Why Openers Are Winning

By Robin Hanson · May 5, 2020 7:50 am · Comments (3)

Three main relevant groups have vied lately to influence pandemic policy: public, elites, and experts. Initially, public health experts dominated, even when they screwed up. But then they seemed to publicly assume that it was too late to contain Covid19, and the only viable option was “flattening the curve” to get herd immunity. At that point, elite opinion worldwide objected loudly, and insisted that containment be the official policy.

Experts and the public demurred, and elites got their way. Everywhere in the world, all at once, strong lockdown polices began, and containment became the official goal. But elites did not insist on any particular standard containment policy. Such as, for example, the packages of polices that seem to have worked initially in Wuhan or South Korea. Instead elites seemed satisfied to let the politicians and experts in each jurisdiction craft their own policy packages, as long as they seemed “strong”, involving much public sacrifice. And they allowed official public messages suggesting that relatively short durations would be sufficient.

A few months later, those duration periods are expiring. And in the different jurisdictions, the diverse policies now sit next to quite diverse outcomes. In some places, infections are low or declining, while in others they are flat or increasing. The public is feeling the accumulated pain, and itching to break out. If these flat or increasing trends continue, containment will fail, and lockdown harms will soon exceed plausible future gains from preventing medical system overload.

Elites are now loudly and consistently saying that this is not time to open; we must stay closed and try harder to contain. When confronted with the discouraging recent trends, elites respond with a blizzard of explanations for local failures, and point to a cacophony of prophets with plans and white papers declaring obvious solutions.

But, and this is the key point, they mostly point to different explanations and solutions. For example, this polls shows very little agreement on the key problem:

So while the public will uniformly push for more opening, elites and experts push in a dozen different directions. If elites would all back the same story and solution, as they did before, they would probably get it. If they would say “We agree that this is what we did wrong over the last few months, and this is the specific policy package that will produce much different outcomes over the next few months.” But they aren’t saying this.

So elites and experts don’t speak with a unified voice, while the public does. And that’s why the public will win. While the public tends to defer to elites and experts, and even now still defers a lot, this deference is gradually weakening. We are starting to open, and will continue to open, as long as opening is the main well-supported alternative to the closed status quo, which we can all see isn’t working as fast as expected, and plausibly not fast enough to be a net gain. Hearing elites debate a dozen other alternatives, each supported by different theories and groups, will not be enough to resist that pressure to open.

Winning at politics requires more than just prestige, good ideas, and passion. It also requires compromise, to produce sufficient unity. At this game, elites are now failing, while the public is not.

Added 3p: Many are reading me as claiming that the public is unified in the sense of agreeing on everything. But I only said that the public pushes will will tend to be correlated in a particular direction, in contrast with the elite pushes which are much more diverse. Some also read me as claiming that strong majorities of the public support fast opening, but again that’s not what I said.

Added 6May: Here is data suggesting people are getting out more. Here is data suggesting increasing support for opening.

Added 7May: This poll suggests patience is thin. Lognormal fit says only willing to wait median of 1.2 months (mode 0.08, mean 4.7).

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Social Network Games

By Robin Hanson · May 4, 2020 12:00 pm · Comments (0)

I’m not very good at social networking, but by now I’m old enough to see the value in many skills that I don’t have. One problem is that you often need to invest in networks many years before you plan to draw on them. Another is that it isn’t at all clear to young nerds, as I was once, what sorts of connections and relations would end up being most valuable later. Especially if you have big doubts about where your career and interests may go.

What if we could create games to show and teach social networking skills? And perhaps even to encourage the creation of useful networks? As nerds like games, we might tempt nerdy kids to play them, and we might subsidize such games as a society, to induce stronger denser social networks. There are plausibly externalities by which we all benefit when we all have longer stronger networks.

The tricky part, of course, is figuring out what exactly should happen in these games. We don’t want them to encourage just any social networks; we want the networks that are actually socially helpful. So we don’t obviously just want to encourage people to have more LinkedIn connections or Facebook friends, or to join and rise within multilevel Ponzi-like marketing systems like Amway. At least we don’t while we remain uncertain about the marginal value of more connections in such systems.

Ideally, we want people to be usefully selective about who they include in their network, and to whom they make referrals. We want to give them incentives to evaluate potential network partners well for suitability in various networking roles. But holding constant such evaluation and selectivity, we also want people to put in the work to collect more network partners.

For example, imagine that we periodically announced prizes shared among everyone in the first network path to connect a person of type X to a person of type Y. Say, a someone with a particular foot problem to someone who knows well how to deal with that problem. From what space of X,Y pairs should we draw for tied prizes to induce the most socially valuable networks?

Being not good at social networking, I’m probably also not good at making such proposals. But I might be better at evaluating such proposals, or more generally at social network game proposals. So please, you of my associates who like inventing games or who understand social networking better, do make such suggestions for I and others to evaluate.

Btw, negative liability would seem to help encourage such networks.

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The Plan A Winner’s Circle Alliance

By Robin Hanson · May 2, 2020 9:40 am · Comments (1)

Plan A is how to contain Covid19 until a vaccine or other strong treatment shows up. Plan B is how to deal with Plan A failing, and a substantial fraction (>20%) of the population getting infected.

While I’ve mostly focused on Plan B analysis, many nations and sub-regions seem to be doing okay so far at Plan A, keeping infections low and now declining in rate. It isn’t at all clear that they can maintain this until a vaccine arrives, but it is clear that they will keep trying for a while. And most other places have been shamed into giving lip service to Plan A. So much so that they may well induce much more damage from such efforts than they’d suffer from quitting and moving on to Plan B.

Soon the places that are doing well under Plan A will consider carefully relaxing their controls, while standing ready to reassert them should infections rise. And one of their key choices will be how much contact to have with other places. They will be much more willing to interact with places that also seem to be doing well at Plan A.

If X opens to Y who opens to Z, that makes X vulnerable to Z. Thus a winner’s circle of places doing well at Plan A will want to coordinate on who opens to who. They may want to share monitoring efforts re who is worthy to join their circle, and standards re how to grade their openings. And how to prevent hidden openings to the contagious centers that are failing at Plan A. And eventually, how if at all to open to places that fail so much as to achieve local “herd immunity”.

I’m not sure what names people will give to these two groups. Competent circle versus incompetent basket case centers? Clean versus unclean? High vs low state capacity? But whatever they are called, the US seems a likely candidate to stay in the bad group, with Europe a close second, and US rivals will eagerly push for a new international alignment that keeps them there.

US and European prestige will take a huge hit if this situation persists long. You might think this would shame us into reorganizing better to succeed, but apparently not. Yet we seem inclined to pay large costs to pursue plan A with our poor organization. So we risk the worst of both: trashing our economy far more than do they, and yet still ending up excluded from the winner’s circle.

Of course if success at Plan A is only temporary, and infections from the contagious centers infect most of the world before vaccines arrive, it will be the Plan B places who achieve herd immunity that will form the growing and relatively successful alliance. In that case, the Plan A alliance will shrink and suffer while they limit their connections to the Plan B group.

Note that places that achieve herd immunity have less need to coordinate on who they open to. And if these really organized into hostile alliances of nations, some may be willing to do the extreme things that nations have long done against competing alliances. The Plan A alliance may accuse the Plan B group of trying to infect them on purpose, and in at least some cases, they may be right.

Added 2May: Here’s an article on a Plan A alliance.

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Constant Elasticity Prevention

By Robin Hanson · April 30, 2020 11:40 am · Comments (1)

While many engaged Analysis #1 in my last post, only one engaged Analysis #2. So let me try again, this time with a graph.

This is about a simple model of prevention, one that assumes a constant elasticity (= power law) between harm and prevention effort. An elasticity of 1 means that 1% more effort cuts harm by 1%. For an elasticity of 2, then 1% more effort cuts harm by 2%, while for an elasticity of 0.5, 1% more effort cuts harm by 0.5%.

Such simple “reduced form” models are common in many fields, including economics. Yes of course the real situation is far more complex than this. Even so, reduced forms are typically decent approximations for at least small variations around a reference policy. As with all models, they are wrong, but can be useful.

Each line in the following graph shows how total loss, i.e., the sum of harm and prevention effort, varies with the fraction of that loss coming from prevention. The different lines are for different elasticities, and the big dots which match the color of their lines show the optimum choice on each line to min total loss. (The lines all intersect at prevention = 1/20, harm = 20.)

As you can see, for min total loss you want to be on a line with higher elasticity, where prevention effort is more effective at cutting harm. And the more effective is prevention effort, then the more effort you want to put in, which will result in a larger fraction of the total harm coming from prevention effort.

So if locks are very effective at preventing theft, you may well pay a lot more for locks on than you ever suffer on average in theft. And in the US today, the elasticity of crime with respect to spending on police is ~0.3, explaining why we suffer ~3x more losses from crime than we spend on police to prevent crime.

Recently, I asked a few polls on using lockdown duration as a way to prevent pandemic deaths. In these polls, I asked directly for estimates of elasticity, and in this poll, I asked for estimates of the ratio of prevention to health harm loss. And here I asked if if the ratio is above one.

In the above graph there is a red dot on the 0.5 elasticity line. In the polls, 56% estimate that our position will be somewhere to the right of the red dot on the graph, while 58% estimate that we will be somewhere above that grey 0.5% elasticity line (with less elasticity). Which means they expect us to do too much lockdown.

Fortunately, the loss at that red dot is “only” 26% higher than at the min of the grey line. So if this pandemic hurts the US by ~$4T, the median poll respondents expects “only” an extra $1T lost due to extra lockdown. Whew. Of course they could be wrong.

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2 Lockdown Cost-Benefit Analyses

By Robin Hanson · April 27, 2020 6:45 pm · Comments (7)

Back on Mar. 21 I complained that I hadn’t seen any cost-benefit analyses of the lockdown policies that had just been applied where I live. Some have been posted since, but I’ve finally bothered to make my own. Here are two.

ANALYSIS #1: One the one side are costs of economic disruption. I estimate that a typical strong lockdown cuts 27% of econ/social value gained per unit time, relative to income. (Though some double this estimate when accounting for stress and mental health harms.) If lockdown last 4 months, perhaps on and off spread out over a longer period, that’s a total of 9% of a year’s income lost.

On the other side are losses due to infection. I estimate an average infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.5%, and half as much additional harm to those who don’t die, due to other infection harms. (E.g., 3% have severe symptoms, and 40% of those get 20% disabled.) I estimate that eventually half would get infected, and assume the recovered are immune. Because most victims are old, the average number of life years lost seems to be about 12. (Though time discounting and quality adjustment arguably cut that figure in half.) And a standard health-econ estimate is that a life-year is worth about twice annual income. Multiply these together and you get an expected loss of 9% of a year’s income..

As these equal the same amount, it seems a convenient reference point for analysis. Thus, if we believed these estimates, we should be indifferent between doing nothing and a policy of spending 4 added months of lockdown (beyond the perhaps 1-2 months that might happen without government rules) to prevent all deaths, perhaps because a vaccine would come by then. Or, if death rates would actually be double this estimate due to an overloaded medical system, we should be indifferent between doing nothing and spending 4 added months of lockdown to avoid that overloading. Or we should be indifferent between doing nothing and 2 added months of lockdown which somehow cut the above estimated death rate in half.

Unfortunately, the usual “aspirational” estimate for a time till vaccine is over 4 times longer, or 18 months. And a doubling of death rates seems a high estimate for medical system overload effects, perhaps valid sometimes but not usually. It seems hard to use that to argue for longer lockdown periods when medical systems are not nearly overwhelmed. Especially in places like the US with far more medical capacity.

During the 1918 flu epidemic, duration variations around the typical one month lockdown had no noticeable effect on overall deaths. In the US lately we’ve also so far seen no correlation between earlier lockdowns and deaths. And people consistently overestimate the value of medical treatment. Also, as death rates for patients on the oft-celebrated ventilators is 85%, they can’t cut deaths by more than 15%.

We’ve had about 1.5 months of lockdown so far where I live. A short added lockdown seems likely to just delay deaths by a few months, not to cut them much, while a long one seems likely to do more damage than could possibly be saved by cutting deaths.

Of course you don’t have to agree with my reference estimates above. But ask yourself how you’d change them, and what indifferences your new estimates imply. Yes, there are places in the world that seem to have done the right sort of lockdown early enough in the process to get big gains, at least so far. But if your place didn’t start that early nor is doing that right sort of lockdown, can you really expect similar benefits now?

ANALYSIS #2: Consider the related question: how much should we pay to prevent crime?

Assume a simple power-law (= constant elasticity) relation between the cost H of the harm resulting directly from the crimes committed, and the cost P of efforts to prevent crime:

H = k*P–a,  or  dlnH / dlnP = –a ,

where a is the (positive) elasticity of harm H with respect to prevention P. To minimize total loss L = H + P, you set P = (k*a)1/(1+a), at which point we have a nice simple expression for the cost ratio, namely P/H = a.

So, when you do it right, the more effective is prevention at stopping harm, then the larger is the fraction of total loss due to prevention. If 1% more prevention effort cuts 1% of crime, you should lose about the same amounts from harm and prevention. If 1% more prevention cuts 2% of crime, then you should lose twice as much in prevention as you do in harm. And if it takes 2% more prevention effort to cut 1% of crime, you should lose about twice as much in harm as you do in prevention.

This model roughly fits two facts about US crime spending: the elasticity is less than one, and most loss comes from the crimes themselves, rather than prevention efforts. Typical estimates of elasticity are around 0.3 (ranging 0.1-0.7). US governments spend $280B a year on police, courts, and jails, and private security spends <$34B. Estimates of the total costs of crime range $690-3410B.

Now consider Covid19 prevention efforts. In this poll respondents said 3.44 to 1 that more harm will come from econ disruption than from direct health harms. And in this poll, 56% say that more than twice the loss will come from econ disruption. For that to be optimal in this constant elasticity model, a 10% increase in lockdown, say adding 12 days to a 4 month lockdown, must cut total eventual deaths (and other illness harm) by over 20%. That seems very hard to achieve, and in this poll 42% said they expect us to see too much econ disruption, while only 29% thought we’d see too little.

(More on Analysis #2 in the next post.)

In this post I’ve outlined two simple analyses of lockdown tradeoffs. Both suggest that we are at serious risk of doing too much lockdown.

10am: On reflection, I changed my estimate of the lockdown from 25% to 27% of income, and my estimate of non-death harm from as-much-as to half-as-much-as the death harm. So my reference added shutdown duration is now 4 months instead of 6.

12pm: Even if recovery gave immunity for only a limited period, then as long as you were considering lockdown durations less than that period, the above calculation still applies, but now it applies to each such period. For example, if immunity only lasts a year, then these are annual costs, not eventual costs. And that’s only if infection chances are independent each period. If, more likely, it is the same people who at more at risk each year, then in later years gains from lockdowns decline.

29Apr, 3am: We are now at 73 comments, and so far all of them are about analysis #1, and none about analysis #2. Also, tweet on #1 got 18 retweets, tweet on #2 got none.

29Apr, 1pm: In two more polls. over half estimate a 10% increase in lockdown duration gives <5% decrease in deaths, for both world and US. Instead of the >20% that would be required to justify allowing twice the damage of lockdowns as health harms.

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Vouch For Pandemic Passports

By Robin Hanson · April 24, 2020 8:40 pm · Comments (0)

Car pollution is an externality. Via pollution, the behavior of some hurts others, an effect that injurers may not take into account unless encouraged to by norm, contract, liability, or regulation. However, as the pollution from one vehicle mixes with that from many others, liability is poorly suited to discourage this; it is too hard to identify which cars hurt you, and there are too many of them. It seems to work better use regulations regarding car design and maintenance to limit the pollution emitted per mile driven, and to tax those miles driven.

Assault is also an externality; you can hurt someone by punching them. But in contrast to pollution, regulation is poorly suited to assault. We could require everyone to wear boxing globes and headgear, and we might ban insults and alcohol consumption, or perhaps even all socializing. But such regulations would go too far in restricting useful behavior. It works better to just hold liable those who punch others, via tort or criminal law. Yes, to discourage assault in this way, we must hold (or at least threaten to hold) expensive trials for each assault. But that still seems far cheaper than regulatory solutions.

These two examples illustrate a well-known tradeoff in choosing between (strict) liability and regulation. On the one hand, making people pay damages when they hurt others encourages them to take such harms into account, while also letting their behavior flexibly adapt to other context. On the other hand, regulation lets us avoid expensive court trials that require victims to prove who hurt who when where and how much. Though regulation induces more uniform behavior that is less well adapted to circumstances, it works acceptably well in many cases, like auto pollution, even if less well in others, like assault. (The mixed solution of negligence liability is discussed below.)

In our current pandemic, the main externality is infection, whereby one person exposes another to the virus. Conventional public health wisdom says to discourage infection via regulation: tell everyone when to get tested and isolated, and make them tell you who they met when and where. Tell them who can leave home when and for what reasons, and what they must wear out there. However, as we are all now experiencing first hand, not only are such changes to our usual behaviors quite expensive, such rules can also induce far from optimal behavior.

Recent pandemic rules have banned bike riding, but not cars or long walks. You can take only one exercise trip per day, but there’s no limit on how long. Members of a big home can all meet in their yard together, but members of two small adjacent homes may not meet in one of their yards. You can’t go meet distant friends, even if they only ever meet you. All parks are closed regardless of how densely people would be in there. The same rules were set in dense cities and in sparse rural areas. Alcohol store workers are deemed critical, even though alcohol can be mailed, but not auto repair, which cannot be mailed. Six feet is declared the safe distance, regardless of how long we stay near, if we wear masks, if we are outdoors, or which way the air is moving. Workplaces are closed regardless of the number of workers, how closely they interact, or how many other contacts each of them have. The same rules apply to all regardless of age or other illness. You may have to wear a mask, but it doesn’t have to be a good one.

Imagine that we instead used legal (strict) liability to make as many of us as possible expect to suffer personally and directly from infecting others, and to suffer more-so the worse their symptoms. In this scenario, such people would try to take all these factors and more into account in choosing their actions. For actions that risk infecting others, they would consider not only on how important such acts are to them, but also on how likely they are personally to be infected now, how vulnerable each other person they come near might be to suffering from an infection, how vigorously their activity moves the air near them, where such air currents are likely to go, how well different kinds of masks hinder infected air, and so on. If allowed, they might even choose variolation.

Of course, for the purpose of protecting ourselves from getting infected by others, we already have substantial incentives to attend to such factors. The problem is that simple regulations don’t give us good incentives to attend to these factors for the purpose of preventing us from infecting others. With regulations, we have incentives to follow the letter of the law, but not its spirit. So we don’t do enough in some ways, and yet do too much in others. But if liability could make us care about infecting others as well as ourselves, then it might simultaneously reduce both infections and the economic and social disruptions caused by lockdowns. With strong and clear enough liability incentives, we wouldn’t need regulations; we could just let people choose when and how to work, shop, travel, etc.

But is it feasible to use liability to discourage infections? Yes, if we can satisfy two conditions: (1) most people are actually able to pay for damages if they are successfully sued for infecting others, and (2) enough of those who infect others are actually and successfully sued, and so made to pay.

On the first condition, ensuring that people can pay damages if they are found guilty, it is sufficient to require people who mix with others to buy infection liability insurance, similar to how we now require car drivers to get accident liability insurance. That is, to get a “pandemic passport” to excuse you from a strong lockdown, you must get an insurance company to guarantee that you will pay damages if you are shown to have infected someone. In a sense they “vouch” for you, and so are your “voucher”. The more types of voucher-client contract terms we are willing to enforce, the more levers vouchers gain to reduce risks.

The premiums for such insurance will be low if you can convince a voucher that you have already recovered from the virus, and so are relatively immune, or that you will leave your lockdown only rarely, to safe destinations. Otherwise, a voucher may require you to install an app on your phone to track your movements, or they may spot check your claims that you have sufficient supply of good masks that you use reliably when you leave home.

Okay, but what about the second condition, that enough infectors are actually made to pay? For this we need enough data to be collected on both sides, the infector and the infected, so that one can frequently enough match the two, to conclude that this person likely infected that one at this location at this time.

Now, we don’t need to be always absolutely sure of who infected who. In ordinary civil trials, the standard is a “preponderance of the evidence”; courts need only be 51% or more sure to convict the defendant. And sometimes we add on extra “punitive” damages, up to four ties as large as basic damages, often to compensate for a lower chance of catching offenders. So if we can find evidence to convince a court at the 51% or better standard for only one fifth of offenders, but we can add four times punitive damages, then offenders who do not know if they will be caught still expect to on average to pay near the basic damage amount.

Okay, but we still need to collect enough info to see who infected who at least one fifth of the time. Is this feasible? Well it is clearly quite feasible early in a pandemic, when few have been infected. Early on, if the times and places, i.e., space-time path, consistent with you being infected then and there overlap with the space-time path when someone else was likely infectious, then it was most likely their fault. This is the “contact trace” process usually recommended by public health workers early in a pandemic.

The problem gets harder later in a pandemic, when your infected path may overlap with the infectious paths of many others. Here it might be possible to use info on which virus strain you and they had to narrow the field. But even so there may still be several consistent candidates. In this case it seems reasonable to divide the liability over all of them, perhaps in proportion to the size of the path overlap. For the purpose of creating incentives to avoid infecting others, it isn’t that important to know later who exactly infected who when.

But yes, we still need info on who was infected and infectious where and when, perhaps supplemented by data on who had what virus strains. How can we get this info? People who might get infected have incentives to collect info on their path, to help them sue if infected. But people who might infect others would seem to want to erase such info, to keep them from being sued. I’ve recently outlined a more general approach to induce the collection of info sufficiently likely to be useful in later lawsuits. But for this essay, I’ll just propose that collecting key info be another condition required to get a pandemic passport, with violations punished by fines also guaranteed by your voucher.

Let me also note that yes, legal liability doesn’t work to discourage harms if typical harms get so small that people wouldn’t bother to sue to recover damages. In this case we could use a random lottery approach to dramatically lower the average cost of suing.

So let’s put this all together. You must stay at home, locked down, unless you get a “pandemic passport”, in which case you can go where you want when, to meet anyone. To get such a passport, you must get someone to vouch for you. They guarantee that you will pay should someone successfully sue you for infecting them, if you agree to their terms of premiums, behavior, monitoring, punishment, and co-liability. Defendants who pay damages may have to pay extra, to compensate for most infectors not getting caught in this way. When several infector candidates are consistent with the data, they can divide the damages. And for low damage levels, a random lottery approach can lower court costs.

To get and keep a passport, your voucher also guarantees that you will collect info that can help others to show that you infected them, but which can also help you to sue others if they infect you, and win you bounties via showing that others did not collect required info. For example, perhaps you must track your movements in space and time, regularly record some symptoms like body temperature, and also save regular spit samples. This info is available to be subpoenaed by those who can show sufficient reason to suspect that you infected them. Such info seems sufficient to catch enough infectors.

And by catching a sufficient fraction of infectors who then actually pay on average for the harms that they cause by infecting, (strict) legal liability can give sufficient incentives to individuals to avoid infecting others. If so, we don’t need crude lockdown regulations telling people what to do when and how; individuals can instead more flexibly adapt to details of their context in deciding when and where to work, shop, travel etc. Yes, voucher rules would not let them do such things as freely as they would in the absence of a pandemic. But behavior would be more free and impose lower economic costs than under crude regulations which similarly suppress the pandemic spread.

Note that today the most common form of legal liability is actually negligence, which we can see as a mixed form between simple regulation and simple strict liability. With negligence, the court judges if your behavior has been consistent with good behavior standards, which are essentially behavior regulations. But you are only punished for violating these regulations in situations where your behavior contributed to the harm of a particular person. Today courts tend to limit strict liability to cases where courts find it hard to define or observe good behavior details, such as using explosives, keeping a pet tiger, or making complex product design choices. As courts find it harder to define and observe good behavior in a new pandemic, strict liability seems better suited to this case.

Note also that none of this requires employers to be liable for their infected employees. Someone who is sued for infecting others may turn around and blame their employer for pushing them into situations that cause them to infect others. Employer-employee contract could usefully address such issues.

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Why Does Govt Do Stuff?

By Robin Hanson · April 23, 2020 9:20 am · Comments (1)

Looking across the many different activities and sectors of society, how well can we predict where governments get more vs. less involved?

Though this is an oft discussed topic, I can’t recall seeing an overall theory summary. So I thought I’d write one up. Here are some big relevant factors, and areas they may explain. Most are tentative; you may well convince me to move/change/add them.

Control – Whomever runs the government prefers to control areas that can be used to prevent and resist opposition and rivals.
Predicts more: religion, military, police, law, news, schools, disaster response, electricity, energy, banking.

Scale – If supplying a product or service has strong economies of scale, network, or coordination, it can be cheaper to use one integrated organization, who if private may demand excessive prices and thereby threaten control.
Predicts more: military, “roads” (including air, boat travel support), social media, money, language, electricity, telecom, water, sewer, trash, parks, fire, software, fashion, prestige
Predicts less: housing, food, medicine, art, entertainment, news, police, jail.

Innovation – As governments seem less able to encourage or accommodate effective innovation, governments tend to be less involved in rapidly evolving sectors.
Predicts more: roads, water, sewer, track, parks.
Predicts less: military hardware, vehicles, tech/computers, entertainment, social networks.

Variety – Governments tend to encourage and be better at relatively standardized products and services, done with fewer versions, more the same for everyone everywhere at all times.
Predicts more: war, medicine, schools, disaster response, roads.
Predicts less: housing, food, entertainment, romance, parenting, friendship, humor.

Norms – Norms are shared, and we like to enforce them together, officially.
Predicts more: religion, law, war, romance, parenting, medicine, drugs, gambling, slavery, language, manners, sports.

Show Unity – As we want to show that we are together, and care about each other, we like to do the things we to do to show such care together in a unified way.
Predicts more: religion, poverty/unemployment/health insurance, school, medicine, fire, parks, housing, food, disaster response, trash/sewer, coverage expansion subsidies.

Show Off – We want to impress outsiders with our tastes, abilities.
Predicts more: research, schools, high art, high sport, roads, parks, shared space architecture, trash/sewer.
Predicts less: low art/entertainment, low sport, gossip.

Hypocrisy – When we profess some motives, but others are stronger, the opacity and slack of government agencies, and better ability to suppress critiques, makes them better able to hide such differences.
Predicts more: medicine, drugs, gambling, schools, police, jail, courts, romance, zoning, building codes, war, banking.
Predicts less: water, sewers, electricity.

If we could collect even crude stats on how often or far govt is involved in each area, and crudely rate each area-factor combo for how strongly that factor applies to that area, we could do a more formal analysis of which of factors predict better where.

Note that scale is the strongest factor suggesting that govt does more when more govt helps more. Innovation and variety suggest that also when those factors are the cause of govt involvement, but much less so if those features are the result. While norms are on average valuable, it is much less clear when govt support improves them. Most signaling likely helps each society that does it, but is done too much for the good of the world overall.

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Subpoena Futures

By Robin Hanson · April 20, 2020 1:50 pm · Comments (2)

A subpoena … is a writ issued by a government agency, most often a court, to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. … party being subpoenaed has the right to object to the issuance of the subpoena, if it is for an improper purpose, such as subpoenaing records that have no relevance to the proceedings, or subpoenaing persons who would have no evidence to present, or subpoenaing records or testimony that is confidential or privileged. (More)

Parties may obtain discovery regarding any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party’s claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case, considering the importance of the issues at stake in the action, the amount in controversy, the parties’ relative access to relevant information, the parties’ resources, the importance of the discovery in resolving the issues, and whether the burden or expense of the proposed discovery outweighs its likely benefit. (More)

Exceptions are quite limited: self-incrimination, illegally-obtained info, and privileges of spouses, priests, doctors, diplomats, and lawyers. The remarkable fact is that the law has little general respect for privacy. Unless you can invoke one of these specific privileges, you must publicly report to the court any info that it thinks sufficiently relevant to a current court case. You simply have no general right to or expectation of privacy re stuff a court wants to know. Courts don’t even compensate you for your costs to collect evidence or appear to testify.

And yet. Consider what I wrote March 5:

The straightforward legal remedy for [pandemic] externalities is to let people sue others for infecting them. In the past this remedy has seemed inadequate for two reasons:

1. It has often been expensive and hard to learn and prove who infected who, and
2. … most folks just can’t pay large legal debts.
The vouching system directly solves (2), … And the key to (1) is ensuring that the right info is collected and saved.

First, consider some new rules that would limit people’s freedoms in some ways. Imagine people were required to keep an RFID tag (or visible QR code) on their person when not at home, and also to save a sample of their spit or skin once a week? Then phones could remember a history of the tags of people near that phone, and lawsuits could subpoena to get surveillance records of possible infection events, and to see if spit/skin samples on nearby dates contain a particular pathogen, and its genetic code if present. We might also adopt a gambled lawsuit system to make it easier to sue for small harms. (More)

Here, to help law deal with pandemics, I was tempted to propose specific rules re info that people must collect and preserve. Yet if courts can get any info they think relevant, why is there ever a problem with courts lacking info to deal with key harms, such as pandemic infection?

The answer is that current law allows a huge exception to its subpoena power. Courts can force you to reveal info that you have already collected, on paper, a computer, in your head, or in your physical objects. But you usually have no obligation to collect and save info now that the court might want later. As a result, many people and orgs go out of their way to not save incriminating info. For example, firms do key discussions verbally, not recorded, rather than via email. Thus you have no obligation to save spit samples or detailed records of where your phone goes, to help with future pandemic infection lawsuits.

This seems a huge and inconsistent loophole. I could understand if the law wanted to respect a more general right to privacy. Then the court might weigh the value of some info in helping court cases against the social harm from forcing its publication via a subpoena. As a result, it might sometimes block a subpoena even when the info collected would be relevant to a court case.

But I can’t see a reason to eagerly insist on access to info that seems relevant to a court case, and yet put no effort into inducing people to collect and preserve such info beforehand. So I propose that we create a legal process by which legal judgements are made on, if collected and saved, how likely some info would be to be subpoenaed, and how valuable it would be in that case.

When info would be valuable enough if collected and saved, then the court should require this. I don’t have a strong opinion on who exactly should bring a suit asking that such info be saved, or who should represent the many who would have to save that info. But one obvious system that occurs to me is to just have courts usually make ex post estimates of info value by the end of each court case, and then use “subpoena futures” prediction markets to make an estimate of that value ahead of time. (And make it legal and cheap to start such markets.)

So, if a subpoena futures market on a type of info estimates its expected court value to be above a standard threshold, then by law that info must be collected and saved. These prediction markets needn’t be huge in number, if they could estimate the average value of such info collect over a large group, which would then justify requiring that entire group collect the info. Such as everyone in an area who might infect others with a pandemic. If some subgroup wanted to claim that such info wasn’t less valuable regarding them, and so they should be excused, why they’d have to create different prediction markets to justify their different estimates.

For example, when a pandemic appears, if those who might infect others are likely vouched, then those who might be infected would want to require that first group to collect and save info that could be used later to prove who infected who. So they’d create prediction markets on the likely court value of spit samples and phone location records, and use market estimates to get courts to require the collection of that info.

Compared to my prior suggestion of just having the law directly require that such info be collected, this subpoena futures approach seems more flexible and general. What other harms that we do each other could be better addressed by lawsuits if we could require that relevant info be collected and saved?

(Btw, courts need not estimate info value in money terms. They might instead express the value of each piece of info in terms of its multiple of a “min info unit”, i.e., the value of info where they’d be just on the border of allowing it to be subpoenaed for a particular case.)

Added 7a: As mentioned in this comment, we now have this related legal concept:

Spoliation of evidence is the intentional, reckless, or negligent withholding, hiding, altering, fabricating, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding …The spoliation inference is a negative evidentiary inference that a finder of fact can draw from a party’s destruction of a document or thing that is relevant to an ongoing or reasonably foreseeable civil or criminal proceeding.

My proposal can be seen as expanding this concept to allow a much weaker standard of “foreseeable”. And instead of allowing a presumption at trial, we just require the evidence to actually be collected.

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What Can Money Buy Directly?

By Robin Hanson · April 19, 2020 8:45 pm · Comments (0)

Can money buy oranges? Well obviously, in an indirect sense. With money, you could travel to a place where you’ve heard oranges grow wild, search to find such a plant in the wild, dig it up and try to ship it home, see if it you can make it thrive there, and if it does, take some oranges as your reward. This might work, but success depends not just on the money you pay; it also depends much more on your effort, abilities, and other context. In principle, you might be able to execute this plan without any money, but typically more money will make such a plan a bit easier. So, yes, in this weak sense, you can “buy” oranges with money.

At an ordinary grocery store, however, you can buy oranges much more directly. You go to the produce section, look for the orange color, walk to the pile of oranges, take as many as you want, and pay the price per orange at the register. Or at a full service grocery, you might just say “six oranges please” and a grocer would go find and bag them for you. Online, you might just type in “orange”, enter “6” for quantity, and click “buy”.

These ways to buy oranges are usually pretty reliable even for an ordinary person who knows little about oranges. Using these methods, the number of oranges you get depends mainly on how much money you are willing to pay, and much less on other context. This is what I mean by buying something “directly.” And so regarding the oft-asked question “what can money buy?”, a more interesting version of this question is “What can money buy relatively directly.”

As more money makes most any plan a bit easier to achieve, the many long lists one can find of “things money can’t buy” are in one sense obviously wrong; money helps with most of them. And if they just mean that money can’t guarantee the max level of each thing, that’s obvious, but trivial, as pretty much nothing guarantees that. You can’t even guarantee you’ll get oranges if you order them from a grocery. And if that is the meaning, why pick on money, relative to anything else that might greatly but imperfectly help you get things?

Perhaps what people mean is that money isn’t the main factor that determines if you succeed with such things; money can be a distraction from more important issues. But if so, that seems to claim that you can’t buy such things directly. Which then raises the key question: for what kinds of things can the money you pay be a strong factor in determining how much of it you get? That is, what can money buy directly?

In my last post, I talked about how one can buy higher wages, via a job agent. I wasn’t saying that there are complex and subtle ways to spend money to help your career, ways that could work if only you were clever and skilled enough to understand and apply them. I was instead saying that there is a simple direct way to do this, one most anyone can understand: hire an agent (and anti-agent). That method doesn’t guarantee you any particular wage, but it does let you control how much you pay per wage increase.

In fact, I’ll go further now, and say that there seem to be ways to measure most anything, and as a result we can buy most any measured thing relatively simply and directly. That is, via a simple method that most anyone can come to understand, you can just point to what you want, put cash on the table, and then lose cash in proportion to how much you get of what you want. And the relation is substantially causal; paying more can cause you to get more, even when you have little relevant ability or understanding.

In the academic literature, this method is called an “incentive contract”. You find a way to measure the outcome you want, you offer to give someone access to levers by which they can plausibly influence this outcome, and you contract to pay them more cash the higher is this measure. You might also hold auctions or competitions to see who is best to put into this role.

We have a great many real examples today, and in history, of oft-used incentive contracts. Artists and athletes have agents paid a fraction of their earnings. Line workers are paid “piece rates” per how many items they assemble, or tomatoes they pick. Sales workers are paid commissions, per how many items they sell. Hedge fund managers are paid more if their fund makes higher returns. Lawyers on contingency fees are paid a fraction of court awarded damages. Firm managers are paid in stocks and options which rise in value when firm stock prices rise. Athletes are paid bonuses for individual and team success. Construction contractors are paid more if their work is completed by a deadline. Ships carrying convicts to Australia were paid on the number who arrived alive (which worked much better than the number who started out alive.)

Are the applications we’ve seen the only feasible ones, or could many more yet be developed? Consider beauty. Some say beauty can’t be measured, as it is “in the eye of the beholder”. But if you ask many people to rate someone’s beauty, their ratings are correlated. So imagine taking many standardized pictures and video of a client, across across their usual range of clothes and environments, and then paying many independent observers to rate their attractiveness. Do this at the start to get an initial value, and plan to do it again in, say, six months. A client might pay a beauty agent based on the change in this measure.

Potential beauty agents could bid by offering how much money they want to be paid per unit of increased beauty, how much they would pay up front to gain this role, and which particular beauty decisions they want to control, rather than merely advise, at least until the second measurement. There are probably clever ways to use auctions or decision markets to select from among these bids, but such details need not concern us now.

Yes, it would be a problem if a beauty agent could corrupt beauty measurements, or exploit their biases. But if such effects are modest, expert beauty agents can likely substantially increase a client’s beauty, relative to that client’s amateur efforts. Consider that movies don’t usually let actors pick their own clothes and hairstyle to look good in each movie; beauty experts instead make those choices. Yes, clients may care less about beauty as seen by average people, and more as seen by particular communities. But measuring such local versions of beauty should only cost a bit more.

Now consider happiness. If happiness were an entirely internal mental state that never influenced our external appearances, well then yes it would be hard to measure happiness. At least until we can better read brains. But most humans leak their feelings in many ways. So a 24/7 audio/video feed of a person, especially their facial expression and tone of voice, perhaps augmented by watch-based measures of heart rates, etc., seems plenty sufficient. Especially if processed via self and other reports, rather than artificially. Happiness could be measured pretty accurately from such things, especially for a client who wants it to be measurable, so that they can hire an agent to increase their happiness. (And especially as things like smiles and laughter probably evolved to signal happy internal states.)

A happiness agent is given control over some elements of a client’s life, and can advise on others. Especially on which other agents to hire for beauty, health, career, etc. Happiness agents pay some initial fee to gain this role, and then they are paid in proportion to the client’s measured happiness. Such agents might be big firms that combine many kinds of happiness expertise, and who can take big risks. If there are things that an expert can learn about how to be happy, things an ordinary amateur doesn’t know, then there is likely substantial scope for using agents to directly buy happiness. If so, money can buy happiness, directly.

Well this is enough for one blog post. The key conclusion: it looks feasible to much more directly buy many things we care greatly about, including beauty, happiness, health, career success, popularity, and status. Yes it would be work to set up systems to measure such things, work that could not be recouped for just from one client. But the prospect of many millions of clients should be quite sufficient.

One key question remains: why hasn’t there been more interest in such possibilities? Are these new innovations that could spread widely, or are they blocked by key fundamental permanent obstacles not yet considered in the above discussion?

Added 20Apr: Most seem to actually be comforted by the fact that it can be hard to buy things with money, and seem uninterested in finding ways to make it easier to buy things with money. I suspect they feel that better methods of this sort would give a relative advantage to people with more money, who they see as other people. While everyone could benefit from better ways to buy things with money, that matters little to those focused on relative status.

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Why Not More Job Agents?

By Robin Hanson · April 18, 2020 4:50 pm · Comments (1)

Professional agents take substantial fractions of client wages: 3-10% in sports,10-15% in music, 10-20% in acting, and 15% for writers. Somewhat relatedly, job recruiters take 10-30% of a first year salary, and home realtors take 2-3% of home sales.

The logic is simple: you might be good at your job, but you can’t be the best at everything related to your career. There is room to be helped by people or organizations who specialize in advising, presenting, evaluating, matching, and networking for workers with your sort of career. Such help can be useful not only when you seek to change jobs, or get promoted within an organization, but at all points in your career. Even at the start, when you are deciding where to get trained in what.

The agency relation works smoothest with a clear division of labor; your tasks and their tasks. But there is also room for collaboration on shared tasks. Such as by their giving you advice on choices that are ultimately up to you.

The best agents are usually paid via an “incentive contact”, wherein they get paid a fraction of what clients get paid. This seems a big improvement on how we usually pay tutors, advisors, mentors, personal coaches, or inclined-to-advise friends and family. When you instead pay someone by the hour, or by favors traded, their interests are less clearly aligned with yours. Yes, you might judge them based on reputations or track records. But track records are rarely visible, and reputations are often only loosely related to help. You may not be much better at judging if their help and advice is good than you would be at just trying to do those things yourself.

In contrast, paying your agent a fraction of your earnings more clearly aligns their interests with yours, and also makes it easier to choose an agent. By agreeing to be your agent, someone credibly signals confidence in their and your abilities, and that you can work together. This is similar to how most lawyers will happily take your case if you pay them by the hour, but will be much picker if you ask them to be paid a contingency fee (i.e., % of the verdict). Also, all else equal, the lower the fraction of earnings they will take to do the same tasks, the higher their estimate of your earnings given their help.

While most people informally collect some career advisors and mentors, it seems something of a puzzle that more people don’t have career agents. You might claim that agents just can’t help most careers, but that seems just wrong. Maybe they don’t help a lot, but surely they could charge a little do a little. You might note that most of us have goals other than making money, but that is also true for most who have agents; the incentive contract method doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be better than other methods, such as paying by the hour.

Yes, if your career is very risky, with a small chance of huge success, then being your agent is risky too. But each agent can have many clients, and agents can band together into larger firms to spread risk. As a result, risk-aversion need not greatly limit agent incentive contracts.

Now perhaps you object that an agent just couldn’t help enough to deserve 10%, or even 5%, of most salaries. But you can use an initial signing fee to separate an agent’s incentive from their net compensation. For example, assume that your and your agent’s fractional incentives must add to 100%, and that for incentive purposes the most efficient fractions are 70% for you and 30% for your agent. But also assume that the cost to an agent to put in that optimal effort is equivalent to only 10% of your salary. In this case, a better contract is for the agent to pay you a 20% up front “signing fee” for the right to be your agent and then later get 30% of your earnings. In this way your agent will on net get paid 10% of your earnings, and yet have a 30% stake in your income to give them a strong incentives.

Yes, for short term contracts such incentives only make agents work hard in ways that can produce short term gains. And we might rightly be wary of committing early on to one agent for our whole life. A simple solution here is to have each new short-term agent pay their up front signing fee to your previous agent, instead of to you. In this way each of your agents has a long term incentive about you, even if they may not always stay your agent. Your first agent may then pay you an especially large signing fee, which you might use to help pay for early career education or training (or you could paying for those part of their tasks).

To avoid the problem that a stronger incentive for your agent comes at the cost of a weaker incentive for you, it is actually possible to have the sum of your and your agent’s wage fractions add up to more than 100%. All you have to do is find a third party “anti-agent” willing to accept the remaining incentive. For example, you could get 100% and your agent get 50% of your earnings, if your anti-agent takes a -50% stake. You’d pay your anti-agent an up-front signing fee, and then they’d later pay your agent 50% of your earnings, while you just kept your earnings.

The main problem with an anti-agent is that they’d have an incentive to hurt your career. So you’d want to make sure to pick anti-agents only from organizations who are set up so that it is hard for them to hurt you. Perhaps (1) they are only your anti-agent for a short period, (2) you use cryptography so they don’t know who exactly you are, (3) they are headquartered far from where you live, and (4) they are just a financial holding firm, without employees able to do things to help the firm.

It wouldn’t be terrible to use auctions (or decision markets) to pick your agents and anti-agents, and their fees, from qualified candidates. For example, you might initially pick optimal agent and anti-agent fractions, and identities, via an initial auction for the max net singing fee given to you. You could probably use many criteria to define who is qualified, though your agents would be wary of your later using arbitrary conditions to extort the signing fees that agents were supposed to be paid. So you would have to agree on some limits to changes in qualification conditions.

If agents expect that you will may make choices that cut your earnings, they would likely pay more for agent contracts that put those choices within their sphere of control. Such as the ability to format your resume, or perhaps to veto job choices. So you’d want to think carefully about which choices agents get full control over, and which they can only advise you on. And current laws may limit these contracts in many ways.

Think about it this way: with a good initial auction to choose an agent, if the help of an agent isn’t actually on average worth its cost, then the winning bid should be someone who just pays you up front for the present financial value of a fraction of your future income. They won’t include an amount in their bid to cover costs to help you, as they don’t plan to try to help. If that’s the winner, accept them, and walk away wiser for knowing that you are better off without an agent trying to help you.

With all these options available to help set up a productive agency relation, I am honestly puzzled about why more people don’t seem interested in having agents. Especially as it tends to be the more prestigious and successful people today who have agents. Why don’t people get an agent, just to brag that they have one?

(Note that I’m not making any assumptions about how the roles of “agent” are organized or divided. They could be provided by individuals or by large firms, and could either be unified into one role or divided up into many differing roles.)

Added 19Apr: Many say they’d rather pay an agent a percentage of earnings over some reference earnings. But that’s mathematically equivalent to an agent who pays a signing fee and then gets a percentage of all earnings.

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