Marx and the Arrows of Determination

How do the different parts of the substructure and superstructure determine each other according to Marx?

Marx is usually understood as arguing that the substructure (the material world) determines the superstructure. But that’s only part of his argument. The creation and propagation of ideology is an important activity of the ruling class. The members of this class usually do not work but appropriate the fruits of the labor of other classes, and hence they have the necessary leisure time to engage in intellectual “work” and to construct and promote ideologies that they can use to serve their interests, consciously or unconsciously. Those with material power also have intellectual power. They can influence what others think, and they will be most successful if they themselves believe the ideologies that they want to force on others.

This clearly shows that the substructure does not only determine the legal and political parts of the superstructure, but thinking as well. The prevailing ideas are the ideas of the prevailing class.

[T]he class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. K. Marx, The German Ideology

But there is a kind of feedback action at work here. The substructure determines ideas, but these ideas in turn help to maintain a particular economic substructure. Not everything goes up from the material to the intellectual. Something comes down as well, but only after it went up first.

This can be expressed in the left half of the following drawing:

In this drawing, an arrow means “determination”. All ideas, not only political and legal ones, are both the expression (arrow 2) and the safeguard (arrow 3) of the economic structure of society. (The bottom-left half, arrow 1, represents the previously mentioned relationship between means of production and relations of production).

But there is also a right half in this drawing: the fact that ideas, in a kind of feedback mode, help to determine a particular economic structure, does not always have to be negative or aimed at the status quo. The poor, when they shed their false consciousness imposed by ideology, become conscious of their real situation, and this consciousness will help to start the revolution which will modify class relations and hence the substructure. This is represented by arrow 6.

Ideally, arrow 6 would have to pass through the box containing “politics” since the revolutionary proletariat will take over the state when attempting to modify the relations of production.

However, this awakening is bound to certain material preconditions, in particular the presence of certain very specific forces of production, namely large-scale industrial production with mass labor (arrow 4) and the strain imposed by existing class relations (arrow 5). It cannot, therefore, take place in every setting. Ultimately, all consciousness, real and false, is determined by the substructure. The order of determinations is fixed and follows the numerical order in the drawing.

More about Marx here.

A Would-Be Philosopher-King Offers His Optimal Tax Policy

If I had any real power I would tax you all in the following manner:

First, I’d impose a consumption tax such as a VAT on traded goods and services. The consumption tax will have to be progressive, for example by way of a 0% tax on food and other basic necessities and a rate close to 100% for luxuries. A consumption tax encourages savings and investment and does away with the disincentives of income and payroll taxes which it will replace (disincentives to work, earn and hire). It also puts a stop to wasteful conspicuous consumption and status competition, at least at the top end. The sharply decreasing marginal utility at high levels of consumption means that the tax can indeed be strongly progressive, with close to 100% rates at very high levels of consumption. Such a strongly progressive consumption tax will leave incentives in place: a $1 million dollar home motivates just as well as a $200 million home, because people mostly care about how they are doing relative to similar others and all similar others will be subject to the same taxes.

Second: add an inheritance or estate tax because the wealthy, who will save more as a consequence of the consumption tax, will die with larger estates than before. Inheritance is inherently unfair because undeserved. A tax on inheritance not only reduces this unfairness, but does so without distorting incentives. Most other types of taxes have disincentive effects: when an activity such as consumption, investment, employment or pollution is taxed, the activity becomes more expensive. Hence, people will to some extent disengage from the activity (consume less, hire less employees, invest less, pollute less) or find ways to reduce their tax burden (offshore profits or assets, fail to declare income etc.). Disengagement is good in the case of pollution and consumption, but not for investment and employment. An inheritance tax is one that doesn’t have disincentive effects. People will not die less when wealth and assets are taxed after death. This tax is therefore sustainable, in addition to being moral.

It’s a kind of wealth tax. Wealth taxes, including an inheritance tax, promote consumption and are in conflict with the stated aims of a consumption tax (see above). But in the case of inheritance tax that’s a reasonable price to pay. Other wealth taxes – with one exception (see below) – will have to go, precisely for this reason, as well as other reasons: wealth taxes are difficult (they are a percentage of the taxpayer’s calculated net worth – total assets including cash deposits, real estate holdings, investments, trusts and shares in businesses, minus debt – and this net worth is difficult to valuate and easy to offshore); and they raise liquidity problems (the taxpayer may have to sell part of her assets in order to pay the tax, which will increase the supply of assets and drive down their prices, making wealth creation less attractive and possibly undermining the wealth tax). So, although a wealth tax is perhaps a fair tax – wealth is more concentrated in the hands of a very small elite, compared to income – it’s not necessarily a good idea.

Third: add a land value tax. This is a wealth tax, but not really a real estate tax, because the largest part of the value of real estate is the value of the land, not the value of the buildings. It doesn’t cost much more to build a house in Manhattan than to build an identical one in the Midwest. The house in Manhattan is much more expensive because it’s on Manhattan land. A land tax is similar to an inheritance tax: no one built the land, so people will not have less land when it’s taxed. And because no one built it, no one can be said to deserve it. So no incentives arguments against a land tax, and a strong moral argument in favor of it. Just as with inheritance.

Fourth: add some pigovian taxes (taxes on carbon and other externalities such as pollution, congestion etc.).

Fifth: abolish all other taxes, including taxes on investment income or normal income, on corporate profits, on labor/employment etc.

This system yields our tax revenues. A tax system can be justified on different grounds, and I’ve already mentioned a few, namely fairness, incentives (incentives to consume less, to save and invest more, to avoid pollution…) and efficiency (ease of tax collection and tax calculation). But an important justification of a tax system is its general purpose. What do we want to do with the tax revenue? Apart from the obvious goals – public goods such as a police force, a judiciary, a national defense, infrastructure, some regulatory agencies, public education, healthcare etc. – my main concern is welfare, or social security as they say in Europe. And like an increasing number of people I want to propose that we use our tax revenues to fund a universal basic income system which will replace all or most of the existing government support measures such as unemployment benefits, pensions, food stamps etc. I’ve defended the UBI in more detail before so I won’t burden this already longish post any more than necessary.

Now tell me why I’m wrong.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (55): Bad Luck

To what extent does luck determine the level of realization of our human rights? We have our rights, whether we’re lucky or not, oppressed or not, free or not. The level at which we can actually enjoy those rights, on the other hand, is determined by lots of things: for example, the nature and actions of our government, the practices and beliefs of the culture that we inhabit, the state of the economy and also, it seems, the degree of good or back luck we have as individuals.

First and probably foremost: where we are born is a matter of luck, good or bad. Emigration is sometimes an option. Citizens of poor countries and subjects of oppressive states – those are often the same people – are not, or usually not, prisoners of their countries. However, emigration does imply a cost and entry rights in better countries aren’t unlimited. The bad luck of being born in and being stuck in a dictatorship obviously has a general and continuous impact on the rights of most subjects of the dictator. But luck also plays a role in the degree of this impact. Dictators are known for their random behavior, and some subjects may have the additional bad luck of receiving some special governmental attention. However, if you’re unfortunate enough to be born or stuck in the wrong place, you’re suffering from a decidedly man-made type of bad luck. If people gave each other freedom of movement and stopped oppressing each other, place of birth would no longer be a matter of luck.

When we are born is arguable just as important as where we are born. Life in the Middle Ages was in many respects of inferior quality compared to life today, and inferior quality often meant rights violations. One can also wonder to what extent our behavior today will impact the rights of future generations. A different time of birth can make the difference between good and bad luck. But again, this is a man-made difference.

Disability is to some extent a matter of bad luck, whether it is inborn or acquired disability. And disability has an impact on a lot of human rights. However, it’s wrong to view disability as only a matter of bad luck; the way in which we organize society determines what counts as a disability. A society that has decided to communicate principally through written language makes blindness a much bigger problem than a society based on oral communication. As in the previous examples, if disability is bad luck, it’s to a large extent man-made bad luck.

It seems that poverty as well is due to bad luck, at least in some cases. Bad luck can make you poor, and not just because it means being born in a poor country. If you happen to be black, ugly or obese, you have a much higher risk of being poor. Skin color, appearance and in some cases obesity are, unfortunately, instances of bad luck given some widespread opinions on the proper way to treat black, ugly or obese people. Poverty itself is a human rights violation, but it also has a negative impact on other human rights, such as the right to education, the right to health etc. However, as in the case of disability, appearance and skin color are not in themselves causes of bad luck; the way society is organized turns them into causes of bad luck.

More speculative: our genes are obviously also a matter of luck. If it would turn out that our genes determine whether or not we’re suicidal, criminal or self-destructive in other manners, then that would explain a lot of rights violations and unrealized rights.

More posts is this series are here.

Migration and Human Rights (48): The Arguments Against Immigration, and How They Are Mistaken

I’m going to try to list the most common arguments against immigration, and show how they are devoid of any basis in facts. Since I’m talking facts, I’ll include some handy references to scientific evidence debunking the arguments. (The references will sometimes be found in older blogposts, so you may have to click through a few times. If you feel that I’m shamelessly overlooking some seminal papers, please tell me in comments).

1. The labor cost argument

Claim:

Immigrants are willing to work for low wages, especially the illegal ones. The result is unfair wage competition with natives who will see their wages drop as a result, or who may even be priced out of the labor market altogether. The welfare of native workers requires that we limit immigration.

Facts:

Immigration actually increases native wages because it allows native workers to move up the pay scale, for example as supervisors of the new immigrant workers. Low skilled immigrants also make it possible for natives to spend less time on non-paid, low-skilled activities that they can outsource. As a result, the latter can spend more time on paid activities, which increases their income. The wage competition claim can also be refuted by pointing to the fact that native workers and immigrants tend to take different occupations.

Not only is there a positive wage effect of immigration (with perhaps a small exception for native high school drop outs), but immigration also creates or saves jobs. The easier it is to find cheap immigrant labor at home the less likely that production will relocate offshore. More here.

2. The social safety net argument

Claim:

Immigrants come over just to cash in on unemployment and other benefits, since the income of even the relatively rich people in many poor countries pales in comparison to the welfare benefits in rich countries. This is unsustainable, since welfare benefits have to be financed, and working native populations often have a hard time producing enough tax revenue in order to support native welfare beneficiaries. Allowing immigrants to come but then excluding them from welfare benefits seems harsh and unjust. Hence it’s better not to allow them to come in the first place.

Facts:

Immigrants use welfare at lower rates than natives. The labor force participation rate for illegal immigrants in the US is higher than that of the native-born. In the UK, immigrants represent about 13% of all workers, but only 7% percent of unemployment benefits.

3. The “importing poverty” argument

Claim:

Immigrants are less well off than natives. That’s precisely why they want to migrate. Allowing them in reduces the average wealth of the destination country.

Facts:

Many immigrants are indeed less well off than the native born, even after they’ve immigrated, because they come from poorer countries and because they’re often less skilled than the native born. Hence, an increase in immigration may push up the national poverty rate. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, since the same immigration flow will probably push down the global poverty rate: migrants usually improve their lot by migrating – they probably wouldn’t migrate if that were not the case.

4. The crime argument

Claim:

Immigrants cause an increase in the crime rate. They often come from countries with dysfunctional states and bad enforcement institutions. Hence, they have grown to be more tolerant of violations of the law. The poverty of their countries of origin also pushes them towards more crime. Less crime is a good thing, hence less immigration is also a good thing.

Facts:

Immigration is associated with lower crime rates and lower incarceration rates.

5. The lack of integration argument

Claim:

Immigrants, especially those from other cultures (and that would be most immigrants, since it’s the poor who want to migrate and the poor are almost by definition from outside the West), find it hard to fit in. As a result, there will be frictions between the immigrant population and the original inhabitants. These frictions benefit nobody, hence we should restrict immigration.

Facts:

Natives are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior like bullying, dropping out of school, domestic violence, harassment, vandalism etc. The evidence is here.

6. The cultural argument

Claim:

The local culture will not be able to survive a large influx of high fertility immigrants from completely different cultures. People have a legitimate interest in the preservation of their distinctive cultural identity. Hence immigration should be restricted.

Facts:

A cultural identity is obviously a valuable good. However, it’s not at all clear that immigration threatens the cultures of destinations countries. Those destination countries are multicultural to begin with. Most immigrants are also  willing and able to adapt (see previous point). Moreover, cultural change is not by definition a bad thing, both for those arriving and for those already there. And finally, cultural change is not always likely to happen anyway: throughout history, even those minority cultures living in highly hostile environments where the majority controls the state have been able to survive and flourish. Often a threat to a culture is the cause of increased cultural awareness.

7. The educational argument

Claim:

Immigrant children push down the quality of schools and therefore harm the education of native children. Immigrant children have different types of disadvantages: they speak the local language less well, they have cultural burdens inhibiting education, and perhaps even IQ burdens. The welfare of native children requires that we limit immigration.

Facts:

Higher rates of immigration encourage native children to study harder – to complete high school and to go to university – so that they can avoid competing with immigrant high-school dropouts in the labor market.

Conclusion

All of these claims about immigration are based on supposed harms to the population of the destination country. (There’s one argument I didn’t mention, namely the brain drain argument, that focuses on the effects of migration on origin countries, but that one is just as flawed as the rest). Not only is this a very selfish mode of argument, ignoring the clear benefits for (potential) immigrants, but – as it turns out – also a very misguided one, based on factual errors. However, even if it were the case that immigration imposes some form of financial costs on host countries, then that wouldn’t necessarily be the final argument against immigration, since these cost can be seen as a form of global redistribution and global justice.

More posts in this series are here.

The Ethics of Human Rights (82): The Link Between Human Rights and Social Mobility

Most of us think about social mobility as some kind of political ideal or even as a necessary feature of a just society. Many theories of justice make space for social mobility, as they do for equality of opportunity, fairness, the wellbeing of the worst off etc. And indeed, it’s hard to be against social mobility. Cynics might say that politicians extol the virtues of social mobility in order to camouflage or even justify actual inequalities (“if people can be socially mobile, then the resulting inequalities are deserved”, or “inequalities aren’t bad because people can be mobile and escape their class”). However, it’s not because a concept is misused for political reasons that it loses it’s theoretical or even practical value. If democracy is used as a cover to invade Iraq, then that doesn’t mean democracy is bad.

Hence, we should embrace social mobility. Human rights as well are often seen as a political ideal or a requirement of justice. How do social mobility and human rights relate to each other? At first sight, there’s no relationship at all, except that both are part of a lot of theories of justice. Social mobility is about the possibility to enter another – usually higher – income class than the one you were born in (the one of your parents). Human rights, on the other hand, are generally silent about income, except in rare cases such as the right to a decent standard of living or the right to unemployment insurance. And those cases are about minimum levels of income, not about the equal opportunity to achieve any level of income. Most human rights aren’t about income at all, let alone changes in income. Hence, social mobility is not required by human rights.

Does that mean that a society without social mobility can be one where all human rights are perfectly respected? It depends. Let’s imagine a kind of Dickensian society in which everyone knows their place. Poor people have poor children. Those poor children also have poor children. And all poor people die poor. Same thing for the rich. At first sight, such a society, or even one closely resembling it, is free of rights violations, and yet it clearly does not value human equality. And if you look more closely, it doesn’t really value human rights either. For instance, it’s likely that this society does not offer equal rights to education, for if it did some poor people would break ranks. Neither does such a society respect non-discrimination rules at work. Companies and government employers are probably very classist in their employment decisions, otherwise one would tend to see some poor again breaking ranks. Non-discrimination rules are human rights, and this is therefore another example of the way in which human rights are violated in a society lacking social mobility.

In short, a Dickensian society like the one described here has to be extremely classist and has to marshal extensive means in order to keep people in their place. It can only do so by way of massive violations of some human rights.

While a society like this is the exception in our modern world, there are many societies that resemble it. As a rule, we can say that societies with less than average social mobility will have more than average rights violations, all else being equal. Hence, social mobility is relevant to human rights in the sense that an effort to suppress social mobility almost always has an impact on the level of respect for human rights.

I guess this means that a society without social mobility can never be one where all human rights are perfectly respected. One can imagine a society in which there’s no discrimination, equal rights, no poverty and equal opportunity, but in which people are still socially mobile. A child of middle class parents can turn out to be a genius and enter the top earning class. Even in human rights utopia, one doesn’t want to enforce equal pay for everyone because incentives are good (in general). Vice versa, the children of genius parents can turn out to be average and end up in a lower income class. If this doesn’t happen, one can assume discrimination and favoritism.

The opposite isn’t the case: a society without social mobility can never be one where all human rights are perfectly respected, but a society with social mobility can be a brutal dictatorship:

Imagine a dictator who imprisons his subjects, but gives wealth and power to some chosen at random. There’ll be a lot of social mobility, but no justice or liberty. (source)

This shows that social mobility, although difficult to dismiss, is not enough because it does not require freedom and rights. It can even hide and justify deeper injustices. It’s also not enough because it removes attention away from the conditions of life in the lowest income strata. Instead of making it easier for people to enter higher income strata, it’s often better to improve their lives where they are: make their jobs better and more pleasant; give them a say in their companies; focus on the content of their jobs etc. Often, that is what they want rather than a higher station in life.

More on social mobility is here. Other posts in this series are here.

The Causes of Wealth Inequality (25): Globalization, Ctd.

Globalization is the usual suspect when people discuss the causes of contemporary increases in income inequality in many Western nations. As a result of easier transportation, trade and communication, low skilled workers in those nations now face ever tougher competition from cheap workers in developing countries, and this competition drives down wages at the poor end of Western income distributions: workers have to swallow wage reductions under the threat of outsourcing. Increased immigration – another facet of globalization – has the same effect.

At the top end of the income distribution, the reverse is happening: the job of a CEO is now more complicated in our globalized world, and hence his pay is higher. The threat of relocation also has an effect on income inequality through the channel of the welfare state: companies threaten to relocate, not just because of labor costs, but also because of tax rates. Taxes in Western countries tend to be relatively high because social security tends to be relatively generous. The threat of relocation convinces governments to reduce tax rates, but the price to pay is often a less generous welfare state. This as well puts pressure on the income distribution.

All this sounds convincing, but I’m afraid it’s too simple. The effects of globalization on inequality starts to look more complicated when we take consumption into account. Globalization tends to lower the consumption prizes of a lot of goods, and cheaper consumption can counteract downward pressures on wages and social security. If you can buy more and better stuff with your paycheck, your unemployment benefit or your disability check, then perhaps you’re not worse off.

There’s an interesting paper here by Broda and Romalis in which they look at

the compositional differences in the basket of goods consumed by the poor and the rich in America. Using household data on non-durable consumption between 1994 and 2005 we document that much of the rise of income inequality has been offset by a relative decline in the price index of the poor. By relaxing the standard assumptions underlying the representative agent framework we find that inflation for households in the lowest tenth percentile of income has been 6 percentage points smaller than inflation for the upper tenth percentile over this period. The lower inflation at low income levels can be explained by three factors: 1) The poor consume a higher share of non-durable goods —whose prices have fallen relative to services over this period; 2) the prices of the set of non-durable goods consumed by the poor has fallen relative to that of the rich; and 3) a higher proportion of the new goods are purchased by the poor. We examine the role played by Chinese exports in explaining the lower inflation of the poor. Since Chinese exports are concentrated in low-quality non-durable products that are heavily purchased by poorer Americans, we find that about one third of the relative price drops faced by the poor are associated with rising Chinese imports.

When measuring income inequality, we should correct for the different prices of goods and services consumed by people in different income groups. This doesn’t mean that we should be happy about the fact that poor people live on cheap stuff; it simply means that some of the rising income inequality is compensated by cheaper stuff. And we have cheaper stuff because of globalization. Turning globalization into some sort of bogey man is therefore rather too simple. Income inequality has many causes, and it’s not clear that globalization is, everything considered, an important one.

Finally, a word about the supposed wage pressures of increased immigration: they are indeed no more than supposed.

More posts in this series.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (41): Path Dependence

The theory of path dependence refers to the way in which our current sets of possible decisions are limited by the decisions we have made in the past. The classic example is the QWERTY layout of typewriters and computer keyboards. QWERTY was originally designed to avoid the “hammers” of typewriters interlocking when people type very fast. There’s no reason why computers should still use QWERTY keyboards rather than other layouts that permit easier and more ergonomic typing with less finger movement and less long term health effects, and yet they do. When typewriter users started to get used to QWERTY, switching costs and the cost of learning other systems went up. Consequently, the keyboard became more common, and the more common it became the more useful it became to learn to use it. When more people learned and used it, it became more profitable to sell this keyboard instead of competitors. Office managers worked with people trained in QWERTY and were therefore encouraged to buy QWERTY machines. And so on.

What does this have to do with human rights? Well, it seems to be the case that path dependence is the cause of a number of human rights violations. In an older post, I mentioned a study arguing that present-day poverty can be explained in part by the lingering effects of the slave trade (slavery fostered ethnic fractionalization in Africa and undermined the development of effective government institutions).

Acemoglu and Robinson make a similar claim about colonialism:

[T]he organization of colonial states, though it typically built on absolutist structures, often intensified these structures. … [T]he “Gate-Keeper” state … was designed for extraction and order but not for development or the provision of public goods. All of these ideas rest on some form of path dependence linking the institutional and political strategies of colonialism with those of post-colonial states. Second, the arbitrary way in which the European colonial powers put together very different ethnic groups into the same polities created countries which would be difficult to govern and very conflict prone after independence. Colonialism itself probably intensified notions of ethnicity and made them more rigid. (source)

The path dependence in this case is evident from the reluctance of post-colonial rulers to modify colonial borders even when those borders defy ethnic realities. It’s also evident from the way in which an authoritarian style of government was maintained after independence.

In fact, once you start thinking about it, you see path dependence everywhere. Take for example my native country, Belgium. It’s hardly the worst place in the world for human rights, but it is systematically governed in a bad way, making a mockery of political rights. Demographic minorities and minority interest groups weigh heavily on policies and legislation. The levels of taxation are much higher than justifiable, with negative effects on property rights and incentives. Linguistic minorities are not oppressed but they are often harassed. And I could go on. Add to that the dismal climate and the general ugliness of the country, and you can be forgiven for asking why people still live there. After all, within the European Union, it’s very easy to move to a nicer country. The answer, of course, is path dependence: people know the language, and switching to another language is difficult for many; people’s ancestors are buried there; they have friends and family, and often a good job. That’s alright as far as it goes, but we need to be more vigilant in those areas where path dependence causes significant harm. Of course, the word “dependence” means that it’s often difficult to do something about this harm. But difficult doesn’t mean impossible.

More posts in this series are here.

The Causes of Wealth Inequality (17): Education

People who have enjoyed a relatively high level of education tend to have higher wages. They are more likely to be employed. And their marketable skills give them a competitive advantage. It would seem to follow from this that countries with low percentages of the population having completed some specified level of education (say secondary education) should also be countries that have relatively high levels of income inequality. However, that’s not really the case (the correlation is obviously weak if it’s there at all).

It’s also true that educational attainment levels have risen in countries where income inequality has risen. All this would suggest that it’s not insufficient education that causes income inequality and that it’s futile to try to reduce income inequality by way of broadening the levels of education in a country.

However, that statement may go a bit too far. Education probably helps, but its effects are swamped by the effects of other factors that go the other way and aggravate income inequality. For instance, wage premiums aren’t the simple product of one’s education level. The type of education also matters (engineers will probably always earn more than philosophers), as do some noncognitive traits that are fostered by education but that are also more difficult if not impossible to equalize through education (such as discipline and intelligence). Add to this all the other elements that determine the levels of income in a society – the nature of one’s parents, peers and neighborhood, the social selection of desirable skills, international wage competition, regulation, corporate governance, taxation etc. – and it becomes clear that education alone can’t possibly produce a lot more income equality.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t help or that it shouldn’t be promoted for other reasons. Education is a good in itself, regardless of its effects on inequality. Furthermore, education promotes social mobility (the correlation between parents’ earnings and children’s earnings). See here; a much stronger correlation, especially without the US.

Measuring Human Rights (15): Measuring Segregation Using the Dissimilarity Index

If people tend to live, work, eat or go to school together with other members of their group – race, gender etc. – then we shouldn’t automatically assume that this is caused by discrimination, forced separation, restrictions on movement or choice of residence, or other kinds of human rights violations. It can be their free choice. However, if it’s not, then we usually call it segregation and we believe it’s a moral wrong that should be corrected. People have a right to live where they want, go to school where they want, and move freely about (with some restrictions necessary to protect the property rights and the freedom of association of others). If they are prohibited from doing so, either by law (e.g. Jim Crow) or by social pressure (e.g. discrimination by landlords or employers), then government policy and legislation should step in in order to better protect people’s rights. Forced desegregation is then an option, and this can take various forms, such as anti-discrimination legislation in employment and rent, forced integration of schools, busing, zoning laws, subsidized housing etc.

There’s also some room for intervention when segregation is not the result of conscious, unconscious, legal or social discrimination. For example, poor people tend to be segregated in poor districts, not because other people make it impossible for them to live elsewhere but because their poverty condemns them to certain residential areas. The same is true for schooling. In order to avoid poverty traps or membership poverty, it’s better to do something about that as well.

In all such cases, the solution should not necessarily be found in physical desegregation, i.e. forcibly moving people about. Perhaps the underlying causes of segregation, rather than segregation itself, should be tackled. For example, rather than moving poor children to better schools or poor families to better, subsidized housing, perhaps we should focus on their poverty directly.

However, before deciding what to do about segregation, we have to know its extent. Is it a big problem, or a minor one? How does it evolve? Is it getting better? How segregated are residential areas, schools, workplaces etc.? And to what extent is this segregation involuntary? The latter question is a hard one, but the others can be answered. There are several methods for measuring different kinds of segregation. The most popular measure of residential segregation is undoubtedly the so-called index of dissimilarity. If you have a city, for example, that is divide into N districts (or sections, census tracts or whatever), the dissimilarity index measures the percentage of a group’s population that would have to change districts for each district to have the same percentage of that group as the whole city.

The dissimilarity index is not perfect, mainly because it depends on the sometimes arbitrary way in which cities are divided into districts or sections. Which means that modifying city partitions can influence levels of “segregation”, which is not something we want. Take this extreme example. You can show the same city twice, with two different partitions, A and B situation. No one has moved residency between situations A and B, but the district boundaries have been altered radically. In situation A with the districts drawn in a certain way, there is no segregation (dissimilarity index of 0). But in situation B, with the districts drawn differently, there is complete segregation (index = 1), although no one has physically moved. That’s why other, complementary measures are probably necessary for correct information about levels of segregation. Some of those measures are proposed here and here.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (33): The Omitted Variable Bias, Ctd.

I discussed the so-called Omitted Variable Bias before on this blog (here and here). So I suppose I can mention this other example: guess what is the correlation, on a country level, between per capita smoking rates and life expectancy rates? High smoking rates equal low life expectancy rates, right? And vice versa?

Actually, and surprisingly, the correlation goes the other way: the higher smoking rates – the more people smoke in a certain country – the longer the citizens of that country live, on average.

Why is that the case? Smoking is unhealthy and should therefore make life shorter, on average. However, people in rich countries smoke more; in poor countries they can’t afford it. And people in rich countries live longer. But they obviously don’t live longer because they smoke more but because of the simple fact they have the good luck to live in a rich country, which tends to be a country with better healthcare and the lot. If they would smoke less they would live even longer.

Why is this important? Not because I’m particularly interested in smoking rates. It’s important because it shows how easily we are fooled by simple correlations, how we imagine what correlations should be like, and how we can’t see beyond the two elements of a correlation when we’re confronted with one that goes against our intuitions. We usually assume that, in a correlation, one element should cause the other. And apart from the common mistake of switching the direction of the causation, we often forget that there can be a third element causing the two elements in the correlation (in this example, the prosperity of a country causing both high smoking rates and high life expectancy), rather than one element in the correlation causing the other.

More posts in this series are here.

Migration and Human Rights (36): The Social Security Argument Against Open Borders

If there’s one Milton Friedman quote that’s repeated far too often it’s the following: “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state”. The income of relatively rich people in many poor countries pales in comparison to what the poor, unemployed, sick, young and elderly in rich countries get from welfare and social security transfers. Hence, the argument goes, opening borders and eliminating immigration restrictions would cause massive flows of people to those rich countries. Perhaps some of these people would come in the hope of finding a good job, but at the same time they have the certainty that, if they fail, they will enjoy generous social protection. And all the rest will come just for the benefits.

The problem, some say, is that rich countries can’t afford large increases in the numbers of welfare beneficiaries, and that they therefore must limit immigration. Open borders are only feasible when global poverty has been solved and income levels are more or less comparable across countries. Or, when rich countries would decide, unrealistically, to eliminate their welfare systems or at least coldheartedly decide to exclude all immigrants from welfare.

However, immigrants in the U.S. use welfare at lower rates than natives and have higher rates of labor force participation. In the U.K., immigrants represent about 13% of all workers, but only 7% percent of unemployment benefits (source).

Anyway, even if we assume that open borders will be a net negative for western welfare systems, there’s no need to limit the options to the stark choice between welfare and open borders. We could, for example, give immigrants access to labor markets but only limited access to unemployment benefits, or we could delay their benefits, demanding that they first contribute to the system during a number of years (something which might actually strengthen the system). However, we’d have to be careful and not create inequality, discrimination and a class society.

Or we could decide to grant immigrants full access to welfare because we believe that global inequality should be reduced. Access to welfare would then be a kind a development aid.

And, finally, it’s possible to view matters from an entirely different angle. Large chunks of welfare transfers go to the elderly. Given the demographic evolutions in many rich countries, it may be that immigration will be the only way for aging countries to sustain their welfare states.

Terrorism and Human Rights (29): Terrorism, Caused by Poverty or Repression?

It seems that poverty doesn’t cause terrorism, at least not usually. Rights violations are a better predictor (and, conversely, respect for human rights predict reduced terrorism). I’ve found this paper (gated unfortunately) supporting those claims.

The empirical results reported here show that terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer countries, once the effects of other country-specific characteristics, such as the level of political freedom, are taken into account. … lack of political freedom is shown to explain terrorism, and it does so in a nonmonotonic way. Countries with intermediate levels of political freedom are shown to be more prone to terrorism than countries with high levels of political freedom or countries with highly authoritarian regimes. …

On the one hand, the repressive practices commonly adopted by autocratic regimes to eliminate political dissent may help keep terrorism at bay. On the other hand, intermediate levels of political freedom are often experienced during times of political transitions, when governments are weak, and political instability is elevated, so conditions are favorable for the appearance of terrorism. (source)

Capital Punishment (24): The Probability of Capital Punishment in the U.S., by Race

The U.S. population is about 300,000,000. Whites represent about 80%, or roughly 240,000,000. If you check the numbers of executions in the U.S., you’ll see that there were about 1,000 in the period from 1977 to 2005. 584 of those executions were of whites. That’s about 20 executions per year on average, meaning that whites have a chance of 1 in 12,000,000 of being executed.

There are about 40,000,000 African Americans, representing roughly 13 % of the U.S. population. 339 executions in the 1977-2005 period were of African Americans. That’s about 12 a year, meaning that blacks have a chance of 1 in 3,300,000 of being executed.

A black person in the U.S. is therefore almost 4 times more likely to be executed. Even if we assume that this higher probability of being executed correctly reflects a higher probability of being involved in crime that comes with capital punishment – and that’s something we shouldn’t assume, because it’s likely that there are injustices involved, e.g. inadequate legal representation and such – that shouldn’t put our minds at ease. We then still have to ask the question: why are blacks more likely to be involved in capital offences? Surely not because of their race. Something happens in society that leads to this outcome, and it’s likely that there are injustices involved: for example, inadequate education, poverty levels, discrimination etc.

The Environment and Human Rights (3): Water and Human Rights

We obviously need water to survive, and no human rights without survival. Inadequate water supplies also cause diseases, violating our right to health. We need water – and clean water – to drink, but also to eat. Or rather, to produce our food. And we need a lot. People drink on average just a few liters a day, but they consume thousands of liters a day if we count the water required to produce their food. And evidently we should count it. Many areas of the world face already now face water shortages. A fifth of the world’s population already lives in areas short of water. A global water crisis waits around the corner, and one likely consequence is famine, another human rights violation.

If we want to do something about the water crisis, we should be aware of the effect of food production on water shortages. Especially the production of meat requires huge amounts of water, compared to the production of grains or even rice. People in the West eat a lot a meat, and therefore contribute substantially to water shortages. As incomes in the developing world increase, people there will consume more meat. Hence, global water consumption will also increase. Combine this future increase with the fact that there are already shortages and that these shortages will get worse with global warming, desertification etc., and you get a real crisis.

What are the solutions? Or how can we prevent things from getting worse?

• Jokingly we could ask people to become vegetarians. That would also be better for greenhouse gas emissions, by the way.
• More realistically: food production, and especially agriculture and farming, represent 70% of global water consumption. That number could be cut down significantly with better irrigation; “more crop per drop”. There’s incredible waste going on there. 70% of irrigation water is lost in the process. One reason: farmers rarely pay their water bills at market prices, hence no incentives to cut waste. Unfortunately, pricing water at market prices would drive up food prices, pushing many consumers into poverty. And many poor farmers already can’t pay for expensive irrigation systems. More expensive water surely wouldn’t help them. Moreover, market prices may mean the privatization of water, and that’s dangerous. You might as well privatize oxygen.
• Other solutions: cut waste in households and industries. Here, everyone can help. Also more recycling efforts are needed. Desalination, although expensive, is an option. As are better water storage facilities, especially for poor families in developing countries. All these efforts will not only reduce the risk of a major global water crisis, but will also improve crop yields, thereby reducing the price of food and hence the risk of poverty and famine.

Economic Human Rights (28): The Health Consequences of the Recession and of Unemployment

The Economist called it the “unsurprising research finding of the day“, but I think it’s a useful confirmation of an existing intuition: this paper finds that the recession can have a beneficial effect on the health of some people who lose their job because of it, namely those people spending their new leisure time in a healthy way. Other people, however, spend their leisure time cultivating some of their pre-existing unhealthy habits, or find themselves depressed and without employer-provided healthcare (especially in the U.S.). Because their healthcare has become more expensive now that they are unemployed, they decide to go without treatment or tests.

Results showed the body mass of the average laid-off food-lover increasing by the equivalent of more than 7 pounds for a 5-foot, 10-inch man weighing 180 pounds during unemployment. Similarly, frequent drinkers on average doubled their daily alcohol intake after losing their jobs and before finding another one. (source)

Elsewhere in the world, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, it seems that the health consequences of the global recession are more dramatic:

The financial crisis will kill between 28,000 and 50,000 babies in sub-Saharan Africa this year, according to this paper. The reasoning here is straightforward. For people on subsistence incomes, a fall in GDP can be fatal. The paper’s authors, Jed Friedman and Norbert Schady, estimate that a one percentage point fall in per GDP across sub-Saharan Africa is associated with a rise in infant (defined as under-ones) mortality of between 0.34 and 0.62 per 1000. If we multiply this increase by the number of births this year and by the 2.4 percentage point difference between GDP growth this year and last (a reasonableish estimate of the effect of the crisis), we get a figure of between 28,000 and 50,000. … Of course, you can quibble with the numbers. But the general story holds. For the poor, income is a matter of life or death. Which brings me to my question. If one-in-seventeen British babies were to die this year because of the financial crisis, it would be the biggest media story for years and there’d be rioting in the streets until the government did something. So, why the silence? Chris Dillow (source)

The Failure of “Trickle Down Economics”

Trickle Down Economics, also called Reaganomics (due to its association with the policies of Reagan and Thatcher) or supply-side economics, is the theory according to which policies destined to alleviate poverty and redistribute wealth are unnecessary and even counterproductive. The rich should be allowed to become even more wealthy, by imposing very low tax rates on high incomes (or a flat tax for example) rather than using the tax system to redistribute wealth. The result will be that their wealth will “trickle down” towards those who are less well off.

When government policies favor the wealthy — for example, via tax cuts for upper-income classes — the increase in wealth flows down to those with lower incomes. That’s because the rich are more likely to spend the additional income, creating more economic activity, which in turn generates jobs and eventually, better paychecks for the less well-off. Michael S. Derby (source)

All boats rise on a rising tide. Redistribution is counterproductive because it will take away the incentives to do well, and hence also take away the possibility of wealth creation and subsequent automatic wealth distribution through “trickling down”. All this is reminiscent of laissez-faire and the invisible hand theory.

Reagan’s trickle down policies in the U.S. can still be felt today:

According to the Tax Policy Center, the top marginal tax rate in the U.S. stood at 70% when Reagan was elected in 1980, falling steadily to 28% by 1989, before it began to rise modestly. The top marginal rate now stands at 35% against a peak of 94% in 1945. (source)

These tax cuts were implemented with the support of the Democrats in the House, which explains why they have been upheld all these years. The result of this was, unsurprisingly, a higher concentration of wealth in fewer hands:

In the period since the economic crisis of the early 1970s, US GDP has grown strongly, and the incomes and wealth of the richest Americans has grown spectacularly. By contrast, the gains to households in the middle of the income distribution have been much more modest. Between 1973 … and 2007, median household income rose from $44 000 to just over $50 000, an annual rate of increase of 0.4 per cent. … For those at the bottom of the income distribution, there have been no gains at all. … incomes accruing to the poorest 10 per cent of Americans have actually fallen over the last 30 years. John Quigging (source)

This is already part of the refutation of the doctrine. Obviously not all boats have risen on the same tide. But if you don’t believe this, there’s a paper here and a blogpost here arguing against the doctrine in a more intelligent way. Maybe “spreading the wealth around” a bit and imposing some tougher taxes on the rich isn’t such a bad idea after all. I mean, the “tricklers” have had decades to prove their point, and failed; maybe now it’s time for the “spreaders” to have a go.

The Causes of Poverty (23): Better Healthcare = More People = More Poverty?

Investment in better healthcare results in lower mortality rates (especially child mortality rates) and larger populations. If more people have to live from an equal amount of resources, every individual has less resources. Hence there will be more poverty.

This reasoning is typical of Malthusians and others who fret about overpopulation. They forget, however, that high mortality rates and inefficient insufficient healthcare lead to high fertility rates because people decide to have many children in order to offset the risk of mortality. Better healthcare brings down fertility rates because it reduces this risk, but also because it leads to less poverty and hence eliminates another reason to have a lot of children: extra labor force.

Read more about this here.

Why Do Countries Become/Remain Democracies? Or Don’t? (6)

Democracy is a human right. If we want to promote universal respect for this right, we have to know how societies have achieved the transition from authoritarian forms of government to more democratic ones, and how democracies have avoided the opposite transition. Once we know this, we can promote the future emergence of democracies, and we can counteract the breakdown of existing ones.

Unfortunately, this is a very murky area of political science. The only thing that’s clear is that there is no silver bullet. There isn’t one thing we can do to transform societies once and for all into democracies. Things aren’t easy or simple. A huge number of factors have been identified as causes of or obstacles to democratic transitions, and existing democracies need constant nurturing and protection. A few of the factors that have been named as either promoting or inhibiting democracy are:

• economic growth or GDP per capita
• protestant culture versus catholic culture (a catholic culture is believed to be more hierarchical)
• levels of education and literacy
• income or wealth inequality (in very unequal societies, the wealthy have a lot to lose with democracy)
• levels of employment in agriculture versus industry (industrial societies are believed to more more urban and less attached to traditional and authoritarian social relationships)
• the presence/absence of neighboring democracies
• export diversity (countries with one major export product such as oil tend to be “resource cursed”)
• is a country a former U.K. colony or not? (former U.K. colonies are believed to be more sympathetic to democracy given their British colonial heritage)
• is there a large middle class or not?
• etc.

Statistical analysis to pinpoint which ones of these many variables really determine democracy – and which ones are merely guesses – has yielded contradictory results, not surprisingly given the low numbers of observations (societies or countries don’t change their political systems very often) and the relative lack of long time series (most classifications of regime types haven’t started earlier than a couple of decades ago). One interesting analysis is here.

So don’t expect me to have an opinion here. What I wanted to focus on in this post is the first in the list. There are two radically opposing views on the effect of economic development on democracy. One view is called modernization theory. Basically, the idea is that as countries develop economically, people will switch to other, higher needs, such as self-government, self-control, and political activity in general. Poverty, on the contrary, forces people to focus on survival and makes democracy seem like a luxury.

However, the opposite view is also persuasive. Countries that do well economically are less likely to become democratic because the population is quite pleased with how things are going and will not revolt. The authoritarian rulers can claim that it’s thanks to them that things are going well. It’s not unlikely that economic collapse rather than success causes authoritarian regimes to break down.

So even if you isolate one of dozens of possible factors causing regime transition, things aren’t very clear. Should we starve dictatorships, or help them develop economically? As a result of this lack of clarity, it’s very difficult to frame foreign policy in such a way that it favors the development of democracies around the world. This may go some way to explain the traditional lack of ambition in diplomatic circles.

The Causes of Poverty (22): Poverty Trap – Why Being Poor Makes You Poorer

The poorer you are, the more things cost. For example, if you’re poor, it’s possible or even likely that you don’t own a car. That means it’s a lot harder to shop around for the best deals. It also means that you’ll prefer to shop closer at home in order to avoid carrying your stuff over long distances. Being poor, you probably don’t have time to spend hours in a bus to do your shopping (for example, you don’t have time because you don’t own a washing machine and have to spend time at the laundromat). So you shop at the corner shop, where everything is more expensive. The stuff there may not be as fresh as elsewhere, which may affect your long term health. Hence, you’ll probably spend more on healthcare and you end up deeper in poverty. It’s also a fact that the diet of many poor people is relatively high-fat, and that obesity is a big problem. Hence even more money goes to healthcare. And then there are the health consequences of having to go to extremes such as organ donation, blood donation etc.

If you want a loan to buy a house or something, you’ll pay a higher interest rate because of the risk that you, with your low income, will someday default. Hence you’re forced to pay rent which may be higher than a mortgage. And you are forced to rent in a low-income neighborhood, which comes with its own costs such as a higher risk of being a crime victim.

If you want a job, an employer may think twice about someone who has a relatively high health risk, doesn’t have a car, doesn’t live close to a business area, and is generally depressed about being poor. Etc. etc. etc. etc. And like this you spiral down until you finally crash.

The Causes of Poverty (21): Absence of Human Rights and Democracy

I’m often asked what is the most serious form of human rights violations in the world today, and my reply is consistent: extreme poverty. Mary Robinson

Sustained poverty reduction requires equitable growth – but it also requires that poor people have political power. And the best way to achieve that in a manner consistent with human development objectives is by building strong and deep forms of democratic governance at all levels of society. That means ensuring that institutions and power are structured and distributed in a way that gives real voice and space to poor people and creates mechanisms through which the powerful – whether political leaders, corporations or other influential actors – can be held accountable for their actions. Mark Malloch Brown

Poverty is a human rights violation, but the fight against poverty requires the use of other human rights and democratic participation. Only the squeaky hinge gets the oil. Poor people need to express themselves; they need to organize and to get represented; they have to be allowed to engage in trade and the economy with full protection of their property rights; they need education and healthcare in order to avoid poverty traps etc.

Income Inequality (11): Why Should We Care?

It’s a fact that many rich countries – rich in terms of total GDP – have a substantially unequal distribution of income; or, to put it in other words, these countries accept that there is huge inequality of wealth between people. It’s also a fact that, in many countries and particularly the U.S., these inequalities in income or wealth have become wider over the last decades.

What’s the problem, you may ask. Well, according to me this inequality poses some problems. But these problems are of relative importance. More important to me is the problem of absolute poverty. Absolute poverty is a lack of certain resources that are necessary to meet certain basic needs. This is not a problem of inequality. People may live in a very unequal society and at the wrong end of inequality, but they may nevertheless have no problem whatsoever meeting their basic needs.

More important as well, in some aspects at least, are the problems posed by other types of inequality. Gender inequality in some countries may be much more of a problem than income inequality (although these different types of inequality are probably connected).

Nevertheless, income inequality engenders some important problems. One is self-esteem. People suffering from relative poverty – i.e. finding themselves on the wrong end of an unequal income distribution – may suffer psychologically and emotionally. It’s also likely that their relative disadvantage isn’t very fair. In other words, it’s probably not solely based on questions of merit and desert. We don’t live in a world of equality of opportunity and level starting conditions. There’s also a correlation between relative and absolute poverty, so we may have to worry about relative poverty as a cause of absolute poverty.

Income inequality can also cause a problem for democracy. The rich can use their financial means to pervert the democratic procedures and to distort the equal influence on which democracy is based. Another way in which income inequality may pervert democracy is its divisiveness. It polarizes societies and it can antagonize regions within countries. None of this is helpful for the adequate functioning of democracy.

More on income inequality here and here.

The Ethics of Human Rights (16): The Extent of Our Duties Towards the Poor

Not only the state has a duty to help the poor and to protect their economic rights. The individual should also intervene in order to realize the economic rights of his or her fellow citizens and fellow human beings. He or she can intervene in different ways: through caritas or altruism, through trade and exchange etc. (Simply giving the example and inspiring others by way of your own success, as in this cartoon, is not enough).

It is only when these interventions fail or never take place and individuals neglect their duties, that the state must act by way of redistribution. After all, redistribution is a limit on freedom and on property rights (which are very important) and should therefore be kept to a minimum.

I mentioned our fellow human beings. The extent of our duties towards the poor is an interesting discussion in contemporary philosophy. Some say that we have only duties towards our fellow citizens; others that we have a duty towards everyone. Whereas in principle, everyone regardless of borders has the same right to our assistance, there has to be some differentiation in practice. Our duties arising from economic rights are not the same towards everyone. In general, we have more duties towards certain persons than towards other persons. This is because of the principle “ought implies can” (if you cannot swim, then you do not have a duty to rescue persons from drowning), which is a general principle of law and morality. None of us can give material assistance to everybody in need of assistance. We all have a limited amount of resources, and even if we have more than we require for our basic needs, we will not be able to assist everybody.

That is why we have to be selective. Our own children, for example, take precedence. We have more duties towards our children than towards other people. Closeness means that you can do more, and if you can do more, you ought to do more. Can also implies ought. Closeness, therefore, plays a part in the degree of duty, although not in the existence of duty. If we can help everybody, then we have to help everybody. This is especially the case when we transcend the level of individuals. Wealthy groups – for example a wealthy country or a group of wealthy countries – can help many people and maybe even everybody, and hence have a duty to do so.

The Causes of Poverty (19): Does Better Healthcare Lead to More Poverty?

This may look like a stupid – or, more kindly, counterintuitive – question. The answer is obviously “no”. At least when we focus on the level of the individual, better healthcare seems like the best way out of poverty rather than a cause of more poverty. With better health comes better education, better and more productive work, and hence less poverty. Even a society as a whole seems better off if less of its members are unhealthy. Overall productivity and wealth increase when there is less disease. Healthy people produce more, innovate more and contribute in other ways to social wealth.

However, many people believe – wrongly in my view – that the question should be answered in the affirmative, especially when the topic is development aid. When a country drastically improves its healthcare system – thanks to development aid for instance – life expectancy rates will go up and child mortality rates will go down. This results in population growth which often outpaces GDP growth (for example because scarce development resources have been targeted at healthcare rather than GDP). GDP per capita will therefore decrease, which means increasing poverty levels and perhaps even famine.

This type of reasoning is sometimes used to justify limits on development aid in the field of healthcare. However, it’s plainly wrong. Better healthcare doesn’t lead to high population growth, and this non-existing population growth therefore cannot result in more poverty.

Now, why doesn’t better healthcare lead to population growth? With just a few exceptions, it’s the poor countries of the world that have high fertility rates, and when countries become richer, these rates drop dramatically. Poverty leads to high fertility rates for a number of reasons (see also here), but the most important one is that people tend to have more children to offset the risk of high infant mortality rates that are typical for poor countries.

Countries with high infant mortality rates also have high population growth (contrary to intuition). Some other reasons why high fertility rates are correlated with poverty:

• More developed countries move away from agriculture and towards urban and industrialized economies, reducing the need for children as farmworkers.
• For the same reason, women become more active in the economy, increasing the cost (in money and time) of raising children.
• Also for the same reason, contraceptives and family planning become more common.

In this case, it seems that our initial intuitions are correct.

Hate (3): Is Hate Crime Caused by Poverty and Lack of Education?

This paper claims that hate crime is independent of economic deprivation and lack of education. Hate crimes are typically acts of violence against persons or their property committed for no other reason than these persons’ membership of a certain religion, race or ethnic or other group. Those who commit hate crimes can act on an individual basis, but are often members of so-called hate groups and may act together with other members.

The paper cites a number of data that indicate that poverty and ignorance aren’t the main drivers of hate crime. Lynchings, for example, were not correlated to economic growth. They didn’t rise during the Great Depression. The existence of hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan is unrelated to economic indicators such as unemployment. We even see that there is a higher probability that a hate group is located in an area with a relatively large share of the population with higher education. The wave of violence against foreigners in Germany in the 1990s also didn’t show a relationship between unemployment rates per county, and the number of incidents in a county. The same for levels of education and wages.

Terrorism and Human Rights (9): Is Terrorism Caused by Poverty and Lack of Education?

This paper says it is incorrect to state that poverty and a lack of education are the root causes driving people towards terrorism. It’s a highly interesting paper worth to be read in full. I’ll just try to summarize it here.

Terrorism is premeditated violence against citizens intended to cause fear and terror and to influence public opinion and government policies. Given that terrorism is obviously a crime, and given the well-established link causal link between poverty and lack of education on the one hand, and crime on the other, one could assume that there is also such a link between poverty/lack of education and terrorism. However, the link with crime in general, as the paper points out, is stronger in the case of property crime than in the case of violent crime.  And terrorism is a violent crime.

The paper also presents more direct evidence of the absence of a causal link between poverty/lack of education and terrorism:

• Opinion polls measuring public support for terrorism among Palestinians do not show more support among the poor.
• Hezbollah members are not, on average, poorer than the rest of the population of Lebanon, on the contrary.
• The education and income levels of individual terrorists are higher than average:

An explanation for this is that people with higher levels of education and income often feel much stronger about political causes, have more passionate support for political groups etc., partly because such involvement requires knowledge and leisure time.

The most extreme type of terrorist, the suicide bomber, is obviously not motivated by economic gain. But he may be motivated, not by his own poverty and his struggle against it, but by the poverty of his family, people or country (many terrorist groups give money to the families of suicide bombers). The paper calls this “Robin Hood terrorism”. While it is true that the poorer countries produce relatively more terrorists, this correlation disappears when respect for human rights is taken into account.

At a given level of income, countries with greater respect for civil liberties are less likely to be a wellspring for international terrorists. A lack of civil liberties is associated with higher participation in terrorism.

The results of the paper are discouraging in a way, because they cut off one avenue in the fight against terrorism: provide better education and higher incomes. If terrorism isn’t the result of poverty and ignorance, then the struggle against it may prove to be very difficult. It’s easier to do away with poverty and ignorance than it is to remove other possible causes of terrorism, such as indignity, frustration, religion, culture etc. What is encouraging is the link between rights violations and terrorism. One more reason to promote human rights.

Migration and Human Rights (14): Migration and Overpopulation

People often, but mistakenly in my view, see two types of links between overpopulation and migration:

• The pressure to migrate from the undeveloped South to the richer North is mainly if not exclusively caused by overpopulation in the South.
• The reason why countries in the North restrict immigration from the South is the fear of overpopulation in the North, resulting from immigration. The relatively healthy economies of the North would not be able to withstand the population shock of major inflows of immigrants, especially given the fact that most immigrants are not high-skilled and tend to be a burden on an economy rather than an asset. Immigration needs to be restricted because it means importing poverty.

I’ll try to argue that both these arguments are wrong and that it is a mistake to link migration to overpopulation in these ways. I’ll start with the first point.

Two things are true about the first argument: migration towards developed countries has increased sharply during the last decades (see here), and population growth in the South has been faster than in the North (see here). What is not true, however, is that the latter has been the cause of the former.

Other social and economic factors, rather than overpopulation, have driven migration. Given the highly regulated nature of migration to the North (green cards, other types of labor certification, visa, border controls etc.), it’s obvious that the people who are able to immigrate are not the poor that are supposedly driven out of their own economies by overpopulation. Only the “jobworthy” who are successful at applying for entry-visas can migrate. (See also here.) And the same is true for illegal immigrants, i.e. those bypassing the regulations. They as well tend to be people who have work prospects in the North, or at least enough money to pay human traffickers.

All this also serves to disprove the second argument above: if migrants in general are not the poorest of the poor, then the second argument doesn’t hold.

However, back to the first argument for a moment. Another economic factor driving migration and completely unconnected to population levels, is the globalization of economic production. Employers in developed countries actively look for relatively cheap workers from the South, and technological improvements in communication, transportation and travel are making this easier.

(One could also point to war and violence as driving forces behind migration, but Malthusians would reply that the real driving force is overpopulation, causing first war and conflict, and then migration. There’s a lot to be said against this, but I’ll keep that for another time).

Regarding the second argument, one can make the following counter-claim. Let’s assume that immigration controls indeed serve the only purpose of keeping people out so as to keep the economy healthy and avoid population shocks which the economy wouldn’t be able to withstand. (Of course, immigration controls in reality serve many other purposes, e.g. pampering xenophobes). If we assume this, we should further assume that existing quotas on immigration (quotas as the result of visa policy, labor permits, family reunion policy etc.) are set in such a way that the number of migrants that are allowed into the country is roughly the number that the economy can sustain. Not higher because then immigration policy would defeat its purpose, but not much lower either because then the restrictions would be unjust and arbitrary.

Given these two assumptions, how do we explain the failure of massive numbers of illegal immigration to destroy host economies? Take for instance the U.S. It’s in an economic crisis right now, but nobody in his right mind claims that immigration is the cause. The U.S. economy was booming for years, and at the same time accommodated millions of legal and illegal immigrants.

To sum up, the tidal wave paranoia of the poor masses of the South engulfing the developed world is just another example of Malthusian hysteria. A simple look at population growth numbers make this abundantly clear. Population has indeed grown more rapidly in the South than in the North (partially because of higher birth rates), but only to return to the same proportion as a few centuries ago. The industrial revolution in the North resulted in more rapid population growth, and the South is now catching up. Fears of growing imbalances and “tsunamis of the poor” aren’t based on facts.

Economic Human Rights (20): Health and Wealth

A few more words about the relationship between poverty and health. First of all: both are human rights issues. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration states:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

The concern is that people may find themselves in a trap. Their poverty causes ill health because healthcare costs money, because poverty leads to malnutrition etc. And their ill health leads to further poverty, because they aren’t as productive as healthy people.

The ill health of poor people isn’t a problem only for these poor people. If they were more healthy, they would be more productive and more creative, and the economy as a whole and the wellbeing of society as a whole would benefit. Healthy children are also likely to stay in school longer, and hence will be more valuable to society when they grow up.

There is, of course, some obscurity regarding the direction of the causation: rich countries may be more healthy on average mainly because they spend more on healthcare. But it may also be that they have become rich because their health was improved first. Impossible to disentangle all this, because the “wealth of nations” is the result of hugely complex processes of many forces and counter-forces.

For example, there were some developing countries that benefited from WHO assistance after World War II and from breakthroughs in medication (such as penicillin). These countries, therefore, didn’t improve their health through economic growth and increased wealth. Health improvements were caused by external forces. One result of these health improvements was increased life expectancy, but as a result of this increase, there was population growth that went beyond GDP growth, resulting in declining levels of income per head. After some decades, the economic benefits of having more people in the economy, and reduced birth rates caused by better healthcare (and access to contraceptives), reversed the trend. There’s an interesting study by Acemoglu and Johnson here.

Others, however, have pointed out that this is just a tiny piece of the puzzle, and other factors can push societies in other directions. An increase in the population doesn’t necessarily lead to Malthusian problems. International trade and cooperation for example, but also technological improvements have sharply reduced the possible impact on an economy of an increase in population levels.

What is Poverty? (2): Different Definitions of Poverty and an Attempt to Make Some Order

This is the World Bank‘s definition of poverty:

Poverty is an income level below some minimum level necessary to meet basic needs. This minimum level is usually called the “poverty line”. What is necessary to satisfy basic needs varies across time and societies. Therefore, poverty lines vary in time and place, and each country uses lines which are appropriate to its level of development, societal norms and values. But the content of the needs is more or less the same everywhere. Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom.

And this is Wikipedia‘s definition:

Poverty is the deprivation of common necessities such as food, clothing, shelter and safe drinking water, all of which determine our quality of life. It may also include the lack of access to opportunities such as education and employment which aid the escape from poverty and/or allow one to enjoy the respect of fellow citizens. According to Mollie Orshansky who developed the poverty measurements used by the U.S. government, “to be poor is to be deprived of those goods and services and pleasures which others around us take for granted”.

The definition agreed by the World Summit on Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995:

Poverty is a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services. It includes a lack of income and productive resources to ensure sustainable livelihoods; hunger and malnutrition; ill health; limited or lack of access to education and other basic services; increased morbidity and mortality from illness; homelessness and inadequate housing; unsafe environments and social discrimination and exclusion. It is also characterized by lack of participation in decision making and in civil, social and cultural life. It occurs in all countries: as mass poverty in many developing countries, pockets of poverty amid wealth in developed countries, loss of livelihoods as a result of economic recession, sudden poverty as a result of disaster or conflict, the poverty of low-wage workers, and the utter destitution of people who fall outside family support systems, social institutions and safety nets.

The UN definition:

Fundamentally, poverty is a denial of choices and opportunities, a violation of human dignity. It means lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. It means not having enough to feed and cloth a family, not having a school or clinic to go to, not having the land on which to grow one’s food or a job to earn one’s living, not having access to credit. It means insecurity, powerlessness and exclusion of individuals, households and communities. It means susceptibility to violence, and it often implies living on marginal or fragile environments, without access to clean water or sanitation.

There’s also the very interesting definition by David Gordon in his paper, “Indicators of Poverty & Hunger“.

Poverty is the absence of any two or more of the following eight basic needs:

• Food: Body Mass Index must be above 16.
• Safe drinking water: Water must not come from solely rivers and ponds, and must be available nearby (less than 15 minutes’ walk each way).
• Sanitation facilities: Toilets or latrines must be accessible in or near the home.
• Health: Treatment must be received for serious illnesses and pregnancy.
• Shelter: Homes must have fewer than four people living in each room. Floors must not be made of dirt, mud, or clay.
• Education: Everyone must attend school or otherwise learn to read.
• Information: Everyone must have access to newspapers, radios, televisions, computers, or telephones at home.
• Access to services such as education, health, legal, social, and financial (credit) services.

And there’s the equally interesting but completely different definition by Peter Townsend:

Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or are at least widely encouraged or approved, in the societies to which they belong. Their resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns and activities.

There are, of course, many other definitions, but if we stick to these examples and summarize them, we can conclude that poverty is the impossibility to meet certain basic needs or the absence of certain necessities or resources:

• food *
• clothing *
• shelter *
• sanitation *
• clean water *
• health **
• education **
• work **
• power **
• representation **
• freedom **
• information **
• trust in the future (absence of fear) ***
• access to opportunities and choices ***
• respect ***
• self-esteem ***
• dignity ***
• inclusion, participation in social and cultural life ***
• independence ***.

All of these needs and resources are valuable and important in themselves, but I think we can distinguish them according to certain types. For example, you’re not necessarily poor if you’re uneducated. I can think of many uneducated rich people. And all poor people aren’t necessarily without an education. So I would propose the following distinction:

• Food, clothing, shelter, sanitation and clean water are needs that are directly linked to poverty. You are, by definition, poor if you lack one of these resources (and you may even die). I call these first-level-resources (marked with *).
• Health, education, work, representation, power, freedom and information, are resources, the lack of which can (but doesn’t have to) make you poor – poor in the sense of not having the first types of resources – and the presence of which is necessary to escape poverty. I call these second-level-resources or supporting resources (marked with **).
• Respect, self-esteem, dignity, inclusion, participation, trust in the future and the absence of fear, and opportunities, are resources which, like health, education etc., you may lose when you become poor, but which do not really help you to escape poverty. I call these third-level-resources or concomitant resources (marked with ***).

When looking at the different definitions cited above, we also see that poverty has many dimensions:

• A material dimension (food, clothing etc.)
• A psychological dimension (respect, self-esteem, trust, fear)
• A political dimension (power, representation) and
• A social dimension (education, health, work).

The latter 2 dimensions point to the fact that poverty, while often suffered alone and in solitude, requires social cooperation if it is to be eliminated.

The material, political and social dimensions can, to some extent, be measured, which is necessary if we want to have an idea of the importance of the problem, its evolution over time, and the effectiveness and success of policy measures aimed to combat poverty. One can measure nutrition, housing, income, access to certain services, standard of living, quality of life etc.

The psychological dimension is much more difficult to measure, but no less important. This dimension also shows us that poverty is not just a matter of the current state one is in, and the resources one has or doesn’t have. It is also about vulnerability, about the future, about trust and fear. And it also has a relative side (obvious from the Townsend definition given above), which attaches itself to the problem of our current level of resources (the absolute side): poverty means comparing yourself to others, feeling like a failure, humiliated, shameful etc.

The Causes of Poverty (17): Overpopulation

According to Malthus, food and other resources are limited, and a population growth that exceeds a certain pace will inevitably hit a resource ceiling, and will result in decreasing standards of living, poverty, conflict over scarce resources, famine etc. (This is called a Malthusian catastrophe). Ultimately, population growth will halt because if this, and population levels will return to the “normal” equilibrium possible within the limits offered by nature (the so-called “carrying capacity”).

And if these disasters aren’t enough, active population control is necessary, including measures such as the abolition of social security (social security doesn’t incite people to birth control, see here) and even more extreme policies (many of which proposed by Malthus’ more enthusiastic followers rather than by himself).

Malthus agreed that humanity was capable of increasing its productivity, but believed that population growth would necessarily outpace this increase. The facts are, however, different. Standards of living have risen enormously over the last centuries, notwithstanding large increases in population numbers. GDP growth has even been faster than population growth, giving, on average, every human being more resources than ever before in history. Of course, these resources aren’t equally distributed, but that’s a problem of justice, not of population.

Blaming everything on overpopulation is simplistic. All major problems in life are multi-causal, and population isn’t a real or major cause in many cases (bad governance is often a more important cause). And when it is, population control isn’t the answer. Technology, productivity, consumer adaptation, better governance etc. are more promising solutions.

Income Inequality (9): Absolute and Relative Poverty

The problem of poverty and related problems such as income inequality have received a lot of attention on this blog, because I consider poverty to be one of the most urgent human rights problems. Now and again, I’ve also mentioned the possibility of distinguishing between different types of poverty, and one such possibility in particular, namely the difference between absolute and relative poverty. Absolute poverty meaning the lack of basic resources, and relative poverty meaning income inequality.

I’ve taken the view that absolute poverty is a more urgent priority than relative poverty, and that therefore measurements of income inequality – such as the Gini coefficient – are less relevant than measurements of absolute poverty – such as the $1 a day measure. It’s the absolute income of people that matters, not the fact that other people are richer than you are and can afford more luxuries, at least from a human rights point of view (the absence of a certain minimum amount of basic resources is a human rights violation in itself and renders many other human rights meaningless).

Inequality of wealth or income is less urgent than the fight against absolute poverty, and a lot of opposition to income inequality can be easily categorized as the politics of envy. If inequality really matters it is the inequality of opportunity and other types of inequality not related to wealth (<discrimination for example).

But this is perhaps putting it too strongly. There are negative effects of high levels of income inequality, for example on the adequate functioning of democracy. There is also a correlation between relative poverty and absolute poverty: countries with relatively unequal income distribution don’t score well on absolute poverty measures either.

Richard Wilkinson has pointed out, some time ago already, that relative poverty matters. Once economic growth has pushed up absolute (albeit average per capita) income levels and done away with penury, people tend to be more healthy and live longer if levels of income inequality are relatively low. Countries with lower per capita income levels but also lower income inequality, can do better in terms of public health than high income countries with higher levels of income inequality. Poorer countries with a more equal wealth distribution are healthier and happier than richer, more unequal ones. There’s also a link between inequality (measured not by Gini but by way of the concentration of wealth in the 10% richest people) and both life expectancy and child mortality.

Some of the reasons for this are the stress of living at the bottom of the pecking order, the stress of disrespect and the lack of esteem and respect (including self-respect).

The Ethics of Human Rights (13): Justice and Merit According to Aristotle and Rawls

No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society. … The natural distribution of talents is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that men are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. John Rawls

The natural and social lottery – the good or bad fortune of being born in a wealthy or poor country or social class, with or without certain talents and biological/genetic assets or liabilities – has nothing to do with justice. Justice is what people and society decide to do about these inequalities of fortune.

Obviously, Rawls and many others – including myself – believe that doing nothing about them and simply leaving them as they are, is unjust. And we believe that the reason for doing something is merit or desert. None of us deserves or merits the genes we have, the fact that we are born in a certain place or group, and the opportunities that we receive from these facts and our genes.

Merit is central to the concept of justice, at least since the time of Aristotle. I think Aristotle gave the example of a teacher and his or her pupils. Would it be just for the teacher to give all pupils an equal score, regardless of the merits of each? He says no, because justice isn’t simply about equality. Justice is giving each what he or she deserves. The best pupil would have a sense of injustice if he or she would receive the same grades as all the rest, while the worst student would not necessarily have a sense of justice.

So justice means, in part at least, that people should get what they deserve (hence the derivative use of the word “justice” in the sphere of the judiciary). Matters over which people have no control, such as the place or environment where they are born or the genes that they carry, determine their quality of life, their prospects in life, their opportunities and capabilities and their stock of resources (material and other). It follows that the distribution of prospects and capabilities is to a large extent beyond the control of individuals (not completely because we can do a lot to develop and change these prospects and capabilities), and therefore also beyond merit or desert. As Rawls puts it, we don’t deserve our starting place in society.

If merit is to play a part in the determination of whether a situation is just or unjust, we have to correct for the unequal and undeserved distribution of talents, genes and prospects linked to the places where we are born and the families in which we are born. Justice therefore requires that we help the less fortunate, those who are unfortunate to have been born in the wrong country or class, with the wrong genes or in the wrong family. Contrary to what libertarians want us to believe, justice is not merely a matter of avoiding to harm people and to make them worse off. It is also about helping them to be better off. And more specifically, helping them to be better off than they are as a result of the lottery of nature and birth.

Those who win from this lottery are under moral pressure to give to others who, through no fault of their own, have fared less well. It is in this context that economic human rights for instance have to be understood. These rights impose on the rich the duty to part with some of their riches and hand them over to the poor.

The Causes of Poverty (7c): Globalization

Does globalization erode social safety nets? Economic theory and intuition suggest that as economies become more globalized, the ability of governments to undertake redistributive policies and to engage in social spending erodes. After all, a large part of the tax base – corporations, financial intermediaries, and skilled workers in particular – become internationally mobile and can evade taxes needed to finance those public expenditures.

… the lack of an obvious decline in the overall tax take in major advanced economies, has led many observers to think that the hypothesized decline of the welfare state has not in fact taken place. [However], as technological progress and multilateral trade liberalization have made borders less of a barrier to economic activity, the scope of redistribution policies has become smaller. Dani Rodrik (source)

This doesn’t mean that globalization necessarily leads to more poverty. Redistribution on the basis of taxation is only one way to fight poverty. In this post I discussed some of the ways in which more free trade and hence more globalization can reduce poverty.

The Compatibility of Freedom and Equality (3): Freedom, Poverty and Public Life

Freedom and poverty

Is the problem of the contradiction between freedom and equality solved by limiting freedom – limiting the freedom of the strong, thereby providing security against the freedom of the strong, and this equalizing freedom? Not quite. I can see at least three problems remaining. The first one is poverty. Poor people can’t do what they want and the laws which protect their physical security against the free actions of others will not help them. Their situation is not primarily caused by the limitations imposed on them by the free actions of others. And the provision of social security is much more controversial than the provision of physical security, which is bizarre given that both kinds of security have the same purpose, namely the equalization of freedom in the sense of the ability to do as you want.

We see here that the state, by intervening and reducing poverty, can promote freedom. People whose basic needs are met have a whole new world of choices and opportunities opened up to them and can move on to more complicated needs. “Freedom from” (in this case freedom from want) creates “freedom to”.

Freedom and public life

A second problem with limited freedom is revealed by the bigot. Take the example of the bigot who isn’t poor but doesn’t want anything else in life than watching sport, drinking beer and shouting to his wife. He can do as he wants, but is he free? Here we see that it may be necessary to redefine freedom and not only to limit it. Freedom means not only the ability to do what you choose, but also, and in the first place, the fact of having significant choices, the ability to expand the options you can choose from, the ability to make an educated choice between examined options and to choose the options which are best for yourself and for the people around you. In other words, freedom is the ability to choose the options which make ourselves better persons and allow us and our fellow-humans to develop.

Now, how do you widen the available choices, and check if what you want is really what you want? Only if all possible options and choices are flooded with the light of publicity and education. When you see which options are available, when you hear people discussing the merits of different options and objects of volition, only then can you make an educated choice.

Freedom and human rights

This publicity, and hence freedom as the possibility to develop your self, requires a legal system. Legally protected human rights for example open up the world of culture, art, science, history, education, etc. They open up the options, show the merits of all options and hence can improve your volition. Constraining rules are also enabling rules. By limiting certain kinds of behavior they make other behavior possible, for example public discussion of objects of volition. Only in a public space protected by legal rights, where everybody is equal and where everybody can speak and listen in an equal way, can we examine our opinions and options and can we self develop. So we see that freedom needs equality in the sense of the equal participation in public life.

The law is necessary for freedom because if there is no external control, then rights will be violated, security rights but also rights which protect the public space in which choices can appear. Some people will be victims of others and will not be free, not in any sense of the word. They cannot do as they like and they have no public life in which to determine what they like. And we can all be victims in certain circumstances. Laws and obedience are not just obstacles or impediments, limits on our freedom or elements of oppression. They are prerequisites for public life and therefore prerequisites for freedom as well because freedom needs public life.

Laws do not only limit the actions of people; they also link the actions of people because they create a public space. And these links make freedom possible. Laws are rules for public life and should not disappear. The state is a mechanism to coerce people, but this is not necessarily negative. On the contrary, coercion creates possibilities. The state creates, by way of coercion, the prerequisites for public life — such as security and human rights — and therefore creates the possibility of freedom.

The Compatibility of Freedom and Equality (2): Limited Freedom

What is freedom? The ability to do as you like

In the previous post in this series, I described the ways in which freedom and equality can be incompatible. I also mentioned that the reason for this opposition has something to do with the way in which we normally define freedom. In the current post, I want juxtapose this standard definition with another one.

Traditionally, freedom is believed to be the absence of coercion and the ability to do as you want. Hobbes gave one of the canonical descriptions:

By LIBERTY, is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of externall Impediments: which Impediments, may oft take away part of a mans power to do what hee would.

This is a negative definition of freedom because it focuses on the absence of impediments, constraints or limits on actions (limits imposed by other human beings, by the state, by nature or perhaps even by our own passions).

Is this kind of freedom possible? And is it acceptable? It will definitely be a very unequal freedom. If everybody can do as he or she likes, then we create offenders and victims rather than free citizens. Victims obviously cannot do as they like. And we can all become victims. Not even the strongest among us can do as he likes, because he has to sleep now and again and we are weak when we sleep. Unlimited and lawless freedom as in the definition of Hobbes therefore cannot exist, or only in a very precarious fashion. And it should not exist because if it did, most people’s freedom, human rights and other important values such as security would suffer. Hobbes clearly understood this.

What is freedom? The ability to do as you like, within limits

That is why this absolute negative freedom has to be limited. Freedom is always freedom in the state and freedom within the limits of the rule of law. Freedom can only exist together with obedience because only a state with its rules and laws can create equal and durable freedom for all. Obedience to rules opens up a space in which people can be free without fear of insecurity, coercion, domination, intolerance etc. Freedom is, therefore, not incompatible with rules, obedience and coercion.

Strictly speaking, none of this invalidates the definition of freedom as the ability to do as you like without impediments. One can say that the state merely limits our freedom defined in this way, in order to make it safer, more secure and more lasting. So we are still speaking about the same kind of freedom, but now it’s limited.

Much of social contract theory – of which Hobbes is an example – posits a kind of natural, unlimited freedom, a part of which people give up when entering into a contract with a state. And instead of saying that they give up a part of their freedom or their ability to do as they like in order to gain security, one could say that they give up a part of their freedom to make the remainder of their freedom more secure. That’s the same thing. They choose not to do certain things – e.g. break the law – in order to have more freedom to do the other things they want.

According to this definition of freedom, all coercion is bad but some kind of coercion is necessary. If people were always friendly to each other, the state would not be necessary and people would not have to accept a limitation of their freedom. State coercion in the form of laws limits freedom because it forces people to act in a way that is contrary to their wishes. Yet coercion can actually promote freedom. Coercing one person and thus limiting his or her freedom can promote the freedom of other persons. And since we can all be these “other persons”, coercion promotes the freedom of all. Coercion in fact equalizes freedom. It makes it impossible that the freedom of one harms the freedom of another. So it already becomes apparent how freedom and equality are intertwined.

Limiting the limits

However, because of the importance of freedom as the ability to do as you like, the proponents of limited negative freedom want to keep the area of the law and the state as small as possible. Libertarians and conservatives generally believe that the only way in which the state can promote freedom is by guaranteeing the physical security of the weak. The state should only protect the weak against the strong. In this way, it makes it possible for the weak to do as they want. It puts the freedom of the weak on the same and equal level as the freedom of the strong who can do what they want even without protection.

For the rest, they say, the state should not do anything and should keep itself as inconspicuous as possible. It should create an area which is free from state coercion and in which people can do as they like. In a certain sense, this freedom is a stateless freedom even though the state must act to protect it. The area of non-interference must be as large as possible in order to allow freedom to become as comprehensive as possible. Freedom and politics can only go together because and insofar as politics guarantees freedom from politics.

Contrary to anarchists, libertarians and conservatives believe — correctly I think — that the area of freedom or non-interference cannot be unlimited because this would result in insecurity, chaos and war. But in a sense they all believe in unlimited freedom. For anarchists it’s an ideal for the future, for libertarians and conservatives it’s something which belongs to a perhaps mythical past (before the time of the “contract”) and which can only be desirable in the unlikely event that human beings learn to behave and to respect each others security.

The Compatibility of Freedom and Equality (1): Impossible?

Freedom vs. Equality, or Equal Freedom/Free Equality?

In this blog series, I want to look for philosophical arguments in favor of the link between freedom and equality and against the traditional opposition between these values. The conclusion will be that the best way of defending this link is by adopting a certain definition of freedom, namely freedom as self-realization, self-development and autonomy. Other types of freedom are more difficult to combine with the demands of equality.

An important part of the link between freedom and equality is the law and the state. Protection by the law, security because of the law, the creation of a public space by the law, political participation in a democratic state based on the law, are all factors which combine in producing an equal liberty for all, liberty in the sense of self-rule, freedom of choice and the possibility to determine your own life and to develop your self.

In this first post of the series, I will limit myself to the statement of the problem. Why should there be a contradiction between freedom and equality? Over the last centuries, it has indeed become kind of a tradition to juxtapose freedom and equality and to view these two important human values as opposing goals, one inevitably leading to the limitation of the other.

Some examples

One can point to the way in which the claims of equality, as they are expressed in economic rights and policies of income redistribution, limit the freedom of the wealthier parts of the population, in particular the freedom to do with their possessions as they want.

Moreover, the struggle against poverty can become the overriding preoccupation and often even an excuse for violations of freedom rights (the Chinese government can be criticized for this). Non-economic injustices are often readily accepted once people are convinced that these injustices are needed to combat economic injustices.

Another example of the way in which the struggle for equality limits the freedom of certain groups is given by some kinds of affirmative action programs. And a final example, the principle of non-discrimination may require limiting the freedom of expression of those who promote racism or other forms of discrimination.

Conversely, freedom can also limit equality. Although I’m all in favor of economic freedom, I have to admit that the unfettered free market and the absolute protection of property – a freedom right – can produce or exacerbate economic inequalities. When the unequal distribution of talent and starting-capital is not checked by government intervention then the outcome tends to be more economic inequality, the exceptional “rags to riches” story notwithstanding. It is obvious that people who are born in wealthy families have more opportunities and less risks than others.

This is true even if we don’t assume that people only use their abilities and starting capital for selfish purposes. There is charity and solidarity, but even if we combine this with so-called trickle-down effects or Invisible hand effects (the wealth of the wealthy benefits the less wealthy because they can work for the wealthy etc.) we have to admit that some people will lose and will find themselves in a situation which is not only economically unequal but also detrimental for their wellbeing.

Economic rights, the rights to these basic resources and capabilities, are not the automatic product of voluntary caritas, free solidarity, economic freedom or the invisible hand. Some kind of government intervention and coercion is necessary in order to redistribute wealth and undo the most heinous forms of economic inequality.

Another example: an absolute freedom of expression which includes the protection of hatred and racist speech, can lead to inequality, discrimination and even genocide.

The choice between freedom and equality

Most if not all people consider both freedom and equality to be important human values and goals. But because of the apparent contradiction between these goals, people tend to make a choice, and prefer one to the other. It is this choice which separates conservatives and liberals, or people from the right and left; the former preferring liberty, the latter equality (simplistically).

No one, however, throws the other value overboard. Either equality or freedom is merely deemed somewhat less important in certain specific cases. Not all things that are good and desirable are necessarily compatible. Sometimes one good thing will have to be abandoned or limited in order to protect another good thing. And I don’t exclude that this can be the case of equality and freedom. However, what I will try to do in this series is to show that things aren’t so problematic and that, given a correct understanding of freedom in particular, conflicts are not necessary.

Limiting Free Speech (7): Violence in the Media and Real Life Violence

Conventional wisdom says that violent films, violent video games, violent song lyrics or even news stories about violence, lead to an increase in violent crime. On the basis of this causal link, some argue that the right to free speech of movie makers and others should be limited and they should be forced to show restraint when depicting violence. And if they don’t, some measure of benevolent censorship should be applied. The use of movie ratings, which do not limit freedom of speech, isn’t enough. It’s useful to protect children – probably the most impressionable part of humanity – but if violence in movies incites real violence, there’s no reason to think that this is only the case for children.

Is this conventional wisdom true? It probably is, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that limiting free speech is the right kind of remedy. Many studies have pointed out that media violence exposure increases aggressive behavior because

• it renders viewers insensitive,
• excites them,
• changes their moral compass (especially in the case of young viewers),
• and gives them ideas (people, also adults, learn through imitation).

However, another study claimed that movie violence might temper the real thing:

On days with a high audience for violent movies, violent crime is lower. And crime is not merely delayed until after the credits run. In the hours after theatres close — from midnight to 6 a.m. the next day — violent crimes dropped. Violent films prevent violent crime by attracting would-be assailants and keeping them cloistered in darkened, alcohol-free environs. Instead of fueling up at bars and then roaming around looking for trouble, potential criminals pass the prime hours for mayhem eating popcorn and watching celluloid villains slay in their stead. “You’re taking a lot of violent people off the streets and putting them inside movie theaters,” said one of the authors of the study, Gordon Dahl, an economist at the University of California, San Diego. “In the short run, if you take away violent movies, you’re going to increase violent crime.” Over the last decade the showing of violent films in the United States has decreased assaults by an average of about 1,000 a weekend, or 52,000 a year. (source)

Such things are difficult to prove. Who can say that a movie is the cause of a particular crime? And who can redo the events to see what would have happened had the criminal not seen the movie? Or the other way around: if you claim that moviegoers forgo activities that have a greater tendency to encourage mayhem, like drinking and drug use, how can you prove that they would have been more likely to have committed a crime had they not visited the cinema?

Any act of violence has multiple and complex causes. One person can sit through hours of violent movies and remain his own calm self. Another person turns violent because of one wrong word. He or she may be burdened by low self-esteem as a result of years of childhood negligence, poverty etc. The problems is: if there have to be limits on the freedom of expression of artists, these have to be the same for all viewers. You can’t check at the ticket stand of a cinema if a person has violent tendencies that may be aggravated by a violent movie. You just have to cut away the violent scenes from the movie. And then you’ll always be overshooting (pardon the expression) because you’re protecting many viewers who don’t need protection since they will not be incited to violence.

But better safe than sorry and cut the violence anyway? I don’t think so. Freedom of expression and artistic expression are extremely important. It’s likely that other measures, short of censorship, and intervention earlier in the causal chain of violence will be more successful in stopping or limiting violence.

Economic Human Rights (19): Spreading the Wealth Around

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. … The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. … It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion. Adam Smith

The purpose of economic rights is the equal possession of a minimum supply of those fundamental material means, which are necessary for the continuation of life in a decent way. If there are some people who have less than the minimum, economic rights will redistribute some of these means. In other words, these rights will take some things away from those who have enough and give it to those who do not have enough. This is possible because, globally or even nationally in some cases, there is enough for everybody. The only problem is the unequal distribution.

The Ethics of Human Rights (11): Organ Trade

The shortage of organs for transplantation is a universal problem. The supply of organs is way below the demand. And demand is increasing due to progress in medical science and increasing average age. The demand comes mainly from developed countries. The reason is that life expectancy is higher in these countries, and therefore also the demand for organs. Also, the health care system is more developed and hence more likely to engage in transplants.

There are two ways to harvest organs: deceased organ donation, and live organ donation.

Deceased organ donation

In some countries, deceased organ donation is hampered by social, cultural, religious, legal and other factors. In some cases, donors have to state their intent while living. They have to opt in. In other cases, they have to opt out and hence they are donors by default, which tends to produce higher rates of donation.
In other cases still, family members of the deceased have to consent, which brings down rates.

Live organ donation

The use of live donors for non-vital organs such as kidneys and parts of liver, for example, is also practiced, but the purchase and sale of transplant organs from live donors are prohibited in many countries.

Transplant tourism and international organ trade

The shortage of a local supply of organs – due to some of the reasons given above, or a combination – has led to the development of transplant tourism and international organ trade. Poor people in developing countries are often forced to donate a non-vital organ; forced by poverty or forced by outright violence. People are kidnapped and operated under duress, and often don’t even get paid. Sometimes they simply get killed because this bypasses the requirement of consent. Corpses are also harvested, not rarely without the consent of the deceased or his or her relatives. The legality of live organ donations in some countries encourages poor people to sell some of their non-vital organs such as kidneys. However, the circumstances in which they are operated can turn a non-vital organ donation into a fatal one.

Rich people travel to countries where these different kinds of harvesting are possible, legally or illegally, and where hospitals are willing to cooperate in such a scheme and are relatively capable so as not to scare away patients. China is a well-known destination because there’s the enormous supply of thousands of people executed every year.

Although those who can afford to buy organs are obviously exploiting those who are desperate enough to sell their organs, the recipients may also suffer from the trade. They may receive substandard or even sick organs.

Some contend that the poor should be allowed to sell their organs, because we merely contribute to their poverty. Exploitation may be morally preferable to death, but given the risk of forced donation and of complications during surgery, this is a slippery slope.

Someone has aptly called the whole business New Cannibalism.

Other issues

One can also see a trend to declare a person dead at an earlier stage than in the past, for example some seconds after cessation of brain activity or heart activity, rather than minutes. Some organs become useless after a certain waiting period. This means shifting the definition of life and death, and perhaps less reanimation enthusiasm. Another, and opposite form of abuse is keeping brain-dead people artificially “alive” as an “organ warehouse” for future donations.

Also, the use of cloning and designer babies for the purpose of organ production is controversial, as is the use of animal organs.

Crime and Human Rights (1): Poverty and Crime

Poverty is the mother of crime. Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Does poverty cause crime? Are people criminal because they are poor, or are they poor because they are criminal? The latter is uncontroversial, given the time and professional and educational experience inmates lose, the difficulties they have finding a job after their release etc.

But what about the former statement? Crime obviously has many causes, and poverty is most likely one of them in some cases. It seems likely that some poor people may sometimes have to resort to theft in order to survive. But the causal relationship between crime and poverty is only likely for some types of crimes. Other crimes, such as fraud, crimes of passion, serial murder etc. bear absolutely no link to poverty. There may be even an inverse link, since poor people are not in a position to carry out a crime like fraud or insider trading.

This paper lists some of the statistics that show a possible correlation between poverty and crime – mainly property crime, more than violent crime. There is also the fact that African-Americans in the U.S. are overrepresented both in prisons and in poverty statistics, indicating as well that there is a correlation. There is some anecdotal evidence (there are many news stories indicating a link, such as the stories about people stranded on a desert island, being subject to extreme scarcity and engaging in crime such as murder and cannibalism). But there’s also anecdotal evidence to the contrary. During the Great Depression, for example, crime did not increase significantly.

Anyway, it seems intuitively acceptable that there is some causal link between crime and poverty, in both directions. So dealing with crime without dealing with root causes of crime such as poverty, and only focusing on punishment is indeed not the best option. However, none of this should imply:

• that poverty somehow determines crime, or that crime is a necessary result of poverty; many poor people are not criminals, and many rich people are
• that poor people are perhaps not predetermined to be criminals, but that they are more disposed to crime than other people; that would be insulting
• that there are no other, perhaps more important causes of crime such as irresponsibility, immorality etc.
• that poverty is somehow an excuse for crime, or perhaps even a justification; I think it’s not even a mitigating circumstance
• that poverty should be reduced to a problem of crime; poverty, slums and homelessness should not be eliminated because they are so-called breeding grounds of crime, but because we have a moral duty to do so.

Given the causal link, we should also accept that poverty, like a bad upbringing, is often abused as a false excuse for crime.

A related question is the following: are poor inmates incarcerated because they are criminal or because they are poor and can’t escape the law as easily as the rich? Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights gives everyone the right to legal defense, without charge if necessary:

Everyone shall be entitled to have legal assistance assigned to him, in any case where the interests of justice so require, and without payment by him in any such case if he does not have sufficient means to pay for it.

The Causes of Poverty (12): Protectionism

Few propositions command as much consensus among professional economists as that open world trade increases economic growth and raises living standards. N. Gregory Mankiw

Types and justifications of protectionism

Most governments in the world apply restrictions on the international trade of goods. They limit the imports into their countries by way of different measures:

• Import tariffs (or taxes – “duties” ’96 on imported goods)
• Regulatory legislation (e.g. public health legislation or sanitation legislation, “purity” legislation etc.)
• Quotas (limits on quantities of certain goods that can be imported)
• Anti-dumping laws (laws against selling below production cost)
• Government-imposed monopolies on the sale of certain goods
• And other measures.

They do so in order to protect local producers and farmers against foreign competition. That is where the word “protectionism” comes from. The reasons they state for introducing these measures are usually the following:

• Someone else did it first.
• Labor in other countries is cheaper, and therefore the products are cheaper.
• Labor in other countries may be forced labor, e.g. in prison camps.
• Labor in other countries may be child labor.
• Governments’ first duties are towards their own citizens.
• Countries should be self-sufficient and should protect certain important industries such as the food and energy industries, so as not to depend on foreign countries, even if the local products are more expensive than their foreign equivalents.
• It may take some time for industries to become fully operative. Before that, countries can protect these industries by shielding them from foreign competition.
• It is more environmentally responsible to consume local goods than products that have to be transported over thousands of miles.
• Free trade favors the stronger party in a deal, and hence is neocolonial. The outcome of a free deal between unequal partners means more inequality.
• Free trade encourages off-shoring and outsourcing, and hence job losses in the unprotected markets.
• Etc.

Many of these justifications are also commonly used in the debate on globalization. (I will not examine the merits of these arguments here ’96 although I believe that some have some merit – because this post deals with the rationale of trade liberalization, not protectionism.)

Both developed and developing countries uses these measures to protect their own producers.

Another distortion of free international trade comes in the form of subsidies for the production of goods to be exported. This is also a protectionist measure because the aim is to protect industries in difficulties, industries which would have problems selling their goods abroad at normal prices.

Origins of protectionism

As is apparent from the quote above, these measures are usually not inspired by economic thought, but emanate from political concerns. Pressure groups in different industries lobby the government and try to have specific protections put in place. At the same time, however, the international community of states has been involved in trade liberalization negotiations (GATT, WTO etc.) that have been going on for decades already and that should result in the scaling down of the different protection measures. Some success has been achieved so far but the talks are still going on.

Trade liberalization and poverty

One of the aims of these negotiations is the reduction of poverty around the world. But does liberalization of farm trade help the poor? I think it does. Free trade brings down the cost of some products, because it may be cheaper to buy these products elsewhere than to produce them yourself. The cost of producing them yourself may be higher than the cost to produce them elsewhere (e.g. because of the climate in your country, or the available knowledge etc.), even if you include the profit margin of the seller in this cost.

Also, international trade’a0allows countries to specialize in certain products only, and specialization increases productivity and diminishes prices (see also the concept of comparative advantage).

There’s yet another reason why free trade may bring down the price of goods. Normally, if trade is free and restrictions on international trade are abolished, then competition will increase. And when competition increases, prices tend to go down.

So there are several reasons why free trade brings down prices. And when prices go down, consumers pay less. And when people pay less, they are generally less poor.

Import tariffs

Also, when import tariffs are cut in trade liberalization measures, prices for the consumers in importing countries go down, and exports in relatively poor export countries go up. So this would help the poor everywhere, the poor consumers in importing countries, and the poor producers in exporting countries.

However, when import tariffs are cut, local production in some countries will go down because local companies will have to compete with lower priced goods from abroad, lower priced because of the absence of tariffs, but often also because of cheaper foreign labor. With job losses as a consequence and hence more poverty for the people working in certain sectors of the economy. Consumers in general may be better off, but not those working in the industries that were protected by tariffs. For them, the benefits of cheaper products may be outweighed by the financial loss of losing their employment.

Furthermore, the government loses tax revenues when tariffs are cut, and therefore may be less able to provide a social safety net to cushion the adverse effects of competition.

However, most economists believe that removing tariffs and having free trade would be a net gain for society (for some evidence of this see here and here).

Import quotas

Import quotas limit the number of foreign goods that can enter a country and be sold there. This increases the prices of the goods because the supply is limited, and also because many of the foreign goods are cheaper than the local equivalents (mostly because of cheaper labor costs abroad). Restrictions on competition push up prices as well. Eliminating quotas therefore lowers prices and benefits the poor.

However, similarly to import tariffs, quotas protect local producers because they suffer less competition from foreign producers. Quotas can save jobs and therefore diminish poverty. But the people in these saved jobs are less numerous than the total population of consumers who benefit from lower prices (and they are also consumers themselves).

Quotas, contrary to tariffs, do not generate tax revenue, so there abolition would not cut into government benefits.

Export subsidies

Export subsidies depress prices and make it harder for non-subsidized producers, often in the poorer countries, to compete. Many local producers and workers will go bankrupted when the same products that they produce, are freely imported from countries where their production is heavily subsidized, sometimes to the extent that they can be sold below production price.

However, the initial effect of slashing export subsidies is an increase in prices of goods. Take the important example of food prices or prices for farm products. Even in rural societies, most people buy more food than they sell. Slashing subsidies would therefore hurt the poor because it makes it more expensive for them to buy food. The World Bank has estimated that slashing all farm subsidies would lead to a 5% increase in average prices. However, net food buyers are generally richer than net sellers; higher prices therefore transfer income from the rich to the poor, on average. Moreover, even the poor who buy more food than they sell (and those who do not sell at all), may benefit from higher prices for farm products because these higher prices boost demand for rural labor and push up wages for farm workers. The farm sector as a whole grows because of an increase in profitability, and this creates employment.

The World Bank has argued that the net effect of all these elements (price increases because of slashing subsidies, higher wages in farm jobs etc.) is positive for the poor.

Conclusion

Free trade helps the poor, and the ongoing trade liberalization talks in the framework of the WTO should be pursued. But at the same time it should be made clear that free trade is not a miracle solution. Poverty has many causes and many solutions and should be attacked from many fronts at the same time.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (8): Lack of Good Governance

Bad governance is a cause of underdevelopment, poverty, war and human rights violations. Major donors and international financial institutions are increasingly basing their aid and loans on the condition that the recipient countries reform their systems so that these conform to the requirements of good governance.

Good governance means a good way to take and implement government decisions (corporate governance is the way to take and implement decisions in a company, but that’s another topic). When judging whether governance is good or bad one has to look at:

• the way decisions are taken and implemented
• the structures and rules that govern the decision making and implementing process
• the people involved
• the decisions themselves
• the outcome and consequences of the decisions.

The focus is both on what is done and on the way it is done.

Criteria for judging governance

The criteria used to judge governance are the following (some are partially overlapping):

1. Is the government accountable or is there no way to criticize it, to replace it or to correct it?
2. Is the process of decision-making and implementation transparent or is it hidden from public criticism? Is information freely and directly accessible to those who will be affected by decisions?
3. Is the process of decision-making and implementation responsive to the needs of the citizens or does it follow other needs (such as business needs, international requirements, selfish needs’85) and ignores or misrepresents the needs of the people?
4. Is the process of decision-making and implementation inclusive, just and fair? Are the needs of the most vulnerable taken into account? Do all the members of society feel that they have an equal stake in it, or do some feel excluded, left out, treated unfairly or discriminated?
5. Is the process of decision-making and implementation effective and efficient? Does it produce the results that meet the needs of society or results that are demanded by an elite? Does it deliver rapid service or are the procedures slow and cumbersome? Does it make the best use of resources or is it wasteful and time consuming? Does it make use of natural resources in a sustainable way and a way that protects the environment?
6. Does the process of decision-making and implementation follow the rule of law or is it arbitrary? Are decisions based on enforceable rules that apply equally to all? Are these rules enforced by an independent judiciary and an impartial and incorruptible police force?
7. Is the process of decision-making and implementation participatory or is it exclusive? Does it respect equality and non-discrimination? Is the participation ad hoc or organized and structured?
8. Is the process of decision-making and implementation oriented towards consensus, towards mediation of and compromise between different interests, or is it divisive?

The concept of good governance is therefore not limited to the government, but to the whole of society, including the effects of government on society and the input of society in government.

The criteria to judge governance are universal, but it is important to take into account local circumstances, historical “baggage” (like previous regimes, colonialism etc.), a country’s position in the international system etc.

The Causes of Poverty (9): Poverty Traps

A poverty trap occurs when poverty has effects which act as causes of poverty, creating a vicious circle in which poverty engenders more poverty, a circle of cumulative causation leading to a downward spiral of ever more extreme poverty.

Poverty traps or poverty circles can be of different kinds: individual, social, national, international…

1. Individual poverty traps

A poverty trap can be limited to the purely individual: for example, a person being discouraged by his or her situation or misfortune, and thereby sinking deeper into misfortune because of inactivity.

2. Regional poverty traps

The poverty trap may also have a regional aspect: some parts of the country or the population may be poor because they are isolated geographically from the rest of the population and the main centres of wealth and prosperity.

Profitable business opportunities may be few, and thus productive employment lacking, owing to poor transport and communication links with those centres. But the low level of economic activity in the isolated region means that transport services are inadequate and that improved transport infrastructure cannot be economically justified, thus perpetuating the isolation. (source)

3. Racial/ethnic poverty traps

The isolation may also be racial or ethnic. This may harm their self-esteem or their sense of responsibility for their own advancement. The responsibility for their fate is, not without reason, projected on others, but this can become a fetish creating passivity and hence more poverty.

4. Social poverty traps

Poor people, because they tend to be more often sick, hungry and weak, don’t manage to get well paid jobs or – if they are independent producers – tend to produce less. As a result, they have less money, less food, and limited access to health care. And because of this, they get even more hungry, weak or sick, and the circle starts again.

Another example: an individual is poor because his or her parents are poor; because of this, a good education becomes problematic – the children may have to work instead of attending school; without a good education the individual does not acquire the tools and capabilities to escape poverty, may succumb to the temptation of crime, and as a result sinks deeper into poverty.

5. National poverty traps

Low income leads to low savings; low savings lead to low investment; low investment leads to low productivity and low incomes. Poverty leads to environmental degradation, which in turn undermines the assets of the poor and exacerbates poverty. Poverty can lead to violence and conflict, and the associated destruction of physical, human, social and organizational capital in turn causes poverty to intensify. (source)

6. International poverty traps

A poor country may have to rely on its natural resources for its exports and hard currency. As a result, however, other and more stable sectors of the economy are neglected and the resource curse may set in, creating poverty and forcing the other sectors even more to the background.

Some countries may find that they are regionally isolated from the global economic centres, much like some social groups can be regionally isolated within a country (see above). Their import markets are too far away from the main exporters, or too difficult to reach because of the poverty of the country and the resulting lack of investments in infrastructure and transport facilities.

Needless to say that the different kinds of poverty traps can exacerbate each other, and thereby creating a “poverty trap of poverty traps”, a vicious circle in which different poverty traps reinforce each other. This sounds quite apocalyptic, but fortunately seems to be only a theoretical possibility because globally poverty is actually on the retreat, but only on average. Many countries, many social groups and many individuals are still terribly poor, and the poverty traps are one reason.

Economic Human Rights (14): Health

Health is a human rights issue in two respects. First, people have a right to health care and health insurance. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration states that

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is more specific. Article 7 guarantees the rights to safe and healthy working conditions. Article 10 deals with child labor:

The employment of children in work harmful to their morals or health or dangerous to life or likely to hamper their normal development should be punishable by law.

Article 12 states:

1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. 2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for: (a) The provision for the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child; (b) The improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene; (c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases; (d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

The second way in which health is a human rights issue is the fact that good health is a precondition for the enjoyment of all human rights. In this way, bad health is similar to poverty. You have to be healthy and without pain in order to be able to use freedom rights and political rights. A sick, suffering or toiling person is thrown back upon himself and unable to relate to the outside world, just as a person who concentrates exclusively on his or her body for pleasurable reasons. Intense bodily sensations of any kind – positive and negative – shut us off from the world, because they make it impossible to perceive anything except our own body. In other words, they make the use of our classical rights impossible or undesirable.

Human Rights and International Law (7): Crimes Against Humanity

A crime against humanity is a large scale atrocity against a civilian population, such as genocide, ethnic cleansing or the massive killing of civilians during war, and is the highest level of criminal offense. It is either a government policy or a wide practice of atrocities tolerated, condoned or facilitated by a government. Atrocities such as murder, torture and rape are crimes against humanity only if they are large scale and part of a widespread or systematic practice organized or condoned by a government. Isolated atrocities are certainly human rights violations, and can perhaps even be war crimes, but they don’t fall into the category of crimes against humanity. (And acts which do not violate human rights can never be crimes against humanity, even if they are widespread and systematic and even if they cause suffering).

Crimes against humanity can take place during a war or in peace time, and can be committed by a state against its own citizens or against the citizens of another state.

Discrimination (1)

Discrimination, in its non-political and non-legal sense, simply means the recognition of differences. In the political and legal sense, it means unjustifiable differences in treatment between groups of people, most often the unjustifiable denial of the equal enjoyment of human rights.

Groups of people are discriminated because they have certain group-specific attributes that set them apart from the rest of society and that warrant, in the eyes of the people who are discriminating, less favorable treatment. One can make the following distinctions:

• Discrimination can come in different degrees, affecting large or small numbers of people to a large or small extent: from government policy to an unspoken mentality of a small part of the population, and everything in between (such as states not acting to counter discrimination, very active and outspoken discrimination in some parts of the community, entrenched cultural practices such as the caste system etc.).
• It can be exercised in different ways. People may be discriminated on the grounds of their race, gender etc. They can be discriminated in relatively harmless ways (denial of a promotion because of a likely pregnancy for example) or very brutal ways (slavery, denying of equal education etc.). They can also be discriminated in many different fields of life: education, employment, justice, health care etc.

Some people have the misfortune of finding themselves in a state which has an overt and active policy of discrimination, and in different discriminated groups at the same time (black lesbians in Apartheid South-Africa for example). As a result, they may also be discriminated in different fields of life at the same time (employment, family law, education etc.).

There are many types of discrimination, and the concept of discrimination is often linked to others such as racism, agism, sexism, xenophobia, intolerance, religious fundamentalism, genocide, ethnic cleansing etc. Whereas all these phenomena undoubtedly have a dose of discrimination, they are not the necessary result of discrimination. Discrimination can be much more limited.

One can distinguish between types of discrimination according to the groups that are discriminated, and the ways in which these groups are discriminated.

Groups:

• racial discrimination
• gender discrimination
• discrimination based on one’s sexual orientation
• discrimination based on one’s language, culture or national origin
• discrimination based on one’s religion or one’s status within a religion
• discrimination based on one’s political convictions
• age discrimination
• health discrimination (e.g. discrimination of HIV patients, disabled persons or obese persons)
• etc. (when it comes to cruelty, man’s imagination has no limits I’m afraid)

Ways:

• economic discrimination (e.g. persistent differences in poverty levels between groups)
• employment discrimination (e.g. discrimination in career opportunities, pay, “Berufsverbot” etc.)
• housing discrimination
• family law discrimination (e.g. the inability of homosexuals to marry or to adopt)
• education discrimination, different levels or quality of education for different groups
• discrimination of the access to public service or elected positions
• judicial discrimination, discrimination in the justice system
• health discrimination, different levels or quality of healthcare for different groups
• cultural practices such as honor killings, female genital mutilation,…
• legal discrimination such as Jim Crow or segregation
• etc.

Causes of discrimination:

• racism, sexism etc.
• a history of discrimination, creating a burden on future generations
• immigration
• xenophobia
• recession or economic scarcity
• education
• cultural practices (e.g. the caste system)
• religious doctrine
• legislation (e.g. the Jim Crow laws or other types of legally enforced discrimination)
• etc.

Article 2 of the Universal Declaration prohibits discrimination:

“Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”

Although poverty has many causes, discrimination is undoubtedly one of them. Large differences in wealth between groups (for example racial groups) may indicate the existence of discrimination.

Statistics on the differences between races in incarceration or execution rates may indicate the existence of discrimination in the justice system, although these differences may have other causes besides discrimination, e.g. differences in poverty rates (see above), differences in levels of education etc. Of course, the latter differences may be caused by discrimination so that discrimination is indirectly the cause of the differences in the application of justice. Here again are some data on the situation in the US, showing that blacks, although they make up only 12% of the population, account for more than 1 in 3 of the prison population and of the executions. 5% of black men are in jail, compared to less than 1% of white men.

 

 

Blacks are also about twice as likely as whites to be a victim of a crime.

Migration and Human Rights (4): Asylum

Asylum is a form of protection that allows individuals to remain in a country, provided that they meet the definition of a refugee. Eventually, they may become permanent residents or even nationals.

People seeking asylum in another country do so because they have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. They usually petition for asylum when they enter a country, and the government of the country decides on a case-to-case basis, according to its own rules, whether or not to grant asylum to a particular person. A person has to fulfill certain conditions before being granted asylum. These conditions differ widely from one country to another. Some countries have a very restrictive policy.

When asylum is denied, states usually deport the asylum seekers, back to their own country or to a third country. During the period leading up to the decision whether or not to grant asylum, states often detain the asylum seekers (and their families and children) in special prisons. Nevertheless, many failed applicants manage to remain illegally in the country. However, whether deported or gone underground, failed asylum seekers often lead miserable lives. And then we forget all those that didn’t make it to the country of application. Asylum seekers often undertake hazardous and fatal journeys.

People have a right to asylum (see article 14 of the Universal Declaration). It’s a very old legal notion (e.g. the medieval church sanctuaries). The grounds for asylum are however, rather limited. There should be some kind of persecution. An important question is whether economic refugees should be given asylum. I think they should. Poverty is just as much a violation of human rights as forcing someone to change his or her religion.

However, unrestricted economic asylum does not seem to be possible. Flooding rich countries with millions of economic refugees will not help anybody. It will destroy economic welfare in the few places where it exists, without offering any real improvement for the disadvantaged.

The same is true for other kinds of refugees. In principle people should be protected, whatever their origin. But of course, a state is no longer obliged to grant asylum if the applicants are so numerous that accepting all of them would lead to chaos and economic problems in the receiving country. Accepting them anyway would mean sacrificing the rights of the people of the receiving country without being able to do much in favor of the rights of the refugees.

Combating human rights violations in the country of origin is the best way to solve refugee problems. Most people do not want to flee, so accepting them as refugees is not the best solution from their point of view, even though it is still better than not accepting them and it makes it possible to protect their rights.

The Causes of Poverty (8): Lack of Economic Freedom

Open markets offer the only realistic hope of pulling billions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty, while sustaining prosperity in the industrialized world. Kofi Annan

Africa must be allowed to trade itself out of poverty. Bob Geldof

Human rights do not include a right to have economic freedom or to have a free market. But one can argue that economic freedom is a necessary consequence of human rights and that the absence of economic freedom is an indication of a country’s disrespect for human rights. The right to do with your property as you like, to move freely and to associate freely are all human rights and are prerequisites and causes of economic freedom.

There’s also a strong case in favor of the theory that economic freedom promotes prosperity and hence also respect for economic rights.

Economic freedom consists of personal choice, the ability to make voluntary transactions, the freedom to compete, and security of privately owned property. This is the definition of the Fraser Institute. This institute tries to measure the degree to which the policies and institutions of countries support economic freedom. Their index measures:

• size of government
• legal structure and security of property rights
• access to sound money
• freedom to trade internationally and
• regulation of credit, labor and business.

They conclude that economic freedom has grown considerably in recent decades and that economic freedom is correlated with income.

 

The complete list of countries is here. I don’t want to suggest that economic freedom should be absolute. There has to be regulation of markets (for health reasons, safety reasons, reasons of fair competition etc.) as well as political corrections of the effects of markets on issues of social justice, poverty and equality.

Moreover, when discussing economic freedom we shouldn’t only think of the internal structure of states but also their interaction: import tariffs, quota, subsidies and other protectionist measures also inhibit free trade, often at the expense of poor traders and farmers in developing countries.

What Are Human Rights? (17): Interdependent

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty. Lyndon B. Johnson

Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope. It is a tool for daily life in modern society. It is a bulwark against poverty, and a building block of development, an essential complement to investments in roads, dams, clinics and factories. Literacy is a platform for democratization, and a vehicle for the promotion of cultural and national identity. Especially for girls and women, it is an agent of family health and nutrition. For everyone, everywhere, literacy is, along with education in general, a basic human right…. Literacy is, finally, the road to human progress and the means through which every man, woman and child can realize his or her full potential. Kofi Annan

The right to education (article 26 of the Universal Declaration) and the right not to suffer poverty (article 25) are examples of the interdependence of human rights. A good education helps people to escape poverty, and a good standard of living helps people to get an education. Of course, this works also the other way around: when suffering from poverty, it’s hard to educate yourself, and without education it’s hard to escape poverty.

Here’s a quote by another “Johnson”:

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult. Samuel Johnson

This is another example of interdependence. The absence of poverty is a prerequisite for the exercise of political freedom and participation. Material circumstances can be such that freedom of opinion or the right to political participation is difficult to use. Moreover, in this case it is almost impossible to use freedom and participation in order to improve your material circumstances. However, ou do not have to claim or participate in politics on your own behalf. You can claim rights (for example economic rights) or participate in politics on behalf of somebody else, someone who finds it difficult to do so himself.

The Causes of Poverty (7): Shame

The poor man’s conscience is clear; yet, he is ashamed … He feels himself out of the sight of others, groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles and wanders unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at church, in the market … He is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is only not seen … To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable. John Adams

Poverty is not only an economic problem. It creates shame for those who suffer from it. For example, a study of a food emergency program in Kinshasa, Congo, found that it failed in part because people didn’t come forward to claim the food. They were ashamed. Coming forward would have meant admitting failure, failure as self-sustaining beings and as care-takers for their children. They don’t see the external causes of their poverty, such as war, government policies, climate change etc.

Marx and Human Rights

According to Marx, human rights are the “rights of the egoistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community”. They are the rights of man as an isolated, inward looking, self-centered creature

• who regards his free opinion as his intellectual private property instead of a part of communication
• who uses his right to private property not in order to create a beach-head for his public and cultural life but to accumulate unnecessary wealth and to protect unequal property relationships
• who uses the right to privacy as a wall keeping out the poor snoopers watching the rich people
• who considers fellow men as the only legitimate restraint on his own freedom, and therefore as a limit instead of the source of his own thinking, identity and humanity (this is the way in which Marx read art. 6 of the French constitution of 1793: “Liberty is the power which man has to do everything which does not harm the rights of others”)
• who considers freedom to be no more than the ability to pursue selfish interests and to enjoy property, unhindered by the need to help other people, “without regard for other men and independently of society”
• and who considers equality to be the equal right to this kind of freedom (everybody can emancipate himself by becoming a bourgeois).

Human rights, in this view, serve only to protect egoism and the unequal distribution of property, and to oppress the poor who question this and who try to redistribute property. On top of that, human rights obscure this fact because they are formulated in such a way that it seems that everybody profits from them. Contrary to what is implicit in their name, “human” rights are not general or universal rights. They are the rights of those who have property and who want to keep it. A specific situation of a specific group of people is generalized in human rights.

Of course, this criticism can be correct. No one will deny that human rights can serve to protect and justify egoism, oppression of the poor and indifference. They can help to shield people behind private interest and to transform society into a collection of loose, self-centered, self-sufficient, withdrawn, independent, sovereign and isolated individuals. Because the rich have more means to use, for example, their freedom of expression, this freedom can be an instrument of the rich to monopolize political propaganda and political power and to use this power to maintain their privileged situation. Economic relationships can be maintained by legal means.

However, in order to judge and possibly reject a phenomenon, one should also look at its intended and ideal functions, not only at the ways in which it can be abused. Human rights not only protect man against the attacks and claims of other people (for example the attacks and claims on his property); they also create the possibility of forcing people to help each other. They do not allow you to do something to other people (taking their property, determining their opinions etc.), but at the same time they invite you to do something with other people. In other words, they are not only negative. They not only limit the way we relate to other people, they also stimulate and protect the way we relate to other people.