The picture above is of Bob Tollison.
Steve Landsburg, true to form, has a provocative post in which he wonders if the increase in opioid deaths could be a good sign–a sign that people are celebrating their lives by using opioids. That’s not a hill I’m willing to die on–the argument or the opioids–but it’s an interesting point nevertheless.
If you want to know his argument, read it rather than depending on me. You’ll also see what is, even for Steve, a high percentage of disagreement from commenters.
Steve ends with this paragraph:
You know what else is way up over the past couple of decades? Expenditures on smartphones. That sounds really really bad if you choose to ignore the fact that the people who are spending all that money get to have smartphones. Likewise, an upward trend in mortality from M&M consumption sounds really really bad if you choose to ignore the fact that the people who are shortening their life expectancies also get to eat a lot of M&Ms. There is more to life than life expectancy.
One commenter wrote:
I think the issue is that people underestimate the power of opioid addiction. Smart phones and M&Ms may have an element of addiction, but not nearly to the degree of opioids. You can argue that people should know this by now, but not everyone has good judgment, and addiction can occur after just one use. That’s [a] steep price to pay for poor judgment, relative to someone who splurges one night on M&Ms or upgrades a cell phone too early.
I’m not sure the commenter got the point about cell phones. If he has been in a restaurant in, oh, about the last five years, he will see that the possible addiction is not to new cell phones but to using cell phones. I’ve been at conferences with economists whose names you would recognize–and no I won’t say their names–who are on their cell phones in the middle of conversations and, going from what they’re saying, they weren’t listening to or other participants.
Even though I’m concerned about opioids, I love the last sentence of his paragraph I quoted above: “There is more to life than life expectancy.”
It reminds me of a conversation I had with the late Robert Tollison in the late 1980s, I think. Bob was telling me about some of his research on, if I recall correctly, the nanny state and its regulation of cigarettes. He said that the nanny staters wanted life to be “nasty, brutish, and long.”
[If you don’t get the humor, check this.]
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
Dec 2 2019 at 7:08pm
This reminds me of a joke by Denis Leary. Leary is a big smoker and he’s telling a story about how people always bother him by saying “ya know, if you stopped smoking now, you would add 10 years to your life!”
Leary responds: “Those are the adult diaper, Alzheimer years. I don’t want them!”
David Henderson
Dec 2 2019 at 7:11pm
Good one. And your’s, in turn, reminds me of a conversation I had with my sometime co-author Henry Miller, M.D. I asked him what he thinks the optimal weight and eating regimen is for someone who wants to live to be 100. He told me and it sounded awful: not much eating, being too skinny, etc. He saw the look on my face and then said, “You won’t live forever, but it will feel like it.”
Jon Murphy
Dec 3 2019 at 8:23am
Here’s the clip. Warning: extremely strong language.
The whole bit is funny, but I’ve just linked to the relevant quote.
Phil H
Dec 3 2019 at 2:03am
It’s a good argument. But as always, there are some good counterarguments as well.
There’s no better way to remove someone’s freedom than to stop their heart beating. So if freedom is something you value, early deaths count as a very bad thing. On the individual level: You can celebrate the individual’s ability to choose, but hate the choice they make, if that choice leads to their incarceration, poverty, or death, because all of those things ultimately make the person less free.
Another possible counter (which I think the commenter quoted above meant) is that addiction is inherently limiting of freedom. Another would be that there has been a breakdown in transmission of knowledge, and that drug users aren’t entering into their transactions fully informed about what they are buying.
There’s a mild consistency worry: Caplan on this site was telling us just a few weeks ago that we ought to despise the poor more for their intemperate behaviour, including drug taking. Now Landsman claims they’re to be celebrated. Can’t you economists agree and give us some proper answers?
A final argument is polemical rather than analytic, but it also has a certain power: don’t be so bloody silly. People dying from a drugs epidemic? To be celebrated? Yeah, that’s really the way to persuade people that liberty-oriented economics is the way forward.
David Henderson
Dec 3 2019 at 8:52am
I think you missed my criticism of Steve’s point, which was admittedly subtle.
Also, you write:
I think you would be hard pressed to find anything in Bryan Caplan’s posts that suggests he despises the poor. I think he’s more in line with the old Christian saying “Hate the sin and love the sinner.” He wants to hold people to account for their actions. But nowadays in many quarters, holding people accountable is thought of as despising them. If that’s so, then my parents despised me.
Phil H
Dec 3 2019 at 8:28pm
Thanks, David.
He used the word blame. That’s not quite the same as your phrase “holding to account”. It’s a moral and emotional sentiment, not an action.
And there are many parents who do despise their children, alongside beating them, interfering with them sexually, neglecting them, and a whole host of other things. I’m glad yours didn’t, but that argument doesn’t have quite the universal appeal you might have assumed.
David Henderson
Dec 3 2019 at 9:27pm
I think “blame” is the same as holding to account.
You missed my point about parents. It wasn’t about parents in general; it was about MY parents. The point I’m making is that holding people to account says nothing about despising. I gave my parents as an example. And the fact that some parents are horrible to their children has nothing to do with my point.
Phil H
Dec 4 2019 at 2:13am
“I think “blame” is the same as holding to account.”
Well, that’s a fairly easy one to respond to, you’re simply incorrect about the way the language works. Perhaps more importantly, you’re incorrect about how Caplan’s argument works. Poor people are plainly already held to account for their actions – they’re poor! What Caplan was explicitly suggesting was a change in culture: that in addition to the consequence of being poor (which is apparently not sufficiently motivational enough for the poor) they be *additionally* subjected to blame. That’s why it was a rather grim proposal.
KevinDC
Dec 5 2019 at 2:55pm
I figured I’d jump in to this part of the conversation as well, because hey, why not?
Is “blame” the same as being “held to account”? I dunno. Words and concepts can be fuzzy and their usage can vary according to person and circumstance. Certainly they’re at the very least close cousins. Consider statements “Bob isn’t accountable for what happened but we blame him for it.” That statement isn’t literally logical contradictions in the strictest sense, but it seems very confused at a minimum. Even if blame and accountability aren’t identical, they strongly overlap, and I think most people most of the time use them interchangeably. I know I certainly do. For what it’s worth, I checked Merriam Webster and one of the listed definitions of “blame” was “to hold responsible” and another is “to place responsibility for.” So David’s interpretation of the word certainly seems to cash out with the dictionary definition of the word.
But I’m more interested in your comment where you say:
I guess now it’s my turn to split semantic hairs. You seem to be using the concept of “blame” as if it means making an active effort to highlight people for social stigma and public shaming. Saying someone “is to blame” means going out of your way to belittle them. That’s not at all how Caplan has been using the term. Blaming someone and shaming them are two different things. When Caplan speaks about blame, he’s just talking about how responsible someone is for their circumstance. Simple example – it’s widely understood that skipping classes and blowing off homework greatly increases your odds of failing a class. Therefore, if Bill frequently engages in that behavior and then fails a class, Caplan would say that they are to blame for getting an F. (I agree with that.) But it’s not like me saying “You’re to blame for your failing grade” means I think we should post their picture to Twitter with the hashtag #BlameworthyFailureLetsAllLaughAtHim!!! (I’m assuming that’s how Twitter works? I’ve never actually used it.)
I don’t think Caplan believes that being poor is inherently bad and blameworthy. If, say, a person took a vow of poverty for religious reasons, or remained low income because they believed living a life of simplicity is better for philosophical reasons, it’s not like Caplan would say “Look at them! They’re poor purely as a predictable result of their behavior! Heap blame (by which I mean shame) upon them!!!”
Now, if a person frequently engaged in intemperate behavior and ended up poor as a result, and then declared that their resulting poverty made them entitled to receive involuntarily provided financial benefits at other people’s expense, that is something Caplan would consider worthy of shaming and stigma. (As would Landsburg, for what it’s worth) But that is not the same as shaming the poor for simply being poor.
Phil H
Dec 6 2019 at 10:45am
Kevin, I support your jumping in!
“declared that their resulting poverty made them entitled to receive involuntarily provided financial benefits”
The problem is, that is exactly what happens in real life, in every developed country in the world. You’ve argued that Caplan’s proposal is not nasty at all in a perfect libertarian world where no-one makes demands on anyone else. But I took it for a proposal for how we should act in the real world, and in this world, as you correctly identify, Caplan appears to be calling for “shaming and stigma”. I find that very very hard to get behind, because *it’s been tried before*. That’s what the world was like before the twentieth century: a few rich folk who looked down on the poor. It didn’t help the poor then, and it won’t help the poor now.
KevinDC
Dec 7 2019 at 11:07am
I’m not sure where I made that argument – I’ve re-read all my comments a few times and I don’t see anywhere I said that or anything that entailed that, at least as far as I can tell. Help me out here? Where did I say that?
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think follows from this? The fact that something is widespread is taken to be proof that it’s good? Wise? Just? Desirable? There may be reasons to think that it’s good/wise/just/etc to keep people who are irresponsible from being affected by their choices at the expense of those who behave responsibly, but “everyone else is doing it” isn’t very compelling.
I do think it’s important, though, to keep the discussion in it’s proper scope. Caplan’s position has always been fairly targeted – he’s talking specifically about able bodied adults in the first world who are poor due to their own behavior and who have the capability of changing their situation by making different choices. Unlike, say, people in the third world, or children of irresponsible parents, or people born with physical and mental health issues (all of whom Caplan has explicitly and repeatedly classified as “the deserving poor”), this group of people has a door wide open, plainly visible, right in front of them, with a giant neon sign saying “SOLUTION TO YOUR PROBLEMS THROUGH HERE” and respond by looking at the door and saying “instead of walking through that door, I’ll keep doing things the same way and insist I should just be given other people’s money instead.” You keep reframing Caplan’s position as being about “the poor” as such. This isn’t very helpful for carrying the discussion forward. If someone wrote essays highly critical of fundamentalist and extremist Christians such as the Westboro Baptist Church and suggested such people were deserving of scorn, it wouldn’t do much for the discussion for me to say “so you’re saying we should shame and mock everyone who goes to church or believes in god?” That’s simply not a relevant response to the actual argument being made, and I think much of your pushback on these topics lacks relevance for similar reasons.
As a contrast, Karl Smith and Caplan had a few go-arounds on this topic before. Karl’s criticism acknowledged Caplan’s specific position – that people who are poor as a result of their own lazy and irresponsible behavior are less deserving of sympathy and support than people who are poor through no fault of their own. And Smith engaged that position on it’s own terms, and gave reasons why such people do deserve sympathy and support. If you’re curious about his case, it’s right here: https://modeledbehavior.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/the-deserving-poor/
And it may surprise you to learn my position is actually much closer to Smith’s than it is to Caplan’s on this topic. While I have on many occasions pushed back on your comments, my pushback has never been “here’s why Caplan is right,” it’s usually more along the lines of “your characterization of Caplan’s argument is inaccurate so your criticism lacks force.”
Phil H
Dec 8 2019 at 7:32pm
Hi Kevin.
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think follows from this?”
If something happens in all the developed countries in the world, I think you should draw two conclusions. (1) There must be some reason for it. That reason may not be good (it could be an unintended consequence of some other policy). But it’s very likely that some feature of developed economies causes this phenomenon. Therefore it’s unlikely to be something that can just be swept away *without affecting a lot of other stuff that happens in developed economies*. And that could be dangerous, because it may interrupt the growth. This is actually a conservative principle: if you don’t understand it, don’t (lightly) mess with it. (2) This is where real-world policies have to start from. In your post, you explained how Caplan’s proposal would not be bad for any poor person who doesn’t demand benefits. But I’m not very interested in that, because in the real world, being generally does mean claiming some benefits. If you can’t explain the implicationa of a policy for the real world, then you haven’t thought it through. In fact, you can! You said clearly: in the real world, the world where people claim benefits, Caplan’s policy means stigma and shame. And I can reply to that straightforwardly: stigma and shame are bad economic policies. I couldn’t support them.
I read Smith’s post, and it had a couple of good points. The most important was: How do you tell the difference between the good poor and the bad poor? I understood Caplan’s proposal to be an economic policy. Economic policies don’t act on people’s characters. They work on money. An economic policy, by its very nature, cannot distinguish between the good poor and the bad poor. You gave the example of the good Christians (most churchgoers) and the bad Christians (Westboro) – unless you provide a principled way to distinguish between them, then how am I supposed to tell the difference? More importantly an economic policy is just an algorithm. Unless you can describe in economic terms what “this group of people” with the “wide open door” are, then they cannot be the proper object of economic policy.
Perhaps you can see that this is the inverse of social justice claims. Some white people were involved in the repression of people of colour; the social justice claim is that all white people should bear some blame. You’re claiming that some poor people are responsible for their own poverty; in the absence of a clear *economic* definition of that group, the consequence of any economic policy that targets the poor is that all poor people will take some blame for poverty.
Or let me put the question to you more directly: What is it that you think Caplan’s policy would cause to happen. You’ve told me what it isn’t (twitter hashtags). But what specific thing do you think should happen to which people, that doesn’t happen now?
KevinDC
Dec 9 2019 at 3:17pm
Hey Phil –
I’ll just leave one more reply because I feel like it’s going around in circles at this point and if you want to toss in the last word I’ll leave that up to you.
Really? I said it wouldn’t be bad for any poor person as long as they don’t demand benefits? No no no, that is just not at all what I said. I said that Caplan’s proposal wouldn’t be bad for members of the deserving poor who do claim benefits, and would be bad for members of the undeserving poor if they demand benefits instead of changing their behavior, and gave a definition for what classifies someone as deserving or undeserving in that system. You might disagree with the wisdom of such a policy for various reasons, or question the ability of policymakers to make that distinction, or think it would be carried out poorly in practice, and that’s fine, but don’t say I said something I didn’t say. Nobody has ever been convinced to change their mind about something by someone criticizing a different position from what they actually hold.
This is just false. Now, the phrase “economic policies act on people’s character” is a bit muddled, and I don’t know any other economists who would agree with that quite the way you phrased it. It’s more accurate to say “economic policies act on people’s incentives.” (Even that’s a bit oversimplified, but it’s a good enough as a first pass approximation.) But I have never, ever met a fellow economist who would sign off on the phrase “economics policies work on money” nor have I ever come across anything in any economics publication that would define economic policies that way. As fundamental misunderstandings of a field of study go, “economic policies act on money” is right up there with “evolution says life happens by random chance.”
Actually I’m not claiming that. As I made explicitly clear, my views on this topic tend much closer to Smith’s than Caplan’s. All I’ve done is say you’re consistently mischaracterizing the scope and content of Caplan’s argument. If you want people to take your criticisms of a position seriously, it won’t do any good for you to continually change the position into something different and criticize that.
Also, in your last bit you said:
Do you see the switch you did? The question morphed from asking what I think the likely outcome of Caplan’s policy would be, to asking me what I think should be happening differently. But both of those questions are besides the point. All I’ve been saying is that you’re misrepresenting Caplan’s position. What results his preferred policies would lead to, and what policies I prefer instead, are irrelevant to that discussion. They’re interesting discussions to be had, but completely off topic. I mean, I occasionally hear people misrepresent Marx’s view of religion and I’ll tell them they are misrepresenting Marx on that point. That doesn’t commit me to sharing or defending Marx’s theory of religion, nor does it oblige me to elucidate my own theory of religion. That’s all beside the point.
Phil H
Dec 12 2019 at 10:29am
Thanks, Kevin.
I mean… OK. You’re right, I have been imprecise in my language, I have conflated you and Caplan… many of your nits were well-picked.
I’m just sorry you couldn’t tell me more clearly how to be right. When I tried to reformulate what you said, it was in an effort to bring more clarity. You’ve told me that I’m wrong, so… OK…
I wish you were able to tell me what you think, or what you think Caplan thinks, more clearly. If I’m being thick, then sorry, but it’s genuinely not clear to me. Thanks, anyway.
KevinDC
Dec 3 2019 at 1:12pm
Hi Phil! A few thoughts on what you posted.
You said “There’s no better way to remove someone’s freedom than to stop their heart beating.” Definitely with you on that. If I stop your heart from beating I’m clearly violating your freedom. But notice that’s something I did to you. (In this hypothetical, I mean. Not in real life. I’m not a monster.) But it’s not at all clear to me that it’s a violation of freedom for me to do something that stops my own heart from beating. As was once said by the greatest fictional American of all time, Ron Swanson, “The whole point of this country is if you want to eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds, and die of a heart attack at 43, you can. You are free to do so. To me, that’s beautiful.” I’m trying to imagine what else I might say. “Gaining all this weight from your unhealthy eating habits puts you at risk of overloading your heart, therefore because of the health risk, your dietary choices are actually you violating your own freedom”? Or suppose someone attempts to set a new land speed record and dies in the attempt. Should we say “Their attempt to put themselves in the record books ultimately stopped their heart from beating, therefore the attempt to break the record was a violation of their freedom”? I mean, to statements like that work you would need to be using a really weird definition of freedom. Maybe it’s the right definition, but it’s not obviously correct, at least not to me.
I must admit I’m confused by your concern over the apparent (to you) inconsistency between Caplan and Landsburg. If it had been “A few weeks ago Caplan said X but now he’s saying Y and that seems inconsistent” I’d see your point. But “Caplan said X and Landsburg said Y and those seem inconsistent to me” strikes me as a total nothingburger. I mean, sometimes Paul Krugman and Brad Delong disagree on things. I could point to such disagreements and say “Jeez, can’t you Keynesian social democrats give us consistent answers” but that would be, well…silly of me. The world is a complicated place, moral and political philosophy are complicated, economics is complicated, and sometimes individuals in the same general camp can disagree about specific issues. That’s all pretty obvious and should be expected, right?
Also, “People dying from a drugs epidemic? To be celebrated?” If this is what you think Landsburg is saying, I suspect you didn’t actually read his post, or if you did, you didn’t read it very carefully. Because he’s not saying “shorter life expectancy and more deaths from drug use is good.” Not remotely. He was making a more general argument that “X leads to shorter life expectancy” does not entail the conclusion “X is bad” – you need additional arguments to get you there.
There are a number of different ways that something might lead to shorter lifespans and be good or bad. For example, in his post, Landsburg explicitly stipulates that it being good depends on it “result[ing] from voluntary, informed choices.” You expressed concern on this axis in your comment, where you raised the possibility that “drug users aren’t entering into their transactions fully informed.” But this is exactly what Landsburg is getting at – you are noticing that this is a relevant factor and acknowledging the issue exists, whereas the journalist in question doesn’t rise to even this very basic level. They just take it for granted that “lowers total lifespan = bad.” And that’s the crux of Landsburg’s complaint, which is why he concludes by saying “The Washington Post article alludes to the former possibility, without a shred of a good reason to think it’s the right story, as opposed to one of many possible stories.” Nowhere is he saying any of the other stories are therefore true. Saying “you haven’t given good reasons why your interpretation is the correct one among many other possibilities” is not the same as saying “your interpretation is wrong and I therefore conclude the opposite.”
Phil H
Dec 3 2019 at 8:22pm
Hi, Kevin. Thanks, those are good comments.
Weakest/least interesting first: the consistency argument. You’re right, it’s not strong. I’m not quite willing to call it “nothing” – both Caplan and Landsburg claim to be arguing for the same principle, so it’s reasonable to ask why they reach such apparently different conclusions. But it’s definitely not a strong argument against.
Now, onto the substantive one: “But it’s not at all clear to me that it’s a violation of freedom for me to do something that stops my own heart from beating.” I think that’s right, it’s not clear. I’m making the argument that it is a violation. That is, I’m trying to undermine Landsburg/Henderson’s argument *completely from within a liberty framework*. There are lots of other arguments: utilitarian, public health, virtue-based, etc. But it’s interesting to see if it can be done purely in terms of liberty. It’s not clear that this works, but here goes…
To start with the specific examples you give: “eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds” and “set a land speed record”. First, today’s society does intervene in both those cases. The overeater gets strong messages from their doctors; land speed teams take massive safety precautions.
Here’s a couple of approaches. 1) You can treat “freedom” a bit like utilitarians treat utility. If the goal is to maximise the amount of freedom in the world, then having more free people is a positive; removing yourself from the world is a negative. We would then have to balance two things: how does the apparent restriction on freedom to kill yourself balance against the years of freedom lost… Hmmm. Removing the freedom to take your own life is a pretty big one! I’m not sure this would work.
2) On the individual level, we could treat freedom in a more normal way, i.e. as something that is usually only affected in a negative way: someone takes it away. Then we could look on suicide, or drug taking, as actions which take away liberty from yourself in the future… Huh, maybe this doesn’t work, either. Because every action we take restricts our future freedoms in some way, but the power to do that is precisely what liberty implies.
Perhaps I was wrong! Maybe you can’t construct a good argument against fatal drug taking from within a purely liberty-oriented ethical framework. That’s interesting.
Mark
Dec 5 2019 at 9:07am
Phil said: “There’s no better way to remove someone’s freedom than to stop their heart beating. So if freedom is something you value, early deaths count as a very bad thing.”
Using this logic, we must therefore ban people from things like jumping out of planes, riding motorcycles, and even riding in automobiles.
The freedom to act doesn’t mean one doesn’t bear the consequences resulting from exercising that freedom. In fact, protecting someone from the consequences of their action is to restrict their agency, which is a violation of their freedoms.
Phil H
Dec 6 2019 at 10:34am
Hi, Mark.
We do ban all of those things! You can’t drive a car or motorcycle unless you’ve had extensive safety training. Try to get out of a flying aircraft and they will wrestle you to the ground.
Look, if you want to talk about the principles, that’s fine. I’m just saying, for the most part, it’s useful to start from where we actually are. In the real world, all of those highly dangerous activities are heavily regulated. That’s what people are like, as of now. If you think we should be different, OK, but we’re going to need reasons, and “my abstract principle of liberty says so” isn’t a very convincing argument.
nobody.really
Dec 3 2019 at 3:13am
Is this a photo of David Henderson?
Jon Murphy
Dec 3 2019 at 8:24am
No, Bob Tollison
MarkW
Dec 3 2019 at 6:41am
I’m reminded of the semi-serious argument from a decade ago that since ‘Equasy’ was statistically more dangerous than ‘Ecstasy’ and apparently just as addictive for some users, it should be added to the list of controlled substances. What is ‘Equasy’? Horse riding and jumping. You could include many other forms of risky ‘adrenaline addiction’ in the same list: climbing, parachuting, cave-diving, motorcycle racing, whitewater kayaking, back-country skiing — not to mention base-jumping and wing-suit flying. Should we feel less sad about a young person who becomes addicted to climbing and falls off a cliff than one who becomes addicted to opiates and dies of an overdose? If so, why? Was the risk taken in pursuit of pleasure really more justifiable in the one case than in the other?
David Henderson
Dec 3 2019 at 9:20am
Interesting.
When I discussed my case for legalizing all drugs with my students and got pushback about legalizing heroin, I asked them if they would ban people from attempting to climb Mt. Everest. The death rate from such attempts is, I believe, substantially higher than the death rate (per thousand) from using heroin. The best answer I got back was that so many fewer people try to scale Everest than use heroin. I asked the person who made this argument if he would ban people from climbing Everest if 100 times more people tried to climb it. (Of course, in that case, there would be congestion problems, but put that aside.) He wasn’t sure.
Vivian Darkbloom
Dec 3 2019 at 10:37am
I’m not sure that comparing the death rate for those climbing Everest with the death rate of heroin addicts is adequate to determine whether one activity should be illegal and another not. For a heroin addict, there seems to be a lot more damage caused on the route to that eventual premature death in terms of families destroyed, children neglected (or addicted in the womb), crimes committed to support the habit, etc., etc. See, for example, this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6653385
I think economists refer to these as negative externalities. Whether making heroin illegal is the best way to reduce addiction and the negative externalities related to it (other than the death rate of addicts) is, of course, a necessary part of the debate.
robc
Dec 3 2019 at 11:37am
Correct. The only thing we need to consider is whether it is moral to stop someone from climbing Everest of shooting up.
[Hint: No, and no. At least for competent adults]
Vivian Darkbloom
Dec 3 2019 at 12:14pm
I guess that settles everything (as long as everyone defers to your “morality”)! Sorry for wasting everyone’s time (including mine) with irrelevant considerations.
Christophe Biocca
Dec 3 2019 at 12:25pm
For a
heroin addictwidget factory, there seems to be a lot more damage caused on the route to that eventualpremature deathwidget produced in terms of pollution, noise, and local delivery traffic.I think economists refer to these as negative externalities. Whether making
heroinwidget production illegal is the best way to reduce addiction and the negative externalities related to it is, of course, a necessary part of the debate.Maybe a bit of an unfair search and replace but I do think it’s worth using it to highlight that the normal economics approach to externalities is to directly target (tax or otherwise) the externality itself, not the behaviors that can sometimes lead to that externality.
And arguably we do target those things directly: crime is tautologically illegal, child support means you can’t stop supporting your family financially just because you’re on heroin (to the extent you still have income that can be seized), and multiple states consider drug use while pregnant to be child abuse (which comes with its own legal mess, but at least it’s more narrowly tailored than a blanket ban).
Since we have the policies targeting externalities in place already, the externalities-justify-prohibition argument doesn’t make much sense.
Vivian Darkbloom
Dec 3 2019 at 1:05pm
I anticipated that argument–it should be part of the debate. To wit, for example, whether the best way to address the externalities is to chase down several hundred crimes per year, etc., etc., or to address the root cause–the use and addiction. And, whether the best way to address the root cause is to make it illegal or some other method. Considering illicit drug use while pregnant child abuse doesn’t really do much to help that child (or deter the parent), but perhaps I’m trying to be overly practical and/or unfair. Perhaps I’ve been too quick to suggest that perhaps to address multiple negative externalities directly is not always the most efficient and that I’ve violated some sacred principle of economics in suggesting that it might not be in this case. Wars may be bad, but lets just address the casualties doesn’t strike me as the only or best way to look at things. But, as long as heroin addicts are having a good time, I guess the rest we can address and clean up later…
I will, however, simply re-iterate the original point: comparing the death rate of Everest climbers with that of heroin addicts doesn’t strike me as the sole or best or adequate means of deciding whether either should be illegal Not that Henderson suggested it was, but he also didn’t suggest otherwise in his comparison. I don’t tend to resolve questions such as this one solely from a philosophical point of view, which is one reason I’m not a self-professed “libertarian”, much less a “deontological one”.
Mark Z
Dec 3 2019 at 2:49pm
But some of these are externalities in the ‘broad’ sense of the word, the sense in which every decision you make has negative externalities. Pollution is a negative externality in the more narrow sense that it uses/damages someone else’s property (or property regarded as common) without consent. The negative effects of drug use on one’s family don’t intrude upon their rights, as they don’t (most would agree) have a claim of ownership over the person leaving them. If merely causing a negative effect justifies prohibition, well that justifies essentially unlimited totalitarianism. We ought to prohibit adultery as well, to prevent people from leaving their families for their lovers; it ought to be illegal for someone qualified to become a doctor to instead become a painter, as this harms his potential patients be reducing the supply of doctors. Every time you buy something, you help drive up the price, negatively impacting someone, etc. Hence why we usually limit state intervention to cases where the externality infringes upon someone’s property (or person) without their consent, rather than merely causes harm in a broader sense.
And if we eschew the concept rights and property altogether in favor of pure utilitarianism, this externalities-based argument is probably even more applicable to prohibition of alcohol and sugary foods, which likely incur a greater social cost than opioids, and who knows, maybe modern law enforcement technology would make effectively enforcing the Volstead act doable today. To reduce drunk driving fatalities alone might make it worth considering. Overall though, I think even a consequentialist should be wary of giving the state license to play the role of ‘social utility maximizer’ with its subjects, and the rights-based framework is worth holding on to.
MarkW
Dec 3 2019 at 5:03pm
But some of the problems associated with heroin abuse derive from its illegality. Do alcoholics routinely commit crimes to support their habits? And do alcoholics die because their booze is of uncertain quality and strength? (The answer to the second questions was briefly yes…during prohibition). Also fetal alcohol syndrome seems more damaging than the pregnancy effects of <a href=”https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/heroin/how-does-heroin-abuse-affect-pregnant-women“>heroin addiction</a>. But we’re not thinking of outlawing alcohol again, are we?
Vivian Darkbloom
Dec 4 2019 at 12:48am
You raise good issues, which are all debatable and should be discussed. It’s a complex and important problem that’s need easily solved. I don’t have all the answers. But, I’m glad that you agree that there is much, much more to the question than just death rates.
KevinDC
Dec 3 2019 at 1:35pm
This reminds me of some musings from one of my favorite comedians, Doug Stanhope. He’s a lifelong drug user (abuser, some would say) and was going on about how adrenaline junkies get way more social respect than just plain old drug junkies. He said something like (quoted from memory so this is a paraphrase):
RPLong
Dec 3 2019 at 9:52am
Frank Zappa tells the story in his autobiography about how, because he had pneumonia, he temporarily had to quit smoking. He writes that his sense of smell returned to him after a while, and that it made him realize that he didn’t like the way the world smelled. So, he started smoking again.
Christopher McDougall has written many articles about his friend Micah True, AKA El Caballo Blanco, who was also featured as a central character in McDougall’s classic book Born to Run. Mr. True basically lived in abject poverty and spent all his time long-distance running, to the detriment of his financial well-being and many of his personal relationships. But that’s the way he wanted it. That was the life he sought for himself.
Similar to Micah True, there is a man named Dag Aaybe who lives in the mountains of British Columbia. He spends all his time running in solitude and only comes to town occasionally for medical care and similar needs. The Atlantic published a documentary video about him a few years back. He is an interesting man.
I could go on. Lemmy Kilmister spent nearly his whole adult life consuming cocaine. Alex Honnold lives in a trailer and climbs mountains. There are many, many people in the world who are perfectly kind and intelligent, but who wish to pursue habits and lifestyles that are highly eccentric. Reasonable people can disagree about the wisdom of the lives they’ve chosen to pursue, but I believe there will always be people like this as long as human beings exist. Some of us like to live safe lives in close proximity to healthy communities; others prefer living life on the outskirts.
One of the reasons I oppose nanny-state laws is because it makes life increasingly difficult for innocent people who simply want to live differently than the rest of us, and want to be left alone. We don’t have to condone their way of life, but it’s wrong to forcibly prevent them from living it. “Nasty, brutish, and long” is exactly right.
nobody.really
Dec 3 2019 at 10:25am
The Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker reports the following average life expediencies for 2017:
Japan: 84.1 years and rising
France: 82.4 and rising
Industrialized nations overall: 82.2 years and rising
Canada: 81.9 and rising
US: 78.9–and falling
But wait–I’m lying. The US reached average life expectancy of 78.9 years back in 2014–and has been DECLINING EVER SINCE, now falling to 78.6. American exceptionalism on display.
Still, striking a blow for national solidarity, we can report that life expectancy is declining for men, women, white, black, Hispanic, and Native American/Alaskan Native populations simultaneously. In Tom Lehrer’s immortal mortal words, we truly all go together when we go.
Ok, I’m lying again; we’re not quite all in this together. <a href=”https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/02/opinion/life-expectancy-united-states.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage”>Paul Krugman elaborates:</a>
1: So perhaps greater opiod deaths reflect a laudatory expansion of choice. But if so, it appears to be an expansion in the choice of inferior goods, ‘cuz it doesn’t seem to be a choice especially prized by richer US citizens. Or Canadians of any demographic. Or Europeans. Or Japanese.
At what point does the statement “The differences in outcomes are explained by exogenous differences in taste and preferences” become a simple <I>deus ex machina</i> excuse?
2: Do any of our libertarian friends wish to contest the suggestion that Medicaid expansion contributes to life expectancy? Or do you merely want to argue that Medicaid expansion represents a wrongful nanny-state interference in people’s right to retain more tax dollars to better finance their opiod deaths?
robc
Dec 3 2019 at 11:35am
As a deontological libertarian, I don’t need* to consider outcomes, so “medicare expansion is a wrongful nanny-state interference, full stop.”
*I can, and do, but I don’t need to. Choose moral means and let the ends fall where they may. If there are multiple moral means, sure, go ahead, choose the one with the best outcome.
Bob Murphy
Dec 5 2019 at 11:15pm
nobody.really wrote: “Do any of our libertarian friends wish to contest the suggestion that Medicaid expansion contributes to life expectancy?”
Actually yes, I want to point out that there was a randomized control trial experiment done, under Jonathan Gruber among others, that found Medicaid expansion in Oregon yielded no statistically significant improvement on the measures of physical health tracked in the study.
As I wrote about it here, what’s hilarious with this episode is that the study was 2 years long, and after the first year–when it looked good for Medicaid–people like Ezra Klein were saying what a great study it was; called it the “gold standard” in the literature. Then a year later, when no s.s. improvement on physical health outcomes, Ezra Klein all of sudden notices all the shortcomings of the study.
Mark Z
Dec 3 2019 at 3:03pm
“Do any of our libertarian friends wish to contest the suggestion that Medicaid expansion contributes to life expectancy?”
Yes. I won’t argue that it has *no* effect whatsoever, but fairly little effect. Health insurance status itself doesn’t explain much variability in life expectancy. The NYT is playing a cheap political trick here. “Hmm, correlation between medicaid expansion and life expectancy, that must surely mean something!” But it really doesn’t,once you look beyond mere correlation (and if correlation is sufficient, perhaps we should blame church attendance or NASCAR enthusiasm). Red states tend to be poorer than blue states, and the lower life expectancy of poor people is mostly attributable to higher rates of smoking, drug use, drinking, overeating, etc. Essentially, behavioral predictors of mortality, not differences in healthcare usage.
The international comparison actually works against your argument: the US consumes more healthcare per capita than any country in the world, and it does us little good. That’s because healthcare is simply far less important than things like diet, smoking, car accidents, and other non-healthcare related factors. I’d recommend randomcriticalanalysis’s excellent and data-rich (if very long) posts on healthcare and mortality.
RPLong
Dec 3 2019 at 5:32pm
nobody.really, can you please help me identify the connection between my comment and yours? I’m not particularly sure what your reply means in the context of my comment.
nobody.really
Dec 5 2019 at 12:00pm
I’m sorry; that was supposed to be it’s own post. I was initially pondering a specific reply to you, but my thoughts evolved as I wrote.
KevinDC
Dec 3 2019 at 3:11pm
“There’s more to life than lifespan.”
Like most things in life, this idea was well captured by a post from SMBC:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-02-06
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