In human challenge trials, willing volunteers are paid to be infected with a vaccine and then subsequently deliberately infected with COVID to test whether the vaccine works. The UK recently allowed human challenge trials, but there is a worldwide prohibition on such trials due to the disproportionate influence of certain bioethicists on government policy. The ethical case for legalising human challenge trials is extremely strong and the arguments against are extremely weak.
The costs of delay
The Moderna vaccine was invented on January 13th 2020. Since then, 1.75 million have died of Covid despite massive social restrictions, and there has been an enormous global recession. The Moderna vaccine was eventually approved in the US in December. Each day that approval is delayed, thousands of people die from COVID.
This is a very large cost of prohibiting human challenge trials, which we need to be cognisant of. The arguments against such trials needs to be extremely strong to merit prohibiting the trials. What are the arguments against?
Arguments against
One possible argument is to argue that we should not expose volunteers to risk of death. This is a bad argument for several reasons. Firstly, we already allow people to do this. People volunteer to accept a risk of death when driving a car. So do kidney donors. Ice road truckers voluntarily accept a risk of death in exchange for money, as do soldiers, firefighters and oil rig workers. The social benefits of allowing these people to do this are miniscule compared to those produced by human challenge trials.
Secondly, in the status quo of delaying approval by six months, we expose far more people to the risk of getting COVID without pay, involuntarily, andwith much less active monitoring and treatment. To get an adequately powered trial, you would need to infect a few hundred people with the virus. Since the summer, nearly 2 million more people have contracted COVID in the UK alone – again they did this without compensation and involuntarily. As I write, 50,000 people are contracting COVID every day in the UK. It is a bizarre ethical system that holds that the status quo is superior running to a challenge trial with a few hundred voluntary participants in March.
Another argument appeals to concerns about justice. We would get most information from including at-risk groups. Charles Weijer argues that this would violate justice because it would include certain minority groups such as blacks and South Asians.
This is a bad argument for several reasons. Firstly, the trial need not include such groups but could instead include middle aged or elderly anglo-saxons, Jews or East Asians. Secondly, in the status quo, far more blacks and South Asians will get the virus without pay, involuntarily and with far less monitoring and treatment. This is clearly worse for disadvantaged groups than participation of a few dozen representatives of those groups in a challenge trial.
Thirdly, the volunteers have voluntarily accepted this risk, which, as I have noted above, we usually take to be reason to allow them to do so in other domains.
There is an unfortunate divide in the rationalist tribe between Bayesians and believers in scientism. Bayesians are those who rationally incorporate all sources of information when choosing what credence to have in different propositions. You have prior credences that are set by common sense, theoretical arguments, empirical information and so on. You then update from those priors with new information, whether that is from personal observation, social science, theory or whatever. Believers in scientism in contrast form their beliefs by putting lots of weight on published scientific evidence over other types of evidence.
I think scientism is the wrong approach and can be costly. It is also among the leading reasons not to defer to the scientific establishment on some key questions; it is a case where the requirements of epistemic modesty are not as they might appear. A lot of experts with comprehensive knowledge of the scientific literature have the wrong epistemology and oftentimes, for that reason, we shouldn’t defer to them. I will illustrate this with examples.
Masks
The Bayesianism vs scientism cleavage has played out recently in the disagreement between experts about the efficacy of face masks. Some experts have come out strongly in favour of masks, whereas some have cast doubt on their efficacy. For example, in August, a Swedish epidemiologist said:
“Mr Ludvigsson noted that in a meta-analysis by the WHO of 29 studies that showed face masks were effective, only three concerned their use outside hospitals and of those that did not none involved Covid-19.”
This is a paradigmatic scientistic attitude. Mr Ludvigsson casts doubt on whether masks work outside hospitals and for covid because there haven’t been any studies testing them outside hospitals and for covid. The Bayesian approach, in contrast, would update on the information from all of the studies, even though the context is not exactly the same in the studies as what is being proposed now.
They would also take into account the basic science of viral transmission, and use common sense. We know that covid spreads via droplets that are released from the mouth or nose when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or speaks. People can catch covid when those infectious droplets get into their mouth, nose or eyes. This is where common sense kicks in: if you put a mask in the way of the droplets from my mouth or nose, then that makes it less likely that the droplets will get from my mouth or nose into yours. We even have video footage of masks doing the blocking.
Even if masks have only been tested for influenza and not covid, we still understand the mechanism by which they work – droplet blocking. If they work for influenza, which spreads in the same way as covid, then they will very likely also work for covid.
The scientistic view is that to know whether we should recommend that people wear masks in enclosed spaces like shops, buses and the tube, we would need to have a high-quality study (preferably an RCT) of that exact thing. However, that exact thing can never be done twice. Any intervention that we impose will be different in some way from the version of the intervention that has been tested.
To illustrate, consider this dialogue:
Scientism: Ok, we have the evidence: masks work on buses.
Bayesian: Great! One thing – all the masks you tested were blue. Do yellow masks work?
Scientism: Well, we didn’t study that, but of course yellow masks work.
Bayesian: How do you know if you didn’t study it?
Scientism: There is nothing about yellow masks that would make them not work if blue masks work – colour is irrelevant.
Bayesian: Do you have a scientific study showing that colour is irrelevant?
Colour is indeed irrelevant. The argument for this is that the colour of the masks is not going to have an effect on the mechanism by which the mask works, which is blocking droplets. Knowledge of the mechanism of transmission tells us the results will generalise to yellow masks. But this argument is not available to scientism.
This is why the experts have disagreed about masks. World-leading experts have got this one wrong, and it is down to their mistaken scientistic epistemology. Unusually, someone who just relied on sturdy common sense would be more likely to be right than an expert who knew the whole scientific literature really well but assimilated it in a scientistic way.
The minimum wage
I am going to preface this by saying that I am in favour of more redistribution – I am opposed to the minimum wage because it is bad for low-skilled people. Economics 101 states that if you introduce a minimum wage, employers will demand less labour – they will lay people off or demand fewer hours from them. If you think the demand curve for labour slopes downwards, then a minimum wage will cause firms to economise on labour.
In spite of this, as this IGM poll shows, there is active disagreement among leading economists about whether minimum wages will make it harder for the lower paid to find work:
Some of the experts’ answers are influenced by how interpret the term ‘noticeably’, but others justify their arguments with scientistic claims, such as
“I’m not aware of any strong evidence demonstrating this result.” (David Autor)
“The empirical evidence now pretty decisively shows no employment effect, even a few years later. See Dube, Lester and Reich in the REStat” (Michael Greenstone)
“Yes, I know the Econ 101 answer but the evidence suggests the effect on employment is between small and 0.” (Richard Thaler)
These statements suggest that one’s view of the minimum wage should be determined by what the median study finds about the effects of the minimum wage. But really when we are assessing this claim we need to consider economic theory, common sense and all the other evidence that demand curves for labour slope downward. Here is Bryan Caplan on the strength of the case from economic theory and common sense:
“In the absence of any specific empirical evidence, I am 99%+ sure that a randomly selected demand curve will have a negative slope. I hew to this prior even in cases – like demand for illegal drugs or illegal immigration – where a downward-sloping demand curve is ideologically inconvenient for me. What makes me so sure? Every purchase I’ve ever made or considered – and every conversation I’ve had with other people about every purchase they’ve ever made or considered.”
He goes on to argue that empirical evidence from other parts of economics should also update us towards minimum wages having a disincentive effect. This includes
The literature on the effect of low-skilled immigration on native wages. The strong consensus is that high levels of low skill immigration have little effect on native wages. This implies a near horizontal demand curve for low-skilled labour.
The literature on the effect of European labor market regulation, which shows that regulations that increase the cost of hiring people causes high unemployment in Europe.
The literature on Keynesian macroeconomics. Keynesian macroeconomics suggests that nominal wage rigidity causes short-term unemployment. This makes it highly likely that government-imposed wage rigidity causes unemployment.
The literature on the effects of price controls, on rent, energy and agriculture, which bolster the textbook story of price floors.
On this last point, Caplan makes a version of the point I made above about masks:
“If you object, “Evidence on rent control is only relevant for housing markets, not labor markets,” I’ll retort, “In that case, evidence on the minimum wage in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the 1990s is only relevant for those two states during that decade.” My point: If you can’t generalize empirical results from one market to another, you can’t generalize empirical results from one state to another, or one era to another. And if that’s what you think, empirical work is a waste of time.”
The empirical work on the employment effects of the minimum wage is mixed. The majority of studies find a negative effect on employment, but some prominent studies do not. But this is pretty much what we would expect to find if the minimum wage did indeed have a negative effect on employment. Empirical social science research is not very good. Most published research is false. John Ioannidis has found that nearly 80% of the reported effects in the empirical economics literature he studied are exaggerated, typically by a factor of two, and with one third inflated by a factor of four or more.
Minimum wage studies are especially likely to find false negatives. Studies of the minimum wage usually test the effects of minimum wage levels that are low ($4 – $11) and so they are antecedently likely to find effects that are dotted either side of zero. Moreover, when assessing the effect of the minimum wage, you are comparing a counterfactual to the real world that is affected by innumerable other forces, including every other labour market policy, the plans of literally every business in the area, all other economic forces that could affect a region, etc. Then there is the problem of actually measuring changes in demand for labour properly. So, we have very noisy data measuring a small treatment effect – of course we will find some surprising results, which are very likely false negatives. The rational thing to do is not to update very much.
In advance of examining any evidence about the employment effects of the minimum wage, your prior that it reduces employment should be something like >99%. Upon observing any study showing that the minimum wage does not have an effect on employment, you shouldn’t update much because empirical research is not very good. Caplan establishes this formally here.
Libertarians are, sociologically, much more likely to be sceptical of COVID lockdowns than most people. Often their arguments appeal to government curtailment of freedom and the economic and social costs of lockdowns. But libertarianism is really about rights, not weighing up costs and benefits: it says that people may do what they want, provided they don’t violate the rights of others, such as rights to life, liberty and property. The government may step in and coercively and forcibly prevent people from violating the rights of others. For instance, the police may stop me from going on a murderous rampage by locking me up.
The concern that governments have not done a proper cost-benefit analysis on lockdown policies is an interesting one, but cost-benefit analysis is in large part irrelevant to libertarianism. What then, does libertarianism imply about lockdowns?
Let’s first think about what risk individuals impose on others through going to the shops or going to work. If I have covid and pass it on to someone else, I impose around a 1 in 200 chance of death on them, higher if they are over 50 or already ill. Let’s say that given prevalence in my area, there is a 1 in 500 chance that I have covid, and a 50% chance that I spread it to someone else on the tube. The chance I kill someone on a given day is therefore 1 in 200,000 if I get the tube to and from work. If I get the tube every work day in a year, the chance that I kill someone over the course of the year is around 1 in 400.
What would a libertarian say about this? Two things to resolve first are: (1) what level of risk is unacceptable (2) whether others on the tube have implicitly accepted the risk by getting the tube.
What’s the risk threshold?
(1) is, I think, impossible to answer in a principled way because it requires us to put some kind of value or weight on a right. This would be very like saying how good the right is, but nonconsequentialism steadfastly avoids answering that kind of question. The justification for rights in nonconsequentialist philosophy looks like this:
? ⇒ right to bodily security
On consequentialism, the justification looks like this:
Social welfare ⇒ right to bodily security
Utilitarianism can fairly straightforwardly deal with cases of risk by quantifying the badness of an outcome and weighting according to the probability that we realise it. On rights-based theories it is quite unclear what justifies people’s rights and it is therefore very difficult to say about how important a given right is. As a result, we cannot get a clear answer by weighting outcomes according to their probability, so we cannot get a clear answer about what level of risk is unacceptable. This is a very big flaw of nonconsequentialist theories, like libertarianism.
Anyway, imposing a 1 in 400 chance of dying on someone else looks far too high. Imposing a 1 in 200,000 risk of death on someone roughly quintuples their daily risk of dying. Is this an unacceptable level of risk? It is hard to say. I’m not sure what the risk of killing someone via drink driving is, but it is plausibly in the 1 in 20,000 to 1 in 200,000 ballpark, and libertarians think it is ok to ban drink driving. Michael Huemer, a great libertarian philosopher, argues that playing Russian Roulette with unwilling victims counts as aggression, and calls for a coercive response. That’s true even if you imagine a gun with a million chambers, so that the probability of shooting someone is only 1/1,000,000.
Acceptance of risk
Now, what about the point that others have implicitly accepted the risk by getting on the tube, and so have forfeited their right to life if they die. One counter-argument is that drivers know that they accept some risk of being killed by dangerous driving, but we should still prevent dangerous driving. Anyone who goes out on the street knows there is a risk of being mugged, but we should still prevent muggings.
A difference here might be that everyone on the tube is in the same position with respect to the risk they impose on others, so this is a bit like everyone agreeing to get involved in a destruction derby, which does not call for state interference, according to libertarianism.
There are two problems with this as an argument against lockdowns. Firstly, there are externalities from widespread community transmission of covid. If lots of people get the tube, this increases community transmission of covid, which makes it more likely that people who are trying to avoid the risk will die. For instance, it increases the risk that old people will get it on the way to the shops or that the virus will get into care homes, or that people visiting their parents will inadvertently kill them. Thus, symmetry between individuals is not present here. This is more like a case in which everyone agrees to engage in a destruction derby, but the cars sometimes career off the track and kill unsuspecting pedestrians.
This point speaks in favour of lockdowns, from a libertarian point of view, just as it speaks in favour of the regulation of the destruction derby. To reiterate, the point that the benefits of the regulation might not be worth the costs is to a large extent beside the point – what matters is the evident risk that people’s basic rights will be violated.
Secondly, covid seems more like the drunk driver case than the destruction derby case. In the drunk driver case, no-one argues that we should not prohibit drunk driving merely because other drivers use the roads knowing that there is some chance of there being drunk drivers. In the destruction derby case, people choose to accept the risk and they have ample opportunities not to participate. With covid, there are some people who use the tube to go to work and are otherwise cautious and there are some people who use the tube to go to the pub and so expose the more cautious people to much greater risk than they would prefer.
Libertarianism therefore seems to imply that it would be ok to close pubs, restaurants and clubs in order to protect the people who have ventured out but are taking lower risks. In the same way, we should prevent drink driving to protect the rights of ordinary motorists. Again, from a libertarian point of view, the issue is not whether the economic or mental health costs are worth it, it is whether people’s right not to be aggressed against have been violated.
Conclusion
The true implications of libertarianism for pandemic policy seem likely very different to how they have been interpreted by real world libertarians.
I studied political philosophy at university. This meant I spent a lot of my time doing exegesis of John Rawls, a prominent philosopher. There was a particularly big exegesis industry surrounding Political Liberalism and related work. People just could not agree on what his arguments for political liberalism were.
This is a failing on Rawls’ part. Rule number one when making an argument is clarity. Smart well-informed people should not be left uncertain about what you are saying if they get to the end of your long book.
The table below shows ten headline policies in the 2019 Conservatives and Labour manifestos (Brexit aside), as well as some of my own top picks, in no particular order
Conservatives
Labour
Me
Increase spending on the NHS
A green industrial revolution, including more funding for low carbon technology and more state control of climate and energy policy
Encourage clean energy innovation and expand on and strengthen the UK’s mix of flexible regulations and carbon pricing.
Additional funding of social care and a cross-party resolution on how to improve social care
Expansion of public transport
Relax restrictions on house building in urban centres, taking planning decisions out of the hands of local property owners.
School funding
Increase funding for the NHS and social care
Introduce a land value tax, or common ownership self-assessed tax
Cut national insurance or payroll taxes
A national education service to provide lifelong vocational technical and academic education
Abolish stamp duty
Additional funding for childcare
Spend more on policing
Fund greater tax credits for those on low incomes by increasing income tax on the very wealthy
Increased funding for the police
Increase funding of, and devolve power to, local councils
Increased high skilled immigration
Measures to cut utility bills
Increase the minimum wage and expand employment rights, including a 32 hour week in ten years
Introduce responsive road pricing
A points-based immigration system
Increase legal guarantee of various forms of identity inequality
Increase funding for public transport, especially in the North.
Upgrading rail systems in the north
Scrap universal credit and work to develop a viable alternative
Relax drug laws.
Net zero economy by 2050
Large increase in building of social housing
Establish a new government body for socially beneficial high-risk science projects
Now I am going to cross out the policies that have not, in any relevant social context, been tested by a randomised control trial. In bold are the policies that definitely cannot, for practical or ethical reasons, be tested by RCTs.
Conservatives
Labour
Me
Increase spending on the NHS, building new hospitals and employing more staff
A green industrial revolution, including more funding for low carbon technology and more state control of climate and energy policy
Encourage clean energy innovation and expand on and strengthen the UK’s mix of flexible regulations and carbon pricing.
Additional funding of social care
Expansion of public transport
Relax restrictions on house building in urban centres, taking planning decisions out of the hands of local property owners.
More funding for schools
Increase funding for the NHS and social care
Introduce a land value tax, or common ownership self-assessed tax
Cut national insurance or payroll taxes
A national education service to provide lifelong vocational technical and academic education
Abolish stamp duty
Additional funding for childcare
Spend more on policing
Fund greater tax credits for those on low incomes by increasing income tax on the very wealthy
Increased funding for the police
Increase funding and devolve power to local councils
Increase high skilled immigration
Measures to cut utility bills, including regulations
Increase the minimum wage and expand employment rights, including a 32 hour week in ten years
Introduce responsive road pricing
A points-based immigration system
Increase legal protection of various identity groups
Increase funding for public transport, especially in the North.
Upgrading rail systems in the north
Scrap universal credit and work to develop a viable alternative
Relax drug laws.
Net zero economy by 2050
Large increase in building of social housing
Establish a new government body for socially beneficial high-risk science projects
If you were feeling very ambitious, you could test the effect of increased funding for schools and the health service with an RCT – maybe employ the new nurses and teachers in a treatment region and compare to a control region. However, the statistical power of the RCT would not be very good, and even if the whole government became convinced of the value of this, it would be political suicide.
What becomes clear from performing this exercise is that RCT-evaluable policies are not now, nor will they ever be, where the action is when it comes to the big UK policy questions. The highest impact things one would want to do have not been tested by RCTs and there is no way they could ever be in the future. If we were allocating the effort of economists in the UK, less than 1% of it should focus on things that can be tested by RCTs.
This raises the question – why is so much of the economics profession and philanthropy focused on RCT-evaluable things when their attention turns to low- and middle-income countries? What is the difference between rich and poor countries that makes RCTs the right approach in one context but not another?
I suffered from insomnia from the age of about 23 to 29. It got really bad in 2014-15 where I would sleep for about three hours each night for a year. The problem began when I started having to get up at night to go to the toilet. I eventually became so stressed by this that I couldn’t get back to sleep. Later, the sleep stress became so great that I couldn’t get to sleep in the first place. I would spend 11 hours in bed, waiting desperately to fall asleep, becoming ever more frustrated and less likely to sleep. (The tendency to spend more time in bed is quite common in insomniacs, but is the opposite of what you should do.)
I spoke to doctors about this, and they put me on sleeping pills of different types, which didn’t help very much. The thing that cured me entirely in 2016 was CBT for insomnia. The treatment is non-pharmacological and does not require a trained therapist. Not only did this work for me, there is also good evidence for it and it is the frontline recommended treatment for insomnia, according to major health bodies in Europe, the UK and US. See the NICE page for a review.
I think the most impactful aspect of this course was sleep restriction, which is limiting the amount of time you spend in bed. Sleep hygiene is are also useful, but is secondary to sleep restriction.
Sleep restriction
This is a guide to sleep restriction. First, a definition:
Sleep efficiency = (Total sleep time / Time in bed)
The goal is to reduce time in bed in the short term, such that sleep efficiency increases. After a few weeks, total sleep time also increases.
Pick a set time that you get out of bed (e.g. 8:00am)
Over one week, work out how much you sleep and how much time you spend in bed by keeping a sleep diary – logging what time you get into bed, when you woke up, when you got back to sleep. Suppose you find that you usually sleep for 5 and a half hours.
The difficult bit: you now have to stay out of your bedroom and your bed until 5 and a half hours before your waking up time. For you, this is 2:30am.You are not allowed to nap in the day or sleep outside of your bedroom.
In bed, you are only allowed to sleep or have sex – you are not allowed to read or watch TV or listen to music.
Track your sleep efficiency with your sleep diary.
If you do not sleep for 40 minutes, get out of bed and do something boring in a different room, like meditation or tidying.
(Note: You should never reduce time in bed to less than 5 hours throughout this whole process).
Next you have two options
If your sleep efficiency is >90% after 1 week, then increase time in bed by 30 minutes. i.e. set your bedtime to 2:00am, so you have 6 hours in bed.
If your sleep efficiency is <80% after 1 week, then reduce time in bed by 30 minutes. i.e. set your bedtime to 3:00am, so you have 5 hours in bed. (Remember not to spend less than 5 hours in bed per night throughout this whole process)
Repeat step 4 until you are getting your goal amount of sleep. If you feel normal and refreshed after 7 and a half hours of sleep, then you should be going to bed at 12:30am, and getting up at 8:00am.
This process will take several weeks or months to complete, depending on your response. To maintain your healthy sleep, only use your bed for sleep or sex and stick to your bed time and waking time, plus or minus 1 hour.
Sleep hygiene + tools
Sleep hygiene is the control of the environment and behaviours that can affect sleep. I also suggest some tools I think are useful. The three most important things to consider are chemicals, light and your bed set up.
Chemicals: Cut out caffeine and alcohol. Caffeine has a six hour half life so if you have a double espresso at 2pm, this is like having an espresso at 8pm. Most coffees in coffee shops are double expressos. Drinking caffeine is a vicious cycle. You want to do it when you are tired, but it makes you less likely to sleep the next night. Your body also habituates to caffeine after a while so all you are eventually doing by drinking it is adjusting to the withdrawal symptoms. Alcohol makes it easier for you to fall asleep but reduces the quality of your sleep.
Light: Natural sleep hormones are strongly affected by light exposure. You want lots of light in the day and little light from 7pm onwards. I used to think I was a natural night owl because found it hard to get out of bed before 9am. Then I had a child, which meant I had to get out of bed at 6am every day. I no longer believe I was a natural owl: I got out of bed late like a teenager because I am more sensitive to blue light than other people and I stared at my computer, TV and phone for too long in the evening. If you want to get to sleep earlier, you have to limit your exposure to blue light. So, I think you should dim the lights in your house three hours before bed – get dimmable lights or turn off the bright lights. Avoid very bright bathroom lights by getting dimmable lights for your bathroom. Don’t stare at your TV, computer or phone within two hours of going to bed. Gradually dim your screen brightness after 6pm. In the day time, get a sunrise wake up lamp like a Lumie. Use a SAD lamp in the day. Also, getting natural sunlight is a good move.
Mattress: I recommend a 2.5cm memory foam mattress topper on top of a medium-firm foam mattress. It’s impossible to overspend on a mattress, but my set up cost about £400 and my bed set up now is very comfortable. I find that very firm mattresses leave me with a frozen shoulder as I have quite broad shoulders, and memory foam toppers prevent that.
Pillow: The IKEA Rosenkarm pillow is the best pillow I have tried, and only costs £15. The good thing about it is that due to the shape, it provides neck support, and it is comfortable whether you are on your back or on your side.
Exercise: Exercise in the morning or afternoon seems to improve my sleep
Food: Don’t eat big meals right before bed. Don’t go to bed hungry.
Eye mask: 3D eye masks are good.
Curtains: Get blackout curtains or blinds.
Ear plugs: These JVC marshmallow earphones are the best ear plugs I have tried, as they are reusable and the wire makes it easier not to lose them. You can also listen to pink noise on them…
Pink noise: I find pink noise on Spotify quite useful for getting back to sleep after waking up.
This post ties together two other posts I have written on capitalism, markets and morality.
The following things are all different but are often not distinguished properly:
Capitalism – The private ownership of the means of production
Markets – A system in which buyers and sellers engage in exchange
Ethos of selfishness – People have very limited duties to benefit others and have extensive permission to engage in self-interested action.
Egalitarianism – Equality of outcome or opportunity for outcome is intrinsically good.
Utilitarianism – Everyone’s happiness counts equally, so more count for more.
The pros and cons of all of these things are quite different. Some of these things are foundational ethical theories, some are theories of personal morality, some are evaluations of culture, and some are institutional systems of ownership.
Today, whether one believes in an egalitarian society is predictive of whether one is anti-capitalist, anti-big business, anti-market, anti-ethos of selfishness and anti-bourgeois morality. Also, whether one is pro-capitalist, pro-business, or pro-market is predictive of whether one is pro-ethos of selfishness or pro-bourgeois morality. I think there is room for a more nuanced mix of these beliefs.
Capitalism & Socialism
Capitalism is defined very specifically as the private ownership of the means of production. The main argument for it is that it seems to have played a major role in the greatest increase in human welfare ever over the last 200 years. Moreover, experiments with socialism – extensive public ownership of the means of production – tend to go very badly.
The Labour Party’s Clause IV used to say:
“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”
Clause IV was altered by Tony Blair in the 1990s to be focused not on socialism, but on the broader ethical aims of the party. It is at least worth noting that it is a very long walk from the claim that it would be better to have a prosperous and equal society to the claim that Tesco should be taken into state ownership. There seem to be many other ways to achieve the aim of a prosperous and egalitarian society, such as redistribution, free childcare, increased skills training, and so on.
Being a pro-capitalist egalitarian is a live option – this is social democracy.
Going further, I think there are good social welfarist and egalitarian arguments for a common-ownership self-assessed tax, which would not be capitalistic.
Capitalism, big business and markets
Capitalism and big business are different to a market-economy. Firms are not markets. Herbert Simon a thought experiment to make this clear:
Suppose an alien intelligence were to study a strange world with “a telescope which reveals social structures”. Pointed at the Earth, Simon argued, that telescope would show lots of solid green areas with faint interior contours linked by a network of thin red lines. Both colours would be dynamic; new red links would form and old ones perish; some green blobs would grow, others shrivel. Now or then one blob might engulf another.
The green blobs in Simon’s vision were firms and other organisations in which people work; the red lines, market transactions. And if asked what the long-range scanner revealed, the observer would reply “large green areas interconnected by red lines” not “a network of red lines connecting green spots”.
In a large company like Amazon or Tesco, decisions are not made by the market mechanism. Rather, the activities of managers and employees are determined by management structures and by algorithms.
Uber is a platform that provides a market for its drivers and riders to buy and sell services on. When demand increases, the price of a ride increases with surge pricing, so drivers are incentivised to provide more rides and consumers are incentivised to reduce their demand. To reiterate, most decisions in firms are not made like this – there is no market system set up to determine who does what project, rather managers or algorithms decide how it is done and who does it.
Conceptually, there could be a market economy that is not capitalist. The common-ownership self-assessed tax is one way this could happen. Under that system, everyone sets a price for all of their property, and they would have to sell if someone bids that price. The higher they set the price, the higher the tax they pay. This would increase market transactions and encourage more accurate pricing of assets, but it would do away with a key feature of private property, which is that you have monopoly rights over what you own – if you don’t want to sell then you don’t have to.
Another non-capitalist market system would be a system of worker-run cooperatives operating in a market economy. Thus, each firm would be owned and democratically run by its employees. The feasibility and scalability of this system is questionable because cooperatives are disincentivised to grow and accept new members.
Moreover, it is again a long walk from the claim that it would be better to have a prosperous and egalitarian society to the claim that we should not use market prices to make investment and production decisions. One could be in favour of a market economy, but also find other ways to realise a prosperous and equal society, such as redistribution, free childcare, skills training, and so on.
Suppose we were thinking about how to distribute cabbage. On the anti-market approach, we would not use prices, but would instead use state planning. A bureaucracy would have to decide how much cabbage was needed in Oxford on a given day, what type of cabbage people wanted, where they wanted to get it from, how they wanted it packaged, and so on. Doing this without feedback from prices is hard.
In a market system, if demand for cabbage rises, then supermarkets in a competitive market increase their prices. This sends a signal to consumers to limit their consumption of cabbage relative to other vegetables. This also sends a signal to cabbage growers to increase their production of cabbages to meet demand. This kind of information is lost in the absence of market prices.
An ethos of selfishness
Many people in rich Western societies think that their moral responsibilities are heavily circumscribed. Provided people stick to the rules and look after their family, any benevolent acts are purely supererogatory. I think the ethos of selfishness is wrong and that people in fact have quite extensive duties of benevolence. However, this is completely conceptually distinct from one’s assessment of the value of markets and capitalism.
Indeed, I think it is plausible to be pro-market and pro-capitalism but also in favour of extremely stringent duties of benevolence that require thoroughgoing self-abnegation.
A lot of the attention people put into following the news would be better directed at assessing long-term trends. The example I look at in this post is the key underlying facts about the UK economy, which I don’t think most people know very well, sometimes because they get distracted by noise. Overall, things have been going quite well.
Growth and inequality
Economic growth has been pretty healthy over the last 40 years, with average real incomes doubling over that time, and a clear acceleration in the trend in growth after 1980
It is less well-known that on most measures, inequality has been pretty flat since 1990, and the bottom 10% of earners have seen pretty good income growth, especially from 1990 onwards, with incomes increasing by about 60%. The picture that emerges is one of a rising tide lifting all ships:
The Gini coefficient – one measure of inequality has also been pretty flat since 1990
These measures of inequality are all after taxes and transfers, so they account for the effects of redistribution, which increased after Labour took power in 1997.
Unemployment
Unemployment in the UK has also been consistently low, below many of our European neighbours.
Many have argued that billionaire philanthropy is objectionably undemocratic. For example, Anand Giridharadas writes:
“When a society helps people through its shared democratic institutions [as opposed to private charitable foundations], it does so on behalf of all, and in a context of equality. Those institutions, representing free and equal citizens, are making a collective choice of whom to help and how. Those who receive help are not only objects of the transaction, but also subjects of it—citizens with agency. When help is moved into the private sphere, no matter how efficient we are told it is, the context of the helping is a relationship of inequality: the giver and the taker, the helper and the helped, the donor and the recipient.”
There have been other criticisms of these arguments by Scott Alexander and from Cullen O’Keefe. I think one additional point is worth making. The point of view expressed by Giridharadas, Rob Reich and others has almost no support from within mainstream political philosophy, at least as a criticism of effective altruist billionaire philanthropy. The reason for this is that almost all mainstream political philosophers endorse a view I call High Stakes Instrumentalism, which permits the use of undemocratic procedures, such as billionaire philanthropy, in order to avoid high stakes errors.
High Stakes Instrumentalism
When studying for my doctoral thesis, I set out to argue for an instrumentalist defence of political procedures: I argued that we should use democratic procedures if and only if doing so produced the best results. Upon approaching the topic for the first time, I expected to find the field to be split broadly into two camps: pure instrumentalists and pure intrinsic proceduralists who argued that democracy is intrinsically valuable or intrinsically just and so should be used even if it does not produce the best results.
However, what I actually found was that political philosophers were broadly divided into pure instrumentalists and proponents of hybrids of instrumentalism and intrinsic proceduralism. Even proponents of the latter type of view endorse a theory I call High Stakes Instrumentalism:
High Stakes Instrumentalism = For all cases in which we can feasibly use either a political procedure in the set of procedures S1, or a procedure in the set of procedures S2, and all procedures in the set S1 would produce high stakes errors if used, but those in S2 would not, we ought, for instrumentalist reasons, to use a procedure in S2 rather than S1.
More informally, High Stakes Instrumentalism is the idea that if we can use undemocratic procedures to prevent high stakes political errors, then we ought to do so, even though those procedures are undemocratic.
The boundary of high stakes error is usually drawn somewhat fuzzily at policies that violate rights to subsistence or an economic minimum, or basic liberal rights. For example, Joshua Cohen argues,
“Decisions should also be substantively just, according to some reasonable conception of justice, and effective at advancing the general welfare. But a principle of political equality states norms that will normally override other considerations, apart from the most fundamental requirements of justice.”[^1]
And Tom Christiano writes:
“[Democratic] institutions are partly evaluated by whether they manage to protect democracy, liberal rights, and the economic minimum. But beyond these there is no agreement on justice in law and policy in terms of which we can evaluate democracy from the egalitarian standpoint. Therefore, with the exception of these, democracy will be entirely intrinsically justified from the egalitarian standpoint.”[^2]
I discussed the popularity of High Stakes Instrumentalism in a paper in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. The only prominent political philosopher to deny High Stakes Instrumentalism was arguably the Jeremy Waldron of Law and Disagreement, but even he explicitly came to accept High Stakes Instrumentalism a few years later.[^3] In general, it seems as though High Stakes Instrumentalism is a principle which any prima facie plausible democratic theory ought to accept. It appears to be very difficult to defend the view that majorities have the right to violate fundamental rights or to be tyrannous to minorities. Thus, while denying High Stakes Instrumentalism is an option, it is not a palatable one. Indeed, the fact that almost all democratic theorists accept High Stakes Instrumentalism provides some indication of its intuitive strength.
Does political theory condemn billionaire philanthropy?
Billionaire philanthropy is undoubtedly politically inegalitarian and undemocratic. When Bill Gates decides to spend $1m on vaccinations in poor countries, he has unequal influence over that decision. If he were to make this decision democratically, he would put it in a fund and have the US electorate (or maybe all global citizens) vote on what to do with the money.
However, if High Stakes Instrumentalism is true, Gates’ influence over how this money is spent is not objectionable, as long as his control over it prevents high stakes errors. Gates spends substantial portions of his philanthropic money on direct global health aid and on global health research, such as research into vaccines. Open Philanthropy spends its money on saving and improving the lives of people in extremely poor countries; reducing the risk of pandemics; campaigning against horrific abuse of animals in factory farms, and so on. If this money and that of other impact-focused philanthropists were instead under the control of the American democratic system, it would not be spent on these priorities. Some would be spent on farm subsidies, some on wars in the Middle East, some on income support for people in high-income countries, and so on. There would, in short, be far more high stakes errors if this money were under democratic control.
Thus, while billionaire philanthropy may well be undemocratic, it would be incorrect to conclude that a substantial fraction of political philosophers believe it is therefore necessarily illegitimate. In fact, almost all democratic theorists accept that billionaire philanthropy is morally required,provided the money is spent wisely.
The same argument cannot be made for ineffective or harmful billionaire philanthropy. Many billionaire philanthropists donate money to projects with negligible social benefit, such as concert halls at their old university. Others, such as the Koch brothers attempt to cast doubt on the science on climate change. But this should not indict billionaire philanthropists who spend their money effectively on pressing global problems, such as Gates, Open Philanthropy, Hewlett, Children’s Investment Fund, and Bloomberg.
As Rob Reich has argued, billionaire philanthropy does deserve scrutiny in a democratic society. But this scrutiny does not mean that billionaire philanthropy should be placed under democratic control. Rather it should be focused on convincing philanthropists that the world is not, as most of them seem to think, a canvas on which to paint their personality, but is something full of huge problems that they ought to help solve by spending their resources in a careful and rational way.
Some people argue against strong action on climate change with the following reasoning. “Whatever we do in this country makes no difference because China produces more than that in a week”. This line of thought is mistaken. There are two ways of thinking about the damage from CO2 emissions:
Cumulative Damage: The damage from CO2 emissions is cumulative such that the costs of CO2 increases with additional CO2 emissions.
Passing Thresholds: The damage from CO2 emissions stems from the risk that we pass tipping points, such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or the burning of the Amazon rainforest.
On the Cumulative Damage view, the fact that China emits a lot more than the UK doesn’t matter for the question of whether the UK causes damage by emitting CO2. Regardless of whether China emits or not, the UK’s emissions still cause damage. When one thinks about small amounts of emissions, such as one person might produce, the cumulative damage view may look counterintuitive. But it is not really. If my personal emissions cause millions of people to die 0.000000001 second earlier, this amount of time spread across millions of people can be substantial and amount to years of life lost.
On the Passing Thresholds view, the UK’s emissions might not in fact cause us to pass a dangerous threshold, and so might not in fact do damage. However, we are uncertain about when we will pass climate thresholds. We don’t know what amount of emissions could cause the permafrost to melt, or the Greenland ice sheet to melt, or the Amazon to burn. If passing a threshold has some cost X, then the expected cost of our emissions is given by the probability that our emissions cause us to pass that threshold pc*X. So, on the Passing Thresholds view, our emissions do impose expected costs on society. It’s irrelevant that Chinese people are collectively pushing us much closer to the threshold than my personal emissions.
