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SoullessAutomaton comments on Survey Results - Less Wrong
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In what way is he "poisoning" the discourse? He didn't even use the term ideologue, and he explained in a later post why he thinks libertarianism is essentially deontological in nature. Accusing him of "making the discourse worse" only serves to itself worsen the discussion.
Quite frankly, in my experience with people arguing for libertarianism, it tends to be precisely what he describes--a lot of bottom-line faux-consequentialist arguments about why free market principles necessarily produce better results, combined with question-begging arguments that assume individual economic freedom as the value to be maximized.
As a concrete example, by almost any metric European-style socialized health care systems work empirically, objectively better. Given the high cost of trying untested systems and the general lack of predictive power demonstrated by current macroeconomics, I can't conceive of any coherent, consequentialist argument agaisnt the immediate utility of adopting such a system in the USA, yet most libertarians will argue until blue in the face that socialized health care is a terrible idea, in aparent defiance of reality.
EDIT: This comment was pretty promptly voted down to -2 for reasons not apparent to me. Any reasons other than disagreement?
Deontological principles often help maximize utility indirectly, as I'm sure most utilitarians agree in contexts like war and criminal justice. Still, I agree deontology can bias people in the direction of libertarian politics. On the other hand, folk economics can bias people away from libertarian politics.
Since utilitarianism values the sum of all future generations far more than it values the current generation, it seems like (if we ignore that existential risks are even more important) utilitarianism recommends whatever policies grow the economy the fastest in the long run. That might be an argument for libertarianism but it might also be an argument for governments spending lots of money subsidizing research and development.
It seems more the other way to me--die-hard libertarians tend toward deontological positions, typically by gradual reification of consequentialist instrumental values into deontological terminal values ("free markets usually produce the best results" becomes "free markets are Good", &c.).
This is true, of course, and it's worth noting that I agree with a substantial majority of libertarian positions, which is part of why I find some aspects of libertarianism so irritating--it helps marginalize a political outlook that could be doing some good.
I'd think more likely it'd be an argument for both--subsidized research combined with lowered barriers to entry for innovative businesses--tile the country with alternating universities and silicon valley-type startup hotbeds, essentially (see also: Paul Graham's wet dream).
Anyway, I don't think it's the case that all forms of utilitarianism assign value to future generations that may or may not ever exist. Assigning value to potential entities seems fraught with peril.
Such as?
It would seem to support the biblical condemnation of onanism.
"Potential entities" here doesn't mean "currently existing non-morally-significant entities that might give rise to morally significant entities", just "entities that don't exist yet". A much clearer phrasing would be something like "Does my utility function aggregate over all entities existing in spacetime, or only those existing now?" IMO, the latter is obviously wrong, either being dynamically inconsistent if "now" is defined indexically, or, if "now" is some specific time, implying that we should bind ourselves not to care about people born after that time even once they do exist.
Combinatorial explosion, for starters. There's a very large set of potential entities that may or may not exist, and most won't. Assigning value to these entities seems likely to lead to absurdity. If nothing else, it seems to quickly lead to some manner of obligation to see as many entities created as possible.
But not assigning value to potential entities implies that we should make a lot of changes. Ignoring global warming for one. Perhaps enslaving future generations?
I think it's arguable that global warming could impact plenty of people already alive today, and I'm not sure what you mean by enslaving future generations.
But yes, assigning no value at all to potential entities may also be problematic, but I'm not sure what a reasonable balance is.
Taken together, bullet points 2, 3, and 4 are a textbook strawman.
To me, this speaks more to the extent of your motivation to find merit-worthy libertarian writing than to the merit of libertarian ideas. It so happens that an entire school of libertarian thought ("policy libertarianism") is dedicated to studying the specific consequences of government action. One interesting claim: "State actors are (made up of) people who are subject to the same irrational biases and collective stupidity as market actors, and often have perverse incentive structures as well."
If you're interested in reading some reasonable libertarians, you might try The Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, or EconLog as starting points.
Really? Respectfully, it seems much more plausible, based on the tone of your post, that you're couching an appeal for your own preferred policy in hypothetical terms than that you're actually suffering from a failure of imagination.
FWIW, I generally find Will Wilkinson and Tyler Cowen more reasonable than those listed above. (Yes, I realize Will works for the Cato Institute; I find him more reasonable than his employers.) YMMV.
Along with a few others, I mentioned them both by name in an earlier version of that post. I didn't want to get bogged down presenting all the relationships needed to establish that all these people were in fact libertarians:
Instead of beating that glob of stuff into something readable, I got lazy and went for the low-hanging fruit instead, specifically the over-the-top claim that there's no such thing as a coherent, consequentialist, libertarian argument against (e.g.) European-style socialzed health care.
That's certainly not what I meant by "poisoning the discourse," or I would have made my comment on it. It isn't a strawman (in the sense of purely made up). That is how most libertarians argue. I liked that post much better, but it still doesn't say why these actions by the majority of libertarians matter. Maybe they've poisoned the word already. Saying "these guys are nuts, avoid their brand name" is just pointing out a bad situation, not making it worse. There are other reasons it might matter: a consequentialist libertarian should ask himself how he reached that state, if it was from fakely consequentialist libertarian arguments.
It reminds me of Robin Hanson's advice to pull the rope sideways; while that seems like good advice on how to choose policies to focus on, his advice not to choose sides seems exactly backwards. Instead, choose a party, prove your loyalty, and pull that party sideways.
I am not afraid of fakely consequentialist libertarians, because I think I can tell the difference. Except that I am afraid of Cato, which argues from the conclusions and might be cluefull enough to invest in rhetoric. Why would you ever look to lobbyists?
Let's not argue semantics. I had intended to express the following simile:
(3-bullet-points : rigorous libertarian thinking) :: (straw-facsimile-of-human : actual-human)
I'm afraid I'm having trouble understanding what you mean here. Can you clarify? I recognize it may not speak to the question you're actually asking, but my immediate reaction to this is: "Arguments employed by most libertarians are completely irrelevant. It's the arguments employed by the strongest and most sophisticated libertarians that demand our attention."
I'm confused here, too. You mention falsely consequentialist libertarians and seem dismissive of them. You mention the Cato institute, and suggest they are arguing in bad faith and therefore very likely to be wrong. Your reference to "tell[ing] the difference" suggests you might entertain the idea of a consequentialist libertarian who argues in good faith. Is it possible that an earnest consequentialist libertarian could be right? What about?
Uhm, point 2 at least is a straight up fact, as real markets typically diverge to varying degrees from perfect markets. I also note you don't actually dispute point 1, which is the strong statement of a deontological ethical position, and pure deontology remains incompatible with consequentialism, hence the apparent contradiction in ethical systems.
If I've been unimpressed with the arguments of rank-and-file members of a political position, why would I be motivated to look for better writing that may or may not exist? Do you go looking for merit-worthy religious apologetics?
That said, do you know of any libertarian arguments that do not assume either 1) economic freedom as the primary terminal value or 2) assume the efficiency of real-world markets? Both are unwarranted assumptions that seem to underlie many libertarian arguments I've seen.
Well, yes, I prefer policies that are empirically demonstrated to actually work, especially when the cost of trying a system that fails is very high. Why don't you?
Yes. Diagnosing the faults in Alvin Plantinga's reasoning is important. Am I to understand you'd prefer a frank exchange of views with Jerry Falwell?
Yes. I included one such argument in the post you just replied to. I quote myself:
In other words, government decision-makers (i.e. bureaucrats) have just as much trouble integrating new information, violating social norms, and admitting error as consumers or decision-makers for firms, but bureaucrats are also subject to perverse incentives, regulatory capture, etc.
The implied primary terminal value here is welfare-maximization, according to some material standard that I'm assuming we could agree on, given that we're both here. No specific claim about the efficiency of markets is made. A fortiori, the argument derives some of its strength from the acknowledgment of certain deviations from rational behavior that (once again) we both presumably know about, because we're both here.
My main complaint with this argument is that it should be empirically testable. You can implement regulatory scheme X in Area A, and no regulatory scheme in Area B, and see which produces better results. For example, ban all cancer treatments that top doctors agree are useless and dangerous in Area A, keep all treatments legal in Area B, and see which area has higher mortality among cancer patients.
Many libertarians I know have absolutely no interest in doing this, and don't even like talking about the term "regulatory scheme X" because they prefer to lump all possible regulatory schemes together and judge them on the merit of the first one that comes to mind (this is also a problem with many socialists, for the opposite reason).
I don't know much about economics, but I do know a bit about public health policy, and the people in charge of that are sometimes very good about using studies to determine whether their government interventions are an overall improvement over the no-intervention case (obvious exception: the FDA, which is very good at running studies, but very bad at running the right studies and doing sane cost-benefit analysis). When these studies show positive results at relatively low cost, a truly consequentialist libertarian ought to admit government regulation has been effective in that case. Instead, they tend to dismiss it as a fluke or start talking about some case where government regulation isn't effective.
I think the great error in this whole debate is framing it as a conflict between socialists (who supposedly ought to think all government interventions are great) and libertarians (who supposedly ought to think all government interventions are terrible). In reality, some of these will work and some of these won't. I'd rather people started paying more attention to which were which than become crusaders for bigger or smaller government. I think "Government regulation is bad" (or "is good") is approximately the same kind of sentence as "Islam is a religion of peace".
I'm reluctant to jump into a long discussion of the specifics of libertarian public policy -- mind killer and all that -- but in light of the terrible account of itself libertarianism has given you and SoullessAutomaton, maybe a few nonspecific comments are in order.
There's such a thing as libertarian public policy research. It happens in think tanks. It gets done by academics (mostly economists), it incorporates peer review, and it usually doesn't hold with the kind of boorish behavior you're describing. Many of its hypotheticals are imports from the most inconvenient possible world. Specifically, it acknowledges that market failures exist and that government intervention is sometimes the most effective way to deal with them; that regulation has legitimate uses in service of the public good; and above all that pragmatism and compromise are the only virtues that can survive in the political arena.
Like most public policy it is essentially utilitarian, and its specific claims center around the idea that society is too complex for any central authority to administer efficiently. That's to say, while there are many good ends the government might achieve through intervention in the economy or the private lives of its citizens, the costs of such intervention -- money spent, conventions altered, expectations shifted, power grabbed, responsibility abdicated, and goals co-opted by the political process -- are rarely less than the benefits.
You may take issue with any of these claims, but hopefully you can agree that the framework I'm developing here supports more sophisticated answers to the question "As a society, what should we do?" than just chanting "Private GOOD! Public BAD!"
In the specific case of your test of Regulatory Scheme X, the thoughtful libertarian position might go something like this:
Accountability is great. Empirical validation is great. But in this case, your test is a non-starter. No one is going to want this to happen. Drug companies will resist the removal of their products from the marketplace. Doctors will see the legislative call to dispense with certain treatments as a threat to their professional autonomy. Crossover between the AMA and FDA will favor an equilibrium where most experts already support the status quo. Insurance companies will use the opportunity to demand changes elsewhere in their payment structure. Any one of these groups can scuttle the whole project and throw your whole party out of power in the next election by letting it slip to the AARP that you're planning on taking away something previously covered by Medicare. And even if you manage a legislative or executive miracle, anyone in Area A who wants the banned treatments can just migrate to Area B and get them there.
None of this should be interpreted to rule out the possibility that the test itself could yield invaluable information, saving lives or huge amounts of taxpayer money. But no regulator or legislator has any direct incentive to risk his career and all his political capital for nobody in particular. When talking about cost-benefit analysis, it's important to remember that government officials implicitly measure costs and benefits to themselves, and that many of the responsibilities government arrogates to itself go unmet as a result.
I appreciate your presentation of the ideas here; it's more enlightening than most material I've seen. That said, I still take issue with some points:
Peer review by academics is only meaningful if based on a foundation of empirical observation and testable predictions; I think it remains to be demonstrated that macroeconomics has any predictive power whatsoever. Otherwise you end up with something like literary criticism--sophisticated, elaborate arguments unrelated to reality in nearly every way.
This does not require that certain subsections of society may benefit from central administration. This is easily demonstrated by the existence of large, niche-dominating corporations, which tend to be every bit as inefficient and bureaucratic as government. Some problems are such that the benefits of centralization outweigh the costs of bureaucracy.
Agreed completely, but sophisticated answers are still useless without empirical foundations.
...which, ironically, leads to the other great flaw of libertarian politics--it proposes that government voluntarily reduce its own power dramatically and promotes increased personal responsibility. This is not a popular idea. People like having an authority, and people in government like being authorities. Large-scale libertarian government stikes me as, unfortunately, every bit as unlikely as Yvain's government of controlled experimentation.
While I am pretty skeptical of the predictive power of a lot of macroeconomics as well, it seems odd to demand empirical research but simultaneously deny that the field in question is amenable to empirical research. A lot of the economics research that is used as support for libertarian positions is based on comparative studies between countries or between jurisdictions within countries. One common thread of research is to attempt to rate countries according to some defined measure of economic freedom and then see if the rating correlates with positive outcomes (GDP per capita being a common choice). There's all sorts of ways that research can be criticized but to completely rule out such research as admissible evidence would seem to render questions about how to organize society completely beyond the realms of scientific investigation. If studies of this kind are not a valid basis for making decisions then how do you propose ideal enlightened governments should determine policy?
Hence the existence of things like the free state project and seasteading. Libertarians are quite aware of the difficulties of achieving their vision of society through conventional democratic politics. In fact, there's a recently established blog on that very topic run in part by a less wrong commenter (who is also behind the seasteading idea).
I'm not saying it's not amenable to empirical research, I just don't get the impression that any extant research has been fruitful. As I said earlier, I saw serious economists discussing the USA stimulus bill predicting everything from "harmful" to "no effect" to "doesn't do enough", and as Robin has observed the chances that any of these predictions will be remembered is close to nil. This is strong evidence that the field as a whole lacks rigor, and that anyone who does know their stuff is being drowned out by the rest.
Relying first and foremost on things that are already demonstrated to have worked well is a good start--hence my argument for adopting European-style socialized health care. Also, drop things that have been demonstrated ineffective, like the "war on drugs".
Beyond that, take action only when necessary, and test new ideas in small areas first when possible. Modern governments are too large and powerful to be making large, expensive mistakes.
I've read about the seasteading project before, actually, and I think it's generally a wonderful idea.
I'm not sure what kind of economics you're thinking of when you say macroeconomics. I have very little confidence in the kind of macroeconomics that tries to relate things like interest rates and savings to money supply using simple formulas, or that tries to give accurate values to 'multipliers' for stimulus spending, or that construct mathematical models of the economy and use them to make predictions about future growth from a few aggregated inputs by curve fitting to historical data. I'd agree that most of that is junk.
The kind of macroeconomics I think has some value is that which attempts to gather empirical support for particular policies by comparing outcomes across different countries or jurisdictions, or across different time periods. This kind of research is obviously far from ideal since it is weakly controlled and is often making hard to justify comparisons between different measures. Maybe macroeconomics is not the right term for that kind of research but I'm not sure what else to call it. In terms of gathering empirical evidence for the results of particular policy decisions, that seems about the best we can do at the moment.
You do realize how far from an uncontroversial claim that is? I grew up with the NHS in the UK (and I now live in Canada which is also a universal health care system). They are far from perfect systems. Every government for as long as I can remember in the UK has come into power partly on a promise to 'fix' the NHS. None have succeeded. I don't think I've heard anyone argue that the healthcare system in the US is fine as it is - there is fairly universal agreement that it is broken. I'm far from persuaded that the best solution is to try and adopt a European model though. There's plenty of research from libertarian think tanks that provides empirical evidence in favour of health care reforms that reduce government involvement in healthcare rather than increase it. I'm sure there are grounds for questioning some of that research but it is disingenuous to pretend it doesn't exist.
And healthcare is a good candidate for the largest and most expensive of them all. Why is healthcare exempt from the principle of testing new ideas on a small scale first?
This is by far the most useful discussion of the subject I have ever had. I'm starting to think this rationality stuff might actually work out.
I see little value to discussion with either. Given the fundamental problems with theism (primarily a lack of empiricism), I can reasonably expect that "better" theist arguments will only be more elaborate and rigorous argumentation from the same broken axioms. Unless I were preparing for a formal, public debate with a theist it wouldn't be worth my time.
The phrase "policy libertarianism" gets only a couple thousand google hits, many of which are false positives. Eliminating the most common false positive (the phrase "foreign policy, libertarianism"), your own LW comment comes up on the first page of results. The remaining results seem to mostly concern matters of evolutionary vs. revolutionary change as a means of implementing libertarian goals, not arguments for goals, and bear no obvious relation to what you've mentioned. If you're referring to a major school of libertarian thought, I'm assuming there's another, more popular term for it, but I don't know how to figure out what it would be, sorry.
This point is not under dispute, but it also does not suffice to prove that governmental action is therefore less effective, especially given imperfect markets, other problematic incentives for smaller agents (e.g., problems of collective action), and empirical evidence showing that governmental programs can sometimes lead to better results than non-governmental programs (e.g., European vs. USA health care).
Some form of welfare-maximization, yes. Various quality-of-life metrics are a (rough) approximation. I'm not sure what else you're getting at here.
I should say again, it is likely that we agree on the vast majority of actual conclusions. My complaint with libertarianism as a political philosophy is that (like most other political philosophies) it has no apparent, consistent empirical basis and resorts frequently to bottom-line arguments, even though many of their conclusions can be justified rigorously.
I am convinced of this in large part because most libertarians I have encountered have been completely impervious to real-world examples of government programs being more efficient and effective than equivalent non-governmental systems, leading me to conclude that the mainstream of libertarian thought is essentially anti-empirical.
It's a fairly recently coined term. The first use I'm aware of is here. The distinction between policy and structural libertarianism has been picked up quite quickly as many have found it useful.
In that case I remain confused in that it seems to mostly refer to a framework for how to achieve libertarian goals, not for justifying that said goals will successfully confer the advertised benefits (e.g., some type of welfare maximization or general utility).
The post is on a libertarian blog and as such is aimed at an audience who already accept the case for libertarian goals being desirable. It's making a distinction between libertarians who believe that the best way to achieve their goals is to work within existing democratic systems to promote libertarian policies and those who believe that existing democratic systems are fundamentally inhospitable to libertarian policies and that achieving libertarianism requires addressing structural factors that tend to produce unlibertarian societies.
The 'policy libertarians' tend to be the ones focusing on demonstrating empirical support for improved outcomes under libertarian policies. The idea being that it may be possible to get more libertarian policies implemented by appealing to empirical evidence for their efficacy on a case by case basis rather than by trying to convince people that libertarianism is the 'one true way'. That would seem to be precisely the kind of approach you would seem to prefer.
That clarifies the relevance, thank you.
He used the term "ideology."
Are you being disingenuous here, or do you really think those connotationally equivalent?
Some people use ideology more broadly. Others use it exactly as ideologue. It's pretty clear from taw's later comment that he meant it as ideologue. I responded to the short comment rather than the long comment because it merely insinuates.
That does not seem clear to me. Are you certain you aren't reading too much into it?
Assume good faith, as Wikipedia would say.