Dignity in prostitution.

In this weekend’s “Room for Debate” in the New York Times the topic is whether prostitution is safer when legal.  Prostitution is a touchy subject because it is conjures up the thought of abuse pimps and johns, amorality & immorality, disease running rampant, shady underground locales, and the like.  Arguments made against legalizing prostitution in the NY Times debate vary from exploitation by Johns, legality leading to increased trafficking, and women choosing prostitution largely because of their circumstance (they were abused, poor, etc).  All of these are legitimate concerns.

Essentially, the act is viewed among a majority of the public and legislators as repugnant.  Despite most of the repugnance associated with prostitution comes as a side-effect of its prohibited legal status.  Pimps and Johns are abusive because the women have little recourse due to the nature of their job.  Shady underground locales are to avoid detection by the authorities.  And disease is not as big of a deal in the porn industry and where prostitution is legal, because most producers and managers require their employees to test for disease and take precautions.

All of these are legitimate criticisms of continued prohibition on prostitution.  There are others.  However, one of the most convincing criticisms is that by prohibiting prostitution we deny women their autonomy, humanity and dignity.  As Martha Nessbaum writes:

And prostitution’s continued illegality hampers any efforts on behalf of the dignity and self-respect of prostitutes. Women in many parts of the world are especially likely to be stuck at a low level of mechanical functioning, whether as agricultural laborers, factory workers or prostitutes. The real question to be faced is how to expand opportunities for such women, how to increase the humanity inherent in their work and how to guarantee that workers of all sorts are treated with dignity.

Why I won’t be voting and neither should you.

Traditionally people believe the act of voting is a necessary democratic act.  After all, we have not always had the privilege of electing our public servants.  Historically we have been ruled on the basis of bloodline or those with the largest, strongest armies.  So, with such a great deal of freedom as we have today, we should celebrate such a condition by revealing our preferences through the act of voting.  Voting is often thought of as our civic duty, it is what the forefathers fought for, and insert whatever other moral and emotionally charged excuse people come up with here.

I don’t feel this way.  In fact, for myself, I can’t find a real good reason to vote at all.  It seems as though it is more trouble than its worth, puts forth very little change, exerts unnecessary cost on society, and I get no thrill or feel that no good moral deed is done through my vote.

Also, voting is costly to yourself with very little benefit.  If one is truly doing their civic duty, maybe one ought to become familiar with the issues and where each candidate stands on those issues.  This takes a great deal of effort and time to read the relevant material on every policy subject the candidate you are voting for will affect.  Not only that, but then you have to actually form an informed opinion on these subjects, find out where the candidates stands, and then decide which candidate best represents your views.  After all that, you have to go to the polling place, wait in line, and, finally, cast your vote.  What are you awarded with?  Nothing more than an “I voted” sticker to show the world you made your insignificant contribution to society.

Wait a second.  Insignificant?  Why did I just do all that research on the issues and the candidates positions?

Well, because you didn’t consider the likelihood of actually effecting the outcome of the election is, effectively, nil.  Here is Steven Landsburg in Slate to explain:

Your individual vote will never matter unless the election in your state is within one vote of a dead-even tie. (And even then, it will matter only if your state tips the balance in the electoral college.) What are the odds of that? Well, let’s suppose you live in Florida and that Florida’s 6 million voters are statistically evenly divided—meaning that each of them has (as far as you know) exactly a 50/50 chance of voting for either Bush or Kerry—the statistical equivalent of a coin toss. Then the probability you’ll break a tie is equal to the probability that exactly 3 million out of 6 million tosses will turn up heads. That’s about 1 in 3,100—roughly the same as the probability you’ll be murdered by your mother.

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And that’s surely a gross overestimate of your influence, because it assumes there’s no bias at all in your neighbors’ preferences. Even a slight change in that assumption leads to a dramatic change in the conclusion. If Kerry (or Bush) has just a slight edge, so that each of your fellow voters has a 51 percent likelihood of voting for him, then your chance of casting the tiebreaker is about one in 10 to the 1,046^th power—approximately the same chance you have of winning the Powerball jackpot 128 times in a row. (emphasis added)

For those of us who live in New York State, the situation is far worse. Last time around, about 6.5 million votes were cast for major party candidates in New York state and 63 percent of them went to Al Gore. Assuming an electorate of similar size with a similar bias, my chance of casting the deciding vote in New York is about one in 10 to the 200,708^th power. I have a better chance of winning the Powerball jackpot 7,400 times in a row than of affecting the election’s outcome. Which makes it pretty hard to see why I should vote.

Sure, Landsburg was explaining a national election during a presidential term.  But, according to research by Casey Mulligan and Charles Hunter state and local elections are not all that far departed from the same problems.  As Dubner and Levitt explain in the New York Times Mulligan and Hunter:

…analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote, only one election in the past 100 years – a 1910 race in Buffalo – was decided by a single vote.

Essentially what it comes down to is what economist Patricia Funk stated in her paper Social Incentives and Voter Turnouts: Evidence from the Swiss Mail Ballot System, “Since instrumental benefits are close to zero, but not the costs from going to the polls, a rational individual should abstain from voting.”

So why do people vote?

Well, first of all out of those eligible to vote, only about half do.  Those that do may do so for any reason, but I think one of the most important reasons is that since they were small children they were constantly told that it is their civic duty to vote until it is pounded into to their little, soft head.  I remember my middle school civics teacher, and almost everyone I have ever talked to about this issue, constantly telling me that it is my civic duty and that those that do not vote have no right to complain.  Most people took it at face value and never questioned it, eventually parroting the same line.  However, I’m with George Carlin on this one.

On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. . . . . . . If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for what these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.

What it comes down to, why people vote, is because of social norms.  Because many people view voting as their civic duty.  We, as social beings, tend to want to impress others and feel like we have made a difference doing so.  I don’t vote because I don’t believe either.  Social norms are an important part of civil society, but some social norms are, from my own subjective view, wrong.  Voting, alone, is not fulfilling any meaningful civic duty.  Donating to charity, making a product that people will buy, working in soup kitchens, picking up trash from ditches, singing in a choir, keeping healthy, going to work and doing it well, buying consumer goods that make your life easier, helping children learn, and cleaning up trash from a local park are fulfilling meaningful social duties.  Voting, contrary to public opinion, is largely insignificant and a wasteful signal of fulfilling a social duty compared to the actions listed above or any other productive action one could take.

So, abstain from voting this year and do something productive instead.  Or, if you prefer, just relax.  Most of all, don’t feel bad about it.

More Links:

Voting Schmoting.  A PBS Interview with Gordon Tullock on voting. “You’re more likely to be killed while driving to the polling booth than the likelihood your vote will change the outcome.”

Not Voting and Proud by Brian Doherty (Reason)

Should you vote? by Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution) “Overall I view voting as a selfish act, usually done for purposes of self-image. But this has some altruistic and some non-altruistic ramifications… I fondly recall Gordon Tullock’s point: “The paradox is not why people vote, but why everyone doesn’t vote for himself.”

Hat tip to Larry Ribstein and Peter Klein for most of the links I used.

beyond markets and states

I recently received the latest edition of the American Economic Review and it was quite the pleasure to read Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel lecture.  Ostrom’s work has helped us understand how people go about dealing with tragedy of the commons problems.  Through her work she finds that there are several examples where people are able to manage common property without government involvement.  Cultural and societal norms along with other rules and penalties agreed upon by those using the common property can restrict actions that will lead to better outcomes.  Really fascinating work with really cool implications.

Towards the ends she gives us the following paragraph:

Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century.  Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead, a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.  We need to ask how diverse polycentric institutions help or hinder the innovativeness, learning, adapting, trustworthiness, levels of cooperation of participants, and the achievement of more effective, equitable, and sustainable outcomes at multiple scales.

Quite frankly, I cannot begin to tell you how refreshing reading her lecture was.  Give the entire lecture a read.  It is a draft, to read the finalized edition you, unfortunately, have to be an AEA member.

Cross posted on Trying Liberty.

evolution, social cost, and ideas to change the world.

Over at Org Theory, David Stark has an interesting piece on game theory and sociology that is self-recommending.  One of the interesting observations in the post in the first paragraph:

Some years ago, when they were little kids, my children developed a hybrid game.They’d taken their Monopoly board over to a friend’s house.  They’d remembered to bring back the board, but they’d forgotten the houses and hotels.  What to do?  So, they started to use Lego building blocks in place of the houses and hotels.  But, with the Lego pieces offering more affordances, they immediately began to construct ever more elaborate structures.  Even when the Monopoly pieces were returned, the Legos were much preferred and they played it again and again that year while they were first-graders in Budapest. Was it Monopoly? Was it Legos?  It was “Legopoly.” Over time the rules evolved away from bankrupting one’s opponents and toward attracting customers to the plastic skyscrapers that towered over the Monopoly plain. [emphasis mine]

While this is merely a story to illustrate a point I do think there is a significant amount of game theory and experimental economics work with data to back it up (see Wilson, Kimbrough, and Smith’s “Exchange, Theft, and the Social Formation of Property” for experimental).  This story illustrates quite well the possibility of what Hayek called the “spontaneous evolution” of the “rules of the game.”  When there was a change in the way of doing things, that is, when the top-down rules could no longer be followed, the children took matters into their own hands, altering the rules in a way that suited their needs.  Through this evolution came about a less aggressive game.  The game changed from trying to harm your opponent via bankrupting them to a game of cooperation and creating products that attracted others.

However, this is also a quite simplistic view of the world. In his seminal work, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Coase observed that in a world of zero, or near zero, transaction costs, it is easy for people to come to cooperative agreements and that in the real world, a world of transaction costs, it may be more difficult to get people to work together. In the story observed above, there indeed were little barriers to facilitate cooperative, innovative behavior. The only thing that existed was the incentives, that is, the probability of making themselves better off in the game.  With a probability there is also risk that it could fail.

I sometimes feel that there are not enough libertarians who understand this.  They possess utopian, or near utopian, fantasies of the world being perfect and without transaction costs.  Those who believe in liberty tend to talk past people with genuine concerns and who believe there are places in which the state has a legitimate role in providing a social safety net or protecting society from others’ actions.  By no means am I advocating for state intervention, but we must see the big picture if we want to foster the ideas we hope will change the world.

Cross posted at Trying Liberty.

do food stamps increase unemployment?

Many argue that welfare programs such as food stamp programs will often create additional unemployment.  Now, a new NBER paper shows empirical evidence supporting this claim.

Abstract:

Labor supply theory makes strong predictions about how the introduction of a social welfare program impacts work effort. Although there is a large literature on the work incentive effects of AFDC and the EITC, relatively little is known about the work incentive effects of the Food Stamp Program and none of the existing literature is based on quasi-experimental methods. We use the cross-county introduction of the program in the 1960s and 1970s to estimate the impact of the program on the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply, earnings, and family cash income. Consistent with theory, we find modest reductions in employment and hours worked when food stamps are introduced. The results are larger for single-parent families.

Does this mean that the Food Stamp Program is a bad program?  That it isn’t necessary?  Not quite sure.  One could argue that some of those individuals on the program desperately need the help regardless of those who could find jobs that may be leaching off the program.  What this does tell me, however, is that the program is rather inefficient at aligning incentives.

There are ways in which some types of entitlement reforms could attempt to curb this effect.  One of these ways would be to instead of using the money as direct food stamp payments, redirect the money in a way that creates jobs–either through subsidizing a company to create jobs or just creating government jobs.  It would get those individuals on food stamps 1) off food stamps and/or 2) in the workforce.  But the question becomes, “what is this the most economically efficient use of this money?”

My preferable method of creating jobs–and arguably the most efficient way–is to allow people to keep the money taken to pay for these entitlement programs.  The money saved, invested, and spent would then be used to create jobs with far less bureaucracy involved.  People could certainly donate to charities, although this again introduces a great deal more bureaucracy.  But the bureaucracy of nonprofits is probably just as efficient, if not more so, than that of government.

Cross posted at Trying Liberty.

let’s be adults here

A letter I sent to the New York Times:

In a New York Times editorial on May 21st titled “Limits of Libertarianism” you published, “It was only government power that ended slavery and abolished Jim Crow, neither of which would have been eliminated by a purely free market”

The government abolishing Jim Crow and Slavery were incredible steps forward for our society; however, hailing these laws as miracles of government is like saying, “sorry I ran you over with my car, but now everything is okay because my bumper is no longer smashing your face.”

Immigration reduces crime…

…or evidence of Bryan Caplan’s anti-foreign bias.

Futurity.org links to a University of Colorado-Boulder study and an Arizona Republic article which seems to suggest that, at worst, immigration has led to no rise in violent crime or, at best, has actually lead a society with less violent crime.  From the UC-Boulder study:

“Cities that experienced greater growth in immigrant or new-immigrant populations between 1990 and 2000 tended to demonstrate sharper decreases in homicide and robbery,” Wadsworth writes. “The suggestion that high levels of immigration may have been partially responsible for the drop in crime during the 1990s seems plausible.”

…

Wadsworth’s research suggests that, controlling for a variety of other factors, growth in the new immigrant population was responsible, on average, for 9.3 percent of the decline in homicide rates, and that growth in total immigration was, on average, responsible for 22.2 percent of the decrease in robbery rates.

Polls have shown that sixty-one percent are in agreement with the SB 1070 legislation; however, the data seems to go against the populous fervor against immigrants the country seem to hold.

Cross posted at Trying Liberty and Students for a Free Economy.

markets facilitate cooperative behavior…

In a recent study by a couple of anthropologists, some interesting, but pretty obvious, information comes to light;

A new study co-authored by University of California, Davis, anthropologist Richard McElreath and published today in Science magazine suggests that the cooperative nature of each society is at least partly dependent upon historical forces – such as religious beliefs and the growth of market transactions.

The study also found the extent to which a society uses punishment to enforce norms increases and decreases with the number of people in the society.

Both religion and markets are institutions which people interact with other people.  They do this for a simple reason; they are better off by doing so.  When people are better off they make a conscious decision about what extent they may want to or not want to break common socially acceptable rules.

When weighing these costs the incentives are on the side of remaining cooperative among society, lest the offending individual is punished by being made worse off; not entering a trade which would have made the individual better off, aggressive retaliation, social ostracism, and so forth.  These negative incentives are why people in society coöperate.  It is part of our evolutionary design that we have become civilized members of society, not because government forces us to.

Ultimately, this is really simple theory:  1) people respond to incentives and 2) people tend to prefer being made better off.

Welcome to the blog…

This is my new blog.  Kick up your feet and make yourself feel at home… and keep an eye out for trolls…