Just deserts and the market

Actually, “just desserts” sounds like my elderly mother’s eating habits. (Sorry.)

Andrew, why do you call that the “present”? Your description of the “function” of the market is precisely what Anderson means by linking it to the future. And in saying they “deserve” their earnings, people usually mean, “I worked hard for them”, i.e., they justify them based on the past.

The present may be when the prices are set, but it isn’t the locus of their justification — whether under the argument of “just deserts” or of the wise informational market.

Let’s consider first Hayek’s claim that prices in free market capitalism do not give people what they morally deserve.

‘Morally deserve’ – what does it mean? By whose judgment?

Henry – couldn’t someone who wanted to salvage the argument (that the market gives people what they deserve) say the following: of course it isn’t the function of the market to reward desert; nor is it guaranteed to have that effect; but it might still have that tendency – in particular, it might produce a closer approximation to what people deserve than trying to measure and reward desert directly, through planned intervention.

I’m not sure this argument works, but I offer it because it strikes me it might be what many sensible pro-market types might believe (i.e., I doubt many of them really see it as a giant mechanism for measuring and rewarding desert; they just think that people who do well by it, generally deserve to).

MC, that’s entirely consistent with what Anderson is trying to defend. She’s arguing, if I’ve understood the thread correctly, that we can give philosophical justifications for roughly the level of redistributive taxation we find in advanced democracies. That does leave people with a lot of their pretax income, but also adjusts for some people who do badly. In other words, even with redistribution we still agree that markets do a good job on the whole in the long run at giving people what they deserve, but we don’t agree they are perfect in the short run which is why we have some redistribution.

Brian – I had made a mental note to read Anderson but hadn’t yet. I’m certainly sympathetic to the general project. I never could stand the kind of argument she seems to be attacking. In particular, the way it paints a picture in which (1) I earn a certain amount of money and then (2) the government comes and takes it away from me. As if every employment contract wasn’t entered into against a background including the fact of taxation; as if employers didn’t make their offers against that background, etc. Never mind all the ‘tax freedom day’ stuff, I begin to wonder whether even terms like ‘pre-tax’ and ‘post-tax’ contribute to this obtuse/dishonest picture.

Until I’ve got to grips with Anderson I have just one thought, which is this. Anyone who wants to argue that the kind of combination of the market plus a bit of taxation which we have in countries like the US/UK represents a reasonable approximation to people getting what they deserve still has a couple of options. They can say (as from your summary I take Anderson to be saying) that the taxation element in this picture actually makes it a better approximation; or they can say that the taxation element is justified by other reasons – eg need or decency or cohesion rather than justice/desert – but that we shouldn’t allow people to make out that this is a big trade-off between justice/desert and these other considerations, given that the justice/desert consideration is only true in an aggregate and approximate sense anyway.

Henry– can you point to a couple of examples where people actually argued that the market produces outcomes in line with moral deserts?

Every time I see people claim this, it looks to me like a strawman, or else more of a conservative than a properly pro-market argument. As I understand it, the libertarian case that the market is just as well as efficient does *not* rest on the claim that it produces just outcomes. Rather it rests on the idea that there is really no such thing as a just outcome per se, since justice is an attribute of processes and not outcomes.

Nicholas, I think that the tax freedom day and all the “taxpayers money” rhetoric count as examples.

I suspect that a coherent version of the argument you outline would not win much popular acceptance. Not that I think that such a thing is easy to make. You need to establish both that such a conclusion about justice is correct, that if it is correct that it implies a libertarian outcome and that such a philisiphy might rationally be supported by a majority of the population and would actually work rather than being merely a string of objections to the status quo. Who is the canonical source for this argument?

In particular no-one has sold a tax cutting package without support from this line of reasoning and some trickle down argument.

The conceit is that the capitalist thing is value-neutral, as opposed to value-neutral within a subset of the species. It’s the same with a lot of other stuff too, the trope being that human-ness is some kind of inalterable constant; when the truth is it’s subject to the same shaping mechanisms as any other organism. We are, that is.
Urban-tolerant people see their reality as the human-median, and the agrarians, who were themselves once the median, fade to the margins, where the nomadics have disappeared virtually entire. Folly.
The appropriateness of this has been driven into the minds of all of us so thoroughly that it takes a strong effort to even question it as inevitable.
Yet the Nicobarese and Andaman islanders have weathered the Indonesian tsunami virtually unscathed; and they were pretty much at the epicenter.
Interesting how that’s so far under the radar news-wise, considering immediately after the event there were widespread reports of animals fleeing to safety ahead of the waves.
The second-level scam is any criticism of capitalism itself is a commercial for Marxism or something. More folly. Capitalism rewards certain kinds of people, and they will naturally see that as a good thing. Whether it is or not depends on how subjective your viewpoint is. If one of your moral goals is the long-term survival of the human race then there is much to complain about.
But if the benificiaries can manage to remove the complainants from the scene, then what benefits them will be – ta da – good for everyone!
People gardened before there were cities or towns, with flowers as well as herbs and vegetables; had beauty in their lives, made toys for their children, lived well. But the cliche is they were all grunting dirtbags scratching at the earth and running around in superstitious panic when they weren’t attacking each other in brutal violent acts, or dying in epidemics.
Stark vision as opposed to the current social/political landscape, mm?
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SE-
OBS is maybe more vile even than sheetrock. I heard it was outlawed in the more sensible parts of Europe because the glue in it’s so damned toxic.

Close, but wrong. The subset of the species is the individual actor who acts out of relatively simple self interest. The counter argument is most often seen as a defense of some unquantifiable collective truth or will that is seen as coercive. But as I wrote in a comment at L2R:
“The market as such is responsible for the decision that the look of a tomato could be considered more important than its taste.”
The morality of this absurd outcome is based on the fact that that everyone, and therefore no one is responsible for it.
But that isn’t neutrality it’s moral passivity; the same passivity seen in the ideal of ‘objectivity’ in journalism.

The alternative isn’t Stalinism or Catholic Monarchy, it’s in the nurturing of the skill of judgment. It is simply, more and better, and openly biased, speech, as in a courtroom.

Any state is coercive. Social norms are coercive. Language itself is coercive. But let’s have an ongoing debate about the terms, and teach the forms of debate themselves. That’s the point of a moot court yes?

If you concentrate on the formal structure and not the outcome -and that’s the point of our constitution- you teach responsibility, the responsibility everyone should face to have an opinion. From that point you begin the debate. The Market [Market Theory] says that some things are off limits and writes them in stone as truth. But there is no fucking truth other than to eat, shit, fuck, and die. Everything else is artificial.
And freedom is as vague a term as any other.
The ultimate freedom after all is the ability to kill without anger or regret.

Have you ever lived in a house with plaster walls? Sheetrock isn’t crap because its toxic, it’s crap because it’s made to be demolished. It’s flimsy. It’s garbage. And I’m saying this as a carpenter. I use the stuff.

To end on old turf: Bad tomatoes market theory and fantasy fiction all have a lot in common. They all represent the desire of the individual imagination to express itself, rather than the desire of an individual imagination to communicate

Nicholas, I was thinking back to commenters like godlesscapitalist who (if I’m remembering correctly), used to argue that the poor deserved to be where they were because of the economic choices they made. I’m aware that your justification for free markets (and that of many other libertarians) differs – my target here isn’t libertarianism, it’s what one might call after Weber, everyday Calvinism (not that Calvin should be blamed either).

As noted by several commenters already, Andy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Although I reckon that the concept of “just desserts” could be explored further by the pie-experts at Fafblog.

Nicholas Weiniger:

You claim that justice is a process, not an outcome. Prsumably, what you mean is that justice is what is achieved by affairs being conducted in terms of fair rules of the game. Leaving aside any implication about aesthetist ludism, as to it being “all just a game” and its accompanying obtuseness, presumably you mean that the rules to the game concern property rights, defined as the exclusive access to the use of resources, which is then identified with capacities for the exercise of individual agency. The assumption is then, that assuming an equal or equitable initial distribution of resources, all exhanges, being voluntary acts, must be mutually beneficial and optimal in outcome. But, leaving aside that there is no prior equitable distribution of resources, not all resources, defined as whatever sustains the capacity for the exercize of personal agency, can be defined and regulated in terms of individual property. (Are knowledge or education a species of private property? What educated person would be so foolish or so uncultured as to believe that his acquired capacities are uniquely his own attainment?) Furthermore, exchanges are not merely bilateral volitional acts, but can have effects on third parties, or, more generally, the environment in which they occur. And leaving aside any coercive effects of power relationships in which they may occur, they may be predicated on asymmetries of information or preference intensities that put in doubt whether they are necessarily mutually beneficial, optimal, or equitable. But still more realistically to the point, modern economic production involves the joint combination of several distinct labors, which are not individually distinguishable, and virtually anything that gets called property in a modern economy is the product of such a collective process. (Yes, let us not fall for the fallacy that it is market exchanges that produce wealth unto themselves and ignore the sphere of production that is responsible for the rates of productivity behind relative scarcities and their ratios of exchange.) And, in turn, such modern production requires the collective provision of the infrastructure that renders it possible, in the form of public goods, regulations, and social supports: hence taxes. Finally, consider that there are no static rules of the game, that the “game” has successive rounds and that the results of previous rounds feed into subsequent rounds, such that what would constitute fair rules of the game can not be deduced from a priori premises, in ignorance of the evolving muddle. The Platonic definition of justice as “giving what is due” hardly clarifies the matter, but at least it focuses the matter on a consideration of what is due, rather than disregarding the matter in favor of a vaunting of individual autonomy under a set of artificially gerrymandered rules or assumptions that have no more substance than life on the planet Venus. The fact of the matter is that individual human agency and choice are not magic, metaphysical properties that can instantaneously generate all values, but human agents necessarily live in social groups and are subject to the complex consequentiality of the dynamics of social groups, which at once constrain and constitute them. Indeed, it is the constraint of underlying, implicit rules that constitutes the phenomenon of human agency in the first place. The very notion of choice is meaningless, no more than a metaphysical fantasy, without the reality and consequentiality of social groups.

The constitution grants a right to ‘due process,’ it does not guarantee justice.
A courtroom however is about as fundamentally artificial a construct as I can imagine. If you’re willing to accept a market as constrained as that Mr Weininger, I might be willing to listen, if only for the laughs.

Still I’m amazed at the unwillingness of people to argue that the goverment as an agent of the people as a whole should have a right to limit individual economic freedom. Why not come out and say it? John Halasz writes: “the notion of choice is meaningless,’ and that may be true, but he falls into the same trap that people accuse the democrats of falling into: of attacking a policy while offering nothing to replace it.
The critique of individualism has to be more than a critique as such. Negative dialectics, if I’m using the term correctly, makes for lousy argument. But from the standpoint of much that I read on CT, including the appreciative comments concerning Elizabeth Anderson’s absurdities, reflection, or ‘backward-looking’ is only to be done as in the name of charity. It has no positive value Curiosity has no value, unless it can be seen as related to the logic of the individual or of the market. So what opposes the rule of the market, the vague sense that we are never really alone in the world? That’s not enough. A real defense would involve a discussion of the positive effects and the responsibilities of a rigorous uncertainty, of an uncertain understanding of the world. For example: What is the difference between seeing Michelangelo as a one of the greatest creators of the renaissance and as one of its greatest creations? The market may ask us to choose the first designation, but it should not be allowed deny us the right to consider the second.

What is the positive value of reflection? Any academic in the humanities should be able to answer this question.

seth edelbaum:

That was a curiously selective quotation, as the second half of the sentence bore its main burden and I clearly was not say “individual choice is meaningless”. In fact, I was mounting a snippet of defense of ethical community and political society, by way of criticism of libertarian notions that atomic individuals, defined solely through volitional capacity, which must remain untainted by coercion, inspite of the conflictual potential obtaining between unconstrained exercize of individual volitions, could constitute human society solely through the model of explicit contractual relations between individuals, on the basis of an absurdly idealized view of the market as the exemplar of human freedom. (The original occasion for this thread, if you’ll recall, was von Hayek’s notion of markets as information-processing mechanisms, which hence frustrate individual purposes and bear no relation to individual moral desert or justice.) In fact, contrary to both libertarians and von Hayek, I was concerned to rehabilitate the notion of outcomes or ends, individual and collective, as being relevant to questions of justice. Markets are a quasi-institution which are effective and useful for arranging many of the necessities of social life, but they are hardly the whole, or even exemplar, of human freedom: their much-vaunted “freedom” is a functional property rather than a moral value. And I hardly think that human society can be modeled on the basis of individual contractual relations. (“I, as the star of the show, require that Perrier water be provided to my dressing-room,etc.,etc….”) Even the heuristic idea of a social contract functions less as an account of extant social reality than as a device for critical reflection on the social relations and agreements that must precede any explicit contract and the extent to which extant social reality violates the putative terms of such a would-be contract. A constitution could be viewed as such a social contract, inspite of the abuses that politicians and other anointed power-holders make of it, except that it suffers from the inherent ambiguity of the constituting/constituted power. So I would be careful about speaking of the state as “an agent of the people as a whole”. Everything depends on whether the public sphere, with all its conflicts and reconcilements, can be a legitimating power effecting the conduct of affairs of state, or whether the state, in its functional interlock with the market economy and its effects, becomes merely the administrative arm captured by particular interests, marching in universal guise. But as to the question of historical amenseusis, that is a favorite topic of mine, especially when it concerns questions of social justice and their precedence.

I’m still trying to figure out why people are so stupid.

How do you propose to answer this question? Also, is it possible that you have unconsciously surrounded yourself with only stupid people?

What is the positive value of reflection? Any academic in the humanities should be able to answer this question.

Why did Bodhidharma come from the West? What separates us from the beasts? What is the nature of the soul? Twenty-five words or less, go.

Seth, what’s up with this values thing?

Is being a skeptical observer like being a mystic?

Seems to be just as rare and badly explained. Coincidence?

Has it been pointed out that you frequently change the subject, in “performative mode”, when a real question gets asked? Maybe that’s part of your communication theory. Fine with me, I’m just sayin’. But looking at your rhetoric, it seems to boil down to this:

“I don’t see why I should have to bark at all these people with graduate degrees about the moral implications of standard theories.”

The thing is, they don’t see it either. Your intuition that the academic world should be different is like being angry you can’t have a root canal done at Starbucks. Some of the baristas individually might even agree with you about the importance of dental care, but they’re not going to speak up while you’re ranting at the half-n-half, and it’s got nothing to do with Starbucks.

My point was this: Elizabeth Anderson’s argument about the forward-looking nature of the market read almost as an argument against even historical reflection. And in a context where the market as such faces no opposition even from an idea, this marks the end of any rational need for professors of history or literature. Anderson has philosophized the end of the humanities as subjects worthy of attention. As I said above, by this logic a the only reason to ‘look backward’ is to care for the fallen.
And no one else here mocks this!?

Pete, you’re right, I don’t have a graduate degree. My parents have enough of them for all their children, and for you as well. But they grew tired of this shit years ago, while I still know how to hate.
I don’t go to Starbuck’s, they burn the coffee.
What’s a ‘barista?’

NW: I’m having a hard time getting my head around this statement of yours:
the idea that taxpayers’ money is rightfully theirs follows easily from the notion that justice is about process not outcome. The reasoning goes: taxpayers’ money is theirs because they got it through free exchanges for mutual benefit, which are inherently just. Taking money by force, which is what the government does, is inherently unjust. The substantive content of the outcomes— who has how much money— is irrelevant to the justice of the process.

Isn’t taxation also the result of processes which have been openly discussed and agreed upon, including the constitution, the elections that sent our representatives to Washington, the votes that passed our current tax laws, etc?
“Taking money by force” is a loaded term that I suspect has been added to sabotage reasonable debate. Yes, the feds will come and get you if you don’t pay your taxes willingly, but they will also come for you if you don’t live up to your end of the “free exchanges for mutual benefit” that you make with others. That’s why we have laws against theft, fraud, etc.
It sure would be groovy if we could accept as just the processes that put money in our pockets while rejecting as unjust any process that asks us to pony up, but I don’t think that would work out very well in the real world.

SE: a barista is the person behind the bar at a coffee house who makes your drink.

CT: Why do lines of text on this website keep disappearing? I need to hit “refresh” every minute or so. I don’t have this problem with other sites.