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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30454 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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Exactly! And I guess your point is that the push for legal marijuana is slowly winning, but my counter-point is that legal marijuana is winning much more slowly than it ought to be, given that there is such a strong argument in its favor. Indeed, these are the kinds of important questions of public policy that I am worried about and that inspired this post, Singer's A' being illegal is nowhere near the top 10 on my list of biggest injustices.

I think this misunderstands my point. My point is rather, there are some arguments of the A/A' form that do not descend into "Ew, yuck" or similar, but also that what makes an argument convincing is not universal, it can be relative. It's relative to what ethical premises you accept. It's relative to facts you know about the world. Changes in policy get even more complicated, being related to facts about how governments are structured and a million other factors. There are many explanations for why the given A/A' argument is not considered strong by a lot of people, ranging from differences of premises to different knowledge of facts. It is not correct to extrapolate the state of the world by assuming most people share your moral opinions and state of knowledge.

But we have lots of things that would make a lot of people better off but are illegal because they sound bad, which, as Bryan Caplan puts it, "The way I like to think about it is that markets are great at doing good things that sound bad, and governments are great at doing bad things, that sound good."

Frankly, I think this is a terrible theory of mind. People generally have motivations and reasons for believing the things they do beyond "it sounds bad." Maybe you think their reasons round off to that because they are not utilitarians or consequentialists but I think it is much better to understand people's beliefs and motivations on their own terms.

I agree with you that Singer's A' is not strictly comparable to A such that we can say supporting A but not A' is irrational, but my point is that the responses I have seen do not even get there, they stop at "A'? Ew, yuck"

Do you often see discussions of issues on Twitter that go the way you wish this discussion had gone?

Frankly, I think this is a terrible theory of mind.

Well... I disagree that it is a terrible theory of mind. In line with the main theme of this discussion, people just don't tend to think very deeply about most issues. And I don't believe that the average person who supports, say, rent control laws, understands the economic argument against them but still supports them because they have a different moral philosophy from economists, even though I agree that in theory there could be such a person with such a philosophy. I just think most voters go by "gut instinct", so if something sounds bad, they want a law against it, and if it sounds good, they want a law promoting it.

I think the issue is most people in favor of rent control policies don't understand the economic arguments against them. They have mistaken factual beliefs. They correctly perceive the first order effects of reducing rent for people covered by such policies and think it is desirable. I think it takes a pretty specific kind of economics education to see the prices as outputs of a system, rather than inputs, and reason from the implications of that.

I think there is a confusion in this discussion between people being irrational and people lacking specific technical knowledge or perspective.It's like the xkcd Average Familiarity comic but for moral philosophy or economics.

According to one survey, two-thirds of people in the US believe that the law of supply and demand does not apply to housing.

According to one survey, two-thirds of people in the US believe that the law of supply and demand does not apply to housing.

Or perhaps they're correctly noticing that the places with the most supply are often the places with the highest prices.

That isn't how the survey was worded.

Imagine that {State} passes a law to ensure that suburban homes may be developed on farmland and open space near cities. The new law overrides local zoning restrictions. It causes a building boom. In five years, the number of homes and apartments in your metropolitan region is 10 % larger than it otherwise would have been. For example, a region that would have had 1,000,000 residential units in five years without any change to development restrictions will instead have 1,100,000 units. This is three times the rate of housing growth in the nation as a whole.

How would this affect the market value of typical {Home Type} in {City}? It would...

  • substantially increase their market value
  • somewhat increase their market value
  • have no effect on their market value
  • somewhat decrease their market value
  • substantially decrease their market value

Literally 60 to 70 percent of respondents chose "substantially increase", "somewhat increase", or "have no effect on".

I don't see how that addresses what I said.

People recognize that large, booming cities have high housing prices despite huge amounts of stock, so of course they'll respond to such a poll with that in mind. The median respondent isn't analyzing this question in the way economists or even just people on a rationalist forum would. They don't assume "ceteris paribus" the way it's become second nature for economists and generally educated people. They don't recognize what the question is "getting at".

They read that poll question and call upon their general knowledge of what they know happens to housing prices when a city is booming. And they're right insofar as housing prices in booming cities increase more than housing prices in non-booming cities. That the poll has difficulty herding them into the thought experiment the poll wishes to herd them into does not mean they're imbeciles who don't think supply and demand is a thing, for housing or otherwise.

That the poll has difficulty herding them into the thought experiment the poll wishes to herd them into does not mean they're imbeciles who don't think supply and demand is a thing, for housing or otherwise.

More questions from the same survey:

Imagine that a new high-school program for training students to be plumbers causes a large increase in the number of plumbers in a city. Would wages for other residential plumbers in the city increase, decrease, or stay the same?

A free trade agreement is a pact between two or more nations to reduce barriers to imports and exports among them. Do free trade agreements make the price of products sold in the U.S. higher, lower or not make a difference?

For each of these questions, there was a 50/50 split between "lower" (correct) and "higher or no difference" (incorrect). I have no qualms with calling these respondents "imbeciles who don't think supply and demand is a thing".

I concede!

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