Tag Archives: Private Governance

Private Social Distancing, Private Reversal

04 Monday May 2020

Posted by in Liberty, Pandemic, Uncategorized

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My original post on the dominance of voluntary social distancing over the mandated variety appears below. That dominance is qualified by the greater difficulty of engaging in certain activities when they are outlawed by government, or when the natural locations of activities are declared off-limits. Nevertheless, as with almost all regulation, people make certain “adjustments” to suit themselves (sometimes involving kickbacks to authorities, because regulation does nothing so well as creating opportunities for graft). Those “adjustments” often lead to much less desirable outcomes than the original, unregulated state. In the case of a pandemic, however, it’s tempting to view such unavoidable actions as a matter of compromise.

I say this now because the voluntary social distancing preceding most government lockdown orders in March (discussed in the post below) is subject to a degree of self-reversal. Apple Mobility Data suggests that something like that was happening throughout much of April, as shown in the chart at the top of this post. Now, in early May, the trend is likely to continue as some of the government lockdown mandates are being lifted, or at least loosened.

An earlier version of the chart above appeared in a Forbes article entitled, “Apple Data Shows Shelter-In-Place Is Ending, Whether Governments Want It To Or Not“. The author, John Koetsier, noted the Apple data are taken from map searches, so they may not be reliable indicators of actual movement. But he also featured some charts from Foursquare, which showed actual visits to various kinds of destinations, and some of theoe demonstrate the upward trend in activity.

In the original post below, I used SafeGraph charts lifted from a paper I described there. The four charts below are available on the SafeGraph website, which offered the services of the friendly little robot in the lower right-hand corner, but I demurred. You’ll probably need to click on the image to read the detail. They show more granular information by industry, brand, region, and restaurant categories. The upward trends are evident in quite a few of the series.

I should qualify my interpretation of the charts above and those in my original post: First, nine states did not have stay-at-home orders, though a few of those had varying restrictions on individuals and on the operation of “non-essential” businesses. The five having no orders of any kind (that I can tell) are lightly-populated, very low-density states, so the vast majority of the U.S. population was subject to some sort of lockdown measure. Second, eight states began to ease or lift orders in the last few days of April, Georgia and Colorado being the largest. Therefore, at the tail end, a small part of the increase in activity could be related to those liberalizations. Then again, it might have happened anyway.

The authoritarian impulse to shut everything down was largely unnecessary, and it did not accomplish much that voluntary distancing hadn’t accomplished already (again, see below). Healthy people need to stop cowering and take action. That includes the non-elderly and those free of underlying health conditions. Sure, take precautions, keep your distance, but get out of your home if you can. Get some sunny Vitamin D.

Committing yourself to the existence of a shut-in is not healthy, not wise, and it might destroy whatever wealth you possess if you are a working person. The data above show that people are recognizing that fact. As much as the Left wishes it were so, government seldom “knows better”. It is least effective when it uses force to suppress voluntary behavior; it is most effective when it follows consensus, and especially when it protects the rights of individuals to make their own choices where no consensus exists.

Last week’s post follows:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How much did state and local governments accomplish when they decided to issue stay-at-home orders? Perhaps not much. That’s the implication of data presented by the authors of “Internal and external effects of social distancing in a pandemic” (starts on page 22 in the linked PDF). Social distancing began in the U.S. in a series of voluntary, private actions. Government orders merely followed and, at best, reinforced those actions, but often in ham-handed ways.

The paper has a broader purpose than the finding that social distancing is often a matter of private initiative. I’ll say a bit more about it, but you can probably skip the rest of this paragraph without loss of continuity. The paper explores theoretical relationships between key parameters (including a social distancing construct) and the dynamics of a pandemic over time in a social welfare context. The authors study several alternatives: a baseline in which behavior doesn’t change in any way; a “laissez faire” path in which actions are all voluntary; and a “socially optimal” path imposed by a benevolent and all-knowing central authority (say what???). I’d offer more details, but I’ll await the coming extension promised by the authors to a world in which susceptible populations are heterogenous (e.g., like Covid-19, where children are virtually unaffected, healthy working age adults are roughly as at-risk as they are to the flu, and a population of the elderly and health-compromised individuals for which the virus is much more dangerous than the flu). In general, the paper seems to support a more liberalized approach to dealing with the pandemic, but that’s a matter of interpretation. Tyler Cowen, who deserves a hat-tip, believes that reading is correct “at the margin”.

Let’s look at some of the charts the authors present early in the paper. The data on social distancing behavior comes from Safegraph, a vendor of mobility data taken from cell phone location information. This data can be used to construct various proxies for aggregate social activity. The first chart below shows traffic at “points of interest” (POI) in the U.S. from March 8 to April 12, 2020. That’s the blue line. The red line is the percentage of the U.S. population subject to lockdown orders on each date. The authors explain the details in the notes below the chart:

Clearly POI visits were declining sharply before any governments imposed their own orders. The next two charts show similar declines in the percent of mobile devices that leave “home” each day (“home” being the device’s dominant location during nighttime hours) and the duration over which devices were away from “home”, on average.

So all of these measures of social activity began declining well ahead of the government orders. The authors say private social distancing preceded government action in all 50 states. POI traffic was down almost 40% by the time 10% of the U.S. population was subject to government orders, and those early declines accounted for the bulk of the total decline through April 12. The early drops in the two away-from-home measures were 15-20%, again accounting for well over half of the total decline.

The additional declines beyond that time, to the extent they can be discerned, could be either trends that would have continued even in the absence of government orders or reinforcing effects the orders themselves. This does not imply that lockdown orders have no effects on specific activities. Rather, it means that those orders have minor incremental effects on measures of aggregate social activity than the voluntary actions already taken. In other words, the government lockdowns are largely a matter of rearranging the deck chairs, or, that is to say, their distribution.

Many private individuals and institutions acted early in response to information about the virus, motivated by concerns about their own safety and the safety of family and friends. The public sector in the U.S. was not especially effective in providing information, with such politicos as President Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, Bill De Blasio, and the mayor of New Orleans minimizing the dangers into the month of March, and some among them encouraging people to get out and celebrate at public events. Even Anthony Fauci minimized the danger in late February (not to mention the World Health Organization). In fact, “the scientists” were as negligent in their guidance as anyone in the early stages of the pandemic.

When lockdown orders were issued, they were often arbitrary and nonsensical. Grocery stores, liquor stores, and Wal Mart were allowed to remain open, but department stores and gun shops were not. Beaches and parks were ordered closed, though there is little if any chance of infection outdoors. Lawn care services, another outdoor activity, were classified as non-essential in some jurisdictions and therefore prohibited. And certain personal services seem to be available to public officials, but not to private citizens. The lists of things one can and can’t buy truly defies logic.

In March, John W. Whitehead wrote:

“We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, ‘stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,’…”

That is fearsome indeed, and individuals can accomplish distancing without it. If you are extremely risk averse, you can distance yourself or take other precautions to remain protected. You can either take action to isolate yourself or you can decide to be in proximity to others. The more risk averse among us will internalize most of the cost of voluntary social distancing. The less risk averse will avoid that cost but face greater exposure to the virus. Of course, this raises questions of public support for vulnerable segments of the population for whom risk aversion will be quite rational. That would certainly be a more enlightened form of intervention than lockdowns, though support should be offered only to those highly at-risk individuals who can’t support themselves.

Christopher Phelan writes of three rationales for the lockdowns: buying time for development of a vaccine or treatments; reducing the number of infected individuals; and to avoid overwhelming the health care system. Phelan thinks all three are of questionable validity at this point. A vaccine might never arrive, and Phelan is pessimistic about treatments (I have more hope in that regard). Ultimately a large share of the population will be infected, lockdowns or not. And of course the health care system is not overwhelmed at this point. Yes, those caring for Covid patients are under a great stress, but the health care system as a whole, and patients with other maladies, are currently suffering from massive under-utilization.

If you wish to be socially distant, you are free to do so on your very own. Individuals are quite capable of voluntary risk mitigation without authoritarian fiat, as the charts above show. While private actors might not internalize all of the external costs of their activities, government is seldom capable of making the appropriate corrections. Coercion to enforce the kinds of crazy rules that have been imposed during this pandemic is the kind of abuse of power the nation’s founders intended to prevent. Reversing those orders can be difficult, and the precedent itself becomes a threat to future liberty. Nevertheless, we see mounting efforts to resist by those who are harmed by these orders, and by those who recognize the short-sighted nature of the orders. Private incentives for risk reduction, and private evaluation of the benefits of social and economic activity, offer superior governance to the draconian realities of lockdowns.

Social Distancing Largely a Private Matter

26 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in Liberty, Pandemic, Uncategorized

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How much did state and local governments accomplish when they decided to issue stay-at-home orders? Perhaps not much. That’s the implication of data presented by the authors of “Internal and external effects of social distancing in a pandemic” (starts on page 22 in the linked PDF). Social distancing began in the U.S. in a series of voluntary, private actions. Government orders merely followed and, at best, reinforced those actions, but often in ham-handed ways.

The paper has a broader purpose than the finding that social distancing is often a matter of private initiative. I’ll say a bit more about it, but you can probably skip the rest of this paragraph without loss of continuity. The paper explores theoretical relationships between key parameters (including a social distancing construct) and the dynamics of a pandemic over time in a social welfare context. The authors study several alternatives: a baseline in which behavior doesn’t change in any way; a “laissez faire” path in which actions are all voluntary; and a “socially optimal” path imposed by a benevolent and all-knowing central authority (say what???). I’d offer more details, but I’ll await the coming extension promised by the authors to a world in which susceptible populations are heterogenous (e.g., like Covid-19, where children are virtually unaffected, healthy working age adults are roughly as at-risk as they are to the flu, and a population of the elderly and health-compromised individuals for which the virus is much more dangerous than the flu). In general, the paper seems to support a more liberalized approach to dealing with the pandemic, but that’s a matter of interpretation. Tyler Cowen, who deserves a hat-tip, believes that reading is correct “at the margin”.

Let’s look at some of the charts the authors present early in the paper. The data on social distancing behavior comes from Safegraph, a vendor of mobility data taken from cell phone location information. This data can be used to construct various proxies for aggregate social activity. The first chart below shows traffic at “points of interest” (POI) in the U.S. from March 8 to April 12, 2020. That’s the blue line. The red line is the percentage of the U.S. population subject to lockdown orders on each date. The authors explain the details in the notes below the chart:

Clearly POI visits were declining sharply before any governments imposed their own orders. The next two charts show similar declines in the percent of mobile devices that leave “home” each day (“home” being the device’s dominant location during nighttime hours) and the duration over which devices were away from “home”, on average.

So all of these measures of social activity began declining well ahead of the government orders. The authors say private social distancing preceded government action in all 50 states. POI traffic was down almost 40% by the time 10% of the U.S. population was subject to government orders, and those early declines accounted for the bulk of the total decline through April 12. The early drops in the two away-from-home measures were 15-20%, again accounting for well over half of the total decline.

The additional declines beyond that time, to the extent they can be discerned, could be either trends that would have continued even in the absence of government orders or reinforcing effects the orders themselves. This does not imply that lockdown orders have no effects on specific activities. Rather, it means that those orders have minor incremental effects on measures of aggregate social activity than the voluntary actions already taken. In other words, the government lockdowns are largely a matter of rearranging the deck chairs, or, that is to say, their distribution.

Many private individuals and institutions acted early in response to information about the virus, motivated by concerns about their own safety and the safety of family and friends. The public sector in the U.S. was not especially effective in providing information, with such politicos as President Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, Bill De Blasio, and the mayor of New Orleans minimizing the dangers into the month of March, and some among them encouraging people to get out and celebrate at public events. Even Anthony Fauci minimized the danger in late February (not to mention the World Health Organization). In fact, “the scientists” were as negligent in their guidance as anyone in the early stages of the pandemic.

When lockdown orders were issued, they were often arbitrary and nonsensical. Grocery stores, liquor stores, and Wal Mart were allowed to remain open, but department stores and gun shops were not. Beaches and parks were ordered closed, though there is little if any chance of infection outdoors. Lawn care services, another outdoor activity, were classified as non-essential in some jurisdictions and therefore prohibited. And certain personal services seem to be available to public officials, but not to private citizens. The lists of things one can and can’t buy truly defies logic.

In March, John W. Whitehead wrote:

“We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, ‘stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,’…”

That is fearsome indeed, and individuals can accomplish distancing without it. If you are extremely risk averse, you can distance yourself or take other precautions to remain protected. You can either take action to isolate yourself or you can decide to be in proximity to others. The more risk averse among us will internalize most of the cost of voluntary social distancing. The less risk averse will avoid that cost but face greater exposure to the virus. Of course, this raises questions of public support for vulnerable segments of the population for whom risk aversion will be quite rational. That would certainly be a more enlightened form of intervention than lockdowns, though support should be offered only to those highly at-risk individuals who can’t support themselves.

Christopher Phelan writes of three rationales for the lockdowns: buying time for development of a vaccine or treatments; reducing the number of infected individuals; and to avoid overwhelming the health care system. Phelan thinks all three are of questionable validity at this point. A vaccine might never arrive, and Phelan is pessimistic about treatments (I have more hope in that regard). Ultimately a large share of the population will be infected, lockdowns or not. And of course the health care system is not overwhelmed at this point. Yes, those caring for Covid patients are under a great stress, but the health care system as a whole, and patients with other maladies, are currently suffering from massive under-utilization.

If you wish to be socially distant, you are free to do so on your very own. Individuals are quite capable of voluntary risk mitigation without authoritarian fiat, as the charts above show. While private actors might not internalize all of the external costs of their activities, government is seldom capable of making the appropriate corrections. Coercion to enforce the kinds of crazy rules that have been imposed during this pandemic is the kind of abuse of power the nation’s founders intended to prevent. Reversing those orders can be difficult, and the precedent itself becomes a threat to future liberty. Nevertheless, we see mounting efforts to resist by those who are harmed by these orders, and by those who recognize the short-sighted nature of the orders. Private incentives for risk reduction, and private evaluation of the benefits of social and economic activity, offer superior governance to the draconian realities of lockdowns.

Statists Might Like To Vaccinate Against Many Things

25 Monday Nov 2019

Posted by in Vaccinations

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The vaccine debate illustrates a widespread misunderstanding about the meaning of an “advanced society”. It does not mean that difficult social problems must be dealt with always and everywhere in a uniform way, as supporters of vaccine mandates seem to assume. Instead, it often means that society can respect differences in the preferences of individuals by allowing varied approaches to problem-solving across jurisdictions, as well as across public and private institutions. This latter notion of advancement respects individual freedom and facilitates experiential social learning. But is that varied approach wise in a world of communicable diseases?

One standard of “community” protection assumes that vaccines work with a high degree of certainty within groups of individuals, especially with a second booster. The share of the population vaccinated against most common childhood diseases is fairly high. In fact, these shares mostly exceed their respective “community protection thresholds” — the percentage required to prevent a particular disease from spreading. That means achieving so-called “herd immunity”. Of course, that will not be true across many local subgroups. Nevertheless, if one accepts this standard, a runaway contagion in the U.S. is an extremely remote possibility, affording some flexibility for respecting preferences for and against vaccination.

My Friend, the Vaccine Resistor

One of my best friends is a passionate vaccine resistor (VR). I won’t say he’s “vaccine hesitant” because that doesn’t come close to his position. I won’t call him an “anti-vaxxer” because he doesn’t mind if others avail themselves of vaccines (and besides, the term has taken on such derogatory connotation. He’s a fine fellow, very smart, lots of fun to be with, and we have plenty of mutual interests. We’ve argued about vaccinations before, and a few other medical and nutritional issues, but we mostly stay out of each others’ ways on these topics.

But I recently witnessed my pal get into a “debate” on social media with a mutual acquaintance and some of her connections. She happens to be a nurse. She’d posted a photo of an attractive young woman in a t-shirt imprinted, “Vaccines Cause Adults”. My buddy spoke up and said “Not for everyone!’, and he posted a link to an article that he felt supported his position. Of course, a number of barbed responses came his way. Okay, some of those were fair debate points, though barbed, but others were quite derisive, ad hominem attacks on him. He responded by posting links to more articles and research, which might not have been productive. It’s usually a waste of time to argue with people on social media. But to his great credit he maintained his equanimity. The episode made me feel a bit sad. People can be such assholes on social media. I was put off by the nurse’s refusal to moderate . That’s a typical pattern: posters allow their other friends to hurl terrible insults at anyone who disagrees, even when it’s an old friend. Mind you, I stayed on the sidelines in this case, except that I originally “liked” the nurse’s meme.

Later, I had a private exchange with my friend. I’m on board with vaccinations. I believe that widespread immunization contributes to public health, but I told him there are certain points on which I can sympathize with VRs. Without knowing the details, he encouraged me to write a blog post on the subject. I’m not sure he’ll like the results. However, as noted above, I’m willing to make a few concessions to my buddy’s side of the argument, and I wish we could identify a path that would settle the debate.

My Standpoint

This is one part my pal won’t like. Are VRs anti-science? First, VR’s come in several varieties. Some might resist only some vaccines and not others. But VRs do not disavow empiricism, as they claim their own set of empirical findings to support their position, however one might regard the research quality. 

I believe many VRs are misled by a serious post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: after this, therefore because of this. For example, for many observers, the purported link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine was put to rest when the British medical journal Lancet retracted the original article supporting that claim as faulty. That doesn’t wash with more radical VRs, many of whom seem to have someone on the autism spectrum in their own families. They are understandably sensitive, but please forgive me: that suggests a need to find some external explanation, a source of blame not related to genetics.

Radical VRs are selective proponents of the precautionary principle: any risk of harm from a vaccine delivered in any amount is too great a risk. They seem reluctant to acknowledge the reality of a dose-response relationship, which bears on the risks of exposure to certain compounds often present in vaccine formulations. VRs will not acknowledge that vaccines present a manageable risk. And then there are the misleading references to disease incidence counts, as opposed to disease incidence rates, that are all too common (though my friend is almost certainly innocent on this count).

Vaccine resistance is not a new phenomenon, as the cartoon above from 1802 illustrates. Certain people will always find the idea of injecting germs into their systems deeply unsettling. Of course, that’s a very natural basis of resistance. A person’s body is their own property, after all. My default position is that an individual’s control over their own body is inviolable, and parents should always be the first authority over decisions about their children. The real issue, however, is the question of whether unvaccinated children inflict external costs on others.

Points of Contention

The major objections of VRs fall into several categories: 1) preservatives; 2) multiple viruses; 3) vulnerable infants; 4) contra-indications; 5) inefficacy; and 6) free choice. There may be others, but I’ll go with those.

Preservatives: Some vaccines still use a form of mercury, but a much more innocuous variant than the one VRs found so objectionable a few decades ago. Still, they object. And they object to many other compounds used in minute quantities as preservatives, such as formaldehyde, which occurs naturally in our bodies. I think the following test is helpful: if it were proposed that VRs take new versions of the vaccines that had zero preservatives, many would still refuse, especially if they were asked to pay the additional cost of providing them in that form. Thus, preservatives are revealed to be something of a side show.

Multiple Viruses: VRs object to the administration of vaccines that inoculate against several viruses in one dose or within a short window of time. This objection has some plausibility, since an injection of several different “bugs’ at once might place excessive stress on the body, even if the risk is still small. But again, would VRs volunteer to take single strain vaccines in a schedule over a lengthier period of time? Probably not.

Vulnerable Infants: VRs say it’s too risky to vaccinate infants in their first few months of life. This too is a plausible objection, and it would seem like a relatively easy concession to make in the interests of compromise … except, it won’t ever be good enough. Radical VRs will not agree to having their children vaccinated at any age.

Contra-Indications: There are undoubtedly genetic factors that pre-dispose certain individuals to an adverse reaction to certain vaccines. These might be rare, so an effort to compromise by requiring a thorough genetic profile before vaccination would be costly. I believe profiling is a reasonable demand for individuals to make, however, provided they pay the cost themselves.

Inefficacy: My friend posted an intriguing article about the drastic declines that occurred in the incidence of various diseases before the introduction of vaccines to prevent those diseases. This might not be the same link, but it makes the same argument. That doesn’t mean vaccines don’t work, of course. There is a vast literature that shows that they do. Bing it! And in cases such as smallpox, the use of “folk applications” of puss to a small scratch in the skin were in use long before the vaccine was available. Nevertheless, the VRs contend that the historical rates of disease incidence provide evidence against vaccinating. They also contend that diseases like measles are not serious enough to warrant precautions like vaccines. Measles can be deadly, though not as deadly as the flu.

Free Choice: This is the point on which I’m most sympathetic to VRs. Again, we own our own bodies and should have authority over our own minor children, yet communicable diseases seem to be a classic case of externality. Susceptible individuals may inflict a cost on others by refusing vaccination or segregation. Other people own their bodies too, and they have a right to avoid exposure. They too can isolate themselves or take precautions as they deem necessary. If both parties wish to participate in society, then both hold rights they allege to be threatened by the other. That complicates the task of reconciling these interests in private, voluntary ways, and yet they often are reconciled privately.

Solutions?

The debate today often revolves around mandatory vaccination, which would be an extreme measure relying on the coercive power of the state. The rationale is that even a vaccinated majority would be subject to an unnecessarily high risk of infection when in frequent contact with an unvaccinated minority. It’s difficult to endorse such broad intrusiveness when we’re dealing with a negative externality of such minute probability. And such a policy is not at all defensible without exceptions for individuals for whom a vaccine is contra-indicated.

Tolerating differences in vaccination rules across cities, school districts, or even states, may be a reasonable approach to settling the debate in the long run. These variations allow empirical evidence to accumulate on the efficacy of different vaccine regimes. It also allows individuals and families to “vote with their feet”, migrating to jurisdictions that best suit their preferences. These are the basic foundations of federalism, a principle of great usefulness in preserving freedoms while addressing regional differences of opinion on contentious issues.

Michigan has a policy allowing unvaccinated children to attend schools, but a waiver must be obtained requiring the child’s parents to attend a vaccine education program. The policy is credited with increasing vaccination rates. The problem is that VRs tend to view this requirement as an infringement on their rights. Advocates of the policy might argue that the situation should be viewed as an arms-length, voluntary exchange between two parties, in this case a family and a public entity. The vaccine education program is just the price one must pay in lieu of vaccination. The exchange is not arms length, however, as it would be if the school were a private entity. The VR parents who refuse the waiver are not rebated for taxes paid for local schools. In fact, like all taxes, the payment is coerced.

It’s not always necessary to appeal to some form of government action, even at local levels. For example, private schools may require vaccination among enrollees, and private businesses, especially health care providers, may require staff to be vaccinated. Life and health insurers may wish to price risk differently for the unvaccinated. VRs might object that they are subject to discrimination by institutions requiring immunization, or who price discriminate in favor of the immunized, but VRs are free to form competitive institutions, even on small scales or as mutual companies. To the extent that such private rules are unjustified, the institutions who discriminate are likely to learn or lose eventually. That’s the beauty of market solutions. In these ways, non-coercive private governance is far preferable to action by the state.

Dr. Jeffrey Singer is an advocate of immunization who opposes mandatory vaccine laws, as he explained a few years ago in “Vaccination and Free Will“. He suggested elsewhere, in “Seeking Balance In Vaccination Laws“, that schools, instead of requiring immunization, could mitigate the risk of a contagion by insisting that unvaccinated children be held out of school when a particular threat arises and remain out until it passed. That’s a reasonable idea, but I suspect many pro-vax parents would fear that it doesn’t go far enough in protecting against the introduction of a disease by an unvaccinated child.

Conclusion

Recent increases in the incidence of diseases such as measles, mumps and whooping cough are extremely troubling. Whether these outbreaks bear any relationship to patterns of vaccination in the population is certainly a valid question. To the extent that more families and individuals wish to be immunized, and that private institutions wish to take action to increase vaccination rates within their sphere of influence, I’m all for it. Vaccination laws are a different matter.

Political action at the local level might mean that school districts and other public entities will require vaccinations or vaccine education programs. Alternatives exist for those refusing to vaccinate, but broad mandatory vaccination is too coercive. Such measures carry significant costs, not least of which is a loss of liberty and normalization of losses of liberty. It’s not clear that a vaccination mandate at the national level, or even a state vaccination mandate, can offer benefits sufficient to justify those costs. Nudges are irritating and may be costly, but forcible intrusions are way out-of-bounds. Unfortunately, there are parties that simply can’t resist the temptations of behavioral control, and that’s worthy of resistance. Let’s continue to muddle through with an essentially federalist approach to vaccination policy. I regard that as a hallmark of an advanced society.

 

Behold Our Algorithmic Overlords

18 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Automation, Censorship, Discrimination, Marketplace of Ideas

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A willingness to question authority is healthy, both in private matters and in the public sphere, but having the freedom to do so is even healthier. It facilitates free inquiry, the application of the scientific method, and it lies at the heart of our constitutional system. Voluntary acceptance of authority, and trust in its legitimacy, hinges on our ability to identify its source, the rationale for its actions, and its accountability. Unaccountable authority, on the other hand, cannot be tolerated. It’s the stuff of which tyranny is made.

That’s one linchpin of a great essay by Matthew D. Crawford in American Affairs entitled “Algorithmic Governance and Political Legitimacy“. It’s a lengthy piece that covers lots of ground, and very much worth reading. Or you can read my slightly shorter take on it!

Imagine a world in which all the information you see is selected by algorithm. In addition, your success in the labor market is determined by algorithm. Your college admission and financial aid decisions are determined by algorithm. Credit applications are decisioned by algorithm. The prioritization you are assigned for various health care treatments is determined by algorithm. The list could go on and on, but many of these “use-cases” are already happening to one extent or another.

Blurring Private and Public Governance

Much of what Crawford describes has to do with the way we conduct private transactions and/or private governance. Most governance in free societies, of the kind that touches us day-to-day, is private or self-government, as Crawford calls it. With the advent of giant on-line platforms, algorithms are increasingly an aspect of that governance. Crawford notes the rising concentration of private governmental power within these organizations. While the platforms lack complete monopoly power, they are performing functions that we’d ordinarily be reluctant to grant any public form of government: they curate the information we see, conduct surveillance, exercise control over speech, and even indulge in the “deplatforming” of individuals and organizations when it suits them. Crawford quotes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg:

“In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. . . . We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.”

At the same time, the public sector is increasingly dominated by a large administrative apparatus that is outside of the normal reach of legislative, judicial and even executive checks. Crawford worries about “… the affinities between administrative governance and algorithmic governance“.  He emphasizes that neither algorithmic governance on technology platforms nor an algorithmic administrative state are what one could call representative democracy. But whether these powers have been seized or we’ve granted them voluntarily, there are already challenges to their legitimacy. And no wonder! As Crawford says, algorithms are faceless pathways of neural connections that are usually difficult to explain, and their decisions often strike those affected as arbitrary or even nonsensical.

Ministry of Wokeness

Political correctness plays a central part in this story. There is no question that the platforms are setting policies that discriminate against certain viewpoints. But Crawford goes further, asserting that algorithms have a certain bureaucratic logic to elites desiring “cutting edge enforcement of social norms“, i.e., political correctness, or “wokeness”, the term of current fashion.

“First, in the spirit of Václav Havel we might entertain the idea that the institutional workings of political correctness need to be shrouded in peremptory and opaque administrative mechanisms be­cause its power lies precisely in the gap between what people actu­ally think and what one is expected to say. It is in this gap that one has the experience of humiliation, of staying silent, and that is how power is exercised.

But if we put it this way, what we are really saying is not that PC needs administrative enforcement but rather the reverse: the expand­ing empire of bureaucrats needs PC. The conflicts created by identi­ty politics become occasions to extend administrative authority into previously autonomous domains of activity. …

The incentive to technologize the whole drama enters thus: managers are answerable (sometimes legally) for the conflict that they also feed on. In a corporate setting, especially, some kind of ass‑covering becomes necessary. Judgments made by an algorithm (ideally one supplied by a third-party vendor) are ones that nobody has to take responsibility for. The more contentious the social and political landscape, the bigger the institutional taste for automated decision-making is likely to be.

Political correctness is a regime of institutionalized insecurity, both moral and material. Seemingly solid careers are subject to sud­den reversal, along with one’s status as a decent person.”

The Tyranny of Deliberative Democracy

Crawford takes aim at several other trends in intellectual fashion that seem to complement algorithmic governance. One is “deliberative democracy”, an ironically-named theory which holds that with the proper framing conditions, people will ultimately support the “correct” set of policies. Joseph Goebbels couldn’t have put it better. As Crawford explains, the idea is to formalize those conditions so that action can be taken if people do not support the “correct” policies. And if that doesn’t sound like Gleichschaltung (enforcement of conformity), nothing does! This sort of enterprise would require:

 “… a cadre of subtle dia­lecticians working at a meta-level on the formal conditions of thought, nudging the populace through a cognitive framing operation to be conducted beneath the threshold of explicit argument. 

… the theory has proved immensely successful. By that I mean the basic assumptions and aspira­tions it expressed have been institutionalized in elite culture, perhaps nowhere more than at Google, in its capacity as directorate of information. The firm sees itself as ‘definer and defender of the public interest’ …“

Don’t Nudge Me

Another of Crawford’s targets is the growing field of work related to the irrationality of human behavior. This work resulted from the revolutionary development of  experimental or behavioral economics, in which various hypotheses are tested regarding choice, risk aversion, an related issues. Crawford offers the following interpretation, which rings true:

“… the more psychologically informed school of behavioral economics … teaches that we need all the help we can get in the form of external ‘nudges’ and cognitive scaffolding if we are to do the rational thing. But the glee and sheer repetition with which this (needed) revision to our under­standing of the human person has been trumpeted by journalists and popularizers indicates that it has some moral appeal, quite apart from its intellectual merits. Perhaps it is the old Enlightenment thrill at disabusing human beings of their pretensions to specialness, whether as made in the image of God or as ‘the rational animal.’ The effect of this anti-humanism is to make us more receptive to the work of the nudgers.”

While changes in the framing of certain decisions, such as opt-in versus opt-out rules, can often benefit individuals, most of us would rather not have nudgers cum central planners interfere with too many of our decisions, no matter how poorly they think those decisions approximate rationality. Nudge engineers cannot replicate your personal objectives or know your preference map. Indeed, externally applied nudges might well be intended to serve interests other than your own. If the political equilibrium involves widespread nudging, it is not even clear that the result will be desirable for society: the history of central planning is one of unintended consequences and abject failure. But it’s plausible that this is where the elitist technocrats in Silicon Vally and within the administrative state would like to go with algorithmic governance.

Crawford’s larger thesis is summarized fairly well by the following statements about Google’s plans for the future:

“The ideal being articulated in Mountain View is that we will inte­grate Google’s services into our lives so effortlessly, and the guiding presence of this beneficent entity in our lives will be so pervasive and unobtrusive, that the boundary between self and Google will blur. The firm will provide a kind of mental scaffold for us, guiding our intentions by shaping our informational context. This is to take the idea of trusteeship and install it in the infrastructure of thought.

Populism is the rejection of this.”

He closes with reflections on the attitudes of the technocratic elite toward those who reject their vision as untrustworthy. The dominance of algorithmic governance is unlikely to help them gain that trust.

What’s to be done?

Crawford seems resigned to the idea that the only way forward is an ongoing struggle for political dominance “to be won and held onto by whatever means necessary“. Like Bryan Caplan, I have always argued that we should eschew anti-trust action against the big tech platforms, largely because we still have a modicum of choice in all of the services they provide. Caplan rejects the populist arguments against the tech “monopolies” and insists that the data collection so widely feared represents a benign phenomenon. And after all, consumers continue to receive a huge surplus from the many free services offered on-line.

But the reality elucidated by Crawford is that the tech firms are much more than private companies. They are political and quasi-governmental entities. Their tentacles reach deeply into our lives and into our institutions, public and private. They are capable of great social influence, and putting their tools in the hands of government (with a monopoly on force), they are capable of exerting social control. They span international boundaries, bringing their technical skills to bear in service to foreign governments. This week Peter Theil stated that Google’s work with the Chinese military was “treasonous”. It was only a matter of time before someone prominent made that charge.

The are no real safeguards against abusive governance by the tech behemoths short of breaking them up or subjecting them to tight regulation, and neither of those is likely to turn out well for users. I would, however, support safeguards on the privacy of customer data from scrutiny by government security agencies for which the platforms might work. Firewalls between their consumer and commercial businesses and government military and intelligence interests would be perfectly fine by me. 

The best safeguard of viewpoint diversity and against manipulation is competition. Of course, the seriousness of threats these companies actually face from competitors is open to question. One paradox among many is that the effectiveness of the algorithms used by these companies in delivering services might enhance their appeal to some, even as those algorithms can undermine public trust.

There is an ostensible conflict in the perspective Crawford offers with respect to the social media giants: despite the increasing sophistication of their algorithms, the complaint is really about the motives of human beings who wish to control political debate through those algorithms, or end it once and for all. Jonah Goldberg puts it thusly:

“The recent effort by Google to deny the Claremont Institute the ability to advertise its gala was ridiculous. Facebook’s blocking of Prager University videos was absurd. And I’m glad Facebook apologized.

But the fact that they apologized points to the fact that while many of these platforms clearly have biases — often encoded in bad algorithms — points to the possibility that these behemoths aren’t actually conspiring to ‘silence’ all conservatives. They’re just making boneheaded mistakes based in groupthink, bias, and ignorance.”

David French notes that the best antidote for hypocrisy in the management of user content on social media is to expose it loud and clear, which sets the stage for a “market correction“. And after all, the best competition for any social media platform is real life. Indeed, many users are dropping out of various forms of on-line interaction. Social media companies might be able to retain users and appeal to a broader population if they could demonstrate complete impartiality. French proposes that these companies adopt free speech policies fashioned on the First Amendment itself:

“…rules and regulations restricting speech must be viewpoint-neutral. Harassment, incitement, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress are speech limitations with viewpoint-neutral definitions…”

In other words, the companies must demonstrate that both moderators and algorithms governing user content and interaction are neutral. That is one way for them to regain broad trust. The other crucial ingredient is a government that is steadfast in defending free speech rights and the rights of the platforms to be neutral. Among other things, that means the platforms must retain protection under Section 230 of the Telecommunications Decency Act, which assures their immunity against lawsuits for user content. However, the platforms have had that immunity since quite early in internet history, yet they have developed an aggressive preference for promoting certain viewpoints and suppressing others. The platforms should be content to ensure that their policies and algorithms provide useful tools for users without compromising the free exchange of ideas. Good governance, political legitimacy, and ultimately freedom demand it.