Hindsight bias and Obama's "capitulation"

Paul Krugman and many other Democrats are saying that President Obama and the Democrats made a mistake by putting off until now the question of what to do about the Bush tax cuts. Clearly - as David Leohhardt, Nate Silver, and others have argued - the Democrats are not in a strong bargaining position now that the Republicans have threatened utter chaos (hold up all the other legislation, kill all extensions of all tax cuts, etc.) unless the Democrats extend the unproductive and unfair tax cuts for the rich.

But the wisdom of hindsight is wonderful. Where were the pundits saying "Now is the time to bring up the extension of the tax cuts"? And, looking back over the last two very difficult years, even now, can someone point to a specific time when the Democrats could have done this? My hunch is that there were always more important things.

So long as one of the two major parties is willing to sacrifice the well-being of the nation and the world for its misguided ideology, we have a problem that is not easy to solve. In this respect, the U.S. is much like Israel, where the equivalents of the Republicans are in control.

Added later: Seems I'm wrong. Here is what should have been done, in hindsight. But the congress had to do it, not the president.

Provenge

Medicare will now pay for Provenge, which costs $93,000 and prolongs life for about four months, although this is the median not the mean. This comes to about $279,000 per year, and probably more for a quality-adjusted life year. At the hearing where this was decided, may objected to the possibility that Medicare would consider costs, calling it "rationing". What precedent does this set, and what else could Medicare cover if it were to value life so highly?

Consensus statement on morality

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/morality10/morality_consensus.html is a consensus statement of a few people invited to a meeting.

Near the bottom of
http://www.edge.org/discourse/morality.html
is my attempt to say everything I believe about moral judgment in 500 words.

World government

I keep reading about problems that are best solved at the world level, or at least at some level that involves many nations: climate change; overfishing; illegal drugs (if they are a problem); deforestation (which is related to the importation of wood); trade; protection of endangered species like whales; terrorism; and on and on. One of the lessons that Howard Raiffa, Max Bazerman and others have taught us is that negotiation about several issues at once allows log-rolling, that is, trade-offs in which each party gives up something it cares about less in return for something it cares about more. One way to prevent this kind of win-win strategy is to negotiate one issue at a time, but that is exactly what we do at the world level. We have organizations for fish, organizations for climate change, and so on, but no supra-national organization that permits nations to make trade-offs with all these issues on the table. The lack of this sort of world government is a serious impediment to world progress.

I was reminded of this issue this morning when I discovered a project called Democracy Unbound, which aims to study the prospects for supranational government from the perspective of several scholarly disciplines.

Action and omission in the U.S. Supreme Court

This interesting article shows how the Court accepted a distinction between action and omission as relevant. Harm caused by omission becomes a matter of "positive liberty", which is apparently not protected by the Constitution. In particular, even after a child welfare agency involved itself in a case, the agency cannot be sued for failing to protect the child from terrible harm. Of interest is that this is not the sort of omission that anyone can commit; the agency was already involved, hence, by everyday moral standards, "responsible".

Direct democracy

I was supposed to be in a video for a group that advocates direct democracy (initiative and referendum at the national level in the U.S., among other things). I said I had doubts. ("You see Switzerland. I see California.") But they wanted to do it anyway. In the end we couldn't schedule it. I had thought about what I would say, and here it is.

My first worry comes from my work (with Ed McCaffery) on the isolation effect. When people are asked about a given proposal by itself they isolate that proposal and ignore its side effects, its costs, and to some extent the alternatives to it. This leads to inconsistencies.

For example, majorities seem to favor lower government spending, lower taxes, a balanced budget, but more spending on health care, education, and social security. This happens when they are asked about these things one at a time. Yet the combination is impossible, even if we take into account their willingness to cut military spending and other parts of the U.S. budget.

Or, for a slightly more subtle case, they favor progressive taxation, couples neutrality, and marriage neutrality. Couples neutrality means that couples with the same income pay the same tax. Marriage neutrality means that marriage does not affect the total taxes paid by the couple. These three things are mathematically impossible to have at once.

The first problem is thus that referenda do not protect us against proposals that are incompatible with other things that we want.

The second problem is that, when we consider one proposal at a time, we prevent "log rolling". A better term might be mutual back scratching. This is what legislatures do, when they work as they are supposed to work. Each side gives in on something that it cares about less, in order to get something that it cares about more.

A recent example is the energy bill that the U.S. Senate almost got to debate. The idea was to get a price on carbon, for one side, in return for increased development of nuclear power, and increased off-short drilling, for the other side. It would still be a good deal, even without the off-shore drilling. This sort of thing could not happen unless someone happened to put together deals like this in an entire referendum proposal, which is unlikely, because most of these proposals come from interest groups on one side and they don't negotiate with their opponents.

I'm sure there are places where referenda can do some good, but we need to consider these problems too.

Presumed consent for research

Although presumed consent for organ donation
may not be a panacea, it does seem to help. (Showing that presumed consent is correlated with other determinants of high donation rates does not determine the direction of causality.) Why not do the same for certain kinds of research?

A case in point is the use DNA samples for research on the genetics of disease. In a recent case, the University of Arizona returned DNA samples to a Native American tribe, the Havasupai, and paid them $700,000, to settle a lawsuit about informed consent. The tribe members had donated DNA for what they thought was a study of diabetes, but the DNA was used for other purposes. (The dispute about what they were actually told was not settled. See the news article in Science, April 30, 2010, p. 558.)

The main issue here seems to me to be property rights. Some of my recent research has shown that people think of property rights as dictated by deontological (non-consequential) moral rules. But economic and utilitarian analyses of property argue that it exists because of its social value in terms of beneficial consequences, such as encouraging development of property, production, and innovation.

In the case of organs and DNA samples, it is hard to see how functions like these are relevant. The social value of not having property rights in these cases seems quite high, much higher than any benefit of property rights might be.

The idea of presumed consent does not completely remove property rights. It removes them unless they are positively asserted. This limitation allows people who want property rights an option to take them. In general, we might think of such desires as anti-social. However, some people might not trust others to look out for their welfare. They might believe that organ donors are allowed to die more quickly or that DNA donors will be found to have some condition that others can use against them. The option to assert property rights may help to make the users more trustworthy, lest they become more generally untrusted.

My hunch here is that perception of the violation of rights is highly dependent on social norms and conventions. For example, when we write in blogs we assume that our writing is in the public domain. It is polite to attribute quotations but not illegal not to do so, unlike other writing. I don't know the law on this, but this is what I assume, and I suspect that others do too. In another example, when I go to a tourist attraction I do not think I have the right to consent to being in someone's photograph of the scene. So long as we know what our rights are, these expectations are generally harmless.

More generally, in cases like these, people get upset when they think that social norms and conventions actually give them certain rights. If they did not think so, they would not get upset. This argument applies, of course, only to cases where there is little or no justification for providing a right in the first place, in terms of the social value of such provision.