Digressions&Impressions

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that debt ceiling crises are, in fact, constitutional monetary moments in which it may make sense to abandon outdated monetary symbols, we close off the full range of political possibilities and legal options available to us to improve fiscal policy administration, and with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.

 

 

 

 

A response to some of my critics (on MacAskill, What we Owe to the Future, pt 5); Population Ethics reconsidered.

I knew that my most recent post on MacAskill's What we Owe the Future -- where I link his project to a certain kind of eugenic program (here) -- would be controversial and would be read more widely and carefully than many of my other posts. Since I expected controversy, and also knew that I was at the edge of part of my expertise, I decided to build up to this post by first writing a piece on a key passage in Parfit (here), and then three other digressions (The first here; the second one is here; the third here.) Even so I received two kinds of criticisms by highly regarded experts that may be worth responding to. Today I will respond to the more specialist concern about the nature and use of 'population ethics.'

First, 'population ethics' is a technical term. For example, here is how Gustaf Arrhenius (one of my critics) uses, perhaps even defines the term in a high-profile place:

The last three decades have witnessed an increasing philosophical interest in questions such as “Is it possible to make the world a better place by creating additional happy people?” and “Is there a moral obligation to have children?” The main problem has been to find an adequate theory about 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. Since, arguably, any reasonable moral theory has to take these aspects of possible states of affairs into account when determining the normative status of actions, the study of population ethics is of general import for moral theory. 

Population ethics is then the effort to theorize about "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."  Let's call this 'the technical version of population ethics.' I have no problem with this enterprise in the seminar room or esoteric journal article. When this project is conducted in terms of highly abstract end states, it may well be illuminating about various kinks in and tensions in the moral theories we might use in action guiding or policy contexts without itself being implicated in policy. Of course, such technical population ethics is, to some degree, part and parcel of climate ethics and projects (often conducted in terms of intergenerational justice). But since, as I noted, MacAskill is not much focused on climate ethics, I leave it aside here.

However, even in this technical version, the concern with the quality of lives of future people may well generate what I call an 'undue interest in other people's children.' And so, while the technical version can be done in highly abstract and unproblematic ways, it is not defined in a way that prevents such undue interest altogether. In fact, if one thinks that the technical version reveals what is obligatory for us, I don't see how one can avoid what I call such undue interest. (Of course, moral theory may convince you such interest is obligatory, even if defeasible.) But if, in practice, one is primarily interested in comparing different highly abstract states of affairs (post facto or hypothetically) then what I call the undue interest never arises. Of course, this interest might well arise (as I noted in my fourth post on MacAskill) through all kinds of areas of bio-ethics, including what is known as 'liberal eugenics,' and so in some respects this train has left the station (about which another time more).

Now, it is worth noting that both Parfit and MacAskill explicitly present population ethics as something "secular" something emphasized by MacAskill) in a passage I quoted:

Parfit inaugurated several new areas of moral philosophy. The one that has most shaped my worldview, and which is covered in this chapter, is population ethics—the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be. Secular discussion of this topic is strikingly scarce: despite thousands of years of ethical thought, the issue was only discussed briefly by the early utilitarians and their critics in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it received sporadic attention in the years that followed. (168)

Parfit uses 'atheist' where MacAskill uses 'secular'. This is, in fact, orthogonal to the technical version of population ethics (even if, in practice, the technical version is conducted through the norms of what one might call public reason and so secular in character). And, as Gustaf Arrhenius pointed out to me, Parfit did not use the phrase 'population ethics' in Reasons and Persons. (This fits with my construal that Parfit saw his own project as a fresh start, but not as wholly new. See also my post on him.)

Now, MacAskill offers a definition of what he means by population ethics: "the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be." (168) This is, I think, the first use of the term 'population ethics' in MacAskill's What We Owe to the Future. And MacAskill goes on to suggest that this is what "the arguments of others in the field of population ethics" are about. (169) Let's call MacAskill's definition the 'popular version of population ethics."

It is clear that the popular version deviates from the technical version: first, there is a focus on (concrete) actions and not(abstract) states of affairs or highly stylized possible worlds. Second, the first focus (because mentioned first) is, in fact, on births and this automatically introduces questions of reproduction and what I call the undue interest in other people's children into the fold. (Of course, I have not given any  argument that it is undue when no force is involved except to hint that it may end up reinforcing structural injustices, and so this may be thought question begging.) In the technical version the number of people is pertinent, too, but how to operationalize it is left quite open. So,  one can work, in principle, in the technical version of population ethics and deny any undue interest in other people's children. I grant this, and if I misled any of my readers about this my apologies. Of course, once one starts thinking about policy derived from the technical version of population ethics, one may still run into problems. But that is downstream.

A further key difference between the technical and popular version is that MacAskill is willing to entertain the content of desirable traits (cultural and genetic) that should be part of future populations. In fact, in his presentation this consideration is presented in chapters before he discusses his version of  population ethics (it's really a major theme of chapter 3, especially after p. 55). And MacAskill clearly argues that the the preponderance of such traits is under human control. So, I think the natural reading of MacAskill's popular version of population ethics is that among the salient actions that is under our control are the traits that shape the quality of lives of those that are born and through their lives.

Now in fairness to MacAskill he is much more focused on cultural traits than genetic ones.+ (While the text suggests an interest in enhancement, I see no evidence he has an interest in racial characteristics.) And, as I noted, he explicitly denies that he wants to limit abortion and reproductive rights. (This is common among so-called liberal eugenicists.) But as I suggested the devil is in the detail because the unequal distribution of techniques of enhancement and IVF may well prevent reproduction among some sub-populations and promote it among others (and so generate or reinforce structural injustices). 

So, if I were doing technical population ethics, I would be worried that MacAskill's popular version came to be confused with the technical kind. And I would be annoyed that MacAskill's version was the one that first appeared in a popular discussion of the subject. However, I also suspect that from MacAskill's perspective popular population ethics just is a subset of the technical kind one that is inevitable once one focuses on public policy to get from here to various end states or to prevent certain outcomes that the technical kind has established as inferior.*

Good Breeding, Population Ethics and all that. On MacAskill’s *What We Owe the Future*, Part 4

Parfit inaugurated several new areas of moral philosophy. The one that has most shaped my worldview, and which is covered in this chapter, is population ethics—the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be. Secular discussion of this topic is strikingly scarce: despite thousands of years of ethical thought, the issue was only discussed briefly by the early utilitarians and their critics in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it received sporadic attention in the years that followed.6 The watershed moment came in 1984 with the publication of Parfit’s book Reasons and Persons.
Population ethics is crucial for longtermism because it greatly affects how we should evaluate the end of civilisation.--William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, p. 168.

This is the fourth post on MacAskill's book. (The first one is here which also lists some qualities about the book that I admire; the second one is here; the third here.) MacAskill's note 6 refers to the Mohists, who are not treated as population ethicists because "they did not discuss the intrinsic and instrumentalist benefits and costs of increasing population." (307) Let me grant, for the sake of argument, that such an economic analysis (costs/benefits) is intrinsic to population ethics.

It's unclear why we should exclude non-secular population ethicists (starting with Plato, but not least Berkeley, Malthus, and Nassau Senior all of whom shaped the early utilitarians), although (recall) Parfit has soft-Nietzschean reasons for doing so, but it is left unclear whether MacAskill endorses these. Even so, MacAskill's historical claim is odd. Some of the most important innovations in early twentieth century social and biological sciences and statistical technique (associated with names like Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Edgeworth, and Haldane)* are intertwined with population ethics (and eugenics). I am almost inclined to joke that in their age we even developed a fallacy, 'the naturalistic' one so as to avoid tainting doctrines with their sordid origins.

While undoubtedly some early utilitarians were pioneering population ethicists, it seems unfair to ignore the pre-utilitarian population ethicists of imperialists political arithmeticians like William Petty (seventeenth century), who put the art of managing populations by modern states on a more scientific footing while terrorizing the Irish. The managing of the size and quality of populations was an intrinsic part of the (quite 'secular') art of government in the reason of state tradition of the sixteenth century, too. In fact, civilizations (including feudal orders) that emphasize 'good breeding' (a phrase that had a positive connotation until quite recently) are generally self-consciously engaged in population ethics (even if their cost-benefit analysis deviates from MacAskill's).

Of course, MacAskill's focus is not on the past, but the future. It's notable that population ethics is said to be essential to longtermism. This is by no means intuitive. If one is attached to, say, the survival of civilization, or one wishes to evaluate if one ought to be concerned with it, one need not articulate this or defend it in terms of (a) population ethics focused on wellbeing. MacAskill often writes as if it's the only ethical long game in town. But, as Itai Sher notes, there are passages where MacAskill allows for "non-welfarist, non-utilitarian values" but that means that either his population ethics is itself a mixed (ad hoc) bag or not intrinsic to longtermism. 

To be sure, in between the lines, MacAskill is aware that some wish to promote perpetual peace (which he seems to associate with Steve Pinker, see p. 297 n. 60), but as I noted before (in part 2), he treats this possibility not in terms of, say, a regime of human rights enforcement, but exclusively in terms of "world government" and, so, as undesirable. (158) Of course, there may be other ends (e.g., elimination of hunger, the promotion of leisure, or, more elitist, the arts and sciences) that might make the extension of civilization worth having. Or, perhaps, civilization is intrinsically caught up in social domination, and the anarchists are right that we should aim to abolish it in the long run.

What's odd about doubling down on population ethics is that it both encourages us to take an unhealthy amount of interest in the quality of lives of other people's children and that it encourages us to make calculations that are without any solid ground. On the latter, Itai Sher (who is much more sympathetic to the project than I am) observes that the book makes "too many heroic assumptions and tries to estimate too many things that can't be estimated." That is, MacAskill is completely unwilling to take the significance of Keynesian and Knightian uncertainty seriously at all. Keynes (who had a non-trivial interest in population ethics) wrote in 1937:

The sense in which I am using the term ['uncertainty'] is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever.

In some respects, perhaps, our judgments have become more optimistic (we have tools that can help us estimate, say, the price of copper a few decades out), Keynes' general underlying outlook strikes me as sound. Very long-term forecasting is very difficult. In fact, often the short term calculations are difficult, too. Recently, Peter Singer was unusually sober when asked to comment on the significance of the collapse of FTX and its implications on earning-to-give:

“I think in general, a lot more good has been done by earning-to-give than harm, at least up until the collapse of FTX, which has certainly caused a lot more harm than any other [example]” says Singer. “It’s very hard to reckon up the total balance sheet on that.”--The Guardian (December 23).+

There is an ambiguity here in whether Singer thinks it's difficult to do a cost-benefit analysis on earning-to-give or on the collapse of FTX. But for my present purposes that's irrelevant. If we find it so difficult indeed to weigh up the net costs and benefits of known actions today, how much more difficult does it become when we look into the downstream effects of the very long future. (I return to MacAskill's promotion of earning-to give (pp 232-233) some other time.)

It is worth noting, especially because Itai is too polite to do so, that MacAskill (nearly always) plays the 'uncertainty card' in the opposite direction: "uncertainty cuts both ways" (89) Outcomes may sneak up on us before we anticipate it. And this observation is turned into a carte blanche by MacAskill to posit all kinds of estimates (with incredible precision and confidence), for example "I don't think one could reasonably go lower than a 10 percent chance of AGI in the next fifty years." (91) As I remarked on his use of the Solow-Swan model, it is notable that such claims are not even made (pro forma) as ceteris paribus judgments. (All the more striking because MacAskill co-authored a highly regarded work on moral uncertainty.)

In general, population ethics generates an unhealthy interest in other people's reproductive choices. And so, it is no surprise that population ethics is repeatedly entangled in eugenics and race science. And folk who are attracted to this topic tend to take pride in their own steadfast ability to look cold facts into the eyes and their capacity for plain speaking. MacAskill himself is a lot more cautious, and treats such topics in terms of 'fitness landscapes' and organism's and cultural 'traits.'

The key issue is, of course, how MacAskill proposes to achieve the dominance of certain traits. When it comes to action MacAskill never explicitly suggests that others are directly forced to join in. (He is clearly more interested in building a voluntary social movement.) But it does not mean coercion is absent from the framework. For, MacAskill does promote "political activism" and "voting" (233) to get governments on board with his program. But he is not transparent about how much coercion governments can use subsequently to promote particular fitness landscapes alongside growing populations. (Here it does look like the ends will justify most means.)

Sometimes one is told that inattention to population ethics is also a (de facto) population policy. That's true enough. But there is an also a cost (even an opportunity cost) involved in paying too much attention to population ethics. After all, most population ethicists of the past were unduly worried about the quality of other people's children (the poor, the Irish, the Jews, etc.).

At first sight, MacAskill really does better: he phrases his claims primarily in terms of population size (more is better). In fact, throughout the book there is an argument for having more children. And this, in turn, is justified consequentially, "when children grow up they contribute to public goods through their taxes, they build infrastructure, and they develop and champion new ideas about how to live and how to structure society." (187; he goes on to suggest that sufficiently good lives are also good for children (188)). It is worth noting that, alas, in some political contexts not all children of all political demographics are perceived as future taxpayers (in some contexts this might even count as a dog whistle).

In the text, MacAskill is explicit that governments should not "restrict people's reproductive rights by...limiting access to contraception or banning abortion." (188) But one need not be a careful logician to realize that this leaves it wide open for a community of longtermists or, if they can persuade them, governments to engage in population policies that either enhance the posited desirable traits of desirable children (that is, future tax payers, infrastructure builders, and idea generators) or privilege those sub-populations that are taken as would-be-good breeders for the desired fitness landscape. (The latter is not science fiction because parental 'risk factors' on the child's future welfare are already often incorporated into, say, IVF policies.) One suspects MacAskill is strategically, even wisely, silent here.**

 

 

 

 

 

 

Central Banking is too Important to be De-Politicized; on Lev Menand’s The Fed Unbound

Today's post can be found at CrookedTimber (here).

On What we Owe the Future, Part 3

To illustrate the claims in this book, I rely on three primary metaphors throughout....The second is of history as molten glass. At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes. But at some point, the glass might cool, set, and become much harder to change. The resulting shape could be beautiful or deformed, or the glass could shatter altogether, depending on what happens while the glass is still hot. William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, p. 6

This is the third post on MacAskill's book. (The first one is here which also lists some qualities about the book that I admire; the second one is here.)

A key strain of MacAskill's argument rests on three contentious claims: (i) that currently society is relatively plastic; (ii) that the future values of society can be shaped; (iii) that in history there is a  dynamic of “early plasticity, later rigidity” (p. 43). Such rigidity is also called "lock-in" by MacAskill, and he is especially interested in (iv) "value lock-in."

Before I get to criticizing these three claims, it's worth stating that in a previous post I noted that from (ii) MacAskill and the social movement he is creating (pp. 243-246) have (v) claimed for themselves the authority to act as humanity's legislators without receiving authority or consent to do so. It's quite odd that MacAskill doesn't reflect on the dangers in the vicinity here because most of the examples MacAskill offers of relatively long-lasting 'value lock-in' are, by his lights, the effects of "conquest." (p.92) Not to put too fine a point on it, but in general the project of 'value lock-in' is team evil (as MacAskill notes, this is the project of imperialists, colonialists, religious monopolists, etc.) You would hope that one of the lessons one takes from this fact is that it's not a good idea to be on team lock-in. I return to this in the future.

On (i) I don't think MacAskill ever offers a metric of social plasticity or even really provides thorough evidence that our age is genuinely molten. (And, in fact, I have noted that at times he undermines this claim by suggesting that our age is characterized by "homogeneity" (p.96) and the effects of "modern secular culture" or a "single global culture." (158)) But it's worth looking at how MacAskill articulates the first claim:

In China, the Hundred Schools of Thought was a period of plasticity. Like still-molten glass, during this time the philosophical culture of China could be blown into one of many shapes. By the time of the Song dynasty, the culture was more rigid; the glass had cooled and set. It was still possible for ideological change to occur, but it was much more difficult than before.
We are now living through the global equivalent of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Different moral worldviews are competing, and no single worldview has yet won out; it’s possible to alter and influence which ideas have prominence. But technological advances could cause this long period of diversity and change to come to an end.--(p. 79)

Not unlike MacAskill, I am fascinated by the period of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Each year I spent some time on it with my undergrads. But I never fail to point out that this era is also known as the 'Warring States period.' (In fact, I observe, as a puzzle, that the intellectual fertility and relentless war within a  relatively fractured political system is something it shares with the Italian Renaissance of Machiavelli and, perhaps, Kautilya's age in India.) The absence of empire is beneficial to value pluralism. 

I don't mean to suggest that value pluralism is a necessary effect of multi-polar world. Presumably there are other social and institutional sources. Max Weber thought such pluralism was the effect of the advanced division of labor, Plato and Al-Farabi seem to have thought it was the effect of the diversity of human passions that flourish in democratic societies alongside freedom of speech and lack of educational uniformity. That's to say, one may obtain value pluralism without context of permanent war.

So, if one thinks cultural plasticity is worth having -- or at least if one thinks rigidity is something threatening -- then one should be thinking about the practices and institutions that prevent empire and that promote enduring cultural diversity. MacAskill is rather fond of thinking about society in terms of cultural evolution. But, as I have repeatedly noted, he is thoroughly uninterested in thinking of the role of institutions -- as selection mechanisms or ecological structures-- in generating and sustaining such pluralism.* And the effect of this is to flatten (to use his lingo) the cultural fitness space. For MacAskill treats technology as a determining cause of value lock-in.

Now, I don't want to suggest technology never shapes values, but it is peculiar that MacAskill doesn't notice that technology can be neutral among competing values and that technology is often shaped by values. I call it peculiar because (a) the hot topic in AI ethics today is that even neutral algorithms often reflect and amplify existing structural (that is, institutional) injustice(s); and (b) lots of military technology gets used for competing  ends. We can observe this peculiarity in the very next paragraph:

When thinking about lock-in, the key technology is artificial intelligence. Writing gave ideas the power to influence society for thousands of years; artificial intelligence could give them influence that lasts millions. I’ll discuss when this might occur later; for now let’s focus on why advanced artificial intelligence would be of such great longterm importance.--(p.79)

Let's stipulate that it's true that "writing gave ideas the power to influence society for thousands of years" but writing itself does not limit the number of ideas that can be expressed. From the perspective of cultural evolution, the invention of writing creates an explosion of cultural variation. And while, surely, some technologies may be homogenizing along some dimensions (including as instruments of empire), it is simply not intrinsic to technology to be value-homogenizing. (As an aside, it is notable that in his work MacAskill draws on economists who think about productivity, but that he has ignored the rich area of philosophy of technology and what we might call STS studies. MacAskill is engaged in (what Nathan Ballantyne calls) epistemic trespassing without realizing, it seems, which fields he has ignored.) 

In fairness, MacAskill cites this paper (here). But a key premisse in the argument is this: "If a large majority of the world’s economic and military powers agreed to set-up such an institution, and bestowed it with the power to defend itself against external threats, that institution could pursue its agenda for at least millions of years (and perhaps for trillions)." The dangerousness of AGI would be a possible effect of (near) world peace. So, even if one grants that the probability of AGI in the next fifty years is "no lower than  10%," (p. 91) the whole argument for (iv) relies on the utopian thought that in the context of the stress of rising climate change the great powers of humanity opt for world peace!

In fact,  MacAskill's argument for (ii/iii) rests on the idea that stagnation is inevitable because scientific and technological innovation become harder and harder (pp. 150-151) and as countries grow wealthier fertility drops (and there is an implied absolute plateau to population on Earth (pp. 152-155). MacAskill is clearly influenced by Tyler Cowen's work (147-148), but he cites as authority research by Stanford University's Chad Jones on "longer timescales." (p. 150) And since I try to keep up in philosophy of economics, I thought it useful to take a look at some of Jones' papers (which is, as MacAskill himself notes in an endnote, a dressed up Solow-Swan growth model--these leave considerable known uncertainty in long range forecasting).+

Jones assumes that "a larger population means more researchers which in turn leads to more new ideas and to higher living standards." Something MacAskill also embraces (p. 152).Here's a passage from a conclusion of one of the key papers MacAskill cites:

Of course, the results in this paper are not a forecast—the paper is designed to suggest that a possibility we have until now not considered carefully deserves more attention. There are ways in which this model could fail to predict the future even though the forces it highlights are operative. Automation and artificial intelligence could enhance our ability to produce ideas sufficiently that growth in living standards continues even with a declining population, for example. Or new discoveries could eventually reduce the mortality rate to zero, allowing the population to grow despite low fertility. Or evolutionary forces could eventually favor groups with high fertility rates (Galor and Moav 2002). Nevertheless, the emergence of negative population growth in many countries and the possible consequences for the future of economic growth make this a topic worthy of further exploration.--"The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population" American Economic Review, November 2020

The reason I quote this passage is not to refute MacAskill although MacAskill is not sufficiently attentive to the implied difference between a model-driven scenario and a forecast. But because it helps explain why MacAskill is so focused on artificial intelligence. (Some critics of longtermism suggest that it is the effect of the values of Sillicon Valley and its donors on the EA movement, but while one cannot rule it out, I like to think it's  model driven.) At one point MacAskill writes:

Think of the innovation happening today in a single, small country—say, Switzerland. If the world’s only new technologies were whatever came out of Switzerland, we would be moving at a glacial pace. But in a future with a shrinking population—and with progress being even harder than it is today because we will have picked more of the low-hanging fruit—the entire world will be in the position of Switzerland. Even if we have great scientific institutions and a large proportion of the population works in research, we simply won’t be able to drive much progress. (p. 155)

Neither Jones nor MacAskill really considers the benefits of educating a large part of the world's population at, say, Switzerland's levels. (Go look up, say, its patents or education spending per capita.) Presumably because in the Solow-Swan model such benefits are a one-off and don't generate a permanent productivity spiral. But it seems to have the perverse effect on MacAskill's program/longtermism that the economic development of poor countries (and, say, opening markets to their products) does not figure in What we Owe the Future as an especially important end worth pursuing.  As an aside, in another paper (also cited by MacAskill) Jones and his co-authors notes the significance of the fact that ideas are non-rivalrous. Their model implies that 'educating a large part of the world's population at, say, Switzerland's levels' would be worth doing.

I quote Jones for two other reasons. First, Solow-Swan does not imply that technology driven future productivity or intensive growth is impossible. It's important to MacAskill's general argument that something like "past [scientific/technological] progress makes future progress harder," (151) is true (this is Cowen's influence on MacAskill). And the main empirical argument for it is the record of declining productivity growth of the last half century or so (which gets accentuated by drop in fertility in countries with good education systems). We are at risk of reaching what in the eighteenth century was called a 'stationary state.' But even if we were to really understand what caused the scientific and industrial revolution to happen, there is really no reason to think a future leap in productivity would necessarily have to follow the same underlying causal structure.

As a non-trivial aside, for MacAskill a civilizationa plateau is (if we don't destroy ourselves) inevitable due to physical constraints of the universe. He thinks the number of atoms puts an absolute upper limit on growth (p. 27). But I really don't understand the argument for why increasing value-added per atom is impossible on his view. Again, it is noticeable that institutions are irrelevant to MacAskill's argument.

In a future post, I will explore MacAskill's "ideal" that shapes his argument for (ii). Here I just want to close with the observation that it is odd to see a model, Solow-Swann, which (let's stipulate) is "foundational for all of modern growth theory" (note 18, p. 304) has known problems as a forecasting device because there is considerably room for uncertainty,+ be presented as a reliable guide to very longterm developments. This is a scientific field that is still in its infancy. And the known uncertainty in the error margins of the models don't get eliminated over the very long term, but the sensitivity to even minor modeling mistakes get worse. To sum up, any collective decision for the long term future made on the prospect of world peace and this model is an expression of a lovely faith.

 

On the Aristocracy of Manchester: Richard Bellamy and Cobden on Work Place Relations,

In a typical piece of culture critique, Smiles observed how 'in their pursuit of riches, the English are gradually losing sight of their higher characteristics.' The growth of cities, increased factory size, greater mobility of labour with the new railway system, even improved prosperity, all seemed to be destroying the environment necessary for the Victorian virtues to flourish. As early as 1857, the free trader campaigner Richard Cobden remarked "the social and political state of [Birmingham] is far more healthy than that of Manchester; and it arises from the fact that the industry of the hardware district is carried on by small manufacturers...whilst the great capitalists of Manchester form an aristocracy.' Only competition could provide the necessary antidote for it placed the 'lazy man...under the necessity of exerting itself,' It disciplined businessman and worker alike,  rewarding merit and effort and punishing the indolent.--Richard Bellamy (1992) Liberalism and Modern Society, pp. 11-12

Ever since I read Hobson's (1919) Richard Cobden: the international man, I have been alert to the fact that contemporary discussions of Cobden, if he is mentioned all, treat him primarily, as Bellamy introduces him in the passage quoted above, "the free trader campaigner." Cobden was a gifted political organizer and orator, a critic of slavery, anti-mercantile spirit of war, and arguably one of the key architects of developing international, functional integration as a means toward peace (something now part of the DNA of the EU). I consider him one of the great Smithians of the nineteenth century (which I will illustrate below). As it happens, I have grown very fond of the letter by Cobden (to Palmer) that Bellamy quotes.  

Bellamy's work is an important, somewhat neglected milestone in the development of a more realist sensibility in discussions of liberalism before that became a popular niche in recent political theory/philosophy. I hope to engage with his book more constructively in the future. But sometimes nitpicking can be illustrative, too. I want to suggest Bellamy mispresents Cobden's point, and that Cobden's analysis is a point worth tracking. First, let me quote the full paragraph of the letter as Hobson presents it:

The honest and independent course taken by the people at Birmingham, their exemption from aristocratic snobbery, and their fair appreciation of a democratic aim of the people, confirms me in the opinion I have always had that the social and political state of that town is far more healthy than that of Manchester; and it arises from the fact that the industry of the hardware district is carried on by small manufacturers, employing a few men and boys each, sometimes only an apprentice or two; whilst the great capitalists of Manchester form an aristocracy, individual members of which wield an influence over sometimes two thousand persons. The former state of society is more natural and healthy in a moral and political sense. There is a freer intercourse between all classes than in the Lancashire town, where a great and impassable gulf separates the workman from his employer. The great capitalist class formed an excellent basis for the Anti-Corn-Law movement, for they had inexhaustible purses, which they opened freely in a contest where not only their pecuniary interests but their pride as 'an order' was at stake. But I very much doubt whether such a state of society is favourable to a democratic political movement.^[1]

Cobden's key point is that what we might call 'work-place structure' or if you are more Marxist, the 'organization of capitalism,' permeates social, moral, and political relations. In fact, his bottom line that a steep hierarchy at work is inimical to democratic life has not lost its salience yet. According to Cobden, hierarchy creates a social distance -- it generates the conditions of antipathy -- that undermines social interaction. So, when later liberals treat democracy in terms of "government by discussion," they are not merely making an anodyne point about the significance of talk to civilization, but they are also calling attention to the material pre-conditions of such a practice.

This is especially so when a particular location has uniform work conditions. Anticipating Max Weber's insight, it is such local homogeneity that creates contrasting political perspective with other geographic locations (where work is organized differently). The social clash of values is an effect of different organization of work, and so different material interests and social practices.  Of course, in the quoted passage, Cobden does not hide his own preference for more egalitarian work-place relations. And while his phrasing is gendered, Cobden was hugely influential on the so-called 'first wave feminism' in the UK (including his daughter Jane Cobden).

Notice, too, that Cobden is not averse to talk in the language of 'class.' And, in fact, his understanding of class is not merely economic or based on economic self-interest. He notes that the support for the Anti-Corn-Law movement was not just financial, but also in terms of their collective social status (their "pride"). The problem with Manchester is not the laziness of workers or capitalists, or their ability to avoid the discipline of the market, it is rather the economies of scale enjoyed in Manchester that creates a social hierarchy and, thereby, a political problem. How to deal with the economic and political fruits of economies of scale is, in fact, one of the more enduring challenges in liberal political theory. (This fits one of Bellamy's larger arguments in the book, so it is a bit sad he missed the point.) 

Now, Bellamy's source of this material is Ian C. Bradley's (1980) The Optimists : Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism, p. 59. Bradley does not mention that Palmer is the addressee, and it is natural to read Bradley as suggesting that this is a letter to the other great Liberal politician of the era, Bright. Bradley quotes the paragraph as follows:

social and political state of that town is far more healthy than that of Manchester; and it arises from the fact that the industry of the hardware district is carried on by small manufacturers, employing a few men and boys each, sometimes only an apprentice or two; whilst the great capitalists of Manchester form an aristocracy, individual members of which wield an influence over sometimes two thousand persons. The former state of society is more natural and healthy in a moral and political sense. There is a freer intercourse between all classes than in the Lancashire town...The great capitalist class formed an excellent basis for the Anti-Corn-Law movement, for they had inexhaustible purses, which they opened freely in a contest where not only their pecuniary interests but their pride as 'an order' was at stake. But I very much doubt whether such a state of society is favourable to a democratic political movement.

In Bradley (whose book is on the Liberal party), this letter is introduced in the context of the Liberal party's effort to expand the franchise, and Bright's (1857) election as MP in Birmingham after he lost his seat in Manchester (also in 1857) due to his opposition to the Crimean war (something Bradley does not mention in context, but I think becomes clear later in the book). 

When I looked up Bradley I kind of expected that he would be the source of Bellamy's interpretive mistake. In fact, I don't think there is anything in Bradley's argument that supports Bellamy's use of this material. Bradley's decision to remove "where a great and impassable gulf separates the workman from his employer" from his presentation does change the meaning of the material. And perhaps it was sufficient to mislead Bellamy about Cobden's underlying argument.

 

 

On What we Owe the Future [no, not on SBF/FTX!], Part 1

The effect of such extreme climate change is difficult to predict. We just do not know what the world would be like if it were more than seven degrees warmer; most research has focused on the impact of less than five degrees. Warming of seven to ten degrees would do enormous harm to countries in the tropics, with many poor agrarian countries being hit by severe heat stress and drought. Since these countries have contributed the least to climate change, this would be a colossal injustice.
But it’s hard to see how even this could lead directly to civilisational collapse. For example, one pressing concern about climate change is the effect it might have on agriculture. Although climate change would be bad for agriculture in the tropics, there is scope for adaptation, temperate regions would not be as badly damaged, and frozen land would be freed up at higher latitudes. There is a similar picture for heat stress. Outdoor labour would become increasingly difficult in the tropics because of heat stress, which would be disastrous for hotter and poorer countries with limited adaptive capacity. But richer countries would be able to adapt, and temperate regions would emerge relatively unscathed.--William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, "chapter 6: collapse" p 136

Two ground-rules about what follows:

1. I ignore all the good non-longtermist, effective altruism (EA) has done. It's mostly wonderful stuff, and no cynicism about it is warranted.
2. I ignore MacAskill's association with SBF/FTX. I have said what I want to say about it (here), although if any longtermists associated with the EA movement come to comment here, I hope they remember that the EA community directly benefitted from fraud (and that there is an interesting question to what degree it was facilitated by the relentless mutual backscratching of the intellectual side of the EA community and SBF); and perhaps focus on helping the victims of SBF.

• Perhaps, for some consequentialists (1) and (2) cancel each other out?

Anyway, after my post on MacAskill's twitter thread (here) and my post on the concluding pages of Parfit's Reasons and Persons (here), I was told by numerous people that I ought to read MacAskill's What We Owe the Future. And while I am going to be rather critical in what follows (and subsequent posts), I want to note a few important caveats: first, MacAskill is asking very interesting social questions, and draws on a wide range of examples (also historically far apart). I am happy this is a possible future for philosophy today. Second, he is an engaging writer. Third, What We Owe the Future is -- as the first and last chapter make clear -- quite explicitly intended as a contribution to movement building, and that means that the standards of evaluation cannot be (say) identical to what one might expect in a journal article. In a future post, I'll have something to say about the relationship between public philosophy and movement building, but in this post I will be silent on it. Fourth, if you are looking for a philosophically stimulating review of What We Owe the Future, I warmly recommend Peter Wolfendale's essay here for a general overview (here). If you are especially interested in objections to the axiology, I warmly recommend Kierin Setiya's piece in Boston Review (here). It's also worth re-reading Amia Srinivasan's high profile, prescient critique of MacAskill's earlier work (here).*

In today’s post, I offer two (kinds of) criticisms of What We Owe the Future. First, I discuss its cavalier attitude toward injustice. This criticism will be extrinsic to MacAskill's own project. Second, I argue it treats a whole number of existential risks as uncorrelated which are, almost certainly correlated. (This I consider an intrinsic problem.) And this exhibits two kinds of lacunae at the heart of his approach: (a) his lack of theoretical interest in political institutions and the nature of international political coordination; (b) the absence of a disciplining social theory (or models) that can help evaluate the empirical data and integrate them. (That is, lurking in this second criticism is the charge of cherry-picking data and relentless privileging of some measures/inputs rather than being transparent about these being one of many such measures/inputs--a charge I will develop over subsequent posts.) I have argued elsewhere all integrative or synthetic philosophy requires such models, so here I illustrate what happens absent such a synthetic glue.

So much for set up.

The quoted paragraph is literally the only time MacAskill confronts injustice in the book. To his credit, he notices that climate change is generating what he rightly calls a "colossal injustice." The countries and peoples least responsible for climate change shoulder most of its downside risks and burdens. I would emphasize more than he would that this will have foreseeable consequences in such places of civil war, famine, flooding, and emigration of the population, including skilled labor who may find refuge elsewhere.

While MacAskill treats the possibility of colossal injustice as something in the future, these unjust effects of climate change are already visible in the world today, often exacerbated by imperfect political institutions and/or irresponsible social elites (arguably the case in Sri Lanka and Pakistan). Elsewhere in the book, MacAskill notes that 15% of the world's adult population (!) wants to move, but he does not connect it to the unfolding climate crisis (see p. 101, which, while descriptive, I read the implicature as a defense of the "quality of life" in "rich liberal democracies." These are the VERY countries responsible for the colossal injustice he diagnoses two chapters later!)+

Now, one would think that the diagnosis of colossal injustice would motivate, say, discussion of reparations, or less ambitiously, mitigation and prevention. But as the quoted paragraph shows, that's not MacAskill's route. In fact, because he is so concerned with evaluating the risk of civilizational collapse, the significance of this colossal injustice never quite gets internalized in or further developed in his approach. In fact, while climate change is by no means ignored in the book (MacAskill is, for example, a proponent of decarbonization—a topic that recurs regularly), climate justice is missing, except in this quoted passage.  

The lack of further focus on this colossal injustice is due to three features of his longtermist population ethics approach (two of which are philosophical in character): first, the nearly infinite number of possible future people simply dwarf the interests of the living, as Srinivasan already noted ("the expected value of preventing an x-risk dwarfs the value of, say, curing cancer or preventing genocide.") To be sure, this is not MacAskill's intent -- in the book one can find plenty of statements that one should not sacrifice the interests of present generations to an uncertain future --; but there is a clear distinction between actively sacrificing present interests, and actively undoing harms to present generations. On his approach there is simply no reason to privilege attention to (say) intersectionally vulnerable populations. Second, the relentlessly forward looking longtermism of MacAskill doesn't really know what to do with the past (and the possible colossal injustice he diagnoses is, in part, the effect of imperialism, colonialism; and in part the effect of industrialization). From the vantage point of maximizing effective value, compensation or reparations for developing injustices among relatively poor or unskilled populations is simply an inefficient use of money. (Again, this point is not original with me; it echoes the complaints of those who worried about the effects of, say, trading emission rights on the poor without a seat at the technocratic negotiating table.) Third, MacAskill's implied 'we,' -- and I would bet 'we' is one of the most used words in the book -- which often seems like it's speaking for all of humanity, clearly does not include the victims of this injustice (this is made explicit when he addresses who his likely readers are on p. 194).

Okay, let me turn to the second issue I promised to discuss in this post. On the very same page that I have quoted above, MacAskill writes,

There is a substantial chance that our decarbonisation efforts will get stuck. First, limited progress on decarbonisation is exacerbated by the risk of a breakdown in international coordination, which could happen because of rising military tensions between the major economies in the world….Decarbonisation is a truly global problem: even if most regions stop emitting, emissions could continue for a long time if one region decides not to cooperate. Second, the risk of prolonged technological stagnation, which I discuss in the next chapter, would increase the risk that we do not develop the technology needed to fully decarbonise. These are not outlandish risks; I would put both risks at around one in three. (136)

The underlying concerns strike me as very apt (even if I would like to see more transparency about how MacAskill arrives at his probabilities--the endnotes often send you to a website, and the calculations are then burried in cited papers). But it is odd to treat the risk of a breakdown in international coordination and the risk of technological stagnation as independent from each other. In fact, if the breakdown of international coordination would lead to world war, then decarbonization is off the table not just because war is truly a great source of carbon emissions, but also because it (de facto) ends international coordination.

In fact, it is odd that MacAskill misses this point because earlier he recognizes “that great power war also increases the risk of a host of other risks to civilization.” (p. 116) He reports “a chance of a third world war by 2050 at 23%” and add that “annual risk stayed the same for the following fifty years, this would mean another world war before the end of the century is more likely than not.” (p. 116) If that’s right then the numbers reported for  “engineered pandemics” (risk 1% [p. 113]) and technological stagnation (as well fossil fuel depletion [which MacAskill wants to prevent] all seem rather optimistic because in reality they represent correlated or systemic risks.

While MacAskill is highly interested in great power war (pp. 114-116), he is curiously uninterested in how to theorize explicitly about great power politics in the context of international institutions despite these being the causal source of the main factor in the probabilities he bandies about throughout the book. Throughout his argument, he tacitly black-boxes what he calls “the international system,” “international cooperation,” “international coordination” and “international norms.” (Obviously, he could claim that great power politics is independent from international institutions and shaped by the interactions of small number of elite actors—something he hints at in his historical examples; but it is not developed in his future oriented chapters.) And so, somewhat curiously, a book devoted to building a social movement and changing values, leaves under-theorized the main social factor that will determine (by its own lights) the possibility of that movement having a future at all.**

To be continued.

 

Mill, The Art of Government, Tocqueville (and Foucault), Part II

The native of New England is attached to his township because it is independent and free: his co-operation in its affairs ensures his attachment to its interest; the well-being it affords him secures his affection; and its welfare is the aim of his ambition and of his future exertions: he takes a part in every occurrence in the place; he practises the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms himself to those forms which can alone ensure the steady progress of liberty; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends the union or the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.--Tocqueville (1835) Democracy in America, Translated by Henry Reeve, Esq. (1835) Vol 1. Book 1, Chapter 5, Necessity Of Examining The Condition Of The States—Part I

The quoted passage also caught Mill's attention because he quotes it verbatim in his review of the Reeve translation.* My interest here is not in the empirical basis of Tocqueville's presentation of New England.+ But in the claims about the art of government. Anticipating Dewey (and his followers), Tocqueville emphasizes that the New England township facilitates practical learning of the art of government in a relatively circumscribed political domain. The effects of such practice have a multiplicity of purported benefits: some are relate to individual character formation (e.g., a taste for public order), some involve knowledge of the structure of government (the balance of powers), some involve an education in citizenship and one's legal protections (the nature of one duties as well as acquiring the "spirit" of freedom, and extend of one's rights), and some involve practical knowledge  (how to promote liberty). What's striking here is the heterogeneous character of the consequences of engaging in the art of knowledge locally. 

Now, this heterogeneity can be partly explained by the fact that, as Tocqueville explains, while townships end up delegating a lot of tasks to particular individuals, the setting of the tasks in light of each other and in light of a whole number of practical constraints: e.g., what taxes will pay for them, do county, state, and federal laws impact these aims: how will neighboring townships respond, does the town have capacity and expertise to pursue them. The nuts and bolts deliberation is a collective enterprise. (As Mill notes ruefully, this is easier in the context of "high wages and high profits," [where] "every citizen can afford to attend to public affairs." And, surely, one of the motives for defending a basic income on democratic grounds.)

Tocqueville is unclear exactly which parts of the process are included in the art of government. But here it seems to involve (i) the setting of political aims, (ii) the assigning of positions and officers to complete these, and (iii) the execution/administration of these. And the skills required for this clearly involve training by doing it. And what makes townships so useful for this is that the issues are relatively low stakes, and tend to repeat over time and in nearby townships. So, that in any deliberative body there will be those that have experienced how the township has handled the problem before (and there may well be legal precedents around) and how others might have tackled them. In his review, Mill puts the point as follows in his review:

But the ever-increasing intervention of the people, and of all classes of the people, in their own affairs, he regards as a cardinal maxim in the modern art of government: and he believes that the nations of civilized Europe, though not all equally advanced, are all advancing, towards a condition in which there will be no distinctions of political rights, no great or very permanent distinctions of hereditary wealth; when, as there will remain no classes nor individuals capable of making head against the government, unless all are, and are fit to be, alike citizens, all will ere long be equally slaves.**

Even so, Tocqueville is quite clear that township education in the art of government is not a panacea for the more topdown art of government. As he writes in chapter 13 (in a section titled, "Instability Of The Administration In The United States"):

But the persons who conduct the administration in America can seldom afford any instruction to each other; and when they assume the direction of society, they simply possess those attainments which are most widely disseminated in the community, and no experience peculiar to themselves. Democracy, carried to its furthest limits, is therefore prejudicial to the art of government; and for this reason it is better adapted to a people already versed in the conduct of an administration than to a nation which is uninitiated in public affairs.

In this passage from chapter 13, the 'art of government' almost seems equivalent to what we would call 'public administration" (recall (iii)).  'Tocqueville's underlying point is also registered by Mill in his review. Tocqueville intimates that one of the benefits of an aristocratic political order is that it provides a ruling class leisure to prepare for and acquire the theoretical, empirical, and practical skill-set of running a great state. And one may well add that getting elected may itself not be so useful in running things. (Schumpeter, of course, picks up on this theme.) Lurking in Tocqueville's account is also a more general view that while democracy involves a raising of median and mean quality of the population along many dimensions, it also involves a certain kind of leveling, which generates the conditions of despotism (something highly salient again, and that also attracts the attention of learned commentators). It's passages like these that create the reperation of Tocqueville as a kind of aristocratic liberal.

But on Tocqueville's view this leveling should impact the quality of science and art of administration.  With regard to science, democracies have found it useful to develop lengthy apprenticeship programs and many decades of education in degreed programs to combat this problem. (And one may add that in more recent times assortative mating among scientists is also nudged by the way such education is organized.) No such equivalent exists for the running of society (except the existence of occasional political dynasties in families.) 

The final use of the 'art of government' in Democracy of America is found in the chapter summary of chapter 16. Initially, it also seems to involve the fairly narrow use of he term as public admininistration (which, of course, is a very heterogeneous category itself):

The townships, municipal bodies, and counties may therefore be looked upon as concealed break-waters, which check or part the tide of popular excitement. If an oppressive law were passed, the liberties of the people would still be protected by the means by which that law would be put in execution: the majority cannot descend to the details and (as I will venture to style them) the puerilities of administrative tyranny. Nor does the people entertain that full consciousness of its authority which would prompt it to interfere in these matters; it knows the extent of its natural powers, but it is unacquainted with the increased resources which the art of government might furnish.

The underlying point is an important one for those that defend the social utility of federalism and intermediary bodies against desposotism (and more prosaically) bad legislation. But a closer look suggests that the art of government is more than public adminsitration, if we think of it as just the skill at running things. Clearly here (iv) the art of government provides resources for active citizenship. In fact, what we might call the version involved 'civil disobedience' or 'practical resistance against authority' from below. (Passages like this tend to get ignored by friends of aristocratic liberalism.)

Notice that one of the effects of the art of government can teach citizens the extent of their own power to resist. I suspect lurking here is the idea that in a democracy, even the despotic kinds, ultimately authority rests on (informed) opinion. Informed in so far as that the art of government teaches theoretical knowledge and practical skills. And in particular it teaches citizens where in the gigantic state structure local action can be effective in slowing things down, if not halting them.

As regular readers know, yesterday (here) I suggested that in his (1861) Considerations on Representative Government, Mill divides political theory/philosophy in two. One is engaged with  the basic structure or as he puts it, the "fundamental constitution of the government." This is institutional design. (Recall this post, which discusses some of the pertinent vies of Mill's System of Logic.) And the other, is the art of government, that is, the understanding of the mode of conducting the practical business of government, including a normative version of it in liberal democracies.

Now, there is a rather prominent use of the phrase 'art of government' that I have skipped so far. So let me close with it. The final stirring paragraph of Mill's (1859) On Liberty (which also the final section V), starts with the following passage:

To determine the point at which evils, so formidable to human freedom and advancement, begin, or rather at which they begin to predominate over the benefits attending the collective application of the force of society, under its recognised chiefs, for the removal of the obstacles which stand in the way of its well-being; to secure as much of the advantages of centralized power and intelligence, as can be had without turning into governmental channels too great a proportion of the general activity—is one of the most difficult and complicated questions in the art of government. It is, in a great measure, a question of detail, in which many and various considerations must be kept in view, and no absolute rule can be laid down. But I believe that the practical principle in which safety resides, the ideal to be kept in view, the standard by which to test all arrangements intended for overcoming the difficulty, may be conveyed in these words: the greatest dissemination of power consistent with efficiency; but the greatest possible centralization of information, and diffusion of it from the centre. Thus, in municipal administration, there would be, as in the New England States, a very minute division among separate officers, chosen by the localities, of all business which is not better left to the persons directly interested; but besides this, there would be, in each department of local affairs, a central superintendence, forming a branch of the general government.++ 

The reference to "municipal administration" in "New England" suggests that he is harking back to Tocqueville (and his own discussion of Democracy in America). And, in fact, Mill is suggesting here a way to correct the problems with township governance by creating a parallel administrative central structure to be alert to problems and whose main task would be to supply information and shared practices. (Nick Cowen and I have used this passage to discuss the role of what we call the articulate state.)

Here the art of government is clearly not merely public administration. It involves considerable judgment, and the capacity to balance empirical and normative considerations. In addition, while knowledge of the mode of conducting the practical business of government is presupposed in it here, it also involves what we might call questions of mechanism design, even institutional design in light of multiple political aims (efficiency, freedom, and progress).***

Since this post has gone on, I close here and leave discussion of the significance of this semantic instability, or broad reach of the 'art of government' to another time. 

 

Hobson, Mancur Olson, Lenin, and Laissez-faire democracy

Seeing that the Imperialism of the last three decades is clearly condemned as a business policy, in that at enormous expense it has procured a small, bad, unsafe increase of markets, and has jeopardised the entire wealth of the nation in rousing the strong resentment of other nations, we may ask, “How is the British nation induced to embark upon such unsound business?” The only possible answer is that the business interests of the nation as a whole are subordinated to those of certain sectional interests that usurp control of the national resources and use them for their private gain. This is no strange or monstrous charge to bring; it is the commonest disease of all forms of government. The famous words of Sir Thomas More are as true now as when he wrote them: “Everywhere do I perceive a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their own advantage under the name and pretext of the commonwealth.”

Although the new Imperialism has been bad business for the nation, it has been good business for certain classes and certain trades within the nation. The vast expenditure on armaments, the costly wars, the grave risks and embarrassments of foreign policy, the stoppage of political and social reforms within Great Britain, though fraught with great injury to the nation, have served well the present business interests of certain industries and professions.

It is idle to meddle with politics unless we clearly recognise this central fact and understand what these sectional interests are which are the enemies of national safety and the commonwealth. We must put aside the merely sentimental diagnosis which explains wars or other national blunders by outbursts of patriotic animosity or errors of statecraft. Doubtless at every outbreak of war not only the man in the street but the man at the helm is often duped by the cunning with which aggressive motives and greedy purposes dress themselves in defensive clothing. There is, it may be safely asserted, no war within memory, however nakedly aggressive it may seem to the dispassionate historian, which has not been presented to the people who were called upon to fight as a necessary defensive policy, in which the honour, perhaps the very existence, of the State was involved.

The disastrous folly of these wars, the material and moral damage inflicted even on the victor, appear so plain to the disinterested spectator that he is apt to despair of any State attaining years of discretion, and inclines to regard these natural cataclysms as implying some ultimate irrationalism in politics. But careful analysis of the existing relations between business and politics shows that the aggressive Imperialism which we seek to understand is not in the main the product of blind passions of races or of the mixed folly and ambition of politicians. It is far more rational than at first sight appears. Irrational from the standpoint of the whole nation, it is rational enough from the standpoint of certain classes in the nation. A completely socialist State which kept good books and presented regular balance-sheets of expenditure and assets would soon discard Imperialism; an intelligent laissez-faire democracy which gave duly proportionate weight in its policy to all economic interests alike would do the same. But a State in which certain well-organised business interests are able to outweigh the weak, diffused interest of the community is bound to pursue a policy which accords with the pressure of the former interests.--J.A. Hobson (1902) Imperialism, A Study, Chapter IV

Hobson claims that from the perspective of both liberalism ("laissez-faire democracy") and socialism a public, cost-benefit analysis of imperialism would find imperialism wanting. The mystery, then, is why it survives. And the mystery resolves once one realizes that imperialism benefits and greatly benefits concentrated, special or "sectional" interests. (He avoids the more Millian phrase, 'sinister' interest.)

Depending on one's training and disciplinary formation, it is incredibly difficult not to read the quoted passage and not think immediately of Mancur Olson's treatment of interest groups. And if I understand Paul Krugman's criticism of Adam Tooze correctly (see here), it's actually a good thing if that were to happen to you.

Or perhaps, if you are primed to see rent-seeking here, you think of Tullock and Krueger. The problem is that this literature is focused on tariffs, import licensing, and monopoly not imperialism (which tacitly is relegated to mere historical interest). That's not quite fair to Tullock, who is widely read and explicitly interested in vindicating "the classical economists;" and whose recurring mention of Gladstone in his short paper may well lead one to believe that the question of imperialism is lurking in the informal background of his treatment. After all, the implied lesson of Tullock's paper is that there are political costs from rent-seeking not well captured by a purely economic focus. And if this seems all too Straussian to you, Tullock has a known interest in Hobson (recall; see here 1963).

Hobson himself does not claim originality (his analysis is Smithian through and through) and evokes Tomas More. Some playing around with Google convinced me Hobson relies on a relatively late (1808) translation (Dibdin's revision of Raphe Robinson) of Utopia. But here I am not interested in tracing lineages. (That was the hook.)

As I have noted before (recall; and here) many people come to Hobson's Imperialism via Lenin and the tacit reception of Lenin in contemporary political economy and intellectual history. And once one has read Lenin, the crucial issue in Hobson's argument is Hobson's diagnosis of domestic underconsumption and over-saving as a driver of the export of capital. Imperialism then becomes a search for new markets (recall Duncan Bell's interpretation).

And from the Leninist-Marxist perspective domestic underconsumption is best understood as an effect of monopoly capitalism. There are, indeed, passages in Hobson that seem to evoke and anticipate this diagnosis. For example, in Chapter VI, Hobson writes,

It is not industrial progress that demands the opening up of new markets and areas of investment, but maldistribution of consuming power which prevents the absorption of commodities and capital within the country. The over-saving which is the economic root of Imperialism is found by analysis to consist of rents, monopoly profits, and other unearned or excessive elements of income, which, not being earned by labour of head or hand, have no legitimate raison d'être. 

But as Hobson's wording suggests, his treatment is normative ("legitimate"). He does not think monopoly capitalism inevitable or necessary. In fact, as his analytic categories ('complete socialism' and 'laissez faire democracy') suggest he thinks alternative polities can be coherently thought. And that's because for Hobson imperialism is the effect of political decisions not the necessary outcome of economic laws. As he puts it (also in chapter VI), his economic analysis "dispels the delusion that expansion of foreign trade, and therefore of empire, is a necessity of national life." In so far as there are monopolies, these are themselves the effect of tariffs and political decisions. 

Moreover, for Hobson, the search for new markets does not drive imperialism. (Simply put, he shows that the gains from new markets tend to be negligible. This does not deny some imperialist projects are pursued in the service of expanding markets.) For Hobson, while many interests benefit from imperialism, and sustain it, and while he recognizes all kinds of ideological commitments that promote it, imperialism is fundamentally a mechanism to protect high risk (and so high interest) investment income of creditors from political risk; as he puts it in Chapter VII:

The political conditions of my country are taken into calculation at the time of my investment. If I invest in consols, I fully recognise that no right of political interference with foreign policy affecting my investment is accorded to me in virtue of my interest as a fund-holder. But, if I invest either in the public funds or in some private industrial venture in a foreign country for the benefit of my private purse, getting specially favourable terms to cover risks arising from the political insecurity of the country or the deficiencies of its Government, I am entitled to call upon my Government to use its political and military force to secure me against those very risks which I have already discounted in the terms of my investment. Can anything be more palpably unfair? 

That is to say, imperialism for Hobson is analytically connected with finance capital and its manipulation of the political process (and national public opinion).* If you pursue high risk, high reward investments, which effectively price in some defaults, you have no claim on socializing the downside risk.

On this view imperialism does not disappear with de-colonization, but is still exhibited in the gains from market turbulence -- "every oscillation of public credit short of this collapse, every risky enterprise in which public resources can be made the pledge of private speculations" -- and financial bailouts of the potential losses suffered by European and American creditors abroad. 

I do not mean to deny that for Hobson protecting the political risks faced by a creditor class abroad isn't a peculiarly modern phenomenon. As he puts it:

To a larger extent every year Great Britain is becoming a nation living upon tribute from abroad, and the classes who enjoy this tribute have an ever-increasing incentive to employ the public policy, the public purse, and the public force to extend the field of their private investments, and to safeguard and improve their existing investments. This is, perhaps, the most important fact in modern politics, and the obscurity in which it is wrapped constitutes the gravest danger to our State.

What is true of Great Britain is true likewise of France, Germany, the United States, and of all countries in which modern capitalism has placed large surplus savings in the hands of a plutocracy or of a thrifty middle class. 

And this gives rise to the modern phenomenon of competitive imperialism.+ But rather than treating such large saving surpluses as intrinsic to late stage capitalism, Hobson treats them as an effect of political decisions.  For, Hobson does not subscribe to an economic destiny; he respects the primacy of what he calls "statecraft." And this means such saving surpluses are also correctable by political decisions. For as he puts it in Chapter VI:

If, by some economic readjustment, the products which flow from the surplus saving of the rich to swell the overflow streams could be diverted so as to raise the incomes and the standard of consumption of this inefficient fourth, there would be no need for pushful Imperialism, and the cause of social reform would have won its greatest victory.

It is not inherent in the nature of things that we should spend our natural resources on militarism, war, and risky, unscrupulous diplomacy, in order to find markets for our goods and surplus capital.

Of course, diagnosing the desirably of an alternative political outcome is not the same as diagnosing the existence of a political coalition or a feasible pathway that can generate it.

Hazony on Conservatism, Part IV

[S]uch expressions of traditional Anglo-American nationalism and public religion would soon come to an end. In the wake of the Second World War, America, Britain, and other Western countries underwent a dramatic change in self-understanding. Somehow, a war fought to defend God-fearing democracy inadvertently ended up destroying the religious foundations of the victorious Western nations. Within a few years, the God-fearing democracies came to see themselves as liberal democracies, and liberalism replaced Christianity as the perceived source of whatever was good about America and other Western nations.
We can see the beginning of this change immediately after the Second World War in the American Supreme Court’s determination, in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), that state governments could no longer support and encourage religion—whether a particular religion or any religion. In theory, this decision is deduced from the First Amendment of the Constitution as applied through the Fourteenth. But the Fourteenth Amendment, passed after the Civil War to protect black Americans from violations of their right to due process under the law, had by this point been on the books for seventy-nine years without anyone supposing that support for religion by the states was a violation of anyone’s right to due process.
What had changed in the interim was not the letter of the law, but the narrative framework through which the justices of the Supreme Court, as representatives of elite opinion, understood the relationship between Christianity and the American nation. That there had been such a change is obvious from the fact that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Justice Hugo Black felt he needed to provide a new story of the American founding—one broadly hostile to government encouragement of religion. Among other things, he writes:

It is not inappropriate briefly to review the background and environment of the period in which that constitutional language was fashioned and adopted. A large proportion of the early settlers of this country came here from Europe to escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches. The centuries immediately before and contemporaneous with the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy. With the power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews. In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place, men and women had been fined, cast in jail, cruelly tortured, and killed.

In Black’s retelling, religion is no longer the source of American democracy and independence, as it had been in Roosevelt’s State of the Union address eight years earlier. On the contrary, religion is now portrayed as a danger and a threat to democratic freedoms. Indeed, the very form of the American Constitution is now said to have resulted from the excesses of religion that drove the first Europeans to settle in America. It is in the Everson decision, in other words, that we find some of the first intimations of the transition from a God-fearing democracy to a liberal democracy: one in which religion is perceived as being so great a threat that the federal government must act to safeguard every child in the country from being taught religion in a publicly supported school.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Part III" pp. 264-266,

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here; here the second one on Hazony's post-feminist conception of the family; and here the third one on Hazony's account of statecraft). In this series, I mix exposition with immanent critique (even if sometimes I am bad at hiding my own skeptical liberal commitments). 

The quoted material is part of a chapter, "Liberal Hegemony and Cold War Conservatism," that introduces Hazony's intellectual  history of the post WWII conservative 'fusionist' movement. It has major treatments of Russell Kirk, Hayek, Leo Strauss, and Frank Meyer. (Burnham is notably missing.) The first of these is, in many ways, closest to Hazony, but Kirk's defense of states' rights (and the racialism supporting it) are criticized by Hazony. (As I have noted, before Hazony is a fierce critic of ethnic and genetic accounts of nationalism.) The latter three are all treated as liberals, and criticized for their one-sided defense of individual freedom. The cumulative effect of the chapter is, to simplify, to show how the intellectual, 'fusionist' movement organized by and around Buckley's National Review somewhat unintentionally contributed to 'liberal hegemony.' For present purposes what matters is a common thread in these thinkers that in different degrees they are willing 'to privatize' (a phrase Hazony uses in context of Meyer) religion to a relatively domestic sphere.

Now, Hazony treats World War II as a major rupture, or a triggering cause, for the retreat from public religion Stateside. (He resists the temptation to throw this on the sixties youth culture.) His explanation for this change is that elite opinion -- shocked and shamed by the racial Nazi atrocities -- correctly retreated from Jim Crow and other forms of state enforced, domestic racial oppression, and then mistakenly treated other forms of state sanctioned distinctions as on par with the racial kind. By contrast, Hazony does not "believe these aims are substantively similar at all. However, it is important to recognize that the U.S. Supreme Court did fid them comparable. Indeed, it is fair to say that these two goals—erasing distinctions based on race and religion—were the principal engines driving the establishment of liberal-democratic government in America after the Second World War." (267) And this led to the mistake of "instead of engaging in a focused effort to assist black Americans in overcoming the racial barriers that had been placed in their way, the constitutional revolution of the 1960s set out to reconstruct America in the image of the social-contract theories of Enlightenment rationalist philosophy." (270)

My interest here is not to contest the historical accuracy of this narrative. But it is worth noting an important irony. As I have noted before, Hazony treats Locke as the key 'rationalist,' who is foundational to the 'Enlightenment liberalism' (and 'liberal democracy') that Hazony treats as a rival to his own conservative/federalist nationalism. And Hazony implies throughout his argument that the Lockean liberals are to blame for the retreat of public religion. The irony, of course, is that Locke thought only protestants ought to be tolerated, and that Catholics and atheists not. And while Jews could be tolerate in Locke's day, and in the American Founders' era, the thrust of his argument is that no such toleration is possible once there is a Jewish state (due to possibility of divided loyalty, which is the argument to reject toleration of Catholics).

The point here is not that Locke was a bigot, or even to suggest that the "spirit of old the Protestant republicanism" Hazony suddenly extolls in the context of Reagan's presidency, is rather Lockean in character (and so there is something off in Hazony's conceptual framework), but rather to look again at Justice Black's rationale (and by implication of those American elites) to change the relationship between 'government 'and 'Christianity.' And to point to a surprising equivocation in Hazony's position in which 'Christianity' is treated as a kind term and 'religion' or 'religious practices' a kind of synonym for it. We see this in how Hazony advocates for what he calls 'conservative democracy. I first quote the principle on which it rests:

Principle 3. Religion. The state upholds and honors God and the Bible, the congregation and the family, and the religious practices common to the nation. These are essential to the national heritage and indispensable for justice and public morals. At the same time, the state offers toleration to religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole. (337; this is repeated from pp. 30-1, end of chapter 1)

While Hazony rejects Locke's views on consent, in the practical effects this account of toleration (to tolerate 'religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole') is, thus, actually remarkably Lockean. And while Locke might emphasize more than Hazony the right to exit from one's congregation, Hazony, too, allows this as we have seen in his account of the nature of 'loyalty groups.'

Anyway, the principle is rather vague. And is to be balanced with a number of other principles. But the practical pay-off is articulated as follows: 

Public religion. Conservative democracy regards biblical religion as the only firm foundation for national independence, justice, and public morals in Western nations. In America and other traditionally Christian countries, Christianity should be the basis for public life and strongly reflected in government and other institutions, wherever a majority of the public so desires. Provision should be made for Jews and other minorities to ensure that their particular traditions and way of life are not encumbered. The liberal doctrine requiring a “wall of separation between church and state” is a product of the post–Second World War period and is not an inherent feature of American political tradition. It should be discarded both with respect to majority religion and to minorities. (341)

That biblical religion is (in 'Western' contexts) the only firm foundation for 'national independence, justice, and public morals' might raise protests from liberals (like myself). But that does not concern me here. Rather I am interested in the consequences for religion to Hazony's view that a (local or national) "majority of the public" can impose their religious views on minorities. And I do so by returning to Hazony's treatment of Everson vs Board of Education quoted above. 

In the passage quoted from Black's opinion of Everson v. Board of Education, justice Black is fundamentally concerned about the political effects of sectarianism that is repeated almost staccato like in the opinion: (i) 'escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches;' (ii) 'the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy; (iii) he power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews;' (iv) 'In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place.' And the implication is that such sectarianism has also shaped American political life, or is a danger to it.

Of course, for much of American history, Protestantism was the majority religion. But Justice Black is writing in the aftermath of a huge, century long demographic shift toward Catholicism, and consequent increasing Catholic, political emancipation. The series of legal rulings that make the state retreat from enforcing religion in public life, can be understood as an attempt to pacify the potential for non-trivial sectarian strife not the least among Catholics and protestants, and among different protestant sects. In fact, liberals of the age (including Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls) suddenly start to emphasize (it's an innovation) the significance of religious wars as a foundational myth in the growth of liberalism.

That is to say, if sects can justly try to control government, this means that religious life will be politicized and factionalized permanently. Now, I think Hazony accepts that loyalty groups are intrinsically political (and hierarchical), although he underestimates what kind of leaders will rise to the top within religion if religion is a means to political spoils. But the dangers of sectarianism are obscured in Hazony's argument because he kind of tacitly assumes that 'Christians' will agree with each other. Of course, he is not unfamiliar with the history of sectarianism and political religious persecution. But because contemporary conservative Christians understand themselves, rightly or wrongly, as embattled against, and unified in opposition to, the near victory of (secular) Enlightenment liberalism/rationalism, Hazony never has to confront the dangers of doctrinal and factional sectarianism.

Let me close. In a way the problem of sectarianism makes the problem of statecraft I diagnosed in the previous post on Hazony's book worse. For in order to maintain peace among different religious sects, the wise politician must not only navigate a complex commerce of honors (and interests), as Hazony advocates, but s/he must also navigate a complex set of doctrinal and theological religious disputes founded on by no means durable majority opinion. This is a recipe for permanent political strife.