We talk about society because we want to align ourselves with a chosen group, to signal that alignment to others, and to tell a story about who we are. There are AIDS activists because there are people who want to express sympathy for gays, to align themselves against conservatives, and thereby to express “who they are”. There are no nephritis activists, because there’s no salient group you align yourself with (kidney disease sufferers?) by advocating for nephritis research, there’s no group you thereby align yourself *against*, and you don’t tell any story about what kind of person you are.
One of the central problems for human society is attaining cooperation at large scale. It seems that one of the tools for getting a large group to cooperate is to identify and demonize an enemy. This certainly has to be one of the most troubling characteristics of human culture.
There are actually are a number of groups dedicated to supporting people with kidney disease. Link goes to just one of those. While your cited author is concentrating on group affiliations, he really misses out on the money part. As an economist, I am surprised you missed this. There is competition for resources for different illnesses. Donors have to choose to which case they will give. AIDS activists are advocating for their illness of choice. They want private donors to give more. They want government sources to spend more on research and treatment. So do the kidney people. The “who they are” bit comes from working together with others towards a common cause. Dont we really see a bit of this in almost any group that voluntarily works together?
http://www.rsnhope.org
Steve
I saw this when Bryan Caplan posted it, and was shocked how poorly thought through it was. How is it possible for two highly respected economists to see this as an interesting post? The only answer is highly ironic. He resorts to a signaling narrative to explain his conclusions, and that appears to be enough to make this appealing.
I actually laughed out loud when he suggested that “The government could, for example, try to discourage tobacco smoking…”.
Does Heumer know what causes nephritis? Does he really see any utility for nephritis activism?
Most of his observations are demonstrably wrong, but worse, Huemer seems to have no idea how to frame a legitimate argument here.
These are not good sentences.
A better example (one I’m surprised was passed over in favor of AIDS/nephritis) would be breast cancer vs. prostate cancer. The former enjoys a clear advantage over the latter in terms of fund raising due to it being a ‘women’s issue’ and women being an ‘oppressed group’. It’s just not as glamorous to fight to save men from prostate cancer, especially when the narrative is that women’s health is largely overlooked by the sexist healthcare industry and breast cancer activism is characterized as a proxy fight against the patriarchy (ironically, given that prostate cancer gets but a fraction of the funding and research breast cancer does).
The National Kidney Foundation sponsors a Kidney Walk, the Washington DC version of which will be held next weekend (October 14). There are also people, such as this group to which I belong, wh0 propose a way to eliminate deaths from kidney disease even if medical research does not figure out how to eliminate kidney disease itself for a long time:
http://www.organreform.org
Rene Girard agrees: https://woodybelangia.com/what-is-mimetic-theory/
I agree with some of the social organizational points of that paragraph from Huemer but the rest of that essay could use some polish. AIDS had a (bogus) “bad conservative enemies hate gays and hope they die, unless us righteous enlightened liberals,” propaganda narrative (e.g., Philadelphia), and yes, that matters. Even though they can occasionally be untreatable or even fatal, no other sexually transmitted infections get as much attention as HIV.
But no enemy is needed to demonstrate differential disease attention, only victims that differ in social popularity and sympathy.
For example, there are about 40K breast cancer deaths in a year, and about 27K prostate cancer deaths in a year. But because the first is female and the second male, one definitely doesn’t see prostate cancer getting anything close to 2/3rds the attention of breast cancer, no color ribbons, no special days or shoes or outfits at professional sport games, etc. Funding ratios are slightly more rational, partly because out technocracy is more rational, and partly because, well, just look at Congress. The point is, rival human enemies aren’t some sine qua non.
But it strikes almost everyone as totally absurd for anyone to use “the death rate” as a denominator for the sake of comparison of the relative intensity of disease-related advocacy. Everyone is going to die of something eventually. Rush Limbaugh used to have a joke about this, “Regardless of what anyone does, we all know the mortality rate is still going to be 100%”
People tend to split up causes of death into three categories, though they aren’t necessarily reasonable or rational or consistent in the way they assign morbid conditions to these categories, and a lot of it depends on what (or who) is socially desirable or not, and whether it maybe fits an bigger ideological narrative.
1. Old Age Stuff
2. Premature Stuff, for which there are two subcategories.
2.a. Deceased Should Be Blamed.
2.b. Deceased Shouldn’t Be Blamed.
The amount of attention a disease gets depends on the distribution of category assignments in the population, and the social status of who the typical victims are.
If most people agree a disease fits in category 1, then usually only old people will care much about it, and it gets low public attention. Though, it should be noted that we are demographically inching towards gerontocracy, so that still matters.
If most people agree on 2.a, then nobody cares, and if there are treatments, it’s probably because of spillover from developments focused on dealing with more sympathetic circumstances. Think of some young adult seriously hurting himself during some stunt trying to get some YouTube. Or someone hurting themselves in the commission of a crime of violence.
If most people agree on category 2.b, then it gets medium attention, as a way to signal generally-agreed-upon righteousness. A good example could be child cancers. These kids are blameless and evoke plenty of sympathy. Breast cancer counts here, and much more than prostrate cancer since women evoke more sympathy than men.
But we pay the most attention to any particular illness when there is a lot of social disagreement over blameworthiness, since that tends to serve as a correlated proxy for our broader ideological coalition disagreements and provides good opportunities to signal which team loyalty.
And blameworthiness depends less on actual “causation” from personal choices and behaviors then on whether one can be portrayed as being “oppressed” by some typical narrative enemy.
So, for example, attitudes about tobacco-use-related illnesses ranged from “their own damn fault / their responsibility” to “blameless addicts” to “victims of Big Tobacco predation and exploitation for evil profit.”
Many diseases are claimed to be easily “preventable” and remedied by lifestyle changes – usually a combination of diet and exercise – yet attitudes about blameworthiness differ for similar “narrative matching” reasons.
You’re sure about this, eh? There once upon a time was a really large group of (evil) people who promoted polio, against the sentiments of of a small, disorganized, but eventually triumphant group of dissidents. Oh yeah, that’s absolutly the way we all remember things.
And before that …. the vast numbers of people gathered together to advance the cause of scurvy, and tuberculosis, and yellow fever, and … and the mobs — nations practically — of people insisting on our need for automobile accidents and sexually transmitted diseases and gun homicides … How did we ever get past them?
Y’know, you’ve really transformed my notions about how human societies function and the way our political system works!
Mike, You seem to assume that all “AIDS activism” was directly about AIDS. But a substantial amount of it was “to identify and demonize an enemy.” All those homophobic people who had created the conditions for it and who were not doing enough against it. And it became a way for lots of straight people to feel, “See what a good person I am. I support gay people against a society that doesn’t care about them enough.”
This line of thinking strikes me as suffering from the same flaw you see with viewing all behavior as purely motivated by self-interest. In the same way that there is “if there is no limit to the breadth of you definition, then ‘people act in their self-interest’ is tautology”, I’d argue that with no limits, all behavior can be about aligning yourself with a tribe.
The millions of people that donate to the nephritis foundation, the Alzheimer’s foundation, or wounded warriors foundation could just be aligning themselves with a tribe. The hundreds of thousands that do so anonymously, similarly may merely be “aligning themselves” with a tribe.
But if every donation one makes, if every cause one supports – and taken to the extreme, if every action one takes- simply degenerates into a deed done solely for the sake of group alignment, then we are dealing with the tautological. We are dealing with something that is “always true” and thus “uninteresting.”
Indeed, as you have so eloquently stated, “If you want to make an interesting statement, you have to take the risk that your statement will be false.” Michael Huemer’s sentence is good. But it isn’t interesting.
This phenomenon could theoretically be tested, and it’d be interesting to see what comes up. Look at diseases of comparable death toll or incidence rate, and see how funding correlated to what demographic group is most afflicted. Obviously there are lots of confounding variables, so it may not be practically plausible.
Choices about what we signal and who we signal to are political choices, not simply tribal alliances. These choices don’t necessarily line up with our neighbors, friends and coworkers. The fact that alignments seem to be somewhat disproportionally important to us is not enlightening. Its just another way of saying we are social animals.
Citing signaling is increasing being used as a way to quickly dismiss political points of view.
It is actually enlightening to observe that our political behavior (and in the case of donating to charities, even our valuation of human lives and wellbeing) are motivated are motivated largely by (illigical) social impulses rather than rational analysis or even basic principles. Do we not aspire to be rational or principles in politics?
You don’t think that it’s at least interesting, if not a problem, that one cares more about saving one person than saving another because saving the former has more social currency in the political narrative in which one believes oneself to be situated?
We all only have so much bandwidth. No one person can express a rational distribution of responses to diseases overall.
No one has made a great case here (particularly Heumer) that our aggregate efforts are all that far off, either.
You are implying with the language you are using that group alignment is an accident of circumstances. I see more personal choice in the narratives we align with, and narratives are a fundamental tool for how we operate collectively.
Another example of the same thing would be that in cases where we have well understood language to describe a problem, we do better than when we don’t. We all need tools to act.
“Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” Mark 6:1.
But that’s typical of Jesus, always quick to dismiss the people he didn’t approve of.
Plus it was two thousand years ago, so it’s hardly enlightening to point out, again, that people blow their own trumpets.
It’s troubling that humans cooperate by identifying enemies? Let’s replace “identifying enemies” with “punishing freeriders” and so “it’s troubling that humans cooperate by punishing freeriders.” Of course, why would anyone cooperate if freeriders would reap all the benefits? Cooperation and enmity are a duality, like up and down.
Why equate enemies with free riders?
Friends:enemies::cooperators:freeriders
But the “enemies” are not necessarily (or even usually) people who ‘fail to cooperate’ in some hypothetical joint venture. They’re people with different values, goals, or preferred methods of accomplishing a goal.
The Christians are “failing to cooperate” in the joint venture of reciprocating equal dignity to each member of society, and likewise gays fail to uphold sexual norms that maintain the moral tone of society. Each group is trying to punish defectors or broadly ‘freeriders’ from group norms. You can tell the same story about Muslims, illegal aliens, communists, libertarians, etc. This works along all the axes – oppressor/oppressed (capitalism is theft), freedom/coercion (taxation is theft), or civilization/barbarism (your unmowed lawn is lowering my property values).
“It seems that one of the tools for getting a large group to cooperate is to identify and demonize an enemy.”
There’s not much alternative to identifying and demonizing an enemy if those trying to generate the cooperation have no positive content on which to center a group identity and thereby generate cooperation.
It also would not hurt to admit that sometimes different groups have genuinely conflicting interests and to acknowledge the legitimacy of the political working out of these conflicts.
Good point, one sees this in the way politics now works in many developed counties with very boring parties chronically unable to articulate any compelling and purely positive agenda. Instead they rely on negative blame games and the swing voter population’s fickleness, general sense of malaise, restlessness, ignorance, and impatience, and play the pendulum game using cliches from “A Face In The Crowd”: e.g., “it’s time for a change”, and, “the mess in Washington.”