Human Rights Ads (69): Tienanmen Tank Man Spoof

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The original is here. For the story on the Tienanmen Square protests and the violent crackdown, see here. More on freedom of the press here.

This is another one:

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The original. More human rights ads.

The Causes of Wealth Inequality (22): Non-Progressive Taxation and Weak Transfers

This post applies to the U.S., but I guess the same conclusion are valid for a number of other countries as well. In the case of the U.S., very high levels of income inequality could, in theory, be reduced in several ways:

• offering people better education (better education means better jobs, and more applicants for top jobs means lower wages at the top)
• cracking down on government backed corporate expropriation
• making the tax system more progressive
• increasing government transfers to those at the bottom etc.

Unfortunately, very little of this is happening. Let’s focus on the last two options. The tax system in the U.S. is not progressive at all. As you can see from the graphs below, taxation in the U.S. hardly influences income shares:

pretax and after tax income shares, federal taxes only, 2006

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The poor only get a little bit more thanks to taxes, and the rich only lose a little bit. This is all the more regrettable given the fact that the rich have done very well over the last decades:

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Higher tax rates for the wealthy and other more progressive taxes such as a higher inheritance tax, a higher capital gains tax, a Tobin tax etc. are politically impossible it seems.

Increased benefits for the poor are equally unrealistic given the fiscal situation and the predominant ideology. Although the poor in the U.S. do profit from the existing benefit system in absolute terms (unemployment insurance for example saves millions from absolute poverty), income inequality barely moves because of it. Income shares after benefits are hardly less unequal than before. The following graph shows the influence on income shares of the sum of taxes and transfers, but you get the picture:

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Taxes and transfers result in the poor having a bit more and the rich having a bit less, but fundamentally they don’t change the distribution of income.

More posts in this series are here.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (112): Romney Signing Ceremony

Ok, Massachusetts does not have the death penalty, so Romney in his time as Governor never faced that ultimate decision. But he was generally not very generous with other types of pardon, and he did file a bill to reinstate the death penalty in Massachusetts (which was ultimately defeated). Hence, few doubt his resolve were he to be confronted with pleas for clemency coming from people on death row.

More jokes.

The Causes of Human Rights Violations (33): Nefarious Political Metaphors

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I want to go out on a limb here and argue that most if not all human rights violations as they have occurred throughout human history can be explained and have been directly caused by the persistent and widespread use of metaphors. (Which doesn’t mean that there are no other causes).

But before I list some of the metaphors I have in mind, a few general words that may help to explain why I think simple metaphors can do so much damage. The fact that we constantly use metaphors in language and thought may buttress the thesis that they have some effect on our actions. The same is true for the fact that metaphors are not just figures of speech but are cognitively important as well: by claiming that some things are alike – metaphors are descriptions of one thing as something else – they help us understand things.

For example, if we say that compound interest is like a snowball rolling off a snowy mountain side, we use something we already understand – the snowball – in order to understand something else that looked and sounded strange before the application of the metaphor – compound interest. And when we then understand things in a certain way, we act according to our understanding of things – in our example, we put our money in a savings account that offers compound interest rather than in one that just offers a fixed interest on the basic sum.

Or let’s use another, more appropriate example (one which I will return to below): if we have difficulties assessing the impact of immigration on our own society and culture, then the metaphor of the “tidal wave of immigration” can help us to “understand” this impact and to do something about it (stop the wave, for instance). Immigration is like a wave because it’s equally overwhelming and harmful. It’s clear from this example that the word “understanding” should not be understood (pun intended) in an epistemological sense: the point is not that understanding produces correct knowledge about the world, but simply that we believe it does. In this case, I personally think the wave metaphor does not help us to understand the phenomenon of immigration (on the contrary), but many people believe it does and it inspires their actions.

If all this has convinced you that metaphors can indeed cause political actions, then it’s now time to list what I believe have been and to some extent still are some of the most destructive political metaphors in history. (Do tell me in comments if you think of other examples).

Moral Balance

Wall Painting in a Jain Monastery, Sravanabelagola

This metaphor is most clearly expressed in lex talionis – an eye for an eye – which is a form of criminal justice that claims to balance crime and retribution. A softer version is proportionality: even if people shouldn’t be punished in a manner that strictly balances out their criminal acts, they should get what they deserve and they deserve tougher sentences when their crimes are worse. There may also be a deeper metaphor at work here, one in which there is some kind of cosmic moral balance that shouldn’t be disturbed and that should be corrected when people do disturb it. Failure to correct it leaves moral imbalances intact, and that is damaging in some unspecified and metaphysical way.

Many people agree that the moral balance metaphor has done a lot of harm in the case of capital punishment, but I argue that it poisons our entire criminal justice system. We shouldn’t incarcerate people in order to punish those who deserve some amount of incarceration proportional to their crime. If we have to incarcerate, it’s because that’s the only way to protect other people’s rights. And this rule would drastically reduce the number of inmates currently in prisons all over the world. It’s fashionable to say that we have come a long way since the time of medieval criminal punishment, but I believe our current judicial practices – even those in “developed countries” – are still among the worst human rights violations in the world.

Bootstrapping

Von Munchhausen bootstrapping

This metaphor is most harmful when it blocks assistance to the poor (and poverty is a human rights violation). It promotes an “understanding” of the phenomenon of poverty that paints the poor as lazy, self-destructive and undeserving people who only have themselves to blame and who could easily save themselves were they willing to invest the necessary effort. This “understanding” obscures many other and often more important causes of poverty and therefore perpetuates it.

Dirt

nazi propaganda about "jewish dirt"

Genocide, mass murder, ethnic cleansing and other crimes against humanity are made easier when the target group is persuasively depicted as some sort of “dirt”, “cockroaches“, “vermin” or any other dehumanized entity. The best way to violate human rights is to deny people’s humanity. However, dehumanization also occurs on a much smaller and seemingly harmless scale, in advertising, gender stereotypes, popular culture etc.

The dirt example shows that people often don’t even realize that they are acting on the basis of a metaphor and actually view what is supposed to be a similarity as being an identity. Many Rwandan Hutus implicated in the genocide probably believed that Tutsis and cockroaches were quasi-identical.

The Family

a family

The metaphor of the family of fellow citizens is often used to justify differential treatment of citizens and non-citizens. For example, social security offers protection to fellow-citizens who are nationally the worst off but who are nevertheless relatively wealthy when compared to the poorest in other countries. And development aid is usually much less generous than social security. I would argue for a more cosmopolitan stance as a better means to protect the equal human rights of all human beings.

The same metaphor is used to justify excessive patriotism and the wars that seem an inevitable result of it, as well as authoritarian government by a father figure or by people who think they know better.

The Wave

Hokusai great wave off kanagawa, early 1830s

As mentioned earlier, this metaphor is used to counter immigration, when in fact increased immigration could do an enormous amount of good, not only for millions of poor people all over the world, but also for the populations in the more wealthy destination countries.

The metaphor does some more damage when it’s used in overpopulation discourse. Horrible population control policies are supposedly justified by the “wave” of overpopulation, and as if these policies aren’t harmful enough by themselves, they have disastrous side effects such as gendercide.

The Child

Jackie Coogan in Chaplin's "The Kid"

This metaphor has often been used to subjugate women, those supposedly childlike creatures unable to control their emotions or to marshal the forces – physical or mental – necessary for many social roles. Slaves and colonized peoples as well were often viewed as childlike beings in need of the White Man’s guidance.

Conclusion

So, what can we take away from this? It would seem that we can’t do much about human rights violations: metaphors are notoriously hard to weed out and if they caused rights violations in the past they will continue to do so. But that’s not entirely true. While we may not be able to remove certain metaphors from common language, we may reduce their impact on real life events and their salience in certain circumstances. We can chip away at their nefarious role in rights violations, and that’s exactly what we already did in the past.

For example, the child metaphor used to be an important conduit in the submission of blacks, but that’s no longer the case today. The metaphor is still there and is still doing damage (in criminal justice for instance, as an analogy for punishment based on a supposed lack of self-control), but its range has been curtailed. Curtailment of harmful metaphors often means dismissing the similarity between things that a metaphor has tried to establish. For example, if we can show that immigration doesn’t do the same damage to a society as a “tidal wave” but actually has a lot of benefits, then the metaphor of the “tidal wave” can be curtailed.

Other posts in this series are here. More on the effect of language on human rights is here.

Political Graffiti (172): Minimum Wage

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More on the minimum wage here, here and here. More political graffiti here.

Human Rights and International Law (21): Human Rights and the Irrelevance of the Law

If you want to promote respect for human rights you’re likely to turn to the law, and not just any law: human rights are usually if not always included in constitutions and in the human rights treaties that countries have accepted. They are, in other works, part of the basic law. You hope and expect that those in charge of verifying respect for the law and enforcing this respect when it’s absent will see that the case you bring before them is a clear violation of human rights – clear on the basis of the evidence you present – and will use their legal monopoly of violence in order to force the violators to stop, to respect the law and to remedy the harm that is done to you or to those you represent. Judicial courts, including international courts, and enforcement agencies such as the police force, the military, peacekeepers and such, are believed to be the institutions that are best placed to promote respect for human rights law.

You may have many good reasons for this belief: there’s the authority of the law as a special kind of rule, stronger and more commonly accepted than rules of morality, and there’s the possibility to use violence as a means to coerce. You may also have good reasons to believe that these legal and enforcement institutions will never be perfect: there can be perjury, judges may be incapable, suspects can escape, the police may be corrupt, laws can be counterproductive etc. Still, you strongly believe that the law is the best you can hope for in a world of imperfect humans, and certainly better than self-defense or persuasion.

the activist judge

Many of us will recognize our own beliefs in this description. However, one could easily call these beliefs naive. Look at the Supreme Court in the U.S. for instance. Would there be so much bickering over the nomination of new Justices by acting Presidents, if the judicial protection of rights was the quasi-mechanical process that I just described? Or is this bickering not proof of the fact that the political affiliation of the Justices determines to a large degree their rulings? Why would the other political party systematically object to the Justices proposed by the President if the politics of those Justices don’t make a lot of difference in the way they rule? But if those politics do make a lot of difference, what is left of the credibility of the system of law as a means to enforce respect for rights?

Some of this skepticism is the basis of the theory of legal indeterminacy. This theory states that laws have nothing to do with how judicial cases come out; that lawyers and judges can manipulate laws and the legal system in order to justify any decision they please; and that any possible result in any legal dispute can be justified as the legally correct outcome. If laws do not determine or – according to a more moderate form of the theory – do not significantly constrain judicial decisions, then it’s often futile or even risky to ask a judge to rule on a supposed rights violation. You may get the result you want, but only if the judges share your moral, political or religious outlook. In the worst case, your tormentor is vindicated, which will only encourage him and others like him.

The theory of indeterminacy is corroborated by the historical shifts in rulings based on the same texts. Take for example the death penalty in the U.S., which has been ruled both constitutional and unconstitutional. Of course, the indeterminacy of the law is not always the fault of judges, lawyers or prosecutors. The legislators also have a role to play. Laws have to be clear and unequivocal.

On the other hand, it’s impossible to require strict determinacy: no law, however carefully crafted, will produce one and the same legally acceptable type of outcome over decades. There will always be so-called hard cases that require interpretation and choices. And because beliefs and opinions change over time, interpretations and choice will also change. Still, in all legal systems in the world, there seems to be much more indeterminacy than what most of us believe would be optimal.

Woodrow Wilson trying to avoid the rocky shores of "war" and "intervention" on his way to "justice"

Take another example: international criminal justice. Here as well it’s clear that the equal application of the law is just a sick joke. Security Council Resolutions – which can be seen as quasi-judicial – are notoriously inconsistent, and their application is even more inconsistent. The International Criminal Court, one of the best international legal institutions around, only manages to prosecute the worst violators in the poorest and geopolitically irrelevant parts of Africa. China merely has to hint at possible economic consequences and all human rights talk about China – let alone action against China – stops instantly. Never mind the fact that China has accepted human rights treaties. Russia is part of the Council of Europe and has therefore accepted the jurisdiction of the most powerful international human rights court in the world. And yet, we all know that human rights in Russia are far from safe. International human rights law clearly suffers from collective action problems, perverse incentives, competing priorities and double standards.

So, if it’s naive to rely only on the law, which other means do we have in order to promote respect for human rights? The two major alternatives to law are story-telling and honor. Read more about those here and here respectively.

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Human Rights Maps (170): Hate Crime Rates

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What drives hate crime? Some say it’s poverty, and this seems to be corroborated by the following map:

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On the other hand, the data here paint a different picture.

More data on hate crime here. More hate crime maps here. More human rights maps in general here.

Human Rights and Anarchism

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At first sight, anarchism is an attractive theory for proponents of human rights. It’s often the state that violates human rights and getting rid of the state would therefore automatically and drastically reduce the number of rights violations. However, state action isn’t the only cause of rights violations; our fellow citizens can also take away our rights or fail to act in ways that protect our rights. When that happens, we often go to the state for protection. We regularly ask judges and police officers to protect our rights to physical security, property and life, and we depend on the government to provide education, poverty relief, transportation infrastructure etc.

Anarchists claim that we don’t necessarily have to go to the state for those forms of protection or provision. For example, the monopolization of violence by the state isn’t the only possible means to achieve physical security and protection of property. One can imagine private companies offering their protection services. That would also be more fair to those who need those services less (for example because they have less property or because they live somewhere isolated). In a government protection scheme, these people pay as much as anyone else (at least proportionally, given a more or less progressive tax system) whereas in a system of private protection services they could pay less or even nothing at all if they so wish.

One problem with a system of private protection services is that it can’t regulate violence or theft among the different service providers (a form of insecurity that can affect individuals as well). Anarchists could reply that a natural monopoly would arise as a result of that risk, but a monopoly would then drive up the price of security, which would be detrimental to the buyers and would, in the end, make government provided security look like a better deal. And government is definitely a better deal for those who can’t afford to buy private security.

And then there are of course the other, non-security related human rights. A free market solution to education, healthcare etc. is possible, but again would likely be insufficient for those who don’t have the means to buy those services. Rights are important first and foremost for vulnerable members of a community. If these people can’t count on rights, rights aren’t of much use. We all have rights and the protection of those rights shouldn’t be dependent on our individual ability to pay for them.

Of course, it’s true that rights cost money, and somehow this cost has to be covered in whichever way we think is best. But it seems better and more fair to cover this cost by way of taxation than by way of voluntary purchase, because then at least people’s rights don’t depend on their ability to pay, even though they depend on an overall social ability to cover the cost.

piglet free riding, by Leonard Leslie Brooke

Moreover, free market solutions can cause free rider problems, especially in the case of public goods – and many human rights are public goods. If people have to pay for services, then some may be able to enjoy the services without paying. In private garbage collection systems, for instance, people who don’t pay for the collection may just put their garbage next door, together with the garbage of the paying neighbor. That is obviously not a human rights issue, but the same effect can occur when people have to pay for rights protection or provision. Let’s reiterate the example of security: if a certain number of people in an area pay a private security agency, then this agency will provide security in the area, even – to some extent – for those who don’t pay. This, of course, will convince many that they don’t have to pay. State protection or provision can also suffer from free rider problems, but at least the state can force people to pay (by way of taxation). However, government monopolies create the same problems as private monopolies (see above), so perhaps a mixed system of government and private rights protection and provision would be optimal.

Obviously, when we argue in favor of the relative advantages of state vis-à-vis private protection and provision of rights, we also have to acknowledge the practical reality that states often fail to protect and provide. They fail in two ways: many of them don’t sufficiently protect or provide, and much of what they do is completely unrelated to rights and often even detrimental to rights. We also have to admit that whatever the theoretical merits of either state or private protection and provision, the empirical reality is difficult to ascertain. Whereas we have many cases of state action – some good, some very bad – we have very few cases of attempted anarchy. That doesn’t help the case of anarchism. Maybe some theoretical shortcomings of anarchism don’t turn out so bad in practice, compared to the practice of government. And there’s of course the status quo bias which doesn’t help anarchism either: we know what we have, and trying something new is always risky.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (111): The Dangers of Morality

Eric Fischl - Untitled

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I argued before that morality can be and often has been the cause of a lot of evil in the world. The conviction of knowing what is good and right can lead to violent coercion of others who don’t conform to certain ideals. At the very least, moral certainty inhibits cooperation and compromise. Hence the claim by George Carlin:

I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who’s lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis and I’ll show you someone who’s not causing any fucking trouble!

Of course, he’s not doing any good either, but the point is that doing good isn’t always good. More Carlin. More quotes & jokes.

Income Inequality, New Paper

I’ve posted a new paper on income inequality here:

Maybe this is good timing on my part, with Obama being accused of “class war”, Romney paying ridiculously little in taxes, the Occupy movement and the 99 percenters still going strong (I think), and all that. So hopefully, this paper will attract a few eyeballs, at least more than academic writing can normally expect.