Regulating Vice: Chapter 3 (part 2), "The Robustness Principle"
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:10 PM

Recall that surprise bestseller Regulating Vice calls for the robustness principle to govern vice policy. Policies are robust if they work pretty well independently of the extent to which vice participants are rational. That is, the policies should be serviceable if everyone is completely rational in their vice-related choices, and they should work pretty well even if lots of folks are wacky. From Chapter 3 (footnote omitted):


The main rationale for the robustness principle lies in ignorance. We can’t easily judge when a habit becomes an addiction or when rational consumption involves dynamic inconsistency or shades into compulsion. Therefore we want to avoid a regulatory regime that only makes sense if there is no such thing as vice rationality, or an alternative regime that only works well if everyone makes considered, sober judgments about his or her vice participation. What we tend to end up with when we avoid these extremes is vice controls that offer some assistance to those who are misinformed or struggling with self-control issues, as long as those controls do not impinge significantly upon those who are rationally vicious. In the realm of adult self-regarding vice, robust public policies can inform, entreat, and induce – but not compel.

Robustness is a sort of insurance against our own propensity to error. Policies that harshly punish private vice participation -- which in many manifestations has no obvious externalities -- would be inconsistent with robustness. But so might an unregulated market for highly addictive goods, because such a market would bring significant costs if myriad folks are addicted or diseased with respect to their consumption of the good.

Labels: Regulating Vice, robustness

 
Regulating Vice: Chapter 3, "The Robustness Principle"
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:38 PM

Enough time has elapsed since the, er, five-part summary of Chapter 2, for Vice Squad to move on to summarizing Chapter 3 in surprise bestseller Regulating Vice. Recall that we started by looking at John Stuart Mill's harm principle. Then we explored addiction, to see if there is any reason to alter the harm principle because of the addictiveness and self-control problems (or just plain shortfalls from rationality) associated with many vices. Chapter 3, "The Robustness Principle," argues that yes, Mill's approach -- which would rule out policies that have as their motivation the reduction of adult vice -- should be replaced by that pesky Robustness Principle, long foisted on the loyal Vice Squad reader. From Chapter 3:


Some adult vice-related consumption is harmful and (arguably) less than rational; further, we cannot easily distinguish rational from irrational choice with respect to vice. This leads us to the robustness principle.... Public policy towards potentially addictive activities should be robust with respect to departures from full rationality. Vice policy for adults should hold up pretty well if everyone is always well-informed and fully rational, and it should work well, too, even if some or many vice-related choices are irrational. We require this robustness precisely because we cannot ascertain how much vice is rational, nor distinguish the rational component from that which flows from a degradation of the reflecting faculties.

A robust vice policy will provide some support for those who are uninformed or struggling with self-control in their decision making. The provision of such support should not impose substantial costs upon those whose vice-related decisions are marked by rationality. One example of a policy that satisfies the robustness principle is a requirement for purchases of heroin, say, to be made with at least three days’ notice – where the notice would be revocable by the adult would-be purchaser at any time during the ensuing waiting period. Rational heroin consumers, and even rational addicts, can then assure themselves of a steady supply, but those struggling with self-control issues will not be able to immediately satisfy an unforeseen craving and can cancel an impulsive order when their decision-making faculties are controlled by their more considered selves.

I suspect some more Vice Squad discussion of the Robustness Principle in the days (weeks? decades?) ahead. [Update: Here's the brief follow-up post.]

For those keeping score at home, here's the Regulating Vice Posts Roundup:
(1) Announcement
(2) Introduction (part I)
(3) Introduction (part II)
(4) Introduction (part III)
(5) Erratum, Page 2!!
(6) Chapter 1, The Harm Principle (part I)
(7) Chapter 1, The Harm Principle (part II)
(8) GMU Talk (part I)
(9) GMU Talk (part II)
(10) Chapter 2, Addiction (part I)
(11) Chapter 2, Addiction (part II)
(12) Chapter 2, Addiction (part III)
(13) Chapter 2, Addiction (part IV)
(14) Chapter 2, Addiction (part V)

Labels: heroin, Mill, Regulating Vice, robustness

 
WHO's Tobacco Message
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:39 PM

A couple weeks ago the World Health Organization issued a new report on the "Global Tobacco Epidemic" and what steps to implement to counter it. The toll that tobacco takes (and will continue to take in the future) on health is staggering, with more than 5 million tobacco-related deaths annually, supplemented by the threat that the tab will rise to more than 8 million by 2030. The cumulative impact over the course of the 21st century, according to the WHO, will be hundreds of millions of deaths, and (if that is not sufficient), the toll could be an attention-grabbing 1 billion tobacco-related deaths. (There are more than one billion smokers currently on planet earth.) Today, the New York Times picked up on the WHO report in a special Week in Review graphic, following an editorial earlier in the week calling for the US to submit the 2005 Tobacco Control Convention to the Senate for ratification.

The WHO offers six policies (read about them in this 19-page pdf) to try to stem the tobacco health cataclysm. My concern, of course, is that at least two of the WHO's suggested policies -- public smoking bans and high tobacco taxes -- do not meet standard Vice Squad precepts. (The higher taxes might be OK if the starting point is low.) Eventually, as I note in Chapter 3 of Regulating Vice, harm minimization (or health maximization) and vice policy robustness must always part company. Robustness accepts that there might be benefits available from vice consumption, but a strict harm minimization strategy ignores these putative benefits. There should be limits on how much an adult who chooses to smoke (or drink, or gamble, or sell/buy sex, or...) should be punished or inconvenienced, in the absence of harm to others.

Labels: Regulating Vice, robustness, smoking ban, taxes, tobacco, WHO

 
Regulating Vice: Chapter 2, "Addiction: Rational and Otherwise" (part V)
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 8:23 PM

OK, I simply refuse to have any more posts -- after this one -- about Chapter 2 of surprise bestseller Regulating Vice. Following a look at comparative addictiveness -- itself a slightly misguided concept, given that the addictiveness of a drug or activity varies among, well, everything: people, time, place, manner, and so on -- Chapter 2 notes how addiction is not, and should not be, an excuse for committing a non-victimless crime. (While behaviors such as simple possession should not be illegal in any case, if they are illegal, there's a decent argument that addicts should not be held responsible for breaking a drug possession law.) Then Chapter 2 offers a summary of a sort, suggesting that: (1) there is a case -- not airtight, but a significant case -- that some addictive-type behavior lies outside the bounds of standard notions of rationality or even dynamic inconsistency; (2) self-control problems and addiction lie on a continuum, and even in a world without addiction, there might be a role for public policy to help (adults) manage their self-control problems; and (3) that despite all the discussion of addiction and self-control when, for instance, drug policy is being discussed, actual public policies (and even private responses) to vice do not seem to be closely tied to changes in our scientific understanding of addiction. Following the conclusion is the first of many "Vice Verdicts" sections; this one looks at four court cases in which addiction and responsibility for behavior were central concerns.

The idea behind the opening chapters of Regulating Vice, just to recap, is to examine what we can learn from John Stuart Mill's harm principle, and then to look closely at addiction and self-control, to see if our 21st century understanding of addiction provides any (further?) reason to accept or amend or reject the harm principle. This is the point at which Chapter 3 picks up. Whew.

Regulating Vice Posts Roundup:
(1) Announcement
(2) Introduction (part I)
(3) Introduction (part II)
(4) Introduction (part III)
(5) Erratum, Page 2!!
(6) Chapter 1, The Harm Principle (part I)
(7) Chapter 1, The Harm Principle (part II)
(8) GMU Talk (part I)
(9) GMU Talk (part II)
(10) Chapter 2, Addiction (part I)
(11) Chapter 2, Addiction (part II)
(12) Chapter 2, Addiction (part III)
(13) Chapter 2, Addiction (part IV)

Labels: addiction, Mill, Regulating Vice

 
Regulating Vice: Chapter 2, "Addiction: Rational and Otherwise" (part IV)
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 6:07 PM

When last we left off in our tortuous journey through the surprise bestseller Regulating Vice, we were nearing the end of Chapter 2's exploration of addiction. There's a short section entitled "Comparative Addictiveness," that explores such claims as "heroin is more addictive than alcohol." Is it? Probably depends on who the consumer is, the mode of ingestion, the social setting: Zinberg's Drug, Set, and Setting, yet again. (Comparative addictiveness even depends on the regulatory structure facing the various vices.) Nevertheless, ice cream is probably more addictive than spinach, and there are methods of trying to formalize such commonsense notions. One method is to ask what percentage of casual users of a drug go on to become habitual users; a second is to try to gauge the difficulty of quitting an acquired habit.

It is probably the case that for formulating desirable policy, dangerousness is more important than addictiveness. Most people think of caffeine as rather addictive, but not as particularly harmful. What is most striking about typical rankings of dangerousness is how poorly they map onto existing public policy, however. In particular, marijuana and many hallucinogens do not appear to be all that dangerous, but they face prohibitions. Alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous, and quite legal.

Labels: addiction, Regulating Vice

 
Regulating Vice: Chapter 2, "Addiction: Rational and Otherwise" (part III)
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:44 PM

When we last checked in with Regulating Vice, we saw how time inconsistent preferences might recommend (public and private) policies that would differ from those that would be appropriate for rational, time-consistent addicts. Chapter 2 continues by looking at further departures from the "standard" rationality story, i.e., where addictive choices are made outside of the usual cognitive framework, or are the result of a diseased mind. One piece of evidence that addictive-type choices are not simply reflecting time inconsistency is that cues in the environment can bring on intense cravings for addicts -- though there is little reason to think that these cues alter discount rates generally, since they only seem to affect choices made in relation to the addictive good or substance. When a smoker has a beer in a bar in night, he might crave a cigarette, but he doesn't necessarily want to lower his savings in favor of more present consumption.

The disease view of addiction has much to recommend it -- at least more than I suggested in an early Vice Squad attempt to come to grips with it. The basic idea is that our brains evolved "reward mechanisms" that give us pleasure when we engage in activities that are (or at least were) helpful for propagating our genes. These mechanisms -- think about those pathways from Monday's post -- have a biochemical substrate, of course. Along comes some chemical like cocaine or morphine that acts as a key that unlocks the pleasure pathway, though these chemicals were not part of the environment in which the pleasure pathways evolved. People try morphine, they really enjoy it, so naturally they try it again -- and again, and again. The brain, awash with external opiates, cuts back on its own endogenous production of pleasure chemicals (endorphins, or endogenous morphines), so now, without the external morphine, the addict is less happy than she was to begin with. Eventually, she needs the morphine not to make herself happy, but to prevent her from being miserable.

Regulating Vice Posts Roundup:
(1) Announcement
(2) Introduction (part I)
(3) Introduction (part II)
(4) Introduction (part III)
(5) Erratum, Page 2!!
(6) Chapter 1, The Harm Principle (part I)
(7) Chapter 1, The Harm Principle (part II)
(8) GMU Talk (part I)
(9) GMU Talk (part II)
(10) Chapter 2, Addiction (part I)
(11) Chapter 2, Addiction (part II)

Labels: addiction, Regulating Vice

 
Regulating Vice: Chapter 2, "Addiction: Rational and Otherwise" (part II)
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 9:52 AM

My project of providing a running summary of Regulating Vice came a cropper in early December, but is herewith revived. We left off after characterising rational addiction. Chapter 2 continues with a look at time inconsistency, which we first blogged about during Vice Squad's inaugural week. The basic idea is that people tend to be more impatient with respect to choices concerning the here and now and near future, than they are about choices over alternatives for the more-distant future. So folks have a sort of prudent, patient, long-view Dr. Jekyll side, and an imprudent, impatient, live-for-the-moment Mr. Hyde side. Mr. Hyde decides how much to drink today, and Dr. Jekyll finds the choices made on his behalf by Mr. Hyde to involve excessive drinking.

There is nothing obviously "irrational" about time inconsistency -- that is, there is nothing inherent in rational choice which requires dynamically consistent choices. But private and public vice policies appropriate for a rational, time inconsistent person might differ from those policies appropriate for a dynamically consistent rational consumer. (Similarly, policies appropriate for irrational consumers also might differ from those of rational, time consistent consumers.) Dr. Jekyll's might look for some commitment device that will keep Mr. Hyde's from drinking too much, and public policies such as taxes or buyer licenses can help Jekyll gain the upper hand. [We could be evenhanded, and say that the public has no more reason to side with Jekyll than with Hyde, but vice tends to be associated with excess. It seems to be more common (or more painful) to regret one too many drinks than one too few.] The costs that Hyde imposes upon a non-consenting Jekyll have many of the marks of economic externalities -- the difference being that rather than Hyde and Jekyll being two physically separate people, they are different incarnations of the same person. In an analogy with "externalities," these costs are called "internalities." And if you accept the externality-internality analogy, then a harm to Jekyll is a type of "harm to others," and hence social coercion of Hyde does not violate John Stuart Mill's harm principle.


Regulating Vice Posts Roundup:
(1) Announcement
(2) Introduction (part I)
(3) Introduction (part II)
(4) Introduction (part III)
(5) Erratum, Page 2!!
(6) Chapter 1, The Harm Principle (part I)
(7) Chapter 1, The Harm Principle (part II)
(8) GMU Talk (part I)
(9) GMU Talk (part II)
(10) Chapter 2, Addiction (part I)

Labels: addiction, dynamic inconsistency, Mill, Regulating Vice

 
Legal Prostitution in the US in the Early 20th Century
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:03 AM

One of the hazards of writing a book is that you might eventually discover something wrong, or infelicitously worded, right at the beginning, and then you are confronted with your error again and again over the years. On page 2 of Regulating Vice I mention that prostitution was "legal in much of the United States in the first two decades of the [20th] century..." I thought that I had said "legal or tolerated" but I didn't actually include the tolerated part. Is it true that prostitution was legal in much of the US early in the 20th century? [Most large cities had red-light districts where prostitution was tolerated -- Storyville in New Orleans was the most famous example. (Scroll down here for more on Storyville; thanks to the SWOP East Sex Workers Outreach Project for the link.) I have seen conflicting claims on whether prostitution was legal or just tolerated in Storyville.] Well, I am still unsure, but it looks as if the answer is "no" -- that is, prostitution was tolerated in much of the US at the time, but it was not legal. I have just reviewed chapter 2 of David Langum's great book on the Mann Act, and it mentions the legalization and regulation of prostitution in St. Louis in 1870. Apparently such regulatory moves were more common, as they provoked a considerable backlash in the form of various purity societies working against legal recognition of prostitution. Nevertheless, Langum states that "almost all of the [urban red-light] districts existed only by tolerance and lacked any legally protected status...[p. 25]," so it looks as if my page 2 claim is wrong. Ugh.

Labels: Mann Act, prostitution, Regulating Vice

 
Britain's Alcohol Disorder Zones Still Under Wraps
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 11:19 PM

You might think that Britain already has plenty of Alcohol Disorder Zones (ADZs), but strictly speaking, no. The official version of ADZs are actually anti-alcohol disorder zones, and they were pledged by the Labour government years ago. The idea is that alcohol licensed businesses within an ADZ would have to pay for the extra public services that stem from concentrated drinking. But so far, they have remained on the back burner. On the front burner is fiery rhetoric aimed at supermarkets (and their owners) that sell alcohol for prices that really are astonishingly low, given the significant taxes on alcohol in Britain. For instance, a one-litre bottle of Smirnoff Red Label Vodka sells for ten pounds at some British supermarkets, despite a tax of, oh, 8.83 pounds. (Read about it in the Daily Telegraph here.)

Vice Squad's Britain obsession is fueled this week by the prospect of stopping off in London on the way to a workshop in Kyiv. And did I mention that Regulating Vice is published by Cambridge University Press?

Labels: alcohol, Britain, Regulating Vice

 
Regulating Vice: Chapter 2, "Addiction: Rational and Otherwise"
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 9:59 PM

Chapter 2 of Regulating Vice starts by describing addiction, while noting the myriad definitions of addiction and dependence that previously have been offered. (In The Addiction Concept, Glenn D. Walters writes: "After reviewing the addiction literature, one might be inclined to conclude that there are as many definitions of addiction as there are investigators conducting research in the area.") Reinforcement, tolerance, and withdrawal are generally part of the mix, but not all vicious compulsions that people would likely term "addiction" demonstrate all three of these traits. Nevertheless, the chapter moves ahead with a description of rational addiction theory, as developed by two University of Chicago economists, Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy:

A capsule summary of rational addiction theory begins with the description of a potentially addictive good (a drug, say) as having the quality that the consumer’s current satisfaction from the drug depends on the extent of previous drug consumption. Other factors such as price will also influence current drug use, but the amount of past consumption plays a key role in generating today’s demand for the drug. In keeping with the notion that addiction involves reinforcement, the more you have consumed in the past, the more that you will choose to consume now, holding all other factors constant.

What separates rational addiction theory from most other approaches is that the basic description just provided is understood by the consumer as well as by the armchair addiction theorist. So when you make a choice to consume an addictive drug today, you recognize that today’s consumption will increase your desire for the drug tomorrow.

Rational addiction theory, it turns out, provides a solid underpinning for much addiction-related behavior, and also gains support from empirical tests when it is compared to addiction models where consumers lack foresight. One type of behavior that rational addiction cannot easily explain, however, is the costs that some people impose on themselves to try to commit to reduced future consumption. [Stomach reduction surgeries are one example.] In its pure form, rational addiction theory suggests that public policies that try to make drugs (or whatever) harder to obtain cannot make anyone, even addicts, better off (at least directly); private policies adopted towards the same end also would not make sense -- and yet such private policies are commonly undertaken.

Labels: addiction, Regulating Vice

 
Robust to What?
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:45 PM

One of the participants in the George Mason workshop yesterday asked why I focused on policies that are robust to the amount of rationality or self-control shortcomings among vice participants, when there are many other dimensions along which we might want robustness. For instance, we might want regulations that are robust to potential capture attempts by the regulated, or are robust to government empire-building. Once again, I did not have much in the way of ready response. Now, I think, I would mention that these other sorts of robustness, which may well be important, apply to essentially all areas of regulation. Self-control problems are central to the "traditional vices" -- a phrase itself that rightly came under some scrutiny -- and so it makes sense to reflect this centrality in thinking about desirable vice policies. One and one-third of the standard three and one-third vice concerns are addiction and "internalities," and these are largely missing from most other policy areas, such as antitrust or environmental policy. The robustness principle is aimed directly at these one and one-third concerns.

What I did mention is that while I am confident that attention to "robustness to rationality shortfalls" is essential to desirable vice policies, I often find myself less certain about the importance of some of the other purported problems. For instance, some people argue against a special sin tax on alcohol because once you start taxing alcohol in an exceptional manner, you will pave the way for higher and higher taxes and eventually serve a neo-prohibitionist agenda. But other people worry about a nearly opposite problem, that any special regulations will be undermined by moneyed alcohol interests. Which way do these political economy arguments cut, that sin taxes tend to rise, or to fall?

Labels: Regulating Vice, robustness

 
Regulating Vice at George Mason
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 11:46 PM

Thanks to Pete Boettke, I was able to give a talk (or participate in a discussion, rather -- the majority of my talk outline was skipped entirely) at George Mason University today, in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics workshop. My negligible sleep Monday night was poorly compensated for by lots of caffeine, but I managed to learn a lot and to enjoy the experience (which might make me unique among today's workshop participants). I'd say the most recurrent issue with my general approach to vice was a concern that my embrace of regulations might lead to all sorts of matters being declared to be vices, whereupon government would generate tons of new, counterproductive controls. [I am tempted to make a bad historical pun by saying that George Mason was constitutionally opposed to my approach to vice.]

My general response to the potential overinclusiveness of the definition of vice was along the lines of, "Maybe, but the robustness principle ensures that the costs of taking the notion of vice too far will not be very high. Further, even without the robustness principle, your favorite activity could be declared to be a vice, and then it might even be banned." (Ask the folks who enjoy alcohol inhalers, or marijuana.) [I should mention, though, that one friend in the audience reported that after an hour and a half, he still didn't really understand this robustness principle, so I must have been pretty incoherent -- maybe I shouldn't have skipped most of the outline?]

There was more at GMU, of course, and perhaps I will blog again as I process it. But one point that I find interesting is how different audiences respond in such varied ways to the robustness principle. Non-academics (or perhaps non-economists) focus on the fact that I would allow legal (though regulated) markets for heroin and adult prostitution; economists typically don't bat an eye at the legal heroin, but are concerned that my approach might be used to tax fatty or sugary foods. There's something to be said for perturbing everyone, no?

George Mason, of course, is (among other things) ground zero for econoblogs, and Pete's workshop has a very nice vibe.

Labels: Regulating Vice, robustness

 
Regulating Vice: Chapter 1, "The Harm Principle" (2)
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:42 PM

What if John Stuart Mill were the Drug Czar? What are the strictest drug policies that we could have that would be consistent with Mill's "Harm Principle" and the precepts of On Liberty? Interpretations of Mill can vary, of course, but in what I think are the most plausible interpretations, the libertarian-style philosopher would allow quite strict controls over drugs. What would be ruled out by Mill would be the criminalization of adult drug possession, as well as a medicalization-type regime in which drugs are available legally only via a prescription. Among the controls that would not run afoul of Czar Mill are bans on sales of those drugs, such as marijuana, for which sales are not really requisite for consumption; bans on advertising of drugs; high taxes on drugs; and buyer and seller licensing. While Mill would not allow a policy to be adopted if its purpose were to limit adult vice consumption, he would permit many policies that have other aims, but have the side effect of limiting adult consumption. Thus the high taxes, for instance, are OK (Mill goes further -- they are all but required) if their purpose is to raise necessary government revenue, even though high taxes will discourage drug consumption. And while I don't state it explicitly in Regulating Vice, I think that you could have a fairly restrictive, and quite adequate, drug control regime while staying within the bounds proposed by J. S. Mill.

Labels: Mill, Prohibition, Regulating Vice

 
Regulating Vice: Chapter 1, The Harm Principle
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:50 PM

The Introduction to Regulating Vice is so engaging that I thought, hey, people might actually read this. What can I do to make sure that this won't happen? Then inspiration came: I could devote Chapter 1 to John Stuart Mill and his harm principle. Mill was not in favor of governmental or private coercion of adults in their "self-regarding" actions -- a category within which most vice activities fall. What is a poor vice prohibitionist to do, then, in a Millian world? Well, you can search for loopholes: kids are an obvious one. Maybe we can prohibit vice for adults as a collateral measure aimed at Helping The Children. Or maybe we can argue that there is No Such Thing as a self-regarding act. That joint you are puffing on in the privacy of your home ten miles away is hurting me, or hurting somebody, so you must be stopped. (My vice? Well, thanks for asking, but my vice is benign, and self-regarding.) Anyway, I argue that these exceptions don't cut the mustard -- for the traditional vices, they would not justify prohibition, in Mill's eyes or mine. (In On Liberty, Mill was quite explicit about some of the vice policy implications of his harm principle: alcohol sales must be allowed, private gambling must be legal, prostitution per se cannot be criminalized, and so on.) But then there is a third exception, one I call "Vice Lunacy." Mill argued, essentially, that coercion is OK when someone is in a condition of a sort of temporary irrationality, when a person is “in some state of excitement or absorption incompatible with the full use of the reflecting faculty…” [see paragraph 5 in the linked section of On Liberty]. Hmmm, maybe vice brings on this state, especially for addicts. Can we justify a vice prohibition on these grounds, while still remaining true to Mill? That is an issue that I take up in Chapters 2 and 3.

Of course, maybe you don't like the harm principle, maybe you don't see any need to be true to Mill. The problem (or one problem) with an outright rejection of Mill is that it then sets one up to admit the propriety of almost any invasive or tyrannous act, such as the government telling you what time to get up in the morning or what color to paint your living room. But again, this is a topic to which I return in Chapter 3....

Labels: Mill, Regulating Vice

 
Regulating Vice: The Introduction (part III)
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 5:15 PM

After wading through Zero Tolerance versus Harm Reduction approaches to vice policy, the Introduction sashays towards a conclusion with two sections, one (provocatively?) entitled "Futility?" and the other "Toward a Thesis." (The original title of the final section was "Towards a Thesis" but my towards were deemed untoward by the copy editor.) "Futility?" points out that it is not uncommon to hear people make claims of complete vice policy ineffectiveness, along the lines of "Prohibition can't work, because market forces are too strong for mankind's meager regulations." As you might guess (and as the loyal Vice Squad reader knows), "Futility?" argues that this sort of claim generally is overstated. As for "Toward a Thesis," this section will not be news to the Vice Squad reader, either. In it, I foreground what becomes the organizing structure of my approach to vice policy, and to Regulating Vice. I...

...suggest that a type of “robustness principle” should govern the regulation of vice: public policy toward [sic!] addictive or vicious activities engaged in by adults should be robust with respect to departures from full rationality. That is, policies should work pretty well if everyone is fully informed and completely rational, and policies should work pretty well even if a substantial number of folks are occasionally (or frequently) irrational in their vice-related choices. “Working well” entails coming to grips with the 3⅓ standard vice concerns of kids, addicts, externalities, and harms to nonaddicted adult users.

(The word "nonaddicted" started out as non-addicted, but the copy editing involved some extreme hyphen cleansing along with the towards-shortening.)

I get the sense that these sort of lengthy summaries of Regulating Vice have found an unfortunate middle ground between a bare-bones recitation of the argument and an engaging presentation keeping with the spirit of the book. As is standard in the vice world, I have every intention of reforming.

Labels: Regulating Vice, robustness

 
Regulating Vice: The Introduction (part II)
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 7:31 PM

The Introduction proceeds by discussing a typical vice policy dilemma, that of Zero Tolerance versus Harm Reduction. First, imagine that vice activity has no benefits at all -- then the social goal, presumably, would be to decrease the total harms, or total social costs, of vice and vice policy enforcement. Drawing upon MacCoun and Reuter, Total harm = [# of vice incidents] times [harm per incident]. It looks as if reducing the number of vice incidents is a good way to reduce harm, but there is a catch: in practice, policies aimed at reducing vice incidents simultaneously increase the harm per incident. [Zero tolerance policies are among those that hope to reduce the number of incidents.] Under alcohol Prohibition, for instance, drinking went down, but the drinking that remained tended to come at high cost, including poisonings via adulterated beverages and crime and corruption. So even if you ignore the benefits of vice, it might be desirable to adopt policies that accept some vicious behavior, in order to reduce harms per incident and potentially, to reduce overall social costs. Thus it makes sense to consider policies such as the provision of clean needles to heroin addicts, or drug legalization, as possible methods to reduce overall costs.

The harm reduction versus zero tolerance trade-off exists in a wide array of social policies. One that has recently been in the news concerns the provision of driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. Such policies probably decrease the social cost per illegal immigrant driver. Opponents stress, instead, that license availability in some sense subsidizes illegal immigration, so the number of incidents of illegal immigrant driving might go up.

Labels: harm reduction, Regulating Vice, zero tolerance

 
Regulating Vice: The Introduction (part I)
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:20 PM

Regulating Vice starts off by trying to impress upon the reader (note the singular) that vice policy has traditionally been highly unstable, and that on these grounds alone there is reason to believe that current policies will prove similarly ephemeral. (An early Vice Squad post offers a parallel discussion, not coincidentally.) The next step is to delimit the subject matter: what constitutes a vice? (An axiomatic-style definition is not sought.) Excess and habit are part of the standard equation, as is the idea that the behavior in question does not have (at least in some private manifestations) direct effects upon non-participants -- in econ-speak, 'no externalities', or in Mill-speak, 'self-regarding'. And then there is the conflation of wickedness (or immorality) and pleasure, which separates gambling, for instance, from exercise, though both gambling and exercise can be habitual, excessive, and self-regarding. [The very end of Regulating Vice returns to the question of what is a vice.]

...taking perceptions of immorality as given, a traditional vice exhibits excess, is habitual, and produces direct consequences that fall nearly in their entirety on the person engaging in it. These common traits imply that approaches to regulating vices as disparate as gambling and injecting heroin involve a shared set of principles. Within the class of illicit drugs alone there are vast and important variations that influence the appropriateness of alternative regulatory structures; nevertheless, it makes sense to discuss public policy toward alcohol, gambling, prostitution, and so on, within a common framework [pp. 5-6].

The framework that is then proposed is one that is primarily economic and legal, one that takes into account (at least implicitly) the pleasures that some people find in vice. The standard three and one-third vice concerns (familiar to the loyal Vice Squad reader) of kids, addicts, externalities, and internalities are then introduced. This gets us to page 12; more tomorrow, I hope.

Labels: Mill, Regulating Vice

 
What I Have Been Up To
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 8:14 AM


In the initial Vice Squad post of September 18, 2003, I noted that I had "recently started to write a secondary text" for my Regulation of Vice class. On June 6, 2005, Vice Squad entered a year and a half of semi-hibernation, which I claimed was undertaken largely "to devote myself to finishing up the book I have been composing (decomposing?) on vice policy." Today, about four and a half years after starting work on the book, I am happy to report that Regulating Vice has sprung (or stumbled) into existence. The Amazon page (for the paperback) is here.

There are no kind words from famous folks on the back of the book -- hmmm, was this intentional, or despite heroic efforts, was the publisher unable to conjure up such encomia? In any event, I will provide my own ringing endorsement of Regulating Vice: "All the tedium of Vice Squad, without the brevity." Everyone should buy a copy -- er, two copies, one hardback ($85 at Amazon, so appropriate for the library at Alexandria) and one paperback (for you, dear Vice Squad reader, only $29.99 at Amazon.) When I return to Chicago from the conference in New Orleans I'll have lots more to say about Regulating Vice; for now, though, I must dance.

Labels: Regulating Vice, solipsism