(No?) Thanks to Noah, my new favorite blog is Slate Star Codex, where Scott Alexander (whoever he may be) has interesting things to say about social cognition-related topics. Frequently these involve showing up feminist hypocrisy.

Monday, Mr. Alexander had a post called Does Class Warfare Have a Free-Rider Problem?, where he decides that (a) it does, but it’s one that (b) social classes are able to overcome by using ideology to do an end-run around individual cost-benefit analysis and that this process is (c) “spooky.” I’d like to take issue with (c). (c) is in fact a nice illustration of the problem with rationalist arguments.

OK, so the problem is this. Imagine you’re rich, to the tune of an annual income around $1million. You pay 40% in taxes, and there’s a chance of getting that reduced to 30% through lobbying efforts. But lobbying efforts cost money, money which has to be voluntarily contributed. As any game theorist will tell you, we now have a Free Rider Problem in that everyone (in the 1%) stands to benefit from this change in law whether or not they contribute to the lobbying effort to get it passed.

Once again we encounter free rider problems. Suppose a representative of the Rich People’s Union asks for a $10,000 donation to fight for lower taxes. There are hundreds of thousands of rich people, so you’re pretty sure your one donation isn’t going to push anything over the edge one way or the other. Supposing the tax cut goes through, you will get the same benefit whether you donated or not; supposing it doesn’t, you won’t gain anything either way. It’s easy to see that in either case the rational self-interested thing to do is to refuse to donate.

OK, fair enough. And yet, Mr. Alexander sees a problem with this.

Yet the rich do seem to get their way a disproportionate amount of the time, and this seems to require an explanation.

His explanation is that the rich align themselves with worldviews that require lower taxes, and that because these are ideologies rather than cost-benefit business deals, people are willing to donate to them. Because once something is an ideology, it triggers whatever the weird altruism/morality instinct is that we all seem to have that requires us to make at least minor sacrificies in the name of right just for the fact of its being right.

But as far as I can tell, this calculation is never made on a conscious level. What happens on a conscious level is the rich person finds themselves supporting some moral philosophy – libertarianism, Objectivism, prosperity gospel, whatever – which says it is morally wrong to raise taxes on the rich, so much so that one should altruistically make personal sacrifices in order to stop them from being raised. And then these moral philosophies spread, and without any conscious awareness, the rich people find themselves coordinating very nicely to protect their class interests.

And up to this point in his argument, I agree completely. Yes, there is a free rider problem in class warfare. Yes, there’s some evidence that at least the upper classes have overcome it (to some degree or other). Yes, supporting ideologically-aligned moral theories seems like a good explanation for how they’ve done that.

Here’s where I get off the bus:

I hope you agree that if this is true, it is spooky. I admit on this blog I sometimes mock human nature and human cognition a little too much, but this particular cognitive process is really impressive. I hope whatever angel designed it got a promotion.

Why does it have to be “spooky?”

I don’t like this [explanation] because it raises more questions than it answers. Why don’t the poor coordinate this well? Too many of them? And if this is true, how sure should we be of our previous belief that the Secretary of Health and Human Services isn’t coordinating with all the other progressive bureaucrats to deliberately cause social problems?

Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything too mysterious here. It’s just straightforward selection bias.

Let’s take these other questions in turn.

Why don’t the poor coordinate this well? Don’t they, though? Mr. Alexander is aware that we have a welfare state in the US, just like every other OECD country does, right? In fact, the largest item on the federal budget by far is Medicare/Medicaid – a welfare program. If “the rich” had outright won this coordination battle, we might assume that there were no welfare state at all, and yet there is one. And if the existence of a welfare state doesn’t count as successful ideological alignment among the poor, what does? What sorts of policies would we need to see to believe in lower class coordination? Because if the argument is going to end up being that the poor have failed to maximize their potential benefit, then I think Mr. Alexander is going to find that that’s equally applicatble to the rich. Sure, we see lots of policies that seem to favor the rich, but I don’t think we see the maximum number of such policies, nor do we see these policies going to the maximal degree. As for whether the relative success of the rich at coordination owes to their smaller size, I’d submit that Mr. Alexander is probably wrong that “the poor” is significantly larger than “the rich.” “The poor” isn’t the complement of “the rich,” rather, it, like the rich, is a group that’s a subset of the overall not-rich-not-poor population. Once that’s understood, we can probably explain any coordination deficit in two ways. First, we can explain it by noting that policies that benefit “the poor” tend to involve visible sacrificies, whereas policies that benefit “the rich” don’t. Or, if you prefer, the sacrifices that policies that benefit “the poor” are usually visible and quantifiable, whereas the sacrifices we make to benefit “the rich” aren’t. So maybe there’s no coordination deficit, it’s just that the poor typically have a harder sell. The rich just have to say “people get to keep the money they’ve earned.” The poor have to say “even though you earned that money, I get some of it too.” As is were. The other part of the explanation is that the fact of being rich is itself an advantage, so there’s a real problem conflating which advantages rich people seem to have that owe to their political coordination, and which are there just because the nature of being rich means having advantages. The part of this that I think is being overlooked in Mr. Alexander’s article is that coordinating through the ideological proxy means that you’re not coordinating along exactly the lines that the coordination is purportedly trying coordinate along. So, what kinds of ideologies are on the table actually matter. The fact of coordinating through an ideological proxy means you can’t coordinate along the lines of “maximize my wealth,” you’ve got to coordinate along “people have a right to keep what they’ve earned,” which dilutes the purpose of the coordination.

How sure should we be of our previous belief that the Secretary of Health and Human Services isn’t coordinating with all the other progressive bureaucrats to deliberately cause social problems? I would say “not sure at all,” because I don’t believe that the Secretary of Health and Human Services actually wants to deliberately cause social problems. I should explain where this is coming from. Earlier in the piece Mr. Alexander disparagingly quotes this comment, which he promptly dismisses as a quack conspiracy theory:

Progressivism is under massive selective pressure to actually cause problems because that leads to more power for progressivism.

The rest of the article is offered as explanation of why there seems to be at least some truth to a similar conspiracy theory (namely, the rich coordinate to maximize their interests, often at the expense of the rest of society).

I actually think this is the wrong answer to the idea that Progressivism is under selectional pressure to “actually cause problems” because I don’t think Progressivism is under much selectional pressure at all to “actually cause problems.” I think what Progressivism is actually under selective pressure to do is to (a) maximize alarm at and awareness of existing social problems and to (b) maximize support for government solutions to existing social problems. I don’t think we have to imagine that Progressives will create actual social problems so long as they have the option of exaggerating the scope of existing ones. I have seen almost no evidence of Progressives creating actual fires to put out, but I see lots of evidence all the time of Progressives pretending that a bonfire is a raging forest fire, if you will.

I think this effect is even more obvious with Affirmative Action, something else that’s mentioned in the post. Do black leaders actually hope for real racial inequality because it contributes to the cause of Affirmative Action? I rather doubt it. However, I do believe that support for Affirmative Action correlates well with selectional bias toward seeing racial inequality where it might not really exist. Just like opposition to Affirmative Action no doubt correlates well with selectional bias that denies the existence of racial equality where it might exist. Black leaders don’t have to actually create racial bias to bolster their cause, they just have to always prefer the racial bias interpretation of any offered set of data. And it’s really no psychological mystery why the purported beneficiaries of affirmative action policies would be more likely to suffer from selection bias that sees racism where it isn’t. You can run the experiement this afternoon, actually – just show people a bunch of blue-green discs and tell them to pull out all the blue ones. You’ll probably find that if you pay one group 50cents a blue disc and the other group only 20cents, the group you paid 50cents to will judge more discs to be blue.

Since I trust that’s reasonably obvious, go back an reconsider the supposed “spookiness” of rich people coordinating around ideologies that tend to benefit their interests. Why would it be “spooky” that there is such a thing as selectional bias?

Imagine that you’re rich. There are a couple of ways that you could’ve gotten here. It could be because you worked hard and provided value and have been justly rewarded for your efforts. It could also be because you took advantage of privileges that were unavailable to your peers. It could also be because you were outright rent-seeking. If there’s any ambiguity here at all, I don’t think any psychologist would be surprised to find your own interpretation of your situation leaning more heavily toward the “worked hard and provided value” component than an objective outsider’s might. Shake that up, pour it out, and you get a whole group of people who are more likely than average to believe that hard work is rewarded and that there is comparatively little need to adjust the system to correct for unfairness. The ideology coordinates itself.

So, I don’t think there’s actually anything mysterious here. All we need to do is note that the world is more complicated than our cognition can accurately process, note that this means that we all use heuristics to make sense of situations, note that this opens the door to selection bias, and then expect that selection bias will lead us more often than not to adopt self-interested interpretations of the world. No mystery.

As my 9th grade chemistry teacher was fond of saying, “there are only two pure things in this world: your momma, and mine.” People see what they want to see. If you don’t believe me, try Facebook.