Paternalism and puritanism

Paternalists are often cast as a joyless and puritanical bunch, closing off avenues of pleasure for ordinary people because it is in their own good. But though puritanism does, I think, characterise a lot of paternalists today, it is not a necessary feature of paternalism. Paternalism properly construed is the view that we may interfere with people against their will for the sake of their own well-being, but it is often interpreted as the view that we may interfere with people against their will for the sake of their health. There is more to life than health, but some paternalists often neglect this. 

I personally am in favour of paternalism. I think the state may and should sometimes intervene in people’s lives for their own good. I think seatbelt laws are wise, that tobacco should be taxed, and that people should at the very least strongly discouraged from taking heroin. But puritanism isn’t at all plausible and I think it leads people to neglect some very important benefits. 

Take the example of alcohol. In their discussion of alcohol taxation, GiveWell discuss the many problems with alcohol:

“Heavy drinking is associated with many health and social problems, including liver disease, unsafe sex, domestic violence, homicide, and reckless driving. In 2012, 28,000 Americans died from alcohol-caused diseases. Another 10,000 lost their lives in alcohol-involved motor vehicle crashes, accounting for 31% of all motor vehicle deaths… Worldwide in 2010, the death toll from alcohol-caused disease was 155,000…”

These are indeed serious problems associated with alcohol. But alcohol has loads of benefits too. My friends and colleagues are psychologically normal non-alcoholics and almost all of them drink and enjoy it. Alcohol greases the wheels of social interaction, it leads to great parties, it creates friendships.

In the UK, 30 million people drink every week. If we assume that this creates an extra two hours of fun for these people, that is 600 million hours of fun per week, 68,500 years of fun per week or 3.6m years of fun per year. These are very large benefits, but I have never seen a paternalist consider them when assessing whether increased taxation or prohibition is justified. Paternalists should carry out a proper wellbeing analysis when deciding on their policies.

Saving lives vs saving the economy

As COVID-19 tore through China, Iran, Italy and Spain, killing thousands of people and overwhelming health systems, governments across the world took the extraordinary step of imposing lockdowns, which remain in place in many countries today:

The lockdown has created huge economic costs, with unemployment in the US now the highest it has been since World War 2. This has led many people to ask – at what point do the economic costs of the lockdown stop being worth it? When does the cure become worse than the disease? To answer this, we need some way to compare health costs with economic costs. 

Some people find such comparisons distasteful, arguing that we should never let people die merely for the sake of the economy. Views such as these effectively give saving lives infinite weight, but this leads to counterintuitive conclusions. For example, in our day-to-day lives, we all impose small risks of death on others through mundane tasks such as driving. But if death has infinite weight, then driving must always be wrong. Moreover, it is important to recognise that “the economy” is not an inanimate thing, but something that has important effects on people’s wellbeing, for example by providing employment prospects and income.  

How, then, can we resolve the awful trade-off between lives and the economy?

What is your life worth, statistically?

One popular approach in economics is to try to convert all the costs and benefits into money. When doing this for lives, we can use what is known as the ‘Value of a Statistical Life‘. Rather than asking people what they would pay to avoid certain death (presumably infinite), we ask them how much money they would accept in exchange for an increase in risk of death. Suppose someone is willing to take an extra $1,000 for an additional 1-in-10,000 risk of death by working as an ice road trucker. If 10,000 truckers are each paid to take on that added 1-in-10,000 risk, then the “expected” number of deaths (expected in a probabilistic sense, that is, the probability of death multiplied by the number at risk) is 1. So economists multiply that $1,000 by 10,000 workers to get the “Value of a Statistical Life.” The result: $10 million. This, the argument goes, is what the US government should be willing to pay to save a life. 

Although popular, the Value of a Statistical Life is subject to numerous problems. 

Firstly, the Value of a Statistical Life implies that whether governments happen to know who will be killed by a policy makes a vast difference to the costs and benefits of that policy. Suppose a government is faced with two options:

A. Introduce a pollution regulation that produces $10 billion in economic benefits but with certainty will kill 100,001 people, but we don’t know who they are.

B. Introduce a pollution regulation that produces $10 billion in economic benefits, but will definitely kill one person – Brian. 

Since Brian’s willingness to pay to avoid death is infinite, the Value of a Statistical Life implies that A is better than B, even though it kills 100,000 more people, which is clearly wrong. One way to avoid this is to say that only risk of death, rather than death itself, is valuable, but this is the opposite of the truth. 

Secondly, there is lots of evidence that people are poor at thinking about small probabilities. Many-fold decreases in the chance of harm do not produce proportionate decreases in people’s willingness to pay to avoid it. It is, therefore, not clear why we should let these judgements determine governments’ life-and-death decisions. Moreover, the values produced by this method are highly sensitive to people’s wealth and to the options they have to choose from. Charles Koch’s willingness to pay for personal safety is much higher than a 25-year-old farmer in Ohio, but that doesn’t mean his life is worth more than the farmer’s, it just means he has more money. 

In light of these and other methodological issues, it is not surprising that studies using similar methodologies have set the value of a statistical life as low as $100,000 and as high as $76,000,000.

This suggests that the value of a statistical life approach is fraught with problems.

Wellbeing analysis

The value of a statistical life tries to make health and money comparable by converting health costs to money. A more promising approach is wellbeing analysis: we compare health and monetary costs in terms of their effects on wellbeing. In other words, we should figure out the effects on wellbeing of saving lives, and the effects on wellbeing of avoiding economic problems such as unemployment and reduced consumption. We can measure and compare these costs using what are known as Wellbeing-Years (WELLBYs). 

WELLBYs recognise that wellbeing is dependent on quality and quantity of life. If someone dies prematurely, then they miss out on the good things in life. Other things equal, it is worse for a 40-year-old to die than an 85-year-old because the 40-year-old will miss out on more of the good things in life. WELLBYs also track quality of life. Fortunately, there is now a voluminous literature on the effects of different life events on wellbeing, such as unemployment, loneliness, divorce and so on. Average wellbeing in the UK is 7.5 on a 0-10 scale, and we have lots of data on how external events can push people up or down this scale. 

Richard Layard and other economists have put wellbeing analysis to use in their paper ‘When to release the lockdown‘. Releasing the lockdown would have various positive effects on wellbeing, including:

  1. Increasing people’s incomes now and in the future. 
  2. Reducing unemployment now and in the future. 
  3. Improving mental health and reducing suicide, domestic violence, addiction and loneliness. 
  4. Restoring schooling. 

On the negative side, releasing the lockdown 

  1. Increases the final number of deaths from the virus (as well as from other conditions which may get undertreated if health services become overstretched with COVID-19 patients). 
  2. Increases road deaths, commuting, CO2 emissions and air pollution. 

To see how WELLBYs work, take the example of income. The literature in psychological science suggests that a 1% gain in income increases wellbeing by 0.002 points. Layard et al. argue that if we release the lockdown in June rather than July, income will decline by 5.1% as a percentage of annual income. The effect on wellbeing for each person of this is therefore 5.1*0.002. Spread across the whole UK population of 67 million, this is 663,000 WELLBYs.

Against this, we have to balance the costs to health of releasing the lockdown. Layard et al. argue that each extra month of lockdown saves 35,000 lives from COVID-19. They argue that since COVID-19 disproportionately affects the elderly, each person saved would otherwise live another 6 years on average (at wellbeing level 7.5). So, each extra month of lockdown saves 1.5 million WELLBYs (35,000*6*7.5). Given some probably debatable assumptions, Layard et al. estimate that the net costs and benefits of the lockdown break down as follows:

Net benefits of releasing the UK lockdown on the stated date rather than in May (in WELLBYs, 10k)

June 1July 1Aug 1
Benefits
Income-48-114-200
Unemployment-79-161-245
Mental health-20-43-69
Confidence in government-9-22-44
Schooling-5-10-13
Costs
COVID-19 deaths158316474
Road deaths51015
Commuting102030
CO2 emissions71421
Air quality81624
Net benefits2726-7

(Adapted from Layard et al. page 2)

Thus, on Layard et al.’s assumptions, releasing the lockdown in mid-June would be optimal, with the net benefits declining thereafter – releasing in August would actually be worse than releasing now due to the rising economic costs. Layard et al. themselves say that the numbers in the table above are purely illustrative, so we should not take this conclusion literally. Nevertheless, the quantitative framework is an important contribution. 

Wellbeing is arguably not all that matters, but almost all ethical viewpoints agree that wellbeing is morally important. The new science of wellbeing analysis should be a key guide for governments making decisions about when to end the lockdown.

Sources of information: good and bad

To have useful and rational beliefs about the world you need (1) good sources of information and (2) a rational brain. There is lots of evidence that people are not rational, especially about things that are strongly associated with group identity, such as politics, ethics, economics, and some topics in science. This is true regardless of intelligence.

People tend to interpret evidence in a way that supports their prior position and they ignore evidence to the contrary. Politics makes us stupid.

I think factor (1) is a bit more neglected and not well understood by people who are actively trying to have above average knowledge of the world. I know people who read The Guardian who think they should challenge their views by going on the Daily Mail comments section. I know people who watch Newsnight every night, thinking they will learn stuff. This is a bad mistake – worse than doing nothing, it will actually make you stupider than you were when you went in. And this problem is easily solved because there are lots of great source of information.

1. TV

The bad

There are some good programmes on TV about science and history. But I have almost never seen a TV programme that was a good way to learn about politics, economics or philosophy. For the most part, if you want to learn important things about the world, turn your TV off.

Lots of conscientious citizens watch the news and news programmes like Question Time and Newsnight, and think it their duty. You will learn less than nothing by doing this.

  • Negative stories. TV news massively over-reports negative stories, which is why people fail to recognise that the world is actually getting a lot better.
  • Focus on political intrigue. TV news in the UK is obsessed with psycho-dramas in Westminster rather than understanding complex issues, such as:
    • How bad could climate change be and what is the most cost-effective way to deal with it?
    • Does foreign aid work?
    • What are the merits of a land value tax?
    • Is it possible to influence social mobility?
    • Why is housing unaffordable in the South East?
  • Two disagreeing mouths = objectivity. TV operates according to the principle that if you have two people who take different views on a topic, then if you make them talk at each other, the truth comes out. Newsnight, the premier current affairs show in Britain, tried to inform viewers about addiction by having a debate between Chandler from Friends and Peter Hitchens. This is typical for current affairs on TV.
  • Reliance on ‘expert pundits’. TV current affairs often relies on people like Robert Peston, Andrew Marr, Andrew Neill, John Snow, Paul Mason, or Nick Robinson. Phillip Tetlock has shown that the opinions of such people are basically worthless. When they are put to the test and made to give testable predictions, they are no better than the proverbial dart-throwing chimp.

2. Newspapers and magazines

The bad

Almost all newspapers are terrible, including most of the supposedly high-brow ones – The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent and The Guardian. As with TV, the news skews negative. Moreover, these newspapers are all unbelievably politically biased and are pushing an agenda with their news coverage which precludes them from being objective.

Comment writers’ job is to have an interesting opinion once a week that is eye-catching and appealing to their readership. Most of the writers come from a humanities background and so don’t understand stats, which you need to do to understand current affairs. Consequently, the quality of analysis in comment sections is almost always abysmal.

I have smart friends who take seriously comment writes who are leading writers at our flagship right of centre and left of centre newspapers. Most of these guys would be out of their depth in a puddle. Here is Charles Moore talking about grammar schools, liberated from the desire to examine any evidence on the topic, such as selection effects in education. And here is Owen Jones half-understanding his own notes while trying to explain why Venezuela’s economy crashed, even though he had written on the topic for many years and predicted that it wouldn’t. This is what it looks like when someone has bluffed a career.

There is the occasional good article in these papers, but it’s not worth sifting through the rubbish to get to the good stuff.

The same applies to supposedly highbrow political magazines, such as The Spectator and The New Statesman. I read The Spectator for many years and the New Statesman for less. Both are poor. The Spectator has had people like James Delingpole, a bona fide conspiracy theorist, as regular contributors.

The good

I really like The Economist. For the most part, I think it is a well-researched attempt to give an objective view of important issues in politics and economics. Some of the coverage isn’t great – if The Economist had its way they’d be using the Euro in Iraq – but it is mostly good and non-ideological.

I’m told by people I trust that The Financial Times is good.

3. Radio and podcasts

The bad

Many of the criticisms above apply to a lot of radio programmes. Lots of smart and conscientious people listen to the Today programme. Everyone knows that politicians on those programmes act within constraints and are not incentivised to convey accurate information. You don’t learn anything from watching John Humphrys trying to catch them out: that is merely sport. You learn stuff from experts in their field speaking freely, openly and tolerantly with someone who actually understands what they’re talking about.

The good

There are some great radio programmes and podcasts out there. I think this is because the constraints of public opinion are weaker on the radio. We have a public broadcaster, so it is hard for programmes to actually put forward a controversial view with any conviction.

More or Less – Covers statistical claims in the news on the assumption that it is possible to find and communicate the correct answer and the attendant uncertainty. I have learnt so much about statistics from this show. They will even get into very thorny and heated topics, such as whether the Spirit Level is bad social science or not, or the economic effects of the Thatcher government. You could never get away with that on TV.

The Inquiry – Four expert witnesses discuss some defined proposition and try to reach an answer on it. These will be scientific experts in the field or people close to the action, rather than rent-a-gobs from newspapers.

In Our Time – Melvyn Bragg gets three academic experts to talk for 45 minutes about a topic such as utilitarianism or what caused the Industrial Revolution. Again, no rent-a-gobs.

Econtalk – Russ Roberts discusses economics-relevant research with experts for more than an hour. Roberts has his own libertarian biases, but he is open about them, and the guests come from across the political spectrum. Several Nobel Laureates have appeared.

Conversations with Tyler – Similar to Econtalk, conversations from informed and smart people with the polymath Tyler Cowen.

80,000 Hours podcast – Rob Wiblin has >1 hour conversations on philosophy, policy, global catastrophic risk, long-termism and effective altruism. He is a great presenter and you wouldn’t find a lot of the guests anywhere else.

Rationally speaking with Julia Galef – Julia is a brilliant interviewer who gets guests with deep expertise in a topic to explain their view on it.

Freakonomics – This is generally good, but occasionally features things like the Malcolm Gladwell ‘10,000 hours’ nonsense. The presenters are smart and well-informed and the contributors usually good.

You will learn more listening to the back catalogue of these shows than a lifetime’s watching the news or reading newspapers.

4. Blogs and online news

The good

You will learn more about a topic from reading the Wikipedia or Our World in Data entry on it than if you watched the news for a hundred lifetimes.

Some good blogs:

Slatestarcodex. Scott Alexander is brilliant. Thorough investigations of scientific papers related to important topics, and careful analysis of current events.

Econlog. Bryan Caplan and Scott Sumner are worth reading.

Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are really smart and knowledgeable. They cover a wide range of topics in economics.

Andrew Gelman’s blog. Criticising the use of stats in the media and in science.

Fakenous Michael Huemer is one of my favourite philosophers. On the Fake Nous blog, he provides rational and impartial treatment to philosophical topics and to current affairs.

Effective Altruism Forum. The posts with more than 50 upvotes are usually worth reading.

Overcoming Bias. Robin Hanson is worth reading but a bit of a troll.

Don’t buy a house

I think for most people buying a house is a very bad move, financially and for people’s wellbeing. My friends often say things like

“Rent is throwing money down the drain” and “My parents bought their house for £100k, but it’s now worth £550k”

Thoughts like this are wide of the mark and lead people to make decisions that make their lives worse. Here is a spreadsheet that sets out all of the costs and benefits of owning a house. If you’re thinking about buying a house, you should input your own figures and see what comes out.

Opportunity cost

Many people neglect the opportunity cost of their deposit and their mortgage repayments. That is money that could otherwise be invested in stocks or other investments. Investing in stocks is easy with Vanguard LifeStrategy or Nutmeg. Stocks tend to strongly outperform real estate as an asset class – 10% over the 20th century for stocks, vs barely beating inflation for real estate. Real estate does a bit better in places like London and the South East, but still worse than stocks. That £100k you put into your deposit could go into a Vanguard stocks account and get you £60-£90k in 10 years. This would be money you can actually spend as well, of which more later.

Home ownership is burning money

People say that renting is burning money. But buying, selling and owning a house involves massive costs that you don’t incur when renting, including:

  • Legal fees
  • Stamp duty
  • Estate agent fees
  • Property inspection
  • Repairs

These costs will set you back about £50k over 10 years. All of this will likely burn through a substantial chunk of the profit you make when buying and selling a house. If you buy more than once in the space of 10 years, you’ll likely lose money.

Then you have to consider mortgage interest, which in my model would cost me about £67k over ten years.

House value is money I’ll only have when I’m old

Suppose my house increases in value from £200k to £400k. This is nice but it is not money I can actually spend, unless

  1. I sell and start renting again
  2. I move to a cheaper house – either a worse house or one in a less desirable area

Most people don’t want to do option 2 – they want to live in ever nicer areas in ever nicer house. But then if your house has increased in value, then the houses in the nicer areas probably have as well – we’d expect the tide to lift all ships. The only time home owners will get to enjoy their winnings is once their kids leave and they retire to a less popular area. e.g. move out of zone 2 London and go and live in a suburb in zone 6. So, it’s only money you get when you’re old.

In contrast, if the value of my stocks doubles, then I can actually spend the money on things that make my life better, such as nicer rental properties, child care, etc.

Owning a house is very risky

Buying a house puts all your eggs in one locational basket. I live in Oxford. Suppose I buy a house, and five years down the line the price is the same or has fallen, but I want to move to San Francisco. If so, I will lose a lot of money. It’s true that the stock market can fall as well. However, I have no reason to sell my stocks just because I want to move house. I can move, sit on my stocks for another five years and the market will likely have risen and I can enjoy my winnings. (Over ten years, the stock market almost never falls.)

Things can also go wrong with houses. You might have Japanese knotweed in your garden, you might need to put on an entirely new roof, your chimney might fall off, the last owners might have concealed rotting foundations from you. In short, you could end up unlucky and have something that costs you loads of money or makes your house plummet in value. This could mean financial ruin. Such risks do not exist for the happy renter.

Compare like with like

I find that a lot of people who say “I’m paying less now than I was in rent” aren’t comparing like with like. They’ll have lived in a central Oxford flat and then move outside the ring road to a house worth £400k. If they bought the house they were previously renting, they would likely pay £1m.

House prices can rise above rental costs because there are two housing markets – houses are an asset and so will be bought for speculation, but there is also a rental market for people who just want somewhere to live. This means that price to rental ratios are an important indicator of whether you are mugging yourself off by buying a house rather than renting. I discuss this in the spreadsheet. The price rental ratio in Oxford is over 20, which makes buying a house a bad move. This will likely be true in most desirable cities.

This means you can live in a much nicer house if you rent rather than buy. People on decent money can rent somewhere in zone 2 London, but if you wanted to buy it, you would need to be a millionaire. I’d rather have the 20 minute walk to work than the house I own in Crouch End, and an hour each way.

What if interest rates go up?

Interest rates are at historic lows at the moment, and were even before COVID-19. This has been a major driver of recent house price increases. The question then is – what if interest rates increase? Then home owners would be in lots of trouble.

Advantages of home ownership

The main advantages of home ownership are

  1. Additional security – your landlord might sell your house
  2. You can change the house how you like

It is true that home ownership gives you more security along one dimension but as discussed above, it also makes you much more precarious along many others. I think other costs and risks far outweigh this benefit.

It is true that you can knock down walls and install new bathrooms. But then if you want a really nice rental, you can also just get a nicer rental (using the money from your stocks). I’m personally not massively eager to knock down walls. I’m not a property developer, and I don’t know why everyone in England thinks they are one.

When people tell you about all the money they’re saving owning a house, they don’t often mention the 20 grand they spent on their new kitchen and the 10 grand they spent on their new bathroom. It would be more accurate to say that people have bought a house to and it has cost them a tonne, but they really wanted to do it.

What about leverage?

One advantage of buying rather than renting is that banks will lend you money to buy a house, which they won’t do for stocks. Even though returns to real estate are smaller than houses, this leverage can mean that property does much better than stocks. Indeed, in my model if housing does really well, then the asset value you own can be a lot higher than if you went for stocks ten years down the line. But two things. Firstly, remember that you can’t actually spend the money until you’re old.

Secondly, the downside of leverage is that it leaves you massively screwed if your house falls in value. This defence of home ownership is more along the lines of “roll the dice” than sage advice from your parents. If banks did lend money to let people invest in stocks, would you be advising your kids to get involved?

Policy implications

Governments in the UK are very keen on building a property-owning democracy. 60% of people in the UK own a home. 60%! The government, even actively subsidises people to buy houses. This is bonkers, immoral and inequitable. For a lot of people, it’s a really bad choice.

Fatal flaws of nonconsequentialism: rights that trump the common good

Almost all nonconsequentialists hold that people have rights against that may not be infringed simply because the consequences are better. For example, here is Peter Vallentyne:

“[I]ndividuals have certain rights that may not be infringed simply because the consequences are better. Unlike prudential rationality, morality involves many distinct centers of will (choice) or interests, and these cannot simply be lumped together and traded off against each other. 

The basic problem with standard versions of core consequentialism is that they fail to recognize adequately the normative separateness of persons. Psychological autonomous beings (as well, perhaps, as other beings with moral standing) are not merely means for the promotion of value. They must be respected and honored, and this means that at least sometimes certain things may not be done to them, even though this promotes value overall. An innocent person may not be killed against her will, for example, in order to make a million happy people significantly happier. This would be sacrificing her for the benefit of others.” (Vallentyne in Norcross)

1. Justifications for rights

Rights are often defended with claims about the separateness of persons:

There is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall social good covers this up. (Intentionally?) To use a person in this way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has. (Nozick in Norcross)

One can find similar defences of the separateness of persons by Rawls, Nagel, Gauthier and other nonconsequentialist luminaries.

Vallentyne appeals to the apparently distinct idea that individuals “must be respected and honoured” as an argument for rights. Some also defend it by appealing to the Kantian idea that to sacrifice one for many treats people as a means, and fails to recognise their status as an end in themselves. 

As a result, nonconsequentialists, along with most people, think that it is impermissible for a doctor to kill one person and harvest their organs to save five other people. They think that we may never punish the innocent even if doing so is for the greater good. The reason is that the one person has a right not to be killed or punished, even if doing so produces better consequences overall. 

2. An absolute prohibition?

One natural initial interpretation of claims about rights is that they imply an absolute prohibition on violation of the right regardless of the consequences. So, we may never kill one person even to save one million people from dying or from being tortured for years. 

Problems

There are several problems with rights absolutism.

Counterintuitive

This is extremely counterintuitive. This is why, with the exception of John Taurek and a handful of others, few nonconsequentialists actually endorse the absolutist position. 

Risk

Secondly, as Michael Huemer argues here, absolutist theories run into problems when they have to deal with risk. Ok, we may never punish the innocent for the greater good. But can we punish someone with a 0.0001% chance of being innocent for the greater good? If not, then we need to say goodbye to the criminal justice system. We know for a fact that the criminal justice system punishes lots of innocent people every year. I am not pointing to corruption or bureaucratic ineptitude. The point is just that an infallible legal system is practically impossible. So, even a legal system in some advanced social democracy like Sweden is going to punish lots and lots of innocent people every year: we can never be 100% certain that those we imprison are guilty. 

Similarly, by driving, you impose a nonzero risk of death on others by causing a car accident. Does this mean that driving is never permissible?

Near certain harms

In fact, as Will MacAskill argues, by driving, you, with almost 100% certainty, cause some people to die by causally affecting traffic flow – you pulling into the road will through some distant causal chain change the identity of who is killed in a car crash. Does this mean that driving is never permissible? To reiterate, this isn’t about imposing a small risk of harm, it is about knowingly and with near-certainty changing the identity of who is killed through a positive action that you take. If you say that this doesn’t matter because the net harms are the same, then welcome to the consequentialist club. 

3. Moderate nonconsequentialism

One solution to the first two problems is to give up on absolutism. Huemer proposes that the existence of a right has the effect of raising the standards for justifying a harm. That is, it’s harder to justify a rights-violating harm than an ordinary, non-rights-violating harm. E.g., you might need to have expected benefits many times greater than the harm. Huemer writes:

“This view has a coherent response to risk. The requirements for justification are simply discounted by the probability. So, suppose that, to justify killing an innocent person, it would be necessary to have (expected) benefits equal to saving 1,000 lives. (I don’t know what the correct ratio should be.) Then, to justify imposing a 1% risk of killing an innocent person, it would be necessary to have expected benefits equal to saving 10 lives (= (1%)(1,000)).” [my emphasis]

This avoids problems with risk and also offers a way out of the counter-intuitiveness of saying that we may never sacrifice one person even if we can thereby prevent billions from being tortured. 

Problems

Inconsistent with justification for rights

The first problem with this is that it is inconsistent with the justifications for rights offered above. To say that one can be sacrificed for the many is to fail to recognise “the normative separateness of persons”, to act as though “people’s interests can be traded off against each other”. Ok, but why can people’s interests be traded off for 1,001 lives? The separateness of persons sounds like a claim to the effect that we can never make interpersonal trade-offs. If it isn’t this, I don’t know what it means. If it means that the standards for inflicting harm on others is raised to 1,000 lives, then the separateness of persons is merely an elaborate and rhetorical way of redescribing the intuition that people have non-absolute rights. Arguments from the separateness of persons entail absolutism, not moderate deontology. 

Similarly, where does this leave the argument that respecting and honouring an individual means that we cannot sacrifice them for the greater good? If the idea of respect does some work in the argument, why does respect stop at 1,000 lives? What if I respond as a typical consequentialist and say that respecting and honouring an individual means giving their interests equal weight to others. One counts for one, so more count for more. So, we can sacrifice one for many. What would count as an argument against this from ‘respect’? Would it be to just restate that respect requires that the standard for inflicting harm is raised to 1,000 lives. If so, again, the appeal to rights just seems to be an elaborate rhetorical way to redescribe the intuition that people have non-absolute rights. 

What about the idea that people should be treated as an end and not as a means? On the most natural interpretation of this claim, it means that we must never impose costs on people for the greater good. Why does sacrificing someone for 1,001 people not treat them as a means? If the answer is that their interests were considered but they were outweighed, then why can’t we use that argument when deciding whether to sacrifice 1 person for 2 people? Again, the appeal to the idea that people are an end just seems to be an elaborate rhetorical redescription of the intuition that people have non-absolute rights. 

(There is a theme emerging here, which I will return to in a later post).

What is the threshold?

The second problem is related to the first. In the quote above, Huemer says “I don’t know what the correct threshold should be”. Can this question be resolved, then, by further inquiry? What would such an argument look like? Consequentialists have a coherent and compelling account of these cases. We consider each person’s interests equally. Sacrificing 1 for 2 produces more of what we ultimately care about, so we should save 2. Saving 1,000 is even better!

What could be the nonconsequentialist argument for the threshold being 6 lives, 50 lives, 948 lives, 1 million lives or 1 billion lives? This is not a case of vagueness where there are clear cases at some ends of the scale and then a fuzzy boundary. It is not like the question – how many hairs do we have to remove before someone becomes bald? There are clearly answers at either end of the spectrum here: remove 10,000 hairs, someone is clearly bald, remove 5 clearly not. The rights threshold isn’t like this. I genuinely do not know what arguments you could use in favour of a 1,000 person threshold vs a 1 billion people threshold. We’re not uncertain about a fuzzy boundary case, rather there seem to be no criteria telling us how to decide between any possible answer. 

As we have seen above, the tools in the nonconsequentialist toolkit don’t seem like they will be much help. The reason for this is that the heart of the nonconsequentialist project is to ignore how good certain actions are. Rights are not grounded in how good they would be for anyone’s life – they’re prohibitions that are independent of their service of welfare. I say “We will be able to produce more welfare if we use our healthcare resources to improve the health of other people rather than keep this 90 year old alive for another week.” The nonconsequentialist retort is “the 90 year old has a right to health”. Where does this leave us? He has a right to treatment that doesn’t seem to be grounded in anything, especially not something that can be compared and prioritised.

Return to the threshold. Maybe one answer is simply intuition. Maybe people have the intuition that the threshold is 1,000 and that is good enough. 

Several things may be said here. Firstly, nonconsequentialists themselves implicitly deny that this kind of argument is good enough. That is why they try to build theories that justify where the threshold should be, just as they try to justify why people have rights in the first place. In truth, I would prefer the entirely intuition-led approach because it is more honest and transparent.

Secondly, this is the kind of thing about which there would be massive disagreement among nonconsequentialists. I would wager that some people will answer 100, some 1,000, some civilisation collapse, and some will endorse no threshold (Taurek). Since no arguments can be brought to bear, how do we decide who is right? Do we vote? Moreover, if we are apprehending an independent moral reality, why would there be such disagreement among smart people that cannot be resolved by further argument? 

The better explanation is that this is an ad hoc modification erected to save a theory that cannot, in the end, be saved. I would expect that if people really believed that persons are separate, need to be respected, not treated as a means, and so on, there would be much more people who end up in Taurek’s position of denying any trade-offs. I would expect moral philosophy to be divided between utilitarians and Taurekians who refuse to leave the house lest they risk a car accident. The world is not like this, so I don’t think people actually believe these claims. 

Not a response to near-certain harms

Moderate non-consequentialism is not a response to the near-certain harms objection. 

Summing up

Rights were initially defended with what seemed to be arguments with premises and a conclusion: separateness of persons therefore rights; people as an end therefore rights; respect therefore rights. The implications of these arguments are so unpalatable that almost no nonconsequentialists actually accept them. In the end, they endorse something more moderate which is inconsistent with the arguments that they initially appealed to. Moreover, on closer examination the arguments seemed merely to be elaborate rhetorical redescriptions of the intuition that people have rights. Until better arguments are forthcoming, this looks like a good reason to believe that people do not have rights that trump the common good.

How hot will it get?

Understanding the probability of extreme warming of more than 6, 8 or 10 degrees is highly consequential for understanding how we should prioritise climate change relative to other global catastrophic risks. How hot it will get depends on:

  • How much we emit
  • How sensitive the climate is to emissions

Here, I construct a model of each of these uncertain questions. I conclude that:

  1. Assigning a probability distribution to a broad range of possible ‘business as usual’ scenarios up to 2100, on what I believe to be the most plausible estimate of climate sensitivity, the probability of eventual warming of more than 6 degrees is around 6% and of more than 10 degrees is 1 in 1000.
  2. Assigning a probability distribution to a broad range of possible ‘business as usual’ scenarios up to 2200, on what I believe to be the most plausible estimate of climate sensitivity, the probability of eventual warming of more than 6 degrees is around 16% and of more than 10 degrees is around 1%.

This suggests a lower risk of extreme warming than other leading estimates, such as from Wagner and Weitzman. This is due to differences in priors across climate sensitivity. Nonetheless, the probability of extreme warming is uncomfortably high and strong mitigation remains imperative. There are two forces here pushing in different directions. On the one hand, many estimates of climate sensitivity are too high due to the faulty use of Bayesian statistics. On the other, focusing only on the most likely ‘business as usual’ pathway ignores the downside risk of higher-than-expected emissions, due, for example, to surprising economic growth or population growth. Overall, it looks as though the risk is lower than some leading estimates, but still worth worrying about.I am grateful to Johannes Ackva and Will MacAskill for thoughts and comments. Mistakes are my own.

1. How much will we emit?

How much we emit depends on choices we make. When we are trying to understand how bad climate change could be, I think it is most useful to try to understand how much we will emit if things roughly carry on as they have been doing over the last 20 or 30 years. This gives us a baseline or ‘business as usual’ set of scenarios which allow us to understand how much danger we are in if we don’t make extra efforts to decarbonise relative to what we are doing at the moment.

Existing literature

There are estimates of how much we are likely to emit in the literature. Rogelj et al (2016) provides a good overview of the literature:_____________________📷 [1]The bars here show the median estimate of emissions across different emissions scenarios, and the vertical black lines show the range due to scenario spread – though it is unclear from the text what confidence interval this is supposed to depict. INDCs are Intended Nationally Determined Contributions that countries have made in accordance with the Paris Agreement. The bottom of the conditional INDC scenario to the top no policy scenario spreads from 2 trillion tonnes of CO2 to 7 trillion tonnes of CO2. This is equivalent to the bottom end of RCP 4.5 (the medium-low emissions pathway) and the top end of RCP 8.5 (the high emissions pathway). Median cumulative emissions on current policies is 3.5 trillion tonnes of CO2, which is about the middle of RCP6.0 (the medium high emissions pathway). You can check how cumulative emissions correspond to emissions pathways with this table: 📷 [2]

My own model of likely emissions

It remains somewhat unclear from the Rogelj et al (2016) estimate how probability should be distributed across these scenarios. How plausible is a global no policies scenario, for example? Thus, I have constructed a model myself which tries to give a plausible probability density function across a range of emissions scenarios. To do this, I have given different estimates of the three parameters in the Kaya Identity: Total cumulative CO2 emissions is the product of three factors: (1) human population, (2) GDP per capita, (3) carbon intensity (emissions per $).

My estimate of these parameters:

  • Uses existing estimates of the likely trends in these parameters over the century, where available
  • Where these are not available, I extrapolate for the trends over the past 30 or so years in the parameters of interest.

The model is here. It includes:

  • Three estimates up to 2100 of the likely range of business as usual emissions.
    • One is based on extrapolating growth in GDP per capita from the last 30 years
    • Another is based on the Christensen et al expert survey of forecasts of economic growth.
    • One assuming that there is an AI explosion leading to growth of 10% per year.
    • One estimate of emissions to 2200 which extrapolates GDP per capita growth from our experience over the last 30 years.

The results are here:

📷 (Note results will vary in the real model depending on when you refresh the model.)

There is large uncertainty about the parameters that make up the Kaya Identity and this produces large uncertainty about business as usual. For example, 2% economic growth produces an economy that is 5 times larger in 2100, whereas 3% growth produces an economy that is 10 times larger. The 95% confidence interval for UN population projections stretches from 9.5 billion to 13 billion people. This is why there is such uncertainty about how much we will emit, assuming that we make no extra effort to reduce emissions.

Emissions and CO2 concentrations to 2100

  • The median business as usual scenario to 2100 is the medium-high emissions pathway (in the RCP6 range), which is roughly the same as what happens if countries continue on current policy
    • This corresponds to atmospheric CO2 concentrations of about 700ppm.
  • The upper 5% bound of cumulative emissions is beyond the RCP8.5 range.

Emissions and CO2 concentrations to 2200

If we continue on current trends up to 2200, then the median pathway is 11 trillion tonnes, and there is a 5% chance of more than 31 trillion tonnes (which is bad news).

Flaws in the model

This model assumes that the parameters in the Kaya Identity are independent, which is false. So, the model should be taken with something of a grain of salt. Nevertheless, I do think it is useful for giving a fairly plausible range of uncertainty about what we could emit without making extra effort to mitigate.

2. How hot will it get?

The relationship between CO2 concentrations and warming is logarithmic: at least within a certain range, each doubling of concentrations produces the same amount of warming. Equilibrium climate sensitivity measures how much the planet warms after a doubling of CO2 concentrations, once the climate system has reached equilibrium. There is uncertainty about the true equilibrium climate sensitivity. The IPCC does not give a formal probability distribution function over equilibrium climate sensitivity, but instead states:“Based on the combined evidence from observed climate change including the observed 20th century warming, climate models, feedback analysis and paleoclimate, as discussed above, ECS “is likely [>66% chance] in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C with high confidence. ECS is positive, extremely unlikely [<1% chance] less than 1°C (high confidence), and very unlikely [<10% chance] greater than 6°C (medium confidence)”.[3]

Lamentably, this leaves the nature of the right tail of climate sensitivity very unclear. In Climate Shock, Wagner and Weitzman discuss how to convert this into a probability distribution function. They end up positing that the underlying distribution is lognormal,[4] which suggests a distribution over climate sensitivity that looks like this:

📷

This is a heavy tailed distribution which, as we shall see, leaves us with a high chance of extreme warming.

The influence of uniform priors

I think this estimate of climate sensitivity and others like it are flawed. As far as I can tell, the heavy right tail produced in many IPCC estimates of climate sensitivity is entirely a product of the fact that these posterior distributions are updated from a uniform prior over climate sensitivity with an arbitrary cut-off at 10 degrees or 20 degrees. I checked some of the papers for IPCC models of climate sensitivity that have a long tail and they either: explicitly use a uniform prior which makes a large difference to tail behaviour,[5] or do not say whether or not they use a uniform prior (but I would guess that they do). When this is combined with the likelihood ratio from the data and evidence that we have, we end up with a posterior distribution with heavy right tails.

However, as Annan and Hargreaves (2011) have argued, the use of a uniform prior is unjustified. Firstly, climate scientists use these priors on the assumption that they involve “zero information”, but this is not the case. Secondly and relatedly, the cut-off is arbitrary. Why not have a cut-off at 50 degrees?

Thirdly, it is not the case that before analysing modern instrumental and paleoclimatic data on the climate, we would rationally believe that a doubling from pre-industrial levels of 280ppm to 560ppm would be equally likely to produce warming of 3 degrees or 20 degrees. In fact, before analysing modern data sets, scientists had settled on a 67% confidence range of between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees in 1979, and this likely range has barely changed since.[6]

As Annan and Hargreaves note:

“This estimate was produced well in advance of any modern probabilistic analysis of the warming trend and much other observational data, and could barely have been affected by the strong multidecadal trend in global temperature that has emerged since around 1975. Therefore, it could be considered a sensible basis for a credible prior to be updated by recent data.”[7]

Arguments from physical laws also suggest that extreme values of 10 degrees or 20 degrees are extremely unlikely.

If we use a more plausible prior based on an expert survey by Webster and Sokolov, and update this with a likelihood ratio from modern data sets, the resulting posterior 95% confidence interval for climate sensitivity is 1.2–3.6 degrees.

For the sake of sensitivity analysis, Annan and Hargreaves also update using a prior following a Cauchy distribution with greatly exaggerated tails. This prior is quite extreme. It implies a probability of climate sensitivity exceeding 6 degrees of 18% and a probability of more than 15 degrees of 5%. It seems likely that the experts in 1979 without access to modern data sets would have thought this implausible. The posterior upper 95% confidence bound from this prior is 4.7 degrees. The influence of different priors is shown here:

📷 [8]

How hot could it get?

In the second guesstimate model, I have modelled the implications of these different estimates of climate sensitivity for how hot it could get unless we make extra effort to reduce emissions. I have put the estimates of cumulative emissions from the first model and converted them into the corresponding 95% confidence interval for CO2 concentrations.[9] This gives us the correct 95% confidence interval, which is the main thing we are interested in because we want to know the tail risk. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give us the right median. (I’m not sure how to resolve this in Guesstimate).

Emissions to 2100

For simplicity, I just report results from the estimate of emissions that extrapolates from the Christensen et al economic growth forecasts.

  • On the Wagner and Weitzman estimate of climate sensitivity, there is about a 15% chance of more than 6 degrees of eventual warming, and a 1% chance of more than 10 degrees
  • On the Webster estimate, there is a 6% chance of 6 degrees of warming, and a 0.1% chance of more than 10 degrees.
  • On the Cauchy estimate, there is a 14% chance of warming of more than 6 degrees and a 3% chance of more than 10 degrees.

📷

Of these estimates, I think the Webster prior is the most plausible, and this suggests that the chance of 6 degrees is markedly lower than Wagner and Weitzman estimate, on business as usual.

Emissions to 2200

If we assume that we will continue business as usual past 2100:

  • On the Wagner and Weitzman estimate of climate sensitivity, there is about a 24% chance of more than 6 degrees of warming, and a 6% chance of more than 10 degrees
  • On the Webster estimate, there is a 16% chance of 6 degrees of warming, and a 1% chance of more than 10 degrees.
  • On the Cauchy estimate, there is a 22% chance of warming of more than 6 degrees and a 4.3% chance of more than 10 degrees.

📷

Conclusions

Climate Shock by Wagner and Weitzman is one of the best treatments of the importance of tail risk for climate change. Still, I think the very high tail risk suggested by Wagner and Weitzman’s model is a result of the mistaken use of uniform priors in IPCC models of climate sensitivity. If we just take the most likely emissions scenario without extra effort, the chance of 6 degrees is <1%, whereas Wagner and Weitzman estimate that it is >10%.

However, this effect is offset by the risk that emissions are much higher than expected. Once we account for the full distribution of plausible ‘business as usual’ scenarios, the risk of more than 5 degrees is 6%: still lower than Wagner and Weitzman, but certainly worth worrying about. The chance of 10 degrees of warming is in the 1 in 1000 range. 10 degrees has been posited as a plausible threshold at which climate change poses a direct existential risk.[10] This suggests that the direct existential risk of climate change remains a concern.

If we fail to get our act together by the 22nd century, cumulative emissions could be truly massive, with all the civilisational strife this entails. Will MacAskill has also pointed out to me that if there is an AI explosion, energy demand will increase massively. I am not sure what to make of this possibility for how promising climate change is to work on as a problem.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that these estimates of climate sensitivity exclude some potentially important carbon cycle feedbacks. However, as I argue here, the median view in the literature is that these feedbacks are much less important than anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, these feedbacks are understudied, so there is likely considerable model uncertainty.

[1] Joeri Rogelj et al., “Paris Agreement Climate Proposals Need a Boost to Keep Warming Well below 2 °C,” Nature 534, no. 7609 (June 30, 2016): 635, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18307.

[2] IPCC, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis: Working Group I Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. T. F. Stocker et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 27.

[3] IPCC, 84.

[4] Gernot Wagner and Martin L. Weitzman, Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 182–83.

[5] Olson Roman et al., “A Climate Sensitivity Estimate Using Bayesian Fusion of Instrumental Observations and an Earth System Model,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 117, no. D4 (February 21, 2012), https://doi.org/10.1029/2011JD016620; Lorenzo Tomassini et al., “Robust Bayesian Uncertainty Analysis of Climate System Properties Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods,” Journal of Climate 20, no. 7 (April 1, 2007): 1239–54, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI4064.1.

[6] J. D. Annan and J. C. Hargreaves, “On the Generation and Interpretation of Probabilistic Estimates of Climate Sensitivity,” Climatic Change 104, no. 3–4 (February 1, 2011): 429–30, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-009-9715-y.

[7] Annan and Hargreaves, 429–30.

[8] Annan and Hargreaves, 431.

[9] This conversion is based on Malte Meinshausen et al., “The RCP Greenhouse Gas Concentrations and Their Extensions from 1765 to 2300,” Climatic Change 109, no. 1–2 (November 1, 2011): Table 4, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-011-0156-z.

[10] Martin L. Weitzman, “Fat-Tailed Uncertainty in the Economics of Catastrophic Climate Change,” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 5, no. 2 (July 1, 2011): 275–92, https://doi.org/10.1093/reep/rer006; Steven C. Sherwood and Matthew Huber, “An Adaptability Limit to Climate Change Due to Heat Stress,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 21 (May 25, 2010): 9552–55, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0913352107.

The political philosophy of Radical Markets

Glen Weyl and Eric Posner’s book Radical Markets is full of innovative and novel ideas about how we should organise social institutions. Perhaps most interesting is the idea of the Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax (COST), a radical alternative to private property.  Under the COST, every citizen would self-assess the value of assets they possess, pay a 7% tax on these values and be required to sell the assets to anyone willing to purchase them at this self-assessed price. Everything would constantly be for sale at a price people would be willing to accept. This incentivises socially optimal trades of goods. 

Take the example of my house. Under the COST, I would have to set a price for my house at which I would be willing to sell if there were a willing buyer. I would be incentivised not to set the price too high because I would be taxed at 7% of the value I put on the house. Suppose that purchasing power is distributed equally and that people’s willingness to pay for a house is a perfect indicator of the amount of welfare that they would derive from it. If so, under the COST, as soon as someone else would get more welfare from the house than me, then the house would change hands. Compared to private property, the COST improves allocative efficiency. That is, goods go to the people who value them most. Thus, if optimising the welfare of people alive right now is our aim, then the COST produces more social welfare than private property. 

Applied to the taxation of land, the COST is a land value tax, which is widely agreed to be the best of all taxes. It is market-based and avoids the problem of bureaucrats having to determine the value of land. The COST can also be applied to all assets: cars, sofas, tables and so on. Weyl and Posner propose that the revenue from the tax should be redistributed in the form of a negative income tax or universal basic income. This would make the COST highly egalitarian.

The COST is the most serious intellectual challenge to the idea of private property in history. It is also relevant to debates in the golden era of political philosophy, after Theory of Justice but before ‘public reason liberalism’. This was when philosophers like Nozick, Jerry Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Brian Barry and Frank Arneson were disputing the social and economic institutions required by justice. The COST brings debates about the ultimate justification for private property back to life.

1. Background on libertarianism

Libertarians of all stripes usually believe in strong rights of self-ownership. This entails:

  1. The right to use my self as I wish, and the right not to have others interfere in that right.
  2. The right to enforce my other rights of self-ownership using force or coercion. 

For example, if I want to choose to sell my labour in a call centre, I may do so and no-one may stop me, but if I choose to go to the beach and surf, I may do so and no-one may stop me. 

The left-right divide in libertarianism stems from how different theories treat the acquisition of property in natural resources. Right-libertarians hold that people have extensive rights to acquire private property of natural resources, with the most popular version holding that people have a right to acquire natural resources provided they leave enough for everyone else. For example, if I cordon off a piece of land and sow and till it, others who have not worked the land do not have a right to my vegetables, unless they would otherwise be left below some threshold. Provided everyone else is left with a sufficiently high level of natural resources, I gain full libertarian rights over the land, just as I have over myself: people cannot take the land without my consent and I have full rights to use force to deny people the use of it if I so wish. 

Left libertarians endorse self-ownership but hold that natural resources are held in common or that there are much stronger egalitarian conditions on people’s rights to acquire natural resources – they might require that everyone have equally valuable shares of natural resources. For example, if I cordon off more land than others, then I have to compensate those others, or they may have the right to reclaim some of the land from me. 

Right libertarians and many utilitarians today form an alliance in defence of private property. Utilitarian economists recognise the instrumental value of secure property rights in helping to provide security, and incentivise productive work and investment, which in turn produces goods for consumers, higher wages and improved living standards. The utilitarian defence of private property is conditional – if there is another system of ownership that produces greater welfare, then we should switch to that. Right libertarians hold that people should have a legal right to private property regardless of the instrumental value of such rights. Even if it would increase welfare overall for someone to take my patch of farmland, they nevertheless do not have a right to take my farmland: it is mine and not theirs to take. 

2. The COST and private property

The COST would abolish private property as we know it today. Suppose I own land in England, which a developer would like to buy to build a railway between Birmingham and London, bringing large social benefits. I know that the developer has deep pockets, so I will hold out for a very high price, far in excess of the price at which I marginally prefer the money rather than the house. Moreover, if I wish, I can refuse to sell, no matter the social costs. Private property is, in this case, economically inefficient. 

In contrast, the COST embodies the idea that by refusing to sell, I am imposing large costs on the rest of society. I have my portion of land, but I should pay a fee to society that reflects the social cost of doing so. I am in essence renting my land off everyone else. For right libertarians in contrast, I am a full owner, not a renter.  

The intuitive case for the ‘property as rental’ idea can be made as follows. Suppose that 5 settlers arrive at a piece of land, and Jim happens to cordon off the largest and most fertile land for himself. He makes good effort with half of it and then makes a half-baked attempt at the other half, but still ends up with 3 times as much food as everyone else. What is it that justifies Jim from using threats of force to keep Sarah from taking the neglected part of his patch and growing her own stuff on it? What about these ideas:

  • Jim has mixed his labour with his patch: I have in a very literal way mixed half of my genetic material (which, as a self-owner, I surely own) with that of my wife when making my child. Does that mean I own half my child?
  • It is good for Jim’s autonomy and personal projects: What about Sarah’s personal autonomy and projects? If everyone has equal moral status, shouldn’t we care about everyone’s autonomy and personal projects equally?
  • There is no further argument, the intuition is strong enough alone: This seems to be at odds with almost all right libertarian philosophers who have thought that some argument for original acquisition is required. 

A more plausible way to view the allocation of land is as follows. There is no non-instrumental moral power or moral magic tying land to one person or another. We should allocate rights over the land insofar as those rights improve people’s lives; such rights are instrumentally justified in terms of how much welfare they produce. If I stop other people using a socially valuable thing, then I should compensate them for doing so, and if others would get more value out of it than me, then they should gain access to the land.

The COST could be justified from the point of view of several different theories. I have discussed the welfarist and utilitarian arguments for it above. Left libertarians would like it because it embodies the idea that natural resources are owned by no-one or owned in common. Our possession and control of natural resources is justified insofar as it serves the common good. 

Egalitarians (close relatives to left libertarians) would like the allocative efficiency underlying the COST. As long as people have equal purchasing power and are rational, the COST embodies the idea, advanced by Ronald Dworkin, that fairness is ensured when people with equal purchasing power engage in an auction for all the resources, and no-one wants to change their bid given the bids of the others. Similarly, under the COST, there is significant redistribution, and mutually beneficial trades are incentivised so goods go to the people who value them most. 

The right libertarian case for the COST

Right libertarians might not like the principle behind the COST, and they would view it as a violation of people’s basic rights to property. But then, today, the state taxes people and corporations for:

  • Earning income from work
  • Profiting from investments
  • Spending money in shops
  • Leaving money to their children
  • Buying a house 

These taxes are widely agreed to be highly inefficient, some egregiously so. For a right libertarian who at least accepts a role for a minimal state, something has to be taxed, and this must be seen as a pro tanto rights violation. If we assume that all taxes are equally undesirable in terms of their effect on rights to private property, we may as well go for the tax that does well according to other criteria, such as making people’s lives go better. The COST is more efficient than an income tax for example because it taxes people for doing things that are to some extent socially harmful – for withholding goods from society. In contrast, income tax taxes people for doing something socially productive – working to earn an income. From a right libertarian point of view, the COST seems like the least worst-option. 

3. The COST and self-ownership

That’s how the COST works for natural resources, but what about natural talent? In one of the most controversial parts of Radical Markets, Weyl and Posner argue that the COST could apply to people’s labour as well as to natural resources such as land. Consider a surgeon who announced that she would perform knee surgery for $2,000. She would pay a tax based on that amount and would be required to perform an operation on anyone who offered that amount. The tax would discourage her from overvaluing her time and thus denying her talents to the community, while the need to be on-call would avoid her setting too low a wage. There would, then, be a tax on the talented, which would be redistributed to others in society, and which would incentivise the talented to work. 

In this way, the COST is in accord with the luck egalitarianism of Jerry Cohen, who argued that inequalities due to bad luck are unjust. Since differences in our natural talents are due to brute luck, they are unjust. On this hard left luck egalitarianism, the talented are under a moral duty to have a socially useful career, and as Cecile Fabre has argued, this political philosophy pushes in the direction of the state having the right to coerce people to pursue socially valuable careers, though Cohen himself was reluctant to recognise this. Similarly, utilitarians believe that people have demanding duties of beneficence, which also apply to their career choices. If the COST were a low cost way of encouraging socially beneficial work, then the utilitarian would support it.

Left libertarians would want no part of this. The left libertarian would say that if a surgeon doesn’t want to perform surgery, then, as a self-owner, she does not have to and may not be coerced into doing so. This is true even if the surgeon would increase social welfare by performing operations. 

Several things may be said in response to the libertarian. It is true that the COST on labour would coerce the talented. However, as Weyl and Posner point out, the current system offers an even worse choice to the untalented. Those with few marketable skills are given a stark choice: work in harsh, boring or tedious jobs, starve, or live on welfare. If we care about the equal status and freedom of everyone, then we should recognise that the refusal of the talented to engage in socially valuable labour imposes substantial costs on the untalented. In this way, self-ownership privileges the freedom and autonomy of the talented over the untalented. 

Furthermore, the talented coerce the less talented by coercively denying them the fruits of their labour. If someone on welfare in the US tries to take some of Jess Bezos’ money, they will be punished. This is coercion. It is hard to recognise because many think it just, but it is coercion nonetheless. Therefore, there must be some argument that the coercion is justified in one case but not the other. 

A COST on labour reduces this inequality and relieves the pressure on the poorest in society. 

Finally, my argument above against the ‘mixing labour’ argument for original acquisition also seems to me an effective argument against self-ownership. To repeat: I have in a very literal way mixed half of my genetic material (which, as a self-owner, I surely own) with that of my wife when making my child. Does that mean I own half my child? My child is made up of half of my genetic material. That doesn’t make me a slave owner. 

4. The COST and the future

The discussion so far has proceeded on the assumption that the main topic of interest in political philosophy is the optimal or just distribution of goods among people right now. But we should care not only about distributing the current pie justly or optimally, but also growing the pie for the future. This crucial point is neglected by leftist political philosophy and by the political left. Both are overwhelmingly concerned with inequality right now, rather than economic growth and the welfare of current people in the future and of future generations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us what exponential growth can do: doublings in cases over a handful of days. Economic growth is also exponential and this really matters. If between 1870 and 1990, the United States had grown one percentage point less per year, the country would in 1990 have had the same standard of living as Mexico. If you can boost the growth rate by two percentage points a year, after 56 years, income will be three times higher than it otherwise would have been. 

In the early 1960s, South Korea was as poor as sub-Saharan Africa. If you were the South Korean government in 1960, would you focus on equally distributing income to each person, such that the poorest in society would be levelled up to the princely sum of $160 per year, or would you focus on producing one of the most impressive growth episodes in history and make your country one of the richest on Earth? (Bear in mind that GDP per capita is correlated with almost all objective and subjective measures of welfare.)

When discussing rights to natural resources, it is easy to talk as though people come across natural resources that are already socially useful. But this is not the case. We are not facing a problem in which we stumble across some manna from heaven and we have to decide how to divide it up, but rather one in which we find natural resources that are only made socially useful through talent, endeavour and cooperation in governments, corporations and markets. There is lithium in Chile, but it is only put to use in batteries due to our ingenuity. We should incentivise this ingenuity. This may involve providing unequal rewards to people who carry out socially valuable activities. We should encourage people like Jeff Bezos to build companies that are as good as Amazon. A reward of billions is perhaps excessive, but some substantial reward is justified as long as Bezos is not motivated to produce great companies out of the goodness of his heart. 

The best argument for meritocracy and inequality is that it encourages people to do socially useful things. As Scott Alexander says 

“If some rich parents pay for their unborn kid to have experimental gene therapy that makes him a superhumanly-brilliant economist, and it works, and through no credit of his own he becomes a superhumanly-brilliant economist – then I want that kid in charge of the Federal Reserve. And if you care about saving ten million people’s jobs, you do too.” 

One might add, I also want him to be paid enough to be incentivised to work for the Federal Reserve: this means inequality.

Now let’s return to the COST. I said above that under the COST, people would in essence be renting their land from society. But if your land can be taken off you at any time, you might well let it fall into disrepair. Equally, I could buy a patch of land and then build some attractive flats on it, which would increase demand for the asset and increase its price. The COST would therefore penalise this effort to the detriment of investment. This is known as investment inefficiency. However, Weyl and Posner point out that the tax can be reduced to improve investment efficiency and the gain in investment efficiency is greater than the loss in allocative efficiency. The 7% COST is a rough sweet spot for allocative and investment efficiency. We can tweak the COST downward if we wish to adjust the balance further towards investment efficiency. This would weaken the egalitarian nature of the COST. Nonetheless, a society with a 7% COST would be dramatically more egalitarian than our society. 

We should also encourage people to invest in themselves and we have to take account of this if we were to ever set a COST on human capital.  

The simple case for Bayesian statistics

There is a debate among some scientists, philosophers of science and statisticians about which of frequentist statistics and Bayesian statistics is correct. Here is a simple case for Bayesian statistics. 

1. Everyone agrees that Bayes theorem is true 

Bayes theorem is stated mathematically with the following theorem:

As far as I know, everyone accepts that Bayes’ theorem is true. It is a theorem with a mathematical proof. 

2. The probability of the hypothesis given the data is what we should care about

When we are developing credences in a hypothesis, H, what we should ultimately care about is the probability of H given the data, D, that we actually have. This is what is on the left hand side of the equation above. Here ends the defence of Bayesian statistics; no further argument is needed. Either you deny a mathematical proof or you deny that we should form beliefs on the basis of the evidence you have. Neither is acceptable, so Bayesian statistics is correct. This argument is straightforward and there should no longer be any debate about it. 

Appendix. Contrast to frequentism

(Note again that the argument for Bayesian statistics is over, this is just to make the contrast to frequentism clear.) In contrast to Bayesianism, frequentist statistics using p-values asks us:

Assuming that the hypothesis H is false, what is the probability of obtaining a result equal to or more extreme that the one you in fact observed?

What you actually care about is how likely the hypothesis is, given the data, rather than the above question. So, you should not form beliefs on the basis of p-values. Whether a Bayesian prior is ‘subjective’ or not, it is necessary to form rational beliefs given the evidence we have. 

The counterfactual impact of agents acting in concert

Summary: Consider some project worked on by multiple organisations A, B, C and D. The benefit of the project is x. Each of the organisations is a necessary condition of the benefit x. The counterfactual impact of A is x; the counterfactual impact of B is x; etc. Despite this, the counterfactual impact of A, B, C, and D acting together is not 4*x, rather it is x. This seems paradoxical but isn’t. This is relevant in numerous ways to EAs.

Much of the time when organisations are working to produce some positive outcome, no single organisations would have produced the benefit acting on their own. Usually, organisations work in concert to achieve valuable outcomes and in many cases the outcome would not have been produced if some of the organisations taken individually had not acted as they did. This is a particularly pervasive feature of policy advocacy and EA advocacy. This gives rise to apparent paradoxes in the assessment of counterfactual impact.

For example, suppose Victoria hears about EA through GWWC and wouldn’t have heard about it otherwise. She makes the pledge and gives $1m to ACE charities, which she wouldn’t have found otherwise (and otherwise would have donated to a non-effective animal charity let’s suppose). Who counterfactually produced the $1m donation benefit: Victoria, GWWC or ACE? Each of them is a necessary condition for the benefit: if Victoria hadn’t acted, then the $1m wouldn’t have been donated; if GWWC hadn’t existed, then the $1m wouldn’t have been donated; and if ACE hadn’t existed then the $1m wouldn’t have been donated effectively. Therefore, Victoria’s counterfactual impact is $1m to effective charities, GWWC’s counterfactual impact is $1m to effective charities, and ACE’s impact is $1m to effective charities.

Apparent paradox: doesn’t this entail that the aggregate counterfactual impact of Victoria, GWWC and ACE is $3m to effective charities? No. When we are assessing the counterfactual impact of Victoria, GWWC and ACE acting together, we now ask a different question to the one we asked above viz. “if Victoria, GWWC and ACE had not acted, what benefit would there have been?”. This is a different question and so gets a different answer: $1m. The difference is that when we are assessing the counterfactual impact of Victoria acting, the counterfactual worlds we compare are

Actual World: Victoria, GWWC, and ACE all act.

Counterfactual world (Victoria): Victoria doesn’t act, GWWC and ACE act as they would have done if Victoria had not acted.

The benefits in the Actual World are +$1bn compared to the Counterfactual World (Victoria). We take the same approach for each actor, changing what needs to be changed. In contrast, when assessing the collective counterfactual impact of the actors, we ask:

Actual World: Victoria, GWWC, and ACE all act.

Counterfactual world (Victoria+GWWC+ACE): Victoria, GWWC and ACE don’t act.

When multiple actors are each a necessary condition for some outcome, it is inappropriate to sum the counterfactual impact of actors taken individually to produce an estimate of the collective counterfactual impact of the actors.

Applications

The case of voting

This has obvious applications when assessing the social benefits of voting. Suppose that there is an election and Politician A would produce $10bn in benefit compared to Politician B. The election is decided by one vote. (For simplicity suppose that B wins if there is a tie.) Emma cast a decisive vote for option A and therefore her counterfactual impact is $10bn. It is correct to say that the counterfactual impact of each other A voter is also $10bn.

The alternative approach (which I argue is wrong) is to say that each of the n A voters is counterfactually responsible for 1/n of the $10bn benefit. Suppose there are 10m A voters. Then each A voter’s counterfactual social impact is 1/10m*$10bn = $1000. But on this approach the common EA view that it is rational for individuals to vote as long as the probability of being decisive is not too small, is wrong. Suppose the ex ante chance of being decisive is 1/1m. Then the expected value of Emma voting is a mere 1/1m*$1000 = $0.001. On the correct approach, the expected value of Emma voting is 1/10m*$10bn = $1000. If voting takes 5 minutes, this is obviously a worthwhile investment for the benevolent voter, as per common EA wisdom.

Assessing the impact of EA organisations

When evaluating their own impact, EA organisations will often face this issue. Community orgs like CEA, REG, and Founders Pledge will recruit new donors who donate to charities recommended by GiveWell, ACE and others. How do we calculate the counterfactual impact here? If I am right, in the manner above. This does mean we should be careful when making claims about the collective impact of EA as a whole movement. It would be a mistake to aggregate the counterfactual impact of all the EA orgs taken one by one.

Assessing the impact of policy organisations

For most policy advocacy campaigns, numerous actors are involved and in some cases numerous organisations will be a necessary condition for some particular policy change. Notwithstanding difficulties in finding out which actors actually were necessary conditions, their counterfactual impact should be calculated as per the above methodology.

A note of caution: leveraging and funging[1]

The approach I have outlined needs to be applied with care. Most importantly, we need to be careful not to confuse the following two counterfactual comparisons:

Comparison 1 (correct)

Actual World: A, B, and C all act.

Counterfactual world (A): A doesn’t act, B and C act as they would have done if A had not acted.

Comparison 2 (incorrect)

Actual World: A, B, and C all act.

Counterfactual world (A): A doesn’t act, B and C act as they did in the actual world.

Confusing these two comparisons can lead one to neglect leveraging and funging effects. Organisations can leverage funds from other actors into a particular project. Suppose that AMF will spend $1m on a net distribution. As a result of AMF’s commitment, the Gates Foundation contributes $400,000. If AMF had not acted, Gates would have spent the $400,000 on something else. Therefore, the counterfactual impact of AMF’s work is:

AMF’s own $1m on bednets plus Gates’ $400,000 on bednets minus the benefits of what Gates would otherwise have spent their $400,000 on.

If Gates would otherwise have spent the money on something worse than bednets, then the leveraging is beneficial; if they would otherwise have spent it on something better than bednets, the leveraging reduces the benefit produced by AMF.

Confusing the two comparisons can also lead us to neglect funging effects. Suppose again that AMF commits $1m to a net distribution. But if AMF had put nothing in, DFID would instead have committed $500,000 to the net distribution. In this case, AMF funges with DFID. AMF’s counterfactual impact is therefore:

AMF’s own $1m on bednets minus the $500,000 that DFID would have put in plus the benefits of what DFID in fact spent their $500,000 on.

The effect of funging is the mirror image of the effect of leveraging. If DFID in fact spent their $500,000 on something worse than bednets, then the funging reduces AMF’s benefit; if DFID spent the $500,000 on something better than bednets, then the funging increases AMF’s benefits.

END

 

Thanks to James Snowden and Marinella Capriati for discussion of some of the ideas developed here.

[1] The ideas here are James Snowden’s