DISQUS

Speaking of "pulling a fast one" and being excited -- it's entirely possible you're misunderstanding what's being said (or that you're being wildly unfair). I didn't "call" for optimal extinction. I pointed out that you can't be a good consequentialist on environmental policy as you claimed if you're ruling out a priori the possibility that the extinction of a species or environmental degradation in general might be optimal. And no, you don't get to say that these might be in principle be okay but only way in the future and that these things are inherently suboptimal in the immediate future. Or at least you don't if you really are committed to being the hard-headed, consequentialist empiricist on environmental & natural resource issues that you insisted to Wilkinson that you were.

I didn't define optimal extinction because I thought it was obvious, particularly given my other comments. You choose policy as best you can (from the set of all policies available to us) to maximize present discounted value, and if it turns out that the policy that best achieves that goal involves one species dying out, you call it "optimal extinction".

Now consider an extreme, very unrealistic example (just as a mental exercise): suppose there were some infinitely lived species that never reproduced at all (so leaving them alone doesn't increase future population) and that had no aesthetic or other value besides eating them. It's very easy to imagine that there would be an "optimal extinction" here (it's basically a nonrenewable resource, and it's not like reasonable people think we should never use them). In fact, if you can scale up your catch cheaply enough, and if the marginal value of the fish doesn't drop off too quickly (or you just expect to be richer and/or have plenty of alternatives in the future), that optimal extinction would be almost immediate.

Now please note that I'm not saying this is a realistic example. But I think it does a pretty good job of laying out the reasons why we would want to preserve a species -- e.g., if there are important (and good) interactions with other species or aesthetics or other value that you can get besides eating a fish, if marginal value drops rapidly, if the species grows or reproduces rapidly (or otherwise increases value), etc. And if you extend it, you can see how it's almost certainly not generally the case that the ideal is to shoot for the maximum sustainable yield.

Sorry for the overly long response.

No, I'm saying that I don't think a (competent) alien naturalist would believe that human have a hivemind. If you want to talk coherently about purposes and goals, you have to talk about individuals.

Well, first of all, "humanity" doesn't seek anything. More to the point, the issue isn't "would we rather have more big fish or not?" That gives a non-interesting answer to a non-interesting question. The better question is, is the present discounted value of the amount of extra big fish we get in the future from catching one less today greater than the value of catching said fish? The key point with big fish is that the "return" to leaving it in the water is lower.

I think poverty might cut in the opposite direction you're implying, given economic growth. If world poverty rates are declining and average income is increasing (so we expect to have more in the future than today), then that pushes for consuming more today. After all, if we're making an argument about transferring from the rich to the poor, well, future generations are richer than the current one, and since we're already discounting the future ...

Odograph,
Sure, those are facts, but I'm not sure they have the policy implications you seem to be assuming. If you have a consequentialist view of environmental issues, there's no reason why, for instance, being able to prevent the extinction of a big edible fish implies that you ought to prevent it. (That is, the natural resource econ literature explicitly allows for an "optimal extinction.")
Though I may be misreading you and merely stating the obvious.

I really should check myself rather than asking (I would plead busy morning, but then why am I looking at a blog?), but are they controlling for other variables, or is this just the straight data? I'm specifically thinking about education, but maybe race & gender too. IIRC playing around with GSS, holding race & gender constant, income makes one slightly more conservative (holding education equal) and education makes more one slightly more liberal (or at least socially liberal), holding income constant. I wonder what happens to the bends in those curves if they control for education (assuming they haven't) or if don't (assuming they have)?

Which theory, though? They weren't directly elected originally, so clearly not the original theory. You could say the theory of the people amending the constitution, but I'm not sure they had a theory in general, or if they did that it didn't amount to saying "increasing democracy is an end in itself."

Are there really a lot of discussions about the degree of democracy that are speaking directly about the effect on the quality of policy? Always sounds like people talking wishing to better express the 'will of the people' to me.

I don't want to be written off here as a crazy libertarian who is defecting in a cooperation game. But why couldn't all of the same logic be applied to appointing judges, or Supreme Court justices, or presidential cabinets? In fact, just consider this paragraph: Even absent corrupt motives, that role asks too much of any governor. No one can accurately represent the wishes of the people of the state, and no one should try. One could say the same thing not just about appointments, but about representative democracy in general. It seems like Chapman is expressing a tautology more than an argument: making decisions in a less democratic way is less democratic. Okay, fine: and so? Clearly no one would say that limitations on democracy are always bad and only justified when the alternative is cost-prohibitive: that would seem to rule out most of the constitution. I would say that I think judges should be appointed rather than elected, and not for primarily cost reasons -- it's because I think electing judges leads to worse judges.

Good point Freddie. But actually, since I'm already wishing, I'm just going to skip to wishing that there's a way that health care can be magically free. Or that the value of benefits to workers can exceed the value of the money it would take to pay for said benefits.

publiusendures,
I see the point, and I think it's reasonable (though I don't think I agree). I'm just saying that the happiness literature doesn't make your point more convincing, and also that the claim "happiness ... highest priority for most people" is provably false (at least if you define "happiness" to mean whatever it is those studies measure).

Regarding priorities, is it in fact the case that high income people do want lower/less progressive taxes? If they simply have other priorities that trump what they actually want on economic issues, then this should show up in public opinion polls. Does it?

publiusendures,
Happiness studies also say that, after 6 months or so, becoming a quadriplegic has no affect on happiness. Does this demonstrate: (a) people don't care about being quadriplegics, (b) that what people want can't be collapsed to "happiness" or (c) happiness literatures is just junk that comes from taking utility theory waaaaay too seriously [except for the part about how a utility function is only unique up to a monotonic transformation]?

Will,
You seem generally willing to take seriously the point that your vote is ridiculously unlikely to matter, so why is this so shocking? With the exception of P-Diddy, I don't think many voters who make more than $100K really and truly believe that they're swinging the election.

"There is certainly more than one way of winning an argument, but there's just one way of knowing: the empirical way. "

Has this ever been proven empirically?

More seriously, I just wonder what really was wrong with old-fashioned revealed preference? Sure, there are uncountably many utility functions that correspond to any set of preferences, making interpersonal comparisons deeply problematic (not that that stops anyone), but maybe that just tells us something about what we should expect from happiness research.

Daniel,
I'm a bit confused as to what the public good is here. I can see how if the state owns something and provides it to residents (or sells it and gives residents the money), that might fit (more or less) the technical definition of "public good". But to me, it seems like "public good" is a useful concept only when we're talking about goods where it's inherently difficult to exclude (as opposed to where they just happen not to exclude). It seems like the point of the concept is to point to places where it's hard for the market to exist and so state action is required; talking about places where the state's action per se causes the market absence seems to obscure the issue.

Am I just misunderstanding?

I had thought that the empirics were that education and performance on basic political tests don't have much of a predictive power (at least in a linear fashion) with political party, though they do have a lot of predictive power, just orthogonal to the right-left dimension. That is, adding extra education or political information changes preferences, but not systematically in favor of one party. Which seems to be entirely in keeping with what Brennan is saying (though not in keeping with some of the less sympathetic readings of what Brennan or Wilkinson are saying), unless I'm misinterpreting.

Tiberius,
Wouldn't one think that the practice isn't the act of voting itself, but something like, for example, reading newspapers or discussing politics or general education or something along those lines?

What about a test of general political knowledge (how many years to a Senator's term?, etc.) or even a vocabulary test (on grounds that smarter voters are more likely to be better voters)? If one agrees with arguments like Brennan's, it doesn't seem one would have to try very hard to generate a test that is more accurate than the status quo, right? After all, we're really just looking for something that works better in the aggregate.