Drugs, alcohol and porn. How many people have a preexisting tendency towards overuse of these substances that is kept in check by the need to get up on time for work and be reasonably productive and presentable at work? This is no limit to the amount of time an addicted person can spend pursuing their addiction.
You could extend this to other potentially addictive activities, like shopping, video games, and social media.
If people aren’t causing problems, and aren’t asking for addiction intervention, then why shouldn’t their agency and privacy be respected?
i agree on this principle: making people work to avoid them falling in vice seems definitely an exceedingly patronizing position for the State. However, I can think to two possible answers to your question:
- many addicted people are not really happy with their addiction, and do not ask for help for pride or because they are costantly believing that are quitting (like the stereotypical smoker that decides avery day to quit smoking). So it would be a net utilitarian harm if more people were addicted.
- maybe the society could have a legitimate interest in preventing the spreading of addictions. Maybe there are no problems if 10% is high, but there could be trouble on the streets if 80% of the populations was high.
While I agree that the state can not prevent you from becoming obese or drunk (mush less sure about, say, heroine), I think it is legitimate to apply economic incentives to decrease the expected number of people engaging in a given activity.
Many states apply taxes on tobacco and sugar, and there are advertising and sale restrictions on cigarettes and alcohol.
If you (= the government) tax something, then you (i.e., the government) have little incentive to decrease it, but the people doing it have a clear financial incentive to decrease it.
So a government that puts a big tax on whatever-it-is gives up its own ability (or at least motivation) to decrease the thing directly, while giving the people who actually do it an incentive to do so. It’s reasonable, at least in some cases, to hope that those people are better placed to decrease the thing than the government is.
First of all, this isn’t only about literal drug addictions; other examples mentioned in the subthread are eating too much sugar (which surely has some addiction-like qualities but I wouldn’t bet heavily that it works just the same way) and advertising (where the people who might be deterred by taxation are the advertisers, whose relationship to advertising is surely not one of addiction). Even for drug addiction, the relevant taxes might reduce profits for the sellers who are generally not addicted, whether or not they affect the behaviour of the buyers.
Second, I dispute that we “know” that increasing incentives not to take some addictive drug consistently does nothing to reduce addictive-drug-taking. Maybe I’m just not aware of some relevant evidence; would you like to give me a pointer to, say, the two things that you think are the strongest evidence for that proposition? (As opposed to weaker ones like “sometimes if you deter people from using one drug they switch to another”, which I’m sure is true.)
For the avoidance of doubt, I entirely agree that governments should be trying much harder to reduce the harm done by drug addiction and trying much less hard to punish people for getting addicted to drugs. I’m just not at all convinced by one specific argument you made, namely that taxing “lotuses” can’t reduce how much they’re used because it decreases the government’s incentive to do it.
Yes, “lotus” is broader than “addictive intoxicating drug” (though I’m not sure it’s specifically about “utility to society or state”; it might be utility to oneself-thinking-longer-term, for instance). That was exactly my point: you are trying to generalize from something allegedly true of literal drug addiction (that if an addict’s drug of preference becomes unavailable or much harder to get, they will switch to another drug rather than stopping being addicted) to all lotuses, even ones that might be quite different from drugs.
Disincentives are incentives. If I know that I’ll get punched in the face if I do X, that is an incentive to do something other than X instead. If I know that I’ll get punched in the face if I don’t do X, that is an incentive to do X.
You may be right that positive incentives are more effective than negative ones, and it’s absolutely reasonable to want to reduce the negative incentives imposed by governments. I’ve no problem with any of that. But you made stronger claims than those, and those are what I disagreed with.
If the government decides that something I enjoy[1] should be taxed into oblivion, then I’ll probably do it much less or not at all. I may well do more of something else I enjoy[1] to compensate. If that’s something the government is happier for me to do, then they may be pleased with the outcome. I don’t think anyone is claiming that carefully chosen taxes will turn people into idealized productivity machines.
(How certain is it that if denied one lotus I’ll switch to another lotus? Not very, I think. The nearest available substitute for a newly-unvailable lotus may be less lotus-y.)
[1] Or “desire”, which of course isn’t the same thing.
Incentives are not only about operant conditioning, and what matters is whether a given measure is successful in changing people’s behaviour, not whether it’s successful specifically by means of operant conditioning.
I don’t think “incentive” is a standard term in behaviourist psychology at all, but unless I’m very confused—which is always possible—operant conditioning absolutely does include responses to the presence or absence of unpleasant stimuli, and also to the absence of a pleasant one that would otherwise have been present. If you’re claiming that disincentives can’t be effective in changing behaviour, I think you need to provide some actual evidence for that.
I wasn’t attempting to put up an “academic fence”, I was responded to what seemed like your attempt at doing exactly that. I’ve no objection to the terms “incentive” and “disincentive”. Perhaps I misunderstood your intention.
Anyway, it seems to me that the claims you’re making have got weaker and weaker, to the point at which they don’t offer any real argument against (e.g.) taxes on things the government wants people to do less of.
You started off by claiming that doing this would be counterproductive because the government’s incentives would be wrong. “Anything you tax you have little incentive to decrease.”
I pointed out that that could be counterbalanced by the fact that taxing things give the people actually doing them an incentive to do them less. You then shifted to claiming that specifically for addictive drugs making one drug less available just makes people switch to another.
I pointed out that we aren’t talking only about addictive drugs, and questioned whether there’s good evidence that the substitution effect you describe is strong and consistent enough to justify the claim that there’s no point trying to dissuade people from taking a drug because they’ll necessarily switch to another that’s just as bad. You ignored my request for evidence, and switched to arguing that taxes give disincentives which are completely different from incentives.
I pointed out that disincentives are one variety of incentives. You then switched to saying that they’re completely different from the perspective of operant conditioning.
I pointed out that human motivation isn’t just operant conditioning and that operant conditioning works with disincentives as well as incentives. You switched to claiming that operant conditioning is “the gold standard”, whatever exactly that means, and that positive stimuli work better than negative stimuli in operant conditioning.
By this point, what you’re saying has very little to do with the original question. We shouldn’t tax lotus-like things … because operant conditioning is (in some unspecified and unevidenced sense) the best way to modify behaviour and it works better with positive than negative stimuli? That doesn’t seem very convincing.
Again, I’m not arguing that the government should (always, or often, or in any particular case, or ever) tax lotus-like things. Maybe it’s a good idea, maybe not. But I hope that whoever’s making that decision is going to base it on something other than what sort of stimuli are most effective for training pigeons.
I am not really into the studies, but I know that in 1950/1960 virtually everyone smoked (also, if you read books from that period, is it taken as given that everyone smokes), while now it is quite uncommon for a young person in Italy to smoke.
I think that also in the USA tobacco consumption rate is plummeting, so why are you saying that it does not work?
It may be misleading to conflate all “addictions” together. I can see how this can not work with heroine, but addiction to candies is a different thing.
here’s some busywork because we don’t want you touching yourself too much.
This, and even more monstrous when you put it into context that maybe part of the population would spend their time touching themselves, but another part would spend their time doing something amazing… but we will sacrifice the possibility of the latter, just to make 100% sure no one touches themselves too much.
As a slightly unrelated question, I would be very interested to hear if you think that the quality of the work you watch over is somehow affected by the workers being addicted, and how much.
A) If it happens that you are sick one day, you can still (with pain) carry out an acceptable amount of work for that day.
B) You can work in a decent way, in the long run, while being sick most of the time.
Are you saying that (B) is true, or just (A)? I fully concede (A) - I also did it. But (A) does not imply (B). I work as a PhD student (which in Europe is a job: you do not have to attend lessons, but you have to do research), and I am sure that (B) is false for me.
Maybe there are jobs for which (A) implies (B), but my intuition is that they are not the majority.
Business (and life) favours completion over perfection. You might have a feel for whether you are underperforming at work but the question is whether others can see that (and especially whether they can quantify it).
So you are saying that you can still pretend to do a good work if many people do a work just a bat as yours. This is different from saying that your work is decent.
In the town I grew up in, it is common for people to do not work at all (not because they are sick, but because they do not care). They “can” do it in the sense that they do it and they face no consequences—but we all pay the price, for our public services are terrible to nonexistent.
People are sick all the time. A third of the population is on antidepressants or other psych meds, and script drug addiction is massive. Work still gets done.
Do you think that the performance of a workforce on antidepressants would be the same as the performance of a drunk workforce?
In regards to you and B: If you haven’t worked at breaking point then you don’t know what you’re capable of.
I do not know, but neither do you. I mantain that my output would be terrible (I would not be fired, because of my contract, but it still would be terrible).
I’m willing to bet your town’s average wages are terrible in comparison to what you get doing nothing.
No, it is not that the wages are low, it is that they can not be fired (both for legal and for cultural reasons). So they do not risk to lose their wage by not working.
To clarify your position, are you saying that if more people were sick/intoxicated then the quality of their work would deteriorate, but this does not really matter because there is sufficient slack in the system and nothing really bad would happen?
How many people have a preexisting tendency towards overuse of these substances that is kept in check by the need to get up on time for work and be reasonably productive and presentable at work?
This implies that rich people who don’t (or don’t need to) work for their living will spend much more time on drugs, alcohol and porn, because they can afford to. Is that the case?
Probably some of them do (at least in the popular imagination); I do not know if this can be checked.
Maybe it is possible estimate drug consumption in a geographical area by enviromental data, for example the amount of cocaine retrieved in the water, and attempt to infer a correlation with income. But I do not know if there is sufficient data available.
Depression and alcoholism are the opposite of “things you spend more time on, when you’re rich enough not to work”. People who work for a living aren’t kept from alcoholism because they don’t have time to drink, or can’t afford even cheap alcohol. (In fact, sufferers of alcoholism, like other drug addictions, notoriously spend too much time and money on their addictions even when they can’t afford to do so and keep working.)
There’s a kind of spectrum between “I really want to do X but I must spend time working; if I worked less I would X more”, and “I’m going to do X even though it harms my ability to work and is not sustainable, because it’s just that valuable/attractive in the short term.” A very simple model would say the only difference is in the short-term subjective value of X.
But more complex models tend to cash this out as different things: biological vs. psychological causes of addiction; seeking highs, vs. avoiding lows; upstream vs. downstream of conscious behavior.
They are not things you would like to spend more time on, when you’re rich enough not to work.
People who work for a living aren’t kept from alcoholism because they don’t have time to drink, or can’t afford even cheap alcohol.
This is sure; but someone could be kept from alcoholism because he knows he must be sober to live. This comment suggests that some very rich people who lacks this motivation do effectively become drink-addicted.
After thinking this over, this effect may be due to hangovers. I don’t drink myself, so I don’t really know this firsthand, but in stories there’s always someone saying “I shouldn’t drink more tonight, I have work / school tomorrow.”
Or even more prosaically, “I shouldn’t drink more tonight, I need to drive home (and I’m not a rich person who always takes a cab or has a chauffeur)”.
Also, some people would devote themselves to caretaking activities: lots of kids incl. foster kids, lots of dogs or cats. I’m not saying this is exactly bad, in some cases it’s good, but at extremes it can become hoarding, when the impulse to collect kids/pets overwhelms the motivation to adequately care for them.
I understand how this can be very rewarding, but it is also an activity which requires mental effort (you do not just look after a kid the way you can drink a bottle or the way you can scroll your Facebook feed).
It does not feel to me like the sort of activity in which you can just fall into, while you are planned to do other things. Are there documented cases of pathological dependence by caretaking?
Drugs, alcohol and porn. How many people have a preexisting tendency towards overuse of these substances that is kept in check by the need to get up on time for work and be reasonably productive and presentable at work? This is no limit to the amount of time an addicted person can spend pursuing their addiction.
You could extend this to other potentially addictive activities, like shopping, video games, and social media.
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i agree on this principle: making people work to avoid them falling in vice seems definitely an exceedingly patronizing position for the State. However, I can think to two possible answers to your question:
- many addicted people are not really happy with their addiction, and do not ask for help for pride or because they are costantly believing that are quitting (like the stereotypical smoker that decides avery day to quit smoking). So it would be a net utilitarian harm if more people were addicted.
- maybe the society could have a legitimate interest in preventing the spreading of addictions. Maybe there are no problems if 10% is high, but there could be trouble on the streets if 80% of the populations was high.
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While I agree that the state can not prevent you from becoming obese or drunk (mush less sure about, say, heroine), I think it is legitimate to apply economic incentives to decrease the expected number of people engaging in a given activity.
Many states apply taxes on tobacco and sugar, and there are advertising and sale restrictions on cigarettes and alcohol.
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If you (= the government) tax something, then you (i.e., the government) have little incentive to decrease it, but the people doing it have a clear financial incentive to decrease it.
So a government that puts a big tax on whatever-it-is gives up its own ability (or at least motivation) to decrease the thing directly, while giving the people who actually do it an incentive to do so. It’s reasonable, at least in some cases, to hope that those people are better placed to decrease the thing than the government is.
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First of all, this isn’t only about literal drug addictions; other examples mentioned in the subthread are eating too much sugar (which surely has some addiction-like qualities but I wouldn’t bet heavily that it works just the same way) and advertising (where the people who might be deterred by taxation are the advertisers, whose relationship to advertising is surely not one of addiction). Even for drug addiction, the relevant taxes might reduce profits for the sellers who are generally not addicted, whether or not they affect the behaviour of the buyers.
Second, I dispute that we “know” that increasing incentives not to take some addictive drug consistently does nothing to reduce addictive-drug-taking. Maybe I’m just not aware of some relevant evidence; would you like to give me a pointer to, say, the two things that you think are the strongest evidence for that proposition? (As opposed to weaker ones like “sometimes if you deter people from using one drug they switch to another”, which I’m sure is true.)
For the avoidance of doubt, I entirely agree that governments should be trying much harder to reduce the harm done by drug addiction and trying much less hard to punish people for getting addicted to drugs. I’m just not at all convinced by one specific argument you made, namely that taxing “lotuses” can’t reduce how much they’re used because it decreases the government’s incentive to do it.
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Yes, “lotus” is broader than “addictive intoxicating drug” (though I’m not sure it’s specifically about “utility to society or state”; it might be utility to oneself-thinking-longer-term, for instance). That was exactly my point: you are trying to generalize from something allegedly true of literal drug addiction (that if an addict’s drug of preference becomes unavailable or much harder to get, they will switch to another drug rather than stopping being addicted) to all lotuses, even ones that might be quite different from drugs.
Disincentives are incentives. If I know that I’ll get punched in the face if I do X, that is an incentive to do something other than X instead. If I know that I’ll get punched in the face if I don’t do X, that is an incentive to do X.
You may be right that positive incentives are more effective than negative ones, and it’s absolutely reasonable to want to reduce the negative incentives imposed by governments. I’ve no problem with any of that. But you made stronger claims than those, and those are what I disagreed with.
If the government decides that something I enjoy[1] should be taxed into oblivion, then I’ll probably do it much less or not at all. I may well do more of something else I enjoy[1] to compensate. If that’s something the government is happier for me to do, then they may be pleased with the outcome. I don’t think anyone is claiming that carefully chosen taxes will turn people into idealized productivity machines.
(How certain is it that if denied one lotus I’ll switch to another lotus? Not very, I think. The nearest available substitute for a newly-unvailable lotus may be less lotus-y.)
[1] Or “desire”, which of course isn’t the same thing.
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Incentives are not only about operant conditioning, and what matters is whether a given measure is successful in changing people’s behaviour, not whether it’s successful specifically by means of operant conditioning.
I don’t think “incentive” is a standard term in behaviourist psychology at all, but unless I’m very confused—which is always possible—operant conditioning absolutely does include responses to the presence or absence of unpleasant stimuli, and also to the absence of a pleasant one that would otherwise have been present. If you’re claiming that disincentives can’t be effective in changing behaviour, I think you need to provide some actual evidence for that.
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I wasn’t attempting to put up an “academic fence”, I was responded to what seemed like your attempt at doing exactly that. I’ve no objection to the terms “incentive” and “disincentive”. Perhaps I misunderstood your intention.
Anyway, it seems to me that the claims you’re making have got weaker and weaker, to the point at which they don’t offer any real argument against (e.g.) taxes on things the government wants people to do less of.
You started off by claiming that doing this would be counterproductive because the government’s incentives would be wrong. “Anything you tax you have little incentive to decrease.”
I pointed out that that could be counterbalanced by the fact that taxing things give the people actually doing them an incentive to do them less. You then shifted to claiming that specifically for addictive drugs making one drug less available just makes people switch to another.
I pointed out that we aren’t talking only about addictive drugs, and questioned whether there’s good evidence that the substitution effect you describe is strong and consistent enough to justify the claim that there’s no point trying to dissuade people from taking a drug because they’ll necessarily switch to another that’s just as bad. You ignored my request for evidence, and switched to arguing that taxes give disincentives which are completely different from incentives.
I pointed out that disincentives are one variety of incentives. You then switched to saying that they’re completely different from the perspective of operant conditioning.
I pointed out that human motivation isn’t just operant conditioning and that operant conditioning works with disincentives as well as incentives. You switched to claiming that operant conditioning is “the gold standard”, whatever exactly that means, and that positive stimuli work better than negative stimuli in operant conditioning.
By this point, what you’re saying has very little to do with the original question. We shouldn’t tax lotus-like things … because operant conditioning is (in some unspecified and unevidenced sense) the best way to modify behaviour and it works better with positive than negative stimuli? That doesn’t seem very convincing.
Again, I’m not arguing that the government should (always, or often, or in any particular case, or ever) tax lotus-like things. Maybe it’s a good idea, maybe not. But I hope that whoever’s making that decision is going to base it on something other than what sort of stimuli are most effective for training pigeons.
I am not really into the studies, but I know that in 1950/1960 virtually everyone smoked (also, if you read books from that period, is it taken as given that everyone smokes), while now it is quite uncommon for a young person in Italy to smoke.
I think that also in the USA tobacco consumption rate is plummeting, so why are you saying that it does not work?
It may be misleading to conflate all “addictions” together. I can see how this can not work with heroine, but addiction to candies is a different thing.
This, and even more monstrous when you put it into context that maybe part of the population would spend their time touching themselves, but another part would spend their time doing something amazing… but we will sacrifice the possibility of the latter, just to make 100% sure no one touches themselves too much.
As a slightly unrelated question, I would be very interested to hear if you think that the quality of the work you watch over is somehow affected by the workers being addicted, and how much.
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I definitely can not work when I am sick. Can I ask what kind of job are you overseeing?
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Maybe I am making confusion between two claims:
A) If it happens that you are sick one day, you can still (with pain) carry out an acceptable amount of work for that day.
B) You can work in a decent way, in the long run, while being sick most of the time.
Are you saying that (B) is true, or just (A)? I fully concede (A) - I also did it. But (A) does not imply (B). I work as a PhD student (which in Europe is a job: you do not have to attend lessons, but you have to do research), and I am sure that (B) is false for me.
Maybe there are jobs for which (A) implies (B), but my intuition is that they are not the majority.
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So you are saying that you can still pretend to do a good work if many people do a work just a bat as yours. This is different from saying that your work is decent.
In the town I grew up in, it is common for people to do not work at all (not because they are sick, but because they do not care). They “can” do it in the sense that they do it and they face no consequences—but we all pay the price, for our public services are terrible to nonexistent.
Do you think that the performance of a workforce on antidepressants would be the same as the performance of a drunk workforce?
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No, it is not that the wages are low, it is that they can not be fired (both for legal and for cultural reasons). So they do not risk to lose their wage by not working.
To clarify your position, are you saying that if more people were sick/intoxicated then the quality of their work would deteriorate, but this does not really matter because there is sufficient slack in the system and nothing really bad would happen?
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I do not think this is true. I think that it is important that we clarify this point before continuing.
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This implies that rich people who don’t (or don’t need to) work for their living will spend much more time on drugs, alcohol and porn, because they can afford to. Is that the case?
Probably some of them do (at least in the popular imagination); I do not know if this can be checked.
Maybe it is possible estimate drug consumption in a geographical area by enviromental data, for example the amount of cocaine retrieved in the water, and attempt to infer a correlation with income. But I do not know if there is sufficient data available.
Surely not everyone would be like Ogodei Khan.
The final paragraph of this comment seems relevant: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-fussell-on-class#comment-1350041
Depression and alcoholism are the opposite of “things you spend more time on, when you’re rich enough not to work”. People who work for a living aren’t kept from alcoholism because they don’t have time to drink, or can’t afford even cheap alcohol. (In fact, sufferers of alcoholism, like other drug addictions, notoriously spend too much time and money on their addictions even when they can’t afford to do so and keep working.)
There’s a kind of spectrum between “I really want to do X but I must spend time working; if I worked less I would X more”, and “I’m going to do X even though it harms my ability to work and is not sustainable, because it’s just that valuable/attractive in the short term.” A very simple model would say the only difference is in the short-term subjective value of X.
But more complex models tend to cash this out as different things: biological vs. psychological causes of addiction; seeking highs, vs. avoiding lows; upstream vs. downstream of conscious behavior.
They are not things you would like to spend more time on, when you’re rich enough not to work.
This is sure; but someone could be kept from alcoholism because he knows he must be sober to live. This comment suggests that some very rich people who lacks this motivation do effectively become drink-addicted.
After thinking this over, this effect may be due to hangovers. I don’t drink myself, so I don’t really know this firsthand, but in stories there’s always someone saying “I shouldn’t drink more tonight, I have work / school tomorrow.”
Or even more prosaically, “I shouldn’t drink more tonight, I need to drive home (and I’m not a rich person who always takes a cab or has a chauffeur)”.
Also, some people would devote themselves to caretaking activities: lots of kids incl. foster kids, lots of dogs or cats. I’m not saying this is exactly bad, in some cases it’s good, but at extremes it can become hoarding, when the impulse to collect kids/pets overwhelms the motivation to adequately care for them.
I understand how this can be very rewarding, but it is also an activity which requires mental effort (you do not just look after a kid the way you can drink a bottle or the way you can scroll your Facebook feed).
It does not feel to me like the sort of activity in which you can just fall into, while you are planned to do other things. Are there documented cases of pathological dependence by caretaking?