Note: this is from my personal blog here.

A strange phenomenon plagues public discourse. Subtle and largely detached from the culture war, it often manages to evade detection. Can you spot it in each of the following arguments or discussion points?

Drugs like cocaine and heroin are bad. They are ruinous to users’ health, and use imposes a large negative externality on society.
We should decriminalize drugs. There is no reason to tear families apart and ruin lives for the sake of regulating consciousness.
Most American adults should exercise more. Exercise has a plethora of mental and physical health benefits, after all, and most adults are sedentary.
This expansion of unemployment insurance is bad. It creates distortionary incentives and will reduce workforce participation.

All four arguments completely ignore the first-order, direct effects of the practice in question!

Drug use and the war on drugs might impose serious costs on society, but we can’t forget that drugs themselves are fun to use! Exercise may be very important to personal wellbeing, but don’t ignore that (for some people, some of the time) exercise sucks! And we can talk about the second-order consequences of any sort of social welfare program, but let’s not neglect that the money directly improves poor people’s lives!

Saying this out loud sounds trivial, almost stupid. But I think “first-order effect neglect,” as I’ll call it, is a serious issue with public discourse.

When was the last time…

When was the last time that you heard a debate over the merits of drug legalization consider the stupidly-obvious fact that drugs make people happy? I don’t know if I ever have! Consider this list from the first result of my Google search for “pros and cons drug decriminalization.”

These are all valid and important points to consider, but nowhere is a mention of the most direct and obvious effect of drug use: if 10% more people smoke weed because of decriminalization, that’s a lot in chemical-induced pleasure!

Some public discussions have only a mild case of the disease. Consider Biden’s COVID relief package, as well as the larger discourse about public assistance in America. I’m sure there are better examples, but I managed to find this tweet pretty quickly.

As an observer of the online liberal-technocrat-effective altruism nexus, I see points like this made on Twitter or elsewhere from time to time. But—as the tweet...

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