Attack Ships on Fire off the Shoulder of Orion

For your consideration.

Sex with robots is not euvoluntary.

Because it cheapens the real thing. It alters the BATNA of flesh-and-blood relationships.

Curious how a replicant ban might be enforced? There's a documentary for that. I think there's even a film adaptation somewhere.

Consider how sex with robots might influence intergenerational wealth inequality.

Also, this.

Consent in Captivity

If you don't already subscribe to Simple Justice, consider adding it to your list. Greenfield is usually entertaining, always prodigious (at least 2 word-packed posts a day), and unfailingly filled to the brim with righteous indignation. It's also good to see what law looks like from the trenches if, like me, you're either a punter or an academic.

Today's AM post was of particular interest to me in my capacity as a fan of prison drama. From the old WIP exploitation films of the 70s to the mostly well-executed premium TV shows of today (Oz, OITNB), I've been a fan of the genre as far back as I can remember. And always and everywhere, one of the enduring literary tropes of the Caged Heat variety is sex in prison. Is it lewd? Is it rude? Is it always in the nude?

More importantly for EE purposes, can it ever be consensual? I don't mean just guard-and-inmate relations, which obviously contain coercion, but prisoner-prisoner relations. Excluding forcible rape, can a prisoner tryst be euvoluntary? In prison, indeed in any extended-stay, isolated community, outside options are limited. You aren't really free to choose with such limited choices, right? It would be a bit like being locked in a restaurant and then being asked what your favorite food is. Sure, you might choose something off the available menu, but are you being sincere or merely convenient?

Then again, even people with the relative liberty afforded by all our modern conveniences hardly consider anything more than the tiniest sliver of the entire world population. Even with the assistance of computers, we generally limit ourselves to the people available in our communities, our workplaces, our schools, our churches, our online forums, &c. Folks in the regular world are presumed to give free and clear consent even with all those limitations.

How good a BATNA is good enough? Can a prisoner give enthusiastic consent? Can anyone in a cloistered community give enthusiastic consent? How cloistered is cloistered?

For Your Convenience

Meet PinkBox. PinkBox is a sex toy vending machine. From the splash page:

If you are looking for a way to increase revenue at you bar or nightclub, please contact us. We provide the machine, the product, and the upkeep. You earn money from every sale we make. Our machines have a slender footprint that won’t rob you of vital space, and we’ll consult with you to customize the product selection to suit your clientele.

 Part of the shadow price of buying sex toys, for the marginal customer anyway, is the embarrassment of bringing your purchase to the counter and having to interact with an actual person. A vending machine dispenses with that unpleasantness.

I don't think traditional smut shops have too much to fear from this enterprise however. Soda vending machines didn't destroy Coke sales in supermarkets after all. It's more a matter of filling a niche. Kirznerian entrepreneurship if you will.

I'm old enough to remember cigarette vending machines. And now I'm evidently young enough to witness the advent of dildo vending machines. What a wonderful time to be alive.

Specialization and Exchange: Pegging Edition

Ascended fanfic 50 Shades of Grey has been tearing up the box office lately. According to injury reports from the CPSC, that ain't the only thing it's been tearing up.

When the novels were published, they appear to have awakened a dormant interest in kink among marginal readers. And as you might expect, these marginal readers are the most likely to be rank amateurs when it comes to things like safety protocols and good sense.

You know what sort of folks are experts at that sort of thing? Professional dominatrices.

You know what sort of profession is illegal?

Consider the possibility that lifting the ban on sex work expands the availability of expert spanking advice for consenting adults. And that's just short-term. Who knows what the next mania du jour will be? A prudent public health measure would be to refrain from throttling the development and availability of expert kink assistance.

S&M, with its risk of injury when conducted by amateurs, is not euvoluntary. Expertise makes it more so. Free citizens that they might bind each other.

h/t @mistressmatisse for the twitter convo

Pole Tax

On Twitter, E.N. Brown asks:

Hey, #sexwork twitter: Any thoughts on Nevada declaring strippers employees, not independent contractors, who must be paid minimum wage?
— Elizabeth N. Brown (@enbrown) October 31, 2014

Concatenated, EE friend The Honest Courtesan replies: "I think it'd be better to leave them as contractors, but stop TREATING them like employees & cash cows. The biggest problem is that clubs SAY they're contractors, then charge extortive fees & impose draconian rules."

A glib take: the Uber of exotic dancing already exists, and it is called "escort services." The physical property of the gentleman's club (614 Wharf Ave.) acts as one or more of the following:

• A clearinghouse: it provides a centralized location to match clients with performers. A customer might want something in particular, but the act of browsing helps define specific desires. Nota bene, this works both ways. In a club, performers can quickly visually screen customers before approaching for private dances. Call-in services oblige escorts to haul clear out to the site before assessing whether or not the client is tolerable.
• A (for lack of a better term) sacred space. This land is for a single purpose. There may be libation here, but this is not where we drink. There may be food here, but this is not where we eat. There may be music here, but this is not where we go to get our Creedence fix (brb, getting my Creedence fix). This place is the place to see undulating flesh. This place is the place to be on the business end of an inviting smile. This place is the place to feel a tempting, inviting touch, to smell forbidden musk, to hear gracious lies, to forget your loneliness for a little while. This place is a place of great glamour, in the old sense of the word: a gratifying, glimmering shared falsehood that lifts the weight of the world if but for a fleeting moment. It is an important, valuable space and should be kept as such. 
• A warren. This is the less-charitable interpretation of the "sacred space" interpretation. Like it or not, a great many people are simply disgusted by sex work, no matter how sanitized or discreet it might be. Zoning legislation keeps exotic dancing segregated from the God-fearing, pearl-clutching types. I see quite a bit of this here in my uptight Northern Virginia suburban corridor. I won't Google any addresses here at my work machine, but I'm fairly certain that I'd have to make my way clear to DC to see a dancer half my age swivel her hips in my direction. The median constituent in my neck of the woods has uttered a pretty unambiguous "nope" towards pole grindin'. 
• A place of ordinary business. Payment for services rendered, like at the dentist.

Club owners can get away with extorting dancers because of the aforementioned land use restrictions (and if you think Nevada is some sort of free-for-all when it comes to opening a strip club, you have another think coming). In the terms of econ 101, clubs provide a rent, and the rents are generated by way of the first three above bullet points. The value added to the client, to the performer, and to the community accrue to the residual claimant, which under the ordinary rules of organization is usually the property holder, the person with his (and don't kid yourself, it's usually a man) name on the title deed.

Typically, Ray keeps the [value] streams separate through multi-part tariffs. The cover charge and the drinks minimum goes to the club owner, the dancers get their tips (or some fraction after they tip out the DJ and staff [I presume]). The details almost certainly vary from venue to venue. The idea of treating dancers as independent contractors renting out space is actually quite a clever one—by paying a fixed charge to perform, the club obliges dancers to deliver de minimus that much value to the clients, thereby increasing the prestige of the club. Paying wages and heavily garnishing tips gives dancers an incentive to shirk (on the margin) and to hide tips (on another margin). Shirking and evading is evidence of a hostile relationship between owners, performers, and clients. This is less euvoluntary than a situation of mutual respect and service.

How to collect and distribute rents is a matter of negotiation. The minimum wage idea is perhaps one way to get to a just outcome, but it isn't the only one. Relaxed land-use regulations help to strip the location premium from the owner. Re-formatting the multi-part tariff might also help. Most of all, it's important to recognize which property rights regimes lead to the most efficient allocation of scarce resources. Treating exotic dancers like factory workers is probably a lousy approach. Then again, treating factory workers the way they're typically treated is no great shakes either. Hm.

Obligatory:

We Like to Party. We Like, We Like to Party!

In my haste to draw tenuous relationships between the infantilization of university students and California's recent campus consent legislation, I overlooked something important. The key provision of SB-967 is "affirmative consent." Both parties must agree to the transaction. If that sounds familiar to you, my dear readers, it may be because affirmative consent subsumes at least three of the six conditions for euvoluntary exchange.

For typical market interactions, the prima facie evidence of mutual felicity in exchange is the trade of value for value: a good or service is swapped for money. Money is, lest we forget, merely an unspecified claim on some other good or service to be redeemed in the future. The vendor typically provides a bill of sale or a receipt to affirm that the transaction was completed to satisfaction. This receipt can be used for any number of purposes, from accounting to tax collection, to evidence in a tort or civil case.

And now with SB-967, payment and receipt for sexual services rendered can provide adequate evidence for affirmative mutual consent in precisely the manner prescribed by the legislation. California is only just now discovering what courtesans have known since antiquity: proof of full consent is revealed by payment for services rendered. "Did you have consensual sex with that person?" "Yup, Sure did. Here's my receipt."

I agree that if this had happened twenty years ago, it might have been a hassle for universities to have cash registers installed adjacent to dormitory beds, but with the advent of the blockchain, students can now use bitcoin to verify consent. Instead of issuing students greenclad ledgers, they can just sign up for an alt-currency wallet to be used for sexual liaisons as part of freshman orientation.

And once these transactions are on the blockchain, they're now potentially subject to government monitoring and taxation. Universities are always hard up for revenue. This should help with some of the budget problems.

I totally don't see a downside here, guys. Let's treat sex exactly like what it is: a mutually agreeable market interaction with full public accountability. Why, we could even have an OTC derivatives market to regulate prices and smooth out inconsistencies in consumption. Who's with me? Let's make college trysts even more euvoluntary than they already are. Condoms are so 2004. Protect yourself with hash verification.

California Conflict

California SB-967, the Student Safety: Sexual Assault bill recently signed by the Governor of CA (full text here) withholds public funding for universities unless administrations develop comprehensive sexual assault policies that conform to the several conditions described in the bill. Much of the criticism of the bill I've seen involves clause (1):

An affirmative consent standard in the determination of whether consent was given by both parties to sexual activity. “Affirmative consent” means affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity. It is the responsibility of each person involved in the sexual activity to ensure that he or she has the affirmative consent of the other or others to engage in the sexual activity. Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time. The existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.

The trope invoked here is "if it ain't euvoluntary, it ain't voluntary." Sexual encounters that provoke ex post regret are not euvoluntary, hence the "affirmative consent" criterion. There's even an app for that.

"Get the government out of my uterus" this is not. But the purpose of this post is not to fret about the possible downsides of a database of sexual liaisons accessible by university personnel, law enforcement officials, or (given the frequency with which sensitive information is compromised by enterprising black hat crackers) pretty much anyone. Instead, I ask you whether or not SB-967 isn't just a natural consequence of zero-tolerance primary education.

Typical college students in 2014 have spent their entire school careers in a post-Columbine (1999, how tempus doth fugit) environment. Every hallway scuffle, every playground bout of fisticuffs, every swirlie, every noogie, every wedgie has been first subject to administrative oversight and then carefully excised. The very purpose of intolerant policy is to sanitize child development of the unfortunate ills of conflict, particularly violent conflict. It welds training wheels to the bicycle of social development. A natural consequence of this is that 19 year old adult children are (relatively) incapable of negotiating grown-up relationships. They're sent into the deep end still wearing their water wings. It should come as no surprise when the legislature mandates a new squadron of lifeguards.

Is there a Great Stagnation? Perhaps. But if SB-967 is a bellwether, then it seems likely that there may also be a Great Ossification. Amid the disruptions of the sharing economy, the public is also facing greater command and control from political elites. What a relief those elites are wise, beneficent, civic-minded servants of the public interest with no motives of their own other than to see the flower of humanity blossom.

Live Nude Camgirls!

The article I link to here is not for the faint of heart. It has its own trigger warning, but if you're likely to have an adverse reaction to a story of sexual abuse against children, consider giving it a pass. "Harrowing" is an accurate one-word description.

link

I beg you again to please consider the logic of prohibition. Every vice cop out there busting a majority-aged streetwalker or professional call girl is an officer of the law not out there tracking down mothers renting out their children to pedophiles to pay for drugs.

Mercifully, not all paid sex work is forced to accept the second-best governance of the pimp and the gangster. The (relatively) new profession of cam-girl enjoys if not all, at least most of the ordinary protections of the law. They (I assume—correct me if I'm wrong) pay taxes, feel as comfortable calling the cops if they're harassed as any NORP (Normal Ordinary Respectable Person), can petition the government for redress of injury, file suit in courts of law, and register for jury duty—they live in virtually every respect as mundane as June Cleaver. But they still trade sexual pleasure for money. Is being a camgirl so much more euvoluntary than being a call girl that we treat one like a typical PTA member and the other like a social and legal pariah?

I find myself unable to offer much in the way of moral commentary, other than to note that Jesus of Nazareth spent a big chunk of the New Testament narrative tending to prostitutes, thieves, tax collectors, and the chronically ill. I hear a lot about how America is a Christian nation—unfortunately, the actual operation of the criminal justice system seems to put the lie to that kayfabe. What I can offer is a useful question: is the difference between being a cam girl and being a call girl so great that one can lead a normal life in the eyes of the law and the other cannot?

Legalizing prostitution doesn't mean we have to celebrate it, elevate its cultural status, lionize it. What it does mean is that for justice to apply without discrimination or dominion, sex workers must have equal access to the machinery of law—access that they do not now enjoy. What it also means is that a large, well-trained law enforcement apparatus can be liberated to concentrate on the important tasks of investigating and prosecuting cases of actual abuse, such as the one linked above. That seems like a pretty good trade-off to me.

It's entirely consistent to believe that sex work degrades and corrodes civil society and to believe that affording workers commonplace legal protection is an improvement over the institutions they now labor under. It's also entirely consistent to believe that sex work is more or less harmless fun and to believe that the law of the Union is preferable to the law of the underworld. Legalizing prostitution doesn't say, "prostitution is okay" as much as it says, "abusing prostitutes is not okay."

Sex work is not euvoluntary. Legalizing it will help make it more so. Liberate police so that Cracked doesn't have to run another article like the one above.

Crass, Despicable, Sleazy, but is it Euvoluntary?

Via A.V. Club, there are rumors that the creative minds behind adultery service Ashley Madison (presumably no relation to the actress) are working on producing a TV show based on the service (h/t Poet). Having come of age in a time when the sauciest thing on prime-time was Hawkeye Pierce was chasing skirts in Korea, this quite naturally caught my attention.

It seems to me that there are three transactions here.

1. Adultery
2. The Internet-enabled matching service for adulterers
3. The television program promoting the Internet-enabled matching service for adulterers.

Adultery is not euvoluntary. Unless otherwise specified as part of the relationship, sleeping around is a breach of contract. It violates the "conventional capacity to exchange" condition. Infidelity has long been adequate grounds for dissolution of marriage (or worse). But apart from that, infidelity is largely a private affair. Unless there's some sort of contagion effect, where the mere prevalence of cheating produces more cheating, the costs of adultery are either kept within the affected family or are a result of political choices (here, I'm referring to preferential tax treatment, public assistance, or the like). Adultery is largely a private misfortune rather than a public calamity. 

How about the service? Is Ashley Madison euvoluntary? Surely it reduces the cost of the matching problem faced by people who wish to cheat on their spouses, but it's difficult to see how it could contribute to the underlying demand. And it's hard to drum up much sympathy for folks who are on the adultery fence sitting at home thinking, "you know, I'd be fine with cheating on the old lady, but it's just such a hassle hitting the bars after work, man." The home life dissatisfaction that leads to adultery is the problem. These guys are simply providing a valuable service to already-dissatisfied consumers. Should the aggrieved party be more offended by the act or by the pent-up demand that gave rise to it?

And the show? Is an hour-long commercial for purveyors of sleaze euvoluntary? Here, I'm ambivalent. I am well-convinced that rhetoric and persuasion is an important determinant of behavior, but it's not clear to me beforehand what marginal (or average) effect such advertisement would have on the public. Recall that one of the hypotheses to explain the sudden decline in teenage pregnancies was an MTV program about kids with babies. And again, even if the site gets a boost in traffic thanks to the show, the underlying problem of mismatches in the marriage market cannot reasonably laid on the stoop of Noel Biderman and set on fire just before ringing the doorbell and running away.

Curious though. Even if something is vile and reprehensible, could it still enjoy freedom from calls for censorship? My prior belief is that folks who lean socially conservative would look at corrosive entertainment and see it as yet another threat to the fabric of civilization. And if persuasion is effective, it should be worth considering carefully whether or not their arguments have merit.

Swiper No Swiping or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Game Theoretic Analysis of Hookup Culture

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

-J. Austen, Pride and Prejudice

I gather from the kids these days that mobile phone applications have replaced seedy dive bars as the go-to venue for taking a spin on the ol' genital mashing lottery¹. "Swipe right" is the "hey baby" of 2014. To credit technology for the apparent rise of casual sexual encounters is perhaps a bit premature. To illustrate why, let's swipe right on some elementary game theory.

Consider a single player. Call her Ann. Ann finds herself at the start of her sexual career and is faced with two options:
a) Participate in the casual sex market
b) Participate in the marriage market
Since this is ~elementary~ game theory, omit from consideration opting out altogether, or exotic choices like... well, use your imagination.

Before that choice, Ann was secretly assigned by Nature to one of two types.
Type L (for licentious). There is no penalty for choosing (a) after type is revealed. There is a penalty for choosing (b) after type is revealed.
Type D (for demure). There is a penalty for choosing (a) after type is revealed. There is no penalty for choosing (b) after type is revealed.

My conscience urges me to point out that what I'm about to do is methodologically suspect. I am going to assign numbers to utility. Doing this covertly drafts several stealth assumptions into this model, some of which I find terribly implausible. I excuse myself by noting that I'm doing a comparative statics problem here, rather than utility comparison. On the margin, you can (probably) toss out assumptions of well-ordered convex utility functions and still get similar results. Whether or not the model holds up when tested at extreme parameter values is questionable. So as far as a bit of insight into why some people might marginally choose regrettable mating decisions, this might be useful, if not entirely accurate.

My conscience temporarily sated, let's define a few structural parameters.

First, we need Ann's type assignment probability. Remember that Ann doesn't know what her type is as she makes her choice over (a) or (b). Only afterwards will she find out. Let's call this probability α. With Pr = α, Ann is Type L, and with Pr = (1-α), Ann is Type D.

Next, we'll want a parameter for a successful casual sex match. With Pr = β, Ann finds a partner for the evening. With Pr = (1-β), she spends the night alone.

Next, let's define γ as Ann's discount rate. For arithmetic purposes, this is just a multiplier that lets us compare payoffs earned in the future to payoffs earned now. For social science purposes, this is a contentious mess. Empirically decomposing the inputs to individual discount rates is a hassle, and even when aggregating, it's hard to measure, and harder yet to isolate specific treatment effects. Over a person's lifespan the discount rate can change wildly, some of it because of normal lifecycle reasons, some of it for cohort reasons, some cultural, some from exogenous shock, some for psychological reasons, some from conformity, some idiosyncratic. Beware stories that attempt to reduce discount rates to a monocause. I include this here for discussion, but I'll omit it from the model since I don't want to make things too intractable. Not yet anyway. Maybe in a follow-up post.

Finally, we'll need a parameter for the probability that Ann will participate successfully in the marriage market. Let's use ω. With Pr = ω, Ann marries. With Pr = (1-ω), Ann ends up with cats. Lots of cats.

At the risk of drifting into differential equations territory, β and ω are both partially functions of [potential partners'] α parameters. That is to say, the more people in the {temporary mating|marriage} market, the higher the probability of finding a match in that market. For the purposes of this exercise, assume that participants know which market they are in and that no participants attempt to participate in both markets at the same time. Modeling infidelity is another exercise entirely.

Let's say that a successful booty call yields v and a successful marriage yields w units of pleasure. Failure of either one yields 0.

If Ann is Type L, she'll pay a penalty of -c for successfully participating in the marriage market, no penalties otherwise.
If Ann is Type D, she'll pay a penalty of -d for successfully participating in the casual sex market, no penalties otherwise.

With Pr = α, Ann earns a payoff of:
β*v + (1-β)*(0) for playing (a)
and
ω*w + (1-ω)*(0) + ω*(-c) for playing (b)
With Pr = (1-α), Ann earns a payoff of:
β*v + (1-β)*(0) + β*(-d) for playing (a)
and
ω*w + (1-ω)*(0) for playing (b)

Ann is therefore indifferent between playing (a) and (b) when
α(β*v + (1-β)*(0)) + (1-α)(β*v + (1-β)*(0) + β*(-d)) = α(ω*w + (1-ω)*(0) + ω*(-c)) + (1-α)(ω*w + (1-ω)*(0))

simplified:
βv - βd + αβd = ωw - αωc

If βv - βd + αβd > ωw - αωc, Ann will play (a). Casual sex.
If βv - βd + αβd < ωw - αωc, Ann will play (b). Marriage market.

Casual sex is increasing in the probability of a successful right-swipe and costs of regrettable marriage; decreasing in social stigma against licentiousness and the probability of a happy marriage. Reverse that for marriage market participation.

And this gets interesting when we consider that the probability parameters are something of a commons. The more people that participate in the casual sex market, the greater the probability that Ann will find a match for any given attempt. If, ex post, Ann is a Type D attempting an (a) strategy, she would prefer to have had incentives encouraging her to pursue a (b) strategy instead. Similarly, if Ann is a Type L attempting a (b) strategy, she'd regret settling down and probably be a bit disgruntled that her society had provided her incentives to marry that schlub Jasper (no relation to the Peanut Butter Kid).

Think of "traditional" marriage and everything that goes along with it as a set of institutions that attempt to avert the regrets of licentiousness. The tradeoffs are the foregone opportunities of short-term associations. Knocking down that Chestertonian fence can reveal that if Ann is a Type D living the life of a Type L, the costs could be quite real and quite salient.

There's an interesting tragedy in there. If identifying type ex ante is either very costly or downright impossible, and if Ann's incentive structure is the product of human action, but not human design, a semi-stable equilibrium emerging from the joint and several negotiations between human minds, what is her optimal strategy? Which parameters should she try to strengthen? Which should she try to weaken? She can't choose her culture. Can she choose her discount rate? Can she select her cultural filters? By choosing the non-dominant strategy, does she run afoul of a concentrated costs-diffuse benefits dilemma? How can she overcome this problem? What would you do?


¹ Apologies for the horrific idiom. Blame it on my low blood sugar.

Michelle Goldberg on Constrained Optimization

One important lesson I took away from my chat with Maggie McNeill: criminalizing prostitutes' clients can be worse than criminalizing prostitutes. Clients have more to lose from a conviction, so they'll insist on additional protections, at the expense of the safety of workers.

It's good to see the trope spreading, along with folks' willingness to recognize that if sex work looks like exploitation, it's simply because the alternative circumstances are worse, and that it's pretty awful to punish someone from hailing from lousy circumstances.

Michelle Goldberg, channeling Bastiat at his best peers through the veil of intentions to see the unseen consequences of well-meaning policy.

ATSRTWT

Salient quote:

The answer to the question of which law better protects women—full legalization or the criminalization of demand—is as much ideological as empirical. It depends on whether you see Anna as a trafficked, exploited woman mouthing sex-industry propaganda, or as a person with agency making the best choices she can given her constrained circumstances. It depends on how much regulation you’re willing to accept in the name of gender equality, and ultimately whether you think making it harder for some prostitutes to work is a worthwhile price to pay for reducing the number of women in prostitution overall.

 Driving a trade, any trade, underground makes it harder to identify actual cases of abuse. When everyone is a criminal, genuine criminals find it easier to blend in with the crowd. Prostitution may not be euvoluntary, but it's a dang sight better than violent criminals running amok among women of the evening with impunity.

h/t Ross D & Reihan S

Sex Offender

Rape is a crime.

Unfortunately, it's a crime unlike any other. Before I mansplain why, a brief review of hypothesis-testing errors.

First, a reminder of how to construct a null hypothesis. In the most basic form, start with a control group that receives no interventions, they're all business-as-usual. Then get yourself a treatment group, those subjects who are otherwise identical to the control group but for one change, the treatment of interest. Your null hypothesis should be that the treatment produces no effect. The aim of inquiry is to reject the null hypothesis.

This is where error comes in and why the results of hypothesis tests sound like they were written by a mental patient. We don't say "X causes Y", but rather something closer to "with 95% confidence, we reject the null hypothesis that X has no effect on Y". Similarly, we don't say "X doesn't cause Y", but rather "with 95% confidence, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that X has no effect on Y." The wordiness and the careful construction of the result statements are explicit nods to the limits of statistical inference. Hypothesis testing is still, for all its sophistication, a bit like rolling one of those fancy Dungeons and Dragons dice: every now and again, you roll a natural 20. In other words, sometimes we erroneously reject a true null hypothesis (Type I) or erroneously fail to reject a false null hypothesis (Type II). A type I error suggests that X causes Y even when it actually doesn't, and a type II error suggests that X doesn't cause Y even when it actually does.

What does this have to do with rape? Well, the null hypothesis is that X did not rape Y, and the job of the criminal justice system is to attempt to reject this null hypothesis. In the case of rape, this task is rife with epistemological confusion, at least for marginal cases. Consent, or at least a plebeian notion of consent, is murky, especially when one or more parties is intoxicated. Add to that the barbaric habits of victim-blaming and perpetrator-excusing (particularly when it comes to cases involving strong social class disparities) and it shouldn't be too surprising when conscientious folks want to work to rid the system of type II errors, ultimately with the aim of effectively deterring incident rates.

Hence the rise of sex offender registries. Hence the rise of minimum mandatory sentences. Hence the conflation of forcible rape with other sex offenses (such as consensual sex between people slightly on opposite sides of statutory bright lines or public nudity or snapchatting nudes). The purpose of all these measures is to raise the relative price of sexual deviancy in an effort to discourage the deviant behavior. It's plain vanilla ordinary law and economics, straight out of Becker or Epstein.

The costs, of course, are an increase in the incidence of type I errors, where kids end up permanently on sex offender registries. Thanks to typical precautionary heuristics, landing on one of those registries severely curtails someone's options. Offenders can't buy property in certain areas, there are lots of places that won't hire registrees, and forget registered fathers volunteering at school, or even picking their kids up from soccer practice.

Still, it's a matter of trade-offs. Maybe swapping one type of error for another is acceptable to the median voter. Maybe the concentrated costs and diffuse benefits of registries are good on net for communities. Maybe. Still, it's worth considering what institutional failures prevent rape from being handled the same basic way as, say, armed robbery. It is my impression that police aren't terribly inclined to say to a B&E victim "well, maybe you shouldn't have been flaunting your living room like that" or to an arson victim, "did you leave the house with a gasoline can in your garage this morning?"

Euvoluntary sexual encounters can be mutually felicitous. Coercive sexual encounters not so. In between are a wide galaxy of indeterminacy, and it seems reckless to assume that even a well-meaning legislature, far from the specifics of the thing can adequately anticipate the nature and details of such encounters, much less to accurately prescribe punishments that both fit the crime and are suitable to basic common-sense justice.

Much of the world (not just the US) has a nasty problem with how the crime of rape is handled. It seems an affront to justice to stymie progress by handicapping the evolution of the common law with restrictive ex ante legislative tinkering. Our euvoluntary future deserves better.

Dear Mr. Arsenault

Order to Cease Manufacturing of HCT/Ps - Trent Arsenault
November 1, 2010

I am not making any of this up.

Fremont, CA resident T. Arsenault found himself on the business end of a cease-and-desist order from the FDA of all august organizations to quit selling his, um, genetic material over the Internet in 2010. Click the link for a more glorious timeline.

After a surprise inspection, the FDA found: "your Establishment does not provide adequate protections against the risks of communicable disease transmission through the use of these HCT/Ps."

HCT/P stands for "human cells, tissues, and cellular and tissue-based products."

Mr. Arsenault provides the same services as a sperm bank, but without all the regulatory hassle. It's the Craigslist of sperm donation, though he does claim to be a virgin and posts recent, dated STI test results on his site.

Curious: Mr. Arsenault could presumably visit recipients in person, impregnate them locally in the old-fashioned way and continue on his merry way—a modern-day Johnny Appleseed—without incurring the attentions of the FDA. Correct?

Does the fact that this procedure is done remotely increase the risk of infection?

Does the exchange of money increase the risk of infection?

How is this anything but a private contract between two consenting adults? Where is the public interest? I don't see the moral intuition. If it's okay for a woman to get pregnant, the specific mechanism should be her choice.

Right?

Today's SCOTUS decision on Hobby Lobby sure seems to be generating some moral outrage. This bullying by the FDA seems at least as bad. What's the difference? Is coercion exercised by the state exempt from moral scrutiny in a way that "coercion" exercised by an employer is not? Why?

Res Ipsa Loquitur: The Virgin Auctions, Round Deux

A website (here) allows folks to place a bid on obtaining the virginity of a 27 year old medical student going by the pseudonym "Elizabeth Raine."

According to the site, the max bid as of press datetime is US$550k. I wonder if folks are running sealed-bid scripts against this value like you can do on Ebay. Hm. Whoever wrote the terms and conditions seems to be familiar with elementary auction theory (there's a $100 buy-in).

Anyway, is this euvoluntary? According to the site, she doesn't really need the money. She's a well-to-do white American girl who's lived abroad, and she's studying medicine. She's got a pretty good BATNA. I see no evidence of exploitation, at least in the direction you'd expect. If anything, she might be the one doing the exploiting.

How about unconscionablity? This isn't the first time someone's tried a trick like this. Repetition is what morphs the bizarre into the mundane. How many more high denomination virgin auctions need to happen before the price drops sharply and it's just a dreary routine?

If this story is legit (and I have some reservations), I'm curious if it's a leading indicator of... something. I'm not sure what. I agree with Maggie McNeill that the way prostitutes are treated in the US is egregious, but most of the worst is focused on the discount end of the market. Do high-cash-value transactions help alter public moral intuitions towards the sex workers who would most directly benefit from decriminalization?

Episode 3: Maggie McNeill

Today's discussion is with Maggie McNeill, the Honest Courtesan. We discuss sex work, criminalization, misinformation, the abuses inherent in the sex offender registry, the courage of Belle Knox, and many other things. I hope you enjoy our chat.


download

Additional material mentioned in the podcast:

The Honest Courtesan
Maggie's Resources Page
Lies, Lies, Misconceptions, and more Lies
Stats on Transgender Sex Workers Misrepresented by Police Reports (the estimate is closer to 10% rather than the 5% we noted in the discussion)
Radley Balko: Rise of the Warrior Cop
Mustard Seeds and Vampires
Bruce Yandle on Bootleggers and Baptists
Arnold Kling: The Three Languages of Politics

You can follow Maggie on Twitter here: @Maggie_McNeill
And me here: @Spivonomist
And Belle Knox here (Not Even Remotely SFW): @belle_knox

Also, apologies for the plosives. I'm working on that.

MIE: Fakebook Girlfriend Edition

via Vipul Naik, the headline says it all: "I will be your New Facebook Girlfriend for 2 days and will leave Sweet Notes for $5"

link

Euvoluntary? If not, who is exploiting whom?

Also, for half the price, I'll be your facebook boyfriend for 4 days and will leave Sarcastic Notes for $2.50.

FEEL THE STING OF MY MIGHTY COMPETITION

Is Sex a Euvoluntary "Exchange," or Something Else Entirely?

Very interesting video.  Perhaps not entirely seriously, but surely not entirely inaccurate.

Contra Contraception

Justice Sotomayor issued an injunction against mandated contraception coverage on behalf of a Roman Catholic order of nuns based in Colorado. Religious arguments still have some sway from time to time, it seems.

The Obama administration has repeatedly defended the birth control requirement. “The president believes that no one, including the government or for-profit corporations, should be able to dictate those decisions to women,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said last month.

This is such obvious malarkey that there must be some other moral intuition at work than what meets the eye. Particularly since it is the government that dictates that women must visit a doctor before being allowed to purchase oral contraceptives.

With this case, we're not all that different from the sea captain in Locke's Venditio. From a particular point of view, a risk of surprise pregnancy is sort of similar to being just offshore minus an anchor: there's heightened uncertainty, and a substantial burden should the unexpected occur. For low-income, low-wealth young women, the BATNA is desperate. Therefore, contraception should be cheaper. Anything else is unjust, I reckon. I'm not sure how this counts as anyone "dictating" anything to women, but a desperate BATNA argument is the closest fit for the Carney quote up there.

But I'm still a bit puzzled why an employer should have even the first thing to do with a woman's reproductive choices. Unless she's in the sex trade, of course. If the market (I'll omit the scare quotes, but you and I both know that pharmaceuticals hardly constitute a pairwise market) for birth control is unjust as-is, why make things more difficult by involving firms? Why not directly subsidize contraceptives? Aren't out-of-work women just as (if not more) coerced by circumstance?

The practice of tying third party health service payment to employment is the Arnold Rimmer of in-kind compensation, doubly so if you buy the erroneous argument that health services are a public good. Why push this silly idea further when it comes to reproductive decisions? Shouldn't the decision to bear a child be one made by the mother with support from her intimate network? "Get the government out of my vagina" makes a fine appeal to liberty, privacy, and common dignity. It seems eminently sensible to extend that idea to, "get my boss out of my vagina." Sotomayor's injunction hardly goes far enough. If contraception is not euvoluntary, sloppy patchwork "solutions" are third-best in a world where a second-best solution is not only available, but politically viable.

Sigh.

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

Voluntary? Sex-positive Feminism

It IS interesting, once you start thinking about what's voluntary and what's coercive.  It's subversive, actually.