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.

A Game of Institutions Book 3: The Sanctioners' Dilemma

Recall from last chapter the proposition I encouraged you to consider: though the reasoning may be fallacious or rooted in vice, people may be motivated by payoff asymmetries and previously-accumulated earnings. Let's consult our simplified table of game archetypes to see where we might look next.

	Cooperative	Non-Cooperative
Symmetrical	Coordination (Euvoluntary)	PD (Coercive-Voluntary)
Asymmetrical	BoS (Voluntary)	Hawk-Dove (Coercive)

In S&T, recall that euvoluntary constitutions require no ex post enforcement to maintain cohesion. I used the example of low-exit-cost partnerships to illustrate these. I think that some of the Ostroms' examples would qualify too. But once we start shuffling around the box above, we move away from the euvoluntary conditions toward... something else. I do hope you're willing to forgive me for staying in the "symmetrical" row rather than the "cooperative" column, but since I just got done posting about the Amish, I trust you'll be willing to bear with me.

Exclaves fascinate me. Pseudo-enclaves even more so. In the case of the Amish, we've got an extra layer of governance embedded (loosely) in the ordinary federal structure. But here's the fascinating bit. Unlike a Olsonian stationary bandit, the Amish lil' leviathan generates inalienable quasi-rents. After all, there's really no technology that allows a taxing authority to expropriate the warm sense of belonging to a community or the fellowship of hearth and kin. 

But, ha ha, there's quite obviously a private incentive to shirk. Amish individuals can obtain higher private utility by flaunting the rules of their society. Of course, since the SPNE of this is for everybody to shirk, it is in the constitutional interest to have an enforcement mechanism. And what could be better than yanking the club card? Credibly threaten to revoke the quasi-rents of family and community, and hey-yo, the decision calculus changes. Elementary economics.

Now, I'm not 100% sure that this sits squarely in the corner of the PD box, but at least in terms of expected utility, it's my understanding that Amish communities are marginally more egalitarian than, say, old world Europe. I'm sure that some families are more influential or wealthier than others, but the Amish Church itself lacks the hierarchy that characterizes the Catholic or Orthodox Churches. The local bishop is the community leader, but it's an unpaid, elected post. I'm not enough of an expert to know whether or not hereditary elites are common, but at least nominally, the Amish value the virtues of thrift, temperance, piety, prudence, and industry. Good work makes good people. An expression of Nicomachean ethics. Again, from an outsider's perspective, it seems as if envy within the community isn't as big a component of private motivation as it is among the English.

So yes. Shunning is coercive. But it has to be in a game that generates inalienable quasi-rents. No other punishment option is either appropriate or in the choice set. Besides, if it was rough enough for Socrates to guzzle hemlock, it's severe enough to keep wayward flock members in line.

A parting note: I had originally planned to calculate and share with you the comparative statics for all these games, but soon I discovered that LaTeX editors are both a pain in the rump to use and don't display for butt in my reader, so if you were looking forward to more "math", I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you. Sorry.

Edit: As AG notes, bishops are (can be?) selected by lot (sources I've found in a quick Google search vary, so maybe it varies by community) and more importantly, the decision to shun cannot be made lightly. There's a risk of schism, and even if there weren't, there are increasing quality-adjusted returns to network size. If the strength of your organization depends on good members, you'd want to be dang sure that truncations are well and truly in the group interest. Over-pruning a tree is as fatal as drought.

Firearms, Euvoluntarity, Game Theory and Complexity.

Friend of EE and all-around great guy Art Carden poses the following question on Facebook:

In light of the CT shootings, people are talking about a lot of things: gun control, mental illness, culture, etc. I have a network full of people who deal in ideas and evidence for a living, and I'm interested in their feedback. In the interests of advancing evidence-based discussion, please answer the following:

1. Do you think the government should do more to restrict access to guns?

2. On the basis of what arguments or evidence?

3. What arguments or evidence would make you change your mind?

Ground rules: no insults, name-calling, or ad hominem attacks. Seriously. I might publish this as my December Forbes contribution, and you'll be welcome to sling mud over there if that's what you're in to.

Please answer all three questions. [edited for some minor typos]

This is an empirical question and I find Lott's work on guns and crime convincing. I also believe that there's more to the story than even the most carefully-controlled econometric provides. The reason I believe this (which points to answering questions 2 and 3) can be found in Ayres and Donohue's "Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis" (2003). They find quite a bit of sensitivity with regard to specification, which is consistent with my own crime regressions. Unfortunately for the curious researcher, even the best-specified microeconometric investigation cannot get at mens rea. Without some theory, trying to peer into the minds of criminals is futile. Gun control is one possible policy response to horrible tragedies like school shootings, but it's not the only one, nor is it necessarily the cheapest or most effective.

So what is the theory? I have a hunch that this is where opinions most differ. I suspect that gun control is one of those issues that goes beyond simple moral intuition. Regular folks, median voters if you will, wrestle with the language of the US Constitution when pondering their priors and this forces them to think logically about their stance. The median voter may not always think clearly or carefully, but there is thought there. I can't say for sure what the specific thinking is in the minds of the electorate, but I can share how I'd approach the question. To do so, I need to give a poor man's primer on game theory. If you're already familiar with the subject, or if you're bored by this sort of thing, please skip down a few paragraphs. I am emphatically not EE's resident game theory expert. JR has more practice than me (and is in general a much smarter dude), and the GTM has been publishing peer-reviewed articles steeped in game theory since I was in short pants. This is merely a quick overview, intended more to illustrate just how difficult this question can be.

The chief elements of a game are: players, actions, payoffs, and strategies. Most textbook examples use two players, but when dealing with policy questions, abstracting from reality is more costly. Do we consider extant majority-age American citizens to be players in the Game of Guns? How about foreign nationals? Do future discounted American citizens deserve a seat at the gaming table? How should we account for the wishes of past generations? Please note that I'm not being facetious here. Many of the appeals made are either "for the children" or for the more nebulous "unborn generations". Identifying relevant parties is no simple matter. Actions are similarly complex. Carden framed his question around access to sidearms (I'm a Navy veteran, and aboard ships, a "gun" isn't something a person can pick up and fire. Guns are mounted weapons and are fired from a console), but what if an action might be something like "institute 48-hour media blackout?" What if an action could be to refit public spaces with armored doors and panic buttons? Outside of blackboard beard-scratching, the set of possible actions is limited by the extent of human creativity. Payoffs, likewise, tend to be stochastic in the real world. I might harumph past the distinction between payoffs and expected payoffs when I'm explaining game theory to a 19 year old undergrad, but turning theory into practice, I cannot ethically dodge questions of systematic bias on the part of any player, including the policy-maker. Both the probabilities and the ordinal payoff amount is subject to mis-estimation. This all adds up to the actual strategies employed (being that the strategy is a function of the other elements of the game) can be shrouded in uncertainty if not downright non-ergodicity. Understanding and appreciating the depth of imperfect information in society helps us to forecast unintended, unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences.

The four non-trivial types of strategic games are: a) Prisoner's Dilemma, b) Battle of the Sexes, c) Hawk-Dove and d) Coordination Game. Each of these games have different solutions and different implications for intervention. Gun ownership as an infinitely-repeated PD reacts differently to third-party intervention than a H-D game. Apart from misrepresenting the elements of the game, folks may be assuming a society is playing a game that does not accurately mirror reality. Civilian gun ownership may be a coordination game in a universally disarmed society (or in a meta-game sense), but a Hawk-Dove game elsewhere.

Game theory allows the theorist to predict the behavior of rational players based on the architecture of the game and on a few assumptions about the rationality of the players. Much of the fun of experimental economics rests in finding laboratory results that run contrary to the predictions of the sketchpad theory. Apparent violations of Arrow-Debreu rationality add another layer of strategic uncertainty to an already complex game. To reach a conclusion that the government should restrict access to guns, an analyst would have to be able to show that this intervention is a K-H improvement over the status quo and over reasonable alternative interventions. I think there's good reason to be a priori skeptical of this, and it's mostly because I think the assumptions needed to generate this conclusion are contraindicated. For gun control to work as advertised, the state would have to identify and disarm future violent criminals. Because of knowledge constraints, practical policy often ends up being municipal handgun bans or assault rifle bans. This sort of policy assumes a coordination game: fiat legislation crosses out the (Gun, Gun) node, so the equilibrium is now (Unarmed, Unarmed). It seems more reasonable that the actual game is Hawk-Dove and the equilibrium is (Gun, Unarmed), acknowledging that people who get a large payoff from a horrible mass-murder atrocity will be willing to pay substantially for horrific infamy. The same reasoning applies to common violent crime. If criminals assume citizens are unarmed, they will be more likely to commit armed robberies. Naturally, there are more reasons than just the existence of legislation to form beliefs over whether or not someone is armed, but we're looking at policy here, not practice.

So what are some ways to limit the damage caused by deranged maniacs on shooting sprees? What sort of policies are directionally euvoluntary? What is the appropriate scale for precautions? Well, if the game selection is wrong, gun bans may increase the risk of violent incidents and could result in deadlier outcomes. Not to be flippant, but if I can't defend myself using lethal force in a horrible scenario, I'd call that a case of ex post regret. But that's what I wouldn't do: I wouldn't try to ban guns. I think another thing I wouldn't try to do is to assume a policy scale. For example, suppose a good way to defend against a spree shooter is to build emergency exits to the exterior in each room combined with airbag-style barriers built into door frames, activated by a wall switch. It seems obvious to even a casual observer that the risk-adjusted cost effectiveness of this sort of intervention will depend heavily on local conditions. All costs are opportunity costs, and policy makers under the Capitol dome lack the requisite local knowledge to solve that problem.

The game is what it is. Wishful thinking and good intentions are insufficient to change a H-D game into a coordination game. It might be possible to alter some of the payoffs though. If killers' objective function is to maximize post mort infamy, the FCC might consider drafting rules under the obscenity clause to fine publishers that sensationalize spree killing events. Or NCLB guidelines could be modified for mental health screenings. I'm sure you can think of your own interventions, and perhaps it's worth considering some (and not others, including but not limited to the two I just shared). The point is, it's not immediately clear that one particular policy will best provide a socially optimal outcome, nor that that one particular policy will pass a reasonable cost-benefit analysis for a large constituency. Spree killings have no easy solution, political kayfabe notwithstanding.

Answering the Dub-MOE's third question seems tough. I'm familiar enough with the econometrics first-hand to be skeptical of empirical claims. I'm also leery enough of the knowledge problem to shy away from policies aimed at national-scale solutions. To change my mind, I suppose someone would have to convince me that their game theoretic model is the correct one, then bolster that theoretical model with better empirics than currently exist and be able to properly account for hidden costs and unintended consequences.

Firearm ownership by responsible citizens is super-euvoluntary: arms are a last bulwark against tyranny and the regret experienced by failure to responsibly own and operate a sidearm may outweigh the regret from ownership. Conversely, firearm ownership by criminals and the irresponsible is sub-euvoluntary. Effective policy must consider the benefits of the former and the costs of the latter.

[edit] Many thanks to Professor Carden for reviewing my copy.

Euvoluntary Exchange, Sympathy, and Evolution

Two interesting examples.

1.  Is generosity adaptive?  It used to be verboten to suggest that group selection worked across species (though it might work within a species, for hives or nests of eusocial insects).  But now we can ask, is generostiy adaptive?  Notice that this is NOT altruism, exactly.  Interesting.

Evidence from economic games played in the laboratory for real money suggests humans are both trusting of those they have no reason to expect they will ever see again, and surprisingly unwilling to cheat them—and that these phenomena are deeply ingrained in the species’s psychology. Existing theories of the evolution of trust depend either on the participants being relatives (and thus sharing genes) or on their relationship being long-term, with each keeping count to make sure the overall benefits of collaboration exceed the costs. Neither applies in the case of passing strangers, and that has led to speculation that something extraordinary, such as a need for extreme collaboration prompted by the emergence of warfare that uses weapons, has happened in recent human evolution to promote the emergence of an instinct for unconditional generosity.

I'm not so sure.  Smacks of a "just so" story.

2.  On the other hand:  the incredible shrinking wholly mackeral ball.  Do watch:



Bait ball, bait ball, watcha gonna do?  Whatcha gonna do when tuna come for you?

My colleague Emerson Niou insists that this behavior is a straightforward one-shot PD.
That is, this behavior is NOT adaptive, at the group level, but it is adaptive at the individual level.

Consider:
a.  If somehow the mackeral could signal, "1, 2, 3....GO!" they could all skedaddle at once, in random directions, before predators gather in large numbers.  The bluefin would have had to concentrate on single skedaddlers, instead of taking a bite of the ball, and then another, and then another.

b.  However, if I expect you to skedaddle, I should stay in the (for now) relative safety of the bait ball, while you lead predators away (and, of course, you die, because one loan mackeral can't escape the speedy tuna).

c.   If instead  I expect you to stay in the bait ball, I should...stay in the baitball.  In other words, "stay in the bait ball" is an individually dominant strategy, even though the Pareto optimum is "everybody skedaddle now!"

The question is how a species that acts like this survives.  The answer has to be (as commenters pointed out when I discussed this over at KPC) that it just doesn't happen very often.

My question for Prof. Niou is:  why not?  Why would it be rare?  Why aren't mackeral extinct?

(UPDATE: I accidently said "loan mackeral" above. But I left it. Because it's true that a loan mackeral could never escape a loan shark. Man, I kill me...)