Two Questions on Utilitarianism

I was thinking on utilitarianism last  night about how ultimately we want to maximize the good in the world – and not diminish any individual’s good at the expense of the others (pareto optimality) –  it made me wonder a couple of things.

First, do the units we use to measure utility in a move from abstract to something quantifiable all have the same value to all users? Does an Util face the law of diminishing returns so that if we have one unit of good to pass around, it would do best to give it to the one who has the lowest absolute utility?

Secondly, one of my favorite thought experiments that might hit on moral philosophy is that of the trolley problem, defined in Wikipedia as:

“There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options:

Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track.

Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.

Which is the most ethical choice?”

How does a utilitarian answer that question and does it differ from other answers in different philosophical frames?

Back to School: Econ Autodidactic No More

When I was a kid, I would always steal my parent’s newspapers.

And I mean a kid. I have memories of stealing the Chicago Tribune from my parents and we moved away from the Chicago area right after I left first grade. My dad liked to have fresh paper, and I always put it back a little worse for wear. I did this with all the reading material that came into the house.

One constant as I grew up was the USA Today. What I like to do even to this day to take the paper and sort the sections by how excited I was to read the sections. With the USA Today, it still pops in my memory because of color coding. I’d take it split it up and put the colors together. Green then blue then maybe purple or red. It depended on the season – I would savor the sports section during football season. This was especially true because we moved around a lot, and the national reach meant that it covered the teams I liked. It was hard to root for KC and Chicago in the Pittsburgh area before the internet. I would buy the USA Today on my way into the family restaurant. I saved my quarters. But that green section, money and business, I always read first and got through to the things I wanted to read more.

Growing up, even though I was widely read, I was still fairly apolitical. I joked about wanting to take over the world as an adult goal but there was no ideology behind that other than desire for absolute power. You know, kids are sociopaths and I was no different. I think part of this is because for me everything was working. When I was younger and my dad was in the military, I remember wanting the most up to date shoe, but I never really wanted for anything. I went to school and got good grades and had good friends and relationships. I voted for Gore and stayed up all night waiting for the results to roll in. As it played out over the next few months I was disappointed but not mad.

My sophomore year of 2001-2 is what really made me look at the wider world. First, I was working in a way that I needed the money to help support me. My parents helped out through college so I can’t pretend I was on my own, but it is really eye-opening to know your price and the menu price you put your labor on and figure out how much of a fraction you get of the total.  And then you figure out what bills you can afford when you make the minimum wage at $5.15 an hour. It was slow, but facing economic realities for the first time make you think of your place in the power structure and optimal ways to order it. The second piece was the day of 9/11. It’s hard to forget the unity of that day, but for me there was a sense of questioning my path. I was a declared chemistry major at that time, and that morning I had a calculus class and then organic lab that we literally went about normal business with. I had to catch up around noon and watch the replays of the towers falling and then I went to an English class where the teacher, Mark Brazitis, sat on his desk and said I can’t teach on a day like today and we sat and spoke about our feelings. That had much more impact than if I found the right unknown in lab that day. Then watching the run up over the next 18 months or so as that was used to justify a war in a place against a foe that had no hand in the attack made me realize how tied I was to the wider world and how tied the economic is to the political. I didn’t want to get drafted to help provide cheap Iraqi oil and help Bush overcome his daddy issues.

Even then, things still worked. I changed my major and graduated with honors and went on to grad school in English. Where I didn’t finish my degree but I did ok in class and met some really good people. I then got a job and moved to Chicago and got engaged and things were working.

But then things stopped working. 

Here it is 2017 and the financial journalists are starting to cover the tenth anniversary of the financial crisis. I don’t think I realized what was happening at the time. In 2007 I was reading two or three different newspapers a day and didn’t have a good sense of the potential problems. Some banks were freezing redemptions to some funds, and in hindsight we collectively know a lot more about the housing market peaking and the slow-motion effect that had on different financial institutions from 2005 to 2008, but nothing really struck me at the time that I should be looking out for. I had that job teaching for one year and then when it didn’t work out I was looking for sales jobs that summer I was interviewing at an auto dealership and I remember asking about the dip in auto sales – It was labor day and August numbers had just been released showing that it was the worst summer for a while. But I was confident enough that things were working that I took the job. I took the job because things were working and I figured though I didn’t want to be a car salesman, I could make some quick money and figure out how to get back into teaching.

I still remember the day that everyone finally knew that things weren’t working. While the who’s who of the financial world were in New York at the Fed trying to stop a crash, I was in training at the dealership. I was keyed in to what was going on, but I wasn’t aware of its magnitude. I knew it was getting worse and worse because the trainer would look at his little net book at every break and he was getting more and more agitated, This was a guy who was a salesman in his blood and all the enthuse was gone from him. It was the middle of September, and we had only been in training a couple of weeks. As the initial stages of the crisis played out, people were scared. The most important part to me was that you could see it in the foot traffic. As my training was over and I was on the floor, there just weren’t the customers to talk to. We tried more and more different things to try to get the traffic, but they weren’t working. Managers were let go first, then sales staff. I sold three cars in October. I sold none in November. I was let go in early December. It would have been a day earlier but the first snow of the year fell, and they wanted all hands to shovel out the cars.

Here’s where I’m glad there was a somewhat robust policy response to the crisis. I was unemployed from that December of 2008 to fall of 2010. I had done, at that point, what I thought was right. With all the advantages I was born with and then I went to school and got good grades, I didn’t think I’d ever have a problem staying employed. It had stopped working for me – in a way I know that even in good times it is stacked against so many others. I collected unemployment and tried to figure out how to unbreak it. I applied for teach for America like programs, got certified as a substitute teacher. I applied for and was waitlisted for a master’s program for elementary education. I was trying to get back into teaching at a time there was austerity, and even people with teaching degrees and certifications were having problems finding substitute positions. 

What I also did was try to look and figure out what was broken and how it was broken and what would need to happen to fix it. It’s a deep dive, and included reading books on the economy both in what was being put out in public by people trying to figure the same thing out, but also by people looking at the problems of the past in the past. I took my lifelong curiosity and tried to approach and learn about macro problems and learned about micro and behavioral economics along the way as they feed into macro behavior. I joined twitter and read and commented on the blogs to part of the community unwinding the economic problem. In a world of abundant but finite resources, how do we best distribute these resources? I stated my own blog.

But it wasn’t enough for me. I eventually got a job I like working for a population that I feel I help, but I wanted to formalize my learning. But things came in the way. Seven years ago, I met with the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Illinois – Chicago to look into grad school. I was unemployed at the time and I found out that I might need some classes to catch up and clear some prerequisites but you can’t really borrow for undergrad classes if you already have a degree and you lose your unemployment if you go back to school. I took a turn and got my MBA which helped me instrumentally at work but it didn’t challenge me in the ways I wanted to be challenged nor really teach me what I wanted to learn. It was a good experience, but I need and wanted more.

It came about earlier in this year there was some turmoil at work. The woman who had been my mentor for years was removed from her job and the guy brought in to replace her had some chemistry problems with me and he demoted me. I wasn’t happy and looking for other jobs. But none of the jobs really excited me and what I really wanted to do was to go back to school. Specifically, I have wanted to go to Roosevelt for econ for several years since I learned that they are one of the handful of schools in the country that are explicitly welcoming to non-orthodox schools of thought in economics. And for me, that is the road that we will find on the macro-level the right answers to the economic problem. Those who thought they had it fixed for a generation found out they were wrong. Even Greenspan was surprised that his model failed. What happened was I found myself working on the application to that and none of the jobs I found. And they took me.

I start today. I’m excited. I’m nervous. I don’t fully know what to expect. I’m really not sure how I will use this in my career, but after the last year I decided to focus less on concrete career plans and more on general directions. I like this direction. Maybe someday instead of skimming the green section, I’ll be quoted in it.

Statues

This country –

Born with the word

“compromise” on its lips

The plosive of the p

Ending with that sibilant z

We learned it fast –

Three fifths to

Missouri to

Eighteen Fifty

It allowed everyone

To pretend and avert gaze

To peculiar institutions

To slave catchers after fugitives

To Dredd Scott not having standing

Because property can’t sue

The words on our lips

Made us blind to blood

On our hands from 

the start through

Reconstruction and James Crow

And voting rights questioned

Laws abandoned as men,

Names soon forgotten,

Are shot in the street.

How can we forget our history

If we never bothered to learn?

"Heritage, not hate"

Here's the problem with that argument. Let's just say that one time I got drunk, stripped naked, and then walked down the street attacking people.

If I did something like that, I wouldn't want to build a statue about it or keep pictures of the incident. I'd bury that shit as deep as possible. Because it would be my past, but I wouldn't want to celebrate it and talk about how I've changed if it did come up.

A Southern Thing

If I did celebrate it and talk about how much that part of my past shaped me in a positive way to this day, then it's not an aberration, it's who you are. So if you want to pretend a confederate past is about heritage, then you're right. It's the heritage of your ancestors owning people and fighting for that economic system

Twentieth Century Nostalgia: On Louis Uchitelle's "Making It: Why Manufacturing Still Matters"

I wanted to like this book more than I did. Uchitelle has a long history on writing about this subject, and I think in some way that history makes him nostalgic in a looking backward sort of way and not in proposing new solutions.

In the book, he looks at the relative decline of manufacturing as an urbanized phenomenon and wants to get back to that. He hates the factories that do exist in smaller communities near the interstate using more robotics. What he really doesn’t like is the race to the bottom in terms of state giveaways to corporations for locating their factories in one place and not the other. He is right to emphasize that these are zero-sum giveaways.

But he also misses some things and under-emphasizes others. Reading this I wanted him to talk not just about the tax incentives to bring factories but also right to work laws that allow manufacturers to pay less. Deunionizaion is only mentioned in passing when for me it is a huge part of the story. The other miss is that the decline in manufacturing is only on some metrics. Manufacturing output has grown almost every year as productivity grows. Gone is the need for armies of men stamping metal and instead you have much fewer manual jobs but the jobs that do exist are skilled up – this plus the deunionizaion mean that we make more with fewer people. The other side of the coin is that manufacturing has not been shrinking, but growing at a slower rate. More services are in the marketplace so these have overtaken manufacturing. I’d also map to that the entrance of more women in the workplace over the last generation. Things that were internal to the family now hit the national accounts.

But how to fix it? He really wants manufacturing to make up a larger percentage of the GDP. Which means either more done here or less in services (got to hit the top or bottom of the fraction there). He wants to bring back a national industrial policy akin to one proposed by Reagan so that the central government would dictate to private companies where to build and where to source from while nationalizing those zero-sum state subsidies and an incentive for reshoring. But this industrial policy as described in the book feels so Pollyannaish that reading it made me mad. He wants to reverse globalization and have the state (with cooperation between the parties, no less) dictate to corporations, but even he admits that that horse left the barn. For me the whole think is looking too far backwards to want to try to regain the glories of the 50s and 60s when the economy was growing and the gains were more equally spread. But that is not here or maybe possible at all. What we need is economic policy that is forward looking to face the challenges of the 21st century and not try to return to the 20th.