Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 119

Debate Training: Deserve to Win, by Bryan Caplan

[UPDATE: Broken link to my presentation fixed.]

The annual Cato-Heritage intern debate on Libertarianism versus Conservatism is scheduled for July 23, 2015.  Today I visited Cato to provide debate training, so yesterday I had to figure out what I actually know about debating. 

My first thought: Winning isn't everything.  Many sleazy debating tactics are effective, especially with broader audiences. 

appeals to emotionchanging the subjectad hominem attacks
making persuasive arguments you know to be false or overstatedThat, of course, is why televised political debates are godawful.

My real goal, then, isn't to teach debaters how to win, but how to deserve to win.  There's a correlation between winning and deserving to win, but it's far from perfect.  In the end, I distilled seven big principles from my experience.  The first three focus on substance, the latter four on style/strategy.

Substance

1. Become broadly knowledgeable about the subject under
debate.
2. Speak literal truth.
3. Defend your actual views with your actual arguments.

Style/Strategy

4. Know your time limit.
5. Know who you're really addressing: undecided audience members.
6. Talk to your opponent like he's your best friend.
7. [If there's before-and-after voting] Make sure the audience clearly grasps the issue before the
first vote.

Detailed presentation here.

P.S. I briefly considered waiting to publish this until after the debate, but I'm more interested in raising the level of the debate than giving Cato an edge.  If both sides spend the next two weeks reading the other sides' favorite authors, then bend over backwards to be friendly on July 23, I'll be deeply pleased.

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Posner Contra Polygamy, by Bryan Caplan

Like the creators of Big Love, I've long seen strong parallels between gay marriage and polygamy.  After last weeks' decision, some prominent

[L]ater in his opinion the chief justice remembers polygamy and suggests
that if gay marriage is allowed, so must be polygamy. He ignores the
fact that polygamy imposes real costs, by reducing the number of
marriageable women. Suppose a society contains 100 men and 100 women,
but the five wealthiest men have a total of 50 wives. That leaves 95 men
to compete for only 50 marriageable women.

Do you know what else has exactly the same effect?  Female gay marriage!  If half of women lost interest in men, this would have the same "real costs" that Posner attributes to polygamy.  Indeed, the same goes for straight women who don't date - or straight women with high standards.  Posner's argument proves too much - especially considering the fact that female gay marriages outnumber male gay marriages. 

More critically, though, Posner's argument ignores the fundamental economic distinction between transfers and deadweight costs.  Anything that raises the male/female ratio in the dating pool imposes costs on men.  Anything that lowers the male/female ratio imposes costs on women.  This is no different from shifts in supply or demand in any other market: While change implies both winners and losers, total social surplus is greatest at the intersection of supply and demand.

If Posner really wanted to economically critique polygamy, he would have focused not on distribution, but externalities.  In his earlier work, he did so - but he was still off his game. 

My view is that polygamy would impose substantial social costs in a
modern Western-type society that probably would not be offset by the
benefits to the parties to polygamous marriages. (For elaboration, see
my book Sex and Reason (1992), particularly Chapter 9.)
Especially given the large disparities in wealth in the United States,
legalizing polygamy would enable wealthy men to have multiple wives,
even harems, which would reduce the supply of women to men of lower
incomes and thus aggravate inequality.

Yes, but this extra inequality could have great incentive effects on male production.  Maybe more inequality - or a different kind of inequality - would be socially beneficial.  Posner continues:

The resulting shortage of women
would lead to queuing, and thus to a high age of marriage for men, which
in turn would increase the demand for prostitution.

So?  The standard evils of prostitution stem from prohibition, not prostitution itself.

Moreover, intense
competition for women would lower the age of marriage for women, which
would be likely to result in less investment by them in education
(because household production is a substitute for market production) and
therefore reduce women's market output.

Even if you don't think signaling is a big deal, the obvious response is again, "So what?"  Allowing women to inherit wealth also makes a life of uneducated leisure more attractive, but I doubt Posner wants to do anything about it.  And if intense competition discourages female education, wouldn't it also encourage male education?

The only negative externality that Posner clearly identifies is political, but even he doesn't take it seriously.

In societies in which polygamy is permitted without any
limitation on the number of wives, wealthy households become clans,
since all the children of a polygamous household are related through
having the same father, no matter how many different mothers they have.
These clans can become so powerful as to threaten the state's monopoly
of political power; this is one of the historical reasons for the
abolition of polygamy, though it would be unlikely to pose a serious
danger to the stability of American government.

An unlikely danger indeed.  Imagine a polygamist reading Posner's broad-brush history:

There is of course a long history of persecution of gay people, a
history punctuated by such names as Oscar Wilde, Pyotr Ilyich
Tchaikovsky, and Alan Turing. Until quite recently, many American gays
and lesbians took great pains to conceal their homosexuality in order to
avoid discrimination. They value marriage just as straight people do.
They want their adopted children to have the psychological and financial
advantages of legitimacy. They are hurt by the discrimination that the
dissenting justices condone. Prohibiting gay marriage is discrimination.

Change the labels and names, and the parallel between government persecution of gays and polygamists is nearly perfect.  Let the slippery slope of marriage equality proceed at maximum speed.

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Debate Bleg, by Bryan Caplan

I'm looking for quantitative research on the effectiveness of various debating strategies and styles.  Nothing good readily googles.  Tips?

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A Question for Juris Doctors, by Bryan Caplan

About half of J.D.s don't work as lawyers.  But this doesn't mean their legal educations were bad financial investments.  Law degrees might open doors to desirable careers outside the law, most obviously via signaling. 

Soon after my wife finished law school, for example, top Silicon Valley tech firms started poaching elite graduates from top U.S. law schools for non-legal jobs.  Entry-level salaries at top law firms leapt about 50% in a few short years.  Of course, top firms in the late 90s might be an extreme outlier of an extreme outlier.

Question for anyone with a J.D.: In your experience, how effective is the J.D. at opening doors to desirable non-legal jobs?



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Escobar's Dilemma, by Bryan Caplan

Suppose you want to murder a lot of innocent people, but you also want to be widely loved.  What's the best way to achieve both goals simultaneously?

Pablo Escobar's approach is probably the most effective: Kill freely, but also give freely.  Loudly help the poor, and psychologically normal humans will struggle to condemn you for the most blatant and brutal of crimes. 

Indeed, the best way to make sure people do condemn mass murderers is to make sure people never hear about their charitable activities.  And the second-best is probably to loudly publicize the mass murderers' luxurious lifestyles so people picture them as playboys rather than philanthropists.  Tales of Communist leaders' dachas and limousines probably did more to discredit them than enumeration of their executions and slave labor camps.  And if Westerners knew anything about Nazi internal social and economic policies, they'd feel much cognitive dissonance.

Challenge: Name any group of mass murderers that did not loudly help the poor.  I can think of several candidates, but all of them pre-date the 20th century.  In the age of global media, ambitious killers seem to know - almost by instinct - that conspicuous do-gooding is the best way to get away with murder.

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How the Welfare State Melts Your Conscience, by Bryan Caplan

While vacationing in LA, I saw Escobar: Paradise Lost .  Not great, not bad, but I did learn something: drug lord Pablo Escobar was beloved as well as infamous.  His massive charitable giving won him a mass following: About 25,000 people attended his funeral, and his grave continues to attract admirers.  Escobar's ardent fans don't deny that he murdered hundreds or thousands.  But they think his philanthropy far outshines whatever he did to earn his riches.  A fascinating unpublished paper, "Robin Hood or Villain: The Social Constructions of Pablo Escobar" explores the tension:

Pablo Escobar was a Colombian drug lord and leader of the Medell��n Cartel which at one point controlled as much as 80% of the international cocaine trade. He is famous for waging war against the Colombian government in his campaign to outlaw extradition of criminals to the United State and ordering the assassination of countless individuals, including police officers, journalists, and high ranking officials and politicians. He is also well known for investing large sums of his fortune in charitable public works, including the construction of schools, sports fields and housing developments for the urban poor. While U.S. and Colombian officials have portrayed Escobar as a villain and terrorist who held the entire nation hostage, many people among the Colombian popular class admire him as a generous benefactor, like a Colombian Robin Hood.

Furthermore:

Pablo Escobar's most famous personality traits were his extreme ruthlessness and his great generosity, as attributed to him by his enemies and admirers, respectively. Each of these traits has some evidence to support it. It is unclear exactly how many murders can be attributed to him because he employed numerous sicarios (assassins) to carry out his orders for him and was always careful to avoid anything that would directly link him to the crime. However, he and his associates were probably responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths, including police officers, journalists, and high-ranking officials and politicians. He also funded social programs and housing projects to benefit the poor, such as Barrio Pablo Escobar as it is called today, a neighborhood he had constructed in Medell��n to house the poor living in the city's dump that still has nearly 13,000 residents. There he is still remembered as a great man and referred to as "Don Pablo". It was Semana magazine in 1983 that first described him as a "paisa Robin Hood," praising his charity work.

You could minimize all this as a sign of Columbians' depravity, but you probably shouldn't.  Human beings deeply admire philanthropists.  It brings tears to our eyes to see a rich man share his bounty with widows and orphans.  Once the tears start, objectivity ends.  If the philanthropist has feet of clay, we yearn to show him leniency, to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

Even if he's a mass murderer, a strong record of charitable giving makes us want to call him "complex" rather than wicked.  The families of the slain will never love him, but their neighbors will
rush to excuse his "excesses."  And his cheerleaders will hardly be limited to
the direct beneficiaries of his largesse: Charity melts the hearts of witnesses as well as recipients.

You could of course object, "Escobar wasn't really charitable.  The money he handed out was never his in the first place.  He extorted and stole his 'donations' from others."  But my point is about moral psychology, not moral philosophy: Even "fake" charity inspires affection.

So what?  Libertarians often argue that welfare states, like Pablo Escobar, are not really "charitable."  Whether or not they're right, the fact remains: Welfare states seem charitable to almost everyone.  School-lunch and old-age programs inspire the same emotions as uncontested charity: Admiration, affection, gratitude.  And these emotions have the Escobarian downside: They melt people's consciences, leading them to excuse and minimize the most horrible of crimes.

This doesn't mean we lament Bill Gates' philanthropy because it will lead jurors to show leniency on the off-chance that he commits a murder.  For a nice guy like Gates, this is a small downside.  But when organizations that kill people for a living - like crime families or governments - loudly help the needy, we should indeed shudder.  Why?  Because their perceived philanthropy makes it easy for them to get away with murder.  Maybe they'll use their power over life and death wisely and fairly.  But they probably won't - especially if they're surrounded by devoted fans eager to excuse their... shortcomings.

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The Incredible Vanishing Minarchist, by Bryan Caplan

In the 70s and 80s, a great intellectual battle waged between two libertarian factions: minarchists and anarcho-capitalists.  In 1974, the Libertarian Party papered-over the dispute with one of the oddest compromises in political history: the Dallas Accord. Under its terms, the LP platform remained silent on the very question of whether government should exist!

Since then, libertarians have definitely moderated.  But as far as I can tell, the moderation led to the near-demise not of anarcho-capitalism, but of minarchism!  I have no data, but I do have decades of daily libertarian interaction under my belt.  It has literally been years since I've heard a libertarian self-identify as a "minarchist."  It's not just semantic.  It has also been years since I've heard a libertarian say, "Government should provide police, courts, national defense, and nothing else." 

Instead, most libertarians now have a long and broad list of exceptions to libertarian principles - everything from banning discrimination to fighting contagious disease to building roads to providing a social safety net.  The libertarians who oppose all these deviations are now typically anarcho-capitalists, not minarchists.

The result, as far as I can tell, is that anarcho-capitalism has become the modal libertarian position.  It's has a smaller market share than in the 70s, but zero is focal in a way that "minimal" isn't.  More moderate libertarians have fanned out to embrace a vast range of ideas, but no specific moderate position now predominates.

Party-line Objectivists are the only plausible chunk of remaining minarchists.  Ayn Rand, after all, explicitly embraced the position.  Atlas Shrugged:

The only proper
functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the
army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your
property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by
rational rules, according to objective law.

Even Objectivists, though, have fanned out since the 80s.  See for example the Leonard Peikoff-Yaron Brooks debate on immigration.

If anyone knows of good data on the prevalence of minarchism, please share.  Barring that, I welcome your impressions - especially the impressions of libertarians over 40.

P.S. Capla-Con 2015 is this weekend.  All who call me friend are welcome in my home - the heart of my Beautiful Bubble.

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Not So Hard to Argue, by Bryan Caplan

Scott Sumner:

Unlike many on the left, I don't envy the rich. I'm really happy that
Larry is really happy. If Larry was even a bit happier, and if that
boosted total global happiness, that would be fine with me. But I can't
get away from the implication of (what I perceive as) diminishing
marginal utility. Some redistribution is justified.

Larry Ellison is extremely lucky to live in a universe where:

1. Government is very inefficient.

2. Incentives have a surprisingly strong effect on behavior.

If not for those practical limitations to redistribution, it would be
hard to argue against people who favor taking away almost all of
Ellison's wealth, and reducing his consumption levels back to roughly
average.

I have two responses.

1. Sumner neglects important additional practical limitations to redistribution.  Most obviously:

a. Targets of coercion often resent the fact they're being coerced.  So the relevant utilitarian calculation for forcible redistribution from A to B is not just "Will B enjoy A's stuff more than A" but "Will B enjoy A's stuff more than A plus the resentment cost."

b. Due to the endowment effect, people who lose their stuff suffer more than equally wealthy people who gain the stuff.  So instead of looking at inequality alone, you need to put some weight on initial endowments!

2. All practical limitations aside, arguing against full redistribution is child's play.  Just say: "Pure utilitarianism is not certainly true" and Sumner's extreme (though hypothetical) conclusion collapses.  Suppose for example there's a 99% chance utilitarianism is true, but a 1% chance that libertarian absolutism is true.  That 1% risk should at least slightly temper your redistribution.  And if, like Scott, you "know little about philosophy other than that Descartes said 'I think therefore I am,'" isn't substantial uncertainty about moral principles warranted?



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Down With Public Goods, by Bryan Caplan

Every economic educator should immediately read Frances Woolley's working paper, "Why Public Goods are a Pedagogical Bad."  The conflict between the official definition of "public goods" and the actual use of the phrase has long troubled me.  But Woolley explains the trouble far better than I ever have. 

First big problem: The concept of "public goods" is pedagogically confusing.

The public goods discussion violates the first basic pedagogical principle: explain one thing at a time. Confounding rivalry and excludability, it attempts to teach these two analytically, empirically and economically different concepts together. The problem of public finance and the problem of the definition of property rights are confounded into one lecture, one chapter, what seems to be one idea. Moreover, to the extent that the pure public goods discussion ignores goods that are rival but non-excludable, or goods that are non-rival but excludable, the implications of rivalry or excludability are not fully discussed. Hence the second pedagogical principle, begin with basic concepts and work upwards, is violated.

Second big problem: The concept of "public goods" is usually misapplied.

The concept of excludability, as defined in public goods textbooks, is based on technology, that is, whether or not it is technologically feasible to exclude those who do not pay from using the good. However technological feasibility is a hypothetical construct. For example, the streets of New York are excludable if it is hypothetically possible to require people to pay a toll in order to drive a car in Manhattan. A few years ago, many might have agreed such a charge was infeasible; the successful introduction of the London congestion charge suggests that it is not. Because actual exclusion is so much easier to conceptualize than hypothetical excludability, students and others tend to assume, incorrectly, that goods supplied free of charge by government, such as (in many countries) health care, bridges or education, are public goods. Non-excludability is confounded with public finance.

Most publicly-funded health care treatments (pharmaceuticals, chemotherapy, hip replacements, and so on) in wealthy countries are not "public goods" as economists use the term because it is easy, from a technological point of view, to deny people access to, say, coronary-bypass surgery. Toll-booths can be erected on bridges. For education, too, it is straightforward to deny people access (and, in any event, education is, like health care, rival). Yet the confusion between the theoretical concept of public goods and the notion of public, free provision has a long history in the literature. The classic paper on public goods, Samuelson (1954), is "The pure theory of public expenditure." It formalized what is now known as public goods theory as a way of explaining public expenditure. The two have been confounded ever since.

Woolley goes on to offer three explanations for this misleading concept's memetic success.

1. Intellectual lock-in.  "Academic publishers wish to appeal to the widest possible audience. As long as there is a perception that the average public economics instructor wants a chapter called 'public goods,' textbooks will include such a chapter."

2. Demagogic equivocation. "To call these [stuff that sounds good] public goods somehow seems to imply that they are 'good' as in good, desirable things, and 'public' in that there is a role for public involvement."

3. Economists' distaste for appeals to equity. "[P]ublic goods theory appears to offer the promise of turning equity arguments into efficiency ones."

My only serious quarrel with this working paper is that it never discusses, or ever mentions, Social Desirability Bias.  But hopefully that will make it into the final draft.

HT: Nathaniel Bechhofer

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The Sachs-Warner Conditions, by Bryan Caplan

I've long been a fan of Sachs and Warner's 1995 "Economic Convergence and Economic Polices."  Key result: Non-idiotic economic policies are a sufficient condition for economic convergence.  They operationalize idiotic policies as follows:

We then establish two basic subsets of "appropriate" policies: one set related to property rights and one set related to integration of the economy in international trade. All countries that pass both sets of criteria are considered to be countries that have pursued appropriate policies during the observation period. We call these the "qualifying" countries. Countries that fail at least one test are "non-qualifying."

The property rights part:

With regard to the property rights test, a country is non-qualifying (i.e. judged to have inappropriate policies) if it is characterized by at least one of the following three conditions:
(1) a socialist economic structure, according to the list of countries in Kornai (1993);

(2) extreme domestic unrest, caused by revolutions, coups, chronic civil unrest, or a prolonged war with a foreign country that is fought on domestic territory;

(3) extreme deprivation of civil or political rights, according to the Freedom House index, reported in McMillan, et. al. (1994);

The openness part:

Specifically, a country fails the openness test as a result of any of the following criteria (with details in the Appendix) :

(1) a very high proportion of imports covered by quota restrictions, according to the index prepared by Lee (1993);

(2) for Sub-Saharan Africa, a high proportion of exports covered by state export monopolies and state-set prices, according to an index in the World Bank (1993);

(3) a socialist economic structure, according to the list of countries in Kornai (1993);

(4) a black-market premium over the official exchange rate of 20 percent or more, on average, either for the decade of the 1970s or the decade of the 1980s (or both).

I wish I knew how well their results hold up for the last 20 years.  Anyone?

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