What Info Is Verifiable?

By Robin Hanson · November 18, 2019 11:40 am · Comments (0)

For econ topics where info is relevant, including key areas of mechanism design, and law & econ, we often make use of a key distinction: verifiable versus unverifiable info. For example, we might say that whether it rains in your city tomorrow is verifiable, but whether you feel discouraged tomorrow is not verifiable. 

Verifiable info can much more easily be the basis of a contract or a legal decision. You can insure yourself against rain, but not discouragement, because insurance contracts can refer to the rain, and courts can enforce those contract terms. And as courts can also enforce bets about rain, prediction markets can incentivize accurate forecasts on rain. Without that, you have to resort to the sort of mechanisms I discussed in my last post. 

Often, traffic police can officially pull over a car only if they have a verifiable reason to think some wrong has been done, but not if they just have a hunch. In the blockchain world, things that are directly visible on the blockchain are seen as verifiable, and thus can be included in smart contracts. However, blockchain folks struggle to make “oracles” that might allow other info to be verifiable, including most info that ordinary courts now consider to be verifiable. 

Wikipedia is a powerful source of organized info, but only info that is pretty directly verifiable, via cites to other sources. The larger world of media and academia can say many more things, via its looser and more inclusive concepts of “verifiable”. Of course once something is said in those worlds, it can then be said on Wikipedia via citing those other sources.

I’m eager to reform many social institutions more in the direction of paying for results. But these efforts are limited by the kinds of results that can be verified, and thus become the basis of pay-for-results contracts. In mechanism design, it is well known that it is much easier to design mechanisms that get people to reveal and act on verifiable info. So the long term potential for dramatic institution gains may depend crucially on how much info can be made verifiable. The coming hypocralypse may result from the potential to make widely available info into verifiable info. More direct mind-reading tech might have a similar effect. 

Given all this reliance on the concept of verifiability, it is worth noting that verifiability seems to be a social construct. Info exists in the universe, and the universe may even be made out of info, but this concept of verifiability seems to be more about when you can get people to agree on a piece of info. When you can reliably ask many difference sources and they will all confidently tell you the same answer, we tend to treat that as verifiable. (Verifiability is related to whether info is “common knowledge” or “common belief”, but the concepts don’t seem to be quite the same.)

It is a deep and difficult question what actually makes info verifiable. Sometimes when we ask the same question to many people, they will coordinate to tell us the answer that we or someone wants to hear, or will punish them for contradicting. But at other times when we ask many people the same question, it seems like their best strategy is just to look directly at the “truth” and report that. Perhaps because they find it too hard to coordinate, or because implicit threats are weak or ambiguous. 

The question of what is verifiable opens an important meta question: how can can we verify claims of verifiability? For example, a totalitarian regime might well insist not only that everyone agree that the regime is fair and kind, a force for good, but that they agree that these facts are clear and verifiable. Most any community with a dogma may be tempted to claim not only that their dogma is true, but also that it is verifiable. This can allow such dogma to be the basis for settling contract disputes or other court rulings, such as re crimes of sedition or treason.

I don’t have a clear theory or hypothesis to offer here, but while this was in my head I wanted to highlight the importance of this topic, and its apparent openness to investigation. While I have no current plans to study this, it seems quite amenable to study now, at least by folks who understand enough of both game theory and a wide range of social phenomena.  

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A New Truth Mechanism

By Robin Hanson · November 15, 2019 12:40 pm · Comments (1)

Early in 2017 I reported:

This week Nature published some empirical data on a surprising-popularity consensus mechanism. The idea is to ask people to pick from several options, and also to have each person forecast the distribution of opinion among others. … Compared to prediction markets, this mechanism doesn’t require that those who run the mechanism actually know the truth later. … The big problem … however, is that it requires that learning the truth be the cheapest way to coordinate opinion. …. I can see variations on [this method] being used much more widely to generate standard safe answers that people can adopt with less fear of seeming strange or ignorant. But those who actually want to find true answers even when such answers are contrarian, they will need something closer to prediction markets.

In a new mechanism by Yuqing Kong, N agents simultaneously and without communication give answers to T questions, each of which has C possible answers. The clues that agents have about each question can be arbitrarily correlated, and agents can have differing priors about that clue distribution. However, clues must be identically and independently distributed (IID) across questions. If T ≥ 2C and N ≥ 2, then in this new mechanism telling the “truth” (i.e., answer indicated by clue) is a dominant strategy, with a strictly higher payoff if anyone else also tells the truth!

This is a substantial advance over the prior literature, and I expect future mechanisms to weaken the IID across questions constraint. Alas, even so this seems to suffer for the same key problem of needing truth to be the cheapest way for respondents to coordinate answers. I expect this problem to be much harder to overcome.

Of course if you add “truth speakers” as some of the agents, and wait for those speakers’ input before paying the other participants, you get something much closer to a prediction market.

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Occam’s Policy Razor

By Robin Hanson · November 14, 2019 8:00 pm · Comments (0)

Nine experiments provide support for promiscuous condemnation: the general tendency to assume that ambiguous actions are immoral. Both cognitive and functional arguments support the idea of promiscuous condemnation. (More)

The world is full of inefficient policies. But why, when many can can simply and clearly explain why such policies are inefficient? The following concrete example suggests a simple explanation:

Logically, it doesn’t seem cruel to offer someone an extra option, if you don’t thereby change their other options. Two thirds of poll respondents agree re this prisoner case. However, 94% also think that the world media would roast any nation who did this, and they’d get away with it. And I agree with these poll respondents in both cases.

Most of the audience of that world media would not be paying close attention, and would not care greatly about truth. They would instead make a quick and shallow calculation: will many find this accusation innately plausible and incendiary enough to stick, and would I like that? If they answer is yes, they add their pitchforks to the mob. That’s the sort of thing I’ve seen with internet mobs lately, and also with prior media mobs.

As most of the world is eager to call the United States an evil empire driven by evil intent, any concrete U.S. support for torture might plausibly be taken as evidence for such evil intent, at least to observers who aren’t paying much attention. So even those who know that in such cases allowing torture can be better policy would avoid supporting it. Add in large U.S. mobs who are also not paying attention, and who might like to accuse U.S. powers of ill intent, and we get our situation where almost no one is willing to seriously suggest that we offer torture substitutes for prison. Even though that would help.

Similar theories can explain many other inefficient policies, such as laws against prostitution, gambling, and recreational drugs. We might know that such policies are ineffective and harmful, and yet not be able to bring ourselves to publicly support ending such bans, for fear of being accused of bad intent. This account might even explain policies to punish the rich, big business, and foreigners. The more that contrary policies could be spun to distracted observers as showing evil intent, the more likely such inefficient policies are to be adopted.

Is there any solution? Consider the example of Congress creating a commission to recommend which U.S. military bases to close, where afterward Congress could only approve or reject the whole list, without making changes. While bills to close individual bases would have been met with fierce difficult-to-overcome opposition, this way to package base closings into a bundle allowed Congress to actually close many inefficient bases.

Also consider how a nation can resist international pressure to imprison one disliked person, or to censor one disliked book. In the first case the nation may plead “we follow a general rule of law, and our law has not yet convicted this person”, while in the second case the nation may plead “We have adopted a general policy of free speech, which limits our ability to ban individual books.”

I see a pattern here: simpler policy spaces, with fewer degrees of freedom, are safer from bias, corruption, special-pleading, and selfish lobbying. A political system choosing from a smaller space of possible policies that will then apply to a large range of situations seems to make more efficient choices.

Think of this as Occam’s Policy Razor. In science, Occam’s Theory Razor says to pick the simplest theory that can fit the data. Doing this can help fractious scientific communities to avoid bias and favoritism in theory choice. Similarly, Occam’s Policy Razor says to limit policy choices to the smallest space of policies which can address the key problems for which policies are needed. More complexity to address complex situation details is mostly not worth the risk. This policy razor may help fractious political communities to avoid bias and favoritism in policy choice.

Yes, I haven’t formalized this much, and this is still a pretty sloppy analysis. And yes, there are in fact many strong criticisms of Occum’s Razor in science. Even so, it feels like there may be something to this. And futarchy seems to me a good example of this principle. In a futarchy with a simple value function based on basic outcomes like population, health, and wealth, then voting on values but betting on beliefs would probably mostly legalize things like prostitution, gambling, recreational drugs, immigration, and big business. It would probably even let prisoners pick torture.

Today we resist world mob disapproval regarding particular people we don’t jail, or particular books we don’t ban, by saying “Look we have worked out general systems to deal with such things, and it isn’t safe for us to give some folks discretion to make exceptions just because a mob somewhere yells”. Under futarchy, we might similarly resist world disapproval of our prostitution, etc. legalization by saying:

Look, we have chosen a simple general system to deal with such things, and we can’t trust giving folks discretion make policy exceptions just because talking heads somewhere scowl. So far our system hasn’t banned those things, and if you don’t like that outcome then participate in our simple general system, to see if you can get your desired changes by working through channels.

By limiting ourselves to simple general choices, we might also tend to make more efficient choices, to our overall benefit.

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Prestige Blocks Reform

By Robin Hanson · November 13, 2019 11:15 am · Comments (0)

At several recent conferences, I suggested to the organizers that I talk about social institution innovation, but they preferred I talk about my tech related work (or not talk at all). At those events they did have other people talk about social reforms and innovations, and all those speakers were relatively high status people with a background in “hard” sciences (e.g., physics or computers science). And to my eyes, their suggestions and analysis were amateurish.

Curious about this pattern, I did these Twitter polls:

So while more of us would rather hear about social analysis from a social expert, more of us would rather hear about social reform proposals from prestigious hard scientists. This makes sense if we see reform as a social coordination game: if we only want to support reforms that we expect to be supported by many high status folks, we need a high status advocates to be our focal point to get the ball rolling.

Alas, since hard scientists tend to know little social science and to think little of social scientists, the reforms they suggest tend to be low quality, at least by social scientist standards. Furthermore, since prestige-driven social systems have done well for them personally, and are said to do well in running their hard science world, they will tend to promote such systems as reforms. Alas, as I think replacing such systems should be one of our main social reform priorities.

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Firms & Cities Have Open Borders

By Robin Hanson · November 1, 2019 5:00 pm · Comments (0)

Cities usually don’t much limit who can move there. If you can find someone in a city to give you a job, to rent you an apartment, to sell you food and other stuff, and to be your friends, etc. and if you can pay for your move, then you can move to that city from anywhere in a much larger region. Of course individual employers, landlords, and stores are mostly free to reject you, but the city doesn’t add much in the way of additional requirements. Same for other units smaller than a nation, such as counties and states.

Large firms also don’t usually much limit who can work there. Oh each particular small work group is usually particular about who works there, but the larger firm will mostly defer to local decisions about hires. Yes, if the larger firm has made commitments to trying never to fire anyone, but to always find someone another place in the firm when they are no longer wanted in any one part, then that larger firm may put more limits on who and how many folks can be hired by any one small group. But when the larger firm has few obligations to local workers, then local groups are also mostly free to hire who they want.

The obvious analogies between cities, firms and nations make it somewhat puzzling that nations are much more eager to limit who can enter them. The analogy is strongest when those who enter nations can only do so in practice if they can find local employers, landlords, suppliers, friends, etc. willing to deal with them. And when the nation assigns itself few obligations to anyone who happens to live there.

Yes, in principle there can be externalities whereby the people who enter one part of a nation effect the enjoyment and productivity of people in other parts of a nation. But those same sort of effects should also appear within parts of a city or of a firm. So why don’t cities and firms work harder to limit local choices of who can enter them?

You might claim that cities and firms don’t need to attend to limiting entry because nations already do it for them. But most nations already have a lot of internal variation; why is none of that variation of interest to cities and firms, yet the variation between nations would supposedly be of huge interest, if nations were not handling that? And firms and cities within the nations that hold all those bad people that you think good nations are focused on excluding don’t have firm- or city-wide exclusion policies either.

Furthermore, many multinational firms today already have employees who are spread across a great many nations, nations that vary a lot in wealth, development, etc. Yet such multinationals usually don’t have much in the way of centralized limits on who can be hired by their divisions in different firms, nor on who can be transferred between such divisions. These firms may face limits imposed by nations, but they seem to mostly lament such limits, and aren’t eager to add more.

Firms and cities live in more competitive environments than do nations. So we should expect their behavior to be shaped more by competitive pressures. Thus we can conclude that competitive entities tend not to create entity-wide limits on who can enter them; they are mostly content to let smaller parts of them made those decisions.

So if nations act differently from firms and cities, that should be because either:
1) there are big important effects that are quite different at the national level, than at firm and city levels, or
2) nations are failing to adopt policies that competition would induce, if they faced more competition.

My bet is on the latter. In that case, the key question is: is there a market failure that makes the entry policies that competition pushes lamentable? If not, we should lament that competition isn’t inducing more free entry into nations. That is, we should lament that competition isn’t inducing national open borders, like we mostly have for cities and firms.

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Why Not Also Punish False Praise?

By Robin Hanson · October 31, 2019 11:00 am · Comments (0)

I recently read on social media praise for someone I know, someone about whom I know some negative things. I realized that if I posted my negative comments, those would be held to much higher standards than are positive comments. I might be sued for defamation, and many would apply a social norm to me which demands that one defend negative comments with concrete supporting evidence. We don’t have such a norm regarding positive comments.

While the Romans allowed one to sue for damages when someone defamed you even by saying true things, we today only allow that when someone says false negative things, although at common law the burden of proof is on the person accused of defamation to prove their negative claim. The message is: don’t say negative things about others in public if you can’t prove them in court.

Presumably the reason we now allow suits for false defamation is that we see a net social harm there; others are liable to be misled, causing misallocations of resources and relations. In addition, resources may be wasted in back-and-forth defamation battles. But it seems to me that we should also expect similar social harms to result from false positive comments, not just false negative comments. So maybe we should consider having law discourage those as well.

With negative comments it is the defamer who pays the person defamed, even though it is the larger society who in fact suffers the net social harm. The person defamed is just a convenient party we give an incentive to sue. But defamation law would serve a similar social function if we turned it into a bounty, where anyone could sue and collect it. So an obvious option for false positive comments would be to make that into a bounty.

It seems counterproductive to expect the person who is falsely praised to sue someone for doing that. Their incentive can be weak, and if they win they gain twice, from the false claim and from the suit. So my proposal is: let anyone sue re a false positive claim, the first person to succeed gains a bounty amount equal to the court’s estimate of the false gain that resulted. Again put the burden of proof on the person who made the claim. So just as with defamation today, the bounty hunter would have to show some substantial net monetary equivalent gain to the person who was falsely praised, and that could be the amount awarded to that hunter.

Yes, in our world where false praise isn’t punished there’s a lot of it, which isn’t believed so much, and thus each instance causes less harm. But that would also be true if we didn’t allow suing for defamation; a lot more criticism would happen, which would be believed less. If this isn’t a reason to allow defamation, it isn’t a reason not to allow suits against false praise.

Of course, I don’t expect people to leap to implement my proposal. I offer it as a thought experiment, to help us think about *why* we don’t like this, even though its justification seems similarly strong to our usual justification for allowing false defamation lawsuits. Why is false praise seen as so much less harmful than false criticism?

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Rules of Public Evidence?

By Robin Hanson · October 25, 2019 10:00 am · Comments (0)

The United States is perhaps unique among the developed world in that under law, some hate speech is protected. (more)

The United States has a very complicated system of evidentiary rules; for example, John Wigmore’s celebrated treatise on it filled ten volumes. James Bradley Thayer reported in 1898 that even English lawyers were surprised by the complexity of American evidence law. (more)

The main rules of evidence in Sweden are: (i) the principle of free evidence, meaning that there are basically no provisions on what is permitted as evidence as long as it is relevant to the facts to be proven in the case; and (ii) the principle of free evaluation of evidence, meaning that the court evaluates all evidence at its discretion. (more)

On 2 December 1766 Sweden became the first country in the world to have freedom of the press written into the constitution. (more)

Many in the US are proud that the US has weaker limits on speech than do most other nations, especially regarding political speech. However, most in US are not aware that the US also has some of the strongest “rules of evidence” limits on speech in legal courts. These US rules are new; we didn’t have them centuries ago.

Yet the usual arguments used to argue for free political speech can also argue for free court speech, while the usual arguments supporting rules of evidence can also support similar limits on political speech. And the examples of other nations shows that there isn’t a strong world consensus that court limits make more sense than political speech limits. Sweden shows that one can allow free speech in both contexts, while many other nations show that one can also have strong limits in both contexts.

Here are some common rules of evidence limiting trial speech. These are rough guides; the law is quite complex with simple summaries rarely applying exactly.

  • A big clear separation is required between “news” and “editorials”, that is between supporting evidence (most of a trial) and arguments for conclusions (given in closing statements).
  • All witnesses must swear oaths to tell the truth, and are guilty of a crime if they lie.
  • Anyone may be required to testify, except the accused, spouses, docs, therapists, lawyers.
  • One must apply any burdens of proof separately to each element, not just to overall evidence.

All these kinds of evidence are not allowed:

  1. The opinion of a non-expert, unless it is reached unconsciously,
  2. Unauthenticated tangible evidence,
  3. Indirect circumstantial evidence,
  4. Data on similar prior convictions or behavior by the accused,
  5. Hearsay, i.e., what someone heard someone else say,
  6. Simple “naked” statistical evidence, based on relative counts rather than direct observations,
  7. Extrinsic evidence of the contents of a written contract,
  8. Evidence obtained via illegal acts, and
  9. Confessions obtained in an “unreliable” context.

If we wanted, we could eliminate these court rules, and just let everyone say anything relevant that they want in court, as happens now in Sweden.

Or, we might instead apply many of these rules to public political speech. For example, we could require evidence and argument to appear in separate places, we could ban opinions by non-experts, and ban arguments using hearsay or naked statistical evidence. We might even ban irrelevant distracting tangents.

Such rules would require some discretion to enforce, but not much more than judges already use now to apply such rules in courts. Any disputes about excess or misdirected discretion would be judged by those very same legal judges who now make those judgments in courtrooms. And as with most law, minor offenses, which bring small sanctions, may be mostly ignored by both state police and by private suits.

Even in the US, we already apply many limits to business speech. For example, alcohol firms can’t tell the public that most studies find health benefits from modest consumption, anti-discrimination laws limit the kinds of questions one can ask in a job interview, professional licensing limits who you can pay for advice, and some offers are banned by blackmail and wrongful interference with relations rules.

The business world still roughly functions with these rules, as do political worlds in other nations that have strong limits on political speech. And courts could still roughly function without rules of evidence, as happens now in Sweden. These are clearly choices we could make, not clearly forced on us by survival or even wealth considerations.

So what should we choose, more free speech at trials, less free political speech, or a continuation of our inconsistent approach? Here’s a Twitter poll on that:

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The Big Change In Blame

By Robin Hanson · October 22, 2019 8:00 am · Comments (1)

Law is our main system of official blame; it is how we officially blame people for things. So it is a pretty big deal that, over the last few centuries, changes to law have induced big changes in who officially blames who for most things that go wrong. These changes may be having big bad effects.

Long ago most everyone could use law to blame most everyone else. Even though people were poor, the legal process was simple enough for most to use it without needing a lawyer. (Many places actually banned lawyers.) Those found liable could often be sold into slavery to pay their legal debts, and their larger family clans could also be held responsible for their debts. So basically, people blamed people, with families as guarentors.

Over the last few centuries, the legal system has become far more complex and expensive, now requiring people to pay lawyers to sue. But at the same time we’ve made it harder to get people who are found liable to pay. We don’t sell them into slavery or make their families pay, and going bankrupt has become easier and less painful. So when ordinary people suffer a harm and look for someone to sue, their lawyers usually strongly advise that they focus on any deep pockets at all related to their harm.

The law, sympathetic to their plight, has found ways to blame the rich and big firms for most everything that goes wrong. For example, these are all real examples.

  • A rape in an abandoned building is blamed on the building owner.
  • Harassment in a stadium parking lot is blamed on the stadium owner.
  • A student harming another student in an off-campus apartment is blamed on the school.
  • A post-event bad-weather auto-accident is blamed on event host for not cancelling.
  • A harm from using a product bought from a 3rd party is blamed on its manufacturer.

As ordinary people aren’t suing each other much, the government steps in to discipline ordinary folks’ behavior, via regulation and crime law. So, while once people blamed people, law now trains people to blame the rich and big business, and to expect to be blamed by government. So it maybe isn’t so strange that in the recent US Democratic presidential debates, the main parties blamed are the rich and big business. And if ordinary people are seen as doing something wrong (as with guns), regulation or crime law is assumed to be the solution.

When bad things happen in government spaces, like roads, it gets harder to find a rich person or business to blame. So on the roads we have introduced a system of requiring liability insurance, to make sure there’s a big rich business to pay if something goes wrong. As a result, on the road people blame people. That seems a healthier situation to me, and my vouching proposal would try to apply that idea much more widely, to help us return to a world where more often people blame people, rather than people blaming business or government blaming people.

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Joker is Creepy

By Robin Hanson · October 20, 2019 8:30 pm · Comments (0)

Joker is a classic villain, opposite the classic hero Batman. The new Joker movie is an origin story that treats him sympathetically. We see how circumstances and personality can combine to turn a sad but loyal citizen into a vicious villain.

The basic formula is simple, but quite well-executed, especially via the remarkable acting performance of Joaquin Phoenix. The formula has two parts. First, there’s a slow steady trajectory. We start Joker out as a pretty ordinary if weak person, hungry for respect that he doesn’t get. We pile on abuses and crises, under which he slowly cracks. We give him the respect and attention he craves only when he is violent, and so tempt him toward more. He starts out admirably restrained in his response to quite unfair abuse, then we slowly ratchet up the size of the abuse, his sometimes out-sized response, and his comfort level with that response. He slowly becomes more confident, graceful, and charismatic, and he is surprised to learn he doesn’t feel so bad about what he’s done. With no clear bright line crossed, the movie dares the viewer to judge when exactly he has gone too far.

The second part of the formula is to subtly make Joker seem creepy, right from the start, to foreshadow the eventual outcome. (“Creepy” = ambiguous threat.) That is, though what he overtly does seems mostly restrained and reasonable, at least for a while, and though we make him understandable and sympathetic, we also pile on subtle and largely unconscious cues that he can’t be trusted. We combine signs that he’s low status and has poor social skills with signs that he’s prone toward physical outbursts. We make sure he seems self-absorbed, and that his gaze and voice seem guarded, i.e., overly controlled and evasive. Joker chain smokes, often laughs uncontrollably, often has his legs shake uncontrollably, lives among garish home furnishings, wears white socks with dark pants and shoes, has an awkward lanky running style, walks into glass doors, and is bad at reading what others will think is funny. He often fails to read or anticipate how others do or will react to what he does.

Audiences love the Joker movie:

After three impressive weekends in a row at the box office, Joker is on track to become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.

With Democratic candidates competing to advocate unprecedented extreme redistribution schemes, you might think left-leaning movie critics would love a film about a downtrodden guy who, suffering from public service cutbacks, starts a political movement to resist the rich and powerful. But in fact elite critics mostly hate it:

Joker … preview provided social media with the one thing it will not tolerate: moral ambiguity. … What critics … seem to fear is that Arthur Fleck … is also the kind of person we imagine would be very excited about the Joker movie in real life. … He thinks he’s taking revenge on an unjust world. This makes him look like an element of society we associate with senseless violence in real life: lonely, male and emotionally stunted. … David Ehrlich of Indiewire called it ‘a toxic rallying cry for self-pitying incels’ … At Slate, Sam Adams wrote that ‘no matter how emphatic Phoenix’s performance, it feels like a risk to feel too much for him, not knowing who might be sitting next to you in the theater using his resentments to justify their own. … has led reviewers to condemn the kind of moral ambiguity that was supposed to distinguish art from crass commerce in the first place. … won’t this movie cause dummies to think the Joker is good? To ask the question is to argue that nuance is dangerous. … failure to maintain critical distance… projected onto…audience that critics imagine to be more suggestible than themselves— insanely more suggestible, almost comically so… critics telling us, in a tone of concern for their fellow man, that these losers are total misanthropes. (more).

Apparently Joker being a low status white male who uses a gun to gain respect is a deal-breaker for them – that’s just too much like those incels and Trump supporters.

I’d say the movie actually pretty clearly disapproves of Joker’s actions toward the end; this is the origin story of a famous villain after all. It also disapproves of the rioting mobs that he inspires. Even if the rich and powerful have been mean to the poor and weak, wild angry rioters just make things worse. As Tyler says, “it is the most anti-Leftist movie I have seen, ever”. Which may also be why left-leaning critics hate it.

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Open Borders

By Robin Hanson · October 19, 2019 9:35 am · Comments (0)

In their new book Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, Bryan Caplan and Zach Weinersmith do everything you’d think that good policy pundits should do.

They don’t just track trends or scold rivals, they identify and focus on a feasible positive policy change. They don’t just pick any old change, but focus on one of the biggest possible gains they can identify. And it isn’t a complex fragile proposal that most people couldn’t understand, or that would go badly if not implemented exactly as recommended; their proposal is simple and robust. They don’t pick a topic that has little emotional-resonance, regarding which few would act even if they were persuaded; their topic is quite emotionally-engaging. They don’t pick a change so abstract (like futarchy) that few can concretely imagine it; one can create concrete vivid images of what would happen if their proposal were implemented.

They don’t use complex technical prose, they write in simple clear language, and even add engaging pictures; their book is actually a well-done “graphic novel”. They don’t just present one side of an argument, but instead respond to many major counter arguments. They don’t just use one favored framework of analysis, they consider the issue from many possible frameworks. They don’t just focus on their favorite policy choice, they consider many possible ways to compromise with others. They aren’t overly confident in their claims. And while they consider many possible details and complexities, their main argument, regarding the main effect of their proposal, is simplicity itself.

Most important, their arguments seem solid and correct. Adopting their proposal could in fact plausibly double world product, over and above the growth rate that we might achieve without it. The main obvious effect seems so huge as to overwhelm other considerations. Relative to that huge gain, other costs and risks seem minor and acceptable. Of course, the real world is more complex than are our models of it, and so we can never be very confident that changes which go well in our models will actually go well in the real world. And all the more so when our models are noisy and partial, as in social science. Even so, this is another case I’d call “checkmate”, at least in argument terms.

So, damn it, Caplan and Weinersmith do everything you might think pundits should do. I remain personally persuaded (as I have long been); I’d pull the trigger on doing large broad tests of their plan, and if necessary making big compromises to get a deal that can make these tests happen.

I very much hope that everyone loves this book, and that it is the trigger we needed to start a larger debate that leads eventually to big trials. But alas, I’d bet against this happening, if I had to bet. The large political world isn’t that responsive, at least in the short to medium term, to the world of elite policy debates, and in the elite world people mainly care about signs of status and prestige. Elites loved Hawking’s Brief History of Time, Dubner & Levitt’s Freakonomics, Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and Bostrom’s Superintelligence not because those offered clear solid arguments that readers understood, but because they came with signs of high status. Many elites talked about them, their style projected prestige, their authors had high status affiliations, and the positions they took were in fashion, at least in elite circles.

I deeply admire my colleague Bryan Caplan, and am proud that he has again gone for the big solid simple intellectual win, as he did before regarding politics, parenting, and school. I hope he can do it another dozen times. I’ll read each one, and usually be persuaded. There’s a small chance he’ll have big effects, and his taking that chance seems a clear win on cost-benefit terms. But I must also be honest; that chance is still low.

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