Digressions&Impressions

My First GPT assisted toy model

A few days ago a prominent economist hereafter (PE) I follow on twitter and enjoy bantering with mentioned, en passant, that PE had used ChatGPT to submit a referee report. (I couldn't find the tweet, so that's why I am not revealing his identity here.) Perhaps PE did so in the context of me entertaining the idea to use it in writing an exam because I have been experimenting with that. I can't say yet it is really a labor saving device, but it makes the process less lonely and more stimulating. The reason it is not a labor saving device is because GPT is a bullshit artist and you constantly have to be on guard it's not just making crap up (which it will then freely admit).

I don't see how I can make it worth my time to get GPT to write referee reports for me given the specific textual commentary I often have to make. I wondered -- since I didn't have the guts to ask PE to share the GPT enabled referee report with me -- if it would be easier to write such a joint report in the context of pointing out mistakes in the kind of toy models a lot of economics engages in. This got me thinking. 

About a decade ago I was exposed to work by Allan Franklin and Kent Staley (see here) and (here). It may have been a session at a conference before this work was published; I don't recall the exact order. But it was about the role of incredibly high statistical significance standards in some parts of high energy physics, and the evolution of these standards over time. What was neat about their research is that it also was sensitive to background pragmatic and sociological issues. And as I was reflecting on their narratives and evidence, it occurred to me one could create a toy model to represent some of the main factors that should be able to predict if an experimental paper gets accepted, and where failure of the model would indicate shifting standards (or something interesting about that). 

However, back home, I realized I couldn't do it. Every decision created anxiety, and i noticed that even simple functional relations were opportunities for agonising internal debates. I reflected on the fact that while I had been writing about other people's models and methods for a long time  (sometimes involving non-trivial math), I had never actually tried to put together a model because all my knowledge about science was theoretical and self-learned. I had never taken graduate level science courses, and so never had been drilled in the making of even basic toy-models. This needn't been the end of the matter because all I needed to do was be patient and work through it in trial and error or, more efficiently, find a collaborator within (smiles sheepishly) the division of labor. But the one person I mentioned this project to over dinner didn't think it was an interesting modeling exercise because (i) my model would be super basic and (ii) it was not in his current research interests to really explore it. (He is super sweet dude, so he said it without kicking down.)

Anyway, this morning, GPT and I 'worked together' to produce Model 7.0.

Model 7.0 is a toy model that represents the likelihood a scientific paper is accepted or rejected in a field characterized as 'normal science' based on several factors. I wanted to capture intuitons about the kind of work it is, but also sociological and economic considations that operate in the background. I decided the model needed to distinguish among four kinds of 'results':

• Ri: replications
• Rii: results that require adjustment to the edges of the background theory;
• Riii: results that confirm difficult to produce predictions/implications of the background theory;
• Riv: results that refute central tenets of the background theory (so called falsifications).

The model is shaped by the lack of interest in replications. Results that refute central tenets of a well confirmed theory need to pass relatively high evidential treshholds (higher than in Rii and Riii). I decided that experimental cost (which I would treat as a proxy for difficulty) would enter into decisions about relative priority of Rii and Riii.  In addition, there were differences of standards in fields defined by robust background theories (or not so robust). As robustness goes up baseline standards of significance that need to be met, too. 

I thought it clever to capture a Lakatosian intuition that results in a core and result on a fringe are treated differently. And I also wanted to capture the pragmatic fact that journal  space is not unlimited and that its supply is shaped by the number of people chasing tenure.

So, in model 7.0 we can distinguish among the following variables

• Θ represents the centrality of the topic (Theta).
• Σ represents the statistical significance of the results (Sigma).
• Ρ represents the robustness of the background theory (Rho).
• α represents the journal space availability (Alpha).
• N the number of people seeking tenure,
• C the cost of the experiments 

I decided that the relationship between journal space and number of people seeking tenure would be structurally the same in all four kinds of results. As the number of people seeking tenure in a field (N) increases, journal space availability (α) also increases, leading to a decrease in the importance of the other three variables (Θ, Σ, Ρ) in determining the probability of acceptance (P(Accepted) and so this became 'α / (α + k * N)' in all the functions. k represents the rate of decrease in significance threshold with increase in number of replications, which GTP thought clever to include. (Obviously, if you think that in a larger field it gets harder to publish results at a threshhold you would change signs here, etc.)

The formula for accepting papers for four different kind of results in a given field with a shared backgrond theory is given as follows:

• P(Accepted | Ri) = f(Θ, Σ, Ρ, α, Ri) = f(Θ, Σ, Ρ, α / (α + k * N), Ri)
• P(Accepted | Rii) = f(Θ, Σ, Ρ, α, Rii) = f(Θ, Σ, Ρ, α / (α + k * N), Rii) * h(C, Rii)
• P(Accepted | Riii) = f(Θ, Σ, Ρ, α, Riii) = f(Θ, Σ, Ρ, α / (α + k * N), Riii) * h(C, Riii)
• P(Accepted | Riv) = f(Θ, Σ, Ρ, α, Riv) = f(Θ, Σ, Ρ, α / (α + k * N), Riv) * g(Σ, Ρ, Riv)

For Rii and Riii, the formula also includes an additional term h(C, Rii) or h(C, Riii) respectively, which represents the effect of cost on the likelihood of acceptance. The function h is such that as costs go up, there is a greater likelihood that Riii will be accepted than Rii. We are more interested in a new particle than we are in a changing parameter that effects some measurements only. For Riv, the formula includes an additional term g(Σ, Ρ, Riv), which represents the impact of the robustness of the scientific theory being tested and the quality of the experimental design on the likelihood of acceptance. The standard for Riv is much higher than for Rii and Riii, as it requires an order of magnitude higher level of statistical significance.

It is not especially complicated to extend this kind of model to capture the idea that journals with different prestige game relative acceptance rates, or that replications (Ri) with non trivial higher statistical power do get accepted (for a while), but that's for future work.:)

I decided to pause at Model 7.0 because GPT seemed to be rather busy helping others. I was getting lots of "Maybe try me again in a little bit" responses. And I could see that merely adding terms was not going to be satisfying. I needed to do some thinking about the nature of this model and play around with it. Anyway, GPT also made some suggestions on how to collect data for such a model, how to operationalize different variables, and how to refine it, but I have to run to a lunch meeting. And then do a literature survey to see what kind of models are out there. It's probably too late for me to get into the modeling business, but I suspect GPT like models will become lots of people's buddies.

 

 

On the New Alexandria

This is where I believe we are in analytic philosophy. Contrary to the scholastic charge analytic philosophy is not really characterised by formalised debates around niche propositions got from pernickety yet rigorous deductions from esoteric and ultimately pointless theories. For one thing I think the rigour of analytic deductions is much overstated. For another it just misses what has been apparent about analytic philosophy for a number of years, it is an outdated stereotype of the field from a time (perhaps in its recent past, late 20th century for instance) when the field was quite insular and self-satisfied. But nowadays it is apparent that widespread naturalism and the practical turn have each in their own way broke down those doors. Analytic philosophers nowadays are typically very keen to show their work is in good scientific standing, and will have practically interesting consequences for the pressing issues of the day. And what that means is syncretising.

Our political and ethical theories often involve drawing on a mish-mash of sources. First, there is the pertinent philsophical tradition. In analytic philosophy this usually means at least one of Rawls or some other great liberal, Rawls' students, or their students; feminist theory of the recent past; or, in some quarters, libertarian thinkers whose connections to Pinochet were, we are assured, much overstated. These are shown to be able to accommodate or refine views that are taken from the vanguard of very online downwardly mobile frequent social media users ("activists", as academics will refer to them), the common sense of the Euro-American middle class, salient results from legal theory or social psychology, and increasingly nowadays maybe AI or machine learning in its more socio-politically salient aspects. Along the way one may well get some argument or deduction of one part of the framework for the other -- but the energy, the impetus, comes really from the fact that bourgeois common sense, comprehensible bits of social science, shouty people online, and the recent philosophical tradition of one sort or another, are all felt to be authoritative. The payoff is the reconciliation, the sense that one can have one's cake and eat it.

I have a very similar sense for contemporary epistemology and metaphysics. Once again we admit bourgeois common sense, pertinent sciences - again sometimes psychology, but here also linguistics, statistics, physics, biology (more rarely chemistry I do not know why) - and the authoritative works of highly respected recent philosophers, typically Lewis or Kripke, increasingly Carnap, more rarely Wittgenstein, Brandom, or McDowell. Once again arguments can sometimes be had, but they are really in the service of proving coherence rather than anything akin to deduction from accepted first principles. The emotional pay off is, I believe, the achievement of synthesis. We are in a syncretic age.

And I believe that is why we will soon be forgot. The common sense of the bourgeois (which may not even be that common), social science that shan't survive the replication crisis, AI and machine learning (and thus statistical and reasoning capacities) that are manifestly in their infancy, and the theoretical works of people who happened to be good at placing their students in the latter quarter of the 20th century? I just see zero reason to predict that anyone will care what we make of this. It matters to us - we may well have reason to continue to try and organise it, this is our zeitgeist and anyway attempts to make it make sense will probably reveal its weaknesses and thus generate real progress. But we are a syncretising era working with elements whose nature and interrelations no-one shall care about within the space of a generation. 

This is more hopeful than the polemical claim that the present age is scholastic. I think there is more room for creativity in this activity. The attempt to rationalise new socio-ethical movements in the face of decaying empire mean that we join the Alexandrites in trying to provide comfort to a time that needs it. The failures and frictions of our attempts to syncretise will no doubt reveal anomalies that are worth attending to. But I think it is less likely to be of lasting interest than ambitious derivations from first principles. These sort of projects are designed to gain attractiveness from the inner plausibility of their premises, and thus gain a sort of independence from the immediacies of their age. Descartes, Hume, and Spinoza have far more secure places in history. I think this will be felt as a loss because for whatever reason lasting influence does seem to be sought after.--Last Positivist "The New Alexandria" January 28, 2023

If you are not laughing when you learn inter alia that we are a repetition of an out of Africa episode, the joke is on you. But if you are only laughing you may be missing some of the bite here. Before I get to that, I agree with Bright that it is time to retire a whole bunch of external critiques (that we are scientistic and/instrumentalizing, scholastic, deneutered cold war puppies, or speech policing servants of the carceral state) that stem from an unwillingness to read the much more thoroughgoing self-indictments of analytic philosophy (or so I argue).

It is quite natural that on social media the claims about syncretism, scholasticism, and historical memory past and future received much attention. But I call attention to three unpleasant aspects of Bright's analysis: first, our cultural or intellectual world is doomed. For, while we like the Alexandrians may have "hope of righting course" and not yet despair despite the "clear signs of turning for the worse," if the analogy is strict enought, the game is up (and one worries for the fate of our Hypatia). This makes it puzzling why anyone would accept the "zeitgeist;" any "real progress" we generate will be futile. I return below to consider how we should treat this rhetoric.

Second, there is a ludicrious mismatch between our self-image as fearless aimers for truth (or, as Bright allows, fighters for social justice) who follow the argument come what may  and our unwillingness to pay a price for it: in our reflective equilibrium we become reconciled to, even consoled by, our world, but this is no better than a stale confirmation bias if you are bourgeois (or adapted preferences if you are from another class.) While twentieth century continental philosophy was too addicted to the smells and sights of decomposing corpses in the imagery of Baudelaire, we are, in reality, the true decadents who reconcile ourselves by our inability to see our own corpse ahead.

Now, it is quite possible that this is all intended as sober diagnosis. But it is worth noting that there is a subtle connection between these two aspects. The more doomed we are in reality the more our self-imposed aspirations our out of touch with it. We lack, that is, third, self-knowledge. History repeats, as farce only.

Now, it's possible that Bright is preaching quietism in light of our fate; maybe we should keep our heads down and achieve the progress we can. But, this rhetoric can also be a call to arms -- or philosophical prophecy -- in two ways: first, he is baiting us to find within our umwelt the paths that lead to our equivalent of  St. Augustine. That is, some of us must throw our lot in with africana philosophy. (Another route goes to Al-Farabi, and the East). This is The Dream of Scipio as retold by Iain Pears. 

The other possibility is to rebel against our fate and that we really change course and unlearn the many bad intellectual habits that are diagnosed by him; a painful emendation of the mind. For, the intellectual revolution that the moment requires is, if we take his diagnosis seriously, the overthrow of our common sense. And in so far as our intuitions are shaped by our material conditions and practices of social recruitment this is a call to arms to destroy the modern research university, of at least philosophy's place in it. 

Not unlike MacAskill, one wishes to say, Bright is playing the long game for high stakes. But rather than betting the farm on engineering the right sort of population (human or robotic) given existing institutions and philanthropy by the wealthy, Bright is hinting at a different approach less beholden to Mammon. After all, I can't help but notice that his narrative echoes rather neatly Friedrich Engels' variations (see here; and here) on Bauer on the rise of Christianity. We might say, then, that the last waltz is about to be played.

On Foucault's Discipline and Punishment & Chicago/Public Choice Economics (II)

But perhaps one should reverse the problem and ask oneself what is served by the failure of the prison; what is the use of these different phenomena that are continually being criticized; the maintenance of delinquency, the encouragement of recidivism, the transformation of the occasional offender into a habitual delinquent, the organization of a closed milieu of delinquency. Perhaps one should look for what is hidden beneath the apparent cynicism of the penal institution, which, after purging the convicts by means of their sentence, continues to follow them by a whole series of 'brandings' (a surveillance that was once de jure and which is today de facto; the police record that has taken the place of the convic's passport) and which thus pursues as a 'delinquent' someone who has acquitted himself of his punishment as an offender. Can we not see here a consequence rather than a contradiction? If so, one would be forced to suppose that the prison, and no doubt punishment in general, is not intended to eliminate offences, but rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use th!m; that it is not so much that they render docile those who are liable to transgress the law, but that they tend to assimilate the transgression of the laws in a general tactics of subiection.--Michel Foucault (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison] translated by Alan Sheridan, pp. 272.

The passage quoted above occurs in the section where Foucault steps back from his account of the 'birth' of a prison and reminds his reader that he is researching and writing his book during "prisoners' revolts of recent weeks." (p. 268) And some readers, then and now, will be familiar with Foucault's activism on behalf of those prisoners. Foucault goes on to note that such revolts elicit a predictable response from (what one might call) enlightened, bien pensant public opinion: "the prisoners' revolts...have been attributed to the fact that the reforms proposed in 1945 never really took effect; that one must therefore return to the fundamental principles of the prison." (p. 268) And Foucault goes on to note that the (seven) principles that entered into the 1945 reform and the predictable response to their failure are a return of the same with a history of "150 years," (p. 269): "Word for word, from one century to the other, the same fundamental propositions are repeated. They reappear in each new, hard-won, finally accepted formulation of a reform that has hitherto always been lacking." (p. 270).*

A certain kind of economist -- often associated with public choice theory and/or Stigler's account of rent-seeking [hereafter the fusion of Chicago and Virginia] --, when confronted by a persistent and enduring failure of a social institution, will ask Cui bono? And what will follow is a story about persistent rents, and rent-seeking. That is, while it is often presented in terms of methodological individualism of utility maximizing agents, the Chicago-Virginia fusion offers a functionalist account of the persistence of social institutions in virtue of the functions they serve to some socially powerful agents or classes of agents. (I put it like that to pay due hommage to the Smithian and Marxist (recall) roots of the emphasis on rent-seeking in the Chicago-Virginia fusion (recall this post on Stigler and recall here on Buchanan and Tullock.) If you don't like the word 'class' use 'representative agent' instead.

Now, before I say anything else, it is worth noting that in the subsequent pages of the material I quote, Foucault offers the rent-seeking answer familiar from Chicago and Virginia fusion. In particular, he identifies three kinds of rents: first, and this is central to the argument of the whole book, members of the human sciences -- medicine, psychology, crimonology, pedagogy, social work, statistics, sociology etc. -- directly gain employment and status from the fact that modern prisons are not just places to lock people away, but also to reform and discipline them. They also gain an easily acessible study object and data (e.g. p. 277 & p. 281).  Second, the criminalization of, say, brothels and the simultaneous regulation of the health of the prostitutes create "enormous profits" that are partially captured by members of the political classes, partially captured by police forces, and again  medicine (see, especially, pp. 279-280). Third, prisons are themselves producers of delinquincy, and so that generates one might call 'second order rents' because it reinforces all the primary rents discussed just mentioned.

There is a further, more important, convergence with Chicago-Virginia fusion lurking here. Foucault treats prisons and the penal system as producers of delinquincy. (This is, in fact, one of the central insights of most prison reform programs that reappear.) And, in fact, it is quite natural to read Becker and Stigler as providing a framework to think about what (in the 1970s already) was called "the crime production function" (as even critics acknowledged). As Becker (1968) put it one can articulate a "function relating the number of offenses by any person to his probability of conviction, to his punishment if convicted, and to other variables, such as the income available to him in legal and other illegal activities, the frequency of nuisance arrests, and his willingness to commit an illegal act." (Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach, p. 177) From his annotations, we know Foucault read this essay (even though we don't know when exactly).  That is to say, what Foucault recognizes is that the production of delinquincy is itself a source of possible rents or what Foucault calls "usable...illegality." (p. 277) And in (1979) Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault explicitly links his discussion of the "cost of delinquency" to Becker, Stigler, and Ehrlich.  (21 March 1979, Lecture 10, p. 248) And in many ways the tenth lecture can be read as a restatement of Foucault's Discipline & Punish in the vernacular of Chicago.

So, again, as I noted last week, this kind of convergence between Foucault and the Chicago-Virginia fusion suggests either that Foucault was familiar with Stigler's and Becker's work before he published Discipline and Punish and before he encountered Lepage's (1978) Tomorrow, Capitalism: The Economics of Economic Freedom or that there was a kind of convergence between Foucault and Chicago already during his prison activism phase (when Foucault was associated with Maoist and far left groups).

I could stop here, but I don't mean to suggest that for Foucault the enduring functionality of prison as a producer of delinquincy is exclusively or primarily in financial (and scientific) rents. He also thinks that it has other enduring political benefits to ruling elites in direct and indirect ways. Whether one agrees with this or not, Foucault's answer here is no different in kind than the one articulated just now in terms of rents. (Even if the utility involved would be more difficult to measure directly.) And somewhat remarkably, in his classic study (Sour Grapes) Jon Elster singled out Foucault's question and answer as an especially bad consequence explanations--ones that lack a mechanism, a feedback mechanism, and even an intentional agent.  I responded to that charge in press here before I developed my interest in the Birth of Biopolitics and Foucault's thought. And while I would be the last person to suggest that Foucault's work could pass peer review at JPE, good chunks of the enduring substance of Discipline & Punish is not fundamentally different from work that did at the time.

 

Pufendorf and Locke on Tacit Consent (in language and money)

But that the Nature of Discourse may be more throughly understood, it must first be known, that there is a two-fold Obligation respecting Discourse, whether exprest with the Voice, or written in Characters. The first is, that those who make use of the same Language, are obliged to apply such certain Words to such certain Things, according as Custom has made them to signify in each Language. For since neither any Words nor any particular Strokes form’d into Letters can naturally denote any certain Thing (otherwise all Languages and Characters for writing would be the same; and hence the Use of the Tongue would be to no purpose if every Man might call every Thing by what Name he pleas’d;) it is absolutely necessary among those who speak the same Language, that there be a tacit Agreement among them, that this certain Thing shall be so, or so call’d, and not otherwise. So that unless an uniform Application of Words be agreed upon, ’twill be impossible for one Man to gather the Meaning of another from his Talk. By virtue then of this tacit Compact, every Man is bound in his common Discourse to apply his Words to that Sense, which agrees with the receiv’d Signification thereof in that Language: From whence also it follows, that albeit a Man’s Sentiments may differ from what he expresses in Words, yet in the Affairs of Human Life he must be look’d upon as intending what he says, tho’, as was said, perhaps his inward Meaning be the clear contrary. For since we cannot be inform’d of another’s Mind otherwise than by outward Signs, all Use of Discourse would be to no purpose, if by mental Reservations, which any Man may form as he lists, it might be in his power to elude what he had declar’d by Signs usually accepted to that end.--Pufendorf, Samuel and Barbeyrac, Jean. The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature (1673, 2003). Liberty Fund, 1673.  pp. 120-121

As regular readers know I have been directed toward Pufendorf's account of tacit consent because of my reading of Martin Lenz's entertaining and stimulating Socializing Minds (recall this post, especially; but also this one). Lenz (pp. 138-139) explicitly quotes the passage above, and notes four key anticipations of Locke in Pufendorf:

• • the characterisation of language as the great instrument of society,
  • the anti-naturalist conventionalism and the argument that if language were naturally significant, there would be just one language
  • the use of customary outward signs for inward meaning
  • the tacit agreement that binds everyone to apply words in accordance with the received use (receptus usus).--Socializing Minds, p. 138

Lenz is surely right about this, and I accept his contention that Locke's account of the conventionality of language (especially at Essay 3.2.8 and 3.11.11) is inspired by Pufendorf's  De Officio hominis civis, or at least that it would have evoked it to contemporary readers then.

So, this raises the question to what degree what I call recall 'the Humean template' for analyzing convention is already present in Pufendorf. The elements of the Humean template are: (i) a sense of common interest (i*) felt in each person's breast; (ii) and it (that is, (i)) observed in others; (iii), this fact (the existence of (i&ii) creates collaboration; (iv) the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways; (v) and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society. (I avoid the language of 'utility' to avoid issues pertaining to utilitarianism.) And (vi) a Humean convention is contrasted with practices founded in promises and in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition, (vii), the process (i-iii) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit. And I argued (recall) that Locke articulates the Humean template at Essay 2.28.10 in the context of describing how moral terms are structurally the same in each language even though they can refer to locally different moral behaviors and characters/character-traits. (And that we can also find (recall) the template in the Second Treatise, paragraph 50 in his account of the value off money.)

If we then look at the quoted passage from De Officio, we can read that Pufendorf treats the convention in terms of an existing "custom." And while this is fully compatible with the elements of the Humean template, we are left without an account how the custom could arrise. That's to say while Pufendorf makes, as Lenz notes, the obligatory character of the convention quite clear, he leaves its origin quite mysterious. For, earlier, Pufendorf defines custom as "the frequent Repetition of Actions of the same kind does also incline the Will to do certain Things" (pp. 34-35). But why linguistic practices get repeated in particular patterns is simply contingent now. 

This absence of a mechanism of how tacit consent arises is actually notable when Pufendorf explicitly treats of the practice:

Consent is usually made known by outward Signs, as, by Speaking, Writing, a Nod, or the like; tho’ sometimes it may also be plainly intimated without any of them, according to the Nature of the thing and other Circumstances. So Silence in some Cases, and attended with some Circumstances, passes for a Sign expressing Consent. To this may be attributed those tacit Contracts, where we give not our formal Consent by the Signs generally made use of among Men; but the Nature of the Business, and other Circumstances make it fairly supposable. Thus frequently in the principal Contract, which is express, another is included which is tacit, the Nature of the Case so requiring: And it is usual, in most Covenants that are made, that some tacit Exceptions and imply’d Conditions must of necessity be understood.--pp. 111-112

Pufendorf is undoubtedly correct that even in explicit covenants lots of tacit exceptions and implied conditions are presupposed and understood. (In a later passage he treats as plainly resulting "from the Nature of the Thing." (p. 127)) That there is often a social scaffolding on which a formal contract is built is pretty much a shared insight of all critics of Hobbes. But how we should think of the character and sources of this 'necessity' is left opaque in Pufendorf.

I don't mean to suggest Pufendorf never has a mechanism when he is discussing custom. So, for example, when it comes to price formation of prices in the market place (so called vulgar prices) he writes the following. 

But the Vulgar Price, which is not fix’d by the Laws, admits of a certain Latitude, within the Compass whereof more or less may be, and often is, either taken or given, according to the Agreement of the Persons dealing; which yet for the most part, goes according to the Custom of the Market. Where commonly there is Regard had to the Trouble and Charges which the Tradesmen generally are at, in the bringing home and managing their Commodities, and also after what manner they are bought or sold, whether by Wholesale or Retail. Sometimes also on a sudden the Common Price is alter’d by reason of the Plenty or Scarcity of Buyers, Money, or the Commodity. For the Scarcity of Buyers and of Money, (which on any particular Account may happen) and the Plenty of the Commodity, may be a Means of diminishing the Price thereof. On the other hand, the Plenty of Buyers and of Money, and the Scarcity of the Commodity, inhanses the same. Thus as the Value of a Commodity is lessen’d, if it wants a Buyer, so the Price is augmented when the Possessor is solicited to sell what otherwise he would not have parted with. Lastly, it is likewise to be regarded, whether the Person offers ready Money, or desires Time for Payment; for Allowance of Time is Part of the Price.--pp. 143-144

Here it is quite clear that the customary price itself reflects underlying costs and even disutility of production and procurement ("the Trouble and Charges which the Tradesmen generally are at, in the bringing home and managing their Commodities") and also reflects supply/demand conditions ("plenty or scarcity"/"plenty of buyers...wants a buyer") in the market-place as well as what we would call inflation, but in Pufendorf's time is felt in terms of the availability of coins [say because the local gold/silver/copper value of coins has made it attractive to melt them down or export them], or "ready money." Interestingly enough buying on credit ("time for payment") is not treated as pure equivalent for buying with coin, presumably not just in virtue of the delay ("allowance of time"), but also the implied risk.  Here Pufendorf has a relatively clear account of the mechanism by which the vulgar price can change, but again, he has no account of how it can become customary (except that conditions  of change are not operative).

I have not done an exhaustive survey of Pufendorf. (You go read, Of the Law of Nature and Nations: Eight Books!--Seriously, I welcome suggestions.) But Locke deserves some credit for recognizing that Pufendorf's account of convention and tacit contract left too much unexplained. And while I have not defended the adequacy of the Humean template, the fact that Locke adopts it in non-trivial ways is no small advance over Pufendorf's analysis.

Lenz and Locke (and Hume) on Semantic Convention

Thirdly, it is not enough that men have ideas, determined ideas, for which they make these signs stand; but they must also take care to apply their words as near as may be to such ideas as common use has annexed them to. For words, especially of languages already framed, being no man's private possession, but the common measure of commerce and communication, it is not for any one at pleasure to change the stamp they are current in, nor alter the ideas they are affixed to; or at least, when there is a necessity to do so, he is bound to give notice of it. Men's intentions in speaking are, or at least should be, to be understood; which cannot be without frequent explanations, demands, and other the like incommodious interruptions, where men do not follow common use. Propriety of speech is that which gives our thoughts entrance into other men's minds with the greatest ease and advantage: and therefore deserves some part of our care and study, especially in the names of moral words. The proper signification and use of terms is best to be learned from those who in their writings and discourses appear to have had the clearest notions, and applied to them their terms with the exactest choice and fitness. This way of using a man's words, according to the propriety of the language, though it have not always the good fortune to be understood; yet most commonly leaves the blame of it on him who is so unskilful in the language he speaks, as not to understand it when made use of as it ought to be.--Locke An Essay Concerning Human(e) Understanding, 3.11.11

In his entertaining and instructive book, Socializing Minds (recall yesterday's post), Martin Lenz calls attention to (and partially quotes) the passage quoted above. For Lenz the passage describes what he (Lenz) calls the "acceptance conditions" as "consolidated by other members of the speech community." (p. 130; see also. p. 131.) Lenz emphasizes, correctly, that for Locke the meaning of words is, in part, established by their proper common use. There is -- as Locke's use of 'propriety' signals -- something normative about this 'proper'. And this normativity is the effect of the desire to be understood and the fact that the correct usage (see below on 'speaking properly') has already been established.

Of course, at 3.11.11, the situation is a bit complicated because Locke defines 'propriety of speech' that 'which gives our thoughts entrance into other men's minds with the greatest ease and advantage.''And the 'advantage' here is to us (the speaker) and not to the community. So, that Locke is not merely describing acceptance conditions in 3.11.11 (although I do not deny that this is involved in the proper significantion and use of terms), but also the rthe art of persuasion (again not the role of skill in speaking) here. So, in context, Locke is not merely discussing acceptance conditions, but the role of such acceptance conditions in (a poetics of) rhetoric. (I don't think Lenz needs to disagree with this, but he doesn't mention it; and later in the book (p. 174) Lenz draws a a perhaps too sharp contrast between Locke and Hume on the significance of rhetoric to their account of language.)

The contrast between private property and a common measure (about which more below) that Locke invokes (at 3.11.11), of course, echoes his treatment of convention. And Lenz had prepared the reader to notice it not just by quoting these words, but because earlier he had discussed Locke's account of convention and tacit consent when he introduced the idea of 'speaker consolidation' (p. 110) which is how linguistic conventions are themselves established and (now I quote Lenz again) "set the standard for use." (p. 111). Lenz appeals to Locke's earlier account at 3.2.8, which I quote in full:

Words, by long and familiar use, as has been said, come to excite in men certain ideas so constantly and readily, that they are apt to suppose a natural connexion between them. But that they signify only men's peculiar ideas, and that BY A PERFECT ARBITRARY IMPOSITION, is evident, in that they often fail to excite in others (even that use the same language) the same ideas we take them to be signs of: and every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for what ideas he pleases, that no one hath the power to make others have the same ideas in their minds that he has, when they use the same words that he does. And therefore the great Augustus himself, in the possession of that power which ruled the world, acknowledged he could not make a new Latin word: which was as much as to say, that he could not arbitrarily appoint what idea any sound should be a sign of, in the mouths and common language of his subjects. It is true, common use, by a tacit consent, appropriates certain sounds to certain ideas in all languages, which so far limits the signification of that sound, that unless a man applies it to the same idea, he does not speak properly: and let me add, that unless a man's words excite the same ideas in the hearer which he makes them stand for in speaking, he does not speak intelligibly. But whatever be the consequence of any man's using of words differently, either from their general meaning, or the particular sense of the person to whom he addresses them; this is certain, their signification, in his use of them, is limited to his ideas, and they can be signs of nothing else.--John Locke An Essay Concerning Human(e) Understanding, 3.2.8

What's neat about Locke's account is that he inscribes his account of linguistic convention into his political theory in two explicit ways. First, and less significantly, he argues that once a linguistic convention is established even an absolute ruler has very limited power to tinker with it. In fact, Locke goes much further than this and has Augustus deny that he cannot innovate in language by stipulation. A moment's reflection does allow one to recognize that on Locke's account, Augustus' power allows one to corrupt (by force law) existing words and disassociate them from established ideas.* (This is a sufficiently common phenomenon in political speech that I will leave it to the reader to find some examples.)

Second, the linguistic convention the implied measure or the existing common use of words and its stability, in particular, rests, and this might be thought paradoxical, on the inviolable liberty each and every one of us has to make words stand for any of our ideas!  Notice, first, that this is a commitment to an egalitarianism of a sort that is akin to Locke's account of our relative status in the state of nature. Second, the analysis of the convention rests on a kind of methodological individualism. It is in virtue of the fact that 'naturally' all individuals have the power to innovate that Augustus is denied once the convention is up and running (in linguistic social life)! This fact (a kind of natural equality to innovate) is ground in the fact that 'naturally' we don't have access to each other's ideas (which are inacessible to others without some mediation of language or other signs).

What 3.2.8 adds is that convention isn't just needed for what Lenz calls speaker 'consolidation' or 'acceptance conditions' in making us adhere to pre-existing standards of use, but also helps explain why there can be different language communities. Because once there is (say) some geographic or political (or religious) distance between different language users, acceptance conditions can stabilize in locally different equilibria. Once they interact again (through trade or migration) these conditions may well shift given the needs of exchange and social persuasion. (From here, it's really a very small step to Adam Smith's account of certain kinds of language use as non-servile persuasion.)

Given all these appeals to property and credit in the passage(s) above, it is tempting (recall) to look at Locke's account of convention in the second Treatise. But today, I postpone this and focus on an earlier passage in the Essay, where Locke explicitly appeals to tacit consent. And this passage makes explicit (in the context of discussion moral terms) the role of convention in linguistic diversity:

Thirdly, the LAW OF OPINION OR REPUTATION. Virtue and vice are names pretended and supposed everywhere to stand for actions in their own nature right and wrong: and as far as they really are so applied, they so far are coincident with the divine law above mentioned. But yet, whatever is pretended, this is visible, that these names, virtue and vice, in the particular instances of their application, through the several nations and societies of men in the world, are constantly attributed only to such actions as in each country and society are in reputation or discredit. Nor is it to be thought strange, that men everywhere should give the name of virtue to those actions, which amongst them are judged praiseworthy; and call that vice, which they account blamable: since otherwise they would condemn themselves, if they should think anything right, to which they allowed not commendation, anything wrong, which they let pass without blame. Thus the measure of what is everywhere called and esteemed virtue and vice is this approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which, by a secret and tacit consent, establishes itself in the several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world: whereby several actions come to find credit or disgrace amongst them, according to the judgment, maxims, or fashion of that place. For, though men uniting into politic societies, have resigned up to the public the disposing of all their force, so that they cannot employ it against any fellow-citizens any further than the law of the country directs: yet they retain still the power of thinking well or ill, approving or disapproving of the actions of those whom they live amongst, and converse with: and by this approbation and dislike they establish amongst themselves what they will call virtue and vice.-- Locke An Essay Concerning Human(e) Understanding, 2.28.10

Locke here anticipates the Humean observation (in the appendix to the Second Enquiry) that there is remarkable stability in moral terminology while there is enormous diversity what the content (qua behavior or character) applies to. And this is an effect of the fact that the meta-ethical measure that regulates the local linguistic conventions just is local approval and disapproval (not again the role of credit here). 

Again, at 2.28.10 Locke uses the contrast with an explicit political social contract to illustrate the nature of the tacit convention. And he claims that this convention operates orthogonally to the official political social contract. And that there are practices of approval and disapproval that are not regulated by law, but by independent judgment presumably in light of one's interest (like/dislike/approbation) and evaluation of what is (to use Smithian language) praiseworthy. The point echoes Hobbes's and Spinoza's observation that the law cannot fully control (although certainly corrupt) the minds of the ruled, and these maintain a kind of informal credit economy (or score in a language game) that tracks local judgments of merit. So, here, too, we see that the privacy of ideas is presupposed to maintain the conventionality of the shared linguistic social world.

I am struck, anew, how much of Locke's account anticipates Hume's official treatment of a convention, which has (recall) seven (or eight) parts: (i) a sense of common interest (i*) felt in each person's breast; (ii) and it (that is, (i)) observed in others; (iii), this fact (the existence of (i&ii) creates collaboration; (iv) the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways; (v) and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society. (I avoid the language of 'utility' to avoid issues pertaining to utilitarianism.) And (vi) a Humean convention is contrasted with practices founded in promises and in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition, (vii), the process (i-iii) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit.

Of these, all are explicitly present except (i-ii), although (i*) is in Locke's account of linguistic conventions in the Essay (and so kind of entails (i)). And (ii-iii) are implied once the convention is up and running (as the example of Augustus illustrates). The fact that in his account of convention Locke embraces (i-vii), while being a bit ambigious about (i-iii) is as I noted (recall) also true of Locke's account of the conventions of property and money in the Second Treatise. So, that is to say, Locke has an internally consistent 'template' of what a convention is that he applies to a number of large scale social institutions, and this template anticipates in crucial ways Hume's account who refines it by making some features (and implied mechanisms of stability) more explicit. 

That's enough for today on this topic. TBC with a nod to Pufendorf.

 

Lenz's Contact Problem with some reflections on Condorcet and Rousseau

Especially early modern explanations seem to construe the mind as something that is tucked away in a body and thus inaccessible by other minds. If this is correct, how could we even begin to think of a way that my thoughts influence yours? Are there ways of transmission or other modes of influence between different minds? I would like to call this the contact problem. Intersubjective explanations, it seems, must specify ways in which one mind can affect another mind. As I will argue, at least some early modern philosophers addressed this problem and provided intersubjective accounts of the mind. What is more, they relied on different models of intersubjectivity. To present three different but crucial explanatory models, I will focus on Spinoza, Locke and Hume: Spinoza will be shown to opt for a metaphysical model, Locke as resorting to a linguistic model and Hume as relying on a medical model that combines assumptions about contagion and sympathy.
Before we take a brief look at these models, let us take a step back and look at the contact problem again. Taking human minds as individual units hidden inside a body suggests that a direct contact between minds is impossible. I can tell you what I think, but in doing so, it’s not my thought that is transmitted. Getting at the thought seems to require an inference on the part of the listener. By contrast, if I endorse a view of the mind that takes mental states to be ingrained in behaviour, such that my mental states are not hidden but part of behavioural patterns, then my mind does seem to be more directly accessible. It seems, then, that the contact problem poses an enormous obstacle for the former but not for the latter view of the mind. On this assumption, intersubjective explanations work well in a behavioural view of the mind but not on what has been called “mentalism”. Martin Lenz (2022) Socializing Minds: Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford University Press), pp, 93-4 (emphases in original)*

I have to admit that when I first started to read Lenz's very entertaining Socializing Minds, I was a bit dubious about the so-called contact problem. It seemed to me, and sometimes still seems to me, an artifact of behaviorialism and some of Ryle's more dubious historiographic moves (which, alas, he was not immune to). But because Lenz's book is so much fun -- it mixes contemporary insights with very erudite and clearly written history of philosophy in refreshing ways easily moving between Avoerrism and memes-- I decided to revise my view. Reflecting on the contact problem is generative and so (by my lights) cannot be a mere artifact (which are sterile).

I have to admit that I don't understand why inference is thought to be a barrier to contact -- the contact problem seems to be rather the no unmediated contact problem --, but obviously for the contact problem to have real bite, by inference here (in this context) is meant something like 'not truth preserving' inference or distorting. And clearly it's true that many if not most early modern philosophers thought that language and other mechanisms of social contact are distorting of reality (and don't do full justice to our ideas of it). Lenz shows that despite this commitment, Spinoza, Locke, and Hume have different kinds of theories in which our minds are, de facto, dependant on other minds, although -- he may disagree with this -- the effect is that in interacting with others the vulnerability to embracing the false remains. (Perhaps, in Locke the vulnerability is also simultaneously the grounds for possibility of reaching some truths. About that some other time.)

Anyway, that the no contact problem seems so much an artificat of behavioralism made me wonder if one couldn't generate it in an alternative framework. This made me consider whether there are circumstances in which no contact is desirable. I immediately thought of Condorcet's Jury theorem which, formally, requires that voters do not communicate with each other and make up their own minds on a decision problem. Without such independence the result that (with rather weak assumptions about human nature) more folk do better than fewer would be unsurprising (and not so unsettling to the elitist and hierarchical mindset).+ Of course, the formation of Rousseau's general will also requires such independence.

Now, while Rousseau's account of the general will has non-trivial formal similarity with Condorcet's jury theorem -- and I would be amazed if it didn't shape Condorcet's thinking --, it is worth signaling that the nature of their independence pushes in different directions: (i) and skating over many interpretive disputes, in Rousseau's general will set up, independence is really designed to create a kind of impartiality not tainted by self-interest (and irrelevant personality features). And this is why this kind of independence is compatible with a kind of representative agent approach (familiar from, and perhaps an ultimate source of, Rawls' original position).

A representative agent approach would undermine the force of the Condorcet jury theorem; in it independence is really about a kind of authenticity of one's judgment. Other minds are corrupting (because they undermine independence). Now, I don't mean to deny that the previous two sentences are things Rousseau himself might say. I am just trying to track a conceptual distinction. (To be sure I think both directions have roots in Spinoza's debts to stoicism--but about that in a future post.) 

That is, the no contact problem is no problem in two contexts: first, one requires or needs authentic judgments that give each of us weight. That is, if one takes democracy seriously. (And lurking here are also protestant ideas about conscience that I have not touched upon above.) Second, one is dealing with a decision problem that is best handled by an impartial agent that represents (the true interests of us) all. That is, if one takes a certain species of objectivity/impartiality seriously. Put like that the two sources of the desirability of no contact seem to be a feature and not a bug of a certain conception of modern political life. And so, to put it as a serious joke, Wittgenstein and Ryle are untimely.

 

On Foucault's Discipline and Punishment & Chicago Economics

It is understandable that the criticism of the public execution should have assumed such importance in penal reform: for it was the form in which, in the most visible way, the unlimited power of the sovereign and the ever-active illegality of the people came together. Humanity in the sentences was the rule given to a system of punishment that must fix their limits on both. The ‘man’ that must be respected in the sentence was the juridical and moral form given to this double delimitation.
But, although it is true that reform, as a penal theory and as a strategy of the power to punish, took shape at the point of coincidence of these two objectives, its stability in the future was due to the fact that, for a long time, priority was given to the second. It was because the pressure on popular illegalities had become, at the period of the Revolution, then under the Empire, and finally throughout the nineteenth century, an essential imperative, that reform was able to pass from the project stage to that of an institution and set of practices. That is to say, although the new criminal legislation appears to be characterized by less severe penalties, a clearer codification, a marked diminution of the arbitrary, a more generally accepted consensus concerning the power to punish (in the absence of a more real division in its exercise), it is sustained in reality by an upheaval in the traditional economy of illegalities and a rigorous application of force to maintain their new adjustment. A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all.--Michel Foucault (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison] translated by Alan Sheridan, pp. 88-9 [in the Vintage & Penguin classcis edition]

The passage quoted from Discipline and Punish (hereafter D&P) caught my attention because the final sentence expresses an idea that later in the (1979) lecture series, Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault associates with the 'Chicago' (that is, Becker and Stigler) approach to crime. Let me explain.

At the end of the second lecture of 17 January 1979, with an explicit nod to Beccaria, Foucault had summarized  the"new regime" of "the well-known principle of mildness of punishment appears:" "...government is basically no longer to be exercised over subjects and other things subjected through these subjects. Government is now to be exercised over what we could call the phenomenal republic of interests." (p. 49) In fact, in 1979, Foucault here explicitly denies that this change has anything to do with a new humane sensibility.

He then returns to the theme of crime as a major subject (recall this post) in his tenth lecture of 21 March 1979, which is the second one devoted to American (Chicago) neoliberalism (in context he explicitly mentions Ehrlich, Becker, and Stigler).* There he starts his discussion by claiming that "Their analysis of criminality at first appears to be the simplest possible return to the eighteenth century reformers like Beccaria and especially Bentham." (248)+ He then goes on to summarize a kind of synthesis of the reformers as follows (and uses Coase-ian language):

A good law is necessary and almost sufficient, was nothing other than the desire for what could be called, in economic terms, a reduction in the transaction cost. The law is the most economical solution for punishing people adequately and for this punishment to be effective. First, the crime must be defined as an infraction of a formulated law, so that in the absence of a law there is no crime and an action cannot be incriminated. Second, penalties must be fixed once and for all by the law. Third, penalties must be fixed in law according to the degree of seriousness of the crime. Fourth, henceforth the criminal court will only have one thing to do, which is to apply to an established and proven crime a law which determines in advance what penalty the criminal must suffer according to the seriousness of his crime. An absolutely simple, apparently completely obvious mechanics constitutes the most economic form, that is to say, the least costly and most effective form for obtaining punishment and the elimination of conducts deemed harmful to society. (p. 249)

So, in 1979, Foucault implies that the late eighteenth century penal reformers (Beccaria & Bentham) invent the economic analysis of the law in terms of transaction costs and cost benefit analysis. It is worth noting that this reflects a modest change from Discipline and Punishment, where Beccaria is not treated as a progenitor of law and economics, and where (with nods to Capital) Bentham is treated as someone who helps create or constitute the homo economicus through a 'disciplinary mechanism' (D&P, pp. 205-209), but does not take homo economicus as given (in the way, say, Chicago economics does). This change, reflects a rethinking on Foucault's part of the role of interest (and of a decrease of Marx's significance and an increase of Hume's significance to his overall argument), but about that some other time more.

Now, in the passage quoted from p. 249 it seems as if Foucault allows that the 18th century reformers allowed for the complete elimination of conduct deemed harmful to society. But recall (again here) that this will come at a cost. And so, de facto, the way Foucault introduces the eighteenth century reformers is that in their law & economics of crime, one can calculate a kind of optimum crime rate at the lowest cost to society. And, after explaining that the reformers did not have a pure law & economics, this is, in fact, the view he ends up attributing to Stigler as "the objective of a penal policy: “The goal of law enforcement,” he says, “is to achieve a degree of compliance with the rule of prescribed behavior that society believes it can procure while taking account of the fact that enforcement is costly.” This is in the Journal of Political Economy in 1970." (256; as the editors note, this is a reference to “The optimum enforcement of laws,”) And then Foucault glosses Stigler's point as follows: "Consequently, good penal policy does not aim at the extinction of crime, but at a balance between the curves of the supply of crime and negative demand. Or again: society does not have a limitless need for compliance. Society does not need to conform to an exhaustive disciplinary system." (256)**

That a "penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all" is, thus, a key insight of Stigler (1970), and Foucault makes a point of emphasizing this in his 1979 lecture where he treats it as a return to the reformist sensibility of the late 18th century (before it was, as it were, corrupted by criminology's search for the anthropology of the criminal). Foucault thinks this is highly significant because, looking forward, "On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals." (259-260, emphasis added on the Hayekian, 'rules of the game'). While I would not go so far as claiming that Foucault endorses this horizon in normative fashion, I do think he is intrigued by the opportunities this affords.

Before I conclude. You might think I have made way too much of Foucault's claim that the "penal system must be conceived as a mechanism intended to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them all" as an anticipation of his analysis of Chicago law & economics. After all, the quoted paragraph leading up to it does not seem very law & economics at all. Fair enough. However, in his own gloss, he goes on to write the following:

Shift the object and change the scale. Define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the social body. Find new techniques for adjusting punishment to it and for adapting its effects. Lay down new principles for regularizing, refining, universalizing the art of punishing. Homogenize its application. Reduce its economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by multiplying its circuits. In short, constitute a new economy and a new technology of the power to punish: these are no doubt the essential raisons d'etre of penal reform in the eighteenth century. (D&P, 89)++

So, it's clear that in 1975, Foucault understands the significance of the late 18th century penal reformers in terms of a political economy. And he presents them as anticipating the very point that in 1979 he attributes to Stigler (who he treats as returning to the best insights of the reformers). And this theme is really introduced as early as D&P p. 82, so it's not a mere  throw away remark.

Let me conclude with two speculations. First, it is not impossible that Foucault was familiar with Stigler's work before he published Discipline and Punish. There is an annotation on Stigler 1970 in his hand (see here). After all, Foucault was enmeshed in prison reform activism, so not just doing historical research on prisons in the early 1970s. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that Stigler 1970 is absent in Lepage (1978), which is often treated as Foucault's source to Chicago neoliberalism.** So, if that's right, Foucault was already interpreting his source material in light of some familiarity with the Chicago approach to crime.

Second, it's also possible, of course, that Foucault's familiarity with Stigler and the Chicago approach to crime came after he wrote Discipline and Punish. And then that opens up the possibility of not just an epynomous disovery (a term coined by George's son, Stephen Stigler), but also a kind of convergence between Foucault and Chicago economics on a non-trivial issue. This suggests that Foucault's purported late affinity with American neoliberalism (a much debated issue among Foucault scholars) may have roots in his own intellectual development in reflecting on the role of crime and punishment in society.

 

Cantillon, Sidgewick, and the Pre-History of (Secular) Population Ethics

The Dutch exchange their labor in navigation, fishing and manufacturing, principally with foreigners, for the products of their land. Otherwise, Holland could not support half of its population. England buys from abroad considerable amounts of timber, hemp and other materials or products of the soil and consumes much wine for which she pays in minerals, manufactured goods, etc. That saves the English a great quantity of the production of their soil. Without these advantages, the people of England, based on their standard of living, could not be as numerous as they are. The coal mines save them several million acres of land, which would otherwise be needed to grow timber.
But all these advantages are refinements and exceptional cases, which I mention only incidentally. The natural and constant way of increasing population in a state is to find employment for the people there, and to make the land provide their means of support.
It is also a question outside of my subject whether it is better to have a great multitude of inhabitants, poor and badly provided for, or a smaller number with better means; a million who consume the product of six acres per head or four million who live on the product of an acre and a half.--Cantillon (1755) Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général translated as An Essay on Economic Theory, Translated by Chantal Saucier, part 1, chapter 15. [See here for the original French.]*

Last week, with some bravura, I made fun of MacAskill's rewriting of the history of population ethics (recall here). And I insisted that population ethics was as old as (Plato inspired) philosophy. However, Gustaf Arrhenius reached out to me, first, to force me to be precise between (what I ended up calling) [I] 'the technical version of population ethics,'  which theorizes about (and now I quote work by Arrhenius), "the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives (or their life-time welfare or well-being—we shall use these terms interchangeably here), and their identities may vary."  And [II] "the popular version of population ethics," which MacAskill defines as  "the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be." (MacAskill's What We Owe to the Future., p. 168). (Recall this post.)

While I continue to insist that the popular version is more or less co-equal with the history of European philosophy, in response to Gustaf I was mum about the history of the technical version of population ethics. It's pretty clear that the technical version of population ethics is in Sidwick. In fact, Gustaf reminded me of a passage from Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics that is often mentioned (see here for example) in the context of discussions of the repugnant conclusion.

If we foresee as possible that an increase in numbers will be accompanied by a decrease in average happiness or vice versa, a point arises which has not only never been formally noticed, but which seems to have been substantially overlooked by many Utilitarians. For if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individual's happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible, – as appears to be often assumed by political economists of the school of Malthus – but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum.” (quoted from the fifth edition)

It is worth noting that the snarky aside about "the political economists of the school of Malthus" is missing from the first 1874 edition (here)!  (I don't know in which edition it was added by Sidgwick.) I noticed it was missing from the first edition of Sidgwick's Methods because it is quoted partially in Edgeworth's (1877) New and Old Methods of Ethics: Or, "Physical Ethics" and "Methods of Ethics", p. 35. And this made me check the first edition!

Now, I mentioned Edgeworth's significance to eugenics in the post responding to MacAskill's claims. (I learned of his significance through the work of David M. Levy and Sandra  Peart.)  It is worth noting that Edgeworth (whose  Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences, is rather important in the development of mathematical economics) insists that, in so far as Sidgwick is a kind of exact utilitarian for whom the "greatest quantity of happiness of sentients" is the proper end that this is kind of anticipated in Gustav Theodor Fechner's (1846) Ueber das höchste Gut (here). I am unsure if we find a population ethics in the technical sense in it. But it's a short book, and worth finding out (go for it).

As I was looking at the reception of Sidgwick's passage, a comment by Myrdal (in The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory) sent me back to a different passage in Edgeworth, reviewing Sidgwick's The Elements of Politics in 1891 in the Economic Journal  (which he edited). And it's this review that let me to the passage in Cantillon quoted above. In the passage, Edgeworth gives a kind of mini history of technical population ethics in the technical sense, and treats Sidgwick as its founder (as Sidgwick himself had suggested.) Let me first quote Edgeworth:

Discoveries are hardly possible in ethics, practical principles have grown slowly; but we hold that the nearest approach to an absolutely new idea of first - rate importance in morals was made by the following momentous passage which occurs in the fourth book of the Methods of Ethics (ch . 1 ): 'Political economists of the school of Malthus often appear to assume that no increase of numbers can be right which involves any decrease in average happiness. But if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individual's happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be allowed to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible, but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches a maximum."
   Bentham was not led to regard the lot of happiness' enjoyed by a nation as a function of the number of population considered as variable. J. S. Mill was so preoccupied by the evils of overpopulation as hardly to have indicated whether there is an opposite extreme. Even, if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it,' he says with respect to the increase of population. Cantillon indeed, had stated, but did not attempt to answer the question, whether it is better to have a large population poor and without comforts, or a smaller population with more affluence; a population of a million consuming the produce of six acres (arpens) per head, or of four millions, each living on an acre and a half.' And Cournot, in his later writings, had pointed to the insolubility of such questions as the rock on which economic optimism foundered. But the question is not regarded as unanswerable, nor is it left unanswered, by Dr. Sidgwick..--P. 784

Edgeworth is here quoting the fourth (1890) edition of Methods of Ethics. And the way I read Edgeworth, he is saying that in the middle of the eighteenth century, Cantillon basically asks the question in such a way that could have led to (somewhat) technical population ethics, but left it aside. It is worth noting, as an aside, that in the sense Parfit and MacAskill use atheism/secular, Cantillon's treatment is entirely secular. (In fact, theorizing about population in the early modern period was nearly always also means to undermine any Biblical narrative--this can be easily seen if you go to Damilaville's (1765) entry on population in Diderot's Encyclopedia.)

Since this is pretty much the length of a solid digression, I will stop here. But I will leave you with a question and a thought: first, to what degree was Cantillon's question really so out of the ordinary? (See here for the claim that it was.; I am not so sure) In part, this requires an engagement with early modern political economy and political arithmetick. Second, and this is my observation, stated as such, Cantillon's question is already modelled in Socrates' account of the city of pigs, where a large healthy  population poor and without comforts, is explicitly preferred over any with luxuries (and where population and conforts are explicitly traded off each other). As Cannan (an important commentator on Adam Smith) notes without mentioning Plato, Paley (yes that Paley) writing later in the eighteenth century agreed with Socrates. 

Foucault on Enlightenment, and Journalism

It was toward the end of the Age of Enlightenment, in 1784. A Berlin journal asked a few worthy thinkers the question, "What is enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant answered, after Moses Mendels­sohn.

I find the question more noteworthy than the answers. Because enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, was not news, was not an invention, a revolution, or a party. It was something familiar and diffuse, something that was going on-and fading out. The Prussian newspaper was basically asking: "What is it that has happened to us? What is this event that is nothing else but what we have just said, thought, and done-nothing else but ourselves, noth­ing but that something which we have been and still are?"
Should this singular inquiry be placed in the history of joumal­ism or of philosophy? I only know that, since that time, there have not been many philosophies that don't revolve around the question: "What are we now? What is this ever so fragile moment from which we cannot detach our identity and which will carry that identity away with it?" But I believe this question is also the basis of the journalist's occupation.--Michel Foucault (1979) "For an Ethic of Discomfort," [reviewing Jean Daniel], in Power: Essential Works of Foiucault 1954-84: Volume Three, translated by Robert Hurley, p. 443

lt is probably well known that near the end of his life, Foucault got very interested in Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" Foucault engaged with it directly and circled around it on a number of occasions. A subset of these has, in fact, been collected in a volume edited by Sylvère Lotringer (who I long thought an invention of Chris Kraus) What is Truth? It contains a version of the same book review that I quoted above, but there it is translated beautifully by Lysa Hochroth.

My interest here is not to litigate to what degree Foucault's reading or appropriation of Kant does justice to the source material, or even is worth emulating. But I digress on some of Foucault's moves.

First, Foucault redefines the nature of journalism from, say, the reporting of news, to this more ontological or existential question pertaining in tricky ways to identity, 'what are we now?' To be sure, Foucault does not legislate that journalism is not about reporting the news anymore, but we might say that what is thought or taken to be worthy to be reported must pertain to this kind of salience. What's interesting about this claim is that it prefigures, but also reminds us of what we already know, that 'All the News That's Fit to Print' reflects the question of (our potentially fleeting) identity. The expanding lifestyle pages, perhaps, suggest that the oblique mirror that contemporary journalism provides us with to answer this question is more suggestive of our desires and fantasies than anything else.

What journalism is perhaps not, however, is the initial record for law and (historical and social) science that can enter into any truth. It's orthogonal to establishing a public record that enters as facts into, say, a deliberative practice. It is, of course, so conceived not wholly irrelevant to public deliberation because in a non-trivial sense it defines and helps constitute the unity -- the we -- that deliberates and does so in virtue of some non-trivial identity. And while in the previous paragraph I satirized the pretentions of journalism so conceived, in this paragraph I point to the constitutive role of journalism to social life. 

Evidently, this constitutive role to social life is also a task for the philosopher. In fact, Foucault tells us explicitly that nearly all philosophies he is aware of -- and while he has limitations, Foucault is nothing but well-read and he stakes a knowledge claim on it "I only know that"-- try to play this role, at least since Kant tried to answer the question. It's a bit of a shame that he doesn't hint at the exceptions, but Foucault's claim here is a nice way of capturing one way in which analytic philosophy, while conditioned by the ages in which it is produced, does not -- despite our advances in quantified modal logic -- generally (there are exceptions) answer the question, what are we now. 

There is, of course, for all the play (Foucault clearly admires w the author of the book he is reviewing) a dethroning involved here. To speak crassly, philosophy is not in the business of truth as the law and science are, but it is much closer to the world of opinion (that is journalism) and this is a world of near-Hericlitan flux--the oft imperceptible instability of identity, when its self-evidentness cannot be taken for granted anymore, is the great theme of the review. * 

As I have noted before, there is for all his nominalism and disciplined skepticism a historicism lurking in Foucault. Each fleeting now has its singular identity, and it takes occupations devoted to singular inquiry -- journalism, philosophy, and, of course, the arts -- to try to sketch a kind of repetition of that once diffuse identity; for after completion of the task, it turns out already to be "familiar" even if we see it afresh. 

 

 

 

On Constitutional Monetary Moments

I argue that in “constitutional monetary moments” like those generated by debt ceiling crisis, it is important—not only positively but also normatively—to recognize that contemporary operational constraints on money creation are self-imposed, institutionally contingent, and ultimately legal rather than material in nature. It is important to do so because in such instances it may be not only appropriate, but socially optimal, to subject existing legal constraints to creative interpretation, or even ignore them outright, in order to challenge and disrupt the social myths they uphold, as well as the political dynamics that they produce. As noted legal realist Thurman Arnold argued: “You judge the symbols [upon which society is built and depends] as good or bad on the basis of whether they lead to the type of society you like. You do not cling to them on general principles when they are leading in the wrong direction.”
By denying from the outset the possibility that debt ceiling crises are, in fact, constitutional monetary moments in which it may make sense to abandon outdated monetary symbols, we close off the full range of political possibilities and legal options available to us to improve fiscal policy administration, and with it, our economy more broadly. In other words, it was not sufficient then, and it is not sufficient now, to merely assert as a positive matter that our current social myths about the nature of money preclude exotic or even “radical” legal solutions such as HVCS from serious consideration. Rather, it is incumbent on us to question whether the social myths in question are in fact worthy of preservation, or at the very least, how sure we are that the alternatives that would likely emerge to take their place would lead to socially inferior outcomes.--Grey, Rohan. "Administering Money: Coinage, Debt Crises, and the Future of Fiscal Policy." Ky. LJ 109 (2020): 289. [HT Nathan Tankus]

Earlier today,  after I tweeted out that "Proposals to mint $1tn platinum coin are designed to circumvent the US constitution's "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts," I got lectured by Nathan Tankus for "not grasping the most elementary legal issues in the topic you're pontificating on." This turns on the interpretation on the authority granted by Section 31 U.S. Code § 5112. Advocates of the platinum coin naturally like to quote the plain meaning of the text: "(k) The Secretary may mint and issue bullion and proof platinum coins in accordance with such specifications, designs, varieties, quantities, denominations, and inscriptions as the Secretary, in the Secretary's discretion, may prescribe from time to time." The plain meaning interpretation of (k) has been supported by Philip N. Diehl, former director of the United States Mint, who helped write the bill. But Diehl was not in Congress (and in virtue of his former office has obvious incentives to exaggerate its power and his former achievements).

However, the official author of the original bill, Representative Michael Castle, denied this interpretation, and suggested (quite plausibly in my opinion) that the provision was intended to cover collectibles (and not to provide the Treasure with the power to do an end run around any debt limits). I would be amazed if the original legislative record suggested otherwise. The law as we have it was inserted as a provisions into H.R. 3610, the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act for 1997. It would be interesting if the congressional leadership at the time recorded any views on the matter at the time (and that would change my view!) But the revisionary ('plain meaning interpretation') wasn't voiced until May 2010. Even Diehl has admitted at one point that (the 'plain meaning interpretation') would constitute an “unintended consequence” of the bill. [Quoted in Grey (2020) op. cit, p. 261.] So, I don't think this is really in doubt.

Eventually Tankus, who himself has become a high-profile advocate of minting the $1tr coin, referred me to Grey's very interesting law review article from which I quoted above (and also a fascinating interview that Grey did with Diehl.) Grey (a law professor at Willamette University) meticulously goes through the pros and cons of reading (k) literally (and also provides arguments for the opposing views that anticipate my own), but his main interest is not, I think, in gaming how a constitutional court would rule on using (k) to do an end-run around the fiscal debt limit (also authorized by Congress), but in thinking about the "new possibilities for fundamental monetary reform."* Grey, correctly, notes that in various crises the FED has gone well beyond the Federal Reserve Act. As I wrote last week at CrookedTimber (in the context of discussing Lev Menand's recent book (2022) The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis) the "effect of this process is the development of a super-government-agency that tries to do too much without sufficient accountability and that undermines the legislative process." So, I am at least consistent in worrying about treating this as precedent!

But this also gets me at the underlying theoretical-political issue that I want to discuss here. For Grey a constitutional monetary moment occurs when "partisan disagreements over proper exercise of the “money power” pushed monetary issues to the forefront of the popular and legal imagination." (p. 288) Now, let's grant Grey this stipulation.

Interestingly enough, as Grey recognizes political battles over the deficit limit need not become constitutional debates over money power. In fact, as Grey recognizes in the last few decades, the Democrats have tended to win the battles over the deficit limit by sidestepping "the deeper constitutional questions." (p. 288) That is, rather than using the debates over deficit limits, the threat of default, and annoyance at legislative gridlock as an occasion to debate changes in the constitutional arrangement -- that is, the proper exercise of the money power --, the Democrats have played ordinary (non-constitutional) political hardball. And even if they did this merely based on opinion polling and without any fundamental respect for the constitution, the significance of  this fact is that fights over the deficit limit are not necessarily constitutional monetary moments by definition. I think Grey agrees with me about that.

Of course, performatively, Grey would like it if a fight over the deficit limit were to be constitutionalized because for various reasons Grey rejects the contemporary status quo.* And, in fact, I can imagine that some kind of debt ceiling crises might well make me agree with Grey. Once the US defaults on debts and market turmoil starts hitting the real economy or the acrimony over the debt ceiling leads to street turmoil even a revolutionary moment, surely that would quite rightly be treated as a constitutional monetary moment. But one shouldn't wish for being in such turmoil, and one should recognize that debates and even games of chicken over the debt ceiling have been normalized in Washington, DC. (The US --and I will grant the MMT folk this much --has a lot more monetary sovereignty for such games than, say, the UK government (as was revealed in 2022) or most Euro member states, which lack any such sovereignty.)

Now, I am no friend of the current practice of setting a debt ceiling while simultaneously authorizing expenditures and borrowing that go beyond it. I don't mind a demise of this status quo. And I also don't mind ways of poking the irresponsible Congressional Republicans in the (proverbial) eyes. But I notice that Grey (and the proponents of minting such special coins) are not really worried by the Imperial presidency and the lack of checks on its power.+ That they lack this worry even after experiencing a Trump presidency and near usurpation (as well as the various ways in which courts were not a check on the Trump presidency) is something I cannot fathom. 

But I view the tax and coin [sic] power of Congress as one of the few would-be-effective checks on the risks of the very real and ongoing erosion of liberty from an imperial presidency. If anything, while I dislike Republican control of the House, it is high time if Stateside the pendulum returned to the post-Watergate situation of the 1970s, and re-established Congressional authority. So, in so far as I offer a political-theoretical argument against seeing the situation as a constitutional monetary moments that is ripe for monetary innovation, I do so because the US needs a considerable restoration of the power of the legislative branch -- which after all is also, despite everything (and yes that includes quite a few sins), still the most democratic element of the US constitutional arrangement -- not a further strengthening of the Executive branch. And while one may not reasonably hope that this Congress would use such power reasonably or for noble ends, it is to be hoped that such enhanced power would attract better legislators and more effective citizen participation in the future.