The beauty of a counter-conventional-wisdom mindset is that it frees one to explore solutions outside a decision space bounded not by actual constraints but by false limits. Remember, importantly, many CCW approaches are ultimate dead ends—the wisdom is in the exploration.
Remember also, again importantly, that in some cases CCW leads to truth and solutions.
Along those lines, here are two posts to ponder. Each will challenge certain constituencies: one more left centered and the other more right centered. Yet in both cases these are positions that come from a high-safety value set. Like any bias, prioritizing safety comes with downsides . . . no solutions, only tradeoffs.
In the first case is Judge Glock writing a Works in Progress. The title of the post says it all: “American water is too clean.”
I imagine your first reaction is dismissal followed by consideration only allowing this in a technical sense.
Today, the average urban household in America pays about $1,300 a year for water and sewers, close to the $1,600 they spend on electricity. In San Francisco, even before the new sewer mandates went into effect, water rates were about $3,600 a year. Local governments spend more on building and maintaining their water and sewer systems than they do on policing.
The main reason for high water charges is federal mandates. The US, largely through federal mandates and subsidies, has spent about $5 trillion, in contemporary dollars, to fight water pollution since 1970, about 0.8 percent of the annual GDP in that period. This effort makes clean water ‘arguably the most expensive environmental investment in US history’, according to one study, far more than air pollution regulations.
Yet the EPA finds that the one category of environmental regulation where estimated costs exceed benefits is surface water regulations. The EPA does say that most of its drinking water mandates have benefits that exceed the costs, but, as one study showed, ‘these determinations were unsupported by the Agency’s own regulatory impact analyses’. The EPA analyses found that for many of the regulated dangers ‘the risks may be as low as zero’, but argued that potential risks should be treated as probable ones.
Technology and local governments have worked wonders over the decades to make drinking water and water systems incredibly clean. But that desire for progress has now become excessive. Mandates from the EPA are demanding water become too clean. It is important to remember that the optimal level of pollution is never zero and there are always important trade-offs to consider. The ironic knock-on effect is that these mandates have actually become environmentally negative on top of being economically destructive.1
He ends the article with suggestions about balancing the costs and benefits including this:
There is an old joke about a boy who said that he knew how to spell the word ‘banana’ but that he didn’t know when to stop. Officials in control of water today know how to get cleaner water but don’t know when to stop. Local voters already face the problems of balancing costs and benefits and the more distant the regulators, the less likely they are to get the balance right themselves.
Now turning to the second case we have Benjamin Nadelstein suggesting a way to abolish prisons.
Prisons can be viewed as an overall bad deal for society. They are expensive, inefficient, and often counterproductive. Prisoners live in dehumanizing conditions, the legal system groans under inefficiency, and taxpayers have to pay an average of $30,000 per year for every inmate.
The total price tag for U.S. prisons exceeds $80 billion annually, while the economic cost to incarcerated individuals in lost earnings exceeds $500,000 per person over a lifetime.
Prisons generally fail any purported goals of rehabilitation, failing to provide adequate educational opportunities or career programming. Prisons also tend to create overcrowded spaces with heightened violence, that often makes people more criminal, not less, by surrounding them with antisocial values and criminal networks.
That introduction lays out the scope of the problem. Here is his CCW proposal:
Instead of sitting in a prison cell at taxpayer expense, governments could auction off their prisoners’ future tax payments to private investors in exchange for more flexible confinement and rehabilitation arrangements.
These investors—let’s call them “prison career agents”—would assume full responsibility for their prisoner’s security and reintegration into society.
Crucially, these career agents could also be on the hook for their prisoners’ negative tax receipts. That means if a prisoner fails to earn income or returns to crime and is imprisoned, the career agent eats the associated costs and not the taxpayer.
After listing what he believes would be the win-wins, he anticipates pushback ending the post with a hypothetical Q&A. The quote he references from Bob Murphy probably hints at how opponents to this idea might retreat from a “it won’t work!” reaction to one of “but that’s not what I want.”
Economist Bob Murphy has pointed out that market forces would naturally regulate the private provision of prisoner security:
“No insurance company would vouch for a serial killer unless he agreed to live in a secure facility. These facilities, akin to hotels, would compete for prisoners by offering better conditions, as inspectors ensure safety. Undue cruelty would disappear because prisoners could switch providers, just as travelers switch hotels.”
PTAs would introduce competition into incarceration for prisoners, just as Airbnbs compete with hotels for travelers, Uber competes with taxis compete for riders, and UPS competes with the Post Office.
It is hard for people to get past the idea of prison as pain where any alleviation of pain is repugnant. For them there is a ratchet effect. They might not think they want it worse for prisoners at each step in it getting worse, but they refuse to think about it moving backwards from where it happens to be even though previously (before it got worse) they weren’t prepared to advocate for it being worse.
I’m not ready to endorse this as THE solution (aptly, Robin Hanson comments). But I am ready, stand always ready, to think outside the box. This idea has merit in direction and spirit if not exact specification.
Substacks mentioned:
Yes, I’m separating out environmental cost/benefit from economic cost/benefit when I generally argue the former is simply part of the latter. I do this only because most people think in these boxes.