Notes of many things 5

1.

Risk management is often code for a form of class warfare in which powerful people make their risks a problem for other, weaker people to manage.

I’ve recently found out about a disturbing case in which a University of Sydney student was threatened with expulsion for writing “From the River to the Sea” on a whiteboard in an empty classroom. Obviously, that’s a foul act by the administrators and you can, and should, be very angry about that.

But I’m interested in what this reveals about our world more broadly. I think we can best understand it under the category of risk management- a Kudzu vine of business management that, like so many other ills, started in the seventies. Doubtless, the leadership of Sydney University are personally supportive of Zionism, but I doubt they’d care much about someone using a whiteboard marker to write on the board if it were wholly up to them. Rather, they are concerned with reputational risk.

Social media increased the risk to the reputation of corporate bodies like the University of Sydney. Rather than bear this risk with grace, many have bought in Draconian rules restricting expression. The principle is always the same— make the risk someone else’s problem. In this case, this was achieved by curtailing freedom of political expression through a creepy “Campus Access Policy”.

Take another, quite different example. Think what you like about workplace dating, which obviously has dangers under even ideal conditions, but a blanket ban on dating in the workplace is, frankly, a bit anti-human. It is the responsibility of everyone not to sexually harass their workmates, but it is also the responsibility of each employer to prevent sexual harassment. There are obviously ways of dating and “asking out” that are not sexual harassment, and it is our responsibility to adhere to those norms, and the responsibility of the workplace to protect against the risks of non-adherence.

Rather than bear this responsibility and risk in good humor, many businesses have responded with blanket bans on workplace romance for the sake of risk management and minimizing liability. In other words, rather than shoulder their burden, they’ve just the category of “risk management” to make it other people’s problems by banning innocent activities.

Endless hiring processes with sixty million rounds of interviews are- once again- big business refusing to decently accept the risk inherent in the hiring processes. Instead, they have made it other people’s problem- both the applicants and, ironically, other businesses [since, presumably, the applicants with alleged red flags they reject will ultimately be hired elsewhere].

But even describing it in terms of shifting danger, in a way, gives it too much credence. Much of risk management is executives making up shadows to jump at in order to justify their jobs. Studies suggest corporations routinely overestimate the real risk of torts, and when it comes to reputational risks, executives are often in a bubble that distorts how much the public really cares about certain topics. Looking at at things from this point of view we see another relationship between risk management and class warfare. Risk management is a coven of silver spoon vampires in legal compliance and HR making their livelihood by transferring paranoia, worry, and restriction from CEOs and boards with unrealistic fears, to employees and the public who now face very real and onerous restrictions on their lives.

There’s nothing surprising about this. Class warfare is often not rational- it is a reflex. Employers have always been worried about controlling their employees in a way that goes beyond the strictly rational. It is plain that they resent employment costs in a way that does not extend to other costs. Rents never excite their concerns so much as wages do. A hundred times the energy is spent on preventing “time theft” by employees than is spent on preventing the underusage of rented space, even though both are extremely common.

2.

Nonconformity, all else being equal, has moral value. There is a debate [*], but female genital mutilation likely started as a way of signaling fidelity. When it was first adopted it presumably gave its initial practitioners an advantage in the marriage market. Eventually, however, in some regions, it became essential or near essential.

It wasn’t just that if you didn’t engage in genital mutilation your daughter lacked an (apparently) attractive quality that other women had, it was worse than that. If you were the one person who refused to get your daughter mutilated in an area where frequency was at, or close to 100% you sent out a signal.

At best, you were a little bit weird- not great for marrying up. At worst, your family cared so little for fidelity that you were unwilling to make the fidelity signal- perhaps your family was lackadaisical about matters like cheating- and that’s a signal in itself.

The practice started out giving an advantage to a small number of families in the marriage market, and in the end, gave essentially no advantage, imposed costs on all women, and punished women and their families who wouldn’t conform.

There are many practices like FGM which have this structure. Some of them involve even greater harm. Fortunately, almost all are not nearly so harmful, but they are destructive in their own way:

a. Insisting men wear suits to show “professionalism”

b. Not taking all your allocated days off work to show you’re keen about work.

c. Forbidding men to wear dresses

d. Setting a standard that both men and women are supposed to shave “down there”

e. Requiring women to wear makeup to go outside

f. Male circumcision in some contexts (“I don’t want my boy to look weird to the others”)

In many of these cases, if you do not conform you will be doubly punished. It is not just that you haven’t done the desired thing- that’s bad enough- but worse, there must be something especially odd about you and/or your family for you to be one of a handful of people who won’t get with the program. Maybe you’re too poor to buy a suit. Maybe you’re a political radical. Maybe you’re taking all your days off because you’re unambitious and not a team player.

This is why, when you see a behavior that imposes a cost, for which conformity is expected, but which provides no public benefit beyond signaling, you are doing a moral service if you refuse to comply with it. You are contributing- in however large or small a way, to human liberation.

This is also why functionalist explanations of social norms are so often ridiculous. Sometimes they serve individuals, not societies- yes- but even more than that, sometimes they used to serve individuals, but now we are all trapped and no one is gaining any real benefit. We’ve all bound our feet, so there’s no marriage market reward for doing it- just a punishment.

It is at least meritorious to resist such incentives when you can, and one might even argue that if you have the opportunity- and in at least some of the cases listed above- it is morally wrong not to resist these forms of social trap.

Footnote: I’m going to do something I generally try to avoid doing and deliberately take a stand on a factual issue that is the subject of a live debate and which I haven’t researched extensively. I’ll lay my cards on the table though so you can make up your own mind. There is a view that FGM did not originate largely as a signal of sexual fidelity used to control women, but I find that so incredibly hard to credit. Doubtless FGM has complex cultural origins, but I’m willing to bet a big chunk of it is exactly what it looks like. There are numerous cultures that have countless practices that all seem designed to control and suppress women, and time and time again anthropologists come along and say “well acskhually even though there is a repeating pattern of behaviour that makes sense as an attempt to control women, this particular instance is really about some deeply culturally embedded specificity and not what it appears to be- not the obvious attempt to control paternity and dominate women.” At best this seems like typical academic contrarianism. At worst it seems like a misguided attempt to invert Western imperialist narratives and deny that now subaltern cultures also have the capacity to do awful things, turning into apologism and a weird form of infantilization to boot.

3.

A group of people convinced themselves that anything that sounds edgy and depressing is true, and pursued a hitherto unknown form of self-harm publicly on the internet.

Perhaps this will sound ridiculous, but I have seen enough of “grim truths” manospherists to see their similarities to “pro-ana” and “pro-cutting” social media.

The straight men who form the manosphere are the worst in this regard, but they have imitators from both sides of the political spectrum, and every sex and gender combination you could imagine.

4.

Society has some bad incentives around unemployment. Firstly, some voters have incentives to keep it high (business owners, shareholders) for obvious reasons. Secondly, those with secure employment may find an increase from, say, 5 to 8 percent unemployment not of direct concern. Finally, to the extent there is a tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, the nature of the electorate favors concern about inflation (moderate impact on everyone) over unemployment (extreme impact on a few people) since a vote can only flip once.

Here’s part of the solution- social unemployment insurance. Unemployment insurance raises the cost of having people unemployed for the electorate- it socializes the cost of unemployment- driving the electorate towards pro-employment policies. This effect of unemployment insurance may partially (or conceivably even wholly) countervail the tendency of unemployment insurance to reduce employment by giving people an alternative means of survival other than work. But once we start thinking about incentives on the electorate like this we see that there are a lot of them- and they are rarely considered.

Have you ever noticed, for example, that relative income effects give us an incentive to resist people becoming much richer than us, but that progressive taxation countervails this? Taxation makes us the partial beneficiaries of others’ income, and progressive taxation, and progressive taxation makes this especially true of a dollar going to the wealthy. Indeed taxation, especially progressive taxation, changes our rational position on the earnings of others from mildly antipathic to positively ecstatic. By giving society a stake in big earnings, high taxes may thus alter policy to encourage high earnings, and this may wholly or partly counteract effects on income caused by any disincentive to work

5.

Have you ever noticed that almost all political philosophy- ideal or non-ideal takes the position of the state? Not the position of the voter. Not the position of the activist. Not even the position of the bureaucrat who has some heavily constrained influence on the state, but the state itself (albeit perhaps constrained- as in non-ideal theory). A strange contrast to our experience of politics.

6.

Here’s an argument for moral anti-realism, in the sense of rejecting stance-independent moral facts that exist ‘apart from’ humans. On its face, it’s not exceptionally strong, yet I find it persuasive.

1. If moral realism were true, we would be inclined to think morality should make sense. It should have some kind of inherent cohesion- “Serve God”, “Maximize happiness”, “Exemplify human nature”, or “Obey the categorical imperative”. It would be surprising if were it just a set of disconnected rules. An independent moral truth that is just a list of disconnected principles and rules that would take countless pages to write out, and is not grounded in any more general ideas, but which we just so happen to find attractive, seems inherently unlikely to be true independently of human psychology.

2. But morality doesn’t make sense and attempts to make it make sense lead to monstrosities in at least some cases. For example, I think utilitarianism works for most situations, but when it fails, it fails spectacularly. Further,

3. Ergo, stance of independent moral realism is false.

7.

One of the more pleasant aspects of the revealed preferences view of human behavior is that it makes you much more optimistic about people. No! Really. Consider La Rochefoucauld's “Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors.", “However rare true love may be, true friendship is even rarer.” or “Most women mourn the death of their lovers less because they loved them than to seem worthy of being loved.” I suspect on a sentimental level- the level of feeling- there is probably some truth to all of these- secret unseemly wantings and flashes of desire certainly romp around in our hearts. However, seen from the lens of revealed preferences Rocheffoucauld’s maxims are far too cynical. Consider the wife whose grief is called into question. How much would she pay should a genie appear in front of her and offer to take money for her husband back? Or the grateful friend so impugned above- how much would he be willing to pay should the aforementioned genie appear and offer to save his friend from falling rocks? Quite a bit, I think. Hence, if we take revealed preferences, and not the tumult of sentiments, as decisive in the question of what we really care about, we end up less cynical a reversal of the usual way of looking at revealed preferences!

8.

The fundamental tragedy of governance is that you have a clear majority of technocrats who want to reduce inequality, and a clear majority of the public want to reduce inequality- but this never happens in part because they want to use incompatible methods. The typical member of the public believes that instead of using transfers we should alter the structure of the economy so that the market gives people “what they deserve”- which in their mind entails much less inequality, much greater rewards for useful labor, etc. The typical technocrat believes that there is no such thing as a “deserved” market wage and that we should restructure the tax and transfer system to reduce inequality. The technocrat forbids rigging market results. The public forbids direct and unseemly transfers. As a result of their lack of coordination (and, of course, for many other reasons) the rich hold onto the status quo. Technocrats need to get over themselves and accept that predistribution and rigged markets are the only way that people are going to accept a reduction of inequality, even if it involves an unnecessary reduction in aggregate output.

9.

Is there anything redemptive in the culture of online MAGA, particularly the younger groypers? Anything the left could appeal to in trying to lathe off a slice of them?

One candidate would be their hatred of HR. Now to be sure, a lot of the reasons they hate it are: 1. Statistically, it’s mainly women. 2. It stops them from calling people “retards”. But still, they have made valid critiques of the corporate-HR complex. The six million interviews you need to do to get an entry-level job. The all-pervasive infantilization. The refusal to respect work-life boundaries. The transformation of human life into a series of “risk factors” to be managed.

Some of these people think that Trump is going to give them their dream job. When he doesn’t, and when people like Rufo meet them with scorn, and when being a worker is still a micromanagerial hell, and when AI is starting to make it much, much worse, we should try to nab em’.

10.

At some point the “thrive-survive” theory of the left and right was popular. On this view, the left believes that we have what we need to live gorgeous lives, whereas the right is focused on surviving.

But at least when it comes to my own form of leftism, and the most popular form of rightism, I think things are backwards. The right represents unfettered consumption, the left represents “planting trees whose shade you will never sit in.” The only context in which the right is particularly interested in survival is when the threat can be ascribed to a specific and malicious human enemy agency.

Nowhere is this misconception about the role of the left and the right clearer than in the much-misused concept of decadence- a concept the left should reclaim.

As a culture, we haven’t got a clear conception of what decadence is. This is, in part, because the people who talk all the time about decadence are right-wing, but right-wingers largely support decadence. Decadence has very little, if anything, to do with lots of sex or gay sex.

Decadence, simply, is eating the seed grain. It is a choice by “society” to indulge rather than build. That indulgence can be impatience, pleasure, hate, or all manner of things.

But “society” cannot be taken as a whole. We are not equally powerful, therefore, we are not equally culpable. A society as a whole can be decadent, even if most of its people are not, if its ruling class supports decadence.

When a society lowers its public investment rate, that’s decadence.

When a society lowers its private investment rate- e.g. by demanding short-term dividends from corporations rather than trying to build something- that’s decadence.

When a society stops building houses to increase the value of its existing stock through forced scarcity, that’s decadence.

When people compete by signaling their value through buying expensive shit, rather than trying to make something- a firm, a monument, a donation- whatever- for the public good that’s decadence.

When mewling idiots on the internet convince themselves that only a tiny circle of people are actual human beings who matter, and everyone else is an “NPC” or just “Biodiesel” or whatever, that’s decadence.

Shrinking your circle of concern so you don’t have to think about the poor- heedless of the harms we do, and the way the floor underneath us rots? Decadence.

When people destroy social trust and seethe in hate and bile towards whole genders, races, age groups, whatever- that’s decadence.

Heating the planet without consideration or control? Decadence.

Destroying capacities you don’t understand with effects unknown because you have a vague sense you’ve been collectively disrespected by people with college degrees? Decadence.

Building new AI faster and faster because it’s exciting, heedless of the dangers? Absolute decadence.

11.

I want to talk about a corner of the autistic lifeworld you’ve probably never thought.

I hesitate to even give such assurances, but I am a bona fide autist, diagnosed in the early nineties. Hand flapping, obsessive interests, no eye contact, the relevant cognitive profile of strengths and weaknesses, the whole schmoozle. If you believe “fake” autistic diagnoses are common, I have an excellent case I’m not one of them.

At a certain point, maybe in my early to mid-twenties, I got good at making friends and achieved a measure of above-average popularity. Nothing spectacular, but I am clearly (reasonably) well-liked, perhaps even in the top five percent.

And yet, something very subtle is still off. I can read people quite well. I know what they’re thinking and feeling better than most, yet still in many contexts I cannot translate this theoretical knowledge into charm. I’m quite good at making people laugh, but not at putting them at ease- at least not at first.

Many people seek my friendly company, but I’ve never had a long-term boyfriend despite being decent-looking, maybe even a little above average. Partly this is just that I’m picky, and a bit neurotic, and gays aren’t always the settling type- but this can’t be the only answer. But it’s more than that. I see the strange looks I get. I see the surprise in people’s eyes when they realize I do have quite a few friends.

There is something off- alien- about the way I hold my face, the intonations of my voice, my posture- some or all of these- that no amount of theoretical knowledge of how people work will fix. I’m happy with my lot, it has advantages and disadvantages, but I am sad for those in a similar position who have it worse. About a third of people I know eventually guess I’m autistic, about a third accept it when I tell them, and about a third refuse to believe it.

This is, in part, why I believe that a better world has to be one where we’re just nicer to everyone. Trying to patch things the way much of the identity-conscious left has by banning explicit ableism, classism, or whatever will never catch everything. There will always be people who just don’t fit in. Who rubs you the wrong way a bit? Who, despite having no discernable, concrete form of “marginalization” that you are aware of just don’t sit right with you.

We have to learn to love all people.

12.

It’s very interesting to me, and I think it might be a good topic for a political philosophy thesis, how we tend to think of politicians and public servants as fiduciaries in a limiting and dangerous sense.

I was talking with a public servant about a particular case in which there was an argument before the courts about whether or not some government contractor workers had been underpaid. There was a widespread perception that the government, in ferociously defending the case, had done the wrong thing, that their case was weak, and that they should settle. “Still,” the public servant said to me “It’s the public’s money, we have to hold onto it if we can”.

An attitude like this poses a moral risk to the public. The government is the public’s representative, and if they, claiming to represent the public, do morally wrong things, or fail to do the right thing, that is a kind of injury they have done to the public. If I do wrong things in your name, I have injured not just the subject of those wrongs, but you too (and this is true regardless of whether or not I was properly authorized as a representative by you). All too often though we don’t think about it that way- we think that the government has protected the public if it has acted as a material fiduciary, protecting the public’s material interest, and forget that the government must also be an ethical fiduciary, protecting the public’s ethical interests. Perhaps I’m simply naive, yet— I think it is not just what is right but it is even what the people desire.