Wealth Is Not Income, and That Is Extremely Important

Projections that Bezos might soon become a trillionaire have sparked renewed controversy over wealth and income inequality. These debates are fraught with misunderstanding on both sides. Here are some points to consider:

1- It is important to distinguish wealth from income for a variety of reasons. For one thing, nations that are very equal in terms of income can still be very unequal in terms of wealth. For instance, Scandinavian countries such as Sweden (income-Gini = 0.288, wealth-Gini = 0.865) and Denmark (income-Gini = 0.287, wealth-Gini = 0.835) are far more income-equal but have a similar level of wealth-inequality as the US (income-Gini = 0.414, wealth-Gini = 0.852).

2- Wealth is a one-time thing, whereas income flows in annually. This is important because lifting people out of poverty requires increasing their income, not their wealth. A good mental exercise that demonstrates this is to imagine distributing the wealth of a wealthy person to the poor. The result is often no help to the poor at all. For instance, suppose Bezos becomes a trillionaire and we take all of his wealth and distribute it to the poorer half of the US population. Each recipient will get a one-time payment of $6,000. That’s not nothing, but it won’t even come close to solving the problem of poverty, which requires giving people a few extra tens of thousands EVERY YEAR (e.g. increasing the minimum wage to $15/hr would presumably give the minimum wage earners ~$15,000 extra per year).

3- Wealth is not money, even though it’s often expressed in dollars. More accurately, wealth is not a measure of one’s purchasing power. If you own a house worth $200,000 with a remaining mortgage of $100,000, your net wealth is $100,000. But you don’t have $100,000 to spend. You just have a house to live in. You could, in principle, swap your house with a cheaper one and cash in the difference if you wanted to, but that would take months and come with a lot of hassle.

4- A person’s wealth is not something that only they can enjoy. This is especially true when it comes to the wealth of business-owners. Bezos’s wealth, for example, consists of the presumed value of his house, car, and other possessions, which only he and his family can enjoy, but also the presumed market value of the shares of companies he owns, the value of the government bonds he has purchased, etc. So Bezos’s wealth includes things like Whole Foods isles, delivery trucks, and Amazon cloud servers — things that you and I actually enjoy everyday, things that dramatically improve our lives all the time. The government bonds he owns provide vital loans to the US government, which it then spends on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other government programs. The fact that Bezos “owns” them means that he has the responsibility to take care of them. If you owned those things, you would have to take care of them, or else they would quickly lose value and become worthless. Incidentally, this also means that having more wealth often implies having higher expenses (owning a house implies having to maintain it, repair it, clean it, paint it, etc.)

5- Wealth can appear or disappear without any tangible thing changing. Your house might lose half of its value in a market crash tomorrow, but you still have a house. You haven’t actually lost anything concrete. Similarly, the market value of Amazon might plummet to half its current value tomorrow, which would immediately erase a chunk of Bezos’s wealth. But most of the Whole Foods isles and Amazon servers would still be there for us to enjoy (some would shut down), but they would just be considered less valuable. On the flip side, Bezos’s wealth might double in a market rally tomorrow, but he doesn’t actually have twice as many things as he had yesterday. Wealth is neither money, nor objects; it’s the estimated exchange value of certain objects at the moment.

6- Partly as a result of the above, wealth is not something that a person “earns”, and therefore not something that one “deserves”. Bezos’s wealth depends heavily on how much other people believe in his business model. So if there is anything that he has earned, it is the trust of investors. But his wealth can go up because of irrational exuberance in the markets or down because of panic selling, and none of that has anything to do with what he “deserves”.

7- If anything “trickles down” in the economy, it is income, not wealth. Your owning a house does not add to anyone else’s wealth. But you will have to spend part of your income to pay the cleaning staff, the lawn-mower, the handyman, etc. It is true that this “trickle-down” is a direct result of your owning the house, but it only happens if you can afford to maintain said house. If you cannot afford to maintain a house that big, you will have to sell it to someone who can. So arguments that Bezos having more wealth will make other people rich are not quite valid. Due to 4 above, everyone can enjoy Bezos’s wealth, but it does not “trickle down” to them.

8- None of this is to say that the current distribution of wealth is ideal or inevitable. I am attracted to proposals for giving employees some shares of their own company. But in the final analysis, what such policies achieve is not about money; it is about power. Giving workers some shares of the company is monetarily equivalent to giving them a one-time bonus equivalent to the market value of the shares on that day (which is not going to be much per worker). The more important consequence is that the workers will get a vote in elections of board members, and thus a degree of influence (as well as responsibility, as per 4 above) over the future direction of the company. The problem with the current system is therefore the undemocratic distribution of power in the workplace, not how much money each individual has.

 

“Then just marry one woman!” — Does the Argument for Legalizing Gay Marriage Apply to Wall Street?

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This Elizabeth Warren answer was quite a moment at CNN #EqualityTownHall pic.twitter.com/ThpI7YSO8M

— MJ Lee (@mj_lee) October 11, 2019

 

I really like Warren’s humor in this exchange. She delivers the lines confidently, hilariously pauses between them, and her body language when delivering the punch line is perfectly fitting!

But I was intrigued by the philosophical idea behind her answer. The idea is that we respond to a man who says that marriage is ethically between a man and a woman by telling them to go and marry a woman. In other words, tell them to do what they consider ethical, and I assume by implicature, to leave those who do otherwise alone. It’s probably fair to also assume that a couple of admissibility criteria are presupposed for the “otherwise but ok” behavior, namely that it be harmless in its direct consequences, and be consensual between the parties directly involved. Gay marriage, for instance, does not hurt anyone in its direct consequences, and of course we assume it’s a consensual marriage. I think it’s important to emphasize the “directness” in the admissibility criteria, because otherwise one would be open to such arguments as that, for example, gay marriage has other bad consequences down the road, for it encourages radical changes in the fundamental building block of society, the family unit, which might involve structures that we have not experimented with before; or take the argument that gay sex is associated with higher prevalence of certain STDs. Now, I understand that people argue on empirical grounds that these statements are false, but if I understand it correctly, we are not exactly going to ban gay marriage if it turns out that it does indeed encourage more changes to the family unit or is indeed associated with higher prevalence of certain diseases. The argument for keeping gay marriage would presumably stay the same under those circumstances: it should be generally allowed because the people doing it have mutually agreed on it and it does not seem to DIRECTLY harm anyone by virtue of the act itself, rather than by virtue of its second- and third-order repercussions.

To sum up, I believe the general principle behind Warren’s response (“well then marry a woman!”) is something like “acts that are consensual between the parties involved and don’t seem to harm anyone by virtue of their direct consequences should be legal”.

But couldn’t we apply the same principle to certain acts that Warren wants to ban and/or restrict? Consider banking and other commercial transactions. They are consensual between the people involved, and don’t seem to harm anyone directly. For instance, when someone takes out a loan, assuming they know the terms of the loan (which is already part of our transparency laws), they clearly must have thought that having that money at that rate of interest was better than not having it. That is, the borrower reckoned they benefit from the transaction, and they participated in it with informed consent. Similarly when stocks or other asset are traded. Arguments against these sorts of transactions usually either concern the history of events that put the borrower in the position they were in, or the second- and higher-order consequences of the practice of banking and lending in society at large. But as I understand it, we don’t consider these sorts of things in the case of gay marriage. We don’t care how desperate the people who are getting married are, and how they got to the point where they thought it a good idea to get into that marriage (which statistically speaking will more likely than not be a failure!). Nor do we care how many pairs of such people engaging in that act might eventually affect the fabric of society. I would argue that objections to banking and asset trading will inevitably be of the kind that the “directness criterion” rules out.

What do you think? Have I misidentified the principle behind Warren’s response? Is the situation with banking a bad analogy? Or do you think there is genuine inconsistency at work?

There Is Nothing New about Trump’s Border Policy

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Take a look at this fascinating article on Slate. The title promises us evidence that conditions in detention centers, while “atrocious” under Obama, have gotten “so much worse” under Trump. The introduction claims that “Trump’s policy changes and focus on deporting as many people as possible, however, has created all-out chaos in a system that was already pushed to the brink.” Yet unbelievably, if you look at the statistics in the article, they sort of prove the opposite of what the article claims: with the exception of two weeks of “zero tolerance”, nothing has gotten worse under Trump; and the number of children that were detained under the two weeks of “zero tolerance” is dwarfed by the number of “unaccompanied” children who are otherwise detained.

Let’s dig into the statistics that the Slate article provides, and see how amazingly they prove the opposite of what the article promises.

Detentions:
“the average daily population [of detainees] hovering between 30,000 and 40,000 during Obama’s presidency. In fiscal year 2018, under Trump, the average daily population was 45,890, and it has continued to rise this year.”

So the average daily population, the number of people who are held at all migrant facilities if you looked at any given day, has increased about 40-50% under Trump compared to Obama. It increased 60-70% under Obama compared to Bush. Under Clinton, it increased ~200% compared to H.W. Bush! [1] :O (The percentages go down but these are more-or-less comparable increments of ~15,000.) So there is nothing above trend here. And of course new facilities have also been opening during this whole time. For example: “Trump is asking to increase the number of beds used to detain migrants to 52,000 as outlined in his 2019 budget proposal, raising the budget by $4.2 billion.” [1]

Conditions:
“It is hard to say whether the terrible conditions in CBP facilities currently are “worse” than they were under Obama, but what seems to be clear is that a focus on detaining people—including children—is forcing more people to spend longer amounts of time inside CBP facilities, which would likely cause a deterioration of the already-appalling conditions.”

So the author actually doesn’t know if the conditions are worse. They couldn’t find any evidence to prove that. Rather, they argue that Trump has “focused on detaining people” and that would “likely cause a deterioration” of the conditions. But we just saw that the growth of the numbers under Trump is not larger than previous years, and new beds are being added, so we’d need a little more than a “likely” theoretical guess to assert that conditions have gotten worse. According to the author, the conditions under Obama were described as “freezing, overcrowded, and filthy cells for extended periods of time, no access to beds, soap, showers, adequate meals and water, medical care, and lawyers in violation of constitutional standards”. Has it gone from “no access” to worse than that?

Prosecutions:
“During the last year of Bush’s presidency in 2008, and throughout Obama’s presidency, prosecutions jumped extensively, increasing from under 40,000 per year to almost 100,000 at the highest point in 2013.”

So the most prosecutions happened under Obama. It’s lower than that now.

Family detention centers:
“The Artesia facility [opened by Obama] was so criticized that it was shut down in less than a year. The facilities at Berks, Karnes, and Dilley are still in use by the Trump administration.”

Ok, nothing to see there either.

Deportations:
“total deportations under Obama hit a high in 2012 with 409,849 removals, and a low in 2015 and 2016, when the numbers dipped below 250,000. In fiscal year 2017, under Trump, the number of removals was 226,119, before rising to 256,085 in fiscal year 2018 and 282,242 for fiscal year 2019 as of June.”

So the highest number of annual deportations under Trump so far is about the same as the lowest record of annual deportations under Obama.

Paroles:
“This year, the Trump administration … implemented a program to force many asylum-seekers to wait out their cases in Mexican border towns, instead of being paroled into the United States or detained in an ICE facility.”

Ok, this policy clearly made the facilities in the US less crowded than they would have been, so it can’t possibly have made the conditions worse.

Children:
The only thing the article mentions that was worse under Trump is the zero tolerance / family separation, which as said lasted for about two weeks (though some of the children haven’t been reunited yet).

Also, as for children: about 2300 children were separated from their families during the two weeks of zero tolerance [2]. That’s about 4% of the total number of apprehended unaccompanied minors, which was 68,000 in 2014, 40,000 in 2015, 60,000 in 2016 under Obama [3], and 40,000 and 50,000 in 2017 and 2018, respectively, under Trump [4]. So at the peak of zero tolerance, the vast majority (95%) of detained children crossed the border without an adult (or in many cases designated as “unaccompanied” and separated from the adult who brought them, because the adult was not a parent or legal guardian). Also, the average of detained children so far under Trump is less than that under Obama.

 

Upshot:
The title promises one thing, but the content says something else, in fact very close to the opposite of what the title promises. The article is inevitably complicated; it throws a bunch of facts and numbers at you. It’s understandable if many people read it and assume that whatever the details, the take-away must be what the title says.

 
[1] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/02/12/how-trump-inherited-his-expanding-detention-system
[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/06/19/621065383/what-we-know-family-separation-and-zero-tolerance-at-the-border
[3] https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-border-unaccompanied-children/fy-2016
[4] https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/usbp-sw-border-apprehensions

What Is “the Cause” of a Terrorist Act?

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I assume a lot of factors join together to cause a person to go on a suicidal mass-murder mission:

-a violent or hateful ideology,
-resentments from an “unfair” life and feelings of isolation and failure to integrate,
-mental illness or instability,
-certain aspects of culture that glorify violent protest,
-easy access to highly lethal weapons,
-and who knows what else.

And it’s usually a confluence of those same factors no matter who the perpetrator is: a radical Islamist, a white supremacist, or some local Baloch militant who terrorizes for the sake of “their people”. In the paradigm case, the violent ideology feeds on the person’s grievances and allows the person to scapegoat their problems onto some enemy group out there, which the ideology usually identifies as the source of pretty much everything that’s wrong with pretty much everything. The mental illness then feeds on this situation and aggravates the person’s feelings of having been betrayed and deepens their struggle with self-esteem. Looking for a catharsis and at the same time an external source of self-value, the person turns to some glorified form of violence that’s common in their culture, and will probably use the most common weapons around them.

One of the side effects of ideological polarization is that which of the above factors a person finds to be “the cause” of the problem and therefore the factor to intervene on has become a political matter: if you are a Republican, you’re supposed to emphasize mental illness and cultural items that glorify violence if the suspect is white, and violent ideology if they’re Muslim. If you’re a Democrat, you’re supposed to highlight easy access to highly lethal weapons and violent ideology if the person is white, and feelings of isolation and failure to integrate if they’re Muslim. In all of this it’s often completely ignored what is meant by “the cause”. It’s good that people look at it differently — that way we learn about the different possible causes of the phenomenon — but it makes more sense to consider all factors in every case.

When people say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, they seem to be downplaying the role of easy access to lethal weapons in favor of mental illness, as if the latter is the only thing that matters. Or in the case of “racism isn’t mental illness”, the implication seems to be that “the real cause” of the act is violent ideology, not mental illness. At least that’s the way I make sense of those sayings.

But I don’t know that one can determine what the dominant factor that caused the act was, or whether any of the factors were in fact dominant for that matter, without closely studying the subject. I could imagine a Muslim terrorist for whom the Islamism was just the last little push towards a decision that their mental illness had already mostly determined for them, or a person with an unstable mind who regardless of their mental illness really would have never committed the act if it weren’t for their easy access to guns. There is no global formula for this sort of thing.

The Most Compelling Argument for the Unfairness of Current Business Models

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To me, the most compelling argument for the unfairness of the current capitalistic business model is the argument that goes through the structure of relations within capitalistic enterprises, and shows that they are unfair, but otherwise brackets any discussion of standards of living, working conditions, income, wealth, or any other metric.

According to this argument — call it the argument from relations — capitalistic business is unfair insofar as most employees have no say, no vote, in the business of the company: not just in terms of how much people get paid, but also in what gets produced, how much, in what manner, at what price, etc. The principle behind this argument, if any, is that insofar as the employees have stakes in the collective enterprise that is the business of the company, they should also have a vote in what happens and how things get done. Aristotle would say equals are not being treated as equal (voting power is not matching stakes), whereas Kant would say the agency of the worker is being violated. Either way, I think most people can see what is unfair about that. (The obvious antidote to this unfairness is of course to turn the business into a cooperative where all employees vote. But that’s another discussion!)

I find the argument from relations most convincing precisely because it is immune to all other messy discussions (such as working conditions, inequality, etc.) which are about states of affairs whose unfairness must be established independently. And I say “independently” because it seems to me that the fairness of the relations is ultimately what we want to judge. In other words, insofar as judging the fairness of a business model is concerned, the structure of relations within the enterprise seems to override whatever other judgment one makes on the basis of inequality or what have you. Consider the following.

Suppose we examine a fully democratic, “one person, one vote” cooperative and we find that the CEO earns 300 times the median worker. And suppose we make sure that this is not seen by the employees as something imposed on them by external forces but truly as a desirable state of affairs they chose. It would be hard for me to object to that state of affairs, because by assumption, this is what the workers in that enterprise have collectively decided would be best for their business. (And as far as I know, in real cooperatives high-level executives still do make a lot more money, though probably not as much as CEOs in capitalistic businesses.) Now consider the opposite: suppose we find a business in which one person, for instance the owner of the machines (as in the traditional Marxian example), decides everything that happens, including pay. But suppose the pay is actually quite generous. I would argue that’s still unfair, in the sense that a benevolent dictatorship is unfair. It’s not that currently the outcomes are good or bad, it’s just that people have associated for a collective activity but they have no say in what happens to them.

Incidentally, some people who I think would love much of what I said above (minus some terminology) include Karl Marx and Allen Wood! In fact, I learned from Allen Wood that Marx and Engels distinguished between “injustice”, a juridical concept which often looks at the distribution of material conditions, and “exploitation” that looks at human relations and finds the problem in “the appropriation of another’s will”, the overtaking of another’s agency, not in how much anyone is paid. As Wood puts it: “The worker is exploited every bit as much when he is paid just wages as when he is paid unjust wages.” (p. 266)

Giving up the arguments based on inequality and the like does not amount to giving up some of the force behind the argument for the unfairness of capitalistic business; it amounts to focusing it on what actually matters.

Why Economic Growth Is the Only Solution to Poverty

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We often hear about how much the top 1% earns / owns versus the bottom 50%, and things of that sort. And it always sounds daunting. But what we seldom hear is: how much money is that exactly? There is a helpful exercise that any person can do with the four basic operations: take the amount of money the richest people have and divide it by the number of poor people at the bottom. Is the amount that’s concentrated at the top significant enough to make any difference in the lives of the people at the bottom upon redistribution? The answer is often no.

Here’s an example of income: the CEO of Walmart made ~$23 million last year. That’s about 1,200 times the salary of a median worker at Walmart. Ok, now, Walmart has about 1.5 million workers in the US and about 2 million workers globally. Let’s take the US only, and say a fifth of those are poor / underpaid. That would be about 300,000 workers. If you divide $23 million by 300,000, you get something like 70 bucks per worker per year. So if we took all of Walmart CEO’s salary and distributed it to the bottom 20% of their workers, each worker would get $70 more per year, $6 more per month.

Or consider wealth, and let’s do this one globally: there are about 2,000 billionaires in the world. If we took all of their wealth (~$8 trillion), and distributed it to the bottom 50% of the world (who live on less than $2.5 a day, aka “absolute poverty”), each person would get about $2,300. That’s less than the amount of money those people make in three years. Remember, that’s wealth, not income; it’s a one-time payment. In other words, if we redistributed every billionaire’s wealth, the global poor would be able to barely subsist for another three years without starving.

Yet another way to see what I mean is to look at the policy proposals of those who proclaim to be concerned about poverty and propose to solve it by discouraging executive overpay. Bernie Sanders is one such person. Supposedly, he is the best hope we have of anything being done about executive overpay. We can get a sense of how much this issue is worth pursuing by looking at Sanders’s recent proposal to tax companies that overpay their CEOs. The following is really all you need to know about this plan:

“The plan would raise an estimated $150 billion over the next decade, according to a Sanders campaign statement.”

To put this in perspective, the US federal budget is approximately 4 trillion dollars, about 2.5 trillion of which is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Sanders is proposing to raise $15 billion per year, which would be about 0.4% of the federal budget. What this means is that it would take Sanders’s plan 100 years to raise an amount of money that is comparable to the US federal budget at all.

The general conclusion from these sorts of back-of-the-envelope calculations is that the poor cannot be helped by taking money from the rich, not because (or just because) of the “second-order” or “dynamic” effects that are harmful for the economy, but for the simple reason that the existing amount of money isn’t enough to help the poor. New value must be created. The only way to really help the poor is to grow the economy.

I rest my case.

The Phoebe Fallacy: a Common Comedy Trope and a Psychological / Epistemological Lesson

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You know that scene in Friends? Phoebe holds up a picture and says something like “the man in this picture is my father, and I deserve to know where he is”. Then her birth-mom says “ok, here is the truth: the man in that picture is Chuck Mangione”, to which Phoebe responds: “my father is Chuck Mangione?!” This is a common comedy trope, which essentially hinges on a simple logic trick: a character refuses to relax a wrong assumption they’ve been making (“the man in the picture is my father”) in light of new information (“the man in the picture is Chuck Mangione”), and instead goes on to infer something that is perfectly logically valid but very ridiculous nonetheless (“my father is Chuck Mangione”) from the conjunction of the new information and the wrong assumption. The idea is that the character is so hell-bent on believing the wrong assumption that no amount of new information can refute it, and anything you say instead serves to push her further down the path of absurdity. Louis CK has a similar bit with the same trope where he sees a little head bobbing along behind a dumpster just as a young white couple happens to be walking by, and so he assumes the head must be the young couple’s child; but when the head comes out from behind the dumpster and turns out to belong to an old Chinese lady, Louie thinks to himself “oh, their kid is an old Chinese lady!”

This comedy trope is funny to me because it’s actually very common in real life. It usually happens with things that the person has strong emotional investment in, or that activate the “fight or flight” module in the brain, rather than the problem-solving module (so more of a Phoebe-type situation, rather than a Louie-type one). For instance we’ve all been there when we had a bad break-up with someone, and of course we had reasons for thinking that our ex was malicious and/or abusive, which is presumably why we were so mad at them. But when other people try to give charitable interpretations of the ex’s behavior, instead of using that information to stop ourselves from being angry at said ex, we tend to get even more angry at the person who is “defending” our evil ex. Logically speaking, if our friend’s rationalization of our ex’s behavior is at least one plausible story, this should at least somewhat lower our credence in the belief that our ex did something malicious / abusive, which should presumably make us somewhat less angry at them. But it seems that in these situations one is often deeply invested in the very feeling of being angry. This is perhaps because a traumatic wound that’s already been inflicted cannot be healed through purely cognitive intervention, or perhaps due to a “sour grapes” type mechanism. But regardless of the mechanism behind it, the “Phoebe fallacy” is happening in such cases.

The Phoebe fallacy also happens with other topics that one might be deeply invested in, such as social, political, national, professional, or sport-related topics. To pick my favorite category (i.e. politics!), one who believes that socialists are all godless dictators who drive nations to total devastation might not like hearing arguments that socialism in some forms and contexts is actually pretty harmless or beneficial. They will probably be wondering what demon is running around inside you to be saying such things. Likewise, one who believes that minimum wage laws are necessary for poor exploited workers to get their fair share might not take kindly to an article that presents evidence that minimum wage laws can sometimes actually harm low-income workers. They will probably be wondering what a disgusting bought-and-paid-for journalist the author must be. In both cases, the Phoebe fallacy is happening because i) presumably the reason for hating socialism and loving minimum wages are the immense harm that one believes follows from socialism and the boon that one believes ensues from minimum wage laws, respectively; and ii) in both cases the very assumption that is presumably behind the hate / love is the assumption being questioned. But the person instead chooses to hold on to the questionable assumption, and instead infers something absurd, such as that the person presenting counter-arguments is somehow a beneficiary of evil.

The Phoebe fallacy helps explain an otherwise puzzling phenomenon that happens quite frequently (at least to me) when presenting empirical facts: sometimes people seem to resist good news or information that shows things are not as bad as they seem. For instance, when one presents data that the poor are not getting poorer to a liberal or that illegal immigration has been on the decline since the 2000s to a conservative, one is likely to face mountains of suspicion about the data, if not outright denial and dismissal. Why would someone not welcome arguments that would relieve them of sadness, anger, or whatever other bad feelings they’re having? Do they like bad news? Do they need to believe that things are appalling in the world? I would say no, they’re not that silly. What’s happening is rather like a Phoebe fallacy: they’re invested in feeling a certain way about the situation because that’s how they believe they can be good and avoid evil, and as a result they turn what should be a healthy modus tollens into a deviant modus ponens: rather than accepting that there is less evil in the world than they thought, they add the messenger of supposed good news to the list of evil things in the world.

It seems to me that the proper content of the sometimes-controversial or counter-productive suggestion to “take emotion out of the argument” is also just a warning against Phoebe fallacies. The problem is often not the mere fact that emotion is involved in the discussion, but rather that the emotion is attached to a particular belief in such a way that prevents the person from updating their beliefs in light of new evidence, and instead causes them to become even more cynical about the world. Rather than “perhaps the world is not as awful as I thought”, one ends up with “the world is even more awful than I thought because not only is it awful, but there are also people who try to deny this awfulness”.

The Phoebe fallacy provides partial explanation for the phenomenon of ideological polarization in that once polarization begins, the Phoebe fallacy can help accelerate it: once people have sufficiently different pictures of reality, it becomes harder to integrate contrary information from the other side into one’s own worldview; it is much easier and more comfortable to keep one’s own worldview and instead infer that the other side is defending something evil. This results in avoidance of exposure to the other side (why would you listen to evil people?), which in turn results in further divergence of the two sides’ pictures of reality, which then increases one’s desire to commit the fallacy — and the cycle continues.

Being aware of the Phoebe fallacy and monitoring it in one’s own thought process thus allows one to be more open to and relaxed about other viewpoints, experience counter-evidence as thrill rather than threat, reduce polarization in society, and accept good news as a reason to be happy, rather than a reason to be more dismayed.

Fascinating Facts about Education You Might Not Have Expected

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Pew Research recently released some interesting findings regarding college student demographics and trends thereof.

First of all, the share of poor and non-white students has increased in all types of colleges, including public two-year colleges, and public and private four-year college, whether they are very selective, moderately selective, or minimally selective. In fact poor and non-white students constitute the bulk of the dramatic increase in the number of undergraduates in the past couple of decades. This is obviously good news, as it shows that historical patterns are fading and college is becoming accessible to more people.

There is a lot of interesting nuance in the data, though, whether you look at change percentages or the total number of poor and non-white students.

First of all, when you break it down by selectiveness and focus on minority students, it turns out that the minimally selective colleges have had the greatest percentage increase, with moderately selective, very selective, and public two-year colleges falling behind slightly. Private for-profit colleges had the smallest percentage increase of minority students. On the other hand, the picture changes if you look at poor students, rather than non-white ones. This time, it is the public two-year colleges that show the highest percentage increase, minimally selective schools rank second by a decent margin, while moderately selective colleges and private for-profits fare about the same. Very selective schools have had the smallest percentage change in poor undergraduates. These two facts are interesting on their own, but they might also be telling us about where the inclusivity efforts of the past couple of decades have been focused / effective and where they haven’t. This data suggests that more selective colleges have succeeded more in including minority students than poor ones.

But the data is also interesting if you look at the total percentages, rather than percentage increases: private for-profit colleges carry the highest percentage of both poor and minority students. In the case of poor students, all other categories fare much worse; and the more selective they are, the worse it gets. However, once again, when we look at minorities, very selective schools seem to break this trend by taking a higher percentage of minorities than the moderately selective schools, though still much less than for-profits. So also when we look at the total numbers, the same implication seems to present itself: very selective schools seem to have succeeded in admitting more minority students, but not so much poor ones.

This also raised a question for me: given that for-profits are so good at attracting poor and minority students and the nonprofit schools are not, does that mean for-profits are a better solution to the inclusivity problem than affirmative action? This is of course assuming that nonprofits have been implementing robust affirmative action policies.

By the way, I have heard the claim that for-profits bankrupt poor students and/or the government that pays for the education. But if you look at the increase in undergraduate borrowing (same data set, scroll down), the percentage of poor students who borrow has barely increased in the past twenty years. Most of the increase in borrowing comes from middle and high income undergraduates. This is of course against the background of the rapid increase in college tuition. So the last interesting implication of the data seems to be a disconfirmation of the narrative that for-profit colleges prey on poor students and/or the government.

Who Is to Blame for “Systemic Racism”?

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There is much that I like and deeply admire about the work of heterodox sociologist Musa al-Gharbi (he’s also a sweet dude!). But we have our disagreements. In this particular essay, which I enjoyed reading on several levels, al-Gharbi claims that the main culprits for “systemic / institutional racism” are not the usual suspects, i.e. right-leaning, rural or suburban whites who vote against welfare programs and do not believe the narrative of “white privilege”. Rather, al-Gharbi argues, the ones who are “responsible” for “perpetuating” systemic racism are the left-leaning, coastal elite whites who “produce and consume antiracist content in academia or the media” and profess much disdain for racialized patterns of inequality and much desire for rectifying them.

Al-Gharbi presents some empirical data and various theoretical arguments for the claim above, including a theory of “benevolent racism” in which obsession with being “woke” in itself causes people to behave in racist ways. In this post I don’t want to question the data or the theories behind this claim. What I want to ask is this: why the intentional language? Compared to the traditional ways of looking at systemic racism, al-Gharbi has a provocatively novel theory. But one thing that al-Gharbi shares with traditional theories of systemic racism is the pervasive language of “responsibility”, “culpability”, “perpetuating”, “exacerbating”, and “reinforcing” that is attributed to the institutions and sub-populations of interest throughout the essay.

Why speak of these people as though they are intentionally creating systemic racism? If anything, al-Gharbi’s thesis (namely that these people perpetuate racism in spite — and even because — of their awareness of their privilege) naturally leads one to believe that the “left-leaning, coastal elite whites” are technically not morally “responsible” for systemic racism, unless one holds a very strict theory of moral responsibility in which one is morally responsible for anything that one is causally implicated in. I don’t think anyone holds such an extreme view of culpability who has not killed themselves out of unbearable guilt for millions of horrible things happening in the world every day.

For some reason, when it comes to racism, even heterodox thinkers such as al-Gharbi prefer to continue using a language that reeks of finger-pointing and obsession with blame rather than impartial sociological analysis. Al-Gharbi criticizes white elites for “expropriating blame” and adopting an “introspecitve and psychologized approach” to a problem that is “fundamentally social in nature”. But if the problem is psychologizing what is sociological, then it does not matter whether the blame is being “expropriated” or “appropriated”; the problem is that blame is being assigned to begin with. Blame is an individual matter, not a social one, and I would therefore argue that it should not feature in sociological explanations, ever.

Where Is the Received View?

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Most people (myself included) tend to speak as if the positions we are opposed to are the dominant “received views” in society, ones that are not in need of further argumentation or representation, presumably because they are already well-known and well-established. The position that one oneself defends, on the other hand, is typically viewed by the speaker as the critical, underdog view, as the mentality that has been neglected, suppressed, or underappreciated. Now, obviously, this contrast between the popularity of the two views has nothing to do with the intrinsic merits of the views in question, but rather with their relationship to other humans, i.e. how much other people know and accept each view. In principle, how much one believes in something, or how much one pushes a certain opinion, should not have anything to do with how popular the view is: ideally one would only care about the legitimacy and truthfulness of the view. Nevertheless, in practice, one’s perception of the popularity of an opinion and especially its perceived status as the “received view” tend to determine a great deal of one’s attitude towards the opinion. The more neglected the view is, the more one feels the urge to push it. I personally feel the constant desire to “correct” for the omissions that I see in my environment. Whenever I feel like a certain argument or viewpoint is having free rein and being disseminated uncritically in a given community that I am a member of, I tend to look for and emphasize the counterarguments to it, even if those counterarguments don’t strike me as particularly strong. As weak as they may be, surely they need to be heard before being dismissed?

I am confident that this urge to course-correct does not merely arise for those views that I already disagree with. When I enrolled at the HPS department at Pitt, I did not know much about the unique, “practice-oriented”, anti-metaphysics tradition of philosophy of science that had formed in this department in recent years. But I found, to my surprise, that almost everyone here shared my disdain for analytic metaphysics, which I had developed independently but for a lot of the same reasons. At the beginning, it was utterly cathartic to hear other people make statements that I had thought up for myself almost verbatim. And while it is still enjoyable to be around like-minded people, I have recently started to feel that here at Pitt we have our own way of regurgitating old phrases over and over again in a manner that begins to resemble less a proposition and more a lullaby, a feel-good signal from one agreer to another. I have thus found myself criticizing ideas that I used to stress with frustration in rooms full of analytic philosophers — rooms that in my thought represented the entire universe of Anglo-American philosophy.

But experiences such as the one I had after moving to Pittsburgh highlight the fundamental problem with the anti-received view attitude: How do we know which view is the received view and which ones are being neglected or suppressed? Even worse: are we correct to assume that there is such a thing as a received view in the first place? Perhaps the society is just a collection of lots of mini-societies each of which has their own received view, without any of them becoming /the/ received view? In that case, is one’s duty to criticize the received view of one’s immediate community? Given how much influence one’s perception of an opinion’s popularity has on how much one criticizes the view, answering these questions is of utmost importance. Yet answering these questions is not easy. One’s perception is often shaped by one’s immediate environment more than anything else.

As far as politics is concerned, my impression during the nine years of my presence in the US has always been that the received view in the American society as a whole is the Progressive platform. It was always apparent to me that if the thing on your mind was a Progressive talking point, even a boiler-plate statement that cannot survive five minutes of googling, you could express yourself freely and without fear. But if your position was anything other than the standard Liberal view, you would have to choose between silence and an extremely carefully crafted and sensitively worded argument. It was customary to follow up personal introductions with a condemnation of racism or a celebration of the multiple skin colors in the room, but talking about ethnic differences was extremely uncomfortable. It was commonplace to bash “the system”, “capitalism”, “globalism”, Wall Street, and the government. Making the case that these institutions and practices serve vital functions in the world was the difficult task. Bias and discrimination against gays and blacks was no news to anybody, whereas anti-Christian bias was a debated concept. Everyone knew that there was a consensus among experts on climate change, including those who denied this consensus, but virtually no one knew that there is an equally strong consensus among experts on the benefits of outsourcing and global trade — a lack of knowledge that extended even to those who defended global trade. The Progressive view was always the “public” view, the one that you could simply come out and say. Every other opinion required a private trial before releasing the beta version for public comment.

This has always baffled my Progressive friends. In their opinion things are completely the other way around. The dominant culture of the American society for them is Conservatism. The “mainstream”, uncritical culture that they are sick of is dominated by “whiteness”, Christianity, a love for unfettered capitalism, and all the other things that Progressives take themselves to be fighting against. The idea that their views are dominant in society is almost antithetical to the very identity of a Progressive.

This problem has always bothered me. Is one of us correct here? And if so how do we find who it is? Is it perhaps the case that everyone’s perception of the “dominant” or “received” view is simply a product of which dogmatic environment one grew up in and/or where one piled up most of one’s frustrations? Was my perception of Progressive beliefs and values as mainstream distorted by the fact that most of my life takes place in academia?

But place is only one of the complications. Time is another. What is and is not acceptable to say, what is the default view and what needs to be defended, what can go public right away and what needs trial runs — all of these can and do change over time. They can ebb and flow or even completely invert themselves within a decade

For example, a recent survey by Cato [1] showed that self-censorship and discomfort expressing oneself clearly correlate with political orientation: 30% of Strong Liberals said that the political climate prevents them from saying what they believe compared to 57% of Moderates and 76% of Strong Conservatives. On the other hand, while only 32% of Strong Liberals believe that political correctness silences necessary discussions, 78% of Moderates 87% of Strong Conservatives say the same thing. But are these numbers merely a reflection of the past couple of years? Or do they confirm my perception of the received view throughout the past decade?

And what if they are merely a reflection of the past couple of years? Does that mean the trends will be reversed again soon? How long should a trend go on until we say that it is in fact a trend?

My strongest inclination these days is towards the pluralist view: there is no such thing as the received view. Every time and place has its own dogma. What is “obvious truth” in one time and place can be the “long-refuted opinion” in another. A piece of evidence that is unheard of in one circle might be commonplace in another. A good citizen should not attempt to target for criticism the most salient dogma that threatens one’s society: there is no such thing. Rather, one should simply observe what the people in one’s spatio-temporal vicinity take for granted and try to poke holes in that.

[1] https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/state-free-speech-tolerance-america