The Very Model of a Postmodern Major-General

Will human genetic engineering be euvoluntary?

Kaffeeklatch nattering on the nature of fiddling with genes tends, in my experience, towards the far-mode. Most of the conversations I've had on the topic center on aggregate social consequences. The few near-mode chats I've had tend to be fairly mundane: a genetically engineered child still needs periodic diaper changes, cuddles, and bandages on skinned knees. Designer babies still get the sniffles, have their hearts broken, and climb up on the counter to sneak a few jellybeans while daddy's upstairs writing a blog post about human genetic engineering.

In my remarks in my previous post, I omitted much discussion of the peace dividend. Forgoing or delaying child rearing is accompanied by a non-violent mien. Bronies are not generally aggressive. At least not individually. Try to imagine an Applejack cosplayer mugging you for drug money. Now try to stop snickering. Now try to imagine a multitude of families, each playing slightly (sometimes very) different status games, often overlapping, with different status markers, in different communities. Grass-eaters might beget grass-eaters, and outsource protection to genetically modified bodyguards. Is this a problem? Should we expect to see EE violations in a HGE world?

1. Conventional ownership. Do you own your genes? Do your genes own you? Do you find it comical, tragic, or perfectly reasonable that gene sequences enjoy IP protection (at least for agricultural products)? If by "conventional" you mean "there's some case law on this" then yes, we have some idea, some precedent for residual rights over gene sequences. But if by "conventional" you mean an established tradition that resides in the minds of the citizenry, my impression (about 60% supported by the most recent release of the General Social Survey) is that the typical person is not of the opinion that tinkering with human genetics is a task for the mind of Man, but rather reserved to the authority of God. The relevant question is this: will opinions change and conventions arise once the practice becomes commonplace? The evidence from other popular technological advancements suggests that, yes, conventions will shift to accommodate valuable exchange opportunities.
2. Conventional capacity to exchange. Let's review Shackel's Motte and Bailey Doctrine. There is a core argument (lynching blacks is an inarguable evil) that is res ipsa loquitor obvious, and a less-defensible, but related claim (racial quotas enforced by state mandate is a natural right) that may or may not be true, but can be defended from the ethical comfort of the core claim (if you oppose race-based university quotas, you may as well put on a white hood and robes, because you're basically a klansman already). In the case of genetic engineering, the Bailey (the core, easy-to-defend proposition) is that there's a whole range of genetic disorders that could be wiped from the earth in but a few scant generations. Huntington's, Crohn's , Cri du Chat, Fragile X—the list is pretty long—these can all be corrected by manipulating embryonic genes (someday). Most respondents would be loath to toss the eradication of these diseases on the dunny heap, so expect most of the rancor to erupt in the Motte: designer babies, with +3SD IQ or the strength of Hercules or what-have-you: these sorts of exchange are outre, and in the interest of honesty, these are the ones I'd like to defend by encouraging you to think about them carefully. So for the rest of this little essay, assume I'll be spending all my time in the middle of the muddy Motte.
3. Absence of regret. Few parents express sincere regret for having had children. It's conceivable that parents might regret having designer babies, but the sorts of duplicitous sales practices that could lead to regret are already covered under the Uniform Commercial Code. Systematic individual regret therefore seems unlikely. But it's aggregate regret that I think worries most skeptics. In agriculture, genetic engineering often results in monoculture: superior strains of corn or wheat or whatever now dominate production, This monoculture leaves the entire species vulnerable to a well-targeted attack: some virus with a taste for a particular protein produced by a swapped-out gene could easily result in widespread crop devastation, leading to famine. In Talebian terms, such a system is fragile. If human genetic engineering produces a similar monoculture in the human population, a clever enough misanthrope might design a bio-weapon that could eat a very popular gene sequence, resulting in a near-extinction event. It might be worth it to invoke the precautionary principle in this case.
4. No uncompensated externalities. This is one where my own beliefs seem at odds with the popular sentiment. I am of the opinion that the success of others does not diminish my own. I believe that specialized production and exchange makes both parties richer, and I believe that envy is an unseemly vice, whether or not it makes its way into statute law. I also think I'm in the minority here. I suspect that if you told regular folks that some idle rich Beverly Hills clan maven had poured a million bucks into designing a superbaby, you'd get sneers, scoffs, looks of disgust, and a tidy sum of invective. How often do you hear "the rich keep getting richer, while the rest of us get left behind?" Having studied economics to some brief extent, I think this sentiment is bunk rubbish. Having studied politics, I am perhaps more inclined to agree with it. If a genetic sequence could be isolated that allows individuals to obtain political favor more readily, then there seems to be a pretty substantial downside. However, there is something that will mitigate this risk. Let me get back to it in a moment.
5. Neither party coerced by human agency. This one is actually the one I worry about the most. Human genetic engineering is so fraught with bioethical issues that it's very likely to be heavily regulated nearly everywhere. Heavily regulated (or banned) industries selling products or services with extremely high consumer surplus tend to encourage black or gray markets. And just like a market in heroin or sex, the logic of prohibition applies. It might be weird to consider bootleg gene re-sequencing, but during the heyday of the Apollo program, was it any sillier to imagine that the computing power of the reel-to-reel mainframes would be utterly dwarfed by tiny little handheld devices in the pockets of everyone from heads of state to boardroom executives to humble day laborers? Unaccountable genetic merchants operating out of the panopticon's view might very well dupe customers. Ne'er-do-well organizations might well kidnap or otherwise coerce hapless women into breeding them an army of genetically superior drug mules or super soldiers or suicide bombers or whatever. If this sounds far-fetched, then consider it a tail risk: unlikely but still possible. So, much like the unsolicited advice I regularly offer for sin taxes or prohibition, it is wise to consider what sort of underground markets would arise in response to attempts at prohibition. The cure might be worse than the disease.
6. Neither party coerced by circumstance. Does "keeping up with the Joneses" count as BATNA disparity? I think this is the presumed mechanism that ends in the gray-goo one-of-us conformity end game many skeptics fear. That, or the parable of the peacock, wherein parents select for socially-impressive-but-practically-useless traits in their progeny, like, oh, long necks or something. 

Here's why I think monoculture fears are (mostly) misguided: there is no one single arena for competition, even with our boring, inherited genes. Some of us are musically apt, others are good at basketball, others yet have tactical finesse in wartime. There are numerous margins along which to compete, and as we've seen with the flowering of leisure activities since the hockey stick of human prosperity took off, there are many more margins yet to be discovered. If there's big money to be had in Starcraft tournaments, don't be too surprised to find at least some parents selecting for fast-twitch muscles and uber micro. Other parents would probably go for an NFL defensive line package: dense bone and heavy muscle. Others would seek a well-tuned ear, others excellent balance, others high cheekbones, others an aptitude for research. Hipster parents might select genes that produce whimsical facial hair. Genetic engineering is more likely to result in more genetic diversity rather than less.

With one important exception: longevity. Immortality is a nearly universal human aspiration. As soon as genetic engineers can switch off the aging process, expect it to become part of the standard package without delay. Everyone will want this. And if anything will increase resource allocation disparity, it will be a cohort of Tolkenian elves freed from the shackles of making hay while the sun shines. All else equal (including what other genetic advantages might attend), extremely long life instantly bottoms out discount rates. If you expect to live centuries, prudent investment is no longer something you take for granted. Similarly, all the good things we're slowing training each other to value, like conservation, environmental quality, honesty and transparency in politics, all the little things we foist on future generations become things long-lived GE people foist on themselves. A lot of my pals on Twitter fret about a Jeb v. Hil ticket in '16. I don't. Political dynasties at least have the virtue of wishing to preserve the integrity of the system. They're less likely to be rapacious in the short term. Jeb in '16, Chelsea in '24, Jenna in '32. Given present institutions, that's how you ensure stability. Genetically modified quasi-immortals would do the trick too. Good stewardship strikes me as too good to pass up.

Now about the downside risks: GM armies, foreign or domestic, running roughshod over the enemy, crushing all resistance. Here, I'm not exactly sure I see the marginal influence of genetic engineering. Modern war is chiefly a matter of capital battery. Yes, infantry still has an important role, but to cow resistance, we tend to use naval and air superiority. Marines storming fortified beachheads is as antiquated as the hauberk and the blunderbuss. Send in the drones. Same goes for defense. As for guerrilla war, suicide bombing, et al, I again direct your attention to the longevity issue. Being personally invested in peace should, I think, give the political elite an incentive to direct more resources towards resolving lingering conflicts. And even if that isn't successful, it seems difficult to believe that folks who would resort to detonating the faithful and gullible would be particularly inclined to engineer a better suicide bomber. If you've got that kind of walking-around money, then as with nation-state armies, it's probably better to just invest in capital. 

Are there any downside risks that I can't comfortably dismiss? Well yes. Political risk. If HGE becomes cheap and effective, and it ends up banned anyway, I think it's reasonable to expect prudence to be an early casualty. One of the more disruptive outcomes would be outright speciation, where the GM offspring bred by one organization is so genetically distinct from those bred by another that they would be unable to mate successfully. High fantasy settings with elves, dwarves. orcs, and men are nearly always only ever held in homeostasis with the generous addition of applied phlebotinum. There's only room on this planet for one sapient species, pardner, and you better bet that it's the one with the nukes. Yes, that's an extreme scenario, but the stringent downside risk hints very strongly in favor of (twice in one post, oh my) invoking the precautionary principle: be very careful about enforcing a drug-war style ban on human genetic modification. A gene war could be devastating.

I think I'll leave it at this for now. This post already exceeds my already generous self-imposed word limit. I think I'll reserve a few other thoughts for a future post. For now, I'll just say that HGE is too dangerous to ban. 

Tragedy of the Commons: Fertility Edition

At Quartz, Sarah Perry claims that having kids has become a Tragedy of the Commons. Because the value of children now accrues more to the general public instead of to the family that begat them, would-be parents have less incentive to procreate.

ATSRTWT

The mark of a good claim is that it can be tested empirically. In that sense, this is a good claim. I am in the habit of being a bit leery of monocausal explanations for complex phenomena, as I am sure you are, but any relative price story has at least one treatment effect. Here, there's an embarrassment of econometric riches. We have lots of natural experiments with transfer payment legislation, varying both geographically and over time (for panel regressions), we have big treatments like the 1996 welfare reforms (for discontinuity regressions), and we have plenty of historical data (for time series econometrics). There's lots to choose from.

But behind all that are McCloskey's ol' admonitions: why is this question important? Are the results meaningful (i.e. are the coefficients substantial, and not merely statistically significant)? Who is the relevant population? What's the relevant counterfactual?

It's always that last one that needles me when I hear claims about changes in rates (of any kind). I strain to imagine why it should be that historical rates were somehow closer to a Platonic ideal than what we've got today. I keep a bottle of aspirin handy for the headaches that inevitably develop from all the eye-rolling I do every time I hear some DC politician wringing his hands over "cuts" to this program or that, as if last year's budget was some magical cloud farted from the candy-coated buttocks of a majestic unicorn in flight aboard a helicopter made of chocolate and powered by pixie dust.

That expressly is not what Perry is doing, however. I won't claim that Caldwell is or isn't making this mistake here, but I will note that there's a big gulf between positive statistical analysis and public opinion and that stealth assumptions have a nasty way of sneaking into your empirical claims and drinking all the milk in your fridge, so to speak. Perry is making a straightforward relative price claim that's perfectly consistent with ordinary plain-jane workhorse Economics 101. The tragedy is when someone reads that and goes all Helen Lovejoy, setting about to rush hasty legislation through hot on the heels of an imagined crisis: "won't someone think of the (unborn) children?"

The point is, if I were inclined towards the economics of the family (and I'm not, since competing in the same arena as Justin Wolfers means my contributions would be rapidly and summarily overshadowed), I'd want to very carefully establish the following:

1. Am I measuring the right thing? Should I care about fertility per se or about, say, a combination of fertility and mortality? Should I care about utility-adjusted life-years or something? Total aggregate discounted lifetime productivity maybe? How should any of this be measured? What controls should I include? Why?
2. Are historical comparisons appropriate? Why or why not? 
3. How strong is the treatment effect of state-provided goods (including in this case retirement benefits, education, direct transfer payments, and medical subsidies)? How does this effect compare to reasonable alternative hypotheses, like widely-available contraception, household composition effects, selection effects, et al?
4. Finally, what are the public choice implications? 

Sadly, many authors behave as if there is no four. There's quite frequently a throwaway closing paragraph in most empirical papers outlining what the appropriate policy response should be, but these tend to be laughably naïve, invoking the mighty powers of the Sikorskean unicorn referenced above.

Tradeoffs abound, including in the maternity ward. I'm very much a member of the Julian Simon club: people strongly tend to be net assets rather than net liabilities, so I'm naturally sympathetic to the idea of encouraging fertility. Similarly, my priors lean towards private provision of private goods (including most education), with perhaps some public funding where appropriate. But careful analysis must account for the public costs of policy alterations.

I have a hunch that thorough research would produce some of the same results. Proving definitively that a tragedy of the commons actually exists is a grueling task, but it could be an interesting exercise. If nothing else, it'd be a nice way to needle both the left and the right at the same time, and that's gotta be worth something to someone, right?

Kids aren't euvoluntary because regret. Consider very very very carefully what this might imply for public policy. Consider also historical context and the undeniable fact that people get mighty squirrely when confronting questions of reproduction.

h/t The Peej

Anjie Brings the Heat (Again!)

Via The Ümlaut, a smashing Castillo piece on the directional euvoluntarity of female sexuality.

EE quote:

Female porn stars provide one case study. These women enjoy Bergner’s vision of uninhibited female sexuality and make money doing it. They preform sexually diverse acts, à la Bailey, and reside at Meanda’s commanding heights of male desire. While many are drawn to the sex industry under less than euvoluntary conditions, we can compare their preferences and outcomes to those of other women of similar socio-economic status. If the first order preference of sexual satisfaction is stronger for these women than the second order preference for a traditional family, we should expect porn stars to be happier and less desiring of monogamy on average than similarly-situated women outside of the porn industry.

While the male porn stars harbored few regrets from their time in “the biz,” many of the women were rattled or reeling. Their fame, power, and sexual satisfaction came at the extreme price of a diminished shot at a normal, “oppressive,” marriage and children. Undoubtedly, social stigma against sex workers is largely to blame for their plight. For better or for worse, the sexual cartel is a harsh mistress. Still, it is worth noting that some women who unwittingly live la vida Bergner jealously eye their sisters’ “shackles.”

People, the sexual menu is expanding. With heterogeneous preferences, Ozzie and Harriet are still on the table, but now so is Caligula. More choices, less stigma? That's the EE way.

Labor is not Euvoluntary: Labor Edition

I don't know what your experience is, but I can't recall Cesarean section births being all that common when I was a youngster. I still recall my surprise upon hearing that there was such a thing as a convenience C-section, usually scheduled well in advance. At first, I dismissed this as a fringe trend, disconnected from the actual experience of women, confined mostly to elite upper-middle class mothers.

I was wrong. From the CDC:

Source.

There are a lot of series on that graph, but the interesting one is the dashed line, for all births. In 1996, 19.7% of births were by C-Section, compared with 31.3% in 2011. It's a pity the time series doesn't go back farther, as I'd like to see what the rates were when we here at EE were born (the 50s and the 70s for Mike and me, and I think JR was born in the 80s), but the opportunity costs of fetching the data are too damn high. At any rate, this sort of thing doesn't happen just by accident: whoops, I tripped, fell on your scalpel and a baby popped out. No, there must be a tale of incentives, institutions, and relative prices in there.

And it wasn't until a chat with Mrs Spivonomist yesterday that I found the missing puzzle piece. Short-term disability.

At least here in the Commonwealth, short-term disability covers 6 weeks for vaginal birth and 8 weeks for C-section. Moreover, [employer redacted] grants extra paid time off for C-section recovery and no such benefit whatsoever for vaginal birth. I don't know if that's industry standard or not, but if it is, there's your story right there. Even more over, according to what I've been able to glean, this [employer redacted] policy is relatively new, a response to legitimate concerns that women who had medically necessary C-sections were being unfairly penalized by employment requirements. And that's true; recovery from invasive surgery takes time.

Knowing all that, it's kind of surprising that the slope on the graph above isn't steeper. Though, it is possible that the stale labor market has changed the relative prices. No sense shipping your good apples if nobody's buying. At any rate, it's kind of a relief to have a bit more insight into this odd outcome. I think it's at least a little bit easier to reject alternative hypotheses like all of a sudden placentas all across America have shifted out of place.

The last empirical question has to do with long-term outcomes. Will there be any interesting repercussions 20 years down the road? My priors say no, as I chiefly suspect that the big social ills come not from delivery method but from bad policy. Still, some economist two decades from now could do worse than to include a term for C-section birth rates in her regressions.

What are your moral intuitions about childbirth? How do you feel about midwifery? About scheduled C-sections? Should politicians and bureaucrats attempt to tinker with incentives that influence mothers' decisions? Why or why not? What's the appropriate moral calculus? Fairness? Justice? Care? What's the correct policy scale? National? State? Local? Personal? Please explain.

And if you do elect to have this conversation in class or with friends or family, please feel free to share your experiences in the comments or by e-mail. I'd love to follow up on the topic. I have one daughter and she was born at home, despite systematic pressures to deliver in a hospital under the supervision of a physician.

Knock

Steven Landsburg links to a JEP piece on teenage pregnancy in America. The authors contend that teen pregnancy is a result of relative poverty and that the long-term implications aren't particularly worse than if the pregnancy had never occurred. They find higher levels of sexual activity and lower contraception use in poor or rural areas.