For 1 and 2 the answer is never and none, pretty much by definition if you are talking to a utilitarian.
Most limits people around here talk about are practical not moral. E.g. In an ideal world I'd donate most of my money to charity and be happy about it, but I know that practically that's not possible because of how human psychology works. If I did that I'd be miserable and probably stop doing it fairly quickly. So it's not a good option. Instead I donate about 10% of my income regularly, which is an amount I can sustain. Psychological constraints are just as real as other practical constraints. Other constraints might be certainty, eg you might think killing someone would be net utility maximising, but can't be sufficiently certain that you'd do it, because if the risks of being wrong. And you can inform that with reasoning about how often people who think that killing someone is the right thing to do are correct.
I think the slight caveat on 1 and 2 is that you have to look at what level the decision is being made at. We naively think that we can decide each individual action that we make. But in practice, we more often control our actions by developing habits. Most of the things I do in the morning (have coffee, go to the bathroom, shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, check my e-mail) are done every day more because I've done them each of the past several days than because of any explicit decision to do them today.
So if A is the specific action on this specific occasion that will maximize utility, but B is part of a habit that is slightly less good on this occasion, but part of a broader pattern of behavior that is better than any habit one can train by doing A, then maybe doing B is better. (Of course, in this case, we might say that doing B actually maximizes utility, because we can account some of the good from future acts of B to this act, and can account some of the bad from breaking the habit to the present act of A.)
I have a more pragmatic approach to the problem. You can choose to offset immoral but permitted actions, like polluting and eating meat - that's between you and your God/conscience - but you can't offset actions that we all agree should be prohibited, for legal and societal reasons.
Allowing offsets for murder increases the social acceptability of murder, a very undesirable consequence. Perhaps more money goes to charity, but by definition this is evened out be an increase in murder, which is bad for the people that get murdered but also for everyone else in society. Obviously there are legal barriers to offsetting murder and getting away with it, but even if you could get away (bribing the cops? framing someone else and offsetting their sentence as well?), I'd argue that you shouldn't - there's value to a general prohibition of murder.
(I can't 100% say that murder can't be offset - we generally agree that it can be offset by time served, and many cultures in the past allowed it to be offset by blood money - however, that doesn't seem to be a society that we want to live in today.)
Offsetting something like meat eating or polluting has solely good consequences - the offsetting does good, it incentives you to do less of the bad thing by increasing its cost, and it has a second order positive effect in that other people may also consider whether the negative externalities should be factored into.
TL;DR offset things you were going to do anyway, don't offset reprehensible things in order to allow you to do them.
We generally agree that time served in prison is the /most acceptable/ out of all the ones we tried or thought of: the death penalty, blood money, corporal punishment, or indentured servitude have all been found unacceptable. The conflicting drives of the need for retributive justice and the opposition to cruel and unusual punishment mean that no one solution is universally satisfying. For that reason I'd say that murder cannot be offset, even though we try to force people to do so out of necessity.
I'd sort of argue that we still have acceptable offsets. Mainly I'd point to speeding fines. The core danger of speeding is that you kill someone, so to me speeding fines represent offsetting the small chance of you killing someone through speeding. We also have similar fines for other things that have low percentage chances of killing someone. Admittedly we no longer have good ways of offsetting 100% odds of murder, but we do ok with smaller odds.
"many cultures in the past allowed it to be offset by blood money"
Seems to have been a combination of "I'm an important rich guy and that was only a serf/slave/whatever, should I really have to undergo the death penalty instead of using my wealth to pay a fine?" and stopping the cycle of "Bob kills Joe so Tom is obligated by blood feud social pressure to kill Bob so then Bill has to kill Tom and then Phil had to kill Bill...."
I have a more pragmatic approach to the problem. You can choose to offset immoral but permitted actions, like polluting and eating meat - that's between you and your God/conscience - but you can't offset actions that we all agree should be prohibited, for legal and societal reasons"
That's assuming society supplies you with deontological ethics, which is more correct than utilitarian ethics, because it overrides utilitarian ethics. It's hardly a defense of utilitarian ism
Not quite - I'm focusing on the consequences, and arguing that there are good consequences for prohibiting murder (less people get murdered, we all feel safer) so allowing offsetting would make the world a worse place. Perhaps it would be better if there were equally strong prohibitions against eating animals (debateable), but if you feel that it's morally wrong but struggle to refrain from it, offsetting it seems like a good way to move the world towards a state in which its less permissible, because offsetting at least implies that there's a need for atonement.
Seeing value in rules is not inconsistent with utilitarianism, I think it's fairly uncontroversial that the world would be a worse place if we told everyone that murder is OK if you think it makes the world a better place.
"Not quite - I'm focusing on the consequences, and arguing that there are good consequences for prohibiting murder (less people get murdered, we all feel safer"
. If you have a rule that murder can never be offset, then you lose utility in the cases where the offset would have generated positive utility. In general, utilitarianism is utility maximising, and having absolute rules is deontology, and deontology isn't utility maximising, so adopting deontology leaves some utility on the table.
"Seeing value in rules is not inconsistent with utilitarianism".
OK, well I'm either inconsistent (very likely) or just outlining a useful principle that I'd generally (but not universally) adhere to, given the impossibility of actually calculating utility (approximations all the way down). I accept that there are contrived situations in which offsetting murder seems like a good idea, but most of the time it seems like it's going to be better to not do the murder and also do whatever good thing would offset it. In the real world maintaining a general prohibition against murder seems like a good idea - after all, if it's justified, it's not generally considered murder.
I was just trying to explain why a utilitarian might recommend offsetting actions that are socially acceptable but morally questionable, without also thinking that we shouldn't just let billionaires murder people after donating to AMF - primarily because there are better ways to raise money for charity than that (although I guess if there weren't I'd have to consider it...)
I agree with the impossibility of actually calculating utility, but I summarise that as "utility wrong". It's confused thinking to fix utilitarianism by making it work like deontology, while still calling it utilitarianism.
Utility is only guaranteed to be utility maximizing if you do *all* the math, including all the second- and third-order terms involving small harms spread over large populations. No, not just the *one* dust-specks-in-a-trillion-eyes term that made this particular problem so fascinating to think about, but also all the other messy realities that you tried to round to zero before you started calculating.
That's not how anybody actually practices utilitarianism. To implement utilitarianism in finite time requires rounding most of the terms to zero before you start calculating, and most people intuitively zero out the terms they expect would argue against their preferred course of action.
Allow murder offsets, and people will balance the zero-order "murder is bad" term with whatever first-order terms they think are most likely to make their preferred murder seem OK, and maybe whatever terms they can't get away with ignoring because other people will focus on them, and then they will stop. Whether they're a wannabe murderer themselves, or a judge charged with deciding whether someone else has paid enough offsets.
I've never seen anyone even seriously try to put numbers on the "this will result in far more murders because wannabe murderers will optimistically expect they can get away with discount weregeld", and "this will result in lots of people living their lives in fear of being murdered because they don't think other people put a high enough dollar value on their lives" terms. So I highly doubt that a bunch of clever utilitarians trying to implement a murder-offset legal regime would maximize, or even increase, utility.
I read your blog and liked it. I felt convinced then that there was some detail missing / inconsistencies.
Now reading the other responses I feel less convinced.
The value of a civil society is what jumped out at me.
If the price a making a brick is £1 and just to be sure you make it £100 that doesn't mean I'll happily give you a brick from my house in exchange for £100.
All that to say the price for murder should be the price for saving a life plus the price of making everyone feel as secure as they used to before they could be murdered legally.
Should there still be a price? Yes. Perhaps the reason it isn't openly accepted / talked about is the price is so high. Or that there is no utility in talking about it. I'm sure military commanders have made similarly cold blooded decisions in the past but it would be bad for morale to describe exactly how much benefit each soldier would be sacrificed for
I think it gives good intuitions for the questions you've asked. But here is my own explanation.
Utilitarianism works poorly without propper consequentialist framework. It's like a chess program with a propper ability to evaluate possible moves which can only look one step ahead. Such program can be beaten even by a heuristic chess reasoner like GPT-3. However if such program can look lots of steps ahead - it can become very good at chess.
If our utility function is properly defined according to our ability to predict long term consequences it's always moral to do action A. But it may be not the case. So the moral consideration which overrides pure utility maximization is weather such maximization will probably lead to less utility eventually.
The distinction between Axiology, Morality and Law comes from acknowledging the possible consequences. If we normalize offsetting human murder it seems to lead to the world with more murder and more power to the wealthy ellites which seems to be a drop in utility. On the other hand normalizing carbon offset seems to be leading mostly to more money in initiatives fighting carbon pollution and only a tiny increase in actuall pollution. So that's why we say that offsetting murder is a bad idea, while offsetting carbon emision is a good one.
If by moral hazard you mean exactly this - than there is no other reason. But I believe that reason is enough.
I think you sort of miss Scott's point about axiology/morality/law. Utilitarians (consistent ones, at least) really do believe that the only thing that matters is the maximization of utility. To a utilitarian, morality and law are not things external to axiology, but rather some of its specific subsets; this is, in fact, the point of rule utilitarianism. A utilitarian might say that a rule like "thou shalt not kill" is shorthand for "there is very strong evidence that killing people has negative utility beyond what naive consideration would suggest; therefore, you shouldn't e.g. kill 1 to save 2". Both the utilitarian and the deontologist recognize the rule; the utilitarian does not believe it to be absolute - so there's an 'N' where "kill 1" becomes better "don't save N" - and I don't know enough about deontology to know what it thinks about this.
Within this framework, moral blameworthiness as a concept is entirely instrumental, as is the notion of supererogatory acts. They are (ideally) set at whatever society-wide level that gets the most people to do good stuff, i.e. to maximize utility.
Your analysis of rationalists' attitude in respect to utilitarianism (in the essay) is perhaps correct, but it is besides the point and somewhat improper as an argument. It does not, strictly speaking, matter to a philosophical position's strength that a particular group of people was driven to it by "impure" considerations.
As for your questions this particular utilitarian would answer:
1. Never
2. There aren't any
3. By taking "common-sense morality" as a reasonable-but-not-infallible metric to compare naively-utilitarian considerations against, attempting to derive its commands in their most common forms from utilitarian principles, and then seeing if this derivation works for the specific case at hand.
In the case of "thou shalt not kill", for example, you say something like "(a) murder has direct adverse effects on social order, and also (b) there are pseudo-Kantian considerations like 'if you think you have sufficient reason to murder, then everyone will think that, too', and also (c) murder is usually wrong even without taking these complicated reasons, so the simplicity of a rule like 'murder is never correct' wins out in utility over the fringe cases where it doesn't work."
(Not claiming that this list is exhaustive - just that these can be morally valid reasons for a utilitarian to avoid murder.)
If the situation is such that (a), (b) or (c) are negated completely - or 'enough', really - and a utilitarian is confident enough in their applied ethics to believe that there isn't any (d) of substance they're missing, then yeah, they actually do get to ignore the rule. This is obviously a pretty rare occurrence, which is, again, why "don't murder" is usually good enough.
If something related to (a), (b) or (c) is what you mean by moral hazard, then I believe that answers the third question.
I think it depends on your utilitarian. There is the strawman bad guy who goes "okay, so I killed a few people/skinned some cats alive/eat beefburgers every Wednesday, but look at all the good things I do! Look at all the lives my donations to disease research and hospital wings have saved! Does it *really* matter if I murdered my mother for the insurance money to get my start in business, when I've been a huge philanthropist since I made my first billion?"
But there is the danger, because we're all human and humans make excuses to rationalise their behaviour, that people will go "does it really matter if I do teeny, tiny, bad thing X so long as good thing Y also happens?"
I am probably more of a utilitarian than most people, so I’ll just give you my general take on 3. I don’t really believe in moral laws. This point has been made by other commenters: “Do not kill” is a good shorthand rule. It’s an especially good law since that makes it an enforceable rule that will stop the action of killing which usually has bad outcomes. So I actually think (in a vacuum) it’s worse to not save two people than to kill one. Once you add in externalities, who knows though.
With respect to moral offsetting, it’s weird. Here’s how I think of it: In economics there’s this idea of “indifference curves” where it’s all the possible combinations of a pair of goods that would give you the same amount of utility. If you add one more of Good A your utility goes up and you’re off of the indifference curve. Obviously this can be generalized to indifference hyper-surfaces.
people tend to have a goal amount of morality. I think very few people aim to be maximally moral, unless they have a system that sets the bar reasonably low. As everyone knows, utilitarianism sets a high, almost unreachable, bar. So often a utilitarian will have some amount of utility that they informally aim to create.
Now let’s say you want to do something that would drop you below your “goodness goal.” In order to get back up to that level, you want to stay on the hypersurface so you have to offset somewhere else.
To bring up Bill Gates murdering people, I’d be concerned, but overall he’s done a lot of good and if it wasn’t going to lead to serious societal issues (which it probably would), I’d be ok with offsetting
There are practical as well as moral considerations driving human action. No inertia needs to be overcome to not save someone. You just need to keep doing whatever you were already doing. Murdering a person is not easy for most people to do. You may find yourself unwilling or unable even if you believe it is the right thing to do, and if you follow through and manage it anyway, it is likely to do significant psychology damage, which is a lot of disincentive.
Patching an ethical system with extra-moral considerations like this makes it much more likely that people can actually adopt and follow it, even if it makes the system less internally consistent.
Where true pure utilitarianism shines is guiding the actions of states, not individuals. Nations are absolutely going to kill lots of people one way or another, whether through inaction or action, and should use that to guide whether active killing is the better option. They have efficient means of killing via specialized trained professionals who are willing and able to do it.
> Utilitarianism maps everything to a linear scale of utility.
I don't see why the scale has to be linear. Murder could very well be exponentially more abhorrent than minor infractions like , say, eating meat. So much so that offseting murder would be impossible unless you were balancing it against other deaths in a trolley problem scenario, ie. murder one person to save humanity.
I think in this context "linear" is meant to contrast with "multi-dimensional" rather than with "quadratic" or "exponential". A linear ordering is one in which for every two elements, either the first is greater than the second, or the second is greater than the first, or they are equal.
That said, I don't see that utilitarianism needs to assume linearity of the ordering. A utilitarian could conceivably treat physical pleasure and social pleasure as two incomparable positive values, so that a situation that is better on both counts is better, one that is worse on both counts is worse, and one that is better on one but worse on the other is neither better nor worse nor equal. It's going to mean that there are some situations where no action is "right" or "required", because there's a set of acts whose outcomes are incomparable to each other. But there will usually be many acts that are still forbidden, because they end with results that are worse on both counts.
While I agree that a multi-dimensional calculation makes more sense, that's not really meeting the purpose of utilitarian calculations. If you cannot compare two acts, even with perfect knowledge, then you're defeating the purpose.
If the purpose is to see which is better and which is worse, and there is no fact about which is better and which is worse, then you're serving the purpose right.
It's only if the purpose is to have some algorithm that always returns a unique result that this would be defeating the purpose.
> Utilitarians do not incorporate other ethical intuitions or considerations in moral choices
I think that's incorrect, under my understanding of utilitarianism as a type of consequentialism. Even if we're talking about a hypothetical perfect utilitarian who has no competing moral intuitions, this person would still be trying to examine all consequences of their choices, including the way those choices would be perceived by the majority of the public who are non-utilitarians. Those perceptions could alter which choice is best from the utilitarian's perspective, e.g. the utilitarian may be wise to avoid "reputational damage" from actions that otherwise improve utility but are considered unvirtuous / rule-breaking by the community, because poor reputation can lower one's freedom/ability to act or influence others in the future.
1. A is utility maximizing and B is not, all things considered. Under what circumstances is B the correct choice?
In line with the previous thought, action B may sometimes enable more freedom of future action than A because it looks more virtuous, or more popular, or is simply cheaper (e.g. action B, "giving 100% of my savings to effective charity X", is more utility-maximizing than action A, "giving 10% of my savings to effective charity X", but it also limits my future actions. I might afterward learn something that shows charity Y is actually more effective than charity X, say, and would regret the 100% donation due to that.
In addition, it's often hard to be sure that A is utility maximizing and B is not. What we usually have when making a choice is "I predict A improves utility more than B, but I could be wrong". This is a great reason to let the Law and deontological/vitrtue ethics inform your otherwise utilitarian decisions. These other forms of ethics are organic things, shaped by history, and so they encode general knowledge of how past decisions played out (i.e. actions that often caused problems historically are likely to end up in rules against those actions). So one can reasonably use these other ethical ideas as a "general prior" about what actions are more or less likely to maximize utility.
2. What is a moral consideration that overrides utility maximization?
Nothing comes to mind.
3. If you believe in this idea of morality (as laid out in Scott's essay Axiology, Morality, Law), can you explain how you come to know moral facts or the nature of this morality. For example, why is it worse to kill 1 than to not save 2 even without moral hazard issues?
I don't have a theory of utilitarianism that says it is better to let 2 die than to kill 1, except in reference to the above (killing people can badly harm your reputation/freedom, except in special cases like killing a convicted murderer who is holding a gun on two people and threatening to kill them).
The saving grace of utilitarianism is that it's looking for ways to increase utility *as much as possible*, and killing people is usually not the *best way* you can find to do that. That is, when people claim "utilitarianism implores me to kill!" they are usually wrong (and, I suspect, usually arguing against utilitarianism). But there are cases where killing people seems like obviously the best available choice, e.g. if you somehow have an opportunity to kill Hitler during WWII, my utilitarianism approves.
Your argument for 1) is meaningless. The parameters of the question are "A is utility-maximising, B is not, *all things considered*". All your answers for this amount to "well, maybe B is actually utility-maximising when you consider all things", which seems to me a misunderstanding of the question.
(1) and (3) in your hypothesis are logically contradictory. If the attitude is largely the result of DNA, then ipso facto it cannot become widespread by any means other than substantial procreational advantage, which is inconsistent with the philosophy itself. If, on the other hand, the attitude can be learned, freely taken up by reflection, et cetera, then it cannot be heritable (i.e. Lamarckism remains dead), and so natural selection poses no barrier to its widespread adoption.
I think you are mistaken. E.g. SAT scores have high heritability within the US population but clearly are based on culturally learned prerequisites (such as understanding the English language). Likewise, the invention of better methods of birth control must have had a huge impact on the effects of genes that affect the propensity to use birth control.
"Heritable" in this context could also be looked at as learned behavior in the next generation. Those who have this philosophy are not having children and cannot pass it along to the next generation as they raise them. People who choose to have children will be able to teach (even implicitly through their choice to have children) the next generation.
This implies that over any timeframe above one generation, anti-natalism will diminish itself, whether because of the OPs genetic heritability or through learned behavior in future generations.
This also applies to long term population trends between those who have few to no children for other reasons - for instance philosophical desire to not overwhelm the earth's resources, compared to those who choose to have large families.
You seem to be assuming that memes are inherited from parents. I don't think that this is a reasonable assumption. E.g. the reason Newtonian physics is popular today is not that Newton had a bunch of children.
I'm suggesting that we do learn a lot from our parents, especially about their lifestyle. What we see in our early years is what we consider normal, even if it's actually really weird to much of society. If you grew up in a household with several siblings, you are going to have a different opinion about having children than if you grew up in a household without any other children. Far more importantly, nobody can grow up in a household with no children, to absorb that approach and think of it as normal.
Right. Memes can spread in lots of ways, and learning from parents is an important one.
Take religion, the archetypal example of a meme. Evangelism to strangers happens, but most people still follow the religion of their parents. And not coincidentally, successful religions tend to be very opposed to antinatalism.
Agree except for one important point: "the average antinatalist feels their own life is comprised of a lot of suffering and **they feel other’s lives must be as well**"
There is no need to assume that many/most other people are depressed, only (as you discuss further down) that depression is heritable. If you are depressed in your own life, then chances are reasonably good that your offspring will be as well, which I think constitutes a pretty good argument against oneself reproducing.
I understand antinatalism not just as the decision not to have children, but the moral opposition to anyone having children, usually accompanied by dismay that the majority of people still feel that life is worth living. Those certainly feel like distinct positions - one's personal preference, the other is a normative statement.
Depression isn't the only reason people might adopt antinatalism. I can see 2 others, both of which are probably growing:
1. Resolution of cognitive dissonance: You're apprehensive about having kids because of the effect on your lifestyle, or because you can't find a suitable partner. You rationalize your decision not to reproduce by believing that you're doing what is right.
2. Environmentalism and Malthusianism: You don't actually want the human race to die out, but think that current population is above Earth's carrying capacity, or just that we'd all have a better quality of life if the world was less crowded. You'd switch to pronatalism if the population got low enough.
Completely voluntary extinction is almost certainly impossible, as even a single remaining small contrarian population would be enough for eventual repopulation. Of course, if such an outlook was ever to become the majority opinion, it's doubtful that compliance would remain voluntary.
Majority antinatalist wouldn't be enough for enforcement. You'd also need the "sterilisation = death, therefore I have no reason not to revolt" group to be small enough to be suppressed (else the state fails and can't execute the plan).
There are certain ideologies that have strong favouritism for encouraging people into non reproductive sexual behaviours and sterilisation, while viewing it as a moral virtue and statements as milquetoast as this comment as evil as genocidal murder. These ideologies have become, in a very underststed way, much more common over the last decade. Of course as this is a no politics thread this topic cannot be explored any further for now.
This is why I encourage anti-natalists. Not that I agree with them, but because filtering them out of the gene pool little-by-little is the safest way.
This is generally true at some level, but it still take longer to get going because culture is changing so rapidly at present, which means the anti-natal and pro-natal psychological profile are also in flux. This is how fertility has been able to decrease basically continuously since the start of the industrial revolution and is now comfortably below replacement in most of the world.
For example, the stat "lifetime number of sexual partners" probably has a highly heritable component. But is it a pro-natal or anti-natal characteristic? For men it flipped twice in this regard over the course of the 20th century. At present, it is anti-natal: the more sexual partners a man has (assuming at least 1), the fewer children.
Going back to the topic of the Ashkenazim from a few threads back -- at one point, the Jewish population was exploding and Ashkenazi Judaism was clearly a pro-natal cultural belief. But now its population, at least in the US, is imploding, with most US Jews having significantly fewer children than the US median, and it has transformed into an anti-natal belief system. Though of course the more traditional Orthodox Judaism remains a pro-natal belief system, for now.
All that to say, I think ultimately human beings will develop some combination of culture and genetics that are resistant to anti-natal ideas (and as a result I believe the Earth will one day return to a Malthusian state), but it will likely be a messy, centuries-long process, with several false starts and dead ends.
> the stat "lifetime number of sexual partners" probably has a highly heritable component. But is it a pro-natal or anti-natal characteristic? For men it flipped twice in this regard over the course of the 20th century. At present, it is anti-natal: the more sexual partners a man has (assuming at least 1), the fewer children.
This sounds really interesting - do you have a source where I can see more about this?
It's the graph towards the bottom, though unfortunately the link for his source is now broken, so I'm not sure what the root source is.
What you see is that men with 1 partner have always done reasonably well, and started out the 20th century, while men with 20+ partners have never been the most fertile group (presumably relying mostly on prostitutes prior to the Sexual Revolution).
But in the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of "dating culture" and the breakdown of some traditional norms, all of the more caddish groups rose considerably, with 7-9 partners being the most fertile group in the 1930s. After that 1 partner returned to the top position but only slight beat out the next few groups, until the 1960s, when men who defied the Sexual Revolution and only had 1 partner became by far the most fertile group.
Better to be the kid born after he decided kids were bad (that's how much he wanted you) than to be the kids born before he decided they were bad (you were why he regretted having kids).
Sorry, missent one, so this is the real post. I think there are two main possibilities for a counterargument.
Counterargument A) Sickle Cell traits. This has advantages if you have only one copy of the trait, but disadvantages if you have both. I think it's quite possible antinatalism could be something like this. Intelligence is certainly positive, as is opportunity for education, both of which would tend to be necessary. It could be just that when you have the misfortune of combining that with irreligiosity, depression, and whatever else contributes, you end up with antinatilism, but the core components each can serve a purpose for enhancing fitness.
Counterargument B) Grandmother effects. I think it seems plausible that being an antinatilist could have positive outcomes for relatives. While intelligence is heritable, that's a pretty noisy inheritance. It seems like there's good odds that if you are an antinalist, you'll be smarter than your siblings just by regression to the mean. Thus you'll tend to make more money, and since you're an antinatalist who feels life is suffering, maybe you'll be more compelled to help your nieces and nephews. I'm much less confident in B, but figured I'd throw it out there.
If either A or B hold, it seems plausible we'll never see the extinction of antinatalism simply because it's tied to other good outcomes.
But you can basically only have that if you also have a pretty good education. The best quality medications are expensive, so you both need a good job and need to live somewhere with a good economy (and usually thus good education). I'd be willing to bet that people in the US who didn't complete high school have worse child mortality rates than someone college educated, even controlling for race.
It does not require "the best quality of medications" for children to reliably survive to adulthood. The cheap medicines you can buy for $10 at Wal-Mart or have handed to you for free by hanging out in an ER for a while will suffice for that, I do not think there is any socioeconomic class or other major population subgroup in the United States whose children have <90% probability of surviving to adulthood, and to grandparenthood if they are so inclined.
P(kids surviving to adulthood) is a second-order term in this equation, the dominant term is p(kids will bother having kids of their own).
> No property owner was harmed or lost property values in this exercise.
The amount of economic ignorance in this sentence is truly depressing. You made your properties less desirable to developers. That, by definition, made them less valuable, which cost everyone who owned those houses money. It's one thing if you guys said "we like our neighborhood the way it is, don't want it to change, and are willing to give up higher property prices to keep it that way." It's entirely another to pretend that that tradeoff doesn't exist...
If they want to preserve the character of the neighborhood e.g. by stopping a building getting torn down they can buy the building they are protecting otherwise they just want other people to subsidize their lifestyle. Same goes for stopping apartments being constructed either buy the land or jog on.
There's a legitimate argument from externalities. I have an interest in nobody within half a kilometre of me working with thioacetone, for instance, as the compound is so horrifically smelly that people will vomit and faint at that distance (fumehoods have little effect).
The usual way to deal with this is zoning; in location A, you're not allowed to build a plant using thioacetone, and in location B, you're told in advance that people are allowed to build a plant using thioacetone (and thus if you have any brains you don't live there). However, zoning is only useful if it is enforced.
Yes, that’s right. Zoning is public land use regulation enforced by public law enforcement and land use agencies. HOAs are private land use regulation enforced through contract. Homeowners are free to contract with each other (with some limits) in lieu of public land use restrictions.
A lot of racial covenants were written into HOA laws in the 1950’s and before. Because these agreements are legally permanent, a lot of these racial covenants are still on the books at HOAs, with an agreement that they won’t be enforced. They are awful, and they’re still out there.
"If they want to preserve the character of the neighborhood e.g. by stopping a building getting torn down they can buy the building they are protecting otherwise they just want other people to subsidize their lifestyle. Same goes for stopping apartments being constructed either buy the land or jog on."
Well, it should be actually all the people. Not, like, ten nimbys who are the only people who show up at the committee meetings. It should be at least 51% of all the people who live in that neighborhood.
If the city has a reasonable georgist-land-tax, then that's probably a sufficient criterion.
The answer to this question feels like a policy setting rather than a moral law. Ideally the local government would have a specific answer to that question.
Some local government areas would have a policy saying "Build whatever you want on your own land". Other local government areas can have a policy saying "You can't build anything unless you get at least 90% of the people living within a 1km radius to agree to it". Most areas could have something somewhere in between. People could choose whether they wanted to live in a pro-development area or an anti-development area, and we could see in the long run which areas wind up nicer and which wind up awful.
Personally I'd love to live in an area which is permanently and irrevocably set to "one house per quarter acre block" but still within 20 minutes of the downtown core of a major city.
> an area which is permanently and irrevocably set to "one house per quarter acre block" but still within 20 minutes of the downtown core of a major city.
If this is 20 minutes walking distance, I could see the pleasure of such an area. But basically by definition, it's impossible for there to be very much of this sort of land area (if you have too much of it then your location is not near a downtown core of a major city, but at best a weird suburban splotch that is surrounded by denser areas).
We have a version of this in my small upstate NY village. Current zoning code says you cannot cover more than 10% of your land with built structure (excluding driveways) yet less than 5% of the currently built structure adheres to that requirement. Essentially this means if you want to replace that falling down deck in back of your house, you need to go through planning board which then refers you to a zoning board which may or may not approve it based upon, you guessed it, the opinion of the neighbors. Because of rapidly escalating prices lately, it's not uncommon for applicants at the zoning board of appeals to 'lawyer up.' This is in a village of less than 3,000. So, while we don't require "90% of the people living within a 1km radius to agree to it," essentially we require 100% of the neighbors within 200 feet to agree to it or you will be forced to modify your plans to suit your neighbors whims which is how the un-elected boards get away with all this. I'm told that changing the code is "too hard" as there are too many moneyed interests that like it the way it is (recent lakefront estate went on the market for $15m) yet the political interests all say that affordable housing is in the top 3 of local concerns.
if it's the wrong sort of people moving in then you don't really have anything you can do
even burning crosses aren't going to reverse the economic changes that prompted the move
if it's illegal activity and/or vagrants you need to become a bigger nuisance to the police and the municipal authorities than dealing with the issue is
this has three stages and you have to be persistent and go through all of them
1. they'll humor you but practically ignore you - someone will show up when you call but explain they don't have the legal authority to do anything - they're lying
2.they'll start harassing and threatening to prosecute you for wasting police resources - ignore it
3. if you have karened strongly and longly enough they will finally remove the hobo camp/crack house/brothel and it would help if you and all the other people from the neighborhood are there to cheer them on - giving the police positive reinforcement helps shorten the process the next time
you should always be able to do what you can to change the character in your prefered direction. but things like 'character of the neighborhood' are nowhere near as permanent as people think. they will inevitably change,.. your neighborhoods character has probably only been that way for no longer than one and a half generations ( exceptions of course)
If it's a new building going in. The neighborhood might ask for changes to the facade that tries to keep the same 'character'. I've seen that work in small town USA.
It should be decided by people who don't live or have interests in the neighborhood. There's a tradeoff between the aesthetic value of the neighborhood's current character and the economic value of letting the neighborhood grow/change. Only an outsider can make an objective choice about which has more value.
I actually have no problem with a community deciding to stop development to save the character of a neighbourhood, basically ever. I just wish that, when doing so, they would be honest about the fact that this is going to dramatically increase the price of housing (at least, in communities with increasing demand, which is most urban areas), and have negative consequences for young families and the poor trying to live in the area. That's not a tradeoff I personally would ever make, but I don't have a problem really with any community deciding to make it. The problem is when communities make that tradeoff but then lie to themselves about why the community is expensive and start doing a bunch of other things to try and fix the problem that won't ever work because they aren't addressing the root cause.
I think there are at least two components to the "character of a neighborhood". One is the physical infrastructure (i.e., buildings, streets, bike lanes, sidewalks, green spaces, signage, etc.) and the other is the social character (i.e., who are the residents, what businesses are present, what languages are spoken, what is the level of wealth, etc.).
These two characters usually interface in a way with regional economic conditions, such that no one of these can change without one of the others changing. If the overall metro grows so that this neighborhood is now more central than it used to be, it will be in higher demand, so that if the physical infrastructure remains the same, then the social character will drastically change.
The problem I see is that people sometimes see the change in the physical infrastructure as a symptom of a single overall concept of "change in character", and assume that if they can stop the change of physical infrastructure, then they can also stop the change of the social character. But sometimes you may need to *accelerate* the change of physical infrastructure to have any hope of keeping the social character. If a neighborhood comes into higher demand, you may need to build lots of big apartment buildings in order to maintain some residences that are still affordable for the working-class residents of the previous incarnation of the neighborhood, and lots of storefronts near these apartments in order for the affordable diners and hardware stores that cater to these residents to be able to remain while a new set of businesses catering to the new residents also come in.
There are some cases when it seems to me that the physical infrastructure is absolutely worthy of preservation, even if it means the destruction of the social character of the neighborhood. The historic cores of Florence, Venice, and Amsterdam are worth preserving as a museum, even if they become places of tourism rather than sites of commerce and daily life as they used to be. But I think in most cases, the social character of a neighborhood is far more morally valuable than the physical infrastructure, and it would be nice if preservation laws were able to more effectively target that. However, this is an extremely difficult problem - it's hard to know how to change physical infrastructure in light of changing economic conditions in such a way that an existing community is able to remain in place, while it's much easier to know how to keep physical infrastructure the same, regardless of its effects on anything else.
Basically its numerically impossible for low density suburbs to contain a tax base that can pay for the upkeep of all their sprawled out infrastructure. I
So its one thing to want to control the character of a neighborhood. It's something else entirely to demand everyone subsidize a bunch of insolvent organizational systems and pretend its all just perfectly natural and organic because its your "preference."
Zoning seems like one of those powers that will just never be used responsibly once it exists. Yes, there might be cases where people have legitimate compelling interests to control what gets built in their neighborhood.
I don't want to watch a video when I can read text instead. How is zoning a "Ponzi scheme"? It seems to me like there are suburbs which have been around longer than any Ponzi scheme.
Presumably there is a level of services required in some suburbs that is beyond the level of the tax base in that same suburb to provide. In that case, a nearby city/the state provide the services at a loss while recouping the money from other taxpayers?
My local small town does not have all the services that a big city might offer, but the local tax base does pay for what we do have just fine. I would imagine most suburbs of bigger cities have more services, but I would also expect higher home values and a stronger tax base than a small town.
Inner ring suburbs are the places where the Ponzi scheme has stopped. They are famously impoverished, while their former apparent wealth has moved out to further suburbs.
Oak Park, just across the border from one of Chicago's worst neighborhoods, is not famously impoverished. Nor is Westchester, just across the border from the Bronx. I don't think the inner ring around Los Angeles is impoverished either, rather Beverly Hills is famously wealthy.
You're right that the pattern is more complicated than what I'm suggesting. There is often a "favored quarter" where the suburbs in that direction retain their value, and the ones in the other directions burn out. There are also often individual suburbs that manage to resist.
It seems to me that Oak Park is a unique dot of wealth on Chicago's west side, and Mt Greenwood is a suburban neighborhood of the city of Chicago that is also a standout on the southwest. But otherwise, both south and west from Chicago seem to share the pattern that there's poverty a mile or two out from downtown, and then increasing wealth as you go farther out. (The north side is the favored quarter.)
In New York, it looks like the parts of Westchester adjacent to the Bronx *are* pretty poor, and it's a few miles out before you reach wealth. To the extent that there's a favored quarter, it appears to be northwest (though the ring of poverty falls inside the city to the east and north, and outside the city towards the west).
Los Angeles has lots of complications in its patterns, due in part to the constraints that the mountains and deserts put on development, and also to the fact that its suburbs have always had a more urban development pattern than suburbs in the northeast and midwest. But the history of Compton exemplifies the pattern pretty strikingly.
It's not that zoning *itself* is the Ponzi scheme. It's rather that zoning for standard suburban development only works as a Ponzi scheme. It's cheap to put in pipes and streets on a greenfield development, but more expensive to dig them up and repair them a few decades later when they are reaching the end of their life. So a suburban development can be built rather cheaply, but in a few decades it will be too expensive to fix, unless it is upzoned for higher density, or has become *extremely* rich. Thus, the typical pattern around cities since the middle 20th century has been a slow burn of middle class suburbs around the edge, gradually turning into poor suburbs with bad infrastructure as the middle class fringe moves farther out.
Obviously this is oversimplified, and I haven't worked through the details of the calculations, but it gets at something right, particularly things like the plight of Detroit, where the city is now swamped by debt obligations it took on for the first round of suburbanization, that it can no longer grow to pay back, let alone fix up the decrepit former suburban neighborhoods.
Strongtown's thesis is nonsense; infrastructure maintenance is typically a small part of suburban budgets. Detroit (which is not a suburb and was not built the way Strongtowns claims) has a much larger problem: depopulation. When you go from 1.8 million people to 0.67 million, you tend to lose a lot of tax base.
Detroit has a whole set of problems, it's true. Depopulation is partly white flight, partly the decrease in household size everywhere, and partly inability to densify (only the latter of which fits in the Strong Towns thesis).
But much of the land area of Detroit is clearly suburban in form and zoning.
Anecdata: my middle-ring suburb of 53,000 people spends only $11.4m out of a $157m budget on public works. As with most places, education claims the lion's share of the revenue.
The link appears to be a theory founded upon the 2008 recession, which was actually caused by monetary policy. I'm not going to bother reading further chapters about "why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted" when that is plainly not true.
Thanks for the text link. Their theory seems to be founded largely on things like including the area devoted to parking in the denominator of their "efficiency" calculation for stores which have their own parking lots, but not including the on-street parking in front of stores which don't.
Yes, that's right. There's a lot of reasonable criticisms of Strong Towns.
But I think it would be fair to calculate efficiency for neighborhoods including all the land devoted to "green space", streets, and on-street parking as well as off-street parking. It might not turn out *quite* as stark as the calculations they carry out, but it'll still have the same pattern (because most development of the past 70 years has required the land area devoted to parking to be comparable or larger to the land area for the store, while street parking has never been that much).
Melbourne doesn't seem to have collapsed yet, and that's a city of 5 million in 10,000 km^2 (i.e. houses, houses and more houses, although there's been an effort to increase density recently).
What is the general consensus on Tether, the $60 billion stablecoin that detractors allege is a giant fraud? If true, does this pose a systemic risk to Bitcoin and the crypto market in general?
From what I've heard (probably from Coffeezilla), the issue with Tether isn't that it's a threat to bitcoin, it's that it's a really big bank which claimed to have 100% fiat money reserves, turned out to have much less than that, and may have none at all.
Tether being unbacked, by itself, would only be a problem for anyone owning Tether (and to anybody who was involved in the misrepresentation and didn't outrun the law).
The "Bitcoin is overvalued due to market distortion by Tether-the-company" claim is explicitly made by "The Bit Short" (the article Scott linked when making his prediction on DSL).
I mean, it's a threat to Bitcoin in the sense that a majority of the stablecoin volume in BTC is through Tether. Tether is largely controlled by a few large wallets that likely engage in substantial wash trading of BTC/Tether to manipulate the price. In other words, a lot of the supposed volume of interest in BTC may not be using real dollars but essentially a digital counterfeit version of USD. Liquidity is not what it appears to be in these markets.
Remember that the crypto markets have none of the consumer protections in place in regulated markets, and that shady stuff is going on 24/7.
So much of the problem with cryptos as an asset class is the point at which they touch the fiat market. Fees, and taxes are obvious big pains; price instability, over-leveraged coin holders, and algo traders are also concerns. I think it might be wrong to ever consider crypto as equivalent to dollars, instead of as a thing of value in its own right. People lament that BTC is used for illegal stuff without considering we could very easily be heading toward a future where wanting illegal stuff will be more common and seem like less of a choice (Need Penicillin? Got XRP?).
The USDT/USD exchange rate will fall on various exchanges. At the peak of tether FUD in April 2017 it briefly dipped to 92 cents, but for the last 3 years it has never gone below 99 cents even for a moment. Consider this exchange rate as a prediction market that allows all the tether critics to put their money where their mouth is.
Tether's market cap is only 10% of the size of bitcoin and it is only used because it is cheaper, faster, and less regulated than wire transfers for sending fiat from one exchange to another for arbitrage purposes. If Tether went to zero tomorrow due to an exit scam, bitcoin would dip temporarily, but I don't think it would have any effect on the long term trajectory of bitcoin (I estimate a 60% chance that bitcoin's market cap passes gold's before 2028 regardless of whether tether is a scam)
"...but for the last 3 years it has never gone below 99 cents even for a moment" During the selloff last month, it was pretty clearly in the mid 90's on several exchanges (per coingecko)
If you want to argue that that's only on a few exchanges, cuz arbitrage, OK, but your claim wasn't true. Also, it seems like you should have to explain why high USDT premiums have existed if the general thesis is that exchange arbitrage is driving everything
"Consider this exchange rate as a prediction market that allows all the tether critics to put their money where their mouth is". I sort of see this point except that with challenging off-ramps, you have to settle in USDT, whereas in real prediction markets, you get settlement in dollars. If you're long tether, and want to compare it to a prediction markets, units of settlement should be the same.
"Tether's market cap is only 10% of the size of bitcoin". I admit this is a nit, but it was 10.2% when you wrote this.
cryptos are an extremely interesting and possibly useful technology that currently has zero usefulness. however there seems to be too many wealthy people behind it now, and they arent going to let it fail.
For 1 and 2 the answer is never and none, pretty much by definition if you are talking to a utilitarian.
Most limits people around here talk about are practical not moral. E.g. In an ideal world I'd donate most of my money to charity and be happy about it, but I know that practically that's not possible because of how human psychology works. If I did that I'd be miserable and probably stop doing it fairly quickly. So it's not a good option. Instead I donate about 10% of my income regularly, which is an amount I can sustain. Psychological constraints are just as real as other practical constraints. Other constraints might be certainty, eg you might think killing someone would be net utility maximising, but can't be sufficiently certain that you'd do it, because if the risks of being wrong. And you can inform that with reasoning about how often people who think that killing someone is the right thing to do are correct.
I think the slight caveat on 1 and 2 is that you have to look at what level the decision is being made at. We naively think that we can decide each individual action that we make. But in practice, we more often control our actions by developing habits. Most of the things I do in the morning (have coffee, go to the bathroom, shower, brush my teeth, get dressed, check my e-mail) are done every day more because I've done them each of the past several days than because of any explicit decision to do them today.
So if A is the specific action on this specific occasion that will maximize utility, but B is part of a habit that is slightly less good on this occasion, but part of a broader pattern of behavior that is better than any habit one can train by doing A, then maybe doing B is better. (Of course, in this case, we might say that doing B actually maximizes utility, because we can account some of the good from future acts of B to this act, and can account some of the bad from breaking the habit to the present act of A.)
I have a more pragmatic approach to the problem. You can choose to offset immoral but permitted actions, like polluting and eating meat - that's between you and your God/conscience - but you can't offset actions that we all agree should be prohibited, for legal and societal reasons.
Allowing offsets for murder increases the social acceptability of murder, a very undesirable consequence. Perhaps more money goes to charity, but by definition this is evened out be an increase in murder, which is bad for the people that get murdered but also for everyone else in society. Obviously there are legal barriers to offsetting murder and getting away with it, but even if you could get away (bribing the cops? framing someone else and offsetting their sentence as well?), I'd argue that you shouldn't - there's value to a general prohibition of murder.
(I can't 100% say that murder can't be offset - we generally agree that it can be offset by time served, and many cultures in the past allowed it to be offset by blood money - however, that doesn't seem to be a society that we want to live in today.)
Offsetting something like meat eating or polluting has solely good consequences - the offsetting does good, it incentives you to do less of the bad thing by increasing its cost, and it has a second order positive effect in that other people may also consider whether the negative externalities should be factored into.
TL;DR offset things you were going to do anyway, don't offset reprehensible things in order to allow you to do them.
We generally agree that time served in prison is the /most acceptable/ out of all the ones we tried or thought of: the death penalty, blood money, corporal punishment, or indentured servitude have all been found unacceptable. The conflicting drives of the need for retributive justice and the opposition to cruel and unusual punishment mean that no one solution is universally satisfying. For that reason I'd say that murder cannot be offset, even though we try to force people to do so out of necessity.
I'd sort of argue that we still have acceptable offsets. Mainly I'd point to speeding fines. The core danger of speeding is that you kill someone, so to me speeding fines represent offsetting the small chance of you killing someone through speeding. We also have similar fines for other things that have low percentage chances of killing someone. Admittedly we no longer have good ways of offsetting 100% odds of murder, but we do ok with smaller odds.
"many cultures in the past allowed it to be offset by blood money"
Seems to have been a combination of "I'm an important rich guy and that was only a serf/slave/whatever, should I really have to undergo the death penalty instead of using my wealth to pay a fine?" and stopping the cycle of "Bob kills Joe so Tom is obligated by blood feud social pressure to kill Bob so then Bill has to kill Tom and then Phil had to kill Bill...."
"Jerdenizen9 hr ago
I have a more pragmatic approach to the problem. You can choose to offset immoral but permitted actions, like polluting and eating meat - that's between you and your God/conscience - but you can't offset actions that we all agree should be prohibited, for legal and societal reasons"
That's assuming society supplies you with deontological ethics, which is more correct than utilitarian ethics, because it overrides utilitarian ethics. It's hardly a defense of utilitarian ism
Not quite - I'm focusing on the consequences, and arguing that there are good consequences for prohibiting murder (less people get murdered, we all feel safer) so allowing offsetting would make the world a worse place. Perhaps it would be better if there were equally strong prohibitions against eating animals (debateable), but if you feel that it's morally wrong but struggle to refrain from it, offsetting it seems like a good way to move the world towards a state in which its less permissible, because offsetting at least implies that there's a need for atonement.
Seeing value in rules is not inconsistent with utilitarianism, I think it's fairly uncontroversial that the world would be a worse place if we told everyone that murder is OK if you think it makes the world a better place.
"Not quite - I'm focusing on the consequences, and arguing that there are good consequences for prohibiting murder (less people get murdered, we all feel safer"
. If you have a rule that murder can never be offset, then you lose utility in the cases where the offset would have generated positive utility. In general, utilitarianism is utility maximising, and having absolute rules is deontology, and deontology isn't utility maximising, so adopting deontology leaves some utility on the table.
"Seeing value in rules is not inconsistent with utilitarianism".
No, but failing to maximise utility is.
OK, well I'm either inconsistent (very likely) or just outlining a useful principle that I'd generally (but not universally) adhere to, given the impossibility of actually calculating utility (approximations all the way down). I accept that there are contrived situations in which offsetting murder seems like a good idea, but most of the time it seems like it's going to be better to not do the murder and also do whatever good thing would offset it. In the real world maintaining a general prohibition against murder seems like a good idea - after all, if it's justified, it's not generally considered murder.
I was just trying to explain why a utilitarian might recommend offsetting actions that are socially acceptable but morally questionable, without also thinking that we shouldn't just let billionaires murder people after donating to AMF - primarily because there are better ways to raise money for charity than that (although I guess if there weren't I'd have to consider it...)
I agree with the impossibility of actually calculating utility, but I summarise that as "utility wrong". It's confused thinking to fix utilitarianism by making it work like deontology, while still calling it utilitarianism.
Utility is only guaranteed to be utility maximizing if you do *all* the math, including all the second- and third-order terms involving small harms spread over large populations. No, not just the *one* dust-specks-in-a-trillion-eyes term that made this particular problem so fascinating to think about, but also all the other messy realities that you tried to round to zero before you started calculating.
That's not how anybody actually practices utilitarianism. To implement utilitarianism in finite time requires rounding most of the terms to zero before you start calculating, and most people intuitively zero out the terms they expect would argue against their preferred course of action.
Allow murder offsets, and people will balance the zero-order "murder is bad" term with whatever first-order terms they think are most likely to make their preferred murder seem OK, and maybe whatever terms they can't get away with ignoring because other people will focus on them, and then they will stop. Whether they're a wannabe murderer themselves, or a judge charged with deciding whether someone else has paid enough offsets.
I've never seen anyone even seriously try to put numbers on the "this will result in far more murders because wannabe murderers will optimistically expect they can get away with discount weregeld", and "this will result in lots of people living their lives in fear of being murdered because they don't think other people put a high enough dollar value on their lives" terms. So I highly doubt that a bunch of clever utilitarians trying to implement a murder-offset legal regime would maximize, or even increase, utility.
Oh, dear. This needs to come back in a politics thread.
I read your blog and liked it. I felt convinced then that there was some detail missing / inconsistencies.
Now reading the other responses I feel less convinced.
The value of a civil society is what jumped out at me.
If the price a making a brick is £1 and just to be sure you make it £100 that doesn't mean I'll happily give you a brick from my house in exchange for £100.
All that to say the price for murder should be the price for saving a life plus the price of making everyone feel as secure as they used to before they could be murdered legally.
Should there still be a price? Yes. Perhaps the reason it isn't openly accepted / talked about is the price is so high. Or that there is no utility in talking about it. I'm sure military commanders have made similarly cold blooded decisions in the past but it would be bad for morale to describe exactly how much benefit each soldier would be sacrificed for
Have you read Consequentialist FAQ? https://web.archive.org/web/20161115073538/http://raikoth.net/consequentialism.html
I think it gives good intuitions for the questions you've asked. But here is my own explanation.
Utilitarianism works poorly without propper consequentialist framework. It's like a chess program with a propper ability to evaluate possible moves which can only look one step ahead. Such program can be beaten even by a heuristic chess reasoner like GPT-3. However if such program can look lots of steps ahead - it can become very good at chess.
If our utility function is properly defined according to our ability to predict long term consequences it's always moral to do action A. But it may be not the case. So the moral consideration which overrides pure utility maximization is weather such maximization will probably lead to less utility eventually.
The distinction between Axiology, Morality and Law comes from acknowledging the possible consequences. If we normalize offsetting human murder it seems to lead to the world with more murder and more power to the wealthy ellites which seems to be a drop in utility. On the other hand normalizing carbon offset seems to be leading mostly to more money in initiatives fighting carbon pollution and only a tiny increase in actuall pollution. So that's why we say that offsetting murder is a bad idea, while offsetting carbon emision is a good one.
If by moral hazard you mean exactly this - than there is no other reason. But I believe that reason is enough.
I think you sort of miss Scott's point about axiology/morality/law. Utilitarians (consistent ones, at least) really do believe that the only thing that matters is the maximization of utility. To a utilitarian, morality and law are not things external to axiology, but rather some of its specific subsets; this is, in fact, the point of rule utilitarianism. A utilitarian might say that a rule like "thou shalt not kill" is shorthand for "there is very strong evidence that killing people has negative utility beyond what naive consideration would suggest; therefore, you shouldn't e.g. kill 1 to save 2". Both the utilitarian and the deontologist recognize the rule; the utilitarian does not believe it to be absolute - so there's an 'N' where "kill 1" becomes better "don't save N" - and I don't know enough about deontology to know what it thinks about this.
Within this framework, moral blameworthiness as a concept is entirely instrumental, as is the notion of supererogatory acts. They are (ideally) set at whatever society-wide level that gets the most people to do good stuff, i.e. to maximize utility.
Your analysis of rationalists' attitude in respect to utilitarianism (in the essay) is perhaps correct, but it is besides the point and somewhat improper as an argument. It does not, strictly speaking, matter to a philosophical position's strength that a particular group of people was driven to it by "impure" considerations.
As for your questions this particular utilitarian would answer:
1. Never
2. There aren't any
3. By taking "common-sense morality" as a reasonable-but-not-infallible metric to compare naively-utilitarian considerations against, attempting to derive its commands in their most common forms from utilitarian principles, and then seeing if this derivation works for the specific case at hand.
In the case of "thou shalt not kill", for example, you say something like "(a) murder has direct adverse effects on social order, and also (b) there are pseudo-Kantian considerations like 'if you think you have sufficient reason to murder, then everyone will think that, too', and also (c) murder is usually wrong even without taking these complicated reasons, so the simplicity of a rule like 'murder is never correct' wins out in utility over the fringe cases where it doesn't work."
(Not claiming that this list is exhaustive - just that these can be morally valid reasons for a utilitarian to avoid murder.)
If the situation is such that (a), (b) or (c) are negated completely - or 'enough', really - and a utilitarian is confident enough in their applied ethics to believe that there isn't any (d) of substance they're missing, then yeah, they actually do get to ignore the rule. This is obviously a pretty rare occurrence, which is, again, why "don't murder" is usually good enough.
If something related to (a), (b) or (c) is what you mean by moral hazard, then I believe that answers the third question.
I think it depends on your utilitarian. There is the strawman bad guy who goes "okay, so I killed a few people/skinned some cats alive/eat beefburgers every Wednesday, but look at all the good things I do! Look at all the lives my donations to disease research and hospital wings have saved! Does it *really* matter if I murdered my mother for the insurance money to get my start in business, when I've been a huge philanthropist since I made my first billion?"
But there is the danger, because we're all human and humans make excuses to rationalise their behaviour, that people will go "does it really matter if I do teeny, tiny, bad thing X so long as good thing Y also happens?"
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/utilitarian
as said by many others, 1 and 2 are both “no”
I am probably more of a utilitarian than most people, so I’ll just give you my general take on 3. I don’t really believe in moral laws. This point has been made by other commenters: “Do not kill” is a good shorthand rule. It’s an especially good law since that makes it an enforceable rule that will stop the action of killing which usually has bad outcomes. So I actually think (in a vacuum) it’s worse to not save two people than to kill one. Once you add in externalities, who knows though.
With respect to moral offsetting, it’s weird. Here’s how I think of it: In economics there’s this idea of “indifference curves” where it’s all the possible combinations of a pair of goods that would give you the same amount of utility. If you add one more of Good A your utility goes up and you’re off of the indifference curve. Obviously this can be generalized to indifference hyper-surfaces.
people tend to have a goal amount of morality. I think very few people aim to be maximally moral, unless they have a system that sets the bar reasonably low. As everyone knows, utilitarianism sets a high, almost unreachable, bar. So often a utilitarian will have some amount of utility that they informally aim to create.
Now let’s say you want to do something that would drop you below your “goodness goal.” In order to get back up to that level, you want to stay on the hypersurface so you have to offset somewhere else.
To bring up Bill Gates murdering people, I’d be concerned, but overall he’s done a lot of good and if it wasn’t going to lead to serious societal issues (which it probably would), I’d be ok with offsetting
There are practical as well as moral considerations driving human action. No inertia needs to be overcome to not save someone. You just need to keep doing whatever you were already doing. Murdering a person is not easy for most people to do. You may find yourself unwilling or unable even if you believe it is the right thing to do, and if you follow through and manage it anyway, it is likely to do significant psychology damage, which is a lot of disincentive.
Patching an ethical system with extra-moral considerations like this makes it much more likely that people can actually adopt and follow it, even if it makes the system less internally consistent.
Where true pure utilitarianism shines is guiding the actions of states, not individuals. Nations are absolutely going to kill lots of people one way or another, whether through inaction or action, and should use that to guide whether active killing is the better option. They have efficient means of killing via specialized trained professionals who are willing and able to do it.
> Utilitarianism maps everything to a linear scale of utility.
I don't see why the scale has to be linear. Murder could very well be exponentially more abhorrent than minor infractions like , say, eating meat. So much so that offseting murder would be impossible unless you were balancing it against other deaths in a trolley problem scenario, ie. murder one person to save humanity.
I think in this context "linear" is meant to contrast with "multi-dimensional" rather than with "quadratic" or "exponential". A linear ordering is one in which for every two elements, either the first is greater than the second, or the second is greater than the first, or they are equal.
That said, I don't see that utilitarianism needs to assume linearity of the ordering. A utilitarian could conceivably treat physical pleasure and social pleasure as two incomparable positive values, so that a situation that is better on both counts is better, one that is worse on both counts is worse, and one that is better on one but worse on the other is neither better nor worse nor equal. It's going to mean that there are some situations where no action is "right" or "required", because there's a set of acts whose outcomes are incomparable to each other. But there will usually be many acts that are still forbidden, because they end with results that are worse on both counts.
While I agree that a multi-dimensional calculation makes more sense, that's not really meeting the purpose of utilitarian calculations. If you cannot compare two acts, even with perfect knowledge, then you're defeating the purpose.
If the purpose is to see which is better and which is worse, and there is no fact about which is better and which is worse, then you're serving the purpose right.
It's only if the purpose is to have some algorithm that always returns a unique result that this would be defeating the purpose.
Agreed, which is one of the reasons I reject utilitarianism.
> Utilitarians do not incorporate other ethical intuitions or considerations in moral choices
I think that's incorrect, under my understanding of utilitarianism as a type of consequentialism. Even if we're talking about a hypothetical perfect utilitarian who has no competing moral intuitions, this person would still be trying to examine all consequences of their choices, including the way those choices would be perceived by the majority of the public who are non-utilitarians. Those perceptions could alter which choice is best from the utilitarian's perspective, e.g. the utilitarian may be wise to avoid "reputational damage" from actions that otherwise improve utility but are considered unvirtuous / rule-breaking by the community, because poor reputation can lower one's freedom/ability to act or influence others in the future.
1. A is utility maximizing and B is not, all things considered. Under what circumstances is B the correct choice?
In line with the previous thought, action B may sometimes enable more freedom of future action than A because it looks more virtuous, or more popular, or is simply cheaper (e.g. action B, "giving 100% of my savings to effective charity X", is more utility-maximizing than action A, "giving 10% of my savings to effective charity X", but it also limits my future actions. I might afterward learn something that shows charity Y is actually more effective than charity X, say, and would regret the 100% donation due to that.
In addition, it's often hard to be sure that A is utility maximizing and B is not. What we usually have when making a choice is "I predict A improves utility more than B, but I could be wrong". This is a great reason to let the Law and deontological/vitrtue ethics inform your otherwise utilitarian decisions. These other forms of ethics are organic things, shaped by history, and so they encode general knowledge of how past decisions played out (i.e. actions that often caused problems historically are likely to end up in rules against those actions). So one can reasonably use these other ethical ideas as a "general prior" about what actions are more or less likely to maximize utility.
2. What is a moral consideration that overrides utility maximization?
Nothing comes to mind.
3. If you believe in this idea of morality (as laid out in Scott's essay Axiology, Morality, Law), can you explain how you come to know moral facts or the nature of this morality. For example, why is it worse to kill 1 than to not save 2 even without moral hazard issues?
I don't have a theory of utilitarianism that says it is better to let 2 die than to kill 1, except in reference to the above (killing people can badly harm your reputation/freedom, except in special cases like killing a convicted murderer who is holding a gun on two people and threatening to kill them).
The saving grace of utilitarianism is that it's looking for ways to increase utility *as much as possible*, and killing people is usually not the *best way* you can find to do that. That is, when people claim "utilitarianism implores me to kill!" they are usually wrong (and, I suspect, usually arguing against utilitarianism). But there are cases where killing people seems like obviously the best available choice, e.g. if you somehow have an opportunity to kill Hitler during WWII, my utilitarianism approves.
Your argument for 1) is meaningless. The parameters of the question are "A is utility-maximising, B is not, *all things considered*". All your answers for this amount to "well, maybe B is actually utility-maximising when you consider all things", which seems to me a misunderstanding of the question.
(1) and (3) in your hypothesis are logically contradictory. If the attitude is largely the result of DNA, then ipso facto it cannot become widespread by any means other than substantial procreational advantage, which is inconsistent with the philosophy itself. If, on the other hand, the attitude can be learned, freely taken up by reflection, et cetera, then it cannot be heritable (i.e. Lamarckism remains dead), and so natural selection poses no barrier to its widespread adoption.
I think you are mistaken. E.g. SAT scores have high heritability within the US population but clearly are based on culturally learned prerequisites (such as understanding the English language). Likewise, the invention of better methods of birth control must have had a huge impact on the effects of genes that affect the propensity to use birth control.
"Heritable" in this context could also be looked at as learned behavior in the next generation. Those who have this philosophy are not having children and cannot pass it along to the next generation as they raise them. People who choose to have children will be able to teach (even implicitly through their choice to have children) the next generation.
This implies that over any timeframe above one generation, anti-natalism will diminish itself, whether because of the OPs genetic heritability or through learned behavior in future generations.
This also applies to long term population trends between those who have few to no children for other reasons - for instance philosophical desire to not overwhelm the earth's resources, compared to those who choose to have large families.
You seem to be assuming that memes are inherited from parents. I don't think that this is a reasonable assumption. E.g. the reason Newtonian physics is popular today is not that Newton had a bunch of children.
I'm suggesting that we do learn a lot from our parents, especially about their lifestyle. What we see in our early years is what we consider normal, even if it's actually really weird to much of society. If you grew up in a household with several siblings, you are going to have a different opinion about having children than if you grew up in a household without any other children. Far more importantly, nobody can grow up in a household with no children, to absorb that approach and think of it as normal.
Right. Memes can spread in lots of ways, and learning from parents is an important one.
Take religion, the archetypal example of a meme. Evangelism to strangers happens, but most people still follow the religion of their parents. And not coincidentally, successful religions tend to be very opposed to antinatalism.
Agree except for one important point: "the average antinatalist feels their own life is comprised of a lot of suffering and **they feel other’s lives must be as well**"
There is no need to assume that many/most other people are depressed, only (as you discuss further down) that depression is heritable. If you are depressed in your own life, then chances are reasonably good that your offspring will be as well, which I think constitutes a pretty good argument against oneself reproducing.
I understand antinatalism not just as the decision not to have children, but the moral opposition to anyone having children, usually accompanied by dismay that the majority of people still feel that life is worth living. Those certainly feel like distinct positions - one's personal preference, the other is a normative statement.
Depression isn't the only reason people might adopt antinatalism. I can see 2 others, both of which are probably growing:
1. Resolution of cognitive dissonance: You're apprehensive about having kids because of the effect on your lifestyle, or because you can't find a suitable partner. You rationalize your decision not to reproduce by believing that you're doing what is right.
2. Environmentalism and Malthusianism: You don't actually want the human race to die out, but think that current population is above Earth's carrying capacity, or just that we'd all have a better quality of life if the world was less crowded. You'd switch to pronatalism if the population got low enough.
Completely voluntary extinction is almost certainly impossible, as even a single remaining small contrarian population would be enough for eventual repopulation. Of course, if such an outlook was ever to become the majority opinion, it's doubtful that compliance would remain voluntary.
Majority antinatalist wouldn't be enough for enforcement. You'd also need the "sterilisation = death, therefore I have no reason not to revolt" group to be small enough to be suppressed (else the state fails and can't execute the plan).
There are certain ideologies that have strong favouritism for encouraging people into non reproductive sexual behaviours and sterilisation, while viewing it as a moral virtue and statements as milquetoast as this comment as evil as genocidal murder. These ideologies have become, in a very underststed way, much more common over the last decade. Of course as this is a no politics thread this topic cannot be explored any further for now.
This is why I encourage anti-natalists. Not that I agree with them, but because filtering them out of the gene pool little-by-little is the safest way.
This is generally true at some level, but it still take longer to get going because culture is changing so rapidly at present, which means the anti-natal and pro-natal psychological profile are also in flux. This is how fertility has been able to decrease basically continuously since the start of the industrial revolution and is now comfortably below replacement in most of the world.
For example, the stat "lifetime number of sexual partners" probably has a highly heritable component. But is it a pro-natal or anti-natal characteristic? For men it flipped twice in this regard over the course of the 20th century. At present, it is anti-natal: the more sexual partners a man has (assuming at least 1), the fewer children.
Going back to the topic of the Ashkenazim from a few threads back -- at one point, the Jewish population was exploding and Ashkenazi Judaism was clearly a pro-natal cultural belief. But now its population, at least in the US, is imploding, with most US Jews having significantly fewer children than the US median, and it has transformed into an anti-natal belief system. Though of course the more traditional Orthodox Judaism remains a pro-natal belief system, for now.
All that to say, I think ultimately human beings will develop some combination of culture and genetics that are resistant to anti-natal ideas (and as a result I believe the Earth will one day return to a Malthusian state), but it will likely be a messy, centuries-long process, with several false starts and dead ends.
> the stat "lifetime number of sexual partners" probably has a highly heritable component. But is it a pro-natal or anti-natal characteristic? For men it flipped twice in this regard over the course of the 20th century. At present, it is anti-natal: the more sexual partners a man has (assuming at least 1), the fewer children.
This sounds really interesting - do you have a source where I can see more about this?
I know I've seen it in more than one place, but here's one example:
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/some-guys-get-all-the-babes-not-exactly/
It's the graph towards the bottom, though unfortunately the link for his source is now broken, so I'm not sure what the root source is.
What you see is that men with 1 partner have always done reasonably well, and started out the 20th century, while men with 20+ partners have never been the most fertile group (presumably relying mostly on prostitutes prior to the Sexual Revolution).
But in the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of "dating culture" and the breakdown of some traditional norms, all of the more caddish groups rose considerably, with 7-9 partners being the most fertile group in the 1930s. After that 1 partner returned to the top position but only slight beat out the next few groups, until the 1960s, when men who defied the Sexual Revolution and only had 1 partner became by far the most fertile group.
Jim Crawford of the antinatalism blog has kids... some of whom post-date him becoming an antinatalist.
I bet that's fun for those kids when they find out!
Better to be the kid born after he decided kids were bad (that's how much he wanted you) than to be the kids born before he decided they were bad (you were why he regretted having kids).
Sorry, missent one, so this is the real post. I think there are two main possibilities for a counterargument.
Counterargument A) Sickle Cell traits. This has advantages if you have only one copy of the trait, but disadvantages if you have both. I think it's quite possible antinatalism could be something like this. Intelligence is certainly positive, as is opportunity for education, both of which would tend to be necessary. It could be just that when you have the misfortune of combining that with irreligiosity, depression, and whatever else contributes, you end up with antinatilism, but the core components each can serve a purpose for enhancing fitness.
Counterargument B) Grandmother effects. I think it seems plausible that being an antinatilist could have positive outcomes for relatives. While intelligence is heritable, that's a pretty noisy inheritance. It seems like there's good odds that if you are an antinalist, you'll be smarter than your siblings just by regression to the mean. Thus you'll tend to make more money, and since you're an antinatalist who feels life is suffering, maybe you'll be more compelled to help your nieces and nephews. I'm much less confident in B, but figured I'd throw it out there.
If either A or B hold, it seems plausible we'll never see the extinction of antinatalism simply because it's tied to other good outcomes.
My understanding is that education is currently negatively correlated with fertility.
My guess would be that it's pretty well correlated with having your children survive to adulthood though
Children surviving to adulthood is the norm with modern medicine & lack of famines.
But you can basically only have that if you also have a pretty good education. The best quality medications are expensive, so you both need a good job and need to live somewhere with a good economy (and usually thus good education). I'd be willing to bet that people in the US who didn't complete high school have worse child mortality rates than someone college educated, even controlling for race.
It does not require "the best quality of medications" for children to reliably survive to adulthood. The cheap medicines you can buy for $10 at Wal-Mart or have handed to you for free by hanging out in an ER for a while will suffice for that, I do not think there is any socioeconomic class or other major population subgroup in the United States whose children have <90% probability of surviving to adulthood, and to grandparenthood if they are so inclined.
P(kids surviving to adulthood) is a second-order term in this equation, the dominant term is p(kids will bother having kids of their own).
> No property owner was harmed or lost property values in this exercise.
The amount of economic ignorance in this sentence is truly depressing. You made your properties less desirable to developers. That, by definition, made them less valuable, which cost everyone who owned those houses money. It's one thing if you guys said "we like our neighborhood the way it is, don't want it to change, and are willing to give up higher property prices to keep it that way." It's entirely another to pretend that that tradeoff doesn't exist...
how much permanence does the character of the neighborhood have?
If they want to preserve the character of the neighborhood e.g. by stopping a building getting torn down they can buy the building they are protecting otherwise they just want other people to subsidize their lifestyle. Same goes for stopping apartments being constructed either buy the land or jog on.
There's a legitimate argument from externalities. I have an interest in nobody within half a kilometre of me working with thioacetone, for instance, as the compound is so horrifically smelly that people will vomit and faint at that distance (fumehoods have little effect).
The usual way to deal with this is zoning; in location A, you're not allowed to build a plant using thioacetone, and in location B, you're told in advance that people are allowed to build a plant using thioacetone (and thus if you have any brains you don't live there). However, zoning is only useful if it is enforced.
I often feel like HOAs are what you get when "if zoning didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it"
Yes, that’s right. Zoning is public land use regulation enforced by public law enforcement and land use agencies. HOAs are private land use regulation enforced through contract. Homeowners are free to contract with each other (with some limits) in lieu of public land use restrictions.
A lot of racial covenants were written into HOA laws in the 1950’s and before. Because these agreements are legally permanent, a lot of these racial covenants are still on the books at HOAs, with an agreement that they won’t be enforced. They are awful, and they’re still out there.
"If they want to preserve the character of the neighborhood e.g. by stopping a building getting torn down they can buy the building they are protecting otherwise they just want other people to subsidize their lifestyle. Same goes for stopping apartments being constructed either buy the land or jog on."
This.
Well, it should be actually all the people. Not, like, ten nimbys who are the only people who show up at the committee meetings. It should be at least 51% of all the people who live in that neighborhood.
If the city has a reasonable georgist-land-tax, then that's probably a sufficient criterion.
The answer to this question feels like a policy setting rather than a moral law. Ideally the local government would have a specific answer to that question.
Some local government areas would have a policy saying "Build whatever you want on your own land". Other local government areas can have a policy saying "You can't build anything unless you get at least 90% of the people living within a 1km radius to agree to it". Most areas could have something somewhere in between. People could choose whether they wanted to live in a pro-development area or an anti-development area, and we could see in the long run which areas wind up nicer and which wind up awful.
Personally I'd love to live in an area which is permanently and irrevocably set to "one house per quarter acre block" but still within 20 minutes of the downtown core of a major city.
"Some local government areas would have a policy saying "Build whatever you want on your own land". "
But then what would the bureaucrats have control over?
> an area which is permanently and irrevocably set to "one house per quarter acre block" but still within 20 minutes of the downtown core of a major city.
If this is 20 minutes walking distance, I could see the pleasure of such an area. But basically by definition, it's impossible for there to be very much of this sort of land area (if you have too much of it then your location is not near a downtown core of a major city, but at best a weird suburban splotch that is surrounded by denser areas).
We have a version of this in my small upstate NY village. Current zoning code says you cannot cover more than 10% of your land with built structure (excluding driveways) yet less than 5% of the currently built structure adheres to that requirement. Essentially this means if you want to replace that falling down deck in back of your house, you need to go through planning board which then refers you to a zoning board which may or may not approve it based upon, you guessed it, the opinion of the neighbors. Because of rapidly escalating prices lately, it's not uncommon for applicants at the zoning board of appeals to 'lawyer up.' This is in a village of less than 3,000. So, while we don't require "90% of the people living within a 1km radius to agree to it," essentially we require 100% of the neighbors within 200 feet to agree to it or you will be forced to modify your plans to suit your neighbors whims which is how the un-elected boards get away with all this. I'm told that changing the code is "too hard" as there are too many moneyed interests that like it the way it is (recent lakefront estate went on the market for $15m) yet the political interests all say that affordable housing is in the top 3 of local concerns.
Never. If the character of your neighborhood needs saving it is already gone.
if it's the wrong sort of people moving in then you don't really have anything you can do
even burning crosses aren't going to reverse the economic changes that prompted the move
if it's illegal activity and/or vagrants you need to become a bigger nuisance to the police and the municipal authorities than dealing with the issue is
this has three stages and you have to be persistent and go through all of them
1. they'll humor you but practically ignore you - someone will show up when you call but explain they don't have the legal authority to do anything - they're lying
2.they'll start harassing and threatening to prosecute you for wasting police resources - ignore it
3. if you have karened strongly and longly enough they will finally remove the hobo camp/crack house/brothel and it would help if you and all the other people from the neighborhood are there to cheer them on - giving the police positive reinforcement helps shorten the process the next time
>if it's the wrong sort of people moving in then you don't really have anything you can do
>even burning crosses aren't going to reverse the economic changes that prompted the move
Adios.
you should always be able to do what you can to change the character in your prefered direction. but things like 'character of the neighborhood' are nowhere near as permanent as people think. they will inevitably change,.. your neighborhoods character has probably only been that way for no longer than one and a half generations ( exceptions of course)
If it's a new building going in. The neighborhood might ask for changes to the facade that tries to keep the same 'character'. I've seen that work in small town USA.
It should be decided by people who don't live or have interests in the neighborhood. There's a tradeoff between the aesthetic value of the neighborhood's current character and the economic value of letting the neighborhood grow/change. Only an outsider can make an objective choice about which has more value.
I actually have no problem with a community deciding to stop development to save the character of a neighbourhood, basically ever. I just wish that, when doing so, they would be honest about the fact that this is going to dramatically increase the price of housing (at least, in communities with increasing demand, which is most urban areas), and have negative consequences for young families and the poor trying to live in the area. That's not a tradeoff I personally would ever make, but I don't have a problem really with any community deciding to make it. The problem is when communities make that tradeoff but then lie to themselves about why the community is expensive and start doing a bunch of other things to try and fix the problem that won't ever work because they aren't addressing the root cause.
I think there are at least two components to the "character of a neighborhood". One is the physical infrastructure (i.e., buildings, streets, bike lanes, sidewalks, green spaces, signage, etc.) and the other is the social character (i.e., who are the residents, what businesses are present, what languages are spoken, what is the level of wealth, etc.).
These two characters usually interface in a way with regional economic conditions, such that no one of these can change without one of the others changing. If the overall metro grows so that this neighborhood is now more central than it used to be, it will be in higher demand, so that if the physical infrastructure remains the same, then the social character will drastically change.
The problem I see is that people sometimes see the change in the physical infrastructure as a symptom of a single overall concept of "change in character", and assume that if they can stop the change of physical infrastructure, then they can also stop the change of the social character. But sometimes you may need to *accelerate* the change of physical infrastructure to have any hope of keeping the social character. If a neighborhood comes into higher demand, you may need to build lots of big apartment buildings in order to maintain some residences that are still affordable for the working-class residents of the previous incarnation of the neighborhood, and lots of storefronts near these apartments in order for the affordable diners and hardware stores that cater to these residents to be able to remain while a new set of businesses catering to the new residents also come in.
There are some cases when it seems to me that the physical infrastructure is absolutely worthy of preservation, even if it means the destruction of the social character of the neighborhood. The historic cores of Florence, Venice, and Amsterdam are worth preserving as a museum, even if they become places of tourism rather than sites of commerce and daily life as they used to be. But I think in most cases, the social character of a neighborhood is far more morally valuable than the physical infrastructure, and it would be nice if preservation laws were able to more effectively target that. However, this is an extremely difficult problem - it's hard to know how to change physical infrastructure in light of changing economic conditions in such a way that an existing community is able to remain in place, while it's much easier to know how to keep physical infrastructure the same, regardless of its effects on anything else.
The retired civil engineer behind Strong Towns makes a compelling case that autocentric suburban zoning is wildly financially unsustainable and essentially a giant Ponzi Scheme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0&ab_channel=NotJustBikes
Basically its numerically impossible for low density suburbs to contain a tax base that can pay for the upkeep of all their sprawled out infrastructure. I
So its one thing to want to control the character of a neighborhood. It's something else entirely to demand everyone subsidize a bunch of insolvent organizational systems and pretend its all just perfectly natural and organic because its your "preference."
Zoning seems like one of those powers that will just never be used responsibly once it exists. Yes, there might be cases where people have legitimate compelling interests to control what gets built in their neighborhood.
I don't want to watch a video when I can read text instead. How is zoning a "Ponzi scheme"? It seems to me like there are suburbs which have been around longer than any Ponzi scheme.
I'll second the request.
Presumably there is a level of services required in some suburbs that is beyond the level of the tax base in that same suburb to provide. In that case, a nearby city/the state provide the services at a loss while recouping the money from other taxpayers?
My local small town does not have all the services that a big city might offer, but the local tax base does pay for what we do have just fine. I would imagine most suburbs of bigger cities have more services, but I would also expect higher home values and a stronger tax base than a small town.
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
Time to summon the ghost of the nameless academic who said "It may work in practice, but will it work in theory?"
Famous saying: "If something can't go on, it will stop."
Corollary to famous saying: "If something has not stopped, it can go on."
Inner ring suburbs are the places where the Ponzi scheme has stopped. They are famously impoverished, while their former apparent wealth has moved out to further suburbs.
Oak Park, just across the border from one of Chicago's worst neighborhoods, is not famously impoverished. Nor is Westchester, just across the border from the Bronx. I don't think the inner ring around Los Angeles is impoverished either, rather Beverly Hills is famously wealthy.
You're right that the pattern is more complicated than what I'm suggesting. There is often a "favored quarter" where the suburbs in that direction retain their value, and the ones in the other directions burn out. There are also often individual suburbs that manage to resist.
Looking at this site: https://richblockspoorblocks.com/
It seems to me that Oak Park is a unique dot of wealth on Chicago's west side, and Mt Greenwood is a suburban neighborhood of the city of Chicago that is also a standout on the southwest. But otherwise, both south and west from Chicago seem to share the pattern that there's poverty a mile or two out from downtown, and then increasing wealth as you go farther out. (The north side is the favored quarter.)
In New York, it looks like the parts of Westchester adjacent to the Bronx *are* pretty poor, and it's a few miles out before you reach wealth. To the extent that there's a favored quarter, it appears to be northwest (though the ring of poverty falls inside the city to the east and north, and outside the city towards the west).
Los Angeles has lots of complications in its patterns, due in part to the constraints that the mountains and deserts put on development, and also to the fact that its suburbs have always had a more urban development pattern than suburbs in the northeast and midwest. But the history of Compton exemplifies the pattern pretty strikingly.
Here's the text version: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
It's not that zoning *itself* is the Ponzi scheme. It's rather that zoning for standard suburban development only works as a Ponzi scheme. It's cheap to put in pipes and streets on a greenfield development, but more expensive to dig them up and repair them a few decades later when they are reaching the end of their life. So a suburban development can be built rather cheaply, but in a few decades it will be too expensive to fix, unless it is upzoned for higher density, or has become *extremely* rich. Thus, the typical pattern around cities since the middle 20th century has been a slow burn of middle class suburbs around the edge, gradually turning into poor suburbs with bad infrastructure as the middle class fringe moves farther out.
Obviously this is oversimplified, and I haven't worked through the details of the calculations, but it gets at something right, particularly things like the plight of Detroit, where the city is now swamped by debt obligations it took on for the first round of suburbanization, that it can no longer grow to pay back, let alone fix up the decrepit former suburban neighborhoods.
Strongtown's thesis is nonsense; infrastructure maintenance is typically a small part of suburban budgets. Detroit (which is not a suburb and was not built the way Strongtowns claims) has a much larger problem: depopulation. When you go from 1.8 million people to 0.67 million, you tend to lose a lot of tax base.
Detroit has a whole set of problems, it's true. Depopulation is partly white flight, partly the decrease in household size everywhere, and partly inability to densify (only the latter of which fits in the Strong Towns thesis).
But much of the land area of Detroit is clearly suburban in form and zoning.
Detroit can't "densify" because of depopulation. And Grosse Pointe, which shares a border with Detroit, is not famously impoverished.
Anecdata: my middle-ring suburb of 53,000 people spends only $11.4m out of a $157m budget on public works. As with most places, education claims the lion's share of the revenue.
The link appears to be a theory founded upon the 2008 recession, which was actually caused by monetary policy. I'm not going to bother reading further chapters about "why our economy is stalled and cannot be restarted" when that is plainly not true.
Thanks for the text link. Their theory seems to be founded largely on things like including the area devoted to parking in the denominator of their "efficiency" calculation for stores which have their own parking lots, but not including the on-street parking in front of stores which don't.
Yes, that's right. There's a lot of reasonable criticisms of Strong Towns.
But I think it would be fair to calculate efficiency for neighborhoods including all the land devoted to "green space", streets, and on-street parking as well as off-street parking. It might not turn out *quite* as stark as the calculations they carry out, but it'll still have the same pattern (because most development of the past 70 years has required the land area devoted to parking to be comparable or larger to the land area for the store, while street parking has never been that much).
Melbourne doesn't seem to have collapsed yet, and that's a city of 5 million in 10,000 km^2 (i.e. houses, houses and more houses, although there's been an effort to increase density recently).
Why isn't this the essence of politics? Who gets to do what to whom?
What is the general consensus on Tether, the $60 billion stablecoin that detractors allege is a giant fraud? If true, does this pose a systemic risk to Bitcoin and the crypto market in general?
Some relevant articles:
- https://www.singlelunch.com/2021/05/19/the-tether-ponzi-scheme/
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoins-reliance-on-stablecoins-harks-back-to-the-wild-west-of-finance-11622115246 (paywall)
From what I've heard (probably from Coffeezilla), the issue with Tether isn't that it's a threat to bitcoin, it's that it's a really big bank which claimed to have 100% fiat money reserves, turned out to have much less than that, and may have none at all.
What happens if there's a run on Tether?
Tether being unbacked, by itself, would only be a problem for anyone owning Tether (and to anybody who was involved in the misrepresentation and didn't outrun the law).
The "Bitcoin is overvalued due to market distortion by Tether-the-company" claim is explicitly made by "The Bit Short" (the article Scott linked when making his prediction on DSL).
I mean, it's a threat to Bitcoin in the sense that a majority of the stablecoin volume in BTC is through Tether. Tether is largely controlled by a few large wallets that likely engage in substantial wash trading of BTC/Tether to manipulate the price. In other words, a lot of the supposed volume of interest in BTC may not be using real dollars but essentially a digital counterfeit version of USD. Liquidity is not what it appears to be in these markets.
Remember that the crypto markets have none of the consumer protections in place in regulated markets, and that shady stuff is going on 24/7.
I second this understanding of the issue^
So much of the problem with cryptos as an asset class is the point at which they touch the fiat market. Fees, and taxes are obvious big pains; price instability, over-leveraged coin holders, and algo traders are also concerns. I think it might be wrong to ever consider crypto as equivalent to dollars, instead of as a thing of value in its own right. People lament that BTC is used for illegal stuff without considering we could very easily be heading toward a future where wanting illegal stuff will be more common and seem like less of a choice (Need Penicillin? Got XRP?).
Also, there's a pretty good correlation between the Tether peg breaking and Bitcoin price crashes. Although that's kind of a chicken/egg issue.
The USDT/USD exchange rate will fall on various exchanges. At the peak of tether FUD in April 2017 it briefly dipped to 92 cents, but for the last 3 years it has never gone below 99 cents even for a moment. Consider this exchange rate as a prediction market that allows all the tether critics to put their money where their mouth is.
Tether's market cap is only 10% of the size of bitcoin and it is only used because it is cheaper, faster, and less regulated than wire transfers for sending fiat from one exchange to another for arbitrage purposes. If Tether went to zero tomorrow due to an exit scam, bitcoin would dip temporarily, but I don't think it would have any effect on the long term trajectory of bitcoin (I estimate a 60% chance that bitcoin's market cap passes gold's before 2028 regardless of whether tether is a scam)
I'm moderately certain that all (and certainly most) of these claims are false.
Would you please elaborate on that and provide evidence?
"...but for the last 3 years it has never gone below 99 cents even for a moment" During the selloff last month, it was pretty clearly in the mid 90's on several exchanges (per coingecko)
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/tether
If you want to argue that that's only on a few exchanges, cuz arbitrage, OK, but your claim wasn't true. Also, it seems like you should have to explain why high USDT premiums have existed if the general thesis is that exchange arbitrage is driving everything
"Consider this exchange rate as a prediction market that allows all the tether critics to put their money where their mouth is". I sort of see this point except that with challenging off-ramps, you have to settle in USDT, whereas in real prediction markets, you get settlement in dollars. If you're long tether, and want to compare it to a prediction markets, units of settlement should be the same.
"Tether's market cap is only 10% of the size of bitcoin". I admit this is a nit, but it was 10.2% when you wrote this.
cryptos are an extremely interesting and possibly useful technology that currently has zero usefulness. however there seems to be too many wealthy people behind it now, and they arent going to let it fail.
Surely it's still useful for criminal activity, as well as in messed-up countries where it's still a better currency than their own local garbage?