David Brin and Adam Smith

I've run into yet another case of someone complaining about conservatives falsely claiming Adam Smith in support of their views while doing exactly that himself. The complainer this time is David Brin, who wrote an interesting book on surveillance some years back but has, in my experience, a tendency to pontificate well beyond the limits of his knowledge.

In the relevant passage, he wrote:

But anyone who actually reads Adam Smith also knows that he went on and on about that "fair and open" part! Especially how excessive disparities of wealth and income destroy competition. Unlike today's conservatives, who grew up in a post-WWII flattened social order without major wealth-castes, Smith lived immersed in class-rooted oligarchy, of the kind that ruined markets, freedom and science across nearly 99% of human history. He knew the real enemy, first hand and denounced it in terms that he never used for mere bureaucrats.

In a comment, I asked him to produce a quote from Smith saying that excessive disparities of wealth and income destroy competition. He responded with the following (from The Theory of Moral Sentiments).

"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."

Which, as I pointed out in my response, has nothing to do with disparities of wealth and income destroying competition. Apparently Brin couldn't find any examples of Smith saying what he claims Smith went on and on about, so quoted something else instead.

I could have gone on to point out that Smith's attacks are not, for the most part, against the "class-rooted oligarchy," which at his time consisted mostly of the landed gentry. On the contrary, he tried to persuade the landowners that the policies he thought were in the general interest were also in their interest—sometimes stretching his argument pretty far to do so. His attacks were mostly directed at the "merchants and manufacturers."

But it didn't seem worth the trouble.

Those interested in reading Brin's post and our exchange of comments will find them here. 

My earlier post on people misrepresenting Smith while complaining about other people doing so is here.

P.S. Since I put this up, Brin posted another response and I answered it. As I suggest in my answer, my fundamental complaint about Brin is the same as my complaint elsewhere about Rothbard—that as long as he believes he is arguing for the right side, he doesn't really care whether what he says is true.

D. Friedman vs D. Brin

[Here's a link to Brin's post and the comments, including mine, courtesy of Chris Hibbert]

I've been having an exchange on Google+ with David Brin, started by a post of his that began:

Is it "class war" to reset tax levels to the levels of the prosperous 1990s?

I pointed out that, according to the CBO figures, the top quintile of the income distribution was paying a slightly higher average federal tax rate in 2007, the last year for which I could find CBO data, than in 1990, while the bottom quintile was paying about half the rate in 2007 it was paying in 1990, and asked him if what he was proposing was doubling the taxes on low income taxpayers.

My point, of course, was that although there is lots of rhetoric about the rich paying low taxes, what actually happened over the past twenty years was a sharp cut in federal taxes for the lower half of the income distribution.

Brin responded with:

Quintiles are utterly utterly misleading. 90% of the people in the topmost quintile still earn most of their income from wages, not dividends or capital gains. Try the top 5% and 1% and 0.1% and include shelters overseas (estimated.) This is exactly the kind of razzle dazzle switcheroo you should be wary of and have spotted for yourself.

To which I replied by quoting his post, followed by:

I don't think I'm the one offering razzle-dazzle--and I note that while you ask me to look up data, you don't actually offer any.

As you could easily have discovered if you looked up the numbers yourself, the CBO figures for 2007 show the top 1% paying an effective federal tax rate of 29.5%. The figure for 1990 is 28.8%.

The bottom quintile, on the other hand, paid an effective rate of 8.9% in 1990. In 2007, it was 4.0%.

So you have your facts backwards, at least so far as I can tell from the CBO figures--if you have something better, feel free to offer it. The effective rate on the bottom quintile has been cut in half since 1990, on the top 1% it has increased a little. I have no idea, and you don't say, what your source is for "shelters overseas (estimated)," but I suspect it's bluff--do you have figures showing that the top 1% is sheltering much more of its income now than in the 1990's? That's what your argument requires.

Let me repeat my question, since you didn't answer it the first time. You suggest rolling back tax levels to what they were in the 1990's. Does that mean that you want to double taxes on low income taxpayers, to get them back to where they were then? That's the big change, after all.

My figures are only up to 2007, since that's all I could readily find from the CBO; my guess is that the 2010 figures, if I could find them, would show a lower tax rate than in 2007 for all groups, since the current Administration has financed its budget largely with borrowing. But the big change from 1990 would still be the sharp drop in the effective tax rates paid by the lower part of the income distribution. For some reason neither you nor Obama seems to have noticed that--or at least let it interfere with your rhetoric.

Brin has so far not responded. I'm waiting to see if he will support his claims, concede error, or simply leave the argument unanswered. The fact that his response to my first post was, so far as I can tell, pure bluff--no data, just the implication that if one looked at the data it would support his beliefs--is disturbing. 

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David Henderson has a link to a piece that goes into much more detail than I have and finds that the tax system has been becoming pretty steadily more progressive over the past fifteen years, under both Democrats and Republicans.

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The argument continues. For those who don't want to follow the link at the top of this and then search through the comments, here is my most recent response (to two of his):

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David B. writes:

“In fact I agree that taxes for everybody are lower now than they were in the 1990s.”

Because current spending is financed by borrowing. Which, absent a default, will eventually have to be paid for by higher taxes.

That was not however the point of my comments. My point was that taxation has become more progressive since the 1990’s, when you and lots of other people, including Obama, want to claim it has become less. Do you agree with that? If so, why have you gone to so much trouble, with your handwaving about the top 1% and tax shelters, to deny it?

“Put this in the context of 6000 years of history …”

More evasion. If I can’t get you to face demonstrable facts about taxation in the U.S. over the past few decades, I doubt that arguing with you about the past 6000 years of history would be very useful.

You keep trying to make this an argument about whether one supports or opposes the policies of the Bush administration. I didn’t vote for Bush, didn’t approve of his policies at the time, and don’t approve of their continuation by Obama, so you can have that argument with someone else. I’m simply trying to get you to face the fact that the federal tax system has gotten more progressive over time, not less.

And when I point you at evidence that that’s true, your response isn’t to try to rebut it, or even to understand it, but to talk about “you guys” and try to change the subject to your grand theories about America. If I’m going to argue about grand theories, I would prefer to do it with people who care whether the facts they use in their arguments are true or not.

“You even seem to implicitly say that tax rates SHOULD be progressive. Of course they aren't. Look closely.”

I have said nothing at all about whether tax rates should or shouldn’t be progressive. I’ve merely been trying to establish what they are, and how they have changed over time.

“Most of these right wing "studies" incorporate corporate taxes INTO the recipient's claim of taxes paid, under the bizarre incantation that this envelopes what the call "double taxation."”

Does that include the “right wing studies” by the Congressional Budget Office? Have you looked at their figures on the federal income tax alone? That by itself is highly progressive. That plus payroll taxes—which they treat as entirely a tax on the employee—is still progressive, although not as progressive.

How progressivity has changed over time requires a little effort to determine, and you would rather demagogue than make that effort. To see that the federal tax system is progressive, under any plausible assumption about incidence, requires only the ability to read and do arithmetic. But it apparently doesn’t fit your current ideology, whatever that may be.

I am curious, however, as to who you believe pays corporate income tax, since you think the notion that it comes out of money that would otherwise go to dividends and capital gains is bizarre. Is it just manna from heaven?

Robert Heinlein, Cell Phones, and Police

Somewhere, Heinlein comments that predicting the direct effects of technological change is relatively easy. What is harder is predicting indirect effects. His example was the automobile. He argued that it had a substantial effect on sexual behavior by giving couples a place to make love out of sight of parents.

I am not sure how convincing that example is, but it occurs to me that we have another and clearer one. Did it occur to anyone, ten or fifteen years ago, that one effect of the development of cell phone technology would be, by providing practically everyone with a pocket video camera, to greatly increase public opposition to police beating people up? 

The closest I can think of is in David Brin's Transparent Society, where he argued that, in a future where everything is subject to surveillance, the transparency ought to go in both directions: The police can watch us, but we can also watch them.  I do not think it occurred to him how we would get there or that the essential change would be not in what you could see but in what you could record and offer for public view.

P.S. Judging by comments, I may have been unfair to Brin, working off my memory of one book, not all of his writing.

The Transparent Society: v 0.1

In The Transparent Society, David Brin argued that developments in surveillance technology were leading us to a world where everything you did would be observed, recordable, and searchable. That outcome could not, in his view, be prevented. The best we could hope for was transparency in both directions, a world where the cops can watch us but we can also watch them.

Early evidence that he might be right appeared in incidents where police officers made the mistake of misbehaving when someone had a video camera—more recently a cell phone—pointed at them. Thinking about the WikiLeaks case, it occurred to me that it was a further development in the same direction. The origin of the information was a conventional leak, not high tech surveillance. But it is modern technology that makes it virtually impossible for the governments affected to prevent widespread public distribution of the leaked information.

In that sense, what we are seeing is an early stage of the transparent society.

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David Brin's web site

The chapter on surveillance technology in my Future Imperfect.

A Story Idea

Someone comes up with a drug, or a technology, that gives the user perfect recall, the ability to rerun, in full detail, any part of his life. How would it get used?

One possibility is for self-education. Observing selected past experiences with a fifty year old mind and seventeen year old eyes might teach me a good deal about mistakes I had made, some of which I might still be making.  It might provide information about what it was like to be seventeen useful in dealing with current teenagers, including my own children. In life as it now is, we get to see each episode only once. As any video game player could tell you, being able to play the same events over and over makes it possible to greatly improve your skill. In my hypothetical, unlike a video game, you don't get to  try different tactics and see what happens. But you do get to see repeated replays of what you did the first time and the results.

Another possibility is entertainment. You can rerun, over and over again, your happiest, most exciting moments. Replace internet porn with memories of your first, or best, sex. Watch a reality show that was real, with yourself as star.

There is, however, a potential down side. After things go wrong, a marital breakup, a business failure, an election loss, it is tempting to go over it again and again, agonizing over what you did wrong and what you should have done. Now you can do it in living color. Forever.

The version of this scenario I have just described is probably impossible, since there is no reason to believe that a full record of my past is actually stored anywhere in my brain. But a different version, enabled by a different technology, might well come into existence in the not too distant future.

Consider a world with greatly improved surveillance, a much advanced version of video cameras on poles combined with face recognition software and database technology. In that world, David Brin's Transparent Society, everything that happens in a public place is recorded and findable. And once we have video cameras with the size and aerodynamic characteristics of mosquitoes, practically every place is public.

If the system is open access we are back with perfect recall. I am no longer watching my past life through the eyes of my past self, but I still get to watch it. 

I was born too early. But it might be reality for my future grandchildren.

Surveillance Considered as a Time Machine

It would be both interesting and educational to be able to view my own past, to see how my life looked without the filter of memory. It is too late for me, but in the not very distant future the surveillance technology discussed by David Brin in The Transparent Society and by me in Chapter 5 of Future Imperfect may let other people do it.

Imagine a future where everything that happens in public spaces, and perhaps much in private spaces as well, is routinely recorded, saved and searchable. In that future, the man of thirty gets to watch himself at fifteen on his first date, judge how reasonable or otherwise the quarrel that ended a friendship at eighteen was, see how his parents treated him and he them, with perhaps useful lessons for bringing up his own children. At fifty he gets to look back at what he was doing when he was thirty, recognizing faults or errors invisible to him at the time.

It works for shorter time periods too. After the political argument or lovers quarrel in which my behavior was, as I saw it, entirely reasonable and the fault all on the other side, I get to rerun an outside view—and perhaps see how my voice tones, gestures, facial expressions conveyed a very different message than I chose to remember.

Google's usenet archive already provides a pale ghost of such an opportunity, limited to a string of text messages. The future may expand that to full motion, living color, perhaps even 3D.