Able Abel and Post-Scarcity

Bryan Caplan has an extremely thought-provoking post over on his blog:

Suppose there are ten people on a desert island.  One, named Able Abel, is extremely able.  With a hard day’s work, Able can produce enough to feed all ten people on the island.  Eight islanders are marginally able.  With a hard day’s work, each can produce enough to feed one person.  The last person, Hapless Harry, is extremely unable.  Harry can’t produce any food at all.

Questions:

1. Do the bottom nine have a right to tax Abel’s surplus to support Harry?

2. Suppose Abel only produces enough food to support himself, and relaxes the rest of the day.  Do the bottom nine have a right to force Abel to work more to support Harry?

3. Do the bottom nine have a right to tax Abel’s surplus to raise everyone‘s standard of living above subsistence?

4. Suppose Abel only produces enough food to support himself, and relaxes the rest of the day.  Do the bottom nine have a right to force Abel to work more to raise everyone‘s standard of living above subsistence?

Do click the link, there’s more to the post, not to mention some rather interesting comments.Leave aside all the very important questions (which other people have already brought up) over how much of the fruits of Abel’s labour are, in fact, solely the fruits of his labour, the value Abel derives from the very existence of the social fabric, and so on. The question I was wondering about was this: what level or ratio of ability would overturn our intuitions (I say our under the assumption that most of you feel the same way, but I don’t know how justified that is) on forcing Abel into “slavery”?

What if the total level of the economy is far above subsistence level in the aggregate, as I think we can agree most Western countries are? Assume the others’ abilities remain roughly constant: at what level of Abel’s ability to create wealth/resources could we claim to have hit “post-scarcity”? A hundred times subsistence? A thousand? A million? Does it not matter? If the other 8 demand that Abel work an extra second so that Harry doesn’t starve, or even so they can enjoy some chunk of the incredible wealth that this “economy” has accumulated, would we still consider it slavery?An extra minute? An extra hour?

Most people would consider “how big a chunk” and “how much more work” the more important questions here, I think, and insofar as most discussions of taxation seem to revolve around it I think the “status quo” sees things more clearly than Caplan. My intuitions suggest that the size of the chunk should vary with the level of the aggregate economy over subsistence more than the actual distribution of wealth within the economy. Presumably this is where we could use some actual economics to guide us.

Q&A

Plinky Answers, all mashed up. This should make it clear that I’m both bored and feeling uncreative.

About how many books do you read each year?

As it happens, I know that to a pretty decent degree of accuracy! I’m sure there’s a lot of books that I’ve missed, especially the ones I didn’t like so much, and I start far more books than I finish so this is an ambiguous question anyway, but this page tells me I’ve read about 52, roughly, since I remember reading the Anita Blake books around this time last year.

If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell?

I’d like to say “books” but we already know that doesn’t work so well. Besides, I wouldn’t open up “a shop.” I’d have some people in charge of getting the permits and I’d hire an army of unemployed people to put tiny little stalls every 200 metres in middle class neighbourhoods where you can buy snacks, non-alcoholic drinks and cigarettes. If I had to do it myself and it didn’t necessarily have to make enough money… books and coffee, but with more emphasis on high-end coffee than on the books.

When was the last time you visited a library?

I visited the “library” in our training centre just 2-3 weeks ago, although that was mostly to find a place to study rather than to refer to any material or take out any books.

Make a list of all the countries you’ve visited.

Reverse chronological order:

• UAE

• UK
• USA
• Hong Kong/Macau
• Switzerland
• UAE, again
• Singapore
• US, again

And I will be going to the western seaboard of the US and Canada in another month.

Have you ever tried to grow your own fruits or vegetables?

My parents/grandmother does, in the backyard at home, but I have never done much besides pick the fruit, and even that has been a while.

What’s the coolest airport you’ve been in?

Hmm. Singapore was the nicest. Dubai is very close. Chennai, Cochin and Mumbai are all horrible. The new terminal in Delhi is quite nice, about on par with most good airports anywhere.

Should coffee shops limit the amount of time that laptop users can occupy tables?

That depends! What vibe is the coffee shop trying to project? Of course the answer to “should coffee shops permit people to use their space/maybe wifi for free indefinitely” is no, but there are probably better ways of doing that/extracting value out of these people than explicit time limits.

The Hunger Games

Jennifer Lawrence is brilliant. The movie is not. Oh, it’s fine if you need a big screen and comfy seats to rest in for 2.5 hours(!), but it will likely disappoint many hard-core fans.The fact that my seats were 10 feet from the screen and the assholes behind me who insisted on laughing during scenes that were meant to be poignant might have had something to do with why I didn’t enjoy it as much as you might; but considering that I had to work from memories of the book to evoke said poignancy myself, I don’t think I need to reserve judgement.

It’s not the cast, who generally acquit themselves quite well. It might be the direction- too many close-ups, too many quick pans and cross-cuts, too many of various other problems that I could feel but do not know enough film theory to explain. It might be the marketing: “Team Peeta” and “Team Gale” did sound a bit foreboding. But most of all I think it’s the “flattening out,” the appeal to a queasy mainstream: as Andrew O’Hehir hints at in this Salon piece ,

The problem really isn’t the lack of explicit violence; far more important, we get no sense of the hunger, thirst, cold, disease and harrowing physical torment undergone by Katniss and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), the shy, blond District 12 baker’s son who has long loved her from afar. OK, they get a few superficial nicks and scratches, but they look as well-fed and runway-ready in the second half of the movie as they did at the beginning.

(I should note that the rest of his issues with the franchise don’t bug me as much, though.) Because while “The Hunger Games” is, in many ways, rather typical (good) YA speculative fiction, the books managed to retain a sense of calculated brutality that was quite jarring, considering the intended audience.

The Hunger Games (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

[MINOR SPOILERS] The one-line hook of the series, for those few who still haven’t been exposed to it, is: “Teenage girl is forced to fight in a televised free-for-all fight to the death between children by a tyrannical state and eventually leads a revolution against it” but the structure is not quite that simple: Katniss has no intention of being a rebel leader, she just wants to save herself and her family, and the nature of war (the “glorious revolution” that most of us were rooting for as soon as we were introduced to the world) and its resolution depicted in the third book is… not pretty. The ending tries for a certain hopefulness but the philosophy espoused is deliberately inward-looking, as the author simply can’t think of a positive spin on the way the world is going, both within the book and by the barest of analogies the world today. But for all that it is an incredibly gripping series, not nearly as much “work” as I might have made it sound like, and I finished all 3 of the books in a week. Overall, well worth a read, but only worth a watch if you don’t expect too much.

PS: I did have a problem with the book initially: namely, an  instinctive rejection of the idea that anything quite so brutal as the premise could become so thoroughly legitimized within the context of the story. But as soon as the aptness of the dominant allegory- Panem is the Roman Empire, of course- stuck I realized that that was my problem, not the book’s. Of course brutal things can happen on a wide scale, and of course they can be normalised: it happens every day! Every war-zone, every “Killing Fields”, produces societies with  hierarchies of repression far less veiled than the ones our more extreme liberal brethren are inclined to see (not without reason) everywhere. In retrospect, I’m rather surprised at my initial naiveté, even though that was barely a month back.

UPDATE: Check out Yglesias’s post on the viability of Panem’s economy and some other interesting ideas.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The book is excellent and so is the movie, which glosses over the very small parts where John le Carre bemoans (through his characters, principally his villain, thereby never actually betraying the thought incontrovertibly as his own) the passing of Empire into history, at least for the Brits. George Smiley is an excellent character, I can’t say as much for the rest in the movie but they all rather shine in the book. Principally both are brilliant at evoking the atmosphere of the age, the “Great Game” and these quite human gentleman-spies. There were descriptions of the movie as principally being “long lingering shots of manila folders being passed from hand to hand” and while it is rather slow, you might prefer to use the word sedate. In any case it is hardly devoid of action and I found the plot quite thrilling, even if a lot of the really interesting parts happen inside the character’s heads. Avoid too much context or moralising “outside the box” while reading (not much chance of it during the movie), even though moralizing within it is apparently the chief draw for many of its fans.

I watched the movie first and then read the book (and then was inspired to start on a list of le Carre’s other major spy novels; so far my expectations have been fulfilled) but for any readers of mine who wish to go about it the proper way here is a suggestion: first, read the book at whatever pace you normally employ. Then either alone or with a quiet friend or significant other- someone you are comfortable with and do not need to be careful around or impress- watch the movie with either a steaming cup of tea or a warm alcoholic beverage (I recommend ginger tea with dark rum, as a matter of fact) in a slightly-too-cold room under a blanket. Expect a slow but steady pace, watch out for the scenery, and you will be pleasantly surprised. Go in expecting early James Bond and, well, you’ll still be surprised.

I should probably provide more of an introduction for the work itself but I will outsource that to Wikipedia:

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a 1974 spy novel by British author John le Carré, featuring George Smiley. Smiley is a middle-aged, taciturn, perspicaciousintelligence expert who has been forced to retire. He is recalled to hunt down a Soviet mole in the “Circus”, the highest echelon of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In keeping with le Carré’s work, the narrative begins in medias res with the repatriation of a captured British spy. The background is supplied during the book through a series of flashbacks.

Film:

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a 2011 Anglo-French espionage film directed by Tomas Alfredson, from a screenplay written by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan based on the 1974 novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré. The film stars Gary Oldman as George Smiley, and co-stars Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch and Ciarán Hinds. Set in London in the early 1970s, the story follows the hunt for a Soviet double agent at the top of the British secret service.

The film was produced through the British company Working Title Films and financed by France’s StudioCanal. It premiered in competition at the 68th Venice International Film Festival. The film was a critical and commercial success and was the highest-grossing film at the British box office for three consecutive weeks. It received three Academy Award nominations including a Best Actornomination for Oldman.

A Guide to the Legitimacy of State Authority for Minarchists

The point of a legitimate monopoly on the use of force is, at a fundamental level, to limit the level of violence. Insofar as it accomplishes this aim the state is superior to anarchism; insofar as this monopoly unleashes unchecked or insufficiently checked violence, it is not. In a situation where multiple agents try to extract rents through the use of force a state modeled simply as a stable protection racket- forget theories of justice or any larger scope of political philosophy- still pays for itself; in a society that largely understands the virtues of cooperation where apathy and where badly calibrated moral outrage over, say, drug laws leads to the disproportionate incarceration of millions of lower-class citizens of minority backgrounds, it does not.

Inspired by: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/no-kony-is-an-island-death-and-profit-in-central-africa/ , although I didn’t read the whole thing, because it says far too little in far too many words.

Theories on Growing Up, locked away for later re-examination

Perhaps
that’s all there is to maturity;
knowing when to cut your losses
to put to rest the overworked horse
relieving it
of burdens it was never meant to bear.
Perhaps
it’s learning when to stop raging,
to accept the inexorable night.
Perhaps
you learn to navigate
to steer yourself
through islands of heartbreak,
preferring the occasional grounding
to an endless sea of loneliness.

Or
perhaps
you just learn to stop whining,
or maybe even simply learn
to whine more artfully.

Things I don’t get

I think this post has something for all the classes of people that I know have ever read my blog.

1) Why free speech advocates reject the “but it will offend Muslims!” argument as if it were clearly not worth considering.

Personally, I preferred the bear suit.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the idea that you should not be able to draw a picture or write an article about something because somebody might find it offensive really is inherently stupid. I think blasphemy laws suck, that they’re a disgrace to a civilised world and that they’re taking us back to the dark ages. But the idea that some things can offend us simply by existing is not in fact particularly new or unconventional, as much as it might go against my libertarian principles. Few people demand the categorical repeal of obscenity laws, which are essentially just that. Here is a Less Wrong article asking a similar question.

My theory is that this is a problem that inevitably arises in heterogenous societies. Most of us don’t object to a law that bans public masturbation because we share the same instinctual reaction to it, and we don’t share the reaction of an observant Muslim faced with a cartoon of Mohammed. Of course, I still say the offended Muslim can go poke his/her eyes out if he cares that much, but then I’m also perfectly comfortable to generally push “enlightenment values” and secular traditions in the face of local cultures everywhere.

2) Why people cried for Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs and a device people now identify with Steve Jobs.

Which is an entirely different question from why people exhibit such strong emotions for their Apple devices. Because let’s be fair, Apple makes a lot of good products. They have great designs and generally trouble-free, marvelously smooth interfaces, and the customer support in Apple stores is wonderful (or so I’m told).  But Jobs himself was never the most savoury of characters. The man was horrible to work for, stole ideas all over the place, never gave significantly to charity despite his vast wealth, promoted quack medicine until it almost killed him, and cared little for how his subcontractors treated workers.

Of course he was smart. And of course he had a good eye for design and had vision and was a good executor and gave good speeches. If I owned a tech company-ok, pretty much any company- and Zombie Jobs offered to run it I would jump at the chance. But since when does any of that lead people to care so deeply about a total stranger?

My answer is a combination of the media’s increasing tendency towards hagiographic obituaries, the fact that he had very consciously developed a personality cult and tied the company and its products strongly to himself, and the simple truth that he was a very well-known figure and there will be someone who cries for just about any celebrity, just because it means a change in their world. I remain unsatisfied at the idea that so many people the world over chose him as the only corporate titan to connect to in such an emotional way, though.

3) Why people care about the US elections

Like the first one, this is a bit of a tease, because I find myself reading a fair bit about it and I’ll probably continue to, if only because I won’t be able to escape it. But from a purely utilitarian viewpoint it’s a pointless exercise.

I mean, look at him.

“But Nikhil!” , you protest. “Perry’s a whore, Santorum’s santorum, and Gingrich is such an obvious prick: wouldn’t it be horrible if one of them won?” And I say: it won’t, because they won’t. The truth is that none of them have a real shot, let alone the gallery of buffoons (Cain, Bachman, and oh God, Palin) that have sprung up and dropped out one by one. Mitt Romney is the only real Republican candidate who has a chance- sorry, Ron Paul- and no matter what he says in the primary to appease the raving horde, his actions as president are unlikely to be significantly different from Obama’s. Of course he’ll be a little to Obama’s right but on most things we would care about-foreign policy, Internet regulation, general IP regulations/agreements, free trade agreements- that isn’t saying much. As long as he isn’t stupid enough to start a new war-and however much you might despise his views, he shows all signs of being a rather intelligent man- the rest of the world could easily close their eyes to this entire circus.