Partly because I’ve only had intermittent access to the blog over the past week, I haven’t got around to responding to Jason Soon and Andrew Norton on the debate over neoliberalism and free speech. Given this lag I thought it would be good to summarise the positions as I see them.

Neoliberals like Andrew and Jason are opposed to government restrictions on political freedom of speech with the usual narrowly-drawn exceptions (fraud, defamation of individuals and so on) but argue that

private property rights trump free speech as a general rule

. So, for example, employers and property owners can impose whatever restrictions they like on speech by their employees, tenants and so on, and government should not intervene.

I disagree with this, though not to the extent of arguing that no private restrictions on freedom of speech should be permitted. To give some substantive examples, I believe

• Employers should be prohibited from discriminating against employees on the basis of political beliefs or off-the-job political activities
• Similarly, landlords should be prohibited from discriminating against tenants
• Governments should ensure that there is sufficient public space (both physical and media space) to permit the free expression of political views.

On the other hand, assuming that there are a range of media outlets, I don’t believe that individual media outlets should be required to be ‘balanced’, except for a requirement to correct defamatory falsehoods.

Having summarised the two positions as best I can, there are a lot of questions that remain. Most obviously, there’s the question of which position is right, that is, which produces the best consequences? Second, there’s the semantic issue of whether issues like those of raised are, as Jason says

nothing to do with free speech at all.

Third, there’s the history-of-thought question WWMS (What would Mill say?). Finally, there are some more specific issues regarding press freedom and academic freedom that I’d like to discuss further.

That’s enough for now. I hope to pick up the pace a bit on this one, but I’d appreciate it if anyone who thinks I’ve mischaracterized the neoliberal position speaks up now.

I’ve finally got around to resuming the debate with Andrew Norton over my claim that neoliberals (or, if you prefer, contemporary classical liberals) are not particularly supportive of freedom of speech. Norton argues that the absence of discussion of freedom of speech reflects the fact that, with minor exceptions, freedom of speech is not threatened.

But at least one form of freedom of speech, academic freedom, is coming under sustained attack. Academics are regularly being subject to attacks from university managers either for criticising the commercial operations of the university or for political speech. The most notable recent example was the Steele case, but it is by no means unique.

The Centre for Independent Studies has been active participant in this debate, and has presented the viewpoints of university managers concerned to manage or suppress academic freedom. The most striking instance is a piece by Steven & Gregory Schwartz (Steven Schwartz was formerly vice-chancellor of Murdoch university. The breakout quotes chosen by the CIS in republishing the piece give the basic line

the laissez-faire approach to academic freedom is neither logical nor practical

like freedom of speech, academic freedom has its limits

Lauchlan Chipman is more reasonable, but still seeks to invent precedents for the restrictions on academic speech managers are now trying to impose.

Australian universities have always insisted that academics have no right to comment publicly, except as ordinary citizens, on any matters outside their area of academic expertise. Whether written or unwritten, such policies have always denied academics the right to use their university rank, occupational position, or address in external communications on other than their area of academic expertise

I can say from personal experience that this is untrue. Precisely this issue was vigorously debated when I was at James Cook University, where the management was trying to suppress an environmental law lecturer who was criticising an influential local property magnate. You can read a bit about the case here (search for David Haigh). At the time, the Academic Board had sufficient power to resist this move, but as Chipman indicates, it’s a standard item in the managerialist log of claims. And of course it’s managers who decide what is relevant.

The concept of academic freedom raises a lot of complex issues, including the general ‘whistleblower’ problem, the relative weight placed on freedom of contract and freedom of speech and the nature of universities. But it’s easy to see who is in favour of free speech and who is against it.

Writing in Slate, blogger Mark Kleiman demolishes a report from the University of Pennsylvania claiming that faith-based programs reduce recidivism among prisoners. In essence, the report compared ‘graduates’ of the program with a control population, disregarding the larger group who failed to complete the program satisfactorily for various reasons. When the entire program group is compared to the control group they actually had slightly higher rates of recidivism (not a statistically or substantively significant difference though).

This is a striking outcome for a couple of reasons. First, as Kleiman notes,

You don’t have to believe in faith-healing to think that an intensive 16-month program, with post-release follow-up, run by deeply caring people might be the occasion for some inmates to turn their lives around.

Lots of programs of all kinds are strikingly successful when run, in pilot form, by deeply committed people with particular skills but fail when replicated on a larger scale.

In addition, though, you don’t have to believe in God to believe that faith-healing might work. There’s a long tradition, exemplified by Plato, Machiavelli and more recently by Leo Strauss in which religious or pseudo-religious belief is held to be good for the masses regardless of its truth or falsity. (I recollect the phrase “politic religion” in this context, but Google doesn’t show any links that would support this.)

While I would argue that the long-run effects of the kind deception recommended by Plato and Strauss are invariably pernicious, I would not have been surprised to find it effective in the short run. It’s easy to imagine that a promise of eternal salvation would help in supporting a desire to reform, particularly if you take the view that convicted criminals are typically not rational optimizers. So the results are something of a surprise to me.

UpdateThe Blog Geist being what it is, I am now noticing lots of references to the topic of politic/civic/pragmatic religion popping up. I liked this one from Stentor Danielson who argues that the social benefits of Jesus’ teaching do not depend on general belief that he actually existed.

In the comments thread, Mark Kleiman makes the intriguing claim that Plato’s advocacy of the “Noble Lie” was intended satirically. He says

After all, if you were going to tell fairy-tales hoping that they would be believed, you wouldn’t publish a document explaining that they were in fact fairy-tales.

My view is that Plato held an esoteric/exoteric distinction similar to that of Strauss and assumed that anyone literate enough to read his work was on the esoteric side of the divide.

OTOH, Kleiman’s argument points up how bad Plato’s political judgement was – the same is true of Machiavelli and Strauss. If you think lying and cheating in the service of good ends is desirable, the last thing you should do is say so.

Maybe there are some real philosophers reading this who would like to give a better-informed view on these topics.

Also on Mark Kleiman’s blog

The Pentagon says the occupation of Iraq is going to cost about $50 billion per year, indefinitely. That’s not counting reconstruction costs. Keeping Afghanistan safe for its warlords is now costing about $10 billion per year. Can you imagine how much safer a world we’d have today if we’d been willing to spend half that much on rebuilding the fragments of the Soviet Empire in the years just after 1989? Or how much a tenth of that, well spent, could do for human and economic development in Africa? Or how big a horselaugh you would get if you proposed spending anything like those sums on an activity that didn’t also include killing people?

I made the identical point here (full text here, with some reasonably hard numbers

Consider, for example, the alternative option of allocating the money to improved health care or public safety. Under current conditions, marginal health care and public safety interventions in the United States typically cost around $5 million per life saved. Thus, if the direct war budget of $50 billion had been allocated to public health instead, the lives of around 10 000 Americans could have been saved.
…It seems certain, however, that the war will herald a sustained increase in military expenditure of at least $US100 billion per year. A more reasonable comparison, therefore, is the ambitious proposal of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, led by Harvard Economist Jeffrey Sachs. The Commission aimed to achieve, for all a poor countries, a two-thirds reduction of 1990 child mortality levels, a three-fourths reduction of 1990 maternal mortality ratios and an end to the rising prevalence of major diseases, especially HIV/AIDS.

As the Commission pointed out, in addition to the humanitarian benefits of saving as many as 8 million lives per year, reductions in mortality are directly correlated with a reduced frequency of military coups and state collapse. These provide the breeding ground for terrorism and dictatorship and ultimately lead, in many cases, lead to US military intervention. The estimated cost for the Commission’s seemingly-utopian program over the next decade is estimated at between $US 50 billion and $US 100 billion per year.

Of course, there’s nothing new here: the same point has been made over and over again for decades. What’s frustrating is that the advocates of war as public policy seem to have no answer to this except to dismiss it as politically unrealistic.

Via some critical responses from Kevin Drum, I found this piece by Mark Kleiman opposing the legalization of cocaine. There are some good arguments, and evidence, for drug prohibition. However, it’s crucial to apply a consistency test here. Most of the arguments and evidence that support prohibition of cocaine can also be used to support prohibition of alcohol. (Mark’s “adjustment costs” argument about unemployed coke dealers is an exception, but not, as Kevin notes, a very convincing one).

I wrote a piece for the Fin a while back, looking at the experience of Prohibition in the US and concluding as follows:

In summary, Prohibition produced greater benefits than the War on Drugs, at a lower cost in terms of crime and social dislocation. The idea that it is impossible to change the status of currently legal drugs, does not stand up to an examination of the evidence.

The real reason we will not even attempt to make society drug-free is that we do not want to. I don’t want to give up my evening gin-and-tonic, even if it does me more harm than good. Similarly, despite the appeal of ‘Just Say No’ and the priority placed on abstinence rather than risk reduction in other contexts, no-one seems to be suggesting the promotion of even voluntary abstinence from alcohol.

We are then, left with a paradox. Through the governments we elect, we are willing to turn our homes into fortresses and our streets into battlefields in order to maintain the illegal status of drugs that have been widely used for decades. But the same governments are unwilling to take even modest steps against drugs whose only distinguishing characteristics are a longer history of use and abuse, and the existence of influential producer and consumer lobbies.

I do not know whether our social acceptance of established drugs is a good thing. But until we are prepared to take a consistent position one way or the other, we should stop talking about sending messages. The only message our current policies send is that we are a bunch of hypocrites.

You can read the whole thing here

Update Mark Kleiman responds, suggesting

Even believing that alcohol, on balance, creates a net social deficit, I don’t actually believe that alcohol should be prohibited. Given the enormous user base for alcohol, its prohibition would be operationally nightmarish as well as politically infeasible. Instead, why not ban its sale to those previously convicted of alcohol-induced violence or repeated drunken driving? That ban wouldn’t be perfectly obeyed, but it would have some good effect nonetheless, and wouldn’t create another huge illicit market.

I’m not sure this particular policy would work, but I’m with Kleiman on the point that a pragmatic drug-by-drug policy is needed. I’m reasonably satisfied that this would imply more restrictions on alcohol (e.g. on advertising), further tightening on tobacco, some form of legalisation for widely-used illegal drugs like marijuana and ecstasy and harm minimisation for heroin (needle exchanges, injecting rooms and some form of legal provision for registered addicts). I don’t know much about cocaine – for reasons I don’t understand, it never seems to have become a big deal here.

In posting on utilitarianism and consequentialism a while back, I meant to get on to some relevant implications, but got sidetracked into some interesting disputes with political and legal philosophers. There’s a lot I need to do to shore up my position on the issues raised, but blogging is nonlinear, so I’m going to jump straight to some conclusions, with the plan of filling in the gaps later.

My first observation is that sensible use of consequentialist reasoning requires that we evaluate decisions in terms of the outcomes that could be seen as possible when the decision was made (preferably with probabilities attached, but that’s not always feasible) rather than on the basis of the outcome that actually took place.

To give an example, let’s suppose, as is commonly claimed, that Reagan’s military buildup was designed to force the Soviet rulers to undertake a matching buildup, wrecking their economy and thereby hastening the downfall of Communism. Such a policy obviously entailed a somewhat higher risk that the arms race would lead to nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. I’ll be conservative and make the increase in risk one percentage point over the decade or so of the buildup. And I’ll suppose that the arms race brought forward the collapse of Communism by a full decade.

Considered in advance, and with these assumptions, Reagan’s policy was clearly a bad one. A nuclear war would have killed hundreds of millions of people and even a one per cent chance of such a disaster was too terrible a price to pay for the near-certain benefit of an early end to Communism.

Note that, if you focus on actual consequences, you’ll almost always support gambles of this kind. On the assumptions above, there’s a 99 per cent chance that the policy will pay off, as it did.

Warren Buffett gets stuck into the Republicans over the greed of the rich in pushing for tax relief while paying less (proportionally) than almost anyone else. He also makes the obvious point that its the current account deficit and not the abandonment “strong dollar policy” that will ultimately drive down the US dollar, getting backup from fellow-billionaire George Soros

And while I’m saying nice things about billionaires, this Salon story says Bill Gates is giving away the bulk of his fortune mostly to people in poor countries. (Both Buffett and Soros are also notable for philanthropy).

At the very least, the latter report makes me feel less resentful about paying my Microsoft taxes (the effectively compulsory copy of Office I need primarily for file compatibility).

Going further, it makes me think about billionaires and egalitarianism. Certainly these guys are doing a lot of good with their money. And while there are other billionaires who don’t do anything positive, taken as a group the ultra-rich seem a lot more attractive than the merely rich, as represented, say, by the Bush administration. So perhaps a bit of inequality at the very top of the income distribution (a few billion-dollar fortunes and a corresponding reduction in the number of millionaires/multimillionaires) is not such a bad idea. With this much money it is possible for someone to a lot of good unilaterally.

Kevin Drum at Calpundit says:

But why do I get the feeling that most people who complain about traffic cameras are actually just people who routinely push their luck at intersections and are afraid of getting caught? Is it because their principled arguments always strike me as completely lame?

Yeah, that’s it.

I’d note that, in my experience, complaints about enforcement of road safety laws of all kinds come mainly from the political right, and, as Kevin notes, mostly from people who routinely break the law themselves.

By contrast, suggestions for more lenient treatment of burglars, drug users etc come mostly from liberals, most of whom are not prone to burglary or even (relative to the general population) illegal drug use. This, along with the Bill Bennett affair, leads me to the following gigantic overgeneralisation. Conservatives make excuses for their own wrongdoing, liberals for the wrongdoing of others.

I’ve been meaning to post on this for ages. It’s pretty clear that one reason the government is locked into supporting whatever the US does on Iraq is that Howard is desperate to secure a Free Trade Agreement with the US. It’s not of course, the only reason. Following the US is the automatic reaction of any Australian government, especially a Liberal one, and Howard initially thought that war would be popular. But the FTA is one reason that Howard (unlike, for example, Blair ) has been an unquestioning supporter of the US Administration. Now the cat is out of the bag. Trade Minister Mark Vaile says

like-mindedness with the United States on international issues including a war against Iraq will put Australia at an advantage in the talks.

The US negotiators are busy denying all this – they’d rather have us seen as a loyal ally rather than another member of the “coalition of the billing”.