Value and ambit

As economist Frank Mehrling has observed (pdf):

All monetary theories (at least all those of which I am aware) build from some underlying parable about the nature of money.

One such parable is money as pure creation of the state, or Chartalism. Its original texts are George Knapp's The State Theory of Money (pdf), which I have waded my way through--I don't recommend the experience; Knapp takes Germanic confusion of taxonomy with analysis to ludicrous heights--and two articles by Alfred Mitchell Innes, particularly his 1913 What is Money?

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is what Chartalism has evolved into. Wikipedia summarises the central claim of MMT as:

money enters circulation through government spending; Taxation is employed to establish the fiat money as currency, giving it value by creating demand for it in the form of a private tax obligation that can only be met using the government's currency. An ongoing tax obligation, in concert with private confidence and acceptance of the currency, maintains its value.

This expresses very nicely the confusion at the heart of MMT: mistakenly holding that answering the very important question of what is the ambit of money (which transactions it can be used for) will provide some sort of answer to the question of what is the value of money (what are its swap values, its rates of exchange for goods and services). The problem is the ambiguity in the word 'value' between, in this case, being swappable at all and specific swap values.

A comment at one of my favourite economic blogs crystallised this confusion nicely:

Crazy as it sounds, taxes do not collect revenue for the government. They can’t because the government has to spend its money first to collect any taxes at all. Taxes ensure that the arbitrary, intrinsically worthless thing it spends is accepted.
This is based on historical record too: many times in ancient and recent history governors of subjugated lands would impose a tax payable in money only they possessed (eg the French in Madagascar – France wasn’t trying to raise francs in Madagascar that had none!) to ensure that local population accepts the thing in exchange for labor and goods.

Angkor Wat: a little something to keep the peasants busy in the off-season

The commenter is correct in that colonial governors in places which did not already have money did levy taxes in money to get people to start using money. But it is entirely possible for a state to collect taxes without money. It can levy labour-service (as Pharaonic Egypt or the Khmer Empire did–that is how the Pyramids, Angkor Wat, etc got built) or in-kind tribute or some combination thereof.

In fact, that is why, I would argue, that labour-service empires were so addicted to gargantuan building projects. Labour service has a use-it-or-lose-it nature, you cannot store it up for the future. So rulers found things for the labour to be used on; things that they decreed, thereby exercising control in their construction. Otherwise, someone else could have found use for that labour service and the ruler's own labour-service claims could atrophy. The edifices constructed by said labour-service are statements of power; but far more so was the (continuing) control over the labour that built them in the first place.

And when they finished this, they moved on to the next project

If, however, the state wants to collect taxes in money, then the state first has to make sure that there is money in circulation. The above commenter, in citing the colonial cases, is confusing establishing the form in which taxes are levied with the actual extraction of income.

What is money?
Something is money if it is used in transactions, not for its production or consumption utility, but because it can be used in further transactions. So, something is money if it has, and is money to the extent it has, transaction utility. Transaction utility has two parts to it. One is the swap value of the money.  How much money has to be used to purchase a given item. The (weighted) average of all such swap values for goods and services is the price level.

Swap values, being the price(s) of money in terms of goods and services (the price of money in money terms is itself), are generated by supply and demand. In the pure fiat money systems we use (by which I mean money in the form of otherwise largely valueless tokens not convertible into any real asset), said supply and demand is how much money is being transacted for how many goods and services. (Not, one notes, the amount of money in existence but the amount of money in circulation, in the sense of being transacted for goods and services).
In a gold standard, where any note can be exchanged for a given amount of gold, the price level is determined by how much monetised gold is backing how much output--the price of gold sets the underlying price level.

(Similarly with silver in a silver standard; historically, silver has been a much more widely used monetary metal than gold--though usually as coins rather than as backing for notes.) With commodity money, swap values are determined by supply and demand for the commodity, with some premium for transaction convenience if the commodity has been suitably branded, such as being turned into coins. (A thousand years ago, all money was commodity money; now none of it is.)

Said branding provides a face value or tale, a standard content and a transaction context. In our fiat money systems, the content is about the coin or note being authentic, being issued by who its face claims it to be issued by. In commodity money systems, it is having a certain amount of the underlying commodity. Being not counterfeit means being legal tender, so having a certain guarantee of transaction utility (and convertibility, if that is part of the monetary system). In commodity money systems, having a given amount of the underlying commodity provides its own guarantee of transaction utility, in that you can swap it out at the price of the commodity. If the transaction premium is positive, it will not get swapped out.  If it is negative (i.e. the price of the commodity-content is above the price-as-money), then it will. Such as having 50c coins with more than 50c of silver in them.

Ambit claims
As for transaction context (who issued the coin and where their writ runs), that is where the question of ambit, of the range of transactions over which a given money is acceptable, comes in. Each money has a currency realm, the range of transactions for which it can be used. The supply and demand setting the swap values of money is a matter of which output operates within which currency realm.

A very successful export

A major complication here is that exchange rates (official or unofficial) connect moneys to each other. If one has a national money--call it US$--which is easily exchanged for local moneys elsewhere, then it may be acceptable in transactions in many countries. Particularly in countries where the local currency is less trusted (such as a store of value) than US$. This more widely acceptable money's currency realm will therefore extend well beyond its national borders. It has been estimated that somewhere in the vicinity of 40-60% of US currency circulates outside the US.
In that situation, the US$ acts somewhat like gold in a goldzone; as a monetized store of value acceptable across currency realms. The similarity may go deeper; it has been very reasonably argued that a surge in demand for the premier global reserve currency not matched by increased supply was a major cause of the Great Recession.

Explaining ambit
Explaining why things have production or consumption utility is not difficult.  How do we explain the crucial second part of transaction utility; the range of monetised transactions? That money has transaction utility at all, based on the confident expectation of use in futuretransactions. Particularly for moneys--such as printed notes not convertible into say gold or silver on demand--which have no other significant value. Whose transaction premium is such a large part of their swap value.

Obviously, it is very convenient to have something which can be used across many transactions. In Ancient Mesopotamia, contracts where written that specified payment in shekels of barley, wheat or silver. Units of account, such as the shekel, were often originally weights (such as the pound, originally the pound sterling or a pound of silver) because it is an easy form of standardisation. Cattle were also used as a unit of account while ancient Irish law codes used a slave girl as a unit of account, and continued to do so even when there were no slaves. Units of account make it easier to have transactions on credit. Credit greatly expands the possible range of transactions, since credit transactions do not have to be concluded immediately.

But credit relationships remain of a one-to-one nature (I owe you). Money permits immediate conclusion of transactions--goods and services for money. Things of production or consumption utility swapped for something acceptable because of its expected use in future transactions. There is no need for any ongoing connection, or any past connection, between the transactors. Money expands the range of transactions precisely because it is so anonymous and self-sufficient. Which is also why monetising personal transactions can give grave offence--as the point is precisely that the interaction is not anonymous and is thoroughly embedded in on-going connection; by contrast, a monetary transaction you can have with just anyone. That is its great strength, but makes it lacking in the personal connection stakes. (Hence giving presents rather than money; a present is a much more personal statement of connection--even a gift certificate says you know what the recipient likes.)

Legal tender laws don't actually get us very far in explaining how modern, non-convertible, non-commodity money has expected transaction utility, as such laws they do not compel private transactors to engage in monetary transactions. Nor do they cover on-the-spot transactions. On the contrary, people are free to insist on a certain currency; or give a premium for preferred currency; or specify some other payment or refuse to contract. Legal tender laws merely specify that, within a given jurisdiction, a specified money must be accepted as payment in obligations already agreed to be monetised. In the words of economist Dror Goldberg:

... sellers are not really forced to accept legal tender money if they are slightly cautious. They only need to state in advance that they want to be paid in a different object, or use a different unit of account. The websites of some central banks are honest about this limited legal status of their money ... The role of the state, after declaring what is legal tender, can be described as passive and negative: To dismiss a creditor’s lawsuit if the debtor offers the right quantity of legal tender. A legal tender law never results in the state affirmatively prosecuting a buyer or a seller for using another currency or for rejecting the legal tender in a spot transaction. Other laws might do that, but they mostly exist in totalitarian regimes.

And what is the largest set of transactions in almost any state society? Taxes. Even more to the point, they are involuntary transactions, you cannot opt out of them or out of using the object set as acceptable payment. If a state sets that its taxes must be paid in its money, then that money has a guaranteed transaction utility. Making a money's use in the payment of taxes compulsory provides an anchor for expectations about its future transaction utility. Which does provide a good answer (pdf) to why otherwise near-valueless tokens have transaction utility--because they can always be used to pay taxes, lots of people have to pay taxes and the state can (and typically does) insist its money be used to pay its taxes.

Not even the Zimbabwean government uses this currency anymore

Even in the case of US$ outside the US--they can be swapped for money that can be used to pay taxes. Why not just stick with the local money then? Well, in places with "hard" (i.e. reliable) currency, including strong property regimes, folk do. US$ are used in ordinary transactions outside the US in place of local currencies due to failings in said local currencies (small matters such as[pdf] hyperinflation and bank confiscations). That US$ can be exchanged for local currency if needed (such as to pay taxes) provides an anchor for their local transaction utility, while their use to pay US taxes is the ultimate anchor for transaction utility.

In money terms, the US economy is about a quarter of world GDP and US taxes are about a quarter of US GDP (or about 6% of world GDP). Even given that maybe half the US currency realm is outside the US, US taxes are enough to anchor transaction utility expectations about US$, but not nearly enough to set its swap values. (Particularly not outside the US.) Add in the countries which use US$ as their official currency or accept it in official transactions to the ability of US$ to be exchanged for local money-you-pay-taxes-in, and the global transaction utility of US$ is well-anchored.

Use in taxes means that the money is, and will continue to be, swappable.  What its current swap values are is a different question. The two are connected by that money's expected future swap values--i.e. its function as a store of value. Hyperinflation is regularly associated with collapsing political authority, as whether the local money will remain swappable at all is increasingly unlikely and the point at which it stops being swappable appears to be getting closer and closer. If quantity was all that mattered, that the point at which production ceases was also approaching would help protect the value of that money (as its supply would be now forever fixed). But price is a matter of supply and demand, and anchoring their transaction utility through use in taxes anchors the demand for the local money.

But it anchors the demand in only a very limited sense. For use to pay taxes grounds a money's use, but not its price. A dollar's worth of taxes is not a set price in the way a given amount of gold or silver is in a gold or silver standard, as tax liability is discharged--once you have paid it, all you have is a release from that obligation. You have no specific item able to be sold, no production or consumption utility to show for it (apart from not being liable for punishment.) Taxes are an extraction, they are not a normal transaction.

Taxes are so much not a set price, that is in part why taxes are typically levied as a percentage of income, as a percentage of a transaction, as a proportion of asset value, etc. Levying tax liability at a set money rate obviously fails to adjust revenue to total output. More to this point, in inflationary periods, it would make revenue worth less and less in goods and services precisely because there is no set price for some asset, good or service involved. The money government gains has to be spent according to market prices, which tax liability sets no automatic connection to because taxes do not set a price, they discharge an extractive liability.

So, the MMT people are on to something. Unfortunately, they confuse questions of ambit for questions of swap value and write as if the guarantee of transaction utility sets the swap values of money, which it does not. The state may be the largest transactor, but it is not remotely the only transactor and, absent confiscations, has to buy goods and services at going prices. As hyperinflation demonstrates, anchoring a money's transaction utility is very much not the same as anchoring its swap values, how good a store of value it is. Just as the problems with inflation targeting show that anchoring expectations about money as a store of value is not the same as anchoring expectations about the future level of transactions (i.e. expectations about income).

The taxes-guarantee-transaction-utility is a nice, consistent story. If it wasn't for the existence of private currencies. It is entirely possible that coins were originally a private invention. During the late C18th and early C19th, privately minted copper coins circulated freely in England; a market response to the Royal Mint's failure to produce sufficient decent copper coins and the shortage of silver coins. (Copper pennies issued by the Anglesey copper mine were rather charmingly called 'druids'.)  Nowadays, there is even the virtual private money of bitcoins.

Privately minted in Anglesey

Except that the private currencies turn out to be much less of a problem than they appear. The tax-foundation story is about explaining the transaction utility of something otherwise valueless (or, at least, whose transaction premium is hugely dominant in its swap value). Despite much economist mythologising to the contrary, there is no clear case of private fiat currency. Private moneys turn out to be convertible, or failures. Convertible to a monetary metal (typically gold or silver), to a legal tender you-can-pay-taxes-with-it money or redeemable via other assets or goods and services. States have a major advantage in production of money in that they are the largest transactors, the only significant involuntary transaction generators, said transactions operate throughout their jurisdictions and are widely known as such. All of which gives them major "branding" advantages.

The questions of the swap value(s) of money and the ambit of money are related but separate questions. Confusing one with the other is a great way to go badly wrong in monetary analysis.

[Cross-posted at Critical Thinking Applied and slightly earlier version cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Open borders

Uberblogger Matt Yglesias recently posted on why an open borders policy for the US--possibly using an auction system to regulate the rate of flow--is a reasonable option, basing his claim on comparative population densities and history:

But the United States ran an open borders regime throughout the 19th century and we weren't worse off for it. On the contrary, it laid the foundations for American greatness. Shifting back in that direction—with exceptions for dangerous criminals and other select problem types—over time seems perfectly feasible to me and would substantially increase overall human welfare.

Winners and losers
An obvious response is, "who is this we, white man?" Amerindians would have a distinct view on whether they were better off for said open border policy and the land hunger it fuelled. Though Yglesias is correct in that overall human welfare was improved, just as he is correct in suggesting that overall human welfare would be improved if all the 150 million adults who polls indicate would  like to migrate to the US did. Nor does raising US population density to 135 people per square mile seem over-crowded--not when you compare it, as he does, to other developed countries:

France has 303 people per square mile and Germany has 593. Japan has 873. The Dutch have 1,287!

But even leaving aside the dispossession of the Amerindians--settler land hunger was, after all, one of the grievances that led to the American Revolution; the commitment of the British Crown to its treaties with the Amerindians and the block that posed to settler land-hunger was one of those decisions-without-representation that the American colonists were aggrieved about--the effect of mass migration on the existing settler-and-descendants population was mixed, to  say the least.

In his Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, (which I review here) Nobel memorial Laureate Robert Fogel quantifies how high immigration led to drops in the average height and life expectancy of native-born American workers.

The exceptional health of native-born Northerners during the late eighteenth century is revealed by new time series on stature and life expectation ... They show that by the end of Washington's administration, native-born American white males were more than 68 inches tall (which was 2 to 4 inches taller than the typical Englishman and had an average life expectations of at age 10 of close to 57 years (about 10 years longer than the English). However, both life expectation and stature began to decline early in the nineteenth century. The most rapid period of deterioration was between 1830 and 1860. By the eve of the Civil War life expectation was 10 years less than it had been just before the turn of the century and males born in 1860 reached final heights that were about 1.5 inches less than those  born in the early 1830s (p.360).

High immigration advantages new migrants (if they survive the passage) since they benefit from increased opportunities. It advantages owners of capital, whether land (since rents and land prices go up), manufacturing (downward pressure is put on wages while product demand increases), or intellectual (since the migrants are unlikely to compete and demand for their services goes up)

In the case of intellectual capital, the contemporary tendency of the owners of intellectual capital to attempt to form cartels excluding those with competing ideas increases this effect, since support for immigration is a marker for cartel membership. The effect is increased further by encourage cultural diversity in immigration, which decreases intellectual competition from newcomers.That academics in particular live in transnational labour markets also increases their likely comfort with open borders.


High immigration disadvantages resident sellers of labour, through downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on rents and land prices, crowding effects, increased crime from decreased social trust (even though many migrant groups are less likely to be imprisoned for crime than locals) and increased disease exposure. The combination of these factors can outweigh increased demand for labour's products in an expanded domestic economy and far outdid so in C19th America (when disease control and sanitation were much worse and rates of immigration extraordinarily high). Hence the falling average height and life expectancy.

Migration politicsOne of the great themes of politics in settler societies in the C19th was that there were temperate zone migration flows and tropical zone migration flows; working class politics in settler societies was particularly concerned that tropical labour flows not spread into the temperate settler societies. This was far from a irrational concern on their part.

You could say that C19th native-born American workers suffered a milder version of what the preceding (by several millennia) indigenous settlers had suffered from the arrival of a mass of newcomers. Which is not to deny that the US gained both power and dynamism from immigration. (Or, that, for example, the great restriction of US immigration from 1923 was not a major tragedy.)


In his Without Consent or Contract, Fogel sets out how the anti-slavery campaign forged a victorious political coalition (the Republican Party) on the back of directing worker-resentment away from manifesting as nativist xenophobia (a political dead-end, with so many voters being recent migrants) to anti-slavery and resentment of Southern ‘Slave Power’. There are some contemporary parallels for such political dynamics.

An example of contemporary Lincolnesque political ju-jitsu was one John Winston Howard, the former Australian Prime Minister. John Howard’s politics of a sense of control (border enforcement), endorsement ("battler" aspirations) and security (family policy, external threat) were not so different from Lincoln’s: Lincoln finessed nativism, Howard finessed general anti-immigration sentiment. He did this while running a high immigration policy and Australia's least Eurocentric immigration policy up to that time. Lincoln and co saw off the nativist xenophobia of the Know Nothings, Howard saw off Pauline Hauline. And the jihadis are real enemies.

The differing interests and perspectives on migration create very different attitudes to illegal immigration. If one likes open borders, illegal immigration is a positive. If one does not, enforcement of immigration policy is the only way you can have an effective say on the matter. Since so much of what is at stake is that sense of control, the more visible the illegal immigration, the more politically salient it is. Arriving boats or organised border-crossing are going to figure rather more than visa over-stayers.

How compatible open borders are with how extensive a welfare state is an open question too. While belief that the welfare state channels taxpayer funds to illegal immigrants is a recurring sore-point. Provision of welfare extends the club good nature of the state.

If one looks at the issue from the comfortable heights of intellectual eminence, the gains from open borders seem obvious. They are rather less so to sellers of labour living in suburbs where neither infrastructure nor services keep up with demand.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer and at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Norm failure

I have previously posted about how similar the failures in indigenous policy and development (particularly foreign aid) policy have been. Remarkably similar, indeed. They also show some distinct similarities to the more unfortunate effects of welfare provision. (By 'welfare provision' I do not mean the aged pension or health or education services; I am talking about income and other transfers to working-age-but-not-working people.)

Policy lowlights
That indigenous policy has a remarkably consistent dismal story of failure is its most striking feature. Whether it is Australian aborigines, Amerindians or Lapps, the record of broken communities mired in violence and sexual, drug, alcohol and child abuse, entrenched poverty and lower life expectancies is dismally similar. [Though comparison between Australian aborigines and Amerindians is complicated by the much greater range of the latter in their pre-conquest ways of life--from foragers through horse-peoples to agrarians--and that some Amerindian communities have parlayed treaty rights into profitable assets, such as casinos, which gets them "out from under" the more problematic features of indigenous policy.] No matter how much money is thrown at the issue, the problems never seem to get much better [within communities primarily dependant on indigenous policy]. Indeed, in Australia, outback Aboriginal communities were often more dysfunctional by the time of the Commonwealth Intervention than they were in the 1960s and early 1970s.  The difficulties for indigenous peoples tend to be notably worse for former foragers (i.e. hunter-gatherer cultures) than farming peoples, but the latter are not exactly shining beacons of success.


Development policy--specifically foreign aid--has much the same record of failure as indigenous policy for farming peoples. Not the level of disaster that indigenous policy has been for former foragers, but still remarkably little return for huge expenditures (in total sumsover time).

Welfare recipients also show patterns of entrenched problems--broken homes, violence and crime, entrenched poverty. There is a cause-or-effect problem here, in that social dysfunction makes one more likely to qualify for welfare assistance. Still, being on welfare does not seem to do much to improve such patterns and there is some evidence it makes them worse. Though, in all this, one has to be careful to not to mis-characterise behaviour which may turn out to be rational responses to the constraints of poverty (pdf) that have little to do with the above forms of public policy.

Saints, knaves and moralisers
I was reading a typically excellent paper (pdf) by the late Elinor Ostrom (a fine appreciation is here) when I came across a passage that generated an "a ha!" moment:

Finally, the worst of all worlds may be one where external authorities impose rules but are only able to achieve weak monitoring and sanctioning, cooperation is enforced without any need for internal norms to develop. In a world of no external rules or monitoring, norms can evolve to support cooperation. But, in an in-between case, the mild degree of external monitoring discourages the formation of social norms, while also making it attractive for some players to deceive and defect and take the relatively low risk of being caught (Pp 147-8; Pp 12-3 in the pdf).

Clearly, welfarism, indigenous policy and foreign aid involve "weak monitoring and sanctioning" and a "mild degree of external monitoring". But the epiphany went deeper than that.

Ostrom starts her paper by putting the problem of collective action in context. The problem being that, on the assumption that folk are rational egoists, then there is a massive free riding problem for collective action which should make cooperative action effectively impossible. Yet, both in the wider world and in experimental economics, we observe a wide range of cooperative behaviour.

From the experimental and empirical evidence, Ostrom distills three basic types of human agents--rational egoists, conditional cooperators (presume cooperation and then respond to others actions) and willing punishers (keen on sanctioning those who free ride). This is a similar framing as founder of cliodynamics Peter Turchin's division of people into knaves (always self-interested), saints (always cooperate) and moralists (moral with punishment). Turchin characterisers his moralists as conditional cooperators, but he draws out folk at the high end of cooperation spectrum to form his saints category and puts those more willing to withdraw if cooperation is not forthcoming in with Ostrom's willing punishers: these are different ways of cutting up the same underlying patterns, they are inferring from the same general body of evidence. (I discuss Turchin's book War and Peace and War here; he also has a useful website.)

Norms evolve
We homo sapiens did the key part of our evolving in small foraging bands. So, results from game theory experiments that:

Only the trustworthy type would survive in an evolutionary process with complete information. ... Where a player's type is common knowledge, rational egoists would not survive. Full and accurate information about all players' types, however, is a very strong assumption and unlikely to be met in most real world settings (p.145; p.10 of the pdf)

suggest that there might have been strong evolutionary pressure for cooperators (saints and moralisers) and against rational egoists (knaves). More worrying for more complex social settings is that:

If there is no information about player types for a relatively large population, preferences will evolve so that only rational egoists survive (p.145; p.10 of the pdf).
This implies that, in a game where people know only their own payoffs and not the payoffs of others, they are more likely to behave like rational egoists. McCabe and Smith (1999) show that players tend to evolve towards the predicted, subgame perfect outcomes in experiments where they only have private information of their own payoffs and to cooperative outcomes when they have information about payoffs and the moves made by other players (n8, p.145; p.10 of the pdf).

Different social settings affect which norms evolve and some may favour rational egoism. While most people start off as cooperators (saints and moralisers):

... preferences based on these norms can be altered by bad experiences. ... In this setting, the norms supporting cooperation and reciprocity were diminished, but not eliminated, by experience (p.146; p.11 of pdf).

Somewhat more reassuringly:

... if there is a noisy signal about a player's type that is at least more accurate than random, trustworthy types will survive as a substantial proportion of the population. Noisy signals may result from seeing one another, face-to-face communication, and various mechanisms that humans have designed to monitor each other's behaviour (p.145; p.10 of the pdf).

So talking is good.[1]

The big, take-away point here is that social settings affect which norms evolve and public policy can create or influence social settings.

Pay-off delayed
If we consider the evolution of norms, it is not surprising that people from foraging cultures do worse than people from farming cultures in modern industrial (and post-industrial) society. Foragers do not develop norms encouraging long time-horizons since there is little time-lapse between acquisition of food and its consumption. Farmers have to develop such norms, or they starve, since they live off delayed consumption. This is particularly so for farmers in colder climates (like, say, Northern Europe, Northern China and Japan) where surviving winter takes extra preparation.


In societies where asset accumulation is crucial (starting with one's own human capital), a failure to develop longer time-horizons, and the associated and reinforcing norms, is going to be a bit of a problem. A recipe for social failure, indeed.

Nice middle class folk from farming-cum-industrial-cum-post-industrial societies may not "get" what a big deal this is, as they have so internalised longer time-horizons--and their supporting norms--that they do not "see" them, and so do not seriously consider their possible lack and the implications thereof. Consider yours, mine andours. In a foraging culture, food storage is not much of an option. All food is fresh food and has to be consumed pretty rapidly. So sharing is simply what you do (within your not-very-big band). Particularly with "big" items such as meat. There is an awful lot of ours, not so much yours and mine.


This does not work with farming. You have to engage in an annual cycle of effort for considerably delayed payoffs where food is stored to get you through the year and production of sufficient seed grain is crucial. If one is expected to share everything, the free rider problems become enormous. A farming community based on continuation of forager sharing typically collapses in starvation. (This experiment has been run repeatedly; notably in the very early North American colonies who attempted Christian sharing of all food: this was a complete disaster until the new governor re-imposed the evolved farming norm of your land, your effort, your food.  It also makes me wonder about the very high violence level of non-state farming communities, which might represent difficult transitions from foraging to farming norms.)


Forager sharing also does not work with, say, housing. Asset-use massively disconnected from asset-care is not good for asset preservation. And housing paid for by others does not encourage the development of asset-care norms. Are the notorious problems of indigenous public housing making more sense now?

But it gets worse. How do prospects for "human capital formation" (i.e. doing well at school) look if everything has to be shared, so quiet space to do homework rarely or never happens? Or anything which evolves delayed pay-offs in cultures which have never had much cause to evolve such norms? Now add in free, no-effort-required, "sit down money" to the free, no-effort-required, housing. Not only are the evolution of norms appropriate to an industrial/post-industrial society frustrated, it is worse than that. The original pay-off-for-effort norms of foraging society are undermined too.

What would one predict from that? Massive social dysfunction, tending to get worse as time marches on. A tendency for norms to (probably rapidly) evolve to rational egoism with short-time horizons since income and housing comes without cooperation or effort.

What we have is massive norm failure. Public policy creating social settings where the evolution of norms appropriate to modern society is blocked and existing effort-and-cooperation norms are undermined or directed to profoundly parasitical behaviour.

Even more basically, prosperous lives in functioning communities with stable families and good life expectancies in decent polities are not the result of material things. They are results of patterns of behaviour, and the underlying cognitive framings, that produce the behaviours which create those things. Said behaviours, and supporting norms, do not just "happen" if income-and-material-things are provided. Dropping the physical consequences of such patterns of behaviour on people do not induce the patterns of behaviour. Worse, since provision of such things creates incentives, the resulting incentives can actively militate against beneficial norms and behaviours; they can actively undermine their development. This has been expressed as Reynolds' Law:

Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them

from a comment by überblogger Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit:

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Referring to the matter as a problem of "character traits" may be great for conservative, middle class righteousness but it lacks social science support. Not to mention any sense of historical change or cultural evolution. Looking at the issue as one of which norms are likely to evolve, or not, and why, is much more productive and does have good social science behind it.

Ironically, talking in terms of "character traits" rather than norms actually tends to underestimate the damage that can be done by badly structured public policy. If it is a matter of character traits, then, at worse, poor public policy is subsidising poor traits and weakening the return from good ones. If, however, it is matter of norms, then the potential exists for public policy to both block things getting better and make things worse through its effect on cognitive framings and the behaviour that flow therefrom. Hence some calls from African economists to stop foreign aid to Africa.

Conspicuous signals
Welfare, indigenous and foreign aid are rather bedevilled by the politics of righteousness, largely due to being high-signalling-but-devalued-consequence policy areas. That is, in these areas good intentions have high salience but the policies are typically directed towards people with low participation in public debate. (Public policy generally has a problem with signalling--which is clear and simple--having greater public debate salience than consequences--which are often indirect and complex--but the imbalance is particularly intense in these issues; as it is in public policy areas affecting groups with diminished or no moral standing.) This makes welfare, indigenous and foreign aid excellent policies for signalling righteousness (or moral vanity, or conspicuous compassion) since the intentions of the policies are very public but their effects much less so. This creates an attractive simplicity: if you are in favour of (preferably) more spending on welfare, indigenous policy and foreign aid, you are a good (that is, righteous) person. If you criticise such policies as ineffectual or counterproductive you are a bad (that is unrighteous) person. After all, you are threatening to take the conspicuously compassionate's signalling toys away from them.


Or else, if you are playing to a different righteousness game, it is just subsidising laziness and other "bad character traits" and, as the late Jesse Helms' famously dismissed foreign aid, pouring money "down a rat hole".
But if we proceed on the basis that people actually matter, so the actual consequences matter, then we can ignore the squeals of conspicuous outrage (or other posturing) and move on.

A further complication is that welfare, indigenous policy and aid bureaucracies have little incentive to explore options that make them redundant. Worse, politicians can have an incentive to keep people welfare-dependent or otherwise limited in opportunities if improved circumstances would increase the likelihood they would vote for their opponents. Or, in the case of indigenous political entrepreneurs, lessen their appeal. Part of the so-called Curley effect (pdf), using taxes and redistributive policies to shape the electorate. The ALP and other centre-left political parties, for example, have an incentive to expand public housing that concentrates their voters, and put them in marginal seats, as a way of increasing their chances in such electorates.[2]

Foreign aid is in even a worse situation than welfare or indigenous policy, given that the recipients are not even potential voters in the donating polities. So, one would expect fairly low (share of total) expenditures with little effective benefit to the alleged recipients, since the main political benefit domestically is the signalling one gets from the intentions, which actively militates against paying serious attention to any negative consequences. Any policy area where there is active pressure against facing failure is going to tend to produce a lot of it.
In other words, these are areas where there are sadly good grounds to have low expectations about policy effectiveness (defined as good for the recipients).

Including not even asking the right questions.

Evolved norms or imposed constraints
Cooperative behaviour (both active--doing things together--and passive--not blocking others) is crucial to achieving positive social outcomes. A society of rational egoists would be poor and nasty. (Postively Hobbesian indeed.)

In the paper on collective action and the evolution of social norms (pdf) first cited above, Elinor Ostrom pointed out that imposing outside rules turns out to be somewhat fraught in encouraging cooperation:

... experimental (as well as field) evidence has accumulated that externally imposed rules tend to "crowd out" endogenous cooperative behaviour ... To the surprise of experimenters, a higher level of cooperation occurred occurred in the control groups [that had not experienced imposed rules], especially for those who communicated on a face-to-face basis. The greater cooperation that had occurred due to the exogenously created incentive-compatible mechanism appeared to be transient. As the authors put it ... the removal of the external mechanism "seemed to undermine subsequent cooperation and leave the control group worse off than in the control group who had played a regular ... prisoner's dilemma."
Several other recent experimental studies have confirmed the notion that external rules and monitoring can crowd out cooperative behaviour. These studies typically find that a social norm, especially in a setting where there is communication between the parties, can work as well or nearly as well at generating cooperative behaviour as an externally imposed set of rules and system of monitoring and sanctioning. Moreover, norms seem to have a certain staying power in encouraging a growth of the desire for cooperative behaviour over time, while cooperation enforced be externally imposed rules can disappear very quickly (p.147; p.12 of the pdf).

Public policy, it's difficult. Particularly when it is effectively attempting to shift people in a single generation through processes of social evolution that took millennia elsewhere. Europeans and East Asians are the fortunate heirs of said millennia of evolution, so are not in a great position to sneer at those who are not.

Even in the case of industrialisation in farming society, we are still talking taking a generation to traverse what the originators took a couple of centuries to work through. Rather more centuries if we mean developing rule of law and responsible government. A point, btw, which also applies to migrants. So policies which undermine the development of productive norms by migrants and their children are particularly problematic, for both them and the host society.

Regarding indigenous policies, one of the more tragic stories I have been told is of a group of indigenous kids from Arnhem Land who were taken to Singapore; apparently the take-away point the organisers were after was that you did not have to be white to be successful. The kids came back to their broken communities and got straight into the glue-sniffing etc, because they were not white and so had no excuse. Realising how very different things can look to the person standing next to you is one of the hardest things in life, let alone public policy. Lots of folk pontificate about cultural difference; rather fewer seriously consider their implications.

Morality, custom and law
A point Ostrom makes in the above paper and elsewhere, supported by lots of field research (particularly in irrigation systems, were locally generated rules tend to manage water resources much more sustainably than those with externally imposed rules), is that the government advantage in rule provision and enforcement is much more limited than is generally realised. Particularly for common resources used by longstanding inter-actors. Worse, attempts to manage common resources--such as fisheries--have been sabotaged by central governments refusing to recognise the local rules and property rights that have evolved to manage the common resource. This has been particularly true of forests, local streams, grazing areas and inshore fisheries in the developing world, often out of a misplaced environmental concern and an inability to recognise the difference between open-access and common-property regimes. Ironically:

When resources that were previously controlled by local participants have been nationalized, state control has usually proved to be less effective and efficient than control by those directly affected, if not disastrous in its consequences (...). The harmful effects of nationalizing forests that had earlier been governed by local user groups have been well documented for Thailand (...), Niger (...), Nepal (...) and India (...). Similar results have occurred in regard to inshore fisheries taken over by the state or national agencies from local control by the inshore fishermen themselves (...).

In looking at norms, how they work, how they arise, what factors effect their evolution, we are in the area where morality shades into custom shades into law. Indeed, in much of the medieval period--particularly early in the medieval period--law basically meant the custom of the area (or "what we remember doing last time this came up"). Nor were laws simply territorial; If a matter came to trial, a traveller might well be asked which set of laws applied to them. We are so used to thinking of law as something that emanates from a central authority, we now longer recognise it when it emerges out of custom, such as local use regimes. (Alternatively, states are determined to defend their monopoly privileges.) Though, in the mid-C19th, the California Supreme Court had the sense to legally recognise what the gold miners themselves had worked out. Native title is also legal recognition of existing custom.

Both of which were the common law returning to its roots. Henry II's attempt to provide royal judges for a kingdom that had Anglo-Saxon law, Danelaw and Norman law, and regional variations thereof, is what led to the development of the common law. Send us all your local laws was the royal request, and his chancery distilled the common bits--hence the commonlaw. Henry's royal justice was competing with both the ecclesiastical courts enforcing canon law (which led to some Beckett unpleasantness) and local manorial and baronial courts. His travelling judges were such a success that the only part of Magna Carta which called for more royal government was the clause insisting on more frequent visits by royal judges.

To call Henry II a law-giver is to underestimate his achievement. He oversaw the creation of a system for generating law; for taking custom, precedent and current experience and producing law. Appropriately, for centuries, the end of his reign was the beginning of time immemorial. About one-third of humanity now lives under full or part common law systems; a system which began operating in a knightly society now copes fine with the space age.

The barons were not so keen on the royal competition with their own courts, but they became quite keen on being able to sue other folk; provided, of course, that no royal judge could do anything to them unless they were found guilty by their peers. Possibly the most famous of the trade-offs in Magna Carta. (The list of trials of peers before the House of Lords makes for racy reading. A highlight being Earl Ferrers who pleaded his own defence on grounds of insanity; a paradoxical approach--he conducted his defence with sufficient ability as to fatally undermine it--that did not save him from the gallows for murder of his steward. Allegedly, he was hung with a silken rope, out of deference for his rank.)

That, in English law, only the holder of the title was noble--so all the rest of their family were legally commoners--affected both the laws and norms of England, since it gave the peerage a strong vested interest in how the law treated commoners. Not the case in, for example, France were all members of a noble house were nobles so lacked incentives to attend to the legal (or other) treatment of commoners. They did, however have strong incentives to insist on their status and privileges, these being increasingly unanchored in genuine responsibilities. So a significant number of the peers of France ended up guillotined while the House of Lords is still with us. (It is even still inspiring emulators; it is a pity that those responsible for post-invasion Iraq and Afghanisgtan did not consider something similar to the Somaliland House of Elders, thereby anchoring their new governments in existing social structures.)

Norms matter
Norms matter; so the incentives that affect their evolution matter. Aid, indigenous and other welfare transfers typically do not generate productive norms. Worse, unearned transfers encourage rational egoism with short-time horizons since they provide payoffs without cooperation or effort. The failures of indigenous policy, of foreign aid, are typically norm failures. They will continue to be failures until they are structured to encourage the evolution of norms that encourage healthy and productive lives, families and communities. Successful lives, families, communities and economies are built on patterns of behaviour and supporting norms; so failure to attend to what does, or does not, encourage the evolution of such norms simply leads to failure. Including making things worse.

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer and at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Notes

---

[1] Speaking from personal experience, a narcissist--rational egoists with added self-delusion--can be very much more revealing in email; presumably because they are only channelling themselves, they are not getting any audience feedback, so their-convenience-as-reality-principle gets freer reign. Companies may also want to consider whether private payment structures are such a good idea.

[2] There have also been suggestions that centre-left parties may be using immigration policy to boost the number of supporting voters; in effect, importing voters.

Righteousness trumps morality (and civility)

It is a persistent feature of religious systems that they create outcasts. At its most extreme, such outcasts are deemed worthy of being put to death, as is the case for Jewish apostates under Deuteronomy 13 or Islamic apostates under the traditional interpretation of Sharia.

Even if outcasts are not deemed as marked for slaughter, they are deemed to be stripped of social standing and of moral protections available to others. Their lack of righteousness, of adherence to religious precepts, weakens the moral protections they would be otherwise subject to.

Gatekeepers of righteousness
The creation of outcasts is very helpful to clerics and priests. It is a very direct demonstration of their authority as gatekeepers of righteousness. For how can they be said gatekeepers if there are not those outside the circle of righteousness, if they cannot "cast out" from righteousness? And being able to so "cast out" manifests their authority.


But it is not only a matter of object lessons for the social authority of priests or clerics, but also their epistemic authority. Their authority as delineators of righteousness. A priest or cleric is such because they have knowledge of the specific qualities of righteousness, the specific ways to please the divine. Without such specific knowledge, what differentiates one set of priests or clerics from another? What does one need priests or clerics for at all?

Righteousness is not the same as being moral. For merely being moral does not signal righteousness, it does not signal adherence to a specific deity or belief system. For that, one needs something extra. And the more such precepts of righteousness can limit or suspend the operation of morality, the more authority they embody.

Hence apostasy warranting the supreme suspension of morality, being put to death. It may be presented as displaying the supreme authority of God, but what it actually displays is the supreme authority of righteousness at its most basic (worshipping the correct God), and of the role of priests and clerics as gatekeepers of righteousness.

Signaling righteousness
Food and clothing make fine signals of adherence to the precepts of righteousness. As does participation in public rituals. The contraceptive pill was something of a disaster for organised Christianity because female-controlled contraception greatly undermined the value of church attendance as a sex-and-marriage signaling device.
(Secular systems can also use  signals of righteousness -- modern political correctness makes public speech its prime marker of righteousness; an ideal marker in a highly literate society pervaded by electronic media, especially to signal righteousness among the intelligentsia. And any system where people aspire to be gatekeepers of righteousness is going to create, or seek to create outcasts. Hence the "noxious belief" tagging which is such a feature of secular opinion-righteousness. Elementary civility is an early and easy casualty of the display of righteousness.)

And by adhering to those extra precepts, one signals one's membership of the religious community (or relevant secular group), one's righteousness. Including -- indeed especially -- by participating in the out-casting, in public rejection of the unrighteous. The less empathy for the outcast, the easier participating in such signaling-by-outcasting is. By participating in drawing the line between the righteous us and the outcast, unrighteous them, reassurance is provided about one's own status as being of the righteous. The cleric or priest's role as gatekeeper of righteous mobilises identity, status and disgust in its service. A sense of superiority allied to authorised malice is a potent brew.

Morality is thus subordinated to righteousness. Righteousness offers authorised, targeted relief from the burdens of morality. Indeed, the more grand the moral pretensions that are taken on, the more appealing is relief from the burdens of morality. And the more of an affront the failure to adhere to righteousness is (one of the many ways Islamism is like Leninism, for example). The value of creating outcasts is central to why clerical  Christian theology, and its apologists, spends so much effort subverting the second principle of Christianity.

Religion and moral order
Religious precepts do incorporate morality -- among believers. Because to create an enduring community requires a moral order. And a moral order is a public good. (More precisely, it is a club good, as membership in the moral order can be denied; it can be blocked or withdrawn.) Any religion interested in persistence down the generations has to be concerned for creating and maintaining moral order -- within its adherents. Indeed, it has been argued that religion arose in the first place as a way of getting over "free rider" problems in creating and maintaining a moral order. Be that as it may, social selection pressures will tend to favour the spread of religions able to generate and maintain internal moral order.

Especially as the creation of a strong and resilient moral order can be a recruiting point for a religion. Extending to a social order more generally. Monotheism had selection advantages in the Middle East because it was able to generate a unifying moral order able to bridge the herder-farmer gap and bind across lineages.

The commercial advantages of Sharia compared to competing commercial codes seems to have been a recruiting path for Islam in the Malay world. Setting Islam up to be a counterposing identity to the ostentatious Christianity of Portuguese and Dutch colonisers. A sense of righteousness can be a powerful counterpoint to social subordination; a compensating and "trumping" sense of status. (If the English had stayed Catholic, the Irish would probably be raving Calvinists.)  This is particularly so amongst any elite who feels denied power and standing it feels otherwise entitled to -- the jihadis are much more likely to be educated professionals than genuinely poor, who tend to have more immediate concerns. The otherworldly can be a refuge from the frustrations of the world, in all sorts of ways.

Casting out the vulnerable
The powerful might be outside the righteous, but they will not be outcasts. That requires a degree of social vulnerability. Outcasts tend to be vulnerable groups or isolated individuals (or vulnerable groups made up of isolated individuals). People with smelly or unpleasant occupations, who are disturbingly different, who fail to play the proper social "game" (especially in ways which appear to undermine those who do) or who contradict any logic underlying or natural to the specific system of righteous belief are all classic outcast groups.

The Abrahamic monotheisms have tended to repress "paganism" (i.e. polytheism and animism) and oppress alternative versions of Abrahamic monotheism. Since there is only One God, any worship of multiple deities or spirits must be pernicious error. And how else can one truly signal righteousness except by adhering to the one true path to the One true God? There are also obvious advantages to being the priests or clerics of the version of One God worship that has monopoly access to office and preferred treatment by state power.

Another recurring feature of monotheism is very strong gender and sex taboos. The Abrahamic monotheisms and Zoroastrianism all regarded homosexual activity as warranting death. They also have strong anti-nakedness taboos and overwhelmingly masculinise religious authority.


Though the level of the subordination of women by Abrahamic monotheisms has varied, it is a persistent pattern. If there is only going to be One God, the probability that said One God will be masculinised is very high. God may not have a sex, but He is gendered. (A God whom nuns "marry" by being celibate is not a sexualised deity.) Instead, sexualising the divine is "idolatry" and subject to severe condemnation -- concern over idolatry moves any realm of dispute from morality to righteousness. Monotheism, in its worship of a One God who is so profoundly Other, has recurring bitter disputes about whether images and other forms of worldliness (such as music, dancing and other public pleasures) are distractions from, and so offenses against, the One God. Not merely as a way of distinguishing themselves from animists and polytheists ("pagans") but also a way of signaling righteousness against other One God believers; a pattern than extends from the Iconoclast disputes through Reformation denunciation of graven images to contemporary Islamist severity, most recently in northern Mali (via).

Given that anthropologically the public realm tends to be male and the domestic realm female -- a pattern that goes right back to the hunting males and gathering females of our foraging ancestors -- the ultimate embodiment of authority -- the One God -- will naturally be gendered as male. As will be His priests and clerics. Predictably, this does not have good consequences for the standing of women as decision-makers -- particularly their control over their own fertility. Abrahamic monotheisms are full of hostility to female sexuality and particularly female control over fertility. When added to a gendered doctrine of monogenesis -- that the male seed is procreative, the female is merely its field of growth -- the rightful notion of male control over fertility and link with a solitary Creator gendered as male is much reinforced. Queer Australian Biblical scholar Michael Carden puts it rather nicely in analysing Jewish natural law philosopher Philo of Alexandria's masculinising of the One God:

Philo's masculine ideal is both potent and in charge of that potency. This control is the avenue to knowing the divine, that ultimate potency in Philo's universe (p.65).

For Philo, same-sex activity both sterilises and feminises the male, thwarting his God-connecting male creative potency. An act so heinous that Philo recasts the attempted gang rape story of Genesis 19 as being about getting the mechanics of sex wrong, warranting the destruction of the cities of the plain. From Philo comes what is now the traditional Christian interpretation of Genesis 19 and the story of Lot and the cities of the plain, one that also turns up in the Quran. (Philo read Genesis 19 in the context of Hellenic natural law philosophy and Leviticus, but not in its wider scriptural context. This is in defiance of rabbinical tradition, hence the failure of his it-is-about-the-mechanics-of-sex interpretation to take within Judaism.) Christian theorists, such as Aquinas, take up Philo's notion that same-sex activity is treason against the purposes of the One God, so warranting death.


Though the Quran does incorporate the Philo-Patristic interpretation of the story of Lut (Lot), traditional Islam was much less bothered by same-sex activity than Christianity if it kept to the approved patterns of submission -- an adult male believer penetrating a male slave or dhimmi (thereby "feminising" and subordinating them) was not nearly as confronting to the approved social hierarchy as a male believer permitting himself to be penetrated. Teenage-adult relationships also kept within approved hierarchies (hence phenomena such as "caravan wives"). In Pathan areas, the notion of women as "unclean" led to patterns of preference for teenage male lovers. More recently, the abandonment of slavery and official dhimmitude within Islam has encouraged a more rigorous denunciation of same-sex activity, particularly to shore up Islamic clerics' role as gatekeepers of righteousness and to pander to a sense of righteousness among their followers; a sense of righteousness all the more affronted by, and so consoling about, the power of the infidel in the modern world.

Philo's recasting of the Genesis 19 story as being about the mechanics of sex rather than exploitive, xenophobic cruelty makes it about righteousness rather than morality; about pleasing the divine, not respecting others. On the contrary, it licenses the murderous enforcement of the precepts of sexual righteousness and glorifies the purifying slaughter of the outcast -- a notion reiterated in best-selling late medieval compilation The Golden Legend's story of the "Christmas day massacre". (This is in dramatic contrast to the Rabbinical literature, which emphasizes the cruelty, rapacity and malice of the people of the cities of the plain; some of the literature claiming that was the punishing of those who acted well towards vulnerable outsiders that provoked God's wrath.)

This notion that sex can only be justified by procreation -- without that, it is a distraction from attention to the divine and polluting offense to the natural order -- and that the male, in his God-connecting creative potency, is fully, authoritatively, human in ways women are not (Philo's misogyny is a pervasive element in his thought and feeds into similar formulations and patterns in Patristic and Islamic thought), naturally leads to hostility to female control over fertility, which then manifests in attitudes that play badly in contemporary society as women gain more income dependence and control over their fertility. If one believes one is peddling eternal verities, changes in background constraints become somewhat problematic.

Given that the One God is not going to be sexualised -- there is no being for Him to have sex with -- so sex is going to be a distraction from Him, the strong nudity taboos of One God worship and the deep concern to repress sexuality follows naturally; the fear of uncontrolled sexuality as distracting and lawless. (The Virgin Mary is the perfect mother because no sex was involved in Christ's conception, while it is a marker of Christ's divinity that He was conceived without the "impurity" of sex.) The only connection of sex to the divine is going to be via procreation. Hence the strong gender roles, conceived pro-creatively, and focus on procreative sex. Which leaves the queer -- those who do not adhere to the procreative gender roles, whether due to same-sex attraction or orientation (homo- or bisexual), or identification with the other sex (transgender), or indeterminacy of sex (intersex) -- well out-cast.

As queers grow up as isolated individuals within overwhelmingly "straight" families and social milieus, they amply fulfill the vulnerability criteria to be outcasts. Prelates such as Cardinal O'Brien, in their denunciations of giving queers equal protection of the law, are seeking to keep queers in the category of outcasts in much the same way that preceding Princes of the Church did with Jews. Whether it is Jews or queers, the Catholic Church in particular has a long tradition of putting the outcasting boot into the appropriately vulnerable; though evangelical Protestantism and Pentacostalism also enthusiastically outcast the queer. All the time, of course, claiming that said vulnerable outcasts have great corrupting power and are an enormous affront to God. But one has to say that, otherwise it is too obviously a huge majority bullying small and vulnerable minorities to signal and reinforce their own righteousness.

Authorised malice
A recurring feature of the righteous is their maliciousness, and the more righteous, the stronger the tendency to display malice. They do not see it as maliciousness, of course, as it is righteous malice, rightful opprobrium directed to the wicked, the unrighteous. So, denying the unrighteous equal protection of law is not malice, it is defending righteousness which is, itself, higher morality (which is to say, trumps morality).

Conservative Catholic commentator Philip F. Lawler, in his perceptive analysis of the collapse of Boston's Catholic culture, takes the march of queers towards equal protection of the law -- that is, the collapse of their outcasting -- as being a sign (indeed, "the most painful" such sign, p.4) of the decline of Catholic influence. The conservative Christian blogosphere is full of regret, even outrage, over the progressive collapse of the social outcasting of queers. (A retreat of social power in more than one sense.) The more invested one's sense of self is in the structures of righteousness, the more confronted and hostile one is likely to be towards the unrighteous -- particularly them aspiring to any sort of (insulting) equality with the righteous or achieving any acceptance of the legitimacy of their unrighteous perspectives or aspirations. (A point that operates as much to opposition to legal recognition of same-sex relationships as it does to attempts to limit freedom of speech.) Moreover, part of the appeal of righteousness is precisely its license to suspend morality and to engage in ill-feeling. For such licensed ill-will signals one is a member of the righteous, not merely moral.

Hence righteousness trumps morality. (And, of course, civility.)

[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer and at Critical Thinking Applied.]