Our Future: Trading Reliability for Power

I've often heard people 40+ grumble in the following way about modern communication technology: "Yeah email and text and voicemail and all that are great. But in 1982, you called a number, and either the person answered, or they didn't. There was no 'Oh your text got buried,' 'It must've gone into my spam folder,' et cetera." (All the more annoying because they're all plausible excuses.) Having all these technologies makes our reach much greater, but ironically, much less reliable.

If you're not sure this is such a great trade, it's worth thinking about, because something similar is increasingly happening with public services. Startups are replacing a lot of the services that local government typically provides in the U.S. - e.g., information reporting for state governments (traffic light is out at Third and Grant), DMV appointments, metro bus routes, trash collection, etc. Yes, sometimes those services are already spotty. The concern is that with, say, trash collection, barring gross dereliction of duty, I know the majority of days they'll get my trash, I know who to call if they miss it, and I know next week and next month and next year it'll be my city that's doing it. In a truly efficient market, there's no guarantee that if Startup A is doing it this week that they'll be doing it next year - yes, Startup B might replace them because it's doing a better job, but with that marginal improvement comes a whole lot of friction - a new schedule, new rules to learn, etc. This is a cost which, in making this trade, I don't think is adequately appreciated. It's already enough of a pain that you have certain friends eat up your bandwidth remembering which media platform is the one the check regularly. Expand this to other domains in life, and pretty soon all you're doing is keeping lists, which change constantly.

The analogy: you have to choose between being Clark Kent who can bench a respectable 400 lbs any day of the week, vs Superman. The catch is that 20% of the time Superman is sick in bed with kryptonite flu and you never know when that will be, and the medicine for kryptonite flu is constantly sold at different pharmacies and his health insurance changes unpredictably.

"The enforcer class is primarily concerned with itself (see Dorner)"

Please read this great piece by Ian Welsh, the Logic of Surveillance, which contains the statement in the title of this post. What was most disturbing about the Dorner incident was how the police acted out of all proportion to "get him", compared to a threat he might have made against any other professional class. They really didn't make much of an effort to hide the fact that this was a personal vendetta, because Dorner had declared war on police. Certainly when an armed and trained individual declares his intentions to kill human beings, you have to find him and stop him. That said, if Dorner had made threats against lawyers, or dentists, or scientists, certainly there would have been a response, but not the war footing we saw.



What's more, I highly doubt that the public would be as blithely accepting of the collateral damage we experienced in the form of a mother and a mailman being shot because they were driving vaguely similar vehicles.

The full quote that I used from the title is: "The enforcer class is also insular, primarily concerned with itself (see Dorner) and is paid in large part by practical immunity to many laws and a license to abuse ordinary people.) Not being driven primarily by justice and a desire to serve the public and with a code of honor which appears to largely center around self-protection and fraternity within the enforcer class, the enforcers reliability of the enforcers is in question: they are blunt tools and their fear for themselves makes them remarkably inefficient." It bears pointing out that the Blue Wall of Silence is particularly strong in SoCal cities. LAPD is notorious for this from incidents in the 90s, and San Diego's current mayor may be in office largely owing to support from the police union in a close election, since his competitor promised more thorough oversight.

Is Discounting the Future Due to a Defect in Impulse Control, Or a Rational Adaptation?

Many people are familiar with the Mischel marshmallow experiment. Kids who delayed gratification had better life outcomes.* The concept of varying ability to delay gratification is quite critical to discussions of public policy, since clearly we do not all have identical agency in every situation, by reason of variation of our nervous systems.

The received wisdom in the informed public is that not delaying gratification - that is, discounting the future - is a negative, a deficit in impulse control. The experiment has been run in multiple settings with the discount rate quantified: do you accept a ten dollar payment at the conclusion of your participation, or $11 a month later? (If you take the $10 right now, your future discounting rate is 10% per month.) It's been pointed out repeatedly since then that there are many other plausibly influential factors, including the predictability of the environment. Run this study in Singapore, and you can count on the experimenter being in their office when you go back. In Somalia, after a month, who knows if the building will be there anymore? Whether it's war or just low trust that makes it less likely you'll actually get your payoff, the direction of the impact on your discount rate is going to be the same.

Celeste Kidd created a model of this in children, and sure enough, kids who were disappointed by not receiving a promised reward, later on discounted the future significantly more. This relates to future discount rates in politically unstable parts of the world, as well as in children raised by inconsistent parents. It's a vicious cycle, because increasing your discounting is actual the rational choice.

I would have expected this result to be much better known, so I'm doing my small part in making that happen.

Kidd C, Palmeri H, Aslin RN. Rational snacking: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition. Volume 126, Issue 1, January 2013, Pages 109-114.


*It's worth pointing out that, so far as I know, there's no research showing that low future discounting increases happiness - in fact, there's research strongly suggesting that the curve is U-shaped, and beyond a certain point, good impulse control makes us less happy! Isn't that why we care? Essentially longitudinal studies here and here; writeup of both in Washington Post. Of course, your country is affected by the level of impulse control of your countrymen, so the ideal situation might be to be a person with low impulse control in a country of people with high impulse control, a classic free-rider problem.