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I’m probably just indulging several different offensive stereotypes here, but shouldn’t the universe of people who want to carry guns in public and the universe that want to shop at Starbucks look like a non-overlapping venn diagram? Apparently not:
Colorado gun-control activists are protesting Starbucks’ policy not to ban customers carrying weapons. Colorado Ceasefire says Starbucks Corp. should change its policy of letting customers carry guns where it’s legal. The coffee chain has said it does want to be put in the middle of a gun-control debate.
This strikes me as a little like protesting for the right to wear a burqa in a porno theater. Yeah, you could… but are you really gonna?
Kevin Drum and Matt Steinglass both object to the Spirit Airlines decision to charge for carry-ons on the grounds the sometimes you want the luxury of a simplified decision that bundling provides. Drum complains:
Choice is good. Most of the time we want it, and economically it’s often beneficial. But it can also hide things and make prices hard to compare. Is the Spirit flight really cheaper? Better do a close comparison! Is dinner at Joe’s the same price as dinner at Mary’s? If Joe charges for bread, maybe not.
Steinglass agrees:
I generally hate a la carte pricing for things that used to come bundled. I especially hate it when it forces me to make complex decisions about things that are trivial and irritating. I hate spending discretion. I want to be offered a price for a service with the normal accoutrements of that service, not ten prices for ten different versions of that service in terms that take me an hour to understand.
They both have a point that simplicity can be the consumers friend and complexity can be a device used by producers to extract more surplus from consumers… or to put it more plainly, to charge higher prices. As Drum points out, it is valuable to a consumer to be able to compare prices between suppliers. If you can’t compare the total price and benefits of two otherwise similar goods (or bundle of goods), then the goods become less like homogeneous, easily substitutable goods, subject to a competitive market price and more like heterogeneous goods that can’t easily be substituted for each other. This means that making goods complex or confusing can allow them to garner a monopolistically competitive price.
In the real world, there are many examples of this. Mattresses for instance, are notoriously and purposefully overcomplicated. The same exact mattress is sold under different names in different stores just so that you can’t do price comparisons. Even the free market economist must bristle somewhat at this… or at least they will when they have to buy a new mattress.
However, Steinglass should be more wary of bundling, which he praises, since it can easily be used as a tool for confusion and price obfuscation. This is exactly what Toys’R'Us did when faced with increasing competition from warehouse clubs like Costco, Sam’s Club, and BJ’s. They forced manufacturers to only sell bundled toys to the warehouse clubs, thus making their prices incomparable so that they couldn’t be undercut by their lower prices. This example also illustrates why all producers don’t just unilaterally make their prices more confusing: people like simplicity, and are willing to pay for it. If Toys’R'Us has just put all of their own products into complex bundles, then consumers would switch to the warehouse stores because they prefer simplicity. Thus, Toys’R'Us pressured manufacturers into foisting complexity onto their competitors.
For a more formal discussion of this phenomenon, check out this paper from Xavier Gabaix and David Laibson which shows that purposefully confusing complexity can exist in a competitive market:
In this analysis, complexity is itself an endogenous variable chosen by each firm. For example, a firm can create an unnecessarily complex fee schedule, which makes it harder for a consumer to determine the true cost of the good. We show that firms will generally prefer such excess complexity. A small amount of excess complexity has only a second-order negative impact on the intrinsic quality of the good, but generates a first order increase in the (confusion-driven) demand for the good. So firms choose inefficiently high levels of complexity.
I would say this beats Obama asking people to put more air in their tires and Jimmy Carter asking people to turn the thermostat down. Has the government ever asked people to voluntarily do anything more absurd than take their waste fats to their meat dealers so they can be used in torpedoes?
[Note: This is a repost that I thought might be interesting to the many new visitors Chauncy seems to be bringing us.]
There has been a lot of very thoughtful discussion lately about the obesity epidemic facing this country. All I have to add to this insightful and informed conversation is a comment on and picture of a turn-of-the-century sideshow freak:
This is Chauncy Morlan, and around 100 years ago his obesity was so shocking that people would pay money to see him as he toured the country as a circus “fat man”. I find the unremarkableness of his size to be a telling sign of how we’ve pushed the limits of obesity in the past 100 years. Imagine, if you will, what society would look like if 100 years from now if what passed as spectacularly obese today would not even turn heads at the mall.
[Note from Karl: Adam is a phenomenal satirist but now that you're here take a minute to read our other stuff on obesity:http://modeledbehavior.com/category/obesity/]
This is the second part of my response to Brad’s comment
Your post scratches at some scientific-sounding ideas of the involvement of genetics, but fails to cite any definitive research into inheritable weight-control issues. The mathematics behind maintaining a healthy weight are startlingly simple, and the mythology of “fat genes” and thyroid problems and impossible to shed pounds is merely there to sell books and gym memberships.
The body is a closed system and cannot create additional weight without an over consumption of calories. Joel S is correct — it’s literally impossible to gain weight by eating your “maintenance” number of calories without violating the first law of thermodynamics.
Previously, I talked a little bit about the scientific evidence for a genetic basis for obesity and gave a few links to some big papers on genes and obesity.
Now I’ll address the first law. So, first a minor nit to pick. The commonly repeated statement
it’s literally impossible to gain weight by eating your “maintenance” number of calories without violating the first law of thermodynamics
conflates energy balance and mass balance. This is somewhat important if you actually want to predict and measure weight loss. It is true that calories-in minus calories-out must equal the calorie content of the organism. However, not all tissue and body fluid have the same calorie/mass ratio. Thus, it is technically possible to gain mass while having a negative calorie balance.
As a super nerdy aside, mass balance must hold as well. That is mass-in minus mass-out must equal mass of the organism. So when the organism looses mass where does that mass go? Answer at the end.
So, yes calorie balance must hold. Calories-in minus calories-out must equal the calorie content of the organism.
Doesn’t this imply that we can control weight by controlling calories-in?
No.
For several reasons. First, is that calories-in and calories-out are not independent. If you feed a load of sugar to a five year-old you will witness one of the natural calorie balancing processes the body engages in.
Tolerance to a glycemic spike is actually one of the earliest breakdowns in the calorie regulation mechanism and I suspect that it is in part responsible for the mild weight gain that most adults experience and have experienced for generations.
However, even in adults one will find that consistent calorie restriction results in exhaustion, drowsiness, and a reduction in body temperature. Thus restricting calories-in reduces calories-out.
Secondly, you have no direct control over the composition of the weight loss. It could be fat, muscle, bone, hair, blood, etc. In general it is a combination of all of the above. Even in bariatric surgery, which shows great success in fat reduction, muscle loss is common and hair loss is not infrequent.
Muscle loss in particular is counter-productive because muscle is much more metabolically active than fat. Thus a loss in muscle reduces the regular amount of calories expended and thus reduces calories-out.
The combination of these factors is likely responsible for the plateau that most dieters experience where continued calorie restriction does not result in additional weight loss. Surprisingly the plateau appears even in Very Low Calorie diets of 500 kcals a day or less.
There is an intense debate over whether this could possibly be due to a reduction in the maintenance level to only 500 kcals. I am not sure where I side on this debate but it does seem that the plateau appears.
We should also note that hormone changes can induce changes in weight. The most obvious is human growth hormone. Since the first law must hold in all cases how is it possible that growth hormone can do what only a change in calorie balance can accomplish?
The short answer is that changes in body composition induce changes in calorie intake and expenditure. Teenage boys are famously hungry and they are all adding mass. The same is true for pregnant women.
Could it be that the same is true for the obese? I don’t know how we could rule it out.
Perhaps, a hormonal change induces the body to accumulate fat. The accumulation of fat then increases hunger to satisfy calorie balance. The individual then attempts to eat more. In addition, like pregnant women and teenage boys we should not be surprised that such an individual develops cravings for calorie dense food that would sicken a normal person.
Indeed, that’s one of the observations that makes us think this is hormonal. The behavior of many obese persons is not desirable to the non-obese. Many thin people do not want to eat ultra-high fat food.
Odd desires point to hormones. Again see the behavior of teenagers, both make and female, and pregnant women for notes on the strange desires that raging hormones can induce.
A more important observation, however, is that both thin and obese people seem to know how many calories they “need.” That is both the thin and the obese are typically in caloric equilibrium, neither gaining nor loosing weight. A person will often be 50lbs overweight for years.
How does their body “know” exactly the right number of calories to eat to maintain 50 lbs extra fat. It would be one thing if their weight was constantly fluctuating with the season, the opening of new restaurants, etc.
But that’s not what we observe. We observe either solid gaining trends or solid holding patterns. How does the body know that it needs exactly maintenance plus 500?
Moreover, how does the thin body know that it needs exactly maintenance? Most people have no idea what their maintenance level is and even if they did caloric estimates on food are only accurate to around 90% and not universally available. Are we really to believe that all thin people are counting up every calorie in and every calorie out to make sure they balance?
No, almost certainly their hormones are telling them. They are telling them they desire food or that they have had too much and now food is repulsive. Their hormones are telling them they really need a hardy steak or they are just “in the mood” for a salad. Their hormones are monitoring body composition and issuing feedback to the brain to tell the brain what to eat.
Thus when someone becomes obese our first suspect should be a breakdown in this feedback loop. This is where I believe that research needs to focus. What is the nature of this feedback breakdown and how can it be fixed?
Answer: When we loose weight were does the fat mass go?
It turns into air and water. Fat is a primarily a chain of carbon and hydrogen atoms. The carbon combines with the oxygen we breathe to produce carbon dioxide, which we breathe out. The hydrogen combines with the oxygen we breathe to produce water, which we urinate out.
Most of the mass, however, is carbon and so we loose weight primarily because the air we breathe out is slightly heavier than the air we breathe in.
Brad comments
Your post scratches at some scientific-sounding ideas of the involvement of genetics, but fails to cite any definitive research into inheritable weight-control issues. The mathematics behind maintaining a healthy weight are startlingly simple, and the mythology of “fat genes” and thyroid problems and impossible to shed pounds is merely there to sell books and gym memberships.
The body is a closed system and cannot create additional weight without an over consumption of calories. Joel S is correct — it’s literally impossible to gain weight by eating your “maintenance” number of calories without violating the first law of thermodynamics.
So there are a couple of issues here. One is on whether or not genetics can make a difference. Are there “fat genes?” Does the thyroid matter? The second is whether or not First Law solves the obesity question. I’ll do this in two posts.
On Genetics
I’ll post a couple of links on genetics of obesity and one chart
The chart comes from a paper I am writing on obesity and is based off of data organized by Bruce Scaredote and first used in his paper What Happens When We Randomly Assign Families.
The red dots show the the BMI of mothers plotted against that of their birth children. The blue dots show the BMI of the mothers plotted against that of their adopted children. As you can see the correlation for adopted children is very slight. While the correlation for birth children has a steeper slope.
In both cases we are dealing with heights and weights for all persons reported by the mother. This will tend to introduce measurement error and cause the correlations to be less than the true correlation.
I think its important to note that almost all of the adopted children of morbidly obese mothers, BMI over 40, were normal weight. While the birth children of morbidly obese women tended to be at least overweight if not morbidly obese themselves.
We should also consider the possibility of response anchoring. That is giving a high or low weight for one child will influence the mother’s estimation of the weight for the other child. This will tend to introduce correlation between adopted and birth weights. Which will mean that the two correlations with Mother’s BMI will be closer together than reality. Because the adopted correlation is slight and the birth small, this should lead us to believe that the adopted correlation is even smaller and the birth even larger.
The take home here is that the tendency for whole families to be overweight or normal weight at least seems to work through genetic as opposed to environmental channels.
Other work on obesity and heritability
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/87/2/275
http://diabetes.diabetesjournals.org/content/57/11/2905.short
http://www.nature.com/nrendo/journal/v2/n8/full/ncpendmet0220.html
http://www.nature.com/ijo/journal/v32/n7s/full/ijo2008239a.html
Eductationnext has an update on Microsoft’s School of the Future located in Philadelphia. The school opened a few years ago with a untraditional image of what a school should be. It would involve incorporating technology into education, including giving students laptops, project based learning, teachers working in teams, and the “course of study would be dynamic, interdisciplinary, and driven by their interests”. The school was designed and launched by Microsoft, but is a collaborative effort with, and operates within, the School District of Philadelphia. This means that the school was not paid for by Microsoft, so that if it was successful it would be scaleable by being able to operate within school districts budgets. However, there seems to be a problem executing the vision of the SOF within the restrictions of the districts school system:
For starters, the school district’s computer couldn’t accept SOF’s narrative-style report cards, which evaluated students’ proficiency in the core competencies rather than giving them traditional numeric grades in individual subjects…. By the middle of year three, the district had pressured the school to begin using its core curriculum and, like other neighborhood high schools, administer biweekly benchmark tests based on it. Two periods a week were set aside for mini-projects.
Even without the problems of working within the district, the school’s brand new model of education is creating difficulty for their traditional model of students:
The students, almost all African American, more than 80 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, came with skill levels all over the map; a majority read at a 5th-grade level or below. Used to worksheets, paper-and-pencil tests, and being asked to regurgitate information, many weren’t prepared to take control of their own learning. Some thrived on the project-based, interdisciplinary, and technology-rich model, and were finally able to connect to the purpose of school; others simply found it bewildering.
And as others have found, the technology-heavy model of education has problems of it’s own:
“I would spend 30 or 60 minutes of a period deleting games from the computer,” lamented one teacher. Students would be instant messaging and checking emails during class. “When you’re exhausted because you’ve been telling kids to stop playing Halo all day, you’re not actually teaching them literature or skills or the content that they need to drive their own learning.”
So is the project doomed? It doesn’t sound like it. The students perform no better on standardized tests, but appear to be getting a more enriching educational experience that is tailored to their interests. In a country with a 30% dropout rate, just getting kids to like being in school more is a good thing if it can lower that number. Also, one thing that is also clear is that the school is evolving, adapting, and learning to fulfill it’s mission within the constraints of the school system. It may yet hit it’s stride. However, this school does provide another lesson in the difficulty of implementing radical reforms within the existing system.
While I am preparing the First Law of Thermodynamics and Obesity post I thought I’d mention:
A commenter asked why I don’t discuss Gary Taubes’s book Good Calories, Bad Calories more as it addresses many of the issues I bring up.
My failure to cite Taubes is probably a mistake. Taubes’s lectures on the subject of obesity were instrumental in my intellectual journey. He was the first to shake me from my dogmatic slumber of calories-in vs. calories-out.
Where I break with Taubes is over the solution. Taubes seems fairly convinced on the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis. I am more skeptical. For me carbohydrate-insulin is one of the leading candidates for a Theory of Obesity but there are a lot of questions it fails to answer.
Not least of my objections is that carbohydrate restriction is not universally and completely successful. It is more successful than calorie or fat restriction but it doesn’t have the track record of say bariatric surgery. A complete Theory of Obesity needs to explain that.
Moreover, we are rapidly learning more about the hormone regulation mechanisms involved in obesity. Leptin was discovered in 1994. The fat regulation effects of grehlin and peptide YY were discovered in 1999 and 2006 respectively. All three seem to have an importance on par with insulin.
Its important that we don’t hang our hats on a single hormone or regulation chain. We are not even close to uncovering all of the hormones involved. The best we can say right now is that while obesity seems strongly related to hyperinsulinemia we still cannot say for sure what the cause of the obesity epidemic is.
Dan comments
All of this talk of “obesity epidemics”, genetic factors … it’s as if people weren’t deliberately choosing to be obese! They are ALL choosing it. Every time an obese person eats anything other than steamed spinach and egg whites with no salt or butter, every instant they spend on their ample bottom rather than running, swimming, or doing pushups – every instant of self-indulgence is a CHOICE to remain massive.
Suppose there was a condition that required that you had to eat steamed spinach and egg whites only and spend every leisure hour of the day working out or else you would become horribly disfigured, your organs would shrivel and your chance of death would rise. We would rightfully call such a condition a disease and if millions of people had it, it would be a major priority to understand what caused this disease and how to ameliorate it.
At best this is where we are with obesity. Indeed, Very Low Calorie diets often fail to work. Why such failure occurs is a question of hot debate, but the evidence suggest they do.
On the other hand for example, Fen-Phen had an excellent track record. If Fen-Phen treats obesity more effectively than near starvation then its important that we understand why and what the heck is going on.
Brad, you’re on deck for tomorrow.
Keep the comments coming. If you think I am an idiot, off my rocker, don’t know the first thing, etc then please let me know. This is a conversation worth having.
Joel S comments
The genetic argument doesn’t hold water: how many of our grandparents were obese? Not many, and they had the same genes.
We search endlessly for a cause for obesity when it is common for an adult man in America, whose caloric requirement (to maintain the same weight with a sedentary lifestyle) might be 2000 or 2500, to be ingesting 4000 or more per day.
There is no mystery: a person who is ingesting only their maintenance number of calories per day will not be obese. Our caloric intake, combined with sedentary lifestyles, explains the obesity epidemic entirely. It’s not sugar, per se, and it’s not fats, per se.
I appreciate Joel bringing these issues up. I never know whether discussing these basics will insult my readers or not.
On genetics: How is it possible that obesity can be strongly genetic if our grandparents weren’t obese?
The nerdy argument is that while the incidence of obesity has risen over time the variability in obesity attributable to genetics has actually remained constant. This is one of the remarkable stylized facts that a Theory of Obesity would need to explain.
In more common terms it works like this. In our grandparent’s day very few people were obese but a few were overweight and in general some were pudgier than others. Well, it turns out that if you carry the genes that produced overweightness in our grandparents time then you are almost certainly obese today. If you carry the genes that produced pudigness in our grandparent’s day then you are very likely overweight today.
The general level of fatness is rising but the relative fatness of people in the population is as genetically determined as ever. Moreover, genetics has a lot to say.
There is a very interesting parallel with height. In the same way as obesity, height has been increasing over time. Yet, height is strongly genetic. Indeed, height seems to be only slightly more genetic than obesity.
Even more fascinating, the rise in height slowed down just as the rise in obesity was speeding up. If you look at the rise in body mass you actually see a smooth trend that extends at least back to the early 20th century. However, for the first part of that trend people were getting heavier because they were getting taller. Now they are getting heavier because they are getting fatter.
One radical hypothesis that I have toyed with is that obesity is the result of improving nutrition. In short, we see that height, intelligence and obesity are rising over time at similair growth rates. We think the first two are due to increases in nutrition. Is it possible the same is true for the third?
Its clear that being obese is undesirable in the modern world but its not immediately clear that its less evolutionarily maladaptive than being 6’2” or having an IQ of 135. In all cases you have resources going to create tissue that probably wouldn’t have conferred much of an advantage in our evolutionary past.
I don’t endorse this hypothesis, but I think its important to keep even radical suggestions in mind.
On Calories: Don’t we just eat more and exercise less?
We definitely eat more. Its not clear that we exercise less or that sedentary behavior can explain anything. In fact households that make their living doing manual labor are more likely to be obese than those who make their living as professionals.
We do eat more though. Doesn’t that explain it?
No.
The question is why do we eat more. Eating behavior in all animals is actually fairly tightly regulated by numerous feedback loops. Most animals do not “watch what they eat” and most do not get obese. At least not those who are not genetically prone to do so.
More importantly humans in the 1950s and 1960s were mostly normal weight yet most of them were not on tightly regulated diets. Most thin people today probably could not tell you how many calories they ingested each day nor how many they expended. This regulation is carried on subconsciously by hormone mechanisms through out the body.
The regulation mechanism is also highly fine tuned. In order to stay within one pound of your current weight over a year, calories-in have to match calorie-out with 99.7% accuracy. The calorie testing equipment that determines what goes on food labels is not even that accurate, so it seems implausible that people are achieving this through conscious equation of calories-in with calories-out.
So, for thousands of years the regulation mechanism worked despite people living in environments that were quite different from our hunter-gatherer past. However, in the past 30 years it has broken down completely. That begs for an explanation.
For the nerdier, I would also suggest that the sudden breakdown is why I am skeptical of “many independent causes of the obesity epidemic” theories. Why should it be the case that all of sudden lots of independent forces came together all to breakdown the calorie regulation mechanism in the same direction?
That is, if we were seeing just as much spontaneous anorexia as spontaneous obesity then maybe I could buy the “things just went haywire” hypothesis. However, it looks like something particular went wrong with the down-regulation mechanism of calorie management. This was probably a single cause or at least a single complex of causes. Not independent events.
There is a lot more to say but this is enough for one post.
Yesterday I pointed out that given his belief that the social pressures you face as an Amish person don’t make you less free, Bryan Caplan would actually be more free as an Amish. The econblogosphere’s resident graphic artist Niklas Blanchard of CheapSeatsEcon cooks up the Caplan-counterfactual:
Thanks Niklas!
Bryan Caplan argues that Amish women are no less free than other women:
How free are Amish women compared to other American women? I say they’re just as free. I also say, against Will Wilkinson, that their “formal freedom” is morally significant.
However, if you don’t count the social pressure Amish women face as restricting their freedom then they are actually more free than the rest of us when you consider the unique economic freedoms they enjoy. And since they have even less social pressures than the women, Amish men are also more free than non-Amish men.
For instance, the Amish don’t pay Social Security taxes. In addition, they are exempt from Medicare and the individual mandate in the new health care reform bill. And since Bryan has sons he will also be interested to know that the Amish are exempt from many child labor laws.
So if you don’t consider the social pressure in the Amish community to be restrictions on freedom, then given the extra economic freedoms they enjoy, being Amish is actually a libertarian paradise compared to what we have now. Somebody tell Patri Friedman he can call off his seasteading ventures, they are no longer needed.
I do have one piece of advice for Bryan: if you’re going to join the Amish libertarian paradise you’re going to need a longer beard, English.
Marc has a thoughtful piece in the Atlantic where he discusses his own struggles with obesity, his discussion to undergo bariatric surgery and our current obesity policy.
This observation is especially poignant
IF WE CAN’T EASILY cure obesity, we’ve got two choices: we rely on medical science to ameliorate its effects, in which case we consign the obese to a miserable life waiting for that one pill or Nature article that solves it all; or we get serious about helping to prevent people, and especially children, from becoming overweight and obese in the first place. (Eighty percent of people who were overweight at ages 10 to 15 are obese at 25.) This is the province of policy makers: state legislatures, school boards, members of Congress, executive-branch members, even corporate boards.
However, it is important to accept that we know as little about preventing obesity as we do about curing it. There is no significant evidence that I am aware of to believe that preventing obesity is any easier than curing it.
It is possible that the modern rise in obesity involves some form of addiction and that some people are more genetically prone. In the same way that many can drink all they want and never become alcoholics, some can eat all they want and never become obese. In this case prevention might seem to make a lot sense.
This may be true. I don’t know of strong evidence to suggest that is. However, even if it is true it doesn’t tell us what we need to do to prevent obesity. We can’t ask that people abstain from food.
We could ask that they abstain from all “unhealthy food” though that would require a good grasp on exactly what healthy food is. This is something that we do not have. Note that as little as 12 years ago most doctors would have considered pasta a health food, while virtually few would today.
However, even that is not likely to be the answer. Ice cream and soft drinks existed in the 1950s yet the obesity epidemic was under control. If there is a specific tipping point, then we don’t know what it is.
To make social policy and to be sure we are not doing more harm than good we need a serious Theory of Obesity. One that accounts for all of the stylized facts. One that can explain the rise in the epidemic, the strong genetic association, the tens of millions of failed attempts to loose weight and the stunning success of bariatric surgery and Fen-Phen.
It must also be able to explain how for 5000 years since the formation of the first human cities our environment was close enough to our evolutionary environment to avoid obesity but in the last 35 the entire world has suddenly tipped into a spiraling obesity.
These are not easy questions. This is not an easy problem. By far the most important thing we need at this juncture is humility. When we start monkeying around with government policy that impacts the very sustenance of individuals then the potential for doing more harm than good is great.
There has been a lot of very thoughtful discussion lately about the obesity epidemic facing this country. All I have to add to this insightful and informed conversation is a comment on and picture of a turn-of-the-century sideshow freak:
This is Chauncy Morlan, and around 100 years ago his obesity was so shocking that people would pay money to see him as he toured the country as a circus “fat man”. I find the unremarkableness of his size to be a telling sign of how we’ve pushed the limits of obesity in the past 100 years. Imagine, if you will, what society would look like if 100 years from now if what passed as spectacularly obese today would not even turn heads at the mall.
[Note from Karl: Adam is a phenomenal satirist but now that you're here take a minute to read our other stuff on obesity:http://modeledbehavior.com/category/obesity/]
From a new working paper:
This paper provides statistical evidence suggesting that in industrial countries, recessions that are associated with either banking crises or housing crises dampen output far more than ordinary recessions… [W]e find that ordinary recessions are followed by strong recoveries that make up for almost all the preceding shortfall in output. This bounceback tends to be significantly smaller following recessions associated with banking crises or housing crises.
The authors also discuss other recent findings in the literature that have followed Reinhart and Rogoff in supporting this view:
Ignited partly by Reinhart’s and Rogoff’s (2008) attempt to draw lessons for the course of the US subprime crises from historical episodes with financial crises in other countries across the last centuries, a number of recent studies have investigated recessions triggered by severe crises and their aftermath…The general finding of these studies is that recessions triggered by severe crises are followed by rather weak and slow recoveries, and thus have long lasting effects on output.
It’s a good thing for Krugman he never took that bet with Mankiw.
Kudos to Matt Yglesias for making an important but infrequently discussed point that price discrimination can be socially optimal. However, I must point out that his statement that “price-discrimination in monopolist-dominated markets is socially optimal” is not correct. It would instead be correct to say price discrimination by a monopolist can be socially optimal.
One reason for this is because, as Matt points out, you never get perfect price discrimination in the real world. This means that airlines can’t know, and therefore can’t charge, each customers their exact valuation of a ticket, and instead must try and find some way to sort customers by willingness to pay. If the sorting is costly and wasteful then the price discrimination can be inefficient, i.e. not socially optimal.
The irony is that a very common example used in textbooks of inefficient price discrimination is in fact airlines (see, for example, Kwoka and White’s antitrust book). One way that airlines price discriminate is to offer tickets at a discount if the person is willing to stay over saturday night. Because businessmen are typically unwilling to stay longer than they need to and are also less price sensitive, this allows airlines to offer a discount only to the more price sensitive leisure segment of the market… thus price discrimination. The inefficiency arises because people staying longer than they otherwise would is a distortion, and the loss of welfare due to distortions like these can more than offset the welfare gains from the discount. This cost of separating the market can make price discrimination on net less socially optimal than not price discriminating in the first place.
There are other ways price discrimination by a monopolist can be socially suboptimal, but Matt’s point that they can also be socially optimal is the less understood point, so overall I can forgive him for not getting it quite right.
[UPDATE: Yglesias responds. I agree.]
I recall reading somewhere that in this culture we praise kids for getting good grades instead of praising them for working hard, when we should be doing the opposite. The simple economic response to this is that grades are more observable than effort, and so you should reward grades otherwise you may just get a lot of ineffective or half-hearted effort. Imagine, for example, paying a business for how much work they put into making something instead of how much stuff they actually made; you’d obviously get less output. Roland Fryer has a new NBER paper with evidence that the simple economic view is wrong when it comes to children and education:
In stark contrast to simple economic models, our results suggest that student incentives increase achievement when the rewards are given for inputs to the educational production function, but incentives tied to output are not effective.
His explanation for this phenomenon sounds amusingly economist-y, but makes sense:
Qualitative data suggest that incentives for inputs may be more effective because students do not know the educational production function, and thus have little clue how to turn their excitement about rewards into achievement.
I can imagine this problem is discussed by many parents and academically struggling children across the country.
Dad: I just don’t understand the problem, Jimmy. You seem to want to get good grades, but you keep failing.
Jimmy: Dad, mom… I don’t know my production function! I’m sorry!
Mom: Dammit Greg, I told he didn’t know his production function! You know Jimmy, you’re uncle Arthur didn’t know his production function when he was you’re age either, and he turned out just fine.
The two takeaways from this evidence are that 1) when designed correctly, financial incentives for students do work, and 2) empirical evidence matters for education reforms designed to impact children’s behavior.
After reading a speech by the head of the AFL-CIO about the decline of manufacturing jobs, Ezra Klein opines about class and creative destruction:
…consider the way elites have treated the decline of journalism jobs and the decline of manufacturing jobs. Both sectors are fundamentally suffering from the same thing… But where the decline of manufacturing was greeted with sanguine talk about “retraining,” the decline of journalism has been greeted with something akin to grief.
I have some friendly advice for journalists: if you find yourself thinking that anyone other than your co-workers and their immediate families give a whiff about journalism jobs any more than they care manufacturing jobs, restaurant jobs, or any other kind of jobs for that matter, then you need to spend more time outside the lunchroom of the Washington Post. Because nobody cares. This belief that journalism jobs in-and-of-themselves are somehow important isn’t an elite/non-elite divide, it’s a delusional journalist/everyone else divide.
People don’t care about the fate of the Columbia School of Journalism Class of 2014, what they care about is the output of quality journalism. If all the journalists in the country could be replaced by one sleepless blogger without suffering any decline in the quality or quantity of journalism, then we would be better off. Of course that’s not the case, and journalists are needed to supply quality journalism. But it is only to the extent that quality journalism requires journalists that we care about their jobs.
Another reason Ezra’s whole argument falls apart is his explanation for why people -I’m sorry, I mean” elites”- don’t worry about the decline of manufacturing like they worry about the decline of journalism. It’s not a class issue, it’s because the manufacturing output over time has gone up, continues to go up, and shows no sign of stopping. As seen in the graph below, which shows an index of the value-added output of U.S. manufacturing industry since 1947, even on the production side manufacturing in this country has gone up steadily over time.
And that’s to say nothing about the overall availability to consumers and businesses of manufacturing goods like cheaper washing machines, fridges, and inputs into other industries. Unlike quality journalism, I seriously doubt anyone thinks we are in danger of having a shortage of manufactured goods in the future. That, and not some sort of elitist bias, is why “elites” aren’t concerned about the decline of manufacturing; in short, it’s not happening.
This is probably a pretty banal point, but I don’t think it’s sufficiently emblazoned on people’s minds: not all studies are created equal. Combine this with the fact that there are many ways to test the same hypothesis, and what you get is conflicting empirical studies on most issues that matter. The existence of conflicting studies, however, does not mean that the evidence is mixed. If some studies are better than others the evidence may in fact be overwhelming. Unfortunately, when a journalist or blogger can’t weigh evidence and draw conclusions despite sufficient evidence to do so it can lead them to false and undeserved equivalency.
One important example is the evidence on charter schools. Study design is really important here since the causality problem is tricky. All school choice programs will have some mechanism by which students are allocated, and unless very carefully designed, most of those mechanisms will mean that students in the program are systematically different than those not in the program. When you have an intervention that creates prior systematic differences between the study and control groups by design, causality is incredibly difficult. In this context, the ability to tell the difference between a rigorous study that has controlled for the selection problem and one that hasn’t is crucial.
From everything I’ve read from Diane Ravitch, she lacks this ability, and this seems to be at least partly driving her conclusions about charters. Some journalists, like Dana Goldstein at The American Prospect, have shown a similar inability to discern which charter studies are more rigorous. Goldstein discusses conflicting studies on charter school choice, but nowhere does she mention that one of the studies, by Caroline Hoxby, is by nature of it’s randomization indisputably more valid than the other.
I am also curious if a lack of discriminating between studies of different quality is what leads very smart, insightful bloggers like Matt Steinglass to write that “with well over a decade of large-scale pilots for various implementations, [school choice] doesn’t seem to be showing any results”.
I’m not sure if this phenomenon is related to Felix Salmon’s point that journalists and bloggers don’t typically understand the mathematics underlying academic papers, or if it’s just humility in the face of biased policy experts who are providing them with false equivalency.
Jonathan Rauch contrasts David Frum’s vision of the world with Fox News’ vision of the world:
In Fox World, he says, Obama is a radical ideologue determined to impose European-style socialism on the United States; in reality, he is a pragmatic consensus-seeker who gets his ideas from the Left but wants to win re-election with 60 percent of the vote. In Fox World, Americans in the millions are rising up to protest Obama’s expansion of government; in reality, many Americans are distressed by the economy and will simmer down when prosperity returns.
In Fox World, liberals have wrecked the country; in reality, 21st-century America is better in almost every way than the America of 1975 or 1955. In Fox World, people such as Palin and the conservative talking heads Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck speak for the overlooked American middle; in reality, they speak for a fringe, one big enough to make them rich but not to elect anyone to national office.
Where you land on the spectrum between these two world views will determine how radical you see the Tea Party movement. I think part of the fundamental disagreement between Arnold Kling and Will Wilkinson about who libertarians should align with and how to view the Tea Party Movement is that Arnold sees the Fox World as closer to reality and Will sees the Frum world as closer to reality. The more radical the movement, the farther from reality their beliefs, the less sustainable and influential they they will be as a political movement.
Another part of the disagreement between these competing visions is how to brand libertarianism. Will thinks the association with the Tea Party will push libertarianism, or at least the perception of libertarianism, even more towards an undesirable brand that is already holding it back. Arnold, in contrast, believes that the Tea Party movement is a relatively reasonable movement with libertarian aspects, and is a practical and desirable vehicle for libertarianism. (Of course, I may be completely projecting with this assessment of Arnold and Will’s beliefs, in which case replace “Arnold” and “Will” with “some libertarians” and “other libertarians”.)
I guess the question is whether the Tea Party Movement can actually deliver libertarian policies, or will it achieve nothing and tarnish the name of libertarianism along the way?
CNN has a Saturday show on the IOUSA theme and the challenges we face as a nation.
As long as the debate goes on I will continue to repeat that these are not challenges, they are choices. It is not as if by rolling up our sleeves and getting to work we are going to find a solution to these problems.
No, what we face is a choice. Either we accept significantly higher levels or taxation or we cut benefits. Indeed, I think that politically choice is not a serious one. We are going to face higher taxes.
Now a productive conversation is on how we are going to raise taxes. How can we make the entire tax structure more efficient. And, most importantly how can we divorce the issue of taxation from the issue of anti-businessism.
Matt Yglesias has said the left-right divide comes down to pro versus contra business. This may be true but it would tragic to allow this divide to infect the issue of long term fiscal choices.
It is possible to have strong pro-business policies, light but smart regulatory environment and significantly heavier taxes. This is the path that I indentify with Liberaltarianism and is the most promising path for the future.
The recent coal mining tragedy has spurred a discussion of the danger of the profession. The New York Times is hosting a debate on mine safety and regulation, and what the latter can do to ameliorate the former. Economist Price Fishback takes the role of the lone regulatory skeptic:
A handful of specific regulations cut coal accidents in the early 1900s. Yet, there are numerous economic studies of workplace safety regulations that find that accident rates fall very little after new regulations are passed.
Arguing nearly the complete opposite is journalist and historian Bill Kovarik:
Mine fatality rates have gone down significantly from 100 years ago, but where you see the statistical drops in fatality rates are in the years following the enactment of mining regulations.
The rates go down to under 2 fatalities per thousand miners per year only after the 1952 regulations forced mines to open up to inspections, and they drop again to the current levels of 2 to 3 fatalities per 10,000 miners per year only after passage of the 1977 Federal Mine Safety and Health Act.
Looking at data on mining deaths from the Mine Safety & Health Administration, which is the same data Kovarik links to, the importance of the 1952 and 1977 regulatory changes is not apparent. In fact mining fatalities were dropping precipitously in the decade leading up to the 1977 change, and continued a general downward trend long after the impact of the 1977 regulation would have taken affect.
It is also worth noting that the death rate in commercial fishing was 11.2 per 10,000 workers from 1994-2004, whereas mining averaged around 3 deaths per 10,000 in the same period. Despite being much less dangerous than fishing, the media attention received by mining deaths seems much greater. It also seems to me that the outrage over the injustice of the deaths is also disproportionately greater for mining. Is this because fishing deaths are perceived as unavoidable acts of nature that are inherent in the job, whereas mining deaths are seen as accidents that could be regulated away? And is this characterization accurate?
In the interesting debate on libertarian paternalism at Cato Unbound both sides have mentioned the issue of smoking bans. In the anti-paternalism lead essay, Glen Whitman uses smoking bans as an example of a slippery regulatory slope: first it was just the airplanes, then it was restaurants, what’s next? Richard Thaler counters in the pro-paternalism essay that smoking bans aren’t even really nudges:
First, most of the anti-smoking laws are based on externalities, not paternalism. People do not want to fly, eat, or work in smoke-filled environments. Indeed, many smokers favor such laws. Note that while smoking bans are not nudges, they are shoves…
Scott Sumner chimes in, disagreeing with Thaler that smoking is an externality at all:
Doesn’t this argument violate the Coase Theorem? For example, let’s take the ban on smoking in the workplace. Where is the externality argument? Doesn’t the employer already have an incentive to put in place the smoking rules that minimize his productivity-adjusted wage bill?
One important problem not discussed is that if we are nudging (or shoving) people away from a behavior that is (or could be) an externality, what are we nudging them towards? The unintended consequences are potentially serious here. For instance, the literature on smoking bans suggests that they increase drunk driving and exposure to secondhand smoke for the children of smokers, both of which are more obvious and more egregious externalities than the one we were trying to get rid of in the first place.
Negative unintended consequences may occur even when there is no externality. For instance, a new paper in the current edition of AEJ: Applied Economics uses a field experiment at a fast food chain to show that if not properly designed, a nudge that successfully reduces an individual’s caloric intake of sandwiches may be offset by an increase in their caloric intake of soda and side orders. Depending on the kind of sandwich, side order, and soda involved, this may make the individual worse off. Shifting from less of a turkey wrap to more french fries with trans fats would clearly make the person worse off.
Both examples show that when weighing nudges (or shoves) we should consider the potential unintended consequences, otherwise we may end up pushing people in a bad direction. When externalities are potentially involved, this is especially important. The smoking bans also provide a warning that even if we identify a very serious unintended consequence down the road, the legislation won’t necessarily be undone. We should be extremely cautious about passing these laws if we are uncertain about our ability to identify unintended consequences in advance; by the time we know for sure it could be too late.
Can’t you tell?
Why would the guy leave his Obama administration post, when he’s clearly having so much fun.
George Soros’ new economics think tank, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, is employing a decent number of econ superstars. Interestingly though, it lists both Ken Rogoff and Joe Stiglitz as members of it’s advisory board. These two notoriously butted heads several years ago over Joe’s book “Globalization and it’s Discontents”, which heavily criticized the IMF, where Rogoff was Director of Research. In response to the book, Rogoff wrote an open letter to Joe that was, to put it mildly, a spirited rebuke. Here is a beautiful line from that letter:
…it is also important, before I begin, for me to quash rumors about the demolition of the former PEPCO building that stood right next to the IMF until a few days ago. No, it’s absolutely not true that this was caused by a loose cannon planted within the World Bank.
The World Bank being where Stiglitz had been chief economist, and Stiglitz being that loose cannon.
Let’s hope they share an office!
Apparently, you can install R on an iPhone, although it has to be jailbroken. I could not find a screenshot confirming that it has in fact been done. Really though, would anyone realistically ever need to use Stata on their iPhone? Probably not. But would anyone like to use Stata on their iPhone? Yes.
Glen Whitman over at Cato Unbound attacks mild paternalism using behavior economics, arguing essentially that they put us on a slippery slope to more intrusive paternalism:
First, it is well-established that people exhibit extremeness aversion: a tendency to avoid positions that are presented as extremes…. The mere presence of an extreme option makes the middle option seem better. The new paternalists, intentionally or not, have exploited this same tendency by presenting their position as a middle-ground between laissez-faire and heavy-handed paternalism.
This would be no great concern, were it not for the tendency of the middle ground to shift over time. A newly adopted middle-ground quickly becomes the status quo. Then a more intrusive option takes center stage, and what used to be the middle-ground becomes one of the bookends….
Sound paranoid? Anti-smoking regulations followed a similar path. Once upon a time, banning smoking on airplanes seemed like the reasonable middle ground. Now that’s the (relatively) laissez-faire position, smoking bans in bars and restaurants are the middle, and full-blown smoking bans have come to pass in some cities.
Behavioral economics is typically used to justify paternalism (“people are irrational, let’s help them”), and the usual counter-argument is a rational agent one (“no they’re not, so you can’t”). It is, to me, a novel framing of the debate to see Whitman attack paternalism on behavioral grounds. Will Gary Becker get a voice in this debate?
The Vatican is claiming that the Pope is the target of “hate” campaign.
VATICAN CITY – The Vatican heatedly defended Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday, claiming accusations that he helped cover up the actions of pedophile priests are part of an anti-Catholic "hate" campaign targeting the pope for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.
Vatican Radio broadcast comments by two senior cardinals explaining "the motive for these attacks" on the pope and the Vatican newspaper chipped in with spirited comments from another top cardinal.
"The pope defends life and the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, in a world in which powerful lobbies would like to impose a completely different" agenda, Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, head of the disciplinary commission for Holy See officials, said on the radio.
When your critics are all mean spirited and have hidden agendas then cognitive dissonance within the organization is at its maximum and sustainably at its minimum. This may not be the end of the Catholic Church but I do suspect that the Church’s days as a Western Institution are numbered.
Chad Aldeman at the excellent Quick and the Ed explains how improvements in the NAEP reading scores are masked by looking at overall scores because of Simpson’s Paradox. To put it simply, this means that the you can see progress when looking at group-by-group numbers, but then see no progress overall due to relative group sample sizes. In the context of the NAEP, what this means is that overall scores show no progress because of changing demographics, and that looking within demographic groups progress is obvious.
Here are the overall long-term NAEP scores which show very little progress:
And here are the same scores broken down by race/ethnicity, which paint quite a different picture:
Chad sums up these graphs:
Each group has actually made greater gains over time than the overall total. White students increase 11 points, one more than the national average. Black students scored 23 points higher, and Hispanic students were scoring 24 points higher in 2008 than they were in 1975 despite quadrupling in size. In other words, the white-black and white-Hispanic gaps are closing and every group is scoring higher, but the national score is showing more modest improvements because of demographic changes.
A series by The Atlantic Wire has been asking people “what they read” on a daily basis to stay informed. They have been interviewing everyone from blue-collar, everyman bloggers like Tyler Cowen, to serious public intellectuals like Andrew Breitbart. I think my media habits are pretty banal and really as average as they come, but I thought I’d share what I read anyway.
Like many of the technology saavy contributers to the series, I start my day with digital consumption. I begin by reading through the AOL chatroom window that I’ve kept open all night. Unfortunately, about half the time my modem has lost the dial-tone at some point in the night, which means I only get half of the news and ASCII art that happened over the last 8 hours. I’m told if I upgraded to a 56k that would improve. Then I check to see if Jim Belushi has a twitter account yet. Still no.
Call me a traditionalist, but I still get the newspaper delivered to my door every morning. They say it’s wasteful to use all that paper when you could get it online, but I think it’s worth it. You can’t get the same feeling from a website that I do when I open my USA Today, go straight to Family Circus, and then throw the rest in the trash.
The rest of my news for the day comes through ham radio, which to the chagrin of family members, coworkers, and fellow Amtrak commuters, blares non-stop through the speakers of the FT-897D I carry with me from sunup until sundown. If the truck drivers aren’t talking about it, than it isn’t news.
And that’s “what I read”, nothing too radical.
…For what it’s worth, I was going to contribute to the “books that have influenced me” meme that’s going around, but the only piece of media that has ever affected me is The Money Pit.
More good news on TARP via CNBC
U.S. taxpayers earned an annualized 8.5 percent return from the government’s bailout of 49 financial firms, underscoring efforts by the industry to speed up repayments and warrant repurchases, according to a report by SNL Financial.
I know the Regional Banks are not looking as good but the long term return prospects are still solid. After all BofA and Citi didn’t look so hot last year but the government’s return on holding them was solid.
A point I want to make a big deal out of as this thing gets settled is whether or not this was "taxpayer money." If the taxpayers never had their taxes increased to pay for the bailout and if indeed as I argue there was no serious threat of ever having their taxes increased, then in what sense was it "taxpayer money."
The deal was leveraged using taxpayer goodwill but that’s not quite the same thing.
A new NBER paper from Jonathan Gruber and Samuel Kleiner argues that hospital strikes are deadly:
Controlling for hospital specific heterogeneity, patient demographics and disease severity, the results show that nurses’ strikes increase in-hospital mortality by 19.4% and 30-day readmission by 6.5% for patients admitted during a strike, with little change in patient demographics, disease severity or treatment intensity.
I don’t have time to read this closely right now, and the endogeneity problem here is probably pretty tricky, so caveat lector. In any case though, the implications here are interesting. Many public sector unions regarded as essential are forbidden from striking. Should the same rules apply to nurses? Or should hospital unions be outlawed altogether? Gruber has been a favorite economist among progressives like Ezra Klein for his health care work, so it will be interesting to see how this paper is received.
If we could only understand fundamentally how to make forecasts this good
HT: Sullivan
The first day I got me a fuel pump
And the next day I got me an engine and a trunk
Then I got me a transmission and all of the chrome
The little things I could get in my big lunchbox
Like nuts, an’ bolts, and all four shocks
But the big stuff we snuck out in my buddy’s mobile home.
Johnny Cash, One Piece At A TIme
Ryan Avent at the Economist argues with Matt Steinglass, also at the Economist, about whether “leave it in the ground” is a desirable way to reduce global warming. Here is Avent:
In the end, reduction of fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions is all about the demand side—the supply of fossil fuels on earth is more than sufficient to turn the planet into an oven, and so demand must be rationed. So either you commit yourself to disrupting enough of currently available fossil fuel supply to raise fossil fuel prices, or you quit worrying about supplies and focus on demand-side measures. The former seems to me to be utterly impossible and not that economically desirable, and so I’d urge my colleague to concentrate on the latter…
This debate plays out all over the place: do you support a marginal policy that would reduce global warming by some small amount, or instead focus on promoting the much more efficient carbon tax and forgo these piecemeal policies? I understand why this debate goes on, and I can understand why cynics who are skeptical that we will get a carbon tax would promote piecemeal policies, although I disagree with them.
What I don’t understand is why all libertarians and conservatives don’t recognize that given the public perception on the issue, this is our choice set: we’re either going to do it like Johnny Cash -sloppily, inefficiently, and, one piece at a time-, or we can do it all at once as efficiently as possible. As long as pollution is perceived as being underpriced there will be a large, economically justified demand for piecemeal attempts to reduce it. Why not support the efficient approach and remove the economic case for these inefficient piecemeal policies?
Do people donate to charities because altruism makes them feel good about themselves, or because of social pressure to donate? It matters because altruistically motivated giving benefits both the giver and the charity, since the giver enjoys giving, while social pressure motivated giving benefits only the charity. A new study from Stefano DellaVigna, John List, and Ulrike Malmendier uses a randomized field experiment and a structural model to estimate the extent to which giving to door-to-door charities is motivated by each:
We find evidence that both altruism and social pressure affect door-to-door charitable giving. We estimate that about half of donors would prefer not to be contacted by the fund- raiser either because they would prefer not to donate, or because they would prefer to donate less. We estimate a social pressure cost of turning down a giving request of $1 to $4, depending on the type of charity…. On average, we estimate the welfare effect of the door-to-door campaigns in our sample to be negative.
If their study is taken to be representative of door-to-door fundraisers, the authors claim that the welfare loss incurred by those being solicited for donation is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Do we need a pigouvian tax for door-to-door charities?
Adam is having a fascinating conversation on future versus present self that I wish I had the time to comment on in-depth. However, what I can add is perhaps an additional layer of complexity via Dan Kahneman
Kahneman argues that we have a two distinct levels of self. The experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self last for about 3 seconds before what is happening becomes what has happened. I have self experimented with this concept since a small kid.
I was fascinated by the idea that my memories could be false and in fact I have only been living for a few moments. I tried to whittle that down to the shortest possible period I could have been alive and through introspection I got about 5 seconds, not that far off of Kahneman’s three seconds.
The really creepy part is having is repeating this self-experiment and then having to accept that you can only remember the experiences of truly focusing on the experience of the moment.
Regardless, the economic significance of the levels of self is two fold. One, most of the experiences we have never make into memory. So in some sense the experiencing self is just vanishing away. How do then do we count its preference because . . .
Two, the experiencing self and the remembering self have different preferences. Put, in short terms the remembering self wants money, status, fame, power, etc. The experiencing self wants good friends and good laughs.
The remembering self is a high power executive, the experiencing self is a hippy. How do we weight then the preferences of each?
Two days ago my past self discussed a paper that argued we might want to consider our current selves as distinct from our future selves. The idea was that “when we make choices that affect both our current selves and our future selves, we think about the preferences of our future self in the same way we think about the preferences of a different person”.
My past self, being more interested in entertaining than informing, didn’t really discuss some critical problems that could arise if we took this framework seriously. My current self is less frivolous than that.
First, is the issue of whether suicide is murder. teageegeepea points out in the comments that if you treat future and present selves as separate people, than things that we obviously consider acceptable also become crimes:
If suicide is murder, then spending in the present is theft from a future self, sex is rape and a boxing match is battery.
The crucial difference here is that on average the preferences for these things should align fairly well between current and future selves. A priori we don’t really have any way to know whether the current boxer’s future self would want him to not box, or not spend the money, or not have sex. His future self may in fact wish his past self did more of each.This is true even for behaviors more destructive than those; if we enjoy those experiences today, our future selves may enjoy the memories of those experiences enough that they are worth doing.
The reality is that in most situations the relative preferences of future selves and current selves are difficult to guess, and the current self probably knows better than policy-makers or anyone else what his future self wants. If we don’t now know the preferences of future selves over current actions, than we can’t call those actions crimes against them.
With suicide, in contrast, it is a fairly safe bet that the vast majority our future selves would really, really, rather our current selves not commit suicide. In this case the distinction between future and current self is useful, because we know today how to balance current actions to better reflect future desires: we simply try to stop suicides. You can object that suicide shouldn’t really be called murder, and that’s fine; since our future selves and current selves would obviously be different “selves” in a way that is distinct from how you and I are different selves, and I’m not concerned with whether or not the word can literally be used that way. What’s more important than the semantics is the notion that suicide is like murder in this framework.
A second objection comes from Sister Y:
The “successive selves” idea can never genuinely catch on, true as it may be, because then we couldn’t lock people up for rapes and murders for long periods of time.
We can still justify locking people up even if we grant their future selves as separate from past selves. First off, for practical reasons alone we must all be somewhat responsible for the actions of our past selves. The alternative is a world of intolerable level of crime. Even if we granted that, in-and-of-itself locking a future self up for the crimes of a past self is not ideally just, the downside to not doing this is obviously too great. I’ll certainly grant though that the notion of a future/current self distinction certainly complicates the notion of justice.
The second reason we could lock future selves up is that, as I said before, in the vast majority of cases the current and future selves preferences tend to be highly related. In the short run, most people will not be able to credibly claim that their current selves aren’t criminals even though their past selves were. However, we already accept this notion in the long run and release people from jail if we believe they are truly “reformed”, which really means that their current self is sufficiently different from their past self.
These issues do show the difficultly in considering future and current selves as literally distinct selves. However, the points I’ve raised show that we already accept many of the logical conclusions of doing so. What I find appealing about this notion isn’t that it justifies some new, radical, ideas about how we should think or policies we should enact, but rather how it justifies common sense policies without violating notions of rational individuals. We should try to prevent suicides and some very destructive behaviors; with some choices we tend on average to not consider the future as much as we should; in the long-run we can become very different people. These are not radical ideas.
Then again, the extent to which this idea makes us freer from responsibility for past actions isn’t really appealing to me. And if society in general accepts many of the conclusions of thinking like this without actually thinking like this, then would thinking like this move the general attitudes about crime and free will too far in the direction of paternalism and no personal responsibility?
Overall I am open to persuasion on this issue.
