Tag: Self-interest

Steven Pinker On Morality

Steven Pinker on Morality

Posted on by jabittan
According to Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, morality comes from our ability to reason and our need to cooperate together. Without interactions and dependence on other human beings, we wouldn’t have a sense of morals. We would only have our individual self-interest. However, humans live in complex social groups within complex social communities and we have to live and work together for survival and general life satisfaction. As Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler argue in The Elephant in the Brain, social and political tribes drove the evolution and need for large rational brains, which Pinker argues allow us to reason from a point of mutual unselfishness, ultimately creating our ideas of morality.
 
 
To demonstrate, Pinker writes, “if I appeal to you to do something that affects me – to get off my foot, or not stab me for the fun of it, or to save my child from drowning – then I can’t do it in a way that privileges my interests over yours.” All humans are self-interested, which conflicts with our social lives. We all want to act in our own self-interested ways, but we have to cooperate with others and work with others to get what we desire or need for survival. Therefore, you must demonstrate that your interests go beyond simply your own self-interest in order to get people to respect you, respect your interests, and to cooperate with you. Pinker continues, “I have to state my case in a way that would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not.” To work together we have to find ways in which our interests align. I may have to pay you to do some physical effort that I don’t want to do. I may have to agree to respect your property if I want you to respect my property. I may have to give up some level of individual rights if I don’t want you to abridge liberties of mine. “Mutual unselfishness is the only way we can simultaneously pursue our interests,” Pinker writes.
 
 
What Pinker argues, flowing from this discussion of mutual unselfishness, self-interests, and social cooperation, is that our morals are not given to us by a supernatural power and that our morals do not exist separate from humans. Morals are created through human rationality and through our ability to recognize that we have individual feelings and preferences, and therefore other people who are like us probably have the same capacity for all the feelings, emotions, preferences, and desires that we have. Our morals exist because we have to work together, to interact in social groups and organizations, and to rely upon institutions to order our relationships and collective efforts.
 
 
Pinker writes, “Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.” By interchangeability of perspectives Pinker is referring to the human ability to consider that other people have thoughts and feelings and the human ability to imagine or adopt other perspectives. Positive-sum games are situations where everyone is made better through cooperation. By all working together and combining inert pieces of material, we can create a house which which shelter us, keep us warm in the winter and shaded in the summer, and will give us a place to meet and hang out. The total value of the house is greater than the individual value of each component piece. Much of our world is structured around positive-sum interactions that occur when we cooperate through mutual unselfishness. Our morals derive from our ability to reason and help us harness these positive-sum moments. But it all comes back to our desire to pursue our own self interests while having to compromise as part of a larger social group.
Circular Arguments in Racism, Sexism, and Other Forms of Discrimination

Circular Arguments in Racism, Sexism, and Other Forms of Discrimination

Posted on by jabittan

The myths which supported slavery were hard to eliminate in part because they created environments for circular arguments and vicious circles. The myths created situations where black people were discriminated against, and the outcome of that discrimination became a justification for the discrimination. Yuval Noah Harari describes the lasting impact of such circular arguments generations after the civil war in his book Sapiens by writing, “trapped in this vicious circle, blacks were not hired for white-collar jobs because they were deemed unintelligent, and the proof of their inferiority was the paucity of blacks in white-collar jobs.”

This type of circular thinking is common in many arenas of discrimination. We see an outcome that likely has a long history of cultural norms, discrimination, and bias yet fail to recognize the context. We see the end result and assume that it is not a cultural biproduct of discriminatory views and practices, but somehow reflective of the true nature of the universe. Examples go beyond the lack of black business owners and CEOs in the United States. Women historically have been shut out of math, computer science, and engineering fields on discriminatory grounds. However, the same circular argument around their inability to do the work as evidenced by their low representation in such fields is used to justify their absences from STEM and computer industries. The biased and discriminatory explanation is that women are not good at math and science, and that is why women are not represented in such fields, but this argument fails to recognize the cultural factors at play.

In the instances above, with specific attention called out to the circular thinking, the role of unjust bias and discrimination can be obvious and infuriating. But it is often harder to see and recognize circular arguments in the real world. Asians are viewed as being good at math and the evidence is the high proportion of Asians in math and science fields in American Universities. White people are not viewed as being as good at sports as black people, with representation in major American sports being used as evidence for the argument – although quarterbacks in college football and the NFL are more white than the rest of the teams, often supported by the circular argument that black athletes are not smart enough to play the position as evidenced by the fact that so few quarterbacks are black. Quite often some sort of bias, discrimination, or other cultural factor is at play, but American’s have an easier time attributing outcomes to individual factors and hazy notions of biology than to cultural biases, discrimination, and other factors. Circular arguments may ultimately be vacuous, but they are hard to always recognize and denounce – especially when the results of discrimination and bias are in our individual self-interest.

A Vicious Circle

A Vicious Circle

Posted on by jabittan
How did discrimination against black people in the United States become so bad? In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that two competing desires, economic self-interest and a desire to see themselves as pious, just, and objective drove white slave owners to develop myths and excuses for the enslavement of black people. The myths created were powerful. Harari writes, “theologians argued that Africans descended from Ham, son of Noah, saddled by his father with a curse that his offspring would be slaves. Biologists argued that blacks are less intelligent than whites and their moral sense less developed. Doctors alleged that blacks live in filth and spread diseases – in other words, they are a source of pollution.”
 
 
These myths dominated the mindset of both white and black people with regards to race. They played on fear, used faulty evidence to justify white slave owners’ inherent self-interest, and allowed white slave owners to see themselves as benevolent, not as oppressive. Harari argues that these myths were so effective and persuasive that even when slavery officially ended, the influence of these myths lived on. While it was a huge change of events and culture to make slavery illegal, the power of myths found a way to live on.
 
 
“Notably,” Harari writes of British anti-slavery actions and subsequent American actions, “this was the first and only time in history that a large number of slaveholding societies voluntarily abolished slavery. But, even though the slaves were freed, racist myths that justified slavery persisted. Separation of the races was maintained by racist legislation and social custom. The result was a self-reinforcing cycle of cause and effect, a vicious circle.”
 
 
We celebrate the achievements of those who overturned and outlawed slavery in the Untied States, but we often fail to recognize how powerful the myths surrounding black inferiority were, and in many ways have continued to be to this day. It is a mistake to say that when slavery ended, that when blatantly racist legislation was repealed, that when a black man was elected president, the power of the myths which bolstered slavery and in some ways established our country dissipated. When myth creates the circumstances for a vicious circle, passively hoping that racism and inequality established by such myths will fade away is inadequate. The power of a myth must be replaced, Harari would argue, by another more powerful myth. Myths do not go away and cease to be influential on their own.
Personally and Politically Disturbed by the Homeless

Personally and Politically Disturbed by the Homeless

Posted on by jabittan
On the first page of the preface of The Homeless, Christopher Jencks writes about the responses that many Americans had to the rise of homelessness in American cities in the 1970s. He writes, “The spread of homelessness disturbed affluent Americans for both personal and political reasons. At a personal level, the faces of the homeless often suggest depths of despair that we would rather not imagine, much less confront in the flesh. … At a political level, the spread of homelessness suggests that something has gone fundamentally wrong with America’s economic or social institutions.”
I think the two books which most accurately describe the way that I understand our political and social worlds are Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. Kahneman suggests that our brains are far more susceptible to cognitive errors than we would like to believe. Much of our decision-making isn’t really so much decision-making as it is excuse making, finding ways to give us agency over decisions that were more or less automatic. Additionally, Kahneman shows that we very frequently, and very predictably, make certain cognitive errors that lead us to inaccurate conclusions about the world. Simler and Hansen show that we often deliberately mislead ourselves, choosing to intentionally buy into our minds’ cognitive errors. By deliberately lying to ourselves and choosing to view ourselves and our beliefs through a false objectivity, we can better lie to others, enhancing the way we signal to the world and making ourselves appear more authentic. [Note: some recent evidence has put some findings from Kahneman in doubt, but I think his general argument around cognitive errors still holds.]
Jencks published his book long before Thinking Fast and Slow and The Elephant in the Brain were published, but I think his observation hints at the findings that Kahneman, Simler, and Hanson would all write about in the coming decades. People wanted to hold onto beliefs they possibly knew or suspected to be false. They were disturbed by a reality that did not match the imagined reality in which they wanted to believe. They embraced cognitive errors and adopted beliefs and conclusions based on those cognitive errors. They deceived themselves about reality to better appear to believe the myths they embraced, and in the end they developed a political system where they could signal their virtue by strongly adhering to the initial cognitive errors that sparked the whole process.
Jencks’ quote shows why homelessness is such a tough issue for many of us to face. When we see large number of people failing and ending up homeless it suggests that there is something more than individual shortcomings at work. It suggests that somewhere within society and our social structures are points of failure. It suggests that our institutions, from which we may benefit as individuals, are not serving everyone. This goes against our beliefs which reinforce our self-interest, and is hard to accept. It is much easier to simply fall back on cognitive illusions and errors and to blame those who have failed. We truly believe that homelessness is the problem of individuals because we are deceiving ourselves, and because it serves our self-interest to do so. When we see homeless, we see a reality we want to ignore and pretend does not exist because we fear it and we fear that we may be responsible for it in some way. We fear that homelessness will necessitate a change in the social structures and institutions that have helped us get to where we are and that changes may make things harder for us or somehow diminishing our social status. This is why we are so disturbed by homeless, why we prefer not to think about it, and why we develop policies based on the assumption that people who end up homeless are deeply flawed individuals and are responsible for their own situation. It is also likely why we have not done enough to help the homeless, why it is becoming a bigger issue in American cities, and why we have been so bad at addressing the real causes of homelessness in America. There is definitely some truth to the argument that homelessness is the result of flawed individuals, which is why it is such a strong argument, but we should accept that there are some flawed causal thoughts at play and that it is often in our self-interest to dismiss the homeless as individual failures.
Who Wants Market Regulation?

Who Wants Market Regulation?

Posted on by jabittan
“Those who profit from the current situation – and those indifferent to it – will say that the housing market should be left alone to regulate itself. They don’t really mean that,” writes Matthew Desmond in his book Evicted.  In the world that Desmond investigated, the world of low-income housing, the ones who don’t think any government action needs to be taken to regulate or stabilize the market are the landlords and people able to make money from slum housing. The people exploiting market failures and extracting rents say they don’t want any changes in housing policy because they favor a free market, but what Desmond’s quote hints at is that they don’t really exist within a free-market, and they currently profit from existing government action (not just inaction) on housing policy.
The quote from Desmond reminds me of senior citizens who protest changes to Medicare with signs that say “Keep your government hands off my Medicare,” seemingly unaware that Medicare is a government run health program. The line between government and markets is not always clear to people, and what people actually want in terms of government market regulation doesn’t always line up with people’s stated political beliefs or stated beliefs about government intervention. We can have high minded opinions about the proper role of government relative to markets, and we sound better and more impressive when we do, but the bottom line is that we are all likely driven more by our own self-interest than our high minded opinions of governments and markets.
I am currently listening to Ron Chernow’s Hamilton biography on audiobook. I am struck by how our nation’s founding fathers quickly broke down into self-interested policy quarrels that were couched in high minded political rhetoric, but seemed to perfectly back the self-interest of the given founding father. Jefferson in particular seemed to be a master of this kind of deception, arguing that America should have a minimal government and reflect a populist standpoint. However, Jefferson owned slaves and had a vast agrarian plantation and his policies seemed to clearly favor his own lifestyle. His actions can be well understood when viewed through the lens of The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson who suggest that most of our behavior is signaling and that we generally (and deceptively) act on self-interest more than we would ever admit.
All of this is to suggest that most people don’t really have any independent and objective views of government regulations of markets. Desmond’s quote about housing markets shows that people are driven by self-interest, that they discount regulations that favor their financial interests, and that they misrepresent government policies that make them better off. When our own self-interest, our own bottom line, and our social status are on the line, we are willing to compromise our high minded positions to adopt the view that is expedient to our own interests. This was true of Jefferson and Hamilton in the first Presidential Administration after the adoption of the Constitution, and it is true today in housing, Medicare, and other government and market areas. Landlords, real-estate agents, and others who currently profit in the housing market are in favor of government tax breaks on mortgage interest, of housing vouchers, and other policies that help ensure people can afford high rents. They view the market as being free without fully acknowledging these interventions and how they benefit from them.
Self-Interest & A Banking Moral Hazard

Self-Interest & A Banking Moral Hazard

Posted on by jabittan
I have not really read into or studied the financial crisis of 2008, but I remember how angry and furious so many people were at the time. There was an incredible amount of anger at big banks, especially when executives at big banks began to receive massive bonuses while many people in the country lost their homes and had trouble rebounding from the worst parts of the recession. The anger at banks spilled into the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is still a protest that I only have a hazy understanding of.
While I don’t understand the financial crisis that well, I do believe that I better understand self-interest, thanks to my own personal experience and constantly thinking about Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler’s book The Elephant in the Brain. The argument from Hanson and Simler is that most of us don’t actually have really strong beliefs about most aspects of the world. For most topics, the beliefs we have are usually subservient to our own self-interest, to the things we want that would give us more money, more prestige, and more social status. When you apply this filter retroactively to the financial crisis of 2008, some of the arguments shift, and I feel that I am able to better understand some of what took place in terms of rhetoric coming out of the crisis.
In Risk Savvy, published in 2014, Gerd Gigerenzer wrote about the big banks. He wrote about the way that bankers argued for limited regulation and intervention from states, suggesting that a fee market was necessary for a successful banking sector that could fund innovation and fuel the economy. However, banks realized that in the event of a major banking crisis, all banks would be in trouble, and dramatic government action would be needed to save the biggest banks and prevent a catastrophic collapse. “Profits are pocketed by executives, and losses are compensated by taxpayers. That is not exactly a free market – it’s a moral hazard,” writes Gigerenzer.
Banks, like the individuals who work for and comprise them, are self-interested. They don’t want to be regulated and have too many authorities limiting their business enterprises. At the same time, they don’t want to be held responsible for their actions. Banks took on increasingly risky and unsound financial loans, recognizing that if everyone was engaged in the same harmful lending practice, that it wouldn’t just be a single bank that went bust, but all of them. They argued for a free market before the crash, because a free market with limited intervention was in their self-interest, not because they had high minded ideological beliefs. After the crash, when all banks risked failure, the largest banks pleaded for bail outs, arguing that they were necessary to prevent further economic disaster. Counter to their free-market arguments of before, the banks favored bail-outs that were clearly in their self-interest during the crisis. Their high minded ideology of a free market was out the window.
Gigerenzer’s quote was meant to focus more on the moral hazard dimension of bailing out banks that take on too many risky loans, but for me, someone who just doesn’t fully understand banking the way I do healthcare or other political science topics, what is more obvious in his quote is the role of self-interest, and how we try to frame our arguments to hide the ways we act on little more than self-interest. A moral hazard, where we benefit by pushing risk onto others is just one example of how individual self-interest can be negative when multiplied across society. Tragedy of the commons, bank runs, and social signaling are all other examples where our self-interest can be problematic when layered up to larger societal levels.
Social learning and risk aversion

Social Learning and Risk Aversion

Posted on by jabittan
In his book Risk Savvy, Gerd Gigerenzer looks at risk aversion in the context of social learning and presents interesting ideas and results from studies of risk aversion and fear. He writes, “In risk research people are sometimes divided into two kinds of personalities: risk seeking and risk averse. But it is misleading to generalize a person as one or the other. … Social learning is the reason why people aren’t generally risk seeking or risk averse. They tend to fear whatever their peers fear, resulting in a patchwork of risks taken and avoided.”

 

I agree with Gigerenzer and I find it is normally helpful to look beyond standard dichotomies. We often categorize things into binaries as the example of risk averse or risk seeking demonstrates. The reality, I believe, is that far more things are situational and exist within spectrums. In general for most of our behaviors that we may want to categorize with a dichotomy, I would argue that we are often much more self-interested than we would like to admit and often driven by our present context to a greater extent than we normally realize. People are not good or evil, honest or dishonest, or even hardworking or lazy. People adjust to the needs of the moment, fitting what they believe is in their best interest at a given time with influence from a great deal of social determinants. Social learning and risk aversion helps us see that dichotomies often don’t stand up, and it reveals something interesting about who we are as individuals within a larger society.

 

People have a patchwork of things they fear and a patchwork of risks they are willing to accept. On the whole, we generally won’t accept a bet unless the payoff is twice the potential gamble (there is an expected value calculation we can do that I don’t want to dive into). However, we are not always rational and calculating in the risks and gambles we take. We are much more likely to die in a car crash than an airplane crash, yet few of have any hesitation when buckling our seat for the drive to work but likely feel some nervousness during takeoff on a short flight. We are not risk seeking if we are more willing to drive than fly (in fact it isn’t really appropriate to categorize this activity as either risk seeking or risk avoiding), we are simply responding to learned fears that have developed in our culture.

 

What this shows us is that we are creatures that respond to our environment, especially our social environments. We often think of ourselves as unique individuals, but the reality is that we are dependent on society and define ourselves based on the societies and groups we belong to. We learn from those around us, try to do what we understand to be in our best interest, and navigate a complicated course between societal expectations and our self-interest. Just as we can’t classify ourselves into imagined dichotomies, we cannot do so with others. Social learning and risk aversion give us a window into the complexity that we smooth over when we try to categorize ourselves or others into simple dichotomies.
Open Default Nudges

Open Defaults

Posted on by jabittan
Our society has a lot of defaults, and for many of us, we only opt out of the default in a narrow set of circumstances. Whether it is our mode of travel, how we pay for goods, or the type of health insurance plan we are enrolled in, the default option makes a big difference in our lives. Actors within our political and economic systems know this, and the choice of default can matter a lot to individual actors, political groups, and companies. Consequentially, what default is selected, and what story we tell about the default, is a constant point of argument and debate in our country.

 

In their book Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler discuss the importance of nudges and the ways that responsible choice architects should think about them. Choice architects may face pressure to select a default option that in one way or another benefits them personally or benefits the group or ideology they identify with. A state government may favor a default Medicaid option that is confusing and hard for individuals to use, meaning that fewer people will access services, and the state won’t have to pay as much for medical services for low income individuals. A corporate HR representative might feel pressured from a boss to have the default retirement savings rate for employees set at 2%, knowing that the company will spend less through retirement savings matching if the rate is lower.

 

But these types of defaults are not in the best interest of individuals. A health plan that is easy to use and facilitates access to necessary medical care is clearly in the best interest of the individual, but it may cost more for the government agency or corporation sponsoring the plan. A retirement plan that helps save above the rate of inflation is also clearly in the best interest of the individual, but might be more costly to a company’s bottom line.

 

As a guide for setting defaults, following with previous advice of ensuring that deliberate nudges employed by governments or corporations can survive open transparency, Sunstein and Thaler write, “The same conclusion holds for legal default rules. If government alters such rules – to encourage organ donation or reduce discrimination – it should not be secretive about what it is doing.”

 

The defaults we chose, and the reasons we select defaults should be open and transparent. If a choice architect cannot defend a default choice, then they should set an alternative default that can be defended in the open. Defaults that clearly benefit the choice architect or their interests at the expense of the individual making (or failing to make) a choice should be excluded. It is important to note that this means that choice architects have to actively make a decision with the default. Setting the default for a retirement savings plan if an individual never makes a selection to 0 is not in the best interest of the individual. An argument could be made that the choice architect attempted to remove themselves from the choice setting as much as possible by not providing a default, but that is still a choice, and will leave some people worse off than if the choice architect had selected a more defensible choice. Choosing not to set a default can be as indefensible as selecting a self-serving default.
Acknowledging Nudges

Acknowledging Nudges

Posted on by jabittan
In the book Nudge, Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler argue that it is impossible to avoid and eliminate nudges. Whenever people have a choice to be made, someone else has a hand in shaping how that choice is presented and structured. Even if a choice architect were to strive to maximize choice and decision-making autonomy in the chooser, subtle factors will influence the chooser and nudge them in particular directions. Striving to eliminate nudges is likely to lead to worse potential outcomes and choices than acknowledging nudges and trying to employ them in ways that help people make good choices.

 

But how does a choice architect judge when a nudge is appropriate versus when a nudge goes too far? Again, Sunstein and Thaler recommend that first a choice architect acknowledge their nudge, and then ask themselves whether they could discuss the way they use nudges in public. The authors reference an idea from John Rawls called the publicity principle. If a choice architect feels comfortable with publicly acknowledging nudges and their choice to employ a given nudge, then their nudge is probably going in an appropriate direction. If however, the discovery of their nudges would lead people to shame them or if they would be embarrassed about their actions, then they have overstepped the bounds of an acceptable nudge.

 

Sunstein and Thaler write, “The government should respect the people whom it governs, and if it adopts policies that it could not defend in public, it fails to manifest that respect. Instead, it treats its citizens as tools for its own manipulation.”

 

Nudges are effective tools because we can understand how human psychology works and we can predict situations in which people are likely to make biased judgements or judgements based on cognitive errors. Appropriate nudges seek to improve decision-making by helping people overcome these biases and errors. Manipulative nudges are those which seek to exploit such biases. Governments are expected to be transparent, and more laws exist for transparency in the public rather than the private sector, meaning that government officials must be more considerate about their explicit nudges. If oversight bodies, reporters, or the general public were to learn of a practice that made an agency or official look good while failing to actually benefit the public, then it would be clear that an abuse of power took place. Choice architects who wish to serve the public rather than manipulate it should always consider acknowledging nudges, and whether they can safely do so publicly.
Public vs Private Choice Architects - Joe Abittan

Who to Fear: Public vs Private Choice Architects

Posted on by jabittan
A question that Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler raise in their book Nudge is whether we should worry more about public or private sector choice architects. A choice architect is anyone who influences the decision space of another individual or group. Your office’s HR person in charge of health benefits is a choice architect. The people at Twitter who decided to increase the character length of tweets are choice architects. The government bureaucrat who designs the form you use to register to vote is also a choice architect. The decisions that each individual or team makes around the choice structure for other people’s decisions will influence the decisions and behaviors of people in those choice settings.

 

In the United States, we often see a split between public and private that is feels more concrete than the divide truly is. Often, we fall dramatically on one side of the imagined divide, either believing everything needs to be handled by businesses, or thinking that businesses are corrupt and self-interested and that government needs to step in to monitor almost all business actions. The reality is that businesses and government agencies overlap and intersect in many complex ways, and that choice architects in both influence the public and each other in complex ways. Regardless of what you believe and what side you fall on, both choice architects need to be taken seriously.

 

“On the face of it, it is odd to say that the public architects are always more dangerous than the private ones. After all, managers in the public sector have to answer to voters, and managers in the private sector have as their mandate the job of maximizing profits and share prices, not consumer welfare.”

 

Sunstein and Thaler suggest that we should be concerned about private sector choice architects because they are ultimately responsible to company growth and shareholder value, rather than what is in the best interest of individuals. When conflicts arise between what is best for people and what is best for a company’s bottom line, there could be pressure on the choice architect to use nudges to help the bottom line rather than to help people make the best decisions possible.

 

However, the public sector is not free from perverse incentives simply by being elected, being accountable to the public, or being free from profit motives. Sunstein and Thaler continue, “we agree that government officials, elected or otherwise, are often captured by private-sector interests whose representatives are seeking to nudge people in directions that will specifically promote their selfish goals.” The complex interplay of government and private companies means that even the public sector is not a space purely dedicated to public welfare. The general public doesn’t have the time, attention, energy, or financial resources to influence public sector choice architects in the ways that the private sector does. And if private sector influences shape choice structures via public elected officials, they can create a sense of legitimacy for ultimately selfish decisions. Of course, public sector choice architects could be more interested in keeping their job or winning reelection, and may promote their own selfish goals for self-preservation reasons as well.

 

We can’t think of public sector or private sector actors as being more trustworthy or responsible than the other. Often times, they overlap and influence each other, shifting the incentives and opinions of the public and the actors within public and private sectors simultaneously. Sunstein and Thaler suggest that this is a reason for maintaining the maximal choice freedom possible. The more people have their own ability to make choices, even if they are nudged, the more we can limit the impact of self-serving choice architects, whether they are in the public or private sectors.