Roberto Unger & Hume’s cat

   What’s the difference between a fact and a value judgement? The answer, of course, is ‘Miaow’ – at least, if you ask my neighbor’s cat.
   Suppose the cat to be speaking for Hume or Kant or Moore or some other such non-tabby. Let M be the set of all instantiations of Miaow meanings re. fact value hiatus as cognized and received in a given decision context by Roberto Unger. The question arises, is there any fact, in that decision context, which, with some Bayesian probability, is also a value judgement? Suppose there is only one possible way the world can be such that a given fact is true iff a semantically identical deontic proposition is implemented. Here, the value judgement is the condition for the fact. Relaxing the assumption of only one possible world, we can get a Bayesian debate re. the probability that a value is a fact, based on the available M which is uniquely resolved for every Unger.
In this sense, Unger’s M, for some given decision situation, includes the null element. Is it possible to classify all value judgments according to how close they come to the nearest possible fact? If so, M is well ordered provided values are. This suggests a relationship to stochastic dominance in inference based decision theory such that for some given ‘value-aversion’ or ‘fact-aversion’, we can devise a heuristic which has the effect of turning any value judgement into a factual statement with an ‘error term’ related to distance from the null element. In other words, if one fact is a value judgement and it is possible to rank value judgements according to how different they are from the ‘closest possible’ fact, then all value judgements are facts with a bigger or smaller error term and are, for any given degree of value aversion or adhesion, more or less stochastically dominated.

Another approach, which might converge on the above, is to think of Putnam fact/value entanglement as legitimating mixed strategy choice. In this case considerations of Evolutionary stability yield a ranking over M.

The good news is that we can now get rid of the cat’s Miaow and the philosopher’s message it encodes. Why? Well, how does it help us to keep pulling the tail of the cat and hearing it say Miaow? We can proceed in an ad hoc manner till, like the cat, we get bored and saunter off over the rooftops. One good reason to do so, is that the calculus of inference based stochastic dominance and/or the evolutionarily stability of mixed-strategies has the effect of cashing out Putnam fact/value entanglement as something more or less antinomian if not De Maistre’s theory of sacrifice.

Unger, however, is not Hume or Kant or even Putnam. He believes in 

1) ‘infinite personality‘- not multiple personalities as arising from conflicting drives but infinite personality arising out of a sort of conatus of divine discontent- coz, obviously, we have infinite cognitive processing capacity and don’t need to eat to fuel our brains which, magically, are totally hysteresis free and like always shortest path ergodic and able to bitchslap math till P=NP and other cool stuff of that sort. Unger is constrained to believe impossible things about our brains because he rejects ontological dysphoria as a possible expression of human freedom which, for some reason, has to feel at home in this world or else it won’t get any pudding and be sent straight up to bed.
By contrast, I can believe I have low cognitive power in this world but ‘infinite personality’ across possible and impossible worlds- but this cashes out as not feeling at home in this world- that’s ontological dysphoria- which Unger thinks is real, real bad and evil and will probably cause hair to grow on my palms and lead to blindness.

If it’s ‘wrong’ to be ontologically dysphoric, you can throw away information about preferences while still pretending to be doing Democratic Social Choice- but that erases the fact/value distinction at the get go. This aint Philosophy, it’s prejudice.

2) some sort of ‘real’ Time which evolves and so isn’t really many fingered and has no truck with that Possible Worlds bullshit- i.e. this is a brutalist ‘anything goes’ Presentism, wholly at odds with the fin de siecle, fin du globe, Proustian pathos of Bergsonian duration and which, as such, only attracts Tim Maudlin or Lee Smolin type Soft Left senile delinquents.
Essentially, in Unger’s conception of Time, nothing inter-personal is conserved, Noether’s theorem gains no purchase, so we know the system is dissipative- it throws away information. But, that’s the same thing as erasing the fact/value distinction. But in that case Smolin, Woits et al needn’t actually do any Physics to say String theory is not even wrong because human beings have no right way to agree something is wrong. Thus the only game in town is declaring a theory to be ontologically dysphoric because it isn’t dedicated to ‘making itself at home in the World’- itself constrained to be Unger’s moral gymnasium.

Still, on the basis of the above two premises, if Unger thinks the cat’s miaow stands for his own theory, then does something real cool happen such that we get a genuinely prescriptive ‘super-theory’ out of just plain old pi-jaw?

One reason to think so is that, on Unger’s assumptions, human passions are Divinized, while Time (that is Evolution that is hysteresis that is Ontological dysphoria) is  put firmly into a box marked ‘don’t open till Xmas- or else’. 

Thus the cat’s Miaow is now the voice of that God who creates us and sustains us and to whom we return in death.
But only for Unger who, having successfully erased the fact/ value distinction, felt able to become the Minister for Strategic Corruption under Lula in Brazil and to hand out Govt. money to various random shitheads- not because it was fun or the optimal mixed strategy but because it was like EMPOWERING DEMOCRACY and finding a THIRD WAY and other such shite.

Still he came out against Obama in 2012, so at least we know he isn’t Mormon.
The moral of this story is- don’t waste your money on books by Harvard Professors who erase the fact value distinction. Cut out the middle-man! Just listen to your neighbor’s cat. If only in this sense, it really is talking to you.

Can ‘Informed Consent’ operationalize the Categorical imperative?

Can  an ‘informed consent’ procedure- as in Medical practice, where the Doctor has either more information than the patient, or else superior dispassion, thus creating an asymmetry which problematizes a relationist, as opposed to substantivist, Ethics – operationalize the Kantian categorical imperative? Manson & O’Neill say no, but Alasdair Maclean disagrees.

(Vide Autonomy, Informed Consent and Medical Law: A Relational Challenge,  By Alasdair Maclean)

What are the salient features of the Doctor/ Patient game w.r.t Informed Consent?
1) The Doctor, in seeking informed consent for a particular therapy, is- consciously or not-  advancing a particular Scientific Research Program (SRP) in which he has invested all of himself, or indeed borrowed more than he can ever amount to, by reason of an absolute or comparative advantage in specializing in that particular therapeutic practice. This advantage may have arisen by chance or else it might have been acquired through the arduous or aleatory travails of the Doctor’s own subjective, Bayesian, trajectory evaluative of different therapies.
By enrolling the patient in a particular therapeutic regimen, a data-set is augmented which privileges the SRP the Doctor himself is professionally invested in. In other words, just by seeking informed consent, a self-regarding element has entered the equation.  To cancel it out would require the Doctor to play Devil’s Advocate for alternative therapies, or the null option, at least as well as if he had an acquired, absolute or comparative advantage in each of those therapies and invested exactly the same amount of time and passion on espousing and nurturing each. 
A related point is that it may be the case that different therapies place different weightings on the components of well being and hold different opinions on what symptoms are malign or, indeed, disabling,
This being the case, the very nature of the information/disapassion asymmetry between Doctor & Patient militates for the former’s heteronomy. The Kantian Doctor needn’t quit Medicine- he could still sign my sick note and prescribe my Viagra- but must give up on seeking ‘informed consent’ as opposed to simply hanging out his shingle and touting for business like any other tradesman.
2)  The patient’s choice of therapist has both a psychological and a physiological effect. It may be that there is a trade-off between short-term dysphoria and long term physiological healing such that the Quack is initially more effective than the Doctor. If the Patient’s ‘time preference’ is an objective datum, does a Kantian Patient have a duty to consult the Quack and tell the Doctor to go hang?  Clearly, ‘time preference’ itself would be determined by life expectancy. However, the certainty of imminent death might lead to meta-preferences dominating the decision process in an unpredictable way.
Both the ‘Doctor’s dilemma’ & the ‘Patient’s trilemma’- which relate to hysteresis effects arising from information exchange- militate for a mixed strategy or, what cashes out as the same thing, some internal psycho-drama whose output is stochastic. This means that ‘informed consent’ looks operationalizable but only at a macro level leaving Kantian relationism pointing mutely at Tardean mimetic heteronomy.

A foolish article by Prof. Michael Gardiner

This is a link to an incredibly stupid and badly written essay by Michael Gardiner, a Prof. of Eng Lit, which is  available at National Collective and, in amended form, also appears on Open Democracy.

Prof, Gardener writes-

Self-determination campaigns will find easy pickings in post-2008 austerity policies and the long embrace of neoliberalism by the Labour Party since the early ’90s. Too easy, in a way, because there is another question here which is as old as Britain itself. This question’s modern and most successfully total expression comes in the 1940s settlement we still often see as a natural inheritance to be preserved, the tremendously perishable 1942 form of the welfare state. We are still living this moment, it has an emotional appeal which only partially still holds, and it is the most ‘sticky’ of the claims to British achievement. This is a moment which we should start to historicise.

Gardner says there is a 1942 form of the British Welfare State. Is this true? Urm… no. There was no N.H.S in ’42 so – duh!- there wasn’t any Welfare State at all- just a patchwork of local provision. Beveridge was a guy who had been side-lined by Churchill and his Report was talked up after the fact but had no importance in itself. The truth is, if the conditions for over-full employment hadn’t obtained for all manufacturing nations in the 50’s, then Beveridge ‘full employment’ would never have gained currency as a meme.

Gardner believes that a Question was born some time ago and it is the same age as Britain. Anyway, this Question was just wandering around minding its own business when suddenly in 1942, some guy or bunch of guys gave it its most modern and successful total expression. Something similar happened to me on my 17th birthday when the girls in the Indian YMCA caught hold of me and painted my nails and put make-up on my face and dressed me in a flowery dupatta. No, I didn’t turn totally Gay but then I’m not a Question as old as Britain itself which is why it is totally senile and, as if in obedience to Schopenhauer’s theory of pederasty, did actually turn totally Gay and not the nice hygienic sort of Gay but like real sticky Gay which is why we are still like trapped in a Time loop coz it has got stuck inside us and has ‘an emotional appeal which only partially holds’ even tho’ we’re all like -‘stop fucking guilt tripping me you sticky and totally senile Gay and just get out of my orifice already- fuck, is that super-glue oozing out of you? you filthy old pervert- shit, this gonna hurt so bad…’

Even if Gardiner is right, and a Question as old as England got a makeover in 1942 which turned it totally sticky and Gay and it is now up our arse, would it still be true that some moment exists which we should start to historicise?

Fuck no! Some filthy Gay is up your butt- what you need is fucking surgical intervention or like maybe Ricky Martin serenading that Gay and luring it out of your rectum or something like that. Historicizing the moment aint gonna help.  

Gardener, who is in no hurry to get this senile and sticky pervert out of his butt, continues his essay thus-

It’s easy to feel anti-social complaining about British services. It’s also important to remember, though, that the British Union was has never been defined in terms of the participation of the people, but just the opposite, as the defence against popular sovereignty understood not formally but as a principle of timeless accretion and based on the adaptation of always already existing interests. If the British nationalism in today’s press and broadcast media seems transparent, it is because Britain is less a nation than a rationalisation of credit. In is governmental form it first arises from the time of the import of the Anglo-Dutch financial system after 1688, its guarantee in perpetuity by the Hanoverian crown, and central banks which support it from the 1690s. As Daniel Defoe was describing in 1706, its raison d’état is as an investment entity, which depended on avoiding, rather than promoting, shared action.

Why is it easy to ‘feel anti-social’ complaining about British services? If I say- State Schools aint teaching proper English like wot I rite- or the fucking post code lottery dun bin killing ma peeps- fuck is anti-social about that? Perhaps, what Gardner- a Prof of Eng Lit- means is ‘complaining against the very existence of British Public Services makes one feel anti-social’. But that’s coz it is fucking anti-social. Now you may say- Vivek, you don’t understand. You see if the N.H.S disappeared then like Ayn Rand or Joan of Arc or La Passionara would suddenly appear in the Sky and wave a magic wand and there’d be a dedicated fully staffed Hospital in every broom cupboard and you personally would have an entire Eng Lit faculty from Oxford, or some fancy place like that, to correct your abysmal prose and like wipe the drool off you next time you start typing one of your illiterate blogposts. So, you see, my criticism of the N.H.S and whatever rubbishy Adult Education College you are enrolled at, isn’t anti-social at all”
 My riposte is- ‘fuck off you big loony. You are too anti-social coz u r pretending to be like a Professor or summat. By the way no Crown, Hanoverian or otherwise can guarantee a Financial System even if some fuckwit is stupid enough to think it can have ‘a Reason of State as an investment entity.’ Financial systems, national, trans-national or whatever, contain investment vehicles and debt instruments. States can survive the crash of a Financial system- Iceland yo! yo!- or they can fail though the financial system survives- the Afghan currency didn’t disappear during the Civil War though five different powers were printing money- so Gardiner is writing portentous nonsense- on a par with Sokal’s famous spoof article.

Gardener says- look, British services are tied to British sovereignty which, historically, was oligarchic not popular.                                                                           He is wrong. The State did not create Services like Education, Social Insurance and Health provision, or even a Law & Order machinery. Indeed, it often opposed the burgeoning of these things because they increased Popular Sovereignty. Universal Education meant workers might cease to ‘know their place’. Florence Nightingale’s efforts were opposed by the War Office because it might harm the fighting spirit of the Army rank and file and thus endanger National Security. Still, for reasons well understood by non-shite Economic Historians- i.e. not shitheads like Polyani who thought most human beings didn’t go in for trade and division of labor till Adam Smith told them to- what ineluctably transpired was that locally produced Services were increasingly centralized, codified, and made more uniform but, in general, this was fought tooth and nail both by vested interests as well as paranoid nut-jobs ranging across the spectrum from Tory Radical types to Trotskyite silly-arses.

Gardener’s original essay was in the context of Scottish Nationalism- in which it is not a non seqitur, yet still historically illiterate, to speak of the ‘import of the Anglo-Dutch financial system- yet, he presents the same material under the rubric of a critique of English Nationalism. How the fuck do we import something which is already ours? Where there is credit, it is going to be rationalized- either that or it stops being credit. Why? In business, rational agents survive, irrational ones go to the wall. Now it is true that both rent seeking vested interests and exhibitionist paranoid nutjobs with a gift for phrase making violently oppose rationalization of any sort- but, long run, either they lose or crash the system. Incidentally, rational action is always shared action- Nash equilibria- read about it sometime why don’t you- what isn’t shared action is paranoid logorhea spouted by an illiterate Eng Lit Prof who is pretending he knows from Econ or History or Politics.

Gardner’s gadarening essay carries on thus

After the financial eighteenth century and after dealing with tricky rebels, John Locke’s and Daniel Defoe’s non-experiential citizenship as property would be reinvented as nature itself from the 1790s by Romantics reacting to the French Revolution, and would then be exported into empire as the timeless inheritance. But it took on its most durable form with the modernisation of the 1920s and ’30s with which it has to adapt parliamentary sovereignty to a straitened empire, in cultural forms which took in the 1920s and ’30s in figures including J.M. Keynes (economics), John Reith (broadcast), and F.R. Leavis (literature). In the modernising era fiat currency took much the place gold has during high empire as a unifying principle, official and examined models of civility took the place of inheritance, and the state broadcaster reached every home with its Commonwealth unionist message.

What is the ‘financial eighteenth century’? Does Gardener mean ‘the system of finance characteristic of the Eighteenth Century England’? This begs the question- did such a system exist in a form that could be cognized as sufficiently monolithic to permit its re-invention as ‘Nature itself’? The short answer is no. There were competing systems of finance, one Mercantilist the other Market based and pronounced tension between them made visible in, for example Adam Smith & Edmund Burke whose ringing denunciation of Mercantilist Imperialism- which Burke termed ‘Indianism’ (i.e. the corrupt rent-seeking of the East India Company)- concludes by asserting it to be a greater threat to England than ‘Jacobinism’. All this being widely known to be the case, it is simply foolish to suggest that so heteroclite a viewpoint could be ‘exported to Empire as the timeless inheritance’ (sic).
 Gardener tells us that not only was some non-heteroclite thesis exported but that it took a more, indeed ‘most’, durable form in the 20’s and 30’s. This is fucked in the head. Ronald Coase, whom the Right has illegitimately claimed, defeats Reithianism with his Wicksteed based critique less than half way through the Thirties and it is his Law & Econ approach which remains relevant to us today. F.R. Leavis was a shit-head- which great author did he influence? Did Joyce go- ‘better abandon Finnegan’s Wake and write some shite about copulating mine-workers coz that’s what Queenie gets off on?’ Fuck no. The 20’s and 30’s were described as a ‘Long’ (that is Lost) Weekend by people who lived through it. During the Battle of Britain, two English authors- James Hilton and Graham Greene- write novels showing that the period was a sort of amnesiac Waste Land with no connection between what went before and what was to come. As for Gardener’s reference to Keynes- does he really not get that Keynes was a voice in the wilderness from Versailles till Lend-Lease? Fuck is wrong with this shithead? What does this mean-  In the modernising era fiat currency took much the place gold has during high empire as a unifying principle- fiat currencies have always existed, sometimes with full gold convertibility sometimes with notional convertibility sometimes with only black market convertibility. This is true of ‘High Empires’ as well as  ‘modernising regimes’. Monetary Econ 101 explains why- as happened in the U.K during the 20’s and 30’s- a country may, over a decade or two, cycle through all these variants. What fucking ‘unifying principle’ is this shithead, Gardiner, talking about? The fact that people use money? No… it must be that Money uses people…yeah that’s right… wow! that’s like so profound… dude you are like totally blowing my mind!

Moving on, what price-  official and examined models of civility took the place of inheritance- urm… when have they not? Civil Society is by definition not Tribal or Clan based. It is of the essence of Civic interaction that genealogy only gains expression by courtesy. This is as true of the Meat Vendor in the Vyadha Gita as the industrious manufacturer in Adam Smith.
Finally- the state broadcaster reached every home with its Commonwealth unionist message- every home? Really? What they Govt. gave everybody a Radio set? Course they did, in fact it was a TV set which watched you as you watched it. Orwell described it so it must be true.
The problem with this paranoid view of them scary Radio Waves is that Reithianism wasn’t consensus but contested and pretty much happened by default precisely because Radio and later TV just weren’t as important for Britain because of the huge inheritance of other popular Media which, especially in its Working Class forms, had already mobilized stout popular defenses and could draw on a tradition pre-dating Defoe & Wilkes

The impetus for the latest, modernising defence of Britain was a grave, and yet familiar, defence in the fact of a terrifying Europe. Avoiding the European excesses of fascism, Britain was able to create something much more permanent. So George Orwell described how fascism would be laughable to the Brits while outlining a totalised vision of the late 1940s, Karl Polanyi spoke of a Great Transformation linking the classic liberalism of anti-Napoleonic times to the era of modern consensus, and Antonio Negri described how Keynesian economics identified fascism as primitive and ineffective compared to a more resilient and totalising force for continuity. The welfare state delivered great material benefits, but only at the cost of more effectively shielding the state from popular participation.

Orwell didn’t know from Econ. The guys who did know from Econ, back then, made sure that people like Anuerin Bevan were getting well briefed- Bevan’s speeches show an understanding of the Economic theory of Externalities avant la lettre. Incidentally, Abba Lerner- Coase’s pal from the LSE- tried to educate Trotsky on marginal pricing back in the Thirties. Polanyi, unfortunately, didn’t talk to the right guys at the Workers Education Association back in the mid 30’s- shame, but there it is. Anyway, nobody not swotting for Oxbridge in an Alan Benett play actually fucking reads him.As for Negri- what he thinks aint worth shit. Even an Eng Lit Professor like Gardener must have read Keynes’s famous introduction to the German edition of the General Theory. So fuck is his major malfunction? 

If the Welfare State yielded great material benefits- better housing, schools, health care- how did it ‘effectively shield the state from popular participation’? A guy who is ill, ignorant and vagrant does not ‘effectively participate’ in popular sovereignty. True, he may give you his vote in return for a couple of bottles of Rum- but that aint a good thing. That’s why rent-seeking vested interests don’t want Public Services. That’s why Political Econ, historically in this country, has worked very closely with Local Communities, Trade Unions and victims of Social exclusion. No doubt there are some shit-head Academics and Paranoid nutjob Op Ed writers who muddy the waters from time to time, but so what? Shitheads we shall always have with us.

I suppose there is a sort of Old Morality ‘panem et Circen’- as Nietzche put it- cognitive bias behind Gardener’s idiocy. But, we now know a lot about how fucking stupid such cognitive biases are. They are the reverse of rationality and have no place in Public Discourse. 

This modernised constitutional conservatism found its moment in War Keynesianism, with the state’s involvement in massive ‘public’ investment, understood as the defence of an inherited and unwritten way of life from European systematic political thought (the 1940s connoting 1790s invasion fears). This political totality, rather than using overt or identifiable coercion, demanded perpetual self-creation, as the personal itself became the new ground of expropriation. Whole lives were defined in terms of the state’s franchise, and progressiveness can now only be described as a desire for British social justice.

Wow! You couldn’t make it up if you tried. Turns out there was never any Battle of Britain, no fucking Luftwaffe, no Hitler no Goering no Goebells. What actually happened was, all of a sudden, them 1790’s invasion fears suddenly re-incarnated as ‘War Kenynesianism’ (though Keynes was against the way, for example, Beaverbrook pushed things through in Aircraft production) because you see the entire Cabinet- including people like Atlee and Bevin- said ‘fuck, them nasty Continental ideas are trying to come over and like liberate the Sheeple. Let’s invent a bogeyman called Hitler and ‘rather than using overt or identifiable coercion’ (which is why Britain didn’t have Conscription, forced labor- e.g. chaps being sent down the coal mines against their will- exchange control, sumptuary laws etc etc) let us do something real sneaky- like create a Welfare State- coz …urm… well, dunno but it sure sounds like a swell thing to do.

The truth is the present Econ crisis has a lot to do with Govts. being too lazy or being too afraid of being taken to task for due process mistakes or just, down right, too fucking incompetent to initiate and carry through the sort of Socially Beneficial program of Public works and Social Spending which will bring nominal asset prices back in alignment with what was previously and erroneously projected- i.e. liquidate toxic debt overhangs through real growth. The safer thing to do is just mouth Fox news type factoids while spending more time with your focus group figuring out whether a hair transplant is higher priority than a tummy tuck.
British ‘progressives’ missed a trick back in the ’80’s when they failed to spot a parallel with extensive privatization under the Nazis- crucially, this meant we got to win the Battle of Britain because the Govt. could go straight to Command Economy mode and produce aircraft, which though technically inferior to the German product on a case by case basis, nevertheless had greater tactical synergy- the German fighters were forced to fly sub-optimally and thus throw away their advantage because bombers were manufactured by a rival company with its own in built bureaucratic resistance to change. Essentially, Britain did better than Germany at that crucial time because it felt under greater existential threat- i.e. exigent circumstances cancel hysteresis effects and thus if any issue is felt to be urgent enough Polanyi type shite is fucking irrelevant (not to mention just Historically wrong.)

The early welfare state’s assumption of perpetual improvement was both modern and familiar, and originated with eighteenth-century whigs for whom inheritance was always the most progressive form. The new wartime consensus updated and strengthened the old whig, monetary Union, by redefining the person as both labourer and consumer, granting immediate material benefit but giving away the possibility of challenge of the ideal time of the unwritten continuant constitution, modernising Britain’s refusal of present-tense action. With welfare consensus, modernised state-capitalism became a moral act which was harder than ever to question. An instinctual way of life was perpetually ‘preserved’ (that is, created), and the ideological springboard of defence and privation would line up the entire British press, and state TV, behind it. Its conservative defence of unwritten sovereignty, though, is its downfall as well as its strength.

What does this mean?-  ‘ the early welfare state;s assumption of perpetual improvement…originated with eighteenth century whigs for whom inheritance was always the most progressive form.’ Form of what? Government? But, Whigs were against some inherited aspects of Govt and for others from which they personally derived a rent. The so called Whig theory of History-as-Progress is Nineteenth Century. There are plenty of steady-state formulations of Eighteenth Century Whiggery some of which are wholly Utopian and not inheritance based at all. Even in the Nineteenth Century, one can point to some Whig support for Chartism, for example, and a present day Whig Economist like Ken Binmore would have no difficulty tracing a hysteresis free (i.e. no inheritance) intellectual genealogy for himself. In any case, utilitarian legal scholars like Glanville Williams long ago supplied British & Commonwealth Judges with a hysteresis free theory of substantive due process- so fuck is this shite about ‘heritage’ and ‘primitive accumulation’? Gardiner can’t be that much younger or markedly more ignorant than me. Does he really believe there was an uncontested Butskellite consensus on any fucking thing? Ever? Fuck is wrong with the cunt?

Anyway, enough of this secular stupidity- like shouting écrasez l’infâme ever changed anything- so since my morning bottle of Rum is almost empty & it’s off to the Offy in carpet slippers for yours truly; just to save time I’ll simply copy and paste my comments from the Open Democracy blog before drunkenly staggering down Halford Rd. to the Hair of the Dog. My Sundays are horrible.

windwheel • 3 days ago

It’s okay, the guy is a Prof. of English Literature so he doesn’t understand what he’s saying and it doesn’t mean anything anyway.

Phew! Had me worried for a moment.Still, as a thought experiment, suppose this article had been typed out by a bunch of monkeys who hadn’t a single PhD between them- in that case it would be worth our while to ask if it there is any truth to the notion that- ‘the British sovereignty behind these public services has always in fact defined itself as a defence against popular sovereignty, a defence projected as timeless inheritance which is intuitive and ‘just there’.

What does this sentence mean? ‘Public Services’- is that stuff like the N.H.S, Govt. funded Schools, National Insurance, the Police, the Fire Brigade etc.? Well, we know how each of them evolved. Take the ‘Bow Street runners’ or the Parish Poor House or the local Dame Schools- these are the seeds from which our modern Public Services have grown. Is there any evidence at all that ‘British sorvereignty’ was ‘behind’ these ‘Tiebout model’ locally produced services? We know how and why the drive to Centralization arose in each case- indeed, a Public Finance Economist who knows nothing of English History would pretty much be able to predict, in broad outline, how things would have panned out- i.e. what forces would have driven the evolution of such services. ‘British sovereignty’- which last experienced a crisis in …urm… dunno but it was definitely like days of yore and there were dragons and witches involved- never decided to go lurk behind ‘public services’ coz it was playing hide and seek with…urm…. dunno, maybe it was ‘popular sovereignty’ which had escaped out of the pages of some nice fairy tale which Professors of Eng Lit know about, and anyway like ‘popular sovereignty’ got bitten by a radio-active spider so its like all ‘in your face British Sovereignty! I’m gonna whup yo ass bitch!’ and like all them nice Lefties- who are totally gay- are going ‘You leave British Sovereignty alone! It’s timeless and just there. Have some museli. Toodle pip.’

Come to think of it- that’s probably what is actually going down.

Personally, I blame David Cameron’s breast feeding George Osborne but denying the teat to Nick Clegg who is clearly a victim of neglect or cot death or something. I’d have informed Child Services but turns out British Sovereignty is hiding out there pretending to be an anatomically correct- thus not Nick Clegg- doll.

Is it just me or does David Icke seem to be making more and more sense?

wheel • 12 hours ago

• −Reply by C.Spenser

I have a lot of sympathy with your sentiment. But the Professor was making a very strong point.

If you were really struggling with the piece, I translated it as follows:

“Sovereignty”: having independent authority over something, usually a territory/geographical area. I think “British Sovereignty” here is synonymous with Parliamentary Sovereignty. “Popular Sovereignty” is the concept of the power of the people; that the power of government is created by, flows from and is maintained by the authority and consent of the people.

So, understanding the sentence (and general thrust of the article), “…the British sovereignty behind these public services has always in fact defined itself as a defence against popular sovereignty, a defence projected as timeless inheritance which is intuitive and ‘just there’”, which the authors wants us to reflect on means:

The independent authority that controls the public services, namely the British Government, sees itself as owning these services for the “welfare” (as it sees fit) of a compliant, disenfranchised people; that the current constitutional settlement of the UK holds up public services as a stop against the people waking up to the fact that they are not sovereign; that they do not own the public services; that public services exist only for the public services; that the people have no independent authority. And that this maintains British Sovereignty at the expense of Popular Sovereignty.

Expansion of the public services, without popular sovereignty, creates ever greater reliance by the 
people on those public services – the client state; the fear of loss creates a natural stop, or defence, to Popular Sovereignty – the risk that these public services would be lost to us if we were to truly seek a new constitutional settlement based on citizenry and popular sovereignty.

I think the Professor is suggesting that the current constitution has had its day and as it comes to an end (and before it can metamorphose into a 21st Century version of its, as he puts it, 17th Century self), the people need to grasp the sovereignty nettle and form a true Popular Sovereignty despite the risks.

I share the view: the people of the UK, as subjects (conferred with entitlements), not citizens (possessing rights), are wholly reliant on the good auspices, charity, compassionate conscience and adherence to convention of successive ruling elites. I would go further than the Professor: for nearly one thousand years we have been ruled; only rarely have we been represented.

• • windwheel  CSpencer1 • 3 hours ago

    • −

    It is a tribute to your sense of fair play that you have taken the time to seek for a non malignant kernel in the Professor’s essay.

    However, on reflection, this kernel bears no relation to either ‘popular sovereignty’ or ‘British sovereignty’ but relates instead to the notion of subsidiarity- i.e. the principle that decisions should be made as close as possible and with the greatest possible involvement or responsiveness to the people affected by that decision.

    Whereas sovereignty is defined territorially and refers back to an autarkic, mainly agricultural, past; the concept of subsidiarity bears no such defect and permits laws or norms to be framed without regard to class, race, nationality etc. but only to what is best for the community affected by the decision in question. I think this also applies to ‘minority’ rights. Popular Sovereignty may militate for Homophobic laws- whereas sensible laws re. age of consent, marriage etc should be made, as far as possible, by people with direct knowledge and experience of what it means to be Gay in modern society. I oughtn’t to get a say in such laws if the only thing I know about Gay people is what I read in Genesis or Leviticus or whatever, whereas let us say a loving mother of a young gay person, so disabled as unable to speak in her own behalf, should certainly get a voice in stipulating what sort of safe-guards are required or can be dispensed with in this regard. My bigoted views oughtn’t, in my view, to get any weighting at all, no matter how obstreperously and vituperatively I express them.

    The problem with the Professor’s essay is that it relies on a conspiracy theory of history and suggests that British sovereignty in its entirety is fruit of a poisoned tree. However, notions of ‘popular sovereignty’ in the history of English literature have been at least as mischievous as the secret workings of oligarchic cabals. Take G.K Chesterton’s ‘the ball and the cross’ where the Govt. uses a newly created Universal Health Service to simply lock up every true Blue Brit under the pretense that they are all raving lunatics. Similarly, in the ‘Flying Inn’, the Govt. brings in Turkish troops in an attempt to impose Prohibition on a supine population.

    Chesterton may have been right about corruption in the Liberal Party, but his anti-semitism, though couched in the language of ‘Popular Sovereignty’, represented a far greater threat to the English ethos than the cupidity of certain Cabinet Ministers.

    The Professor’s Essay isn’t really about the manner in which Clientism disenfranchises- if it were it would be phrased in the language of Public Choice theory and, instead of dwelling upon a paranoid and highly tendentious conspiracy theory of history, it would take a comparative approach to discussing current literature on how to bring popular and national- or trans-national- sovereignty into better alignment.

    You are quite right to say that this is a very important question and that what is happening right now is utterly scandalous.
    That is why paranoid theories of history- which are fine, and quite enjoyable, when focused on things which don’t matter, e.g proving Simon Cowell is a high ranking Illuminati – nevertheless have no place in our on-going struggle to tame and render useful the great trumpeting Leviathan of the State.
    In this regard it is important to understand why and how, in this country, Public services re. Health, Education, Law & Order, Social Insurance etc- came increasingly under the control of a Centeralizing behemoth. Clearly, this has a lot to do with well known problems in Econ re. Local Govt. finance- Tiebout model theory- as well as the problem of preference revelation re. funding of Public Goods.
    It is no good subscribing to some Manichaean or Paranoid theory of History such that we are all now the hapless victims of a Juggernaut state because of some occult political conspiracy back in the Seventeenth Century. Okay, I suppose, if Time travel existed maybe there’d be some point to the Professor’s essay. But, Time travel doesn’t exist and so it’s just bad English, bad History, bad Economics, bad Political theory.

David Friedman getting it wrong on Bork & Landsburg

Steve Landsburg, the enfant terrible of Demotic, Joe-the-Fox-News-watching-Plumber, Economics, posted some typically distasteful and speciously argued entries to his blog on the subject of the Stuebenville rape. David Friedman, the son of the illustrious Rose & Milton, came to Landsburg’s defence in a series of blog posts which made the astonishing claim that there was something philosophically interesting in what Landsburg had written.

Was Friedman right?

Briefly- No.
Both the Law and Moral Intuition are unambiguous in determining that the State and/or Community takes guardianship of a person who lacks competence and is duty bound to take action against any transgression of that person’s rights. It is of the essence of both Property and ‘Natural’ rights that they do not cease to exist in the absence or incapacity of the owner. If this weren’t true, deontics would be as impossible a project, for rational Public Discourse, as Witchcraft or Vodoo. This being the case, for deontics not to be empty it must minimally be the case that a deontically legitimate State and or Community has an over riding duty to punish transgression of rights otherwise unenforceable by reason of absence or incompetence of the agent concerned.

Yet, it is a fact that Friedman has argued differently. What were his arguments?

Turning to his first post on the topic, we find he makes the following claims

1) that there is some similarity between some argument to be found in Landsburg’s post and a principle enunciated in an essay by the Originalist legal scholar Robert Bork.

2) that the conjunction of Bork’s essay and Landsburg’s post somehow raises the bogey that the ‘libertarian principle that I have a right to engage in what Mill referred to as self-regarding actions, actions that only affect me, is either false or empty.’

3) That there is in Law or lay Moral intuition some distinction between physical and mental harm. Friedman writes ‘“knowledge that pains you” isn’t injury in the same sense as causing you to get cancer is.

 On the basis of his intuition of the truth of these 3 claims, Friedman feels able to say-

Bork was arguing that the harm caused by the use of contraception and the harm caused by air pollution were ultimately of the same sort, that it was legitimate to ban pollution hence legitimate to ban contraception—his article was in part an attack on Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court case that legalized contraception, a fact I had forgotten when I started writing this post. Landsburg is arguing that rape that does only subjective harm is of the same sort as reading pornography that does only subjective harm (unlike Bork, it isn’t clear that he is thinks his argument is right, only that he thinks it interesting), that it is not legitimate to ban the reading of pornography hence not legitimate to ban that particular sort of rape. 

Let us now examine Friedman’s 3 claims before evaluating his conclusion.

1) Is there a similarity between Landsburg’s post and Bork’s essay? 

No. A similarity between two texts can arise in the following ways

a) if they address the same issue or audience- this isn’t the case. 

Bork is talking about the need for Supreme Court Justices to have a theory of the Constitution for Constitutional reasons. Landsburg isn’t talking about any such thing. Furthermore, Bork wasn’t against Contraception. On the contrary, he argued that the Statutory ban on it in Connecticut had fallen into desuetude and that it was ludicrous to pretend otherwise. What was mischievous about Grisworld vs. Conecticut was that the Judge had created a general right to Privacy which had no basis in the Bill or Rights, by pretending that the Connecticut statute still had some sort of force and thus presented an injury to the right of privacy. Friedman goes on saying ‘Bork was against Contraception’. This is false. Bork says it would have been as ridiculous to enforce the relevant dusty old Statute as it would have been to arrest a Catholic priest under the Statute relating to Gambling just for hosting a Bingo night. To be clear, Bork was for Contraception or, at least, considered it as inoffensive as Bingo. There is not one iota of evidence for Friedman’s claim yet he has made it on several occasions and on different fora. Bork’s objection is to substantive due process as tending to the Judiciary’s usurpation or unjust restriction on the proper operation of an essential function of the Legislature. Friedman does not understand this. He writes-

Bork’s argument, in my words not his, goes as follows:

When I pollute the air I am injuring other people, so it is legitimate for the legal system to respond by penalizing me. What makes it an injury is not the fact that I affect the air but that the effect does harm; one could imagine an effect, such as a change in the ratio of two stable isotopes of trace gases in the atmosphere, that would not matter to anyone and so would not be seen as an injury or a proper subject for legal action.

Friedman is writing about what Lawyers call Justiciability which only arises when someone somewhere is injured either physically or feels a sense of moral outrage or affront or has some other objection to what is happening. The scenario Friedman puts forward- viz. one in which a harmless change in the ratio of stable isotopes occurs- is not justiciable because the point at issue is ‘unripe’. Bork does not make this observation. It would have been ludicrous for him to do so since he was writing for Lawyers and Legal theorists perfectly familiar with this notion.

b) they share some premise or reflect upon a common history as happens if they have an intertwined intellectual genealogy- i.e Landsburg post encodes an intellectual tradition with which Bork had interacted in his essay. This is not the case. Friendman’s reference to a chapter in his own book, on optimal punishment theory, is totally beside the point because Bork was an Originalist not a Utilitarian, and so, not surprisingly, there is nothing in his essay which shows an interaction with either Landsburg’s intellectual precursors or those of Friedman.

c) they share a property of ‘salience’- i.e. are important intellectual landmarks within a specific inter-subjective cognitive map. This is not the case. Bork’s essay has salience- it was published in a respected Journal. Landsburg’s blog post was a mere jeu d’esprit of a particularly juvenile and attention seeking sort.

Clearly, Friedman’s claim is easily defeated by methods he must have some inkling of. The fact that he makes it anyway is evidence of either bad faith or mental impairment.

2) Even if there is no inter-subjective similarity between Bork and Landsburg, still subjectively Friedman has found, in their heteroclite conjunction, that a threat exists to the Libertarian principle re. self-regarding actions (i.e. those which have no ‘externalities’ i.e. impose no cost or benefit to others other than through the market). 

Is this claim reasonable?

 No. 

For two items in your train of thought to be related by succession does not constitute, except perhaps in Mantic poetry, a publicly justifiable claim that the terminus of that train of thought is indeed, objectively and for the purpose of rational discussion, inter-related with what went before. In this particular case, Bork’s Originalism goes hand in hand with something else- viz. the Constitutional right of Americans to change the Laws of their Country by putting pressure on their Legislators whose rights Bork defends against curtailment or usurpation by the Judiciary through his critique of substantive due process. Hirshcman would call this having ‘Voice’. Suppose, for some reason, Hirschman ‘Voice’ is ineffective, then Americans have a Constitutional right to leave that country, renounce their citizenship, and thus cease to be bound by the Constitution created by its Founding Fathers. But, since such emigration (Hirschman ‘Exit’) can occur through the market, no externality arises. Thus Bork’s essay is not relevant to the bogeyman that Friedman has raised.  

It appears that Friedman’s invocation of the name and fame of the great Robert Bork- a hero to many-  in the context of Landsburg’s puerile exhibitionism arises either from mental infirmity or bad faith. 

3) Neither the Law nor Moral Intuition makes any distinction between purely mental and physical pain. Why? If I make a credible threat that I will kill or torture you unless you do what I want, a crime has occurred, your rights have been violated, even if, by reason of your compliance, I do not actually carry out that threat. A little thought will show why a distinction between mental and physical injury- even if the two can be meaningfully distinguished- utterly vitiates any regime capable of enforcing Property or Natural Rights meaningfully. 

Friedman’s motivation, it appears, is to isolate spurious from genuine claims of Psychic harm. In Economics, this is termed the problem of Preference Revelation. Yet neither Bork nor Landsburg nor Friedman himself address the topic. Instead, he uses the fact that this problematic is a feature of any Human Society to pretend to be a deep thinker. Once again, this is evidence of either mental infirmity or bad faith.

Having shown that Friedman’s claims are false, and false in a particularly stupid and self-serving manner, we are in a position to pass judgement on his conclusion- viz that there is an intellectually plausible argument such that in our Society- ‘rape that does only subjective harm is of the same sort as reading pornography that does only subjective harm’

This is false. 

Rape, by definition, is a Rights Violation. The State or the Community or whatever body it is that takes cognizance of Rights, has a duty to punish the transgressor of those Rights though that duty may be defeasible for all sorts of reasons. Bork’s Originalist theory re. Constitutional Law is perfectly compatible with the view, which is now the mainstream view, that the Right to Privacy covers reading certain kinds of Porn- or indeed Landsburg’s blog- but not others.

Friedman’s own optimal punishment theory, without ambiguity or encountering any philosophical aporia, militates for this ‘common sense’ view. Even if the Local Govt. of Stuebenville had sold its right to Law enforcement back to the Community, rape that did not physical damage but ‘only subjective harm’ would still be punished. 

Now, to fully ‘internalize’ -in the Coasian sense- the benefit to the criminal of the crime as well as the benefit to others of his remaining free it is possible to stipulate- as happens in some Islamic regimes- that blood money or other compensation has to be offered the relatives of the criminal you want to execute or imprison. True, that is a possible market solution. But that doesn’t militate against the principles involved here or my conclusion that Friedman’s blog post evidences either bad faith or incapacity to reason.

Friedman’s subsequent posts

Friedman’s second post on this topic seeks to make a case that there is a fundamental distinction between ‘property rules’ and ‘liability rules’. I have asked him to explain why this might be the case and if any relevant literature exists which supports his claim. He has not bothered to reply. I suggested reasons why Friedman is wrong in an earlier post.
Friedman writes-

I think I have now answered Steve Landsburg’s puzzle. The difference between his example (or mine) of an action that imposes only subjective costs and his example of an activity such as reading pornography, or Bork’s of using contraception, that imposes only subjective costs, is not the nature of the harm. The difference is that in the one case the cost is of a sort that can be measured, the action controlled, via a property rule. In the other, it is not. 

This is sheer nonsense. The same difficulties in imputing costs arise regardless of whether it is a property owner claiming damages or an appellant seeking compensation under a liability rule. Indeed, the distinction becomes meaningless if liability rule damages are assignable and survivable as is indeed the case for offences against the Right to Publicity, as opposed to that of Privacy.

In his third post on this topic, Friedman says that Landsburg’s post is philosophically interesting and not trivial at all. Why? Well, it turns out he believes that Rights only obtain against the action of humans. If a bear attacks you, no question of Rights arise. If a human attacks you, the reverse is the case.
This is nonsense. It is of the essence of a Right that it arises independent of the species of the transgressor. I have a right to kill a bear who threatens me even if that bear belongs to someone else. I don’t have the right to kill that bear, even if it belongs to no one, absent either a recognition that the act occurs in terra nullis or that the right has been ceded me either by Custom or Statute or some defeasible process of Public Reasoning.

In his fourth and final post on this topic, Friedman makes some disconnected references to issues in the Philosophy of Mind to suggest that at the root of his intervention in the Landsburg affair is some ‘frightening idea’ such that Moral Intuitionism cashes out as Nihilism or some other such Nasty. However, Friedman has never demonstrated any awareness or engagement with the areas of Philosophy which might make his claim plausible.  Here, more nakedly than elsewhere we see Intellectual mediocrity, if not meretriciousness, strutting its stiff on the catwalk or fashionable inanity as part of the ‘Blogging Professor’s collection’  brought to us by the ‘Emperors without Clothes’ Couture House or Designer Label.

Shame on David Friedman. He comes of distinguished stock. He has great talents- not least as a story teller.
Still, at least he isn’t quite as awful as Landsburg. But Landsburg has worked hard to lower standards. Friedman can’t hope to permanently boost his Blogger stats simply by becoming a free-rider on Landsburg’s gadarene gravy train of thought.

Self ownership, Extractive introjection & Jacking it in San Diego.

How does the Libertarian notion of Self-ownership differ from a set of Legally enforceable Entitlements all reasonable people would loosely agree ‘amounted to the same thing’?
Ownership unlike Entitlement does not discriminate between animate and inanimate objects- a rock or a stone can own things in Anglo Saxon Law- as can abstract as opposed to concrete things. Since Libertarians tend to have rocks for brains and since their notions of Community are pretty sketchy and utterly abstract, they naturally prefer the notion of Ownership to Entitlement.

There are other differences.  Assignability and survivability (i.e. posthumous rights) characterize something owned. Thus, in America, ‘the right to publicity’ is considered something assignable and survivable such that my heirs, assignees, or Receiver in Bankruptcy can derive a revenue from the sale of naked pics of yours truly. However, my ‘right to privacy’ is not similarly assignable and survivable such that though I can claim damages against you for illegally downloading naked pics of me, my heirs or assignees have no such right absent some overt inter vivos  action on my part such that it is clear that I am claiming protection under ‘the right of publicity’ not privacy.

The concept of ‘Self ownership’ gives rise to a rabid sense of Entitlement and may, assuming some degree of rationality and sense of Reality- also militate for voluntary recognition of a Legal system of Entitlements with two different types of rights- ones which are justiciable only by the possessor of some corporeal thing, or his agent or assignee- and others which are justiciable independent of the desire of volition of the person in whom the Entitlement is vested. Both types of rights give rise to allocational and dynamic inefficiencies provided the ability to evaluate the value of, or otherwise exercise, those rights are unequal hence giving rise to Agent-Principal hazards. With property type rights, the very fact that it is of the essence of the right that a local monopoly is created militates for allocative inefficiency and strategic behavior. But this does not mean that Entitlement type rights are free of defect.
The law relating to Minors or vulnerable people lacking competency, is an example where the Legal Guardian can exercise rights and claim damages on the part of a person who, it may be, has no interest in pursuing legal redress.

This creates an Agent-Principal hazard- as in Munchausen’s syndrome, where the Guardian exaggerates or inflicts injuries for some selfish motive. More generally, there is a type of psychic injury, which the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has termed ‘extractive introjection’ whereby the Agent confiscates the Principals’ genuine injury for the sake of Publicity or some other sort of ‘Rent’ accruing to the role of Spokesman.

Much ‘moral entrepreneurship’ is genuine but much is self-seeking, strategic or downright corrupt. In the same way that ‘extractive introjection’ hollows out the vulnerable person- whose pain has been confiscated leaving them with less inwardness and moral agency than before- so too does it ‘hollow out’ the manicly protesting pseudo-Guardian who ultimately, South Park tells us, ends up ‘naked & jacking it in San Diego.’

As regular readers of my blog will know, I only ever advert to such arcane topics as feature in this post when I’ve gotta killer hangover and the only thing that helps me keep my Cocopops-marinated-in-bloody-mary down is pretending I’m the ghost of John Rawls & Richard Dworkin just got a sneak peek behind my veil of ignorance and is laughing himself silly. 

Still- to get to the ‘kids, what I’ve learnt today’ bit- the fact remains that self-ownership of a property type is vitiated by hysteresis based repugnancy costs (the dead dictate the disposition of living things) whereas, on the other horn of the dilemma, the hyper-inflationary bias of Entitlement theory hollows out the concept of self-hood from within.

Landsburg, Efficiency and Rape.

Steve Landsburg has been getting very hot and bothered about the Stuebenville rape. He asks ‘Let’s suppose that you, or I, or someone we love, or someone we care about from afar, is raped while unconscious in a way that causes no direct physical harm — no injury, no pregnancy, no disease transmission. (Note: The Steubenville rape victim, according to all the accounts I’ve read, was not even aware that she’d been sexually assaulted until she learned about it from the Internet some days later.) Despite the lack of physical damage, we are shocked, appalled and horrified at the thought of being treated in this way, and suffer deep trauma as a result. Ought the law discourage such acts of rape? Should they be illegal?

As usually happens with Landsburg’s lucubrations, there is something obvious he is missing. 
What is it?  Public policy, in Econ, is about balancing costs and benefits. It is the latter he has forgotten to speak off so as to elide the obvious fact that Laws are created by either
1) the ‘Stationary Bandit’ of the State which taxes benefits accruing to individual agents for which task it gains legitimacy by levying punitive fines and/or imposing corporal punishment on transgressors of Social Conventions. One reason people may acquiesce in the State’s policing functions is that their own property and personal rights are safeguarded in their absence or other state of non-competency. In the rape case, the State became the guardian of the girl once she lost competency by reason of intoxication and has, as a matter of empirical fact not moral speculation, the duty to punish the transgressors- perhaps in a way that sets an example and creates a deterrent.
2) Communities bound together by some tie- perhaps contiguity, perhaps genealogy, perhaps identity of interest cab create Laws vesting different types of Rights. Once again, it is the essence of rights possessed by virtue of belonging to the Community that they continue to operate and remain enforceable in the absence or non-competence of the agent concerned.

In neither case, does any philosophical puzzle for Utilitarianism arise from the Stuebenville rape case because that ideology has always recognized that
a) doing righteous things itself generates Utility
b) present Utility can be the capitalized value of a future stream
c) (since Wicksteed) that the correct Utility calculus in (b) concerns true opportunity cost- i.e. is computed globally across all possible worlds.

Now, following H.L.A Hart, it is entirely uncontroversial to say that it is of the essence of the Law and Social Conventions that they are defeasible especially under the rubric of a change in the information set regarding Wicksteed opportunity cost. But this does not give rise to any great quandary for the layman nor any aporia for the intellectual.

To see why, suppose the following-

We learn that an act of necrophilia has been committed on a corpse in a mortuary. The immediate friends and family of the victim bear a terrible psychic cost. The friends and families of other eligible corpses handled by that mortuary also bear a high psychic cost. Anybody about to die or who has friends or family about to die also bears a psychic cost. More generally, there is a diffused psychic cost of an ‘what sort of world are we living in?’ type.

Now let us look at an actual case- a young woman in Taiwan was raped by a mortuary attendant. The rape caused her to come back to life. Her family decided to forgive the mortuary attendant. Here the ‘victim’ who previously bore no psychic cost receives such a large psychic benefit that it makes sense for Public Policy to make an exception to the rule ‘punish necrophiliacs’ such that it becomes ‘punish necrophiliacs IFF their horrible crime fails to restore life to the corpse they violate AND Society is so constituted that the victim may be reasonably be expected not to suffer so extreme a stigma as to prefer death’.
True, the Social Cost of such a Law may be more cases of necrophilia but the pay off might be  more victims brought back to life who might otherwise have been killed by their violators.

By failing to take notice of psychic benefits– or Kenneth Boulding’s notion of psychic capital- Landsburg condemns himself, and his readers, to an exercise in futility. He refuses to give himself access to the Econ theory which made talk of costs relevant to issues of Public Policy. One reason why he might be inclined to do so has to do with the redistributional consequences of external costs, including psychic costs. Now, standard Econ- e.g. in constructing Cost of Living indices- distinguishes an Income effect from a Substitution effect such that one can meaningfully speak of Hicks-Kaldor improvements- i.e. situations where Society is made better off because it is possible for the people gaining a benefit to compensate those incurring a cost such that the latter are no worse off than before. If one does not distinguish the Income effect from the plain fact that an adversely affected agent has accepted some substitute by way of compensation, one can’t say if a Hicks-Kaldor improvement has occurred. For e.g.  Paul Pennyfeather, in Waugh’s first novel, suffers a catastrophic loss by reason of the drunken loutishness  of a fellow undergraduate at his Oxford College.  Paul loses a valuable scholarship, his place at University and his chance to rise in the world. The offending student, Sir Alastair Digby Trumpe, sends him Five pounds by way of compensation. Since Paul is now a much poorer man he has to take the compensation- but this does not mean it is adequate. (In the novel, his High Victorian scruple that ‘a gentleman never accepts an illicit perquisite’ is shown to be deontological pi-jaw simply). Later, however, it turns out that being expelled from College is what permits Paul to marry a wealthy widow with whom he is infatuated. Alastair now qualifies as his true benefactor and best man. However, it turns out that the widow is running a White Slavery syndicate- for which Paul receives the blame and has to go to Jail. Oddly, Jail suits Paul and he is perhaps better off than in his original position. 
In Waugh’s books- Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust- though people have consistent preferences under the rubric of the Substitution effect- they continue to prefer caviare to bacon and Dickens to Maeterlinck whatever their socio-economic position- the reverse tends to be the case for massive reversals of Fortune which Economists study under the rubric of the Income effect. The upshot is that Waugh, inheritor of the High Victorian Gothic style, is able to arrive at a sort of Stoic ataraxia such that the Efficient cause of Happiness is immune to Externality. True, the Substitution effect, at the level of cocktails and canapes, continues to operate and, absent transaction costs, can be brought under the banner of the market; but radical Income effects open the gates to a Catholicity of inwardness.

Returning to Landsburg, for whom the Income effect is anathema because it raises the question of Income distribution in Society (vide his misreading of the Ramsey rule) ,  every access and approach to ataraxia must be vitiated by the putting forward of the following false question to The Law.

‘ When we say that the law should encourage all and only those actions that are efficient, what, exactly, should we mean?’

further to which he offers the following analysis.

Definition 1. The action is efficient if my willingness to pay exceeds your willingness to accept. For example, if I’m willing to pay $100 for the privilege of harvesting the tree, and if you’d accept less than $100 to part with it, then the tree-cutting is efficient.

Definition 2. The tree-cutting is efficient if it would occur in a world with no transactions costs (i.e. a world in which there are no impediments to bargaining).

In many circumstances (ones where Income effects are negligible, for example) these definitions are equivalent, and economists often pretend they’re equivalent always — (well, bad economists do when writing stupid blogs) but sometimes they’re not

Example 1. I want to punch you in the nose non-consensually. (The non-consensuality is a big part of my enjoyment.) I’d pay $100 to punch you in the nose, and you’d accept $50 to take the punch. By Definition 1, the punch is efficient. But the punch would be unlikely to occur in a world with no transactions costs, because it would require bargaining, hence consensuality on your part, which kills my interest. So by Definition 2, the punch is inefficient.

Example 2. I am willing to pay $100 to cut down a tree; you are willing to accept no less than $150 to part with it. By Definition 1, the cutting is inefficient. But part of the reason I’m willing to pay only $100 is that I’m credit constrained. In a world with no transactions costs, I’d borrow more, and would be willing to pay $200 to cut down the tree. So by Definition 2, the cutting is efficient.

Example 3. I am willing to pay $1000 to cut down a tree; you are willing to accept $500 to part with it. By Definition 1, the cutting is efficient. But the only reason I’m willing to pay so much is that I make an excellent living in my job as a mediator who helps people overcome transactions costs. In a world with no transactions costs, I’d be much poorer and would be willing to pay only $200 to cut the tree. So by Definition 2, the cutting is inefficient.

Landsburg’s confusion, which arises out of his failure to do a proper Cost/Benefit, Income distinguished from Substitution effect, Econ analysis, nevertheless reveals  a fundamental problem re. Counterfactuals and Revealed Preferences. Essentially, to be able to speak of efficiency we have to have something like a David Lewis/Stalnacker  notion of ‘closest possible worlds’. But, once we grant the metaphysical reality of these worlds strange things start to happen which beg the question of whether Preferences can be consistent. If they can’t, then talk of efficiency is stymied- it’s an anything goes universe.
In
Example 1) we might make a sort of Konus index over possible worlds so that you get to non-consensually punch a guy whom we know (by examining the closest possible world) would settle for less than you are prepared to pay. But this does not really get rid of the problem. If your Preferences are consistent and robust to small perturbations of the Information set, you don’t want to non-consensually punch the guy whose closest, possible world, counter-part consents. This is when things get spooky. There are a whole lot of things you want to do now, and would happily pay for, but which you wouldn’t if you knew how easy, uncontroversial and therefore the reverse of thrilling, they are in the closest possible world. In other words, knowledge of your Konus Preference Map over all possible worlds would cause you to change that very Preference Map, more especially for positional goods or thymotic services.
There are a lot of problems with modal realism of this sort even though Lewis developed it going forward from a Schelling type analysis of the Co-ordination problem. Essentially, for this approach to work, there has to be some underlying ‘basic preferences’ that can be objectively determined which agents ‘ought’ to have. But if such basic preferences are inter-subjectively discoverable in some possible world then who needs markets? An altruistic Central Planning Authority, setting each agent’s ration, would eliminate a source of Pareto inefficiency.
2) This same consideration arises with respect to Landsburg’s Second Example.
 Here the credit constraint mentioned is equivalent to assuming imperfect arbitrage relating to information available from possible worlds. Clearly, in this scenario, my ‘true’ credit worthiness, based on modal realism, is greater than what obtains in this world and this creates the inefficiency. Again, spooky stuff starts happening when we think about this. If modal realism is true, why don’t we know more about possible worlds? Or perhaps we do have this knowledge at some ‘basic’ level. 
Here we come up against Lewis’s arguments that there is some ‘elite eligible’ criterion which is just better at determining the truth of things than that which arises out of our, this world, conventions.

Example 3) The transaction cost arbitrageur here, to be successful, must have better ‘Lewis elite eligible’ criteria yet he is an agent in this world just like any other. But this means the quest of Efficiency must give rise to a Rent. The spooky bit arises because, admitting a notion of meta-preferences, the arbitrageur can have a rent dissipation ratio higher than One. This is because self-contestation of the rent can outweigh the Rent to Information or potential Efficiency gain.In any case, iff, as I think plausible, the diachronous nature of meta-preferences makes them essentially ontologically dysphoric, then Consequentialism is empty.

I suppose Paul Pennyfeather, who returned to College to study Theology, might well have changed his name to Frank Ramsey. Landsburg, on the other hand, in a glaring example of a blogger becoming as egregiously shite as the type of bigot attracted to his blog, might just as well change his name to Sanjeev Sabhlok and get himself a Baba already.

Scold the Environment not the Economy

If the Environment is misbehaving is it not because is totally corrupt, materialistic and awards itself huge pay increases when the rest of us are having to tighten our belts? I mean look at the Amazon rain forest- it has these ridiculously tall trees which even have their own micro-climate! Why is the Environment behaving so badly? What is the point of scolding the kids to turn down the thermostat when the Environment is recklessly warming itself on a global level and melting the ice caps? Do you know how much energy the Environment wastes every time it indulges in one of those hurricanes or cyclones? I don’t but its the sort of thing you probably have an i-phone app to calculate.

For far  too long we have been taught to say nice things about the Environment- especially seeing as it is constantly getting raped in unlikely places which can’t be good for its morale. However, what I say is the Environment is a damned slut! How about it learn Krav Maga, put on an extra set of underwear and take some fucking responsibility for its actions like not spending so much time out of its gourd in seedy Third World dives or hillbilly country or other such random places? I mean,  how often do you hear about the Environment getting raped in the Home Counties? No doubt the quality of the ‘raves’ and the drugs and so on aren’t up to its usual high standards and maybe it will actually have to work for a living to pay its Council tax but that’s what we call being a grown up, dear. Try it sometime.

I’m not saying one shouldn’t regularly scold the Economy & whack it on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and definitely revoke its couch privileges. But, fair’s fair. How come the Environment gets a pass every time it fouls up but the Economy doesn’t?

It is not enough to recover the portion of Adam Smith, actually the greater part, which consisted in saying snide things about the Economy, nor the Ricardian tradition as modified by Marx and Sraffa- which frankly was counter-productive and actually made being bourgeois kinda cool- what we have to do is go back to Aquinas and Aristotle, or even further back to the Ape-people, when scolding the Environment made up the greater part of Public discourse.

I think Kaushik Basu has written a book about this. I don’t know if this is true, but next time the Environment gets high and turns into one of those hurricanes or cyclones or tsunamis, just you a toss your Game Theory textbooks into is maw. That will teach it.
Not that it isn’t all David Cameron’s fault.
That boy aint right.

‘True Blood’, Hysteresis Costs and Repugnancy Markets.

Vampires like human blood. Humans are willing to sell blood, preferably that of somebody else, for a price.  So long as Vampires are willing to sell their services to humans- say as night-watchmen-the conditions for a co-operative equilibrium exists.
However Vampires may be very impulsive by nature and so their ‘time-preference’ may be too extreme to permit them making binding contracts. However, since Vampires by their nature are immortal, it follows that so long as they have non zero phenotypal polymorphism- i.e. so long as small differences in ‘time preference’ exist in that species- then there must be an evolutionarily stable equilibrium in which some older vampires kill young vampires for humans in return for a steady supply of blood.
The problem here is that this is a ‘repugnancy market’- Vampires may feel it infra dig to do deals with humans and humans may find it disgusting to live peacefully with their historic predators- and so  irrational barriers or restrictions may arise which make the co-operative equilibrium infeasible.
The TV show, ‘True Blood’ deals with a synthetic food for Vampires which allows them to ‘come out of their coffins’ and enter Civil Society by getting rid of the overt repugnancy cost associated with blood sucking. However this is an unstable equilibrium on both sides for purely thymotic reasons and, in the current episode,  militant Vampires are planning to dynamite the ‘True Blood’ factories so as to restore overt repugnancy costs and set the stage for a final conflict between the dead and the living.
From the human point of view, what lies at the root of this repugnance? Is it that something which is dead is having commerce with the living? The same ‘repugnancy cost’ was associated with usury- the notion that ‘dead’ money can multiply in the same way as cattle or sheep. At a later stage, Marx introduced the idea that Capital- i.e. some fungible asset vital to the production process- was ‘dead labor’ and that it was morally repugnant that Capitalist Vampires get to dictate how and when and where ‘living’ Labor is to be employed.

More broadly, we can say that anything created before today which nevertheless has a bearing on our present decisions, is an example of the ‘dead hand’ of something or other constraining us in a morally repugnant way. Let us take an example. Suppose a new Bank wants to set up its H.Q. in the City of London. The Govt. could say ‘look, the City of London already has plenty of Banks. Why don’t you set up in Liverpool?’ The Bank may reply- ‘It is precisely because there are plenty of other Banks in London that we need to set up there. London has ‘external economies of scope and scale’, for the Banking industry.’

The Govt. may reply (and in the Seventies quite often did reply) ‘but these ‘external economies’ are merely a historical accident. Why should we let the ‘dead hand’ of Capitalism’s vampirical past dictate the future shape of Britain?’
Moving away from Govts., in the de-regulated Eighties, we find a lot of factually inaccurate memes cropping up which protested against ‘lock-in’ inefficiency by reason of historical accident.
Thus, people asked- Why should we be stuck with the qwerty key-board? It was only introduced to slow down professional typists who might otherwise type too fast and break the primitive machines which were available a Century ago. Why should the ‘dead hand’ of past typewriter technology constrain us to a sub-optimal keyboard which, going forward, imposes an ever rising Social Cost? (Actually, qwerty reduced jams and thus enabled people to type faster.) Similar, generally mistaken, points were often made about VHS vs. Betamax or the Windows Operating System and so on- i.e. there was a notion that ‘historical accident’ had got us stuck with an inferior product because producers were too stupid or unimaginative or downright sucky to understand that they needed to be competitive just as much against potential rivals as actual rivals.

Why did these ‘memes’ gain such widespread and unquestioning currency? Is it because of an irrational repugnancy cost attaching to the notion that ‘the dead past’ still constrains us modern, living, human beings?

In Economics, ‘lock-in’ effects are studied under the rubric of ‘hysteresis’ or ‘path dependence’.
One reason why Moral Philosophers were attracted to ‘Neo-Classical’ Welfare Economics was because it used hysteresis-free models. This meant that the opportunity cost of breaking with the past- what we might term hysteresis costs- was set to zero. Thus, a playground was created where all manners of pseudo repugnancy costs could be conjured out of thin air.
Any form of intersubjective Just Proceeding, that is widely acknowledged as such, is going to have hysteresis effects as it is a sort of moving target for successive co-ordination problems. But, by simply ignoring hysteresis- the way most Economists do in their models (because hysteresis is less mathematically tractable)-  Moral Philosophers got to re-label every form of Just Proceeding as an example of a grievous injustice. The comedy here is that Philosophy’s own in-built path dependence is the reason it has been shunned by all sensible people and not just starting from Aristophanes either. But this itself is an example of a hysteresis cost becoming the basis of an irrational repugnancy effect! Equally, had philosophers been alert to the hysteresis ridden nature of their own profession, they wouldn’t have made fools of themselves by so sedulously manufacturing bogus repugnancy costs! This stricture applies not just to Moral Philosophy but also to every Philosophically informed Methodenstriet (dispute over what constitutes proper methodology and thus what results can be thought of as valid) such that there was a repugnancy cost attached to truths only derivable by one method of proceeding or which violated some preferred ontology. Empirical results, e.g. experimental confirmation of Bell’s inequality, ought to have killed this sort of Philosophy off, but the evidence is it didn’t.

As a case in point, Putnam argues that the Many Worlds interpretation is wrong because any time there’s a Schrodinger’s cat type situation then, no matter what the probability of the cat being killed, half of the observers across multiple worlds will see a dead cat. This because there are only two possible worlds- dead cat and live cat world. What about a sequence of Schrodinger experiments- so we have sequences of dead or live cats?  Surely, the Universe splits every time the Schrodinger box is opened such that you have a bunch of these Universes out there. Putnam asks ‘What is the probability in the naive sense—not the ‘‘probability’’ in the quantum mechanical sense, this real number which I calculate by finding the square of the absolute value of a certain vector, but the probability in the sense of the number of my future histories in which I will observe that, say,( the cat was dead) half of the time plus or minus 5% of the time divided by the total number of my future histories?’ 
Putnam thinks it very strange that this naive probability is 50 percent and not whatever the chance of getting a dead cat was according to the Q.M probability theory. Yet, what else could it be? These multiple worlds (generated by the experimental sequence) differ only according to the criteria dead cat/ live cat. In every other respect they are indistinguishable. Putnam is ascribing a repugnancy cost to the Many Worlds interpretation based on discerning a bogus hysteresis. To see why, consider the following- is there anything in Many Worlds which constrains the arrow of Time to a particular direction? If your answer is yes, then Putnam is right- there is some sensible use of the word ‘probability’ such that he can say ‘On the Many Worlds interpretation, quantum mechanics is the first physical theory to predict that the observations of most observers will disconfirm the theory.’ In other words, if path dependence is a feature of Many Worlds, then its use has a repugnancy cost. But, if Many Worlds is hysteresis free- i.e. if it says there’s a block Multiverse containing all the possible worlds- then Putnam’s use of the word ‘probability’ is not logically coherent. As a matter of fact, Many Worlds doesn’t have to make any ontological commitments at all and can plume itself as a paradigm of, hysteresis free, ‘logically coherent thought’

Bearing this in mind and returning to take a closer look at repugnancy markets- prostitution, abortion, drug dealing etc.- the problem with each of these is that once hysteresis effects are taken into account, the picture changes. In each case, the relevant information- viz. was this particular  act of prostitution/abortion/drug dealing, welfare and capability enhancing or was it deleterious?- is difficult to extract because it is so highly correlated with everything else that was happening or had happened or was likely to happen.  Contemplating this mess we find there are no easy answers. It may be that licensing a repugnancy market reduces the social evil and enables Society to move more quickly to a better path in which that evil diminishes to a purely medical problem affecting very small numbers of people. On the other hand, it could happen that a small increase in the Social evil has a run-away effect. How are we to know in advance what sort of attractors are lurking in our vicinity on the fitness landscape? Might not hysteresis effects save us from disaster? But is it not somehow repugnant that we can even ask ourselves this question? Whatever are we to do?

The answer, of course, is watch more TV, because the Series Finale of ‘True Blood’, will reveal that beverage not to have been synthetic at all. It was ordinary human blood purchased from willing humans out of wages paid by humans to Vampire night-guard guild. This guild contains the oldest Vampires with lowest time preference. They secretly manipulated the militant Vampires to blow up the True Blood factories not so as to re-establish overt repugnancy costs and thus drive a wedge between the dead and the living, but to show that repugnancy  costs are irrational and ought to be abandoned when a stable co-operative equilibrium exists.
Thus it turns out the ‘True Blood’ fraud had two objectives
1) to get the dead and living used to living together
2) to shake out the low time preference or high repugnancy cost militants and hate-mongers on both sides.

My question is, once this co-operative Utopia is established, would sex with Vampires still be hot?
No. Not at all. Think about it, what would women need tampons for if Vampires were on tap?

Lloyd Shapley and the Bhagvad Gita

Shapley’s well deserved Nobel win has been a long time coming. I know geniuses like him don’t need Nobels but it is worth pausing a moment on an occasion like this to think about how India might have been different if people of my generation- or that of Gurcharan Das, for that matter- had not gone Gadarening after Amartya Sen and John Rawls and now Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam and so forth, rather than Coase and Tiebout and Shapley and Buchanan who, I think, are right about Wicksteed & Choice and thus immune to pointless palaver over what the word ‘Cost’ means- i.e. dining philosophers starving to death for caught in a concurrency deadlock.
Still maybe these hunger artists on Ivy League catwalks were doing Gandhian dharna so my Hindu instinct was to worship them.
My own antipathy to Shapley is summarized by this extract from my novel Samlee’s daughter-

In other words, since Shapley’s work is very useful and highly relevant to India, it must be ‘Right Wing’ and thus it is to be feared and denounced or, at any rate, studied in the abstract but never applied to Policy making. At the same time, I guess people like me were uneasily aware that every semi-literate dehati politician was a master of calculating the Shapley index of power for various interest groups, not to mention  the most computationally efficient collocation method for solving for correlated equilibria (we call it corruption)- indeed that sort of thing is virtually hard-wired in their brains- and that even if us City boys mastered the maths or wrote a Computer program to do the same thing, we’d simply be outclassed by them.

It was only later on, thinking about Game theory in the Gita, that I realized that the paleo-discrete maths tradition in ancient Tribal Republics would have been strongly focused on the sorts of things Shapley taught us guys to at least be aware of, if not actually do. Since the Mahabharata’s own compositional heuristic- at least in my belief- is part and parcel of that wider paleo-mathematical politics Welt Bild- it follows that the Bhagvad Gita, as its Pyrrhonist epoche- tells us that it is our ‘svadharma’ (i.e. there is a ‘public signal’ telling us our strategy so that, in a manner more general than Nash, we come to Aumann correlated equilibrium) to do Shapley not for the sake of the fruits of Shapley (good stuff, like getting democracy to work properly) but in an Amartya Sen-tentious spirit of utterly abnegating constructive Politics in favor of cunt-queefing pi-jaw so Man remain a futile passion and God again slay himself in vain.
Shapley & Roth’s approach to matching problems is, of course, something the Mahabharata does very well so as to show that all ‘svadharmas’ have a stable way of meshing within just a few iterations. But the central epochee of the Gita shows that one such match- that of Nar & Narayan- is thereby rendered both a Philosophical Situation Comedy as well as Occasionalism’s Nightmare on Om Street.
So I’m sticking with slagging off Sen- virodha bhakti donchaknow- but, sure, you guys just go ahead and read the Gita with Shapley as its Smriti. Not everybody can be a pointless fuckwit you know. Me, I’m just lucky that way.

Ethics, Engineering and Efficiency.

What is Ethics? Essentially it’s stuff to do with your ethos- what you are for yourself, what kinds of things you value or want to value, your life project or salutary lack of any such hair up yo’ ass, as well as what sort of World you want to inhabit, or want to want to inhabit, who you want to relate to and how you want them to relate to you or each other- so it would be reasonable to say Ethics is about what Economists call ‘Preferences’ except when it isn’t and comes under the rubric of ‘Signalling’ or ‘Mechanism Design’ or whatever.

This brings us to the question- what is Economics? Well, its about how to economize- do the same thing but using less resources and from that point of view it is a type of Ethical theory- viz. it’s better to do things in the least expensive and least stupid way. Engineers are attracted to this aspect of Economics and good Economics is smart engineering. However, Economics- like Theology or Literary Theory- is also something else- a Careerist Ponzi scheme based on the bankrupt notion of a totalizing ‘grand narrative’, whose hallmark is its radical heterogeneity with respect to what it claims to study. Thus, Theology explains why Religion and Spirituality and Love of the Creator is totally ungodly and spite ridden in a fucked up way & Literary Theory explains that good writers are really very very evil and bad writers and very very bad writers are actually very very good and saintly. Similarly, Economics is about being very very wasteful and stupid. Herbert Hoover was a truly great Humanitarian when he acted as an Engineer. As President, thinking he had to act the Economist, he fucked up big time.
Why? Well he’d spotted, as an engineer, that a whole industry can come forward when they put a floor under wages- so as to avoid cut-throat price and wage competition such that quality declines or a ‘repugnancy’ factor is created thus destroying the market long term. But, once President, he didn’t get that downward wage rigidity meant that markets couldn’t clear without an anti-deflationary monetary policy, a full employment balanced budget Fiscal policy as well as optimal, correlated equilibria (rather than Mercantilist, beggar my neighbour) Tariff policy. In other words, the engineer was seduced by the apparent similarity between Economics and his own profession and didn’t do proper due diligence to check that Economists weren’t all a bunch of irresponsible fuckwits whose idea of a good time is fiddling while Rome burns in a grand Concerto of ‘told you so’.

The pity of the thing is that there was once an Engineer who took up Economics and invented a notion of Efficiency which ought to have got everybody singing from the same hymn sheet.
But, before looking at that story, the question arises- what is Efficiency and why would Economists care about it? Briefly, Efficiency is about waste, cutting it down, and it is the sort of thing you hire Engineers or Managers or Agronomists or other such people with practical skills to do for you. Economists can’t do anything themselves except produce hot air, so its useful for them to set up problems such that Engineers can have a crack at them while standing back to take the credit.
That being said, let us now look at the trajectory of Vifredo Pareto, the paradigmatic Engineer who moved into Economics because he was sick and tired of the way the stupid pi-jaw of Economists empowered the Govt. to tie Industry up in knots and create waste. Pareto put forward a theory of ‘residues & derivations‘ such that Moral & Political Entrepreneurs recombine various stupid and vacuous ideas (derivations) because there is a market for something which caters for irrational, or instinctual or thymotic or mimetic or other such Social glue (residues).
The theory of imperfect competition allows us to predict that you are going to get a lot of product differentiation with excess capacity in ‘derivations’ where there are low barriers to entry (anybody can set up a Think Tank), whereas you are going to get very little real product differentiation as opposed to wasteful advertising and branding if there are high barriers to entry (setting up a Political Party which has a shot at power under first past the Post). In other words the two main parties or sects or whatever will be virtually identical while the lunatic fringe will be all over the place. But, the important thing for Pareto is that ‘derivations and residues’ obscure the Engineering problem- cracking down on stupidity and waste. In other words, noise ye shall always have with you, so concentrate on the signal,  ignore the Careerist, Credentialist, pi-jaw merchants scoring points about which of them was more diligent at swallowing whatever shite Aristotle or Kant or Gramsci or David Icke bequeathed to posterity, or pretending to be more pro disabled Lesbian Bahishkrit Samaj Smartha Vadadesi Vadama Bloggers wot have been forced to repeatedly commit suttee by Narendra Modi just to suck up to the Tatas.
The concept of Pareto Efficiency was one of Pareto’s legacies to Economics as wot she is taught but many Economists never liked it because it got in the way of Classical Economics- which consists in saying really sarky things to the Economy till it sits up straight and stops chewing gum and turns in its homework assignments on time.
This is a link to a paper on ‘Ethics & Efficiency’ by a Dutch Professor which summarizes the Hilary Putnam/Walsh/Sen approach which seeks to revive old fashioned Pigouvian Welfare Economics as a tremendous engine for whining and pretending to be a great big bleeding heart while quietly climbing every Careerist ladder in sight and living it large on the Conference Circuit.

At the heart of its complaint against Pareto Efficiency is the feeling that if bargaining power, or wealth or something else of value, is not equitably distributed to begin with, then the outcome of trade and exchange might worsen Social Welfare though technically leaving no one worse off.
Indeed, we all at some time or another- either by reason of information asymmetry, lack of endowment, neediness or desperation or some thing else of that sort- feel that we are likely to get the short end of a stick in a negotiation. Hence, middle men evolve who are either stronger or more daring or more in the know than you, and they act as your pimp or dealer or whatever.
The question which naturally arises is do pimps actually make under-age crack whores or elderly Tam Bram gigolos (what? You think this blog pays my dental bills?) significantly better off in the same way that the Feminist Anti Poverty industry (Gender and Development it used to be called) actually makes millions of women living in rural Belgravia significantly better off? The answer is, yes of course they do. Only pimps can make inter-personal comparisons of Utility and tell you which street corner to strut your stuff and decide how  much of your chest hair to expose or what to charge for a Manmohan Singh special (don’t ask but at least its shuddh vegetarian unlike the Montek Singh Ahluwalia which Feminist Academics, flush with their bonus money from Big Pharma (what? they make tampons don’t they and Feminist Academia is about menstruating all the time) insist upon just to humiliate us elderly Tam Bram prostitutes dressed in our P.Chidambaram style veshtis and untucked white shirt.

Yet, and this is the paradox, though Pimps and Sen-tentious Welfare E- Con Problematization represent a Ethical interessement mechanism they only do by involving all in a lasting impoverishment.
The Pareto efficient solution is to have no interessement mechanisms and everybody voting with their feet for a better Tiebout model- like how’s about we just get dinner and maybe a movie and then call it a night. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t murli Manohar Joshi. Murli him but good.