My favorite part:
Jordan Weissman: Isn’t the simplest explanation [for the fact that people treat the idea of sex redistribution different from the way they treat wealth redistribution] that money’s really important and you can’t live without it?
Robin Hanson: We live in a rich society.
Weissman: Not everybody is rich, though. That’s the whole point.
Hanson: They’re still rich compared to most people who ever lived in history. Compared to the median person in history, almost everyone in our society is rich. And so, the threat of not [DRH note: it’s clear from context that the “not” should not be there] dying if you don’t have enough money is really a pretty minor threat for the vast majority of people in rich societies.
Weissman: Is that the standard we really want to judge by now? Not dying?
Hanson: Well that’s the one you mentioned!
Weissman: I want to move on
This is from Jordan Weissman, “An Interview With Robin Hanson, the Sex Redistribution Professor,” Slate, May 4, 2018. The title is misleading, by the way: Robin doesn’t actually advocate sex redistribution.
If you want to know what this is all about, here is the thumbnail version. George Mason University economics professor Robin Hanson, as is his wont, used a grisly news hook about the recent murders in Toronto to raise the issue about why most people treat sex redistribution as something not to be done but treat wealth distribution as something plausible and probably desirable.
Weissman responded with a hatchet job titled “Is Robin Hanson America’s Creepiest Economist?” Slate, April 29. This isn’t exactly in conformity with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which says that “any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.” But it’s close. When Weissman finally gets to the answer to his question, at the end of a long article, he writes, “So is Robin Hanson America’s creepiest economist? I’m not saying he is. But it is certainly a striking question.” (italics in original)
Robin fought back the way Robin fights back–by analyzing language and even going so far as to say that economics should be creepy. [For the record, I part company with him here, even though I think the original issue he raised was and is a good one.] I doubt that that alone would have caused Weissman to respond by interviewing Robin. I think what made the difference was a piece by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in which Douthat showed that he, unlike Weissman, had actually read Robin’s post carefully.
Econlib published a Feature Article a few years ago by Dwight Lee that addressed a related issue. It’s “Should Government Reduce Inequality in Life Spans?” Econlib Feature Article, January 5, 2009. By the way, it’s completely compliant with Betteridge’s Law.
READER COMMENTS
Vivian Darkbloom
May 5 2018 at 5:08pm
“…the threat of not dying if you don’t have enough money is really a pretty minor threat for the vast majority of people in rich societies.”
I would say the “threat of not dying” is, on average, over one’s lifespan, much greater than the threat of dying, even for those who are not rich, and even though, rich or poor, I tend to not view not dying as a threat at all, but rather as an opportunity.
Mr. Hanson really does deserve a careful reading!
zeke5123
May 5 2018 at 6:00pm
First, I think that was a really uncharitable interview by Weissman. He framed the topics as sexist / creepy until proven otherwise. If I was being uncharitable, I would say he was trying to suggest that Prof. Hanson was interested in this stuff because Prof. Hanson is a loser in the sexual market. Weissman comes off as someone who has never questioned his priors, and really isn’t interested in questioning at all.
Second, while my priors tend to agree with Prof. Hanson’s priors, i.e., I think the reluctance — perhaps a better word is contempt — for sexual redistribution suggests a flaw in economic redistribution, I tried to argue against my prior. Wealth is fat-tailed; sex is thin-tailed. That difference could impact decision on fairness which could eliminate the apparent incongruent position. In the end, I still think it is a useful thought experiment.
Robert
May 5 2018 at 8:18pm
What do you and Hanson have to say about this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/budget-and-spending/2018/04/03/midlife-wealth-shock-may-lead-death-ama-study/483228002/
?
And yes, government should reduce inequality in lifespans – by providing funds to research and, when known, ameliorate the causes of premature* death in subpopulations.
* – this is an evolving term dependent on what we expect next year’s capabilities to be.
Weir
May 6 2018 at 7:34am
Weissman talks a lot about women’s feelings, but Hannah Arendt was a woman. Susan Sontag was a woman. Lionel Shriver is a woman. There are plenty of economists and philosophers and novelists eager to think about abstract ideas, fearlessly, even at the risk of confounding the Jordan Weissmans of the world who believe that abstract thought is unwomanly, but these thinkers are still women, all the same.
Jean Bethke Elshtain didn’t cease to be a woman just because she was willing to debate ideas dispassionately. People said Mary McCarthy was cold and heartless. Patricia Highsmith was as cruel as they come, but her novels were better for it. To Muriel Spark’s critics she was remote and aloof. Germaine Greer’s feelings are robust enough to withstand debate. Camille Paglia is thick-skinned. She fights for herself. There are plenty of women who don’t need Jordan Weissman to jump in and rescue them, as chivalrous as he sees himself, rushing to their protection and aid.
In Weissman’s mind none of these women are real women, because he thinks women just have feelings, and their feelings get hurt and they get discouraged and feel creeped out by a philosophical analysis of the grown up world. Autistic women aren’t “real women” because they use rational arguments. George Eliot was “unfeminine” for examining Christianity with a cold and critical eye. But Megan McArdle can use her intelligence without thereby renouncing her womanhood, no matter what Weissman feels.
David R Henderson
May 6 2018 at 9:57am
@Vivian Darkbloom,
Good catch. Thanks.
David R Henderson
May 6 2018 at 12:18pm
@Robert,
What do you and Hanson have to say about this:
I can’t speak for Robin, but here’s what I have to say.
1. The article appears to suffer from the standard affliction of many such articles: not having a control group. Could the wealth shock be caused by some prior health problem and so what is attributed to the wealth shock may in fact be due partly to the health problem? I don’t know. I would bet that’s part of it though.
2. The increase in the risk of dying for such people is small. They note a 50% higher risk of dying for middle-aged people due to a wealth shock. That’s 50% on top of a very small number, which means it’s a slightly less-small number.
mbka
May 6 2018 at 11:17pm
On the matter of inequality-reduction reductio ad absurdum, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron” is still my gold standard…
Weir
May 7 2018 at 7:25pm
There’s an L.P. Hartley novel called Facial Justice about the correct distribution of beauty, and before that there was a deeply offensive book called The Republic in which its creepy author Plato talks about a communism of wives. That book deserves a huge trigger warning if you’re not already disgusted by it.
OAG
May 8 2018 at 10:53am
Weissman’s point wasn’t that the arguments Hanson were making were bad, or uninteresting; rather he was pointing out a pattern in Hanson’s argumentation/thought experiments.
I think this interview actually makes Hanson look worse, unfortunately, and has changed my opinion of him. He comes off as not particularly self-aware. Rather, he seems to explicitly avoid examining his own motivations, claiming that he has a “limited budget of honesty”, and can’t be bothered to spend the effort to examine or address the pattern in his behavior. This is highly arrogant, especially from someone who wrote a book on what motivates people.
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