In my previous post on utilitarianism, I started with two crucial observations.
First, utilitarianism is a political philosophy, dealing with the question of how the resources in a community should be distributed. It’s not a system of individual ethics
Second, (this shouldn’t be necessary to state, but it is), there is no such thing as utility. It’s a theoretical construct which can be used to compare different allocations of resources, not a number in people’s heads that can be measured and added up.
Failure to accept these points is at the heart of the kind of ‘longtermism’ advocated by William McAskill and, earlier, Parfit’s Repugnant conclusion. The claim here is that the objective of utilitarians should be to maximise total utility, including people who are brought into existence as a result of our decisions. In particular, that means that it is desirable to bring children into existence who will have a miserable life, provided that no one else is made worse off, and the life is not so bad that the children in question regret being born.
As well as being intuitively unappealing, this idea makes no sense in the two main contexts in which it is relevant: families deciding how many children to have, and polities deciding whether to promote pro-natalist policies[1]
The members of a family, and of a polity, have to allocate resources among themselves. Utilitarianism says that the welfare of each member should be given equal weight. In deciding whether to bring an additional child into existence, it’s necessary to compare two situations
(i) the child is born, and has an equal weight with everyone else; or
(ii) the child isn’t born, and all the current members of the group are weighted equally
It’s nonsensical in case (ii) to add in some extra weight to the hypothetical child who doesn’t exist. And it’s clear, to me at any rate, that if everyone in case (ii) is better off than everyone in case (i), the correct utilitarian decision is to go with (ii).
This leads to the conclusion that the social order we want is one where average utility is maximized (remembering that utility is a way of comparing allocations, not a real thing).
Another way to reach this conclusion is from behind a Harsanyi/Rawls veil of ignorance where we choose a social order of which we will be a member, without knowing where we will be situated. There’s no way to make this work if we are also supposed to consider the infinite set of possible people who won’t come into existence at all.
The counterarguments I’ve seen don’t impress me. Many of them start with some version of the utility monster, an individual who can have massively more utility than anyone else. But, as I showed in my last post, utilitarianism as a political philosophy doesn’t work that way. Reductions in the utility of a trillionaire are outweighed by small improvements for a hundred other people, or significant improvements for ten.
Parfit’s arguments, as quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy rest on appeals to intuition derived from situations that can’t possibly exist in an actual polity.
For instance, the principle implies that for any population consisting of very good lives there is a better population consisting of just one person leading a life at a slightly higher level of well-being”
This is both untrue and analytically faulty.
Untrue because humans are social animals, and human societies require a minimum number of people to deliver anything beyond bare existence. Solitary individuals (castaways, for example) don’t live well, so the supposed “better population” can’t exist. But if it were possible, we wouldn’t need polities or utilitarianism, any more than bears or skunks do.
It’s analytically faulty because the point isn’t to compare different populations in the abstract but for families and polities to make choices about population. Starting from an existing population, it’s entirely possible (and is now the case) that people might choose below-replacement fertility so that they and their children can have better lives.
So, we could easily see the population of the world gradually decline from billions to hundreds of millions, with steadily rising living standards. But below some point (Charlie Stross estimates a lower bound of 100 million) it would become impossible to sustain a modern civilisation. So, at this point (many generations away) it might be necessary to encourage people to have more kids.
Until then, the choice can be put as one between
(i) Letting families make their own choices, leading to a world with a shrinking population living better lives; or
(ii) Adopting pro-natalist policies[2] to deliver a growing population, living worse lives
Parfit called (ii) the repugnant conclusion, and he was right to do so.
[1] Migration raises a whole new set of issues about who counts. My position is essentially cosmopolitan (everyone counts, wherever they live), but this needs a whole new post, or maybe a book.
[2] To get fertility rates above replacement under current conditions, such policies would have to be very intrusive.
John Quiggin 
Maximising average utility doesn’t work in Parfit’s world because of the “mere addition paradox”. If you accept it is reasonable that you would always endorse a population increase where every person (pre-existing and new) are better off then average utility is not a good guide to population increase. Averages can decline even though every person is better-off with the population increase.
For example: A society of 10m gets utility 10000 utils each and their utility rises to 10,020 utils with a population increase of 1m brought about by immigration of people from a poor country with the migrants increasing their utility from 100 to 1000 utils with the move. Everyone is better-off with this change but average utility of the original society falls from 10000 originally to (10*10,000 +1* 1000)/11 = 9182. So if you use the average utility criterion you would reject this move even though everyone is made better off with it.
In standard population economics average utility involves moving a society to that level where returns to scale peter out.
Total utility works better but, yes, it is subject to the repugnance conclusion. Most people who use total utility (e.g. Partha Dasgupta) impose a lower bound on the level of utility that is acceptable. It is a fairly arbitrary.
IMHO both average and total utility criteria are conceptually flawed because they assume new people are added to a new society and enjoy an equal share in it. That might be true in a fictitious communist society where everyone gets an equal share as a birthright. But in actual capitalist societies, ignoring bequests, people must buy their way into an existing society by making deals with that society that ensure both sides are better-off. Land, housing and durables must be bought on terms consistent with seller’s intentions. The better markets work and the less the common property, external costs and public goods the more you can expect free markets to deliver this outcome.
In fact the equal share idea gives rise to an optimal population by implicitly assuming a common property externality – it is an artifact. Getting the thing cleare means that we stop arguing about totals and averages and instead concentrating on the extent to which markets work. This is discussed further in:
Click to access 17-population-discussant-clarke.pdf
What we see in the contemporary world is that people living better lives is bringing about shrinking populations. It is the nearest thing we have to an Iron Law of Demography that the achievement by a nation of a high level of human development is closely followed by a fall in the fertility rate to below replacement level.
From a pragmatic standpoint, if a nation like Australia wanted to grow its population further or maintain replacement it could cost pro-natalist policies against pro-immigration policies. I make no comment here on how good or valid the costings might or might not be. Theoretically, the pro-immigration policies (and even the pro-natalist policies) could be racist, meritocratic, humanitarian, financial or any combination of those. However, a first determination ought to be an estimate of the long term sustainable population, given where the world system, human and natural, is at. To spell it out, the world system is at the catastrophic collapse inflection point.
On the theoretical, or philosophical, side I am not satisfied or persuaded by the general claim or position that:
“There is no such thing as “x”. “X” is a theoretical construct which can be used to compare “prescriptive courses of action”, not a number (cardinal or ordinal) in people’s heads that can be measured and added up (or sequenced).”
How this squares with attempts at microfoundations of macroeconomics I have no idea. I suspect it doesn’t but then I am highly skeptical about the empirical ontology foundations of microeconomics.
Admittedly, I may be at fault or in a state of ignorance in not understanding the point which I attempted to generalize above. The first problem might be that my attempt to generalize the statement already incorporates errors. I doubt that anyone will want to explore this issue but I flag it to signal a certain amount of skepticism on my part about its validity. I’ve been told I veer too much to naive realism and/or logical positivism. Naturally, I think the opposing camp veer too much to category errors in their disregard of empirical ontology. I expressly do *not* refer here to religious or speculative ontology. I refer to empirical ontology simpliciter which is a valid subject domain in scientific empiricism.
I intend not just the tautological meaning of the term “scientific empiricism” but the philosophical meaning:
1 : a philosophical movement that denies the existence of any ultimate differences in the sciences, strives for unified science through a synthesis of scientific methodologies, comprises in addition to logical positivists thinkers with similar objectives.
The position I occupy is not one which considers that science can model everything accurately or adequately (for successful manipulations and predictions). It’s more the position that where we cannot be model accurately or adequately, the subject is not science or not yet science.
But below some point (Charlie Stross estimates a lower bound of 100 million) it would become impossible to sustain a modern civilisation.
What is modern? Why would such a change result in civilisation staying in the same way modern, consumerist, and dumb? Why not modern, survivalist, and smarter? Most of what now sustains goes to landfill and much else to other environmental degradation. Wind the population down and there is less call for that… and for things like swarms jumbo airplanes and multitudes of jumbo ships. The smaller population has a smaller environmental footprint, there are more resources to go around, more accessible higher yielding resources at that, and with even similar current inequality (unlikely) on average people are relatively wealthier, and society placing the planet under far less pressure is under far less pressure itself. A far more creative, and where it seems most to count for Stross too, a far more progressive and technically productive society is most likely to arise from the smaller population.
But in saying this I am as guilty of an anthropocentric limited view as those making the utility and natalist arguments and counter arguments in the OP. Ethics or lack thereof have a great deal to do with the subjects today even if justifiably not in the eighteenth century. Indeed encoded in law the rights of Nature as something akin to the rights of humanity are beginning to be increasingly asserted, and to be found in existing law and be tested. And surely Nature has some highly pertinent actionable rights with respect to human population size. Nature is the ultimate distributor of resources, and Nature bats last.
JQ: “Utilitarianism says that the welfare of each member should be given equal weight.”
There are two versions of this claim. In the classical version, it is a contingent inference from psychological facts. There is no evidence for “utility monsters” – though plantation slaveowners may have seen themselves this way – and a lot for the proposition that people are very similar in their capacity for enjoying life, ergo diminishing marginal utility is very plausible, as are its egalitarian implications. In Kantian versions equal interests are an independent proposition arising from the Golden Rule or variants of it, forming an external a priori</i) constraint on utility maximisation. I agree with the post that the Repugnant Conclusion is not at all plausible, either way.
“utilitarianism is […] not a system of individual ethics”
This is an — honestly! — astounding assertion, at odds with both hundreds of years of philosophy* and empirical evidence that at least some of time people appear to reason in at least utilitarian-ish fashion.
*I’m no scholar of Bentham or Mill, so it’s possible that the way they discuss utilitarianism implies that it is not a “system of individual ethics”**, although I’d be surprised if that were the case. But it’s certainly true that Sidgwick and Moore treated it as such a system, and it has been treated as such by, AFAIK, every subsequent utilitarian and counter-utilitarian, so let’s say it’s at odds with at least 120 years of philosophy. Of course 120 years of philosophy could be wrong, just as 50 million Elvis fans could be (I think there are several thousand years of philosophy that get it wrong in some areas!), and so it might be true that utilitarianism is best considered as a political philosophy. But, given the weight of historical opinion, that’s a massively substantial meta-ethical claim in need of argument, not just bald assertion.
** I’m not sure what this means, but I guess it means a system for determining the moral status of an individual’s actions and/or a method for individuals to work out the same
1. This is a blog. Bald assertions are the norm.
2. I don’t think philosophers get to legislate here. Economists have done far more work on utility theory and its applications than philosophers.
3. If you want to make this claim wrt philosophy, where do you place Rawls, and the large associated literature, in which criticism of utilitarianism as a political philosophy is the central concern.
Thanks for the reply
re 1: ha ha, good point!
re 2 and 3: as a good post-Quinean naturalist I wouldn’t want to let philosophers legislate anywhere! (Much less to denigrate work done in other fields). Let a thousand flowers etc. And it’s no accident that Bentham and Mill, in particular, were interested in public policy.
By all means, political philosophers, economists and others should critically examine and make use of utilitarianism and its associated concepts and debates! But I think that’s compatible with also treating utilitarianism as an ethical theory relevant to individuals (relevant in which way, is up for grabs), and indeed as a potential general ethical theory of the kind sought by (arguably) Aristotle, Kant, Sidgwick and even, yes, Rawls and (of course) Parfit. It might not be the best ethical theory out there, or perhaps we should even jettison the very project of developing an ethical theory (as would be argued by, say, Bernard Williams or moral particularists), but in the first instance it’s at least a candidate for such a theory.
FWIW, I have always tended strongly towards a fairly hardcore utilitarianism and never found any of the counter-examples compelling UNTIL longtermism, which feels pretty close to a reductio ad absurdum, although I don’t know that I could actually back that up if dialectical push came to shove
Svante – “But below some point (Charlie Stross estimates a lower bound of 100 million) it would become impossible to sustain a modern civilisation.”
Hard to put numbers to but that is much like my thinking – it needs to be big to work – and is one reason I am skeptical of the viability of Moon or Mars colonies; it isn’t only the wide array of industries and technical specialties a small and/or geographically constrained society must have but the cost effectiveness of many of them at small scale with only small local demand for them to sustain them. I expect an advanced industrialised economy would still require effectively global geographic range to have availability of a comprehensive range of resources, many of which won’t be available within a nation sized area. Exploiting resources in remote uninhabited regions lacking infrastructure would be no small thing.
Interesting post and interesting comments, but I don’t think have any interesting comments or insights about utilitarianism itself.
JQ: “…there is no such thing as utility. It’s a theoretical construct which can be used to compare different allocations of resources, not a number in people’s heads that can be measured and added up.”
You would think that an entire prestigious profession that bases its influential policy prescriptions on a “theoretical construct” that can’t be operationally defined, observed, or measured would have a few more qualms about it. Utility has of course counterparts in other sciences: dark energy, Planck strings, Freud’s gallery of unconscious daemons, dormitive virtue, and phlogiston. As it were, a Swiss Crime Syndicate multitool of dubiously legal kit.
Ken, in so far as utilitarianism deals with resource distribution for a population in a world of scarcity, the scarcity maybe real, or an arbitrary social construct. I don’t see a “modern” planetary civilisation with greatly reduced population being subject to real resource scarcity except, say, in the initial phase of rolling out new tech resources such as new pharmaceuticals. It could perhaps be subject to arbitrary scarcity if the polity continued to allow it. I doubt they would. Its been said all wars are over resources, so another plus maybe an end to war… war consumes lots of resources but if this world has abundant resource availability… why then war?
Once for all intents and purposes removed from the gravity well of Earth I doubt range, mode, mass, or time would be a problem for colonies on Mars or the Moon, or for transport between them and further afield. But lets wait at least until the extra terrestrial medical issues are solved before depositing, say, 100 million Earthling colonists out there.
Ken, regarding a greatly reduced stable world population and economies of scale, AI and robotics developments already change the picture as does 3D printing and much else from agriculture to zoology. The relatively more abundant richer resources and a relatively inconsequential negative environmental impact should not be discounted either. Even if it remained (unlikely) dominantly a dumb dog-eat-dog grasping consumerist throwaway society, even if it remained as such today and happy to drown in its own waste it could hardly do so unless for some unfathomable reason it decided to pack itself into a few toxic by choice megacities. Ideally but not necessarily things like profit driven engineered redundancy would be down and recycling would be up. Shipping, and developments like overland caravans sorted the problem of obtaining globally dispersed resources thousands of years ago save the occurrence of sometimes sporadic but always population driven increasing demand and increasing scarcity. Surely smaller planes would still fly, but possibly airships would become quite a viable mode of transport for long distance freight in a world no longer scrambling to be just-in-time for fickle profits for a few, but one with plenty to go around, and time to spare.
As for utilitarianism, Nature as the ultimate distributor of resources, and the rights of Nature see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism#Other_sentient_beings
Damage the natural environment (Nature) beyond a tolerable degree and other sentient beings, but also humans suffer. The natural environment is a resource but due to the ecological interconnectedness Nature also encompasses all forms of sentience on the planet. Utilitarianism is a flawed system of resource distribution if that distribution is not formulated inclusive of both humans and Nature. I’m not sure where to begin but think as good a place to start is as for the application of utilitarianism between humans then Nature should be on an equal footing with humans. The treatment of the two should certainly not be so unequal as it has been up to date.
James Wimberley,
I kind of said the same thing several posts ago. I still hold that there is something fundamentally (ontologically) rotten in the state of (conventional) economics.
It is certainly true that we are finding a lot of previous suppositions untenable across a number of modern disciplines as more data comes in. This is true from cosmology to psychiatry; two fields you mention. I feel quite certain that economics will not prove uniquely immune to new, disconcerting discoveries which can affect that field. New instruments from the James Webb telescope for cosmological research to the latest instruments and methods in neuroscience research are exposing many treasured hypotheses and theoretical constructs of formerly received authorities as false or “not even wrong” as the saying goes. The explosion of research since the advent of COVID-19 (including new findings facilitated in part due to COVID-19’s sui generis nature) have exposed pre-COVID-19 immunology as essentially an infant science.
To discover that further developments in human knowledge via empirical studies (if we survive the extinction threats we have created) do not expose the conventional economics of today as also an infant science still harboring key false constructs and assumptions would be surprising, to me at least.
Vichy France had about the most ruthless pronatalist policy imaginable in an advanced country. Abortion was made a capital crime, and one unfortunate abortionist was guillotined. Interwar natalist subsidies (supported by Left and Right) were continued and reinforced. This all failed to raise the French birth rate during the war. It rose sharply afterwards – as it did in other countries without the subsidies and lectures. The episode suggests that natalist policies are unlikely to work.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033137/fertility-rate-france-1800-2020/
I recall that when my first wife became pregnant in 1974 in France, she was given, no questions asked, a small wad of vouchers for free antenatal checkups. This was outside the normal social insurance system, except that the checkups were a precondition for being paid a child allowance later. I think this was a Vichy holdover.
Svante, I disagree about space and I think cost effective transport and other economic problems in space are not actually lessened by positing a space economy independent of Earth – launch and landing for Moon and Mars don’t look less difficult than for Earth to me and it would surprise me if they won’t remain prohibitively expensive for shifting bulk commodities around ie limited ability to trade – but I’ve taken things off topic; this should a discussion for a Sandpit I suppose, rather than derailing this thread.
Ken: OT? Paul Krugman wrote a paper on “The theory of interstellar trade” in 1978. “A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved. […] This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics. ” https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
There is no galactic paywall, though IP is about the only thing you can really imagine could be worth trading across interstellar distances. If you buy the specs for a time machine from the Vogons, it doesn’t really matter if they take 300 years to arrive.
Krugman’s essay is funny with lots of jokes and puns in it… but back on the topic:
The specialized concept “utility” might be pursuable in philosophy. However, I am not a fan of the concept in its definition and attempted uses in economics. Given its specialized definition there, in practice it offends the correspondence theory of truth and fails to stand up to empirical investigation, IMHO.
At the level of engaging with the majority of voting people, who are workers, unemployed and/or superannuation/pensions/benefits recipients, I think talking about fairness and equality (and sustainability) will gain the most traction. The vaguer yet better intuitively understood concepts, namely fairness and equality, should serve I think.
“[1] Migration raises a whole new set of issues about who counts. My position is essentially cosmopolitan (everyone counts, wherever they live), but this needs a whole new post, or maybe a book.”
JQ, your position on migration is and has been long term very much in the minority. A substantial majority of Australians have rejected it in the form imposed on them for some twenty years. And most of those are opposed to it from a utilitarian basis, ie., by it they and their country suffer. So it would be good to see your substantive empirically based case.
The pro-cosmopolitan, pro status quo immigration ABC blew itself up in that regard the day after your post. A remarkable occurrence. They are usually so very careful in how they promote and cultivate a certain view point, or silence others:
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2023/08/abc-qa-blows-itself-up-with-immigration-debate
“[2] To get fertility rates above replacement under current conditions, such policies would have to be very intrusive.”
If for some never yet sensibly well stated reason population boosting was needed then pro-natalist policies are not needed to achieve it, at least not for a good long while. Due to the unpopular high rates of immigration to date if Australian net overseas migration was cut immediately to zero the population would continue to grow for many years before levelling out then declining to be about the same as the current population in fifty years. That’s plenty of breathing space before any worries, if justifiable worries there be, about replacement rates.
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2018/11/immigration-to-drive-100-of-australias-future-18m-population-growth/
James – that is not good service (although Vogons are known for that). They should be able to foresee the time machine specs order and have already sent it.
I advocate stabilizing our population long-term at no more than 30 million. Any higher poses serious risks of being unsustainable, given Australia’s very grim and dangerous future under climate change.
Our wealthy and governing elites claim to believe simultaneously in environmentalism and endless growth. They are dishonest and avaricious. High immigration in Australia is mostly about lining the pockets of the property owning class. Currently and going forward it harms / will harm most of the population. These harms will increase over time due to climate change, environmental damage and the inequalities being embedded by neoliberalism.
Ken: What we need to worry about in trading with Vogons is their likely very strong deterrent policy against being cheated. We can safely assume they know the optimum solution to the repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma, viz. tit-for-tat. The retaliation may, as per Adams, include vaporizing the solar system. If we email them the complete works of Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Mozart in exchange for the time machine, they are likely to discover these are out of copyright and there is zero opportunity cost to the email. Fraud! Beyonce, Taylor Swift and (inevitably) Mickey Mouse are in copyright, but Vogon youth is fickle and may reject the proffer. Perhaps we should try to live without the time machine.
James W: You are probably reading me too strongly. Utility isn’t a real thing, but neither are concepts like “the rate of inflation”, “real GDP” etc. You can attach numbers to these concepts, with an appropriate model, but you need to be aware of what you are doing.
An immigration unintended consequence, I certainly hadn’t factored in – monitoring us due to monitoring new arrivals. If say a politician were to use “you’ll be monitored more”, as a consequence of migration, as a negative, a decision on migration would imo, not be justified on facts. But they’ll do it anyway. And I might be swayed – a bit.
Ikon, having travelled around the countryside, I too see 30m as a top population. But on what basis is this number generated, and who is to say in 5yrs we won’t have fusion & MOF based water feom air. If we get a concensus with appropriate resources allocation, maybe we are able to build a 10m city. Heresy I know, but I do believe we are smart. 6m refugees from Ukraine gives the flavour. In crisis we may do things we thought near impossible.
Svante, asking JQ “And most of those are opposed to it from a utilitarian basis, ie., by it they and their country suffer. So it would be good to see your substantive empirically based case.”, may be turned around to ask to see “… your substantive empirically based case”.
Immigration / migration is a fraught topic and may easily lead to the Repugnant Conclusion – or not.
So I’m wary. Interesting to see this study relying on what people said on the Internet. Better imo than face to face or questionnaire. F2f has social and personal confirmation bias. Questionnaires allow for biased / subtle direction questions.
*
“Kukathas on Immigration and Freedom”
by CHRIS BERTRAM
SEPTEMBER 8, 2021
“I just finished reading Chandran Kukathas’s book on immigration, Immigration and Freedom, (Princeton: 2021) and I recommend it strongly. … Kukathas’s basic argument, though developed in detail over many pages, is that to control immigration, states need to monitor and control migrants. But in order to do this, states also need to monitor and control their own citizens. Because one thing human beings are prone to do is to associate with other human beings, independently of their immigration status. People love, befriend, work with, create with, employ others and some of those people are immigrants. So to stop immigrants from doing the things the state doesn’t want them to do, the state also has to monitor its citizens who want to do those things with them and if necessary to pass laws preventing them from doing those things.
“In the UK, the whole of the “hostile environment” that caused the Windrush Scandal is premised on such control.”
*
And Svante, your strong claims and opinions such as “… long term very much in the minority”
“A substantial majority of Australians have rejected it in the form imposed on them for some twenty years”.
… may not be as strong as your feel population wide. I’m just in good faith introducing a study by Anna Boucher, who says;
“We found Australians overall have a neutral view towards migration — in that they are neither strongly opposed or in favour of it. But from their internet usage, we can tell they are highly engaged on the topic”.
From:
“What do people really think about immigration to Australia? We analysed their internet usage to find out
December 16, 2020
Anna Boucher,
University of Sydney
“Many opinion polls on migration in Australia have limited sample sizes, such as the Essential poll, which often interviews around 1,000 people.
“This is small when you consider there are over 215 languages other than English spoken in Australia. Running a survey, even a multi-lingual one, will only ever capture so much variation and complexity.
“I have recently conducted a study with Elisa Choy, founder of Maven Data, an AI-powered strategic market research company, to gauge public sentiment toward migration. To do this, we used a much larger data pool — all open-access internet sources across the globe.
“Our aim was to find out what Australians think about migration through an analysis of how people engaged with all publicly available online sources on this topic. This includes what they searched for on Google, what they read and how they discussed the topic with others on blogs, social media and online comments.
“Our study included both Australian and foreign websites, as Australians often consume overseas English-language media.
“We found Australians overall have a neutral view towards migration — in that they are neither strongly opposed or in favour of it. But from their internet usage, we can tell they are highly engaged on the topic.
“As part of our research, we also sought to gauge what potential migrants around the world think about Australia as a destination, using the same research method in countries where most migrants come from.
“Surprisingly, we found a high degree of interest in Australia in only one country – India. In other countries, such as China, there was relatively low online engagement on Australian immigration. However, with China, this could have been the result of state control of the media.
…
https://theconversation.com/what-do-people-really-think-about-immigration-to-australia-we-analysed-their-internet-usage-to-find-out-151026
*
Ymmv.
At this stage in my life I have little first order skin in the immigration migration game. So I too, even with the bounce in arrivals this year, am still nuetral. I am hoping for policies which are more accommodating family reunion – about 5% compared to economic or skilled – and a long term population policy to allow for appropriate physical resource use, and culture and society to gain confidence the worst outcomes – job substitution and or polarisation – to be appropriately managed.
I can always hope!
And more data the merrier.
John Q.,
Your answer to James W. raises the question: “Well, why are you doing it?” In my experience, economists dodge this question. They won’t answer it, implying that the answer is so obvious that anyone who raises it is just plain dumb.
The issue indeed gets back to models. What is a model and why have them? I speak here of models meant to model reality in some fashion either for applied or theoretical purposes. In applied science, hard science or social science, I assume the intended purpose of theoretical models is to discover or elucidate something, before testing it empirically, if possible.
I assume we both accept that there exists an objective reality; that certain things and processes exist independent of conscious human awareness or presupposition of them via perceptions or thoughts. Common mid-sized physical objects presumably apply, as does the generally accepted fact of persons having subjective or affective states (qualia or experiences).
The above being so, what is the practical function of models? Let us take the design drawings of a house and the survey map of the plot of land as models. What is the function of these models? Simply put, they exist as representations of what is or as plans of what might be. In what does the validity and practical applicability of such models inhere if it inheres at all? I mean not just plans as models but statements and formulas as models. The validity and practical applicability of models inheres in their homomorphic congruence with some aspect(s) of reality. We can approach this idea as follows.
“That truth is the correspondence of a representation to its object is, as Kant says, merely the nominal definition of it. Truth belongs exclusively to propositions. A proposition has a subject (or set of subjects) and a predicate. The subject is a sign; the predicate is a sign; and the proposition is a sign that the predicate is a sign of that which the subject is a sign. If it be so, it is true. But what does this correspondence or reference of the sign, to its object, consist in?” – Charles Sanders Peirce.
The last question is key. What does this correspondence or reference of the sign, to its object, consist in?
Following Peirce, a “Theory of Truth” means a theory of how formal signs are related to real, objective existents. This incorporates the idea that language statements and mathematical equations, which function as compounded formal sign statements, may be related in some way to the signified real objects, forces, processes or systems to which they refer and model. This correspondence theory of truth must hold that there can be true representations and false representations of real existents and real systems. This must be so, even if unavoidably in practice, a “true” representation is always an approach to truth rather than a complete, final or absolute truth.
This correspondence of signs, as word statements, equations or models (real or virtual), to the real can only be conceived as a homomorphic correspondence when modelling is expressly or implicitly occurring. This is as opposed to mere formal or customary naming as in “That man is Bill Jones.” Aside from such formal or customary naming, there must be something in the structure and relations in a compounded modelling statement (be it a language statement, maths equation, real model or virtual model) as a formal system, which homomorphically matches one or more essential structures, relations or processes in the real objects/real systems being referred to.
As Bertrand Russell wrote, “we are driven back to correspondence with fact as constituting the nature of truth”. Homomorphism, as a concept, is the most suitable way to conceive of this correspondence. Homomorphism as employed in active modelling practice may be considered as the procedure of generating a structure-preserving statement, equation, map or model of a real object or real system, or a part thereof. For a dynamic model this will also entail a process-preserving or process-mapping component. In algebra, a “homomorphism is a structure-preserving map between two algebraic structures of the same type”. The preservation of essential aspects in structure, relation and dynamism in the model, in relation to the real object or system, is critical to any claim that it be an accurate or true model in some sense; that it corresponds with (at least some) real, empirical facts.
So where you say “Utility isn’t a real thing” are you saying more comprehensively as follows?
“Utility isn’t a real thing but it is an element of a model which as a whole we contend models or could be developed to model a part of reality in an homomorphically congruent way.”
If you are saying this, I can understand your claim. It doesn’t mean I am convinced by the claim and I think much further examination of the claim is necessary. Indeed, I remain skeptical not least because of the insights I find in “Capital as Power” theory but also due to my own examinations in the field of empirical ontology. But at least I would understand your claim if it exists in the above terms in quotes.
John: Phlogiston may have been a bit harsh, but the cases are still far apart. For GDP and inflation, the objects of inquiry are reasonably coherent commonsense ideas, “overall economic production” and “average price level in relation to the unit of currency”. Economists and statisticians translate these into numerical indicators based on well-defined methodologies, making a variety of technical calls along the way which are noted and published. The trouble is that amateurs don’t read the fine print and too many professionals forget it, so the indicators are abused or sacralised. Compare prescription drugs, which come with a closely printed leaflet including a long list of possible side-effects and drug interactions. In addition, patients know that the drug has been rigorously tested for safety end efficacy, and that the latter is incomplete. They then forget to take the pills, take too many when they feel bad, and stop taking them too soon. This is not the fault of the drug manufacturers.
Utility on the other hand is more like herbal medicines bought online, untested for safety, efficacy or even dosage of the active ingredient if there is one, and marketed without regulation. Luckily most of them are harmless (though not all). The commonsense concepts of pleasure and pain, or happiness and misery, are not transformed into any numerical indicators. Maybe for pain, as doctors do ask how bad your post-operative pain is on a scale of 0 to 10. 8 may get you morphine, 2 paracetamol. In 200 years, we haven’t advanced much beyond the broad qualitative comparisons we always had. Useful empirical findings, like the decoupling of self-reported happiness from GDP above about $10,000 a year, do not SFIK rely on theoretical constructs. I stand by dubious.
James Wimberley, John Quiggin,
I will start start somewhat dogmatically re utility and the state of economics. There is, for sure, a real possibility that I am completely off target.
The problem as I see it is that economics is a hybrid discipline (unavoidably) in that it combines descriptive and prescriptive (normative) endeavors. Physics has a relatively easy task by comparison. Yet physics still seems stumped by the “mere” n-body problem let alone the many issues at small scale (quantum theory) and large scale (cosmology) and the issues of complex systems, emergence and downward as well as upward causation.
When a discipline, like economics, is descriptive *and* prescriptive this means essentially that it is both:
(a) describing fundamental objects of its ontology from physical nature and seeking to discover fundamental laws (which are essentially laws of interaction and exclusion in a single connected real relational system); *and*
(b) prescribing fundamental objects for its ontology from or rather via law, regulation, custom, ethics (moral philosophy), institutionalism and finally its (economic’s) own reflexive theorizing.
It is the unacknowledged or inadequately examined existence and interaction of formal ontological objects and real ontological objects in conventional economics that is at the heart of its problems, in my lay opinion. It has an ontological problem which unavoidably becomes a methodological problem.
A person, a physical product and a physical service are all real objects / processes (obviously), but the numéraire, for example the dollar, is a formal construct. The laws, regulations and customs defining property ownership and the operations of markets are also formal objects, not real objects.
Hence, what we ought to be concerned with in economics are the interactions of formal objects and real objects (using “object” with this broader meaning). By default and unavoidably, economics is indeed concerned with these interactions and attempts, in many ways according to the various schools of economics, to deal with the influence of the formal on the real and of the real on the formal. However, I argue that most schools of economics deal with this problem badly and with inappropriate methods. In this purview, humans and perhaps computers and AI are in a special class. They combine the influences of the real and the formal in their internal operations in an integrated manner, to put it simply.
The ontology of the formal and the real can be integrated theoretically, I hold. They are in fact fully integrated in holistic or monistic reality. That’s a large topic beyond this post. Briefly, the prospect for theoretical integration lies in information theory in the following understanding of information: information as patterns in physical media (matter and processes) capable of influencing the generation of other patterns in physical matter and processes. This highlights the importance of code (as patterns in real media), meaning code from DNA code to all human generated formal systems and their code (in the form of language and mathematics), to code as in codes of law and regulation. Just as DNA strands are real systems or components of real systems, human created formal systems are subsets of real systems. They are instruction patterns in media which are encoded, decoded and enacted/ignored, obeyed/disobeyed by human agents. But as I said that’s a large topic beyond this post.
Utility theory, is in the end, value theory or axiology; the philosophical study of value. Any attempt to mathematise value comparisons of disparate objects in the light of “utility”, even by ordinal comparisons will fail of explanatory and predictive power, IFF utility theory is pursued in the descriptive vein. At least, I deduce that will be the case because of the mixing of human rules and fundamental laws in the (any) extant economic system.
IFF utility theory is pursued in the *prescriptive* vein, as “Normative Theories of Rational Choice” then this I suspect may change things, at least theoretically. It is here that I refer to my suspicions that I may be making a wrong-headed tilt at Utility theory of the generalized expected utility variety. I am currently trying to understand this link and wonder if it will assist me.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationality-normative-utility/
Or is this linked article of poor quality? Is there something better I can read?
KT2 (AUGUST 5, 2023 AT 10:20 AM), Anna Boucher, Associate Professor in Public Policy and Political Science, University of Sydney? No surprises then on the likelihood of conflicts of interest over immigration influencing flawed research methodology and conclusions there. Wow! As if anyone employed by the dodgy edumigration sector, let alone in one of the great eight unis, would/could/can call a spade a spade concerning Australian immigration when that is seriously against the party line.
Am I blind? In Boucher’s Conversation article I find no usual inclusion of links to the dubious claimed research. Will it ever be published or did they shred it themselves? One thing that immediately springs to mind is how did they ascertain who among the surveilled internet users were actually Australians, and voting age Australians at that?
I suspect someone on the internet is badly wrong – again. I’m not going to spend much time on it nor lose any sleep https://xkcd.com/386/ but I’ll briefly mention a few concerns that I am not alone with concerning Boucher.
“all the online content we could find related to immigration” …aint all the online content.
“Further, much of Australians’ interest in this subject is focused on “gaining facts” rather than forming or reinforcing opinions, which means the government has the power to shape opinion on this issue in the future.” …The Government/Elite/MSM complex has tried to shape opinion through propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation for forty and more years and has failed. It has increasingly failed for some twenty years as Big Australia hyper immigration ramped up steeply.
“Key online sources that Indians looked to for information included major media outlets like the ABC, Guardian and Sydney Morning Herald,” …All three “sources” are very much biased in favour of Big Australia through hyper immigration. The first two for ideological reasons, the SMH, and all other DomainFax-Nine media, for vested financial reasons. However if they had sampled comments below relevant DomainFaxNine media content they would have noted comments are predominantly opposed and mostly on utilitarian grounds and often running to astounding numbers in total. The Guardian has a rather strict editorial policy of allowing politically correct only comments, but comments opposed to the party line do get through and occasionally proliferate. BTW, The New Daily, also very much with a vested interest in high population growth, tried allowing comments below articles for a few months earlier this year but shut it down as by far the majority of comments were similarly critical of the inherent content biases. Similarly gone are comments at the similarly conflicted and biased The Conversation. And did you check the preponderance of comments, where earlier allowed, that are critical of Boucher’s immigration articles?
The claim by Boucher that a diverse array of other professional pollsters consistently returning similar results over time don’t know what they are doing is more than a bit rich! They consistently show that a significant majority of Australians are opposed to current immigration policy. If you want the facts from surveys conducted long term with highly credible academic rigor you could best start with TAPRI and Prof Bob Birrell rather than some risible self-serving random internet Boucher beat up.
“The above shenanigans are why we should settle the debate once and for all via a plebiscite on Australia’s future population.”
However, the charts generally used for this purpose could stand some improvement, as discussed and illustrated in detail here:
https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/02/boyfriend-doesnt-have-ebola-probably.html
“Dopesick”, starring Michael Keaton, shows how the 1 to 10 pain scale was all but invented by Perdue Pharmaceutical as they pushed Oxycontin and generated the prescription opioid crisis. The gullible and greedy medical profession swallowed the grift hook, line and sinker. Seeing the gullible medical and political professions take up the reasoning of the Pharma Corporations and the GBD (Great Barrington Declaration) about how we should accept the circulation of a dangerous new pandemic disease (Covid-19) and endemicise it with only leaky vaccines as protection has been further proof of their lack of institutional wisdom and their egregiously incomplete understanding of science and ethics.
“In 1995 the American Pain Society started a campaign to promote pain as a fifth vital sign. On the surface it seemed like a good idea and it was heavily promoted. As this was happening the seeds of the opioid epidemic were being planted.
Purdue Pharma was one of the backers of the fifth vital sign campaign just as they were about to start promoting their new drug OxyContin. In 1996 Purdue Pharma launched the biggest marketing campaign in pharmaceutical history as they aggressively promoted use of the 1-10 pain scale and backed the fifth vital sign push.
Purdue then started working with the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Hospitals and in 2001the commission promoted the 1-10 pain scale and started judging hospitals based on patient satisfaction of pain treatment. The push was on and Purdue had figured out how to manipulate an entire industry solely for the sake of profit.
The Joint Commission and Purdue joined forces and published a guide for doctors and patients that said, “There is no evidence that addiction is a significant issue when persons are given opioids for pain control.” As Purdue sent its army of drug detailers to doctors’ offices and hospitals Purdue had taken control of clinical aspects of pain control. The rest is history.” – ELIMINATE THE 1-10 PAIN SCALE By Richard Davis.