Comments for Taxing Height: A Response To Mankiw

Taxing Height: A Response To Mankiw

2009-05-29T15:40:14Z

Greg Mankiw is kind enough to link to my question about his paper (pdf) on the optimal taxation of height and knock me around a bit:

The point of our paper is this: If you are going to take [utilitarian] philosophy seriously, you have to take all of the implications seriously. And one of those implications is the optimality of taxing height and other exogenous personal characteristics correlated with income-producing abilities. A moral and political philosophy is not like a smorgasbord, where you get to pick and choose the offerings you like and leave the others behind without explanation.

There are plenty of small things to say about this. Height is not perfectly exogenous -- we can imagine people trying to reduce their height to reduce their tax burden, can't we? -- and the fact that the correlation is not perfect suggests there will be some individuals unfairly affected by a height tax. (On the other hand, as the government's information gets better we could imagine that unfairness disappearing.) But mostly, I want to say this: Isn't moral and political philosophy exactly like a smorgasbord?]]>
Consider everyone's favorite hypothetical from ethics 101: A runaway train is barreling down the tracks toward five workers, unaware that they're in for a grisly demise. You are standing on a bluff overlooking the scene, in front of a magic lever that can divert the train to a separate track on which there is a lone worker. Do you pull the switch?

It seems intuitively obvious to me, and I think intuitively obvious to most people, that you should pull the switch. But for me that intuition does not hold across all cases with similar stakes. Switch the scene to a hospital emergency room in which you are the surgeon. You have five patients desperately in need of organ transplants. In walks a healthy person. Do you whack him over the head with a mallet and harvest his organs to save the other five? Maybe readers of the Atlantic aren't so cowardly, but I wouldn't!

But I don't really have a good explanation for why I wouldn't, except that intuition tells me I don't want to live in a world where doctors can whack me over the head and steal my liver and lungs in the name of the greater good. Of course, I'm perfectly OK with being run over by a train for the same principle. But the blatant hypocrisy of this really doesn't keep me up at night, largely because I don't see the alternative: Everyone has moral intuitions they can't justify in the same we can justify the pythagorean theorem, and I don't see the point of fighting that strong impulse in the name of a hobgoblin-ish consistency.

So I think of height as a little like the hospital. I have a strong moral intuition -- even though I know it's one I can't justify -- that height is something I deserve. But proving that my moral intuitions are an inconsistent smorgasbord doesn't mean I'm going to give them up!

(Note Bene: This is getting somewhat far afield of the original tax question, but I wouldn't pick the utilitarian social welfare function, either. A Rawlsian social welfare function -- attempting to maximize the the utility of the least well off person within some other constraints -- strikes me as a better alternative. I am assuming that Mankiw's argument for a height tax holds for a Rawlsian social welfare function too. But it's possible the height tax would violate some other Rawlsian principle -- like the principle of greatest equal liberty. Maybe some moral or political philosophers would have an opinion on that.)

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Comment from Steve Koch on 2009-05-29

2009-05-29T16:51:46Z

It is a free country, of course you have the right to pick whatever set of political beliefs you want to believe.

My guess is that Mankiw is not contesting your right to believe whatever you want to believe but is saying is that one measure of the goodness/usefulness of a person's philosophy is how internally self consistent it is. The libertarian philosophy appeals to me because when I use it to approach a particular political question, I usually end up with an answer that makes sense to me intuitively, rationally and experientially (is that a word?).

Comment from Conor Clarke on 2009-05-29

2009-05-29T17:06:29Z

but is your libertarianism a mechanism for maximizing some other good (like aggregate utility), or is it a good unto itself? and if the latter, where does that intuition come from?

Comment from mdb002 on 2009-05-29

2009-05-29T17:14:33Z

Black and white what ifs are very poor defenses, what if 5 single mothers were on one track and your child on the other, do you still pull the switch? What if it was 5 drifters and your child?

Comment from Conor Clarke on 2009-05-29

2009-05-29T17:25:54Z

I don't really see how calibrating the details of the hypothetical changes the upshot. I think people see the first scenario and think: "there's a general principle here! it is better to let one die than five." but then the general principle doesn't seem to apply in other situations. what does messing with the details to mess with my intuition prove, except that the principle one might derive from the first scenario is weak?

I think this same thing plays out all over the place. you go from particular situation to general principle to particular situation (or moral intuition to comprehensive doctrine in Rawls' terms), only to find that the general principle no longer applies. that this happens with optimal tax theory doesn't really seem like it should be surprising, or worrying.

Conor

Comment from Spencer on 2009-05-29

2009-05-29T17:27:46Z

Mankiw assumes that it is absurd to treat height as an unfair and therefore taxable advantage, but it's worth pointing out that height is basically undeserved, in the sense that the person who has it did nothing to earn it. So are intelligence, and attractiveness, strength, and all the rest of our genetic square one – even things like our capacity to work hard. Sometimes there is obvious social utility to rewarding people who have these as if they deserve them – it’s good if people with lots of inborn intelligence are rewarded for it, because it creates incentives for them to express their intelligence and pursue those rewards, and if we’re careful in constructing our meritocracy that will usually make them use their intelligence in ways beneficial to everyone. Same goes for people who are able to work hard.

But height isn’t like that. There’s no good social reason to reward tall people, and there’s certainly no good moral reason. It actually does sort of suck that some people are born tall and that tall people get shit for free. But does that mean we should use policies like taxation to level (ha ha) this particular playing field?

I have the extremely strong intuition that we should not. I imagine almost everyone shares that intuition (Mankiw’s argument certainly assumes we do). But we can’t just rest there. It’s important that we be able to explain our case-by-base intuitions with some reference to broader moral principles. And not important in some strong philosophical sense – I think one of the most powerful moral intuitions we have is the desire that our whole moral understanding be more or less coherent, because if it's not then its particular elements seem arbitrary. And arbitrary is one of the very last things we want morality to be.

But what is the reasonable broader principle by which it makes sense that I enjoy enormous social benefit due to my height? Or even that people born for no good reason without access to that benefit shouldn't receive policy help to water down the difference? Maybe "people at least shouldn't be punished for their natural gifts." But of course, short people are being punished for their natural inheritance all the time.

To push it a little harder, I think that one severe problem with reasoning from even strong intuitions that the sources of those intuitions are not always clear, and we have good reason to believe that at least some of them are illegitimate. In particular I think that to varying degrees we all have a very strong conservative impulse that creates intuitive feelings of repulsion when we're confronted with radically novel moral arrangements. "A tax on height? That's insane." "Women should vote? Craziness."

But in the end, I would not support a tax on height, nor probably any other policy response to the amoral arbitration of biology, and here's why: sometimes I think our strong conservative impulse is a good one. It's a defense mechanism against radical change and uberprogressive scheming. Our belief (or mine anyway) in some kind of social meritocracy is so deep that I literally have no idea what a society based on its denial would look like. I have no confidence in my ability to build one, so I'm gonna leave well enough alone. But to some extent I'm going to remain unsatisfied, too.

Comment from mdb002 on 2009-05-29

2009-05-29T17:48:38Z

Where this leads is basically no where, because you don't really believe in the general principle. You believe in the example.

Comment from Conor Clarke on 2009-05-29

2009-05-29T18:07:29Z

well sure. if I had a general principle that conflicted with a series of deeply held moral intuitions in particular circumstances, I would drop it.

Comment from mdb002 on 2009-05-29

2009-05-29T18:15:53Z

But there would be many many counter examples to your general principle, I could come up with many others with relative ease. To me that means, it is not your general principle, it is a specific principle. Which makes debating the broad application of the general principle, quite pointless.

Comment from Bababooey on 2009-05-29

2009-05-29T19:52:50Z

and the fact that the correlation is not perfect suggests there will be some individuals unfairly affected by a height tax

Isn't that true of the income tax? If Saez is right that "taxes should be based on income, which measures economic welfare or need closely", isn't it true that the income tax on 2 couples earning $200k poorly measures "welfare and need" when 1 couple childlessly reside in Boise while the other couple has 4 kids in Manhattan and also cares for elderly parents? Similarly an individual in Texas making 100k pays less in taxes than a couple with 4 kids in New York making 200k.

Shouldn't you investigate whether the correlation between height & "welfare and need" exceeds the correlation between income & "welfare and need" and if it does advocate for a height tax?

Comment from Steve Koch on 2009-05-29

2009-05-29T21:59:59Z

Libertarianism maximizes personal liberty. That is good unto itself. If you consider any political topic from the perspective of how it impacts personal liberty, the answer is usually intuitively obvious. For example, should we have a military draft? Nope, that decreases personal liberty. Should we have school choice vouchers? Yep, it increases personal liberty. Should we make marijuana illegal? Nope, it decreases personal liberty. Low taxes are better than high taxes because it increases personal liberty. Small government is better than big government because it increases personal liberty.

Obviously it can't answer all questions. For example, take abortion. You might think that the libertarian approach is to permit abortion so as to not violate the liberty of the mother. But what if the fetus is regarded as a not yet born human? Then protecting the liberty of the fetus means not aborting it.

I don't think libertarianism addresses whether the fetus is human or not so it can't answer the question of abortion rights.