Posner and Becker Comedy Gold

Are you sure you’ve read any actual Posner, Kieran? That sounds _a lot_ like him to me. (Comment from a much better economist than Posner- “Posner learned economics from reading intro text books. He should have read some more.”)

good lord, couldn’t they have known that they couldn’t possibly win with this blog? i mean, they are indeed now just one of the hoi polloi, and not even nearly as good as giblets. in fact, a nice google-bomb to link them to fafblog would be a nice touch…

Ah, Healey, you delight. A pint of porter to you.

You may be delighted/devasted (depending on your perspective on hurling) that Aisake O’Halpairn (I can’t spell it, I have no Gaelic,) has signed with Carlton as a ‘rookie’. Big brother, Setanta, is already ‘there’.

Diasporas become fractal. And, in the Irish instance, span generations – from when one of our lot, changed the gaelic name, for potatoes, took ship, discovered gold (twice), went back, married a child bride, and returned to take up a free selection square mile.

Is the ‘Medium Lobster’ Irish? Are there several ‘Bloomsdays’ a year in the parallel universe now operant in ‘touch screen’ Diebold land?

By the way, as a piece of cost/benefit analysis, “Posner” (I am as yet agnostic) is wrong. Starting a war is an irreversible project, so you have to factor in as part of the cost of starting a war the fact that you thereby lose the opportunity to start the same war at a later date on potentially more favourable terms. This “option value” is an orthodox part of modern capital budgeting textbooks post about 1994.

And thinking about it, “Posner” is also wrong on the history of the doctrine of preventive war. Preventive wars were outlawed under the Nuremberg Principles, not because the people who put them together hadn’t thought that there could be situations in which it was rational to declare a preventive war, but precisely because they (apparently correctly) believed that far too many of the inputs to any calculation like “Posner”‘s were intrinsically subjective and therefore prone to being gerrymandered into rationalisations of a war that had already been decided upon.

By the way, this sort of thing is almost enough to shake my faith in Bayesian statistics. It would be a great deal of fun to ask Posner precisely what he means by “probability” in this context; is he suggesting that if the Nazis occupied the Sudetenland over and over again, then as the number of Sudetenland-occupations tended toward infinity, the proportion of them which ended in war would tend toward fifty per cent???

A few, somewhat telegraphic, points….

(1) John and DSquared notwithstanding, I’m unpersuaded that a consequentialist weighing of costs and benefits is the right way to think about justifiying a war. It is, at best, a very subsiduary component of such thinking. Maybe I’ll post on that at some point ….

(2) But even if it were, Posner’s weighing of costs and benefits _to the nation_ (!!!) rather than taking into account the interests of all is a recipe for aggressive imperialist war against other nations. (At least given some not implausible empirical assumptions.)

(3) Note that, if c&b _to the nation_ were an appropriate justification, it would fully justify a nation of fanatical jihadists who care little about their own survival waging thermonuclear war on the Great Satan. I take it that’s some kind of reductio of the idea.

(3) As David Rodin argued, at a seminar I attended last week, the problem with “preventive war” is that it involves a conspiracy to attack other nations (planning, active preparation etc.) and therefore itself licenses preventive war by those very nations on the nation adopting the doctrine. Surely not what the promulgators of the doctrine had in mind.

Perhaps the lesson here is that strong reasoning is not a prerequisite for making strong decisions.

This is fine, let’s assume that the c/b analysis works, I suspect it does in a very limited sense.

This is analogous to a wild-west situation: dangerous lawless town, you walk into saloon, you see a couple of suspicious fellows in a corner, you quickly calculate the odds and you shoot first.

The thing that’s missing here is acknowledgment that this whole wild-west model is one of the worst possible arrangements; most societies developed a much better one called ‘law & order’, the one where unprovoked attack is a crime.

Why wouldn’t he calculate the costs and benefits of implementing a proper system of international laws and international law enforcement.

I agree that the quotation does sound reasonably Posnerian.

Posner once constructed a sort of algebraic formula for determining whether a temporary restraining order should be granted. On close analysis, it melted down into pretty much what ol’ Learned Hand had said on the matter many years earlier, in his naively unscientific non-quant way. Posner’s version was clearly a vast improvement, as it looked impressively mathematical.

Kieran’s still right; Posner is certainly one of the Big Swinging Brains of the legal game. But he is subject to parody and, at times, self-parody.

I agree that the quotation does sound reasonably Posnerian.

Posner once constructed a sort of algebraic formula for determining whether a temporary restraining order should be granted. On close analysis, it melted down into pretty much what ol’ Learned Hand had said on the matter many years earlier, in his naively unscientific non-quant way. Posner’s version was clearly a vast improvement, as it looked impressively mathematical.

Kieran’s still right; Posner is certainly one of the Big Swinging Brains of the legal game. But he is subject to parody and, at times, self-parody.

Kieran, you are teh funny.

I’m agnostic as to whether “Posner” is a hoax. I am confident, however, that the “2L at DePaul” commenter is one (a hoax, that is; and a big fat one at that). If a second year law student hasn’t figured out that its “Judge” — not “Justice” — Posner, then he’s a lost cause.

Are you really shocked that students suck up to professors, especially big name ones? Then you have led a happily sheltered academic career. An important reason why many universities have anti-incest rules preventing departments from hiring their own recent graduates is to ensure that students spend time doing good work rather than just sucking up to their teachers for a job.

Kieran was so busy sputtering that he didn’t bother to read closely (quelle surprise!) He claims that Posner only mentions Iraq once, in the first sentence.
But Posner does mention the war in Iraq again, in the first sentence of the 3rd paragraph: “Second, and more important, and well illustrated by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, if the threat of attack lies in the future it is difficult to gauge either its actual likelihood or its probable magnitude.”

The argument is very clearly related to the argument of his new book. In case anyone’s interested in, you know, actually reading something, as opposed to simply (and I do mean simply) ridiculing it.

Sputter, sputter.

bq. Second, and more important, and well illustrated by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, if the threat of attack lies in the future it is difficult to gauge either its actual likelihood or its probable magnitude.

All the more reason, you would think, not to talk like the cost-benefit language amounted to a rational, objective and well-specified calculation, rather than a bit of rhetoric.

tom: Among its other features, the Firefox web browser seems to be better at rendering web sites like this one which have lines of text too close together for Internet Explorer to cope with. Normally I don’t hold with “use a different piece of software” as an answer to a problem, but you might give it a try and see if you like it.

abb1: Killing the FBI snitch will doubtless have unpredictable-at-the-time future costs which may greatly exceed the benefits in the present. Sort of like starting an avoidable war in the Middle East with no contingency plans and no exit strategy.

Kieran, if you’re now engaging the argument,

My original post engaged his argument directly. Read it again.

whether you think that, say, the risks of global warming are such that we should impose constraints on our use of fossil fuels? But don’t go using cost-benefit analysis…

Is there anything in my post that says cost-benefit analysis is a useless method? Is there anything that suggests we shouldn’t weigh the evidence as best we can when it comes to deciding what to do?

I thought I was missing something, until I realised that the argument for preventive war is exactly like the argument for reducing fuel emissions to avoid risks of global warming.
Or, also, like supporting a ban on smoking in pubs, to reduce the effects of passive smoking. Totally cost effective. Nice and clean. Better living through napalm.

I don’t think the blog is a hoax at all. If you check the domain registration details at register.com, you can see that the name has been registered by Lawrence Lessig.

Domain Name: BECKER-POSNER-BLOG.COM
Registrant:
LESSIG, LAWRENCE (EEBSYEWUWD)
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305
US

You can check Lessig’s posting about Becker-Posner at http://www.lessig.org/blog/

WE INTERRUPT THIS THREAD FOR A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT ….

You guys who are having screen display problem:

I’ve found it is possible to reproduce the effect you are complaining about if I (a) increase my screen resolution to its maximum, (b) then increase font size to its maximum and (c) use Internet Explorer.

I’d strongly advise changing one of a, b or c, but especially c unless you want to download lots of drive-by malware. Firefox is a better browser, is standards compliant, and is downloadable “here”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/index.html .

Your post evokes the reflection that Posner’s entire career has been a sort of giant blog avant la lettre. His scholarly and judicial output since the 1960s has been shaped by the following characteristics, all of which are central to the blogging phenomena (at least as an ideal type):

(a) a willingness to apply an amateur knowledge of a technical discipline to a novel subject often in a half-assed fashion — beginning with the application of law to economics and expanding asymptotically to the application of all disciplines to all subjects;

(b) a stance of naive common sense;

(c) a flood the zone publication strategy, the initial zone being legal scholarship, later expanding to the body of American judicial opinions, and aspiring to flood a zone consisting of the set of all public policy and intellectual subjects;

(d) a willingness (perhaps unintentional) to say lots of wrong or stupid things as the price of maximizing output of smart or things.

What could be more bloglike, even if published in Harvard Law Review or Fed.3d.?

And to top it all off, he has parlayed these approaches into genuine preeminence in legal thought — in terms of intellectual contribution, not just academic status — without for a moment abandoning the foibles of intellect and sensibility that his approach shares with 4 (or whatever) million ordinary bloogers.

(So maybe you guys should get tenure credit for CT.)

Martin’s post is dead on about both Posner and blogging.

The fact that Posner apparently totally ignores the effect of preventative war on the international system — legitimacy, trust, and norms in ongoing relationships between actors — is yet another demonstration of how harmful the “a-sociality” of simplistic economic theory is.

Nic,
Is estimating the probable cost of reducing emissions to avoid the risk of future global warming exactly like estimating the probable cost of launching a preemptive war in the Middle East?
Also, was there a consensus about the probable benefits of launching a preemptive invasion of Iraq – anything approaching the broad worldwide scientific consensus about the benefits of curtailing the emissions that lead to global warming?

Tony Blair claimed to have WMD evidence which he could not reveal to the public.

Rumsfeld claimed that “We know where they [WMDs] are”… around the Baghdad area, he said.

Will we ever know the details of all this “evidence”… or was it all just porky-pies, like all the other “evidence” they dredged up?

Hmm… I wonder.

Kieran, perhaps you could go ahead and make the argument then, for constraints on our use of fossil fuels. Tell us–exactly–what the risks of global warming are. None of these simplified scenarios, which only appears to offer “rational, objective and well-specified calculation.” Don’t go telling us that such constraints would easily be justified, if we assumed that the risks–which in reality are impossible to quantify–were said to be x, and the costs were y (also impossible to quanitify), and x is greater than y. That’s just rhetoric, and we’re entitled to more than that. (Unless we agree with the policy prescription, in which case we aren’t.)

The trick here is to figure out what degree of probability is sufficient and how confident is one in one’s probability assumption.

The trick is to realize that 1. war presupposes an overestimate of the expected returns on at least one side, quite possible on both sides, and 2. the incentives of the public and its leaders are rarely aligned when it comes to choosing between war and peace, with the rulers having the propensity to choose war more often than is socially optimal. Which turns the idiotic question “Is preventive justifiable?” into the more relevant question, “Which institutions support a decision making process that chooses war only when it is socially beneficial?” I.e. that actively biases the decision against the incentives and estimates of the rulers.

You can’t even apply the Law of Trichotomy to complex numbers. You really make a jerk of yourself when you try to quantify the unquantifiable, and then try to legitimise your analyses by cloaking them in grade-school mathematics from dubious premises. All those ‘supposes’–my, my.
There’s a great takedown of this sort of thing in Davis and Hersh’s ‘Descartes’ Dream.’

I reread my comment about Posner’s career and find that a craven spirit of fairness compells me to add a John-Kerry-on-a-bad-rhetoric-day qualifier. Based on the somewhat limited number of Posner’s judicial opinions I have read, I feel that he is as least as careful as the average judge to make sure that the result he reaches is consistent with precedent and otherwise conforms to standard norms of the judicial role. (Since I am an old fashioned Karl Llewellyn realist, the phrase “as carefull as the average judge” allows quite a bit of leeway, but not unlimited.) The reasoning of his opinions often reads like blogs, however. Compared with most jusicial opinions, this is no insult.

I guess you are right. The historic revisionism is too strong. But why is it not news that it is a hoax yet.

JH

my working theory is that the blog >is an elaborate hoax

I hope people realise this was never my working theory.

I hope people realise this was never my working theory.

I take it most people assumed preventive facetiousness. Justifiable preventive facetiousness.

And wait til Kieran reads this one:

Asteroid collisions? I anticipate teasing comments asking me whether I’m also worried about invasions of aliens from other galaxies. (I’m not.) In fact the probability of a catastrophic asteroid collision, while small, has a greater expected cost than the $4 million that is all that NASA is spending a year to map NEOs (dangerous near-earth objects, i.e., asteroids whose orbits intersect the earth’s orbit. For a good discussion, see the report of the Task Force commissioned by the U.K.’s minister for science. It was less than a century ago that an asteroid a mere 60 meters or so in diameter exploded over Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb. Fortunately, the only casualties, so far as anyone knows, were the local reindeer. Maybe the next asteroid will explode above Los Angeles, sparing the reindeer. Of course that’s unlikely; cities occupy a minute fraction of the earth’s surface. But a slightly larger asteroid, wherever it landed, could inflict tens or even hundreds of millions of casualties from tsunamis, fire storms, shock waves, and dense clouds of debris that could block photosynthesis and even trigger catastrophic global warming.
_________

That’ll keep Kieran posting for days, I’m sure.

Thomas,

The inclusion and exclusion of the probabilities of certain events–notwithstanding the difficulties of estimating them–is certainly quite telling. How is it that the plausible effects of advocating a policy of preemption become null events for the purposes of the analysis?

In the case of global warming, cost/benefit analyses certainly take into account the effects of environmental regulations on the economy. How is it that the possible deleterious effects of pursuing a particular policy in response to the threat of terrorism are deemed unworthy of ‘rational’, probabilistic analsis?

“All true; but reading the skeptical literature, I am reminded of the debates in the 1960s over the effects of cigarette smoking on human health. ”

Hahaha… There, Posner supports my theory, preventive war *is* exactly like bans on smoking! and on gas emissions! hurrah. I feel vindicated.

Hoax, or madness, does it even matter? There’s people who take him seriously anyway. That’s what’s so fascinating…

Regarding “preventive” war.

While agreeing that the cost-benefit analysis arguments are not clear to me, the legal question is worth asking and debating.

1. The US has a tricky legal issue under question regarding the Constituionality of an Established Military, period. Let us not misuse or confuse the term “war” as it relates to the US Constition. The authority to declare war is supposed to reside wholly in the Legislative Branch, a qualification that has been circumvented over time, but especially post-WWII, when the collapse of the old colonial Empires and the cold war required an established military. The trick was to use vague and questionable Treaty Organizations, like NATO and the UN SC to allow the US Executive to wage war without explicit Congressional authority to do so.

This created two (or more) legal definitions of “war” in the US. The first, “formal” war, declared by Congress. The second, “executive” war, based on the retention by the Executive branch of (limited) War Powers to honor Treaty obligations, control the established Military, and to try and fill the void created by the utter failure of the previous International system. (“cold” war or “law enforcement” war have their own supporters as well).

It surprises me that no one seems to bother to note that the idea of “preemptive war” is an oxymoron. What we are really talking about is the legal extent of Executive Authority to justify using War Powers on the grounds of possible external threats, and without first securing the Constitional authority to do so from Congress or under the aegis of Treaty obligation.

We have allowed Congress to surrender it’s appropriate authority to declare “war” to a greater extent than many Americans think wise. We have gotten into the habit of allowing the US Executive, under the guise of Treaty, War Powers, the UN, NATO, and etc. to assume the power and legitimacy to wantonly use the military to engage in acts that most reasonable people would consider acts of war (i.e. bombing other Countries). This is not a vice particular to the Bush administration, as it’s worth noting that the previous administration engaged in acts of war in many more instances and often with less merit. Regardless, let’s not confuse “Executive War Powers”, with Consititional “Declarations of War”, as we’re only debating the former.

This is the basis of the legal debate. What are the appropriate limits and conditions vis a vis Executive War Powers? Both the Right and Left have their respective ‘pet’ uses for the US military that neither would dare submit for a formal Congressional declaration of war. And for all the Blair bashing over sending UK troops to Iraq by the British intelligencia, it’d be wise for his critics to remember the word, “Suez”, prior to judging him too harshly.