Boccaccio's Typology of Plague Responses

Completely coincidentally, I happened to be part of a Decameron reading group as the Coronavirus pandemic hit. We have managed to continue the reading group on Zoom (not in a country estate) as we continue to work through the book.

The book is set in the midst of the Florentine Black Death of 1348. In a marvelous introduction, Boccaccio describes the effect of the plague on life in the city. I was especially struck by this passage, which applies just as well to the range of Coronavirus reactions today:

Some people were of the opinion that living moderately and being abstemious would really help them resist the disease. They, therefore, formed themselves into companies and lived in isolation from everyone else. Having come together, they shut themselves up inside houses where no one was sick and they had ample means to live well, so that, while avoiding overindulgence, they still enjoyed the most delicate foods and the best wines in moderation. They would not speak with anyone from outside, nor did they want to hear any news about the dead and the dying, and instead, they passed their time playing music and enjoying whatever other amusements they could devise.  

Others, holding the contrary opinion, maintained that the surest medicine for such an evil disease was to drink heavily, enjoy life's pleasures, and go about singing and having fun, satisfying their appetites by any means available, while laughing at everything and turning whatever happened into a joke. Moreover, they practiced what they preached to the best of their ability, for they went from one tavern to another, drinking to excess both day and night. They did their drinking more freely in private homes, however, provided that they found something there to enjoy or that held out the promise of pleasure. ... And yet, while these people behaved like wild animals, they always took great care to avoid any contact at all with the sick. 

In the midst of so much affliction and misery in our city, the respect for the reverend authority of the laws, both divine and human, had declined just about to the vanishing point, for, like everyone else, their officers and executors, who were not dead or sick themselves, had so few personnel that they could not fulfill their duties. Thus, people felt free to behave however they liked. 

There were many others who took a middle course between the two already mentioned, neither restricting their diet so much as the first, nor letting themselves go in drinking and other forms of dissipation as much as the second, but doing just enough to satisfy their appetites. Instead of shutting themselves up, they went about, some carrying flowers in their hands, others with sweet-smelling herbs, and yet others with various kinds of spices. They would repeatedly hold these things up to their noses, for they thought the best course was to fortify the brain with such odors against the stinking air that seemed to be saturated with the stench of dead bodies and disease and medicine. Others, choosing what may have been the safer alternative, cruelly maintained that no medicine was better or more effective against the plague than flight.

All these reactions are on display today. Although it's worth noting that the abstemious group in Florence still permitted themselves to drink and wisely closed themselves off from news of the plague. The extreme shut-ins today have, regrettably, chosen to closely follow hourly pandemic updates, and to share their findings with great exuberance online.

Most amusing, however, is Boccaccio's flat assessment of the success rates of the various strategies:

Of the people holding these varied opinions, not all of them died, but, by the same token, not all of them survived. On the contrary, many proponents of each view got sick here, there, and everywhere.

Boccaccio's probably right about that. Then again, he didn't know about "flattening the curve." Such progress we have made!

John Stuart Mill on Tone Policing

I had forgotten this argument from the final few pages of JS Mill's famous chapter, "Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion" in On Liberty. Mill raises the question of offensive speech. He puts to himself an objection: "the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion."

This particular objection deals with speech that offends in its tone/style/presentation, rather than in its content. Mill deals with that other species of offensive speech at length earlier in the chapter.

Mill says a number of things in response to the objection from intemperate tone. He notes, predictably, the impossibility of clearly setting what the "bounds of fair discussion" might be. He adds further that speech that offends often does so because it touches the truth in an uncomfortable manner.

But then he makes the following, more interesting point:

"With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use, is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions." 

In short, critics of "intemperate speech" have no credibility, because they only attack these tools when they come from the defenders of unpopular opinions. The majority is free to mock, ridicule, and satirize the minority. But when the minority deploys the same tools, they are scolded for intemperance or a lack of charity.

That observation rings true to me. "Trolling" is an abusive form of speech when it is deployed to target mainstream views. But it is a righteous form of mockery when it is deployed against dangerous ideas--i.e., non-dominant perspectives.

Mill continues by spelling out the unfairness that results from this dishonest use of tone policing:

"In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them." 

That too comports with my experience. When disagreeing with the conventional wisdom, an extraordinary degree of caution, precision, and moderation is required. You must begin by granting the kernel of truth--however minuscule--there might be in the mainstream view you oppose. You must distance yourself from those who share your views but articulate them in a relatively inartful manner. (Note, none of these caveats are required for defenders of the dominant view). You begin with apologies and dull precision, the other side begins with mockery and hyperbolic condemnation. You are fated to lose the debate.

Necessary Capitalist Deceptions

A professor recently brought to my attention this wonderful passage from Keynes' A Tract on Monetary Reform':

No man of spirit will consent to remain poor if he believes his betters to have gained their goods by lucky gambling. To convert the business man into the profiteer is to strike a blow at capitalism, because it destroys the psychological equilibrium which permits the perpetuance of unequal rewards. The economic doctrine of normal profits, vaguely apprehended by every one, is a necessary condition for the justification of capitalism. The business man is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society. (25-26).

This came up in the context of a classmate's presentation of a wonderful working paper of his. He is thinking through the connection between economic theories of value (labor and capital's respective contributions to production) and normative theories of distributive justice (the degree to which prevailing distributions of income are just).

His paper looked at this question through Marx's discussion of commodity fetishism and classical economics. The great question that emerged from his paper was what *kind* of connection we should expect to find between theories of how wealth is created and theories of who deserves what share of that wealth.

Keynes' point in this passage is that (1) we will only tolerate inequalities of wealth IF we believe that those inequalities in some sense are understood to be just. And (2) we understand gains to be just if they are connected to someone's contribution to society.

This makes sense as a general sociological explanation for the persistent toleration of the material inequality generated by market systems. It is also the position defended explicitly by Greg Mankiw in his "Defending the One Percent" and his earlier "Spreading the Wealth Around." There, Mankiw argues that we should accept the extraordinary wealth of the 1% not just because the economic system that generates this inequality is beneficial to the rest of society, but because the rich deserve their tremendous wealth in virtue of their tremendous contributions.

We deserve what we contribute, and the rich contributed a lot more. Here's Mankiw in "Spreading the Wealth:"

Let me propose the following principle: People should get what they deserve. A person who  contributes more to society deserves a higher income that reflects those greater contributions. Society permits him that higher income not just to incentivize him, as it does according to utilitarian theory, but because that income is rightfully his. This perspective is, I believe, what Robert Nozick, Milton Friedman, and other classically liberal writers have in mind. We might call it the Just Deserts Theory.

Though Mankiw *claims* he is channeling the tradition of Nozick, Friedman, and other classical liberal philosophers, he is actually repudiating their central arguments for capitalism.

Friedman, I believe but haven't confirmed, resists the language of "moral desert," and prefers to speak instead just in terms of the consequentialist benefits of the market economy.

Nozick, as Mankiw acknowledges in the paper, explicitly rejects any "patterned theory of justice" according to which people are paid what they deserve. For Nozick, justice does not inhere in broad patterns of social distribution, EVEN a pattern on which people are paid precisely what they contribute. Justice inheres MERELY in the free, contractual agreements that individual agents reach.

Hayek is probably the most extreme case in this respect. Hayek argues vehemently against any theory of justice that connects income with moral desert. Contra Mankiw, Hayek is insistent that there is no such thing as "value to society." Articulating the classic subjectivist position, he writes in The Mirage of Social Justice:

though the conception of a 'value to society' is sometimes carelessly used even by economists, there is strictly no such thing and the expression implies the same sort of anthropomorphism or personification of society as the term 'social justice'. Services can have value only to particular people (or an organization), and any particular service will have very different values for different members of the same society. To regard them differently is to treat society not as a spontaneous order but as an organization whose members are all made to serve a single hierarchy of ends. This would necessarily be a totalitarian system in which personal freedom would be absent. (75-76)

On Hayek's view, there is no such thing as an objective contribution of value to society. Consequently, it is absurd to suppose that people are being paid "justly" only if they are being paid as a function of their contribution. A few pages earlier, he writes:

It has been argued persuasively [by Keynes in the above quotation, for example] that people will tolerate major inequalities of the material positions only if they believe that the different individuals get on the whole what they deserve, that they did in fact support the market order only because (and so long as) they thought that the differences of remuneration corresponded roughly to differences of merit, and that in consequence the maintenance of a free society presupposes the belief that some sort of 'social justice' is being done. The market order, however, does not in fact owe its origin to such beliefs, nor was originally justified in this manner. (73)

So we have a puzzle. It's common sense enough to believe that capitalist material inequality can only be tolerated if we believe that the inequality somehow maps on to a sense of moral desert. Keynes makes this prediction. Mankiw insists that the wealth inequality we see ACTUALLY DOES map onto moral deservingness based on contributions to society.

And yet the most sophisticated defenders of capitalism--Nozick and Hayek--explicitly REJECT this position. They reject any defense of capitalism which argues that people are paid what they deserve. Nozick focuses instead on free, individual agreement. Hayek focuses on non-moral rewards for subjectively valued success.

So the puzzle, crudely put, is that capitalism can only function if most people believe in something that capitalism's best defenders reject. The theorists of capitalism hate moralizing economic outcomes. The sociology of capitalism requires precisely that.

I'll end with a very different picture of the noble lie capitalism requires to sustain itself. In TMS IV.I, Adam Smith gives his famous story of the "poor man's son," a striving, bourgeois citizen who devotes himself to bettering his material condition. His whole life is motivated by a desire to attain the apparent happiness afforded by the luxurious, beautiful lifestyles of the rich. He is motivated to gain wealth because he believes wealth will make him happy. It is only after he attains that wealth that he realizes he has squandered his life in the pursuit of trinkets and baubles, while ignoring the true sources of personal fulfillment.

A false picture of happiness inspired his thrift and industry. And yet, Smith continues:

It is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth. (TMS IV.I.10)

Smith continues with his only explicit use of the phrase "invisible hand" in TMS, arguing that the same aesthetic deception doesn't just inspire the poor man to work hard, but leads the rich man to squander his wealth on useless trinkets and baubles. Conspicuous consumption leads him to (foolishly) redistribute his own wealth to the poor. A very different kind of "trickle down" economics than is typically associated with Smith.

So the Keynesian deception that motivates an acceptance of capitalism: A false belief that inequality is deserved because it tracks contributions to society.

The Smithian deception that motivates participation in capitalism : A false belief that the trinkets and baubles wealth will buy you are the sources of genuine happiness.