I posted some comments here, and then some more here and here and here.
I'm starting to think that the biggest problem for global/scalar consequentialism is that, rightly conceived, it tells moral philosophers that they ought not be moral philosophers. (Which is one story to tell about utilitarianism: the fundamental 'moral philosophy' questions were worked out no later than Sidgwick, after which point they all became economists. And soon enough forgot the philosophy.) I've never thought the 'self-undermining' objection a reason to disbelieve consequentialism, but this sociological variant seems to do some explanatory work...
Monday, October 19, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Reserved for Directors
As Matt Yglesias says, all sorts of people bike regularly in Germany, not just students and 20-somethings. Today I saw something that captured this so well, I just had to take a picture:
All of this sounds like a NYC cyclist's dream, but I must admit that obeying traffic laws is really, really weird.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Ok, I confess!
I may have claimed I was moving 4000 miles for my research, but really, it was just to see these sweet Piraatenparty election posters in person. (Also: gosh, Heidelberg is pretty!)
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Now, with extra German flavor!
... by which I mean that I'm living in Heidelberg, at least for awhile. So far (~14 hours) it seems pretty neat. Tons of bicycles. Far denser and more walkable than a comparable US city of ~140k. Quite pretty, in that charming European way.
I'll try to actually start blogging again.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
In a dark room we can do just as we like
Earlier I expressed some pessimism about the future of copyright law, finishing with an extended quote from Bill Patry's own gloomy diagnosis. Now Charles Johnson has written a sharp response to Patry, insisting that the proper evaluand is not law but life, where copyright-as-lived is nearly irrelevant. I think Johnson is right in some ways but wrong in others, and my reasons for thinking his optimism misplaced have implications that go far beyond questions of copyright.
To clarify: I agree with the two claims that seem at the heart of Johnson's post: that as a practical matter, copyright law has proven ineffective at barring access to creative works; and that voluntary initiative (think DeCSS, Napster, Bittorrent, The Pirate Bay, IRC channels, etc.) is typically a better use of activists' energy and resources than governmental politics as far as actually enhancing freedom-as-lived. So what's the problem? In a nutshell, I think Johnson is too quick to downplay, 1, the damage that even "unenforceable" policies can do, and 2, the long-term social and political costs of states criminalizing, rather than merely ignoring, the "counter-economy" or radical sector more generally.
There's some truth to Johnson's claim that "a law that cannot be enforced is as good as a law that has been repealed." While jurisprudes might quibble about how precisely to characterise the situation, a norm whose existence is universally ignored by the legal system's officials is of questionable validity at best. The problem is when we turn to norms that cannot be generally or impartially enforced, but are enforced nonetheless, the penalties meted out in conformity to the whims ("priorities") of particular officials. The best examples of this, of course, remains what Lawyers, Guns, and Money call "The War on [Some Classes of People Who Use Some Sorts of] Drugs." As with copyright, vast segments of the population regularly break the relevant laws; doing so is neither practically difficult nor unusually risky; for a certain sort of person, even explicit admissions of criminality have essentially no consequences at all. And yet none of this stops officials from locking millions of their fellow human beings in cages for doing the wrong drug as the wrong sort of person at the wrong time--or voters from eagerly rewarding those officials with higher offices and greater powers.
This so widely acknowledged as to be almost banal, especially in Law & Society work, but it bears repeating: laws whose enforcement is possible only when selective are not uncommon, because officials--and not only officials--value the discretion such laws inevitably require. If everyone is guilty of something, officials can effectively target people and not merely behavior. There's a big difference between random enforcement and discretionary enforcement, even when structural factors constrain both to the same aggregate arrest totals, and I worry that copyright law will follow narcotics and "vice" policing into the ugly realm where all is permitted, so long as you don't annoy the wrong people.
Johnson has written some good critiques of the fetishization of our flawed constitution and against law-worship more generally, but I worry that he's too dismissive of the conceptual link between liberty and the rule of law. I don't pretend to have this stuff fully worked out, but I think the republican focus on protected status, a security against the arbitrary will of another, reflects an important dimension of any liberty worth defending. None of which implies that modern nation-states are either necessary to or particularly good at safeguarding this liberty; I merely want to insist that what matters is not aggregate enforcement but individual vulnerability, even if this vulnerability is largely insufficient to deter the proscribed behavior.
My second concern is more speculative, and (blush) rather Foucaultian. What leads to vulnerability is the gap between cultural and legal norms, a gap prompted both by the low (unconditional) probability of punishment and the marginal benefits of rule-breaking. Napster was revolutionary because it provided a service that hadn't before been available at any price--the possibility of getting nearly any song on demand. It's taken the music industry a decade to replicate this feat, but they've basically done it; for a lot of stuff, it's just easier to pay. The cost/benefit calculus has shifted.
So long as you've got the money, that is. I suspect the optimal pricing structure will lead to something of a separating equilibrium; middle class kids pay (and share libraries via sneakernet), poor kids infringe online. Among the privileged, unlicensed downloading becomes much worse than illegal--it becomes tacky and pathetic, like crack (but not powder) cocaine. Or perhaps the parallel is to payroll taxes--convenient because automatic, at least for Dilberts living and working within institutions large and ordinary enough to become bureaucratized; annoying and painful, tempting evasion, for those who walk different paths. (And of course, that dynamic itself disincentivizes deviance.) Even now, a distressing number of people seem to think "he knew the risks" sufficient reason to temper the sympathy one might ordinarily feel for a person facing a 6-digit lawsuit over harmless acts; what happens when today's Organization Kids become tomorrow's prosecutors, governors, judges? (Ian MacDonald's novels Brasyl and especially River of Gods both portray futures with this interesting cultural-juristic twist on "the digital divide.")
One response might be to question my armchair sociology; far from being Foucaultian self-disciplinarians living in a digital Panopticon of Google-powered data mining, aren't Kids These Days selling their virginities on eBay and posting the videos to MySpace (before penning angsty regrets on Livejournal), consequences be damned? Perhaps. But I'm dubious that youthful oversharing in the name of authenticity is in any fundamental tension with copyright, once content owners and manufacturers realize that user experience is everything (think of the cellphone ringtone business).
Ultimately, it's precisely because I agree with Johnson about the importance of social, technological, and cultural change that I question his optimistic conclusions. It may be easier than ever to evade copyright controls, but even aside from the issue of discretionary enforcement, we need to look at the other side of the ledger: the increasing invisibility of those very controls. The defining feature of the Napster era was not simply the yawning gulf between copyright and copynorm but the indispensibility of copyright infringement to participation in youth culture, even for the privileged. This indispensibility is disappearing, and the gulf may go with it; the Google Books settlement promises to skip the Napster stage entirely--heading right to the locked-down iTunes paradigm--as the books of the world join its music in the digital ether. And that would be deeply unfortunate, less for econ 101 deadweight-loss reasons than for the impact on tomorrow's taken-for-granteds concerning freedom, ownership, and authority.
To clarify: I agree with the two claims that seem at the heart of Johnson's post: that as a practical matter, copyright law has proven ineffective at barring access to creative works; and that voluntary initiative (think DeCSS, Napster, Bittorrent, The Pirate Bay, IRC channels, etc.) is typically a better use of activists' energy and resources than governmental politics as far as actually enhancing freedom-as-lived. So what's the problem? In a nutshell, I think Johnson is too quick to downplay, 1, the damage that even "unenforceable" policies can do, and 2, the long-term social and political costs of states criminalizing, rather than merely ignoring, the "counter-economy" or radical sector more generally.
There's some truth to Johnson's claim that "a law that cannot be enforced is as good as a law that has been repealed." While jurisprudes might quibble about how precisely to characterise the situation, a norm whose existence is universally ignored by the legal system's officials is of questionable validity at best. The problem is when we turn to norms that cannot be generally or impartially enforced, but are enforced nonetheless, the penalties meted out in conformity to the whims ("priorities") of particular officials. The best examples of this, of course, remains what Lawyers, Guns, and Money call "The War on [Some Classes of People Who Use Some Sorts of] Drugs." As with copyright, vast segments of the population regularly break the relevant laws; doing so is neither practically difficult nor unusually risky; for a certain sort of person, even explicit admissions of criminality have essentially no consequences at all. And yet none of this stops officials from locking millions of their fellow human beings in cages for doing the wrong drug as the wrong sort of person at the wrong time--or voters from eagerly rewarding those officials with higher offices and greater powers.
This so widely acknowledged as to be almost banal, especially in Law & Society work, but it bears repeating: laws whose enforcement is possible only when selective are not uncommon, because officials--and not only officials--value the discretion such laws inevitably require. If everyone is guilty of something, officials can effectively target people and not merely behavior. There's a big difference between random enforcement and discretionary enforcement, even when structural factors constrain both to the same aggregate arrest totals, and I worry that copyright law will follow narcotics and "vice" policing into the ugly realm where all is permitted, so long as you don't annoy the wrong people.
Johnson has written some good critiques of the fetishization of our flawed constitution and against law-worship more generally, but I worry that he's too dismissive of the conceptual link between liberty and the rule of law. I don't pretend to have this stuff fully worked out, but I think the republican focus on protected status, a security against the arbitrary will of another, reflects an important dimension of any liberty worth defending. None of which implies that modern nation-states are either necessary to or particularly good at safeguarding this liberty; I merely want to insist that what matters is not aggregate enforcement but individual vulnerability, even if this vulnerability is largely insufficient to deter the proscribed behavior.
My second concern is more speculative, and (blush) rather Foucaultian. What leads to vulnerability is the gap between cultural and legal norms, a gap prompted both by the low (unconditional) probability of punishment and the marginal benefits of rule-breaking. Napster was revolutionary because it provided a service that hadn't before been available at any price--the possibility of getting nearly any song on demand. It's taken the music industry a decade to replicate this feat, but they've basically done it; for a lot of stuff, it's just easier to pay. The cost/benefit calculus has shifted.
So long as you've got the money, that is. I suspect the optimal pricing structure will lead to something of a separating equilibrium; middle class kids pay (and share libraries via sneakernet), poor kids infringe online. Among the privileged, unlicensed downloading becomes much worse than illegal--it becomes tacky and pathetic, like crack (but not powder) cocaine. Or perhaps the parallel is to payroll taxes--convenient because automatic, at least for Dilberts living and working within institutions large and ordinary enough to become bureaucratized; annoying and painful, tempting evasion, for those who walk different paths. (And of course, that dynamic itself disincentivizes deviance.) Even now, a distressing number of people seem to think "he knew the risks" sufficient reason to temper the sympathy one might ordinarily feel for a person facing a 6-digit lawsuit over harmless acts; what happens when today's Organization Kids become tomorrow's prosecutors, governors, judges? (Ian MacDonald's novels Brasyl and especially River of Gods both portray futures with this interesting cultural-juristic twist on "the digital divide.")
One response might be to question my armchair sociology; far from being Foucaultian self-disciplinarians living in a digital Panopticon of Google-powered data mining, aren't Kids These Days selling their virginities on eBay and posting the videos to MySpace (before penning angsty regrets on Livejournal), consequences be damned? Perhaps. But I'm dubious that youthful oversharing in the name of authenticity is in any fundamental tension with copyright, once content owners and manufacturers realize that user experience is everything (think of the cellphone ringtone business).
Ultimately, it's precisely because I agree with Johnson about the importance of social, technological, and cultural change that I question his optimistic conclusions. It may be easier than ever to evade copyright controls, but even aside from the issue of discretionary enforcement, we need to look at the other side of the ledger: the increasing invisibility of those very controls. The defining feature of the Napster era was not simply the yawning gulf between copyright and copynorm but the indispensibility of copyright infringement to participation in youth culture, even for the privileged. This indispensibility is disappearing, and the gulf may go with it; the Google Books settlement promises to skip the Napster stage entirely--heading right to the locked-down iTunes paradigm--as the books of the world join its music in the digital ether. And that would be deeply unfortunate, less for econ 101 deadweight-loss reasons than for the impact on tomorrow's taken-for-granteds concerning freedom, ownership, and authority.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
"On the Moon, nerds get their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks."
Suppose you were to teach an introductory class on applied rational-choice theory. The goal would be to reach students interested in political phenomena but methodologically undecided: to give them a sympathetic but non-triumphalist presentation of RCT "on the ground" without requiring them to invest so much in tools as to make it a waste for all but the converted. Perhaps an advanced undergrad seminar, or a class for MA students (or PhD students who, with funding package in hand, can now admit that they have no idea what they want to focus on...); "Rational Choice Perspectives on Political Order and Disorder" might be a good topic. You could count on effort and general academic achievement, but no math/econ background.
You wouldn't want to spend every class refighting the Perestroika Wars; you'd need to bracket the philosophy of social science stuff, insist on suspension of disbelief, simply in order to make room for learning the material. But at the same time, it would be a disservice to ... well, to something; the Enlightenment, maybe?-- to ignore the Big Questions entirely. I'm thinking perhaps a week devoted to philosophy of social science / the natural of scientific explanation, and then a week of critical assessments of RCT in the light of that; perhaps time constraints would demand squeezing both parts into one week. Leave it for the end of the semester--with perhaps a teaser reading at the very beginning?--so they can draw on what they've spend the class learning. What do you think?
More specifically, what would you assign? Here's what I came up with off the top of my head after a couple of hours:
- For the nature of rationality, and particularly the question of whether rationality is limited to instrumental, means-to-ends reasoning, or can extend to reasoning about ends and value, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a great review article on Practical Reason. Sections 4 and 5 are particularly apt.
- For the nature of scientific explanation--when is something an explanation rather than a "mere description" or a "just-so story"?--the SEP's article on Scientific Explanation is great.
- Ok, so what does it mean for us? In "Rational Choice History: A Case of Excessive Ambition," a review of an influential collection of rational-choice "analytic narratives," Jon Elster expresses skepticism over whether RCT is capable of doing all that its practitioners ask (and boast) of it; the authors of the collection, in turn, respond.
- For a more extended argument by Elster about "The Nature and Scope of Rational-Choice Explanation," see his early article of that title.
- How do practicing game theorists view their rational-choice models? Ariel Rubinstein has some sobering "Comments on the Interpretation of Game Theory."
Roger Myerson, another prominent game theorist, has a more positive (though still nuanced) take "On the Value of Game Theory in Social Science."
- Finally, the history of rational choice political science--coauthored by someone who helped make it happen. "The Rochester School: The Origins of Positive Political Theory."
(Inspired by Will Wilkinson's new hobby-horse, and Off-Blog Happenings.)
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Response to von Lohmann
Fred von Lohmann of EFF stopped by and left a comment that's worth addressing directly:
That said, I don't think "a collecting society to solve the problem of getting permission for all the orphan works, along with an opt-out right" is the right approach; I think abolishing copyright is the right approach. So there's some disagreement right there. Of course, even if von Lohmann agreed with me about what would be optimal, it would be irresponsible for him to say so: EFF, like Creative Commons, gains credibility in part because of the moderation of its claims. A movement needs to have radicals, but its litigation arm needs to win cases and persuade elites. Even when the goals are shared by all, radicals and reformers will still (reasonably) disagree about What Is To Be Done.
(Disagreement isn't rationally required, of course; each could see the other's role as complementary. But I suspect that this is psychologically unlikely; radicals tend to feel that anything short of radicalism risks complicity, and I imagine few would be pleased by certain knowledge that their goals would only be achieved in centuries, and by the hands of that time's gradualists. Nor is it easy on the psyche to be an extremist committed to moderate reforms; see this nice article by Sheri Berman on the splits in the early 20th century Left.)
But I digress. My worry, as a copyright abolitionist, is not so much that von Lohmann is wrong as that he is right: the new institutions for license collection and copyright registration will embed copyright within the foundations of the 21st century's knowledge ecology, just as the content industries are attempting to do for consumer electronics. This is what depresses me: restrictions becoming increasingly invisible, with that very invisibility making it harder to imagine anything different. I worry about barriers to entry that are small enough to avoid political backlash, but large enough to deter hard-to-monetize innovation. I worry about the world's books reserved for those lucky enough to have already fallen in love with text, those willing to jump through some hoops to get at it (say, by waiting for their library's single free Google Book Terminal). I worry that finding a "reasonable" solution will inevitably lead to the triumph of administrative and managerial imperatives, with the public represented, if at all, as simply a mass of consumers. And I worry that this representation will increasingly become reality.
[/melodrama]
"... I'm not quite that pessimistic. I think the general approach of the settlement -- a collecting society to solve the problem of getting permission for all the orphan works, along with an opt out right -- is the right one. At the same time, I agree that we need to take steps to reduce the "Google monopoly over books" risk.I confess that I simply haven't thought very deeply about Where We Go From Here; it's good to know that EFF is concerned about the settlement's effects, and I encourage everyone to support them in their efforts: donate here! Von Lohmann and EFF have done more for the fight to restrain the digital enclosure movement than I could in dozens of lifetimes, and I'm a bit ashamed that my post could be read as implying that efforts at reform, whether legislative or judicial, are hopeless. I don't believe that at all: if nothing else, EFF and others help make things less bad than they otherwise would be, and that's nothing to sneeze at.
I think legislation to supplement (not replace) the settlement might be the answer. This would not be legislation over the objections of copyright industries (which I agree is hard to push through a Congress compromised by years of disinformation and campaign contributions), but rather with support from copyright industries against Google. In fact, I think Google might not object, either, since I don't think monopoly is really their goal here. I suspect Google would be happy to rely on its engineering skill and head start to fend off most rivals.
We should all be thinking about how legislation might work as an adjunct to the settlement agreement. I know I am."
That said, I don't think "a collecting society to solve the problem of getting permission for all the orphan works, along with an opt-out right" is the right approach; I think abolishing copyright is the right approach. So there's some disagreement right there. Of course, even if von Lohmann agreed with me about what would be optimal, it would be irresponsible for him to say so: EFF, like Creative Commons, gains credibility in part because of the moderation of its claims. A movement needs to have radicals, but its litigation arm needs to win cases and persuade elites. Even when the goals are shared by all, radicals and reformers will still (reasonably) disagree about What Is To Be Done.
(Disagreement isn't rationally required, of course; each could see the other's role as complementary. But I suspect that this is psychologically unlikely; radicals tend to feel that anything short of radicalism risks complicity, and I imagine few would be pleased by certain knowledge that their goals would only be achieved in centuries, and by the hands of that time's gradualists. Nor is it easy on the psyche to be an extremist committed to moderate reforms; see this nice article by Sheri Berman on the splits in the early 20th century Left.)
But I digress. My worry, as a copyright abolitionist, is not so much that von Lohmann is wrong as that he is right: the new institutions for license collection and copyright registration will embed copyright within the foundations of the 21st century's knowledge ecology, just as the content industries are attempting to do for consumer electronics. This is what depresses me: restrictions becoming increasingly invisible, with that very invisibility making it harder to imagine anything different. I worry about barriers to entry that are small enough to avoid political backlash, but large enough to deter hard-to-monetize innovation. I worry about the world's books reserved for those lucky enough to have already fallen in love with text, those willing to jump through some hoops to get at it (say, by waiting for their library's single free Google Book Terminal). I worry that finding a "reasonable" solution will inevitably lead to the triumph of administrative and managerial imperatives, with the public represented, if at all, as simply a mass of consumers. And I worry that this representation will increasingly become reality.
[/melodrama]
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