Steve Reads

…at least in his writings for mass consumption. In this he may be succumbing to the disease that he himself diagnosed, and for which he so often castigates Nobel laureate Paul Krugman: letting his ideology guide him when he’s unleashed from the shackles of peer review.

Here’s Richard Thaler, smirking at Posner in the way that only Thaler can. Here is the place to recommend again that you run out and read a few of Thaler’s works:

• The Winner's Curse
• Nudge
• Choices, Values, and Frames (not Thaler’s book — it’s Kahneman and Tversky’s — but Thaler’s work is sprinkled throughout the book, and he’s almost as much a father of the field documented in that book as Kahneman and Tversky are)
• “The Law of One Price in Financial Markets”, a spectacular paper that also appears in The Winner's Curse. If you don’t read the book, you should at least read the paper. It’s as clear as glass, which is Thaler’s great skill.

Time to go unsubscribe from Posner’s blog, which has long since worn out its welcome.

I don’t have the time to write much on it now, but I’d like to provide a bit of inoculation here: Richard Posner’s latest blog post is an embarrassment. He claims not to have heard what Krugman et al. would recommend for a stimulus package. This proves only that Posner himself has not been reading Krugman since the time of the first stimulus. Try this Google search, for instance. Posner apparently cannot be bothered to use Google.

(Attention conservation notice: 2,000 words on another of the books that Richard Posner, widely respected judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, publishes “every half hour”. There’s so much about Posner to make you mad, but then so much that’s brilliant or at least deftly written. Like the rest of his books, I would recommend reading Public Intellectuals, even if it also drives me nuts. Even if Posner is your enemy, he’s more intelligent than any other enemy you will ever have. If he’s being an ass, he surely knows it.)

I’ve read enough of Judge Posner’s work by now — The Economics of Justice, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law, How Judges Think, Frontiers of Legal Theory, and now Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline — to have picked up a pattern: the man will drive you absolutely insane. But he’s really very, very smart, and is right enough at the level of principle that you would need to spend a lot of time rebutting all the individual mistakes in his books; you couldn’t dispense with the whole work in one lump. Which is why I often think that Posner is a decoy for liberals to aim at. He draws so much fire that you’re left with little ammunition for anyone else.

Characterizing him as a conservative agent provocateur is unfair to Posner, though. Above all else, I want to be fair to him in this review, because he is deeply unfair to his enemies, often gratuitously so. As I’ve mentioned, one of the major premises of Public Intellectuals is that this type of scholar is unfair to opposing viewpoints. Posner clearly knows that he’s treading on risky terrain here. As he writes in the introduction,

[A]re not people often particularly acute at spotting their own weaknesses (of which they are unaware) observed in other people?

All true. I am aware that the arrows I shoot may curve in flight and hit the archer. The reader shall judge.

First, naturally, Posner is obliged to sketch what “public intellectual” means. If instead of “intellectual” we use “academic” — as in, “someone employed by a university” — we get at Posner’s main gripe. His favorite non-academic — “unaffiliated,” in his usage — intellectual is George Orwell, which narrows in on the type that he’s thinking about. An intellectual is someone who thinks more broadly than the case before his eyes, let’s say; he’s concerned with Big Ideas. A “public intellectual” takes those Big Ideas and presents them to a broader audience. He’s quite often interested in suggesting changes in government, in economic organization, etc. A biologist who explains natural selection to a non-specialist audience may be an intellectual, but he’s not necessarily a public intellectual. A public intellectual is most often advocating something. Public-intellectual work, in other words, is more than mere popularization.

Because today’s intellectuals are largely in universities, says Posner, they’re highly specialized, and are therefore mostly not in a position to weigh in on the complicated social issues of the day. Because they’re ensconced in universities, they have a job even if their public-intellectual work is shoddy (as, Posner says, it often is); an academic, to Posner, is a “safe specialist.” This safety means that public intellectuals can say whatever they want with little fear.

Within their chosen field, academics are hemmed in by disciplinary constraints: editors, peers, and tenure committees mean that they have to hedge every extreme assertion and back it with evidence. There are no such constraints for the public intellectual. In fact, Posner asserts that public-intellectual output is meant more for entertainment and solidarity than it is for actual information: we read public intellectuals who agree with us so that we can feel better about what we believe. And public-intellectual work is a classic “credence” good: like a used car, we can’t judge the value of public-intellectual work. The public responds by largely ignoring it as a source of information, says Posner.

All of these assertions about how we read public intellectuals, it seems to me, need to be hedged. Maybe we can’t always judge the details of, say, the economics that Paul Krugman teaches us, but we can judge it at the level of argument: do the pieces fit together like they should? Certainly the Internet has changed substantially how we consume arguments: I recall a big section in The Wealth of Networks where Yochai Benkler examines how often different cliques (liberal or conservative blogs, say) interact with one another, and finds that they actually do so quite often — pace Cass Sunstein’s assertion in Republic.com that the balkanization of American political discourse is accelerating in the age of the Internet.

As for the public’s ignoring public intellectuals, it’s not entirely clear that that’s important. As far as their impact on society goes, is it important that the public read them, or that policymakers do? Posner does a modicum of statistical analysis, comparing public intellectuals’ media citation counts to their scholarly reputation, but doesn’t bother to analyze, say, how many public intellectuals go on to get careers in government. The fact that Henry Kissinger is the number-one public intellectual, as measured by media citations, makes this omission surprising.

Then there’s the “Decline” part of Posner’s subtitle. We’re supposed to infer that public intellectuals used to be less academic, hence less specialized and more engaged with the broader population, but Posner presents no evidence in this direction. This might partly be a relic of which data are easiest to collect: counting citations is easier, and only academics have citation counts, and Posner asserts that today’s public intellectuals are much more academic than they were previously.

To fix ideas on whom we’re compassing under the term “public intellectual”: Bertrand Russell was one. So was George Orwell. So was Charles Dickens: his literature was meant to make a point about the living conditions of London’s poor, push for reform of the poor houses, and so forth. Stephen Jay Gould was half public intellectual, half popularizer. His most famous public-intellectual work was The Mismeasure of Man. Here is where my rage nearly made it impossible to continue: Posner gets The Mismeasure of Man alarmingly, spectacularly wrong. I want to go into a bit of detail about Gould and Posner, because I think Posner’s failings here are especially illustrative.

Mismeasure, if you’re not aware, covers the history of IQ from the 1800s to now. Gould explains that IQ measurement was initially intended to help those who might need some extra help, but that it quickly developed into a tool for locking races into preassigned castes: Asians on top, white people one step down, black people at the bottom. To establish that these castes are permanent and unalterable, it was necessary along the way to reinterpret IQ as a measure of what Gould calls a “thing in the head” rather than just a number: those with low IQ “really are,” in some sense, dumber than those with a higher IQ.

One must go further, of course, if one is going to assert that I and my children and my children’s children will be stuck forever in our benighted caste. One must assert the genetic basis of IQ. But one must go further than that — substantially further, in fact: one must assert that no human intervention can correct this. As Gould himself put it, I believe: no one doubts for an instant that poor eyesight is completely due to “nature” rather than “nurture,” yet a $10 pair of eyeglasses can completely correct it.

To sum up, then: to make anything interesting out of IQ, one must assert a) that it measures something real in the head, b) that it has a genetic basis, and c) that human intervention can do little to correct a low IQ. Gould attacks each one in turn. First, IQ is an outcome of principal components analysis — a statistical process that is often useful, but doesn’t represent any underlying reality. Indeed, Gould shows that the particular number arising from a principal-components analysis is largely arbitrary. Gould notes that, in discussing principal-components analysis, he’s one of the first writers to criticize the actual statistical basis of IQ.

Now, one of Posner’s biggest gripes about public intellectuals is that they too often venture outside of their areas of competence. Here he rails on Gould for having no business writing about IQ. But as Gould himself says in Mismeasure, he spends his professional career as a biologist performing statistical analysis, including principal-components analysis, on large datasets. He understands the statistics very well. One might gripe that Gould is in no position to discuss the history of IQ, either, not being a historian, but Posner doesn’t go there.

Still Posner descends to calling Gould, along with many other intellectuals, “false prophets.” That is, Gould is supposedly one who claims to know what the future will bring; in Gould’s case, Posner is pretty sure that Mismeasure is on the wrong side of the IQ debate. Posner claims that The Bell Curve had got the better of the fight with Gould, which I don’t understand: the evidence against Herrstein & Murray’s book had been overwhelming for years by the time Posner wrote. Public Intellectuals came out in 2001, whereas Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve — tearing H&M’s book to shreds from a number of angles — had come out in 1997. The Bell Curve was a public-intellectual work, not a work of scholarship; it was fairly obvious at the time that Herrstein and Murray wrote it to undergird their libertarian beliefs, among which was the uselessness of social spending. You’d think that Posner would count H&M as false prophets. In fact, you’d think that Posner would at the very least accuse H&M of the same sin for which he attacks so many public intellectuals: letting their ideologies guide them in public, even while they admit the true complexity of an issue in their scholarly work.

So the first place I found a subject I knew something about in Public Intellectuals, I saw that Posner was being viciously unfair. It’s hard for me not to think that this was deliberate, and rooted in Posner’s conservatism: Gould freely admits that his politics are liberal, and that he doesn’t want to see his disabled child consigned to a low caste in Herrstein and Murray’s world. In fact Posner takes the absolutely egregious step of suggesting that Gould and Eldredge came up with punctuated equilibrium because “Marxism celebrates revolution.”

To his credit, Posner does get around to spearing conservatives, as well. He takes down Robert Bork and Gertrude Himmelfarb in a chapter about the public-intellectual genre known as the “Jeremiad.” Jeremiahs fit into the “false prophets” category, specifically the brand of prophecy that asserts that the sky is falling, and that the only way to put it back up is to follow the author’s recipe for repentance. In Bork’s case the disease is cultural collapse, and the cure is a dose of old-time religion (which Bork himself doesn’t follow).

Public Intellectuals is, as you might have noticed, a purely destructive work, and I should say right away that I don’t count this as a deficit: destroying bad ideas is just as useful as, and maybe more so than, affirming good ones. When Public Intellectuals isn’t attacking academics for being safe specialists committed to principle, who scorn politicians for being stupid and who have no idea about the sort of compromises necessary to live in the real world (“They tend to be unworldly. They are, most of them anyway, the people who have never left school. Their milieu is postadolescent.”), it’s attacking the idea of measuring literature by its conformance to our current ethical standards. Literature isn’t there to teach us anything; it is there to be beautiful. If it’s trying to be didactic about an issue of contemporary concern, it will quickly sound dated — as, Posner notes, Dickens does if you read him ethically rather than aesthetically.

A lot of Posner’s arguments about, say, the misuse of literature sound right to me. But I know, from the little part of Public Intellectuals that touches on areas where I have experience, that Posner is hideously unfair. That colors the rest of his book for me. That said, you have to admire the breadth of intellect that would be able to touch on so many subjects, however shallowly. I’m not sure that’s how Posner would like Public Intellectuals to be remembered.

I’m spending the first part of the day reading Posner’s Public Intellectuals: A Study Of Decline. This is just a fascinatingly unfair book. Unfairness is par for the course for Posner, but this is really above and beyond.

What’s fascinating is that Posner is clearly engaging in the unfairness for which he attacks public intellectuals. The book’s premise is that when academic intellectuals step out of their academic specialty — where they’re hemmed in by journals’ editorial constraints and other disciplinary checks — they tend to be ideological, unfair, one-sided, and sloppy with evidence.

Now, clearly Posner realizes a couple things: first, that he is a public intellectual; second, that he is stepping outside of his own disciplinary bounds in writing such a book. So clearly he must be aware that the reader will judge him by the standard that he’s laying out.

It’s hard, then, not to think that Posner’s deep, ugly unfairness in Public Intellectuals is deliberate. How could it be otherwise? A man who doesn’t want to foist himself by his own petards would have been exceedingly scrupulous in writing a book like Public Intellectuals.

I see two possibilities, then: either Public Intellectuals is an extended joke, or it is an embarrassment. As I read the remainder of the book, I’ll try to figure out which it is.

I started out wanting to hate this book, but as it turns out I think that most people with an engineering cast of mind will love it: like a good engineer, Posner wants to take apart problems, see what makes them tick, and find solutions. Barring that, he’s content to clear away intellectual dross; if he has to be rather short about it, too bad. He’ll tear your arguments apart, but at least he’s eloquent about it.

Not all arrogant men deserve to be; in fact most don’t. Fortunately for Posner, he’s a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals judge, founder of a major legal school of thought (namely “law and economics”), reframer of much of American antitrust law, and remarkably prolific besides: by a quick count, Posner is the author of two score books over the past few decades. This is the man whom Yale law professor Jack Balkin advocated for the Supreme Court (while acknowledging that “It’ll never happen”) before Bush nominated John Roberts.

Posner does, however, have a habit of being rather unfair. I continually go back to his description of behavioral economics, a subject which by now I know rather well:

Behavioral economics is defined by its subject rather than by its method and its subject is merely the set of phenomena that rational-choice models (or at least the simplest of them) do not explain. It would not be surprising if many of these phenomena turned out to be unrelated to each other, just as the set of things that are not edible by man include stones, toadstools, thunderclaps, and the Pythagorean theorem.

The man is cold. Fortunately for the reader, it is this icy wit that makes reading Posner’s books such a joy. Watch how he rips into inconsistencies:

In discussing a case that invalidated the exclusion of homosexuals from the military, Beatty approvingly remarks that the court “noted the lack of ‘concrete’ and ‘actual or significant’ evidence that allowing gay men to enlist in the armed forces would prejudice its morale, fighting power, or operational effectiveness in any way.” He does not require that there be “concrete” and “actual or significant” evidence that homosexuals are harmed by the exclusion. Nor is he bothered by a lack of concreteness when he says that “laws that establish a broadcasting spectrum [must] guarantee that the full spectrum of opinion in the community will be heard.” What is “the full spectrum” of opinion, and who is to decide? Must every lunatic have access to a broadcast studio? Beatty contends that government has a constitutional duty to subsidize religious schools but “may make funding conditional on religious schools agreeing to teach the same curriculum that is used in state-run schools.” If the curriculum is identical, in what sense are they religious schools?

(internal footnotes omitted)

The point, here as elsewhere in How Judges Think, is to drive a spear into the side of judicial and scholarly hypocrisy. The particular target here, Beatty, is no more or less hypocritical than the rest of us: judges and legal scholars, as much as anyone, pretend that their opinions are more than just opinions. Judges — especially Supreme Court Justices — have a fancy term for this, which we as Americans have come to sanctify as The One True Way Of Judging. The fancy term is ‘textualism’ or ‘originalism’ or (as Posner calls it) ‘legalism.’ Legalism is meant to keep the judges out of judging: they’re supposed to read the facts of the case, read the relevant precedents, read the text of any relevant statutes, maybe read the legislative history, then decide the case syllogistically. A judge becomes an automaton lacking independent will. This is supposed to keep politics out of the court, and keep us closer to the ideal of “a nation of laws, not men.” The law, after all, shouldn’t depend on who’s enforcing it. This isn’t the way actual judges or actual courts work, says Posner; he spends the next 350 pages crisply and efficiently taking down any number of legalist conceptions of judging. He replaces them with his own description of how judging actually works.

Judges also don’t spend much time at all deliberating — at least not in groups. A judge may be internally conflicted over a case, and at times he may actually change his mind on the basis of what others say. But not normally. Normally — like poor Mr. Beatty, above — he’s either deliberately or subconsciously deploying judicial reasoning, or the appearance of judicial reasoning, in the service of what he already believes to be true. The ultimate source of judicial opinion is emotion: the race you were born into, the economic class you inhabit, whether you worked as a prosecutor or a defense attorney before you reached the Court.

If judges find sophisticated-sounding justifications for conclusions that they reached at the start, what’s to stop them from running totally off the rails? Why can’t a judge say whatever he wants? Here Posner walks through the range of ‘judges’ — from paid arbitrators through Federal appellate-court judges, all the way to the Supreme Court. An arbitrator has certain economic motivations: if he’s known as thorough and unbiased, he’ll get more business; if he tends to land on compromises that make both sides happy, he’ll get still more. District court judges are subject to review by the appellate courts. Federal appellate judges have life tenure, insulating them from public opinion — but they’re subject to review by the Supreme Court. Supreme Court Justices themselves have a cushy job with limited caseloads and no possibility of review. So where do Supreme Court justices get their constraints? The public: if the Court veers too far into cloud cuckoo land, it can expect that the people will revolt and clamor for overriding legislation. The Supreme Court still has constraints.

Judges are “constrained pragmatists,” in Posner’s terminology. They must choose among conflicting interpretations of the common-law and statute history; a pragmatist chooses by considering the consequences of each interpretation in the light of the law’s intent, if not its wording. A pragmatic judge doesn’t get overly bogged down in the words of the law, when those words are an imperfect guide to what the law was supposed to achieve. This sounds similar to objectives-based regulation: specify the outcome and the intent, and focus less on the implementation. The realization behind this is that society changes quickly, and laws that fixate on the present moment’s circumstances will quickly become obsolete.

This was the weakest part of Posner’s argument: legislation, says Posner, moves more slowly than the courts do, so it’s natural to place some of the burden of its interpretation on the courts. The process of amending the Constitution is tortuous, but Posner never makes it clear why this is a bad thing, or whether legislators actually desire to make the judicial branch a second branch of execution. We already have a president who overrules legislation via signing statements; do we really need another branch that overrules via loose construction?

Posner’s argument isn’t absurd. Even pragmatist judges operate under constraints, after all: if they strike down perfectly constitutional legislation, remedies up to impeachment are theoretically available. And the public has been trained to be on the lookout for ‘activist judges’. But to base a large part of the argument for pragmatism on a bare assertion that “it works out better that way for everyone” is odd.

His analyses of how a pragmatist would resolve any number of cases are fascinating. Take the Kelo case, for instance, which allowed the city of New London, Connecticut to seize land by eminent domain for private development. A pragmatist assesses a claim of eminent domain by looking at the original intent of the law, and the economic consequences of granting or withholding the seizure right. The original intent, says Posner, was to prevent individual people from holding a big public-works project hostage: if I’m building a several-thousand-mile-long road, everyone in its path knows that their cooperation is vital. They have, in other words, something like monopoly power, and they can demand exorbitant sale prices for their land. If there’s no danger of “holdouts,” as these are called, there’s no reason to grant the state eminent domain. Moreover, a pragmatist would examine the consequences of granting eminent domain in these cases, would realize that the market is better able to assign just compensation to land sales than the state itself is, and would in effect hand the case over to the market for resolution.

A pragmatist judge, it seems to me, is expected to exercise remarkable foresight. Not only must he know enough about the common and statute law to genuflect appropriately at the law’s majesty, but now he must also be able to guess the long-term consequences of a particular taking. This means he must be rather thoroughly educated in economics and statistics. Posner might reply here that it’s six of one, half-dozen of another: a non-pragmatist judge only has to convert his gut feelings into the language of precedent, but the outcome of this simpler process is decidedly worse than what a pragmatist — with his wider scope — comes up with. If I have Posner right, there’s little evidence for this claim in How Judges Think. Indeed, Posner repeatedly critiques judges for a lack of interest or skill in the exact sciences. So what’s to make us think that an unschooled pragmatist judge would come up with better decisions overall? Maybe “unschooled pragmatist” is a contradiction in terms?

This reliance on economics, statistics, and science makes it all the more jarring when Posner throws down bare assertions — as, for instance, when he asserts (p. 306) that the “total misery of the wrongly convicted was not lessened” when the Court increased the rights of criminal defendants in the ’60′s. Total misery decreases if the average wrongly convicted defendant spends less time in jail, or if fewer people are wrongly convicted to begin with. Posner asserts (with evidence) that defendants spent more time in jail after the ’60′s, in part because of a legislative backlash against the courts. (It could also be because violent crime increased. Posner himself doesn’t engage in much convincing heavy-duty statistical analysis, though he cites plenty.) For his claim to hold, he has to show that the probability of wrongful conviction didn’t fall enough to compensate for increased jail time. This he does not do. In general, the pretensions of “a sect of academics who want to use their facility with the differential calculus to impose … hegemonic domination over social science” invite skepticism during their falls from the empiricist wagon.

One final note from Posner that I found especially interesting: academics, he says, have grown increasingly distant from the actual practice of judging. One consequence is that law students learn the very artificial academic view of how judicial decisions are made. Law students, in a word, are trained to be legalists. They come to expect that judges are the automata they read about in class. Students learn that if they want to convince judges of anything, all they need to do is read a long litany of precedent; the judge will be forced, through logic alone, to accept their conclusions. They import this conceit into the courtroom and get nowhere with it. If legal academia were more in line with how judging actually worked, law students would learn to address judges pragmatically. As it is, even a decorated legal scholar like Larry Lessig — a man who clerked for Scalia and Posner, in fact — didn’t understand quite how to talk to Supremes:

“Here was a case [ Eldred v. Ashcroft ] that pitted all the money in the world against reasoning. And here was the last naïve law professor, scouring the pages, looking for reasoning.”

Attention conservation notice: 1800 words on the very excellent, easy-to-read (I basically started and finished it on a train ride from New York to Boston) Cradle to Cradle, eliding into some questions about why corporations haven’t already arrived at McDonough and Braungart’s solutions, if in fact they’re hyper-rational profit maximizers. Brings in Brad DeLong, Seeing Like A State, and The Omnivore's Dilemma : the failure to latch onto M & B’s ideas with both hands seems like an instance of the capitalist insanity that Pollan diagnoses so well.

McDonough’s and Braungart’s point is most succinctly summarized in one of their chapter titles: “Why Being ‘Less Bad’ Is No Good.” Recycling, they say, just postpones the inevitable resource depletion. Plus, recycling normally only takes you one step through the cycle, or less: recycled paper is substantially less strong than new paper, so it needs to be fortified with chemical additives. They give countless examples of processes that seem good but are in fact just less evil. We’re making ourselves less bad by recycling, but we’re not actually solving the larger ecological problem.

The big way to solve it, they say, is for products to assume from the start that they will be thrown away, and embrace that fact. Paper doesn’t recycle well because it wasn’t designed to be recycled; hence it becomes worse with every generation. So Cradle to Cradle is printed on non-paper; it’s recycled plastic. Subject it to a simple chemical process, or to extremely high heat, and the ink detaches to form completely reusable pages. Products need to be infinitely reusable with limited additional processing. People need to be thinking about their products in perfectly closed ecological loops.

The authors envision a day when products will be gleefully thrown on the side of the road as soon-to-be-decomposed litter. Why not build your plastic containers with a little seed inside, so that when they’re thrown overboard they add something to the environment rather than taking away from it? This may sound pie-in-the-sky, but one of this book’s great joys — which keeps it from flying off into Liberal Fairy-Land — is that the authors are architects and industrial designers who’ve spent 20 years designing eco-friendly products and buildings. They impressively helped re-architect the River Rouge factory for the 21st century. Their hopes are quite a bit grander, though: a day when cars themselves will be perfectly recyclable, when their parts can be disassembled, melted down and built into a new, equally high quality car with minimal labor.

The authors’ natural next step is to develop an environmental certification process by which products would be labeled “cradle to cradle” if they’re designed to be environmentally beneficial even when thrown away. This, it seems, is exactly what they’ve done. (Those of my friends who’ve bought environmentally friendly carpeting because they’re concerned about outgassing might look, for instance, at cradle-to-cradle carpet fiber.)

The larger message is that you can’t just look at a product in isolation, or even at a process like recycling in isolation. Look at whole ecosystems, instead. Celebrate organic diversity. Don’t see the world like a corporation, growing one kind of vegetable because it’s cheaper and believing that your responsibility ends at the factory door.

But again, this would be too pie-in-the-sky for the authors’ purposes, not only because they want to make money, but because they need to enlist corporate support if they’re going to get anywhere with their hopes for social improvement. So a good chunk of the book is given over to showing that corporations actually save money in the not-very-long run if they design cradle-to-cradle products. Not least among the savings is avoiding regulation: if your product is only “less bad,” in that it contains (for instance) less mercury, you’ll still have to submit to a government review to make sure you’re being good enough. But if your product is designed from the ground up to help the environment — or even to be edible — you skirt around these environmental problems by design. Just the cost of avoiding regulation, they say, often pays for the re-engineering.

The natural question, then, is: why haven’t companies been jumping on this? Why do American products celebrate consumption-and-disposal over infinite reusability? The natural response is: because consumption-and-disposal is cheaper. But in many cases it’s not, if McDonough and Braungart are right. Instead, companies’ aversion seems to be part of their famous shortsightedness: in the short run, they’re doing what’s best for their stockholders, but they’re not making the investments that would save them lots of money in the long term. But McDonough and Braungart have seemingly brought nontrivial returns to their corporate clients in the space of a decade or less, so this long term isn’t even the famous Keynesian one. Hence their shortsightedness is really short.

Which is really interesting, if you think about it. Why should companies be so shortsighted? If they’re hyper-rational, they’ll have some discount rate: a dollar a year from now is worth only 1/(1+r) dollars today or 1/(1+r)^n dollars n years from now, where r is the interest rate. So maybe a hyper-rational corporation will turn down some long-term projects, but it shouldn’t consistently overlook its own long-term health nearly as often as people accuse it of doing. This is the sort of thing that Cosma Shalizi talks about; there, he blames it on a mismatch between the wishes of the stockholders and those of the management, to be remedied in a particularly cool way.

There could also be an issue of externalities. Maybe the long-term damages accruing to the world from monoculture produce, for instance, never affect the corporations that are perpetrating the damage. As a matter of fact, it seems to be in Monsanto’s interest to keep their particular agricultural model going, wherein crops develop herbicide resistance that requires ever-larger doses of ever-stronger Monsanto herbicides. They see quite clearly the insanity that this is producing, but their own internal calculations may suggest that the party will go on for decades more before anyone cares.

Reading books like Cradle to Cradle and The Omnivore's Dilemma makes it frighteningly clear that the raw economic logic of capitalism may well be self-destructive. Our children develop respiratory illnesses and food allergies at unheard-of rates; we start to suspect that the way our food, water, shoes, clothing, carpeting and 100 products besides are made has something to do with it. Every company is just doing what it needs to do, not looking at the larger picture, and we’re in the crossfire. Some sort of economic coordination starts to seem not only desirable, but absolutely necessary to prevent collective suicide.

It’s pure capitalist logic that tries to make all meat and produce as identical as possible; it’s cheaper to distribute that way, and the factory farms can exploit economies of scale. Cows wallow in a lake of their own shit, but that’s exactly what the economics says we should have. (In fairness, The Omnivore's Dilemma suggests that government policy, particularly the farm bill, has a lot to do with shaping the rewards that tell capitalist enterprises what to raise and how to raise it.)

Which is why Brad DeLong’s review of Seeing Like A State is a little odd. From what I’ve read of Seeing Like A State, James Scott objects to large centralized bureaucracies’ habit of trying to shape their environment and their people to fit a model, rather than adapting their models to the world as it is. DeLong takes real issue with Scott’s claim that

The destruction of metis and its replacement by standardized formulas legible only from the center is virtually inscribed in the activities of both the state and large-scale bureaucratic capitalism.

DeLong retorts:

[W]hen we look around at modern large-scale bureaucratic capitalism, we see what Scott calls “metis” everywhere. Everything from the flick of your wrist so that the supermarket laser-scanner reads the bar code (try it some time) to the virtual experience at flying 747′s that airline pilots gain in simulators to knowing when you have lost your lecture audience and need to back up to knowing when it too risky to drive the moving van over Donner Pass–all of these are forms of metis. Attempts to design-out metis–to turn workers into efficient, pre-programmed automatons as in the imagination of Frederick W. Taylor–usually fail. They fail precisely because they do not make allowance for the importance of local, practical knowledge. And when they fail businesses that recognized the importance of their workers’ skills take up the slack.

Surely capitalism is good for satisfying a lot of people’s wants, and quite often uses local knowledge to design the best products and services for its customers. Surely much of the time, the best product wins and those companies that don’t give customers what they want die. But I hope DeLong doesn’t find it a fatal chink in the armor to realize that sometimes corporations are guilty of the same centralizing tendencies that he hates so much in governments. I don’t have nearly the conceptual arsenal to argue the point right now, but it seems safe to say that, at the very least, economies of scale often contribute to bigness, which in turn contributes to mass standardization, which leads to treating the world as though it were composed of indistinguishable commodities. For evidence of this last, see the portion of Omnivore's Dilemma where Pollan charts the evolution of corn from what we might today call an “artisanal” product – differentiated by manufacturer — to a more or less standard product that can be traded in the thousands of bushels. Corn was not in fact an indistinguishable commodity, but the needs of commerce forced it to be treated that way, which led people to treat it as though it were, which led to massive monoculture which may one day (please, god that I don’t believe in, let it not be so) lead to crop destruction on the scale of the Irish potato famine.

Again, I don’t yet have the skills to argue this as well as I’d like, but: corporations cannot be relied upon, on their own, to get us out of this mess. There is a big coordination problem. It is in Monsanto’s interest, and ADM’s interest, and Cargill’s interest, to keep the process going the way it’s been going. And there are few enough of them that they can collude without even actually talking to one another. One of them moves, and the others know that they all should move the same way. (I believe Posner talks about this somewhere early in Antitrust Law.)

So I wish McDonough and Braungart much luck, and for the sake of the world I hope they become very rich men by convincing corporations that it’s in their best interests to think globally and locally. I just have to wonder, in the meantime, what it is about corporations that makes M & B’s idea so novel.

I don’t really have the time to defend the point right now, but it just occurred to me: Richard Posner’s defense of the Bush administration’s violations of the law are completely of a piece with the man’s instrumentalism. By instrumentalism, I mean his belief that fundamental human rights are merely tools for achieving something else — in Posner’s case, maximizing overall social wealth. Here “social wealth”, in order to hack together a solution to utilitarianism’s well-known failings, is basically defined to be maximized when people are engaged in uncoerced, voluntary transactions.

It’s interesting to see Posner’s principles — nearly contentless as they are — painted with such self-parody. I’ve complained for a while that Posner smacks hard against fundamental human rights. No matter how much cash someone gives you, the conscience recoils at the thought of their being able to deny your human rights. The government shouldn’t be allowed to, say, pay the American public $1,000 apiece to repeal the right against self-incrimination. Yes, citizens have entered into this transaction willingly (by stipulation), but these are basic human rights. We’ve fought for them for at least 800 years, and we should think long and hard before we throw them away. Posner would have no problem with our committing moral suicide, so long as we signed a contract first.

And now Posner insists that the government has the right to break the law in the service of the greater good. It all fits very well together, doesn’t it?

The esteemed judge Richard Posner chimes in with his views on the recent FISA violations, and Marty Lederman smacks him down.

P.S.: Of the many on-point takedowns, probably Crooked Timber’s is best.