A few months ago I wrote about some disturbing stuff I’d been hearing about from Harvard Law School professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeuele. The two of them wrote an article back in 2005 writing, “a refusal to impose [the death] penalty condemns numerous innocent people to death. . . . a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel, rather than forbid that form of punishment. . . .”
My own view is that the death penalty makes sense in some settings and not others. To say that “a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel” the death penalty . . . jeez, I dunno, that’s some Inquisition-level thinking going on. Not just supporting capital punishment, they’re compelling it. That’s a real edgelord attitude, kinda like the thought-provoking professor in your freshman ethics class who argues that companies have not just the right but the moral responsibility to pollute the maximum amount possible under the law because otherwise they’re ducking their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. Indeed, it’s arguably immoral to not pollute beyond the limits of the law if the expected gain from polluting is lower than the expected loss from getting caught and fined.
Sunstein and Vermeule also recommended that the government should fight conspiracy theories by engaging in “cognitive infiltration of extremist groups,” which seemed pretty rich, considering that Vermeule spent his online leisure hours after the 2020 election promoting election conspiracy theories. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. This is one guy I would not trust to be in charge of government efforts to cognitively infiltrate extremist groups!
Meanwhile, these guys go on NPR, they’ve held appointive positions with the U.S. government, they’re buddies with elite legal academics . . . it bothers me! I’m not saying their free speech should be suppressed—we got some Marxists running around in this country too—I just don’t want them anywhere near the levers of power.
Anyway, I heard by email from someone who knows Sunstein and Vermeuele. It seems that both of them are nice guys, and when they stick to legal work and stay away from social science or politics they’re excellent scholars. My correspondent also wrote:
And on that 2019 Stasi tweet. Yes, it was totally out of line. You and others were right to denounce it. But I think it’s worth pointing out that he deleted the tweet the very same day (less than nine hours later), apologized for it as an ill-conceived attempt at humor, and noted with regret that the tweet came across as “unkind and harsh to good people doing good and important work.” I might gently and respectfully suggest that continuing to bring up this tweet four years later, after such a prompt retraction—which was coupled with an acknowledgement of the value of the work that you and others are doing in focusing on the need for scrutiny and replication of eye-catching findings—might be perceived as just a tad ungracious, even by those who believe that Cass was entirely in the wrong and you were entirely in the right as regards the original tweet. To paraphrase one of the great capital defense lawyers (who obviously said this in a much more serious context), all of us are better than our worst moment.
I replied:
– Regarding the disjunction between Vermeule’s scholarly competence and nice-guyness, on one hand, and his extreme political views: I can offer a statistical or population perspective. Think of a Venn diagram where the two circles are “reasonable person” and “extreme political views and actions.” (I’m adding “actions” here to recognize that the issue is not just that Vermeule thinks that a fascist takeover would be cool, but that he’s willing to sell out his intellectual integrity for it, in the sense of endorsing ridiculous claims.)
From an ethical point of view, there’s an argument in favor of selling out one’s intellectual integrity for political goals. One can make this argument for Vermeule or also for, say, Ted Cruz. The argument is that the larger goal (a fascist government in the U.S., or more power for Ted Cruz) is important enough that it’s worth making such a sacrifice. Or, to take slightly lesser examples, the argument would be that when Hillary Clinton lied about her plane being shot at, or when Donald Trump lied about . . . ok, just about everything, that they were thinking about larger goals. Indeed, one could argue that for Cruz and the other politicians, it’s not such a big deal—nobody expects politicians to believe half of what they’re saying anyway—but for Vermeule to trash his reputation in this way, that shows real commitment!
Actually, I’m guessing that Vermeule was just spending too much time online in a political bubble, and he didn’t really think that endorsing these stupid voter-fraud claims meant anything. To put it another way, you and I think that endorsing unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud is bad for two reasons: (1) intellectually it’s dishonest to claim evidence for X when you have no evidence for X, (2) this sort of thing is dangerous in the short term by supplying support to traitors, and (3) it’s dangerous in the long term by degrading the democratic process. But, for Vermeule, #2 and #3 might well be a plus not a minus, and, as for #1, I think it’s not uncommon for people to make a division between their professional and non-professional statements, and to have a higher standard for the former than the latter. Vermeule might well think, “Hey, that’s just twitter, it’s not real.” Similarly, the economist Steven Levitt and his colleagues wrote all sorts of stupid things (along with many smart things) under the Freakonomics banner, thinks which I guess (or, should I say, hope) he’d never have done in his capacity as an academic. Just to be clear, I’m not saying that everyone does this, indeed I don’t think I do it—I stand by what I blog, just as I stand by my articles and books—but I don’t think everyone does. Another example that’s kinda famous is biologists who don’t believe in evolution. They can just separate the different parts of their belief systems.
Anyway, back to the Venn diagram. The point is that something like 30% of Americans believe this election fraud crap. 30% of Americans won’t translate into 30% of competent and nice-guy law professors, but it won’t be zero, either. Even if it’s only 10% or less in that Venn overlap, it won’t be zero. And the people inside that overlap will get attention. And some of them like the attention! So at that point you can get people going further and further off the deep end.
If it would help, you could think of this as a 2-dimensional scatterplot rather than a Venn diagram, and in this case you can picture the points drifting off to the extreme over time.
To look at this another way, consider various well-respected people in U.S. and Britain who were communists in the 1930s through 1950s. Some of these people were scientists! And they said lots of stupid things. From a political perspective, that’s all understandable: even if they didn’t personally want to tear up families, murder political opponents, start wars, etc., they could make the case that Stalin’s USSR was a counterweight to fascism elsewhere. But from an intellectual perspective, they wouldn’t always make that sort of minimalist case. Some of them were real Soviet cheerleaders. Again, who knows what moral calculations they were making in their heads.
I’m not gonna go all Sunstein-level contrarian and argue that selling out one’s intellectual integrity is the ultimate moral sacrifice—I’m picturing a cartoon where Vermeule is Abraham, his reputation is Isaac, and the Lord is thundering above, booming down at him to just do it already—but I guess the case could be made, indeed maybe will be the subject of one of the 8 books that Sunstein comes out with next year and is respectfully reviewed on NPR etc.
– Regarding the capital punishment article: I have three problems here. The first is their uncritical acceptance of a pretty dramatic claim. In Sunstein and Vermeule’s defense, though, back in 2005 it was standard in social science for people to think that statistical significance + identification strategy + SSRN or NBER = discovery. Indeed, I’d guess that most academic economists still think that way! So to chide them on their innumeracy here would be a bit . . . anachronistic, I guess. The second problem is that I’m guessing they were so eager to accept this finding is that it allowed them to make this cool point that they wanted to make. If they’d said, “Here’s a claim, maybe it’s iffy but if it’s true, it has some interesting ethical implications…”, that would be one thing. But that’s not what I read their paper as saying. By saying “Recent evidence suggests that capital punishment may have a significant deterrent effect” and not considering the opposite, they’re making the fallacy of the one-way bet. My third problem is that I think their argument is crap, even setting aside the statistical study. I discussed this a bit in my post. There are two big issues they’re ignoring. The first is that if each execution saves 18 lives, then maybe we should start executing innocent people! Or, hey, we can find some guilty people to execute, maybe some second-degree murderers, armed robbers, arsonists, tax evaders, speeders, jaywalkers, . . . . shouldn’t be too hard to find some more targets–after all, they used to have the death penalty for forgery. Just execute a few hundred of them and consider how many lives will be saved. That may sound silly to you, but it’s Sunstein and Vermeule, not me, who wrote that bit about “a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life.” I discussed the challenges here in more detail in a 2006 post; see the section, “The death penalty as a decision-analysis problem?” My point is not that they have to agree with me, just that it’s not a good sign that their long-ass law article with its thundering about “the sanctity of human life” is more shallow than two paragraphs of a blog post.
In summary regarding the death-penalty article, I’m not slamming them for falling for crappy research (that’s what social scientists and journalists did back in 2005, and lots of them still to do this day) and I’m not slamming them for supporting death penalty (I’ve supported it too, at various times in my life; more generally I think it depends on the situation and that the death penalty can be a good idea in some circumstances, even if the current version in the U.S. doesn’t work so well). I’m slamming them for taking half-assed reasoning and presenting it as sophisticated. I’d say they don’t know better, they’re just kinda dumb—but you assure me that Vermeule is actually smart. So my take on it is that they’re really good at playing the academic game. For me to criticize their too-clever-by-half “law and economics” article as not being well thought through, that would be like criticizing LeBron James for not being a golf champion. They do what’s demanded of them in their job.
– Regarding Sunstein’s ability to learn from error: Yes, I mention in my post that Sunstein was persuaded by the article by Wolfers and Donohue. I do think it was good that Sunstein retracted his earlier stance. That’s one reason I was particularly disappointed by what he and his collaborator did in the second edition of Nudge, which was to memory-hole the Wansink episode. It was such a great opportunity in the revision, for them to have said that the nudge idea is so compelling that they (and many others) were fooled, and to consider the implications: in a world where people are rewarded for discovering apparently successful nudges, the Wansinks of the world will prosper, at least in the short term. Indeed, Sunstein and Thaler could’ve even put a positive spin on it by talking about the self-correcting nature of science, sunlight is the best disinfectant, etc. But, no, instead they remove it entirely, and then Sunstein returns to his previous credulous self by posting something on what he called the “coolest behavioral finding of 2019.” Earlier they’d referred to Wansink as having had multiple masterpieces. Kind of makes you question their judgment, no? My take on this is . . . for them, everyone’s a friend, so why rock the boat? As I wrote, it looks to me like an alliance of celebrities. I’m guessing that they are genuinely baffled by people like Uri Simonsohn or me who criticize this stuff: Don’t we have anything better to do? It’s natural to think of behavior of Simonsohn, me, and other “data thugs” as being kinda pathological: we are jealous, or haters, or glory-seekers, or we just have some compulsion to be mean (the kind of people who, in another life, would be Stasi).
– Regarding the Stasi quote: Yes, I agree it’s a good thing Sunstein retracted it. I was not thrilled that in the retraction he said he’d thought it had “a grain of truth,” but, yeah, as retractions go, it was much better than average! Much better than the person who called people “terrorists,” never retracted or apologized, then later published an article lying about a couple of us (a very annoying episode to me, which I have to kind of keep quiet about cos nobody likes a complainer, but grrrr it burns me up, that people can just lie in public like that and get away with it). So, yes, for sure, next time I write about this I will emphasize that he retracted the Stasi line.
– Libertarian paternalism: There’s too much on this for one email, but for my basic take, see this post, in particular the section “Several problems with science reporting, all in one place.” This captures it: Sunstein is all too willing to think that ordinary people are wrong, while trusting the testimony of Wansink, who appears to have been a serial fabricator. It’s part of a world in which normies are stupidly going about their lives doing stupid things, and thank goodness (or, maybe I should say in deference to Vermeule, thank God) there are leaders like Sunstein, Vermeule, and Wansink around to save us from ourselves, and also in the meantime go on NPR, pat each other on the back on Twitter, and enlist the U.S. government in their worthy schemes.
– People are complicated: Vermeule and Sunstein are not “good guys” or “bad guys”; they’re just people. People are complicated. What makes me sad about Sunstein is that, as you said, he does care about evidence, he can learn from error. But then he chooses not to. He chooses to stay in his celebrity comfort zone, making stupid arguments evaluating the president’s job performance based on the stock market, cheerleading biased studies about nudges as if they represent reality. See the last three paragraphs here. Another bad thing Sunstein did recently was to coauthor that Noise book. Another alliance of celebrities! (As a side note, I’m sad to see the collection of academic all-star endorsements that this book received.) Regarding Sunstein himself, see the section “A new continent?” of that post. As I wrote at the time, if you’re going to explore a new continent, it can help to have a local guide who can show you the territory.
Vermeule I know less about; my take is that he’s playing the politics game. He thinks that on balance the Republicans are better than the Democrats, and I’m guessing that when he promotes election fraud misinformation, that he just thinks he’s being mischievous and cute. After all, the Democrats promoted misinformation about police shootings or whatever, so why can’t he have his fun? And, in any case, election security is important, right? Etc etc etc. Anyone with a bit of debate-team experience can justify lots worse than Vermeule’s post-election tweets. I guess they’re not extreme enough for Sunstein to want to stop working with him.
– Other work by Vermeule and Sunstein: They’re well-respected academics, also you and others say how smart they are, so I can well believe they’ve also done high-quality work. It might be that their success in some subfields led them into a false belief that they know what they’re doing in other areas (such as psychology research, statistics, and election administration) where they have no expertise. As the saying goes, sometimes it’s important to know what you don’t know.
My larger concern, perhaps, is that these people get such deference in academia and the news media, that they start to believe their own hype and they think they’re experts in everything.
– Conspiracy theories: Sunstein and Vermeule wrote, “Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event. A recent example is the belief, widespread in some parts of the world, that the attacks of 9/11 were carried out not by Al Qaeda, but by Israel or the United States.” My point here is that there are two conspiracy theories here: a false conspiracy theory that the attacks were carried out by Israel or the United States, and a true conspiracy theory that the attacks were carried out by Al Qaeda. In the meantime, Vermeule has lent his support to unsupported conspiracy theories regarding the 2020 election. So Vermeule is incoherent. On one hand, he’s saying that conspiracy theories are a bad thing. On the other hand, in one place he’s not recognizing the existence of true conspiracies; in another place he’s supporting ridiculous and dangerous conspiracy theories, I assume on the basis that they are in support of his political allies. I don’t think it’s a cheap shot to point out this incoherence.
And what does it mean that Sunstein thinks that “Because those who hold conspiracy theories typically suffer from a ‘crippled epistemology,’ in accordance with which it is rational to hold such theories, the best response consists in cognitive infiltration of extremist groups.”—but he continues to work with Vermeule? Who would want to collaborate with someone who suffers from a crippled epistemology (whatever that means)? The whole thing is hard for me to interpret except as an elitist position where some people such as Sunstein and Vermeule are allowed to believe whatever they want, and hold government positions, while other people get “cognitively infiltrated.”
– The proposed government program: I see your point that when the government is infiltrating dangerous extremist groups, it could make sense for them to try to talk some of these people out of their extremism. After all, for reasons of public safety the FBI and local police are already doing lots of infiltration anyway—they hardly needed Sunstein and Vermeule’s encouragement. Overall I suspect it’s a good thing that the cops are gathering intelligence this way rather than just letting these groups make plans in secret, set off bombs, etc., and once the agents are on the inside, I’d rather have them counsel moderation than do that entrapment thing where they try to talk people into planning crimes so as to be able to get more arrests.
I think what bothers me about the Sunstein and Vermeule article—beyond that they’re worried about conspiracy theories while themselves promoting various con artists and manipulators—is in their assumption that the government is on the side of the good. Perhaps this is related to Sunstein being pals with Kissinger. I labeled Sunstein and Vermeuele as libertarian paternalists, but maybe Vermuele is better described as an authoritarian; in any case they seem to have the presumption that the government is on their side, whether it’s for nudging people to do good things (not to do bad things) or for defusing conspiracy theories (not to support conspiracy theories).
But governments can’t always be trusted. When I wrote, “They don’t even seem to consider a third option, which is the government actively promoting conspiracy theories,” it’s not that I was saying that this third option was a good thing! Rather, I was saying that the third option is something that’s actually done, and I gave examples of the U.S. executive branch and much of Congress in the period Nov 2020 – Jan 2021, and the Russian government in their invasion of Ukraine.” And it seems that Vermeule may well be cool with both these things! So my reaction to Vermeule saying the government should be engaging in information warfare is similar to my reaction when the government proposed to start a terrorism-futures program and have it be run by an actual terrorist: it might be a good idea in theory and even in practice, but (a) these are not the guys I would want in charge of such a program, and (b) their enthusiasm for it makes me suspicious.
– Unrelated to all the above: You say of Vermeule, “after his conversion to Catholicism, he adopted the Church’s line on moral opposition to capital punishment.” That’s funny because I thought the Catholic church was cool with the death penalty—they did the inquisition, right?? Don’t tell me they’ve flip-flopped! Once they start giving into the liberals on the death-penalty issue, all hell will break loose.
OK, why did I write all that?
1. The mix of social science, statistical evidence, and politics is interesting and important.
2. As an academic, I’m always interested in academics behaving badly, especially when it involves statistics or social science in some way. In particular, the idea that these guys are supposed to be so smart and so nice in regular life, and then they go with these not-so-smart, not-so-nice theories, that’s interesting. When mean, dumb people promote mean, dumb ideas, that’s not so interesting. But when nice, smart people do it . . .
3. It’s been unfair to Sunstein for me to keep bringing up that Stasi thing.
Regarding item 2, one analogy I can see with Vermeule endorsing stupid and dangerous election-fraud claims is dudes in the 60s wearing Che T-shirts and thinking Chairman Mao was cool. From one perspective, Che was one screwed-up dude and Mao was one of history’s greatest monsters . . . but both of them were bad-ass dudes and it was cool to give the finger to the Man. Similarly, Vermeule could well think of Trump as badass, and he probably thinks its hilarious to endorse B.S. claims that support his politics. Kinda like how Steven Levitt probably thinks he’s a charming mischievous imp by supporting climate denialists. Levitt would not personally want his (hypothetical) beach house on Fiji to be flooded, but, for a certain kind of person, it’s fun to be a rogue.
Here’s what I wrote when the topic came up before:
There’s no evidence that Vermeule was trying to overthrow the election. He was merely supportive of these efforts, not doing it himself, in the same way that an academic Marxist might root for the general strike and the soviet takeover of government but not be doing anything active on the revolution’s behalf.
Dude, I passed out halfway through that.
Total:
Yeah, I know, I know. The first draft is sometimes the longest.
I think you a little unfair to the original capital-punishment paper. The part about being compelled to employ the death penalty was based on the utilitarian principle that the act/omission distinction BY ITSELF is irrelevant, so that failure to impose it is equivalent in this case to killing those people who would otherwise be saved. Unfortunately, Sunstein used the language of deontology: “a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel, rather than forbid that form of punishment. . . .” “Sanctity” is not a utilitarian concept. Sunstein has a habit of advocating utilitarian solutions while pretending that they are something else (perhaps because he was influenced by Martha Nussbaum, an opponent of utilitarianism … but this is speculation on my part). In 2005 he wrote a BBS article in which he did this, and my (published) comment on it was called “Biting the utilitarian bullet.”
I won’t comment here on your parody of utilitarianism: executing innocent people, etc.
But I do wonder how you can distinguish individual cases where the death penalty is warranted, given that, in aggregate, it has no detectable benefit. (The “Canada graph” in the Donahue/Wolfers paper was what convinced me.)
A German spy is caught in the middle of WWII during heavy fighting in a small town in France. The Geneva conventions say that a spy found out of uniform has committed a war crime and may be executed. Failure to execute means continuing to harbor this spy as a prisoner during a period of time where the prisoner may be able to aid the enemy by revealing the squads location, the allied soldiers are already in serious danger of being overrun by German forces. Does executing the prisoner make sense and does it have a utilitarian ethical justification in terms of the Captain of this squad attempting to provide the best chance for his troops to survive this battle?
So many people have such limited imagination.
I’m against the death penalty in use for normal civilian criminal proceedings but nothing is absolute. If the calculus is execute a spy or risk 100 people being blown up by artillery fire… it’s a very different calculus than having some serial killer in solitary confinement in prison in peacetime vs decades of expensive legal battles to allow lethal injection.
One can always come up with some hypothetical which supports almost anything.
Jonathan:
I continue to think that it was ridiculous for them to claim that “a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel” the death penalty.
Maybe part of my problem with that statement is the “sanctity” thing, which is so . . . sanctimonious! The idea of these stuffed-shirt law professors telling the rest of us what we need to do to have “a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life” . . . when all of this is based on an overinterpretation of some crappy social science study . . . it just seems horrible to me.
But, sure, there’s a precedent for this. The people who did the Inquisition presumably took the position that “a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel” the death penalty. And then there were the dudes who did the Salem witch trials. And, like Sunstein and Vermeule, they were moral leaders who had the confidence to tell the rest of us what to believe and how to live.
P.S. Relatedly, there are other cases in academia where people get treated as gurus for making over-the-top ridiculous pronouncements. Recall the ludicrous statement by economist Gary Becker that “most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent ‘suicides.'”
There’s some selection bias here. If Sunstein and Vermeule had limited themselves to only saying reasonable things, we might never have heard about them. Instead, they say things that are provocative, and, yeah, we get provoked. That’s one way to “win” in the attention game—if that’s their goal.
Andrew –
.
> The idea of these stuffed-shirt law professors telling the rest of us what we need to do to have “a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life
.
I think we can go to basic principles of fallacious arguments. If we look at their logic, it’s that no one who doubts the return value of executions (under any scenarios, at that!), can’t have a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life. It’s an absurd argument at face value. I think it’s an argument from personal incredulity. But ChatGPT disagrees with me:
Regardless, it’s obviously a fallacious argument.
I think the Gary Becker quote/claim is representative of specific type of claim/statement that certain people just love. These take the form of using some kind of linguistic reframing of X, a thing that we have a common sense understanding of, into Y – a thing that has a different technical definition and is not what most people think of as being X.
Then make claims about Y, labelled as X. The claims are true about Y and so can be defended on the technical definition of Y, but only seem profound, shocking, or controversial, when applied to X. This melding of X and Y does a huge amount of work in making these statements seem so cool or interesting to some people. Consider what the Becker claim would be without the linking of suicide (X) with the alternative technical thing that will now take the place of suicide (Y):
“According to the economic approach, therefore, most (if not all!) deaths are to some extent “suicides” in the sense that they could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life.”
This would just be technical claim: “Most if not all deaths could have been postponed if more resources had been invested in prolonging life”.
It is one of many ways of making a claim or set of research have popular appeal or interest, by linking it with something that is indeed very interesting or important to people. It’s similar to an experimentalist leaping from the specifics of their experiment to some very wide claim about society.
Dan Dennett does a similar thing in defending the notion of Free Will.
My thinking is that in order for the death penalty to have great value as a deterrent, potential murderers would have to be forward-looking non-risk-takers, and most ain’t (to quote Bill Smith’s character in “Any Which Way You Can” (or something like that–old Clint Eastwood movie).
In “Stopping at Slow Year” by Frederik Pohl, a barely sustainable colony on a distant planet can’t afford prisons, so they have one sort of penalty for all crimes: you have to choose and take a pill from a bottle of 1000 identically-looking pills. If the crime is a misdemeanor, there might be one poison pill and the rest placebos. If the crime was murder, there might be 999 poison pills.
That’s an exaggeration, but I think the basic motivation for the death penalty is similar; it’s the cheapest way to deal with murderers that prevents them from killing again. The argument against it is that not all convicted people are guilty.
I wonder whether this is the lengthiest posting since the inception of this blog. I have read this entire posting, but early on, there is a typo; “thinks” should be changed to “things”:
“(along with many smart things) under the Freakonomics banner, thinks which I guess (or, should I say, hope) he’d never have done in his capacity as an academic.”
But, now that I have reread the offending prose a few times, I am not sure my suggestion is warranted. In a way, “thinks” might make for more vivid criticism of academic pontificating.
This relates to a very minor point in the post, but I knew a bunch of very smart people, including my uncle, who were communists in the 30s and even beyond. The press lied enough about the things they were involved with that it was easy for them to believe that it was lying about what was going on in the Soviet Union (I got a taste of this during the 1964 Free Speech Movement — the press mostly reported the administration’s press releases as truth.)
John:
Not a minor point at all! I see many parallels between American left-wingers from the 1930s-1970s and American right-wingers from the 1980s-2020s.
Andrew –
What parallels do you see?
Joshua:
I wrote a post on this, should appear in a few months…
Andrew,
Can you explain to me how Harry Bridges, for example, was like the right-wingers from the 1980s-2020s? Sure, there have always been nuts on the left. At Berkeley, those of us in the mainstream left called them “the lefties and their allies, the crazies,” but people like that never built the labor movement, etc. (By “the lefties,” we meant people with an overly abstract view of reality, who tended to identify as Trotskyist.)
John:
Harry Bridges was a labor union organizer on the left who was involved with the Communist party. I guess the equivalent today would be a business leader who’s involved in fascist organizing . . . Peter Thiel, perhaps?
Once you accept the metric of maximum numbers of lives saved (or something analogous), you can find many ironic, astounding, surprising, or clickbait-worthy things to say. That is a garden of forking paths for logical thinking. You can even try to evaluate these paths according to available data – how likely is it that killing person X will eventually have prevented X from a mass shooting episode? Or, how likely is it that preventing an energy development that could threaten the existence of species Y will result in less people able to heat their homes, thereby resulting in #y extra deaths due to additional diseases? Similarly, I think once you accept the metric that the goal is to minimize the number of erroneous votes, you can find all sorts of surprising things to support. And you can evaluate some of these logical chains using available data – how likely is it that a particular kind of voting machine systematically undercounts a particular candidate’s votes? Or, how likely is it that x% of the mail in ballots counted during particular hours would be for candidate A when the overall vote count up to that point was y% for candidate A?
I think these types of evidence-based evaluations are worthwhile and necessary in the face of the myriad claims that can get made. However, I think the original sin is accepting the metric (maximum lives saved, minimum erroneous votes) to begin with. The forking logical paths all have some claims to validity, and sometimes the evidence can be used to determine which claims are more or less plausible. But it feels like a fools errand to me, and one that sounds like the kind of academic games that give academics a bad name while gathering all kinds of media attention. Once you decide to play that game, then I think you are committed to trying to evaluate the relative plausibility of different arduous logical chains of how one action or policy might impact the chosen metric. Sounds like a fools errand to me.
Dale:
I don’t think Vermeule cares about “minimum erroneous votes” or anything like that. My impression is just that he thinks fascism is cool and he likes the election deniers because he sees them as badass dudes who are on his side in the world struggle. He’s the right-wing equivalent of left-wing students in the 1970s wearing Che T-shirts.
Motivation and tactics are different things. He may well think fascism is cool (motivation) but focusing on voting irregularities can be a vehicle (tactics) for expressing that. It gives the appearance of being scientifically based without having to declare your real motivation (I haven’t read Vermeule so I may not be correctly portraying what he’s done, but many of the academic election deniers have used the tactic I describe while I believe their true motivation is that it is “cool” and part of “the world struggle”).
Any metric that relies on a single real world measurement like “lives saved” is certainly flawed. We need to always involve multiple factors, like life years lived, and police powers exercised, and homelessness experienced, and drug addiction experienced and etc. but I’m not against developing a univariate ordered measure. I do however think that a focus on that measure without any idea of uncertainty leads to errors. How much do we know that at location X in policy space the outcome Y is higher than at location Z in policy space. Focus on this univariate measure without uncertainty leads to poor decision making
Isn’t the CS/AV argument that each true positive saves multiple lives while each false positive condemns “but” a single life? In other words, we’ll make mistakes by executing innocent people but it is “worth it” if we prevent enough guilty people from eventually killing multiple others. That may not be the argument they made (I don’t have the patience to go back and check), but I think a number of such logical chains could be employed to argue that capital punishment is necessary for the “sanctity of human life.”
I’m not saying I support such a line of thought (I do not), but I think it isn’t hard to invent such logical chains. Then, of course, we can try to evaluate how consistent they are with data (how many convicted killers get released from prison, how many go on to commit additional murders, how many innocent people end up being killed, etc.). The whole thing seems like a fools errand to me – and dangerously diverts attention away from what I think is essentially an ethical matter. Is this really decision science or morality?
Dale:
Also, as I pointed out in my post, Sunstein and Vermeule’s trolley-style logic also implies that it’s ok to knowingly kill an innocent person, if that could save us from those 18 counterfactual murders. This is a utilitarian motivation not just for capital punishment but for flat-out state terror. This is the same sort of logic that used to be associated with the far left, back in Soviet days. Also, as with Stalinism, these iffy moral arguments are backed up by bad science.
Some utilitarians argue that there’s no difference between the best decision and the most moral decision; you should have a utility function that makes these the same.
Any system is going to have false positives and false negatives. I don’t think Blackstone’s Ratio ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio ) has any formal legal standing, but it has provoked plenty of discussion. Blackstone wrote “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”, but Benjamin Franklin wrote “it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer”, so there’s a factor of 10 inflation in just a few decades. But these both appear to be deflated versions of Maimonides, who wrote “It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.” (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Maimonides )
Sunstein and Vermeule seem to be flipping this around. Better to put seventeen innocents to death than to allow one guilty person to go free?
Phil:
No, they were arguing that if you kill one guilty person, it will save the lives of 18 innocent people.
Yes, that’s my point. If you execute one guilty person and seventeen innocents, you’re coming out ahead!
I’m nervous psychologizing about public figures, who are often quite different in private, as we are told is the case here. However: I did have the opportunity to observe Cass Sunstein closely over a few days when he was mostly improvising and perhaps closer to demonstrating his character more accurately than usual. I wouldn’t say he is a bad person in any general sense, and he might well be a wonderful friend and colleague. He is certainly very smart, especially in his mental quickness. He has an acute ear for hearing the part of an argument that matters to him, even if it is largely submerged. I’m not surprised he is such a center of attention.
But he is also very proud of these traits, impressed with his own intellectual agility. He reminded me of the portrayal of the judge in the film version of “A Civil Action” (can’t recall the portrayal in the original book), who delighted in the cleverness of his decision to separate the defendents, oblivious to how it was being advanced to serve the interests of the deep-pocketed one. Sunstein too fancies himself to be the most rigorously fair-minded and rational person in the room, and he can team up with the conservative and plutocratic interests behind Olin, AEI and the other foundations he’s funded by, sure that he’s that much smarter by finding ways to tap into their largesse for what he perceives as his own purposes. Recall that one of the key (most funded) applications of his version of behavioral econ was tort “reform”. I think his delight in his own nimbleness has the effect of muting the self-doubt that would plague the rest of us mortals if we suspected we were being used.
If you look at Sunstein’s more outrageous claims over the years, what connects them, in my opinion, is the pleasure he takes in being more clever than the intellectually predictable masses. Of course, your garden variety environmentalist will support the Precautionary Principle. Of course, your typical sanctimonious life-is-precious blowhard will oppose the death penalty and the imposition of a monetary value on statistical lives. But how cool it is to turn the tables on them, yes? And the contrarian nature of this mission is candy for the middle-brow media, so why not?
The connection between all this psychological speculation and the issues this blog is about is this: there is a temptation for motivated researchers to see statistical procedures as games to be played, where getting to result you want means “winning”. And the standard methods out there conduce to that. So the critique of the misuse of data takes us naturally to cases like Sunstein’s.
Sunstein also spent many years arguing cleverly and implausibly that abortion rights would be more secure if the Supreme Court “grounded them” rhetorically in “equality” rather than privacy, as if that would really make any difference to a swing judicial vote or to the public.
Peter:
The bit about Sunstein thinking that he’s smart reminds me of two things:
1. An academic economist reporting a commonplace observation by Lawrence Summers and taking this as evidence of Summers’s brilliance.
2. An academic public-policy scholar who got mad at me for not admitting I was wrong when I criticized the claims of Case and Deaton regarding trends in life expectancy. At the time, I wrote, “I can only issue a correction if I know where I was wrong. Can you please explain where I was wrong regarding the work of Case and Deaton? I am not aware of any errors that I made in that regard.” Rather than pointing to any errors, he criticized me for publishing “a series of skeptical takes” and for, among other things, not applauding Hillary Clinton for talking about the topic. He also sarcastically referred to me as a “stats genius” and wrote that my posts on the topic “proved [my] cleverness.” The whole thing was kinda bizarre to me because it all started with him saying I should admit I was wrong, but then he never pointed out anything incorrect that I had said.
The point of the first story is that standards for brilliance in some fields are pretty low. Or, to put it another way, I’m sure that Summers and Sunstein are brilliant. Lots of people are brilliant; that doesn’t mean they always know what they’re talking about.
The point of the second story is that some people seem to think of intellectual exchanges in terms of the brilliance or cleverness of the participants rather than the quality of the arguments. At its worst, this leads to Edge Foundation thinking. From my perspective, the deaths-of-despair thing was all about a public health / policy / statistics question, along with related issues such as the difficulty of even sophisticated news media to address the subtleties of the question, and my frustration with Case and Deaton’s response to criticism. It wasn’t about genius or cleverness or whatever; indeed, from my perspective, one of the problems with the news reporting was that, rather than taking with demographers for whom this sort of thing was bread and butter, they went with the angle in which the Nobel-prizewinning economist makes a great discovery. But my correspondent had to put things in that box.
So, sure, from Sunstein’s perspective, maybe he’s so brilliant that he can write a book about something he knows nothing about and say he’s “discovered a new continent,” and the rest of us are resentful complainers, the kind of losers who don’t appreciate the brilliance of other academic celebrities such as Henry Kissinger. That sort of attitude is one reason I hate the whole scientist-as-hero narrative.
This discussion kinda reminds me of the equivalent utilitarian position in health economics that we should actually be promoting smoking, because smokers usually die early and avoid all that expensive end of life care that the frail elderly accumulate. It is regarded as a mostly humorous in-joke, and to take it seriously would ultimately a bad faith position because the goal is to be different rather than to convince anyone. Perhaps if you repeat a stupid argument often enough, you convince yourself of its validity.
The argument that smoking has net societal benefits (due to the lower retirement benefits more than offsetting the health costs) I’ve always used as an example of the missing ethical basis of economics. There are many economic studies “documenting” the health costs of smoking, yet few or none include offsetting benefits in the form of lower retirement benefits. There seems to be an understanding of what can and cannot be included in such calculations – and that understanding comes from outside of economics. But keeping these things implicit gives a false impression that the economic calculations are somehow “objective” or not subject to ethical judgements. It’s not that the argument is stupid – but it is incomplete and misrepresented. Economists generally do a poor job of being explicit about what assumptions they are making – often to the point that they don’t realize these assumptions themselves.
But in the US, we’ve already paid for our retirement benefits with our SS payments. (I spent half my working life paying into SS, and am getting half benefits. It helps.) Ditto for Medicare. These are PRE-F-ING-PAID benefits. People love to conveniently forget that an “entitlement’ is something one has earned/paid for the title thereto. It’s not a cost/gift, it’s interest on a savings plan.
Also, the numbers are interesting. In Australia, at least, it seems that 1/3 of the elderly die in nursing homes after an average stay of three years. That means that this horrific care burden for the elderly (yes, that was sarcasm) amounts to one year per person. And in the meantime, we’re spending our income and savings and thus contributing to the economy. (The cost of medical care in the US is insane, but that’s not the elderly’s fault. All other industrialized countries manage to keep their medical costs under way better control.)
Meanwhile, replacing one dead old bloke takes 18 to 22 or more years of complete support. More for those of us who go to grad school (although all 7 years I spent in grad school were paid for by folks who wanted me to be doing that (Xerox, Sumitomo, and ARPA (thanks!)). That’s a horrific economic burden. Even in the US, back when the MIT tuition riot chant was “twenty-seven hundred, too damn much”, my father worked two jobs to pay the tuition.
The idea that we old folks are a horrible burden is simply wrong. But we are crochety.
Yes, good point on the prepaid aspect. They are essentially your property. You could reinvest them from a societal perspective which is perhaps Dale’s point but it’s not like a cost that needs bearing, it’s an asset essentially being appropriated by the state.
I totally agree with your conclusion that the debatable nature of many assumptions are very poorly handled in economics. I think the “externality” problem for example is one that has been handwaved away by traditional economics using weak arguments first conceived the better part of centuries ago.
However, this specific example also contains some assumptions that are strongly against smoking and weaken the retirement benefits argument. Foremost among them would be the lost quality-adjusted life years; given the clear causal nature of smoking on COPD, cancer, and so on, the quality of life of smokers tends to be lower in a measurable and quite expensive way depending on your willingness to pay for quality-adjusted life years, and not really offset by the marginal utility of smoking. Incidentally, I don’t think anyone has really measured the utility gain from the pleasure of smoking a cigarette (it would be interesting!) but many smokers wish desperately to quit and talk frequently about feeling stigmatised.
You could also argue that retirement benefits are reinvested into the economy in a way that healthcare provision isn’t, similar to the way economists measure the cost of death due to lost productivity. There is also the opportunity cost of healthcare provision ‘crowding out’ other consumers (sunk costs, wait times, and so on). I am sure someone has already done this to death in a textbook somewhere.
None of this is really objective, but to advocate for smoking from an economic perspective requires a very precise and usually unreasonable set of assumptions that likely means someone’s arguing from a position of bad faith (e.g. trying to troll or knowingly mislead).
My real point is that there is a mixture of economic calculations and moral arguments involved. Most economists portray these estimations as technical matters, ignoring the myriad ethical choices involved. I think this does a disservice to people searching to understand the issues. Too much of economics becomes an advocacy for a particular definition of economic efficiency which most people do not understand. Almost all externality discussions are like this – economists attempt to measure the “value” of good visibility but do not include the “value” of freedom enjoyed by ATV riders who diminish such visibility. There are prior moral judgements that are being made, but not explicitly. A very good old book (The Economy of the Earth by Mark Sagoff) details this very well – and was naturally dismissed by economists. Eliminating the essential ethical discussion from such issues and portraying them as technical exercises is an objectionable practice (in my view) for any discipline (and one exhibited by many disciplines besides economics).
Ditto for the issues surrounding the net costs/benefits of smoking. Retirement benefits and whether they were “earned” or not are precisely ethical issues involved with evaluating policies regarding smoking. They are not simply technical economic questions of how to measure the value of a statistical life or the value of a quality adjusted life year. Good decisions require a multidisciplinary approach, not just the one self-ordained as “the queen of the social sciences” (perhaps someone has the reference for when economists started referring to their discipline as such).
Interesting that this has come up in the context of Sunstein. He has collaborated with Viscusi on a number of papers (yes, I know he’s a big-time collaborator), and Viscusi made exactly this argument in a submission to, IIRC, the Czech government. This was while V was on a retainer from one of the cigarette companies. Shall we inquire into the ethics of this one?
Peter:
My guess is that Sunstein’s position would be that he’s a liberal (in the U.S. political sense) and so his moral motivations can’t be questioned on those grounds. In the same way that a conservative might feel that his tough-on-crime credentials are unaffected by any personal connections with criminals. Sunstein’s a liberal so he’s automatically moral no matter how many immoral acts he endorses, Rudy Guiliani’s a conservative so he’s automatically tough on crime, no matter how many criminals he hangs out with.
How Sunstein explains his friendship with Henry Kissinger, I have no idea. Maybe he’s just envious of Kissinger’s celebrity?
Andrew, you’ve pointed out the contrarian impulse that many economists have: people generally act rationally and they are irrational not to see how rational they actually are. The contrarian thing is even stronger in Sunstein. I think he is thrilled to be a friend/collaborator with Kissinger, Vermeulen and the rest, and to be able to convince himself that, as a consistent liberal, he’s on a higher plane because of this. Same with his espousal of limitations on tort awards, skepticism toward environmental and public health activism, and the rest. You’ve got to be really clever to pull this off.
BTW, it’s interesting his initial reaction to Covid was to warn us against the alarmists who thought lots of people might die from it. He started out taking the same stance as Fox News commentators etc. Only when the mortality numbers started to mount did he switch sides and argue that nudges would be great at reducing the spread. In short, the first impulse was to be contrarian and argue from the right, and only when that was foreclosed did he switch to the soft liberalism of nudgeworthy concern.
He’s really such an interesting case. It’s a shame you have to spend so much time to keep up with his writings if you want to follow the twists and turns.
Peter:
Yes, good point. I’m reminded of when David Brooks promoted some specious argument about Jewish students at Harvard. Part of the appeal to Brooks must have been that it supported his conservative political views, but I think another part was that it allowed Brooks to feel proud of his open-mindedness: he was such a broad thinker that he’d endorse some flat-out anti-Semitism. The racist provenance of the idea was, paradoxically, part of its appeal.
So, yeah, I could see that Sunstein could feel proud that he’s such a broad thinker that he can be friends with Kissinger: the rest of us just see Kissinger as a schemer, a war criminal, and a world-class brown-noser, but Sunstein can see more deeply.
I guess the Brooks thing is different, in that I doubt Brooks thinks of himself as brilliant or even as smart. I’m guessing that Brooks thinks of himself as judicious, wise, and a hard worker, with his endorsement of the anti-Semitic argument as an example of his good judgment.
I was going to suggest that making this argument unironically usually means someone’s on the take.