OT111: Ophion Thread


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This is the bi-weekly visible open thread (there are also hidden open threads twice a week you can reach through the Open Thread tab on the top of the page). Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. You can also talk at the SSC subreddit or the SSC Discord server – and also check out the SSC Podcast. Also:

1. There were some great comments on the schizophrenia thread. They convinced me I made a couple of mistakes both of fact and emphasis on there: first, that in many prodromes the negative symptoms come before or at the same time as the positive; second, that I forgot to mention there’s a large population of people with schizophrenia (or schizophrenia-like symptoms) who never worsen at all no matter how long their psychosis is untreated. I’ve also been reminded of many things about psychosis that don’t fit this model, which I might talk about more later. Beyond that, see this comment by local schizophrenia research JRG, and this thread of comments by local schizophrenic Vaticidalprophet. And see also Seppo on shamanism and thedixon on psychedelics.

2. Other good discussions from the subreddit: is Britain really poorer than Mississippi, and in what sense? and JudyKateR on useless jobs.

3. New South Bay meetup, Saturday October 6, see here for details. And you can always find the latest meetups around the world on the meetup sidebar on the left.

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1,079 Responses to OT111: Ophion Thread

  1. toastengineer says:

    Ever noticed how a lot of time people all kinda look the same? Like, you see a person, and you say “oh, that kind of person. I’ve seen that kind of person before.” Almost like race, except way subtler and I don’t think they’re related to each other. What’s up with that?

    • JPNunez says:

      You mean like…social class?

      • melolontha says:

        If it’s the thing I recognise, it’s much finer grained than that. (Though I wouldn’t go as far as to say that ‘people all kinda look the same’ — for me, only some people fit into ‘types’ in this way.)

        I don’t really understand it, but I assume it’s something to do with collections of relatively subtle and/or hard-to-describe features — like mouth shape, or cheek angles, or whatever — that sometimes cluster together in recognisable ways. Whether it’s a matter of distant family relationships or just random (if I see a large, semi-random set of people in my life, some of them are going to cluster together just by chance), I’m not sure.

    • Well... says:

      I know exactly what you’re talking about. For instance there’s a whole lot of people (most of them white but not all) with roughly the same facial characteristics as Brent Spiner, especially his nose and eyebrow shapes.

      • Jaskologist says:

        That’s a glitch in the Holodeck. Please be warned that the safeguards are probably broken as well.

      • GardenVarietyWraith says:

        Yep–derivatives of the Ur-Walter Matthau prototype : )

      • Migratory says:

        I looked up pictures of Brent Spiner, expecting to find that he fits in one of the “groups” that I’m thinking of, but it’s not the case. He looks unique to me. Maybe it’s regional, or maybe everyone has their own grouping system and he falls squarely in one of your groups but not in mine.

        Something about schemas?

    • Squirrel of Doom says:

      I don’t know, but I bet it says something about your brain, not so much about the people you meet.

      • cactus head says:

        Maybe we could hear what it says about his brain and what it says about the people he meets, and decide for ourselves which one says much of something.

    • Mark Atwood says:

      It’s true. And it’s a thing that is becoming a thing that can’t be ignored and is having real impact, with software facial recognition, and large population sets.

      Visible-light perfect viewing conditions software facial recognition cannot uniquely pick you out of a database of a national population, or even a city population. It MIGHT be able to successfully pick out a database of the employees of a large corporation. Maybe.

    • Well Armed Sheep says:

      Yes, definitely! I’ve always wondered about that and haven’t really ever read anything about it. (Except in of all places Hitchens’s memoir, where he referenced a “hatchet shaped Cornish face” or something to that effect and I looked up the person he was talking about and it pattern matched to a face shape I recognized and associated with Appalachia (whether that association is valid idk)).

      It could all be faulty pattern matching I guess but I experience it frequently. Some people just look exceptionally similar but not in a way that suggests close relation.

    • yodelyak says:

      This is totally a thing. Some of it feels like sub-ethnicity, other times it just seems like there are different dimensions along which faces differ from ‘average’.

      • Aapje says:

        Some genetic variations are known to create a specific kind of face. The most obvious example is Down’s syndrome.

        It seems plausible that something similar would be at play in more subtle ways.

    • fion says:

      Just for the sake of recording negative data: I’ve never noticed this and I don’t really understand what you mean.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      I’ve photographed portraits of literally thousands of people, and no, I don’t see this. Note, this doesn’t mean it’s not a thing, it could just be that I pay much more attention to the details of faces than others.

      • Randy M says:

        I do see it fairly regularly; possibly people differ in how much the subconsciously pattern match.

      • Well... says:

        I’ll bet if you painted rather than photographed people you’d notice it.

        • Kendric says:

          FWIW, I paint professionally, and this is absolutely a thing that jumps out at me all the time–faces that fall into categories of faces, in a way that’s probably related to, but not identical with, ethnicity.

          Conrad’s point about photographic attention to detail is interesting; portrait painting as I do it is really the opposite–you get the likeness by finding the two trapezoids that get the shape of an individual’s skull, and a Z-shape that locks in the brow and nose. Details not really required, or often, desirable.

          • Well... says:

            I would think with photography one might be focusing mainly on lighting, composition, tones, etc. Painting focuses on these too but adds to it a particular concern with the shape, dimensions, spacing etc. of the facial features, because they don’t just bounce their light onto your medium: you have to put them there and get them right.

          • Randy M says:

            Speaking of ethnicity, I once saw a Vietnamese (I’m guessing, but the city makes it quite likely) boy who threw me for a loop because he very much reminded me visually of myself at that age.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Sure, and lighting is definitely influenced by face shape (short light broad faces, broad light narrow faces, etc). So yes I can categorize a face by face shape…but not “people” or anything much more broadly than that.

          • Well... says:

            PS. @Kendric:

            It’s refreshing to see a young painter at an advanced level with classical techniques. Keep up the good work!

    • j1000000 says:

      I’m with others who say no, I have never noticed that and don’t feel that way.

      (That being said, and realizing this was an evolutionary imperative, it is pretty amazing how extremely minor the differences between most human faces are, and yet I can immediately tell the difference between them.)

      • fion says:

        Your parenthetical remark occasionally but repeatedly blows my mind. We’re *very* sensitive to tiny variations in faces. Related, I find it really interesting to think how small a difference you need to make to features to make somebody look ‘ugly’ or ‘weird’. I guess I’m kind of getting into “a few millimetres of bone” territory, but it’s true!

    • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

      I notice this all the time as a teacher. I feel like there’s maybe 50-60 archetypes of people that I just see repeated year after year in my classes. It’s caused me to conclude that the Great Programmer only created ~100 real people and is just CTRL+Ving them all over the place.

      • baconbits9 says:

        If you are a teacher that has similar aged students each year a part of that is just going to be catching people in a similar point in their lives so some patterns are going to be repeated. Last night we had some neighbors over for dinner who we don’t know well, but are trying to get to know. There is a lot of overlap here, the women have similar education levels, we live in similar sized homes in the same neighborhood, they have 3 kids under 6, my wife is pregnant with our 3rd (all under six), and we are both likely to homeschool to name a few, so there are a lot of facets of the conversation where we had a ton in common. However when we talked about the distant (10+ year past) there was a ton of divergence, my “I dropped out of college to play poker professionally” got a big reaction as they didn’t know anyone who had done that. However when I was playing poker I knew a ton of guys who did just that. The arc of “dropped out of college to play poker and ending up a stay at home dad and home schooler” is going to be fairly unique, but the individual aspects as they happen are going to look less unique to people within those circles.

    • aho bata says:

      I’ve noticed this since I was in elementary school, but only with males. Of course it’s easy to come up with a group of similar-looking women but they don’t seem to cluster into types the way some men do.

      • Glen Raphael says:

        I’ve noticed this since I was in elementary school, but only with males.

        I’m the exact opposite. Watching Person of Interest I had trouble telling characters apart because all the women had dark medium-length hair so they kind of looked the same to me. There are also movies when the lead actress changes her hairstyle (eg, to indicate jumps in time in La La Land) and I get confused because I don’t realize it’s still the same person.

    • Well... says:

      Question for all SSCers:

      If there was a corner of the internet devoted to posting a daily set of pictures of two unrelated people who look uncannily similar, would you follow it (or at least visit daily)?

      What form should it take: website? Instagram? Twitter? blog? something else?

      If it solicited submissions, would you send in any?

      Also, would you want to see some info along with the pictures, just the names of the people, or no text at all?

      • Randy M says:

        No… but I might peruse it if you linked it here for evidence of the phenomenon. But it seems a boring and somewhat obtrusive hobby.

      • Matt M says:

        I would send in my own picture and ask you to find someone who looked like me.

        And then I’d want a picture of that dude’s wife or girlfriend, to see how I’m doing, comparatively speaking.

      • Nootropic cormorant says:

        I think that physical anthropology forums (Apricity, Anthroscape, Anthrogenica) exist partly to satisfy this need.

      • GardenVarietyWraith says:

        I don’t know about checking in daily, or even monthly, but I’d be curious enough to submit my own pic initially. I don’t have a particularly memorable, “you look just like so-and-so” face…but a few years ago, my mom found my absolute doppelganger in a magazine photo–of a street riot in a country I’ve never been to–and I swear, the resemblance was fricking uncanny. If it had been more recent, I’d have been honestly concerned about how someone could’ve gotten their hands on my picture.

        If you were to do this, I’d recommend Twitter and/or Instagram; you’ll get more submissions if you ask for less info. I’d be mildly curious about the countries of origin, but it’d be interesting enough without.

      • fion says:

        It’s the sort of thing that I wouldn’t follow, but if I got sent a link to a collection of 30 of them I’d look at them, show it to my friends at work, and have a good old goggle at it.

      • Randy M says:

        This reminds me of a site I saw that shows people next to works of art painted long prior that look just like them. Should prove the existence of facial repetition.

        • baconbits9 says:

          I feel like a lot of these pictures are “my hair style/facial hair looks just like theirs”. If you look at the individual features, nose, cheekbones, chin, then you see that they are different (or different in most of these ways) but the overall impression is mostly created in the men by the beard and hairline. Notice how every single male in both the painting and the guy who looks like the painting has facial hair.

          • Randy M says:

            Notice how every single male in both the painting and the guy who looks like the painting has facial hair.

            I think this says something about the ubiquity of facial hair in the past.

          • Nick says:

            A lot of it is the facial hair, yeah. The blonde girl in the third picture is a pretty good match, though.

          • Well... says:

            I look for a few uncanny features that draw the eye, triggering that rhythmic sensation of visual repetition. None of those pictures really created that sensation for me.

            I thought the blonde girl in the third image sorta resembled the girl in the painting behind her, but not in a striking kind of way. In the next two pictures after that, the guys might have been better matches for their paintings if they’d matched the visual angle of the head, tilting it down slightly (in the first case) or done a better job matching the facial expression (in the second case).

    • helaku says:

      Yeah, I also notice this. Despite our phenotypic variance, in the end repetitions in gene recombination might occur which lead to alikeness. Some people may notice those subtleties in features, some may not.

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      Yes, I’ve experienced this.

    • Snailprincess says:

      I’ve totally noticed this. I’ve always thought of it like eigenvalues. Like there are a limited set of facial eigenvalues or archetypes, and most faces are sort of a combination of one or of those types.

    • Plumber says:

      “….Like, you see a person, and you say “oh, that kind of person. I’ve seen that kind of person before”….”

      @toastengineer,
      Many times I will see a young lady, and a few times a young man, and for an instant I’ll think that I recognize a former friend or acquaintance, but usually before I speak I’ll do the arithmetic and realize that the person I see is way too young to be who I momentarily think they are.

    • GardenVarietyWraith says:

      I sculpt, and I’ve noticed the HELL out of this. I’ve always taken note of faces with particularly striking bone structure, and if I set out to create a portrait bust without a particular subject in mind, there are are about 20 distinct subtypes I draw from, based on how the planes of the face come together, how the light hits them, and what expressions suit certain types of face.

      I assume some of it’s genetic–I used to look at old propaganda posters and wonder how anyone could create caricatures of what I regarded as different flavors of generic white people, and I was astonished to realize that, yes, Irishmen really do have a certain “look” about them–but I think you’re describing something more subtle and less easily categorized. Like, in addition to an Ur-Antinous and an Ur-Winged Victory, there’s an Ur-Kevin Bacon and an Ur-Ariana Grande prototype. They walk among us, lol.

      Certain faces just seem to fall into certain patterns: how they emote, how they age, et cetera. I’m not sure whether to attribute this to the viewer’s pattern-matching inclinations, or whether it’s a measurable thing; I dunno, but I see it, too, and bet it’s a bit of both.

    • BlindKungFuMaster says:

      “Like, you see a person, and you say “oh, that kind of person. I’ve seen that kind of person before.””

      I totally get that. Maybe it has to do with some deeper ancestry structure. I now live in the town where a friend of mine comes from and I see more people of “his type”. Of course that may also have to do with the subconscious realisation that it’s more likely for me to run into him here.

    • raj says:

      Sort of, but not really.

      You can come up with clusters in facial-phenotype space (because you can make clusters in any space), but I don’t find them particularly useful compared to other buckets.

    • I wouldn’t describe it as they look the same; everybody looks quite different. However there are definitely common features shared here and there, and one can use these to classify people’s physical appearances into natural categories at a considerably finer level than race.

  2. johan_larson says:

    Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create superheroes or supervillains based on these unlikely concepts:
    – the Dunning-Kruger effect
    – fundamental attribution error
    – the Peter principle
    – the halting problem
    – conspicuous consumption
    – the uncertainty principle
    – the narcissism of small differences
    – Gell-Mann amnesia
    – comparative advantage
    – the birthday paradox

    • Nornagest says:

      A superhero based on conspicuous consumption? Isn’t that basically just Richie Rich?

    • JPNunez says:

      Man, I wonder what I could do if I could solve the halting problem by just looking at a program.

      Probably not much, because most programs are gigantic and designed to run forever so all I’d knew would be that, yes, this program mostly does not stop, unless one were to press the quit button.

      I’d have to isolate parts of it so it is meaningful at all, you know, by working at the algorithm level.

      • johan_larson says:

        You could find a cryptographic key in O(log n) looks. That sounds useful.

        Suppose a message has been encrypted with a key from 1 to N.

        Write a program that goes through the keys from A to B and tries each in turn, stopping if it finds one that produces an intelligible message, otherwise running forever.

        Now you get two versions of the program, one looking through keys 1 to N/2, the other from N/2+1 to N. One will halt and the other will not (typically). You pick the one that halts and congratulations, you’ve thrown away half the keyspace with your superpower.

        Repeat the process until the remaining range is small enough that brute-force search is faster than further division.

        • JPNunez says:

          I know I know

          maybe I’d look at people’s DNA and know when they are going to die or something

          insert some v long technobabble about DNA, programs, the halting program, and some convenient sub power that allows me to see DNA without a ton of equipment

          • Migratory says:

            You couldn’t just look at their DNA, you’d have to look at the entire planet at least. Otherwise you’re leaving out far too many variables. Besides, can you really claim that people halt when they die?

        • alef says:

          I don’t understand this, I feel stupid. Why can’t you just use your power on the “1 to N” question directly – getting the answer right away? I.e. what is the bisection for? If the issue is representing N, set the limit as N = 2^2^k for suitable k, and so log log N. That might overshoot, but so what? …. that hinges on how (im)perfect the ‘finds one that produces an intelligible answer’ oracle is – which seems to hide a lot of stuff beneath it. Give me that (nearly AI-complete) oracle, and this power, and I’d change the universe! Well, I could, but would not.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            The power as stated gives you only a Yes or No answer each time it is used, either the knowledge that the program halts or that it does not halt. It doesn’t tell you, e.g., what the program’s output would be, or how long it would run for before halting.

            … kind of an artificial limitation, I guess, but no more so than some superpower limitations in popular works.

          • alef says:

            Oh, I see, I can find out (given the magic ‘is the decryption intelligible?” power) whether there exists a good key in constant time, but I need log(N) to actually find the key -?

          • alef says:

            … which is presumably optimal since I need log(N) even to write the key down.

            Still seems like an fairly awesome power; I can decide if any theorem is provable in O(1) and provide a proof it in O(log len(proof)); the Fields medal money and NSA cash should flow in.

          • JPNunez says:

            I know all this, guys.

            But I don’t want the Fields Prize.

            I want to punch bank robbers in the face (or rob banks) and fight Godzilla while he flattens a city.

            http://worm.wikia.com/wiki/Behemoth

          • beleester says:

            If you want to rob banks, perhaps you could crack passwords and steal money that way? Or be one of those “information broker” villains like Tattletale?

            Unfortunately, a lot of real-world applications will be stymied by the fact that the halting problem is defined for both a program and its input, and the input is something you can’t know in advance in most real-world scenarios. You can’t, for example, see if Armsmaster’s combat prediction software will halt when he fights Leviathan, because the input to that program is “what is Leviathan doing in this fight?” and you don’t know that until you’re actually fighting.

      • Lambert says:

        This is a pretty well-studied concept.
        In CS, they call a hypothetical black box that can magically solve a certain problem, such as the halting problem, an Oracle. (well there’s your superhero name sorted)
        The Other Scott has written about a turing machine that halts iff the Goldbach Conjecture is false, so you could solve that problem fairly easily. Same with the consistency of ZF theory (and therefore mathematics).

        Could pitch this to Netflix:
        By day, he’s Scott Aaronson, a mild mannered complexity theorist, but at night, he becomes The Oracle, using his superpower to fight the evil D-Wave corporation. Bitten one day be a radioactive travelling salesman…

    • robirahman says:

      Make up a supervillain whose power is comparative advantage? Isn’t that just Mexican immigrants?

    • jaimeastorga2000 says:

      I pitch these to Wildbow as ideas for his next web serial and let him do it for me.

    • The Element of Surprise says:

      Peter principle would be a guy becoming a superhero because he was so good at everything else he did before, but who ends up being ineffectual and helpless as a hero.

    • “the Dunning-Kruger effect – fundamental attribution error”

      Sigmund Freud.

      • Nornagest says:

        I have a feeling that Superman has always had a little-known secondary power based on the Dunning-Kruger effect. Otherwise it’s hard to explain all those criminals that keep shooting at him instead of running away, even when they can see the bullets bouncing off. And when Superman’s a public figure in that universe and the general outlines of his powers are well known.

        “Invulnerable flying alien who can bench-press the Hoover Dam and melt steel with his eyes? Meh, I can take him.”

        • beleester says:

          If you’re confronted by a man who’s faster than a speeding bullet, running away is just as useless as shooting him. May as well keep firing out of spite.

          • Evan Þ says:

            Reminds me of one of Fred Clark’s suggested subtitles for the Left Behind series: “Annoying the Antichrist”. A lot of commenters suggested that a more self-aware series with that title could actually be good: if your protagonists know they can’t stop him from running roughshod over every good thing, they might as well settle for at least annoying him.

          • Matt says:

            “President? Foolish, faceless man; my campaign is a farce. A small part of a much grander scheme. President… do you know how much power I’d have to give up to be President? That’s right, conspiracy buff. I spent 75 million dollars on a fake Presidential campaign, all just to tick Superman off.”

            – Lex Luthor

          • CatCube says:

            @Matt

            That was one of Clancy Brown’s best scenes.

    • The Nybbler says:

      – the uncertainty principle

      An easy one. He or she can teleport simply by standing still, since when s/he fixes his velocity his/her position becomes unknown. (The gender being uncertain is just a side effect)

      – Gell-Mann amnesia

      Quite useful. Is able to perform any feat that would be possible were things to be as if the newspapers explained them.

    • Paul Zrimsek says:

      comparative advantage

      Little-known fact: Bruce Wayne was actually a better butler than Alfred. But it was still rational to let Alfred do the butling and Bruce concentrate on crime-fighting.

      • David Speyer says:

        Bruce Wayne is more or less the opposite of Comparative Advantage Man. Comparative Advantage Man would manage the Wayne fortune and hire thousands of disposable crime fighters. (Admittedly, Wayne is an heir and maybe he hasn’t inherited the skills that built that fortune. Tony Stark is more dramatically failing to exploit his comparative advantage.)

        • Matt M says:

          Yeah but at least Stark is presented as something of an arrogant/selfish jerk who knows he isn’t necessarily optimizing for achieving the greatest benefit for the “common good.”

          Wayne is less honest about how much of his quest is motivated by pure revenge against the criminal element.

        • cryptoshill says:

          Who says? Tony Stark gave the world cold-fusion. Seems to me he’s like a Mary Sue of Elon Musk who is a supersuit-wearing, alcoholic, crime-fighting superhero in his spare time

    • beleester says:

      The Fae King is a support hero who has the ability to shift the blame using his supernatural powers of persuasion. By manipulating the Fundamental Attribution Error, the damage that heroes cause is perceived as an unfortunate result of their circumstances – it was a tough fight, they did their best – while the damage that villains cause is seen as a sign of their poor character.

      This is an indispensable ability for maintaining the public image of superhero teams, who frequently find themselves in violent, high-collateral damage situations.

      • The Element of Surprise says:

        the ability to shift the blame using his supernatural powers of persuasion

        One ark of the story could involve him becoming President.

    • Mary says:

      “the Dunning-Kruger effect”

      Psych games! A superhero who intimidates the supervillians by making them think he’s a powerful as they are!

      • Lillian says:

        The One Punch Man character King is an S-class hero who has zero superpowers except perhaps being incredibly intimidating and lucky. He has mistakenly been given credit for a lot of Saitma’s victories, which is how he got the S-rank. Many villains and heroes have challenged King to test their strength against him, however because of his fearsome reputation, he is able to bluff them into losing their nerve and running away.

        In one particularly amusing instance, a samurai with real superpowers gives King his sword so he can watch him cut an apple with it. King is too weak to even draw the blade from its scabbard, so after sitting there for a few moments, he sets it on the ground and walks away. The samurai interprets this as King being so strong and skilled that he was able to draw the sword, cut the apple between the molecules so that it remained intact, and then resheathe it, all with such inhuman speed that it looked like he never moved a muscle. The super-samurai walks away from the encounter convinced that King is unsurpassed stronger than him.

    • WashedOut says:

      Birthday Paradox Gang

      These 30 thugs prowl the streets at night looking for probability-naive suckers to game. The leader of the BPG has a trademark gambit:

      What would you rather pay out on? The result of a coin flip, or that you might share a birthday with one of us? [If they choose birthday] Hahaha! C’mon man! There’s 30 of us! You sure have an apetite for long odds! Are you sure?

      • mondsemmel says:

        I like this. But the gang isn’t a random sample of the population; presumably the gang leader selects thugs by some metric, including whether they share a birthday with any existing member. So the normal probability calculations don’t apply, and the gang could use this to their advantage.

        Bonus points if there are 31 members, only two of which share a birthday, and the leader decides by some metric whether to bring the guys who share a birthday.

        Basically, the gang could prey on both the probability-naive, *and* on the probability-literate.

      • fion says:

        I think your example doesn’t work. As soon as you select one unique person (the mugee) and ask if they share a birthday with one of the others, it becomes much smaller probability and much more intuitive. The birthday paradox comes from asking “do any two of the people here share a birthday?”, not “does Bob share a birthday with anybody else?”.

    • Paul Brinkley says:

      Donald Crewglie always had a knack for getting ahead. He wasn’t always on top, but you could always count on him being close. He’d get 95% on the exam, or second place in the playoffs. It wasn’t until college, however, that he noticed that he could always beat someone who tried, no matter how good they were – they just had to believe they could beat him. That was the beginning of his quest to seize the world, bit by bit, by surrounding himself with toadies possessing both great skill, and great hubris.

      His first recruit ended up being his girlfriend. Fae had an uncanny read on people, particularly on what they thought of her. It often wasn’t hard – a lot of them saw a woman, and assumed she’d behave like one (though not always), while she fleeced them, usually for tuition money. It was a different scam every time. This guy kept flicking the corner of his low pair and she called his bluff. That one scratched on the eight ball because the overhead light distracted him. One girl bet she could pick up a guy within sixty seconds, then left her credit card behind. The only person she couldn’t get the better of was Donald. The harder she tried, the more he squeaked by, and the weirdest part was that he didn’t seem to mind. He’d just smile, buy her a drink, and propose another wager. Eventually they just started hanging out together.

      Next was Laurence. He was an obvious pick; the better his marks, the worse he then got, so Donald kept giving him the crap work on their projects. Laurence resented Donald always taking charge, but he had to admit Donald deserved it, since Donald always seem to do better at it than he was. Then came Holly, his go-to study buddy in compsci, and Thurston, a fellow biz major with a trust fund who showed Donald the best in power accessories without realizing it.

      In their junior year, Holly found a boyfriend, Vernon, a judo freak. No one could tell where he’d be next (except for Holly), but he found a worthy sparring partner in Donald for some reason. Donald’s little brother, Ernie, an OCD case, kept watching Vernon closely – no one else seemed to be able to – and coached Donald on how to recognize subtle details in Vernon’s positioning until he was able to predict how to block even better than Holly could. He then met Vernon’s sister, Marie, a journalism major who could speak expertly in any subject after only a minute of reading about it. After a few weeks of on and off debate, Donald figured out how to shave off ten seconds.

      By the time he earned his MBA, Donald was a crack martial artist, a master at spotting even tiny weaknesses in his rivals, in the ring, the boardroom, or the market, and overcoming them by seemingly sheer luck. He was a workaholic who nevertheless knew when to quit. His charisma was almost magical, a combination of aggressive fashion and effusive knowledge of the topics of the day (so long as you didn’t ask him again an hour later). Backed by his coterie, Donald was unstoppable.

      That is, until he met a curious fellow at a reception for his birthday in London. He was the essence of mediocrity. He didn’t dress as well, speak as knowledgeably, assess as shrewdly, react as quickly, or even work as diligently. But he did excel at one thing, which Donald would discover to his dismay…

    • baconbits9 says:

      Nice try Zach Weinersmith, we aren’t writing your comics for you.

    • Matt M says:

      Comparative advantage could be addressed in a story where Superman decides to do something other than crime-fighting, because it’s more useful.

      Bob Murphy theorized some of the potential other jobs Superman could do, in the context of what sort of salary he might be able to command if he participated in the free market rather than the idealized selfless altruism he currently possesses. See the end for some discussion on how Superman could also be “effective altruism man”

      • The Nybbler says:

        The operating cost of a Skycrane is apparently in the $5000/hour range. That means minimum rental cost must be more than that. Superman could do at least some of the Skycrane’s jobs in far less time, and Superman seems to be pretty normal-human in his maintenance requirements; he should be able to make a killing on piecework. So, Superman makes a deal with a Skycrane rental company to throw some business his way during busy times, then spends the rest of his time chilling on the beach.

    • JPNunez says:

      – fundamental attribution error

      This is King from One Punch Man. He is a big, scary dude, but just a regular guy. He is attributed all the monster killings of the titular One Punch Man by mistake and quickly ascends the ranks of the hero association.

    • beleester says:

      The Birthday Circle is an organization of sorcerers that exploits the fact that various astrological coincidences are much more common than you think. Traditional ritual magic is tied to a single, specific event which is hard to find – “born at midnight on the winter solstice,” for example. Instead, the Circle specializes in magic based on pairs of significant astrological events – linking two people who share a birthday, linking people with complementary zodiac signs, etc.

      Because the number of possible combinations is much greater than the number of wizards, they are able to muster up incredibly powerful magic despite having only a few dozen members. Their weakness is that the birthday paradox only works if you need to find a connection between any two members – if they need to help a specific person cast a spell, they’re no more likely to be helpful than any other random wizard.

    • Matt M says:

      How about a movie for the replication crisis?

      In Avengers 3 – the Avengers all wake up to suddenly discover that they don’t have super powers after all. And nobody can prove they ever did!

    • Rowan says:

      >The Dunning-Kruger effect

      Power grants skills, abilities and expertise relative to the user’s perception of them. Having carefully deluded themselves as much as possible, the hero/villain has comic-book “peak human” ability at basically everything. Naturally, their weak point is whatever subject they were studying before they got powers and dropped out.

      >Fundamental Attribution Error

      Has the power to give people attributes by citing a single piece of evidence for why that person has that attribute. A supervillain, if a hero has ever publicly lost or ran from a fight he can win instantly by calling them “Weak” or “Cowardly” which puts them out of action for a few days. Otherwise a C-lister, likely to rob a bank with a few Brute 2 “Strong” or “Tough” henchmen and get his ass beat by a rookie hero with no previous reputation. Can also show up in a villain team, keeping the big-name heroes away so it’s up to our underdog protagonists (possibly until the one top hero with an unblemished reputation shows up in the nick of time).

      >The Peter Principle

      The power to induce incompetence? A Stranger power with weird restrictions? I think I’d just go with an unpowered supervillain who’s followed the principle off a cliff into fanaticism and started murdering top executives and bureaucrats in the name of hierarchy-less anarchism.

      >The Halting Problem

      Robot assassin, “halts programs” with ruthless efficiency. Noted for being obsessive about timing.

      >Conspicuous Consumption

      Supervillain, can eat anything, gains temporary power proportional to the value of what was eaten. Once went toe to toe with [local Superman expy] after eating half a dozen gold bricks.

      >The Uncertainty Principle

      Can be in several places at once according to a probability distribution of where he might be. Gets really mad when people call his power the shadow clone jitsu, deepest darkest secret is a Naruto obsession.

      >The Narcissism of Small Differences

      Can split people into arbitrary groups and ramp up tribalism until they tear each other apart. Tragic figure, power isn’t fully controlled, especially wasn’t on day one when it activated against their bullies at school, but it’s hard not to be a villain when your power is “starting the race war” and your killcount is already edging into the quadruple-digits.

      >Gell-Mann Amnesia

      Has a “make people believe everything you write” Master power, but the effect is really weak. Secondary stranger power stops people from noticing what’s up, however, and worse yet he controls a major newspaper.

      >Comparative Advantage

      Thinker power, superhuman at assessing people’s strengths and weaknesses. Probably a villain since it’s a power that works best with plans and henchmen.

      >The Birthday Paradox

      No clue for this one, even for unpowered gimmicks.

    • MrApophenia says:

      Marvel Comics actually has a hero powered by the Dunning-Kruger effect. Gladiator, a Superman stand-in, instead of truly having super strength or speed or what have you, actually has the psychic power that he can do anything he thinks he can do.

      Since he is absolutely sure he can do anything, the result is pretty much Superman. However, people have beaten him a few times by finding ways to make him doubt his omnipotence, which makes it go away.

    • Dan Hornsby says:

      The Dunning Kruger Effect:

      Brian has an area-of-effect ability to leech the skills and competency from those around him, while simultaneously instilling increased confidence in those same skills to those he takes them from. He uses this ability to be an easy victor in most conflicts – stealing an opponent’s skills while making them rampantly overconfident at the same time.

      Fundamental Attribution Error:

      Alice has a presence-based emotional power which overwrites the motivations of the people around her with whatever she thinks they should be. The effect has a radius of around a hundred feet, and the severity increases as people get closer to Alice. People find themselves conforming to Alice’s view of them, either for good or ill, creating several incidents where events have taken on a “comic book heroes and villains” narrative thanks to constant reinforcement from Alice’s power.

      The Peter Principle:

      Peter has a unique ability – he has superhuman strength, speed, toughness and mental acuity in every area except the task he is currently attempting to accomplish. He is as fast as a speeding bullet – except when he needs to catch something. He is as tough as steel – except when he needs to take a hit. He can bend industrial girders – except when he needs to lift something. He’s inhumanly intelligent – except when he needs to work something out. Whatever area he consciously focuses on, he loses his abilities in.

      The Halting Problem:

      Jeff has the ability to touch a person or object and instil either no effect, or a closed, perpetually-repeating five-to-fifteen-second time-loop, at random. The effects are seemingly permanent, and Jeff’s victims are constantly flickering within the same looped activity, in perpetuity. While looped, nothing can interact with them except Jeff, who can touch them once more to remove the effect.

      Conspicuous Consumption:

      Gina has superhuman strength, speed, toughness and flight, all of which scale based on the perception of those around her – she is as strong, as fast and as tough as those around her believe she should be. She games this power through excessive ostentation and massive hype, spending thousands to cultivate a persona of superiority.

      The Uncertainty Principle:

      Eric has a limited omnipresence – he can simultaneously be anywhere and everywhere that is not being observed by a sapient creature, and can manifest any number of bodies within those limitations. However, as soon as one of his bodies is observed, he is collapsed into that body and unable to move or effect the world, until that body is no longer being observed. In the past, Eric has spent years as an impervious statue, and in the future, he fears that constant camera coverage will leave him nowhere left to exist.

      The Narcissism of Small Differences:

      Julia has the power to invert the emotional impact of stimuli in those she can see. Inconsequential trivialities will take on huge significance, while wide-reaching fundamental differences are dismissed completely. This has the practical effect of flaring hostility between those closest to one another, while bringing together groups who otherwise hate each other.

      Gell-Mann Amnesia:

      Clive has the power to instil or remove competency in those around him in inverse proportion to his own competencies – those around him will get worse at things he’s good at, and get better at things he’s bad at. His attempts to “game” this ability tend to be stymied, as anyone who tutors or trains him will get worse as he improves, until he plateau’s at ‘enthusiastic amateur’ levels of ability.

      Comparative Advantage:

      Jonathan has enhanced speed, strength and mental acuity equivalent to twice the average of everyone within 100 feet of him. He is always strictly better than average in any group of people, but otherwise has no other abilities. Without anyone nearby, he has an IQ of around 80 and the physique of someone who has never physically pushed themselves.

      The Birthday Paradox:

      Christine has the ability to manipulate probability. She can superimpose the probability of an event our outcome happening to her with the probability of that same event or outcome happening to anyone at all – rendering her able to achieve incredibly improbable feats. The chance of one specific person doing any given thing might well be astonishingly small, but the chance of anyone at all doing it is usually close to 1.

      • Nick says:

        The Dunning Kruger Effect:

        Brian has an area-of-effect ability to leech the skills and competency from those around him, while simultaneously instilling increased confidence in those same skills to those he takes them from. He uses this ability to be an easy victor in most conflicts – stealing an opponent’s skills while making them rampantly overconfident at the same time.

        Man, this guy would make a terrible teammate.

      • proyas says:

        Excellent. After initial failure, I think Peter would find use on a team of fellow superheroes who found humorous ways to distract him from the actual task at hand so his relevant skill wouldn’t pause. For example, if a group of villains had pointed guns at them, one of the team members would grab Peter, twirl him around so he couldn’t see the enemies and was hence unaware of his “human shield” purpose, and then say: “Quick, Peter, what are the twenty largest cities in Africa?”

    • AnonYEmous says:

      – Gell-Mann amnesia

      if you can give this to other people, then it’s a phenomenal superpower where you can convince anyone that you’re an expert, or something along those lines

      – the narcissism of small differences

      another case of : if you can give this to other people, it’s strong. Take apart criminal enterprises or gangs of criminals by making them all think they’re way too different to get along, possibly causing them all to kill one another.

      – the birthday paradox

      Maybe you can create an energy line between two people with the same birthday that smashes them into each other, probably knocking them both out. This works way more often than people think and since criminals don’t understand the birthday paradox they never figure out how the power works. You can also use innocent bystanders as missiles, but then the hero has to wonder if it’s morally right to risk a bystander to potentially stop something else bad from happening. Man, I’m getting fired up just thinking about this!

  3. Scott Alexander says:

    A friend has low cholesterol; their doctor told them to eat many eggs every day.

    I have been told that “eating too many eggs causes high cholesterol” is kind of a myth, but I don’t know how much of that is just that people probably eat lots of things and it’s unfair to blame eggs. Does eating eggs to cure low cholesterol work, or is that a myth too?

    • Squirrel of Doom says:

      Food has low impact of cholesterol, but it’s not zero.

    • Randy M says:

      Eggs do have cholesterol, so if you eat them, even if you break down the cholesterol, it should at the least give your body the building blocks, so I couldn’t see it hurting, but it probably isn’t sufficient if there’s some reason his body isn’t properly regulating the levels.

    • Bugmaster says:

      I don’t know about cholesterol, but I’ve got a follow-up question: is it possible to develop an egg allergy by eating too many eggs ? My doctor mentioned this at some point long time ago, but was he right ?

      • Mary says:

        Probably. At least, high levels of the proteins may trigger it.

      • jimmy says:

        I don’t know if it was an allergy, but my body definitely stopped responding well to eggs after a period of eating a lot of them.

        I took a break from eating eggs for a while, and now I can eat them again without problem

        • j1000000 says:

          Wow, I eat a ton of eggs, and recently I started getting stomach pains after breakfast. I thought it was the time of day, though, I never figured eggs were the culprit.

          I’ve never heard of this before, though. Wouldn’t, anecdotally, this be a somewhat common problem among NFL players and bodybuilders and other people who are said to eat tons of eggs?

      • methylethyl says:

        I developed an intolerance to raw egg yolks (but not to cooked eggs!), after including them in breakfast smoothies for months. Not an allergy, but really painful stomach cramps after breakfast every day.

    • Glen Raphael says:

      Some people seem to be cholesterol-insensitive – if they consume more their body makes less to compensate and vice-versa (A friend of mine was in a medical study that established he was one such – the test subjects were medical students who agreed to eat a supervised researcher-produced diet for a period of time). Which would seem to argue for skepticism.

      Applying personal science: couldn’t your friend just *try* eating eggs and then take the test again to see if anything changed?

      • Scott Alexander says:

        Yes, but eating five eggs a day is hard and I thought I had heard somewhere that it definitely wouldn’t work.

        • Deiseach says:

          Usually the advice is to try lowering cholesterol so being told to raise it is unusual. Is it total cholesterol is too low, or that the levels of HDL cholesterol are too low and need to be raised?

        • methylethyl says:

          If you’re eating the eggs to raise cholesterol, only the yolk matters. 2 eggs + 3 more yolks is not difficult, scrambled (delicious, actually). I ate 6 eggs for breakfast nearly every day (3eggs + 3 yolks) for 1-2 years and had no trouble with it. Mostly scrambled, but sometimes to shake it up, I’d mix them with half a mashed banana and some buckwheat flour, salt, and a bit of cinnamon for faux pancakes.

    • fortaleza84 says:

      Not an answer to your question, but why is the guy’s cholesterol low? If it’s because he has developed a condition which is impairing his liver function, eating foods to increase his cholesterol is kind of missing the point.

    • James Miller says:

      Around ten years ago I had very low cholesterol and came across information that people with low cholesterol had vastly elevated death rates. After investigating (I’m an economist) I became convinced that I should raise my cholesterol. I changed my diet and started consuming lots of butter from grass-fed cows, mostly in coffee. I succeeded in raising my “good” and “bad” cholesterol to above average levels.

      • j1000000 says:

        Wait, ten years ago? So you were putting butter from grass-fed cows in your coffee before the Bulletproof guy?

        Was that already A Thing before him and he only helped spread the idea?

      • fortaleza84 says:

        I’ve researched the issue myself (I am hypolipidemic) and the research I found seems to divide people with low cholesterol into two categories: Those with a genetic mutation who as a result have low cholesterol from birth; and those who develop a disease which damages the function of their liver.

        People in the second category have greater death rates, but (according to the research) it’s not from the lack of cholesterol per se but from the underlying condition. People in the first category are pretty much okay, they are more prone to develop non-alcoholic fatty liver disease but at the same time they are less prone to heart problems. (This doesn’t apply if you are homozygous, in that case you’ve got big problems).

        The upshot of this is that there doesn’t seem to be much point in trying to increase your cholesterol levels. If you are hypolipidemic, the better strategy (in my non-professional opinion) is to calorie-restrict so as to avoid overburdening your liver with fats that it will have difficulty metabolizing.

    • Fossegrimen says:

      If this person is some variant of vegetarian, eating eggs will probably increase cholesterol, if on a normal western diet, probably not.
      If the _only_ problem is cholesterol then fats will get them there faster; butter or cream are excellent. If the problem is due to a more fundamentally unbalanced diet, eggs are quite possibly the best choice because the simplest possible ‘nutritionally complete’ diet that you can live on forever is eggs and orange juice.

      Given the doctors recommendation I would suspect the latter and tell them to eat loads of eggs. Note that if the recommended amount of eggs seems like a lot, eggs are ridiculously versatile and can be turned into things like cake where you don’t even notice.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      Eggs really do have a large effect on blood cholesterol. The myth is that it’s due to the cholesterol in the eggs, while the truth is that it’s mainly due to the saturated fat in the eggs.

    • pontifex says:

      Eggs have a fair amount of cholesterol, but also contain a substance that inhibits cholesterol absorption.

      If you really want to dial up the cholesterol to 11, I suggest eating canned pig brains. It’s a Southern delicacy, apparently.

      The makeup of the brain is about 29% fat, most of which is located in myelin (which itself is 70–80% fat).[8] Specific fatty acid ratios will depend in part on the diet of the animal it is harvested from. The brain is also very high in cholesterol. For example, a single 140 g (5 oz) serving of “pork brains in milk gravy” can contain 3500 mg of cholesterol (1170% of the USRDA).[9]

      This is uh, definitely not medical advice. And I have no idea how cholesterol regulation works, really…

    • Nootropic cormorant says:

      My father seemingly raised his cholesterol, after allegedly having low levels throughout his life, by physical exercise (anaerobic), but this is just anecdata.

  4. robirahman says:

    Was a winner ever picked in the adversarial collaboration contest?

  5. hash872 says:

    Is anyone else, like…. a bit troubled by how simplistic the whole anti-NIMBY movement is these days? Or at least, the alleged policy benefits- ‘if we stop exclusionary zoning and building restrictions and such, we can lower rents and (uh, somehow) make the Bay Area affordable for the low and middle-income’. This line of argumentation and the whole anti-NIMBY movement is the new hotness among some wonky liberals, many libertarians, lots of neoliberal types etc. I have a number of objections (plus, an alternate vision for affordable urban housing).

    I like the theory behind the anti-NIMBY movement (being against naked rent seeking). In practice though, the entire movement seems to be ‘how can we cram even more people into the Bay Area?’ Here’s my alternate vision from a central planning perspective- accept that a number of cities are effectively full, and focus on exporting the strengths of NYC/Bay Area/LA to tier 2 cities- Phoenix, Charlotte, Denver, Miami etc.- even Dayton and Indianapolis and Milwaukee and such. It’s more realistic (easier to make say Denver a tech hub and get a lot of startup & tech employers there, than it is to defeat entrenched homeowners in Menlo Park who vote en masse). Here are my top 4 arguments for this vision (I put minor ones in a separate comment below):

    1. Building more might not actually reduce rents, and might even increase them! Remember building more only reduces rent *if demand stays the same*. But with demand so high for just a few Tier 1 cities, more units might mean even more people can flood into San Fran or Manhattan, so prices wouldn’t be reduced….. Tier 1 cities become ultra-popular through network effects, which are only increased through higher population. Here’s a great argument for this, posted by Scott a couple of months ago http://devonzuegel.com/post/agglomeration-effects-might-change-the-yimby-caculus.

    I get really annoyed when anti-NIMBYists smugly pretend to have economics on their side (as if economics was some kind of rigorously quantitative field, as opposed to ‘astrology for dudes’). Again, more supply only reduces average rents *with the same level of demand*. But if the Bay Area is the most attractive place in the US to live for young techbros, more apartments simply means more people can live there- completely negating any type of pricing advantage.

    2. I want anti-NIMBYists to think carefully about the overall future of the US- not just their favorite city. Having all of our financial, technological, and cultural elites living in like 4 cities is *the* recipe for massive regional inequality- I’m pretty sure that’s like the literal plot of the Hunger Games. What becomes of the 99% of the country that’s not the Bay Area/NYC/LA? Why can’t we achieve our affordable housing goals by spreading white collar employers into Phoenix and Charlotte, Miami and Denver, Houston and Chicago…. I’m confused by liberal types who are nominally horrified by wealth inequality, yet want all of our nation’s wealth and social/technical capital to be concentrated in 1% of our physical geography.

    3. Stuffing all of our nation’s most important tech, finance and cultural firms into just a few relatively small areas violates some pretty basic systems engineering concepts around redundancy and resiliency. We are one earthquake, terrorist attack or natural disaster away from wiping out our nation’s whole competitive advantage in tech, in the Bay Area- especially the earthquake option! If one were designing the US from scratch, who would say ‘hmm yes, let’s put almost all of our nation’s technical capital right here in the most earthquake-prone part of the country, this seems like an excellent location’. I mean, we know with a high degree of certainty that California will suffer a very strong and damaging earthquake within the next century of less- just a question of when. Spreading out our urban strengths in multiple cities enhances redundancy against long-tail risks.

    4. I’m a partisan Democrat, and jamming all of our voters into just a few small areas is part of the why the numerically larger liberals don’t currently control Congress & the presidency. It’s not the only reason, but it’s certainly a strong one. The US has more liberals than conservatives and more Democrats than Republicans, but the former chooses to run up their numbers in cities where they routinely vote Dem 80+%. Cramming even more people into cities with the same number of Congressional representatives is the height of political stupidity. Spread out liberals!

    For example, Los Angeles County has a population larger than 41 US states (and I would imagine a huge number of countries). Looks like it went 71 to 22% for Clinton for over Trump, roughly (Gary Johnson’s in the mix too). How many people are anti-NIMBYists looking to cram in to this one area? 45 US states? 48? How much more inefficiently can Democrats spread themselves out?

    • hash872 says:

      Other objections to the modern anti-NIMBY movement (smaller than the above four so I wanted to separate them out):

      5. Anti-NIMBYists have some awfully confused ideas around the economics of multi-family development. I previously worked in commercial real estate, so I have a bit stronger grasp on the fundamentals. The idea that just building more apartments will lower average rent by any meaningful degree (like, enough to make San Fran affordable to families making $60k) is wildly unrealistic and childishly simple. I’m seeing sources online say that the average two bedroom apartment in San Fran rents for $4500- let’s say $4k to be generous. To be affordable (one third of income) for a couple making $100k together, rents would have to drop about a third (!) for this entire city of almost 900k people. I think this could be done in say China, with zero property rights, with seizing homes and bulldozing whole neighborhoods to make 100+ unit buildings. Totally unrealistic in a market economy.

      You see this with these emotional arguments around, say, historic zoning districts in Tier 1 cities. Is it a mix of naked rent seeking & architectural snobbery? Yes, probably. Also, even if one removed every historic neighborhood protection- only a small percentage of owners would actually choose to sell in any given year. Then, the buyer would have to be a developer who wants to do a complete teardown and build a huge multi-family unit- and not, say, another wealthy person who wants to keep the building as-is. Let’s break down- what % of potential buyers are wealthy people who want a beautiful building in a beautiful historic neighborhood- versus what % are developers with the capital and expertise to create a multi-unit apartment building? Shooting from the hip as a former commercial real estate broker in a Tier 1 city- say, 90/10? 95/5? More? Remember, San Fran/NYC/London etc. attracts ultra-wealthy cash buyers from the global population- China, Russia, Europe, India etc.- not just the US. Plus- they can afford to outbid a developer- because they’re motivated by totally different reasons, and they *don’t have to make a profit*. Mr. Developer can only pay $2.5 million for that building to make a reasonable profit on a 50 unit apartment building? Well Mr. Wealthy Chinese Cash Buyer who wants a 5th Home can afford to outbid him because his motivations are not purely financial!

      Even if the developer wins the bid, then he or she has to spend years to actually build the units etc. TLDR- just rezoning a historic neighborhood is not going to add significant housing supply over any kind of time frame- certainly not enough to reduce rents.

      6. As other commentators have noted in the past- increased housing drives up traffic and other infrastructure costs- I’ve never seen even in the slightest counter-argument to this. Every desirable Tier 1 city already has crushing traffic and untreated infrastructure problems- increasing the population only adds to this dramatically.

      • hnau says:

        Reading your objections, I’m very confused.

        1. As the article you cite mentions, YIMBYs want to reduce rents *and* increase supply. Why are you only talking about the first? Even if the rent does go up– which is pretty implausible given the actual empirical economics research cited in this op-ed saying the opposite— just the fact that people are so eager to move into the new housing shows that a tremendous amount of economic value has been gained. Which is better from a utilitarian perspective: a super-nice city with 100,000 people living in it, or an almost-as-nice city with 200,000?

        2. I’m no huge fan of the urban elites either, despite more or less being a part of them. But based on #4, you *are* a fan, so citing The Hunger Games (not a perfect comparison– “regional inequality” isn’t the main point– but I get where you’re going) comes off as weird. Does it really matter to the plot whether the Capital is a single location or a segment of society in many different ones? The reality today is some combination of the two, but the Internet is making that largely irrelevant. More importantly, how do you plan to convince your white-collar employers to move their jobs into other cities? Even with Bay Area housing prices what they are, I don’t see Google opening offices in Charlotte. I speak from experience when I say there are *very good* reasons for that. The benefits of having your employees and talent pool in one place are huge, and with what programmers are paid they can (mostly) afford housing anyway. So I have a hard time seeing how building more housing would make things noticeably worse in this regard.

        3. This is like #2, but even weirder. You know part of the reason why California housing prices are so high? Building codes, designed to ensure safety in… earthquakes. If a 9.0 hit the Bay Area tomorrow, we’d take it, we’d hurt, we’d have a few casualties, and we’d be back to 100% or more within a few years. In what bizarro world is “avoid concentrating workforces in geographic regions where a single disaster could affect them all” a relevant consideration for local housing policy? And as with #2: how exactly are you planning on Big Brothering large fractions of huge industries to different parts of the country? Given today’s concentrations, how much worse could more Bay Area housing really make the problem?

        4. Well, for those of us out there who aren’t partisan Democrats… “shrug”.
        And for those that are: in fact the effect goes in the opposite direction.

        5. Ah, yes, the classic “It wouldn’t have any effect anyway, so why do it?” objection that accidentally invalidates all the others. If re-zoning isn’t going to cause the neighborhood’s composition to change, then why are NIMBYs so up in arms about it? And if it’s only going to have an effect after years or decades, then for heaven’s sake, why not do it now?!?

        6. This is by far the objection that real-life NIMBYs most often bring up. No one is denying that development imposes costs / negative externalities on the local governments that have to provide services and infrastructure. That’s what property taxes are for, and you’d better believe those taxes get passed on to renters. So the costs to local governments are priced into rents anyway. And yet, despite the sky-high prices and supposedly horrible traffic problems… people are still falling over themselves to buy in those markets. Weird, huh? It’s almost as if cities had gigantic *positive* externalities somehow…

        In sum, these objections seem very scattershot and I’m inclined to suspect that they reflect a knee-jerk partisan attitude in search of plausible arguments.

        • Guy in TN says:

          Even if the rent does go up– which is pretty implausible given the actual empirical economics research cited in this op-ed saying the opposite

          This claim is not found in the references of the article you cited.

          • hnau says:

            I stand corrected. The article implicitly equates “housing follows the law of supply and demand” with “market-rate housing filters down” and the citations are in support of the filtering-down claim. The article doesn’t provide a citation for its later claim that “the data shows that rents rise even faster when market-rate housing is not built”, so I’m not sure where it’s getting that from.

        • Eternaltraveler says:

          If a 9.0 hit the Bay Area tomorrow, we’d take it, we’d hurt, we’d have a few casualties, and we’d be back to 100% or more within a few years

          If a 9.0 on the moment magnitude scale had an epicenter in the middle of the bay area there wouldn’t be a single surviving structure anywhere nearby. A 9 permanently changes topography. Luckily the only earthquakes of this magnitude are megathrust quakes generated in subduction zones at the edge of some continental shelves (pretty far out to sea). They are still devastating, mostly through the tsunamis they generate.

          The Tōhoku earthquake was one such. The entire main Island of Japan was moved east 8 feet, there was $360 billion in damage including a nuclear meltdown, 20,000 people died (most from the tsunami, zero from radiation), and it’s epicenter was 43 miles out to sea.

          The Bay Area could plausibility experience something like an 8, which would basically be a repeat of the 1906 quake. $100-300 billion would be a reasonable estimate of the damage (if you buy earthquake insurance the CEA can only pay out 15 billion before it’s insolvent). It’s hard to say how well the Bay Area will bounce back from that. I suspect not very well.

          • hnau says:

            Shame on me for not doing my research. I wrote “9.0” without thinking too much because I vaguely remembered it as being the worst earthquake possible, but you’re right, I had something more like an 8 in mind.

          • Eric Rall says:

            (if you buy earthquake insurance the CEA can only pay out 15 billion before it’s insolvent)

            That’s why I bought privately-underwritten earthquake insurance. Amica sells non-CEA earthquake policies, and I expect there are other companies that also offer similar products.

      • idontknow131647093 says:

        I will start by saying that a lot of companies already are trying the not-California model, and/or are expanding out of Cali. I know several Facebook employees who were 50% in the process or more towards moving to Silicon Valley, but then Facebook said, “Hey why not just stay in Chicago/Nashville/Pittsburgh/Vegas and telecommute + be a starter in our local office + fly out twice a year.”

        The San Fran boom was a product of its time and is tapering off. But that still doesn’t solve the San Fran problem, which is where anti-Nimbys have the greatest point. Its silly to pay middle school english teachers $500k a year just because its a Silicon Valley school district and they need to earn that much to live within an hour of the school. The same is true down the line all the way to the lowliest McDonalds employee. Indeed, this kind of thing is important for San Fran beyond the tech boom. In some ways its only sustainable because of whats going on. You need more stratified “normal” living spaces so that there can be normalcy, and families for everyone from a janitor to a janitor app mogul.

        Thus, maybe there are two problems: 1. NIMBYism; and 2. San Fran being too attractive to richies, such that even if San Fran has a normal ratio of mansions/houses/condos/apartments it simply has too many rich people so it needs to kick them out. If thats the case, then they should just enact super high progressive income taxes, then they will end up with the correct Millionaire/Teacher ratio in driving distance.

        • johan_larson says:

          Yeah, there are already some real success stories that are very distributed. Elastic is one of them; GitLab is another.

          Apparently one of the things that make being distributed difficult is VC resistance. For all their talk of disruption, they tend to be strikingly wedded to doing things the way they have always done it. And part of that is being able to drive to the companies they invest in for meetings with management. Hopefully that will start to change as younger members who see distributed work as normal are elevated to the partner level.

      • cryptoshill says:

        1. Not only is it important to build market-rate housing, but it is also important to legalize types of housing that have been illegalized. To give you an example from my local area (not a Bay Area techie) – having more than one unit per half acre of land is illegal unless you get your development specifically rezoned, and having a unit less than 1200sqft is illegal for lots of other reasons (structural requirements, closet space requirements, bedroom space requirements, it all adds up). In my city, rents have gone up approximately 45% from three years ago. The natural choice would be to minimize your consumption of living space or at least to consume living space efficiently. However, due to the way the local laws work – things like micro-apartments, tiny houses, boarding houses, etc are not just disincentivized, they are illegal. To use a different analogy – when it comes to food, if you’re trying to save money you can buy in bulk, cook for yourself, or eat fast food – similar options to reduce costs are not options in our major cities.

        2. I’m not a liberal – but it seems like cities that have lots of concentrated wealth/capital/technology/etc tend to *be* more liberal. Even the City of Chicago which reliably votes Democrat is *much* more conservative than SF or Seattle. It advantages the progressives culturally to encourage more people to move to those cities. Although I mostly agree with Point 4, it disadvantages them in political races.

        3. Most of the “technical capital” in San Francisco and Seattle actually resides in datacenters in Eastern Washington – which is pretty disaster-resistant. Technical capital is pretty easy to locate in places that you don’t work. Sure, having lots and lots of good knowledge-workers die in an earthquake isn’t good – but it isn’t like all of the advantages will magically disappear.

        4. I am largely against “choosing housing policy to manipulate demographics”. Progressives are also notably critical of gerrymandering, but pro-NIMBYism is effectively gerrymandering *for* rich progressive-types.

        5. I mostly agree with a weaker version of this criticism, which is that “demand has outstripped supply for so long that the amount of building that would be required to lower rents to the point where they are considered “affordable” by progressive standards (not by my standards, if people are willing to pay the rents, then they are being afforded by something) will not be achievable within a 10-year cycle of local politics”

        6. NIMBYism has directly led to a lot of these infrastructure problems. People moved away from the urban core due to housing prices, moving to areas where they could get decent-sized housing for cheaper than even small studio apartments, taking the commute as an externality. The type of transit infrastructure progressives want is *specifically* ineffective at addressing sprawl, thus the economically efficient solution is (sadly) crushing traffic and not enough fare-box revenue or political willpower to fund transit – because that transit will *never* serve the outlying areas that actually need it, and already serves the core areas fairly well.

        • Eric Rall says:

          To give you an example from my local area (not a Bay Area techie) – having more than one unit per half acre of land is illegal unless you get your development specifically rezoned, and having a unit less than 1200sqft is illegal for lots of other reasons (structural requirements, closet space requirements, bedroom space requirements, it all adds up).

          In most of the Bay Area, the standard is small single-family houses (1000-1500 square feet) on small lots (1/8 acre to 1/4 acre). The big restrictive zoning restraints are limitations on building up (most residential property is zoned only for one-story single-family houses, not for apartment buildings or even townhouses) and on building out (there’s a ton of land right around the built-on areas of the Bay Area that’s zoned as “Agricultural”, which requires large lots (2 to 20 acres, depending on the precise zoning classification) and no more than two dwelling units per lot (a main house and a small guest house)).

          • baconbits9 says:

            1/4 acre is a pretty big lot for most population dense areas. Even an 1/8th of an acre is a good size. Our twin house in on about 1/8th of an acre which is probably average making the local conditions about 1 house per 1/16th of an acre.

          • Deiseach says:

            there’s a ton of land right around the built-on areas of the Bay Area that’s zoned as “Agricultural”

            Hmm. In our (first) boom that led to the housing bubble, the value of agricultural land shot up because it was being sold to developers for housing. Why can’t the Bay Area do something similar? Okay, zoning, but it should be easy to change use from agricultural to residential, unless that means we’re back at square one with people agitating to make sure the zoning isn’t changed.

            So part of the problem is that there is land available in the general area, but it can’t be built on?

          • Eric Rall says:

            1/4 acre is the extreme I’ve seen. 1/8 to 1/6 is more typical of the “suburban” parts of the Bay Area, and SF and San Jose proper seem to be a bit smaller than that.

          • mister64738 says:

            there’s a ton of land right around the built-on areas of the Bay Area that’s zoned as “Agricultural”

            Where were you thinking of in particular? My impression is that whatever agricultural land is left in the Bay Area is either part of rich people’s enclaves (e.g. Portola Valley), or so distant from the job centers as to be unusable for mass housing without major upgrades to public transportation (e.g. Gilroy). In either case, the problem is not really “zoning”.

          • Eric Rall says:

            Where were you thinking of in particular?

            I was thinking mainly of the southeastern fringes of the Bay Area: Los Gatos, Morgan Hill, Gilroy, etc. I agree that these areas (especially Gilroy) are unsuitable for dense urban development without major infrastructure upgrades, but there’s plenty of room for development in these areas for car commutes into the South Bay (San Jose, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and Mountain View).

            There are also big restrictions via zoning and planning on commercial development in these areas. In Gilroy at least, they’re quite a bit worse than the restrictions of residential development (most notably the Measure H Urban Growth Boundary, which was specifically intended in part to prevent tech companies from setting up satellite campuses in Gilroy). These are significant because if tech companies could readily set up satellite campuses in Morgan Hill and Gilroy, then at least some of their employees could live in those cities and still have only a local commute.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Yes, I have vague plans to write a post that sketches out pretty much the same territory you’re mentioning, so thanks for the thought you’ve put into this.

      • hnau says:

        A Much-More-Than-You-Wanted-To-Know-style post about the effects of building more market-rate housing would be awesome. I was hoping we’d get something like that out of the adversarial collaboration contest (there were a few proposals), but no such luck.

      • yodelyak says:

        My simplest pro-NIMBY argument is that there’s a general push to facilitate “seeing like a state” has downsides, and the communities/groups/interests that effectively push NIMBY-type politics are often the best or even the only effective political check on centralized power’s desire to see like a state.

        • Statismagician says:

          This causes problems in that while e.g. power stations are objectively unpleasant to live near, they equally-objectively have to go somewhere. The State is not incorrect in noticing the lack of sufficient power stations, and the factors governing efficient-power-station-placement aren’t locally legible – the village doesn’t have hydroelectrical engineering data on hand, it just knows that the river is a great place for a picnic and that fishing is traditionally important.

          If the village doesn’t look powerful to the State [i.e. is poor/not a valued minority group/voted for the other guy/whatever] then it gets ignored and the power station gets build in the efficient place; if it does, the power station gets build ten miles up the river, some other community gets just as shafted, but now everything costs twice as much and only generates half the kW/h.

          Sometimes the village view is the right one. Sometimes the State view is the right one. Something something Arch-Fiend of Meta-Epistemological Murkiness?

    • The Nybbler says:

      I think Denver actually is on its way to becoming another tech hub, mostly via Boulder.

      • johan_larson says:

        If we use the heuristic that a true tech hub must have the HQ of at least one top tech company in the metropolitan area, then there are two true tech hubs in the US: Seattle (with Microsoft and Amazon) and San Francisco (with Google, Facebook and Apple). Other contenders for top tech company status, such as Oracle, eBay, Netflix, Twitter, and Uber also tend to be located in the San Francisco metropolitan area.

        The harder question is what areas qualify as second-tier tech hubs. NYC and LA probably qualify by sheer size, since even if the portion of companies that are tech companies is low, you still end up with a sizable number of second-tier companies and branch campuses of the majors. I keep hearing about Boston, Portland, Denver and Austin as good places for tech people. Not sure what other places rate. Pittsburgh, maybe?

        • Brad says:

          The DC area flies under the radar, and it’s true that companies working on social media for pets aren’t likely to be located there. But in overall tech job terms it’s a decent size player.

          • gbdub says:

            DC is huge for anything in government contracting (e.g. Defense) which absorbs a ton of STEM grads without standing out as being as “sexy” as the FANGs. I’d count it.

          • The Nybbler says:

            There’s two related problems with tech in the DC area. One is a huge number of jobs require a security clearance. The other is that government contracting software jobs involve as much awful paperwork as you’d expect.

          • Erusian says:

            The problem with DC is that the government is so huge it strangles other industries. Plus it’s very much a company town and that company, the government, is specifically not supposed to be disruptive or innovative.

            There are certainly tech jobs. But the concentration of tech jobs is just not a great indicator. When controlling for population, iirc, DC doesn’t even make it into the top 20 for VC money.

    • Squirrel of Doom says:

      as if economics was some kind of rigorously quantitative field, as opposed to ‘astrology for dudes’

      I’m a pretty passionate YIMBY, but this alone tells me there is no rational discourse to be had here.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        That quote was especially hard to take coming from someone who talks about “demand” as if it were a scalar and “affordable” as if it were a Boolean.

      • hash872 says:

        I mean, I’m pretty comfortable with it. The consensus view that even many economists now embrace is that economics to date has been a largely theoretical and not empirical field, and that it’s going through a revolution with better data access now but it’s certainly not, like, a hard science. Ask any chemist or physicist you know what they think about the methodology and rigor of an economics paper. It’s pretty well established that they have little predictive power and mostly just make ad hoc justifications for phenomena

        • Squirrel of Doom says:

          If it’s such a consensus view even among economists, it’s strange that I’ve never heard of it. I’m not an economist at all, but I do follow it on a hobby level.

          Do you have a list a of a few reputable economists who have said so publicly?

          Let me try to not (only) be a condescending asshole: “Economics” describes a large number of disciplines, with variable levels of success, but the main division is between Macroeconomics and Microeconomics.

          Macroeconomics is a very difficult field of study, and may be in part impossible as a science, since the object it studies is aware of its findings, and changes itself to make them invalid as soon as they’re known. You may have heard people talk about this and overgeneralized.

          Microeconomics, which might better be called “price theory” is a quite solid hard science which has produced a lot of deep and important insights the last 1-2 centuries. I’d be very surprised if you found an economist who denies this. There is of course still more to discover, but that’s true of Physics as well.

          The NIMBY/YIMBY debate is solidly in the Microeconomics realm!

        • Brad says:

          Why does your field need a journal?

          Okay then. It’s your right to be obnoxious but only at the cost of your being convincing.

        • Ilya Shpitser says:

          “The consensus view that even many economists now embrace is that economics to date has been a largely theoretical and not empirical field.”

          Name the last three economics papers you have read, on any subject.

          I will start. I think “mostly harmless econometrics” is a good read, and I have been reading a ton of stuff by Chernozhukov on using machine learning in causal problems.

          If you can’t name any recent papers you have read, name a list of economists/econometricians expressing your professed “consensus view” on the nature of economics.

      • hnau says:

        For me it was the use of “techbro” in the same paragraph.

    • sourcreamus says:

      Your first point does not make sense. If building new housing does not lower prices how does it induce new demand?
      You could say that given high demand building new housing will not lower prices enough to make a huge difference but it would make a small difference.
      However, even if the price lowering is small, it is still a large increase in utility since the bay area is the best place to live for a certain type of person and more housing would allow more of those types of people to live there. The tone of your post seems dismissive toward that type of person but I see no reason to not factor their utility in beside prejudice.

    • “Again, more supply only reduces average rents *with the same level of demand*. But if the Bay Area is the most attractive place in the US to live for young techbros, more apartments simply means more people can live there- completely negating any type of pricing advantage.”

      If the cost of living didn’t fall, what would cause the increased demand? You can’t just assume that more people buying proves that there is more demand. To give an example, there were a lot more buyers after they deregulated the airlines. This did not “cancel out” the price-reducing effect of the deregulation, because it didn’t reflect truly greater demand.

      “If one were designing the US from scratch, who would say ‘hmm yes, let’s put almost all of our nation’s technical capital right here in the most earthquake-prone part of the country, this seems like an excellent location’. I mean, we know with a high degree of certainty that California will suffer a very strong and damaging earthquake within the next century of less- just a question of when. Spreading out our urban strengths in multiple cities enhances redundancy against long-tail risks.”

      In countries with first world building standards, you’re not going to get hundreds of thousands killed in an earthquake.(c.f., Japan)

    • John Schilling says:

      I get really annoyed when anti-NIMBYists smugly pretend to have economics on their side (as if economics was some kind of rigorously quantitative field, as opposed to ‘astrology for dudes’).

      It is somewhat less quantitative than e.g. physics, and vastly more quantitative than e.g. every argument you are putting forward here.

      For example:

      Again, more supply only reduces average rents *with the same level of demand*. But if the Bay Area is the most attractive place in the US to live for young techbros, more apartments simply means more people can live there- completely negating any type of pricing advantage.

      Completely negating any type of pricing advantage? How do you expect this to actually happen? Yes, more people can live there, but how does it come to pass that more people will live there?

      In order for more people to live in the Bay Area(*), people who presently do not live in the Bay Area and would not have moved to the Bay Area if the status quo persisted, will have to change their mind and say, “Oh, in that case, I’m going to move to the Bay Area after all”. What’s going to make them do that? What sort of thing do you consider when you decide whether you ought to move to a place?

      Approximately nobody counts the total number of homes in a city vs. the total population of that city, in deciding whether to move there. And nobody says “I will move there if there are empty homes I could move in to”. There are always empty homes you could move into. There’s always someone who left their apartment last week and whose landlord hasn’t found a new tenant yet. Each and every person you think might move into the Bay Area next year if the number of apartments goes up, could have moved into the Bay Area last year. They didn’t.

      Because they didn’t think they could afford it, and probably rightly so. The one and only aspect of the real estate market that any one person considers when deciding whether to move into a desirable area is, “how much will it cost me to buy or rent an acceptable home”? Which differs from person to person, of course. The lower you set the price, the more people will say “yes, I can afford that and will move there”. And the decision is made one person at a time.

      And that’s the only financial factor that matters. Not total housing stock vs. population, but the rent for the next suitable apartment on the market. If you imagine all the new apartments filling up because all the people who didn’t move to the Bay Area last year, instead move next year, then the only thing that will make each of those people decide, one at a time, to make the move, is if the price comes down. If the price stays the same, their decision will stay the same, and they decided last year to stay away.

      More apartments means lower rents, EVEN IF people from outside your community are now saying “I want to move into those apartments in that community”.

      This is basic Econ 101 stuff, and you’ll look a lot less foolish if you familiarize yourself with it before you start talking about economic matters.

      * Neglecting the idea where people in the Bay Area decide to pair up and make babies faster than the geezers die off, because I know I’ve linked to the local population period before.

      • hnau says:

        +1 for explaining supply and demand in practical, non-magical terms.

        It’s not necessarily fair to say that housing prices are the only factor, though. People could be moving because of a job (it’s how I ended up in the Bay Area), possibly one that pays enough to offset the higher housing costs. I think that’s what Devon’s original post was getting at (that, and denser areas can support a greater quality and variety of businesses).

      • Scott Alexander says:

        The argument I’ve always heard is about elasticity. If the current rent is $2000, and there are a million people waiting to jump in once it becomes $1999, then it’s unlikely to get to $1998 any time soon. Even though those numbers are obviously exaggerations and simplifications, my impression is that something like this is going on that will make it very hard for moderate amounts of new housing to lower rents significantly.

        • John Schilling says:

          If the current rent is $2000, and there are a million people waiting to jump in once it becomes $1999, then it’s unlikely to get to $1998 any time soon.

          But the price has to go down to $1999 at least, or nobody changes their “meh, don’t bother to move to SF” decision and the new apartments sit empty and the landlords all feel silly for not knocking a dollar off the rent. So, yes, more apartments means lower rent.

          By more than a dollar, because as you admit, you greatly exaggerated the numbers. If you admit that economic cause X inevitably produces effect Y, but then knowingly and grossly exaggerate something that reduces Y so you can say “…and thus Y is negligible and nothing changes”, then I think you have departed from the path of wisdom.

          So don’t do that. If there are, say, 100,000 new apartments built in San Francisco last year, how much does the rent actually have to come down for a hundred thousand actual people who last year said, “San Francisco is nice and I’d totally move but for the single fact that it is too expensive” to change their mind?

          • yodelyak says:

            Not understanding Paul Zrimsek, I poked around for price elasticity of demand in the Bay Area, and found this link reporting on an apparently very well-received model for SF rents that uses three variables only: employment, wages, and the number of housing units.

            In Fischer’s model, a sustained doubling of housing construction can turn a $3,500 1-bedroom San Francisco apartment into a $2,500 one-bedroom San Francisco apartment (if employment and wages stay the same) by 2035.

            I don’t know what current construction rates are like, or whether doubling them (or even boosting them by 50%) is within the realm of the possible.

          • yodelyak says:

            Okay, looks like the housing supply in SF increased 12% from 1996 to 2016 (link), or around .6% per year.* So if you could push SF to boost that rate to 1.2%, that’d represent a doubling of SF’s build rate. Hold that boosted rate to 2025, and per my earlier link, you cut 2/7ths off of SF rents. That doesn’t seem out of the range of the possible to me, not at all. So, for the folks who argue against NIMBY here, what’s your data/model on the other side?

            * My quick back of the envelope to put that into an annual increase… My link gives 12% growth from 1996 to 2016, which is 20 years. 1.057 ^ 20 = 1.12.

          • Scott Alexander says:

            I’m giving a possibility proof of how supply can go up without cost going down significantly.

            I think the numbers support that this is true. Yodelyak is imagining absolutely complete YIMBY victory (I don’t know if anyone thinks we can double housing), and even so, all it means is if we really stick to it for a generation, my children will have apartments that are only somewhat unaffordable, if nothing else gets worse. As per yodelyak’s link, everyone interprets the study he cited as an argument against supply being very influential.

            The same is true of this Fed study, which finds that adding 5% more housing would lower rents by 0.5%.

            The same is true of this model which finds that in order to get median rents below $800 (plausibly a target for being affordable for the lower and middle class), San Francisco would have to dectuple its construction and continue at that rate for ten to fifteen years.

            I agree this is better than nothing, but if some people are arguing for rent control or public housing or something, I don’t think it’s fair to say “No, just build more houses!” as a counterstrategy when that won’t make anything affordable without implausibly large increases sustained over decades.

          • johan_larson says:

            I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to study San Francisco in isolation when discussing housing issues. It’s a small part of a larger urban area. Is there any particular reason why every municipality in that area needs to be affordable to people with Joe-jobs? Probably not.

            I suspect it would be possible to make the Bay area’s housing problems much more manageable, even while leaving the existing low-density areas as they are, by building up a ring of high-density areas around them, with good transit connections for commuters.

            Of course, even then, it would help if the low-density areas were allowed to densify, however slowly.

          • David Speyer says:

            Doubling housing construction, not doubling housing.

          • John Schilling says:

            I think the numbers support that this is true. Yodelyak is imagining absolutely complete YIMBY victory (I don’t know if anyone thinks we can double housing), and even so, all it means is if we really stick to it for a generation, my children will have apartments that are only somewhat unaffordable,

            Yodelyak was postulating a 22% increase in housing (1.2%/year for 17 years), not a doubling. That doesn’t strike me as implausible, and it does result in SF housing moving solidly into the “affordable” category for middle-class SF residents like your future children. And if that’s not a hypothetical, congratulations.

            The same is true of this model which finds that in order to get median rents below $800 (plausibly a target for being affordable for the lower and middle class),

            $800 for median rent? OK, yes, that is going to require at least doubling the housing supply. But, “affordable for the lower and middle class”?

            The median household income in the SF bay area is $96,677/year. Using the traditional rule of thumb that rent should be ~30% of gross income, that means the Bay Area’s middle class can readily afford $2417/month rent, and yodelyak’s math looks pretty good.

            But you did specify “lower class” as well. OK, a full-time minimum wage job, times 30%, gets you $572/month now and $780/month in 2022, so a good match for your $800 figure. But for a median apartment? If individual members of the Bay Area’s working poor with no roomates or working partners are snatching up the median apartments, who is living in the sub-median apartments that by definition make up 50% of the city’s housing stock? Are we leaving those empty so that the working poor don’t feel bad?

            It seems to me that the problem you are trying to solve – and you are far from alone from where I look – is not the potentially soluble problem of inadequate housing, but the insoluble problem of definitional poverty. Per the usual definition, middle-class people can afford median everything, and lower-class people cannot. That’s what being poor means – not being able to afford the median.

            If you set the goal as “make sure poor people are not deprived of the ability to purchase median goods”, you will fail and you may break the market in the process. If instead you target $2500/month median rent, with a range that includes $800/month SROs and boarding houses, that’s something you can achieve with reasonable levels of construction and that will provide actually-affordable housing for SF’s middle and lower classes.

          • cryptoshill says:

            @John Schilling – I will also argue that being pro-YIMBY also helps you indirectly in terms of “the poor not being able to afford the median goods” – more housing construction equals more newer buildings that are built to a higher standard even without government housing codes getting in the way (gfci outlets, asbestos, lead paint, open-space designs, those cool laminate planks that look and feel like “real wood” despite being made mostly of ceramic and rubber). So even though the poor still can’t afford the “median” apartment in SF definitionally, the definition of what a “median” apartment is has in fact, improved in quality.

          • Fossegrimen says:

            I always thought that the high prices was due to the ‘gravitational pull’ of all the techies already being there and thus causing all the jobs to be there.

            So you build a million houses that are filled with people @1999 which increases the pressure to move to the hub enough that the market will support a rate of 2100.

          • Deiseach says:

            The problem is somewhere like Dublin, which grossly imbalances the rest of the country. So since everything (including decent jobs) is there, then landlords can get away with high rents because it’s a toss-up between “move to Dublin” or “stagnate and get nothing where I am”.

            I’m wondering if the San Francisco problem isn’t the same; it’s not 100,000 general people who want to move to the City By The Bay, it’s 100,000 potential workers for the big tech companies who all want/need to live in a particular area in order to get to work without hours of commuting. Yeah sure, new hire from Idaho, you can rent a place for $800 a month – if you want to spend four hours round-trip getting to and from work, or you can pay me $1,600 a month for house sharing with five other people but you can bike to work in the morning. Don’t want it? Don’t worry, I have ten other potential tenants who’ll snap it up! And it doesn’t matter if another twenty houses are built on the same street because we can fill them up with all the incoming new people working for Big Tech Company who need/want to live in this area, at the same price!

            Eventually there will be a limit on “how many computer programmers can you fit into a square mile anyway” and then demand will drop and price with it, but I’m not seeing any slow-down as yet. Is there any estimation on how many new jobs Silicon Valley needs to fill each year, because that would give us an idea of X number of new people moving to SF for a job who need a place to live, then if we have an idea how much housing is available in the areas they want to live we can say “there needs to be Y number of new houses/apartment blocks/holes in the ground to meet demand”.

            EDIT: Wah-hey! A very helpful article on the subject, and yep, it agrees: more supply and fewer jobs means rents come down!

            Rents started to level off in early 2016, a trend that continued throughout the year.

            By the end of 2016, “job growth normalized from robust levels and apartment completions picked up. In turn, occupancy sagged and operators responded by cutting rents. The dip was temporary, though, and now that job growth and occupancy have improved, Bay Area pricing is once again on the rise,” RealPage said.

            …Since then [2017 ], rents have moved up, but not rapidly. “The slowdown the Bay Area has seen is due to more supply coming online” and more Millennials looking to buy, Clark said. “I think we are going to see (rent growth) stabilize around 1 to 2.5 percent. That’s in line with inflation. That is stable and sustainable in the long run.”

          • baconbits9 says:

            Wikipedia claims that GDP per capita in Dublin is lower than in the rest of Ireland.

          • yodelyak says:

            Replying to @Scott Alexander, limited to having read the Fed study he points at pretty closely.

            If I’m reading the Fed study right, it finds nothing contrary to my expectation that it should be possible to take policy action to significantly reduce rents in the Bay Area, or at least significantly reduce the rate at which Bay Area rents are increasing compared to a business as usual baseline. (For all I know 100k people who all make $400k/yr are about to get hired by Salesforce and told to move to SF. If that happens, I can’t solve it, but *not* building new things to house those newcomers will not help the situation.)

            Scott wrote

            The same is true of this Fed study, which finds that adding 5% more housing would lower rents by 0.5%.

            The study actually found this:

            We find that increasing the housing stock in the most expensive neighborhoods by 5% [but holding total housing everywhere else in the city constant] would only reduce equilibrium rents in those neighborhoods by less than 0.5%.

            Also, note that the Fed study uses these assumptions:

            An important reason for the low rent elasticity in the model is that we estimate a relatively low amount of preference heterogeneity across households. In other words, there tends to be more agreement than disagreement across households on which neighborhoods in the city have the most attractive amenities. This finding implies that the willingness to pay to live in a particular neighborhood for a household that is on the margin between living in that neighborhood and elsewhere will be similar before and after a change in housing supply.

            One potentially important assumption behind our analysis throughout this paper is that our model treats each city as a closed economy. Although households can choose from among many different types of neighborhoods within the city, they cannot choose to live outside the city, and households from outside the city cannot choose to move to the city. Therefore, in our counterfactuals where we expand the housing supply, we must assume that the new entrants to the city arrive exogenously, and we must make an assumption about the distribution of preferences among the new entrants. Our counterfactuals are concerned with small changes to the housing stock, so it turns out that our results are not too sensitive to this assumption. However, for larger changes to the housing stock of the city, the number and particular preference distribution of new entrants may become important for the main results.

            In effect, the Fed study looked at what the rental price change would be for renters on Knob Hill in SF if somebody with a single family mansion on Knob Hill kicked the bucket, left the property to their son-in-law who happens to be a high-rise developer, and he built 1000 awesome condos there. [If I understand their model right, it also assumes exactly 1000 people with preferences just like the ‘average’ San Franciscan concurrently move to SF.] Result: enough San Franciscans from outside Knob Hill move into Knob Hill that Knob Hill’s rental prices are barely affected.

            Most importantly, they expressly reject applying their result to city-wide regulations that restrict housing supply:

            The papers that find large effects of regulation on house prices are not necessarily at odds with our findings in this paper, because regulations can have very large effects on the housing stock. For example, Jackson (2016) finds that an additional regulation reduces residential permits by 4 to 8 percent per year. Glaeser and Ward (2009) estimate even larger effects on supply. These effects on construction can accumulate into very large changes to the housing stock, especially when these regulations are in place for many years, as is often the case. Thus, regulation may be associated with changes to the size of the housing stock that are outside the scope of our model for the reasons mentioned above.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          The estimates for price elasticity of demand that I found with a bit of poking around online were generally -0.5 or less-negative (long-term; short-term demand is even less elastic). So if applied to San Francisco’s approximately 200,000 rental units, your 0.05% rent decrease should eventually bring round about 50 new renters citywide.

          • yodelyak says:

            @Paul Zrimsek: I don’t understand how you’ve presented these numbers. (I have an undergrad degree in econ. from a good school, but am not professionally an economist.)

            John Schilling’s question makes sense to me. The independent variable should be “housing in SF (bedrooms for rent)” and the dependent variable should be “monthly rent (dollars)” or something like that. You seem to have presented rental units as a fixed number (200k) and declare a price decrease (But but but prices are set by markets! They go down for *reasons*!) of .05% (That is very small! Did you mean 5% or .5%?) and that causes more renters to move to the city (even though there are no additional beds for them, because you set the rental stock at 200k and haven’t changed it!)

            Do you see why what you wrote is hard to parse?

          • isotropy says:

            @yodelyak, I couldn’t reply to your comment, but I think the 0.05% here is just referring to the tiny decrease of $1 from a rent of $2000 to $1999 used in Scott’s example above. With Paul’s elasticity number, he’s calculating that each dollar decrease in rent makes the city affordable for ballpark 50 more renters.

          • yodelyak says:

            @isotropy

            Oh… .05% of 2000 is one, so a .05% decrease from $2000 is $1999. I see what you did there. I don’t think that’s what Zrimsek is doing.

            I suspect Paul Zrimsek of using Trulia’s data here, where Trulia describes SF as having an elasticity under .05 (not .05%). I think the measure Trulia is labeling as “price elasticity of demand” is perhaps better thought of as “price inelasticity of supply” which is to say, it’s not based on surveying people who might move to SF at different rental prices to gauge whether a new-hire Google employee will move to SF if rents are $2500, but won’t if they are $2600. Rather their metric is based on looking at how *supply* in SF changes when the median price of a rental unit goes up. The .05 number is a way of indicating that SF’s housing supply does not grow when prices go up, which is unusual compared to other areas. (Trulia’s methodology for calculating their “elasticity” number is to look at construction rates compared to rents. High elasticity would mean that rental increases result in proportionate construction increases–so rental price increases cause supply growth. Low elasticity means that as prices go up, construction rates do not, so *supply* is fixed.) To my ear, that tends to support the exact opposite of what Paul Zrimsek is saying it supports. To me, looking at the contrast between SF’s and the area’s data, versus Vegas’ data, as reported by Trulia, and it looks like if SF had taken a policy more like Vegas’ policy, 20 years ago, you’d get more construction in SF and prices would have likely moved upward much less quickly, and prices in SF would be somewhat more like what prices in Vegas are now.

            I’m still confused about his theory and direction of causality, so I have no idea what policy decisions would flow from his claim. What does the word “negative” mean in his comment? It would really help me if he (or someone) would label a dependent variable and independent variable(s), or use counterfactual type language where they posit a baseline, a policy intervention, and a difference from the baseline they expect would be caused by that intervention.

            Is he saying that if we build 50 beds more in the next year than we otherwise would, that will achieve a $1/mo rent price decrease? Would he expand that to say that if we built 50,000 more beds in the next year than we otherwise would, that will achieve a $10,000/mo price decrease? I don’t think he is saying that, but I’m not sure what, in fact, he is saying.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Vegas isn’t exactly a clear model to emulate here. Housing prices flew up prior to the bust, increasing almost 2.5x from 2000 to 2007 collapsed back to levels not seen since 1996 and has more than doubled since that trough.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Yodelyak, I was talking about what Scott said and nothing else (among other things, it explains why I said “your 0.05% rent decrease”). Note that that was concerned only with the demand curve; I would have let it pass as an exaggerated-for-clarity theoretical example if he hadn’t gone on to say “my impression is that something like this is going on”– pretty unlikely when you start with an elasticity that’s off by four orders of magnitude. As for your question about “negative”, that’s a hyphen in front of it, not an em-dash; I said “less-negative” because “less” by itself is easily misunderstood in relation to a negative number (-0.6 is less than -0.5, but of course I meant “in the direction toward zero”, not away from it.)

          • yodelyak says:

            Okay. Thank you for clarifying so I could have a second shot at understanding. I had misunderstood about as completely as it was possible to do. Hopefully the extra clarification was useful to others besides me.

        • Squirrel of Doom says:

          Even in that exaggerated example, a lot of people got housing who would not otherwise have it.

          Concretely, if the “moderate increase” is 10,000 units, and 2.4 people live per unit, 24,000 unhoused people got housing. That’s a big net positive as I see it!

          • LesHapablap says:

            Not only that, but it means a decrease in demand in other cities that these techbros would have chosen to live in otherwise.

            Somewhere, someone is going to benefit if you build more places to live. Places to live are a real form of wealth for society.

          • gbdub says:

            Right, if nothing else the additional housing in the super desirable city center will pull in some of the richer people that are driving up prices in the less desirable areas.

            So maybe San Fran proper is still crazy expensive, but San Jose becomes much more affordable.

        • Sui Generalist says:

          Let’s have a think about what a really elastic demand to live in SF means.

          The cost of producing new “SF housing” if development were to be permitted is very significantly less than the value of that development (current average rent is about $3750/month).

          Suppose there are a million people willing to move in if that price drops even a tiny bit.

          Then if we allow the building of a million new apartments, the price might not drop that much. But we’ve created a huge economic windfall because for each apartment there’s a gap of hundreds of thousands of dollars between how much it sells for and how much it costs to build.

          Of course large chunks of this profit would go to landowners and developers (hey, they have utility too!) but creating such a massive surplus would also mean a gushing torrent of revenue for local and state government, some of which could be reinvested in infrastructure to support the larger population.

          Sure, prices haven’t gone down (in this extreme-assumptions model) but we’ve still created a free lunch in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

      • The mistake you are pointing out is one that more often shows up in discussions of highway improvements. Someone argues that if you expand a highway so it won’t jam as badly more people will drive on it until it’s just as slow as before. They are forgetting that the only reason more people will drive on it is that it isn’t jamming as much as before.

        The correct conclusion, in both cases, is that the improvement (faster travel, lower rents) will be more than zero, less than what would happen if nobody shifted his behavior (using the route more, moving to the Bay Area) in response to the change.

        Part of the mistake, as an earlier commenter hinted, is thinking of demand as a number rather than a function of price and failing to distinguish between changes in demand and changes in quantity demanded.

        All of which, as I think several others have suggested, is elementary economics.

        • Paul Zrimsek says:

          That phrase “demand as… a function of price” brings a tangential question to mind: Do you happen to know how supply and demand curves came to be drawn with quantity on the X axis and price on the Y axis? It’s always seemed to me like it should be the other way around.

        • actinide meta says:

          I have seen at least one model where adding capacity to a road network can decrease utility. I think I once saw a different one.

          Not that I disagree with your general point.

    • Guy in TN says:

      This is a good post. I’m an outsider to the whole YIMBY discussion (I live in a smallish city), but from what I’ve heard the arguments do seem simplistic.

      Let me offer an example that Californians may not be familiar with. In Tennessee, there’s a city called Oak Ridge that the US government built from scratch in the 1940s as a nuclear research hub. Its population went from 3,000 in 1942, to 75,000 in 1945.

      Two things can be learned from this. First, as you pointed out, increasing housing can induce demand, by attracting more people, jobs, and businesses. Today, its more expensive to rent in Oak Ridge than it is in the near-vacant farmland a few miles down the road. I doubt that even the most contrarian opinionator would dare to say this has nothing to do with the housing construction of 1942-1945.

      And second, it is evidence that the US government was historically capable of building a minor tech hub out of nothing but farmland. Today, a concentrated effort in a mid-size city would at least move the dial, assuming the government was willing to make significant investments like it was in the 1940s. While its unlikely that the government would be able to amass the resources to turn, say, Columbus Ohio into the next San Francisco, it could at least take a bit of the pressure off, by shifting where the jobs are.

      • hnau says:

        Yes, but that’s not really about housing– it’s about jobs. There are plenty of cases where single large employers (government or not) became the seed for industrial or tech hubs. On the other hand, I don’t know of any case where someone just built a ton of housing and got the jobs to follow it. The causation normally goes in the other direction.

        • Guy in TN says:

          The causation is multi-directional. More housing means more people, which means more jobs (positive externality, as you say). And conversely, a job in a city without affordable housing, means no job in that city at all (since you must leave).

          This is why you can’t necessarily say that building more housing will decrease home values, because you don’t know if it the increase in housing stock is enough to offset the demand you are inducing.

      • John Schilling says:

        If the government had built the research center but not the houses, telling everyone to commute from Knoxville, then the original thousand or so houses in the area would be even more expensive than they presently are, thanks to all the people bidding up the price to avoid the commute.

        More jobs means higher rent. More homes means lower rent. It really is that simple.

        • Guy in TN says:

          If the government had built the research center but not the houses, telling everyone to commute from Knoxville, then the original thousand or so houses in the area would be even more expensive than they presently are, thanks to all the people bidding up the price to avoid the commute.

          That’s nothing more than a just-so story. Another alternative, is that Oak Ridge would have been a massive failure without the corresponding houses being built, and worth nothing today.

          More jobs means higher rent. More homes means lower rent. It really is that simple.

          It’s really not that simple. And the reason is because of basic supply and demand:

          More houses -> more people -> increased demand -> higher rent.

          Your alternative only holds true if the increase in supply outpaces the increased induced demand, which you can’t say for certain.

          • Paul Brinkley says:

            It’s really not that simple. And the reason is because of basic supply and demand:

            More houses -> more people -> increased demand -> higher rent.

            More houses doesn’t necessarily mean more people. The value of a house to a customer is specially tied to a number of factors in addition to its price, such as its location. Otherwise, I could build a lot of houses in the middle of the Mohave and expect people to spontaneously move in.

            In general, if I were to build houses somewhere where the benefit of living there undershot the benefit of living at a customer’s current location, I would have to lower the rent (in this case) farther than that difference. In this case, we’re roughly calculating the benefit of living as salary – rent, and is presumably a positive. If there are no jobs in my location, their salary would be zero, and the only way for me to make up the difference is to pay them to live there.

            Or somehow offer guarantees that the jobs are coming, which is essentially the same thing in this case as increasing job supply.

            There’s an argument to be made that jobs with no homes is a no-go either, but that isn’t really the case if you’re building a job generator within commuting distance of existing homes, even if the commute is arduous. A tough commute just means that the jobs have to be that much more lucrative. But that’s still infinitely easier than turning a profit on homes where the rent is negative.

          • John Schilling says:

            More houses -> more people -> increased demand -> higher rent

            So, building a house causes a man and a woman to make a baby? I did not know that, and should probably complain to my middle school sex ed teacher for leaving that out.

            Presumably you meant “more people in the Bay Area“, but that means the next step of your chain fails. Because the economic demand for housing in the Bay Area, is not limited to people who live in the Bay Area. The demand for housing in the Bay Area includes all the people who live in the Bay Area today, and all the people who might move there in the future. More specifically, the demand curve for e.g. 1BR SF apartments at $3000/month, consists of all the people living in SF today and paying at least $3000 for a 1BR apartment, minus all the ones who are going to move out if the price doesn’t drop below that point real soon, plus all the people who would move to SF if the price did drop below that point.

            Adding a new apartment to the market (and doing nothing else), increases the fraction of people on that list who live in SF, but it doesn’t change the number of people on the list. Which is what matters for supply-and-demand price theory purposes.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Adding a new apartment to the market (and doing nothing else), increases the fraction of people on that list who live in SF, but it doesn’t change the number of people on the list.

            It absolutely does change the number of people on that list. There is a fraction of people who will decide they want to move, not because of the drop in price of housing, but because of the increased job opportunities having more people in the Bay Area provides. Increasing the population creates business opportunities. You induce demand for housing when you increase the population, because you create more opportunities for jobs.

            Let me offer you an example. Let’s say there are 100 people who want to move to a plot of currently vacant land, if they can find housing there at a price they are willing to pay. A construction project creates an apartment complex that can house these 100 people at a price they agree to, so 100 people move there.

            Immediately, businesses notice that there is a 100-person-sized housing project with no gas stations, restaurants, stores, or anything nearby. Seeing a prime business opportunity, 20 additional people now want to live in that block of land. This additional 20-person size demand for housing was induced by the creation of the 100-person housing complex, and the subsequent 100 people moving there. These 20 people did NOT initially want to move there, and they are initially absent from your list. Building the housing put them on the list.

            To spell it out:
            More housing -> more people in the Bay Area -> additional people who want to live in the Bay Area than who would otherwise -> increased demand

            Of course, the increase in supply could be enough to counteract the increase in induced demand, and thus result in lower rents, but such things have to be investigated.

          • Plumber says:

            “…So, building a house causes a man and a woman to make a baby?….

            @John Schilling;

            In one case yes.

            The last recession dropped prices enough that we bought a house in 2011 (just before house prices climbed past their 2007 highs, and continued climbing).

            After we had a house we decided to have a second child, which we most likely would not have if we still lived in our old one bedroom apartment in Oakland. 

            If house prices hadn’t temporarily dropped there’d probably be one less human born.

    • So economics is “astrology for dudes” but your “top” arguments are just things you thought up. You don’t have any kind of empirical study supporting your arguments. You can’t just criticize economists for being theoretical and then do that exact thing.

    • Brett says:

      Original reply got eaten. I’ll try it without the links.

      1. That’s not what we’re seeing. In the face of increasing housing supply, rents in New York City and Los Angeles have either flattened or slightly declined in the past year or so, not continued to increase. Economics still governs housing.

      I don’t disagree with the idea that having more widespread prosperity and tech clusters would be good. But you’re just trying to export the problem rather than solving it, and it won’t work – NIMBY movements will and have arisen in cities outside of the big coastal cities as well. So you end up instead working on greenfield development – typically sprawl – with all the negative environmental consequences that entails. Actually fixing the problem would entail the federal and state governments moving to aggressively restrict local governments’ incredible amount of power over local housing regulations (which makes them very prone to being pulled under the control of local wealthy cliques of homeowners). To a lesser extent, it would also involve actually allowing some of the low income housing types that existed until they were banned or de facto regulated out of existence in the early 20th century.

    • Brad says:

      2. I want anti-NIMBYists to think carefully about the overall future of the US- not just their favorite city. Having all of our financial, technological, and cultural elites living in like 4 cities is *the* recipe for massive regional inequality- I’m pretty sure that’s like the literal plot of the Hunger Games. What becomes of the 99% of the country that’s not the Bay Area/NYC/LA? Why can’t we achieve our affordable housing goals by spreading white collar employers into Phoenix and Charlotte, Miami and Denver, Houston and Chicago…. I’m confused by liberal types who are nominally horrified by wealth inequality, yet want all of our nation’s wealth and social/technical capital to be concentrated in 1% of our physical geography.

      3. Stuffing all of our nation’s most important tech, finance and cultural firms into just a few relatively small areas violates some pretty basic systems engineering concepts around redundancy and resiliency. We are one earthquake, terrorist attack or natural disaster away from wiping out our nation’s whole competitive advantage in tech, in the Bay Area- especially the earthquake option! If one were designing the US from scratch, who would say ‘hmm yes, let’s put almost all of our nation’s technical capital right here in the most earthquake-prone part of the country, this seems like an excellent location’. I mean, we know with a high degree of certainty that California will suffer a very strong and damaging earthquake within the next century of less- just a question of when. Spreading out our urban strengths in multiple cities enhances redundancy against long-tail risks.

      Other countries exist! In particular, the UK, South Korea, and Japan exist. And they all only have one dominant city. When you expand out to four you are looking at huge swaths of the world. At least acknowledge and distinguish instead of pretending the US is the only country that exists and so we have no choice but to hypothesize in a vacuum.

      • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

        I’m not sure why you gave those three examples; so far as I’m aware, none of those cities have ever had a major natural disaster?

        • Brad says:

          They all have one city that dominates their respective nations financially, technologically, and culturally and also as it happens are the respective seats of government.

          Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1855_Edo_earthquake

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            Yes, I get that, but how are they relevant to the question of whether or not it is really wise to centralize that much? (“If the UK, South Korea and Japan all jumped off a cliff…”)

            … the 1855 quake might well be relevant, since as near as I can guess about 1 in 27 of Japan’s people lived there at the time. Except that (a) for all I know, the impact on Japan’s economy was in fact disastrous, the Wikipedia article doesn’t say; and (b) I’m not sure how much we can generalize from Japan’s 19th century economy to the modern day.

          • Brad says:

            We aren’t nearly as centralized as those countries. I’m hard pressed to think of a first world nation that’s less centralized along those axes than the United States, though admittedly adjusting for population is tricky one here.

            We have three top tier metropolitan areas — NYC, LA, and Chicago plus a separate large and influential seat of government district plus two high tech specialist cities (SF and Seattle) that together serve as the headquarters for 5 of 5 of the top largest companies in the country. Then we have however you want to characterize Houston and Dallas. While not my favorite places, they certainly aren’t dying backwater has-beens living in the shadows of more dominant cities.

            What other first world nations come close? The only ones I can think that would even be in contention are Germany and Canada.

            If it is such a bad idea for the future of the nation to have even this level of centralization wouldn’t we expect one of the many first world countries that are even more centralized to have already suffered permanent decline due to their even more highly centralized natures?

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            I found Brad’s post to be very insightful.

          • Matt M says:

            I also agree with Brad on this one.

            Although I’m under the impression that this is quickly happening in China as well. That there are more large/influential cities than the average Westerner might be aware of. Despite the fact that their political system would not seem to encourage “decentralization” as an ideal…

          • Jaskologist says:

            Those other countries are much smaller geographically than the US. I’d be interested in seeing comparisons of how many “major cities” (however defined) the US has compared to Europe or Asia as a group, rather than individual European countries which could plausibly be serviced by a single city.

          • Brad says:

            I fail to see what geographic area has to do with the need for more cities? Is Greenland in desperate need of more financial/technological/cultural centers?

            The larger issue here is that this “need” as a whole is entirely underjustified.

        • John Schilling says:

          so far as I’m aware, none of those cities have ever had a major natural disaster?

          Ninja’d by Brad on the Edo Earthquake, but why are you limiting this to natural disasters? If you’ve got one premier city and you have neighbors, then your neighbors may well observe that, nice city you’ve got there, shame if something were to happen to it.

          One can argue that it is foolish to put so many of a nation’s economic eggs in one basket, but as Brad notes we do have the data to look at. The economic concentration provides great dividends in time of non-disaster, and nations can bounce back from the destruction of their premier cities quite quickly.

    • John Schilling says:

      Also, if the “anti-NIMBY” movement is just about housing in San Francisco, then the United States has maybe fifty years before it goes from BANANA(*) Republic to Mad Max. San Francisco isn’t the only city with a housing crunch, and housing isn’t the only thing being driven down and/or out by the NIMBYs.

      But yeah, Bay Area, maybe they will come up with a good idea and use it exactly and only to solve their one immediate problem and say “mission accomplished”.

      * Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone

    • Plumber says:

      As far as The City and County of San Francisco goes my first comment to a SSC thread addressed some issues about more building in The City, which I’ll re-post here: 

      “”There’s been a shift among some of my YIMBY friends to being more willing to acknowledge that building more housing may not decrease housing costs very quickly, effectively, or at all (short of implausibly massive amounts of new housing). Devon Zuegel presents one of the arguments.”

       Amusing article.

      People really didn’t understand why people want to live in The City, and that demand compounds?

      Besides, I’ve spent a couple of years working for The Port and The Department of Public Works for The City and County of San Francisco, and note something that the “Just build more” types don’t explain away is the real physical infrastructure limits as well as the political ones to housing more people in San Francisco.

      First, in an already crowded city, people don’t want to lose their parks, so you can’t build there.

      Second, Treasure Island, and by the old Hunters Point Shipyards are toxic places to build, cleanup will be extremely expensive, that’s why there isn’t more new housing already!

      Third, during heavy rains the sewage treatment plants are overloaded already and Federal limits on high much untreated sewage can go into the Bay are exceeded.

      Hope for more droughts if you want to pack more people in here!

      Expand the sewage treatment plants?

      On what land, and with what money?

      Plus the pipes under the streets are already way past due for replacement (many are more than a century old).
      physical infrastructure limits as well as the political ones to housing more people in San Francisco.

      But having said that, I have indeed read of at least one town (Brisbane) that the limits to more housing are indeed political not physical, and if left to the market more houding would’ve already been built there, but unless the State overrides the local governments I don’t see much hope for relief.”

      • baconbits9 says:

        Most infrastructure scales well with use, there are some exceptions and I would guess that iconic bridges might fit into that subset. However the issue is likely to be in the bay area that you have to change your infrastructure, not just try the same ratios and implementations as were used during the build up. NIMBYism has a tendency to stop those projects as well as the larger housing projects and other visible changes, meaning that improvements are often expensive and only marginally productive.

      • Deiseach says:

        This is the kind of interesting and informative comment that makes SSC so educational.

        I’d like to know more about this bit:

        Expand the sewage treatment plants?

        On what land, and with what money?

        I can see the land crunch, but why haven’t they the money? What are the SF Board of Supervisors doing – never mind, I just answered my own question.

        • Brad says:

          They have more money than they’ve ever had using whatever deflator you care to use.

        • Glen Raphael says:

          I can see the land crunch, but why haven’t they the money?

          The question isn’t just why don’t they have the money, but also why wouldn’t they have the money? The more people move into an area, the more tax revenue local government has to play with. So you need more infrastructure but you can also afford more infrastructure. Even better than that, higher densities make stuff like trains and subway lines inherently more profitable – one ought to be able to use the extra BART and CalTrain revenue from increased ridership to buy more trains and hire more conductors and such.

          • johan_larson says:

            The answer is a messed-up tax structure and a general reluctance on the part of voters to say yes to taxes that pay for infrastructure. In California, Proposition 13 pushed down property tax rates a lot, froze taxes of home owners who stay in their homes and don’t upgrade them, and generally made it difficult to raise new taxes.

            I seem to recall that municipalities generally make money on new commercial developments, but lose money on new housing.

          • baconbits9 says:

            It probably wouldn’t be difficult to fix these issues if you got passed the basic NIMBY stuff as you could pass a good chunk of the taxed onto the new developments.

      • Tenacious D says:

        With respect to wastewater, they could potentially expand the treatment capacity in their existing footprint with some (expensive) modifications–replacing secondary clarifiers with ultrafiltration membranes is something that has been done in a number of places. And as the century-old buried infrastructure is slowly replaced, hopefully wastewater and stormwater flows can be separated.

        • Plumber says:

          Yeah, that sewage and storm water aren’t seperate is an old city problem, newer towns build them separate.

          A larger issue is that people who want to live in a place but don’t yet aren’t voters there yet and current residents have no incentive to vote tax themselves more in order to crowd in more neighbors.

          The State would have to overrule municipalities, but few politicians have much incentive to make it easier for their constituents to move elsewhere against the will of the current residents.

          I like the way my neighborhood is now and I don’t want it more crowded, but I also want my son’s to be able to afford to live in nearby, but there really isn’t a way (that I know) to square that circle.

          • gbdub says:

            Given their immense impact on the fortunes of the state and regions, I do think large municipalities should be overruled more frequently by their state governments, not that I really know how to achieve it.

            It seems like big cities are the sweet spot for lousy and/or outright corrupt governance. Small enough to affect a near-permanent takeover of the institutions that matter, large enough to be worth the effort.

          • Matt M says:

            current residents have no incentive to vote tax themselves more in order to crowd in more neighbors.

            I dunno. A whole lot of people keep going on about how great and awesome large, dense, cities are.

            If you’re someone who thinks that Manhattan and downtown SF are just the coolest, why wouldn’t you vote to make your own slice of suburban hell a little more like that?

          • Plumber says:

            “If you’re someone who thinks that Manhattan and downtown SF are just the coolest, why wouldn’t you vote to make your own slice of suburban hell a little more like that?”

            @Matt M,

            My guess is that folks who think “downtown is the coolest” tend to be younger.

            Younger people tend to vote less, so they’re out voted by those who like less density, plus those with enough money who want to live downtown already do, so in order to transform “suburban hell” to be more like “downtown” you’d have to have a community where the majority of voters wanted more density and builders foresaw profits.

            Mostly where I see permits and developments for greater density is in “transit hubs” where “new urbanism” convinces politicians to approve increased density which is usually opposed by the immediate neighbors (though I did know a homeowner who had solar panels who didn’t fight the house next door being turned into four condos because “It fights sprawl”, but she’s a rare exception).

            If there’s only increased density effecting few enough voters, the politicians may keep their jobs, but too much can lead to voter revolt.

            I’d compare it to San Leandro, California where a bunch of private homes got seized by eminent domain so car dealerships could be built there instead (this was so the dealerships could move out of next door Oakland), San Leandro wanted the dealerships for the sales tax revenue (and to clear out long-term Prop 13 low tax rate owners), and San Leandro then built a new library and swim center, so the remaining San Leandro residents got goodies, and the displaced homeowners mostly had to move out of town and didn’t vote in San Leandro anymore anyway.

            If, however, enough residents found that they were going to be displaced, and an election was close enough, maybe they could have prevented it, but that’s not what happened.

    • Nootropic cormorant says:

      What I’m wondering about is how Silicon valley moguls haven’t crushed NIMYism by now. Who are these locally connected rich home owners that have more political clout that Jeff Bezos?

      • hnau says:

        Jeff Bezos lives in Seattle, but I take your point.

        My guess is that rents aren’t a major pain point for Silicon Valley companies at the moment. Good software engineers are hard to find for reasons that have little or nothing to do with housing, and they’re in very high demand, so salaries (yes, even starting salaries) have gone up to the point where Silicon Valley housing seems pretty affordable.

        There are also political reasons for Silicon Valley companies not to make a big issue of housing. Image is a big concern for them, so they don’t want to start a fight with local governments that will make them look bad. It’s also possible (I’m not well informed on this) that they’re getting sweet deals in other respects, e.g. taxes, and don’t want to rock the boat. Anyway, what political capital they have goes toward securing new office space. Commercial property in the Bay Area is even harder to find than residential.

        As far as the locally connected rich homeowners go: 1. almost every Silicon Valley homeowner is rich by definition, and 2. city government is disproportionately dominated by who shows up– i.e. longtime homeowners with time on their hands who live downtown, not 20-something renters with long workdays and no idea whether they’ll still be there in five years. Mountain View, where I live, is 60% renters by population, but I bet the ballots in local elections are >50% homeowner cast, and as far as I know all the city council members are homeowners.

        • Matt M says:

          Good software engineers are hard to find for reasons that have little or nothing to do with housing, and they’re in very high demand, so salaries (yes, even starting salaries) have gone up to the point where Silicon Valley housing seems pretty affordable.

          Generally agree with this. Facebook and Google are rich enough that that they can afford to pay their talent whatever it costs to locate them in SF. Same with the latest hot new startup backed by serious PE money.

          The biggest threat, IMO, isn’t housing cost, but rather the general shitholeishness of the Bay Area driving away talent who say “I will not live or work there for any price”

          • Brad says:

            That’s fine for twenty somethings, but even google and facebook can’t afford to pay salaries necessary to buy the kind of housing their older workers are going to want.

            Well, can’t is not quite right. They could afford it, but Wall Street is just not going to accept those kind of compensation costs for any company except Goldman Sachs.

            In the past this has been papered over with stock. If you went to go work at google at 25 by the time you were 35, if you were still there you were likely a stock multimillionaire so it didn’t matter that you were “only” making $300k. It’s unlikely that papering over will be able to continue over the next decade.

            One option is to let your mid senior people migrate to branch offices and keep the Bay Area for twenty somethings and high level executives, but that strikes me as dangerous culturally.

          • Matt M says:

            That’s fine for twenty somethings, but even google and facebook can’t afford to pay salaries necessary to buy the kind of housing their older workers are going to want.

            Not sure if it’s the chicken or the egg, but perhaps this is why they recruit so heavily from the hipster demographic. Young SJW types whose primary desire in life is to make money, buy expensive Sushi, and live the DINK dream.

            I think there’s some self-selection going on there, too. It doesn’t strike me that software would necessarily be the career of choice for someone who knows that they will be family-inclined in the future, and “This occupation will probably require me to live in SF or Seattle” is certainly a factor in that decision calculus.

          • John Schilling says:

            but even google and facebook can’t afford to pay salaries necessary to buy the kind of housing their older workers are going to want.

            This is a feature, not a bug. They don’t want their older workers to continue being their workers, but it is politically unpalatable if not illegal to fire them just for being old.

          • arlie says:

            @Brad

            but even google and facebook can’t afford to pay salaries necessary to buy the kind of housing their older workers are going to want.

            This older tech worker is living quite comfortably in the SF Bay area 😉

            It’s a trusim locally, mind you, that the older would-be suburbanites prefer companies with offices down towards the south end of the bay (i.e. near San Jose) and the younger hipster set prefer offices in or near San Francisco.One tech firm I worked for had two local offices, and offered new employees a choice of where they’d be based. (I picked Sunnyvale, where most of those sitting near me were middle aged with kids.)

            And no, I don’t have a major successful IPO somewhere in my past. Some company stock provided useful bonuses, but nothing hugely lifechanging.

          • Matt M says:

            One tech firm I worked for had two local offices, and offered new employees a choice of where they’d be based. (I picked Sunnyvale, where most of those sitting near me were middle aged with kids.)

            A consulting firm I once worked for also did this. The downtown SF office housed almost all of the junior and senior consultants. Virtually all of the partners operated out of the “silicon valley” office near Palo Alto.

          • pontifex says:

            It’s really annoying when people gloss “San Francisco” into “Sillicon Valley.” Sillicon Valley is an hour’s drive from SF, even without traffic. They are not the same thing at all.

            Most older people don’t want to live in San Francisco because it’s not a great place to raise kids. And when you’re older, you spend more time with your family, and less time at bars or events. So once they hit their thirties, people move out. Hence keeping the place “cool” for the next batch of 20-somethings, arriving on the next bus. It’s been this way for decades at this point.

            If you’re an older tech worker in the Bay Area, you should be making at least 150k/year. If you work at a FANG, you can make double or triple that easily, just in salary. That pays for housing somewhere in the south or east bay.

            Most of the FANGS are monopolies in their own little areas. For example, Google makes over a million dollars in revenue per employee. They can afford to be generous. It’s not all stock-based compensation.

            Startup companies are the ones whose compensation is mostly stock-based. And usually, your lottery ticket is not worth anything. But the politics are a lot less terrible than at the bigger companies.

          • Brad says:

            Honest question: if someone works at Google or Facebook headquarters and wants to buy a single family detatched house on no less than 1/8 acre within 30 minutes door to door commute to his office, what is he realistically looking at paying? What about 60 minutes?

          • Eric Rall says:

            Honest question: if someone works at Google or Facebook headquarters and wants to buy a single family detatched house on no less than 1/8 acre within 30 minutes door to door commute to his office, what is he realistically looking at paying? What about 60 minutes?

            Assuming you mean 30 minutes with traffic during standard tech-company commuting hours, the answer for the Google campus is probably something is Santa Clara (20-40 minutes with traffic each way, according to Google Maps). It looks like detached single-family houses with 6500+ sq ft lots (a little more than 1/8 acre) in Santa Clara start at around $1.2 million. The houses themselves are mostly in the 1000-1300 sq ft range. Redfin’s payment calculator tells me that work out to $6,354 per month in mortgage ($4,936), taxes ($1,198
            ), and insurance ($220) after a $239,600 down payment.

            One hour with traffic will get you to South San Jose or Fremont, where you can get a similar house in some neighborhoods in the $800k-900k range. That works out for $4,238 per month in PITI after a $159,800 down payment.

            If you have more flexibility in your working hours and can shift your schedule to avoid traffic, then South San Jose and Fremont come within the 30 minute radius, and the 60 minute radius opens up to include places like Gilroy. The low end of the single-family on 1/8 acre market in Gilroy looks like $650k-700k, or $3,553 per month with a $134,000 down payment. This also gets you a bit more house than you’d get in the South Bay proper: more like 1500 or 1600 sq ft instead of 1000 to 1300.

            Facebook’s HQ is further up the peninsula, in Menlo Park. 30 minutes with traffic only gets you to Mountain View, where the bottom end of the single-family on 1/8 acre market looks like about $1.7 million, for $9,011 per month in PITI after a $339,800 down payment.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Jeebus those numbers are nuts. You could get a comparable home outside Philadelphia for under $200,000, and tech jobs exist that pay into the low 100,000s. The difference in mortgage payments alone is close to $5,000 a month, or $60,000 a year, or in the ball park of $80,000 in pre tax earnings.

          • The Nybbler says:

            If you’re an older tech worker in the Bay Area, you should be making at least 150k/year. If you work at a FANG, you can make double or triple that easily, just in salary. That pays for housing somewhere in the south or east bay

            Unless salaries have gone up a lot since I worked at Google, definitely not $300k easy in just salary, or even salary + bonus. More like low $200s salary + bonus. Equity compensation was considerable however.

          • Eric Rall says:

            Unless salaries have gone up a lot since I worked at Google, definitely not $300k easy in just salary, or even salary + bonus. More like low $200s salary + bonus. Equity compensation was considerable however.

            That’s about what I’m getting as a Senior SDE (level 63) at Microsoft’s Sunnyvale office, and it’s consistent with what I remember from when I worked for Google a few years back.

          • Brad says:

            @Eric Rall

            Thanks!

            It looks like detached single-family houses with 6500+ sq ft lots (a little more than 1/8 acre) in Santa Clara start at around $1.2 million. The houses themselves are mostly in the 1000-1300 sq ft range. Redfin’s payment calculator tells me that work out to $6,354 per month in mortgage ($4,936), taxes ($1,198), and insurance ($220) after a $239,600 down payment.

            At front end DTI of 28, that’s income of $272k.

            One hour with traffic will get you to South San Jose or Fremont, where you can get a similar house in some neighborhoods in the $800k-900k range. That works out for $4,238 per month in PITI after a $159,800 down payment.

            That’s $181k.

            Facebook’s HQ is further up the peninsula, in Menlo Park. 30 minutes with traffic only gets you to Mountain View, where the bottom end of the single-family on 1/8 acre market looks like about $1.7 million, for $9,011 per month in PITI after a $339,800 down payment.

            $386k

            You can get someone to write a mortgage at higher than 28 DTI, because we are back to crazy pants land but it’s probably not a good idea. That’s especially true if you are in a high income tax state, which the formula does not take into account.

            The bottom line seems to be that if you are willing to do a miserable hour long car commute (do the company buses run down to South San Jose and/or Fremont?) you can almost certainly make it work. If you want to cut that down to a half hour, you can probably get there with even a low earning spouse if you work at google, but the numbers are significantly harder to make work at facebook.

            Contra baconbits9 that’s a little less bad than I would have guessed.

          • baconbits9 says:

            I find it interesting that you view those numbers as less bad, Brad :).

            $200,000 extra in down payment at 5% over the 30 years is $850,000 compounded, at 7.5% its 1,800,000. That is how much your 1.2 million dollar house has to appreciate by the time you pay off the mortgage just to cover the opportunity cost of not buying in an area where you can put $40,000 down.

            Anyway, its all bonkers to me and I will continue assuming that a large percentage of these people are making these decisions based on nominal higher pay or prestige of working at these firms and not life long net earnings.

          • Plumber says:

            When I worked construction in “Silicon Valley” (typically Palo Alto or Santa Clara), while I lived a two to four hour drive in Oakland, most of my co-workers either slept in someone’s garage, lived in their vehicles, or had a four to six hour commute to Stockton, California.

            A typical strategy was to start driving at 2 to 3AM to beat traffic and have just a one hour drive-in commute (two hours on Mondays because you’d compete with those who had weekend homes), and sleep in the car until start time.

            Now I work near downtown San Francisco which is a 25 minute commute at midnight, but is typically a 90 minute commute, but has been up to 210 minutes when I was called for an emergency at Noon on a Saturday (yes traffic is worse on the weekends!).

            We bought our first house, a two bedroom, one bathroom house that’s 15 miles from my work for $550,000 in 2011, when I was 43 years old, then rented it out to an overpaid UC Berkeley professor (when the revolution comes he’s on the list!) for 18 months until we moved in. An equivalent house across the street sold last year for $1.1 million.

            Why do I live here?

            I was born here, like the familiar and hate the weather and how the water tastes most other places I’ve seen, also I’m just plain stubborn, and I don’t want to be forced out.

          • pontifex says:

            There are other options than standalone houses, of course. There are condominiums, townhouses, and so on. The new construction around here is almost all three or four story townhouses. You can also rent out a room for $1000 a month, or two rooms for twice that, to help with the mortgage.

          • Brad says:

            @baconbits9

            I expected most of the commutable region to be closer to the quoted Mountain View price.

            It sounds like a house in Santa Clara is it at least within the realm of possibility for a senior software engineer with a spouse that’s a teacher or similar.

            They’d still have to come up with a quarter million for a down payment and closing costs—which post tax is something like $40k/year in forgone consumption for a decade—but at least the possibility exists.

            @pontifex
            I’m in my late 30s and living in an apartment. But that doesn’t seem to be the preference of most my age cohort.

          • Matt M says:

            Brad,

            Are you single? There’s pretty much no reason for a single person not to live in an apartment.

      • Nornagest says:

        Tech companies in the Bay don’t have as much political influence as you’d think. They have a lot of money , but that doesn’t easily translate into votes without doing a lot more overt campaigning than they’re generally willing to.

        • Plumber says:

          It must be COMPLETELY COINCIDENTAL that AirBnB contributed to Mayor Ed Lee’s campaign, and he vetoed a bill thar would have imposed a 60 night annual limit.

          • Nornagest says:

            As far as I’m concerned, that’s bad policy and Ed Lee made the right call, coincidence or not. But AirBnB (and also Uber and Lyft) are exceptional: they invest a lot more in politics than the average tech company because their business plans depend on certain gaps in regulation continuing to exist.

            Even for them, though, getting their way on development policy would take a lot more influence than getting their way on taxis or hotels: they probably couldn’t do it with the amount of money they have to spend. Real estate is just way too closely tied to local politics. There’s a reason why you don’t hear about anyone “disruptively innovating” in the real estate market.

          • yodelyak says:

            Actually, there are disruptive innovations in the real estate market, but they’re often extremely big gambits by extremely deep pockets.

            E.g., look into the class action lawsuits against MERS. Historically, if you wanted to sell your house, or get a second mortgage, you and your bank had to navigate your state’s/county’s relevant property laws, which often required e.g. paying a $20 fee to record the loan and preserve a clean record of exactly who has what interests in the house for what reasons. Either MERS has successfully subverted local governmental power to regulate clean title and tax every newly originated loan on a house with a $20 fee (it sure tried to dodge all that), or it hasn’t.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @yodelyak

            I believe you are misrepresenting what MERS does. Their system handles mortgage re-assignment without the involvement of the counties, not the sale of the property (and consequent settling of the lien) or creation of new mortgage liens.

          • yodelyak says:

            @The Nybbler

            I think my use of the phrase “newly originated” does not match my understanding, and is wrong/misleading as you say.

            I should have said that as I understand it, what MERS aimed to change was that every time a mortgage changes hands *after* the origination of the mortgage, a new filing fee would (if the county’s authority meant anything) need to be filed with an updated record of the new mortgage owner. The MERS system represents a big gambit versus state authority, on a national scale. In Oregon, at least versus Multnomah County, MERS’ gambit went to court, and eventually settled, with MERS paying $9 million to settle the county’s claim for unpaid filing fees and damages to the clear title of every resident of the county, as well as promising that MERS would hereforth behave better (though I didn’t follow the details).

            Here’s a link to the settlement press coverage.

            (Normally if a bank sells a mortgage to another bank, either a filing fee is paid to the relevant county or other state government to record the transaction publicly, or important rights of the original bank do not transfer to the new bank, and a ‘cloud’ can form on the title to the house in general, as anyone buying or selling it now has to wonder about whether they can expect to get stuck in litigation and maybe end up not owning it on a formality.) Basically, a component of the MERS scheme is that because MERS is printed on the title in the relevant filing office, the banks that bundle lots of mortgages together, and then sell tranches of those bundles (which in turn are sold and resold and resold, all remotely.)

          • The Nybbler says:

            The claim that MERS clouds the title is a pretty transparent excuse when what the counties are really torqued about is filing fees. If the note is paid off (e.g. during sale), the MERS lien is removed from the title. If the house is foreclosed by the senior lienholder, that clears the title on its own. What happened in between doesn’t matter. MERS used to allow foreclosures by the actual bank in the name of MERS; this was legal in some jurisdictions but not in others, and MERS no longer allows that. Instead, the lien is transferred (by the standard paper process) from MERS to the foreclosing bank before the procedure begins.

            But as far as I can tell, while banks were taking paperwork shortcuts (not keeping track of the physical mortgage note, in particular) and MERSs procedures weren’t 100% legal in some jurisdictions, there was no cloud on title nor were homes foreclosed upon which weren’t in default (at least, not because of MERS).

          • yodelyak says:

            @The Nybbler

            I’m not a property law attorney. I think I’m going to stop following this thread, because I feel weird talking about this as though I know, when all I’ve done is read a few headlines and a couple things a friend (who originates loans for a credit union) sent me. If you are really interested in getting a discussion on it, if you start a thread in the next open, I bet you’ll get some folks with much more knowledge than me to chime in. I’m not comfortable agreeing with you that there’s definitely no cloud on a title that has MERS on an active loan on that title. The easiest thing I can argue from is the problem would be things like local attorneys telling their clients there is a potential problem, charging $500 or $1000 to “look into it” before deciding that at least in the specific case of the specific homeowner, there is no problem. If I were an attorney who mostly does something adjacent to titles, but sometimes looks at titles, how much would you blame me if I billed a few extra hours at my usual rate the first time I saw a MERS mortgage because I didn’t know how to feel about it? What about a few of my hours and a five to ten of a junior attorney’s hours, after I asked the junior attorney to check on it, and they made the wrong call to start with? You can say the county’s concerns about clean title are a transparent excuse, and all they really care about is fees, but if I don’t agree, how could we settle this dispute… except to spend money on lawyers?

            Only slightly harder to argue is that MERS’ filing runaround actually does create questions of priority among lienholders. I still think there’s the situation where a second-in-line mortgage forecloses, and argues the first-in-line lien was not perfected and is consequently a junior, not a senior lender, because the second-in-line was not properly on notice about it, because “MERS” was not the actual owner of the lien, or because filing fees weren’t paid, or or or. Sure, that makes no difference to the original owner (who is now not an owner, because foreclosure), but that doesn’t answer which lender is now senior. You can say “obviously the second lender was on notice, and is still junior” but if they say different (say they see you as just someone who has fallen for the MERS gambit, which is obviously not an acceptable method for filing and perfecting a lien on real property) where normally the local county paperwork would be pretty dispositive, now it seems to me there’s a very good chance both banks end up in court.

    • sohois says:

      1. But what happens if more units are no constructed, and demand increases? San Francisco is not the most expensive city in the world, so it’s hardly like they have reached some kind of price ceiling beyond which demand simply will not rise. Perhaps denser cities will only succeed in maintaining house prices as more and more people look to migrate to the so-called tier 1 cities, but even that is a clear improvement over a further rise in house prices.

      And on the subject of the most expensive cities in the world, why do you frame your argument as criticising the “anti-Nimby movment”, but then proceed to talk only of San Francisco? YIMBYism is a national and international cause, and even if you have specific arguments against more building in the Bay area, there are plenty of people in Vancouver, or London, or Sydney that will benefit from an increase in housing supply. In fact, the only mega city that doesn’t have to worry about massive rises in housing costs is Tokyo, a city with many of the same structural issues as San Francisco (hard limit on physical space, risk of earthquakes) but one whose sensible building regulations have defeated the massive housing cost increases seen everywhere else.

      2. Again, if you just want to make a San Fran or US argument that’s fine, but not every country has a bunch of mid-tier cities ready and willing to absorb the excess masses. In the UK, London is so dominant that it would take decades of work to bring up a Manchester or Edinburgh; far easier to just increase supply in London.

      3. A fair point, but I think you overestimate that potential damage of an earthquake. Earthquakes largely cause building damage, not people damage, and for those businesses that are harmed they are unlikely to place much of their value in physical assets in any case. A modern tech firm is going to have dozens of redundancies spread out across server farms.

      4. Perhaps instead of punishing city residents with higher property prices, the US should just figure out a sensible voting system?

      5. Reversed Stupidity is not intelligence. Yes, it is true that some YIMBYs have unrealistic ideas about what will happen. But plenty of people will be well aware of likely outcomes – such as simply preventing further price rises – and so you should argue against them, not against the weakest proponents of the idea.

      6. As pointed out with Tokyo, much larger cities have been able to maintian manageable infrastructure and transport.

    • Matt M says:

      It’s more realistic (easier to make say Denver a tech hub and get a lot of startup & tech employers there, than it is to defeat entrenched homeowners in Menlo Park who vote en masse).

      No it isn’t.

      Every one of those cities has been actively trying to do this for years already.

      • Brad says:

        There have been some modest success—Austin, Boulder, Portland, and even Pittsburgh (!).

        • Matt M says:

          Yeah, but for every one of those, there’s five decaying rust-belt cities who claim they are re-inventing themselves as “tech hubs” but have achieved approximately nothing.

          I did my MBA internship in Indianapolis. The local government hyped up their efforts quite a bit. The results were… less than impressive. (That said, I liked it there. To me “tech hub” = “import a lot of progressives.” I live in Houston and I’m quite glad that Austin is the “tech hub” and not us.)

          • pontifex says:

            To me “tech hub” = “import a lot of progressives.” I live in Houston and I’m quite glad that Austin is the “tech hub” and not us.

            Hey. Let’s be fair.

            Tech hub also = having a totally dysfunctional, rent-seeking, and corrupt city government.

            Like how Portland dumped 38 million gallons of water after one guy peed in the reservoir. Or how Austin tried to ban Uber and Lyft from the city. Or SF spending 30k on each homeless person in the city.

          • dick says:

            I don’t think “tech hub” means anything more rigorous or specific than “popular place for young CS grads to move to”.

        • Nick says:

          Cleveland has been developing a healthcare information technology industry for a while. We have the concentration of hospitals for it, and we did have our first unicorn last year, CoverMyMeds, but I don’t know that our universities can meet the demand. (Case Western’s CS department doesn’t compare favorably to Carnegie Mellon’s, to give one comparison.)

          • baconbits9 says:

            You don’t need local universities to meet the demand, and there is no reason that successful Cleveland based companies can’t recruit from Carnegie Mellon.

          • Nick says:

            Hey, I’m only mentioning it because people make a big deal about the number of startups and patents and so on that come out of universities like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.

    • Murphy says:

      1: when you start by comparing economics to astrology… that does not say good things.

      Sure, it’s hypothetically possible that increasing supply will actually increase demand… but cases like that are super rare and it puts it squarely in the court of the anti-increaseing-supply people to make a really really solid case that this is one of those rare cases. Just generally insulting people doesn’t make the cut. Just stating that it’s theoretically possible is on a par with pointing out that there are hypothetical flat mega-structures that could support life on their surface. The hypothetical is not enough on it’s own.

      2:

      Have you bitten the bullet and moved away from the tech hubs yourself? Or should that cost only be born by everyone else?

      3:

      You already mentioned network effects. There are massive advantages to being near facilities that cater to you. Being able to walk down the hall and find the guy who build the tech your system is built on can be a big deal.

      But again, feel free to be the one who eats the cost of enhancing durability by moving yourself.

      4: same answer as 2&3.

      If people cared that much then democrats could move a few million people around and take almost complete control of everything. Unfortunately people aren’t terribly keen to be shipped around like cattle to enhance their parties vote results.

      5: Sure, sometimes wealthy people outbid people for fun, paying orders of magnitude above market rate. If they do that a lot then they tend to stop being very rich people. it comes down to how many millions people are willing to sacrifice on the alter of fashion.

      6: a reasonable and valid criticism.

    • Urstoff says:

      What does “effectively full” mean? The only US city that comes close to reaching European levels of density (not to mention East Asian density) is NYC.

    • Deiseach says:

      The US has more liberals than conservatives and more Democrats than Republicans, but the former chooses to run up their numbers in cities where they routinely vote Dem 80+%. Cramming even more people into cities with the same number of Congressional representatives is the height of political stupidity. Spread out liberals!

      Isn’t that a chicken and egg problem, though? People who live in large, cosmopolitan, diverse and so on cities are more inclined to be liberal/progressive, so by spreading people out into smaller/less diverse areas, they aren’t going to be liberals. It’s only by cramming even more people into cities that you get larger numbers of liberals!

    • Bugmaster says:

      How much more inefficiently can Democrats spread themselves out?

      If you let Democrats spread out, thus destroying their cultural bubbles, you run the risk of them becoming more centrist, or even outright Republican. Same thing goes for Republicans, of course.

      • Bugmaster says:

        Doh, Deiseach beat me to it.

      • Plumber says:

        “If you let Democrats spread out, thus destroying their cultural bubbles, you run the risk of them becoming more centrist, or even outright Republican. Same thing goes for Republicans, of course”.

        @Bugmaster,
        While people do tend to adopt the views of those around them, I don’t think dispersing Republicans will much change their politics.
        Nine times out of ten I can correctly guess which political party a co-worker supports just by asking him how far his commute is.
        The closer you live to the city center the more likely you are to be a Democrat, and the less people they are in the square mile that you sleep in the more likely you are to be a Republican.

        Simple as that.

        • Bugmaster says:

          This could be a function of the specific city you live in combined with the commute time, as opposed to just the commute time alone.

          • Plumber says:

            Good point, the only place besides the San Francisco Bay Area for more than two weeks is a couple of months in Seattle.

    • gbdub says:

      One of the arguments against NIMBYs is that they are reducing funds available to the public coffers by artificially reducing the value of their own property through restrictive zoning (reduced property taxes) and sometimes explicitly through property tax caps. Additionally, reducing the density of housing will also reduce revenue from local income taxes.

      Has any municipality ever tried something like “alternative minimum property tax”? Basically, fine, grandma gets to keep her sprawling single family Victorian, but the city council has determined that the “ideal” zoning for that property is medium density multi-unit residential, so we’re going to set your tax rate as if it was a 20 unit apartment home. Or, basically, set property taxes based on lot square footage rather than actual property value – you can put a single family home worth $1,000,000 on your quarter acre, but no reason you should pay lower taxes than the $10,000,000 apartment building across the street – you’re using up the same amount of the actually scarce local resource, land.

      I get that this is politically infeasible (for the same problem as NIMBY – the people who it helps don’t get a vote), but assuming you could force it, would it work?

      • Tenacious D says:

        Harrisburg (and some other communities in PA) uses a land value tax, along with a lower tax rate on any improvements to a property.

      • The Nybbler says:

        This is basically a land value tax. Aside from eliminating remaining vestiges of land ownership, it also fails to consider that the costs to the taxing entity due to the property are largely due to the improvements and not the land. That is, the municipality is using those taxes to pay for police, fire, roads, schools, sewers, libraries, junkets for local officials, welfare programs, etc… and nearly all those things scale more per-capita than per-land-area.

    • Plumber says:

      @hash872,

      As best as I can tell the essay that you linked to is describing an effect where cramming more people into an area creates more jobs, because one person’s spending is another person’s income, and the resulting extra jobs will further increase demand et cetera. 

      In other words popular places are popular. 

      Not exactly related, but I’m reminded of a pizza place on College Avenue that gave out free samples, tasted better and was cheaper than the pizza place across the street which had lines out the door, but went out of business due to a lack of customers. 

      Why?

      The nearest I can tell is that the more expensive and crowded pizza place had big windows so that everyone from the street could see how crowded it was.

      Maybe people see the crowds and think “If it’s popular it must be good”, or maybe some people just like to be crowded.

      Anyway, if you want to lower rents in San Francisco (as I think someone suggested upthread) tax income more.

      A lot more.

      You could pave the Pacific Ocean and build on it, but people (and jobs) cluster where the most people are already. 

      Gold was in California, but not in San Francisco, but San Francisco grew because it was on the shipping lanes, and already there when gold was discovered. 

      Besides Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Stockton are just too damn hot.

    • bean says:

      For example, Los Angeles County has a population larger than 41 US states (and I would imagine a huge number of countries). Looks like it went 71 to 22% for Clinton for over Trump, roughly (Gary Johnson’s in the mix too).

      Speaking as someone who voted in LA county in 2016, that was a weird year. I came within an inch of not voting because I didn’t have any chance of making an impact on either of the two headline races. If Trump could win California, he’s won the White House, and I didn’t even bother voting for Senator because I didn’t want either of them. The Republican vote was down almost 5% from 2012, 3% of which went to third-party.

    • eqdw says:

      Pre-emptively: I did not read your whole comment. My eyes glazed over around point (2). It’s nothing personal, it’s just that after years of trying to inform myself on bay area local policy issues, while watching everyone else (not here on SSC, but out in the real world in SF) go full on fuck-you-got-mine, it’s hard to participate. And after moving away to a city that is much more functional and livable, I really don’t care what happens in SF.

      So apologies if you actually said this in your post. But anyways, I want to add a point that I think maybe supports your position.

      Anti-NIMBY people say “just build more houses and it will make rent come down!”. This is… usually true. This is true for markets that are at or near equilibrium. Simple supply/demand, etc etc

      But one of the problems with the Bay Area is that there is an absolutely _massive_ amount of pent up demand. Naievely, people think of the pent up demand as the delta between the number of people moving to the city and the number of housing units built: if 5000 people are moving to the city but only 1000 housing units are built, you need to build 4000 more units. But there are many other sources of demand that are _hidden_.

      There’s all the people who want to move to the bay area, but don’t because of the cost (but who will if you build more housing / lower rents)

      There’s all the people who are living cramped lives with too many roommates in too small of a house, who would get their own houses if they could afford it (and will if you build more housing/lower rents)

      There are people who currently live in a place that is insufficient for their purposes (too small, too big, too cheap, too expensive, too dangerous, too long commute, too isolated from services, too far from friends, etc) who would move to a different house if a more preferable one was available (and one would be, in a healthy real estate market where supply meets demand).

      Building more housing absolutely will lower rents… once _all_ of that demand is satisfied. But, well, I think a good argument could be made that there’s easily a million peoples’ worth of pent up demand for San Francisco real estate.

      If you could build ONE MILLION APARTMENTS, you would see rent meaningfully fall. But when pro-development people in the bay area get their way, they don’t build a million apartments. If nothing else, it’s utterly implausible on short term time scales. They get one or two major residential towers built; like what, 5000 units? This is nowhere near enough supply to satiate the pent up demand.

      And as a result, gentrification happens and this actually _raises_ the price of rent. For a bunch of reasons, none of which are terribly important for the underlying point I’m trying to make.

      All of this is to say: you are correct. In my experience the anti-NIMBY people either don’t understand this or (more likely) don’t say anything about it because it would be politically counterproductive for them to do so. And this has always frustrated me, because not acknowledging this makes the anti-NIMBY people (and I count myself among them, generally) lose all credibility with people who don’t spend all day obsessively researching optimal policy, but who do see what happens when new condos go up in the Mission

      • Building more housing absolutely will lower rents… once _all_ of that demand is satisfied. But, well, I think a good argument could be made that there’s easily a million peoples’ worth of pent up demand for San Francisco real estate.

        You also wrote:

        There’s all the people who want to move to the bay area, but don’t because of the cost (but who will if you build more housing / lower rents)

        The only reason what you are calling “pent-up demand” turns into actual people renting is that the cost has gone down, since it was the cost that was keeping them away.

        Demand is a function not a number. Your “pent-up demand” is simply the difference between quantity demanded at what the price will be after the new housing is built and quantity demanded at the current price–Q(P1)-Q(P2). If the two prices were the same it would be zero.

        One of the frustrations of being an economist is watching people invent economics for themselves and get it wrong–with great confidence.

        • eqdw says:

          In the bay area housing market, the price of housing is kept artificially low through a combination of explicit price controls (eg rent control) and implicit price controls (eg zoning and permitting).

          As a consequence of this, given the current supply and demand (yes, I mean this in the sense of functions), the price should be significantly higher than the actual price currently is.

          If the bay area housing market was currently at that equilibrium point and unencumbered by the various restrictions, then a marginal increase in quantity supplied would cause a marginal decrease in the price of housing. However, the price that decreases is not the price fixed by government fiat, it is the theoretical free market equilibrium price.

          Before the construction of additional housing can lower the actual, current, real world price that people are actually, currently, really paying, it would have to lower the theoretical free market price to below the actual, current, real world price. Building a small amount of more housing will not significantly change the price of housing.

          In a normal market, the supply and demand fundamentals would be the main determinant of price. But because of the restrictions on this market, there are other more transient effects that have a stronger effect on the price of housing. As an example, additional housing construction may increase the average rent paid if all additional housing construction is high end housing, through the mechanism of shifting the total distribution of available housing in the direction of the upper end of the market. If we want to be extremely charitable to the communists (usually a bad idea), this is what is bad about gentrification

          https://i.imgur.com/U3HFqou.png

          In a free market with the current level of quantity supplied in the bay area, the price would be at the equilibrium point (read: significantly higher than it is right now). And then every marginal home constructed would marginally lower rent. In the actual market with the current level of quantity supplied in the bay area, marginal housing construction does not cause a marginal reduction in housing costs because it has to bridge that gap first.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            If this is true, wouldn’t there be waiting lists? That is, it would be impossible for a typical outsider to rent an apartment in SF without applying N days in advance.

            I have no prior belief either way, but this seems to me to be a factual claim that is contrary to other factual claims previously made in this thread, and which could be checked on. Also, I’d like to know what the value of N actually is: a week, a month, six months, three years?

          • Matt M says:

            If this is true, wouldn’t there be waiting lists? That is, it would be impossible for a typical outsider to rent an apartment in SF without applying N days in advance.

            This was several years ago, but when a friend of mine was moving to the Bay Area, he suggested this was pretty close to true. That is, in addition to very high costs, basically any place that “became available” on Craigslist or any other such online posting would receive dozens of applications in the first few hours. He told me most people moving there had to accept places (and even pay deposits) sight unseen, because if you didn’t, someone else definitely would.

        • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

          The only reason what you are calling “pent-up demand” turns into actual people renting is that the cost has gone down, since it was the cost that was keeping them away.

          Can you briefly explain how inertia gets fitted into this model? For example, someone might move to SF in response to a reduction in the rent, but if the rent then went back up, they wouldn’t necessarily move out again, e.g., because they’ve got a job now, or a SO, or whatever.

          Similarly, I would imagine the typical person who was forced to leave SF because the rent finally got too high for them to cope with wouldn’t move back just because the rents have gone back down, or at least not straight away. “The burnt hand teaches best”, yada yada.

  6. Well... says:

    Just so y’all know, Wikipedia’s list of Ig Nobel Prize Winners is awesome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners

  7. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    Blue sky (ignore political feasibility) fix for healthcare? I agree with Scott that who pays for healthcare is less important than figuring out why it’s so expensive and how to make it cheap. If a doctor’s visit costs $15, setting a broken bone $25, and childbirth $100, then it doesn’t matter if poor people have to pay for healthcare out of hand.

    Furthermore, I agree with Eliezer that the reason healthcare is so expensive is because government is restricting supply. Therefore, what we need is massive deregulation/delicensing of the health care industry. Let people become eye surgeons with 2 years of training, let registered nurses do doctor stuff, let computers do diagnosing, let people sell psychiatric medicines on vending machines, let hospitals be built without getting approval, eliminate residencies, allow any drug legal in Britain, Canada, or Australia to be legal in the U.S., etc…

    • JPNunez says:

      how does this matches with countries with good public healthcare? I somehow doubt they are building illegal hospitals

      • fahertym says:

        IMO, like education, healthcare as an industry is so badly constructed that even the best existing examples are vastly inferior to what is possible with existing tech.

      • idontknow131647093 says:

        They have doctors that would be unlicensed in the US, nurses ditto, and instead of CON (state mandated oligopolies) they build based on things closer to market demand.

        There’s the saying that goes something like, “the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing people he didn’t exist”, same is true with US government intervention in healthcare. I doubt people could name many industries without more intervention. Education, electricity, roads, those are the parallels. We already treat it like a public utility, its just more politically advantageous for certain folk to pretend otherwise.

        • JPNunez says:

          Again, it could be even more intervened by the government if the government itself ran it.

          The thing is that, yes, less regulation and letting the free market work more would lower prices, but just not as much as putting that government regulation to work and control the prices. Japan is a good example; they let the free market work somewhat, but all the providers are non profits, so they don’t have incentives to charge as much as possible. It’s far from a perfect system, but at least the costs are below the gdp% of the US with better results.

          Obamacare would have been a good step in the right direction to make the free market work, by forcing people to buy an insurance plan and have insurers compete, but it is honestly unworkable in the US political climate. Obamacare would have tracked in some general ways the chilean system, where insurers sell healthcare plans to workers, every worker has to be insured, and the providers _can_be_ for profits. The results are similar to the US, for less % of the GDP. The Chilean government has to provide public healthcare for the non-workers/poor people, so that would probably be a difference with America, but at least you’d insure the people who can pay it, and the government sometimes forces the insurers to cover new stuff. It is far from perfect, but it’d be a step in the right direction for the US.

          However Obamacare is largely dead after the killing of the individual mandate. Trump may probably dismantle the rest.

          About the costs:

          My hunch is that the cost of USA’s healthcare was not really _that_ inflated by any kind of regulatory capture, but mainly by letting so much of insurance be tied to the employer. Most people do not choose their insurance; they choose a job and the company provides insurance. Thus, while some people will actually be lured by better healthcare to a given company, most people are not really the ones choosing which plan to buy. This allows companies to rise costs, cause what is the consumer gonna do? Switch companies? Very rare. This level of indirection in the insurance market is very damaging imho, at least the Chilean system gets that right.

      • eqdw says:

        I can’t speak for other countries but in Canada there’s a massive amount of implicit rationing going on which keeps costs down. I know in my family, depending on what the specific specialist you want to see is, for non-life-threatening things you’re waiting anywhere from 3 months to 5 years to get seen.

        This is not the main reason for US healthcare being so expensive. But it is _a_ factor: Americans are consuming dramatically more healthcare than Canadians are, so of course there’s more spending.

        Or, to put it another way: Restrictions on supply are less painful when you can also put parallel restrictions on demand

        • Matt M says:

          Note that this is exactly where the “death panels” criticism came from.

          The left (correctly) pointed out that Obamacare does not, explicitly, call for death panels to be formed.

          But anyone able to think a couple steps ahead can see that any system designed to reduce price will increase demand, and that without a corresponding increase in supply, this will inevitably lead to increased rationing.

          • albatross11 says:

            Matt M:

            Scarcity is a fact of life. There will be rationing of medical care in any system ever designed this side of one run by Culture Minds.

            Specifically, someone has to decide which treatments are likely enough to be helpful to be covered (can I get a nose job covered under my insurance?). Someone has to decide when medical care is futile (you’re scheduling the 90 year old with liver cancer for bypass surgery).

            If it’s you paying your own money, then you get to decide how to ration things, subject to a market. (The US healthcare market is massively screwed-up, but if you want to spend $500K on (necessary or unnecessary) surgeries, you can almost certainly manage it.)

            If it’s an insurance company paying, or a government program like Medicare or Medicaid paying, or a government agency providing care like the VA system, then they’re going to have to make those decisions. They’re going to have to be able to say “No, we’re not paying for your accupuncture and reiki sessions.” They need to be able to say “No, we’re not paying for a bone marrow transplant for your cancer given that the statistics show it doesn’t work for this kind of cancer.” They even need to be able to say “We’re not paying for a quadruple bypass surgery on this guy with terminal cancer.” Or they will spend unlimited amounts of money providing care, and a lot of that money will go to care that doesn’t actually help anyone. An unlimited pool of money will draw an unlimited pool of parasites.

          • Matt M says:

            Indeed.

            And nobody comes closer to having an “unlimited pool of money” than the US government…

          • baconbits9 says:

            Scarcity is a fact of life, but it isn’t equal across systems and re-distributive system typically commit the double sin of promising more care while increasing scarcity.

          • albatross11 says:

            That which cannot go on forever will eventually stop.

    • Brad says:

      The bottom line is that there is a too many people making too much money problem. And not just 12 CEO fat cats each somehow a multibillionaire that no one noticed. Those supply restrictions lead to “good jobs” at every level from unskilled direct care, through medical billers, to nurses, and definitely to doctors. That deregulation means that there aren’t going to be several hundreds of thousands of specialist doctors all making 6+ times the median household income. And as much they like to complain about medical school debt or malpractice insurance, do the math–the savings are in no way going to make up for the loss of their monopoly rents. That’s going to be one pissed off group of doctors. Then replicate that for nurses, physicians assistants, imaging techs, etc, etc, etc.

      Whether its through deregulation or government takeover or any other idea anything that works is *by definition* going to mean the loss of an awful lot of income to an awful lot of people. Which means it will be near impossible to enact.

      • arlie says:

        I’ve heard a lot of complaining from providers in the existing system. To listen to them talk, they sure aren’t rich, and their hours suck. Many of the complaints are about all the money going to bureaucrats/administrators rather than those dealing with patients and/or about the need to spend ever increasing amounts of time – or pay someone else to spend that time – satisfying ever more Kafkaesque insurance bureaucrats. Of course none of my acquaintances are specialist doctors; maybe those are still exceptional.

        • John Schilling says:

          Of course none of my acquaintances are specialist doctors; maybe those are still exceptional.

          Even among general practitioners, US doctors are paid roughly twice the global average, normalized by PPP. They may still complain about not being rich and working extra hard, but only because approximately 99.8% of the human race does that.

          The numbers for Registered Nurses seem similar. I’m going to guess that they complain even louder than the doctors.

          If everyone who labors to created “Health Care” in the United States, earns twice what their foreign counterparts do, then US health care will cost twice as much as the rest of the world. And good luck getting anyone to take a 50% pay cut.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            One of the other threads alleges that everybody in the US is paid well over the global average, apparently even when adjusted for PPP. Are you sure healthcare is really particularly extreme in this respect?

          • albatross11 says:

            One extra problem is that everyone in that industry has built their life around the income in their field. From spending a decade being trained to buying a McMansion in an expensive neighborhood, their whole lives are planned around the idea that a cardiologist makes $X / year. Those folks are going to fight tooth and nail to avoid having that become $0.5 X/year, because that will wreck their lives the same way it has wrecked the lives of lots of factory workers when their union $20/hour assembly line job went away and they found they could make $8/hour working nights at the local convenience store.

            There’s no sense in which the cardiologist deserves to make twice as much in the US as in Germany or Japan or Canada, any more than there’s any sense in which the assembly line worker deserves to make $20/hour. But they will still feel genuinely screwed over when their salary drops dramatically over a few years, and they have to sell their huge beautiful house and start driving a Honda instead of a Tesla.

          • Brad says:

            My fairness instinct is to say tough shit, but as a practical matter this is exactly why I think anything that’s effective will be impossible to implement. Our only hope is to slow cost growth and hope for several decades of economic growth to shrink relative costs.

            Even that will produce much gnashing of teeth because employment markets in rapidly growing industries are more pleasant than in static industries.

          • John Schilling says:

            My fairness instinct is to say tough shit, but as a practical matter this is exactly why I think anything that’s effective will be impossible to implement.

            Right. You basically can’t get people to keep doing their jobs for substantially less pay than they are already getting. The old ones will take early retirement, the good ones will find opportunities elsewhere, the rest will either quit out of spite or stay on as demoralized malcontents. And those are the ones who are going to provide on-the-job training for any new hires you bring in at the new pay scale.

            To get dramatic cost reductions, you have to actually fire people. So if someone else either promises or demands dramatic cost reductions, do not accept “efficiency” or “reduce waste” as a mechanism; demand to know who gets fired. If the answer is nobody, there will be no cost reductions.

          • eqdw says:

            My understanding is that doctors in the US make significantly more than doctors in (eg) Canada, but they also have two costs that are significantly higher: Malpractice insurance and student debt.

            Why those costs are so much higher is a different discussion entirely. But if those costs are significantly higher, it’s not really accurate to talk about how much more doctors get paid, if they’re not actually taking it home

          • Brad says:

            Yes, they’ll talk your ear off about those two costs but they aren’t even of the right order of magnitude to make up the differences.

          • IsmiratSeven says:

            @ brad:

            Yes, they’ll talk your ear off about those two costs but they aren’t even of the right order of magnitude to make up the differences.

            From a cursory Google search:

            When a Florida obstetrician/gynecologist discovered what the annual cost of his liability insurance would be if he were practicing in Canada, he was stunned. In the US his costs could run up to $200,000 per year. In British Columbia: $2,400 – $20,000.

            Sounds like an order of magnitude to me, but maybe it’s not the “right” order of magnitude…

          • Googling on the costs of malpractice insurance, it seems to vary a lot by specialty and by state. Ob/Gyn is one of the most expensive specialties:

            On average, medical malpractice insurance can cost OB/GYN providers anywhere from $85,000 to as much as $200,000 per year.

            On average, medical malpractice insurance can cost internal medicine providers anywhere from $8,000 to as much as $50,000 per year.

            (Source)

        • Brad says:

          I’ve heard a lot of complaining from providers in the existing system. To listen to them talk, they sure aren’t rich, and their hours suck.

          It’s frankly bullshit. If you look at every profession that has a non-trivial number of people doing it (i.e. not NYC unionized crane operator), being a specialty doctor (that is anything other than primary care, pediatric primary care, and family medicine) is the best gig out there.

          They like to point to investment bankers making more money, but investment banking is a brutal war of all against that never lets up. A 50 year old investment banker making 3 million a year is a 1 in 100 survivor and still has to spend every waking hour worried about losing his job. Once someone is admitted to an American medical school he never has to worried about being unemployed again. And the bankers have to live in greater NYC (plus the four guys in Chicago and two in San Francisco). A doctor can live wherever he wants.

          They talk about hours, but compare any doctor to a lawyer making the same amount of money. A partner in big law isn’t going to be paged at 2AM because he is still going to be in the office. And everyone hates lawyers, and idealizes doctors.

          They talk about the length of the education process, but scientists have it worse and there’s no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Just look at the credit card companies — they can’t wait to lend money to residents. No one is desperately trying to lend money to post docs.

          As for dealing with paperwork and bureaucrats do we even need to go through all the professions that have to deal with them far more than doctors?

          And all this for something that is almost always non-multiplicative. It’s not the type of field where one can really have 10x productivity, because at the end of the day they each only treat one patient at a time.

          • AliceToBob says:

            @ Brad

            Big claims, little evidence:

            It’s not the type of field where one can really have 10x productivity, because at the end of the day they each only treat one patient at a time.

            Nonsense. Many doctors who are practicing medicine also pursue research. For example, they help design and run clinical trials which can lead to saving quite a few lives. Oncology is one such area.

            Once someone is admitted to an American medical school he never has to worried about being unemployed again.

            Cannot literally be true. If you’re going to make this argument, you at least need to compare against rates of unemployment for professions of roughly equal scarcity. Your comparison to lawyers doesn’t seem on target as ~40% of graduates don’t go on to practice law [1].

            They talk about the length of the education process, but scientists have it worse and there’s no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.

            Another apples to oranges comparison. You can score in the 50th percentile on the GRE quantitative section and still easily find grad schools who will welcome you for a science PhD. In the tech sector, you likely won’t end up at Google, but you’ll find a decent job in industry somewhere (no pot of gold, but arguably you shouldn’t get one).

            I doubt that many people scoring in the 50th percentile on the MCAT are accepted to medical school.

            Maybe there’s a comparison to be made among those PhDs who attend elite schools, but (a) that’s not what you said, and (b) arguably there is a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, either in the form of a high-paying job with a higher-paying career trajectory given your educational pedigree, or a coveted tenure-track position.

            ———-
            [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-law_school_employment_in_the_United_States#Employment_statistics_and_salary_information

          • Brad says:

            Nonsense. Many doctors who are practicing medicine also pursue research.

            Many? If you had to guess, what percentage of licensed doctors in the US would you guess spend at least 15% of their time doing research tasks?

            roughly equal scarcity.

            I doubt that many people scoring in the 50th percentile on the MCAT are accepted to medical school.

            This argument seems circular to me. Maybe I’m misunderstanding it. Is it that doctors have managed to get themselves a really efficient cartel and therefore they deserve all the excess compensation that monopolization has earned them and more?

          • JPNunez says:

            Unemployment rates for doctors in America are super low. Maybe there are some specialties that are the exception, but the “never have to worry about unemployment again” claim is mostly true.

            The solution to lowering salaries (and thus costs) would be to massively import doctors from abroad. I agree that there may be regulation there that stops this, and also you’d end up rising healthcare costs elsewhere.

            The alternative is educating a fuck ton more doctors.

            The doctors per capita statistic compared to Japan (ie: it’s roughly similar) suggests doctor pay may be an important factor in healthcare costs. You could of course rise the doctors taxes to pay for … more doctors.

          • Plumber says:

            “….You could of course rise the doctors taxes to pay for … more doctors”

            @JPNunez,

            I like this idea.

            I like it a lot!

            Out of each hour that I work a portion goes to fund the union apprenticeship school that trains my future competition.

            We (union plumbers) vote on this.

            Why do we fund our competitors?

            Part of it is “paying it forward” but a lot of it is to have working hands in the future paying to support our pensions.

            Trust is involved, as future plumbers could just decide to walk out of the union and our pensions go bankrupt.

            I’m more than a little ticked off that starting in 1978 a generation decided it didn’t want to pay to sustain the civilization that enriched them.

            To Hell with the Boomers and the Upper Class, please bring back Eisenhower era income taxes and education.

          • I’m more than a little ticked off that starting in 1978 a generation decided it didn’t want to pay to sustain the civilization that enriched them.

            To Hell with the Boomers and the Upper Class, please bring back Eisenhower era income taxes and education.

            Fill in the factual blanks in your rhetoric. Are you claiming that levels of taxes and spending (per capita and adjusted for inflation) are lower now than they were in 1978? Spending on schooling?

            I don’t think either claim is true. If that is what you are saying I will be happy to find the numbers and provide them.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Trust is involved, as future plumbers could just decide to walk out of the union and our pensions go bankrupt.

            If this is true then someone took you guys for a ride.

          • albatross11 says:

            How do grades/test scores needed for getting into a STEM PhD compare with those needed for getting into medical school?

            In terms of science PhDs, the job market is fairly ugly if you’re shooting for an academic job. Basically, you do a PhD, then one or two postdocs, so you can get hired in a tenure-track position, and then several years later you maybe end up with a permanent job. There are also jobs in industry and government that may offer better pay/work-life balance/etc., but doing a hard science PhD is a hell of a hard path, and at the end of it, you’re not extremely unlikely to be making big bucks, and you may end up with some kind of marginal adjunct-at-three-colleges position without much prospect of anything better, after burning a decade on education when you weren’t making anything more than subsistence.

          • AliceToBob says:

            @ Brad

            Many? If you had to guess, what percentage of licensed doctors in the US would you guess spend at least 15% of their time doing research tasks?

            You’re the one making strong claims: being a doctor is the “best gig out there”, other professional pursuits have it so much harder by comparison, the value offered by doctors is non-multiplicative, that the profession is a cartel of people “making too much money”.

            The onus is on you — not me — to back up your claims. I decline to go down some rabbit hole looking for stats to answer your question while you put in zero effort.*

            I responded to your strong claim about the profession not being “the type of field where one can really have 10x productivity, because at the end of the day they each only treat one patient at a time”. There are doctors who do practice and perform research, and that research has multiplicative impact. You want to focus on my use of “many”, that’s fine, but that’s just a diversion.

            This argument seems circular to me. Maybe I’m misunderstanding it. Is it that doctors have managed to get themselves a really efficient cartel and therefore they deserve all the excess compensation that monopolization has earned them and more?

            No, my argument is that your argument is poor for the reasons I gave in my post. Without giving evidence, you come across a just another person who perceives some group as better off, and assumes it’s a conspiracy/injustice (a cartel!) that must be righted for the Greater Good.

            * Perhaps NIH funding can give some indication of this, but pharma-funded projects are going to be a part of that pie and I don’t see how to trace that. Additionally, I’m not convinced that your question is even on target; if a doctor who contributes 10% of his/her time to the development of a new drug that becomes widely adopted, then that seems sufficiently multiplicative.

          • Plumber says:

            “Fill in the factual blanks in your rhetoric. Are you claiming that levels of taxes and spending (per capita and adjusted for inflation) are lower now than they were in 1978? Spending on schooling?

            I don’t think either claim is true. If that is what you are saying I will be happy to find the numbers and provide them”

            @David  Friedman,
            I think you probably did in a previous thread.

            Where did the money go?

            I was ten years old in 1978 when “Proposition 13”, and the resulting cut-backs were obvious to me as a child with the missing toilet paper, classes with not enough chairs for each student, much fewer new books I could tell the difference right away all of which I’m still angry about  decades later.

            I do remember some spending in that my elementary school was at what is now the location of Willard in Berkeley, and they stopped having most of the buildings be used because of “earthquake safety”, they took years to tear it down (I remember playing in the rubble) and when it was rebuilt in time for my 7th grade in 1980, it was junk! A boy sitting next to me leaned back against the wall (because they’ weren’t enough chairs for all of us to sit) and his head went through the paper thin drywall!

            I well remember how adult supervision stopped for recess and lunch and all the fights that resulted, until I realized that no one would stop me if I just walked away, which is what I did at 12 years old, I’d go for the first class in the morning and walked out of that Hellscape every day without anyone questioning me and I’d go to the public library instead (if there have to be cuts please save libraries and cut U.C instead!), speaking of walking, at Berkeley High School to find a bathroom with toilet paper I’d miss either lunch or a class and walk to UC Berkeley or City Hall, because apparently only adults get to have TP. This decade I spoke to a young man who went to Berkeley High School in the 1990’s (a decade after me) and he told me, without my prompting him, that he had to walk to City Hall to use the bathroom as well.

            Maybe the Berkeley Unified School District was being cheapskate scumbags in order to insure that we’d grow up to be anti-libertarians?

            Unfortunately for libertarianism during my lifetime I’ve noticed how life gets worse after tax cuts and better after taxes rise.

            After Reagan cut income taxes in 1981, there was massive unemployment in 1982, I encountered many more beggers year, after year, after year, and I heard more and more gunshots and sirens (I think I heard the most in 1985), and finding jobs was really damn hard for me in 1986.

            After Bush (senior) and Clinton raised income taxes, jobs were easier to come by and I heard less gunshots and sirens, and 1999 was great!

            After Bush (junior) cut income taxes, jobs became harder to find again (but thankfully the gunshots didn’t come back), and many guys I knew lost their homes 2008 to 2010. 

            After taxes were raised as part of Obamacare, jobs became plentiful (very much easier for me to find employment in 2011 to now than it was for me in 2007 to 2010 (or 1986 to 1992 for that matter).

            I’m mostly in the tank for “Tax and Spend” now, but this is where is gets sketchy, as while jobs are plentiful now, so is homelessness (unlike in the 1980’s when it seemed the lack of jobs and how many beggers I encountered correlated), which is puzzling and worrying.

            In my job today for The City and County of San Francisco I try to maintain what were once impressive City buildings with far less resources than previous generations had to build them with, for example the building maintenance crew at The Hall of Justice is a quarter of the size it was in 1979 (according to my old boss).

            If there’s more spending now, where is it going? 

            My beliefs are related to what I’ve directly experienced, and I know my experience isn’t universal as the guy who owns the shop I buy my overalls from says the Reagan years were great for him, while I remember them as being awful, so I imagine that different life experiences would have given me different beliefs, but my life has been what it has been and my beliefs are what they are.

            To get me to support tax cuts, it’s not enough to tell me a theory, or to show charts, I have to actually see things in front of me improving.

            Oh, and for the record we’ve pulled our 13 years old son out of Albany Middle School last year and are homeschooling him after a classmate tried to stab him.

          • After Reagan cut income taxes in 1981, there was massive unemployment in 1982, I encountered many more beggers year, after year, after year,

            Year Unemployment rate
            1981 8.5%
            1982 10.8%
            1983 8.3%
            1984 7.3%
            1985 7.0%

            So up for one year, although not massively, falling thereafter.

            I was ten years old in 1978 when “Proposition 13”, and the resulting cut-backs were obvious to me as a child

            Proposition 13 didn’t cut taxes, it just restricted how much property taxes could rise.

            Year CA Expenditure
            1977-78 11,613.1
            1978-79 16,136.0
            1979-80 18,421.0
            1980-81 20,871.8
            (Source)

            I haven’t checked the rest of your factoids.

            As I like to put it, humans are equipped with extraordinarily good pattern recognition software, so good that it can find patterns that are not there.

            There is a reason to err in that direction. Seeing a tiger in the brush that isn’t there is a much less expensive mistake than not seeing one that is.

          • albatross11 says:

            AliceToBob:

            I don’t know the medical field that well, but it sure seems like most doctors spend most of their time on treating individual patients, where there are hard limits on any multiplicity. My cardiologist is, as best I can tell, a very smart and capable guy, but he can’t really examine more than one patient at a time. Similarly, awhile back I had surgery, and the surgeon is, as best I can tell, extremely competent and smart. But he can only do so many surgeries per day.

            Even if they participate in some medical studies, that’s not most of their work day.

            And the folks doing drug delivery, at least, seem to need to spend a godawful number of man-hours and dollars to get to a useful result, in a process usually spanning decades from the original discovery of some important mechanism of a disease to the point where sick people are getting the new medicine. We make progress, but it absorbs a *lot* of time from very high-value people to get to the next improvement.

          • AliceToBob says:

            @ albatross11

            How do grades/test scores needed for getting into a STEM PhD compare with those needed for getting into medical school?

            Medical school seems to have a significantly higher bar. At random, the relevant FSU page [1] for Computer Science whose grad program ranks #82 according to US News [2] states a minimum requirement of “142 on the verbal section and a 150 on the quantitative section” which puts you in the 17th and 39th percentiles, respectively [3].

            Augusta University’s medical school, which is ranked 90th (by primary care) by US News [4] lists a minimum MCAT score of 509 [5], which puts you in the 79th percentile [6].

            But note that this difference in student quality is inherent even in the way the test scores are considered. Performing well on the GRE only tells the admissions committee that the applicant can handle (essentially) high school mathematics, and might have a reasonable hold on English (the verbal section is typically hard even for native speakers). That is, the applicant may not be a half-wit.

            In contrast, the MCAT tests organic chemistry, for example (albeit, a small amount). But this is indicative of how the GRE and MCAT are testing at different levels.*

            Anyway, getting back to why this even came up: I would (on average) expect there to be a bigger “pot of gold” for those who meet the minimum admission requirements for medical school, than for those who meet the lower standards of a science PhD program. Comparing doctors with scientists along an arbitrary metric (length of the education process) is not useful.

            ———

            [1] https://www.cs.fsu.edu/admissions/graduate-admissions/minimum-admissions-requirements-for-computer-science-ms-and-phd-programs/

            [2] https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings

            [3] https://www.mbacrystalball.com/gre/gre-score-percentiles

            [4] https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-medical-schools/augusta-university-04024

            [5] https://www.augusta.edu/mcg/admissions/generalinformation.php

            [6] https://aamc-orange.global.ssl.fastly.net/production/media/filer_public/2c/76/2c767bca-4020-45d6-beb6-7b3bcd3baff6/mcat_total_and_section_score_percentile_ranks_2018_for_web.pdf

            * The subject GRE is a different beast. My understanding is that it’s typically not required, although it may be recommended at higher-tier schools.

          • Plumber says:

            “….Year CA Expenditure
            1977-78 11,613.1
            1978-79 16,136.0
            1979-80 18,421.0
            1980-81 20,871.8….”

            @David Friedman,

            Well if that’s the case then I’ve got almost 40 years of misplaced anger.

            That’s a big ship to turn around!

            As I remember it, the teachers (and even more so the “after school program” workers) were very adamant that we tell our parents to “vote no on prop 13”, some telling us to tell our parents to vote yes on prop 8, others that “prop 8 is bad too, just not as bad”.

            But as I related, the cuts were noticeable for this then child, but if your figures are correct they were for show and a way to punish kids for how their parents voted.

          • Randy M says:

            the cuts were noticeable

            They would have to be, otherwise the teachers, and others who warned you, would lose credibility.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome

            It is not unusual for a group that isn’t in control of their budget to react to budget cuts with punitive measures, instead of just cutting the least-needed/lowest-priority/worst-payoff departments.

          • As I remember it, the teachers (and even more so the “after school program” workers) were very adamant that we tell our parents to “vote no on prop 13”

            I expect the prison guards tell their friends to vote against bills that reduce the number of people in prison. And professors seem to have an odd preference for increasing government spending on universities.

            Prop 13 resulted in less being spent than would have been spent if it hadn’t passed. Expenditure continued to rise, but not as rapidly as it would have. So people whose jobs depended on government spending naturally opposed it.

            One of the problems with a government run school system is that children are being taught by people with an obvious interest in believing that more government spending is better.

          • Brad says:

            It sounds like you aren’t disagreeing that doctors have it the best, the complaints notwithstanding, but instead argue that they deserve everything they get (and more?) because they are really smart. Also because some small percent do scientific research part time.

          • BBA says:

            Those numbers are for the state general fund. Prop 13 affected local property taxes, which (if I understand correctly) were the primary source of school funding in California until the 1970s, but had no direct bearing on the state general fund. You’d have to compare school district expenditures before and after Prop 13, and determine when and whether increased state funding offset the drop in property tax revenue in order to figure out whether the cuts were real or illusory.

            And the proposition limited total (county + city + school) property taxes to 1% of assessed value. They could have been higher than 1% in some localities, in which case there would be an actual cut in revenue. (They certainly are over 1% here in NY today and we have a mostly unreformed property tax system.)

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            It isn’t necessarily malicious. If you anticipate that your budget will be cut, you may want to start saving now, or spending in a different pattern: for example, getting preventative maintenance done now while you still have any money to do it with, even if that means spending less on things like toilet paper.

            (Although from Plumber’s story it sounds to me more likely that the main problem was the cost of replacing unsafe buildings, and may have had nothing to do with the tax rules changing at all.)

          • Anthony says:

            David Friedman – Proposition 13 did significantly reduce property tax rates. I recall hearing that the rate was close to 3% before Prop 13, but this seems really high unless most properties were under-assessed. The State BOE says that property tax revenue declined by half due to Proposition 13 (http://www.boe.ca.gov/proptaxes/pdf/pub29.pdf)

          • @Anthony:

            The question isn’t whether Prop 13 reduced tax rates but whether it reduced tax revenue. What it did, as best I recall, was to freeze the amount of property tax on a home as long as it remained with the original owner. If, after it passes, the market value of a house doubles, the rate will be half what it was before, but the amount of tax will be the same. Since some houses are changing hands and having their taxable value increased, total property tax revenue will be going up.

            As I pointed out earlier, if you look at the figures for total tax revenue of California, it increases in the year after Prop 13 passes and in the year after that (and I think for quite a while longer, but I didn’t post the numbers).

            Plumber’s claim was that government services declined after Prop 13 passed because the state had less money. That can’t be true if the state had more money, and it did.

          • Anthony says:

            David – Prop 13 reset assessments to two high-inflation years before Prop 13 was on the ballot. The link I gave says that total statewide property tax revenue dropped by nearly half.

            Other tax revenue (primarily income and sales taxes) would have gone up because of inflation.

          • @Anthony:

            Thanks. I didn’t realize that Prop 13 rolled back the assessments to 1976.

            You are correct that I ought to take account of inflation, which was high for a couple of years just after Prop 13. Prop 13 was passed in 1978—I’m not sure how fast it went into effect. I also should take account of population. I’ve calculated state expenditure/(CPIxPopulation) for ten years starting just before Prop13 passed.

            Year …….. Exp/CPI*Popn
            1977-78…. 8.2
            1978-79…. 10.3
            1979-80…. 10.2
            1980-81…. 10.1
            1981-82…. 9.4
            1982-83…. 8.8
            1983-84…. 8.7
            1984-85…. 9.3
            1985-86…. 9.9
            1986-87…. 10.4

            The result isn’t as clear as I thought, but I don’t think it supports Plumber’s view of the subject. The pattern of real expenditure per capita is a big increase in the Prop 13 year, gradually falling thereafter but never getting down to what it had been before the increase

            My population figures are here–I interpolated between 1970 and 1980.

            But it occurs to me that there is still a problem. My data are for the general fund, which I am reasonably sure is just state expenditure, not state plus local expenditure. So it’s possible that including local expenditure, which I haven’t been able to find a historical table of, would change the conclusion.

    • Garrett says:

      To make matters more interesting, you also have to balance supply, cost disease, etc.

      For example, I volunteer in EMS. I work full-time as a software developer at a high-enough level that I worked for Google for a while. I’d happily go to medical school and become an ER doc. The problem isn’t the tuition. The problem is the opportunity cost. The last time I did the math, assuming that I got a full-ride scholarship to medical school (ha!) it would take me 12 years to break even.

      Why go through all that work and risk of loss when I can keep my current job which is much more free on time to show up, fewer annoying people to deal with, etc?

      I’m totally in favor of pushing procedures down the training curve (why an undergrad degree is required for medical school, but a degree in philosophy will suffice puzzles me) but you still have to figure out how to deal with convincing people smart enough to do the job and also to get high-paying work elsewhere to do the work.

      • Brad says:

        I think we’d rather have you be a software developer than a doctor. One person can write a program used by millions.

        There’s isn’t any shortage of people smart enough to do the job applying to medical school. On the contrary there are people that would make fine doctors being turned away.

        • IsmiratSeven says:

          Yeah, Brad, we get it, you think the world would be a happy utopia if only those goddamn lazy-ass rent-seeking cabalistic doctor buttholes would just treat a hundred people at a time for $10 an hour.

          • Plumber says:

            Limiting physicians pay by law works very well in Japan, but I tend to think sudden drastic changes usually don’t work well, if we were to adopt the Japanese health care system it should be implemented slowly over forty years, and they’re probably other changes that aren’t directly health care related that would have to be done for it to mesh.

          • Mark Atwood says:

            Limiting physicians pay by law works very well in Japan

            Which is why Japan is a significant source of travelers engaging in medical tourism.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          Ismirat banned for three months.

  8. The Nybbler says:

    I’ve posted (or rather, whined) previously about the state of model aircraft regulation in the US. There are some changes coming.

    When last we left it, the state was that a law called Section 336 held sway. This law allowed operation of a model aircraft without a certification or a license or any of that nonsense if

    1) the aircraft is flown strictly for hobby or recreational use;

    2) the aircraft is operated in accordance with a community based set of safety guidelines and within the programming of a nationwide community-based organization;

    3) the aircraft is limited to not more than 55 pounds unless otherwise certified through a design, construction, inspection, flight test, and operational safety program administered by a community-based organization;

    4) The aircraft is operated in a manner that does not interfere with and gives way to any manned aircraft; and

    5) when flown within 5 miles of an airport, the operator of the aircraft provides the airport operator and the airport air traffic control tower (when an air traffic facility is located at the airport) with prior notice of the operation (model aircraft operators flying from a permanent location within 5 miles of an airport should establish a mutually-agreed upon operating procedure with the airport operator and the airport air traffic control tower (when an air traffic facility is located at the airport)).

    The FAA doesn’t like to be told it can’t totally control the air, so in December 2015, it decided to ignore Section 336 and pass a law requiring people flying model aircraft to register. This was eventually struck down as beyond the FAAs authority. Unfortunately, it was re-instated by act of Congress. Since then, the FAA has imposed every limitation it is permitted to by Section 336, plus registration, plus a few others which are not permitted by Section 336, such as prohibiting any flying within 5 miles of a Class B airport.

    A bunch of stuff has gone on, but fast forward to this week. A new FAA authorization bill has come out of conference committee; it is on track to pass without amendment. This bill repeals section 336. It gives the FAA nearly full authority to shut down…err, regulate model aircraft. The new section says you can operate a model aircraft if

    1) The aircraft is flown strictly for recreational purposes.

    2) The aircraft is operated in accordance with or within the programming of a community-based
    organization’s set of safety guidelines that are developed in coordination with the Federal Aviation
    Administration. [Note that no such guidelines exist, since previous guidelines were not developed in coordination with the FAA. Until such guidelines are developed, all model aircraft flying is prohibited]

    3) The aircraft is flown within the visual line of sight of the person operating the aircraft or a visual
    observer co-located and in direct communication with the operator. [This is terrible for people doing autonomous or first person view flight, but it’s not a change; Sec 336 excluded non-visual-line-of-sight operation in its definition section]

    4) The aircraft is operated in a manner that does not interfere with and gives way to any manned aircraft.

    5) In Class B, Class C, or Class D airspace or within the lateral boundaries of the surface area of Class E airspace designated for an airport, the operator obtains prior authorization from the Administrator or designee before operating and complies with all airspace restrictions and prohibitions. [“Hello? FAA? I’d like to speak to the Administrator, Mr. Elwell, please? What do you mean he’s busy? This is IMPORTANT, I want to fly my toy helicopter.” OK, obviously that’s not how it’s going to work. Most likely it will work the way it originally worked for commercial unmanned aircraft — you fill out a web form a few weeks in advance telling them exactly where and how high you’ll be flying. And for class B they just say “No”.]

    6) In Class G airspace, the aircraft is flown from the surface to not more than 400 feet above ground level and complies with all airspace restrictions and prohibitions. [There’s an entire section of the hobby, sailplanes / thermal soaring, which will be made illegal by this provision.]

    7) The operator has passed an aeronautical knowledge and safety test described in subsection (g) and maintains proof of test passage to be made available to the Administrator or law enforcement upon request. [So you need to carry proof you passed a test. They don’t call this a license, but it’s a license. The FAA has 180 days to come up with this test; in the interim all model flying is illegal]

    8) The aircraft is registered and marked in accordance with chapter 441 of this title and proof of registration is made available to the Administrator or a designee of the Administrator or law enforcement upon request.

    That’s bad enough. But wait, there’s more

    “IN GENERAL.—The Administrator, in consultation with government, stakeholders, and community-based organizations, shall initiate a process to periodically update the operational parameters under subsection (a), as appropriate.” That’s Blank Check #1. They can change the rules at any time.

    Then there’s subsection (f):

    ‘‘(f) EXCEPTIONS.—Nothing in this section prohibits the Administrator from promulgating rules generally applicable to unmanned aircraft, including those unmanned aircraft eligible for the exception set forth in this section, relating to—
    ‘‘(1) updates to the operational parameters for unmanned aircraft in subsection (a);
    ‘‘(2) the registration and marking of unmanned aircraft;
    ‘‘(3) the standards for remotely identifying owners and operators of unmanned aircraft systems and associated unmanned aircraft; and
    ‘‘(4) other standards consistent with maintaining the safety and security of the National Airspace System.

    The rules for marking are really going to tick off the people flying period-marked models. Also, some of the FAA proposals require markings visible from the ground… on planes that might be just a few inches long. The bit about remotely identifying has to do with transponders — that section gives the FAA authority to require transponders which can be of arbitrary weight, size, power consumption, and expense. And of course (4) is Blank Check #2.

    Summary: As of the passage of this bill next week, all model aircraft flying becomes illegal in the United States until the Academy for Model Aeronautics and the FAA coordinate on rules (these rules can be arbitrarily restrictive) and the FAA sets up the test. Once both of those happen, flying becomes legal only for those who have passed the test, follow the rules, fly within visual line of sight, stay out of all controlled airspace (including their own backyard in many cases), and stay under 400′. And the FAA can add new rules at any time, including requiring arbitrarily heavy and expensive equipment.

    So it’s basically a meme: The high status aerospace engineer flies home from work over populated areas in his own plane and waves to the FAA guy as he goes to his car. The low status software engineer spends hours getting home on packed transit trains, then when the weekend rolls around, gets arrested and ruinously fined for flying a toy helicopter over an empty field.

    • LesHapablap says:

      What is the justification for this? Are they afraid of terrorists packing bombs in the thing and aiming them at planes, or are they just worried about airspace incursions and accidental loss of separations?

      f.3 and f.4 might relate to mandating ADS-B transponders

      • The Nybbler says:

        Mostly airspace incursions, with a strong dose of “RESPECT MY AUTHORITY”. The FAA’s number one through ten priority is the flying buses. They’re currently so safe that the smallest absolute danger translates into an enormous relative danger, which means the FAA would regulate gnat farts if it could. The next few priorities are other commercial aviation, and all the way at the bottom, grudgingly, is general aviation. Unmanned Aircraft Systems would be something the FAA would just eliminate entirely, except that commercial entities really really want it and have the Congresspeople to make it happen; the FAA dragged their feet for years before enacting what eventually became Part 107 (commercial unmanned aircraft systems — requires an actual pilot’s license and a bunch of other silly requirements).

        When the original Section 336 passed, hobbyists flying models were mostly a relatively small bunch of retired guys flying fixed-wing aircraft in circles on club fields. The exceptions (scale jets, or the soaring people) tended to fly way out in the middle of nowhere. A lot of them were real pilots as well, so could actually talk to FAA and airport people. The FAA published a few advisory rules and otherwise mainly ignored them. Models were relatively low capability, expensive and hard to fly. Technology has moved on and now models are cheap, can be flown from small non-dedicated fields, and can be as easy to fly as you like. They can even by flown by “first person view”, using goggles which show a view from the model. There are 200,000 members of the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), which is the organization mostly made up of the retired guys flying in circles. There are over 900,000 _registered_ flyers of model aircraft — and who knows how many unregistered ones, such as myself?

        So where the FAA had no problem with the in-crowd flying in circles, once the unwashed masses started flying, they started panicking. Someone could fly a model into an airliner! And besides, these aren’t “their kind of people”. And furthermore, the commercial drone people — the ones who jumped through all the Part 107 hoops — were rather jealous of the fact that recreational flyers weren’t under the same restrictions. So the FAA went on a years-long campaign of the dangers of drones, publishing reports of every pilot who saw a drone, balloon, trash bag, strange light, or full-scale aircraft in the distance and calling it a near-miss with a drone, and, along with the Commercial Drone Alliance, lobbied for repeal of Section 336.

        They got their way. The irony is, it’s going to hurt the old-school fliers the most. The AMA and its clubs have fixed fields, many in controlled airspace — their headquarters field looks to be in Class E surface airspace. That means the FAA has enormous leverage over them. The FAA says “frog”, the AMA will jump. And when that means their members can’t fly (or can’t fly without jumping through a ridiculous number of hoops), they’re not going to be members for much longer; clubs will shut down, possibly the AMA itself will. The other people, flying from non-dedicated fields? There’s no organization to control us. There are less than 600,000 real pilots, mostly trying to follow the rules. There are well over 700,000 non-AMA modelers, none of whom has passed the FAAs test, most of whom aren’t even going to know about these new rules. The FAA has nothing like the enforcement capability to handle this. What agencies usually resort to in these sorts of cases is enforcement by terrorism — find someone who looks like they can’t defend themselves, hit them with multiple civil penalties and criminal charges, and publicize the hell out of it.

        And yes, I believe (f)(3) is about ADS-B. Several thousand dollars, power requirements and size greater than my smaller helis.

        • LesHapablap says:

          There are some relatively cheap and light ADS-b units out there, 20g and $2000: https://uavionix.com/product/ping2020/

          Drones seem to be much higher risk than model aircraft, since the purpose of a drone is often to get high quality video footage which can mean jumping up into approach paths. And still, the drone apocalypse has been predicted for a while now without any strikes on airplanes of any kind.

          • The Nybbler says:

            There’s been one drone strike on a military helicopter near Staten Island. That’s the only one.

            The smallest outdoor-capable model I have is an Oxy 2, which runs about $400 fully equipped. All-up weight is about 320g, which means that 23g Ping2020i is significant, though not weight prohibitive. The 30W burst requirement is a problem, though. And I see the full-size pilots complaining about spending $2000 on a $20,000 airplane; spending $2000 on a $400 airplane (and I have about 6 in flyable or almost-flyable condition, ranging in initial cost from $300 to $2000) is ridiculous.

      • Mustard Tiger says:

        I think it’s the same thing as any other hobby or endeavor that used to be difficult suddenly becoming (too) easy.

        15 years ago, if you flew model airplanes, there’s a good chance you spent hours and hours building the thing on your dining room table. You likely attended coordinated flying events where people cared about what frequency they were on, never flew over people or buildings or other things they weren’t willing to crash-land on, and generally took the hobby seriously. It was expensive and it wasn’t easy. There was a filter of effort that dissuaded the riff-raff.

        Now, anyone can go out and buy a drone that will fly itself wherever you point it to with your cell phone. It can still crash, it can still hurt someone, and many, many more people are using them, arguably less carefully than the old timers.

        So, the government sees this problem with people getting “autonomous” quad-copters for Christmas that require virtually no training to get up in the air. People are using them to fly around wildfires and creating dangers for water-dropping aircraft. People are using them to take pictures of airports or whatever.

        Is there a term for this? I’m thinking Tragedy of the Commons, but I don’t think that’s right. When something becomes easier to access, less conscientious / dedicated people start accessing it and it gets used less carefully / skillfully than before..? And this causes a clamp-down on everyone (and obviously upsets the careful old-timers more)?

        • AG says:

          Mops, probably.

        • John Schilling says:

          There’s also a big difference in that, for classic model aircraft, flying the model was the goal. Which means, A: the operators tend to be diligent about flying well and B: they don’t have any particular reason to fly dangerous, except possibly at informal exhibitions where spectators get too close to the flight line.

          For modern quadcopters, the goal is often to position a camera someplace really interesting. So, A: less diligence about the flying-for-the-sake-of-flying thing, and B: the interesting cameraworthy things are very often things that involve or attract other people, i.e. crowds of potential victims. Also, things that attract camera drones have a significant probability of attracting police/fire/medevac/news helicopters and the like. And nobody is going to like what happens the first time a helicopter carrying a photogenic accident victim sucks a quadcopter through its turbine.

          If there are problems with the FAA’s new rules, there would have been even bigger problems with using the old model-airplane rules and pretending nothing had changed.

          • bean says:

            This makes me wonder if it would be feasible to loosen the rules for vehicles that do not carry cameras. But that’s unlikely, because you have to figure out if that means don’t carry cameras or can’t carry cameras. I have a friend who has RC model planes and would occasionally strap a camera to one. No transmission, no intent to see cool things, just a view of what the thing was doing. But I can’t see an anti-camera copter regulation which wouldn’t trap him, too.

          • The Nybbler says:

            There’s a group of people who think the regulation is about the camera drones. But this seems unlikely. There’s nothing in the new law which even addresses any of the things John mentions. There are things that explicitly address traditional R/C from fixed fields. And the only way the new regulations are actually _looser_ than the old Section 336 is that one can legally fly a model using “first person view” (from a camera on the model) if there’s someone else watching it from the same location. It’s not about the cameras or people on the ground; its about the FAA wanting full control of everything artificial in the air, and preferably paring down the number of those things to a controllable level.

    • CatCube says:

      Are you getting the “will be illegal the moment Congress votes” thing from somewhere, or are you assuming it? Because that’s really atypical of legislation of this type. Usually there’s an effective date to avoid exactly what you’re talking about: requirements that can’t be fulfilled because there’s no time to implement regulations.

      You’re going to have to articulate the problems with 1-4, since to me they make perfect sense, and are not much more onerous than what other airspace users must do.

      …the operator obtains prior authorization from the Administrator or designee before operating and complies with all airspace restrictions and prohibitions. [“Hello? FAA? I’d like to speak to the Administrator, Mr. Elwell, please? What do you mean he’s busy?…

      If you’re just reading through the language yourself, you might want to get some help from a website with people who read laws on a regular basis, because this is a really weird thing to get wrapped around the axle about. This is how laws implemented by a particular agency are written–all agency action is done in the name of the responsible Executive official. Here, the Administrator of the FAA.

      For my own agency, laws authorizing construction are phrased as directing either the Secretary of the Army or the Chief of Engineers to do something, but nobody in or outside of government seems to think that that means that I have to run my calculations package by either Mr. Esper or General Semonite. They have massive bureaucracies beneath them that contain experts in the particular field, and who sign the actual drawing sets (or authorization to use a UAV, in your case).

      Similarly, if you sue the FAA, you technically sue the Administrator, since whatever action is taken in his name.

      The most concerning thing here is the 400′ requirement in Class G, because that’s the most limiting thing proposed. However, my opinion on it will depend on how well you can answer this question: Why do you think they chose 400′ as the upper limit? It’s a little unfair to put my opinion of all hobby UAV users on you, but you’re putting yourself out there. But there’s a reason that they may have chosen 400′, instead of 300′, 500′, or 600′, the rest of us flying around know it, and I don’t think it’s unfair that you should too.

      As far as the rest, especially the fact that the language permits further regulation: this isn’t much different than other airspace users deal with. The FAA dropped an ADS-B requirement imposing several thousand dollars of costs on people who want to continue to fly inside the Mode C veil. I’m not saying that it’s right, just that nothing in this tells me that UAV users are being singled out for persecution here.

      I just can’t get worked up over the notion that to cruise around near an airport you should know what the hell everybody else knows about how the NAS works, and have some form of communications.

      • The Nybbler says:

        You’re going to have to articulate the problems with 1-4, since to me they make perfect sense, and are not much more onerous than what other airspace users must do.

        Except 2, these aren’t a change. Whether the rules are terrible or not depends on what they are; the FAA (“in cooperation” with the community-based organization, which means what the FAA says gets written down and given the AMA’s stamp of approval) may choose, for instance, to require models fly from dedicated fields only.

        Are you getting the “will be illegal the moment Congress votes” thing from somewhere, or are you assuming it? Because that’s really atypical of legislation of this type. Usually there’s an effective date to avoid exactly what you’re talking about: requirements that can’t be fulfilled because there’s no time to implement regulations.

        There’s a section of the bill which says

        (a) REGULATIONS.—Notwithstanding the repeals under sections 341, 348, 347, 349, and 383 of this Act, all orders, determinations, rules, regulations, permits, grants, and contracts, which have been issued under any law described under subsection (b) of this section before the effective date of this Act shall continue in effect until modified or revoked by the Secretary of Transportation, acting through the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, as applicable, by a court of competent jurisdiction, or by operation of law other than this Act.

        Section 336 is listed as one of those. However, since Section 336 didn’t authorize any regulations, orders, determinations, rules, etc, it’s not clear that the exemption is covered. The exemption for operation of model aircraft came directly from the statute, not from FAA regulations. In practice, whether or not model aircraft operations are allowed depends entirely on how hard-assed the FAA feels like getting about it.

        This is how laws implemented by a particular agency are written–all agency action is done in the name of the responsible Executive official. Here, the Administrator of the FAA.

        I’m aware of that; that was a joke; the rest of my parenthetical goes into what the actual procedure will likely be, based on the Part 107 procedures. Making a request to fly a model helicopter weeks in advance is not really practical. Nowadays there’s an expedited procedure (LAANC) for Part 107 licensees at some airports, but there’s no reason to think they’ll allow not-technically-licensed recreational fliers to use it.

        Why do you think they chose 400′ as the upper limit? It’s a little unfair to put my opinion of all hobby UAV users on you, but you’re putting yourself out there.

        500′ is the typical minimum altitude for full-sized aircraft set out in 14 CFR 91.119(c). Setting a 400′ upper limit for models gives 100′ of separation. Like I said, doesn’t affect me and my little helicopters (which rarely go above 100′; they could, but I’d have a heck of a time getting them back down in one piece where I could find them), but puts the thermal soaring people out of business.

        FAA dropped an ADS-B requirement imposing several thousand dollars of costs on people who want to continue to fly inside the Mode C veil.

        What’s unreasonable for someone flying around in a full-sized aircraft that’s tens of thousands of dollars is mega-unreasonable for someone flying models that weigh a few pounds, which cost a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and can neither handle the weight nor the power requirements of a transponder.

        I just can’t get worked up over the notion that to cruise around near an airport you should know what the hell everybody else knows about how the NAS works, and have some form of communications.

        “Near” an airport includes large swathes of the United States; there’s a LOT of Class D/E airspace. People have been flying models in it for decades without issue. And of course you’re not getting worked up, you’re not the one having your hobby outlawed. And as a structural engineer, you have the ability and experience to deal with government officials and red tape and permissions and such. For me, if I need permission the answer is “no”, or it’s “Why?” with the implication being that if I cannot satisfy the asker to why allowing my request benefits him, the answer is “no”.

        • CatCube says:

          500′ is the typical minimum altitude for full-sized aircraft set out in 14 CFR 91.119(c). Setting a 400′ upper limit for models gives 100′ of separation. Like I said, doesn’t affect me and my little helicopters (which rarely go above 100′; they could, but I’d have a heck of a time getting them back down in one piece where I could find them), but puts the thermal soaring people out of business.

          I apologize for doubting you. And reading on the AMA website, I agree with you that this is a problem. I think it’s reasonable to have the altitude limit presumptively top out at 400′ to provide separation, but it doesn’t provide for any way to exceed that, which is not reasonable; if there’s some legwork done to avoid conflicts (e.g., communicating with a flight service station so other flyers are aware) there shouldn’t be any problem with going above that. I mean, unless you’re going to be in the approach path of a runway or something.

          As an aside, both your post and the AMA’s blog on the subject have the same irritation: they state that these rules are deadly (AMA: “…other changes would land a devastating blow to competitions and disciplines that have operated safely in our hobby for decades…”) but don’t articulate what exactly the problem is, because the changes seem pretty subtle. Most of them also don’t seem too unreasonable on their face, since any time I fly I expect to spend at least an hour looking up what’s going on in my area and filing a flight plan before I take off; requirements like “In Class B, C, D, and E airspace, recreational users must obtain authorization from the FAA or a designee” is more or less what we do every time (Class E is the exception). It’s more understandable once you realize that the process is more onerous than just picking up a phone and making a call or making a call on the radio.

          People have been flying models in it for decades without issue. And of course you’re not getting worked up, you’re not the one having your hobby outlawed.

          Not outlawed outright, but they certainly can impose thousands of dollars in costs either through new required technology (ADS-B) or airworthiness directives for a particular aircraft.

          And as a structural engineer, you have the ability and experience to deal with government officials and red tape and permissions and such.

          My insouciance regarding interactions with airspace users don’t come from my job as a structural engineer*, military officer, or government employee, they come with my experiences getting a pilot’s license and a ham radio license, neither of which required any contact with government employees whatsoever**. I’m not going to say that zero of the employees you’re going to interact with are yanking it in their cubicle and need to tell somebody “no” so they can finish, but it’s pretty rare in my experience. Of course, all agencies have their own internal personality, so maybe the FAA is 100% like that. But half the battle is not being afraid to pick up the phone; another 40% is understanding the limitations they’re operating under, and being ready to answer those. I acknowledge that the other 10% is realizing that there might not be a ZOPA, but starting from that assumption is rarely fruitful.

          * I’m a structural engineer for the government, so it’s a bit of a different animal. I don’t have to request permits in the same way as a private developer, and while the law requires us to comply with the building codes of the local jurisdiction, they don’t have any authority to enter our facilities for inspection. Also, I work on things that aren’t technically governed by building codes as such, and many of the standards are internal to our organization–the primary author of one such code is the guy kitty-corner from my cubicle.

          **Well, I guess interacting on the radio with ATC would count, but that’s so heavily protocol-based you’re not asking permission in the same way you mean.

          • bean says:

            Of course, all agencies have their own internal personality, so maybe the FAA is 100% like that.

            Not 100%. I’ve worked with a very different division of the FAA fairly closely, and they were in a lot of ways easier to work with than the internal delegates. Those often seemed unwilling to accept my changes until I’d rebuffed them a dozen times with “the FAA will not let us do that”. The FAA made changes when they needed to, but generally were decent people.

            That said, this was the LA ACO, and the Seattle ACO was apparently much less pleasant to deal with.

          • The Nybbler says:

            As an aside, both your post and the AMA’s blog on the subject have the same irritation: they state that these rules are deadly (AMA: “…other changes would land a devastating blow to competitions and disciplines that have operated safely in our hobby for decades…”) but don’t articulate what exactly the problem is, because the changes seem pretty subtle.

            The AMA post isn’t aimed at a general audience; I imagine their members know which competitions and disciplines they’re referring to. Sailplanes shut down by the 400′ rule are one I know of; I believe there are also large acrobatic R/C planes which regularly exceed 400′. There’s also the turbine jet people; R/C turbine jets are expensive and require a lot of space both laterally and vertically. They’re also only owned by those who are very serious about the hobby. The AMA is probably also worried about the FAA with its new authority to regulate applying the Part 107 rules to models — these include in addition to the 400′ rule, a 100mph restriction (there’s a model helicopter with a 1.5m rotor that can do 180mph, and of course those jets can do much better than 100mph) and daylight-only restrictions (the AMA has night flying competitions).

            While the airspace rules take out a lot of locations for me, the AMA probably isn’t too bothered because they’re operating from fixed fields and can set up operating agreements. However, the FAA can use these operating agreements as leverage on the AMA to force them to police their clubs and to force their clubs to police their members — make sure everyone follows all the rules or they revoke the agreements. And if there’s any fields within Class B they’re probably out of luck (The FAA has claimed for some time “recreational operations are not permitted in Class B airspace around most major airports without specific air traffic permission and coordination”, but until now they’ve lacked the authority to back that up.)

            But half the battle is not being afraid to pick up the phone;

            The FAA does not want part 107 UAS operators contacting facilities directly; they certainly will not want modelers doing it either.

            another 40% is understanding the limitations they’re operating under

            I know what “You have to understand the limitations I’m operating under” means from a bureaucrat. It means “No, and either that’s coming from above my pay grade or I’m going to pretend it is so you go away”. (except in some places where it means “you need to offer a bribe”, but I don’t think it means that from the FAA).

            Most of them also don’t seem too unreasonable on their face, since any time I fly I expect to spend at least an hour looking up what’s going on in my area and filing a flight plan before I take off

            You have a real license, you’re flying a real plane, at least 100 times the weight of my toys, and you get to fly IN the plane and fly over populated areas for long distances. I’m flying a toy helicopter, less than 7 minutes at a time, over an empty field. I wouldn’t have gotten into the hobby if it was about following a model bureaucracy, and the real bureaucracy is certainly far too heavyweight.

    • Garrett says:

      I have no idea how to read this, but it looks like the entire greater Pittsburgh area is Class B airspace meaning that flying a toy 1/2 lbs camera copter would be a violation. Maybe.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        Only the innermost ring is Class B all the way down to the surface. Farther out you see numbers like “80/40”, meaning only the altitudes between 4000′ and 8000′ (MSL) are in the Class B.

      • The Nybbler says:

        I actually do know how to read that. The inner blue ring around the airport indicates class B airspace from the surface to 8000 feet (note the 80/SFC marking), so that’s all that’s relevant for model aircraft purposes. The various shaded magenta curves indicate areas where Class E airspace starts at 700 feet instead of 1200 feet or 14500 feet. Dotted blue circles (e.g. around Beaver County airport, BVI or Alleghany County, AGC) indicate Class D surface airspace; the number [38] means it extends from the surface to 3800 feet. This is also forbidden to model aircraft under the new rules. AGC is the biggest problem for those in Pittsburgh proper, whereas PIT knocks out a large section of western and northwestern suburbs.

        There is a model airplane field in Hillman State Park, just slightly to the west of the Pittsburgh surface class B. They lucked out. There’s another field that appears to be just INSIDE the AGC class D, near the southwest edge, though it’s a very near thing. If they’re inside, they’re going to need someone who can schmooze with ATC and the FAA to set up an agreement to operate, or they’re out of business.

        The huge outer red ring marked “Mode C” is where by 2020 expensive Mode C transponders will be required for all (manned) aircraft having an engine-driven electrical system; one could guess the FAA will require them for all unmanned aircraft within that area as well, but such regulations have not yet been published.

  9. rlms says:

    On Title IX proceedings:

    Many people who bring forward such claims require the guarantee of confidentiality. My worry, though, is that in public culture right now an allegation of sexual harassment can be immediately taken to be the proof of the claim. Since women complainants, in particular, have been conventionally disbelieved and discredited, the trend is now reversed so that whoever speaks is assumed to speak the truth. Legal procedures for the fair adjudication of such claims are sometimes sidestepped altogether as the media becomes the new public tribunal. I understand why it is important to have public discussions such as these. At the same, in higher education we need procedures: clear and accessible ways for claimants to come forward and have a timely investigation of their claims; provisions for faculty review, safeguards against preemptive punishments by administrators who fear liability that short-circuit fair procedure the rights of the accused.

    Sounds sensible? Uh oh, you just agreed with Whqvgu Ohgyre!

    • The Nybbler says:

      Sounds sensible? Uh oh, you just agreed with Whqvgu Ohgyre!

      That’s not really an uh-oh. If I disagreed with all the people on the Other Side all the time, they’d be indistinguishable. Now if it was Amanda Marcotte…

      • Mary says:

        Except, of course, Amanda Marcotte would never say that.

        There may be other subjects on which she is sane, but she wouldn’t say that.

      • Plumber says:

        @The Nybbler

        I had to look up who “Amanda Marcotte” is, and I found that she briefly worked for the John Edwards campaign, but otherwise seems to mostly drawn negative attention to herself (for the record, I have extremely dim memories of the Duke lacrosse allegations, and if commenters here didn’t say so I wouldn’t have known that the accusations were shown to be false).

        I very much know of John Edwards, originally because in 2003 The New York Times published a story on the death of Patrick Walters who was doing the exact same type of work that I was doing at the time, and then Senator John Edwards responded in a letter to the times, catching my attention, and he advocated strengthening OSHA, and for a brief moment there was a Presidential candidate who was talking about the issues that were most important to me, and then the press jumped on a sex scandal story about him and that was that with that.

        This year a quick web search shows me that as a Federal judge Supreme Court nominee Kavaugh has already ruled on issues that are very important to me (including workplace safety), but all the news is about some damn sex scandal. 

        I really don’t get it and am pretty sick of it.

        • Nick says:

          I’m guessing The Nybbler mentioned Marcotte because of the Duke allegations, yeah. From Wikipedia:

          In January 2007, Marcotte made several controversial statements about the Duke lacrosse case including calling people who defended the accused “rape-loving scum”[7][8][9][10] and writing on her blog “Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.” The post, which Marcotte later deleted, attracted criticism, was mentioned in The New York Times.[11][12] The Duke lacrosse players were eventually found to have been falsely accused. Their accuser, Crystal Mangum, was later convicted of an unrelated murder, and the prosecuting attorney, Mike Nifong, was disbarred.

          I take it The Nybbler’s point is that Marcotte admitting the sort of thing which Butler writes above would be a big deal.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Warning to everyone in this thread: be very careful and don’t let it degenerate into contentless outgroup bashing

    • Philosophisticat says:

      I am annoyed at the description of Ronell as “by all accounts, one of the great academic minds of our time”. The accounts of an incestuous subcommunity of postmodernists are not “all accounts”.

      • Deiseach says:

        This whole affair reminds me of another incestuous academic department that was its own little cult that I read about some years back, but my leaky memory won’t let me remember who it was or where it was. It was some nasty psychological control, though, and the way that Ronell is described as getting her foot in the door and then getting the run of the place (if it’s true) is uncannily similar.

        I can’t remember if it was sociology or feminist studies or something along those lines, but it ended up with a husband and wife team of professors ruling the roost and doing the same thing – cutting out any oversight from the administration, making sure any other professors/lecturers in the department were all ‘yes men (and women)’, wielding immense influence over the students (the description of students confessing all kinds of offences against the queen bee and begging to be allowed back into her good graces is disturbingly familiar). I wish I could remember where I read it – it was some tiny department of a big university that was let go its own way because of producing cutting-edge theoretical work like this professor? But the two stories are very alike in the whole cult of personality and having the whims of the female professor be iron laws for her chosen students.

        • baconbits9 says:

          Reading these accounts it is interesting how little the authors seem to know about dealing with anyone with any will. What was the author expecting when he went to the Dean? That they would immediately side with him without investigating? That he and one other person would take down someone who was committed to building their own army of followers? Did he imagine himself as a good ally, someone who needed approval from an authority figure to fix the issue? What was the plan here?

          • Erusian says:

            Backbone is a great quality, until someone is standing up to you. Most major organizations, especially non-competitive ones like government and academia, are designed to reward people who are compliant with the organization’s goals and directives. Note that ‘submissive’ and ‘meek’ are synonyms for compliant.

            You cannot geld someone and bid they be fruitful. If you train and select people to be compliant, you will end up with an organization filled with people who are compliant rather than willful. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially for the organization. But it does lead to a certain shock when these people are exposed to something else. Suddenly they realize they’ve lived their lives inside a walled garden and have no real immune system to deal with bullies, queen bees, and power players.

            In such cases, they must turn to the system to protect them. They cannot fight their own battle. They have been discouraged from developing these skills their entire lives. Plus, they will be punished for doing so. Likewise, walking away is often a life-damaging prospect in a world where recommendations and reputation is everything.

            A true believer will turn to the proper authorities because the system is supposed to be set against such things. And it is in principle. But in practice, it’s optimized to keep things running smoothly, which isn’t always in the individual’s best interest. And no bully prospers in one of these systems without the ability to manipulate it. So they complain, often naively expecting the truth of their claims to weigh heavily, and find they do not live in a just world.

    • idontknow131647093 says:

      I dont know who that is and it doesn’t sound all that sensible at all.

      1. Faculty review? Why would faculty be involved in a criminal or human relations matter? This is for police and/or HR departments. The Physics 235, Electrical Engineering 200, Psychology 215, and French 201 professors bring little perspective to such matters other than personal and political biases. Police have a high burden of proof, and HR people have an incentive to avoid litigation where courts overturn their decisions. So, including faculty is not sensible at all, its entirely not sensible.

      2. Why would you respect confidentiality of claims? Confidentiality actually only has two real benefits: 1) Allowing a statement to be objectively evaluated; and 2) Preventing undue retaliation.

      1) This is the use of a pen name, somewhat like how you attempted to in this post. Its kind of like how people will quote Hitler or some other hated figure to get their enemies to applaud, then reveal their idiocy, without the last part. Anonymity thus has its uses when making abstract arguments such as in the Federalist Papers. When you apply higher principles to the days current events a pen name can be useful such that readers do no pre-judge your arguments. This is why, for example, the recent Times anonymous Op-Ed was such a failure, it was short on philosophy and first principles, and long on partisanship and specific accusations. In the latter scenario a name must be attached for any credibility to attach (aka sexual harassment or rape allegations).

      2) This is akin to a whistleblower. The whistleblower has a truth that he/she reveals to the public for the public good; however the whistleblower must be protected (at least temporarily) because otherwise he will be bankrupted because of internal backlash (one usually blows the whistle on his bosses). Now, its true that reporting an abuser is a public good, and its true that anonymity can prevent backlash, however there is a crucial difference in the majority of whistleblower cases vs. sexual abuse allegations in a Title IX court: proof other than the allegation, and no plausible other scenario where such evidence could have come about.

      2a) I have no problem with a university expelling a man who raped a woman without the woman testifying and revealing her name given: A rape kit taken that has a DNA match; corroborating pictures of bruises and marks; testimony of contemporaneous actions from one or both parties, and a timely allegation. In that case I am perfectly fine with the school’s HR department conducting the inquiry anonymously such that the accuser submits a written statement and all other witnesses are to refer to the accuser as such. If the physical evidence and non-accuser testimony provides clear and convincing evidence of sexual assault, expel the person without cross-examination of the accuser. But that is rare, because those cases normally go to the police (or no one).

      2b) This brings me to why would there be confidentiality for rape victims in this case? Well there is no compelling reason unless we live under Sharia law or a similar society. If that is the case, then you will lose regardless, so the fact that you win is prima facie evidence that you anonymity request is bunk. Now you could rebut that, but no one does because we don’t live in anything representing a world that shames this, we aggrandize it, reward it, and glorify it.

      • axiomsofdominion says:

        Confidentiality exists to deal with political and social polarization. No one sends nasty hate male, death threats, doxxing, etc to someone who reports other crimes but in sexual assault crimes the response to the reporting party is often quite “intense”. There is a group of people, we’ll avoid the topic of which particular people and smaller groups are truly part of this umbrella group, who will go out of their way to attempt to cause emotional and physical distress to someone who reports a sexual crime in order to maintain an status of limited consequences for perpetrators. Confidentiality is designed to protect from that. When you report a robbery by an average person no one goes out to rob you or threaten to rob you in retaliation. That is not the case for sexual crimes.

        • idontknow131647093 says:

          I think that is naive. If a person reported a SCOTUS nominee or Presidential candidate burgled their home 10, 20, 30 years ago and provided no evidence, that person would receive threats as well. Indeed, there are no Title IX tribunals for burglary because for a claim of burglary to be taken seriously there has to be great evidence. An accused burglar and accuser both face scrutiny. The difference is that sexual misconduct is the only crime that is ever alleged under the circumstance where there is no corroborating evidence; or at the very least the only such crime where the person isn’t laughed out of existence.

          I mean, it would be easy for me to craft a more credible allegation of burglary against my hometown mayor than we have in many of these Title IX cases. I would simply FOIA his mayoral records, find a time where he is consistently out of the office, find a time he was alone at home, and then accuse him of burglary at that time. I could even break a window and make a manifest of stolen items. Even under all those circumstances very few people would take it all that seriously (unless I was buddies with an investigating cop, or the cop had a grudge against the mayor).

          Moreover, those “elements” as I’ll call them might be crude, but are they wrong on the whole? The media always seems to be eager to accept these “great white devil” stories from mattress girl to UVA to Duke, and the only time I recall them ever finding a real monster is the California swimmer rapist. The media is batting like .100 on the rapists they like to put on the front pages of national news outlets.

          • albatross11 says:

            It’s true that anyone who steps in front of the politics bus is likely to get run down, but I think prominent women in general get more threats from crazy people on the internet, and rape/sexual assault allegations bring the crazies out of the woodwork.

            If Kavenaugh’s accusers are remotely sane and in touch with reality, they have to have forseen that they’d get the attention of vast numbers of crazies, as well as the ethics-free shills and attack dogs and media personalities maintained by the other side (both sides employ such people). This doesn’t guarantee that they’re telling the truth, but coming forward was a personally expensive thing to do, so they probably didn’t do it without some serious thought.

          • Deiseach says:

            This doesn’t guarantee that they’re telling the truth, but coming forward was a personally expensive thing to do, so they probably didn’t do it without some serious thought.

            Yeah, but then you have bandwagon jumpers like Ms “I was empowered on Facebook” which don’t help anyone at all.

            “In my [Facebook] post, I was empowered and I was sure it probably did [happen],” she told Totenberg, who reached out to her on Wednesday. “I had no idea that I would now have to go to the specifics and defend it before 50 cable channels and have my face spread all over MSNBC news and Twitter.”

            I was going to make a highly uncharitable comment about not knowing the publicity would ensue but that would be unfair. However, this is part of the problem – if she truly didn’t think that adding fuel to the fire would bring attention to her, then maybe people don’t factor in all the likely repercussions when they make accusations.

          • but coming forward was a personally expensive thing to do, so they probably didn’t do it without some serious thought.

            Probably true. But it doesn’t follow that she was telling the truth.

            It’s been obvious for quite a while that a lot of people on the left believe that Kavanaugh getting on the court would be a catastrophe. If Ford is one such person, as seems likely, then the benefit of a false accusation, both altruistic—preventing what she sees as a terrible outcome—and selfish in terms of her future status with her ingroup would be large, so after thinking about it she might well decide to do it.

            There were hundreds, probably thousands, of women in a position to make an equally convincing false charge–all it requires is that at some time in the past the event could have happened. The fact that one or two of them did make the charge is very weak evidence that it is true.

          • Matt M says:

            Even aside from the altruistic “I’m saving the world from Hitler” aim, it’s unclear to me whether we can definitively say that this is even “personally expensive.”

            It’s not costless, but on the net of things, the benefits, even entirely selfish ones, might easily outweigh the costs. It seems likely, for example, that she could probably parlay her minor celebrity into a fairly generous book deal. Or a public speaking career as a “sex assault survivor.”

          • Even simpler, since she is an academic in a world where university faculties are heavily left, she could simply get better positions or more pay because the people making the decisions are grateful to her for her efforts blocking a conservative justice candidate.

          • albatross11 says:

            This article describes research into known-false rape accusations, and the patterns that false accusers usually fall into. FWIW, this doesn’t look at all like Ford.

            As best I can tell (this is not remotely my field), this is based only on cases where the authorities could determine that there was a false accusation or where people were actually let out of prison. So this is still including errors in two directions:

            a. There may be successful false rape accusations that stuck and nobody knows that they were false. Just as with other places where the justice system just flat puts the wrong person in prison, it’s very hard to know how common this is.

            b. There may be real rapes that got incorrectly dismissed as false accusations (for example, if the victim looked too much like the common type of false accuser) and released prisoners who really did it but they were let out because of some massive misconduct somewhere in their case.

            This also doesn’t account for possible political motives for a false accusation. The motive is there–the supreme court is extremely powerful and being able to influence its makeup might be worth a huge personal sacrifice to many people.

            But it’s worth noting that (as the author of this piece did on Twitter) if you were crafting a false accusation, you’d probably do better to make a false accusation that was less messy and harder to dismiss as drunk teenagers misbehaving but thankfully not actually raping anyone. She could as easily have fabricated a claim that he’d been alone in the room and had raped her–there would be the same lack of available evidence now, fewer potential witnesses, and an accusation that couldn’t possibly be excused with a “drunk horny teenagers acting badly” kind of explanation. She’s also clearly smart enough to have fabricated such a story.

            This makes me think that Ford’s telling the truth as she believes it. Maybe she’s somehow got her memories jumbled, or she’s done some kind of memory recovery thing that’s planted false memories in her head, or for that matter maybe she’s just making something up and wasn’t very strategic about it. But that sure doesn’t seem like the way to bet.

          • albatross11 says:

            Matt M:

            The world’s a big place, and not everyone shares my values. But it’s hard for me to imagine subjecting myself and my family to this sort of circus, in exchange for some hoped-for payoff in terms of improved chances at jobs or book deals. Even when everyone’s sympathetic to you (as most decent people are when someone says they’ve been sexually assaulted), it’s still going to be an extremely uncomfortable interaction, with people pointing at her in the streets and casual acquaintances thinking “Wow, I wonder if that’s true or she made it all up.”

            As a thought experiment, it’s interesting to ask how much money you’d have to offer the average divorced liberal college professor with teenaged kids to end up where she has ended up. I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it would be a fair bit of money.

          • Matt M says:

            But the relevant question here isn’t “Would the average person do this?”

            It’s “Would at least one out of ~5 million* people do this?”

            *My incredibly rough approximation for “Females who could credibly claim to have been at a frat party in Maryland sometime within the relevant multi-year period”

          • The Nybbler says:

            @Matt M

            For this specific allegation it’s rather less than that; you need to limit it to private school girls (since I can’t see the preppies partying with the public school kids, not even in Montgomery County, MD) in the right place and time period. That brings it down to a few hundred, maybe. The universe of possible unprovable allegations is much larger, however.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            First, my base assumption that Ford simply made this up, having merely met Kavanaugh at some party in the past, is low. Around 10%.

            I also think trying to weigh the destruction of your old way of life with the creation of a new, possibly better one, is very weird and it makes me uncomfortable to try to put any odds on that.

            But by the Democrats own rhetoric, stopping Kavanaugh is the alternative to The Handmaid’s Tale. If you constantly scream that the sky is going to fall, you can’t just brush off the idea that someone will show up to say a piece just hit them in the head.

          • Matt M says:

            That brings it down to a few hundred, maybe. The universe of possible unprovable allegations is much larger, however.

            Okay, but I don’t think this affects my larger point that the “average person” is irrelevant.

            Even if we drop down a couple orders of magnitude, asking “Would 1% of people be willing to do this” is a lot different than saying “I probably won’t do that, therefore it’s unlikely she’s doing it.”

          • Matt M says:

            First, my base assumption that Ford simply made this up, having merely met Kavanaugh at some party in the past, is low. Around 10%.

            If 10% of the females who “merely met Kavanaugh at some party in the past” were willing to do this, why isn’t he facing dozens of such accusations?

            I feel like all of these conversations are exhibiting a very poor understanding of probability. “It’s incredibly unlikely that any one given person would do this” and “It’s incredibly likely that at least one person would do this” can both co-exist.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            If 10% of the females who “merely met Kavanaugh at some party in the past”

            That’s not very Bayesian. 10% wasn’t the chance that any random woman who knows Kav would lie.

            I had second thoughts about including a specific number, which turn out to be well-founded.

          • Matt M says:

            What do you know about Ford that is causing you to significantly adjust your prior that she’s a liar, compared to any random other women who met him?

            In any case, my point stands. The fact that any given woman is unlikely to fabricate this charge does not negate the fact that at least one woman is likely to fabricate this charge.

          • baconbits9 says:

            The odds aren’t just about the accusation being false, but also mistaken. Was she really attacked but remembered the wrong guy, in a grey situation that has turned into something more sinister in her mind, or some other option?

          • idontknow131647093 says:

            but I think prominent women in general get more threats from crazy people on the internet,

            This is an oft-asserted idea that has no evidence behind it, and honestly needs to die. The only thing there is evidence for is that women who get even minor harassment are treated extremely sympathetically, in particular pseudo-intellectual left-wing women.

            A pattern I’ve typically noticed is that ladies who claim to be harassed a lot on the internet are just lady versions of Milo Yiabopolis. When their ideas are questioned they give embarrassing answers ala Alexandria-Ocasio-Cortez on Jake Tapper (and every other non-puff interview) so then they stop giving debates, claim to be shut down a lot, engage in provocation, and then point at people replying to provocation and call it harassment.

          • albatross11 says:

            What’s the base rate of women willing to concoct a sexual assault allegation to derail a political figure? I don’t know the answer off the top of my head, but it’s way, way lower than 1%.

            One way to start thinking about this is to look at how many high elected officials have had a sexual assault/harassment claim made against them. A quick Google search turned up this article. There are about 430 male members of congress (house and senate). Let’s say there are W women in a position to make a spurious claim of sexual assault/harassment against each male congressman, and that women never get such a claim. Let’s imagine W=100 for now.

            Let P = the probability that a given woman in a position to make a false sexual assault/harassment claim against a congressman[1], given that she’s in a position to do so.

            Finally, let’s imagine all the congressmen are pure as the driven snow, and all those accusations were false ones. What’s the relationship between W and P? Cheating a bit by assuming each congressman who gets accused at all is accused by exactly one woman: There are 43000 women capable of making an accusation. We see seven accusations. To expect seven false accusations in about a year, we’d need

            43000*P = 7

            P = 7/43000 ~= 0.0001

            That seems like an upper bound on the real number, since I’ve assumed all the accusations were false, and it seems unlikely they all were. And maybe W should be smaller.

            My very rough estimate of P here scales linearly with W–if W gets twice as big, P gets half as big. And if we assume that only half of the accusations listed in that article are false, P gets half as big.

            So this is a very rough back-of-the-envelope estimate, but P(random woman in a position to make a false sexual accusation against a powerful male political figure) might be somewhere around 1/10000 = 0.0001. I suspect it’s lower, but it’s probably at least within an order of magnitude. It seems like a reasonable base rate.

            How many women were in a position to make a false accusation against Kavenaugh? I doubt it was 10,000. Maybe 100-1000? (Though I wouldn’t think of Ford as being someone who was at all likely to make some such accusation, as opposed to (say) some pretty young woman clerking for him or some secretary or something.)

            We can check this another way: male SC nominees don’t seem to have this kind of accusation come up very often. Thomas is the last one I know of. (And the accusation there was quite different from this one–uncomfortable sexual innuendo and maybe hoping to talk a subordinate into bed, vs drunken teenage sexual assault.) If the base rate were high enough to expect this to happen, we’d see it happening a lot.

            [1] Used here to stand in for powerful political figures generally.

          • The Nybbler says:

            @albatross11

            I think you’re trying to solve the Drake equation here. Realistically, you have order-of-magnitude uncertainties in each estimate, and furthermore there are “unknown unknowns”.

          • dick says:

            Plus, for a tribally polarizing issue like this, it seems pretty optimistic to think anyone’s position is going to be swayed by statistics.

            Slightly related: “I think you’ll find that the men from my village are born with, eh, something extra,” Tom said tribally.

          • @albatross11:

            What you are missing in the argument is that the payoff to an invented accusation of Kavanaugh is much higher than to a similar accusation of a random congressman, for two reasons:

            1. An accusation with no evidence is going to cost a congressman very few votes, so is unlikely to result in his losing the election–especially unlikely given that most of the time the winner is the incumbent who wins by a sizable margin. But all the accuser has to do this time is persuade two Republican senators that the chance the accusation is true is enough so they shouldn’t confirm Kavenaugh–or that it will look that way to enough voters to matter to the senator. The same unsupported charge that has has a near zero chance of changing the outcome of a congressional election has quite a good chance of changing the outcome of the confirmation process.

            2. One additional conservative justice has a much larger effect on the world than one additional conservative congressman. That has to be discounted by the fact that if they block Kavanaugh, the result may be to get a different conservative senator a few months later. On the other hand, you have to increase the payoff by the effect on the midterm elections of making it look as if Republicans are soft on rape.

            So I get back to my subjective probability for someone who is a committed partisan being willing to tell a lie that will never be exposed in service of a large payoff to her side, and I think the odds that at least one person will be willing to do that are pretty high.

          • Matt M says:

            Plus, for a tribally polarizing issue like this, it seems pretty optimistic to think anyone’s position is going to be swayed by statistics.

            Of course not.

            But that doesn’t mean we can’t use statistics to call out obviously-terrible arguments like “The average person wouldn’t make this up, therefore Ford isn’t making it up.”

          • Matt M says:

            So I get back to my subjective probability for someone who is a committed partisan being willing to tell a lie that will never be exposed in service of a large payoff to her side, and I think the odds that at least one person will be willing to do that are pretty high.

            Agreed.

            I would also push back on albatross’ suggestion that we can look to the past lack of accusations as informative on the probabilities here.

            Clarence Thomas aside, #MeToo is a fairly new thing. The severity of which sexual assault claims are taken has increased probably by an order of magnitude over the last 2-3 years. This type of accusation is simply more likely to work now than it has ever been in the past, therefore, we can’t judge it based on past behaviors.

            I think we could go back on forth as to how high the potential number of false accusers is, but all I’ll say here is that Ford has established that you don’t even need to provide a location or even the year it supposedly happened for your accusation to be “credible.” Nor do you need a single witness available to confirm the two of you were together at any given time. It occurs to me that literally any woman who might conceivably have been in the general geographic vicinity at any time over a multi-year period could make this same claim with equal validity as Ford.

          • dick says:

            But that doesn’t mean we can’t use statistics to call out obviously-terrible arguments…

            The last time we discussed this, you said that Ford being truthful was “just as possible” as Obama being born in Kenya, Seth Rich being murdered by the Clintons, and the US government being behind 9/11.

          • Incurian says:

            …if you were crafting a false accusation, you’d probably do better to make a false accusation that was less messy and harder to dismiss…

            https://youtu.be/rMz7JBRbmNo?t=51

            And from the article:

            …it’s exceedingly rare for a false rape allegation to end in prison time. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, since records began in 1989, in the US there are only 52 cases where men convicted of sexual assault were exonerated because it turned out they were falsely accused.

            By the same method, we can be confident that police very rarely shoot innocent people, because police investigate those claims of wrongful use of force and almost never find them to be substantiated.

          • Matt M says:

            The last time we discussed this, you said that Ford being truthful was “just as possible” as Obama being born in Kenya, Seth Rich being murdered by the Clintons, and the US government being behind 9/11.

            To the extent that the pro-Ford argument is nothing more than “You can’t prove it didn’t happen!” then those are perfectly reasonable analogues.

          • Matt M says:

            By the same method, we can be confident that police very rarely shoot innocent people, because police investigate those claims of wrongful use of force and almost never find them to be substantiated.

            It amazes me that these articles seem to get away with stuff like this.

            They count the total number of sexual assaults by simply counting the number of times a woman claims to have been assaulted.

            But they count false accusations if and only if a man is arrested, convicted, sentenced, and later exonerated after the fact.

            I wonder what these statistics would look like if we flipped the standards here? The total amount of sexual assaults in society consists solely of assaults that are reported and where a victim is arrested, convicted, and sentenced. But the total amount of false accusations is based on a survey where men are asked if they’ve ever been falsely accused of doing something sexual?

          • albatross11 says:

            Actually, survey data from men would be very useful here.

            The problem I have is that so much of this discussion (the one about sexual assault, unreported rapes, etc.) seems to go:

            ideology -> assumed facts -> discussion/proposals

            So I’m very interested in ways to find any kind of ground truth that we can use to make sure our discussions and proposals aren’t just reflecting our starting ideology.

            I mean, it’s really easy to see this when you see some feminists talking about rape. But it looks to me like *everyone* is doing this–inferring from ideology and vaguely remembered media stories to figure out what the facts must be, to justify some proposed policy.

            [ETA:]

            I’ve seen a similar criticism about using the Washington Post’s database on police shootings to infer things about what police shootings look like in the US. Their database draws on police reports to fill in data like whether the person shot dead by the police was armed or was in the middle of a violent crime when shot. There’s an incentive there for the policeman who’s just shot you to write his report to make you look like a terrifying threat that needed to be shot, since he’d like to keep his job. And yet, this database makes conversations around police shootings *enormously* more worthwhile, because we’re not just going on what stories have appeared in a lot of media coverage or what our ideologies tell us must be going on.

            Where would we get better data on the prevalence and nature of false rape/sexual assault accusations? The article I linked to was using a pretty strong standard there–what do false accusations that are detected by the justice system look like. There’s an opportunity for error in both directions there. But we’re not going to get any smarter about this issue without finding some kind of data we can sink our teeth into. Where else would we go to look for it?

          • Incurian says:

            But we’re not going to get any smarter about this issue without finding some kind of data we can sink our teeth into.

            My complaint is not that they used imperfect data, it’s all imperfect. My complaint is that they did not acknowledge the weakness of the data and did not temper the confidence in their conclusions that was based on weak data (I assume, I stopped reading the article shortly after the part I quoted; I apologize in advance if I’m mistaken {<–That’s how you use weak data, with humility}).

          • The last time we discussed this, you said that Ford being truthful was “just as possible”

            To my ear, “probable” is quantitative, “possible” is binary–something either is possible or is not. So there is a sense in which all things that cannot be proven to be false are equally possible, although some are much more probable than others.

            I don’t know if that was the point being made in the comment quoted or not.

          • dick says:

            To the extent that the pro-Ford argument is nothing more than “You can’t prove it didn’t happen!” then those are perfectly reasonable analogues.

            This seems like straight up trolling, and the fact that no one else is saying so seems like a “we don’t punch to the right” rule here.

            But, carrying forward with the laughable pretense that you’re speaking in earnest, the answer is: you can’t just say “there’s no evidence that Ford was assaulted, and no evidence that Obama was born in Kenya, therefore either is just as likely as the other.” You have to also ask, is there evidence that Ford was not assaulted, and is there evidence that Obama was not born in Kenya? To which the answers are no and yes, which is what makes Ford being assaulted more plausible than Obama being Kenyan.

          • Matt M says:

            You have to also ask, is there evidence that Ford was not assaulted, and is there evidence that Obama was not born in Kenya? To which the answers are no and yes, which is what makes Ford being assaulted more plausible than Obama being Kenyan.

            Incorrect.

            The evidence that Ford was not assaulted includes:

            Did not report an assault at the time (or within 10 years)
            Did not discuss an assault, ever, with anyone except her therapist
            Can not produce a single witness to verify her account
            Cannot name where the assault happened
            Cannot even approximate when the assault happened
            Multiple character witnesses insisting Kavanaugh would not, and never has, done something like this
            Etc.

            Now, you can dismiss all of that and say “Well, that doesn’t prove it didn’t happen.”

            But if you’d care to list out all of your “evidence” that Obama was born in Hawaii, I can just as easily respond with “Well, that doesn’t prove the witnesses aren’t lying, the certificate wasn’t forged, etc.”

          • Randy M says:

            This seems like straight up trolling, and the fact that no one else is saying so seems like a “we don’t punch to the right” rule here.

            Or it could be that “prove you aren’t a witch/heretic/child molester” has bad precedent.

          • rlms says:

            @dick
            Indeed. I think it’s the new stupidest thing I’ve seen in the comments here.

            @Randy M
            I don’t believe anyone here is saying Kavanaugh needs to prove he is innocent, merely that the probability he is guilty is non-negligible.

          • dick says:

            But if you’d care to list out all of your “evidence”…

            A discussion about the relative merits of different pieces of evidence is the sort of thing I would have with someone who hadn’t recently announced that he believes his side despite the lack of evidence because it’s his side.

          • Matt M says:

            A discussion about the relative merits of different pieces of evidence is the sort of thing I would have with someone who hadn’t recently announced that he believes his side despite the lack of evidence because it’s his side.

            Which makes me just like everyone else, except more honest.

          • dick says:

            Or it could be that “prove you aren’t a witch/heretic/child molester” has bad precedent.

            No one is demanding that. Or rather, lots of people are demanding that, on Daily Kos and The_Donald and other fora that aren’t nominally associated with rational inquiry and constructive debate, and I’m here to avoid them as well as the people they’re having their pointless and nakedly partisan shouting match with.

          • Randy M says:

            I don’t believe anyone here is saying Kavanaugh needs to prove he is innocent, merely that the probability he is guilty is non-negligible.

            So the argument is between Matt’s negligible and dick’s non-negligible but impossible to positively identify as there has been zero corroborating evidence and you expect us to ride in to chastise Matt about the difference between 10^-5 and 10^-??

          • dick says:

            Which makes me just like everyone else, except more honest.

            I’m pretty consistently and obviously liberal, and I don’t find Ford’s allegations compelling. (Nor do I find the proposition that they’re fabricated compelling). I’m not even convinced that, if he did exactly what she alleges, that it should bar him from being confirmed! But there’s not a lot of room for nuanced discussion when Mr. “Yeah, I guess it’s possible she’s telling the truth, the same way it’s possible that Obama tortured and murdered a hooker” is posting fifty times a day.

          • rlms says:

            @Randy M
            Given that in a “he-said-she-said” situation, a figure in the ballpark of 0.3 seems appropriate for your value of ?, I do indeed expect chastisement. Or do you think the probability of Ford telling the truth is only insignificantly larger than 0.001%?

          • quanta413 says:

            Given that in a “he-said-she-said” situation, a figure in the ballpark of 0.3 seems appropriate for your value of ?, I do indeed expect chastisement.

            This is not just any “he-said-she-said” situation. I’d take odds like 50/50 if the accusation was made about something that occurred last month, and it could be confirmed that the two were at a party together. And there was no reason to suspect many people had a motive to slander the accused.

            This was ~30 years ago with no location or time specified. And it’s a supreme court nominee in the middle of an immense partisan battle.

            Assigning a probability of .5 is like Matt’s mistake just in the opposite direction. It basically assumes that the fact we’re talking about a supreme court nominee who Democrats are desperate to prevent from being seated is totally irrelevant.

          • Nick says:

            Dick, in the intervening thread literally everyone else disagreed with Matt, so no, we do not operate on a “we don’t punch to the right” rule. I thought Matt’s statement was poorly worded at best, but I’m not interested in having that argument.

            One of the nice things about text discussions is that you don’t actually have to respond to everyone. If you think Matt’s argument is so bad that he must be trolling, you can ignore him. The worst he can do to you is bring up something completely outrageous that derails everyone else’s discussion, but, well….

          • albatross11 says:

            We all have a temptation to evaluate evidence in light of our desired conclusion. But it’s a temptation we should try to resist–not by trying extra hard to be epistemicaly virtuous (that probably doesn’t help as much as we’d like), but rather by reducing a factual question to some kind of question of logic or mathematics that can be answered by System 2 instead of System 1. (AKA “Shut up and multiply.”)

            My best guess is that Ford believes the accusation she’s making (90%). I imagine that there is some reasonable chance (maybe 10%?) that she’s sincerely remembering something that never happened, and probably at least 30% that her memory is pretty seriously jumbled by the passage of time and the trauma of the event, to the point where she doesn’t have a basically accurate explanation of what happened. Both probabilities go up quite a bit if she has “recovered” this memory in therapy over many hard and painful sessions.

            Assuming it happened as she remembers, there’s some chance of a misidentification–depending on how well she knew Kavenaugh that could be quite low or pretty high. (For example, if she knew him on a first-name basis and had spent a lot of time around him, then the probability she misidentified him is almost 0% unless she’s face blind or something. On the other hand, if she’d never met him but had seen him at a couple parties sometime, the probability of a misidentification is probably rather higher. I’m not sure how to put a number of this–if he was a stranger to her, maybe 20%? (There must be good data on misidentification by eyewitnesses somewhere….)

            I’d guess something around a 20%-30% chance that Kavenaugh might sincerely not remember such an incident assuming it occurred exactly as she says.

            So maybe we have

            Sincere * Accurate * Correct ID which is probably something like

            0.9 * 0.9* 1 = 0.81 if she knew him well, and

            0.9 * 0.9 * 0.7 = 0.56 if she didn’t know him at all.

            Assuming it happened, let’s say there’s a 0.2 probability he sincerely doesn’t remember it. That gets us to

            P( he did it and is lying about it)

            between 0.81 * 0.8 = 0.64 and 0.56 * 0.8 = 0.45

            This is all back-of-the-envelope, but it seems at least like a reasonable first cut, and I’m pretty sure I’m not letting my team spirit infect at least the multiplication (which is being done by Sage, not me!).

            The reason I’m interested in this particular probability is because this is the situation where I’d say he was disqualified to be a justice–if he did this sexual assault and now is knowingly lying about it, then that seems like a major character issue sufficient to refuse to put him on the court.

            I’m not convinced that the drunken sexual assault as a teenager would be disqualifying otherwise–especially if he genuinely has no memory of it now. (Reasons to say it’s disqualifying would be if you thought it showed important things about his personality or character now, or if you think that sending the signal that sexual assault is bad is important enough to be worth derailing an otherwise acceptable SC nominee, with the added caveat that the deterrent/signaling effect is probably lessened in that about half the country thinks he didn’t do it.)

            The last question is whether something like a 0.5 probability that he’s sufficiently unethical to knowingly lie under oath about something like this is sufficient to disqualify him from the SC. That is, given that we don’t know what happened but accept something like the above probabilities, should we want him on the SC?

            Caveat #1: We also care about future SC nominations. Ford looks (to me) quite unlikely to be making it up[1]. But the other two accusations, especially the most recent one, looks made-up to me. This is basically a worked example, showing that we can expect made-up accusations or hazy memories reshaped into accusations as a feature of SC nominations, probably many in the near future. It’s probably not so hard to create accusations that have something like this level of plausibility, and yet we’d like to be able to nominate judges in the future without this happening every time.

            Caveat #2: You might also disagree about whether knowingly lying under oath in this case is disqualifying. I think a judge ought not to lie under oath, even when he thinks the questions are unfair. Without dragging up too many old political battles, I think Clinton’s defenders were able to justify this sort of behavior to themselves in the past. IMO, it’s bullshit.

            [1] First, because she doesn’t fit the pattern of known false rape accusations. Second, because she seems to have told people close to her that it happened some years ago–it’s hard to believe that she was planning this two years ago, just in case he got nominated to the SC. Third, because an intentional derailing accusation could as easily have been much more damning and had no witnesses (“He pulled me into a dark room and raped me while I screamed and cried for him to stop. When I finally got away, nobody had heard anything over the loud music.”)

          • albatross11 says:

            Addendum:

            If she only realized he was the guy a couple years ago and before that didn’t know who had done it, then the probability of misidentification seems to me to be much, much higher. Maybe 50%?

            I’ve shown my work, so if you disagree, it might be interesting to make an argument about either my calculation or my specific assumed probabilities.

          • Nornagest says:

            Assuming it happened, let’s say there’s a 0.2 probability he sincerely doesn’t remember it.

            That sounds low to me. I’m pretty sure I didn’t nonconsensually grope anyone in high school, but I’m also pretty sure I remember a lot less than 80% of the stuff I did at parties in those years, especially if alcohol was involved — and I’ve got a good memory, and Kavenaugh’s much older than I am.

            Looking at it another way, if we assume you’re more likely to remember something the more significant it is to you, and we’re giving Ford a 20% chance of misremembering the event, then we should only expect the same of Kavenaugh if it meant as much to him as it did to her. That doesn’t seem psychologically realistic to me.

          • Randy M says:

            First, because she doesn’t fit the pattern of known false rape accusations.

            Is this based on false accusations shown to be so at trial? Because there’s not much reason to believe that pattern would hold for accusations made in public but not to authorities.

            That said, you’re probably right that she believes her story at this point, but after 30 years and some coaching, I don’t think that says all that much about reality.

          • Matt M says:

            But there’s not a lot of room for nuanced discussion when Mr. “Yeah, I guess it’s possible she’s telling the truth, the same way it’s possible that Obama tortured and murdered a hooker” is posting fifty times a day.

            Look, my issue here is with her allegations being automatically referred to as “credible” or the odds “non-negligible” based, entirely, on the fact that they cannot be directly proven to not have happened. And especially so, given that the allegations against Kavanaugh are so incredibly vague as to make it literally impossible for anyone to ever prove they did not happen.

            If “nobody can prove it didn’t happen” is what makes something “credible” then, in that case, virtually every wild-eyed conspiracy theory is credible. That is the point of the analogy.

            The point of the analogy is NOT to suggest that “Ford made this up” is literally as statistically probable as “Bush did 9/11.” Because yes, sexual assaults are quite common, and grand political schemes of false flag terrorist attacks are quite rare.

            What annoys me here most is the prospect of someone being torn down over a literal non-falsifiable claim. We reject non-falsifiable claims in pretty much every other circumstance. But in this one they’re “credible” and the odds that they are being fabricated are “non-negligible.” Why? Because politics, that’s why.

            That’s dumb, and it deserves to be called out as dumb.

            Remember after Trump’s election when the MSM was riding high on their “fact-checking” exercises, and how after literally any statement he ever made, they would add their new favorite sentence ever: “The President offered no evidence for his claims.” Have we seen ANY of these media outlets follow-up Ford’s allegations with that line? Why do you suppose not?

          • you can’t just say “there’s no evidence that Ford was assaulted, and no evidence that Obama was born in Kenya, therefore either is just as likely as the other.”

            He didn’t say that. He didn’t imply that. The bit he quoted and responded to was about “possible” not “likely.”

            As I just pointed out:

            So there is a sense in which all things that cannot be proven to be false are equally possible, although some are much more probable than others.

            The point being that “possible” is a binary characteristic, not a matter of degree. Something either is possible or it isn’t.

          • rlms says:

            @quanta413
            Do you have any statistics on how frequently accusations of this kind (i.e. where politics is at stake) are found to be false? If not, 50/50 seems appropriate; one could even argue for a higher probability of truth by using accusations of sexual assault in general. But in any case, I’m not tied to the 50/50 figure. I think reasonable people could come up with a wide range of range of estimates. However, I don’t think a reasonable person could be more than 99% sure in either direction, and even a highly unreasonable figure of say 99.9% certainty is still not comparable with wacky conspiracy theories.

          • quanta413 says:

            @albatross11

            My best guess is that Ford believes the accusation she’s making (90%).

            I’m don’t think it makes sense to peg this at 90%. You’re treating the fact that there’s a strong reason to try to get rid of Kavanaugh and that he’s in the news as irrelevant.

            90-95% is what I’d use in the case that we were looking at a randomly chosen accusation including lots of private ones we don’t hear about. But we already know what accusation we’re talking about.

            I’ll try to explain why I think the conceptual mistake is so severe by making a slightly more ridiculous example in the same spirit.

            This is similar to reasoning about who shot the President from knowledge of regular shootings. Without all the evidence we have, you’d conclude that it was probably the President’s spouse or a close acquaintance. When really, it’s usually someone he’s never met who disagrees with him politically and occasionally someone who thinks Jodie Foster will pay attention to them if they kill the President.

            @rlms

            I don’t think we’re going to find any good numbers for that. For one thing, the nature of sexual assault claims tends to make them hard to prove or disprove. Especially when we’re talking “one time at a party…”. On top of that until recently it’s unlikely such a tactic would have worked at all even if the candidate did it and there was corroborating evidence or witnesses. Yet there has been a recent upsurge in successful takedowns of relatively powerful people for bad behavior.

            See my reasoning for why just using normal probabilities fails above in my response to albatross.

            Using basic probability only works when you have reasonable data in a comparable situation or a strong theoretical model like physics. We do not have anything like either of those things, and we have lots of reasons to believe that the situation is not comparable. It’s like a temporary state of Knightian uncertainty. When you’re in that sort of situation, calculating as if you weren’t in it can be counterproductive.

            I think the overinterpretation of Matt’s hyperbole is something he can answer. He’s already elaborated.

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Third, because an intentional derailing accusation could as easily have been much more damning…

            “Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.” –Screwtape

          • dick says:

            @ Matt M

            Look, my issue here is with her allegations being automatically referred to as “credible”…

            So, Diane Feinstein says she believes Ford despite the lack of evidence, and you call that dumb. Then you say you believe Kavanaugh despite the lack of evidence, but we’re not supposed to call that dumb? Is this some sort of “I shall highlight the stupidity of the other side by adopting it” performance art, to which you are so committed as to not break character for weeks on end?

            @ DavidFriedman

            The point being that “possible” is a binary characteristic, not a matter of degree. Something either is possible or it isn’t.

            Riiiiight. Suppose there were an argument going on over whether you’re really in the SCA. You claim to be in the SCA, someone else claims that you’re making it up to sound more interesting. My contribution to the discussion is, “Sure, it’s possible DavidFriedman is in the SCA. It’s also possible that our government did 9/11.” Would you say I’m supporting your claim or disputing it?

          • Matt M says:

            So, Diane Feinstein says she believes Ford despite the lack of evidence, and you call that dumb. Then you say you believe Kavanaugh despite the lack of evidence, but we’re not supposed to call that dumb? Is this some sort of “I shall highlight the stupidity of the other side by adopting it” performance art, to which you are so committed as to not break character for weeks on end?

            I believe the first first time I said “I believe Kavanaugh despite no evidence” I also said “If they can do this, so can I.”

            Which means, yes, the intent is to highlight the stupidity of automatically believing the victim (and to reinforce that “innocent until proven guilty” is a good freaking idea, not just some weird loophole that happens to exist for no real reason in the criminal law but can be safely discarded in all other circumstances)

          • albatross11 says:

            quanta:

            It has been reported that she named Kavenaugh to her husband and therapist and some others a couple years ago. If that’s true, then she’s not making up a new accusation against him now that he’s a SC nominee.

            It looks to me like what happened is that she had an unsubstantiated accusation to make against him, which may be true or false but is unprovable at this point. And she came forward with it when he was heavily in the news as a SC nominee–perhaps for political reasons, perhaps for others.

          • quanta413 says:

            @albatross11

            The reports I’ve seen say her therapist’s notes don’t mention Kavanaugh’s name so we are back to relying on what she says. I don’t think that changes much. If her therapist was questioned and couldn’t confirm Kavanaugh’s name from his memory, that may even point in the opposite direction.

            If her therapist’s notes do have Kavanaugh’s name, I agree that is positive evidence.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            It has been reported that she named Kavenaugh to her husband and therapist and some others a couple years ago. If that’s true, then she’s not making up a new accusation against him now that he’s a SC nominee.

            Kavanaugh’s name came up in March 2012 as a possible SCOTUS judge should Romney win. This morning, we learned she started her therapy in May 2012.

            (NB: there is also a perfectly reasonable explanation that she started the therapy because it really did happen and seeing his name in the news reminded her of it. But “she started this long process before his name came up as a nominee” is incorrect.)

            *EDIT*: March 2012 New Yorker article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/26/holding-court/amp

            Written by the same Toobin who is talking on CNN.

          • dick says:

            Is this some sort of “I shall highlight the stupidity of the other side by adopting it” performance art?

            yes, the intent is to highlight the stupidity of automatically believing the victim

            Boy, I’m confused. My position is that both sides are plausible, so a rational person should accept that, which means rejecting the ideologically comfortable lies “She’s definitely telling the truth” and “She’s definitely a fraud.” I’ve been arguing with you because it seemed like your position was that I’m wrong – that she is, if not definitely a fraud, so close to it that a rational person can treat her like one. But now, it seems like you’re saying that you agreed with me all along, but have been acting like someone who uncritically disbelieves her, in order to “highlight the stupidity” of people who uncritically believe her? Do I have this right?

          • Thomas Jørgensen says:

            Oh for. The political payoff for successfully stopping Kavanaugh via false accusation is zero. Because absent the crime he is an spherical exemplar of a Federalist Society supreme pick, and the republicans are going to hold the senate long enough to put someone on the bench, and they are simply going to pick the next name out of the hat who will hold precisely the same views. Changing the name of the person on the court and delaying things for four weeks is not worth the hassle. All of which is obvious.

            However, in the case where the allegations are true… Well, not having a the guy who nearly raped you on the supremes? That is a cause for which nearly any amount of personal sacrifice is justified.

            Sure, the republicans are just going to seat someone else horrifying, but at least you will keep your self-respect.

          • Oh for. The political payoff for successfully stopping Kavanaugh via false accusation is zero.

            I disagree, for two reasons. If they stop him, that almost certainly pushes the vote on the next candidate past the election. If the Democrats take control of the senate, which I think prediction markets gave as a 30% chance recently, the Republicans have until January 2nd to get a second candidate through. Democratic senators currently up for reelection in red states will either be out of the senate or safe for six years at that point, so have little reason to support a Republican candidate. If the Democrats can get two Republican senators to vote against the new candidate, they can block him or her.

            Second, whether or not Kavanaugh is blocked, Ford might well believe that the accusations will cost the Republicans votes in November–perhaps especially if he is confirmed.

            It’s relevant that a lot of people left of center have been describing both the Kavanaugh issue and this election as of absolutely crucial, near end of the world, importance.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      The fence was torn down. The bull is goring people left and right. The correct answer is “put the fence back up” and not “lessons in how to treat goring wounds.”

      • Matt M says:

        Teach bulls not to gore!

        • BBA says:

          …you know, that’s precisely what’s wrong with your metaphor. We’re supposed to be better than the animals. Degraded and devolved as we are, are we not men?

          • Matt M says:

            It was really meant as a throwaway joke, not as a literal metaphor.

          • Incurian says:

            Isn’t that an oxymoron?

          • quanta413 says:

            Some people are teachable. Not all people are teachable. My personal guess is that most people who commit clear and obvious rape (I mean morally clear if you knew all the evidence; not clear in the sense the evidence is known by anyone) probably aren’t teachable.

            I could imagine ways to discourage rapists while mostly maintaining current sexual mores, but those ways involve severe physical punishment. Punishment probably won’t happen enough if it relies upon regular standards of proof through the law system rather than vigilantism.

            I can also imagine a society with a much stricter sexual morality reducing the frequency of rape by making strong norms controlling when it’s proper to have sex, etc. And punishing stepping out of line harshly. But that morality is closer to the morality of centuries or millenia ago than now.

            Moral exhortation is not that effective. We’re not even good at morally exhorting people not to drink themselves to death or to stop taking opiates while we repeatedly revive them from the brink of death…

            That aside for more fuzzy relationship unpleasantness- which is not an insignificant complaint- Conrad Honcho isn’t obviously wrong. I’m not a fan of the solution of returning to earlier stricter social mores, but I’m not a fan of current mores either.

          • Randy M says:

            My personal guess is that most people who commit clear and obvious rape (I mean morally clear if you knew all the evidence; not clear in the sense the evidence is known by anyone) probably aren’t teachable.

            Because society does in fact teach men not to rape. For example, anyone who has seen Back to the Future has seen an example of a lesson that raping is bad. It also teaches “don’t hit”, be kind, and many other lessons that would suggest forcible anything, let along intercourse, is not something good people do. People who haven’t learned that lesson by the time they are capable of raping are not raping for lack of knowing not to.

          • Matt M says:

            Right.

            “Teach men not to rape” has always actually been more of a “Try to convince men that our (much more expansive than what society has long defined it as) definition of rape is the correct one.”

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Conrad Honcho isn’t obviously wrong.

            I will take that as high praise.

            As for “teaching men not to rape,” as Matt says, an awful lot of that involves expanding the definition of rape. I could be okay with this (while calling it something besides “rape”) if we could also teach women to object to this behavior immediately and vigorously and shame women who do not.

            Consider James Franco pushing a girl’s head into his lap (I know he was accused of doing worse things than this). Well, James Franco does that because it works for James Franco. By the time he’s doing that to a girl who objects, that’s probably the 10th girl whose head Franco has pushed into his lap that week, and the other nine said “Oh, this is excellent. The very reason I got into James Franco’s car is because James Franco is rich, famous and attractive, and I was very much looking forward to putting my head in his lap.”

            Now, I don’t do what James Franco does. I like to think it’s because of my morality, but it probably also has something to do with the fact that I am not as rich, handsome, or famous as Franco, and so pushing girls’ heads into my lap will almost never result in a positive outcome for me.

            So hey, I’m already “taught.” How do you teach Franco? Well, lecturing from me isn’t going to do a damn bit of good. Franco does not care what I think. The only opinions Franco cares about is those of the girls whose heads he’s pushing into his lap (and only their opinion vis-a-vis their willingness to have their heads pushed into James Franco’s lap). If even 50% of the women whose heads James Franco tried to push into his lap said “excuse me, Mr. Franco, but I am not interested in having my head pushed into your lap and will now remove myself from your presence,” then James Franco would stop pushing girls’ heads into his lap because it would no longer accomplish his goal of having attractive girls’ heads in his lap.

            If you want to stop Franco’s behavior, you need to teach women not to ever consent to have their heads in Franco’s lap, but I don’t see a lot of feminists writing thinkpieces about that. In fact they tend to do the opposite and criticize people who suggest that route for “slut shaming.” So I’m pretty sure this behavior is going to continue, forever.

          • Matt M says:

            while calling it something besides “rape”

            They will absolutely not agree to this. The notion that the activities that have been folded into rape are “not as bad” as traditional rape is completely unacceptable. The confusion of language here is deliberate, and is a cornerstone of their strategy.

          • quanta413 says:

            @Conrad Honcho

            I will take that as high praise.

            I originally just said “isn’t wrong.” But I don’t know whether you’re right either. I’m not socially that conservative and didn’t want to give people the wrong impression about what I thought. I’m not sure if you’re more wrong or right than other popular ideas.

            From a selfish point of view, I prefer significantly looser sexual mores than Catholic doctrine. But at the same time, I’m not on board with college mores either. They’re not good.

          • BBA says:

            I was mostly getting at how blaming the change in societal values disregards personal responsibility, and I thought conservatives were all about personal responsibility.

            Also, that Devo song was stuck in my head. It doesn’t have anything to do with the topic at hand, but there’s never a bad reason to link Devo.

          • quanta413 says:

            @BBA

            I was mostly getting at how blaming the change in societal values disregards personal responsibility, and I thought conservatives were all about personal responsibility.

            Republican talking points might be something something personal responsibility. Like Democrat talking points might be something something tax the rich.

            But both of those are soundbites. They are pretty bad foundations.

            “Keep the fence” is a pretty conservative sentiment. It’s a better summary of conservative political philosophy than “personal responsibility”.

            If I had to make a matching sentiment for progressivism it’d be something like “we can build a better fence”.

            “Personal responsibility” is a better sentiment for ancaps than conservatives.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Eh, I just really liked the statement “Conrad Honcho isn’t obviously wrong.” If we had signatures on this forum, that quote would be my new sig.

            Also, I’m not big on “personal responsibility.” It’s really hard and people fail at it all the time. I’m more interested in social norms and patterns of behavior that tend towards better outcomes over time and over the population. If men were angels we would have no need of government (or church or whatever), but that is not the nature of men.

          • quanta413 says:

            Eh, I just really liked the statement “Conrad Honcho isn’t obviously wrong.” If we had signatures on this forum, that quote would be my new sig.

            I shall revel in the glory of this accomplishment then.

            Almost the second time I got quoted in a forum signature. So close…

    • Aapje says:

      It’s a pretty decent piece with a lot of nuance, although it still suffers a bit from conventional feminists dogma, like the assertion that “women complainants, in particular, have been conventionally disbelieved and discredited”, when it’s actually the opposite in situations where men accuse women of abuse.

      Then again, in other ways it avoids dogma, like the assertion that we can’t judge people from another time and place (and thus culture) with the standards of today.

      However, I’m a little cynical because this nuance and reason seems to mainly come to the fore when someone from the ingroup is accused, but way way less often when outgroup is accused.

    • fortaleza84 says:

      Members of the outgroup say sensible things all the time, but when they do it’s because they are hypocritically pretending to be reasonable because it serves their immediate needs at the moment — they are either hiding in the motte or an unexpected ox is being gored.

      Anyway, it certainly feels that way. 🙂

    • Plumber says:

      “….Sounds sensible? Uh oh, you just agreed with Whqvgu Ohgyre!

      @rims,

      I had to skim quite a bit of the essay you linked to to find out that “Whqvgu Ohgyre” is “University of California, Berkeley, professor and gender theorist Judith Butler”, so mission accomplished your code game got me to skim some of the article.

      Now please tell me why I should be suprised that something said by Judith Butler (who I’ve no memory of hearing about before your link) would make sense.

      • CatCube says:

        “Whqvgu Ohgyre” is in ROT13, which is a substitution cypher where you take every letter of your text and rotate it 13 places through the alphabet. “A” becomes “N”, “B” becomes “O”, and “C” becomes “P”. This has the advantage that encryption and decryption are the same thing–if you ROT13 again, “N” will be turned back to “A”, “O” to “B”, etc. There are browser plugins for it, or you can go here: https://rot13.com and cut and paste in the text to decrypt it. It gets used on a lot of internet sites to do things like hide spoilers, or as here to hide the answer to a quiz question.

        As far as why anybody would care about that, since a bunch of us are on the right here and have some pretty deep-seated objections to the work of Butler (who we’d expect to normally take the other side of this debate, where Title IX Star Chambers are good and right), he’s doing something like posting the quote “An absolute and permanent ban on vivisection is not only a necessary law to protect animals and to show sympathy with their pain, but it is also a law for humanity itself…” so you can then say, “Do you know who said that? Herman Goering! You just agreed with Herman Goering! How does that make you feel?”

        To be fairer to Butler, it’s very possible that she’s been saying this for a while. I don’t read much about her, so I don’t know what her stance has been over time. There are certainly people on the left who recognize that the rather evidence-free standard used for these tribunals is troubling; several colleges have had open letters from their law school faculty pointing out that not permitting the accused to know enough detail to rebut their accusations, or to question their accusers violates most notions of due process.

        For his point, all I can say is that it’s good to see some respected gender theorist say something that makes sense for once–a stopped clock is right twice a day, after all. Hopefully she’ll actually apply this to everybody, not just one of her ingroup. We’ll see, though.

        • Incurian says:

          We could halve the prevalence of Type I Errors by switching to military time!

        • Plumber says:

          @CatCube,

          Thanks, that explains a lot!

        • Aapje says:

          One reason why I don’t care much for Butler as an academic is because her methodology is awful* and her writing is (probably necessarily) nigh impenetrable (because otherwise her poor methodology would be obvious).

          Her claims have, as with most feminism, a core of truth that is then taken to absurd extremes. One of her main claims is that gender is a performance, but this is taken to the extreme where it is argued that there are no fundamental differences between the sexes. Or as Butler puts it:

          The spectres of discontinuity and incoherence themselves thinkable only in relation to existing norms of continuity and coherence, are constantly prohibited and produced by the very laws that seek to establish causal or expressive lines of connection among biological sex, culturally constituted genders and the ‘expression’ or ‘effect’ of both in the manifestation of sexual desire through sexual practice.

          So my main surprise at the earlier quote was not so much the content, but the clarity of the writing. Apparently, Butler can be legible.

          * For example, she often builds on the work of Freud, which is like trying to build a house on quicksand. However, in engineering trying to do the impossible will obviously fail, while in philosophy you can write the most abject nonsense without a reality check.

      • Nick says:

        ETA: Looks like CatCube ninja’d me. Oh well.

        (Bearing Scott’s warning above in mind, I’m going to try to be as fair as I can here. Scrutiny welcome.)

        It’s surprising because Title IX investigations have been supported, generally by feminists and those on the left, because the intent is justice for victims of rape or sexual abuse on campuses. Title IX has come under fire, though—generally by those on the right—, for having too low an evidentiary standard, not respecting due process or imposing draconian interim restrictions, having policies that define rape too broadly, and so on. Here’s a good article from The Atlantic on the case against contemporary campus rape policies. Key quote as to the evidentiary standards adopted under the Obama administration:

        The most significant requirement in the “Dear Colleague” letter was the adoption, by all colleges, in all adjudications involving allegations of sexual misconduct, of the lowest possible burden of proof, a “preponderance of evidence”—often described as just over a 50 percent likelihood of guilt. (Many universities were already using this standard, but others favored a “clear and convincing evidence” standard, requiring roughly a 75 percent likelihood of guilt. Criminal courts require proof “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the highest legal standard for finding guilt.)

        The chief concern here is that these policies and investigations sometimes have the result that a student cannot get an education even when he or she has been cleared of wrongdoing or there remains great doubt. This is why The Atlantic later writes,

        the preponderance-of-evidence standard is held to be appropriate by the Supreme Court in civil litigation involving discrimination. But the Court has also ruled that the clear-and-convincing standard is appropriate for those civil proceedings where “particularly important individual interests or rights are at stake.”

        This is a problem for supporters of Title IX (many of whom, again, are leftists and/or feminists). Justice is not always served, regardless of the noble intentions of those carrying out these investigations. They know this—leftist academics have to their credit been studying this sort of thing for decades, and have developed many tools to apply to Title IX too—but there is apparently a widespread failure to do so. So this is the first layer of hypocrisy.

        Now, the Ronell–Reitman case is a Title IX investigation too, but an unusual one. Most cases of Title IX—that capture media attention, at least—are more like the Bonso case in the beginning of the Atlantic article, where it’s between two students and alcohol is involved. (This is not a statement that all these cases “really” are or are not rape.) But the Ronell–Reitman case is between a graduate student (Reitman) and his advisor (Ronell), where the graduate student is gay and the advisor a feminist scholar and lesbian. Alcohol isn’t involved at all, and there are complicating factors like the florid language the two used when privately communicating. The last factor is a draft of a letter by prominent academics in support of Ronell which was leaked.

        Most folks left or right and feminist or not took a very dim view of the letter, as the author of that New Yorker piece evidently does too. On top of the hypocrisy of supporting Title IX for so long, and #MeToo for that matter, it looks all the more hypocritical for these scholars to be criticizing it only now that it comes for one of their own. Butler’s response is better—the sort of criticisms a critic of Title IX might be inclined to agree with—but may still be perceived the same way.

        This comes with particular force at a time when there is disagreement between whether Christine Blasey Ford’s or Deborah Ramirez’s accusations against Kavanaugh are credible or not. Someone inclined to defend or believe Kavanaugh—a group with considerable overlap with critics of Title IX and with skeptics of perceived excesses of #MeToo—would likely agree vociferously that “in public culture right now an allegation of sexual harassment can be immediately taken to be the proof of the claim” and that “Since women complainants, in particular, have been conventionally disbelieved and discredited, the trend is now reversed so that whoever speaks is assumed to speak the truth” and that “Legal procedures for the fair adjudication of such claims are sometimes sidestepped altogether as the media becomes the new public tribunal.”

        Speaking personally, and to make clear my own bias here, I definitely give Butler credit for adding, “I note with some irony that most people on the liberal-left abhor the lack of due process in the indefinite detention of migrants, that we underscore the importance of due process in the civil rights movement because it provided a legal mechanism to protect black men unfairly accused of acting in a seductive way toward white women.” Butler lays bare that first layer of hypocrisy, of leftist academics supporting Title IX apparently unreflectively. I don’t know whether Butler has known about this irony for a long time, or spoken or written against it. Not knowing that larger context—which is required for a fair appraisal of Butler here—I’ll only say it would sound a lot more sincere if this were being said in context other than the allegations against Ronell.

  10. Nick says:

    Did anyone see this article from The Hedgehog Review? “What Is It Like to Be a Man?” by Phil Christman, subtitled “Sometimes we men feel like a bad joke.”

    It’s well written and thought-provoking, but it really rubs me the wrong way. I can’t seem to get my thoughts in order about it, though, so I’d like to see what you folks think of it.

    • Evan Þ says:

      As close as I can tell, it rubs me the wrong way in that it reduces masculinity to the Duty to Protect. That’s part of it, and perhaps the part that’s seeped most into the cultural zeitgeist, but not all. At risk of conflating manhood with husband-hood, and moving from cultural to religious, the Bible calls us to be servant leaders – which includes protection, but goes well beyond it, outside the realm of “lurid, bad-movie scenarios” to the everyday.

      • Randy M says:

        At risk of conflating manhood with husband-hood, and moving from cultural to religious, the Bible calls us to be servant leaders

        Source?
        A quick search did not turn up “servant” in any marriage context.

        • Deiseach says:

          A quick search did not turn up “servant” in any marriage context.

          So far as I understand it, and I’m not up on current non-denominational Protestant hermeneutics, it’s not necessarily within the context of marriage, it’s the idea that “The last shall be first and the first shall be last” from the Parable of the Labourers in the Vineyard, and the washing of the feet at the Last Supper where Jesus says ” “Do you understand what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. 14 If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15 For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you.”

          So the idea is that within Christianity, leaders should be at the service of those they lead (as in the papal title “servant of the servants of God”), and that this carries over into marriage where the husband is head of the household (as Christ is the Bridegroom and Head of the Church) and husbands should be to their wives as Christ is to the Church (see St Paul: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her”).

          • Randy M says:

            Yeah, I was asking for context because there is sometimes a tendency to place very heave emphasis on the modifier there, to the extent that it almost becomes a negation.
            Worth keeping in mind that not only did Christ suffer and die (and that can’t be minimized) for the church, he also chose, instructs, and disciplines the church.
            I think the fairest understanding of Christian leadership is that the responsibility is emphasized and the privileges diminished, and that a good leader needs to understand the perspective of, and have the humility of, even the lowliest member of the organization.

          • Evan Þ says:

            +1: Deiseach got it exactly right. The term isn’t in the Bible, but the concept is.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      Looking at it from the outside, I think he’s generalizing his own neurotic take on masculinity to men in general.

      It’s entirely plausible that he’s not the only one with his point of view, and that there are many more men with milder versions of the same problem.

      However, there are other men who have different bad takes on masculinity, and yet others who have a version of masculinity which works in favor of their lives rather than against them.

      • quanta413 says:

        You said what I was feeling but couldn’t enunciate. Neurotic is the perfect adjective in this case.

        And Christ the length of it! So many words for so little substance. I’m bad, but I hope I’m not that bad.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Here’s a tool which I think can analyse a lot: Karen Horney (an early psychoanalyst) if I understand her correctly, said that if people are mistreated as children (neglected, abused, or pushed to mature faster than they can) are apt to conclude that just being a human isn’t good enough, so they adopt impossible standards, such as always being right, always being altruistic, or always winning. It’s possible that one person will have multiple incompatible impossible standards.

          I should take another crack at reading her– she gets into the effects of finding out that one isn’t living up those strongly held standards, and I don’t know whether she describes treatment.

          Anyway, the fellow who wrote the article has a clear case of impossible standards.

          • Aapje says:

            It seems to me that there are a wide range of coping mechanisms and behavioral adaptations, not just high standards. It also seems to me that such a need doesn’t (only) have to reflect mistreatment, but can result from a specific personality or mental aberration. For example, a naturally highly anxious person may need certain coping mechanism.

            Arguable even most ‘normal’ humans have limited capability of dealing with reality and apply coping mechanisms.

            Her being a psychoanalyst raises some strong red flags as that field has a history of coming up with fancy theories and then searching for cherry picked evidence or pseudo-evidence.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            The pattern I’m talking about isn’t high standards, it’s impossible standards.

          • BBA says:

            Now you have me wondering. Do my impossible standards for myself spring from my background as a burnt-out child prodigy? Food for thought.

        • Nornagest says:

          Neurotic is the perfect adjective in this case.

          Not just neurotic, but neurotic and trying to shoehorn itself into a worldview that’s totally incompatible with that kind of neuroticism. It’s like Woody Allen playing a Clint Eastwood character.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Epistemic status: Never seen a Woody Allen movie.

            “I know what you are thinking… well, no actually that is presumptuous of me, as people we often don’t even know what we are thinking ourselves how could I know what you are thinking. Sometimes I lie in bed wondering, was it 5 shots or 6? Sure its the most powerful handgun in the world, but what does that even mean? Does that make me powerful or is this just replacing masturbation for me? And would shooting you make my day honestly. How sick do you have to be to think of killing someone as making your day?”

      • beleester says:

        Agreed. There’s not a lot that I outright disagree with – it’s true that I sometimes stupidly avoid making my life easier because I think “I’m a man, I’ve got this!” (or a related thought like “Do I really need that?”). It’s true that some of my urges to exercise or work hard come from trying to measure up to my (unreachable) ideal of how a “real adult” would live their life. It’s depressing, on some level, to know that you aren’t Batman.

        But he seems to feel those urges a lot more strongly than I do, which is why I can make quips about not being Batman, while he writes a long column about how he feels like a failure for not being as manly as he could possibly be.

      • Conrad Honcho says:

        I agree with this. He kept writing “we” and I kept thinking “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

    • Nootropic cormorant says:

      One thing that strikes me as ironic is how chivalrous his feminism is.
      My stereotype of male feminists was that they either suffer from subclinically low self interest or are cynical predators, but his case seems like an extension of exactly the same misplaced masculine values that the article describes.

      In his overeager acceptance of the role of a bumbling sitcom dad, he takes the pleasure of being overly generous while avoiding the scrutiny such an act usually brings and satisfying his value of not making a big deal of his virtue.
      I’m not sure if the article is only meant to satisfy this need or if we’re supposed to understand this behaviour as fellow stoic men and adopt it.

      If you wish to be ungenerous, the article engages in virtue signaling and humble-bragging on multiple levels.

      • Hoopyfreud says:

        Some men decide to let us know that they aren’t jokes. They turn sullen and grumpy, like people out of a Frank Miller comic. Or they turn defensive, a trait I cannot really blame in anyone, in a society so bitterly competitive—I particularly cannot fault it in men of color, poor men, and immigrants, whose masculinity subjects them simultaneously to actual serious threat from white men and to the feminist scrutiny that they, along with the rest of us, warrant.

        This, I think, is the section that really gets under my skin. “Men are a joke. If you don’t accept that, you’re bitter and defensive. That’s society’s fault. That also means that if you’re not a cis white male I get to call you bitter and defensive if you think men aren’t a joke, but of course it’s not your fault like it is mine. But also you deserve for women to not trust you.”

        I’ll freely admit that part of me feels attacked here, but I also think the author is caught in a axiomatic box which only allows him to identify masculinity with bitter self-recrimination, and that his attempt to “examine” masculinity, while not invalid, is severely constrained by it. Why does he want to be the last one off the boat? Surely not because for him self-sacrifice is a component of love; he can’t bring himself to admit that his experience of love is defined by his willingness to sacrifice himself. Instead, because his wife doesn’t like that part of him, he projects it onto masculinity and offers it for flagellation. He’s unwilling to consider the possibility that even though it’s “masculine,” “pointless,” and possibly even cruel to his wife, it has essential validity.

        I think his view of masculinity, self-hating as it is, almost seems to approach a dysphoric longing for a masculinity he despairs of ever attaining. He believes so much in this institution of masculinity, and is so distressed by the possibility of lacking membership, that his attempts to introspect immediately externalize. He doesn’t ask why he doesn’t take an aspirin, he asks why men don’t take asprin. I don’t (and it’s true, I don’t, unless I’m trying to sleep and can’t) because I think that it’s better to remain conscious of [pain/tiredness/emotions] that are indicative of underlying problems than to chemically suppress them; I’m happier for not taking it. Is that reinforced by cultural perceptions of masculinity? Probably. I’ve been told I’m an idiot for this, though I haven’t been called a chauvinist, but there’s still a logic to it that I find convincing. It has internal support. I don’t sense that in anything he says or describes himself doing, and while I can sympathize with him for feeling that way, I think it makes it impossible for him to see men generally as anything but, as he says, bad jokes.

        • Nick says:

          You! You put my thoughts in order! Thank you. Particularly your middle paragraph.

          The part you quote is pretty bad, but it’s not the nadir. I think the metaphorical bottom of the article is at the literal bottom, in footnote 15:

          As I wrote this essay, I fretted that an argument that seems to reject masculinity as an ideal would insult trans men: Here I am, thoughtlessly tossing aside what they spend blood and treasure to realize. But it turns out that the notion of “men trapped within women’s bodies” has come under fire from within that community as well. See, for example, Andrea Long Chu, “On Liking Women,” n+1, Winter 2018, https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women.

          • Randy M says:

            How far off are we from “I realize an article rejecting humanity may come as an insult to androids, ems, and others who strive to be accepted as human; but one must really consider that it is the notion of human supremacy that wrongs them, rather than a movement that seeks to move past the privilege granted to meat-bags.”

    • idontknow131647093 says:

      I will say that I just attempted to read it, but after a certain amount of it found it unreadable. I will say that I can assert with 95% certainty that I consider myself more manly than the man he holds himself out to be in the portions I read, and while many of his Headers would otherwise be quite manly, the ones I read made him appear to be not manly at all, more of an excuse making loser.

      If someone has a later portion they consider compelling please direct me to it, but really this guy seems to me to be a self-flagellating loser who’s greatest achievement is being linked to by a commentor on SSC.

    • Deiseach says:

      It does rub the wrong way because it equates being a man with being stupid. Why didn’t I buy pillows? Oh, that was the chosen discomfort of masculinity! And then umpteen instances of “doing painful crap I don’t enjoy because er, um, some reason”.

      Which elicits the natural reaction from readers of “well if it’s painful crap you don’t enjoy, why not stop doing it?” And the answer seems to be “eh, I have no idea why except that toxic masculinity or feminism or summat”. It’s as though sitting down and thinking for five minutes about what he’s doing, what he wants, and if A matches with B is some alien concept that never occurred to him as he grunts and sweats his way through life.

      • Nootropic cormorant says:

        I wouldn’t think I’d have to explain this to the wise old woman of the tribe, but this really is what men are like. Or at least many are, and they attribute this to manliness, that is, they will men not acting like this as unmanly.

        We can stop doing painful crap (in fact our revealed preference is to not do it), but we can’t stop desiring to do painful crap.

        I do not know whether men were always like this, whether they inevitably get like this under such unprecedented lack of hardship, or if this is just a social construct we’ve created recently.

        • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

          I can’t be sure of this, because I’m neuroatypical, but I think (this particular variant, at least) is specific to the US. So I’m guessing social construct.

        • Deiseach says:

          I’m used to men grunting and sweating their way through life, but I’m not used to them whining about having to do it and they don’t know why they’re doing it and why does society force them into the role of doing it while they’re doing it.

          Mate (addressing the writer of the article here), if you don’t want to be like that, then don’t be like that. If you’re rejecting the traditional role of men because it’s antithetical to feminism or trans men or whatever, then acknowledge “I cannot be lord and master because I don’t accept the principles underlying that, that men as the stronger sex have a duty to use that strength on behalf of the weaker, like women” and then go find some other way of being a husband. Don’t ask me to simultaneously agree with you that your college distance running was absurd pointless masochism and admire you for it at the same time.

          I remember this anecdote from Denis Leary’s “No Cure for Cancer” show, and it really does describe a kind of rural Irish stoicism (that applied to women as well in a different way) so the guy complaining about how hard it is to be a man because a man has to be hard gets no sympathy from me, mainly because yeah, that was the expectation everyone had, what makes you special?

          Leary remembers his father, an Irish immigrant, as a devoted parent, if somewhat emotionally reserved. In “No Cure for Cancer,” he recalled how during his brother’s 10th birthday party, his father calmly walked in from the living room, where he had been cutting paneling with a circular saw, his thumb nearly severed.

          “And I’m thinking, ‘Wow, Dad’s thumb is hanging off. He’s probably gonna start crying any second now.’ And this is what my father says: ‘We got any tape around here? I need to tape this baby up.’ He wouldn’t let my mother drive him to the hospital. That was too much a threat to his masculinity–to be seen in a car driven by a woman. So he taped up his thumb with black electrical tape and drove himself to the hospital. I looked at my brother and said, ‘Hey pal, forget about crying. We’re never going to be able to cry about anything, ever. Our authority figure is a man who could cut his head off with a chain saw, and he’d staple-gun it back on.’ “

          • Randy M says:

            Oh, yes indeed, taking an aspirin is way more manly than whining about cultural expectations that you never take an aspirin.
            Knowing when to not care about cultural expectations is a part of masculinity.

          • Nootropic cormorant says:

            “A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.”

            He doesn’t complain about society forcing him to do anything, he’s annoyed with himself holding a value system that to him appears to be irrational and harmful to its advertised purpose.

            “Find some other way of being a husband” sounds like something that scores you a Fields medal in gender studies.

            He considers pointless masochism to be admirable, so he asks (in an act of pointless masochism) for this admiration to be accepted in some form despite being antithetical to the feminist project.

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          So, the way this manifests for me is, I like doing stupid painful crap. The crap I choose generally isn’t that painful, and I feel proud of it afterwards, so I’m almost always glad I did it. That’s why I keep doing it, and I’ve always assumed I’d stop if that ceased to be the case.

          My girlfriend likes to walk up mountains. I’ve done it with her, and there’s plenty of pain involved. So not strictly a male pathology.

          • Nootropic cormorant says:

            I think he’s exaggerating for rhetorical purposes, he probably enjoys it too.

            Of course some women also enjoy struggling, but I wouldn’t judge a woman who didn’t the same as I would a man.

      • Randy M says:

        A healthy masculinity does, at times, eschew comfort in order to train and accustom one to function well in a harsher environment and to master one’s own body. Living without a pillow is akin to fasting.

        • Nick says:

          Yeah. I think this is pretty common, and it’s part of the reason the article actually sucked me in at the beginning. Speaking personally, denying myself things has always been pretty easy, or maybe I should say “uncomplicated.” (Holding myself to positive obligations has always been a lot harder; look at me failing women over here!) I haven’t done anything as stupid as carrying a desk home myself, but I’ve done lesser things in the same spirit.

          • Deiseach says:

            Living without a pillow is pretty typical ‘young guy out on his own for the first time where his mother has been the one in the home doing stuff like buying furnishings’. The reason it never occurred to him to buy his own goddamn pillows is because up till then that had been “Mom’s job”. That it took him getting a girlfriend to finally clue him into the fact that pillows are not provided by the Bedding Fairy in the night but you have to purchase them your own self is, again, the kind of anecdote that gets told and indeed used in comedy routines, to the point where women get annoyed by it as coming under “emotional labour” – yeah, we have to replace your mother and teach you how to function as an adult, otherwise you’d continue living like a dog.

            So you’d expect the point of this little story to be “thinking about it now, why didn’t I buy my own pillows? Why did I expect that to be a woman’s job, even on a subconscious level?” and then something about how parents should teach their sons as well as their daughters things like how to do their own washing and cook and the rest of it, but he goes off into a self-indulgent spiral of how hard it is to be a man when all you have is traditional roles that no longer fit the modern world oh look at me I’m so tortured and deep.

            Oh brother.

          • Nick says:

            I think you’re missing the point here, Deiseach. He could have told a story like that about womenfolk doing all the pillow-buying, and I’ve seen stories like that told. But he wasn’t making the point that he didn’t think about things like that, he was making the point that even when did occur to him he took the harder option, because that’s what the voice of masculinity in his head told him to do.

          • Randy M says:

            Has anyone made a comic that basically shows a bell curve (or normal distribution, if being reminded of the eponymous book is triggering) with a speech bubble pointing at a speck just a hair past the long tail on one side or the other saying “Wow, this social system we’re under sure is oppressive, isn’t it?”

            I’m not trying to say any particular more is perfect or even on net beneficial, but someone with an extreme view might not be representative. I don’t think someone with a view of masculinity so particular that he sleeps on wadded up laundry says much about the Patriarchy either way.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            “When the means are autonomous, they are deadly”– Charles Williams

            In this case, male stoicism and willingness to take on difficult tasks are *means* to protecting people and making life better, but that author has last all connection to sensible goals.

            Or you could look at it as Goodhart’s Law. Prove you’re doing useful work by how much you’re suffering.

          • Conrad Honcho says:

            Nancy’s knocking it out of the park on this one. That was a great insight.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Conrad, I’m glad you liked it.

            One more point– a lot of commenters seem to think the author at that link is just a fool. I see him as driven by very bad emotional imperatives.

            He’s in the hell of knowing that what he’s doing makes no sense, but having no idea of how to do better.

          • Thegnskald says:

            Stoicism isn’t something that you get to choose when to apply, it is something that takes practice and effort.

            Which means the things you want out of male stoicism come at the cost of years of practice that, divorced from purpose, become hard to distinguish from a kind of self harm.

    • cryptoshill says:

      I just read it and it bothers me because in every economic analysis that has ever been done, women have worked less than men. The studies he is citing conveniently includes homework such as cooking and cleaning – and ignores the fact that men do quite a lot of that too.

      It seems like a really weird mistake for someone who can write that well to make, so I feel like there’s a lot of personal bias here.

      • Nootropic cormorant says:

        My reading is that he doesn’t believe it himself, he’s just being charitable because he deeply believes men should be doing more and taking less credit anyways.

    • baconbits9 says:

      It rubs me the wrong way, and a major part of it (for my tastes) is the complete disconnect between his descriptions and the actions he describes.

      For a while I gardened, and when my wife and I first moved to Ann Arbor, I’d spend hours working in the yard, always finding the costliest, least productive, most epic way of doing everything. I tried to remove a tree stump with my hands, a saw, and a shovel. I cleaned the gutters with a ladder so short that I pulled a shoulder muscle reaching overhead to dig out the muck. I’d purchased that ladder, too, at a nearby Salvation Army, and had walked home carrying it on my head like a canoe. I mowed the lawn with a series of Nixon-era push reel mowers I’d rolled home from the same place. I enjoyed none of these activities.

      Are any of these examples epic in any way? Are any of the the most costly way (unless you only mean effort cost, which just goes right into inefficient)? He sounds like a guy who literally doesn’t have any idea to do anything.

      Then I realize, days later, that the reason the statement is still bugging me is that I am literally never not sore from the gym, because I am so concerned with looking a certain way.

      9/10 experts would tell you if you are literally never not sore from the gym you are working out way to much and way to hard. He doesn’t know how to remove a tree stump, or that there are plenty of ‘masculine’ ways to dig one out, and far more ‘epic’ ones as well.

      His writing comes across (to me) as oblivious, and someone who is telling it like it is while clearly having no idea about anything is grating.

      • Rowan says:

        Maybe he means “epic” in a more classic sense, as in a work that’s really long? It certainly sounds epic in that sense.

      • Deiseach says:

        Yeah, his descriptions of the garden and yard work sound more like “never learned from my father how to do it the right way” more than any epic “Sing, muse, of the muscle strained-man, gym-haunting, garden-vexed”.

        Epic whinging, I have to admit. You don’t have to enjoy doing necessary work, either you can’t afford to hire someone to clean your guttering and so you do it yourself, or you pay a man with a van to do these kind of jobs because you don’t want to climb ladders and dig out muck. Some men enjoy doing these jobs, that doesn’t mean all men do. Same with women and housework (I have not knowingly ironed anything in years, thank God for modern fabrics and crease-free settings on the washing machine and tumble dryer, yet there are other women love ironing and find it relaxing and soothing).

        • The Nybbler says:

          Yeah, even if a Real Man removes his own stump, he rents a stump grinder or a stump puller to do it. Doing really hard things by hand was for before humanity invented power tools.

          I used to clean gutters by going up on the roof and doing it from the top. It’s easier that way because you don’t have to move the ladder constantly, just walk along the roof. Not for those fearful of heights however. Doing it with a short ladder is just masochism, not masculinity.

          • Matt M says:

            I’m loathe to defend this guy, but for a lot of “hard labor” situations, like cleaning gutters, where there is no easy way to do the job, someone who doesn’t really know any better might not stop to consider “hmm, this seems too hard, perhaps there’s an easier way…”

          • baconbits9 says:

            The issue isn’t that he doesn’t’ know how to do stuff as there are many things that I don’t know how to do, its that he is so oblivious to the fact that he doesn’t know how to do things well that he presents this obvious flaw as a strength and then goes on to lecture his audience. Who would listen to someone with so little awareness, both self awareness and a complete lack of understanding that many people do know how to do these things.

          • Garrett says:

            Epic and manly stump removal involves dynamite. Lots of dynamite. And possibly beer.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            The issue isn’t that he doesn’t’ know how to do stuff as there are many things that I don’t know how to do, its that he is so oblivious to the fact that he doesn’t know how to do things well that he presents this obvious flaw as a strength and then goes on to lecture his audience. Who would listen to someone with so little awareness, both self awareness and a complete lack of understanding that many people do know how to do these things.

            All of this. All of it. My god.
            The author seems to confuse masochism with masculinity. Being a man is not intentionally hurting yourself to show how tough you are. That’s what stupid teenage boys trying to impress girls do.

            There were a couple of at least useful notes in the beginning of the essay. “What’s it like to be comfortable in your own body and not worry at all how you look, which you obviously do because you are a cisheteronormative white man in a patriarchy” is an utterly alien sentence to me. It does not match any of the young men I know.

          • Deiseach says:

            where there is no easy way to do the job, someone who doesn’t really know any better might not stop to consider “hmm, this seems too hard, perhaps there’s an easier way

            And that’s true, but they don’t generally then write whiny pieces about how they completely made a mess of doing manual labour and that is all the fault of the model of socially constructed masculinity they have been indoctrinated with (and not because “well heck, I had no idea what I was doing but at least I tried”).

          • Thegnskald says:

            Deiseach –

            Your criticism, from a certain perspective, seems to come down to “Quit whining about it, that isn’t masculine”. Which is fair, in that it isn’t masculine to complain, but misses the point.

            If men can’t complain about the expectations society places upon them, who do we get to advocate for changes to our social expectations? Women are allowed to complain, so things get to improve for them – our gender role doesn’t even allow us to say “Hey, this fucking sucks”.

            Which seems to be the persistent response here. Yes, he fails at masculinity. But treating that as a valid criticism renders it impossible for men to self-advocate.

          • Randy M says:

            Yes, he fails at masculinity. But treating that as a valid criticism renders it impossible for men to self-advocate.

            Context matters. The target in the spectrum of advocacy vs agency is not identical for masculine vs feminine, but neither is it an absolute in either case. So, at the margins, this might mean that some men incorrectly think masculinity requires that they suck it up when, say, the family courts take their kids, because they think being a man means never complaining about anything since they are told not to complain about scrapped knees. And some women might have thought (in times long past when we didn’t have 24/7 grrl power) that being feminine meant calling daddy up to squash the daddy-long legs in the bathroom.

            That doesn’t mean that Mr. Ladders-are-for-Ladies shouldn’t be ever hear “Man up and solve your problem, bud”.

            It’s like that old post about how not everyone needs the same advice.

          • Nick says:

            Randy, yeah, that is actually one of my favorite posts from Scott.

          • Thegnskald says:

            Is “Quit complaining” useful advice in this case, however, or is it just shutting up someone who is saying that the social standards they have absorbed are making them miserable?

            “Just be miserable in silence” seems to be advice men already get throughout their entire lives. A major element of different advice for different people is that the advice has to be balancing against an excess of inclination – that is, we should be providing advice that brings people into a healthy balance. Given that men already get lots of “Shut up about your suffering” advice, the prior on it being useful for any given man should be really, really low.

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      I have to say, I found it neither well written nor thought-provoking. His personal observations of manhood all conflict with mine, his supporting evidence is all stuff I already knew, and the information density is horrible.

    • Thegnskald says:

      I am amused both by the author’s inability to concentrate on conveying the concepts he is attempting to describe, and also by the deep irony of many of the responses here by people who apparently completely missed what he is attempting to describe. Which isn’t the self-imposed misery; that’s more the excuse to write this than what he is writing. It’s the restrictions themselves, the sense of “This is what I must be”. The… restrictiveness of a sense of identity. He understands he doesn’t have to care – he doesn’t know how not to.

      He’s not quite accepting of the fact that he cares, as well; he jokes about it, but they’re bitter jokes.

      Feminist angst in a nutshell; “Do I want to do this womanly thing because I’m trying to be more womanly, or because I actually want it?”

      Ah, the joy of awakening to the fact that your identity isn’t you.

  11. Taymon A. Beal says:

    Somebody told me that Scott was interested in meetup attendance numbers; we had 12 in Boston yesterday. I’m not sure where else to put this, so I’m putting it here.

  12. Telminha says:

    I have a question (a desperate one): My aunt came to the US looking for a second opinion about her cancer treatment. She was in AZ for three months and now she’s at my house and will spend 10 days here, then she’ll travel back to Brazil. Somehow she lost her last nine tamoxifen (20 mg) pills during her trip here. She is now very, very worried about missing 9 doses. She’s been taking it for one and a half years. How serious is it to miss 9 doses? What do people usually do when they forget or lose vital medication during a trip?

    • Cheese says:

      Obligatory not a doctor and have no specific training in oncology other than a background in molecular biology.

      It is most likely inconsequential, or of such minor consequence that in the long run it is not an issue. Tamoxifen is, for laypurposes, a drug which stops oestrogen from exerting growth-promoting effects on breast cancer cells and exerts it’s own anti-proliferative effect. It does this by, in effect, inducing the production of certain gene products and suppressing the production of others. This kind of thing is a more long term effect biologically and it is not really a case of missed doses will let the cancer cells out of their cage so to speak. Yeah, ideally you keep taking it because you want to exert the effect constantly. But we’re talking about a therapy that many will be on for the order of decades, 9 days in the scheme of things is not a huge amount.

      As for what to do when you lose medication – i’m not familiar with the US/Brazil health systems in this regard. I would go to a pharmacy with her original script for advice, i’m not sure if you’ll have much luck there – you could also ring a local hospital with an oncology centre for advice. I imagine you’ll run into bureaucratic walls, but it can’t hurt to try. Perhaps someone from the US might be better able to answer that.

  13. Daniel Frank says:

    I’m heading to sao paulo and rio de janeiro for 8 days in November.

    1) Does anyone on here live in either of those two cities and want to meet up?
    2) Does anyone on here have any recommendations for either of those two cities (aside from the usual)?

    Thanks!

    • Winter Shaker says:

      Didn’t spend a whole load of time in Rio de Janeiro when I was there (and obviously I now regret not going to the National Museum while it was not on fire), but one charming little bit of the city that I visited was the Parque das Ruinas, where they have preserved the ruins of a turn-of-the-20th-century mansion as a little cultural centre, on a hill overlooking central Rio with a great view of the city – if you’re comfortable with heights – and if not, Rio is probably not the place for you 🙂

    • Tenacious D says:

      I’ve only been to SP.
      These probably count as the usual recommendations, but the Pinacoteca and Iberapuera Park are both really nice.
      SP has a lot of people of Italian descent so you can get good pizza etc. there.
      I didn’t have time to do this, but I would have liked to take a day trip from SP to Santos: the route through the coastal mountain range looks quite dramatic, and Santos has some neat heritage as the premier coffee-exporting port in the world.
      Have fun!

    • IsmiratSeven says:

      Telminha’s aunt could use some Tamoxifen, while you’re there.

  14. RavenclawPrefect says:

    In reading strange takes on weird issues across large swathes of the internet, I’ve seen a lot of contrasting opinions on things, but one topic about which I can recall exactly zero people dissenting despite hearing hundreds of different people’s opinions is the moral status of Elsevier and the like. I can’t even recall a single instance in which someone’s recounted a minor redeeming quality of anything they do. By all accounts this seems to be a fairly accurate assessment and I don’t know of anything to contradict the thesis that Elsevier is basically uniformly awful, but it seems worth inquiring about: anyone have a steelman of this sort of thing? I would assume that out of the thousands of people involved in some capacity with their endeavors, someone has at least tried to justify it.

    The closest thing I’ve found was this comment (the only such in that thread, if I didn’t miss something), which only holds if one conditions on the idea that knowledge-seeking institutions are dangerous and thus worth inhibiting.

    • peterispaikens says:

      The way I see it, there’s a particular need that Elsevier (and company) serves – there are a bunch of important organizations e.g. funding agencies, various regulatory bodies and gov’t agencies who all (a) want a way to evaluate whether something is “good research”; (b) don’t want to have the capacity to do that evaluation themselves; and (c) don’t trust the universities or the researchers they’re reviewing or other organizations controlled by the researchers they’re reviewing to do that evaluation.

      They want an outsourced way to get a number “the product of this research group is 7.3 good” in a way that’s somewhat correlated with reality, somewhat comparable across all the various disciplines, and shifts any possible blame for misevaluation to some other authority. There’s some consensus that doing it *well* might be nearly impossible, but anyway such a metric is needed and they’ll use whatever fits the needs best even if all alternatives are poor. Elsevier is providing such a service (SCOPUS), and so is the rest of the industry (e.g. Web of Science). The existing journal and review structure/process, as well as all the motivation and incentives to follow that process is deeply tied into the need to provide this service. The various incentives to avoid Elsevier (e.g. self-publishing, Arxiv, new open-access journals, etc) don’t show a credible way to fill this niche and provide this service, so in that regard Elsevier is fulfilling a real need. You could argue that perhaps in an ideal world this service wouldn’t be needed, but in our world it is considered an absolute necessity by the people holding all the cards for research funding.

    • Cheese says:

      I don’t necessarily disagree with the general internet takes about the moral aspect of having a large proportion of humanity’s expert knowledge locked away in walled gardens. I find it is a topic that irks me though because people ascribe moral motives to publishers like Elsevier. I mean it is obvious why they as a company act the way they do.

      I think peterispaikens answer is a good one. They hopefully function as both an access point and a quality rating system. It is a bad system, but in that way perhaps better than open access. My preference would be a system that involved paid peer review.

    • Douglas Knight says:

      I’m going to attack Elsevier-owned journals yet again, but I’m going to give a general-purpose argument that should rebut any defense of such journals. If you ever do find a defense of such journals, consider this attack and see if it applies.

      Of course printers used to be important. But some journals are owned by Elsevier and other journals are merely printed by Elsevier. Comparison shows that ownership by Elsevier has provided no benefits.

    • Plumber says:

      @RavenclawPrefect,

      Until your post I’d never heard of “Elsevier’ so it’s pretty normal that I wouldn’t write anything defending them, or attacking for that matter.

  15. WashedOut says:

    It recently happened to me that something I understood to be true for a long time got completely falsified in light of pretty trivial evidence, which I came across by accident. For no obvious cultural or political reason, I went through my formative years hearing a lot about Yitzhak Rabin mainly from people casually citing examples of questionable characters turning out good in the end.

    Over time I developed a mental model of his death, wherein he was assassinated (true) by a member of Hamas (false), punctuating one of the many bouts of violent conflict between Israel and Palestine. Turns out he was actually killed by Yigal Amir, a conservative jew from Israel, who vehemently opposed the Oslo Accords which Rabin signed as part of a diplomatic effort between Israel and the PLO.

    Has this happened to anyone else? It’s a mixed feeling of excitement for having ones beliefs updated and embarrassment for not looking into things more, but I really like it.

    • idontknow131647093 says:

      I will say in your defense that the fake reality you constructed for yourself did you no harm on a larger scale (unless your were quizzed on this question and lost a job). Sometimes small misconceptions could be helpful to your interpretation of the world. Say you see an apple drop (which is by random chance), then you see some rats run and decide its time to leave the area based on the combination. Then an earthquake happens. You have become right based on luck. Same happened to you in this situation, you demonized (correctly) Hamas based on a misunderstanding.

      • Aapje says:

        I disagree that this is a harmless mistake, because while Hamas is bad, the Israeli extreme right are very bad too (including using terror against Palestinians). Furthermore, the narrative that the Palestinians are preventing peace is common, but not very fair.

        Believing that Rabin was killed by Hamas can very easily help create or maintain an alief or belief in a one-sided narrative.

        • Salem says:

          But what’s the harm? Unless WashedOut is in a very small set of actors, his views of the Palestinian conflict don’t matter. Would there be peace in the Middle East now, if only WashedOut had correctly attributed blame for Yitzhak Rabin’s murder? Come on now.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            Hmmm. It has always seemed to me that the common but unfair belief (internationally) that Israel is preventing peace has significantly contributed to Palestinian intransigence and therefore had the effect of preventing peace, or at least making it far less likely.

            Presumably, if you have differing beliefs, e.g., about what peace terms would be reasonable (?) that argument works much the same either way.

          • Aapje says:

            @Harry Maurice Johnston

            One of the claims that Israel is and was least willing to accept is the return of refugees (and their descendants) to their homes.

            To me it seems like a human right to be able to return to your home if you flee from violence with the intent to return when the violence is over.

          • idontknow131647093 says:

            @aapje

            Except that is ahistorical. The occupied areas of dubious government are not filled with people who fled Israeli persecution they are full of people who either already lived there, or moved their to be part of the coalition of countries that tried to eliminate the Israeli state during the various wars at the time.

            Gaza was part of Egypt, Egypt lost it in the Six Day War and has rejected offers to reclaim parts of it because that was politically advantageous at the time. The West Bank was part of Jordan and they lost it during the Six Day War. Parts of it would, ideally, be returned to Jordan, but the original pre-1967 borders are not sensible so some of it would have to become permanently part of Israel proper.

            It really makes no sense historically to harp on these things, no one talks about returning Puck, Gdansk, Konisberg and the rest of Prussia to Germany. Nor do they talk about border problems caused by France having Metz and Strasbourg.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            @Aapje, I don’t think any absolute right to continue to live in a particular place is commonly recognized. Just as a random example, when the Clyde Dam was built (not far from where I grew up) a number of people had to be relocated, and I don’t recall the UN getting involved.

            I think the Palestinian situation is more about what this article calls the right of conquest. That made me much more sympathetic to the European position, because I can understand wanting to avoid a dangerous precedent.

            But that leaves us with no way forwards, because Israel can’t both recognize the right of return and continue to exist, and it isn’t like the Israelis have anywhere else to go either. From a pragmatic point of view it seems to me like the Palestinians have far more to gain from peace than the Israelis do, and insisting on the right of return seems unhelpful.

          • Aapje says:

            @idontknow131647093

            You are ignoring a lot of history there. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled during the 1947–48 Civil War and ‘Plan Dalet.’ The latter plan, executed by Haganah, the paramilitary organization that turned into the IDF, had the removal of Palestinians from certain areas as an explicit goal:

            Mounting operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:
            – Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.
            – Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.

            Note how this is written to allow destruction of villages that are in inconvenient locations. There was no plan to house these people elsewhere within the Jewish state, with the predictable outcome that these people would be forced out. Of course, aside from Palestinians being expelled, many chose not to hang out near the fighting and fled, as people tend to do for most conflicts. The Palestinians had an extra good reason to do so, as during this time two other Zionist paramilitary organizations, Irgun and Lehi, massacred Palestinian civilians at Deir Yassin.

            The refugees were actually a major reason why the Arab countries went on the offensive:

            According to Yoav Gelber, the Arab countries were “drawn into the war by the collapse of the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab Liberation Army [and] the Arab governments’ primary goal was preventing the Palestinian Arabs’ total ruin and the flooding of their own countries by more refugees. According to their own perception, had the invasion not taken place, there was no Arab force in Palestine capable of checking the Haganah’s offensive”.

            There is a narrative where none of this happened and Israel was just minding its business when the nasty Arabs attacked. Reality is a lot more complex, with the UN partition plan being implemented really poorly and with little support from the involved parties, resulting in many on both sides seeing violence as the only way to get justice done (with Jewish violence against Palestinians, the British and other Jews and Palestinian violence against Jews, the British and other Palestinians).

            I never heard this particular narrative of yours where the refugees never even lived within the area that became Israel. That’s really a very, very extremist claim that goes against so much evidence that it is on par with Holocaust denial for its, eh, creative interpretation of the facts.

            Anyway, my opinion and that of the UN at the time was that after the violence died down, people should be able to return.

            As for the logistics, most refugees seem to be willing to return to Gaza or the West Bank with compensation for their lost property/land, which seems reasonable.

          • Aapje says:

            @Harry Maurice Johnston

            The insistence that Israel must be a white Jewish nationalist state merely requires a two state solution, which in itself is relatively simple to achieve within the original division as decided upon by the UN.

            It is a lot more difficult to implement if Israel insists on being Greater Israel. In fact, even without the refugees returning, Israel already has a big issue with their Greater Israel plans, which doesn’t leave a viable state for the Gaza and West Bank Palestinians.

            Any peace plan that leaves a viable state for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank surely also results in a place to go for the refugees.

            PS. I assume that the displaced people for the Clyde Dam got compensation and relocation to a decent place in their own country, not a camp in a foreign country that doesn’t treat them too well.

          • quanta413 says:

            it isn’t like the Israelis have anywhere else to go either

            Arguably Israelis had better choices than Palestinians. The United States is pretty great. A lot of Jews did move to the U.S. in the early 1900s.

            The U.S. could still absorb a huge number of Israelis. On the order of a million easily. With Israel’s level of wealth and human capital, even absorbing all of Israel would be like absorbing a rich chunk of Europe. A lot of Israelis already have English proficiency to boot. Ties between Israel and the U.S. are strong too.

            Palestinians on the other hand are screwed. GDP per capita isn’t even a tenth of Israel’s. Absorbing all of Palestine’s people would cause immense stress on any country that tried.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            @Aapje,

            As I understand it, the Palestinian demand is that all the refugees (and their descendants) be allowed to return to their original homes. Merely allowing them to return to a newly created State of Palestine is not considered acceptable. Nor can I find any suggestion that the Israeli proposals routinely (or ever) include any clauses denying the putative new State of Palestine the right to accept as many of the refugees as it sees fit.

            If you agree with me thus far, perhaps you are suggesting that the dispute is around whether the proposed borders are large enough to allow a viable state that can absorb the refugees? That’s plausible, I suppose, except that (a) I’ve never seen it presented that way, and (b) it seems to me that if you can fit nearly 2 million people into the Gaza strip, it should be possible to fit a bit over 8 million people into the West Bank, which is about fifteen times as large. Are there factors I’m not considering?

            (Regarding compensation, Israel, and in particular the Israeli left, appear to be willing to negotiate on that point. The Palestinian position appears to be that compensation should be provided for those who choose not to exercise the right of return, but is not an acceptable alternative to it.)

            To provide a frame of reference, these are the articles I read in fact-checking myself before writing this response:

            Palestinian right of return

            Two-state solution

            The Two-State Solution: What It Is and Why It Hasn’t Happened

            Happy to check out anything else you might suggest, so long as it isn’t too long. Material of about the same length as the above would be ideal.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            @quanta413,

            Arguably Israelis had better choices than Palestinians. The United States is pretty great. A lot of Jews did move to the U.S. in the early 1900s.

            Sure, and personally I tentatively lean towards the idea that Palestine was a bad choice, though I don’t know enough of the history to form a sensible opinion. I was talking strictly about the situation now, not historical counterfactuals. (Am I using that word correctly?)

            The U.S. could still absorb a huge number of Israelis.

            … I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the US wouldn’t agree to accept all nine million Israelis, even if the Israelis would agree to move. And it would be even less likely to allow them to form a separate nation within US territory.

            Absorbing all of Palestine’s people would cause immense stress on any country that tried.

            Can you expand on this? I’ve always been mildly puzzled as to why forcing them to stay in refugee camps makes the surrounding nation any better off. At the very least, couldn’t proper cities be built for them? Even if you’re not going to let them leave?

          • John Schilling says:

            Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled during the 1947–48 Civil War

            That’s two different things being lumped together. Is there a breakdown on how many fled vs. how many were expelled? Also relevant, what were they fleeing and what happened to the ones who didn’t flee?

          • quanta413 says:

            … I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the US wouldn’t agree to accept all nine million Israelis, even if the Israelis would agree to move. And it would be even less likely to allow them to form a separate nation within US territory.

            Sure it has no interest; the idea’s not even on the horizon and probably won’t ever be. But both American parties are pretty pro-Israel. American Evangelicals think Jews are god’s chosen people. I think it would be easier to sell 9 million Israelis immigrating (well, all the Jewish Israelis immigrating would be not too hard of a sell I think) than it would be to sell 2 million more Mexicans immigrating. And there are a hell of a lot more than 2 million Mexicans already here despite the law. I think the logistics is a bigger deal than the politics.

            But if Israelis immigrated here over the course of a decade or two, I doubt it would be a problem. My guess is they’d generate less opposition than Chinese immigrants. And you see relatively few complaints about Chinese immigration.

            The only groups that would be much easier to integrate economically and culturally are British or British descended.

            Obviously they can’t form their own nation though. That’s wholly untenable. Why should they get to form an ethnostate in the new world? There are no other ethnostates in the new world. They’d have to integrate more or less like all the Jews who immigrated to the U.S. before integrated (more or less).

            So I don’t think we could mass import Israel’s population in a year. But if there were Israelis immigrating to the U.S. at a clip of about a million a year I think it would be doable. Of course, Israelis don’t want to leave so it’s all moot. And obviously if they were leaving, at some point their population would be too small to sustain a military to hold their border.

            Can you expand on this? I’ve always been mildly puzzled as to why forcing them to stay in refugee camps makes the surrounding nation any better off. At the very least, couldn’t proper cities be built for them? Even if you’re not going to let them leave?

            My best guess is…

            Why would Israel want a functional and likely hostile state on its borders? Functional cities need to be able to engage in trade. They might challenge you or serve as a base for resistance. It’s far easier to push around a disorganized and weakened group. Even if you could get 95% of Palestinians to sign on to a two-state solution, 5% would still be really angry about what happened to them.

            I don’t think you can just build cities for people. People have to have the ability to run the city or trade for what they need to run the city. What total set of skills does a group of people who’ve lived in a weak quasistate that’s periodically invaded by a far superior force have? Much less when they can easily be blockaded and cutoff from external trade?

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            @John Schilling, I don’t see that it makes any difference.

            @quanta413, I was thinking of the refugee camps in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon; were you talking about the ones in Gaza and the West Bank?

          • quanta413 says:

            @Harry Maurice Johnston

            Yes, I was thinking of the West Bank and Gaza which I suppose are mostly not camps but are desperately poor. Not camps in another nation’s territory. I agree there is no benefit to Jordan of having a refugee camp. On the other hand, Jordan’s GDP per capita is only about double or triple the West Bank’s when I quickly searched for an estimate. Jordan may lack the capacity to create a new city.

            Syria isn’t even able to hold together. Lebanon has had a lot of troubles too. It’s hardly surprising a functioning city doesn’t spring up in either place. Brazil has favelas around some cities even though it’s not war torn.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            Well, it didn’t have to happen quickly; the camps have been there 50+ years. And it isn’t like Jordan would have had to fund the development themselves, the same organizations that help rebuild Gaza each time Hamas and Israel start fighting again could surely have assisted.

            I suspect that at least part of the reason is that if the refugees are resettled or even just treated well, it limits their usefulness as leverage against Israel. I’m just not sure to what extent this is true, and to what extent there are real practical or political problems. Or even to what extent this has already been done and just isn’t mentioned much.

          • albatross11 says:

            I expect we would accept most or all Israelis in a genuine pinch (Israel has collapsed and they’re fleeing for their lives). Everyone remembers what happened the last time lots of Jews were running for their lives and got turned back from lots of places, and I imagine that Israeli refugees would have massive amounts of sympathy from most Americans.

            OTOH, there is no chance we’d carve off a bit of territory and turn it into New Israel.

          • Matt M says:

            I don’t think there’s much of a scenario where we’d accept several million Isreali immigrants.

            Mainly because the American right (and a decent chunk of the warmongering left) would rather nuke the entire region than concede military defeat to some sort of Muslim coalition driving the Isrealis off the land.

            And “Muslims are the rightful owners, all the Jews have to leave” isn’t within light years of the overton window for most people, so….

          • Aapje says:

            @Harry Maurice Johnston

            Of course the Palestinians publicly demand that the refugees should return, because that’s how negotiations work. You demand anything that you can make a semi-decent argument for, especially if it is important to your people. That doesn’t mean that you expect to get it. But you don’t publicly demand the minimum compromise that you’ll accept.

            Information from the actual negotiations suggests that the PA was willing to accept a token group of Palestinians that would return to Israel (so small that the demographic effect would be minimal) and that the rest would slowly be moved into Palestinian territory.

            This again is what I mean by false narratives, there is this narrative of Palestinians blowing up any peace deal unless they get all refugees back to Israel and there is this:

            In an email Ziyad Clot, a legal adviser to Palestinian negotiators on the refugee file, writes, “President [Mahmoud] Abbas offered an extremely low proposal for the number of returnees to Israel a few weeks only after the start of the process.”

            That is not the behavior by someone who desperately wants the refugees to return to their homes.

            Note that this is nothing new since Arafat already gave up the right to return in thinly veiled language:

            We understand Israel’s demographic concerns and understand that the right of return of Palestinian refugees, a right guaranteed under international law and United Nations Resolution 194, must be implemented in a way that takes into account such concerns. However, just as we Palestinians must be realistic with respect to Israel’s demographic desires, Israelis too must be realistic in understanding that there can be no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if the legitimate rights of these innocent civilians continue to be ignored.

            By arguing that “Israel’s demographic concerns” must be taken into account, he gives up the solution where the refugees return to Israel as citizens with full rights who get to vote in Israeli elections.

            So if they cannot be citizens of Israel, they must then become citizens of the Palestinian state, right? But then that means that they can’t return to land that is part of Israel, rather than the Palestinian state. So…here is how I would undiplomat that statement:

            We accept that it’s not realistic to have the refugees return to Israel, but we won’t accept a deal that won’t help the refugees.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            @Aapje, the article you link to puts Abbas’s ability to sell any such deal to his own people in serious question. There’s also this which puts Abbas’s willingness to accept a symbolic right of return into question. But in any case, if the right of return isn’t blocking a peace agreement, this entire subthread is moot, since your assertion that it was is how it started.

            Pulling back from that particular issue, then, my overall impression remains. I’m not attempting to convince you or anyone, but the Palestinians just don’t seem to me to be acting in their own best interests. I suspect some sort of coordination problem.

            (In fact I’ve sometimes speculated that the original problem was that because of the British Mandate, etc., the Palestinians had no central authority that could negotiate terms of surrender with the newly formed State of Israel in the same way that Japan, say, was able to negotiate terms of surrender with the US. Probably a very naive suggestion.)

            The more interesting question to me right now isn’t any of that, but the question @Salem brought up shortly before we got derailed: would the situation would be markedly different if international opinion was one-sided, either one way or the other? Would the Palestinians in fact be more willing to make additional concessions if the UN tended to take Israel’s side rather than theirs? Would Israel in fact be more conciliatory if the international community was united against them?

          • Aapje says:

            @Harry Maurice Johnston

            Israel seems unwilling to accept any state that can be a threat, which is any state that is viable. Furthermore, the current government consists in large part of Greater Israel fans, which means putting colonists ‘out there,’ which then exposes them, which then results in very oppressive measures against Palestinians to keep the colonists safe.

            I don’t see how putting pressure on the Palestinians is going to result in peace in this environment, unless this pressure convinces them to commit mass suicide (convincing them to leave isn’t going to do anything, since no one will accept them).

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            @Aapje,

            Israel seems unwilling to accept any state that can be a threat, which is any state that is viable.

            OK. I don’t agree, but I can understand and respect this argument. I would only add that Israel’s paranoia in this respect is also entirely understandable under the circumstances.

            (The ideal solution IMO would be to relocate the Palestinians en masse, perhaps to the southern end of Israel where it forms a triangle between Egypt and Jordan. That way, the border would be a short, straight line, easily defensible, and no more of a threat than Israel’s existing borders with Lebanon or Syria. Even better, you could relocate them to elsewhere in the Middle East. Unfortunately any such relocation would be way outside the Overton window, for reasons I don’t really get. But then, I’d also want to split Northern Ireland in half and move everybody to whichever half they feel they belong in. I suspect these opinions qualify as kooky.)

            Furthermore, the current government

            Well, yeah. Those guys are aholes. Not much more so IMO than many other right-wing, religiously influenced governments, except that their circumstances exaggerate the impact. From my perspective, this only underscores why the Palestinians should have made peace decades ago.

            which means putting colonists ‘out there,’ which then exposes them, which then results in very oppressive measures

            Another valid point. I’ve always been ambivalent on the subject of non-contiguous settlements, this may push me towards opposing them.

            On the other hand, this is an example of the sort of thing I mean when I say that the Palestinians and their supporters aren’t acting in their best interests: why don’t I ever see them objecting to the settlements on those sort of grounds? It seems like it’s always “but international law” or “stop stealing our land” or my personal favourite, “like two people negotiating about the disposition of a pizza while one of them is eating it” which just baffles me. (So accept a deal already, before the pizza is all gone!)

            On the gripping hand, I guess I’m not the kind of person they’re talking to. OK, I’ll try to update on that as well.

            convincing them to leave isn’t going to do anything, since no one will accept them

            … I’m not convinced of that. Or, rather, I am, but only in the sense of “I have acknowledged that the international community would never allow such an arrangement”. If not for that, I don’t see any compelling reason why a deal couldn’t be made. There’s plenty of precedent for one government buying territory from another, after all.

            PS: out of curiosity, and only if you don’t mind saying, are you old enough to remember PLO terrorist attacks against the international community? I suspect that influences people’s positions, I’m sure it influences mine. If I were even older, and remembered Zionist terrorist attacks against Britain, that might have influenced my opinion too.

          • Aapje says:

            @Harry Maurice Johnston

            A major reason why relocation to other middle eastern countries is not acceptable to them is because those countries have strong tribal politics (which is a major component of Israeli politics as well, BTW), so giving those people full rights would shift the political power of balance in a way that can cause a civil war.

            If they would take in the Palestinians they also just get hated more by their populace, for working together with Israel to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians.

            Furthermore, the idea that an ethnic group should live with others of the same ethnicity and/or a religious group should live with others that share their religion is ethnic and/or religious nationalism, which is a kind of nationalism that many people reject (although Western globalists tend to restrict this disapproval to white nationalism and Christian nationalism).

            As for for your claim that the Palestinians don’t argue against the settlements because they threaten (or have already made impossible) a viable Palestinian state, they do argue that.

            In fact, Arafat already argued it in 2004.

            Didn’t do them much good…

            out of curiosity, and only if you don’t mind saying, are you old enough to remember PLO terrorist attacks against the international community? I suspect that influences people’s positions, I’m sure it influences mine.

            Probably, since I’m not sure what you are referring to. Are you talking about Munich and the plane hijackings? I wouldn’t call these attacks against the international community, but rather attacks against Israel and Israelis outside of Israel, causing harm to other nations (note that Israel has also assassinated people abroad).

            There are also more modern (groups of) events that are missing from your list, like the many incidental and structural abuses as documented by Breaking the Silence and Bt’Selem. Furthermore, we now know about the fairly large scale settler terrorism, like the common ‘price tag’ response to the IDF dismantling an illegal settlement being an attack on Palestinians. Or how the Palestinians are not protected sufficiently by the IDF or the Israeli courts, despite not being allowed to defend themselves. An example of how Palestinians are discriminated against, is the Israeli settler who was let go for ‘lack of evidence’ while being caught fleeing from a burning Palestinian orchard while holding a jerrycan filled with flammable liquid, and with the smell of the liquid on his hands.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            @Aapje, I think you’ve misunderstood what I meant by relocation. I’m not talking about them becoming citizens of an existing nation, I’m talking about buying land from an existing nation to form a new one.

            they also just get hated more by their populace, for working together with Israel to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians

            … quite possibly, but only because of the baffling-to-me state of the Overton window, as already discussed.

            I’m not sure what your point about ethnic/religious nationalism is. I don’t think there are very many people who object to a Palestinian state on these grounds. Why would it make any difference where said state is to be located?

            As for for your claim that the Palestinians don’t argue against the settlements because they threaten (or have already made impossible) a viable Palestinian state

            Not what I said. Your argument was quite different: “which means putting colonists ‘out there,’ which then exposes them, which then results in very oppressive measures”. Your argument is a good one; their argument is not.

            Are you talking about Munich and the plane hijackings? I wouldn’t call these attacks against the international community

            Call it what you like; people with no stake in the conflict were held hostage and/or killed. TWA Flight 847 looks like a central example of the sort of thing that would have influenced my perspective: so far as I can see, the flight had no connection to Israel whatsoever.

            I will concede that it looks like a significantly higher proportion of the international targets than I’d realized did have some Israeli connection, e.g., TWA Flight 841 departed from Tel Aviv, which probably wouldn’t have registered with me at the time. That said, I still doubt that many of the people on board deserved to die.

            So did these attacks not seem as monstrous to you at the time as they did to me? Curious; but I suppose there are any number of reasons why that might be the case, e.g., if you were older than I was you might have been better able to put them in context.

          • Aapje says:

            @Harry Maurice Johnston

            I’m talking about buying land from an existing nation to form a new one.

            The current land is decent agricultural land. Good farm land is rare in the region. Any offer is going to be sand dunes or rock, not farmland or land on top of a large oil reserve, which would not be a viable Palestinian state. What is the point in going from a place that would have decent prospects without oppression or from a refugee camp that has no real economy and is fully dependent on aid, to a ‘state’ that has no real economy and is fully dependent on aid? In other words, a refugee camp in all but name.

            Furthermore, there is the religious angle. Jerusalem is a Muslim holy place, not just a Jewish one.

            I’m not sure what your point about ethnic/religious nationalism is.

            My point is that your proposals are based on the assumption that other nations/peoples have an obligation based on religion and/or ethnicity. If one rejects the idea that there is a special link/obligation between people based on religion and/or ethnicity, then your demands look discriminatory. Imagine having starvation in Ethiopia and then someone saying that black Americans have an obligation to give aid, but not white Americans.

            Of course, this entire thing started by a third party deciding that others had an obligation to host a bunch of people, while those people didn’t agree. We have many decades of evidence that this can create conflicts that don’t just fix themselves over time.

            So did these attacks not seem as monstrous to you at the time as they did to me?

            I was more interested in pacifiers than politics back then. Ultimately I don’t see how it matters. The PLO abandoned those tactics and now cooperates with Israel against terrorism. If we are going to allow people to hold grudges and retaliate because of them forever, then peace becomes impossible.

            The abuses I’m talking about are happening right now, so they can be changed. You can’t undo the past.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            @Aapje,

            My point is that your proposals are based on the assumption that other nations/peoples have an obligation based on religion and/or ethnicity.

            I’m not sure where you got that idea. It isn’t one of my assumptions.

            … I was, however, assuming that the Palestinian state would be better off if their putative new neighbours were ethnically and religiously compatible. Given the overall state of the Middle East that might have been overly optimistic! Still, I’d imagine they’d rather not be any further away from their original homeland than absolutely necessary. [And to reiterate, in case anybody just came in, this is strictly a hypothetical anyway, because Overton window.]

            Your assertion that there is no good land that could be made available anywhere in the Middle East is plausible and will be taken under consideration, though I would suggest that with modern technology this isn’t necessarily as much of a problem as it would have been in the past. Also in this hypothetical scenario the Palestinian territories, at least, would have to be either purchased or leased from the owners and/or the new Palestinian state, so there’d be another potential source of income there. That’s on top of compensation for refugees from Israel proper.

            I was more interested in pacifiers than politics back then. Ultimately I don’t see how it matters.

            Well, it suggests that international opinion might shift in favour of the Palestinians as the older generations depart, which is vaguely promising given the thesis that one of the barriers to peace is that the international community is divided, with different interest groups backing both sides. It is also possible, though perhaps not likely, that the Palestinian leadership anticipates this demographic change and is deliberately stalling in the expectation of a better deal later.

            The abuses I’m talking about are happening right now, so they can be changed.

            Oh, I’m sure Israel could do better than it does now, see above re aholes. But in the absence of a peace deal there’s a limit to how liberal they can realistically be.

            (It also doesn’t help that the “abuses” that get the most publicity are the ones where Israel can most plausibly claim to have just been defending themselves, which I guess is a Toxoplasma thing. NB: I’m not blaming the Palestinians for this.)

          • Aapje says:

            @Harry Maurice Johnston

            I suggest reading this Q&A with a poller which is very much worth reading. Some key quotes:

            What has changed is the partisan divide on this issue, which we have begun seeing over the past few years. This has resulted in more Democrats wanting the U.S. to take neither side and more Republicans wanting the U.S. to lean toward Israel.

            However, among Democrats, it’s obvious that Democratic politicians, particularly in Congress, are not in harmony with their Democratic base on many of the questions related to Israel-Palestine. At some point, one would expect that this gap cannot be sustained.

            So what I expect is for the taboo on strongly criticizing Israel to end in the future, among Democrats.

            Moreover, just 43% of all Republicans (and 38% of non-Evangelical Republicans) said they want the U.S. to veto a UN resolution endorsing the creation of a Palestinian state, while just 15% of Democrats and 13% of independents felt the same.

            Two things are very clear to me- one is that public opinion does not present a barrier for bold U.S. actions such as recognizing the state of Palestine at the United Nations. The public is far more open to this option than politicians and it’s obvious that the barrier is principally emanating from passionate minorities, campaign contributions, and lobbying.

            So there is already minority support to allow the Palestinians to try and force a state into existence. The increasing partisan nature of the issue erodes the current broad agreement in the US, meaning that a Democrat win might result in pro-Palestine policies/decisions in the future.

            I’ve always believed that on the settlement issue there is widespread opposition and frustration within the American public and even among political elites within the U.S. This was born out last year when we discovered that 39% overall were open to punitive measures against Israeli settlement activity which is comparable to this year (37% overall). But the fact that half of the Democrats want the U.S. to impose some punitive measures could ultimately become a factor in the debate though I suspect not in this election cycle.”

            This latest poll also shows that a large majority of Americans of all political stripes believes that if it cannot be both, then Israel should be a democratic state rather than a Jewish state, with 82% of Democrats, 74% of independents, and 62% of Republicans endorsing such a view.

            So, ultimately, there is way less support for a Jewish state than for a state where Jews are safe.

            For various reasons, it seems likely to me that (strong) support for Israel is way lower in Europe and much more linked to the extreme right.

            I think that Israel is really lucky that Palestinian culture is so resistant to non-violence, because the Palestinians really shoot themselves in the foot often with resistance that isn’t good enough to really hurt Israel, but too aggressive for them to get as much sympathy as they could get.

            But in the absence of a peace deal there’s a limit to how liberal they can realistically be.

            I disagree and believe that the opposite is true: the lack of good will on the part of Israel has blocked moves towards peace time and again. For example, Hamas was extremely effective at reducing the attacks on Israel during the 2008 Israel–Hamas ceasefire, reducing the attacks by 98%. The agreement was to increase the supplies to Gaza by 30% in 3 days and open the border fully in 10 days. This was never adhered to. Instead, Israel started making excuses why they couldn’t adhere to their promises and making additional demands that were not part of the agreement, like the release of Gilad Shalit.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            Israel started making excuses why they couldn’t adhere to their promises and making additional demands that were not part of the agreement, like the release of Gilad Shalit.

            Israel seems to have been up-front about the fact that the entire deal was conditional on Gilad’s release. Arguably it was unethical to agree to the cease-fire without formalizing that condition, but personally I wouldn’t care to second-guess such a decision.

            References: Wikipedia, Haaretz.

          • Aapje says:

            @Harry Maurice Johnston

            It seems clear from the reporting that Israel didn’t expect the release to be part of the cease fire, but instead, to be linked to it. In other words, they expected to have to make further concessions to secure his release (like releasing Palestinian prisoners).

            In the words of Olmert:

            I believe that as part of the understandings that enabled this calm, we will be able to advance his release.

            To me, this seems to be a demand for progress, not a hard demand that the cease fire results in Gilad’s release very quickly.

            Even if we take it as a given that release is part of the truce, then I still reject that Israel could refuse to make good on their short term commitments until this happened.

            The agreement with Hamas was that 30% more supplies would go through the crossings after 3 days and no more restrictions after 10 days. Those are time-based commitments that are very aggressive, but that Israel agreed to. I don’t think that it is reasonable to expect an exchange deal within 3 days or 10 days, especially since Israel seemed to negotiate pretty hard. The Gilad deal eventually took 6 years (and for almost 7 times as many prisoners as what Israel initially offered) and the current attempt at another deal has already been ongoing for 4 years.

            So I think that Hamas reasonably expected that real progress on negotiations for Gilad’s release would not be expected before the crossings would mostly be opened. Basic strategy when the other side stalls on making good on their commitments, is to stall on your commitments too, to prevent the stalling from paying off. So I don’t think it was reasonable to expect Hamas to put haste behind an exchange when Israel was stalling on their commitments.

            Ultimately, Israel could always have closed off the crossings again, so it’s not like Israel would have weakened their negotiation position for the Gilad deal appreciatively. IMO a good faith effort on their part would have been to go a long way towards fulfilling their promises. Perhaps not 98 or 100%, but 75% or so. Then they could reasonably complain if there was no progress on Gilad in a few months of mostly open borders, while the other cease fire conditions were reasonably well adhered to by both sides. As it is, I think that Israel defected first.

            Hamas fulfilled their short term commitment to stop the rocket attacks almost perfectly, although a little bit later than demanded by the treaty (days, rather than immediately), which seems reasonable.

            Israel then fulfilled their short term commitments to a far smaller extent and with no indication of really trying to improve. This is defection.

            Hamas then defected relatively modestly in return when it comes to Gilad. It seems to me that this might have been resolved by careful, evenhanded diplomacy where both sides get convinced to make good on their commitments.

            Then Israel defected like crazy by bombing the shit out of Gaza. At that point the cease fire is obviously unsalvageable.

    • Plumber says:

      “It recently happened to me that something I understood to be true for a long time got completely falsified in light of pretty trivial evidence…

      ….Has this happened to anyone else? It’s a mixed feeling of excitement for having ones beliefs updated and embarrassment for not looking into things more….”


      @WashedOut,

      In a couple of previous threads @David Friedman has linked to compelling evidence that “facts” that have informed my extremely anti-libertarian views are wrong, but despite this my conclusions about “how-things-ought-to-be” (basically they way things were between Roosevelt and Carter) are pretty much the same.

      Probably means I’m stubborn, have had too many head blows, and need to learn how to change my mind, but there it is.

      • Probably means I’m stubborn, have had too many head blows, and need to learn how to change my mind, but there it is.

        My father, who may be the wisest man I’ve known, told me that the purpose of an argument is not to convince someone but to give him the ideas with which he may later convince himself.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          That’s very sensible– I think one of the things that makes people crazy is expecting to convince other people quickly.

        • baconbits9 says:

          My personal opinion is that at its best debate or argument should be used to convince yourself of the correct opinion. I switched over to libertarian/ancap thinking because I found myself arguing against someone where I couldn’t counter their arguments and was looking searching for data or tricks to strengthen my side.

  16. The Pachyderminator says:

    I’m curious about how many non-academic people here have a personal subscription to one or more academic journals for pleasure.

    I’m not a historian and my only connection to the field is that I studied it in undergrad, but I’m a member of the American Historical Association simply because I enjoy reading the American Historical Review. It might be possible for me to scrounge up PDFs through local libraries or something, but I love having hard copies. I’ve considered adding other journals too, but neither my income nor my living space are big enough for me to start my own academic library.

    It seems likely that for STEM journals, this would be less useful due to (1) the availability of resources like arXiv.org, (2) higher cost, and (3) for hard copies, the sheer shelf space they would take up. (I’ve seen science journals on library shelves that are as much as a dozen hefty volumes per year, so I can only assume the print versions aren’t too widely distributed.) However, there are certainly people here who are interested in history, psychology, political science, etc.…

  17. CatCube says:

    Structural Engineering Post Series

    Continued from here:
    https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/08/29/open-thread-109-25/#comment-663922

    @Hoopyfreund covered some mechanics here:
    https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/16/open-thread-110-5/#comment-669181

    Statics (continuted)

    I apologize for the long time between these posts. I got into some longer hours at work, and let this project fall by the wayside a little bit. I’d like to thank Hoopyfreund for putting it back front and center for me.

    I’m going to continue on from my last post on statics. Since there were no questions or discussion, I’m going to assume there was either little interest in that particular topic, or that I made it so opaque that it was useless to people who didn’t already know the material. Consequently, I’ll fly through this one, just for the sake of completeness. My intent here is to expand a little bit on the concept of load path, to explain how we determine what the path for each load is.

    In the last post, I covered how the principles of static equilibrium describe how loads are distributed to supports of a beam. I’ll talk a little bit about how loads are distributed to structural elements by an engineer.

    Most loads on a structure are distributed; that is, they are some force per unit area. Floor loads are one example, where a standard floor loading for an office in the US is 50 pounds per square foot. The traditional concept used is tributary area. For example, if you have a floor consisting of a slab supported by beams, the assumption is that if you draw a line midway between the beams, each beam gets the share on each side of the line.

    This assumes that the floor system is one-way. If you have an area of floor bounded by beams, if the aspect ratio of that area is over about 2:1, you can neglect the contribution of the beams on the short side, and assume the floor load is distributed to the beams on the long side. This also means that the floor can be designed by considering only the short direction–you just have to take a unit width of the floor and design it as a beam spanning the short direction.

    If the area is more square, conversely, the system will be a two-way slab, and you’ll have to distribute using a more complex pattern. The traditional way is to draw a 45° line from each corner until they meet, and then draw a line connecting the meeting points. If you’ve got a square area, the 45° lines will meet at the center point, and you’ll have a triangle of tributary area for each beam. If the area is rectangular, you’ll have triangles for the short side, and two trapezoids for the long side.

    One-way slabs are common in steel buildings, and two-way in concrete.

    Once you have the load on each beam, you can figure out what the load each beam imposes on the member supporting it (girders or columns), and then what that member imposes on its supporting members, until you’ve gotten all the way down to the foundation.

    Tributary area is used for lateral loads as well. For example, wind acts on the side of a building. The wind pressure on the outside wall is usually distributed up and down to the floors above and below. Each floor slab, then, acts as a diaphragm, which transfers the load collectors or drag struts–usually the floor beams discussed a few paragraphs ago–and the drag struts carry it to the Main Wind Force Resisting System, wich are usually one of two things: Frames, which are collections of beams, columns, and ties designed to resist lateral load. The other option commonly used are shear walls, which are walls that are solid over most of their extent–if you have a softcover book at hand, it’s easy to bend the book out of plane, but difficult to deform the book into a parallelogram. That’s how shear walls resist lateral load.

    Once it’s in the MWFRS, of course, each element there transfers load as above until you’re in the foundation. Snow loads, rain, earth pressure, etc. are all similar. Seismic is a little weirder, because it’s a dynamic process, but the most common methods will ultimately boil down to distributing loads according to a set of rules and ensuring a load path. Sometimes wind can be odd, too, because you can get periodic excitation, but that’s more a concern for large or otherwise oddball structures.

    Next, I’m going to move on to more discussion of building codes. I’ll have more to say on the structural sections, but I want to cover some basics on the codes as a whole.

    • bean says:

      Since there were no questions or discussion, I’m going to assume there was either little interest in that particular topic, or that I made it so opaque that it was useless to people who didn’t already know the material.

      I don’t think this is a good assumption. One of the things I had to learn when doing Naval Gazing was that how much people like something is only loosely coupled to how many comments I get. It could mean that there’s no interest, or that you’ve done a good job of explaining it, and nobody has any questions or comments to make. That’s pretty much where I was last time (and this time, except for that note).

      • Eltargrim says:

        Adding to this: I didn’t pay attention to the first post (on statics), as I’m already quite familiar with the subject. I’m eagerly awaiting the post on building codes.

      • Aapje says:

        This is one of the times where upvotes would be useful.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          Back the ancient days of apas (amateur press associations— what people did before the internet), there was RAEBNC– Read and Enjoyed, But No Comment. They were frustrating if you wanted comments, but obviously better than no feedback.

      • CatCube says:

        Yeah, fair enough. I read every posting on Navalgazing, but rarely comment.

      • Doesntliketocomment says:

        Speaking of which, the captcha is down at naval gazing, I haven’t been able to post for about a week. Looking at the comment volume I don’t think I’m alone. I came here to find you because I don’t know how else to reach you and let you know.

    • Deiseach says:

      Well, I’m not commenting because I don’t know enough about the topic under discussion, but I am finding it interesting and educational. Me too dumb for the maths, but that’s not your fault 🙂

      • CatCube says:

        Well, the one thing I was trying to do was make this accessible without math. That is, to give people who aren’t good at math at least a qualitative understanding of “if you have a beam that’s not moving, it must have exactly as much force acting upwards on it as you have acting downwards on it, and engineers can calculate what those forces are and where they act.”

        The downside to this forum is that you don’t have pictures, which makes qualitative understanding harder.

        • Gobbobobble says:

          I wonder if starting with a of a toy problem to zoom in on aspects of might have made it *feel* less mathy than jumping right into Statics&Dynamics? Using the basic tools illustratively rather than foundationally (pun not intended though I wish it was).

          I dunno. I am neither an educator nor particularly versed in communications. But it’s a potential avenue to explore.

    • ryan8518 says:

      I’m quite enjoying this series, though it reminds of my time growing up in London, the language should be the same but something just feels off (I’m an aerospace structures person). Every time I’ve had to crack open a civil code, particularly the dynamic load/material property sections I’m struck by how differently things are handled. I’m particularly looking forward to the building codes section, and hoping for both some of the technical aspects but also the authorizing/enforcement side of the house.

      • CatCube says:

        Unfortunately, the authorizing/enforcement side is the one I’m weakest on, since I work for the federal government; we don’t do permits the way a regular developer would, and the local building officials don’t have the authority to either demand review of my projects, nor to inspect the completed facilities, though federal law does obligate us to comply with the local building code as adopted in the project’s jurisdiction. (We have outside reviews of our projects, but the workflow is different.)

  18. Levantine says:

    When I was age 7, 8, 9, ‘male chauvinism’ was almost omnipresent among my peers – and the number of factual references to male chauvinism among children that I’ve come across in the next three decades, is zero.

    In childhood, that it was almost omnipresent led me to assume that it is strongly based on biology.

    The decades of observation that it’s virtually unreferenced makes me wonder whether that is right and what is the actual truth.

    Now, to the details: What can I say specifically about this ‘male chauvinism’ among children?

    It looked, acted and quacked like one.
    I observed it as a heterosexual boy, and
    At the same time, I found it completely alien, completely at odds with my common sense, which led me to ask myself countless questions.

    What is its nature? Why am I different? What is its spread? etc. etc.

    It happened in a society where females were: school teachers, mothers, distinguished professionals, a female was the head of government. Try as I might, I saw no way that this perspective on females is or can be transmitted from the adults to the children to such an extent that it dominates almost every boy.
    Therefore – I reasoned – it is by all chance biologically based, and age-specific.

    I would liken its moral status to the medical status of flat feet: perfectly commonplace and normal in children while pathological in adults.

    I could also suggest that it may be specific to modern, settled societies and virtually absent among many hunter-gatherer societies.

    But why do I fail to recall a single discussion of it.
    Memory failure? My memory is apparently normal.
    Lack of reading, lack of looking it up? Right now, googling about sexism or male chauvinism in childhood leads me to zero results.
    Maybe it’s present in some backward environments, absent in the more enlightened ones, and the enlightened observers just fail to notice it among the unenlightened kids? Maybe …& does not look likely.
    Maybe it’s a victim of political calculations related to sexual interests, and simply no one finds it in their interest to speak about its existence and wide spread?
    And after I post this, a bunch of feminist witches will draw a pentagram around my name and make me condemn me to self-combustion or lifelong celibacy?
    Maybe, … Even without the witch part, this whole thing strikes me as strange

    • idontknow131647093 says:

      You are just describing a nonentity.

    • Nootropic cormorant says:

      Maybe it’s just some tribalism?
      I don’t think 7 years old is too young to pick up societal memes though.

    • Aapje says:

      I’ve seen a study that claimed that babies are already being treated differently, where parents are more likely to respond to a crying girl than boy. So if boys are refused empathy at such an early age already, it’s perfectly possible that most are taught survival strategies that are based on self-reliance and dominance very early on.

    • Thegnskald says:

      What the heck are you calling “male chauvinism” here?

      The fact that little boys think boys should be in charge?

      Did you not hang around enough little girls to observe that they think girls should be in charge?

  19. jaimeastorga2000 says:

    Against the minimum wage:

    Assume someone’s labor is worth $10/hour. What does it mean for someone’s labor to be “worth” $10/hour? See the first third of “The Cambist and Lord Iron”. The value of something is what the market will bear; it’s what costumers are willing to pay for the labor. If the most somebody is willing to pay to have you mow the grass is $10/hour, the value of your grass mowing labor is $10/hour. It doesn’t matter if you work really hard, it doesn’t matter if you have 2 children starving at home. That has nothing to do with what your labor is worth. Your labor is worth what people are willing to pay for it. And since trades are mutually beneficent exchanges, the maximum price they are willing to pay for it is the price where they are just barely getting any value out of the trade. That’s it.

    So, again, suppose someone’s labor is worth $10/hour. This is what the company charges the costumer. The company then takes the $10/hour, pays the employee $8/hour, and pockets the remaining $2/hour. (Why isn’t the company paying him even less? Because the employee can quit and work for another company which pays him $8/hour.) Now suppose the minimum wage is raised to $15/hour. What happens? Well, we have already established that that company can’t sell his labor for more than $10/hour. So, at best, the company would be LOSING $5/hour by employing him. So of course the company fires him, or refuses to hire him, and now he is unemployed. Lawn-mowing was his most profitable skill (otherwise he would have already been doing something else and earning more money), so he is now UNEMPLOYABLE. He’s probably not gonna starve, but he is gonna have to get by on one or more of welfare, charity, under-the-table work, or crime. HOW ON EARTH is this an improvement?

    The Marxist would note that the corporation is pocketing the $2/hour difference and calling it exploitation/stealing. So why doesn’t the guy just sell his labor to the costumer directly and pocket the full $10/hour? Coordination is hard. The company has guys specializing on advertising, maintaining a costumer list, calling other people in when the first guy gets sick, dealing with costumer complaints, etc… Which allows the guy to just show up and do his job. If he was working by himself, any hour he would be spending on advertising, organizing, etc… would be hours he would not be earning money. Plus government regulation that prevents him from selling his services directly, but that’s evil.

    And yes, this generalizes all the way down to our current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. I bite that bullet. Not only should the minimum wage not be raised to $15/hour, the minimum wage should be eliminated altogether. If I thought raising the minimum wage would ACTUALLY result in everyone earning at least $15/hr with no unemployment, I would be all for it. I’m not some evil mutant who hates workers. But it won’t. If you want everyone to make at least $15/hr, the idea you actually want is wage subsidies, not minimum wage.

    • WashedOut says:

      I think I agree with the high-level point of view you’re presenting, but a few points here and there:

      Why isn’t the company paying him even less? Because the employee can quit and work for another company which pays him $8/hour.

      This assumes that the market is liquid enough to support this action, and that the cost to the worker of changing jobs (including whatever unemployment period there is in between) is less than the value of him working for a boss that doesn’t (outwardly) plan to lower his wage.

      Now suppose the minimum wage is raised to $15/hour. What happens? Well, we have already established that that company can’t sell his labor for more than $10/hour. So, at best, the company would be LOSING $5/hour by employing him. So of course the company fires him, or refuses to hire him, and now he is unemployed.

      Or he keeps his job and his Company passes the increased costs onto their customers (home owners with lawns), who struggle to switch providers for this minimum wage service because the wage has gone up uniformly, so they bare it and the cost of living increases. Whatever job losses that follow would be proportional to the % of homeowners who start mowing their own lawns instead.

      Even though you don’t explicitly endorse it per se, why would wage subsidies be a good thing?

      The argument you’ve left out is that a minimum wage reduces the independent bargaining power of low skilled workers. The other facet to this is that laws which enforce equal-pay can paradoxically hurt the poor and minorities more, since for the same price a discriminatory employer will choose to employ someone from their in-group, absent any bargaining power of the minority worker to make an offer.

      • Glen Raphael says:

        Or he keeps his job and his Company passes the increased costs onto their customers (home owners with lawns), who struggle to switch providers for this minimum wage service because the wage has gone up uniformly, so they bare it and the cost of living increases.

        That’s just denying the premise that the work was “worth” $10/hour to customers.

        If the work really is worth only $10/hour to customers then raising the price doesn’t (in the long run) increase revenue. $10/hour is the revenue-maximizing price; if firms could earn more total revenue by raising the price to customers to $17/hour (enough to pay workers $15/hour and still cover $2 overhead) they would have already done that.

        When you raise the price above the revenue-maximizing price, revenue declines because people find substitutes. Perhaps they’ll just shut up and pay the higher price this month, but in subsequent months they’ll find ways to pay less such that overall revenue for your firm and/or the entire industry declines. The only way for this not to happen is if people stop responding to incentives. So here’s a few things that change when the price increases. In addition to some people just mowing their own lawn others will:

        – buy lawn-mowing robots to mow their lawn with no labor cost

        – let some or all of the lawn turn into high grass

        – keep the lawn but let it grow taller by mowing less often

        – switch to grass variants that grow more slowly to need less mowing

        – switch to ground cover that doesn’t require mowing (honeysuckle, iceplant)

        – replace lawns with rock gardens or orchards or pavement

        – in new homes, lawns on offer shrink or entirely fall out of fashion

        A market price of $10/hour for mowing takes all this into account – it’s the price at which if you charge less you lose money (even though you get more business) because you’re not charging enough per hour and if you charge more you lose money (even though you’re making more per hour) because you get less business.

        And yes, firms are price-takers because if they charge too much, somebody else can jump in and undercut to steal the business. But firms are also price-takers because customer demand for the product they sell isn’t infinite. You’re not just competing with other suppliers of your product, you’re also competing with substitutes…and cartelizing the industry doesn’t help with that at all.

        In the case of McDonalds – a company selling food – it’s at least possible to argue that everybody fundamentally needs to consume food so they’ll just have to suck it up if it gets uniformly more expensive. But who needs a large well-trimmed lawn?

        • Adrian says:

          That’s just denying the premise that the work was “worth” $10/hour to customers.

          Reasoning about hypotheticals is fine, but when you attempt to draw real-life conclusions from them (which jaimeastorga2000 did), then challenging the assumptions is not just allowed, but essential.

          In the case of McDonalds – a company selling food – it’s at least possible to argue that everybody fundamentally needs to consume food so they’ll just have to suck it up if it gets uniformly more expensive. But who needs a large well-trimmed lawn?

          Who needs fast-food? You could also cook your own food at home.

        • Aapje says:

          @Glen Raphael

          If the work really is worth only $10/hour to customers then raising the price doesn’t (in the long run) increase revenue. $10/hour is the revenue-maximizing price; if firms could earn more total revenue by raising the price to customers to $17/hour (enough to pay workers $15/hour and still cover $2 overhead) they would have already done that.

          This is only true if demand outstrips supply. In that case, suppliers compete mainly against substitutes.

          However, if supply outstrips demand, suppliers compete mainly against each other. In that case they could increase their revenue if they collude to increase prices. A minimum wage is a legislative and legal way to collude to increase the price of labor.

          In the case of McDonalds – a company selling food – it’s at least possible to argue that everybody fundamentally needs to consume food so they’ll just have to suck it up if it gets uniformly more expensive. But who needs a large well-trimmed lawn?

          A higher minimum wage will cause shifts in the labor market, as conditions are not the same for different kinds of labor. For some labor, the increase will benefit the workers, for other labor, it will harm them. Workers also have some flexibility, so some will change jobs as a result of the change.

          Any claim that the effect of the minimum wage is unidirectional and obvious seem vapid to me and the actual effects can most likely only be approximated with complex modelling.

    • NostalgiaForInfinity says:

      A couple of arguments in favour (largely to point out that people who support minimum wages aren’t all people who have just failed to think through simple consequences):

      Say instead that the minimum wage in your example was raised to $9. This makes it still in the interest of the the business to employ the worker, but does reduce their profits – unless they raise their prices to maintain the profit level and pass the cost on to the consumer. This is more possible if there’s lots of competition in that particular industry and consumers could pick a business where this wasn’t done (or done to a lesser extent). Similar arguments suggest that if there are few employers in an area, the reduced level of competition in the labour market allows them to pay lower wages, and a minimum wage could increase this. See here for a (partisan) summary. Obviously this is contested by other economists.

      There’s also macro-focused, slightly woolier arguments about how increasing wages for lower-paid workers can increase demand because they spend a higher proportion of their income. This seems to depend on whether rich people just sit on piles of cash, or whether you think profits do find their way back into the economy to stimulate demand just as much as wages for lower-paid workers.

      I’m not necessarily in favour of minimum wages over wage subsidies/negative income taxes/universal incomes. But there are (I think) reasonable arguments that minimum wages don’t necessarily raise unemployment.

    • Robin says:

      I’m not sure I understand this argument.

      If it is illegal to employ a lawn-mower for less than $15, some people would decide to pay them $15, while other would mow their lawn themselves or live with high grass. In this theoretical setup, it is no good arguing how many would decide either way. But no company would pay the employees $15 while still charging the customer $10.

      On the other hand, the employee’s working time is a finite resource. Human dignity would prohibit selling it for less money than needed to support himself and his family.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        I’d think the real offense against human dignity would be throwing the employee’s working time on the scrap heap because its value fails to pass some arbitrary threshold. I’ve never understood the widespread assumption that anyone who can’t be 100% self-supporting ought to be 0% self-supporting instead.

    • beleester says:

      I’m not sure I have a comment on the minimum wage, but I hadn’t read “The Cambist and Lord Iron” and I quite liked it, so thank you for the link.

    • Guy in TN says:

      You’ve got to compare the utility lost by those who wish they could work for under the wage floor, to the utility gained by those who are glad they are being propped up by it.

      Let’s say, hypothetically, that a $15 minimum wage causes 1 out of 100 minimum wage workers to lose their job. We both agree that this one worker has lost utility. But in order to determining if this is bad policy, you have to looked at what the other workers have gained, and see if its a good trade-off.

      It gets even easier, when most of the people who have a skill level with a market rate of less than minimum wage, would qualify for disability or social security. This means their utility loss would be relative minimal.

      • baconbits9 says:

        If you are going to go the utility argument you have to include all of the customers who lose utility by paying higher prices, and the cost of long term growth by restricting the dynamic processes of the economy.

        • JPNunez says:

          Then we also got to consider the utility loss by the unemployed by having them work stressful, low compensated jobs, and the impact in their health.

          Do notice that a lot of the unemployed would not get a job at the minimum wage, even if you increased it, due to a bunch of factors, so working the minimum is not just an equation of $/hours. There are costs to working in minimum wage jobs.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Studies of unemployment in the US associate being unemployed with greater stresses and health impacts, and they find that being unemployed has similar negative effects to losing a loved one.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Do notice that a lot of the unemployed would not get a job at the minimum wage, even if you increased it, due to a bunch of factors, so working the minimum is not just an equation of $/hours. There are costs to working in minimum wage jobs.

            Why would the casual arrow be this direction? It is far more likely given that almost no jobs in the US pay the minimum wage for long stretches that people who are unemployed are so because no one wants to hire them, not because they are to good for work*

            *With exceptions for bad welfare policy leading to onerous marginal tax rates.

          • JPNunez says:

            I think those studies do not differentiate between people who lost a good paying job and cannot find something similar, and people who just cannot find a job with a minimum wage.

            Do consider that Amazon has a very high churn rate. People take those jobs and are burned out super quick.

            Not the same thing.

            @baconbits9

            If you were, say a previously-high-paid-developer, who cannot find a job for a while, things will have to get v bad before you take some survival level job at Walmart or whatever. You will try to find a job equivalent to the one you had for several reasons.

            Raising the minimum wage won’t solve that until you raise it a lot. And of course, lowering the minimum wage won’t solve it either. We are talking here about people who cannot get a job due to the minimum wage, not the general unemployed.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Raising the minimum wage won’t solve that until you raise it a lot. And of course, lowering the minimum wage won’t solve it either. We are talking here about people who cannot get a job due to the minimum wage, not the general unemployed.

            I am not quite sure what this refers to, so I will restate my position.

            If you are currently unemployed and can’t get a job at above the minimum wage then the costs of working probably aren’t the determining factor. If you aren’t worth more than the minimum wage to a company now then you won’t be worth a higher minimum wage should it be raised. Someone sitting at home refusing to work for 7.25 an hour might jump off the couch and look for a job if it were raised to 14.50, but the company who might have hired them at 7.25 is probably not interested at 14.50.

            If there was a company interested in hiring them at 14.50 then why would they be unemployed now? The people who are unemployed now because of the minimum wage can’t be made employable by forcing the minimum wage up.

        • Guy in TN says:

          There are lots of things to consider, which is to say its not as simple as jaimeastorga2000 presented.

          Particularly, this:

          the cost of long term growth by restricting the dynamic processes of the economy.

          Is a can of worms that I imagine we could have quite a debate over.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Is a can of worms that I imagine we could have quite a debate over.

            We sure could!

            Opening salvo: Small businesses are more likely to use minimum wage labor than large businesses, and small businesses are more influential for both employment growth and economic growth than large businesses.

          • Guy in TN says:

            By your categorization, you have three groups: Small business owners, large business owners, and non-business owners. How is that you are measuring which of these contribute most to economic growth?

            Wouldn’t whichever group that has the most total wealth necessarily contribute the most, since they would be doing the most buying and selling, and most involved in production? (And since a minimum wage shifts that total wealth, the respective group responsibility for economic growth would shift in response?)

            This gets even more complicated, when you consider that most economic growth happens at the intersection of a business owner and a non-business owners (an employee). You’re not just lumping the wealth they create together as “created by the business owner”, are you?

          • baconbits9 says:

            No, because we are measuring changes, not totals. We can track say employment by company by year, and if net changes in employment for all companies over size x in the first sample are zero then we can reasonably conclude that employment growth is driven by companies under size x (simplified for the example). It is possible, and indeed likely, that those companies that are now above X were responsible for growth in the past as they went from below X to above X, but are no longer driving growth.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Is employment growth a good proxy for economic growth? Especially considering that non-business owners contribute significantly to the economy?

          • baconbits9 says:

            Especially considering that non-business owners contribute significantly to the economy?

            I am not sure what you mean by this. If you mean employees contribute to the economy those are rolled up in the employment numbers, if you mean the self employed who will never hire any employees of their own then they aren’t effectively constrained by minimum wage laws (nor are they likely a large portion of the economy).

            In you mean consumers then the value of that is rolled up with production and sales numbers, which relate to the employment numbers.

            Is employment growth a good proxy for economic growth?

            Within the contexts of a mostly voluntary economy, yes. Long term employment trends are going to be related to growth and while there might be some hypothetical situations where it might be bad these are unlikely to dominate.

          • Guy in TN says:

            In you mean consumers then the value of that is rolled up with production and sales numbers, which relate to the employment numbers.

            I mean the economic benefits that occur outside of the employer-employee relationship. Even if we agree that minimum wage would be projected to decrease employment, it would change the distribution of wealth in the economy, meaning that low-income people could contribute to the economy more than they did before.
            There is reason to think that this transfer of wealth would result in a net-increase for the economy, since low-income workers contribute in many ways that aren’t captured by just looking at employment rates.

            Firstly, people with more money have more children. Each additional person contributes greatly to the economy, yet none of the economic growth associated with child-bearing is captured in the employment analysis. When someone turns 18 and enters the workforce, we record their labor just magically appearing, instead of as an expensive investment that occurred decades earlier.

            Secondly, not letting the lowest classes sink too far results in social and political stability. At below a certain wage, the lower classes will vote (or directly act) in desperation, in ways that sacrifice long-term growth for their short term interests. While business are aware of this, the first one that “gives in” in the form of paying higher wages has a competitive disadvantage with other businesses. The minimum wage solves the coordination problem.
            By reducing the frequency of revolutions and magnitude of social instability, it is a huge benefit to the economy, yet this benefit is written down as a “loss” if you are just looking at the employment numbers.

          • Even if we agree that minimum wage would be projected to decrease employment, it would change the distribution of wealth in the economy, meaning that low-income people could contribute to the economy more than they did before.

            That depends on assuming that the demand for low skill labor is inelastic–that the percent increase in the income of those employed is greater than the percent decrease in the number employed.

            And since raising the cost of low-skill labor will raise the cost of goods produced by such labor, people in general will have lower real incomes, thus be less willing to (for example) have children.

            At a slight tangent, do you happen to know what percentage of the labor force receives the minimum wage? It’s relevant to the kinds of arguments you are offering.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Firstly, people with more money have more children. Each additional person contributes greatly to the economy, yet none of the economic growth associated with child-bearing is captured in the employment analysis.

            This is a bold statement, there is not a positive correlation across nations between birth rate and income at all. Within the US there does not appear to be a positive correlation either with higher income people having fewer kids and lower economic classes having more. I guess its possible that within those lower economic classes having more kids is correlated with higher earnings, but I have never heard that claim before.

            Secondly, not letting the lowest classes sink too far results in social and political stability. At below a certain wage, the lower classes will vote (or directly act) in desperation, in ways that sacrifice long-term growth for their short term interests.

            I actually agree with this but it is a huge strike against the minimum wage if the minimum wage decreases employment. Decreasing employment makes it far more likely that a permanent underclass exists who have only political power with no economic power.

            You appear to be assuming that the increase in the minimum wage must (or at least will) lead to a stronger economic position for the lower classes, my position is the opposite. In the long run fewer economic opportunities means less economic power for the lower classes, and pushes their activities/frustrations/anger into political and social situations (and also increases those frustrations) which decreases stability.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @DavidFriedman

            That depends on assuming that the demand for low skill labor is inelastic–that the percent increase in the income of those employed is greater than the percent decrease in the number employed.

            That’s correct. And the argument to the contrary assumes that the demand is perfectly elastic. Since workers are a necessary part of most production, I would say their demand is somewhat fixed for the employer. As long as the employer wants to stay in business, he has to have some minimal level of workers.

            And since raising the cost of low-skill labor will raise the cost of goods produced by such labor, people in general will have lower real incomes, thus be less willing to (for example) have children.

            This only holds if you assume the low-income labor market is perfectly elastic. Otherwise, you’ve got to subtract the increase in cost of goods from their increase in income, to see whether it is a net-positive.

            At a slight tangent, do you happen to know what percentage of the labor force receives the minimum wage? It’s relevant to the kinds of arguments you are offering.

            Its a small percentage, I’m aware. For both of our positions, that just means that the impact of a minimum wage increase will have a small impact, in either a positive or negative direction.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @baconbits9

            You appear to be assuming that the increase in the minimum wage must (or at least will) lead to a stronger economic position for the lower classes, my position is the opposite.

            Well yes, my whole support for the minimum wage hinges on this. When the minimum wage question was brought up in previous threads, I’ve mentioned that if there was convincing evidence that the minimum wage decreased the total amount of wealth of the lower classes, I would cease to support it.

            This is a question that I’ve rarely seen addressed in an empirical way. A Seattle study from a few years ago, to its credit, tried to address it, but it had fundamental methodological flaws.

            Unless we have some empirical data, I’m just relying on my sense that the labor market is probably rather inelastic, since labor is a necessary part of most businesses (particularly in a service economy). Meaning, that if labor costs rise, businesses will be forced to look for other ways to save money, rather than a 1:1 reduction in employment in response to rising costs of employment.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I would say their demand is somewhat fixed for the employer. As long as the employer wants to stay in business, he has to have some minimal level of workers.

            Yes, a lot of businesses need 10 bodies, no matter what.

            But if they have to pay middle-class wages, they are going to hire middle-class workers, with no arrest records and some college.

            They don’t even need to be explicit about this. If the gas station wage changes from $12 to $20, they will get a better talent pool applying on its own.

            If you look at the total employment, the number of workers still looks the same, and people are even getting paid more! Success!

            If you were the guy who was able to find a job because your labor was worth $13/hour, sorry, your life was ruined to be a pawn in someone else’s pissing contest. You should have thought about that before you became a peasant. Come read this flyer about UBI and make sure to vote for it; remember, you can trust us.

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            But if they have to pay middle-class wages, they are going to hire middle-class workers, with no arrest records and some college.

            Won’t the employers who really need middle-class workers wind up raising their wages to compensate?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Yes, the previous $20/hour people will have a decreased unemployment and increased wages. To the extent that they cannot capture all of it, some of it will be captured by the $19/hour people, who will capture as much as they can, then what’s left will go to the $18/hour people, etc etc.

            By the time that shifting makes it all the way down to the old $12/hour people, there is very little left, certainly not enough to make up for them going from $12/hour to nothing.

          • Quoting me:

            That depends on assuming that the demand for low skill labor is inelastic–that the percent increase in the income of those employed is greater than the percent decrease in the number employed.

            That’s correct. And the argument to the contrary assumes that the demand is perfectly elastic.

            No. If it were perfectly elastic, any increase in the minimum wage would result in all the current minimum wage workers becoming unemployed. The argument to the contrary (with regard to your particular argument) assumes that demand is elastic–that a one percent increase in the wage results in more than a one percent decrease in employment.

            Since workers are a necessary part of most production, I would say their demand is somewhat fixed for the employer. As long as the employer wants to stay in business, he has to have some minimal level of workers.

            The issue isn’t workers but unskilled/low wage workers. You can substitute skilled workers for unskilled or capital for unskilled.

            Workers at or below minimum wage make up 2.7% of all hourly paid workers, or a bit over one percent of the labor force. The problem with increasing the minimum wage isn’t that it imposes a huge cost on the rest of the economy, it’s that it imposes a large cost on the unskilled workers who are priced out of the market and tends to create a permanent welfare class by preventing unskilled workers from getting a first job and working their way up.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Yes, a lot of businesses need 10 bodies, no matter what.

            I think this number is actually pretty small. If you walk into a popular, low to middle end restaurant like Applebees they would look like everyone is needed and you would struggle to cut staff but if you look closer you will see that

            1. They have cut the number of dishwashing shifts in half at some point in the past by adding an automated diswasher.
            2. They have cut 1/4 of their wait staff and maybe a dedicated food runner by adding digital ordering kiosks for their servers to use (or perhaps they cut all the bussers and now the wait staff buses with that extra time).
            3. Their vegetables come pre cut in steam bags, lettuce pre shredded for salad’s, all their patties pre formed and ready to slap on the grill, cutting out a couple of shifts a day of food prep and outsourcing it to a factory setting where machines do most of the work.

            Same with a grocery store, mine recently put in 6 self check out stations replacing 2 lanes which probably cuts down on as many as 5 or 6 cashier shifts a day, and before that laser scanning had already cut back multiple shifts, and in the deli/bakery/prepared food sections all the comments about applebee’s apply there as well.

            A large increase in the minimum wage isn’t going to put everyone out of work on day 1, but in 5-10 years there will be bodies gone from these jobs.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Edward Scizorhands

            But if they have to pay middle-class wages, they are going to hire middle-class workers, with no arrest records and some college.

            They don’t even need to be explicit about this. If the gas station wage changes from $12 to $20, they will get a better talent pool applying on its own.

            If you look at the total employment, the number of workers still looks the same, and people are even getting paid more! Success!

            I don’t follow your logic. If we agree that the total number of people employed will remain the same, then if you are saying the lower-value workers will become unemployed, that implies that the higher-value workers must be currently unemployed. Since someone has to take their place, and we are holding the number of jobs constant. Is that right? Are high-value workers more likely to be unemployed today than low-value ones?

          • Guy in TN says:

            @DavidFriedman
            Thank you for the correction regarding elasticity.

            The problem with increasing the minimum wage isn’t that it imposes a huge cost on the rest of the economy, it’s that it imposes a large cost on the unskilled workers who are priced out of the market and tends to create a permanent welfare class by preventing unskilled workers from getting a first job and working their way up.

            I agree that this hurdle is something to consider. I’ll put this in my internal calculus as a negative aspect of the minimum wage, weighing it against the potential benefits.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            , that implies that the higher-value workers must be currently unemployed.

            Well, yes, there are people unemployed at the $20/hour level. There are some number of people in the job market whose skills are worth $20/hour in the current market, and some subset of them that are employed, and some subset that are not. If you change a $12/hour job into a $20/hour job, you simply transfer a job from one group to the other.

            Like I said, each marginal worker in the $20/hour worker pool who becomes employed slightly drags all workers making less than he does up a tiny little bit. Imagine that 1000 brand new jobs come to down and hire people at $20/hour: this will marginally increase the wages of everyone underneath them. But that benefit will not even be within an order of magnitude of the penalty if 1000 $12/hour jobs disappeared.

            Are high-value workers more likely to be unemployed today than low-value ones?

            I doubt it. But why would anyone want to transfer jobs from the group with higher unemployment to the group with lower unemployment? I guess if you were a $20/hour worker, this proposal is selfishly good for you, but why would anyone else sign on?

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            Question: is the number of unemployed, naturally-worth-$20-per-hour workers actually high enough to have all that much impact on the unemployed, naturally-worth-$12-per-hour workers anyway?

            And if it is, doesn’t it make more sense economically for the more capable workers to be employed rather than the less capable ones? Assuming someone is going to be unemployed anyway, that is.

          • Guy in TN says:

            @Edward Scizorhands

            I’ve been thinking about your argument, on a long drive across Kentucky today. I came to conclusion that your logic is sound, but there’s an interesting twist to it. It proves too much. What you wrote earlier:

            If you change a $12/hour job into a $20/hour job, you simply transfer a job from one group to the other.

            Is true. But its not just true if the job changes from $12 to $20 because of mandates from the minimum wage. Its true if the job changes from $12 to $20 for any reason.

            For example, if an employer says “hmm, I’m not getting the sort of talent applying for this position that I was hoping for. Let’s raise the pay for this position from $12 to $20”, this has the same effect that you suggested takes place during minimum wage increases. That is, while previously people with high skill sets would be unsuited for the position, now people with low skill sets would be unsuited for the position.

            And we can agree this is a bad thing. This phenomenon, examined in isolation, is an outcome that gets worse with rising wages. And it happen regardless of whether they are rising via Minimum Wage Law or market forces.

            So what to make of it? Should we support lowering wages? (Perhaps to zero, or even negative?)

            I think its clear that, while this phenomenon is a strike against rising wages, there are plenty of other reasons why rising wages produces net-positive social utility, despite this. And if you agree that raising wages via market forces can produce benefits that counteract this phenomenon, then what is the rationale for why raising wages via non-market forces cannot as well?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Its true if the job changes from $12 to $20 for any reason.

            You’re absolutely right. And there has been a very strong move in the past 50 years against low-skill workers. Those low-skill workers have been squeezed hard. (Here I’m not saying anything about the morality or goodness of that, just that it’s happened.) High skilled workers have noticeably less unemployment than the unskilled.

            That’s why I think making things *even worse* for them, especially by a policy that is supposed to make things better for them, is foolish policy.

          • Guy in TN says:

            That’s why I think making things *even worse* for them, especially by a policy that is supposed to make things better for them, is foolish policy.

            The implication of your argument, is that there are no social benefits (for the lowest classes) for anyone to have wages above zero dollars. Do you agree with this?

            If you think there are benefits, then you can’t say that raising the minimum wage would strictly make things *worse* for the lower classes. (for whatever reason you think having non-zero wages is good).

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            The implication of your argument, is that there are no social benefits (for the lowest classes) for anyone to have wages above zero dollars. Do you agree with this?

            I do not agree, because that is bonkers. I have no idea how you got that “implication.” If you imagine that I might say a bunch of stuff I didn’t say, I guess.

          • Guy in TN says:

            Your argument was:

            If you change a $12/hour job into a $20/hour job, you simply transfer a job from one group to the other.

            And you agreed, in your previous post, that this argument applies to more than just increases via the minimum wage, but wage increases in general.

            So, does it not also apply for changing from $5 to $10? Why not from $1 to $5? Or 0$ to 1$?

          • Edward Scizorhands says:


            The implication of your argument, is that there are no social benefits (for the lowest classes) for anyone to have wages above zero dollars. Do you agree with this?

            If there were no people working, then the $0/hour workers would have no food, and no shelter, and no clothes, and no My Little Pony, and would be dead. So there is definitely “social benefits” to jobs existing that they cannot work.

            If were are only talking about wage pressure, there is benefit to those jobs that they cannot do existing. Like I already said earlier:

            Like I said, each marginal worker in the $20/hour worker pool who becomes employed slightly drags all workers making less than he does up a tiny little bit. Imagine that 1000 brand new jobs come to down and hire people at $20/hour: this will marginally increase the wages of everyone underneath them

            (Quoting myself already saying something is fun.)

    • Marx demonstrates, starting with his pamphlet “Value, Price, and Profit,” that, contra Ricardo’s “Iron Law of Real Wages,” that increases in (nominal) wages will, all other things being equal, leave the final prices of commodities unchanged while decreasing the rate of profit in all lines of business that are affected…thus increasing the real wage. (The “all other things being equal” part is very important! If the increase in nominal wages coincides with an increase in the monetary base of token fiat money that outpaces the rate of increase in the holdings of commodity-money (gold) in that country, then the final prices of commodities will not remain unchanged, but will instead inflate. There is a common misconception that businesses simply calculate their costs and then add a pre-determined “mark-up” to give rise to the final commodity price and the profit rate. However, if businesses could do this, then why wouldn’t they insist on as high of a mark-up as is imaginable? In reality, these attempted mark-ups must be accommodated by an increase in the monetary base; if they are not, then insufficient monetarily-effective demand will leave commodities unsold at the higher prices and force businesses, under pain of competition, to reduce their prices once again and simply eat the higher wage costs and thus lower profit rates).

      If the minimum wage is, let’s say, doubled…then that will tend to lower the average rate of profit, as well as interest rates on average over the long-term (interest rates that approach or exceed the average profit rate cannot be supported over the long-term because there is no profit of enterprise leftover and no incentive to be an industrial capitalist as opposed to a financial capitalist…and industrial capital is where surplus value is generated before it is shared out to rentiers and finance capitalists).

      However, the doubling of the minimum wage will affect the profitability of some lines of business more than others. Those lines of business that rely more on complex labor-power and capital-intensive methods (i.e. those businesses with a high “organic composition of capital” in Marx’s terminology) will see their profit rates decline less than average, and will not be making above-average rates of profit in the short-term. It will be the opposite with industries that rely disproportionately on unskilled labor.

      Over the medium-run, capital will move out of the labor-intensive sectors where a below-average rate of profit is being made and into the capital-intensive sectors. Supply of the labor-intensive goods will decrease, driving up the market prices of the labor-intensive goods beyond their former levels until the production of those labor-intensive goods by a typical producer are now making an average rate of profit once again. Accordingly, supply of the capital-intensive goods will increase, driving down the market-prices of the capital-intensive goods until those goods now make an average rate of profit for a typical producer.

      Within each industry, the higher minimum wage will disproportionately penalize the producers who are labor-intensive and comparatively reward the high-productivity producers with larger market-share and expanded incentives for their individual production as the labor-intensive producers go out of business. In this way, the higher minimum wage will spur on productivity growth, just as the high wages in England spurred on the Industrial Revolution, and how the comparatively high wages in the American North spurred on its industrialization to overtake England’s by the late 1800s.

      What will happen to overall employment, though? First, capital will be moving from labor-intensive sectors and enterprises to capital-intensive sectors and enterprises, which will decrease the amount of employment, all other things being equal. Second, the average rate of profit will decrease. If some capitalists react by putting money in bank accounts rather than spend it on their own production, then this should have no net effect because that addition of money into the banking system will tend to lower interest rates and spur on other capitalists to make use of that money to expand production. But if profit rates decline to such a low level that there is suddenly very little opportunity cost to hoarding money in the form of gold for the added security, then we would witness an absolute decline in employment due to the lowered profit rates.

      If the market were perfectly and instantly responsive, then this hoarding of gold would tend to raise the relative price of gold, which would make gold mining more profitable and providing replacement job opportunities for the unemployed in gold mining. Unfortunately, a relative lack of gold on the market will tend to increase interest rates instead of raise the relative price of gold. It is counter-intuitive, I know, but it is verified empirically time and time again.

      In any case, the minimum wage increase WILL tend to decrease the employment opportunities in the capitalist sector, all other things being equal. Here I think Marxist theory would agree with classical liberal and neoliberal economic theory.

      The question, though, is whether there is a non-capitalist sector standing at the ready to make-use of this idle labor-power, which retains its ability to work (its use-value) but which has lost its exchange-value (its ability to generate a profit for its purchaser). To make use of this idle labor-power, rather than allow it to die off, the non-capitalist sector will need some proportion of the capitalist sector’s labor in order to provide consumer goods (“Department II commodities” in Marx’s terminology) to this redundant workforce. (In practice, even if this labor-power is not employed by a non-capitalist sector to make useful things, the capitalist sector is usually willing to provide some bare minimum of sustenance to this idle-labor power in order to keep it alive, should it ever need to call upon this labor-power later during an economic boom or an imperialist war).

      Concretely, this re-assignment of some of the capitalist sector’s labor to the non-capitalist sector for the support of the labor-power used by the non-capitalist sector will take the form of taxes, which will further decrease the average rate of profit in the capitalist sector and lead to incrementally a bit more of an idle pool of labor-power for the non-capitalist sector to potentially use.

      If the non-capitalist sector produces at a loss (whether it is the production of aircraft carriers, F-35s, or anything else that is not then sold as a commodity to make a profit), then the net result is that society gets to make use of whatever use-values are produced by the non-capitalist sector at the expense of a lower average rate of profit, which will also incidentally entail a lower rate of re-investment, a lower rate of gold production, and a slower expansion of the market in the future. However, this would have to be calculated and weighed up against the increased rate of innovation that would be spurred on by the higher minimum wage. In any case, is then up to society as a whole to judge whether these use-values (aircraft carriers, etc.) are worth the resulting cost to society. In surplus-value terms, all of this production is unproductive of surplus-value.

      If the non-capitalist sector wants to, instead, produce commodities at a profit, it will have to produce the sorts of commodities for which there is market demand, which will in practice mean acting as the direct competitor of the capitalist sector and gradually crowding out the capitalist sector and replacing the unplanned production of the capitalist sector with the planned production of the non-capitalist sector. The capitalist sector will hate this and will kick and scream and complain about “unfair competition.”

      If the non-capitalist sector ceases to be governed democratically, then it becomes state-capitalism.

      If the non-capitalist sector remains democratically governed and comes to the point where it entirely crowd out the capitalist sector, then we have socialism.

      So, in this way even something as simple as a minimum wage increase can set the stage for socialism. But society must also be ready to employ the newly-redundant labor-power in a planned and constructive fashion—not on aircraft carriers, but on things that directly compete with the private sector. If society insists on not using this newly-idled labor-power, made redundant by the enforced shift from labor-intensive to capital-intensive production in the capitalist sector…then what should have been a boon (newly freed-up labor-power due to greater productivity) becomes an apparent curse…and the minimum wage law will get all of the blame.

      • baconbits9 says:

        Marx demonstrates, starting with his pamphlet “Value, Price, and Profit,” that, contra Ricardo’s “Iron Law of Real Wages,” that increases in (nominal) wages will, all other things being equal, leave the final prices of commodities unchanged while decreasing the rate of profit in all lines of business that are affected…thus increasing the real wage.

        Marx demonstrates nothing of the kind, as “the all other things equal” stipulation is not satisfied. The “logic” of the system requires continual economic growth throughout. The quote where you state that labor intensive industries will see a relative decline in profits compared to those with lower relative labor costs is correct, but the conclusions require that the rate of return on capital remains positive (there are many other downstream complaints about the conclusions which are dubious). If the raising of nominal wages drives the rate of return on capital negative (ie causes a recession) then the logic reverses and instead of a boom you get a perpetual downward spiral where the only conclusion that you can reach is that there will be no capital and no wages.

    • Nootropic cormorant says:

      But what determines the price of worker’s labor as $8/h? With so many unemployed around, why don’t some work for $7/h and lower this price?

      I would say, as a Marxist, that this is because $7/h won’t cover the worker’s living expenses. Yet there is no reason to believe that these living expenses are themselves set in stone, why don’t the unemployed workers lower their standard of living and accept lower wages?

      The answer is of course entitlement. They feel entitled to own plasma TVs and eat fast food. Their ancestors felt entitled to sleep in beds instead of cages, to eat meat instead of chalk-adultered bread and so on.

      This is where this becomes a political issue, attempts to lower the standard of living through lowering wages or discontinuing government programs is met with moral outrage even as it becomes obvious that it is necessary for economic recovery, try to force the issue may cause the workers to chop the bourgeoise with machetes or even elect Trump.

      If you think that this is unsustainable, yes, that’s the point.

      • baconbits9 says:

        But what determines the price of worker’s labor as $8/h? With so many unemployed around, why don’t some work for $7/h and lower this price?

        What do you mean by “so many unemployed around”? UE rates are low and employment rates have been rising for 8+ years.

        • Matt M says:

          And to the extent that large amounts of the remaining unemployed are minimum-wage earners, the literal answer to “Why don’t they work for cheaper?” is that it’s illegal for them to do so.

          • Nootropic cormorant says:

            That’s exactly what I’m saying, worker’s price of living is determined politically and not by laws of supply and demand.

          • JPNunez says:

            Yeaaah but the alternative is not particularly great.

            Look at american companies like Walmart or Amazon paying the minimum and expecting the government to help the workers to survive with food stamps. Why would we let Amazon to pay _less_ and then the government pay for even more help for the employees? And given they’d be able to pay less, they’d drive down the wages of more employees that previously made the minimum, thus making the government pay more.

            So now your taxes are still going to the poor, except now even more of the poor is being exploited and feeling like shit from bad working conditions. Even some are adding costs in the healthcare system by work related injuries, and, on top of all that, you are driving wages down. This happens right now WITH a minimum wage, why do you think it would improve without a minimum.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Except Wal-Mart and amazon don’t pay the minimum, except in very limited circumstances. Most of their positions have a company policy minimum of $11 and the average pay is $13-14, so something is pushing up wages and it isn’t the federal minimum wage. $11 an hour is >50% more than the federal minimum wage and is more than the state levels of 47 states.

          • Matt M says:

            Look at american companies like Walmart or Amazon paying the minimum and expecting the government to help the workers to survive with food stamps.

            This is a false narrative. These companies, and ALL companies, set their wages based on the market demand.

          • albatross11 says:

            Also, it’s worth noting that there are poverty programs intended to be used by the working poor. I think those programs exist because we previously had (and still have) programs that cut off your aid when you got a job, and those create an incentive to avoid getting a job and stay on aid forever.

            So, the program is working as it’s supposed to–some folks working crappy jobs at Wal-Mart aren’t making enough to survive on, and public assistance of some kind is helping them out. It’s hard to see this as Wal-Mart doing something wrong.

          • gbdub says:

            Re: Walmart, the idea that any of their employees on public assistance means they are nefariously freeriding on the government seems flawed for a couple reasons:
            1) If Walmart were NOT employing those people, they wouldn’t be at higher paying jobs somewhere else… they’d be unemployed, and fully dependent on the government for support.
            2) Where did we get the idea that “minimum wage” is or should be enough to fully support a family of 4 or whatever? Should it be against the law to sell your labor for less than what it would take to support yourself and a couple kids at some reasonable level of comfort at 40 hours a week? That’s the built in assumption of the idea that “minimum wage” and “living wage” should be synonyms.
            3) I think the argument can be turned around – an artificially high minimum wage functions as a tax on employers of low-skilled labor, since they are effectively being forced to pay more than fair market rate so that the government doesn’t have to shell out as much in benefits. This feels regressive – if anything, employers of low-skilled labor should be encouraged to hire as many workers as they can afford, to reduce the strain on the dole.

          • beleester says:

            In defense of the “minimum wage should be a living wage” folks, I see a lot of arguments along the lines of “There are plenty of jobs, but people think they’re too good to flip burgers for a living.” To which “You can’t actually make a living by flipping burgers” is a reasonable response.

        • baconbits9 says:

          If you got a job at the minimum wage flipping burgers and showed up every day and did the job reasonably well how long do you think you would stay at the minimum wage? How many dollars an hour is an actual ‘living wage’ (recalling that there are quite a few subsidies that you can qualify for at the same time) then?

          • Matt says:

            If you got a job at the minimum wage flipping burgers and showed up every day and did the job reasonably well how long do you think you would stay at the minimum wage?

            From what I’ve heard, working like this will get you earning more than the minimum wage. But only because most of your coworkers don’t do this, which will make you stand out. If the answer to this question is to work harder than most, then that answer, mathematically, will not work for most minimum wage earners.

          • Matt M says:

            But my understanding is that it does work for most minimum wage earners. The vast majority of people who make the minimum wage go on to make a higher wage at some point in the future of their life, yes?

          • Randy M says:

            Presumably, if everyone worked that hard, the company would be more profitable, due to either productivity or needing fewer employees. Then either their wages would increase or prices decrease, which if generalized across the economy should mean improvements in purchasing power for all employees.
            More work should equal higher standards of living.
            I expect in reality various inefficiencies would make the correlation somewhat more tenuous.

            But it should be true in a free market that you aren’t only competing with your coworkers, but also cooperating to an extent.

            Interesting, is working hard defecting in a prisoners dilemma?

          • Paul Zrimsek says:

            Interesting, is working hard defecting in a prisoners dilemma?

            Unions have a reputation (at least partly deserved) for treating it as such.

          • Matt M says:

            Presumably, if everyone worked that hard, the company would be more profitable, due to either productivity or needing fewer employees.

            No, what’s going on here is that minimum wage jobs are mostly entry-level jobs.

            People who work hard in them are either promoted to a different job in the company, or leave and get a new job at a different company. The especially productive fry cooks don’t just hang around until suddenly fry-cooking is super productive. They leave, and are replaced with a new crop of unskilled people who then either work harder and leave themselves, or don’t work hard and stick around at the average level of fry-cook productivity.

          • Randy M says:

            Matt M–yes, but “work hard” means “work harder than everyone else.” If everyone worked harder, some would still be promoted, so you would need to work hard to qualify, but not every hard worker would be. (Hence why it could be viewed as a prisoners dilemma–once one person works hard, everyone needs to).
            But if that hard work is actually improving service, it should still pay off, to an extent.

          • Matt says:

            It also depends on who captures the gains from the increased productivity. If a single man with a backhoe can dig faster than 30 men with shovels, you still can’t pay the backhoe driver 30X the amount each shoveler would make, because someone has to buy and maintain the backhoe.

            This is one reason to be suspicious of claims that worker wages aren’t in lockstep with worker productivity. Or, rather, that they should be.

          • but “work hard” means “work harder than everyone else.”

            Why do you believe that?

            Most jobs pay more than the minimum wage. The standard economic explanation is that market wage, like the market price of any input, tends to be equal to marginal productivity. In most jobs, every competent employee has a marginal productivity above the minimum wage and incompetent employees are fired when recognized to be incompetent.

            So if all the minimum wage workers work hard, thus having a marginal productivity well above the minimum wage, why don’t you expect all of them to end up being paid more than the minimum wage?

          • Randy M says:

            Why do you believe that?

            Because the context was promotions. And because Matt explicitly defined it that way.
            My prior post was arguing that if everyone did work harder, there is a reasonable expectation that they should benefit to an extent, albeit perhaps not one proportional to the increased effort.

            But to engage with your argument, I don’t have too much experience with minimum wage work. Is it the case in actual burger flipping jobs that merit increases are common and track with performance? Or is pay based more strictly on position and seniority?

            And if the real value of the labor to the employer was something less that minimum wage, the employee improving their productivity, while appreciated, might not see a corresponding increase in pay even theoretically.

          • Matt M says:

            Is it the case in actual burger flipping jobs that merit increases are common and track with performance? Or is pay based more strictly on position and seniority?

            My understanding is that the two are pretty highly correlated.

            The bane of existence of the minimum wage employer is employee misbehavior and employee turnover. Someone who hangs around for a year without quitting, and without doing anything that would cause you to fire them (showing up late, being rude to customers, failing a drug test, etc.) is, de facto, a “more productive” employee than average, because the average employee either quits or gets fired after 2 months.

          • baconbits9 says:

            The comparison here isn’t just between you and the other minimum wage employees it you and the guys that weren’t hired and maybe even you and the guys that will expect to be hired. You don’t have to work harder than all the other min wage guys to get a pay bump or a promotion, you just have to work harder than the guy that the boss would replace you with if you left.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Even if your company won’t give you a pay raise for some reason there are low skill companies who have internal minimum wages higher than the federal minimum wage. Wal-Mart has a company minimum $11 an hour for most positions, and they are nearly constantly hiring. If you show up with one or two years full time work on your resume you will stand an excellent chance at getting one of those jobs.

            So even if you stipulate that the minimum wage isn’t a living wage you still haven’t given a good reason for raising it as you would expect few people to actually have to live on the minimum wage. The evidence is that most people who start out on the minimum wage move up or get knocked out of the workforce, being replaced by other entry level people aging into the role.

          • Randy M says:

            You don’t have to work harder than all the other min wage guys to get a pay bump or a promotion

            I’m modeling promotions as “choose one employee at current level to put into the open slot on the next level up” and work harder as “demonstrate more competence and commitment in tangible ways”
            Unless we are specifying bias in the promotion process, I think you do need to be among the hardest working of your cohort to be selected for promotion, as well as the hypothetical baseline the boss thinks he can get from hiring outside for the position.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            I’m not 100% committed to this model, but you can have everyone succeed by dropping people into the pool, and you keep on pulling the good workers out, and even if you somehow pull out all the workers there are always more coming around.

            I wanted to make an analogy to school, except we tend to move everyone onto the next grade anyway.

          • baconbits9 says:

            @ Edward S

            One of the major complaints about Pikettey’s work was that he treated the individual quintiles as static as if no one ever moved in or out of them which makes inequality look worse in countries with higher mobility between classes. I think a similar mistake is frequently made with the minimum wage discussion, the workers are discussed as if they stick at that level of pay rather than being constantly replaced by less experienced workers.

    • MrApophenia says:

      And since trades are mutually beneficent exchanges, the maximum price they are willing to pay for it is the price where they are just barely getting any value out of the trade. That’s it.

      This is one of those ‘spherical cow’ economic principles with no bearing on actual trade as practiced on Earth.

      At one point, I worked as a paralegal at a large law firm. I was required to track my hours for purpose of billing the client, and I was privy to how much the client was being billed for my work per hour. It was more than an order of magnitude greater than what I was getting paid.

      This isn’t even slightly exceptional. Large companies pay their entry level and unskilled labor – and for that matter, sometimes even their skilled labor – far, far less than the value they extract from that labor.

      The relationship between most workers and most companies is not a level bargaining environment. The companies have many systemic advanctages which allow them to get employees to work for only a tiny portion of the money the company will make off them.

      So raising the minimum wage doesn’t lead to any of the rest of your hypothetical scenario. Instead, it makes a company go from ‘ludicrously, obscenely profitable’ to ‘very slightly less ludicrously, obscenely profitable.’

      (There are, of course, lots of not terribly profitable companies – but typically not the ones employing huge numbers of minimum wage workers, which is what these laws are of course aimed at.)

      Presumably there is some level of minimum wage where it really would exceed the value being derived from the workers. But nobody is even gesturing in the direction of a minimum wage that high.

      • cryptoshill says:

        I don’t think calling it a “spherical cow” argument is fair, at least with the argumentation in your rebuke. Your anecdata effectively demonstrates that even though the maximum price of labor is the maximum you can pay for it and still be getting something of value out of it – there is no guarantee you will achieve the maximum price for your labor. The availability of competent paralegals in your industry can be a factor, as well as how much your Law Firm(TM) can charge other businesses and clients that are not in the Business of Lawyering for those services specifically. Because at the Law Firm, there are *lots* of perfectly capable law clerks – but at the Client Firm, there are not. So they get to overcharge *a lot*, especially since there are a lot of services that are legally mandated to be performed by notary publics, paralegals, lawyers, etc that don’t really have to be (government enforced licensure monopoly.). However, you were still more than happy to take the wage offered – because it was likely near the highest wage you were offered in that position.

        • MrApophenia says:

          Right – which means that raising the minimum wage, at least in that situation, would not have any of the flow-through effects discussed above. Instead, the law firm just makes a somewhat smaller profit margin.

          The same argument also holds for companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. The gap between what they pay their employees and the profit they make from same is so wide that a raise in minimum wage doesn’t need to translate into price increases or less employment or anything like that – let alone in making people unemployable because the price of their work has been raised above its value. It just takes a cut out of the billions of dollars of profit being made by paying employees far, far less than the value they generate for the company.

          • Matt M says:

            The same argument also holds for companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. The gap between what they pay their employees and the profit they make from same is so wide

            Uh, no.

            Retail typically has margins of like 0-5%.

            Law Firm (TM) is significantly higher.

            If you think Wal-Mart is making so much profit per person they employ, why are they in such a hurry to replace all of their employees with automated check-out machines?

          • baconbits9 says:

            Which employees are creating such excess value?

          • MrApophenia says:

            Back in May, Walmart announced a $20 billion stock buyback. People crunched the numbers on that and found that if that money was instead spent on employee salaries, Walmart could afford to pay its staff $16+ an hour.

            There were actually efforts to get the shareholders to vote that the money instead be spent on raising employee wages; to no one’s surprise, the shareholders instead voted to keep the money for themselves.

            None of this is surprising – maximizing shareholder value is officially the thing they are supposed to be doing. But one of the main ways to maximize shareholder value is to get your employees to generate more wealth than you pay them for.

            If you think Wal-Mart is making so much profit per person they employ, why are they in such a hurry to replace all of their employees with automated check-out machines?

            Because they could make even more? I mean, if I’m a shareholder, why stop at $20 billion when I could make that $30 billion?

            EDIT – Also, did some Googling around and found a calculation of the top 19 companies that generate the most profit per employee, based on their reported profits and number of employees.

            https://www.expertmarket.co.uk/focus/most-profitable-employees

            Walmart isn’t on the list, but it certainly does illustrate how nuts it is to say that companies only pay their employees the minimum they can pay them and still make a profit. Apple, for instance, makes a tidy profit of $393,853 per person employed.

            It is safe to say that forcing apple to pay its employees more would not automatically lead to any of the follow-on actions detailed by the OP. You could double the pay of Apple employees and the company could continue to otherwise run in every respect exactly the same way it does now, with absolutely no other changes, and it would still remain hugely profitable.

          • Matt M says:

            I’m not familiar with the details of Wal-Mart’s specific situation, but a lot of the recent wave of buybacks was triggered by the recent reduction in the corporate income tax.

            In general though, if your premise is that Wal-Mart is making just as much profit off its employees as prestigious Law Firm(TM)s are, you’re just insane.

            Wal-Mart’s front-line employees are necessary evils. They’d eliminate all of them if they could.

          • baconbits9 says:

            1. Stock buybacks are one time events, even if taken at face value paying it out to employees would raise their wages to $16 an hour for a limited time (probably a year, but you didn’t link the numbers), the implication that Wal-Mart could afford to pay its workers more with a one off event is weak.

            But one of the main ways to maximize shareholder value is to get your employees to generate more wealth than you pay them for.

            Well duh, why would you put a ton of effort into raising the funding, planning, going through permitting processes, building the store, organizing logistics and hiring people if you weren’t going to make a profit.

            More importantly though you have just assumed that the profits are excess value that the worker creates and there is little evidence for this. Workers on their own without massive capital investments make virtually nothing. Farming without technology created in the last century won’t earn you $10 an hour. There is a stronger case to be made that the employees are ripping of Wal-Mart than the other way around.

          • John Schilling says:

            But one of the main ways to maximize shareholder value is to get your employees to generate more wealth than you pay them for.

            Which Wal-Mart employees basically can’t do except to the nominal standard, any more than a highly motivated assembly-line worker can generate more than the usual wealth for their employer. There are some business models where a highly motivated worker will generate more profit than a disgruntled slacker skating by on the enough-to-not-get-fired minimum, but they don’t all work that way. Wal-Mart’s model is optimized towards using lowest-common-denominator commodity labor to minimize costs, not using skilled and motivated labor to maximize revenue. Paying (most of) their people more than the minimum needed to keep them doing the job, will not result in more profit for Wal-Mart.

          • MrApophenia says:

            It is possible (likely) that I am explaining myself very badly.

            I am not saying the profit margin on a line cook or a Walmart greeter are as much as an Apple factory worker or a paralegal, nor am I saying Walmart would make more profit if they put a larger share of profits into employee wages.

            I am merely saying that the claim from the original post that employee wages are always set at the absolute possible amount they can be at and still allow the employer to make money, due to the Invisible Hand of the Market or whatever, is untrue on its face.

            Most employees, especially those making minimum wage, have a very large gap between what they are being paid and what profit their employer makes from their labor. Therefore, the arguments that say raising minimum wage will push their wage to a level where it no longer makes sense to employ them do not follow.

            It is much better from Walmart’s point of view to be able to pay its employees $8/hr than $15/hr; however, if we passed that law tomorrow Walmart would not go out of business or have massive layoffs. They would complain a lot, begin lobbying Congress to reverse it, and go right on employing the minimum number of people they can get away with (as they do now) and making a huge profit nonetheless – albeit less than they were making before.

          • cryptoshill says:

            @MrApophenia –

            I think you strongly overestimate how much value a retail Wal-Mart employee generates for the company, per hour. Most of the value is generated by their truck drivers and the people who manage to locate the cheapest supply possible of goods to fill their stores.

            It’s pretty obvious to me that a Wal Mart, requiring *lots* of unskilled labor – would probably have wages approaching the maximum a business could possibly pay for labor (just labor, no special skills, training, or danger incentives, literally breathing and putting items on shelves) and remain profitable.

            Suggesting that “wages don’t fall, businesses just get less profitable” assumes that businesses won’t substitute labor, using less instead of more – making quality of life substantially worse for the remaining employees, replacing labor with labor-saving equipment, or in the extreme case – just not building business at all. You are also in your own “spherical cow” assumption – are assuming that no businesses will just shutter if the minimum wage rises.

    • dick says:

      The value of something is what the market will bear; it’s what costumers are willing to pay for the labor. If the most somebody is willing to pay to have you mow the grass is $10/hour, the value of your grass mowing labor is $10/hour.

      Where is supply in all of this? This example seems contrived and unrealistic even by “Econ 101 story problem” standards. Among other problems, if $10/hr is the going rate for something, that implies that (presuming this is not a town of identical clones) there are people who would happily pay $11 or $12 who are getting a bargain, not that $10 is the maximum anyone in the town would pay.

      I think it makes sense to consider a minimum wage as achieving the effect of constraining the supply of labor without actually constraining it directly (which requires ham-handed interventions like taxi medallions), so it’s not going to make much sense in a weird hypothetical fixed-demand scenario.

    • Dan Hornsby says:

      To tie it to real-world numbers:

      A quick google tells me that average payroll overheads tend to be around 25% of revenue, and profit tends to be around 10%.

      So say you’re selling £4 magazines. If each employee sells 10 an a hour, and their wage costs are £10 per hour, then you’re about on track. You’re making £40 per hour, and paying £10 of it in payroll. Since profit margins are around 10%, you’re spending £26 on other overheads, and making £4 in profit.

      Say the minimum wage is raised by 20%, to £12 per hour. Now your payroll overhead is 30% rather than 25%, and you’re only making 5% profit rather than 10%. You have two options: find a way to let each employee sell more magazines per hour, to reduce the relative labour costs on a per-magazine basis, or find a way to reduce other overheads, to make the per-magazine costs cheaper. I.e, raise productivity, or raise efficiency.

      Say the minimum wage is doubled, to £20 per hour. Now you’re looking at a cost of £46 per £40-worth of magazines sold – you’re losing £6 for each hour that employee spends selling magazines, because the money you make from those magazines isn’t enough to pay the overheads of making and selling them. So you have two options: raise prices, or reduce production overheads. If the market won’t support magazines that cost more than £4 each, then you can’t raise prices. If you have no way to streamline the production process or make it cheaper in any appreciable way, then you’re stuck. You’ll go out of business.

      But here’s the question: do we really want industries around that are either so inefficient or so exploitation-dependent that they literally cannot make a profit while paying their employees enough of a wage to independently support themselves?

      Surely as a basic standard we should hold that if someone spends 40 hours a week working for you, you should be obligated to ensure that they can support themselves? If you want someone to spend their full-time day-to-day life doing your work, then surely in return they should at minimum expect enough compensation that they don’t have to find other income on the side, or accept government welfare?

      It’s the Henry Ford scenario – since the labour force that makes the products is the same consumer base that buys the products, to maximise profit a company should pay its employees well enough to ensure full market participation. It’s in every company’s best interest to raise the average wage high enough that everyone can afford to buy what they’re selling.

      We’re hitting a few stumbling blocks with that in the current system though – namely welfare benefits and credit.

      Benefits allow a company to pay less than the amount their employees need to enable market participation, because the government will step in to ‘top up’ the remainder. And since welfare benefits are nominally tax-funded, this is basically allowing a company to use its tax bill to pay its wage bill (doubly so when you consider payroll tax as well).

      Credit doubles down on this, allowing employees to spend an order of magnitude more than they would otherwise be able to, because on a 3%-minimum-payment credit card you only need to spend £300 a month to get access to £10,000 in value.

      So we’re in a weird scenario where a whole load of industries that shouldn’t be able to operate profitably, because their product or business model relies on be able to pay less than market-participation rates, that nonetheless are making a profit, because between government subsidies and cheap credit, they don’t have to pay well. As long as the money an individual receives in welfare is enough to secure enough credit to participate in the economy at at least as basic level, then companies can get away with paying as little as they’re legally required to.

      This certainly could be a workable economic system (though I’m not convinced it would be a sustainable one, given credit bubbles), because it effectively replaces a company’s wage bill with its tax bill. A company pays hefty corporation taxes, then the government uses those taxes to enable its population to secure enough credit to buy the products and services offered by the company. Precarious and unstable, maybe, but workable at least in the near-term. Followed by an inevitable horrendous crash.

      The real problem is that these things are all so intertwined into the economy that fixing any of it would immediately incite a massive financial crash and screw it all up for everyone. Remove wage subsidies to force companies to foot the bill themselves (by raising the minimum wage) and suddenly an appreciable percentage of business go under, leading to mass employment and everyone worse off. Make credit more expensive to reduce the artificial inflation of buying power (mandating higher minimum payment rates, or higher interest rates on borrowing, etc) would cause millions of people reliant on credit to default on their bills, and (again) leading to mass unemployment and everyone worse off.

      • albatross11 says:

        I don’t think it’s impossible to support yourself on a 40-hour-a-week minimum wage job, if we accept a sufficiently low standard of living as acceptable. That means really lousy housing (rooming houses, say) and enough food to survive and not much else.

        The problem is that we would like to have a higher standard of living as the floor, both for humanitarian reasons and for NIMBY/drive away the poor reasons.

        • baconbits9 says:

          I don’t think the humanitarian reasons hold, the overwhelming majority of working households earn more than minimum wage, very few have a single, full time minimum wage earner (and if they do have have dependents they qualify for a fair amount of assistance).

          • baconbits9 says:

            The groups who win from minimum wage increases tend to be union workers who have their wages tied to a multiple of the minimum and universities. The minimum wage typically causes unemployment for teenagers, people just out looking for their first job, high school dropouts etc. The minimum wage prevents lower paying companies from having what amount to low paid internships or apprenticeships, it used to be fairly common to get a low level job as a teenager and slowly work your way up. You might essentially get capped in your early 20s, getting only cost of living increases after a point, but you would have gone from little education to 5-10 years worth of working experience with a few job changes. The minimum wage breaks that and puts pressure on second and third rung positions, which eventually pushes up forcing more and more people to go into higher education to attempt to jump rungs.

        • Dan Hornsby says:

          40 billable hours at £7.50 per hour (the UK ‘living wage’) gives you an income of £300 per week, or £15,600 per year, which equates to a monthly post-tax take-home of £1,166.

          I live in the Midlands of England, in a not-amazingly-prosperous area (lots of ex-miners). Average rent is somewhere around £400 per month, which makes average bills somewhere around £700, closer to 800 including food. That leaves about £350 left for everything else – if you need a car to commute, that eats up between £150 and £200 of that (not including the initial purchase), which then leaves £100-£150 per month as “disposable” income. Add in credit payments, and you can just about afford to live independently on a single minimum-wage income, as long as you don’t buy anything that’s not essential and nothing ever breaks or goes wrong, and you don’t have any children or dependants.

          Adding in to this, you could probably qualify for a few hundred a month in benefits, from tax credits to housing benefit, child benefit too, and they’ll allow you to live slightly more comfortably, but almost definitely not enough to get any meaningful savings together.

          I think my main point is that “is not homeless and starving” is a very low bar, and at least when speaking of prosperous western economies, we should be aiming to set the bar higher than that.

          • liate says:

            …why are you using average rent and bills? Wouldn’t it make more sense to go for the cheaper end of both, due to this obviously being with people without much money?

      • But here’s the question: do we really want industries around that are either so inefficient or so exploitation-dependent that they literally cannot make a profit while paying their employees enough of a wage to independently support themselves?

        Most of the population of the world through most of history supported itself on an income less than 1/20th the current U.S. average, which is a small fraction of a minimum wage income. What you mean is “to support themselves at a standard that seems appropriate to someone who has grown up in one of the richest societies in history.”

        You don’t say what you mean by profit. My guess is that it is accounting profit, which does not include the cost of capital. If the effect of raising the minimum wage is that a particular type of firm, one employing a lot of low skill/low wage labor, produces a return on capital below what investors can get elsewhere, such firms disappear, to be replaced by competitors producing similar goods and services in other ways.

        Going back to your question. Yes, we want industries around that can employ low skill labor because the alternative is that unskilled people coming onto the job market never get employed and never acquire the abilities that would earn them a higher wage.

      • A Definite Beta Guy says:

        Surely as a basic standard we should hold that if someone spends 40 hours a week working for you, you should be obligated to ensure that they can support themselves? If you want someone to spend their full-time day-to-day life doing your work, then surely in return they should at minimum expect enough compensation that they don’t have to find other income on the side, or accept government welfare?

        No, why? My wife works and makes a 6 figure salary. What if we have kids and I want to be a stay-at-home Dad, but I have enough time to work a couple shifts at WalMart for $4 an hour. Why should I be banned from working because someone else feels I cannot support myself at $160/week? My Wife is supporting us, I just want to work 20 hours a week so we can afford a vacation in the summer or buy a new washer and dryer. Both Walmart and I are made better off by this arranagement. It’s not exploitation.

        People who are unable to make a living in the market economy should be provided for, but these are alms-cases, it’s not the fault of the economy.

        • Dan Hornsby says:

          By that logic then there should be no minimum wage, since we’re setting it according to what someone who doesn’t need the income might want from it.

          I’m mainly holding that a person’s time has inherent value, and the minimum price to buy a person’s full-time working week of labour should be enough to enable that person to support themselves independently, simply from the standpoint of basic moral fairness.

          This is something that governments have to regulate via minimum wages, much like worker rights, the full-time work-week, etc, because it’s a Moloch-esque race to the bottom otherwise – competing companies can’t afford to give employees any more than the absolute minimum the market forces them to, because then they’ll be out-competed by companies that don’t. So we need blanket regulations to force all companies to comply and punish defectors across the board.

          If you choose not to work full-time, that’s fine. If you don’t need that minimum price because you’re being supported by someone else, that’s fine. Nobody is forcing you to do anything, or banning you from doing anything. “There shouldn’t be a minimum wage because otherwise people who don’t need the money wouldn’t be able to do busy-work for a pittance to fill their rainy-day fund” is an argument I have difficulty wrapping my head around.

          • Randy M says:

            I’m mainly holding that a person’s time has inherent value

            Indeed it does–to them. Economically, not so much.

            I would prefer a world where low skilled but diligent workers could support a family in a small clean apartment on one income at 40.0 hours a week.

            I’m not sure how to get there without sacrificing other important things, though.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            By that logic then there should be no minimum wage, since we’re setting it according to what someone who doesn’t need the income might want from it.

            That was the thesis at the top of this comment chain, so you aren’t shocking anybody by suggesting that their argument leads to that.

          • baconbits9 says:

            This is something that governments have to regulate via minimum wages, much like worker rights, the full-time work-week, etc, because it’s a Moloch-esque race to the bottom otherwise – competing companies can’t afford to give employees any more than the absolute minimum the market forces them to, because then they’ll be out-competed by companies that don’t

            This argument is historically false, Henry Ford famously only became successful as an automaker after raising wages, not cutting them. The US had no federal minimum wage law until 1938 and yet wages rose from the end of the civil to the eve of the great depression.

          • Matt M says:

            By that logic then there should be no minimum wage

            Hey, now you’re getting it!

          • I’m mainly holding that a person’s time has inherent value, and the minimum price to buy a person’s full-time working week of labour should be enough to enable that person to support themselves independently, simply from the standpoint of basic moral fairness.

            Is there some reason why this argument only holds within the boundary of one country? If not, if you believe what you are writing, shouldn’t you be in favor of taxing everyone in the U.S., rich and poor, for the benefit of people in places such as Africa and India who are much poorer than the American poor?

            And, since you can’t actually do that, shouldn’t you feel morally obliged to donate all money beyond what you need to support yourself to people much poorer than you are?

            To put my point more brutally, you are insisting that it is the fault of people who are making poor people better off by giving them jobs, albeit at low pay, that those people are not as much better off as you would like them to be, when you are not yourself doing even that much for those people.

            Retracted if you in fact do contribute a large fraction of your income to helping poor people.

          • A Definite Beta Guy says:

            Economically and building from scratch, no, I don’t think there should be a minimum wage.
            Given normal political constraints and my innate desire to be cautious, I’d say hold the minimum wage steady (which is a reduction in real terms).

            Either way, if we desire a minimum wage, the bar should not be “living wage based on 40 hours/week.” There’s a lot of work we would like to do, that wouldn’t be able to get done. Not all jobs need to be those kinds of jobs.

            There’s also the next problem: not only do some people tend to think the only allowable jobs should be “living wage” jobs, these same people also think everyone should be guaranteed one of these jobs. Uhhh…

          • Aapje says:

            @A Definite Beta Guy

            The most cautious approach is to increase it with inflation.

            Note that slow and semi-steady reductions don’t necessarily result in steady outcomes, but can cause sudden extreme outcomes, just like the slow movement of tectonic plates can result in nasty earthquakes.

      • Paul Zrimsek says:

        There are many words that could be used to describe a business that’s able to produce a saleable good or service using the dregs of the labor market, but I don’t think “inefficient” is one of them.

        • albatross11 says:

          Wal-Mart, in particular, is famous for spending as little as possible on everything, so that they can underprice just about everyone.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        It’s the Henry Ford scenario – since the labour force that makes the products is the same consumer base that buys the products, to maximise profit a company should pay its employees well enough to ensure full market participation.

        This is crazy. You can’t have an infinite money-making machine by paying your employees to buy your product.

        The “$5 a day” had half of it paid as a retention bonus because Ford had trouble keeping workers. If anything, he was previously underpaying his workers. Working on an assembly line was incredibly boring work, and Henry Ford had essentially invented the industry the previous year, so the old wage model was wrong and it took him time to figure it out.

        And that bonus required a lot of fairly onerous demands on the worker, like proving he was living a good proper “American” life: not drinking or gambling, and speaking English at home. Also, men couldn’t get it if they had a wife who worked outside the home. If you are trying to boost consumption, you don’t penalize women who work.

        I get that you’ve long held that this infinite money-making machine exists, but it isn’t true.

      • baconbits9 says:

        It’s the Henry Ford scenario – since the labour force that makes the products is the same consumer base that buys the products, to maximise profit a company should pay its employees well enough to ensure full market participation. It’s in every company’s best interest to raise the average wage high enough that everyone can afford to buy what they’re selling.

        This is a persistent myth. As an exercise guess how many employees Ford had for a given year and guess how many cars he actually sold that year.

      • LesHapablap says:

        Walmart has a net profit margin of 3%
        https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/071615/what-profit-margin-usual-company-retail-sector.asp

        Why Retail Margins are Low
        The Internet has made it easier than ever to compare prices and shop from around the world. Low-cost foreign competition has also made it tough on retailers. However, one of the major reasons retail margins are so relatively low is most retail spending is purely discretionary. Consumers can afford to be frugal and picky when it comes to discretionary items; they make decisions quickly, and can often change their minds and return purchases without consequence. This means there is a relatively high price elasticity of demand for retail goods, which makes it difficult to raise prices.

      • dodrian says:

        Benefits allow a company to pay less than the amount their employees need to enable market participation, because the government will step in to ‘top up’ the remainder. And since welfare benefits are nominally tax-funded, this is basically allowing a company to use its tax bill to pay its wage bill (doubly so when you consider payroll tax as well).

        With a higher minimum wage and the company priced out of the market, now the government has to pay for the entirety of its former employees’ welfare costs, rather than just a portion.

        If as a society we demand that everyone have a certain standard of living, is it better to pay £20/hr/person in benefits to achieve that, or subsidise some jobs that otherwise wouldn’t exist and only pay £5/hr/person?

  20. Russell Davis says:

    The South Bay meetup link is broken.

  21. onyomi says:

    Periodically browsing job ads for positions in the UK I also share the impression expressed in the subreddit that the salary ranges seem ludicrous… like, I could be a lecturer at Oxford or just work at McDonalds in the US. And everyone knows rent, food, etc. are quite expensive in London, presumably better elsewhere but I don’t think THAT much better…

    So, this is probably a dumb question, but how do the British deal? Americans are probably spoiled (certainly are by world-historical standards), but we often already subjectively feel it’s hard to avoid racking up credit card bills, much less save for the future. Is this impression just on steroids in the UK? Does everyone just share tiny apartments with a bunch of people? Is there a sense it was always like that or has it gotten much worse in recent decades?

    • thirqual says:

      Starting university lecturer in the UK: north of £30k.

      Full time (good luck with that) employee at McDonalds in the USA: on average $9/h, so less than $21k/year.

    • AlphaGamma says:

      London is a huge outlier. Oxford is expensive, but nowhere near as bad as London. According to a relatively recent survey, the average renter in England and Wales spends 27% of gross salary on rent. The average in London is 49%!

      Oxford is (for statistics purposes) in the South East of England, which is the second most expensive, but the equivalent figure there is about 33%.

      Put another way, the median rent for a one-bedroom property was £1275 per month in London, but £675 in the South East.

      Drilling further down, the 33% figure for a £30k salary as mentioned by thirqual is £833/month. In Oxford itself, that is at the low end of the range for a one-bedroom property.

      There is definitely a sense that housing has become more expensive in recent decades- especially buying . But it has not got to the point of “everyone sharing tiny apartments with a bunch of people” Soviet kommunalka-style.

      • thirqual says:

        ” Soviet kommunalka-style” I think you mispelled “San Francisco-style” here :p

        There is also generally a (not really sufficient to cover the difference in costs) bonus for university staff working in or close to London, of up to £2800 per year if memory serves.

      • Brad says:

        The main determinant of how terrible a housing market becomes seems to be the availability of ever longer mortgages.* I don’t know if it was government intervention that allows for the 50 year and 100 year mortgages in London, but I suspect it is. If so, the governments responsible ought to be ashamed of themselves. They’ve immiserated entire generations in order to hand a pure, unearned giveaway to incumbent homeowners.

        If governments would cease their efforts to make it “easier” to buy a home, we’d be far better off. It all ends of being capitalized into prices.

        * The other factor that matters is the attractiveness of the particular market to foreign cash buyers. But even in the most attractive cities to such buyers–London, Vancouver, NYC–they are still a relatively small percentage.

        • onyomi says:

          Sounds like a classic “Bootleggers and Baptists” dynamic (the “bootleggers” here being the homeowners who profit off the appreciation and the “Baptists” those who think the government should do more to make home ownership accessible).

          • Brad says:

            I don’t know that there are any sincere baptists. Maybe 50 years ago when the dynamics perhaps weren’t as well understood, but not today.

          • onyomi says:

            Really? I think if you surveyed the American public (and maybe the British public?), even now, after the subprime crisis, you would get a pretty high percentage of “yes” responses to the question “should the government do more to increase access to home loans?”

          • Brad says:

            More than 60% of households are incumbents that stand to benefit from such boondoggles. How do you disentangle that?

          • onyomi says:

            I think you’re right that this may be a case where the categories sort of merged: people motivated to believe that it’s good for the poor and middle class for the government to promote home ownership by the fact that they stand to benefit by its doing so. I guess there are probably many other such cases (where the genuine, non-self-interested “Baptists” kind of disappear but the “bootleggers” buy into their rhetoric so heavily as to, in many cases, believe it themselves and almost be hard to distinguish from them).

          • Matt M says:

            More than 60% of households are incumbents that stand to benefit from such boondoggles. How do you disentangle that?

            While I don’t deny that there’s surely a self-motivated financial interest in play when it comes to California NIMBYism, how do we reconcile this with the fact that these are also the same types of people who generally vote for, say, higher income taxes. Or more specifically, more progressive income taxes.

            If the rich Bay Area homeowners were as motivated by economic self-interest as we claim in these debates, why don’t they manifest this in any issue other than NIMBYism?

          • Plumber says:

            “While I don’t deny that there’s surely a self-motivated financial interest in play when it comes to California NIMBYism, how do we reconcile this with the fact that these are also the same types of people who generally vote for, say, higher income taxes. Or more specifically, more progressive income taxes.

            If the rich Bay Area homeowners were as motivated by economic self-interest as we claim in these debates, why don’t they manifest this in any issue other than NIMBYism?”

            @Matt M,

            That’s easy!

            In California you can inherit low 1975 property tax rates if the property was in your family in 1979, or the rate that the property was the year when it got into the families hands (there’s a small increase each year, but it’s nowhere near what market rate valuation would be), and even if you bought high, come a good recession (say in 2009) you may apply for re-assessment at a lower rate and it’s frozen there.

            Fat city baby!

            You lobby for increased taxes
            (which fall mostly on newcomers), so with the improved policing and schools the rents you may charge increases so even with the higher income taxes you pay you still profit!

        • fion says:

          Sorry if this is a stupid question, but could you explain why making long mortgages available helps incumbent homeowners?

          • baconbits9 says:

            It makes the payments affordable, while the person selling still gets the cash value up front.

          • John Schilling says:

            Long mortgages make it easier for people who don’t already own homes, to borrow Ridiculously Large Amounts of money to buy homes. Bankers would laugh you out of the bank if you proposed to borrow RLA money and pay it back in fifteen or thirty years; they can do the math (because banker) and know you won’t be paying them back. A buyer limited to ordinary mortgages can only borrow Ordinary Large Amounts of money to buy a house.

            The more buyers are capable of paying $RLA instead of $OLA, the higher the market price of homes. Higher market price means greater borrowing power for home equity loans while one owns the house, and greater profit when you sell it.

          • fion says:

            @John Schilling

            The more buyers are capable of paying $RLA instead of $OLA, the higher the market price of homes

            I don’t quite get this. Is this true of everything? Does the market price of apples increase if people get more disposable income? Or is it only true because of the housing shortage?

          • Lambert says:

            Affluent people start buying poncey organic apples from Whole foods or wherever, so yes.

          • Chalid says:

            Empirically, when signing a mortgage, homebuyers care mostly about their down payment and monthly payment, and not so much about how long the mortgage lasts (or so I’ve been told, I’ve never looked at the data myself). So in general, buyers are willing to pay more if they have longer mortgages.

          • John Schilling says:

            I don’t quite get this. Is this true of everything? Does the market price of apples increase if people get more disposable income?

            If you give people more money, without simultaneously filling the markets with more of the stuff they want to buy, then yes, the market price of everything goes up. That’s the basic driving factor of price inflation. In this particular case, we’re “only” giving them more money if they commit to using it to buy a house, so only housing prices go up.

            Well, mostly only, because there are second-order effects.

          • Or is it only true because of the housing shortage?

            It is not true for any good where quantity can be increased without increasing per unit costs. Housing is special in two ways. In the short run, building houses takes a while, so an increase in quantity demanded will result in a short term increase in price.

            In the long run, land to build on in a desirable location is a fixed resource, so an increase in quantity demanded will bid up the price of the land.

          • Edward Scizorhands says:

            Housing in a desirable city is a positional good. I support making more supply, but prices are still going to go up.

          • fion says:

            Thanks for your explanations. That makes more sense now. 🙂

    • ChrisA says:

      I was always pretty surprised by my US colleagues when I worked in the US, they seemed absurdly well paid compared with people in my home country, but were still complaining all the time about how they didn’t have enough money. It was even more surprising when you compare the cost of groceries, cars, houses and so on in the US. On top of this, most Americans don’t even take vacations which is another saving. Part of the answer seemed to be people considered necessities what in other countries would be luxuries, like eating out on a very regular basis, buying expensive snacks and coffees, and having very large houses with associated costs (heating, cooling, landscaping, local taxes etc). But I still could not understand it really. My wife and myself had fairly modest jobs when we lived in the US and we bought our own home which seemed large for us, but we still managed to save most of our income.

    • fion says:

      Wait, are you saying incomes in the UK are low? Growing up and living here, I never knew that. In fact I earn significantly less than median income and still have more money than I know what to do with.

    • add_lhr says:

      Some quantitative info based on my experiences with on cost of living – I am a professional with experience living in both London and NYC. I am a hard-core lover of cities with no family and thus I optimize my spending for being in the heart of it all and enjoying the cultural / social / gastronomic advantages of living in the biggest cities in the world, so my spending patterns will not match everyone’s, of course. But, what I found when I ran the numbers a few years ago was (ALL FIGURES IN USD, at 1.3 to the pound):

      – A salary of GBP 80k (USD 105K) is roughly equivalent in quality-of-life terms to $125K in NYC, as measured by having the same amount left over each month to save / pay off student loans (in this case, anchoring on about $3K per mo)
      – The effective tax rates at those levels are 33% in the UK and 35% in the US (yes, the US is higher due to NYC + NYS taxes), but of course VAT is higher in the UK than in NYC so it probably comes out in the wash when you account for non-food consumption
      – Rent can be much cheaper in London depending on what you optimize for. I share a nice 2 BR flat with a friend right next to the train station in a *very* trendy and decently-located part of London and pay just over $1,050 including utilities. The same flat + utilities in a similarly trendy part of Brooklyn would probably be at least $1,800 each for 2 people, and it seems to be getting worse.
      – Transit is more expensive as there is no monthly pass in London – it’s hard to get away with paying less than $250/mo on transit unless you bike to work. I think in NYC it’s no more than $150/mo even today
      – Going out to eat and drink is *much* cheaper in London – I find it’s about 20-40% cheaper depending on what you are looking for. I can have a great dinner + dessert + drinks at a trendy but not fancy restaurant for $32 incl tax and tip – I can rarely get away with the same for less than $50 in NYC. Similarly, 2 pints in London, which is equivalent in volume to 3 NYC draft beers, is $14 at a trendy pub/bar, whereas in NYC with tax & tip it would be more like $25-28 at best (!) Cocktails are even worse (you can get a G&T at a trendy bar in London for $6 total… try that in NYC).
      – Groceries are also cheaper, in part due to the availability of very low-cost basics. There are lots of things in London supermarkets that cost 50p – or even 40p. If you live on your own and only need a bit of milk or a small amount of staples, or even prepared food, supermarkets have those pack sizes and will sell them to you for 50p to a pound. I found living in NYC that this was not the case and living alone resulted in minimum $30 grocery runs for lunch & breakfast supplies for the week – whereas it’s more like $18 in London
      – Getting away for a city break is of course also cheaper (and adds thousands in non-monetary quality of life value, which I have not attempted to capture) – I can go away with friends to a European city for 2-3 days for $325 for flights, transfers, and lodging pretty much whenever I want

      • Lambert says:

        Never thought I’d see the day when someone calls the beer in London cheap. It’s twice what the rest of the country pays.
        It’s rumored that there’s a place in Edinburgh where you can get a pint of Tennants for £1.

        • Nornagest says:

          $14 is about what you’d pay for two pints of decent beer in any of the big West Coast cities. Less in a dive, more in a trendy club, a nice restaurant, or a really expensive bar. If it’s twice that in New York, that’s on New York.

          $50 is about what you’d pay for a nice meal including drinks, though.

        • Brad says:

          I’ll concede cocktails but even at a nice bar in NYC you aren’t paying $15 a beer with tip unless it is some kind of exotic brew, which is probably high test.

          If you’re in a fancy restaurant where they prefer to steer you towards those $18 cocktails or $100 bottles of wine, maybe you’d see something like that.

          • add_lhr says:

            Hi Brad – no argument there, pints are definitely not $15 in NYC. But I was going on the logic that while a British pint is 19.2 US oz, whereas I always heard NYC draft beers are often (though I may have been misinformed, as I am now learning through googling) not even a full US pint but more like 14 oz. So 2 british pints is almost as much beer as 3 US draft beers, which could easily be $7 + $1 tip or $8 + $1 tip each.

            But if you assume that all NYC draft beers are 16 oz, then 2 british pints’ worth of beer in NYC is more like $20-22.

      • rlms says:

        Interesting! It appears that £80k and $125k are both around 95th percentile for individual pre-tax income in each country. N.B. there are monthly (and indeed yearly) passes in London though; the zone 1-3 monthly pass is $200/month at your exchange rate, and the annual one would be $173/month.

        Note that London is a lot more expensive than the rest of the UK, but equally it has higher salaries.

      • Evan Þ says:

        Very interesting; thank you!

        Out of curiosity, how big is your two-bedroom flat? For comparison, my previous two-bedroom apartment just outside Seattle (for which I was paying ~$950/month when there were two of us) was ~860 square feet; my current two-bedroom condo in the same area is ~1000 square feet.

        • add_lhr says:

          It’s not big! About 500sf, which is the same as my old 2BR flat in the East Village (which now rents for close to $2,000 per person per month, I believe). Perhaps Brooklyn flats are a bit bigger, although based on recent AirBnB experience, I doubt it – the one I stayed in last time I visited was more like 400sf!

    • rlms says:

      Outside of London, middle-class people (such as your hypothetical lecturer on £30k) generally don’t feel poor. Tiny apartments, and indeed apartments in general are rare — I would guess <1% of people outside London share an apartment with non-relatives — although I believe houses are smaller than in the US (smaller rooms, fewer bathrooms, lack of garages). Households also tend to have fewer cars, other than that I'm not sure what the differences in consumption are.

      • fion says:

        I would guess <1% of people outside London share an apartment with non-relatives

        Are you including students? I’m not sure how many students there are in the UK, but I’d guess it’s a few percent, and I’d guess that most of those share accommodation with non-relatives.

        • rlms says:

          Good point, I wasn’t. It looks like just under 3% of people in the UK are full-time students, most of whom share accommodation. But I think typical student housing is shared houses or student halls; if we class the latter as non-apartments I think the <1% figure could still be correct.

  22. nadbor says:

    In a previous open thread we’ve had a small discussion of griefers in online games (esentially online-game bullies). The point of contention was: are griefers rare evil mutants who enjoy causing suffering or are they basically normal teenage boys responding to specific social circumstances. According to the first view, they’re a tiny, persistent and distinct group, a bit like psychopaths. According to the second view almost all of us are potential griefers like almost all of us are potential liars.

    Either way, there must be some (former) griefers reading this thread. Can we get a show of hands? Have you ever done something that could be seen as griefing? Why did you do it? Would you do it again? Do you consider yourself less empathetic than the average person? In your opinion, is there a psychological profile of a griefer that is distinct from general population?

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      Have you ever done something that could be seen as griefing?

      In the late 90s I regularly played a game called Subspace, which was a very early stab at large-scale multiplayer internet gaming. You controlled a spaceship in a 2D, top down arena alongside upwards of 100 other players. Your ship started very weak, but as you flew around you would collect power-ups for improved weapons, engines, bombs, abilities, etc. You would score points by destroying other ships, and the numbers of points you’d get for a kill go up as the number of power-ups they collected went up. Basically the longer you survived, the higher your “bounty” was. Once you were killed, you would respawn with no power-ups.

      It was also generally considered poor sportsmanship to kill low-value players instead of “picking on someone your own size.” To discourage you from preying on players who just spawned, a brand new ship was worth negative points. Any time someone had just spawned and was killed, they would go to chat to complain about this “neg killer” and let everyone know to watch out for this schmuck.

      So I named my character “Neg Hunter Zodar,” whose mission was to get as low a score as possible by hunting down and killing only people who just spawned and were worth negative points. If you managed to scrape up enough power-ups to be worth positive points by the time I found you, you were free to go. To make my predation as blindingly unfair as possible, I used the Spider ship, which could get a cloaking device. Some poor schlep would spawn, with their slow-ass, no weapons, no armor, no sensors ship, and Neg Hunter Zodar pops out of nothing right behind him, blasts him to bits, cloaks and moves off.

      Why did you do it?

      It was more fun than playing the game the way the designers wanted you to play it.

      Would you do it again?

      In a heartbeat. I would say it’s harder to do these days as designers now think about the ways in which players can royally piss each other off, understand it makes people not want to play the game, and minimize mechanics by which griefing can occur. For instance, very few multiplayer shooters have team damage turned on.

      Do you consider yourself less empathetic than the average person?

      Maybe? I don’t know. I don’t think most people are very empathetic, but I could just be typical minding. Also, it’s a video game. No one’s actually getting hurt. And maybe I was even providing a service. People got really pissed off at Neg Hunter Zodar and would vow to hunt me down and exact their revenge. They didn’t have much luck with that, though, as I was good and preferred to stay cloaked and avoided fair fights like the plague.

      In your opinion, is there a psychological profile of a griefer that is distinct from general population?

      Not really. I think people just get bored and find other ways to amuse themselves.

      • gbdub says:

        What’s interesting to me is that Neg Hunter Zodar actually behaves much more like real life successful fighter pilots. Guys that go out looking for “fair fights” tend to have short careers.

        The one difference is a thing that does bug me about some online multiplayers: in real life, Gunther Rall flew the same Bf 109s as everyone else. His 250th kill didn’t earn him impregnable armor, a cloaking device, and auto-locking laser cannons. While in some online shooters (Star Wars Battlefront II is particularly bad about this), experienced players get power ups that make them nearly impossible to beat for someone with beginner equipment regardless of skill. This is annoying.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          Yes, I rant about this frequently. I despise progression systems in multiplayer games (that aren’t MMORPGs). You buy the game, load it up, and you’re running around with your bolt action rifle while some dude in full body armor dual-wielding P90s blows you away. Yeah, I’m sure I lost that match because of skill. And it’s no fun on the other side, too. I want to beat people at these games because I’m better than they are, not because I’ve been playing long enough to unlock the P90s.

          Back in my day we didn’t have this crap. You bought Quake II, you installed it, logged on to the server and if you could find the weapons you could use the weapons. You didn’t have to get 500 kills with the chain gun before you could unlock the rail gun. And we liked it!

          That said, SubSpace wasn’t like that because the power-ups were not persistent. Everyone started a match with nothing, and every time you died you went back to having nothing.

          Also, yes, I dislike that part of Battlefront II, but love everything else about that game. I wish EA hadn’t flubbed the launch so badly with the lootbox fiasco because I love that game.

          • Nornagest says:

            You bought Quake II, you installed it, logged on to the server and if you could find the weapons you could use the weapons.

            And then there’s Day of Defeat, where it was all the dudes in the restricted classes with machine guns and sniper rifles who were the newbies, and it was the anonymous grunt with the Garand and a couple of grenades that you really had to look out for.

            On the RPG side of things, the Dark Souls games are still like that. Get invaded by a guy wearing his weight in armor and carrying a sword taller than he is? Might be a threat, might not be. But get invaded by a naked guy waving around a board with a nail in it? Watch out.

        • Matt M says:

          I’m sure the psychologists in the employ of the DoD are working on gamification algorithms to stimulate pilot achievement as we speak.

    • Murphy says:

      Myself I tend to be a very carebear player but I used to like following the SA goons antics in various games.

      I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Goons?

      They griefed on an industrial scale.

      their history in Eve Online is probably a good example.

      http://wiki.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?title=Goonswarm_(Player_alliance)

      basics: in eve you start with a crappy little ship, if you die you get given one of these newbie ships for free. They’ve got crappy firepower and crappy everything. But they’re free.

      So the goons decided to all create newbie accounts at once. They created the goon swarm. Hundreds or thousands of newbie ships that just swarmed and attacked suicidally. At this point in the game the “police” ingame weren’t immortal/invulnerable. So they’d go to “safe” space and swarm and kill the cops then kill everything else. The Swarm was a permanent floating riot sweeping systems clean.

      Eventually the game devs made the newbie ship weaker, gave the automated “cops” weapons that worked on groups and made the cops invulnerable.

      The goons turned into one of the games biggest alliances controlling a huge region of the game.

      So the goons adapted to the changes in the rules and started traditions like Burn Jita, where they organized suicide runs on the main trade hub in the game.

      https://imperium.news/goons-burned-elite-find-fun-profit-burning-jita/

      Eve provide an opportunity to play as the villains. “Normally, when you play a [game], you want to be the hero, never the bad guy. You want to be praised for doing a good deed a fight off a shitty bad guy to save the day yet again. I decided to turn my back on that and open my eyes to the sea of possibilities this game seems to provide, and participate in my first Burn Jita, essentially the antithesis of everything that I had seen and have been taught in video games.”

      This thread has some gems:

      https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3764286

      Notice a theme of thumbing their noses at the admins.

      Bullies target the powerless.

      Griefers more often love targeting the admins or the people who’ve crawled to the top of the heap.

      The stories people seem most proud of are ones where the weak and powerless players joined them.

      Some lowbie told me that he didn’t have any money, and asked to join my team instead. It was a useless gesture, as he was around level 2, but I accepted him into the bloody fold.

      or more stories of pissing off the admins with violent living sandwiches.

      You see, there’s another life-creating mad scientist chemistry recipe in Space Station 13. It’s extremely hard to discover and make, but it has the effect of imbuing any object it touches with life. This creates, for instance, a Living Crowbar that floats around and attacks people. At some point a Chef got the brilliant (terrible) idea to combine the living object recipe with fractal cooking.

      Enter The Crashwich. Every time this haunted apocalypse of culinary hubris attacked someone, the game reported its name multiple times. When it charged, when it slammed into someone, and every time it hit them, the chat buffer would once again overflow with infinite recursive fractal sandwich. The entire station was brought to its knees by crippling lag, while anyone unfortunate enough to be present for The Crashwich’s rampage would immediately crash out and have to reconnect their client, usually to find themselves dead and/or immediately crash out again because The Crashwich was still wreaking havoc.

      Some people just want to watch the world burn.

      The scientist all started to flee the unstoppable flames. The thing on the space station is fire extinguishers are prized fighting weapons, there are seldom few as the game goes on. They had no chance, I pushed the last plasma tank in and flew away.

      A scientist came flying out of Zeta, typing up a flurry of insults. Turns out they were an admin, they pushed me down and took off all my items to make me die in space.

      • Nick says:

        Notice a theme of thumbing their noses at the admins. Bullies target the powerless. Griefers more often love targeting the admins or the people who’ve crawled to the top of the heap.

        This is an interesting distinction, but in my experience most of those whom we would describe as griefers are targeting the powerless. A lot of griefing in Minecraft, for instance, is pretty indiscriminate, or just aimed at ruining the biggest, nicest thing on the map.

        ETA: And what about griefers who used to aim to take down whole servers? Folks would crash servers by flooding them with water or lava back before fluid mechanics were changed. Does that hurt the players more or the admins?

        • Matt M says:

          Agreed. I would almost say that if you’re targeting people with some level of power, it can’t reasonably be called “griefing” anymore.

          • Murphy says:

            Is “griefing” now getting redefined to join the “it only counts when targeting my group” club?

          • Nick says:

            May or may not be relevant, but you’ve got me thinking: one theme of griefing is that it’s enabled by bad game mechanics. In Conrad Honcho’s case, he could do what he did because there’s no actual downside to having a score of negative one zillion. In your EVE Online example, Murphy, the starting ships were just too strong and there weren’t any AOE attacks to prevent swarm tactics. In the case of Minecraft, it’s just a lot easier to delete 300 blocks than to put them together. (Or in the case of flooding a server, astronomically easier.)

            When the player being griefed has power to, say, lock down their creation, or ban the griefer, then things aren’t so asymmetric. So it doesn’t really have anything to do with an “it only counts when targeting my group” attitude. It seems to me that these “sticking it to The Man” or “watching the world burn” motivations are a little different from what I remember of griefers—the kind who griefed regular players or indiscriminately, and just seemed to enjoy destroying something or ruining someone’s day—but I will grant you that I ran private servers and never had to put up with any as an admin.

          • Matt M says:

            Is “griefing” now getting redefined to join the “it only counts when targeting my group” club?

            The reason it causes grief is because the victim is powerless to stop it.

            If you could stop it, how are you grieved?

          • Murphy says:

            @Matt M

            By having to spend time and effort.

            If the makers of a game literally change the game rules because of you you’ve put them in a corner.

            In terms of power differentials in-game… causing the devs to get involved is like causing so much ruckus that god himself leans down out of the clouds to create a commandment just for you.

        • Murphy says:

          Does that hurt the players more or the admins?

          Practically speaking it probably creates work for the admins, either reverting from backup or otherwise undoing what’s happened to try to get things back to normal.

      • MrApophenia says:

        Yeah, the Goons’ involvement in the old persistent browser MMO Urban Dead greatly improved that game, too.

        For those who never played it, it was a turn based zombie survival game where players were either humans or zombies. If a human character died you could continue play as a zombie, and there were methods to be resurrected, but generally speaking they were enough of a pain in the ass that if you didn’t have allies specifically trying to find you and bring you back, you were either stuck as a zombie or had to create a new character.

        Anyway, the Goons invaded the game en masse, just like Eve Online. They claimed a whole neighborhood of the city, and made it as zombie proof as the game allowed – fully barricading every building, which also made the buildings inaccessible to most players, leaving anyone unlucky enough to be on the streets to get eaten.

        Then they started killing any human player that came into their territory.

        Due to their numbers, none of the other human players had any way to deal with this. Eventually all anyone could do was stay as far away from their territory as possible.

        Except… one of the limits zombies had in that game was communication. They couldn’t use anything other than gestures or grunts. A lone zombie was basically useless, you needed hordes of them to batter down barricades faster than they could be repaired and get to the humans. So organizing a decent zombie horde was always a challenge.

        Except… now everyone knew where they were guaranteed to find lots and lots of humans to eat. So as the humans fled the Goons in terrror, more and more zombies just kept flooding in. Eventually they overwhelmed even the ridiculous barricading efforts of the Goons, broke through their defenses, and ate all of them.

        Some people in the game were super pissed about the Goons, but honestly I thought that whole thing was the most Zombie Movie the game ever got.

      • beleester says:

        Griefing in EVE is a special case because it’s pretty much stated up-front that it’s part of the experience. CCP is very hands-off when it comes to punishing griefers and scammers. People come to EVE specifically because they want to be in a universe of ruthless capitalist assholes.

        But most games aren’t like that. You can’t really justify what you’re doing as an intentional part of the game, it’s just ruining someone else’s fun for your own enjoyment.

  23. vaaal888 says:

    Hello. Assuming that this is allowed, here is my latest post about humanity and rationality. In this post I claim that morality is the way humans solve Prisoner’s Dilemma problems.

    http://valeriobiscione.com/2018/09/23/morality-is-the-way-humans-solve-prisoners-dilemma-problems/

    A nice intuition result is the following: Why the most rational action in moral problems is to behave immoraly? Because morality has been developed precisely to prevent people to behave rationally in moral problems.

    Any comment and critique is deeply appreciated.

    • fion says:

      Why the most rational action in moral problems is to behave immoraly?

      I admit I haven’t read your post, but my reaction to the above question is “it’s not”. With the exception of the prisoners’ dilemma, I think in most moral problems the most rational and the most moral actions coincide.

      • vaaal888 says:

        Thank you for your honesty. I use the word rational in a peculiar way (as in: convenient in term of individual fitness). Do you agree with this version?

        • fion says:

          Ah, I see. That’s not how I use the word. I’d probably use the word “selfish” for that. And yes, I do believe that morality has developed to make people act less selfishly.

        • Incurian says:

          To continue harping on your use of the word rational (which I think you should take to heart when communicating with this community, because I think there tends to be broad agreement on this point), here’s a quote from HPMOR:

          Suppose, Harry had said, you were playing the game against a magically produced identical copy of yourself.

          Draco had said that if there were two Dracos, of course neither Draco would want anything bad to happen to the other one, not to mention that no Malfoy would let himself become known as a traitor.

          Harry had nodded again, and said that this was yet another solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma – people might cooperate because they cared about each other, or because they had senses of honor, or because they wanted to preserve their reputation. Indeed, Harry had said, it was rather difficult to construct a true Prisoner’s Dilemma – in real life, people usually cared about the other person, or their honor or their reputation or a Dark Lord’s punishment or something besides the prison sentences. But suppose the copy had been of someone completely selfish –

          (Pansy Parkinson had been the example they’d used)

          – so each Pansy only cared what happened to her and not to the other Pansy.

          Given that this was all Pansy cared about… and that there was no Dark Lord… and Pansy wasn’t worried about her reputation… and Pansy either had no sense of honor or didn’t consider herself obligated to the other prisoner… then would the rational thing be for Pansy to cooperate, or defect?

          Some people, Harry said, claimed that the rational thing to do was for Pansy to defect against her copy, but Harry, plus someone named Douglas Hofstadter, thought these people were wrong. Because, Harry had said, if Pansy defected – not at random, but for what seemed to her like rational reasons – then the other Pansy would think exactly the same way. Two identical copies wouldn’t decide different things. So Pansy had to choose between a world in which both Pansies cooperated, or a world in which both Pansies defected, and she was better off if both copies cooperated. And if Harry had thought ‘rational’ people did defect in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, then he wouldn’t have done anything to spread that kind of ‘rationality’, because a country or a conspiracy full of ‘rational’ people would dissolve into chaos. You would tell your enemies about ‘rationality’.

          In other words, it’s rational to consider all the effects of your actions, not just to generalize from a hypothetical one-shot prisoners’ dilemma.

          • The argument is wrong.

            If you get to choose, before you are duplicated, whether you are the sort of person who would defect, it’s rational to choose not to be. But if you get to choose whether to defect after you are duplicated, the standard argument goes through and it is rational to defect.

            To put it differently, the mistake in the argument is confusing causation with evidence. The fact that you defect is evidence that your copy will defect. But, assuming we believe that choice is possible, your choice to defect does not affect the copy.

          • Dan L says:

            @ DavidFriedman:

            The section quoted is elaborated on somewhat further in the full text, but Yudkowski was certainly treating the rejection of causal decision theory as a feature, not a bug.

          • fion says:

            @DavidFriedman

            You remind me of two-boxers in Newcombe’s problem.

            Suppose Incurian is convinced by the argument they quote. They and their clone will co-operate and achieve good results. You are not convinced by their argument. You and your clone will defect and achieve bad results. If rationality is about winning, and if Incurian’s quoted argument leads to winning, doesn’t that make it rational?

          • strangepoop says:

            @DavidFriedman

            Wha?! David Friedman getting a standard decision theory problem wrong?

            Maybe the problematic phrase is “assuming choice is possible”, which is what exactly? Some asymmetric source of randomness?

          • baconbits9 says:

            @ Fion

            The prisoner’s dilemma is set up such that there is winning where you defect and the other party doesn’t, there is a second level where you both cooperate that is worse than the first level and a 3rd level which is the worst where you both defect or your opponent defects and you don’t.

            Rationality in this situation is basically defined as the best personal outcome that your actions can lead to, which means you supposedly always defect because either you get the best outcome or the worst, where as cooperate means you either get the 2nd best outcome or the worst.

          • baconbits9 says:

            Two identical copies wouldn’t decide different things. So Pansy had to choose between a world in which both Pansies cooperated, or a world in which both Pansies defected, and she was better off if both copies cooperated.

            This is just arguing against the hypothetical, it attempts to backdoor information that is explicitly prohibited in the PD. You do not know what the other persons behavior is, nor do you control it, this situation assumes that both Pansies know that the other will behave in the same way that they do, which is a violation.

          • Maybe the problematic phrase is “assuming choice is possible”, which is what exactly?

            It’s assuming free will. Without that, “what should you choose” becomes a meaningless question.

          • Thegnskald says:

            Modified version:

            You are in a lab, and informed you are in a blind, iterated game:

            In every iteration, your memory is erased, and you must choose to cooperate or defect. You are then compared to the previous iteration’s response; if they cooperated, and you cooperate, you get a chocolate. Hurray you! If you defect and they cooperated, you get three chocolates. If you cooperate and they defected, you get ten electric shocks. And if you both defected, you get three electric shocks.

            Your answer will then be used as the basis of the next iteration of the test.

            Do you cooperate or defect? And what is the difference between this, and the version of this in which you are instead playing against a copy of yourself?

            (That without getting into the free will nonsense again. Randomness isn’t free will, that is all I will say.)

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            It’s assuming free will. Without that, “what should you choose” becomes a meaningless question.

            Huh. While the ambiguities in “what should you choose” are important, I don’t think you can sensibly eliminate them simply by defining the phrase in an equally or even more ambiguous way. (Plus most people’s interpretation of “free will” seems to be openly counterfactual, ala Dilbert.)

      • albatross11 says:

        I think there is a large set of situations in which a “prudent predator” strategy is better for you individually. This is the guy who is scrupulously honest until the day the opportunity arises to steal a bunch of money in a way that is guaranteed not to be traced back to him, or the guy who expresses all the right beliefs about womens’ autonomy until he’s alone in a room with a lower-status woman and he’s sure he can get away with whatever he wants to do. Then the sheep mask comes off and he’s got long fangs.

        Prudence is about following rules that benefit you, appearing to be trustworthy so people will do business with you, etc. (And much moral instruction of children is about getting them to realize that a lot of those rules are worth following even when they don’t seem to be important.)

        Morality is about following those rules even when they don’t benefit you–not stealing the money from the senile old man who has nobody else watching over him and can’t defend himself, not forcing yourself on the attractive lower-status woman who you know will never dare accuse you of anything no matter what you do. Even small things like lifting the seat in a public restroom you’re never coming back to so you don’t leave a puddle on the seat, or tipping in a restaurant when you’re just passing through and don’t need to worry about iterated games.

        There are a lot of ways to get away with defecting in social games, from minor stuff (stiffing your waitress) to really awful stuff (date-raping some girl with no connections or defenders). Morality is about not defecting in those situations, even when it’s clear you can get away with it. Groups of people who mostly adhere to that kind of morality are way, way nicer to live in; groups who mostly adhere to the prudent predator strategy are generally pretty shitty places to live. So we benefit from getting everyone to learn and adopt some kinds of moral behavior, rather than only following their self interest in every case.

        Sometimes, this is justified as some version of “God is watching” or karma. Other times, it’s justified in terms of pride or self-image–to take advantage of a helpless person would lower yourself in your own eyes. Sometimes, it’s in terms of compassion and empathy–to steal the old man’s money or stiff the waitress would hurt other people, and their pain matters to you. But I think you very much want to live in a community where people find reasons to follow some notion of morality that applies even when nobody’s watching and they could gain by taking advantage of the situation.

        • fion says:

          If you happen to have a morality that values other people, then not defecting is the rational thing to do. If you happen to have a morality that values only the self, then defecting is (sometimes) the rational thing to do.

          I think any framing that pits rationality against morality is missing the point big time.

    • rlms says:

      You should read the relevant chapters of Reasons and Persons. Also, “immorally” has two “l”s.

  24. bean says:

    Naval Gazing looks at the battlecruisers built during WWI.

    Also, there’s our regular open thread, with bonus mockery of terrible defense articles.

  25. ana53294 says:

    One of the things that surprised me when I moved out of Spain is how different family relations in regards to money are between more Southern European countries and the North European countries.

    In Spain, parents whose income is sufficient have the obligation to finance their kids’ education. Government assistance is only given to kids whose parents lack the financial ability to maintain their kids through college (and they expect significant sacrifices on the parent’s part). Working your way through college is really, really hard, and there are no student loans available to the general public. Youth unemployment is high, and salaries for uneducated people are low.

    This is why in Spain college students can and do sue their parents for alimony. Article 142 of the Civil code says the following (translation mine, so a bit rough):

    Child support is everything necessary for the substenance, housing, clothing and medical assistance.

    Child support also includes the education and instruction of the receiver while they are a minor, and even afterwards, as long as they haven’t finished their education for reasons imputable to them.

    Pregnancy and birth expenses are included in child support.

    This Code is from 1889.

    So there are people who continue their studies for much longer than anybody would continue receiving child support. You can sue your parents for child support even if they are married, but they refuse to fund your education. And there are enough stories about 30 year olds who are still in college and sue their parents for child support.

    It seems to me like kids in Spain have more expectations on their parents’ income (you cannot disown your kids in Spain). What reasons could there be for this type of view of family?

    • Urstoff says:

      Why isn’t there a student loan industry in Spain? Does Spain’s perennial high unemployment and weak economy make private student loans too risky? And thus perhaps the social norm was developed. Or perhaps the causation runs the other way. The social norm existed first, rendering demand for private student loans too small to sustain an industry. Either way, I suspect Spain’s constant economic woe has something to do with both.

      • Murphy says:

        I don’t know much about student loans in spain but I have some idea about the finance industry in spain as I have some family there.

        One thing to keep in mind is that spain is much more decentralized than you’re probably used to. Local town halls have a remarkable amount of power. Some regions or spain or even individual towns will have grant schemes while others have none.

        27% of spanish students receive some kind of grant to study at third level education in spain.

        Re: spains finance industry.

        Mortgages are much harder to get in Spain, you either need a massive deposit to the point that you barely need the mortgage… or, effectively, someone who already has a house willing to cosign.

        Spain apparently ended up getting the worst of both worlds out of the 2008 crash. Their domestic finance industry was heavily regulated and very conservative such that it would have been almost impossible for them to suffer a crash… but unfortunately their banks were heavily exposed to a bunch of american banks because their international finance was very lightly regulated by comparison leading to them making massive devastating bad bets.

      • Well... says:

        Is the implication here that the student loan industry is not as unstable/perversely aligned/generally problematic as I and many others believe it to be?

    • Argos says:

      For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is a North vs South difference. We in Germany have pretty much the same system, including the right to sue, although I only know one person who did that (she won).
      https://www.hochschulkompass.de/en/degree-programmes/fees-funding/federal-financial-aid-bafoeg.html

      • Aapje says:

        The same in The Netherlands, where the child alimony ends at 21 years of age, unless the child is still studying.

        Perhaps this is more the UK vs the rest of Europe?

      • ana53294 says:

        Well, in Scandinavian countries, they do find it surprising. But maybe that’s because they don’t discriminate student aid by parental income.

        So Germany also has a system of aid and loans that you can only get if your family has no money? I wonder what the percentage of people who receive this grant vs those who don’t is. In Spain, kids of a middle class married employed couple will not get any grant. Most of the people I know who received the scholarships are kids of single or unemployed parents. Or, they work in the kind of employment with lots of undeclared income.

        • Argos says:

          I am finding somewhat conflicting numbers, but generally the estimate seems to be that 15% to 20% of the students qualify for those grants. Half of the money is paid out as an interest free loan, which you only have to pay back once you earn enough money. If upon graudation you remain eternally unemployed, you will never have to pay it back. But I should mention that these numbers are also lowered by the fact that the grants are dependent on a sometimes unrealisitically quick advancement through the studies.

          Those who do not qualify can still get loans instead, but although practically everybody qualifies only around 5% of students receive such a loan.

    • Statismagician says:

      Weird combination of modern incentive structures and historical artifact? You yourself said the relevant law is from 1889; it’s not like Spain sat down yesterday and decided ‘yes, it’s perfectly reasonable to make parents pay for everything their 30-year-old child can plausibly call an education expense.’

      • BBA says:

        This reminds me of the filial support laws that exist in some states, which allow the poor elderly to sue their adult children for support, much like the more familiar spousal support and child support laws. The original rationale dates back to the old poor laws, under which an indigent person had to exhaust all other means of support before they could be admitted to the county poorhouse. The Social Security Act, with its universal payments to the elderly and its other reforms of state-based welfare, made all this obsolete, and for 60-odd years lawsuits for filial support were completely unheard of… until the financial crisis and the rising costs of nursing home care led some enterprising lawyers to dust off those old sections of the statute books and hit up their clients’ ungrateful spawn for cash.

        In the meantime, some states repealed their filial support laws, thinking they were completely obsolete and would never be invoked again. Others didn’t bother changing the laws, also thinking they were completely obsolete and would never be invoked again. Whether or not a state kept these laws on the books does not appear to be any active policy choice but pure happenstance, and now that’s what controls whether these lawsuits can go forward or not.

        • albatross11 says:

          So the outcome will be bad for mankind, but great for some social scientists looking for a natural experiment.

      • ana53294 says:

        I am not surprised that we have a really old law on the books that means 30 year old kids can sue their parents to fund their suboptimal education.

        I was mainly talking about the social aspect of it. In Spain, there is a very strong social expectation that parents who can afford it will fund their kids education. So, if the kid studies hard and spends a year per academic year, parents are expected to fund the kid, even if they choose to study something the parent finds undesirable (Greek Philosophy or whatever).

        Laws frequently shape society. Although it is very hard to pinpoint the reason, just ten years after gay marriage was passed, approval of gay marriage changed by more ten percent in ten years.

        But I am not sure that it is that old law that has built expectations around family money. It rather seems to me like there is a more communal property view of family money in Spain, where every family member is entitled to a share.

  26. Matt M says:

    Does anyone know of any good media aggregation/tracking websites/apps?

    Like say, something like Goodreads, but not just for books. I want one app where I can track books, movies, TV, music, etc.

    Does such a thing exist?

    • fion says:

      I just use goodreads and imdb (and I don’t bother tracking music). I don’t really see any attraction in having them combined to one website. Letterboxd also exists but I think it’s basically just equivalent to imdb.

    • AG says:

      I’ve used Listal for my TV version of MyAnimeList, but Listal allows stuff for any type of media.

  27. j1000000 says:

    I know people get sick of all-encompassing requests for book recommendations, so I apologize for this, but I’m looking for interesting non-fiction books that are not at all about politics or current events, but instead are about niche-ish, narrow focus topics: The History of Bread, or How Sewers Work, or A Guidebook for Surviving A Massive Natural Disaster, anything at all that doesn’t mention Trump or political theories of history or anything like that.

    (I made a book rec request about a year ago and got tons of suggestions and read several that I really enjoyed, so a belated thank you to the SSC commentariat!)

    • Matt M says:

      I tend to like these types of books as well. Of the ones you enjoyed, are there a few you’d recommend?

      • j1000000 says:

        Well, to be honest, I haven’t read all that many books like this in my life. Mostly I read fiction and thesis-driven non-fiction that’s basically political (stuff like, say, The Blank Slate or The Black Swan or Bowling Alone or Coming Apart. Not uniformly conservative, which I guess all of those are.)

        But I just read “Addiction by Design” before going to Las Vegas, and for me the best part of the book was learning about casino design and slot machines themselves. (There was social theory/political stuff in there I wasn’t as interested in, but I wasn’t overwhelmed by it.) Made my experience in Vegas more interesting.

        So perhaps books about the history of everyday aspects of modern life would be the sorts of things I’d be interested in. So that for like a week after reading, say, “The History of Running Water” I could turn on my faucet and be like “WOW!!!!”

    • Urstoff says:

      In the area of Nature writing, The Forest Unseen by David George Haskell is pretty good. He just takes one square meter of ground in an old-growth forest and talks about all the things he sees there.

    • Tenacious D says:

      I read a couple of books last year that have a narrow focus and aren’t political:

      Thirst, by Steven Mithen – it describes and discusses water and wastewater infrastructure at archaeological sites around the world.

      Salt, by Mark Kurlansky – about the history of salt as a commodity (he’s written similar books about cod fish and paper, though I haven’t read them yet).

    • Well... says:

      In the realm of audiobooks, I’m most of they way through a Great Courses lecture series called “The Science of Energy” and I’ve found it illuminating, fascinating, and perspective-changing.

    • massivefocusedinaction says:

      Physics for Future Presidents is a good set of essays with a very pretentious name.

      • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

        Seconding this one. The framework is that it’s the sort of physics a policy maker would need to understand to make sensible, informed decisions, without getting too lost in the weeds.

    • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

      Michael Lewis’s body of work I’ve always really enjoyed – Moneyball and The Big Short were both great fun and I at least felt like I learned a lot. Not sure how accurate he is, since I’ve never read a review of him, but eh.

      Let’s see, Blind Descent is a book about caving – specifically, two competing spelologists quest to find the deepest cave on Earth, either Krubera in the Caucasus Mountains or a larger complex in the Mexican highlands. I learned a LOT about caving and cave diving from this book, and was really glad I’d read it when that Thai soccer team got stuck this summer.

      Finally, Deep Survival is a book looking at who lives and who dies in mass casualty disasters. I felt sort of safer after reading it.

      None of these should be mistaken for scholarly works, they’re definitely in the popular non-fiction genre. But I think they’re worth a look nonetheless. None is too long, so you never feel like you wasted your time.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      The World in a Grain— this one is on my to-read list, but it seems to be what you’re looking for.

      Chulo— a year of close observation of coatimundis (they’re something like raccoons, but more narrowly built and communal). Coatimundis have syntax– that is, the order of the sounds they made can affect the meaning.

    • Incurian says:

      Universal Principles of Design

    • SamChevre says:

      An assortment of random suggestions: none of these are “popular non-fiction”, they are books I like but are somewhat specialized.

      Frederick Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
      A book about managing software design projects, written when APL was still a standard language. However, it’s observations about team design, typical failure modes, and other issues. It’s the source of the (semi)famous quote “The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”

      Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, The Smartest Guys in the Room
      A popular-audience book about the fall of Enron, which captures the feel of working for a business that’s imploding. Very readable and fun, for values of fun that involve helplessly watching a train wreck.

      Eric Sevareid, Canoeing with the Cree
      An account of a trip by canoe from Minneapolis to the Hudson Bay in 1930.

  28. alcoraiden says:

    Is there a service a la Triplebyte or other “we will totally help you get a job” for coders in the Northeast? I have a programmer friend who has like…very little actual job experience (right out of college etc etc) but has a high caliber MIT education and is running headlong into “we want 3 years’ experience for a newbie.” It seems nice to have companies/organizations that can do the interfacing for you or help you along. Something that will put aside the history (or lack thereof) on a resume and look at what you can actually *do*. Anyone know of anything like this?

    (On a grumpy side note, I think colleges should do this. Like your careers department should actually help you get a job in the modern shit economy, not just abandon you like “good fucking luck kid.” I had a hell of a time settling into a career and would have liked an ally on my side.)

    • Matt M says:

      A lot of colleges do, in fact, do this. But the extent to which they are willing to hold your hand seems to vary greatly not only among colleges, but among majors within colleges.

      • Nick says:

        Yeah, my college was pretty good about this. Business students explicitly got this sort of help. A lot of other majors got it for certain things or at certain times, including a mandatory meeting with the career center everyone had to do the end of the junior year or beginning of the senior year, I can’t remember quite when. And a lot of professors were willing to help if you went to them, too.

        • Matt M says:

          Heh, when I got my MBA, the school would practically drag you, kicking and screaming, to interviews, if it had to.

          As toast says below, they compete with each other on “% of students who are employed within 6 months of graduation.” They cared more about you finding a job than they did about you keeping your grades up.

          • Nick says:

            As toast says below, they compete with each other on “% of students who are employed within 6 months of graduation.” They cared more about you finding a job than they did about you keeping your grades up.

            As strange as you make that sound, it looks to me like my and my career center’s incentives are aligned!

          • Matt M says:

            Hey, you don’t see me complaining!

    • johan_larson says:

      This person has an actual MIT degree, is looking for work as a programmer, and is getting rejected?

      This seems very strange to me, like there has to be more to the story. Is their background in something other than software, like chemistry, say? Can they actually code? Or are they applying to second-tier jobs, where employers are looking for a bit of experience, rather than true entry-level positions?

      • gbdub says:

        Common failure modes I see in top-tier school grads that get them rejected from my big company:
        1) Crappy GPA
        2) Lots of experience on small personal projects or academic projects, but no internship experience in the relevant industry
        3) Nothing that sets them apart from other grads of same top-tier school (this is particularly bad at career fairs, one place where “big fish in a small pond” is a major advantage, but the pond has to be big enough for companies to bother fishing there).
        4) Entitlement (or other personality flaws that are obvious in a short interview). I interviewed one guy who seemed pretty brilliant at software. But when asked for a positive story about a time he had to work through a design decision on a team with conflicting opinions, talked about a time he pulled an all nighter the night before a project was due and changed the team’s whole code to reflect the ideas he couldn’t convince them of. Apparently he felt this was an example of his can-do, hardworking attitude.

        Honestly assess if any of these are an issue and do what you can to mitigate.

        I struggle a bit as a recruiter because there are a lot of new grads I meet who have maybe a nontraditional resume, or maybe have some flaw (GPA for one) that stands out but a short interview easily mitigates. I can tell myself great stories about how they’d be excellent employees (and they probably would be). The problem is then I meet 5 more students who interview just as well and DON’T have the glaring resume flaws. Why take the risk if I don’t have to?

        Best advice is to seek out some of the smaller companies, less glamorous jobs. Be the big fish in the small pond. Then come back after you prove yourself there. Also, hang out with the MIT alumni clubs and glad-hand everyone. Slip in that you could use a job.

    • toastengineer says:

      Yeah, I thought they DID do that if only so they could go and strut around with their “99.9% of our graduates get jobs in their field” statistics.

      My boss asked me if I knew anyone looking for work a few months ago, you can refer the guy to me. EMail is my username here at gmail.

      Does he (or she?) have any big personal projects? My FOSS history got me an excellent job and I didn’t even get the degree in the end.

    • Chalid says:

      I don’t know if anything’s changed since I graduated, but I got a whole lot of interviews through the MIT career website in spite of having a less employable major than CS and the economy being lots worse. At the time, it was definitely targeted at undergrads, but it was open to alumni, grad students, etc. and had plenty of opportunities for non-undergrads.

    • baconbits9 says:

      Based on my wife’s experiences hiring in IT near Philadelphia there are some positions where the main question is “how soon can we get them up to speed”. Given that all new employees have to learn the particulars of their specific, in house made software along with other issues the minimum time seems to be on the order of 2 months for someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience (5+ years), and indefinitely for someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience and isn’t really well self motivated. This appears to be leading to recursive issues with the tight IT labor market. If someone quits or has to be fired during a project then the project is shorthanded until they find an adequate replacement and finding an inadequate replacement will make the issue worse by draining resources to train and deal with the issues they create. The longer you go without filling the position the more acute the need is for getting someone in who can be up to speed right away.

      In this environment I can see certain personality types as being functional non starters. Talented coder but perhaps difficult to work with is going to be one, guy who doesn’t sell himself as a self starter well is another.

    • Teeki says:

      Nope, but I have personally helped someone who was on a worse boat a few months ago (No formal CS education, and less than 1 year of experience/training)

      Career fairs are excellent at getting your foot through the door. Look ahead to see what companies are attending, figure out which ones you’d like to work for and do your research on them. It really helps to know their stack, what they do, and ask some intelligent questions. Most other students would ask them questions that are clearly on display on their panel, and they really do appreciate an a keen and astute lead. It’s not unusual for the panelists to give you their information and tell you to personally ask for them in the recruitment forms.

      Another piece of advice is to curate a linkedin. It does spam you, but it anecdotally works. I have gotten interviews at one of the big five, and my friend landed a job.

    • dick says:

      I manage and hire programmers. Couple questions:

      1) Isn’t the “Triplebyte for coders in the northeast” just Triplebyte? I haven’t used that service (on either end) but my impression is it’s primarily geared towards remote workers, i.e. not limited by geography.

      2) Is he working with traditional recruiters? If not, it could help, a lot of companies do most of their hiring that way.

      3) At what stage is he failing? “I can’t get a phone screen” is a very different problem from “None of my offers are north of six figures”.

      IMO, there are true entry-level jobs out there, the problem your friend is noticing is that jobs requiring two years (which may or may not be incorrectly described as entry-level) are an order of magnitude more common. There’s nothing sinister about this, it’s just that two years is the point where the weirdos/layabouts/etc have mostly been weeded out but you can still justify below-median salary. Your friend should still apply to those jobs, they can and do relax that requirement sometimes, but expect a lot of rejections.

    • WashedOut says:

      Tell him to go work for a cryptocurrency dev team, at least as a stop-gap until he finds a “mainstream” job. Blockchain/fintech company are tripping over themselves trying to find and retain programmers. They may not be able to pay him in anything other than tokens, but if he understands the movement afoot in this space it shouldn’t be a dealbreaker.

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      Do they have temps? I dunno. That’s what we got stuck doing in business if you lacked the XP. It puts you years behind your earnings curve unless you can quickly rise ranks or make a bunch of strategic job transitions.

      Strategy should be to network and intern while still in school. Experience is king.

      • dick says:

        Er, temp jobs range wildly from “we need a body to fill this chair” to “we need a special hard-to-find set of skills and will pay top dollar” but all other things being equal, temps should and IMO do make more than full-timers, even after the benefits and bonuses and whatnot.

    • Erusian says:

      Hired is the big one. You can also go through a traditional service like Talener. There’s also a few coding online programs like CodeKata that some companies look for people on. My biggest piece of advice is to apply for those three years of experience jobs. They do have three years of experience coding. At least, they do if they’ve been coding while in college, and if they didn’t that’s your problem. They can also take freelancing contracts to shore up their resume.

      Also, if you want to send over their resume, I can critique it and will pass it along to any companies I know in the Northeast (mainly Boston and NYC) who might be interested.

    • Nornagest says:

      When I was looking for a job right out of college, I gathered up all the coding I’d been doing for open source and personal projects (which thankfully were big enough that I could sell them as relevant to industry) and put it on my resume. My interviewers mentioned it during the interview that got me that job, so apparently it worked.

    • eqdw says:

      Indeed.com has a service called Indeed Prime. You fill out a linkedin-style profile, take some coding tests, and then they shop your profile around to tech companies looking for employees. You end up getting interview requests coming in over time.

      I didn’t get a large volume of opportunities out of that when I did it, but every single opportunity I got out of it was a good one

  29. proyas says:

    Starting in 1944, is there any evidence that German soldiers on the Western Front started teaching themselves simple English expressions in anticipation of surrendering or being captured?

    • engleberg says:

      CS Lewis got the Military Cross for walking through the trenches in the previous war, getting surrounded by fifty Germans who looked him over and surrendered. Probably some guys in back still had rifles to hand just in case young Lewis jerked his pistol. It’s in Surprised by Joy.

      ‘Kamerad’ was a widely used WWII phrase.

  30. proyas says:

    How much better off would the U.S. economy be if it had annexed Canada long ago, and there were no U.S.-Canada deadweight losses thanks to trade barriers? I’d imagine that things would get cheaper thanks to bigger economies of scale, an enlargement of the single market, and the freer movement of labor, but by how much?

    • Matt M says:

      Well, the population of Canada is only ~10% of the population of the US. So it’d be a larger market, but not that much larger…

    • WashedOut says:

      I’d imagine the value of Canada’s natural resources would be higher than the annexation costs by orders of magnitude. See: Alaska.

      • Garrett says:

        You have to take into account the value of the natural resources minus the extraction costs. As a first-world country, Canada has environmental, safety and labor standards. Much of their extractive industries have lost to competition from other countries which don’t.

    • cassander says:

      economies of scale aren’t magic and don’t go on forever. there is always a maximum optimum firm size and given the size of the US, it’s almost always going to be way past that. any benefit from incorporating canada would have come about purely through easier movement of goods and services, not scale.

    • Erusian says:

      Canada is about 25% poorer in per capita terms than the US. Annexing Canada would thus increase the US economy by about 1.5 trillion, plus a little more in tearing down trade barriers, and slightly lower GDP per capita.

      How much is that little more? We trade about 600 billion dollars with Canada, or about 15% of our trade. We already have a free trade agreement with them but let’s presume that eliminating those last barriers adds another 20% in the value of that trade. That means our economy will increase by a total of about 1.6 trillion.

      So not much, though it would be a net gain. The main advantage in annexing Canada would be making US territory contiguous and more defensible. It would leave us with, effectively, a single border in the South. (Invasions through the Northern wastelands would be problematic to say the least.) Of course, if you’re looking for border optimization, the US should push through Mexico to Panama and then fortify then Colombian border. It’s seventy miles of swamp and jungle. That would add 42,000,000 central Americans (GDP 200 billion) and 130,000,000 Mexicans (GDP 2.5 trillion). There’s also much more room for economic growth there by removing barriers/integrating them.

      Of course, this is literally discussing imperialism, and we all remember what that was like…

    • Plumber says:

      I don’t know, but I’m way in favor of going the other way and getting California annexed by Canada.

      First off I’ve seen Canadian money and the women pictured on it is smokin’ hot, I could look at that a lot, God Save the Queen indeed!

      Second, we wouldn’t have to send money to Dixieland anymore, win baby!

      Third, while unfortunately we couldn’t keep southern Californians from coming north (unless we divide the State and they stay in the U.S.A. which I totally support!), but we could keep other Americans from moving here, yeah Canadians could more easily move here, but there not many of them, they’d probably apologize if they did, and the French speaking ones sound totally hot!

      Oh Canada!

      • Evan Þ says:

        I’m also in favor of California being annexed by Canada. Or declaring independence. Whatever way lets them do their own thing and stay out of the other states’ business. 😉

        (And then Texas can do the same thing once we don’t need it to offset the Californian vote any longer.)

  31. AlesZiegler says:

    Does anyone have good theories why Abbasid Empire collapsed? It seems to be at least equally important and mysterious event as breakdown of Western Roman Empire, yet totally underexplored.

    • Statismagician says:

      Umm… Mongols, no? Or is that too simple?

      • AlesZiegler says:

        When Mongols came, empire was already fragmented shadow of its former self.

        • Statismagician says:

          Gotcha – perhaps illustrating your point, I don’t know very much at all about this area of history.

        • Deiseach says:

          My very vague impression is Abbasid Empire = Persians and, well, Persians y’know? *shrugs* Mainly that Persian or predominantly Persian empires get big, get highly civilised, and then collapse due to a combination of in-fighting and making one too many external enemies because they are such an attractive target being rich and soft and did we mention rich?

          Take the above with an entire mine of salt.

          • Lillian says:

            Though the Abbasids began their rebellion against the Umayyads in Persia, the Abbasid Caliphate was not particularly Persianized, and Persia was not under their control for most of their reign, being lost only a century after they took over. Indeed, one of the reasons the Abbasids lost control of Persia was that the hereditary governors of the various parts of Persia did become increasingly Persianized, and thus resentful of the Abbasids’ foreign authority.

            Persian culture is one of the strongest forces in human history, in that despite the fact that the Persians kept being invaded and conquered by foreigners over and over again, these invaders would invariably wind up going native and becoming Persians themselves. It happened with the Parthians, the Arabs, the Turks, the Mongols, and then Turks again.

            As for why they collapsed, well the their entire revolution was premised in part in opposing the iron grip that the Umayyads and the Arab aristocracy had on power. They promised more autonomy to their supporters, and when they took over they delivered. Unfortunately for them, this undermined the secular authority of the Caliph, planting the seeds of their own eventual fracture into many squabbling polities.

    • Nootropic cormorant says:

      Maybe we should wonder how it lasted as long as it did. Nomadic societies easily conquer more advanced civilizations but they usually don’t uphold their power for too long.

      • Lillian says:

        The Abbasid Empire was not a nomadic society, and they did not last for particularly long. They took over from the Umayyads in AD 750-751 and remained more or less stable for the next century, holding the territories shown on this map. However they started breaking up in the 860s, such that by 900 they had been reduced to just Iraq and parts of Western Iran, and their hold over the latter was not particularly strong. Less than 50 years later the Shiite Buyids would straight up conquer them whole, reducing the Caliph to a mere ceremonial position. They did, however, enjoy a resurgence after the collapse of the Seljuks, which was in turn ended by the Mongols.

        • Nootropic cormorant says:

          I am aware, but the Abbasid collapse is in my understanding just the Arab aristocracy losing their grip on Iran, which lasted some 200 years, longer than what the Mongols managed in most places, probably thanks to Islamizing Persia.

          • Lillian says:

            The Abbasids didn’t just lose their grip on Iran though, they also lost North Africa, Egypt, Arabia, the Levant, Armenia, and Azerbaijan all in roughly the same period. Many of these places remained under the control of the Arab aristocracy, but an Arab aristocracy that felt no need to answer to the Khalifa. It was a pretty swift collapse from having a very large domain in 860 to being reduced to pretty much just Iraq by 900.

            As for the Mongols, they held Iran for about a century between the conquest of Kwarezemia and the collapse of the Ilkhanate. Then after a brief intermezzo they got another century out of the Timurids before they too collapsed. So both the Arabs and the Mongols managed about 200 years each.

    • Tenacious D says:

      Here are a couple of theories:
      1) Due to the geography and climate of the region, it has population centres along the Nile and in Mesopotamia with a gap (and the smaller population band along the eastern Mediterranean littoral) in between. Maintaining unity between them is a challenge.
      2) External threats (i.e. the Crusades and waves of invaders from the Eurasian steppe) shifted power to military castes. The Abbasids lasted longer as caliphs than they did as a proper empire; they were at least nominally recognized by the Seljuqs, Ayyubids, and Mamluks, but the balance of power had shifted by that time.

    • cassander says:

      The abbasid caliphate ruled over a huge, culturally diverse and poorly connected swath of land for the best part of 5 centuries, the question isn’t why it collapsed, it’s how they manage to hold together for so long in the first place? How did a few tens of thousands of barely literate hill people manage to conquer such an enormous empire and not just hold it for 5 centuries, but stamp their culture on the region to this day?

      • Lillian says:

        The Abbasid Caliphate was established in AD 750, started breaking up in the 860s, and lost the last remainder of its secular authority when the Buyids took Baghdad in AD 932. That’s not even two centuries, so how are you figuring five? They did enjoy a resurgence under al-Muqtafi in the 1150s and ruled Iraq independently until the Mongols destroyed them a century later. So that’s less than three centuries of Abbasid rule total, during half of which they only ruled Iraq.

    • Salem says:

      What do you mean by “collapsed?”

      If you mean “why did the Caliph lose temporal authority?” the basic story is well-known. The traditional system was based heavily on prestige, not linearity or military/administrative dominance. Anyone could claim to be the “real” deserving ruler, so civil wars and dynastic struggles were common, and indeed this is how the Abbasids came to power in the first place. So after a particularly brutal civil war, Al-Ma’mun and Al-Mu’tasim replaced the vassalage system with a professional, tax-funded military, aiming to solidify their control of the empire. In the short term it worked, but it meant that whoever controlled the army was in control, regardless of their prestige – so within a couple of generations, the Caliphs were sidelined by their own army commanders. But they had a good run.

      If you mean “Why did they lose so much territory?” – well, they were “collapsing” in that sense almost from the start. They inherited that territory from the Umayyads, their control over the outlying regions was always weak, even in the time of Harun Al-Rashid they were losing territory. They simply never had good administrative control of their empire. It wasn’t really collapse, it was the familiar “slowly at first, then all at once.”

  32. FlorianDietz says:

    A thought experiment:

    What would happen if someone developed a lie-detector that actually worked?

    Imagine:
    -Criminals can be found by just asking people “Did you commit any crimes this week?”
    -For the first time in history, people can be sure that politicians are not lying to them and genuinely do have their best interests at heart.
    -A dictator becomes virtually impossible to remove, because “thoughtcrime” is now a very real thing.

    Both the benefits and the drawbacks would be massive.

    I suspect that such a technology would be easier to develop than strong AI and would arise eventually, and yet I have never found any articles giving the idea any thought.

    I have written some more about the subject on my blog: https://floriandietz.me/accessible_mind/

    What are your thoughts on the topic?

    • Matt M says:

      Assuming it operates under the same general principles as current lie detection (i.e. looking for minute but measurable changes in a person), I feel like there would still be a certain type of person who is immune – those who are literally insane, or suffer from various other mental illnesses.

      As was said by one of the pre-eminent philosophers of the late 20th century: “It’s not a lie, if you believe it.”

      • FlorianDietz says:

        I agree that some people would be immun due to insanity. It should still be possible to detect those kinds of people by asking calibrating questions. You wouldn’t be able to tell if the person is lying, but you would be able to tell that you can’t trust the lie detector and that the person has some kind of mental illness.

        • albatross11 says:

          You can imagine all kinds of ways this would work, if it worked. The Vorkosigan stories have fast penta, which basically makes it impossible to keep a secret (with a few exceptions). Non-horrible places limit its use to people who are under suspicion of a crime with some reasonable level of civil liberties protections.

    • Randy M says:

      I think there would be a black market in fast acting roofies.

      -Criminals can be found by just asking people “Did you commit any crimes this week?”

      I think eventually we might get to a cultural norm of such questions being okay, but even law abiding people who are sure they will be believed don’t like being asked that. And of course this only works for crimes that are generally known about.

      Anyway, this is an excellent example of a post advertising the posters blog in a way that doesn’t attempt to move discussion away from this one. I point this out because occasionally people ask here if they can or how they should do such things.

      • FlorianDietz says:

        The fast acting roofies are an interesting point I hadn’t considered!

        You could counter that by asking this, though:
        “have you ever bought fast acting roofies? Why?”

        What would happen if there was a list of questions designed to uncover crimes, and everyone just has to answer all of these questions once a month?
        It would become impossible to get away with committing a crime, wouldn’t it?

        • Evan Þ says:

          But wouldn’t the roofies remove your memory of taking the roofies?

          • Randy M says:

            For those who missed it–perhaps wisely–this was one of the plots of the Netflix arrested development episodes, where one man, in order to remove shameful memories, gets caught in a “roofie circle”, leading to lengthy periods of amnesia.

          • gbdub says:

            Forget-Me-Nows were actually introduced during the original Fox run, although the roofie circle plotline you mention was in the not-so-good season 4 as you note.

            If it wasn’t clear from Randy’s description, the key was that he took the pills too late to actually forget the shameful memory, but they still made him forget taking the pill. So every day he woke up with his last memory being the shameful thing, and needing to go get a Forget-Me-Now to remove it.

          • Randy M says:

            Forget-Me-Nows were actually introduced during the original Fox run

            Not, iirc, in the context of Gob taking them himself, but rather giving them, forcibly, to others. In that case, Michael’s mentally handicapped girlfriend.

    • Eric Rall says:

      It depends a lot on the specifics of what the lie-detector detects as lies. For example:

      Lie Detector A detects intent to deceive.

      Lie Detector B detects the subjects’ belief that they are not speaking the literal truth.

      Lie Detector C determines the objective truth value of the statement.

      • FlorianDietz says:

        For the sake of argument, let assume this:

        There is a part of the brain that lights up whenever we knowingly say something false, in order to prevent ourselves from believing our own lies. The lie detector can detect this. Both variant A and variant B you mention are similar.

        Of course, you could always just build a hybrid lie detector that looks for all of those criteria instead of only one.

        (except of course variant C. That’s clearly impossible.)

      • Matt says:

        C is my favorite. Imagine the discoveries that could be made!

        • FlorianDietz says:

          While I agree that C would be awesome, it also makes no sense and detracts from the point I’m trying to make.

          (Sorry if I sound a bit aggressive, I have talked about this before IRL and the discussion about political and economical impacts tends to get derailed hard once people start talking about variant C.)

        • fion says:

          You’d have sweatshops of people saying statements about the world into lie detectors. Whenever a lie detector wasn’t set off, the statement would be sent to the research teams to interpret and exploit.

    • Jaskologist says:

      Criminals can be found by just asking people “Did you commit any crimes this week?”

      Reading Three Felonies a Day would become a very bad idea. Really, one should strive to be as ignorant of the law as possible.

      • albatross11 says:

        What is the state of the art w.r.t. whether existing polygraphs work? I’ve spent many decades hearing about how they’ve not reliable, but I don’t know enough to have much of an opinion beyond the vague “this is supposed to be pseudoscience” notion I have from reading stuff on the internet about it.

        • engleberg says:

          According to Paul Ekman, the state of the art with existing polygraphs is that they work great at detecting emotions, specifically the six basic emotions in Darwin’s Expressions of Emotions in Animals and Man: happiness, unhappiness, anger, fear, appetite, disgust. Lie detectors suck at detecting lies, because lies are, well, less basic? Metaphysical? Aggressive cops are too good at intimidating suspects whose emotions they can read? Sneaky felons are too good at explaining away their lies? Lawyers?

          • My very non-expert understanding is that the lie detector detects your response to a question. If the question is “did you murder her,” there is likely to be a significant response from both the innocent and the guilty defendant, so it doesn’t tell you anything.

            On the other hand, if the question is “where were you Monday” followed by Tuesday, Wednesday, …, the guilty defendant who knows the murder occurred on Tuesday is likely to respond differently to the Tuesday question than to the other. The innocent defendant who doesn’t know won’t. So the lie detector is detecting guilty knowledge.

            Ideally, the question is being asked by someone who doesn’t know what day the murder occurred and so can’t signal the significant day by facial expression, voice tone, and the like.

            This is similar to the approach used in the Visigothic law of torture. Torture was only legal if there were facts of the crime that the guilty person would know and the innocent would not, and evidence obtained by torture was only accepted if it revealed such knowledge.

          • Lillian says:

            This is similar to the approach used in the Visigothic law of torture. Torture was only legal if there were facts of the crime that the guilty person would know and the innocent would not, and evidence obtained by torture was only accepted if it revealed such knowledge.

            Somehow i doubt the safeguards against the interrogator feeding the subject such knowledge were anywhere near as strong as the innocent would have liked.

      • FlorianDietz says:

        I agree. I mention this on my blog: Many contemporary laws are not designed with the idea in mind that they could actually be enforced all the time.

        • The following is from my legal systems book, not yet published:

          Suppose there were a substitute without those problems, a truth drug that produced reliable information with no harm to the defendant. The arguments against torture would then not apply. Should we use it?
          A possible response is that we want to do a good job of enforcing the law, but not too good. My analysis so far has taken it for granted that the laws being enforced are ones that should be enforced. That may not always be the case. An easy and reliable way of convicting all criminals is also a way of enforcing tyrannical laws. Limits to how good the technologies for law enforcement are may be justified as limits on the power of whoever is making and enforcing the laws.

          • albatross11 says:

            I think the optimal set of laws is very different in a world where laws can all be enforced. If once each year you answered a question under fast-penta along the lines of “Have you robbed, raped, or killed anyone?” you wouldn’t get a crapsack world. But it would be awfully tempting to add in a couple other questions, like “have you thought ill of the emperor” or “have you doubted the doctrines of the church,” and you can see that leading to a bad place pretty quickly.

            Having fast penta/perfect lie detectors only usable with a court order, when you are accused of a crime or are a witness to a crime, would be pretty useful. False accusations would basically disappear. But again, there would be a lot of incentive to stretch that use. The president’s advisors and office staff get fast-pentaed once a month to ask if they’ve leaked anything to the press; prosecutors looking to nail someone get to go on fast-penta fishing expeditions where they can always find *something* the bastard has done, etc.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            I’ve been mulling the idea of cultures needing to be modest about what they enforce.

            In particular, we have the case of laws against homosexual behavior making people’s lives worse for no good reason– and presumably nothing would have been done about that if people didn’t have a good bit of freedom to break those laws.

            I don’t know whether that sort of flexibility can be designed.

          • engleberg says:

            Justinian said that even a perfectly just law, if enforced perfectly, would result in perfect injustice. When is your book coming out?

          • When is your book coming out?

            Assuming the question was directed to me, I expect to have it out sometime in the next six months. But a late draft is webbed.

          • IsmiratSeven says:

            If once each year you answered a question under fast-penta along the lines of “Have you robbed, raped, or killed anyone?” you wouldn’t get a crapsack world.

            What about the cashier who forgets to ring up sales tax, or the cubicle warrior browsing SSC on company time, or the customer who is inadvertently given an extra side order with their meal and doesn’t return it, or…?

            Seems like you’ve created a hell for anyone with a strong conscience.

            (Leaving aside the culture war minefield of #2…)

          • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

            Seems to me that even if the subject was misinterpreting the question in such a way, the follow-up questions would exonerate them.

    • Deiseach says:

      Criminals can be found by just asking people “Did you commit any crimes this week?”

      As Hamlet said, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall ‘scape whipping?” Ask everyone did they break any laws/rules and you’ll get 99.9% of respondents have done something, whether minor or major (“Crap! I never sorted out my recycling!”).

    • baconbits9 says:

      If your lie detector detected if a person thought that they were lying then people who bought into their own BS would get by easily, cult leader type of personalities and people like Bill Clinton who are able to wonder what “is” means. Everyone else would be in as much, or as little, trouble based on their ability to avoid a turn under the lie dector.

    • mrjeremyfade says:

      The Truth Machine by James Halperin covered this in a sci-fi style. It’s been years since I read it, but I recall it as a fun read with interesting ideas.

    • massivefocusedinaction says:

      I think the interesting question is what happens to all the societal structures we’ve developed to solve access to commons if it becomes costless to simply negotiate access to any commons.

      Transaction costs get very low if no one can get away with lying anymore.

      • Lillian says:

        Nobody except for all the people who believe their own lies. Oh and sociopaths, who generally can’t tell the difference between lying and telling the truth except in the most abstract and intellectual sense, and therefore probably would show up as being utterly truthful under the lie detector.

        Currently their ability to do damage is somewhat limited by some portion of the population not being taken in by their superficial charm, they notice there is something off about them and instinctively mistrust them. If they could call upon an objective measure of their trustworthyness, they would be able to bypass most of these people’s mistrust, allowing them greater reign to do as they wish.

        If the proportion of sociopaths in the population turns out to be high enough, we might find that many of these structures for negotiating access to the commons need to stay up, lest they run roughshod over everyone else.

        • FlorianDietz says:

          There is no reason to assume that you couldn’t find out when a sociopath lies.

          Sociopaths are aware that they are lying (else they would be tricking themselves too), they just don’t feel bad about it and don’t get nervous while doing it.

          • Lillian says:

            Well you see, that depends.

            It’s possible to hold beliefs which you know are false and yet believe to be true without deceiving yourself. Consider for example the statement, “Captain Jean-Luc Picard is a Frenchman.” This statement is false, Captain Picard doesn’t exist, and yet i genuinely believe it to be true. In fact i believe it to be true in spite of contradictory evidence like the fact that Picard speaks with a British accent and never uses the French language, but nonetheless this belief does not at all affect my ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

            If you hooked me up to a lie detector, it would register me saying “Picard is a Frenchman” as a true statement. What’s more, i don’t think it would be able to distinguish the truth value of this statement from the truth value of the statement, “I post in SSC as Lillian”. As far as i’m concerned, they are both equally true, except that one applies to the world i live in, and the other applies to the world that Picard lives in.

            Any person who is able to apply this “true, but different world” tag to any arbitrary statement, should be able to beat the lie detector. While it is not necessarily the case that sociopaths can do it, they may very well not be any more capable of it than it than i am, i think they are the strongest candidates for having this ability.

            You could counter this by making your lie detector able to distinguish between a person’s mental categories, but by that point your device has evolved into a full on mind reader, which carries a whole slew of additional implications.

          • AlphaGamma says:

            @Lillian on Picard being French- just last week I was having a discussion about how, given the existence of the Universal Translator, we can’t be sure that Picard isn’t speaking French at least some of the time.

            Picard also sings in French on-screen at least once. Although in that same episode, when he is visiting his French family in France, the dialogue between them is in English. I assume that they are actually speaking French, and it is rendered as English by the same convention that allows dialogue between Germans in WW2 films to be in English when there is no English-speaking character present.

          • FlorianDietz says:

            I’m pretty sure you could develop a standard suite of questions to rule out deceptions like this:
            “is any of the stuff you just said only true in some alternate world?”
            “do you think that there is any part of what you just said that you understood differently than we did?”

            It would slow things down, but by asking enough meta-questions about the questions to which you want answers, you could probably get very reliable results.

          • Matt M says:

            Hell, there’s an episode where Picard teaches some of the children on the ship to sing Frere Jacques.

            The universal translator must be good at recognizing an artistic rendition of words for a musical purpose, as it chooses not to translate, for anyone.

            Possibly confirmed by its inability to handle the infamous “Darmok” language.

          • Matt says:

            The universal translator must be good at recognizing an artistic rendition of words for a musical purpose, as it chooses not to translate, for anyone.

            The universal translator can also tell when NOT to translate a Klingon word or phrase.

          • Lillian says:

            When i played a Star Trek roleplaying game, we toned down how good the universal translator was such that there was still actual value in learning other languages. Most people didn’t bother because the translator was good enough, but being able to speak a language fluently was still superior since you could speak to people directly rather than having to filter it through the translator. So of course my character, an aristocratic and very politically inclined Romulan, went out of her way to learn the two primary languages of the Romulan Empire’s chief rivals: English and Vulcan for the Federation, tlhIngan Hol and Klingonaase for the Klingons. After the Cardassian-Federation War she also picked up the principal Cardassian tongue. Together with her native Romulan this made her fluent in six languages. However, she didn’t speak a word of Reman, because why would she learn the tongue of a filthy servant race?

          • Evan Þ says:

            @Lillian, IIRC, I’ve read the same thing in Diane Duane’s excellent Star Trek tie-in (really, takeoff) novels.

          • IsmiratSeven says:

            @Florian

            I’m pretty sure you could develop a standard suite of questions to rule out deceptions like this:
            “is any of the stuff you just said only true in some alternate world?”
            “do you think that there is any part of what you just said that you understood differently than we did?”

            “No” [it’s true in many alternate worlds]
            “Yes” [every single statement will be understood differently by whoever experienced it, in a sense even more basic than that of Rashomon – I may be able to tell you I went to the store at 8:00am, but I remember the smell of the fresh-cut grass, and you do not]

            You’re very, very optimistic. 🙂

    • Lillian says:

      It would be a horrifying development. There are a lot of laws that are passed based on notions of how people ought to behave rather than to deter and punish the victimization of others, and for the most part i consider these laws to be inherently tyrannical and unjustified under the maxim that if there is no victim, there is no crime. Topping the list are prohibitions against drug use and prostitution (also gambling, though that is declining a bit). Sin taxes and certain excessive and unnecessary regulation also falls under a similar category.

      People respond to these foolish prohibitions by routing around them, black markets are created allowing people to indulge their desires in spite of the majority’s democratic despotism trying to stop them. This is a good thing, and we need to have more of it, not less. Anything that decreases people’s ability to avoid these pointless and evil impositions, from mass surveillance to working lie detectors, is therefore an instrument of tyranny. The widespread use of truly reliable lie detectors would force those of us who try to live lives free of government imposition of what we do with and to ourselves to stop doing so, destroying some of our freedom. This is both unequivocally bad and quite terrifying.

      • FlorianDietz says:

        I agree that a lot of terrifying stuff would happen. However, I think it’s worth pointing out that that would be a transitional phase. The problem is not that lie detectors are bad, but that the combination of lie detectors + laws that were made before lie detectors existed is bad. The question is how much terrible stuff would result from this before the legislative gets its act together and removs the laws that don’t work well with the existence of lie detectors.

        • Lillian says:

          Existing US laws against child pornography don’t work well at the intersection of horny teenagers, widely available digital cameras, and ease of dissemination of digital images. Yet somehow the legislature seems much more inclined to make the problem worse than it seems inclined to make it better. There are myriad of examples along these same lines. Just recently the US government decided to respond to the rise of internet prostitution, which was serving to make prostitution less dangerous for everyone involved, by passing a law making the online promotion of prostitution into a Federal crime, which helps no-one and puts many at risk.

          You will have to forgive me if i don’t share your optimism about the government’s ability and willingness to adjust the law to minimize its harms in light of new technology. Their track record thus far is to make the law ever more tyrannical and oppressive on everyone. Perhaps working lie detectors will make it so oppressive as to trigger a voter revolt and a sea change towards more reasonable laws, but i wouldn’t hold my breath.

          • The Nybbler says:

            Well, you know what they say; the opposite of progress is congress.

          • Lillian says:

            And the only thing worse that partisanship is bipartisanship. Most of the nation’s worst laws sailed through state and federal legislatures with broad support.

          • engleberg says:

            If someone has perfect working lie detectors, you lie to them by finding a sucker who honestly believes you and sending them the sucker. This would make being a sucker valuable, as we think we are today.

    • fion says:

      I think the equilibrium that this would lead to is basically your “dictator becomes impossible to remove” scenario. Liberal democracies would go through a turbulent transition period where almost all politicians are discredited and the police force makes a huge number of arrests, with no overall guidelines yet about which laws to enforce and which to ignore.

      Those in power try to maintain it. The super-rich remain super-rich, for they had little need to lie. The government won’t just stand aside and let a load of honest but inexperienced politicians take over, and the public won’t be happy about this. There will be unrest, there will be “honest demagogues” trying to lead movements, and there will be the military. The military will be largely unaffected by the introduction of lie detectors and will be the only force capable of restoring order.

      Eventually you end up with some savvy, not-necessarily-honest person who has command of armed bodies of men being in charge. This person refuses to take lie tests and uses normal methods (i.e. threat of violence) to dissuade anybody from trying to disagree with this. The new leader figures out how to restore order and decides which laws should be enforced. This includes maintaining his or her own power.

      This is a stable state that will be virtually impossible to get out of, and it’s the only stable state I can think of that is reasonably easy to get into, so I think it’s what would happen approximately everywhere. In short, I think the world becomes almost unambiguously worse.

    • Nancy Lebovitz says:

      My cynical reaction is that a lot will depend on who gets questioned.

      In the real world, low-level people get drug tested, but CEOs and high officials don’t get drug-tested, even though in theory the high status people are making more important decisions.

      • Edward Scizorhands says:

        > making more important decisions

        I don’t want to bring this down to one word, because there are lots of reasons for drug-testing, but “dangerous” is the better determinant than “important.”

        If a lawyer is high and writes a bad argument in a brief, he might have a colleague catch it, or be able to amend it later, or even rewrite it before it is due.

        If a truck driver doesn’t see someone crossing the street, there’s no recourse. A lot of blue-collar work is just more brutal to mistakes. Someone screwing up can destroy an entire semi-conductor fab run.

        Now I wonder: Are surgeons drug-tested? It’s a high-status job but doesn’t have slack for correcting mistakes later.

        • Evan Þ says:

          Based on the stories I’ve heard of drug-addict doctors who definitely weren’t tested, I expect surgeons aren’t either. I know my grandfather (a former surgeon who retired in the 90’s) never mentioned anything about it.

        • Nancy Lebovitz says:

          I see your point, but a CEO can make mistakes which eventually destroy the company even if no one dies.

    • Jiro says:

      Even making reasonable assumptions such as “the lie detector detects intent and knowledge”, I still think this won’t work, because people aren’t 100% confident.

      If you’re thinking “I hope this will be ruled as self-defense and not a crime” but you’re not certain, does the lie detector detect a lie when you say you haven’t committed a crime?

      If the lie detector detects such things as lies only when you’re very confident it’s a crime, it will become useless for this purpose because it will fail to detect a lot of crimes. If it detects such things as lies when you think it’s only slightly likely that you have committed a crime, it will become useless for this purpose because it detects a lot of non-crimes.

      Using it on a politician has a similar problem. You can detect such direct lies as “I don’t want to raise taxes” when the politician wants to raise taxes, but what’s it going to detect if the politician says “this new policy will decrease crime” and he thinks it only has a 60% chance of decreasing crime? What if he thinks it has an 80% chance of reducing crime, but he mainly supports the policy for some other unsaid reason that may be bad for you? What if he doesn’t know if it will decrease crime, but his advisor says it does; does the lie detector now show a lie depending on how confident he is in the proclamations of his advisor?

      • Lillian says:

        There’s also the issue that politicians may make promises that they genuinely intend to keep, and then decide that for the good of the country they’d best not when the rubber hits the road. Like when George H.W. Bush said, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” He was probably being completely truthful and had zero intention of imposing new taxes. Then he looked at the country’s fiscal situation and changed his mind, and people were upset, but he never lied intentionally.

        An interesting question is what this would do to people’s trust in politicians. Would the public trust politicians more if they have tangible evidence that they are well intentioned even when they break their promises? Or would they trust politicians less because there’s no guarantee they’ll keep even their truthful promises? Personally, i trust Bush Sr more for raising taxes, because i want politicians who both make good faith efforts to keep their promises, and are willing to break them for the good of the country. However i’m not necessarily typical in that respect.

        Also, this is only tangentially related but it sprang to mind so i’m sharing it. Sometimes when playing videogames with dialogue options you’ll get a choice like: 1) Agree to retrieve McGuffin, 2) Agree to retrieve McGuffin [Lie], 3) Refuse to retrieve McGuffin. And i haaaate it, because most of the time at that point i don’t know whether i’m lying yet! Maybe i’ll betray the guy, maybe i won’t, i have to see how the situation plays out first, and i hate that the game is trying to force me to precommit to one course or the other.

  33. Statismagician says:

    Why are lawns a thing? How did all of suburban America decide that it would assign everyone an onerous chore trying to keep plants that generally don’t want to be there within a very specific height range? This has baffled me for years and I’m curious to know if there’s an actual answer.

    • Randy M says:

      In this book review, Card argues that they are derived from wealthy Americans imitating aristocratic English manor houses.

    • gbdub says:

      If you’ve got a yard big enough to run around and play in, a grass lawn is objectively a very nice surface for that.

      But ornamental lawns, as in a tiny patch that is worthless for anything but proving you can be more meticulous than your neighbor? Tear it up and replace with gravel and cacti.

    • j1000000 says:

      Wikipedia’s article contains the basic narrative I’ve heard, something along the lines of: various incremental improvements in agriculture/technology over a century made the lawn a possibility beyond just the richest class of society — better/more widespread seed for heartier grasses, more effective/affordable lawnmowers — then Levittown cemented the lawn’s status as a middle class staple by creating the front lawn/white picket fence ideal, right as VA loans for the huge number of WW2 vets created a new generation of potential homeowners ready to buy.

      But responding to specifically your use of “onerous,” I find lawncare enjoyable and satisfying in the way I think a lot of people do, and I think that’s why they stick around even though they are not natural and in many ways are tremendously wasteful. A tiny connection to our history as farmers.

      • Matt M says:

        that’s why they stick around even though they are not natural and in many ways are tremendously wasteful. A tiny connection to our history as farmers

        And for the rest of us, well, you probably live in a HOA where it’s mandatory to have a well-cared for lawn anyway…

        • j1000000 says:

          Yeah fair point — I have no idea what number of people actually enjoy caring for their lawn so I’m probably vastly overestimating that as a factor in them sticking around. Not every American is Hank Hill.

          • Matt M says:

            Well, my point was more “There are enough of you crazies around who will vote to make these sort of things mandatory for the rest of us – even if we’d rather not participate.”

    • RobJ says:

      As someone who grew up with a large lawn and currently doesn’t have one with 2 young kids… I really want one and am considering spending a ridiculous amount of money and/or time to get one put in instead of our current “low maintenance” landscaping. Mostly it’s just for an outdoor versatile play area that also looks nice. It’s a place to throw a football or baseball around, set up soccer goals, have a croquet or badminton game, set up the sprinkler on a hot day, etc. Lawns are great.

    • The Nybbler says:

      In desert areas they’re kinda silly, but in the Northeast, _something_ is going to grow like it or not, unless you take extreme measures to prevent it (paving over it is not sufficient unless you also regularly drive over it, or treat it with herbicide). So you’ve got some sort of maintenance task no matter what.

      • Matt M says:

        Heh. I grew up in Oregon and this was definitely true. Planting and caring for a lawn wasn’t any more work than dealing with the weeds that would inevitably show up on any bare patch of land left to its own devices.

    • RobJ says:

      As for more ornamental lawns (like small front lawns that are never used for anything). I’d guess it’s a combination of things. For one, it’s just become the norm of what a nice landscape looks like for whatever reason. But I also think, while mowing is constant and can be a nuisance, it’s also very straightforward. We moved into a house with a lot of plants that don’t require much water and are appropriate for our climate, but they also require more knowledge to keep looking nice and require replacement every few years when they start getting overgrown.

    • baconbits9 says:

      More onerous than what though? A lawn is probably the easiest thing to manage in modern times and have it look well tended. Trees tend to have bare spots at their roots, lose limbs during storms, and require raking and pruning. Bushes and shrubs need pruning that is more difficult than pushing a lawn mower, and ‘whatever grows, grows’ either looks a mess or requires a ton of work.

      • The Nybbler says:

        A lawn is probably the easiest thing to manage in modern times and have it look well tended.

        Especially if you follow the lazy suburbanite’s mantra: “Crabgrass is still grass”.

    • Matt says:

      I live on the side of a hill and the parts of my yard that don’t have grass have a real erosion problem. The lot uphill from my house is just woods, which means I’ve got poison ivy that would expand into my yard but for the grass that can choke it out. Further, the area had a pretty bad tick problem that I solved for my yard this spring by just hitting the perimeter of the woodsy lot uphill. If I even could let the lot go wild I’m pretty sure the ticks would expand aggressively into my yard. Other options for my backyard that would resist erosion AND keep my dogs from getting muddy paws every time it rains… I’m not sure what a better choice would be. Maybe rocks, lots of pesticides and herbicides?

    • Dack says:

      How else are you going to feed your horses/cows/sheep/etc?

    • A Definite Beta Guy says:

      It’s not really onerous. Most people have motorized lawnmowers that can chew through practically anything in short order, and it doesn’t take particularly long to mow an eight-to-quarter acre. You fertilize 4 times a year and spray for weeds twice on top of that. Edging is optional, but can be done with a motorized weed whacker.

      Once every few years you aerate and you dethatch once a year, if you choose to. Both of those are motorized machines you can rent from Home Depot.

      The biggest PITA is watering it, but a lot of people have in-ground sprinklers that make that really easy.

      Grass grows relatively easily, it just gets outcompeted by certain weeds, and most weeds look disgusting. It actually takes a great deal of effort to grow a blended garden, which is why most people don’t even bother with a lot of garden beds and instead put up low-maintenance shrubs.

      All in all, the lawn on my 5500 sq ft property takes up a lot less time than my 36 sq ft vegetable garden and the 20 sq ft “whatever grows grows” spot. And I use a reel lawnmower! no engine

  34. DragonMilk says:

    Would the following mechanic jump start third parties?

    Change the voting system to as follows for a single seat:
    1. You must provide your first choice and second choice
    2. If you pick the same person for first and second choice your vote is tossed out.
    3. The first choice is given twice the weight of the second
    4. Winner is the highest sum of weights

    Thought is that it people are two-tribal, forcing a second choice may introduce fresh blood.

    Ideally, for senate elections, I’d have each state have 3 seats up for grabs under the following mechanic:
    Every three years, either seat 1 or 2 is up for grabs. The first choice candidate gets either seat 1 or 2 for six years. The second choice candidate gets the 3rd seat which is a 3-year term.

    • Matt M says:

      Thought is that it people are two-tribal, forcing a second choice may introduce fresh blood.

      Would it?

      Or would the GOP/DNC just run dual candidates for every relevant seat?

      I guess you could make a rule saying the votes have to be for different political parties, but I feel like that would just result in a new “Just like the Republicans/Democrats but with a different name” parties suddenly coming into existence.

      The two party system exists in America because Americans want it to exist. There is no “democratic” way to get rid of it.

      • Eric Rall says:

        That was my first thought, too, but I don’t think that works except in districts where your party has a much stronger position than the other major party. Otherwise, you’re risking splitting your voter base and losing the election for the first-place seat.

        A simple scenario where a two-candidate strategy works is a district that’s about 60% Democratic and 30% Republican in a two-party race, with the Republican voters uniformly preferring Libertarians to Democrats. If the Democrats run two candidates and coordinate effectively to split their voters between the two candidates, Dem A and Dem B each has 30% of first-place votes and 30% of second-place vote, while the Republican candidate has 40% of first-place votes and the Libertarian candidate has 40% of second-place votes. The totals are then 90% for Dem A, 90% for Dem B, 80% for the Republican, and 40% for the Libertarian. With perfect coordination and no crossover votes (two unrealistic assumptions that cut in opposite directions), I think the threshold is a 4/7 majority (about 57%).

        Granted, there are a lot of districts like that, especially for gerrymander-able races (House of Representatives and state legislature districts), but there are also a lot of races where running two candidates isn’t worth the risk that splitting your first-place votes makes you lose the more-valuable first-place seat.

        There’s probably a viable strategy for districts where one party has an advantage but not an overwhelming majority (say, a 55/45 split) to make a play for both seats by running two candidates with significant ideological separation: a hard-liner to turn out your base and attract their first-place votes, and a moderate to attract crossover support from moderate Republican voters (or moderate Democratic voters in a reddish-purple district) who would otherwise be casting their second-place vote for a conservative or libertarian third-party candidate. While this scenario doesn’t really support DragonMilk’s stated goal of jump-starting third parties, it would have the beneficial effect of increasing ideological diversity within each party’s caucus in the legislature.

        • Matt M says:

          The party is capable of communicating to voters that their two candidates are running as a ticket, similar to Pres and VP. The party can make it clear that you’re supposed to vote for this guy first, and this guy second. And most people will.

          Assuming some type of primary process, they would anyway.

          Like, if we had this rule in 2016, it might have given us Bernie or Cruz or Jeb, but it damn sure wouldn’t have given us Gary Johnson or Jill Stein…

          • albatross11 says:

            There are many countries where each party puts up a list of candidates in order–people can vote for specific candidates but if their candidate doesn’t get in, I think the vote rolls over to the party list in order. If you looked at how elections go in those countries, you could learn something about how it’s likely to go in this proposed system.

      • BBA says:

        A personal pet peeve: don’t use “DNC” as a counterpart to “GOP”. The latter refers to the entire Republican Party, the former only to the Democratic Party’s executive committee, counterpart to the RNC.

        Unless you mean it as Bernista derp about how the committee controls the party and the superdelegates forced Hillary on us from on high, in which case we have more than two problems.

      • DragonMilk says:

        If you run two candidates per party you’d split the vote – Let’s say D runs two candidates and R runs one. Suppose further that there are two independent parties G and L.

        If R would have had 51% of the vote vs. 47% D1, 1% G, 1% L. Introducing D2 may mean they split the first vote and say their differences mean they take more of R, so it would be R 49%, D1 30%, D2 19%, 1% G, 1% L.

        Now as for the second choice, let’s say the R voters all go 49% L and vice versa for simplicity, but the D1 and D2 votes stay the same, with G voting for D1. The results of the race would be as follows:

        First choice: 49 R, 30 D1, 19 D2, 1 G, 1 L
        Second choice: 49L, 31D1, 19D2, 1R

        Weighted result:
        R = 49.5, D1 = 45.5, L = 30.5, D2 = 28.5, G = 1.

        So R still wins.

        Now reconsider the above example without vote splitting, maybe should have done this first:

        First choice: 51 R, 47 D1, 1 G, 1 L
        Second choice: 51 L, 47 G, 1 D1, 1 R

        R = 51.5, D1 = 47.5, L = 26.5, G = 24.5

        So the final outcome did not change in the above case, but the weighted result boosts the proportion and voters see these results. They may think, hmm, maybe L and G actually have a chance! I’ll vote based on preference rather than assume two major parties always win. So let’s say the next election the first order preference becomes the following:

        First choice: R = 40, D = 26, L = 20, G = 14
        Second choice: R = 20, D = 14, L = 40, G = 26

        Final result: R = 50, D = 37, L = 40, G = 27

        Again, the final result didn’t change, but upon seeing the tally, the third party candidates may get more of an ear now that they seem to command a larger “share” of voters interests. If nothing else, new ideas rather than new people get introduced as “fresh blood”

    • Nornagest says:

      There’s a large literature on voting systems, and the general answer to questions like yours is “yes, but there are side effects”. As for the specific answer, what you’re describing is a simple Borda count system. That article’s worth reading, and it outlines several criticisms in detail.

      For now, though, one potentially problematic feature is that it’s possible for a candidate who’s the first choice of a majority of voters to not be elected. Imagine a polity with 100 voters and two front-running candidates, Alice and Bob. If Alice gets 60 first-choice votes but isn’t anyone’s second choice, and Bob gets 40 first-choice votes but also 41 second-choice votes, then Alice’s weighted score is 60 and Bob’s is 60.5. Bob wins, even though Alice had 50% more voters who wanted her as a first choice.

      That’s highly counterintuitive, and it means that the details of how many candidates a party runs and how close they are to each other ideologically become very important. I predict a lot of Electoral College-style drama.

      • Nootropic cormorant says:

        Why don’t any of the Bobites accept Alice as a second choice? If 40% of voters won’t compromise with Alice maybe she shouldn’t be elected.

        • Nornagest says:

          Because it’s a thought experiment. I’m trying to illustrate a counterintuitive feature of the system in an understandable way, not present the kind of (messy, complicated) scenario with the same underlying math that you’d actually see in the wild.

          • Nootropic cormorant says:

            I know, but my point is that this doesn’t intuitively strike me as a drawback.

          • albatross11 says:

            This comes back to Arrow’s theorem–there’s no way to get a democratic voting scheme that’s rational in the same way a single human might be expected to be rational.

        • beleester says:

          Maybe there’s a third party, Charlie. Charlie is a fringe candidate who’s like Bob but more extreme, so Bobites pick him as their second choice, but Alicians would rather have Bob than Charlie.

          That gives us:
          60 first-choice votes for Alice.
          40 first-choice votes for Bob
          60 second-choice votes for Bob
          40 second-choice votes for Charlie.
          Final score: Alice 60, Bob 70, Charlie 20.

          Charlie sort of acts as the opposite of a spoiler candidate – because he provides a place for Bobites to dump their second-choice votes besides Alice, Bob gets an advantage.

          It gives both voters and political parties some really weird incentives. Even if a Bobite would prefer Alice to Charlie, it’s rational for him to vote for Charlie as his second choice because he knows Charlie has no chance and it gives Bob a better chance of winning.

          It also means that both political parties have the incentive to nominate a “second choice” candidate to keep the second-choice votes under their tent. If Alice is smart, she’ll get David to run on her fringe, and soak up the second choice votes on her side.

    • Tenacious D says:

      I think the struggle for third parties to get traction in the US has more to do with the presidential system* than first-past-the-post voting. When everyone in the country is voting for [electors for] a single position it is easy for the two major parties to cast it as a binary choice. In a parliamentary system, in contrast, strong local candidates (or a focus on issues that are of concern to a specific region) can help third parties break out. For example, my province (which uses FPTP) had an election today and there will be four parties with seats in the next session of the legislature.

      *Granted there are countries that use the presidential system and have viable 3rd+ parties, but I can’t think of any countries with a parliamentary system that don’t have viable 3rd+ parties.

    • Plumber says:

      I want four different parties that were:

      Economic libertarianist/social conservative

      Economic libertarianist/social liberal

      Economic statist/social conservative

      and

      Economic statist/social liberal

      To rule you’d have to have a coalition.

      I’d want coalitions to change every few years.

      And I’d want voters to clearly know who stood for what.

  35. dndnrsn says:

    RPG thread:

    What, as a GM (or a player, I suppose), are your biggest weakness? More productively: how can people think to fix other people’s issues?

    The one I think causes the most actual problems for my game is that I’m awful at keeping track of atmospheric effects. Keeping track of light sources is hassle enough; I’m not going to remember to determine if it’s raining or shining every day. Which means weather basically defaults to “OK” most of the time, unless I specifically determine for a given adventure what the weather is, or put a note to do that (I never remember to put these notes in reliably, either). If I could reliably remember to do this, the atmosphere would be a bit better, tactical combat would be a bit more interesting, distance travel might be affected, etc. It would make the game a bit more varied.

    • Ventrue Capital says:

      What, as a GM (or a player, I suppose), are your biggest weakness?

      What am my biggest weakness? 😀

      Seriously, though, right now my biggest weaknesses as a GM are:

      1. Lack of free time to perform campaign maintenance (e.g. posting session logs);

      2. Physical issues which make me sleepy so that I’m slow responding even when I’ve taken caffeine;

      3. Not prodding the players to choose a course of action, particularly on the issue of which adventure to go on, which rumor to pursue, what to do about a random encounter, etc., so they spend a lot of real-world time not doing anything, even making plans.

      More productively: how can people think to fix other people’s issues?

      I’m not sure exactly what you mean by that, but merely getting me to put the above challenges down in writing has helped me think of solutions to them.

      Regarding the issue of remembering to track weather, I’ve found that the meta-principle behind setting up a new habit is:

      1. Make sure that it’s easy to actually *do* Action X;

      2. Make sure it’s easy to *remember* to do it.

      2.1. Figure out a way to set a reminder such that every time you need to do that action, the reminder goes off.

      2.1.1. Figure out what other action you always perform, or what else always happens, every time you need to be reminded to do Action X.

      2.1.2. Then set up a trigger for the reminder.

      If you have difficulty with step 2, probably your Unconscious is dragging its feet because it isn’t confident that step 1 is handled!

      • dndnrsn says:

        I might try putting the weather in the random encounter chart, or a note in there. That might work; thanks.

        With regard to getting players to make a decision: one thing I’ve found useful is to, if the players are spending a long time arguing over different choices, I’ll speak GM-to-player and give them a vague idea of what each adventure hook is. Not anything specific, but “this adventure hook will lead to a wilderness adventure, that one will lead to a dungeon crawl” makes it clear that they’re different choices and makes it difficult for someone to say they didn’t know what they were getting into.

        If their lack of information something lower level than that (“will we get kidnapped by elves if we go into that forest?” within the wilderness adventure, say) I’ll let them gather info within the setting, but they don’t get out-of-character knowledge. At that point they’ve at least chosen what kind of game it’s going to be.

        • Ventrue Capital says:

          You’re welcome for my advice to you, and thank you for your advice to me!

          After thinking about your advice, I believe the issue may be that my campaign world is so familiar to me that I have been mistakenly assuming that my players have various important pieces of information that their characters would have.

          So from now on, when the players are just sitting around silent, or at least not planning productively, I will try to find out what sort of information they need/want in order to make a decision. Because in my campaign, if a character doesn’t have a particular piece of information, it’s usually very easy to at least find out how to get it.

          Now, how do I set a trigger to remind me to do that? How can I set an alarm or reminder to occur whenever the players are indecisive?

          • deathtales says:

            Epistemic status: « works for me » only a few sessions as a GM.

            What I do is make intensive use of notes. In particular I have notes on what the player can learn in a scene and what they should know at the end. As when pacing slows down I am drawn to my notes i already have the check list handy.
            If you do use notes like that but find these insufficient. Maybe adding an explicit reminder (like « don’t forget to check if the player have these ») in a different color on these notes might help.

    • ing says:

      As a DM, here are some things I regret doing recently:

      (1) I got excited by worldbuilding and told my players their empire was ruled by a CR15 dragon. The final villain of their campaign is less than CR15, and has a plan which threatens the empire. I will soon need to come up with a reason why the Dragon Empress doesn’t handle it personally. I don’t have a good solution.

      (2) I narrated my players coming across a passage into that same Dragon Empress’s treasure hoard. A group of villains had used the passage to steal an artifact. The players defeated the villains and took the artifact, and promptly piled into the passage so they could loot more things from the Dragon Empress’s treasure hoard. This is a stupid plan. I now have the choice between running a TPK, or pulling my punches enough that they can burgle the Dragon Empress’s treasure hoard (the second time it’s been raided in a week!) and not get caught.

      Complicating the situation is that this is my game at a game store, and the group changes from week to week. If new players join my table and I’m like: “okay, you continue traveling through the passage to the Dragon Empress’s treasure hoard. You arrive, and she’s sensed you coming and she’s waiting for you. Roll initiative. You all die.”, that’s a lousy experience which I shouldn’t inflict on people who don’t “deserve” it.

      (3) One of my characters (female player, female character) keeps seducing NPCs. I don’t know how to handle this.

      When a male player tells me his male character is seducing a female NPC, I do know how to handle that: I say “okay, the two of you retire to a private room, and you’ve successfully distracted her while the rest of the group advances their own plans.”

      My female player told me her character was seducing two fire cultists, so I narrated that the three of them left town and bedded down for the night. Then I noticed the player was getting really uncomfortable, so I walked it back quickly: “but they’re not doing anything inappropriate, they just argue over who has to take first watch and then go to sleep. Do you want first watch?”

      The next couple of times she did this, I wised up and just told her: “okay, this NPC is doing what you want. What do you want them to do?” I feel like that’s a a safe way to handle it but it’s sort of a missed opportunity.

      • Evan Þ says:

        (2) Hmm, what if the Dragon Empress doesn’t want to kill these adventurers? Maybe she thinks they’re interesting, or maybe she wants to hire them? If you want to drag the adventure way off-track, “You get assigned to the Dragon Empress’s punishment squad” could be an interesting prompt.

        (3) FWIW, the GM of the one quest I’ve played handled this with “… Okay; roll for Charisma… great; you get a success. Interpret that however you want. Next morning…”

      • Ventrue Capital says:

        (1)

        I will soon need to come up with a reason why the Dragon Empress doesn’t handle it personally.

        Yes, you will.

        How about “The Dragon Empress physically can’t fit into the villain’s location”? Although if she can shapeshift, that reason doesn’t work.

        Also, out of curiosity, why doesn’t the Dragon Empress send a legion, or at least a cohort, of her army instead of a small band of unreliable adventurers?

        (2)

        Complicating the situation is that this is my game at a game store, and the group changes from week to week.

        That is a major challenge which I’ve had to deal with in my online game, and *lots* of games, perhaps a majority, have to deal with the issue of how to handle absent players.

        My first piece of advice is for you to Google {D&D absent players} and look at the advice that’s out there and try whatever sounds best to you.

        My second piece of advice is to read “Opening Your Gaming Table” and “The Open Table Manifesto” and consider switching to a more episodic setup, maybe a “West Marches” sort of thing.

        (3)

        One of my characters (female player, female character) keeps seducing NPCs. I don’t know how to handle this.

        When a male player tells me his male character is seducing a female NPC, I do know how to handle that: I say “okay, the two of you retire to a private room, and you’ve successfully distracted her while the rest of the group advances their own plans.”

        Why don’t you just say the exact same thing, but gender-flipped? “Okay, the two/three of you retire to a private room/your tent in the wilderness, and you’ve successfully distracted him/her”?

        What am I overlooking?

        • engleberg says:

          Challenge ratings can include Expert and Aristocrat. The Empress is some kind of (soaks up CR numbers) aristocrat. She could be an expert political economist, aerobatic dancer, calligrapher, or a Sage (why aren’t all dragons Sages? Smart, around forever). CR doesn’t have to be fighter.

        • Harry Maurice Johnston says:

          Why don’t you just say the exact same thing, but gender-flipped?

          Sounds to me like that’s exactly what the OP was trying to do, but it made the player uncomfortable. I’m wondering if the player’s intent was to flirt rather than to seduce and the OP misinterpreted it?

          • Nornagest says:

            My read was that the character had some kind of seduction ability, and the GM had gotten used to describing its results, for other players, in terms that this player wasn’t comfortable with.

            That might be reading too much into it, though.

      • beleester says:

        1. The villain is planning things in secret and the Empress hasn’t found out. The Empress doesn’t believe the players because they just burgled her treasure hoard and her trust is at rock bottom.

        2. Some sort of warning before they get into the treasure hoard? Presumably, their fight over the artifact wasn’t particularly quiet, so the Empress and her guards might have noticed the secret passage by now. “As you approach the other end of the secret passage, you hear the Empress roaring in anger. She’s ordering her squad of Big Scary Not-Level-Appropriate Guards to go into the passage and hunt down the thieves! What do you do?”

        • John Schilling says:

          Big Scary Not-Level-Appropriate Guards

          Can such a thing exist in the D&D-verse?

          I’m not sure they can in a pick-up game involving random store customers joining an open table for a session. As has been discussed here before, the general tradition of murderhoboism and the particular mishandling of CRs in recent D&D editions has lead many players to believe that A: absolutely every encounter will be with level-appropriate combat adversaries and B: the DM will not reward them for any encounter outcome other than victory in combat. Expecting new players to catch on to the fact that they are supposed to run away from the first encounter of the session, might not work. Telling them so explicitly, might leave them to wonder what fun any of this is going to be.

          In a long-running campaign with the same players, sure, you can probably establish early on that this sort of thing is expected and there will be adequate rewards elsewhere.

          • dick says:

            “As you approach the temple, you hear loud talking and grunting. Creeping closer and looking through the foliage, you see two very large, burly men dressed in chain mail bearing the Duke of Evilton’s insignia. One has an enormous pickaxe, the other is swinging a shovel, and they appear to be digging a grave. Beside them is a pile of bodies, maybe three or four, recently slain. Actually, you recognize one of them from the adventurer’s guild! You didn’t know him well, but he was a fighter you’ve sparred with, and he was no slouch. The guard with the pickaxe sets down his tool and drags the fighter’s body over to the pit and laughs as he tips it in. I guess you won’t be sparring with him anymore…”

          • Nornagest says:

            I’ve played with groups who’d respond to that with “Leeeeroy Jenkins!”, hints or no hints.

          • dick says:

            Yes, I too know dumb people 🙂 My point is just that unwinnable encounters are not inherently unfair, they can be unfair or fair depending on the options and hints given, just like traps.

          • John Schilling says:

            The unfair part is when, having gone through the trouble of crafting an unwinnable encounter that is a plot hook for an interesting story to come, the players in your pick-up game all whine and quit. But life isn’t fair, and you should plan for that.

          • dick says:

            You lost me. Why are the players quitting?

          • John Schilling says:

            Because, after the very brief “Leeroy Jenkins!” moment, the DM told them their characters were dead and they’d have to roll up new ones, and they decided that pretending to repeatedly die in unwinnable fights concocted by a DM they didn’t know and could only model as a sadistic twerp, sounded less fun than any of the other things they could be doing in A: an active game shop in B: a cosmopolitan area capable of supporting a game shop.

          • dick says:

            Who said you had to kill them? They could wake up in jail, they could be intimidated in to fleeing, they could be captured and sold to the fighting pits… Granted, this may throw your plans to disarray, but that’s the price of giving the characters agency and meaningful decisions, not the price of giving them tough encounters.

          • John Schilling says:

            Those, also, are the sort of outcomes that often make casual drop-ins want to exercise their agency by finding a new DM.

          • dick says:

            *shrug* Those are the sort of outcomes that have happened to Jaime Lannister, Jack Sparrow, Bilbo Baggins and Indiana Jones. If the players don’t like adventure then there’s not a lot to talk about.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @dick: Some players only like adventures where they consistently win, alas.
            Me, my only problem with death is if the system says I can’t get back into the action in 5 minutes by generating a new character. What makes death unfun is, like, GURPS character creation.

          • dndnrsn says:

            Players generally fight very hard to avoid having their characters taken captive.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @dndnrsn: And yet, just the other week I was playing an official Wizards of the Coast module in a game store with my bestie (she’s also the current GM in the Greek mythology setting I initiated!) that requires the PCs to get captured. It’s amazing how many known problems professional designers publish.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Le Maistre Chat

            It makes sense if you take the approach that the adventures are being written as fiction.

          • Lillian says:

            Players generally fight very hard to avoid having their characters taken captive.

            This is something i often hear people say about other groups, but have never experienced and don’t understand. For example, when i was playing Earthdawn our group surrendered to the authorities on two separate occasions while visiting the Orkish nation of Cara Fahd.

            The first time they were looking for a notorious Thief Adept whom they had been credibly tipped-off would be a particular soiree. Because Thieves are known to have magical disguise abilities, they arrested everyone present, including most of the PCs. We surrendered without a fight, though my character did try to sneak the merchant she was guarding out the back door, she was met by a squad of militia spearmen who insisted they go back inside. Meanwhile, the Thief in question used the distraction to rob the money changers, which we all thought was hilarious.

            The second time we were ambushed in the street by people intent on killing us, and over the course of defending ourselves accidentally set part of a tent city on fire. When the guards showed up they proceeded to arrest everyone, which meant just us because our honour guard was dead, and the surviving assailants had fled. We threw down our weapons and surrendered, figuring the justice system would absolve us. Well it turned out the justice system was infiltrated by Horror cultists, but fortunately we had an agent of the queen’s as an ally, and he was able to find a non-corrupt judge. She agreed to let us out on condition that we swear a Blood Oath to uncover what was going on. Long story short, we left town as heroes, really really rich heroes.

            It’s hard for me to imagine how it would have made any sense for our characters to have resisted arrest in either of these two occasions. Sure being a squad of magical mercenaries, we probably could have escaped the city guard, but why would we want to do that? There was no benefit to becoming outlaws in Cara Fahd, and plenty of benefit to cooperating with the authorities. It’s weird to me that other groups would apparently have resisted capture against all reason.

            Similarly, the very first time i played a game of Exalted, the ST decided that our first fight had attracted the attention of an angel-like Exalt. He rolled to determine which one, and the dice came up with literally the strongest one on the list, way stronger than all the PCs combined. We of course didn’t know what she was, and flush from our first victory, we vigorously defended ourselves against her attack. When it became clear we weren’t making a dent in our opponent, i had my character ask for terms of surrender, at which point the angel-Exalt had some kind of seizure and we took the opportunity to escape.

            When told the story, another Exalted player not in our group said he would have fought to the death in the same circumstance. This struck me as incredibly foolish and irrational. If you can’t defeat your enemy, then obviously you try to effect a retreat or negotiate a surrender. You don’t fight to the death unless you have no better options.

          • dick says:

            Out of curiosity, how common for you guys’ games is it for someone’s pc to die? Really die, like the player has to roll up a new character, as opposed to a few minutes of death before being carted off to the town healer? IME it’s pretty rare, but this is a big game with room to be played a lot of ways.

          • Nornagest says:

            Really, really depends on the game. New-school D&D is on the forgiving side, along with World of Darkness and most other narrative-heavy games. Old-school D&D is pretty far on the lethal side, but some games of Paranoia I’ve played haven’t even made it out of the briefing room without a body count.

          • johan_larson says:

            Out of curiosity, how common for you guys’ games is it for someone’s pc to die? Really die, like the player has to roll up a new character,

            In most games I can remember, permanent death was rare. The DM would scale encounters to be survivable, fudge the occasional dice roll that would have produced a really bad result for the players, and sometimes just rewind and rerun scenarios where the players did something that got them all killed.

            The only scenarios I can remember with permanent death were one-off wargame-like scenarios that were straight fights rather than continuing adventures.

            My impression is that this sort of narrative agreement was pretty standard. Still, it’s striking how contrary to old-school rules it was. Original D&D could have you starting out at a single hit point, and if you got to zero you were dead.

            I can only assume that if you played the game that way, you had to treat beginning characters sort of like replacements in a war zone: don’t get too attached to them until they’d had a chance to prove themselves.

          • Nick says:

            In my experience a big factor is how hard it is to build a new character. If my Pathfinder level 10 paladin dies and I want to build a replacement inquisitor, that’s… going to take a while. It’s common among my friends for such builds to take a few hours, especially if you start trawling pfsrd for just the right archetype or spell.

          • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

            I mean it seems like a pretty basic bit of psychology that people don’t like being captured.

            Death in battle is glorious, at least when you’re not the one dying, whereas capture is humiliating. In real life combatants generally are willing to accept humiliation if it means not being stabbed to death, but since the players themselves aren’t in any danger it’s a no-brainer to choose glory over humiliation.

            Is that realistic? Does it fit with tropes from non-interactive fiction like books and movies? No, but it doesn’t really have to be either.

          • Vorkon says:

            Really, really depends on the game. New-school D&D is on the forgiving side, along with World of Darkness and most other narrative-heavy games. Old-school D&D is pretty far on the lethal side, but some games of Paranoia I’ve played haven’t even made it out of the briefing room without a body count.

            Wait, does that mean you’ve played games of Paranoia where everyone actually did make it out of the briefing room without a body count?

          • johan_larson says:

            Death in battle is glorious, at least when you’re not the one dying, whereas capture is humiliating.

            If I have invested a lot of time in a character, I think I would rather have the character captured than killed. Capture allows the possibility of escape, ransom, or rescue.

            It also depends on how the death happens. If my tenth-level character who I have spent a year developing dies because he failed to notice a pit-trap, that sucks. But if he gets to exit in some “You shall not pass” moment, that’s an end befitting a hero.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Lillian

            My personal experience is that “you’re taken captive” is so often pulled as a bullshit railroad move in adventures that require the PCs be taken captive, that any instance of it instantly sets me on edge. This is as a GM and a player – it’s very rare for PCs being taken captive to be something that can emerge from play; it’s very common for the book to say “OK and now one of the PCs has to be taken captive! Or, they all do! There’s no way to stop this!”

            @dick

            The two long-running games I’ve been a part of recently, one is a D&D “old school” game I’m running. Pretty soft for something allegedly old school – why, I even let them have max HP at first level, and I’ve never been a fan of traps, as most traps in games make zero sense – but clearly more lethal than the norm, because the players have adjusted to it by having their characters become very careful (slash cowardly). Couple PC deaths, a lot of hireling deaths, but more importantly, they have and will avoided things, cut and run, etc, because they’re not making the assumption that they’re guaranteed survival, a story arc, combats that are balanced to them, etc.

            The other game I played a lot of recently was as a player in a game that was, sad to say, an utter railroad. Over dozens of sessions we had not a single player death, because the PCs were part of the story, and you can’t have PCs die and ruin the story.

            Nornagest, johan_larson, and nick all have it right. The latter is probably the norm in a lot of games now. People are encouraged to show up with characters with elaborate backstories and intended story arcs (and they will get pissed off if their Chosen One heroine with the cool backstory they spend an hour on dies in some basement because a goblin stabbed her in the eye), GMs are encouraged to work that into the story (or, worse, plot) of their game, published adventures and campaigns explicitly or implicitly promote fudging so the PCs can neither succeed or fail unexpectedly, and in a lot of systems characters take so long to make that killing a PC any time but the end of a session puts a player out (and, depending on the party balance and so forth, can put the entire party out) for the rest of the session.

          • Randy M says:

            My personal experience is that “you’re taken captive” is so often pulled as a bullshit railroad move in adventures that require the PCs be taken captive, that any instance of it instantly sets me on edge

            I agree with you that it makes a big difference whether being captured is a way to clumsily set up the next story arc versus an alternative to killing the PC’s in situations where they get in over their head against foes who don’t happen to be so blood thirsty. The former is “sit there and listen to my cool story for awhile” while the latter is “this is a sensible outcome for the world and also a second chance at life for you if you’re clever”. I guess the trick is making it obvious which is it.

          • dndnrsn says:

            If it’s something that has to happen for the game to work (leaving aside setups like “you all meet in a prison cell”) then it’s bad. Knowing what could happen if they’re taken prisoner or surrender is good, but having it as an event in the game is bad.

          • Matt M says:

            If The Elder Scrolls has taught me anything, it’s that if your character begins their adventure as a prisoner, you’re almost certainly the reincarnation of some sort of powerful god-like figure.

          • dick says:

            It sounds reasonable that maybe a generation of bad DMs relying on the party getting captured as a method of railroading have given the very concept of capture a bad connotation, but that’s not the kind of problem you have to worry about if you’re not a bad DM, and if you are a bad DM, simply avoiding jail cells won’t help you much. Back to the starting point though – can you have the players encounter mobs they can’t kill? – I think the answer is Absolutely, as long as you’re not also doing the stuff that bad DMs do.

            On the topic of player death, I agree with a lot of what dndnrsn and johan said, it seems like player permadeath is inversely correlated to player backstory. If you’re in the kind of campaign where the PCs are basically just a name/class/weapon/spell list, then you can roll up a new one in five minutes and get back to it; if you’re in the kind of campaign where the players know what kind of home life their elf had as a child and why they decided to become a cleric in the first place, then a death can kind of mess up most of a session.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @dick

            Nevertheless, the long tradition of railroads using unavoidable captivity means that players will often seek to avoid any sort of captivity they don’t essentially initiate themselves (eg marching into an enemy fortress intending to be taken POW as part of some scheme). They might try to surrender if they think the only alternative is death. But the moment the DM says “the enemies demand you surrender” players will start thinking the whole thing was a setup.

            Regarding how long it takes to make a PC, more complicated mechanics in character generation and more mechanical choices available to the player in making and advancing their character is probably the main villain here.

            (I’m not a huge fan of detailed character backstories. The stuff people remember is gonna happen in play!)

            EDIT: This isn’t just “a generation of bad GMs” but rather that most published adventures are going to be written in a way that demands railroading, including sketchiness involving making sure the PCs get captured. The worst I ever encountered was probably “an NPC betrays you and when you meet him the lights go out and you’re shot with tranquilizer darts” with no way whatsoever to find out the NPC is planning betrayal, no way to avoid the capture, and no guidance to the GM what to do if the PCs, I dunno, only send part of the group to the meeting.

            If people aren’t taking their cues from the published stuff, they’re often taking their cues from advice to “tell a story” and emulate works of fiction (maybe emulating atmosphere and so on are good, but emulating a written (or filmed or whatever) narrative style is a great way to end up railroading.

            It’s not a generation of GMs, it’s an endemic thing.

          • Lillian says:

            Never in any game i’ve played have i experienced a player character dying. The closest was a Vampire game where shortly before i joined an injured and hungry PC picked an ill advised fight with a Setite sorceress instead of running away, and got melted to goo for his trouble

            Frankly, i would be perfectly happy never having any of my characters die, unless it’s a game like Paranoia where characters are disposable joke items. In most games i play i get deeply invested in my characters. Should i ever lose one, i expect that i will not be able to continue playing, since i would be far too distraught to make a replacement.

            @Nabil ad Dajjal: Isn’t the point of a role-playing game to play the role? Sure you as the player may not mind your character being stabbed to death, but your character probably minds very much, and part of playing the role is to take that into account when narrating the character’s decisions. Even in games where there is contractual PC death immunity, i do my best to play as if there wasn’t, because my character doesn’t know that she’s death proof.

            Similarly if my character is mind controlled i make a good faith effort to act according to the control’s directives. Or if i fail a knowledge check and get false information, i try my hardest to act as if i thought the information were true, because my character doesn’t know she failed. If you’re not willing to play the role, i feel like the whole exercise breaks down, you know?

            @dndnrsn: Honestly i’ve never had a bad GM. The closest it’s come have been flakey GMs who were unable to continue running, but when a game is going, it’s always been good for me. This perhaps makes me inclined to see any given GM action as being in good faith. It also helps that since i’ve had good GMs, events usually flow naturally from whatever was going on before. It’s never been the case for me that someone gets captured out of nowhere because the GM said so, it’s always a reasonable consequence of earlier decisions.

          • dndnrsn says:

            @Lillian

            Well, they’re out there. In the case of capture, it’s an easy way to move PCs from one place to another, put them in situations where they can be fed information without the ability to cause shenanigans (they don’t have their equipment, are in chains, whatever). It happens pretty egregiously in some published adventures.

            With regard to character death, I can’t really enjoy a game without it. I was in a long-running campaign where it became increasingly obvious it was a railroad, and part of this was that fudging and rigging of combats was being done to protect our PCs. It basically was a collaborative storytelling game, by the end of it – we got to input little bits and pieces, but the main details of the story were decided. I enjoyed it less and less, because it is a game. I think there are better ways to do collaborative storytelling than RPGs. As a player and a GM one of the best parts is when the unknown flies in and messes stuff up.

      • Civilis says:

        I got excited by worldbuilding and told my players their empire was ruled by a CR15 dragon. The final villain of their campaign is less than CR15, and has a plan which threatens the empire. I will soon need to come up with a reason why the Dragon Empress doesn’t handle it personally. I don’t have a good solution.

        Something I’ve learned about storytelling: the players don’t need to know everything. It’s good to have an idea for yourself as to what’s going on in the background, but leave what you tell the players as vague as possible. Some general possibilities to consider (assuming she knows about the villain’s plan):
        A) She has another more serious threat she’s spending her effort to solve.
        B) The villain has planned for her intervention (perhaps has some magic item which is good against dragons) and so she’d rather have someone else deal with it than take the risk of facing the threat if she can avoid it.
        B1) Even if the villain doesn’t have such a plan, if it becomes common knowledge that she personally intervenes every time the country is threatened, someone that wants her dead could easily contrive to lure her out.
        C) She knows of a flaw in the villain’s plan that the villain doesn’t know about (the artifact doesn’t work, for example), so there’s no pressing need to solve it, still she’d rather have the heroes stop the villain before the flaw is exposed so the next villain won’t know about it
        D) There are political or social barriers to her direct intervention that she’d rather avoid if possible
        Keep in mind, she can deceive the players if need be (and if good, can justify it by citing the safety of the realm). Also, none of the solutions preclude using her as a Deus Ex Machina (Draconus Ex Machina) if the situation needs it.

        If necessary, expose her rationale after the adventure is over. “Thanks for saving the empire, I was busy eating an arch-lich that was trying to set up in one of the northern provinces. Blech; he tasted nasty. By any chance, did you find a bundle of arrows in the villain’s possession? You did? Can you put them on the stone floor over there?” *Breathes fire* “The empire will reimburse you for those Arrows of Dragon Slaying. Thanks again!”

        The underlying flaw, and this is something a lot of game developers have problems with, is giving a stat number to a prominent NPC that doesn’t need it. The players shouldn’t know how powerful the Dragon Empress is. At the very least, given that your players are looting her treasury, anything with stats is a potential target for bored players.

        (2) I narrated my players coming across a passage into that same Dragon Empress’s treasure hoard. A group of villains had used the passage to steal an artifact. The players defeated the villains and took the artifact, and promptly piled into the passage so they could loot more things from the Dragon Empress’s treasure hoard. This is a stupid plan. I now have the choice between running a TPK, or pulling my punches enough that they can burgle the Dragon Empress’s treasure hoard (the second time it’s been raided in a week!) and not get caught.

        You’ve got two things you need to do: limit the damage, then work this into the plot. One way to limit the damage, probably not usable at this point, but for future use: a note on the lead villain from his boss saying something like: “Important! Take only the artifact! Don’t touch anything else!” If you want to drive the point home, have a member of the villain’s squad dead in the treasure chamber from a particularly nasty contact poison, and no sign of what he had touched. Clever players will still grab a few things, but not too much. You can also make the loot hard to steal. Since it’s a dragon’s hoard, piles of coins are a necessity, but nobody says they are neatly sorted, and most will be copper. Further, have something in the chamber set off an obvious alarm, forcing the party to hurry or face an army of guards.

        Working it into the plot is easy. You can have a messenger approach them (especially if they think they made a clean get-away and are nice and hidden) and hand them a message with a royal seal asking them to return what they stole. Or you can pretend to forget about it and wait until they’ve saved the empire, and deduct the theft from their reward… and throw in a bill for the accounting fee. You don’t need to justify any of this, beyond ‘it’s magic’.

      • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

        Regarding 1., I’ve found that “flavor” detail of settings can sometimes distract and confuse players. Players generally expect that the more detail you give in a description, the more important the thing that you’re describing. That’s a reasonable assumption most of the time but it also means that it’s hard to showcase more fantastical elements of the setting that aren’t directly relevant to what the players are currently doing.

        On the lighter side, I’ve had sessions veer off into weird side-quests when players drop everything to haggle for pack apes or wrangle mammoths. More frustratingly, this kind of misplaced emphasis might lead players to assume that particular people or organizations are much more important than they actually are.

        2. If it’s something that you’re not prepared for you have the option of calling the session early or taking a half-hour breather to quickly figure out what sort of guards and traps might be left on the hoard. Normally a powerful dragon’s hoard would be more than most PCs could handle, but given that the defenses were just breached it seems reasonable to me that the previous thieves neutralized a significant fraction of the defenses. If they want to take advantage of that rare opportunity it seems like an interesting adventure to run.

        3. Yeah I had a similar problem a while back. One of my players tried to, and succeeded in, seducing the priest in Keep on the Borderlands for information. The situation got pretty uncomfortable because she’s my girlfriend’s roommate and both of them were new to role-playing, although luckily I was able to defuse the situation with minimal drama.

        It seems like in general when male players try to seduce NPCs it’s just for it’s own sake, whereas female players are more likely to try to get information or some other tangible benefit. That’s not always the case but from what I’ve seen it’s heavily weighted that way.

      • The Nybbler says:

        1) Perhaps the Empire’s borders are under threat elsewhere, and she’s distracted? Or she underestimates the threat and thinks her minions can handle it?

        2) Does the passage have to remain open? Perhaps it collapses due to a trap or something.

        3) Perhaps her seduction ability could desert her entirely?

      • Another Throw says:

        [W]hy the Dragon Empress doesn’t handle it personally

        1. Palace politics. The answer is always palace politics.

        If the empress were to disappear, even for a couple of hours, to go handle something herself the halls of the palace would run red with blood blue with eldritch fire as every faction in the palace devolves into a free for all murder orgy. Within hours of her disappearance, someone would be coronating themselves astride a pile of corpses and disseminating the cover story that there was a coup attempt that the *ahem* “loyalists” were able to repulse but, alas, not until after the Empress herself was slain. The entire empire should immediately be put on high alert in preparation for the counter-counter coup, and anyone claiming to be the late empress is an imposter that must be immediately slain. Because, of course, we have definitive evidence that their entire plot was to place an imposter on the throne, but we were unable to capture said imposter during the initial round of fighting.

        In order for the Empress to go anywhere, she has to take the entire court with her. Not only is this ruinously expensive (and we all know how dragons feel about depleting the treasure horde), but it is incredible dangerous. All the courtiers would, of course, rally all their most loyal warriors and gird themselves with their most powerful artifacts. The whole point of keeping the courtiers hemmed up in the palace was to keep them away from their most loyal warriors, and their most powerful artifacts safely stored in their mansions on the other side of the empire! [Why would you need your lance of dragon slaying to go to a garden party??] Having gathered all your enemies and their allies together for the purpose of killing things, you’re one betrayal in battle and a mad dash back to the capital away from a coup.

        Likewise, she can not delegate the task to one of the courtiers (or legionnaires) because they would immediately rally all their most loyal warriors and gird themselves with their most powerful artifacts. After their inevitable victory she would be obliged to give them a victory parade to the palace, resplendent in their full battle regalia. Not only are her loyalists not likewise equipped [because why do you need your lance of rebellion suppression to watch a parade??], but the victory and the showering of praise and honors that would follow empower them among the palace factions. It only takes a couple decisions to back a different horse before she is relegated to a ceremonial role and the victor has gone full shogun. Assuming they don’t just dispose of her.

        And sending a loyalist is equally problematic because, not only is loyalty relative, but they would take a considerable amount of her power base with them.

        The solution, obviously, is to send a bunch of inconsequential nobodies and pretend it isn’t a big deal.

        2. Pride / Sloth

        The whole point of becoming an Empress is to have an entire empire of minions to take care of these things for me!

        3. Is it a threat? Is it really?

        Common. The Empress is an elder dragon. The Supreme Grand Marshall, the Grand Marshall of the Imperial Guard, and Grand Marshalls of all fifteen legions are all CR15 warriors, with a dozen CR14 lieutenants each. The Supreme Wizarding Council is made of of a dozen CR15 Wizards. Same with the priests of the Imperial Temple. The Thieves Guild Master is on the Empress’ take. Any one of them could certainly handle it themselves, but, frankly, its beneath them. Let some inconsequential nobodies take care of it. Of course you tell them it is of vital importance to the safety of the realm, how else are you going to get some murderhobos to do your grunt work for you on the cheap!

        4. Wait a minute, this sounds like a trap…

        “Your majesty! I have urgent news about a mortal threat to the realm! If you act now, personally and immediately, without even a second to think about it, the threat can be neutralized, but if you wait—again, for even a second to think about it—the Chaos Gates will be opened and ten thousand years of darkness will descend upon the realm. And it’ll be none too good for your complexion, too.”
        “Um, no, Grand Vizar. I am going to send a ragtag band of inconsequential nobodies because, if what you say is true, they shall be able to take care of it handily. If they fail I will know you tried to betray me. In which case, I would have you disemboweled and wear your entrails as a necklace as a reminder to the rest of the court to never try that.”

        Not only does he have to make sure it gets taken care of (assuming it wasn’t his plot in the first place), but he has to expend substantial more effort to do so in secret while keeping those damn bumbling buffoons alive and thinking they did it themselves. All without any of the benefits of doing so publicly. And as a DM this kind of sets you up for a periodic grand vizar ex machina.

        5. What are the lives of mortals in the games of Dragons and Empresses?

        The Grand Prince of Mauve’s attempts at intrigue are so bumbling and transparent that they are a continual source of mirth for the entire court. Having a bunch of mortals—peasants!—throw his carefully laid plans into disarray is a cutting joke at his expense. And if they fail, who cares. Everyone [that matters] knows what’s going on, and his plans will never succeed. She’ll just come up with an even more cruel way to goading him over it.

        Or, as a twist, his incompetence has been a Hundred Year Long Con, and she has played right into his hands! Mwahahaha. And, having neutralized the Empress and launched into his climactic villain soliloquy before delivering his killing stroke/activating the Orb of Destruction/opening the Chaos Gate, in a fit of irony he succumbs to the same hubris that brought her low by failing to neutralize the players. Who are perfectly situated to deliver their own killing stroke/shatter the Orb/destroy the Gate.

        Or, you know, let him do it because screw her for using us as pawns.

        Or seizing the upper hand and bargaining between them to see who will pay them the handsomest reward.

      • dndnrsn says:

        2. If you’re running a pick-up game, or if your group will play with a minimum number of people, you can’t end sessions in the middle of things. It also makes it very hard to have something that’s to any degree story-driven.

    • Nabil ad Dajjal says:

      My biggest weakness as a DM is that I get way too into world building. I have to reign myself in or it’s easy to overload the PCs with irrelevant detail.

      My homebrew settings usually aren’t at the ACKS “roll for the price of wool in this hamlet” level of detail, but I like to know e.g. whether people
      in a given town drink small beer or have access to fresh water. Most of the time players don’t really care about the details of daily life so it ends up being so much wasted effort. I can’t even call it verisimilitude because most of the time nobody notices.

      • Le Maistre Chat says:

        Somehow I’ve had the good luck for small details to pay off with my players. Even “People in this town drink diluted wine” led to the party Barbarian taking the side of a random encounter centaur who set his host’s house on fire because, as a centaur, he thought the foodstuff that sealed sacred hospitality was unmixed wine rather than bread with salt. That centaur I thought they’d fight wound up getting persuaded to become a priest of Apollo and defended Delphi from offended Gaia cultists.

        • Nornagest says:

          If you haven’t read Gene Wolfe’s Soldier books (Soldier of the Mist, Soldier of Arete, Soldier of Sidon; the first two are currently being sold as an omnibus under the name of Latro in the Mist), you should. They’re full of this sort of stuff.

          I think there’s actually a scene where a centaur fights offended Gaia cultists, although it wasn’t at Delphi. (This isn’t much of a spoiler for complicated reasons.)

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            I definitely have not, so thank you! Alas, I can’t recall anything I have read by Gene Wolfe beyond the obligatory New Sun quartet and The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

      • dndnrsn says:

        Maybe try to include a few little chunks of world building in the “general description” of a town or whatever? “Springstown is known as a health destination because of its unbeatable combination of hot and freshwater springs. They never shit themselves t’death, neither.” The world building details players remember are going to be the weird stuff and the goofy stuff and so on. (Or just roll 2d6 and players run into some kind of basic gross medieval illness in town on boxcars; Springstown doesn’t have this effect – make the players care!)

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Not being able to recruit more than 3 players, which leads to changing things to keep the worst player content.
      After that would probably be not doing the book-keeping for passage of time. I should be narrating things like “after a day’s march interrupted by an encounter with a mother bear, you stumble into this village a couple of hours before dark, seeking hospitality for the night. No woman will let you in their door because it’s the first day of harvest time, their menfolk are still out scything, and the family needs all the food she’s prepared to fuel tomorrow’s labor.” or “the cold rain of this winter day interferes with your overland journey” and have it all be consistent rather than fiat.

      • Ventrue Capital says:

        Not being able to recruit more than 3 players, which leads to changing things to keep the worst player content.

        Have you considered running your game online rather than face-to-face? It’s *much* easier to find players when you can meet people from around the world.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Yes. I was thinking of pitching a campaign over Roll20 here on SSC. 🙂

          • Nick says:

            Depending on the system, I’d be up for playing that!

          • Nornagest says:

            I haven’t had the best luck with online tabletop in the past, but I’d be willing to give it a shot.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Nick: I’ve been wanting to run retro-D&D for a couple of years, which would probably mean specifically Rules Cyclopedia/its free retroclone Dark Dungeons. ACKS is also very similar.

            @Nornagest: Yeah, I’ll need some prep time to figure out how to make it work. There are a bunch of interface questions to address.

          • bean says:

            I did that a couple years ago, and it worked pretty well. That said, it was a limited-time adventure, so I’m not sure how well it would work long-term. Go for it.

        • toastengineer says:

          Trouble with online games is that people are a lot more likely to just disappear weeks or months in.

      • dndnrsn says:

        Have you tried recruiting non-gamers? I’ve made it work two or three times.

    • Ventrue Capital says:

      BTW I’d like to invite anyone on SSC to play in Terramar, my online tabletop rpg campaign.

      Our regular sessions are 6pm to Eastern Time (currently UTC-4, so 2200 to 0200 UTC). We play using text on Roll20.net for IC actions and speech, and using our Discord server for OOC and between-sessions communication.

      I have also started a separate channel on our server for play-by-post one-on-one roleplaying, for those who expressed a desire to play and can’t make our regularly-scheduled sessions.

    • baconbits9 says:

      The School District of Philadelphia covers the cab, which costs roughly $228 a day, or $41,040 over a 180-day school year. The district also pays Kareem’s aide $17,500 each year.

      The average special needs teacher in Philly makes around $58,000 a year, so one teacher going to the child’s home to work 1 on 1 would cost roughly the same here without considering his school costs. If one teacher could go to a home and work with 2 kids that would slash costs in half.

      But then there is this

      Last school year, it took until spring for the district to finally provide the ride-along transportation aide promised in Kareem’s individualized education program or IEP. So far this school year, which started at the end of August, Kareem’s already had three different drivers, a nightmare scenario for a 20-year-old who craves routine and structure.

      Kareem, who stands about 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighs 300 pounds, assaulted one of those drivers during a recent morning commute.

      Oh.

      He’s 20, enormous and unpredictable to the point of violence and the district is paying 70-80,000 a year to educate someone who is astonishingly unlikely to have a positive outcome from the experience.

      We are literally looking at No Child Left Behind where the slogan meets the policy and there is nothing left to do but twist people and budgets in knots to show that you are trying to achieve the impossible.

      • gbdub says:

        Does anyone honestly believe that the world is better place spending $60k a year on cab rides for this “kid” as opposed to putting a gifted student through Columbia. Or like half a dozen students through a smaller state college?

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          No, not when you pull it down to the object level. No Child Left Behind was a high-level value statement, not something GWB would believe in each object-level case if he had any brains (insert joke here).

    • j1000000 says:

      I only skimmed the article because it was very long, but I didn’t see anywhere in there — why is a 20 year old still going to school?

      • Matt says:

        No… erm… ‘Child’ Left Behind?

        The youth group at my wife’s church had a similar problem with a pair of kids who had developmental problems. The girl never really got large so I guess I should say she was never a problem, but the young man got to his mid-teens with the mind of a 7-year-old, and his parents wanted to keep him with kids he could relate to better, which actually resulted in some weird ‘compromise’ where he was physically 16, mentally 7, and grouped with kids 11-13 years old. That was the worst of all worlds, in my opinion.

        Eventually, the church aged them both out of the youth group.

  36. meiscooldude says:

    Is anyone here very Anti-Gun / Pro-Gun Control and well enough informed on the subject to participate on a collaborative essay?

    Less interested in the contest and more interested in exploring the potential for congressional legislation that provides a benefit to society in relation to this issue while also avoiding the culture war.

    For some of my personal background on the subject: I don’t even know how many guns the wife and I own…. probably close to 30 or so. My wife is a professional gunsmith, currently apprenticing under a traditional American stock maker.

    I’m personally fairly familiar with the regulations placed on Federal Firearm Licensed dealers (at least Types 01 and 07), several state regulations on firearms & related business, and the basic design and function of most firearms. Where I am lacking in these subjects I know where to find the info and have plenty of friends in the business I can ask direct questions. I’ve been in the vaults of some of the largest firearms collections in the US, shared dinner with high ranking members of the NRA, and I have friends in some of the largest manufacturers of firearms in the US.

    I believe there is a huge potential for collaboration on a solution for the reduction of firearm suicides… maybe even more.

    If you’re interested, let me know.

    • Randy M says:

      You didn’t say what side you would be taking?

      • Nick says:

        It’s hard to say, but he sounds like a gun control person to me.

        • Vorkon says:

          What makes you say that?

          I mean, I know that pro-gun people are (perhaps understandably) primed to read everyone who so much as attempts to reach out to the other side as being insincere Fudds, just because of the sheer amount of defection we’ve received every time we’ve so much as attempted to compromise with people claiming “we don’t want to take your guns,” but here, of all places, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a legitimately pro-gun person trying to emulate the adversarial collaboration model Scott has been promoting recently. To me, a collection of 30+ guns, a gunsmith wife, and contacts with various gun manufacturers doesn’t exactly scream “pro gun control.”

          Even the subject he’s trying to collaborate on, suicides, is the one area where even the most staunch pro-gun types will usually agree that gun control could theoretically make a difference, if they’re being honest with themselves. After all, even though guns don’t make people any more likely to attempt suicide, there are good reasons to believe they make those attempts more likely to succeed. It’s dishonest attempts to conflate gun suicide numbers with gun murders and other gun crimes that people have a problem with, not addressing the issue of gun suicide on its own.

          I know I’m about as pro-gun as you can get, and other than some concerns about how most any attempt to solve this problem would constitute an “infringement,” I think that suicide by gun is definitely a problem worth addressing, and that there are probably ways to address it that aren’t unconstitutional. This guy strikes me as having more or less the same opinion.

          (Well, either that, or you’re being sarcastic and I’m a dumbass. You know, whichever. :op )

          • Randy M says:

            What makes you say that?

            I would wager a wry and ironic sense of humor 😛
            That said, I’ll cop to not noticing he was specifically talking about suicides, so it is not implausible he could be in favor of various measures for tightening access to guns specifically for those at risk of mental illness.

          • Nick says:

            Randy is right; I was just joking. FWIW I’d very much like to see an adversarial collaboration about this topic.

  37. Markus Ramikin says:

    Ugh, what did you do to your “you are still crying wolf” article. It’s one of your best, and it’s a pain to read now. Also there were well-placed italics for emphasis, which are now of course impossible to tell from the rest of the text.

  38. ADifferentAnonymous says:

    Anyone seen this list of culture war memetic tribes? (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11Ov1Y1xM-LCeYSSBYZ7yPXJah2ldgFX4oIlDtdd7-Qw/edit#gid=0)

    Tweeted by this guy (https://twitter.com/peternlimberg/status/1040393891218972672), don’t know who he is but he seems to have done a decent job and AFAICT resisted the urge to throw in a sick burn against his outgroup.

    • Randy M says:

      No… looks comprehensive.

    • Conrad Honcho says:

      That’s pretty good. I laughed though that the only group with an existential threat that doesn’t exist* in some form is the Rationalist Diaspora.

      * I consider that “white genocide” doesn’t literally exist, but is used mostly as political hyperbole to draw attention to declining birthrates and population replacement through mass immigration.

      • albatross11 says:

        I think most claimed existential threats are hyperbole. I mean, if you’re an opposition political activist in Bahrain or a Christian missionary in North Korea, yeah, there are genuine threats to your continued existence. But most political versions of that are way overhyped–if the Supreme Court rules that employers can be required to provide birth control in their health plans, it’s the end of religious freedom in America; if some random wedding-cake baker is allowed to refuse a commission for religious reasons, it’s the end of gay rights and everyone will be forced back into the closet.

        Hyperbole and extreme rhetoric is how you get attention. If there’s not a countervailing force of people tuning you out as an obvious lunatic, then the whole world ends up full of dire “this is the end of the world” claims, even about boring crap like who Trump chooses as his secretary of education.

        • Conrad Honcho says:

          That’s why I said “in some form.” There is some form of threat to religious liberty. There is some form of threat to gay rights. I had to put in a * about “white genocide” because that doesn’t exist (maybe in South Africa?) except in an extreme hyperbolic form.

          There is no AI, hyperbolic or not.

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        The flip side is that they’re the only group whose existential threat is actually an existential threat if it did happen (assuming “white genocide” is defined as in your footnote)

    • Nick says:

      This is pretty comprehensive, yeah.

      A few things pop out at me, though:
      1. Michael Anissimov is considered a “chieftain” of the Enn Arr Ex? Didn’t they exile him for being incredibly toxic, or am I thinking of someone else?
      2. Where are all the libertarians? Looks like “Optimists” is sort of in the ballpark, but that’s more about cosmopolitanism. Establishment right and Tea Party sort of cover it too. Is libertarian just not a natural category in the culture wars?
      3. Where is the Christian Left? Come on, I know they’re trying to liberalize themselves out of existence, but they still have pull. Here’s a try at it—it’s too Catholic-centric, obviously:
      Telos: Christian democracy
      Sacred values: Christianity, liberalism
      Master status: op-ed writer
      Existential threats: return of Christendom, dissolution of Christianity
      Combatants: Benedictines, Christian Right
      Campfire: Patheos?, Churches
      Chieftains: Pope Francis, Elizabeth Bruenig?, Mark Shea?
      Mental models: conscience, aggiornamento, ralliement
      Forebearers: Jacques Maritain, Joseph Bernardin, MLK?

  39. Paul Brinkley says:

    Test comment. Has anyone else stopped getting comment notifications on this thread, or others? I saw about 100 new comments on a reload, but no emails…

  40. Le Maistre Chat says:

    Bronze Age Collapse: The Hittite angle

    When we left off, Suppiluliuma II had come to the throne. It is (probably) 1207 BC, (probably) a year after Merneptah defeated the Sea Peoples in his fifth year. So the Collapse was already beginning. Merneptah also left behind a text saying that he sent grain to the Kingdom of Hatti due to famine there. While one-off famines were just a thing civilizations had to weather, in this case it’s supporting evidence for the “economically catastrophic drought” hypothesis, because we also have a letter from the earlier Hittite queen Puduhepa (consort of Hattusilis III) to Ramesses II pleading for grain and a letter from Suppiluliuma II’s father Tudhaliya to the king of Ugarit saying that shipping 450 tons of grain to him “is a matter of life or death!”
    As I said before, archaeologists can usually only date settlement destruction layers relatively, by pottery, and so we can never know the sequence in which the Hittite Empire was destroyed without textual sources. We know that the Hittite ports had not yet been destroyed when Merneptah sent Suppiluliuma’s older brother and short-lived predecessor grain in 1208 BC. Once the Empire lost the provinces of classical Cilicia (probably Kizzuwatna) and Lycia (Lukka), getting grain by sea would no longer be an option. Then Suppiluliuma must have controlled ports because he recorded a naval campaign against Alashiya (Cyprus or part of it). Pre-eminent Hittitologist Trevor Bryce believes the casus belli was probably a Sea Peoples alliance overthrowing the government of Alashiya to use its harbors as bases for further raids.
    Hammurabi of Ugarit, the king who lived to see his city destroyed by the Sea Peoples, responded to a king of Alashiya asking for ships thusly:

    “My father, behold, the enemy’s ships came (here); my cities(?) were burned, and they did evil things in my country. Does not my father know that all my troops and chariots(?) are in the Land of Hatti, and all my ships are in the Land of Lukka? … Thus the country is abandoned to itself. May my father know it: The seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.”

    This presents a mystery. If the Sea Peoples who were attacking Ugarit also overthrew Cyprus, the king whom Ugarit’s ruler addresses as “my father” would have also been the Sea People’s enemy. Did Alashiya and its vassal Ugarit attack the Hittites overland with Ugarit’s chariotry and infantry support while also trying to land infantry on the western section of the empire’s Mediterranean coast in a flanking maneuver? Or were Ugarit’s chariots and ships in the empire because it was still a vassal of the Great King of Hatti? But if so, why would he address any other king as “my father”?
    (OTOH, Hammurabi of Ugarit could have thrown in his lot with the usurper of Alashiya and the people in the seven enemy ships were a different faction.)

    In any case, the handful of texts from Suppiluliuma’s reign tell a mixed story of military victories over rebellious vassals in southern and western Anatolia and off the coast of Cyprus but also unrest among both elite and common elements of his population. Then, according to recent archaeological findings, Hattusa was abandoned! The fire destruction layer, for which the Kaskas are the probable culprits, was an attack against a minority of hold-outs. “hoi polloi were left to fend for themselves. Those who stayed behind scavenged through the leavings of those who had departed. When Hattusa was little more than a decaying ruin, outside forces moved in, plundering and torching a largely derelict settlement.” We don’t even know what year Suppiluliuma died or abdicated: Bryce gives his reign as 1207-? BC.
    In addition to Hattusa and Hisarlik (generally accepted as Wilusa and Troy), the coastal cities of Tarsus and Alalakh were burned, as were Carchemish and Aleppo far inland. However, while civilization collapsed in western and inland Anatolia, Carchemish and Aleppo soon bounced back. Indeed, the fertile parts of Syria had “Neo-Hittite” dynasties in the Iron Age.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      “If anyone impresses an ox, a horse. a mule or an ass, and it dies at his place, he shall bring it and shall pay its rent also.” — Hittite Law 76

      I’ve limited this series to the Hittite New Kingdom (or Empire), since it’s been focused on the couple of centuries leading up to the end of the Bronze Age. But some important things about a civilization have a broader temporal scope. In the case of the Hittites, we know to a remarkable degree what it was like to live under their law from about when they first conquered Hatti* through Suppiluliuma II (~1650-1187 BC, minimum). Law tablets have been recovered in Old, Middle and New Hittite dialects. They are usually identical except for attempts to update grammar: one OH copy includes a clause beginning “formerly they…” in many laws, while only one NH copy dares to update the penalties for some crimes. You can read a translation here.
      Some examples:

      10 If anyone injures a person and temporarily incapacitates him, he shall provide medical care for him. In his place he shall provide a person to work on his estate until he recovers. When he recovers, his assailant shall pay him 6 shekels of silver and shall pay the physician’s fee as well.

      Laws 17-18 set the fine for causing a free woman to miscarry at 1 shekel per month into the pregnancy and half that for a female slave. The late reform applied double the former maximum fine starting at conception.

      26b If a man divorces a woman […] Whoever buys her pa[y him] 12 shekels of silver. (Wait, what?!)

      37 If anyone elopes with a woman, and a group of supporters goes after them, if 3 or 2 men are killed, there shall be no compensation. “You (singular) have become a wolf.”

      182 The price of a … garment is 12 shekels of silver. The price of a fine garment is 30 shekels of silver. The price of a blue wool garment is 20 shekels of silver. The price of a … garment is 10 shekels of silver. The price of a tattered(?) garment is 3 shekels of silver. The price of a … garment is 4 shekels of silver. The price of a sackcloth garment is one shekel of silver. The price of a sheer/thin tunic is 3 shekels of silver. The price of an ordinary tunic is [broken]
      (Good luck keeping so many prices static for 450 years…)

      199 If anyone has sexual relations with a pig or a dog, he shall die. He shall bring him to the palace gate (i.e., the royal court). The king may have them (I.e., the human and the animal) killed or he may spare them, but the human shall not approach the king. If an ox leaps on a man (in sexual excitement), the ox shall die; the man shall not die. They shall substitute one sheep for the man and put it to death. If a pig leaps on a man (in sexual excitement). it is not an offense.

      *The people who spoke the language modern scholars call “Hittite” actually called it Nesili, “Nesa-speech”, after the city-state where they believed they originated. I say “believed” because as Indo-Europeans they must have come from wherever the IE homeland was before settling the villages in central Anatolia that went on to support the urban settlement of Nesa. Closely-related languages were Luwian from the west and Palaic on the Black Sea coast. Hatti was the name of the land, later Cappadocia, and had its own non-IE language.

      • dndnrsn says:

        If an ox leaps on a man (in sexual excitement), the ox shall die; the man shall not die. They shall substitute one sheep for the man and put it to death. If a pig leaps on a man (in sexual excitement). it is not an offense.

        Is there any reason speculated for this?

        • The Nybbler says:

          I don’t know, but I suspect that if an ox leaps on a man in sexual excitement, in most cases the man shall die whether the law says so or not. Oxen are… not small.

          • dndnrsn says:

            More why pigs get off the hook.

          • Thegnskald says:

            I’d guess somebody did survive, and somebody had to make some revisions to the law to deal with a circumstance that nobody had anticipated when the original law was created.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          The man who penetrates a bovine, a sheep, a pig or a dog is a polluted freak, while a human who gets penetrated is, to use a modern phrase, a rape victim. The pig, I would speculate, is getting let off the hook because its act is not homicidal and it lacks the capacity to be held accountable in any other way (i.e. humans were usually punished with a fine rather than death).
          I could point you to published academic speculation, but it appears hopelessly postmodern.

          • Nancy Lebovitz says:

            Tangent: How big were Hittite pigs? A modern pig is big enough to be very dangerous.

          • Le Maistre Chat says:

            @Nancy: This should be unusually easy to answer, since the Hittites buried pig bones or entire skeletons in many graves. I don’t have descriptions of Hittite grave excavations at my fingertips, but pigs were domesticated from Sus scrofa libycus in Anatolia and the Levant, and those wild boars are only about 50 kg, like a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig or a large German shepherd. Once the West Asian Neolithic “package” of domestic animals and crops were introduced to Europe, the locals domesticated their own larger wild pigs. I don’t know if Asian pigs had been bred significantly larger by 1500 BC, but as I said it’s something that can be found locked up in archaeology papers.

      • Thegnskald says:

        Personally I am a fan of the law that says that if you steal someone’s door, you are responsible for anything else that gets stolen until it is replaced.

        Somebody found a loophole in the law and it got closed.

    • Le Maistre Chat says:

      Bonus section: Underground cities

      I can’t leave Hatti/Cappadocia without mentioning its underground cities. More than 100 underground settlements were carved into the soft volcanic rock by local people. They range from village-size to large enough for 20,000 people with all their livestock, with eight or more levels that could be sealed off separately in case of invasion with wheel-shaped stone doors with a central peep hole, and using wells up to 60 meters deep as ventilation shafts and elevators as well as for water. Not only are some of them huge, but some of the largest cities like Derinkuyu and Kaymakli were connected to each other by tunnels at least 8 km long.
      We don’t know when they were built. They can’t be carbon dated and the trash archaeologists typically use for dating had to be cleared out by the inhabitants because, you know, stone ceilings. They were most recently used by Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, and at least expanding them must be credited to their forebears during the Roman persecution of Christians, since one level of Derinkuyu was excavated into cruciform shape for the city’s church.
      Did they already exist in the Late Bronze Age? No one knows, but I’d like to think so!

      • Nornagest says:

        That sounds like something out of an RPG. Did the inhabitants have horned helmets? Magnificent beards? Scottish accents?

        Jokes aside, though, I think I’d mainly be interested in why they were built. Even in tuff — I’m guessing that’s what “soft volcanic rock” means, and it’s consistent with the photos — doing that much tunneling would be a huge amount of effort, and it’d take a very long time. I can’t see anyone going to the trouble unless they had some serious threats on the horizon but also a long time to prepare, which is a combination you don’t see very much.

        • Le Maistre Chat says:

          Yes, tunneling your entire city out of tuff is still a huge amount of effort compared to just putting up wooden houses. The best-documented threatened population with a long time to prepare would be the Greek-speaking Christians. Remember that just refusing to sacrifice incense to the emperor was a capital crime from after the Great Fire of Nero until the Edict of Milan, but most emperors chose weak enforcement. However, this better explains the small settlements than the “megadungeons” (a city of 20,000 Christians cooperating semi-incognito during the pagan Roman era?). Back in the Bronze Age, the Hittite Old Kingdom collapsed into anarchy with the assassination of Mursilis I shortly after 1595 BC and we can’t be sure that the royal dynasty of Nesa and Hattusa securely controlled all of Hatti/Cappadocia again until after 1340 BC. So it’s possible but not provable that they were started by Hattians during that 250-year period to keep their independence from the ever-present threat of Nesili resurgence.

        • Matt M says:

          I toured some of these caves and “cities” when I visited Cappadocia.

          Despite the claims of housing tens of thousands, most of the caves you were allowed to walk in were quite small and cramped. I believe the explanation was something like that they didn’t literally live in the caves anything approximating full time. The caves were essentially meant to serve as long-term “shelters” in the event of an extended enemy presence. Like a bomb shelter or what have you.

          Also I recall something about the construction happening very slowly over generations, and being done somewhat in proportion to increasing population. (That is to say, you didn’t need space for 10,000 people right away, just the amount of people you had at first, and as you had more babies, you dug more caves, etc.)

      • Lambert says:

        Are there any good maps of the place?
        I may or may not have a plan for the next time I play Dwarf Fortress.

  41. johan_larson says:

    PAX is a series of multi-day annual conferences dealing with gaming and various nerdy activities. People who attend these conferences often complain of an ailment called “PAX pox” with non-specific symptoms like a common cold.

    https://kotaku.com/pax-psa-bring-hand-sanitizer-to-the-con-or-youll-die-1224251809

    Could this be some sort of actual ailment spread by having many people with unfamiliar regional micro-fauna mingling in close proximity, or is it more likely simply people being tired and irritable after several days of disrupted routines, not enough sleep, rich food and more booze than usual?

    • Nornagest says:

      It’s a common complaint among conventiongoers: see “con crud”. Probably it’s the same deal as getting a cold after a long plane flight (read: being crammed into a metal tube with two hundred strangers for several hours).

      • RDNinja says:

        I remember being warned about this at the beginning of college. It was said that bringing all these people from across the country into one place, with all of their regional variations on the cold, meant that there was probably a version around that you hadn’t built an immunity for yet.

        On top of that, the poor diet and sleep schedule that usually accompany convention life will weaken your immune system.

        • Matt M says:

          This was a thing when I went to boot camp in the US Navy too. Despite being given a large shot of “preventative” penicillin in the rear end, almost every ended up with some version of the “recruit flu” pretty early on.

          • johan_larson says:

            I wonder if there’s an opportunity there. Sell a not-quite-pharmaceutical that carries the normal germs of a broad set of regions. People who are going to widely-sourced meetups could apply the product to give their immune systems an early taste of what they are about to encounter.

            It would be like shaking hands with 100 people from all over the country (or world.) Maybe that would do for a name: “100 Handshakes”.

  42. Statismagician says:

    Okay, so – as you’re all aware there has been a great deal of ink spilled during the past few years about the idea that it’s generally concerning that [x, y, z companies] are creating ever-more-detailed profiles of our web browsing patterns to sell to advertisers. This is generally portrayed as a bad thing, and there are variously-sophisticated articles running around concerning the equally-variously-plausible negative outcomes.

    I’m almost sure I’ve seen a similar thread, but… why should I care about this? My subjective experience is that advertising generally is almost entirely ignored, in the strict sense [i.e. it literally does not register], and that tailored advertising is almost entirely ignored in the weak sense [i.e. it doesn’t register except to say something like ‘huh, not gonna click on that’]. What, specifically, am I supposed to be worried about because Google/Amazon/Whoever knows that I searched for men’s 32/34 straight-leg pants last week, as an example? I’m not pro this – why would I be? – but it seems… I don’t know, just not that big a deal? Tell me why I’m wrong, as I’m pretty sure I ought to be given the quality of persons on the contrary viewpoint.

    • dick says:

      It’s 2027. Partial browsing histories for you and 50M other people have gotten in to the wild due to (hackers / disgruntled employee / tech bankruptcy / something else). Some bright soul trains a machine learning algorithm on it to predict outcomes like arrests and bankruptcies and so forth. It works. They sell it to Experian and the FBI and some other folks, who do with it about what you’d think they’d do.

      • Statismagician says:

        They do… what? The FBI presumably hasn’t got enough agents to investigate everyone implicated statistically [also, due process and basic evidence rules, and I’m not in fact guilty of anything], and I literally cannot imagine a plausible scenario where I have to worry about Experian agents bursting through my door; I’m willing to bet actual money that search histories turn out not to correlate statistically-significantly with criminality, and there are real financial incentives for Experian et. al. to not care about anything short of that. Again, please, enough people who I think are smarter than I am think differently, which is concerning, but can we please skip to the second- or third-tier arguments?

        • CatCube says:

          You don’t think you’re guilty of anything. Have you picked up a bird feather? If so, you might be a felon.

        • dick says:

          I’m willing to bet actual money that search histories turn out not to correlate statistically-significantly with criminality

          You would think that you can’t combine a thousand arbitrary “are there at least 10 green pixels less than an inch from a red pixel” style pixels to get an algorithm that can tell you with 99% certainty whether the picture has a cat in it, but here we are. And that’s what we can do today.

          That said, the worry is more about nebulous rankings like the Chinese citizenship score than about specific accusations. Big Brother isn’t going to say, “Our algorithm says you’re 99% likely to get a DUI someday so we’re locking you up now.” More like, “Our algorithm says you’re 79% similar to a model of an undesirable citizen, we need to get that below 75% for you to be considered for a management position.”

          • Eltargrim says:

            You would think that you can’t combine a thousand arbitrary “are there at least 10 green pixels less than an inch from a red pixel” style pixels to get an algorithm that can tell you with 99% certainty whether the picture has a cat in it, but here we are. And that’s what we can do today.

            Google recently auto-generated a video for me out of pictures I had taken. Titled something like “Doggy Video”, it was a charming little montage of my little girl, set to a barking melody.

            Too bad it was of my cat.

            Not a criticism of Google, recognizing that the photos were all of the same small animal is no mean feat! I just found it funny at the time.

          • Matt M says:

            Assuming they actually define “desirable citizen” correctly, why is this a problem?

            The existence of Experian has made my life, as a financially responsible person, a lot better. I look forward to them having more detailed information about how responsible I am, and how irresponsible everyone else is.

            The problem here isn’t the technology itself, it’s the terminal values of those who will use it.

      • LesHapablap says:

        Most of the people here won’t post under their own name because they are afraid of the known and unknown consequences years down the line. Having your browsing or posting habits from decades prior used against you is very likely to be a real thing. Just imagine confirmation hearings 30 years from now, if facebook messenger logs or profile searches from high school are floating around.

        Targeted advertising itself doesn’t bother me, and you’re right, it does seem odd that a lot of people have a problem with just the part where facebook uses it for ad targeting.

        • Matt M says:

          Just imagine confirmation hearings 30 years from now

          I have made my peace with the fact that I’m never going to be a CEO or a Supreme Court Justice.

          And I’m not convinced that people who aspire to those things shouldn’t be strongly encouraged to live lives of total purity, given the rewards involved.

          • albatross11 says:

            I suspect that the kind of person who shapes his whole life, from age 16 on, toward becoming a supreme court justice or president or CEO is a very unusual kind of person. It’s not at all clear to me that this is the kind of person who will be best in those jobs.

            And supporting the quote-mining-for-outrage operations of political operatives (like quote-mining Kavenaugh’s high school yearbook, for God’s sake) seems like it leads to a world where highly ambitious people don’t dare express any political or social opinion other than the most conventional ones imaginable, in order to protect themselves from future quote-mining attacks where someone finds one line from an essay you wrote in high school and turns it into evidence that you’re the reincarnation of Hitler, and all the partisans on their side pretend like it makes sense because winning today’s battle is the only thing in the universe that matters.

            I think we will have a better world if we can figure out how to have some forgiveness for both unorthodox views and insensitive remarks, and even for bad behavior in the past. I also think that once a high-stakes political battle is underway, most partisans will bend or throw away any principle to win today’s battle.

            Five years from now, there will be a Democrat being nominated and Republicans trying to bring him down, and they’ll all swap positions on what the relevant rules of evidence and standard of proof should be. And the really amazing thing is that millions of their followers, who (unlike the top political operatives) aren’t actually shills, will go along.

          • Jaskologist says:

            The kind of person who shapes his whole life, including childhood (there’s no way the cut-off would stay at 16, that’s already past the potential Schelling point of 18) toward political power is the kind of person whose parents were grooming him for the position.

            Which is to say, it’s not an individual at all, it’s a hereditary aristocracy.

            There have been many around here who would argue for precisely that. Let’s just be clear that that’s what we’re asking for.

          • seems like it leads to a world where highly ambitious people don’t dare express any political or social opinion other than the most conventional ones imaginable

            For a real world example …

            Richard Posner is, and has been for quite a while, one of the most prominent living legal scholars. His opinions as an appeals court judge have been very frequently cited.

            It is widely believed that one reason he was never seriously considered as a Supreme Court candidate was his having written in favor of permitting payments by adoptive parents to biological parents for permission to adopt, easily described as “buying babies.”

        • The Nybbler says:

          Most of the people here won’t post under their own name because they are afraid of the known and unknown consequences years down the line.

          I’m not worried about the FBI (who certainly could find out who I am, if they cared), or the credit agencies (who according to Discover are my best buds anyway) or even my enemies (who know who I am; I recently got a nasty PM on reddit from someone who clearly knew who I was at Google. I imagine it was supposed to be threatening). I use a pseudonym to keep my name from showing up in casual searches, that’s all. Keeping work-life separation from those who won’t maintain it on their own but are too lazy to really try and break it.

      • Brad says:

        Forget experian and the FBI, do you really want a world when anyone that can install tor can find the browser history of anyone that doesn’t browse with no script? The downsides of a leak are so high that the information shouldn’t be collected.

      • The Nybbler says:

        It’s pretty useless to Experian, because it’s a snapshot — the algorithm would be useful if they had a continuous stream of browsing history, but they don’t. They can make a one-time adjustment to credit scores, but realistically they’re not even going to buy this thing.

        It’s even less useful to the FBI; they would be interested in the raw browsing histories to connect to specific cases, but a snapshot giving them statistical predictions of crime is useless.

        For completeness, the NSA would find the algorithm useful, but they already have one.

    • Murphy says:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2ra7ixXM10

      I think scott talked about something related in an old article, about how countries that kept great records about their citizens: when the nazis rolled in all they had to do was stroll down to the court house to find out who was a a jew and their addresses etc.

      Nazis are an extreme case but I’m gonna call this a case of high-energy-ethics.

      Those marketing profiles include lots of things probably not in official government records. If some evil party comes to power in future and decides they want to round up all the gays into concentration camps… that’s not in your government records but lots of these companies will have nice little columns with how likely to be gay they think you are so that they can try to advertise gay clubs to you.

      The same goes for if this hypothetical evil future party wants to round up and kill any other unpopular minority.

      Further, the same tech that can watch a crowd and decide who’s interested in a particular billboard or product and what social networks they’re attached to can and almost certainly will be pivoted and abused by repressive governments to identify dissidents and agitators for culling as the tech matures and becomes better and more accurate.

      The more mundane threats include things we’re already starting to see, political advertisements crafted to appeal to peoples specific fears of very specific groups. The same mechanism used to gently make you feel like company X has an good reputation by making sure you hear their brand names surrounded by lots of positive affect can just as easily be used to give you the vague impression that political candidate Y is probably vaguely corrupt.

      Even if it doesn’t work on you it seems to work pretty well in aggregate .

      • albatross11 says:

        Yeah, the existence of detailed databases on everyone is a hazard–it makes the transition from decent country to nightmare state potentially a lot faster and easier.

        • At a slight tangent …

          The Nazis attempted to eliminate both the Jews and the Romany. The estimates I have seen suggest that they got only about a quarter of the latter group. My conjecture is that the reason is a long standing Romany tactic of staying below the radar, making it hard for non-Romany to keep track of them.

          • To put the point differently, I would rather see advertisements for the sorts of things I might want than attempts to get me to refinance my nonexistent mortgage.

          • Plumber says:

            I think I read that the Nazis were able to kill a higher percentage of Jews in countries like The Netherlands were Jews where more integrated in the larger society, and for longer (and where bettet records were kept), but a higher percentage survived where pograms were still in living memory.

            Not paranoia when they’re really out to get you!

          • Incurian says:

            Scott wrote a little about this, sections IV and V are most relevant, https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/30/book-review-eichmann-in-jerusalem/

          • Aapje says:

            @Plumber

            An interesting fact is that The Netherlands was the only country that had a general strike to protest the prosecution of the Jews… and yet it had one of the highest death rates among Jews.

          • Matt M says:

            Didn’t the German government engage in a lot of propaganda asserting that the rumors of a holocaust were all fake, that the Jews were being re-settled into nice communities, etc.

            A theory might be that overall integration of Jews into mainstream society in the Netherlands made the non-Jewish populace more likely to believe such stories, in the sense that they didn’t see Jews as an “other” and so, were not typically inclined to believe that anti-Semitism was as bad and as serious as all that.

          • Aapje says:

            The British radio spread information about gassings in 1942. Anne Frank wrote that she heard about it from the British radio in October 1942.

            However, listening to the British radio was illegal, of course. I think that it is most likely that different segments of the Dutch population heard different things, depending on what bubble they were in and how anti-authoritarian they were (to dare listen to British radio and such). Note that back then, the Dutch people were far less anti-authoritarian than later on and now.

            Of course, it was obvious that the Jews were not being treated well, but people probably had very different beliefs about the extent to which they were mistreated (and Nazi propaganda indeed tried to misinform people about this).

            Secondly, I think that it was hard to believe for many people. Nowadays we have the pictures, testimony, etc, but back then they just heard claims. I suspect that quite a few dismissed it as exaggerated propaganda, like many people today would not be so eager to believe in Pizzagate or Rotherham*.

            * And yes, I realize that one of these is false and one is true, it’s an intentional choice to do so, because back then people most likely also were faced with a mix of nonsense and truth.

    • Matt M says:

      I am very much in favor of targeted advertising. It gets awful publicity but is a great advance, and makes all of our lives better.

      I look forward to a day where my male children will spend their entire lives without ever viewing a single ad for feminine hygiene products.

  43. Statismagician says:

    Unrelated to above, would anybody in Saint Louis, MO, USA like to get together this coming weekend? [Unaware of proper procedure for above; hope this isn’t too bad]

    • Chevalier Mal Fet says:

      I could be open to this. Depends on the venue and other people committing, but I’m free most Saturdays.

  44. Droch says:

    A few months ago there was a thread about people in the trading/HFT industry in London wanting to meet up. Did anything come up from it?

  45. Deiseach says:

    Asking for a nephew, so reproducing his query here:

    Has anyone ever taken the GRE or GMAT tests? Would greatly appreciate any help with applying/tips for studying.

    All advice gratefully received and passed on 🙂

    • Matt M says:

      I’ve taken the GMAT and did quite well. Advice generally needs to be customized to the needs of the person. If I assume your nephew is Irish and speaks English as his first language, my general advice would be to study hard on the math portion and basically ignore the rest. A lot of your competition is coming from Indian, Chinese, and other students for whom English is a second language, and a lot of them are engineers, finance, or other heavy math-users.

      In a practical sense, I’d recommend re-creating the test conditions. Purchase a little dry-erase flip-book and pen similar to the one you’ll use on the test, and use that for studying. Always do practice problems under time pressure (because you’ll have a lot of it on the real test). Learn the weird shortcuts that help you do certain kinds of problems faster. For study materials, if you’re really rusty on math, I’d recommend a basic algebra book / practice problems before getting into GMAT-specific study materials. Almost every GMAT math problem can be tackled algebraically and having a good foundation of how to model problems and write equations is absolutely essential (and not all GMAT books go over this or drill it sufficiently)

    • Incurian says:

      Took the GRE. Found the English study guides were helpful after one read-through (and completing the accompanying practice tests) and flash cards were fun and useful to do a little bit each day (make sure you get the advanced set). Learn the difference between “tone” and “timbre.”

      On the Math side, I had a little trouble with the study guides. I really should have spent a lot more time taking practice math tests rather than trying to memorize all of algebra. I came away with the wrong impression of what the math problems would be like and was not fully prepared for the test, which has simple problems (most of them are “which number is bigger?”) but they must be completed quickly. If you try to solve the inequalities long hand you’re taking up too much time, you need to be able to recognize patterns and algebraic rules. If I had taken more practice tests I could have focused on my speed, and tailored my studying to the problems I tended to get wrong.

      • Deiseach says:

        Thanks for the advice, gentlemen! Have passed it on and he’s got six or seven weeks to prepare, so we’ll see how he does 🙂

    • andrewflicker says:

      My wife recently took (and did extremely well) on the GRE. She found a number of GRE study mobile apps very helpful- there was on in particular that had a paid version for $15, I think, and did an extremely good job of working through micro-lessons, identifying weaknesses, and predicting score based on responses and trends so far. (Had the numeral 4 as an app icon, I think?)