Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Ethics

Grace and the Cycle of Abuse

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On December 2, 2013

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Those to whom evil is done. Do evil in return

– W. H. Auden

Grace is the good we do not deserve.  A society without grace, a society without mercy, a society that knows only vengeance, is a horrid land of violence and fear.

The simple rule of evil is Auden’s, but it’s worse than his line implies: we don’t do evil to those who do evil to us.  Oh no, those who are abused, do evil to someone else, someone innocent, and so it goes.  The cycle of abuse lives in families, it lives in prisons, it lives in everyday life, it lives in nations, as Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians attests.

A person or group who is hurt comes to believe that’s how one should act.  It’s weird, it’s counterintuitive (shouldn’t abuse make you want to be sure it never happens to anyone else), but the evidence is that it’s true.  Once hurt, once damaged, too many of us act out that hurt on other people.

Or, as the saying about child-rearing runs, children do what you do, not what you say. If you abuse them, they will abuse.  If you bully them, they will become bullies.

True of adults, too.

Justice requires that we punish those who hurt others except in defense of themselves or others.  But the nature of that punishment is key, it must be rehabilitative, not punitive.  This was understood well by by the prison reformers of previous generations, and in this as in much else, we have regressed from our humanity in the 60s and  70s.

A prison where people are raped, turns out rapists.  A prison where people are beaten, turns out people who resort easily to violence.  A prison where the only people who can protect you from rape and beatings are racist gangs, turns out racist gang-members.

Rape a rapist, or stand by and watch, effectively condoning it, and you become a rapist.  The problem with eye-for-an-eye punishment is that it perpetuates the cycle of abuse and it coarsens those who must do the punishing.

And so, in civilized nations (like Finland, not America) the punishment is understood simply: the loss of freedom.  Because the prisoner has proven they cannot be trusted to make their own decisions, the right to make those decisions is taken away from them for a time.  During that time they should be treated well, treated better than they treated their victim, both because a society which rapes and murders is coarsened and because the cycle of abuse must be broken.

The recidivism rate in Finland is 1/2 that of the US rate.  Why?  Because their prisoners aren’t raped and beaten, that’s why.  Because they are treated kindly.

Grace is the kindness you don’t deserve.  Only grace, only kindness, can break the cycle of abuse.  To be sure, it doesn’t always work, but it works more often than violence does.

If you aren’t going to either lock someone up for the rest of their life (expensive) or kill them (and we make way too many mistakes to be killing people based on our court’s decisions), then you’d best treat prisoners well, because they’re coming out of the prison, and you want them to come out better people than they went in, not worse.

This also has to do with how we treat them once out.  The standard practice, now, of criminal background checks for every decent jobs, means that ex-cons can never actually have a good life outside prison.  Absent any opportunity in the legal economy, of course they go to the illegal economy: those are often the only people willing to hire them.  Once someone has done their time, they’ve paid their debt to society and save for a very few jobs, criminal record checks need to be illegal.

Treat people with both justice and grace, and you’ll have a far happier society.  This is true for affairs far beyond prison, mind you, but it is especially true for those who have committed crimes.  Justice without mercy is cruelty, and mercy without justice is unfair.

Grace: it’s the good we don’t deserve, and combined with justice, it’s how we should run our societies.

The Role of Violence and Coercion in Saving the World

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On November 9, 2013

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It will be impossible to save the world from climate change without coercion.  The problem of climate change is a problem of common sinks and limited resources: the atmosphere can only absorb so much carbon, the seas only have so many fish and can only withstand us dumping so much plastic and other pollutants into them.  The world has only so many forests, and so on.

These are genuinely limited resources.  Dumping into them, or chopping them down, or overfishing them is an advantage to whoever does it: they can burn dirty (cheap) fuels, they can use plastic packaging consumers like, they can have fish to eat now.

It is rational, in the sense that you receive a benefit, to destroy the world. It is especially rational to do so if you expect to be dead before the costs come to bear, or if you think you can use your money to avoid the worst of climate change.

We have an additional problem: no one has jurisdiction over all of the atmosphere, all of the seas, all of the forests.  If country A decides not to pollute or dump or cut down forests, someone else can do more of that and gain a short term benefit.  And by short term benefit I mean “some of the decision makers and their friends will personally get rich.  Filthy, stinking, rich.”  (This is also one  problem with refusing to have high marginal taxation, capital taxes, estate taxes and corporate taxes.  People are less interested in destroying the world when they’ll only make a little bit off it.  The calculus does change somewhat.)

So how do you ensure that Brazil doesn’t destroy the rest of the Amazon, that Japan doesn’t radically overfish, or that the US doesn’t dump obscene amounts of carbon into the air per capita?

There are three essential approaches.  The first is bribery: we’ll pay you not to do this.  Up to a certain point this is necessary: if Brazilians can make more money chopping down jungle than keeping it around, why wouldn’t they? But everyone has the ability to do destroy the world, everyone can hold you hostage, and once people start, they don’t stop.  Bribery only works if it is short term, if it becomes “we’ll pay for you to transition to a different economic model, but no more than that.”

The second is incentives.  Why are the Brazilians chopping down the jungle?  Because Americans want to eat beef.  If Americans change how they eat, much less reason for the jungles to be chopped down.  If we don’t want plastic to destroy the Oceans maybe we should just forbid most plastic packaging?  It can be done, I grew up with paper bags and glass bottles, for example.  I grew up in a culture where every food worker didn’t wear disposable plastic gloves.  I survived, I guarantee you will too, no  matter how much of a germphobe you are.

The third is coercion.  You will not do this, and if you do we will do bad things to you.  Lock you up, sink your ships, and if it comes to it, kill you.

Now let’s be clear, coercion underlies virtually all social relations.  You pay taxes because if you don’t, somebody with a gun will come along and throw you in jail.  You have property because men with guns enforce your property rights.  You go to school, because if you don’t… well, you get the picture.  No society has EVER existed that did not have some form of coercion available to it.  In many hunter-gatherer societies that coercion was the simplest of all: expulsion.  If you didn’t obey the rules, they kicked you out, and that meant death because no, most people cannot survive alone, and most people don’t want to.

Because there is an advantage to unilateral betrayal: to dumping your pollution on other people and letting them pay the cost, there will always be people who want to do it, and it’s not always worth trying to use incentives to get them not to: it swiftly becomes too expensive.  The best approach is often to unilaterally take certain actions off the table: none of us will unilaterally take each others stuff.  None of us will dump poisons into the air that kill other people we don’t know.  None of us will, on net, allow forests to decrease.  None of us will use plastic packaging.

This is the problem of collective action: if none of us do these things, we’re all better off.  But if one of us or a few of us do it, we have an advantage over other people, and if other people are doing it, we need to do it to keep up.

This brings us to my comment, in my 44 Points Post about needing an armed force to protect the Oceans, a comment which caused much screaming, since people thought it violated my point about not wanting large standing armies.

An army and a police force are not the same thing.  An international “Ocean Guard” is not a navy, it does not need destroyers with depth charges and nuclear submarines with missiles and Aircraft Carriers.  It needs ships capable of find trawlers and boarding them.  Police force.

But the key problem here is jurisdiction: no one has jurisdiction.  No one can say to the US or China or India or Japan, “you will not do this!”

We must create institutions which have the authority to say “you will not pollute, you will not destroy the environment.”  More than that, because we have gone too far, we are going to need institutions which can say “and you will also work to fix the environment.”  Again, countries will want to not contribute, because if someone else does it, and you don’t, you get most of the benefits without the costs.

Now we can create a world economy which is not harmful to the environment and in which everyone is fed, clothed, has shelter and has a meaningful life with a good chance at happiness.  We are going to have to, because people who are unhappy, who do not love, and are not loved, who are frightened, will do whatever they feel they must.  We must drain the swamp of true need, of hunger, of great fear.

But that’s the end point: that’s where we must commit to go.  Along the way, however, bad actors will have to be forced to stop what they are doing coercively.

Failure to do so means death and suffering.  More death and suffering than is caused by coercively, say, sinking Trawlers or trade embargoing countries which won’t stop using plastic containers.  We are in a situation where the median death estimate from climate change is probably a billion people.

We cannot entirely bribe and incentivize ourselves our way out of this problem, some coercion will be necessary.  How much money would you have to pay Wall Street, for example, to stop doing what they do?  As much, or more than they make doing what they do.  How much to stop Big Oil?  Same answer.  We can’t afford it, that money, those resources, must be spent fixing the problem and taking care of ordinary people.  So we must criminalize certain behaviour, on a world scale and then enforce it.

That is policing, if done right, not military action.

There are great big reasons to be scared of anything that looks like a world state.  I have a preference for nations, because a world state that turns totalitarian is a nightmare, and a world state is also likely to lead to stagnation.  My suggestion is to try federalization: specific bodies with specific enforcement, but they must have transnational police powers.  There is no reason these bodies can’t be run by democratic methods, no reasons the courts they run can’t be fair and open. Our current transnational bodies aren’t democratic, indeed are anti-democratic, precisely because our elites don’t want them to be, but that is, again, a social choice.

We figure this problem out, or we fry.  We need institutions for transnational action, institutions with police power, courts and which are democratically constituted.  This isn’t an insoluble problem, either in general, or specific, except that it challenges the people who currently have power and who are currently getting filthy rich by destroying the environment, and in so doing likely killing a billion or more people, and conceivably, risking the future existence of humanity entirely.

Given the stakes, we’d best grow up.  There is only one world, and until we get off it, it is a single point of failure. It must be dealt with as such.

 

Incentives

44 Explicit Points on Creating a Better World

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On October 25, 2013

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1) Ideology is key.  If you like (or were horrified by) my Baseline Predictions post, understand that the next two posts on ideology were about the solution.  Our decisions about what to do are virtually always ideological.  You cannot think about any complex subject without ideology, without idea structures mediating.  You cannot decide what to do without making judgments that are mediated through you world-view.

2) We know much of what must be done.  We know we need to do it.  We have not done it.  That suggests this is not a “practical” problem.

3) The structure of everyday life (job work, regimented schooling for children, passive entertainment, consumer “choice” that isn’t real choice) produces our world-view, our ideology.  We are left passive and accepting of social arrangement, unable to see that there are different ways to live.  We accept the world as it is, and accept systematic injustice, even injustice that directly and clearly injures us.

4) The problem of collective action is one part belief: people must believe they should do things differently.

5) Any social structure, including social structures which seek to change the dominant culture, if it can be bought out, will lose.

6) Any new social structure must throw off surplus that people can live on, and that surplus must not be able to be bought up by the old system, which will seek to do so.  The ban against selling out/being bought out must be irrational and ideological.  Rational people sell out.

7) The forms of the old world must be gotten rid of, and must be seen as anathema. You cannot save the world and keep American style suburbia as it is now.  You cannot change the world so people are happy and healthy and prosperous and keep wage labor as your primary method of distributing surplus value to the commons.

8) You cannot keep profit, aka. greed as the primary driver of social decision making.  Eating is for living, living is not for eating, to paraphrase Socrates.

9) Greed as primary driver leads to sociopathic behaviour being rewarded (read Barkin’s “The Corporation”).  This means you select, systematically, people who act sociopathically or pyschopathically as your leaders.  You get the behavior your reward, and right now our system rewards people for doing whatever it takes to make money, no matter what the costs to other people, to the environment or the future.

10) Most profits today are extracted value, they are not actual surplus value.  Instead they represent destruction of actual economic productivity.  Every cent the financial sector “earned” from 2000 to 2007 was destroyed, ten times over, in the crisis and the depression after the crisis.

11) Actual value is not rewarded.  A janitor or a garbageman or a teacher or a nurse or an assembly line worker or an engineer produces real value.  If the CEO does not come in tomorrow, so what?  If the janitor doesn’t, everyone is complaining immediately.  The people we call value creators today are mostly value extractors: their job is to squeeze hard, to monetize, not to create new products which are genuinely beneficial to the world, not to create workers who are well paid and thus able to provide demand, not to create better paying work, but worse paying work.

12) If you need a job to survive, you are always at the mercy of people who provide jobs.

13) The wage you are paid is based on the tightness of the labor market and how protected  you are by government. It has virtually nothing to do with your personal skillset, except to the extent that skillset is in short supply.  As programmers found out, corporations and government will do everything they can to make sure any specific labor shortage is reduced as quickly as possible.

14) You have power, as an ordinary individual, only if you act as a group and in solidarity.  If you can be bribed to betray other ordinary people, they will play you off against each other.

15) Jobs aren’t a good way to distribute surplus, but if that is how you do it, you will only get surplus in a tight labor market.  Central banks, the rich, corporations and government today all work systematically to make sure that there is no tight labor market.  If there is no tight labor market, you can and will be replaced.  If you can be easily replaced, there is no reason to give you any extra money, even if you are producing more than you did in the past. It is for this reason that for over 30 years now NONE of the productivity gains have gone to ordinary workers on aggregate.

16) The economy must be completely electrified.  Energy must be made, to the largest extent possible, a capital good, this is a specific instance of the next point:

17) Supply bottlenecks cannot be allowed.  Ever.  Whenever one starts to form, it must be broken.  Failure to do so is why the post-war liberal order failed and was replaced with neo-liberalism.

18) You cannot use up sinks (like carbon storage in the atmosphere) faster than they can be regenerated.  Period.

19) You cannot allow degradation of food or environment.  These are major causes of the degenerative and chronic diseases which are epidemic in our society.

20) You cannot allow significant unproductive consumption to be a major part of your economy.  Suburbia, for example, is essentially pure consumption.  All bans on productive work, agriculture, etc… in suburbia must be removed.

21) You cannot allow public goods, like education or health care, to be rationed based on ability to pay.  Paying for schools through property taxes creates an education system which wastes the human potential of millions of people in an attempt to replicate class privilege.  Ironically, the middle class is failing anyway, as the economic value of education has been destroyed.

22) The most important rule of all is this: your elites must experience the same life as ordinary people.  They must go to the same shitty schools (no private schools, no enriched schools, no Ivy League).  They must fly on the same planes and go through the same security (they don’t), they must use the same healthcare and stew in the same wards in the same rooms as the poorest of the citizens.  They must eat the same food, rather than being able to buy high quality food the poor can’t.  If they don’t experience what you experience, they will not care what is happening to you.  And they don’t.  Why should they when they’re the richest riches the world has ever known. The world is great, to the rich and powerful.

23) You have power to the degree you have solidarity, control your own government, and have the ability to support yourself without a job.  If you cannot walk, if you have no ability to say “screw you”, then you are a slave, the only question is who you are a slave to.  The people we feel worst for today are the unemployed who can’t even find a master.

24) People who actually create value must be allowed to keep enough of it.  Right now they aren’t.  Google takes almost all the value created by the people who actually make the web, for example.  Wal-mart crushes its suppliers into the dust.  A few key  pipelines like App Stores, Amazon, and so on take almost all of the surplus value.  Anyone who thinks 30% is a reasonable charge for an app store wants to see failure (this doesn’t mean no taxation, proper taxation takes away unneeded surplus, not needed surplus.)

25) A regular rate of return of 5% is reasonable.  A world in which you have to make 15% or 30%+ to be viable is a world in which most businesses are not viable, and in which millions sit idle with nothing to do because there is nothing to do that can make those sort of returns.

26) Returns of 15% or more can only be made through fraud, exploitation or oligopolistic practices.  Bad or fraudulent profits drive out real profits and real value creation.

27) The network effect is not something which should be rewarded with a 30% commission.  Neither is the railroad effect “nice product you got there, son, but it doesn’t get to market if you don’t pay us our vig.”

28) We can all be prosperous, but we can’t all be rich.  Having hundreds of billionaires is exactly why you haven’t had a real raise in 30 years.

29) Concentrations of wealth are used to protect that wealth and buy up the system.  That is why they can’t be allowed.  The first thing someone does who wins the market, is buy the market, and that means buying the government.

30) Government is either your worst enemy, or you best friend, depending on whether it is controlled by the public, by private interests or running rogue.  But government is also the only major organization which can work for ordinary people.  Every other organization has another purpose.  As such, you must control government if you want prosperity.

31) Government, under whatever name, is needed to do things we must do together for the greater good.  When it does not exist, you get Somalia.  Great cell phone service, but your daughters get pulled out shacks at 2 am and raped, or you buy your safety by submitting to an oppressive set of relgous laws.

32) You cannot have large standing armies and keep liberty.  Period.

33) You cannot give private entities the right to print money without extremely strict limits and not expect unreasonable concentration of money, which means power, which means the government gets bought out and you lose both your liberty and your freedom.

34) Biodiversity is wealth, it is where the great biochemical advances and products of the future will come from. Every time we kill a species, we impoverish our future.

35) We are going to require a transnational body with armed forces to enforce environmental controls.

36) Fines no longer work to control economic activity, we will require outright criminal bans and tough enforcement to stop rapacious corporate behaviour.

37) If you must have the cheapest devices, you are requiring a woman in the Congo to be raped and rivers in China to be polluted.  Fixing this is not an individual action, it is a collective action problem, it can only be fixed by government and by terrible things like, oh “tariffs”.

38) Free Trade is meaningless if you don’t have full employment.  It is a rounding error at best, harmful at worst.

39) Capital flows cannot be allowed to move faster than trade flows and really shouldn’t be much faster than labor flows.

40) The functionless rich cannot be allowed to keep the money they have.  Use it for actual new production, or lose it.

41) Inflation is not a bad thing below about 10% or so.  There is no good evidence it reduces growth, and it does break up concentrations of wealth.  We are terrified of inflation because we know our wages aren’t rising faster than it is.

42) People who make a bad loan, should lose their money.  There is no such thing as free money, and bondholders need to learn that.  Concomittent, bankruptcy must be easy to get: economic cripples, unable to discharge debts are not in our economic interest.  It is especially abhorrent that bankruptcy cannot discharge student loans.

43) An economy in which people are free to do what they love, free of fear of losing everything, is far more economically productive than one in which people are forced to do things they hate to make ends meet.

44) The right thing to do, ethically, is usually the right thing to do economically. Helping the distressed is good for the economy.  Universal healthcare that doesn’t give extra money to insurance companies is good for the economy.  Believe it or not, not dumping pollution into air and not poisoning food… is good for the economy.  Feeding the poor is… good for the economy.

If you’re ever not sure what the right economic policy is ask yourself what the kind thing to do is.  You’ll be right nine times out ten, and the remaining one time you’ll still be doing something good.

 

Start from common humanity

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On June 26, 2013

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The basic political principle is that we all share our humanity.  Compassion starts from imaging ourselves in other people’s skin, in feeling that pain and indignities to them, are injuries to our common humanity.  An injury, an injustice, to one of us, is an injury and injustice to all of us.  In this sense, we acknowledge differences, such as gender, skin color, age, health, and our individual experience, and we take them in to account, but we do not let them obscure our common humanity.

When you think this way, when you feel this way, right action, right law, becomes much more clear.

The author Lois McMaster Bujold once had one of her characters asked if she loved someone.  Her reply was, “when he is cut, I bleed.”

Injustice to any of us, hurts us all.  I could explain the connections in technocratic terms, I could talk about how loss of liberty for one is eventually loss of liberty for all, how inequality hurts even those at the top, but at the end it is as simple as injustice to one, is injustice to all.

On Islam, Religion and Love

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On June 26, 2013

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As with many things, I’m no expert on Islam.  Nonetheless, within the limitations of my language skills, I’ve done the reading.

One of the things which seems clear from the life of the Prophet, is that he made things better for women and slaves. Zakat is meant to be used, among other things to free slaves.

Mohammed’s first followers were mostly women and poorer men.

Mohammed made things better for them.

But the strength of scripture is also its weakness: what was written is always there.  Absent interpretation from the spirit of what was written, absent living script, it can be used to ossify change.  God’s law in any good teaching, is love.  When we  use scripture, and this is true of secular scripture like the US constitution, against love, against kindness, we do a disservice to the scripture and to the intentions of those who originally preached it.

Interpretation can be used for good or evil.  It can be used to make religious social beliefs not intrinsic to the religion, like female genital mutilation or the divine right of kings.  But it can also be used in the spirit of God’s law of love, to nurture kinder people, and kinder societies.

While intention doesn’t always work out, it is best to start from good intentions and in dealing with religious and spiritual traditions it is best to interpret in line with intention.  For America, this might be a further movement towards freedom and the pursuit of happiness.  For Islam, submission to God, and good works aiding those who need it most.

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