Within pretty broad limits[1], I’m an advocate of historical ‘presentism’, that is, assessing past events and actions in the same way as those in the present, and considering history in relation to our present concerns. In particular, that implies viewing enslavers, racists and warmongers in the same light, whether they are active today or died hundreds of years ago.

Protesters pulling down a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, England, during a demonstration organized to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement on June 7, 2020.

William Want/Twitter/AFP

A common objection to this position runs along the lines:

Suppose that at some point in the future, the vast majority of people are vegans. They will judge you in the same way as you judge past enslavers, racists and warmongers. In anticipation of this, you should suspend judgement on people in the past.

I don’t buy this. There are plenty of vegans around today and I have heard and rejected their arguments. While I condemn cruel farming practices, and try to avoid buying food produced with such practices, I don’t accept that there is anything inherently wrong with killing animals for food. Animals raised for food live longer and, with humane farming practices, happier, lives than their wild counterparts [2]. They aren’t aware of their own mortality, and have no life projects that are foreclosed when they die.

Vegans reject these arguments and judge me and others harshly for making them. Perhaps they are right. And they might, in the future, convince a majority of people. But if so, members of the future vegan majority would be just as entitled to condemn my views as are vegans alive today, and to view me in the same light as they would the remaining minority of non-vegans. The fact that I would by then be a “person of my own time” is neither here nor there.

I’ll qualify this a bit. No one can think deeply about everything so, most of the time, most of us go along with whatever people around us think. So, it’s unfair to pass judgement on ordinary Confederate (or Nazi) soldiers for fighting for a cause everyone around them said was right.

But that doesn’t excuse Calhoun, or Jefferson, or Locke, any more than it excuses Hitler. These are people who had been made aware of the evil they were promoting and profiting from, and promoted it anyway. And, if the ethical case for veganism is correct, then I am wrong, regardless of the fact that, at present, most people agree with me.

fn1. As examples of those limits, I don’t want to criticise people who failed to support equal marriage at a time when hardly anyone thought about it. And going back before the modern era (say pre-1600) the difference in world views is so great that it’s hard to make any kind of judgement on most issues.

fn2. Not to mention, happier than the lives of most people.

More discussion at Substack. Based on that, I expect most of the comments here to be about the merits or otherwise of veganism, and only a few to address presentism. This reinforces the point that veganism is not an example on which anti-presentists can lean to support their case. Feel free to provide better examples.

With corrupt crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried as its most prominent representative, the Effective Altruism movement is not particularly popularly these days. And some other people associated with the Effective Altruism movement have bizarre and unappealing ideas. But the worst form of ad hominem argument is “someone bad asserts p, therefore p is bad”[1].

Whether under this name or not, most economic research on both welfare policy and development aid takes the premise of effective altruism for granted. The central premise of effective altruism is simple: if you want to help poor people, give them what they most need. The practical force of this premise arises from a lot of evidence showing that, in general, what poor people need most is money.

(Image generated with DALL-E)

The starting point for the premise is some version of consequentialism. It is most directly opposed to the idea that altruism should be evaluated in terms of personal virtue. To take a typical example, effective altruism would say that someone with professional skills that are highly valued in the market should not volunteer in a soup kitchen, they should spend the time working for high pay and then donate their pay to the people who are hungry. [2] And there are plenty of highly popular interpretations of personal altruism that are even less effective, such as “thoughts and prayers”.

Coming to the question: why give people money, rather than addressing their needs directly, I will quote from my book Economics in Two Lessons which presents the issue in terms of opportunity cost.

What would a desperately poor family do with some extra money? They might use it to stave off immediate disaster, buying urgently needed food or medical attention for sick children. On they other hand, they could put the money towards school fees for the children, or save up for a piece of capital like a sewing machine or mobile phone that would increase the family’s earning power.

The poor family is faced with the reality of opportunity cost. Improved living standards in the future come at the cost of present suffering, perhaps even starvation and death. Whether or not their judgements are the same as we would make, they are in the best possible position to make them.

There are plenty of qualifications to make here. Maybe the most important is that family heads (commonly men) may make decisions that are more in their own interests than in those of the family as a whole. Giving money to mothers is often more effective.

And sometimes delivering aid in kind is the only way to stop corrupt officials stealing it along the way.

In addition, there are some kinds of aid (local public goods) that can’t be given on a household basis. If people in a village don’t have clean drinking water, then the solution may be a well that everyone can use.

Nevertheless, whenever anyone advocates a policy on the basis that it will help poor people it is always worth asking: wouldn’t it be better to just send money?

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[1] Ad hominem arguments aren’t always bad, as I’ve discussed before. If someone is presenting evidence on a factual issue, rather than a logical syllogism, it’s necessary to ask whether you are getting all the facts, or just those that suit the person’s own position .

[2} Contrary to the SBF example, it doesn’t suggest stealing money to buy an island in the Bahamas, then covering up by giving some of the loot away

I’ve been posting on Armistice Day ever since I started this blog back in 2002, arguing against war and lamenting the disaster of the Great War which has cast a shadow over all of our subsequent history, including the terrible wars that afflict the world today. This year, I’m too depressed to say anything more, except to express the hope that peace will come one day.

(14 Nov update) I got this badly wrong. Johnson followed the same path that doomed McCarthy, passing a short-term fix with Democratic votes. It’s hard to see why the Republicans went through all these contortions to end up where they started.

Government shutdowns, and threats of shutdown, have become routine in the US, with the result that no one much worries about them any more. Typically some kind of compromise is reached just as the deadline approaches, and government returns to quasi-normality.. Occasionally, bluffs are called and a ‘shutdown’ actually happens. Civil servants are sent home, public facilities are closed and so on. But the armed forces operate as normal, Social Security checks go out, and IOUs take the place of actual spending for various essential purposes. After a few weeks at the most, that produces enough pressure to deliver some kind of resolution. As far as I can see, that’s what most political commentators think will happen in November, when the next deadline is reached.

I foresee something more drastic and dangerous. It’s hard to imagine the Republicans in the House of Representatives agreeing on any set of demands for a spending bill, short of requiring Biden and Harris to resign and install Johnson as President* . But if they do come up with a program, it will be so extreme as to be totally unacceptable to Biden and the Democrats. And, the long history of blackmail efforts like this seems to have stiffened spines on the Democratic side.
Earthquakes: Facts, Definition, Types, Causes and Effects of Earthquake …

So, there will probably be a shutdown. But how will it end? Leaving aside the fact that Johnson is a far-right extremist dedicated to the overthrow of US democracy, cutting any kind of deal with Biden would be signing his own resignation (but see below). On the other side, capitulation would doom Biden’s presidency.

That means the shutdown has to continue past the symbolic stage of closing national parks and so on, to the point where it is doing serious damage to the US economy and society, with debt downgrades, personal and corporate bankruptcies and so on. That will still not be enough to shift the Republican extreme right, so no deal will be achieved with Republicans alone. What are the remaining possibilities? Here are a few I’ve thought about, roughly in order of probability

• Johnson cuts a deal with the Democrats, passing a continuing resolution in return for the promise of some abstentions, or even active support, when the Freedom Caucus try to vote him out. This seems the most likely option to me, but it will be very painful on both sides
• Biden capitulates. I still see this as unlikely, but the pressure to do so will be immense.
• A handful of Republicans remember that they are supposed to care about the country they govern, and cross the floor, knowing they will lose their seats and face the obloquy of most of their (former) friends and supporters.
• Biden invokes emergency powers to reopen the government and defies the Supreme Court to stop him. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know what these powers might be, but the issue is essentially political. Unless he is impeached or otherwise prevented from acting, emergency powers are what the President says they are, a point made by Abraham Lincoln at the beginning of the Civil War (a relevant precedent in the current state of the US).

I haven’t seen anyone else predicting such a crisis, so maybe I’m over-estimating the difficulty of reaching a resolution. IIRC, I was among the first to predict a crisis like this when the Republicans retook the House in 2010**, but I couldn’t see a resolution then either, and one was reached in the end.

• Joking, but not really – I can imagine at least some of them demanding this, with the proviso that Johnson would then resign in favour of Trump.

** There was a debt limit crisis in 2011 and a 16-day shutdown in 2013.

Crossposted from my substack https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/the-big-one