Let's Talk Policy. Not Motives. Not Virtue. Just Policy.

What passes for "political" commentary these days usually has nothing whatsoever to do with policy. If anyone is actually interested in discussing policy, I'm here and I'm listening. 

My great disappointment about this election (aside from the obvious) is that almost none of the discussion has been about policy. There has been very little discussion of the exact proposals of Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton and the relative costs, merits, or economics of such proposals. It’s mostly been rabid denunciations. It’s been about who is or isn’t a “bad person.” It’s been about political tribalism, signaling of cultural identities, and signaling one’s opposition to someone else’s cultural identity. Not that this is *always* uncalled for. Sometimes there is evil in plain sight and it's hard to resist calling a spade a spade. The problem is that this tactic of denunciation is a non-starter if your goal is persuasion. A sweet zinger or a harshly worded rhetorical flourish will get you a hive-five from your ideological buddies, but it’s not going to win the hearts and minds of your ideological opposites. On the other hand, it's possible to have a reasonable discussion of the relative merits of different policy proposals.

I’ll probably be talking a great deal about Mr. Trump’s policy proposals. When he is grossly mistaken, as he is with immigration and trade policy, I will explain why it’s a bad policy and why the effects will be harmful. Where he picks a *good* policy, as he might if he’s serious about cleaning up regulatory morass and ending taxation on capital, I’ll explain why it’s a good policy and say, “Well, good on Trump for this one thing.” I expect any readers to *not* interpret these one-offs as a general endorsement of Trump. When I am being critical, I will not lead with “Trump is a horrible person.” But I won’t hesitate to point out that he’s picked an awful, harmful, possibly deadly policy position. Sometimes it suffices to say, “This is what Mr. Trump wants to do to us. These are the likely consequences. Draw your own conclusions about his personal character.” I don’t necessarily care what kinds of sinister motives or misguided feelings Mr. Trump harbors in his heart. I don’t care whether Mr. Trump’s anti-trade position is motivated by enmity toward the Chinese or amity toward American factory workers. I care about the actual harm he is proposing to do, not his motive for causing that harm.

I have tried to discuss policy here on my page. I occasionally post something about policy analysis on my Facebook page with a few words or a few paragraphs of my own commentary. The response is typically underwhelming. When I post something crassly partisan (which I do rarely), I get a bunch of thumbs-ups or angry comments. This differential in response rates discourages me. I also get the occasional, “LOL, I never know what you’re talking about!” I’m talking about all the same shit that everyone else is talking about, it’s just that I’m trying to get the details right. I’ll keep it up, because I know that there are five or six people out there who are interested in this mode of discussion. I suspect there are many more who read but never comment or respond but who nevertheless mull over the new ideas presented here. If you’re in that group, keep it up! You’re awesome! We need way more of you!

The “Name a Logical Fallacy” Fallacy

Here’s another item for my “bad comments” list. This is different from the argument from fallacy (or fallacy fallacy), which involves rejecting a conclusion because an argument given for it is fallacious. (“My hair is a bird. Therefor the earth revolves around the sun.”)

In this fallacy, the fallacious reasoner names a logical fallacy, and instead of addressing the argument given or engaging in the discussion, spends all his time speaking about the logical fallacy. I’ve encountered this a few times.

In one thread a few years ago, someone pointed out that the amount spent annually to house a prisoner is more than the cost of year of college. It was in the context of arguing for spending more on college (I think). It’s an irrelevant comparison, and I said so. (Is the argument that we should send the criminal to college instead of prison? Like, even a murderer or a rapist? Is the argument that we should send everyone to college so that nobody ends up becoming a criminal? Is this a plausible strategy for reducing crime?) Someone piped up with “Nice straw-man dude!” without any elaboration. As far as I know I didn’t commit the straw-man fallacy, which is when you attack an argument different from the one that was offered. I asked for clarification. Instead of discussing the topic with me or explaining how I had made an error in reasoning, he kept repeating the words “straw-man” and posting links to internet dictionaries defining the term. There was even a "Take a course in logic, dude."  Someone arguing in good faith would have said, “No, your argument is against *this* position, which nobody has taken. Our actual position is the following…” No such clarifying dialogue happened. My interlocutor was happy to insist that I’d committed a fallacy and to describe the fallacy rather than engage in conversation.

All of this is to just give an example, which is really a composite of several different failed attempts to communicate over the past few years. I’m not picking on any one person. I think it’s good to know about logical fallacies and to worry about committing them, but I’ve seen how they can make people lazy. As in, “Ah ha! That sounds kind of like a logical fallacy, which we all know is wrong. So I win!” I have a book called An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. I plan on reading it to my kids when they're old enough to understand. But I'm going to have to caution them not to just name the fallacy when they spot it. That's not enough. You have to explain how a bad argument fits into a given fallacy category. In fact, if you're having an honest discussion, you should be able to explain why an argument is bad without naming a fallacy, and an honest interlocutor should understand the error without reference to a canonical list of sins. 

How Much Should the Legal System Respond to Public Outrage?

“After all the outrage on social media over the not guilty verdict (or light sentence), we’re going to have a re-trial. Don’t worry, folks. We’ll get ‘im!”

Does anyone actually wish the system worked this way?

I’ll be fair and say that a few people (very few) are thoughtful and nuanced enough to actually ask for some kind of policy change or concrete structural reform amidst their outrage. And I’ll generously grant that this is what many others are asking for, if sometimes inarticulately or unintelligibly. But I get the strong sense that commenters are asking for a *specific verdict* to be reconsidered. Even if they are just asking for similar future cases to be decided differently, I’m very uneasy with the notion that judges and juries are considering “social media backlash” as a factor in their decision-making, and in such a way that it would result in a harsher verdict than otherwise. I don't like the idea of individual cases being decided so as to even out some societal injustice. 

If I have a tin ear here, and all the outrage is really just a call to even out the underlying injustices, then I apologize for this irrelevant post. It's just that much of what I see and hear doesn't support this more reasonable interpretation of what's being demanded.

You can say things like “But this story highlights a more general trend of blah blah blah…” But this is wrong, because no one story indicates an overall trend. It’s just one data-point. Even if we got all the policies right and made all the right institutional changes, you’d *still* have the occasional blunder, the bone-headed decision by a judge, or the head-scratching verdict by a jury, or the woeful mishandling of a motorist by a police officer. We’d still have the occasional outrage-inducing blunder-story, even in this “perfected policy” world, and we’d have run out of policy levers to address them. Perfection in the sense of eliminating all errors is not possible. Perfection in the sense of minimizing errors is possible. (Or at any rate minimizing the costs of errors within the constraints of acceptable error-prevention costs.) I would advise anyone reading to not give too much credit to any one news story, even if you think you’re noticing a “pattern.” You simply can’t paste headlines together into a coherent worldview. 

Stop Trying to Regulate the Sharing Economy

From Fortune, an article titled New York Just Cracked Down on Airbnb With a New Law:

Things aren’t going in Airbnb’s favor in New York.
On Friday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law a controversial bill that makes it illegal to advertise short-term rentals that violate New York City’s rules—and imposes steep fines to the violators. New York City’s regulations prohibit rentals for less than 30 days without the host being present—also known as entire-home listings.

These attempts to regulate the sharing economy are really pointless. These are regulations that probably should never have existed in the first place, and now a completely new thing is being crammed into a generations-out-of-date regulatory structure.

A left-wing version of the narrative is that the regulations are a foregone conclusion, and Airbnb and Uber are evil and cynical for trying to flout them. I don’t buy this framing. I think it gloriously misses the point and papers over the possibility that regulating business the way we do *might* be a bad idea. That’s kind of the point. When people voluntarily transact with each other, and a regulation makes that transaction impossible, that means government has imposed a cost on those parties. It would be nice to see *some* acknowledgement that regulation can be costly or wrong-headed. Technology is making it easier for people to transact with each other, and government is making it harder. That’s what’s happening here. It’s easier to hook up someone who wishes to sell his labor to someone who wishes to buy it. It’s easier to hook up someone with an empty car seat with someone who needs a ride. It’s easier to hook up someone who needs a place to stay with someone who has an empty room or basement. The buyers in this market get needed stuff more cheaply, and the sellers can earn some extra income. That’s what economic growth looks like. Every little regulation makes these transactions more costly, which ensures that at least some of them won’t happen. In some extreme cases, they force the Ubers and the Airbnbs to exit a state or a city entirely.

Some people are very worried about economic stagnation and weak economic growth for the middle class. Okay, so let’s stop hindering progress. Stop giving petty bureaucrats veto-power over consensual transactions between adults. Capitalist acts between consenting adults ought to be allowed.

How Safe is the Dakota Access Pipeline?

Let me just start off by saying that the title of this post is a real question. I’m not being coy. I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m not going to surprise the reader with “Completely safe, so suck it!” or “Not safe at all, so suck it!” But I’m not just asking for me. I’d like to get others to consider the question. Perhaps failing to side with the “right” team will make me the target of internet outrage, but I’m going to try anyway and I will simply ignore the unreasonable people who don’t like to think about trade-offs and relative risks. This is going to be another post where I’m not arguing for a conclusion, I’m just trying to articulate a trade-off.

I recently saw some maps of the pipeline.  It was a line extending from North Dakota to South Dakota to Iowa to Illinois, with some pink shading around it to indicate what communities might be affected by it. Someone took the pink shading to mean, “These regions are threatened by the pipeline!” but I found this to be misleading without having any estimates of 1) the risk that the pipeline would leak and 2) the harm that would be unleashed if it were to leak. You could just as easily draw a line extending from one major airport to the next implying that everyone in the path is in imminent danger of having an airplane fall on their heads, implicitly multiplying this by the millions of flights that take place each year. Of course the chance of an airplane crashing into you is so vanishingly small as to be irrelevant, but still non-zero. I don’t think anyone takes seriously the notion that we should ban air travel because it imposes such an irrelevant cost to third-parties. We all just accept that the economic benefit of air travel trumps the minor risk that an airplane will kill someone who didn’t consent to the risk (as opposed to the passengers and flight crew, who knowingly consent to the risk).

Now, certainly it’s wrong for me to pull out a fully loaded six-shooter, point it at your head and pull the trigger. It’s almost-as-surely wrong to pull out a six-shooter with one bullet in a random chamber, point it at your head and pull the trigger. (I should say 1/6^th as surely, but still pretty damn surely!) Nobody tolerates this kind of risk. But what if the gun has ten thousand chambers and only one bullet? A million chambers? A trillion? And the gun-slinger derives some significant benefit from pulling the trigger? Suppose that in that one-in-ten thousand event, the results aren’t fatal but just annoying or costly. Maybe you don’t get your brains blown out, but simply take one in the shoulder. Or perhaps, in the event that the gun fires, you have the opportunity to pay some price to avoid taking the bullet at all, and in fact perhaps the gun-slinger can pre-commit to paying said cost in the event of a firing. (I am stealing the “million-chamber revolver” example from many people, but I believe I first heard of it from David Friedman. Couldn’t tell you which book it came from, though.)

Some people are arguing that total aggregate risk of oil spills will *decrease* if the pipeline gets built. Supposedly pipelines are less prone to oil spills than the alternative: moving oil tank cars by rail. This seems reasonable enough. In the past few years there have been plenty of high-profile oil spills and even explosions of oil moved by rail. If this view is correct, we’re not just arbitrarily subjecting an Indian nation to risk, we’re re-directing risk that is currently incurred elsewhere, in fact *reducing* the overall risk (according to this argument). If that’s true, the map in the link above should be compared to another map, showing all the routes by which oil will travel across the country by rail if we don’t build the pipeline. Perhaps they can be color-coded to indicate risk-per-mile at each point, and perhaps some clever person can sum up the total risk by doing a path integral along both lines. We could see which map gives us the greater overall risk. That would give us the proper comparison. I’d like to have that information before I hitch my cart to any bandwagon, but I have yet to see it. (Once again, maybe it’s out there and I just haven’t seen it. I’m raising a question here, not answering it.) In my gun-slinger example, perhaps he’s not simply pulling out a new gun, but decommissioning several existing guns so as to reduce the overall risk. Yeah, it sucks if the new gun is aimed in *your* face, but to block all such projects because “The new safer gun is pointed in *my* face!” would seem to block all progress made by mankind in the past thousand years. A “we’re all in this together” attitude would imply that we accept these kinds of changes *in general* knowing that sometimes they will hurt us but on balance they will benefit us (dramatically!).

I’m a property rights enthusiast. If someone says “No, you can’t build on my property, no matter how much you pay me,” my instinct is to say this person gets veto power, no matter how seemingly unreasonable he is being. On the other hand, I think it would be wrong to allow the property owner to say, “You can’t do anything on *your* property either, because there is a small chance that it will negatively impact *my* property.” In this second case, the unreasonable property owner is imposing costs on *his* neighbor by hindering the neighbor’s use of his own property. (Paging Ronald Coase.)  According to the map in this article, which is quite sympathetic to the Standing Rock tribe, the pipeline goes just north of their reservation. The tribe’s complaint is that an oil spill will poison their water supply, not that it crosses their property. So they don't get to play the "You're on my property" trump card. I think that whether they have a legitimate case against the pipeline depends on how risky an oil leak is, and how damaging it is if one happens. Who I should side with depends on the answers to these questions. If I find out that the pipeline is effectively pointing a six-shooter with a single bullet at the heads of some innocent people, without even compensating them for the risk, I will be vehemently opposed to the pipeline and express my total sympathy for the tribe and the protesters. But if it’s more like aiming a million-chamber revolver filled with one or two rubber bullets at a few random people, all while fully agreeing to compensate for any harm done, then my sympathies will end up lying with Dakota Access, LCC.

My frustration here isn’t that people have chosen the wrong side. There exists an intellectual framework for thinking about these kinds of pollution problems (“externalities” in economic speak); my frustration is that nobody seems to be engaging with it. Everything about this story that has crawled across my news-feed has been terribly emotional. Aim higher, folks. Engage with the intellect a little. If I hear a compelling case that this is a significant risk of enormous harm, I will become very passionately anti-Dakota Access. 

Is a Trump Sign in a Neighbor’s Yard a Legitimate Grievance for a Home Seller?

Interesting story at Marginal Revolution:

“A homeowner took to a message board Sunday to complain about her neighbor’s sign supporting the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump. The anonymous homeowner said his or her family lived in a liberal part of Northern Virginia and were putting their house up for sale. The homeowner feared that the Trump sign would scare away potential buyers, and asked on the message board whether it was appropriate to ask the neighbor to take down the sign.
…The question proved popular, and elicited 10 pages of responses. Some commenters, in more offensive terms, said the anonymous poster was being ridiculous to even think this was in issue; others suggested the homeowner wait until after the election to sell the house. Still others said they would not want to buy a house next to a Trump supporter.”

What do people think? I have some scattered thoughts. Here is the original message board.

1)      If indeed a “Trump” sign affects the owner’s ability to sell a home, it’s a legitimate concern. It’s an “externality,” or cost to third parties.

2)      Yes, free speech is very important and we should have a presumption against limiting speech *even* as a matter of private policy (as compared to public policy). But let’s not paper over the fact that someone’s behavior is causing harm to a third party. We need to at least acknowledge the harm, even if we then dismiss it with “That’s a price worth paying.”

3)      Limiting someone’s speech because it hurts a third party is simply *another* kind of externality. So compelling the homeowner to remove the Trump sign wouldn’t “resolve” the externality, it just creates a different one where B imposes costs on A rather than A onto B. This was one of Ronald Coase’s Nobel-winning insights, if I understand correctly.

4)      In the original message board and in the comments of the Marginal Revolution blog post, some people say that a Trump sign in a neighbor’s yard would deter them from buying the home. Are they serious or just blowing smoke? If they’re serious, is it okay to think this way? If it’s okay to think this way, what other kinds of discrimination are okay? All kinds of discrimination? Just certain approved kinds?

5)      Nobody anywhere suggested that it’s wrong for the homeowner to try to conceal the fact that her neighbor is a Trump supporter. Everyone who took the homeowner’s side of this said something along the lines of “It’s okay to try to get the sign taken down.” None of them said, “How dare you conceal damaging information about the value of your property?!” Which makes me think the “I wouldn’t buy such a home” people were blowing hot air and didn’t really believe what they were saying.

6)      I absolutely love how this situation was resolved – by talking! Maybe we don’t need a bunch of sin-taxes, enforcement mechanisms and courts for resolving property disputes…we just need to talk to each other! “The homeowner reported back later Monday that she or he talked to the neighbor, and the neighbor seemed understanding of the predicament and removed the sign. The neighbor was an elderly woman who apparently didn’t even like Trump much. She was, however, married to a big Trump fan who was not home at the time. It is unclear how her husband felt about her decision to remove the sign.” The homeowner even made brownies for the neighbor for being so nice about the whole thing. 

Defending Gary Johnson Against Stupid "Gotcha!" Questions

There is something missing from all the coverage of Gary Johnson’s “Aleppo moment.” Unless you actually watched the interview you wouldn’t know that he answered the question asked of him. As soon as he realizes they are talking about the Syrian civil war, he answers the question and explains his policy position. He expresses a non-interventionist worldview (if perhaps a bit inarticulately). It was clear from his answer that he’d given some thought to the issue and had a ready answer. So I think it’s totally unfair to peg Johnson as clueless, as if he’d never even heard of the Syrian civil war. I’d call this episode mildly embarrassing and his overall answer is a bit weak (at least poorly expressed), but I’m not buying the notion that this disqualifies him from the presidency. Clearly he had a well-formed opinion on the topic in question, even if he didn’t pass the interviewer’s geography quiz. I get almost daily news updates on the Syrian civil war, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the significance of Aleppo, and I’ve heard/read something similar from a few other regular NPR listeners. So I certainly don’t buy the pretense that “all of us smart, informed policy wonks know the significance of Aleppo.” Especially considering this: 

And yet Johnson is hardly alone when it comes to Syria gaffes. Former Obama administration ambassador to Iraq, Chris Hill, followed Johnson on Morning Joe and mocked the former New Mexico governor's "blank stare." Hill predicted that "he will now be known as 'Aleppo Johnson'" and then called Aleppo "the capital of ISIS." In fact, Raqqa, not Aleppo, is widely considered the capital of the self-declared caliphate known as the Islamic State. The New York Times incorrectly referred to Aleppo as "the capital" of ISIS three times in its quick take on Johnson's screw-up before adding a correction to the bottom of the page. Even that correction required a correction, as it initially referred to Aleppo as Syria's capital, when it is in fact, Damascus.

In other words, in the rush to smear Johnson, his snide critics are fumbling on the factual details of Aleppo. So you’ll have to pardon me if I think this “everyone knows what Aleppo is” attitude is all a pretense.

I think people are applying a double-standard here. I can’t read people’s minds, and I can’t peer into the alternate universe where Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump get surprised with the same or a similar “gotcha” question. (My best guess is that Clinton would get it right, Trump wouldn’t, and on a random different day Johnson wouldn’t have brain-farted and supplied sleazy journalists with their “gotcha” moment.) But I’m pretty sure nobody would disqualify a candidate they liked over something this petty.

I’m imagining an alternative universe where Hilary Clinton is asked “What would you as president do about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?” and she stumbles to recall who that is or asks a clarifying question. Her critics pounce on her "ignorance" of foreign policy details, but her defenders understandably point out that it’s a stupid “gotcha” question. The interviewer did not intend for his average viewer to understand the context of the question, but was deliberately attempting to trip up the candidate and eventually succeeded. You might think that the intention of the interviewer is irrelevant. A mistake’s a mistake, and ignorance is ignorance, right? But this is wrong. If I know the interviewer was fishing for “gotcha”s, I’m going to think it’s less significant that he finds one. A gaffe is less embarrassing if we know that the politician was placed in a gaffe-generating environment; it’s more embarrassing if it happens spontaneously. What you’d like to know is a politician’s gaffe-propensity “in the wild,” their true “gaffe base-rate,” not their gaffe-propensity in an artificial gaffe-magnifying environment. 

To reiterate, none of this is to say he gave a great answer or that the incident was completely irrelevant. It's just that people are blowing it way out of proportion and not even acknowledging that he answered the goddamn question asked of him.

This is in contrast to the “name a foreign leader” incident, which many people have been dishonestly misrepresenting. The conversation that scrawled across my social media feed was: “Johnson was asked to name a foreign leader, any foreign leader, and he couldn’t name one.” Any  thoughtful person’s nonsense detector should have gone off. “Would an interviewer really ask such a pointless quiz question? Of course not! I should read more into this!” And such a thoughtful news reader might eventually discover what actually happened. In fact, he was asked to name a foreign leader he admired. That’s a question that requires some thought. It’s a legitimate stumper. Nonetheless, Johnson *had an answer*! His answer was Vincente Fox, although he did fail to recall Fox’s name on the spot. That might be mildly embarrassing if Johnson ever meets Fox face-to-face, but it’s hardly an indictment of his mental ability or his knowledge of world events.  The mischaracterization of this event is more serious than the Aleppo thing. It caused me to down-rate the credibility of some news sources and some people who I know personally. It’s a very shallow reading of the news, and I saw several people commenting on it as if the “Johnson was asked to name any foreign leader and failed” narrative was the correct one.