Shame On You, Miami Herald

The Miami Herald publishes a women's prison exposé detailing allegations of abuse. So far, so good. But then they have the temerity to title it "Bartered sex, corruption and cover-ups behind bars in nation’s largest women’s prison."

"Bartered" sex, as if the farmer's wife is swapping two chickens for a skein of yarn.

No, Miami Herald, that is not "barter." That is rape. The guard-prisoner relationship is and must always be coercive. "Coerced sex" is fancy-talk for rape.

ATSRTWT

NB, I do not fault the author for the rubbish headline. Composing headlines typically falls to editors.

Good pick for the lead anecdote though. I appreciate it when anyone highlights the cruelty and absurdity of the nation's barbaric drug prohibition statutes.

Assume Fragility?

Via SJ, a foray into the perils of being a young person in America. At issue: social expectations can mimic coercion. Saying "no" might be unpopular or urge others to say unkind things.

Assume this is true. Assume further that young people share this sentiment in sufficient numbers to adopt the following as a general heuristic: anyone in a protected class may say "yes" when they actually mean "no."

The consequences of this heuristic are damning for anyone in the protected class. Having to second-guess intonations of consent raises the cost of interacting with this class of people. A rational, risk-averse person will be more prone to avoiding someone whose most elemental words—yes and no—cannot be trusted. A rational, risk-averse person interacting with someone who fits the profile of an untrustworthy person will need to be compensated.

And as with taxes, the party that bears the cost of compensation will depend on the relative elasticities. If there are many substitutes for the young person who expects to be treated with kid gloves, young people in the protected class will pay the larger share of the social tax. If there are few substitutes, it will be the other party to pick up most of the tab. The cost burden of wilting violets is an empirical matter.

The alternative is to pursue virtue. Being able to say yes and no and mean it is an important component of integrity. Integrity is a useful virtue, as it reduces the uncertainty costs of doing business.

The collective action problem is particularly challenging here. To what extent should people form new stereotypes that conform to the yes-is-no-sometimes message in Jordan Bosiljevac's piece? To what extent will people form these new stereotypes? A small, well-organized, vocal constituency can clamor to petition the sovereign, and with enough amplification, can also successfully petition the entire society? If successful, what is the outcome? Is the price of an assumption of fragility one we wish to oblige others to pay?

Uber, but for Police Harassment

It's a bad day to be gullible on the Internet, so accept the possibility that this is a finely scripted prank.

Wars on multiple fronts are difficult to coordinate. This is as true for culture wars as for ground campaigns. Here, we evidently see crossfire from multiple battlefields. An interesting artifact.

Uber is not euvoluntary. Neither is immigration. Neither is the contract between the agents of the sovereign and the constituency.

This machine produces outrage and its effluvium is death. Or maybe the other way round. It can be hard to tell at times.

Oregon Trail

In the very merry month of May, Team KPC took a road trip. I bundled the JR up into the station wagon and we headed down to Durham to grab Meat Mountain Mungowitz for the trek west. When our feckless trio hit the Sooner State, I handed driving duties over to Robin. Our freshly-minted quintet hooked a right turn on our way to the fabled land of the Great Beaver. Here's a partial transcript of the cabin conversation as we approached Wichita for the  evening's respite.

Robin: Okay guys. I see a... I see a McDonalds and a Burger King. Where should we eat?

Angus: McDonalds, of course. Slainte!

MMM: Uh huh, I don't think so. Home of the Whopper, please. Please and thank you.

It's difficult for me to adequately convey the kindly imperiousness in Mungo's voice here. As the father of two grown men (and a chaired professor at a major university), he's developed a certain rhetorical style that manages to be both charming and compelling at the same time. Search the Econtalk archives if you don't believe me.

JR: <snore>

Jeff had been asleep for the past hour and a half.

Me: I don't like hamburgers.

I could feel perplexed contempt just starting to boil off my traveling companions. How is it even possible to "not like hamburgers?" Is this guy a Communist or something? Luckily, we had a peacemaker in the car.

Robin: Okay, well, there's also a Five Guys and a Whataburger. How about that, Sam?

Me: I don't like hamburgers. At all.

Kevin had heard enough.

Angus: WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T LIKE HAMBURGERS!?! IF YOU DON'T EAT YOUR HAMBURGER, YOU KNOW WHAT WE'LL HAVE? ANARCHY!!! IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT!?!

I did my best to suppress a smile. I probably wasn't all that successful, judging by Mike's follow-up.

MMM: Okay, we'll settle this like adults. Jeff's asleep, so Robin, Kevin, and I will vote on where to eat, and we'll watch as you enjoy our democratically-chosen hamburger. We don't want you to starve, after all. it's for your own good and the collective good of the car.

Here's Reuters. Here's the Oregon DMV. Full text of HB 2177 here.

I keep company with many folks who are naturally skeptical—if not outright contemptuous—of choosing via the ballot box instead of in more spontaneous, natural agglomerations such as professional, neighborhood, or social clubs. Politics, they say, make fools of us all, forcing upon private citizens a certain telescopic morality that is both unseemly and unnatural. I don't disagree, but I also don't see a lot of damage done in reducing the costs of voter registration. It's not like it makes voter participation any more salient for disaffected, alienated, or apathetic voters. At most, Oregon's HB 2177 adds a little more noise to the voting process, and it's very likely that the noise will be centered pretty much on mainstream beliefs. It's the nasty biases in the mainstream beliefs that cause so much havoc. Noise in large systems tends to cancel out. [citations available in any standard Public Choice textbook, esp. Mueller]

The party registration bit in there (seriously, check the language in the third link) reflects the typical ambitions of the sovereign: "we're just gonna go ahead as sign you up as a voter here. And oh, by the way, have you heard of the Democratic and Republican parties? Would you be interested in some literature?" It's got some grim humor to it, I must admit. After all, how can we even have a republic if constituents run about all willy-nilly identifying as independent or with another party. Maybe this is only funny to me, having spent so much time with these specific GSS variables. Eh, whatever.

Governments are duly organized by constituents to serve the interest of the public. Elites who interpret that mandate as "the public exists to participate in the political process" reveal a curious sort of political philosophy. Authority is being exchanged here for sure, but I'm not convinced it's all that euvoluntary.

"Vote or die" is not the slogan of a free society, people.

Convert

Consider the following claims:

1. Members of the Church of Latter Day Saints (aka Mormons) are (a) more wealthy (b) more conscientious (c) more future-oriented and (d) more personally and socially stable than comparable members of the general public.
2. Differences in traits and outcomes between Mormons and the general public remain both large and statistically significant even after controlling for confounding variables such as IQ, race, and gender.
3. These differences cannot be explained by selection effects. Twin and adoption studies show that church membership is a genuine treatment effect: being in the church improves not only members' productive capacity, but their personal traits as well.

If all of these are true, it follows that an all-Mormon society would be happier and more prosperous. 

If I could empirically establish that conditions 1-3 are true, would it justify mandatory conversion? Assume that conversion by the sword would produce no erosion of the institutions that give rise to the enhanced performance of the faithful.

I've posted here before that I tend to reject a strict consequentialist/deontological split. I find the moral sentiment that a consideration of outcomes is one consideration among many to be convincing. I also find dominion distasteful. But I'll put up with dominion if the price is right. I'll give the keys to the prison to a jailer who'll lock me up for murder. 

How about here? How much better than the BATNA would membership have to be to tolerate forcible conversion? Not that there are any plans, of course, but would we be willing to allow Church leadership to, say, organize mass adoptions from abroad? Or to collect sex workers in an effort to save their souls? How about to baptize dead infants in the name of Jesus and the Church? 

What's acceptable here? Why? Is a euvoluntary covenant with the Lord important enough to disregard the gains from membership?

Inspired by a tweet by Tyler Cowen.

May and Must: the Politics of Disgust

A couple instances of obstreperous racism have grazed the news lately, encouraging me to think a bit on prior restraint. Here are some preliminary thoughts.

My non-representative survey sample on my friends' sense of justice suggests that they rely on their gut to pronounce acts (or outcomes) just. Justice is a feeling. Well, more than a feeling, since they can be pressed to think carefully about details in some cases. But usually just a feeling (citations galore ft. Jon Haidt).

Disgust is also a feeling, and I cannot shake the nagging possibility that the two are deeply and desperately linked. The language and (Lord forgive me) semiotics people use to describe ~undesirables~ across space and time seem if not specifically designed, then at least unconsciously arranged to tickle the yick-yuck sensibility. My hunch about this is why I'm leery of the word "homophobia." Perhaps some aversion to homosexuality is rooted in fear, but I suspect that the bulk is more closely tied to disgust. In Haidt's moral dimensions, it's the same aversion you find with all sorts of out-group biases. Heck, look at some of the horrific slander heaped on the backs of European Jews and the Romany. The sickening rumors of what they do with kidnapped (Christian) children expressly evoke disgust.

An easy response to disgust is to forbid the act it gives rise to (stick it, Strunk and White; I'm finishing my sentence with a preposition). You tell your toddler to stop eating her boogers (for all the good that does in the short run), you shoo your dog away from his vomit, and you shame the dude who walks out of the public restroom without washing his hands after a pinching a loaf. These are good and proper non-telescopic reactions to disgust. Contrast these with the prior restraint of Jim Crow legislation, where scurrilous preferences of taste were lent the truncheon of the state to ensure that dainty bigots did not have to suffer the tepid scourge of mild disgust as they dined, sequestered. Shall we crucify mankind upon a cross of bile?

But like Aristotle points out, justice is all in the proportions. If it's unjust to deny freedom in association ex ante based on the cowardly imaginations of bigots, is it not also unjust to deny freedom in association ex ante based on the imaginations of men of system? Unilateral exchange is hardly euvoluntary.

Just because I may discriminate on disgust-laden sentiments does not imply that I must discriminate on disgust-laden sentiments. Writing special exemptions into the legal code encodes disgust just as surely as the sun rises in the East. Every statue that lends dominion to one free person over another is an insult to Solon.

Repeal Title IX.

Because You're Mine

Ambiguity is uncomfortable. Clear labels help folks understand and react appropriately without having to resort to expensive, thought-consuming analysis. For clear cases, shortcuts are very valuable indeed.

JR: You got anything to eat in here?

Sam: I think there's some ham in the chilly bin.

JR: "Chilly bin?"

Sam: It's Kiwi talk for "refrigerator."

JR: *rummages* You mean this? *holds up plastic bag* It has green fur.

Sam: Hm. It must have gone off.

The shortcut of "this slab of animal flesh has gone rotten" saves my houseguest from a trip to the ER. Valuable. Not all cases are quite so clear, however. Hands up if your nose has ever lingered over a milk carton whose "sell by" date is twerkin' all up on today's date. It's probably safe to drink, but you just want to make absolutely sure. Honey, can you come take a whiff of this? Does it smell okay to you?

There's a line where the milk goes sour. You're just not precisely sure where it is. You need to sniff and sniff and sniff some more. Maybe you need some help sniffing.

The same goes for all manner of stuff. Gary Ridgway is clearly, incontrovertibly, a premeditated murderer. He killed without cause or remorse and he deserves more punishment than any human is capable of granting. Similarly, there are clear-cut cases of self-defense we never hear about because killing an armed assailant is unlikely to make headlines. But contentious cases? George Zimmerman isn't infamous because of the extreme cruelty of his actions, but because he claimed (and was acquitted by) a self-defense defense, despite his victim being a) a teenage kid and b) unarmed.

Where do we draw the line?

Where do we draw the line on what counts as coercive activity? For some folks, "if it ain't euvoluntary, it ain't voluntary" and any instance of asymmetry in BATNA is evidence of coercion.

		BATNA Disparity
		High	Low
Force	High	A	B
	Low	C	D

In other words, for some folks, call them Type 1, (A) and (C) violate Rawlsian justice and ought to be verboten. For natural-rights libertarians, call them Type 2, the initiation of force is the ultimate public offense, so (A) and (B) are the equally odious combinations.

One way to think about the word "coercion" is that it describes different phenomena to different people. Saying that someone is being "coerced" by unpleasant circumstances strikes the ear of a Type 2 person as ludicrous, since no one is initiating force. And saying that large-cap firms (or wealthy private individuals) with strong property rights over natural resources is not coercive sounds awful to the Type 1 person, since ownership definitionally includes rights of exclusion; excluding non-owners from the use of vital goods and services is de facto coercive.

So when discussing where to draw the line between euvoluntary and non-euvoluntary exchanges, it's worth remembering that not everyone will want to scribble the chalk along the same axis.

tl;dr: Phronesis



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Of Dingoes and Deacons

Trigger warning. This post discusses missing and exploited children. If this is the sort of topic that bothers you, come back tomorrow for the hidden link between GDP and Justin Bieber.

Adam The OG sends a tale of coercion in the First Estate. In 1955 Ireland, a single mother gave up her baby at the behest of the Church. To avoid burying the lede:

Such was the power of the church, and of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, that the state bowed before its demands, ceding responsibility for the mothers and babies to the nuns. For them it was not only a matter of sin and morality, but one of pounds, shillings and pence. At the time young Anthony Lee was born, I discovered that the Irish government was paying the Catholic church a pound a week for every woman in its care, and two shillings and sixpence for every baby. And that was not all.

After giving birth, the girls were allowed to leave the convent only if they or their family could pay the nuns £100. It was a substantial sum, and those who couldn't afford it – the vast majority – were kept in the convent for three years, working in kitchens, greenhouses and laundries or making rosary beads and religious artefacts, while the church kept the profits from their labour.

Sometimes the bootleggers and the Baptists are one and the same.

Consider the institutions here. From a broad point of view, the proscription against single motherhood was likely adaptive for farmers. Fixed land assets and stationary capital depend on intergenerational discounting to have a high enough PDV to justify the expense. The "sin against God" fig leaf covered justifiable concerns about the relationships between land and labor, lord and fiefdom. Imagine the Domesday Book without clear lineage.

So the alliance between the first and second estates did well in promoting institutions that supported the feudal-manorial systems, though it should be clear by the time that 1955 rolled around, the memo that the times they were a-changin' evidently hadn't reached the desk of the Irish archdiocese. The mostly adaptive institutions that had supported an œconomy of culchies and lords stuck despite the transformation to burghers and the House o' Commons. And this is pretty much what you should expect. Why should London, Rome, and Dublin be on the same cultural timetable? Why should NYC and Moscow be on the same cultural timetable for that matter?

You can read this story several ways. The author seems to be going for the human tragedy angle. You can also look at it as the Church conspiring with the state to a) exploit the powerless and b) rip off the taxpayer. You can even see it as a simple tragedy in service of a larger, mostly-useful institution.

For the EE-minded? It's a matter of inseparable institutions. On their own, both the state and the Church were doing what they thought was right. State officials believed they were serving the needy – funding cash-strapped parishes sure sounds charitable. And the Church thought they were doing the Lord's work, as they had understood it for centuries. But both of these notions were based on clear misconceptions about the nature of the alliance between the estates. And that's the great tragedy.

It might even be that a similar tragedy exists when the second and the third estates seek to collaborate. The errors of corruption that arise from unwarranted state support (or "regulation") of trade may well look quite benevolent from afar, without the benefit of prudent discipline. But get up close and you'll find children torn from parents, or pallets full of cash vanishing under the relentless glare of the Iraqi sun.

Crony beware.

A Survey: Prostitution, Porn, or Purity?

As you might imagine, this is pretty big news at Duke right now.  Duke freshwoman pays for college with work on the side as a porn star.  It's a fascinating article. I just don't have a problem with how she has chosen to support herself.   Perhaps because it reminds me of the early story line in West Wing pilot...of course, she was a prostitute.

Raising the question:  Which is more morally problematic, from the perspective of the woman herself--prostitution or porn?  That is, from a woman's perspective, and if the pay were the same, would you choose prostitution or porn?  So, here's the question:  starting at a price of $1,000 per hour.  Assume that neither involved an act you find repulsive in principle, though perhaps distasteful in actual practice.   Assume finally that you, the woman, are neither particularly rich nor poor, and that you have no immediate desperate need of money.

Now, the price bid--starting at $1,000--is raised in $100 per hour increments.  Would you choose FIRST (at the lowest price, as the price rises to the point where you consent):
A.  Do an hour of porn (filming a sex act, or several, none of which you find inherently objectionable, but which are of course quite explicit, real sex acts, one sex partner who is of the opposite sex and not in any way physically repulsive )
B.  Perform an hour of prostitution (a sex act, or several, none of which you find inherently objectionable, but which are of course quite explicit, real sex acts, one sex partner who is of the opposite sex and not in any way physically repulsive)
C.   There is no price, ever, that would be high enough to induce me to choose A or B.

I am not sure I believe C, but it's a fair answer (the LMM chose C, but admitted that it would depend on desperation.  That's why I'm ruling out desperation).  But remember that choosing C means that you would not do just one hour of porn, or prostitution, for $100 million.  I think that is a dubious claim.

Which of course reminds one of the old Winston Churchill story.  (Or perhaps not Winston Churchill?) Should "haggling about the price" matter?  But of course it does, because that is what changes a coercive transaction into a voluntary exchange.  If a desperate woman sells herself for $1,000, it's coerced.  If a rich woman sells herself for a couple of drinks and show, we think that's fine.  If the woman is ABLE to haggle, it's voluntary.

Desperation is the key feature in two stories, the "Casablanca" story of Annina and Reneault (Annina is willing to sleep with Renault to obtain the exit visa, so she and Jan can escape to America, but Jan doesn't know), and this story (Robert Redford's character offers $1 million, and the husband does know, and approves), both of which involve "selling" the wife to someone in exchange for something of value.  Annina is desperate; so is Diana (the Demi Moore character).  The difference is that the husband is encouraging in the "Indecent Proposal" story, and the husband will be deceived and cuckolded in the "Casablanca" story. 

To get through college, I worked on a crew clearing roads in swamp in central Florida. We used chain saws in knee deep mud. Sometimes there were dead things, not clear what they had been (raccoon? possum? dog?), but they were very nasty.

 No normal porn (that is if there are no children, violence, etc) could be much more dehumanizing than that job. And I bet porn pays better, as it should.

And I have to laugh at the "peers" at Duke who aspire to connect with the woman. It's unlikely that the young lady is going to be interested in their puny assets, both because she is already tired and because...well, you know.   As in this SMBC cartoon, "I thought it would be bigger."

A final point:  we tend not to scorn the young guy who brags that he will seek out the porn star freshwoman for an assignation.  The above survey, administered to most men, would not be very complicated.  I expect that men IMAGINE themselves as porn stars, but that given the chance they would be reluctant on grounds of size and stamina to reveal themselves on camera.  But heterosexual prostitution?  The price might be negative.  And if the starting bid is $1,000 for an hour the guy might just accept the proposition at the outset (remember, the client is of the opposite sex, and not repulsive).

So, we don't think badly of the male who accepts the $1,000, takes three shots of Cuervo, and then gets busy. Of COURSE that's what (single) men would do.  Why is it so different for women?  To put it another way, how would we react if the word got out that this freshwoman was a freshMAN porn star, a male?  Would there be young ladies telling the reporter that they were going to get them a slice of that?  Actually....at Duke at least...I think there would.  Perhaps that's progress, of a sort.

Thanks to Gabriel Rossman, without in any way implicating him.

UPDATE:  Follow-up post....

Treading on Snow

My pal Nate is where I usually go for questions of jurisprudence. I wander into his territory, uninvited, without regret.

Cynthia Nixon on marriage equality:

When women got the vote, they did not redefine voting. When African-Americans got the right to sit at a lunch counter alongside white people, they did not redefine eating out. They were simply invited to the table. That is all we want to do; we have no desire to change marriage. We want to be entitled to not only the same privileges but the same responsibilities as straight people.

 Equality before the law implies a non-discrimination standard under the law. The law is an ass, suited to the mulish task of bulk imposition of clearly understood rules. The inelegant artlessness of parsing complexion, social status, sexuality, or belief is a chore unfit for a legislature distant in cognition and void of meaningful accountability.

Seek not dominion, for surely it shall find you first.

Nota bene, friends: this longsword cuts on the backstroke too. If you object to statutes that restrain folks from contracting (or not) based on sexual identity, it's consistent to object to statutes that restrain folks from contracting (or not) based on which side of the counter they stand on. The lunch counter example is particularly noteworthy in Nixon's choice of words. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did more than just repeal the ass of Jim Crow, it inserted its own ass into every space, both public and private.

Sidebar: in case you weren't aware, the "ass" in "the law is an ass" is "ass" qua donkey. The law is a stubborn, single-minded entity. And like the common ass, is quite useful for certain tasks, though you wouldn't ask ius or lex to pen a sonnet.

Substituting one form of dominion for another invites spiteful retribution under the petticoats of Lady Justice. Equality under the law, a fine principle, demands that any two fit people have access to the marriage contract in the eyes of the state. The principle here is not that gay people are great and deserve special protection, it's that under the US Constitutional order, all constituents are equal before the law. If it seems as if I'm repeating myself, it may be because this fairly obvious little slice of jurisprudence seems utterly lost in these discussions. This is a founding principle carried over from the Enlightenment that appears to be buried in the din of bristly moralizing on both sides.

But people, while severing the tether that forces that ass to discriminate is consistent with good statesmanship, it's an error of the same type that pinions this dumb creature to the task of discriminating along new dimensions. It was an act of justice to lift the statutes that imposed segregation. But consider the cost of yoking business owners to the common will: some people obtain the obligation to enter into contracts they would have not otherwise entertained. This is perverse. The antidote to oppression is liberty, not coercion.

So yes, it's obvious on its face that consenting people should have the right to voluntarily enter into mutually agreeable contracts. That's just as blatantly, obviously true for marriage as it is for cake decoration services and renting out the privately-owned grounds of a bed and breakfast.

Everyone deserves the right to say "no", even if—no, especially if—the answer may be frustrating for others. The alternative is illiberal and unjust.

Microtransactions

Warning: salty language.


Question: are microtransactions euvoluntary? Coercive? The psychology is similar to addiction: tease players with a little shot of dopamine just out of reach, then charge them for the pleasure of fulfilling an artificial goal. The early egregious examples of DLC shenanigans were patently absurd (functionless horse armor in TES IV), but as this video demonstrates, developers (ahem EA) have turned the corner, turning microtransactions into devious exploitation devices.

And, correctly, Nerd^3 echoes Tullock. To avoid getting caught in this web, don't start playing in the first place.

Is there good, properly euvoluntary microtransactions? Sure. Add-on campaigns fit the bill. The DLC for Borderlands 2 is a perfect example. The DLC for Bioshock Infinite would also count if the doors for Burial At Sea Part I weren't broken (but I digress).

There's almost certainly no single perfect business model here. It seems to me that game developers are prone to the same sort of heuristic errors that plague the rest of us. Think of the above video as evidence of supply-side bubble formation. Wait for the worm to turn, people.

Reblog: Neko Cafes to Hit the City by the Bay

EE of days past: Mungo on Japan's Neko Cafes.

An idea so great that San Francisco is opening one soon. KitTea will serve both as a relaxing place for San Franciscans to chill out with some kitties and to provide a home for wayward felines.

So, what do you think? Will California's notoriously draconian food safety regulators skin this cat? How about Animal Control? PETA? Seems like an uphill battle, even if the result of the venture is to match cat-friendly tea drinkers with purring balls of fur and at the same time providing a nice, safe, warm home (and veterinary care, assuredly) for otherwise homeless cats.

We'll see, but I wish them all the best in the meantime.

The 20-Year Letter as Coercion

I'm thoroughly enjoying Tim Kane's Bleeding Talent: How the U.S. Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why it's Time for a Revolution. This is one of those rare books that hits all the right notes for me. Kane is former Air Force (I'm former Navy) turned economist (same here), it's about the policies and practices of the G1 (my day job is data analysis for a firm that contracts with the ARNG G1), and Kane repeatedly references the two schools of economic thought that most inform my own research: Virginia Political Economy (aka Public Choice, the school founded by Buchanan, Tullock, et al) and the New Institutional Economics (whose luminaries are Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast), putting Kane and me in the same general camp as Coase, Williamson, Grief, Demsetz (maybe), Tollison, Nye, Munger, Grier, and Carden (among many others).

Name-dropping aside (and many apologies if you didn't see your name on the list) the book is quite good so far. I would like to bring up one particular passage that caught my eye. I don't post here all that much about military service for fear of delving too deeply into a subject the general reader might find esoteric, but the personnel side shouldn't be all that confusing. Prepare for a pair of peripatetic paragraphs printed on pages 50-51:

There is a danger in the false pride that military service isn't tainted by money. More to the point, the scornful attitude toward market incentives within some Pentagon circles is simply dishonest. Dollars are used as incentives within the military constantly, in matters large and small. Retention bonuses and early-retirement bonuses are used in force shaping, as just one example. A more important example is the U.S. military retirement package, a relatively generous monthly pension benefit of 50 percent of a retiree's final salary. This pension is only earned after nothing less than 20 years of service. Why 20 years? Why does the military pay no benefit to someone who retires at 19 years? Surely the answer isn't to compensate those who have served, because there is no serious distinction between 19 versus 20 years in uniform.

The real answer to this question is revealing. The army, navy, air force, marines, and coast guard [sic] use a 20-year "cliff " for their retirement programs precisely as a coercive monetary tool. It all but compels officers and enlistees to stay in uniform for a full second decade. And it must be said that such a cliff is illegal in the private sector, precisely because it is coercive.

 What thinketh ye? Does the 20-year letter count as coercion? When you agree ex ante to sign up for the gig, part and parcel of the arrangement is that you'll only qualify for retirement pay once you've done your 20. It's clearly not fraudulent, right?

Unless of course there's systematic asymmetries in the expectations of service. If you're 18 years old and you sign up for God and Country and once you get your AOC you find out that life in the field or the fleet ain't all you thought it would be, the rude awakening you get might be unpleasant. It can be easy enough to imagine that the 20 year letter is a bit like setting the hook once you've got a decent nibble. Of course, this effect can be mean-neutral as well, with some Soldiers and Sailors discovering a deeper affinity for service than they imagined at recruiting time. I knew such Sailors, and I work with such Soldiers now. Still, if Kane is right, there is ample room for improvement, particularly with secondary markets in post assignments.

The good news? The good news is the second lemma to my Second Law of Public Finance: over time, all policy is malleable. Which implies that even the seemingly-immutable institutions that bind personnel management can be reconstituted.

The bad news? Vested interests make institutional change costly. The best reforms would upturn a pretty big chunk of what the Pentagon (and Arlington Hall) does. Pointing your barrel any direction other than downrange can be career suicide.

The ugly news? Half-measures might be even worse than the status quo. The institutional trap happens when the Ouroboros is out for dinner: reforms beget disaster beget reforms ad infinitum until you're left with the self-chewed bubblegum that is, for example, the US health care or banking systems. It would be a grievous error to send the military marching down that road.

Anyway, like I said, it's a great book and if you're at all interested in economics and the military, consider picking up a copy. I might blog more on it later.

Kayfabe, Political and Private

The fine art of kayfabe owes its roots to the traveling circus. Carnies and barkers would drum up interest in their attractions with a combination of preposterously over-inflated self-promotion coupled with ludicrous claims about the insufficiency of their rivals. Professional wrestling circuit managers took note of carnies' success in seizing the attention of rubes and polished the art, giving the world the peculiar theatrics that we can now watch LIVE ON PAY-PER-VIEW THIS SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY. We have our faces, our heels, our turns, and our corporate mischief, and it's tough to tell where the theatrics end and the actual skulduggery begins. And that's part of the draw.

The best thing about kayfabe? The audience is in on it. Rather, the audience can be in on it should they so choose. If they wish to maintain the willing suspension of disbelief, so be it. Either way, participation is entirely voluntary. You buys your ticket, you takes your ride. 

How about extensions of (private) kayfabe? Legislation regulating advertising have just enough bend in them to permit some puffery, though outright lies about the nature of the products offered and slander or libel about competitors' products is verboten. But the actual content of advertising? Is shampoo really the personal transformative it appears in commercials? Obviously not, as anyone who has washed her hair can attest. Do competitor products sink you in the mire of split ends and frizz? Probably no. Are you fooled by claims to the contrary? If so, not for long. People figure out pretty quickly that the dance played by advertisers and consumers is a minuet wherein one partner minces straight up to the edge of outright fraud and the other demurs, accepting partial truth in exchange for a cocktail of brand affiliation, risk aversion, and plain ol' instrumental value. Most of the time, it's close enough to euvoluntary that it makes no never you mind either way. 

Of course, not everyone agrees. Different strokes, I guess. & so on & so on and scooby-dooby-doo.

Contrast the voluntary dance in marketplace advertising with the compulsory dance in politics. Sure, you don't have to listen to politicians pontificate (and at the risk of a telling confession, I must say I go out of my way to avoid it--nails on a blackboard most of the time), but you do have to do the Washington two-step whether you like it or no, come hell, come The Flood. I fancy that the chief distinction, apart from compulsion, between private and public sloganeering lies in accountability. Pepsi Co retains a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to keep customers happy. Under Duverger's Law and the median voter theorem (sorry, I can't find an ungated copy of Black or Downs, so here's something by Congleton), actual party positions are nearly identical, only the speech is different. Variance is introduced only by heterogeneity in the constituency. And to the extent that people want to hear one thing and practice another, politicians cannot reasonably be expected to be held accountable for policy outcomes. More so perhaps for regulatory agencies whose activities are not salient to the median voter. Much more so when it seems as if people care more about the intent of a piece of legislation as captured in its title than its actual effects.

In commerce, advertisers can tell you that noxious body spray will attract hordes of women to your doorstep. You are free to believe that as is your wont. Should you not, no one forces you to purchase the product. In politics, speechwriters can tell you that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. You are free to believe that as is your wont. Should you not, your military will still be sent overseas regardless.

Private kayfabe can be a fun little diversion, play-acting for grown-ups who want to indulge in some mostly-harmless play-acting. It is a consensual act of capitalism. Political kayfabe is the masque held over an edifice of coercion. It is erroneous, dangerous even to conflate the two. I encourage you to learn the difference and to pass it on. 

Caplan on Coercion

My great friend Bryan Caplan offers an excellent public choice critique of standard theories of taxation. He raises an old question: "why does the sovereign direct tax collection and regulation towards firms rather than individuals?" The standard, Coasean answer is "transaction costs." It's quite difficult to coordinate the efforts of a bureaucratic apparatus towards the great mass of humanity.

The common-sense rejoinder is obvious if you've spent any time studying East European political history: get citizens to rat on each other. It might even pay bounties (which work remarkably well for criminal scofflaws) to enforce regulatory compliance. Caplan says that this sort of Stazi/KGB/Brownshirt menace would be universally reviled among freedom-loving Americans.

Maybe that's true. My experience with nosy neighbors suggests that Bryan might be slightly off the mark, but overall I think he's got a pretty good point. Of course if you would have told me in 1911 that Lithuanian children, residents of one of the most freedom-loving nations in the history of European Civilization, would one day come to snitch on their own parents, I probably would have thought you bonkers. People can adapt to surprising conditions, even famously tolerant Balts, even famously independent Scots-Irish migrants.

At any rate, if I'm reading the literature right, there does appear to be evidence to suggest that the technology for citizen enforcers exists even without any frog-boiling. Immigration. Sniderman &al have a 2004 paper in the APSR called "Predisposing Factors and Situational Triggers: Exclusionary Reactions to Immigrant Minorities" that concludes that native residents are all too happy to invoke exclusionary measures against outgroups. There's a small flotilla of similar studies with similar results.

As a euvoluntary exchangeur, this should bother me. Undue, citizen-led state coercion dams the river of trade, shrinking the trout pond in which we angle for those voluntary arrangements that make us all a little better off each time. As a game theory dabbler, it's actually kind of a relief. Why? Because the folk theorem can also support an equilibrium with more open borders and lower overall regulatory and tax burdens. For at least marginal improvements in this direction, ask yourself if New Zealand, Hong Kong, and Singapore are all just bizarre flukes, isolated island (or peninsular) nations with no great lessons to teach the rest of the world. It might be that that's the case, and their relative freedom of association or lack of coercion or whatever you want to call it is strictly a product of historical accident, irreplicable elsewhere, but I again urge you to consider that Lithuanian schoolchild. If a 4th grader in 1971 can cheerfully yak about the anti-state sentiments of mom and dad to the KGB whereas her daughter in 2001 would find the very notion alien and probably a Paul Bunyanesque tale of fancy (not kidding here folks, these are my relatives I'm talking about), then it's not beyond belief that the US could move in the direction of a stable equilibrium of more immigration and lower regulation.

How to get there? I'm afraid I'm still, to my shame, unable to give Andrea a satisfying answer.

Hume on Coercion

Essays; Moral, Political, and Literary Part II, Essay XII: "Of the Original Contract"

I shall venture to affirm, That both these systems [divine right of the sovereign and the social contract] are just; though not in the sense, intended by the parties: And, That both the schemes of practical consequences are prudent; though not in the extremes, to which each party, in opposition to the other, has commonly endeavoured to carry them.

Emphasis in original.

 It's quite an essay. Here's a nice little passage: "[Philosophers] affirm, that all men are still born equal, and owe allegiance to no prince or government, unless bound by the obligation and sanction of a promise." Again, emphasis in original. Just prior to this he forwarded a particularly lovely style of historicism, both presaging Strauss and writing with prudent Straussian elision. So here, the social contractarians are right, but only so long as the terms of the contract are met. Unwritten is men owe no allegiance to a prince who upturns the terms of trade, so to speak. A sovereign who breaks the agreement no longer retains legitimate authority.

Likewise, "a sovereign cannot, properly speaking, be called [the Deity's] vice-regent, in any other sense than every power or force, being derived from him, may be said to act by his commission." Again, a Straussian call to revolt when the sovereign ceases to act in accordance with the Will of the Divine. You can almost hear him snickering into his sleeve here.

A little later on though, we find the following (keep in mind this was written in 1748, fifty years before M. Guillotine began his bloody rampage): "In reality, there is not a more terrible event, than a total dissolution of government, which gives liberty to the multitude, and makes the determination or choice of a new establishment depend upon a number, which nearly approaches to that of the body of the people: For it never comes entirely to the whole body of them." If you're reading Buchanan into that, you're not alone. Heck, if you're reading Caplan into that, you're not alone. Hume was mightily skeptical of the ability of regular folk to re-design from whole cloth either the terms of a social contract or to re-interpret the Word of God.

Of course, in practice, the post-Enlightenment revolutions tended to be based on the principles of "reason" or "science" or some such nonsense. They also tended to be rather bloody and messy. Being proven right in this case seems little cause for joy.

At any rate, the whole essay is great fun, and if you'll indulge me, there's one more passage in there that answers the question Hayek asks by way of Munger's post below:

Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.

Hard coercion by untenable alternatives. QED. Take it from a guy who's lived in a place where he knows no foreign language or manners, and lived from day to day, by the small wages which he acquired.

CONFORM, HUMAN

Sarah (The Healthy Home Economist) reports on the ongoing saga of Sarah Hershberger, an Amish girl with leukemia. In breve, the 10 year old patient begged her parents to keep her off another round of chemotherapy. Her folks agreed, the hospital did not. Hospital administration sought custody and so spawned a court struggle.

This story reminds me strongly of a case that was plastered all over the New Zealand news while I was visiting for a month in 1999. Maori parents took their son out of chemo to pursue alternative treatments and the hospital turned to the state to reel the patient back in.

Okay, so let's get the red herrings out of the way. Appeals to religious liberty and the shades of medical ethics codes are top notes played over a foundation of conflicting virtue. The care ethic pulls in both directions here. What we've really got is a question of the appropriate role of coercion.

I think the thing that confuses me is why a hospital would want to risk being painted as a bully. It seems to me that jawboning little girls is a pretty surefire way to make future patients all the more pee-shy, particularly for outgroup members. Think about the message this sends: "you'll take your goddamn medicine whether you like it or not, citizen." This is meant to inspire confidence in a medical system already well-plagued by, well, let's call it "rent-seeking and preservation" rather than the ever so slightly more confrontational "institutionalized corruption" that might also be accurate on a certain reading?

Patients (and even doctors) tend to be terrible Bayesians. Should this impute to a common moral intuition that consumer sovereignty in medicine be revoked? There's already a lot to suggest that the typical response to this question is "yes". I have a friend who lives in Germany who has been threatened on more than one occasion that her son would be (read: permanently) taken into state custody because she refused to administer his prescribed dose of ADHD medication before she sent him off to school in the morning. The key measure of the ACA is that every citizen is compelled to participate in the market (I'll leave off the scare quotes this time) for medicine. Coercion, my boy. Coercion as far as the eye can see.

How euvoluntary is medicine? How euvoluntary should it be?

Christopher Walken's Lesser Known Brother, Jay

From the Twitter, an interesting conversation between EE peeps Pamela J Stubbart, Adam Gurri, and Zac Gochenour, plus commentary from "Dr. Phil of Economics", the content of which can be found here. Again, the threading is a little hard to follow, so let's see if I can parse.

Peej: Aggressive but genuinely competent jaywalking still has pretty serious negative externalities because other pedestrians are taking cues from you.

Zac/Dr. Phil: That's an abuse of the language of economics. You're talking about information transmission, and negative externalities are what happens when a third party incurs costs of a transaction of which they are not a part. This doesn't count, since the decision of the other pedestrians in your example still have to make the rational decision whether or not to jaywalk.

Peej: Rational? What are you talking about? I'm talking Kahneman here, not Demsetz. Try to keep up, boys.

Adam: lol, pwned. But it's still hard to call that an externality. Even if the mental processing is not de facto rationally conscious, it's not like the classical examples where avoidance costs come from outside sources. Think of Coase's train sparks and cornfields. There's no farmer mulling over a private calculus, there are burning crops. The two just aren't equivalent.

Peej: Theory of mind much, Adam? What happens in your head is as "real" as what happens in physical space. [SLW note: Pamela didn't actually press this point, this is more me furthering the argument for didactic purposes]

Dr. Phil/Adam: Information transmission is how civilizations happen. We are human thanks to our habit of mimicry.

Peej: So you admit I'm right. That's what I thought.

And then she took a picture of herself in a victory pose.

What do you think? Does jaywalking impose mimicry costs on others? In a court of law, you wouldn't be able to make a case of actual physical coercion, but what of a sort of soft coercion centered on a weakness of will or overconfidence or whatever other cognitive bias might influence a novice (or a child) jaywalker-to-be?

Can we extend the example? Does pro wrestling bear some responsibility for idiot kids breaking their necks in the backyard when they try to recreate Wrestlemania XXIX with their idiot buddies? Do savvy day traders bear responsibility for overenthusiastic amateurs' dabblings in uncovered short sales? I don't mean in a legal sense, I mean in a pedestrian heuristic sense.

I think the ol' "I learned it by watching you, dad" cry is commonly brought to bear when convenient. Parents will storm the studios of MTV when their kids parrot what they see on Jackass (can you tell how long it's been since I've watched TV regularly?), but they're more likely to do the Justification Tango when it's their own behavior that might be suspect. Construal Level Theory strikes again.

It's also very interesting to revisit Munger's norms arguments in light of jaywalking. Nobody, and I mean but nobody jaywalks in Seattle. This is not true in Boston. Why? Is it more euvoluntary in Beantown? How did it get that way? Curious stuff, people.

NJ to Ban Conversion Therapy

The AP (among numerous other sources) reports that NJ Governor Christie is expected to sign legislation banning so-called "conversion therapy," becoming the second state in the union to do so.

My thoughts haven't changed that much since California passed similar legislation last year. There's an agency problem when parents' moral and economic calculus is misaligned with the long-term interests of their children and they end up making systematically erroneous coercive decisions, but this does not seem to imply that the appropriate legislative response is a comprehensive ban.

Before I condemn too quickly on faint evidence, I might also consider tacit coercion. Okay, so one way to get a kid to attend conversion therapy is for the parents to twist their ears or haul them kicking and screaming to the center. Another way is to silently guilt them into it. Or to... well, use your imagination. Have you ever had to get a toddler to eat peas when she didn't want to? I think I may have been a little blithe when I said that California should have just banned the coercion instead of the therapy itself. When you're dealing with children, how can you even identify coercive behavior from afar?

What we seem to have here is an interesting application of the end-state precautionary principle: "The Republican governor also said the health risks of trying to change a child's sexual orientation, as identified by the American Psychological Association, outweigh concerns over the government setting limits on parental choice." This therapy has demonstrated harm: suicide, depression, anxiety. If it can't show commensurate benefits, practitioners should be shut down. Right? We have a double-whammy of coercion and regret. It is not okay to force kids into therapy of dubious worth against their will.

It's an interesting lesson to ponder, so let's hope that people think about it seriously. Let's hope that while they're thinking about it, they take the time to generalize the analysis and rethink the position that stuffing kids full of amphetamines so that they don't fidget in class is such a great idea.

It's okay to be Takei, but it's also okay to play. Skenazy and Sulu have at least this one thing in common: kids are human beings too, people. Lend them some dignity if you can spare it.

Uncertainty and Harm: Goat Milk and the Precautionary Principle

From Maine, a curious tale of a young mother and her tussle with state officials. Her baby didn't much cotton to store-bought formula, so she swapped in a goats' milk confection. Her doctor reports this to DHHS and wouldn't you know it, they threaten to take her child away.

I'm still a little fuzzy on the arguments behind raw milk bans and the like, so I'll try to see if I can reason my way to this reaction from more elementary principles. Let's assume that there's some risk of harm that travels with consuming dairy products. When you combine that with illness severity, you can estimate roughly what the uncovered cost of raw milk is. If you're a fan of unintentional hilarity, you can check the FDA's site here to discover that between 1993 and 2006, a thirteen year period, well, let's let them use their own words:

[B]etween 1993 and 2006 more than 1500 people in the United States became sick from drinking raw milk or eating cheese made from raw milk. In addition, CDC reported that unpasteurized milk is 150 times more likely to cause foodborne illness and results in 13 times more hospitalizations than illnesses involving pasteurized dairy products.

See the dodge? See how to lie with statistics? We've got 1500+ folks who "became ill", then they moved right on to talking about hospitalizations, hoping that you'll assume that all those roughly 100 folks a year ended up in the ICU rather than with a case of the hershey squirts or upended over a porcelain throne barking their groceries to the Great God Ralph. I especially love that last bit, as if the base rates associated for pasteurized milk is something to incite terror in the great masses of men. Thirteen times close to zero is still pretty close to zero, people.

And really, that's like 115 people a year. Even if these were fatalities, and they're not, the numbers are still too small to be reported by the CDC. Link.

So here we've got a known problem: the baby can't handle store-bought formula, and we've got an unknown solution: homemade goat milk formula (and recall that the risk priors for raw milk are for cow's milk), so how does the cost-benefit calculus employed here justify coercive correction? What's the moral intuition?

For this to really stick, we'd need some way of showing that the mother (and by extension, all mothers) are systematically biased when it comes to risk assessment, that state officials are more accurate when it comes to dispassionately assessing the relative risk-adjusted costs and benefits of different menu options. This either assumes supernatural knowledge on the part of these officials or it relies on the moral warrant that children are the responsibility not of those who whelped them, but to the whole of the democracy. If that's the case, it's a moral warrant that seems entirely at odds with the everyday practice of moral behavior. Should children be removed from homes with pools? From homes with antifreeze in the garage? From homes with dogs? The CDC link above has a list of causes of infant mortality, maybe the state has an interest at minimizing all those risks, consequences be damned.

If this idea of the precautionary principle is to really have any meaningful teeth to it, and if you agree with the notion of equality in the eyes of the law, no one is innocent. No home is safe. If, on the other hand, you hold that the purpose of commercial regulation is to safeguard against manifest risk and extant fraud, you'll probably agree that these Maine officials and those of their ilk are a clowder of tax-funded bullies picking on a teen mother.

But then again, there's very little that has to do with children that could be considered euvoluntary. That's reason #1 to be wary of political speech that ever once references the little tykes.