Another Brick in the Wall

As a tribute to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Vulgar Moralist has translated this post by a Cuban blogger. The Cuban blogger, Yoani Sanchez, has apparently made quite a name for herself getting out information about the terrible conditions of her country. I will reproduce the Vulgar Moralist's translation here. The section in italics is the part from Yoani's blog.

The post is titled “Mafia-style kidnapping”; the scene is a gathering of dissidents and bloggers in downtown Havana – marching, as it happened, against violence. Teo is Yoani’s son.

Near 23^rd St. and in the Avenida de los Presidentes traffic circle we saw arrive, in a black, Chinese-made car, three burly strangers. “Yoani, get in the car,” one of them told me while grabbing me powerfully by the wrist. The other two moved behind Claudia Cadelo, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and a friend who accompanied us to a march against violence. It’s one of life’s ironies that it was to be an afternoon filled by blows, screams, and dirty words, what should have been a day of peace and concord. The same “attackers” called in a patrol car that took away my two companions, while Orlando and I were condemned to the car with yellow license plates, to the terrifying landscape of illegality and impunity of Armageddon.

I refused to climb into the shining Geely, and we demanded that we be shown ID or a warrant to take us away. Of course they didn’t show us any paper proving the legitimacy of our arrest. Curious bystanders crowded behind, and I was shouting, “Help, these men are trying to kidnap us.” But they stopped those who tried to interfere with a shout that revealed the ideological context of the operation: “Don’t get involved, they are counterrevolutionaries.” Faced with our resistance, they got on the phone and called someone who must have been their boss. “What do we do? They don’t want to get in the car.” I imagine the response from the other side must have been sharp, because immediately after came a frenzy of punches, shovings, they picked me up with my head facing down and tried to shove me into the car. I grabbed the door . . . they hit my knuckles . . . I managed to snatch a paper from one of them and stuffed it inside my mouth. Another frenzy of punches to make us return the document.

Orlando was already inside, immobilized by a karate hold which kept him with his face flattened against the floorboard. One of the men put his knee against my breast and the other man, from the front seat, was hitting me in the kidneys and punching my head to make me open my mouth and release the paper. In that moment, I felt I would never leave that car. “This is as far as you go, Yoani,” “This is the end of your clowning around,” said the man sitting next to the driver, who was pulling on my hair. In the back seat, a rare spectacle took place: my legs were up, my face reddened by the pressure, and my body hurting, while on the other side Orlando stunned by a man whose profession was to deliver beatings. All I could do was to grab, through his pants, that one’s testicles, in an act of desperation. I sunk in my fingernails, supposing he was going to keep crushing my breast until my last gasp. “Kill me already,” I shouted with the last breath I had, and the man from the front seat told the younger one, “Let her breathe.”

I could hear Orlando panting while the punches kept raining down on us, I thought to open the car door and leap out but there was no handle to open it from inside. We were at their mercy, and hearing Orlando’s voice encouraged me. Later he told me that he felt the same when he heard my attempts to speak . . . it said “Yoani is still alive.” They threw us out in a street of the Timba area, and a woman came near: “What’s happened to you?” . . . “A kidnapping,” I managed to say. We wept, hugging, in the middle of the sidewalk, I was thinking of Teo, God, how can I explain to him all these bruises. How can I say to him that he lives in a country where this happens, how can I look at him and tell him that his mother, for writing a blog and putting her opinions in kylobytes, has been attacked in the open street. How can I describe to him the despotic faces of those men who used violence to throw us into that car, the pleasure they took in beating us, in lifting up my skirt and dragging me half naked to the car.

I managed to see, however, a degree of fright among our attackers, the fear of the new, of what they can’t destroy because they do not understand, the terror of the bully who knows his days are numbered.

Public Goods and Collective Action

I recently explained the traditional theory of public goods as market failure, and provided a critical review. I've actually been thinking a lot about public goods lately.

Quick recap: a public good is something that is non-rivalrous, meaning that you can consume it without reducing the ability of someone else to consume it, and non-excludable, meaning you can't stop other people from enjoying the benefits even if they don't incur any of the costs.

In my opinion, the guy who really got what public good were all about was not Paul Samuelson, the man who coined the term. Samuelson only thinks about public goods in market failure terms. Public good = suboptimal market provision, therefore add the tax system to extract the funds necessary to provide the optimal amount, which will be provisioned through government. It's all about public finance; the field Samuelson pioneered. The original paper in which he introduced the term was The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure. In short, Samuelson really only is interested in government spending and demonstrating that it is appropriate in this particular circumstance.

I think that perspective is rather limited, and misses a lot of opportunities to understand how the world really works (rather than just creating opportunities for economists to pretend to be experts on how much government should spend).

The man who really got it was Mancur Olson. In The Logic of Collective Action, he got to the heart of what public goods are all about. It isn't about market failure or government spending, it's about the difficulty that groups--especially very large ones--have with getting organized to complete some goal that every member would benefit from.

Imagine the group project in school. If an A+ caliber project is produced, every member of the group benefits equally. So every member of the group has an incentive to let the other group members do all the work. But if all of them free ride, then if any project is produced at all it will be far more mediocre than the sum of the members is capable of.

The school project is a good example because it shows how Samuelson really misses the ball. The benefits of the completed project are non-rivalrous and non-excludable to the members of the group; does that mean that the government should just tax the members and provide a group project for them? That is incoherent.

Olson argues that small groups are much more effective at overcoming this problem. So the smaller the group that benefits from these public goods, the more likely that they will be provisioned.

Lately I feel like I've started seeing this logic just about everywhere. A professor recently argued that the reason you don't see more cases of majorities rebelling against minorities in history is precisely because of the collective action problem. Instead, you see the chief opposition to ruling minorities being other minorities, who no doubt will then be able to provide substantial benefits to their members should they manage a successful coup.

Why didn't the slaves in the American south get together and overthrow their masters? Each of them would have benefitted from such a successful overthrow, so none of them were willing to take on the costs (including risks) associated with the attempt. Why aren't politicians thrown out for catering to special interests over the interests of the general voting population? And so forth.

More interesting of course are the ways that groups manage to overcome this challenge. I mentoned the example of the lighthouse, where a public good was tied to an excludable, rivalrous good (the dock) to make it profitable to provision privately. Olson discusses how organizations will provide special incentives in order to get people to opt in. The AARP, for instance, is one of the biggest and most successful lobby groups around. It manages to fund its activities by providing members with special benefits--insurance, coupons, etc--in exchange for membership dues.

Olson did briefly mention those cases where the costs are so low that whether or not the public good is provisioned is, as he put it, "indeterminate". He was probably right to not consider the case so important back when he wrote the Logic, but it is of immense importance today. Understanding what happens when the costs of providing a public good are small and falling is important if you want to explain how Wikipedia's success is possible, for example.

So I've got collective action on the brain at the moment. After the semester is over, I'm going to read recent Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom's book Governing the Commons, and then maybe reread Olson's Logic. Both deal with the many emergent mechanisms for dealing with the collective action problems, albeit with different focuses.

What Economists do right, What Economists do wrong

So I tend to be pretty hard on the direction the economics profession has gone in, but obviously I do think there's a lot they do right (I am getting my MA in it, hopefully I think I'm learning something of value, right?)

I talked about how all of life is trade-offs. Economists are infamous for hammering this point. I think it was Larry Summers who said that the number of people who die in plane crashes every years should be more than zero. What he meant was not that he believed plane crashes were a good thing, but that basically the only way to get to zero would be to suspend all plane flights entirely, the cost to society of which would be far greater. He was saying that you can't abolish plane crashes entirely without paying some other cost. There is a trade-off.

More recently, Mike Munger has made the more wonderfully evil remark that an economist is a person who believes, as a matter of moral rightness, that the infant mortality rate ought to be more than zero. Again, his point is not that we like dead babies--but that the cost to society of driving the infant mortality rate to zero might include, say, increasing the mortality of people who are five or six, or something else. There is a trade-off there.

Where I break with mainstream economics is in the belief that there is one specific trade-off in every situation that is the correct one. Or, more technically, the "Pareto optimal" one.

Economists are right to harp on the existence of trade-offs where people find them unpleasant or don't consider them. They are wrong to treat the balancing of trade-offs as if it is something that can be accomplished by some objective--worse yet, mathematical--criteria.

Trade-offs exist. The particular trade-offs we make is to begin with a matter of luck, and secondly a matter of value judgments. Luck, because the decisions we can make in life are always constrained by the hand that we are dealt. Value judgments, because what we consider a cost and what we consider a benefit is itself inherently defined by personal values.

The idea that you could pretend that costs and benefits are uniform across individuals, and fit some mathematical formula on top of that assumption, is simply absurd. Sadly, that is basically what the majority of the work being done in economics today consists of. And that is why I am getting my MA, rather than pursuing a PhD and going into the world of academic economics.

All of Life is Trade-Offs

Every decision made is any number of alternative decisions sacrificed. Every benefit is enjoyed at the expense of some other benefit that might have been attained.

Put simply, you can't get something for nothing.

We face trade-offs all the time, on a hundred thousand different fronts. There's choosing which book you're going to read, but then there's choosing whether or not to read right now at all, rather than going out with friends or watching TV. There's which class' homework to start on and then there's whether or not to spend time doing homework at all at this moment.

These are the trade-offs of the here and now, but the most important trade-offs in our lives are often over time. Using heroin may be extremely enjoyable right now, but it comes with a heavy cost tomorrow, a cost that rises each time. The recovering alcoholic can choose to indulge today, but if they slip and end up having more than "just one drink", they risk undoing all of the progress up until that point.

This doesn't mean that giving up something now for something later is always the right choice. I'm not really interesting in talking about what the right thing is at the moment; my interest is in trade-offs.

For instance; it may be that my scholarly ambitions will profit far more from sitting down to read The Wealth of Nations right now than from watching NCIS. But I don't need to spend every waking moment investing in my future. If you give up too much to that end, you will end up with nothing to enjoy in the present.

The nature of a trade-off is not just giving up something to get something you might prefer, but to emphasize that you do give something up. Investing in the future is a good idea in concept, but Carpe diem is also a good idea--in concept. Everything involving enjoying something at any point in time sounds great. But I don't think it's a very good idea to talk about living in the moment or building a better tomorrow without keeping in mind that you will have to give up something either way, and at every point along the spectrum.

All of life is trade-offs, and I think understanding that fact is an important part of leading a meaningful life.

Meaningful

Stephen has a very thoughtful post up about the things that give us satisfaction, as opposed to the things that are just stimulating.

I made a list of the things that satisfied me. Reading a book. Cooking a meal. Time with my wife. Playing with my daughter. Writing more than 140 characters. All things that can’t be rushed, and things that make me feel calm.

Today I took the day off from work. There were a couple of reasons; there was a crash-course on the process for submitting my thesis once it's completed, and the company I work for doesn't want everyone using up all their PTO in December. In any case, I found myself in the Fairfax campus for most of the day.

Three different people asked me what I wanted to do once I got my Master's. I don't really have a clear-cut answer other than some vague aspirations and dreams.

I want to live a meaningful life, to do things that bring me the kind of satisfaction that Stephen wrote about. I want to write, research, start a family. Some people in this world are lucky enough to make a living doing something that they find meaningful. I can hope to one day be one of those people, and do my best to seize any opportunities that present themselves. But I have low expectations here--I don't feel entitled to be so lucky, and am satisfied to find meaning in the life I lead outside of whatever my job is.

In this regard I am really inspired by my father, who has pursued a couple of really big research projects in his spare time. I know that no matter what I do to make money, I can do research and write.

But the most important part of a meaningful life is the people in it.

In that regard I couldn't be more fortunate.

Vulgar Morality has moved

So update your bookmarks--it is now vulgarmorality.wordpress.com. Radio Userland is going the way of the dodo, putting the Vulgar Moralist into this state of exile.

Making Claims About the World

Really enamored with one Charles Manski at the moment. His book reads like the practitioners' version of How to Lie with Statistics. He emphasizes the importance of thinking hard, and being earnest, about what we cannot say we know with any certainty, in order to gain a better understanding of what we can say. It's not an easy read, though for people with a more grounded in statistics and mathematics than I am will probably find it an easy read--though fruitful.

Reading Manski has me thinking about a seeming contradiction in my beliefs and my actions. I believe, like Manski does, that people are too quick to sacrifice scientific integrity in order to be able to draw strong conclusions. I very much believe in conceding how little it is possible to know. If you can't draw any firm conclusion from something, then I think the right thing to do is to simply say so.

On the other hand, I love theory. And theory involves pontificating about general rules that explain some part of the natural world. Yet I believe, along with Hume, that pinning theory to reality is problematic if not at times outright impossible.

What I'm saying is that I feel like in many ways I have both a skepticism of and an affinity for bold claims about the world.

But in reality there is no conflict. What I'm really skeptical of is claims of authority. I believe, with Sir Karl Popper, that "there are all kinds of sources of our knowledge, but none has authority." When I go off into theory land, I try to avoid claiming some special status that allows me to distinguish which theories have authority and which don't. As a fairly arrogant fellow, I often fall short of this standard but it is the ethical standard that I believe in.

Intellectual life would not be very interesting without theory, but from a methodological standpoint the golden rule should always be humility.