Note added on 4/5: Some readers missed the point of this post very badly, which means that it could have been written more clearly. Here is a brief attempt to clarify.

______________________________________-

Here are three dilemmas about public policy:

Farnsworth McCrankypants just hates the idea that someone, somewhere might be looking at pornography. It’s not that he thinks porn causes bad behavior; it’s just the idea of other people’s viewing habits that causes him deep psychic distress. Ought Farnsworth’s preferences be weighed in the balance when we make public policy? In other words, is the psychic harm to Farnsworth an argument for discouraging pornography through, say, taxation or regulation?

Granola McMustardseed just hates the idea that someone, somewhere might be altering the natural state of a wilderness area. It’s not that Granola ever plans to visit that area or to derive any other direct benefits from it; it’s just the idea of wilderness desecration that causes her deep psychic distress. Ought Granola’s preferences be weighed in the balance when we make public policy? In other words, is the psychic harm to Granola an argument for discouraging, say, oil drilling in Alaska, either through taxes or regulation?

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?

If your answers to questions 1, 2 and 3 were not all identical, what is the key difference among them?

Continue reading ‘Censorship, Environmentalism and Steubenville’

Re the fiscal cliff, I’ve tried hard to keep my head in the sand, figuring I can always go back to watching the news in 2016. So I’m not completely up to date on all this stuff, and I might be missing something important. But here are a few last-minute observations:

Continue reading ‘Over the Cliff’

I’m a little frazzled this week, so I haven’t caught up with all the comments on Monday’s
post on immigration, but I know there’s been some discussion about the actual costs and benefits of admitting unskilled immigrants. I thought I’d supply some numbers that might inform that discussion; all of this is lifted from Chapter 20 of The Big Questions.

When an unskilled Mexican immigrant arrives in the United States, his wages typically rise from about $2 a hour to $9 an hour — call it a $7 an hour gain. He also bids down the wages of American workers by (and this is a high-end estimate from the labor economics literature) about $.00000003 per hour; multiply that by a hundred million American workers and you’ve got a collective $3 an hour loss.

Now there seems to be something like a consensus that it’s okay for US policies to benefit US citizens at the expense of Mexicans, but there also seems to be something like a consensus that there’s a limit to that; we would not want, for example, to allow Americans to hunt Mexicans for sport. So when we consider turning someone away at the border, one good question is: Are we willing to do $7 worth of harm to a Mexican in order to confer $3 worth of benefits on American workers?

Note that the potential Mexican immigrant is typically much poorer than those American workers, and that it’s not uncommonly argued that we should care more about the poor than about the rich. If you weight that $7 loss to the Mexican and that $3 gain to the Americans accordingly (i.e. assuming logarithmic utility, which is a quite conservative assumption — that is, one that biases the result in the anti-immigration direction), you discover exclusion hurts the Mexican about five times as much as it helps the Americans.

So, at least if you buy into that way of thinking (which pervades a lot of the policy literature) then exclusion is justified only if you “count” a Mexican as less than one-fifth of an American. That’s a pretty extreme position. It’s not as extreme as hunting Mexicans for sport, but it’s still pretty extreme.

Continue reading ‘Immigration Followup’