Dishonest Don and the Moral and Intellectual Rot of Modern Conservatism

Welcome friends!  

I was just sitting around contemplating the rather remarkable level of dishonesty issuing forth from the White House on a daily basis as well as the complete absence of concern let alone outrage on the part of our current president’s conservative base and it occurred to me that beyond merely damaging the USA in the more obvious ways, economically, militarily, politically, socially, legally, diplomatically and so on contemporary American conservatism seems intent on destroying the very soul of the USA: our moral integrity and respect for the truth.

What got me started thinking about this issue this week in particular was an article I read about our president apparently making up a story relating to a recent speech he gave at the National Scout Jamboree, the annual meeting of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), in which he rather predictably annoyed quite a few people by telling the boys Washington DC is a “sewer,” attacking Hilary Clinton, attacking the media, and basically engaging in the usual sort of lowbrow rabble rousing he has used to such great effect when speaking to his adoring army of angry redneck supporters.  The story he apparently made up about the event for the benefit of the tarted up conservative rag Wall Street Journal was that he had received a call from the “head of the Boy Scouts” who told him “it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them.”  ... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Inequality, Fairness, and Poverty

Welcome friends!

Did you ever have one of those depressing moments when you realize a problem you noticed and delved into many years ago still exists in nearly identical form and no progress of any sort appears to have taken place in the intervening decades?  I had that sensation the other day while reading an article on economic inequality.  Apparently some researchers who study people’s attitude to wealth disparity discovered ideas of fairness or what we used to social justice can play a role.  To quote a younger and slightly more uncouth version of myself, “No shit Sherlock!”  Sorry to get all juvenile and sarcastic but is this really as far as we’ve advanced in terms of the social discussion of distributional issues?  One’s ideas about fairness may play a role?  Someone had to write it up in a newspaper article?  It’s especially disheartening to me because as I’ve probably mentioned before I feel distributional issues are behind a good deal of what’s wrong with human societies today.  I don’t mean just in terms of the ethical issues and costs associated with inappropriate distributions but also in terms of the social conflict and instability our inability to come to grips with distributional issues generate.  How to explain the feeling I was having?  To put the phenomenon in a different context let’s imagine one was concerned with some basic health issue, let’s say long term behaviors that reduce the risk of heart attack, and one noticed an article in a newspaper that looked potentially relevant only to find on closer examination the article revealed merely that some doctors suspect having a beating heart might be important for one’s health.  Just give me a moment to calm down again.  Perhaps I’m being unreasonable.  Given our collective aversion to any serious discussion of distributional issues most likely because the haves of the world don’t really like the have nots of the world talking or thinking about such matters perhaps it’s not really all that remarkable each generation has to discover rudimentary features of the issue and write newspaper articles informing one another of their insights.  But I can play that game too.  In the grand tradition of reinventing the wheel let me take a few moments this week to say a few words about distributional issues, again, and how ideas about fairness may play a role, again.  Hey, anything worth saying once is worth saying a million times, right?

Let me first just quickly summarize the article so we all know what we’re talking about.  By way of introduction the authors mention what most literate people must surely already know: the resources of the world are currently distributed very unequally and more so every day.  Indeed, the top one percent of the world’s economic elite apparently now controls about fifty percent of the world’s wealth.  However, they note some researchers have recently suggested income (and I suspect they also meant wealth) disparity itself may not be the “main problem.”  No, the researchers in question apparently feel the “main problem” may be unfairness and in particular how unfairness relates to poverty.  Yes, it seems a team of researchers from Yale University recently published a journal article establishing that people tend to prefer unequal societies because they find legitimate reasons for some degree of inequality and they feel having everyone attain exactly the same outcome would not be entirely fair.  These researchers noted that in the present day USA as well as much of the rest of the world there is so much inequality some people just assume it must be unfair and have started talking about inequality in the abstract rather than sticking with the more central issue of fairness.  They argue this complicates the situation and note there are three separate but related ideas that typically feature in discussions of inequality: 1) equal opportunity, 2) fair distribution, and 3) equality of outcome.  To make any progress addressing “inequality” they argue we should first reach some agreement on what aspect of inequality we have in mind.  They go on to suggest people pay too much attention to the relative standing of the one percent and so on and suggest we instead focus on helping people who are unable to improve their situation because of a lack of fairness.  The article cites Harry Frankfurt, professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, who argues in his book On Inequality that the moral obligation in question should involve eliminating “poverty” and striving to make sure everyone has “the means to live a good life” rather than achieving “equality.”

Got the picture?  Then let’s dive right in shall we?  The first point I would make is it seems eminently plausible to me many people think fairness is relevant to distributional issues.  This makes it all the more remarkable the textbook defense of the distributional system associated with the generally market based system by which we conduct our affairs in this country and many others doesn’t really mention fairness at all but instead involves the competing philosophical framework of utilitarianism.  According to utilitarianism something that generates greater utility is preferable to something that generates less utility, which in practice and under the conventional philosophical versions of utilitarianism amounts to the notion it’s nice when people are happy.  (I suppose using the idiosyncratic and just plain peculiar version of utility that appears in neoclassical economic theory one might say when some person is happy since we might be talking about one of those superconductors of utility allowed for in that system.  If you’re not getting what I’m driving at here you should take a glance at any of my previous posts on this topic filed most likely under utility or economic theory or something of that nature.  I’d go over it again here but I’m afraid this post is already destined to be overly long).  In the utilitarian framework there isn’t really any discussion of whether the people (or possibly the person in the case of economic theory) in question ought to be happy or deserve (or deserves in the one person case) to be happy or even why we should be concerned with people being happy.

So how does one square the fact that although most people think fairness is relevant to distributional issue the main theoretical context in which we tend to talk about distributional issues, the neoclassical demonstration of the ostensibly desirable outcomes associated with a free market, says nothing at all about it?  Well, that gets to something I’ve discussed before many times and that I’ve long associated with conservative rhetoric and ideology in general.  Basically my perception is many conservatives don’t discuss issues in what one might call a real or genuine way.  They use words and arguments and theories strategically or rhetorically.  If it gets them where they want to go they don’t worry too much about the actual meaning.  They spout off about economic theory and what it says about markets not because they necessarily agree with the philosophical framework used in economic theory to talk about markets but because it happens willy nilly to support what they support on some entirely different basis they are unable or unwilling to discuss.  I suspect that must be the main reason they continue to use the flawed and implausible version of utilitarianism in economic theory no matter how many times I or anyone else may demonstrate its rather obvious shortcomings.  It just doesn’t really matter to them.  They don’t take it that seriously or to put in the context of the discussion of how arch conservative President Trump’s supporters view their champion, they may take it seriously but not literally.  It’s more in the nature of useful rhetoric than a serious intellectual endeavor.

Along the same general lines I can’t help but detect a certain straw man element in the focus of “inequality” in some abstract and absolute sense rather than in terms of acceptable levels of inequality.  I doubt very much if anyone expressing concerns about inequality has ever argued a need for absolute equality.  I strongly suspect most people who talk about such matters are more concerned with the level of inequality and in particular the level of inequality justified by concerns relating to fairness.  It’s hard to avoid the implication that like those who talk about the glories of the free market in terms of economic theory without really buying into the moral philosophizing that informs that theory the authors in this case are setting up some sort of irrelevant dichotomy between absolute equality and fairness as a way to basically encourage people to stop talking about inequality and to think about fairness in some implausible way that doesn’t involve inequality in the sense of relative outcomes.

I’m picking up a bit of the same feeling from the passage in which the researchers note the three separate but related ideas that typically feature in discussions of inequality: 1) equal opportunity, 2) fair distribution, and 3) equality of outcome.  These issues seem to me entirely complementary and compatible.  One may feel one prerequisite for a fair distribution is equal opportunity.  Similarly one’s feeling about acceptable levels of inequality may hinge on one’s notion of fairness.  I don’t really see any reason we can’t take up these interrelated issues as a unit or anyway simultaneously.  Again, it’s almost as though the authors are trying to separate out issues of equality and get people talking and thinking about opportunity and fairness divorced from inequality but I’m just not sure I can take that objective very seriously.  If we have a very unequal sort of society where some kids have all the advantages wouldn’t that affect one’s feelings relating to equal opportunity?  If we’re discussing what we think is a fair distribution based on some consideration X wouldn’t we want to know something about the relative standing of those possessing or expressing X relative to those who do not?  If it’s fair such a person has let’s say twice the economic power of the other person does it necessarily follow it must be fair that person has one million times the market power of the other?  Again it’s hard to avoid the feeling the authors are trying to build a sort of wall around inequality or offer up a sort of indirect defense of inequality rather than sincerely trying to improve our understanding of the subject.

I might also mention I’ve never been a huge fan of discussions relating to distributional issues that focus on “poverty” and things like “the means to live a good life” as opposed to relative economic power.  I get relative economic power but “poverty” seems so subjective and arbitrary and anyway is just as relative as just looking directly at inequality in general.  Most likely we’re all doing pretty well relative to let’s say some Stone Age tribe eking out a subsistence living in a jungle somewhere.  Does that mean all distributional issues have been resolved?  Not to my mind.  And what is a good life anyway?  Sitting in a lawn chair with a glass of wine and a nice book?  Actually that does sound pretty good to me but I wonder what other people have in mind.  A big TV?  A computer?  A vacation?  A nice car?  Superior health care?  No I think we’re going down the wrong path when we stop thinking about inequality in relative terms and start thinking about “poverty” and “the means to a good life.”

Let me just end with some random thoughts of my own on the topic of inequality and fairness.  I’ve probably mentioned most of these before but what the heck.  First of all, I don’t see any reason one can’t combine the utilitarian insight it’s nice when people are happy with the insight people like fairness as well.  Setting aside the peculiar super conductor conceptualization of utility used in economic theory I don’t see much wrong with the notion it’s nice when as many people have as much utility as possible relative to their own maximum utility.  If one also accepts the notion of diminishing marginal utility and the notion one tends to address one’s most basic and important needs and wants first I believe that does generate a certain tendency toward egalitarianism and spreading the wealth around.  But I also don’t see much wrong with supposing we’re also willing to give up some of that social utility to address fairness.  I suppose if one wanted to get all philosophical about it one could relate one’s feelings about a system expressing fairness to one’s utility from living in such a system and try to work it all out in that way but that sounds a bit of a parlor game to me.  I don’t have any particular problem mixing philosophical systems.  For example, even with respect to neoclassical economic theory I think it’s fine as far as it goes but as I’ve explained before it just doesn’t really go very far and certainly not as far as many people would like to present it as going.  I don’t see anything wrong with supposing maximizing utility is good as far as it goes with the proviso fairness is also important.   (Incidentally aside from utility and fairness the other big philosophical approach to thinking about distributions one tends to hear a lot about involves various conceptions of rights so if one wishes one can just imagine we’re including that line of thinking as well.  I’m not doing that literally here because we’re talking about inequality and fairness but if one wants to bump it up in one’s mind so to speak and think about distributions in general I think some of these same points probably apply there as well.)

So what are the issues that might justify at least some level of inequality on the basis of fairness?  As a general point I would say given my individualistic outlook on such matters the relevant consideration for the issue of fairness is whether an individual is doing something that suggests he or she deserves higher compensation than someone doing something else.  Let’s look at some specific instances of this general idea.

I think right at the top of the heap must be a willingness to accept the market incentive structure.  One might like writing poetry on a breezy hill top but if no one really wants to pay one to do that but is willing to pay one to do something else he or she finds more personally useful like let’s say digging in the old salt mine I guess it makes sense the person who agrees to work in the old salt mine should make more than the person who insists on the breezy hill top.  Trying to get along with other people and so on should probably count for something.  The nicest way to get money from other people is to do something they’re willing to pay one to do.  Of course other values may be involved as well and in this context I think one is in real danger of putting one’s ethical cart before the horse.  Depending on the distribution of economic power the most highly paid activity on the market might be something like, I don’t know, installing golden toilets in the palaces of the hereditarily wealthy.  I mean, if they have all the money and that’s what they value then that will be what the market recommends one spends one’s time doing.  Indeed under the right conditions that be the only activity called forth on the market.  However, taking a somewhat broader view I suppose one could make an argument a nice bit of poetry or something else like let’s say providing housing or health services or what have you for the poor or something like that might be more valuable to humanity in some ultimate way.  Of course, it’s quite possible the only way to pay someone to do things like that in a market system geared to gold toilet installation might be to tax those with money and subsidize the people doing those other things, which I suppose depending on one’s ethical frame of mind might seem a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  I suppose one could also directly alter the market incentive structure by changing the pattern of economic power if one could find some generally acceptable basis on which to do that.  In our example if a few poetry lovers and poor people had a bit of money that would also solve the ostensible problem.

It may be worthwhile to note this is where the perspectives of liberals and conservatives relating to the merits of democracies and market systems really begin to diverge.  To me as a liberal democracy must take precedence.  There is no legitimate distributional system until we set one up via democratic government and what makes it legitimate is we agree to support it.  If enough of us decide something isn’t working quite right it seems eminently reasonable to me we should be able to step in and redistribute resources in some way that makes a little more sense.  Tax a bit here.  Subsidize a bit there.  This sort of thing of course drives conservatives bonkers.  They see redistribution even resulting from democratic government as a great crime against the individual.  They believe once one sets up a distributional system it becomes sacrosanct and takes on a life of its own and the only legitimate political objective from that point on is to prevent democracy from altering it in any way.  Not surprisingly this view seems most attractive to those prospering under the current system and wanting to keep it that way but sometimes they manage to pull in people who feel they should be prospering under the current system but suspect other people have been interfering with it in some way that has prevented them from getting their due.  I personally think a more middle of the road approach is more attractive.  That is to say, I suppose it’s perfectly fine to say people who go along with what those with economic power want them to do should end up better off than those who do not but I wouldn’t want to go all crazy in that respect.

How much better would avoid the implication we’ve gone crazy in that respect?  Ah, well, that’s the tricky part isn’t it?  I wouldn’t expect someone trying to do something that isn’t called forth by the economic power expressed in the market to be justified in wanting to live like royalty.  I suppose a middling amount that leads to a more or less reasonable style of life?  Or I suppose rather less since they have the breezy hilltops.  Just throwing out ideas. It’s all relative. Some percentage of the average?  In a sense it depends on the other side of the coin.  How much better off should someone be who pays greater attention to market incentives?  Well, I don’t know.  I guess part of it might be what level of relative income can reasonably be expected to change what people decide to do.  Writing poetry on breezy hill sides sounds a lot more enticing to me than working at the old salt mine at least if one has some modicum of interest and ability with respect to poetry so I suppose without adequate relative compensation we might very well end up with an awful lot of questionable poetry and no one working at the old salt mine.  Doesn’t seem very reasonable.  We may arguably need a bit of poetry but we probably also need some salt.  So I don’t know.  Maybe some people don’t even like writing poetry on hill tops.  Double?  Triple?  Something like that?  Perhaps see what happens?  I would think the issues must be related in some way because of course if one expects the entire incentive system to crash if one alters relative compensation at all then one would might need to be very careful indeed with redistribution at least if one places some significance on the current distribution of economic power and hence the incentive patterns flowing from that distribution but on the other hand if one sees quite of a lot of flab in relative compensation in the sense everyone would end up doing pretty much the same things anyway then maybe it becomes more of an open question even if one were trying to maintain the significance of the current distribution.

I suppose another generally acceptable basis for at least some level of inequality must be one’s level of effort or let’s say willingness to work hard.  Now certainly in our system if two people have identical jobs and let’s say they do work of roughly comparable quality and one person is willing to put in more hours than another person it makes sense the person working more hours should end up better off.  I suppose relative effort while on the job holding hours equal follows a similar path as long as one is holding everything else equal but of course the problem there is in practice everything else is typically not equal, which raises the question of whether one thinks fairness in terms of effort has to do with effort relative to a person’s maximum effort or some sort of standard criterion like output.  For example, let’s say we’re looking at some sort of physical labor like I don’t know picking fruit.  If the aspiring Olympic athlete desultorily picks more fruit than frail and asthmatic grandma is it fair he is compensated more on the basis of effort?  Or would that involve some other consideration having to do with rightful compensation based on one’s contribution to the system?  I don’t know.  My general point is figuring out how hard work relates to inequality in realistic contexts gets pretty complicated pretty quickly because of differences in talents, abilities, and situations.  Some of the hardest working people I know work at some of the lowest paying jobs while some of the most casual workers I know work at some of the most high paying jobs.  Indeed some fat cats have sufficient money to invest they make quite a nice living expending no effort at all beyond the effort involved in hauling their fat behinds to the local wine bar every afternoon.  So yes I suppose I think differences in effort justify some level of inequality when it can be identified and the general level of inequality justified might be commensurate with the relative amount of effort in that case.  If someone works twice as long I suppose they should earn twice as much.  Do I suspect there are people out there putting in let’s say a million times more effort than other people?  No, not really.

I’m trying to think of some other things that would justify inequality on the grounds of fairness but I find I’m already starting to hit a bit of a wall here.  A good part of the reason is many of the things I suspect account for a good deal of the inequality we see in our system aren’t really based on any sort of commendable activity on the part of the people involved but are more along the lines of things that just happen to people.  Let’s go over a few of these.

A big one for me is inborn talents and abilities.  Let’s take intelligence as a prime example.  I hate to be the one to point it out but some people are just not very smart.  Unfortunately lots of fields require a bit of brains.  I think this has been changing over time.  At one point probably there may have been quite a lot of demand for relatively mindless labor.  However, now that many things are automated the emphasis is more on brain work.  So is it fair someone who was born a bit of a dummy be poor or suffer materially because of it?  What if he or she is a very hard worker and is willing to go along with market incentives or otherwise do what people want them to do to the extent of their abilities?  Again, I just don’t know.  Doesn’t seem particularly fair to me although I suppose if one switches to some other line of justification like output or contributions to the system then maybe it makes more sense.

How about environment and support provided by one’s birth family?  It’s no secret if one has the good sense to be born to wealthy and well connected parents one will end up with a much cushier life than otherwise.  Not only can they provide a nice environment to study and pay for the best education and keep one healthy and happy and so on but one would not feel compelled to make decisions based on helping them out or be in any particular rush to get a paycheck and one could probably afford to try some things with the expectation one should be able to recover from any missteps and one might reasonably expect some useful connections and introductions to be forthcoming that might smooth one’s way and indeed one might reasonably expect to be installed directly into a nice job at the family firm.  But of course one doesn’t really have any say with respect to one’s birth family.  One just pops out into the world one day and looks around and is either pleasantly surprised or a bit miffed.  Not sure I can see much inequality based on this consideration justified on the basis of fairness.

How about luck?  I think a big component of the inequality we really see in the world today is little more than being in the right place at the right time.  Honestly, many years ago when I actively studied such matters I found it rather interesting that even though the economic models meant to predict wages might include everything one might reasonably expect to be involved including the proverbial kitchen sink they could in fact only explain in a statistical sense a small portion of the observed differences in wages.  I always assumed that unexplained bit must just involve old fashioned luck.  Hard to think of what else it might be.  I’m not suggesting we banish luck but again I’m not sure I’d consider sufficiently related to fairness to justify much inequality on that account.

Maybe that’s enough talk for now.  To sum up I would suggest that as far as I can tell our current system has a good deal of both inequality and unfairness.  Not the worst system in the world of course.  I’m sure there are plenty of even more unequal and unfair systems out there.  But on the other hand I’m not ready to suggest we’ve hit the jackpot and have no room for further improvement just yet.  Even granting some level of inequality is justified due to considerations relating to fairness I don’t see the extreme levels of inequality we see here in the USA to be anywhere near the levels I would find likely to be justified by those considerations and indeed I see extreme inequality as presenting a significant and ever increasing impediment to fairness.  As such I don’t think we really need to get bogged down on parlor games involving what we really mean by inequality and so on.  We should probably just get to work.  Our system is out of kilter in the sense some people lay claim to more resources than can reasonably be justified on any ethical basis be it utilitarian or social justice.  Some undeserving people hoard billions of dollars.  Some deserving people suffer material want.  We could adjust the system to make it fairer and at the same time end up with a great many more happy people than we have now.  But do to do that we have to fight conservatives hell bent on defending the status quo levels of inequality both through fanciful anti-democratic rights based arguments of the sort that no matter how bad things get we have no ethical rationale or justification for changing anything because it’s all a matter of unchanging rights and also through purposeful attempts to obscure the issue and shut down the conversation including bogus appeals to the incomplete and let’s just say sham utilitarianism presented in economic theory and unnecessarily convoluted and unhelpful suggestions to first reach agreement on interrelated and complicated philosophical issues of questionable practical significance such as what one definition or aspect of inequality is most important.  Let’s try to keep it simple shall we? Fight conservatism.  Make the world a better place.

References

There’s a problem with the way we define equality.  Bryan Lufkin.  July 7, 2017.  BBC.  http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170706-theres-a-problem-with-the-way-we-define-inequality

The Pope, Greed, and Capitalism

Welcome friends!

Can we talk about greed?  I’ve been wanting to take this up again ever since Pope Francis appeared in the papers recently describing an “unfettered pursuit of money” in suitably anachronistic terms as “the dung of the Devil.”  The fact he would say such a thing seems unremarkable to me.  Isn’t that part of the whole Christian theme of respecting the poor?  One of the nobler sentiments of the whole enterprise in my opinion.  No, the interesting bit for me was not what the Pope had to say but what came after.  Many commentators at least here in the US immediately claimed the Pope had said capitalism was the dung of the Devil.  That got me thinking again about the tendency among certain economic conservatives to associate capitalism with greed and hence to believe greed is good presumably because one is ostensibly most useful to society if one is most attuned to the pecuniary incentives expressed in market forces and thus most liable to provide what society evidently values most highly.  I’m sure I must have said a few words about this idea before but it’s been a while so maybe it’s time for another go. It’s not like it’s going anywhere soon.

My first thought on this whole conservative greed is good narrative is that, yes, greed can operate as a driving force for human activity, which I suppose might sometimes be useful activity, by which I mean something other than selling drugs or stealing someone’s car, etc.  However, there would appear to be any number of other such wellsprings of human activity that would fall into pretty much the same category.  People can also be motivated by insecurity, egotism, a lust for power, hatred, fear, cruelty, and any number of other less than entirely savory emotions and feelings.  People can also be motivated by the nobler emotions: love, kindness, duty, honor, and so on.  So why are conservatives always so hung up on greed as the great motivating force?  Well, I don’t know.  It might just be that’s the motivation they’re most familiar with and it just falls out of the familiar tendency of rich conservatives to love and respect themselves and their own motivations and desires above all others.  However, given the close association between conservative ideology and certain branches of economic theory I’ve often wondered if some element of that theory or perhaps bastardization of that theory may have something to do with it.  That’s what I’d like to discuss today.

Let me just start out by saying economic theory does not explicitly or literally portray greed as good.  Therefore, trying to figure out how some people might have gotten this impression requires a bit of detective work.  I see two main suspects in terms of elements of economic theory that might plausibly be related to such a belief.  One is the common assumption within economic models that people have unlimited wants, that is, that holding everything else constant people tend to prefer more to less.  That might seem a little farfetched concerning particular goods.  I like hummus but how much of the stuff can one person eat?  But if we’re talking about money I guess that assumption seems rather reasonable to me.  I think most people could always do with a bit of extra cash even if they intend to save it for a rainy day, pass it out to loved ones, or even hand it out to whosoever they might think of as the deserving poor.  Is that what we normally mean by greed?  I don’t think so.  Greed to me carries the implication of countervailing ethical considerations and one inappropriately choosing mammon over more suitable goals.  I suppose that’s what the Pope was getting at when he mentioned the unfettered pursuit of money.  The pursuit of money fettered so to speak by an attention to ethical concerns is a whole different kettle of fish.

Let’s move on to our second suspect lurking within economic theory, which I feel must be this whole business of utility and so-called welfare economics and so on.  You know what that means, right?  Another opportunity for me to talk about one of my pet peeves: what I consider the incomplete if not entirely incoherent social philosophy represented by neoclassical economic theory or as I’m always careful to say possibly a mangled popular interpretation of that theory.

I think to appreciate what’s going in the endlessly fascinating world of economic theory it helps to understand a little something about the history of the discipline.  The first thing one needs to know is that Adam Smith and the other bewigged old timers who got the ball rolling were amateur theologians and ethicists as much as they were scientists. They were not concerned simply to predict human behavior.  No, these people were mostly what were known as “deists” and had the rather grandiose agenda of establishing the world had been set up by a benevolent deity in such a way the natural laws of human behavior would inevitably lead to optimal outcomes if only people could refrain from mucking up the works.  That’s why the imagery that clearly most resonated with these writers involved things like natural laws, invisible hands, clocks, and so on.  Now I feel it’s quite likely these early writers were indeed concerned to establish that a certain amount of greed was both natural and good at least under the right conditions.  No doubt they looked around and saw a whole heck of lot of greed and said to themselves, well, apparently greed is a natural condition for the human animal and must therefore fit into the divinely ordained social order.  It’s well known Mr. Smith at least was not so simple minded as to suggest greed was good always and everywhere.  He made some rather pointed remarks about greed.  But his general conviction was clearly if we set things up the way the good Lord intended, which he associated with nature despite the rather obvious human effort required to set up and maintain those particular natural conditions, then greed would function as nature had intended and would lead to beneficial results for us all.

Fast forward a few decades and both economic conditions and intellectual life had moved on.  Some people had been working to formalize economic thinking using the concept of utility, which was at that time defined within the field of economics pretty much the same as it was within the field of ethical philosophy.  However, something odd and clearly rather disconcerting for some people started to happen.  Serious philosophical ethical utilitarians began to cast doubt on the notion the results of any old free market were necessarily really what one ought to consider socially optimal.  Not all that surprising I suppose.  By this time the industrial revolution had made some people fantastically wealthy but had kicked many people up and down the street and some people right off the end of the pier.  Sort of like what information technology is doing today.  Anyway, after what must have seemed an interminable series of novels about suffering street urchins and so on some people began to wonder if they might have missed some important ethical principle along the way.  People were beginning to look askance at the prevailing social order based on free market ideology.  The field of academic economics was in crisis!

Fortunately an Italian fascist named Vilfredo Pareto stepped into the breach along with a number of other like minded souls.  The solution Pareto and others hits upon was to gut the concept of utility within economics by defining it in a way that made it irrelevant to ethical issues involving conflicts between the needs and desires of different people.  That is to say, they switched from using utility to mean a measure of welfare one could compare across people to more of a subjective feeling one could only meaningfully investigate in the context of a single person.  Comparing utility across people was recast as impossible in an (economic) utilitarian context but curiously enough not because they simply explicitly chose to redefine it that way but ostensibly at least because of practical measurement issues.  (The argument was that one could reliably infer someone preferred A to B if that person was given a choice and opted for A, but there was no comparable method for inferring utility across different people.)  The basic idea was that even if all outward appearances suggested one person might generate more utility from some resolution of some conflict of desires, say two people wanted a doughnut and one person was starving and really really needed the doughnut but someone else wanted the doughnut to hang on the dashboard of his or her horse and buggy, assuming such contraptions had dashboards, there was no way to tell which resolution was better based on utility because the subjective feelings of utility associated with the latter might very well be greater than the utility associated with the former.  That is to say, the buggy man or woman in this case might have been one of those superconductors of utility whose passing whims are associated with more utility and are thus more important under this conceptualization of utility than the seemingly more pressing desires of lesser mortals.  With this innovation the discussion of utility within economics and within serious ethical philosophy parted ways perhaps forever.

Economists had found a way to shut down pesky discussions of redistribution based on utilitarian concerns within the field of economics but had they thrown the baby out with the bath water?  Did economic theory still have sufficient intellectual content to convince people of the superiority of the status quo free market system?  Could they still establish interfering with the free market was always a big no no?  Well, that’s an interesting question.  They did and they didn’t.  Or let’s say they did to a small degree that was enough to get some people thinking maybe they did to a much larger degree.  What they established was if one is at a distribution that addresses all one’s ethical issues and so on, and certain conditions prevail (i.e. the well known conditions required for a so-called perfectly competitive market), and one does not currently have the institutions that go with a free market, then one can demonstrate using the stripped down version of utility with seemingly very little potentially divisive ethical content whatsoever that one should be able to improve upon one’s situation by moving to free market institutions.  Of course, that wouldn’t necessarily hold true if adopting those free market institutions moved one to some other distributional result that did not adequately address one’s ethical concerns or even if one’s ethical concerns included the relative standing of different people (because the result is based on demonstrating that under these conditions one could make at least one person better off while making no one worse off in an absolute sense, which of course is entirely consistent with making one person worse off relative to another person).

To further confuse the hell out of everyone economists also developed this notion that they were no longer even talking about social ethics in general terms.  They were simply talking as economists constrained by working with the peculiar stripped down version of utility we’ve been discussing and as such they didn’t have any basis to discuss the mysterious ethical concerns other people might have about how to resolve interpersonal conflicts and hence with distributional issues in general.  They never explicitly suggested other people could not or should not discuss these important and ubiquitous ethical issues.  To this day careful economists will always try to make clear that distributional concerns are outside their purview and if one has ethical beliefs relating to resolving interpersonal conflicts of desire then one should always feel free to redistribute to address those concerns.

But of course the devil is always in the details and in this case the details involved how economist spun their economic policy recommendations.  The underlying conceit was that as a first approximation we should treat all free market results as equivalent and just concentrate on getting to any one.  Once there we can then worry about adjusting for distributional issues as a second step.  The problem is that’s not consistent with how the world actually works at all.  Labor markets and distributional concerns are intimately mixed up with people’s feelings about what constitutes free market institutions and hence cannot really be separated out that way.  It’s entirely unrealistic to imagine one can talk about optimal economic institutions without at the same time bringing up the ethical issues associated with distributional concerns such as who should be getting what.

The practical result of this unfortunate mishmash is that we have some conservatives and economists stuck in the eighteenth century with Adam Smith and his buddies talking about natural laws and clocks and so on, we have some conservatives and economists stuck in the nineteenth talking about how capitalism maximizes total utility and fretting about capitalism versus communism and so on, and we have yet other economists and conservatives stuck in the middle of the twentieth century talking about how we’ve demonstrated the social optimality of free market institutions in general all the while acknowledging and then promptly dismissing distributional issues with a wave of the hand.  I think people in all three of these groups can very easily get the idea if things are going to be natural or socially optimal or whatever then we all need to act as much as possible like the simplified actors that feature in their economic models and respond and react only to the pecuniary and material considerations that are discussed in those models, in other words, that we all be greedy.

However, more careful economists and liberals know that’s not what we’re really talking about at all.  For one thing, even if one wants to muck about with the type of utility discussed in economic theory no one ever said that type of utility only arises from money or goods and services.  One could theoretically derive utility from anything including following one’s ethical beliefs about not being greedy.  Economic models address economic matters and thus concentrate on things like money and goods and services but the issues typically addressed in those models do not represent the totality of human experience.  For another thing, as I just finished discussing the ethical considerations one can imagine might serve as counterparts to greed fall into the category of ethical issues relating to distributional concerns and thus are explicitly not addressed within the context of economic theory.

Oh hell, let’s just have a practical example.  Let’s say one could make a buck putting desperately deprived kids to work in the old coal mine.  (Hey, I’m just trying to make it interesting by setting up a situation where there are some plausible countervailing ethical issues to making a buck.)  However, one has some moral reservations.  One thinks kids should really be sitting around on couches playing video games.  Does economic theory establish one has an ethical obligation to society to be greedy and haul the kids off to the mine?  No, it doesn’t.  One may get more utility from following one’s own ethical theories relating to what kids should be doing than from selling a boxcar of coal.  What about the unmet demand for coal and the fact that society was apparently willing to pay for coal but was not actually offering up anything to have kids sitting about playing video games?  Well, for one thing under the strictures set up within economic theory one can’t really compare the utility of the decider in this case to that of anyone else or any combination of anyone else so there’s no way to tell if the sort of utility discussed within economic theory would be higher if the kids play video games or work the old mine.  Second, all one really has is an indication that people value coal.  One doesn’t have information relating to the potential utility other people might derive from living in a society where kids are not working in coal mines.  That’s not a product one buys on the market.  One might be able to get at that issue indirectly through the political system maybe by seeing what sorts of labor market regulation people are willing to adopt.  And notice I’m not even talking about the utility of the kids because I wanted to abstract away from that issue.  (Yes, assuming the kids share one’s belief they should be playing video games rather than working in coal mines that would represent yet another of those pesky distributional issues I’ve been discussing.)  So does economics establish that greed is good in this example?  No, not at all.  Put briefly, the institutions we tend to call the “free market” or in the case of pugnacious old timers “capitalism” and extol based on the very limited demonstration of the optimality of those institutions in modern neoclassical economic theory does not really involve anyone necessarily being greedy nor does it recommend anyone be greedy.

But the story doesn’t end there although like you I rather wish it did as I’ve already written considerably more than I intended.  We also have the complicated collision of the scientific and ethical elements of economic theory or in the parlance of that old time philosophy I still feel makes a lot of sense, the positive and the normative.  The quasi-ethical stylings of welfare economics is really only one aspect of the field of economics.  Today there are many scientifically minded economists who think all they’re really trying to do with their models is predict behavior.  They’re not interested in trying to convince anyone that anything in particular is socially optimal.  Now according to the assessment of these people their models tend to work well enough to suggest we can think of people as behaving like the actors in those models.  In other words, according to many of these economists, economic theory establishes not that people should be greedy but that they are in fact greedy.  Now of course this by itself doesn’t support any ethical conclusions relating to greed.  Maybe the world would be a better place if economic models didn’t work so well.  However, I can imagine people thinking something along the lines of maybe people just can’t help being greedy so why fight it?  Or maybe everyone is doing it so what’s the big deal?  Indeed, I read about a study a little while ago that found exposure to economic theory was associated with an increase in greedy behavior.  But now I’m just talking about psychological issues like framing what one considers normal behavior.  I’m not talking about justifiable ethical conclusions relating to greed because of course there is no reason to suppose that even if one is in fact greedy one must remain greedy or that it is good for one to be greedy.  Again, economics interpreted as a modern social science does not and cannot establish that greed is good.

I suppose I’ve been going on long enough.  Let me just summarize and close it out.  Greed in the sense of preferring more to less if there are no ethical considerations involved seems unobjectionable.  And if it gets one off the couch then I suppose we can say greed is good in that particular context.  Greed in the sense of elevating the pursuit of material gain to a position of ethical preeminence is not necessarily good depending on how one feels about whatever other considerations we’re talking about.  Economic theory properly interpreted does not imply or rely upon people being greedy.  If one wants to follow the old timers and associate the free market institutions discussed within economic theory with something called “capitalism,” then capitalism also does not imply or rely upon greed.  Personally I’ve never seen much use for such an ambiguous and ill-defined term as capitalism given the limitations of the conclusions relating to free market institutions one can actually derive from modern economic theory.  I prefer to say if the necessary conditions hold (and they sure as heck don’t always) and no other ethical considerations are involved (by which I mean distributional issues that may be associated with one’s ethical beliefs be they utilitarian, rights based, or what have you, and there often are such issues) then free market institutions seem fine.  If the proper conditions don’t hold or one has ethical concerns then I suppose one might feel the need to change some things up.  Do we really need a term for that?  How about common sense-ism?  Get real-ism?  Whatever.  In other words, there might be a lot of greed about right now but there doesn’t have to be.  We can get along just fine without it.  On a more personal level let me just say I like to make a buck as much as the next guy but I think I have to agree with the Pope on this one: the unfettered pursuit of money is indeed the dung of the Devil if one wants to get all medieval about it.  And you know the Pope and I don’t always see eye to eye.  So that’s something.

Real Economics II

Welcome friends!

I had a few additional thoughts about those distributional issues I raised in my last post so maybe this time out we can do yet another follow-up post.  Sorry about that.  But that’s half the fun of talking things out, right?  The way one thing leads to another?

My additional thought was that last time when I said I doubted anyone could take seriously the sort of utility discussed within economic theory and hence within conservative social philosophy I may have failed to take into account the potential differences in the fundamental moral senses of liberals and conservatives.  I probably should have said I doubted any liberal could take that sort of utility seriously because upon further reflection it occurs to me maybe some conservatives do.  The reason I think so is it seems to me an important difference in the fundamental moral perspectives of liberals and conservatives involves the degree to which we are all the same or different.  Most liberals, starting from the belief that at some level we’re all pretty similar, would naturally recoil from any ethical theory implying the desires of any one person should dominate those of everyone else.  Many conservatives, on the other hand, starting from a conviction vast differences exist between people, may very well not have the same reaction.

Now you may have noticed that in our society, as in most societies relying mostly on a market based system of allocating resources, the most trivial material desires of the wealthy outrank even the most desperate needs of the poor.  I suppose that rather unsightly phenomenon must be one of the great underlying ethical issues of our age.  Is it a problem or isn’t it?  Hmm, well, that’s a tough one.  You can probably guess which way I lean but I do appreciate there are a lot of issues involved and I’m certainly not going to resolve those issues today.  In this post I would simply like to point out if one were to wholeheartedly support the status quo, as many conservatives are wont to do, then one would need some sort of ethical proposition implying there is something pretty special about rich folk that renders this result morally acceptable no matter what ethical theory one may choose to adopt.  I’ve mentioned before there are plenty of different approaches one might take to attaching the necessary significance to the desires of rich people.  One might talk about the issue in terms of their rights or their merit or what have you.  However, if one were going with a utilitarian framework then I suppose one’s concept of utility would have to allow that rich people’s desires might just be associated with a lot more utility than those of other people.  In other words, it occurs to me the distinctive type of utility used in economic theory is probably the only type of utility that would make utilitarianism palatable to many conservatives. 

When it gets to the close intellectual relationship of economists and conservatives the interesting wrinkle that has always fascinated me is that although economists espouse the requisite form of utility they back away from actually arguing fulfilling rich people’s desires generates more utility than fulfilling the desires of other people.  No, economists are satisfied to step back and say merely that fulfilling the needs of rich people may be associated with greater levels of utility or may not.  Now as I’ve suggested before this would obviously be a troubling result for anyone who really took this form of utilitarianism seriously because it implies one cannot address any of the potentially ethically troubling situations involving conflicting needs, wants, and desires, such as occur for example in the distribution of resources.  Indeed, one could only invoke one’s utilitarianism when thinking about one person in isolation which, of course, is a situation I think many people probably suppose doesn’t really require any ethical theory at all.  That would be a rather funny form of utilitarianism, wouldn’t you say?  I suppose if that were the type of utilitarianism one really supported then at the very least one would have to come with some additional ethical propositions to handle all the ethically significant cases involving resolving conflicting desires.  Otherwise we’re talking about a whole lot of indifference.  (For the economically literate note we would be talking not only about indifference between Pareto optimal outcomes but also between a Pareto optimal outcome and any non-Pareto optimal outcome that implied a different distribution of resources because one could never know if the associated costs were worth it or not.  Pretty much the only conclusion one could make would involve moving between a given non-Pareto optimal outcome and a Pareto optimal outcome implying the same distribution, in which case one would obviously do better with the Pareto optimal outcome.)

You may have noticed that neither conservatives nor economists espouse quite the level of indifference one might reasonably expect a serious supporter of the relevant form of utilitarianism to demonstrate.  Indeed, quite the contrary.  Most of them tend to get rather agitated if anyone mentions anything having to do with redistribution.  I think it’s reasonable to suggest something else must be going on.  However, I suppose we shouldn’t be too hasty in our speculations about what that something may be.  The possibility I concentrated on last time was that conservatives and economists don’t sincerely endorse the relevant form of utilitarianism at all but instead support the status quo distribution on some unexpressed and entirely different ethical basis and only talk about the particular form of utility they talk about because doing so displaces discussion of other conceptions of utility that other people, such as liberals, might find more ethically compelling.  However, after thinking about it a bit more I now wonder if perhaps I was being a little too cynical.  I suppose another possibility is at least some conservatives actually do sincerely support this form of utilitarianism but because of its limited practical significance they augment that theory with some unrelated ethical premises just to get them where they need to go.  Like what you ask?  Well, at the very least I suppose one would need to attach some independent value to upholding the status quo to escape the anomie of complete indifference.  You know, if we can’t tell what we have stinks or not we should just keep it because it’s what we have.  That sort of thing.  It’s fine in isolation I suppose but a little awkward if you’re trying to discuss things with someone holding an ethical theory that does have implications for resolving interpersonal conflicts.  Basically you’d be saying something along the lines of my own ethical theory implies I don’t know what would be better but in such situations I give precedence to the status quo and it doesn’t really matter to me how you or anyone else thinks about it or that your suggestions are just as likely as not to improve matters even under my own underlying ethical system.  It’s a little weird if you think about it.  I guess one must just really love that status quo.  Of course, one might always go further and add any number of value premises to address the many situations in which the necessary information on utility is not forthcoming.  Actually I suppose the need for additional value premises is much the same as last time.  If one restricts oneself strictly to the type of utility used in economics one can’t really can’t say much about anything at all.  Should we stay or should we go?  I don’t know.  What’s changed is in this case I’m suggesting conservatives might be holding these additional value premises in addition to the relevant form of utilitarianism rather than instead of the relevant form of utilitarianism as I postulated last time.

Figuring out if any economists and conservatives sincerely support the type of utility we’re discussing here is obviously an enormously difficult task because of course one can’t just walk up and ask them.  At least that’s been my experience.  With conservatives it’s all about misdirection, bait and switch, double meanings, false leads.  Honestly, it makes one’s head spin.  However, here’s a simple thought experiment that might work.  You’re familiar with thought experiments in the context of ethics, right?  You imagine a counterfactual state of the world to isolate the implications of a given ethical proposition and see how you feel about it.  So let’s see.  Imagine you lived in the first half of the twentieth century.  In Germany.  (Why?  Because it’s easy.)  Let’s say you were omniscient so if something existed then you knew all there was to know about it.  Yes, you were very special.  Indeed, you even knew the amount of utility (as conceived of by economists) different people derived from fulfilling their desires.  One day you considered the case of that great bugbear himself, Adolph Hitler, and you discovered he was one of those superconductors of utility that is allowed for under the type of utility discussed within economic theory.  Indeed, you determined that fulfilling his preternaturally strong desire to kill off various groups of people generated higher levels of utility than the combined utility that would be generated by fulfilling his victims’ desires to survive.  So would it have been socially optimal to maximize utility in this case?  Would it have been ethical to get behind Hitler and support him in his famous struggle?  In other words, would Hitler have been in a comparable situation to rich people whose trivial desires trump the more vital desires of poor people because (maybe) they just get a lot more utility from fulfilling their trivial desires?  Yes?  OK, well then you do indeed have a sincere interest in the form of utility discussed within economic theory.  I’m sorry I doubted you.  No?  That’s basically the case I discussed last time.  If you’re not really interested in maximizing that type of utility then you shouldn’t talk as though you are.  Someone will think you’re up to something.  Can’t say / won’t say / situation is logically impossible?  Hmm.  Yeah, I’m not sure you think utility actually exists.  Forget about the supposed difficulties in measuring or inferring utility, I think you must be using utility as just a funny way to talk about your perspective on the ethical implications of allowing a single person in isolation to do what he or she wants.  In that case you could do us all a big favor and just talk a little more clearly.  Don’t blather on about utility.  Just say what you think and maybe add something like, look I’m not interested in resolving situations involving people with conflicting desires.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  I don’t have any opinion on how that should play out.  Or, if you do want to address those issues then just talk about whatever values you’re using to address those situations.

I know what you’re thinking: conservatism is complicated, isn’t it?  Sometimes I wish they could just talk plainly and honestly about they believe.  But what would be the fun in that?

Conservatism and Egotism

Welcome friends!

I’ve probably mentioned it a number of times now but I’m starting more and more to think that the best way to make sense of modern conservatives is to view them simply as self-obsessed egotists and to treat all their various theories and pronouncements as just so much posturing and window dressing.  Why do I think that?  Well, a lot of reasons.  Like the way they’re always gushing about that doyen of egotism Ayn Rand.  Or the way they call anyone who shows concern for other people a socialist.  Or the way they’re always pouring scorn on anyone less well off than themselves.  Or the way they always suspect that everyone else is a self-obsessed egotist who can easily be bought off with a little help with his or her medical bills or what have you.  Or the fact that whenever they try to explain what they profess to believe in any more general or philosophical terms they can never seem to get their story straight.  (When I listen to conservatives trying to expound on anything of substance I sometimes feel like I’m watching one of those TV crime dramas in which the wily detective trips up the suspect by simply letting him or her talk too much.  Detective: “But didn’t you say you were at the dry cleaners on Monday afternoon?”  Suspect: “Oh damn!  Caught in my own web of lies!”)  And then, of course, we have the fact that every now and then one of them just stands up and blurts it out.  That’s basically what happened a few weeks ago when prominent conservative Saxby Chambliss, a US Senator for the infrared deep deep south state of Georgia, pretty much let it all hang out.  When asked whether his views on marriage equality had changed at all the Senator answered simply, “I’m not gay.  So I’m not going to marry one.”  You’re thinking he didn’t really answer the question?  No, he did, but you have to think like a conservative to get it.  Feeling a little confused?  Well, let me explain... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Economics And Human Society

Welcome friends!

Hey, looks like this is post number fifty.  That’s a small personal milestone for me.  You know, when I started this little blog I expected to run out of things to say pretty quickly but it turns out the two headed monster of modern conservatism has a seemingly inexhaustible ability to irritate the living bejesus out of me on a nearly daily basis, so I guess I need to just keep on writing for the sake of my own sanity if for no other reason.  Anyway, in honor of the occasion I’d like to do a bit of a special issue and go back to one of my core interests: economics.  Yes, sorry to return to economic themes so quickly but I’ve had something on my mind recently and I might as well get it off my chest.  (OK, smarty, I suppose that means my mind must reside in my chest, but that’s not important here.)  If you’ve read some of my other posts you know I often criticize a certain common presentation of neoclassical microeconomic theory because of what I consider its intellectual dishonesty, which I have argued lies in starting out with an interpretation of utility that is insufficient to support a comprehensive ethical theory about optimal economic or social policy and yet hey presto ending up supposedly managing to do just that.  (I’ve tried to explain what’s going on with this apparent miracle of philosophy in a number of ways, most recently in Redistribution and Economic Theory III, July 5, 2012.  Take a look if you’re interested.)  Now I guess I’ve never been entirely clear in my own mind about whether the problem lies with economic theory, the interpretation of economic theory by certain less than scrupulously careful economists, or the mangled interpretation of economic theory by conservatives who don’t really know that much about it.  I guess it doesn’t really matter to me, but I do hold the economics profession at least partly responsible because they are really the ones who should be straightening out this type of stuff, not me, I have a day job.  (Well, I suppose I also hold our social and ethical philosophers to blame to some degree because they should be providing critical commentary on this type of thing, but they seem to have become a little distracted in the last fifty years or so.)  Anyway, I’ve recently been reading some economic debates that are more macroeconomic in nature (yes, that would be the whole stimulus versus austerity issue) and I’ve consequently been thinking a bit about the differences between macroeconomic and microeconomic theory.  Maybe I’m imagining things but I think these differences are related to my previous points about microeconomic theory in isolation.  I think what ties them together is a determination within certain presentations of microeconomic theory to eliminate the thorny issues associated with living in a human society from discussions of optimal economic policy.  Sounds a little dubious?  Please allow me to explain.

I’ve suggested previously the problem with the type of utility used in microeconomic theory is it has nothing to say about social situations in which people have needs or desires that come into conflict with one another, such as happens in any distributional system.  Addressing these conflicts involves making so-called “interpersonal utility comparisons,” which is impossible using the type of utility discussed within economic theory.  That particular formulation of utility is really only suitable for making conclusions about one person in isolation.  Some economists and conservatives have tried to make it appear relevant to broader social situations by an intellectual sleight of hand I’ve discussed previously and probably don’t have to go into again just yet, but just as a reminder it involves fudging what it means to not say something about something.  My point this time is that one way of thinking about what is going on within microeconomic theory or within that particular misrepresentation of microeconomic theory (take your pick, doesn’t matter here) is as an attempt to sidestep all the messy philosophical issues that arise from humans interacting with one another to produce and distribute goods, that is, to remove from microeconomic theory the real economic issues associated with living in a human society.

However, I now think you can catch a glimpse of the same sort of phenomenon if you contrast how certain issues are handled in macroeconomic theory with how they are handled in microeconomic theory.  What I’m thinking about here is that one of the main goals economists talk about in the context of macroeconomic theory is employment.  I understand, of course, it’s a little difficult to actually figure out how to promote high employment, which I’m sure is an interesting question and all but not really what I want to talk about there.  Right now I’m just talking about the fact that figuring out how to get people employed is one of the objectives of macroeconomic theory.  Now to me this goal seems to acknowledge one of the real economic issues associated with human society, so I give it credit for that.  In the broadest possible terms, the fundamental economic issues associated with any human society are coordination for purposes of production on the one hand and then distribution of the product in a way that seems equitable and just on the other hand.  In more practical terms, I suspect all successful human societies have at least tried to create a situation in which everyone is able to participate and play a part according to whatever ability they might have and in which everyone who does so is able to make some sort of acceptable living.  Heck, I suppose even stone age hunter and gatherer tribes tried to address those issues.  That’s what a human society is.  I just don’t see them saying to one another, “Ugh.  We no need you.  Drop dead.”  That sounds to me a little more like what a modern conservative might say to someone.  No, I think our primitive ancestors probably tried to find some way to accommodate everyone in their tribe.  So that raises the issue of how this important social objective is captured within microeconomic theory.  The answer, unfortunately, is that it doesn’t really seem to appear at all.  In microeconomic theory, labor is conceptualized as an input of production more or less identical in stature to capital along the lines of we need Y people and Z wrenches to produce product X.  It’s all very much from the point of view of a plant manager or what have you.  But really we know there’s a big difference between people and wrenches, right?  If we don’t need the wrenches then that’s great, we can just throw out the ones we have and save some money by not making any more.  In contrast, people need jobs and a certain level of income, and people have opinions about what level of income would be just given their activities or lack thereof.  In microeconomic models, labor just sort of appears out of nowhere, can happily survive on whatever it happens to get, has no particular beliefs about who should get what, and if not needed disappears into nowhere, presumably to be put to some other good use.  So there’s really no problems associated with employment at all.  It’s really a rather lovely fantasy world in which there’s no unemployment, no economic distress, no need, no poverty, no distributional disagreements, and so on, basically none of the economic issues associated with real human societies.

Now I realize more responsible economists are fully aware of this theoretical lacuna and tend to cover it with a few blithe lines about economic theory being agnostic about redistribution if one has a value system that involves values that are not captured in the type of utility used in economic theory, such as people having jobs, people making a living wage, people not dropping dead on the pavement, and people having needs and desires that come into conflict with those of other people (that is to say, distributional issues in general).  However, they don’t seem very concerned about how that is all supposed to take place or about whether it would even be consistent with their own policy prescriptions based on the drastically limited ethical issues they do consider to be under their purview.  You know, in their minds, it’s simply not their job.  I get it.  But I always get a good chuckle out of it anyway.  I feel like saying, “Ohhhh, now I see!  We just handle all the difficult economic issues generated by living in a human society by redistributing output in some old way, if that’s what we think we need to do.”  And here I thought it was going to be a difficult issue!  I know the heart of any scientific modeling is simplification but talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Now I suspect this omission of significant economic issues from microeconomic theory is what has led some otherwise reasonable people who maybe just aren’t paying sufficient attention to the rather important but typically small print caveat about the conceptual role of redistribution in economic theory to the erroneous conclusion that if we just manage to mimic the perfectly competitive market situations described in microeconomic theory then we’ll essentially enter into a sort of magical World of Microeconomic Theory and all the problematic issues associated with real human economic systems will vanish.  Now to the extent that is what’s going on it really strikes me as a rather risible example of confusing reality with theory.  Unless one actually has a theory about why economic activity will be sufficient to keep everyone employed and to allocate everyone a living wage and one people consider equitable and fair, or one actually has a theory about how we can redistribute to resolve these issues in a way that is consistent with our labor market policies and so on, then I think it’s pretty comical to imagine these issues will disappear because we have chosen not to take them up in a microeconomic model.  And of course the problem is really even worse than I’m portraying it here because not only do these conservatives ignore the fine print about redistribution that is really the only link between microeconomic theory and the messy philosophical issues involved in determining what would really constitute an optimal economic system, but the inevitable consequence is they really have no appreciation of the role redistribution (or I guess the possibility of redistribution) plays in making microeconomic theory consistent with any broader and more complete system of social ethics.  Thus, they end up being adamantly opposed to even the idea of redistribution, which they ironically present as a sort of socialist plot that fails to appreciate the lessons of economic theory.  Holy cow!  I wonder, how can one group of people get so freaking confused?

Now I know this is really only one group of economic conservatives I’m talking about.  Some other economic conservatives know full well what’s really on their mind is not captured at all within microeconomic theory: it actually involves the complicated moral issue of who should be getting what and they just happen to believe what people get under certain market structures is ethically superior to the alternatives.  It’s got nothing really to do with the sort of utility discussed in microeconomic theory.  That’s fine.  I happen to think that point of view also ignores certain relevant considerations, as I’ve discussed before and will undoubtedly discuss again in the future, but at least it makes a modicum of sense and is something we can talk about.  No, what’s always bothered me is this gigantic intellectual red herring of microeconomic theory and utility maximization that seems to flop into view whenever people try to discuss these serious economic issues.

Anyway, after thinking about it, I wonder if this whole issue is part of a larger tendency among many conservatives to confuse reality with our thinking about reality I discussed previously in the context of religion.  Some conservatives are clearly attracted to the sort of dumbed down version of microeconomic theory I’ve just been discussing (i.e., microeconomic theory without the fine print covering distributional issues) while some are attracted to the dumbed down theories about humanity and the physical world one finds in religion.  But is it possible on another level both heads of the conservative monster are involved in essentially the same type of flawed thought process: the predisposition to confuse reality with simplified stories about reality or in even more general terms the quixotic quest to make difficult and complex real issues appear simpler than they really are?  (I guess that would cover even the group of conservatives I just portrayed above as the more reasonable of the bunch: the group that understands what we’re talking when we get into these social economic issues cannot really be addressed within the confines of microeconomic theory.  Because I think my issue with them is really also one of oversimplification.  In particular, I feel they tend to have a rather stylized and abstract view of what happens in certain market situations that cause the virtuous to thrive and the less virtuous to struggle and I’m not sure they appreciate all the various ways people can actually make a buck in these market situations and all the various ways people can tank.)  Maybe that’s what I’ve personally always found so distasteful about much of conservative thinking.  Although I think we all appreciate it’s vitally important for our quality of life to maintain a sphere for individual liberty, I think most people also appreciate humans are ultimately social animals and the complicated social, moral, and economic issues associated with people coming together to form a human society are some of the core problems of the whole human enterprise.  There’s certainly a role for the isolated pioneer living by his or her wits so beloved by American folklore, but I would suggest the highest expression of humanity is not found in these socially isolated pioneers but in human society and especially in the cumulative intellectual products of human society.  To be sure, it’s a bit of a thorny problem to work out the boundary of what should belong to the world of individual liberty and what should fall more under the dictates of social interaction and cooperation but that’s the reality of human society: it’s complicated.  However, I would like to add that within that complicated conversation about social issues I do find the traditional conservative focus on the individual can be very helpful, so please don’t say later I have no appreciation for traditional conservative theories and concerns because really I do.  I think in its most respectable and reasonable form traditional conservatism has a valuable role to play in any discussion of the relationship of the individual and society.  But many modern conservatives seem to me to have taken their position to an absurd extreme in which their apparent desire for simplicity has led them to present the problems and issues associated with human society as irrelevant or even to banish them altogether from their thinking, and that is just not a serious intellectual position to take in my view.  I wish more conservatives would regain their senses and join with liberals to discuss these social issues in a serious way.  So much more productive and satisfying than the shrill and annoying background noise that passes for political debate today.