Bottom-up

This morning I had a bit of an argument on Twitter with Ryan Avent about the future of self-driving cars. He thinks his infant daughter will never need to learn to drive because self-driving cars will be ready for prime time before she reaches her 16th birthday in 2026. I’m more skeptical. I think self-driving cars are coming, but I doubt we’ll see them available to consumers before the 2030s. So I proposed, and Ryan accepted, the following bet:

I bet you $500 that on your daughter’s 16th birthday, it won’t be possible and legal for someone with no driver’s license to hop into a self-driving car in DC, give it an address in Philly, take a nap, and wake up at her destination 3-4 hours later (depending on traffic, obviously).

The car must be generally commercially available–not a research prototype or limited regulatory trial. It can be either purchased or a rented “taxi.” And obviously there can’t be anyone helping to guide the vehicle either in the car or over the air.

Tom Lee has agreed to be the judge in case the outcome is disputed 16 years hence, with the following addition provision:

Let me suggest the proviso that the “nap” criterion in the bet be eliminated if it turns out that by 2026 nootropic pharmaceutical or cybernetic interventions mean that sleep is no longer possible.

So that’s the bet. Let me give a couple of thoughts for why I think I’m going to win.

First, although there are already self-driving cars on the road, those cars are “self-driving” with some major caveats. There’s a human being behind the wheel who takes control when the car approaches a potentially tricky situation like a pedestrian or bicyclist. I haven’t talked to the team that made the Google car, but unless there’s been fantastic progress since I talked to some AI researchers in 2008, the vehicles are probably not equipped to deal gracefully with adverse weather conditions like fog, rain, and ice. They’ll get steadily better at this, but it’s going to take a lot of work to reach the point where they can safely handle all the real-world situations they might encounter.

Second, the path from research prototype to mainstream commercial product is almost always longer than people expect. Building a system that works when built in a lab and operated by sophisticated technical staff is always much easier than building a system that’s simple and user-friendly enough for use by the general public. Commercial products need to work despite the abuse and neglect of their indifferent users.

And the challenge is much greater when you’re dealing with questions of life or death. One of the reasons that consumer electronics have advanced so rapidly is that the failure modes for these products generally aren’t terrible. If your cell phone drops a call, you just shrug and wait until reception improves. Obviously, if your self-driving car has a bug that causes it to crash, you’re going to be pretty upset. So a commercial self-driving car product would need to be over-engineered for safety, with redundant systems and the ability to detect and recover from instrument and mechanical failures. Presumably the Google car doesn’t do this; it relies on the human driver to notice a problem and grab the wheel to recover.

A third obstacle is liability. If a human driver crashes his car, he may get sued for it if he harms a third party, but the settlement amount is likely to be relatively small (at most the value of his insurance coverage) and the car manufacturer probably won’t be sued unless there’s evidence of a mechanical defect. In contrast, if a self-driving car crashes, the car manufacturer is almost guaranteed to be sued, and given the way our liability system works the jury is likely to hand down a much larger judgment against the deep-pocketed defendant. And this will be true even if the car’s overall safety record is much better than that of the average human driver. The fact that the crash victim was statistically less likely to crash in the self-driving car will not impress the jury who’s just heard testimony from the victim’s grieving husband. So self-driving cars will need to be much safer than normal human-driven cars before car companies will be prepared to shoulder the liability risk.

Finally, there’s the regulatory environment. Regulators are likely to be even more risk-averse than auto company executives. People are much more terrified of dying in novel ways than in mundane ones: that’s why we go to such ridiculous effort to make air travel safer despite the fact that air travel is already much safer than driving: the TSA gets blamed if a terrorist blows up an airplane. They don’t get blamed if the cost and inconvenience of flying causes 1000 extra people to die on the highways. By the same token, if regulators approve a self-driving car that goes on to kill someone, they’ll face a much bigger backlash than if their failure to approve self-driving cars lead to preventable deaths at the hands of human drivers. So even if the above factors all break in Ryan’s favor, I’m counting on the timidity of government regulators to drag the approval process out beyond 2026.

Will I win? I hope I don’t. The benefits of self-driving cars—both to me personally and to society at large—would dwarf the value of the bet. But unfortunately I think Ryan’s daughter is going to need to get a driver’s license, because self-driving cars won’t come onto the market until after she reaches adulthood.

I wrote a series of articles for Ars Technica about self-driving cars in 2008.

Update: Ryan makes his case. I’ll just make one final point: I think 16 years may be enough time to overcome either the technical or the legal hurdles alone. But the two problems will have to be attacked in sequence, not in parallel. That is, the policy debate won’t begin in earnest until prototype self-driving cars start to show safety records comparable to human-driven cars; this still seems to be a decade off at least. And then in the best case there will be several years of foot-dragging by policymakers.

Last week, Russ Roberts had libertarian tech policy scholar Tom Hazlett on his excellent EconTalk podcast to talk about the Google-vs-Apple battle in the mobile phone market, and the implications for open and closed platforms. One of my favorite things about the EconTalk is that when Roberts and a guest agree about a topic, he usually tries pretty hard to provide a fair and sympathetic account of the “other side,” so that listeners can get a realistic idea of the shape of debate and decide for themselves which side is right. He didn’t do that here. Instead, Hazlett repeatedly heaped scorn on the pro-openness side of the debate, and while Roberts was more diplomatic, he didn’t really make any effort to explain why the pro-openness side thinks as it does, even for the sake of argument.

I jumped into the comment section and pointed this out to him, and it became clear that Roberts is less hostile to the pro-openness position than genuinely unfamiliar with it. After an hour in which both he and his guest speculated that pro-openness advocates were elitist, irrational, religious, and so forth, he seemed surprised by my suggestion that there was “another side” he should have been more respectful to. He seems to believe that there’s just two sides: a pro-market side that believes that “the market will sort that out if we let it,” and a pro-regulation side that wants the government to mandate the use of open technologies. The possibility that the open-vs-closed debate might be orthogonal to the free-markets-vs-regulation debate—that one can be pro-openness and anti-regulation—seemed to be a surprise to him, despite the fact that he’s had guests like that on his show in the past.

I asked Jerry Brito for his take, and he suggested an analogy that I think might help shed some light on the issue. Consider vegetarians. People become vegetarians for a wide variety of reasons, but the most common reason in the US is probably a concern for animal welfare. The Roberts/Hazlett discussion reminded me a bit of a debate over food policy between two people who have never seen a farm animal. The debate might focus on whether meat tastes better than non-meat alternatives, and speculate on why people become vegetarians: maybe they’re elitist? Maybe men become vegetarians to score with vegetarian women? Maybe they hate capitalist factory farms?

If you ask an actual vegetarian, you’ll find that most vegetarians aren’t just concerned with the intrinsic qualities of meat—whether it “works” at nourishing people—but with the effect of meat-eating on animals. But if you’ve never seen a farm animal, this argument will always have a pie-in-the-sky vibe to it. Similarly, if you’ve never developed software, pro-openness arguments will seem vague and esoteric. It requires a leap of imagination to understand someone else’s concerns without a common frame of reference. And if you’re primed to view those concerns in terms of an existing ideological debate, such as markets vs. regulation, you’re even less likely to take those concerns seriously.

Partisans for openness don’t necessarily consider a Droid a better phone than an iPhone in the narrow sense that it has a better UI or more useful applications. (To the contrary, many lament that Apple is ahead on this score) Rather, they believe that buying an iPhone helps to shape the technology marketplace in ways that have negative long-term consequences for society. They believe that open technologies better promote values like free expression, individual autonomy, privacy, and human creativity.

This argument isn’t about government regulation. There are plenty of libertarian vegetarians who choose not to eat meat but don’t advocate making meat-eating illegal. To say that “the market will sort out” whether to eat meat is to entirely miss the point, because the point of vegetarianism is to change peoples’ preferences through persuasion, not merely to satisfy their existing preferences more effectively. By the same token, the goal of many openness advocates isn’t to make proprietary phones illegal, but rather to convince people to voluntarily buy open products because doing so provides large benefits for society at large. Libertarians don’t have to agree with that goal, but there’s no reason for them to be hostile to it.

Update: I wrote this post before reading this excellent article Roberts wrote about Linux in 2003. Roberts is clearly familiar with at least some of the argument for openness. Which makes the tone of his Hazlett podcast all the more puzzling. He seems to understand the practical advantages of the free software model, but not the ideology that motivates many of the volunteers to devote so many hours to the project. But the two can’t really be separated. The free software movement would be vastly less successful if not for the ideologically-motivated actions of Richard Stallman, Jeremy Allison, and dozens of others. If you think free software projects like Linux are a glorious thing, then you should take seriously the values and concerns of the people behind them. Especially if your podcast is published using an Apache web server.

Update 2: I endorse Jerry’s take on this subject.

Reason.tv visits the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear:

My favorite exchange:

Woman: You don’t see reasonable people putting Hitler mustaches on peoples’ faces.
Interviewer: So there were no people with “Bush is Hitler” signs like there are “Obama is Hitler?”
Woman: I see what you’re saying. No, but if there should have been a Hitler sign on someone, it should have been him I hate to say it.

While I’m lecturing people about disclosure, you can see my updated disclosure page here. The only major change is that my 2010-11 graduate work is being funded by Carl Malamud, who in turn is funded in part by Google. This is a much more indirect relationship to Google than I had this summer, so I’m not going to refrain from writing about Google as I did then. But I’ll try to remember to mention the conflict when I do write about Google-related subjects.

In September 2005, I attended the 2005 State Policy Network annual convention in Charleston. SPN is a trade association of state-based free-market think tanks, and I was there as an employee of the recently-founded Show-Me Institute, Missouri’s free-market think tank.

The Supreme Court had just handed down its infamous Kelo v. New London decision, holding that local governments could transfer property from one private party to promote economic development. SPN think tanks were busy capitalizing on the tremendous public outrage over the decision to promote state-level eminent domain reforms. On the first afternoon of the conference there was a curious panel called “Land and Homes Meet Knowledge and Ideas — The Bridge between Physical and Intellectual Property Rights.” The panel consisted of a mix of serious property rights advocates (Bert Gall from IJ, Chuck Cushman from the American Land Rights Association) as well as lobbyists from a variety of “intellectual property” organizations: the Business Software Alliance, PhRMA, the Recording Industry Association of America, and so forth. And the point of the panel was that we should respond to the Kelo decision by maintaining strong patent and copyright protections.

If that sounds like a non-sequitur, that’s because it is. These issues have nothing in common with each other, other than the fact that copyright and patent law are frequently described as “intellectual property.” Governments are not in the business of seizing patents and copyrights using eminent domain, and the Kelo decision posed no danger whatsoever to the pharmaceutical industry’s patents or the recording industry’s copyrights. Indeed, it wasn’t clear why these lobbyists were here at all; virtually all the regulations that affect the pharmaceutical, movie, music, and software industries—copyright, patent, FDA, telecom regulation, immigration—are made at the federal level.

What was going on is that property rights are popular, while the pharmaceutical and recording industries are not. The panel was a small part of a long-range, carefully planned campaign to hitch their rent-seeking agenda to the broader free-market movement. I don’t think SPN discloses who pays for its conferences, but I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that the “intellectual property” industries wrote large checks for the privilege of putting that panel together. The situation irritated me so much that I wrote a piece for reason denouncing the project.

The campaign to co-opt the free-market movement for the agenda of “intellectual property” intersts continues to this day. Another quasi-think tank called the Institute for Policy Innovation tried to get me fired in 2006 for writing this admittedly intemperate post about a shoddy study they had put out on the costs of copyright infringement. And just today I was followed on Twitter by a representative from the Property Rights Alliance, the (presumably industry-funded) organization that sponsored that 2005 conference and puts out embarrassingly bad “studies” promoting stronger copyright and patent protections.

To be clear, there’s an intellectually defensible argument (made by Richard Epstein here, among others) tying physical and “intellectual property” together. But there’s nothing intellectually serious about the efforts I highlight above. Rather, these projects are a kind of reputational arbitrage. Serious think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Mercatus Center have built up considerable reputational capital among policymakers, the press, and the general public by doing actual public policy scholarship over many decades. Organizations like the PRA and IPI exist to cash in on that reputation by presenting their sponsors’ in trade dress that a casual observer won’t be able to distinguish from the work of reputable think tanks.

Now, copyright and patent policy aren’t the most important issues in the world, and truthfully this particular campaign has been something of a dud. Most tech policy scholars at prominent libertarian think tanks (including Cato, Mercatus, and CEI) are duly skeptical of the recent trend toward stronger patent and copyright protection. I highlight it only because it’s an area I know particularly well from first-hand experience, and it illustrates a depressingly common strategy that special interests use to corrupt the policy process.

Which brings me to this appalling story (via E.D. Kain) documenting that private prison companies were a key lobbying force behind Arizona’s “papers, please” immigration law. If private prison companies had openly drafted and lobbied for a new immigration law that would increase the state’s prison population, it would have been obvious what was going on and the effort would have gone nowhere. So instead, the prison companies went to the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that performs think tank-type work for conservative state legislators (and regularly attends SPN conferences), and asked them to draft the language. The legislation was drafted by an ALEC committee, with industry input. An Arizona ALEC member then took the legislation back to his state, where several other ALEC members signed on as co-sponsors.

It’s important to be clear that ALEC isn’t just about this kind of corruption. I imagine ALEC provides real services to its legislator-members, who often have small staffs and benefit from the help of ideologically like-minded policy experts. And ALEC often collaborates with state-based think tanks, many of which employ genuine policy experts. The problem is that the details of legislation drafted this way are likely to be driven by sponsors’ interests. Even assuming that conservatives are going to push for anti-immigrant legislation, there are a number of ways you might do that. If the prison lobby has a seat at the table, the legislation is likely to be written in a way that maximizes the prison population—and the cost to state taxpayers.

Unfortunately, this kind of institutional rot is endemic in the public policy world. This ALEC story is particularly egregious, but most of the time the process is more subtle. Some think tanks (such as Cato) do a pretty good job of insulating their scholars from donor pressure. But there are lots of quasi-think tanks who make no such effort. And the result is a steady gravitational pull in directions that benefit corporate sponsors. People who want to do work that happens to align with the interests of sponsors find there are lots of organizations that want to hire them. People who want to do work that doesn’t align with sponsor interests find their options much more limited, and may leave the public policy community altogether. Over time, the community as a whole becomes more favorable to the interests of the donors.

Moreover, because people move from organization to organization, most people in the more reputable organizations have friends and former colleagues in the less-reputable ones. This makes quality control hard. If your friend is working at an organization that happens to have slightly lower standards for scholarly independence than yours, it would be rude to point that out. And so over time you get a blurring of the line between scholarship and lobbying. Many think tank scholars who wouldn’t feel a need to take the arguments of an industry lobbyist seriously feel more pressure to take seriously, and maybe even promote the work of, their former colleague who is now working at a “think tank” that happens to always advocate its corporate members’ interests.

I think a lot of people inside this community overestimate the extent to which ideology insulates them from the problem. They’ll say “I was a free-market guy long before I took this job, so I’m just getting paid to say stuff I would’ve said anyway.” But the world is a complicated place, and it’s not always obvious how to apply an ideological principle in a particular case. If several of your co-ideologues have already taken a particular position, you might decide to adopt that position yourself rather than taking the time to become an expert on it yourself. And once the community reaches a critical mass, there are growing social pressures not to take what is seen as the “other” side. This is how free trade becomes importing price controls and network neutrality became a matter of religious freedom. Getting the right answer is hard, and you’re just less likely to do it if you have a huge financial incentive not to.

To be clear, I don’t want to give the impression that this is primarily a problem on the “right,” or that it is limited to think tanks. Google has recently been hoovering up talent from academia and worthy left-of-center organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I’m sure that folks at EFF are more likely to take calls from their former colleagues Derek and Fred than they would from a random Google lobbyist. Similarly, I’m sure that Wal-Mart is getting something for the half million dollars they’ve donated to the Center for American Progress. Some left-of-center groups are also corrupted by traditionally left-wing interest groups like teachers’ unions and trial lawyers. My focus is on free-market think tanks simply because that’s the world I know best. But this is a transpartisan and panideological problem.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but I think the first step is that people need to talk about it more. In particular, members of the public and the press should be more aggressive about demanding donor transparency from organizations that do public policy work, and they shouldn’t take seriously scholars who won’t tell you who’s paying for their work.

Earlier today, I tweeted that “voting by mail is a huge privacy and security risk, and states should be discouraging it a lot more.” This generated a number of confused responses, so I thought I’d elaborate a bit.

When thinking about security issues, it’s important to understand what your “threat model” is. If you’re trying to secure your company against fraudulent behavior by customers, you’ll take very different steps than if you’re worried about an unscrupulous employee.

There are (at least) two basic threats to a voting system. One is that people will be allowed to vote when they’re not entitled to. This might be because they’re non-citizens, convicted felons, residents of another jurisdiction, have already voted, etc. Another threat is that a voter will be enticed or coerced into casting a vote that’s different from his or her true preference.

These are different problems, both conceptually and practically. We use a variety of methods for protecting against the former threat, including voter registration, checking IDs or proof of registration, recording the reported names and addresses of people who vote, and so forth. The primary defense against the latter is the secret ballot: since no one knows how you voted, no one can coerce you into voting in a particular way.

The former threat has gotten all the attention because Republicans in recent years have worked hard to portray it as a growing problem. (Claims my colleague Jim Harper has greeted with skepticism) They’ve pushed for rules that (among other things) require a photo ID to vote. The debate is intensely partisan because everyone understands that the people most likely to be disenfranchised by such legislation (or in the Republican version the ones most likely to commit voter fraud) are likely to vote for Democrats.

Anyway, that’s not what I was talking about. To the contrary, vote-by-mail is probably more resistant to voter fraud than some traditional voting schemes because they create a fairly extensive paper trail. Rather, my point was about the effect of vote-by-mail schemes on voter secrecy. Imagine if an employer, who everyone knew to be a Republican, required his employees to request absentee ballots and show them to him before they were submitted. Think of an abusive husband who insists that he and his wife fill out their ballots together. Or imagine a political operative going around a low-income neighborhood paying people $50 if they let him fill out their ballots for them. This kind of corruption is very hard for voting officials to detect. And more insidious, voters themselves may not even realize that it’s unethical.

Now, there are some circumstances, such as soldiers stationed overseas, where absentee voting is unavoidable. But traditionally, to get an absentee ballot you had to give a specific reason that you would be unable to make it to your regular polling place on election day. But in the last couple of decades a growing number of states are dropping these restrictions, allowing anyone to vote by mail without giving a reason. And the states of Washington and Oregon are moving towards mail-in voting as the default option. Although this is moderately more convenient for voters (and election officials!), the effective abandonment of the secret ballot is too high a price to pay.

“Development and socialization of the Implementation Plan with public and private sector stakeholders will leverage interagency processes and forums in place today to maintain momentum.”

People actually write sentences like that. And they don’t seem to be doing it ironically.

With the rise of the Tea Party, it’s become fashionable for folks on the right to warn that the Obama administration’s policies are pushing us down the “road to serfdom.” Tea Party favorite Rand Paul, for example, warns that reckless deficit spending could lead to the conditions that led to Hitler’s rise to power. And AEI’s Arthur Brooks and Rep. Paul Ryan argue that “the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises.”

There are a couple of problems with this “road to serfdom” argument. One is that it’s a misreading of Hayek’s famous book with that title. But the more serious problem, as Conor Friedersdorf points out, is that we live in a society in which actual “knocks in the night” and “jack-booted thugs” are increasingly common:

I regard the actual, ongoing abrogation of civil liberties in America as the clearer, more present danger, as compared to the unintended consequences of “smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises.” Indeed, these issues seem to me unsurpassed in their importance.

Americans are on an assassination list already. Innocents are imprisoned today. SWAT teams took out countless doors in no-knock raids this week. The last two presidents have asserted authority unprecedented in American history… and even when they break the law it goes unpunished.

If you’re not worried about the actual jack-booted thugs staging actual midnight raids in America today, you can’t expect to be taken seriously seriously when you warn that some policy you oppose could lead to jack-booted thugs staging midnight raids at some point in the future. And the party that has pushed relentlessly for warrantless surveillance, imprisonment without trial, and the normalization of torture has no business lecturing us about how the other party’s policies will, eventually, lead us to a police state.

The New York Times reports that the Obama administration is planning new legislation to give the government even-more-sweeping powers to spy on Internet users. It will be interesting to see if Tea Party candidates denounce this proposal, which really could facilitate future tyranny, as vehemently as they’ve denounced Obama’s spending proposals.

In recent months, Matt Yglesias has had a series of excellent posts about the anti-competitive effects of regulations on barbers, dental hygienists, tour guides, and various other industries. And each post has been greeted by a chorus of condemnation from his readers, who accuse him of being a libertarian sellout.

Now obviously, as a libertarian I think Matt is right on the merits. But I also think Matt’s critics are wrong about the ideological valence of these issues. It’s true that in contemporary politics there’s a tendency for people on the “right” to be reflexively anti-regulation and people on the “left” to be reflexively pro-regulation. But I think this is largely a matter of folks on the left not knowing their own history. Matt’s posts are, in fact, comfortably within the confines of liberal intellectual traditions.

If you look back to the work of early liberals who are the common intellectual ancestors of both liberals and libertarians, you’ll find a lot of concern about interest groups using the power of the state to enrich themselves at the expense of the general public. Early European liberals strongly opposed the state practice of selling state-enforced monopolies as a way of raising revenue and rewarding political supporters. The free-market and free-trade arguments of 19th Century liberals often took a populist, anti-business cast precisely because government interventions of the time were often such blatant attempts to benefit entrenched interests at the expense of the general public.

This liberal strand of leftist thought declined in the early 20th century. It was largely displaced by illiberal progressive and socialist movements that favored favored the centralization of economic decisions in the hands of either industry cartels (in the case of FDR’s National Recovery Administration, for example) or in the hands of the state itself. These trends created a schism in the liberal intellectual tradition, with libertarian-leaning liberals such as Henry Hazlett permanently distancing themselves from their erstwhile intellectual allies.

Yet the corporatist and socialist strains of leftist thought never completely eclipsed the liberal strain, and the former has made a comeback in recent decades. At the urging of staffer (and future liberal Justice) Stephen Breyer, and with the support of President Carter, Ted Kennedy spearheaded a sweeping deregulation of the nation’s transportation and communications industries, which had been organized as cozy government cartels since the New Deal. Presidents Kennedy and Clinton were both strong free-traders.

There’s a tendency to view this kind of thing as a fluke: liberals inexplicably deviating from their ideological commitment to government regulation. But this is stupid. Even the most hardened left-winger doesn’t see government regulation as an end in itself; they see government as a means to various ends, such as public health and safety, economic stability, and so forth. When regulations aren’t achieving those ends, and are instead benefitting special interest groups, it makes sense for liberals to favor their repeal. Not because they favor “deregulation” in the abstract, but because doing so is consistent with liberal values of equality, fairness, freedom, and so forth.

A big part of the problem is that the political right has become so effective at branding deregulation as their issue that people have come to talk about these things in a very right-wing way. Libertarians see the deregulation of barbering as part of a broader “economic liberty” agenda that also includes privatizing government services, cutting taxes, and so forth. And this means that even when regulations have clearly inegalitarian effects, the left has a knee-jerk tendency to support them on the grounds that anything the other side supports must be bad.

What’s needed, then, is an authentically liberal (in the modern American sense) way of talking about economic freedom—one that allows liberals to claim the mantle of Stephen Breyer without simultaneously signing up for Social Security privatization, abolishing the inheritance tax, and so forth. We need a vocabulary that reclaims the populist, egalitarian spirit of classical liberal thought. Modern libertarians spend an awful lot of time defending the deregulatory agenda of large corporations. We’re often right on the merits in these arguments, but it understandably makes the left suspicious that all our deregulatory proposals are somehow benefitting the wealthy and powerful. One of the brilliant things about the Institute for Justice is that they almost always choose “little guys” as their clients: individuals or small businesses who are having their livelihoods destroyed by more powerful incumbents. Even if these cases are not any different in principle from deregulations favored by large corporations, they’re much more likely to win over skeptical observers on the political left.

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I’m so interested in copyright and patent issues, an issue about which (not coincidentally) Matt has sensible views as well. These legal regimes are remnants of the monopolies that were the focus of much 18th and 19th century liberal agitation. In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of the free culture movement, a deregulatory movement that largely identifies with the political left. Larry Lessig’s work, with its focus on corporations using government to enrich themselves, gives us an excellent model for advocating deregulation in a way that appeals to the left-hand side of the political spectrum.

A few months ago, I began to notice that all the smart people I knew, including several readers of this blog, were recommending that I read James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. By happy coincidence, Cato’s monthly magazine, Cato Unbound decided to do a symposium on the subject and asked me to participate. Scott himself wrote the opening essay, which provides a capsule summary of his book:

It is both striking and important to recognize how relatively little the pre-modern state actually knew about the society over which it presided. State officials had only the most tenuous idea of the population under their jurisdiction, its movements, its real property, wealth, crop yields, and so forth. Their degree of ignorance was directly proportional to the fragmentation of their sources of information. Local currencies and local measures of capacity (e.g., the bushel) and length (the ell, the rod, the toise) were likely to vary from place to place and with the nature of the transacting parties. The opacity of local society was, of course, actively maintained by local elites as one effective means of resistance to intrusions from above.

Having little synoptic, aggregate intelligence about the manpower and resources available to it, officials were apt either to overreach in their exactions, touching off flight or revolt, or to fail to mobilize the resources that were, in fact, available. To follow the process of state-making, then, is to follow the conquest of illegibility. The account of this conquest — an achievement won against stiff resistance — could take many forms, for example: the creation of the cadastral survey and uniform property registers, the invention and imposition of the meter, national censuses and currencies, and the development of uniform legal codes.

The essay is well worth reading in full.

In my response, I consider how his argument maps to the modern debate over technology policy. Read on to see what 19th Century German forestry techniques can teach us about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and software patents.

After the formal responses are in (Donald Boudreaux and Brad DeLong are the other two participants), there will be a free-form response period where we discuss among ourselves. So if you’re not already a Cato Unbound reader (which you should be) I encourage you to add it to your RSS reader for the month.