Sometimes the Good Guys Win

A moving account by a young lawyer who succeeded in getting his client acquitted of a bunch of charges that could have put him in in jail for the rest of his life. The client's offense was shooting two police officers in the legs--when the police smashed down his door in the middle of the night in a SWAT raid. The police fired 37 rounds, mostly from a rifle, into a house containing a bunch of people, including six children—by good fortune none of them were hit. The client fired four shots, all aimed low through the door they were breaking through, and stopped firing as soon as it became clear the attackers were police.

The grounds for the raid? A police informant had told them that someone else in the house had sold crack cocaine. The police found cocaine concealed in a room used by both the client and the person they had been told sold it—and tried to convict the client of having it.

As far as I can tell, none of the policemen were charged with reckless endangerment or anything else, and they are presumably still out there, armed and dangerous.

This summary is based on the lawyer's account, but given other such stories I have seen I see no reason to doubt it.

Cartoon Libertarians, Social Justice, and Bleeding Hearts

"Social justice = the idea that coercive institutions can be legitimate (i.e., permissible) only if, under favorable circumstances, they can reasonably be expected to help ensure that most conscientious people will lead minimally decent lives."

(From Jason Brennan’s Facebook page)

"social justice is a moral standard by which the institutions of a  society can be evaluated on the basis of how well they serve the  interests of the poor and least advantaged."

(Definition offered by Zwolinski and Tomasi in the course of a Cato Unbound exchange)

In a recent piece on the Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog, Jason Brennan took some of his fellow libertarians to task for “cartoony opinions on complex matters.” His list of examples started:

You might be a cartoon libertarian if:

1. You think the term “social justice” has no definite meaning in philosophy today.

(followed by points 2-17)

While I agreed with many of his examples, that was not one of them. If “social justice” has a definite meaning in philosophy, philosophers should be able to offer clear definitions and the definitions should be consistent with each other. As the quotes above, from philosophers from the same faction of the same political movement, demonstrate, they are not. The first specifies that it is about coercive institutions, the second about institutions in general. The second makes the evaluation of a society depend on how well it serves the interests of the poor and least advantaged, the first makes it depend on maintaining a minimal standard for “conscientious people.” The poor and disadvantaged are not all conscientious, conscientious people are not all poor and disadvantaged. Both definitions look more like political rhetoric than political philosophy.

Not only are the definitions not consistent with each other, neither has a clear meaning. Consider, for instance, “minimally decent lives.” A modern making a list of the requirements would almost certainly include access to decent medical care, by which definition no human being prior to 1900 lived a minimally decent life, since what we consider reasonable medical care did not then exist. One obvious response is that what is a minimally decent life changes over time. But that is to concede that the definition uses dishonest rhetoric, pretends that a relative concept is an absolute one. To say that the same life would be minimally decent if lived in 1700 but not if lived in 2000 makes nonsense of the words “minimally decent.”

An egalitarian might say that what matters is not the absolute level but how equal the society is. A utilitarian could point out that what distribution of income maximizes utility depends, among other things, on how much income there is to be distributed. The BHL folks are unwilling to identify with either of those approaches and unwilling or unable to offer a substitute that actually means what it says.

To continue …  . “Advocates of social justice believe the moral justification of our institutions depends on well these institutions serve the interests of the poor and least advantaged.” Depends entirely? Two societies are equally justified if they equally serve the interests of (say) the bottom 10% of the income distribution, even if, in one of them, the rulers live a life of luxury supported by the taxes of everyone else above the bottom, or if, in one, almost everyone above the bottom 10% is a (well taken care of) slave? Does Brennan think there is any human being who thinks none of that matters, that the moral justification of the institutions depends only on how well they serve the bottom of the distribution? I am pretty confident he does not—he is, of course, welcome to correct me in the comment thread to this post.

One possible response is that advocates of social justice believe that the justification of the society depends in part on the implications for poor people. But so does very nearly everyone else. Utilitarians believe that the justification of the society depends on how well it serves everyone’s interests, the poor and disadvantaged included. Similarly for alternative candidates. The concept that, according to Brennan, has a definite meaning in philosophy either has a meaning that nobody could take seriously or a meaning that distinguishes it from practically none of the alternative concepts—the only exception I can think of is a pure deontological position that pays no attention at all to consequences. I agree with Jason that consequences matter, but that agreement does not define social justice.

To return to the first definition …  . If “coercion” means the literal use of force, then fighting off a murderer or rapist counts as coercion, making a society that permits it a “coercive institution.” Does Brennan believe, does he think anyone believes, that permitting such self-defense is only morally permissible if it helps “ensure that most conscientious people will lead minimally decent lives?" What if self-defense is relevant to only a few, and most will get to live minimally decent lives without it? What if it is important only to people who would manage minimally decent lives even if they are not able to use force to defend themselves, but much better lives if they are?

Brennan might reply—he is again invited to do so here—that using force in self-defense does not count as coercion. But that would bring him straight into one of the problems with libertarian theory that he is, I suspect, already aware of. Libertarians say they are against the initiation of coercion, but their definition of initiation of coercion depends on their definition of what rights people have. If Brennan uses the same definition of rights for his definition of social justice, then practically all libertarians believe in it. If not, then what distinguishes Brennan et. al. from the rest of us is not their commitment to social justice but their view of what rights people have.

One of the things that bothered me in a later online exchange with Matt Zwolinski (on libertarianism.org) was a tendency to slide over from the right to use force to protect property in land, which raises serious moral issues since most land was not produced by humans, to the right to use force to protect property in general. Without a theory of what property claims are legitimate, one cannot distinguish the use of force to protect legitimate property from other and coercive uses, which gets us back to the idea that one is only permitted to fight off a murderer or rapist if doing so helps the poor—or at least helps whoever is at risk of not living a minimally decent life, whatever that means.

I should probably stop now, at least for long enough to give Jason Brennan an opportunity to respond. Before doing so, it is worth pointing out just how heavy a burden of justification he has imposed on himself. In his point 1 he was not merely claiming that his view of the status of the meaning of social justice was defensible. He was claiming that it was so obviously true that to deny it was a cartoonish position.

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My challenges to Zwolinski and Tomasi on social justice from the Cato Unbound discussion.

Discussion started by Bryan Caplan, with comments by me and others, on the problem of defining social justice.

 -------------

You might be a cartoon bleeding heart libertarian if:

1:  You describe Rawls as offering the “philosophically most sophisticated” theory of social justice—and then decline to defend it when "David Friedman trenchantly critiques the maximin decision rule that lies at the heart of John Rawls’s theory of social justice."

2. When asked to define "social justice" you insist that the idea is well defined and prove it by offering two or more inconsistent definitions.

3. When asked in exactly what sense your philosophy implies a special concern for the poor, you change the subject.

4. Your explanations of why the views of other libertarians are wrong are clearer, better written, more convincing and much shorter than your explanations of what you believe and why it is right.

5. You describe your associate professor's salary as a "minimum basic income." (Suggested, perhaps a little unfairly, by Sean II commenting on Brennan's post)

Benghazi and Intra-Party Politics

The current controversy over the attack on the Benghazi consulate and its aftermath looks, at first glance, like a straightforward case of inter-party politics, with Republicans using their control of the House of Representatives to produce and publicize evidence of the misdeeds of the Democrats controlling the White House. But it occurs to me that something else, perhaps more interesting, may develop.

The evidence so far suggests that the Administration, in particular the State Department, deliberately misrepresented the information available to them, blaming the attack on a spontaneous demonstration due to a UTube video, something which they could not be held responsible for or expected to have anticipated, when the evidence suggested that it was actually a pre-planned terrorist attack. And some of the testimony suggests that the objective was to mislead not only the public but Congress, something that members of Congress, Democrats as well as Republicans, might reasonably object to. Hence it would not be too surprising if at some point some Democrats in Congress announced that, much as it pained them to admit that their Republican colleagues were, in this case, correct in their suspicions, the demands of truth, justice, and their obligations to the American people forced them to rise above politics.

It might even be true. But ...  .

Politics exists within parties as well as between them. The part of the Administration most obviously responsible for both failing to protect the consulate and misrepresenting the nature of the attack was the State Department. The Secretary of State was Hilary Clinton. Barack Obama cannot run for President in the next election, but Hilary not only can run, she is currently the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.

And there are surely other Democrats who would like to be President. It will be interesting to see, when and if Democratic unity on this particular controversy breaks—I have not followed the story carefully enough to know if it has yet started breaking—which Democrats break it, and what their alignment is within the Democratic party.

The Binding Constraint on Book Length

Nonetheless, a  non-exhaustive but still wide spatiotemporal coverage has its own epistemic and methodological problems, especially if attempted within the realistic constraints of page economy (scholarly publication being increasingly subject to the harsh rules of profit and loss).

(Wael B. Hallaq, in the introduction to his Sharia: Theory, Practice, Transformations, a book more than six hundred pages long)

Hallaq's complaint takes it for granted that the constraint on how long a book he can write is how long a book his publisher is willing to publish. I suspect that the more important constraint is how long a book his readers are willing to read. As some evidence, I note that he also published a drastically shortened version of the book, discussed in a recent post here. That version, about a third as long and about half the price, ranks 152,814 on Amazon. The longer version ranks 871,161. Amazon does not provide actual numbers for book sales, but my guess is that the latter figure represents a fraction as many as the former.

It is possible, of course, that the still longer book he would like to have written would do better. There is a straightforward way in which he could find out. CreateSpace, Amazon's print on demand subsidiary, will publish a book at negligible cost to you, put it up on Amazon and send you the resulting royalties; the rate depends on the price you choose to charge. If you are willing to accept royalties of 10%, the price for a 600 page book is about $16. So Hallaq could  publish twice the number of pages he did as a two volume work and sell it on Amazon for a total of $32, which is less than half the price of the existing book.

My guess is that it would not sell many copies, even at that price, but I could be wrong.

A Positive Health Effect From Smoking

I just came across an interesting article reporting on new evidence suggesting that eating peppers substantially reduces the risk of getting Parkinson's disease. It mentioned, in passing, that it is well established that smoking anti-correlates with getting Parkinson's.

The observation that smokers have a lower risk for PD has been "consistently reported in more than 60 epidemiological studies," Honglei Chen, MD, PhD, from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, who wasn't involved in the study, told Medscape Medical News.

 The link between smoking and peppers is that both tobacco and vegetable peppers are in the same vegetable family (Solanaceae) and that pepper contain small amounts of nicotine.

The information about peppers is more relevant to me than the information about smoking, since smoking has enough negative effects to make it quite unlikely I will start doing it—although I have played with the idea of trying one of the smoking substitutes, such as a nicotine patch or an eCigarette, to see if I like the effects. But the information about smoking is more interesting, precisely because the fact that I was not aware of it is evidence of a problem with the mechanisms by which information reaching me gets filtered.

Assuming that the quote from Chen correctly reports the evidence—a quick google suggests it does, and that the effect is substantial—it is surely relevant to the question of whether people ought to smoke, a positive effect, possibly a substantial one, to set against the well established negative health effects. So why has it not been widely reported, at least widely enough so that I would have heard of it? Why does it only appear as a passing comment in a news story about something else?

My guess is that it is for the same reason that the evidence that moderate alcohol consumption is good for you is not widely known, a point I discussed here about a year ago. It is widely, and I think correctly, believed that smoking is bad for you. Hence publicizing evidence against that belief, evidence that in at least one important respect smoking is good for you, amounts to supporting the bad guys, which very few people, whether scientists or journalists, want to do. The result is a sort of informal and unofficial censorship, a filtering of the information that reaches the public to make the case for whatever the conventional view is look stronger than it is.

In a previous post I expressed my skepticism about popular claims on the magnitude of the negative effect of second hand smoke. While I think those claims are bogus, my guess is that second hand smoke does have negative effects, since there is good evidence that smoking does. But ...

For a long time, opponents of nuclear testing argued that the resulting increase in background radiation increased the rate of cancer and birth defects, on the grounds that high levels of radiation were known to do so. The implicit assumption was that the negative effect was proportional to the dosage, that if a large amount of radiation had a substantial effect, a small amount had a proportionally smaller effect. As I understand the evidence, that assumption turned out not to be true, the standard counterexample being Denver. Because it is about a mile above sea level, the background level of cosmic radiation is higher than most other places people live, but rates of cancer and birth defects are not correspondingly elevated, indeed may not be elevated at all. 

That suggests that human biology can deal with low levels of radiation,  has problems only with high levels. Suppose that turns out to be true of the effect of tobacco smoke as well. From the same article:

"A few studies suggest that secondhand smoke might be associated with a reduced risk of PD, so that prompted us to look at another source of a relatively small amount of nicotine — foods in the same plant family as tobacco," [Dr. Searles Nielsen] added.

If it turns out that secondhand smoke does reduce the risk of Parkinson's and does not cause cancer, heart attacks, or other adverse effects associated with smoking, secondhand smoke might, aside from the unpleasant smell, be good for you. If so, even if the evidence turns out to be reasonably good, it may be a long time before you find out.

A Defense of Traditional Islamic Law

I have just finished reading an interesting book, An Introduction to Islamic Law by Wael Hallaq. The author is a scholar, but the book is clearly aimed at a general audience. Its central theses are:

1. Traditional Islamic law was a well functioning legal system, superior in most ways to modern law.

2. That system was corrupted and ultimately destroyed in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries by some combination of western influence, direct and indirect, and the rise of the nation state.

The author makes a persuasive case and one that ought to be particularly interesting to libertarians, since it starts with the fact that, in Islamic legal doctrine, law is independent of the state. Judges are appointed by the ruler, but the law they enforce is not state created but derived by legal scholars from religious sources. I like to describe it as what Anglo-American common law would be if the decisions of judges were replaced by the books and articles of law professors. Further, the legal system itself was polylegal, with (eventually) four mutually orthodox schools of Sunni law coexisting, along with Shia, Christian, and Jewish law.

The case Hallaq makes is persuasive, but that does not necessarily mean it is true. A ruler could, after all, use the power to appoint judges to select ones who would rule according to his view of the law and use his control over the enforcement of rulings to determine what laws actually got enforced. 

There is a medieval example in the story of the Caliph al Mansur and the poet Ibn Harma:

The Caliph, delighted with the poet's performance, told him to name his reward; the poet replied that the reward he wanted was to be let off from the punishment for drunkenness when he was found drunk and brought in to the authorities. Al Mansur replied that that was God's law, not his, so he could not change it, and asked ibn Harm to name a different reward; the poet responded that there was nothing else he wanted.

So al Mansur sent instructions to the officials in Medina that, if Ibn Harma was found drunk and brought in, he should receive sixty lashes as specified in Koranic law—but whoever brought him in should receive eighty. And ever after, when someone saw the poet drunk upon the pavement, he would turn to his companion, say "eighty for sixty is a bad bargain," and pass on.

It is a good story and demonstrates one possible disconnect between legal theory and legal practice. But we do not know if it is true or whether if true it represented the rule or the exception.

Why would a ruler choose to leave the content of the law out of his control? Hallaq's answer is that the rulers were typically foreigners—Turkish princes, for instance, ruling over Syrian, Egyptian, Arabic populations. The existing system of Islamic law provided them with legitimacy in the eyes of the population and a link into local customs and social structures. Both were particularly important in a world where pre-modern limits on transport and communication made a modern bureaucratic state of any substantial size, controlled by direct authority, impractical. The rulers were therefor willing to make an implicit deal with the legists, the legal scholars and those associated with them. The ruler left the content of the law to the legists and provided them with material support—salaries for judges and endowments for legal schools, which in turn provided salaries to professors and food and lodging to students. The legists, in exchange, supported the legitimacy of the ruler and ran his legal system for him in a way acceptable to the population he ruled.

Further support for legal independence came from the distinction between the roles of qadi and mufti. The qadi was the judge appointed by the ruler to decide cases. The mufti was the legal authority upon whose expertise both the qadi and the general populace relied. A party to litigation, or anyone else who wanted an authoritative opinion on a legal or moral question, presented the question to the mufti, who provided him with a fatwa, an advisory opinion. If the case got to court, that opinion would be offered as evidence of what the law was. While the qadi was, ideally, a legal scholar himself, he did not have to be, since he could rely on opinions brought to him by litigants or provided by the mufti at his request. And while the qadi was appointed and paid by the ruler, the mufti was not; his position depended only on his reputation.

By Hallaq's account, the result was a legal system that produced generally just and attractive results. In particular, he claims that the poor and powerless frequently succeeded in using it to defend their rights over the rich and powerful, non-Muslims over Muslims, Women over men. He further claims that Islamic law, in contrast to modern law, saw its function more as producing outcomes satisfactory to all parties, where possible arbitrating among them, than as simply choosing winners and losers.

Hallaq obviously has an axe to grind, a conclusion he wants to argue for. He knows much more about the subject than I do, and large parts of his argument depend on facts I have no easy way of checking, in particular on the surviving records of the outcomes of court cases. I know that there is a wide range of opinions about modern legal systems, including the one I live under, despite the fact that they are there to be looked at, and I do not know how wide the range is of possible interpretations of a system that disappeared, by his account, a century or more ago. That leaves me unsure how much of the story he tells to believe

To solve that problem, I have tried to find parts of his story, both what he says and what he does not say, that I can check against other sources. The parts that are clearly true, judging by everything else I have read on the subject, are the theoretical separation of state and law and the existence of a polylegal system in which different people in the same city were under at least somewhat different systems of legal rules. Also, I have access to two webbed accounts of the legal rules, one from the tenth century (from the Maliki school) and one from the fourteenth (from the Shafi'i school), and can compare their contents with what Hallaq says the rules were.

For the most part, what he says is consistent with what they say. I am less happy with what he does not say. Part of his argument, clearly intended to counter hostile views of Islamic law in the modern world, is that the system in practice was not seriously biased against women and non-Muslims. He mentions that a woman's testimony in court counted for half that of a man, but argues that the active involvement of women in court cases shows that that was not a serious handicap. He does not mention that women's testimony was only acceptable at all in a limited subset of legal areas or that, while two women in those areas were the equivalent of one man, a hundred women were also the equivalent of one man, the usual legal rule requiring either two male witnesses or one male and at least two female. Nor does he mention that the damage payment for killing a woman was half that for killing a man or that the damage payment for killing a Christian or Jew was half to a third (depending on the school of law) that for killing a Muslim, or that deliberately killing a Muslim was a capital offense, deliberately killing a Christian or Jew was not. 

None of those facts imply that the system failed to provide a reasonable degree of protection to those who were not male Muslims, or even that it was, in practice, less egalitarian than modern law. Part of his implied argument is that the protection provided by modern law is largely dependent on how much money one has, while it was effectively free under Islamic law.  But they are all facts that would make his case look less persuasive to the readers the book is aimed at. His failure to mention them makes me less confident that the facts he does offer and I cannot check present a balanced picture of the evidence.

When it comes to his second thesis, what happened to destroy that system of non-state law, the problems seem to me both clearer, on his own evidence, and less fundamental. The essential change was the takeover of law by the state. That consisted in part in replacing a system of law as deduced by scholars with one of law as written down by the state, in some cases based on religious law, in others on western models. It consisted in part in the state taking over the machinery for supporting and training the actors in the legal system.  Hallaq wants to blame that change mostly on western influence, direct in the case of Islamic societies under colonial rule (India, Indonesia, Algeria), indirect in the case of the Ottoman Empire, responding both to foreign pressures on an increasingly weak state and by the desire of Ottoman elites to imitate western practices in order to catch up with its western rivals. 

The problem with that account is that, judging both by Hallaq's account and by others I have read, the changes in the Ottoman empire occurred long before the 19th century. The Ottomans supported the Hanafi school of law, with the result that, in much of the empire, judges were required to rule in accordance with that school, while elsewhere judges of the other three schools were subordinate to a Hanafi chief judge who had to approve their rulings as not too inconsistent with those of his school. As early as the sixteenth century, the Sultan sometimes instructed judges as to which of several alternate rules within Hanafi laws they had to follow. In the same century the Ottomans recognized a Grand Mufti, a state appointed top level religious authority. They also took over effective control of the schools where legal scholars were trained. And the Ottoman sultans produced their own legal code, the Qanun, running in parallel with and, in theory, supporting, the religious legal code of the scholars.

Hallaq goes to some length to try to argue that, despite these changes, Islamic law in the Ottoman Empire was alive and well, providing justice and even restricting the power of the Sultan until corrupted by western influence over the course of the nineteenth century. I found this one of the less convincing parts of his argument. 

As I read his evidence, what destroyed the traditional system he admires was the increasing power of the nation state, which eventually annexed the independent legal system and used it for its purposes. That development parallels the process in western societies by which the state took over the church. Hallaq describes the seizure of the property of the waqfs, Islamic charitable foundations used both to support the families of the donors and to support mosques, schools and other charitable enterprises, something that occurred in a variety of different Islamic states, independent or under colonial rule, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He does not mention the obvious parallel to the seizure of the property of the monasteries by Henry VIII. One obvious conjecture is that changes in both east and west reflected changes, possibly technological, that strengthened the position of centralizing political institutions.

It is an interesting book, a persuasive book, and its central thesis, however implausible it may sound to modern readers, could be true. I have a lot more reading to do.

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A note on terminology

Many writers, including Hallaq, use "Shari'a" as the label for the Islamic legal system. As best I can tell, that is not quite right. Shari'a, as I understand it, is the legal system as it ought to be, the legal system in the mind of God. The actual legal system, fiqh, is an imperfect human attempt to implement shari'a in the real world. Since "shari'a" is the wrong label and "fiqh" unfamiliar to most of my readers, I have been simply referring to it as the Islamic legal system.

Seduction to Matrimony—from PUA to Red Pill

Some years ago, I came across a series of web pages that offered what spam messages sometimes claim to offer—instructions to men on how to seduce women. They were labelled PUA, for "pickup-artist," and were more interesting than one might have expected, especially if one was twenty years or more out of that particular market. 

Part of what made them interesting was that there was a theory underlying them: Women are attracted to alpha men, so the way to attract women is to be, or at least pretend to be, an alpha male. Another was the frankly amoral approach. As best I could tell, the authors did not regard either honesty towards or the welfare of their would-be partners as matters of much importance. The objective was simply to bed as many desirable women as possible, and the techniques were worked out in some detail.

Recently, reading comments on an interesting post by Eric Raymond, I came across a mention of the current incarnation, or perhaps descendant, of PUA, and followed it up via Google. This time the label was "red pill," a reference to the film The Matrix, where the red pill represents possibly painful reality as an alternative to pleasant illusion. The underlying theory—women are attracted to dominant men—is still the same, but the application has changed. The objective this time is successful marriage.

The tone has also changed. The central idea, as best I can judge it, is that the husband's role should be that of a benevolent dictator. He should work hard, do all the husbandly duties, pay careful attention to the desires and welfare of his wife, listen when she talks. But he should also make it clear that, in the last analysis, he is the one who decides things. I do not know if any of the authors of red pill pages are familiar with Blackstone's famous explanation of the legal status of a married couple: "In law, husband and wife are one person, and that person is the husband"—but I expect they would approve of it. 

Which reflects how conservative the terminus of their intellectual journey is. They start with amoral hedonism aimed at as much casual sex as possible and end up with a conventional, if somewhat old fashioned, version of traditional monogamous matrimony. Their one addition to the traditional account, carried over from where they started, is the objective: Since women are turned on by dominant men, following their marital formula is supposed to provide lots of matrimonial sex and a happy and satisfied wife.

I do not have the data to judge how successful either the original program or the later version are. My guess is that both work for some people some of the time in some situations, but less universally than their proponents believe. The PUA tactics appear designed mostly for single bars where, as I understand the institution, the women present are there to be picked up, so the only question is which of the men they end up with; I would not be surprised if, in that setting, the advice works pretty well. And I expect there are successful marriages that work in part along red pill lines, as well as others that would not. But what I found most interesting was the way in which a mating philosophy designed for men in their early twenties with a single-minded focus on casual sex had morphed into a form suited to the same men a little older, a little more mature, and with a different set of objectives.

I will now await the comments of those who know both versions better than I do and can either correct my account or fill it out with their own data.

The Greatest Post Ever Written?

That was how another blogger referred to this post by Dierdre McCloskey. I don't have sufficient data to confirm that claim, but it is very good.

The Economics of SF Fandom

I expect to attend a local science fiction convention (Baycon) in a few weeks, which makes this an appropriate time to talk about the economics of fandom. One part of it—fandom as a modern gift economy—I discussed briefly in an old post. This one is on gains from trade and the risks of technological progress.

Suppose you are a moderately successful sf author but not one of the handful of top writers. Your writing pays well enough to support you but not well enough to make you rich. Your neighbors, unless they happen to  read your books, see you as no more important, no higher status, than anyone else on the block. You are, along with most of the population of the world, a nonentity.

Most of us don't like being nonentities. But somewhere, scattered around the world, there are thousands of people who look up to you as an artist, a magician, a story teller, the creator of worlds where they spend hours of enjoyment. Humans enjoy status, and putting you together with your fans gives it to both of you. You get to spend time being an important person, a celebrity. They get to actually meet, talk with, a celebrity—not, perhaps, a celebrity for most of the world, but a celebrity for them. Both of you are better off, benefiting by gains from trade, although a trade not in material goods. That is one of the reasons they are willing to pay to attend a science fiction convention at which you are a guest, and one of the reasons you are willing to show up at the convention and spend many hours interacting with fans, even though you are probably not being paid to do so. That, as I interpret it, is one of the things that makes the subculture of sf fandom, and similar subcultures that I know less about, work.

The mechanism I describe has worked for quite a while, but it may be encountering a problem due to technological progress. One way of interacting with an author you admire is to attend a convention and hope he shows up. Another is to read his blog, comment on it, with luck get comments in return. Exchange emails with him. Chat with him on one of the sf Usenet groups. The less such interaction depends on being in the same room, the better a substitute it is for a convention, hence the less the gains from trade that a convention produces. 

The loss is to conventions, not to fandom more generally. The new technology has made it possible for substantial parts of what fandom produces to move to cyberspace, where it can be produced at a lower cost in money and effort. How large the effect is, I do not know. I read and write sf and attend an occasional convention, but I am not enough a part of the subculture to tell whether attendance is on net falling, or if so by how much. 

One relevant question, to which I do not know the answer, is to what degree people see virtual contact, contact online, as an adequate substitute for realspace contact. That gets me back to an old puzzle—why the mass lecture survived the invention of the printing press. Reading a book is also a form of virtual contact, it too is more convenient than the realspace equivalent, and it has the further advantage of giving you contact with a much higher quality and higher status partner—the author of the best book ever written in the relevant field. Yet many students still prefer to get their information sitting in a room with several hundred others listening to a professor talk.

Which may mean that sf conventions will be with us for a while longer.