David D. Friedman's Blog, page 7
November 24, 2012
Left-Libertarianisms
The term "left-libertarian" has gotten a good deal of attention in recent months, at least among libertarians, in part due to an online Cato Unbound Symposium and in part due to the efforts of a number of bloggers who consider themselves left-libertarians and a few others who consider themselves critics of left-libertarianism.
One source of potential confusion in these exchanges is that "left-libertarian" is used to label three quite different clusters of positions. In its oldest sense a left libertarian is a left wing anarchist, typically anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist; "libertarian" is still sometimes used that way in Europe, although less often in the U.S.
But that is not how the term is being used in the current discussion. A more recent and more relevant use is to describe positions that differ from conventional libertarianism mainly in supporting and justifying policies that most libertarians would reject as income redistribution. The best known is geolibertarianism, based on the ideas of Henry George, a 19th century economist. Its central tenet is that since no individual has a just claim to the income from the site value of land, land being an unproduced resource, government ought to support itself by taxing all and only that income. Two recent books, The Origins of Left-Libertarianism and Left-Libertarianism and its Critics, both edited by Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, discuss that and other positions along somewhat similar lines.
I find that form of left-libertarianism interesting in large part because it grows out of, and tries to solve, the problem of initial appropriation. It is very useful for land to be treated as private property. But libertarian philosophy mostly bases its justification of ownership on creation—and land, with rare exceptions, is not created by humans. Locke famously tried to solve the problem by arguing that humans acquire ownership over land by mixing their labor with it, but his solution raises a number of problems. Readers who share my interest in the issue may want to look at an old article of mine in which I offered some possible, if not entirely satisfactory, solutions.
Left-libertarianism in that sense is not the version that has been getting attention of late, although they are related. Current discussions mostly deal with what is sometimes described as Bleeding Heart Libertarianism, BHL for short. It was that that was the subject of the Cato symposium.
My problem with BHL is that I have been unable to get its supporters to tell me what it is. Readers who wish to check that claim for themselves may want to look at the symposium, especially at the lead essay by Zwolinski and Tomasi, my response, and as much more of the conversation as they find of interest.
Supporters of BHL, or at least Zwolinski and Tomasi, want to add "social justice" to the mix of ideas that make up libertarianism, but they are reluctant to explain what that means. My own conclusion long ago was that social justice means "views of justice that appeal to people on the left," or, alternatively, "that view of justice which implies that the first question to ask about any proposal at all is 'how does it affect the poor.'"
Part of the BHL position is the rejection of the hard line rights version of libertarianism—the version which, taken seriously, implies that if I fall out of the window of my tenth floor apartment and manage to catch hold of the flagpole projecting out of the window of the apartment immediately below, I am morally obliged to let go and fall to my death if the owner of that apartment refuses me permission to trespass on his property. I reject that version too, as did the late Bill Bradford of Liberty Magazine, who is responsible for the flagpole example. But that rejection is well within the range of libertarianism conventionally defined, so cannot be what distinguishes Bleeding Heart Libertarians from the rest of us.
What about the poor? Bleeding Heart Libertarians consider concern for the poor as one of their defining characteristics but are, at least in my experience, unwilling or unable to say exactly how far that concern goes or what is its basis. The pure Rawlsian position—they seem to have some positive things to say about Rawls—gives the welfare of the poorest infinite weighting; no benefit to the not-poor, however large, can outweigh any cost to the poorest, however small. The BHL position appears to prudently stop short of that extreme. It is unclear whether it goes further than the claim that a libertarian society would be good for, among others, the poor, a view shared by most libertarians. The further view that the fact that a libertarian society is good for the poor is an important reason to support it, while less universal, is at least shared by many other libertarians. I am left with the puzzle of just what it is that they believe that most of the rest of us don't.
My conclusion so far is that Bleeding Heart Libertarianism is simply a version of libertarianism whose presentation and contents are designed, so far as possible, to appeal to people on the left, especially academics on the left. Possibly that is unfair—but, as I believe readers can see by browsing the archive of the symposium, I did try without success to get proponents to provide me with a better definition.
In about a week, I will be spending several days at a conference at least one of whose participants regards himself as a left-libertarian and, I think, a bleeding heart libertarian; he will have an opportunity to correct any errors in my view of the matter.
One source of potential confusion in these exchanges is that "left-libertarian" is used to label three quite different clusters of positions. In its oldest sense a left libertarian is a left wing anarchist, typically anarcho-communist or anarcho-syndicalist; "libertarian" is still sometimes used that way in Europe, although less often in the U.S.
But that is not how the term is being used in the current discussion. A more recent and more relevant use is to describe positions that differ from conventional libertarianism mainly in supporting and justifying policies that most libertarians would reject as income redistribution. The best known is geolibertarianism, based on the ideas of Henry George, a 19th century economist. Its central tenet is that since no individual has a just claim to the income from the site value of land, land being an unproduced resource, government ought to support itself by taxing all and only that income. Two recent books, The Origins of Left-Libertarianism and Left-Libertarianism and its Critics, both edited by Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner, discuss that and other positions along somewhat similar lines.
I find that form of left-libertarianism interesting in large part because it grows out of, and tries to solve, the problem of initial appropriation. It is very useful for land to be treated as private property. But libertarian philosophy mostly bases its justification of ownership on creation—and land, with rare exceptions, is not created by humans. Locke famously tried to solve the problem by arguing that humans acquire ownership over land by mixing their labor with it, but his solution raises a number of problems. Readers who share my interest in the issue may want to look at an old article of mine in which I offered some possible, if not entirely satisfactory, solutions.
Left-libertarianism in that sense is not the version that has been getting attention of late, although they are related. Current discussions mostly deal with what is sometimes described as Bleeding Heart Libertarianism, BHL for short. It was that that was the subject of the Cato symposium.
My problem with BHL is that I have been unable to get its supporters to tell me what it is. Readers who wish to check that claim for themselves may want to look at the symposium, especially at the lead essay by Zwolinski and Tomasi, my response, and as much more of the conversation as they find of interest.
Supporters of BHL, or at least Zwolinski and Tomasi, want to add "social justice" to the mix of ideas that make up libertarianism, but they are reluctant to explain what that means. My own conclusion long ago was that social justice means "views of justice that appeal to people on the left," or, alternatively, "that view of justice which implies that the first question to ask about any proposal at all is 'how does it affect the poor.'"
Part of the BHL position is the rejection of the hard line rights version of libertarianism—the version which, taken seriously, implies that if I fall out of the window of my tenth floor apartment and manage to catch hold of the flagpole projecting out of the window of the apartment immediately below, I am morally obliged to let go and fall to my death if the owner of that apartment refuses me permission to trespass on his property. I reject that version too, as did the late Bill Bradford of Liberty Magazine, who is responsible for the flagpole example. But that rejection is well within the range of libertarianism conventionally defined, so cannot be what distinguishes Bleeding Heart Libertarians from the rest of us.
What about the poor? Bleeding Heart Libertarians consider concern for the poor as one of their defining characteristics but are, at least in my experience, unwilling or unable to say exactly how far that concern goes or what is its basis. The pure Rawlsian position—they seem to have some positive things to say about Rawls—gives the welfare of the poorest infinite weighting; no benefit to the not-poor, however large, can outweigh any cost to the poorest, however small. The BHL position appears to prudently stop short of that extreme. It is unclear whether it goes further than the claim that a libertarian society would be good for, among others, the poor, a view shared by most libertarians. The further view that the fact that a libertarian society is good for the poor is an important reason to support it, while less universal, is at least shared by many other libertarians. I am left with the puzzle of just what it is that they believe that most of the rest of us don't.
My conclusion so far is that Bleeding Heart Libertarianism is simply a version of libertarianism whose presentation and contents are designed, so far as possible, to appeal to people on the left, especially academics on the left. Possibly that is unfair—but, as I believe readers can see by browsing the archive of the symposium, I did try without success to get proponents to provide me with a better definition.
In about a week, I will be spending several days at a conference at least one of whose participants regards himself as a left-libertarian and, I think, a bleeding heart libertarian; he will have an opportunity to correct any errors in my view of the matter.
November 23, 2012
My Europe Trip: Update
As I mentioned some time back, I'm planning to spend a couple of weeks in January giving talks in Europe. A good deal of my schedule is now reasonably definite, so I thought it would be worth posting it, both for people who might want to come to one of my talks and for anyone interested in scheduling one. I currently have a space of about five days open, from January 19 to January 23rd, but there are several people who expressed interest in arranging talks whom I have not yet heard back from, so that time may fill up. My current schedule is:
1/14: London, talk for the Libertarian Alliance1/15: London, talk for the IEA1/16: London, talk for the Adam Smith Institute1/18: Zurich, talk for the Avenir Suisse1/24: Madrid, talk for the Fundacion Rafael Pino1/26: Madrid, talk for the Juan de Mariana Institute1/27-28: Probably talks in Barcelona, details not definite~1/29 Home via London.
The topics of the various talks have not yet been determined, but I'll plan on posting them here when I know.
1/14: London, talk for the Libertarian Alliance1/15: London, talk for the IEA1/16: London, talk for the Adam Smith Institute1/18: Zurich, talk for the Avenir Suisse1/24: Madrid, talk for the Fundacion Rafael Pino1/26: Madrid, talk for the Juan de Mariana Institute1/27-28: Probably talks in Barcelona, details not definite~1/29 Home via London.
The topics of the various talks have not yet been determined, but I'll plan on posting them here when I know.
November 22, 2012
Economics as a Unifier of Law: A True Story
I have just finished teaching a course on intellectual property theory. The main text was a book of readings on the subject compiled by two prominent IP scholars. One of the reading was an article that Lou Kaplow, a prominent (and very able) law and economics scholar at Harvard, published in 1984 ["The Patent—Antitrust Intersection: A Reappraisal, 97 Harv. L. Rev. 1913 (1984)]. What most interested me about the article was that I wrote it. In 1981.
Neither Lou nor I engaged in plagiarism, with or without the aid of a time machine. I first saw his article only a month or so ago; he had never seen my article when he wrote his and may not have seen it yet. The two articles were on entirely different topics, his on patent law, mine on criminal law. Yet they were, in their essence, the same article. Each of them hinged on a single simple idea—simple enough so that I can explain it in a blog post, as I am about to demonstrate. And it was the same idea in both articles.
The conventional view of patent law is that it rewards inventors with a temporary monopoly in order to give them an incentive to make and reveal inventions. Lou was looking at the question of how long the term of the monopoly should be and what the inventor should be permitted to do with it. Part of that was the question of how large the reward for making an invention should be.
There is an obvious answer to that question, obvious at least to an economist. Set the reward equal to the social value of the invention. That way it will be in the interest of inventors to make any invention that costs less than it is worth. Applying that rule in practice faces a host of difficulties, but the theoretical answer seems straightforward.
It is also, as Lou pointed out, wrong. The reason it is wrong is that giving the reward is costly. For reasons familiar in economic theory, the benefit a monopoly provides to the monopolist is less than the cost it imposes on his customers, the difference being what economists refer to as "deadweight cost."
To see the relevance of that, imagine that there is an invention whose social value we can somehow measure as ten million dollars. Further imagine that we have calculated that ten years of monopoly will give the inventor a reward of exactly that sum. Should we give it to him?
No. Suppose we reduce the term of patent protection from ten years to nine and that doing so reduces his reward from ten million dollars to nine million. If the cost of making the invention is less than nine million dollars, he will still make it, we will still get the benefit—and we will have a year less of deadweight cost. That is a net benefit. If it happens that the cost is between nine million and ten million the invention won't get made. That is a cost, but it is a cost, on net, of less than a million dollars, since we (consumers and inventor together) will lose a ten million dollar benefit but save a cost of between nine and ten million. To figure out what the optimal length of protection is we would need more information—a probability distribution for the cost, telling us how likely it is that any reduction in the reward will result in the invention being made, and a way of calculating how large the deadweight cost is for any length of protection.
But it is easy to see that the optimal term of protection can be less than ten years and only a little harder to see that it almost has to be [readers uncomfortable with mathematics are advised to skip the rest of this paragraph]—because if the term of protection is 10 years - X, both the chance that the shorter term will result in not getting the invention and the cost of doing so are proportional to X, making the combined effect proportional to X squared—what an older generation of scientists referred to as of the second order of smalls. The savings in deadweight loss is proportional to X, since that is much less time we bear it. So if X is small enough, the gain has to be larger than the loss.
Lou's conclusion was that the conventional answer, optimal reward equal to value of invention, was wrong. As long as giving a reward costs something, the optimal reward is instead at the point where any further extension of term costs as much in increased deadweight loss as it gains in increased chance of invention. That was the central point of Lou's article, and it was correct—obviously correct, once stated.
My article ["Reflections on Optimal Punishment or Should the Rich Pay Higher Fines?," Research in Law and Economics, (1981)] was on how to calculate the optimal penalty for any criminal offense. In that case too, there was an obvious answer, obvious at least to any economist, and the logic of the answer was the same. Set the penalty (more precisely, the combination of penalty if convicted and chance of conviction) equal to the damage done by the offense. That way the only offenses it is worth committing are those where the gain to the offender is greater than the loss to the victim, in which case deterring the offense would make us, on net, worse off.
That obvious answer is also wrong, and for precisely the same reason. Catching and punishing criminals, like rewarding inventors, is costly. If an offense costs the victim $100 and benefits the criminal by $99, it imposes a net cost of $1. But if raising the punishment by enough to deter that offense costs $10 in extra enforcement and punishment costs, costs of paying cops and running prisons, we are better off not doing it. The level of punishment that minimizes net costs is the level at which any further increase would cost as much in extra enforcement and punishment costs as it would gain in deterring offenses that do net damage.
There are differences in detail between my case and his, in particular the fact that the cost of deterrence is sometimes negative—if you deter an offense you don't have to punish it. Anyone sufficiently interested can find the details in the relevant chapter of my Law's Order and, in a more mathematical form, in a virtual footnote to that chapter. But the logic of the two articles is identical, as is the logic of the two errors, one in patent theory and one in criminal theory, that they critique.
Which is evidence of how economics unifies the law, makes the same analysis, the same ideas, the same logic apply across a wide range of apparently unrelated legal fields.
Neither Lou nor I engaged in plagiarism, with or without the aid of a time machine. I first saw his article only a month or so ago; he had never seen my article when he wrote his and may not have seen it yet. The two articles were on entirely different topics, his on patent law, mine on criminal law. Yet they were, in their essence, the same article. Each of them hinged on a single simple idea—simple enough so that I can explain it in a blog post, as I am about to demonstrate. And it was the same idea in both articles.
The conventional view of patent law is that it rewards inventors with a temporary monopoly in order to give them an incentive to make and reveal inventions. Lou was looking at the question of how long the term of the monopoly should be and what the inventor should be permitted to do with it. Part of that was the question of how large the reward for making an invention should be.
There is an obvious answer to that question, obvious at least to an economist. Set the reward equal to the social value of the invention. That way it will be in the interest of inventors to make any invention that costs less than it is worth. Applying that rule in practice faces a host of difficulties, but the theoretical answer seems straightforward.
It is also, as Lou pointed out, wrong. The reason it is wrong is that giving the reward is costly. For reasons familiar in economic theory, the benefit a monopoly provides to the monopolist is less than the cost it imposes on his customers, the difference being what economists refer to as "deadweight cost."
To see the relevance of that, imagine that there is an invention whose social value we can somehow measure as ten million dollars. Further imagine that we have calculated that ten years of monopoly will give the inventor a reward of exactly that sum. Should we give it to him?
No. Suppose we reduce the term of patent protection from ten years to nine and that doing so reduces his reward from ten million dollars to nine million. If the cost of making the invention is less than nine million dollars, he will still make it, we will still get the benefit—and we will have a year less of deadweight cost. That is a net benefit. If it happens that the cost is between nine million and ten million the invention won't get made. That is a cost, but it is a cost, on net, of less than a million dollars, since we (consumers and inventor together) will lose a ten million dollar benefit but save a cost of between nine and ten million. To figure out what the optimal length of protection is we would need more information—a probability distribution for the cost, telling us how likely it is that any reduction in the reward will result in the invention being made, and a way of calculating how large the deadweight cost is for any length of protection.
But it is easy to see that the optimal term of protection can be less than ten years and only a little harder to see that it almost has to be [readers uncomfortable with mathematics are advised to skip the rest of this paragraph]—because if the term of protection is 10 years - X, both the chance that the shorter term will result in not getting the invention and the cost of doing so are proportional to X, making the combined effect proportional to X squared—what an older generation of scientists referred to as of the second order of smalls. The savings in deadweight loss is proportional to X, since that is much less time we bear it. So if X is small enough, the gain has to be larger than the loss.
Lou's conclusion was that the conventional answer, optimal reward equal to value of invention, was wrong. As long as giving a reward costs something, the optimal reward is instead at the point where any further extension of term costs as much in increased deadweight loss as it gains in increased chance of invention. That was the central point of Lou's article, and it was correct—obviously correct, once stated.
My article ["Reflections on Optimal Punishment or Should the Rich Pay Higher Fines?," Research in Law and Economics, (1981)] was on how to calculate the optimal penalty for any criminal offense. In that case too, there was an obvious answer, obvious at least to any economist, and the logic of the answer was the same. Set the penalty (more precisely, the combination of penalty if convicted and chance of conviction) equal to the damage done by the offense. That way the only offenses it is worth committing are those where the gain to the offender is greater than the loss to the victim, in which case deterring the offense would make us, on net, worse off.
That obvious answer is also wrong, and for precisely the same reason. Catching and punishing criminals, like rewarding inventors, is costly. If an offense costs the victim $100 and benefits the criminal by $99, it imposes a net cost of $1. But if raising the punishment by enough to deter that offense costs $10 in extra enforcement and punishment costs, costs of paying cops and running prisons, we are better off not doing it. The level of punishment that minimizes net costs is the level at which any further increase would cost as much in extra enforcement and punishment costs as it would gain in deterring offenses that do net damage.
There are differences in detail between my case and his, in particular the fact that the cost of deterrence is sometimes negative—if you deter an offense you don't have to punish it. Anyone sufficiently interested can find the details in the relevant chapter of my Law's Order and, in a more mathematical form, in a virtual footnote to that chapter. But the logic of the two articles is identical, as is the logic of the two errors, one in patent theory and one in criminal theory, that they critique.
Which is evidence of how economics unifies the law, makes the same analysis, the same ideas, the same logic apply across a wide range of apparently unrelated legal fields.
Why Only New Toys?
Twice in recent days I have encountered requests for toys (in one case also books) to be given away, presumably to children whose parents are poor. In both cases, the request was put in terms of new toys—in one, specifically unopened new toys.
Our children are both in college, and we have a lot of used toys and books lying around; my guess is that the purchase price of all of them would add up to several thousand dollars. We have given a few to grandchildren, and would be happy to pass on most of the rest to other people who had a use for them. On the other hand, we are quite unlikely to spend several thousand dollars buying new toys to give away to strangers.
I expect there are a lot of people in our situation, hence that a request for donated toys would get a lot more without the requirement that they be new. Which leaves me wondering why that requirement exists. Is the assumption that the recipients, or their parents, unlike my older son and his children, are too proud to accept used toys? Is there some legal restriction, justified on grounds of safety or prevention of contagion and actually due to pressure by toy companies who want to sell more toys? Or is there some good reason that I am missing?
Our children are both in college, and we have a lot of used toys and books lying around; my guess is that the purchase price of all of them would add up to several thousand dollars. We have given a few to grandchildren, and would be happy to pass on most of the rest to other people who had a use for them. On the other hand, we are quite unlikely to spend several thousand dollars buying new toys to give away to strangers.
I expect there are a lot of people in our situation, hence that a request for donated toys would get a lot more without the requirement that they be new. Which leaves me wondering why that requirement exists. Is the assumption that the recipients, or their parents, unlike my older son and his children, are too proud to accept used toys? Is there some legal restriction, justified on grounds of safety or prevention of contagion and actually due to pressure by toy companies who want to sell more toys? Or is there some good reason that I am missing?
November 21, 2012
Between Rights and Consequences
Arguments about how one ought to act, judged by both introspection and my observations of other people, seem to fit into two broad categories. One may be loosely described as consequentialist; you should decide how to act according to what consequences your acts can be expected to produce. The other is based on the idea that there are things one is not entitled to do and so should not do, whatever the consequences. Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, put it in terms of side constraints. You are entitled to pursue your objectives, should pursue your objectives, but only subject to side constraints, absolute limits on what you may do in pursuit of those objectives. Such arguments are sometimes put in terms of other people's rights, which you may not violate.
Looking more carefully at my moral intuitions and other people's behavior, I conclude that the division is not as sharp edged as Nozick's description makes it sound. There are side constraints—one is not free to do anything that achieves good consequences. The ends do not, in that sense, justify the means. But the side constraints are not absolute. You may, even should, do bad things to achieve good ends if the disproportion between rights based cost and consequentialist benefit is sufficiently large. The ends do justify the means, if the ends are sufficiently good and the means insufficiently bad.
I raised the issue in the second edition of my first book, The Machinery of Freedom:
The prince is not a villain. He is, on the whole, an admirable individual, doing his best to serve his brother the king and the kingdom his brother rules. He believes, reasonably although perhaps not correctly, that if he cannot get Coelus to do what he wants the likely consequence is that someone else will complete the research and use the result to kill the king and seize the throne. If his view of the situation is correct, he is in the sort of situation described in my first quote, although the disproportion between cost and benefit is not quite so extreme as in that example.
As evidence of my view of him, I let him get the girl; at the end of the book he is engaged to Ellen's friend Mari, the intelligent, beautiful, and high status woman he has been courting. In the sequel, I have been doing my best to avoid killing him, despite the suspicion that doing so would strengthen the plot.
I cannot prove that any particular moral beliefs are correct, and doubt that anyone else can. All I can report is the content of my moral intuitions, what seems right to me, and what I can deduce about what seems right to other people from what they say and do. On that basis, I do not think that either the pure consequentialist or the hard-line rights based view can be correct. Consequences are not all that matters, but they are a good deal of what matters. Rights are not absolute constraints, but neither are they mere rules of thumb to be discarded whenever there is good reason to think that doing so will produce somewhat improved results.
Looking more carefully at my moral intuitions and other people's behavior, I conclude that the division is not as sharp edged as Nozick's description makes it sound. There are side constraints—one is not free to do anything that achieves good consequences. The ends do not, in that sense, justify the means. But the side constraints are not absolute. You may, even should, do bad things to achieve good ends if the disproportion between rights based cost and consequentialist benefit is sufficiently large. The ends do justify the means, if the ends are sufficiently good and the means insufficiently bad.
I raised the issue in the second edition of my first book, The Machinery of Freedom:
Suppose you happen to know that everyone in the world is going to die tomorrow (by some natural catastrophe, say the earth colliding with a large asteroid), unless you prevent it. Further suppose that the only way to prevent it involves stealing a piece of equipment worth a hundred dollars from someone who, in your opinion, rightfully owns it. Your choice is simple: violate libertarian principles by stealing something or let everyone die.I raised it again, implicitly, in my most recent book, Salamander , this one fantasy fiction. Prince Kieron is a major secondary character, brother and heir of the king and the royal official in charge of dealing with magery. One of his subordinates, Fieras, in the process of doing what the Prince wants him to do, uses illegal magery on Ellen, who is both a student and herself a very accomplished mage. She defeats his attempt, in the process providing clear evidence of what he was doing to several of the magisters, professors in the kingdom's only college of magery. She then accuses him to his boss, whose job includes arranging for the punishment of people who break the laws that restrict the use of magic. After agreeing to prosecute Fieras, he says:
What do you do?
"I apologize. ... and I concede the justice of your point. The King is not above the law. Nonetheless, I will not promise never to violate bounds or law myself, nor will I promise to instruct my servants never to do so. Law-breaking is a bad thing, whether by the King's servants or anyone else, but there are worse things, some of which it is my responsibility to deal with. I will promise not to violate bounds or law save in the most extreme circumstances, and to do my best to see that my servants will not, so that incidents such as the two you have described do not occur again. If my people are charged, as Fieras was, I will do my best to see that they get an honest trial. I am sorry, but that is the most I can offer."Later in the book, Prince Kieron tricks Ellen and Coelus, a magister who is in love with her, into his power, and threatens Ellen in order to force Coelus to complete an important piece of magical research—for details you will have to read the book.
The prince is not a villain. He is, on the whole, an admirable individual, doing his best to serve his brother the king and the kingdom his brother rules. He believes, reasonably although perhaps not correctly, that if he cannot get Coelus to do what he wants the likely consequence is that someone else will complete the research and use the result to kill the king and seize the throne. If his view of the situation is correct, he is in the sort of situation described in my first quote, although the disproportion between cost and benefit is not quite so extreme as in that example.
As evidence of my view of him, I let him get the girl; at the end of the book he is engaged to Ellen's friend Mari, the intelligent, beautiful, and high status woman he has been courting. In the sequel, I have been doing my best to avoid killing him, despite the suspicion that doing so would strengthen the plot.
I cannot prove that any particular moral beliefs are correct, and doubt that anyone else can. All I can report is the content of my moral intuitions, what seems right to me, and what I can deduce about what seems right to other people from what they say and do. On that basis, I do not think that either the pure consequentialist or the hard-line rights based view can be correct. Consequences are not all that matters, but they are a good deal of what matters. Rights are not absolute constraints, but neither are they mere rules of thumb to be discarded whenever there is good reason to think that doing so will produce somewhat improved results.
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Wanted: A Robot Cameraman
Both of the classes I am currently teaching are in rooms set up for video recording; interested readers can find the results here and here. I arranged it that way partly for the convenience of students who miss a class or want to review, more to make the classes available to anyone in the world with an internet connection who is interested.
There is, however, one problem. The camera is set up with a field of view that is virtually the entire width of the wall I am standing in front of. The result is to make the image of my face too small to readily read my expression, which largely eliminates the advantage of having video as well as audio recording. The resulting recordings do not look nearly as good as the recordings of public lectures of mine that have been made on various occasions and webbed.
The simple solution, which I hope to persuade the people in charge of the system to adopt next time I use it, would be to narrow the field of view down so it only covered the central location where I am normally standing. One disadvantage of that as a general solution to the problem is that professors sometimes move around to make use of the whiteboard, which also runs the full width of the wall, or for other reasons.
That problem could be solved by having a human behind the camera, either physically present or via remote control, pointing it at the professor's face, wherever it happens to be. But that would significantly raise the cost of recording lectures. Part of the attraction of the present system is that it does not require any human intervention.
Which suggests that what we really need is a robot cameraman. Modern cameras have face detection software that seems to work pretty well. It should be possible to use such software to detect where the speaker, the only person at the front of the room facing the camera, is standing, and automatically focus on him. I do not know if such equipment exists yet, but it should.
The novelty requirement in U.S. patent law bars the patenting of an invention that has been publicly disclosed less than a year before the patent is filed. Start your engines.
There is, however, one problem. The camera is set up with a field of view that is virtually the entire width of the wall I am standing in front of. The result is to make the image of my face too small to readily read my expression, which largely eliminates the advantage of having video as well as audio recording. The resulting recordings do not look nearly as good as the recordings of public lectures of mine that have been made on various occasions and webbed.
The simple solution, which I hope to persuade the people in charge of the system to adopt next time I use it, would be to narrow the field of view down so it only covered the central location where I am normally standing. One disadvantage of that as a general solution to the problem is that professors sometimes move around to make use of the whiteboard, which also runs the full width of the wall, or for other reasons.
That problem could be solved by having a human behind the camera, either physically present or via remote control, pointing it at the professor's face, wherever it happens to be. But that would significantly raise the cost of recording lectures. Part of the attraction of the present system is that it does not require any human intervention.
Which suggests that what we really need is a robot cameraman. Modern cameras have face detection software that seems to work pretty well. It should be possible to use such software to detect where the speaker, the only person at the front of the room facing the camera, is standing, and automatically focus on him. I do not know if such equipment exists yet, but it should.
The novelty requirement in U.S. patent law bars the patenting of an invention that has been publicly disclosed less than a year before the patent is filed. Start your engines.
November 19, 2012
Are Women Different?
Obviously they are, in a variety of ways, but I am thinking of one—behavior associated with sex and courtship. The traditional pattern, in our society and many others, was for men to make advances and women to accept or reject them. The normal assumption was that most men were happy, given the opportunity, to go to bed with almost any reasonably attractive woman, most women much more selective. Over my lifetime that has changed. Substantial numbers of women, in at least some social circles, seem to have shifted to something more like the male pattern. Which raises an obvious pair of questions. Why did the difference exist and why did it, to at least some degree, disappear?
One obvious explanation is prudential. Women get pregnant, men don't. Hence in a world without reliable contraception, a woman faced a much larger risk from sex than a man and adjusted her behavior accordingly, largely restricting sex to partners who could be expected to help her rear any offspring that resulted. A second possible explanation is social. Both men and women valued long term relationships, men preferred to marry women who had not had sex with other men, and women thus found it prudent to maintain at least the appearance of virginity until they had obtained the necessary commitment from a partner. In both versions, the incentive for the traditional behavior pattern would be amplified by a feedback effect. Promiscuous sex was imprudent, hence openly promiscuous sex signalled a lack of sense and/or self control, making a woman who acted that way less attractive as wife, employee, or in most other roles.
A third possible explanation is biological. The scarce biological input to reproduction is neither egg nor sperm but womb space, and it belongs to women. That put them in a position to be much pickier about their partners than men needed, or had any reason, to be. To put it differently, casual sex was a reproductive win for a male—it cost him nothing and might produce offspring. For a female, limited to producing one child every year or two, it made sense to select the father of that child for the best combination of high quality genes and willingness to help support offspring that she could find. The result was to hardwire different patterns of behavior into males and females.
The first explanation is the one that most readily explains what changed. As reliable contraception became available, the incentive for women to refrain from casual sex disappeared. Women, like men, enjoy sex, so women shifted their behavior to be more like that of men. Over time social expectations adjusted; there was no longer a reputational cost to behavior that was no longer imprudent.
That argument works to some extent, but less clearly, for the second explanation. One implication of the increasing availability of contraception was that women who did not want children and did like sex would be willing to sleep with men without long term guarantees, and their competition would weaken the bargaining position of women following the traditional strategy and so weaken the attraction of that strategy.
The third alternative provides no explanation for the change, since human evolution is too slow to produce significant change over so short a period. But it might be consistent with the change, if we assume that something else explains it—most notably ideological and/or social pressure in the other direction, towards women throwing off the constraints of traditional sex roles.
One rather weak piece of evidence for that reading is my impression that the new behavior pattern has not proved entirely satisfactory. At least, I have read a number of articles by women who had followed it and were now unhappy at the results. I have not come across any similar articles by men lamenting the downsides of male promiscuity, although they might exist.
One obvious explanation is prudential. Women get pregnant, men don't. Hence in a world without reliable contraception, a woman faced a much larger risk from sex than a man and adjusted her behavior accordingly, largely restricting sex to partners who could be expected to help her rear any offspring that resulted. A second possible explanation is social. Both men and women valued long term relationships, men preferred to marry women who had not had sex with other men, and women thus found it prudent to maintain at least the appearance of virginity until they had obtained the necessary commitment from a partner. In both versions, the incentive for the traditional behavior pattern would be amplified by a feedback effect. Promiscuous sex was imprudent, hence openly promiscuous sex signalled a lack of sense and/or self control, making a woman who acted that way less attractive as wife, employee, or in most other roles.
A third possible explanation is biological. The scarce biological input to reproduction is neither egg nor sperm but womb space, and it belongs to women. That put them in a position to be much pickier about their partners than men needed, or had any reason, to be. To put it differently, casual sex was a reproductive win for a male—it cost him nothing and might produce offspring. For a female, limited to producing one child every year or two, it made sense to select the father of that child for the best combination of high quality genes and willingness to help support offspring that she could find. The result was to hardwire different patterns of behavior into males and females.
The first explanation is the one that most readily explains what changed. As reliable contraception became available, the incentive for women to refrain from casual sex disappeared. Women, like men, enjoy sex, so women shifted their behavior to be more like that of men. Over time social expectations adjusted; there was no longer a reputational cost to behavior that was no longer imprudent.
That argument works to some extent, but less clearly, for the second explanation. One implication of the increasing availability of contraception was that women who did not want children and did like sex would be willing to sleep with men without long term guarantees, and their competition would weaken the bargaining position of women following the traditional strategy and so weaken the attraction of that strategy.
The third alternative provides no explanation for the change, since human evolution is too slow to produce significant change over so short a period. But it might be consistent with the change, if we assume that something else explains it—most notably ideological and/or social pressure in the other direction, towards women throwing off the constraints of traditional sex roles.
One rather weak piece of evidence for that reading is my impression that the new behavior pattern has not proved entirely satisfactory. At least, I have read a number of articles by women who had followed it and were now unhappy at the results. I have not come across any similar articles by men lamenting the downsides of male promiscuity, although they might exist.
WoW as Educational Software
At the same event that inspired my previous post I heard another brief talk, this one by a father and daughter team who had produced
Bankaroo
, a mobile app to better let kids control their budget—keep track of how much money they had, what they were saving for, what their money had been spent on. It served a dual function. It was designed to be both a useful tool and educational software to help teach children how to deal with money. Listening to the talk, it occurred to me that I already knew of a software program that provided at least the educational part of the same service. Bankaroo was proud of having reached several thousand users. My example is a little larger.
It is, of course, World of Warcraft—considered not as a game but as educational software. The player has an income in gold, produced as a byproduct of things he is already doing—killing monsters, doing quests. He can increase that income by doing other things that he otherwise might not do, such as daily quests or crafting. He has things he wants to buy with his income—armor, gear, training of various sorts. The total cost of everything he wants to buy is probably more than he can afford, so he will have to budget his income and make tradeoffs between the value of getting what he wants to buy and the cost of spending time on money making activities he otherwise would not choose to do.
The virtual world he is making these decisions in is in many ways like the real world in which he will make it. There are wealthy individuals, to whom things that seem expensive to him are cheap. There are beggars, people who hope to get money from others without giving anything in exchange. Some wealthy players are wealthy because they have found something that both makes money and is fun, such as auction house games of arbitrage, speculation, cartelization, and the like ... .
And he is doing all of it not because someone makes him, whether parent or teacher, but because he wants to, because it is fun. It is, in that respect, the ideal educational software.
Which brings up another idea, one that WoW has not yet implemented but that it, or one of its rivals, could. Another real world skill that could be learned in a virtual world, perhaps better there than in school, is language. I am imagining a version of World of Warcraft in which the non-player characters sometimes speak French instead of English. At the early levels, it would be very simple French, with the meaning obvious either from parallels to English worlds or from context. As the game progressed, more and more French words would be used and understanding them would become increasingly important in playing the game. Done right, the effect would be not that different from the way in which we normally learn our first language.
I am sure there are other examples of "school skills" that could be taught better, and more entertainingly, in similar ways; commenters are invited to suggest some.
It is, of course, World of Warcraft—considered not as a game but as educational software. The player has an income in gold, produced as a byproduct of things he is already doing—killing monsters, doing quests. He can increase that income by doing other things that he otherwise might not do, such as daily quests or crafting. He has things he wants to buy with his income—armor, gear, training of various sorts. The total cost of everything he wants to buy is probably more than he can afford, so he will have to budget his income and make tradeoffs between the value of getting what he wants to buy and the cost of spending time on money making activities he otherwise would not choose to do.
The virtual world he is making these decisions in is in many ways like the real world in which he will make it. There are wealthy individuals, to whom things that seem expensive to him are cheap. There are beggars, people who hope to get money from others without giving anything in exchange. Some wealthy players are wealthy because they have found something that both makes money and is fun, such as auction house games of arbitrage, speculation, cartelization, and the like ... .
And he is doing all of it not because someone makes him, whether parent or teacher, but because he wants to, because it is fun. It is, in that respect, the ideal educational software.
Which brings up another idea, one that WoW has not yet implemented but that it, or one of its rivals, could. Another real world skill that could be learned in a virtual world, perhaps better there than in school, is language. I am imagining a version of World of Warcraft in which the non-player characters sometimes speak French instead of English. At the early levels, it would be very simple French, with the meaning obvious either from parallels to English worlds or from context. As the game progressed, more and more French words would be used and understanding them would become increasingly important in playing the game. Done right, the effect would be not that different from the way in which we normally learn our first language.
I am sure there are other examples of "school skills" that could be taught better, and more entertainingly, in similar ways; commenters are invited to suggest some.
November 18, 2012
TSA and Revealed Preference
I heard a brief talk this evening by someone in the business of improving airport security. The basic conclusion was that there are known technologies for solving all of the problems that make going through security a nuisance, but not yet any way of combining those technologies to solve those problems at an acceptable cost. The speaker thought that that situation would be changing in five years or so and changed in another five.
It did not occur to him to ask whether the relevant organizations, in the U.S. the Transportation Safety Agency, would want to solve those problems. The system he described, while much more convenient for passengers, would require fewer TSA employees, and the employees it used would be playing a lower status role relative to the travelers they are supposed to protect—machine tenders rather than cops. Economists generally accept the principle of revealed preference—what individuals value is revealed by the choices they make. It ought to work for organizations too. What does it imply about what the TSA values?
Part of the answer I have pointed out before. When you travel, TSA agents get to go through luggage which you are not permitted to have locked against them. That gives them an opportunity for vandalism or theft.
There is a simple way in which the agency could reduce that problem. When an agent searches your luggage, he leaves a note telling you that the luggage has been searched. That note could have a code identifying for the agency the agent who made the search, allowing them to identify which agents were responsible for multiple reported complaints. The idea is sufficiently obvious so that the private organization to which security is subcontracted at San Francisco airport does it, as I discovered when my luggage was searched there. TSA does not.
The obvious conclusion is that the agency does not much care whether or not its agents steal from the people they are supposed to protect or vandalize their luggage—both of which, in my experience, happen. An obvious suspicion is that they would rather not know which agents are responsible for such problems, since if they knew they might be under pressure to do something. That suspicion was reinforced when I had a brief email correspondence with a TSA representative in San Jose airport with regard to what appeared to be deliberate vandalism of my luggage. His email included a phone number. I tried calling it to continue the conversation. After about ten tries on ten different occasions, none of which reached him, I gave up—and concluded that he really did not wish to talk to unhappy travelers.
If the people running the TSA do not care about the welfare of travelers even enough to take the most obvious precautions and do care, like other bureaucrats, about their own power and influence, it is hard to see why they would go to a good deal of trouble to adopt technologies that made things easier for travelers and sharply reduced the number and visibility of their employees. However good the technologies may become.
It did not occur to him to ask whether the relevant organizations, in the U.S. the Transportation Safety Agency, would want to solve those problems. The system he described, while much more convenient for passengers, would require fewer TSA employees, and the employees it used would be playing a lower status role relative to the travelers they are supposed to protect—machine tenders rather than cops. Economists generally accept the principle of revealed preference—what individuals value is revealed by the choices they make. It ought to work for organizations too. What does it imply about what the TSA values?
Part of the answer I have pointed out before. When you travel, TSA agents get to go through luggage which you are not permitted to have locked against them. That gives them an opportunity for vandalism or theft.
There is a simple way in which the agency could reduce that problem. When an agent searches your luggage, he leaves a note telling you that the luggage has been searched. That note could have a code identifying for the agency the agent who made the search, allowing them to identify which agents were responsible for multiple reported complaints. The idea is sufficiently obvious so that the private organization to which security is subcontracted at San Francisco airport does it, as I discovered when my luggage was searched there. TSA does not.
The obvious conclusion is that the agency does not much care whether or not its agents steal from the people they are supposed to protect or vandalize their luggage—both of which, in my experience, happen. An obvious suspicion is that they would rather not know which agents are responsible for such problems, since if they knew they might be under pressure to do something. That suspicion was reinforced when I had a brief email correspondence with a TSA representative in San Jose airport with regard to what appeared to be deliberate vandalism of my luggage. His email included a phone number. I tried calling it to continue the conversation. After about ten tries on ten different occasions, none of which reached him, I gave up—and concluded that he really did not wish to talk to unhappy travelers.
If the people running the TSA do not care about the welfare of travelers even enough to take the most obvious precautions and do care, like other bureaucrats, about their own power and influence, it is hard to see why they would go to a good deal of trouble to adopt technologies that made things easier for travelers and sharply reduced the number and visibility of their employees. However good the technologies may become.
The British Navy and the Extensive Margin
David Ricardo, arguably the first great economic theorist, distinguished between the intensive and extensive margin in agriculture. Increases on the intensive margin consist of getting more output from land already being cultivated. Increases on the extensive margin consist of getting output from land previous not cultivated.
In an old post, I applied Ricardo's distinction to research projects, in particular in his and my field. The intensive margin involves trying to say something new and important about a question that smart people have been looking at for a long time. An example would be the question of why involuntary unemployment sometimes exists, and what can be done about it.
That is an important question, sufficiently important so that many non-economists seem to consider dealing with it the chief business of economists. But it is also a question which quite a lot of very good economists have been working on for a long time, which makes it difficult to say anything both new and interesting about it. Another example would be game theory. I like to defend my disinterest in being more than an observer of that field by explaining that, when looking for problems to work on, problems that stumped John Von Neumann, one of the most brilliant thinkers of the Twentieth Century, go at the bottom of my pile.
One unfortunate consequence of the difficulty of such questions is that anything new is quite likely to be either uninteresting or wrong. That is an implication of what I refer to as the rising marginal cost of originality, a principle I usually illustrate with examples from city planning and architecture. My favorite example of the latter is, for those familiar with it, the Coombs building at Australian National University, a truly inspired piece of bad design in which I once spent part of a summer.
What about the extensive margin? An example I am fond of is the work Peter Leeson has done on applying economics to making sense of 18th century piracy; curious readers will find it in his book The Invisible Hook . Because nobody, so far as I know, had thought of doing it before, Leeson was able to produce interesting results by applying conventional economic analysis to a subject that specialist historians had researched but economists knew very little about, to the benefit of both fields.
As I mentioned a few posts back, I recently read the most recent novel in the most recent series dealing with the British Navy during the Napoleonic war—a series that departs a little further from history than its predecessors by providing the British and their enemies with dragons, and makes a very good story out of it. Having done so, I was inspired to start rereading the series and am now in the middle of the first volume.
Dragons aside, Novik's picture of how the navy was organized appears reasonably accurate—although I confess that my basis for that belief consists mostly of other novels, one written by an author who had been an officer in the navy during the Napoleonic wars (Frederic Marryat, who invented the genre) and two series by modern authors who appear to have done a careful and competent job of mining primary sources for their background. The internal structure and the associated rules and customs of the navy seem very strange to a modern eye, but it was a strikingly successful institution, which should also make them interesting. I expect it has gotten a good deal of attention from historians, but I am not aware of any work by an economist analogous to Leeson's on piracy.
One of the features of those institutions particularly likely to catch an economist's eye was prize money. If a naval vessel captured a legitimate prize, an enemy warship or merchantman, and brought it back to port, the vessel and its contents were sold and the money distributed among those in some sense responsible. One large chunk went to the captain, another was distributed among his officers, a third among the crew. And part of the money went to his superior, the admiral under whose orders he was operating.
One can imagine a variety of ways in which the resulting incentives might have made the system work better or worse. The particular one that struck me was the final division. An admiral might have all sorts of reasons, personal or political, to favor one captain under his command over another. But he had a very direct self-interest in providing opportunities to whatever captain was most likely to take advantage of them, whether or not he liked him.
A second interesting feature was the role of patronage, political influence both within the navy and outside it, in the career of an officer, especially a young officer. The critical step was promotion from lieutenant to captain. It depended in part on performance, in particular on the opinion of the captain under whom a lieutenant was serving. But it depended also on things that seem, to us, irrelevant.
One of the passages in one of Patrick O'Brien's novels that particularly struck me was a conversation between Maturin, one of his protagonists, and a young officer of aristocratic birth who is a friend of his. The young officer is asking the older man for advice. He has been having an affair with the separated wife of a high naval official and wants to know whether he should live openly with her. Maturin's response is that, moral issues aside, it might be imprudent for the officer to offend a powerful official and so risk his future career. His friend replies that he has considered that matter, but his family controls a significant number of seats in both houses of parliament and he thinks their influence is sufficient to balance that of the man he will be offending.
Neither party seems to see anything strange in either half of the argument, either the assumption that giving personal offense to someone within the bureaucracy will make it harder for a competent officer to be promoted, or that having a politically influential family will make it easier. That is simply taken for granted, part of how the system works. Yet it was a system that produced extraordinarily successful results.
A third feature was the seniority system. Once a lieutenant was promoted to captain, his future rank depend only on how long he survived. His name was on the list of captains, the list was ordered by strict seniority, and the next captain to be promoted to admiral would be the one at the top of the list.
When two or more captains were working together, it was the senior who commanded. That provided an unambiguous rule for allocating command—every captain knew where he was on the list and knew, or could readily find out if necessary, where any other captain was. But it was a rule that had nothing to do with the relative competence of two officers of the same nominal rank.
Promotion beyond captain was entirely a matter of seniority, but what the officer got to do with his rank was not. A sufficiently incompetent captain who made it to admiral would end up as an admiral of the yellow, an admiral without a fleet, effectively retired on half pay. A sufficiently competent captain could be assigned particularly important duties, including the command of a group of ships with the temporary position of commodore—provided none of the other captains in the squadron was senior to him.
As I hope these examples show, it was an odd and interesting set of institutions. And it worked. I suspect that a good economist willing to immerse himself in the primary and secondary literature could provide interesting explanations of why. It is possible that someone has already done it, but if so I have not come across the work; if any of my readers have, perhaps they can point me at it.
If not ... . It would be a more interesting doctoral thesis than the hundredth exploration of some more conventional set of questions.
In an old post, I applied Ricardo's distinction to research projects, in particular in his and my field. The intensive margin involves trying to say something new and important about a question that smart people have been looking at for a long time. An example would be the question of why involuntary unemployment sometimes exists, and what can be done about it.
That is an important question, sufficiently important so that many non-economists seem to consider dealing with it the chief business of economists. But it is also a question which quite a lot of very good economists have been working on for a long time, which makes it difficult to say anything both new and interesting about it. Another example would be game theory. I like to defend my disinterest in being more than an observer of that field by explaining that, when looking for problems to work on, problems that stumped John Von Neumann, one of the most brilliant thinkers of the Twentieth Century, go at the bottom of my pile.
One unfortunate consequence of the difficulty of such questions is that anything new is quite likely to be either uninteresting or wrong. That is an implication of what I refer to as the rising marginal cost of originality, a principle I usually illustrate with examples from city planning and architecture. My favorite example of the latter is, for those familiar with it, the Coombs building at Australian National University, a truly inspired piece of bad design in which I once spent part of a summer.
What about the extensive margin? An example I am fond of is the work Peter Leeson has done on applying economics to making sense of 18th century piracy; curious readers will find it in his book The Invisible Hook . Because nobody, so far as I know, had thought of doing it before, Leeson was able to produce interesting results by applying conventional economic analysis to a subject that specialist historians had researched but economists knew very little about, to the benefit of both fields.
As I mentioned a few posts back, I recently read the most recent novel in the most recent series dealing with the British Navy during the Napoleonic war—a series that departs a little further from history than its predecessors by providing the British and their enemies with dragons, and makes a very good story out of it. Having done so, I was inspired to start rereading the series and am now in the middle of the first volume.
Dragons aside, Novik's picture of how the navy was organized appears reasonably accurate—although I confess that my basis for that belief consists mostly of other novels, one written by an author who had been an officer in the navy during the Napoleonic wars (Frederic Marryat, who invented the genre) and two series by modern authors who appear to have done a careful and competent job of mining primary sources for their background. The internal structure and the associated rules and customs of the navy seem very strange to a modern eye, but it was a strikingly successful institution, which should also make them interesting. I expect it has gotten a good deal of attention from historians, but I am not aware of any work by an economist analogous to Leeson's on piracy.
One of the features of those institutions particularly likely to catch an economist's eye was prize money. If a naval vessel captured a legitimate prize, an enemy warship or merchantman, and brought it back to port, the vessel and its contents were sold and the money distributed among those in some sense responsible. One large chunk went to the captain, another was distributed among his officers, a third among the crew. And part of the money went to his superior, the admiral under whose orders he was operating.
One can imagine a variety of ways in which the resulting incentives might have made the system work better or worse. The particular one that struck me was the final division. An admiral might have all sorts of reasons, personal or political, to favor one captain under his command over another. But he had a very direct self-interest in providing opportunities to whatever captain was most likely to take advantage of them, whether or not he liked him.
A second interesting feature was the role of patronage, political influence both within the navy and outside it, in the career of an officer, especially a young officer. The critical step was promotion from lieutenant to captain. It depended in part on performance, in particular on the opinion of the captain under whom a lieutenant was serving. But it depended also on things that seem, to us, irrelevant.
One of the passages in one of Patrick O'Brien's novels that particularly struck me was a conversation between Maturin, one of his protagonists, and a young officer of aristocratic birth who is a friend of his. The young officer is asking the older man for advice. He has been having an affair with the separated wife of a high naval official and wants to know whether he should live openly with her. Maturin's response is that, moral issues aside, it might be imprudent for the officer to offend a powerful official and so risk his future career. His friend replies that he has considered that matter, but his family controls a significant number of seats in both houses of parliament and he thinks their influence is sufficient to balance that of the man he will be offending.
Neither party seems to see anything strange in either half of the argument, either the assumption that giving personal offense to someone within the bureaucracy will make it harder for a competent officer to be promoted, or that having a politically influential family will make it easier. That is simply taken for granted, part of how the system works. Yet it was a system that produced extraordinarily successful results.
A third feature was the seniority system. Once a lieutenant was promoted to captain, his future rank depend only on how long he survived. His name was on the list of captains, the list was ordered by strict seniority, and the next captain to be promoted to admiral would be the one at the top of the list.
When two or more captains were working together, it was the senior who commanded. That provided an unambiguous rule for allocating command—every captain knew where he was on the list and knew, or could readily find out if necessary, where any other captain was. But it was a rule that had nothing to do with the relative competence of two officers of the same nominal rank.
Promotion beyond captain was entirely a matter of seniority, but what the officer got to do with his rank was not. A sufficiently incompetent captain who made it to admiral would end up as an admiral of the yellow, an admiral without a fleet, effectively retired on half pay. A sufficiently competent captain could be assigned particularly important duties, including the command of a group of ships with the temporary position of commodore—provided none of the other captains in the squadron was senior to him.
As I hope these examples show, it was an odd and interesting set of institutions. And it worked. I suspect that a good economist willing to immerse himself in the primary and secondary literature could provide interesting explanations of why. It is possible that someone has already done it, but if so I have not come across the work; if any of my readers have, perhaps they can point me at it.
If not ... . It would be a more interesting doctoral thesis than the hundredth exploration of some more conventional set of questions.
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