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RobinHanson comments on Typical Mind and Politics - Less Wrong
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A common reason economists say noise regulation is not needed is that noise doesn't travel very far, most noise sources don't move, and so one can easily find the offending parties. So as long as it is clear who has the relevant property right (to make noise or to stop noise) they can plausibly make a deal to achieve the efficient outcome, at least if the problem is big enough.
Silas has already come up with a good response, but...let's say this was implemented. And let's take the standard economic oversimplification of assuming mostly self-interested people.
And let's say I live in an apartment with six other people, one of whom is noisy. Five people are considerate and respectful of their neighbors, one is an inconsiderate asshole. I pay the asshole $100/month to do what everyone else does because they're a decent person. End result: being an inconsiderate asshole earns you $100/month. If you value fairness, this is already a bad outcome.
Now the other five people are upset, so they start making noise in the hope that I pay them $100. All this noise makes everyone unhappy, since everyone has at least some noise intolerance, and I don't have $500/month I can give away. I try to renegotiate the contract with the asshole, and he refuses. The other people can't back down, because they know this would ensure that they would never be respected as a bargaining partner again because even if I didn't pay them the money they would eventually stop making noise. The apartment becomes intolerably loud. This is an extremely bad outcome.
It becomes tempting to suggest that now everyone in the apartment make a deal, in which everyone who wants quiet pays a certain amount to everyone who wants to make noise, with the amount of money depending on how much each person believes in their individual preference. However, if you're quiet, there's a strong temptation to say you're actually loud in the hopes that other quiet people will buy you off. And if you're loud, there's a strong temptation to demand more money than your loudness is actually worth to you: that is, even if you don't really enjoy being loud, you should threaten to be really loud unless the quiet person agrees to pay you the absolute maximum amount ze can.
I read once about some people who tried paying kids for getting good grades (my memory is very hazy, I may be confusing some details of this study). They found that if they paid kids a small amount for good grades, their grades actually went down. When the kids weren't being paid, they were thinking in terms of "Do I have enough intrinsic motivation to want to do well?" and the answer was very often "yes". But when the kids were paid, they were thinking in terms of "is this amount I'm getting paid worth the effort of getting good grades", in which case the answer was very often "no". I think the same thing could happen here, leaving everyone worse off.
And finally, there's just plain ethical ramifications. Imagine an apartment with six people, some of whom are rapists. The rapists want to rape the non-rapists, and the non-rapists don't want to be raped. One solution would be that the non-rapists pay a certain amount of money to the rapists each month to incentivize them not to rape them. The other solution is government regulation. I think the government regulation solution comes a whole lot closer to our intuitive ethical conception of who has what obligations.
[another easy solution: simply have landowners or other nongovernment entities designate certain apartments or neighborhoods as "quiet zones" and others as "party zones". My old college did this with its dormitories, and it worked fine. Unfortunately, I have never seen this implemented in the real world with any sort of rigor.]
Wow, you and I think very much alike.
I was actually in a similar situation, where a neighboring apartment felt it was okay to practice their band in their unit, involving extremely loud drums, and going so far as to say they had the landlord's permission (ETA: they didn't).
In the end, I handled it by "fighting fire with fire". I banged on the adjoining wall whenever I didn't like their noise, in an attempt to unveil their own latent dislike of uninvited, loud noise. It eventually "worked": strained relations with the neighbors, but no more band practice. Trying to buy them off would have been stupid, for the reasons you gave.
But our similarities pose a difficulty for your thesis here. If our psyches are so similar, why am I a libertarian ( well, kind of ) and you're not? Why do I see a prohibition on murder as a kind of property right (in one's body) while you see it as a government regulation?
FWIW, I recognize the difficulties of noise for the "no initiation of force" libertarian framework, but I see it as a non-troublesome boundary case that boils down to:
1) Who was there first, 2) What are prevailing norms, and 3) is the "annoyance" "involuntarily observable"?
Interesting, Rothbard, a hardcore libertarian, sees a right to freedom from noise pollution.
Property rights are government regulation. There are no such inherent rights.
The rights vs. regulation distinction is another example of gratuitous moral realist language that we should probably avoid.
Not so fast. People certainly think they are grabbing different clusters of thingspace with these terms, and you'd have to show how they reduce.
Not that I see your claim as totally outrageous. Many property rights can be equivalently expressed as government regulation, and vice versa. I've certainly run into trouble on that issue in debating intellectual property with libertarians.
However, the supposed similarity does break down quickly: while property rights have a definite owner, there generally isn't someone I can go to in order to buy back my right to own a tank, no matter what precautions I agree to take.
Actually, it's legal for private individuals to own tanks in the US, so long as the main gun has been decommissioned. You can get a Soviet T-72 starting at around 50k Euro. Know your rights, you sheeple!!!!111
Okay, take government regulation out of the picture. What's to prevent someone from walking onto your land and taking your stuff? Threat of physical force? They can do the same. If they overpower you, then it's "their" stuff, at least for now.
Is it bad to take someone's things under threat of force? Of course! Why? Uhhh... because it's bad? And we're back to fundamental morals.
...but as always, fundamental human morals. Nearly universal in our species, certainly, but not inherent to the universe. The essential purpose of government regulation is to use threat of force to demand adherence to certain moral ideas; property rights are no different than any other such norm, other than perhaps being one of the most common such norms.
I see you've had a lot of experience arguing with stupid libertarians, but I can assure that you won't run into such inanity with this libertarian.
The libertarian position is not to object to all force, or to all taking of things by force, but to doing so in contravention of a set of property rights they favor, and I can go into greater detail about what rights those are, but I just want to distinguish it from some general "rejection of force".
I agree that property rights, like government regulations, act to enforce norms. However, like I mentioned before, there are morally preferable things about "that which we call property rights" compared to "that which would be a government regulation", and it is there that your equation of the two ceases to be helpful.
Actually, I try to avoid arguing with stupid people, as it's rarely productive. Most libertarians are well above average in regard to being non-stupid, which is part of why I find myself arguing with them more often than I should.
I wouldn't impose on you to do so. I agree with 95% of what you would likely say and am very unlikely to be persuaded on the remaining 5%.
Anyway, my example of "taking things by force" was not in reference to libertarian positions, but to illustrate what the "natural" state of affairs is. Most people reject this state; this rejection is broadly known as "civilization".
Yes, precisely, but missing my point. They are morally preferable to you, not necessarily to everyone. The distinction between rights and regulation that you are drawing is based on your own moral weights which, as I am guessing you agree, are not inherent to the universe. This distinction between the two, which I agree is important, is derived entirely from the differing moral weights.
In general, a moral principle one thinks is foundational is a "right". An enforced moral principle one merely accepts is a just law. A moral principle one rejects, or subordinates to a higher principle, is a meddlesome or unjust regulation. Not everyone puts a given moral principle into the same category everyone else does.
This is why I said that your remark above is "realist moral language", cf. the linked post. Even if you are not (as I assume) a moral realist, you were using language deeply tied to such confusion.
Sure, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But nevertheless, a huge part of why I hold those moral preferences is that I believe that they would also better satisfy the values of those who nominally "disagree". To me, libertarian serves more as a metasystem in which differing value systems can be tested, and the refusal of someone to subject their values to such a test is what makes them suspect to me.
Or at least that's what my reptilian brain is tricking me into thinking...
I assumed as much, and this is why I was arguing for avoiding language that seemed to imply an objective difference between rights and regulations. The difference is purely a moral one and it behooves us as rationalists to avoid seemingly-objective terminology on things that are at best quirks of human nature. Otherwise we fall into the "Islam is a religion of peace" trap that has been discussed before.
Whereas I tend to see large-scale libertarianism, in the conventional sense of a political organization promoting legislative goals, as being a concerted effort to impose on others an untested, anarchic context that stands a good chance of having dire and difficult to correct failure modes that will reduce the quality of life even for those who didn't want it, with a side helping of being unwitting pawns of plutocrats who want reduced government where it benefits them but plenty of regulation for everyone else (i.e., mainstream so-called "conservativism").
Perhaps that clarifies why someone with otherwise more libertarian views than not finds the philosophy disagreeable...
I believe you've allied yourself with a minority in American legal discourse. And against a significant portion of political philosophers.
I don't know if this fact should bother you. But it might temper that sort of bald assertion.
ETA: note: I am a moral realist.
Have you ever allied yourself with minority political positions? Does that bother you, or temper your assertions?
Perhaps I should clarify my statement; "property rights" are not inherent in that if you go looking for them in nature, you will not find them. Outside of human society, this concept does not exist. Respect for property rights is an artifact of human culture, created by evolution's whims, and enforced by governments--just like prohibitions on murder or any other moral stance.
To consider property rights as any more inherent than other moral concepts is to veer into gross moral realism.
Uhm. I'm somewhat at a loss as to how you can spend as much time as you have on OB/LW and still hold this position.
I'm not sure what else to say to at this point.
Compared to a world in which there are no noise regulations and people are randomly distributed across neighborhoods, the actual world has relatively little problems with noise. To what extent do you credit regulations and to what extent do you credit people's freedom of movement? We could also consider a third factor interacts with the other two, social norms.
I think social norms are probably much more important for people*. The reason why is my own personal experience in a dog-owning family; every time my parents would notice the dogs barking, they'd go yell at them or yell at me to yell at them, because they were afraid what the neighbors would think. (Sometimes they'd appeal to regulations/laws in justifying this to me, but we could both see how hollow an argument that was.)
I notice that when I was very young, I couldn't've cared less about whether the dogs were barking or not, but that as I grew older, a nameless terror would descend upon me when the dogs began barking.
* I say people because when I consider industrial settings or transportation, then regulation is more important than social norms; the airport doesn't care what the surrounding people think, but will care about lawsuits.
There are more than two possible solutions to that problem, Yvain.
And "government regulation" isn't even a particularly good solution. What happens when the government is run by rapists?
Wouldn't it have been more helpful to avoid mention of rapists and link to mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice theory?
Really, for maximal effect that comment should be followed by an "...OR DID I JUST BLOW YOUR MIND?!?!?!"
Perhaps you'd prefer the traditional example of two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.
The problem itself dates from time immemorial: the powerless have no way to compel the powerful. The only solution is to ensure that the powerful are on your side.
The problem is you've presented a fully general counterexample to all possible policies, including (apparently intentionally) a law against rape. Possibly also a fully general counterexample to ever being part of a group with other human beings (what if they're rapists?!?) I don't really see your point, other than trying to live up to your name.
Not to all possible policies, and not fully general. Frankly, I'm rather surprised that you don't see any alternative solutions.
It is perfectly possible to reward 'courtesy', and punish 'discourtesy', without resorting to government regulation - or regulation of any kind.
If you have six roommates, one of whom is inconsiderate, you have a number of options. You can be inconsiderate towards the rude person in an attempt to dissuade their inconsideration. You can try to persuade the other five to exert social pressure on your behalf. You can move out.
Sometimes you can't get what you want, period. The people who don't acknowledge that point either never consider that they could be on the receiving end of power, or believe that they have enough power and dominance to ensure that it'll never happen to them.
What if your roommates - and everyone who learns of your conflict - believes you're the one being inconsiderate, and the 'inconsiderate' person to be behaving quite appropriately? Would you be willing to be subject to the same coercion you favor for others?
You seem to be saying that once we accept the possibility of ever coercing anyone, we have to also accept the possibility of coercion being misused. You then suggest that since we don't want coercion to be misused, we can never coerce anyone, and we should accept a society where other people can do whatever they want.
This is a lot like saying that since science could theoretically be used to bioengineer a plague, we should avoid all scientific thought.
I don't demand - as you seem to think I do - that everyone do whatever I want. I demand that everyone work together for a solution that maximizes the utility of everyone. I believe that a society where we all realize that no one raping anyone leaves everyone better off is better than a society where everyone can rape whoever they want. Likewise, I think a society with certain minimum noise restrictions will leave everyone, whether noisy or quiet, in general better off than one where everyone is free to extort their neighbors for however much they want.
This isn't new - Bentham and Mill worked out the details several hundred years ago. Yes, there are costs from the existence of enforcement mechanisms and the potential for the restriction of freedom to be greater than the benefits. But in some cases - like the case of please don't rape people - the benefits are clearly greater than the costs.
Sometimes you can't get what you want. But most people who enjoy proclaiming that very loudly are just trying to signal how hard-headed and tough they are. If there's an easy way in which you can get what you want, there's no extra virtue in refusing to take it. Having restrictions about not committing violence against other people is one such easy way.
I am not trying to say that I've thought about it and I'm absolutely sure there's no possible non-coercive way to solve the problem of rape. If you can think of one, you're welcome to post it. I'm just trying to say that your particular argument here that all coercive methods are bad doesn't hold any water.
[addendum: no, I don't think the case of violence and annoyance are particularly different. If it helps, imagine a person releasing poison gas from the room next door. If the gas kills me, it's violence. If it's a little less gas, and it merely injures me to such a degree I end up in the hospital for a month, it's still violence. If the gas sends me into a fit of coughing every time I breathe, it's annoyance. If it just makes me itchy, it's definitely annoyance. At what point does releasing the gas change from "injury" to "annoyance"? I would say these are artificial categories with no real-world equivalent, and that instead of looking for a clean answer with an obvious distinguishing case, you have to just accept that there's going to be a cost-benefit analysis to going over to your neighbor's and smashing the gas-apparatus either way, and that at some points it will return negative and at other points positive results.]
This is turning into a political discussion here, and not even one that meets this community's high standards. I will read your next response, but otherwise not continue this thread further.
Just that one demand is enough to make you an enemy of me. I don't intend to work towards any such solution, I don't think it's the right thing to do, and I will fight and die for the right to avoid it.
I'm not interested in conversing with people who make long lists of assertions, then remove themselves from the discussion.
...sigh. Okay, put it like this. We're clearly arguing past each other. I think your points are self-evidently wrong, and your arguments bordering on trolling. I am sure this is not how the discussion appears to you, and you may feel that my points are equally bad, but we're not making any progress here. And it's degenerating into a Standard Political Debate - basically a libertarian "no coercive government is ever okay" position versus a utilitarian "sometimes it's an optimal solution" position, which has been done about a billion times and about which there is very little left to be said.
That leaves us with two options. We can either continue unproductively wasting time and energy on a particularly unproductive version of a cliched topic that neither of us can realistically affect, all the while breaking the Less Wrong gentlemens' agreement against explicit political discussions. Or one person can bow out and allow the other person to take the last word.
There really is a large literature that has already worked this issue through in great detail. I'm just trying to give you a flavor of it. The fact that people will be tempted to pretend to want things they don't want to get better deals is a standard transaction cost that makes it harder to make deals. Given transaction costs it is better if the default property right is the efficient allocation. But the ability to change who you live with makes the transaction costs lower. And we can't make the default property rights efficient unless we know which is the efficient outcome, noise or no noise.
The fact that economists familiar with this literature dismissively suggest giving in to extortion, with all the inefficiencies and weakening of property rights and expectations that entails, causes me to be skeptical of the quality of this work, even without having read it.
(I actually one time argued with an economist who demanded I read the classic Coase paper on externalities before discussing the issue with me, until he realized he misunderstood my position and thus the Coase paper is non-responsive.)
By the way, what fraction of your wealth would you pay to buy out the rights of all Harley revvers?
You do realize, though, that this is potentially symmetrical, right? I mean, five people aren't complaining about one, but there's one inconsiderate asshole who complains constantly, so why shouldn't that guy have to pay to change the behavior of the one he complains about? Different people have different norms about which behavior is asinine, and there's no objectively right answer, but the economic solution works without requiring one answer to be right, only that an answer is picked and then the parties involved are allowed to settle it personally.
But there's also a critical asymmetry: If the six others give Yvain a heaping dose of silence, he'll quite enjoy it. But if Yvain and five others team up and inflict the sixth's level of noise back onto him, he'd suddenly discover his love of quiet time.
Not surprisingly, that's roughly how I dealt with the situation when it happened to me -- minus the accomplices. (Everybody has a love of quiet, you just have to lure it out.)
If you suddenly find that you really hate when other people treat you the way you treat them, You're Doing It Wrong.
While I understand that that was your experience, it isn't universal. Some people really are more comfortable with constant noise and a loud party atmosphere, all the time. While I prefer quiet most of the time, I've had roommates who became nervous and uncomfortable without a nearly-full-volume TV going in the room, if by themselves (or just around me; I'm a pretty quiet person). There's no guarantee that Yvain's problem roommate wouldn't be ecstatic to have all these accepting party animals around him all the time.
Masochists don't enjoy every whipping. (You can quote me on that.)
While people often do enjoy noisy environments, they actually enjoy a tiny subset out of all possibly noisy environments. The people you describe may like the TV on, but I doubt they run chainsaws next to their desks or play the sound of rivets being installed.
Technically, yes, I didn't fight music with music; I fought it with wall banging. But there will always be a kind of noise that will get on their nerves. When they understand that other people can be just as inconsiderate along just the same dimension, they tend to "get it" ... at least in the sense of understanding what they just put you through.
As a libertarian with Yvain's hatred of noise, I may have some insight on why this is a dissatisfying answer.
But people can't quite anticipate all the ways that others can be jerks[1] and will therefore assume certain rights which other people, by will or accident, can find holes in: the relevant rights weren't defined like one might think.
So, as I've ranted on my blog, imagine that it just so happens that your neighborhood doesn't prohibit the level of motorcycle noise that is just enough to drive you batty. Then, I come by and rev my motorcycle near enough to your window to annoy you, but not violate your rights.
No problem, right? You "just" pay me to go away. Problem solved.
Er, until the next biker, who hasn't sold his right to you, comes by and extorts -- that is the right word for it -- from you the same way. What next? Do you buy out everyone in the world? Do you sell your home? Well, who's going to buy the house with the Harley extortionists?
At some point, Coasean bargaining breaks down and becomes extortion. I have a neat graphic for this too. Go here, scroll down, and replace "pollution" with "loud noise". (And maybe "Bob Murphy" with "Robin_Hanson"...)
[1] Okay, okay, people with different psychological impressions of stimuli.
If you have the right to make noise and someone else wants to pay you to be quiet, you might pretend to like noise more than you do to get them to pay you more. But if you have the right to keep things quiet and someone else wants to pay you so they can make noise, you might pretend to like quiet more than you do to get them to pay you more. The fact that people can pretend to want things more than they do makes deals harder regardless of which is the efficient outcome.
The problem isn't that people might pretend to like noise. Their liking of noise is irrelevant. The problem is that
a) Annoying people is a path to wealth, and b) Even paying them off doesn't make the problem go away, but draws in more people to try the same trick.
The motorcycle revver could actually hate noise, but simply love extortion payments drawn from the wealth that society has -- or at least, has until people like him become too common and too tolerated.
It's all about incentives. Rewarding people for threatening to do, but refraining from, some action, will lead to people capable of threatening convincingly making a great deal of wealth, up to some equilibrium point where either the action is sufficiently tolerated by society or the people who don't like the action have become sufficiently poor that the public threats to do it are no longer rewarding enough.
Yes, exactly right, but ... did you mean that as a reply to RobinHanson?
Er, perhaps. I was generalizing a bit from what you said, so I wanted the context of your post. It was more directed at uninvolved readers, I think.
But I haven't had much coffee yet today so I'm not sure.
Oh, okay. That works too. You have enough coffee; I'm just too combative today ;-)
If there's no public regulation of noise, and I feel like being noisy, why would I offer to pay a quiet-liker? I'll just be noisy and stop if someone pays me to. The situation isn't symmetric, because the quiet-liker wants the noise-maker to change their default behavior, but the noise-maker doesn't care about the quiet-liker's default behavior.
Regulation is different from property rights. People could have a property right to make noise, or to prevent noise, or there could be regulation to set a given level of noise or quiet.