Corporate Activism: Freedom of Association?

An interesting dilemma.  On the one hand, there is the famous Friedman thesis, that corporations need not, and perhaps should not, engage in "civic duty" actions.

If you think that's wrong, then you in effect enable corporations to act on their own social agendas.  Which gives you the Koch Foundation.  I happen to admire the Koch Foundation, but many of my colleagues BOTH say Friedman is wrong and yet CGKF should be prevented from having any say in social activity.  You gots to PICK, folks.  Those are the choices.

Radical Repertoires: The Incidence and Impact of Corporate-Sponsored Social Activism

Mary-Hunter McDonnell
Organization Science, forthcoming

Abstract: This article explores when and why firms participate in overt corporate-sponsored social activism. To shed light on this question, I empirically explore the emergence and implications of a new strategic phenomenon in nonmarket strategy - the corporate-sponsored boycott - in which firms voluntarily cooperate with contentious social movement organizations to sponsor boycotts that protest the contested social practices of other companies or entities at higher orders of market organization, such as industries, transnational regulators, or states. Using a longitudinal database that tracks the social movement challenges faced by 300 large companies between 1993 and 2007, I provide evidence that overt corporate-sponsored activism is used by companies that are chronically targeted and losing ground to activists, especially when those companies are facing a reputational deficit. Furthermore, I find that participation in overt corporate-sponsored activism is associated with significant decreases in the number of activist challenges targeting a firm in the future, suggesting that the tactic may effectively defend a firm from contentious threat by allowing firms to co-opt allies within the activist population. I discuss implications of these findings for social movement research, nonmarket strategy, and the study of corporate social responsibility.

American Exceptionalism vs. The Precautionary Principle: Refugee Edition

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken

Among the many objections to more liberal immigration policy, one stands out as more difficult to debunk than others. On questions of immigrants bringing with them crime, dependency, disease, or Communism, the empirical evidence shows that these are unambiguously overblown concerns. If anything, ordinary immigrants on average tend to be more industrious, healthy, independent, and conscientious than native-born Americans, again on average. It should be immediately clear why with a little reflection. Uprooting to travel to a foreign land is ambitious. The timid, the callow, the craven, the risk-averse will be marginally more likely to accept a mediocre BATNA and stay home. Emigration is an act of courage, of hope. Under normal circumstances, that is.

The objection of which I speak is of culture. Not of superficial culture, like driving courtesy or a tolerance for spicy food, but rather the deep appreciation for Enlightenment ideals that somehow still sort of drags its gutshot corpse through a post-William Jennings Bryan America. Will immigrants help keep the torch of free speech alive? Will they maintain a healthy skepticism of centralized political authority? Will they resist the urge to flaccidly permit the quartering of troops in civilian homes? Will they insist on procedural due process? Will they cherish the precepts of strictly delineated federalized power? Specifically,, will they support and defend American constitutional jurisprudence at rates comparable with natives?

The good news, is that yes, they will! I'll spare you the econometrics, but there's no statistically significant difference between immigrants and natives on issues of censorship and firearm ownership rights. In fact, when you control for education and IQ, immigrants actually beat natives on these issues. (source: author's analysis of GSS data 1974-2012)

The bad news is that everyone, immigrants and natives alike show an almost shocking disregard for the foundations of our national claim to natural liberty. Given the choice, only one in four respondents would preserve the freedom of expression, written or spoken, across a mere four categories of potentially bilious speech. In other words, we have met the enemy of the first amendment, and he is us.

But this is for ordinary immigration, under ordinary circumstances. Normal immigration builds character in a healthy nation, inviting hale, hardworking, determined men and women to our shores to truck, barter, and exchange with us and create a better life for them and theirs. This arrangement is to the mutual benefit of immigrant and host alike. Refugees are unlike ordinary immigrants in that they are compelled to migration thanks to especially gruesome BATNA. Death squads, systematic rape, homes incinerated, and mass exile will stir even the lumpiest of lumpenprole to pack up the ol' bindle and hit the long road to salvation.

It's this group that is utterly out of sample. I urge you to be skeptical of claims one way or the other about the desirability of permanently hosting refugees with an eye towards assimilation and eventual citizenship. If you'll permit a bit of #gertruding, the morality of providing aid and succor to displaced resident of war-torn nations is plainly obvious: giving aid to the afflicted is an almost universally-recognized moral and ethical duty. However, this duty is unrelated to the economic and cultural benefits of routine peaceful immigration.

The Precautionary Principle would tell us to refuse refugees entry for two reasons:
1) There is no assurance that their entry would not irrevocably corrupt American culture and the institutions that arise from that culture.
2) It is impossible to credibly commit to policies that would maintain refugees as non-citizen residents. (bleg: what's your favorite quick-n-dirty intro to the folk theorem you like to use in your undergrad courses?)

Refugees present a difficult conundrum not forwarded by ordinary immigration. As with difficult conundrums of all stripes, the Mencken quote above applies. How to fulfill the humanitarian demands of charity and sanctuary without risking the golden goose eggs is an enormously thorny question. But it is one not made any easier by conflating it with an immigration debate. The two are only superficially related.

Revel in Your Abandon

Will Bryan Caplan take in Syrian refugees? HEAVENS NO! But he'll happily become a slumlord. https://t.co/HDByziOkJB

— John Durant (@johndurant) September 1, 2015

OP here.

If you'll permit me the luxury of gross abstraction and generalization, there appear to be two classes of objections to receiving refugees. Call the first class "hardhearted" and the second class "softhearted."

Hardhearted objections owe their pedigree to what economists call "fiscal externalities," a term of art describing public policy choices that would impose costs on blameless third parties. Stereotypical examples of this include public education and medicine: the American public has decided to fund these important services through the public coffers, so anyone using these services is seen (rightly or wrongly) as a burden on the system. Contrast this with shopping at a grocery store, where the use of the service is simply called "being a customer." Or if you don't want a stretched analogy, if a refugee were to enroll their kids in a fully-private Catholic school and send them to get their vision fixed at a Lasik center, it's unlikely the hardhearted type objections would consider this to be a burden. Related hardhearted objections concern things like cultural or political effluvia, but these questions are a little beyond the scope of Durant's objection. I think his comment is more properly classified as a softhearted objection.

Softhearted objections rely on sympathetic moral intuitions. Refugees are already at probably the lowest point in their lives. Further burdening them with the duties and responsibilities of holding down a job, paying rent, and providing for the future of their children is uncharitable, even callous. You don't kick a man when he's down. You give him a hand up.

It can be challenging to reconcile these two types of objections. The presently fashionable "solution" in the Mediterranean seems to be "let their boats founder on the waves," which is pretty good at piling up the corpses of children, but seems to have done little to curb the flow of people fleeing violence and savagery. It might be better for the refugees if the voters of receiving countries could put aside their differences for a moment and agree that it would be better for these cold, desperate victims to have a place to stop running for a little while, even if it means they have to eventually earn their keep. Much as we might like, we can't simply wish (or vote, at least in the short term) away the hardhearted objections. The nasty alternative to paying rent to a Bryan Caplan is drowning. It's hard to see how that's much of an improvement.

It is in poor taste to wage cultural and political conflict on the backs of the world's most desperate people in the midst of their most dire circumstances.

nod to KE

Litterbug

When I was in elementary school, Earth Day went largely ignored. Sure, we had a goofball peanut farmer in the White House who put his clodhoppers up Detroit's tailpipe to build us this glorious embarrassment:

Remember that? Good times, man.

Note something amiss in the photograph: There isn't any rubbish on the ground. That's how you know it wasn't taken in 1976. Even in the eco-chummy Oregon college town I spent my first few years, it was impossible to leave the house without seeing damnable litter everywhere. And it seemed like it was always fast food wrappers. Or cigarette butts. 'Twas truly a nasty time to be an American.

So I have to hand it to environmentalists. They accomplished something that should be downright impossible according to ordinary textbook treatments of collective action problems: they not only got nearly every single American to stop littering, they turned nearly every single American into an anti-littering scold. Can you even imagine what would happen if you were to attempt to throw your trash on the ground in any major metropolitan area in 2015? You wouldn't hear the end of it. We now enjoy (relatively) clean streets through the force of collective will backed by the threat of public shaming. Pause for a moment today to appreciate that triumph.

And then tremble at the power. Anti-littering efforts were low-hanging fruit compared to the many other social ills that busybodies catalog. It might be worth it to clean up the streets that everyone enjoys jointly and severally, but that shame mechanism is a powerful weapon. Neo-anti-littering activists have been deploying it against folks who make off-color jokes or who have poor sartorial judgement when appearing on TV or who have the audacity to follow the bylaws of the Hugo Award nomination process.

Cleaning up the environment is a step in the euvoluntary direction: it internalizes some of the negative externalities of littering. But we need a little filth. Perfectly sanitized, sterile environments breed allergen sensitivity and weaken the immune system. Eat a handful of dirt before you die.

Freedom of Association, Private Discrimination, and Public Discrimination

Interesting article, though 12 years old, from Roger Pilon.

Excerpt:


The “problem” of discrimination arises in the context of human association. We believe in freedom of association — it’s implicit in the First Amendment, in fact — but that freedom entails not only the right to associate with those willing to associate with us but the right not to associate — the right to discriminate, on any ground, good or bad, or no ground at all. Absent that, freedom of association is compromised. It means that others choose the grounds for us. Others tell us which grounds are and are not acceptable. That’s not freedom.

Raising the question:  when can businesses discriminate?  Can "we" substitute our judgment for the business's judgment about whom to hire, for example?  "We" have decided that we can, to some extent, when it comes to race and gender.  The stated reason is that the business wanted to use criteria not germane to the practice of business, but based only on personal predjudice.  How can "we" tell?  It's hard to read someone's mind, so we look at outcomes:  if there is a pattern of disparate treatment then we simply infer prejudice.

But sometimes businesses openly state a prejudice.  For example, A. Some businesses in Indiana more or less openly stated their unwillingness to serve gay couples in the actual process of getting married.  That is, a baker might be unwilling to be paid to put a same sex couple doll set on top of a wedding cake, or a photographer might be unwilling to take pictures of a same sex couple kissing.

Or, B, A business NOT in Indiana might more or less openly state their unwillingness to buy or sell from businesses in Indiana, because of the Indiana law that enables businesses there to exercise their freedom of association.

Many of my friends think open example of discrimination A is bad, and should be punished.  But open example of discrimination B is not only not bad, but good.  In fact, anyone NOT willing to engage in action B should be punished be also being discriminated against by having the refusal to do business extended.  So anyone who discriminates should be discriminated against, and anyone who refuses to discriminate against the original discriminator will also be discriminated against, just as if he or she were the original discriminator.  Failure to condemn the original discrimination is a sin just as bad as the original discrimination.

I can see their point.  But I am skeptical of their optimism about their ability to decide when discrimination is justified.  Remember, my friends are NOT condemning discrimination.  Far from it.  They are actively advocating discrimination.

Now, one could go through the above paragraphs and take out "discrimination" and substitute "commit acts of violence."  Would the argument go through?  After all initiating violence might be wrong, but then the person threatened might be justified in threatening violence in self-defense.  Most of us, even relative pacifists, would accept a "self-defense" exception to rules against commiting acts of violence?

Does discrimination work the same way?  I don't think so.   "I am hitting you a bat" is different from "I would prefer not to do business with you."

The point, as Pilon makes very clearly, is that there is a tension between "Arbitrary discrimination is bad" and "freedom of association of private persons is good, and in fact is a fundamental right."

So, the problem:  If I am forced to provide a service, that's not a voluntary exchange.

But if I am "open for business," I have an obligation to fulfill the implied contract.  If a sign says, "Wedding Cakes:  $75" that is an offer to do business.  I can't say, "Nope, no cake for you!" 

(Although..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNwbjcuQUv8.)  (And some backstory.  Is this discrimination? Clearly a violation of the "open for business" rule...)

The bottom line for me is that I am disturbed at how many people, on both sides, think this is just an easy question.  It's not.  It's a hard question.


.

Fear

Fear, panic, terror: these things arise involuntarily, when the tyger tyger burning bright creeps past the perimeter in the night. I must wonder if they're truly involuntary however.

As far back as I can remember, there's always been some sort of moral panic. I'm not quite old enough to recall firsthand whatever the pearl-clutching du jour of the 70s was (to be fair, dealing with stagflation was probably of legitimate concern), but I do recall panics over: heavy metal music, the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, Satanic worship, drugs, teen sex, vaccines, euthanasia, and on and on and on (remember acid rain?). And now, with Newsweek's latest cover story (h/t/ ENB), it looks like we're reaching the event horizon of sex trafficking. 

Actual humans who earn actual paychecks pay actual money for these easily-debunked, flatulent puff-pastry articles with the actual intent of reading them. I find it difficult to believe that people are so deliberately stupid that they'd be willing to accept with open hearts and minds that rubbish like "kids are sacrificing fatted calves to Lucifer in America's cemeteries at midnight" is even remotely true. I find it difficult (sadly, in the absence of decent evidence) to reject the hypothesis that people buy this tripe with the express intent to raise their dander.

Humanity has slain all the dragons. Child mortality is statistically indistinguishable from zero, at least compared to what it was even as recently as a hundred years ago. Proper bloody war is something that happens far from our shores. Bear attacks are rare. Even the ceaseless owl scourge has waned of late. There is little left in the natural world for ordinary folks to fear. Increasingly, there's little in the world of men for ordinary folks to fear (yes, this is an Anglophonic observation, but living standards are rising even among the bottom billion). So could it be that moral panics like the one pictured above is simply a way for a producer to meet consumer demand? People want to be scared of something once in a while. The wolves at the gate are all dead, so why not just pick some random bullshit with a kernel of truth buried in there really deep? Can't that be a euvoluntary transaction?

I suppose it's a matter of proportionality (#TeamAristotle). Moral panics about genuine problems can divert resources towards reducing genuine harms. By the time my daughter is old enough to learn what mesothelioma is, home asbestos insulation will be something from the history books. Maybe part of the trouble is that it's harder to generate indignant panics about chronic heart disease or inattentive driving the way it is about violence in video games. I am beginning to suspect that harm-reduction isn't actually the relevant margin for collective action. Perhaps the telos is that sweet, sweet hit of imminent danger.

Just the Tip

Quoth @interfluidity: "perhaps there are some domains where payment itself is a consumption good."

Context here.

Would you tip an android? How about a perfectly convincing one? Why do you tip?

Unless, of course, you don't tip.

Some possibilities:

1. You appreciate good service and wish to encourage more.
2. It's expected. The costs of being a Mr. Pink are greater than the value of the money you'd pony up.
3. You are genuinely magnanimous. You wish to redistribute your wealth to the relatively poor service workers you encounter.
4. You've worked service jobs in the past and you know how difficult they can be compared to the scale pay.
5. You want to flirt with the waitress (if this has ever worked for you, let me know in the comments, as I'm still trying to prove to Meat Mountain Mungowitz that unicorns do exist).
6. You want to signal to other diners your fitness as a potential mate and to reduce the relative status of less-generous tippers.

There are many ways to play status games. Conspicuous tipping is one. Does that mean it is euvoluntary? For Buscemi up there, he endured the scorn of his fellows for being a cheapskate (and I suspect that #2 is one of the reasons why the practice is so durable). And #4 suggests that the institutional equilibrium for tip recipients isn't euvoluntary (tbf, several states have converted server positions to regular-scale jobs subject to ordinary minimum wage requirements, though that doesn't seem to have done much to dent the practice of tipping in those states, afaik).

When robots take over service jobs, how quickly will the practice of tipping disappear? What mix of #1-6 will result in waifu-style animatronic servants, and which will result in hyper-efficient flying spider-appendage machines? Which sort of world do you wish to live in?

When the robots do start to take over, it's hard to tell from afar if folks will be interested in putting lots of resources into tip-generating features. And it's also hard to tell if that would be a bad thing. Prices convey information after all, and if people are willing to throw a few extra bucks at Boob-bot 5000 while leaving the Mantisblimp's jar empty, that suggests that form matters in a very real economic sense.

I don't know about you guys, but I can't wait to see what happens.

Shouting Fire in a Crowded Barracks

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

No amendment is absolute. The Supreme Court has held that reasonable constraints on the freedom of speech are Constitutional so long as they protect a public interest. Copyright law, for example, impinges on my right to reproduce or distribute certain materials for material gain. Nor am I at perfect liberty to obtain fissile materials, land mines, or earth-scouring lasers (I may have to consult with my attorney for that last one). I have no Fourth Amendment protections if law enforcement agencies seek to confiscate my property on "suspicion" of illegal activity. If I am a foreign national (and perhaps even if I'm an American national) sought in connection to non-state aggression against American interests, I have no Fifth or Sixth protections whatsoever. Indeed, I can even have hummus pumped into my rectum to the point of prolapse, or chained to a dungeon wall until I die of exposure.

No amendment is absolute. The 7th is scarcely upheld when the grand jury is little more than a sock puppet for prosecutors. And the 8th? Ha ha ha. No. Botched execution is the most extreme and obvious example, but I urge you to pick up a copy of David Skarbek's latest to get an idea of how the emergent organizations in prisons act to socialize inmates to the society, including otherwise peaceful offenders. Turning a kid with three simple possession strikes into a lifer is a pretty good example of "cruel" even if it is sadly not "unusual." The 9th? Well, let's just regulate everything, down to how many gallons of water you can use to dispose of your feces and what sorts of light bulbs you are and are not permitted to purchase. That should take care of that one. Ditto 10th.

That pesky third though. The joke amendment. What can the ambitions of the sovereign do to abrogate that sucker? Well,

Step 1: find a clever little workaround for the Posse Comitatus Act, like, oh, say, donating surplus war materiel to police departments.

Step 2: handle the inevitable abuses that arise from letting police play dress-up as Soldiers by inciting discontent either by proxy or through direct speech.

Step 3: await sedition.

Step 4: there is no step 4.

Step 5: declare national state of emergency.

Step 6: it ain't a 3rd violation if the police/FEMA/ATF/& al do it, right? RIGHT?

Recall Hume:

May not the sovereign lay claim to [superfluous (unemployed) labor], and employ them in fleets and armies, to encrease the dominions of the state abroad, and spread its fame over distant nations? It is certain that the fewer desires and wants are found in the proprietors and labourers of land, the fewer hands do they employ; and consequently the superfluities of the land, instead of maintaining tradesmen and manufacturers, may support fleets and armies to a much greater extent, than were a great many arts are required to minister to the luxury of particular persons. Here therefore seems to be a kind of opposition between the greatness of the state and the happiness of the subject. A state is never greater than when all its superfluous hands are employed in the service of the public. The ease and convenience of private persons require, that these hands should be employed in their service. The one can never be satisfied, but at the expense of the other. As the ambition of the sovereign must entrench on the luxury of individuals; so the luxury of individuals must diminish the force, and check the ambition of the sovereign [emphasis SLW].

I'd like to think there are good, non-confrontational negotiations that might return the job of policing back to the euvoluntary provision of decent law and order. I worry that as a practical matter for very large jurisdictions, that ship might already have sailed. If you live in an area with cowboy keystone cops, I sincerely wish you the best of fortunes. Let's just hope I'm a false Cassandra and my paranoia is the product of a worried mind and nothing more.

Then again, hope in one hand, sue for libel in the other. See which one fills up first.

Marriage: Private Good, Public Institution

Two friends recently wed. When I first met Pamela, her surname was the same as mine. She was kind enough to grant me the rare luxury of shortening her name to "Pam" for the sake of the rhyming scheme. As of earlier this week, she and BH have merged to form the Voltron we now call #TeamByrmela.

Okay, maybe it's just me that does that.

At any rate, congratulations you guys. And a well-timed one, as Justin Wolfers has been getting some really good press over his latest (impeccable, as always) empirical work on the role of the divorce regime as it relates to marriage stability. The tl;dr version: divorce rates have tanked. People who choose to marry these days tend to stay married. Of course, people have been delaying marriage and having kids out of wedlock and all that stuff. But for those folks who do tie the knot, they seem to be better at forward induction. There are fewer social pressures to wed hastily, therefore the rate of euvoluntary marriage is greater. That's fantastic news, so long as you're in a euvoluntary marriage.

Consider the following distribution:

The right tail has always been good to go. They marry, they stay married, they have decent jobs, live in good neighborhoods, obtain good educations, contribute plentifully to their retirement accounts, get regular checkups, and eat kale. The left tail has always been doomed, and the evidence for that is in the dismal failure of longstanding New Deal and Great Society programs to eradicate measured poverty. Life in the left tail is characterized by periodic joblessness, substance abuse, negative savings rates, unplanned reproduction, you know—pretty much most of the chronic gripes you hear from social conservatives.

But the grey area is what's contentious here. Wolfers is picking up a tendency for these folks to (marginally) postpone marriage until they've found a better match. No hasty marriage at 19 means no messy divorce at 35. My hunch is that the reasons for this are some admixture of both cultural and regime reform. There's less social stigma to being unwed, and that's related, probably by both cause and effect, to the advent of no-fault divorce.

The benefits of a good, stable marriage are unquestionable. The folks in the right tail have better lifetime earnings, more satisfaction, and usually a legacy they take pride in (see some of Double-D's posts on end of life regret for counterexamples). If the folks in the middle of the distribution would simply be more prudent and diligent about participating earnestly in the marriage market, they would find that the discounted present value of a successful marriage far outweigh the costs of obtaining one.

The empirical question is this: how receptive to treatment is that "if"? As Wolfers and Stevenson have noted in other research, the costs of at-fault regimes include higher rates of domestic violence and spousal suicide. Yikes. Restoring the old regime would hit the left side of the gray zone pretty hard.

There are maybe some tax incentives that could encourage the grey zone to shrink, at least a little, and probably only on the right side. But having one mortgage instead of two is already a pretty strong financial incentive, ne c'est pas?

So what remains? The institution of marriage is a public good: it has all the characteristics of a non-rival, non-excludable good. Individual marriages, contrarily, are precious private goods. Typically, when we want to encourage good behavior without the downsides of relying on coercion, we default to rhetoric, to persuasion. In the misty days of my youth, we watched felicitous families on television like The Waltons, or the Cunninghams, or the Ingalls clan out there in that little house on the... I dunno what to call it... savanna I suppose... veldt maybe. As I grew older, Ward Cleaver gave way to Al Bundy. TV families stopped being aspirational and became more cynical. Long time readers might accurately predict that I prefer cynicism in my own entertainment fare, given my cruel and unforgiving temperament, but if Deirdre McCloskey and Virginia Postrel are right, we get more of what we respect, we get more of what we glamourize. Perhaps we'd see more stable marriages out there if viewers would consume more content that raised the relative status of durable marriage.

A public service, if you will, in support of a euvoluntary institution.

Just watch out for hammy tropes though. Audiences know when they're being preached to, and they don't much like it.

The Horrible Truth of Nien Nunb

For those of you too young or insufficiently interested in the minutae of Star Wars trivia to recall, Nien Nunb was the Sullustan "co"-pilot who, together with Lando Calrissian, successfully detonated the power plant at the center of the second Death Star orbiting the forest moon of Endor. This assault marked the demise of both Emperor Palpatine and the last remaining Sith apprentice, Darth Vader.

Astute viewers will notice that while aboard the Millennium Falcon, Lando occupied the seat typically filled by Han Solo, and the froglike Nunb took Chewbacca's seat. Even more astute viewers will note that nearly every scene in the previous movies that required both adept piloting (the escape from the first Death Star or the flight from Hoth eg) and assistance elsewhere aboard the Falcon, Chewie kept his post, while Han went off to man the turrets or flirt with Leia or whatever. Han may have had legal title over the Falcon, but Chewbacca was its main pilot. This is not unlike our own terrestrial seagoing vessels, where the owner of the ship, the captain of the vessel, and the pilot are seldom the same person. If Nien Nunb was actually in the pilot's chair, it was he who deserves the lion's share of credit for the victory at Endor.

Despite this obvious-in-retrospect conclusion, Nunb is virtually unknown to casual fans. I had to wait until the action figure came out to learn his name, and it was only because of the extended universe novels that I remembered it with any regularity. How could this happen? Why do we so cavalierly forget one of the most important figures of the Rebellion?

The answer is a little complicated, so bear with me. On Nien Nunb's homeworld of Sullust, his distant ancestors civilized themselves in low-lying swamplands on one of the larger continents. This continent was a dangerous place, chock full of toothy predators and geological hazards. Proto-Sullustans competed with a number of similar Anurials for the same sorts of swamp resources. What set Nunb's ancestors apart from the other contenders for intellectual advancement was an idiosyncratic propensity to cooperate. This propensity arose almost by accident when a group of medium-status individuals found that by banding together to kill individually powerful males one at a time, they were able to avoid domination and capture a larger share of the community wealth. Of course, they were still social animals, and the Anurials clever enough to band together were also clever enough to exclude the very low-status members, obliging them to accept either charity or a BATNA of autarky (you get what you can make with your own two hands). Nota bene, in order for coalition members to avoid becoming the next assassination target, proto-Sullustans got very good at loudly championing equality for all, while surreptitiously hoarding wealth and excluding the untouchables.

Ancient proper Sullustans organized themselves by loosely-hierarchical clans. Members were more or less equal, with a clan head (usually an elder) to give direction where needed. But the habits of their Anurial ancestors was already baked into their DNA, so to speak, and they carried with them a strong skepticism of overt domination, or of bragging, or other displays of individualism. It was only with the development of stable farming that they began to deepen hierarchy and re-assert a measure of dominion.

Unfortunately for the military accolades owed to Nunb himself, re-emergent hierarchy was arrested by the arrival of hyperspace-capable vessels. Sullustans had all the mental faculties required for spacefaring, so it was simply a matter of a couple generations' training to get them serving aboard freight vessels and eventually as the chief pilot responsible for the fall of the Empire.

And so we have Nunb, heir to a culture that had never provided much in the way of reward for exceptional courage, and had indeed gone out of its way to punish overt displays of dominance. And as heir to this culture, he readily joined with Mon Mothma's fleet to overthrow the most domineering regime in the entire galaxy: Palpatine's Empire. But he also had flowing through his cold veins just enough contempt for lower-status creatures that he couldn't much care about the flaming debris that cascaded down onto the surface of Endor. Ewoks barely register as sapient, their ultimate sacrifice so that the galaxy can be rid of a hated sovereign was more than worth it. After all, it would have been a heck of a hassle to wrest control of the Death Star (and the rebel fleet had no way of knowing that Vader had killed Palpatine anyway) and move it out of Endor's gravity well. Right?

Nunb was in thrall to his biological and cultural programming. He could have no more sought recognition for his vital role in overthrowing the Empire than our own hotheaded champions of "justice" and "fairness" could have kept themselves from frothing up a lather over the unprofessional sartorial choices of a European rocket scientist who just helped land a tiny probe on a distant comet. Sullustans, much like we humans, are social creatures first and foremost. The tiny little triggers in our heads itch to be pulled, and they're tuned not for unfathomable greatness in achievement, but to slight cues of dominance. It is only by mastery of the Force can anyone hope to Jedi their way out of the swamps and savannas whence we emerged.

Oops

Okay, so this is a little bothersome. A trio of poli sci profs co-opt the seal of the state of Montana to do some hum-drum research on voter turnout (if you think the experimental design is exceptional, I urge you to attend an experimental econ seminar once in a while). Folks get upset, complain to the election boards, and now their universities are facing civil action (pending an attorney huddle).

Ordinarily, I'd go with the Angus-ism, but I think in this case I'll let Jeff Goldblum take this one.
It's a little strange though that folks would get bent out of shape about this, thinking that it would influence an election. If you're worried that voters are so easily led astray by a mailer, even one with the official seal of the state, perhaps you should retain a greater skepticism about the validity of choosing through elections. The fact that low-information voters might determine an election surely points to a dire flaw in the system, does it not?

Hm. Poor dudes. If this costs them tenure, they'll have to accept a nasty, brutish BATNA: adjunct.

Shiver me timbers.

Why is the World in Love Again?

Interesting... interview? Conversation? Argument?



"The idea that people are actually free in a system of global capitalism is just not borne out by economic reality."

BATNA disparity is an important component of moral reasoning, at least for folks with little at risk.

If "euvoluntary" is the sole criterion for the legitimacy of trade, exchange will dwindle to a trickle of garage sales and local farmers' markets. Billions would perish.

The Alchemy of Intentions

Reads a sign on the patio of my local grocer's:

Retail Alcoholic Beverages Not To Be Consumed on the Premises 

Naturally, alcohol by-the-glass is quite available. You can have a slice of pizza and some on-tap beer to wash it down with, but if you dare unplug the spigot of that box of Chablis you bought inside, you flaunt the good laws of the Commonwealth.

Statutes against public drunkenness dabble in the gray area between what Hayek referred to as "law" (the spontaneous ordering of society's rules, emerging over time through trial and error) and "legislation" (mandates from a legislature, seldom subjected to the rigorous review of time and experience). Surely there have been the equivalent of drunk tanks for time immemorial—you absolutely must let someone three sheets to the wind sleep it off lest he become a danger to his own person and the safety of those around him. That's not particularly controversial.

However, using common sense, common law proscriptions against public intoxication as justification for treating beer differently if it comes from a tap compared to coming from a bottle smells a little skunky. Does the alcohol content rise during the bottling process? Perhaps my experience with home brewing has misled me, but my before-and-after specific gravity readings have never so indicated. Perhaps it's a monitoring issue. If the customer has to approach the counter every time he wishes to refresh his tasty beverage, the vendor has a chance to gauge whether or not to cut him off: a chance that does not exist if he bought all his liquor beforehand in the grocery store.

This argument is not entirely without merit, so the next question is whether or not the marginal risk-weighted costs of drunk and disorderly conduct for the consumption of retail-purchased alcohol (net of on-tap service) are high enough to justify the direct costs plus all the hidden opportunity costs of having an alcoholic beverage control department.

Perhaps I was out sick the day they issued the philosophers' stone that allows for the transmutation of good intentions into desirable outcomes, but I can't for the life of me divine the alchemy by which the political rents generated by the VA ABC result in cheerful temperance at the Fair Lakes Whole Foods. Instances of drunken buffoonery are everywhere and always a purely local phenomenon. The grocers, not an alcohol control board, know best the specific circumstances of their business and are far better equipped to handle the particular, idiosyncratic desires of their customers than a gang of state employees.

And I don't even drink. Sheesh.

Intellectual Pork Rinds

In a post heralding the pending Adamularity, The OG excoriates intemperance in media consumption. Just as too many mini-muffins and Funyuns can enporkulate your jiggling posterior, popular media is at once rewarding while you consume it, and destructive the more you indulge and the longer the habit persists.

And in another devious parallel (assuming Straussian intent in Adam is probably not far off the mark), both gorging your corpse and your mind suffer from pretty dreadful pecuniary externalities. To wit, if the taxpayer is obliged to pick up the bill for Corpulent Sam's Eternal Snacking, and if this obligation is exogenous, then there is a public interest in imposing dietary restraint on the less temperate among us. Symmetrically, if constituents suffer political risk from Mad Mike's Media Malingering, then there is a public interest in, say, arresting climate change deniers.

Free speech ain't so free. Or, if you prefer, yikes!

The crux is whether or not the policy is exogenous. If the taxpayer isn't on the hook for my snackological protocols, I'm more generally at liberty to stuff my craw as I see fit (nb, this cuts against farm subsidies [particularly mega agribusiness] a lot harder than against SNAP restrictions). Ditto a free press. A state that restricts its operations to enforcing the natural rule of law rather than disseminating party favors to the mess of tatterdemalions, rogues, pettifoggers, lickspittles, louts, knaves, clods, cluttermidges, churls, and skiddermarks under their weal can far more graciously suffer a clamor of saffron journalists. 'Tis no accident that state-provided media is a staple of dictators.

The press is not euvoluntary in a big, big way. How we approach our moral intuition towards it depends in no small part on the role it plays in forming policy opinion. A sensible, Bayesian precautionary principle hints that perhaps a natural immunity to the shenanigans implied by the First Amendment can be discovered when the sovereign more closely hews to restraint rather than the profligacy that so characterizes its many functions. Small steps to a more euvoluntary world, people.

The Downside to Ending the War on Drugs

In 1975, Gordon Tullock described the "transitional gains trap." The theory is this: when the state makes people jump through hoops to start a business, or restricts how many participants (sellers usually, but similar arguments apply for buyers) can trade, the people lucky (or cunning, or diligent) enough to make the cut can charge higher prices than they'd be able to get away with in a more competitive setting. This extra-high price is valuable, so when the policy is still new, there's a scrum to see who gets it. If a state-generated rent is worth $100, you should be willing to pay just up to that without going over in order to secure the right. The bidding war that occurs for the special right to produce tends to dissipate its value. If five people each squander $99 to secure that $100 rent, society is out to the tune of $395. That money is simply squandered, never to return. It vanishes down a rabbit hole dug in Congress.

And from the point of view of the winning bidder? To her, that $100 comes in drips and drops over the life of the rent. For most policy, it's close enough to a perpetuity that it matters little for analytical purposes. So after the first year, she's paid out $99 for the rights to, I don't know, braid hair or something, but she's only gotten $5 in rent income (that is to say, income above and beyond what's available in an open-entry market) back. From her point of view, she's still out $94. And when those rents are threatened, she'll again fight tooth and nail (well, so long as the teeth and the nails cost less than $94) to protect them.

That's the transitional gains trap. State intervention destroys wealth both coming and going.

So what does this have to do with the drug war and euvoluntary exchange?

Well, wanton destruction of wealth is the opposite of euvoluntary exchange. Naturally, EEers should be wary of it. And yes, that should indeed apply to drug cartels too. Think about the ways in which they might choose to enforce their monopoly privileges. They could increase violence at the border, they could adulterate their product, they could quietly sift cash into the coffers of prohibitionist PACs. They have at least a few orders of magnitude of millions of dollars' worth of rents to protect. I'm sure they'll be a lot more clever and aggressive than I can even imagine.

So is this one surviving argument strong enough to persist with the War on Drugs?

Not a chance. The ongoing damage to poor (especially minority) communities is a grievous injustice, a set of Jim Crow institutions, the unconscionable, unconstitutional stop and frisk replacing segregation as today's tyranny of choice. The drug cartels (inter alia) will push back? If there's not enough political will to buy them out (and there isn't; I'm quite confident of that), then just get a good grip on that wax strip and tear it right out.

Dedicated to the 2014 PCS meeting, which I unfortunately could not attend.

No, My First Name Ain't 'Baby'.

If you've been reading EE long enough, you may recall me using the term "pedestrian morality" from time to time. I'm not sure I've adequately explained what I mean there, so let me give it a shot now. Pedestrian morality is not formed from high theory, but it may possibly be described by high theory. Pedestrian morality is the workhorse of the moral mind, getting the basic work of "don't steal", "be nice to old people", "honor your obligations", "refrain from lying" and stuff like that done without too much extra effort. Pedestrian morality is useful for most people in most situations. But it's not, to unrepentantly borrow a term from computer science, Aristotle complete. It's not sufficient for the full flowering of human experience, for areté, nor should it be. Pedestrian morality, with its heuristics, its general rules, its aphorisms, and its allegories is an efficiency device: it civilizes cheaply.

So this cringe-inducing piece from Reason and the ongoing row over a controversial art installation at Wellesley got me thinking about the role of disgust in guiding pedestrian morality. Recall that it's something we've discussed before here at EE. But something odd happens to me reading tales of turpitude and corruption. And the something that happens suggests to me that Jon Haidt is either just a wee bit off the mark or that any pretense I have to the little-l "libertarian" label that might stick to my posterior from time to time doesn't actually belong there.

Jonathan Haidt conducts some truly remarkable research. If you're not already familiar with his work, here he is chatting with the Great Russ Roberts on his opus, The Righteous Mind. One of the great pleasures of casually observing his research unfold in the past few years is how he's updated his understanding of how moral intuitions inform political party affiliation, policy preferences, and most importantly, political views. Specifically, I've had the pleasure of watching him move from a very simple moral interpretation of libertarians (something like "libertarians care about liberty/oppression to the exclusion of all other moral dimensions") to a growing acceptance of the power of framing and the possibility of hidden saliency. If you're of the opinion that libertarians don't care about loyalty, for example, you've probably not spent enough time asking one about the career of one Murray Rothbard.

But it's disgust that got me thinking. Foundation #5. Here's an updated version of a quiz you can take to see how you score. Disgust is a belly-deep reaction. It's visceral, atavistic. Loyalty swells in the breast, but disgust is buried below, stirring the bowel to revolt, the gorge to rise. Disgust rejects reason. Again, in the language of economics, the private opportunity cost of corralling disgust is higher than for muzzling fairness sentiments.

And what does the rational animal do when faced with high private opportunity costs? Politics. If thine eye offend thee, why pluck it out when you can beggar thy neighbor to remove the log from your brother's? The path from "I'm offended" to "you can't do that" is short, rational, and leads ultimately to a world where only the blind roam.

Alas, there are no solutions. Only tradeoffs. It's facile of me to say that we shouldn't legislate disgust. The third link up there in the second graf is a tale of "voluntary" cannibalism. That's gross, dudes and dudettes. And as long as some apparatus for imposing force on civil society exists (excepting perhaps the dregs of the Roman emperors at their most depraved), it seems reasonable to expect to find disgust encoded into the law of the land to a greater or lesser degree. That degree itself is likely a function in part of both historical accident and deliberate rhetorical penetration.

I suppose I don't speak for other libertarians, but for myself, the opportunity cost of overcoming my disgust is one I resolutely refuse to foist on others. It's not just because I'm trenchant in my support for freedom of association, it's for the consequentialist reason that the world produced by cheap censorship is one I find hopelessly dull and for the virtue-aspirational reason that my ability to weather objectionable material enriches my character and affords me the opportunity to investigate the breadth of the human experience. Legislating disgust aversion constricts the universe of euvoluntary exchange on what strikes me as a fairly important margin.

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.

Boobs

A new French (quelle surprise) study suggests brassieres could contribute to, well, here:

Women who did not wear bras had a 7 millimeter lift as measured from their nipples each year. Their breasts were also firmer, and their stretch marks faded. There was also no evidence that the bras helped get rid of back pain.

With this in mind, presupposing these results are robust, is it euvoluntary for women to continue wearing bras?

Please note that this is not evidence of a public goods problem. Unless you count men's predilection for ogling to be in the public interest. The costs and benefits of undergarment selection are entirely absorbed by the person making the decision. Right? Or would social pressures count as at least mildly coercive? Can we imagine that the shift to a bra-less society as being an equilibrium shift?

Or should we simply focus on liberating the decision to wear a bra or not, lifting stigma from either side of the decision? Is not the chief virtue of living in a liberal society the ability to choose freely and without scorn?

Liberté pour les seins!

Euvoluntary Glamour?

Virginia Postrel has a new book out on glamour.

ATSRTWT

In lieu of (or, better yet, in addition to) that, watch this interview she did with Nick "The Jacket" Gillespie.



The bit in there about politics should sound familiar to regular readers here. I've flogged the idea of political kayfabe, which is a calculated attempt to bamboozle the constituency with glamorous talk. It's also unsustainable. As fairy dust evaporates on dawn's touch, political flimflammery sours in the second term. Note especially which presidents had comparatively decent lame duck administrations (Clinton, eg) and the lack of glamour they engendered.

Private glamour is a categorically different matter than public. The glamour of statecraft ensorcells children to don the vestments of war and bear arms abroad in a bid to encrease the dominions of the sovereign. That seems to me somewhat different than My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic LARP.

Private glamour can be weird, particularly for those uninvolved in the scene. For me, I find fashion baffling. I also find quite a bit of the paraphernalia of professional sports mystifying. But seldom do I second-guess anyone else's fandom peccadilloes, given my sentimental attachment to monochrome samurai epics, the early Herzog work, and the modern iterations of hybrid FPS-RPG titles. Private glamour strikes me as euvoluntary, at least until it isn't. Until it causes harm.

There's the rub. Glamour is necessarily deceptive. That is its nature. It's escapism. And sometimes what folks want to escape is things like family responsibility, or social obligations, or the basic responsibility to be a decent human being. And perhaps in moderation, that's fine. Perhaps it's not all that bad once in a while to dress up like Fluttershy and make bad equine puns. The difficult puzzle is to second-guess someone else's optimal amount of self-deception. Is it reasonable to deploy paternalistic instincts when someone's WOW penchant starts to interfere with their regular bathing regimen? More to the point, is it wise to grant the coercive authority of state-sanctioned bureaucrats to make those sorts of decisions on the behalf of citizens?

The answer is probably, "maybe". But when it comes to questions of voluntary deception, it seems to me that the precautionary principle argues in favor of self-determination. The burden of proof is on the censor. Any ideas about how to ensure the censoring authority regularly shoulders that burden would be greatly appreciated.

Eating the Cake You Have

Is the OAS part of OASDI a transfer program or a savings program?

If that strikes you as a trick question, it's because it is. Any economist will gaze upon you with the patience one ordinarily reserves for a wayward toddler and tell you calmly and clearly that it's a transfer program. When you waggle your finger at the trust fund lockbox, expect your economist to breathe deeply, pinch the bridge of her nose, and remind you that the contents of the OASDI trust fund are held as Treasury instruments, implying that payments are still backed by the current ability of Internal Revenue to collect taxes.

Contrariwise, the typical worker, absent a basic undergraduate exposure to finance, accounting (even this one's questionable), or economics coursework will scoff at the bowtied, bespectacled goon (that's how you can tell Mungo is a political scientist, by the way: laser-corrected vision and nary a bowtie to be found) who has the hubris to suggest that it doesn't matter that he payed into the system: every single moral fiber tugging on his skeleton tells him he's due what he's owed. To the blazing circles of burning hell with the fallacy of the sunk cost. It'd be brazen theft to pull a bait-and-switch like winding down Social Security the way some of those nutbar right-wingers propose from time to idiotic time.

Social Security is endlessly popular from a combination of the above attitude and a fairly large dollop of sociotropic attitude (if you're particularly interested in the empirics on this, see Bryan Caplan's Myth of the Rational Voter or you can conduct your own investigation with the General Social Survey). But it's also terribly insolvent. If you think today's budget showdowns are something, wait until the unfunded liabilities of OASDI start to balloon. Buttercup, you ain't seen nothing yet.

But the fiscal troubles of the trust fund aren't what I want you to consider. I want you to think about the moral intuition here. As economics educators, we often drip blood and froth on the lectern getting students to release the death grip they have on the sunk cost fallacy, and it's often for naught (admit it you guys, you know what I'm talking about). And these are bright minds, open to the possibilities offered when people start thinking past first-round causal effects. Many people don't even know a starting line's there, let alone even think about getting off it. Consider that it's this uninformed moral intuition that rules policy. What, oh what does this imply not merely for pensioneering, but for an expanding transfer state in the midst of Average is Over? What does it imply for federalism, for constitutional constraints on majoritarian democracy? Who wins? Who loses? What advice would you give your kids when they set off down the path of career development?

They say you can't have your cake and eat it too. It's a pity they don't also say you can't have your economic analysis cheeseburger without a side of fried public choice and a large Coke of analytical morality. Actually, that's not a pity; that's a terribly awkward aphorism, do yourself a favor and never repeat it.