Author: marklutter

Exit and ideology

Exit, the ability to leave, has been gaining traction as an institutional arrangement. If exit costs are sufficiently low, people can choose the ideal community for their preferences. Further, the low exit costs force competition between institutional regimes to satisfy client preferences.

Though best enunciated by a liberal economist, Albert Hirschman, exit has largely been associated with the right. In America, secession, the ultimate form of exit, has forever been tainted by racism due to our own War of Secession. However, exit was once a celebrated value of the left. The Guardian, hardly a bastion of conservatism, offered mild support for the south during the American Civil War:

The great stumbling-block issue for the Guardian and many other liberals was the right to self-determination. The paper believed that the south had the right to secede and to establish an independent state.

Of course, if exit is to be a primary political value, the right to exit must extend to all persons, something the south did not do. While intellectually exit has been associated with the right, politically some the distinction is less clear. American states decriminalizing marijuana and legalizing gay marriage in contravention of federal laws has been a milder form of exit, in pursuit of leftist values.

In a very interesting piece Scott Alexander tries to reclaim exit as a liberal (in the modern American sense) value. He envisions competing communities:

Usually the communities are based on a charter, which expresses some founding ideals and asks only the people who agree with those ideals to enter. The charter also specifies a system of government. It could be an absolute monarch, charged with enforcing those ideals upon a population too stupid to know what’s good for them. Or it could be a direct democracy of people who all agree on some basic principles but want to work out for themselves what direction the principles take them.

While he desires a world government to prevent war and ensure the protection of children, he acknowledges that his ideas are largely analogous to Nozick and Moldbug, the advocates of libertarian exit and conservative exit respectively.

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On child labor

I have been in Honduras since Monday and am spending the next week in El Salvador. One thing I notice when traveling in the third world is child labor. There are always children, some as young as 7 years old, trying to sell you something, usually gum, other candy, or cigarettes. These kids are not in school and their futures are bleak. However, despite the obvious poverty of their situation one feels compelled to buy from them. Buying from them increases their income, making them better off. There is an implicit recognition that the alternative is not school, but hunger.

There are two reactions to child labor, one which comes from thinking about it, and the other which comes from seeing it. No one likes the idea of child labor to the extent that even considering it can get you ostracized from polite society. However, actually seeing child labor elicits a different reaction. The feeling is not to ban the child labor itself, but to help the kids in another way. The visualization of child labor forces one to understand the poverty of the choices they face.

The question is how to get people to understand opportunity cost as an abstract concept. Common arguments that children are working because it is the best option available to them fall on deaf ears. Even pointing out the outcomes that follow from restricting child labor is not enough. Paul Krugman notes that when Bangladesh banned child labor many kids turned to prostitution or starved. Even this is sometimes not enough. People have ideological predilections so strong they ignore problems of scarcity, ignoring the fact that the literal alternative to child labor is occasionally starvation.

When we think about child labor sometimes it is better to forget the statistics. Remember the kid trying to sell you gum. Would you take away his livelihood? How would he live? How would he eat?

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A review of Peter Leeson’s ‘Anarchy Unbound’

Anarchy Unbound by Peter Leeson is the newest addition to the academic anarcho-capitalist literature, books and articles that attempt to engage mainstream academia on the topic of anarchism. He begins by setting an admittedly low bar, why anarchism works better than you think. Then he takes you on historical examples to show how self-governance can produce better outcomes than governments.

I strongly recommend this book. It is the clearest exposition of the George Mason approach to anarchism. That being said, reading it, I can more clearly identify a growing gap between popular anarchism, exemplified by attendees of Porcfest, and academic anarchism.

Popular anarchism is a social program, an argument that a stateless society today can lead to better outcomes than most countries. Snapping ones fingers and replacing the state with Friedmanesque, non-territorial, dispute resolution agencies would improve social outcomes. Transitioning is, or course, tricky, but can be ignored for the current discussion.

The primary critique of anarchism is that it is unstable. If a state is inevitable, than anarchism as a social program is, at best, an unachievable ideal. Unfortunately, Leeson never investigates the inevitability of states. As such, I do not think his book has much value for those interested in the possibility of actually enacting of a modern stateless society.

The most recent research suggests the state emerges whenever there is a surplus of wealth that can be expropriated. Raul Sanchez de la Sierra studies villages in Congo, a country whose central government can barely project power outside the capital. He finds pseudo-states emerge in these villages when the price of cobalt rises. On the other hand, nothing of the sort happens when the price of gold rises, as gold is easy to conceal.

This suggests a different research path for those interested in the possibility of a modern anarchist society than Leeson has followed. Rather than investigating stateless societies, anarchists should examine the emergence and growth of states. Under what condition are states inevitable? Do those conditions still exist? Responsible advocacy of anarchism requires answers to these questions. Unfortunately, few are currently considering them.

Kill enough people and become a governor

I found a new favorite blog. It is dedicated to popularizing North, Wallis, and Weingast’s (hereafter NWW) framework of violence and social orders. The argument is that the natural type of government is vicious and predatory. It is what we see in the third world today. Modern liberal governments only really emerged in the 18th century and are still largely restricted to Europe.

A main contribution of NWW is changing the frame of reference for government action. Good governance is not the norm, but the exception. In much of the world, local tyrants are rewarded with power, rather than punished. This post details David Yau Yau, who, having lost an election, decided the best way to keep his rents was to start low-scale warfare:

On again off again since 2010, he’s led one of the most vicious, mindlessly murderous little tribal guerrilla wars you’ve never heard of for control of his home region in Jonglei State’s Pibor County, just near Ethiopia.

For his troubles, he was appointed governor of the area he terrorized. While this offends basic notions of justice, it is probably better than the alternative. Theft by governments is far less socially damaging than raiding villages and murdering their inhabitants.

Leaks and the rule of law

Conor Friedersdorf has a new piece critiquing the liberal moderate critics of Greenwald and Snowden, most recently George Packer in the Prospect. Below is an excerpt, but I recommend you read the whole thing, it is excellent:

Stepping back, notice that in the same passage, Packer contrasts the wrongs of Greenwald with the Obama Administration – the people who’ve persecuted whistleblowers, presided over domestic spying on Muslims and launched drone strikes that kill Americans without due process – yet it is Greenwald who, according to Packer, doesn’t understand that “the rule of law has to protect people regardless of politics.”

I think Friedersdorf doesn’t go far enough in his critique of how writers equivocate regarding Greenwald versus the NSA’s respect for the the rule of law. A simple interpretation of the rule of law is that the laws that apply to people also apply to government officials. The important part of the equation is government officials. No one doubts laws apply to the average citizen, it is how they constrain government officials that matters. Arguing that the actions of private individuals violates the rule of law fundamentally misconstrues the rule of law itself, as a constraint on government action.

Is there one direction in history?

I recently listened to a Free Thought podcast titled “Is There a Purpose to History?” The question at hand was historicism. I found their discussion lacking in two ways. First, they made an incorrect implication of methodological individualism. Second, they fail to consider what I think is a very strong argument for there being a direction to history.

They imply that methodological individualism means theories of group conflict are incorrect because they are not based on individual action. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discusses this precise problem in the section on methodological individualism.

When discussing social phenomena, we often talk about various “social collectivities, such as states, associations, business corporations, foundations, as if they were individual persons”(Weber 1968, 13). Thus we talk about them having plans, performing actions, suffering losses, and so forth. The doctrine of methodological individualism does not take issue with these ordinary ways of speaking, it merely stipulates that “in sociological work these collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action” (Weber 1968, 13).

They use the rejection of group conflict to reject Marx. While there are many reasons to reject Marx, his theory of group conflict is not one of them. First, Marx’s class theory strongly resembles libertarian class theory, only exploitation is defined by Marx as labor and by libertarians as theft.

Modern political economy has embraced, correctly in my view, class theories and class struggles as central. In their recent book, Why Nations Fail, Acemoglu and Robinson argue that the ruling elite often seek to exploit the general population through exclusive institutions. Only by creating inclusive institutions and getting rid of privileged classes of people can there be widespread economic prosperity.

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