But I don’t believe either explanation. For one thing, Eric notes that if anything, the boomers are at the age where philosophers’ influence typically peaks. For another, the stats Eric posts back up something I’ve heard talked about in conversation a bit independently.

There are lots of very prominent, and ground-breaking, philosophers in my generation. (I’m defining generations in a way that my generation includes roughly people born between 1965 and 1980.) And looking at the current crops of grad students, the next generation looks fairly spectacular too. But between the generation of Lewis, Kripke, Fodor, Jackson etc, and my generation, there aren’t as many prominent, field-defining figures. It’s not like there are none; Timothy Williamson alone would refute that claim. But I didn’t think there were as many, and Eric’s figures go some way to confirming that impression.

Eric also makes a suggestion about why this strange state of affairs – strange because you’d expect boomers to be overrepresented in any category like this – may have come about.

College enrollment grew explosively in the 1960s and then flattened out. The pre-baby-boomers were hired in large numbers in the 1960s to teach the baby boomers. The pre-baby boomers rose quickly to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s and set the agenda for philosophy during that period. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the pre-baby-boomers remained dominant. During the 1980s, when the baby boomers should have been exploding onto the philosophical scene, they instead struggled to find faculty positions, journal space, and professional attention in a field still dominated by the depression-era and World War II babies.

That’s an interesting hypothesis, though it seems that if it is true, it should generalise to other disciplines. And I’m wondering whether it does. Are baby boomers underrepresented among the leading figures in other fields such as political science, history, sociology, English literature and so on? If not, I think we need another explanation for philosophy’s recent history.

The median American’s non-household wealth declined by 14% between 2001 and 2007. So when household wealth evaporated, guess what happened?

I’m not sure of the source of this, so take some of this with a grain of salt. But if it’s true, it is relevant to something Daniel Davies claimed and Brad DeLong rejected, namely (to quote Daniel) “we are in a recession basically because of the disppearance of a huge amount of household sector wealth”.

I basically think Daniel is right on this, and Brad wrong, for reasons I’ll go into below the fold. And I take it Nate is endorsing Daniel’s line, namely that the recession was brought about by a huge collapse in household wealth.

Brad offers, I think, two arguments against the wealth effect explanation of the recession. One is that “wealth had disappeared before—remember Black Monday on the stock market in 1987, or the collapse of the dot-com boom?—without it triggering a Lesser Depression.” But both of those collapses led to a huge loss of wealth among people with substantial stock holdings, i.e., among people with the lowest marginal propensity to consume in the economy. That’s very different to a general fall in the value of houses; that tends to affect people who have a very high marginal propensity to consume, and hence lead to recession.

The other argument is a timing argument. Brad says that new construction fell well before the recession hit. And it’s true, it did. And that would be a good argument against the claim that the recession was caused by job losses to construction workers. But it’s not a good argument against the claim that of household wealth caused the recession. Let’s look at when house prices started to fall (at least in the US).

That looks like like house prices collapsed just before the recession hit. So the timing works.

It’s true that house prices start falling in 2007, and there’s no recession until into 2008. But I think (a) you’d expect a wealth effect to percolate slowly through the economy, and (b) people didn’t think house prices had collapsed in late 2007, early 2008. It’s true by then that people knew that house prices in Phoenix and inland California were on their way down. But you don’t see much rapid movement downwards in the prices in non-bubbly areas until much further into 2008. If you like you can look through the data——to see that. Or you can just remember what that time was like. Certainly around New York, the prevailing wisdom was that a bubble in desert properties had quite properly popped, but that was no reason to doubt that New York properties would be affected. And lots of building went on in 2008 on that basis.

So the timeline works out for the theory that loss of household wealth is what did it. On the other hand, I don’t understand Brad’s positive theory of the recession. Here’s what he says.

It was because people recognized that banks that were supposed to have originated-and-distributed mortgage-backed securities had held on to them instead, that as a result a large chunk of the $500 billion in subprime losses had eaten up the capital base of highly leveraged financial institutions, and that you were running grave risks if you lent to a bank. The run on the shadow banking system that followed was the source of the crash as financing for exports and for equipment investment vanished, and then the whole thing snowballed.

But if banks had followed the originate and distribute model, and we found out that all the MBS’s were lousy, you would have had risks on lending to anyone in the financial system anywhere. That would seem to generate an even bigger run on the shadow banking system. Frankly, a pure originate-and-retain model, followed by the bankruptcy of a few dedicated mortgage brokers, would probably have been less complicated to unwind than the mess we have. Certainly it seems that the fact that so much of the market was orginate-and-distribute is causing big problems for doing mortgage adjustments. (I think that SemiEcon makes basically this point in Brad’s thread.)

The dispute between Brad and Daniel is caught up in a bigger dispute about whether the banks are to blame for the crash. I wonder whether this is going to be too hard to figure out without doing some tedious work on defining just what we mean by “the crash”. Here’s one rough take on the Bush era economy. It basically was awful; a long recession in the style of 1920s England. This fact was disguised because house prices kept going up, and people were able to turn rising prices into consumption via HELOCs and the like. In turn, the easy availability of just this financing helped keep house prices rising. But this couldn’t last forever, and when it stopped, there was a crash.

That suggests that bad, or at least odd, behaviour by the banks contributed to the crash. But it also suggests that a more responsible banking sector would have left us so badly off all through the 2000s, that the economy would have been just as bad by the end of Bush’s term. (Assuming, in the relevant counterfactual world, that Bush even won in 2004; without the housing bubble, he might not have.) If that’s right, the banks aren’t to blame for the crisis; Bush is. And the solution to the crisis isn’t to fix the banking sector, either through regulatory reform or continuing to bail out the banks, it’s to stop Bush-era economic policies.

If AV is so god damned simple, why can nobody explain convincingly to me whether it screws the LibDems or not?

This seems like a fun question to work through at longer than Twitter length, even if it is purely hypothetical, since the No side is going to win.

One obvious answer is that as long as the Liberal Democrats are polling 10% the voting system won’t make a lot of difference. Another obvious answer is that if the Lib Dems recover at all, then AV would seem to help them. There will be plenty of seats, such as Oxford East which they lost under FPTP, but would have a very good chance of winning under AV.

But if AV in England[1] plays out in a similar way to how AV played out in Australia, there is a big risk to the Lib Dems. They could lose a huge portion of their vote to the Greens.

Let’s start with a little story about a large English-speaking constitutional monarchy. At one time the two party system, one roughly centre-right, the other a trade unionist party of roughly centre-left persuasion, was disrupted by the formation of a new party, the core of which came from centrist defectors from one of the major parties. The second word in the name of the party was Democrats.

Initially the party appealed to moderates disaffected with the two major parties. But over time their policies drifted leftward, so that on many issues they opposed the trade unionist party from the left. (This was helped by the trade unionist party drifting rightward over time.) They got a large boost in this when they opposed military intervention in Iraq, something that both major parties supported. Although polling on this was never completely clear, it seemed their supporter base consisted largely of people who supported these left-wing views, or who were disaffected with the major parties.

Then one day the party decided to support the radical fiscal policies of the centre-right party, at the time when that centre-right party had much more support than its trade unionist opposition, but needed their support to get their policies through parliament. This opened up divisions in the party, and led over time to their support cratering. Within a couple of elections they were out of the parliament, and most of their support had gone to the Greens.

End of little story.

The story was about Australia, and the party was the Australian Democrats. But with a little work, you could read it as being about the UK and the Liberal Democrats. Now I’ve had to strain a little to get the analogy between the Liberal Democrats and the Australian Democrats to work. Most notably, the Liberal Democrats have a much bigger, and much more diverse, supporter base than the Australian Democrats ever had. So I don’t think we will see a scenario where the Lib Dems cease to win parliamentary seats within two terms of doing their big deal with the large conservative party. But I do think that they have something to fear from the Greens, and AV would make these fears a little more realistic.

It’s true that with the current voting system, i.e., plurality voting, the Greens do not do well in House of Commons elections. They only got 1% of the vote last time. Though amazingly they did win a seat. But under a different voting system for European elections, they got 8.6% of the vote. And I would guess that if AV were in place for House of Commons elections, and voting Green didn’t take away one’s ability to express a preference between the larger parties, the Green vote would go up by several percent.

If that’s right, a big question becomes where the vote would come from. I would bet that much of it would come from the Lib Dems. That is, I would bet most voters who would identify as Greens (in the German or Australian sense) would currently vote Lib Dem rather than Labour. In part that’s because the Lib Dems have many sensible environmental policies (such as no new runway at Heathrow). And in part that’s because many (not all!) Green voters tend to be antagonistic to big legacy parties like Labour.

One thing we’ve seen in Australia, and potentially one big effect of AV in England, is that once AV lets a party round up the votes of its core supporters without them having to worry about wasted votes, there can be something of a bandwagon effect. With AV, the Greens could easily get 5-7% of the vote in a Commons election. And once they get 5-7% of the vote in a Commons election, they might attract more voters, especially voters who are less sympathetic to fringe parties.

In short, just like the Australian Democrats ceased being the natural home for the We hate both those bastards voters, and they lost that mantle to the Greens, the Liberal Democrats could similarly lose voters who drift to them out of disaffection with the two big parties to the Greens. It won’t happen under plurality voting; the Greens won’t reach the needed “critical mass” of voters to be a natural home for disaffected voters. But it could happen, and could happen quickly, under AV.

Of course, since AV isn’t actually going to win, these are mostly unfalsifiable predictions. Which is too bad, especially if I’m right. I’d love watching the Liberal Democrats be undone by their own attempt to tilt the system in their favour.

fn1. I have no idea how AV would affect voting in Scotland and Wales[2]. There’s no obvious precedent I know of for what happens under AV with at least four parties having a large portion of the votes in many districts. If I’m right that AV would help the Greens, there might be many Scottish and Welsh seats where we have five major candidates. Once that happens it gets very hard to predict who will get eliminated at each stage of voting, and hence who will win. If I were in Scotland or Wales, I’d be tempted to vote No just because it would be good for someone else to be the guinea pig for using AV in a many party system. It is much easier to speculate about what will happen in England, where Australian examples provide better analogies. So this post is just for speculation about the consequences of AV for England.

fn2. Northern Ireland, on the other hand, seems easy to predict. We have lots of examples of how runoff elections work when there is a large ethnic or religious or racial divide between two large groups, plus some political disagreement within the two groups. (See, for example, lots of runoff elections in the US South.) The short answer is that the kind of upset we almost saw in Fermanagh and South Tyrone will be even less likely than under the current system, since Unionist candidates will generally win all and only seats where a majority of the voters are Unionist.

Both Matt and Brad are pushing back against Chris’s post below, which argued that Labour had done very little about equality. (Although in his remark on my comment on his post, Brad now seems to suggest that his post was a pre-emptive strike against what Chris would go on to write in comments.) There’s a natural rejoinder on behalf of Chris, which has been well made in both Matt and Brad’s comments threads. Namely, if the graph really showed that things had gotten better, equality-wise, the Gini coefficient for the UK would have fallen. But in fact it rose, somewhat significantly, over Labour’s term. Indeed, the IFS Report that the graph is based on shows quite clearly that it rose markedly towards the end of Labour’s term.

So I got to thinking about how good a measure Gini coefficients are of equality. I think the upshot of what I’ll say below is that Chris’s point is right – if things were really going well, you’d expect Gini coefficients to fall. But it’s messy, particularly because Gini’s are much more sensitive to changes at the top than the bottom.

Because my own thoughts on this are such a mess, I thought I’d hand over to two other characters to handle the back-and-forth.

ACHILLES: Imagine you’ve got a reasonably unequal society.

TORTOISE: You mean 1997 UK, don’t you?

ACHILLES: I do, but any will do.

TORTOISE: I’ll imagine 16th Century Venice then. I like canals.

ACHILLES: Suit yourself. Now imagine that this society gets 30% richer over a period of a few years.

TORTOISE: Yay! More canals!

ACHILLES: And this 30% increase in real income is distributed in proportion to how much income people had at the beginning of the example. In other words, since it was a very unequal society to start with, the gains are distributed very unevenly. So the society has gotten worse with respect to equality.

TORTOISE: Wait a minute. In this example the ratios between incomes of people in the society doesn’t change as a result of the increase. So the Gini coefficient, which is only sensitive to ratios of incomes, doesn’t change. And since the Gini coefficient is the perfect measure of equality, the society hasn’t gotten worse with respect to equality; rather, it hasn’t changed a bit.

ACHILLES: But now the society has all the inequality embedded in the initial position, plus the inequality embedded in the distribution of the new wealth. That’s worse than what they started with.

TORTOISE: Do you have a better measure of inequality than Gini?

ACHILLES: No, but one can be sceptical that a model is universally applicable without having a better model to put in its place.

TORTOISE: Seems like lazy talk to me. In any case, that’s not what actually happened in the UK, 1997-2009. (Which I know is what this is really all about for you.) That there graph slopes downward in the middle section. It isn’t flat, like in you’re example.

ACHILLES: Only if you ignore the tails. I agree though that if you ignore the tails it slopes down. That’s in large part an effect of how the y-axis is drawn. If it was drawn in pounds (or real purchasing power) it would slope up, not down. Eyeballing the graph, it looks like most people got a 1.5% per year real income rise (on average) plus something like a £2 per week per year raise. In other words, it was something like 3/4 due to the gains being distributed in proportion to starting income, and 1/4 due to everyone getting one shiny coin per week extra each year.

TORTOISE: Why are we eyeballing this? Don’t you have the numbers?

ACHILLES: Actually, no I don’t. The IFS study includes a graph, but not the table it is based on.

TORTOISE: I’m thinking I’m going to lose my standing as the lazy one in this dialogue at this rate. In any case, wouldn’t that mean Gini went down. And as we went over earlier, Gini is perfect. So Labour wins, Bertram loses, nyah nyah nyah nyah.

ACHILLES: But Gini didn’t go down, it went up. (And I’m not conceding that it’s the perfect measure.)

TORTOISE: Ah yes, I imagine that had something to do with those tails at either end of the graph. It’s probably something to do with those. You know, when there is a large increase in in-kind payments to the very poor, weird things happen at the lower tail. That’s probably all there is to it.

ACHILLES: That’s probably not all there is to it. Although I am too lazy to find the real numbers and confirm this. But I do have a nice toy model to suggest it.

TORTOISE: Ooh, a toy model. Are you a philosopher or something?

ACHILLES: Something like that. Let’s say we have a society with 100 people, n₁, through n₁₀₀, and let’s say the income of each person n_i is i. Surprisingly, this only leads to a Gini of 0.33, which is lower than most existing societies. It does feel fairly unequal though.

TORTOISE: Only 0.33, not too bad, not too bad.

ACHILLES: Now let’s imagine we reduce the income of the bottom 9 people by 100%, i.e., to 0. This raises the Gini obviously, but not by that much. It only goes up to 0.3409. (At least if Wikipedia is right that this equation works.)

TORTOISE: A Wikipedia equation. Nice, very nice.

ACHILLES: Yes well, you get what you pay for here. Anyway, let’s restore the income to those 9 people, which is pleasing to do, and now double the income of the top nine earners in the society. Now the Gini rockets up to a more real-world like 0.4149. So Gini is much more sensitive to rises at the top end than falls at the bottom end, at least if this toy model is anything to go by.

TORTOISE: I’ll finally admit, this seems like a weakness in the Gini model. After all, when we care about equality, we should care more about what goes on at the lower end than the upper. But it also suggests to me that the rise in Gini under Labour is an artifact of a model that’s too sensitive to the top, combined with a very pleasing rise in the incomes of my City friends.

ACHILLES: So the model is perfect, except when it grounds complaints about Labour and the City, in which cases it should be set aside.

TORTOISE: You may very well think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.

I come out of that liking Achilles’ position more than Tortoise’s, though I also like the conclusion they draw at the end. In principle a rise in Gini that was caused solely by the very rich getting even richer could be accompanied with an intuitive improvement in equality, if we saw in general things getting better for the poorer across the board. But that’s really not what we saw in Britain. And in a period of economic growth, you’d expect Gini to fall even if we were standing still on equality. When it rises, we have an indication that things are getting considerably worse, and I don’t see anything in the data to defeat that indication.

As some of the contributors note, it’s easy to overstate the trend that’s going on here. It’s not that for the 20th Century, philosophers used only armchair methods, and with the dawning of the 21st century they are going back to engaging with the sciences. When I was in grad school in the 90s, it was completely common to rely on psychological studies of all of uses, especially studies on dissociability, on developmental patterns, and on what was distinctive about people with autism or with Capgras Syndrome. And the influence of Peter Singer on work in ethics meant that purely armchair work in ethics was out of the question, whatever one thought of Singer’s conclusions.

This was hardly a distinctive feature of philosophy in south-eastern Australia. Indeed, we were probably more armchair-focussed than contemporary American philosophers. As Ernie Sosa notes in the entry linked above, 20th century metaphysics is shot through with arguments from results in 20th century physics. The importance of objective chance to contemporary nomological theories is obviously related to the role of chance in different branches of physics and biology, and modern theories of it involve a lot of attention to various sciences. And I’ve lost count of the number of debates I’ve been in in philosophy of language where appeal has been made at one stage or other to cross-linguistic data, which is presumably not armchair evidence unless we assume that the person in the armchair knows every human language. It’s not that I think philosophers do as good a job as they should at drawing on evidence from sources outside traditional philosophy – I’ve even tried to encourage philosophers to do more of this – but they tend to see appeal to other areas of inquiry as a generally acceptable, and often important, kind of move.

So it’s a bit of a stretch to say, as Joshua Knobe does, that in that time “people began to feel that philosophy should be understood as a highly specialized technical field that could be separated off from the rest of the intellectual world.” I’m really not sure which of the great philosophers of the 20th century could be characterised this way. Perhaps if you included mathematics in philosophy and not the “rest of the intellectual world” you can get a couple of great 20th century philosophers in. But I doubt it would get much beyond that.

That’s not to say there’s nothing new or interesting that’s been happening in the last fifteen years or so. In fact I think there are three trends here that are worth noting.

One purely stylistic, and actually rather trivial, trend is that philosophers are now a bit more inclined to ‘show their workings’. So if I want to rely on Daniel Gilbert’s work on comprehension and belief, I’ll throw in a bunch of citations to his work, and to the secondary literature on it, in part to give people the impression that I know what’s going on here. You won’t see those kind of notes in, say, J. L. Austin’s work. But that’s not because Austin didn’t know much psychology. I suspect he knew much much more than me. But because of very different traditions about citation, and because of differences in self-confidence between Austin and me, his philosophy might look a bit further removed from empirical work. My case is hardly unique; citations to non-philosophical work by philosophers feel like they are up a lot on what they were a generation or two back. But I doubt this tells us about much more than changes in citation practices.

A more interesting trend is picked up by Ernie Sosa – philosophers are doing a lot more experiments themselves than they were a generation ago. This is presumably a good thing, at least as long as they are good experiments!

The university that Ernie and I work at, Rutgers, has a significant causal role in this. We encourage PhD students to study in the cognitive science department while they are at Rutgers, and many of them end up working in or around experimental work. That’s not to say I’m at all responsible for this – I’m much more sedentary than my median colleague. But many of my colleagues have done a lot to encourage students interested in experimental work.

The third trend, and this one I’m less excited about, is the reliance on survey work in empirical work designed to have philosophical consequences. Indeed, sometimes the phrase ‘experimental philosophy’ seems to be used, at least in conversation, to mean philosophy that involves taking surveys. And most of the original experiments reported on the experimental philosophy blog involve taking surveys. To be fair, many people who regard themselves as experimental philosophers, such as the contributors to that blog, know a lot about philosophically relevant work that doesn’t involve taking surveys, and even write about such work. They tend as a group though to be less involved in running such experiments.

It seems to me that surveying people about what they think about hard philosophical questions, or tricky examples meant to illustrate philosophical points, is not a great guide to what is true, and isn’t even necessarily a good guide to what they think. We certainly wouldn’t take surveys about whether people think it should be legal for an Islamic community center to be built around the corner from here to be significant to political theory debates about freedom of religion.

A slightly more interesting result comes from a survey that Matthew Yglesias posted this morning. If you trust Gallup, only 26% of Americans believe in “the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future”. This is a more than a little nuts, at least as interpreted literally. I know that I had blueberries with breakfast, and I can confidently and reliably predict that the Greens will not win the Australian election currently underway. And I know these things in virtue of having a mind, and in virtue of how my mind works. There’s the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future in action!

Of course, the 74% of people who apparently denied that the mind has the power to know the past and predict the future probably don’t really deny that I have these powers. The survey they were asking was about paranormal phenomena generally. And I left off part of the question they were asked. It asked whether they believed in clairvoyance, which they ‘clarified’ as the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future. Presumably at least some of the people who answered ‘no’ (or ‘don’t know’) interpreted the question as not being about the power of the mind to know stuff through perception, memory and inference, but through some more extraordinary method.

It’s in general extremely hard to understand just what qustion people are answering in surveys. And this makes it hard to know how much significance we should place on different surveys. This matters to some live puzzles. For instance, as Jonathan Schaffer recently wrote, there is an “emerging consensus in experimental philosophy, according to which … the magnitude of the stakes does not affect intuitions about knowledge.” (By ‘the stakes’ he means the stakes faced by a person about who we’re asking whether they know that p, when the person has to make a decision to which p is relevant.) This consensus is largely because the experimenters asked subjects whether certain fictional characters, some facing trivial decisions and some facing quite momentous decisions, knew that p, where p is something that would be important in their deliberations. Generally, they didn’t find a difference in the responses.

But there is quite a bit of evidence, including a lot of experimental evidence (PDF), that differences in stakes in this sense really do matter to cognitive states. In particular, what it takes to have settled the question to one’s own satisfaction of whether p is true, depends on what is at stake, and if you ask them the right way, survey respondents agree that it depends on what is at stake. Assuming, as everyone in this debate does, that knowledge requires settling questions to one’s own satisfaction, this means we have empirical evidence that stakes matter to knowledge. What does this mean for the consensus that Schaffer reports? I suspect it means, like in the Gallup survey, that different people are interpreting the survey questions differently, but there are lots of alternative explanations. In any case, I’d want a lot more evidence than surveys about instinctive responses to difficult cases before I gave up on a well established result in experimental psychology.

There’s something right about the argument Edlin et al are making; it being rational for you to vote does require a degree of altruism. But I think their model (a) makes some fairly heroic assumptions, and more importantly (b) doesn’t explain why so many people in America should go vote today. Below the fold I give a slightly different reason for voting, one that applies in all 50 American states. The short version is that you should vote today because it increases your chances of getting a good outcome next time.

For purely selfish people, voting is a bizarre act. You spend a lot of time, energy and (in some cases) money for a vanishingly small chance at improving your lot in life. If you’re an altruist, as Edlin et al point out, it is a little more rational. You spend a lot of time, energy and money for a vanishingly small chance at improving the lot in life of billions of people. Provided you give enough weight to the utility of others, perhaps this could be rational.

But it isn’t clear that it is. It depends on how vanishingly small the chance of making a difference is. Some people are in states where the probability that they are the marginal vote is literally one in billions. (New York and Utah are examples of this.) Many of those people live in states where the probability that their state is the marginal state is also rather high. The probability of being the marginal vote in a marginal state is, for most people, very small. So the model suggested only gives you a reason to vote in close elections.

Indeed, Andrew Gelman in a post about last year’s local elections says that he didn’t vote because the races weren’t close. I think there’s a reason to vote even in races that aren’t that close, and where you don’t give any positive probability to being the marginal vote. (In the currently popular lingo in philosophy, your probability that you are the marginal vote may be vague over an interval including zero.)

Voting is a lot like playing an n-player Prisoners Dilemma with the other people who (loosely speaking) share the values that underlie your vote. I’m taking values to be defined loosely enough here that it includes most people who vote the same way you do. You’d prefer that all of you vote to all of you not voting. Given turnout rates in the U.S., that’s pretty much always the difference between winning and losing. But conditional on what the other people will almost certainly do, you’d prefer to not vote than to vote. And so would everyone else. We have a Prisoners Dilemma here, and the rational thing to do in a Prisoners Dilemma is to not cooperate.

Note that we can’t get out of the Prisoners Dilemma merely by assuming altruism. As Simon Blackburn pointed out a while ago (“Practical Tortoise Raising”, Mind 1995), as long as there are any divergences in preferences, even altruists will be in Prisoners Dilemma situations from time to time. And perfect convergence in preferences is a crazy assumption. So real-life Prisoners Dilemmas for moderate altruists are possible. And I think elections are such possibilities.

But wait! There is more than one election. If any election is a Prisoners Dilemma, then a series of elections over time is a repeated Prisoners Dilemma. And one of the things we know for sure is that in repeated 2 player Prisoners Dilemma, the rational thing to do is to cooperate. That’s true even though the short-term benefits from non-cooperation clearly outweigh the benefits of cooperation. So all we need to do is to show that n player Prisoners Dilemmas are the same, and we’ll have an argument for the rationality of voting.

This last step isn’t completely obvious. In the 2 person case, cooperation is required at turn t because otherwise the other player will have a bad attitude towards you, and hence not cooperate at turn t+1. But in the n-player case, few people will know that you haven’t voted, and fewer still will have their future behaviour effected by this. This isn’t quite true for parents of impressionable children, or perhaps for friends of people who are apathetic/economists, but we might worry it is true of a lot of people.

But there may be another effect of voting. It might be that the probability that others like you will vote in the next election is a more-or-less continuous function of the number of people like you who vote in this election. This doesn’t seem too implausible actually. If we imagine Democrats having received tens of millions fewer votes in 2000 and 2004, then it is hard to imagine the level of support and work for Democrats in this cycle that there actually are. If you imagine the prior Democratic vote being a little closer to actuality, but still down, it is easy to imagine support and enthusiasm levels this time being down.

If I were being more careful here, I’d try to work out the marginal efficiency of voting at producing future votes. That is, the marginal difference that an extra vote for your team in this election makes to the expected number of votes your team gets in subsequent elections. I suspect it is well over 1. That’s because dropping a party’s support by a lot, say 10,000,000 in a US context, feels like it could be so demoralisingly bad that the party struggles to recover. But this would need a lot more work. It is certainly easy to come up with not completely crazy looking mathematical models where the efficiency is over 2. If everyone like you is a little demoralised by your not voting, even if it’s just a very little bit, that could easily translate into votes lost next time.

Moreover, that effect need not be localised. It’s pretty unlikely that New York will be a swing state any time soon. It’s unlikely that it will be close, and conditional on it being close, it’s unlikely that the national race will be close. But cross-voter incentives can work across state lines. People pay attention to what the national popular vote number is, and it effects their marginal disposition to vote/campaign for candidates that you like. So a vote in New York now may translate into benefits in swing states (which probably means the Mountain West) in the future.

So I think there’s a reason for rational altruists to vote, even when they know they won’t be the marginal vote. They are signaling to like-minded voters that they will vote, and that’s crucial for sustained success. This isn’t an alternative to Edlin et al’s model. In fact I think they are right that someone with no other-related preferences shouldn’t vote, even given the dynamic effects of voting described here. But I think the dynamic effects (a) make the case for voting considerably stronger, and (b) explain why it is rational to vote even in states that won’t be close, and won’t be swing states if they are close.

In any case, I don’t think any readers of this blog have no other-related preferences. You should all go vote, as a signal to everyone else that you’re voters. Take my advice, and you’ll thank me in 2012. You really are voting for America’s future; if I’m right most people in the country are largely voting for America’s electoral future.

Now I think this is all a good thing. Voting is a good thing, and a healthy democracy requires a decent turnout of voters, so doing our little bit to help democracy is being on the side of the good. It’s not exactly related to the courses we’re teaching, but spending 45 seconds before class is officially scheduled to start encouraging voter registration, or putting voter registration ads on course management software as Rutgers has done, seems far from an abuse of official positions.

Still, voting isn’t the only good thing in the world. It seems to me that voting in the upcoming election for Obama/Biden over McCain/Palin is pretty close to a moral requirement. (For those who are eligible to so vote. I of course won’t be voting for Obama, because that would be illegal, and undemocratic.) But it seems it would be seriously wrong for either Rutgers, or for me, to use our positions of authority to promote voting for Obama. And I think this isn’t a particularly controversial position.

But it’s a little hard to say just exactly why it’s OK for Rutgers (and me) to do what we’re doing, and not do what we’re not doing. Below the fold I have a few thoughts on this question.

We are actually helping Obama.
It’s worth noting that there’s a degree of bad faith in all of this. We don’t think that we should be advocating Obama’s election. But we all know that encouraging more college students to vote will, on net, boost Obama’s vote totals. Indeed, given the possibility of a backlash against explicit advocacy of Obama, actively encouraging voter registration might be the best thing we can do in the circumstances for Obama. So if it’s OK to encourage registration, but not to encourage voting for Obama, this can hardly be on narrowly consequentialist grounds.

This generalises to state entities
If the state of New Jersey spent millions of dollars advocating for Obama’s election, that would seem like a violation of some plausible democratic principles. Part of what it is to have free and fair elections is to minimise the advantage the incumbent party has merely by virtue of being the incumbent. Elections where the incumbents use their position to tilt the electoral results are not free and fair elections, and hence not fully democratic.

To be sure, this kind of thing goes on all the time in America. It’s a commonplace observation that Obama’s chances are much better than they would be were there not so many Democratic administrations in swing states. To a non-American observer this suggests something very unhealthy with the state of American democracy, but perhaps that can be something best fixed at a later date. In any case, even the most corrupt states don’t normally advertise directly for one candidate using state resources, and that’s a good thing.

Since Rutgers is a state university, it seems rules that apply to the state should apply to Rutgers. And since I’m at the head of a class in virtue of my position in Rutgers, those rules should apply to me too. So that looks like a good reason that partisan advocacy in a classroom is out of bounds.

It even suggests a reason why partisan advocacy is different to voter registration work. It is a legitimate state interest to have as many people as possible (legally) voting. So it is legitimate for the state to try to have as many people as possible registered to vote. If the state went about this by, say, blanket advertising registration promotions on TV channels whose demographics had a pronounced partisan bent (e.g. young black women, or old white men) that would be bad. But if the state encourages everyone to vote in a non-discriminatory manner, that’s a good activity. And it’s good even if, as is actually the case, the newly registered can be expected to favour one candidate.

Since neither Rutgers nor I are trying to channel our message exclusively to Democrats, it seems we aren’t doing anything wrong in encouraging registration. Of course, our only possible audience (or at least our only possible audience as state actors) is college students, who are a fairly pro-Obama demographic group. But I don’t think this is any worse than the general position the state finds itself in when doing voter registration.

It’s not all about the state
I’m not sure that can be all the story. If my friends at Princeton ran pro-Obama ads before class started, that would seem to be an abuse of authority as well, even though they aren’t state actors.

I don’t have a good story here to match my intuitions however. If an individual Princeton professor uses her position to promote Obama, she might be guilty of misusing the authority that Princeton gave her. But if Princeton as an institution decided it was supporting Obama, and explicitly authorised professors to make pro-Obama speeches before class, I would still think that’s a bad thing. Universities aren’t the kind of institutions that should be in the partisan business. But I don’t really know why I think that’s a bad thing, and maybe I’m just being too squeamish about politics here.

Are elections different to referenda?
I don’t think it’s undemocratic for the state to take sides in referenda. That is, I don’t think that the state openly supporting one side in a referendum is as undemocratic as supporting one party in an election. (This is subject to two provisos. First, the referendum can’t be a quasi-election; for instance a referendum to postpone the next due election. Second, it would be undemocratic for the state to support one side if there were legitimately passed laws saying they shouldn’t do just this. Assume those conditions are not met.)

So, assuming this is legal, it isn’t obvious to me that it would be wrong for the state of California to campaign against the referendum attempting to overturn its own marriage laws. In fact, given that the laws are morally preferable to the alternative proposed by the referendum, it might be morally wrong for the state to not campaign against it. And if the state does this, the argument above suggests that any professor who wishes should be allowed to make anti-referendum speeches in class, the way I’ve had students make pro-registration speeches.

I’m not sure I quite buy that conclusion. But my intuitions about the wrongness of taking sides on a referenda are nowhere near as strong as my intuitions about the wrongness of taking sides on an election. And the arguments here seem to support that.

But none of this is very decisive. I’d be very interested to hear everyone else’s opinion.

In the lower 48 states of the US, there are four time zones, dividing the country up into roughly equal areas from east to west. In the early years of the country pretty much all of its population lived in the two easternmost time zones, the Eastern and the Central. (Actually in the very early years there probably weren’t such things as time zones, but the people lived in what are now the Eastern and Central time zones.) Even today, if this information is correct, about 77% of the population live in those two time zones. So you might expect that the Democratic Party would have taken a fair time to have someone run on its Presidential ticket who was either born outside those time zones, or lived outside those time zones.

The first Democratic candidate (for either President or Vice-President) to be born outside the two easternmost time zones was Adlai Stevenson (1952, 1956), who was born in Los Angeles. Barring a major surprise, Barack Obama will be the second.

The first Democratic candidate (for either President or Vice-President) to be living outside those two time zones when they are nominated is, I believe, yet to be determined, because there haven’t been any yet. (If I’m wrong about this, I’ll be embarrassed, and a lot of what follows will be mistaken. But I don’t see any Westerners on this list apart from Lane, who shouldn’t really count as a Democrat[1].)

Since the two easternmost time zones extend as far as Mitchell, South Dakota, (home of George McGovern) and Mission, Texas (hometown of Lloyd Bentsen), I perhaps shouldn’t call this an east coast bias, but it is shocking just how eastern the party’s Presidential tickets have been.

In contrast, there has been someone from the Mountain or Pacific time zone on the Republican ticket in 15 of the last 21 elections, covering 9 separate candidates. So it’s not like there hasn’t been any chance to run western candidates on a national ticket.[2]

Now the Democratic party does look a lot more western nowadays than it did a while ago. Currently the speaker of the House is from the west, as was the last Democratic speaker, and as is the Senate majority leader. And the Democratic national convention this year will be in Colorado.

And obviously this geographic fact (if it is indeed a fact) about previous nominees isn’t the most interesting demographic generalisation one can make about all previous Democratic candidates for President or Vice-President. And if it is broken this year, it won’t be the most interesting generalisation to topple. But it would (ceteris paribus) be nice to see a party that has for over two centuries exclusively run whites from the eastern half of the country, not do so this time around.

Of course, in all but one case the party has exclusively run white men from the eastern half of the country. So the best candidates for breaking down demographic barriers might be Janet Napolitano or Patty Murray. But it’s hard to believe that either of them will be the candidate at this stage, with no pre-announcement hype at all. (Not that either would be bad picks, either as candidates or as Vice-Presidents.) So that leaves us with Schweitzer as the great western hope.

[1] In 1860 the ticket of Stephen Douglas (IL) and Herschel Johnson (GA) was nominated by the Democratic National Convention. But this was only after several Southern delegates had walked out of the convention. Those Southern delegates reconvened and nominated John Breckinridge and, crucially for our purposes, Joseph Lane (OR) to run. And that ticket carried several southern states, ending up second in the electoral vote. But it is hard to count that as the Democratic ticket, when there was a properly nominated Democratic ticket. More details here.

[2] The candidates are Hoover (CA-1932, 1936), McNary (OR-1940), Warren (CA-1948), Nixon (CA-1952, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972), Goldwater (AZ-1964), Reagan (CA-1980, 1984), Cheney (WY-2000, 2004), McCain (AZ-2008). Hoover and Cheney are somewhat borderline cases, because they were each born back east, and when they ran were associated with DC as much as anywhere. But I believe in each case they can be properly identified with the state I’ve marked here. Note that Jack Kemp (1996) was born in California, but was a New York congressman, and clearly ran as a New Yorker, so he’s not on the list.

Those polls suggest that if we just look state by state at which candidate is likely to win, we see Obama and Clinton both narrowly ahead of McCain, with the differences between their performances well within any margin of error. That seems right, though by that measure I’d put Clinton a little ahead, and they put Obama ahead.

But the polls also suggest that if we look at two more important measures, Obama is (according to just this poll) a much stronger candidate. He has a higher expected electoral vote and, more importantly, a much higher win probability. Darryl at Hominid Views produced one model that suggests this, though I suspect his numbers make both Obama and Clinton look more likely to win than they really are. So below I detail a model that I think is a little more realistic. (It’s still a very stylised model, and I’d be interested in knowing from people who do this kind of modelling well what changes might be made to make it better.)

I’m only interested here in modelling what the SurveyUSA poll tells us. So even when it throws up antecedently improbable results (Obama up in North Dakota! Obama losing in New Jersey!) I’m going to take this data at face value.

The model I’m using takes McCain’s percentage lead in a given state to be a random variable whose probability distribution is given by a normal distribution with the mean being his lead in the SurveyUSA poll, and standard deviation 10. That gives the following expected electoral vote totals.

• Obama 299 – McCain 239
• Clinton 279 – McCain 259

Obama’s lead is three times Clinton’s. I then ran a Monte Carlo simulation where in each round each state’s McCain lead was calculated independently as a random draw from that distribution. (Possibly it would have made more sense to not have these be completely independent.) In those simulations, Obama beat McCain 78% of the time, and Clinton beat McCain 63% of the time. I ran 10,000 simulations, which is plenty to remove sampling error, though obviously not modelling error.

Obama’s big advantage is that he locks down more Democratic leaning states, and competes in Republican leaning states. So if we think state-by-state, Clinton looks to be as electable as Obama. But it’s not likely that everything that’s likely to happen will happen. It is very likely that there will be surprises. And if Obama’s the candidate, those surprises are more likely to be happy surprises for Democrats. With Clinton, they are more likely to be unpleasant surprises.

Update: I realise I ended this post without saying clearly what the fallacy I was referring to at the top was. It’s the fallacy of inferring from the fact that each of a bunch of things is likely to be the case that it is likely that they’ll all be the case. As I say in the last paragraph, that isn’t generally right. Given enough events, it’s likely that some of them will turn out in unlikely ways. That’s generally important to remember, even if one thinks that the best ways to model this insight are somewhat spuriously precise.

• Massachusetts (Boston)
• New Mexico (Albuquerque)
• California (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento)
• New Jersey (Trenton, Elizabeth, Bayonne, Patterson)

Note that New Mexico is the only state other than New Hampshire where Obama has lost despite leading in pre-election polling. It’s true that in New Jersey Obama was supported by some prominent local officials, including the Mayor of Newark. But my impression from talking to some people who know New Jersey well is that the vast majority of local officials (including a large number in Newark itself) were supporting Clinton.

On the other hand, Obama’s best performances, especially his best performances relative to polls, have come in states where he has some crucial endorsements. These include

• Georgia (Atlanta)
• Connecticut (New Haven)
• Virginia (Richmond, Norfolk, Alexandria, Roanoke, Charlottesville)
• D.C. (Washington)
• Maryland (Baltimore)
• Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Madison)

The only state that really doesn’t fit this pattern is Missouri, where Clinton lost badly (and crucially) in St Louis despite being endorsed by the mayor. Still, on the whole it seems like endorsements from major mayors is worth several points compared to pre-election polling.

When I first started thinking about this, I thought it would be an indicator that Clinton would start to comeback on March 4th, because she had some crucial endorsements in upcoming states, including the mayors of Philadelphia and Providence. But two things happened in the last two days that make that judgment less clear.

First, Obama was endorsed by the mayor of Cleveland. Now both Clinton (Akron, Canton, Parma, Toledo) and Obama (Cleveland, Columbus, Youngstown) have solid local support. If Obama can put up a huge win in delegate rich Cleveland, that will make it hard for Clinton to have the massive win she really needs in Ohio to get back in the game.

Second, Clinton now seems to have alienated the mayor of Providence. I assume mayoral endorsements matter not because of their persuasive powers, but because mayor’s have a GOTV machine that they can put to work on their candidate’s behalf. If Mayor Cicilline is unhappy enough to simply not work hard for Clinton, it will make Rhode Island a much closer state. Though it should be noted that Cicilline’s political opponents in Providence are, as far as I can tell, politically similar to the groups who supported Clinton heavily in Massachusetts. So maybe she’ll have enough residual support to win Rhode Island anyway, but without the game-changing margin that a huge win could have produced.

Still, combined with Obama’s endorsement by the mayor of Austin, it’s getting harder to see where Clinton is going to stage her comeback.

Lists of endorsements are largely taken from Wikipedia for Clinton and Obama, with extra help from Raising Kaine and 13th Floor.

A central tenet of his proposal is that ” No insurance companies will be allowed to discriminate because of a previous bout with cancer or some other pre-existing illness.” You literally cannot have that rule without some mechanism forcing everyone to buy in, as the healthy will stay out. … A mandate is not how you cover everyone, it’s how you force insurers to cover everyone, and discriminate against no one.

I don’t know what the force of that ‘cannot’ is supposed to be, but I know it isn’t historical impossibility. Australia for several decades did just the thing Ezra thinks that you can’t do. It had community rating of health insurance, and it didn’t have health insurance mandates. This was true of the periods 1953-1975, and again from 1981-1984. At other times it had compulsory universal basic health insurance. The system wasn’t perfect, bringing in compulsory public health insurance was a very good thing, but it wasn’t as bad as anything I’ve seen in America, and nor was it somehow an impossibility.

The argument for mandates is basically that without them you have adverse selection effects. I don’t particularly think those will be huge. In Australia we still had insurance levels of 70-80. That was with a pretty good level of public provision of emergency care, so you didn’t have to worry about needing health insurance if you were in a car wreck. And it was with a system of GPs where (at the time) the uninsured were charged about as much for a doctor’s visit as I now pay in my co-pay. Had the health options for the uninsured then in Australia been as bad as they are now in America, a huge percentage of people would have been insured. As it was, the system still more or less worked, at least compared to anything the U.S. has seen.

Even if there were adverse selection effects, it isn’t clear what the downside will be. Ezra links to this 3 page Urban Institute report that comes out for mandates, and seems to say the downsides are that we’ll need more government financing. I think anyone who thinks we’ll get a better U.S. health system without some extra government financing is basically living in a fairy tale, so I’m not at all sure why this is a problem. Perhaps mandates are supposed to be politically easier to sell than tax rises, but this seems nonsensical. Given the hideously unbalanced state of the U.S. tax system, we can quite justly have tax raises that cost the vast majority of people not one penny. It’s impossible to have health care mandates that do that.

Of course, without some form of subsidy for insurers, a few insurers will probably fail. Again, I’m not sure that this should be a problem, given the appalling state of the U.S. health insurance industry.

What’s quite irritating about this whole debate is that several writers (most notably Paul Krugman) have been insisting that Obama’s credentials as a progressive are somehow undermined because he doesn’t favour penalising people who decline to buy health insurance. I seem to recall a few years ago John Howard running on a policy of penalising people who decline to buy health insurance. We didn’t think this was a particularly progressive policy when he did it. (Though to be fair to Howard, his penalties only kicked in for people earning significantly above average earnings.) And we didn’t think it was a sign of creeping conservatism in the Labor Party that they opposed it. Quite the opposite; it was caving to Howard’s policies that was the sign of creeping conservatism. We thought, quite accurately, that what Howard was doing was trying to undermine public (i.e. universal) health insurance by propping up private (i.e. partial) health insurance. To see a candidate be smeared as a conservative for not being enough like John Howard, well it’s a bit galling.

Now some may say that there are differences between the Clinton mandate plan and the Howard mandate plan, differences that are big enough to make one plan the paradigm of progressive thought and the other a clearly anti-progressive plan. Personally I think the differences aren’t huge. Both plans let people fulfill their mandated duties by buying into a government plan. Perhaps Clinton’s government-run insurer will be preferable to Medibank Private, but we’ll have to see how that pans out. Both plans have some steps for making it affordable for low-income people. Though in this respect Howard’s plan, which didn’t apply to low-income people, was clearly preferable. Perhaps the penalties will be fairer in Clinton’s plan than Howard’s, though since Howard’s penalty was an extra 1c on the tax rate, it’s hard to imagine that Clinton will suggest a more progressive penalty. Anything not income-tied would clearly be much less progressive.

Obviously Howard was proposing this mandate in a different context to the current American system. But the Clinton/Obama debate is taking place in a different context to the current American system. Both suggest making a range of changes to health insurance, with community rating being the key. The big question is whether we should make all those changes, or make them all and fine people who don’t buy in. I think adding the fines is no better than what Howard did, and I opposed that at the time (and still do), as did many people from the left, so I oppose the Clinton mandates. I could be convinced that there are deep reasons to support the mandates, but I doubt I could be convinced that it is the lefty thing to do. That wouldn’t be John Howard’s style.

Guiliani: 0.277/0.294; 0.285/0.289; 0.220/0.224.
Romney: 0.243/0.253; 0.230/0.245; 0.296/0.305.
Huckabee: 0.106/0.121; 0.094/0.095; 0.140/0.149.
McCain: 0.200/0.212; 0.227/0.232; 0.231/0.232.
Thompson: 0.012/0.029; 0.024/0.029; 0.038/0.043.
Paul*: 0.060/0.068; 0.071/0.075; 0.058/0.065.

Note that for IEM, the Paul quote is actually a rest of field quote, so you’d expect it to be a little above the other Paul quotes not a little below. And obviously there is only so much you can gain out of the Iowa markets, since they only allow you to play with $500. But I’m still struck by this divergence between the different markets. I’m reasonably confident that if we looked around at other betting markets we’d find an even greater divergence.

And perhaps this goes without saying, but I’d think most of the good arguments for taking betting markets seriously as a predictive device make assumptions that entail there aren’t arbitrage possibilities of this size. That’s to say, whatever the potential benefits of predictive markets, there is little reason to believe they are realised in the betting markets on the Republican primary.

Assuming that whatever we are measuring can be observed only in the interval between times t_begin and t_end, if there is nothing special about t_now, we expect t_now to be located randomly in this interval.

As Monton and Kierland note, we can use this to argue that the probability that

t_future is between a and b times t_past

is 1/ ( a + 1) – 1 / ( b + 1), where t_past is the past duration of the event in question, and t_future is its future duration. Most discussion of this has focussed on the case where a = b = 39. But I think the more interesting, or at least easy to interpret, case is where a = 0 and b = 1. In this case we get the result that the probability of the entity in question lasting longer into the future than its current life-span is 1/2.

As a rule I tend to be very hostile to these attempts to get precise probabilities from very little data. I have a short argument against Gott’s Copernican formula below. (Against the general version, not for any particular values of a and b.) But first I want to try a little mockery. I’d like to know anyone who would like to take any of the following bets.

Wikipedia’s History of the Internet dates the founding of the World Wide Web to around the early 1990s, so it is 15 or so years old. Gott’s formula would say that it less than 50/50 that it will survive until around 2025. I’ll take that bet if anyone is offering.

The iPhone has been around for about 3 weeks at this time of writing. Again, Gott’s formula would suggest that it is 50/50 that it will last for more than 3 weeks from now. Again, I’ll take that bet!

Finally, it has been about 100 years since there were over 4,000,000 people on the Australian continent. I’m unlikely to be around long enough to see whether there still will be more than 4,000,000 in 100 years time, but I’m a lot more than 50/50 confident that there will be. I will most likely be around in 10 years to see whether there are more than 4,000,000 people there in 11 years time. Gott’s formula says that the probability of that is around 0.9. I’m a little more optimistic than that, to say the least.

Anyway, enough mockery, here is the argument. Consider any two plays, A and B, that have been running for x and y weeks respectively, with x > y. And consider the following three events.

E1 = Play A is running
E2 = Play B is running
E3 = Plays A and B are both running

Note that E3 has been ongoing for y, just like E2. The Copernican formula tells us that at some time z in the future, the probabilities of these three events are

Pr(E1 at z) = x / (x + z)
Pr(E2 at z) = y / (y + z)
Pr(E3 at z) = y / (y + z)

Now let’s try and work out the conditional probability that A will still be running at z, given that B is running at z. That is, Pr(E1 at z | E2 at z). It is

Pr(E1 at z & E2 at z) / Pr(E2 at z)
= Pr(E3 at z) / Pr(E2 at z)
= (y / (y + z)) / (y / (y + z))
= 1

So using the Copernican formula, we can deduce that the conditional probability of A still running at z given that B is still running at z is 1. And that’s given only the information that z is in the future, and that A has been running at B. That is, to say the least, an absurd result. So I’m sure there is something deeply mistaken with the Copernican formula.

I’m tempted to think that if you put a paper up on the web, that’s to put it in the public domain, and it’s no more appropriate to place a citation restriction on such a paper than it is on a paper published in a print journal. I’m even tempted to think that conference presentations can be freely cited; i.e.that I shouldn’t have to seek Xs permission to refer in one of my papers to the presentation X gave.

The particular issue here is what to do about papers that the author posts and says at the top “Please don’t quote or cite”. (You occasionally see ‘don’t circulate’ as well, which is a little odd.) I’m not sure how common these notes are outside philosophy, but they are pretty common on philosophy papers posted on people’s websites. Now on the one hand, there is something to be said for following people’s requests like this.

On the other hand, as Ross notes, the requests can lead to annoying situation. One kind of case is where the reader notices an important generalisation of the paper’s argument. Another case is where the conclusion of the paper supplies the missing premise in an interesting argument the reader is developing. Either way, the reader is in a bit of a bind.

I think the main thing to say about these situations is that writers shouldn’t put such requests on their papers.

When you circulate a paper, either informally or by publishing it somewhere, two kinds of good things can happen. First, good things can happen to you, either by people offering you suggestions for how to improve the paper, or increasing their opinion of you because it is such a good paper. Second, good things can happen to the profession, because your paper helps advance the field in certain ways. Given the dynamic nature of research work, that advance consists largely in improvements that we see in other papers that cite the work. Now if you circulate a paper but bar citation of it, you’re basically getting the good consequences for you, without allowing there to be good consequences for the field. (Or, at the very least, you are getting the good consequences now while delaying the good consequences for the field.) This seems, to put it mildly, unjustifiably selfish, and it’s very hard to see a moral justification for it.

It’s also hard to see what exactly the costs of being cited are. It would be annoying to have a journal publish an article critiquing yours before yours came out. But unless you are rather famous, and the paper has already become quite well known, journals aren’t going to publish such articles.

A better reason perhaps might be that if mistakes in the paper are spotted, you want the chance to fix the paper before it goes into print. But other people citing the paper doesn’t prevent that. There isn’t any obligation on you to publish the first version of a paper you post to a website. So if you say p, and someone else writes something that shows you are wrong, but you can say p’ instead which does just as well in the context of the paper, you of course can say just that. It might be a little odd for the citer if your published paper doesn’t make the mistake that they cited it for, but that’s just a risk people take when citing papers off people’s websites.

There is, as was noted in the comments thread over at Ross’s, a rather tricky scope question when someone leaves such a request. Presumably it is OK to quote/cite the paper in some forums, e.g. on an email to a friend, or while txting. In practice, few people would say that you shouldn’t quote or cite it on a blog. (That’s what blogs do, right, they cite stuff that appears on the internet.) What’s really just being ruled out is citing it in print. But it is a little odd that to think that it’s OK to cite a paper on a high-profile blog, but not in a low-profile journal. Some situations in academic life are just odd, so that’s not a reason to ignore the request. But it does make it even stranger why someone would request this.

One last thought. I didn’t understand the ‘even’ in Ross’s comment about conferences. I’ve always been under the impression that presentations at conferences are in every respect public performances. What you say there can be used to establish priority, and so it certainly should be citable. I thought this wasn’t even controversial actually, but maybe the younger generation are thinking of confernces as being something like blog posts; things that shouldn’t be mentioned in formal company.

Mr McKinnon reckons you can hardly have a reasonable expectation of privacy on a public street when every second person has a video camera or mobile phone and when Google is now using street-level maps with images of real people who have no idea they have been photographed.

I suspect we’ll see FOI campaigners (who are often attorneys for sensationalist media outlets) running this kind of argument more frequently. If that’s right, it suggests there is potentially a deeper problem with street view than just what it immediately does. It isn’t that street view arguably involves borderline privacy violations. It is rather that the existence of street view diminishes our expectations of privacy and hence, given the way privacy law works, turns what would have been clear cases of privacy violation into borderline (or non) cases.

I don’t have any clear thoughts about what the policy consequences of this might be. What I suspect we’ll have to see in the future is a move away from the ‘reasonable expectations of privacy’ standard to a more explicit list of the cases where privacy is legally protected, even though (given modern technology) people don’t expect this legal right to be upheld in practice. That would be a shame in some respects; standards like the reasonable expectations standard that are flexible and sensitive to real-world conditions generally make for better law than lists handed down from on high.

(I should add that I think the FOI campaigners are in the right over the case Moore is discussing. The person claiming to have their privacy rights violated was either involved in or standing around a fight that broke out at a taxi rank outside a nightclub. There’s neither a reasonable expectation of privacy there, nor a public policy that is served by granting privacy rights.)