Having spoken with professional economists about this exact issue, I have been frequently shocked and dismayed to find that many of them have absolutely no qualms about weighting people's interests in inverse proportion to their marginal utility of wealth. They acknowledge that we are valuing rich people more, and they're just... fine with that.
Maybe it's out of a sense of convenience, where unweighted cost-benefit analysis is easy and good welfare analysis is hard, or maybe it's a devotion to capitalism above all else (the way many of them seem to want to transfer more and more government functions to the private sector would also support this account), or maybe it's simply an unwillingness to change how things have always been done. But whatever the reason, I can tell you it's a pervasive view, even among center-left economists. Economists who absolutely want us to increase taxes and transfers are often still opposed to weighted cost-benefit analysis.
The simple reason why this psychometric method does not work directly, is that "welfare" currently is optimized for tapping latent productivity (think fracking) and reducing damages (think smoke stacks), not the "wellbeing" per capita. If this is the case, the unspoken intermediary rule would be: (a) reducing the amount of damage done by those with low intelligence, since the bottom 10%ile are so anti-productive they are barred from the military (b) rehabilitate those with high intelligence, since every 9 IQ increase yield ~10x return in productivity (from IFS to PumpkinPerson's conjecture).
One of the difficulties in forming even a temporary coalition to depose unweighted CBA paradigms will be that everyone is suspicious of what comes next. It’s a Pareto improvement in the sense that your utilitarian weighting system is more likely to approach at least a locally-maximal area of the economic modeling fitness landscape… but what if my hill is higher than yours, and we’ll never be able to reach it if we try your idea first?
This seems to come up quite a lot as a theme in broader leftist in-fighting as well. I’ll avoid mentioning any specific topics here since doing so tends to just re-create the argument without generating any truly novel ideas, but I think anyone who’s tried to engage with multiple left-leaning subdomains will have encountered this at least once: Carol, Dylan, and the poor fellow with the traumatic brain injury get very suspicious that the proposed improvement will be enough of an improvement to obviate the coalition and placate the masses, but would not be as much of an improvement as the specific improvements they wanted to see, and refuse to pay the opportunity cost by allowing that things need not suck this badly, indefinitely.
That seems like a very cynical and pessimistic view to take. We're not going to do something that we know will make things better, because we think it might make it harder to make things even better still later?
Suppose there are three ways of doing things, A, B, and C. The current way of doing things is A, and a majority agrees that either B or C would be better than A, but is split between whether B is better than C or vice-versa.
You're saying that a supporter of C should still oppose B, because if we transition from A to B, we won't be able to transition to C? If C is really better, why not? Why would it be so much harder to convince people to switch from B to C than from A to C?
I guess I can see how it might make things a little harder, but it should only make it *much* harder if the difference between B and C is small--that is, if we should basically be happy with B anyway!
If the difference between B and C is large, we should still be able to convince people to switch to C later, and at least we can have B in the meantime instead of A. To refuse to accept B is the very essence of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I am saying that, yes. In the most recent election cycle, my state had a proposal in place to “enhance” a corporate minimum tax (in practice, it would _create_ one because the current is on the order of _one thousand dollars_ el oh el) and earmark the revenue for a UBI program.
Many local liberals I talked to about this gave hesitant approval for the _idea_ and a willingness to _consider_ the implementation, but ultimately said they would vote against it (and it was voted down _very decisively_) because some other favorite policy of theirs (like a job-sharing program, means-tested entitlements, a UBI with some other formula for collecting the tax) — _none of which have gathered enough signatures to go on a ballot like this one did_ — would be preferable to them.
People will literally let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to concrete ballot proposals, but when it’s a first-past-the-post election for a person to go into an executive position, suddenly I’m the crazy one!
—Er, I am *not* saying should. I have been trying to say that this appears to be what happens, and in a way that feels more like a force of nature (or at least a strong current in our pool) than something we can fix just by deciding to do better.
Having spoken with professional economists about this exact issue, I have been frequently shocked and dismayed to find that many of them have absolutely no qualms about weighting people's interests in inverse proportion to their marginal utility of wealth. They acknowledge that we are valuing rich people more, and they're just... fine with that.
Maybe it's out of a sense of convenience, where unweighted cost-benefit analysis is easy and good welfare analysis is hard, or maybe it's a devotion to capitalism above all else (the way many of them seem to want to transfer more and more government functions to the private sector would also support this account), or maybe it's simply an unwillingness to change how things have always been done. But whatever the reason, I can tell you it's a pervasive view, even among center-left economists. Economists who absolutely want us to increase taxes and transfers are often still opposed to weighted cost-benefit analysis.
The simple reason why this psychometric method does not work directly, is that "welfare" currently is optimized for tapping latent productivity (think fracking) and reducing damages (think smoke stacks), not the "wellbeing" per capita. If this is the case, the unspoken intermediary rule would be: (a) reducing the amount of damage done by those with low intelligence, since the bottom 10%ile are so anti-productive they are barred from the military (b) rehabilitate those with high intelligence, since every 9 IQ increase yield ~10x return in productivity (from IFS to PumpkinPerson's conjecture).
One of the difficulties in forming even a temporary coalition to depose unweighted CBA paradigms will be that everyone is suspicious of what comes next. It’s a Pareto improvement in the sense that your utilitarian weighting system is more likely to approach at least a locally-maximal area of the economic modeling fitness landscape… but what if my hill is higher than yours, and we’ll never be able to reach it if we try your idea first?
This seems to come up quite a lot as a theme in broader leftist in-fighting as well. I’ll avoid mentioning any specific topics here since doing so tends to just re-create the argument without generating any truly novel ideas, but I think anyone who’s tried to engage with multiple left-leaning subdomains will have encountered this at least once: Carol, Dylan, and the poor fellow with the traumatic brain injury get very suspicious that the proposed improvement will be enough of an improvement to obviate the coalition and placate the masses, but would not be as much of an improvement as the specific improvements they wanted to see, and refuse to pay the opportunity cost by allowing that things need not suck this badly, indefinitely.
That seems like a very cynical and pessimistic view to take. We're not going to do something that we know will make things better, because we think it might make it harder to make things even better still later?
Suppose there are three ways of doing things, A, B, and C. The current way of doing things is A, and a majority agrees that either B or C would be better than A, but is split between whether B is better than C or vice-versa.
You're saying that a supporter of C should still oppose B, because if we transition from A to B, we won't be able to transition to C? If C is really better, why not? Why would it be so much harder to convince people to switch from B to C than from A to C?
I guess I can see how it might make things a little harder, but it should only make it *much* harder if the difference between B and C is small--that is, if we should basically be happy with B anyway!
If the difference between B and C is large, we should still be able to convince people to switch to C later, and at least we can have B in the meantime instead of A. To refuse to accept B is the very essence of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I am saying that, yes. In the most recent election cycle, my state had a proposal in place to “enhance” a corporate minimum tax (in practice, it would _create_ one because the current is on the order of _one thousand dollars_ el oh el) and earmark the revenue for a UBI program.
Many local liberals I talked to about this gave hesitant approval for the _idea_ and a willingness to _consider_ the implementation, but ultimately said they would vote against it (and it was voted down _very decisively_) because some other favorite policy of theirs (like a job-sharing program, means-tested entitlements, a UBI with some other formula for collecting the tax) — _none of which have gathered enough signatures to go on a ballot like this one did_ — would be preferable to them.
People will literally let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to concrete ballot proposals, but when it’s a first-past-the-post election for a person to go into an executive position, suddenly I’m the crazy one!
—Er, I am *not* saying should. I have been trying to say that this appears to be what happens, and in a way that feels more like a force of nature (or at least a strong current in our pool) than something we can fix just by deciding to do better.