Should we celebrate bin Laden's death?

Osama bin Laden was murdered while resisting detainment by the U.S. armed forces. Of course, when President Obama authorized the "raid" on bin Laden's hideout he knew that bin Laden would be killed with high probability. If not, the U.S. would kill him by the death penalty.

Opponents of the death penalty are responding with some sense of outrage. You see it on Facebook and Twitter where "murder is never the answer even for Bin Laden" is the slogan by chanted.

I don't understand that.

First, isn't it good to murder people responsible for 3,000 deaths? Isn't it more likely that a political leader will sentence 3,000 people to death if he thinks that the worst that will happen is that he will be sent to a nice jail in old age, rather than be killed? (The incentive effects are more complicated, but I just want death penalty opponents to acknowledge that the death penalty may save lives. In fact, if you ask most people for their prior on this question, most people implicitly believe the death penalty saves lives.)

Second, murdering bin Laden made a lot of people, esp. in the US very happy. Twitter lit up in celebration and fans at stadiums across the country cheered. The net utility, any way you measure it, was probably positive when you consider that bin Laden was a miserable old man, likely to die soon anyway, so the utility loss from the murder was low, while the benefits were small but for hundreds of millions of people.

Now, I should stop. I know a lot of people will reply "but that is exactly why the utilitarian calculus is wrong. It's actually a famous example." The famous example is that, suppose an innocent man were going to be killed so that a rowdy mob will gain utility. Suppose they gain more utility than he loses. Here the mob has 300,000,000 members in it, give or take, and the innocent man isn't innocent, but its similar. But that's the catch: utilitarianism isn't wrong.

We kill innocent people so that lots of people can gain small sums of utility on a daily basis. Consider highway safety. If we lowered the speed limit it would force people to drive slower and thus there would be fewer fatal crashes. But we choose not to lower the speed limit because we would rather have a few people die than have everyone commute for an extra 10 minutes every day. When two economists, Orley Asherfelter and Michael Greenstone, quantified the dollar value we place on a human life, it was something like $500,000. Now let's consider the Osama case. We are willing to let an innocent American die in a car crash so we can each get to work faster and we'd be willing to collectively pay $500,000 for the privilege. That is completely moral. But if I could collect a dollar from half of Americas (surely I could) to murder Osama, showing that his death is worth at least $150,000,000 or 300x as much, and knowing the cost of his death is not as bad because he isn't innocent and he is old and will die soon anyway, it's immoral.

In summary:

Moral: killing an innocent child on the highways so everyone has as shorter commute
Immoral: killing a mass murdered to generate 300x as much joy

Whose theory of ethics doesn't make sense?

And to answer the question in the title: The best response to any situation is to make the best of it. You can't change the fact that he's dead and sucking the joy out of the event for others or sulking in misery isn't helping anyone.

David Leonhardt wins Pulitzer

The prize was long overdue. Details on the other winners.

Gaming Reality

Heather Caplin has a good commentary on "gamificiation" over at Slate. The basic idea, which she argues against, is that people find life too boring and a way to make them more satisfied and motivated is to sturcture tasks as games. This, they hope, will give life an "epic" feel and provide more rewards (e.g. experience points) for mundane tasks.

I think gamification has some value, and Caplin would admit this. What she is arguing against is extreme gamification--she worries about what will happen when most of our lives have been gamified:

What she misses is that there are legitimate reasons why people feel they're achieving less. These include the boring literal truths of jobs shipped overseas, stagnant wages, and a taxation system that benefits the rich and hurts the middle class and poor. You want to transform peoples' lives into games so they feel as if they're doing something worthwhile? Why not just shoot them up with drugs so they don't notice how miserable they are?

She doesn't put this argument in context. It is really part of a longstanding debate about the importance of connecting feelings with reality. Nozick's experience machine illustrates the tension. Brave New World and Inception provide commentaries in the arts. In popular writing, Barbara Ehrenrich makes essentially the same points about the "positive thinking" movement in general.

As you can guess from my previous posts on Ehrenrich, I think these fears are overblown. All that matters is how people feel. Reality is just instrumentally valuable for generating happiness, which is the only thing we really want (except more life so that we can be happy). When Caplin ironically comments:

This economy doesn't rely on cash—rather, it pays participants with points, peer recognition, and their names on leader boards. It's hard to tell if this is fairy-tale thinking or an evil plot.

the joke falls flat for exactly this reason. The real economy already relies on points (called dollars), peer recognition, and "keeping up with the Joneses" (unofficial leaderboards). Happiness is more closely correlated with (subjective) status than wealth because the economy  already is, for those in the top 3/4ths of the income distribution, a status game.

Needs an RCT: Therapy Dogs for Law Students

Yale Law is trying out a new strategy to help students chill: renting out a dog. You can check out the dog for 30 minutes at the library.

It sounds like a good idea to me. But the librarian apparently thinks "It is well documented that visits from therapy dogs have resulted in increased happiness, calmness and overall emotional well-being." I was skeptical so I did a Google Search and found mixed evidence, mostly for specific types of patients, most with psychiatric disorders, none for college (or law) students, and all from medical journals.

I'm going to file this under "needs an RCT." Maybe, if the dog is oversubscribed during finals weeks, they can lottery access and test the theory.

Quote of the Day: Stiglitz Edition

"When I was in the lawyer- and politician-dominated White House environment, I often felt that I had arrived in another world," [Stiglitz] recounted. "I had expected lower standards of evidence for assertions than would be expected in a professional article, but I had not expected that the evidence offered would be, in so many instances, so irrelevant, and that so many vacuous sentences, sentences whose meaning and import simply baffled me, would be uttered."

From this old profile of Joe Stiglitz. (HT: Marginal Revolution)

Sports story of the year?

Read it at ESPN.

Quote of the Day: Casual Sex Edition

Call it sexist, call it whatever you want—the evidence shows it's true. In one frequently cited study, attractive young researchers separately approached opposite-sex strangers on Florida State University's campus and proposed casual sex. Three-quarters of the men were game, but not one woman said yes.

 More at Slate.