I’m sympathetic to but ultimately must disagree with Seth Stevenson’s take on procrastination, a topic I sadly know a great deal about.

Why did I subject myself to so much stress, instead of starting my work earlier like “normal” people do? Well, you’ve no doubt heard all manner of theories regarding the root cause of procrastination. Fear of failure. Crippling perfectionism. Abnormally low type-2 phloxiplaxitus levels.

I’m here to tell you that it was none of these things. The root cause of my procrastination, in technical terms, is this: I’m lazy. Extremely lazy.

Don’t judge, pal—you’re lazy, too. It’s why you procrastinate. When there’s a difficult, disagreeable, or tedious chore that needs to get done, guess what? You don’t want to do it. So you don’t. Until you have to.

It’s just that simple, my slothful friend.

I’m sure I procrastinate as much as Stevenson, but the thing is, I’m not lazy! I am in fact super-industrious. It’s just that I am always motivated to do something other than the thing that most needs to be done. Stevenson mentions Da Vinci was a flaky, distractable procrastinator. OK.  But lazy? That’s retarded. Doing something else is not laziness; it’s misdirected industriousness.

No discussion of procrastination is complete with John Perry’s now-classic essay “Structured Procrastination.” You can even buy a “I’m not wasting time, I’m a structured procrastinator  t-shirt!”

Tyler and Alex’s son give their impressions of the party at Robin Hanson’s lovely home yesterday afternoon. It’s a special kind of relief to be able to spend a few hours with a whole house full of people with whom one does not have to be defensive about thinking rationally (i.e. “reductively”, “autistically”, “soullessly”) about tough questions. This is a party where you’re the weird one if you don’t think it’s appropriate to apply cost-benefit analysis to the choice to have kids, or if you don’t think it’s more or less obvious that open immigration is welfare-enhancing, or that robots are awesome. Good times. Here’s some pics.

Larry Arnhart states it well:

The folks at the Discovery Institute have made a big mistake in their production of this movie. The political rhetoric of the Discovery Institute’s “wedge strategy” depends upon hiding a fundamental contradiction. But this movie makes the contradiction so evident that any viewer can see it. On the one hand, the rhetorical strategy of the Discovery Institute is to say that “intelligent design” is not a creationist religious belief but pure science, and therefore teaching “intelligent design” in public high school biology classes does not violate the First Amendment’s prohibition on establishing religion. On the other hand, the popular success of the Discovery Institute’s rhetoric depends on appealing to Biblical creationists who assume that “intelligent designer” is just another name for God the Biblical Creator.

This contradiction–both affirming and denying that “intelligent design theory” is the same as Biblical creationism–became evident in the 2005 case in Dover, Pennsylvania. Leaders of the Dover Area Public School board wanted to teach Biblical creationism. They were warned that this would violate U.S. Supreme Court decisions declaring that teaching creationism as science violated the First Amendment separation of church and state. They then decided to teach “intelligent design theory” as a disguised form of Biblical creationism. The trial made clear their deception, and this also exposed the contradiction in the Discovery Institute’s rhetoric.

Rather than covering up this contradiction, this movie makes it hard for any viewer to ignore the contradiction. When Bruce Chapman–President of the Discovery Institute–is interviewed by Stein, Chapman says that journalists distort the true position of intelligent design by saying that it’s a creationist religious belief, because the “intelligent designer” is clearly God. Chapman vehemently denies this. But then for the rest of the movie, it’s asserted that anyone who denies “intelligent design” is therefore an atheist who denies the existence of God!

Read the whole thing. You can hear me ranting about intelligent design in this now-vintage America’s Future Foundation roundtable.

Here’s Yale psychologist Paul Bloom talking with UNC experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe about the evidence for our native bias toward theism. (Don’t worry! The clip’s just 3 minutes.) Everything he says could just as well be applied to folk ideas about planned economies versus spontaneous orders:

Knobe goes on to mention that people seem to revert back to a childlike penchant for intention-based agentive explanation when we become old. Maybe we need to put an age limit on policymakers.

Richard Chappell says, “communitarianism creeps me out.” That makes two of us. More from his excellent post:

I’m so incredibly grateful to be where I am now, to have the opportunity to dedicate my life to the discipline of philosophy; I can’t even begin to imagine being nearly so happy doing anything else. The academic philosophical community is the first to which I’ve felt that I truly belong. But if I had been born a Maori, if my skin were a darker shade, then suddenly I would have been obliged to remain with my ethnic community instead? *shudder*

[...]

So, count me in favour of meritocracy and the upward-mobility (though not the crass materialism) of “middleclassness”. Count me in favour of “elitism”, understood as the claim that some ways of life are better than others, tempered by the cosmopolitan insistence that the best forms of life not be closed to anyone merely due to the circumstances of their birth. (Sadly, this demand is yet to be met. Much more still needs to be done to enable humanity. But entrenching class divisions in the name of “solidarity” is not the place to start. We should want as many people as possible to join the creative classes — to vacate the working class and its culture, not hold people there and reinforce it.) Count me in favour of liberalism.

Richard emphasizes that one need not be some kind of egoist or a pinched individualist unable to value a common enterprise to think this. It’s just generally better for people if they do not feel pushed to consider their parents’ culture a cage within which life must be lived.

This post by one “Deep Thought” is a brilliant example:

This isn’t rocket science; men with easy access to prostitution or to promiscuous women have little incentive to marry. Suddenly there is nothing to offset their legal and financial obligations as a husband – so why take on the obligation? Women who are promiscuous face disease, pregnancy, and emotional trauma – all of them reduce their ability to be a valuable wife.

This probably helps explain what’s going on with prostitution bans, but is it supposed to be a moral reason to endorse them? Dramatic reconstruction:

Sweetheart… Since I have no easy access to women who sell sex, will you share my life so I can use you for sex? I mean, even if there were a few more easy women around here, I’d have no use for you. Definitely no reason to make a commitment to you. But there aren’t. Oh well. So… I love you? And Oh! Here’s a diamond.

Maybe this tells us something about the great romance of being the mother of Deep Thought’s four children, but for my part, I share my life with Kerry because she is brilliant and exciting and we mesh in so many ways and I love her. As far as I can tell, the existence of Craiglist’s Casual Encounters has no bearing on this, my greatest source of happiness.

It gets even more obsessively biological. This is, sensibly enough I suppose, written by a Catholic guy with a theology degree who attends Latin mass and thinks “the Patriarchy, when controlled by Judeo-Christian morality, is a protector of and advocate for women.” [!!!]:

the future belongs to those who show up. If you don’t have kids, you have no stake in the future. If you have kids, you not only have a stake in the future, you can influence it in ways almost impossible to duplicate without kids.

[...]

bans on prostitution exist not just to avoid the exploitation of sex workers; they are in place not just because the majority of world religions declare them immoral; they were passed not solely to fight the spread of disease; they were written with more than the goal of reducing the numbers of poor, fatherless children. No, they are there to protect the future.

Again, I can see the explanatory power here. But to think that this has justificatory power is simply grotesque. This is to reduce individual human beings to tokens of a biological type, to reduce the purpose of an individual human life to a link in a biological chain there is no moral value in forging. Yes, the future belongs to those who show up. But the present belongs to each individual human being. We have lives because a lineage has been perpetuated. But our lives are not for perpetuating lineages. Our lives are for our living. Our duty is to treat one another as free and equal persons, as ends in themselves, which means we are duty-bound not to use people and their lives for purposes not their own. We treat people with the respect they deserve. Whoever shows up, shows up. If you’re interested in that, then breed away. But do leave the rest of us alone.

I’ve got time to kill while waiting in LAX, so I might as well try to clarify my position on prostitution by saying how I think sex is different from other kinds of human activity. Obviously, sex is central to reproduction, and reproduction is central to natural selection, and natural selection is central to why we have the kind of minds and the kinds of sentiments we have. In particular, it looks like sex has an important attachment function for humans, helping to cement pair-bond relationships. Partly because of this function, sex turns out to be a lot of fun for humans, and we do it recreationally in a way that most primates don’t.

People fixated on discreditably vulgar versions of evolutionary psychology (in addition to making the naturalistic fallacy as if making the naturalistic fallacy is a path to riches) tend to miss the cultural variety in sexual norms within the uniformity of evolutionary logic. You don’t need Margaret Mead blank slate-ism to show that there is a fair amount of play in human sexual norms and sexual psychology. Even incest taboos are more variable than most are inclined to think. That said, it is true that there are regularities in male and female sexual psychology. Men will generally tend to be more indiscriminate in partner choice and women will tend be more concerned with screening. And it is also true that lack of paternity confidence will tend to make men extremely jealous and disposed to coordinate to control the sexual behavior of women. Concerted slut-shaming is a classic male strategy to raise the cost of female extra-pair coupling. Shaming norms and even articulate ideologies that reinforce the shared belief that women’s sexual liberty is hugely dangerous to the social order, and to women themselves, are very common and I think are largely explained by a mix of paternity confidence issues and male dominance of social and cultural institutions, which may also have a partly biological explanation.

To reify or essentialize this pattern, and to unthinkingly endorse it, is to compound mistake upon mistake. These kinds of patriarchal sexual mores have relaxed immensely in the West in the last half century and the result is that people–especially women–are doing much better, not worse, in the places where sexual liberalization has occurred. The specialness of sexual psychology mostly helps us to understand the panic about and strenuous resistance to liberalizing norms of female sexual autonomy. And the history of moral panic contrasted with the good results of actual recent sexual liberalization  gives us reason to be especially skeptical about the special damage that will come of deregulating women’s sexual behavior.

I want to say something more about what’s special about sexual experience itself, but I have to catch a plane.  

I say, again and again, that it is an embarrassing non-sequitur to argue that people are “irrational” and then leap to the conclusion that they need benevolent paternal guidance from the state. After all, if people are irrational then voters are irrational, politicians are irrational, bureaucrats are irrational, etc. To this, Ezra Klein responds:

I’m not sure what exactly it is that Will finds so inexplicable here. Behavioral research often finds that consumers act irrationally in certain situations. So given a specific set of constraints, they may underestimate future risk, prove oversensitive to loss, exhibit significant status quo bias, and so on and so forth. All problems.

Now, the government may be made up of people, but it is not made up of people carrying out transactions under these conditions.

Perhaps Ezra is right, but only because people acting inside government institutions are much less likely to themselves bear the cost of their mistakes, and will therefore likely make more of them. There is no way to wriggle out of the fact that people who win elections are just like the rest of us.

I really wish people would pay more attention to Vernon Smith, who invented experimental economics, won the Nobel Prize for it, and remains by far the most philosophically rigorous theorist of the relationship between individual rationality and institutional performance. (Ted Bergstrom’s paper here [pdf] is a good overview.) What Smith’s work shows is that, yes, individuals in isolation don’t act according to canonical postulates of rationality, but that well-structured market institutions will nevertheless tend to converge on the efficient outcome, as if the agents were behaving with full “rationality”, even though they are in fact limited, confused, and ignorant. The “rationality” of the outcome is more a function of the structure of the institution than of the “rationality” of those acting inside it.

Responsible social science therefore compares the way real people perform when embedded in different real-world institutional settings. What you surely don’t do is perform selective empirical work to discover an “anomaly” in decision making, and then deploy a priori high theory to infer that one set of institutions (markets) won’t work, because, in fact, the performance market institution might turn out to be indifferent to the anomaly or limitation. That’s what Smith has proved. If you’re going to be an empiricist, then be an empiricist, and actually test the effect of the anomaly in the performance of the relevant institutions. Until you do this, it’s either arbitrary, naive, or willfully ideological to posit another set of institutions (government) as a fix. Because there may be nothing to fix. And, even if there is, government may be the wrong kind of institution to fix it. You’ve got to run the experiment.

There is a great deal of carelessness in generalizing the results of anomaly-focused behavioral economics. As Steven Levitt and John List write in their short article on behavioral economics in Science ($$$) this month:

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing behavioral economics is demonstrating its applicability in the real world. In nearly every instance, the strongest empirical evidence in favor of behavioral anomalies emerges from the lab. Yet, there are many reasons to suspect that these laboratory findings might fail to generalize to real markets. We have recently discussed several factors, ranging from properties of the situation — such as the nature and extent of scrutiny — to individual expectations and the type of actor involved. For example, the competitive nature of markets encourages individualistic behavior and selects for participants with those tendencies. Compared to lab behavior, therefore, the combination of market forces and experience might lessen the importance of these qualities in everyday markets.

List has run a number of field experiments that show that this is the case. Smith has run a number of lab experiments that show that the frequency of a “mistake” goes down as the cost of making it goes up.

Ezra continues:

An easy example is the research on opt-out 401(k)s. We know, from the economists, that investing in 401(k)s is generally a wise idea. We know, from the statisticians, that far fewer people do it than should. We know, from the behavioralists, that far more people would do it if the default setting put you in the 401(k), rather than forced you to wander down to HR and specifically ask for it. And so folks in the government, acting with more information and in a different context than folks in an office, think up a policy to “recognize the power of inertia in human behavior and enlist it to promote, rather than hinder, saving.”

At exactly which point in this process does Will fear that the same irrationality that keeps someone from creating a retirement account will foul up a regulator’s efforts to ease their way into a retirement account?

As I said to Dan Ariely in our chat, I think behavioral work is really valuable, especially when it suggests to us how people might better structure their affairs to get more of what they want. I think the evidence shows that 401(k) opt-out defaults are often a good idea, and that businesses ought to make that part of their standard labor contract, if that is something that they think would be appealing to their prospective employees.

I also think that this minor fact about the general distaste for filling out complicated forms can hardly be used to justify further encroachments on the right of individuals to negotiate the terms of their contracts with employers. I think Ezra’s argument here is both strangely narrow and ungenerously extreme. I don’t doubt that non-terrible policies are sometimes successfully enacted. To doubt that would be a bit like a market skeptic doubting that anyone ever succeeds in buying a candy bar. That would be terrifically dense. What I doubt, very strongly, is that the discovery of “irrationalities” undermines the authority of market institutions more than it undermines the authority of government institutions. Are people more or likely to behave irrationally when voting for their congressman or when buying a sandwich? Do buyers for private organizations sign contracts for $76 screws? Etc.

So, no. I don’t fear the mandatory opt out 401(k) plans in particular will be a giant debacle. But I do fear that half-baked behavioral economics is being used to undermine support for market institutions in general, way ahead of the evidence. And I fear that a fundamentally confused assault on “rationality” is being used successfully to promote paternalistic control by elites and, necessarily, to encourage the docility of those who are to be controlled.

[Added: If you have not read Ed Glaeser's "Paternalism and Psychology" [pdf], then you probably should.]

I have unforgivably neglected to link to yesterday’s episode of Free Will featuring a discussion with Dan Ariely, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics, about his new book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. I really enjoyed talking to Dan, who is incredibly creative in experimental design. It is good fun reading about the experiments, but I found Dan frustratingly naive about the implications of many of his findings, as I vented here.

I’m pretty sure Dan is guilty of the the fallacy of asymmetrical idealization, and I think he falls victim to a number of confusions common among behavioral economists that are inevitable when you completely destroy the formal neoclassical economic model of rationality but insist on using it as a benchmark of rationality anyway. (I discuss this at greater length here.) But like I told Dan in the diavlog, I’m totally on board with the project of finding out how we actually do make decisions, which is obviously of the first importance. His extremely valuable work is clearly at the cutting edge of that effort, and Predictably Irrational is well worth reading, if only to get a good sense of some important (and perplexing) recent findings.

So far I have found this month’s Cato Unbound extremely stimulating. It sure helps when you get to invite the discussants, but the problem of how exactly limited-government types think government can realistically be limited really is of the first importance.

I think Anthony de Jasay is right that incentive-compatibility problems plague attempts to keep government lean and limited. That said, I think a certain kind of anarchist, like de Jasay, tend to somewhat oversell the impossibility of limited government. As Gordon Tullock likes to emphasize, given the vast amount that could be extracted by political predation, the puzzle for the political scientist is to explain why so little is invested in rent-seeking. Part of the answer lies in the structural constraints de Jasay mentions in his essay. The prospect that financial and human capital may flee a grabbing hand, or the fear that the electorate will rise up in anger and panic when the thicket of opportunistic regulation has begun to strangle prosperity, may rein in government. But these are constraints implicit in the nature of things, not ones imposed by law as limits on lawmakers. So it is interesting that he also mentions the campaign-finance rule as a constraint on the size of government, since that seems open to choice, to design, in a way that the other constraints are not. This seems like an admission that certain rules can successfully bind.

I think I’m almost entirely in agreement with the main thrust of Jerry Gaus’s reply. The problem isn’t so much the weakness of formal, paper constraints, but the weakness of formal constraints that are not reinforced by our moral sentiments. If a formal rule is seen as merely conventional, and therefore revisable by the relevant authority, and not as moral, there may be little resistance to overriding it in order to meet the demands of weightier moral rules. I found this passage especially illuminating:

[I]f the basic normative commitments of classical liberals were widely conceived of as moral rules, then there would be much deeper resistance to government-made rules that seek to cancel or override them. The problem is that the opposite seems nearer the truth: for many citizens, their understanding of the moral norms related to fairness endorses government-made rules overriding the conventional rules of property. The welfare state reigns supreme not because the state and it allies have tricked the rest of us in a power grab; it reigns supreme because in the eyes of most citizens it conforms to the egalitarian fairness norms that have evolved with humans (Fong, Bowles, and Gintis, 2005). Classical liberals who convince themselves that the New Deal is best explained as a power grab by Roosevelt and his allies are manifestly deluded: it was (and still is) very widely seen as demanded by our sense of fairness.

I think this is on the right track. But I think it’s worth emphasizing that the power grab explanation is not at all inconsistent with the “mandate of fairness” explanation. Power-seeking politicians can create the perception that their role and their power is legitimate by appealing to deep-seated moral sentiments. Second, I’m not so sure that our egalitarian sentiments are all that close to a pure expression of egalitarian sharing norms. First, there is the artificiality of nationalism, and the modern welfare state is nothing if not an expression of economic and moral nationalism. To see co-nationals in a vast pluralistic territory as part of a common tribe in which even an attenuated form of ancient sharing norms apply requires an incredible, imaginative, “unnatural” expansion of the circle of affinity.

But I think the general point stands. Moral rules are processed differently than conventional rules. If limited government is going to have a chance, it must be in sync with our moral sentiments and dispositions to moral judgments. I don’t think this is impossible. I’m pretty well sold on something like Jonathan Haidt’s multidimensional conception of the moral sense. And there may be something like a classical liberal calibration of the moral sentiments, such that certain rules limiting the domain of political power and collective choice may come to be experienced as distinctively moral, and therefore non-optional.

Now, I don’t know that there is such a thing, but there might be. I do think there is a broadly liberal calibration of the moral sense, I think that it is prevalent in liberal societies, and that is what makes them stably liberal. That means, in no small part, that the government is effectively limited in what it may do to people. Limited government is evidently possible because it is actual.

The idea that the there are various dimensions of the moral sense each with its own parameters implies that morality is a fill-in-the-blanks slate. The moral sense then isn’t an exogenous variable acting as a hard constraint on feasible social coordination. Nor is it infinitely malleable. There are only so many combinatorial possibilities, and the feasible cultural/developmental paths from one combination of settings to another may be quite limited.

But this kind of view does I think put ideas about pluralism and liberal neutrality that both Jerry and I are very fond of in a tight spot. The multidimensional moral sense view makes it pretty clear that liberal society requires that a certain kind of moral personality become common in the population. A specifically classical liberal society, in which the certain further limits on the scope of politics are felt strongly to be moral, may require an even more tightly-focused and even more-broadly shared, fine-tuning of the moral sense. But I’m not certain I’d even want that.

Yes, I know the political history of the Bauhaus and the International School, thank you very much. (That major in the history and philosophy of art is not worth nothing!) And I admit it does put a strain on my not-very-well-thought-out analogy, if that’s the modernism you had in mind. Of course, I had in mind houses that actually are very lovely and quite nice to live in. How about Frank Lloyd Wright (everybody loves him, right?) or Richard Neutra?

Perhaps the difference in mentality I had in mind is better captured by the difference between the person who is able to grasp why Mark Rothko, say, is a much greater painter than Bouguereau. If you don’t get it, well, then that just proves my point, doesn’t it?

Anyway, semi-silly aesthetic analogies aside, the point is that people’s natural tastes for social structure runs toward the tribal and teleological, but this isn’t actually that good for people. Market liberalism, which is too abstract or “thin” to seem really satisfying or meaningful, since there is no single common goal that transcends the goals individuals happen to have, actually leaves people better off than all the alternatives, and measurably so. It’s not hard to understand why people are so attracted to National Greatness, or to Bouguereau. But with a little inspection of the evidence, or a little development of taste, one can see why this is a mistake… is what I was getting at.

It’s not just that you should be ashamed of your vulgarity if you thrill to the idea of America uber alles, though of course you should, but rather that you should be ashamed of preferring a morally worse state affairs over a better one. People who thunder on about virtue like to complain about the immaturity and self-indulgence of individuals in commercial societies, but those people are very often the ones seeking to indulge atavistic social instincts that our moral culture has begun to mature past.

I don’t have a beef against virtue. Far from it; I’m a big fan of the attempt to study character strengths scientifically. But virtues, if they are worth caring about, are instrumental to well-being and relative to social and economic structure. McCain’s brand of military virtue isn’t admirable in a politician. It’s dangerous. And it does not seem to me that McCain has any worthwhile virtues that, say, Mitt Romney lacks. Indeed, I suspect that my man Mitt has modern managerial and leadership virtues that all the other candidates lack. If Romney is the candidate of virtue, it’s because he’s a first-rate capitalist, not an abstemious Mormon family man. And, as far as I can tell, Barack Obama has a much more inspiring capacity for leadership than does McCain, if that’s the sort of thing you like. The only reason a virtue-thumper would be touting McCain in particular is an infatuation with the virtues of war.

Nice overview. But I found the ending part on why the Haidt calibration view doesn’t imply relativism a bit shady—a bit Straussian even!

Pinker struck me as arguing that there are real external facts about human flourishing that help underpin the authority of the harm and reciprocity dimensions of the moral sense, whereas the new science of morality helps us to see that we are subject to all sorts of “illusions” when it comes to the authority, in-group, and purity dimensions.

Now, I agree about a trillion percent with what I imagine Pinker is going for here: improving real human well-being by establishing the cultural dominance of a distinctively liberal calibration of the moral sense. That is, in fact, the ticket. But I simply don’t see how this stands as an adequate reply to someone who says that it is better that millions suffer and/or die for the greater glory of the tribe, or the Prophet, or to prevent the defilement of the blood of the Motherland. Yes, it is an objective fact of the world that if the well-being of each is our aim, then liberal morality, and its concomitant institutions, such as the extended order of market cooperation, are the necessary means. But, tragically, we do not all share this aim.

Must we? From the perspective of morality per se and not just from the perspective of one among many moralities? Is human flourishing of overriding importance–does it get greater weight than alternatives—because of it’s very nature. Or are those of us with an already liberal moral sense simply willing to go to the mat for the idea? To my mind, Haidt’s views do leave us with relativism. And the obviously correct thing to do is to fight and win a global culture war for a liberal morality. The ongoing fight against liberal morality is sometimes so savage because, well, because the people fighting it are not liberals for one thing, but also because the advantages of liberalism—greater wealth, better health, longer lives, more deeply satisfying individuation, etc.—are so attractive, so enticing, and therefore so dangerous to those whose sense of meaning is bound up in an illiberal calibration of the moral sense.

Why not just say that a more thoroughly liberal calibration of the moral sense will deliver a huge list of incredibly attractive goods for everyone in the world, and leave it at that? If some can’t be persuaded to care about those goods, then their kids can be. And their happy, health, wealthy, long-lived kids will little lament the loss of their backwards ancestral codes.

My unpublished essay on Haidt and politics, here.

I have a lot of objections to Yuval Levin’s Haidt post at NRO. Both Ross and Andrew Sullivan seemed to have been impressed. So let’s look closer:

I think Haidt’s thesis and book are fascinating, but suffer from the general tendency of modern science to turn the study of the nature of something into a study of the history of that thing.

Hmm…. This sounds to me like Levin thinks Haidt’s work suffers from studying its subject in the right way. Post-Darwin, we understand that the nature of an animal is the consequence of the history of its lineage. Humans are animals and the human moral sense is a part of our evolved nature. Studying the natural history of the moral sense is almost the only truly illuminating way to study it. It’s a whole lot better than simply trying to tease out the implications of our moral judgments from the first-person perspective — from the “inside” — and I say that as someone who has spent a huge amount of time employed in the process of reflective equilibration. I’d say Levin’s post suffers from the general tendency of conservatives to do a lot of handwaving about what’s wrong with real science in the attempt to preserve a sense of the authority of our moral judgments — and a sense of the legitimacy of the social order built around them — in the face of the scientific evidence for their biological and cultural contingency.

More:

Not everything about our moral life can be rationalized, because important pieces of it derive from (and serve) the complicated set of moral obligations that arise out of our unchosen social relations. No one chooses to be born into the world, and no one chooses into which family and country to be born, but these unchosen relations nonetheless impose inescapable moral obligations on us.

This straightforwardly begs the question. Haidt’s whole program has to do with explaining cultural variations regarding which perceived obligations arise from our unchosen social relations. Levin seems to want to think that there is some external fact about what the obligations of our social relations are. But the theory under discussion is precisely that both (a) social structure and (b) the sense of moral obligation experienced by those embedded within it depends on the culturally variable settings on the five posited dimensions of the moral sense. These settings not only change from place to place, but also change over time. That’s part of the theory. So what’s wrong with the theory?

My sense is that there has been a huge shift in the cultural consensus in the West about, say, the autonomy parents owe their grown and even adolescent children, and, conversely, the obedience and material assistance grown children owe their parents. You probably wouldn’t be a conservative if you witnessed such a change in norms and failed to diagnose it as a failure of people to meet the “inescapable obligations” that arise from their unchosen social relations. If you were to accept the mutability of these obligations, it would be pretty hard to characterized them as inescapable. Once we no longer feel an obligation’s normative gravity, we stop believing that it has any. And an obligation whose normative pull no one feels stop being considered an obligation. When it stops being considered an obligation, the pattern of individual behavior changes, and, ipso facto, the society is changed. For conservatives, this kind of social change comes as one moral crisis after another. When we in fact arrive at a better place after the change, as we generally do, the conservative mostly just makes peace with it while insisting that we all panic about the next moral shift, which will surely bring down all of society along with it.

Part of what it means to have a thoroughly liberal moral sense, in Haidt’s terms, is to see the claims of ingroup solidarity as weak and easily defeated by competing considerations. For example, this liberal finds the claim, implicit in much of the immigration debate, that I ought to heavily discount the welfare gains to non-citizens simply because they belong to a different national coalition morally abhorrent. I don’t doubt that many people take themselves to have an “inescapable” moral obligation to treat outsiders unfairly, or to even positively harm them (even kill them!), if it redounds to the benefits insiders. But I deny that there is any such obligation to escape in the first place. Haidt’s theory is extremely illuminating because it explains in part how heated cultural and political conflict can flow from opinions that evidently incompatible, but all of which are distinctively “moral” in character. Many of Levin’s claims, such as the claim that “some of our most important obligations—particularly those in the family—remain unchosen yet binding and essential” fail entirely to engage Haidt’s thesis about the underpinnings of variation in moral judgment and sound like little more than hollow, if pious, exhortation.
Levin:

This means we have one way of moralizing—the contractual way—which makes for more freedom and justice but has nothing to say to the deepest truths of our human experience (and therefore can dangerously distort our society); and we have another—the one grounded in continuity and generation—that helps us make sense of our place in the world but cares too little about avoidable injustices. The first is highly artificial, and so is also better suited to highly rational and verbal defenses. The second is highly sentimental—it is geared to those areas of our life about which we have the least explicit knowledge and so can say the least—so it sometimes expresses itself in unspoken shudders more than organized arguments. This leaves it at a great disadvantage in our time, of course.

No. The “contractual way” of moralizing is no less (or more) sentimental, nor is it more (or less) artificial. That is one of Haidt’s central points. All the calibrations of the moral sentiments are calibrations of the moral sentiments. All the dimensions of sentiment naturally evolved. All the calibrations of those setting are conventional and culture-bound. I’m not surprised that Levin, who worked under Leon Kass at the President’s Council on Bioethics, wants to defend the normative authority of our “unspoken shudders.” But I do think Levin is right that the liberal dimensions of the moral sense are uniquely amenable to defense by rational argument, which is no doubt why liberalism is part of our rationalist Enlightenment heritage — why the societies that most value reason are also liberal societies and contain the least suffering and oppression. Levin wants to defend the shudder when it comes to, say, cloning, but (I trust) not when it comes to the subhuman treatment of the Dalits. So, those of us armed with reason inevitably ask: “What’s the difference?” And he doesn’t have a good answer. Which is why, once we hit a certain threshold of sensitivity to harm and injustice, we just keep on getting more and more liberal, despite the best efforts of folks like Levin to get us to see our prejudices as “inescapable” and “essential.”

I was Indianapolis this weekend at a conference on positive psychology and philanthropy. Serendipitously enough, Jonathan Haidt’s happiness book was one of our readings. I’ve come back to see a lot of follow-up on the NYT article and the yourmorals.org quiz, much of which I think is a bit confused.

In this post, I’ll tackle Ross Douthat’s long, thoughtful, interesting meditation on a passage from Haidt’s recent Edge.org piece, and a passage from my Haidt article. Naturally, I think the part of the post in which Ross replies to me is both most interesting and most wrong. So, Ross quotes me plumping for a “thoroughly liberal” morality and says

I would suggest, briefly, that Will ought to give more credence to the notion that he can’t have his cake and eat it too: That what he terms “tribalism, caste, and theocracy” - and what a more sympathetic observer might call “family, community, and religion” - play a stabilizing role in society that would otherwise be filled, almost inevitably, by an ever-expanding state. You can have the kind of economic liberty that Will wants, or you can have the kind of personal liberty, but you can’t necessarily have both. This is the old fusionist argument, of course, and while it’s taken something of a beating of late, I don’t think it’s all that easily dismissed.

Whatever else you might say about them, family, community, and religion are the chief preserves of illiberal sentiment in our society. Of course, family, community and religion don’t have to be illiberal. For example, most strands of Christianity have been successfully “civilized” — by which I mean radically liberalized — by the liberalizing pressures of modernity. One of the problems with conservatives is that, over and over again, they confuse an attack on the illiberal elements of family, community, and religion as attacks on family, community, and religion itself. For example, arguments for gay marriage are not arguments against the family, despite what most conservatives insist. They are liberal argument for equal-opportunity families. Arguments for racial integration aren’t arguments against community. They are liberal arguments for non-racist communities. Etc. If family, community, and religion (and other civil society institutions) are stabilizing, which I don’t doubt, they can be stabilizing without being unjust and harmful.

Ross’s case for fusionism makes me think he may be a little confused about Haidt’s theory. The idea is that the calibration of the five dimensions of the moral sense is highly culturally variable. Our society — like other liberal societies — is already one in which concern for ingroup, hierarchy, and purity is relatively low. But both the liberal U.S. and the liberal Sweden are libertarian paradises — in terms of the individual’s protection from the authority of the state — when compared to much more conservative societies such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, or even democratic India. (Japan might be a good and rare example of fairly liberal institutions combined with strongly conservative social norms.) It is very difficult to look at the pattern of the actual world and think that further liberalization of our sentiments will create a vacuum for the state to seep into. It seems to me that Ross holds fixed a relatively conservative calibration of the moral sentiments — one in which concern for hierarchy, ingroup, and purity are high — and then imagines what would happen if you diminished the influence of the family, community, and church. What’s going to pick up the slack? The state! But the point is to imagine a calibration of the moral sentiments in which concern for hierarchy, ingroup, and purity are lower. Because the places where these sentiments play the least role in the common morality are in fact the most libertarian, we so ought to expect a further reduction in their role to deliver yet greater liberty.

It’s religious emotion, not language, that dooms Democrats.

Will Wilkinson

[Read the explanation of this post.]

The Berkeley linguist George Lakoff was a semi-famous academic when he walked into a retreat of Democratic senators in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 2003. He walked out as one of the most popular gurus in politics. Hillary Clinton wanted to do lunch. Tom Daschle invited Lakoff to come to D.C. for further schooling. By 2004 he had Howard Dean, noted screamer and future head of the Democratic Party, penning an enthusiastic forward to his pre-election manifesto, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Lakoff’s claim? Reagan-loving pols win because of their masterful manipulation of language, not their substantive appeal; with supercharged “framing” Democrats can win, too.

Despite Lakoff’s sage instruction, Bush won a second term, and the GOP picked up seats in the House and Senate. The post-mortem to the 2004 presidential election showed that “moral values” were the “most important issue” for a plurality of voters, and that of those most moved by moral values, a whopping 80 percent punched their ticket for George W. Bush. That would seem to be more a matter of substance than style and a point against the idea that Republicans are winning simply because the mind of the hoi polloi has become a plaything of spellbinding word wizards like the Lakoffians’ demon of choice, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz. A small but vehement anti-Lakoff movement has arisen among Democratic commentators, with scathing critiques last year by Kenneth Baer in The Washington Monthly, Marc Cooper and Joshua Green (separately) in The Atlantic, and Matt Bai’s damning New York Times Magazine profile, which noted that Don’t Think of an Elephant had become “as ubiquitous among Democrats in the Capitol as Mao’s Little Red Book once was in the Forbidden City.” But despite the licking, Lakoff’s linguistic false consciousness doctrine keeps on ticking.

However, as Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker argues in another Lakoff takedown in that appeared in the New Republic, Lakoff’s theories are both bad psychology and bad politics, and the one plays into the other. A better diagnosis of the Dem’s trouble with “moral values” voters might help them claim future victories based on more than Bush fatigue and scandalous instant messages to teenage pages. And better ideas are out there: if liberals take a good hard look at what separates them emotionally from most flag-waving, churchgoing Americans, they can better address their weaknesses.

In his new book, Whose Freedom: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea, Lakoff dusts off his greatest hits and argues that “The conservative dominance of political discourse has been changing what Americans mean by common sense.” According to Lakoff, the post–Great Society welfare state embodies to near-perfection the “traditional” American conception of freedom. Right-wing newspeak threatens to destroy the real freedom we proud Americans cherish, or would cherish, if only our minds had not been colonized by right-wing newspeak.

Lakoff gets reinforcement from fellow Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, author of the maximally subtitled Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freakshow. Though Nunberg, to his credit, rejects Lakoff’s poorly supported theory that all thinking is based in metaphor, they agree on the root cause of the Democrats’ slump. “[T]he left has lost the battle for language itself,” Nunberg writes. “When we talk about politics nowadays…we can’t help using language that embodies the worldview of the right.” If “values voters” tilt right, that’s just because the word “values” has itself become loaded with conservative connotations.

Disappointed Marxists used the idea of “false consciousness” to explain why the oppressed workingman failed to rise in revolt with outrage at his exploitation; his mind had been hijacked by enemy propaganda. False consciousness explanations are powerful—so powerful that anyone can trot one out in a pinch to explain why people who don’t seem hypnotized would nevertheless affirm what the sane and upright despise. Fox News and conservative talk radio would go dead if they couldn’t wheel out the alleged leftist death-grip on academia, Hollywood, and the mainstream media to explain the otherwise inconceivable existence of anti-war protesters, practicing homosexuals, and legal fetus-killing. Nunberg and Lakoff’s tricked-out linguistic versions of false consciousness are barely better. Democrats interested in winning must surrender this disreputable redoubt of desperation and aim at an account of their woes that is more “reality-based.”

Even doggedly ill-informed voters sometimes notice bad results, and the Democrats may be able ride Republican incompetence and corruption to power. But in case the entire GOP doesn’t pull a Ralph Reed, Democrats should face up to the likely possibility that voters are rejecting the content of their message, not just the style. Maybe heavy unionization, comprehensive regulation, high taxes, free-flowing welfare, lax policing, and a passive military posture would have been unpopular in Topeka with or without linguistic shenanigans.

More than just helping Democrats escape the hard truth about unpopular positions, the linguistic mindwarp thesis also blinds the Democrats to their problem relating to voters on crucial non-linguistic frequencies. If they’ve got to have a guru, Democrats should enlist Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who specializes in the moral emotions, and whose innovative research offers liberals—and libertarians, too—a better picture of their problems.

Working in the emotion-centered tradition of David Hume and Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, Haidt’s research leads him to posit five psychological foundations of human moral sentiment, each with a distinct evolutionary history and function, which he labels harm, reciprocity, ingroup, hierarchy, and purity. While the five foundations are universal, cultures build upon each to varying degrees. Imagine five adjustable slides on a stereo equalizer that can be turned up or down to produce different balances of sound. An equalizer preset like “Show Tunes” will turn down the bass and “Hip Hop” will turn it up, but neither turn it off. Similarly, societies modulate the dimension of moral emotions differently, creating a distinctive cultural profile of moral feeling, judgment, and justification. If you’re a sharia devotee ready to stone adulterers and slaughter infidels, you have purity and ingroup pushed up to eleven. PETA members, who vibrate to the pain of other species, have turned ingroup way down and harm way up.

Denizens of liberal democracies tend to be relatively tuned in to harm and reciprocity—concerned with suffering, violations of autonomy, fairness, and justice—while less sensitive to the tribalism and xenophobia of ingroup, the class-bound inequality of hierarchy, and the sense of the sacred and profane wrapped up in purity. That this pattern of sentiment is broadly shared is largely what it means for a society to be liberal.

Haidt’s studies, which involve confronting subjects with often bizarre moral scenarios (there is plenty of material about incest and dead animals) and evaluating their responses, suggest that while Democrat-leaning liberals draw almost exclusively from harm and reciprocity, Republican-leaning conservatives draw more from the whole range of moral emotion. “Conservatives have many moral concerns that liberals simply do not recognize as moral concerns,” Haidt and collaborator Jesse Graham write in a forthcoming paper for Social Justice Research. “When conservatives talk about virtues and policies based on the ingroup, hierarchy, and purity foundations, liberals hear talk about theta waves,” Haidt and Graham’s term for imaginary transmissions from space.

Most intriguing is the possibility of systematic left-right differences on the purity dimension, which Haidt pegs as the source of religious emotion. In a fascinating chapter in his illuminating recent book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt explains how a primal biological system—the disgust system—designed to keep us clear of rotten meat, expanded over our evolutionary history to encompass sexual norms, physical deformations, and much more. Haidt asks us to “Imagine visiting a town where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex ‘doggy-style’ in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass.” Disgusting? No doubt. Immoral? If your thought is, “Well, they’re not violating anyone’s rights,” then, Haidt predicts, you probably didn’t vote for Bush.

The flipside of disgust is the emotion Haidt calls “elevation,” based in a sense of purification and transcendence of our animal incarnation. Cultures the world over picture humanity as midway on a ladder of being between the demonically disgusting and the divinely pure. Most world religions express it through taboos of food, body, and sex, and in rituals of de-animalizing purification and sacralization. The warm, open sense of elevation and the shivering nausea of disgust are high and low notes in the same emotional key.

Haidt’s suggestion is partly that morally broad-band conservatives are better able to exploit the emotional logic of religiosity by deploying rhetoric and imagery that calls on powerful sentiments of elevation and disgust. A bit deaf to the divine, narrow-band liberals are at a disadvantage to stir religious Americans. And there are a lot of religious Americans out there.

According to the University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart and Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris, Americans are more religious than citizens of every liberal democracy except Ireland. A recent study by three University of Minnesota sociologists, Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann, found that Americans trust spiritually insensate atheists less than Muslims, immigrants, lesbians, and probably even the French when it comes to “sharing their vision of American society.” Pew Research Center surveys show that church attendance now predicts Republican and Democratic voting patterns better than income or education. And some of us, like presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, the miraculous Mormon Republican former governor of Massachusetts, grew up believing that Zion is just east of Kansas City. Legions of Americans have the sense that Jesus smiles upon the Constitution, that tiny unborn babies breathe the breath of God, and that the body is a temple drugs defile. Few religious Americans hesitate to speak of America as God’s own land, even if they don’t think the New Jerusalem is in Missouri.

The much-vaunted “values-voters” were casting their ballot for a man with a broad-band religious morality, like theirs. When George Bush says “Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world,” people who feel this to be true know he’s tuned in, too. But when Al Gore says, “I believe that God’s hand has touched the United States of America,” they hear Al Gore expediently aiming to prove his spiritual qualifications for the presidency. That’s a real, deep problem that has nothing much to do with language. The liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias gets to the heart of the matter when he advises that “Democrats who don’t believe marriage is between a man and a woman but who feel they ought to pretend to believe this in order to win elections…need to do a better job of pretending.” But they’d be better off if they didn’t need to fake it in the first place. When it comes to the emotional politics of divinity, narrow-band Democrats are outgunned. Opportunistic fag-bashing and strategic God-talk won’t cut it.

Is the narrower morality of liberalism a form of moral retardation or enlightenment? That’s a question that also breaks along ideological lines. “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder,” says the conservative Leon Kass, former head of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, in defense of what he calls “the wisdom of repugnance”—the moral authority of the digust-purity dimension of feeling. But the liberal philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in her book Hiding from Humanity, argues that though emotions such as anger or fear sometimes embody reasons we can offer to others as legitimate justification for action, disgust is uniquely inarticulate, implying no real reason beyond itself, and so is unfit as a basis for persuasion and policy in an open, pluralistic society.

Tens of millions of Americans are viscerally disgusted by gay sex and therefore see the marriage of Adam and Steve as the debasement of a sacred rite. Nussbaum, and others who share her characteristically liberal style of feeling and justification, wouldn’t count that reaction as an argument at all. But that doesn’t stop tens of millions who dwell within the emotional reality of the sacred and profane from being completely persuaded by it. As Nussbaum notes, there is little hope of reasoning them out of it. An America less fueled by religious feeling—one that tuned down the purity dimension to Danish levels—might be a more just America. But you don’t start with the voters you’d like to have.

What, then, are Democrats to do? (And what about libertarians, who tend to have even more tolerance than the average Democrat for godless debasement?) Democrats can try to appeal to religious American voters by giving some ground in the culture wars. But it seems unlikely they will find an effective balance. There is no point conceding stuff too trivial to really matter, such as school prayer, and comically pretending to be moved by the pure and the foul. And there is even less point in nominating religiously convincing candidates who really do believe embryos have the spark of divinity, that gay is gross, etc. Socialized health care isn’t worth it.

Democrats should play to their own moral-emotional strengths, not apologize for not having different ones. Haidt’s early research on moralized disgust shows that its cultural manifestations vary. The Japanese apparently find it disgusting to fail their station and its duties. And here at home, formerly “repulsive” practices, such as interracial marriage, have become mere curiosities.

Despite its political salience, American religiosity is eroding. Inglehart’s and Norris’ research indicates that America, like Europe, is becoming more secular over time, “although this trend has been partly masked by massive immigration of people with relatively traditional worldviews, and high fertility rates, from Hispanic countries.” We may be stuck with our voters, but not with the configuration of their moral sensibilities. And despite all those Republican majorities, the margins are thin; if swing voters were that keenly attuned to their religious sentiments, they’d be Mel Gibson fans, not swing voters.

Democrats shouldn’t cater to and reinforce sensibilities that both hurt people and hurt the Democrats’ prospects. Religious doctrine and religious feeling can and have been trimmed and shaped over time to accommodate the full plurality of liberal society. Illiberal patterns of feeling bolstered by religious sentiments, like disgust for homosexuality, can be broken through slow desensitization, or a shift in the way the culture recruits that dimension of the moral sense. In dynamic commercial societies, this happens whether we want it to or not. But we have something to say about how it happens. The culture war is worth fighting, one episode of Will & Grace at a time, if that’s what it takes.

Liberals must understand the profundity to others of feelings that are weak in them, but shouldn’t pretend to feel what they don’t. They can lead as well as follow. And it remains true that all Americans, conservative and liberal alike, are wide awake to the liberal emotional dimensions of harm and reciprocity. The American culture war is about how thoroughly the liberal sentiments will be allowed to dominate. If a thoroughly liberal society is worth having, liberals will have to spot the points of conflict between the liberal and illiberal dimensions of the moral sense, drive in the wedge, and pull out all the rhetorical stops—including playing on feelings of quasi-religious elevation and indignant moral disgust—to make Americans feel the moral primacy of harm, autonomy, and rights. When the pattern of feeling is in place, the argument is easy to accept.

Haidt can’t help Democrats with their lousy economic policy, but he can at least help them see where much of their problem lies. Democrats’ problem isn’t the Republican lock on semantics; it’s the Republican lock on illiberal sentiment. But Democrats simply will not win a contest of religious emotion, no matter how dazzling the “framing.” Their best long-term hopes rest in moving the fight to a battlefield with more favorable terrain.

Perhaps Haidt’s most significant contribution is helping liberals of all stripes see that liberalism is not a mere intellectual commitment, but a condition of the soul, a condition to be proud of—one that puts us at a far remove from tribalism, caste, and theocracy. The culture war is real. It’s a war over the calibration of our moral sentiments, and mere “messaging” won’t win it. Democrats ought to buy George Lakoff a gold watch, send him off to the home for superannuated gurus, and start boning up on the new science of moral emotion.

—

Will Wilkinson is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

David Brooks once wrote a column based on an astonishing sociological insight seldom noted by teenagers to the effect that not conforming is just another way of conforming when you do it in the way everyone else is doing it, say, by getting a tatttoo. Opting out is hard! Robert Frank noted this dynamic with the bygone multiple piercing fad in What Price the Moral High Ground. As whatever it is that having a piercing signals gets diluted by widespread adoption, you need more more bangles in holes to get the signaling job done. Frank says something about this costly race subsiding as norms against “bodily mutilation” kick in. That sounds wrong. What kicks in, I think, is a kind of signaling backfire — the ”trying too hard” phenomenon. If you’re out toward the right tail of the piercing distribution, you can attempt a kind of counter-signaling: “I’m not in fact trying too hard; I look this way because I seriously don’t give a f*ck what you think,” but it takes a very special person to make this work. People who invested in the signal early, before it got noisy, generally just drop it and search for something else. 

But let’s back up a second. Frank is right that it seems like there is a kind of waste here. If some kind of truce could be established in the form of a norm that that three, but no more than three, piercings is maximally edgy, people could signal precisely the degree of edginess desired without fear of signal dilution and the costs of an escalating arms race. But in cases where the goal is to signal willingness to deviate from widespread social norms, it seems that additional widespread social norms regulating the pursuit of this goal can’t possibly be stable.

This obviously relates to the paradox of the avant garde, which I spent way too much time thinking about when I was an art student back when giants like Kurt Cobain walked the Earth. Each new shocking work intended to jar the bourgeousie out of their dull complacency only further desensitizes the burghers and hausfraus until even churchgoers and patriots become well-nigh unshockable and the game is used up. So, like a guy who affiliates with a community of tattoo afficianados among whom it doesn’t look like he’s trying too hard (and who provide an explanation), artists shift their frame of reference and create “the art world” and try to impress and dismay the denizens of that world — other artists, critics, collectors, hangers-on — with other kinds of limit-pushing. At some point, it seems, it became radical to paint figurative pictures in a traditional style and bisect sharks. It never ends! Think of the waste!

So how could a “truce” norm possibly work in this context? It couldn’t, unless there is a prior implicit agreement to refuse to confer status upon those who satisfy, entertain, and stimulate with paradigm-shifting novelty, which is not forthcoming. Therefore, artists continue to angle for attention and praise by producing interesting things. Positional arms races do seem to exhaust lines of creation. Each envelope-pushing success imposes costs on competitors. These days Piss Christs and dung-smeared madonnas need media blitzkriegs to invent a minor hubbub. Blank canvases get no blanker, empty rooms no emptier, etc. But as long as there is prestige (money, too) to be won, the aesthetic search pushes into neglected corners and fresh frontiers. Like oil companies with ingenious new extraction techniques, artists unsuited to blazing new trails return to fields that had seemed tapped out, but weren’t. The fecundity of these races is precisely in their norm-defying trucelessness.

Entrepreneurship, I think, is a lot like that.  Or, rather, that’s an example of entrepreneurship at work. Something like this dynamic is behind a great deal of economic discovery in addition to artistic innovation. The supply of human creativity is too low. And status-seeking is probably a greater spur to creativity than even wealth-seeking. We need it. One argument against both taxes and certain social norms intended to limit positional competition is that they further reduce already undersupplied creativity. Of course, positional competition along certain dimensions — for political power, say — can be incredibly destructive and we’d be doomed without robust norms tighly regulating it.  But we should be careful about what exactly we are taxing, socially and fiscally. 

Ezra likes to caricature my claim about the multidimensional, opt-in/opt-out nature of status races as “the idea that otherwise pathetic people can be really respected in Everquest.” This is, of course, true. And it is also true that you can choose your career, choose where you will live, choose whether to marry, choose whether to have children, choose what causes to join, what stores to shop at, choose what to buy in them, etc., etc. with straightforward implications on your experience of status. As far as I can tell, however, Ezra thinks all this is doubtful, which is completely mystifying, since I think it’s pretty obvious. Ezra:

[Liberal arts degreees, obscure Russian poets and vanity bands are] also for very young people. Braxton’s life is essentially defined by an absence of responsibilities, dangers, or economic ties. He’s young and healthy, single (but hanging out with an awesome girl!), doesn’t own a home, doesn’t appear to have college debt, etc. Income doesn’t define his status because, at the moment, he doesn’t much need income. This will change. Quickly. And then income will define his status — and not just in an envious manner. Income will define whether his kid gets to go to a good school, and whether his family is safe from medical emergencies, and whether his clothing makes him look suitable for promotion. The ability to seek fulfillment in other realms will not vanish as he ages, but his capacity to eschew material concerns and forsake financial security will.

The imaginary Braxton, like Ezra and me (despite being so old), is in a major life stage sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calls “the age of independence,” as detailed in this interesting Kieran Healy post. Whether he is going to need a lot of income soon depends on the choices he makes. He could go on just like that for a long time, if he wants, like I have. If it is in the end ”just a phase” (and what isnt?), it is by no means a trivial phase. If the denizens of wealthy liberal democracies now spend longer portions of life free to explore their interests without the necessity of earning high incomes, that seems like a kind of triumph.  

Morevover, if Braxton partners and chooses to have children, requiring extra income, it is completely open to him (and completely normal) to see that income as an instrument to raising his children, not as a signifier of status. And income has almost nothing to do with whether his kid gets to go to a good school. Where he chooses to live does. This might require some hard tradeoffs. Good public schools might not be available in the Boston neighborhoods Braxton can afford, where his friends are. But they are available in Omaha in neighborhoods he can afford. And it’s probably a better music scene, too. If he decides to get a different kind of job so he can afford a place in a Boston neighborhood with good schools, we’ve got to keep in mind that there is no sense whatsoever in which unavoidable circumstances forced him into this. His preferences — for children, for Boston — did. We are not entitled to whatever we at the price we want wherever we want.

Millions upon millions of people in societies like ours spend their whole lives and raise families on modest artist, editor, teacher, or non-profit incomes because they prefer it over ready alternatives that provide larger incomes. Their status comes from being well-received and respected in their communities, whatever their communities may be. Being a beloved school teacher, a leader of a community theater, or the social pillar of a church are the kinds of sources of real status that most people do enjoy and emphasize in their lives. Everquest is good, too. Why demean the way people choose to live?

Ezra needs to put down the Robert Frank. Frank needs to establish that the rat race is something like an inevitability to get the conceptual machinery behind his policy proposals churning, but he can’t, and so it doesn’t. Narrowly materialist status pursuits just aren’t an inevitability and it is so easy to show it that I really wonder what’s going on psychologically and ideologically with people who keep trying to sell us on this. Give me a week and I’ll find a hundred stories of people who have chosen a life in which income in not their main source (or even a source) of status. Give me a year and I’ll find five thousand stories. What does it take? 

Also, Frank has never shown that his conclusions about tax policy even follow from his premises. As David Weisbach, director of the U of Chicago Law & Economics program, makes clear:

This [Frank's] simple intuition [about status] does not tell us anything about the likely effects of status on the tax rate schedule.  For example, increasing progressivity would move everyone closer together.  This might decrease status competition, because the gains from competition are smaller – it would be harder to separate yourself from the group.  On the other hand, it might increase status competition.  If you are closer to beating someone in a status race, you might try harder.  Thus, we can imagine status considerations leading to either a more progressive tax system or a less progressive tax system.

And, like Adam Smith and David Hume thought, in the right institutional and cultural context, the externalities of income-related status-seeking may be net positive, in which case a benevolent planner would subsidize it. So, the idea that people can’t help but seek social status through income and consumption is pretty clearly false in the first place, is of indeterminate policy implication in the second place, and, in the third place, it’s a pretty unattractively materialistic conception of human motivation for nice liberals (the leftwing homo economicus?).

I agree with Ezra that

To most people, money matters. A lot. Sometimes in absolute terms, sometimes in positional terms. Really good taste in vanity bands rarely pays the mortgage.

My point was precisely that money does matter. You need to live in a wealthy society to do the things Braxton does. Wealthy societies — societies in which uninternalized positive externalities run like milk and honey — are liberating. And in that kind of society, you can do these things without making a lot of money yourself.  The absolute amount of money you need, say, for a mortgage, depends on choices you make, mostly the choice of where to live. But the existence of a market in inexpensive secondhand electric guitars, lots of other people who play instruments, and a “scene” is not something you have to pay for yourself. And the importance of money as a positional matter depends on choices we make (especially if you consider the failure to break the hold of your accidental clique’s expectations as a choice, which I do). My point was precisely that vanity bands may not pay the mortgage, but it doesn’t matter, because you don’t have to have a mortgage to have a vanity band, a satisfying level of social status, or happiness. It doesn’t matter how old you are. Surely Ezra doesn’t  really think we are all fated to pin our hopes of esteem on our paychecks. So what are we really talking about?  

My reaction to this online “Moral Sense Test” (take it now if you don’t want ”science” to be tainted by prior knowledge of the experiment) was basically the same as Munger’s (who freaks out about the fact that Drezner assigned any fines at all):

THE PREMISE OF THE TEST IS THAT GOVERNMENT SHOULD FINE PEOPLE FOR ACCIDENTS, AND TAKE THE MONEY AT GUN POINT FOR USE IN THE GENERAL FUND!

These are TORTS, not criminal offenses. It is important that the victims do not receive the payment. An average of $129? GOTT IN HIMMEL! I had an “average payment of $0.00! I thought that several of the scenarios (like the peanuts in the allergist’s office) were clear negligence, and that there was a cause of action for a law suit. Any allergy sufferer knows, or should know, that peanuts can be deadly, and in an allergist’s office one expects to encounter people with…..ALLERGIES!

But not a fine! Why put government in charge of collecting fines when one private person harms another accidentally? You are in favor of criminalizing private mistakes, when there is a private remedy. There is no deterrent effect here, and no pretense of making the damaged party whole.

(Sorry for the yelling. Mike is, well, special, and can’t help it.)

I really, really hope that this is one of the experiments that pretends to be one thing while really studying another. For example, I hope they are really studying how many people are so morally stunted that they are willing to have the government fine people for causing pain through mostly unforeseeable, mostly non-negligent accidents, and not even as compensation to the persons pained! Or maybe they’re studying how people’s ordinary good moral sense can be railroaded into sharing some set of idiotic assumptions by embedding them in the instructions of an “experiment” run by “scientists” at a trusted brand-name institution like “Harvard.” Let’s hope! (I would like to hear from Mixing Memory Chris on this one. Chris?)

Random thought about online experiments. I bet “Harvard” has a moralized aura for many people, it being the bastion of “right-thinking East Coast haute bourgeousie liberalism.” Do volunteers, seeing “Harvard” seek to please the moral arbiters therein? Seek to screw them over? Would you get the same results if the test was hosted at Bowling Green State? At Oral Roberts? 

Nicholas Eberstadt’s American Interest article on American demographic exceptionalism is a great antidote to the badly undermotivated worry that America has lost its animal spirits and assimilationist mojo. His conclusion:

U.S. demographic exceptionalism is not only here today; it will be here tomorrow, as well. It is by no means beyond the realm of the possible that America’s demographic profile will look even more excep