Monday, November 8, 2010

Do Superheroes Act in Socially Optimal Ways?


Microeconomic theory tells us that individual agents, be they consumers, firms, or even superheroes, act rationally. Basically, this means that any individual has a set of stable preferences--which generate a certain level of utility--and that this individual will always behave in a way such that his or her (or its) utility level is maximized.

In other words, economists believe that people try to make themselves as happy as possible. Simple.

Where things become a bit more complicated is when individual demands are aggregated. That is, how do we take the preferences of the individuals in society and design policies that are welfare-maximizing and "socially optimal?"

Consider, for example, the health care market. Obviously, it would be great if every individual could have free, comprehensive coverage. Not only would it ensure lengthier lives, but more people receiving better health care would mean less external costs for society (such as taxpayer dollars going towards treatment of indigent care, lost productivity due to people with illnesses taking sick days, etc.).

Why doesn't everyone have comprehensive health coverage then? Well, resources--including health care--are scarce! Comprehensive coverage for everyone would cost a considerable amount, not just in terms of monetary expenditures, but in time, provider supply, hospital beds, etc. This means that when health care policy is crafted, legislators and other stakeholders need to make hard choices to determine which course of action would benefit society the most.

There are, of course, arguments about welfare enhancing policy. Is health insurance going to be primarily market-based or is there going to be a role for government? If we're going to offer subsidies for individuals to obtain certain services, which services do we offer the subsidies for? If there is a government insurance package, what are the minimum benefits covered by the package? Do we attempt to judge which individuals are more deserving of health care? If so, how do we judge? Severity of the condition? Do we make it first-come-first-serve? How do we perform the cost-benefit analyses to get these answers?

Superheroes face this problem every day. Take Superman, for example. Barring the fact that Superman's duties extend beyond the scope of one major city, let's just limit this analysis to his role as the protector of Metropolis. Each and every day, there are people who need saving. Superman provides a very crucial public service (actually he pretty much has a monopoly on it): fighting crime and saving lives. He has a breadth of unique abilities that allow him to perform this service unlike any other agency, including the police or government.

Yet despite his unique abilities, he is still a limited resource. Superman cannot be everywhere at once and he cannot stop each and every crime in Metropolis. This means that even Superman has to make choices. Each civilian he saves from being thrown off of a building means that a different civilian on the other side of town being threatened with dismemberment by Metallo is not receiving his help. In this sense, Superman can be thought of as a sort of social planner for a good that he just so happens to provide. He implicitly assigns weights to individuals in Metropolis, in effect judging who is deserving enough of his rescue.

How does Superman do this? How does he assign these weights? And is this method socially optimal?

Intuitively, we would think that the most imminent dangers are the ones most worthy of Superman's attention. And indeed, Superman does tackle the gravest of threats to an extent. Should there be a catastrophe that is bound to kill or injure hundreds of citizens, you can bet to see the Man of Steel there. Should Lex Luthor unleash some sort of robot warriors on the city, Superman will try and stop them. Should Darkseid attempt to enslave humanity again, Superman will take him on.

But this system is obviously imperfect. What if Metallo is overturning cars on one side of town and Brainiac is creating robot-zombies on the other? Deciding on which threats are the most dangerous is a difficult task, even for Superman. It is a fact that many of his villains have taken advantage of in the past in order to thrust the Man of Steel into difficult moral situations.

Also, let's not forget that this is only Superman's system to an extent. There isn't always a world-ending event in Metropolis. Most of the time, all you have are muggers, bank robbers, and lets face it, people who just accidentally fall off buildings. How does Superman weigh these people? Well, most of the time, we see him just dash after the criminals that are closest to him. We've seen Clark Kent sitting at his desk at the Daily Planet numerous times, only to hear a scream in a nearby alley. He then finds a phone both, changes, and it's up-up-and-away!

It would seem that most of the time, Superman weighs simply on proximity. That means people within a five mile radius of the Daily Planet should be the safest in Metropolis. Of course, it is also a prime spot for villain activity.

Answering the question of whether this "proximity, unless it's really really dangerous" policy is social welfare maximizing is tricky. We obviously want Superman to assist with the gravest threats, but we also don't want to trivialize run-of-the-mill muggings.

Perhaps it is time for Superman to retire his one-man planner status. Should there be a government task-force delegated with the duty of allocating superhero resources to the citizens of the United States?

69 comments:

Tom said...

One exceptionally glaring problem with a government planning agency would be expediency. Metropolis citizen Joe Public may be targetted by a mugger in an alley on one side of town, while Jane Everywoman is falling out of a helicopter on the other side of town. How would the government agency be notified of each situation, perform any necessary analysis to optimize the Man of Steel's saving abilities, and then communicate that decision to Superman in less time it takes for Joe's mugger to escape and Jane's irresistable attraction to the surface of the Earth to act?

Perhaps this agency pre-weights the save-value of each citizen of Metropolis in any number of given life-threatening situations. Joe-Public-being-mugged is maybe a 2 on the saveability scale, but that same Joe Public might rate an 8 or 9 if he were in immediate danger of being hit by a train, or dangling precariously from a radio antenna atop a Lexcorp skyscraper.

If that is the case I imagine you would see ledgers that look suspiciously like actuarial tables for Metropolites.

There are still some additional problems, however. (1) Census - would the government only be calculating save-values for registered voters? For legal citizens? Superman, we've seen, does not limit his intervention by race/creed/or legal status (illegal aliens, homeless, etc)

(2) Saving-value curves - A situation may arise where Superman has a clear-cut priority to save Jane Everywoman from falling out of the helicopter, and is in the process of doing so might be confronted with a new, higher-priority situation (Luther, plus...kryptonite lasers? etc). At what point during the mid-air rescue does the new danger outweigh Jane's fateful plummet? We'd be trying to optimize curves to determine which of the two (or more) situations is more demanding (or deserving) save-value-wise, instead of simply consulting a table by row-and-column look-ups for some gov't agency's pre-determined static value of saveability.

(And does Lois automatically outrank the rest of the population? Should she?)

-Tom

Unknown said...

Is that why he created the Justice League?

Erik Lund said...

Lois first.

It's like when the UToronto philosophy students used to flee the Grad Students Society meeting to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation* and argue about Data.
Emotions are not "irrational." At the very least emotional attachment prioritises precisely decisions like this. Data is paralysed, because he can't decide who to save first. (Short of some wonky utilitarian calculation.) For Superman, it's Lois, each time, every time. Beyond that, proximity is a good predictor for social connection. So save the Metropolitans first, and save the people of your neighbourhood firster.

Beyond this, I think we're thrown into a question of ethics rather than economics. Is it more virtuous to save someone you don't know from falling out of a helicopter; or that girl at work who looks just like Erica Durance, (this more than outweighing the fact that she keeps trying to figure out your secret identity)?
Okay, I know. We should hand this question off to Immanuel Kant. He's smart, and doesn't care what Durance looks like.

Jimmy Olsen, on the other hand....


*(Secret Moral: even bearded Ryker is better than hanging out with Bloomites.)

Erik Lund said...

Okay, I realise that I'm leaving the idea of a utilitarian calculus hanging, when Tom has just given us an argument for one that sure sounds like economics. And that begs the original question of the post.

I apologise. I've been thinking about conflicts of normative imperatives (you can tell I'm not hep with the terms of art here) a lot lately. And the problem has Grace Park's face on it. Wouldn't you think about it a lot?

Still, isn't the highest social good served by keeping happy the guy who provides the unique saving-from-dehelicopterisation service?
Now, this still seems like a cop-out. Granted that there's only one Last Son of Krypton (not counting a bottle full of miniaturised ones, a high security prison, one cousin, one clone-cousin, one clone, a dog, a horse, a cat, another planet full of Daxamites, and yet another one of Bizarros), but that leads towards more fruitful grounds. Could the argument for a utilitarian calculus be extended to more numerous classes of first responders? I think not.

Has anyone sued a paramedic for starting work on a friend before a stranger? Okay, there's medical triage. But isn't that a slightly different concept? We might second-guess the first responder, but I find hard to imagine the idea of charging them with the crime of saving the less important person first. And isn't this where you end up with a "saveability" scale?

Erik Lund said...

Not to spam the comments or anything, but my current verification word is "Plato."

I think the captcha algorithm wants to post a comment.

Derrill Watson said...

Have we completely forgotten how often these cities' or the nation's government are captured by villains? Do you really want for example the Green Goblin allocating superhero resources?

Even when the government isn't being run or influenced by the enemy, what happened to public choice theory? Politicians want to stay elected while Superman (and several other, but not all supers) acts from a Kantian or utilitarian ethic that follows his duty.

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Anonymous said...

Run-of-the-mill muggings are something people should be able to handle without Superman's help.

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