ryancbriggs
I should also say, if there is a replication package available for the analysis (I didn’t see one) then I should be able to do this myself and I can share the results here.
If we all agree that this topic matters, then it is pretty important to share this kind of normal diagnostic info. For example, the recent water disinfectant meta-analysis by Michael Kremer’s team shows both graphs. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4071953
Thank you for this. I might have more to say later when I read all this more carefully, but I couldn’t find either a forest plot or a funnel plot from the meta-analysis in the report (sorry if I missed it). Could you share those or point me to where they exist? They’re both useful for understanding what is going on in the data.
Thanks for these questions.
I think that there are two main points where we disagree: first on paternalism and second on prioritizing mental states. I don’t expect I will convince you, or vice versa, but I hope that a reply is useful for the sake of other readers.
On paternalism, what makes the capability approach anti-paternalistic is that the aim is to give people options, from which they can then do whatever they want. Somewhat loosely (see fn1 and discussion in text), for an EA the capability approach means trying to max their choices. If instead one decides to try to max any specific functioning, like happiness, then you are being paternalistic as you have decided for them what matters. Now you correctly noted that I said that in practice I think increasing income is useful. Importantly, this is not because “being rich” is a key functioning. It is because for poor people income is a factor limiting their ability to do very many things, so increasing their income increases their capabilities quite a bit. The same thing clearly applies to not dying. Perhaps of interest to HLI, I can believe that not being depressed or not having other serious mental conditions is also a very important functioning that unlocks many capabilities.
You wrote that “We can look at subjective wellbeing data from longitudinal studies to identify which capabilities have the most impact on people’s lives.” Putting aside gigantic causal inference questions, which matter, you still cannot identify “which capabilities have the most impact on people’s lives”. At best, you will identify which functionings cause increases in your measured DV, which would be something like a happiness scale. To me, this is an impoverished view of what matters to people’s lives. I will note that you did not respond to my point about getting an AI to maximize happiness or to the point that many people, such as many religious people, will just straight tell you they aren’t trying to maximize their own happiness. I think these arguments makes the point that happiness is important, but it is not the one thing that we all care about.
On purely prioritizing mental states, I think it is a mistake to prioritize “an unhappy billionaire over a happy rural farmer.” I think happiness as the one master metric breaks in all sorts of real-life cases, such as the one that I gave of women in the 1970s. Rather than give more cases, which might at this point be tedious, I think we can productively relate this point back to paternalism. I think if we polled American women and asked if they would want to go back to the social world of the 1970s—when they were on average happier—they would overwhelmingly say no. I think this is because they value the freedoms they gained from the 1970s forward. If I am right that they would not want to go back to the 1970s, then to say that they are mistaken and that life for American women was better in the 1970s is, again, to me paternalistic.
Finally, I should also say thank you for engaging on this. I think the topic is important and I appreciate the questions and criticisms.
Thank you for the kind words. I’m a little confused by this sentence:
I do think “women being happier despite having less options” is an interesting case, but women would still likely prefer to be in a mental state where they have more options.
I’ll try to respond to what I see as the overall question of the comment (feel free to correct me if I didn’t get it): If we assume someone has the thing they like in their choice set, why is having more choices good?
I think there are two answers to this, theoretical and pragmatic. I struggle sometimes to explain the theoretical one because it just seems blindingly obvious to me. That isn’t an argument, but it’s just to say that my intuitions lean heavily this way so I sometimes struggle to explain it. I think that a full human life is one where we are able to make important choices for ourselves. That, by definition, means that we need more than 1 choice, even if the 1 choice in the set is the one you will pick regardless. I think that this also scales up to more choices. Perhaps one way to frame this is to say that the journey to the choice is valuable. A world where you never got choices but always were forced to select the thing that you would pick anyways is a bad world to me.
The pragmatic answer applies even if you don’t buy the intrinsic value of options in theory. All that you need to value the pragmatic part is to be anti-paternalistic and to think that people are quite heterogeneous in what they’re trying to do in life. If you buy those two things, then you’re going to want to strive to give people options rather than to max some index of the one key functioning, because if you give people more choices then these quite different people can all go off and do quite different things.
I will also say, this is not at all my area of research so if you find this interesting then consider the readings at the end of my post.
Good questions.
I tried to address the fist one in the second part of the Downsides section. It is indeed the case that while the list of capability sets available to you is objective, your personal ranking of them is subjective and the weights can vary quite a bit. I don’t think this problem is worse than the problems other theories face (turns out adding up utility is hard), but it is a problem. I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but you can respond to this by trying to make a minimal list of capabilities that we all value highly (Nussbaum), or you can try to be very contextual (within a society or subgroup of a society, the weights may not be so different), or you can try to find minimal things that unlock lots of capabilities (like income or staying alive). There may be other things one can do too. I’d say more research here could be very useful. This approach is very young.
Re: actually satisfying preferences, if my examples about the kid growing up to be a doctor or the option to walk around at night don’t speak to you, then perhaps we just have different intuitions. One thing I will say on this is that you might think that your preferences are satisfied if the set of options is small (you’ll always have a top choice, and you might even feel quite good about it), but if the set grows you might realize that the old thing you were satisfied with is no longer what you want. You’ll only realize this if we keep increasing the capability sets you can pick from, so it does seem to me that it is useful to try to maximize the number of (value-weighted) capability sets available to people.
The Capability Approach to Human Welfare
There are two meanings of “we don’t know how to increase growth.” One is that literally no one knows what Malawi could do to increase growth. That’s very likely wrong. The second is “given all of the social and (especially) political constraints in existence right now, no one knows what marginal thing they could actually do that would increase growth in Malawi.” I think that’s basically right. Leaders in LICs themselves generally know, or have advisors that know, which policies could increase growth. If a LIC isn’t growing it very likely isn’t because leaders lack knowledge of what they should do. They lack incentives, and those incentives should be taken seriously. It’s kind of like pointing out that US sugar subsidies are a bad economic policy, which they totally are. Everyone knows this. They don’t persist because US politicians or anyone else lacks that knowledge. They persist because of bad incentives, and changing those is very hard.
In sum on this point, I agree that “there’s still lots of potential growth to unlock through policy change in those countries that have resisted or been unable to implement reforms.” My claim is that neither you nor I nor basically any outsider has any lever to pull on that, and that thinking really hard about it will not solve this. Growth is pretty attractive to people in LICs, so almost by definition if it’s blocked then something real and hard to move is blocking it. As I said above “The reason people gravitate towards things like bed nets is purely on tractability.”
Lastly, on the confusion re: delegitimizing policies. Sorry if I phrased that badly. To be clear, gasoline subsidies are horrible! We should be taxing gasoline, not subsidizing it. I picked that as an example of a good policy that is plausibly viewed more skeptically because the IMF pushed it. I think it is plausible that there are a lot of good policies that are now viewed more negatively they were part of SAPs. I hold this view weakly as it’s hard to test, but I think it’s a real thing. If all of a sudden China started telling the US to get rid of its sugar subsidies I actually think that would make them harder not easier to remove. This is the same dynamic.
All that said, I think I’d probably also favour people chipping in towards an endowment for a liberal, free market think tank in Nigeria (though I haven’t give this much thought and for all I know 5 might already exist).
Good question. Kevin and Robin Grier make a similar argument. I mostly buy it, but I think there are two very important caveats.
First, for a long time (like from Nic VDWs politics of permanent crisis if not earlier) a mainstream argument has been that SAPs were bad not because the policies were bad—many were straightforwardly, obviously good—but because they were nearly impossible to implement given the politics of the countries undergoing crisis. In response, many countries just didn’t implement the policies, or they kind of half implemented them and foot dragged and did all kinds of stuff to avoid implementing politically destabilizing policies. So then if we look back like the Griers did in their paper or Easterly did and say “countries that reformed did well” this doesn’t actually address the initial issue with SAPs, which is that lots of countries didn’t reform despite the IMF wanting them to, often for actually decent reasons. And of course for anyone acting today the question isn’t “did countries that selected into reform do well?” it is “did the countries that the IMF tried to get to reform do well?”. Turns out those are different questions, and we don’t have an answer to the second.
Second, and this is more anecdotal, but even if we grant that SAPs worked one effect of them was to radically delegitimize all sorts of good economic policies (like removing gasoline subsidies). That’s tragic, and I think it’s plausible that this effect echos out to this day in some LICs. Any full accounting of SAPs would ideally take this into account.
In response to all this, we got small bore randomista development. I’m not saying it should be the only game in town, but if the question is what can outsiders do to help people in LICs? then I think the randomista approach has a lot going for it. For reasons of power and skin in the game and information, I don’t think outsiders are usually well-positioned to do institutional reform stuff within LICs. I do not feel the same way about water chlorination or bed nets or cash transfers, etc.
This is a nice post that should help people better grasp the magnitudes of income gaps across countries and the importance of growth. I’d only add two things:
Regarding growth, the issue in LICs usually isn’t actually speeding up growth, it’s sustaining growth. Basically every country has experienced periods of Chinese level growth rates (Malawi’s GDP growth data here). The main issue is that in poorer countries these spells are shorter and they are often followed by periods of negative growth.
The development community is very much aware of these arguments, as are EA people that overlap both communities (hi). The reason people gravitate towards things like bed nets is purely on tractability. Somewhat crudely speaking, the last time that outsiders tried seriously to reform institutions in LICs in order to promote growth was the period of IMF structural adjustment in the 80s and 90s and that wasn’t exactly a huge success. This is basically why there was a shift towards “randomista” development i the 2000s. As a matter of history, the development community goes back and forth on this macro vs. micro question every 20ish years, so I suppose we’re due for a swing towards growth again.
I just finished reading all of it, and it was very enjoyable. Kudos to the editors and contributors. For all I know this is complicated and not worth it, but I would really appreciate if there was a way that I could subscribe to this in Apple News+. I like the offline, not-in-browser reading mode and I’d like to slot this reading alongside other long form magazines mentally. I have no clue how Apple News works not the back end, but the magazines must get money out of this. Finally, getting on Apple News might help you extend your audience.
I might be missing the part of my brain that makes these concerns make sense, but this would roughly be my answer: Imagine that you and everyone in your household consume water with lead it in every day. You have the chance to learn if there is lead in the the water. If you learn that it does, you’ll feel very bad but also you’ll be able to change your source of water going forward. If you learn that it does not, you’ll no longer have this nagging doubt about the water quality. I think learning about EA is kind of like this. It will be right or wrong to eat animals regardless of whether you think about it, but only if you learn about it can you change for the better. The only truly shameful stance, at least to me, is to intentionally put your head in the sand.
My secondary approach would be to say that you can’t change your past but you can change your future. There is no use feeling guilt and shame about past mistakes if you’ve already fixed them going forward. Focus your time and attention on what you can control.
Canadian version here. He did a really good job.
The viridis package is good for colourblindness and is also pretty: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/index.html
I have a similar intuition, but I think for me it isn’t that I think far future lives should be discounted. Rather, it’s that I think the uncertainty on basically everything is so large at that time scale (more than 1k years in the future) that it feels like the whole exercise is kind of a joke. To be clear: I’m not saying this take is right, but at a gut level I feel it very strongly.
As an academic, I appreciate people thinking about these things. However, I think Goodhart’s law would bite most new measures hard (just as it bites the current ones). This would apply most clearly to textual analysis.
That’s a good question. I’m not sure. I was raised very religious and for a while when I was younger I found the logic compelling, so maybe? At this point in my life I think the answer is “no.”
Imagine an empty graph with an x and y axis. Imagine quality of life is on the y axis and amount of additional life is on the x (horizontal). If you add a year of life at perfect health, that’s a tall rectangle like a skyscraper. If you add lots of years of life at low quality (maybe with high pain), then that’s a long but low rectangle. The area of each rectangle is the number of QALYs. You can imagine many differently shaped rectangles can have the same area. Does that imagine help?
But as I understand it the whole point of the wager is the heavenly pay off. In that case, you can’t just say “I pick heaven” and defer the part where you pick a religion, as that influences whether or not you get the payoff. So I think this is less like a binary decision and more like picking the right card out of a deck.
Many rankings will add the required complexity, I think, but I’ve definitely heard this said about Jews (by Christians). Surely many Christians would also disagree ofc.
I believe that’s generally outside the model. It’s like asking if people have preferences about the ranking of their preferences.