Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 8
January 16, 2023
Foucault's Historicism and Societies reconsidered
By "archeology" I would like to designate not exactly a discipline, but a domain of research, which would be the following: in a society, different bodies of learning, philosophical ideas, everyday opinions, but also institutions, commercial practices and police activities, mores���all refer to a certain implicit knowledge [savoir] special to this society. This knowledge is profoundly different from the bodies of learning [des connaissances] that one can find in scientific books, philosophical theories, and religious justifications, but it is what makes possible at a given moment the appearance of a theory, an opinion, a pracctice. Thus, in order for the big centers of internment to be opened at the end of the seventeenth century, it was necessary that a certain knowledge of madness be opposed to nonmadness, of order to disorder, and it���s this knowledge [savoir] that I wanted to investigate, as the condition of possibility of knowledge [connaissance], of institutions, of practices.
This style of research has for me the following interests: it allows me to avoid every problem concerning the anteriority of theory in relation to practice, and the reverse. In fact, I deal with practices, institutions and theories on the same plane and according to the same isomorphisms, and I look for the underlying knowledge [savoir] that makes them possible, the stratum of knowledge that constitutes them historically.--Michel Foucault in an interview with Raymond Bellours which appeared in Les Lettres fran��aises (1966) reprinted as "The Order of Things" in Michel Foucault, Aesthetics: Essential Workks 1954-84, translated by John Johnston but slightly amended by the editors of the reprint, pp. 261-262.*
In general I dislike quoting from interviews with authors commenting on their own work. But I do so here because it very nicely captures a feature of Foucault's commitments (one that does not disappear in his late lectures) that I would like to discuss. (In the interview, Foucault himself goes on to contrast what he does with what Sartre does, so I am not doing justice to his own intentions here.) This feature is known within philosophy as a kind of historicism or even organicism. By 'historicism' I mean here the idea that an age has certain fundamental characteristics in common and that these help define what we might call its unique nature.
Now in the passage, Foucault relies on a distinction that in English turn out to track two kinds of knowledge, but for my present purposes I am going to leave aside possible confusion(s) about this. For I am only interested in his account of savoir, which is the common, condition of possibility that makes possible "practices, institutions and theories" (etc.) of a particular age. This is the deep structure, one might say, that makes a particular kind of (as my former teacher, Jody Azzouni explores in his work) semantic perception possible. That is, under savoir just fall the material and formal (etc.) conditions that make, say, certain practices and theories (etc.) intelligible as possible explanations, possible causes, etc.
To be sure, if one is in a grip of certain kind of monisms -- that truth just is what Tarski called the 'classical conception' or that causation just is counterfactual dependence (etc.) -- the previous paragraph is a certain kind of relativistic gibberish to you. That's fine. I am not interested here in defending relativism. I would deny that it is gibberish or unintelligible. But if you can't get your head around it, that's fine, too.
Now, Foucault's Les mots et les choses: Une arch��ologie des sciences humaines (1966), translated as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, is an exploration of the relationship between the two kinds of knowledge in a particular age (which can last for a couple of centuries), as well as the transformation of this relationship from one age to the next, as well as the different contents of both kinds of knowledge in different ages, especially as manifested in different number of what one might call 'human sciences.' One of the effects of this study is that one becomes aware that what counts as a 'science' is itself, in part, structured by or the effect of the underlying stratum. (Again, if one is in the grip of a particular kind of monism then, of course, the idea that different sciences can differ in fundamental character may well be a bit weird.) I like Foucault's approach because it makes visible the fondness accross an age's sciences for say, fixed point theorems, or equilibrium models (etc.) that generate a certain family resemblance among domains of (say) expertise.
My interest here is not in the methodological question of how one can make visibe something implicit that is in a way, simultaneously, an absence from the material one studies. In the qouted passage, Foucault himself hints at one of his techniques; he looks for the effects of certain fundamental contrarieties (in his corpus) and explores how these have certain epistemological, pragmatic, or even generative features that these contrarieties have in common. Unlike the Straussian, for whom the tacit is the true message, for Foucault the tacit is the source of a kind of social unity (to be explained below).
As an aside, it is worth noting, and perhaps this is illuminating to some degree (if not skip this paragraph), that the underlying structure, which one may well think of as a kind of relativized a priori, has certain features in common with the place of a ding-an-sich in Kant's critical philosophy or natura naturans in Spinoza's. That is, in the substratum contrarieties co-exist and rather than being a source of falsity or nonsense, they are productive in the domains that are conceptualized from or built on them. As I said, if this paragraph is mysterious, please skip it.
From a political perspective, it is interesting that Foucault treats philosophical ideas and everyday opinions as on par (and on the same side of the divide). He explicitly rejects, for the purposes of archeology, the Platonic, Madisonian, Arendtian (etc.) contrast between the domains of truth and the domains of opinion. But he does not alert his audience to the significance of this rejection. (Later in the interview, when he returns to the status of philosophical ideas, as edifices, he ignores this political distinction, but contrasts these with the kind of playful 'subphilosophies' studied in history of ideas; that is, the contrast between Kant and Fontenelle.) Foucault himself, quite clearly wants to reject the priviliging of theory over practice (see p. 262).
And the reason I am alert to a kind of (philosophical-)political perspective here, is that Foucault uses the terminology of a 'society' to characterize the kinds of intellectual eras he is interested in. Or to be precise: it seems that within the domain of what Foucault calls an archeology, a society is constituted by different practices, texts, institutions that have a common stratum that makes their unity possible.
For Foucault, societies understood in this way (as a kind of partially invisible structure that makes semantic perception possible, and a certain kind of commonality that infuses the practices of an era), have an origin, a flourishing and endpoints. And the archeologist of society points at, and makes visible to some degree, the structures that are a condition of possibility of a society. Importantly, while societies derive their unity from the lower stratum (savoir), which I playfully compared to a kind of ding-an-sich in character, they (that is, societies) are nothing over and above the practices, institutions, and disciplines that constitute them (or that express this unity).
From a metaphysical perspective one may well wonder if such societies really are compatible with the nominalism (even partial skepticism) one may also discern in Foucault. But here I close on the political question one can ask about the structures delimited by Foucault: to what degree are Foucaultian societies spontaneous orders or are they the partially foreseen effect of certain kind of (intellectual) legislators (what I sometimes call, 'philosophical prophets')?
To be continued.
*Here's the French original:
January 14, 2023
A response to some of my critics (on MacAskill, What we Owe to the Future, pt 5); Population Ethics reconsidered.
I knew that my most recent post on MacAskill's What we Owe the Future -- where I link his project to a certain kind of eugenic program (here) -- would be controversial and would be read more widely and carefully than many of my other posts. Since I expected controversy, and also knew that I was at the edge of part of my expertise, I decided to build up to this post by first writing a piece on a key passage in Parfit (here), and then three other digressions (The first here; the second one is here; the third here.) Even so I received two kinds of criticisms by highly regarded experts that may be worth responding to. Today I will respond to the more specialist concern about the nature and use of 'population ethics.'
First, 'population ethics' is a technical term. For example, here is how Gustaf Arrhenius (one of my critics) uses, perhaps even defines the term in a high-profile place:
Population ethics is then the effort to theorize about "the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives (or their life-time welfare or well-being���we shall use these terms interchangeably here), and their identities may vary." Let's call this 'the technical version of population ethics.' I have no problem with this enterprise in the seminar room or esoteric journal article. When this project is conducted in terms of highly abstract end states, it may well be illuminating about various kinks in and tensions in the moral theories we might use in action guiding or policy contexts without itself being implicated in policy. Of course, such technical population ethics is, to some degree, part and parcel of climate ethics and projects (often conducted in terms of intergenerational justice). But since, as I noted, MacAskill is not much focused on climate ethics, I leave it aside here.
However, even in this technical version, the concern with the quality of lives of future people may well generate what I call an 'undue interest in other people's children.' And so, while the technical version can be done in highly abstract and unproblematic ways, it is not defined in a way that prevents such undue interest altogether. In fact, if one thinks that the technical version reveals what is obligatory for us, I don't see how one can avoid what I call such undue interest. (Of course, moral theory may convince you such interest is obligatory, even if defeasible.) But if, in practice, one is primarily interested in comparing different highly abstract states of affairs (post facto or hypothetically) then what I call the undue interest never arises. Of course, this interest might well arise (as I noted in my fourth post on MacAskill) through all kinds of areas of bio-ethics, including what is known as 'liberal eugenics,' and so in some respects this train has left the station (about which another time more).
Now, it is worth noting that both Parfit and MacAskill explicitly present population ethics as something "secular" something emphasized by MacAskill) in a passage I quoted:
Parfit inaugurated several new areas of moral philosophy. The one that has most shaped my worldview, and which is covered in this chapter, is population ethics���the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be. Secular discussion of this topic is strikingly scarce: despite thousands of years of ethical thought, the issue was only discussed briefly by the early utilitarians and their critics in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it received sporadic attention in the years that followed. (168)
Parfit uses 'atheist' where MacAskill uses 'secular'. This is, in fact, orthogonal to the technical version of population ethics (even if, in practice, the technical version is conducted through the norms of what one might call public reason and so secular in character). And, as Gustaf Arrhenius pointed out to me, Parfit did not use the phrase 'population ethics' in Reasons and Persons. (This fits with my construal that Parfit saw his own project as a fresh start, but not as wholly new. See also my post on him.)
Now, MacAskill offers a definition of what he means by population ethics: "the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be." (168) This is, I think, the first use of the term 'population ethics' in MacAskill's What We Owe to the Future. And MacAskill goes on to suggest that this is what "the arguments of others in the field of population ethics" are about. (169) Let's call MacAskill's definition the 'popular version of population ethics."
It is clear that the popular version deviates from the technical version: first, there is a focus on (concrete) actions and not(abstract) states of affairs or highly stylized possible worlds. Second, the first focus (because mentioned first) is, in fact, on births and this automatically introduces questions of reproduction and what I call the undue interest in other people's children into the fold. (Of course, I have not given any argument that it is undue when no force is involved except to hint that it may end up reinforcing structural injustices, and so this may be thought question begging.) In the technical version the number of people is pertinent, too, but how to operationalize it is left quite open. So, one can work, in principle, in the technical version of population ethics and deny any undue interest in other people's children. I grant this, and if I misled any of my readers about this my apologies. Of course, once one starts thinking about policy derived from the technical version of population ethics, one may still run into problems. But that is downstream.
A further key difference between the technical and popular version is that MacAskill is willing to entertain the content of desirable traits (cultural and genetic) that should be part of future populations. In fact, in his presentation this consideration is presented in chapters before he discusses his version of population ethics (it's really a major theme of chapter 3, especially after p. 55). And MacAskill clearly argues that the the preponderance of such traits is under human control. So, I think the natural reading of MacAskill's popular version of population ethics is that among the salient actions that is under our control are the traits that shape the quality of lives of those that are born and through their lives.
Now in fairness to MacAskill he is much more focused on cultural traits than genetic ones.+ (While the text suggests an interest in enhancement, I see no evidence he has an interest in racial characteristics.) And, as I noted, he explicitly denies that he wants to limit abortion and reproductive rights. (This is common among so-called liberal eugenicists.) But as I suggested the devil is in the detail because the unequal distribution of techniques of enhancement and IVF may well prevent reproduction among some sub-populations and promote it among others (and so generate or reinforce structural injustices).
So, if I were doing technical population ethics, I would be worried that MacAskill's popular version came to be confused with the technical kind. And I would be annoyed that MacAskill's version was the one that first appeared in a popular discussion of the subject. However, I also suspect that from MacAskill's perspective popular population ethics just is a subset of the technical kind one that is inevitable once one focuses on public policy to get from here to various end states or to prevent certain outcomes that the technical kind has established as inferior.*
+Because MacAskill is not especially interested in promoting certain genetic traits, I ignore to what degree his position is compatible with removing harmful genetic traits from a population. For some consequentialists this is not problematic at all.
* I am grateful to Liam Kofi Bright and Gustaf Arrhenius for comments on an earlier draft.
January 13, 2023
Good Breeding, Population Ethics and all that. On MacAskill���s *What We Owe the Future*, Part 4
Parfit inaugurated several new areas of moral philosophy. The one that has most shaped my worldview, and which is covered in this chapter, is population ethics���the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be. Secular discussion of this topic is strikingly scarce: despite thousands of years of ethical thought, the issue was only discussed briefly by the early utilitarians and their critics in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it received sporadic attention in the years that followed.6 The watershed moment came in 1984 with the publication of Parfit���s book Reasons and Persons.
Population ethics is crucial for longtermism because it greatly affects how we should evaluate the end of civilisation.--William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, p. 168.
This is the fourth post on MacAskill's book. (The first one is here which also lists some qualities about the book that I admire; the second one is here; the third here.) MacAskill's note 6 refers to the Mohists, who are not treated as population ethicists because "they did not discuss the intrinsic and instrumentalist benefits and costs of increasing population." (307) Let me grant, for the sake of argument, that such an economic analysis (costs/benefits) is intrinsic to population ethics.
It's unclear why we should exclude non-secular population ethicists (starting with Plato, but not least Berkeley, Malthus, and Nassau Senior all of whom shaped the early utilitarians), although (recall) Parfit has soft-Nietzschean reasons for doing so, but it is left unclear whether MacAskill endorses these. Even so, MacAskill's historical claim is odd. Some of the most important innovations in early twentieth century social and biological sciences and statistical technique (associated with names like Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Edgeworth, and Haldane)* are intertwined with population ethics (and eugenics). I am almost inclined to joke that in their age we even developed a fallacy, 'the naturalistic' one so as to avoid tainting doctrines with their sordid origins.
While undoubtedly some early utilitarians were pioneering population ethicists, it seems unfair to ignore the pre-utilitarian population ethicists of imperialists political arithmeticians like William Petty (seventeenth century), who put the art of managing populations by modern states on a more scientific footing while terrorizing the Irish. The managing of the size and quality of populations was an intrinsic part of the (quite 'secular') art of government in the reason of state tradition of the sixteenth century, too. In fact, civilizations (including feudal orders) that emphasize 'good breeding' (a phrase that had a positive connotation until quite recently) are generally self-consciously engaged in population ethics (even if their cost-benefit analysis deviates from MacAskill's).
Of course, MacAskill's focus is not on the past, but the future. It's notable that population ethics is said to be essential to longtermism. This is by no means intuitive. If one is attached to, say, the survival of civilization, or one wishes to evaluate if one ought to be concerned with it, one need not articulate this or defend it in terms of (a) population ethics focused on wellbeing. MacAskill often writes as if it's the only ethical long game in town. But, as Itai Sher notes, there are passages where MacAskill allows for "non-welfarist, non-utilitarian values" but that means that either his population ethics is itself a mixed (ad hoc) bag or not intrinsic to longtermism.
To be sure, in between the lines, MacAskill is aware that some wish to promote perpetual peace (which he seems to associate with Steve Pinker, see p. 297 n. 60), but as I noted before (in part 2), he treats this possibility not in terms of, say, a regime of human rights enforcement, but exclusively in terms of "world government" and, so, as undesirable. (158) Of course, there may be other ends (e.g., elimination of hunger, the promotion of leisure, or, more elitist, the arts and sciences) that might make the extension of civilization worth having. Or, perhaps, civilization is intrinsically caught up in social domination, and the anarchists are right that we should aim to abolish it in the long run.
What's odd about doubling down on population ethics is that it both encourages us to take an unhealthy amount of interest in the quality of lives of other people's children and that it encourages us to make calculations that are without any solid ground. On the latter, Itai Sher (who is much more sympathetic to the project than I am) observes that the book makes "too many heroic assumptions and tries to estimate too many things that can't be estimated." That is, MacAskill is completely unwilling to take the significance of Keynesian and Knightian uncertainty seriously at all. Keynes (who had a non-trivial interest in population ethics) wrote in 1937:
In some respects, perhaps, our judgments have become more optimistic (we have tools that can help us estimate, say, the price of copper a few decades out), Keynes' general underlying outlook strikes me as sound. Very long-term forecasting is very difficult. In fact, often the short term calculations are difficult, too. Recently, Peter Singer was unusually sober when asked to comment on the significance of the collapse of FTX and its implications on earning-to-give:
���I think in general, a lot more good has been done by earning-to-give than harm, at least up until the collapse of FTX, which has certainly caused a lot more harm than any other [example]��� says Singer. ���It���s very hard to reckon up the total balance sheet on that.���--The Guardian (December 23).+
There is an ambiguity here in whether Singer thinks it's difficult to do a cost-benefit analysis on earning-to-give or on the collapse of FTX. But for my present purposes that's irrelevant. If we find it so difficult indeed to weigh up the net costs and benefits of known actions today, how much more difficult does it become when we look into the downstream effects of the very long future. (I return to MacAskill's promotion of earning-to give (pp 232-233) some other time.)
It is worth noting, especially because Itai is too polite to do so, that MacAskill (nearly always) plays the 'uncertainty card' in the opposite direction: "uncertainty cuts both ways" (89) Outcomes may sneak up on us before we anticipate it. And this observation is turned into a carte blanche by MacAskill to posit all kinds of estimates (with incredible precision and confidence), for example "I don't think one could reasonably go lower than a 10 percent chance of AGI in the next fifty years." (91) As I remarked on his use of the Solow-Swan model, it is notable that such claims are not even made (pro forma) as ceteris paribus judgments. (All the more striking because MacAskill co-authored a highly regarded work on moral uncertainty.)
In general, population ethics generates an unhealthy interest in other people's reproductive choices. And so, it is no surprise that population ethics is repeatedly entangled in eugenics and race science. And folk who are attracted to this topic tend to take pride in their own steadfast ability to look cold facts into the eyes and their capacity for plain speaking. MacAskill himself is a lot more cautious, and treats such topics in terms of 'fitness landscapes' and organism's and cultural 'traits.'
The key issue is, of course, how MacAskill proposes to achieve the dominance of certain traits. When it comes to action MacAskill never explicitly suggests that others are directly forced to join in. (He is clearly more interested in building a voluntary social movement.) But it does not mean coercion is absent from the framework. For, MacAskill does promote "political activism" and "voting" (233) to get governments on board with his program. But he is not transparent about how much coercion governments can use subsequently to promote particular fitness landscapes alongside growing populations. (Here it does look like the ends will justify most means.)
Sometimes one is told that inattention to population ethics is also a (de facto) population policy. That's true enough. But there is an also a cost (even an opportunity cost) involved in paying too much attention to population ethics. After all, most population ethicists of the past were unduly worried about the quality of other people's children (the poor, the Irish, the Jews, etc.).
At first sight, MacAskill really does better: he phrases his claims primarily in terms of population size (more is better). In fact, throughout the book there is an argument for having more children. And this, in turn, is justified consequentially, "when children grow up they contribute to public goods through their taxes, they build infrastructure, and they develop and champion new ideas about how to live and how to structure society." (187; he goes on to suggest that sufficiently good lives are also good for children (188)). It is worth noting that, alas, in some political contexts not all children of all political demographics are perceived as future taxpayers (in some contexts this might even count as a dog whistle).
In the text, MacAskill is explicit that governments should not "restrict people's reproductive rights by...limiting access to contraception or banning abortion." (188) But one need not be a careful logician to realize that this leaves it wide open for a community of longtermists or, if they can persuade them, governments to engage in population policies that either enhance the posited desirable traits of desirable children (that is, future tax payers, infrastructure builders, and idea generators) or privilege those sub-populations that are taken as would-be-good breeders for the desired fitness landscape. (The latter is not science fiction because parental 'risk factors' on the child's future welfare are already often incorporated into, say, IVF policies.) One suspects MacAskill is strategically, even wisely, silent here.**
*In a footnote MacAskill acknowledges this about Haldane (p. 292).
+Trivial aside: I do wonder whether reflecting on SBF's Bahamian apartment, Singer had just recalled Flavius Josephus on King Solomon's palace: " it is very hard to reckon up the magnitude, and the variety of the royal apartments; how many rooms there were of the largest sort; how many of a bigness inferior to those; and how many that were subterraneous and invisible; the curiosity of those that enjoyed the fresh air; and the groves for the most delightful prospect; for the avoiding the heat, and covering of their bodies."
**It does not mean he has no interest in the topic as is witnessed by a paragraph on the regional variation of attitudes toward "new biomedical technologies such as cloning and genetic enhancement," (62)
January 12, 2023
January 11, 2023
Sydney Hook's Creed of Liberal Democracy
Democracy is difficult, and it is made more difficult because many who call themselves democrats are totalitarians in disguise. The moral is not to call off the struggle but to struggle all the more.--Sydney Hook (1943) The Hero in History (chapter 11; emphases in original).
In the 1930s, Hook and James Burnham had collaborated in organizing the American Workers party and in various Trotsky-ite circles. But in the quoted passage, Burnham's The Managerial Revolution (recall here) and The Machiavellians are Hook's clear (albeit unnamed) target. Burnham helped co-found the revival of American conservatism. Hook's journey was more complex in part because he never quite severed his ties with pragmatism.
From the vantage point of the development of professional philosophy and the partial merger of pragmatism and analyic philosophy, Hook's writings are important because they help us understand the character of naturalism and the criticism of dialectical materialism (recall) that became standard within analytic philosophy (in part through the efforts of Ernest Nagel) as well as point us toward the character of political philosophy in the Pre-Rawlsian era in which it is often said, falsely, that political philosophy did not exist.
Despite its archaic and somewhat misleading title, as Hook notes "The Limits of the Hero in History" would be just as apt, The Hero in History is a fun mixture of the philosophy of social science/history, social theory, and political philosophy. In fact, one finds in it all kinds of moves one tends to associate with others. For example, I had to think of Popper while reading Hook's criticism of Spencer and Hegel that their positions are "irrefutable because it does not risk anything by venturing specific predictions. It represents the triumph of metaphysics over empirical method in the study of history." (chapter 4.) There are more resonances with Popper not the least in that Hook also denies that one must tolerate those that wish to overthrow democracy through armed means (chapter XI).
The key distinction in the book is the hero as the eventful man and the hero as event-making man (chapter IX). Despite the gendered language, Hook allows women as heroes. In fact, Catherine II is the exemplar of an eventful person (and, in chapter X, Lenin the exemplar of an event-making man). And Hook's main point is, as is clear from the quoted passage at the top of this post, that in democracies one should be quite resistant to (would-be) event-making heroes in politics.
There are in fact at least three reasons for this democratic suspicion of the event-making political persona: first, the politician who thinks of himself as event-making often is very naive and has a impoverished view of social causation. In chapter 9, Neville Chamberlin at Munich is held up as the kind of dangerous innocent who completely misunderstands his own role in social affairs. It's a devestating portrait.
Second, and unsurprising, is the demagogue, who uses "the very instruments of democracy to debase its quality." This is about as good a definition of a demagogue I have encountered, except that I am inclined to think that a demagogue also expresses the permanent risk of such debasement. In addition, the demagogue acquires "a contempt for the group he leads by virtue of the methods by which he corrupts them."
Third, in a proper functioning democracy, what counts as a hero, should be go against the invidious distinction between leader and masses and should glory, what (recall here; and here) Francis Hutcheson calls, "Heroism, in all stations." In fact, Hook goes beyond this by claiming that a statesman exercises leadership merely by 'proposing' policy. But that its acceptance is in the hands of individuals and their representatives. And they will do so if they are properly educated or enlightened. From this Hook infers that
A successful democracy, therefore, may honour its statesmen; but it must honour its teachers more���whether they be prophets, scientists, poets, jurists, or philosophers. The true hero of democracy, then, should be not the soldier, or the political leader, great as their services may be, but the teacher���the Jeffersons, Holmeses, Deweys, Whitmans, and all others who have given the people vision, method, and knowledge. (Chapter XI)
This quoted claim suggests a kind of intellectual elitist counter position (remniscent of Lippmann) to the elitist school of Pareto, Mosca, and Burnham. But as the passage quoted at the top of this post suggests (and as reflects Hook's pragmatist and organizing background), democratic education can also be moulded from the bottom up, including through all kinds of pressure groups and political activism/organization (which are themselves schools of political education). And the multiplicity of ways in which such moulding takes place is the effect not just of the nearly infinite diversity of "human capacities" (that Hook posits), but also the never finished task of democratic renewal.
In fact, Hook articulates the point in terms of a kind of democratic faith:
A democracy should encourage the belief that all are called and all may be chosen. All may be chosen because a wisely contrived society will take as a point of departure the rich possibilities that Nature herself gives through the spontaneous variations in the powers and capacities of men. These variations are the source and promise of new shoots of personality and value. The belief that all may be chosen, acted upon in a co-operating environment, may inspire the added increment of effort that often transforms promise into achievement.
It follows, that if this creed is lacking, or if some are left behind, our society is not well-ordered.
January 6, 2023
When Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand became Coupled.
"That to these causes, thus necessarily proceeding from this great principle, we are to ascribe in particular both the opulence and prosperity of our own nation, and the necessary diffusion of the arts, manners, language, and race, with which they are connected, and in which they are embodied, over the remotest regions of the globe. That thus, although men in marrying seek only their own good, they nevertheless adopt that course which is most to the advantage of society; and here too , as in many other instances, are led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of their intention. That, therefore, as the revenue and power of a nation can only increase as its population increases, and as the increase of population tends to give a beginning to every useful art, and to carry it to the highest perfection, legislators act a very absurd and culpable part in attempting, in any instance to restrain it , or to check what is undoubtedly the natural, and apparently the most beneficial course of events."--John Rae (1834) Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy,
It's well known, at least since 1971, to students of Adam Smith that Adam Smith uses the phrase, 'invisible hand' three times in his oeuvre.+ In print Smith first used it in 1759 in Part IV, Chapter 1 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (hereafter TMS; see here). He then used it in 1776 in Book IV of An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN; see here). And the third time it appeared in print was in 1795, in his (posthumously published) Essays on Philosophical Subjects (hereafter EPS), in his essay on the "History of Astronomy" (see here). Almost certainly the latter essay was, at least partially, composed first.
Each of Smith's three uses occur in rhetorically complex passages that have different explanatory purposes and different implied targets. In WN Smith is quite explicit that he is criticizing what he calls the 'mercantile system.' But the point and target of the passage in TMS is disputed. Finally, in EPS the 'invisible hand' is explicitly attributed to 'Jupiter,' but this is done by Smith and explicitly not by the heathen polytheists that he is describing! Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs has not generated consensus among scholars about what Smith means by 'invisible hand' when he uses it. (The Wikipedia entry gives a tasting of the diversity of approaches to it.) Somewhat annoyingly, when we look at eighteenth century uses of 'invisible hand' that would have been familiar to Smith we find no uniform use that can help settle this case.
As an aside, in chapter 10 of my book, I have offered a detailed analysis of Smith's three uses, and much to my own surprise I offer a unified interpretation of all three, which (on my view) describes a very particular kind of (social) mechanism: any given iteration of such a mechanism is a relatively short-term process in which the agent produces unintended and to him/her unknown consequences. Crucially, the consequences are, in principle, knowable to the right kind of observer at the time (either because of theory or by accumulated common sense). And I contrast such invisible hand mechanisms to the much more dominant model of large-scale unintended consequences that Smith deploys much more frequently throughout his work (and that Mandeville and Ferguson also made famous). For a careful and generous summary of my views, I happily refer you to one of the doyens of Adam Smith scholarship, Jeffrey Young who wrote a sympathetic review of these issues here. But despite Young's endorsement of my position, I don't expect other scholars to fall into line.*
In cases like this, it can be highly instructive to look at the reception of an author. I expect Glory M. Liu excellent and illuminating Adam Smith's America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism to provoke more reception studies of Smith.
When we do so for the invisible hand we are immediately struck by a quite stunning fact. To the best of my knowledge, none of Smith's early readers ever mention the invisible hand in print! It seems to have inspired no commentary or reflection. I suspect this is what led the distinguished scholar, Emma Rothschild, to treat the 'invisible hand' in deflationary manner as a kind of ironic joke by Smith originally in a famous (1994) article. (You could ask her if you doubt this!) For, she writes, "The evidence for this view is indirect. Smith makes no other mention of the invisible hand; it is interesting that commentators on his work, too, mentioned it only infrequently prior to the 20th century." (319)
Now, when Rothschild wrote that sentence, the internet was in its infancy. And that claim was highly plausible, and if you do a Ngram search, you'll see that only after 1917 does the phrase 'invisible hand' become influential. But when we start digging into the databases, we discover it's not quite right. Between 1810-184o there is definite interest in an 'invisible hand' (see here). Part of that bump is the publication, and re-publication of Invisible Hand: A Tale by W. Clayton. I have found little about this book or author anyway. (It's charming by the way.) But most of that bump reflects the republication (with commentaries) of Smith's works and the use of 'invisible hand' in theological works of some kind or another.
However, the coupling of "Adam Smith" with the invisible hand only starts to pick up in the 1840s. We see this first in French from 1845 onward where, the economist Eug��ne Daire (1798-1847) does this casually in a book review of a book by Ferdinand Duran (Des tendances pacifiques de la soci��t�� europ��enne et du r��le des arm��es dans l'avenir). In Daire, the invisible hand is a mechanism that, in the presence of the possibility of profit, connects the interests of individuals with that of society. This use fits the larger widespread, 19th century liberal view of the (potential) harmony of interests. (In my book I deny this is Smith's own view; short version, the interests of merchants and those of workers & landholders are opposed.) I return to this below.
In 1848 a work attributed to the author of Theodore appeared. Theodore was a young adult crusader story written by Barbara Hofland, who died in 1844. The 1848 work is The Island of Liberty; Or Equality and Community and is said to be written during the Monmouthshire Riots of 1839-1840. I think this refers to what is known as the Newport Rising. The Island of Liberty is a substantial work (and I am somewhat sad I have found no literature on it), and fits no genre easily: it is a mixture of utopian novel, adventure story, and didactism. It advocates, inter alia, colonization for Malthusian reasons, and it has a somewhat feminist tendency. Smith's TMS supplies the epigraphs of the first two chapter headings, and the invisible hand passage is found at the start of the first. (And, while this is quite tentative, it seems Hofland, if it is really her, that it signals with Smith that the rich trample on the poor and that -- although I doubt Smith really endorses this -- providence will guide us.)
That same year, in 1848, the American, Calvin Cotton, a professor of "public economy" at Trinity College, in a substantial treatise, The Public Economy of the United States, quotes the WN's invisible hand passage while using Smith's principles to argue for protectionism! To be sure, he makes clear that "Smith and his followers" all claim that protectionism is a tax (and so to be rejected). But the invisible hand plays no role in Cotton's argument. (For wider context of Smith's role in the debate over protectionism you should read Liu's book!) But after 1850, it becomes not uncommon to couple Adam Smith and the invisible hand (go through here) in an economic context, although in Germany this occurs only after 1870. And then the invisible hand often operates in the marketplace or through markets. I don't mean to suggest there is a single late 19th century interpretation of the invisible hand. On the contrary, if you trace out all the uses you see a proliferation of meanings and interpretations!
In reflecting on all these data points, I was struck by two thoughts. First, for close to a century Smith was treated and read (quite widely) without an immediate association with the invisible hand. That's a very different Smith we have now! Second, I was puzzled by the casualness of Daire's use. For he clearly seems to assume that his audience (he is writing in a political economy journal) is familiar with his move. Now, this is not strange, of course. For example, in 1843, WN was republished in a very useful edition in French because it collected the notes of many important commentators on Smith. It would be natural for Daire to assume that Smith's ideas were familiar to his audience. Even so, the natural seeming coupling in Daire bugged me.
Now, in 1834, John Rae published a quite remarkable book, Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy. This John Rae (who is writing in Canada!) is not the same (as I belatedly realized) as the biographer of Smith (Life of Adam Smith (1895)). Now Rae's Statement is quite critical of Adam Smith. To the best of my knowledge this book was not very well known in the 19th century, but was rediscovered by the end of the nineteenth and then had quite an important role to play in both the social theory of economics (in what sociology) and what is now known as endogenous growth theory. (So, for example, I had hoped to find Cotton cite Rae!)
But it was not wholly unknown because in a draft letter by J.S. Mill assures Rae that " I have made more use of your treatise than you appear to have been informed of, having quoted largely from it, especially from your discussion of the circumstances which influence the " effective desire of accumulation ", a point which you appear to me to have treated better than it had ever been treated before." (1854)
Now, it's absolutely central to Rae's interpretation of Smith that in Smith there is an "exact identity of ends which nations and individuals pursue." This axiom (my term) gives Smith's system its coherence and unity, according to Rae. And Rae had introduced this claim by, rather briefly, quoting Smith's WN passage with the invisible hand. But after articulating this axiom which Rae rejects and attributes to Smith and his followers, Rae writes, "It might, perhaps, in support of such a view of the subject, be said," and then follow a whole number of quotations. Some of these are familiar passages (from Virgil), but others I have been unable to identify a source.
In particular, the passage quoted at the top of this post, which Rae puts in quote marks (because, recall, "in support of such a view [as Smith's] of the subject, be said,") seems to be Rae's own invention! (I welcome refutations of this claim, even if it would detract from my story.) Now, what's neat about the passage is that it is a creative synthesis of the TMS and WN passages of the invisible hand, and these, in turn, synthesized with Malthus (who is, in many respects, an insightful Smithian--as Ross Emmett noted back in 2020). And while I think it is a false interpretation of Smith, what Rae is right about, and this is prescient, this the dominant account of nineteenth century liberalism (especially in the context of population ethics and political economy) and this, in turn, often gets backwardly projected onto Smith in the nineteenth century and by later scholars of the nineteenth century!** Now, I wouldn't bet that Daire had read Rae (such providence probably does not exist), but I think Rae's comments helps explain why a decade later these kind of ideas are merged together without it worth remarking on.
+Interestingly enough, in his 1893 Philosophy and Political Economy in Some of Their Historical Relations, James Bonar had already pointed this out and offered an interpretation of all three invisible hands in light of each other (see here). Macfie does not cite Bonar, but the work has been studied by historians of economics since. (So I am not claiming originality here.)
*One may ask, why not? For two reasons: first, Smith's texts probably underdetermine any interpretation. Second, lots of widely popular readings of Smith have relied on (what I take to be opportunistic) specific interpretations of Smith.
**While Rae does not use 'liberalism', he does use 'liberal' to refer to the Smith and his followers.
January 2, 2023
Two Years (of Long) Covid; (covid diaries)
Last time, I reported I caught covid in the first week of December. (For my official "covid diaries" see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here.) It took about sixteen days before I was negative again. Most of my symptoms were flu-like without any fever. I had a stuffy nose for another week or so, and it was accompanied by nose bleeding. The good news was that most of the very scary symptoms I had the first time around did not reappear.
However, for about four days I had a terrible skin rash and itch that reminded me of an episode that started after an insect bite in the Berkshires. That took seven years to resolve without any clear explanation. So, the recurrence of something very similar was very frightening. Luckily the itch went away.
Unfortunately, my convalescence took place on a deserted, but bug infested tropical island [don���t cry for me] and so I have had a few disturbed night���s sleep since because I am clearly rather sensitive to bug bites right now. While I was recovering, looking at tropical sunrises and sunsets and reading, my immediate family was cursed with bad luck. My better half caught a virus and was out with horrible flu-like symptoms for almost ten days. At first, I was convinced it was corona, but she kept testing negatively. And just as she recovered our son had a food poisoning. So, we only had a ���real��� holiday for the last five days or so.
Tonight, I fly back to Europe. And my amazing research leave ends. (I am so grateful to everyone that made this possible.) So, it���s a useful time to take stock. First, by November I was pretty much in a place that my ���long covid��� was under control with careful planning and relatively modest use of anti-inflammatories. I was able to be in more complex social environments again, walk and talk, and do non-trivial cognitive multi-tasking of the sort that ���we��� (I should say ���neuro-non-divergent���) take for granted especially in work environments and public spaces. I was thrilled to celebrate this, as you may recall with some more strenuous hiking and conference attendance.
When I got covid again last month, I was, of course, very anxious about what symptoms would re-appear and which new ones would develop. The good news was that I immediately noticed that I did not re-develop brain fog or dizziness of any kind. I had to stop reading books, but that was not especially disconcerting because I don���t read philosophy books while I have the flu. In other respects, I was very independent, albeit a touch forgetful. (I left some stuff behind during my move from Tucson. Bad news mom!)
It was a very disappointing end to my amazing research leave. And, emotionally tough because my family had basically let me 'opt out' for a few months with the implicit hope that I would return much better than I was. But a month later, I am confident that I can get to where I was in November. Now the only symptom I have is that I get (head) fatigued in social environments a bit quicker than during the late Fall. But I am not noise sensitive. I even listened to music again on holiday.
So, with planning and anti-inflammatories, I expect to have a normal quality of life. I start teaching my huge (500+ enrolled students) intro lecture course in Amsterdam early February. And that should give a very good reality check of where I stand in my recovery/living with long covid journey.
Meanwhile, I ended the year with an acceptance of a co-authored paper in Ethics/Epistemology of AI. (A new AOS!) That was very gratifying because my two co-authors (the wonderful Federica Russo and Jean Wagemans) basically waited for my recovery to complete the project. I also learned that the contracts between Dutch universities and for-profit publishers to arrange open-access publication, ration the number of annual papers the journals can publish. Luckily, the clock starts at zero at the start of the new year. (But the ration was filled some time in November at the journal that accepted our paper!) Also, I submitted two papers that are spin-offs of my quixotic Foucault project. One of them was desk-rejected quickly but with sensible editorial comments.
And so, on that entirely academic, humdrum note, I mark the two-year point of my first covid diagnosis and celebrate the start of the year with optimism. When I return home, there are a pile of referee requests (grants, tenure, papers) waiting to be completed. For some reason the ordinariness of that sentence pleases me.
December 12, 2022
Covid, again (Covid Diaries)
I tested positive for covid, again, last week. So, it's time for another entry in my Covid Diaries. (For my official "covid diaries" see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here). I attended a conference on December 2-3, and so when I felt crappy on Sunday, I assumed I had done too much socializing during the workshop (despite skipping a few meals). The headache and fatigue were bad, but not worse than any other post-cognitive-multitasking event. On Tuesday morning, I was concerned enough to do a self-test (which came back negative). So, initially I decided I had picked up a flu-bug. I ended up pulling out of all my social activities last week. (There were a lot of them because I was supposed to leave Tucson on Friday.)
While my headache disappeared after two days, a general malaise -- fatigue, brain fog, and an annoying cough-- remained. On Wednesday night I slept especially badly; a weird skin itch had kept me up. Thanks to a mosquito in a quiet valley of the Berkshires near the Appelachian trail, I am not wholly familiar with skin rash. At the time -- it's now fifteen years ago or so -- I tried to treat it with OTC steroid cream to which I had an awful allergic reaction. Somewhat unfortunately, I turned out to be allergic to everything that was prescribed to me in that period. Eventually my skin allergies were diagnosed, and despite meds, I learned to live with itch (while being an irritable, unpleasant human being to others sometimes). After seven miserable years, the itch disappeared one day to the next after an ENT clinician added some meds to deal with a chronic sinusitis half a decade ago or so.
Because I was leaving town on Friday and visiting friends with an elderly mum, I decided to do another covid test. This time I was positive (something confirmed with numerous other tests since). Because I figured I might have to deal with travel insurance and airplanes and some documentation would be helpful, I went to a physician, who told me that the skin rash is a not uncommon side-effect of covid-19. But that otherwise I was in decent shape (no fever, all vitals fine, etc.), and that I could travel later this week again. (We checked the CDC travel guides together.) She said, that I should expect to test positive for quite a period ahead.
Luckily my hosts at the University of Arizona managed to let me stay in my rental for a few extra days. And except for the hyper-sensitive skin and itch -- which keeps me up at night -- most of my current symptoms feel like a mild flu, with brain fog. Last week, I was unable to read books or papers. In fact, I spent most of my time watching short scenes from Friends on my phone. Eventually I binge-watched the second half of Andor (which I loved), and cought up on some Jason Statham movies. (One of them, Mechanic: Resurrection, criminally underuses Michelle Yeoh--I can't believe they did not do a fight scene with her.)
The last few days, I did get exposed, anew, to some of the peculiarities of US health care system. When I scheduled a PCR test at a local Wallgreens, I almost got denied the test because I showed up on foot. (It was a drive through test!) The pharmacy is about 20 minute walk from me. Initially, the attendant declined to give it to me because I was not in a car. When I asked if I could get it inside, that raised even more heckles. Eventually, after a really sad look by me, she relented and let me take the test on foot in the drive through area. After I was done I asked her what happens to peoople without a car. And she said they come with friends or in an uber.
I am fully insured and figured it made sense to register with a GP or a family practice. Last week, I went to the list of approved practices and ended up calling half a dozen. None of them could schedule an intake before the end of the year. One called me back to deny me entry to the practice because their first appointment would be in the middle of January, and by then the insurance records showed I would be without coverage. (True enough I was planning to be back in Europe.) I called the insurance company for advice, and they suggested that if I got really sick I should just go to ER. The next day, while I was checking for covid testing places, I found a medical clinic specialized in covid. Much to my amazement, I could be seen on the week-end and it was all covered by my insurance. Anyway, at the moment the plan is that unless I suddenly deteriorate, I go on family holiday later this week and recuperate on the beach. (Could be worse.)
I have to admit that while I often took precaution against renewed infection, I did secretly think of myself invulnerable after my first illness and the subsequent four shots of vaccination. Anyway, fingers crossed that I recover before the start of classes in February.
December 5, 2022
On What we Owe the Future, Part 3
To illustrate the claims in this book, I rely on three primary metaphors throughout....The second is of history as molten glass. At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes. But at some point, the glass might cool, set, and become much harder to change. The resulting shape could be beautiful or deformed, or the glass could shatter altogether, depending on what happens while the glass is still hot. William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, p. 6
This is the third post on MacAskill's book. (The first one is here which also lists some qualities about the book that I admire; the second one is here.)
A key strain of MacAskill's argument rests on three contentious claims: (i) that currently society is relatively plastic; (ii) that the future values of society can be shaped; (iii) that in history there is a dynamic of ���early plasticity, later rigidity��� (p. 43). Such rigidity is also called "lock-in" by MacAskill, and he is especially interested in (iv) "value lock-in."
Before I get to criticizing these three claims, it's worth stating that in a previous post I noted that from (ii) MacAskill and the social movement he is creating (pp. 243-246) have (v) claimed for themselves the authority to act as humanity's legislators without receiving authority or consent to do so. It's quite odd that MacAskill doesn't reflect on the dangers in the vicinity here because most of the examples MacAskill offers of relatively long-lasting 'value lock-in' are, by his lights, the effects of "conquest." (p.92) Not to put too fine a point on it, but in general the project of 'value lock-in' is team evil (as MacAskill notes, this is the project of imperialists, colonialists, religious monopolists, etc.) You would hope that one of the lessons one takes from this fact is that it's not a good idea to be on team lock-in. I return to this in the future.
On (i) I don't think MacAskill ever offers a metric of social plasticity or even really provides thorough evidence that our age is genuinely molten. (And, in fact, I have noted that at times he undermines this claim by suggesting that our age is characterized by "homogeneity" (p.96) and the effects of "modern secular culture" or a "single global culture." (158)) But it's worth looking at how MacAskill articulates the first claim:
In China, the Hundred Schools of Thought was a period of plasticity. Like still-molten glass, during this time the philosophical culture of China could be blown into one of many shapes. By the time of the Song dynasty, the culture was more rigid; the glass had cooled and set. It was still possible for ideological change to occur, but it was much more difficult than before.
We are now living through the global equivalent of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Different moral worldviews are competing, and no single worldview has yet won out; it���s possible to alter and influence which ideas have prominence. But technological advances could cause this long period of diversity and change to come to an end.--(p. 79)
Not unlike MacAskill, I am fascinated by the period of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Each year I spent some time on it with my undergrads. But I never fail to point out that this era is also known as the 'Warring States period.' (In fact, I observe, as a puzzle, that the intellectual fertility and relentless war within a relatively fractured political system is something it shares with the Italian Renaissance of Machiavelli and, perhaps, Kautilya's age in India.) The absence of empire is beneficial to value pluralism.
I don't mean to suggest that value pluralism is a necessary effect of multi-polar world. Presumably there are other social and institutional sources. Max Weber thought such pluralism was the effect of the advanced division of labor, Plato and Al-Farabi seem to have thought it was the effect of the diversity of human passions that flourish in democratic societies alongside freedom of speech and lack of educational uniformity. That's to say, one may obtain value pluralism without context of permanent war.
So, if one thinks cultural plasticity is worth having -- or at least if one thinks rigidity is something threatening -- then one should be thinking about the practices and institutions that prevent empire and that promote enduring cultural diversity. MacAskill is rather fond of thinking about society in terms of cultural evolution. But, as I have repeatedly noted, he is thoroughly uninterested in thinking of the role of institutions -- as selection mechanisms or ecological structures-- in generating and sustaining such pluralism.* And the effect of this is to flatten (to use his lingo) the cultural fitness space. For MacAskill treats technology as a determining cause of value lock-in.
Now, I don't want to suggest technology never shapes values, but it is peculiar that MacAskill doesn't notice that technology can be neutral among competing values and that technology is often shaped by values. I call it peculiar because (a) the hot topic in AI ethics today is that even neutral algorithms often reflect and amplify existing structural (that is, institutional) injustice(s); and (b) lots of military technology gets used for competing ends. We can observe this peculiarity in the very next paragraph:
When thinking about lock-in, the key technology is artificial intelligence. Writing gave ideas the power to influence society for thousands of years; artificial intelligence could give them influence that lasts millions. I���ll discuss when this might occur later; for now let���s focus on why advanced artificial intelligence would be of such great longterm importance.--(p.79)
Let's stipulate that it's true that "writing gave ideas the power to influence society for thousands of years" but writing itself does not limit the number of ideas that can be expressed. From the perspective of cultural evolution, the invention of writing creates an explosion of cultural variation. And while, surely, some technologies may be homogenizing along some dimensions (including as instruments of empire), it is simply not intrinsic to technology to be value-homogenizing. (As an aside, it is notable that in his work MacAskill draws on economists who think about productivity, but that he has ignored the rich area of philosophy of technology and what we might call STS studies. MacAskill is engaged in (what Nathan Ballantyne calls) epistemic trespassing without realizing, it seems, which fields he has ignored.)
In fairness, MacAskill cites this paper (here). But a key premisse in the argument is this: "If a large majority of the world���s economic and military powers agreed to set-up such an institution, and bestowed it with the power to defend itself against external threats, that institution could pursue its agenda for at least millions of years (and perhaps for trillions)." The dangerousness of AGI would be a possible effect of (near) world peace. So, even if one grants that the probability of AGI in the next fifty years is "no lower than 10%," (p. 91) the whole argument for (iv) relies on the utopian thought that in the context of the stress of rising climate change the great powers of humanity opt for world peace!
In fact, MacAskill's argument for (ii/iii) rests on the idea that stagnation is inevitable because scientific and technological innovation become harder and harder (pp. 150-151) and as countries grow wealthier fertility drops (and there is an implied absolute plateau to population on Earth (pp. 152-155). MacAskill is clearly influenced by Tyler Cowen's work (147-148), but he cites as authority research by Stanford University's Chad Jones on "longer timescales." (p. 150) And since I try to keep up in philosophy of economics, I thought it useful to take a look at some of Jones' papers (which is, as MacAskill himself notes in an endnote, a dressed up Solow-Swan growth model--these leave considerable known uncertainty in long range forecasting).+
Jones assumes that "a larger population means more researchers which in turn leads to more new ideas and to higher living standards." Something MacAskill also embraces (p. 152).Here's a passage from a conclusion of one of the key papers MacAskill cites:
Of course, the results in this paper are not a forecast���the paper is designed to suggest that a possibility we have until now not considered carefully deserves more attention. There are ways in which this model could fail to predict the future even though the forces it highlights are operative. Automation and artificial intelligence could enhance our ability to produce ideas sufficiently that growth in living standards continues even with a declining population, for example. Or new discoveries could eventually reduce the mortality rate to zero, allowing the population to grow despite low fertility. Or evolutionary forces could eventually favor groups with high fertility rates (Galor and Moav 2002). Nevertheless, the emergence of negative population growth in many countries and the possible consequences for the future of economic growth make this a topic worthy of further exploration.--"The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population" American Economic Review, November 2020
The reason I quote this passage is not to refute MacAskill although MacAskill is not sufficiently attentive to the implied difference between a model-driven scenario and a forecast. But because it helps explain why MacAskill is so focused on artificial intelligence. (Some critics of longtermism suggest that it is the effect of the values of Sillicon Valley and its donors on the EA movement, but while one cannot rule it out, I like to think it's model driven.) At one point MacAskill writes:
Think of the innovation happening today in a single, small country���say, Switzerland. If the world���s only new technologies were whatever came out of Switzerland, we would be moving at a glacial pace. But in a future with a shrinking population���and with progress being even harder than it is today because we will have picked more of the low-hanging fruit���the entire world will be in the position of Switzerland. Even if we have great scientific institutions and a large proportion of the population works in research, we simply won���t be able to drive much progress. (p. 155)
Neither Jones nor MacAskill really considers the benefits of educating a large part of the world's population at, say, Switzerland's levels. (Go look up, say, its patents or education spending per capita.) Presumably because in the Solow-Swan model such benefits are a one-off and don't generate a permanent productivity spiral. But it seems to have the perverse effect on MacAskill's program/longtermism that the economic development of poor countries (and, say, opening markets to their products) does not figure in What we Owe the Future as an especially important end worth pursuing. As an aside, in another paper (also cited by MacAskill) Jones and his co-authors notes the significance of the fact that ideas are non-rivalrous. Their model implies that 'educating a large part of the world's population at, say, Switzerland's levels' would be worth doing.
I quote Jones for two other reasons. First, Solow-Swan does not imply that technology driven future productivity or intensive growth is impossible. It's important to MacAskill's general argument that something like "past [scientific/technological] progress makes future progress harder," (151) is true (this is Cowen's influence on MacAskill). And the main empirical argument for it is the record of declining productivity growth of the last half century or so (which gets accentuated by drop in fertility in countries with good education systems). We are at risk of reaching what in the eighteenth century was called a 'stationary state.' But even if we were to really understand what caused the scientific and industrial revolution to happen, there is really no reason to think a future leap in productivity would necessarily have to follow the same underlying causal structure.
As a non-trivial aside, for MacAskill a civilizationa plateau is (if we don't destroy ourselves) inevitable due to physical constraints of the universe. He thinks the number of atoms puts an absolute upper limit on growth (p. 27). But I really don't understand the argument for why increasing value-added per atom is impossible on his view. Again, it is noticeable that institutions are irrelevant to MacAskill's argument.
In a future post, I will explore MacAskill's "ideal" that shapes his argument for (ii). Here I just want to close with the observation that it is odd to see a model, Solow-Swann, which (let's stipulate) is "foundational for all of modern growth theory" (note 18, p. 304) has known problems as a forecasting device because there is considerably room for uncertainty,+ be presented as a reliable guide to very longterm developments. This is a scientific field that is still in its infancy. And the known uncertainty in the error margins of the models don't get eliminated over the very long term, but the sensitivity to even minor modeling mistakes get worse. To sum up, any collective decision for the long term future made on the prospect of world peace and this model is an expression of a lovely faith.
+I thank John Quiggin for this reference.
*Yes, on p. 86 MacAskill mentions the significance of institutional design. But it plays no role in his actual argument.
November 30, 2022
Covid Diaries: A Mixed Bag with some joy, and the mediocre
I have been on leave at the University of Arizona for nearly a full month now. It's time for another entry in my Covid Diaries. (For my official "covid diaries" see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here, here; here; here, here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here). My situation is a mixed bag. I have a lot of great news, but also non-trivial new challenges.
First, I love the weather in Tucson in November. My hosts have given me perfect working conditions with a nice office, and a lovely apartment a convenient fifty-minute walk through town. The free trolley connects my apartment with the university, but I prefer being outdoors and getting some activity walking to compus while taking pictures of local murals and the sky. I pinch myself that being paid to join a research group while on leave is possible in my academic life; although it's also a long time, too long away from my family. It's my son's thirteenth birthday tomorrow, and the occasion is bittersweet.
Anyway, let me start with the promising new. I am much better able to engage in socially complex activities: meet people for lunch in restaurants, hang out in cafes, attend lectures, give public lectures, and most amazingly of all: hike and talk simultaneously. Dave Schmidtz took me up Tumamoc Hill on Thanksgiving morning. And I felt so alive overlooking the city and the desert in the wind on top.
In addition, I often don't need any naproxen (my anti-inflammatory) to complete these activities. So, my quality of social and intellectual life has improved greatly while I have been able to cut back significantly on using anti-inflammatories. It's really enthralling not to be hypersensitive in environments with different kinds of voices or background noise. While I am still not planning to participate in large conferences, I am taking on commitments to give papers in workshops and department colloquia. I really did not expect this to be possible during the Summer when I felt I was stagnating.
Second, and unfortunately, my symptoms have shifted again. (As regular readers know this happens about every three to four months or so.) I develop mysterious headaches in the middle of the night without much rhyme and reason as far as discernable triggering conditions. (Having said that, going to bed on the late side or too much screentime before bedtime are reliable triggers of night-time headaches.) In addition, even on quiet days, I need many more breaks while writing on my laptop and even while reading books.
I have started to work in blocks of two hours, and it is not uncommon that I only have the cognitive energy/focus for one or two such blocks during a day. Because I don't have other obligations, I still get a lot of work done. But I have shifted my attention from my book project -- which feels too big right now -- to developing some paper projects. In fact, for the first time in a half a decade, I have three papers under review at journals.
My leave ends next week, and I'll spend a few days in Boulder with my best friends before I re-unite with my family for our annual holiday break on a near deserted island in the Bahamas. (Yes, don't cry for me Argentina!) Taking unpaid leave from my job in Amsterdam is the smartest thing I have ever done for myself (other than giving up my job Stateside to give my relationship with my better half an opportunity). But I could not do it without the sacrifice of my immediate family. Luckily, I am clearly much better than I was before, and I have grounds for confidence that 2023 will keep improving. I have three weeks of quiet before, in January, I start preparing for my giant lecture course (which starts in February).
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