Month: June 2019

Originally published on Medium on June 26, 2019.

Comparative advantage is an important concept in economics. It explains why, in general, it is advantageous for folks to cooperate even if some people are better at nearly everything. The gist of the idea is that there is often an opportunity cost to doing an activity (you aren’t doing something else that is potentially more valuable to you). Thus, even if you can do something better than someone else, they may be able to do it at a lower opportunity cost, and it may be worth your while to pay them to do it instead.

This becomes particularly interesting when thinking about the distribution of resources in society. Under absolute advantage thinking, if I do something that produces value X and you do something that produces value Y, then I deserve X worth of society’s value and you deserve Y. We can trade to adjust the exact content of the value, but the proportion of the value is directly related to the value produced by an individual. An alternate way about thinking about the distribution of resources in society is that they should be more equal or based on need. As Marx said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” For the purpose of this essay, I will assume we are aiming for proportional distribution but will question the common thinking about what proportional means.

Thinking about comparative advantage provides yet another way of thinking about distribution. Before I get into the details, a caveat: the explanation I am about to go into uses a counterfactual world. In reality, we don’t have access to the counterfactual world, so what follows will not be an explanation of how to actually execute this alternate distribution scheme. What I present here is a principle for evaluating options, not a policy in its own right.

With that caveat, how does comparative advantage give us another option when it comes to distributing the value produced by society? Imagine two worlds. In the first, I produce X and you produce Y, where X is greater than Y. In the second world, I produce X and you produce Y, but I am only able to produce X because we trade in a way that frees me up from doing an activity that only produces Y value.

In the first world, if we want distribution to be proportional to production, you get value Y and I get value X. The total value produced by that two person society is the sum of our independent production decisions.

In the second world, if we had acted as independent agents, then the total value created would have been 2Y. It is only because we cooperated that I was able to produce X. Your comparative advantage allowed us to produce a value X+Y for society. Thus, we both deserve credit for the excess value created by cooperation (X-Y). The portion of society’s value that I deserve is something less than X and yours is something more than Y. This difference is not a wealth transfer. It is a fair distribution of the value created by choosing to collaborate.

Once you start thinking about things this way, the idea of comparative advantage and its impact on distribution and allocation of credit starts appearing everywhere!

(This builds on but does not directly reflect some ideas developed in Ryan Muldoon’s Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance.)

Originally published on Medium on June 11, 2019.

I have a narrow definition of cultural appropriation. (Short version: it’s only cultural appropriation if the thing being appropriated has symbolic value that needs to be earned by those within the culture it is taken from.) Although this definition has flaws, I believe that the definition of cultural appropriation needs to be narrowed somehow from common usage if it is to avoid condemning all cultural exchange. Cultural exchange is the lifeblood of cultural evolution, and it has been the source of much good.

Still, with such a narrow definition of cultural appropriation, it is useful to think about the broader set of questionable cultural borrowings. For example, copying clothing that is strongly associated with a particular culture may not be appropriation, but it may imply a level of affinity with that culture which members of that culture would not consider appropriate. For cases like these, where the cultural item borrowed does not have granted symbolic value but is perceived as closely tied to the originating culture, I propose the term cultural infringement.

The term cultural infringement is intentionally meant to invoke the idea of copyright. Copyright is a delicate balance between control and usage. While copyright cannot be directly translated to cultural infringement, it does have some useful lessons to teach us. One is the idea of fair use: there may be contexts in which it is appropriate to use the artifacts of a culture even if members of that culture might disapprove. Criticism is one such use.

Another idea we can learn from copyright is that borrowing can often be generative. See, for example, the rich world of fan fiction. Much of it is terrible, but the best fanfic helps the reader learn something new about the work. Similarly, cultural borrowing can often be beneficial and lead to mutual enrichment both for the source culture and the destination culture. For copyright, we aim to balance control and generation by having copyright expire. That does not apply to borrowing culture, but the observation that borrowing culture can be generative still stands.

As the expiration of copyright illustrates, cultural infringement cannot be literally treated as copyright. Most of the time, there is not a recognized owner of a culture, and members of the culture may perceive acts of infringement differently. However, thinking of the trade-offs of copyright can lead us to think about the trade-offs, good and bad, that come from non-appropriating borrowing from other cultures. It helps us think about how a cultural has certain claims to its own artifacts but also how giving too much control impedes positive change.

In this framework, whether a particular instance of cultural borrowing is generative or infringing depends largely on how the borrowing is perceived by the members of the source culture. To understand this, we need to listen and learn from the perspectives of those in the culture, both those who feel the borrowing is inappropriate and those who feel it is reasonable. If cultures are going to realize the benefits of borrowing from each other, taking time to learn a bit more about what is being borrowed seems like a small price to pay.