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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing. This makes me confused, as the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face. By "strong welfare state" I mean something akin to the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) in which the necessities of life (healthcare, housing, minimum subsistence) are essentially guaranteed, while maintaining a market economy.

Premise #1: We want to maximize pleasure (utility) and minimize pain (disutility).

Premise #2: Within the unit of people we care about, we care about everyone equally.

Premise #3: Central planning doesn't work very well, so we want to maintain a market economy.

Premise #4: We already have a fairly industrialized, advanced capitalist economy.

ARGUMENT:

  1. Being in poverty is extremely bad for people's wellbeing, both in terms of physical and psychological health. It is extremely unpleasant for people to be homeless or hungry, or having to make decisions like choosing between heat in the winter, medicine, or food. Poverty sucks -- it is painful not being able to afford the essentials of life.

  2. Being afraid of falling into poverty is also bad for people's wellbeing -- it is a major source of worry and concern because everyone knows that being impoverished sucks and is painful. So the existence of poverty is a cause of pain for a much larger group than those actually impoverished. Fear of poverty also leads people to refuse to take risks to avoid the pain of poverty, which leads to less pleasure.

  3. Diminishing marginal utility. At a certain point, another yacht for the ultrawealthy rich guy is not going to make him significantly happier. Money can't buy love, you can't take it with you, etc. etc. However, charging that guy more in taxes and using those resources to eliminate poverty will make the groups mentioned in #1 and #2 significantly more happy.

  4. We should be OK with high taxes in exchange for eliminating poverty by directly providing the necessities of life for those who cannot afford them. The pain avoided by eliminating poverty outweighs the pain imposed by the taxes (or the pleasure that is lost for the wealthy) because of the principle of diminishing marginal utility. Poverty causes more unhappiness than luxuries cause happiness.

Responses to obvious objections:

a. "Eliminating poverty will cause more pain in the long run because the economy will collapse or at the very least growth will slow, leading to a decline in living standards for everyone." Response: This doesn't seem to have happened in Scandinavia. The Scandinavian countries have been strong welfare states for a long time and are still very wealthy countries, among the wealthiest in the world. They haven't had their economies collapse from having too many layabouts and such.

b. "Charging me high taxes on wealth I created infringes on my liberties/freedom". Response: This may be a coherent objection, but it's not a utilitarian objection, it's a rights-based objection.

c. "The Scandinavian countries only could do this because they are ethnically homogenous, tightly knit societies. Look at Sweden right now, it's falling apart as they let in more immigrants." Response: This goes more to the political problem with instituting this system rather than the desirability of the system itself. The fact that present-day social democrats are pro immigration does not make immigration a necessary part of a social democracy. One can easily imagine a social democracy with Japan-style immigration restrictions.

d. "I only care about those who are deserving to not be in poverty; I don't care about everyone, I'm fine with people being in poverty if they do nothing to better themselves, or if they are in the outgroup." Response: This is also not really a utilitarian objection. Who "deserves" what is a question of justice, of deontology. But here, we are trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This is difficult enough, boiling down all of human experience into two buckets, "pleasure" and "pain". If you add a whole 'nother set of buckets, "good people", "medium people", "bad people"... then you've really abandoned the exercise and are just doing deontology with extra steps. The pain someone experiences from not having housing or food or heat during the winter is plainly real and sincerely felt, even if you believe that that person should have done something different to avoid being in that state.

the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face

But us Americans don't need abstract arguments based on a very naive understanding for this. We had the Great Society and the War on Poverty. Which I don't believe right wingers like the consequences of. I believe the standard criticism is that these programs produce single family households that ruin the development of boys, foster multi-genetational dependence on handouts, longer term are to blame for high crime rates and increased drug use, etc, etc. All of course at substantial cost to the taxpayer and feeding the ever expanding bureaucracies. Just hard failures from a right leaning point of view. I've heard this on conservative talk radio and seen it online.

So in their utilitarian calculus, these programs are clearly net negatives. So let's not make a naive utilitarian calculus, let's use the actual reasoning that the right would employ.

Are a lot of people here actually right-wing or utilitarian? I'm right-wing, but definitely not utilitarian. I don't think that's a common union of beliefs anywhere, let alone here.

Well I would classify as right-wing and utilitarian. A materialist, empirically-driven ev. psych, sociobiological and economic pov I think ends up at least vaguely there.

People can quibble with what falls under the umbrella of "welfare state." I think something like seat belt and helmet laws would, and do, ruffle the feathers of a lot of natural rights libertarians but doesn't rise to the level of "holy shot this is socialism," which would put it unequivocally in the left wing, non-conservative camp.

Interesting! So there are right-wing utilitarians here. Well then, I hope you can provide him a good answer to his concerns.

To be a true utilitarian, one should consider all tools available, whether they be aligned with one’s ideology or not. One should also consider how long the effects of the intended goal is planned to last; simply doing something to have done it, regardless of how quickly the effect fades, is surface-level utilitarianism, practically a strawman version.

To that end, if the goal is human happiness, the tool used to get there shouldn’t be one which has caused misery whenever used. Before we commit to a “welfare state,” it must be a type which does not fail, which doesn’t grow to consume all capital while simply maintaining the status quo.

Here’s one better tool:

The FairTax proposal would turn the American tax revenue system (which is part of the current half-hearted welfare state) from a foot on the brake of the economy to a foot on the accelerator. It wouldn’t aim to eliminate poverty, but it would tear down some of the fences between impoverishment and prosperity, and make the cost of government no burden to the poor. It would automation-proof government revenue, preventing one aspect of the automationpocalypse. It would remove tax hassle, tax favoritism, and some of the class war’s acrimony. It would even lay the pipes for an eventual universal welfare program.

Would you like to hear more?

FairTax continues to be a large sales tax, no?

Nordic welfare states collect a huge part of their revenue through a value-added tax, so it doesn't really conflict with a welfare state. Of course they also have other taxes, but then again, there's nothing preventing that, either.

FairTax continues to be a large gross receipts tax, yes, the rate calculated to completely replace the personal + corporate income tax + investment taxes, with a monthly rebate which is calculated to be more progressive than the regressiveness of the sales tax.

It has some aspects each of the main political ideologies say they want from tax reform, but the main thing it does is reduce the power the federal government has over the individual, assuming cash (anonymous money) is still in use by the time it’s implemented. In that, it’s a libertarian, market-based reform, which is the third wing of the bird.

The right-wing/left-wing dichotomy is so intuitive that it naturally comes to mind when discussing politics, yet it is so flawed that it makes hash out of OP’s question. The political spectrum is more properly visualized as a triangular gamut, not a two-dimensional spectrum. The three points are the three basic methods of organizing a society of people who don’t always agree:

  1. Hierarchical Authoritarianism: whoever’s in charge decides, often considered right-wing.

  2. Collective Socialism: the collective will decides, often considered left-wing.

  3. Market Libertarianism: people make bargains and contracts so each can decide, either considered centrism or extreme right wing.

America is largely already market libertarianism with some collectivist and some authoritarian characteristics. As a libertarian Republican, I believe that generally the more such characteristics we add, the worse the situation will get for the poor and the weak. Every fiber of my being would tell me to reject authoritarian or collectivist policies which compromise that libertarian character of America, because any positive effect would be outweighed by eventual negative consequences.

So, I am bound by my moral goals to fulfill the core societal improvement which is envisioned by a welfare state by reducing collectivism or authoritarianism. That means some level of volunteerism or market action.

Taking yachts from ultrarich to make free vaccines for poor is a net win. However, if you take yachts from ultrarich to make cash payments for poor and that money gets spent on addictive drugs, you have a net loss.

Consider me a right-winger. I definitely support a lot of redistribution, including subsidies for reproduction of high IQ young poor people and subsidizing PGS for everyone.

A lot of data disagrees with you. Like we did have a rgdp trend rate increase after the Trump tax cut. So there’s no disagreement with being utilitarian and right wing. Your central primace hasn’t been supported.

I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing. This makes me confused, as the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face.

Is it really a given that you can't be right wing and support a strong welfare state? Because I would say I fall into that category. Though my right-wing predilection for small government leads me to prefer something like a universal basic income, rather than a complex constellation of wealth transfers mediated by a bunch of different government agencies and NGOs.

If you are in the US, I would say yes that is the case.

The bedrock platform of the right in the US above everything is anti-collectivism. The Republicans are more likely to institute a national popular vote and ban guns before approving any sort of wealth transfer.

Your argument conflates "right wing" with "Republican". Perhaps being Republican necessitates being against a welfare state, but not being right leaning.

Republicans may not be the right we want, but it is the right we get in America.

Not at all. Libertarians are often lumped in as right, as was the Tea Party, and so on. And even people who don't support a party like that may still consider themselves on the right without supporting the Republican party.

Yes. I mean in terms of electable major party. Like in the halls of Congress Republicans are the right we get.

I used the repubs as the current Right party in power, but the point remains.

I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing.

I think there is a fundamental mistake here. This place often engages in utilitarian arguments but I don't think one should then conclude that taking utilitarian arguments seriously actually obliges one to utilitarianism. When taking an assertion by a utilitarian seriously it can but useful to engage with them on their own terms in order to show that even under their framework their doesn't hold merit. For instance if my primary reason for being pro-2A is the ward against tyranny but my interlocutor is attempting to make an argument that making all guns illegal would reduce suffering from interpersonal violence and I think it would not it may be worth my time to engage on this premise because if I win there it's a total victory for my side. More abstractly if policy X is thought to cause A and B and I find A very good and you find B very bad I can either convince you that A outweighs B, which will involve difficult value disputes or I can convince you that B is actually not a consequence on X in which case A obviously dominates. I think a lot of discussion on contentious topics in places like this are of this form, it keeps things in the 'is' rather than 'ought' territory, which is much firmer ground even if not the real bedrock of the disagreement.

However, charging that guy more in taxes and using those resources to eliminate poverty will make the groups mentioned in #1 and #2 significantly more happy.

I think a lot breaks down at this step. This is simply not how resources work. How much labor and natural resources actually go into that marginal yacht, even buying the shaky premise that marginal yachts are actually what the marginal ultra-wealthy dollar goes to rather than capital reinvestment. Money is an imperfect proxy for resources, one simply cannot transmute yacht materials into quality inner city housing. At best it can modestly reorganize where efforts are spent. You can throw all the money in the world at wringing water from a stone and end up with nothing to show for it.

I'm not really an opponent to welfare spending and quite a fan of things like very generous UBI if designed properly. But I can absolutely see that as things stand in the US where I'm most familiar drastically increasing welfare spending is much more likely to primarily go to lining the pockets of my ideological opponents, big government stooges spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per homeless person to not solve the problem, and until that's changed I have no confidence in any of this utilitarian argumentation until that is fixed. I think the trade you propose is a false one, we will tax the rich more but that tax will primarily be passed down to me as a customer of these rich people and the money taxed will ultimately have nearly no positive utility, and because the problems it attempts to solve will remain I'll see the demand for more taxes that I will ultimately bear will return again and again.

If you're left wing and utilitarian shouldn't you want to abolish the welfare state and send that money to Africa instead?

Yeah, I think that there is a fundamental tricky problem of "who you care about." For me, I care about people in my country (USA) more than other people, but I definitely do care about people in Africa as well, just not as much. If you care about nonhuman entities, maybe you want to spend all that money on abolishing the use of animals.

it usually turns out that the utilitarian thing to do is what you actually wanted to do all along anyway. By pure coincidence I'm sure.

Yes, I agree with this! It is a problem -- ultimately, you can make it come out any way you want...

Yeah, I think that there is a fundamental tricky problem of "who you care about."

Seconded. I've read many times postings for people who said they care more about animal welfare than certain people because people should be responsible about themselves. Insults that %X% are worse than animals are even more common.

There's really no reason to be surprised that utilitarians could be right-wing if you accept that some people will genuinely end up having different terminal values by which they calculate utility.

There is also a strong intellectual tradition of objecting to centralized government actions on the basis of their pure inability to deliver superior results compared to simply leaving things alone and declining to act at all. On top of the occasional tendency to genocide, wage wars of conquest, and steal from their own population. China is currently doing a genocide, Russia is doing a war of conquest, and seems both Lebanon and Sri Lanka governments were robbing their citizens blind, so these are clearly not relics of the past.

Some observed problems that government programs tend to contribute or be vulnerable to:

  • Increasing fragility

  • Black swans

  • Unintended consequences

  • Calculation problems

  • Lack of skin in the game (i.e. who suffers consequences for failure?)

  • Principal-agent problems

  • Regulatory capture

to name a few. Most of these have to do with the pure lack of reliable information about the sectors they're trying to govern and the inability to effectively use that information towards the best ends.

Most of these can be solved or mitigated by decentralizing and localizing governance, rather than depending on a single 'point of failure' which can drag everyone down.

In short, there's a fallacy that often occurs when analyzing most government-sponsored programs where the costs are hidden but the benefits are obvious. One of the scarier things about government is it's ability to shove those costs into the medium-term future so nobody in the present notices them OR to slough them off onto one particular subset of society so that anyone outside that subset doesn't really care about the costs and ignores them. Governments which have to periodically win elections particularly have an incentive to do this so as to maintain their rule.

Lets use the obvious example with all those direct 'welfare' payments during COVID, where money was sent out directly to everyone, and many employers got 'free' loans to maintain their payrolls.

Back at the time I'm sure you'd say "The utilitarian case for making direct payments to citizens and employers is strong on its face!"

And then two years hence, we have 8-9% inflation which eats up everyone's wages and makes EVERYONE poorer than they would have been otherwise.

Whoops? Are you, the good and faithful Utilitarian, tallying these costs up against the previous welfare program, or are you treating these new problems as completely novel and utterly unrelated to the earlier actions the government took, and thus still believing that the previous programs were obviously the correct and best action?

Utilitarians should care about ALL costs and benefits, even (especially?) the hidden ones.

So if you're being an honest utilitarian, and you are doing an honest assessment of a given program, it is completely possible to conclude that the overall impact of a given program was in fact a net negative and the world would have been better off had said program never been implemented.

This is especially true if you're a Free Market fundamentalist and believe that in the alternative scenario where the market had been allowed to act we would have landed on a vastly superior solution.

So perhaps the right wing utilitarians are doing a very comprehensive census of all of the detectable pros and cons in our current system and are seeing a very, very large locus of dis-utility centered around the government where it becomes clear that almost all of the functions it serves are throwing off negative externalities and causing dead-weight loss and only gets worse over time.

And thus, the conclusion becomes that if most government programs are a net negative and should not exist, this logic also applies to the government as a whole.

Honestly, I'm increasingly surprised and disheartened that utilitarians have lived through the years 2020 and 2021, got to observe the government interfering and bungling EVERY SINGLE STEP of the pandemic response, from lying to people about the nature of the disease to delaying deployment of vaccines to shutting down schools even after danger had passed.

And some of them still somehow conclude that Governments ought to be primarily responsible for disease and pandemic response.

I'm not a utilitarian, libertarian, or marxist, so your arguments do not convince me.

In pure curiosity, what sort of evidence or argument do you find convincing?

Establish your facts and construct a reasonable argument that can be derived from those facts without needing to make leaps to conclusions.

As long as utilitarianism is taken to care about future people or even present people's future utility, almost any other ethical system can be emulated in its framework by having the right priors. The operational pattern is something like "I believe [per my prior] that following ethical system X will result in greater technological progress and societal flourishing; therefore by behaving as an X-ian today and convincing other people to also be X-ians, I am actually maximising utility in the long run". In this particular context, a version of this argument that I imagine could be instantiated (and I find fairly persuasive even though I am not, by the standards of almost anyone apart from people deep in SJ, right-wing) is that something among the lines of: "Average (and even median) utility was much lower in {1800, 1400, the stone age...}. Yet, if we had decided to stop and redistribute human wealth equally at those times to maximise local {average, median} utility, the accumulation of capital and centralisation of power that enabled in the industrial revolution/colonialism/transition to agrarian societies would have been prevented and those developments wouldn't have happened, leaving us in an egalitarian but comparatively miserable stasis".

To me personally, one of the more convincing arguments supporting "socialism now, but not when we lived in caves" is something something great stagnation; more than ever before, it feels like we have hit diminishing returns from concentrating capital to enable scientific progress/letting different systems violently duke it out so that the better, more capable one may build a garden on top of the pyramid of skulls/sacrificing to Moloch. Even if further progress is in fact possible, the possible futures don't necessarily look desirable in expectation, with a lot of probability mass being on something like varying AGI apocalypses and easier nukes. Better to switch from explore to egalitarian exploit now and cash out than keep taking the bet?

There are many places one can disagree with you on empirics. The most notable is here:

Diminishing marginal utility. At a certain point, another yacht for the ultrawealthy rich guy is not going to make him significantly happier.

The marginal alternate use case for the resources is investment in future production, not yachts. The question whether resources should be devoted to providing an x-box for poor people or to building electric cars/installing heat pumps/building homes/etc.

Moreover, this argument just sort of assumes resources are available and their quantity isn't affected by our choices. But in reality, the poor people are both consumers of utility and producers of it. The actual choice we need to make is between:

  1. A person refusing to work, being given resources anyway, and a marginal house is not inhabitable because no one is available to install drywall.

  2. A person installing drywall in return for a similar quantity of resources, but now we have an extra house that someone can live in.

It is far from clear that (2) is worse than (1).

Being afraid of falling into poverty is also bad for people's wellbeing -- it is a major source of worry and concern because everyone knows that being impoverished sucks and is painful. So the existence of poverty is a cause of pain for a much larger group than those actually impoverished. Fear of poverty also leads people to refuse to take risks to avoid the pain of poverty, which leads to less pleasure.

This is interesting. Possibly we should more widely publicize exactly what it means to live in poverty in the US? I.e. make sure everyone knows that "poverty" by US standards means lots of leisure time (most poor people don't work and aren't in the labor force), no danger of hunger, free medical care, a bigger house than the average Parisian or Londoner, 1-2 cars, etc.

From what I can tell, the only thing that's particularly bad about being poor in the US is that you spend time around other poor people.

Of course, knowing these facts does take a lot of wind out of the sails of the typical leftist who wants moar wealth transfers.

Moreover, this argument just sort of assumes resources are available and their quantity isn't affected by our choices. But in reality, the poor people are both consumers of utility and producers of it.

Sure, I admit that a certain segment of the population may drop out of the workforce in a strong welfare state scenario, and that that has negative effects on everyone else. The question is whether it's worth threatening people with poverty to get them to drywall houses for less money.

This is interesting. Possibly we should more widely publicize exactly what it means to live in poverty in the US? I.e. make sure everyone knows that "poverty" by US standards means lots of leisure time (most poor people don't work and aren't in the labor force), no danger of hunger, free medical care, a bigger house than the average Parisian or Londoner, 1-2 cars, etc.

I don't think you've talked to many poor people about their situations. A lot of poor people do work and are still poor, they can easily end up with huge bills for seeking medical care so they avoid it as much as possible, and not even wealthy people can afford a house in Paris or London! But yes, "poverty isn't actually that bad" is a coherent response to my argument, I just think it's blatantly inaccurate.

The question is whether it's worth threatening people with poverty to get them to drywall houses for less money.

Yes, and this is entirely a quantitative question. You just sort of assume it away and don't engage with it.

A lot of poor people do work and are still poor,

What percentage of poor people do you believe work full time (or look for full time work) 50-52 weeks/year and are still poor?

they can easily end up with huge bills for seeking medical care so they avoid it as much as possible

Who cares? The medical care they avoid wouldn't make them healthier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experiment

"poverty isn't actually that bad" is a coherent response to my argument, I just think it's blatantly inaccurate.

Ok. Why do you think poverty is bad?

What specific goods or services do you believe poor Americans lack? And in what proportions? E.g. "25% of poor Americans lack a car" or "15% of poor Americans have less living space than the average computer programmer working for google."

See, what I'm giving you are just standard conservative talking points. Heritage and similar economically minded right wing outfits have been blogspamming BLS and Census stats about how good American poor people have it for decades. Romney repeated these talking points on his presidential campaign, and Newt Gingrich (maybe before your time) also did. Paul Krugman (the economist, not the angry guy in the NYT) did too, and he was talking about the 1980's.

Why not include and address the decades old standard argument under your "obvious objections"?

What percentage of poor people do you believe work full time (or look for full time work) 50-52 weeks/year and are still poor?

I don't know the percentage, but a lot of people work for Walmart or fast food or as a janitor/cleaner or as a day laborer or any number of poorly paying jobs where you are on the edge of subsistence, even working full time.

Why do you think poverty is bad?

The number one problem is insecurity -- having to constantly worry about stuff other people take for granted. Another problem is stigma/low social status. And obviously it's bad not being able to get all the shit that you need to live comfortably.

What specific goods or services do you believe poor Americans lack?

  • Decent housing

  • Mental health care

  • Dental care

  • Transportation (can't afford to maintain a vehicle)

  • Utilities (can't afford electricity/heat/water/air conditioning)

  • Phones/internet

  • Tampons, personal hygiene products in general

I don't know the percentage,

Let me suggest that if you want to make a utilitarian case for something, not knowing even the most basic numbers regarding things you are concerned about kind of undermines your seriousness.

In any case, I do know the percentage. It's 11%.

The number one problem is insecurity -- having to constantly worry about stuff other people take for granted. Another problem is stigma/low social status.

Do you believe their "insecurity" is a rational or irrational response to subsisting mostly on wealth transfers? How do you expect more wealth transfers to fix this?

The low status of the poor comes from their poor behavior (refusing to work, having children out of wedlock, doing drugs, etc). How do you expect more wealth transfers to fix this?

As for the specific goods and services you imagine the poor need, I'm guessing you don't know the percentage. I'm not going to cite numbers because I don't know how you define "decent" housing, but you can easily educate yourself: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html

Anyway, consider the possibility that conservatives don't support your purported utilitarian proposals because they have an accurate picture of what poverty is actually like, and are not just basing their theories off journalistic narratives that have been false since the 80's.

A lot of poor people do work and are still poor,

It is extremely rare to have a full-time job and still be in poverty. The fable of an idle rich is a powerful tale, but at least in 21st century America, upper-class people work more than middle-class people who work more than lower-class people.

they can easily end up with huge bills for seeking medical care so they avoid it as much as possible

Like above, "people defer basic care until it gets more expensive" is an appealing story, and it is easy to imagine it being true. But aside from very specific exceptions, there is no measurable difference in health care outcomes from being given health care.

https://qz.com/574693/americans-working-less-than-ever-before/ From 2016 but shows that the lowest income quartile works less than 30 hours a week and the highest three all more than 40.

I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing. This makes me confused, as the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face.

I agree, I think there's a clear tension there. If you're not an EA working tirelessly to uplift the starving masses of Africa, then you implicitly agree that there are moral values that can take precedence over "the greatest good for the greatest number".

Although, I get the impression that the form of "utilitarianism" that most people subscribe to here is not the global moral philosophy that requires you to do the greatest good for the greatest number, but is instead a sort of hedonism where great importance is placed on immediate experiential states of personal pleasure. Which is why we have so many people eager to plug themselves into the experience machine.

Which is why we have so many people eager to plug themselves into the experience machine.

Name three examples.

One

Two

Three

Example 1: self_made_human, as extreme as his views are, doesn't want to "plug himself into the experience machine".

Example 2: ok, the guy said that he's fine with being a lotus eater, so I guess you found one person.

Example 3: not finding the idea of using your imagination repugnant and by extension not finding it repugnant to experience a simulation under your control doesn't mean that you want to "plug yourself into the experience machine."

The phrase "plugging yourself into the experience machine" sounds ominous and evokes the image of the dreadful wirehead, drooling in his pod, stuck in the loop of perpetual simulated cooming until the heat death of the universe. Applying it to everybody who's not utterly repelled by the idea of virtual reality or mind uploading is dishonest equivocation and it looks like a failure of understanding the people you're condemning.

Don't quote me in support of any form of "utilitarianism", thanks. I'm not a utilitarian.

Premise #2: Within the unit of people we care about, we care about everyone equally.

I think this premise specifically is inherently anti-utilitarian. How can you assign the same utility to each individual when there's so much variance? When the actions and roles and beliefs and experiences of two people can differ so greatly?

How can you quantify, in a principled way, how much you care about one individual's pleasure/pain relative to others? I think a baseline egalitarianism is actually essential to this, as I wrote lower down in the post:

Who "deserves" what is a question of justice, of deontology. But here, we are trying to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This is difficult enough, boiling down all of human experience into two buckets, "pleasure" and "pain". If you add a whole 'nother set of buckets, "good people", "medium people", "bad people"... then you've really abandoned the exercise and are just doing deontology with extra steps. The pain someone experiences from not having housing or food or heat during the winter is plainly real and sincerely felt, even if you believe that that person should have done something different to avoid being in that state.

Also, I do think humans experience poverty and wealth in broadly similar ways, enough to make generalizations about the utility/disutility of both.

I'm not a utilitarian, but I don't think that the utilitarian case for Scandinavian social democracy is obvious. It may be correct, but there's a huge amount of hard work that you need to do to make the argument for it.

Let's leave Norway out, since if you have good governance plus massive natural resources per capita then you can have good conditions with a lot of bad policies. The opportunity cost matters a lot for utilitarians (remember, utilitarians are maximisers not satisficers) and you can't determine much about opportunity cost by comparing policies in countries that have massively different situations.

Sweden has low poverty, but also persistently high unemployment:

https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/unemployment-rate

Unemployment is arguably worse than poverty for utility, because it creates a sense of worthlessness: humans generally like to feel useful, which you can explain with evolutionary psychology as the fact that, in our early evolutionary environment, there were not kings and queens sitting around doing nothing - even leaders were expected to contribute towards hunting, shelter, child-rearing etc. People who were not useful were at risk of being left behind and/or not reproducing, so psychological mechanisms that punished people for perceived uselessness helped them to pass on their genes.

Denmark has low unemployment, but a neoliberal rather than social democratic unemployment benefits system that pushes people into work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits_in_Denmark#Current_policy

Also, in terms of GDP per capita, there is a significant and persistent gap between Denmark and Sweden vs. the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

Remember, utilitarians are welfare maximisers, not just satisficers. And the benefits of a higher GDP per capita are massive relative to the benefits of poverty reduction, if you make the assumption that a higher GDP per capita is a persistent gain over time, i.e. it benefits future generations, whereas poverty reduction does have a big impact on welfare but mainly for the present generation. Arguing from a broadly utilitarian perspective, the economist Tyler Cowen has argued that people massively underrate the benefits of economic growth, assuming that one also maintains long-term economic stability:

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/

Arguably, welfare states not only undermine economic growth, but also long-run social stability. If I can enjoy healthcare, pensions, housing etc. in my old age without a high personal savings rate, then I am incentivised to save less and consume more over my life. It also makes less sense for me to have children, which were historically a way of investing in your old age, as they were expected to support you using their incomes. If I have fewer children, then I can still benefit from future generations, because other people's children will be taxed to benefit me as much as them. I can free ride on their parenting and spend the time/money that they spend on children on myself or on my own child or two. This is mitigated somewhat by subsidising parenthood in various ways (education spending, child benefits etc.) but overall there are big financial costs to raising children, especially more than two.

Like all social democracy, Scandinavian social democracy developed at a time of high birth rates and high personal savings rates. The economist Paul Samuelson explicitly made reference to this in his defence of American Social Security: sure, it's a Ponzi scheme, but it's a Ponzi scheme that can never go bust, because each generation is always much bigger and more prosperous than the last! Social democracy has had a clash with reality in the past few decades and the question of its viability in an ageing society has not been solved. How do you make social democracy work with an exponential and structural increase in the numbers of people using welfare services but not contributing to them?

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.DPND?locations=SE

This problem is structural, in that higher life expectancies and lower birth rates mean that it will continue to accelerate over time. The baby boomers were an unusually big demographic group, in Scandinavia as elsewhere, but the pattern of generations being smaller and living longer is persistent.

This problem is aggravated by the stagnation in wealth-creation in European social democracies since 2007. Sweden, Denmark and even Norway have seen approximately no increase in the level of GDP per capita since 2007. So they have both a structurally persistent rise in welfare demands and a structurally persistent stagnation in their capacity to produce new wealth to meet those demands.

Scandinavia is like a bee hive that is still producing new larvae at an accelerating rate, but which has stopped producing higher levels of honey. The current solution is for the worker bees to work harder and eat less, but that does not seem like the kind of long-run stable social system that Tyler Cowen points out is important for utilitarians, since it requires that the worker bees work harder and eat less indefinitely. And, unlike worker bees, Scandinavian wealth-creators have the option of leaving to places like Switzerland, Singapore, the Netherlands, Hong Kong etc., which let them eat money of the honey they create.

As the proportion of the population benefiting from the welfare state but not contributing to it explodes, how can social democracy survive? It will either have to go down the direction of authoritarian socialism, e.g. banning wealth-creators (workers and investors) from leaving the country to escape high tax rates, or more neoliberalism, e.g. a smaller, meaner welfare state. Thus far, the choice of social democrats has been the latter, moderated by high national debts to put the tax burden on future generations of wealth-creators, who can't vote yet - intensifying the welfare state Ponzi scheme, but not solving its long-run stability problem.

Of course, insofar as the US is socially democratic, it has similar problems, e.g. with Social Security. But that's not a case against right-wing policies, but the opposite! And US GDP per capita has risen at an astonishingly persistent rate since 2007. Note that I'm not talking about wages: what matters for the long-run viability of a welfare system is that wealth-creators are sufficiently incentivised (and not disabled by regulations etc.) to create wealth to fund the ever-increasing future liabilities of the system. For that, you need higher total incomes, not necessarily wages per se - from the point of view of public finance, capital gains tax revenue smells as sweet as payroll tax revenue. There are other problems with "wage stagnation" arguments that may come up at this stage of my arguments, but the whole issue is prima facie irrelevant for the reasons I've just given. And the US welfare system is arguably still too generous to be stable long-term, even with its higher economic growth relative to Scandinavia and other highly social democratic places, but again, that's hardly a utilitarian argument against right-wing policies!

Now, I don't strongly endorse the reasoning above. I can think of lots of social democratic responses. For example, importing worker bees from other hives without Scandinavia's demographic problems may at least prolong the sustainability of social democracy until medical technology enables healthspan to catch up with lifespan. The connection between welfare states, higher taxes, and economic growth is very murky: you can make the case that we don't know if it's Scandinavia's social democratic policies that are causing economic stagnation in Scandinavia and other social democracies viz. the US and other less socially democratic countries. Causal inference in social science is an extremely difficult matter. You can also argue that the utility benefits of a generous welfare state are so strong relative to the costs of unemployment and risks of long-run instability that Sweden's model is preferable to the US model. Or you could argue that social democracy + Danish-style labour market policies is the sort of social democracy that a utilitarian should want. I don't know how to estimate aggregate utility with a sufficient degree of accuracy to answer these questions - that doesn't bother me, because I am not a utilitarian, and even if I was, I wouldn't actually be so epistemically arrogant as to think that utilitarian reasoning was the best way to implement a utilitarian analysis of what is good/evil, any more than being a hedonist is the best way of achieving maximal personal pleasure.

As stated at the start of this comment, I am not saying that there is an obvious utilitarian case against social democracy. I don't think that a social democratic utilitarian is obviously irrational. I am saying that there is not an obvious utilitarian case for social democracy, and that a right-wing utilitarian position is not obviously wrong. Both David Friedman and Peter Singer are utilitarians, and I have a huge amount of admiration for the intellects of each of them.

People who were not useful were at risk of being left behind and/or not reproducing, so psychological mechanisms that punished people for perceived uselessness helped them to pass on their genes.

Is this the case anywhere today? That the useful are more reproductively successful than the useless? Many have traded fecundidity for economic productivity.

Thanks for high effort. I enjoyed the read.

Sweden, Denmark and even Norway have seen approximately no increase in the level of GDP per capita since 2007

Haven't they? Absolute gap is persistent, as you noted, but growth rates closely track US ones. Also it might be a good thing to have certain per capita gap -- to have a room for catch-up.

Unemployment is arguably worse than poverty for utility

If we consider subjective well-being, poverty amounts to permanent survival mode with almost no access to social lifts and any fruits of civilization. I think it's incomparable to any existential sufferings of idle, but otherwise well-to-do people (moreover, lack of job doesn't preclude anyone from meaningful and even societally useful endeavors).

And methodologically, I think evolutionary stories are irrelevant until we have current evidence of what they supposedly imply. And when we have current evidence, there is no need for stories.

Now a macro, long-horizon perspective. One might argue the poor are productivity hoarders in some sense, locked in the low-productivity jobs. I agree, that unconditional redistribution erodes incentives, but conditional transfers (say, of money or education in exchange for obligation to find a job from the list) to the poor might push/nudge them toward upper levels, where they can contribute more to the growth.

Growth is appealing as it enables efficiency improvements, and inefficiency (wastefulness) is a rare thing everyone agrees to be bad. I like Rawlsian scenario of a narrow economic elite, pushing the Pareto frontier, reaping its well deserved 90% share of surplus and doling out 10%. But 10% might be suboptimal for a classic welfare maximizer, who assumes diminishing utility. The latter implies it's optimal to redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom until both sides meet on the utility curve. The poor are at the steepest slope, they gain much more than wealthy ones lose by helping them.

The main question here is how much capital should we set aside for growth, and how much of wealthy capital actually causes growth.

I wouldn't actually be so epistemically arrogant as to think that utilitarian reasoning was the best way to implement a utilitarian analysis of what is good/evil

Could you elaborate on this?

Haven't they? Absolute gap is persistent, as you noted, but growth rates closely track US ones. Also it might be a good thing to have certain per capita gap -- to have a room for catch-up.

I was using nominal GDP per capita. Both PPP and nominal measurements have their advantages, but that would take me too far astray here, since I am just presenting a prima facie case for right-wing utilitarianism, to clarify that it's not obviously an incoherent position. (I'm steelmanning it; I'm neither consistently right-wing nor a utilitarian.) And, as you note, there is a persistent lag in PPP.

I don't see how having room for catch-up growth is a good thing. It's the catching up that is good, not the growth per se!

As for unemployment vs. poverty, I think that this can't be solved by anecdata. It's very plausible that being unemployed in Sweden gives higher utility than being near starvation in Ethiopia, but the poor in the US are not on the verge of starvation.

Could you elaborate on this?

Sure. I see utilitarianism as a bit like the paradox of hedonism. It is very hard to know what will make one happy at an individual level, and vastly harder on a collective level. Sure, there will be massive cases of suffering and (less often) massive sources of happiness where the path to maximising expected happiness is reasonably clear, but that leaves a lot of decisions unguided. Also, since one's own biases are often hard to scrutinise, it is easy to be misled when working out individual cases on their expected utility merits. Conflating one's self-interest or sentimentalism with expected utility maximisation seems pretty easy.

Rather than trying to maximise on each individual decision, a utilitarian can set up rules and rights that are to be respected unless there is a strong case to the contrary. (This is compatible, but not identical with rule utilitarianism.) This is a bit like the rules solution to the time inconsistency problem: if maximising a social welfare function in each time period results in suboptimal outcomes in the long-run, then an alternative is to set up rules that may not be maximising in every case but which probably do relatively well in the long-run, e.g. a 2% inflation target rather than traditional Keynesian fine-tuning of the economy. Similarly, being somewhat of a deontologist seems better for aggregate utility than consciously utility-maximising, given the computational, epistemological, and psychological limitations of human beings.

This GDP per capita graph shows good growth. Which data do you use?

Per capita gap indicates possibility of a relatively easy catch-up growth via import of technologies of the leader. This might be even part of a strategy: you redistribute wealth among your population more evenly than the leader, thus slowing your own growth; then you adopt technologies of the leader, who maintains higher inequality.

the poor in the US are not on the verge of starvation

World bank uses $2.15 per day (PPP) poverty line (graph), so everyone below this line consumes more or less the same across countries (poor relief programs probably aren't accounted for here). With this definition the poor, but employed might feel better than non-poor, but unemployed? I won't argue further against this claim, but I am curious what factor I neglect, which makes the US poor subjectively better off than unemployed.

I see utilitarianism as...

Thanks for sharing. I broadly agree with your case against fine-tuning and over-fitting.

The choice of optimal "ethical framework" is an optimization problem of its own. I would frame it as a task to devise rules that, when imposed on society, produce "good" expected societal trajectories (accounting for people, gaming the rules). I agree, that more clear-cut rules leave less space for manipulation and misinterpretation for actors, and - broadly - this looks close to the current legal system plus policy making based on Cost benefit analysis.

In some sense the notion of utilitarianism is useless for policy design, as the latter is about specialized predictions and theories. On the other hand, when we devise policy we are still in "optimizator" mode, subject to all biases and unintended manipulations.

Which data do you use?

That data. If you look at the data from 2007 to 2019 (excluding the covid period, including both the Great Recession but also the recovery period) the US grew steadily from about $48,000 to $65,000, while Denmark and Sweden had stagnation. Norway, as noted earlier, is a special case of good governance + massive per capita natural resources, but it also didn't see a net increase in this period. It's true that they were doing well relative to the US prior to 2007, but my original steelman was that social democracy creates a structural tendency to stagnation as the population ages.

The technological catch up is something I haven't heard and that I think is interesting, but it's beyond the scope of my steelmanning right-wing utilitarianism, since it's not a strongly established position, and my point is that social democracy isn't obviously preferable if you're a utilitarian.

Unemployment and poverty

A lot depends on the details, e.g. I suspect that a lot people high in Big Five conscientiousness would be happier with employed poverty than (somewhat) less poor unemployment. There is a huge amount of literature showing the negative aveerage effects of poverty on subjective happiness (as well as plenty of folk psychology) but the same is also true of unemployment, especially long-term unemployment. Also, the margin of difference between Swedish vs. US unemployment and Swedish vs. US poverty (going on that graph) seems to be bigger in the case of the former, e.g. US unemployment is about 4 percentage points lower than that of Sweden right now, whereas the difference in poverty (using the measure you provided) is about 1 percentage point. The unemployment gap may be bigger than normal right now, but Sweden seems to have a trend unemployment rate of about 8% at best and the US a trend of about 5% at worst. So, even if the harm from poverty is greater, the difference in unemployment is bigger.

On the other hand, you could argue that the graph you give just captures one part of a bigger picture, since e.g. $2.5 a day is hardly luxurious and US poverty may be bigger. Also, poor relief may be more generous in Scandinavia (plausible). A more complex argument could refute my claims. But that's my point! When one takes into account all the differences, the utilitarian cases for right-wing or left-wing policies both need to be complex - they aren't obvious either way.

optimizator

Yes, I think that an epistemically modest utilitarian is still trying to optimise, but what they can plausibly do within their epistemic limitations, which is to find good long-run moral and political rules. Even then, there is an important difference from deontology, in that in extreme cases it may be obvious that departing from the rules will result in better long-run aggregate utility. This is one of the more plausible parts of utilitarianism, I think: you have to be hardcore into rights to be willing to permit massive suffering instead of e.g. making a tiny infraction of someone's rights. The plausibility of consequentialism (with utilitarianism as one variant) in extreme circumstances was part of a debate on human rights a while back in the UK parliament, which I thought was interesting:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=VO2Ry4j79LU&t=221s

There is a lot one could say about your post but I'd like to point out that the stuff about Swedish unemployment is a bit simplistic.

Sweden used to have persistently low unemployment until the financial crisis in the early nineties. This then shot up and eventually started trending down.

But as this downward trend started another did as well, namely mass immigration of unskilled labour, beginning with the Iraq war and continuing til this day.

Unemployment among ethnic Europeans in Sweden is in fact low and labour force participation is extremely high.

Perhaps it is the fault of social democracy that Sweden has been unable to integrate low skill, culturally hostile immigrants coming faster than at any point in US history or perhaps it's due to other factors...

Yes, as I said, causation in social sciences is hard. For my overall claim, what is important is not that we know that Sweden's welfare state causes its structurally high unemployment rate (in spite of its considerable spending on active labour market policies) but that a right-wing utilitarian could make a case that it does. In a brief part of a brief comment, I naturally cannot make that case rigorously.

Premise #2: Within the unit of people we care about, we care about everyone equally.

Your utilitarians may select different 'units of people we care about.' Someone that might be called a 'globalist' might care about the whole world, while a stereotypical NIMBY might care mostly about their own neighborhood.

Response: This may be a coherent objection, but it's not a utilitarian objection, it's a rights-based objection.

A utilitarian might say 'I alone am rational enough to allocate my resources to maximize utility, the government will fail and I will succeed therefore taking my resources away is unethical'

I only care about those who are deserving to not be in poverty; I don't care about everyone, I'm fine with people being in poverty if they do nothing to better themselves

If your goal is to maximize utility in the shortest possible span of time, sure, spend all the money buying the world a single meal. But there's something to be said for making sure resources are spent in a way that sets people up for continued success. That said, often the resources spent deciding if Joe X Poor is 'down on his luck' or a drug addict make the whole program significantly less effective...

Overall you've made a great argument against utilitarianism.

Your utilitarians may select different 'units of people we care about.' Someone that might be called a 'globalist' might care about the whole world, while a stereotypical NIMBY might care mostly about their own neighborhood.

This isn't really utilitarianism. This is just whatever-I-want-ism.

If I'm free to select which subset of the human race I "care" about, then how do I not have an unlimited license to arbitrarily decide whatever other values I want to follow? In the same way I can decide to only "care" about my own neighborhood, what if I decide to just only "care" about committing bank robberies, to the detriment of all else? It seems like under your definition of utilitarianism, I should just go ahead and do that. But that can hardly be called a systematic moral philosophy.

As I think Nietzsche convincingly argues, every system of morality is whatever-I-want-ism.

Why is your utility function better just because it's larger than a egoist's?

Correct, utilitarianism, deontology and virtue ethics are intercompatible: "My utility is maximized if I behave in accordance with the rules/in a virtuous fashion" vs. "The rule I follow is utilitarianism; utilitarianism is the most virtuous form of behavior." But generally, utilitarianism just means you rate worldstates in a one-dimensional numeric fashion; it doesn't say anything about the nature of your preference. The utility function is not up for grabs. Similarly, I could say, idk, Randian ethics are not virtue ethics because I don't recognize their target as virtuous, but that's just not how those terms work: they're about the way in which you pursue the good / the rules / your preferences, not what those preferences are.

Now, lots of utilitarians, especially in these spaces, are also liberal humanists, and so rate all human life equally, and there are certainly arguments to be had for or against that, but neither side has a monopoly on "utilitarianism".

I mean something akin to the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) in which the necessities of life (healthcare, housing, minimum subsistence) are essentially guaranteed, while maintaining a market economy.

as others have already observed when this comes up, such welfare states tend to not scale well for countries as big, and diverse, and low trust as the US. A prosperous, homogenous, small country having generous welfare is sorta analogous to a breadwinner providing for his family. Now try to scale this to a stadium.

c. "The Scandinavian countries only could do this because they are ethnically homogenous, tightly knit societies. Look at Sweden right now, it's falling apart as they let in more immigrants." Response: This goes more to the political problem with instituting this system rather than the desirability of the system itself. The fact that present-day social democrats are pro immigration does not make immigration a necessary part of a social democracy. One can easily imagine a social democracy with Japan-style immigration restrictions.

Too late for this to happen, and no political will either. American history going as far back almost to its inception has been tolerating immigration. Japan had the advantage of being close knit from its onset.

"Eliminating poverty will cause more pain in the long run because the economy will collapse or at the very least growth will slow, leading to a decline in living standards for everyone."

Poverty largely has been eliminated in America. Americans even in the poorest of states have higher living standards than people in the UK. There are so many programs for poor families in the US, like free education, up through college, dental, healthcare, subsidized housing, etc. People fail to avail themselves of such options due to addiction, mental illness (the two often go together) , or other problems, not because of America being against the poor. Controlling drugs would be a much more useful step for ending poverty.

as others have already observed when this comes up, such welfare states tend to not scale well for countries as big, and diverse, and low trust as the US. A prosperous, homogenous, small country having generous welfare is sorta analogous to a breadwinner providing for his family. Now try to scale this to a stadium.

I disagree, I think you could scale it to a stadium, or a thousand stadiums -- it's called insurance, and we do it all the time! We don't have to trust the other people on the same car insurance program -- you know some of them will be idiot drivers who cause mayhem and destruction, but you also know that many will be normal people who pay way more into the system than they take out in benefits. I take your point, but again this seems like more of a practical political problem with setting it up than an objection to social democracy in a large, diverse country per se.

Poverty largely has been eliminated in America. Americans even in the poorest of states have higher living standards than people in the UK. There are so many programs for poor families in the US, like free education, up through college, dental, healthcare, subsidized housing, etc. People fail to avail themselves of such options due to addiction, mental illness (the two often go together) , or other problems, not because of America being against the poor.

Poverty has not been eliminated in America. 11% of the country, which is 37 million people, were living below poverty in 2020 according to the US Census. There may be "many" programs in the US, but they are NOT sufficient at guaranteeing subsistence, healthcare and subsidized housing being two areas where many, many people fall through the cracks. Subsidized housing does not really exist in many parts of the country, and it is not comprehensive anywhere.

11% of the country, which is 37 million people, were living below poverty in 2020

Key qualifier there being "on paper", which often involves income off the books to maintain access to transfer programs. That also glosses over what poverty means in America - a place to live, often a car, amenities like AC and modern appliances, a new-ish smart phone and far too many calories. Poverty in an objective, global sense is non-existent outside extreme addiction and/or mental illness.

Problem is, some people take offense at the idea of having to pay for net consumers of insurance/welfare.

That's the whole point of insurance, that there are net consumers of it. If everyone was a net contributor, it would just be the greatest con scheme created by the insurers.

I don't really believe in diminishing marginal utility in its strong form. I also don't think the modern welfare state does much to eliminate the real sufferings of poverty, its more akin to a heroine drip for addicts. And on top of that, the taxation for a welfare state reduces economic dynamism (as does the welfare state itself, by disincentivizing work for some populations).

Overall, I find the welfare state an overwhelmingly unredeemable invention that only justifies itself with morally monstrous arguments along the lines of "think of the children."

I don't really believe in diminishing marginal utility in its strong form.

Why not? It seems like common sense to me -- a dollar means a lot more to the guy begging outside McDonalds than it does to Elon Musk.

I also don't think the modern welfare state does much to eliminate the real sufferings of poverty, its more akin to a heroine drip for addicts.

What are the "real sufferings of poverty", then?

"Diminishing marginal utility" is a misonomer. Economists tend to assume that the marginal utility of everything is diminishing, relative to previous units. (Heroin and the like may be exceptions.) The issue is the marginal utility of money vs. other things. In modern utility theory, money has no marginal utility as such; it only has marginal utility relative to an alternative. And utility is typically defined by modern theorists in terms of relative preference, rather than a psychological state of pleasure etc.

If there is a diminishing marginal utility of money, then why do so many poor people buy lottery tickets and otherwise gamble in games with negative expected value?

Moreover, low socio-economic status is associated with high GE [gambling expenditures] (Davidson et al., 2016; Salonen et al., 2018a). To date, a limited number of studies have investigated the relationship between GE and receipt of social security benefits (Worthington 2001; MacDonald et al., 2004). A Canadian survey showed that households with income support were less likely to gamble. With the exception of one jurisdiction, households that received income support spend a lower proportion of their income on gambling. (MacDonald et al., 2004.)

Studies conducted in different countries have shown that although high income groups spend more on gambling, lower income groups contribute proportionally more (Beckert & Lutter 2009; Canale et al., 2016; Castrén et al., 2018; Roukka & Salonen 2020).

Assume that people gamble for the pleasure of taking risks. If there is diminishing marginal utility of money, why would the marginal value of money relative to this pleasure be low for poorer people?

Also, don't middle class and richer people save a higher proportion of their incomes than poorer people? Do they value maintaining their period-to-period monetary assets, relative to their incomes, more than poorer people?

Also, diminishing marginal utility on average is also very different from it being universal. Otherwise, why would many very rich people still work similar hours to poorer people? You can postulate that the former enjoy work, but that's ad hoc, as it doesn't explain why they would prefer paid labour.

I'm not saying that there is increasing marginal utility of money. I'm saying that it is really isn't obvious that money has diminishing marginal utility, even on average.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034138/

I also forgot how to spell "misnomer".

Of course middle class and richer people save more than poor people. Having barely sufficient income to cover needs, and hence having little left to save, is the definition of being poor.

As for why rich people who work a lot prefer paid labour, the answer is obvious: They get more utility out of paid labor (enjoyment + whatever they buy with their income) than unpaid (enjoyment alone).

Anyhow, talking about rich people not working does not address OP's point about relative utility of X extra dollars for a poor vs more affluent person. I can guarantee you that the local homeless guy would get more out of the $165 I recently earned than I will.

(1) I talked about proportions. There's nothing by definition that says that rich people have to save a greater proportion of their incomes than the poor.

(2) Your reasoning about rich people assumes that paid labour is equally preferable to unpaid labour, e.g. working as a bank director is as enjoyable as volunteering for a charity. This seems implausible for me. Do you have evidence for this "obvious" answer?

(3) What do you mean "get more out of"? If you mean "more utility", then you are begging the question. The point of my examples was to muddy the waters: one can cite evidence both for and against a higher interpersonal marginal utility of wealth for the poor vs. the rich. I think the honest answer for utilitarians is to say that they don't know, and that intuitions to the contrary are based on a hedonistic analysis of utility that ran aground in about 1850-1950, when it proved impossible to find a non-arbitrary interpersonal scale for utility. That's why economists and many ethicists ditched the hedonistic analysis of utility in favour of a preference-ranking analysis, but a preference-ranking analysis doesn't give you an interpersonal scale.

  1. Yes, there in fact something about the definition that says that poor people save a smaller proportion. Again, "poor" by definition means that your income is barely enough to cover basic costs, so, by definition, a poor person will have very little surplus income and hence will be able to save a very small proportion of their income. In contrast, if your income is large enough that you can save a large proportion after paying your costs, then by definition you are not poor.

  2. No, my reasoning does NOT imply that working as a bank director is as enjoyable as volunteering for a charity. I said merely that, given the same job, getting paid yields more utility than not getting paid.

  3. Yes, I meant more utility. And, if you think that economists think that my example is wrong, then I think you are misunderstanding them. There is a $150 check on my desk right now, waiting to be deposited. I can literally throw it away, and will not miss it. That is how little marginal utility I get out of that $150. In contrast, $150 for a homeless person can make the difference between sleeping on the subway and sleeping indoors, for more than one night.

(1) But the issue is marginal income - that's where there's an additional dollar. If a poor person has an increase in marginal income and their income is enough to cover basic costs, then there is nothing in the definition of "rich" and "poor" that implies that they save a higher proporiton of that additional dollar than someone with greater wealth.

(2) If the job is different, then you've not explained why many rich people prefer paid labour like being a bank director to unpaid labour like volunteering for a charity.

(3) But what's the common scale for the comparison? Assume you prefer throwing the $150 away and the homeless person does not. That tells us about the internal structure of your respective utility scales, but doesn't tell us that their utility is higher on a scale that incorporates the preferences of both of you.

  1. No, the specific issue is not marginal income; you referred to pct of** total **income: "Also, don't middle class and richer people save a higher proportion of their incomes than poorer people?"

  2. Because they get paid for the paid work. You seem to think that the argument is that a rich person gets zero marginal utility from money. That is not the claim. If I am a lawyer or doctor making $300,000, then obviously I by quitting I am giving up quite a bit of utility. But that says nothing about the issue at hand: It tells us noting about whether I would get as much utility from an extra $1000 as would a poor person. And, btw, people who are rich enough not have to work quit work all the time -- it's called retirement -- and often they spend some of their time volunteering. So, your assumption that rich people don't never quit work and go volunteer is empirically false.

  3. Then let's ignore money. Suppose 100,000 people own three cars each (call them "Group X"), and 100,000 other people ("Group Y") have no cars. I give each of them a 2003 Honda Civic. Which Group members are most likely to use their new cars" It is Group Y, right? Why, if that obviously true, if it is so impossible to make a comparison between the utility each gets out of the car? It isn't.

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I can guarantee you that the local homeless guy would get more out of the $165 I recently earned than I will.

It's not ... directly obvious that this is true. Consider the stereotype of him spending it all on crack or booze. It may also depend on the region. There's probably studies on this; could you link them?

Well, presumably he gets a lot of utility out of crack or booze. Besides, that $165 means that he can now get both crack AND booze. Or crack AND several meals at McDonald's. In contrast, I am able to buy crack and food and booze even if I throw the money away; it has very little marginal utility for me.

Gambling seems like a poor example for your point. Poor people are buying the opportunity to imagine themselves getting rich (and every once in a while it happens). People who already are rich can buy real investments and the psychic thrill isn’t the same for them.

The higher savings rate for the wealthy also seems like evidence of diminishing marginal utility of money. Wealthy people put more money away because spending is a lot less urgent than someone struggling to make ends meet.

Gambling seems like a poor example for your point. Poor people are buying the opportunity to imagine themselves getting rich (and every once in a while it happens). People who already are rich can buy real investments and the psychic thrill isn’t the same for them.

Poor people don't need to gamble to imagine themselves as rich. It does happen sometimes, but the expected value of lotteries etc. is negative.

What's the evidence that the psychic thrill of gambling is less for the rich? Note that, to substantiate this claim, you can't assume a diminishing marginal utility of wealth.

The higher savings rate for the wealthy also seems like evidence of diminishing marginal utility of money. Wealthy people put more money away because spending is a lot less urgent than someone struggling to make ends meet.

If it's less urgent, then that means that their preference for saving a marginal unit of money vs. spending it is greater. As I said, in modern utility theory, something only has utility relative to something else; mathematically, utility is defined as an ordinal variable corresponding to a ranking of alternatives.

There's a further issue, of course, of defining a common unit of utility across people. I'm assuming that's somehow not a problem, because otherwise the "diminishing marginal utility" position is REALLY stuffed.

I also forgot another reason why "diminishing marginal utility of money" is a misnomer: it should really be called "diminishing interpersonal marginal utility of money", because the marginal utility can be decreasing for each individual and yet the value of one more unit of wealth can be greater for rich people rather than poor people. Diminishing marginal utility of money for each individaul does not imply that an additional dollar gives greater utility to a poor person than a rich person. In fact, it's logically possible that money can have diminishing marginal utility for each person and yet one still maximises utility by taxing the poor to give to the rich.

For example, consider a society with two people, A and B. We define MUn(a) as the marginal utility of money for the nth unit of money for A and MUn(b) for B mutatis mutandis.

Suppose that MUn(a) = 1^(-n). So the marginal utility of the 100th unit of wealth for A is 1 / 100. The marginal utility of the 10,000th unit is 1 / 10,000. Thus, the marginal utility of money for A is diminishing: it decreases with each unit. In fact, it's monotonically diminishing: the marginal value of the nth unit is less than each previous unit.

Suppose that MUn(a) = 1^(-√n). So the marginal utility of the 100th unit of wealth for A is 1 / 10. The marginal utility of the 10,000th unit is 1 / 100. Again, the marginal utility of money for B is (monotonically) diminishing.

If A has $499 and B has $159,999, then the value of an additional dollar for A is 1 / 500 and the value of an additional dollar for B is 1 / 400. Utility is maximised by B having the additional dollar, even though we are assuming utility is (montonically!) diminishing.

And again, this is all assuming away the problem of interpersonal utility comparisons, because otherwise I don't begin to have a functioning version of your position with which to play. You could say "Obviously, utility doesn't work the way you specify in your example," but then you ARE obliged to explain how you find a common unit of utility for people in the real world, because all I am granting in this example is diminishing marginal utility of money (relative to something else that is common between A and B, e.g. assuming a common valuation of a Big Mac).

Why not? It seems like common sense to me -- a dollar means a lot more to the guy begging outside McDonalds than it does to Elon Musk.

Does it? Begging is one of the least effective ways to get dollars possible. If dollars are so valuable to him, why not sustain effort to acquire them in quantity?

I think most of the people begging outside McDonalds value their time and short-term amusement more than they value dollars, straight up. Elon Musk is the exact opposite, valuing dollars and the things dollars buy more than idle hours and idle pleasures. Begging gets beggers what they actually want: continued freedom from all responsibility and, frequently, sobriety. That's why they keep begging, because it's what they want. Give them a million dollars, and they'll blow it all in short order, possibly killing themselves in the process, and certainly leaving themselves little better than when they started.

But that first single dollar means a lot more to that guy than it does to Elon Musk, since for him it’s the difference between eating and not eating right then and there whereas for Elon it’s not even a rounding error. You can be right about how Elon and the homeless guy value their time relative to earning money, but $1 still means a lot more to the destitute hungry guy than Elon.

But that first single dollar means a lot more to that guy than it does to Elon Musk, since for him it’s the difference between eating and not eating right then and there whereas for Elon it’s not even a rounding error.

I don't believe this is true. In a nation of ~350 million, my estimate of the number of people who've died of classic Dickensian starvation in the last decade is 0. Kids get neglected by unfit parents, elderly people get sick enough to stop eating, maybe a shut-in breaks a hip and no one notices, but near as I can tell, we have literally conquered bread. Food pantries and giveaways are ubiquitous, as are programs to hand out meals to the homeless. Some of the people panhandling on the side of the street might have missed a meal recently; I also miss meals when I'm on a gaming binge and am too lazy to actually feed myself. When they get hungry enough, food will be available for them. When they go hungry, that is a choice they have made.

This idea that a dollar is the difference between eating or not for the homeless guy is, near as I can tell, entirely fictional. Homeless people mostly live the way they live by choice, at least until the drugs burn out enough neurons that choices aren't really a thing they can do any more. Most of them appear to be stuck in a spiral of self-destruction; we should be taking them off the streets and putting them in a secure, structured environment where they can get their shit back together. Giving them free money often seems to only help them kill themselves faster.

since for him it’s the difference between eating and not eating right then and there whereas for Elon it’s not even a rounding error

But it doesn't follow that the marginal utility is higher for the beggar than Elon Musk.

Assuming that begging in front of a fast food restaurant isn't just a novel form of slumming, IMO this doesn't quite illustrate to what a degree those people are no longer even capable of choosing or valueing anything. That far down, it may seem psychologically unfeasible to climb up towards anything, no matter how modest. The body is degraded, the mind along with it, and they're probably all out of social contacts as well. With no resources to invest, no energy to spend, no faculties intact, nothing to offer to the market and nobody to rely on, what can you actually hope to accomplish? I think it's valid to observe that those people are no longer capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. But there's a bit of a leap required to come to the conclusion that you must throw money at them.

And here I see utilitarians taking the easy way out. Has a utilitarian ever said "this person is beyond help, any resources invested here are wasted"? In my cyncical view, most utilitarians are simply humanitarians with a coat of rational paint, with many of their premises and conclusions going unexamined and only the the details getting the lightest touch of utilitarian calculus. Who questions the metrics of pain and pleasure as proxies for disutility and utility? Who quantifies them? Utilitarianism may as well just be a ritual of rationality, an act put on in order to feel better about indulging one's altruistic impulses. I'm sure I'm wrong about this and effective altruism is actually fully reasoned-out and I just don't get it, after all the people who do it are smarter than me, but I'm getting the same vibes from the so-called utilitarians that I get from those who want to help the starving poor the world over without having ever heard of utilons.

Has a utilitarian ever said "this person is beyond help, any resources invested here are wasted"?

I wouldn't be surprised: that sounds like it could easily be a summary of the condition of a person who has been sentenced to be sacrificed to a bloodthirsty trolley. There are all sorts of repugnancies that utilitarianism can fall into; that's why I see it as, at the very least, something very slippery to deal with.

What are the "real sufferings of poverty", then?

In America, and most industrialized nations, its the fact that the person remains nonfunctional.

Might this be the cause rather than the effect.

Well it is the cause, but the knowing is also the effect.

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