Brief ideas on the history of property (excerpts from Pipes and Hayek)

PROPERTY

Property and Freedom by  Richard Pipes

pp. 25-26

Sometime during the period in European history vaguely labeled “early modern,” there occurred a major break in the attitude toward property.  It was the consequence of a remarkable expansion of commerce which began in the late Middle Ages and accelerated following the discovery of the New World.  Prior to that time, “property” essentially meant land; and since land was inextricably bound up with the powers of sovereignty, discussions of property raised questions of royal (or papal) authority.  With the surge of commerce, however, property in some parts of Europe came also to mean capital; and capital was free of association with politics, being treated as a personal asset and, as such, owned without qualifications.  A change of attitude followed: whereas in theoretical discussions of the preceding millennium property had been treated as an unavoidable evil, it now could be regarded as a positive good.  This attitude prevailed until the second half of the eighteenth century, when egalitarian sentiments led to a renewed assault on the institution of property, this time in an uncompromising manner for which there was no precedent.

Two further factors contributed to the ascendancy of property.  One was the rise of individualism.  Increasingly the community came to be viewed as an abstraction made up of individuals, and communal well-being as the sum total of individual prosperity.  Individual prosperity, in turn, came to be seen as the reward of a rational life.  The early Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370-1444) praised riches as indispensible to an active public life, which alone deserved to be called “virtuous.”  “All in all,” he wrote, “we need many material goods in order to accomplish deeds, and the greater and more excellent our acts of virtue, the more we depend on those means.”  Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), an even more prominent Italian humanist of the Renaissance, preached a “bourgeois” morality very much like the one that would be propounded by Benjamin Franklin three hundred years later.

 

PROPERTY2

selected excerpts from ch. 2 (pp 29-37) of The Fatal Conceit by F.A. Hayek    (full pdf)

If morals and tradition, rather than intelligence and calculating reason, lifted men above the savages, the distinctive foundations of modern civilisation were laid in antiquity in the region surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. There, possibilities of long-distance trade gave, to those communities whose individuals were allowed to make free use of their individual knowledge, an advantage over those in which common local knowledge or that of a ruler determined the activities of all. So far as we know, the Mediterranean region was the first to see the acceptance of a person's right to dispose over a recognised private domain, thus allowing individuals to develop a dense network of commercial relations among different communities. Such a network worked independently of the views and desires of local chiefs, for the movements of naval traders could hardly be centrally directed in those days. If we may accept the account of a highly respected authority (and one certainly not biased in favour of the market order), `the Graeco-Roman world was essentially and precisely one of private ownership, whether of a few acres or of the enormous domains of Roman senators and emperors, a world of private trade and manufacture' (Finley, 1973:29).



Such an order serving a multiplicity of private purposes could in fact have been formed only on the basis of what I prefer to call several property, which is H. S. Maine's more precise term for what is usually described as private property. If several property is the heart of the morals of any advanced civilisation, the ancient Greeks seem to have been the first to see that it is also inseparable from individual freedom.

…

The crucial point is that the prior development of several property is indispensable for the development of trading, and thereby for the formation of larger coherent and cooperating structures, and for the appearance of those signals we call prices.

…

Similarly, of the revival of European civilisation during the later Middle Ages it could be said that the expansion of capitalism - and European civilisation - owes its origins and raison d'etre to political anarchy (Baechler, 1975:77). It was not under the more powerful governments, but in the towns of the Italian Renaissance, of South Germany and of the Low Countries, and finally in lightly-governed England, i.e., under the rule of the bourgeoisie rather than of warriors, that modern industrialism grew. Protection of several property, not the direction of its use by government, laid the foundations for the growth of the dense network of exchange of services that shaped the extended order.

Nothing is more misleading, then, than the conventional formulae of historians who represent the achievement of a powerful state as the culmination of cultural evolution: it as often marked its end.

…

The institutions of property, as they exist at present, are hardly perfect; indeed, we can hardly yet say in what such perfection might consist. Cultural and moral evolution do require further steps if the institution of several property is in fact to be as beneficial as it can be. For example, we need the general practice of competition to prevent abuse of property. This in turn requires further restraint on the innate feelings of the micro-order, the small group discussed earlier (see chapter one above, and Schoeck, 1966/69), for these instinctual feelings are often threatened not only by several property but sometimes even more so by competition, and this leads people to long doubly for non-competitive `solidarity'.

While property is initially a product of custom, and jurisdiction and legislation have merely developed it in the course of millennia, there is then no reason to suppose that the particular forms it has assumed in the contemporary world are final. Traditional concepts of property rights have in recent times been recognised as a modifiable and very complex bundle whose most effective combinations have not yet been discovered in all areas.

…

Just to illustrate how great our ignorance of the optimum forms of delimitation of various rights remains - despite our confidence in the indispensability of the general institution of several property - a few remarks about one particular form of property may be made.

The slow selection by trial and error of a system of rules delimiting individual ranges of control over different resources has created a curious position. Those very intellectuals who are generally inclined to question those forms of material property which are indispensable for the efficient organisation of the material means of production have become the most enthusiastic supporters of certain immaterial property rights invented only relatively recently, having to do, for example, with literary productions and technological inventions (i.e., copyrights and patents).

…

Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process.

…

Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not demonstrated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged period (Machlup, 1962).

…

Another, related, matter could also mislead. Earlier we mentioned the growing differentiation of various kinds of property rights in a vertical or hierarchical dimension. If, elsewhere in this book, we occasionally speak about the rules of several property as if the contents of individual property were uniform and constant, this should be seen as a simplification that could mislead if understood without the qualifi- cations already stated. This is in fact a field in which the greatest advances in the governmental framework of the spontaneous order may be expected, but which we cannot consider further here.

excerpts from How the West Won (subchapter on Venice)

from How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity  by Rodney Stark

Venice

Shielded by remarkable natural barriers and with unimpeded access to the sea, Venice fended off all Lombard efforts to subordinate it and instead became a province of the Byzantine Empire. This gave the growing city many commercial advantages, such as being free from Byzantine tolls or customs in its trade with the East. That commerce became increasingly important as Islam developed a trading network throughout the region, including Spain, Sicily, the toe of Italy, and North Africa. In fact, Venice probably was the first society to live by trade alone.34 It also was a pioneer in the return of democracy. Distance, and growing Venetian sea power, made Byzantium’s sovereignty over Venice nominal at best.

And as time passed, the “people” became an increasingly inclusive group. Meanwhile, the power of the doge was gradually reduced as elected councils took greater authority, leading to what came to be known as the commune—made up of the body of citizens with voting rights and the executives and legislators elected by them.

In early days, participation in Venetian politics was limited to various elites, but as time passed, and especially as Venice became a major manufacturing center as well as a trading port, the franchise was extended. The principal mechanism by which this was accomplished was by the organization of guilds—associations of persons engaged in a specific craft or trade.

Capitalism was not invented in the Italian city-states, for all that they were fully developed capitalist centers by the end of the eleventh century. Weber was correct in asserting that capitalism had religious roots. It was not, however, originated by Protestants: capitalism first appeared in the great Catholic monastic estates back in the ninth century.

…having originated not as an economic concept but as a pejorative term used by nineteenth-century leftists to condemn wealth and privilege. To adapt the term for serious analysis is a bit like trying to make a social-scientific concept out of a reactionary pig.

Notions of the dignity of labor were incomprehensible in ancient Rome or any other precapitalist society. Traditional societies celebrated consumption while holding work in contempt. In China, for example, the Mandarins grew their fingernails as long as they could (even wearing silver sheaths to protect them from breaking) to make it evident that they did no labor. Capitalism required and encouraged a remarkably different attitude, one that saw work as intrinsically virtuous. Max Weber identified this as the Protestant ethic, so-called because he believed it to be absent from Catholic culture. But Weber was wrong. Belief in the virtues of work arose centuries before Martin Luther was born.

Although capitalism developed in the great monastic estates, it soon found a receptive setting in the newly democratic Italian city-states. In the tenth century these city-states emerged as the banking and trading centers of Europe. Subsequently they industrialized and began producing a large volume of manufactured goods for export across the Mediterranean and to northern Europe and the British Isles. For example, eyeglasses (for nearsightedness as well as farsightedness) were mass-produced by plants in both Florence and Venice, and tens of thousands of pairs were exported annually. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Italian capitalism was the rapid perfection of banking. The Italian bankers quickly developed and adopted double-entry bookkeeping. To facilitate trade, they invented bills of exchange, making it possible to transfer funds on paper rather than transporting coins or precious metal over long distances, which was both difficult and dangerous. Italian bankers also initiated insurance to guard against loss of long-distance shipments by land or sea. Perhaps the most important of all the Italian banking innovations was the perfection of modern arithmetic, based on the adoption of Hindu-Arabic numerals and the concept of zero.

The proximate cause of the rise of Italian capitalism was freedom from the rapacious rulers who repressed and consumed economic progress in most of the world, including most of Europe. Although their political life often was turbulent, these city-states were true republics able to sustain the freedom capitalism requires. Second, centuries of technological progress had laid the necessary foundations for the rise of capitalism, especially the agricultural surpluses needed to sustain cities and to permit specialization. In addition, Christian theology encouraged the idea of progress, which justified long-term investment strategies, and provided moral justifications for the business practices fundamental to capitalism.

If there is a single factor responsible for the rise of the West, it is freedom. Freedom to hope. Freedom to act. Freedom to invest. Freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s dreams as well as one’s labor.

Righteous Mind (excerpts)

RighteousMind

 book   search 

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion  

by Jonathan Haidt

I study moral psychology, and I’m going to make the case that morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible.

But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the health and development of any society.

Part I is about the first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Part II is about the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there’s more to morality than harm and fairness.

But people have so many other powerful moral intuitions, such as those related to liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

Part III is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition.

But human nature was also shaped as groups competed with other groups.

Our bee-like nature facilitates altruism, heroism, war, and genocide.

Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion.

I’ll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some scientists (the “New Atheists”) have argued in recent years.

Understanding the simple fact that morality differs around the world, and even within societies, is the first step toward understanding your righteous mind.

…all societies must resolve a small set of questions about how to order society, the most important being how to balance the needs of individuals and groups.

The sociocentric answer dominated most of the ancient world, but the individualistic answer became a powerful rival during the Enlightenment. The individualistic answer largely vanquished the sociocentric approach in the twentieth century as individual rights expanded rapidly, consumer culture spread, and the Western world reacted with horror to the evils perpetrated by the ultrasociocentric fascist and communist empires.

Even in the United States the social order is a moral order, but it’s an individualistic order built up around the protection of individuals and their freedom.

I was chagrined to discover that psychology in Latin America was not very scientific. It was heavily theoretical, and much of that theory was Marxist, focused on oppression, colonialism, and power.

…had found evidence for Hume’s claim. I had found that moral reasoning was often a servant of moral emotions, and this was a challenge to the rationalist approach that dominated moral psychology.

We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.

The bottom line is that human minds, like animal minds, are constantly reacting intuitively to everything they perceive, and basing their responses on those reactions.

As hominid brains tripled in size over the last 5 million years, developing language and a vastly improved ability to reason, why did we evolve an inner lawyer, rather than an inner judge or scientist? Wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, the real truth about who did what and why, rather than using all that brainpower just to find evidence in support of what they wanted to believe? That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation.

Human beings are the world champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it in large part by creating systems of formal and informal accountability. We’re really good at holding others accountable for their actions, and we’re really skilled at navigating through a world in which others hold us accountable for our own.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. The French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently reviewed the vast research literature on motivated reasoning (in social psychology) and on the biases and errors of reasoning (in cognitive psychology). They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people. As they put it, “skilled arguers … are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.”

The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD). They then reviewed dozens of studies showing that WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature. Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans, and within the United States, the educated upper middle class (like my Penn sample) is the most unusual of all.

Morality is so rich and complex, so multifaceted and internally contradictory. Pluralists such as Shweder rise to the challenge, offering theories that can explain moral diversity within and across cultures. Yet many authors reduce morality to a single principle, usually some variant of welfare maximization (basically, help people, don’t hurt them).1 Or sometimes it’s justice or related notions of fairness, rights, or respect for individuals and their autonomy.2 There’s The Utilitarian Grill, serving only sweeteners (welfare), and The Deontological Diner, serving only salts (rights). Those are your options. Neither Shweder nor I am saying that “anything goes,” or that all societies or all cuisines are equally good. But we believe that moral monism—the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle—leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles.

Hume believed that “moral science” had to begin with careful inquiry into what humans are really like. And when he examined human nature—in history, in political affairs, and among his fellow philosophers—he saw that “sentiment” (intuition) is the driving force of our moral lives, whereas reasoning is biased and impotent, fit primarily to be a servant of the passions.8 He also saw a diversity of virtues, and he rejected attempts by some of his contemporaries to reduce all of morality to a single virtue such as kindness, or to do away with virtues and replace them with a few moral laws.

Hume got it right. When he died in 1776, he and other sentimentalists10 had laid a superb foundation for “moral science,” one that has, in my view, been largely vindicated by modern research.11 You would think, then, that in the decades after his death, the moral sciences progressed rapidly. But you would be wrong. In the decades after Hume’s death the rationalists claimed victory over religion and took the moral sciences off on a two-hundred-year tangent.

We’ve advanced a lot since the 1970s in our understanding of the brain, and now we know that traits can be innate without being either hardwired or universal. As the neuroscientist Gary Marcus explains, “Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.”2 To replace wiring diagrams, Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter—be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality—consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. Marcus’s analogy leads to the best definition of innateness I have ever seen: Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.… “Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience.”

We are the descendants of the individuals who were best able to play the game—to rise in status while cultivating the protection of superiors and the allegiance of subordinates.

To put this all together: Moral Foundations Theory says that there are (at least) six psychological systems that comprise the universal foundations of the world’s many moral matrices.53 The various moralities found on the political left tend to rest most strongly on the Care/harm and Liberty/oppression foundations. These two foundations support ideals of social justice, which emphasize compassion for the poor and a struggle for political equality among the subgroups that comprise society. Social justice movements emphasize solidarity—they call for people to come together to fight the oppression of bullying, domineering elites. (This is why there is no separate equality foundation. People don’t crave equality for its own sake; they fight for equality when they perceive that they are being bullied or dominated, as during the American and French revolutions, and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s.)

The remaining three foundations—Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation—show the biggest and most consistent partisan differences. Liberals are ambivalent about these foundations at best, whereas social conservatives embrace them.

Liberals have a three-foundation morality, whereas conservatives use all six. Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression. Conservative morality rests on all six foundations, although conservatives are more willing than liberals to sacrifice Care and let some people get hurt in order to achieve their many other moral objectives.

Until Democrats understand the Durkheimian vision of society and the difference between a six-foundation morality and a three-foundation morality, they will not understand what makes people vote Republican.

But my goal here is not just to build a legal case in an academic battle that you might care nothing about. My goal is to show you that morality is the key to understanding humanity. I’ll take you on a brief tour of humanity’s origins in which we’ll see how groupishness helped us transcend selfishness. I’ll show that our groupishness—despite all of the ugly and tribal things it makes us do—is one of the magic ingredients that made it possible for civilizations to burst forth, cover the Earth, and live ever more peacefully in just a few thousand years.

But if we simply ask whether humans went through the same evolutionary process as bees—a major transition from selfish individualism to groupish hives that prosper when they find a way to suppress free riding—then the analogy gets much tighter. Many animals are social: they live in groups, flocks, or herds. But only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.

Tomasello believes that human ultrasociality arose in two steps. The first was the ability to share intentions in groups of two or three people who were actively hunting or foraging together. (That was the Rubicon.) Then, after several hundred thousand years of evolution for better sharing and collaboration as nomadic hunter-gatherers, more collaborative groups began to get larger, perhaps in response to the threat of other groups. Victory went to the most cohesive groups—the ones that could scale up their ability to share intentions from three people to three hundred or three thousand people. This was the second step: Natural selection favored increasing levels of what Tomasello calls “group-mindedness”—the ability to learn and conform to social norms, feel and share group-related emotions, and, ultimately, to create and obey social institutions, including religion. A new set of selection pressures operated within groups (e.g., nonconformists were punished, or at very least were less likely to be chosen as partners for joint ventures)58 as well as between groups (cohesive groups took territory and other resources from less cohesive groups).

We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.93 If you take that claim metaphorically, then the groupish and hivish things that people do will make a lot more sense.

Among the few useful scholars she found in her quest was Emile Durkheim. Durkheim insisted that there were “social facts” that were not reducible to facts about individuals. Social facts—such as the suicide rate or norms about patriotism—emerge as people interact. They are just as real and worthy of study (by sociology) as are people and their mental states (studied by psychology).

Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society. From his studies of religion he concluded that people have two distinct sets of “social sentiments,” one for each level.

In humans the mirror neuron system is found in brain regions that correspond directly to those studied in macaques. But in humans the mirror neurons have a much stronger connection to emotion-related areas of the brain—first to the insular cortex, and from there to the amygdala and other limbic areas.37 People feel each other’s pain and joy to a much greater degree than do any other primates. Just seeing someone else smile activates some of the same neurons as when you smile. The other person is effectively smiling in your brain, which makes you happy and likely to smile, which in turn passes the smile into someone else’s brain. Mirror neurons are perfectly suited for Durkheim’s collective sentiments, particularly the emotional “electricity” of collective effervescence.

Fascism is hive psychology scaled up to grotesque heights. It’s the doctrine of the nation as a superorganism, within which the individual loses all importance.

It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love—love within groups—amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.

Religions are social facts. Religion cannot be studied in lone individuals any more than hivishness can be studied in lone bees. Durkheim’s definition of religion makes its binding function clear: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.3 In this chapter I continue exploring the third principle of moral psychology: Morality binds and blinds. Many scientists misunderstand religion because they ignore this principle and examine only what is most visible. They focus on individuals and their supernatural beliefs, rather than on groups and their binding practices.

In Wilson’s account, human minds and human religions have been coevolving (just like bees and their physical hives) for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. And if this is true, then we cannot expect people to abandon religion so easily. Of course people can and do forsake organized religions, which are extremely recent cultural innovations. But even those who reject all religions cannot shake the basic religious psychology of figure 11.2: doing linked to believing linked to belonging. Asking people to give up all forms of sacralized belonging and live in a world of purely “rational” beliefs might be like asking people to give up the Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon. It can be done, but it would take a great deal of careful engineering, and even after ten generations, the descendants of those colonists might find themselves with inchoate longings for gravity and greenery.

The only thing that was reliably and powerfully associated with the moral benefits of religion was how enmeshed people were in relationships with their co-religionists. It’s the friendships and group activities, carried out within a moral matrix that emphasizes selflessness. That’s what brings out the best in people. Putnam and Campbell reject the New Atheist emphasis on belief and reach a conclusion straight out of Durkheim: “It is religious belongingness that matters for neighborliness, not religious believing.”

Putnam and Campbell’s work shows that religion in the United States nowadays generates such vast surpluses of social capital that much of it spills over and benefits outsiders.

Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

Utilitarians since Jeremy Bentham have focused intently on individuals. They try to improve the welfare of society by giving individuals what they want. But a Durkheimian version of utilitarianism would recognize that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness. It would begin with the premise that social order is extraordinarily precious and difficult to achieve. A Durkheimian utilitarianism would be open to the possibility that the binding foundations—Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity—have a crucial role to play in a good society.

I just want Bentham to read Durkheim and recognize that we are Homo duplex before he tells any of us, or our legislators, how to go about maximizing that total good.

In the book Moral, Believing Animals, the sociologist Christian Smith writes about the moral matrices within which human life takes place.27 He agrees with Durkheim that every social order has at its core something sacred, and he shows how stories, particularly “grand narratives,” identify and reinforce the sacred core of each matrix.

Smith wrote this narrative before Moral Foundations Theory existed, but you can see that the narrative derives its moral force primarily from the Care/harm foundation (concern for the suffering of victims) and the Liberty/oppression foundation (a celebration of liberty as freedom from oppression, as well as freedom to pursue self-defined happiness). In this narrative, Fairness is political equality (which is part of opposing oppression); there are only oblique hints of Fairness as proportionality.29 Authority is mentioned only as an evil, and there is no mention of Loyalty or Sanctity.

Muller went through a series of claims about human nature and institutions, which he said are the core beliefs of conservatism. Conservatives believe that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed (yes, I thought; see Glaucon, Tetlock, and Ariely in chapter 4). Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience (yes; see Hume in chapter 2 and Baron-Cohen on systemizing in chapter 6). Institutions emerge gradually as social facts, which we then respect and even sacralize, but if we strip these institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary contrivances that exist only for our benefit, we render them less effective. We then expose ourselves to increased anomie and social disorder (yes; see Durkheim in chapters 8 and 11).

Based on my own research, I had no choice but to agree with these conservative claims. As I continued to read the writings of conservative intellectuals, from Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century through Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell in the twentieth, I began to see that they had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before. They understood the importance of what I’ll call moral capital.

Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy. When we think about very large communities such as nations, the challenge is extraordinary and the threat of moral entropy is intense. There is not a big margin for error; many nations are failures as moral communities, particularly corrupt nations where dictators and elites run the country for their own benefit. If you don’t value moral capital, then you won’t foster values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that increase it.

And while high moral capital helps a community to function efficiently, the community can use that efficiency to inflict harm on other communities. High moral capital can be obtained within a cult or a fascist nation, as long as most people truly accept the prevailing moral matrix.

Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently.

Throughout this book I’ve argued that large-scale human societies are nearly miraculous achievements. I’ve tried to show how our complicated moral psychology coevolved with our religions and our other cultural inventions (such as tribes and agriculture) to get us where we are today. I have argued that we are products of multilevel selection, including group selection, and that our “parochial altruism” is part of what makes us such great team players.

If you destroy all groups and dissolve all internal structure, you destroy your moral capital. Conservatives understand this point.

Robert Putnam has provided a wealth of evidence that Burke and Smith were right. In the previous chapter I told you about his finding that religions make Americans into “better neighbors and better citizens.” I told you his conclusion that the active ingredient that made people more virtuous was enmeshing them into relationships with their co-religionists. Anything that binds people together into dense networks of trust makes people less selfish. In an earlier study, Putnam found that ethnic diversity had the opposite effect. In a paper revealingly titled “E Pluribus Unum,” Putnam examined the level of social capital in hundreds of American communities and discovered that high levels of immigration and ethnic diversity seem to cause a reduction in social capital.

In particular, liberals often have difficulty seeing moral capital, which I defined as the resources that sustain a moral community. I suggested that liberals and conservatives are like yin and yang—both are “necessary elements of a healthy state of political life,” as John Stuart Mill put it. Liberals are experts in care; they are better able to see the victims of existing social arrangements, and they continually push us to update those arrangements and invent new ones.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrestled throughout his career with the problem of the world’s moral diversity and what to make of it. He firmly rejected moral relativism: I am not a relativist; I do not say “I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps”—each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false.1 He endorsed pluralism instead, and justified it in this way: I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments.… There is not an infinity of [values]: the number of human values, of values which I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite—let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 27, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference this makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.

We may spend most of our waking hours advancing our own interests, but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It’s not just a capacity; it’s the portal to many of life’s most cherished experiences.

We are deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning.

Statism and cronyism

An Empire of Taxation

The government role in Obama’s budget looks like something last seen in 17th century Europe.

By

Daniel Henninger

Feb. 4, 2015 7:16 p.m. ET

264 COMMENTS

original article

The president’s annual budget reminds the Beltway tribes of what they do—tax the country, distribute revenues to their allies, and euphemize it as a budget. With his 2015 budget, Barack Obama at last makes clear his presidency’s reason for being: to establish an empire of taxation.

Commenting on Mr. Obama’s nearly $4 trillion budget, Jared Bernstein, a former policy adviser to Vice President Joe Biden , told the New York Times : “It’s a visionary document and basically says, ‘You’re with me or you’re not,’ and we can have big philosophical arguments about the role of government.”

He is right. For the Obama presidency that is what it has always been about: You’re with me or you’re not. The government role reflected in this budget looks less like a 21st century American institution than a system last seen in 17th century Europe, in which a leader defines national wealth by handing out dispensations, emoluments and punishments.

The administration’s infliction of punishment deserves special note, most recently what the Obama Justice Department did this week to Standard & Poor’s, the bond-rating agency.

S&P had been very public in saying the Justice Department’s investigation of the company was political payback for its 2011 downgrade of the U.S.’s credit rating. This week S&P agreed to pay the government a mind-boggling settlement of $1.5 billion, while pointedly withdrawing its charge of political retribution. What we have here is the creation of a political crime, heretofore unrecognized in the U.S., known as lèse-majesté, or insulting the majesty of the sovereign.

House and Senate Republicans will submit their own budgets in coming weeks. News analysis of the Obama budget admits that its spending and tax priorities are a “utopian vision” (the New York Times). But it argues that congressional Republicans may eventually buy into a version of Mr. Obama’s own private utopia because he’s offering them spending they can’t refuse on infrastructure and defense. The White House also calculates the Republicans are desperate to escape blame for Washington’s “gridlock.”

Maybe it’s time for the Republicans to tell the Obama Democrats that if they want to own the issue of promising to bring the American people federal government goodness, they can have it. The Republicans should claim as their own what’s left, which is to say the entire private sector.
In six years, the Obama Democrats have abandoned any belief in the idea that the private sector is the primary cause of American prosperity. Instead, they seem to see the private sector as a kind of tax sump-pump, a dumb machine whose only purpose is tax flow.

At the small end of the private economy, starting this year, employers with at least 50 full-time workers who fail to offer health care must pay an Orwellian-sounding ObamaCare tax called the Employer Shared Responsibility Payment. At the other, larger end, the Obama budget offers corporations with overseas profits a convoluted tax deal, whose payments will be dedicated, he says, to underwriting public infrastructure projects.

“Infrastructure” is supposedly the carrot with which Mr. Obama will attract Republican rabbits into his spending garden. But refusing to bite on Mr. Obama’s carrots would be a good way for Republicans to re-establish credibility with American voters.

The most lasting contribution of the conservative insurgency out in the country may be that it blew the whistle on Washington’s bipartisan crony capitalism. Republicans should use infrastructure to join the whistleblowers.

Building infrastructure could indeed be a real public good, if the political process beneath it weren’t so bad. Economists for the International Monetary Fund first blew the whistle on the downside of infrastructure spending in an important 1998 paper, “Roads to Nowhere: How Corruption in Public Investment Hurts Growth.” Last spring the Public Administration Review similarly published a study, “The Impact of Public Officials’ Corruption on the Size and Allocation of U.S. State Spending,” notably spending on highways and construction.

Barack Obama chants “spending on infrastructure” as if it were the holy of holies. It’s not, and most voters don’t need IMF economists to tell them “infrastructure” is code for the campaign contributions that flow back to the politicians only after they spend someone’s taxes on cement, bicycle paths and bullet trains.

That is the empire of taxation. It is an isolated system, based in Washington, which allocates what it exacts from the private sector. Sometimes it calls the allocations “spending choices.” Other times they are purported to be benign decisions about who gets tax credits and who doesn’t get tax credits.
Isolated systems can suffocate. The fourth-quarter growth number for 2014 came in below expectations, at 2.6%. That was of a piece with the historically weak economic growth of the Obama presidency, which is the main cause of stagnant middle-class incomes.

The most disturbing number inside the fourth quarter’s details was that business investment grew only 1.9%. Business investment is the heart and soul of the private sector that the Obama years have left behind. Republicans, the only alternative out there, need to rediscover it and reclaim it.

The reality of some marginal tax rate history

Peter Schiff: The Fantasy of a 91% Top Income Tax Rate

A liberal article of faith that confiscatory taxes fed the postwar boom turns out to be an Edsel of an economic idea.

original article

By

Peter Schiff

Dec. 6, 2012 7:02 p.m. ET

Democratic Party leaders, President Obama in particular, are forever telling the country that wealthy Americans are taxed at too low a rate and pay too little in taxes. The need to correct this seeming injustice is framed not simply in terms of fairness. Higher tax rates on the wealthy, we're told, would help balance the budget, allow for more "investment" in America's future and foster better economic growth for all. In support of this claim, like-minded liberal pundits point out that in the 1950s, when America's economic might was at its zenith, the rich faced tax rates as high as 91%.

True enough, the top marginal income-tax rate in the 1950s was much higher than today's top rate of 35%—but the share of income paid by the wealthiest Americans has essentially remained flat since then.

In 1958, the top 3% of taxpayers earned 14.7% of all adjusted gross income and paid 29.2% of all federal income taxes. In 2010, the top 3% earned 27.2% of adjusted gross income and their share of all federal taxes rose proportionally, to 51%.

So if the top marginal tax rate has fallen to 35% from 91%, how in the world has the tax burden on the wealthy remained roughly the same? Two factors are responsible. Lower- and middle-income workers now bear a significantly lighter burden than in the past. And the confiscatory top marginal rates of the 1950s were essentially symbolic—very few actually paid them. In reality the vast majority of top earners faced lower effective rates than they do today.

In 1958, an 81% marginal tax rate applied to incomes above $140,000, and the 91% rate kicked in at $400,000 for couples. These figures are in unadjusted 1958 dollars and correspond today to nominal income levels that are about eight times higher. That year, according to Internal Revenue Service records, about 10,000 of the nation's 45.6 million tax filers had income that was taxed at 81% or higher. The number is an estimate and is inexact because the IRS tables list the number of tax filers by income ranges, not precisely by the number who paid at the 81% rate.

In 1958, approximately two million filers (4.4% of all taxpayers) earned the $12,000 or more for married couples needed to face marginal rates as high as 30%. These Americans paid about 35% of all income taxes. And now? In 2010, 3.9 million taxpayers (2.75% of all taxpayers) were subjected to rates that were 33% or higher. These Americans—many of whom would hardly call themselves wealthy—reported an adjusted gross income of $209,000 or higher, and they paid 49.7% of all income taxes.

In contrast, the share of taxes paid by the bottom two-thirds of taxpayers has fallen dramatically over the same period. In 1958, these Americans accounted for 41.3% of adjusted gross income and paid 29% of all federal taxes. By 2010, their share of adjusted gross income had fallen to 22.5%. But their share of taxes paid fell far more dramatically—to 6.7%. The 77% decline represents the single biggest difference in the way the tax burden is shared in this country since the late 1950s.

The changes came about not so much by movements in rates but by the addition of tax credits for the poor and the elimination of exemptions for the wealthy. In 1958, even the lowest-tier filers, which included everyone making up to $5,000 annually, were subjected to an effective 20% rate. Today, almost half of all tax filers have no income-tax liability whatsoever, and many "taxpayers" actually get a net refund from the government. Those nostalgic for 1950s-era "tax fairness" should bear this in mind.

The tax code of the 1950s allowed upper-income Americans to take exemptions and deductions that are unheard of today. Tax shelters were widespread, and not just for the superrich. The working wealthy—including doctors, lawyers, business owners and executives—were versed in the art of creating losses to lower their tax exposure.

For instance, a doctor who earned $50,000 through his medical practice could reduce his taxable income to zero with $50,000 in paper losses or depreciation from property he owned through a real-estate investment partnership. Huge numbers of professionals signed up for all kinds of money-losing schemes. Today, a corresponding doctor earning $500,000 can deduct a maximum of $3,000 from his taxable income, no matter how large the loss.

Those 1950s gambits lowered tax liabilities but dissuaded individuals from engaging in the more beneficial activities of increasing their incomes and expanding their businesses. As a result, they were a net drag on the economy. When Ronald Reagan finally lowered rates in the 1980s, he did so in exchange for scrapping uneconomical deductions. When business owners stopped trying to figure out how to lose money, the economy boomed.

It's hard to determine how much otherwise taxable income disappeared through tax shelters in the 1950s. As a result, direct comparisons between the 1950s and now are difficult. However, it is worth noting that from 1958 to 2010, the taxes paid by the top 3% of earners, as a percentage of total personal income (which can't be reduced by shelters), increased to 3.96% from 2.72%, while the percentage paid by the bottom two-thirds of filers fell to 0.51% in 2010 from 2.7%. This starker division of relative tax burdens can be explained by the inability of upper-income groups to shelter income.

It is a testament to the shallow nature of the national economic conversation that higher tax rates can be justified by reference to a fantasy—a 91% marginal rate that hardly any top earners paid.

In reality, tax policies that diminish the incentives and capacities of innovators, business owners and investors will not spur economic improvement. Such policies will, however, satisfy the instincts of those who want to "stick it to the rich." Never mind that the rich have already been stuck fairly well.

Mr. Schiff is the author of "The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy" (St. Martin's Press, 2012) and host of the daily radio program "The Peter Schiff Show."

Editor's note: This article has been amended as per the following correction:

Peter Schiff's Dec. 7 op-ed, "The Fantasy of a 91% Top Income Tax Rate," included some faulty data due to a misreading of IRS tax tables.

In 1958, an 81% marginal tax rate applied to income of $140,000 and the 91% rate at $400,000 for married couples, which would correspond to income levels about eight times higher today. The article misstated the income thresholds and the comparison to income today.

In the same year, roughly 10,000 of the nation's 45.6 million tax filers had income subject to a rate of 81% or higher. The number is an estimate and is inexact because the IRS tables list the number of tax filers by income ranges, not precisely by the number who paid at the 81% rate. The original article said the number of such filers was 236.

Also in 1958, about two million filers (4.4% of all taxpayers) earned the $12,000 for married filers needed to face marginal rates as high as 30%. These Americans paid about 35% of all income taxes but could not all be defined as genuinely wealthy. The article misstated these numbers.

Better late than never

George McGovern in the Journal

A Politician's Dream Is a Businessman's Nightmare: A 1992 column on the realities of running a business 

original article

 

George McGovern

Oct. 21, 2012 10:57 a.m. ET

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
-- Justice Felix Frankfurter

It's been 11 years since I left the U.S. Senate, after serving 24 years in high public office. After leaving a career in politics, I devoted much of my time to public lectures that took me into every state in the union and much of Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

In 1988, I invested most of the earnings from this lecture circuit acquiring the leasehold on Connecticut's Stratford Inn. Hotels, inns and restaurants have always held a special fascination for me. The Stratford Inn promised the realization of a longtime dream to own a combination hotel, restaurant and public conference facility -- complete with an experienced manager and staff.
In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business, especially during a recession of the kind that hit New England just as I was acquiring the inn's 43-year leasehold. I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender.

Today we are much closer to a general acknowledgment that government must encourage business to expand and grow. Bill Clinton, Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerrey and others have, I believe, changed the debate of our party. We intuitively know that to create job opportunities we need entrepreneurs who will risk their capital against an expected payoff. Too often, however, public policy does not consider whether we are choking off those opportunities.

My own business perspective has been limited to that small hotel and restaurant in Stratford, Conn., with an especially difficult lease and a severe recession. But my business associates and I also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never have doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: "Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape." It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.

For example, the papers today are filled with stories about businesses dropping health coverage for employees. We provided a substantial package for our staff at the Stratford Inn. However, were we operating today, those costs would exceed $150,000 a year for health care on top of salaries and other benefits. There would have been no reasonable way for us to absorb or pass on these costs.
Some of the escalation in the cost of health care is attributed to patients suing doctors. While one cannot assess the merit of all these claims, I've also witnessed firsthand the explosion in blame-shifting and scapegoating for every negative experience in life.

Today, despite bankruptcy, we are still dealing with litigation from individuals who fell in or near our restaurant. Despite these injuries, not every misstep is the fault of someone else. Not every such incident should be viewed as a lawsuit instead of an unfortunate accident. And while the business owner may prevail in the end, the endless exposure to frivolous claims and high legal fees is frightening.

Our Connecticut hotel, along with many others, went bankrupt for a variety of reasons, the general economy in the Northeast being a significant cause. But that reason masks the variety of other challenges we faced that drive operating costs and financing charges beyond what a small business can handle.

It is clear that some businesses have products that can be priced at almost any level. The price of raw materials (e.g., steel and glass) and life-saving drugs and medical care are not easily substituted by consumers. It is only competition or antitrust that tempers price increases. Consumers may delay purchases, but they have little choice when faced with higher prices.

In services, however, consumers do have a choice when faced with higher prices. You may have to stay in a hotel while on vacation, but you can stay fewer days. You can eat in restaurants fewer times per month, or forgo a number of services from car washes to shoeshines. Every such decision eventually results in job losses for someone. And often these are the people without the skills to help themselves -- the people I've spent a lifetime trying to help.

In short, "one-size-fits-all" rules for business ignore the reality of the marketplace. And setting thresholds for regulatory guidelines at artificial levels -- e.g., 50 employees or more, $500,000 in sales -- takes no account of other realities, such as profit margins, labor intensive vs. capital intensive businesses, and local market economics.

The problem we face as legislators is: Where do we set the bar so that it is not too high to clear? I don't have the answer. I do know that we need to start raising these questions more often.

Mr. McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, died Sunday at age 90.

Dynamic revenue

What Democrats and the CBO Don’t Get

The numbers reveal that a robust economy, not higher taxes, is the most reliable way to increase federal revenue.

original article

By

Michael Solon

Feb. 2, 2015 7:37 p.m. ET

452 COMMENTS

The recent rule change by House Republicans to incorporate the macroeconomic impact of major legislation into official budget estimates—“dynamic scoring”—has triggered heated criticisms. But three decades of hard accounting data, in addition to supporting the rule change, should prompt Washington to reconsider the way it thinks about what drives federal revenues.

Since 1984 the Congressional Budget Office has tracked all revisions to its triennial projections of federal revenues, outlays and deficits to account for economic, technical and legislative changes. Its data—from the “Changes in CBO’s Baseline Projections” tables that are published annually in the CBO Budget Outlook, the Budget Update and the Analysis of the President’s Budget—indicate which federal policies grew or shrank the economy significantly enough to generate measurable revenue gains or losses. The data also reveal the failures of core Democratic economic policies and flaws within the CBO’s current economic model.

One fact above all others emerges from the data: Economic growth is the single most powerful determinant of federal revenues.

The CBO today projects that if annual gross domestic product were to average one percentage point higher (in real terms), there would be an additional $2.9 trillion in revenues and $370 billion less in federal spending over a decade. Conversely, its 10-year revenue projections have fallen $5.6 trillion since 2007. Most of the lost revenue was not due to the financial crisis and recession, but to the historically weak recovery.

Here’s another vital fact: Economy-driven revenue changes can dwarf legislative changes. Consider the budget summit deal enacted in November 1990. The CBO projected that the law’s variety of tax hikes would raise $159 billion in revenues over five years. Two months later the CBO reported that the 1990 recession would cut revenue projections by $206 billion—wiping out 130% of the revenue supposed to be gained by higher taxes.

US Policy Metrics Partner Michael Solon on data that shows economic growth, not higher taxes, is the most reliable way to raise federal revenue.

Or consider a more recent example: In December 2013 the tax cuts for upper incomes and small businesses enacted in the George W. Bush years were allowed to expire, effectively a $615 billion, 10-year tax hike. Yet the CBO’s revenue estimates were lowered in both February and August of 2014, because of economic weakness. The projected revenue loss over a decade: $1.9 trillion.

A week ago Monday the CBO reported additional 10-year revenue losses of $234 billion from slower growth, offsetting three-fourths of the $320 billion in new taxes proposed in the president’s State of the Union address the previous Tuesday.

Economic growth also can add far more to revenues than legislatively driven tax hikes. The CBO projected that President Clinton’s 1993 tax increase would raise $268 billion over five years. But after the 1997 bipartisan agreements on budget restraint, welfare reform and capital-gains tax cuts, revenues surged, which the CBO said in 2000 arose “from the strength of the economy and changes in characteristics of income.” The CBO’s projected revenues for that year “are now $303 billion more than estimated in 1997.”

In other words, the government gained in one strong year more than the first five years of Clinton’s 1993 tax hike. Overall, an extra $1.34 trillion in revenues flowed from September 1997 to January 2001 solely for economic reasons—five times higher than the projected revenues from the 1993 tax hike.

The CBO data also help identify the periods and policies where both public revenues and private incomes grew the most or the least. These data reveal flaws both in Democratic economic remedies and within the CBO’s economic model.

Once President Obama’s agenda of stimulus and expansion of government power was implemented—along with the Federal Reserve’s record low interest rates—the CBO projected strong economic growth after 2010. In the three annual budget reports after the stimulus bill’s passage, the CBO projected average GDP growth for 2011, 2012 and 2013 of 4.3%, 3.8% and 3.4%, respectively. Instead, growth averaged 2%.

The Clinton administration is another example. Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, and over the next few years pushed through restraints on spending and regulation. As a result of declining federal borrowing, interest rates also were lower. After 1997 the CBO repeatedly projected real gross domestic product growth outside the initial year to drop to a 2.1% average during 1997 to 2000. Yet actual GDP growth averaged 4.7%.

Among many other changes, the 1986 Tax Reform Act lowered the top marginal income-tax rate to 28% from 50%. Instead of projecting an economic boost, the CBO immediately lowered projected average gross national product growth rates for 1987 through 1989 to 2.9% from 3.3% (CBO projections were changed to GDP in 1992). The final GNP figures averaged 3.8% growth, including a strong 4.2% surge in 1988 when the full rate reductions kicked in.

Neither Democrats nor the CBO appear to alter their assumptions or correct their model for economic reality. Both discount the impact of marginal tax-rate changes. The CBO has repeatedly projected since 2001 that the U.S. would enjoy numerous years of 3% or higher growth. But the only two years that occurred were in 2004 and 2005, immediately after the accelerated reductions in virtually all marginal tax rates.

The overwhelming weight of CBO accounting supports dynamic scoring. CBO revisions confirm that slow growth since 2007 has triggered a massive revenue gap, that all revenues lost in past recessions have been recaptured in recoveries until the current one, and that pro-growth policies have delivered revenue surges.

No evidence in the CBO data appears for the macroeconomic feedback that Democrats claim and the CBO assumes from stimulus spending. The data highlight the economic and fiscal benefits to the private and public sectors from tax reductions and “austerity” programs that Republicans tend to pursue but the CBO and Democrats tend to dismiss. Such findings may not change the CBO’s future projections or Democratic policy assumptions, but these are the undeniable facts of the CBO’s past accounting.

Mr. Solon was budget adviser to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and is currently a partner at US Policy Metrics.

Conspicuous Compassion

What exactly is “empathy” good for?

By

James Taranto

Jan. 27, 2015 3:03 p.m. ET

372 COMMENTS

original article

Nicholas Kristof reports from his hometown of Yamhill, Ore., on the sad life and early death of his high-school cross-country teammate Kevin Green, who was laid to rest Saturday: “The doctors say he died at age 54 of multiple organ failure, but in a deeper sense he died of inequality and a lack of good jobs.”

Kristof doesn’t actually dispute the doctors’ opinion as to the proximate cause of Green’s death. His quarrel is with some straw men who have a different view from Kristof’s of the ultimate cause:

Lots of Americans would have seen Kevin—obese with a huge gray beard, surviving on disability and food stamps—as a moocher. They would have been harshly judgmental: Why don’t you look after your health? Why did you father two kids outside of marriage?

That acerbic condescension reflects one of this country’s fundamental problems: an empathy gap.

Yet Kristof’s account of his friend’s life makes some good points on behalf of the straw men. Green did make a series of bad choices, including fathering children out of wedlock: “He fell in love and had twin boys that he doted on. But because he and his girlfriend struggled financially, they never married.”

When he lost his job because of a back injury, the girlfriend took the kids and left him. That’s when he let his health go: “Kevin’s weight ballooned to 350 pounds, and he developed diabetes and had a couple of heart attacks,” Kristof reports. “He grew marijuana and self-medicated with it, [Green’s brother] Clayton says, and was arrested for drug offenses.”
 
Even Clayton Green lends his support to conservative arguments about the baneful incentives of welfare: “Disability [benefits] helped Kevin by providing a monthly check that he desperately needed, but it also hurt him because he might have looked harder for a job if he hadn’t been getting those checks, Clayton says.”

The other side of the story is that Kevin Green was a victim of emergent economic change:

[Kevin’s] dad, Thomas, had only a third-grade education and couldn’t read. But he had a good union job as a cement finisher, paying far above the minimum wage, and he worked hard and made sure his kids did, too. . . . The local glove factory and feed store closed, and other blue-collar employers cut back. Good union jobs became hard to find.

Even before the back injury and breakup set off the downward spiral, Kevin was able to get only lower-paying, nonunion jobs.

For all this, Kristof proclaims himself agnostic as to the ultimate cause of Green’s early death: “I have trouble diagnosing just what went wrong in that odyssey from sleek distance runner to his death at 54, but the lack of good jobs was central to it. Sure, Kevin made mistakes, but his dad had opportunities for good jobs that Kevin never had.”

It’s not an unreasonable argument. It seems fair to surmise that Green’s life chances would have been better had he not come of age at a time when the value of unskilled and semiskilled labor was declining as a result of market forces beyond his control.

Another point—which Kristof doesn’t develop, except to observe in passing that “family structure dissolved”—is that if Green had lived, say, 50 years earlier, he and his girlfriend would likely have been unable to resist the social pressure to marry after she became pregnant. That in turn would have made it harder for her simply to walk out on him, an action that, according to Clayton Green, “knocked him to the dirt” and “destroyed his self-esteem.”

But how does any of the foregoing support Kristof’s contention that “an empathy gap” is “one of this country’s fundamental problems”? That is the central conceit of the column, which is titled “Where’s the Empathy?” and concludes by vainly consoling the decedent: “Those who would judge you don’t have a clue. They could use a dose of your own empathy.”

Were Americans more empathetic in 1960, when Thomas Green was a new father, than they are today? Did empathy create those union jobs that were so much more plentiful when the Green père was of working age? Is there any plausible way in which empathy could have countered, or could now reverse, the trends toward globalization and automation that contributed to Kevin Green’s difficulty making a living?

Kristof does not even attempt to grapple with these questions, not that much grappling is required. It seems obvious that the impersonal economic and social forces that contributed to Green’s undoing have little if anything to do with empathy or the lack thereof.

So what purpose does “empathy” serve for Kristof’s argument? Mostly, it seems to us, that of a status display. In a particularly unattractive passage, Kristof reminds his readers that he is a lot more successful than his high-school chum ever was: “My kids would see Kevin and me together and couldn’t believe he had run cross country with me, and that he wasn’t 20 years older.”

Dan Calabrese argues that it is not Green over whom Kristof wishes to assert his higher status: “Kristof needed to let us know all the failures in Kevin Green’s life because he wanted to tell us something about Nicholas Kristof, which is: Kevin Green made all these mistakes and lived all these failures, but Nicholas Kristof did not judge him, unlike all you horrible people. Nicholas Kristof is morally superior to you.”

It seems to us Calabrese doesn’t quite hit the target here, though he comes close. Kristof’s ideal reader is one who shares his sense of moral superiority. The message is more like: Nicholas Kristof did not judge him, unlike all those horrible people. You are morally superior to them.

In his 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” economist Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” to refer to displays of luxury for the purpose of asserting one’s status. The Kristof column, like much of his work, is an example of conspicuous compassion—an ostentatious, status-seeking display of empathy.

To be sure, Kristof is no gentleman of leisure. He is an industrious journalist who produces close to 100 columns a year, plus blog posts and the occasional book. His affluent readers eagerly consume his work, which reinforces their own high moral status. It’s nice work if you can get it.