Public Principles of Public Philosophy

Via the Peej, K.M. Parsons offers an op-ed defense of public funding for philosophers. Philosophy provides critical thinking, you see, and if citizens were unable to think critically, they'd be nothing but a mob of indoctrinated partisans, you see.

Let's assume that professor Parsons is correct and that the discipline of philosophy does indeed grant students durable, robust critical thinking skills. Let's assume further that the marginal philosopher (extend this to all of the social sciences and humanities if you like: political science, sociology, economics, take your pick) contributes meaningfully to students' ability to question and revise their unexamined beliefs. Assume, if you will, that the exchange between professors and students is euvoluntary.

Even if all of that is true, even if "philosophy is valuable" isn't just a naked assertion, even if the Republic Herself were at stake, a more convincing argument would include at least some mention of how peaceful exchange is insufficient to the task of making sure the next (and by "next" I don't mean Aristotle or Hume or even Sandel or Searle; I mean the third-string just-barely-made-tenure assistant professor at an unranked department) philosopher earns employment. A complete argument, in other words, includes at least some mention of public goods, in the rigorous sense, in that I benefit from your ability to think critically, or that anyone at all benefits from Peppy Not-Quite-Good-Enough-For-Tenure Professor's latest desk rejection. If public funds were supporting the next Summa Theologica, you'd probably be able to get away with hand-waving market failure rebuttals. But that's not what's being argued.

I tend to agree that education is among the new commanding heights. It would be churlish of me to assume that this didn't imply that a great deal of rack and ruin in the editorial pages were sure to follow. But if you must defend your discipline against reasonable objections to outrageous relative price increases, do yourself and your readers a favor and write as if you respected their intelligence.

Hugs,
Sam

IRB SchmaiRB

via The Peej, paying transients for Phase 3 (or earlier!) drug testing.

ATSRTWT

A slice:

The main ethical issues here, of course, are the competence and judgment of the prospective subjects. “When you say ‘money,’ everything else goes out the window,” said Hanif Jackson, a former program supervisor at the Ridge Avenue shelter in Philadelphia, which recently closed down. I heard the same thing from Harvey Bass, a chaplain who has worked at the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission shelter for 15 years. He said drug study recruiters often park outside the shelter and approach residents on the sidewalk. Although Bass didn’t think it was his place to warn residents away from the studies, it was clear that he was not exactly a fan. “These guys have no job, no home, and a habit,” he said. “You have people at their lowest state, and they’ll say yes to anything.”

Much of the piece is an indictment of the accuracy of tests involving indigent subjects. Many of them are schizophrenic and therefore resistant to anti-psychotic medication, but:

Volunteers are typically paid $40 to $50 per visit. “The payments are low enough to not be coercive, but they’re enough to supposedly compensate them for the time they’ve spent here, and give them an incentive to come back,” Sfera said. Still, Walters, who has since left South Coast, added that money is what motivates most subjects. “I’d say at least 85 to 90 percent of clients, that’s why they do studies.”

These subjects are cheaper than enlisting, say, college students, and considerably more ethical than, oh... say, exposing Soldiers to treatment without their knowledge or consent (to pick a totally off-the-wall hypothetical example). More subjects for the same price means more precision, following quite naturally from the statutory requirements imposed by the FDA.

Another good quote:

Concepts like “coercion” and “undue influence” are poorly suited for economic transactions, however. Offering desperate people money to take risks to their health may be wrong, but nobody is being coerced. No one is threatening to harm people if they refuse to become test subjects. One parallel would be sweatshop labor. The ethical problem is not that people are coerced into working in sweatshops—people are desperate to work there, under horrific conditions, for pennies. The ethical problem is whether it is acceptable to take advantage of their desperation.

Agreed. This is an ethical problem. Like most (all?) problems, there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Should the legislature ban testing on transients? Would that make them better off? Is it even true that, "[o]ffering desperate people money to take risks to their health may be wrong," when the alternative is panhandling, exposure, or starvation? Does not their alternative situation already pose risks to their health?

And is the price wrong? Offer them too much money and it's taking advantage of their desperate situation. Offer them too little and it's... taking advantage of their desperate situation. Remove them from consideration at all, and it's forcing them to accept their next available alternative, which by their own economic calculus is worse.

But the real brine this pickle soaks in is one of compos mentis. Whatever the ethical dilemmas of sweatshop labor, at least folks who work in factories in less-developed countries aren't any more (or less) prone to mental illness than the general population. Homeless people have made it through a rather selective filter to land in a bin marked 4F, and are often characterized by debilitating mental disorders. Under the UCC, people with debilitating mental illness don't have capacity, which is legalese for you can't generally enforce a contract (over $500 yadda yadda) against them. In other words, the common law recognizes that mentally ill people aren't suited to make responsible decisions.

And that leaves alternative institutional arrangements still to be considered. For Phase 1 and 2 testing, the manufacturer is still trying to establish safety, which even if you're as skeptical as I am about the charter of the FDA, safety testing is still important prior to a general release. What other population would you target? The elderly? Children? College students? Housewives? Business executives? Longshoremen? Would you ban all testing in humans? Is there a superior path to getting drugs to market? Describe it.

It might be a tragedy that America's homeless population ends up being a collective pincushion for the pharmaceutical industry, but does that speak louder to the collusion of big pharma and the FDA or to the manifold tragedies that lead to homelessness in the first place? There are good ways to advocate on behalf of the indigent. Denying them opportunities is probably not as helpful as exposing the mundane corruptions that are ordinary transfer payments: massive bailouts to well-connected constituents, and payola by the truckload to middle class voters. Given the choice between helping vulnerable populations and securing votes in the next election, politicians tend to act in their own best interests.

I do sometimes wonder if it's ever ethically possible to hire an exceptionally poor person to do anything. Doesn't paying them to any kind of work, even ostensibly honest work, take advantage of their desperate situation? Is there any way to break the Catch-22?

Tragedy of the Commons: Fertility Edition

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

ATSRTWT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

h/t The Peej

Was Aristotle a Euvoluntary Exchangeur? NE Bk 1

How do each of the classical virtues inform and support euvoluntary exchange? It's philosophy amateur hour here at EE as I review first Nicomachean Ethics and later Aquinas on the relationships between virtue and purposeful human action. I don't plan to reinvent the wheel, but perhaps it's wise to check the foundations of the canon from time to time to see if and where modern moral intuitions disagree. Let's start with Book 1.

In NE Bk 1, section 5, we find the following, a point perhaps insufficiently stressed by economists when speaking to the public:

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else. And so one might rather take the aforenamed objects to be ends; for they are loved for themselves.

In econo-speak, our lectures (and our equations) are full of what we call "derived utility." This is simply to say that with a few oddball exceptions, people don't collect wealth simply to have access to an idle vault full of gold bullion or stacks of paper bills. Even Walter White collected that storage locker full of Benjamins for his family (NO SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS PLEASE). Measured wealth is an idle claim on something that we actually value like happiness, satisfaction, fun, pleasure, joy, or the abatement of discomfort. For economists, this is a wholly unremarkable point. For the pundit class and for the income inequality agitator, this point is often casually ignored. To Aristotle, as to your garden-variety economist, the value generated by a voluntary exchange is prima facie evidence that the fruits of the trade are to be "loved for themselves," and the money-making part of it is mere chaff.

nb: you can't bake bread without chaff.

An unexpected upshot of this is that analytical tools like the Gini coefficient misstate the underlying value generated by economic activity, relying on the imperfect proxies of wealth or income (and I urge you to pay close attention to which version of the Lorenz Curve is being peddled) to estimate how much better off some are than others.

As I'm a little strapped for leisure time today, I'll leave you with this passage:

Presumably, however, to say that happiness is the chief good seems a platitude, and a clearer account of what it is still desired. This might perhaps be given, if we could first ascertain the function of man. For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the 'well' is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function. Have the carpenter, then, and the tanner certain functions or activities, and has man none? Is he born without a function? Or as eye, hand, foot, and in general each of the parts evidently has a function, may one lay it down that man similarly has a function apart from all these? What then can this be? Life seems to be common even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be a life of perception, but it also seems to be common even to the horse, the ox, and every animal. There remains, then, an active life of the element that has a rational principle; of this, one part has such a principle in the sense of being obedient to one, the other in the sense of possessing one and exercising thought. And, as 'life of the rational element' also has two meanings, we must state that life in the sense of activity is what we mean; for this seems to be the more proper sense of the term. Now if the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle, and if we say 'so-and-so-and 'a good so-and-so' have a function which is the same in kind, e.g. a lyre, and a good lyre-player, and so without qualification in all cases, eminence in respect of goodness being idded to the name of the function (for the function of a lyre-player is to play the lyre, and that of a good lyre-player is to do so well): if this is the case, and we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

This, my dear readers, is a sketch of the first mainstay of Aristotelian virtue: arete (ἀρετή), roughly translated as "excellence", though it's a particular flavor of excellence, devoted to ends that are consonant with the other limbs of a virtuous life. Of course, Andrea's Question again occurs to me: knowing that virtuous euvoluntary exchange is fine and dandy, but is there anything practical to do with this knowledge? The idea of mounting a soapbox to proclaim the superiority of a life lived in harmony with classical virtue is just absurd enough that people like me would find it appealing. I guess there's some hope to be found earlier on in Book1:

To judge from the lives that men lead, most men, and men of the most vulgar type, seem (not without some ground) to identify the good, or happiness, with pleasure; which is the reason why they love the life of enjoyment.

Even vulgar types can enjoy life. Remember this the next time you find yourself inclined to badmouth crap TV reality programming or ban sugar.

You got to know there's fun to be had.



I like this song, but I genuinely had no idea how silly the video is. This is the first time I've seen it.

Application Charges Depend on Wealth?

So, Mars One is accepting applications.  This one was amusing.  Anything that starts with a blonde woman saying "Hello, Earth!" has my vote.



But here's interesting part for Euvoluntarists.  They (Mars One, not blonde women) are charging different application fees, based on the average wealth of the country from which you are applying. 

Question:  If it is unjust to RAISE your price for someone who is desperate, is it just to DISCOUNT your price for someone who is poor?  If, as Locke claimed, "Justice has but one measure for all men," then these discounts are unjust, discriminating against the rich.  Right?

Nod to Benjamin R., who saw the problem.

UPDATE:  I call on The Peej to apply, as soon as possible. I will kick in for the extortionate rich country app fee.
UPDATE 2:  Too late to apply, at least for the first mission.  Darn!

Differential Non-Euvoluntarity in Schelling Decisions

I have to confess to what I gather is called "privilege". I'm a boring suburban white dad. I have a desk job I enjoy. I commute. I have a mortgage, a pretty good education, a lovely wife, a cute-as-a-button daughter, and a modest collection of threadbare socks. I haven't been in a fistfight since 6th grade, I've only been mugged once, and the only time I've been on the receiving end of purposeful gunfire was in (believe it or not) Florida two decades ago. Being a married, middle-aged white male in the modern secular West means I totally won the historical lottery.

Winning this lottery means that I'm vulnerable to charges of arrogance when I try my hand at Smithian sympathy applied to topics outside my ken. I've never been arrested on possession charges, so who am I to discuss the plight of the casualties in the War on American Minorities? Well, at the risk of taking off my boots to reveal feet of clay, I'd like to consider BATNA disparity applied to the Schelling Effect. I'm pretty much guaranteed to never be subjected to routine street harassment, so is the higher opportunity cost faced by my female reader(s?) cause for moral grievance?

Let's ask PJS.

@amelapay: "headphones are the utilitarian solution to street harassment. they get to have their uncivilized outbursts, but you don't hear a thing."

See these? Ram Jam cranked to 11 right now. More Than A Feeling is up next. Jay-Z later.

Hey baby, how bout you and me head back to Mos Eisley for some blue milk? I got a metal bikini that would look great on you.

@adamgurri: You know, princess, "Tasers are the deontological solution." If Kant taught us anything, there's a categorical imperative to enforce social norms. Escaping the Hobbesian concrete jungle where dreams are made of means being a bit of a scoundrel from time to time.

Artoo, you know what I'm talking about, right?

@DrPhilofEconomi: "An intimidating dog is the eudaimonic solution."

Maybe it's time to swap your pocket pooches for a Rottweiler. The Big Apple surely has a rescue shelter or two with burly dogs in need of some kindly foster care. Arete means that you can care for a critter in need of love while you help make the NYC streets a more civilized place to walk. Everyone wins and you don't have to commit assault to get there.


If these comments weren't in jest, I think this'd count as "mansplaining". The economist would be quick to point out that the costs of street harassment are sunk in the initial calculus. Pamela is no dummy. She knows right well that catcalling and rubbernecking is part of the New York life and she decided to live there anyway.

But the economic efficiency argument falls flat, even to me. There's an unjust transfer of PJS's peace of mind to satisfy... well, I don't claim to understand the motivations of hooting, braying, honking, juvenile males. Smithian sympathy goes only so far. Catcalls aren't about picking up chicks (apologies, Robin H.). Point is, there's an uncompensated exchange in there. The benefit roguish men get from hollering noxious, unwanted sentiments at passersby surely counts as psychic pollution. Right?

But the thing that got me thinking was this. This speaks to my insularity, but I hadn't even heard of "male gaze" until relatively recently. To me, there's a pretty significant difference between a man appreciating a beautiful woman on the one hand and catcalling on the other. But that's to me. I'm willing to entertain the idea that I'm wrong about that. Leering and ogling is neither frotteurism nor lewd remarks, but the wispy boundaries of aggression here are at least plausibly contentious. Can staring be psychic pollution?

The Coasean solution strikes me as eminently sensible. Manners are as good as gold. You don't have to be a blue-blood aristocrat to afford everyone else a de minimus parcel of respect and to handle offenses with tact and dignity. If you find yourself compelled to check an attractive woman out, I assure you it's not difficult to do so with discretion. Appreciating beauty need not cause distress. And for the other side of the exchange, I'm afraid I'm at a loss there. Mrs. Wilson is exceptionally good at deflecting unwanted attention, but I never get to see her razor wit at work. No one catcalls her in my presence. Sorry. But not really, since if you came to EE looking for tips on how to handle street harassment, you've got more serious problems than I can help with.

Anyway, in a static sense, there's a gender asymmetry in where to settle. In a dynamic sense, narrowing the BATNA disparity will take strength of character and a bit of creativity. The institutions that support street harassment are not euvoluntary, so finding and securing a better, emergent equilibrium can't be hand-waved (or gavel-banged) away easily.

Platykurtosis, Bounds, and BATNA

I have no attention span for movies but if that's what your family suggests doing, just go. quality of alternative activities varies WIDELY.
— Pamela J. Stubbart (@amelapay) December 26, 2013

 The "Best" Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement is a little mental fiction useful for considering soap-bubble moral puzzles, floating freely in the atmosphere, undaunted by the cruel shackles of practical gravity. In practice, life is a bit grittier, a bit more uncertain. A "best" alternative is just the #1 spot in a subjective rank ordering of plausible alternatives. For our thought experiments, we rig a guy stumbling through a desert or someone on the verge of being mugged, but actual alternatives out there in the actual world are largely unknown most of the time. If I don't go out to the movies (an odd example for someone with a toddler at home, but please bear with me), what shall I do instead?

If our beloved PJS is like ordinary people... okay, like ordinary people along this particular dimension, she'll be averse to both risk and ambiguity (see Ellsberg, 1961 for the OP, or go here for an overview) and the chore of searching for alternatives will be costly, even in the sweet land of peaches.

With that in mind, what is a BATNA when it's at home? It's a menu with orthogonal elements defined by a multi-dimensional probability distribution. Eek, that sounds gruesome. Fret not, for you're well-equipped to handle it. In your daily routine, you regularly make probabilistic decisions over orthogonal alternatives. Put to the point-blank question, you'd look at me askew if I asked to rank order eating an orange or inflating your basketball. They're not comparable. Yet you still choose between the two without too much fuss. Your mind is built to handle these kinds of decisions, even if categorizing them is daunting in a way that categorizing your favorite shoelaces isn't.

So here's one thing I do with my 2 year old daughter to overcome issues of poorly-defined alternatives. I expressly offer her a false dichotomy. Milly, would you like to watch one Kitty Show then go to bed or just go to bed right away? That way, instead of trying to pluck options from the phlogiston, she's better able to rank-order easily available elements. Until she's able to do this mindhack on her own, I see it as one of my duties as a parent to provide this valuable service for her.

Consider to what extent the Man of System wishes to duplicate my parental efforts for constituents in his jurisdiction.

De novo euvoluntary exchange opportunities arise from the Kirznerian weeds off the trail that's been scribbled on the well-worn menu slate slung like an albatross around our necks. Mind the tradeoff between exploring the platykurtotic edges of the world and œconomy of transacting. There ain't no such thing as a free elimination of search options.

M-m-m-my Fedora

The most powerful incantation in economists' spellbooks is "multiple equilibria." To cast this spell, all you have to do is 1) observe a stable, sub-optimal arrangement 2) flutter your hands a little bit (this part is both to impress your audience and to summon the ancient spirits) and 3) mutter something about transitional gains traps and path dependency.

I'm only half joking. The half that isn't joking really does help explain how it is the US has ludicrous agricultural policy, nonsensical occupational licensing statutes, and rabbit-hole non-violent crime prevention. The half that is joking comes from hearing too many over-eager economic polliwogs improperly citing a phenomenon that has a rigorous game theoretical definition.

So at the risk of outing myself as a legless anurial amphibian, consider a claim I made in yesterday's post. I urged you to consider if Simpson's Paradox applied to the marriage market. It occurred to me last night that I left that comment dangling. Here's what I mean.

Under legacy (I hesitate to invoke "tradition" here because of my sensitivity to charges of parochialism) institutions, families started earlier and lasted longer. These days, in the secular west, folks are delaying marriage, decoupling (lol) sex and marriage, and raising children in single-parent homes at an increasing rate. At least, so goes it in the aggregate.

Was the old equilibrium coercive? Did the compote mashed from the fruit of pulpit-pounding, social obligation, and old-timey paternalism contain trace amounts of force? If so, was it to avoid the prowling menace of endemic foppery?

The Original Foppish Swiss Libertine

You see, what we seem to have run aground on is a peculiar, fedora-shaped reef (f/t PJS). the separating equilibrium is, borrowing from Arnold Kling, characterized by Vickies (stable, high-conscientiousness, high-IQ, 2-parent households) and Thetes (unmarried, underemployed, directionless, single-adult households). Whereas before the rift, betas were shanghaied into quasi-compulsory participation in the institution of marriage, they're now free to pursue their own interests and senses of fashion.

Ah, you say, Simpson's Paradox has us de-omit a variable for analysis. Isn't the treatment the liberalization of sorting behavior? Well, maybe. I think the interesting bit of analysis is still in the non-ergodic aethershpere, a yet-to-be-applied treatment. Namely, how will the fedora and Pinkie Pie crowd adjust to their new marginal freedom? The revealed preference theorem suggests that these folks genuinely prefer celibacy and outre pursuits to the 2.2 kids, white picket fence road more travelled, cheap talk to the contrary notwithstanding.

The abiding puzzle is this: old institutions about family life solved some sort of collective action dilemma. In their absence, we can expect a new equilibrium. How will that new equilibrium compare with the old both within subgroups and across the entire population? Is this one of those instances where moving towards more euvoluntary institutions is a mistake? What's the appropriate metric? What's the appropriate counterfactual?

#NoSolutionsOnlyTradeoffs

Tacit Consent

Long-time friend of EE Pamela J Stubbart writes a brief love letter to lascivious libertarians:

Dear Libertarians Who Are Squabbling About Rape,

N.b., if "tacit consent" isn't a satisfactory standard for the state's moral legitimacy, then maybe it's not good enough for the moral legitimacy of a sexual encounter, either?

kisses, pjs

 Bob Murphy picked this post up here.

This is an important challenge, particularly since the moral intuitions she pries open are likely to raise hackles.

Since you're reading this here at EE, I assume you're already sensitive to BATNA disparity. If you've got a libertarian bent, you're likely to believe that there's an ENORMOUS disparity between the state and the individual. Yes, that's precisely the point of the state: to retain a monopoly on the use of violence.

But here's the thing the libertarian might be slightly less willing to subscribe to: if you're a woman, you're likely to believe that there's a BATNA disparity between men and women, particularly when she's decommissioned by drink or drugs.

Having your way with someone who is three sheets to the wind is not euvoluntary, even if it's nominally voluntary, even if there's no expression of ex post regret. That doesn't automatically make it wrong necessarily, but if you want to understand where these moral sentiments come from, pay attention to your Adam Smith: sympathy is the first plank in building a civil society.

Euvoluntary PUA?

By request, the euvoluntarity of pick-up artistry.

@amelapay has @Spivonomist told us whether or not PUAs are euvoluntary or not yet?
— Adam Gurri (@adamgurri) November 5, 2013

 And before you ask, yes. I did indeed have to look up the acronym. It's probably not so much that I'm too old to know what's going on in the world around me, it's more that the language adjusted while I wasn't looking. Much like yesterday's stewardess is today's flight attendant, yesterday's sleazeball is today's pick-up artist. It appears to be a term of political correctness. I for one appreciate the gentler, more civil tone of the new term.

Here's the story from The Peej [link]. Evidently, the welfare state in Denmark travels well with women's self-esteem. They're not prone to the predations of self-styled Casanovas. It's beyond the scope of this piece to mull the arrow of causality here, so zip up your quiver, Mr. Tell. Instead, consider whether the behavioral arts applied to obtaining strange constitutes a euvoluntary transaction.

Does moral suasion constitute coercion? In the eyes of the law, nope. To count as forcible rape, law enforcement... well, here's the FBI's definition. Judge for yourself.

Forcible rape, as defined in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, is the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will. Attempts or assaults to commit rape by force or threat of force are also included; however, statutory rape (without force) and other sex offenses are excluded.

Does something about that strike you as odd? Leave a note in the comments section.

Anyway, the pick-up artist uses psychological tricks, flim-flammery, patter if you will to flounder and woo. His skill is reminiscent of adept carnival barkers. But it's all talk, all body language, all communication. There are clear lines not to be crossed: no roofies, no physical force, no intimidation. Most importantly perhaps, no exchange of money for a night between the sheets. Just sexual kayfabe.

And even without any regrets, the endeavor will still strike many people as sordid. It's not classical exploitation, but it does explicitly endeavor to exploit psychological weaknesses. Contrast this with prostitution. In that case, there's a mutually beneficial business transaction with no deception, no trickery, no emotional fraud. It seems to me that but for an accident of history, prostitution is probably more euvoluntary than pick-up artistry. Yet one is illegal, the other is not. And I suspect it's a matter of cash changing hands.

So to answer Adam's question, I don't know for sure. For PUAs to be firmly euvoluntary, I suppose you'd have to assume strict rationality, no cognitive biases, no psychological weak spots. But that's wishing for a perfect egg. No such thing. Humans are beautifully flawed and as such are prone to illusion. Still, even if the practice is just off the shore of the land of euvoluntarity, the most reasonable response is to do as the Danes do: help your daughters and your sisters to be psychologically tough. Counter kayfabe with Truth. And then if she wants to have some fun while the getting is good, it'll be less likely to retain coercive overtones.

The same is basically true for any sort of contract. It's all in the offer and acceptance. You can't fault a guy for making an offer, but neither ought you fault a girl for her (informed, rational) response.

Christopher Walken's Lesser Known Brother, Jay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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