Anemia of the Conscience

ORS § 659A.403:
Discrimination in place of public accommodation prohibited

(1) Except as provided in subsection (2) of this section, all persons within the jurisdiction of this state are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of any place of public accommodation, without any distinction, discrimination or restriction on account of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, marital status or age if the individual is 18 years of age or older. 

(2) Subsection (1) of this section does not prohibit:
(a) The enforcement of laws governing the consumption of alcoholic beverages by minors and the frequenting by minors of places of public accommodation where alcoholic beverages are served; or (b) The offering of special rates or services to persons 50 years of age or older. 

(3) It is an unlawful practice for any person to deny full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of any place of public accommodation in violation of this section.

Emphasis added. I picked the Oregon public accommodation statute for its recent relevance, but pretty much any state would do. Furthermore, I highlighted "sexual orientation" for the purposes of illustration, but you might imagine that there are edge cases for the other protected classes.

Before I pose my question, a quick review of etymology for those who may have forgotten:

Pederasty is an act. It is the sexual congress of an adult and a minor. In Anglophone jurisdictions, it is malum in se crime, an act of violence against an innocent. Coercion is assumed, with the possible exception of Romeo and Juliet laws where applicable. Conviction of this offense is typically accompanied by registration with the state and subsequent housing location restrictions after prison release.

Pedophilia is an orientation. It is the sexual attraction of an adult towards minors. Without an accompanying act, such as the possession of child pornography or the sexual assault of a minor, it is not a crime.

Pederasts do not constitute a protected class. Felons may be turned down for work simply because they are felons, no other reason given. They do not enjoy non-discrimination protections for equal housing. Sex offender registrees have it even worse (in some jurisdictions): even if a landlord is willing to rent or sell, proximity to schools or churches may statutorily prohibit the transaction.

Pedophiles are part of a protected class, at least in 21 or so states, depending on the specific language of the state statutes. The same goes for—again, according to the black letter of the statute—bigamists, ISIS members, former Nazis, or flatulent televangelists (curiously, veteran status is not listed in the Oregon statute). Running a business statutorily obviates conscience of association in commerce, both for good and for bad.

Exchange is lovely, doubly so if it's euvoluntary. Both parties are better off (or at least no worse off) for conducting a transaction of their own free and clear will. Under public accommodation statutes like the one above, it is sufficient that merely one party to the exchange is better off. Sellers are permitted neither the luxury nor the exercise of their conscience. Usually, most people will happily approve of the proposal that vendors aren't granted the liberty of indulging a rotten conscience: denying same sex (or mixed-race, or Irish, &al) couples access to market goods is a barbarism the silent majority of us have moved beyond. But the price of forcing this conversion with the hammer of the state is that there may remain some conscience violations many of us are not prepared to accept yet.

And so when the local kiddie pervo saunters into the Circle K to pick up a tub of hand lotion and a box of tissues from you, you are legally obliged to complete the transaction. The alternative social institutions is to allow rhetoric and persuasion to change merchants' minds on the sort of clients they're willing to serve. Perhaps rhetoric and persuasion aren't as powerful or swift as we might like.

Euvoluntary Failure

Is failure euvoluntary? Megan McArdle thinks so. Or at least she argues that it should be.

I tend to agree. Failure triggers ex post regret if you let it. Particularly if you've sunk quite a bit of cost. And don't let economists fool you: sunk costs are relevant, if only psychologically. This is good and useful when it encourages sensible prudence. Prudent risk-taking is a crucial component of human progress.

But regret aversion can be unduly paralyzing. When it's driven by worries about social status or from Viagra Culture*, the terminus of dysfunctional regret aversion is stagnation.

And even though individuals have little control over how others elect to perceive them, they can muster enough courage to disregard the little voice in their head that tells them to cling desperately to an ephemeral relative social ranking.

Failure is useful when it encourages prudence. Graceful failure is useful when it does not throttle vital risk-taking. Be extremely wary when supporting institutions that are unable to clearly and accurately tell the difference.





*Revolting Cocks, Viagra Culture (Cocked and Loaded):

Every day, my thoughts are consumed by winning

I must win and everything I do I must win

my car must win
my money must win
my hair must win
my kids must win
my weiner must win
my wife must win
my mistress must win
my trip to the bunny ranch must win

I must win in business
I must win when I mow the lawn
if I do not win I am not control
so I must win
again and again
I don't need more but I must have it
more more
when the game gets old I must win
I must win
everyone else must lose
because I must win
we have met the weapon of mass destruction
and it is us

Mercantilism, Conquest, and Euvoluntary Exchange: Kissing Your Shackles

An old friend of mine had a birthday recently and I took the opportunity to see what wonderful world events coincided with the date. Turns out, one of the truly amazing battles of Continental Europe happened on the 15th of July in jolly old 1410.

The Battle of Grunwald was a here-and-no-further victory for the Polish-Lithuanian Alliance. After a century of raiding, Vytautas channeled Samuel L Jackson and said "enough is enough; I have had it with these monkey-fighting knights on these Monday-to-Friday plains." He then kicked their armored backsides out of the Baltics, handily revoking German stewardship of fortresses from Gdansk to Elbing.

Curiously, the Poles and Lithuanians didn't seem particularly interested in following up with conquests of their own. They secured a few fortifications into Teutonic lands, but made no real effort to hold them. In 1410, this behavior was unorthodox. I asked my lovely wife about it, being that she grew up crossing the cusp of Soviet dissolution in the very heartland of Lithuania. Here's what she said [paraphrasing].

Lithuanians have an enduring identity. You are never truly a slave until you learn to kiss your shackles. We can be bent to our knees, but we choose to be broken or not. Lithuanians have never chosen to be broken, not when we faced down The Golden Horde, not when we turned the spear of the Teutonic Knights, and not when we were ground under the heel of Communism. We chose to endure. The flip side of that is that we never sought dominion. All were welcome to join, to come to ply trade, to truck, to barter, to exchange, but forcing others to bend to our will pollutes our national character. It is not the act of a Lithuanian.

It seems there's something in them bones that eschews dominion, elevates exchange between peers. It might be that I'm biased, but I find that kind of simple, common dignity and decency considerably more laudable than political economy that arrogates to elites the role of faux-benevolent paternalist.

But that's just, like, my opinion or whatever, man.

Everybody Poops (Peas and Gravy)

In yesterday's post on wagers, I casually asserted that attempts to combine the sacred and the profane is fingers on a chalkboard for regular folks. In my haste, I neglected to support this claim. Here is that support.

Michael Sandel. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

I think that even after you've read Sandel (and you should, he's as good as you're likely to get on the subject), you'll mostly agree with me that his claims are fundamentally aesthetic. But here's the difference you get with Sandel compared to a prototypical hand-wringing anti-capitalist: he makes normative claims about the extent of markets underpinned by rigorous positive aesthetic analysis. Whether Michael Sandel likes the idea of paying cash to see Shakespeare in the Park is not relevant to his argument, it's that he's (correctly, as far as I can tell) identified that ordinary people in their ordinary lives object to these sorts of arrangements.

Well, maybe ordinary folks don't care that much about Shakespeare per se, but let's not let that distract from the key point. Toddlers like their food touching about as much as grown-ups relish impersonal monetary transactions in deeply personal settings. We call it "tithing" and tell each other and ourselves that the geld goes to "God". Parishioner please. Economists are trained (and the good ones continue to hone this valuable skill) to peer through petticoats like these to the truth hidden beneath. We trade in sacred goods all the time, we just have a knack for calling it something else. TANSTAAFL.

A question then of values: the economist would have you swallow your discomfort, encourage you to simply and honestly acknowledge that incentives matter, that to get more of something you want, you must must must pay for it. The economist will also give you a laundry list of good, convincing reasons why impersonal voluntary exchange tends to be the most efficient way to trade. Hey-presto, job done, right? Everybody poops, so why just plainly and publicly acknowledge that and then get along with the business of business?

Or is this all just intolerably indecent? Am I a bad person for advocating for the legal (and marginally safer) trade in sexual services? Or for vigorous resale markets? I reject the notion that my own sentiments of disgust should be elevated to the realm of public policy; does this make me an ogre? Should I conform to the shared fib that denies that from all living buttocks emerge feces? Does that make for a better world? Is my position a minority one because it's just plain wrong? Prices are information, but maybe I'm totally wrong and it's sometimes more comfortable to dwell in ignorance.

Meta-EE and the Constitution Part 15: Nineteenth Amendment

Few Constitutional amendments highlight the contrast between deontology and consequentialism as the 19th. To understand why, I have to take you on a quick tour through some political theory. Because I'm not always intentionally cruel, I'll keep it simple. If you're interested in closer detail, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Hinich and Munger's indispensable Analytical Politics.

Prelude: the text:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Act I: you Kant just disenfranchise people.

 Both fairness and justice demands that any citizen of sound mind and good standing should be eligible to participate in the democratic process. To the modern mind, disenfranchisement is pretty close to a mild form of slavery. Political voice, at least in modern democratic polity, is something of a birthright. The 19th was a hard-won amendment, a ringing victory for women everywhere, not just in the United States, eroding the general legitimacy of patriarchal paternalism the world round.

Act II: franchise and dimensionality

What are the consequences of increased franchise? In a word, indeterminate. In game theory, we've got this result called (of all things) the Folk Theorem. The skinny on the Folk Theorem is that in repeated play, all bets are off and any equilibrium result can be sustained. So, with only white landowning males able to vote, you can wind up with a heavyhanded tyranny just as you can wind up with a sharply constrained market-preserving federal system. Ditto for universal franchise. What ends up important is the median voter.



How does adding women to the mix change the position of the median voter? That's a thorny empirical question. It's important, but close to impossible to know the direction of the arrow of causality leading between ideas and policies here. Could a rising tide of dignity for everyone have both pushed for the 19th and for the civil rights revolution that followed? In other words, to pick out the specific (consequential!) effect that women's suffrage had on the scope and scale of the state, you'd need to isolate the correct counterfactual. That is, to be generous, challenging.

And in light of this analytical challenge, I can't really say whether or not universal franchise is meta-euvoluntary or not. There are still piles upon piles of gender-specific legislation that deals with trades on the margins of euvoluntarity like access to birth control (and I mean for-real access, not just subsidies), sex education, abortion, prostitution, pornography, adoption, marriage, & lots of al. If it's the case that women help draft exchanges like these into the realm of the euvoluntary by way of direct participation, then there we go.

Of course, the nettle of the Folk Theorem still stings both ways: the counterfactual median voter could still cut ice in favor of greater restrictions on trade. I don't pretend to know what the alternative actually is. Beware folks who claim they do.

Is the 19th meta-EE? Indeterminate. Is it still normatively good? Unless you're some kind of misogynist, then yes, of course.

Organic Food

Organic food appears more likely to make some people jerks.  Or, even bigger jerks.

Reacting to this news, PJ O'Rourke had a good line on "Wait! Wait!  Don't Tell Me..." yesterday:  "So!  THAT'S where Democrats come from!"

But this does raise two interesting questions for Euvoluntaryists.

1.  This is the 1 billionth and 57th proof that the idea of "preferences" is pretty much ridiculous.  The reactions we have to things depends strongly on priming and other short term psychological considerations.  That means, as my Duke colleague Dan Ariely has pointed, that we are "predictably irrational."  Businesses and government can manipulate our responses, though the changes may not be permanent.

2.  Entirely separately, it also means that we may be subject to EXTERNAL "force," in the form of social disapproval.

"Why are you buying that organic tomato?  It costs an extra buck, and you can't tell the difference."

"My boy(girl)friend really likes organic stuff, and I'm trying to get busy tonight."

Okay, that's fine, it's the kind of cost people, especially men, have always paid for getting busy.

But social pressures like this may make us do irrational things we actually know to be irrational.  Like recycling.  Not ALL recycling, not even close.  But stuff like this.

We have always been susceptible to social pressures.  Toqueville wrote about it, and how social pressures increase the power of the majority, in effect making choices coerced.

And so not voluntary.

Ol' Scratch Made Me Do It

Incoherent urges occasionally motivate action. "Why did you rabbit-punch Dennis during recess?" asks the school psychiatrist. A shrug of the shoulders and a mopey "I dunno" follows. "The Devil made me do it", if the brat is feeling impish. Some little spark way down in the amygdala or the hungry hungry hippocampus went awry, got processed poorly and manifested as assault. Or a neatly reorganized music collection. Or arson.

Jews Don't Make Anything, So Create No Value?

EE fan (and author of SMBC!) Zach Weiner sends this snippet, for our consideration:

"The Jews were unpopular, partly because of this narrowness already noted in the Roman world, partly perhaps because they had already fallen into that habit of merely handling things for exchange instead of working to make them with their hands." Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man" chapter 4.

Okay, let's ignore the stupid anti-Semitism. Evil, common, but not very creative or interesting.

Let's ignore the fact that even the factual premise is absurd: many Jews were in fact artisans, very skilled artisans, because human capital (jewelry maker, blacksmith, carpenter) was portable. The reason is that you could never tell if some jack-leg king-o-the-month needed a scapegoat and decided it was time for a random Jew-fry, and the people had to skedaddle. This part is just dumb, and wrong: Jews have been brilliant at making things with their hands, for 3,000 years.

The interesting thing about this quote is that it more or less takes it for granted that anyone who just "handles things for exchange" is not creating any value. The Mancgere, then, could be an honorary Jew, in terms of the opprobrium and scorn focused on someone who just trades but does not produce.

Thanks, Zach. Well quoted. I had not seen that one.

Being Nice and Having Good Manners

Apologies as Signals: With Evidence from a Trust Game, Benjamin Ho, Management Science, forthcoming

Abstract: Apologies are part of a social institution designed to restore frayed relationships not only in daily life but also in the domains of corporate governance, medical malpractice litigation, political reputation, organizational culture, etc. The theory shows that in a general class of moral hazard games with imperfect information about agents with two-dimensional type, apologies exhibit regular properties — e.g., apologies are more frequent in long relationships, early in relationships, and between better-matched partners. A variant of the trust game demonstrates that communication matters in a manner consistent with economic theory; specifically, the words “I am sorry” appear to select equilibrium behavior consistent with the theory's main predictions.

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Does Social Capital Promote Safety on the Roads?, Matthew Nagler, Economic Inquiry, forthcoming

Abstract: I present evidence that social capital reduces traffic accidents and related death and injury, using data from a 10-year panel of 48 U.S. states. The econometric challenge is to distinguish the causal effects of social capital from bias resulting from its correlation with unobservable characteristics by state that influence road risks. I accomplish this by employing snow depth as an instrument, and by restricting attention to summertime accidents. My results show that social capital has a statistically significant and sizable negative effect on crashes, traffic fatalities, serious traffic injuries, and pedestrian fatalities that holds up across a range of specifications.

(Nod to Kevin Lewis)