Umm…Paul? They pay both. I’d lift Krugman’s own favorite dismissive phrase and say “That’s Economics 101″, but actually it’s probably standard knowledge among middle schoolers.

To review the details:

First, Krugman reposted (from the website of a left-wing advocacy group) a highly misleading chart purporting to illustrate the federal tax burdens borne by various income groups. The chart accounts for payroll and income taxes, but omits corporate taxes, thereby making the burden on high-income tax payers appear substantially smaller than it is, because corporate taxes reduce dividends which are disporportionately paid to high-income taxpayers.

Next, he got called on it by lots and lots of people, including, for example, Greg Mankiw.

Next, Krugman acknowledged his error. But, as always, he did so with the least possible grace, suggesting that his critics, by virtue of pointing out Krugman’s mistake, have somehow undermined their own principles.

In particular, his position is that by acknowledging that corporate profits benefit shareholders, “conservatives” have undermined their own ability to claim that corporations benefit anyone other than shareholders (e.g. workers). He relies, in other words, on the cockamamie notion that if something is good for group A, it can’t possibly also be good for group B.

If Krugman’s point is that all profits are paid to shareholders, well duh. Surely nobody, nowhere, never, nohow, has ever suggested otherwise.

But if his point is that you must claim a share of those profits in order to benefit from capital accumulation, then he really has stopped even pretending to be an economist. As Professor Krugman is surely well aware, the accumulation of capital is the primary driving force behind the growth of wages.

In other words — and this is exactly what Krugman is denying — if you work for General Electric, you might have a good reason to be glad that General Electric is around. Even if you don’t own any stock.

(Actually, it’s not just GE’s employees who benefit from GE’s capital accumulation; it’s workers everywhere. Example: GE hires a bunch of workers, which makes it harder for IBM to hire workers, which forces IBM to pay higher wages. But if that’s too subtle for Paul Krugman, we can focus on just the GE workers and still devastate his argument.)

In summary: Everybody who knows any economics knows that corporate capital accumulation can benefit both workers (via wages) and stockholders (via dividends) at the same time. (Well duh again.) Krugman makes some bogus argument about taxes that ignores the existence of the dividends. Mankiw and others point out that the dividends exist. Krugman says: “Okay, you’re right, but I hope now you’ll finally stop claiming that wages exist!”

I’d love to find the perfect closing sentence to capture the flavor of this peremptory illogic, but I’m stumped. What should the final line of this post have been?

Share/Save

For at least the eighth time on this blog, I want to point out that this widely believed “fact” is not true.

To understand Mitt Romney’s tax burden, you have to compare him to his doppelganger Timm Romney, who lives on a planet with no taxes. In the year (say) 2000, Mitt and Timm both earned (say) a million dollars. Timm invested his million dollars, saw it double over the past decade or so, and cashed out his investment this year, leaving him with two million dollars. Mitt, by contrast, paid 35% tax in 2000, leaving him with $650,000. He invested it, saw it double, and cashed out last year, paying 15% tax on the $650,000 capital gain. That leaves him $1,202,500, which is about 60% of what Timm’s got. In other words, the tax system costs Mitt almost 40% of his income.

By contrast, people on our planet without investment income collect their wages, pay 35% in taxes, and spend what’s left. The tax system costs them 35%, while it costs Mitt almost 40%. In other words, people with investment income bear a higher tax burden, as a percentage of their income, than anyone else — and that’s before you even start accounting for the taxes on dividends, interest, corporate income and inheritance.

It’s true that there are some hedge fund managers out there who manage to game the system by disguising their wages as capital gains and thereby avoiding the wage tax altogether. That in no way undermines the main point.

Share/Save

A businessman can slash his workforce in half, produce about the same as before, and be considered a big success; an economy that does the same plunges into depression, and ends up not being able to sell its goods.

So according to Krugman, it’s better for you and your spouse to earn $40,000 each than for one of you to earn $80,000 while the other stays home with the kids. I wonder how many two-earner families would agree with him.

Perhaps Krugman hasn’t noticed that the US economy, over the past century or so, has managed to cut its per capita labor input roughly in half without plunging into a 100-year-depression. There are even some people who think we’re better off these days partly because we work 35 hours a week instead of 70.

Apparently business isn’t the only profession where success is not always accompanied by wisdom.

Share/Save

Also, the study of history leads to closed-mindedness. After taking an American history course, students become considerably less open to the idea that Millard Fillmore might have been Abraham Lincoln’s vice president.

Meanwhile, the study of chemistry makes people less ambitious. Chemistry students are particularly unwilling to invest in lead-to-gold conversion kits, even when they are conveniently offered over the Internet.

Geology students are just plain nasty. Among all majors, they are the least likely to participate in coordinated meditation exercises for the prevention of earthquakes — even when the organizers estimate that hundreds of thousands of lives might be at stake.

And economics majors are so greedy that they are particularly unlikely to donate to left-wing interest groups that seek to undermine capitalism.

I made all of those up except for the last one, which I got from University of Washington Lecturer Yoram Bauman’s contribution to yesterday’s New York Times, where he actually (and this part I swear to God I am not making up!!!) draws the conclusion that students who have studied the merits of capitalism are among the least likely to support its detractors and then manages to conclude that this is because economics students are greedy.

What can one possibly say? Did no alternative hypothesis present itself to the editors of the New York Times? Did it not occur to them, for example, that economics courses might, you know, teach something about critical thinking? Except, of course, when those courses are taught by the likes of Yoram Bauman.

Share/Save

So Mitt Romney wants to exempt capital gains from taxation — but only for taxpayers who earn less than $200,000 a year. In Tuesday night’s debate, Newt Gingrich asked him (I’m paraphrasing) “Why the cap?”. Romney’s answer — that he’s looking out for the middle class because “the rich can take care of themselves” — was as incoherent as anything I’ve heard this election year.

Here’s why:

I interpret Romney’s answer to mean that he wants to cut capital gains rates not on efficiency grounds, not on supply side grounds, and not on philosophical grounds, but on redistributionist grounds. Well, okay, I myself don’t think very much of redistribution as a primary driver of tax policy, but Romney and I can disagree on that one. But where the incoherence comes in is this: If your goal is to redistribute from the rich to the middle class, why on earth would you do it by cutting the capital gains tax, as opposed to lowering income tax rates in the middle and raising them at the top?

To put this another way: If you care about efficiency, you’ll want to cut the capital gains rate to zero for everyone. If you care about fairness, and if you believe fairness mitigates against double/triple/quadruple taxation, you’ll still want to cut the capital gains rate to zero for everyone. If you care about redistribution, you’ll want to juggle the tax brackets. But I can’t think of a single thing you could care about that would lead you to laser in on cutting capital gains rates for middle income taxpayers only.

Now it might be that somewhere in Romney’s 59 point economic plan there’s an answer to this. If so, Herman Cain was surely right when he intimated that Romney himself can’t be terribly familiar with the contents of that plan. Because, when asked a simple question about the justification, Romney wasn’t able to come anywhere close to making sense.

I’m guessing that an honest answer would have been something along the lines of “I wanted something that would sound good to Republican primary voters who aren’t paying too much attention to the details, and I knew that the phrase `capital gains cut` was like red meat to a lot of those guys, so I threw it in”.

If the Republicans want a nominee who will pander to the left, right and middle with no coherent philosophy and no coherent policy proposals, why not just drag out Bob Dole? At this rare historical moment when the country just might be willing to take a flyer on some truly radical changes, it saddens me deeply that warmed-over Dole might be the best the Republicans can manage to dish up.

Share/Save

Today’s American right doesn’t believe in externalities, or correcting market failures; it believes that there are no market failures, that capitalism unregulated is always right. Faced with evidence that market prices are in fact wrong, they simply attack the science.

Where to begin?

First: Krugman tells us that

Externalities like pollution are one of the classic forms of market failure, and Econ 101 says that this failure should be remedied through pollution taxes or tradable emissions permits that get the price right.

Yes, that oversimplification is indeed sometimes taught in Econ 101. What Krugman doesn’t tell you is that it gets corrected in Econ 102, where students learn that taxing the source of an externality might or might not be efficient policy, depending on the available alternative remedies. It would, for example, be tragic to tax coal plants out of existence if it proved substantially cheaper to clean up their emissions after the fact, or to relocate the victims of those emissions.

I’m tempted to say that this is just Krugman being true to his principle that economics stopped advancing somewhere around the middle of the 20th century (something I certainly believe about music), so that just as Keynes had the last word on macroeconomics, Pigou had the last word on externalities. (Pigou, writing in 1920, is the source of the Econ 101 analysis; Ronald Coase, writing forty years later, advanced us to the level of Econ 102.) Except I know that Krugman knows better, because he once wrote a pretty good piece on green economics for the New York Times, where he made the Coasian argument tolerably well.

Second: the Times article is about Rick Perry’s past criticisms of the EPA, whereas Krugman is citing a brand new paper from the current issue of the American Economic Review. Apparently, his complaint is that Perry failed to account for this research before it existed. Perhaps he’s overestimated the import of fast neutrinos.

Third: I do not think it is beyond Krugman’s analytical powers to recognize that there is no inconsistency between the positions that a) some industries should be more heavily taxed and b) the EPA is often wrong.

Fourth: it is rarely the case that a single journal article is sufficiently definitive that it ought to dictate policy to the point that any dissension would be laughable. (Krugman’s comment on the whole affair is “Hahahahahahaha”.) One possible exception to that rule is Coase’s paper on social cost, which was quite definitive indeed in its refutation of Krugman’s argument from “Econ 101″.

Fifth: Even if we all agreed that the EPA is a paragon of economic efficiency, some of its policies might still be objectionable on some other grounds. Or does Krugman now want to retract every column and every blogpost in which he has appealed to compassion, equity, justice, fairness, etc., etc.?

Sixth: Krugman concludes that

What this tells us is that we are not actually having a debate about economics. Our free-market advocates aren’t actually operating from a model of how the economy works; they’re operating from some combination of knee-jerk defense of the haves against the rest and mystical faith that self-interest always leads to the common good.

What this tells me is that we are not actually having any sort of debate about policy. Krugman isn’t actually operating from a model of how government works; he’s operating from some combination of knee-jerk defense of redistribution and mystical faith that government always serves the common good.

After all, even if we all agreed that stricter environmental policies are desirable in principle, it would not follow that stricter environmental policies are desirable in a world where those policies will be formulated and enforced by politicians and bureaucrats with decidedly parochial agendas.

Krugman says:

Today’s American right doesn’t believe in externalities, or correcting market failures; it believes that there are no market failures, that capitalism unregulated is always right.

It would indeed be naive to believe that there are no market failures. It would be equally naive to believe that there are no government failures, which is what Krugman seems to be assuming.

The choice, all too often, is not between market failure on the one hand and government success on the other; instead it’s between market failure on the one hand and government failure on the other. That calls for some hard thinking about the costs and benefits of the various policy options, thinking that is not advanced by pointing one’s finger and saying “Hahahahaha.” Economists can contribute to this discussion with an honest attempt to illuminate the tradeoff. Tradeoff! Now there’s a concept Krugman ought to recognize. It is, after all, at the core of Econ 101.

Share/Save

1. Government expenditures have benefits, and taxation has costs. Paul Krugman, I, and all other economists agree that the most efficient policy regime is one that equates all of those benefits and costs at the margin. Here’s why: If the marginal benefit of, say, cancer research, exceeds the marginal benefit of, say, national defense, then you ought to be transferring dollars from defense to cancer research. If the marginal cost of a tax on, say, onions, exceeds the marginal cost of a tax on grapes, then you ought to be switching the burden of taxation from onions to grapes. If the marginal benefit of cancer research exceeds the marginal cost of taxing grapes, then you ought to raise the grape tax to fund more cancer research. And so on, until all of the marginals are equalized.

   Call this the equimarginal principle. (This is what Krugman calls the Ricardian analysis.)

   (Notes: “Marginal” means that we’re looking at the effects of small changes. The marginal cost of a tax includes the disincentive effects of that tax.)

2. Suppose you’ve successfully set up policies that equalize all of these marginals. Call the marginals A, B, C, D and E, where A is the marginal benefit of disaster relief. Now a disaster comes along, which increases that marginal benefit. Then you want to spend more on disaster relief, which means either lowering some other expenditures, or raising some taxes, or both. This will change the relevant marginals; if B is the marginal cost of taxing onions and if you change the tax rate on onions, then B will change. But in view of the equimarginal principle, you want to keep all of these marginals equal. If they’re all equal to begin with, and if you’re going to change one of them, and if you want to keep them equal, then you’ve got to change all of them. Thus in this case the equimarginal principle dictates changing all categories of government expenditure and changing all taxes — essentially, spreading the cost of disaster relief as widely as possible.
3. Eric Cantor has said that he wants any new disaster relief to be funded by cuts in expenditures, without any cuts in taxes. On Tuesday, Krugman raised the question: Is there any reasonable worldview under which Cantor’s position makes sense?. This is not the same as the question: Do we approve of Cantor’s policy position?, and I hope commenters will keep that mind.
4. Krugman’s post was quite ill-considered (I commented here), but fortunately for him, the majority of his commenters (both pro and con) seem not to have understood it. They thought Krugman was arguing against Cantor’s position, but he wasn’t: He was arguing something much stronger, namely that there are no legitimate assumptions under which Cantor’s position makes sense, and that this was true as a matter of theory.
5. Krugman proceeded by explaining points 1 and 2 above (perhaps a little less clearly than I’ve explained them here). He then attributed to Cantor the belief that all policies are currently optimal, and concluded, by invoking points 1 and 2, that Cantor’s position makes no sense.
6. I blogged on Wednesday to the effect that if you attribute to Cantor a different belief — namely that current policies are very far from optimal — then his position can make perfect sense. Namely, if you believe that some programs are very wasteful, those are the programs you should cut first. I cannot imagine how anyone can fail to see that this is a logically consistent position.
7. A few commenters popped up to say “Well, Krugman was giving Cantor the benefit of the doubt by assuming he had employed a sophisticated economic theory”. But that’s a grossly misleading picture. Krugman assumed both that Cantor had employed a sophisticated economic theory and that Cantor believed something (namely the optimality of current policy) that neither Cantor, I, Krugman, nor anyone else I know of believes. The gist of his column was “If Cantor believes that all policies are optimal, then his position on funding disaster relief makes no sense.” One might as well point out that “If you believe that the tooth fairy will cure all your dental problems, then going to the dentist makes no sense”. This is not a good way to prove that going to the dentist is irrational, especially when nobody has ever suggested that there might be a tooth fairy.

   If you want to give Cantor the benefit of the doubt, as those commenters claim Krugman was doing, then you start by assuming that Cantor means what he says: That a lot of current spending is wasteful and should be cut. Then you note that whether or not you agree with that position, it is certainly not an incoherent one.

8. I want to be crystal clear here about the locus of the disagreement: Krugman says that under no assumptions does it make sense to cut expenditures without raising taxes. I said that under some assumptions it makes perfect sense —- for example, itt makes perfect sense under the assumption that some expenditures are very wasteful. That’s the main issue. This was not an argument about the validity of the assumptions, but about what follows from them.
9. I made the side point that sometimes it makes sense to hold even a good policy hostage in order to get action on other good policies. I stand by that position, but I (slightly) regret bringing it up, since it distracted attention from the main point. We can reasonably disagree about this side issue, but I do not believe we can reasonably disagree about the main point.
10. Yesterday, Krugman acknowledged that I was correct regarding the main point. Specifically, he wrote:
    

    If you think the government’s priorities are all wrong, then theory doesn’t tell you much about what should happen.

    Bingo. That’s most of what I was saying, exactly. It’s not a deep point; it’s completely obvious, and the fact that Krugman overlooked it at first only goes to show that we all make mistakes. His acknowledgement of that mistake is what I’d expect from any honest academic, and makes me glad that I’m in one of the few professions where we can expect that kind of honesty.

11. Krugman deflected attention from this concession by objecting to my subisidiary point about holding policies hostage. (He goes so far as to say I “missed the point”, though this point never arose in his original blogpost.) That’s a separate discussion. But note that Krugman’s position on the subsidiary point directly contradicts his (now abandoned) position on the main point. He writes:
    

    He’s denying disaster relief to people hard hit by a hurricane. That is, he’s holding suffering Americans hostage to his goal of smaller government.

    By making this argument, Krugman tacitly acknowledges that any debate about disaster relief (and how to fund it) has to be based on the specific benefits of disaster relief (and other programs), not on general theoretical principles. That, again, was the whole point.

12. As a side note, Krugman objected to one of my metaphors:
    

    Where Landsburg really goes where he shouldn’t, though, is by comparing Cantor’s proposal to denying someone goodies unless he shapes up elsewhere — he uses the example of a teenager who won’t be allowed to go to the prom unless he does his chores.

    Though I hate to be more combative than necessary, this strikes me as pretty weaselly (to use Bob Murphy’s formulation). A metaphor is good or bad depending on how it is used. I used this metaphor only in the sense that disaster relief and going to the prom are both good things. Their levels of importance or frivolity has no bearing on how the metaphor was employed.

13. Some commenters have said: But it is an important part of the metaphor! If you were going to the hospital to fix a broken leg, you wouldn’t stop to debate how you were going to pay for it! Those commenters miss the point that whether it’s a prom, a fracture, or a mission to save the world, it’s still got to be paid for, and the issue of how to pay for it is still going to arise. And the issue of whether to spread that cost over multiple activities is still the same issue.

    Moreover, as soon as you say “what if it’s a broken leg?”, you’ve conceded the whole main point. The whole main point — for the 99th time — is that pure theory can’t dictate policy; your beliefs about the values of different expenditures have to dictate policy. If you’re arguing about the importance of fixing a broken leg, you’re arguing facts, not theory. Welcome to my side.

Finally, let me say this: I’ve been blogging now for almost two years, and have been constantly delighted and astonished by the quality of the comments around here. Try looking at Krugman’s blog to see how much worse it can be. One of the things I value most in these discussions is that we generally try to stay focused on the topics at hand. In this case, the main topics at hand were:

1) Are there or are there not any assumptions under which Cantor’s argument makes sense? (Krugman said no, I said yes, Krugman now says yes.)

2) Did Krugman’s initial argument implicitly assume that the initial policy regime is ideal? (I said yes, Krugman now says yes.)

3) Does this make Krugman’s initial argument pretty much entirely inapplicable? (I said yes, Krugman now says yes.)

There are also, as always, subsidiary issues worth discussing. But “Is disaster relief called for?” is an entirely separate question, and I’m glad we’ve largely managed to avoid getting distracted by it. It’s an interesting question, though. Maybe I’ll blog about it soon.

Share/Save

Anybody who blogs often enough (very much not excluding yours truly) is occasionally going to post something that, at least as written if not as intended, is objectively plain flat out wrong. Paul Krugman did that a couple of days ago, I responded, he’s responded to my response, and at least 4/5 of our disagreement is now resolved. That’s exactly as it should be.

To review the bidding:

1) Eric Cantor demands that any spending on disaster relief should be paid for through cuts in current spending.

2) Krugman makes a blog post arguing that as a matter of theory, the cost of any new spending at all should be spread over as many categories of taxes and cuts as possible. He makes a correct argument, but it’s based on the premise that the current structure of spending and taxes is optimal.

3) I respond with a major point and a minor point. The major point is that it’s nuts to assume that the current structure of spending and taxes is optimal; therefore Krugman’s argument proves nothing. The minor point is that in the nature of politics, sometimes it’s wise to hold even a good policy as a hostage while negotiating for other policies that you also think are good.

4) Krugman concedes the major point, which of course he must, because he’s objectively flat out wrong. (Again — I’ve been that myself from time to time on other issues.):

Landsburg points out, correctly, that the proposition that a spending increase should be offset with a little bit of pain everywhere and everywhen — that is, with higher current and future taxes and lower current and future spending on many things — follows from assuming that the government starts from a position of doing the right thing. If you think the government’s priorities are all wrong, then theory doesn’t tell you much about what should happen.

5) We now agree that there is no principle requiring new spending to be paid for from a broad base of spending cuts and tax increases.

6) Krugman now goes on to say that Eric Cantor is asserting a principle that all new spending on disaster relief must be offset with current spending cuts. I do not know why Krugman says this; my impression is that Cantor defends this as a policy preference, not as a principle. In any event, when Krugman writes “I should have been clearer about that” (that being the question of what point he was trying to make), I think he’s being a bit disingenuous; his original post was very explicitly not a critique of the take-it-all-from-one-place principle but a detailed careful correct argument (though based on a faulty premise) in favor of the spread-it-out principle. But this is an argument over what is now (in Internet time) ancient history; Krugman and I are in total agreement on substance going forward.

7) Let me stress that: We are in total agreement on substance. Namely: There is no general principle that supports Cantor’s policy preference, and (given reasonable assumptions) there is also no general principle that supports the opposite preference.

8) Krugman then turns to the minor point: Is it ever a good idea to hold good policies hostage in order to get other good policies? I think it sometimes is; he seems to think it’s not. Or he thinks it’s not in this particular instance; I’m having trouble telling how general a statement he’s trying to make here.

9) I’d like to be clear that I never took a stand on whether in this instance it was a good idea to hold one policy hostage to another. I said only that there are surely some such instances and therefore we can’t settle this issue by appeal to general all-encompassing principles.

10) Krugman objects to the analogy in which I compare disaster relief to letting your kid go to the prom. Here he has quite entirely misunderstood the point of the analogy (whether the fault lies more in his reading or in my writing, I’ll let you decide). I was not saying “disaster relief is as frivolous as going to the prom”. I was saying: “Look, there is such a thing as relatively unimportant spending, and therefore if you’re going to argue in favor this particular spending, you’ve got to argue for it on its merits, not on the basis of some general principle that `if it’s good we should do it’ “.

11) Krugman closes by repeating the charge that Cantor has invented a nonsense principle. Here I think Krugman is being mildly libelous, because, as I said above, I’ve seen Cantor claim no such principle; all I’ve seen is a statement of a policy preference. But the language of politicians is sufficiently vague that it’s often hard to be sure what they’ve really meant.

12) The language of academics, by contrast, is refreshingly precise, which is why we’re able to reach something pretty close to consensus even when we start off in opposite corners.

Share/Save

The context is Eric Cantor’s demand that any federal disaster relief in the wake of Irene be offset by spending cuts elsewhere. Krugman thinks this is silly, and proves his point with an appeal to the standard Ricardian theory of public finance. According to that theory, which all economists understand and accept, if you’ve got to bear a cost, it’s best to spread that cost out over as many activities as possible. So ideally, you’d pay for disaster relief partly through spending cuts, partly through (current) tax increases, and partly through an increase in the deficit. Therefore says Krugman, “the bottom line is that basic, regular economics says that Cantor isn’t making sense.”

Since Krugman has carelessly neglected to spell out an important detail of his argument, let me fill in the gap for him: The Ricardian conclusion does not come from thin air; instead it follows logically from certain premises, key among which is that you’re starting from an ideal policy regime.

Rather than write down the relevant equations, let me give you an example: Suppose you’ve got a perfect kid, who divides his time optimally among schoolwork, sports, chores and socializing. Now he wants to go to the prom, which is going to cost him some time. Rather than take all that time away from any one activity, he’s best advised to cut back a little bit on schoolwork, a little bit on sports, a little bit on chores, and a little bit on non-prom socializing. (It takes some hidden assumptions to reach that conclusion, but they’re entirely reasonable.)

But suppose, on the other hand, that your kid has not done his chores in a month. Then even if you agree that he really ought to go to the prom, it makes perfect sense to say “You’re not going to the prom until you finish your chores.”

And if your government is as far behind on spending restraint as your kid is on his chores, then it can make perfect sense to say “You’re not providing any disaster relief until you catch up on your spending restraint”.

To get a little wonkier, there are actually two separate points here. First there’s the point that comes from public finance: Unless you believe that everything is perfect to begin with, the Ricardian argument fails, leaving you with no reason to believe that the cost of new spending should be spread widely. Instead, you should start by cutting back on your least wise activities. Cantor and Krugman probably have some legitimate disagreement about what those least wise activities are, but neither of them has any reason that I know of to believe that all activities are currently equally wise at the margin. I’m guessing that if Cantor had proposed paying for disaster relief entirely through an tax increase on the very rich, that Krugman would not have been so quick to dissent with an appeal to Ricardian public finance.

(Come to think of it, if Krugman took his own point seriously, he’d be forced to conclude that every tax increase should be spread across all income groups, and accompanied by cuts in all expenditure categories. This would mark yet another radical change in several of his previous positions.)

Then there’s the separate point that comes from public choice: Sometimes it’s a good idea to constrain people from doing things they want to do until they improve their behavior elsewhere. Even if you approve of the Congress’s intention to provide disaster relief, it can still make sense to hamstring that intention until they get some other stuff right — just like with the kid whose prom plans you approve, but who is still required to finish his chores first.

(Incidentally, all of this completely ignores the issue of whether disaster relief is a proper federal function in the first place — I am granting Krugman that for the sake of argument.)

Notice that Krugman goes beyond implicit insistence that everything today is perfectly hunky-dory; he says that it makes no sense to believe otherwise. In other words, he’s really really sure of this. I await his salute to the Tea Party for its role in bringing us to this state of Nirvana.

P.S. I commented on Krugman’s blog here.

Share/Save

Now come psychologists Daniel Bartels and David Pizarro to report that choosing what they call the “utilitarian” solution (by which they mean the consequentialist solution, though one might have more faith in their scholarship if they’d used the accurate word) is correlated with higher scores on measures of psychopathy, machiavellianism, and “life meaninglessness”. Those who would push the fat man are more likely to agree with statements like “I like to see fistfights” or “The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear” or “When you think about it, life is not worth the effort of getting up in the morning”. In other words, they are what we tend to think of as an unpleasant bunch.

But you see, here’s the thing: Bartels and Pizarro did the wrong test. Because in every one of the dozen or so moral dilemmas presented to the subjects, they asked: Would you shoot the crewmember? or would you execute one of the hostages? or would you flip off the switch to the ventilator? — which doesn’t get to the moral issues at all. The moral issue is this: In your opinion, should you shoot the crewmember or execute the hostge or flip the switch? The researchers never asked those questions, so we have no idea what the subjects’s opinions were.

Tell me a story about 20 children trapped in a burning building and ask me if I think I should rush in to save them. My answer is yes. Now ask me if I would. If I’m honest, I am very unsure I would do the right thing.

So what do we learn from this research? Here’s one interpretation: Maybe most people agree that you should push the fat man, and most people realize that they themselves would shrink from this moral duty out of squeamishness (just as most people agree that you should save the children from the fire, and most realize they might shirk this moral duty). Therefore they answer “No, I would not push the fat man.” But it’s only the psychopaths and Machiavellians who exaggerate their own moral virtues by claiming that they would rise to this particular occasion.

Do I know that that’s correct? No, but I’m betting it’s far closer to the truth than the researchers’ own favorite interpretation, which is that consequentialism is a manifestation of psychopathy (or something like that).

Of course even if consequentialism is a manifestation of psychopathy, the right conclusion might be that the world would be better off with more psychopaths. But I don’t think this study tells that, because I don’t think it tells us anything at all about who’s a consequentialist. It tells us only about who’s willing to exaggerate his or her own moral uprightness, and nothing at all about their morals.

Share/Save