Can we consider for a moment mendelian genetics, in which some traits are regressive and some are dominant - and it doesn't relate to whether the trait is bad or not, but whether it is the product of turning on a catalytic mechanism or turning it off.
In this case, some people are making things people want and other are preventing things people don't want. They are both, in some sense, serving a purpose for the broader society. However, the way they do it - and what happens to 'excess' - is very different.
This framing is very different framing from traditional exploiter/exploited language, or even rent seeking, or actual parasitism. I think you can quickly see how it gives both sides a possible positive role in society - and a possible negative. At least, maybe, try steel-manning the approach in a post.
I immediately had that thought too; in particular, the absence of mention of private roles that individuals play, in other than the economic sphere, has a necessarily Marxian cast. I don’t speak only of women in this regard, of course! - the man who is AK’s “parasite” at the DMV may be something altogether more at home, or in his community - but women are where it meets the road. If you can’t take the feminism out of the man - and I expect most fathers here would look at your daughters and their bright college futures and well-paying if largely parasitic jobs like all the rest and say, you can’t, I won’t! - you can’t quite take the Marxist out either.
I don't disagree with your Mendelian framing suggestion, but I think you and others in these replies are a bit over critical. While Arnold doesn't need my protection, he was very careful to say that 'he doesn't hold tightly to these words.' He's working out ideas, which I think is the point of having a blog. And this framing may be beneficial in working out other ideas later on.
As you say, "They are both, in some sense, serving a purpose for the broader society." When I read his post, I absorbed it through the lens of Solzhenitsyn's 'good/evil...through the heart of every man.' All humans can be good/evil, masculine/feminine, exploiter/exploited, producer/parasite. Often in short succession. We are not static.
I once listened to the Intersectionality guru Kimberly Crenshaw give an interview where she said, 'If we can't name the thing we can't solve the problem.' I thought to myself, "Nah, lady. It's the naming of everything that gets us into trouble in the first place."
Thank you for the substantial reply. I'd like to see what Arnold does with the comment. My comment isn't an attack on Arnold at all. He's in a process; the choice of 'parasite/producer' as the two labels is a dead-end because it makes the conversation more difficult, more emotionally charged, and less accurate.
He's also applying them, I should note, to 'billets' or economic roles, rather than 'people.' In some circles, the language is 'faces' and 'spaces' or 'personnel' and 'manpower.' Other commentors make note that a person can be a father, a son, a coal miner, etc. That better reflects your observation about how people can occupy and move through roles in time, space. I'm asserting that even the roles are not best dichotomized as producer/parasite to get at what Arnold is really trying to express.
The producer/parasite dichotomy has obvious problems. What about farmers and factory workers who owe the continued existence of their jobs to tariffs and other regulatory barriers making in the process the rest of society worse off? Should one prefer them to upper class professionals because they drink beer and eat burgers instead of eating foie gras with Sauterne? (I understand that upper class professionals in many US cities are banned from eating foie gras but this is still possible in Europe)
Are those who thrive by taking advantage of its loo-holes parasites?
Generally yes.
Does this mean that a responsible producer corporation should not take advantage of laws as written and do things that minimize their taxes? No, of course they should be proper fiduciaries with their shareholder’s capital.
The distinction is in whether they thrive BY such actions or take them as part of being responsible producers.
I doubt very many thrive by either alone, and I'd just as soon not have the government making the distinction. The solution is fewer loopholes, not more bureaucrats plugging them with more loopholes.
I have a different take on government food safety inspectors, indeed all government safety regulations and regulators.
Handing off safety certifications and inspections to the government does not absolve private parties from liability. No manufacturer gets to deflect lawsuits to the government as the one who certified their production facilities. They will be sued for shoddy designs or shoddy production whether or not the government certified them as safe and effective.
Part of the problem is the judiciary, which makes it impractical for private victims to hold manufacturers accountable. Courts are slow and expensive, and I believe deliberately so. Lawyer replies to my comments on the Volokh Conspiracy have bragged that slow and expensive is a feature, not a bug, because it keeps the rifff raff with puny cases out of the legal system, which should only concentrate on important matters and leave the small tedious stuff to regulation.
Whether they are representative of all lawyers or not, that is how the system functions and it does encourage reliance on a corrupt nanny state, where the regulators and the regulators collude almost openly to shut out victims.
This is not a problem peculiar to the US. It is what governments do, because governments are nothing but bureaucrats, whose only measure of success is the size of their budgets, the number of subordinates, and how many new regulations they have written. Private bureaucrats are just as bad, but competition keeps them in check. Or at least it would, if it were not for government bureaucrats coming to the aid of private bureaucrats with more regulations requiring more private bureaucrats to collude with them, since the last thing either wants is to solve problems and put themselves or their "colleagues" out of work.
I have a very dim view of governments and bureaucrats. But that's enough rant on someone else's blog.
Well, that's interesting at least! (the argument is that corporations which shield individuals from personal liability are anti-libertarian)
My instinctive answer is that corporations are property, and losing one's property for screwing up is hardly dodging liability.
But I don't know enough about corporations and liability to have any better answer.
When General Motors made a mess of ignition switches to save a few bucks and people died, they paid out $900 million in penalties, says Wikipedia. That's hardly dodging liability. It is dodging personal liability, but it wouldn't do anybody any good to hold any individual accountant or engineer, or even a few dozen committee members, personally liable for $900 million. For that matter, how much did it benefit individual victims for the government to collect $900 million?
And there are personal corporations, where my knowledge is so weak that I don't even know what they are called or how they function, other than some vague concept of shielding personal assets like homes from corporate malfeasance. I don't see a problem with that, as long as if everyone who deals with such a corporation knows the limits of personal liability. I also should have the freedom to do business with people who I cannot sue personally for screwing up. I can envision lots of people who would refuse to start businesses if they could lose their home for screwing up; why is it government's business to forbid voluntary contracts which allow such liability shielding?
eradicating the parasites: Make Hammurabi Great Again... do not get on a 737MAX flight without a Boeing exec also onboard... at least Stockton Rush went down with his vessel... the guy packing the parachutes doesn't get to skip the jump... https://youtu.be/0Uc4DI-BF28?t=112
An uncle was a B-24 mechanic during WW II, I believe for coastal patrols out of California. He said they had a rule that everyone who worked on a plane had to be on its first test flight after maintenance was complete.
Parasitic relationships have a clear definition in biology: an interaction that benefits one organism but harms the other that the parasite has an interest in continuing. As E.O.Wilson wrote, parasites are “predators that eat prey in units of less than one”.
The difficulty with human matters is these are not one-to-one relationships but embedded in complex societies where the easiest way to justify something that harms/costs another is to claim wider social benefit. Across human history most states have been predatory, including to those that they rule. Yet, it is clear from the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck—which only a fraction of male lineages survived—that the ordering predation of the state was generally preferable to the disordering predation within stateless societies. States generally domesticate human interactions.
So, you cannot judge whether a role is parasitic without judging the larger context. Even then, it may not be entirely parasitic. Even if it is, it will have some form of “cover”.
Corruption seems obviously parasitic yet may have some utility to a person paying the bribe if it reduces the degree to which regulation blocks otherwise beneficial transactions. Paying bribes is something people choose to do, even if often under some form of coercion. Corruption is predatory, it is parasitic, but may still reduce net social costs, given the existing regulatory framework.
Exploitation is a form of parasitism. It is usually a highly moralised term that lacks even the implicit grounding in biological usage.
Marx’s theory of surplus value casts commerce as inherently parasitic, which is flatly false. Worse, it is an eliminationist theory of parasitism. Such theories are ready justifications for mass murder, and have been used as such by both Marxists and Nazis, among others.
Massacres of market-dominant minorities that date back millennia are usually based on some notion of them being parasites, as how commerce makes money can often seem mysterious to outsiders. Communist and Nazi mass murders based on eliminationist theories of parasitism—that the Jews/bourgeoisie were exploitive parasites whose elimination would liberate the Aryans/proletariat—mobilised state action for such slaughter.
In the Nazi case, such murder proved much easier to do when Jews were stripped of the protection of a state—either because the state they were citizens of was destroyed or they were shipped outside its jurisdiction. The most successful rescuers of Jews were diplomats, because they could invoke the authority of their state. We are back to the ordering role of the state.
If one can work out a clear framework of what constitutes predatory, including parasitic, behaviour within human societies, the only point of a notion of exploitation is rhetorical. One that comes with a lot of very unfortunate, false—indeed murderously false—baggage.
"We need to separate important from harmonious. The microbiome is incredibily important but it doesn't mean that it's harmonious," says evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers. A well-functioning partnership could easily be seen as a case of reciprocal exploitation. "Both partners may benefit but there's this inherent tension. Symbiosis is conflict -- conflict that can never by totally resolved." -Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes, Ch 4
I agree with your analysis of al-Gharbi, in that he adopts a Marxist framing, with the surprise twist being that the those of us in academia who consider ourselves to be the good people should think again.
On the economic side, al-Gharbi is generally critical of "neoliberalism" because it produces wealthy winners who exploit the working class. With regards to academics and many other knowledge workers, he critiques them because while they consider themselves champions of the poor, many of their progressive stances are shallow and performative (e.g., support for preferred pronouns), but, practically, they often advance their own class interests by being gatekeepers at elite institutions.
Ok, maybe it is a weakly Marxist framing, as long as you didn't mean to say, wealthy winners who ALL exploit. As you stated it, that all sounds true to me.
Any capitalist who doesn't acknowledge some people suffer under "perfect" capitalism isn't honest. It's just that more tend to suffer under alternatives. Worst system except all the others.
“The exploiter-exploited framework allows al-Gharbi to treat all symbolic professionals as members of the exploiter class.“ Sounds like I don’t need to read this book. Thanks again Arnold.
Couple of observations. Food safety inspectors are parasites; how do I know? Because I worked with USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service for a time, but I also know by my second observation. Exchange among humans, which includes an enormous range of human interaction, is voluntary and therefore productive. Interactions that are not voluntary are two things at once: parasitic (to use your taxonomy) and immoral (to use mine).
we can have universal health by shutting down the USDA & FDA... these captured agencies only limit the liability of the industries they're supposedly regulating...
"Poke-and sniff often entailed having an inspector "poke" a piece of meat with a rod and "sniff" the rod to determine, in the inspector's opinion, whether the meat contained pathogens. This method meant that the hands, eyes, and noses of inspectors were to be literally the front line of the USDA's food-safety regime.
"The problem? "[I]f a piece of meat was in fact tainted but the inspector's eyes or nose could not detect the contamination after he poked the meat, the inspector would again use his hands or the same rod to poke the next piece of meat, and the next, and so on.""
Tell me what the USDA does that cannot be accomplished by victims holding meat packers liable.
I have direct experience with many aspects of USDA for not having worked within it. APHIS, ARS, AMS, 4-H, to name several. I also have experience with the FDA (but an overall less positive view, on the whole, even of CFSAN).
The USDA performs many useful functions that it has been given under public trust; some of which could probably be performed more efficiently by the private sector, but others which critically build trust between the producer community and the consumer public. Relying on tort as the backbone of all quality assurance is a pretty horrible idea; if inspection weren't performed by a government agency, there would need to be some NGO sponsored by industry to effectively perform the same function.
Then I do not believe you have much faith in individual responsibility. Why is your first thought that government is best, that an NGO is second best, and nothing else is good enough? Why do you think that companies don't care about their reputations? That is, after all, why they advertise so much, and why cronies like government to shield them from mistakes.
The Bud Light DEI fiasco shows how fast the public responds to corporate mistakes. No legacy judicial systems comes even close. No crony bureaucracy comes even close. If you don't like the Bud Light DEI fiasco, remember the Tylenol poisoning case from 40 years ago.
Government has no skin in the game, except preserving and expanding their fiefdom, and solving problems would reduce their fiefdom, not expand it.
Why is that my thought? Because of history and game theory. A monopoly can preserve a reputation, sure, but if a commodity is produced by many entities, some who cheat on quality arise. Having a stand-alone body that keeps the standards (like NIST) is necessary, and has been recognized as a government function since antiquity. It's one of the first things created by the US executive branch, along with the office of the Geographer.
There will always be a small minority (or maybe it isn't small) that drifts towards shortcuts that compromise safety. That focus on the short-term gain, ignoring the long-term consequence, is a common human tendency. When it comes to food and food pathogens, this is unacceptable and is the benefit of inspectors. The ability to sue after the fact is not a solution to this problem. The apparent addition of less helpful or even harmful activities of food inspectors does not invalidate the underlying justification even if the harms are greater.
But that's just the point! The USDA and all regulators take the precautionary principle to heart, of banning something until it's been proven 100% safe, and yet still have a terrible track record even in 100 year old fields like meat inspection.
Taking action after the fact is how criminal law works. Minority Report would be a terrible reality, but it is how inspectors and regulators work.
Fly-by-night operators are the only ones who have no reputation to lose and don't mind the risks of contaminated food, and they are the ones who regulators leave alone. It's the established brands who have everything to lose and guard their reputations who the regulators waste their time on.
Look at Bud Lite and several other corporations who dropped DEI like a hot rock as soon as it threatened their reputations and sales. They are not the ones who need precautionary inspectors.
the question is who should perform the inspection... Underwriters Laboratories (UL), Consumer Reports, Snell, etc are private entities... you wouldn't voluntarily buy an electrical product without a UL label on it... and, companies voluntarily send their products to be tested...
USDA has also given sugar GRAS status... "But right at the outset I can make two key statements that no one can refute:
"First, there is no physiological requirement for sugar; all human nutritional needs can be met in full without having to take a single spoon of white or brown or raw sugar, on its own or in any food or drink.
"Secondly, if only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned." -John Yudkin, Pure, White, and Deadly
* I bet not 1 in 1000 consumers ever looks for UL approval. I'd be surprised if 1 in 10 even know what the UL tag means.
* UL certification is meaningless. A company which intentionally designs, builds, and sells defective equipment will be sued into oblivion regardless.
* UL certification is especially no shield against being sued. I have never heard of any company deflecting lawsuits to UL because the product was certified by UL.
It would be no different if UL were a government agency.
Usda incorrectly identified one of my family farms chickens as having salmonella, meant they took & killed the bird for further testing. Just bevause the inspector did not check the blood plate on site at the correct time. Total waste.
If an activity is value producing it will ordinarily take place through voluntary exchange, with few exceptions. Individuals working as government operatives are not typically vile, parasitic persons; of course not. But if they were not working as a government operative, they would be working at something more valuable.
Again, not defending the idea that *government* in 2024 should be doing food safety inspections.
Doesn’t change the fact that in aggregate having people doing the job of inspecting food safety is mostly a good, “productive” thing, and that the people doing such inspections are not “parasites”.
Whereas, e.g. people doing the job of occupational licensing the ability to braid women’s hair are not doing something productive and so are “parasites”.
This is independent of the morality of the people in question in each case.
Pretty sure this is the point AK was making. And with which I concur.
I'll push back a bit. Do you really think that people producing food want to make you sick with their food? Do you really think that some government operative has greater interest in your health than companies producing and wanting to sell you food?
I like Arnold Kling just fine, but he doesn't know much about food safety inspection. By happenstance, I had experience with the USDA and its Food Safety Inspection Service, and they are mostly not productive in any sense of the words that makes sense.
I'll stand by my observation about voluntary exchange and morality. If someone needs to use force or threat of force or fraud to accomplish something, that is immoral. Government regulation does all three.
I keep telling you I am NOT in favor of the government being in the business of food safety inspection. I’m surely not as extreme as you are in your last paragraph, but I am equally surely closer to your view than at least 98% of Americans are. So please stop repeating that point and focus on the *actual* discussion of the value of the role.
Just because government should not be doing it doesn’t meant that a quality control function in food processing is without merit, because of course it does have merit.
And just as corporations have auditors, and has accounting departments that audit other departments within an organization, yes there is value with someone other than the people doing the actual production doing an audit of food production practices.
Hence the point that the *role* has SOME productive purpose (please don’t bog down into discussions of some large fraction of what actual FDA inspectors do not having productive purpose; I happily acknowledge that point).
In contrast to a bureaucracy that does occupational licensing of hair-braiding, where there is no productive purpose to the role in question, regardless of who performs it.
Well, I've said what I have to say, so I will take your advice and not repeat it again. Let me ask you to write in one compact sentence what you thin your point is that I'm not processing. Evidently, I'm missing it.
One take on how we got here -- with specific suggestions on how we could fix the problem in the financials and the financial industry is Roger Martin's _Fixing the Game_. His position is that when businesses went from the idea that the purpose of a business was customer-focused ... the purpose of a business is to create a happy customer ... to maximising shareholder value, we lost something very important. It is as if, in football, we went from betting on the results of the game to betting on the spread. In the process we stopped focusing on *being good at our business* and ended up centralising things and destroying the local accumulation of local prestige, power, and civic feeling. Instead of being a person who is 'respected in the local community' you ended up with a local community that can only deal with agents from far away places, who neither understand nor respect the local conditions -- or the locals.
The book is old, and is written in a more simplistic style than I would prefer -- hey, it's
for business people and this is the style popular business books are written in -- but I think its great problem is that it was written before the public was particularly interested in the message. But the recent interest in betting markets for propositions, and all of Bryan Caplan's work has made the idea easier to get across. A really juicy sports scandal where a professional teams was caught not trying to win games, but trying to manage the spread would also do wonders in promoting this idea. At any rate, worth another look? Do his reforms of the financial markets make sense today, or were they ideas whose time has already come and gone (or whose were never such a good idea in the first place?)
But it proivides a piece of the puzzle -- exactly why it is that going more abstract has worked out into worse products and instititions -- without going full class warfare 'whatever the bourgeousie are doing is bad, now they are doing symbolic manipulation, symbolic manipulation is bad q.e.d.
"2) Unless the person is a risk taker, the higher up in any organization, the more you can dispense with him/her. If the nonentrepreneur CEO of [name your company] did not exist, the world would be the same. Or better." -nntaleb on X, 6:24 PM · Apr 22, 2018
I'd really be interested in what Nasim Taleb thinks of Martin's book, which is not about _management_ but about changing the incentives of how we reward businesses and executives. Because he has some pretty strong opinions about that as well.
I think there's a larger point, inspired by BenK's comment on the need for a new language. I'm a lawyer (law professor mostly) and so I will use lawyers as the example, but I think this is a general point. If we're going to divide lawyers into producers/parasites, most people's first cut would probably put (based on stereotypes) tort lawyers on the parasite side and people who write wills and draft corporate charters for business people on the producer side. But some tort lawyers are good and useful (ones that sue on behalf of people genuinely injured by another's negligence - that produces good incentives as well as addressing a loss) and some business lawyers or estate planning lawyers are scoundrels who are actually engaged in bad behavior by facilitating creating a thinly capitalized entity that goes on to be negligent but lacks the assets to pay off its victims. So perhaps we should focus on "enablers" (who facilitate the creation of wealth and meet people's needs for things like estate plans) and "impeders" (not a great word) who are busy seeking to redistribute wealth, engage in regulation by litigation, etc. - mostly use the law to impede the creation of wealth or people's ability to satisfy their personal desires. Probably more government lawyers are impeders than enablers, but some government lawyers actually do enable (people drafting clear, useful, transaction-cost-reducing legislation to enable new business entities, for example, or who work in the PTO to make the IP system function, etc.) Most likely, there are plenty of lawyers who do a bit of both.
No, needing ones makes you hate them more especially after you start to interact with them and realize they are even more reprehensible than you could have even imagined.
You are certainly following on the train of logic; it requires a bit more care to distinguish and dissect. Let's take fashion. Certain companies have a system of 'fast fashion' which meets peoples' desires for new styles quickly. They also have rapid manufacturing. So quickly are new items designed and produced, in fact, that they overshoot in production and end up making many articles that are never worn. This is waste. Something could be done to retard the process and it would probably be good at the social level, but if it brought it back to the earlier norms, that would mean that people wouldn't be able to get the number of items and styles of items at the price and timeliness they apparently want. Some of that demand is stimulated by advertising, which can be good (helping people find things that meet their needs) or bad (creating needs which are harmful to the people). In Arnold's networked economy, it creates regions of relationship discoverability that make life livable by facilitating the creation of new network edges. We need a more sophisticated economics (probably includes Farmer's chaos) to better assess the layered roles of positive (sometimes to excess) and negative (sometimes to excess) activity in society.
One of the things that strikes me is that as society gets more 'abundant' it is easier to saturate production and discourage excess through marginal costs; saturating prevention is basically impossible there is an asymptote there. Also, the anxiety about excess production and waste stimulates a kind of disgust, but decay handles it for us (most of the time). Excess prevention is essentially invisible, and anxiety can ratchet up demand based on edge risks that become rare incidents (i.e. one guy somewhere might have/almost was hurt...).
I don't think your example produces as much as waste as you might imagine in any reasonably free market economy, unless you assume everybody is fashion forward. There are likely to be plenty of 'slow fashion' to 'no fashion' people perfectly willing to buy those 'outdated' goods and so long as the company can sell them for above some marginal production cost there isn't any wastage.
It's odd criminals are categorically considerate parasites given many, if not most, are producers. I mean is the cattle farmer who sells raw milk to his neighbor really a parasite.
I know that wasn't an argument you made, just referenced, I just find it odd.
One of the problems is relying on statutes to define criminals. My definition of criminal is anyone who intentionally harms somebody else. Recklessness and negligence can also cause harm, but not necessarily criminally.
Your distinction between producer and parasite seem completely arbitrary. The way you have defined it, it seems to me that every occupation can be either productive or parasitical depending on how it is executed. That's really no help at all. In my opinion, this is a disturbingly reductionist way to look at the economy and the world. But thanks for the introduction to Mr. Al-Gharbi. I will avoid his work at all costs.
producers vs parasites are extremely moralistic and loaded terms, to a degree that gets in the way of analytic clarity.
A lot of economic roles in the modern private sector are about manipulating the consumer, for example various forms of internet advertising and designing addictive clickbait etc. I wouldn’t want to regulate those out of existence but I’m also not sure how truly productive they are
The question though is why not. One of the few places many libertarians agree on the need for government regulation is to prevent fraud as libertarian Utopia requires good faith contracts based on informed consent. Advertising as you describe is generally fraud, it's actually more sad it hasn't already been stamped out.
Life without advertising would be impoverished. Advertising is how we learn of new products, new travel destinations, new entertainment. It is how brands display their reputations and make themselves valuable enough to protect.
The worst response to scary fraudulent advertising is demanding the government define it, detect it, and protect us from it. Once again, the government judicial system protects the abusers from victim prosecution. The last thing any bureaucrat wants is to solve he problems that justify their existence.
When I'm drawing lines, I tend to put those that manipulate abstractions on one side, and those that work with tangible hard stuff on the other. On the abstraction side there's finance, law, media, education, government/regulatory bodies, .... On the hard tangible side there's construction, health care/medical practitioners, manufacturing, agriculture, logistics...
Then, I revert to my general distaste for plugging anything related to human affairs and activities into mechanical formulas as it limits the amount of humor I can apply to the subject, and therefore a lack of wisdom. Where'd I put my coffee....(?)
Arnold;
You need a new language here.
Can we consider for a moment mendelian genetics, in which some traits are regressive and some are dominant - and it doesn't relate to whether the trait is bad or not, but whether it is the product of turning on a catalytic mechanism or turning it off.
In this case, some people are making things people want and other are preventing things people don't want. They are both, in some sense, serving a purpose for the broader society. However, the way they do it - and what happens to 'excess' - is very different.
This framing is very different framing from traditional exploiter/exploited language, or even rent seeking, or actual parasitism. I think you can quickly see how it gives both sides a possible positive role in society - and a possible negative. At least, maybe, try steel-manning the approach in a post.
This is an excellent point. And "parasite" has uncomfortable echoes of Communist labeling of class enemies.
I immediately had that thought too; in particular, the absence of mention of private roles that individuals play, in other than the economic sphere, has a necessarily Marxian cast. I don’t speak only of women in this regard, of course! - the man who is AK’s “parasite” at the DMV may be something altogether more at home, or in his community - but women are where it meets the road. If you can’t take the feminism out of the man - and I expect most fathers here would look at your daughters and their bright college futures and well-paying if largely parasitic jobs like all the rest and say, you can’t, I won’t! - you can’t quite take the Marxist out either.
I don't disagree with your Mendelian framing suggestion, but I think you and others in these replies are a bit over critical. While Arnold doesn't need my protection, he was very careful to say that 'he doesn't hold tightly to these words.' He's working out ideas, which I think is the point of having a blog. And this framing may be beneficial in working out other ideas later on.
As you say, "They are both, in some sense, serving a purpose for the broader society." When I read his post, I absorbed it through the lens of Solzhenitsyn's 'good/evil...through the heart of every man.' All humans can be good/evil, masculine/feminine, exploiter/exploited, producer/parasite. Often in short succession. We are not static.
I once listened to the Intersectionality guru Kimberly Crenshaw give an interview where she said, 'If we can't name the thing we can't solve the problem.' I thought to myself, "Nah, lady. It's the naming of everything that gets us into trouble in the first place."
Happy new year!
Thank you for the substantial reply. I'd like to see what Arnold does with the comment. My comment isn't an attack on Arnold at all. He's in a process; the choice of 'parasite/producer' as the two labels is a dead-end because it makes the conversation more difficult, more emotionally charged, and less accurate.
He's also applying them, I should note, to 'billets' or economic roles, rather than 'people.' In some circles, the language is 'faces' and 'spaces' or 'personnel' and 'manpower.' Other commentors make note that a person can be a father, a son, a coal miner, etc. That better reflects your observation about how people can occupy and move through roles in time, space. I'm asserting that even the roles are not best dichotomized as producer/parasite to get at what Arnold is really trying to express.
The producer/parasite dichotomy has obvious problems. What about farmers and factory workers who owe the continued existence of their jobs to tariffs and other regulatory barriers making in the process the rest of society worse off? Should one prefer them to upper class professionals because they drink beer and eat burgers instead of eating foie gras with Sauterne? (I understand that upper class professionals in many US cities are banned from eating foie gras but this is still possible in Europe)
And so all the producing conglomerates that earn tax credits that cancel their corporate tax or keep all their profits overseas are also parasites?
Well ... government is the ultimate parasite. Are those who thrive by taking advantage of its loopholes parasites?
Are those who thrive by taking advantage of its loo-holes parasites?
Generally yes.
Does this mean that a responsible producer corporation should not take advantage of laws as written and do things that minimize their taxes? No, of course they should be proper fiduciaries with their shareholder’s capital.
The distinction is in whether they thrive BY such actions or take them as part of being responsible producers.
I doubt very many thrive by either alone, and I'd just as soon not have the government making the distinction. The solution is fewer loopholes, not more bureaucrats plugging them with more loopholes.
I have a different take on government food safety inspectors, indeed all government safety regulations and regulators.
Handing off safety certifications and inspections to the government does not absolve private parties from liability. No manufacturer gets to deflect lawsuits to the government as the one who certified their production facilities. They will be sued for shoddy designs or shoddy production whether or not the government certified them as safe and effective.
Part of the problem is the judiciary, which makes it impractical for private victims to hold manufacturers accountable. Courts are slow and expensive, and I believe deliberately so. Lawyer replies to my comments on the Volokh Conspiracy have bragged that slow and expensive is a feature, not a bug, because it keeps the rifff raff with puny cases out of the legal system, which should only concentrate on important matters and leave the small tedious stuff to regulation.
Whether they are representative of all lawyers or not, that is how the system functions and it does encourage reliance on a corrupt nanny state, where the regulators and the regulators collude almost openly to shut out victims.
This is not a problem peculiar to the US. It is what governments do, because governments are nothing but bureaucrats, whose only measure of success is the size of their budgets, the number of subordinates, and how many new regulations they have written. Private bureaucrats are just as bad, but competition keeps them in check. Or at least it would, if it were not for government bureaucrats coming to the aid of private bureaucrats with more regulations requiring more private bureaucrats to collude with them, since the last thing either wants is to solve problems and put themselves or their "colleagues" out of work.
I have a very dim view of governments and bureaucrats. But that's enough rant on someone else's blog.
"unless the person is perfectly liable, how can they be perfectly responsible? question & attack corporate law..." Karl Hess https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkxdg1XUfkzSra1Y8QedahTjJJgCAXaxmLv
Well, that's interesting at least! (the argument is that corporations which shield individuals from personal liability are anti-libertarian)
My instinctive answer is that corporations are property, and losing one's property for screwing up is hardly dodging liability.
But I don't know enough about corporations and liability to have any better answer.
When General Motors made a mess of ignition switches to save a few bucks and people died, they paid out $900 million in penalties, says Wikipedia. That's hardly dodging liability. It is dodging personal liability, but it wouldn't do anybody any good to hold any individual accountant or engineer, or even a few dozen committee members, personally liable for $900 million. For that matter, how much did it benefit individual victims for the government to collect $900 million?
And there are personal corporations, where my knowledge is so weak that I don't even know what they are called or how they function, other than some vague concept of shielding personal assets like homes from corporate malfeasance. I don't see a problem with that, as long as if everyone who deals with such a corporation knows the limits of personal liability. I also should have the freedom to do business with people who I cannot sue personally for screwing up. I can envision lots of people who would refuse to start businesses if they could lose their home for screwing up; why is it government's business to forbid voluntary contracts which allow such liability shielding?
eradicating the parasites: Make Hammurabi Great Again... do not get on a 737MAX flight without a Boeing exec also onboard... at least Stockton Rush went down with his vessel... the guy packing the parachutes doesn't get to skip the jump... https://youtu.be/0Uc4DI-BF28?t=112
An uncle was a B-24 mechanic during WW II, I believe for coastal patrols out of California. He said they had a rule that everyone who worked on a plane had to be on its first test flight after maintenance was complete.
Parasitic relationships have a clear definition in biology: an interaction that benefits one organism but harms the other that the parasite has an interest in continuing. As E.O.Wilson wrote, parasites are “predators that eat prey in units of less than one”.
The difficulty with human matters is these are not one-to-one relationships but embedded in complex societies where the easiest way to justify something that harms/costs another is to claim wider social benefit. Across human history most states have been predatory, including to those that they rule. Yet, it is clear from the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck—which only a fraction of male lineages survived—that the ordering predation of the state was generally preferable to the disordering predation within stateless societies. States generally domesticate human interactions.
So, you cannot judge whether a role is parasitic without judging the larger context. Even then, it may not be entirely parasitic. Even if it is, it will have some form of “cover”.
Corruption seems obviously parasitic yet may have some utility to a person paying the bribe if it reduces the degree to which regulation blocks otherwise beneficial transactions. Paying bribes is something people choose to do, even if often under some form of coercion. Corruption is predatory, it is parasitic, but may still reduce net social costs, given the existing regulatory framework.
Exploitation is a form of parasitism. It is usually a highly moralised term that lacks even the implicit grounding in biological usage.
Marx’s theory of surplus value casts commerce as inherently parasitic, which is flatly false. Worse, it is an eliminationist theory of parasitism. Such theories are ready justifications for mass murder, and have been used as such by both Marxists and Nazis, among others.
Massacres of market-dominant minorities that date back millennia are usually based on some notion of them being parasites, as how commerce makes money can often seem mysterious to outsiders. Communist and Nazi mass murders based on eliminationist theories of parasitism—that the Jews/bourgeoisie were exploitive parasites whose elimination would liberate the Aryans/proletariat—mobilised state action for such slaughter.
In the Nazi case, such murder proved much easier to do when Jews were stripped of the protection of a state—either because the state they were citizens of was destroyed or they were shipped outside its jurisdiction. The most successful rescuers of Jews were diplomats, because they could invoke the authority of their state. We are back to the ordering role of the state.
If one can work out a clear framework of what constitutes predatory, including parasitic, behaviour within human societies, the only point of a notion of exploitation is rhetorical. One that comes with a lot of very unfortunate, false—indeed murderously false—baggage.
"We need to separate important from harmonious. The microbiome is incredibily important but it doesn't mean that it's harmonious," says evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers. A well-functioning partnership could easily be seen as a case of reciprocal exploitation. "Both partners may benefit but there's this inherent tension. Symbiosis is conflict -- conflict that can never by totally resolved." -Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes, Ch 4
I agree with your analysis of al-Gharbi, in that he adopts a Marxist framing, with the surprise twist being that the those of us in academia who consider ourselves to be the good people should think again.
Can you explain further?
On the economic side, al-Gharbi is generally critical of "neoliberalism" because it produces wealthy winners who exploit the working class. With regards to academics and many other knowledge workers, he critiques them because while they consider themselves champions of the poor, many of their progressive stances are shallow and performative (e.g., support for preferred pronouns), but, practically, they often advance their own class interests by being gatekeepers at elite institutions.
Ok, maybe it is a weakly Marxist framing, as long as you didn't mean to say, wealthy winners who ALL exploit. As you stated it, that all sounds true to me.
Any capitalist who doesn't acknowledge some people suffer under "perfect" capitalism isn't honest. It's just that more tend to suffer under alternatives. Worst system except all the others.
“The exploiter-exploited framework allows al-Gharbi to treat all symbolic professionals as members of the exploiter class.“ Sounds like I don’t need to read this book. Thanks again Arnold.
Couple of observations. Food safety inspectors are parasites; how do I know? Because I worked with USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service for a time, but I also know by my second observation. Exchange among humans, which includes an enormous range of human interaction, is voluntary and therefore productive. Interactions that are not voluntary are two things at once: parasitic (to use your taxonomy) and immoral (to use mine).
we can have universal health by shutting down the USDA & FDA... these captured agencies only limit the liability of the industries they're supposedly regulating...
That's really pretty silly. You don't know much about the USDA, for one.
Do you?
https://reason.com/2012/06/30/the-sickening-nature-of-many-food-safety/
"Poke-and sniff often entailed having an inspector "poke" a piece of meat with a rod and "sniff" the rod to determine, in the inspector's opinion, whether the meat contained pathogens. This method meant that the hands, eyes, and noses of inspectors were to be literally the front line of the USDA's food-safety regime.
"The problem? "[I]f a piece of meat was in fact tainted but the inspector's eyes or nose could not detect the contamination after he poked the meat, the inspector would again use his hands or the same rod to poke the next piece of meat, and the next, and so on.""
Tell me what the USDA does that cannot be accomplished by victims holding meat packers liable.
I have direct experience with many aspects of USDA for not having worked within it. APHIS, ARS, AMS, 4-H, to name several. I also have experience with the FDA (but an overall less positive view, on the whole, even of CFSAN).
The USDA performs many useful functions that it has been given under public trust; some of which could probably be performed more efficiently by the private sector, but others which critically build trust between the producer community and the consumer public. Relying on tort as the backbone of all quality assurance is a pretty horrible idea; if inspection weren't performed by a government agency, there would need to be some NGO sponsored by industry to effectively perform the same function.
Then I do not believe you have much faith in individual responsibility. Why is your first thought that government is best, that an NGO is second best, and nothing else is good enough? Why do you think that companies don't care about their reputations? That is, after all, why they advertise so much, and why cronies like government to shield them from mistakes.
The Bud Light DEI fiasco shows how fast the public responds to corporate mistakes. No legacy judicial systems comes even close. No crony bureaucracy comes even close. If you don't like the Bud Light DEI fiasco, remember the Tylenol poisoning case from 40 years ago.
Government has no skin in the game, except preserving and expanding their fiefdom, and solving problems would reduce their fiefdom, not expand it.
Why is that my thought? Because of history and game theory. A monopoly can preserve a reputation, sure, but if a commodity is produced by many entities, some who cheat on quality arise. Having a stand-alone body that keeps the standards (like NIST) is necessary, and has been recognized as a government function since antiquity. It's one of the first things created by the US executive branch, along with the office of the Geographer.
There will always be a small minority (or maybe it isn't small) that drifts towards shortcuts that compromise safety. That focus on the short-term gain, ignoring the long-term consequence, is a common human tendency. When it comes to food and food pathogens, this is unacceptable and is the benefit of inspectors. The ability to sue after the fact is not a solution to this problem. The apparent addition of less helpful or even harmful activities of food inspectors does not invalidate the underlying justification even if the harms are greater.
But that's just the point! The USDA and all regulators take the precautionary principle to heart, of banning something until it's been proven 100% safe, and yet still have a terrible track record even in 100 year old fields like meat inspection.
Taking action after the fact is how criminal law works. Minority Report would be a terrible reality, but it is how inspectors and regulators work.
Fly-by-night operators are the only ones who have no reputation to lose and don't mind the risks of contaminated food, and they are the ones who regulators leave alone. It's the established brands who have everything to lose and guard their reputations who the regulators waste their time on.
Look at Bud Lite and several other corporations who dropped DEI like a hot rock as soon as it threatened their reputations and sales. They are not the ones who need precautionary inspectors.
That is how government bureaucrats work.
I'm not sure what you intended in the last comment but we must be talking about different things.
the question is who should perform the inspection... Underwriters Laboratories (UL), Consumer Reports, Snell, etc are private entities... you wouldn't voluntarily buy an electrical product without a UL label on it... and, companies voluntarily send their products to be tested...
USDA has also given sugar GRAS status... "But right at the outset I can make two key statements that no one can refute:
"First, there is no physiological requirement for sugar; all human nutritional needs can be met in full without having to take a single spoon of white or brown or raw sugar, on its own or in any food or drink.
"Secondly, if only a small fraction of what is already known about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive, that material would promptly be banned." -John Yudkin, Pure, White, and Deadly
Your UL example ignores some things.
* I bet not 1 in 1000 consumers ever looks for UL approval. I'd be surprised if 1 in 10 even know what the UL tag means.
* UL certification is meaningless. A company which intentionally designs, builds, and sells defective equipment will be sued into oblivion regardless.
* UL certification is especially no shield against being sued. I have never heard of any company deflecting lawsuits to UL because the product was certified by UL.
It would be no different if UL were a government agency.
I'm not exactly sure of your intent, but I say the following knowing it isn't directly relevant:
Definitely not Consumer Reports. While much closer, I'd argue UL and Snell do something much different.
Refined sugar has a variety of health benefits in the treatment of those who are ill.
Usda incorrectly identified one of my family farms chickens as having salmonella, meant they took & killed the bird for further testing. Just bevause the inspector did not check the blood plate on site at the correct time. Total waste.
You can believe that the FDA food safety inspection process is wrong, even parasitic.
But that does not negate AK’s point that the *individuals* working in those roles are not parasites, well at least not al/most of them.
They are performing an actually useful function, even if you and I believe that function should not be performed by government.
(Individual inspectors who shake down their targets for money in order to get a passing grade, by contrast, are of course pure parasites).
If an activity is value producing it will ordinarily take place through voluntary exchange, with few exceptions. Individuals working as government operatives are not typically vile, parasitic persons; of course not. But if they were not working as a government operative, they would be working at something more valuable.
Again, not defending the idea that *government* in 2024 should be doing food safety inspections.
Doesn’t change the fact that in aggregate having people doing the job of inspecting food safety is mostly a good, “productive” thing, and that the people doing such inspections are not “parasites”.
Whereas, e.g. people doing the job of occupational licensing the ability to braid women’s hair are not doing something productive and so are “parasites”.
This is independent of the morality of the people in question in each case.
Pretty sure this is the point AK was making. And with which I concur.
I'll push back a bit. Do you really think that people producing food want to make you sick with their food? Do you really think that some government operative has greater interest in your health than companies producing and wanting to sell you food?
I like Arnold Kling just fine, but he doesn't know much about food safety inspection. By happenstance, I had experience with the USDA and its Food Safety Inspection Service, and they are mostly not productive in any sense of the words that makes sense.
I'll stand by my observation about voluntary exchange and morality. If someone needs to use force or threat of force or fraud to accomplish something, that is immoral. Government regulation does all three.
You are not processing the point, sorry.
I keep telling you I am NOT in favor of the government being in the business of food safety inspection. I’m surely not as extreme as you are in your last paragraph, but I am equally surely closer to your view than at least 98% of Americans are. So please stop repeating that point and focus on the *actual* discussion of the value of the role.
Just because government should not be doing it doesn’t meant that a quality control function in food processing is without merit, because of course it does have merit.
And just as corporations have auditors, and has accounting departments that audit other departments within an organization, yes there is value with someone other than the people doing the actual production doing an audit of food production practices.
Hence the point that the *role* has SOME productive purpose (please don’t bog down into discussions of some large fraction of what actual FDA inspectors do not having productive purpose; I happily acknowledge that point).
In contrast to a bureaucracy that does occupational licensing of hair-braiding, where there is no productive purpose to the role in question, regardless of who performs it.
Well, I've said what I have to say, so I will take your advice and not repeat it again. Let me ask you to write in one compact sentence what you thin your point is that I'm not processing. Evidently, I'm missing it.
One take on how we got here -- with specific suggestions on how we could fix the problem in the financials and the financial industry is Roger Martin's _Fixing the Game_. His position is that when businesses went from the idea that the purpose of a business was customer-focused ... the purpose of a business is to create a happy customer ... to maximising shareholder value, we lost something very important. It is as if, in football, we went from betting on the results of the game to betting on the spread. In the process we stopped focusing on *being good at our business* and ended up centralising things and destroying the local accumulation of local prestige, power, and civic feeling. Instead of being a person who is 'respected in the local community' you ended up with a local community that can only deal with agents from far away places, who neither understand nor respect the local conditions -- or the locals.
see: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizing-shareholder-value-the-dumbest-idea-in-the-world/ for a long book review.
The book is old, and is written in a more simplistic style than I would prefer -- hey, it's
for business people and this is the style popular business books are written in -- but I think its great problem is that it was written before the public was particularly interested in the message. But the recent interest in betting markets for propositions, and all of Bryan Caplan's work has made the idea easier to get across. A really juicy sports scandal where a professional teams was caught not trying to win games, but trying to manage the spread would also do wonders in promoting this idea. At any rate, worth another look? Do his reforms of the financial markets make sense today, or were they ideas whose time has already come and gone (or whose were never such a good idea in the first place?)
But it proivides a piece of the puzzle -- exactly why it is that going more abstract has worked out into worse products and instititions -- without going full class warfare 'whatever the bourgeousie are doing is bad, now they are doing symbolic manipulation, symbolic manipulation is bad q.e.d.
"2) Unless the person is a risk taker, the higher up in any organization, the more you can dispense with him/her. If the nonentrepreneur CEO of [name your company] did not exist, the world would be the same. Or better." -nntaleb on X, 6:24 PM · Apr 22, 2018
https://x.com/nntaleb/status/988181851960430592
I'd really be interested in what Nasim Taleb thinks of Martin's book, which is not about _management_ but about changing the incentives of how we reward businesses and executives. Because he has some pretty strong opinions about that as well.
I think there's a larger point, inspired by BenK's comment on the need for a new language. I'm a lawyer (law professor mostly) and so I will use lawyers as the example, but I think this is a general point. If we're going to divide lawyers into producers/parasites, most people's first cut would probably put (based on stereotypes) tort lawyers on the parasite side and people who write wills and draft corporate charters for business people on the producer side. But some tort lawyers are good and useful (ones that sue on behalf of people genuinely injured by another's negligence - that produces good incentives as well as addressing a loss) and some business lawyers or estate planning lawyers are scoundrels who are actually engaged in bad behavior by facilitating creating a thinly capitalized entity that goes on to be negligent but lacks the assets to pay off its victims. So perhaps we should focus on "enablers" (who facilitate the creation of wealth and meet people's needs for things like estate plans) and "impeders" (not a great word) who are busy seeking to redistribute wealth, engage in regulation by litigation, etc. - mostly use the law to impede the creation of wealth or people's ability to satisfy their personal desires. Probably more government lawyers are impeders than enablers, but some government lawyers actually do enable (people drafting clear, useful, transaction-cost-reducing legislation to enable new business entities, for example, or who work in the PTO to make the IP system function, etc.) Most likely, there are plenty of lawyers who do a bit of both.
"Everyone hates lawyers until they need one."
No, needing ones makes you hate them more especially after you start to interact with them and realize they are even more reprehensible than you could have even imagined.
But they only need lawyers because lawyers created the judicial system that requires lawyers.
Imagine a judicial system NOT invented by lawyers.
Then you hate them again when you get the bill.
You are certainly following on the train of logic; it requires a bit more care to distinguish and dissect. Let's take fashion. Certain companies have a system of 'fast fashion' which meets peoples' desires for new styles quickly. They also have rapid manufacturing. So quickly are new items designed and produced, in fact, that they overshoot in production and end up making many articles that are never worn. This is waste. Something could be done to retard the process and it would probably be good at the social level, but if it brought it back to the earlier norms, that would mean that people wouldn't be able to get the number of items and styles of items at the price and timeliness they apparently want. Some of that demand is stimulated by advertising, which can be good (helping people find things that meet their needs) or bad (creating needs which are harmful to the people). In Arnold's networked economy, it creates regions of relationship discoverability that make life livable by facilitating the creation of new network edges. We need a more sophisticated economics (probably includes Farmer's chaos) to better assess the layered roles of positive (sometimes to excess) and negative (sometimes to excess) activity in society.
One of the things that strikes me is that as society gets more 'abundant' it is easier to saturate production and discourage excess through marginal costs; saturating prevention is basically impossible there is an asymptote there. Also, the anxiety about excess production and waste stimulates a kind of disgust, but decay handles it for us (most of the time). Excess prevention is essentially invisible, and anxiety can ratchet up demand based on edge risks that become rare incidents (i.e. one guy somewhere might have/almost was hurt...).
I don't think your example produces as much as waste as you might imagine in any reasonably free market economy, unless you assume everybody is fashion forward. There are likely to be plenty of 'slow fashion' to 'no fashion' people perfectly willing to buy those 'outdated' goods and so long as the company can sell them for above some marginal production cost there isn't any wastage.
Very interesting analysis, Arnold. A great Australian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, made an analogous distinction between lifters and leaners.
It's odd criminals are categorically considerate parasites given many, if not most, are producers. I mean is the cattle farmer who sells raw milk to his neighbor really a parasite.
I know that wasn't an argument you made, just referenced, I just find it odd.
One of the problems is relying on statutes to define criminals. My definition of criminal is anyone who intentionally harms somebody else. Recklessness and negligence can also cause harm, but not necessarily criminally.
I don't disagree yet modern law, and even the public nowadays, does sadly.
Your distinction between producer and parasite seem completely arbitrary. The way you have defined it, it seems to me that every occupation can be either productive or parasitical depending on how it is executed. That's really no help at all. In my opinion, this is a disturbingly reductionist way to look at the economy and the world. But thanks for the introduction to Mr. Al-Gharbi. I will avoid his work at all costs.
producers vs parasites are extremely moralistic and loaded terms, to a degree that gets in the way of analytic clarity.
A lot of economic roles in the modern private sector are about manipulating the consumer, for example various forms of internet advertising and designing addictive clickbait etc. I wouldn’t want to regulate those out of existence but I’m also not sure how truly productive they are
The question though is why not. One of the few places many libertarians agree on the need for government regulation is to prevent fraud as libertarian Utopia requires good faith contracts based on informed consent. Advertising as you describe is generally fraud, it's actually more sad it hasn't already been stamped out.
Life without advertising would be impoverished. Advertising is how we learn of new products, new travel destinations, new entertainment. It is how brands display their reputations and make themselves valuable enough to protect.
You can do advertising without fraud hence my point "as he described" (clickbait for example)
The worst response to scary fraudulent advertising is demanding the government define it, detect it, and protect us from it. Once again, the government judicial system protects the abusers from victim prosecution. The last thing any bureaucrat wants is to solve he problems that justify their existence.
Parasites who hate their hosts would eventually annihilate them and only parasites would remain. Then they would eat their own.
see also Managerial Revolution by James Burnham
When I'm drawing lines, I tend to put those that manipulate abstractions on one side, and those that work with tangible hard stuff on the other. On the abstraction side there's finance, law, media, education, government/regulatory bodies, .... On the hard tangible side there's construction, health care/medical practitioners, manufacturing, agriculture, logistics...
Then, I revert to my general distaste for plugging anything related to human affairs and activities into mechanical formulas as it limits the amount of humor I can apply to the subject, and therefore a lack of wisdom. Where'd I put my coffee....(?)
Happy New Year...