Coding as a Trade, not as an Art

My favorite scene in Annie Hall is the where Woody Allen / Alvie remembers himself as a kid in a doctors office.  His in the office with his mom, and the mom is worried that Alive doesn’t do his homework.  When the doctor asks Alvie why, Alvie says, “because the sun is going to burn out someday.”  The mom then flips her lid and shouts back something like “whats that have to do with anything?  You’re in Brooklyn now!”

I like this scene because I worry about this kind of stuff a lot.  Maybe not so out of proportion of worrying about the end of the solar system, but worry about long run trends that (probably) won’t have any impact on me.  But then again maybe they will.  Even though I think these concerns are probably outsized, I’m not totally convinced they are, or I guess I wouldn’t really be concerned about them.

The main concern like this I have is professional.  I make most of my money doing programming.  And like a lot of people who take their coding seriously, sometimes I think of coding as an art, that the kinds of things that make you a good coder are impossible (or at least expensive) to teach.  Things like an intuitive drive to order and stick things in taxonomies, a mild OCD about doing things the cleanest possible way, and an intuitive understanding of logical reasoning (I’ve never meet a good coder who’s susceptible to an “appeal to authority” style argument, for example).

But I think I might be part of the last generation of coders where this matters most of the time.  Partially this is a supply issue.  The internet and outsourcing will keep expanding the cost gap between programs that are well written, and programs that are poorly written but needs to be recoded every few months.  This will inevitably squeeze out all but the best, most dedicated rich-country programmers.

But its also a demand issue.  Programmers have spent an incredible amount of time building tools that do portions of our work for us.  (In fact, I wouldn’t hire a programmer who hasn’t at some point built their own framework, even when doing so is redundant.)  Some of this is open source, some of this is closed source but free, and some of this is strictly for pay, but it all falls under the category of “programmers building tools to do programming for us.

Its already the case than paying someone to write, say, a website from scratch (as opposed to using a tool like Drupal, WordPress, other frameworks, etc.) is almost always a sign of a) extreme gullibility on the part of the client, and b) semi-criminality or extreme ignorance on the part of the developer.  The scope of programing tasks are foolish to pay someone for is only going to continue expanding.

All this is going to push programming from being art to being a trade.  It’s not that there will stop being a subset of people with an innate knack for programming, and it’s not that those people will stop striving for mastery or self-expression in their code, its just that the number of projects where it makes sense to pay people for their mastery will shrink to nearly trivial levels.  Just as the idea of a master carpenter, or master electrician, or master plumber, etc., seems kind of quaint today, (the kind of thing that Kanye West would tweet about) the same thing will happen with programming.  Its not that “innate” programmers will stop being better, its just that in most cases it won’t matter; the college taught, rote-memorized, passionless dope will do “good enough.”

And so I expect that in 50 years (or maybe 30, or 10) the average line of code will be better, and cheaper, but that paradoxically the average coder will be less skilled and posses a less comprehensive idea of how their products work.  And so while this definitely a boon for the average person and organization, it’s startling to think that programmers today are in a unique position.  We grew up when programers stopped being social recluses with a common secret (think Garth in Wayne’s World 2 when his dream girl pulls out “The UNIX Book”), became professionals just as programmers became cultural heros (Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network), and will probably start our serious retirement saving just as coding becomes an “everyday-schlub” profession (something like how you know Al Bundy is supposed to be a looser because he works at a shoe store).

The Scandinavian Great Escape (or, a few reasons why I hope Helsinki isn’t like Toronto)

I spent most of this summer living in a kinda-grim apartment in Toronto.  Its not that the building itself was worn down (though my room sported dozens of dime size pock marks in drywall that made it look like  shrapnel grenade had gone off), or that the roommates were unpleasant (they were both very kind, though one guy had the gross habit of peeing in the garden in front of the house).

I think the real culprit was the architecture.  Toronto has this bay-and-gable style architecture of two story row houses that were constructed to use cheap construction and light building materials to accommodate how quickly the city was expanding in the 1850s.  I don’t know if its an effect of of the bay-and-gable style, but lots of these homes have been retrofitted with large two-pane glass windows where only the bottom pane (about a quarter of the entire window) opens, and even then only by sliding horizontally.  Meaning, these windows only open up to 1/8th size, so they let lots of light in but  and very little air.

The end effect is that our apartment made a better greenhouse than living quarters.  And for someone like myself who’s attitude towards heat is like an agoraphobes attitude toward the CTA during rush hour, living in an extremely hot apartment during an extremely hot summer, compounded with not really knowing anyone else in the city to get out of the apartment and hangout with, just made the whole city seem grim.

All the above is really just to introduce the topic of why I’m considering moving to Finland next.  I expect it will not be as hot there, especially since its winter.  The same thinking also explains why I took a road trip to Saskatchewan in late January a few years ago, and why I briefly lived in Anchorage why an all expenses paid trip to Cancun sounds as pleasant as hiking the Appalachian Trail barefoot after someone has broken bottles down the its full length.  There isn’t much I won’t do to avoid heat.

But there is more to my attraction to living in a Scandinavian country than getting to wear heavy coats.  I have this naive image of the country as a place where, because of the high level of per capita income pair with a generous social safety net, you can you can live comfortably without having to engage in status competitions.

I just want to say that I know this knee jerk, unthinking image of Scandinavia is absurd.  Scandinavian countries are able to combine their high incomes with high taxes and generous social welfare systems because they’re societies are in many ways more competitive (for example, in their labor market) than the US, not less.  And social status competitions are endemic to the human condition.  But in the same way that I sometimes dream about being a movie star despite knowing that I’d be miserable doing the things it took to be a movie star, or how people are sometimes attracted to their ex-es despite knowing that they’ll probably be miserable if they got back with them, my naive fantasy-world image of Finland still has some background-pull in my life.

Disclaimer out of the way, I think of Scandinavia as a place where everything smells like lysol, everything is made out of brushed metal and granite, and everyone is quite, stoic and sturdy.  I imagine that there isn’t that much cool stuff to do, and that spending Friday night indulging in tiny pleasures like eating at Chipotle, drinking some beers and playing Goldeneye with a friend or three until 3am isn’t shameful there, but exciting and adventuresome.

Assuming this plan works out and that I am in Helsinki in February, I’m sure I’ll be disappointed, at least in this regard.  But I had this friend Tariq in college who’d say “the only way to get rid of an itch is to scratch it.”  I’m not sure thats right, metaphorically or literally, but whatever, if I’m going to stress about getting stuff figured out, I might as well stress about it in a neat, unique, weird-ish, romanticized place, than in my cramped Chicago apt.

Björklunden Memory

Yesterday I got a flyer in the mail from my college, Lawrence University.  The flyer is a fundraiser for Björklunden, an off campus retreat the college has.  Student groups can go up there for the weekend to do group stuff and relax, alumni groups have meetings there, etc.  Its a great place.

However, this flyer is absurd.  Its filled with quotes like the following:

• “Here are a few reasons why Björklunden is crazy cool:…”
• “Björklunden week is MY week every year.”
• “It’s thrilling to find Björklunden… more delicious than ever!”

Its not specified anywhere on the flyer where these quotes are supposed to have come from.  My knee jerk reaction was that the Lawrence University fundraising department just made these sentences up, put some ambiguous quotation marks around them, a called it a day.  But now that I read them over again, they’re too weird.  These are the kinds of quotes that I get in porn spam, or Tim and Eric episodes, or websites that make fun of advertising campaigns.

So, the question is, has the recession gotten so bad that Lawrence University is outsourcing their fake-quote operations to English learners in far away countries.  All the evidence we have says “yes.”  So should that make me want to donate more or less.  All the evidence we have says “no.”

Technology, The Healthcare Mandate, and the Limits of Libertarianism

If there is one book I deserve to make some cash off of hawking, it is (still) Filthy Lucre / Economics without Illusions.  This is partially because Joseph Heath’s book is excellent and changed my mind about a slew of policies, and partially because I can’t find that many chances to drop Gogol’s Dead Souls into conversation.

Even though Heath doesn’t make this point directly, Filthy Lucre convinced me that there is no libertarian solution to health insurance for the future.  Technological progress will increasingly erode the uncertainty that insurance systems rely on and make private, opt-in schemes unsustainable.  Libertarians will have to choose between the social-welfare-maximizing option of mandatory healthcare, or the liberty-maximizing option of no insurance.  I’m in the former group

The unpleasant tension for libertarian leaning folks is that insurance systems rely on the ignorance of the insured.  If policy holders gain more than a general idea of how likely they are to befall the thing they’re trying to insure themselves against, they’ll either buy more insurance (if they face a greater risk than the mean member of the group), or demand to have to pay less (if they’re less risky).  The more we’re able to determine our own risk, the less easy it is to form groups to aggregate costs over.

This is a problem in any type of insurance, but what makes healthcare particularly problematic is that future technology will allow us to determine our risks of diseases with increasing precision.  Health insurance works moderately-well in a world where people and companies can be sorted into vague risk groups (smokers vs. non-smokers, stuntmen vs. office workers, etc.).  These groups are large enough to make it beneficial to spread risk among the members.  So even if, for example, smokers in general are more likely to develop cancer, the low chance of any particular smoker getting cancer at any given time means that smokers can still come together (through governments or private companies) and find a price where they can afford to all pay a (relative) little to protect the few who end up with cancer.

Fast forward 10 or 20 years into the future though and these broad groupings look increasingly anachronistic and impossible.  As medical science can predict or risk of disease with increasing precision, the number of similarly risky people we can be grouped with shrinks.  And since the number of people sharing the risk in each group shrinks, the cost of insurance in general necessarily must go up, to reflect the increased riskiness of each group.  This is just another way of saying that risk pooling works less well when there are less people to share the risk.

I can only see three possible outcomes from this situation:

1. Try to prevent the problem by imposing limits on what people can know about their own risk factors.  This is already happening in some places.  The idea is that if people (insurance companies and insurance policy holders alike) are prevented from knowing their own susceptibility to diseases, the uncertainty necessary for insurance markets can be maintained and things can continue on.  While this would work, it seems like a terrible idea.  Its genuinely valuable for people to know if they’re more or less likely to have a heart attack, and to be able to take steps to prevent one if they are.  Trying to stop this kind of medical technology from developing would a real loss and prevent people from living longer, healthier lives.  And besides, it also seems unlikely that any government would be able to stop this kind of technology from being developed.  It seems like its coming, one way or another.
2. Accept that technology will make health insurance markets unworkable and encourage private savings and other methods to deal with healthcare provision.  This is the liberty maximizing option, in that it would not impose any obligations on people stop researching this, or to compensate other people for that.  But its also a terrible option.  Risk-pooling / insurance is a valuable technology that makes people better off by freeing most individuals from having to prepare for a future incident only a few people will encounter.  Losing health insurance markets once technology makes them prohibitively expensive might be liberty maximizing (in a sense), but it would make most people worse off.  I also can’t quite imagine how this avoids turning into the GATACA option.
3. Require everyone to buy insurance, so that people are forced to balance out each others’ risks. Whether in the form of a mandate to purchase private insurance or a government run health care system, this seems like the least-worst option.  If everyone is in the same risk pool (or what Joseph Heath calls the “insurer of last resort”), people’s relative risks to each other stop being the same system destroying factor they were.  Instead of creating an uninsurable spiral of high risk people try to hide their conditions vs. low risk people advertise their lack of the same, risk-measuring medical technology can be used to reduce costs within the giant risk pool.

I think the third option above is the only workable, supportable one.  This is also, vaguely, the option included in the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (Obamacare) and used in most other wealthy countries.

I’m not excited by the option either.  It would  have undeniable and high costs.  There would be the moral hazard of decreased incentive for people to watch their own health (since, say, smokers and non-smokers would have the same rates).  There would be the higher costs that would likely result from the loss of a “none-of-the-above” insurance option.  And there would be some loss of liberty by requiring people to work to buy something they might not want.

I’m sure there are more problems than the above too, that don’t come to mind.  But I don’t see a better alternative.  If medical science is going to continue to advance (which I hope we can all agree is on average a great thing for humanity), and we’re going to avoid a sci-fi horror outcome, I think a healthcare mandate is the only option.

That New York Times article on 20-Somethings

Last week Robin Marantz Henig wrote in the New York Times a long, very-linked-to piece titled “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” that, among other things, asked why middle and upper class 20-somethings were taking longer to become “adults.”  A lot of the comments I’ve read about the piece bugged me.  Some people (not in their 20s) used it as ammunition for “you damn kids are lazy and don’t know how good you’ve got it” kinds of pieces, while a lot of other people (in their 20s) used it as yet another chance to get on the self-flagellation soap box and collectively announce ”yea, we’re pretty much just dirt, ain’t we?”

Somehow I haven’t read a single person yet read this piece, and the trend it describes, as something to celebrate, which seems incredible to me.  The article catalogs a long list of “symptoms” of the new “emerging adulthood” (ugh) development phase, including:

1. Traveling more than you parents did
2. Trying out many jobs before deciding one one
3. Pushing back your prime income earning years until later in life
4. Trying out more more romantic and sexual relationships than your parents did
5. Delaying marriage, which almost certainly means waiting longer and being pickier about who you marry
6. Deciding to delay owning property, or even indefinitely planning not to
7. Waiting longer to have kids
8. Taking more classes and getting more degrees
9. Living with your folks a bit after college

My reaction to reading the article was “and why is this a problem again?  Which of the above, with the possible exception of #9, is a bad thing?”  These all seem like things to celebrate, more chances to explore life and try and find some nitch of human existence that feels like a good fit.  Matthew Yglesias wrote a few months back (in a post I can’t manage to find) that critics of the European university system sound like dolts when they argue that European kids start working later and stay in school longer than their American counterparts is a bug instead of a feature.*  He pointed out that it was absurd and bizarrely puritanical to read people arguing that people should be working more as societies get wealthier.

I think the same general point applies here.  A lot of the commentary on the New York Times article seems like different shades of “young folk today should hurry up, grow up, and be more like their folks,” which is a kind of middle class joylessness I can’t subscribe to.  It also also seems to reveal a bit of jealousy on the part of older commenters.  And that seems totally reasonable!  If / when I have kids and they have transporters and Star Trek style food replicators, I’ll definitely be jealous of them!  But thats no reason for middle-to-upper-class 20-somethings to beat ourselves up!

We basically have the the chance to live a life style that most folks from older generations have only been able to live out through the movies, books and commercials (think every time someone quits dramatically, or throws their cell phone into a lake, or goes on a roadtrip, all to be “true to themselves”).  We can take some time to enjoy life before doing the less-fun-but-hopefully-ultimately-satisfying stuff we’ll eventually have to do, and at no cost to anyone else beyond folks who let their jealousy get the best of them.  That seems awesome and worth celebrating.  To finally have these opportunities finally percolate down to parts of the middle class, but to react to it with a Dr. Phil style “you gotta name it before you claim it” rush to label it as a psuedo-affliction, is sickly and self defeating.

You can either think of this as a version of the generation-X perpetual-dissatisfaction that Chuck Klosterman described in his “This is Emo” essay, just writ large, or as a great new opportunity for middle class, college educated folks to get to enjoy a few years of the kind of life that for most of the modern era has only been available to the children of the richest few.   That latter option definitely makes a lot more sense to me.

* There are lots of things about the European university system that are worth criticizing, including the fact that its too cheap (in that providing universal low tuition, instead of tuition assistance to needy students, amounts to a policy of regressively subsidizing the middle and upper classes), continental colleges and universities are on average of lower quality than their American counterparts, many schools undergo annual funding crises that American public schools would be grateful to have to deal with, and students are politicized to the point where state provided secondary education is treated as a right instead of something you might reasonably be expected to contribute to.  But the fact that people can stay in the university system a long time certainly doesn’t deserve to be on the list

Social Security, Retirement and 70-Somethings

Kevin Drum wrote yesterday in the Mother Jones blog the below about the why we shouldn’t raise the retirement age to prevent / push back social security insolvency:

Everyone’s favorite method for “fixing” Social Security seems to be increasing the retirement age to 70.  Can anyone explain why this has become such an article of faith?

But where does the preoccupation with age 70 come from? That would represent a decrease in the expected number of years of retirement since 1970, during a period in which the United States has become nearly twice as wealthy. That doesn’t even begin to make sense. Sure, life expectancy may increase in the future, but if it does then we have the option of increasing the retirement age when it happens. For now, we should make policy based on current reality, and the current reality is that life expectancy at age 65 has increased only 3.5 years since 1970. There’s no reason the retirement age should increase five years in response.

I don’t mean to be rude, but I think its pretty obvious why so many people support pushing the retirement age back, and it has nothing to do with thinking that people should (in any kind of moral sense) work more.  It’s because changing US demographics make even maintaining current social security benefits unfeasible.  People popularly think of social security as a welfare system, or a mandatory pension program, and while you could twist the program to kinda-sorta-not-really fit into those categories, social security is really just a transfer program from the young to the old.  And with the ratio of workers to retirees decreasing every year, its plain that the current system isn’t sustainable and something needs to be done.

That doesn’t necessarily mean pushing back the retirement age.  There are plenty of other possibilities bouncing around that wouldn’t necessarily require people to work more. They include making the system more like a welfare program (by raising or removing the limit on what workers pay in and / or making social security payments rise or fall depending on the retirees wealth at retirement), or making the system more like a pension program (so that workers owned and were assured to receive the money they paid into the system, instead of all social security funds going into and coming out of the same pot), or leaving the system the way it sis and just increasing the amount that current workers have to pay.

But all those are unpleasant, to varying amounts to varying interest.  I don’t favor leaving the structure of social security as is, but for folks that do shoving back the retirement age seems like an obvious (partial) solution with simple rhetorical force: people are living  longer, so they need to work longer before they get a claim to a part of current workers’ paychecks.  Kevin Drum doesn’t favor that policy solution, but his post just seems to be creating a mystery where none exists.

Aerosmith, Tobacco and Office Workers

I recently watched this video for a song called “Grape Aerosmith” by “Tobacco”.  I watched the video because I am a huge Aerosmith fan.  I’ve seen Aerosmith play across the Midwest 5 times.  Aerosmith have a huge catalogue, at least 13 albums, not including the huge number of greatest hits, live, and cover albums they’ve released, and I bet I can still sing along to at least 2/3rds of their songs.  In high school I even bought a vinyl release of Guns n’ Roses’s (proper punctuation!) half-live, half-acoustic album “GnR Lies” because it had a live version of Aerosmith’s “Mama Kin” on it, and I didn’t own a record player.  I would even make my friends mix tapes of 80s and 90s hair metal bands and slip occasional Aerosmith tracks in the middle, just to try and trick people into admitting they liked Aerosmith.  I could go on, but suffice it to say, I love me some Aerosmith.

However, when I started watching the “Grape Aerosmith” video, I was really disappointed.  Not because the song is bad (though it is), and because the song has nothing to do with Aerosmith (though it doesn’t).  What bothered me is that the video is another example of cheap hipster “the-office-is-evil-and-its-denizens-are-dying” mentality.  This is on face factually wrong.   Offices are ways of organizing people to do things, and some of those things are great.  And while I don’t know anyone who is excited, in-and-of-itself, about working from an office, I know lots of people who enjoy and feel proud of their jobs, which just happen to take place in offices.  But just as importantly, this point of view is socially destructive and morally terrible.

Until someone discovers a more effective way of organizing service-sector productive activity than offices (telecommuting seems the best hope for this, but its hard to imagine using this strategy for all actives, though maybe I’m just being unimaginative), individuals in society must make (or, to put a more positive spin on it, get to make) a trade off between either using offices as a tool for production or paying higher prices for services to offset the economic benefits offices bring.

Another way of thinking about this is the following: Imagine you work in an office and your boss comes up to you and says “Sue, I have an offer for you. You can either continue coming to the office each day and we’ll continue to pay you your current salary, or you can have a 10% pay cut but you can work from home.  What would you like to do?”  Assuming everyone considers working from home preferable to going into the office (something I’m sure untrue, but never the less…), each person’s answer will depend on how much more they like working from home than the alternative.  Some will prefer it a lot, some a little, and in general, by looking at different answers at different pay cuts you can approximate how much the average person values working from home.  This number ends up being just another way of saying “how much extra a job must pay to convince people to do a given work from an office.”*  I’ll call this the “office work premium.”

Now, assuming Tobacco and those folks don’t think higher prices are appealing, society necessarily must use offices to provide the cheaper prices society implicitly demands.  Once this choice is made, it simply becomes a question of who in society will work from offices.  People answer this question hundreds of thousands of times a day in the economy, and the relevant factors include  individual ability (does the individual have the ability to produce enough to convince their employers to pay them enough to allow them to work from home and make up the “office work premium”), wealth previous to considering the office job (can the person afford to forego the “office work premium”) and how unpleasant office work seems to the individual (how high an “office work premium” employers must pay to convince someone to work in an office).

Mindsets like the one that created “Grape Aerosmith” have the result of increasing the third above factor while leaving the previous two alone.  They show people at office jobs and depict them as having terrible, soul crushing lives, on the verge of going insane.  I bet most people will either watch these videos and think “this is stupid” or “geeze, this is right, my office life is terrible!” (or, of course, “ha-ha those office folks are dumb”).  In the “Tobacco” world, people would just hate office jobs more, but without the skills or wealth necessary to reduce the need for office jobs in general in the economy.

I know lots of people who (thankfully, correctly) aren’t convinced by this kind of the-modern-world-and-the-office-life-it-brought-is-inherently-evil romantic view.  But for the group of people who do subscribe to that notion (assumably the people Tobacco made the video to appeal to), the main effect of these kinds of messages will be to shift the pool of people working from offices to just be those too unskilled or too poor to take alternatives to office work. Once you accept the anti-office, and “commoner” view of Tobacco’s video (ie once you assume that office life is just a thing for soulless-suckers), you’re left with an in-joke of spitting on the proles.  Its mean, it promotes the idea of looking down your nose at others (or your own choices), and it  promotes the terrible idea that individuals are powerless pawns at work, instead of individuals doing something unpleasant so they can afford to do other things they enjoy more.

As long as this kind of message is always focused on the supply / labor side of office life (ie showing office workers as unhappy automatons) and not the demand side (ie trying to convince people to stop demanding services that offices provide) the affect will be (at the risk of over simplifying) to leave the supply of office-labor required by the economy fixed, while increasing the number of workers.  But I expect videos of people stopping to realize that every time they call a 1-800 support line they are incentivizing “office culture” wouldn’t go as well to not-so-good bedroom-noise-elecronica.

The bigger point isn’t that people should convince themselves that everything is great, and that office work, or work in general, is endlessly spiritually fulfilling.  My point is that people constantly make tradeoffs.  We agree to do things we don’t like (work) in exchange for things we do like (money, which allow for buying movies, music, shelter, food, insurance, etc.), and that there is nothing shameful or contemptible in doing so.  I don’t think its possible that everyone can find a dream job where they’re only doing things they like, but even if it were, it seems highly unlikely that everyone will tomorrow.  Society in general would be much better off if people didn’t try to convince each other that work, and life in general, is more unpleasant than it already is.  We should instead celebrate, or at least emphasized, the parts of what we do that are more pleasant.

* The reality is a bit more complicated because at some point people may find office work so distasteful that the “office work premium” becomes so high that it will be cheaper for employers to either automate all their service work and / or only employe telecommuters, but either possibility seems a ways off.

Re: Ayn Rand Looniness

From Reason:

How far would you go to tell people to read Ayn Rand? For Nick Newcomen, the answer is measurable down to the mile: Newcomen drove 12,238 miles across 30 U.S. states to pen a message using GPS tracking that can only be read using Google Earth. The message? “Read Ayn Rand.” Here’s Gizmodo with the story:

Nick Newcomen did a road trip over 30 days that covered stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. First, he identified on a map the route he would need to drive to spell out the message. He put a GPS device in his car to trace the route he would follow. Then, he hit the road.

“The main reason I did it is because I am an Ayn Rand fan,” he says. “In my opinion if more people would read her books and take her ideas seriously, the country and world would be a better place – freer, more prosperous and we would have a more optimistic view of the future.”

Beating on Ayn Rand seems kind of like pushing an ugly paraplegic down the stairs, but all I’ll say is this: if you’re this guy’s target audience, someone who doesn’t know about Ayn Rand and is ambivalent about her, but you’ve heard that her followers are a bit over-zealous and a bit loopy, would this kind of thing make you more or less likely to pick up one of her books with an open mind?  Its like the Freemasons starting a PR blitz by advertising campaign manipulations (JK)

Efficiency vs. Liberty in the Vienna Subway

I lived in Vienna for a few months last year.  One thing that surprised me while I was there was how the subway works.  You buy a ticket before you get to the station and you’re expected to time-stamp the ticket yourself before you get on the train.  Occasionally a train will have a ticket checker onboard who checks to make sure everyone has a timestamped ticket.  People who don’t receive a 70€ ticket.

This is very different of course from how US and Canadian subway systems work, where either you’re (loosely) barred from getting on the train w/o having your ticket checked, or all tickets are checked on every ride by staff and people w/o a ticket are forced to by one plus a small fine.

When I first learned how the Vienna subway system worked I was really shocked and had a dismissive and idiotic “Euro-governments-are-soft-on-petty-crime” reaction.  It seemed like the Vienna system was rigged to help shirkers, while the US system was setup to make sure all people using the service paid for it.  The Vienna system also seemed easy to game; by following twitter and Facebook avid subway riders can track what lines ticket-checkers are riding and take other routes. I was sure that this lenient, “pro-leech” policy must be terribly inefficient, plus it seemed kind of unjust.

But when I read about the system a bit more I was surprised to find out that, by at least some measures, Vienna’s subway model is far more efficient than alternative system we use in America.  According to these articles, the costs of installing the turn styles and electronic ticket checkers, plus having guards at some or all subway stations to make sure these machines weren’t being tampered with, far outweighed the revenue in ticket sales gained by increasing compliance rates, or increasing the number of train riders holding tickets.  Paradoxically, by making it easier to evade the system, the Vienna government makes its subway system much more efficient. (And even if this loose cost-benefit measure is wrong and the Viennese system is less efficient than US ones, it should be easy to at least imagine a hypothetical system based on the same principal and is more efficient)

Even with this though, somehow the Vienna system still rubbed me the wrong way.  Thinking about it more I realized that this is the kind of situation where, to quote Joseph Heath for the umpteenth-time, “the rubber meets the road between libertarians and social welfare-ists.”  To generalize, when it comes to economic policy conservatives are generally interested in limiting the scope of government and hold up personal-responsibility as a core ideal, while folks who have more trust in government programs to accomplish policy goals favor polices that make society better off in general, something that could loosely be described as holding “social welfare” as their core ideal.

The appeal of libertarianism is that it points out that in many cases you can have both, you can favor “conservative” economic policies while pointing out that they often also maximize social welfare.  Rhetorically, libertarians get to have their cake and eat it too.

However, the Vienna train system should give libertarians pause.  This is because (again generalizing) libertarians lean towards personal responsibility (short hand for minimize-government-intrusion-into-the-market) as both a means and an end.  Government designed to require people to bear the costs of their own actions is both moral itself AND useful because it brings about socially-optimum outcomes that make more people better off.  And as a general rule this is correct.  In cases such as farm subsidies, industrial policy (even when green), and international trade (just to name a few examples) the personal-responsibility position also happens to be the social-welfare maximizing position.  More people are better off in all the above examples when the government does pick winners in the market and competition is maintained.

This “you can have it all” overlap sometimes leads Libertarians into lazy economic analysis though.  It biases us into thinking that promoting personal responsibility will always lead to social-welfare maximizing (or, in Econ lingo, “efficient”) outcomes.  But as the Vienna train system shows, this isn’t always the case.  These cases put the “personal responsibility” and “social welfare” ideals in tension and force us to choose whats really more important to us.  I don’t think that invalidates the general Libertarian position, but it requires us to check it against reality on a case-to-case basis.   It also means that folks like me who end up favoring social welfare over personal responsibility in the Vienna subway situation aught, if we’re really being pedantic about it, to call ourselves “social-welfare-ists with a very skeptical attitude towards government policy” when really pushed during late night bar conversations.

Last thought: the Vienna Subway situation might be the same, fundamentally, as TARP.

Rhetorical Update, feat. Mark E. Smith

I just read this post on public pensions by M.S. on The Economist’s Democracy in America blog, still the most frustrating blogger that shows up in my Google Reader, and it frustrated me again.  In the space of 5 paragraphs the author says

1. people who think public sector pensions are a cause for concern are engaging in class warfare,
2. Matthew Yglesias is right, that the pensions are unsustainable as-is,
3. its worth remembering that military members get larger pensions than teachers,
4. it would be wrong to cut pensions for members of the military

I don’t know enough about the numbers to say x person (military or otherwise) should have their pension cut, and budget concerns aside I’m really hesitant to back cutting anyone’s contractually promised benefits (even if they might be a member of a teachers union, a group that regularly backs policies I think have disastrous effects on the lower and middle class America’s educational achievement).  So I’m willing to concede the possibility that M.S. might, and probably does, know more about the subject than I do.  But still, even a dolt can look at the above and see it amounts to name calling plus nothing.

So thats frustrating, but whatever, its a blog, what can you do?  But it made me think about why some arguments I disagree with really irk me (like this one), while others I disagree just roll off my back (like, I don’t know, net neutrality).  And I think the difference is that when I read posts like M.S.’s above, I can’t help but think that he/she knows that the post is really just a few paragraphs of hand waving, and that they must know that its at least partially disingenuous.  And once that suspicion sneaks into the argument, and you start doubting that the person you’re talking to, or reading, or hearing, is telling you the truth, either in the facts they site on even in presenting their own opinions, everything going forward feels like a waste of time.  And reading on starts feeling like waiting at a bus station for a bus you don’t even want to get on, like time you’d wish away if you could.  It feels frustrating, and even insulting.

For easier future reference, I’m going to start naming these types of tricks when I see them.  And to distance myself from the logisticians and philosophers who have probably already done so, I’m going to name each rhetorical trick after a song by The Fall.  And so first, I’m calling M.S.’s dodge above Think Yrself Fitter, defined as changing the subject by suggesting that the conversation has become caught in a defeatist way of thinking the problem, and that by thinking about things differently we can get to a better outcome.  If possible, it should be delivered in a slightly insulting tone.

This is something I used to do in high school.  For example, when I would bring up my opposition to the WTO and trade agreements to someone who probably just wanted to talk about something, I would say (with due smugness) that trade with poorer countries was wrong because it was exploiting workers in those countries who didn’t have American standards of pay.  A couple of times, say when someone was humoring me or I had them trapped at a BBQ, someone would actually respond and say something totally reasonable like “but doesn’t trade with the poorer country actually help that poorer worker, since they could either stay at their current job or move to one of the new jobs trade created in the country?”  My (even more smug) response would be a proto-think-yrself-fitter, something like “no, thats no defense of free trade.  What we should be doing is building new relationships that help everyone, instead of encouraging poor workers to work for pennies.”  I would dodge the question by saying that the real “solution” was to transcend the trap they’d thought themselves into and arrive at a new everyone-wins outcome, but really just hand waving myself out of an uncomfortable corner.

M.S. pulls a Think Yrself Fitter when, quoting “Jon Cohn,” M.S. says that the real important issue isn’t the unsustainable cost of the current pensions, but the fact that not enough people have them.  The structure is the same.  There is a serious question presented for discussion (how to deal with currently un-fundable pensions), a plain, suggested but politically unpleasant obvious answer (to raise taxes to pay for them, to cut them, to cut other government spending to cover the difference, or some combination of the three), and a dodge to a new way of thinking about the issue that promises to make everyone better off (don’t think about this as some people’s pensions being too high, think of it as way more other people’s pensions as being too low.  Wouldn’t you like a larger pension?).  And then, just for the extra point, theres the tiny bit of smugness added at the end, just to make it clear that you were a bit of a dope to not realize your way of thinking about the issue was petty to begin with.  Here, M.S. manages that by ending a post that acknowledges that there is a state funding problem, that pensions are part of the problem, and that military pensions should not be cut, with the following:

But when budget deficits lead to calls to slash teachers’ retirement pay, with no corresponding interest in slashing soldiers’ far more generous retirement pay, what we’re saying as a nation is that we value our soldiers much more than we value our teachers. That’s a value structure that I don’t share.

I’ll keep posting Think Yrself Fitters as I see them!