Matt Adler's Critique of Methods Based on the Value of a Statistical Life
Matt Adler is a law professor economists should be aware of. He is doing serious work related to constructing social welfare functions. And he explains the current state-of-the-art for constructing social welfare functions in a very understandable way.
A Critique of Typical Value-of-a-Statistical-Life Methods
“What Should We Spend to Save Lives in a Pandemic? A Critique of the Value of Statistical Life” is a nice introduction to Matt Adler. Reading it, I realize, for example, the naivete in how I used the value of a statistical life in “Logarithms and Cost-Benefit Analysis Applied to the Coronavirus Pandemic.” The value of a statistical life is the marginal rate at which an individual would trade off a small extra probability of death with small dollar cost. There are at least three problems with common ways of using the value of a statistical life:
Some interventions are non-marginal. In particular, lockdowns can cause large reductions in income and consumption that are more-than-proportionately costly to an individual than smaller reductions in income and consumption would be. Hence, a naive application of the VSL formula will understate the utility cost of the lockdowns.
The value of a statistical life can easily differ by age—both because of the number of years that would be lost from death at that age and because of the different financial situations individuals have at different ages.
A good social welfare function should treat a dollar’s worth of value to someone living on $500 a month as being a bigger deal than a dollar’s worth of value to a billionaire.
Two notes: (a) The first two issues are problems even if one is treating a dollar as a dollar, regardless of whose dollar it is. (b) The different financial situations of older individuals mentioned in (2) are the kind of issue raised in (3).
On these three issues, it is worth quoting this passage from “What Should We Spend to Save Lives in a Pandemic? A Critique of the Value of Statistical Life”:
As for intuition: textbook VSL is quite counterintuitive, because it places a dramatically higher value on risk reductions for richer individuals; population-average VSL fails to differentiate with respect to age; and all three versions on the cost side are completely insensitive to the incidence of the costs of social distancing policy.
Prioritarianism
How should things be done if not through naive value-of-a-statistical-life methods? The current state-of-the-art for constructing social welfare functions can be described as “Prioritarianism.” Here is Matt Adler’s definition of Prioritarianism:
Prioritarianism is a variation on utilitarianism that has emerged in ethics over the last several decades, and (as suggested by the name) gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. It is appealing to those who are impressed by utilitarianism’s consequentialist structure and attention to individual well-being, but believe that utilitarianism’s exclusive focus on the sum total of well-being is too narrow. Instead, prioritarianism considers both the sum total and the distribution of well-being.
…
Prioritarianism sums expected transformed utilities, using a concave transformation function (so as to give greater weight to the worse off).
I am in agreement with Matt Adler on substance here, but I have a terminological disagreement, as follows:
To an economist, what Matt calls "transformed utility" is also "utility," since any monotonic transformation of utility is also a utility function that represents the same preferences. I think this needs to be explained, at least in a footnote.
Because transformed utility is also utility, Prioritarianism is not a variation on utilitarianism, but a type or species of utilitarianism in which the particular representation of utility is chosen not based on convenience of functional form or some empirical or metaphysical principle, but based on ethical reasoning to make sure that that particular transformation of utility used as the utility function adequately deals with distributional issues.
For example, logarithmic utility is primarily based on convenience and therefore typically has little behind it that should be taken seriously in forming a social welfare function. Convenience leads to wide use; then some people mistake prevalence as a hallowing by tradition that must have some basis back in the mists of time. But often the basis back in the mists of time was only convenience.
As a technical note, it is assumptions of anonymity plus a separability condition that make it so ethical considerations about inequality can be dealt with by using a particular transformation of utility as the intermediate object for aggregation. (Fleurbaey and Maniquet say this on separability: "separability conditions state that indifferent agents should not matter in the social evaluation of two alternatives.")
Conclusion
One of the most important things to be aware of is that welfare economics and the idea of constructing social welfare functions have risen again from the ashes like a phoenix after its reverses from the Arrow Impossibility Theorem and other impossibilities results. In particular, interpersonal comparison of a monotonic reference path of consumption bundles—together with a mapping for each individual of which indifference curve they are on to a point on that monotonic reference path—can substitute for interpersonal comparison of utility; thus interpersonal comparison of utility is not necessary for the construction of social welfare functions. Many economists and a few law professors and others are working hard on making theoretically sound social welfare analysis a reality. Our Well-Being Measurement Initiative (for which Dan Benjamin, Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz and I are the senior investigators) is marrying these principles to other principles specific to well-being measurement.
Don’t miss these other posts on the coronavirus pandemic:
Logarithms and Cost-Benefit Analysis Applied to the Coronavirus Pandemic
Seconding Paul Romer's Proposal of Universal, Frequent Testing as a Way Out
Also, click on this link to see other posts tagged “happiness.”
State-by-State Graphs of the Effective Reproduction Ratio for COVID-19 over Time →
Hat tip to Joshua Hausman
Savannah Taylor: Lessons of the Labyrinth and Tapping Into Your Inner Wisdom
I am pleased to be able to share a guest post from my friend Savannah Taylor from my Co-Active Leadership Program Tribe. One of Savannah’s themes is about labyrinths, which I also love: I was surprised by how the labyrinth I walked sparked ideas about what matters in my life. Another theme is what I say in “Co-Active Coaching as a Tool for Maximizing Utility—Getting Where You Want in Life”: “ideally, everyone would have a coach, or more than one for different areas of their lives.” Here is Savannah:
Most of my life, (up until last summer when I got divorced and started my entire life over), I've made a habit of looking outside of myself for answers. I constantly gave my power away and sought permission from others to live my life the way I wanted. After making the life changing decision to get divorced and start a new chapter on my own, I began the process of unlearning all of the habits where I was giving my power away, staying small and quiet, and being "acceptable." The path has been unpredictable, with so many twists and turns, but ultimately I knew deep down inside that there was a version of my life with so much more joy, ease, and alignment than what I had been living. I was ready to discover who I really was and I wasn't going to give up until I found her.
Each day, each week, has been a beautiful unfolding of discovering more of myself. The more I lean into loving and accepting who I am and what I bring to the world, the more trust I've built in my inner knowing. This knowing is a still and quiet voice that is dependable and true. It will guide you to your authentic life of fulfillment and purpose if you get quiet enough to listen.
Almost 1 year later, I have cultivated a level of self-acceptance I couldn't have dreamed of. I have discovered the woman I was made to be and consciously created a life by my design. My relationship with my inner wisdom is growing stronger every day and it has led me to the most incredible friendships and opportunities I could have ever imagined.
Most days after working, I take time to walk down to the lake by my house to soak in the goodness of the peaceful water, the fresh air, and get present with myself and nature as the sun gets lower and more golden in the sky. After spending some intentional time there on the old wooden dock, I continue on my normal walking path for more exercise before heading back home.
There are two routes to get back home. I can choose to walk the route back along the water, which is my usual favorite, or I can go through downtown Kirkland and a residential area. I almost always walk back along the water, because it just gives me so much life at the end of the day, but something told me to go the residential route this one day. I decided to listen to my quiet inner nudge. As I headed back home, I stumbled upon this labyrinth. I've been on this particular route several times before and never noticed it. It is in PLAIN SIGHT right next to the sidewalk, with no obstructions. This made me stop and think, "What else is in plain sight that I haven't noticed?"
Not sure what a labyrinth is? Here's a snippet from the internet to give you an idea:
A labyrinth is a complex and circuitous path that leads from a beginning point to a center (and back out again). One of the two types is a Meander, with a single, undivided path and no choices to make other than traveling onward through the winding pattern to an assured goal. The meandering pattern may tease the traveler by leading inward, then suddenly outward, but eventually it arrives surely at the goal. A labyrinth may have served to help one find their spiritual path by purposefully removing one from the common understanding of linear time and direction between two points. As one traveled through the labyrinth, one would become increasingly lost in reference to the world outside and, possibly, would unexpectedly discover one’s true path in life.
Before I stepped into the labyrinth, I stopped at the entrance and considered what intention or question I wanted to meditate on as I walked the path. I ended up asking, "What is my next step?" As I walked the meandering path of the labyrinth, considering my question, these are the lessons that revealed themselves to me through the experience:
Stay on the path and keep putting one foot in front of the other and you will reach your goal (even when the path seems to be taking you further away from it)
Even though you can't tell how you get "there" you WILL GET THERE
The journey requires TRUST that you will indeed find your way and get "there"
When you start to enjoy the process and the journey, you get "there" before you know it
Your path and your pace is yours, comparison and judgement aren't helpful or necessary
These lessons were exactly what I needed to hear in the moment as I was contemplating how to move forward with next steps in my business and life. And though this didn't give me any specific action steps, it reminded me of how I needed to BE as I moved forward. I walked this labyrinth a couple weeks ago and as I've stepped into more TRUST that I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other and enjoying the process, I have realized so many creative solutions, next steps, and A-HA moments. It was exactly what I needed. Sometimes it's so easy to feel stuck or lost, but you ALWAYS have the answers inside you. If you have a hard time hearing your inner wisdom, hire a coach that can help you tune in and facilitate it's uncovering.
Savannah Taylor is a sweet and sassy powerhouse of courage and vulnerability, kindness and compassion. In her presence, you will feel like you are ENOUGH, supported, and championed to the highest version of yourself. She is the Founder of the ME FIRST: Self-Care for Leaders community and a Co-Active Adventure Coach. She utilizes exploration and shared experiences in nature to empower Leaders to expand their limits of what's possible. From 1:1 local nature walks (near Seattle) to multi-day retreats of sailing, hiking, scuba diving, and obstacle courses, she guides you to expand through discovery and wonder as you connect to yourself and others outdoors.
Savannah grew up in Seattle with a family that was not “outdoorsy.” After spending 3 years in Hawaii in her late 20's, she began hiking, sailing, and challenging her fear of water by snorkeling and getting scuba certified. Through her journey of exploration and pushing her physical and mental limits, she discovered the power of expansion through nature and adventure coaching. Savannah is on a mission to empower you to trust your inner knowing and cultivate self-acceptance while challenging the self-imposed limits you’ve set for your life. Our greatest work is to uncover our own alignment, joy, and values and build our life around them. Making the world a better place starts inside you.
Book a sample coaching session with Savannah here:
https://savannahtaylorcoachingcalendar.as.me/?appointmentType=5241465
Visit her website:
www.savannahtaylorcoaching.com
Join the Community, ME FIRST: Self-Care for Leaders:
Don’t Miss These Other Posts Related to Positive Mental Health:
Interstellar Travel and Uploaded Humans
Many difficulties of space travel go away when human consciousnesses have already been translated into software. For example,
“Suspended animation” is a simple matter of not running the software program and sticking with a copy
Even if the stored human consciousnesses are physically traveling on a spaceship, the danger from radiation can be taken care of by having many backup copies and doing periodic error correct. Other dangers such as muscle wasting from zero gravity are absent.
Even if the stored human consciousness are physically traveling on a spaceship, the total weight needed is likely to be much, much smaller than the weight of humans.
There is no need to worry about food and oxygen for the journey. And power needs should be relatively low if for most of the human consciousnesses on the journey error correction is the only operation being performed.
This should make even interstellar travel realistically possible without any space travel technology beyond what we can already foresee. Michio Kaku raises the additional possibility of transmitting a human consciousness on a laser beam. Here is a summary of that idea plus a little background from Adam Kirsch’s June 20, 2020 Wall Street Journal article “Looking Forward to the End of Humanity”:
Ultimately, however, the hope is that we won’t just use computers—we’ll become them. Today, cognitive scientists often compare the brain to hardware and the mind to the software that runs on it. But a software program is just information, and in principle there’s no reason why the information of consciousness has to be encoded in neurons.
The Human Connectome Project, launched in 2009 by the National Institutes of Health, describes itself as “an ambitious effort to map the neural pathways that underlie human brain function.” If those pathways could be completely mapped and translated into digital 0s and 1s, the data could be uploaded to a computer, where it could survive indefinitely. The physicist Michio Kaku has theorized that this is how humanity will overcome the logistical challenges of deep-space travel: “We’re going to put the connectome on a laser beam and shoot it to the moon. In one second, our consciousness is on the moon. In 20 minutes we’re on Mars, in eight hours we’re on Pluto, in four years our consciousness has reached the nearest star.”
However, Robin Hanson’s book The Age of Em, which I feature in “On Being a Copy of Someone's Mind,” gives economic arguments for why interstellar travel of software humans, while it is likely to happen, wouldn’t be central to early historical developments after technology to upload human consciousness’s becomes available. Basically, there are a lot of economic reasons why human beings, whether flesh and blood or software humans, want things done fast. And by the time we have the technology to upload human consciousness at all, it is likely that software humans can operate at a much faster pace than flesh-and-blood humans: a thousand or a million times faster.
What would a trip to Pluto look like if the typical software human is operating at 1000 times flesh-and-blood speed? Traveling at the speed of light on a laser beam, it then takes 16000 subjective hours of the software humans back home to go to Pluto and return, which is 22 months. That would seem like a long time to be gone. On the other hand, one copy of you could go while the other stays behind to keep working. So that could be quite attractive.
But even if a receiver station was in orbit around Alpha Centauri at the beginning of the age of software humans, a roundtrip of 8.6 years of flesh-and-blood human time would be 8,600 years of software human time. That would make it seem like a one-way trip. The one-way trip could be quite attractive if copies of all one’s family and friends and many other potential friends took the trip too, but anyone who went to the Alpha Centauri system wouldn’t have any influence on software human civilization for a period of 8,600 subjective years (of the average working software human).
Thus, interstellar travel, while a lot easier when there human consciousness can be uploaded, and likely quite consequential for the galaxy, would have very little effect on human history on earth for what will seem like a long, long time for many software humans.
In closing, let me several background points about the predicted scenario.
First, flesh-and-blood humans would not be central to this future simply because the ease of copying software humans would mean that there could easily—and profitably would be—trillions and trillions of software humans, while the number of flesh-and-blood humans would be measured in billions. Flesh-and-blood humans willing to be uploaded would be important as the source of real variety among software humans. Also, from the perspective of flesh-and-blood humans, the subsistence cost for a software human would be tiny compared to the subsistence cost for a flesh-and-blood human. That means that from the perspective of a software human, a flesh-and-blood human would seem incredibly rich. (The only alternative to a flesh-and-blood human seeming incredibly rich to a software human would be for the flesh-and-blood human to be at below a subsistence level for a flesh-and-blood human and therefore to die. Big, hulking things such as flesh-and-blood humans are expensive.)
Second, one should not think of software humans as being incorporeal. It would be very easy for a software human to move back and forth between being embedded in some kind of physical android form (though that physical form need not be human-shaped) and being embedded in a virtual world—that is, being purely electronic in form. A software human might specialize in one role or another, but fundamentally doesn’t need to choose. It is an easy transition back and forth. Generally speaking, a physical form not needed for work purposes is likely to seem relatively expensive to a software human, so most wouldn’t have a physical form outside of work hours. And as Robin Hanson writes, a large share of software humans, like most flesh-and-blood humans in advanced countries now, are likely to do office work, which leaves them without much reason to incur the expense of a physical form.
A scene from “Upload”
I have started in on the fun TV series “Upload.” It is interesting to compare what happens in the series with Robin Hanson’s predictions (conditional on plausible future technology):
The idea in “Upload” that there might be a period of time when the only connectome scanning technology available destroys the brain that is scanned is plausible enough. Probably at some later period, non-destructive scanning of the connectome will become possible.
“Upload” raises the issue of software humans working, but assumes a law prohibiting it. The commercial advantages of letting software humans work are likely to make such a law difficult to maintain politically in all jurisdictions. And the jurisdictions that allow software humans to work will get much richer than jurisdictions that don’t. As Robin Hanson points out, giving flesh-and-blood humans a small share of the gains from software humans working—even through something as simple as an income tax on software humans—is likely to make the flesh-and-blood humans to not only acquiesce in allowing software humans to work but to actively encourage it.
One of the plot-driving challenges in “Upload” is low-quality virtual reality for software humans. This is quite unlikely for one simple reason: human-brain-emulating software will be vastly more complex— and therefore vastly more expensive to run—than quite high-quality virtual reality software. Some kinds of virtual reality will have an expense that is a substantial fraction of the cost of running a software human—for example, running a scanned cat or dog as opposed to a simplified virtual-reality cat or dog—but many, many high-quality virtual reality features will cost a tiny fraction of running software needed to create human experience for that software.
Finally, “Upload” shows zero recognition in the first few episodes that software humans can operate at a different speed than flesh-and-blood humans—either faster or slower. This possibility would change so many decision points in the first few episodes that it will be hard for the writers to introduce this possibility later on without creating many retrospective plot holes in the first few episodes. As it is, they can hope viewers simply don’t think of this possibility. But technologically, once you have software, it is easy to rig it to run at different speeds. For example, I am now running Peter Attia’s podcasts at 1.2 speed. No problem. One important consequence of the different speeds of software humans and flesh-and-blood humans is that while interactions between these two groups will be easy, ordinary relationships might well be difficult: running at a speed that allows a software human to have a deep relationship with a flesh-and-blood human would mean sacrificing ease of having relationships with the bulk of other software humans. (And even among software humans, there would be divisions based on different operating speeds—perhaps driven by occupational differences in economically optimal speed. But with trillions of software humans likely in existence, there would be many software humans in each speed category to form relationships with.)
I find thinking about the future that Robin Hanson has conditionally predicted fascinating. It is a good topic to return to again and again. And as should already be clear, I highly recommend The Age of Em.
Related Posts:
America's Struggle
Our Home Owner’s Association puts little flags out in front of all of our houses. This year, that flag symbolizes for me how proud I am of the United State of America that in quick succession, it has confronted some of the worst abuses of sexism through the #metoo movement, and now is confronting the continuing abuses of racism in a way that seems to me especially powerful compared to most of the antiracism efforts I have seen since, say, 1980.
Our republic was born unfinished, with a huge fraction of its people (notably African Americans and women, but others too) disenfranchised and treated as lesser beings. But the ideals articulated at the founding of our republic—even when articulated by men who acted in abhorrent ways, such as holding slaves—were universal in their application and appeal, and the charmed circle of those treated as full human beings is expanding, though still far short of where it needs to be.
One frontier of social justice that is near and dear to my heart is the struggle to get people to view and treat individuals who were born outside the United States as full human beings. I know that some are angered by people immigrating in ways that flout our laws. But if that is the concern, then dramatically increase legal immigration! If people have a fair chance to immigrate legally, then there is less temptation for them to immigrate in an unregulated way.
I know it is a matter of dispute, but I think our immigration laws are driven in important measure by racism. If we had large numbers of immigrants—even illegal immigrants—from Northern Europe, I don’t think the push for immigration restrictions would be nearly the same. And I think that would run into less opposition than immigration that brought in people who had excellent English of all ethnic backgrounds from all around the world.
May we quickly extend the charmed circle of those we care about as full human beings to all the people on this planet! Only when we care deeply about all human beings will we have a chance at social justice.
2020 First Half's Most Popular Posts
The "Key Posts" link in navigation at the top of my blog lists all important posts through the end of 2016. Along with "2017's Most Popular Posts," “2018's Most Popular Posts” and “2019's Most Popular Posts,” this is intended as a complement to that list. (Also, my most popular storified Twitter discussions are here, and you can see other recent posts by clicking on the Archive link at the top of my blog.) Continuing this tradition, I give links to the most popular posts in the first half of 2020 below into six groups: popular new posts in 2020 on diet and health, popular new posts in 2020 on political philosophy, popular new posts in 2020 on other topics, and popular older posts in those three categories. (However, the set of new posts in the first half of 2020 on political philosophy with 100 or more pageviews is the empty set.) I provide the pageviews in the first half of 2020 for each post as counted when someone went specifically to that post.
I am pleased to be able to report 331,250 Google Analytics pageviews in the first half of 2020—over 55,000 pageviews per month. Of these, 17,264 were pageviews for my blog homepage. One other thing that stands out from the data is how well my back catalog does because of Google search.
New Posts in 2020 on Diet and Health
New Posts in 2020 on Other Topics
Logarithms and Cost-Benefit Analysis Applied to the Coronavirus Pandemic 934
Responding to Negative Coverage of Negative Rates in the Financial Times 285
Seconding Paul Romer's Proposal of Universal, Frequent Testing as a Way Out 278
Narayana Kocherlakota Advocates Negative Interest Rates Now 240
How Even Liberal Whites Make Themselves Out as Victims in Discussions of Racism 238
Vicky Biggs Pradhan: How Crises Make Us Rethink Our Lives 218
The Mormon Church's Counterpart to a Sovereign Wealth Fund 146
Marc Lipsitch: The New Coronavirus May Be Worse Than You Think (link post) 136
Michael Lind: College-Educated vs. Not is the New Class War 136
Recognizing Opportunity: The Case of the Golden Raspberries—Taryn Laakso 101
Older Posts with Continuing Popularity on Diet and Health
Which Nonsugar Sweeteners are OK? An Insulin-Index Perspective 24,857
Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid 23,475
How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed 10,751
Why a Low-Insulin-Index Diet Isn't Exactly a 'Lowcarb' Diet 7,991
Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon 2,529
Using the Glycemic Index as a Supplement to the Insulin Index 2,405
What Steven Gundry's Book 'The Plant Paradox' Adds to the Principles of a Low-Insulin-Index Diet 1,963
Jason Fung's Single Best Weight Loss Tip: Don't Eat All the Time 859
Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too? 723
Jason Fung: Dietary Fat is Innocent of the Charges Leveled Against It 658
David Ludwig: It Takes Time to Adapt to a Lowcarb, Highfat Diet 568
Layne Norton Discusses the Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes Debate (a Debate on Joe Rogan’s Podcast) 543
Don't Tar Fasting by those of Normal or High Weight with the Brush of Anorexia 496
My Giant Salad 428
Best Health Guide: 10 Surprising Changes When You Quit Sugar 396
Kevin D. Hall and Juen Guo: Why it is So Hard to Lose Weight and So Hard to Keep it Off 302
Anthony Komaroff: The Microbiome and Risk for Obesity and Diabetes 294
A Low-Glycemic-Index Vegan Diet as a Moderately-Low-Insulin-Index Diet 277
How Important is A1 Milk Protein as a Public Health Issue? 252
After Gastric Bypass Surgery, Insulin Goes Down Before Weight Loss has Time to Happen 230
Eggs May Be a Type of Food You Should Eat Sparingly, But Don't Blame Cholesterol Yet 181
The Case Against the Case Against Sugar: Seth Yoder vs. Gary Taubes 137
Is Milk OK? 126
Older Posts with Continuing Popularity on Political Philosophy
John Locke: Freedom is Life; Slavery Can Be Justified Only as a Reprieve from Deserved Death 2,025
John Locke on Punishment 1,399
John Locke: The Only Legitimate Power of Governments is to Articulate the Law of Nature 915
John Stuart Mill’s Vigorous Advocacy of Education Vouchers 785
Freedom Under Law Means All Are Subject to the Same Laws 575
John Locke: People Must Not Be Judges in Their Own Cases 416
John Locke's Smackdown of Robert Filmer: Being a Father Doesn't Make Any Man a King 362
On the Achilles Heel of John Locke's Second Treatise: Slavery and Land Ownership 354
John Locke: How to Resist Tyrants without Causing Anarchy 301
John Stuart Mill on Balancing Christian Morality with the Wisdom of the Greeks and Romans 298
John Stuart Mill on the Protection of "Noble Lies" from Criticism 224
An Experiment with Equality of Outcome: The Case of Jamestown 209
Brian Flaxman—Bern Notice: Why Bernie Sanders is the Best Candidate to Take on Donald Trump in 2020 208
John Locke: The Right to Enforce the Law of Nature Does Not Depend on Any Social Contract 196
John Locke: Defense against the Black Hats is the Origin of the State 193
Social Liberty 180
John Locke Off Base with His Assumption That There Was Plenty of Land at the Time of Acquisition 176
John Stuart Mill on the Sources of Prejudice About What Other People Should Do 169
On Despotism 156
John Stuart Mill’s Brief for the Limits of the Authority of Society over the Individual 129
John Locke: By Natural Law, Husbands Have No Power Over Their Wives 121
John Locke: The Law of Nature Requires Maturity to Discern 110
John Stuart Mill on Being Offended at Other People's Opinions or Private Conduct 109
The Federalist Papers #2 A: John Jay on the Idea of America 108
John Locke: If Rebellion is a Sin, It is a Sin Committed Most Often by Those in Power 101
Older Posts with Continuing Popularity on Other Topics
The Medium-Run Natural Interest Rate and the Short-Run Natural Interest Rate 1,601
Monetary vs. Fiscal Policy: Expansionary Monetary Policy Does Not Raise the Budget Deficit 1,534
Adding a Variable Measured with Error to a Regression Only Partially Controls for that Variable 1,365
The Logarithmic Harmony of Percent Changes and Growth Rates 1,216
Greg Shill: Does the Fed Have the Legal Authority to Buy Equities? 842
Why I Write 746
The Complete Guide to Getting into an Economics PhD Program 703
Supply and Demand for the Monetary Base: How the Fed Currently Determines Interest Rates 610
The Message of Mormonism for Atheists Who Want to Stay Atheists 525
Reza Moghadam Flags 'Enabling Deep Negative Rates to Fight Recessions' in the Financial Times 455
There's One Key Difference Between Kids Who Excel at Math and Those Who Don't 431
Returns to Scale and Imperfect Competition in Market Equilibrium 381
Netflix as an Example of Clay Christensen's 'Disruptive Innovation' 377
How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide 287
The Deep Magic of Money and the Deeper Magic of the Supply Side 248
Even Central Bankers Need Lessons on the Transmission Mechanism for Negative Interest Rates 246
What to Call the Very Rich: Millionaires, Vranaires, Okuaires, Billionaires and Lakhlakhaires 232
The Most Effective Memory Methods are Difficult—and That's Why They Work 230
Co-Active Coaching as a Tool for Maximizing Utility—Getting Where You Want in Life 228
Negative Interest Rate Policy as Conventional Monetary Policy: Full Text 212
Marriage 101 206
Economics Needs to Tackle All of the Big Questions in the Social Sciences 180
Michael Weisbach: Posters on Finance Job Rumors Need to Clean Up Their Act, Too 178
Rodney Stark on the Status of Women in Early Christianity 175
What is the Effective Lower Bound on Interest Rates Made Of? 169
18 Misconceptions about Eliminating the Zero Lower Bound 160
The Shape of Production: Charles Cobb's and Paul Douglas's Boon to Economics 152
Markus Brunnermeier and Yann Koby's "Reversal Interest Rate" 148
The Mormon Church Decides to Treat Gay Marriage as Rebellion on a Par with Polygamy 143
Clay Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang on the Three Basic Types of Business Models 141
How Subordinating Paper Currency to Electronic Money Can End Recessions and End Inflation 126
Silvio Gesell's Plan for Negative Nominal Interest Rates 122
Roger Farmer and Miles Kimball on the Value of Sovereign Wealth Funds for Economic Stabilization 120
Let's Set Half a Percent as the Standard for Statistical Significance 116
When the Output Gap is Zero, But Inflation is Below Target 108
Ezra W. Zuckerman—On Genre: A Few More Tips to Academic Journal Article-Writers (link post to a pdf) 103
How and Why to Expand the Nonprofit Sector as a Partial Alternative to Government: A Reader’s Guide 100
Taryn Laakso: Righting Your Ship Before You Capsize
The Co-Active Leadership Program I am in has given me a wonderful “tribe” of 17 new friends. Taryn Laakso one of these impressive new friends. She appeared on this blog before with “Recognizing Opportunity: The Case of the Golden Raspberries.” Here is another guest post playing off of her love of sailing. Taryn ends with a pitch for Co-Active coaching. (You can see my pitch for Co-Active coaching here: “Co-Active Coaching as a Tool for Maximizing Utility—Getting Where You Want in Life.”) Here is Taryn:
The seas out in the world right now feel choppy with gusts of high winds and a heavy fog of information making it hard to navigate through it. Being faced with so much information in the news and social media, it is hard to not feel like our boats are about to capsize. And maybe a few of the boats out there need to tip over but many more need to be righted.
It's spurred curiosity in me to know how balanced the keel of your life feels right now. I was starting to feel my keel heel to the left last week and I was at risk of capsizing. I wanted to find a sheltered cove, drop anchor, and hunker down out of the storm which I knew wasn't going to help anyone!
Instead, I wondered if I took down some sail area and slowed down, would it help get my boat re-centered? If I got my keel balanced by being in right relationship with myself first, could I continue forward on my journey, so I can step forward supporting causes that make social and systematic changes in our world? Being in the right relationship with myself means that I know my values, my purpose and that allows me to make decisions that are in alignment with my core beliefs. I was righting my ship. How did I do this?
This may feel counter-intuitive to what is being publicized right now, but I knew I needed to retreat a bit so I could have the energy to read, learn, engage in conversations, and study causes that can support long term changes in our world that will bring balance to many more people's boats. I did this by resting, talking, walking, and dancing through my feelings.
How are you taking care of yourself so you can continue supporting what you are passionate about without the risk of your boat heeling over? Which one below describes how you are feeling right now?
My boat is about to heel over
My boat is listing a bit to the left
The keel is balanced and I feel energized
If you are in the 3rd bucket, please share with me how you are keeping yourself balanced and energized! Share your wisdom so I can share it with others. On the other hand, if you are in either of the first two situations, would you like to explore how to balance your keel so that you can continue moving forward without capsizing?
I invite you to spend some time with me and we'll explore what is causing you to feel unbalanced and how you can support what matters to you! That could be social issues, your family, your team, or yourself.
Click here to find time on my calendar. You don't need to navigate this on your own. I've got you.
Wishing you smooth sailing,
Taryn Laakso, CPCC | ACC
Leadership & Life Coach
www.unlaakingyourpotential.com
(206) 310-9409
Don’t Miss These Other Posts Related to Positive Mental Health:
The Federalist Papers #11 B: Union Will Make Possible a Strong Navy, Allowing America to Chart Its Own Destiny—Alexander Hamilton
Link to the Wikipedia article “History of the United States Navy,” from which this painting of the 1799 battle between the Constellation and L’Insurgente is taken. That battle resulted in the capture of L’Insurgent
In the second half of the Federalist Papers #11, Alexander Hamilton makes the case that union is crucial for keeping the states from falling under European domination, because union is crucial for creating a strong American navy. Let me intersperse in bold my interpretation of the points of his argument between passages in the second half of the Federalist Papers #11:
The United States could have a navy powerful enough to make a real difference:
A further resource for influencing the conduct of European nations toward us, in this respect, would arise from the establishment of a federal navy. There can be no doubt that the continuance of the Union under an efficient government would put it in our power, at a period not very distant, to create a navy which, if it could not vie with those of the great maritime powers, would at least be of respectable weight if thrown into the scale of either of two contending parties. This would be more peculiarly the case in relation to operations in the West Indies. A few ships of the line, sent opportunely to the reinforcement of either side, would often be sufficient to decide the fate of a campaign, on the event of which interests of the greatest magnitude were suspended. Our position is, in this respect, a most commanding one. And if to this consideration we add that of the usefulness of supplies from this country, in the prosecution of military operations in the West Indies, it will readily be perceived that a situation so favorable would enable us to bargain with great advantage for commercial privileges. A price would be set not only upon our friendship, but upon our neutrality. By a steady adherence to the Union we may hope, erelong, to become the arbiter of Europe in America, and to be able to incline the balance of European competitions in this part of the world as our interest may dictate.
Divided, the effective naval strength of the American states would be so low they couldn’t even maintain the rights of neutrality:
But in the reverse of this eligible situation, we shall discover that the rivalships of the parts would make them checks upon each other, and would frustrate all the tempting advantages which nature has kindly placed within our reach. In a state so insignificant our commerce would be a prey to the wanton intermeddlings of all nations at war with each other; who, having nothing to fear from us, would with little scruple or remorse, supply their wants by depredations on our property as often as it fell in their way. The rights of neutrality will only be respected when they are defended by an adequate power. A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral.
A strong navy of the states united would enable maritime flourishing:
Under a vigorous national government, the natural strength and resources of the country, directed to a common interest, would baffle all the combinations of European jealousy to restrain our growth. This situation would even take away the motive to such combinations, by inducing an impracticability of success. An active commerce, an extensive navigation, and a flourishing marine would then be the offspring of moral and physical necessity. We might defy the little arts of the little politicians to control or vary the irresistible and unchangeable course of nature.
Divided, the states would be weak enough that foreign powers could take most of the gains from trade:
But in a state of disunion, these combinations might exist and might operate with success. It would be in the power of the maritime nations, availing themselves of our universal impotence, to prescribe the conditions of our political existence; and as they have a common interest in being our carriers, and still more in preventing our becoming theirs, they would in all probability combine to embarrass our navigation in such a manner as would in effect destroy it, and confine us to a PASSIVE COMMERCE. We should then be compelled to content ourselves with the first price of our commodities, and to see the profits of our trade snatched from us to enrich our enemies and p rsecutors. That unequaled spirit of enterprise, which signalizes the genius of the American merchants and navigators, and which is in itself an inexhaustible mine of national wealth, would be stifled and lost, and poverty and disgrace would overspread a country which, with wisdom, might make herself the admiration and envy of the world.
Union is also important for American power over offshore fisheries and key inland waterways:
There are rights of great moment to the trade of America which are rights of the Union--I allude to the fisheries, to the navigation of the Western lakes, and to that of the Mississippi. The dissolution of the Confederacy would give room for delicate questions concerning the future existence of these rights; which the interest of more powerful partners would hardly fail to solve to our disadvantage. The disposition of Spain with regard to the Mississippi needs no comment. France and Britain are concerned with us in the fisheries, and view them as of the utmost moment to their navigation. They, of course, would hardly remain long indifferent to that decided mastery, of which experience has shown us to be possessed in this valuable branch of traffic, and by which we are able to undersell those nations in their own markets. What more natural than that they should be disposed to exclude from the lists such dangerous competitors?
This branch of trade ought not to be considered as a partial benefit. All the navigating States may, in different degrees, advantageously participate in it, and under circumstances of a greater extension of mercantile capital, would not be unlikely to do it. As a nursery of seamen, it now is, or when time shall have more nearly assimilated the principles of navigation in the several States, will become, a universal resource. To the establishment of a navy, it must be indispensable.
Union would contribute to a strong navy through a greater variety of resources as well as a greater quantity:
To this great national object, a NAVY, union will contribute in various ways. Every institution will grow and flourish in proportion to the quantity and extent of the means concentred towards its formation and support. A navy of the United States, as it would embrace the resources of all, is an object far less remote than a navy of any single State or partial confederacy, which would only embrace the resources of a single part. It happens, indeed, that different portions of confederated America possess each some peculiar advantage for this essential establishment. The more southern States furnish in greater abundance certain kinds of naval stores--tar, pitch, and turpentine. Their wood for the construction of ships is also of a more solid and lasting texture. The difference in the duration of the ships of which the navy might be composed, if chiefly constructed of Southern wood, would be of signal importance, either in the view of naval strength or of national economy. Some of the Southern and of the Middle States yield a greater plenty of iron, and of better quality. Seamen must chiefly be drawn from the Northern hive. The necessity of naval protection to external or maritime commerce does not require a particular elucidation, no more than the conduciveness of that species of commerce to the prosperity of a navy.
Free trade among the states will increase the gains not only from trade among the states but also the gains from foreign trade:
An unrestrained intercourse between the States themselves will advance the trade of each by an interchange of their respective productions, not only for the supply of reciprocal wants at home, but for exportation to foreign markets. The veins of commerce in every part will be replenished, and will acquire additional motion and vigor from a free circulation of the commodities of every part. Commercial enterprise will have much greater scope, from the diversity in the productions of different States. When the staple of one fails from a bad harvest or unproductive crop, it can call to its aid the staple of another. The variety, not less than the value, of products for exportation contributes to the activity of foreign commerce. It can be conducted upon much better terms with a large number of materials of a given value than with a small number of materials of the same value; arising from the competitions of trade and from the fluctations of markets. Particular articles may be in great demand at certain periods, and unsalable at others; but if there be a variety of articles, it can scarcely happen that they should all be at one time in the latter predicament, and on this account the operations of the merchant would be less liable to any considerable obstruction or stagnation. The speculative trader will at once perceive the force of these observations, and will acknowledge that the aggregate balance of the commerce of the United States would bid fair to be much more favorable than that of the thirteen States without union or with partial unions.
If the states are divided, free trade among them won’t last long:
It may perhaps be replied to this, that whether the States are united or disunited, there would still be an intimate intercourse between them which would answer the same ends; this intercourse would be fettered, interrupted, and narrowed by a multiplicity of causes, which in the course of these papers have been amply detailed. A unity of commercial, as well as political, interests, can only result from a unity of government.
Europeans are into domination. We need countervailing power:
There are other points of view in which this subject might be placed, of a striking and animating kind. But they would lead us too far into the regions of futurity, and would involve topics not proper for a newspaper discussion. I shall briefly observe, that our situation invites and our interests prompt us to aim at an ascendant in the system of American affairs. The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided into four parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three, Europe, by her arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has, in different degrees, extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and America, have successively felt her domination. The superiority she has long maintained has tempted her to plume herself as the Mistress of the World, and to consider the rest of mankind as created for her benefit. Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority, and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America--that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere[“Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains”]. Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the Europeans. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother, moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will will add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!
PUBLIUS.
Here are links to my other posts on The Federalist Papers so far:
The Federalist Papers #1: Alexander Hamilton's Plea for Reasoned Debate
The Federalist Papers #3: United, the 13 States are Less Likely to Stumble into War
The Federalist Papers #4 B: National Defense Will Be Stronger if the States are United
The Federalist Papers #5: Unless United, the States Will Be at Each Others' Throats
The Federalist Papers #6 A: Alexander Hamilton on the Many Human Motives for War
The Federalist Papers #11 A: United, the States Can Get a Better Trade Deal—Alexander Hamilton
On Policing: Roland Fryer, William Bratton, John Murad, Scott Thomson and the American People
This is a golden moment for police reform. Above, I have links to the four most interesting sources related to the specifics of police reform I have read or listened to in the last few weeks.
First, Roland Fryer gives statistics to understand the problem. Perhaps surprisingly to some, but in what I think makes sense theoretically, the racist tilt of police interactions with civilians is much stronger at lower levels of force that receive less scrutiny than it is in shootings. Here is what Roland writes in the June 22, 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed “What the Data Say About Police”; I have added bullets to distinguish passages:
My research team analyzed nearly five million police encounters from New York City. We found that when police reported the incidents, they were 53% more likely to use physical force on a black civilian than a white one. In a separate, nationally representative dataset asking civilians about their experiences with police, we found the use of physical force on blacks to be 350% as likely. This is true of every level of nonlethal force, from officers putting their hands on civilians to striking them with batons. We controlled for every variable available in myriad ways. That reduced the racial disparities by 66%, but blacks were still significantly more likely to endure police force.
Black civilians who were recorded as compliant by police were 21% more likely to suffer police aggression than compliant whites.
… when we use our data to calculate the descriptive statistics used in popular databases such as the Washington Post’s, we find a higher percentage of black civilians among unarmed men killed by the police than they do. Those statistics, however, cannot address the fundamental question: When a shooting might be justified by department standards, are police more likely actually to shoot if the civilian is black? Only our data can answer this question, because it contains information on situations in which a shooting might meet departmental standards but didn’t happen. The answer appears to be no.
Our data come from localities in California, Colorado, Florida, Texas and Washington state and contain accounts of 1,399 police shootings at civilians between 2000 and 2015. In addition, from Houston only in those same years, we had reports describing situations in which gunfire might have been justified by department guidelines but the cops didn’t shoot. This is a key piece of data that popular online databases don’t include.
No matter how we analyzed the data, we found no racial differences in shootings overall, in any city in particular, or in any subset of the data.
Roland isn’t as clear as he might be in the last two passages above, but he seems to be saying that “situations in which gunfire might have been justified by department guidelines” involve black civilians with more than proportional frequency, but that for each such situation, blacks are no more likely to be shot than whites.
Importantly, Roland Fryer also says the research he has been involved with suggests that federal investigations of a policy department prompted by a video of policy brutality that went viral are a blunt instrument that causes police to pull back dramatically, at great cost in life:
… investigations not preceded by viral incidents of deadly force, on average, reduced homicides and total felony crime. But for the five investigations that were preceded by a viral incident of deadly force, there was a stark increase in crime—893 more homicides and 33,472 more felonies than would have been expected with no investigation. The increases in crime coincide with an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago alone after the killing of Laquan McDonald, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by 90% in the month the investigation was announced.
Importantly, in the eight cities that had a viral incident but no investigation, there was no subsequent increase in crime. Investigations are crucial, but we need to find ways of holding police accountable without sacrificing more black lives.
The Manhattan Institute article “Precision Policing: A Strategy for the Challenges of 21st Century Law Enforcement” by William Bratton and Jon Murad is well worth reading in its entirety. It has two points I found especially interesting. First, that it helps a lot to set priorities in policing that distinguish between serious offenses that need to be immediately addressed by an arrest and what are offenses that people need to be told to stop but can and should be dealt with initially by a warning. Second, historically, rage at police brutality often subsides when innocent police officers are brutality murdered by someone’s hatred of the police. An innocent civilian being killed inflames rage by civilians. An innocent policy officer being killed tamps down rage by civilians at the police.
William Galston, in the June 23, 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Police Reform Americans Want” collects a remarkable set of poll results showing a majority of Americans calling for dramatic police reform. Again, with my bullets added to distinguish passages, here is what William Galston reports:
A ban on chokeholds and strangleholds is supported by 68% of all Americans and 52% of Republicans, according to the Kaiser poll.
Requiring police to give a verbal warning, when possible, before shooting at a civilian is favored by 89% of Americans, including 83% of Republicans.
More than three-quarters of Americans, and more than 6 in 10 Republicans, favor requiring states to release officers’ disciplinary records …
Most Americans want to create stronger incentives for police to do the right thing—and to pay a price when they don’t. A remarkable 95% would require police to intervene against, and report, the excessive use of force by fellow officers, a measure that could help tear down the “wall of silence” protecting wrongdoers from scrutiny.
Seventy-three percent of Americans, including 55% of Republicans, favor allowing individuals to sue police officers when they believe excessive force has been used against them. Given this consensus, legislators should be able to reach agreement on the court-created doctrine of qualified immunity, which makes it hard to hold officers accountable when they violate constitutional rights.
I won’t try to summarize the podcast “The City That Disbanded Its Police.” But it is well worth listening to. A restart involving police having to reapply for their jobs in a new police department with the old police department disbanded can be an effective way to institute new policing practices if done well. As you listen, it is useful to compare the actual changes in detailed policing practices in this Camden instance to the changes in New York City policing practices discussed in “Precision Policing: A Strategy for the Challenges of 21st Century Law Enforcement.”
Conclusion: Social science became big only with the expansion of colleges and universities after World War II. At least the half century after that, there was a large fraction of inadequate social science. In my view, the last quarter century has begun to have better percentage of decent social science. Knowledge about how to do effective and as-gentle-as-consistent-with-effective policing is one of the areas of social science that is only now beginning to come into its own. We have a long way to go, but there is hope. I hope we do a powerful round of police reform now while we can, but also include in that police reform plenty of data collection and funds for research on and dissemination of effective policing strategies as we continue to learn.
Alasdair Munro: COVID-19 Transmission among Children →
Hat tip to Joshua Hausman.
June 2020 Covid-19 Science Roundup
In case it helps even one of my readers in a practical way, I wanted to collect some of the most useful news snippets I have seen recently about Covid-19 science. Most of this is a confirmation of what I said in “4 Types of Heterogeneity that Offer a Bit of Extra Hope for Keeping the Pandemic Under Control without Blanket Lockdowns”: (a) number of people and (b) duration of contact matter as much as (c) distance and (d) masks. For example, take this passage from Jennifer Calfas’s June 18, 2020 Wall Street Journal article, “California Requires Face Coverings as Some States See Daily Record Cases”, which adds (e) ventilation and (f) talking loudly:
Recent findings among researchers and scientists show close-up interactions, crowded events, poorly ventilated areas and places where people are talking loudly maximize the risk of contracting the virus. Fleeting encounters with people outdoors and contaminated surfaces are less of a risk. These findings are helping shape policy as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urges Americans to keep wearing masks and maintaining distance as reopenings continue.
Other sources emphasize that singing has the same kind of malign effect as talking loudly. Peggy Noonan’s June 11, 2020 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Get Ready for the Second Coronavirus Wave” adds that in addition to good ventilation outside, the sunlight and the now more and more common warm temperature outside can reduce transmission:
Coronavirus doesn’t like sunlight, fresh air or warm temperatures. It prefers coolness and poor ventilation in enclosed places, meatpacking plants being the most famous example.
For me the bottom line is: if you can help it, don’t be inside with someone else you don’t live with—and especially not with a lot of someone else’s—for any extended period of time. If you are, masks don’t mean there is no danger, but they help. And even outdoors, if you are going to be in a large gathering despite the danger, make sure to wear a mask and urge others there to wear one. Don’t be like Debbie Tutor, interviewed for Alejandro Lazo, Andrew Restuccia and Joshua Jamerson’s June 19, 2020 Wall Street Journal article “On Juneteenth, Tulsa Prepares for Unrest as Protesters March Nationwide”
Debbie Tutor, 60, of Wichita, Kan., was among those waiting in line. A longtime Trump supporter, she said it was her first time attending a rally. “I’m just here to support him,” she said.
Ms. Tutor, like the others waiting outside the arena, wasn’t wearing a mask and said she isn’t worried about the coronavirus spreading among rally attendees. She asserted that the president’s opponents are amplifying the health threat to hurt his re-election.
On ideas about how to reduce the danger of a bad outcome from the novel coronavirus conditional on becoming infected, see my posts:
If you haven’t had Covid-19 yet, regardless of your other current health conditions, I believe it will materially help your chances if you do get infected later on to go off sugar right now and making sure you get plenty of Vitamin D—more than the miscalculated minimum daily requirement: see “Carola Binder—Why You Should Get More Vitamin D: The Recommended Daily Allowance for Vitamin D Was Underestimated Due to Statistical Illiteracy.”
The importance of going off sugar immediately (and ideally reducing your eating window each day to as few hours as possible) in order to reverse chronic diseases that put you in greater danger from Covid-19 is emphasized by the statistics on who is dying from Covid-19. We all know that older people die with a greater probability if they get the disease, but a substantial fraction of that age difference may be due to the fact that older people tend to have a greater burden of chronic diseases. Two articles give interesting statistics relevant for this.
First, from the June 12, 2020 Wall Street Journal Editorial “The Covid Age Penalty”:
Older people generally have weaker immune systems and more have underlying respiratory and cardiovascular conditions that appear to exacerbate the illness. More than 95% of people who have died in the United Kingdom had at least one underlying condition. Italian public-health officials have also reported that 96% of deaths involved one chronic condition, and 60% had three or more.
Nursing homes are especially vulnerable because they have large numbers of elderly in cramped quarters. They now account for more than 50% of Covid-19 fatalities in 30 or so states, including Arizona, Washington, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
The good news is that most people over age 65 who are in generally good health are unlikely to die or get severely ill from Covid-19. Data from Spain’s national antibody study show that about 92% of those infected from ages 60 to 79 have mild or no symptoms, and only about 6% are hospitalized. Three-quarters of people older than 90 have mild or no symptoms and fewer than 10% die.
Second, from David Luhnow and José de Córdoba’s June 19, 2020 Wall Street Journal article, “As Covid-19 Hits Developing Countries, Its Victims Are Younger”:
Another reason fewer older people are dying in poorer nations is the lack of institutionalized care for the elderly. An estimated one-third or more of deaths in the U.S. have taken place in nursing homes, where the virus can easily spread among those most vulnerable. In countries like Mexico, the elderly usually live with their families, making it less likely they pass it on to other at-risk elderly, said Mr. González-Pier.
But health is a bigger factor. Dr. Alejandro Macias, a specialist in infectious diseases who played a leading role in halting the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, says the main reason the country’s Covid-19 victims are much younger than in the U.S. has to do with the prevalence of a host of unhealthy conditions—obesity, hypertension, and diabetes chief among them.
More than 4 in 10 people who have died in Mexico from Covid-19 had hypertension, roughly 4 in 10 had diabetes, and a quarter were overweight, according to government statistics.
Conclusion: I hope this is helpful. One more resource I have found useful is the May 27, 2020 Wall Street Journal podcast, “Is Banning Certain Events the Key to Reopening?”
New insights in Covid-19 continue to emerge. I hope we soon understand it much better than we do now.
How Even Liberal Whites Make Themselves Out as Victims in Discussions of Racism
In reading White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo (from which I take all the quotations in this post except when noted otherwise), one of the things I found most fascinating was her accounts of her experiences it leading discussions about racism as part of her job as a diversity trainer. Below are some of her descriptions of her experience in that role. (Unless noted otherwise all the quotations in this post are from White Fragility.)
… if and when an educational program does directly address racism and the privileging of whites, common white responses include anger, withdrawal, emotional incapacitation, guilt, argumentation, and cognitive dissonance (all of which reinforce the pressure on facilitators to avoid directly addressing racism). So-called progressive whites may not respond with anger but still insulate themselves via claims that they are beyond the need for engaging with the content because they “already had a class on this” or “already know this.” All these responses constitute white fragility—the result of the reduced psychosocial stamina that racial insulation inculcates.
… intense emotional reactions are common. I have discussed several reasons why whites are so defensive about the suggestion that we benefit from, and are complicit in, a racist system:
Social taboos against talking openly about race
The racist = bad / not racist = good binary
Fear and resentment toward people of color
Our delusion that we are objective individuals
Our guilty knowledge that there is more going on than we can or will admit to
Deep investment in a system that benefits us and that we have been conditioned to see as fair
Internalized superiority and sense of a right to rule
A deep cultural legacy of anti-black sentiment
It is hard to grow up in our society as a white person without ingesting some of the pro-white, anti-black attitudes floating around in our culture.
To me, the most remarkable part of Robin DiAngelo’s accounts of her work as a diversity trainer is the way white people she is talking to try to turn themselves into victims:
One way that whites protect their positions when challenged on race is to invoke the discourse of self-defense. Through this discourse, whites characterize themselves as victimized, slammed, blamed, and attacked. Whites who describe the interactions in this way are responding to the articulation of counternarratives alone; no physical violence has ever occurred in any interracial discussion or training that I am aware of. These self-defense claims work on multiple levels. They identify the speakers as morally superior while obscuring the true power of their social positions. The claims blame others with less social power for their discomfort and falsely describe that discomfort as dangerous. The self-defense approach also reinscribes racist imagery. By positioning themselves as the victim of antiracist efforts, they cannot be the beneficiaries of whiteness. Claiming that it is they who have been unfairly treated—through a challenge to their position or an expectation that they listen to the perspectives and experiences of people of color—they can demand that more social resources (such as time and attention) be channeled in their direction to help them cope with this mistreatment.
When I consult with organizations that want me to help them recruit and retain a more diverse workforce, I am consistently warned that past efforts to address the lack of diversity have resulted in trauma for white employees. This is literally the term used to describe the impact of a brief and isolated workshop: trauma. This trauma has required years of avoiding the topic altogether, and although the business leaders feel they are ready to begin again, I am cautioned to proceed slowly and be careful. Of course, this white racial trauma in response to equity efforts has also ensured that the organization has remained overwhelmingly white.
The language of violence that many whites use to describe antiracist endeavors is not without significance, as it is another example of how white fragility distorts reality. By employing terms that connote physical abuse, whites tap into the classic story that people of color (particularly African Americans) are dangerous and violent. In so doing, whites distort the real direction of danger between whites and others. This history becomes profoundly minimized when whites claim they don’t feel safe or are under attack when they find themselves in the rare situation of merely talking about race with people of color. The use of this language of violence illustrates how fragile and ill-equipped most white people are to confront racial tensions, and their subsequent projection of this tension onto people of color.
Here, I am reminded of Shirzad Chamine’s description of the “Victim” defense mechanism:
Characteristics
If criticized or misunderstood, tend to withdraw, pout, and sulk.
Fairly dramatic and temperamental.
When things get tough, want to crumble and give up.
…
Thoughts
No one understands me.
Poor me.
Terrible things always happen to me.
…
I discuss Shirzad’s book Positive Intelligence in “On Human Potential.” Because of the damage defense mechanisms often do to the one using them, Shirzad calls them “saboteurs.” This is the Victim saboteur in action.
Though there is a lot of additional subtlety to what Robin DiAngelo is saying, one thing I find intriguing is the “tough love” attitude Robin DiAngelo has toward antiracism. We have to buck up and take the feedback that points out structures and attitudes that advantage whites.
Making oneself out out to be a victim is not the only way whites try to avoid confronting their role in perpetuating white privilege. Intellectualizing can be used to insulate one’s heart from seeing one’s own role in the system and one’s own pro-white, anti-black attitudes. For those of us to whom intellectualizing is a reflex, a key question from Robin can help separate out defensive intellectualization from productive intellectual inquiry. She writes:
In my work to unravel the dynamics of racism, I have found a question that never fails me. This question is not “Is this claim true, or is it false?”; we will never come to an agreement on a question that sets up an either/or dichotomy on something as sensitive as racism. Instead I ask, “How does this claim function in the conversation?”
Robin does a good job of pointing to evidence of our pro-white, anti-black attitudes and the various rationalizations through which we avoid feeling bad about our roles in perpetuating white privilege.
One good example of our either devaluing or not thinking about people of color is when we talk about “the good old days.” Robin:
As a white person, I can openly and unabashedly reminisce about “the good old days.” Romanticized recollections of the past and calls for a return to former ways are a function of white privilege, which manifests itself in the ability to remain oblivious to our racial history. Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.
The past was great for white people (and white men in particular) because their positions went largely unchallenged. In understanding the power of white fragility, we have to notice that the mere questioning of those positions triggered the white fragility that Trump capitalized on. There has been no actual loss of power for the white elite, who have always controlled our institutions and continue to do so by a very wide margin.
We are also often ignorant about things going on in the present. For me, and I hope for many others, the protests in the last few weeks have been a wake-up call.
To mention something minor compared to some of my other dimensions of ignorance, I say to my shame that I didn’t know what Juneteenth was until I googled it one day this past week. Let’s make sure that from now on all Americans know that there is a holiday to celebrate one of the best things that has happened in our history: the end of slavery.
In the last few weeks, my wife Gail and I have watched “13th,” “I Am Not Your Negro” (about James Baldwin) and “Selma.” Of those three movies, the documentary “13th” hit me the hardest. I had known abstractly about the rise of the “carceral state” that imprisons a hugely greater fraction of Americans than the fraction imprisoned in other liberal democracies. But the racist origins of the carceral state had not come home to me until I saw “13th.” To put bluntly a key moment in that documentary, Bill Clinton, to win reelection, felt he needed to campaign on law and order, which in our country, sadly, means a lot more than the dictionary definition of “law and order.” Rather, as a politician, if you want to promise in code to lock up a lot of African-Americans, you talk about “law and order.” If you wanted to talk about law and order in the dictionary sense, in a non-racist way, you would want to use another set of words. Bill Clinton then went on to preside over a huge expansion of the number of Americans in prison. Other presidents also presided over a rise, but numerically, the big expansion happened under Bill Clinton.
Robin DiAngelo reminds of some of the racial disparities in policing in 2020:
It has been well documented that blacks and Latinos are stopped by police more often than whites are for the same activities and that they receive harsher sentences than whites do for the same crimes. Research has also shown that a major reason for this racial disparity can be attributed to the beliefs held by judges and others about the cause of the criminal behavior. For example, the criminal behavior of white juveniles is often seen as caused by external factors—the youth comes from a single-parent home, is having a hard time right now, just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, or was bullied at school. Attributing the cause of the action to external factors lessens the person’s responsibility and classifies the person as a victim him or herself. But black and Latinx youth are not afforded this same compassion. When black and Latinx youth go before a judge, the cause of the crime is more often attributed to something internal to the person—the youth is naturally more prone to crime, is more animalistic, and has less capacity for remorse (similarly, a 2016 study found that half of a sample of medical students and residents believe that blacks feel less pain). Whites continually receive the benefit of the doubt not granted to people of color—our race alone helps establish our innocence.
Robin also points to how we perpetuate racism in ordinary social interactions. One way we perpetuate racism is by misrepresenting racism as less of an issue than it really is:
Today we have a cultural norm that insists we hide our racism from people of color and deny it among ourselves, but not that we actually challenge it. In fact, we are socially penalized for challenging racism.
I am often asked if I think the younger generation is less racist. No, I don’t. In some ways, racism’s adaptations over time are more sinister than concrete rules such as Jim Crow. The adaptations produce the same outcome (people of color are blocked from moving forward) but have been put in place by a dominant white society that won’t or can’t admit to its beliefs. This intransigence results in another pillar of white fragility: the refusal to know.
Another way we perpetuate racism is by being too cowardly to challenge overt racism when it appears. Robin gives the example of a racist joke told in an all-white group:
The very real consequences of breaking white solidarity play a fundamental role in maintaining white supremacy. We do indeed risk censure and other penalties from our fellow whites. We might be accused of being politically correct or might be perceived as angry, humorless, combative, and not suited to go far in an organization. In my own life, these penalties have worked as a form of social coercion. Seeking to avoid conflict and wanting to be liked, I have chosen silence all too often.
Conversely, when I kept quiet about racism, I was rewarded with social capital such as being seen as fun, cooperative, and a team player. Notice that within a white supremacist society, I am rewarded for not interrupting racism and punished in a range of ways—big and small—when I do. I can justify my silence by telling myself that at least I am not the one who made the joke and that therefore I am not at fault. But my silence is not benign because it protects and maintains the racial hierarchy and my place within it. Each uninterrupted joke furthers the circulation of racism through the culture, and the ability for the joke to circulate depends on my complicity.
People of color certainly experience white solidarity as a form of racism, wherein we fail to hold each other accountable, to challenge racism when we see it, or to support people of color in the struggle for racial justice.
In my post “Enablers of White Supremacy,” I used the intentionally shocking phrase “white supremacy” both to emphasize the gravity of the state our society is in and to make the idea of institutional racism clear. Robin DiAngelo has a trenchant list of some of the more personal ways in which we become enablers of white supremacy:
In summary, our socialization engenders a common set of racial patterns. These patterns are the foundation of white fragility:
Preference for racial segregation, and a lack of a sense of loss about segregation
Lack of understanding about what racism is
Seeing ourselves as individuals, exempt from the forces of racial socialization
Failure to understand that we bring our group’s history with us, that history matters • Assuming everyone is having or can have our experience
Lack of racial humility, and unwillingness to listen
Dismissing what we don’t understand
Lack of authentic interest in the perspectives of people of color
Wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to “solutions”
Confusing disagreement with not understanding
Need to maintain white solidarity, to save face, to look good
Guilt that paralyzes or allows inaction
Defensiveness about any suggestion that we are connected to racism
A focus on intentions over impact
Conclusion
It is time for all of us to heed the wake-up call of how far we still are from racial equality in America.
If you want one more sign of racism and other bad attitudes that resemble racism, see “‘Keep the Riffraff Out!’” In particular, almost always, when people talk about “preserving the character of their neighborhood” by blocking the construction of apartment buildings and multifamily homes, or homes on small lots, there is a racist effect, whatever you think about whether or not there is an out-and-out racist motivation. And what are, by any standard, out-and-out racist motivations are not at all uncommon when people talk about “preserving the character of their neighborhood.” Being in favor of more residential construction—a lot more, so the supply reaches to people of even modest means—wherever people want to live is one of the more powerful ways of being antiracist.
Finally, let me say that there is more than one way to be effective as an antiracist. What we need now is to get wide agreement on the gravity of the continuing problem of racism and to have a critical mass of people working to fight racism in different ways. Some of those ways of fighting racism have increasing returns to scale, so it can often be useful to join with others and follow antiracist leaders. But there are other ways of fighting racism that may work well even on a small scale. Find your own métier in this fight. But don’t stand on the sidelines.
Don’t miss these other posts touching on racism and antiracism: