Tyler Cowen's Teetotaling Blind-Spot

Tyler Cowen is a great economist and an incredibly thoughtful writer. But sometimes he gets things totally wrong. One of his major blind-spots is drug prohibition (even alcohol prohibition). It's not that he's in favor of it, as far as I can tell. But he downplays the likely benefits and exaggerates the hazards of relaxing prohibition.

Here he is in a recent post on marijuana legalization. He's linking to a Washington Post piece that supposedly argues against the iron law of prohibition: Drug concentrations rise under prohibition. People substitute from opium and morphine to heroin and (more recently) fentanyl. People consume whisky and gin instead of beer and wine. The post uses the example of recent marijuana prohibition to "disprove" this iron law. But I think it really misses the mark. At best it shows that sometimes drug concentrations can rise rather than fall after legalization. But clearly there is some truth to the notion that smugglers prefer a product that is less bulky. A bootlegger can carry ten times as much hard liquor as beer. A heroin dealer can shrink a one-ton shipment down to the size of a suitcase (or even a vial, depending on what class of synthetic opioid we're talking about!).

Marijuana seems completely different from these other substances. Some clever smuggler could conceivably distill pure THC to make it less bulky, but I'm not sure there would be much of a market for it. (Would typical marijuana smokers want, say, pure THC spritzed onto dried oregano? I'm thinking the market for this is thin.) Or maybe a clever cultivator could figure out how to grow a more potent strain. Then again, in an illegal market these strains would constantly be getting intercepted and disrupted by law enforcement. It would be hard to accumulate or share knowledge of this sort in an illegal market. Black-market "capital" keeps getting intercepted and destroyed. Low-grade illegal weed, bulky as it is, is probably "strong enough" for the typical user in a way that these other substances just aren't. In a legal market, cultivators can preserve potent strains and preserve the knowledge of how to grow them. This seems like a bigger deal for marijuana (where the dried plant is smoked directly) than for cocaine and heroin (where the dried plant is heavily processed and concentrated before being delivered to the user).

A couple things from that post struck me. Citing a study of marijuana in the Netherlands:

The researchers estimated that for every 3 percent increase in THC, roughly one more person per 100,000 in the population would seek marijuana use disorder treatment for the first time.

One additional person per 100,000 seems like a pathetically small effect. The study in question sees concentrations ranging from 8.6% to 20.3%. Increasing across this entire range would mean an additional 4 people per 100k seeking "use disorder treatment" (rounding up here a little). We're not even talking about something serious like "mortality" here. "Marijuana use disorder?" It's not addictive in the ways that other drugs are. You don't develop the dependence, withdrawals, or physical cravings. It's addictive in the way that video games are addictive. If four more people per 100k seeks treatment, that's a pretty low price to pay. Something like 7% of Americans have an alcohol use disorder. If there is any appreciable substitution from alcohol to marijuana, this price is well worth it. Eighty-eight thousand Americans succumb to alcohol-related deaths each year. That's 27 per 100k, not "seeking treatment for alcohol use disorder". That's dead. Cowen is a good economist. He should have reached for the concept of "substitute goods."

Here's the part that is Cowen's commentary:

I believe that marijuana legalization has moved rather rapidly into being an overrated idea.  To be clear, it is still an idea I favor.  It seems to me wrong and immoral to put people in jail for ingesting substances into their body, or for aiding others in doing so, at least provided fraud is absent in the transaction.  That said, IQ is so often what is truly scarce in society.  And voluntary consumption decisions that lower IQ are not something we should be regarding with equanimity.  Ideally I would like to see government discourage marijuana consumption by using the non-coercive tools at its disposal, for instance by making it harder for marijuana to have a prominent presence in the public sphere, or by discouraging more potent forms of the drug.  How about higher taxes and less public availability for more potent forms of pot, just as in many states beer and stronger forms of alcohol are not always treated equally under the law?

Props to him for making the moral case for legalization. But...an overrated idea? We're still sending people to prison for petty marijuana offenses. The stuff about IQ is just so much 1930s Reefer Madness hysteria. He offers no support for his suggestion that marijuana use lowers IQ. People in the comments push back on this extremely speculative claim, but he doesn't backtrack or answer them. (The comments section of Marginal Revolution is atrocious, but there are some gems if you can sift through all the garbage.) One commenter (#25 by Doug) points out that almost nothing permanently lowers IQ, so it would be a big surprise if marijuana did so. (Do read his comment, the replies, and Doug's reply to those replies.) This IQ comment is so bad, Cowen should to a massive mae culpa for misleading his readers with irresponsible speculation, and at a particularly bad time where policy is poised to shift. This kind of misinformation could stifle a golden opportunity for a good policy change, and that opportunity might not present itself for another decade or perhaps a generation.

This isn't an isolated incident either. He linked to this paper about repealing alcohol prohibition leading to more infant deaths. I'm thinking, Wait a minute! There are serious questions about whether prohibition reduced alcohol consumption at all. Weren't people poisoned by tainted bathtub gin? Didn't people drink alcohol that was intentionally poisoned by the U.S. government? Any claim that there were public health benefits due to prohibition are pretty hard to swallow, given that prohibition increased the toxicity of alcohol without much decreasing its consumption. And here's this paper suggesting that repealing alcohol prohibition caused ~13k excess infant deaths. It's hard to even take this seriously. (See Jeffrey Miron's Drug War Crimes on this; he fleshes out the argument that alcohol consumption didn't decrease appreciably during prohibition.)

Here Cowen lays out his case for a "voluntary prohibition" of alcohol, enforced by social norms and not by government policy. That's fair enough and nuanced enough, and I can respect that. Here's what he says:

I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.

The "and yes I mean all alcohol" part struck me. I reject the notion that drug use per se, or alcohol use per se, causes social problems. My sipping on a beer or having a single shot of whiskey or glass of wine does not cause any appreciable damage, nor does it inexorably lead to greater alcohol consumption, nor for that matter does moderate consumption lead to problems. Sure, in a "but for" sense, you can blame alcohol: If the alcoholic or drunk driver couldn't get any, then their related social problems would disappear. But you simply can't make inferences such as "Drinking one beer causes you to ultimately drink ten beers." At best, Cowen's private prohibition should be applied specifically to problem individuals. I think he presents us with a false choice, where complete abstinence is easy but partial abstinence is difficult.

Oh, yes, and here's Cowen credulously repeating an easily-checkable claim by Scott Alexander, which grossly overstated Oxycontin-related deaths. I corrected him in the comments, and he conceded the claim "may not be correct." On the one hand, this is the internet working the way it's supposed to: Cowen and Alexander (and Robert VerBruggen, the original source of the bad info) all did mae culpas. On the other hand, it worries me that such an easily-checked claim (seriously, an easy Google search would have done it) can be repeated by such careful thinkers. It makes me reflexively doubt other claims repeated on Cowen's blog. As in, "Did he vet this at all, or is he just passing it along without really checking? Probably the latter."

I'll keep reading anything and everything that Cowen writes. Seriously, hail Tyler Cowen! He is one of my major influences. I've read most of his books and read most of his blog posts. He's usually spot-on and extremely incisive. But I think this is a huge blind spot for him.

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Addendum: I meant to make a bigger stink about this point. A basic economic analysis comes out strongly against drug prohibition. It does so even if you make heroic assumptions to revive it. See the Gary Becker et. al. paper. You really have to make stilted, almost contradictory assumptions in favor of prohibition. Like that people respond enormously to one risk (legal sanctions) while responding little to a risk of similar magnitude (pharmacological harms). I feel like this basic point is missing from Cowen's posts on drug and alcohol policy.

Is the United States' High Incarceration Rate Inappropriate?

More precisely, how inappropriate is it?

Sorry, this is not one of my well-researched posts or one in which I can draw on my expertise. I am merely raising a question.

I get the sense that some developing nations with very poor governance just don’t bother to combat crime. Maybe they have some prisons, but these poorly-run nations don’t direct their meager government resources toward making civil society function better. Maybe these countries make greater use of corporal and capital punishment than we do. In anocracies, people probably have to resort to “self-help” to get justice. My guess is that if some of these nations didn’t execute so many criminals and let so many others go, at least some of them would have incarceration rates as high as in the US. Many would probably benefit from having more incarceration, perhaps as high as US levels.

I also get the sense that many OECD countries are too soft on their criminals. I recall watching a documentary on terrorism in Europe. It profiled a French terrorist who was a disaffected young Muslim immigrant. One of his prior offenses for which he’d served time was shooting at a police officer. I remember this being shocking, and I even said out loud to my wife, “In the US he’d be dead or in prison for life!” I realize it's a bad idea to generalize from a single example. Is this story typical of European treatment of serious criminals? I’m also thinking of a book chapter by Thomas Sowell on crime in England and the refusal of the government to dedicate the necessary resources to it. (Sorry, wish I could supply a better reference.) Maybe this impression, that Europe tends to be soft on its violent criminals, is wrong. But if not, that would explain a lot of the difference in incarceration rates.

Also, these other OECD countries often have lower actual crime rates than the US [edit: this probably isn't true as a generalization]. I’m thinking in particular of Iceland and the Scandinavian countries. These are homogeneous populations with very low crime rates. And in fact American populations with Scandinavian ancestry have similarly low crime rates. If we swapped populations or underlying crime rates with them, maybe they'd see the need for higher incarceration rates. What's the proper comparison here? All of the US to Norway, or Norwegian Americans to Norway? All of the US to Japan, or Japanese Americans to Japan? Yes, this gets quickly hits some touchy questions, but it would be daft to ignore demographics if that's one of the drivers of the difference. 

Maybe European nations have the magic formula for reforming violent criminals? Maybe the welfare state makes crime less attractive? I have serious doubts about this kind of story. Interventions aimed at social problems rarely work. It's just difficult to remold dysfunctional people into well-functioning adults. And crime has a negative expected-value payoff, so appealing to economic imperative as a rationale for crime makes little sense. My best guess is that maybe they are better at putting their ex-cons back to work, which would dramatically reduce recidivism.

The war on drugs is often provided as the reason for high American incarceration rates, but drug-related incarceration appear to be a small or modest fraction of the total [edit: this podcast with John Pfaff says it's in the 15-20% range; oh, there are important qualifiers for this figure]. I could, and I would, argue that prohibition leads to a lot of violent crime and property crime, which in turn leads to non-drug incarceration. But then again much of that crime does not get punished. I think this is a big part of the story, even if it's often overstated.

Long prison sentences? Is five years just as good as 30, and other nations have figured this out? Is "Lock up particularly rowdy teens and 20-somethings until they're at least in their late 20s" a good enough strategy, but we gratuitously keep them in prison for an extra decade or two?

My best guess is that the ideal level of incarceration is probably somewhere between the United States' level and that seen in OECD countries. It annoys me when people just report the bare statistics showing that America stands out and pretend the implications are obvious. "We lead the nation in incarceration, so obviously we're just big meanies." Or "We lead the developed world in infant mortality, so plainly we need to just copy the policies of OECD nations with lower infant mortality rates."

What should I be reading on this topic? This seems like a good start, but I'm certainly open to more recommendations. Helpful suggestions welcome, but any comment of the "[scoff] It's so obvious..." variety will not be published.

I wrote this because I think it's an uncomfortable question for libertarians. Those are exactly the kinds of questions we should concern ourselves with. What does "incarceration" look like in an anarcho-capitalist world anyway? (This isn't too much of a stumper; I've seen Bob Murphy give a pretty good answer.) Would a libertarian society have an incarceration rate closer to America's current rate, or closer to Europe's? If society's optimum rate of incarceration is high (perhaps higher than America's even), is that a way that libertarian societies are less free than societies with large states? Would we do more corporal and capital punishment? Would we tolerate private entities meting out these kinds of punishments?
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I wrote everything above and then listened to this podcast with John Pfaff. He seems like the guy to read on this topic. If I read his book Locked In, I'll report back with what I learned. Apparently US crime rates are comparable to other OECD nations (excluding lethal violence, where we do stand out), so part of my post above is mistaken. He argues that the war on drugs doesn't really cause that much additional violence; essentially he's arguing that those (mostly) young men would be just as violent and find other violent things to do anyway. I think this is badly mistaken. It was the one "WTF?" moment in the entire interview. Columbia? El Salvador? Honduras? Mexico? These are  nations with the top murder rates in the world, and it's because of drug-market related violence. Drug markets in the US aren't quite so violent, but it's hard to believe that what's happening in these other countries isn't happening here (at least to a lesser degree). Plainly black markets make violence more attractive as a means of settling disputes; it would be hard to believe that American criminals uniquely fail to respond to this incentive. It's hard to believe they wouldn't get less violent if the rewards for murdering rivals/witnesses went away. Read Jeffrey Miron's Drug War Crimes on this topic; the relationship between prohibition and violence is very real and robust. But I'm being picky about an otherwise excellent podcast with lots of useful information. It answered a lot of my questions.

Here’s How Bad the Propublica “Machine Bias” Piece Really Is

Imagine you have a population of criminals and you score them for recidivism risk. Let’s make the example race agnostic: you’re scoring a sample comprised of one race, or the data comes from an extremely homogeneous city or region, or it's from a territory in which the races don’t differ very much in their proclivity to commit crime or recidivate after being paroled. Anyway, we take this racially homogeneous sample and “score” it with a predictive model, such that everyone is assigned a “probability to recidivate.” This is some number ranging from 0 to 100%, not necessarily distributed uniformly across that range. And suppose the predictive modeling and scoring is fairly accurate: Of those people who are assigned a 60% chance of recidivism, 60% of them subsequently recidivate. Likewise for people assigned a 1%, 10%, 80%, 99%, etc. Whoever built the model did a pretty good job in this respect. Next, we’re going to semi-randomly assign them a class, “H” or “L”, such that high-probability people are more likely to get an H and low-probability people are more likely to get an L. The categories are not pure; there are L’s who have a 90% recidivism rate and H’s who have a 10% recidivism rate. There are L’s who do in fact recidivate and H’s who do not. But the categories do reflect actual relative risks; overall L’s are less likely to recidivate than H’s.

This population, which was fairly modeled and which we arbitrarily assigned to classes, will exhibit the same “false positives/false negatives” problem as is spelled out in Propublica's "Machine Bias" piece. The H’s, even though their modeled probability of recidivism was accurate (and thus “fair” on this criterion), will show a high rate of false positives and a low rate of false negatives. The L’s will show the converse; high false negatives and low false positives. It looks like the model is “going easy on” L’s, letting too many guilty ones off the hook. It's also “too hard on“ H’s, falsely labeling many of them as likely to recidivate when they ultimately don't. But this is purely statistical result of H’s having a higher real propensity to recidivate. It’s not the result of systemic racism. It can't be, because the H and L categories were only assigned after we modeled. 

Of course none of this proves that there isn't systemic racism in law enforcement, and I do not want to make that claim. But it does show that the "bias" Propublica found is what we'd expect to see even when no bias exists. The metrics Propublica used to berate the recidivism prediction model will impugn even a fair model. As someone else elegantly put it, Propublica exploited an impossibility theorem to write that piece. The false positive rate, defined as false positives divided by false positives plus true negatives, will always be high for the higher-risk group for an unbiased model. 

I wrote two posts about the original Propublica piece. A recent link-roundup at Slate Star Codex, linking to this piece by authors Chris Stucchio and Lisa Mahapatra, revived my interest. Note the discussion in the comments between Ilya Shpister and Chris Stucchio. The discussion was somewhat revived in the comments of this open thread. Stucchio's comments to Shpister and other critics are incredibly useful in understanding this debate. I recommend reading the relevant pieces of those threads.

If I'm asked to adjudicate this debate, I think Stucchio is basically right in his original piece written with Mahapatra; he's also right in his answers to commenters in the SSC threads. Shpister is evasive and at times incredibly rude to other commenters ("Just dropping here to say this discussion is above your pay grade..."), even as Stucchio tries to get to the heart of their disagreement. I definitely agree with Stucchio that some journalists (like the authors of the Propublica piece) are being deliberately misleading, while perhaps others are merely being reckless with statistics. But don't take my word for it; you will learn more by reading through the actual threads.

In this comment Stucchio suggests a very useful exercise. He creates a sample (written in Python) where one race is given more traffic tickets due to unfair hassling. Being an arbitrary bias, this should have nothing to do with future propensity to commit crime. In fact a fairly simple regression should learn this bias and correct for it. I think everyone who is saying, "Well, what if the algorithm is unfair because of this bias..." should come up with a concrete example and show in exactly what way predictive modeling is unfair in this world. This idea can be expanded upon to answer specific criticisms or specific models of how bias creeps into the data, the modeling, or the ultimate decision-making that is based on that data and modeling. 

John Ionnidis on Econtalk

Very good Econtalk with John Ionnidis. I first heard of Ionnidis in this article from The Atlantic which features his work on medical literature. If you’ve heard the claim that “most published medical research is wrong,” this is where it’s coming from. Ionnidis has turned his sights on economics.

I found the discussion of the minimum wage (~15 minute mark) very interesting. The takeaway: studies claiming to find no effect of the minimum wage on employment will usually not find the effect even if it’s real. I know there’s been a lot of recent work trying to empirically measure the effect of minimum wages on employment. The book Minimum Wages, which is kind of a meta-study on the empirical literature, was published in 2008 and is probably already out of date. There have been a lot of dueling studies of increasing sophistication (statistical if not economic) saying “There’s a significant disemployment effect when you raise the minimum wage” versus “No there isn’t.” I thought that the “No there isn’t” crowd were employing some kind of sneaky statistical wizardry to make the effect disappear. Maybe not. Ionnidis claims that, for most of these studies there will only be a ~10% chance of finding a statistically significant effect. (8.5% is the "median power" of these analyses, if I understand him.) Someone trying to build the case for “there is no disemployment effect” could do so by essentially publishing studies at random. I don't think this kind of trick would work in today's world; a funnel plot will reveal the publication bias. Still, taking Ionnidis's point, we should look skeptically at any one study. 

Here’s an excerpt of the conversation. (This seemed crystal clear and well-laid-out when I hear the podcast, but reading the transcript it’s hard to find an excerpt of the piece I found interesting. I’ve noticed this before with transcripts of conversations. “The point” is never crystallized into a single quote as a careful writer might do on purpose; it’s always distributed across several exchanges between the conversants.):

Russ Roberts: Let's do that again. Let's say that again. So, let's try to put it in the context of an actual empirical question that might be examined in economics. One of the ones you mentioned in the paper is the impact of a minimum wage on employment. And a caveat: Of course, there are many other aspects and impacts of the minimum wage besides whether you have a job or not. It can affect the number of hours; it can affect the training you receive; it can affect the way you are treated on the job. And it bothers me that economists only look at this one thing--this 1-0 variable, job-or-not. Number of jobs. Without looking at the quality, outside of the monetary, financial aspect. But, that's what we look at, often. And it is the central question in the area of minimum wage policy: Does it reduce or even expand potentially--which I think is crazy, but okay, a lot of people don't agree--whether it expands or reduces the number of jobs. Now, in such an empirical analysis of the minimum wage, how would you describe the power of that test? Meaning, there's some effect that we don't know of that impact. The power is--fill in the blank--the probably that?
 John Ioannidis: Right. So, for that particular question, the median power if I recall that we estimated was something like 8 or 9%.
 Russ Roberts: It is. I looked at it; I've got it right here. It is 8.5%.
 John Ioannidis: There you go.
 Russ Roberts: That means--so, what does 8.5% mean, in that context?
 John Ioannidis: It means that, if you estimate for each one of these studies that have been done, what are the chances that they would have found that effect? That they would have found a statistically significant signal, if the effect is what is suggested by the largest studies, for example? Their median chance would be 8.5%. So, 50% of the studies would have 8.5% chances or less to be able to detect that signal. Which is amazing. I mean, if you think of that--
 Russ Roberts: It's depressing--
 John Ioannidis: Or depressing, actually. I mean, they basically have no chance of finding that. Even if it is there.
 Russ Roberts: So, does this work on both sides of the question?
 John Ioannidis: It is very, very difficult for them to pick it up.
 Russ Roberts: Does this work on both sides of the question? Meaning: It obviously depends on your null hypothesis. So, if your null hypothesis is: Minimum wages have no effect, and I'm going to test whether they have an effect, you are going to say: Does that mean I'm going to find that I only have an 8% chance of finding that effect?
 John Ioannidis: Yeh. It would mean that even if that effect is there, you would have an 8.5% chance of detecting it.
 Russ Roberts: So, most of the time, I would not find it.
 John Ioannidis: So, most of the time you would find a non-significant result. Called a null result. Or, seemingly null result. Even though there is some effect there.
 Russ Roberts: But it could go the other way, too. Because your null hypothesis could be that the minimum wage has an effect; and I'm testing whether there is no effect. And I might not be able to find no effect. Is that correct to go in that opposite direction?
 John Ioannidis: So, what happens in the opposite direction is that when you are operating in an underpowered environment, you have two problems. One is the obvious: That you have a very high chance of false negative. Because this is exactly what power means. It means that 92%, if you have an 8% power--92% of the time, you will not be able to pick the signal. Even though it is there. So, it's a false negative. At the same time, you have the problem of having a very high risk of a false positive when you do see something that has a statistically significant p-value attached to it. And, it could be an entire false positive, or it could be a gross exaggeration of the effect size. And, um, it could be that the smaller the power that you are operating with, if you do detect something, even if it is real, the magnitude of the effect size will be substantially inflated. So, the smaller the power, the greater the average inflation of the effect that you would see, when you do detect it. So, two major problems. With low power: lots of false negatives. Second problem: lots of false positives and gross exaggeration of the effect sizes.

I Can’t Wait To Hear What a Terrible Person I Am!

I think I make my libertarian politics abundantly clear. I discuss policy, offer arguments and evidence, and try to have intelligent discussions (which almost never seem to materialize). So it is tremendously annoying when a libertarian-ish policy proposal seems within arms reach, and it gets idiotically denounced within the framework of petty partisan politics. Recent examples involve the tax bill, Betsy DeVos' appointment as education secretary, and Republican-proposed "healthcare" bills.

My take on education is that there should be a total separation of education and state. I've argued my position here. Also here. Much more recently, here. In addition to these blog posts, maybe every month or so I'll post a link to Facebook that supports my position. Usually this is a well-argued post by someone else. And 99% of the time these are completely ignored. But then people scream bloody murder when an education secretary gets appointed who is sympathetic with school choice. (It's particularly ridiculous considering that education is mostly funded and administered by state and local governments; a pro-choice education secretary really can't do very much.) I'm left thinking, "Hey, guys, I brought this all up before and you didn't have anything to say about it then. Did you have to wait until everyone was frothing at the mouth before we discussed? Couldn't we have had a civil discussion when heads were cooler?" Apparently not.

I have a similar position on healthcare. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Everything that the government does to regulate the supply of medicine or the health insurance industry backfires tremendously and saddles us with problems. We have nothing to show for all the money we waste on subsidized medicine. But once again, expect people to wax wroth and froth at the mouth when a mild retreat from the existing level of government regulation is actually within arms reach. It's another example of, "Gee, we could have talked about it sooner. Remember when I brought this up? Couldn't we have discussed this reasonably before tempers were hot?" Some topics just don't register unless they are stated in starkly partisan terms. And once you manage to operate within this extremely narrow bandwidth, a sensible proposal for a good policy gets bogged down with all the partisan (even personal) baggage of the coalition that proposed it.

I could go on. Immigration. Drug legalization. The minimum wage. Inefficient taxes on capital. I've shared opinions on all of these topics. Nobody wants to read and discuss a book or white paper on the economics of the minimum wage. But the moment it turns into party-versus-party sloganeering, people pipe up and start spewing the shallowest arguments in their arsenal. If some libertarian politicians come to power and start implementing libertarian policy proposals, I'll get to hear what horrible people they are for wanting poor children to suffer (from malnutrition, lack of healthcare, insufficient schooling, or whatever). And I'll think, "Wait a minute, that proposal is far milder than my favored policy. Am I a horrible person for believing these things? If I surveyed the evidence on health/education/drug/labor policy and came to different conclusions, does that make me a horrible person? I wish we could have had a conversation about this when I brought it up years ago, rather than having a 'my coalition is bigger and angrier' shouting match." Non-libertarians are wrong about the likely effects of non-interventionist (even less-interventionist) policy in all these areas. Or maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong and a civil discussion would reveal a flaw in how I think about these things. Unfortunately, that civil discussion isn't on anyone's radar until an actual policy change is within striking distance (debated in congress, proposed as part of a bill, etc.). And at that point it's almost impossible to keep that discussion civil. There are some exceptions; a few rare corners of the internet are good at staying on topic and adding light rather than heat. I hope this blog is one of them.

Treat People Like People or Treat People Like Robots?

Getting out of bed sucks. It’s usually the worst part of my day. I have to drag myself out of bed every morning. I imagine I’m not the only person who feels this way. So how do others respond to the same experience?

David and Drew feel equal amounts of dread the moment their alarm clocks go off. David forces himself out of bed, gets through his morning ritual, goes to work, and has a stellar career because of his self-discipline. Drew repeatedly indulges his impulse to hit the “snooze” button, or just turns off his alarm entirely and goes back to sleep. As a result, he is repeatedly out of work, and when he does find work it’s in a marginal part-time low-skilled job.

How should we describe these diverging paths? I might say that David chooses to endure some pain because he knows the payoff is high. I might describe Drew as choosing to indulge his lust for sleep. I could even place a judgmental spin on it: David is exercising bourgeois virtues and showing his good work ethic while Drew is being a lazy bum. But even supposing I place value judgments aside; perhaps Drew is perfectly happy with his mix of leisure and income just as David is. Value judgments or no value judgments, think I’d describe them as somehow choosing their paths. I’d describe them as deciding how to live.

I used to have interminable discussions with someone who would have none of this. The concept of choice was an illusion, because we’re all meat robots. If I want to use terms like “decide” and “choose” I must strictly define my terms and explain how this process of “making a decision” happens. My pedestrian concept of “choice” was an illusion because David and Drew are both operating in a world governed by deterministic physics (or random quantum physics, which doesn’t exactly resurrect “free will”). Everything is outside of these men’s power to control. Perhaps Drew and David have different thresholds for “unpleasant stimulus.” Or perhaps they experience “waking up” differently; it is simply too painful for Drew to endure while David experiences it cheerfully. Or Drew simply has a subroutine running in his meat-brain that says, “Stay in bed when the alarm goes off” while David has one that says, “Wake up despite the unpleasantness.”

It doesn’t actually matter to me (or to anyone else, frankly) what’s going on in Drew and David’s brains. I don’t really care whether they are deterministic robots or free-willed avatars complete with a soul. I don’t care whether the stuff driving their behavior looks more like clockwork or more like free choice. I don’t even care if David and Drew are created unequally, such that David was born with “more willpower” while Drew was born with less inherent ability to resist temptation. What matters to me is how society’s judgments and expectations affect these men’s behavior. Drew may intrinsically have difficulty motivating himself because of things within his constitution beyond anyone’s control. His “laziness” might not be “his fault.” But if he lives in a world that’s infinitely forgiving, a world that treats him like an automaton simply responding to internal clockwork, he will behave worse than if he lives in a world that’s more judgmental. David’s constitutional makeup might make him more inclined to behave virtuously, but he might indulge more Drew-like behaviors if he is treated with the same infinite forgiveness. Even if we suppose people are software running on the hardware of their brains, that software contains many “respond to incentives and expectations and social norms” subroutines.

But what do I know? I’m just another meat robot running deterministic subroutines inside my brain. Some of those subroutines say “punish mild vices with mild social censure”; others say “punish severe vices with harsher social censure”; others say “help people a lot for problems they didn’t create themselves; help people less for problems of their own creation”; others say “punish actual crimes with something harsher than social censure.” We all have these, and we all know that everyone else has these. Such “subroutines” running in other people’s heads are part of our environment. We are constantly updating our expectations, judging various transgressions, and trying to avoid judgment, even punishment, ourselves. Such a being can be “deterministic”, but there is enough recursion and uncertainty to make it look like free will. Close enough that it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.

You may disagree with me, but why bother arguing? I’m just a meat robot. I can’t choose to think otherwise. 
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Of course we may want to temper our judgment given people's observable abilities. I had written everything above over a week ago, and since then was confronted with a few challenging cases. I met a person who has only one arm, which plainly limits one's choices. I spoke to someone who suffers sometimes-debilitating back pain. (Is back pain something that just happens to you? Or is it something that we can usually avoid by staying in better shape?) Some people are born with intellectual disabilities; it is unfair to accuse them of "choosing" not to become doctors or engineers. And some people are crippled by mental illness that has nothing to do with the intellect. I met the blind son of a former colleague who wants to be an actuary; he is able to navigate Excel by audio. And this reminded me of Walter Oi, a blind economist with an incredibly successful career. I think it's fine to talk about how some people are born with a wider range of choices than others. But I think it's daft to obliterate the concept of "choice" altogether. I'm more in the "We are the authors of our own destiny" camp than I am in the "Stuff just happens to you and you don't have a say in it" camp, for reasons outlined above. Denying the existence of choice, and denying that successful people caused their own success, does a disservice to people who overcome their disadvantages. It just seems churlish to react to the story of a blind person becoming a successful professional by saying, "Meh, that just kind of happened to him because he had natural ability. He didn't 'choose' to be successful." This is why the "inequality" framing of any social problem is philosophically bankrupt; this framing is by definition grouping people by outcomes. A more useful framing would be to group people by their professed goals and effort expended, and seeing how much "inequality" results after controlling for those factors.

I recently re-read an old Facebook thread where my interlocutor challenged me repeatedly to "define choice," and I repeatedly challenged him to "come up with a scenario where changing the definition of choice changes the outcome of an argument." I think many writers get bogged down by their worst trolls, and maybe this is my own example. Scott Sumner (at least on his Money Illusion blog) often inserts hedges and preemptive responses to commenters, which sometimes distract from the flow of a great post. I think Scott Alexander sometimes does the same thing. I don't interact with that person anymore, but because of his nagging I still hesitate to use words like "choose" and "decide" in the way that we all understand them. Maybe that's wrong and I should just speak freely.

Brilliant Framing in Thomas Sowell's "Cultures" Trilogy

Thomas Sowell does something brilliant in his Cultures trilogy, which is comprised of his books Conquests and Cultures, Migrations and Cultures, and Race and Culture. The books are broadly about the notion that culture matters. Peoples tend to develop long-standing patterns of behavior that are adaptive to the particular times and places of their origins (or perhaps just idiosyncratically different from similarly situated peoples). When those peoples spread to other places via migration or conquest, they bring their long-standing traditions with them. And these traditions persist for generations. He makes it very clear that this is a non-genetic story of culture. It isn’t racial, except in the sense that a racial group might also be a cultural group. He is extremely clear that he’s talking about patterns of behavior that are learned and culturally enforced, not genetic propensities to behave in certain ways.

His brilliance is to lead with the example of the Roman conquest of northern Europe and Britain. A well understood stylized fact about modern Europe is that southern Europe tends to be more corrupt, poorer, and less well governed. In a book called Games Primates Play by an Italian author (Dario Maestripieri), there is a long discussion about the corruption that is rampant in Italy, and how this corruption is least bad in the north but gets worse as one moves south. Northern European states, by contrast, tend to be less corrupt, better governed, and richer (almost certainly as a consequence of their better institutions). Think Britain, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland as compared to Italy, Spain, and Greece. Without a formal model or rigorous regression analysis, at a glance there is something to this stereotype.

Except two thousand years ago, this was flipped. Rome was the peak of western civilization. Northern Europe was backwards, filled with naked barbarians and disgusting villagers who were naked or clad in animal skins. According to Sowell, “[N]ot a single Briton’s name had entered the pages of history” before Julius Caesar conquered the island. What’s more, when the Roman Empire collapsed and retreated from these conquered territories, those territories retrogressed. They lost what civilization Rome had brought to them, in many places taking a millennium or more to recover. Often the very same people working on the very same land with the same equipment become more productive after the Romans conquered, because the Romans actually provided a predictable rule of law. They brought Roman legal traditions with them, along with the means of putting down violent uprisings and brigandry that weaker states (or non-states) couldn’t deal with. Merchant peoples followed the Roman conquerors into conquered lands and set up shop; they also followed them out when the Roman Empire declined. Uncivilized social disorder can be bad for business.  

Leading with this example achieves several things. It takes race out of the question. We’re talking about Europeans conquering other Europeans, so there’s no racial baggage. Given that, it’s safe for Sowell to make his next point: It’s fairly clear that the conquered peoples often benefited from the conquest. Even the faintest hint of this point applied to the 20^th century immediately gets bogged down in discussions of racism, and accusations that the speaker is “defending” violent military conquest or suggesting racial superiority of the conqueror. The example also makes the point that culture, while durable, is not permanent. The Britons benefited from Roman cultural traditions under Roman conquest, retrogressed to a more primitive state after Roman collapse, but then eventually became the richest, most culturally and militarily advanced nation in the world. If they were eventually surpassed, it was by their thoroughly Anglicized former colonies (America, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand), not necessarily by former colonies that did not thoroughly adopt English cultural traditions and institutions.

It's not that the "race" question is unimportant in a discussion of the history of conquest. Rather it's a topic that is so emotionally charged it can prevent people from thinking clearly or giving due consideration to probably-true propositions. Sowell certainly doesn't dodge the race issue. He meets it head-on. It features prominently in all three books. But the "Britons versus Romans" example presents a nice test case where these complications and their associated baggage aren't really present.

Culture isn’t race. With that out of the way...Culture matters. Culture is durable. Culture eventually changes. Culture can be bad as well as good. Bad things, like military conquest, can cause good things, like the spread of good cultural practices.