On public shaming and the expected utility thereof

Via Eric Crampton we discover this post by Timothy Burke:

• The moral of Pierre (Easily Distracted)

It’s long and difficult to do justice with an excerpt, so I’ll quote this teaser and hope that it’ll motivate you to click through:

I heard just a small bit of a story on NPR this morning about “crunch time” in family life, where working parents feel the pressure of getting their kids fed with a decent meal, finished with homework, and to sleep at a reasonable hour, and how exercise and play both tend to fall out of the picture many days.

The segment I heard featured a woman who talked about how she cried when she saw the NPR solicitation for the story on Facebook and another mother who talked about how she didn’t think this is what family life was all about. And then the experts came on and said, “Everybody knows what they’re supposed to do” (in terms of making sure kids get enough exercise and eat well to avoid obesity) and concluded that what we really need to do is figure out why so few people do what they know they’re supposed to do.

In brief and incomplete terms: Burke laments the contemporary nanny discourse in which the Experts blame horrible social phenomena like kids playing too many hours of videogames on “noncompliance”, and then chide the noncompliant — and encourage others to do so as well — for being “a burden on the system”:

If you want an explanation of the meanness of 21st Century American public discourse, for the fractures in the body politic, this will do as a starting place. “Get that guy to wear his helmet, because otherwise he’s going to cost you money.” “Get that woman to lose weight, because otherwise she’s going to cost you money.” “Hassle that couple because their kid plays too many video games and might slightly underperform in school and not make the contribution to net productivity that we are expecting of him.”

We are offered a thousand reasons to complain of other people’s behavior (and to excoriate and loath our own) on the grounds that it will cost us too much. That we should talk about what is good and bad, right and wrong, mostly in terms of the selfish consequences, or at best, in terms of the kind of closeted idea of a collective interest that neoliberalism dare not directly speak of–sort of the nation, sort of the economy, sort of the community, but really none of those directly or clearly.

Now, Dr. Crampton has done an excellent job of phrasing the post in terms of the brilliant diversity of personal utility functions, and if I haven’t persuaded you by now that you should go read Burke’s excellent post in full I’m simply not able to do so.  But I can add one more very speculative wrinkle from the perspective of a glib dilettante physiology nerd.

Burke offers this rebuttal to the idea that we ought to go around shaming each other into what the experts tell us is good behaviour:

“Stop costing me money” in a society that also protects the autonomy of individual choice is a perverse and counterproductive angle of approach: it makes me want to do more of whatever that is up until I’m not allowed to any longer. It is, ultimately, the voice of the Boss, and at least for now, we can still say, most of the time, that the experts and the government and the human resource specialists and the doctors are not the Boss of Me. Small wonder that many policy wonks and technocratic experts flirt so relentlessly with prohibition and restriction as the big stick behind the soft talk.

I’ll offer another: By constantly policing each other, by constantly monitoring our behaviour for and censoring our discourse against anything that might invite expert-mandated criticism from others, we turn ourselves and others into tightly-wound highly-strung chronic stress machines.  This leads to chronic systemic inflammation with nonzero probability, and chronic systemic inflammation is, if not the root of all evil, certainly a top-level directory (and probably a big one, like /usr).  Any cost-benefit analysis of nannyism that doesn’t take into account the health effects of this sort of pervasive stressor, and its downstream pathologia, is incomplete at best.

For the win

I have nothing to add:

• Statements I believe unequivocally (Coyote Blog)

“Everybody with half a brain is coming to California”

– Governor Jerry Brown

Less killer, more filler

I’ll post something substantive one of these days, really I will.

Turd for thought: Most (better than 80%?) of the arguments on both sides of this purportedly-new “national conversation on guns” prove far too much.  Example: The administrative arguments against arming teachers by mandate (e.g. “more guns in non-enthusiasts’ hands means more negligent discharges”) apply just as well to arming police officers, although the proportions may vary somewhat.  The administrative arguments in favour of arming teachers by mandate (e.g. “the right person with the right tool in the right place can solve a violent problem before anyone gets hurt”) apply just as well to arming… er, everyone by mandate (and again the proportions may vary somewhat).  I’m not sure that pressing a heater into a sixteen-year-old 7-11 clerk’s hands as a condition of his employment is a fantastic idea regardless of how often stop-n-robs get shot up vice elementary schools.  These are not easy questions, let alone questions with party-line answers.

Now that you’ve read — or at least skipped over — my political content for the month, how about we go with some more metal?  I’m in a particularly nerdy mood lately so here’s some Hobbit-inspired Summoning:

Still clanks more brass than anything you’ve ever heard on radio.

Examining liberaltarianism

Clark has a post doing that over at Popehat:

• Wherein a right-libertarian sticks a toe in left-libertarianism and finds that the water is fine

It is excellent, and well worth your time.

Because I’m a nerd, and way more of an algebraist than an analyst, I like to find principles behind the things I believe and build frameworks out of them.  I’m not always a Good Scientist, trying to falsify my beliefs at every turn, but so far this approach has worked out pretty well for me.  One of the key principles behind liberaltarianism (I prefer the portmanteau because it’s a fun little context switch when you’re talking to people locked into a single-axis political mindset) comes from something Jim Henley wrote a while ago, distinguishing between government-provided crutches and government-enforced shackles.  Most of us libertarians and an-caps like to talk in terms of cuts to government spending, power, and pervasiveness — and then get indignant when “liberals” complain, because we’re including things like scaling back the drug war and opening up immigration law and how dare you suggest we just want to shut down pension funds and fire departments?  Henley sensibly suggests that liberaltarians should prefer to shitcan the more odious shackles first, and remove the crutches from the strong before the weak.

Clark strips this mindset to its foundations, pointing out that liberaltarians pay a lot more attention to the care/harm axis than “regular” libertarians.  This should come as no great surprise.

He also notes that

most [right-libertarians] picture ourselves as captains of industry and not as workers. Ayn Rand wrote about a lot about copper mine owners and train barons, and not much copper miners working 12 hour shifts swinging picks in the dark.

I’d quibble with this, just a little.  I don’t think right-libertarians picture themselves as captains of industry so much as identify with captains of industry.  We see those capital owners as successful wealth sprinters, people with impressive skillsets who worked a lot of eighty-hour weeks to get to the top of the ladder, and we like to think of ourselves as people who could do the same, at least in principle.  So we have a tendency to take soak-the-rich tax proposals as personal put-downs — “even if you finally make it to the big leagues, we’re still going to hate you” — and find the sanctimonious progressives who scold us for not voting in our best interests condescendingly tone-deaf at best.

That shit cuts both ways, though.  Those of us in the aspirational 14% need to recognize that there are a whole fuck-ton of people out there who aren’t.  As commenter jb puts it:

My problem with right-libertarians boils down to the Sympathy with Workers bit–I see how ordinary people, especially the poor, even the poor who are trying to better themselves, are screwed by the powerful in our system, and the way right-libertarians handwave that away annoys me. However, the left-statist solutions to that problem don’t actually work and impose injustice elsewhere.

It’s easy for someone like me to say “just learn some marketable skills and go get a better job” — and probably far more condescendingly tone-deaf.

Reality is always right

So there’s been an awful lot of discussion on the Big Truck about the GOP’s rather optimistic interpretations of the polls, which gave rise to (among others) George Will gleefully predicting a landslide victory in the electoral college.  Well, there was a landslide EC victory all right, but it didn’t exactly go his way.  It turns out that if you want to use numbers to determine which of two things is larger, you’re probably better off with a Bayesian statistical model rather than a sheer fucking fantasy model.  Just saying “our model predicts such-and-so” only gives you the appearance of credibility until reality intervenes.

People can say whatever they like, of course, and if partisan hacks didn’t spout off nonsense I’d have a lot fewer things to blog about.  Still, it’s about time the truly fantastical ideologues got some push-back.

On a similar note: Remember when Citizens United was going to destroy democracy as we know it because those evil awful one-percenters were going to just buy every election in perpetuity?  I remember that like it was last Monday, which in fact it was.  Yeah, about that:

• Spending by independent groups had little election impact, analysis finds (WaPo — mind the dumbworms)

Spending by outside groups, it turns out, was the dog that barked but did not bite. Obama and other Democrats had long made dire predictions about the potential impact of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited money on elections and created a new class of wealthy political groups.

I don’t need to tell you how that turned out, do I?  In the cold light of day it’s clear that voters are a heck of a lot less vulnerable to teh ebil advertisings than the Cassandras among us would like to portend.  Why, it’s almost as if the dire predictions of unlimited plutocracy were mere ideological bloviations after all!

People can say whatever they like, of course, and if partisan hacks didn’t spout off nonsense I’d have a lot fewer things to blog about.  Still, it’s about time the truly fantastical ideologues got some push-back.

Four more years

By way of the commendably-sufferable Andrew Sullivan we find this eyebrow-raising statement by Samuel Goldman:

[T]he premature elevation of Rubio as frontrunner for 2016 is precisely the wrong strategy for building a Republican majority. Rubio is young and charismatic. But he’s a vocal supporter of the Bush-era policies that voters have twice rejected, especially on foreign policy. One lesson of this election is that Americans do not want another war. I doubt their appetite for confrontation will increase over the next four years.

(Emphasis added.)

Horseshit.

If we judge what “Americans” want by what the executive branch has done under Obama, “Americans” are peachy-keen with the idea of (among other things) staying in Afghanistan, incinerating random Pakistani males of military age who may or may not be in the vicinity of where reported terrorists were sighted sixteen hours before the drone showed up, and straight-up murdering without judicial oversight or due process of law American citizens, provided that those American citizens have brown skin and scary Ay-rab sounding names.  ”Americans” in 2008 might have been forgiven for thinking that they weren’t voting for four more years of Bush 43′s foreign policy, but “Americans” in 2012 have no such excuse.

Jonathan Adler puts it succinctly:

It has often been the case that significant political changes can only occur when a President plays against type. So only Nixon could go to China and only George Bush (41) could sign the 1990 Clean Air Act (the largest and most costly environmental statute ever enacted. Perhaps, by the same token, only a Democratic president could legitimize (and in some cases expand) the aggressive anti-terror policies of the Bush (43) Administration, as Obama has done.

“butbutbutROMNEY!“, I hear you cry.  Tango sierra, sugarplum.  Unless you pulled the lever for a third-party candidate I don’t want to hear word one about your so-called anti-war views.  Between drones over Waziristan, bombs over Libya, and “disposition matrices” we have a pretty good view of what you voted for, and I don’t need to know if you voted for Obama or Romney to make that assertion.

By the same token, all you asshats out there who’re pissing and moaning about the size of government and in particular the size of government debt but proudly refused to throw your vote away need to choke on a family-sized can of horse cock.  Don’t let’s pretend that either major-party candidate had either a serious plan for reducing the budget to manageable levels or a serious interest in doing so.  If Obama wanted to do something about the deficit, he’d have endorsed Simpson-Bowles.  If Romney wanted to do something about the deficit, he’d have proposed a plan less fantastical than “extend all the tax cuts, increase military spending, and whatever happens don’t touch Social Security”.  We’ve been kicking this can down the road for a long time, and the only thing that’s changed recently is that in 2005 Bush laced up a pair of soccer cleats for his second term.  And please, people, don’t shout “Obamacare!” in my comments in defence of Mitt Romney’s purported budgetary hawkishness.

In any event, you need to read this piece by Skippystalin most fucking pronto.

I guess I should write something about that election

Today is “funny stories about Canadians” day, I guess.

Well teenagers, it’s been four years, time to line up again.

Ballot measures look much more encouraging this time around.  Civil rights look to prevail in ME, MD, MN, and probably WA.  As I write this Colorado’s shitting on the drug war 53 to 47.

On the way home I stopped at the liquor store to stock up on bourbon, for reasons which I really hope I don’t need to explain to you on election night.  This’d be about 6pm PST.  The counter clerk was shaking like a cat shitting a cactus, eyes glued to the flatscreen TV showing Romney up, I dunno, 104 to 30 in electoral votes.  Yes, this is what happens when Georgia and Texas report before New York and California.  I don’t think she could’ve gotten any more agitated if I’d told her that a swarm of flesh-eating zombie wasps had just infested the building.

This leads me to compare Presidential elections — at least when watched by Canadians — to NASCAR.  You get a bunch of people who write it off as “boring politicky shit” and a core of fascinated fans who’re mesmerized by the spectacle of cars flying past each other and zooming around corners in huge packs.  Then you get joy-killing nerds like me, who point out that the one guy only took two tires last pit stop and is getting just a little bit too loose exiting the corners, and thirty laps later when they call California for Obama and you go OH WOW DID YOU SEE THAT HE WENT RIGHT PAST THE OTHER GUY we say “Yeah, toldjaso, now what’s happening in Ohio?  He’s making his tires last?  He oughta be able to leapfrog NC in the pits, take fuel only, and get right back up to the front on the last stint”.  And then you’re all like “It’s no fun when they gain places in the pits, you’re such a nerd, don’t you want to watch something exciting?” and I’m like “learn2spreadsheet, noob, now let’s look at the Senate races.”

(Insert “NASCAR’s boring, they only turn left” political joke here, you clever reader you.)

Finally, a number of my friends who’re too sensible to follow politics (let alone foreign politics) for more than five minutes a year have approached me wondering why anyone beyond a raving psychopath would even consider voting for a hate-filled fucked up bag of evil like Romney.  I ask them what Romney’s done to out himself as a hate-filled fucked up bag of evil, and they just kind of sputter until one of us wanders off.  Really, guys?  We had a chance to see Romney contrasted against some genuinely unpleasant people, like Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, and it turns out he’s about as bland as a sawdust milkshake.  If he’s in the “hate-filled fucked up bags of evil” big leagues, it’s only because he’s selling peanuts in the stands.  Not coincidentally, he’s also leading in the popular vote as I write this, and doing better county by county than McCain could ever have dreamed of doing.

After Akin and Mourdock, I rather suspect that the next Republican president will become so by taking a cue from Stephen Harper and snapping an Elastrator around the neck of every GOPper who looks like he might maybe utter the word “rape” or even “abortion”, and if the ballot measures keep going the way they are now s/h/it might do the same for anyone who looks like agitating about teh ghey.

Now in an entirely unexpected turn of events, my glass of Wild Turkey has become more interesting than this fucking election.  Try to shut up for three and a half  years, will you?

My schadenfreude

Let me show you it.

——

Over at Reason, A. Barton Hinkle documents the dismally predictable failure of pro sports subsidies in Gwinnett, Georgia to deliver anything other than a regressive transfer from taxpayers to a baseball team:

• Taxpayers on the hook for Gwinnett, Ga. baseball stadium

Government-funded gifts to sports franchises tend to be sold as economic stimulus, which I imagine is why they’re so beloved of progressives.  Guess how well that turned out?

Plans originally called for 300 hotel rooms, 600 residences, more than 300,000 square feet of retail space and twice that much office space. As of last month, the principal developer had broken ground on fewer than 250 apartments—and was so discouraged he wanted to sell part of his holdings to another developer who would build more apartments.

County officials said no. For one thing, nearby homeowners worried about the effect on their property values: “They said they were promised an upscale commercial area,” writes the AJC, “not apartments and car washes.” Besides, Gwinnett officials “say the original plans are worth waiting for.” The chairman of the county planning commission admits the original vision “may not be viable at the moment, but I think it was a good plan originally.”

——

Next, here’s Warren over at Coyote Blog pointing out another virtue of economies of scale:

• A note to the East Coast

It’s short, so I’m quoting it in full:

For all you hipster large and small towns in the northeast who have taken great pride in banning big box stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, good luck rebuilding after the storm.  I am sure you are going to be really happy that you banned retail establishments with worldwide logistics resources and that have developed special skills in routing supplies needed for post-storm cleanup.  Good luck getting a generator from that boutique hardware store you have been protecting.

It’s worth pointing out that the towns aren’t “hipster towns”, but rather “towns whose governments have been successfully lobbied by hipster constituencies”.  (Also, why are we picking on the hipsters again?  Statists of all parties have been complaining about large corporate big-box stores since long before it was cool.  …oh!)  I imagine that the vast majority of people in boxless communities are more or less blameless for this sort of thing, having been mostly annoyed by the debate until they realized how deep they got fucked by the protectionists.  Let’s not impute the motives of venal politicians and malicious (and/or stupid) “community activists” to everyone in such a town, mmmkay?

Still, I’d dearly love to see Russ Roberts et al. take a sabbatical to rub every last Naomi Klein wannabe’s nose in all the suffering they’ve caused by making things like gensets and hand tools unnecessarily expensive.  Sometimes “that which is unseen” becomes pretty fucking easy to see.

——

Finally, Ken of Popehat and Marc Randazza tag-team a truly vile scammer.  Almost makes me want to go to law school, it does.