The Greater Good

A Healthy Substitute for Willpower

J.D. Trout, Ph.D. — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:30:25 +0000

I have always loved bourbon, and as a graduate student, I loved it regularly. Back then, I drank with friends routinely. But most of us also value a life free from nagging temptation. What to do?

If you change the person's environment, you can break the connection between a potent cue, and an entrenched response. Change the environment in the right way, and you can break the bond between the bar and the bourbon, the corral and cussing, the oven and overeating.

It certainly worked on college students. A study by Wendy Wood and her colleagues looked at the habitual behaviors of transfer students as they moved to a new university. Their habits of exercising, reading the paper, and watching TV-even when strong-did not survive the transfer when the move destabilized or disrupted the living circumstances that supported their habits. The disruption in their behavioral surroundings apparently blocked automatic cues, which then required intention to carry the action through.

Before leaving for vacation one year, I removed the bourbon from the cabinet. When I returned, it was more than an arm's length away. And now that bars prohibit smoking, it is easy to stay away from cigarettes as well!

My example has modest beginnings, but the psychology of habit-change may carry unexpected and lucrative lessons for public policy. After all, so many costly behaviors stem from habits; maybe there is a general lesson to learn about the relation between situations and desires. Because people are most likely to break habits when they are in new environments, institutions (like local governments) can use similarly smart policies when people are moving to a new home, city, or job, when they are experiencing changes in their personal relationships, coping with the death of a loved one, or recovering from a serious illness. For example, it is a lot easier to convert new residents of a community into habitual users of public transit than long-time residents. And this is why some communities offer new residents free passes on public transportation.

In public health, for example, at least four of the leading health risks in the U.S. emerge from everyday repetition of action, eased by contingencies of the environment-substance abuse, obesity, tobacco use, and inadequate exercise. These ultimate costs of these health risks are enormous. Substance abuse alone in 2002 cost the U.S. over 180 billion dollars, and is increasing steeply. In that same year, medical expenditures for overweight- and obesity-attributable conditions were $92.6 billion dollars. Tobacco use is a similar bane. In the U.S. alone, excess medical expenditures owing to tobacco use averaged $75.5 billion dollars from 1995-1999, and if we add that to the death-related losses in productivity, the figure increases to over $150 billion dollars. Inadequate exercise, or "lack of leisure-time physical activity," as a habitual part of daily life, cost $24 billion in 1995. Its health effects amounted to about 2.4% of all U.S. health care expenditures. In today's dollars, these four habit-based health risks together amount to about one-half trillion dollars annually. And none of these costs is decreasing.

It's not that, among our faculties, intention is a weakling; it's just that habit is bigger, quicker, has a longer reach, and finishes strong. But policy is a patient, powerful, and healthy substitute for a weak will.

J.D. Trout is a professor of philosophy at the Loyola University of Chicago, and his book, The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society, recently appeared with Viking/Penguin.

Taxing and Drafting Our Way to Empathy?

J.D. Trout, Ph.D. — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 07:27:31 +0000

With the U.S. troop withdrawal impending, and many tens of thousands dead, it is worth reflecting on the U.S.'s "clean hands" approach to the war in Iraq, and what our best cognitive psychology says about it. In times of war, people commonly announce, with unquestionable sincerity, that war is tragic, with terrible costs in suffering and death. When made about the war in Iraq, though, these proclamations may sound hollow, even robotic. And there is good reason for suspicion: Most of the public is just too isolated from the human costs of the war to feel genuine empathy toward those it affects. There is nothing about the home front's involvement in this war that inspires anguish.

The scientific findings about empathy's limits make perfect sense of the public's indifference to the war, and of the current Administration's war policy. Research conducted decades ago by Milgram, Darley and Latane, and Zimbardo, and more recently by Alicke, Slovic, Hsee and Weber, Trope and Lieberman, Small and Loewenstein, chart the many different ways that psychological distance can paralyze our empathic faculty. We may want to be alert to evil, but psychological distance grants permission to ignore it.

Two U.S. war policies combine to deaden citizen psychology: There is no military draft, and no dedicated tax increase. How do you sustain an unpopular war of unprecedented expense without conscription and real money? The answer is disarmingly simple: You exploit citizens' all-too-human empathy gap. You finance the war on credit, pushing unwanted payment off into the misty future. And then you might, for example, assemble a volunteer army, even under terms many applicants wouldn't accept if there were effective job alternatives. As a result, U.S. citizens feel that the war costs much less, in money and human suffering, than it actually does. What we need is a measure that binds us to respond with moral seriousness to weighty issues, one that makes us take war seriously in the same way that, say, automatic deduction makes us take retirement seriously.

In order to reverse this empathic failure, we ought to make people feel the full cost of the war; we would need to impose a war tax and a draft. An effort to impose moral discipline and standards of fairness has languished in the House of Representatives. On the matter of the draft, New York representative Charles Rangel, Representative from the 15th District of New York has proposed H.R. 393 (2007), the United National Service Act of 2007: Impose a war-time draft. Rangel's colleagues dismissed an ancestor of this Bill in 2006 (a House vote of 2 in favor, 402 against). Rangel's rationale is open for public discussion; the claim is that Americans don't have anything like equal stakes in the war. Those socially and economically isolated in the lower income deciles not only carry a heavier burden of patriotism, they are the victims of empathic neglect.

This particular misalignment of responsibility seems to be a relatively new development in war policy. Wars never used to be run this way. In fact, during every war since the Civil War the government engaged citizens more viscerally, imposing a war tax and a draft on the citizenry and forcing Americans to pay the war's psychological and financial bill up front. A war tax made people feel the pinch at the moment, and a draft made everyone feel that they could lose a loved one. President Wilson raised taxes for WWI via the Emergency Internal Revenue Tax Act of 1914 and his government drafted nearly 2.7 million citizens. Gearing up for WWII, Roosevelt battled a conservative congress and still got passed a substantial federal war tax - and the government drafted over 10 million. Federal taxes were increased during the Korean conflict, and the government drafted over 1.5 million civilians. To finance the Vietnam War, Johnson raised taxes and, under pressure from Republican opponents, gutted some of his Great Society programs. Of course, the reach of a draft extends far beyond the inductees. While the Vietnam War drafted over 1.7 million citizens from August 1964 to February 1973, the draft exposed an average of over 18 million citizens every year.

Whatever you think of Rangel's proposal, it captures a sentiment that, deep down, we know is right: War is no less tragic just because it is staged at a safe psychological distance. H.R. 393 (2007), or a bill like it, is not irresponsibly pacifist or anti-war. It is, however, pro-principle, dedicated to stemming the immoral voyeurism of a remote-control war. Causing the death of another human is so weighty an act that neither inattention nor weakness of will can make it permissible. Such decisions must reach a level of personal involvement that will engage citizens. And for this, U.S. citizens must face the real prospects that their most cherished friends and family members may be relocated, wounded, and even killed.

Opponents may dispute Rangel's legislation by casting it as a mere exercise in shaming your political opponents. But not all disputes are reducible to the gaming of professional politics. Some policies are simple insights of folksy authenticity. But without a draft or a tax to face us with some of the real costs of war, judging the tragedy of war demands an imaginative leap greater than our human psychology can achieve. By bridging an empathy gap with a policy of taxation and draft, we would be brought closer to those who suffer from the war and will carry its crippling debt for years to come. Sadly, we will doubtless face these issues again. Next time, a psychologically informed policy can be ready for citizens who want it.

J.D. Trout is a professor of philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago, and his book, The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society, recently appeared with Viking Penguin.

Funny Money, Or: The Pleasures of Efficiency

J.D. Trout, Ph.D. — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:14:02 +0000

Some months back, PT bloggers were asked to comment on their relationship with money, with a special focus on any quirks we have. This is a more personal perspective than many of us take in our blogs, but still interesting and worthwhile. I hope you like it.

My Sicilian family was happy, but their happiness arrived efficiently. They found joy in activities and items that were both inexpensive and useful. Gnocchi, artichoke with bread crumbs and olive oil, eggplant parmesan, bean soups, spaghetti with a hard-boiled egg - these were the delicious dishes that could feed a family on less than bus fare.

At the same time, costly indulgences were shameful, and well-off relatives who were prideful or possessive of their money were pariahs. There was no greater insult than to say of a relative, "They drank champagne through the Depression." It was a denunciation occasionally whispered with great seriousness at family gatherings, and it always meant that a wealthy family member had turned away a shamed relative who needed help. Wealth could be explained by luck; not sharing some small portion of it when asked (which was never done lightly) was an inexplicable and unforgiveable affront to good fortune.

The pleasures of efficiency shaped all of our activities. After a day of fishing at the Jersey shore, we would grill the catch and then fertilize our petunias and tomatoes by planting the fish heads beneath them. And in our modest neighborhood, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and masons traded skills, converting everyone's carport into an additional room or two, for just the cost of materials.

I still want to trade skills but it is a lost norm. And though I have left behind the income bracket of my youth, when we use a dollar's worth of ingredients to feed our family a homemade black bean stew or pizza, I still think, happily, that this is how we will afford college for our children.

There is wisdom in cultivating inexpensive and functional tastes. As Epicurus held, such simple pleasures are not easily lost.

Hey Commissioner... Hand Me That Predictive Tool (Part 2)

J.D. Trout, Ph.D. — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:19:00 +0000

When I tutored Federal Penitentiary inmates decades ago, I made a big mistake. Part Two of "Hey Commissioner: Hand me that Predictive Tool" is about how mistakes like this happen, and what they mean. In Part One of this two-part post, I discussed the virtues of predictive tools when deciding which prisoners to parole. But people abandon the available predictive instruments and instead try to peer into the prisoner's soul, claiming their intuitive judgments are more accurate.

How do parole boards decide instead? Most have the demographic information in the file, as well as a record of the inmate's prior behavior. But human nature being what it is, some of this valuable diagnostic information is simply ignored, and all of it is improperly weighted. In a National Public Radio interview, a recent Commissioner of the Maryland Board of Parole explained his own method for making parole decisions: "You look in their eyes; you can feel, you know, if they're being sincere or not. And you learn to sort of see right through them."

Apparently their souls are not transparent, but there is a reason I don't laugh too hard at this conceit. In 1981, a parole board convened to hear the case of an inmate I was tutoring at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. The inmate's case worker suggested I speak on his behalf at the parole hearing. My experiences with this inmate were good; he worked hard on his assignments and was on track to take the GED. My last testament was for an inmate who, I later discovered, ran a vicious rape ring while in prison - a side of him he didn't share as we practiced our square roots. It is a special Federal Penitentiary inmate who scares other prisoners.

What went wrong when I provided testimony? First, my evidence was limited. I only saw him once a week, in the protection of the prison library. Second, the limited evidence I did have was, as a matter of fact, not diagnostic of reform. Learning to multiply fractions, acting politely, showing up promptly, etc., doesn't predict success in parole. Third, he didn't seem all that different from people I grew up with and worked with. (When I drove a truck, I was partnered with a guy who kept a gun in his boot, and would take it out on a long night drive to clean it, a bit nervously I thought.) The problem is, these experiences mattered to me. This familiarity influenced my judgment of the inmate's dangerousness. Finally, I trusted my own judgment.

The American public pays dearly when our broken parole system uses coffee clutch methods to solve the problems of a 21st century megademocracy. When parolees commit the same crime again people are harmed. When they otherwise violate their release conditions, their re-commitment is costly. In the meantime, there are many parole-eligible inmates who would not recidivate if released. And yet, our corrections system continues to employ parole hearing techniques guaranteed to err. Those methods are more suited to lazy conversation than scientific identification. As a result of this neglect, the corrections system doles out about $18,000 per year on each person denied parole by a board who would have integrated nicely, and on their own dime. This picture of the corrections system leaves out the important and sensitive issue of identifying candidate parolees. A 2002 Bureau of Justice Statistics study of recidivism indicates that the rates are highest for motor-vehicle theft (78.8%, $4000 per instance), possession or sale of stolen property (77.4%, $8000), larceny (74.6%, $370), and burglary (74.0%, $1400). Other errant parole releases can be even more costly. Basing harm costs on civil awards, a recent study, "Measuring the Costs and Benefits of Crime and Justice" placed the average cost of an instance of arson (without a fatality) at $38,000 and physical abuse of a child at $67,000.

People who build these models often wonder why people can't swallow their pride and step aside. But our arrogance rests on an unwarranted self-esteem that blinds us to our frailties. We can't shake the idea that these forecasting customs, with their bloodless scores, can't track the subtle tissue and turns of human behavior. From a psychological point of view, this impression is understandable. Inmates want to be heard. So do their victims. The courts have become increasingly sensitive to the restorative value of this closure. Inmates want people to know that there is redemption, that they believe they are not the same person who has committed the crime for which they were incarcerated. Their experience as a prisoner has transformed them, making them remorseful, more empathic, more determined to contribute to society, and more committed than ever to making a positive impact on the lives they touch. Victims and their families want others to know that their lives have been permanently altered by the acts of the person before them. It seems unfair to quiet their voice just so we can hear the data speak. But that's not really what we are doing. The alternative is patronizing. If you think that applying numbers to a human is essentially dehumanizing, talk to new parents about the Apgar score, applied to newborns within seconds of birth. This simple number guides the infant's treatment on the spot, and as it turns out, predicts complications years down the line. Our most precious gifts, embraced by numbers.

After 30 years of development, there is nothing high-risk or experimental about these parole decision-making techniques. Corrections institutions can now use commercially available software to look out years beyond an arrest or admittance, to determine whether a patient or prisoner will be violent (for just two examples, see here or here).

I honestly don't know whether my GED student, the U.S.'s inmate, was ever released on parole. In 1981, the parole board could not have known to ignore my prediction. The question is, why are parole boards still offering theirs?

J.D. Trout is a professor of philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago, and his book, The Empathy Gap: Building Bridges to the Good Life and the Good Society, recently appeared with Viking/Penguin.

Hey Commissioner... Hand Me That Predictive Tool

J.D. Trout, Ph.D. — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:08:15 +0000

People worry about crime - about becoming a victim, about its costs, and about a leaky parole system. Are we doing all we can to control those risks?

Is it any wonder that Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter's crime bill, The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, won bipartisan support? Economic collapse has a way of focusing everyone's attention on fiscal responsibility, and the U.S. corrections system has been on an unaccountable spending binge for the last three decades. Though not mentioned in the bill, there are predictive tools we could use at parole time that would help us to control this addiction to incarceration.

It took a new administration and financial desperation before states eyed our gluttonous and wayward corrections system as a place to trim. Facing shrinking budgets, states across the country started looking for ways to save money, and they soon found that the U.S. had become The Incarcerated Society. In 2007, the U.S. had over 2.3 million persons incarcerated. We now lead the world in incarceration rate - the U.S. hovers at five to eight times higher than the countries of Western Europe and twelve times higher than Japan. Senators Webb and Specter came to the obvious conclusion: There are huge inefficiencies in the corrections system and, not being prisoners ourselves, we continue to pay the price because we adapted to those inefficiencies. In the last ten years, parole boards have been using woefully outmoded methods for deciding which prisoners to release, and legislators have been hoping that everything will be ok as violent criminals are released to make room for the mandatory sentences of nonviolent offenders.

This costly embarrassment was a long time coming. From 1985 to 2005, the number of people in local jails rose threefold, from 256,615 to 747,529. This dramatic rise was not some kind of unanticipated side-effect; it was the direct result of policy decisions. These policies freshly criminalized behavior by reclassifying it. From 1974 and 2001, the average American became 3 times more likely to go to prison sometime in his or her lifetime (about 6.6%). Were people getting less compliant? It wouldn't seem so. The crime rate was dropping for much of that period.

The real explanation is much simpler. Well-meaning but poorly-tested offender-treatment programs couldn't stem the escalating crime rates in the 1970s, so new policies resolved to control crime by locking up more people for longer periods. Those policies are still with us, along with the problems they caused: overcrowded prisons, enormous prison administration costs, and higher recidivism rates. We couldn't build prisons fast enough.

The American public has lost its taste for the tough-talking, high-spending, "lock ‘em up at any cost" attitude of prior administrations. At the same time, we aren't prepared to flood the streets with unreformed criminals. So now we may be ready to exercise some science-based governing. As a result, it is all the more disappointing that so promising a bill gives scant attention to the savings that could be harvested by fairer and more accurate parole decision-making.

In states that still have discretionary parole, a parole-eligible prisoner comes before a board that has the inmate's file for review. In addition to that file, the parole board can direct questions to the prisoner about, for example, their adjustment to prison life, their remorse, and their positive activities while incarcerated. They then form a judgment about whether the prisoner merits parole. We want to release parole-eligible inmates, but keep incarcerated those who are likely to commit again. Satisfying these twin goals is usually the job of a parole board. But at what cost?

At least 175,000 parolees on the streets now were deposited by the unsteady, inferior judgment of parole boards. At the same time, prisons are full of parole-eligible, expensive inmates whose low risk was missed by parole boards. According to a National Research Council report, parole is at least $18,000 per year less than housing a parole-eligible prisoner. How much money can be saved depends on how many low-risk inmates denied by parole boards would be identified for release by predictive tools.

These predictive tools have a long pedigree, and by using them the Commission that Senators Webb and Specter propose could save money while finding a more accurate balance of community safety and proper punishment. For decades we have known that much behavior - from college success and cancer treatment outcomes to post parole violence - is better predicted by simple formula than by human "experts". (Pioneered by philosopher and psychologist Paul Meehl, these techniques were made famous in the bestseller Moneyball. My colleague Michael Bishop and I explored their potential contribution to philosophy, in Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, and I work out their promise for public policy in The Empathy Gap - in a chapter called "Stat vs. Gut".) During this time, crime researchers developed tools to identify parole-eligible inmates at risk to commit again if released. Their accuracy consists in distinguishing the likely recidivists from the harmless inmate, by creating a model that includes variables known to be correlated with recidivism for particular crimes - like behavior while incarcerated, age at first crime, and gender of victim, to name a few.

These tools amount to microsurgery in social science, but for some reason the parole system prefers mangling patients with triage. We have superior predictive tools, so why don't we insist that parole boards use them? The best guess is that everyone thinks the "personal touch" of the parole board is a kind of ineffable expertise. Like the winetaster's unchallengable skill, the parole board member merits expert status as well. Unfortunately, we just aren't very good at identifying genuine experts. Just as wine experts fall to these predictive models, so too do parole boards. When pitted against expert judges, predictive models win hands down.

In the next post, I will complete the story of how these predictive tools win, and what we could expect if we actually used them.

From Rags to Aristocracy

J.D. Trout, Ph.D. — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:41:46 +0000

A single lifetime of hard work and personal sacrifice can create a legacy of inherited wealth lasting many generations. But this singular focus on the hero's rugged American individualism hides an important consequence of the story: Only one generation separates rags and aristocracy. In that rarest of stories, you come into the world poor, make a lot of money, and pass it on to your children. After that, family legacies can proceed from riches to idle riches, not exactly the story that the frontier spirit celebrates.

As President Obama picks through unassigned money to cut the deficit, our disastrous economy has left little low-hanging fruit. But the estate tax is juicy, available, and utterly appropriate as a means of funding the budget. By maintaining the tax on estates over 3.5 million at the current 45%, President Obama is missing a huge opportunity to put inherited wealth to budget-balancing use, money more than a generation removed from the sweat that earned it. The current estate tax rate is just 5.4% more than the newly proposed top tax rate on earnings over $250,000.

Taxing estates consistent with our avowed image as self-made Americans won't by itself balance the budget. But it is significant. Even at current levels, the proceeds could help fill the shortfall in social security -- by a recent estimate, as much as 25% of it.

If creating a de facto aristocracy is so inimical to the image of the self-made American, why has the repeal of estate tax enjoyed such stewardship among the most (self-proclaimed) rugged individualists? The credible answer, it turns out, is naked self-interest. In 2006, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities documented eight estate tax reductions since the previous minimum wage increase. As citizens of wealth or plausible aspirants to it, most members of Congress plan to have total assets that will, when that unspeakable moment comes, trigger estate taxation. So they don't want it, and try to make their reasons nontransparent. People are often secretive when they are ashamed of their motives. That is how members of Congress managed to escape the expected public outrage as they accepted their pay raises while voting down minimum wage increases. Congressional pay raises are largely automatic and so move forward without notice (unless someone points it out). But raises in the minimum wage must surmount all of the hurdles that public debate erects, and then face the additional obstacle of a contested Congressional vote.

If we are serious about balancing the budget, then pushing for a repeal of estate taxes looks irresponsible. As late as January 13, the same Center estimates that advocates of permanent repeal would deny the budget almost $1.3 trillion over the first decade in which its cost would be fully felt, 2012-2021. This amount includes $1 trillion in lost revenue, plus $277 billion in increased interest payments on the national debt.

Any case for the reduction or repeal of estate taxes must hew to a ruthless consistency in the story of rugged American individualism. If you buy the vision, then accept the limits. No more cheap attempts to frame estate taxation as ghoulish or disrespectful (as in "death taxes"), and no more offshore estate-bunkers in which to hide unearned wealth (now being exposed with the cooperation of European banks). The American Dream was always about making it on your own, and never about sneaking around the law, or sneering at those without the resources to hire a financial protector. If we believe that, then let's abandon the double standard and do a modest rebooting after every generation. An estate tax needn't require the wealthy to neglect their children, but neither should it allow them to hog resources they didn't earn.

Rather than re-experiencing a collective moral spasm every time we are reminded of the insensitivity of corporate leaders and arrogant wealth, we should craft a durable image of the America we want to occupy. We should take the moribund task of budget-balancing as an opportunity to redraw the frame that girds the rugged individualist, to redefine that image, now shapeless and undignified. As a nation, do we believe in the power of novel ideas, in new businesses, in enterprise and entrepreneurship, and in the virtues of hard work? If so, why the fear of a new beginning every generation or so, of abandoning aristocratic entitlements?

By all means, if we embark on the experiment of a truly progressive estate tax, then let's watch it carefully. Let's see if childless couples become less productive or save less, or if wealthy families flee the country. These are all choices that citizens can make. And if they do, it will be an example of that rugged American individualism we all treasure. Who knows? Perhaps parents, facing a higher tax on their estate, will choose to spend their excess on their children now -- just what the economy seems to need at this crucial moment.

See The Empathy Gap. Viking, 2009; by J.D. Trout.

Do Economists Wear Seatbelts?

J.D. Trout, Ph.D. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:09:44 +0000

I once shared a cab to LaGuardia with a freshly minted Economics Ph.D. On the scent of fame, he identified himself as part of a new breed of "rock-and-roll economist," prepared to draw an audience with findings that jar and awe.

In the art of rhetoric, there are two ways to capture an audience: Tell people their worst fears are overblown, or tell them that a burden can be guiltlessly shed. Don't worry. Be happy. This cynical pose has led distinguished scholars in other fields, like Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, to decry the morality of the modern economist: "The problem is not that economists are unreasonable people, it's that they're evil people... They work in a different moral universe."

The economist's typical response strikes many as obtuse, and robotically affect-free. It is not the economist's job to seek to improve human welfare, or even seek the truth. After all, research is a market, no more and no less. Whether the incentive is fame or money, the market will sort out its quality. That's the official view, anyway. In practice, it's pretty hard to miss the ideology. But if you want to pretend that the economics research market filters out ideology, you shouldn't be surprised when an economist from the Ivy League tells us that U.S. citizens suffer "climate change hysteria", worrying pointlessly about global warming:

"[F]or the average resident of developed, industrialized countries, a warmer climate will bring net health benefits rather than any significant health costs."

Great. Sit back with a mint julep or buy that new tennis racquet (you'll have no need for skis). Global warming is coming to the U.S.! But there's more:

"In the U.S., a warmer climate will likely not only bring health benefits, but also quite sizeable recreational benefits. Early studies of the impact of climate warming in the 2.5 degree centigrade range focused on skiing and unsurprisingly found that a warmer climate would mean a potentially large decrease in ski days and a correspondingly large welfare loss. But skiing is of relative economic insignificance compared to summertime recreational activities such as boating, camping, fishing, golfing, hunting and wildlife viewing, with only $2.5 bill spend annually on skiing compared to $76 billion on the summertime activities. With either a modest 2.5 centigrade increase, or even larger 5 degree centigrade increase in temperature, recent economic work estimates very large net recreational benefits from global warming in the U.S., with net benefits perhaps reaching over $25 billion under the 5-degree increase scenario ." [footnotes omitted]

You will look in vain for cues of satire in this passage. This is a serious contention, complete with the blind trust that a destabilized climate will be gracious enough to allow fiscal year projections for recreational suppliers and real estate developers. The article talks as though national borders magically block global warming, or at least that the average industrialized nation can safely ignore the impact of global warming on less developed nations ("with moderate climate change predominantly benefitting, rather than harming, the U.S."). As it is, this is "A Modest Proposal" without the irony. Or, it could be a pretty effective Carnival Cruise ad.

Could modern economics also show I've been foolish for spending money on people worse off? Malthus, of course, famously argued that it was inefficient to give Irish workers better-than-subsistence wages - they would just squander the increase on the expense of more children - offsetting their gains with greater consumption. So you see, this coerces employers into subsidizing private choices. The coercion is even worse if it is governmentally mandated by a minimum wage.

Malthus's is an argument from "offsetting behavior". It assumes that, by some mysterious alchemy, there is a "natural amount" of risk that we will seek and absorb no matter what the governments does. It is an empirical speculation about human behavior, and there is only occasional evidence for it in psychology. It is, however, the canon in contemporary economics.

The sacred text in this canon is the classic 1975 study by economist Sam Peltzman that reported that automobile safety laws - like seatbelt laws - make people feel safer. Feeling safer, people believe they can "afford" to drive more recklessly (the so-called "Peltzman effect"). But by 2001, the celebrated Peltzman effect had been unmasked as not quite an urban legend, but surely a grossly overstated instance of offsetting behavior. The first hit came from Steven Levitt and Jack Porter, who showed that whatever small increase in recklessness seatbelts introduced was swamped by their power to restrain drivers and occupants. Wearing a seatbelt reduces the likelihood of death by 60% and saved as many as 15,000 lives in 1997 alone. The second blow came from Alma Cohen and Liran Einav in 2003, who found that seat-belted drivers are not more reckless. And these analyses are still unrebutted. Mandatory seatbelt laws reduce driver and occupant deaths, with no increases in pedestrian deaths. But like the Darwin awards, the Peltzman effect is too deliciously ironic or tantalizing to keep to yourself in casual conversation. (For more on the resilience of belief in the Peltzman effect specifically, and in offsetting behavior more generally, see The Empathy Gap.)

Did the research market in economics respond to these novel findings? No. Instead, economists largely ignored these findings, while continuing to ceremonially cite the Peltzman effect. The finding that seat belts do not produce compensating risky behavior might cause the finding to be buried, and professional ties severed. This would seem to be a big crack in its façade of objectivity. In the 2007 edition of his widely used textbook, Greg Mankiw, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, fails to report the findings that disconfirm the canon, "[T]he net result is little change in the number of driver deaths and an increase in the number of pedestrian deaths." (2007, p.8)

Mankiw describes the "Peltzman effect" as evidence for the "general principle that people respond to incentives". But he is too modest. Of course we respond to incentives; that's why a sale at Walmart can produce a stampede. The general assumption of offsetting behavior ventures far more - that government regulation is futile.

But in an efficient research market, the existence of offsetting behavior should be open to empirical test. And so far, the evidence is uneven. We can't assume that behavior will always fully erase the effects of a subsidy. To the extent that it is assumed, it is a beard for conservative economic policy that the economists' "research market" has failed to efficiently sort out. The sheer persistence in the academy of the Peltzman effect myth, for years beyond its disconfirmation, could only show that ideology is alive and well in economics.

Any theory that treats global warming as a growth opportunity, and government social programs as futile on the grounds of offsetting behavior is, shall we say, in the grips of an ideology. Either an unacknowledged value system is driving the economists' judgments of acceptable risk - in which case their inquiry is not value-neutral, or a false assumption of offsetting behavior has been insulated from refutation, in which case the research market is not free. There is nothing sinister going on here; these are all honest oversights of economists. But many economists do not choose the simplistic and mechanical psychology that lends comfort to these conclusions. In fact, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Layard, and Robert Frank champion a psychologically informed economics, one in which people routinely honor sunk costs, take losses to gain unproductive vengeance, and make inefficient decisions to vent moral outrage. Of course, economics is not the only science driven by ideology. But is it the only one that, on the whole, disavows with verve the relevance of value judgments.

Viral Ideas About Food Filth

J.D. Trout, Ph.D. — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:54:16 +0000

In my last post, January 5th, I discussed the apparently harmless "filth" that the FDA allows in our food, and went heavy on the disgust imagery. There, and in another article for a law review, I focused on the case of peanut butter. My new book, The Empathy Gap, was released on February 5, and in it I discuss another unwanted ingredient, maggots, in another foodstuff, mushrooms. After setting out the FDA restrictions in my book, I point out that "you would not have guessed that there was any acceptable number of maggots in your mushrooms."

"The Maggots in Your Mushrooms" was the title of a New York Times op-ed that appeared yesterday, February 13th. The author discusses two main foods that FDA regulations apply to: Peanut Butter and Mushrooms. This may be a peculiar coincidence, but it is also welcome evidence that questions about the efficiency of government regulations (like those of the FDA), and the positive role of government in our lives, are gaining a place once again in public conversation. When I first discussed the maggots in the mushrooms and the insect parts in our peanut butter, I used it to illustrate one issue: People happily accept government (in this case FDA) regulation in technical matters outside of their factual wheelhouse. But these examples obviously serve more than one purpose. You don't have to advance the public discussion of the recent salmonella outbreak or assess the reliability of the FDA. The author of the op-ed uses those examples in an analysis of disgust. The author languishes over the administrative tone and indifferent use of charged words like "filth" and "feces" and "rodent hair". The piece mainly describes the unwanted but permissible contents of the regulated foods, for us to gawk at the humorless descriptions of FDA limits.

When I wrote the January 5th entry "Peanut Butter and Paternalism", no one had any idea that the source of the spreading salmonella was peanuts (The CDC turned its attention to peanut butter on January 7th -- see this timeline). It does not appear that the FDA standards were too lax. It appears instead that the company was not compliant. At the moment, none of this speaks badly for the FDA. Now we can follow the enforcement phase.

I promise to stop talking about critters in our comestibles. But with all the foods regulated by the FDA, a New York Times op-ed on insect parts in peanut butter and maggots in mushrooms was a coincidence too delicious to leave unsampled.

Peanut Butter and Paternalism

J.D. Trout, Ph.D. — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:45:46 +0000

Ever wonder how many fly parts can safely reside in your peanut butter? The government decides, and consumers don't complain. Now consider: How many lives can be safely exposed to helmetless motorcycling? When the government decides, many complain.

On the standard story of economic decision-making, having more choices promotes our welfare, and we have the smarts to determine which choices will make our lives better. But this view has taken a beating at the hands of psychologists and behavioral economists. Often, we make better decisions when we have fewer options, a finding nicely set out in Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice. Our cognitive limitations make it impossible for normal humans to be entirely self-reliant in decision-making. These limitations pose a problem when we need complex strategies to achieve our simple desires.

We need special knowledge to make sound financial, medical, and consumer judgments. But when, if ever, does an individual's cognitive imperfection become so great that the government gets to substitute its judgment for your own? Isn't that paternalism? Most philosophers define ‘paternalism' as a rule, law, or policy that is (1) imposed against your will and (2) justified solely by appeal to your own interests. In the United States, there is a strong presumption against paternalistic measures. But once we are made aware of psychological evidence of the natural limitations on our judgment, it is less clear whether many measures decried as paternalistic really are introduced against our will. In addition to wanting a daily jelly donut, you may also want to reach retirement and have more rather than less money with which to retire. Foregoing the donut and placing the proceeds in a mutual fund will assist us in achieving 2 of our 3 desires. What we need is a reasonable person to tell us how to view our will in this case. Would a reasonable person say that our will is complex, and someone who wants a jelly donut every day may want lots other things that are inconsistent with having a jelly donut every day? So, is refraining from the jelly donut against our will or not?

We can appreciate the necessity of planning and regulation by recalling our old paternalistic friend, the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA has a code that regulates, among other delectables, the rodent hair per 100 grams of peanut butter-at most, you get just one-plus a more generous 30 insect fragments. Look no further than the information on "peanut butter filth" in the FDA guidelines. It says that the following conditions, among others, warrant seizure or citation by the Division of Compliance Management and Operations.
"Filth: The peanut butter contains an average of 30 or more insect fragments per 100 grams; or The peanut butter contains an average of 1 or more rodent hairs per 100 grams."

Popcorn fanciers can relax. Even one "rodent excreta" will scuttle a popcorn haul. On the other hand, it will take at least 20 "gnawed grains" in at least half the subsamples to block its way to the market.

Governmental restrictions like these have got to have a chilling effect on entrepreneurial efforts to enter the market. Isn't this interference paternalistic? After all, isn't the FDA interfering with my god-given right to offer the public - or even explore offering - rodent-hair-ridden peanut butter, or previously knawed popcorn kernels, at bargain prices?

At the same time, who gets to set the specific limit? There is nothing biologically magical about the FDA's average limit of insect parts in your peanut butter. Shouldn't we leave it up to the consumer to decide how many bug thoraxes and legs they are willing to eat? Shouldn't we allow them to freely assume the risk of fronting the costs of marketing an "adulterated" version of peanut butter at a lower price? Then consumers - at least those with strong stomachs - could freely choose to save money on it. Consumers' health decisions should be their own. And the risks don't seem troubling in this case. As one entomologist at the University of Illinois says of such insect parts: "They're actually pretty healthy".

The government doesn't allow us to make that call, but in the case of bug parts, no one complains. Why is that? Why do we, in the U.S., reserve our criticisms of government regulation for things like motorcycle helmet laws and gun laws, but not food regulations? Government regulation of food is justified by appeal to arcane knowledge: Most citizens can't make an informed and principled judgment about the risks of eating insect parts and other contaminants. Those unscheduled ingredients produce risk of sickness and even death, and without a background in the chemical, biological, or medical sciences, those risks are difficult to calculate. After all, the ingestion of rat feces or insect parts is a complicated process, and understanding it requires specialized knowledge that few citizens have.

It is tempting to say that the difference is the obvious one of risk. Ordinary folks know the risks of helmetless motorcycling or possession of firearms. But in fact, only some do, and it is difficult to know what evidence to believe. When it comes to the risks to life that handguns pose, should we believe the National Rifle Association, or the New England Journal of Medicine? Should we listen to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association or American Bikers Aimed Toward Education (ABATE)?

Some paternalistic regulation is designed to protect children, because they are not competent yet to assess risk. But if most of this risk information is too inaccessible or complicated for otherwise competent adults to acquire and process, then minors - even those alert to risk - don't stand a chance.

However complex the calculation of risk, the protection of the nation's minors does not seem to motivate ABATE, which fought the state's recent adoption of a helmet law for riders under 18. This is puzzling, given that this age standard is used in the U.S. as a proxy for competency to vote in a national election or to fight in a war. So individuals deemed too cognitively or motivationally immature to vote in a national election of their country ARE mature enough to assess the risk of helmetless riding?

Perhaps interest groups place some cultural hot-button issues above pragmatic assessment, using morally elevated talk of rights rather than prudential talk of risks. After all, Colorado's coordinator of ABATE said "It's my body, and I should have the right to do with it as I choose." If so, then why isn't there a similarly rights-based "hands off my bug parts" food lobby?

It is not utterly impossible for a non-specialist to acquire knowledge of helmetless fatality statistics, but it isn't easy to get all such knowledge while still having a chance at a rich and full life; handling all of these decisions would soon leave us with no leisure. Feces and wings are just the beginning. Three are also pathogens and maggots.

And how many maggots can be resting comfortably in your mushrooms? For that, you will need to look at The Empathy Gap. Until then, FDA regulations provide an entrée to other issues of arcane knowledge - like the relation between paternalism and prescription drugs - when unaided judgment isn't up to the task. But that is for another day.

The Greater Good: Psychology and Social Policy

J.D. Trout, Ph.D. — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:45:17 +0000

Welcome to The Greater Good. This blog will discuss issues that intersect psychology and social policy, preoccupations of my new book, The Empathy Gap. This is my inaugural entry, a mere introduction. In the next offering, I will ask whether recent psychological discoveries can help define the limits of government's interference with individual choice. (Actually, I will be talking about how many insect parts the FDA says can reside in our peanut butter). Sometimes this effort will bring to life hallowed but arid philosophical issues, like the nature of liberty and well-being. At least as often, this material will be controversial. I am not much interested in ideology. My goal is to advance discussion of issues that we should think more about, or that we should think about in a new and perhaps jarring way.

I am a philosopher of science by training, but have published experimental work in spoken language processing as well. Readers of PT online already know about the new generation of "experimental philosophers" - such as Josh Knobe, Shaun Nichols, Ron Mallon and Edouard Machery - who do psychological experiments designed to clarify, even decide, issues that have embarrassed, puzzled, or paralyzed philosophers for centuries. Currently underway are experimental research programs on consciousness, free will, justification, intention, and moral judgment.

But before there was experimental philosophy there was philosophical naturalism - the view that the best philosophy is guided by, and maybe even reducible to, the best science of the time. So philosophers don't necessarily have to run experiments if the experiments have already been done by psychologists. This view has taken hold in the expected places, like the specializations of the philosophy of science. But naturalism lags in fields like ethics and social & political philosophy (excepting people like John Doris, Steve Stich, and a handful of other philosophers), areas that still struggle in glorious isolation from the other disciplines. Philosophers occasionally concede the importance of empirical research to their fields, but there isn't any professional expectation that philosophers should know about empirical findings. So the standard philosophical approach is to try to move forward by cobbling together intuitions or generating proposals that feel coherent. As a result, the influence of scientific evidence in these fields has been slow and uneven. We will have the chance to talk about the reasons for this resistance to psychological findings. But for the most part, I will be doing naturalistic philosophy rather than talking about it. When discussing and criticizing interesting scientific results, it will become clear that a naturalist needn't be a giddy enthusiast for science.

Very clever experiments in judgment & decision-making and behavioral economics, for example, yield startling and robust results about the frailties of our intuitions. They show how people miscalculate risks, discount the distant vs. nearby needy, are subject to framing and status quo biases, trade many statistical victims for just one concrete victim, and gripe about taxation as they adapt to it. These are just a few of our cognitive and empathic frailties. And they are potent imperfections; in all of these cases, our errant beliefs influence our actions, and frustrate our pursuits.

Policies and institutions like social security, public education, health care, and the correctional system affect millions of people at once, so we should probably try to improve upon the blunt and provincial intuitions employed for centuries in the crafting of customary well-being strategies - intuitions about how we would behave as social isolates in the state of nature, what contributes most to happiness, and whether character plays as dominant a role in our success and failure as the orthodox American success narrative proclaims. We already have the psychological knowledge and superior methods to improve upon the traditional answers, and future posts will investigate their promise in securing a greater good.