Birthdays

Nine years ago, I was walking with Gordon Tullock from Carow Hall over to Buchanan House for a talk. I'd been invited to his 80th birthday party and consequently found out that he and I shared a birthday - the 13th of February. So I said, "Gordon, I hear we have something in common." Gordon replied in a threatening tone, "Well, we'll have to do something about that then, won't we." The rest of the story is here, along with links to other Tullock tales.

This year I've an additional reason to celebrate: I've joined him as a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

I expect if the news reached Gordon, he'd speculate about whether it would be easier to have me expelled or shot. Or maybe he'd resign in disgust at the declining standards.

Nasty cuts

The closing session at Mont Pelerin included Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She's a neoconservative, so I do disagree with her on a good number of things, but I also have great admiration for her achievements.

In the same session, another presenter asked how much we ought to tolerate intolerance, suggesting female circumcision as an absolute line for that which ought not be tolerated.

I would, of course, agree. But recall that a more modern variant of the procedure is far more symbolic than damaging:

The committee settled on calling the procedure “female genital cutting,” or FGC, and in the process of revising, rewording and rethinking its policy, it considered an approach for minimizing harm first proposed by doctors at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. In the mid-1990s, some of them were attending pregnant women from Seattle’s Somali community. “If your baby is a boy, do you want him circumcised?” they would ask. Some of Somali mothers-to-be would reply, “Yes, and also if it’s a girl.”

The Harborview doctors proposed that the hospital offer these mothers a “clitoral nick” for their daugthers — a needle prick, really — in the small hood of tissue that covers the clitoris.

Again, it's superstitious nonsense and a violation of the child's autonomy. But the modern procedure is harm minimizing: the gains from folks substituting away from far worse things well outweigh the costs to those whose parents would otherwise have chosen to avoid the procedure.

Nobody applauding the speaker's comment on intolerance asked why we oughtn't apply the principle without gender distinction. The modern form of the procedure for girls is less invasive than the modern form for males.

“We’re talking about something far less extensive than the removal of foreskin in a male,” a common procedure in the United States, said Dr. Diekema. Such a compromise, the doctors argued, would discourage parents from sending their girls back to their native countries for unregulated and unsanitary procedures.

“They weren’t trying to propagate FGC,” said Dr. Diekema, who had heard the stories of female circumcision requests from his colleagues at Harborview. “If this nick could prevent harm for a few girls, they wanted to have it in their back pocket as an option.” But when news of the proposal broke, anti-circumcision groups and stunned citizens swiftly put an end to the discussion.

When the AAP resurfaced the idea last month, the public reacted with similar outrage.

I wonder what the reaction would have been at MPS had I asked about extending intolerance in gender neutral fashion. But I didn't because I couldn't think of a way of phrasing it that wouldn't have come off as outrageously insensitive given the panel's composition.

Chesnokova & Vaithianathan discuss the economics of female genital cutting here. Their model has multiple equilibria with threshold effects - if sufficient women have had the procedure, then if men put a premium on brides who have had the procedure, the procedure will take place unless female opportunities outside of marriage are sufficiently attractive. Below that threshold, it will die out. The data (Burkina Faso) suggest those having undergone the procedure marry younger and live in wealthier households, so it seems correlated with marital success.

But they're silent about why migrants to the west might seek that the procedure be undertaken. We're well below any tipping threshold and external opportunities are pretty decent. My best guess would be a mix of two motives: tradition and seeking to ensure that the daughter takes a husband from within the ethnic community. Access to the modern form of the procedure may placate the former; I can't see how it would worsen outcomes for the latter.

And so I'm pretty weak on the "don't tolerate intolerance" question. I'm a pluralist - rights matter, but so does utility. It's hard to make a utilitarian case against the modern symbolic forms of the procedure if they can induce substitution away from the far worse versions. If we were in a world where male infant circumcision were banned, I could understand the outrage at allowing even the symbolic version for girls. But in this world, I wonder about the folks who shout a lot about banning even the mild form of the female procedure while saying nothing about the worse treatment accorded a (thankfully decreasing) number of male infants.

Mont Pelerin

I yesterday spoke to the Mont Pelerin Society about paternalism as a threat to liberty. The presentation is embedded below; it looks best in full screen. Hit the "more" button at the bottom to get the full screen version. The link is here should the embedded version fail.

Of healthist nudges and shoves: the resurgent paternalistic threat to liberty on Prezi

I argued that dodgy cost studies have pushed out the demand curve for paternalistic policies by making them seem more necessary; at the same time, 'nudge' policies have served as a supply shock reducing the perceived cost to liberty of paternalistic policies. The policies are far less beneficial and are more costly than voters expect.

Being at Mont Pelerin has been awesome; I'm very grateful for having been invited.

I'll put up the conference paper sometime down the track after I've incorporated the excellent comments I there received.

Mont Pelerin

Looks like I'll be in Sydney next October. Plenary Session Six: New Threats to Liberty and the Private Sphere: Nannies and Busybodies, Tax Harmonisation and the Surveillance State. I'll be speaking on the first topic, of course.

I'm of course rather excited to be going to Mont Pelerin.

After World War II, in 1947, when many of the values of Western civilization were imperiled, 36 scholars, mostly economists, with some historians and philosophers, were invited by Professor Friedrich von Hayek to meet at Mont Pelerin, near Montreux, Switzerland, to discuss the state and the possible fate of liberalism (in its classical sense) in thinking and practice.

The group described itself as the Mont Pelerin Society, after the place of the first meeting. It emphasised that it did not intend to create an orthodoxy, to form or align itself with any political party or parties, or to conduct propaganda. Its sole objective was to facilitate an exchange of ideas between like-minded scholars in the hope of strengthening the principles and practice of a free society and to study the workings, virtues, and defects of market-oriented economic systems.

Members who include high government officials, Nobel prize recipients, journalists, economic and financial experts, and legal scholars from all over the world, come regularly together to present the most current analysis of ideas, trends and events.

The link above has pictures from the first meeting of the society, including a nice shot of von Mises with Karl Popper, who'd left the University of Canterbury one year prior to the first MPS meeting.