Meritocracy - Neither Descriptive nor Desirable

A guest poster at Kiwiblog informs us that full equality of opportunity exists - the only reason why you might be unsuccessful in life is because you're lazy.

This is of course silly, not even the most ardent meritocrat would argue that there is a 0% correlation between your parents' wealth and your own (for example), even correcting for other factors like IQ. Hard work just isn't all the story. But underlying it is the common concept that wealth in society is and ought to be distributed according to merit.

Morally, this is the wrong way of looking at things. As Robert Nozick showed a while back, if you want a society where wealth is strictly patterned according to a particular variable you like (hard work, intelligence, number of posts read on Defective Equilibrium), you are going to have to continually interfere in voluntary (and often mutually beneficial) transactions to maintain this distribution. To take the merit-based argument, if you really want wealth to be distributed according to merit, once you had a meritocracy, you would have to forbid people giving gifts to people less meritorious than themselves, lazy people from accidentally making new discoveries and getting rich off them, etc. To actually maintain the pattern would require a state that intrudes in things most people think it probably shouldn't.

Equally important is that 'merit' is such a nebulous concept, it's more or less impossible to draw any moral conclusions from it. What attributes I think are good are likely to be highly different to the attributes you admire. Maybe I think that a lazy but brilliant person is of greater merit than a hard-working average person, or maybe vice versa. There's not an obvious set of independent standards by which we can judge this. Most people implicitly judge it by imagining what they want to be like, and assuming that everyone should also aspire to that, or something very similar. But that is not a very good way of doing it. It's easy to accept that different people can gain equal enjoyment from living vastly different lives, that is, theories of the good should be thin (at best). But people are for some reason reluctant to generalise this when thinking about desirable personal attributes.

There's also the important question of which of your attributes you deserve and which you do not (further reading: Rawls' Original Position). Surely I don't 'deserve' in any merit-based way the money my parents worked to earn (note that this is a different thing from saying I am entitled to it in a Nozickian sense). But then why should I deserve their work ethic, intelligence, or anything else I might (or might not) inherit from them? Surely I can't claim to be a better person for things I'm not responsible for in any meaningful way?

Conclusion: The meta-readers among you will notice that I've presented a kind of right-wing and a kind of left-wing argument here. My hope is that no matter where on the political spectrum you fall, you will reject meritocracy. There are just simply way better alternatives out there.

Thought experiment of the day - Rights/Welfare Tradeoff

I know I don't do these every day or even every month, but perhaps if I say so it will make me do it - it could be a cool feature perhaps.

Say everyone earns the same wage, $100. The Government taxes income (and income only) at 20%, and has a choice of two policies - A and B.
Policy A lowers the income tax to zero with no other effects (I suppose the Government isn't doing much to start with). So people now earn $100 after tax (up from $80).
Policy B raises the national income level by 25%, meaning an after-tax wage of $100, however it violates people's rights slightly by doing so, perhaps by forcing them to work as slaves for 10 minutes every day.

Which policy would you prefer? In this case it's easy, as they both give the same income level but one has us working as slaves. So you would choose policy A.

But what if I change the numbers? What if policy B doubles the national income, at the cost of 20 minutes a day of slave labour?

The reason I ask this is that I think the majority of deontological theories of political justice (like that of Rawls) take into account consequences at some level (Nozick and Kant being the two obvious exceptions, and even Nozick allowed some ad hoc consequentialism). What is often less clear is how they determine the tradeoff - at what point do we bite the Kantian bullet and just say that rights are too important? At 3 hours of slavery per day? At 8? Or vice versa, at what point does welfare override basic freedoms? What if you could abolish scarcity by putting cameras in everyone's house (don't ask me how) without telling them?

This seems like an obvious question but it is one I think that is rarely spoken to. In particular, most people tend to believe in the fortunate coincidence that their favoured policy is both welfare-maximising and non-rights violating, at least to a certain degree. But if that is not the case, how much welfare is worth one rights-violation?

Notice that I am defining considerations of redistributive justice out of my thought experiment, I think that would overly complicate things.

Update: BK Drinkwater shares his thoughts. He promises he will talk less in the abstract in the future - I make no such promise.

Rawls' Approach to Philosophy

Although from time to time I get mild criticism from some on the left for my economic views, astute readers of this blog (which is all of you of course!) might have ascertained from the name 'defective equilibrium' (c.f. this) that I am a bit of a fan of John Rawls, the great modern political philosopher.

John Rawls' most famous idea is what he calls the 'second principle of justice' (the first being a scheme of appropriate liberties, although he engaged in quite a bit of semantics about this later in his career), also known as the 'maximin principle'. The idea is that the goal of society should be to maximise the wellbeing of the worst off members. This means that inequality is permitted, but only if it makes the worst off better than the counterfactual.

As it is with a lot of influential political philosophy, a large amount of subsequent literature has been devoted to trying to read Rawls' mind, and divine what he was really advocating. Some have claimed him a defender of modern welfare capitalism (Hayek even approvingly cited his earlier work), while many on the left have portrayed him as pretty much a hard core socialist that was maybe willing to tolerate radically altered forms of capitalism (this is basically the approach of Samuel Freeman's book, for example).

I think that both these approaches are wrong, and they are show how people take different approaches to political philosophy. It seems to me that Rawls is at heart a political philosopher, and his book is a contribution to the field of political philosophy, not a political advocacy tract. The difference is subtle, and not, I feel, appreciated by a lot of philosophers. When you think something is unjust, it's very tempting to want to try to correct it, or provide a means by which others might. But trying to correct an injustice is not the same thing as rigorously proving it is actually unjust. It's not necessarily impossible to do both decently (I think Thomas Pogge would be a good example of a mixed approach), but Rawls, I think, only ever saw the task of political philosophers to be the former, not the latter. He essentially never advocated his views in a way that was even vaguely interesting to anyone without a deep interest in moral philosophy - his books are fairly long, exhaustively reasoned and create a lot of jargon. He rarely gave interviews, and certainly not in popular forums.

One way of bringing out this difference a little more sharply is to compare Rawls' work to Noam Chomsky's political writings. Chomsky writes for the most part with a general audience in mind - his goal is to change the world to make it more just. To do so, you have to persuade people, but that is essentially a tool to achieve positive change, not an end in itself. To Rawls (in my interpretation), persuasion and presenting the best possible argument are the ultimate end of political philosophy. In the preface to Theory of Justice, he essentially says that his goal is (only) to provide a more intutionally satisfying alternative to utilitarianism (my insertion).

That's not to say that Rawls was aloof and uninterested in the justice of the real world. I am sure he would have been delighted if modern states had adopted justice as fairness. But that would have been a pleasant side-effect of his writing only.

Whether or not this is the best approach (morally) is something I am not sure of.

The Law and Justice

I don't know much about law in academia, but a lot of what I see seems quite a lot like moral philosophy. That makes sense, because if we are considering new laws, the morality of them is obviously important.

In that vein, the Legal Theory Lexicon has this excellent new entry on justice, including brief primers on consequentialism, deontologicalism and virtue ethics. I suspect most of our readers already know what these are, but it is interesting to see them (and other ideas) explained from a legal perspective, as opposed to a purely philosophical one.

Conservatives and Individualism

In this excellent piece by Will Wilkinson (which you should read the entirety of), this quote stood out for me:

For too many conservatives, “individual rights” is code for their right to remain unburdened by whatever exercise of state power they happen to dislike.

Indeed the relationship between conservatives and individualism is a tricky one. My (fairly cursory) reading of Burke and Oakeshott is that they are fairly collectivist, compared to modern liberal and libertarian philosophers.

The difficulty for American conservatives is that America has strong traditions of individual rights, individualism, etc. Conservatives want to defend these things because they are conservatives, but their philosophy is essentially a collectivist one, so often they end up confusing themselves. Conservative rumblings on nationalism are an excellent case in point - nationalism is a highly collectivist ideal, yet one embraced wholeheartedly by those who like to think that they are all about the individual.

Wilkinson makes similar points but in a far funnier way, I suggest you read his piece if you have not yet done so.

Needy People

Reading this post on the new NZ Labour Party blog got me thinking about how someone could 'need' a tax cut. Claire Curran MP says:

(National have delivered) tax cuts that put extra dollars in the pockets of only those who don’t need them...

This was only a throwaway comment in the general scheme of the post, so what follows is slightly unfair, but hopefully stimulating nonetheless.
What does it mean to need anything? I don't think that the concept of 'need' is strictly meaningful in this sentence, which admittedly is quite common usage. It seems that a concept of 'need' has meaning only in a relational sense - A 'needs' B to do P, which means that without B, A could not perform P.

Often we associate 'need' with what is really just a strong desire - everyone as a child had a toy or similar that they said they 'needed', but in reality just wanted really badly. Occasionally however, and this is the sense I think Curran is getting at, P is equated to 'to live', or even more loosely, 'to live comfortably, or in a manner we might consider a minimum in society'. In these circumstances P is often not stated - we say that people 'need food' rather than 'need food to live', or 'in the modern age, everyone needs access to the internet'. Here we have to become very careful of abusing the word 'need', and I think if we force ourselves to always state what the things are needed for, it can be quite revealing. When we leave out our P's, we allow a whole lot of assumptions to be made.

What does it mean to say that rich people don't 'need' tax cuts? Obviously people need money to live, and the rich don't 'need' any extra help here. I would hope that the amount of people that actually do need extra money (on top of current transfers) to survive in New Zealand is vanishingly small. But I also like to imagine we live in a society slightly less bleak than one where people are only permitted wealth that meets their basic physical needs. The Labour Party is not a communist party, and I am sure they agree with me. But this confused rhetoric is indicative of a party that is not serious about ideas but cheap political partisanship and playing off the visceral disgust many New Zealanders feel for small groups of their compatriots whose supply and demand curves for labour are sloped differently.

Here are a few more meaningful statements Curran could have made:
"National has provided
1) ... tax cuts that will generate lower Keynesian multipliers as the rich have a lower MPC"
2) ... tax cuts that will mainly focus on the groups that gain the least marginal utility from them"
3) ... tax cuts that make our tax scheme less progressive"

etc. Obviously it is silly to expect a politician to talk like an economist, but even something that gave the gist of the above would have been far more meaningful, and easier to judge a) its truth value and b) value as a goal.

Coercion (longish)

Paul Walker's excellent response to a previous post of mine was structured along the following lines - even if private property is an interruption of liberty (which I argued it was) it still leads to more total liberty. Thus someone interested in maximising liberty should still support it (to what extent?).
I responded that it is necessary to distinguish between maximising liberty and maximising good consequences. But of course for this we need a more rigorous definition of what constitutes liberty. The whole 'positive and negative liberty' debate is pretty heavily done, so I thought a fresh approach would be to focus instead on its antithesis - coercion.

What does it mean to be coerced? Consider three situations.

The Robber: Harold keeps all his money in a safe at home (perhaps because he expects deflation). Robber Robin breaks into Harold's house, and threatens to shoot him unless he unlocks his safe and gives him all his money.

The Slave: In a slave-owning society, a particular slave is whipped every day without fail. One day his owner says to him that he will stop the whipping for one day if the slave goes to fetch a pail of water. This example was invented by Robert Nozick, who you may have heard of in another context.

The Debtor: Bill lends his books to Ann but then he needs them back. For some reason, Ann refuses to return them. She then hears about a particular concert she wants to attend, and suggests to Bill that he can have the books back if he buys her the concert ticket. This example comes from Timo Airaksinen.

Broad Concepts
Here's a basic descriptive idea of coercion. There are other theories than descriptive ones, we'll cover those shortly. Imagine you have two agents, A and B, with B the dominant agent. Only actions Q and R are open to A (although R may constitute 'doing nothing', or 'not doing Q', or some variant).
A is coerced to Q iff:
1) B threatens A to perform Q, perhaps by imposing negative consequences for A if he/she performs R
2) In light of 1), A strictly loses when performing either Q or R
3) B gains from A performing Q.

By these broad concepts the robber is obviously coerced, and it seems like the debtor is also coerced. But is the slave? It seems that the owner is not threatening to do anything. If anything, he's promising something good for the slave. Rewarding people for good behaviour doesn't seem like coercion. You might respond that a lack of punishment isn't quite the same morally as an actual reward. This may be, but a potentially more powerful response comes from splitting into normative and descriptive coercion theories.

Normative and Descriptive Coercion Theories
The distinction between normative and descriptive coercion is first found in Nozick(1969). Normative coercion theories state that whether or not someone is coerced can be determined by appealing to morality - whether or not their human rights have been violated. So you aren't coercing someone to do something if you have some right to make them do it. Descriptive theories are those that rely purely on empirical evidence - we can determine whether or not coercion has occurred by deciding whether the victim was under some form of psychological duress or something similar. Nozick supports the concept of normative coercion (as an accurate description, not as a hobby!) but some modern philosophers differ.

Under a normative framework, Nozick argues that the slave is in fact coerced - because his human rights are violated. Likewise with the other two examples. He argues then that the normative explanation is a better one for helping us understand coercion.

There have been responses to this position and it is far from concluded. See, for example, Airaksinen(1988) and Carr(1988) (1988 was a good year for coercion!).

However I want to conclude with an application. Is taxation coercive? Under a descriptive framework it seems only coercive if the taxpayer loses from paying tax. If you are better off after paying your tax (and receiving the benefits of Government services, if any) you wouldn't need to be coerced into paying your tax - the fact that you are threatened seems irrelevant. In a descriptive sense it seems then that the only people who are coerced into taxation are those people (if any) who lose out from the Government taxation.
Does it matter if you're mistaken about whether you will benefit?

Under a normative framework it becomes more opaque. Does the Government have a right to tax you? That is the classic question of political legitmacy and redistributive justice, and I will not touch it here. However (and as Nozick correctly realised), what a normative model of coercion does for us is show that with respect to taxation, in order to show it to be coercive we have to engage with arguments of distributive justice. Nozick went on to attempt to do this in his famous book, but I feel many libertarians are content to assume that a threat equates to coercion, in any situation (and is thus wrong). This, I believe, is unsupportable.

Update: Sorry for any RSS readers that might have got to read this twice, but because I started writing this a few days ago it came up buried towards the bottom of the page, which was unhelpful. Thus I re-posted it.

Update 2: Brad Taylor responds here.

Private Property and Liberty Maximisation

Nor again, can even the enforcement of contracts be fairly said to be a realisation of freedom; for a man seems, strictly speaking, freer when no one of his volitions is allowed to cause an external control of any other.

Henry Sidgwick, in The Method of Ethics.

It is often assumed by defenders of largely unregulated private property that theirs is the system that takes liberty the most seriously - indeed the system with the most freedom of agency. On the other hand, some are pure consequentialists and are ostensibly disinterested in liberty except as a tool to maximise utility. However most are not, and even those who claim to be often use highly loaded language with respect to their positions, perhaps revealing non-consequentialist intuitions. Milton Friedman for example claims to be a consequentialist libertarian (here, 1:45 minutes in,) however, for example, his most famous book is called Capitalism and Freedom (as opposed to, say, 'Capitalism and Happiness'). This is to me hardly the mark of a pure consequentialist. That is a topic for another post, however.

However I think many people forget to consider the flip-side, that private property is in itself a highly coercive institution. This is highlighted in the Sidgwick quote given at the start. Consider two situations. In Country A, the Government passes a law prohibiting people from boarding trains on Sunday. This is obviously a restriction on people's liberty, presuming that they were choosing to board trains on that day previously. In Country B however the Government is more laissez-faire and makes no such law. Despite this, the owner of the trains decides that in accordance with his religious principles, his trains will not run on Sunday.
From the perspective of the passengers of the train, the situation is identical (assume that the citizens themselves have identical demand for the trains between the two countries). They would like to ride the trains and are unable to do so because someone has told them that they cannot.

It seems to me that it is inconsistent to claim that one of these situations is an abrogation of liberty and one is not. Perhaps in B less liberty is violated, because in A the Government places restrictions on both the customers and the owner, while in B only the customers are so restricted (as the owner is free to sell tickets whenever he likes). However my general claim (and also Sidgwick's) if were actually concerned with the maximisation of individual liberty, we would not support the institution of private property. Indeed the very principle of private property is that the owner of the property is permitted to restrict the liberty of others to do what they want with it! The case can be drawn even more clearly by considering ownership of land. Are we really expected to believe that it makes a difference to liberty whether an individual or the Government tells us not to travel on a particular area of land?

The key thing to draw from this is not that we should abolish private property, it that there are such things as legitimate restrictions of people's free choices. I believe private property to be clearly one of them. Thus the goal of liberty maximisation is a misguided one, at least as it is crudely understood by many. This is hardly a killer blow to libertarian philosophy - for example Robert Nozick was one of the most vociferous critics of the idea, critiquing it as a 'utilitarianism of rights'. But we should be sceptical of, dare I say it, the Ron Paul libertarians, who claim to opposed to the initiation of force in all circumstances, but in supporting private property support one of the greatest initiations of force there is.

Update: Edited the post slightly for clarity.

Conservatism and Progressivism, Standard Style

On the Standard is a new poster that has written a sort of primer on progressivism and conservatism. I'm not too sure what the point of it is - you can get a more lucid, balanced perspective on wikipedia (to which it links). It's more of a vessel for the author to say that conservativism appeals to simple people, and other such enlightening generalisations.

This is why I like reading the Standard, and for the same reason, Kiwiblog. They have their moments of being very right, but it shows so often that they just do not seem to be able to understand other points of view. I find this interesting. I would not consider myself a conservative. But there are highly educated, philosophically sophisticated conservatives, and calling them simple and antithetical to reason would be beyond my conceit.

Noam Chomsky

For someone generally enamoured with academics of all persuasions, for some reason I have always found it hard to warm to Noam Chomsky. Perhaps he's just unlucky - he frequently seems to be accused (maybe unfairly) of saying outrageous things in private correspondance, be it calling Christopher Hitchens a racist in a debate or suggesting to Robert Nozick that he was 'agnostic' about the Holocaust. However, although he denied saying the first (but not the second), his condescending response to Hitchens and his alleged assault of Nozick did him no favours in my view. His refutation of postmodernism suggests essentially that because he can't understand it, it must be meaningless. Note that in the same article he expresses scepticism of the whole project of moral philosophy, seemingly because one or two good books failed to persuade the whole of academia. Based on other writings of his (which I can't find at the moment), I suspect he hasn't actually read Rawls or Nozick either. But I could be wrong. He is also well known for apparently attempting to excuse Pol Pot. This is probably exaggeration, the worst you could say (from what I have been able to find) is that he was probably luke-warm towards the regime - here, for example.

The few critiques of Chomsky that I have read have been pretty pathetic, and often quite childish. By contrast, there are also some hilariously fawning interviews with him. It is perhaps no wonder that he might think he is pretty switched on. Add that, of course, to the fact that he is actually very intelligent and perceptive.

I recently read an article on Chomsky called Overrated. This basically sums up my opinion of Chomsky, although I do not endorse the article itself. I have no expertise in linguistics, and his expertise there may truly be awe-inspiring. I've also liked his political books that I have read. He is a good writer. We are fortunate enough to live in a world with plenty of good writers. In my opinion, Chomsky has more or less earned his place in that pack, but no more. The interview I linked, for example compares him to Plato. Plato wrote some of the enduring classics of Western Philosophy. Chomsky criticises US foreign policy. I have to say, I know which I rate as the more difficult intellectual achievement.

Moral Worth

David Brooks in the New York Times has an interesting review of Malcom Gladwell's new book Outliers. You might remember Gladwell as the author of the interesting but a little controversial Tipping Point.

The thesis of Outliers appears to be that individual success is heavily dependent on social conditions, rather than just innate brilliance.

What is interesting to me though is what Brooks claims as an obvious political conclusion from this argument. Gladwell may also claim it, it isn't mentioned in the review.

Brooks says

Gladwell’s social determinism is a useful corrective to the Homo economicus view of human nature. It’s also pleasantly egalitarian. The less successful are not less worthy, they’re just less lucky.

My emphasis.

I'm not sure how Gladwell's theory affects this. Would Brooks have us believe that although you are not to be held responsible for your upbringing, the genes you have been arbitrarily endowed with are key indicators of your moral worth and how much renumeration you ought to receive? This seems a logical consequence of his statement. I think variants of this intuition are very common, not just in public but in the merit-based distributional philosophies of David Hume or, some of the time, David Miller. But is it a reasonable one?

Perhaps if I said "ceterus paribus, smart, hard-working people ought to earn a bit more money than lazy people".
I think that this would be a less controversial thing to say in public, but it is essentially the same principle.

The question I am driving at is 'Do you think that we can justly claim credit for any aspects of our character?". The (hopefully) subtle question-begging I engaged in two paragraphs ago should give some hint as to what I think is the correct answer. I'm also interested in the political ramifications of that answer to that question; I can think of some widely varying possibilities.