Joseph Heath > Quotes

“One of the downsides of working in philosophy is that it attracts a lot of people with mental-health problems.”
― Joseph Heath

“Veblen argues that the existing social hierarchy is actively maintained by competitive consumption among all classes of society. Thus, consumerism, far from being something that is inflicted upon the working classes by the scheming bourgeoisi, is something that the working classes actively participate in maintaining - even though it is not in their collective interest to do so. If the working classes had wanted to buy out the capitalists, they could easily have done so by now, simply by saving a fraction of the wage increases that they have received over the years. But instead they have chosen to max out their spending on consumer goods.”
― Joseph Heath

“The idea that people could get along fine with just markets, and no government, turned out to rest upon a version of what economists call the “compositional fallacy.”
― Joseph Heath, Economics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism

“As Hobbes saw clearly, people don’t have to be evil to get into collective action problems. They just have to be human.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“The question is, if we already know what the right and the wrong answers are to moral questions, prior to the formulation of an abstract principle, what is the point of formulating the principle?”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“When altruistic behavior benefits individuals belonging to another species, it is impossible for the gene to be benefiting some other copy of itself.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“it is unfair to characterize the work of postmodernists as “bad writing,” despite the fact that a lot of it is actually bad writing.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“As a result, the scientific revolution left philosophers (and society more generally) without a plausible moral ontology. While beliefs could be described as being "about" the physical world, in some sense, and desires could be "about" the passions, or some set of internal somatic states, it was no longer clear what moral judgments could be about. And no matter how much ingenuity has been deployed by moral realists, trying to show that evaluative judgments have some kind of empirical correlate, all of their labors seem only to reinforce the impression underlying John Mackie's judgment that values are "ontologically queer."62 (The arguments of moral realists often bring to mind Wittgenstein's remark that on hearing G. E. Moore's proof of an external world, he began to understand why skepticism was such a problem.)”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“The environments that are the most hostile from the standpoint of rationality are those that are the most commercial.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“No discussion of this pattern would be complete without mentioning one fateful little tweak we have introduced into the set of rules that governs these types of organizations. This tweak is what makes the difference between a simple hierarchy and a bureaucracy. Whereas a traditional hierarchy appoints individuals from outside the organization to the various leadership roles, a classic bureaucracy relies upon internal promotion. It allows its members to move up through the ranks as a reward for successful completion of their assigned duties within the organization. This small innovation, which is generally credited to the Chinese, can generate significant improvements in organizational efficiency. A traditional hierarchy relies quite heavily upon negative sanctions in order to keep members “in line” at every tier. These sanctions tend to accumulate in force as one moves downward through the hierarchy, so that those at the very bottom often get “dumped on.” As a result, the overall quality of life of subordinates generally deteriorates as one moves down the organizational hierarchy. As they say in the corporate world, “Shit rolls downhill.” Bureaucratic forms of organization, however, turn this into a virtue. The prospect of moving up is used as an incentive to improve performance at every level. There is something vaguely diabolical about the incentive structure that is offered to subordinates, of course, because it organizes things in such a way that the only chance to reduce the amount that you get “dumped on” in the long term is to let people dump on you for now. But there can be no doubt that this incentive structure works.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“The search for a new type of rationality became just another form of antirationalism.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“In any case, Locke argued that we all have a natural set of property rights and can happily go about our business trading with each other and creating all sorts of prosperity. Only much later do we get together and form governments in order to eliminate certain “inconveniences” associated with the state of nature. This sets up the basic contrasts: economy = natural; government = artificial. The impact of this type of thinking can be truly disastrous. No one knows this better than economic planners in Eastern Europe, who were unlucky enough to ask a bunch of American economists for advice on how to make the transition from communism to capitalism. Naturally, the Americans had no experience in these matters, but they did have an overarching ideology that stipulated that markets are nothing more than the expression of our natural “propensity to truck and barter.” So their advice to the East Europeans was quite simple— don’t do anything. Just destroy all your existing public institutions and markets will magically pop up and take their place. Nothing could be easier. Any country foolish enough to take this advice quickly found that when it scaled back the government’s role, what it wound up with was rampant criminality, not orderly markets.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“The Hobbesian state of nature is really just a state of total market failure. Out of this state of nature, we have been able to build up a set of institutions that promote co-operation and therefore improve efficiency. Markets are one institution of this type. But they are extremely limited in their range, since property rights apply only to a tiny fraction of the ingredients we require for successful living.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“These considerations help to explain why many philosophers are loathe to ascribe beliefs to animals. To a certain extent, this is a terminological dispute, since almost everyone is prepared to grant that dogs and cats have some kind of protobelief that is functionally similar to beliefs in humans."g The question is really how much sense it makes to ascribe beliefs to an organism when that organism is incapable of accepting or rejecting any of the inferential consequences of that belief, and where most of the standard criteria we use to individuate belief cannot be applied. In other words, since the vast majority of conclusions that follow from the claim "x believes that p" simply do not follow when x is a dog, rather than a person, there is something very misleading about using the term "belief" in this context.19”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“But insurance is nothing more than a name we give to risk-pooling arrangements that are organized through private markets. When these markets fail, it is possible to pool risks in other ways. The corporation provides a perfect example of how people can arrange to share risks without the mediation of explicit market mechanisms. For example, there are many types of production processes that call for very specialized skills. The division of labour is itself an enormous source of efficiency gains. Unfortunately, acquiring highly specialized skills can be extremely risky for an individual, because the future is uncertain. While I may know that there is adequate demand for my skills now, I have no idea what things will be like five years down the road. As a result, no one may be willing to invest the time and energy needed to acquire specialized skills, because it is too risky. This efficiency loss could be avoided if it were possible to buy some kind of insurance that would compensate people when there was some fluctuation in the demand for their skills. Unfortunately, no one would ever want to sell this type of insurance because of obvious moral-hazard problems—people would lose all incentive to market or upgrade their skills. So private markets will simply fail to provide this type of insurance. Corporations, however, are able to provide such insurance to workers through bureaucratic means.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“The goal of an efficient society, and of our economy generally, is to satisfy people’s needs, or to satisfy as many needs as possible given the available resources. The advantage of the price system is that it produces an observable “image” of these needs. Again, recall the example of the infrared camera, which detects frequencies that are normally invisible to the eye and converts them to the visible spectrum. The system of needs, like infrared radiation, is invisible. The market takes these needs and converts them into something that is observable—prices. But whenever there are externalities, the image gets a bit skewed. Some of the needs get missed. As a result, the picture that emerges will be distorted; it may even be missing entire sections. Since this picture is what we use to determine what to produce, flaws in the image will lead us into systematic inefficiencies. We will waste resources producing stuff that we don’t really want, instead of other stuff that we do want.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“If you had to give a child just one piece of advice upon entering a shopping mall, a good suggestion might be “Remember that everything—and by that I mean everything—is a trick to take your money.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“Each consumer who holds off on a purchase in order to wait for a sale generates a slight benefit for all other consumers in the form of increased pressure on suppliers to lower the price. Similarly, each supplier who delays putting things on sale produces a benefit for other suppliers in the form of increased pressure on consumers to buy at that price. In both cases, this generates a free-rider incentive—consumers may break ranks and buy at full price, or suppliers may break ranks and have a sale. The consequence of these two collective action problems will be downward pressure on the price of plentiful goods and upward pressure on the price of scarce goods. The only equilibrium will be the point at which the amount of each good exchanged is just right. Inventories will clear, and the resulting allocation will be maximally efficient.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“In 1982, economists at the Brookings Institute estimated that about 62 per cent of the value of a typical American firm stemmed from its physical assets—everything from tables and chairs to factories and inventories. Everything else consisted of more intangible “knowledge assets.” By 1992, the balance had completely reversed. They calculated that only 38 per cent of the average firm’s value came from its physical assets. With the shift towards more knowledge-intensive production processes, it is natural that firms should start to worry much more about employee loyalty. It is relatively easy to stop employees from making off with company property—just post guards at the gate. But when employees leave, they generally take with them all the knowledge and experience they have acquired, and there is no way to stop them. So the best way for a firm to retain control of its assets is to build a strong organizational culture, one that will inspire loyalty and allegiance from its employees. From this perspective, it is entirely predictable that the firms that depend most heavily on the knowledge of their workers will also be the firms that put the most effort into employee retention. Software companies in particular are famous for their efforts to create a corporate culture that will secure employee allegiance.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“if we adopted a different orientation toward the world, one that focused on liberation and freedom rather than manipulation and control, it would literally give rise to a new type of science, new bodies of knowledge, governed by entirely different principles and practices: “The liberated consciousness would promote the development of a science and technology free to discover and realize the possibilities of things and men in the production and gratification of life, playing with the potentialities of form and matter for the attainment of this goal. Technique would then tend to become art, and art would tend to form reality: the opposition between imagination and reason, higher and lower faculties, poetic and scientific thought, would be invalidated.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“HMOs have been so successful that they now occupy a dominant position in the market for health care in the United States. Approximately forty-five million Americans are uninsured. Of the remainder, about half are enrolled in some type of HMO. Most others receive some sort of managed care plan. Less than 10 per cent of Americans still have classic fee-for-service private health insurance (down from more than 70 per cent in the late ’80s). So even though many people equate HMOs with private health care, these sorts of corporations exist only because of the failure of private markets to supply appropriate health care. HMOs succeed precisely because they are more efficient than insurance markets. There should be no illusions about the character of these organizations—they are giant bureaucracies. The largest of them, Kaiser Permanente, employs over eleven thousand physicians and has more than six million subscribers in the state of California alone. This makes Kaiser larger than most of the government-run health care systems in Canada. And while the Canadian system is extremely decentralized, Kaiser Permanente is a single, vertically integrated corporation.”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“Everyone always has a reason to reject a compromise, because everyone thinks that their own view is correct, their own cause is just, or their own values are more important. That gives everyone a reason not to compromise. The only way to see one’s way toward accepting a compromise is to recognize that because everyone thinks that their own view is correct, no one is likely to back down, and so everyone is better off settling for somewhat less than what they think an ideal arrangement would be.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“David Buss found that males were consistently more likely than females to regard "no previous sexual intercourse" as an important characteristic of a potential mate. In 23 of the 3 7 samples, males expressed a stronger preference in this regard than did females, while in the other 14 samples "no significant sex differences were found."94 This is the sort of finding that is sometimes taken to be grist for the sociobiologists's mill, since it seems easy to produce an "evolutionary" explanation for this pattern. Yet the same study also found that the overall intensity of this preference varied even more dramatically-from China, where both men and women almost uniformly viewed a potential mate's chastity as "indispensable" (over 2.5 on a 3-point scale) to Sweden, where it was regarded by both sexes as practically "irrelevant" (around 0.25 on the same scale). Within both Chinese and Swedish cultures, however, men were more likely to identify this issue as a concern than women. Yet the difference was only about 0.1 in both cases. What this shows is that the cultural difference was two orders of magnitude greater than the gender difference. This”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“The fact that people buy beer by the six-pack, and pay more per bottle to do so, suggests that external control is an important feature of self-control. It means also that the all-night beer store is not an unmixed blessing. While providing increased convenience for some, it also pulls away a part of the external scaffold that many people use as part of their self-control system (namely, the unobtainability of more beer, after the six-pack is consumed). Thus late-night hours at the beer store should correctly be viewed as an innovation that decreases the autonomy of these people, by withdrawing a form of social cooperation that they at one time relied on to exercise self-control.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“As individuals, we have enormous difficulty thinking the negative. We see patterns all around us, and each new day brings new evidence that confirms our belief in them. Thinking through the hypothetical “What if I am wrong?” is not something that comes naturally. Having other people around whose sole interest lies in doing just that not only serves as an external corrective, it also pushes us to think in a way that our thoughts do not naturally go.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“Not only is there no a priori reason to suspect that the problem of order should be resolvable within the framework of an instrumental conception of rationality, there is good reason to think that it should not be. In the background of the instrumentalist strategy is an assumption that, on reflection, can easily be seen to be dubious. The idea that decision theory should provide the "foundations" for game theory amounts to the assumption that all of the "equipment" a rational agent brings to bear on the world is already in place and deployed in nonsocial contexts.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“Here the rule-utilitarian believes that the only justifiable rules are ones that will promote the greatest happiness, when generally adhered to in a deontic fashion. Thus the rule-utilitarian rejects "deontology" as a theory of moral justification, but accepts deontic constraints as an essential element of moral action.”
― Joseph Heath, Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint

“More and more frequently, we will find ourselves in the position of the lower animals—with a mental apparatus that is unequipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside environment.” The irony is that, “unlike the animals, whose cognitive powers have always been relatively deficient, we have created our own deficiency by constructing a radically more complex world.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0

“Similarly, the extra three cents per litre for unleaded fuel reflects the cost to society of having to use more intensive refinement techniques. We can now calculate the efficiency gain realized from switching to unleaded—seven cents for every litre of gas consumed. Since Canadians buy about thirty-five billion litres of gasoline every year, this gives us annual savings in the range of $2.45 billion. Unfortunately, we don’t actually save $2.45 billion. When we eliminate atmospheric lead, it gives us a benefit that is worth $3.5 billion to us. But we don’t get this in the form of money, we get it in the form of clean air. And so all the calculations are hypothetical. Because the “market” for air doesn’t exist, we can only guess how much it is worth. Unfortunately, there is a market for gasoline, and so the $1.05 billion cost of additional refinement is quantifiable. This means that the regulation may appear to be costing us money, imposing a drag on the economy even when it isn’t. It just happens to be imposing a drag on that portion of the economy that is organized through private markets. We could remedy this by trying to create an “air” market. Then we would know exactly how much we gain by eliminating leaded gasoline. But what would be the point? The outcome that we want is simply cleaner air. The same gain is realized, regardless of whether this outcome is achieved through the market or through government”
― Joseph Heath, The Efficient Society: Why Canada Is As Close To Utopia As It Gets

“It’s all well and good to have a mountain of psychological research detailing the different ways in which we routinely fail to think and act rationally. But the obvious practical implication is not that it’s okay to be irrational: it’s that we need to work a lot harder at becoming rational, and that where we fail, we need to develop systems and strategies that insulate us from the consequences of these failings. It is important to remember that rationality is not some alien set of rules imposed on us from on high; it is, rather, the basis of human freedom and autonomy.”
― Joseph Heath, Enlightenment 2.0