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maxheld83 / schumpermas

This is where I write all my stuff on taxation and democracy, including my PhD thesis.
http://maxheld.de/schumpermas
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Jonathan Baron: U Penn #295

Open maxheld83 opened 9 years ago

maxheld83 commented 9 years ago

seems interested:

Dear Max,

This sounds very interesting, even to the point where I downloaded your tar.gz file, but at that point I got stuck. I could not find one file that I could run to reproduce an entire document.

I did not plan to go to that conference. I don't go to very many conferences. That one seems interesting, but I know little about the topic in general and would rather read something than listen to people who assume that I have already done the reading.

But do keep me informed about your progress.

One of my plans is to write something about a utilitarian theory of government. I'm not sure I will ever get to it, given all the commitments I have, but this topic is certainly something I want to include.

(Ed and I disagreed about utilitarianism, but it always seemed to me to generate the same conclusions that he wanted to generate in other ways.)

Jon

maxheld83 commented 9 years ago

get back to Dr Baron, address this critique.

Thanks.

And thanks for offering the chapters, but I'll wait for the whole thing.

I see where you are going. I am suspicious of this approach for very general reasons, which I will try to state abstractly.

You have a "balanced expert panel" answer questions about the substance of the various proposals, their economic effects. I always worry about the choice of such panels, which includes many assumptions about what views should be included. And if you are "fair" to all legitimate views, even after applying a sanity filter, you will have so many views that people will just get confused.

But the bigger problem is that the expert panel deals only with substance, not with HOW TO THINK ABOUT THESE ISSUES. The subjects get no training in, for example, utilitarian analysis, or actively open-minded thinking (AOT), the two kinds of competence that I think are necessary for democracy to work as well as it can. (See http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/papers/shalvi.pdf.)

As a result, even after reflection, information, and discussion, their conclusions will be biased by (for example), their over-reliance on moral intuitions and the "myside bias" that is predominant in the group of deliberators.

Thus, my solution to the problems of the world is different. It is, first, instruction of citizens in utilitarianism and AOT, mostly in the schools and universities. And, second, more delegation of technical functions to government bureaucrats, as proposed by Breyer ("Breaking the vicious circle") and Sunstein ("Risk and reason"). I would rather have the entire tax system designed by your panel of economists than have citizens deliberate and do it themselves. They would not be perfect, but they would probably settle on a graduated consumption tax! Similarly, in the U.S. and most other countries, we don't even let the legislature influence interest rates anymore. We leave that to the (expert) central bankers. They aren't perfect either, but they are better than the legislature would be (or was, in the 19th century).