FYIAD, the Ecstasy of the Otherkin

One of my favorite non-Bakshi animated features growing up was a Don Bluth-helmed adaptation of Robert O'Brien's seminal children's novel, Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. You may have seen it yourself. The silver screen title was The Secret of NIMH, and it was a tale of escaped laboratory mice, told from the perspective of the mice themselves, much the way another of my favorite animated classics, Plague Dogs is told from the perspective of escaped canine test subjects.

What I didn't know at the time was that the very fanciful story featuring the charming voice talents of Dom DeLuise was inspired by a very real organization. NIMH is an acronym standing for National Institute of Mental Health, a subsidiary of the US Department of Health and Human Services. As a boy, I had thought the organization a flight of fancy, the product of an author's imagination, much like the organization responsible for the antics of James Bond, or the man from U.N.C.L.E.. To the contrary, it is a very real, very prolific research organization. Its Wiki page (for what it's worth) lists the 2010 budget as $1.5B.

In the early 60s, prominent NIMH researcher John B. Calhoun began an experiment (warning: the previous link contains out-of-sample remarks not necessarily supported by the data) in the dewy fields near Poolsville MD. This experiment would later serve as inspirational fodder for one of Wil Wheaton's earliest credits (see for yourself). The experiment was simple enough: introduce mice into an ideal environment with ample room, plentiful food, abundant nesting material, and unlimited water. See what happens.

The early stages were perfectly predictable: the mice reproduced enough to fill the enclosure to capacity, and somewhere in the aether Malthus grimaced in dour approval. The later stages, particularly right before the colony collapsed completely and the last mouse died, were (and remain) of great interest to amateur sociologists. Notably, the mouse Utopia exhibited a breakdown of standard social rules. Dominant males couldn't defend their territory, females became aggressive, and the one curious phenomenon that seems to have gained attention of late, some males withdrew completely, devoting all of their time to grooming, never getting into fights, never mating.

Calhoun called them "The Beautiful Ones."

If you're an amateur sociologist, and you find it tempting to map Calhoun's mice onto human societies, the Japanese Beautiful Ones are 草食(系)男子, soshokukei danshi, grass-eaters in the vulgate. These are pretty boys, passive, obsessed with fashion, often wearing makeup, groomed immaculately. In the US, you might identify Calhoun's Beautiful Ones with the so-called "metrosexual" males of a few years back, or with image-conscious normcore hipsters. You might even go a little more abstract and say that the two chief characteristics of the Beautiful Ones is (a) obsession and (b) withdrawal. If that's the case, Otherkin, Furries, Otaku, Bronies, even a certain stripe of stereotypical gamer would fit the description.

I do not find the hypothesis that a social experiment using mice can predict what will happen to human populations convincing. What I do find convincing is the claim that many post-industrial nations are in the midst of some troubling demographic concerns. What I do find convincing is that unfunded liabilities, public and private, loom shimmering on the time horizon. What I do find convincing is that productivity is slowly becoming decoupled from employment and that negative-marginal-product make-work government jobs are likely to take over as the dominant transfer scheme (unless Morgan Warstler can ever get GI/CYB off the ground, that is), since there is dignity in work, perhaps even the sort of work that has people burying jars of dollar bills in the desert so that others can dig them back up.

With that in mind, can I also consider Otherkin culture to be euvoluntary? If you believe in your heart of hearts that you are, in point of fact, not a human, but rather a dragon, or a hippogriff, or a gelatinous cube, and all my fancy rhetoric and book-learnin' can't convince you to the contrary, does that herald the End of Times? Or more prosaically, does that contribute to the fiscal difficulties implied in the off-balance-sheet accounting of the fisc? Do members of the younger generation have an obligation to support an older generation by procreation?

Individually, the idea sounds monstrous. If personal sovereignty means anything at all, it means that a person's choice to have children or not is up to that person and that person alone. "It is your civic duty to raise children" is a totalitarian sentiment, one you might expect in a Warhammer 40k codex or an Orwell short story. But collectively? Collectively, political elites have no problem fiddling with the tax code, or with workplace regulations, or even with outright bribery (hello, Finland) to encourage marginal births. The family, it seems, is a private arrangement, but a public institution. Do grass-eaters, do otherkin, do shut-ins threaten the wider social order by shirking or avoiding participation in this institution?

Or are they merely canaries in the coal mine, here to warn us of Total Social and Economic Collapse?

Curious. In the meantime, happy yiffing, everyone. Have a Merry Solstice.

White Hat vs Rent Seeking

Firms will often test security measures before rolling them out. They'll subcontract so-called "white-hat" hackers to test the systems to see how easy it is to gain entry. The White Hats then report back to the firm the results of their investigations so that changes can be made, patches applied, and systems secured.

Public Choice economists, along with a number of other disciplines, have noticed that quite a bit of regulatory legislation ends up benefiting the industries under regulation. Sarbanes-Oxley, for example was ostensibly intended to discipline naughty firms engaging in naughty accounting practices. The result of SarbOx, instead, is that it puts an enormous regulatory roadblock in front of any firm seeking to grow beyond the capacity that will trigger its requirements. It creates, in the parlance of economists, a barrier to entry, allowing incumbent firms the latitude to behave more like the textbook monopolists your econ 101 professor warned you about.

White Hat hacking is quite euvoluntary indeed. It's an excellent service that helps enhance customer confidence and reduces risks inherent in electronic commerce. Well, at least when it works as advertised. What do you think about a legislative equivalent? Politics is exchange, after all. Right? How about having a few independent contracting firms take a stab at finding all the "unwanted" loopholes in a piece of legislation and showing how to exploit them so that bills can head back to committee before they hit the floor? Wouldn't that be in the public interest?

Well, if you agree with Zach Weiner, yes. If the purpose of the legislature is solely to act in the public interest, then it'd be great to dot all the i's and cross all the t's before voting. But if I'm right and the legislature is chiefly Humean, there will be absolutely no interest in independent regime arbitrage hacking prior to the release of legislation, as it is not in the unspoken interests of the political elite.

At least, this is my prior belief. I'm not exactly sure how you could test it unless you actually had a legislator's ear. I could say "I bet that within 25 years, there will be no equivalent to a legislative white hat org vetting proposed legislation," but that wouldn't really vindicate the Humean model of political economy, would it? In the meantime, I thought it might be a cute little thought exercise. A what-if to keep in mind for when Andreessen finally funds my comet utopia.

The Horrible Truth of Nien Nunb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Would YOU Do?

What obligation does the man have to report this, or to return the money?

Here's the setup:

A malfunctioning ATM at a bank in Maine has dispensed $37,000 in cash to a man who requested $140. 

South Portland police say they responded to the TD Bank branch Thursday morning after getting a call from a woman who said a man was spending an unusual amount of time at the ATM she was waiting to use. 

Officers found the man stuffing cash into a shopping bag. The money was returned to the bank. Bank officials say they don't want to press charges. But police continue to investigate. The man hasn't been charged. 

A bank official describes the problem as a "code error" and says no customer accounts were affected. 

What would YOU do?  Suppose it was windy, and it was windy because there was a forest fire nearby.  Suppose the money would have burned if he hadn't taken it.  Or blown into the ocean.

I wonder.  I think I would have just returned the money.  But I'm relatively wealthy, and the threat of being charged with a crime is much worse than $37k.  A desperate person might have offered to split it with the woman behind me, so that she won't call the cops.

So, the question, if a rich person can afford to be "moral," but a poor person is coerced by circumstance to be immoral, are we justified in punishing the poor person?  I think the answer is yes, but the fact that I would return the money is not particularly morally praiseworthy.

Final question:  suppose I knew ALMOST for sure I would not be caught.  What amount of cash would it take to induce me to take it, rather than return it?  I think the answer is about $500,000.  So we already know what I am, we are just haggling about the price.

(With a nod to the LMM for the find...)

Let's Nationalize Salon

I occasionally worry my contributions here at EE are excessively preening or self-congratulatory. Regular readers will recognize an element of smug satisfaction when I write of the analytic superiority of Smithian sympathy, when I go out of my way to take others' arguments at face value, to assume sincerity.

I assure you that this is not part of a tiny campaign to demonstrate my moral superiority. I find this habit useful for the singular reason that I absolutely, resolutely refuse to believe that the large bulk of humanity, and more specifically, the loud intellectual elite that rouse their rabble, are in the regular habit of uttering craven lies all the live-long day. It flies in the face of even a moment's reflection to conclude that ordinary citizens bear vituperative intent in their notions of what's best for civil society.

With this in mind, I beg of you to refrain from assuming of me too much conceit when I attempt to lend Fred Jerome the benefit of the doubt when he forwards a proposal to nationalize the media.

Imagine a world without the New York Times, Fox News, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and countless other tools used by the 1 percent to rule and fool.

Easier done than said. State media is an actual thing that actually exists. The USSR, Mao's China, and the Cuban press are but a few examples. Naturally, I assume that when Mr. Jerome invokes the "1 percent" he means the top observations of the GINI curve for wealth and not for political authority. Otherwise, statements like this strain credulity:

In a socialist society run by and for the working people it represents, the mega-monopolies like Walmart, Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, and the corporations that run the tightly controlled "mainstream media” will be a thing of the past.

 Replaced instead by a vision of the "democratic media", where presumably all voices can be heard on an equal footing. That's pretty good for me. Salon.com has 8,000 subscribers on Feedly (I still miss my Google Reader), but we've got 72. I'd be thrilled to have Mr. Jerome's readers sent my way. But that's obviously not what he means. Instead:

But what will the media be like in a socialist USA? There is no blueprint, but in a society that has erased corporate control, the articles in newspapers and magazines and online will not be filler between ads for teeth whiteners and weight-loss pills. There won’t be TV commercials for Coke, cars, or million-dollar condos. There will be no private corporations to create and sponsor the news.

Agents of the state will have the authority to silence "private corporations" who "create and sponsor the news." I assume that in Mr. Jerome's imagination, this censorious authority will munificently refrain from exploiting their privileged position for their own ends. Instead, we shall enjoy a flowering of multiple voices sponsored by the various "labor unions, tenants’ organizations, or citywide parent-teacher associations" of our fair nation. Evidently, these voices are now silenced, my own humble counterexample here at EE notwithstanding.

But here's the moral intuition, right here. Old school socialism:

To be sure, there will be no shortage of economic news in a socialist society. Some news will still come from local and national governments that set product-distribution quotas or help to negotiate them, sponsor trade and international exchange with other countries, and—if the world is still partly controlled by capitalist powers—organize defense against economic (as well as cultural, and possibly military) assaults. But most news reports in socialist media will come from working people themselves.

It's not clear to me that this author has spent much time talking to "working people themselves," because if a factory worker is especially good at filtering, sorting, editing, and creating compelling content, she may well be in the wrong line of work. Let's not focus on that though. Let's even ignore the murderous undertones of organizing defense against military assault.

Actually, let's not ignore that. I think that's actually where the moral intuition is. According to Mr. Jerome's model of private production, concentrated wealth is de facto coercive. And furthermore, it's coercive in a way that the ability to strip individuals of their possessions, deprive them of their liberty, and ultimately execute capital (pun not intended) punishment is not. In Mr. Jerome's political economy, BATNA disparity is a worse offense than the insoluble problem of production in a socialist economy.

I do vanity searches for "euvoluntary" pretty regularly, and the term shows up from time to time. Once in a while I'll come across a sentiment along the lines of "if it ain't euvoluntary, it ain't voluntary." This is fascinating on many levels, not the least of which is that communist-leaning folks read Munger (and hey, maybe me too, who knows?). If you ask me, the Jerome model is consistent with this sentiment. Because of the editorial process, journalism is not especially euvoluntary.

It takes a special kind of reasoning to move from that mundane observation to "therefore our duly elected representatives owe the constituency the duty to muzzle the paper hounds of the popular press." I too take great issue with the venom spewed by large news organizations. My solution is to share my thoughts with you here rather than silencing the analytically vapid dirty laundresses on cable news channels. I endeavor to practice euvoluntary exchange to the best of my limited ability. I seek neither dominion nor violence. By my estimate, the finest answer to the hogwash on TV and in print is to offer better content. If I'm a good enough writer, the readers will come. If I fail the market test, so long as no one is forcing your eyeballs elsewhere, it's infantile to assign the blame to organizations who are better than I at attracting attention. Shutting them down by force is institutionalized envy. I have little enough interest in encoding virtue into the function of the state. I have no interest whatsoever in wedding the coercive authority in society with one of the more base vices.

h/t to FiSH for the link




Happy birthday, Lysander Spooner! When the dead rise from their graves, yours'll be the last corpse I torch with my homemade flamethrower!

Shall We Crucify Mankind on a Cross of Austerity?

My post on the 17th Amendment got me thinking about William Jennings Bryan. What a character that guy was. He enjoys lingering fame for his efforts to force a newly-strengthened Washington DC to acknowledge and reflect the Will of the People. But most interestingly, he's also possessed of his fair share of infamy thanks to his participation in The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and the embarrassing drubbing he got on the stand at the hands of Clarence Darrow: "We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States." Ouch.

It's not my purpose here to dredge up the ugliness of the early Progressives. Instead, consider Bryan's approach to free exchange between consenting adults: those exchanges against which he bore enmity were to be the subject of control by the state. He did not champion for the virtue of temperance, he championed for the vice of wrath, channeled through the iron truncheon of the 19th Amendment.

In retrospect, we look back at the moral shortcomings of Bryan and men like him and chortle at their bucolic, benighted values, smirking and patting ourselves on the back at our obviously superior morality.

Yet still we turn to the unremitting power of the state to ossify our evaluations of euvoluntarity, expecting the eschaton ere long. Scott Sumner tries to sell monetary policy as a free lunch. Paul Krugman says that anyone who disagrees with him is a liar, a fool, or worse.

W.J. Bryan's arrogance did a lot of damage. Apart from being a prohibitionist, he was a war hawk. Sumner and Krugman probably won't be responsible for the rise of a large criminal underclass or the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young men in the cold Continental mud, but is it at least possible that history will judge each of us poorly? Is it possible that our grave certitude is inexact? Is it possible that we're wrong?

Therein lies the comparison: what are the relative consequences between a) being right and failing to act and b) being wrong and acting. This is a hardheaded question that deserves clear, hardheaded thinking. The euvoluntarity of future generations depends on it.

What are your null hypotheses?