me much when DeLong says his concern is with spite, not envy.
This?
I don't really know enough to say, but I suspect that I might be on the right in Sweden. The right seems to support a lot of policies that involve allowing competition between public and private players as part of social programs. I believe that the right introduced Sweden's voucher program, for instance. But Swedish vouchers are not much like the vouchers proposed in the US: schools that receive vouchers cannot ask for, or receive, any tuition above and beyond the voucher payment itself, so vouchers cannot be used for private schools that charge high tuition. They can accept people only on a first-come, first-served basis. They bargain with teachers' unions, and are subject to extensive quality control measures. And they make up only a tiny fraction of Swedish schools. Nonetheless, they have improved performance in both the public and private schools, and seem like a very good thing.
That was hilzoy. But it's not particularly close to making the rich worse off without benefiting anyone.
DeLong's comments suggest a scope of egalitarian concern that I find, for lack of a better term, creepy. I'm glad you don't share it. I took McCardle's criticism to be that it's inappropriate to regard bad feelings resulting from envy or spite as an appropriate concern of government. No, redistributing money isn't like throwing acid, obviously (and indeed, it seems clear from her post she saw this merely as a shocking dramatization of destructive envy).
You know, I don't know DeLong personally. I think you and McArdle are living in a paranoid fantasy world if you think that he, or really anyone else in contact with reality, is out there saying that the government should be designing policy to reduce inequality in the absence of any tangible benefit to anyone. Liberals advocate reducing inequality because of the tangible benefits. The possible psychic benefits are gravy.
Seriously, if thinking like this forms any large part of "why I am not a liberal" -- "Because they want to destroy wealth so that the envious poor won't feel bad" you should really put some effort into trying to find someone who will, after you've made an effort to distinguish the practical benefits of reducing inequality, actually sign on to the proposition that "the government should pursue policies that destroy wealth without benefiting anyone so that poorer people won't be emotionally injured by comparing themselves to rich people." I really don't think you'll come up with anyone who understands the question who's going to sign onto that as a real life policy goal.
I am much more interested in poltical theory than I am in the 'top 10 reasons to be politically left.' And actually, the use of happiness research to justify egalitarian policies (and paternalist policies), is in fact, a growth area. So maybe this is explains a bit of the cross purposes here. I see really bad poltical philosophy that is gaining influence, you see positions that are (currently) politically irrelevant. No doubt in the big picture of American political egalitarianism, desires to minimize spite are irrelevant players. I hope it stays that way.
Seriously, are you going to show me a link to something saying that "Policy X is advisable because, although it has no tangible good effects, it reduces inequality by destroying the wealth of the rich"? Or some "bad poltical philosophy" that you think can reasonably be led to advocate that statement?
Because I'm sure you're better read than I am in this area, but I find that absolutely incredible.
I think 287 and 288 clarify things somewhat; LB is concerned with public policy and baa with theory (which he thinks might be gaining influence). But as far as the influence of political philosophy on policy goes, there are tons of reasons to favor more equality. There's the argument that relies on utility excluding spite and envy; it merely requires the commonsense point of 2 and 23 to get that off the ground. There's the fairness and cooperation point that Rob H-C was making. There's Rawlian points about how undue concentration of wealth leads to undue concentration of power. There's the pernicious effects of relative inequality; this isn't just about people feeling bad, as GcM pointed out in 189 relative inequality can kill you. (And it sure can drive you out of the neighborhood.)
In the face of this, I don't feel much compunction in condemning the policies that increase the wealth of the wealthiest hugely and of the middle-class hardly at all. Nor do I feel much compulsion to pick apart the motives behind this or to do thought experiments about sinking people's yachts. The desirability of equality is overdetermined.
McCardle has updated and calrified at great length. I had to link because she said leftish blogs would not dare, or something.
This could become a 1000 comment thread yet.
291:She just calrified completely, which is a activity approaching crystallization, a clarity and calcification...never mind.
With immense trepidation, I cannot help but connect her post to Tia's above, as she talks of status seeking being genetically inevitable, a zero-sum game, and beauty and appearance being one of the inevitable arenas.
Warning: You may need to don your anti-smug breathing apparatus before reading that post. I had to come up for air after "rectify their misunderstandings." Back again, forearmed.
#287
Those kind of liberals are EVERYWHERE. And by everywhere, I mean every Ayn Rand novel.
I think there's another aspect to the extravagant-CEO-pay issue that perhaps libertarians are missing, and might even understand if it were pointed out to them.
I perceive a lot more annoyance among our types at CEO pay than at, for example, movie star or basketball player pay, even though they may be comparable.
Why?
For the same reason we express a sense of unfairness at an heiress' wealth: there is no market force that provides them that money.
Companies hiring a CEO do not, in general, select from a pool of qualified applicants that person who will produce the greatest return -- the highest productivity for the lowest pay. Candidates for CEO therefore do not compete in a fair market. The main, largest reason we don't like CEO pay is that it is not the result of market forces.
CEOs are paid by their friends -- the board of directors. They do, as far as most people can tell, nothing that any other person with fairly similar training (say, an MBA) could not do. Yet they earn grossly large slices of our finite economy for their fairly mundane efforts -- efforts which do not, in most of our opinions, actually work to increase the wealth available to all of us (something which would be worth large amounts of compensation: an entertainer, for example, can provide millions of people with significant utility.)
The sense most of us liberals have is that if capitalist market forces actually governed the hiring and retention of CEOs, their compensation would be proportional to their actual contribution to the economy -- which is what a market is supposed to do.
If more libertarians understood this -- if more libertarians understood that, as far as we're concerned, CEOs and boards form an oligarchy more akin to medieval lords than to a capitalist enterprise whose compensation is set by the market -- perhaps they might know why we think it is not fair or just that this concentration of wealth exists.
It is not unfair in the sense that a capitalist winner and a capitalist loser can be said to be unfair -- it is unfair in the sense that a hereditary monarch is unfair. It unfair like a law mandating that the best hunting be reserved for the lord of the land is unfair.
She doesn't cite any actual facts there, does she? Or is Susan from Pilates a real person? I mean, I don't see any evidence for any of the claims up to "academia has a status hierarchy," that last is certainly true but it's also an irrelevant ad hominem (consistent egalitarian academics should favor a weakening of the hierarchy, and if they don't, well hypocrisy doesn't prove that the underlying principle is wrong), and she still hasn't provided an iota of argument that "the wealth hierarchy is precisely equivalent to the beauty hierarchy, morally speaking: it is a zero sum game in which a lucky few feel better only when the others feel worse." And it's not like the concentration is exactly irrelevant to the hierarchy of political power.
Not so much. And she quotes DeLong, but apparently doesn't read what she quotes -- he says that there's no reason to place a positive policy value on that portion of utility the wealthy derive from spite, and she takes that as a claim that he plans to formulate policy around the portion of utility the poor derive from envy.
295:"...it is unfair in the sense that a hereditary monarch is unfair. It unfair like a law mandating that the best hunting be reserved for the lord of the land is unfair."
Well...If I am gonna have reactionary stirrings, I ain't gonna mess around.
1)Recently I read that the meritocracies of the West have a bias selection toward the selfish, egocentric, uncharitable, overly ambitious, etc. That hereditary systems could often come up with a Bush, but as often with a RFK.
2) The Manorial Lord was theoretically responsible for feeding his subjects in times of scarcity or siege.
Restrictions on hunting in a reasonably small domain might have some other justification than privilege.
298: Come on, we're talking about this Jane Galt. Failure to read DeLong carefully is low on the list.
If we lived in a society with perfect social mobility and in which everyone's place in the wealth heirarchy was the result of hard work rather than luck -- luck in the form of the acquisition of a certain level of innate ability or luck in the form of being born into a social position that confers strong benefits upon that person -- then some of these libertarian stances might be more plausible.
However, we all know that's not the case.
Furthermore, most libertarians favour regulatory relaxation in precisely those contexts in which social inequities unrelated to that people 'deserve' are entrenched rather than alleviated by that regulatory relaxation. That tends to lead me to believe they are arguing in bad faith.
It's rare to hear, for example, libertarians arguing for more freedom for unions to organise, for the right of unions to carry out secondary strikes or picketing, and so on.
282(1)-This may very well be a "silly issue"; it's certainly not one I would have preferred to spend this much time discussing (though much ink has been spilled on it, despite assertions in this thread to the contrary). I feel like my arguments are being conflated with baa's for some reason. I'm not really arguing anything one way or the other about the main points under discussion here, at least not primarily. I have no dog in this fight. What drew me into the discussion was LB's strange assertion that money and happiness were inseparable concepts, and her later "clarification" that there was no difference between simply destroying wealth and consuming the fruits thereof. All my efforts have been in trying to explain and clarify why I think she's mistaken on both those points, not at all to argue about anything else. I'm still not fully satisfied that she and I have had a meeting of the minds in this respect, as the bulk of 281 seems aimed at ideas with which I have no quibble. I also don't know why I'm talking to you about this, Tim, instead of her, but it just sort of worked out that way. Regardless, thanks for listening.
forearmed
Weiner's half an octopus!
Per Weiner's 290, I really didn't take myself to be arguing against redistribution here. Or saying (much) about why most people in fact support it.
Looking back, I think I would have better served the discussion by simply noting that the idea of extreme wealth functioning as a kind of negative externality (Mankiw's phrase) via spite and envy is in my opinion a poor justification for an equalizing policy. It seems like most everyone agrees with this. So it seems that everyone will find sympathetic statement of McCardle's in the update post LB glosses as "still living in a fantasy world in which the motivations for politcies that reduce inequality is to injure the rich, rather than help the poor":
This is not an argument against redistribution per se, as some of my readers erroneously assumed. I think that there are good reasons to redistribute income (or in some cases, at least reasons that I would be prepared to debate): preventing hunger, cold, and premature death; maximising the opportunities that children have to lead a rich and satisfying life; giving a helping hand to those who have been brought low by fate, or even their own earlier bad decisions. I was not arguing that disfiguring Cindy Crawford was in any way equivalent to these; it is not.
I don't personally know DeLong, and have in the past considered myself a libertarian (hey, I was 15, give me a break). Things have changed now, I read his blog all the time, and am conservative mostly in comparison to my fellow San Franciscans.
But when I read his post, before reading the Jane Galt response to it, it struck me as very unusual, because he seemed to indeed be saying that destroying the wealth of the rich in and of itself was a good thing. I think he used the words "Surely public policy should weigh the spite-generated utility the rich gain from their conspicuous consumption as worth less than nothing, shouldn't it?". Which directly implies, I think, that taking a Rolex watch from someone, smashing it to bits, and giving them a Timex, would be a net public policy gain. And usually things that are net public policy gains are things that we should be doing.
It's precisely because he didn't just say "we should have a more progressive tax system", but went on to say "person X being richer than person Y is actively bad because it makes person Y feel bad", that he got the response he did.
I thought her analogy was over the top, but that there was a point that wealth is not the only zero-sum status game among primates, and that moral statements about zero-sum status games can lead you to places that you aren't sure you wanted to go - e.g. disfiguring the pretty.
306:It might help, and I do not want to speak for him, that Brad is a historical economist, with as I remember a specific interest in the medieval. I remember him searching for a biography of William Marshall, and listing Machiavelli's library, and discussing the value of books at the time of Machiavelli.
Now I referenced the medieval far above, and Barabra Tuchman and her original main source Froissart, and her other sources were inventories and accounts of the period.
The medieval rich specifically used conspicuous consumption to demonstrate and enforce class distinction, to the point of restricting the wearing of colors and apparel only to nobility. A peasant or merchant could not by law wear the fashionable long pointed shoes. This conspicous consumption as tool of class stratification may have been what he had in mind, extended as a universal pattern of human behavior. There are other examples:do the words "royal purple" ring a bell?
And his specific statement would be better interpretated as saying that publiv policy should not support such class-enforcing mechanism, not sating that gov't should take active steps to eliminate a natural behavior.
"Surely public policy should weigh the spite-generated utility the rich gain from their conspicuous consumption as worth less than nothing, shouldn't it?". Which directly implies, I think, that taking a Rolex watch from someone, smashing it to bits, and giving them a Timex, would be a net public policy gain.
A Rolex is not really conspicuous consumption. Think about it this way;
Ever been to a swanky nightclub and noticed that there is one queue for the normal punters and a special queue for the "guest list"? A large part of the pleasure of being on the guest list is swanking past the plebs. Lots of clubs ensure that the regular punters queue is kept long in order that the guest list have a queue to ostentatiously parade past (in general, the "guest list" is maybe 40% cool people who will give the club atmosphere and 60% rich people who will spend a lot of money. It is in general the second category who want a big queue to walk past).
re: 308
A mate's girlfriend's Dad used to own one of the big Glasgow clubs. So we used to get in for free and generally didn't have to queue.
One night as we were shuttling up the stairs into the club, on the opposite side of the queue, I slipped and fell on my arse down about 20ft of stair. The glee from the queue was palpable!
I have indeed been to those kind of clubs. But I don't see how that doesn't make a Rolex conspicuous consumption. Whatever article he was quoting went into great detail about how income predicted consumption on certain classes of goods, and goods with high visibility were more consumed by the rich, out of spite.
I mean, I went out and bought a dirtbike, and I could have got a clapped out Honda, but instead I bought a pimped-out italian machine. Because it's cool, and I could. But, according to DeLong, when I say "it's cool", I actually bought it because I wanted to make people with clapped out Hondas unhappy and jealous, and that the government should treat this as an inherently bad thing. I would inquire as to if he feels the same about this, which seems pretty similar to me.
But what's the point, really? If Brad DeLong wants to suggest a more progressive tax code, he is very able to do so in a manner that will not cause confusion. He decided instead to throw bombs and/or troll, and managed to hook one Megan McArdle. It just sort of bugs me to see people treat falling for a troll as a serious personal flaw, no matter how well done the troll was.
I apologize for having only skimmed the comments, but let me strive for a moment of moral clarity.
IF I put up a post saying "We should have a progressive tax code to redistribute income and help the poor because otherwise poor people will embark on homicidal rampages and kill rich people", would it be OK for Jane Galt to express her opposition to that particular argument?
Or would Lizardbreath put up a post titled, for example, "Jane Galt Seems Displeased With Advocates of Redistribution"?
In my opinion, about the kindest thing you can say about DeLong's original post was that it was poorly written and did not communicate his position well. And he certainly has not made a credible attempt to defend it (linking to a paper that demonstrates the uncontested point that the rich engage in proportionately more conspicuous consumption than the rest of us hardly settles the question of whether spite is their only possible motivation).
Anyway, I'm just curious - does Lizardbreath typically endorse any and every bad argument where there is agreement with the goal?
IF I put up a post saying "We should have a progressive tax code to redistribute income and help the poor because otherwise poor people will embark on homicidal rampages and kill rich people", would it be OK for Jane Galt to express her opposition to that particular argument?
It'd be an awfully odd fact claim to make (that the homicidal rampages were going to happen), wouldn't it? Much odder than the claim that wealthy people derive utility from displaying their wealth before the less fortunate.
I'm just curious - does Lizardbreath typically endorse any and every bad argument
Not your best work, Tom.
312 -- right, but you're not taking Mr. Maguire's point, which is that you are bad, bad, bad. And not rational.
(You have to read between the lines with this kind of thing.)
As statement against interest, I will note that there are many bad arguments that LB does not endorse.
However, I think that DeLong was suggesting that part of the reason for egalitarian concern is to reduce envy of the poor (maybe caused by spite, but in the end, who cares). McCardle thinks this is a stupid justification for wealth redistribution, and morally noxious. I am still not 100% sure whether LB agrees with that. But I think she too, believes reducing the envy of the poor is a poor justification for redistribution. How this led to the claims that McCardle lives in a fantasy land, thinks the progressive income tax = acid in the face, thinks that the most people support redistribution because of their own envy, etc., I am still unsure. Sounds like McGuire is experiencing similar puzzlement.
there are many bad arguments that LB does not endorse
Only because she doesn't have enough time!
However, I think that DeLong was suggesting that part of the reason for egalitarian concern is to reduce envy of the poor (maybe caused by spite, but in the end, who cares).
I think this is a misreading. DeLong said that the rich derive utility from the existence of inequality, and that that utility should not be considered to have a positive value such that policy should be framed to avoid destroying it.
McArdle's reading of that as the beginning of a slippery slope leading to acid-throwing is where the paranoid fantasy comes in.
No, I think even once you strip out the trollish aspects of DeLong's post, he was saying something stronger than that; he was saying that public policy should treat increases in status to those who already have a lot of it as a net negative. He then added in a bunch of stuff about "spite" and "meanness" to wind people up. McArdle naturally reacted to being wound up, but I think that she drew exactly the conclusion that DeLong wanted her to draw.
I wonder if she'd have gotten a better reaction if she said that a typical liberal arts college education mainly exists to enhance the social status of those who have one vs. those who do not, and so when public policy is being crafted it should treat the status gains of those who get liberal arts college educations as a net negative for society as a whole.
Full marks to DeLong for the well-executed troll, but I'm surprised to see it going over so well here.
And I think that if that's your reading of this text:
I'm enough of a believer in CPI bias to want to say "real compensation for male nonsupervisory workers has stagnated since 1973"--I think it has grown, but only very slowly, and much less rapidly than productivity.
On the other hand, I'm enough of a touchy-feey sociology-lover to believe that a good chunk of the utility the rich derive from their conspicuous consumption is transferred to them from the poor: the happiness America's working poor and middle class derive from the compensation distribution--given their compensation, the compensation of the rich, and the lifestyles of the rich and famous--seems to me to be certainly less than that of their counterparts back in 1973.
The easiest and most important thing the government can do to neutralize the adverse consequences of rising inequality is to make the tax system more progressive, not less. A reality-based government would react to growing pretax inequality by taxing the rich more, and subsidizing the poor more (through policies like the EITC) as well.
you're an absolute nitwit.
See, it's not that passage that's the problem. But when he adds on things like My point was that the rich are spiteful--that they enjoy the envy of the poor. and Surely spite is at least as offensive an other-regarding preference as envy, isn't it? Surely public policy should weigh the spite-generated utility the rich gain from their conspicuous consumption as worth less than nothing, shouldn't it?, that's when he gets misinterpreted.
Or even Make inventions, build enterprises, donate money for hospitals and libraries--that is all extremely meritorious and praiseworthy - why not forbid non-anonymous donations to charity on the grounds that the only reason people want it to be known that they donated the money is so that they can have the envy of their peers?
The portion you quoted was absolutely and 100% in character for DeLong, and indeed the combination of excellent writing style and liberal-technocratic policy prescriptions would probably make me guess it was him if I didn't already know. The bit about spite/envy/status-seeking is, I maintain, very out of character for him, and the reactions it got were not unreasonable.
Ah. But the acid-throwing hypo was a response to the post I quoted. It preceded any use of the word spite.
McArdle took an anodyne post about decreasing inequality and the fact that the rich derive utility from inequality, and responded with an accusation that the language I quoted in 320 was comparable to a belief that models should be maimed to feed the envy of the ugly. This is a paranoid fantasy.
DeLong's use of 'spite' was a clarification that he wasn't talking about positively valuing the envious desire of the poor to see the rich suffer -- he was talking about not valuing the spiteful desire of the rich to flaunt their wealth before the poor.
Really, if you want to call this an example of DeLong trolling, you simply can't, or at least haven't, read.
It’s actually quite hard for me to know what DeLong thinks. He’s generally a really smart guy, so my default is to think he’s meaning smart things.
That said, when he speaks of a *transfer* of utility from the poor to the rich via conspicuous consumption, and then speaks of making other people feel small and unhappy, it seems not unreasonable to believe he thinks that conspicuous consumption is making poor people unhappy and rich people happy. When he then speaks of the utility generated by conspicuous consumption having a “less than zero value,” it seems reasonable to think he draws that conclusion *both* because it is a base kind of happiness, *and also* because it makes poor people envious. But hey, maybe not. What seems puzzling is exactly why he (and LB) want to deny that the kind of point he’s talking about extends to envy. I mean, why is the bad thing the enjoying of envy (that makes the pleasure have less than zero utility) as opposed to the creation of envy (which actively lowers the welfare of the poor)? Seems like an odd distinction to me. Odd enough to explain the misreading (if it was such) from McCardle and Mankiw.
And hey, even if we just stipulate it was a misreading, why is it so terrible that DeLong’s comments got both Mankiw and McCardle thinking about (and being disturbed by ) the idea of the extreme wealth having a negative externality effect via an envy mechanism? Indeed, it seems quite related -- DeLong thinks the conspicuous consumption of the rich effects a transfer of utility from poor to rich. That’s a classic negative externality. Would we want to reduce that externality? Maybe not, says McCardle, using a over-the-top thought experiment that (just to say it again) she explicitly flags as intentionally over the top in her post. Again, this does not imply hostility to redistribution, a belief that the progressive income tax is like acid splashing, or the belief that people support redistribution primarily because they are envious. These are all positions that LB, half jokingly and half not, has attributed to McCardle.
Ok, my sense of the order of things could very well be screwy, as I read DeLong after a week-long absence, and then read the Galt stuff afterwards, and then came back to Unfogged after seeing it mentioned.
I still think that there are lots of good arguments for some degree of income redistribution that ignore the relative status games, encourage the development of alternate status hierarchies (other people don't have to actually feel worse, you just have to think that they do), and am used to reading stuff of that nature from DeLong. If I read this anywhere else, I wouldn't think twice, but coming from DeLong? He knew he was going to wind people up.
It'd be an awfully odd fact claim to make (that the homicidal rampages were going to happen), wouldn't it?
Maybe it's an age thing, but I remember from back in the 60's when folks would mutter that it would be a long, hot summer unless social conditions changed.
And they weren't talking about global warming.
In any case, I find the claim that the rich actually derive spite-related satisfaction at the expense of the poor to be odd. If Bill Gates buys a converted 727 for a private jet, he is doing it to goad Larry Ellison, not me - Bill and I are both clear as to our relative financial status, and neither of us think he needs to put on a show for my benefit.
All that aside - is argumentation by illustration and example that difficult for you? Would DeLong's argument get weaker if I picked a different example? I am quite sure you got my point (bad arguments are not useful support for sensible conclusions), which was, after all, the reason I provided an example.
Not your best work, Tom.
I am diligently minimizing the possibility of spiting anyone with an excessive display of talent, insight, and wit.
McArdle's reading of that as the beginning of a slippery slope leading to acid-throwing is where the paranoid fantasy comes in.
FWIW, I think that, although DeLong's position is weak, Ms. Galt's metaphor is deeply problematic. Her basic reductio ad absurdum effort (here we go!) is that if it is OK to take a person's wealth exclusively to reduce other's envy (or the possibility of a spiteful display), than similar moral logic ought to imply that it is OK to reduce their good looks so that the rest of us don't have to feel ugly by comparison.
An obvious problem is that the government takes people's wealth all the time, so the moral equivalence to acid-tossing just does not grab most people. But I guess it grabbed her. I see a not-so-good illustrative example of moral equivalence, you see a paranoid fantasy... whatever. Maybe people see what they want to see.
Wow! Tom Maguire visits the Unfogged comment thread. Not what I expected to see.
With respect to "In my opinion, about the kindest thing you can say about DeLong's original post was that it was poorly written and did not communicate his position well..."
You can say much kinder things than that, Tom! I know you can! All you have to do is believe!
I was sitting there, having nice utilitarian-technocratic thoughts about American economic policy, writing things like "I'm enough of a believer in CPI bias to want to say 'real compensation for male nonsupervisory workers has stagnated since 1973'--I think it has grown, but only very slowly, and much less rapidly than productivity. On the other hand, I'm enough of a touchy-feely sociology-lover to believe that a good chunk of the utility the rich derive from their conspicuous consumption is transferred to them from the poor: the happiness America's working poor and middle class derive from the compensation distribution--given their compensation, the compensation of the rich, and the lifestyles of the rich and famous--seems to me to be certainly less than that of their counterparts back in 1973."
And Greg Mankiw decides that he wants to change things from a utilitarian-technocratic discussion about social welfare among various states of affairs to a discourse about the moral flaws of the poor: "I am uncomfortable making envy a basis for public policy."
To which I respond by focusing on the moral flaws of the rich: "It's not the hard work and entrepreneurship [of the rich] that is to be discouraged. Make inventions, build enterprises, donate money for hospitals and libraries--that is all extremely meritorious and praiseworthy. It's the conspicuous consumption that is the problem. Surely spite is at least as offensive an other-regarding preference as envy, isn't it?"
And then all of a sudden we are throwing acid in Cindy Crawford's face.
It's a long, strange trip.
Lizardbreath, I think you slightly miss the point (not once but twice):
"DeLong said that the rich derive utility from the existence of inequality, and that that utility should not be considered to have a positive value...."
"[Delong] was talking about not valuing the spiteful desire of the rich...."
As quoted by Galt, Delong says:
"Surely public policy should weigh the spite-generated utility the rich gain from their conspicuous consumption as worth less than nothing?"
So instead of saying "DeLong said ... that utility should not be considered to have a positive value" the point Galt is making is that Delong said that utility should be considered to have a *negative* value. And instead of saying that Delong was "talking about not valuing the spiteful desire of the rich" the point Galt is making is that Delong is talking about *negatively* valuing the spiteful desire of the rich.
This may make it easier to understand why Galt is using the "acid" analogy: the acid makes Cindy uglier, but makes no one else prettier. This (I think) is key to understanding her objection to Delong's "spite" argument: that it suggests that punishing the rich (without otherwise helpign the poor) could be a good idea.
Brad, Long time listener, first time caller. Take this as an non-spiteful, unenvious request for clarification. Do you think it to makes sense to make spite the basis of public policy -- in the sense of applying a discount to "spiteful" utility (perhaps via a luxury tax)? If no, I have no idea what this whole thing was about. If yes, (even in principle), two questions follow:
1. Don't I recall correctly that you're a utilitarian? If so, why should spite (or any base motive) make utility count less?
2. Why not make envy the basis of public policy? Let's imagine there is conspicuous consumption that is really not spiteful, but does in fact inspire envy. Isn't that bad and likely to depress the utility of the poor and middle class?
Right - if I think that a green-metalflake Cadillac with highly polished gold spoke rims and a hand-stiched velour interior will make everyone insanely jealous of me, and work crazy hours so that I can procure said Cadillac, I've provided gainful employment for any number of craftsmen. If rather than insane jealousy, everyone laughs at me instead, total utility has increased dramatically.
It's only when other people actually feel worse because their car is dull and lifeless in comparison that it's a problem, surely?
Baa, I don't know what DeLong's moral philosophy is, but if he's an informed preference satisfaction utilitarian, as opposed to a hedonistic utilitarian, that's pretty much a full answer to 1.
"Her basic reductio ad absurdum effort (here we go!) is that if it is OK to take a person's wealth exclusively to reduce other's envy (or the possibility of a spiteful display), than similar moral logic ought to imply that it is OK to reduce their good looks so that the rest of us don't have to feel ugly by comparison.
An obvious problem is that the government takes people's wealth all the time, so the moral equivalence to acid-tossing just does not grab most people."
Well, this would be an obvious problem if and only if the government just took people's wealth without doing anything constructive with it. Which in general is not the case. Jane Galt is not objecting to the idea of confiscating Larry Ellison's harrier in order to use it to defend the Homeland, she's objecting to the idea of dropping a JDAM on Larry Ellison's harrier.
Everyone wants to say JDAM. Also, washerdryer, can you spell out 330? I would have thought that prima facie that if a preference is fulfilled, that's a win for utilitarians even if it is a base preference. If it's the "informed" that's doing the work, then I am just not groking it.
Also, washerdryer, can you spell out 330?
I'll answer, since we don't have a commenter with that handle. Three hundred and thirty.
i-n-f-o-r-m-e-d p-r-e-f-e-r-e-n-c-e s-a-t-i-s-f-a-c-t-i-o-n u-t-i-l-i-t-a-r-i-a-n
The main thing I've read on this topic is the second chapter of this. I can't find a link to the text of the book (which I regularly and heartily recommend), but section II part C here is summarizing the same source in a way I find unobjectionable.
"You just wanted to say 'JDAM'."
Moderately unny. (I assume this to be the standard response).
I don't know from unny, but the standard response is "Your mom just wanted to say JDAM."
I don't think that works, WD, unless we stipulate that indulging in spiteful preferences will lead to fewer preferences being satisfied long term. But why should we think that?
Dear Baa,
I think 326 answers your question.
I would like to have a nice technocratic-utilitarian discussion about social welfare, taking people and their psychological propensities as they really are, using words like "interdependent utilities" and "relative income effects."
In fact, that's what I was doing until Greg decides to shift the discourse into one on the moral flaws of the poor...
Thanks for responding Brad, although my heart sinks when someone says that a comment answers my questions that -- at least from the example of me asking the question post the comment -- doesn't answer the question enough so that I understand the answer. If anyone else understands how 326 answers the questions in my 328, I am all ears.
Just for the record, I think a nice utilitarian discussion should make envy the basis of policy decisions. I think that's what utilitarianism means. So I am confused why Mankiw was so off base to start talking about envy as motivation for policy.
I'm not DeLong (and am also not, insofar as I understand what I'm talking about, a utilitarian), but given that he probably doesn't hang around here hitting refresh as often as I do, let me give it a stab, or at least see if I can try once again to clearly convey what I thought was wrong with the critiques of DeLong's post.
While I'm not a strict utilitarian, I think that part of what policy makers should be doing is trying to increase total utility, within the bounds of practicality and justice. DeLong's original post asserted that the rich derive some utility from the fact of inequality -- you could argue with that as a fact claim, but I don't think it's unlikely. And then, by advocating a reduction in inequality that tangibly benefits poorer people, he implicitly suggested that the type of utility that the rich derive from the fact of inequality is not utility that he thinks should be valued from a policy point of view.
That all seems entirely unobjectionable to me.
My understanding of Mankiw's and Galt's and your criticism of his post is that it goes along the following lines: DeLong talks about the emotional utility derived from inequality. Acknowledging the existence of such emotional utility opens the possibility of setting policy based solely on creating more such emotional utility, like by maiming Cindy Crawford. Setting policy in that fashion would be really really morally distasteful or at the least incredibly ill-advised. DeLong's post therefore implicitly advocated (or may have implicitly advocated) a really really immoral position, and he should either be ashamed of himself, or should clarify that he doesn't want to set policy based on emotional preferences.
I think the critique (if I've understood it, which given the nature of internet discussions I probably haven't) is wildly off-base in a number of ways. First, DeLong's reference to the existence of a category of emotional utility derived from inequality is not a recommendation that policy decisions be made to increase that type of utility. He was saying that policy decisions should be made (decreasing inequality in a way that tangibly benefits the poor) despite the fact that it would decrease the inequality-derived utility of the rich -- it's an argument for disregarding that category of utility.
Second, and this error is the source of most of my disagreement with McArdle, from my point of view there's nothing morally wrong about valuing this sort of emotional utility, depending on the moral status of the given emotion. Wanting to maim Cindy Crawford is wrong, so I don't care how much utility anyone derives from it they still mayn't do it. Emotional utility that isn't wrong, on the other hand, is not an immoral goal to direct policy toward -- all policy comes down to increasing emotional utility in the end; that's the only sort of utility there is. It may be practically misguided or difficult, but there's nothing wrong about aiming at increasing emotional utility where it's just and practical. (You have strong and persuasive concerns about justice and practicality, but that doesn't mean there's something wrong with the goal).
Third, further to my second point, discussing the emotional effects of inequality does not imply the advocacy of impractical or unjust policies. These effects do or don't exist as a matter of fact; depending on specifics it is just or unjust, or practical or impractical, to address them through public policy. The critique made seems to be that because DeLong noted their existence, and made some completely unobjectionable policy suggestions about them (i.e. disregarding them as a type of utility to be considered in setting policy) he is committed to, or in danger of, disregarding all interests of justice to create the greatest emotional utility for the most envious -- this seems vastly far removed from anything he could reasonably be understood to have said.
Boredom drove me to go read McArdle's post. Honestly, how anyone ever takes her seriously is beyond me. And baa, I don't think you're terrifying, I think you're cute and friendly, but your "no benefit for the poor" from 164 is, as has been pointed out, wrong. Aside from that, I don't see much disagreement here. Everyone seems agreed "emotional utility" can, in principle, be a basis for public policy, even if, in practice, it's fraught.
I dunno - I still think there's a difference between "it decreases the emotional utility of the poor for you to be richer than them, so making them happier by making you poorer is worth considering", and "the rich are happy because the poor feel small and weak, and that's a bad thing, so we should actively discredit their happiness and take their money", and it seemed to me like DeLong was explicitly stating the latter.
Maybe there's no difference, and maybe he wasn't saying it. But I think people get emotional utility out of a lot of weird things, and don't like the idea of judging the morality and acceptability of what gives them that utility. If you are hurting someone else, that's bad regardless of whether or not it makes you happy. But it's their hurt rather than your perversion that is the problem.
So, this inequality stuff: boringest blogspat ever?
Ok, looking back at Galt, I agree the "no benefit description" has her wrong. That's my error. Destroying something to please someone's envy is, I think, spot on to what she's concerned about. While this may not be what DeLong meant, it is a a fair topic for his post to make one think about. Especially when the "rich people as negative externality" topic seems to be placed on the table, explictly, by his comments.
That said:
a) It's not true everyone thinks increasing happy feelings is, in principle, a basis for public policy. Not to reiterate all the anti-utilitarian arguments in the world but: utility monsters, expensive tastes, inter-personal comparison problems. Emotional utility: not a morally salient value beyond some baseline.
b) If you do think increasing emotional utility is an ok goal of public policy, I don't really see why you would shy from increasing emotional utility if you could do so by gratifying envy. (aside from practical problems, of course)
c) if you think increasing emotional utility is ok *but* subject to the 'motivations' of the people who hold it, and you think envy of the poor is different from spitefulness of the rich, then perhaps one could get to the "I never cared about envy I only cared about spitefulness" position. But that's a weird position, and no one should be expected to get it in one go.
e) LB's statement that "there's nothing morally wrong about valuing this sort of emotional utility, depending on the moral status of the given emotion" is as I read it, exactly the point meant to be plumbed by Galt's (perhaps clumsy) example. Maiming: really bad. Taking people's property or preventing consentual behavior: maybe not so bad? Using genetic engineering to ensure that no one as beautiful as Cindy Crawford is ever born: permissable? It all depends on what you think the point of equality is.
a) It's not true everyone thinks increasing happy feelings is, in principle, a basis for public policy.
I meant everyone on this thread, but I haven't read it carefully enough to say even that, so withdrawn.
b) If you do think increasing emotional utility is an ok goal of public policy, I don't really see why you would shy from increasing emotional utility if you could do so by gratifying envy. (aside from practical problems, of course)
Sure, that seems consistent, but let's keep in mind that "gratifying envy" is so simplistic that it doesn't illume much about someone's beliefs, unless they're crazy enough to sign up for it without any caveats, but no one's been that crazy.
c) if you think increasing emotional utility is ok *but* subject to the 'motivations' of the people who hold it, and you think envy of the poor is different from spitefulness of the rich, then perhaps one could get to the "I never cared about envy I only cared about spitefulness" position. But that's a weird position, and no one should be expected to get it in one go.
Delong said that though real wages have "stagnated," the non-rich are not in the same position, but worse off now because the amount of spite directed toward them has increased. That seems like a playful, perhaps not entirely fair way to introduce emotional utility into an economic discussion. That's *all* he said. Then we get the issue between Delong and Mankiw, which basically boils down to one of prejudice: in the "emotional" relation between rich and poor, Delong sees the rich as the primary agents, motivated by spite, while Mankiw sees the poor as the primary agents, motivated by envy. That's what Delong is musing about in his second post (a musing which is obviously supposed to make Mankiw look bad).
Anyway, you didn't have to get it in one go, because it didn't happen in one go.
As for your e), "perhaps clumsy," baa? That's as far as you'll go? My boundless magnanimity lets this slide...
You skipped d, let me supply it. Well, that's one of those non-joke jokes I was just complaining about. Seriously, I think there's a more intuitive alternative:
d) If your position is that increasing emotional utility is ok *but* subject to the 'motivations' of the people who hold it, and you think that only some motivations mean the resulting emotional utility counts, then you might arrive at a position like this: The emotional utility of the 'aggressor' doesn't count. If A does something deliberately to piss B off, you don't count the pleasure A gets out of taunting B, but you do count the negative utility B gets from being pissed off; that's a perfectly appropriate emotion for B to have.
(That's the point of the smug tricyclist example in 256; you take the tricycle away because it's making the paralyzed kid unhappy, and his unhappiness counts because it's an appropriate response to the other kids taunting.)
This gets you to "the rich's spiteful pleasure isn't a plus, but the poor's spited pain is a minus."
And did I mention that it's not just emotions, that inequality kills? I mention it again, see GcM in 191.
OK, ogged pwned me with 'primary agents'.
Would it be uncharitable to note that I weiner-pwned you?
You can feel free to use words with your own idiosyncratic meaning.
Matt, if X kills, I'm against X. If there's data that income inequality is such a thing, count me against it. That is, of course, not really the point that Mankiw or Galt, or Delong took themselves to be arguing. But again, I think that if one can show inequality in income, or beauty, or status causes death, that's a good argument for reducing that inequality. Likewise, thanks for supplying the missing "D" which seems like a position one could hold (although I am not sure how it would distinguish unprovoked envy from spite).
Also, here's one for you: I take a hundred dollar bill from the rich guy's wallet and light his cigar it. The envious poor guy watching, feels great. He thinks I've just destroyed the rich guy's money. The rich guy feels great, because he thinks I've just humiliated the watching poor guy. These guys are both jerks, are both deceived, and I've increased both their malice-derived utility simultaneously. Is the world a better place?
Ogged, I still think Mankiw's original reading of Delong seems reasonable, but I am of course colored by coming on this way late in the game, and having been lead to the whole debate via Mankiw's second post. And I appreciate your boundless magnanimity, but in the world of thought-experiments, I am willing to let extremism slide. Especially, when, as Galt does, the author explictly walks away from the extreme case. I think the sturm-und-drang that specific case provoked silly.
Matt, if X kills, I'm against X. If there's data that income inequality is such a thing, count me against it. That is, of course, not really the point that Mankiw or Galt, or Delong took themselves to be arguing. But again, I think that if one can show inequality in income, or beauty, or status causes death, that's a good argument for reducing that inequality. Likewise, thanks for supplying the missing "D" which seems like a position one could hold (although I am not sure how it would distinguish unprovoked envy from spite).
Also, here's one for you: I take a hundred dollar bill from the rich guy's wallet and light his cigar it. The envious poor guy watching, feels great. He thinks I've just destroyed the rich guy's money. The rich guy feels great, because he thinks I've just humiliated the watching poor guy. These guys are both jerks, are both deceived, and I've increased both their malice-derived utility simultaneously. Is the world a better place?
Ogged, I still think Mankiw's original reading of Delong seems reasonable, but I am of course colored by coming on this way late in the game, and having been lead to the whole debate via Mankiw's second post. And I appreciate your boundless magnanimity, but in the world of thought-experiments, I am willing to let extremism slide. Especially, when, as Galt does, the author explictly walks away from the extreme case. I think the sturm-und-drang that specific case provoked silly.
"I think the critique ... is wildly off-base ... [Delong] was saying that policy decisions should be made (decreasing inequality in a way that tangibly benefits the poor) despite the fact that it would decrease the inequality-derived utility of the rich -- it's an argument for disregarding that category of utility."
But Delong wrote (and Galt quotes):
"Surely public policy should weigh the spite-generated utility the rich gain from their conspicuous consumption as worth less than nothing, shouldn't it?"
I take it that Galt thinks Delong, by that "less than nothing," is not making "an argument for disregarding that category of utility," but an argument for regarding it - regarding it as a bad thing.
Delong is trying to justify redistribution not because it reduces envy, but because it reduces spite - he doesn't want to reduce the poor's feelings of envy for its own sake, but because doing so will reduce the enjoyment of that envy by the rich. "My point was that the rich are spiteful--that they enjoy the envy of the poor," he says.
I take it that Galt (who thinks of spite and envy "that both are distasteful, in exactly the same degree, because they are both exactly the same emotion: the rich gloat, and the poor long to be entitled to gloat") is against envy-reduction policies, regardless of whether reducing envy is the means or the end:
"Rather, my [Crawford] metaphor was aimed at a specific kind of redistribution: that which is less interested in making the poor better off, than in making the rich worse off, so that they don't make the rest of us look bad."
I think "feel bad" is what she might have meant. But notice that Delong (326 above) now says:
"I was sitting there, having nice utilitarian-technocratic thoughts about American economic policy ... then all of a sudden we are throwing acid in Cindy Crawford's face."
Notice that you can interpret this as not disavowing responsibility for the acid being thrown in Cindy Crawford's face (except for that portion - see 341 - belonging to Mankiw), and even as expressing wonderment at what his original idea led to.
How the fuck did this not turn into a "Cindy Crawford: Hott or Not?" thread? is what I want to know.
Lee Siegel is definitely not hott!