A fun figure from Tetlock et al.’s “The Psychology of the Unthinkable.” Possible level of outrage ranges from 1-7, 7 being highest.
Background:
Participants were told that the goal of the study was to explore the attitudes that Americans have about what people should be allowed to buy and sell in competitive market transactions:
Imagine that you had the power to judge the permissibility and morality of each transaction listed below. Would you allow people to enter into certain types of deals? Do you morally approve or disapprove of those deals? And what emotional reactions, if any, do these proposals trigger in you?Respondents then judged two types of trade-offs: routine (secular-secular) and taboo (secular-sacred). The five secular-secular trade-offs included “paying someone to clean my house,” “buying a house,” “buying food,” “paying a doctor to provide medical care to me or my family,” and “paying a lawyer to defend me against criminal charges in court.” The nine secular-sacred trade-offs included buying and selling of human body parts for medical transplant operations, surrogate motherhood contracts (paying someone to have a baby whom the buyer subsequently raises), adoption rights for orphans, votes in elections for political offices, the right to become a U.S. citizen, the right to a jury trial, sexual favors (prostitution), someone else to serve jail time to which the buyer had been sentenced by a court of law, and paying someone to perform military service that the buyer had a draft obligation to perform.
Libertarians are notorious for gratuitously alienating everyone who doesn’t agree with them. Looking at diverse critics and sneering, “You’re all a bunch of socialists” is a classic example. Figure 1 shows, however, that there is a more than a kernel of truth in this unfriendly observation. Conservatives, liberals, and socialists are all highly and almost equally hostile to creative expansions of the domain of the free market. Is this because the “unthinkable” proposals are too radical to appeal to anyone who isn’t a libertarian? Not really; many economists with zero libertarian sympathies would be on the same page.
Could the socialists analogously gripe, “You’re all a bunch of capitalists”? Not easily. Even self-conscious socialists are only moderately outraged by routine trade-offs – and this outrage tapers off almost linearly as we move from liberals to conservatives to libertarians. At least in this data set, libertarians are clear outliers – and the disagreements between conservatives, liberals, and socialists are marginal. I wish it were otherwise, but it rings true.
Last point: Tetlock et al.’s data helps explain why so many people falsely imagine that most economists are libertarians. How so? Because they are the only two groups that routinely transgress anti-market taboos. Even left-wing economists, for example, have been known to endorse a market in human kidneys. Even if they disagree, most will politely discuss an issue that almost everyone else considers beyond the pale. Upshot: When libertarians tell mainstream economists, “You’re all a bunch of socialists” they’re not merely being undiplomatic. They’re being wrong.
READER COMMENTS
Mark
Sep 12 2019 at 12:53pm
This is a good distinction. Some people get offended because others put things up for sale. But if some scarce thing isn’t available for sale, the follow-up question should be—how would you prefer that thing to be distributed? The answer will usually be accident of birth or something similarly arbitrary and unfair. The market isn’t perfectly fair, but it’s the most fair mechanism for dealing with scarce items, with the added benefit of creating an incentive for suppliers to reduce the scarcity. People who are against the market distribution should suggest one that’s better.
Paul A Sand
Sep 12 2019 at 1:52pm
I can’t help but be amused at a graph that labels the amount of outrage as a “Mean Response”.
Jacob C. Witmer
Sep 12 2019 at 1:52pm
This is a great article. I enjoyed meeting you in New Haven. I’m going to have to think a bit more about “the right to a jury trial.” It’s highly likely that obtaining or retaining a free system is not possible without jury trials remaining “inalienable.” Now I need to investigate exactly how the study handled “the right to a jury trial” question…
nobody.really
Sep 12 2019 at 1:54pm
I guess I don’t find the overall shape of the graph so surprising. But I suspect plenty of self-identified libertarians might disagree about the appropriate response to the questions.
1: Should there be a prohibition on being able to buy yourself out of a jail term? Arguably, society sentences criminals to jail to promote society’s interests. A volunteer might willingly serve time in lieu of a criminal, but that volunteer does not “own” the interest that the jail time was designed to defend.
Because libertarians generally oppose fraud, I expect libertarians would oppose this transaction.
2: Should a draftee be able to hire another person to serve in his place? In general, I’d expect that society creates the draft in order to get more military-aged men/people into the military. Society may not care whether the draftee is random person A or random person B. (This contrasts with the case of incarceration, where society cares VERY MUCH that the homicidal maniac, not random person B, is the one locked behind bars.)
But that may not be the end of the analysis.
Society may also have an interest in promoting a sense of equitably shared social burdens. “Will you give all you can give so that our banner may advance? Some will fall and some will live; will you stand up and take your chance?” If it becomes clear that rich people can buy their way out of the draft, this might erode social cohesion—a factor not remedies by a transaction between two willing parties.
More significantly, there’s some risk that the military would not get random person A for random person B, but rather healthy person B might contract with sick person A to take his place. The military would then be stuck managing sick person A—impeding rather than promoting its mission.
Standard contract theory—the kind of theory that libertarians generally embrace—recognizes that duties of personal service cannot be assigned without the consent of all affected parties. Because military service is personal service, the military should have to grant consent before A could be substituted for B.
I could understand a libertarian opposing the draft, and therefore approving of this transaction as a means to evade/sabotage the draft. But otherwise, I expect a libertarian would oppose transactions that undermine conventional norms of contract law.
3: Should people be able to buy “adoption rights for orphans”?
This begs the question: Who owns adoption rights for orphans, and under what terms? I’d guess that people who hold these rights hold them in trust for the benefit of the child. In that case, maybe it would make sense to auction off child custody rights, and to use the proceeds of the auction to create a trust fund for the kid.
But otherwise, it’s not clear how an putting kids up for sale would promote the best interest of the child. If permitting D to take custody of the child would actually promote the kid’s best interest, I expect the kid’s interest would be further promoted by permitting D to keep her money—that is, NOT creating a market system for child custody. And if permitting D to adopt a kid would NOT be in the kid’s best interest, I can’t see how selling the kid would be consistent with the terms of the trust.
What each of these examples have in common is the idea that the person doing the selling may not “own” the interest being sold. It is far from clear that libertarians would support basically fraudulent transactions.
Jon Murphy
Sep 12 2019 at 5:21pm
It’s not clear to me why you think #1 involves fraud, #2 breaches some contract norm, or #3 promotes fraud. Or, for that matter, why you think there’s a running theme of “the idea that the person doing the selling may not “own” the interest being sold.” I don’t see that theme at all. It just seems imputed in there.
Iskander
Sep 12 2019 at 3:26pm
Wasn’t “You’re all a bunch of socialists” what Von Mises supposedly said at one of the first meetings of the Mont Pelerin society? To a meeting involving Milton Friedman and George Stigler!
Wade
Sep 12 2019 at 4:35pm
I love this, and I hope it’s true!
Keith K.
Sep 17 2019 at 4:29pm
It absolutely was Mises and if I am not mistaken it was at a meeting of either the Mont Pelerin Society. I think the comment had to do with more or less everybody but Mises accepting the premise of some welfare program and they were discussing how best to implement it and this is what Mises said to them.
Jon Murphy
Sep 12 2019 at 5:18pm
If I recall correctly, I think it was Hayek, not Mises
Iskander
Sep 12 2019 at 5:26pm
Hayek organised the meeting so I don’t think he’d be rude! Reason cite Milton and Rose Friedman’s memoirs for the anecdote. https://reason.com/2018/09/08/youre-all-a-bunch-of-socialist/
Jon Murphy
Sep 12 2019 at 5:55pm
Then I guess I didn’t recall correctly lol. Thanks!
Daniel Klein
Sep 16 2019 at 9:16am
I glanced at the paper and have two comments regarding the figure reproduced here.
The groups of individuals come from campus student groups: (1) Libertarian Party and a Rand-Hayek group, (2) Republican Party, (3) Democratic Party, (4) Socialist Workers Party and affiliated groups (p. 856). Why not call the groups libertarian, Republican, Democrat, socialist?
Second, they create a moral-outrage index from a slew of questions, including about whether the activities are “sad”, whether they are “tragic,” etc. It would be nice to see the simple data, question by question. I wonder whether such granularity might show that the Republicans are not as much like the Dems and Socialists as the figure suggests. Apologies if this point is covered in the paper, again I only glanced quickly.
Daniel Klein
Sep 16 2019 at 9:28am
David Friedman candidly remarks that perhaps “my moral judgments are ex post rationalizations of the world I live or the conclusions of my economic analysis.”
We tend to think that libertarians are libertarians because of their moral attitudes. But it could be that libertarians have the moral attitudes they do to some extent because they’re libertarians.
Perhaps the paper touches on this point, I only glanced at it.
Comments are closed.