I’ve never really understood the uproar over steroid¹ use in baseball. Unlike some other sports baseball lacked any actual rule banning steroids or performance enhancing drugs before 2004. True there was a policy (without any penalties) generally banning any baseball player from using or possessing any illegal drug or controlled substance but it’s also a MLB policy now that players can’t drink in their clubhouse. Surely you don’t feel that someone who snuck a beer into the clubhouse after a game would be a cheater do you? What about the players who bummed a valium for a plane flight? Sleep helps you play so it’s giving you an advantage on the field. Remember in the baseball culture of that time the use of steroids wasn’t considered a big deal. Besides, the substances used by the more sophisticated users very well might not have been scheduled, and thus not illegal², at the time.

Taking a broader perspective on the attitude we take to cheating in baseball it’s simply absurd to try and hang your the outrage at steroid use on the notion that it’s cheating. When a pitcher is caught scuffing the ball or applying spit it’s not a big issue the way it would be if they were found to be using steroids. Of course some would argue that steroid use by a player undermines the validity of their records by making it impossible to compare them to the past greats and thus damages the game. Why anyone would think that violating a policy that everyone understood wasn’t a genuine rule of the game should undermine the validity of your record but actually cheating during the game doesn’t count for that much totally baffles me but it doesn’t matter as the whole notion that tis nonsensical. As people have throughly documented past players have unfairly benefited from evils like segregation and rule changes to such a degree that the notion of comparing players from one era to another simply by examining the numbers doesn’t make any sense.

Finally, when pushed on these two arguments the people making a fuss about about steroids usage retreat to the argument that these players are role models and setting a bad example for children. Even if so where is the outrage over players who spend the night carousing, who leave their wives or don’t save enough money? Children see baseball players publicly flaunt all kinds of bad behavior all the time but they only hear about the steroid use because moralizing fans and prosecutors insisting on digging it up. Moreover, while these players certainly take some risk they aren’t desperate body builders, even with the steroids they live a healthier lifestyle than most public figures. In my view we should simply take the use of performance enhancing drugs as just another evolution in the long series of changes to the game.

So if the revelations about baseball players past steroid use hasn’t upset me what has? Government prosecutors threatening to prosecute a man’s wife and mother in law for tax violations just to pressure him into spilling the beans on Barry Bonds.** As I’ve said previously I think it should be illegal (frankly I would add it to the constitution) to threaten someone’s family to secure their testimonty. Even if the practice itself doesn’t seem repugnant to you if the defense can’t (openly) pay witnesses to testify for fear it would bias their testimony why should the prosecution be able to threaten their family with jail time? But even if you accept the practice is sometimes nencessery is the Barry Bonds case really that important?

I can’t believe that the government is threatening to screw over a man’s family just so he will help them prove Barry Bonds lied. That really is a new low.

What’s truly amazing about the Phelps bong incident is that people manage to express shock and outrage at his behavior with a straight face. Especially given the fact that they couldn’t have really found it that unlikely that someone in Phelps’ situation would smoke some pot. I mean some of the things they say would be too over the top for an onion story:

He should have known better this time, and at this point, you wonder if Phelps has a problem. He has shown up in plenty of pictures on the Web, and you never know how credible they are. But they become more and more realistic with each verified mistake. He promises never again. To me, he has promised that already wearing red, white and blue. Maybe that Olympic ideal seems hokey to some, but he has packaged it and made the most of it.

I particularly liked the attempt in this article to reach out to the pot sympathetic crowd by suggesting that even if it was ok for a random guy to smoke pot somehow it wasn’t for Phelps. Presumably because he was a role model which would have the harmful effect of….I know, letting random guys know it’s ok to smoke pot. Hmm.

Does she not realize how many middle- and high-school kids look up to Michael Phelps? That he’s on the front of Wheaties boxes right now? That we all warn our kids about the dangers of drug use? Most parents find that photo sad and disappointing and will use it as a Teachable Moment for teenagers. What Michael Phelps did was a shame, but adults’ defending—and even encouraging—his drug use are far more shameful.

This one just demonstrates the reasons I tend not to convince many people. I just don’t do the whole underhanded shift from, they disagree with me about what is dangerous, to, they must be recklessly encouraging behavior they know is bad. More on this later.

However, this whole situation raises a puzzling issue. If people realize that pot use is actually pretty common, indeed pretty common even in the sort of person they would see as being on the ‘right track’¹, why does opposition to pot remain so strong? I mean one might think that if many of your friends, major political figures you know, famous scientists and Olympian record holders all smoked up why would they think legalizing pot would be a big deal?

The explanation is that we don’t always, or even mostly, go from evidence to conclusion as we pretend it does. Often there is some reason we would like to accept the conclusion so we manufacture a story to tell ourselves about how we are justified in that belief. For instance we all realize that “My parents were catholic” isn’t a valid justification for accepting the doctrine of original sin or salvation by faith and works but yet somehow people who are born to catholic parents are very likely to be catholic and many of them would give you a very different explanation of why they believe in Catholicism rather than Islam. Something very similar goes on when it comes to moral issues in politics.

Most people in our society grow up hearing the message that even occasional pot use in college is some kind of shameful dirty behavior, the sort of thing that people might whisper about many years later. Unlike getting totally smashed on cheap vodka at college parties where, despite it’s danger, people are usually happy to publicly laugh about after graduation most people still don’t want their grandma² knowing they smoked up or even that they are okay with people getting stoned. Therefore when the subject comes up around the family table people have a strong incentive not to voice support for loosening pot laws. Indeed, if you have actually gotten stoned the conversation likely makes you anxious about being found out and the last thing you want to do is to give them cause to suspect you think smoking pot isn’t a big deal. Thus there is a strong pressure to adopt some kind of rationalization which lets you avoid thinking of yourself as a hypocrite without requiring you tell grandma that her worries about pot are overblown. Of course when you get to the age where you are having kids yourself an older sister or a prudish new friend take grandma’s place.

This is where your baby brother (alternatively your child) steps into the equation. You recognize that pot can become a harmful habit for some people. Sure so can WoW but if you buy your baby brother WoW for Christmas no one will view you as foolish and irresponsible for encouraging MMORPG playing. We want other people to think we are responsible and mature so we make sure to make grave sounding statements about the risks of pot, especially if grandma is in the room. Even in private we tend to feel guilty about telling a younger brother it’s ok to go smoke up where we wouldn’t have the slightest qualm about taking him out to get smashed when he turns 21. The harms we do by failing to be sufficiently cautionary are very concrete and those done by going overboard are diffuse and abstract so we are motivated to talk up warnings and dangers.

There are a whole host of ills to be laid at the feet of our CYA approach to giving advice but in the case of drugs it augments the granny factor and hands us a ready made excuse for our hypocrisy. Well sure, the reasoning goes, my friends and I can handle pot fine but people my little brother’s age/son’s age shouldn’t be able to get it. Or if you got stoned at that age you instead substitute a concern about the increased strength of today’s weed or it’s increasing association with hard drugs. Of course in actuality making drugs illegal tends to make them easier for youth to access (drug dealers rarely card) and stronger weed is actually more healthy weed but we aren’t evaluating an argument we are searching for a narrative that makes us the mature and responsible party and avoids a disapproving lecture/look from grandma without forcing us to think we are hypocrites. Once ‘grandma’ becomes on older friend and our little brother is replaced with our daughter it takes incredibly strength of character (or a bunch of hippie friends) not to just go along with the flow and accept this narrative.

Frankly, I’m not sure what can be done about this problem. The baby boomers seem to illustrate the fact that the pressure to conform and be thought well of is so strong that even people who smoked up back in the 60s have become the older generation who disapproves of anyone who is foolish enough to suggest to youth that pot smoking isn’t a big deal. I fear it is a stable equilibrium.

It’s not uncommon on the blogs I read to see people objecting to some kind of government action as inconsistent with libertarianism. As a mild example consider this post critiquing the idea of letting bankruptcy judges modify mortgage obligations. More extreme examples are easy to find and usually characterized by strident, but unsupported, declarations that such and such is in principle unacceptable government intervention. Now I happen to agree it would be a mistake to hand bankruptcy judges the general power to renegotiate mortgages¹ but the problem is that referencing libertarianism does nothing to support this argument nor virtually all of the other arguments it is invoked to support. You can no more justify specific governmental interventions by saying you are a libertarian than you could justify federal funding for giving beanie babies to the poor by saying you are a democrat.

Before we can see this we first need to eliminate the spectre of principled libertarianism from the discussion. Many self identified libertarians seem to take the position that the government is absolutely forbidden from interfering in certain vaguely defined kinds of private behaviors no matter what the consequences. However, it’s no accident that, apart from Ayn Rand’s Dexedrine fueled rantings², the deontological restrictions on acceptable government are always left vague or unexplored. Given any supposed inviolable libertarianesque restriction on governmental behavior it’s easy to create a hypothetical where the impact of this principle is so repugnant no one would endorse it. You think the government ought not to ever seize private property solely to distribute the benefits more broadly? What if that property was billions of doses of the only cure for a devastating global plague and the owner was dead seat on destroying them? Would anyone really oppose government seizure of property in that circumstance?

Sure, some people will bite the bullet and endorse deontological moral theories but the rules they endorse don’t resemble the sort of governmental restrictions libertarians have in mind. Given the consistent failure of anyone to articulate a remotely attractive inviolable set of libertarian restrictions on the government we can dismiss any supposed principled libertarian objection to governmental action unless it comes with an attractive articulation of those inviolable restrictions. In other words you can’t just insist that there is some unstated but intuitively compelling rule out there which prevents the government from doing what you find objectionable and expect others to just take it on faith.

Once we accept that in theory severe enough consequences can justify what libertarians would otherwise see as objectionable government interference the whole argumentative structure shifts. The libertarian can no longer say, “that policy would violate personal property it’s unacceptable,” he admits that sometimes the government must do just that. Instead he must argue that the consequentialist benefits of the policy aren’t sufficient to balance the harms to liberty. Indeed, it would be perfectly reasonable for a libertarian to say, “I think that 2 accidental deaths per thousand people is a reasonable price to pay to be free of gun regulations but not 3 per thousand.”³. However, this kind of argument is never made since it saps the appeal to libertarianism of all it’s appeal. Whatever valuations you place on liberty seem arbitrary and the argument is mired in the same kind of consequentalist quibbles that an purely pragmatic objection would face.

Of course a sophisticated libertarian would instead say that libertarianism is a formula for producing good policy outcomes. On this view it’s not that protecting liberty necessarily has some kind of intrinsic value but that when liberty is protected good consequences tend to result. This kind of libertarian tends to emphasize the effectiveness of private property and the market economy in creating wealth and alleviating suffering and try to parlay this into an argument against whatever policy they are currently opposing. That argument might be enough to suggest we should default to a libertarian approach but it isn’t enough to counter specific claims that this policy will lead to beneficial results. After all it’s only in most cases that the libertarian approach is superior but the other side has given specific arguments to the effect that in this case government intervention would be beneficial. If the argument in favor of this specific policy is valid then it should be enacted as one of the few exceptions to the superiority of the libertarian approach. If the argument is shown to be invalid then the reference to libertarianism does no extra work in rejecting the policy. All that being a libertarian does for the author or audience is arm them with the conviction that there is probably a flaw in the arguments for some governmental intervention. It doesn’t resolve them from the responsibility to pinpoint those flaws.

Perhaps the best case that someone could use to bring a general libertarian philosophy to bear on a specific question of policy is to argue that people are irrationally biased toward governmental intervention and against the, usually better, libertarian solution. If the libertarian can convince us that we lack the facilities to rationally evaluate arguments for this policy he can leave us with nothing but the raw general preference for libertarian solutions to guide us. In other words if we are no better evaluating specific policy arguments in our native language than in esperanto we might as well follow the same strategy in both cases and always guess the more libertarian solution is better. Unfortunately, at best this gets us a vague, “well it’s more likely than not that intervention will be bad,” which is far weaker than the conclusion the libertarian in the debate desires. Moreover, it’s simply implausible to believe that we can somehow rationally evaluate the argument that on average the libertarian policy tends to be superior but can’t gain any greater information about the better solution in any specific case. After all if we can’t tell what policies tend to work and which don’t how did we ever conclude that the libertarian policies were preferable in most instances in the first place?

Ultimately one should be a (sophisticated) libertarian only if in most cases the arguments for the libertarian style solution are compelling. One justifies being a libertarian by reference to many specific arguments for the superiority of the libertarian solution. You can’t justify rejecting an argument for a specific government intervention because you are a libertarian.

Kellogg is jettisoning Phelps because he was photographed smoking pot. I think those of us who disagree with the deciscion should boycott Kellogg in response.

I’m constantly amazed at the moral outrage people express at executive pay. For instance take this post expressing amazement that executives who spend 1.2 million dollars to renovate their offices can sleep at night while normal people lose their job or experience economic hardship. Presumably the idea is that it’s immoral for executives to be that profligate when other people at their company are being forced to make sacrifices. While unethical dealings to increase their earnings are obviously wrong the ‘wasteful’ behavior of these executives is no different from that of any other American.

I mean how many of us pay thousands of dollars to get a new car or purchase houses for 100s or thousands? These aren’t truly necessities. Sure, I live four miles from work and it’s almost always below freezing but I could leave two hours early every morning and walk. Sure, it might be shameful and unpleasant but most of us don’t have to buy a house or even rent an apartment of our own. We could live in our parents basements or share an apartment with others. Even if we walked miles in the snow every day and choose to live in our parents basement we would still be many times better off than the billions of people who live on less than a dollar a day. Our purchase of a new car or choice of a nice apartment is as wasteful relative to the way most of humanity lives as an executives expenditure of 1.2 million to redecorate his office.

Ultimately we evaluate our standard of living relative to our friends and associates. Owning a car or living in our own residence seems reasonable because that’s what our colleagues do and our social circle expects that we will do as well. The fact that we, just like these executives, could pass up those conveniences and gift that money to the poor doesn’t make us monsters in our eyes because we aren’t being any more selfish than our friends. Similarly in the circles these executives travel in these expenditures aren’t out of line. Sure, they look obscene to us but no more so than our use of resources looks to the worlds poor.

At first the Barack victory filled me with hope and excitement. Aside from the symbolic accomplishment of accepting a president of African ancestory Obama seems to be the rarest sort of politician: a man of first class intellect honorably committed to the ideal of improving society but pragmatic enough to deliberately mislead the public. I couldn’t prove that, if I could it wouldn’t be true, but the way Barack accepted Christ (and the particular flavor he lead people to believe he endorsed at that time) was remarkably convenient. Not only is this great man now our president but he providentially bestrides the political landscape at a time of crisis handing him the opportunity to recast the American social contract. Universal health care, improved race relations, universal access to education what isn’t now within our grasp?

Sadly, nothing that really matters. Sure society might improve slightly, we might grow slightly strong social ties, we might erase a little pain with improved health care but nothing fundamentally is going to change. Decades of social science research tell us that our capacity for happiness is handicapped by evolution and their is no perfect social structure that can prevail over basic biological constraints. Even if Barack could spread his hands and bring forth plenty to every man, woman and child in the country he wouldn’t change our human nature. Someone is going to have more money, more power, faster cars, hotter sexual partners and (ultimately) more social status and others will crave it. A well ordered society can eliminate some small genuine efficiencies but ultimately decades of data indicate that further major improvement in overall societal happiness are denied to us by our biology. Sure, the industrial revolution made people happier but a country hits a certain minimum level of prosperity (which the western world has enjoyed for at least half a century) and everyone has indoor plumbing and gets morphine while dying of painful cancer overall societal happiness hits a brick wall.

To put the case more vivedly who would you prefer to be: a roman emperor¹ or a poor resident in an inner city slum? I know I’d prefer the former even though objectively the worst off Americans get a better education, receive better medical care and have better (non-human) toys than the most pampered Roman emperor. The worst school in the poorest slum throws knowledge at children about beyond the wildest dreams of the most educated philosophers of the classical age. No need to stab in the dark about earth, air, fire and water the book tells you about chemical elements right there, no need to wonder if moving lights in the sky are gods, your daily dose of TV makes sure you know they are other stars and planets. For all of Emperor Claudius’s imperial majesty he couldn’t command the quality of medical treatment that we provide to penniless vagrants who wander into our hospitals. Having objectively better conditions simply doesn’t keep making us more happy after some point and there’s a limit to how much fairer distribution can improve the situation.

If this was simply destiny then fine, we do the best that we can but biology need not be destiny. If evolution limits our capacity for joy, wonder and pleasure then we must remove those limits. Perhaps you think this isn’t possible, perhaps the flawed logic of Brave New World² makes you think this dream is only an illusion. However, there is solid research baking up the commonsense fact that some people have innately higher happiness fixed points than others. We all experience the ups and downs of life but some of us tend to return to a state of vague glumness while others drift back to innate happiness. Discovering a treatment, or offering genetic modification, to lift us all up to this higher set point would do an order of magnitude more for social welfare than any single payer health care scheme or universal college access could in the wet dreams of progressives. Even better we need not worry that this pleasure would undermine our social and economic systems: research indicates that hypomanic people are actually more productive and better employees than those of us more given to depression³.

Making us all as resilient and happily inclined as the most good natured of us is only what we know for sure could be achieved. There is no reason to believe that we couldn’t take average happiness to unimaginable levels. Every day could be as good as the best day of your life and there is no reason to believe some kind of drugged out stupor or uniform monotonous joy would be necessary to achieve this. Bad things would still sadden us and good ones life our moods, it’s just a question of where we want to put the baseline. Of course more radical change would have to be carried out with extreme caution but when the benefits are so unimaginably huge we have a moral duty to explore our options.

In light of all this I find myself seeing the activists on both sides of this election as tragic figures. The crusading Obama supporter thinks of themselves as fighting the good fight for a better world but in reality their only fighting over the tiniest crumbs of possible social welfare. It’s as if we are all standing out in the rain zealously debating whether to trade our umbrellas for raincoats to stay dry but failing to even ask if we might want to step inside. Then again maybe Obama is an even better man than I give him credit for, maybe he’ll start a secret government research program into biochemically improving people’s average happiness. It’s a long shot but maybe I’ll write him a note and try to convince him.

If you watched so much as one event during this summer’s Olympics you probably heard about the extensive efforts to catch athletes using performance enhancing drugs. Now certainly using steroids, HGH or any other pharmaceutical training aids is cheating and the athletes who use them ought to be stripped of their awards. However, just because something is against the rules doesn’t mean if should be against the rules. So while we ought to chastise cheating athletes who surreptitiously take performance enhancing substances to give them an advantage over their rule abiding competitors does it make sense to have rules against doping in the first place? I think serious consideration reveals the answer is no. Regulations on the type of doping, bans on acute intoxication during competition and other reasonable restrictions make sense but the blanket rule against doping harms both sports and medicine.

In NASCAR (auto racing) the rules often impose a fair number of restrictions on the sort of car that can be driven in a race. When better car designs began pushing races to faster speeds restrictor plates and other design features were mandated to keep the sport (relatively) safe. Thus the rules act to prevent excessive risks to drivers but absent particular reasons to ban or require a practice they allow the teams to modify their cars as they see fit. The net result of this not only maintains the excitement of competitive racing it also encourages engineering advances that bring benefits to society at large. My vision would be something similar for medical enhancement. The rules would ban particularly risky/harmful medications while putting the substantial enthusiasm and advertising money available in sports to generate medical advances. Thus to justify the outright ban on doping one must be able to cite some harm the policy causes that outweighs this benefit as well as the entertainment value of seeing athletes perform even more incredible feets.

The standard objection to allowing doping is that it would make new records and achievements meaningless since modern athletes would be competing with the assistance of chemical compounds while the past greats had no such help (or maybe they weren’t caught). However, most of the emotional force of these arguments is really based on a misconception about how doping works. Somehow people imagine that they could just pop some steroids and go compete in olympic weightlifting next summer but this is simply not true. Sure doping can help athletes become stronger faster, recover from injury quicker and so forth but it doesn’t substitute for the insane dedication and time spent practicing. Moreover, since all the serious competitors will be doping it will still come down to the same factors it always has: luck, dedication, talent etc..

So putting aside the idea that somehow the striving and hunger to win that we love about sports would become irrelevant how much sense does this objection make? Not much really. The idea that somehow modern athletes and those of days past had comparable tools is pure fantasy. Take someone with the same amount of ‘natural’ talent and let them train using techniques from the 50s and modern techniques and their isn’t much of a question about who will win the event. Just the fact that modern athletes grew up with all the benefits of modern medicine and nutritional knowledge is enough to give them a huge leg up over the competitors of a generation ago. As if this wasn’t enough advances in equipment design certainly contribute to world records. The new seamless Speedo swimsuits supposedly shaved a significant amount off race times but that didn’t make watching Phelps compete any less exciting. Maybe you could avoid things like the new speedo swimsuits but even changes like using deeper pools can change race times.

Another common argument is that sports are somehow supposed to push the limits of human performance and that if doping was allowed we would no longer be seeing what the ‘natural’ human body could achieve. However, modern athletes already don’t reflect what a ‘natural’ human could achieve. These athletes were given antibiotics to recover from sickness as children, broken bones were set and they were generally kept in better physical shape than the people of just several generations ago. Moreover, there is simply no principled line that can be drawn between doping and the scientific analysis used to select appropriate vitamins and nutrients for athletes. Trying to insist on a no doping rule for athletes will become even more ridiculous as we develop compounds for the general public that make them more fit and healthy without the need for unpleasant time in the gym.

The final and last objection is that somehow doping would pose too great a risk to the athletes or they would no longer provide good role models for children. Given that we allow sports like NASCAR and let girls start training for gymnastics at super young ages this extreme concern about athlete health seems a bit disingenuous. Moreover, as I pointed out above these risks can be reduced and often these doping compounds can be used to speed recovery from injury. Given the potential medical benefits to society at large shouldn’t we try and only retreat to a total ban when we find that it’s impossible to retain a reasonable degree of safety. Moreover, by reducing the risks from surreptitious doping it may also make many athletes safer. The role model argument is outright circular. The only reason to think kids ought to believe that the managed use of medications under a doctor’s supervision for athletic training is wrong is because we’ve decided that’s it’s wrong. Sure we don’t want high school kids to use steroids so they don’t feel like a dweeb but that’s no more of an argument against the professional managed use of enhancing medications than the fact that we don’t want kids to speed is an argument that NASCAR should impose a 60mph speed limit.

Like everyone else I’ve been following the crisis on wall street and the proposed government bailout. Just like the rest of the American populace (excepting a few experts) I lack the ability to really evaluate the need for or the sufficiency of the proposed bailout and I worry about jumping to give a broad grant of authority to a few members of the executive branch in the midst of a panic. However, just because a proposal has risks doesn’t mean it isn’t the best option. During times of war the executive branch, and military generals in particular, are given the awesome power to choose who lives and who dies but despite the risks and temptations this creates we don’t believe a congressional committee ought to second guess those choices. True, this is not a war but the same observation applies: just because concentrated power poses risks doesn’t mean it’s not the best overall bet.

I would like to believe in this case oversight by some board of experts, e.g., the federal reserve board, would be possible and beneficial but this might not be practical. However, the idea floating around that congress should provide direct oversight scares me. Obviously, congress should follow the actions taken during the bailout and intervene legislatively if it discovers any abuses but, even if constitutional¹, giving a congressional committee the power to review bailout decisions would be a bad idea. Not only do the congressmen involved lack the expertise to make truly informed decisions but they’ve already demonstrated their willingness to put the rhetoric of getting even above the interests of the country. Senator McCain has even done this in the name of putting America First, though Obama and the democrats in the senate aren’t any better.

Rather than focusing on fixing the financial meltdown from the news I’ve seen congressmen are getting caught up in making sure that CEOs are denied their golden parachutes or demanding that we bail out homeowners as well as the ‘fat cats’ on wall street. Now one might think this rescue package is unjustified or unnecessary but the only reason to pursue the bailout is to prevent the economic instability from spreading to the larger economy. The worry is that without government intervention confidence in financial instruments will collapse thus denying individuals and businesses the credit they need to drive the economy. If you don’t think the problems in the financial sector threaten the general economy then you shouldn’t supporting any bailout at all. Unlike the collapse of the financial sector there is no reason I’ve heard to believe that not bailing out homeowners would cause a general economic collapse. Maybe as a matter of policy the government ought to be helping these troubled homeowners more but that’s a different issue and should be carefully considered not allowed to interfere with an emergency bailout.

The obsession with golden parachutes is even worse. One can argue all day about whether it is just for CEOs to receive gigantic compensation packages but the truth is that the cost of CEO compensation at financial institutions is a minuscule percentage of the 700 billion dollars proposed bailout. Rather than focusing on this insignificant cost our representatives could be doing more to save us money by focusing on the details of the actual bailout. Moreover, I worry that some kind of golden parachute poison pill in this bailout would create an incentive for CEOs to avoid taking part even if it is in their companies best interest. Besides, I don’t see why the fact that these CEOs miscalculated means they shouldn’t be compensated at the rate they negotiated. We don’t think basketball players who don’t perform as well as expected or get injured making a stupid play ought to return the money from their contracts why is it any different for CEOs? This isn’t to say there aren’t general reforms that should be taken about CEO pay in general, e.g., giving stockholders greater control over it, but it is to say that congress should be more concerned with saving the US economy rather than making sure everyone suffers.

So I often find myself trying to make the case that people are especially irrational when it comes to voting and other activities where the emotional content is large but individuals have little influence over the outcome or aren’t very affected by it but I’m stymied by a lack of a good example. I can point them at “The Myth of the Rational Voter” for good theoretical and empirical arguments but a good example is worth a lot. I ran across a good one today listening to the KQED discussion about the proposed golden gate suicide barrier. Now I think a suicide barrier is almost certainly unjustified at the cited cost for reasons I give below but what’s interesting/scary isn’t that people disagree with me. If you think there are substantial third party benefits from a suicide barrier or even just make different plausibility judgments from me in a way that consistently favors the barrier you could reasonably think it is a good idea. What’s both scary and interesting is the sorts of motivations people have for thinking a barrier is obviously a good idea and their failure to even indulge in the sort of cost/benefit analysis that would be appropriate for this kind of question.

During the debate the mental health professional opposing the barrier offered rational responses and citations pointing out the faulty reasoning used in arguments for the efficacy of the barrier those who wanted the barrier would call in to say something like, “you admit a barrier might save some people so how many lives is enough?” or, “If you just say we will always have suicides your saying we will always have poverty and…” and those callers at least were making cogent arguments. Many others simply related their personal knowledge of people who had tried to commit suicide and otherwise used emotional ploys (likely unconsciously) to frame the question as whether you were for or against suicide. One caller even went so far as to explicitly express her outraged amazement that someone in the mental health profession would be so cold and unfeeling as to not want to stop suicides.

What is notable about these remarks is that the guest opposing the barrier was arguing that it simply wouldn’t be effective and that we should put our resources into mental health services rather than barriers. The only role these arguments, or the anecdotes offered in the SF gate series promoting the barrier could have in the argument is to make people feel bad for not supporting the barrier. Indeed, despite the fact that at some point we must trade off cost against lives saved (a billion dollars would not be a cost effective price to pay to save one person) some of these arguments derive their force only by pushing the opponent to bite the bullet and admit that these lives aren’t worth X dollars.

To be fair, the callers opposing the barrier were no better. Their arguments seemed to be little more than thinly glossed resentment at being forced to accomodate suicidal individuals. Also the lady supporting the barrier did make reasonable points by citing several studies that on their face would seem to suggest a barrier would be effective. These studies were pretty much the same ones mentioned in this article and fairly easily rebutted. For instance, showing that survivors of one attempt have good prospects for survival is almost totally useless and may even work argue against the barrier. Not only do the survivors constitute a biased sample containing few of those most intent on killing themselves but this statistic, if valid, argues for ensuring that people first attempt suicide in a fashion that is likely to be prevented. Yet, unless you believe a large portion of people who jump off the golden gate bridge do so on impulse while crossing the bridge for unrelated reasons, you would expect that putting up a suicide barrier on the golden gate that is known to be nearly foolproof would drive people contemplating suicide to focus on another location that may not be so easily monitored. Moreover, making it impossible to jump off a particular bridge seems much more akin to taking a single gun off the street or blocking access to one type of barbiturate while leaving others on the market than the wholesale elimination of one convenient method of killing yourself, e.g., putting your head in a coal-gas stove. Not to mention the fact that a single historical data point about gas stoves is highly suspect, likely involves plenty of confounding factors and the rise in suicides 15 years hence is inconsistent with the supposed claim.

Still, even if you generously believe that the barrier will prevent a number of deaths approximately equal to the 34 confirmed suicides that occur some years this simply doesn’t get you to the conclusion that a suicide barrier is justified. For instance economic studies suggest that we implicitly trade off a single life for about 1.5 million dollars. Importantly even if our individual choices in terms of risks and rewards would place a higher dollar value on a statistical life it’s the choices implicit in government decisions that are really relevant since if we could use the 50 million that it will likely cost to build the barrier to save more lives some other way surely that would be preferable. Thus not even counting the loss of utility that might occur from a degradation of the bridge aesthetics nor the fact that the life of a suicidal person is likely to be less enjoyable and thus contribute less utility than an average member of society (suicidal people really do feel more unhappy than most of us) the barrier is a close call. With these factors considered it seems to me that the costs outweigh the benefits.

If you disagree that’s fine but it’s disturbing that people support these projects merely to avoid thinking of themselves as cold because they weigh the cost against the value of the lives lost. That doesn’t make you warm and caring, it makes you a moral monster. Deciding that someone’s life isn’t worth the amount of money it costs to save may seem cold but it’s not as horrific as letting people die because you wanted to feel warm and fuzzy so you couldn’t be bothered to balance the lives this money could save if used to improve road safety with those that might be saved via a suicide barrier.

There are important questions about the appropriate role of government in encouraging healthy behavior. As a free society we should have deep reservations about forcibly taking people’s money and using it to tell them how they should live, even when we are sure that would make for a better society. History is replete with examples of tyrannical majorities wasting resources and even fueling crime combating`harmful’ behavior. Thus we already have plenty of reason to tread carefully when legislation to discourage tobacco use, encourage exercise or promote a healthy diet is proposed. However, I have a much more fundamental question. Is it even preferable to have a society where people live longer?

At first glance this seems to be a truly stupid question. After all it’s bad when people die early. Isn’t it? Well, I certainly don’t want to die and neither do most people but that misses the point. We all die eventually and even if we personally want to put off death as long as possible can we truly say that a society where the average life span is 90 years rather than 70 is a better place? Would a society where the average life span was 200 years be even better? What sort of life span would be optimal?

It’s tempting to answer ‘infinite’ and certainly it would be wonderful if we could all retain our youth for forever and never have to grieve over lost friends and family. However, for the immediate future this simply isn’t possible. No healthy diet or prudent lifestyle can reduce the (average) number of friends we must mourn¹ and no amount of yoga or wheatgrass smoothies can prevent old age from taking it’s toll. Moreover, suppose we really could increase our lifespan indefinitely. At least for the next century or so we would have to virtually stop reproducing to avoid outgrowing our resources.

Ultimately we can’t simply say ‘life is good so we want more of it.’ Almost certainly such a policy would actually demand we divert money from healthcare into programs encouraging reproduction. As a society we’ve already reached the conclusion that it’s better to maintain a relatively small population that can live well than to expand into a great multitude that can barely make do. But rationally applying this insight to this question suggests that investing in longer life spans might not make sense.

Certainly we feel greater pain when someone is snatched from life too early and so we certainly shouldn’t stop pursuing more effective treatments to save people who might otherwise be struck down in the prime of life. Nor would we want to create distress or anger by denying people treatment. However, researching ways to further prolong our life span would likely introduce greater variability (some people die of heart attacks at 65 others make it to 130) and thus prolong the time people would have to endure the loss of loved ones as well as the sense of tragedy and anger at their deaths. Other things being equal a society is better if people spend a smaller proportion of their lives old and frail and since extending old age is unlikely to make people substantially happier (on average²) investing in technologies to lengthen our lifespan seems counterproductive. Of course we should look for technologies that let people be healthy and fit for a greater fraction of their lives and if we are able to make 80 feel like 55 that might justify more investment in keeping people alive till 80.

The observation that merely putting off death is not necessarily a desirable end in and of itself also has substantial consequences to what kind of charity and aid is best to give to the third world. However, that will have to wait for another post.