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I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing. This makes me confused, as the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face. By "strong welfare state" I mean something akin to the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) in which the necessities of life (healthcare, housing, minimum subsistence) are essentially guaranteed, while maintaining a market economy.
Premise #1: We want to maximize pleasure (utility) and minimize pain (disutility).
Premise #2: Within the unit of people we care about, we care about everyone equally.
Premise #3: Central planning doesn't work very well, so we want to maintain a market economy.
Premise #4: We already have a fairly industrialized, advanced capitalist economy.
ARGUMENT:
Being in poverty is extremely bad for people's wellbeing, both in terms of physical and psychological health. It is extremely unpleasant for people to be homeless or hungry, or having to make decisions like choosing between heat in the winter, medicine, or food. Poverty sucks -- it is painful not being able to afford the essentials of life.
Being afraid of falling into poverty is also bad for people's wellbeing -- it is a major source of worry and concern because everyone knows that being impoverished sucks and is painful. So the existence of poverty is a cause of pain for a much larger group than those actually impoverished. Fear of poverty also leads people to refuse to take risks to avoid the pain of poverty, which leads to less pleasure.
Diminishing marginal utility. At a certain point, another yacht for the ultrawealthy rich guy is not going to make him significantly happier. Money can't buy love, you can't take it with you, etc. etc. However, charging that guy more in taxes and using those resources to eliminate poverty will make the groups mentioned in #1 and #2 significantly more happy.
We should be OK with high taxes in exchange for eliminating poverty by directly providing the necessities of life for those who cannot afford them. The pain avoided by eliminating poverty outweighs the pain imposed by the taxes (or the pleasure that is lost for the wealthy) because of the principle of diminishing marginal utility. Poverty causes more unhappiness than luxuries cause happiness.
Responses to obvious objections:
a. "Eliminating poverty will cause more pain in the long run because the economy will collapse or at the very least growth will slow, leading to a decline in living standards for everyone." Response: This doesn't seem to have happened in Scandinavia. The Scandinavian countries have been strong welfare states for a long time and are still very wealthy countries, among the wealthiest in the world. They haven't had their economies collapse from having too many layabouts and such.
b. "Charging me high taxes on wealth I created infringes on my liberties/freedom". Response: This may be a coherent objection, but it's not a utilitarian objection, it's a rights-based objection.
c. "The Scandinavian countries only could do this because they are ethnically homogenous, tightly knit societies. Look at Sweden right now, it's falling apart as they let in more immigrants." Response: This goes more to the political problem with instituting this system rather than the desirability of the system itself. The fact that present-day social democrats are pro immigration does not make immigration a necessary part of a social democracy. One can easily imagine a social democracy with Japan-style immigration restrictions.
d. "I only care about those who are deserving to not be in poverty; I don't care about everyone, I'm fine with people being in poverty if they do nothing to better themselves, or if they are in the outgroup." Response: This is also not really a utilitarian objection. Who "deserves" what is a question of justice, of deontology. But here, we are trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This is difficult enough, boiling down all of human experience into two buckets, "pleasure" and "pain". If you add a whole 'nother set of buckets, "good people", "medium people", "bad people"... then you've really abandoned the exercise and are just doing deontology with extra steps. The pain someone experiences from not having housing or food or heat during the winter is plainly real and sincerely felt, even if you believe that that person should have done something different to avoid being in that state.
I'm not a utilitarian, but I don't think that the utilitarian case for Scandinavian social democracy is obvious. It may be correct, but there's a huge amount of hard work that you need to do to make the argument for it.
Let's leave Norway out, since if you have good governance plus massive natural resources per capita then you can have good conditions with a lot of bad policies. The opportunity cost matters a lot for utilitarians (remember, utilitarians are maximisers not satisficers) and you can't determine much about opportunity cost by comparing policies in countries that have massively different situations.
Sweden has low poverty, but also persistently high unemployment:
https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/unemployment-rate
Unemployment is arguably worse than poverty for utility, because it creates a sense of worthlessness: humans generally like to feel useful, which you can explain with evolutionary psychology as the fact that, in our early evolutionary environment, there were not kings and queens sitting around doing nothing - even leaders were expected to contribute towards hunting, shelter, child-rearing etc. People who were not useful were at risk of being left behind and/or not reproducing, so psychological mechanisms that punished people for perceived uselessness helped them to pass on their genes.
Denmark has low unemployment, but a neoliberal rather than social democratic unemployment benefits system that pushes people into work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_Denmark#Current_policy
Also, in terms of GDP per capita, there is a significant and persistent gap between Denmark and Sweden vs. the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
Remember, utilitarians are welfare maximisers, not just satisficers. And the benefits of a higher GDP per capita are massive relative to the benefits of poverty reduction, if you make the assumption that a higher GDP per capita is a persistent gain over time, i.e. it benefits future generations, whereas poverty reduction does have a big impact on welfare but mainly for the present generation. Arguing from a broadly utilitarian perspective, the economist Tyler Cowen has argued that people massively underrate the benefits of economic growth, assuming that one also maintains long-term economic stability:
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/
Arguably, welfare states not only undermine economic growth, but also long-run social stability. If I can enjoy healthcare, pensions, housing etc. in my old age without a high personal savings rate, then I am incentivised to save less and consume more over my life. It also makes less sense for me to have children, which were historically a way of investing in your old age, as they were expected to support you using their incomes. If I have fewer children, then I can still benefit from future generations, because other people's children will be taxed to benefit me as much as them. I can free ride on their parenting and spend the time/money that they spend on children on myself or on my own child or two. This is mitigated somewhat by subsidising parenthood in various ways (education spending, child benefits etc.) but overall there are big financial costs to raising children, especially more than two.
Like all social democracy, Scandinavian social democracy developed at a time of high birth rates and high personal savings rates. The economist Paul Samuelson explicitly made reference to this in his defence of American Social Security: sure, it's a Ponzi scheme, but it's a Ponzi scheme that can never go bust, because each generation is always much bigger and more prosperous than the last! Social democracy has had a clash with reality in the past few decades and the question of its viability in an ageing society has not been solved. How do you make social democracy work with an exponential and structural increase in the numbers of people using welfare services but not contributing to them?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.DPND?locations=SE
This problem is structural, in that higher life expectancies and lower birth rates mean that it will continue to accelerate over time. The baby boomers were an unusually big demographic group, in Scandinavia as elsewhere, but the pattern of generations being smaller and living longer is persistent.
This problem is aggravated by the stagnation in wealth-creation in European social democracies since 2007. Sweden, Denmark and even Norway have seen approximately no increase in the level of GDP per capita since 2007. So they have both a structurally persistent rise in welfare demands and a structurally persistent stagnation in their capacity to produce new wealth to meet those demands.
Scandinavia is like a bee hive that is still producing new larvae at an accelerating rate, but which has stopped producing higher levels of honey. The current solution is for the worker bees to work harder and eat less, but that does not seem like the kind of long-run stable social system that Tyler Cowen points out is important for utilitarians, since it requires that the worker bees work harder and eat less indefinitely. And, unlike worker bees, Scandinavian wealth-creators have the option of leaving to places like Switzerland, Singapore, the Netherlands, Hong Kong etc., which let them eat money of the honey they create.
As the proportion of the population benefiting from the welfare state but not contributing to it explodes, how can social democracy survive? It will either have to go down the direction of authoritarian socialism, e.g. banning wealth-creators (workers and investors) from leaving the country to escape high tax rates, or more neoliberalism, e.g. a smaller, meaner welfare state. Thus far, the choice of social democrats has been the latter, moderated by high national debts to put the tax burden on future generations of wealth-creators, who can't vote yet - intensifying the welfare state Ponzi scheme, but not solving its long-run stability problem.
Of course, insofar as the US is socially democratic, it has similar problems, e.g. with Social Security. But that's not a case against right-wing policies, but the opposite! And US GDP per capita has risen at an astonishingly persistent rate since 2007. Note that I'm not talking about wages: what matters for the long-run viability of a welfare system is that wealth-creators are sufficiently incentivised (and not disabled by regulations etc.) to create wealth to fund the ever-increasing future liabilities of the system. For that, you need higher total incomes, not necessarily wages per se - from the point of view of public finance, capital gains tax revenue smells as sweet as payroll tax revenue. There are other problems with "wage stagnation" arguments that may come up at this stage of my arguments, but the whole issue is prima facie irrelevant for the reasons I've just given. And the US welfare system is arguably still too generous to be stable long-term, even with its higher economic growth relative to Scandinavia and other highly social democratic places, but again, that's hardly a utilitarian argument against right-wing policies!
Now, I don't strongly endorse the reasoning above. I can think of lots of social democratic responses. For example, importing worker bees from other hives without Scandinavia's demographic problems may at least prolong the sustainability of social democracy until medical technology enables healthspan to catch up with lifespan. The connection between welfare states, higher taxes, and economic growth is very murky: you can make the case that we don't know if it's Scandinavia's social democratic policies that are causing economic stagnation in Scandinavia and other social democracies viz. the US and other less socially democratic countries. Causal inference in social science is an extremely difficult matter. You can also argue that the utility benefits of a generous welfare state are so strong relative to the costs of unemployment and risks of long-run instability that Sweden's model is preferable to the US model. Or you could argue that social democracy + Danish-style labour market policies is the sort of social democracy that a utilitarian should want. I don't know how to estimate aggregate utility with a sufficient degree of accuracy to answer these questions - that doesn't bother me, because I am not a utilitarian, and even if I was, I wouldn't actually be so epistemically arrogant as to think that utilitarian reasoning was the best way to implement a utilitarian analysis of what is good/evil, any more than being a hedonist is the best way of achieving maximal personal pleasure.
As stated at the start of this comment, I am not saying that there is an obvious utilitarian case against social democracy. I don't think that a social democratic utilitarian is obviously irrational. I am saying that there is not an obvious utilitarian case for social democracy, and that a right-wing utilitarian position is not obviously wrong. Both David Friedman and Peter Singer are utilitarians, and I have a huge amount of admiration for the intellects of each of them.
Is this the case anywhere today? That the useful are more reproductively successful than the useless? Many have traded fecundidity for economic productivity.
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Thanks for high effort. I enjoyed the read.
Haven't they? Absolute gap is persistent, as you noted, but growth rates closely track US ones. Also it might be a good thing to have certain per capita gap -- to have a room for catch-up.
If we consider subjective well-being, poverty amounts to permanent survival mode with almost no access to social lifts and any fruits of civilization. I think it's incomparable to any existential sufferings of idle, but otherwise well-to-do people (moreover, lack of job doesn't preclude anyone from meaningful and even societally useful endeavors).
And methodologically, I think evolutionary stories are irrelevant until we have current evidence of what they supposedly imply. And when we have current evidence, there is no need for stories.
Now a macro, long-horizon perspective. One might argue the poor are productivity hoarders in some sense, locked in the low-productivity jobs. I agree, that unconditional redistribution erodes incentives, but conditional transfers (say, of money or education in exchange for obligation to find a job from the list) to the poor might push/nudge them toward upper levels, where they can contribute more to the growth.
Growth is appealing as it enables efficiency improvements, and inefficiency (wastefulness) is a rare thing everyone agrees to be bad. I like Rawlsian scenario of a narrow economic elite, pushing the Pareto frontier, reaping its well deserved 90% share of surplus and doling out 10%. But 10% might be suboptimal for a classic welfare maximizer, who assumes diminishing utility. The latter implies it's optimal to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom until both sides meet on the utility curve. The poor are at the steepest slope, they gain much more than wealthy ones lose by helping them.
The main question here is how much capital should we set aside for growth, and how much of wealthy capital actually causes growth.
Could you elaborate on this?
I was using nominal GDP per capita. Both PPP and nominal measurements have their advantages, but that would take me too far astray here, since I am just presenting a prima facie case for right-wing utilitarianism, to clarify that it's not obviously an incoherent position. (I'm steelmanning it; I'm neither consistently right-wing nor a utilitarian.) And, as you note, there is a persistent lag in PPP.
I don't see how having room for catch-up growth is a good thing. It's the catching up that is good, not the growth per se!
As for unemployment vs. poverty, I think that this can't be solved by anecdata. It's very plausible that being unemployed in Sweden gives higher utility than being near starvation in Ethiopia, but the poor in the US are not on the verge of starvation.
Sure. I see utilitarianism as a bit like the paradox of hedonism. It is very hard to know what will make one happy at an individual level, and vastly harder on a collective level. Sure, there will be massive cases of suffering and (less often) massive sources of happiness where the path to maximising expected happiness is reasonably clear, but that leaves a lot of decisions unguided. Also, since one's own biases are often hard to scrutinise, it is easy to be misled when working out individual cases on their expected utility merits. Conflating one's self-interest or sentimentalism with expected utility maximisation seems pretty easy.
Rather than trying to maximise on each individual decision, a utilitarian can set up rules and rights that are to be respected unless there is a strong case to the contrary. (This is compatible, but not identical with rule utilitarianism.) This is a bit like the rules solution to the time inconsistency problem: if maximising a social welfare function in each time period results in suboptimal outcomes in the long-run, then an alternative is to set up rules that may not be maximising in every case but which probably do relatively well in the long-run, e.g. a 2% inflation target rather than traditional Keynesian fine-tuning of the economy. Similarly, being somewhat of a deontologist seems better for aggregate utility than consciously utility-maximising, given the computational, epistemological, and psychological limitations of human beings.
This GDP per capita graph shows good growth. Which data do you use?
Per capita gap indicates possibility of a relatively easy catch-up growth via import of technologies of the leader. This might be even part of a strategy: you redistribute wealth among your population more evenly than the leader, thus slowing your own growth; then you adopt technologies of the leader, who maintains higher inequality.
World bank uses $2.15 per day (PPP) poverty line (graph), so everyone below this line consumes more or less the same across countries (poor relief programs probably aren't accounted for here). With this definition the poor, but employed might feel better than non-poor, but unemployed? I won't argue further against this claim, but I am curious what factor I neglect, which makes the US poor subjectively better off than unemployed.
Thanks for sharing. I broadly agree with your case against fine-tuning and over-fitting.
The choice of optimal "ethical framework" is an optimization problem of its own. I would frame it as a task to devise rules that, when imposed on society, produce "good" expected societal trajectories (accounting for people, gaming the rules). I agree, that more clear-cut rules leave less space for manipulation and misinterpretation for actors, and - broadly - this looks close to the current legal system plus policy making based on Cost benefit analysis.
In some sense the notion of utilitarianism is useless for policy design, as the latter is about specialized predictions and theories. On the other hand, when we devise policy we are still in "optimizator" mode, subject to all biases and unintended manipulations.
That data. If you look at the data from 2007 to 2019 (excluding the covid period, including both the Great Recession but also the recovery period) the US grew steadily from about $48,000 to $65,000, while Denmark and Sweden had stagnation. Norway, as noted earlier, is a special case of good governance + massive per capita natural resources, but it also didn't see a net increase in this period. It's true that they were doing well relative to the US prior to 2007, but my original steelman was that social democracy creates a structural tendency to stagnation as the population ages.
The technological catch up is something I haven't heard and that I think is interesting, but it's beyond the scope of my steelmanning right-wing utilitarianism, since it's not a strongly established position, and my point is that social democracy isn't obviously preferable if you're a utilitarian.
A lot depends on the details, e.g. I suspect that a lot people high in Big Five conscientiousness would be happier with employed poverty than (somewhat) less poor unemployment. There is a huge amount of literature showing the negative aveerage effects of poverty on subjective happiness (as well as plenty of folk psychology) but the same is also true of unemployment, especially long-term unemployment. Also, the margin of difference between Swedish vs. US unemployment and Swedish vs. US poverty (going on that graph) seems to be bigger in the case of the former, e.g. US unemployment is about 4 percentage points lower than that of Sweden right now, whereas the difference in poverty (using the measure you provided) is about 1 percentage point. The unemployment gap may be bigger than normal right now, but Sweden seems to have a trend unemployment rate of about 8% at best and the US a trend of about 5% at worst. So, even if the harm from poverty is greater, the difference in unemployment is bigger.
On the other hand, you could argue that the graph you give just captures one part of a bigger picture, since e.g. $2.5 a day is hardly luxurious and US poverty may be bigger. Also, poor relief may be more generous in Scandinavia (plausible). A more complex argument could refute my claims. But that's my point! When one takes into account all the differences, the utilitarian cases for right-wing or left-wing policies both need to be complex - they aren't obvious either way.
Yes, I think that an epistemically modest utilitarian is still trying to optimise, but what they can plausibly do within their epistemic limitations, which is to find good long-run moral and political rules. Even then, there is an important difference from deontology, in that in extreme cases it may be obvious that departing from the rules will result in better long-run aggregate utility. This is one of the more plausible parts of utilitarianism, I think: you have to be hardcore into rights to be willing to permit massive suffering instead of e.g. making a tiny infraction of someone's rights. The plausibility of consequentialism (with utilitarianism as one variant) in extreme circumstances was part of a debate on human rights a while back in the UK parliament, which I thought was interesting:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VO2Ry4j79LU&t=221s
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There is a lot one could say about your post but I'd like to point out that the stuff about Swedish unemployment is a bit simplistic.
Sweden used to have persistently low unemployment until the financial crisis in the early nineties. This then shot up and eventually started trending down.
But as this downward trend started another did as well, namely mass immigration of unskilled labour, beginning with the Iraq war and continuing til this day.
Unemployment among ethnic Europeans in Sweden is in fact low and labour force participation is extremely high.
Perhaps it is the fault of social democracy that Sweden has been unable to integrate low skill, culturally hostile immigrants coming faster than at any point in US history or perhaps it's due to other factors...
Yes, as I said, causation in social sciences is hard. For my overall claim, what is important is not that we know that Sweden's welfare state causes its structurally high unemployment rate (in spite of its considerable spending on active labour market policies) but that a right-wing utilitarian could make a case that it does. In a brief part of a brief comment, I naturally cannot make that case rigorously.
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