Social Luddism Ryan Murphy Southern Methodist University Public

Social Luddism Ryan Murphy Southern Methodist University Public Choice Society Annual Meeting 2019

A Few Preliminaries • This is for a chapter for a book project and will not be analytically rigorous. • I am not making claims about it being an empirically large phenomenon. • I am looking for feedback regarding its originality and coherence, other examples I may have missed, etc.

Original Luddism and Neoluddism • Standard story about the Luddites: they were factory workers who attacked labor-saving machines which threatened the value of their labor. • This is classic rent-seeking behavior. • I am not getting caught up in alternative theories of Luddism, such as Anderson and Tollison 1986) • “Neoluddism” is the modern fear of technology • • Excesses in environmentalism The AI Takeover or Robot Apocalypse The Unabomber’s Manifesto Captain Planet / Jurassic Park / Gattaca

A Taxonomy of Anti-Growth Social Action Non-Coercive Altruistic (“Baptist”) Self-Regarding (“Bootlegger”) -Most Neoluddism -Seeking Market Power -Social Luddism Coercive -Eco-terrorism -Blue Laws -Conventional Luddism -Rent-Seeking Through the State

Social Luddism, Defined • Broadly speaking, it means using social suasion and incentives to protect rents, where rents are broadly defined. • Most instances of Social Luddism involve imposing social disincentives against technology or knowledge which reduces the usefulness or status of human capital the Social Luddite has invested in. • It is rent-seeking behavior, and therefore, socially costly. • The rents include both or either labor market income and status/prestige.

Most Well-Known Example • Wine expertise doesn’t exist. (Storchmann 2012, “Wine Economics. ” Journal of Wine Economics 7, no. 1, p. 24 -27) • Or if it does, it is far less important than its proponents make it out to be. • Wine experts do not really rate the same wines similarly if they can’t see the label. • If you give the wine expert three glasses or the same glass of wine and ask them to rate each, they will give different answers. • If they do not know what the wine is ahead of time, they will be inconsistent with the adjectives they use to describe wine. • These are not high bars to clear! • A $2 bottle of wine may not be the same as a $20 bottle of wine, but diminishing returns to wine quality set in far more quickly than is appreciated. • Obfuscating these facts is rent-seeking by wine sommeliers (protecting their rents and status) and amateur wine experts (protecting the status associated with wine expertise. • See also: craft beer versus Coors.

Smaller examples • • • Fahrenheit 451 wasn’t actually about censorship. Former journalists starting blogs and proclaiming their blogs are not blogs Comic sans. Scouts versus stats in baseball. Moralizing that do-it-yourself saves money. The *broad* claims that X was actually better in the past than it is in the present. • Sports, movies, music, fine art, philosophy… • “The Great Books” • GDP Trutherism

“Baseball isn’t just numbers. It’s not science, if it was, anybody can do what we’re doing, but they can’t because they don’t know what we know. They don’t have our experience and they don’t have our intuition. ” –fictionalized baseball scout in Moneyball

Broke: Woke: Things Being Good GDP per capita

Substantive example • The algorithms and the robots • (This example straddles the line between the Baptist and the Bootlegger. )

Conclusions • Social Luddism has been observed in a variety of contexts but has not itself ever been named. • This is a form of private rent-seeking that we encounter in the course of our daily lives. • Don’t trust “experts” who insist that their expertise is not something that can be tested!