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The right way to fix Social Security

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First, we must identify the problem with Social Security.

The problem is that we are currently promising future retirees whose numbers will grow by rather a lot over the next several decades that their real benefits will keep on increasing forever, and delivering on these promises will impose an ever-increasing burden on younger generations.

That’s it. We’ve made foolish promises, and it wouldn’t be right to overburden those future younger workers by keeping them. The question is, how do we unmake those foolish promises?

One idea that I like (but haven’t heard suggested by anyone else) is to hold constant the percentage of the population collecting benefits – then let the “retirement age” fall where it may. Another one that I like is to switch to price indexing rather than wage indexing – the current standard of living of retirees is such that I wouldn’t have a moral problem with the amount we provide them remaining (in real terms) the same regardless of what gains those who continue to work earn for themselves. I think we’re meeting all conceivable moral obligations to the elderly, and I don’t see any reason to suppose those obligations increase without limit just because we earn more money.

One idea that I most emphatically do not like is the idea of adding in a “personal” account. First, it’s not really yours if it can be used only at the sufferance of the Social Security administration. Second, having the government direct the flow of that large quantity of investment capital, however indirectly, is just asking for trouble. The reason that our investment system works is that people attract investment by convincing people not only that their investment will make money, but that their investment is the best possible use of the investor’s money, better not only than “approved investments”, better not only than any other investment, but better than any other possible present use of that money including consumption. Let bureaucrats who won’t even be gaining or losing their own money have a say, and (much more) money will start flowing to enterprises based on pull rather than merit and profitability, and a lot of the money that would otherwise have gone to fund growth and technological advancement will instead go to waste.

And third, any way you slice it, it will represent an increased burden on those younger workers. They’ll have to keep sending checks to current retirees, and they’ll have to forego even more money to invest whether they have a better use for that money or not. That’s a burden, almost as if they were being taxed, and never mind that they’ll get it back in 40 years if they live that long. If they thought investing in a company on the approved list was the best use of their money, they’d do it without prodding. If not, that means they had something better in mind, perhaps having an additional child, perhaps investing in medical research that could help remove the necessity for retirement in the first place, perhaps an activity that they won’t be able to enjoy at all when they’re retired and their health is failing. Believe it or not, there are more important things than retirement, and continuing to work is not the worst thing in the world. (In fact, there are indications that retiring can itself be detrimental to your health)

Right now the burden of Social Security and Medicare is somewhat less that 15% of one’s income, the balance going into the general fund to pay for other government expenditures. If things don’t change, that burden will in the foreseeable future exceed 15% of your income, by rather a lot when all is said and done. That’s significantly more than 15% of your income being used for no other purpose than to send checks to retired people – that’s before anyone’s paid to defend you, before any roads are built, before any public research is done, before any MRE’s or bombs or bullets are even bought, much less shipped to the field, before any thwarting of the evil plans of the rapacious capitalists can be done, before anyone can be punished for putting dangerous things in their mouths…

Okay, so it’s not all downside :) But isn’t that too much? If not, how much would be too much? And why do retirees have a right to eternally increasing support anyway, and why do workers have an ever-increasing obligation to them? And shouldn’t we cut back on those extravagant promises now, before the people given those promises have come to depend on them and have no good way to adjust?

Proper Incentives

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Capitalism is really and truly a wonderful thing. What it all boils down to is that people are rewarded for providing something of value for their fellow human beings, by the recipient himself according to the judgement of the recipient – not busybodies who purport to speak on behalf of the recipient – as to how valuable that something is. Produce something that actually improves the lives of others from their own point of view, and they’ll reward you; produce nothing but excuses, and they’ll reward someone else who can deliver.

Of course, in order for this system to work as advertised, participants must not be able to substitute force for production. They have to be restricted to getting people to pay them voluntarily; otherwise, stealing wealth is easier and more profitable than earning it or asking nicely for it.

Anarcho-capitalists have suggested that police and military protection can be offered on the competitive market, with continuing customer service, process efficiency, and cost improvements typical of relatively unregulated private industries. The problem there, of course, is that these agencies must use force, and lots of it, in order to do their jobs – but that same force can be used more profitably for plunder rather than protection.

At least for a while. A good long term strategy would be to deliver real protection and generate lots of repeat business from increasingly wealthy customers.

Machiavelli pointed out, long before Adam Smith was even born, that a prince who encourages people to peacefully trade and work and keep their profits from doing so will find his state growing in wealth and strength. For best results, a prince who wanted long term wealth and strength would keep economic and other laws liberal while ruthlessly cracking down on violence and theft, attract productive people from other realms and encourage those at home to exercise their abilities to the utmost, maintain a force sufficient to prevent armed interference from rulers and insurgents more interested in plunder or the cheap thrill of pushing people around, and take just enough from his subjects to keep the operation going, while allowing his geese to lay their golden eggs in peace and leaving most of those golden eggs to hatch into new geese, who lay more golden eggs, and so on. Keep it up long enough, and that prince can end up ruling the Galaxy.

Except, thanks to long-familiar and still unsolved medical afflictions (i.e., the aging process), that prince would have ended up dead long before then. A prince doomed to a short lifespan, as all princes throughout human history were, would find it more profitable over his pitiful lifetime to grab all those golden eggs, throw lavish parties to attract lots of beautiful princesses, maids, etc., sink huge amounts of wealth into half-baked enterprises to grab attention and get more statues of himself built (a poor substitute for actual immortality, but the best available under the circumstances), and if people complain, keep executing them until they shut up.

So we wound up with the republic as a kludgy workaround. If the prince can’t collect the long-term profit that could be had in running the state well, then voters can act as a check on the new republican government to stop it from stealing all their golden eggs. Unfortunately, that tends to degenerate into a situation where the voters scheme to steal the golden eggs from each other, and elected officials still sink large amounts of money in half-baked schemes to attract attention and get their names in the history books (the modern-day equivalent of those old statues).

Which means that, far from ruining society, a cure for aging would lead to lots of noticeable improvements in its governance. Even voters might hesitate to vote for more “benefits” for themselves if the alternative is a huge difference in the overall wealth available in their society, and the ease in earning it for oneself, in two hundred years’ time. And libertarian kings and dictators, unfortunately an extremely endangered species up to now, might find themselves in the drivers’ seat and exploit the opportunity to become absolute rulers of humanity’s next superpowers.

Are flying cars too dangerous to be permitted?

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A lot of people seem to think so. A good part of this perception, as far as I can tell, comes from a misunderstanding of the way society would look after the skycar came into general use.

When people recoil in horror at the thought of cheap flying cars, they seem to envision a city much like the ones we live in with those idiots they share the road with trying to navigate our accustomed traffic density in three dimensions. They imagine millions of the things flying over a few dozen square miles of city, with cars falling out of the sky through accident or mechanical failure and inevitably crashing into a building or residence far too often for anyone’s comfort.

All of which fails to address one fundamental question: why do cities exist in the first place?

They exist because they drastically lower the cost, in time and money, for people to trade and socialize, and thereby drastically increase the number of people they can feasibly choose from to trade and socialize with. This leads to more competition as well as larger markets for enterprises of every kind; the latter allows products, services, jobs, and enterprises to exist that couldn’t show a profit if they were limited to serving smaller markets.

For all of these purposes, the flying car serves not as a means of traveling within a city, but as a substitute for the city itself! Instead of shortening the distance between people and enterprises by crowding them into a city, the skycar shortens the travel time while allowing the people themselves to live hundreds of miles away from their jobs, their friends, and their favorite shops. A few dozen houses may be clumped together in a single clearing, or a single house may stand on its own, but in either case small neighborhoods and single office buildings/strip malls/large stores will be surrounded by miles of wilderness, and people will spend most of their time endangering nothing but trees or grass if they happen to suffer mechanical failure, and enjoying plenty of space between themselves and the nearest fellow traveler.

How do we get there from here? Simple – allow ordinary people to operate skycars/aircraft/etc. anywhere except over cities. Even better, let anyone operate an aircraft anywhere if they get sufficient liability insurance – and the insurance companies will profit by setting appropriate rates and conditions. Either way, people flying their own vehicles will tend to avoid population centers, enterprises wishing to sell to or employ such people will start locating away from population centers, and as sales volume and penetration increases and prices go down, the countryside will become more desirable and large population centers less desirable as places to live, work, or operate a business.

And the end result will be better and safer than what we have now. Against a dispersed population, most terrorist attacks, even with nuclear weapons, would yield disappointing results (a notable exception being contagious diseases). While natural disasters are not as much of a threat for us as they once were, there are potential disasters that could still exact large loss of life in today’s concentrated population centers – a direct hit on New Orleans by a hurricane being one example – that would be drastically mitigated by lower population concentrations and faster evacuation capability. Profit opportunities will open up in the development of vehicles that are easy to control safely, opportunities that don’t exist today because no one who isn’t trained to use today’s not-so-user-friendly controls is permitted to fly a craft with any controls.

And when you get right down to it, it’s a travesty that, more than a hundred years after the Wright Brothers’ pioneering flight, practically all of us are still driving glorified Model T’s and seem to accept without a second thought that our children and even our grandchildren will do so as well. What happened to us?

Score another for Niven & Pournelle

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As you may know, these are the guys who wrote a novel about a comet-strike disaster – before anyone had a notion that such a strike might have killed off the dinosaurs, and more than 20 years before observations of comet strikes on Jupiter pretty much confirmed their predictions of its effects. (Update: I’m speaking of Lucifer’s Hammer)

Now a new study suggests that another of their works (with Michael Flynn), Fallen Angels, is much closer to the truth than one might have assumed when it first came out. In the novel, the ecofanatics prevail, the use of technology and particularly energy is severely restricted, and the emission of greenhouse gases by human activity is successfully curtailed – and as a result, a new ice age grips the Earth, with parts of the US and most of Canada covered by thick sheets of ice.

According to the article, “there is evidence that changes in solar radiation and greenhouse gas concentrations should have driven the Earth towards glacial conditions over the last few thousand years. “, but such a disaster was prevented by the release of those dreaded greenhouse gases by humans over the last 8000 years.

Now those favoring severe restrictions on the use of energy have spent the last couple of years insisting that the evidence for global climate change is pretty rock-solid and leaping from there to the notion that their favored restrictions need to be enacted without delay to head off disaster, without ever pausing to consider the question of whether human-caused climate change represents a degradation or an improvement of the environment. If it’s caused by humans, and especially if it’s caused by humans acting to solve their own problems and make their own lives better instead of wagging their tails and waiting for their betters to give them what they need, then it must be bad. Now this assumption that H. Sapiens and all his works are a blight upon the Earth is receiving closer scrutiny, and so far it’s not looking good for the prosecution.

I highly recommend you read both novels if you haven’t already. It’s nice to read stories and writings by people who believe that human beings using their minds and building progressively more powerful tools for solving their problems is fundamentally a good and noble activity rather than a desecration of some mythical benevolent “nature”.

Things that make you go “huh?”

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Are the people at the Washington Post bragging that they’re jumping to bogus conclusions to push a political agenda? Or do they think we’re so dim that we won’t notice even when they wave a big sign in front of our faces?

And didn’t there used to be people whose job it was to throw articles like this in the trash before they appeared in print where everybody could see them and laugh at them?

The article seems to make a good start – after the obligatory reference to alarmed experts – by presenting us with an actual data point. This is an interesting data point – the use of contraception among women over 21 seems to have declined lately.

Why? You’ll search in vain for a statement of the reason. In fact, you get a direct admission about halfway down that the writer of the article and the people interviewed don’t really have the first clue as to why this is – “theories” include “gaps in sex education” (you’re kidding, right?), the “cost of birth control” (did it go up? If it’s constant, how would it explain a decline in its use?), “declining insurance coverage”, “fears of possible side effects of contraceptives” and “personal attitudes about childbearing” (!)

That’s right, folks, they can’t even tell us whether the number of people who are trying to conceive has changed! This right there is crucial information in determining whether a decline in birth control use is “alarming” or “completely expected”. And you’ll search in vain for any mention of whether all or part of the population interviewed is married, or whether the proportion of married women in the sample and in the population at large increased.

Here again – “The December report did not tabulate unintended pregnancies, though preliminary information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found a slight increase in the birth rate in 2003, most notably in women older than 30.” Are these people trying to confuse us by talking about unintended pregancies (by admitting they don’t have a fricking clue about them), then switching to the overall birth rate to point out an increase there? The quality of the propaganda is disappointing – is this the best they can do?

And yet, given such staggering ignorance, half the article consists of crap about uninsured Americans, abstinence education, ignorance about birth control, and other things that haven’t even been established as having anything at all to do with the purported subject of the article. Paul Blumenthal of Johns Hopkins even pushes the theory that “more women have found the cost of birth control burdensome.”

As compared to what? Having a baby? Are you kidding me? And look at this gem: “It is absolutely unconscionable that women have a co-pay of $20 or $25 [a month] for contraceptives and men are getting off scot-free”. Yes, it’s “unconscionable’ that people are buying birth control with their own frigging money! And the only way that men are getting off “scot-free” is if they’re not married to the woman (otherwise, they’re damn well chipping in for the cost), and in that case, she’s taking an awfully big risk of disease if her pills are the only protection used.

And finally, we see a quote suggesting a “considerable drop” in comprehensive sex education from 1988 to 2000″, followed immediately by “Blumenthal has encountered women who mistakenly believe they are infertile because of age or confusion about a missed period” – as if women who think they’re infertile because of age could have possibly been affected by the considerable drop in comprehensive sex education since 1988! Such women are at most 35 years old!

You know, when I heard about the big bad leftist news media that was going to swing elections 15 points and all that, I expected better propaganda than this. With that kind of pathetic effort, it’s no wonder they went down in flames.