Pleasure Counts

You’re working for a government bureaucracy, and your division is tasked with doing a cost-benefit analysis of the country music industry. (That's country music, not the country's music.) You take your best shot. Resources are consumed in the production of country music. We’ll have to count those. Labor, equipment, physical media like CDs and cassettes. Plus there are those mega-concerts. People travel sometimes great distances to see them, so there is the occasional auto accident. We’ll have to count those, too. Plus the gasoline consumed and the resulting carbon emissions. Your team spends a while coming up with considerations like these and tallying up the cost estimates, and it’s starting to look like a really bad deal.

Wait a minute, someone says. “Don’t some people enjoy country music?” Duh. It’s terribly obvious now. Those resources don’t just get chucked into a black hole. They go into producing something that people enjoy.  Since people are willing to shell out their own money to cover this production, you can surmise that it’s probably a good deal. The country music industry would not exist if it didn’t generate some kind of consumer surplus. Those traffic deaths? A cost paid willingly by every motorists who decides to take a trip, and this reasoning applies just as well to killed or injured motorists who weren’t headed to a country music festival. This enterprise of cost-benefit analyzing an innocuous industry was silly from the get-go, because everyone failed to consider that other people’s pleasure counts. You might think they are philistines and their preferred art is trashy, but you would probably count their pleasure in any attempt at a cost-benefit analysis.

So what changes if we are talking about something less innocuous? How about skiing? How about horseback riding? Lawn darts? Trampolines? There is more danger in these pass times, but most people would still agree to count the joy these hobbies bring to their enthusiasts. You might even overrule the hobbyists, deciding that they are irrationally underestimating the risk, or irrationally unresponsive to a well-estimated risk. ("You underestimated the risk of a broken arm by an order of magnitude? Overruled! And you correctly estimated the risk but are failing to respond to it the way you respond to similar risks? Also overruled! Your hobby is banned!") But you’d probably feel weird about taking a big red marker and X-ing out the “benefits” side of the ledger.

What about drugs? Alcohol? Tobacco? Pleasure still counts. Again you might think the cost-benefit analysis comes out in favor of a ban. (It takes completely unreasonable assumptions to make this work, btw.) But pleasure should still count in the “benefits” column. I feel like there is this nasty tendency to completely dismiss the pleasure people get from their vices, as if it’s not a real thing or not worthy of our consideration. There are people who indulge their vices without ever having a problem. It doesn’t interfere with their work or family life, and they don’t do it excessively enough to damage their health. Even in people who do harm to themselves, it makes more sense to think of their habit as something pleasurable with offsetting costs, rather than something that is all cost. I’ve had a few hangovers. I don’t think of them as erasing the joy of the previous night. Rather it’s a price I paid for taking things a little too far.  If we are trying to treat people decently, as fellow human beings with their own sense of agency and and their own preferences, their pleasure ought to count. Even if it seems strange to us.

I think some people might scratch their heads at my previouspost about drug prohibition. The supply and demand diagrams were drawn to show the social welfare consequences of various drug control regimes, a large part of which is the consumer surplus. Consumer surplus is the benefit to the drug users above and beyond what they are willing to pay. If someone buys heroin for $25 but would pay up to $100 for it, his consumer surplus is ($100 - $25 =) $75. This might seem like an alien concept to some people. The welfare calculation is counting it as a good thing when a heroin user buys heroin?

(My argument actually doesn’t much depend on someone having to bite this bullet. It's amazing how robust the argument for drug legalization is. You can throw out the most obvious benefits, make unrealistic assumptions in favor of prohibition, and still get a pretty strong verdict in favor of legalization. At any rate, the conclusion that a tax is better than a ban is true whether you count consumer surplus or not.)

If counting consumer surplus for drugs seems odd, return to the country music cost-benefit analysis and ask yourself what changes. The costs are higher for a risky hobby? Sure, but you should still count the benefits. The pleasure is cheap and tawdry and not real? Some would say the same of country music, I’m sure (or whatever music you like). The pleasure is still real and is experienced by a living, feeling human being. Usually when one human being is incapable of considering another’s emotions and feelings, we consider it a pathology. We describe the person who disregards others’ feelings with a word that ends in “opath”. When it comes to puritanical social alarmists dismissing their fellow citizens’ cheap vices, the lack of empathy is just as harmful. It’s worse than that, really. A sociopath is usually found out and somehow censured for their bad behavior. The puritan’s inability to empathize is often socially validated and even embodied in official public policy. This really needs to stop.

Even smart people fall for this error. In an attempt at a thorough cost-benefit analysis of marijuana legalization, Scott Alexander adds some notes on missed considerations after commenters respond:

EDIT: People in the comments have pointed out several important factors left out, including:

– Some people enjoy smoking marijuana

…

 In other words, he pretty much got a "legalize" verdict while ignoring the biggest benefit. You would get a similar result with other substances.