Psychic harms and property rules

Get your photons off of my lawn!

Here's Steve Landsburg:

George Johnson of the New York Times writes that:

In a saner world, where science and the law meshed more precisely, a case like Firstenberg v. Monribot would have been dead on arrival in court.

Arthur Firstenberg, you see, is suing his neighbor, Raphaela Monribot, for bombarding him with photons from her iPhone, her WiFi connection, her dimmer switches and her fluorescent bulbs (all as side effects of her ordinary use of these devices). Mr. Firstenberg believes (or claims to believe) that said photons are damaging his health — a belief with essentially no scientific basis.

Mr. Firstenberg requests $1.43 million in damages, so perhaps we should think of this as an exercise in bosonic “ka-ching” theory. The case has gone on for five years, and might be headed to the New Mexico Supreme Court. Estimated court costs so far exceed a quarter of a million.

Psychic harms of this sort have been a problem for a while. How do we decide to allow photonic transgressions that cause psychic harms but not allow other transgressions that (in thought experiments) only cause psychic harms?

Here's David Friedman's resolution, from a couple years ago, to a prior Landsburg thought experiment:

More precisely, the property rule under which I have a right to read porn [EC: despite the psychic harm potentially imposed on prudes] and you can only stop me by offering to pay me not to do so produces its result by ignoring the cost my porn reading imposes on you, since, as with the case of risks imposed by careless driving, including that cost requires an unworkable contract between all of the prudes and all of the would-be consumers of porn. The property rule under which you have a right to forbid me, or anyone else, from reading porn, produces its result by ignoring the cost your ban imposes on me, for the same reason. Neither property rule gets the cost/benefit calculation correct, but the former rule is a great deal less expensive to enforce than the latter, which is an argument for it.

What about a liability rule? That is the point at which the subjective nature of the harm comes in. It is true that, from the standpoint of economics, all harm is ultimately subjective—having my arm broken or my car dented would not be a cost under sufficiently bizarre assumptions about my preferences. But some subjective costs are a lot easier to measure externally than others. When I claim damages for my wrecked car, there are market prices out there for repairing or replacing it that provide a court with a reasonable basis for estimating the cost. When I announce that your reading of porn, or oil drilling in a wilderness I never plan to visit, inflicts large psychic harm on me, there is no such basis for checking my claim.

The photon case should use a property right rule where I have the presumptive right to emit photons (though you can pay for abatement), because it's easy to fake psychic harms from photons and it's unverifiable.

Previously:

• Thought experiments and taking harm
• Psychic externalities
• Psychic mountain harms

Contraception costs

Berk Ozler asks whether the government should provide free emergency contraception for young girls. It's an interesting question, especially as the Taranaki District Health Board recently announced plans for free EC provision.* Berk summarises the existing literature pretty comprehensively.

But I'll quibble a bit with his policy conclusion, at risk of channeling Steven Landsburg.

Berk and I agree entirely on his first conclusion: the morning after pill should be easily available without a prescription. It's safe, accidents (or worse) happen, and the barrier of going through a doctor can be non-trivial.

He then asks if it should be subsidised. Berk writes:

That question is more difficult. It depends on the future costs of teen pregnancy (and abortions) – both to the individual and to society. If children from single parent families, poorer families, etc. are more likely to need EC but less likely to be able to afford it, it may make sense for the government to subsidize the cost. Even if the costs are solely to the future adult herself and not to the society in general, they can be justified under the principle of ‘second chances’ – after all we’re talking about children and young people here. If there are positive externalities, the argument for subsidies is even simpler. So, I’ll return to the issue of subsidies after reviewing the literature on the individual consequences and public health externalities of making EC freely available to young people.

Berk's summary of the relevant literature:

• "There is some reason to worry about children's outcomes in teen pregnancies" 
• increased risk of poor natal outcomes


• "The evidence on the effects of teen pregnancies on future outcomes of the mother are mixed. There is not enough here to justify a strong stance for a policy decision." 
• Most of the effects you see in the cross section are due to that women having children in their teens tend to be different from those who decide to wait until they are older, and would have different outcomes even if they had not had children while young. 


• There is little evidence that use of the morning after pill has any effect on teen pregnancy rates, abortion rates, or STD rates, though it does somewhat reduce condom use.
• Berk here highlights that failure to use the emergency contraception even where provided may be a problem, perhaps due to "a failure to recognize (or acknowledge) a risk of conception on part of the prospective users." He writes:

  “In a survey of thousands of teenage mothers who had unintended pregnancies, about a third who didn’t use birth control said the reason was they didn’t believe they could get pregnant. Why they thought that isn’t clear.” The evidence is suggesting that (a) unprotected sexual activity is high among people who don’t report not wanting to have children; and (b) they don’t use the free EC that is in their drawer and can be used for up to 5 days after the unprotected sexual activity or a contraceptive incident. You can take a horse to the water, but you cannot make him drink… 

He concludes that though the public health effects may be negligible, emergency contraception should be available for young people and, ideally, free if we can afford it.

Ozler notes that the morning after pill costs $40 USD and that there's some evidence that teens substitute to its use from condoms (which are rather cheaper). If there's little evidence of other policy-relevant benefits from widespread subsidised EC availability, then I'm having an awfully hard time seeing why the government should stump up $40 per dose.** The NZ Family Planning website sells condoms for about $1.50 each.

I'm also pretty sure that  the government provides subsidised access to condoms via a doctor's prescription.

Steven Landsburgh controversially wondered last year why he should be paying for other peoples' birth control. I can see some decent second-best arguments for that the government subsidise birth control, not least of which is that it may partially offset the incentives created by governments' commitments to support children borne by those who cannot afford to raise them. The elasticity of birth rates among the improvident to subsidised childbearing may be rather larger than the elasticity with respect to the financial cost of contraception, but the former isn't much on the table aside from DPB work requirements. Whatever the second-best arguments for subsidised contraception, I have a hard time seeing the case for a general subsidy for a relatively expensive method of contraception.

* This follows on from a similar trial at the Auckland DHB. One of my projects for the coming semester is to get data from sexual health clinics on STD rates to see whether the Auckland trial had any effect on STDs. We'd started getting things lined up to get that data in the spring*** of 2010, and then the earthquakes put it rather far onto the backburner.

** If you want to subsidise the morning after pill for women seeing a doctor after sexual assault, I'm on your side. That's different from giving it for free to everybody.

*** Wow, North American habits die hard. First draft said fall. But it was August/September. And that's spring here.