Ideas

Typology of property and anarchists

I wrote two pieces arguing for a typology of property rights. Short story shorter. Because property is a relation among men with respect to an object, we can classify property according to the relationship the property owner has with other people. The other people can be family/friends, anonymous strangers, and government. Property can also be distinguished by contracts and personal property which has the threat of violence and theft. These distinctions result in this chart.

Contracts Violence/theft
Family/friends 1 2
Anonymous strangers 3 4
Government 5 6

Below is a quote from Further typologies of property rights. 

The second part is more interesting, how to enforce contracts among anonymous strangers, 3 in the table, and how to ensure there is no violence and theft against anonymous strangers 4. Most economists are unclear on the distinction between the two options, however it is an important one. There is much evidence, international trade being the primary one, that state enforcement is unnecessary to protect contracts among anonymous strangers.  However, as Gurri pointed out, the state is likely necessary to protect against violent expropriation from anonymous strangers.

As such, the state exists less to protect private property per se, and more to protect against a specific type of encroachment on private property. In fact, given that many major American cities did not have police departments until the mid 19th century, it seems state exist primary to prevent large scale violence.

I would like to use this framework to critique academic anarchists. They tend to focus on 3 in the table, whether the state is necessary to enforce contracts among anonymous strangers. Some academic anarchists also investigate whether stable rules can emerge in chaotic situations. However, both research agendas miss the hard question 4, whether a non-monopoly of force can prevent theft and violence by anonymous strangers in a modern city like environment or larger.

To the extent anarchism is a normative project, whether it is a desirable alternative to modern first world governments is an important question. This requires a mechanism to protect against anonymous third party theft and violence. David Friedman provided the theoretical mechanism, as well as an important case study. Unfortunately, there has been little focus on this question since.

kant

Kant on reason and happiness
Lately I have been, ever so slowly, churning my way through some of the philosophical classics one tends to have never read if one studies finance and economics in school.  Naturally, I crossed paths with Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. The German philosopher had just begun to dive into the function of human reason in general when his subsequent passage stunned me:

In actual fact too we find that the more a cultivated reason concerns itself with the aim of enjoying life and happiness, the farther does man get away from true contentment.  This is why there arises in many, and that too in those who have made most trial of this use of reason, if they are only candid enough to admit it, a certain degree of misology – that is, a hatred of reason; for when they balance all the advantage they draw, I will not say from thinking out all the arts of ordinary indulgence, but even from science (which in the last resort seems to them to be also an indulgence of the mind), they discover that they have in fact only brought more trouble on their heads than they have gained in the way of happiness.  On this account they come to envy, rather than to despise, the more common run of men, who are closer to the guidance of mere natural instinct, and who do not allow their reason to have much influence on their conduct.  So far we must admit that the judgement of those who seek to moderate – and even to reduce below zero – the conceited glorification of such advantages as reason is supposed to provide in the way of happiness and contentment with life is in no way soured or ungrateful to the goodness which the world is governed.

Kant had captured the spirit of what had nagged me plenty of times over the past handful of years.  Was deeper philosophical and scientific pondering counterproductive to contentment?  Is ignorance, in fact, bliss?

While I very much enjoyed giving critical thought to large, fundamental questions I had only paid mental lip-service to before, the possibility of unsettling conclusions unsettled me.  If my priors on the efficacy of the minimum wage or the desirability of liberal immigration turn out to be dead-wrong, I’ll get over it.  On the other hand, if human consciousness is a mere illusion and the universe evolved along a deterministic, meaningless path, well, that one’s a bit tougher to swallow. Forget the challenge of defending a libertarian political worldview in a world where no one is ever responsible for any action; entertaining the thought that oneself is a robot for the first time isn’t a lot of fun.  Existential crises are accurately named.  Besides, who can blame you for supporting a particular viewpoint anyways, if you don’t actually choose to support it?  And how can any of the criticisms that I levy, in turn, be legitimate if free will is a myth?  And so on, and so forth.

Or perhaps human agency does exist but occupies a much smaller role in explaining action than I initially attributed it.  If intuition fills that newly created void, then the potential implications are troubling.  Intuition may be somewhat malleable to the human will, but nobody gets to pick their genes (at least up until now) and Kant awards you no points for intuition, concluding that an action’s “authentic moral worth” is driven by an inviolable sense of duty and not “inclinations” or utilitarian calculations alone.  Since a lot of beneficial acts, in my opinion, do not stem from a sense of duty, deeply reasoned or otherwise, “good” people suddenly look a lot less good.  But it gets worse.  If conformance to duty is the only source of moral worth than are people who do not act from duty yet are gifted “good” inclinations on precisely the same moral standing as those who got the short end of the stick with “bad” ones?

I went down similar logical rabbit holes elsewhere but never really reached any hard conclusions on most of the “big” questions, just very weakly held beliefs.  To a certain degree, I have come to accept a transition from taking metaphysical and religious priors for granted to answering “I don’t know” and “yeah, maybe” a lot more.  Still, coming out the other side without clear answers didn’t feel much better than some of the anxiety on the way in.

David Bazan has some pithy lyrics that come to mind from an album chronicling his fallout with religion.

digging up the root of my confusion / if no one planted it how does it grow / and why are some hell-bent on there being an answer / while some are quite content to answer I don’t know

I can’t fully arrive at Bazan’s latter group, and that bothers me.  Most of the big questions still bother me.  Employing reason where intuition and untested assumptions once toiled didn’t advance my position on any axis of happiness and incremental peace from such exploration didn’t materialize in the end.  While some emerge from such a journey with greater or equal conviction, blissful ignorance and blind acceptance can seem very peaceful if that conviction fades instead.  This is the nagging thought that gave initial weight to the quoted excerpt above.  I had suppressed it on a few occasions and reluctantly half-recognized its presence on others, yet never fully addressed it until Kant stuck it in my face.  Maybe the answers are unsettling, and reason is the only way to find them, and therefore ignorance is bliss and reason torture.  If you didn’t know a question existed, it’s impossible to let potential answers bother you.  Reason is responsible for discovering not only the answers, but the questions as well.

As for now, I don’t regret thinking some of the bigger issues through as they seem to have left me no worse off.  Reason can still be a very powerful tool for good, even if that doesn’t perfectly translate to happiness and even if liberals overestimate its importance.  I can’t sign on to the “ignorance is bliss” mantra in this context, but the possibility still lurks, re-surfacing every time I catch myself wondering about determinism or spooky physics and getting a bit unnerved.  But perhaps my reading of Kant is much too negative, after all, the gift of reason as a means to developing a good and pure will seems in line with what a divine being might impart to agents also given free will.  Should that be my reading of it?

I don’t know. Add it to the list I suppose.

Daemonette

“That’s gross,” and other hedonic considerations

You may be familiar with Truffaut’s famous quote, “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film,” which captures the quandry of inadvertently glorifying war by giving it a cinematic representation. I think this is quote is better rendered the more general a “there is no such thing as an anti-hedonistic film.” Or at least it’s really hard. Cinema is an engaging sensory experience, and good and bad are most easily expressed through an engagement of appreciation or an engagement of revulsion. This convention obviously extends beyond movies and into media like books, and it was in fact a book that I read recently that got me thinking about this whole thing.

For anyone who thinks I don’t give feminism a fair shake, I will have you know that I’ve read the radical feminist sci-fi novel Woman on the Edge of Time. On a related note, I have black friends. Anyway, the short of it is that in the novel there’s two potential futures presented to the 1970’s present-day heroine. The first is a Marxist pastoral “utopia” in which gender has been essentially been abolished through Brave New World-like biotechnology. Pretty creepy, but that’s a discussion for another article.

The second future is a hellish capitalist dystopia, where most people are part of a slave-like underclass that are little more than walking organ banks for the rich elite. Women are, of course, particularly oppressed, being kept as ignoramuses who are only valued for their appearance – they are surgically modified to have grotesquely exaggerated sexual characteristics. The grotesqueness is really driven home to let the reader feel just how bad this potential future really is.

Is sickening excess the logical consequence of our unchained material appetites? Of course it isn’t – actual hedonism, by definition, always finds the sweet spot. Excess is, by definition, anti-hedonic. Intentionally eating so much cake to become nauseous isn’t something that people do. Similarly, people find cartoonishly enhanced women revolting; if they didn’t, the author wouldn’t be able to use such a thing as a cautionary tale to scare the reader straight. Showing good or bad in terms of the hedonic calculus is easy, but you can’t have it as both terrifyingly revolting and believably alluring.

Perhaps it is, then, a cautionary tale against changing social norms of the grotesque? Even so, we would need to establish a moral standard outside of “appreciation vs. revulsion” to say that this change of taste is more than merely a value neutral disjunction between our revulsion and their appreciation. After all, the supposed utopia is just as radically different from our current cultural standards as the dystopia is.

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Jim Webb, Jonathan Chait, and the left’s moment of truth

It remains the most peculiar feature of contemporary liberalism that during these waning years of the Obama era it is still in search of a set of organizing principles.  In practice, of course, appeals to increasingly crude identity politics reigns supreme, with what passes for an overarching narrative being the so-called “coalition of the ascendant.”  The pernicious assumption behind this idea is that everything can be reduced to demographics and that no appeal to common sense or conviction is necessary; the advantage of such intellectual laziness, of course, being the support it lends to the self-satisfaction that to be aligned with the naturally harmonious and enlightened coalition of all racial and sexual/gender minorities is to be on the right side of history, and all critics therefore self-evidently illegitimate.

Jonathan Chait’s much-discussed essay of this past week identifies and deplores this phenomenon with the aged and less than satisfying label “PC culture.”  The responses from the left have ranged from the unbowed dogmatic intersectionalist call to arms to the consensus-liberal denial that Chait has aptly labeled “anti-anti-PC” to the sincere radical who agrees with Chait but still feels a need to shoot the messenger.  The point they all seem to be missing is that Chait’s argument is not so much about free speech in abstract principle but about the mainstreaming of this phenomenon in American liberalism.  Indeed, the nerve that Chait seems to have struck so deeply in many on the left is to have pointed out that what has made radicalism so painfully irrelevant in the post-Cold War era is that virtually without exception, it has been hobbled by the same affliction as liberalism: the idolatry of identity politics.

It is doubtful that Chait intended this, for as his detractors have not tired of pointing out, he is a product of The New Republic in its heyday as a bastion of what leftists have obnoxiously labeled “neoliberalism.”  (Speaking for myself, though I would have still labeled Chait a left-neocon as recently as five or six years ago, he is far from the only alumnus of Marty Peretz’s TNR to have proven thoughtful and worth reading once freed from his grip).  In other words, Chait has historically identified himself with that faction of American liberalism that first elevated cultural appeals at the expense of bread-and-butter economics or any appeal to historical liberal principles.  As Ross Douthat points out in his Sunday column:

What’s interesting about this ambition is that it’s about to intersect with a political campaign in which the champion of liberalism will be a Clinton — when the original Clintonism, in its Sister Souljah-ing, Defense of Marriage Act-signing triangulation on social issues, is a big part of what the new cultural left wants to permanently leave behind. . . . Can Hillary, the young feminist turned cautious establishmentarian, harness the energy of the young and restless left? Or will the excesses associated with that energy end up dividing her coalition, as it has divided liberal journalists of late?

Enter the most likely and formidable alternative to Hillary in the coming primary, Jim Webb.  To begin on a personal note: in 2006, I had just moved to New York and finished college, kicking over the last traces of illusions about the radical left and any prospects for it.  It was first seeing Jim Webb on The Colbert Report that summer that made me think I could in fact stand to be a Democrat again.

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The rise of the mega-title: How gratuitous, list-filled names optimized books for Internet age sales, conquered the market, and made titles more boring

An interesting trend has developed in the world of books over the last fifty years. The emergence of the excessively long and overly informative book title has been swift and decisive. Once a rare style of titling, it now fills best-seller lists and Amazon search pages like sand fills a bucket. It took no prisoners. It came, it saw, it search engine-optimized.

Complete with a colon marking the break between the work’s main title and a subtitle attempting to indicate its content, the trend of the new literary mega-title isn’t going away anytime soon. If you’re someone who even occasionally shops for new books, then surely you know what I’m talking about.

Here are a few examples from current popular titles:

Gridlock U.S.A.: How America’s Traffic Problems Damage our Health and Wealth

Please and Thank You: Why Manners Matter More in a Digital World

Have you read or heard of either these books? Probably not, because I just made them up, as you might (or might not) be able to tell. It took me all of ten seconds. They were the first things that came to mind. Yet if you saw them prominently displayed on a Barnes & Noble shelf tomorrow they’d fit right in. Book titles seem to be getting longer and simultaneously worse.

Lest you think I am overreacting, or that I am whining about some imaginary trend in book naming (although I certainly am whining), I took a look at New York Times bestseller lists over the years. In the nonfiction category, which is particularly at risk for this type of title mumbo-jumbo, 80 percent, or 12 out of 15 selections in the most recent hardcover list, are of the mega-title variety. They total a whopping 137 words altogether, or just over nine each.

Going back twenty-five years and taking a peek at the nonfiction NYT list from December 1989, I find seven out of fifteen names, or 47 percent using colons for a grand total of 120 words, equal to eight words per title. There’s a trend emerging.

Turning the dial back yet another twenty-five years, the December 1964 nonfiction list yields ten winners with only three containing subtitles. The entire group clocks in at thirty-one words, a paltry three per book. Moreover, two of the three titles with colons pertain to biographies along the lines of Harlow: An Intimate Biography by Irving Shulman, which made the cut at a mere four words. (the NYT lists used can be found here.)

Three words per title is how you get it done. It’s simple and classy and doesn’t jam some garbled condensed summary onto the cover. The 1964 list contains such mouthfuls as Markings, Reminiscences, and The Kennedy Wit while 2014 boasts the quick and efficient Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War Two’s Most Audacious General and You Can’t Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?

These are not book titles, they are short essays. Fifty years ago, two-part titles functioned merely to stylishly identify what category of book you were actually looking at. Today we get full-blown sentences worthy of a third grade English exercise following the colon (e.g. Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution.) A book title is not the appropriate place to demonstrate your command of comma use.

So why did this trend emerge in the first place and why has it become so dominant, so fast?
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Argument vs Club

Sorry to hear that, but let’s remember that I’m the real victim here

Words are useful insofar as they have publicly agreed upon definitions. From definitions, we can have discourse that leads to some sort of useful truth. But what happens when the meat and potatoes of a discourse is made up of terms that have a powerful connotation, but no precise definition? You get people talking past each other in a fog of emotion and cognitive bias.

Slate Star Codex started the new year with a very long but very important post on the a specific expression of feminism’s contempt for nerdy men. It concerns an MIT professor, Scott Aaronson, opening up about being tormented throughout his adolescence by crippling self-hatred issues.

(sigh) Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. You can call that my personal psychological problem if you want, but it was strongly reinforced by everything I picked up from my environment: to take one example, the sexual-assault prevention workshops we had to attend regularly as undergrads, with their endless lists of all the forms of human interaction that “might be” sexual harassment or assault, and their refusal, ever, to specify anything that definitely wouldn’t be sexual harassment or assault. I left each of those workshops with enough fresh paranoia and self-hatred to last me through another year.

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.

Of course, I was smart enough to realize that maybe this was silly, maybe I was overanalyzing things. So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.

Aaronson goes on to explain that he was so tormented that he’s tried to castrate and kill himself. So what useful truth to feminists have for him? It’s made clear that he needs to recognize that his misery is necessarily of a lower grade than what women feel. Women are oppressed and men are not, so no matter how bad he feels, it’s never oppression-grade bad, whatever that means. Secondly, we are to believe that his own assessment that feminism made him feel the way he did is wrong, and that It’s actually the patriarchy. For whatever reason, whenever gender is part of the story, the focus has to be on women.

The best example of this is an article posted on the New Statesman. Laurie Penny wrote an article explaining Aaronson’s folly for him, titled “On Nerd Entitlement.” Jesus Christ, we’re off to a bad start. I am going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that the tears shed for him were not of the Crocodile variety, but they sort of look that way. She is, intentionally or not, using one man’s heartfelt expression of suffering to make it about her. His painful collision with the diktats of a powerful cultural force was made into a passion play about about how that very same cultural force is the medicine that he needs to learn to learn to like. The problem I have with this way of approaching the issue isn’t that it’s mean, it’s that it presumes that all of society has taken certain vague concepts as gospel.

By using the loaded terms “patriarchy” and “oppression,” feminists are begging the question that these things actually exist in line with their definition. The fact is that those are both controversial and non-falsifiable concepts. There’s a few things that, if they are actually interested in a discourse, feminists need to establish.

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