Court System

Many Libertarians have this amazing, naive faith in the court system to get things right.  They reject legislative or executive rule-making on the grounds that all questions of harm and liability should be handled in the courts.  They do this despite the fact that the courts are often hopelessly incompetent in technical matters.  A system regulated by technocrats in some administrative agency will be much better than a system regulated by judges and lawyers.

Here is an example of how the courts fail to fill their basic function of criminal justice.

Money Attitudes

This article brings up a lot of interesting points about how people think about money.

First, it demonstrates how little children are, by nature, vicious greedy little monkeys obsessed with social status.*

...my 4-year-old daughter a few weeks ago stomped her feet, turned red and demanded to know why we did not own a summer house.

...most questions about salary spring from the schoolyard. "There is so much comparison going on there," he said. "Who is best looking? Who is most popular? And money just plugs right into that system. Who has the richest parents?" 

Second, it has an excellent technique for teaching children the value of money and the costs of things:

Given a particular request to return to a beloved but expensive vacation spot, David Blackburn of Montclair, N.J., stole a lesson from kindergarten class, where his son had been learning about bar charts.

The two sat down and sketched out some things the boy was familiar with, including one week's allowance ($1.25), a Lego set ($20) and sushi for the family ($60). But a night for four at the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, N.Y., was so expensive that it required a few extra pieces of paper to graph it in proportion. "His eyes got big," Mr. Blackburn said. "And he asked a lot less about going to Mohonk."

More parents need to do things like this.  It shows that children can be taught about costs, if you take the time to do it right, and the rewards will be large.  I also approve of the $1.25 weekly allowance for a kindergartener.  That is about the right amount of money for them to be handling.

But what I mainly want to talk about is not something that just involves children.  It is a pervasive problem that infects way too many adults:

Indeed, the problem with disclosure [of salary] in this context is that many younger children will immediately tell someone (or everyone). And the automatic social reflex is often a flash of shame among people who hear the number and make less, Mr. Kessel noted, or arrogance among those who make more. Who truly wants to put others in either situation?

I have never understood why people have such a hang-up about salary.  This paragraph shows an attitude of judging the worth of people by how much money they make.  People who make more money feel or are made to feel inferior and those who earn more are assumed to be superior.

I say this as someone who studies money-related topics for a living: Judging the worth of anyone by how much money they make is stupid, and the reluctance to talk about how much money people make is a serious mistake.  The salary someone earns should not be seen as an integral part of someone's identity, it should be viewed as a choice that they make in life, no no more important than their choice of hobbies.

Leaving aside the fact that marketable skills are only loosely related to your worth as a human being, there are two reasons why people of identical skill might earn different salaries: the labor-leisure trade-off and compensating differentials.

The labor-leisure trade-off is a fact about how people choose to spend their finite amount of time.  They can either work to earn money or they can take time off.  In order to enjoy anything in life, you need both time and money.  Some people prefer to consume things, like world-class restaurant food, that are very expensive but take very little time out of your day.  Other people prefer to consume things, like backpacking trips through the mountains, that are rather cheap but take a lot of time.  The gourmand will choose a job that pays more and takes more time, while the adventurer will take a job that pays less but gives more time off.

The compensating differential is the fact that unpleasant jobs will pay more than pleasant jobs, even if the skills required are identical.  Suppose that a company needs two customer support people, one to take orders and the other to deal with complaints.  Dealing with irate customers is an unpleasant experience, so everyone would prefer to be the one taking orders, so the company will have to pay more to the person who deals with complaints.  (If they do not pay more, then the people who apply for the complaints job will be less skilled and competent than the ones who apply for the order-taking job.)

Note that these two factors need not be part of the job itself, but can also reflect the required training for the job.  Engineers earn more, partly because engineering students in college tend to be assigned more work than people in other majors.  People who prefer to earn more money become engineering students, while people who prefer to consume more leisure time in their college years do not.

So the fact that someone earns more money does not necessarily mean that they are more skilled.  They might have an unpleasant or dangerous job, or a job that requires a lot of time.  The people who earn less might be choosing a lifestyle of relative ease and comfort, rather than one of expensive consumer goods.

Most people understand this.  And yet, they still refuse to talk about salary.  It is the one thing about themselves that they will not share.  At the company I used to work for, people would gladly discuss all manner of private things like medical problems, family conflicts, and sexual adventures.  But they absolutely refused to say anything about their salary, despite the fact that we all had jobs requiring very different skill sets, amount of time at work, and unpleasantness to deal with.

Whenever you see a social norm like this, you should think to yourself: "What group of people are most helped and harmed by this?"  That group of people will have an incentive to perpetuate the norm.  In this case, the reluctance to talk about salaries is harmful to employees and beneficial to employers.  It means that the employer has more information about salaries than the employees do.  In any negotiation or bargaining situation, information is vital.  This social convention of refusing to talk about salaries means that employers have a massive information advantage in salary negotiations.  They know much more about what you are worth than you do, and this can often allow them to take advantage of you.

When comparing salary with your peers, there are three possibilities.  You could learn that you are making more than you are worth, less than you should be getting, or the right amount.  The odds of learning you make too much are very low, because the company simply would not have retired or retained you at a salary above the fair value.  So the only real possibilities are learning that you make too little or just enough.  It might cause some temporary pain to learn that you are underpaid, but once you have this information, you can use it to get more money, or look around for a better job.  And knowing that your salary is fair would be much better than living with uncertainty.  No matter what the situation is, employees can only win by comparing notes.

Unions are aware of this fact.  Whatever you think of them, it cannot be denied that they are quite good at extracting resources from employers for the benefit of the union workers.  Union jobs tend to be characterized by well-known pay scales, while non-union workplaces are characterized by secret salaries and individual negotiations.

It has been speculated that one reason women make less than men is that they are less aggressive in salary negotiations.  This would probably change in a hurry if they knew what everyone else was making.  From this point of view, then, the social norm of refusing to share salary information is a tool to keep women down.

*The neurotypical ones, at least.  Non-neurotypical children are vicious greedy little monkeys obsessed with something else chosen at random.

Funny Quote

This, I believe, also explains why in highly egalitarian Australia, child-rearing consists of turning the tykes loose barefoot in the backyard for 12 years and hurling them slabs of meat thrice daily. They seem to turn out pretty well, actually.

from a blogger at The Economist

 
I checked the comments to see if anyone would take offense at this.  Nobody did, but one commenter said that "The Australian stereotype presented in this article is out of date." and talked about how things are not like that any more.

Crime and Punishment

This story reminds me of how messed up the standard view of criminal justice is.  Everyone seems obsessed by what is going on in the mind of the defendant.  The decision to put him to death or not was based entirely on speculations about what was going on in his mind at the time of the crime.

This is wrong for several reasons.  It is fundamentally impossible to know what is going on in someone else's mind, and even if you could know it, the information has very little value.  Arguing about intention or guilt or culpability makes about as much sense as arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  Both are exercises in the discussion of unobservable things that have no value in explaining the events we observe.

This obsession with intention is a natural consequence of a system based on the idea of 'punishment'.  The argument is that if someone had a certain state of mind during the crime, he is guilty and mush be punished, but if he had a different state of mind, he is diseased and should not be punished.  The fact that questions of punishment, and of who deserves to be punished,  devolve into this kind of philosophical hair-splitting is an indication that the entire concept is flawed.

The purpose of a criminal justice system is to prevent crime.  Period.  All decisions about what to do with someone who has committed a crime should be based on preventing future crimes, and nothing else.  There are two aspects to this.  There is the chance that the person who committed one crime will commit another if released into society.  Then, there is the effect that the sentence will have on other people who might be considering committing a crime.

For example, suppose there is a woman who has killed her husband after discovering he cheated on her.  Aside from this one incident, she is perfectly law-abiding, and we know that she is no threat to anyone who is not married to her and a philanderer.  If we ignore questions of precedent, then it is perfectly logical to simply release her and forbid her from marrying anyone.  After all, society gains nothing by sending her to jail.  She will not commit any crimes.  The only reason to impose larger costs to her is to deter future women who are in that same situation.  If we send her to jail, then we are implicitly assuming that other women in a similar situation will rationally weigh the costs and benefits of killing the husband, and that the prospect of going to jail will discourage the women from committing the murder.

However, this deterrent becomes useless if she can get out of jail by claiming any kind of mental condition that can be faked or has an unclear diagnosis.  Future women will then kill the husband and fake the condition, or hire a sympathetic doctor to diagnose it.  And if the condition is unambiguous, the situation becomes even worse.  People who know they have the condition will feel free to commit crimes, knowing that they will not be punished.  If this happens with any regularity, then society will demand that all people with the condition be identified and pre-emptively locked up.

The only rule that makes any sense is for all people who commit a crime to get the same sentence, regardless of mental state, medical condition, or circumstance.  The punishment should fit the crime, and it should apply to all people equally. 

This will mean that the mentally incompetent will get sentenced along with everyone else.  The way to make this not be a bad thing is to treat all jail time, not as punishment, but as a medical quarantine.  Really, we should just assume that anyone who is observed to commit a crime is mentally defective in some way.  We should treat them as if they had, through no fault of their own, gotten some really nasty and really communicable disease and had to be locked up to protect other people.  The concept of 'jail' should cease to exist, and be replaced with humane asylums.  With a proper emphasis on compassion and treatment, we can try to cure whatever is wrong with them, making them less dangerous.  And if they do have to be locked up for the rest of their lives, as will often be necessary, there is no reason to torture them in the process.

I think that the focus on punishment exists because we all know that jails are horrible, horrible places.  Even if you ignore the humanity and rights of the convicts, it is a fact that jail tends to make people more, not less, likely to commit crimes.  They fail at their primary purpose.  This is to be expected, because it is a well-known fact that putting people in really bad environments causes them to become dysfunctional, insane, and/or criminal.

People want to believe that the world, our government, and our society are good and just.  This is a known psychological flaw.  When faced with information about the horror of jail, people look for an explanation that allows them to continue believing that the world is just.  They usually settle on "Criminals are bad people and they deserve what is happening to them."

Superstimuli

The concept of a 'superstimulus' is an important one to understand, and not just from an academic sense.  You encounter superstimuli every day, and how you respond to them is a big factor in your quality of life.

In biology, a stimulus is anything that provokes a reaction from an organism.  We have a lot of instinctive behavior patterns that determine how we respond to various stimuli.  For example, sweet food is a stimulus.  Our instincts tell us to seek out and consume sweet food, because in a state of nature a sweet food is going to be something good and healthy like fresh fruit or honey.  

However, our instincts do not know that humans have learned how to refine sugar and produce lots of it very cheaply.  We have the ability to make artificial foods that are far sweeter than anything found in nature.  Our instincts, working through the taste buds and the pleasure centers of our brain, tell us that we should eat as much as possible of these hyper-sweet foods.  These artificial foods, the ones that fool are instincts, are superstimuli.

A superstimulus is anything that people are attracted to because it is an artificially enhanced version of something that their instincts tell them to seek out.  A candy bar is a superstimulus.  An airbrushed picture of a fashion model is a superstimulus.

Recreational drugs, like caffeine and heroin, are an even more extreme form of superstimulus.  They work by directly stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain, which are normally stimulated by doing healthy or productive things.

In order to live a healthy life, you should train yourself to identify and avoid superstimuli.  They are almost always harmful, and if you become habituated to them, you enjoy natural things less and less.

As technology advances, we are learning how to make more and more kinds of superstimuli.  This robot baby seal is a perfect example, an artificial creation that mimics something natural.  People are strangely attracted to it, because it is designed to push just the right buttons.  Expect more and more of this kind of thing in the future.  This one is mostly harmless because it replaces animals*, but in a few decades we will have superstimulus robots that replace people by  imitating, and exceeding, all of the qualities we look for in our friends, like kindness or attention or beauty.

I expect this to cause troubles and societal changes at least as big as the widespread availability of junk food.  Today, the healthy people are those who are smart enough to avoid junk food.  In the future, the psychologically healthy will be those who are smart enough to avoid robot companions.

*Nobody knows exactly why people are attracted to 'cute' fuzzy animals in the first place.  I personally think that it is due to some kind of flaw in our brains, and that our pets are themselves a superstimulus.  I have noticed that keeping pets is often a substitute for taking care of children and grandchildren.  They seem to satisfy the instinct for nurturing in the same way that a candy bar satisfies the instinct to eat sweet food.

Somaliland

Most people have never heard of Somaliland.  The northern bit of Somalia has basically declared independence, and, without much help from anybody, managed to create a relatively free and safe democracy.

We could do an amazing amount of good by recognizing Somaliland as an independent country, and giving them a little bit of support.  We would be rewarding good behavior, and helping establish a good democracy in a region that really needs one.  But while we spend vast amounts of money on a failing and corrupt regime in Afghanistan, we are giving nothing to people who really deserve it.  

We won't even acknowledge their existence, even though they have far more right to call themselves a nation than many other places.  Our State Department is incredibly attached to the artificial national boundaries drawn up by the European colonial powers when they carved up the rest of the world.  As a matter of policy, we need to encourage these borders to change.  We need to encourage the formation of new nations, allowing people to break free of the chains of the past.

Well-functioning societies must grow organically.  They cannot be imposed form outside.  The only way to get good nations is to let them grow, by the work and wishes of their own people.  The people of Somaliland have, against all odds, managed to create something resembling a free democracy out of the chaos and lawlessness of one of the worst places in the world.  We should give them the help and support they need to survive and grow.

Plantation House

I like looking at historical houses.  My friend and I went to one today, a plantation owner's house that was built in 1812.  Like most houses owned by the wealthy of that time period, it is much like a modern middle-class house.  Everything: the size, the furnishings, the decor, all are about what you would expect a middle-class family to have.  Obviously things look different, and there is a different style and culture to it, but I am talking functionality when I make this comparison.

I have commented on this before.  But here is a number to put this technological progress into perspective.  The man who owned that house owned assets worth $52 million in today's dollars.

52 million dollars, and his possessions were comparable to that of a middle-class household today.  Of course, he had lots of servants to order around, but we have an array of technological 'servants' that are just as good, maybe even better.