I really enjoyed my Tuesday debate on “The Philosophy of Poverty?” with my friend David Balan. Many thanks to GMU’s Economics Society for setting it up. While we had a great discussion, here are a few thoughts I’d like to add.
1. In my closing statement, I claimed that we should worry about the accuracy of our moral judgments because (a) moral issues are complex, and (b) human beings throughout history have generally considered their societies to be just no matter how awful they actually were. Rather than retreat to agnosticism, however, I argued that the right reaction is to focus on simple moral hypotheticals. Suppose, for example, we want to decide if “I had a disadvantaged background” significantly reduces moral culpability. The best approach is to imagine a situation where your spouse cheats on you, then pleads, “It’s not my fault, my dad cheated on my mom so I didn’t have a good role model.” Or better yet, imagine you’re advising a friend in this situation. To me, the answer’s pretty clear: Excuses like this carry near-zero moral weight.
2. In his closing statement, David objected that he doesn’t believe in credulously accepting such excuses for bad behavior. As long as David is talking about specific incidents of bad behavior, I believe him. My point, however, is that if his moral theory were true, he should accept such excuses. Since he doesn’t, he should abandon his moral theory.
3. David also insisted that he doesn’t accept his society as just. My point, though, was simply that humans’ judgment about big moral questions is poor, since most people throughout history have accepted their societies as just.
4. David repeatedly referenced the “privilege” of the audience, so this seems like a good time to explain my general views on this matter. He begins with some truisms. Have I had many advantages in life for which I cannot reasonably claim credit? Of course. For example, I was born into an upper-middle class home in Los Angeles, not a slum in Tijuana. But David, like most people who appeal to “privilege,” seems to see important implications. I struggle to figure out what these implications are supposed to be. Some possibilities:
a. My background partially clouds my judgment due to self-serving bias. True enough, but the same holds for everyone, including the very least “privileged” people. Furthermore, since almost no one who shares my background shares my views, it’s hard to see how my background could cause my views. Indeed, some of my main views – most obviously, the wastefulness of education – are precisely the opposite of what you’d expect from a tenured professor with self-serving bias.
b. Much of my success is unearned, so I shouldn’t resist too hard when politicians propose redistribution. But this runs afoul of simple moral hypotheticals. E.g., if your friend stole $100 from your wallet, would you consider, “Unlike you, I came from a poor family,” to be a morally plausibly excuse?
c. Much of my success is unearned, so I shouldn’t feel too proud of my accomplishments. Well, I would definitely feel even prouder if I grew up homeless in Haiti. But that hardly shows that I’m wrong to feel very proud indeed.
d. I should avoid hurting the feelings of people who have had a harder life than mine. A reasonable point, but it’s only a special case of a more general – and widely shared – principle: Avoid hurting people’s feelings. However, this comes with a complementary principle: Avoid taking offense when none is intended. From what I’ve seen, most people who talk about “privilege” routinely and grossly violate this latter principle.
Perhaps I’ve missed something, but I doubt it. What’s really going on, I fear, is that “privilege” is a morally vacuous concept people deploy to demoralize and dehumanize people who disagree with them.
5. David repeatedly said that I overestimated the extent of “predatory” behavior among the poor. The main thing on my mind, however, is not calculated wrong-doing, but impulsivity. For example, I doubt many alcoholics ever consciously planned to destroy their families for beverages. Instead, I think they just fail to control their impulsive thirst – even when they know that acting on this thirst has dire consequences. Still, that’s more than enough to merit Puritanical condemnation. The same goes for the full range of irresponsible behavior: unprotected sex, laziness, child neglect, infidelity, violence, and so on.
6. David was incredulous when I suggested that we could significantly alleviate child poverty by holding irresponsible parents more financially accountable. So let me offer this modest proposal: When a child receives government assistance, we should deduct the cost from his parents’ future Social Security benefits. If one parent fails to provide child support, we should deduct the cost from his Social Security benefits alone; otherwise, the parents split the cost. Administratively, this seems quite manageable. Of course, this modest proposal means that many deadbeat dads will have to endure late retirement, but that seems a lot fairer than burdening taxpayers.
P.S. As usual, I’m happy to let David respond.
READER COMMENTS
Tim
Feb 28 2019 at 11:27am
Thanks for unpacking “privilege.” “Privilege” and the term we used to use, “luck,” are literally interchangeable: I can say that I’m privileged because I was born in this country or that I’m lucky to have been born here. But in use, “privilege” carries the connotation that only members of certain groups can have good luck or unearned advantages, and that their good luck comes at the expense of other groups. It is meant to be aggressive.
Floccina
Feb 28 2019 at 4:38pm
I do like it though, that blacks have finally invented a phrase “white privilege” that insults and angers whites. White people have long had the N word but everything else they tried Cracker, honky, whitey, etc bothered whites. It kind of equals things.
P Burgos
Mar 3 2019 at 7:51pm
“Privilege” as a concept may end up being detrimental to blacks, especially when it ends up being applied to Asians and Hispanics (because those groups of people are better off than blacks and might look down on them.) I can think of no better recruitment strategy for Republicans than to convince Asians and Hispanics that the left hates them for their hard work and thinks that they are racists.
Mark Z
Mar 1 2019 at 12:09am
The assumption of the uniformity and deterministic or nearly deterministic nature of privilege is also a serious issue. For example, suppose voters tend to vote more for white candidates for higher office; but that in order to have a likely chance it winning higher office, white or not, one has to be born into a wealthy, connected family, then a poor, not well connected white person doesn’t really enjoy the privilege of being more likely to win higher office; an abstract, unborn white person may hypothetically enjoy this privilege as a higher probability of a perk, but once they’re born, if they don’t win some other lottery, they don’t get the perk. An analogy: if society gives $100 to 1/4 of people born on each day of the year, at birth, randomly selected at the moment of birth, but gives $200 to 1/2 of the people born on March 1. We might speak of ‘March 1ster privilege.’ But do people who belong to the 1/2 born on March 1 but don’t win this lottery have privilege? I’d say clearly not. They only enjoyed the ‘privilege’ of higher likelihood of winning before they were born, as ‘potential people.’ But before they were born, still only potential people, they were only ‘potential March 1sters.’ It makes no more sense to attribute what we, ex post, know their date of birth to be to them before they were born, while not attributing them the fact that they would lose the March 1st lottery to them as well, as well also know will eventually happen. There’s a sort of ‘anthropic principle’ issue here.
And if it’s true that privilege – even assuming it’s as severe as activists insist – is very unequally distributed, then some white people will probably even in net suffer from their whiteness (by being negatively affected by affirmative action while not significantly enjoying the perks of white privilege) while some black people will benefit from their blackness. It would not, therefore, be just to assume – as it is usually assumed – that because a person is white, they therefore enjoy white privilege. It may be as specious as treating every Swede as if they must be wealthier than every German, merely because the average Swede is wealthier than the average German.
Andrew Clough
Feb 28 2019 at 11:41am
One of my favorite Scott Alexander essays was one where he examined the boundaries and purposes of culpability in a casual universe. I’d really recommend reading it.
Francisco Garrido
Feb 28 2019 at 12:55pm
I feel like your entire line of argument in this issue rests on a deep belief on radical liberty in a Sartre sense.
Personally, I find this hard to swallow since we already excuse bad (even egregious) behavior when this behavior has a physical explanation. Take the case of Charles Whitman, he murdered a bunch of people on a shooting spree and was murdered by the police on the. scene. It was later found that his suffered from a brain tumor that explained his delusions and behavior. Today rather than considering him evil, we see him as a victim of incredibly unlucky circumstances. In other words he is not considered to have had the freedom to do otherwise.
I don’t have a worked out theory of this, but I think of it as being a continuum of excusability for a person’s behavior, rather than two dichotomous radical-freedom-or-complete-helplessness categories. For this reason I am a more inclined than you are to excuse people’s irresponsible behavior. I. fear that we might be simply asking too much of them.
That said, this certainly doesn’t make the rest of society responsible for cleaning up other people’s mess, nor does it follow that it is a moral imperative to forcefully redistribute money to the poor. Heck, to justify something like. this you should at least show that government redistribution will make things better. A tall order if you ask me. However, this does make you look at the leftist hypothesis, that poor people are to some extent helpless victims, with more charitable eyes.
Biff Ditt
Mar 2 2019 at 10:01am
Do you know where Sarte outlines his view on radical liberty? I’ve only ever seen it talked about secondarily.
Robert Archer
Feb 28 2019 at 1:10pm
You continually equate poverty with poor decision making, rather than poor wages, lack of mobility etc.
Do you feel that systemic problems have any role?
As to whether wealth distribution makes things better: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/28/18243690/child-poverty-expert-study-child-allowance-national-academy
Thomas Mahoney
Feb 28 2019 at 1:18pm
Privilege is a valid moral concept when those with affluent backgrounds label as “redistribution” any attempt to interrupt the intractable cycle of poverty leading to poverty, giving the poor an opportunity to succeed whether it be by universal preschool, day care, earned income tax credits, or affirmative action for minorities. In the specific case where the well-oppose efforts to break the poverty cycle through education and equal opportunity (as opposed to equal results) by labeling funding of those efforts as “theft”, then privilege is a completely fair and accurate term for that obstruction.
P Burgos
Mar 3 2019 at 7:41pm
I think that there is something useful in your conception of why privilege is a useful term. The basics being that those with power and influence are responsible for creating a society that works well for everyone. Such that the core idea of “privilege” is really an accusation of a failure of “noblesse oblige”. Which is funny, because it is implicitly a request for the country to be run by folks who are culturally NE WASPS, like Obama.
RPLong
Feb 28 2019 at 2:34pm
I sometimes think people have a tendency to conflate matters of empathy with matters of blameworthiness. When I read news stories about people who grew up in difficult situations and inevitably found their way to lives of crime, I feel tremendous moral empathy for those people. That does not get them off the hook for their crimes, however, not in a legal sense and not in a moral sense.
It’s equally true that terrible luck can ruin a person financially, or can ruin their lives in some other way. I feel very sorry for people who fall on hard times, and do what I can to help them when I encounter them. But that doesn’t convince me that the system should provide for victims of circumstance.
I drew the short straw at age 30 when I acquired type 1 diabetes. In the years since, the cost of insulin has skyrocketed, at substantial personal cost to me. I’m incredibly unlucky in that regard, but that doesn’t suggest to me that the government should pay for my insulin. Just because I have a sad story to tell doesn’t mean I am morally entitled to something.
There is a difference between being worthy of empathy and being worthy of more than just empathy.
Mark Z
Mar 1 2019 at 12:34am
I think a charitable interpretation (one that doesn’t assume such a conflation in their thinking) of supporters of extreme redistribution – especially socialists – is that they are instinctive, but reluctant, utilitarians. Blameworthiness, or obligation, is derived from one’s relative fortune itself. Much of the circuitous (imo, rather clumsy) intellectualizing about exploitation, systems of privilege, etc. seems to me like an attempt to craft a non-utiliarian argument to reach a preconceived utilitarian conclusion: that people have a moral obligation to redistribute their resources to those who would derive greater utility from them (‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’). Marx’s entire theory of value strikes me as an attempt to satisfy just such a utilitarian impulse without having to admit to being a utilitarian.
P Burgos
Mar 3 2019 at 7:46pm
Even if the government doesn’t have an obligation to pay for your insulin, shouldn’t it at least set up the rules of the game such basic medicines don’t skyrocket in price? One need not be convinced that we need a lot of redistribution of wealth to believe that the ruling elite should place more weight on the well being of ordinary folks than they have been doing when making decisions.
Biff Ditt
Feb 28 2019 at 2:53pm
Along the same lines as Francisco Garrido, I’m with you most of the way, but I think your gonna have to get into the free will weeds a bit more. Are you planning on engaging with scarcity psychology (cf. Eldar Shafir) and the traumatic brain line of counter argument? Radiolab had a good episode (Revising the Fault Line) about a guy who had a broken brain and started compulsively collecting child porn a la Charles Whitman. Robert Sapolsky is consulted throughout. It’s worth the listen.
Floccina
Feb 28 2019 at 4:29pm
On atributing our success to privilege.
I’ve known some very successful people from low income backgrounds some with shiftless fathers and they seemed the least likely to say privilege is a great advantage.
People would probably call me privileged because my father was a fairly big success, but I do not see how my life pre-adult life was significantly different from the lives of my friends from relatively low income homes. In fact my father though a success was almost always drunk and abusive when he did not have to work the next day (which was a lot being a fireman he worked 3 days on, 3 nights on and 3 days off, and then after the union asked for it, 3 days on, 3 days off, 3 nights, and 3 days off) so they probably had more enjoyable home lives. How his success was supposed to make me successful or my unhappy home life was supposed make me less successful I have no clue. Also when we were under 5 he was just a private in the fire department with 5 children living in a bad part of town.
John Alcorn
Feb 28 2019 at 5:06pm
Your blogpost provides a fuller answer to a question you raised (Hurdle #4) in your previous blogpost about the debate: “Are the potential recipients of government help poor through no fault of their own?”
Children are uniquely vulnerable and innocent.
You argue that most (relative) poverty among children in advanced countries is caused by irresponsible behavior of parents. The mechanism that you emphasize is impulsive behavior, which predictably leads to poverty. Your policy proposal, however, relies on remote future-oriented incentives. (You propose to alleviate poverty of children by withholding future Social Security payments to parents of poor children who receive government support.) If the problem is impulsive behavior, then shouldn’t you devise a policy that turns on present incentives?
Why are some people impulsive, and others not? I will skirt the big questions about Nature, Nurture, & Free Will.
Instead, let me point to a wrinkle in culture. Often, norms that feel categorical are actually frequency-dependent. When peers follow puritanical norms, I readily believe (or tell myself?) that my farsighted rectitude is principled and unconditional; but if I observe that peers don’t comply, then willy nilly I might reduce or abandon my compliance.
Perhaps there are two equilibria (Charles Murray’s Belmont and Fishtown?). It’s a challenge (psychologically) for poor people, and especially for poor children, to ignore local norms.
Rob
Feb 28 2019 at 11:14pm
“To me, the answer’s pretty clear: Excuses like this carry near-zero moral weight.”
To me they seem 100% exonerating, but I should pretend otherwise because doing so will create better consequences (e.g. people trying harder).
E. Harding
Mar 1 2019 at 12:24am
“Children are uniquely vulnerable and innocent.”
No.
“You argue that most (relative) poverty among children in advanced countries is caused by irresponsible behavior of parents.”
It’s genes.
“If the problem is impulsive behavior, then shouldn’t you devise a policy that turns on present incentives?”
Excellent point. Prison time!
j r
Mar 1 2019 at 1:38am
Bryan,
I’ll start by saying that The Myth of the Rational Voter plays a significant and profound role in how I view policy and political economy. The key insight there – that non-economists make a consistent set of errors with regards to economic policy that are the function of a fixed set of biases – is really nothing short of profoundly important for how we approaching getting economic policy-making right.
So, it’s with no small amount of irony that I note that you are making essentially the same sort of errors that you note in The Myth of the Rational Voter. That is, you clearly don’t understand human behavior very well and that is leading you to make a series of conceptual errors based on an your simplistic, mechanistic view of human psychology. Just like the anti-foreign, anti-market, and make-work biases collude in many people’s minds to bring them to an unfavorable view of free trade (because comparative advantage is to some extent counter-intuitive), so to does your misunderstanding of human psychology bring you to believe that Puritanical condemnation has much efficacy. If judging people harshly and punishing them for bad actions were a good way to deal with poverty, we would have eradicated it eons ago.
P Burgoz
Mar 3 2019 at 7:36pm
Maybe we didn’t have sufficient technology to punish people for bad behavior. China is certainly going to put that proposition to the test with their social credit score.
Jeff R
Mar 1 2019 at 8:59am
What’s really going on, I fear, is that “privilege” is a morally vacuous concept people deploy to demoralize and dehumanize people who disagree with them.
Yep. That, and to assuage their own feelings of inferiority.
Swami
Mar 1 2019 at 2:03pm
“Privilege” is a Motte and Bailey term. It has two definitions, one innocuous and obviously true, and the other degrading and derogatory, but not necessarily either true or obvious. The rhetorical advantage of throwing the term around is to imply the negative degrading aspect while hiding behind the innocuous definition.
The innocuous definition of privilege is having some advantage, being born smart or with good parents for example. The negative definition of privilege is one of unfair advantage due to biased or partial rules or treatments. By throwing out the general term, one can imply the “unfair” definition, while hiding behind the advantaged definition, when pushed.
To see how it works, let’s take a similar term with multiple definitions — “handicapped.” The innocuous definition of handicap is disadvantaged. The negative definition is less capable. But if someone suggested a disadvantaged group is handicapped it would be obvious that they were being malicious.
Alan Reynolds
Mar 1 2019 at 2:09pm
Caplan has written at length in the past about his interest in behavioral genetics, a field which is showing us that many aspects of our character (e.g. impulsivity) are very strongly influenced by our genes – and no one is responsible for their genes.
And yet on the issue of poverty, Caplan throws that all aside and assumes that everyone has true, robust free will. This lets Caplan be a moralistic scold, blaming poor people for character traits that they, supposedly, chose.
This is absurd and antiquated. People make choices, but those choices are strongly conditioned by our genetic endowment and our environment. “Free will” is a complete fiction (yes, I have read Caplan’s posts defending the concept of free will, but honestly they read like a naive college freshman in a PHIL 101 class).
Caplan keeps pushing people to think about micro-examples. It is true that in our day-to-day lives we implicitly assume free will and discount the influence of genes, but those are useful illusions. When we formulate public policy, we should take into account a realistic and scientifically informed picture of human decision making.
Anway, this is a huge blind spot in Caplan’s argument.
Alastair
Mar 1 2019 at 6:30pm
“David repeatedly said that I overestimated the extent of “predatory” behavior among the poor. The main thing on my mind, however, is not calculated wrong-doing, but impulsivity. …”
“[L]et me offer this modest proposal: When a child receives government assistance, we should deduct the cost from his parents’ future Social Security benefits.”
If impulsivity is the main reason poor people are poor, why would deducting money from their expected future payments for insufficient child care be effective? The benefit of overconsumption remains instantaneous, and the cost far off. IF penalizing poor parents for their impulsivity is the solution, doing so sooner rather than later makes more sense.
Biff Ditt
Mar 1 2019 at 8:56pm
Does anyone find this Laziness Doesn’t Exist Piece persuasive? My gut tells me its too permissive, but I can’t formulate a decent counterargument. I’d appreciate any comments.
john hare
Mar 2 2019 at 5:53am
I found it persuasive that a lot of people have real problems in the academic world as well as on the street. But laziness doesn’t exist? This is a guy out f touch with reality. That there are reasons behind the laziness doesn’t make it not exist. He also justified homeless smoking, drinking, and doing drugs as a reasonable reaction to their situation.
There are some good points in the article in terms of working with the people as they are instead of as you think they should be. We use some of that in my company. Excusing everything as caused by outside influences as he seems to is insanity. That is a recipe for irresponsible behavior.
John Alcorn
Mar 2 2019 at 1:20pm
The author of the article about laziness rightly explains that educators and social workers might be more effective by understanding mindsets of individuals in their care — by starting from where a person is, so to speak. But it doesn’t follow that laziness and irresponsibility don’t exist.
Maniel
Mar 2 2019 at 11:39am
Prof Caplan et al,
Nice discussion. We all have our stories. I was born into “privilege,” born in the USA to a two-parent family of modest means and educational aspirations. I had the physical ability to play little-league baseball and the mental ability to learn to read and write English and to make change at a grocery store. The biggest privilege I had was to be part of a family; my grandparents were refugees who fled for their lives and their livelihoods – when they arrived at Ellis Island, they did not need to go before a court to make either case. That family, while initially dirt-poor, worked in the sweat shops and the trades. Whether planned or not, their success can now be seen in their descendants.
Success in my case is shared and has occurred over generations. My grandparents, starting with nothing but their lives (and no English or public education), worked hard, largely to largely to the benefit of their children. My parents invested in me and my sister and I am proud to have invested in my own children. I strongly believe that their “privilege” is, in part, the result of hard work by my wife and me. Anyone who would accuse my children of being born into privilege should take that up with me.
sk
Mar 3 2019 at 9:14am
Bryan: Please to pass on your reading list or post it whee it can be seen.
Karunya Patrick
Mar 4 2019 at 1:32am
Thought experiment: What if to-be parents want not the future burden and would like to abort till the moment of birth? Does that make the parents more “responsible” in the now to avoid being “irresponsible” in the near future?
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