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When I buy a really expensive car, this story goes, it subtly shifts my community’s frame of reference for signals of social status. … As Robin has been insistently pointing out, how good-looking we are, … how smart and funny we are when we talk, … signals at least as strongly as our cars. If our investments in appearance, … Bourdieuian cultural capital, … are not equally harmful, then why not? …
This line of thinking can be taken even further. Many so-called “culture wars” are largely about cultural externalities. Consider Linda Hirschman-like arguments to the effect that women who choose to stay at home raising children impose a significant cost on women who wish to pursue professional success by reinforcing traditional stereotypes of women’s relative strengths. …
It looks like we’ve defined “harm” so loosely that the harm principle, so understood, could be the basis for the state regulation of any action whatsoever that affects anyone else in a way they don’t like. … If I open a hot dog stand across the street from your hot dog stand, I will take some of your business. … Have I “harmed” you in some way that requires that you be made whole … ? The law says no, and the law is right. …
When a black family moves into a neighborhood of white racists, thereby causing great unhappiness, or when the recognition of the legitimacy of gay marriages causes traditionalists to feel that their traditional marriages have been “devalued,” … somebody really is getting hurt in some real sense. But I don’t much care, and Robert Frank probably doesn’t either …
In the land of the deaf, there is no noise pollution. In the land of cosmopolitan enlightenment, there is no “there goes the neighborhood.” … To identify a “harm,” and to invoke the harm principle, the moment there is a complaint, is the essence of reactionary politics. It is to shut down the very possibility of relocating “the problem” from the source of a reaction to the reaction itself.
More here. When I ask students to justify various subsidies and taxes, they are quick to say “externality,” but slow to identify specific plausibly-related side-effects, and even slower to seek opposing side-effects. They usually just seek support for pre-existing intuitions.
Like Robert Frank and Geoffrey Miller, Will Wilkinson seems to me a bit too quick here to assume the activities he likes are less deserving of taxes. I’ve been arguing mostly for consistent application of principles. If we are to tax positional or unhappy activities, then let’s do that consistently, following our best data on positionality or happiness. Let’s not just selectively apply a rationale to things we already intuitively disliked.
We have long had a clear theoretical basis for allowing businesses to harm each other via competition, but we have less clear a basis for allowing harm via changing expectations about car standards, female workers, neighborhood race, and marriage legitimacy. So I won’t rule taxing such things out of hand. But I will insist we first articulate a clear principle we are willing to apply consistently across a wide range of cases.
Wilkinson on Side Effects
"I work nights. I have arranged things so that I can sleep through the day with traffic, lawn mowers, amd all the other urban noise sources. If I can do that then there is no reason to impose on others who want to have noisy parties or whatever during the night. It’s your problem, you deal with it."
At the risk of getting bogged down in a trivial example, I'm not sure you understand the difference between background noise and life-ruining level. The reason I used this particular example was because my new neighbors, a group of Irish college students, keep me up until 4 AM with their partying, which tends to involve really loud music and getting into semiregular fights. I wear expensive, high-quality earplugs and have a white noise machine on high power, and I still can't get to bed until 4 in the morning. When I ask them to stop, they threaten to kill me, and they're obviously drunk enough to try. The police have been by a few times, but it hasn't helped. I eventually had a choice of failing all of my exams because I can't stay awake during classes or moving out to a more expensive place (I'm moving on Saturday). I'm just glad I didn't own the place, or I'd be selling it at a huge loss.
Just because you managed to deal with some traffic okay doesn't mean anyone else will ever have a legitimate complaint.
Other more powerful examples to get the point across: someone buys the property next to yours and builds a slaughterhouse on it, which smells terrible. Someone buys the property next to yours and builds a bar on it, and every morning you wake up with beer bottles and vomit all over your lawn and the occasional broken window. Someone buys the property upriver from you and dumps industrial waste in the river, turning it green and mildly radioactive.
It's very easy to tell other people "Oh, just tough it out", but it doesn't lead to very happy people or a society anyone wants to live in for very long. As Will points out, the harm principle can certainly be overused, but we can't scrap anything where we can't elegantly distinguish legitimate and illegitimate uses.
Let me correct my own comment... what I meant to say was that education and intelligence are the positional goods. Harvard sweatshirts and resumes are the signals of education and intelligence. Another signal of intelligence is to be smart and funny in conversation.
The reason I thought the Wilkinson quote was incorrect is because visual signals have further reach, as explained in my other comments. The research you linked to merely states that people say they would rather be relatively smart than have relative advantages in some other areas. But that is different than saying that being "smart and funny when we talk" signals as strongly as our car.
Does that make sense?
Sorry that my last comment was so sloppy on this point.