Time and the Generations I
Introduction and Para-text
Introduction
As discussed in the parent post, I will first put my cards on the table after having read the whole para-text and discuss what I just read after that.
Before that, I want to talk about how I read. One of the most valuable lessons I took from philosophy is that the reader has to do the work where the author did not or could not do it himself. This is because explicating and reading as strongly as possible the position of a deceased authors like Plato or Aristotle in order to place them in the debate may lead to a deeper understanding of ones’ owns, others and the authors positions regarding the matter at hand. Aside from that, one also learns to make the case for or against an argument regardless of ones’ own position on the subject matter. As such, I try to engage a text on its’ own terms, practice suspension of disbelief and judgement until the end and try to lend a helping hand to the arguments where I can. To me this way of reading is extremely helpful and makes every book and adventure - granted, this is a way of reading that makes discrimination of what to read immensely valuable as well.
This book is about a topic that I would approach differently. Which is great, because I do not want to read a book telling me I do everything right, I want to learn.
While I do have a considerable amount of utilitarian proclivities, I prefer to take the cop out of rule utilitarianism leading into the milquetoast neighborhood of deontologist, though they would certainly object. Through Tyler Cowen I am somewhat familiar with the basic premises of Derek Parfit work and can already see the repugnant conclusion lurking in the background.
Regarding my (personal, emotional) stance on the matter of natality, I oppose anti-natalism quite strongly, though I would not consider myself a pro-natalist as well. I would broadly outline my reasoning as follows:
Economic: As Arrow himself notes, each human has a brain and I consider another brain much more valuable than its resource consumption at the moment. Though I would certainly try to curb consumption of the super rich and also the global north overall - but this is a very different discussion
My impression is that shrinking populations are a historically unprecedented fact that have several bad aggregated implications:
Economic: a society of rentiers seems to become sclerotic in several ways
Political: a society of rentiers is a society turning into a vetocracy
Cultural: a society of rentiers is a society struggling with change and new ways of being in the world, new questions, answers, values and thus less progress
All in all, I think our societies are much less alive than 50 years ago. And I overall consider this to be a bad thing, regarding our collective ability to accept and take on hard problems in the world, but also because I think (a shift on a much more emotional level than intellectual) that being alive is good. I understand that the counterfactual would imply a drastically higher ecological impact as well - and do not have a good answer
Connecting with the emphasis on emotion, I think human beings in relationships conductive to them wanting to procreate is a wonderful thing and something I wish everyone to have a true choice between.
Similarly, my understanding of parenthood is that while rearing children tends to be a huge burden in a number of ways, it is my understanding and belief that parents later in life are overall happier people.
In summary, my position would be for a number of mostly cultural reasons concerning human flourishing, the main question should be how to get more humans into a place in their life where they feel safe and loved in a way to consider procreation, and not engage with the question of how to optimize overall utility of a yet to be existing population within certain ecological limits. (I beg to excuse the slight polemic here) This is not to discount those limits, but simply a result of my ethics, epistemics and overall outlook on life.
I think those are all the chips I needed to lay down before engaging with the material itself, I hope it to be a helpful orientation from where my engagement is coming from and where I personally would want to go. I am sure this book will give me some tough questions to think about and positions and problems to consider, and I look forward to that!
I am in no way opposed to the kind of modeling and prima facie conceptionalisation this book seems to attempt and though I am always very sceptical about models appealing to unpersonified social planners, I see how valuable this exercise can be. From what I read until now, the discussions are quite inspiring, enlightening and the questions being asked are surely fascinating.
My suspected problems, questions at the back of my mind when I start to read the text itself will be about the influence culture is given to, how boundaries within an optimal population to be calculated will be characterized, and what individuals place in all this is. I also feel that the “true” topic seems to be that of limitations, which as I started this post, I would approach much differently. I hope (and have big reasons to hope) to learn so much with this book, about where I am wrong, where I hate being right, where I am undecided and how the world works and where my inconsistencies in thinking lie. I am happy to have this place documenting this journey and hope others may find it helpful or enjoyable as well.
Para-text
After some deliberation, I have arranged the order of my discussion different than presented in the book. I found my discussion of the foreword to be the most cohesive ending of this post, and have thus ordered:
Eulogy - Preface - Arrows’ Mails - Foreword
In memoriam Kenneth Arrow
In this section two things stand out to me:
The love and admiration with which Dasgupta talks about Arrow - this is how I would like the relations in my life to be described as. It made me want to read more Arrow, which I feel is the point. What an amazing person.
The second point is something that I may be getting back to that does confirm my experiences interacting with other people as well:
At the personal level, though, Arrow was far from being a Utilitarian (p.16)
Being friends with a practicing utilitarian is hard. Consequently, being a practicing utilitarian and having (fulfilling and happy) friendships is hard. Consequently, being a practicing utilitarian is hard. One of my reasons why I prefer rule-based utilitarianism is precisely that it does not force you to alienate yourself from your surroundings. My interpretation of this part is that Arrow understood this well and decided to be a utilitarian in theory and happy human being in practice. I sympathise with that, and do not think it is better to be unhappy and right than the other way around - and not only because I have a hard time laying out what “being right” would mean. Of course, being right and happy is the true goal, and I simply think we do not and should not have to pick.
Preface
It is a classic foreword, laying out the work done before on the same topic, gives an overview concerning structure and content of the work itself and states the motivation. I like the starting point beginning with potential parents decisions to be made concerning their desired number of children and the clear categorisation of factors ideally to be thought about. At this point I am a little sceptical about the modeling decision to keep most other factors steady, most notably technological progress. I am sure Dasgupta will have lots to say about this later in the modeling, at least in terms of justification, implication and results concerning the model itself. Notably to me are already the debates about the point where marginal utility is zero - it seems to me that this is what utilitarianism always claims to solve but in my opinion never does: the input-output problem, such that lots of situations that are not clearly bad can be made to be permissible or even desirable conditional on assumed minimal standard. This is not a problem Malthus has but at least right now I understand the book and Sidgewickian Utilitarianism to solve the “problem” by making the break-off point of Malthus flexible, leading to the problem of where to place the slider. The much more interesting problem to me which I hope the book will be talking about at length is not granting the living standard flexibility but the environmental constraint Malthus describes. The malthusian impulse (this is decidedly not meant derogatorily) that I feel to be at the core of the book is laid out in the closing remarks of this section.
I also look forward to the discussion concerning parfitian considerations - while the type of though experiments and arguments I know from Parfit are one of the reasons for me losing interest in academic philosophy, I do find them fascinating, but am pretty sure I will side with Dasgupta here, this is not a hard sell for me. Also notable to me is the interdisciplinary nature of this book, which I hope to enjoy quite a lot.
Arrows’ Remarks
I will comment on Arrows’ remarks in the same order laid out in the third mail.
I love the comment concerning preferences, which is how I understand his first three points. My takeaway is to separate the problems really sharp: The collective of a society or the social planer can think about the marginal utility of adding another person, but the person being decided about cannot. At the same time the perspective of the parents necessarily has to differ form that of the collective. I think I will return to this point at a later time and look forward to that
His fourth point is an excellent observation and precise formulation of the dilemma at hand. To me the sheer existence of it stresses the fundamental shift of the human condition resulting from the industrial revolution. I personally would just declare the theoretical considerations laid out here to not apply to the time before, as their significance rest on the industrial revolution having taken place - but I think this is quite an unorthodox position to take
I had to read ahead to get the general gist of the last point, but decided to return to this discussion once the model is fully laid out - which I assume will take quite a while
Foreword (by the late Robert Solow)
Solow has great humor - similar to the result of the eulogy, I will have to add him and Arrow to my already skyscraper-high list of authors to read.
He starts with Malthus and then continues from Mill to Sidgewick, getting more theoretical step by step. The question in my mind from here on out is how is this different than Malthus, but with a decent standard of living and a criterion not to over extract resources baked into the model? My feeling is this question will stay with me for the whole of the book and a good contrast to compare the progress made to. To me it feels like a wonderful reflection of what we are about to read with personal and technical comments intermingled in an insightful an empathetic way. I think it may be really wonderful to reread this section once I finished the actual text as a starting point to reflect my understanding of it as Solow does here.
I would like to discuss several specific points further.
The first directly connects to the second point about Arrow and combines with Solows’ question regarding the abstract decision maker. That person does of course not exists. Still, the model laid out here (and most other models concerning at least economics) presupposes the possibility of them, while the actual reality we all live in is one of particularities. The model to the persons it tries to model and declares to care about by optimizing their overall utility strips all of them of their perspectives and experiences. I think this is the reason while being a utilitarian and having friends is hard, and the modeler should keep it into account. A person trying to model the world is already one with a complicated relation to herself, the world and the other people in it. I think Solow reminding me of this is really important - and I also think that his answer that we can only hope that the abstracted “us” is making the decisions strikes me at the same time as correct and delusional - after all, I am also a person trying to model the world with a complicated relationship to myself, the actual world and the people in it. But it presupposes a kind of habermasian shared base for decision making that erases the fact that most people to us are utterly alien in their beliefs, actions and feelings. This does not make me fatalistic in any way although it may sound like it. My impression is Solow could write at least as much about this point as I feel I could, but like him I will stop here.
The second point I would like to discuss concerns the section on page 21, regarding the what I would call “derivate” of the optimal population function derived from the attitudes of the actual population regarding its own size. My first reaction was of puzzlement as this does not seem to be a hard problem. Solow (at least as I read him) seems to implicitly agree: The reasons he gives to ignore or “abstract away” this question are three: Preferences of a population could overwrite the calculated optimum we worked so much for to calculate, the modelers do not have the epistemic means to approach these preferences in any way, but(!) then muses about the utility function nonetheless:
maybe most people would […] dislike a very sparse population and they might also dislike a very crowded population, being more or less indifferent about a wide middle range of densities. In that case, it would be safe to ignore the point that I have been discussing. (p.21)
My rought estimates of such a function would be some kind of inverted quadratic function with a wide plateau like this:
import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns
def function(a, b, c, d):
return -((a+b)**c+d)
linspace = np.linspace(0, 1)
result = function(linspace, -0.5, 4, -10)
plot = sns.lineplot(result)
My internal solution to this apparent incoherence is that the truth of the matter is that this is a political question and un-personified utilitarian planers calculating the optimal number of people supposed to live at a certain moment do not have any political mandate whatsoever, which they simply abstract away. I may sound harsh here but I think this is an absolute defensible position to take for a modeler, Solow seems to say so himself, the fact that he mentions it and leaves this obvious incoherence in the text reads to me like another meta-comment on the whole project of the book - this is a great foreword!
The third really important point to me is the short discussion of discount factors - I will skip the short discussions about tinkering with simplistic models derived from Sidgewick as I assume that will be the main point of the actual text - what Solow seems to imply here looks closely related to the point before: Individuals discount functions regarding the utility of their direct and indirect offspring and those of the general population are probably (to the utilitarian) obscenely disparate. Notice how important it was for us modelers to render preferences of individuals moot as discussed previously, as the un-personal planer does per definition not have this discrimination. At this point, I do not even understand what a discount rate is supposed to represent here - typically discounting representing a time preference concerning consumption. So, who consumes here? Do we have to take that ingrained time preference for granted? Would we not say that a typical developmental strategy based on consumption deference for capital investment like China practiced implies a discount factor of more than 1? What are the consumption options or opportunity costs foregone or incurred here? All those questions are great questions that I hope to be able to answer after finishing this book, as those question vexed me for quite some time even without knowledge of this book. For one once we have an actual model written down, we will be able to toy with discount factors and the like to test our intuitions, get a feel for the topology of the model and understand the key take insights gained from explicating our implicit assumptions in a (hopefully) coherent way.
Finally (at least in my internal structuring of this text) Solow tries to demark clearly the difference this book and the real world:
This is not intended as a description of the way fertility and saving decisions are made by ordinary humans: it is intended as a benchmark against which to evaluated those decisions, and perhaps to make recommendations
All in all, the foreword by Solow is as I already expressed, great. It tells the reader clearly what to expect and how to engage with the text at hand. It is a great meditation and cautionary reflection on the natures of models, the character of modelers and the practice of modeling. Of the hidden assumptions not only in models themselves but in the people writing them. It is a great text, and it praises the actual book for trying to get a handle on hard questions.
Reflections
Two things keep resonating with me having spend quite some time with this relatively short text(s). The first is obviously about modeling - it is a topic near and dear to my heart. We all know models are wrong but can be useful, a factor I think many are in the danger of forgetting. To me, the go to metaphor for all of this is the MONIAC, which I encountered for the first time in Terry Pratchetts’ "Making Money”. Not to be reminded how far modeling has come (it certainly has, not least thanks to computing), but as a reminder and an object of reflection and meditation that can be transferred to other models - its weirdness makes it at least to me really useful for that. I think about the intuition and metaphors that led a modeler to the conclusion that water may be a way to represent the “flows” of capital within a necessarily “closed” economy (one can already see how a first intuition forces one to buy other premises as well), about the inherent limits the model clearly supposed and processes and phenomena it simply could not account for, represent or even point in the direction of. At the same time I consider that most of that was probably understood by the modeler themselves - they knew what their model could and could not do, and used it because they thought it to be useful to them at the time. And it probably was. I personally also love all other implementations of a computational device differing from the classical von-Neumann architecture, but that seems a rather exotic interest.
The second point I want to make it the demarkations of the project of this book already in play in the foreword, and it is more of an emotional point. The extremes between which this book will take place are obscene amounts of wealth and consumption on the one hand and starvation on the other. I do not want to talk about the first as I feel this is not the place, but the second. My understanding is that the implicit fear, even terror of this book is the return of Malthus by slower technological progress, a shrinking hospitality of our ecology and population growth not taking these factors into account. I think this is probably one of the most important questions that we in affluent societies have forgotten but should have not. I may be projecting a lot here, but I wish to imprint upon me and you the reader the terror of Malthusian Dynamics that are so diminuitively described here, by two man who did it well. I will start with the less graphical and more artistic quote by Terry Pratchett in “Snuff” on page 11 where a characters reads out the description of another race of sentient and very discriminated against beings living under those circumstances:
“I must say that goblins live on the edge, often because they have been driven there. When nothing else can survive, they do. Their universal greeting is, apparently, “Hang”, which means “Survive”. I know dreadful crimes have been laid at their door, but the world itself has never been kind to them. Let it be said here that those who live their lives where life hangs by less than a thread understand the dreadful algebra of necessity, which has no mercy, and when necessity presses in extremis, that is the time when woman need to make the unggue pot called ‘soul of tears’, the most beautiful of all the pots, carved with little flowers and washed with tears.”
I think the fear of encountering the “dreadful algebra of necessity” is well found. The book talks about fertility decisions on the basis of modern contraceptives. These methods are not that old, and living not on but behind the point where “marginal utility” of another human being in a society does imply such situations.
But take it not from me or Terry, take if from Brad DeLongs “Slouching towards utopia” describing from what place, the malthusian world, that slouch did start on:
Agrarian Age humans were desperately poor: it was a subsistence-level society. On average, 2.03 children per mother survived to reproduce. A typical woman (who was not among the one in seven who died in childbirth, or the additional one in five who died before her children were grown, sometimes from the same contagious diseases to which her children succumbed) would have spent perhaps twenty years eating for two: she would have had perhaps nine pregnancies, six live births, and three or four children surviving to age five, and the life expectancy of her children remained under, and perhaps well under, thirty. Keeping your children from dying is the first and highest goal of every parent. Humanity in the Agrarian Age could not do so at all reliably. That is an index of how much pressure from material want humanity found itself under. (p.16)
Reflect on the amount of suffering just this statistics entail. How much violence, how much hunger, how much tragedy, how little (if any) freedom life entailed not that much long ago for our species. Brads’ book makes at least to me clear what an incredible miracle the current state of our species as a whole is in - imperfect and unjust as it may be. To me it also left the important impression that this state is not sustained on its own, and that we have not banished the third rider of the apocalypse as well as we would all like to believe.
I think the topic of this book is of immense importance. And I do hope it will have answers or points from where to think further about those hard problems.