XIII

The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution is short and sweet:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Now, there are a few ways to interpret this guy. The most obvious is that human beings may not be considered chattel: trucked, bartered nor traded. The other bit, the involuntary servitude, this is a bit harder to pin down just as easily. Involuntary service is performed under duress or threat; it is service performed when trade would not be conducted voluntarily otherwise. One might easily make the case that mandating the purchase of services is involuntary servitude, being that one side of the transaction is involuntary. You might think of this as slavery on its head: where the master is forced by fiat to accept the service of others.

If Congress passed a law mandating that every citizen purchase ten gallons of Boudreaux's Butt-Paste every year, would it be reasonable to cry foul by the 13th Amendment? It would be involuntary service to Blairex Laboratories, Inc. on the part of every citizen of the US.

On the other side of these purported rights, let's imagine I was a window washer and the City of Alexandria decided that clean windows were a natural right. They then passed Clean Window legislation and insisted that anyone who didn't patronize my services would be subject to fines and/or imprisonment. What then, if I were the only window washer in town, would occur if I decided to pursue my dream of shucking oysters in Oregon. I would then be violating the natural rights of my former customers and would be subject to terrible penalties. I would be an immoral monster. Anyone who didn't step up and wash windows would be just as guilty. Indeed, in a world that claims we have the natural right to the labor of others must necessarily be one in which everyone becomes a supplier of that service. I will work on a mathematical model to prove this. My point is that mandating access to labor necessarily implies involuntary servitude.

Maybe I'll just swap my windows out for plywood.

Fear and Loathing in the Land of Milk and Honey

Anonymous, impersonal market transactions make us wealthy. These transactions are predicated on high trust. The "stranger danger" phenomenon as well as the assertion that all men are potential rapists are low trust activities and beliefs.

Empirical question: how well does per capita wealth correlate with non-market mistrust of strangers?

Is there reason to suspect that people compartmentalize trust? In Robin Hanson's (and Katya Grace's) worldview, people use near and far processing modes to analyze situations. Market transactions are conducted in near mode, where we can better judge the specifics of the situation and judge trustworthiness on individual merits. Non-market situations are a different kettle of fish altogether. When we contemplate letting our kids out of the house, it's much easier (perhaps even necessary) to employ far reasoning, glossing over the grainy reality and substituting cognitive heuristics for rational judgement.

This near-far split might help explain why anxious mothers won't spend an extra hundred bucks for a better car seat (or an extra few thousand for a safer mode of transportation), but are comfortable with the idea of never letting the kids outside without a caretaker. Decisions inside an automobile are near, immediate, while the outside world is an artificial mental construct, capable of being populated by far-mode demons.

Ramblings on a Snow Day

When I was younger, particularly around the high school era, I was deterred from thinking about entering academics because I had it in my head that we had already pushed the boundaries of knowledge. History was all settled, Psychology, Communication, Economics, the Natural Sciences, pretty much everything except very advanced physical science was all known, and the limit wasn't unknown things to be discovered or rethought but making sure that you digested what other people had already written. Part of that impression is from the way that school is taught up through High School, where uncertainty and interpretation take a back seat to memorization, a legacy I'm sure in some way left in place from positivism in science, even in classes like English. Part of it might have been the general feeling of the 90's and early 00's, embodied in Fukuyama's pronouncement of The End of History after the Cold War ended, with a corrolary in the economy with The Great Moderation.

Well, The End of History didn't last very long, High School ended, and the Great Moderation wasn't so great. Of course, not enough college professors (that I had at least, especially early on) let students in on how dysfunctional Academia really is. We all knew that Keynesian economics didn't work anymore, we all knew WWII ended the Great Depression, we all knew bla bla bla. Maybe it was a little less cut and dry in Ethics, but pretty much everyone agreed that Ethics all just boiled down to taste. And De Gustibus non est Disputandum.

One of the most fascinating things to me since I've become more acquanted with academia is academia itself. The relationship within and between disciplines is just fascinating. I know I've written about overspecialization in academia before, but I continue to be fascinated. Economics and Sociology are pretty much the exact same subject, namely that of human behaviour and human interation. I am probably not stretching if I assume that a first year graduate student in Economics is getting a very different education than a first year Sociology student, the methodology between the two subjects is so different. The same with subjects like Anthropology, Psychology, and Political Science. They're all studying human behaviour from a different lens, and it would make sense for them all to work relatively close together.

I've had a perverse craving to draw some sort of diagram of the sciences , somehow showing the relationship between the human sciences/humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences. I have since come to the conclusion that I need three dimensions, which makes me sad, because I want to create order.

I have been listening to old Econtalks, and listened to the 03/23/09 podcast with Nassim Taleb. Near the end he goes on a diatribe against theoretical searches for knowledge. He believes that Universities have, on whole, done more harm than good in the search for knowledge.

Alright, enough rambling. I'm going to use another snow day and reread Michael Polanyi's "The Republic of Science," it's good stuff!

Wanna trade?

Today, I find myself how many human lives I would be willing to sacrifice to reduce carbon emissions. No matter how I approach the issue, the number keeps coming back to roughly zero. Both readers of this blog likely understand that emissions controls reduce industrial activity, whether through forcing firms to use expensive scrubbers that they might not be able to otherwise afford or through paying for credits (or via fines, levies, fees, sanctions or whatever else you might think of). From there, it doesn't take much imagination to see how people with relatively few opportunities are hurt when those opportunities are taken away. Sure, they will adapt; people are hella good at adapting when the situation changes, but adaptation is costly, and when the stakes are starving children who need bed nets, removing the ability to work, even if it is what we imagine to be meager work, is utterly abominable.

It's quite a wonder that anyone could accuse proponents of freedom to be out of touch with reality. I suspect there are some folks who never had to confront the guy whose kid has to starve when there's an operational, if a bit sooty, factory just o'er the hill and 'cross the dale. What, a hungry child isn't real enough? Sheesh.

Random thought

So, if the interest rate is supposed to calibrate the amount saved and the money demanded for capital investment, what does a Social Security system do to the interest rate? Social Security both decreases current income and is somewhat interchangeable with private savings, so it seems to me that by taking money out of the private savings market and spending it on government expenditures (so, assuming the government doesn't just go and put it back in the loanable funds market), wouldn't this artificially inflate the interest rate? (Quantity of saved funds drops as people defer less of their actual income for future consumption since the government does that for them, causing the equilibrium rate to go up).

The Rhetoric of Capitalism

Sam's last post, as well as some idle thinking, has me wondering whether the term Capitalism is an effective term for what economists imagine it to be. (I seem to remember another blog post on this a while back, but I can't remember where, and I may have just imagined it anyways). A purpose of language is to evoke in others what you are visualizing yourself, and as a word 'Capitalism' seems to be doing a bad job of it. My feeling is that Capitalism evokes in us a society where capital is privately owned, while in others the word evokes a society run by Capitalists. I think of early 20th-century US and Britain, Mid-late 20th century Korea, Japan, West Germany. Others think of early 20th century Latin America with United Fruit, post-1991 Russia, and maybe even 21st century US. The former are Capitalist countries, the latter are ruled by Capitalists (granted, the two are not mutually exclusive). Granted, we're using a word popularized by Karl Marx, it's not surprising that many use and perceive 'Capitalism' in the least flattering way possible, and it's not surprising that people can graffiti things such as 'Capitalism is Murder,' which sounds absurd to our ears.

I am reminded of the decision by bloggers over at The Austrian Economists to rename their blog 'Coordination Problem' because of the shift in the meaning in Austrian Economics over time. Would it be worthwhile to come up with an alternative name for the classical liberal's desired society? And what would we use?

Capitalism is Murder

...or so says a new snippet of graffiti on the Holmes Run walking path underneath I-395.

I struggle to grasp the logic supporting this conclusion. Perhaps it's a definitional miscommunication. I suppose it's possible that someone could think that private ownership of the means of production is the same thing as cold-blooded homicide, but I think it's more likely that the author of the sentiment confuses capitalism with government-backed crony corporatism. True, it doesn't have the same ring to it, but the case that Blackwater is a band of thugs is more defensible than, say, Johnson and Johnson being bloodthirsty mercenaries.

"Know thy enemy" springs to mind. I suspect that adolescent anarchists (anarcho-communists, more probably, based on some of the other graffiti in the area) don't know a plugged thing about how the relative ease of transfer of goods and services have contributed to the post-magical abundance each and every one of us enjoys today.

Interesting status dynamics arise in these sorts of subcultures. There's a funny balance between retaining outsider status, which can confer high status within the group (though, low status, obviously, outside) and attracting new adherents. As the numbers in the group swell, the local high status position is threatened. If the original members are unable or unwilling to adjust their status expectations, they will splinter. It becomes a matter of how highly they value outsider status compared to how much they value their cause. I suspect that members of splinter factions more often cherish being misfits. The label of "sellout" is extremely low status, to be avoided at great cost.

Fight the power!