Kaushik Basu's spurious Gerta's dilemma

Kaushik Basu has a new paper about Environmentalism's 'Gerta's dilemma'.  It is shit.

He begins thus-

We understand selfishness better than unselfishness.

No we don't. There is a good reason that our true intentions and objectives are hidden from us. If they weren't we could be 'hacked' by a parasite or become predictable to a predator. There is no Momus window into the soul. 

On the other hand, we easily spot unselfish behavior though the truly unselfish will quickly say 'hey! I benefit long run by making this sacrifice! Please don't think I'm some sort of Saint!'  

This is so for a reason. Adam Smith’s seminal work (Smith, 1776) and discovery that, in many contexts, the order that we witness prevailing in the economy and society can be explained by the self-interest of the individuals constituting the society was so surprising that it triggered a big reaction.

This is foolish. Smith was writing for a deeply religious society steeped in the Bible which some were able to read in Greek. They were aware that by 'synderesis', i.e. a faculty God had implanted in Man, choosing the right thing was part and parcel of God's 'mysterious economy' such that the katechon held the eschaton (i.e. the day of Judgement) at bay. Hinduism has something similar with respect to Vishnu. Krishna is Vishnu's avatar and explains this in the Bhagvad Gita which is the dual of the Vyadha Gita where the enlightened butcher, pursuing his rational self-interest, is shown to have attained the honeyed wisdom of the Chandogya. 

There were the ideologues who used this to revel in their selfishness, rationalizing that for order and justice in society they need not tire their hands; Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ will do that for them.

Nonsense! No such ideology existed. Laissez faire Victorian economists insisted that the State vigorously detect and draconianly punish wrong doers. The invisible hand would only allocate resources if no visible hands were stealing them. 

There were also the legions of moral philosophers, political economists and even mathematicians who treated Smith’s hypothesis as a challenge to formalize and analyze the extent to which the hypothesis was valid and could be relied upon when thinking of national policy.

Basu's profession has always been populated by stupid wankers. That's true enough.  

Contemporary economists owe a huge debt to this response to Smith. I am referring not to the celebration of selfishness, but the outpouring of research. From Leon Walras (1874) to Ken Arrow and Gerard Debreu (1954), the research that went into this field, bringing modern techniques of general equilibrium to analyze these old philosophical ideas, put us on a sound footing.

Fuck off! Arrow Debreu models ignore Knightian uncertainty. But there would be no need for language in an Arrow Debreu world. 

Game theory is pointless, save in narrow ideographic fields, because we don't know all possible states of the world and thus can't calculate the pay-off matrix. 

The understanding of behavior that goes beyond self-interest to matters of justice, fairness, and morals, has trailed the above research. The reason is that, while the early ideas go back to the seventeenth and eighteenth century, to Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, and arguably even earlier, to Plato and Aristotle, the formal tools we need for this analysis were not available till more recent times.

Aristotle would have dismissed what these tossers were up to as an example of Akribeia- i.e. seeking a greater precision than the subject matter affords- not Economia. 

I am referring to game theory, such as in the works of von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944) and Nash (1951). The use of game theory to shed light on these fundamental building blocks of a successful society is more recent. From a few contributions in the mid twentieth century (such as Braithwaite, 1955; Runciman and Sen, 1965),

which is utterly shite 

there is now a gradual build-up of research that is beginning to reexamine these ancient themes, and creating hope for new theories of justice and order that are founded on a formal structure which we can actually put to test in laboratories and in the field.

This stupidity failed long ago. Basu is serving up the warmed up vomit of the Seventies. 

Consider the following

think of A as the environmentally-friendly activity of ‘Agriculture’ 

Basu knows Green Revolution Agriculture in India is not environmentally friendly. Gerta doesn't but she wasn't Chief Economic Advisor to the Govt. of India. 

and B as the more damaging business of operating ‘Brick kilns’.

bricks are 'intermediate goods'. A brick kiln may be good for the environment if the bricks are used for bashing in the heads of Indian economists.

 And C stands for ‘Coal-mining, which can do a lot of damage to the environment, and D for the greener activity of ‘Dairy farming.’

which may produce more methane and thus end up being worse for the environment than a coal burning power plant.

Basu frames 'Gerta's dilemma' in the same way as his Samaritan's dilemma. It fails immediately because the altruistic player will bribe the other. Thus, there is no dilemma. The only difference in this game is that future generations are invoked. But the solution is for the players not to have progeny. 

Basu mentions the possibility that human behavior may be determined by network effects. In that case, cellular automata theory has purchase. But, in that perspective, even if there is an apparent extinction event, the network may restart because of embedding effects. In other words, summed utilities go to infinity. 

Basu then mentions the cretin Levinas- I would argue that, for now, hope has to lie in the kind of suggestion put forward by Putnam (2005, p.24), drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas: “For Levinas, the irreducible foundation of ethics is my immediate recognition, when confronted with a suffering fellow human being, that I have an obligation to do something. [Even if I cannot actually help,] not to feel the obligation to help the sufferer at all, not to recognize that if I can, I must help … is not to be ethical.”

This is stupid shit. The last thing any of us wants is for strangers coming up to us and saying 'I can see you are a cretin with a small dick. I can't help you to be less stupid or  less rubbish in bed. But I want you to know I feel deeply for your suffering. I felt I had to come and tell you this because if I didn't I would feel I was acting unethically'. 

 Note that Putnam is not contradicting the dictum ‘ought implies can’. He is not asserting you ought to help someone whom you cannot help, but you ought to feel the obligation to help. 

Basu, I have the obligation to tell you that you are as stupid as shit. I can't help you be less stupid because, let's face it, you have shit for brains. I just thought you ought to know how very wonderfully ethical I am.

Building on this, it may be argued that, even if a good outcome is beyond current reach, we must nurture and keep alive what may be called the ‘moral intention,’ which is the intention to achieve the good eventually. 

I have the 'moral intention' that Basu become less stupid. However, drilling into his skull to drain out all the shit lodged there may be against the law. 

If the moral intention is deadened, and we end up in a morally-bad outcome, we would treat this as a fait accompli and do nothing. 

Nonsense! The morally-bad outcome is where we are worse off- i.e. less able to pursue happiness. We do something under such circumstances.

It is our moral intention that makes us want to step beyond the game under consideration,

People with a 'moral intention' don't bother with silly games. But this is also true of sensible people. 

 and think of how we may alter our behavior, such as by adopting deontological ethics or altering the rules of the game by imposing taxes and fines on players or to act selfish even if one is not selfish, in strategic contexts like the Greta’s Dilemma game. The upshot is: there is no easy getting away from the core message of Greta’s Dilemma. 

Yes there is. The Coasian solution is that the altruist bribes the selfish guy or makes some other sort of sacrifice which changes the other's incentive structure. We all do this all the time. Daddy would give me a shilling to go bang my drum at the far end of the garden. Mummy would start explaining to me about the birds and bees till I ran off to the pub. 

When we see a group behaving badly we must not assume that the outcome reflects what the individuals in the group desire.

We don't. We immediately look for the ring-leader and take pains to make her mend her ways. Suppose Manmohan Singh had spanked Amartya Sen firmly all through the Sixties, Indian economists would not behave so badly. 

 Most people do not allow the thought that a group of leaders may not want to do what leaders as a collective often end up doing. 

Rubbish! We all know that what a bunch of guys agree to aint what any one of them wanted in the first place. But this is true of all transactions. I want McDonalds to give me a Big Mac for free. They want me to order something even more expensive and to pay for it. I end up buying a cheeseburger off the saver menu. 

They may be in a trap the same way that Havel (1986) conjectured that the leaders of a post-totalitarian state may have no exit route.

Nobody has an exit route to the past. Otherwise they might end up having sex with their own mother and thus becoming their own daddy. 

 This is indeed a dilemma that Greta Thunberg, with her good moral intention, has to be aware of.

Greta may be stupid but she does understand that agreements are a matter of give and take. Moreover time-travel is not possible. 

 Individuals being concerned about future generations not only may not help those generations, but may actually end up hurting them. 

No. Concern by itself can't help or hurt anybody. I am worried that the Andromeda galaxy will come out as Gay and then the Milky Way will say 'dude, everybody already knew you were a bender' and then the Andromeda galaxy will throw a hissy fit and rush off in the general direction of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. This concern of mine neither helps nor harms anything. It is only if I start a campaign to keep Andromeda in the closet that an opportunity cost is incurred which, at the margin, hurts future generations- unless they are all homophobes.