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I disagreed here with Will Wilkinson on which harms to consider in government policy: I said to use the usual economists’ efficiency criteria, while Will seemed willing to just embrace common opinions on which activities are praise or blameworthy:
Robin complains that I share Miller’s and Frank’s reliance on intuitions about things we happen to dislike because I’m arguing with them from within what I see to be their prior liberal moral commitments, which I share. We’re all liberals, which means we dislike many of the same things.
Recently Will told me in person that a key issue was that we shouldn’t count things as harms if others might plausibly persuade us to change our minds on what is really a harm. For example, if we are still arguing about whether stay-at-home moms give working moms a bad image, or vice versa, we shouldn’t count either effect as a harm.
Will and I just had an IM conversation to get to the bottom of this. I think we agreed on the following:
There can be administrative costs to having government policy encourage or discourage anything; so if the harm or benefit is low, it can make sense to not bother to add a new process to deal with it.
Opening up a new area as fair game for encouraging or discouraging may induce stronger efforts to lobby to get favorable treatment. If the harms or benefits are mind, gains from better addressing them can be overwhelmed by lobbying losses, and so it can make sense to not open new areas up for taxes and subsidizes.
If opinion is likely to change substantially soon, and if there are large fixed costs to change a policy, it can make sense to wait to see if opinions will change soon before paying the fixed costs of making or changing policy.
If envisioned policies to encourage or discourage something would result in less experimentation than status quo policies, that gives an added reason for delay. Continued experimentation, in private spheres or in relatively local governments, may be preferable.
All of these considerations are understandable within the standard policy efficiency framework. It seems that Will and I don’t disagree as much as I’d feared.
Virtues of Policy Delay
I am extremely uncomfortable with the conflation of harms inflicted by violent threat with "harms" that do not entail violence. The whole idea of inflicting extreme forms of organized, irresistible violence such as taxation on persons accused of causing non-violent harms to others (e.g. causing distress to the envious by being richer or prettier) is completely repugnant.
This is especially poignant in the context of the state: State-inflicted violence is extremely cheap - once a coercive monopoly exists, it is as cheap as paying a uniformed thug 15$ an hour to enforce whatever law the state machine came up with. On the other side there is an enormous harm inflicted on the victims of the law, the harm of being exposed to and broken by violence. Therefore, whoever manages to get a hold of the levers of state power can extremely cheaply inflict almost arbitrary levels of violent harm on his victims - and the state is *built* to prevent any form of measuring the relative moral weights of violent harms inflicted on a law's victims vs. the "harms" allegedly prevented by the law.
This situation is the antithesis of moral efficiency that Robin wants to achieve - there is no bargaining process or any other effective way of measuring the relative weights of harms involved, and therefore using the state to achieve one's goals is extremely likely to increase the overall harms inflicted on members of the ingroup.
Would you think otherwise?
Ok, here's a context and a "harm".
Context: Horseless carriages are becoming commonplace.
Harm: Unemployment in horse-related industries: stable hands, street scoopers, buggy whip manufacturers, saddle makers, etc.
Question: Should government act, (and if so how) to mitigate this harm.