When Israel dominates the headlines, Jewish communities worldwide experience measurable increases in antisemitic incidents. Reports of antisemitism surged across the rest of the world following the October 7 attacks and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. Likewise, negative media coverage of China seems to coincide with spikes in anti-Asian racism like it did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dual Loyalties

Jewish and Chinese people are, on occasion, asked to prove their ‘loyalty’ by denouncing or at least declaring a lack of affiliation with Israel and China respectively. Last year, US Senator Tom Cotton pressed the CEO of TikTok on whether he had ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party, to which the CEO repeatedly replied “Senator, I’m Singaporean.” Just two years earlier, then Australian Senator Eric Abetz explicitly asked three Chinese-Australians at a Senate hearing “whether they are willing to unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist party dictatorship”.

Jewish people are often pressed to condemn Israeli military actions or face accusations of complicity, regardless of their actual connection to the State of Israel. I happen to think accusations of mass antisemitism on social media are overblown, but I occasionally see Instagram and TikTok videos where someone mentions that they’re Jewish and their comment section is flooded with ‘Free Palestine’ comments despite the fact that Israel/Palestine is never mentioned in the videos.

Antisemitism and Sinophobia often manifest in conspiracy theories about an elite foreigner class taking over, or already controlling, Western institutions by stealth. The old antisemitic trope about Jews controlling the media and the big banks has a modern parallel in claims about Chinese infiltration of academic institutions and government.

Just as Jewish and Chinese people are asked to disavow Israel and China, they also face pressure from others to be ‘patriotic’ and to defend Israeli and Chinese interests overseas. Jewish organisations sometimes expect members to uncritically support Israeli policies, while Chinese student associations occasionally pressure members to counter any criticism of the CCP. Critics of these countries are expected to go to great lengths to distinguish the states from the ethnic groups, while supporters are free to treat them as inseparable.

Dual loyalties are real – existing through cultural ties, religious connections, or family relationships across borders – and they’re a normal and inevitable part of life in a liberal society. Nonetheless, you shouldn’t treat people with suspicion because of their ethnic or religious background. The Jewish and Chinese communities are, like any other ethnic community, internally diverse and not defined purely by their relationship to a particular state. The demand to constantly disprove presumed allegiances to foreign governments creates a form of conditional citizenship – treating citizens of Jewish or Chinese descent as a fifth column – that doesn’t belong in the 21st Century.

Political Weaponisation

It’s also clear to me that concerns over antisemitism and Sinophobia are often strategically overstated or employed in bad faith to silence criticism of Israel and China. Many pro-Israel groups claim upfront that anti-Zionism is antisemitism and even those that don’t typically claim that any and all pro-Palestinian activism is motivated by antisemitic double standards. Pro-Palestinian student activists often face accusations of creating ‘unsafe environments’ for Jewish students, even when they engage in disciplined critique targeted specifically against Israeli government policies.

Similarly, Chinese state media and Chinese nationalists routinely accuse Western critics of China's human rights record of Sinophobia. They love to spit the dummy at any mention of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Tibetan independence, the persecution of Uyghurs or the existence of Taiwan.

Pro-Israel and pro-China activists have mastered the art of pearl clutching. Two years ago UK Lawyers for Israel lobbied to have these plates decorated by Palestinian children removed from a London hospital on the grounds that they make Jewish patients “feel vulnerable, harassed and victimised”:

These cynical tactics are often employed to get people fired for daring to criticise their beloved states. Journalists have lost their jobs over sharing Instagram posts from human rights NGOs and people of Chinese descent have lost their jobs over calling themselves Taiwanese and stating that Taiwan is a country.

Concluding Thoughts

My point isn't to suggest that antisemitism and Sinophobia are identical in every respect, nor to push you towards any particular stance on Israel or China.

Instead, I'm highlighting the inconsistency in how people often approach these issues. It's unprincipled to readily conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism while dismissing any connection between anti-China politics and Sinophobia (or vice versa). This selective application of principles often reveals more about one’s political allegiances than their commitment to fighting prejudice.

Sometimes legitimate criticism of these countries gets unfairly labelled as prejudice, while other times it really is a cover for antisemitism and Sinophobia. Distinguishing between the two can be hard. Regardless of your stance on these countries and governments, we should ideally be consistent instead of being selectively sceptical in line with our political preferences.

The right has embraced AI art to the point that they’re using it to produce low-effort logos for their political organisations and ‘Ghiblify’ deportations. Meanwhile, many on the left have developed such strong opposition to AI art that they've adopted arguments that seem to contradict their usual ideological positions. I think these arguments are disingenuously employed – the people making them don’t actually believe them – and I’ll try to explain why.

Property Is Theft, but Don’t Steal My Ideas

A common objection to AI art is that it violates the authorship and intellectual property rights of artists. Generative AI tools are trained on vast amounts of data and in some high profile cases that includes copyrighted works used (and often obtained) without the copyright-holder’s consent. These tools enable users to mimic styles and design elements of human artists without providing them with credit or compensation. Is this plagiarism? Is it theft?

Well, that depends on how you feel about private intellectual property rights. Richard Y Chappell explains this better than I can, but to put it simply: private property is typically justified on propertarian or instrumental grounds. Propertarians, think of someone like Ayn Rand, believe that private property – including intellectual property – is a natural right. Instrumentalists, on the other hand, believe that private property rights are only valuable insofar as they’re good for society. They’re a legal fiction, not a natural right. Personally speaking, I spent my formative years on the internet arguing with American libertarians – the most steadfast propertarians – and even they tend to be sceptical of intellectual property rights for creative works.

Intellectual property protections are generally justified instrumentally: they make socially beneficial enterprises profitable and encourage innovation. Chappell notes how we should be cautious about granting strong intellectual property rights without compelling instrumental reasons, which are notably absent in the case of generative AI:

Imagine an artist in a patriarchal society complaining when women are allowed into the art museum for the first time: “I never gave permission for women to view my art!” This artist has no legitimate moral complaint, I’d say, because he has no moral right to make his work accessible only to men. Likewise, artists have no moral right to make their work accessible only to humans. They have no legitimate complaint if an AI trains on the work they post online, any more than they can complain about a young human artist “training on” (or learning from) their work. In claiming such veto powers—demanding that their permission be sought before such actions are undertaken—the artists are claiming power over others without adequate basis. […] There is no utilitarian justification for those rights, and they are not the sorts of rights that could exist without a utilitarian justification. - Richard Y Chappell, ‘There’s No Moral Objection to AI Art

Good Thoughts

There's No Moral Objection to AI Art

Property is essentially coercive: property rights exclude others from use of the “owned” good. But there are obvious reasons why property is nonetheless a socially valuable institution (especially for “rival” goods, like a sandwich, that cannot be shared without loss). At least in…

Read more

a year ago · 43 likes · 1 comment · Richard Y Chappell

Leftists, of course, are typically the most sceptical of strong private property rights. Socialists and communists in particular define themselves in opposition to an economic order characterised by the preponderance of private ownership. Additionally, there’s a long history of progressives supporting media piracy on freedom of information grounds and more left-leaning individuals are more likely to use pirated streaming websites. Regardless of the merits of the intellectual property argument, it’s unusual that it’s coming from the left.

Effort Moralism

Another claim is that using generative AI to make art is lazy. Anyone can write ‘Turn this image into Studio Ghibli anime style’ and send ChatGPT a photo of their dog, but becoming a "real" artist requires hard work and dedication. Using AI is characterized as "cheating," even when users transparently acknowledge their use of generative tools.

But this confuses difficulty and effort with moral permissibility. Everyone can appreciate the difference between the hard work that goes into painting the Mona Lisa and asking ChatGPT to make something in the style of Leonardo da Vinci without declaring the latter immoral. The concept of "cheating" implies art is a competition with agreed-upon rules, rather than something that people engage with for their personal enjoyment.

Supporters of AI art say that generative AI has made art accessible to the wider public, but detractors reply that art has always been accessible – anyone can pick up a pencil. And sure, that’s mostly true (some disabled people notwithstanding), but not everyone has the time or ability to produce what they want. Some of us will never be able to draw or paint in our preferred style. The ability to transpose one’s imagination onto a canvas is something that takes time, effort and talent to achieve – it doesn’t seem like there’s a good reason to believe it’s wrong for someone to use generative AI to do that for them.

When faced with this reply, detractors will point out that the lazy and untalented can always commission artists instead of using ChatGPT. But again, not everyone has the money to commission a sufficiently skilled artist. Generative AI plays a democratising role by allowing anyone with a computer or smartphone to have their own court artists and musicians, not just the rich.

Again, it strikes me that these criticisms of AI art sound almost parodically conservative. Using AI is treated as a moral failing because it’s lazy and it’s ‘cheating’. People just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and put some effort in, or at the very least, they should be able to pay someone to do it for them rather than using a free tool. This perspective aligns more with meritocratic conservatism than with progressive ideals of accessibility and democratisation.

The Slop Heap

The final criticism I’ll address, which is perhaps the most common, is that AI art is just… missing something. It doesn’t convey real, genuine beauty or awe-inspiring sublimity. It’s inauthentic. It doesn’t matter what these terms mean – you know what I mean – what matters is AI art doesn’t have that special something that you find in man-made art. It’s soulless, it’s kitsch, it’s slop.

But none of this is unique to generative AI. You can find plenty of artists willing to draw pictures in the style of The Simpsons and plenty of customers willing to pay to see themselves or their loved ones in that style. Just google ‘Simpsons Fiverr’ and you’ll find plenty of people selling ‘Draw you and your family as a famous yellow cartoon’ for anywhere from $5 to over $100. You’ll also notice that most of these drawings are awful. Many bear only a superficial resemblance to Matt Groening’s work, some are obviously using pre-made assets, and others fail to strike a balance between accurately portraying real people and drawing a children’s cartoon.

Even the artists that manage to do it well are still producing unoriginal and uninteresting work. A good drawing of someone’s family in the style of The Simpsons is still a derivative work. And that’s okay. Some people engage with art because they appreciate novelty and creativity, others care about technical prowess, and others still just want to see what they’d look like as a Disney character. Let people enjoy things.

Moreover, the line between ‘authentic’ human creativity and AI assistance is increasingly blurry. Artists have always used tools like brushes, cameras and nowadays digital software. Photography was once dismissed as mere mechanical reproduction rather than art before it eventually recognition as a legitimate artistic medium. I suspect AI tools will follow a similar trajectory and gradually become integrated into artistic practice.

It’s All Displacement

A few years ago, Freddie DeBoer responded to the media backlash against Substack by suggesting that it’s ‘All Just Displacement’. Journalism is a cut throat industry known for low pay, crappy conditions and broken dreams. I think the same kind of phenomenon is taking place here. The art world is in a similarly bad place and now it’s seemingly under threat from a tech sector that’s explicitly marching towards the singularity – the triumph of machine over man, technology over tradition, tech bro over art snob.

It’s one of the dumbest culture war issues, but in a way it feels very material. The two camps are clearly divided among the two professions they choose to support: the artists or the programmers. Those on the left fear the displacement of their indie artist friends and those on the right relish at the prospect of telling left-leaning artists to ‘learn to code’.

As with any other technological development throughout history, the issue is not with whether to embrace or reject new technology. Rather, the issue is how we can ensure that generative AI serves human flourishing and how we can ensure a just transition for those it displaces.

The New Hereditarian Left

The 2020s has seen the rise of a new kind of hereditarian: the ‘hereditarian leftist’. The hereditarian leftists are basically what you get when you divorce the view that differences in intelligence between individuals are largely genetic from the view that the difference in intelligence between groups (specifically racial groups, although sometimes they include socio-economic classes too) are largely genetic and combine it with the view that this thesis reinforces economic egalitarianism.

Whatever the merits of this position, it is at least a novel one. Most people who insist that intelligence is largely a matter of genetics are right wingers who think hereditarianism reinforces right wing views. This includes those who don’t buy into or aren’t concerned with all the claims about race science.

Being the kind of guy that’s really invested in hereditarianism is a bit like being the kind of guy that likes to start arguments about the age of consent. You better have a good reason for it or we’re going to think that you have bad intentions.

Freddie DeBoer, who is a card-carrying hereditarian leftist, occasionally writes about this issue. I’m going to call it the “Now what?” problem for hereditarianism.2 Hereditarians, right and left both, owe us an explanation of what exactly we’re supposed to do once we believe that intelligence is largely genetic and why it matters.

DeBoer argues that the genes vs environment debate matters because it has important ramifications for education policy and, more broadly, what kind of socio-economic system is morally justifiable. Right wing hereditarians seem to broadly agree on the ramifications for education policy and disagree on the broader political economy stuff.

Luck Egalitarianism vs Natural Inegalitarianism

A hereditarian's pre-existing worldview invariably predicts whether they believe hereditarianism supports right-wing or left-wing economic policies. I suspect this is because left-of-centre and right-of-centre folks have different background assumptions about egalitarianism. Left-of-centre people tend to endorse something like luck egalitarianism: the view that it is unjust when some people end up better or worse off than others because of brute luck. If it turns out that brute luck, in the form of genetics, plays a much greater role in socioeconomic outcomes than we previously thought then we have a good reason to support a more egalitarian economic system.

I haven’t found a convenient phrase to sum of right-of-centre views about inequality, so I’ll coin one of my own: natural inegalitarianism. On this view, it is assumed that economic inequality arising from an unequal distribution of talent is natural, and therefore good. One way of elaborating on this view is with the Ayn Rand-like approach of celebrating ‘producers’ as individualistic heroes who deserve to reap the rewards of their talents.3 The greatest ‘producers’ are people that should invoke feelings of awe and inspiration, not envy or jealousy. Redistributing income away from them is seen as punishing them for their success and limiting their potential. If it turns out that much of what makes someone a ‘producer’ is determined by the genetic lottery, then that means the inegalitarian right has a way of naturalising inequality. You can encounter this kind of thought in the writings of some right-wingers like Murray Rothbard who describes egalitarianism as a ‘revolt against nature’. Inequality is treated as a natural inevitability and any attempt to establish an egalitarian social order is doomed to fail.

This might explain why left and right hereditarians come away thinking that hereditarianism should make one more left or right wing. But you don’t need to be a hereditarian to be convinced by left-wing luck egalitarianism or right wing economic ideas; hereditarianism doesn’t reinforce these ideas so much as it provides a neat, though superfluous, way of naturalising them. Neither view can serve as a compelling answer to the “Now What?” problem.

Hereditarians vs ‘Blank Slatists’ on Education

I’ll turn to the second answer to the “Now What?” problem: the answer that says hereditarianism is an antidote to blank slate thinking in education.

Hereditarians of all stripes pit themselves against ‘blank slatism’. This is an old view, often attributed to John Locke, that all human minds begin as a blank slate at birth and only develop in response to sensory experiences. In other words, differences in personality, intelligence or knowledge are attributable in their entirety to differences in sensory experience. It follows from this that if we can make sure that everyone has the same experiences, such as by having children attend equally good schools, then we can ensure that there are no gaps in academic achievement between students.

If you’ve read other ‘anti-hereditarian’ pieces before, then this is the part where you might expect me to claim that blank slatism is a strawman and that blank slatists don’t actually exist. But in all honesty, I have to admit that there really are people out there who claim that the only reason any why some young adults might not know how to read Shakespeare or do long division is because they were failed by their teachers. Some people genuinely insist that the human mind is infinitely malleable and that implementing their preferred education policy will end inequality.

The practical flaws in blank slate approaches to education policy aren't related to environmental determinism itself. One could attribute our entire psychology to environmental factors without believing we can either equalize everyone's environments or close all academic achievement gaps through school reforms alone.

The neoliberal ‘education reform’ program pursued in the United States and many other countries did not fail because politicians had the wrong beliefs about the relative influence of genetic and environmental factors on academic ability. It failed for far more mundane empirical reasons.

It failed because, whatever the relative influence of genes vs environment, we know that students mostly sort themselves into different achievement bands and stay there. We know that tweaking around the edges of the school system, or trying to reinvent the wheel with alternative forms of schooling, only seems to produce small improvements at most. DeBoer shows how many different interventions seem promising at first, generate an inordinate amount of hype among education researchers and then turn out to have no effect whatsoever on academic outcomes.

That something is determined by environmental factors does not mean that we can change it. One’s environment and history encompass a whole range of things outside schools. We can try to make changes at the margins, but ultimately there is no way to ensure that everyone has the same experiences – at least not without engaging in wacky sci-fi villainy and kidnapping kids at birth, forcing them to grow up in identical pods and so on. There’s simply not much low-hanging fruit left in education reform.

A Concerning Distraction

I am generally sceptical of claims that this or that debate is a ‘distraction’ from the real issues. It comes across as a way of saying “It’s inconvenient to talk about this” that sounds more principled than it really is; but I really think it’s true in this case. We end up focusing on a licentious debate about intelligence and genetics where participants are all too keen to signal their love of Hard Truths™ that trigger the libs and involve themselves in controversies over eugenics.

The genes vs environment debate distracts us from more practical questions: How do we design educational systems that work for students with varying abilities and interests? How do we create an economy that provides dignity and security for all, regardless of academic achievement? These questions are not particularly salacious and that’s a good thing. We don’t want other people to avoid answering them out of a mistaken belief that doing so forces them to address controversial questions about genetics and IQ.

Whether differences in academic ability are 20% or 80% genetic is ultimately irrelevant to these questions. What matters is acknowledging that students will always vary in their academic abilities, interests, and achievements. Education systems should accommodate this variation, rather than attempting the gargantuan and infeasible task of eliminating it. We need multiple pathways, or ‘streams’, leading to rewarding careers that don’t all require the same academic skills. Students should be able to move between these streams when needed, of course, but it should be perfectly fine and expected that many won’t.

The central policy question isn't whether genes or environment determine academic outcomes – it's whether we want a society that distributes resources and opportunities based primarily on academic achievement. We need to figure out how to build institutions that accommodate human diversity regardless of its origins. These are moral and political issues, not biological ones.

There’s some wiggle room on the scope of longtermism too: some say that some of our decisions should be influenced by a concern for the wellbeing of the next few generations, others say that “in a wide class of decision situations, the option one ought, ex ante, to choose is contained in a fairly small subset of options whose ex ante effects on the very long-run future are best.” It’s not that they think the next generation, or the next few generations, matter: they think that generations hundreds and thousands of years away matter. A lot. So much so that they suggest “for the purposes of evaluating actions, we can in the first instance often simply ignore all the effects contained in the first 100 (or even 1,000) years, focusing primarily on the further-future effects. Short-run effects act as little more than tie-breakers.”

Even those who endorse weaker forms of longtermism advocate for massively increasing spending on mitigating existential risks posed by AI, biologically engineered pandemics, giant comets and supervolcanoes. Climate change and nuclear war, on the other hand, are considered less significant threats due to the attention they already receive and the exceptionally low probability that they result in human extinction. They’d be extremely bad, sure, but something that might kill 99.9% of people is not as bad as something that might kill everyone.

Some people on the political left don’t like longtermism. They don’t like the idea of prioritising the very long-run future over the short-to-medium term or prioritising other catastrophic risks over climate change and nuclear war. They’re suspicious of the rhetorical and financial support that longtermism receives from (some) tech billionaires, (some) libertarians and (some) racists – perhaps longtermism presents those groups with a convenient excuse to ignore the present. But some people have become so negatively polarised against longtermism that they’ve ended up endorsing some bizarre views of their own.

Human Extinction

One such figure is Nathan J. Robinson. He has written extensively about his opposition to longtermism. He is so opposed, in fact, that he recently declared neutrality on the question of whether the human race should continue, writing that “If, in the very long run, our species goes extinct, I do not think that is a matter of moral concern.” Similar sentiments are expressed by Émile P. Torres who declares that they don’t see anything wrong with humanity collectively deciding not to have children and going extinct.

Maybe I have been bought off by the Silicon Valley billionaires, but I think that sounds crazy, nihilistic and anti-human. If I was presented with a button that massively improved the lives of everyone on earth but guaranteed that humanity would go extinct in 200 years (perhaps via sterilisation or rendering the known universe uninhabitable), I would not press that button. Torres is at least more careful than Robinson – they claim that human extinction would be bad in most cases because the process of bringing it about would involve great suffering. But I also think it would be bad if humanity went extinct by choice or without suffering.

The end of all human relationships and social bonds, the loss of our cumulative knowledge, the termination of human consciousness and meaning-making, the demise of humanity’s limitless potential, the termination of culture…I could go on. These are things we should do everything we can to avoid, even if some hypothetical future population collectively decides it’s time for humanity to go extinct.

Utilitarianism and Population Ethics

For reasons that have a lot to do with longtermism’s origins in analytic moral philosophy, longtermism is frequently paired with utilitarianism and the total view of population ethics. The former is a theory that says whether an act is right or wrong depends solely on whether it maximises wellbeing. The latter is a view that evaluates populations by the same metric, e.g. a population with greater total wellbeing is preferable to a population with less total wellbeing.

To the extent that Robinson offers substantive reasons to reject longtermism, it is on the grounds that utilitarianism and the total view are wrong. He notes that longtermists like MacAskill accept (or at least entertain) the repugnant conclusion: for any given population, there is a better, sufficiently larger population in which everyone’s lives are only barely worth living. Holding all other things equal, the total view entails that a world with many happy people living in it could be improved by massively increasing its population and making everyone’s lives worse.

Even the prominent alternative to the total view, person-affecting views, put pressure on you to care about future generations. Person-affecting views can be summed up by the slogan: “We are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people". It’s a view that’s insensitive to changes in population size. They don’t agree with the idea that we should, or even can, harm or benefit merely possible future people – those whose very existence depends on our choices. But most person-affecting views entail that we should care about how things turn out for future people who will turn out to exist regardless of our actions.

Even if we adopted an extreme view that says we only ought to care about living people, we are still going to end up indirectly caring about how future generations turn out. Young people alive today will eventually become old and will need to rely on working-age people to maintain a decent standard of living. One would hope, for their sake, that there are enough young and healthy working-age people around to support them. This is true even if the elderly self-fund their retirement because they still need to rely on ongoing economic output. A large generation of elderly people can accumulate all the savings they like to finance their consumption, but too many dollars chasing too few goods will just drive inflation. So even in an indirect sense, we have a reason to want future generations to thrive.

All Else Being Equal

The objections to utilitarianism and the total view raised by Robinson and others target niche thought experiments where these views seemingly advocate for doing abhorrent things. If we ought to maximise wellbeing, then, all else being equal, it’s morally obligatory to harvest organs from homeless people to save additional lives. All else being equal, we should dedicate all our resources to developing mind-uploading technology so we can achieve eternal bliss. If we ought to prefer populations with greater total wellbeing over populations with less total wellbeing, then perhaps, all else being equal, we ought to ensure that people have as many children as possible. Rule of law? Civil rights? Reproductive freedom? They’ve got to go, all else being equal.

But all else is not equal. The thought experiments that generate these problems are set up in an incredibly unrealistic way where we know that abhorrent acts would maximise wellbeing. It’s fine to argue that we should never violate certain human rights, even in strange thought experiments where they maximise wellbeing, but in the real world we have good reason to believe they wouldn’t achieve that. And even supposing that utilitarians found themselves in such a position where they crunched the numbers and figured out that these egregious acts would maximise wellbeing, they almost certainly still have good reasons to doubt themselves and act prudently.

Misapplying Moral Philosophy

Suppose we were discussing whether you should make sacrifices in the present to make things better for your future self. We could spend our time debating the merits of different metaphysical theories of persistence and personal identity to establish whether there is such a thing as the persisting self. Maybe your future self isn’t really you – they’re just a bundle of memories and experiences related to you in some way. Whether you end up believing that or not, you’re probably not going to think that it has any practical bearing on whether you should overdose on hard drugs for a quick high and leave the consequences to your future ‘self’.

We should think about population ethics in the same way. Whether the correct view entails the repugnant conclusion or tells us that creating happy lives is intrinsically neutral shouldn’t inform whether we care about the distant future or whether it’s fine if humanity goes extinct.

Longtermism in the popular imagination is a victim of its philosophical founding. It is all too easy to dismiss by virtue of your disbelief in utilitarianism and the total view, when in reality there’s no reason to believe you need to endorse these views to care about the distant future.

There’s also no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater because some tech billionaire said something stupid about shaming women into having more babies or uploading our minds to computers. Tech billionaires say a lot of things. Some of them have abhorrent views, some of them might use longtermism as a distraction from bad things they’re doing in the present – and some of them see the longtermists as a threat with all their talk of ‘safety’ and ‘risk management’ getting in the way of them cashing in on new technology.

Don’t negatively polarise yourself against intergenerational justice.

There are three components to the evidence-based paradigm that I’ll elucidate upon in this post:

1. An emphasis on trying to find what methods/practices/tools etc. work with a deemphasis on figuring out exactly how and why these things work. (Deprioritise mechanism-based reasoning)

2. Putting less weight on factors like custom, tradition and the anecdotal experiences of individual professionals in the field, e.g. Deemphasising claims like “I should do P because I tried it once and I think it works.” and “I should do P because that’s the done thing among my colleagues.” (Deprioritise anecdotal experience and tradition)

3. A hierarchy of evidence that tells us about the relative differences in strength between results from different kinds of research studies, expert opinion and mechanism-based reasoning. (Evidence Pyramid)

Classical Schools of Medicine

The evidence-based paradigm first emerged in the field of medicine during the 1990s, so I think it’s good to start by looking at the history of different medical paradigms. In ancient Rome, there were many different schools of medical thought. The Greek physician and philosopher Galen wrote about two different schools: the Rationalists (also known as Dogmatists) and the Empiricists.1

The Rationalists believed that medical theory and mechanism-based reasoning should guide medical practice. They cared intensely about finding the hidden causes of illnesses and their corresponding treatments. The Rationalists were interested in grand theories of disease like Humourism and Empedocles’ view that illness is caused by an imbalance of the four classical elements in one’s body. Medicine, to them, was more like philosophy than a trade.

The Empiricists thought this theorising was a waste of time. They argued that medical advancements emerge from experimentation, not armchair reasoning. The precise nature of the human body is beyond our understanding. What matters is what treatments work, not how or why they work. Empiricist doctors would use the following process to treat an illness:

1. Observe the patient’s symptoms and the results of any treatments. (Rely on personal observation – Autopsia)

2. Collate and read a record of prior observations made by other doctors. (Rely on the observations of others – Historia)

3. If the illness is new or unknown, then prescribe a treatment linked to a known illness most similar to it (Treat by analogy – Epilogismos)

Both the Rationalist and Empiricist schools faced multiple problems. Many of the Rationalist theories, like Humourism, turned out to be wrong. The Rationalists derived bad theories from false premises and allowed these theories to inform their practice. Adherents were resistant to modifying these theories even when presented with contrary evidence. They would occasionally sacrifice effective treatment practices in the name of theoretical consistency.

The Empiricists, meanwhile, had a purely observational approach that placed limits on the development of new preventative medicine. They didn’t have a serious framework for systematically exploring new phenomena or adjudicating between conflicting findings. Making observations yourself and reading about prior observations is not enough – you need a way of synthesising and evaluating these findings. Just looking at ‘what works’ leaves you vulnerable to cognitive and statistical biases like observer bias, placebo effect, post hoc bias and so on. In practice, many Empiricists ended up overrelying on their own personal experiences.

Evidence-Based Medicine

Even two millennia on from the BC era, we don’t have a successful grand theory of medicine. Many diseases and corresponding treatments have poorly understood mechanisms. In the absence of good theory, modern medicine couldn’t adopt the Rationalist paradigm. But we also knew it couldn’t adopt the Empiricist paradigm either. So, instead, evidence-based medicine was developed in the 1990s.

The evidence-based paradigm combines insights about the limits of our mechanistic theories and the limits of pure observation. Evidence-based medicine retains the Empiricist emphasis on observation but supplements it with a more sophisticated understanding of causality, statistical analysis and research methodology. It employs a hierarchy of evidence – with expert opinion and mechanism-based reasoning at the bottom and systematic reviews of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) at the top. The use of mechanism-based reasoning as a starting point gives modern practitioners more to go off of than the Empiricists. This hierarchy reflects increasing confidence that observed outcomes represent meaningful causal relationships rather than mere coincidence.

Evidence-based medicine isn’t perfect. The ‘gold standard’ of randomised controlled trials struggles with complex interventions involving multiple components or requiring contextual adaptation like chronic disease management plans. Randomised controlled trials also can’t practically or ethically be used to evaluate everything – you can’t conduct large RCTs on extremely rare diseases or withhold establishment treatments from patients. Focusing on average treatment effects across populations also means that evidence-based medicine can struggle to deal with the fact that individuals often respond to treatment differently, although practitioners can employ N-of-1 trials (trials with a single patient being allocated an experimental and control treatment in a random order). There are other epistemic problems with evidence-based medicine, but it has the advantage of being better than the alternatives.

The Evidence-Based Paradigm Outside of Medicine

Medicine isn’t the only field lacking good big theories and struggling with the limits of personal observation. Economics, education, public policy and sociology have all embraced the evidence-based paradigm to some degree. We know that these fields suffer from inaccurate and imprecise modelling – economic models, for example, are notorious for relying on unrealistic assumptions. The evidence-based paradigm provides a useful way of figuring out what policy interventions work without overrelying on flawed theories about how they work or deferring to the anecdotal experiences of experts.

Robust empirical work can combat false prevalent beliefs, like the false belief that the minimum wage reduces employment or that ‘Scared Straight’ programs makes youths less likely to commit crimes in the future. But, again, sometimes you can’t practically or ethically conduct RCTs and they don’t give you the information you might want in all cases. The evidence-based paradigm can’t tell you which policy objectives you ought to pursue either.

Anyway, I hope this gives you a better idea of what ‘evidence-based’ means than answers like “It’s about basing your ideas on the available evidence”.

The first Rudd government ended the ‘Pacific solution’ policy of intercepting refugee boats and detaining refugees on Pacific island nations. Gillard, Rudd’s immediate successor and predecessor, reintroduced a similar program in 2012 before Rudd declared that “asylum seekers who come here by boat without a visa will never be settled in Australia” during his second term in 2013. Similarly, Biden started off portraying himself as a supporter of undocumented migrants before trying to pass a bill to crack down on them in 2024.

Both Australia’s 2013 federal election and the US 2024 presidential election became referenda on who voters trust to control the border and stop unlawful arrivals. In both cases, tailing the right was not enough to save the centre-left incumbents. The Australian Labor Party took home the lesson that it was too little too late – they spent the next decade building up their credentials as bipartisan border hawks by endorsing their opponent’s Operation Sovereign Borders. The American Democrats are grappling with this issue right now, but they seem to be heading in the same direction.

Something I find incredibly frustrating is how frequently people, whether they are advocating for early Biden/Rudd era policy or for a shift to the right, refuse to seriously engage with the real world issue of border control. Both of these options suck.

The Bad Compromise

Early Biden and Rudd border control policy was clunky and half-assed. Centre-left governments presided over a system of moderate immigration controls and not a system of open borders or one where the supply of humanitarian visas met demand. At the same time, they adopted (comparatively) less harsh policies towards those who successfully crossed the border. The first Rudd Government promised to move some asylum seekers out of mandatory detention facilities and into community-based detention while processing their asylum claims. The Biden administration deported a smaller share of asylum seekers than Trump, weakened harsh family separation policies and introduced a few new avenues for undocumented asylum seekers to gain citizenship. You could hardly describe Rudd and Biden as supporting open borders, but they were certainly presenting themselves as kinder, gentler restrictionists.

Refugees took this all to mean that they would find asylum if they could successfully make the difficult and treacherous journey across the border. Predictably, this meant the number of unauthorised border crossings shot up. The right then spent several years pointing this out, claiming that the government had lost control of its borders and was letting in undesirable ‘illegals’.

It’s easy to see why this approach is unpopular, especially when centre-left politicians wanted to have their cake and eat it too by claiming that their policies wouldn’t result in increased border crossings. Rightly or wrongly, people feel cheated and bewildered by border control policies that result in more people illegally (by the state’s own definition!) crossing the border and potentially acquiring the right to stay.

It’s frustrating how much time the left has spent playing defence here. A system where asylum seekers are incentivised to take incredible risks in order to gain permanent residency is a bad system. Immigration restrictionists are often insincere when they point this out, but they have a point. The real world practices of centre-left border control are less proximately cruel but still remotely cruel. Asylum seekers are presented with an awful dilemma: risk things by waiting it out in a refugee camp or risk their lives by making a treacherous journey across borders. If they do the latter well enough and survive, then they might – just might – win asylum. It’s pretty messed up. That being said, the real world practices of right-wing border control are even more messed up.

Cruelty Maxxing

There are three ways to significantly reduce unlawful border crossings:

1. Massively expanding humanitarian refugee intake and making migration a quick and easy process. (Deter border crossings by making legal immigration easier)

2. Massively improving overall well-being, civil and political rights etc. in countries with high levels of refugee emigration. (Deter border crossings by eliminating the need to seek asylum)

3. Introducing stringent and punitive border control policies which make crossing the border more difficult and less desirable (Deter border crossings by intercepting migrants, banning them from ever legally settling and subjecting them to deportations and/or detaining them indefinitely)

The first option would work, but would provoke anti-immigrant backlash. I don’t know whether it’d be more or less popular then the early Biden/Rudd approach, but at least it could avoid the worry that you’re losing control or refusing to enforce the law. Carl Beijer seems to support something like the second option, but this would take a long time to work even if if we pretend that it’s feasible. Foreign aid can improve living standards in the third world but you can’t wave a magic wand to get rid of the world’s dictators and repressive regimes. Anti-immigrant voters, and probably a sizable portion of pro-immigrant voters, would not get on board with an unprecedented expansion in foreign aid either. And even if we did start spending more on foreign aid, we would still have to address the question of what to do with people who cross the border. The third option works, but it’s deeply immoral. Naturally it’s the popular choice.

Edward Hall points out that supporters stringent and punitive border control policies in theory fail to adequately address the cruelty involved in its practice. He’s talking about political philosophers who support an abstract ‘right to exclude’, but much of what he says can be generalised to politicians and pundits. It’s all well and good to insist that controlling your borders and refusing to let unlawful arrivals settle in your country is a sovereign right, but you should consider whether the following is morally permissible:

Rich democracies in the Global North employ various ‘remote control’ techniques to limit the number of migrants who reach their territories. This is an umbrella term for “practices, physical structures, and institutions whose goal is to control the mobility of individuals while they are outside the territory of their intended destination state” (Refuge Beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers, David Scott FitzGerald, 2019, p.9). This is done so that these states can select which migrants they want to admit, while identifying, monitoring, detaining, or deterring those they want to repel. Most saliently, states from the Global North fund detention and border security initiatives in the Global South, ‘train’ local law enforcement agencies, and engage in joint interception activities. Rich democracies hope this will both prevent unauthorized migrants from arriving on their land, while also deterring others from attempting the journey. States hope to avoid legal responsibility for the ways that migrants are treated in this situation just because the deterrence takes place abroad, through complicated chains of authorisation involving many different state actors and private corporations. Several prominent scholars (for instance, David Scott FitzGerald and Didier Fassin) also insist that rich democracies want these harsh methods of deterrence to take place overseas because it renders the cruelty they involve invisible to electorates at home, who may object to it on humanitarian grounds. Remote control policies thus subject some of the most vulnerable people on the planet to horrendous cruelty and suffering. For instance, systematic fear is employed in the hope of achieving a form of social control. In many respects, this practice mirrors older patterns of colonial domination, where native leaders were incentivised to oppress their own people at the behest of the colonisers.

If unauthorized migrants manage to reach rich democracies, they can face further cruelty. On arrival, many are detained in state-run facilities: prisons, immigration removal centres, or temporary processing centres. Conditions are often grim; mould and vermin thrive, and disease is rife. Adequate medical treatment is often lacking. Moreover, detained migrants can be subject to verbal and physical abuse from underpaid and undertrained staff. States also have a persistent record of inflicting cruelty on unauthorized migrants before they are detained. There are credible reports of police and border patrol officials engaging in violent border pushbacks in many European states. In the US, immigration officials stand accused of holding manipulative ‘credible fear’ interviews instead of sincerely assessing whether unauthorized migrants have a compelling asylum claim (see Illegal, Elizabeth Cohen, 2020, p.61). Advocacy organizations have reported many examples of US agents falsely telling unauthorized migrants that they require the prior approval of Mexican authorities to lodge asylum claims (Refuge Beyond Reach, p.123). There have also been numerous reports of agents pressurising and intimidating unauthorized migrants to sign false statements that undermine their asylum applications (Illegal, pp.61-62).

State agents can also perpetrate dreadful cruelty by enforcing policies decided on by political decision-makers. The most notorious example is the earlier Trump regime’s family separation policy, introduced in 2018, which forcibly removed migrant children from the adults with whom they were travelling – usually their parents or other family members. - Edward Hall, ‘Philosophers & Immigration Control’

It’s clear and obvious to me that these policies are wrong.

Avoiding Obligations

I don’t think that you can get around the obvious immorality of these policies by doing good somewhere else. If someone shows up at your door asking you to hide them from a crazed murderer, then I don’t believe you can reasonably turn them away and insist that it’s okay because you donate to the ‘Stop Murderers Fund’ or you sometimes invite people to your house. You owe something to that specific person – exactly how much you owe I don’t know – but you can’t just treat them with extreme cruelty and buy some malaria net indulgences to make up for it. Maybe I’m too idealistic, maybe I don’t understand the sacrifices you need to make to govern to the left of the possible, maybe there is no other way. But at the very least, the idiocy of the early Biden/Rudd approach and the cruelty of extreme border control measures should keep you up at night.

A big part of the plan to encourage bulk billing involves expanding the Bulk Billing Incentive – an additional payment given to providers for bulk billing patients. Currently the Bulk Billing Incentive is only paid to providers if they provide free visits to children under the age of 16 and concession card holders, but the plan is to expand this incentive to cover all Australian citizens. This is not my preferred approach but it’s better than what we currently have.

Whenever Medicare is in the news various journalists and pundits who have no idea what they’re talking about step up to provide their uninformed opinion. The most egregious case I’ve found comes from Aaron Patrick, who penned a piece for The Nightly the other day opposing the change because it amounts to ‘ a wealth transfer from the well to sick’ and ‘middle-class welfare’. Here’s a quote:

Giving almost everyone free access to general practitioners sounds great. GPs do not work for free, though, and the policy will function as a wealth transfer from the well to the sick.

This is a strange reason to oppose free GP visits. The purpose of any insurance scheme, including health insurance, is to pool risks. Car insurance transfers income from people who haven’t been involved in crashes to people who have. Travel insurance transfers income from those who’ve gotten sick or lost luggage while travelling to those who haven’t encountered those problems.

This is especially the case for universal social insurance schemes like Medicare. Medicare is explicitly designed to transfer income from the well to the sick. It’s always done that. Claiming that expanding the BBI is bad because it ‘will function as a wealth transfer from the well to the sick’ is such a bizarre and discrediting thing to do.

If you’re working and you don’t need to visit a doctor, then you’re contributing to other people’s healthcare costs by paying tax. But you’re not just paying for other people’s healthcare – you’re paying for a promise that you too will be looked after if or when you need to see a doctor in the future.

Transferring from the well to the sick is a good thing. People should not be financially worse off because they’re sick or have complex health needs. It is unfair that someone should be richer than someone else purely because they don’t require medical services.

This is not just a luck egalitarian issue. Co-payments may discourage overutilisation of healthcare, but they also discourage appropriate utilisation. People who ought to visit a doctor decide to put it off or forgo medical treatment entirely because they are unwilling to pay. The fact that people are generally bad at self-triaging makes this problem worse. So it’s good when they don’t have to pay.

Here’s another quote from Patrick:

The new policy is fixing a problem that does not exist.

Anyone in Australia who is poor or very sick does not pay to see a GP.

This is blatantly false. It is journalistic malpractice that a claim like this was published.

There is no mechanism by which poor or very sick people are entitled to free GP visits. Poor people are entitled to a Low Income Health Care Card, which means that providers can receive the existing Bulk Billing Incentive for bulk billing them, but they are not required to bulk bill. Some clinics do bulk bill concession card holders, but some do not.

Some people with ongoing health issues are eligible for care plans. As an example, I’m entitled to a Chronic Disease Management plan (CDM). Many of the clinics that refuse to bulk bill concession card holders will bulk bill patients with these plans. But doctors are still under no obligation to bulk bill patients with them, nor do these plans cover everyone dealing with serious illness.

A final quote from Patrick:

Some 22 per cent of GP consultations, in the second half of last year, required a modest patient payment. The system allows good doctors to earn more money, provides a disincentive for unnecessary visits, and reduces welfare for the affluent.

[…]

whichever side wins will be committed to extra middle-class welfare in an economy awash with subsidies. Those who work will pay.

One of Patrick’s objections is that free GP visits amount to ‘middle-class welfare’, which is an old and tired objection to any universal welfare scheme. The objection doesn’t work for two reasons: Firstly, any benefits that flow to the affluent can be offset by making the tax-transfer system more redistributive. Secondly, this objection fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of universal health insurance, which is not to perform the ‘Robin Hood’ function of distributing income from the rich to the poor. Rather, universal health insurance is designed to perform the ‘Piggy Bank’ function of providing insurance against the risk of illness and smooth consumption over the course of people’s lives.

It is amusing that he simultaneously decries ‘middle-class welfare’ and how ‘those who work will pay’. Is this good for people who have the ability to pay or bad for them? It can’t be both.

When I started writing this I wanted to discuss some other articles I disagreed with, but I decided it would be wrong to compare their work to Patrick’s. Plenty of pundits make niche factual errors (like conflating different measures of the bulk billing rate) or demonstrate a poor understanding of the case for free healthcare, but they do not normally make errors of this magnitude. Patrick should be embarrassed to have written it and the editors at The Nightly should be embarrassed to have published it.

For some reason, perhaps because this argument is usually made by Americans of a libertarian bent, proponents tend to present it as an argument for the view that governments should let pharmaceutical companies charge the market rate and poor Americans should tolerate high prices. For example, in a book published by the American Enterprise Institute Press, John A. Vernon and Joseph H. Golec make this comment before explaining how they’re going to make the utilitarian argument:

Pharmaceutical price controls constitute a short-sighted, wrong-headed, and possibly dangerous policy. The prices set by the free market are the signals that corporations need in order to decide whether to undertake expensive, risky research into new drugs. Free-market pricing is essentially a voting mechanism, whereby consumers can send signals to producers about what they value.

Scott Alexander skirts around the issue a bit by saying that more innovation could lead to lower prices in the long run and doctors could do their patients a favour by not unnecessarily prescribing expensive brand-name drugs before conceding that “rich people can buy Harvoni now for $30,000, and poor people will have to wait ten years to buy Harvoni when it costs $100”.

But the utilitarian argument does not entail any of this. The argument says nothing about the importance of price signals, having a free market for pharmaceuticals or high out-of-pocket costs for individuals. Rather, the argument entails that pharmaceutical companies should receive as much remuneration as needed to increase research and development investment to a welfare-maximising level. It is unlikely that this amount of financial remuneration would, in all cases, correspond exactly with the market prices of prescription drugs. Nor does this renumeration need to come from individual consumers.

In fact, in countries with widespread private health insurance, the market price is already negotiated down by insurance companies. Americans generally pay more for prescription drugs because of high co-payment rates and coverage being determined by the employer-sponsored plan they get and/or their ability to pay. If the government had a universal drug insurance scheme, then they could pay the ‘market price’ (or more!) while the individual receiving the medication would pay nothing out-of-pocket.1

I would go as far to say that the utilitarian argument for high drug prices would favour this sort of arrangement over one where individuals are faced with high out-of-pocket costs when receiving prescription drugs. The state has a much greater ability to pay these costs via tax revenue than unwell individuals, so we can ensure that everyone gets the medication they need and drug companies make even more money. Market pricing as a ‘voting mechanism’ for drug research makes little sense when the consumers are a bunch of different insurance companies and private individuals, but it makes a bit more sense if the consumer is a government informed by experts on public health and cost-effective drug research. It also has the added advantage of distributing the cost burden in a more egalitarian way, unlike a system where individuals need to pay for their own prescription drugs in part or full.

There are other ways, perhaps more sensible ways, of having the government renumerate drug companies to promote R&D investment like giving cash prizes as an alternative to patents or funding drug research directly etc. These wouldn’t involve high prices per se but would generously remunerate pharmaceutical companies for developing new and better drugs. Either way, the utilitarian argument for high drug prices does not work as an argument for market prices and high out-of-pocket costs for individual consumers.

When it comes to addressing trade offs, utilitarianism is typically considered to be the normative theory par excellence. Utilitarians are maximising consequentialists, meaning that they believe whether an act is right or wrong depends solely on its consequences and that we should choose to perform the acts that lead to the best consequences. They also believe that the only thing that is good in itself, and not just good for instrumental reasons, is well-being. When we tie this all together, utilitarianism is the view that some outcome is better than another if and only if it promotes the greatest improvement in overall well-being.

Utilitarianism conceptually simplifies a policy maker’s job: just figure out which policies maximise well-being. As Ben Eggleston puts it, “any policy you choose is going to have some harm and some benefit, you've just got to try to pick the best one”. Alternative normative theories that appeal to a collection of fundamental rights or otherwise reject the commensurability of different values like liberty and security can be criticised on the grounds that they don’t take these trade offs seriously.

But if you want to take trade offs seriously, then I don’t necessarily think you should be a utilitarian. To explain why, I need to talk about Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. In the essay, Berlin distinguished two different ways of thinking about liberty: negative liberty and positive liberty. Negative liberty is something like legal freedom from government interference. You are free, in the negative sense, to obtain groceries from a supermarket if the state doesn’t prevent you from doing so.

Berlin defines positive liberty in a few different ways. One kind of positive liberty can be thought of as real, effective liberty as opposed to merely formal liberty. You might have the negative freedom to buy groceries, but that’s no good to you if you can’t afford them. If you can’t legally obtain your groceries because you can’t afford to pay for them, then in some sense you don’t genuinely have the freedom to get groceries.

Another notion of positive liberty that Berlin discusses can be described as self-mastery or the capacity to determine one’s own destiny unencumbered by irrational desires. Liberty isn’t about getting whatever you think you want, it’s about getting what your ideal self, your true self would want. Berlin felt that both notions of positive liberty were dangerous, because he believed that identifying these things with liberty makes it easy to paper over genuine trade offs between liberty and other values.

During the Covid pandemic, many states imposed lockdowns and other restrictions on people’s freedom of movement. Someone like Berlin might say that this involves trade offs between liberty and public health, whereas someone inclined towards a positive conception of liberty might say that these restrictions were liberty-enhancing. Berlin believed that the latter description would be susceptible to abuse by authoritarian leaders. Restricting liberty in the name of safety is fine, but it is dangerous to claim that it is actually liberty-enhancing because the government is giving you what your true self would want.

Berlin’s broader point is that it’s a mistake to conflate all valuable things. Liberty, equality, security and self-actualisation might all be good, but they are not the same thing. One should take trade offs between these things seriously, rather than thinking that such trade offs do not exist. But it may also be prudent to avoid subsuming all of these values under a single banner as the utilitarian does with well-being.

While utilitarians believe that all value is ultimately reducible to well-being, value pluralists believe that there exist many intrinsically valuable properties like justice, knowledge, beauty, liberty and ecological diversity. These values are not viewed as reducible to each other or to one ultimate value. When we think about housing, for example, we don’t evaluate different policy ideas purely on whether they maximise well-being. Obviously well-being is of utmost importance, but we also consider things like sustainability, fairness and community too.

Pluralism can also explain how one might rationally regret making the right moral choice. Some of the trade offs that we make involve genuine value conflicts and so we can feel bad about losing or diminishing one thing to obtain another, even if we’re making the right choice. Whereas if we’re only making instrumental trade offs, as the utilitarian suggests, it is harder to see how such regret could be rational.

One might worry that we can’t make trade offs without reference to one ultimate, fundamental value. The utilitarian knows that we should trade some freedom for more security specifically when it maximises well-being, whereas the pluralist does not have the same yardstick available to them. But this does not mean that plural values must be incommensurable. As James Griffin notes, “it does not follow from there being no super value that there is no super scale". An intuitive super scale for those involved in policy discussions would be Brian Hedden and Daniel Muñoz’s modified Pareto principle: “If A is better than B along some dimension [of value] and at least as good along all others, then A is overall better than B.”. One could also consider a less stringent principle like the Kaldor-Hicks criterion.

There are ways out for the utilitarian, like adopting an ‘objective-list’ account of well-being or using Pareto to give a ‘neutral’ account of well-being. But at the very least, I think we have good reasons to acknowledge trade offs between plural values instead of treating all trade offs as purely instrumental.

Person-First vs Identity-First Language

There is an open debate among disability and neurodiversity activists, academics and NGOs about whether to use person-first or identity-first language. Person-first language puts the word ‘person’ before the disability, like with ‘person with disability’ or ‘person who is blind’. Identity-first language generally works the other way, like with ‘disabled person’ or ‘blind person’.

Proponents of person-first language argue that it emphasises the person and avoids reducing them to their disability. ‘Disabled person’ is taken to define the person by their disability in a way that ‘person with disability’ does not. Those who prefer identity-first language argue that their disability really is a source of identity and pride, or at least they feel that using person-first language signals that they are ashamed of who they are. There are also specific cases of developmental disorders like autism where the entire project of ‘separating the person from their autism’ does not make sense – there is no separate non-autistic mind beneath the autism. Identity-first language also avoids the linguistic clunkiness and repetitiveness of phrases like ‘person with disability’ in the English language.

An obvious compromise is to accept that different people have different preferences about how others refer to them. This is the approach that most style guides, academics and NGOs are slowly moving towards. But some advocates insist that using the ‘wrong’ language is harmful, even if someone evinces a sincere preference for it, because the language we use influences how we think and feel in a significant way.

But I don’t see it this way at all. ‘Person with disability’ and ‘disabled person’ mean the same thing. They don’t imply in any strong way that someone is or isn’t defined by their disability. Phrases like ‘person who plays soccer’ and ‘soccer player’ or ‘person who loves books’ and ‘book lover’ do not mean different things.

I occasionally see identity-first advocates claim that ‘person with autism’ really does imply that the person can be separated from their autism because we wouldn’t describe a gay person as a ‘person with gayness’. And sure, ‘person with gayness’ sounds wrong, but so do phrases like ‘person with happiness’ and ‘person with sleepiness’ which describe temporary and non-essential traits. It’s possible to come up with all sorts of cases where adjectives or the ‘person with X’ form sound more natural. The phrase ‘person with African ancestry’ sounds fine while ‘African-ancestried person’ doesn’t work - ‘ancestried’ isn’t even a real word! This doesn’t seem to be a socially significant convention. Some cases involve a deeper social meaning but the meaning is a matter of historical contingency, like ‘coloured person’ (outdated, offensive) and ‘person of colour’ (modern, acceptable).

The other language war over phrases like ‘person with a uterus’ and ‘pregnant person’ helps my illustrate my point. These gender neutral phrases are used, often interchangeably, in a medical context to accommodate transgender men and intersex people who have a uterus. Some people object to both of these phrases on the grounds that they are demeaning to women and reduce them to their body parts. Of course you could say this is just a cynical move by anti-transgender activists, but nonetheless it’s interesting that they treat person-first and identity-first language as equally problematic.

Language Is Not That Powerful

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe using ‘person with disability’ instead of ‘disabled person’ has some impact on how you think about disability. Who am I to say that the language we use doesn’t significantly influence our thoughts and perception?

There’s a famous study by Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt and Webb Phillips which shows that German and Spanish speakers associate objects with stereotypically masculine or feminine traits based on the grammatical gender the corresponding nouns have in their language. ‘Key’ is feminine in Spanish and Spanish speakers are more likely to describe keys as ‘tiny’, ‘golden’, ‘intricate’ and so on. It’s masculine in German, so German speakers were more inclined to associate keys with adjectives like ‘metal’, ‘heavy’ and ‘jagged’.

But Paul Elbourne points out that this result is more limited than it might seem. It shows that people’s habitual and irreflective thoughts, in this specific case, are influenced by the language they speak. He notes that the effect exists “only with respect to scarcely perceptible cognitive biases that can be measured only in milliseconds and subtle stereotypes that vanish instantly upon reflection.”

And even then, the famous study is yet another victim of the replication crisis. Subsequent studies lean against the thesis that grammatical gender influences our concepts. We simply don’t have compelling evidence for the view that the language we use influences the way we think. The positive evidence that we do have is weak and suggests that the impact is small.

The things that people really care about when they insist that the choice between person-first or identity-first language matters have nothing to do with language per se. Some people don’t want to be treated like their disability defines them. Other people want to make it clear that their disability is something that they’re not ashamed of, or perhaps it’s an essential part of who they are. These are things that people can, and do, convey by explaining them. It’s why whenever anyone says why they prefer person-first or identity-first language they end up explaining what it means to them. They don’t just say “I would prefer it if you said ‘person with disability’ instead of ‘disabled person’” and leave it there because it’s not obvious to the uninitiated that there’s a substantive difference between the two phrases. It’s an issue of recognition and respect, not semantics.

Getting the Priorities Straight

Even if you disagree with everything I’ve written so far, I would be remiss to mention how picking between ‘person with disability’ and ‘disabled person’ is an incredibly low stakes issue. Take almost any disability and you could compile a massive list of pressing issues before you get down to person-first/identity-first language: discrimination, access to healthcare, access to public spaces, insufficient support systems, access to education and employment, chronic pain, ordinary tasks being overly complicated and difficult, poverty etc. etc.

It would be easy for me to argue, as Freddie DeBoer does, that the relatively large amount of attention that this discourse generates is the fault of affluent, academically gifted disabled people who aren’t representative of the broader group. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò points out that academics, NGOs and the like can ‘listen to the most affected people in the room’ and ‘centre marginalised voices’, but they will inevitably end up listening to those advantaged enough to be ‘in the room’ in the first place. Complex, changing language norms might even reduce the accessibility of disability activism.

But in all honesty, I believe our current political culture simply overweighs the importance of etiquette and interpersonal communication. Plenty of people who really would benefit more from prioritising material concerns still end up focusing on these language wars and many of the more advantaged disabled people fit into that group. The disability language wars have no real stakes and they’re a distraction from more pressing issues.

What brought this all about? Well, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas’ wife read Jonathan Haidt’s psychology book The Anxious Generation, where Haidt argues that smartphones and social media are causing a rise in teen mental illness, and she told the Premier that he “better effing do something about this’”. Then Malinauskas’ announced a social media ban proposal that was taken up by NSW Premier Chris Minns and then by the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Yes, that’s genuinely how this started. The funniest part is that we know this because Malinauskas publicly spoke about it as if he thought people would believe that legislating a ban because his wife read a book is sound policy-making.

The ban is simply the next step for a moral panic built on weak, cherry-picked evidence and media hysteria.

Cherry-Picked Evidence

Malinauskas opened his Social Media Summit, ostensibly an event to consult experts on the relative impact of social media on teens and different regulatory options, by declaring that “the results are in and the science is settled.” In reality, the evidence is weak and mixed at best.

Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge are the two big social psychologists ringing the alarm bells and arguing that social media is driving a teen mental health crisis (especially for teen girls). But they are decidedly in the minority. Most meta-analyses and systematic reviews on the relationship between social media use and teen well-being indicate that the effect is small, mixed or statistically insignificant. Many of the findings suggesting a negative impact indicate a weak effect size and those that do indicate a strong negative effect have not been replicated or have been criticised for being of poor quality.

From what I’ve read, these are the three major live questions in this literature:

1. Does the evidence shows causation between smartphone/social media use and mental illness in teens or mere correlation?

2. Does the evidence conclusively indicate a positive, negative or mixed effect?

3. Does the evidence demonstrate a weak or strong effect size?

Most researchers, who admittedly are not as famous and don’t have as big of a popular audience as Haidt, seem to answer “We don’t know yet, no, and if there is an effect then it’s weak”. That’s not to say that Haidt’s thesis must be wrong, just that Malinauskas is definitely wrong to claim that the science is settled.

To cherry pick one piece of writing myself, let’s look at Sara Abrahamsson's widely-lauded paper where she claims to demonstrate that “banning smartphones significantly decreases the health care take-up for psychological symptoms and diseases among girls”. The paper was received by some in the press to show that banning smartphones in schools is a great idea. But when you actually sit down and read the paper, you discover that the ‘smartphone ban’ in most cases assessed in the study amounted to requiring students to put their phone on silent. Hardly what most people would call a smartphone ban. Even then, the results don’t tell us very much. Girls had their grade point average go up by 0.08 standard deviations and the author found “no effect on the boys’ mental health, GPA, their average grades set by teachers, or on the probability of them attending an academic high school track”. A bigger effect was found on bullying incidents, where the author found that they “decline by 0.25–0.35 standard 19 deviation two to four years after a smartphone ban is implemented (p-values of 0.067 and 0.094)”. The most hyped-up effect found was on visits to medical practitioners for psychological issues:

“One year of exposure to a smartphone ban reduces the number of consultations by 0.98 visits (p-value 0.044), and three and four years of exposure lead to a reduction of 2–2.7 visits (p-value 0.011 and 0.008 respectively). […] Moreover, girls exposed full-time in middle school to the smartphone ban have 0.22 (p-value 0.076) fewer consultations for psychological symptoms and diseases at their GP.”

The most eye-catching way to put this is to say that specialist visits for middle-school girls went down by nearly 60% compared to the pre-treatment mean (3.4 visits) after 3+ years post-’ban’. But these p-values are underwhelming, and visits actually went up for boys! The results are not statistically insignificant but the effect sizes are small at best.

Maximised Harms, Minimised Benefits

What usually happens during a moral panic is that the pearl-clutchers exaggerate the real and potential harms of the vice that they’re up in arms about while minimising the real and potential benefits. That our best available evidence seems to indicate that, at most, social media and smartphone use among teens has a small negative impact on their mental health is not enough. One must operate under the assumption that smartphones and social media are killing children. If you don’t agree with smartphone and social media bans, you must support mass child suicide. And don’t you know, these things are responsible for everything under the sun: mental health problems, poor attention spans, bad grades, turning kids gay and trans, killing gay and trans kids, indoctrinating kids with left-wing propaganda, indoctrinating kids with right-wing propaganda, childhood obesity and so on.

The standard move is to claim that there are no benefits or to claim that the negatives are so bad that to even mention any benefits is morally wrong. Never mind that social media use might have a small positive effect on well-being, especially on feelings of social connectedness. Or that it might encourage creativity, improve writing skills or facilitate civic engagement. Maybe social media use predicts academic success and increases self-motivation for learning. All these things don’t exist, or the evidence for them is weak – totally unlike the evidence for the claim that smartphones and social media are destroying kids lives. This is absolutely different from every other moral panic. It wasn’t true for the internet in the 90s and 00s, or video games, or television, or comic books, or popular fiction books. This time it’s different. Apparently.

Half-Baked Solutions and Political Stunts

Australia’s social media ban was a carefully thought out piece of legislation. Not that it’s based on the best available evidence or that it’s the best solution to the problem. No, I mean that the Albanese government carefully thought through the political implications of the ban. It polls well and has gotten a lot of media attention, which serves as a useful distraction from the cost of living crisis and the Albanese government’s waning popularity. It also doesn’t come into effect until at least 12 months after receiving Royal Assent, so the government and the opposition have a year to figure out how to make it work or quietly shelve it.

The legislation is remarkably light on details. What counts as an ‘age-restricted social media platform’ is more or less up to the Communications Minister.1 The government also skirts around the issue of how exactly the ban is going to be enforced, only stating that social media companies will need to take reasonable steps to ensure that people under 16 aren’t creating or using accounts.

Almost no consideration was given to the potential downsides, whether the ban violates the right to privacy or children’s rights to access information and express themselves. Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner and the National Children’s Commissioner note that:

“The Australian public was given just one day to make submissions to the parliamentary committee considering the proposed laws. The committee today held just three hours of public hearings and is required to report tomorrow. This is not meaningful consultation and does not allow for a thorough consideration of the views of experts, parents or children.”

Haidt himself is notably dismissive of the potential downsides, suggesting that even if he’s wrong banning smartphones and social media alike will just mean kids spending more time doing things like paying attention in school, playing outside and spending less time on those gosh darn screens.

I happen to believe that it is bad when governments implement poorly designed policies because a Premier’s wife read a book one time or because it’s politically advantageous to do so. Those who do believe that smartphones and social media are having a big negative impact on kids lives should be even more concerned. If this policy dies in 12 months or morphs into something disastrous or unpopular when the government comes up with an enforcement mechanism, then it will discourage political will for more sensible regulation in the future.

I’m Not Saying It Doesn’t Matter

I’m not a libertarian. I don’t think governments shouldn’t regulate private companies or services. Nor do I think that regulating or restricting access to things that have negative impacts is always a bad idea or that the treatment is always worse than the disease.

Likewise, the fact that something is a moral panic does not mean it isn’t an issue. I’ve noted that the evidence we currently have is weak and mixed, but that doesn’t mean it’ll remain like that. Maybe Haidt is right and his critics are missing something or imposing impossible standards on the studies he’s citing. I am not strictly opposed to governments restricting access to social media platforms or smartphones, nor do I think that we should have a totally laissez-faire approach to the internet. But what does bother me is politicians declaring that the science is settled when there is no expert consensus that social media and smartphones are driving a teen mental illness epidemic. It is worrying when politicians pass legislation that is simultaneously vague and heavy-handed as a stunt to distract the media and woo the public. And, ultimately, it is bad that the future of social media regulation may depend on the long-term success of this poorly thought out legislation.

The early post-mortem is built on bad counterfactual reasoning. The standard process is to blame the loss on some specific thing and then suggest that the candidate would’ve won if that thing didn’t happen. No one is really interested in evaluating these counterfactuals. It is very difficult to figure out whether “If my preferred candidate didn’t adopt this policy then they would’ve won” is true. Their enemies could’ve figured out a way to respond to this change that would’ve mitigated, negated or even amplified its electoral impact. Perhaps voters would’ve found some other reason to vote against your preferred candidate. This isn’t to say that you can’t make some educated guesses based on surveys and voter behaviour, but we usually don’t have enough information immediately following an election to confidently claim that we know why the winner won and the loser lost. Doing a serious election post-mortem is harder than figuring out whether your bedroom window would’ve cracked if you threw a rock at it 5 minutes ago.

Looking back at the the early post-mortems from previous elections, you can see some amusingly bad theories. When Donald Trump won in 2016, all everyone could talk about was how Trump had used populist magic to activate the disengaged, non-voting white working class and win without persuading former Obama voters. This popular narrative persists despite the fact that there was no grand mobilisation of white working class non-voters. Even the more plausible-sounding theory that Trump had the unique ability to persuade white workers that voted for Obama is probably false. Likewise Bill Shorten’s loss in the 2019 Australian federal election is popularly attributed to bold and unpopular tax proposals even though his party’s own post-mortem report suggests they only played a minor role in his defeat.

I’ve provided a list, which is by no means exhaustive, of popular explanations. The simplest approach is to pick one and dismiss all the others as irrelevant. The smarter move is to focus on one while conceding that some of the others might’ve played some minor role. This way they can pretend like they’ve considered all the possible factors while zeroing in on their favourite.

It doesn’t really matter which explanation gets picked. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. It simply needs to sound plausible and satisfying to the writer’s audience. It often conveniently ends up satisfies their own pre-existing beliefs. This is why I’m suspicious of early election post-mortems.

External Factors

A common move by those who liked the losing candidate and their campaign is to blame external factors. It was the media, it was the macroeconomy, the winning campaign was backed by the right people, or maybe it was a global shift among voters that they were powerless to combat. Perhaps the voters are just dumb and evil. This move can be as straightforward as saying “the vibes were off, man.”

Proponents are often allergic to the suggestion that the loser could or should have mitigated the external factor. For example, those who claim that Kamala Harris lost because American voters are misogynistic are not interested in entertaining the idea that the Democrats should’ve nominated a man and won. Hostile news coverage is treated as an inevitability rather than something that can be mitigated by adopting different policies or running a different candidate.

Those who reject this explanation, whether it’s about Harris in 2024 or Corbyn in 2019, claim that this is avoiding responsibility and refusing to learn from defeat. But in all honesty, it could be true that external factors stopped the candidate from winning. It’s just as convenient for opponents of Harris’ moderate turn and Corbynism to dismiss external factors as it is for supporters to play them up. It does not automatically follow that because someone lost an election they should’ve done things differently. Though I will say that it’s worth thinking this through carefully instead of spitting the dummy the moment the result gets announced.

The Pundit’s Fallacy

Another approach is to claim that the losing candidate lost because they didn’t do what you wanted them to do. Pundits know how to win elections. Of course they’ve never done it themselves, but if they were running a major candidate’s campaign and they wrote their policy platform then they’re confident that the candidate would win. It’s the standard Pundit’s Fallacy.

A common way to develop this theory is to cite the popularity or unpopularity of a candidate’s stance on some particular policy. One doesn’t actually need to provide strong evidence of the policy’s popularity. Nor does one need to demonstrate how this proves that the rest of your policy platform is popular. All that matters is that it sounds somewhat plausible that the losing candidate could’ve done better by being more like you and your audience.

Too Negative or Too Positive

A related explanation is that the candidate lost because their campaign was ‘too negative’. The loser was too fixated on demonising their opponent and didn’t present a sufficiently substantive policy platform of their own. Often this is a sneakier form of the previous explanation where ‘substantive policy platform’ really means ‘my preferred policies’, but it isn’t always. In Australian politics you will inevitably encounter the view that political campaigns are too negative these days and that our politicians need a vision of their own.

At first glance this seems plausible. Famous political leaders have always had some big ideas and bold policy platforms. Franklin D. Roosevelt had the New Deal. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had neoliberalism. Every big leader did a bunch of bold, though not necessarily good, things. No one remembers the lame ducks that did and said nothing more than “Vote for me because I’m the lesser of two evils”.

But those leaders didn’t necessarily rise to power because they promised to make sweeping changes. John Howard was the Australian Prime Minister for 11 years and was able to push through a big agenda, but he won his first term in 1996 off the back of a negative ‘small target’ campaign. His predecessor in the previous federal election, John Hewson, infamously lost the ‘unlosable election’ in part because of his overambitious policy platform. The Australian Labor Party won the last federal election in 2022 while following Howard’s playbook. So you could go the other way and claim that candidates lose because their campaigns are too positive.

Personally, I’m wary of saying too much about the value of positive and negative campaigns per se. Harris lost while running a negative campaign, would she have done better with a more positive campaign? Maybe? Bill Shorten losing the Australian federal election in 2019 is often attributed to his overly ambitious policy agenda, but I could imagine Labor winning that one with a different leader or with a few small tweaks.

It’s Hard to Know Why Things Happen

Needless to say, I’m not a fan of the rush to provide a quick and easy explanation straight after an election. Elections are a complicated affair. It’s hard to evaluate the relative causes of a defeat. It’s hard enough to figure out why your favourite sports team lost a game. Coaches need to make quick judgements because their team needs to play again next week. You don’t need to rush your election analysis, partly because you’re not a real player in that game and partly because you’ve got time before the next election.

1. Raise the minimum repayment threshold from an annual income of $54,435 to $67,000.

2. Replace the existing repayment system with a marginal repayment system to eliminate effective marginal tax rate cliffs.

3. Cut 20% off of all outstanding debts.

I’ll go through each of these changes in order and give my thoughts on them.

Raising the Minimum Repayment Threshold

When HECS-HELP was first introduced, the minimum repayment threshold was set to the median annual wage. The point of doing this was to justify the policy on equity grounds. You only needed to start repaying your university fees once you started earning the same income as the median Australian. Over the decades the median wage has gradually moved further and further away from the minimum repayment threshold. Raising the threshold to $67,000 puts it more or less at the median annual wage again. This is a good move. That said, I would have liked to see the government actually index the minimum repayment threshold to the median annual wage instead of this one-off increase.

The Marginal Repayment System

The second change does a lot to address the scheme’s infamous effective marginal tax rate cliffs. The way that the repayment thresholds currently work is that you pay a fixed percentage of your income depending on the band that you fall into:

This means that as soon as you earn $1 over a previous band you start paying the higher rate. So if you earn $62,850 then you need to pay $628.5, but if you earn $1 more then you need to pay $1,257.02. This is unfair and inefficient, though it’s unclear how many people are impacted by these mini effective marginal tax rate cliffs.

The government is moving to a marginal repayment system, like the system we have for income tax, where anyone earning between $67,000 will need to pay 15 cents for every dollar over $67,000. Those earning over $125,000 will need to pay $8,700 plus 17 cents for every dollar over $125,000. This technically increases most debtors effective marginal tax rates but reduces the actual dollar amount that they’re required to pay.

There is some disagreement over whether lower repayments are good because it means that many people will take longer to pay off their debt. I think it’s good because it’s better for income smoothing reasons. The way HECS-HELP is designed means that people start paying it back relatively early in their earning years where they’re not earning as much as they will in their peak earning years. Allowing people to take more time paying back their debt means that the bulk of the debt doesn’t have to be front-loaded as much in these early earning years. All things considered I think this is a great change.

Cutting 20% Off of All Outstanding Debts

This change is the most controversial of the three and I have to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of it either. The biggest beneficiaries of this policy are those who are paying back very high debts. In other words, it will benefit those who have enrolled in the most expensive courses like deregulated postgraduate coursework programs and those who have done more courses than the average student. I’m not sure why the Albanese government went for forgiving a fixed percentage off of student debts rather than a specific dollar amount.

This kind of defeats the point of having differential fees in the first place, which makes me wonder why the government isn’t reintroducing fee regulation for postgraduate coursework or rolling back the previous government’s absurd ‘Job-Ready Graduates Package’ that tried to use differential student contribution amounts as price signals to discourage students from pursuing arts degrees. Whatever you think of the merits of differential fees (I’m not a fan), it makes little sense to charge some students more and then offer them a big discount after the fact.

Predictably, the decision has been met with pundit complaints about how inequitable it is. Many of which are coming from people who otherwise don’t seem to care about equity at all and, if anything, want a more regressive tax-transfer system. I am generally unsympathetic to this sort of equity argument because, as I’ve said before, “there is no purely distributive reason why university graduates should incur a higher effective tax rate than high-earning non-graduates” and the earnings premium on attending university is relatively small when compared to other OECD nations.

All that being said, I do think the debt forgiveness is a little odd considering it’s been combined with the decision to raise the minimum repayment threshold to $67,000. It will benefit people with large student debts who are earning above the median income, so it’s clearly regressive.

I don’t like how we’ve collectively decided to import American talking points about student debt forgiveness. When I was an undergraduate I was involved in a bunch of student activism, which included things like organising rallies and having debates about abolishing university fees and the like. The issue of debt forgiveness never really came up because no one saw it as an important issue. Partial or complete debt forgiveness wouldn’t actually do anything to make university free. All it would do is make it cheaper or free for those repaying existing debts and it’s not at all clear to me why we should target that particular cohort. Cutting 20% off of all existing student debts just comes across as a cynical and arbitrary measure to win votes from current debt holders.

I do not have very strong opinions on price controls per se. I think there are instances of price controls that work well and make us better off. In other cases, price controls can be a net positive (with some noteworthy downsides) if they are implemented judiciously and with the correct auxiliary policies. There are also many cases where price controls seem like a bad idea. Asking a question like “Are price controls good or bad?” is like asking whether prescribing corticosteroids is good or bad. The answer is that it depends. Does a patient need them? Are you prescribing the right dosage? Monitoring via blood tests? Do you have a plan to taper off or gradually move to a better drug? And so on.

Price Controls Are A Compromise

Price controls are not usually applied to sectors that work well on their own. You don’t usually hear anyone advocating for price controls on socks and underwear. If everyone had a decent home that they could stay in for a reasonable price and for as long as they wanted, then no one would be advocating for rent control. There is no need for price controls when the market (or some non-market means of allocating resources) works well enough for everyone.

Imposing price controls on perfectly competitive markets where consumers are able to exercise their willingness to pay would be a horrible idea. But actually existing markets are not perfectly competitive and consumers willingness to pay does not perfectly correlate with their ability to pay. That doesn’t mean we can dismiss all 'Econ101’ objections to price controls – “Markets don’t fit the idealised models of Econ101, therefore we can ignore all economic theory and do whatever we want” is specious reasoning. The cure can still be worse than the disease.

More importantly, price controls do not resolve these issues. They don’t ensure perfect competition. They aren’t what economists call a first-best policy. Price controls distort price signals and come with observable negative consequences. They’re the kind of policy that you implement when you can’t fix the broader problem.

All of this is to say that price controls are always a compromise. They aren’t ideal, they involve real trade offs and you can’t just recklessly apply them hoping that they’ll fix everything.

Rent Controls Help and Hurt Exactly Who They’re Supposed To

Unlearning Economics made a video a few years ago arguing that the hegemonic anti-rent control view among mainstream economists and in Econ101 textbooks is analogous to the outdated, but similarly hegemonic (until recently) anti-minimum wage position. I don’t entirely agree with this, but it does seem to be the case that some commentators like to copy their old anti-minimum wage spiel and misapply it to the topic of rent control. The anti-minimum wage view played an important pedagogical role in Econ101 and Politics101 classes by providing a legitimate (but empirically false) example of a well-intended policy that hurts the people it’s supposed to help. If minimum wage laws are intended to raise wages for the poorest workers but actually result in the poorest workers losing their jobs via a reduction in the demand for labour, then the minimum wage actually makes things worse. The same argument is often made about rent control. If rent controls are intended to lower rents for the poor but end up leaving them without a place to rent via a reduction in the supply of rental units, then rent controls hurt the people they’re designed to help.

I disagree that rent control is a policy designed to lower rents wholesale or for the all of the poor. Rent control advocates might like to present it as a panacea for rent affordability, but it isn’t. What rent control does is improve rent affordability for existing tenants (provided that their landlord doesn’t or can’t withdraw from the rental market - you have to get the auxiliary policies right) and in some cases to additionally encourage landlords to sell to owner-occupiers. It typically benefits existing renters at the expense of potential future renters, regardless of income. Existing renters get a sweet deal in the form of a rent controlled home and potential future renters are going to struggle to find an unoccupied rent controlled home or have to pay for an unregulated home. Basically, rent control lowers tenant mobility in such a way that it protects existing tenants from being forced to move via rent increases but makes housing more expensive for potential tenants. As Daniel Herriges points out, “Rent control should always be understood as an anti-displacement policy, not an affordability policy.”

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It depends. It sounds like a good thing that rent control might prevent a grandmother from being priced out of the neighbourhood she spent her whole life in. But it’s not ideal that this comes at the expense of people who could be moving to that neighbourhood for work or school. We probably don’t want cities where people live really far away from work because they have a sweet deal on a rent-controlled unit or because they can’t move to the rent-controlled region.

Weaker forms of rent control obviously have less of a positive and negative impact. Certain auxiliary policies, e.g. tenant protections, long phase-in dates for new builds, vacancy decontrol etc. can also mitigate the downsides of rent control. Personally I’m in favour of a modest, judiciously applied form of rent control as a second-best policy before the Anglosphere can maintain the kind of public housing abundance that Singapore has achieved.

Good Price Controls Are Still Price Controls

Rent control is pretty controversial, but some price controls are borderline common sensical. Price controls on utilities are ubiquitous, as are minimum wage laws, and in addition price controls on pharmaceutical drugs are the norm in most developed nations. Many countries have concluded that market prices for prescription medicines are too high and so they impose some form of price controls on pharmaceutical drugs. The way this usually works in Australia is pharmaceutical companies apply to have their drug listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), which subsidises the cost of approved medicines to make them affordable for citizens. If the drug receives a positive recommendation from the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee then they need to negotiate with the government on the price. In doing so the pharmaceutical company needs to provide cost information data (e.g. accurate information about the costs involved in manufacturing the drug). If a price is agreed to then it goes to the Health Minister for approval. Then the government subsidises the drug to a significant extent so that citizens and permanent residents can purchase them at a low price. 1

Advocates of such arrangements don’t like to call them price controls. Instead they call them ‘price negotiation’. The thought is that it’s perfectly normal for an actor (the state) buying and subsidising a product, especially when that actor is the state, to haggle on the price. It does not sound like the same kind of thing as, say, mandating that supermarkets can’t sell oranges to anyone above a certain price. If the pharmaceutical companies and the government can’t come to an agreement, then the pharmaceutical company is free to sell their drug in the private market or refuse to sell it in Australia altogether. But in all honesty, the same applies to other price controls. If someone doesn’t want to comply with a price control, e.g. they can’t agree with the government on the price, then they are free to sell their product somewhere else or in some other way that complies with the law.

Price negotiation for pharmaceutical drugs remains a second-best policy. They address the issue that there isn’t really a genuine market in pharmaceutical drugs because patients just buy whatever they’ve been prescribed. They don’t, however, directly resolve the issue of intellectual property giving drug companies a legal monopoly. They just evade it by getting the government to exercise monopsony power.2 There are also genuine trade offs involved that need to be addressed with auxiliary policies, like reduced profits leading to less private research and development.

Liberals are usually happy to label instances of price negotiation that they don’t like as price controls. Sweden’s rent control system operates via collective bargaining, in much the same way that Swedish wages are determined. One’s rent is determined through negotiations between the landlord and the tenant’s union. If we can call these price controls, then surely pharmaceutical drug price negotiation is an instance of price controls too.

I also occasionally see claims to the effect that weak price controls, which tend to be popular and have minimal adverse effects, are not actually price controls at all. The Australian Capital Territory has a form of rent control where landlords need to seek approval to raise their existing tenant’s rent by greater than 10% of the growth in rents across the territory. This policy doesn’t necessarily do anything to limit rent increases in general, as it simply restricts individual landlords from proposing rent rises significantly higher than what other local landlords are proposing. This is a policy supported by the local branch of Australian Labor Party, which in other states/territories and at a federal level is not too keen on the idea of rent control, and so you occasionally hear Labor-aligned people insist on euphemistically calling this ‘rent stabilisation’ or ‘anti-rent gouging’ instead of rent control.

Price Controls Are Just a Thing That Governments Can Do

Price controls are not, on their own, a terrible idea or an amazing idea. Price controls are just a thing that governments can do to generate outcomes that they might want. Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad and sometimes it can be hard to tell whether they’re good or bad. They have smart use cases and dumb use cases. They can be implemented judiciously or recklessly. There’s no reason to demonise or valorise them.

In what follows, I’m going to take ‘pragmatism’ to mean something like instrumental rationality: using the most efficient means to achieve your desired ends. The claim that moderates are uniquely pragmatic, or at least more pragmatic, obviously hinges on whether they use more efficient means to achieve the same ends as extremists.1

Not all moderates claim to be uniquely pragmatic and those that do sometimes disagree about what makes them pragmatic. I think we can divide moderates into three ideal types: sincere moderates, self-effacing extremists and incrementalists.

Sincere Moderates

The sincere moderate has no unique claim to pragmatism. They have moderate politics because they believe that the status quo is relatively good. They do not want society to change drastically and think that those on the political extremes would make things worse if they implemented their policy agenda. I suspect most moderates are closest to this ideal type.

Self-Effacing Extremists

Self-effacing extremists are those who claim to sympathise with a more extreme agenda but believe that trying to achieve it would be counter-productive and pursuing a moderate agenda would lead to better outcomes. In philosophy, we call a view ‘self-effacing’ if it advises against its own acceptance. I think someone like David Shor is a good example of a self-effacing extremist. He self-identifies as a socialist but his entire schtick is that he thinks the US Democratic Party needs to moderate on key issues to win over swing voters. He does not think that pursuing a more extreme (socialist) policy agenda, at least in the medium term, is a good idea. That might sound odd, but it’s understandable since he believes that pursuing a more left-wing agenda would result in the Republican Party winning and that such an outcome would be catastrophically bad.

Are self-effacing extremists uniquely pragmatic? No, because self-effacing extremists are not extremists. People can reasonably object to self-effacing extremists in two ways:

1. They disagree that their preferred extreme agenda is doomed to fail, or

2. They disagree that their preferred extreme agenda failing will lead to a catastrophic outcome (e.g. they would prefer to pursue this agenda and lose than pursue a moderate agenda and win)

The first response involves a disagreement about the likelihood of an extreme agenda’s success, which can be reasonable or unreasonable depending on the available facts. The second response can involve a factual disagreement about what the outcome would look like. But someone could also agree with the self-effacing extremist about what the outcome would look like and still disagree about whether it’s worth avoiding via moderation. A non-self-effacing extremist is no less pragmatic provided they reasonably disagree with moderates on matters of fact or value.

Incrementalists

The third ideal type of moderate, the incrementalist, is someone who believes that moderate means are the best way to pursue extreme ends. This makes them more authentically extreme than the self-effacing extremists. The incrementalist thinks that supporting a moderate agenda in the here and now is the best way to achieve an extreme agenda in the long term.

The incrementalist’s theory of change would involve something like a major centre-left/centre-right party winning elections with a moderate platform only to pursue a more extreme agenda down the road. The thought is that the only way to achieve a more extreme agenda is by winning successive elections and slowly shifting the Overton window.

This type of moderate has the most plausible claim to pragmatism, since they really do seem to be trying to pursue the same ends as the extremists. If they’re right, then they must be more pragmatic than extremists. But they might be wrong, so it’s not really clear unless we have a good way of evaluating different theories of change.

Although the incrementalist and the extremist might appear to have the same ends in mind, they might not. The extremist might want to satisfy their desire to speak their mind, or be politically earnest, or not compromise some other value and so on. Whether these ends are morally permissible or reasonable is a matter of debate, but if someone has them then they cannot pursue those ends with the same means as the incrementalist.

Intelligent and Moralistic Personality Types

In my experience, moderates who emphasise their pragmatism tend to be those that view themselves as dispassionate rational thinkers. They are not encumbered by moralistic and emotional qualms, so they can do what it takes to use the most efficient means to pursue their desired ends.

There are, of course, moderates who view themselves very differently. Some moderates don’t see themselves as ‘smart’ moderates. Instead, they see themselves as consequentialist do-gooders who don’t let their personal preferences get in the way of harm minimisation. They’re ‘moral’ moderates. They think that extremists are immoral rather than irrational.

Whether you agree with them or not, I think they have a clearer understanding of the difference between moderates and extremists than the ‘smart’ moderates do. The ‘smart’ moderates like to claim that extremists aren’t being pragmatic when they eschew a moderate agenda for an extreme one, while the ‘moral’ moderates accuse the extremists of valuing the wrong things and making unethical trade-offs. The ‘moral’ moderates end up making the more plausible argument, e.g. that the left/right overvalues expressive concerns over actual material outcomes.

In the end, I don’t think there’s a compelling case for the view that moderates are more pragmatic than extremists. Moderates and extremists simply disagree about the facts or, more commonly, they actually have different ends in mind.

The problem with natalist discourse is that everyone seems to slip between talking about one of three different groups of people while insisting that they’re always talking about everyone. As far as I can tell, if your goal is to get people to have (more) kids then there are three distinct groups of people that you need to consider:

1. People who want (more) kids but aren’t having them and the reasons why are easy to address.

2. People who want (more) kids but aren’t having them and the reasons why are difficult to address.

3. People who don’t want or can’t have (more) kids.

The first group includes people that would have (more) kids if only some easily removable barrier were removed. They include people who would like to have (more) kids but aren’t able to get enough time off or feel like they can’t afford to raise a child. Governments can solve these problems with the welfare state. Paid parental leave, paid child care and cash benefits can allow people in this group to achieve their desired family size. Hence why these sorts of policies do, in fact, raise birth rates. I would also include people with easily treated infertility in group one too.

People in the second group would like to have (more) kids but it’s hard to address the reasons why they aren’t having them. This includes people who aren’t having kids because they don’t feel like they or their partner is ready to become a parent, people who would like to have kids but want to prioritise other things and people with difficult-to-treat infertility. Excluding the complex infertility cases, this is the group that Brown spends much of her article talking about. Child welfare policies really won’t do much to raise birth rates among people in group two. As far as I can tell, there is no good and reliable way to significantly raise birth rates among group two. Governments can run parenting education programs and fund fertility treatment research. Natalist authors can write books and op-eds trying to win over people who worry about their parenting skills or whether they’ll be able to ‘have a life’ after having kids. But none of these things seem to move the needle very far.

The third group of people consists of those who can’t or don’t want to have (more) kids. It’s just not something that they plan on doing with their life. There isn’t much that the natalist can do here, at least in the short term. Helping people have the kids that they genuinely want to have is one thing, but getting people to want to have kids or resolve absolute infertility is another matter entirely. I honestly have no idea how natalists could go about doing those things in a robust and effective way.

Once you understand these three groups the arguments between natalists become a lot easier to follow. When right-wing, anti-welfare natalists say that child benefits are ineffective they’re wrong about group one and right about groups two and three. Vice versa for pro-welfare natalists.

It also becomes clear why governments and natalist activists can’t have a massive impact on birth rates. They can make it easier for people to have the kids that they want to have, but there are lots of cases where they can’t do much and there are plenty of people that can’t or don’t want to have kids.

Frank Ramsey is famous for a lot of things. Ramsey’s theorem, simple type theory, subjective probability, Ramsey pricing, the Ramsey rule for optimal commodity taxation, the Ramsey Cass Koopmans model, a proto-theory of counterfactual conditionals and many more. I wonder whether it would be easier to make an exhaustive list of intellectual accomplishments that Ramsey is known for or a list of ones he isn’t known for. The philosopher Donald Davidson coined the term ‘the Ramsey Effect’ to refer to the phenomenon of finding out one’s brilliant and original contribution to human thought was already discovered by Ramsey. But one thing that Ramsey isn’t really remembered for is his socialist beliefs.

Ramsey the Red

As a schoolboy, Ramsey spent his time defending the merits of socialism in formal Winchester College debates. The editors of his school’s student newspaper, The Wykehamist, described him as “evidently an ardent Bolshevik” when reporting on his performance in a debate where he argued against allied intervention following the October Revolution. He engaged in written correspondence with the Glasgow Communist Party and yelled “blacklegs!” at his peers for crossing the picket line during a railway strike. When he won a prize in mathematics, which came with free books of the winner’s choice, he asked for some books by Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. Cheryl Misak notes that he found Trotsky’s coverage of the revolution particularly exciting.

But Ramsey was not a Bolshevik or a Marxist. He was not an uncritical cheerleader for the revolutionaries, believing that “we ought to help them do it better”. He was a supporter of guild socialism – an early 20th Century movement in the United Kingdom that advocated for putting industry in the hands of trade and craft guilds. This position was popular among non-Marxian socialists at the time. It’s a view similar to what advocates of workers’ cooperatives support today.

He did not advocate for revolution, instead believing in a gradual transition to socialism. Ramsey felt that such a transition was inevitable, as society increasingly became more educated. Workers would gradually become more militant as they became more educated and the ruling classes would be drawn to the intellectual case for socialism.

An Egalitarian Shift

The kind of socialism that Ramsey was drawn to, along with what drew him to it, seemed to gradually change during his time at Cambridge. He attended meetings of the Cambridge University Socialist Society (CUSS), including a speech by the leading guild socialist G.D.H. Cole. It was around this time that he noticed he was “sceptical about class war theory”. Ramsey presented a paper at the CUSS arguing against Cole’s idea of workers’ self-government. Cole believed that industrial workers should elect their own managers and directors to enact their will, which was a typical Guild Socialist position. Ramsey disagreed with this, arguing that such a system was poorly thought out and that it would be better to have industries run by boards including representatives from the state, the workforce and consumers. He thought these representatives should not be expected to act in accordance with the workers’ popular will. Rather, Ramsey felt that they should be invested with the confidence to act as responsible public servants. This marked a noticeable shift away from guild socialism and towards a position that you often see among ‘funds socialists’, who advocate for state ownership in the form of social wealth funds with mixed representation.

Ramsey became a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a men’s-only discussion group that included the likes of John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore among their ranks. In 1923, he presented a paper to the Apostles titled Socialism and Equality of Income. The paper itself is short, provocative and light on details, which fit with the unserious tone of Apostles meetings. But it reveals another shift in Ramsey’s evolving socialist beliefs.

The thesis of the paper is that socialism provides the best means of achieving full employment and a relatively equal distribution of income. He also offers some quick rebuttals to common arguments against socialism, including this amusing reply to the claim that private industrialists are more efficient than state bureaucrats:

"The common run of businessmen appear to be very stupid, only obtaining their positions from their parents. That the control of our industries should pass by such nepotism into the hands of fools is a scandal which would not be tolerated in the civil service." - Frank Ramsey, Socialism and Equality of Income

Some of Ramsey’s arguments are not particularly compelling. His responses to common objections drawing on the importance of economic incentives and competition are weak even by the standards of his day. That being said, it is interesting to see Ramsey’s move towards justifying socialism on egalitarian grounds. He retained an interest in workers’ emancipation and alleviating their poor working conditions, but treated this as secondary to achieving full employment and relative equality.

It is also noteworthy that Ramsey did not romanticise industrial action. He argues that socialism is desirable precisely because it would make workers less inclined to go on strike and engage in slowdowns. If everyone had secure jobs and benefitted from greater economic output, then there would be no need to reduce economic output in a fight to protect jobs or improve wages. He also argues that a socialist state would ‘make a more farsighted use of our natural resources such as forests and minerals’.

Family Benefits

Ramsey also reveals an interest in the welfare state, particularly child welfare, in this paper. He notes:

“The principle of making the national income go as far as possible makes reasonable leads towards the maintenance of the children by the State. Evidently the misery of poverty would today be considerably alleviated if incomes were proportioned to the size of the family” - Frank Ramsey, Socialism and Equality of Income

In a later Apostles paper, Sex from the Point of View of Society, he argues that it is wrong to let the male breadwinner family model die without replacing it with a newer, better institution. He suggests that family endowments should be paid to ensure that women are renumerated for raising children and so that they retain financial independence after marriage.

An Underappreciated Legacy

Ramsey did not make particularly original or impactful contributions to socialist thought. Other thinkers at different places and different times came up with similar ideas and developed them further. But Misak suggests that Ramsey’s socialism influenced his more famous works. The landmark paper A Mathematical Theory of Saving attempts to answer the question “How much of its income should a nation save and how much of its income should a nation consume?”, which raises the issue of intergenerational welfare. Ramsey argues that society should not discount the value of the well-being of future generations, even if it makes sense for individuals to discount future lives.

The complementary medicine industry makes millions off of transactions like these. ‘Complementary medicine’ is the nicer face of alternative medicine – pseudo-medicine that does not meet the evidentiary standards of the modern medical community. Complementary medical products are usually herbs, vitamins, essential oils and other ‘natural’ things that are meant to treat various ailments or be good for you more generally. The evidence for such claims usually consists of poor quality studies or evidence that the product fits into some kind of woo-woo paradigm like homeopathy or ‘traditional medicine’. These products are obviously snake oil bullshit and should not be sold in pharmacies, but alas, they are.

The Illusion of Legitimacy and Efficacy

Many people are already aware of the ills of complementary medicine but far fewer are aware that ‘practitioner only supplements’ are a form of complementary medicine. The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) does not determine which products are practitioner only and which ones can go on the shelf.

If you ask your pharmacist or google ‘practitioner only supplements’, you might get the impression that these products are more potent than over-the-counter supplements. Carla Griscti, in an article for Vital+ Pharmacy Supplies, writes that “they are of a much higher quality, and often contain a more concentrated dosage, than over-the-counter medications". She claims that this is because practitioner only supplements “undergo rigorous quality assurance testing and clinical trials to ensure all the ingredients are both effective and safe”, going as far as to claim that “you’re guaranteed results”.1 Vital.ly makes the much weaker claim that “the majority of "practitioner only" brands focus on producing higher quality, more potent products” but “this is not to say all "retail" products are inferior”.

In reality, it’s completely up to the supplier to voluntarily list their products as practitioner only. These products are not regulated any differently from other supplements, aside from the fact that they are not required to put therapeutic indications and patient instructions on the label. It’s also untrue that practitioner only supplements are more potent or of a higher quality than over-the-counter complementary medicines. Many practitioner only brands sell vitamins and herbs at precisely the same dosages you can get over the counter. Bioceuticals, a practitioner only subsidiary of Blackmores, sells ‘D3 Capsules’ which contain 1000IU of vitamin D3 – the exact same amount of vitamin D3 you can get in Blackmores’ over-the-counter vitamin D3 supplement. The only thing that’s more ‘potent’ about the Bioceuticals supplement is the price: $31.99 for 240 capsules instead of $22.99 for 300.

Occasionally practitioner only supplements do contain different ingredients from most over the counter supplements, but there isn’t really a clinically-relevant reason for them to be labelled as practitioner only. For example, the article on Vital.ly suggests that a practitioner only calcium supplement could use calcium glycinate instead of the industry standard calcium carbonate, citing some evidence that supplementing with calcium carbonate might lead to constipation in some people (although they don’t cite any evidence that calcium glycinate avoids this problem). Fine, but that’s not a reason for to label the calcium glycinate supplement as ‘practitioner only’.

Preying on the Vulnerable

The real reason why brands list their supplements as practitioner only is because they know having their products behind the counter, being recommended by recognised health practitioners like pharmacists, naturopaths and the like to their patients, lends their products the illusion of legitimacy and efficacy. It makes these supplements seem more like legitimate medicine. If you can’t get it over the counter, then that implies that it might be so potent, and therefore effective, that there are risks to taking it unnecessarily.

Pharmacies might sell a lot of crap but that’s just stuff they put on the shelves to make money. It’s not like the pharmacist wanders around the store trying to convince old men that they need that horny goat weed supplement to fix their erectile dysfunction. It’s pretty easy to assume that whatever the staff recommend to you must be effective.

The saddest thing about practitioner only supplements and how pharmacies shill them to their customers is that they prey on the vulnerable. People go the pharmacy wanting to find something that will help them only to be suckered into buying a blend of vitamins and herbs at a massive premium. Anecdotally, I’ve seen and heard stories of people with complex health problems getting upsold some practitioner only garbage to ‘help’ with the side effects of their actual medication or to ‘support’ their immune system.2 I’ve known people who’ve trusted these supplements for years, under the impression that they’re genuine drugs designed to treat various ailments, only to be horrified when I’ve told them that they’re just taking an expensive vitamin C and zinc supplement.

It’s About Capital Ownership

The main difference between capitalism and socialism, as I see it, concerns capital ownership or what Marxists call ownership of the means of production. A capitalist economy is characterised by widespread private ownership of capital and a socialist economy is characterised by widespread social ownership of capital. Social ownership of capital includes things like state-owned enterprises, workers’ co-operatives and firms where the state (or some other body representing the public) is the majority shareholder.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to put aside more specific questions about the mode of production, the state and civil society etc. Forget about whether socialism requires economic planning without markets or a ‘genuine’ workers’ democracy and so on. Let’s just focus on treating the capitalism/socialism distinction as a matter of the ratio of private to social ownership.

This is preferable to using a national government’s self-identification for obvious reasons. People and institutions can call themselves whatever they want, regardless of what they actually believe or practice. The fact that North Korea is officially called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea sure as hell doesn’t prove that it’s a democratic nation. It’s a lot easier to look at how much of a country’s wealth is in private and socialised firms.

Finding the Boundary

It’s all well and good to look at the private-social ownership ratio, but where do we draw the line? At what point do we say an economy is capitalist or socialist? Is a country with 80% social ownership a socialist country, or is it still capitalist? What about 50%?

It seems common to insist that socialism requires a very high proportion of firms be socialised whereas capitalism can still persist in an economy with lots of social ownership. Marxian socialists are happy to agree with capitalists on the question of whether ‘social democratic’ mixed economies are still fundamentally capitalist. 20ᵗʰ Century state socialist economies had very little in the way of private firms while modern mixed economies have a sizable public and private sector.

I think this sort of position is a historically contingent artefact. I could imagine a nearby possible world with widespread social ownership and a small private sector, where various flavours of socialism are popular and the idea of capitalism most salient to people is some kind of libertarian anarcho-capitalism. In such a world we might think that a socialist economy is one with any significant level of social ownership but capitalism, true capitalism, requires the total destruction of the socialist state and the abolition of social ownership. Anything less would merely be partially deregulated socialism.

Even if we insist on socialism requiring a uniquely high ratio of social-private ownership, it’s still hard to find the boundary between capitalism and socialism. You might want to say that a socialist economy is one with no privately owned capital at all. Okay, fine, but that means every country in the world today is capitalist. Even North Korea. Even the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, the archetypal state socialist nation, would not count as socialist because it had a small amount of private ownership through the (highly unfree, state-directed) kolkhozes.1 If you’re an anarchist or a certain kind of Trotskyist then these conclusions might not bother you, but they will if you’re the kind of person that likes to point to the Soviet Union as a negative example of socialism or if you want your definition of socialism. It’s also just a bit strange to insist that, for example, a country with 100% social ownership would suddenly become capitalist the moment someone starts working as a freelance musician or starts selling their homemade jewellery online.

Enter the Sorites

Lane Kenworthy, in his book Would Democratic Socialism Be Better?, stipulates that an economy becomes socialist once two-thirds (66.667%) of employment and GDP is in socialised firms. He admits that it’s an arbitrary cut-off but it’s better than nothing. The private sector would decidedly play a subsidiary role in such an economy and social ownership would be the norm. For the purposes of his book it works, but I’m left thinking that it’d be odd to insist that an economy that dips 1% above or below his cut-off would automatically become socialist or capitalist.

Fuzzy boundaries are a common linguistic phenomenon. It’s not entirely clear where to draw the line between capitalism and socialism, much like it’s not entirely clear where to draw the line between a tall person and a person of normal height. These cases generate what philosophers call the Sorites argument or Sorites paradox. Applied to the capitalism/socialism distinction, it looks something like this:

1. An economy with 1% of firms under social ownership is not socialist

2. If (1), then an economy with 2% of firms under social ownership is not socialist

3. If (2), then an economy with 3% of firms under social ownership is not socialist

   …

4. If an economy with 99% of firms under social ownership is not socialist, then an economy with 100% of firms under social ownership is not socialist.

You can run this argument in the opposite direction too with the premise ‘An economy with 100% of firms under social ownership is socialist’, concluding with ‘An economy with 0% of firms under social ownership is socialist’. Either way, we’re left with a problem where the vagueness of terms like capitalism and socialism has led us to incoherence.

The Sorites argument has to go wrong somewhere – it just looks wrong and the conclusion is obviously absurd. Yet it’s not so easy to figure out where exactly it goes wrong. The argument uses the form of modus ponens, which is a valid form of argument under almost every system of formal logic (including classical logic). If the problem can’t be with the structure of the argument, then maybe one of the premises is false. Good luck trying to explain which one and why.

We can’t avoid the problem by going back and insisting that it was wrong to say the capitalism/socialism distinction is about the ratio of social-private ownership. You’re going to run into the Sorites regardless of how you define socialism. We could go with the anarchist or Marxist approach and say that the line is between laissez-faire capitalism and state capitalism, or social democratic capitalism, or whatever you want to call it. We’d just be using different things and running into the same problem.

Evading the Sorites

Socialist policy analyst Matt Bruenig seems to have picked up on this problem, although he describes it a bit differently. He gets around the issue by deciding not to classify countries or economies as capitalist or socialist. Instead, he recommends treating capitalism and socialism as a spectrum rather than a binary. Economies can be more or less capitalistic and more or less socialistic, but trying to identify them as capitalist or socialist is a fool’s game.

You can respond in a similar way to the Sorites more generally, but it’d be a radical move. You’d have to say that words like ‘tall’, ‘bald’, ‘green’ and ‘blue’ are hopelessly vague. But they don’t seem to be hopelessly vague, at least not all the time. A 7’0”ft tall man is unambiguously tall, hex #00FF00 is definitely green and Mike Tyson is obviously bald. Likewise there are paradigmatic cases of capitalist and socialist economies that don’t need to thrown out with the bathwater. We can do better.

Resolving the Sorites

I can’t do all the responses to the Sorites justice. But broadly speaking, there are two ways of trying to resolve the Sorites: an epistemicist approach and a semanticist approach.

Epistemicism is the view that vague terms do have sharp boundaries but these boundaries are hidden from us. We know a little bit about the boundaries, like we know that an economy with 100% private ownership is capitalist and that an economy with 100% social ownership is socialist. We can go much further than that too. But once we start getting into borderline cases it becomes less likely that we’re classifying them correctly.

This approach resolves the Sorites argument because it entails that some of the premises are false. We just don’t know where the line is and therefore we don’t know where the first false premise begins.

Semanticist approaches typically treat borderline cases as having an indeterminate truth value – Sentences like “A country with 65% social ownership is socialist” are neither true nor false. The most popular semanticist view, called supervaluationism, works roughly like this: A sentence that is true on any admissible precisification of the predicate ‘socialist’, that is, one where every competent user of the term ‘socialist’ would agree that the term applies, is said to be super-true. Likewise, a sentence like “A country with 100% private ownership is socialist” is super-false. Essentially the way that supervaluationism works is we evaluate sentences globally with respect to a set of precisifications.2 On this approach, one or more of the premises in the Sorites fail to be true (though they aren’t false either!).

Which approach ultimately works, if any, and which is preferable is a complicated question. Needless to say much turns on the philosophy of language and what kind of things you’re happy doing to your logic, metarules etc. But at the very least you can see how the problem arises and how you can get out of it without conceding that ‘socialism’/’capitalism’ are hopelessly vague terms.