Saturday, March 24, 2007

Food Alarmism

Apparently, Chinese food is unhealthy. Hmmm...so I guess that would mean that people that eat a lot of Chinese food wouldn't live as long as people who didn't eat a lot of Chinese food. So, let's look at two countries with fairly similar economic systems, one where the average person probably eats Chinese food a couple times a month (at best), and one where the average person eats Chinese food just about every day (source: CIA Factbook):

UK life expectancy
total population: 78.54 years
male: 76.09 years
female: 81.13 years (2006 est.)

Hong Kong life expectancy
total population: 81.59 years
male: 78.9 years
female: 84.5 years (2006 est.)

Hmmm....

UPDATE: For comments, see the original blog post here.

Capitalism: the Antithesis of Social Darwinism

Okay, so the following comment in response to Julian Sanchez’s phrase “the progressive version of the intelligent design fallacy” got me all riled up, and I’ve already criticized it here.
If you want to make an evolutionary argument, you have to realize that the way evolution by random mutation works is by failure. Trial and error. Lots and lots of error. Millions of kids lives would be ruined, society would collapse, and a new society billions of years from now would have evolved the innate capacity to build properly functioning schools for their multi-tentacled offspring. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is that if you want progress you can find in the newspaper rather than in the fossil record, you need intelligence.

Julian was advocating for school choice (i.e. vouchers), so I assume that this commenter is an opponent of school choice, and probably of capitalism in general. Who knows...The point is, a lot of people commit the fallacy of associating capitalism with evolution, or more specifically, Social Darwinism.
What's the easiest (and intellectually laziest) way to attack a person advocating capitalism and free markets? Accuse him of supporting Social Darwinism. Of course, such an attack is misguided at best, and actually couldn’t be further from the truth.
In a market-based system, wealth is created through innovation. In evolution/Social Darwinism, wealth is transferred to the biggest bully. Sure, at any given instance, the competition between two businesses vying for the same thing (access to some resource or customer or money) might resemble an encounter between a snake and a mongoose, but the customer ends up winning in either case because the winner of the battle must do something (such as inventing a new product that makes life easier) to win the battle for the resource.
In fact, communism—the polar opposite of capitalism—more accurately resembles Social Darwinism; the lack of incentives for innovators results in a fixed amount of wealth being fought over instead of new wealth being created (through the innovation that capitalism so uniquely fosters). Carl Milsted sums it up nicely here:
Another notorious metaphor [to capitalism] is “Social Darwinism.” It implies a tougher fight for survival in a market system. Ironically, when traditional societies become more free market based, populations tend to explode, until parents realize that their children are likely to live long lives. As far as people are concerned, capitalism is anti-Darwinian. A good case could be made that our descendants will be stupider and less hearty because capitalism has made life too easy.
There is an evolutionary aspect to capitalism, but it applies to businesses, not the people they serve. Businesses that fail to provide good service do get weeded out by competition with better businesses. But the evolutionary process is not entirely Darwinian: businesses learn. Lamarkian evolution is the norm.
Anyway, the point is this: in a market-based school system, some schools would fail, while others would succeed. But just as the consumers win when Target matches Wal-Mart’s prices and provides a more comfortable and attractive shopping environment (while other competitors like K-mart fall by the wayside), the students and parents would win if schools were pitted against each other. Sure, some schools would be closed (i.e. go out of businesses), and (gasp!) some teachers would lose their jobs. But I want bad schools to close, and I want bad teachers to lose their jobs. After all, I’m not all that concerned about the schools and the teachers; I’m concerned about the students!

The Progressive Version of the Intelligent Design Fallacy

Julian Sanchez describes what he calls the "progressive version of the intelligent design fallacy" in this post. Here's the excerpt:
This is the progressive version of the intelligent design fallacy—the implicit belief that complex results must be consciously aimed at to be achieved...
The context that it's used in is to attack how opponents of school choice seem to operate on the presumption that central planning is required to produce a good product. I love the concept that Julian has coined, but I don’t love the term he’s given to it. I think it will lead to a lot of confusion and straw man arguments that conflate market-based systems and capitalism with evolution. For example, a commenter attacks Julian's verbiage with this comment:
If you want to make an evolutionary argument, you have to realize that the way evolution by random mutation works is by failure. Trial and error. Lots and lots of error. Millions of kids lives would be ruined, society would collapse, and a new society billions of years from now would have evolved the innate capacity to build properly functioning schools for their multi-tentacled offspring. Or something like that. Anyway, the point is that if you want progress you can find in the newspaper rather than in the fossil record, you need intelligence.

Nevermind the commenter’s conflation of evolution with market-based systems (see this post for my thoughts on that fallacy). What really freaks me out about this guy’s comment is that he seems to be willing to completely ignore the obvious evidence that markets work, and more specifically that people (in their current state of evolutionary existence) function optimally in market-based systems. It won’t take millions of years of evolution for people to adjust to a market-based school system, just as it won’t take millions of years of evolution for people to adjust to a market-based food distribution system (or any other subsystem of the overall capitalist/market-based economy). NEWSFLASH! We already have those systems! A market-based school system isn’t any different!
Yes, you need intelligence, but not from a central planning perspective. You need intelligence (insofar as being able to tell the difference between a failure and a success) at the level of the consumer, or in the case of school choice, the parent. And we already have that! Would anyone ever really suggest that people are so stupid that, without millions more years of evolution, they can’t tell the difference between a success and a failure?
Anyway, to avoid the confusion that Julian’s comment cause in this commenter, as well as to avoid the conflation of evolution (i.e. Social Darwinism) with capitalism, I’d like to suggest a new term to describe this fallacy that many people assume to be true. How about simply, the “central planner fallacy?”

UPDATE: For comments, see the original blog post here.

School Choice

This post was originally a comment in response to this post on AngryBlog, but I liked it so much I'm posting it here:

Potential reasons for opposition to school-choice:
1.) Public funding of religious schools
2.) An erosion of the sense of “community” that comes with geography-based schools
3.) Fear of treating children like commodities to be shuffled around to school after school to prove a political point
Point #1 is a valid concern, but as long as there’s nothing in the allocation formula regarding religion (or the lack thereof) I think that this concern goes away.
Point #2 is not a valid concern because it relies on the false assumption that geography-based schools have the potential to foster a greater sense of community than performance-based schools.
Point #3 is valid, but as Tim points out, it can’t get any worse than it already is. We’ve been carrying out the progressive experiment with education for a long time now, and inner-city kids are the victims of “progressive dogmatism.”
The progressive system isn’t working (and in fact isn’t all that progressive). It’s time to try something else.

Liberty Mutual's "Responsibility" Site

After calling Liberty Mutual to ask about a bill, I decided to go online to pay it. The image/question on the right side of the page caught my attention. It asked, "Should the government regulate the use of trans fats in restaurants?"



My interest was piqued! "OF COURSE NOT!" I thought to myself, my rage at the recent action by the New York City city council to ban trans fats being quickly recalled. So I clicked on the image and found this site, which has a huge list of "yes/no" survey questions that have been featured in weeks past. Much to my surprise the questions actually address the concept of liberty/personal responsibility vs. government mandates rather directly.



Besides the trans fat question that's currently up, they also ask about motorcycle helmet laws, airport security, even whether people without children should have to pay "school taxes" (their words). In most cases, the survey respondents [predictably] err on the side of more government action (and less liberty). Most respondents think the government should ban trans fats, most think the government should have motorcycle helmet laws, most think the minimum driving age should be raised, etc. But the "yeses" don't usually win by very much, showing that there is a healthy amount of people that believe the government should stay out issues revolving around personal choice and responsibility.



Even better, the comments that those opposed to government action write tend to be along the lines of liberty and the government's taking of freedom. The do-gooders keep trying to bring the question back to whether helmets saves lives or whether trans fats are healthy, but the opposition doesn't fall for that straw man, instead recentering the debate to government action vs. individual liberty and personal responsibility.



Go to the site now and voice your opinion!