On sex work and demand.

I have only occasionally paid for sex work.

At a library booksale, I purchased a copy of The Magus intending only to read the racy bits. At a comic shop in California, I bought a bundle of Playboy magazines from the 1970s. After reading an interview with the Erika Lust, my spouse & I watched some of her company’s short films. While traveling in India with friends, we visited a health center and each purchased an Ayurvedic massage.

For the massage, each of us was taken to private rooms and told to change into rather skimpy thong underwear. Then a trained professional – a man for the males in our group, a woman for the females – rubbed our bodies with a blend of oil and spices, carefully kneading our muscles. There wasn’t the sort of rhythmic, focused attention that I imagine to be a component of “happy endings,” but midway through I began to fret about what I would say if that was the sort of massage that I’d inadvertently purchased.

Worrying left me even more tense after the massage than before it started. Whoops.

Although, after we had all showered and reconvened in the lobby, my friend who’d convinced us to try ayurvedic massage regaled us with a story from his childhood. His parents were Indian, and massage was a totally normal part of their culture. And so, during a family vacation to Mexico when my friend was fourteen, his mother purchased a massage for him at one of the tents near their beach.

Midway through, the masseuse wrapped her fingers around his oiled penis and rapidly pumped back and forth. My friend was alarmed but, as a naive adolescent, didn’t know how to make it stop. So he assumed that the easiest way to get through the experience was to close his eyes and think of things sultrier than England.

The masseuse cleaned off his belly. He sheepishly exited the tent. His mother asked, “Was it a good massage, beta?”

He averted his eyes and mumbled, “yup.” Most teenagers act embarrassed and cagey around their parents all the time, so she didn’t realize anything was wrong.

She would have been outraged to realize that she had hired a sex worker.

Sex work is a slippery concept, though. In the process of writing this essay, I tried to come up with a definition; I failed. You could reasonably argue that all massage therapists are sex workers. Patrons are nearly naked; there’s a whole lot of lubricated skin-to-skin contact; a body is used as conduit to satiation.

A number of other professions fit most of the definitions of “sex work” that I came up with. In strip clubs, lap dancers rub against a patron’s body in order to produce orgasm. After pregnancy, many women visit physical therapists who help them regain bladder control; a worker rhythmically curls her gloved fingers inside the patron’s vulva. A model might pose for Playboy – or even the Victoria’s Secret catalog – knowing that young men will climax while gazing at her image. An actor in a pornographic film engages in sexual contact for money; so do police officers.

A writer who drafts an erotic story is arguably a sex worker, too. The experience is enjoyed asynchronously, but the exchange of titillating words can be a form of sexuality, and a patron can certainly reach orgasm.

In practice, these people are unlikely to face legal consequences for their sex work. Because the term “prostitution” is so nebulously defined, prosecutors and judges get to decide what counts.

Even for full-fledged, both-parties-shuck-their-clothes, somebody’s-parts-enveloping-somebody-else’s-parts types of sex work, certain people slide right past the law. Many clients look like prosecutors and judges – wealthy, white, and male – so it’s easy to feel sympathy for them. Hasn’t the bad press already hurt this man enough? And, he’s a pillar of his community! We’d cause too much collateral damage by locking him up!

Instead, we punish people who are already marginalized. Poor people, Black people, brazen women, LGBTQ folks, undocumented immigrants, drug addicts … they elicit little sympathy from our prosecutors. Go ahead and lock them up. Fine them. Deport them.

Juno Mac and Molly Smith have written an excellent book, Revolting Prostitutes, documenting the actual results of our laws against sex work. On the topic of nebulous definitions, Mac and Smith write that, in England (where sex work itself has been decriminalized, but every measure that would allow sex workers to keep themselves safe is illegal):

The definition of brothel-keeping is so capacious as to easily facilitate the criminalization of sex workers: a brothel can be any place where ‘more than one woman offers sexual intercourse, whether for payment or not’ or that is ‘resorted to for the purposes of lewd homosexual practices’. In other words, a flat-share where both housemates regularly have casual non-commercial sex could theoretically count as a brothel under British law.

Vague and misogynistic, this is exactly the sort of language that leads to injustice. Police officers haven’t been raiding the apartments of college kids who choose to fool around with their classmates; instead, they use this law as another tool to oppress undocumented immigrants.

It should be no surprise that carceral feminists and sex-working feminists have such difficulty even discussing this topic. We disagree not only on the solution but on the problem: for carceral feminists, the problem is commercial sex, which produces trafficking; for us, the problem is borders, which produces people who have few to no rights as they travel and work.

The solutions we propose are equally divergent. Carceral feminists want to tackle commercial sex through criminal law, giving more power to the police. For sex workers, the solution includes dismantling immigration enforcement and the militarized border regimes that push undocumented people into the shadows and shut off their access to safety or justice – in other words, taking power away from the police and giving it to migrants and to workers.

Mac and Smith acknowledge that there are valid reasons to dislike the existence of sex work. But there is a danger – if we are too focused on the risk that society might view women’s bodies as objects to be bought and sold, we might lose sight of the real problem.

Most sex workers don’t like their jobs. They sell sex because they need money.

When we devote resources to the criminal justice system instead of the social services that people need, we make the problem worse.

We are not here to uplift the figure of the ‘sympathetic’ client, nor the idea that any client has a ‘right’ to sex. We are not here to prioritize discussion on whether the sex industry, or even sex itself, is intrinsically good or bad. Nor – as we will unpack over the course of this book – are we uncritical of what work means in a context of insatiable global capitalism and looming environmental catastrophe.

…

In the sense that we wish to see an end to all work, particularly the gendered and exploitative nature of prostitution, many sex worker activists are in fact ‘sex industry abolitionists’. As the English Collection of Prostitutes have said, ‘Ultimately we are organizing for an end to prostitution … When women are able to claim back the wealth we helped produce, the economic conditions which have forced millions of people everywhere to sell their mind, body, time, and skills in order to survive or improve their standard of living, prostitution will no longer be there.’

…

[Anti-prostitution feminists] position work in general as something that the worker should find fulfilling, non-exploitative, and enjoyable. Deviation from this supposed norm is treated as evidence that something cannot be work.

‘It’s not work, it’s exploitation’ is a refrain you hear again and again. One feminist policymaker in Sweden told a reporter, ‘Don’t say sex work, it’s far too awful to be work.’ Awfulness and work are positioned as antithetical: if prostitution is awful, it cannot be work.

Anti-prostitution feminists and even policymakers often ask sex workers whether we would have sex with our clients if we weren’t being paid. Work is thus constantly being re-inscribed as something so personally fulfilling you would pursue it for free.

Indeed, this understanding is in some ways embedded in anti-prostitution advocacy through the prevalence of unpaid internships in such organizations. … The result of these unpaid and underpaid internships is that the women who are most able to build careers in the women’s sector – campaigning and setting policy agendas around prostitution – are women who can afford to do unpaid full-time work in New York and London. In this context, it is hardly a surprise that the anti-prostitution movement as a whole has a somewhat abstracted view of the relationship between work and money.

Work may be mostly positive for those who can largely set the parameters of the conversation, like high-profile journalists. However, this does not describe reality for most women workers or workers in general (or even many journalists).

Most workers suffer some unfair conditions in the workplace and would not, as a rule, do their jobs for free. Work is pretty awful, especially when it’s low paid and unprestigious. This is not to say that this state of affairs is good, or that we should accept it because it is normal, but nor is it useful to pretend that work is generally wonderful and exclude from our analysis the demands of workers whose experience does not meet this standard.

Mac and Smith would love to live in a world where no one felt the need to sell sex. Barring that, they would like to see sex work become less exploitative, and they offer concrete policy suggestions that would help. Their proposals are reasonable – and very different from the laws that our predominantly wealthy, white, male legislatures have been passing.

Even in Sweden – where we first saw the “Nordic model,” which ostensibly decriminalizes the act of selling sex while punishing buyers – sex workers are harassed by the police. There has been no amnesty for women who sell sex because they are barred from other forms of employment by their immigration status.

But, even if the police chose to pursue only buyers, these laws would still harm sex workers. If any person involved in a transaction is considered a criminal, the transaction will be dangerous. Sex workers subject to the Nordic model are unable to take basic safety precautions, and so they are hurt by these laws.

Similarly, U.S. bills that were ostensibly passed to protect women have instead caused worldwide harm. Mac and Smith write that:

SESTA-FOSTA [which shut down websites like Backpage for trafficking concerns] censored a huge number of advertising platforms at once in spring 2018, rendering sex workers in the US and beyond more precarious, broke, and desperate almost overnight as their source of income vanished. SESTA-FOSTA increased the power of clients and would-be managers, as sex workers scrambled to find work in any way they could.

One client wrote, ‘I definitely think this will end up being a win for hobbyists [habitual clients] … prices will drop because providers [sex workers] will not be able to pull in new customers and have to take whoever they can get. Specials [such as sex without a condom] will become more prevalent … They will have to act friendlier and not have the luxury of turning away clients any longer.’

[Note: clarifications for terms like “hobbyists” and “specials” were provided by Mac and Smith.]

…

It could seem paradoxical that these laws, which ostensibly aim to fight exploitation, instead make exploitation easier and more prevalent. But ultimately it is not a paradox: reducing sex workers’ ability to connect with clients always increases scarcity and makes workers more vulnerable.

When we try to suppress demand by passing laws that punish people who buy sex, the lives of sex workers become more dangerous. When we try to suppress demand by shutting down advertising platforms, the lives of sex workers become more dangerous.

We’re doing the wrong things.

Politicians are targeting the wrong sort of demand.

In economic terms, the demand for sex work is relatively elastic. Fooling around is fun; it isn’t necessary. When the price goes up – because sex workers raise their rates, because there’s an outbreak of STIs, because the transaction is criminalized, because there’s a cultural norm that people share their sexuality only within the confines of a church-sanctioned marriage – most people will have less sex.

Supply and demand. In this sort of crude approximation, elastic demand would be represented by a relatively horizontal line (quantity changes significantly if the price changes) and inelastic demand by a relatively vertical line (quantity stays the same no matter the cost). Image from GrokInFullness.

What happens to demand when the effective price goes up because of a risk of punishment. Note that the intersection point between the red & dotted lines is *lower than* the original intersection point. Even though sex workers aren’t being directly punished, they’re now earning less money. Image from GrokInFullness.

By way of contrast, the demand for a safe place to live, food for your children, or medicine are all inelastic. When you’re fleeing the ravages of climate change or militarized gang violence, it doesn’t matter how much it costs. That’s why our immigration policies have been failing – by policing our borders, we’ve raised the price of migration, but we haven’t addressed substandard living conditions in people’s home countries.

Instead, we are making people’s homes less safe. Both the colonial legacy and ongoing carbon pollution of places like the United States and wealthy European countries have led to droughts, government corruption, and drug-sale-funded violence around the world. We have a moral obligation to help the people whose homes we’ve ruined; instead, we’re treating them like criminals.

I’ve written previously that a global wealth tax used to fund a guaranteed basic income would be the best solution to many of our world’s problems; Mac and Smith also conclude that:

To make sex work unnecessary, there is much work to do: winning rights for freedom of movement, labor rights, access to services and to work without threat of deportation, employment alternatives, better welfare provisions, cheaper housing, support services for single mothers, and so on. If everybody had the resources they needed, nobody would need to sell sex.

Revolting Prostitutes is an incredibly well-written, deeply researched, important book. It deserves to be widely read – certainly by everyone who purports to care about feminism, immigration, or human rights.

I worry, though, that some readers might be turned away by an ad hominem attack. Many authors have careers that inform their writing; I’ve never seen these mentioned in our local university’s library listings before. Wouldn’t it be enough to list “Author: Smith, Molly” with no clarification?

Misogyny dies hard.

On taxing robots.

My family recently attended a preschool birthday party at which cupcakes were served. I watched in horror as the children ate. Some used grimy fingers to claw off the top layer of frosting. Others attempted to shove the entire frosted top into their gaping maws, as though they thought their jaws might distend snake-like. These kids failed, obviously, and mostly smashed the cupcakes against their faces.

And then, a mere two minutes later, the kids all slid from their chairs to run off and rampage elsewhere in the house. The table was a wreckage; no child had actually eaten a cupcake. They’d eaten frosting, sure, but left the remnants crumbled and half-masticated on their plates.

Someone needed to clean up.

If I was a better person, I would have offered to help. But I didn’t. I just stood there with my mouth twisted into a grimace of disgust.

I wonder why it’s so hard for our family to make friends. Surely my constant scowls seem charming! Right? Right?

Even at our own house, where our compost bin ensures that uneaten food isn’t completely wasted … and where my own children are responsible for the entirety of any mangled remnants … I loathe scraping the plates clean.

And I don’t like washing dishes.

Luckily, we have a dishwasher. Slide dirty dishes into the rack, push a button, and, voila, a robot will make them clean!

Automation is great!

Also, automation is making our world worse.

Although official unemployment in the United States is low, the economy is doing poorly. The official statistics don’t count people who’ve given up, and they don’t count people who are stuck with worse jobs that they would’ve had in the past.

Low unemployment is supposed to drive up people’s salaries. When a company knows that there are few available job seekers, they’ll pay more to prevent you from leaving. But that’s not happening, currently. If a company knows that your life is sufficiently bleak, and also that no other company is planning to treat you better, then they can keep salaries low. Financial misery lets employers operate like a cartel.

Despite low unemployment, most employees are quite replaceable. If you won’t do the work, a robot could instead. Just like my beleaguered dishwasher, filled with plates and bowls too gross for me to want to touch, a robot won’t advocate for better treatment. And a robot draws no salary. If you have the wealth to invest in a dishwasher – or a washing machine, or a donut maker, or a legal-document-drafting algorithm – it’ll serve you tirelessly for years.

People often say that the jobs of the future will be those that require a human touch. Those people are wrong. Your brain is a finite network of synapses, your body an epidermis-swathed sack of gristle. In the long run, everything you do could be replicated by a machine. It could look like you, talk like you, think like you – or better.

And – after its initial development and manufacture – it wouldn’t cost its owners anything.

As our automation technologies improve, more and more of the world’s income will be shunted to the people who are wealthy enough to own robots. Right now, human delivery people are paid for dropping off the packages people buy from Amazon – but as soon as Jeff Bezos owns drones and self-driving cars, he’ll keep those drivers’ salaries for himself. As your labor becomes less valuable relative to the output of a machine, it’s inevitable that inequality will increase. Unless we implement intentional redistribution.

A recent editorial by Eduardo Porter for the New York Times advocates for a tax on automation. Perhaps this seems sensible, given what I’ve written above – if robots make the world worse, then perhaps robots should be made more expensive.

After all, the correct way to account for negative externalities in a capitalist economy is through taxation. That’s how capitalism solves the tragedy of the commons. If the cost of an action is paid by everyone collectively – like pollution, which causes us all to drink dirty water, or breathe asthma-inducing air, or face apocalyptic climate change – but the profit is garnered by individuals, then that person’s private cost-benefit analysis will call for too much pollution.

For every dollar the Koch brothers earn, the world at large might need to spend $1,000 fighting climate change. That dollar clearly isn’t worth it. But if each dollar they earn increases their personal suffering by only a nickel, then of course they should keep going! That’s what capitalism demands. Pollute more, and keep your ninety-five cents!

But a person’s private priorities can be made to mirror our society’s by charging a tax equal to the total cost of pollution. Then that person’s individual cost-benefit analysis will compare the total cost of an action against its total benefit.

A pollution tax wouldn’t tell people to stop being productive … it would simply nudge them toward forms of production that either pollute less, or are more valuable per unit of pollution.

But automation isn’t harmful.

Yes, automation is making the world worse. But automation itself isn’t bad. I’m very happy with my dishwasher.

If we want to use tax policy to improve the world, we need to consider which features of our society have allowed automation to make the world worse. And it’s not the robots themselves, but rather the precipitous way that current wealth begets future wealth. So the best solution is not to tax robots, specifically, but rather to tax wealth (with owned robots being a form of wealth … just like my dishwasher. Nothing makes me feel rich like that lemony-fresh scent of plates I didn’t have to scrub myself.)

And, after taxing wealth, we would need to find a way to provide money back to people.

World War II taught us that unnecessary production – making goods whose only value was to be used up and decrease the value of other goods, like bombs and tanks and guns – could improve the economic situation of the world. We ended the Great Depression by paying people to make weapons. And we could ameliorate the current economic malaise with something similar.

But an actual war seems misguided, what with all the killing and dying. There are better, kinder ways to increase wasteful government spending.

If I were in charge of my own town, I’d convert the abandoned elevator factory into a bespoke sneaker and clothing factory. The local university offers a degree in fashion design, and it might be nice if there were a way for students to have batches of five or ten items produced to specification.

As a business, this wouldn’t be economically viable. That’s the point. It would be intentionally wasteful production, employing humans instead of robots. Everything would be monetarily inefficient, with the product sold below cost.

It’d be a terrible business, but a reasonable charity.

With alarmingly high frequency, lawmakers try to impose work requirements on welfare payments. I obviously think this policy would be absurd. But it wouldn’t be so bad if there were government-provided work opportunities.

Robots can make shoes cheaper. That’s true. But by taxing wealth and using it to subsidize wasteful production, we could renew people’s sense of purpose in life and combat inequality. No wars required!

And no need for a tax targeting my dishwasher. Because, seriously. I’ve got kids. I don’t want to clean up after them. Would you?

On a guaranteed basic income.

For several months, a friend and I have volleyed emails about a sprawling essay on consciousness, free will, and literature.

The essay will explore the idea that humans feel we have free will because our conscious mind grafts narrative explanations (“I did this because…”) onto our actions. It seems quite clear that our conscious minds do not originate all the choices that we then take credit for. With an electroencephalogram, you could predict when someone is about to raise an arm, for instance, before the person has even consciously decided to do so.

Which is still free will, of course. If we are choosing an action, it hardly matters whether our conscious or subconscious mind makes the choice. But then again, we might not be “free.” If an outside observer were able to scan a person’s brain to sufficient detail, all of that person’s future choices could probably be predicted (as long as our poor study subject is imprisoned in an isolation chamber). Our brains dictate our thoughts and choices, but these brains are composed of salts and such that follow the same laws of physics as all other matter.

That’s okay. It is almost certainly impossible that any outside observer could (non-destructively) scan a brain to sufficient detail. If quantum mechanical detail is implicated in the workings of our brains, it is definitely impossible: quantum mechanical information can’t be duplicated. Wikipedia has a proof of this “no cloning theorem” involving lots of bras and kets, but this is probably unreadable for anyone who hasn’t done much matrix math. An easier way to reason through it might be this: if you agree with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the idea that certain pairs of variables cannot be simultaneously measured to arbitrary precision, the no cloning theorem has to be true. Otherwise you could simply make many copies of a system and measure one variable precisely for each copy.

So, no one will ever be able to prove to me that I am not free. But let’s just postulate, for a moment, that the laws of physics that, so far, have correctly described the behavior of all matter outside my brain also correctly describe the movement of matter inside my brain. In which case, those inviolable laws of physics are dictating my actions as I type this essay. And yet, I feel free. Each word I type feels like a choice. My brain is constantly concocting a story that explains why I am choosing each word.

Does the same neural circuitry that deludes me into feeling free – that has evolved, it seems, to constantly sculpt narratives that make sense of our actions, the same way our dreams often burgeon to include details like a too hot room or a ringing telephone – also give me the ability to write fiction?

In other words, did free will spawn The Iliad?

The essay is obviously rather speculative. I’m incorporating relevant findings from neuroscience, but, as I’ve mentioned, it’s quite likely that no feasible experiments could ever test some of these ideas.

The essay is also unfinished. No laws of physics forbid me from finishing it. I’m just slow because K & I have two young kids. At the end of each day, once our 2.5 year old and our 3 month old are finally asleep, we exhaustedly glance at each other and murmur, “Where did the time go?”

But I am very fortunate to have a collaborator always ready to nudge me back into action. My friend recently sent me an article by Tim Christiaens on the philosophy of financial markets. He sent it because the author argues – correctly, in my opinion – that for many stock market actions it’s sensible to consider the Homo sapiens trader + the nearby multi-monitor computer as a single decision-making entity. Tool-wielding is known to change our brains – even something as simple as a pointing stick alters our self-perception of our reach. And the algorithms churned through by stock traders’ computers are incredibly complex. There’s not a good way for the human to check a computer’s results; the numbers it spits out have to be trusted. So it seems reasonable to consider the two together as a single super-entity that collaborates in choosing when to buy or sell. If something in the room has free will, it would be the tools & trader together.

Which isn’t as weird as it might initially sound. After all, each Homo sapiens shell is already a multi-species super-entity. As I type this essay, the choice of which word to write next is made inside my brain, then signals are sent through my nervous system to my hands and fingers commanding them to tap the appropriate keys. The choice is influenced by all the hormones and signaling molecules inside my brain. It so happens that bacteria and other organisms living in my body excrete signaling molecules that can cross the blood-brain barrier and influence my choice.

The milieu of intestinal bacteria living inside each of us gets to vote on our moods and actions. People with depression seem to harbor noticeably different sets of bacteria than people without. And it seems quite possible that parasites like Toxoplasma gondii can have major influences on our personalities.

Indeed, in his article on stock markets, Christiaens mentions the influence of small molecules on financial behavior, reporting that “some researchers study the trader’s body through the prism of testosterone levels as an indicator of performance. It turns out that traders who regularly visit prostitutes consequently have higher testosterone levels and outperform other traders.”

Now, I could harp on the fact that we designed these markets. That they could have been designed in many different ways. And that it seems pretty rotten to have designed a system in which higher testosterone (and the attendant impulsiveness and risky decision-making) would correlate with success. Indeed, a better, more equitable market design would probably quell the performance boost of testosterone.

I could rant about all that. But I won’t. Instead I’ll simply mention that Toxoplasma seems to boost testosterone. Instead of popping into brothels after work, traders could snack on cat shit.

On the topic of market design, Christiaens also includes a lovely description of the interplay between the structure of our economy and the ways that people are compelled to live:

The reason why financial markets are able to determine the viability of lifestyles is because most individuals and governments are indebted and therefore need a ‘creditworthy’ reputation. As the [U.S.] welfare state declined during the 1980s, access to credit was facilitated in order to sustain high consumption, avoid overproduction and stimulate economic growth. For Lazzarato [a referenced writer], debt is not an obligation emerging from a contract between free and equal individuals, but is from the start an unequal power relation where the creditor can assert his force over the debtor. As long as he is indebted, the latter’s rights are virtually suspended. For instance, a debtor’s property rights can be superseded when he fails to reimburse the creditor by evicting him from his home or selling his property at a public auction. State violence is called upon to force non-creditworthy individuals to comply. We [need] not even jump to these extreme cases of state enforcement to see that debt entails a disequilibrium of power. Even the peaceful house loan harbors a concentration of risk on the side of the debtor. When I take a $100,000 loan for a house that, during an economic crisis, loses its value, I still have to pay $100,000 plus interests to the bank. The risk of a housing crash is shifted to the debtor’s side of the bargain. During a financial crisis this risk concentration makes it possible for the creditors to demand a change of lifestyle from the debtor, without the former having to reform themselves.

Several of my prior essays have touched upon the benefits of a guaranteed basic income for all people, but I think this paragraph is a good lead-in for a reprise. As Christiaens implies, there is violence behind all loans – both the violence that led to initial ownership claims and the threat of state violence that compels repayment. Not that I’m against the threat of state violence to compel people to follow rules in general – without this threat we would have anarchy, in which case actual violence tends to predominate over the threat of incipient enforcement.

We all need wealth to live. After all, land holdings are wealth, and at the very least each human needs access to a place to collect fresh water, a place to grow food, a place to stand and sleep. But no one is born wealthy. A fortunate few people receive gifts of wealth soon after birth, but many people foolishly choose to be born to less well-off parents.

The need for wealth curtails the choices people can make. They need to maintain their “creditworthiness,” as in Christiaens’s passage, or their hire-ability. Wealth has to come from somewhere, and, starting from zero, we rely on others choosing to give it to us. Yes, often in recompense for labor, but just because you are willing and able to do a form of work does not mean that anyone will pay you for it.

Unless people are already wealthy enough to survive, they are at the mercy of others choosing to give them things. Employers are not forced to trade money for salaried working hours. And there isn’t wealth simply waiting around to be claimed. It all starts from something – I’d argue that all wealth stems originally from land holdings – but the world’s finite allotment of land was claimed long ago through violence.

A guaranteed basic income would serve to acknowledge the brutal baselessness of those initial land grabs. It is an imperfect solution, I know. It doesn’t make sense to me that everyone’s expenses should rise whenever a new child is born. But a world where people received a guaranteed basic income would be better than one without. The unluckily-born populace would be less compelled to enter into subjugating financial arrangements. We’d have less misery – feeling poor causes a lot of stress. We’d presumably have less crime and drug abuse, too, for similar reasons.

And, of course, less hypocrisy. It’s worth acknowledging that our good fortune comes from somewhere. No one among us created the world.

On Robert Gordon’s ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth.’

k10544 I read Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth during nap time. My daughter was just shy of two years old. She liked to sleep curled against my arm; I was left with just one hand to hold whatever book I was reading during her nap.

If you’re particularly susceptible to carpal tunnel syndrome, I’d recommend you not attempt to read Gordon’s book one-handed. I had a library hardcover. My wrists hurt quite a bit those weeks.

But I was pleased that Gordon was attempting to quantity the economic value of my time. After all, I am an unpaid caretaker for my daughter. My contribution to our nation’s GDP is zero. From the perspective of many economists, time spent caring for my daughter is equivalent to flopping down on the couch and watching television all day.

Even very bright people discount this work. My best friend from college, a brilliant urologist, was telling me that he felt sad, after his kid had been in day care, that he didn’t know how to calm her down anymore, but then laughed it off with “Nobody remembers those early years anyway.”

I understand that not everyone has the flexibility to sacrifice career progress for children. But, I reminded him, it isn’t about episodic memory. These years build the emotional pallet that will color my daughter’s experiences for the rest of her life.

And it’s important, as a feminist, to do what I can to demonstrate a respect for caretaking. I believe, obviously, that someone’s gender should not curtail their choices; people should be allowed to pursue the careers they want. But I think it’s silly to imply that biology has no effect. Hormones are powerful things, and human males & females are awash in different ones. This isn’t destiny. But it does suggest that, in large populations, we should not be surprised if people with a certain set of hormones are more often drawn toward a particular type of work.

I think it’s important for a feminist to support not only women who want to become cardiac surgeons, but also to push back against the societal judgment that surgery is more worthy of respect than pediatrics. As a male feminist, there is no louder way for me to announce that I think caretaking is important than to do it.

Your_WASHING_MACHINE...Helps_Keep_Clothes_Clean...Make_Your_Equipment_Last._-_NARA_-_514669 I felt pleased that Gordon attempted to quantify the economic value of unpaid work like I was doing. Otherwise you would come to the bizarre conclusion that time-saving home appliances – a washing machine, for instance – have no economic value because a stay-at-home mother gains only worthless time. Those extra minutes not spent washing dishes still contribute nothing to the GDP.

Gordon argues – correctly – that better health, more attentive parenting, and more leisure do have value.

So I was happy with the dude. But I still disagreed with his main conclusion.

Gordon also argues that we will have low economic growth for the foreseeable future – and I’m with him here – because our previous growth rate was driven by technological innovation.

Here’s the rub: once you invent something, nobody will invent it again. Learning to harness electricity was great! A world with electrical appliances is very different from, and probably better than, a world without.

refrigerator-158634_960_720 But the massive boost in productivity that accompanied the spread of electrical appliances can’t happen twice. Once everybody already has an electrical refrigerator, that opportunity for growth is gone.

The same is true of any technology. Once everybody has clean water (setting aside for a moment the fact that many people in the United States do not have clean water piped into their homes), you won’t see another jump in quality of life from water delivery. At that point the changes would be incremental: perhaps delivering clean water more efficiently or wasting less of that water once it arrives. Important, sure. But those are tiny changes. Low growth. Nothing like difference between turning on a tap versus hauling water back to the house in buckets.

Gordon thinks that the major technologies were all invented by the 1970s. Just like the physicists who thought their field would devolve into more precise measurement of the important constants, Gordon feels that there is little more to be made. Which has led to a pattern in reviews of his book: the reviewer feels obliged to rattle off potential inventions that have not yet been made. For the New York Times, Steven Rattner mentioned driver-less cars. For the New York Review of Books, William D. Nordhaus posits the development of artificial intelligence smarter than we are.

Speculating on future technologies is fun. I could offer up a few of my own. Rational enzyme design, for instance, would have many productivity-boosting consequences. If you consider farm animals to be machines for food production, they are woefully inefficient. You could do better with enzyme design and fermentation: then you’d use yeast or bacteria to produce foods with the exact same chemical composition as what we currently harvest from animals. (Former Stanford biochemist Pat Brown is developing technologies that use roughly this idea.)

Complex pharmaceuticals, too, could be made more cheaply by fermentation than by organic synthesis. Perhaps solar panels, too, could be manufactured using biological reagents.

But, honestly, none of this would contravene slow growth. Because the underlying problem is most likely not that our rate of technological innovation has slowed. I’ve written about the fallacy of trying to invent our way out of slow growth previously, but perhaps it’s worth using another contemporary example to make this point.

At one time, you needed to drive to a different store each time you wanted to buy something. Now you can sit down at a computer, type the name of whatever it is you want to buy – running shoes, books, spices, video cameras – pay by credit card, and wait for it to show up at your home. The world now is more efficient. You might even save a few dollars on whatever it was you’d wanted to buy.

But many people received money in the old world. There’d be a running shoe store in every town. A book store. A camera store. In the new world, the dude who owns the single website where all these items can be purchased receives all the money.

And the distribution of income might soon narrow further. At the moment, many delivery people receive money when they deposit those purchased items at your doorstep. But these delivery people may soon be replaced by robotic drones.

This is even more efficient! No humans will be inconvenienced when you make a purchase. You chose what you want and wait for the robot.

Also, no humans need be paid. The owner of the website – who will also own the fleet of drones – keeps even more of the money. The erstwhile delivery people find worse jobs, or are unemployed. With less income now, they buy less.

After the development of a new technology – delivery drones! – the economy could produce more. It could boost the growth rate. But the actual growth might be low because the single person receiving money from the new invention doesn’t need to buy much, and the many people put out of work by the invention are buying less.

The same problem arises with the other posited technologies. If our foods were all produced by fermentation, farmers would go out of business (of course, concentrated animal feeding operations and other industrialized practices have already sunk most small farmers) and only the owner of the fermentation vats and patented micro-organisms would receive money.

If someone patents a superhuman artificial intelligence, then no other humans would need to be paid ever again. The AI could write newspapers, opinion sections and all, better and faster than we could. It could teach, responding to students’ questions with more clarity and precision than any human. It could delete us when it learns that we were both unnecessary and unpleasant.

Which is why I think it’s irrelevant to argue against Gordon’s technological pessimism in a review of The Rise and Fall of American Growth. I may disagree with his belief that the important technologies were all invented before 1970, but my more substantive complaint is with his theory that our nation’s growth slowed when we ran out of things to invent. I believe the nature of our recent inventions have allowed the economy to be reorganized in ways that slow growth.

Gordon does mention inequality in the conclusion to his work, but he cites it only as a “headwind,” a mild impediment to overcome, and not a major factor in the shift between pre- and post-1970 growth:

The combined effect of the four headwinds — inequality, education, demographics [more old people], and government debt — can be roughly quantified. But more difficult to assess are numerous signs of social breakdown in American society. Whether measured by the percentage of children growing up in a household headed by one parent instead of two, or by the vocabulary disadvantage of low-income preschool children, or by the percentage of both white and black young men serving time in prison, signs of social decay are everywhere in the America of the early twenty-first century.

economic-worries I found it worrisome that he did not explain that this social breakdown – which will cause slower growth in the future – is most likely caused by slow economic growth. It’s a feedback loop. Growing up in a one-parent household makes it more likely that someone will be poor, but the stress of poverty makes it more difficult to maintain a relationship. When you’re not worried about money, you can be a better spouse.

So I would argue that the best way to address these economic headwinds and restore growth would be a guaranteed basic income. Technological advances in communication and automation have made it possible for ever-smaller numbers of people to provide all the services we need. As we invent more, the set of people who receive money for this work should continue to shrink. You might think, well, there will always be nurses, there will always be janitors, but, setting aside the fact that it’d be a bleak world in which this was the only work available for humans to do, this isn’t even true. A flesh-coated robot with lifelike eyes and superhuman AI could be a better, more tireless, less fallible nurse than any human.

Despite carrying a flip-phone, I’m no Luddite. I don’t want human ingenuity to stop. But it’s worth recognizing that our current system for wealth distribution will inevitably yield wretched results as technological progress continues.

And that’s without even mentioning the ways in which a guaranteed basic income – worldwide, funded by a similarly worldwide tax on wealth – would compensate for past sins.

On sex work, reparations, a global wealth tax, and the connection between the three.

Many people are upset that Amnesty International finally came out in favor of decriminalizing sex work.

Not me. I think decriminalizing sex work is a step in the right direction. Sex workers’ lives are often miserable. Their underground status denies them police protection; instead, they are often actively abused by the police.

The philosophical rationale for outlawing sex work is at least more sound than the equivalent rationale for outlawing the drug trade, though. I’m in favor of decriminalization for both, but in the case of sex work I acknowledge that there are extremely valid reasons to feel squeamish about the tacit approval conferred by decriminalization.

Laws are just only insofar as they protect people. Driving laws are imminently just — letting people drive however they wanted would endanger the lives of everyone else on or near roadways. Whereas drug laws appear at first glance to be imminently unjust — if a burnout decides to loaf around his apartment, smoke a jay, watch some television, it would seem that no one else is harmed.

Only two arguments I’ve seen for outlawing drug use have any merit. One is that a person under the influence of a particular compound cannot be trusted to peacefully loaf in his apartment. Amphetamine use, for instance, both confers extra energy and impairs judgement (the latter effect is due mostly to lack of sleep, not a pharmacological effect of amphetamines themselves, but I think it’s fair to make this approximation since amphetamines impede sleep. This is especially true for the methylated analogues because that methylation slows drug metabolism; the half-life is so long that a single dose can prevent someone from sleeping for a day or two).

It’s reasonable to guess that people given free access to amphetamines would become unlawful.

Of course, we outlawed amphetamines poorly. They are all scheduled, meaning they are all illegal to purchase or possess without a prescription… but many flavors can be purchased in large quantities with a valid prescription.

In practice, this means that amphetamines are outlawed for poor people. Wealthy college students and medical doctors and tenure-track professors all have ready access. So the way amphetamines are outlawed in this country is clearly unjust, and rampant abuse among wealthy populations belies the notion that amphetamines lead to lawless behavior… but as long as you ignore the empirical evidence and just focus on the theory, the philosophical rationale makes sense.

The other argument for outlawing drug use is that compounds are so addictive, and so dangerous, that we should accept some harm to adults (imprisonment, the danger of participating in underground markets) in order to prevent children from ever trying drugs. Children, knowing that the laws make users’ lives awful, might consider that extra cost and decide that a first taste isn’t worth it. Additionally, the laws might reduce access, so there’d be less risk that a child ever has an opportunity to choose poorly.

Personally, I think this is a rotten strategy. There are viable alternatives that allow adult access while still keeping a good or service out of the hands of children. These strategies also tend to break down in markets for illegal goods or services. In many regions of our country it is easier for children to buy marijuana than alcohol. And we now have nearly a half-century’s worth of evidence that harm caused by the War on Drugs outweighs the potential paternalistic protection afforded to children.

The War on Drugs has led to heroin overdoses because illegal goods have limited quality control. Brutality & murder in impoverished urban areas because people without access to police protection depend upon reprisal to maintain order. Brutality, murder, rape, kidnapping, terror & more in huge swaths of Mexico, all clearly the result of U.S. drug policy. And millions of harmless people denied their freedom in U.S. prisons, effectively state-sponsored partial murders because those people forfeit the bulk of their adult lives.

But, again, that’s merely empirical evidence. None of that contradicts the theoretical justification for outlawing drug use, the idea that some harm to adults is acceptable in order to protect children. Perhaps our legislators simply care about children’s well-being much more than I do.

(Except, right, they don’t care about children in Mexico. Or those living in our nation’s dangerous inner cities. Or those who grow up without access to their incarcerated parents. But, give our legislators a break! Empathy fatigue is real! They can’t be expected to maintain the same degree of concern for everyone. Shouldn’t they be commended that they at least care deeply about the well-being of privileged suburban children?)

It felt necessary to detail those arguments because they also provide the motivation for outlawing sex work.

The feminist argument resembles the supposition that people allowed to buy drugs will then behave unacceptably. The idea is that men who are allowed to purchase women’s bodies will devalue women in general. I’m skeptical, though. After decriminalization, most bodies will still not be for sale. No one would be forced to participate in the sex trade. And just because you can walk into a sparring gym and pay a boxing instructor to let you take some swings at him does not mean that people think it’s fair game to throw down some bills and punch whomever they like.

It’s true that we live in a very misogynistic culture. Some misogynists might feel empowered to talk & act even more crudely if they were legally allowed to purchase sex. But it’s not as though misogynists are currently unable to purchase sex. And our current system denies sex workers protection against bad actors — decriminalization would confer dignity and allow them to demand more respectful treatment from their clientele.

And there is a serious problem with the “increase the cost of participation in the sex trade to protect people from it” argument. A major reason why people need to be protected from joining the trade is that it is illegal. Decriminalization would reduce the dangers. And even though current laws against sex work increase the cost of participation, there are still many people willing to pay that cost. There are individuals who want to buy sex. There are desperate people who need money. Ironically, the laws against sex work even reduce the amount of money that the latter group can earn.

(Some economics in brief: demand for most goods is based on price. If price increases, demand goes down. For purchasers of illegal sex, the risk of being caught is an additional cost. Which means that in every transaction they are paying in both dollars and risk. If the legal risk were instead zero, the amount of dollars that buyers would be willing to pay for identical services would increase.)

This is where my personal qualms come in, by the way. I’m willing to believe that some people are genuinely willing to sell sex. I’ve spoken with several people who enjoy working as massage therapists, and to my mind some types of sex work differ in degree, not in kind, from massage. A professional uses practiced touch to confer physiological and psychological wellness.

The problem is that people who did not want to but had no other options might also sell sex.

I’m in favor of decriminalizing sex work, but I think that if we do decriminalize sex work but make no other changes to the world, the result will be evil. Women will continue to be hurt in ways resembling those documented by Lydia Cacho in her book Slavery, Inc. (The book is great — if you care about these issues, it’s well worth a read. Also, if somebody ever starts printing heroic human rights worker trading cards, I’d definitely nominate Cacho to appear in the first set.)

Without a concurrent effort to address poverty, decriminalizing sex work could reasonably be construed as coercive. The impoverished might well feel compelled to participate in order to survive. If people have extremely limited options, making one option more attractive does funnel people into participation. It wouldn’t be entirely against their will, but survival impetus means it wouldn’t be entirely voluntary either. Ironically, their near-forced participation would also reduce the amount that all those desperate people could earn from each unwanted act.

(The other side of price equilibrium is based on supply — if supply of a good is high, like if many hungry people have to sell sex to have enough money to eat, the price has to be lowered to move the whole quantity. Poverty-impelled participants would undermine each other’s wages.)

Part of why this is so crummy is that we have sufficient resources to fix this. The productivity gains from modern automation and agriculture mean we could probably provide all people with food, shelter, and basic utilities (water will get trickier as time goes on) for free. The rudiments of survival don’t cost that much relative to modern production capacity.

And a guarantee of subsistence would make the idea of decriminalized sex work much more palatable. The idea of sex being traded as commerce isn’t so problematic in and of itself — as I mentioned, I see it as being on the same continuum as legal massage… or mosh pits, which also provide paid access to human contact. The horrors come from people feeling pressured to sell sex in order to survive.

In my opinion, a guaranteed minimum standard of living is also the most practical form for reparations to take.

I really enjoyed Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article about reparations (“The Case for Reparations”). It wasn’t at all pedantic or abstract — which means that I was clearly not the intended audience — but I enjoyed it all the same. One of his main aims is to show that people alive today have been victimized by the long legacy of racially-motivated abuse in the United States. Which means reparations would be not only an acknowledgement of long-past wrongs, but would also serve to ameliorate very recent & ongoing harm.

In his article, however, Coates did not address who would pay or how reparations might be fairly distributed. To my mind those practical considerations are of utmost importance in deciding whether the idea is at all viable.

I think it is. I think that a global wealth tax used to fund a minimum standard of living for all people is plausible, philosophically justifiable, and would have meaningful economic & psychological consequences for the decedents of oppressed peoples.

I wrote about some of the underlying principles in my previous post about the creepy parallel between gene duplication and oppression — the idea that our cultural & technological heritage is the product of exploitation because subjugation of the world’s many allowed a free-riding few to pursue goals other than subsistence. This has rough equivalence to the way advancement comes about in evolution — gene duplication produces free-riding DNA sequences that are allowed to drift because the original copy takes care of required function.

But the basic idea behind using a wealth tax to fund reparations is even simpler: wealth begets wealth. Initial inequalities in distribution (which probably even existed amongst “egalitarian” hunter gatherers) will, over time, magnify into dramatic unfairness. Wealthy heirs earn far more by renting their property than our hardest workers possibly could via effort alone.

I’m not sure anyone still thinks that communism is a reasonable fix for this, though. As much as I dislike Ayn Rand’s writing (although it’s fascinating to me that many feminists and conservative Christians both like her books… this despite repeated depictions of Rand’s ideal men sexually assaulting her ideal women and Rand’s clear disdain for Christianity), I agree with some of her arguments against communism. Knowing that you can’t profit from your efforts saps motivation. Absolute equality undermines personal value. And it seems just plain strange to have your net worth instantly decrease whenever a stranger has a child.

More reasonable, to my mind, is a tax on total wealth. This would not devalue effort because it ignores income; the tax would be based on current holdings. Taxation at any amount less than the rental income rate would still leave that maxim “wealth begets wealth” untouched… the only change would be that wealth would beget slightly less wealth. (A reasonable rate of return on wealth right now, like if you buy some certificates of deposit, is about 3%. Historically 5% is standard, and the largest property holders are often able to attain rates of 8% – 12%. If you’d like to read a little more about this, you could check out my previous post on wealth tax, automation, & human trafficking.)

A global wealth tax would be philosophically justifiable as an acknowledgement that all current holdings can be traced back through time to violence and oppression. For instance, no one created land (this isn’t entirely true — China has been constructing islands, and you could argue that draining the weather-buffering swamps in Florida and Louisiana was akin to creating land — but for most places, though most of history, it’s true enough).

It’s pretty easy to see land entitlement as having resulted from violence. Humans migrated into new territory, killed off the dangerous animals that were there, then were murdered in turn by a new wave of human migrants, who were then murdered by new migrants, over and over until the conquerors were sufficiently powerful to defend their property and stop the cycle of theft.

Or there’s the case of the United States. Our current wealth reflects our long history as a global superpower, but that history began somewhere. First European settlers massacred the Native Americans. Our meteoric rise was then propelled by cotton. And how was the United States able to dominate the world’s cotton market?

Oh, right.

Our nation’s rise as an economic superpower was due to the brutal exploitation of black laborers.

Murder of those who resisted their enslavement. Rape to propagate an imprisoned people.

Because wealth begets wealth, and because economic reparations were never paid, all current wealth in this country can be traced back to that initial evil. Our nation’s initial prosperity came from sin. Everyone who enjoys good fortune here today benefits from & is thereby marked by crimes whose reverberations have not ended & will not end on their own.

I’m not saying that no one did honest work later. Obviously hundreds of millions did. Your parents presumably did not oppress anyone in order to purchase their house.

But that doesn’t change the legacy. If they were lucky, your parents received a decent education — their schools’ funding did not materialize wholesale from the aether. They presumably received a loan to be able to purchase a home (the Coates reparations article has some excellent documentation for historic and contemporary harm perpetuated by both our nation’s banks & federal lending policies). The original inhabitants of the land on which that home was built were murdered. The national prosperity that makes that land more valuable than an equivalent parcel elsewhere was bled out of generations of slaves.

It’s too late to seek forgiveness for sins perpetuated against those who are now dead, but economic reparations could serve to make current wealth clean.

There is, of course, the question of who should benefit from reparations. History is sufficiently tangled that I don’t think any attempt at strict accounting of whose ancestors were harmed & how much would be fruitful. Nor do I think an accounting of that sort is necessary. In contemporary times, the most egregious harms result from our failure to provide for the children of the poor — in our country, not only does wealth perpetuate itself, we have policies that go a long way toward guaranteeing that poverty will perpetuate itself as well.

This could be ameliorated by providing all people with a minimum standard of living. Children can’t learn when they’re hungry. It wouldn’t cost much to offer all students a peanut butter & jelly sandwich (or a calorically-equivalent hypoallergenic meal) at the beginning of each school day. Instead we let them sit in classrooms with rumbling stomachs & agitated minds and chastise their teachers when they fail.

Children who work long hours to help their parents pay rent (please scroll to the bottom of this article and read the final 10 paragraphs — the rest is good too, but I’ve picked out the most heartbreaking section for you) can’t learn well either. Even children who simply stay awake worrying what’ll happen to their families are at a major disadvantage. If you’re worried about having enough money to survive, you can’t really think about anything else (feel free to check out Mani et al.’s “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function” if you haven’t seen it yet, or see this recent post).

If food & shelter & basic utilities were guaranteed, we’d cut down on those worries. Poor people would be given room to breathe and think and plan.

(Are you one of those people who likes numbers? Here is a tiny bit of math to support my claim that this is feasible. I’d say $500 per month per person is reasonable to provide food, shelter, and utilities — honestly, this amount comes close to cutting it in Bloomington IN, and that’s without any dedicated infrastructure for the project. For most of the globe, $500 might be a vast overestimate. With a world population of seven billion, that puts us at needing $3.5 trillion per year if all people wanted to take advantage of the crappy minimum offerings. Under a twentieth of the gross world product. And, regarding a wealth tax, it would take approximately a 1.5% tax on wealth holdings to fund that full amount. That’s well below the historical 5% rate of return for capital.)

This implementation wouldn’t explicitly target blacks. Maybe that’s a bad thing, because it wouldn’t make the apology aspect of reparations explicit. This nation, as a collective, has done wrong and should atone for it. But our nation’s blacks do suffer the slings of poverty more severely than other citizens (largely because we still have policies in place that ensure that they will), so a serious program to address poverty would benefit many who’ve inherited that legacy of mistreatment. And the impoverished masses in other countries generally reside in areas that were once (or are still) exploited by our world’s now-wealthy nations. Their plight reflects past theft of their resources.

And, getting back to sex work — many of the problems that will come from decriminalized sex work would not arise in a world with guaranteed subsistence.

People might feel compelled to sell sex against their wishes if the practice is decriminalized and they need money to survive but have no other way of obtaining it. Many of the current ails of sex workers result from their criminal status. But without addressing poverty, it is likely that sex workers will still be denied police protection because they’ll still be considered criminals. Instead of being criminals by virtue of being sex workers, they’ll be considered criminals because of immigration status. Impoverished people have long been trafficked to regions with decriminalized sex work and held hostage by the threat of fines, deportation, and reprisal against their families.

Which obviously sounds grim. But I don’t think those are inherent consequences of decriminalized sex work. Those are the consequences of impoverished desperation amongst people with few options. Similar economic motivations underlie participation in unethical organ markets (which I wrote about for my first post to this website).

Still, I’d like to thank Amnesty International. Their advocacy for decriminalization is sorely needed. But I expect to hear many more horror stories akin to those documented in Cacho’s book unless we make a sincere effort to combat poverty. Micro-loans or not-quite-enough-to-live-on food allotments are not going to cut it. People need to know that they’ll at least survive if something goes wrong.

Also, how did I type up this whole post without including the Balzac epigraph from Mario Puzo’s The Godfather? I’ll include it here — please pretend you read it earlier, to punctuate any of the above paragraphs where it would’ve been appropriate.

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: wealth tax

On sex work and demand.

On taxing robots.

On sex work, reparations, a global wealth tax, and the connection between the three.