Author Archives: David J. Balan

The Worst You’ve Seen Isn’t the Worst There Is

By David J. Balan · May 9, 2007 10:01 am · Comments (6)

In a reasonably well-functioning society, most people have few opportunities to profit from doing something really bad; it almost certainly wouldn’t be worth your while to kill somebody even if you had nothing in your ideology or in your character to prevent you from doing so.  This means that for most people in such societies the negative experiences that they will have had at the hands of others will have been comparatively minor: inattentiveness, insensitivity, manipulativeness, glory-hogging, and so on.  Since strong negative emotions tend to be about bad hings that people have actually experienced, these evils will tend to be the most salient, and so be the ones that people are most on the lookout for when making judgments about others.

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Doubting Thomas and Pious Pete

By David J. Balan · May 8, 2007 10:00 am · Comments (43)

Religious people like to say that religion provides an objective basis for morality and values and such, whereas without religion these can’t be anything more than just opinion.  Of course, even if this claim were true, it would prove nothing about the existence of God or about the goodness (in any sense that is meaningful to human beings) of any values that God might prescribe.  It’s no argument to say that something must be true because it would be bad if it weren’t.

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More On Future Self Paternalism

By David J. Balan · April 29, 2007 2:56 pm · Comments (13)

Robin recently wrote a post asking whether it makes any sense for your current self to take actions that "paternalistically" constrain your future self.  Below are some points in response, most of which were already mentioned in one form or another in the comments to Robin’s post.

1. Current you has no choice but to act in some sense paternalistically towards future you simply by virtue of the fact that current you came first.  It is inevitable that current you will make choices that set the stage for future you, which requires current you to make decisions based on what’s good for future you.

2. The standard that must be met for future self paternalism to be rational may not be that current you has to be systematically more rational than future you; the standard may only be that current you has to be more rational than future you at his weakest moment.  And that’s not a very hard standard to meet.

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The Very Worst Kind of Bias

By David J. Balan · March 26, 2007 8:53 am · Comments (19)

Here is a truly profound quote by Bertrand Russell:

"The conception of Sin which is bound up with Christian ethics is one that does an extraordinary amount of harm, since it affords people an outlet for their sadism which they believe to be legitimate, and even noble."

People have natural cruelty in them, and they also have a natural desire to view themselves as good.  The concept of sin allows them to satisfy both; they get to indulge their cruelty by punishing the sinner or by cheering the punishment from the sidelines and at the same time they get to retain their belief in their own goodness because the concept of sin has built into it the idea that the sinner had it coming or even that the punishment was for the sinner’s own good.  That doesn’t mean that there is no genuinely evil behavior deserving of condemnation and punishment, but the existence of this really nasty bias ought to make one set the bar for doing so pretty darn high. Here’s another by David Brin:

"While there are many drawbacks, self-righteousness can also be heady, seductive, and even… well… addictive. Any truly honest person will admit that the state feels good. The pleasure of knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong.."

Allowing yourself to enjoy your own rightness and the other guy’s wrongness might have some merit if it is something that you give yourself as a reward for fighting genuine injustice.  But the fact that it is so much fun (Brin believes that it is literally addictive in the brain chemistry sense) ought to make you very suspicious of it; if it’s that much fun you are going to want to adopt the beliefs that allow you to get it in its purest and tastiest form, and such beliefs are unlikely to correspond to truth.

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Disagreement Case Study: Robin Hanson and David Balan

By David J. Balan · March 15, 2007 7:49 am · Comments (8)

The basic challenge posed by Robin is this.  To support the imposition of a paternalistic government policy on Peter, one must believe that: (i) the government is sincerely motivated by Peter’s welfare; and (ii) the government knows what’s best Peter better than Peter himself does, even taking into account the fact that in the absence of paternalistic policy Peter need not rely only on his own knowledge, but is free to seek the uncoercive advice of anyone willing to give it to him, including the government itself.

To my mind, point (ii) is the easy part.  There really are people who left to their own devices will ingest poisinous miracle cures and the like, and who really would be better off if they didn’t do so, and for whom actually existing paternalistic policies are the only hope of being saved.  Of course there are some cases where the government really just doesn’t know better and gets it wrong.  Robin and I would agree that these are the cases where policy should be restrained, and if it’s not restrained it’s more likely to be an abuse of power issue than an ignorance issue.  So in my view the real action is in point (i), the extent to which the government will shun restraint and abuse or misuse the coervice power that paternalistic policies give it.

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Let’s Get Ready to Rumble!!

By David J. Balan · March 7, 2007 6:12 am · Comments (21)

Here’s my opening bit for my debate with Robin tonight.  Needless to say since we’re both all about Overcoming Bias, there will be no cheap point-scoring or sophistry and much gentlemanly conceding of valid points.  And maybe a little hitting each other with metal folding chairs.  At least in my day college kids liked that sort of thing.

Aside from basic functions like enforcing contracts and maintaining order, there are three justifications for governmental intervention in people’s lives:

1. Correct market failures.
2. Redistribution (make Peter do or not do something, or take from Peter, for the benefit of Paul).
3. Paternalism (make Peter do or not do something for Peter’s own benefit).

This discussion is about #3.  The traditional arguments against paternalism are:

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Swinging for the Fences when You Should Bunt

By David J. Balan · March 2, 2007 8:00 pm · Comments (10)

There are probably some kinds of intellectual problems to which only geniuses can make any contribution.  That is, for some problems there may just be no way to break off a nugget of the problem that a non-genius could handle.  But this is not true of most kinds of problems.  Most kinds of problems can be broken up so that the non-geniuses handle the small nuggets and the geniuses handle the big nuggets and/or figure out how to put the nuggets together.  If success and failure could be determined unambiguously, no non-genius would have an incentive to tackle a genius-sized nugget because there would be no (or an unacceptably small) chance of success.  But if failure can be obscured, then it might be worth the while of a non-genius to tackle a genius sized nugget, and just obscure the fact that they didn’t get it right.  This is worse than nothing because it not only makes no contribution but also makes it hard to figure out who really knows what they are talking about.  It seems to me that a lot of this goes on in empirical economics.  It is clear that there are a lot of small nuggets that non-geniuses could work on, like carefully checking the work of genius researchers for robustness, or redoing the genius analysis on lots of other data sets. etc.  But this won’t get you any love, and a bad effort at tackling a big nugget will likely not be easily discovered, because much of the work is very complicated (either of necessity or by design) and no one will ever take the trouble to unpack it, and even if someone did, there would be some remaining ambiguity about who was right and who was wrong.  I know this is a problem for me, I often have a lot of doubt about who to listen to.  I’m not sure whether it introduces any systematic bias.

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Morality or Manipulation?

By David J. Balan · March 1, 2007 10:05 am · Comments (27)

Suppose you are a great moral philosopher and you’ve figured out perfectly how to tell right from wrong.  You have some time on your hands, and you want to use it to do good in the world.  One good thing you might do would be to try to make people more moral by teaching them to be moral philosophers like you.  Another good thing would be to combat one of the specific moral evils you’ve identified in your philosophizing, say drunk driving.  You could achieve this by embarking on a campaign of persuasion in which you portray drunk driving as something that stupid losers do, as groups like SADD and MADD have done with what seems to be great success (it’s remarkable how fast drunk driving has gone from being cool to being powerfully uncool).

The socially optimal division of your time between moral education and manipulative persuasion will depend on a lot of things: how good you are at each activity, how many other people are doing each of them, how effective each of them are, and so on.  But you may have private incentives to engage in too little moral education.  The persuasion campaign is likely to have observable results, whereas you won’t easily be able to see the good effects of having more moral philosophers running around.  Also, the benefits of persuasion are likely to be more immediate, whereas a lot of the benefit of moral education may not be realized until you are gone from the scene. 

What brought all this on is the observation that there seems to be almost none of what could be called moral education.  No one buys airtime on TV and uses it to encourage people to universalize their maxims; even philosophically sophisticated advocates of good causes almost invariably go with some version of the SADD/MADD persuasion approach.  It may be that the socially optimal amount of moral education is just very low, but I have a hard time believing that.  I am inclined to believe that under-investment is a serious problem.  If I’m right about this, then it may be a big source of bias: people have too little skill at purging bias from their moral judgments because they’ve gotten too little moral education in the first place; there aren’t that many philosophers out there, and even the ones there are don’t spend their time teaching philosophy.

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Too Many Loner Theorists?

By David J. Balan · February 14, 2007 10:54 pm · Comments (7)

The basic job of an economic theorist is to write papers, usually with at most one or two co-authors, that develop new models of some phenomenon of interest. A reasonably successful theorist writes about one such paper per year. Each paper contains a brand-new model, which while often similar to other models that have come before, has to be built up from scratch. The fact that you have to build up a new model with each paper, combined with the fact that you have to write lots of papers, means that the models can’t be too complicated, or at least can’t be complicated in ways other than the specific ways that you want them to be. They have to be tricked out in just such a way as to allow you to get at the question of interest, while leaving a whole bunch of other (important) stuff out.

This is not the only way that economic modelling could be done. You could imagine an alternative in which teams of modellers work for a long time on developing much more complicated models, running different versions of them (using different assumptions or different values for the various parameters of the model), seeing what pops out, and then writing a string of papers describing the ways in which the model has been tweaked and reporting the results that have been obtained. There are models like this floating around (I think the Federal Reserve has a big one) but they are rare and almost completely absent from the academic literature. Years ago they were somewhat common in Macroeconomics, but they seem to have fallen out of fashion. There might be good reasons not to use these kinds of models. One theorist friend suggested that working through mathematical proofs of relatively simple models provides more intuition and insight than just cranking away on a huge model that’s too complicated for anyone to really understand. I think he has a good point, and there may be others. But I suspect that these kinds of models are rarer than they should be, and I think the reason is because they are not fun for theorists to build. Building a nice model from scratch feels like a creative act, one with a lot of aesthetic appeal, almost more art than science. Building a huge model with a bunch of other geeks and sticking ugly numbers into it feels much different, and the kind of people who like that feeling are the kind who would have become empirical or experimental economists, and not theorists, in the first place.

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It’s Sad When Bad Ideas Drive Out Good Ones

By David J. Balan · February 13, 2007 10:58 pm · Comments (20)

Recently there was a piece by William Pfaff in the New York Review of Books. It starts off by pointing out that deeply rooted in American political culture is the idea that the United States is not a country like other countries, but rather has a unique (or nearly unique) world historical moral mission, and then makes a more-or-less standard lefty case that this idea has been and continues to be the source of a great deal of misguided and evil U.S. policy.

Pfaff may or may not be right that this widely held belief in a special American moral mission has been a major cause of the many terrible things that we have done in our history. The interesting thing about the piece is that he doesn’t even consider the possibility that there really is, in some meaningful sense that a liberal could get behind, something morally special about the United States. But the United States was explicitly and self-consciously created on the basis of Enlightenment principles, and has a national identity based on a progressive political creed rather than on tribal ties or obedience to kings and priests. This is a remarkable thing, and you would think that it would merit some discussion in a piece on this topic.

But there is none. Why not? One likely reason is that the great majority of the people who talk about the unique moral mission of the United States are illiberal jingoists whose “moral clarity” on subjects related to the use of U.S. power does not stem from a belief that there is an objective moral truth that can be apprehended and should be acted upon, but rather from a belief that whatever the U.S. does is axiomatically right and moral simply because we did it, no matter how stupid or corrupt or homicidal. So Pfaff and others like him are unlikely to pay much attention to anyone who wants to sell them a story about the great moral mission of America. And this is not crazy (though it is very sad); we are stuck in an equilibrium where anyone who makes noises about America’s moral mission is almost certainly a jingoist, so no non-jingoist will take any such idea seriously, so no non-jingoist will have any reason to offer a non-jingoist strain of the idea, and so such a strain never gets a chance to develop or spread. I think a lot of good ideas get frozen out this way.

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