Perhaps one can most quickly unravel the enigma of Pareto's personality by saying that his was the psychology of the disappointed lover. 

Is the Road to Hell Paved with Pareto Improvements?

In a large multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma, any change in any one individual’s strategy doesn’t affect anyone else, so a player can know that defection will be a Pareto improvement. We might say that the problem of social evil is that the road to hell is paved with Pareto improvements. -- Ted Poston, “Social Evil,” Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Volume 5

Poston's "social evil" is what previous authors have called a social trap or, more famously, the tragedy of the commons.

A Pareto improvement is a change that makes at least one person better off without making anyone worse off. According to the standard fable, voluntary exchange results in a Pareto improvement because each party in the exchange gets something they wanted more than what they gave up for it.

A prisoner's dilemma involves a situation where the individual payoff to each player for defection is better, regardless of whether the other player defects or co-operates but the collective payoff is maximized when both players co-operate.

In a large multiplayer prisoner's dilemma game, defection by some players may have no effect on the other players' outcomes, while defection by a large number of players may have catastrophic effects after some vaguely defined tipping point has been reached. Within limits, defections thus appear to result in a Pareto improvement, where some players are made better off and no one is made worse off.

In Fights, Games and Debates, Anatol Rapoport presented a production and exchange model that deserves to be much better known. It is a very elementary model and thus, as Rapoport warns repeatedly, the results should not be taken as a faithful depiction of what is likely to happen in reality. However, it offers some critical insights into "common sense" assumptions and specifically into the idea of Pareto improvement, which is also based on extreme simplification.

Rapoport's production and exchange "society" consists of two people who each produce goods and exchange with each other a uniform, fixed ratio of their products. The individuals derive utility from the goods they produce and, presumably, can increase their utility by exchanging some of the goods they produce for the different goods their counterpart produces.

Effort to produce those goods, however, is a disutility. The utility from goods increases logarithmically as the quantity of goods increases but the disutility of effort increases in proportion to the amount of effort expended.

Agents in this model can only change their utility by increasing or decreasing their own effort and output. Thus, plotted on a graph, X can only move along the x-axis and Y can only move along the y-axis. Under the stipulated conditions, a stable equilibrium can only be achieved when the utility of the proportion retained by each producer is larger than the disutility of effort.That is to say, the proportion retained cannot be too small and the disutility of effort cannot be too large.

In the absence of a stable balance, any relaxation of effort by one of the agents will lead to parasitism by that agent as the other will immediately compensate by increasing effort, the first agent will slack off more to compensate for the increased effort of the other -- and so on.

But even in the presence of a stable equilibrium, the total utility of the two agents, at the balance point, will be less than the total would be without exchange, as long as their production/effort decisions are guided solely by their own utility rather than by some agreement about how to link their production effort to achieve a "social optimum." This outcome is contrary to the "common sense" interpretations of Pareto improvement and Pareto optimality. As Rapoport cites his mentor, Nicolas Rashevsky, it turns out that:

The only 'ethics' which leads to the attainment of maximum joint utility in the model of society we have considered is the 'egalitarian ethic,' in which the concern for self and for other are of equal weight.

It would be easy to dismiss Rapoport's conclusion as pertaining only to very restrictive premises. This is a point that Rapoport reiterates throughout his exposition. But the objection applies equally to Pareto's model.

Vilfredo Pareto is not readily perceived as a proponent of the egalitarian ethic. In his model, though, Rapoport unpacked a tacit premise of Pareto that rational agents would act "as if" guided by some unacknowledged intuition of linkage -- one might even call this invisible intuition "moral sentiments."

Furthermore, the restrictiveness of Rapoport's assumptions may not be as unrealistic as it seems at first. The fixed ratios of exchange can be relaxed to merely widespread similarities in the ratios of exchange. The specification for a stable equilibrium that the proportion of an individual's product exchanged does not exceed the proportion retained can be rationalized by the fact that there is a roughly equal number of hours of unpaid household work performed in the world as there are waged hours of labor. All this is before we move on to the issue of "multiplayer games" -- of a society in which individual actions that ostensively do no harm may accumulate into "social evil."

In Beyond the Invisible Hand, Kaushik Basu examined the issue of outlawing yellow dog contracts, as the Norris-LaGuardia Act did in 1932:

It could he claimed that if one worker prefers to give up the right to join trade unions in order to get a certain job that demands this of workers, then this may be a Pareto improvement. But if such yellow dog contracts are made legal, then lots of firms will offer these contracts, and the terms for jobs without a yellow dog clause may deteriorate so much that those who are strongly averse to giving up the right to join unions will he worse off in this world. 

Basu proceeds to consider labor standards in cases in which there are multiple equilibria. He asks, "Should the law be used to set a limit on the number of hours that a worker is allowed to work?" His answer -- backed by reference to supporting empirical studies -- would earn the scorn of economists who fancy a lump of labor behind every proposal for shorter hours:

A statutory limit on work hours can, by limiting the supply of labor, push up the hourly wage rate, and it is possible that at this higher wage rate people would not want to work that many hours. In other words, the labor market may have two or more equilibria, in which case banning the long work-hours equilibrium is fully compatible with a commitment to the Pareto principle.

Unpacking Pareto optimality and Pareto improvement, as Rapoport's model of production and exchange does, undermines the premise of the road to hell being paved with Pareto improvements. If there is indeed a tacit moral sentiment, a secret egalitarian ethics at the heart of the Paretian idea, then any violation of trust will impose a loss of utility on everyone else -- perhaps even on the violator. Those individuals gains through defecting were only "improvements" assuming an ethical vacuum. What is the point of building a road to a hell when one is already there? In an ethical world, violations of trust are losses of utility.

UPDATE: I have made a pdf copy of the section on the production and exchange model in Rapoport's Fights, Games and Debates. Below is the equation for the utilities of the two members of the society:

In "An Empirical Refutation of Pareto-optimality?" Rupert Read argued that the empirical evidence in Wilkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level suggests "the remarkable normative conclusion of making the Pareto principle, far from the “conservative” device it is often taken to be, a potential agent of radically-egalitarian/socialist distributive justice." I am arguing here that Rapoport's production and exchange model suggest a mathematical demonstration of the same unexpected conclusion. 

Equus II

Keynes:

Keynesianism: 

Equus Librium

A Vulgar Error:

An Infallible Maxim: 

Worstall's Malignant Lump

In an op-ed at the New York Times yesterday, Nick Hanauer and Robert Reich made the following observation:

In a cruel twist, the longer and harder we work for the same wage, the fewer jobs there are for others, the higher unemployment goes and the more we weaken our own bargaining power. That helps explain why over the last 30 years, corporate profits have doubled from about 6 percent of gross domestic product to about 12 percent, while wages have fallen by almost exactly the same amount.

According to Tim Worstall, Hanauer and Reich committed a lump-of-labor fallacy. Worstall objected specifically to their claim that raising the income cap for the overtime premium would force employers to either pay higher wages or hire more workers. Worstall's objection is that the employer's demand for labor will not remain the same if the cost of that labor goes up.

To be precise, Worstall's assertion is one version of the fallacy claim complex. It happens to be the version refuted by Maurice Dobb in 1929. As Dobb pointed out, workers are concerned with how much compensation they receive in return for the amount of effort required of them and not simply in the aggregate amount of employment in the economy. Working longer hours for less pay is not a bonanza for the workers even if it does lead to more aggregate hours worked in the economy as a whole.

 But again, Worstall's fallacy claim is but one version of a complex of claims, some of which contradict each other. I addressed this perplexing proliferation of claims in my contribution to Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives. Refute one of the bogus fallacy claims and a substitute will immediately pop-up to take its place!

It is not easy to unpack what is going on inside the fallacy claim because its persuasive strategy is based on a "house of mirrors" effect. Whether disingenuously or unwittingly, fallacy claimants commit yet another version of the fallacy they attribute to others. Their error, though, is embedded in the perfect competition, perfect information, full employment, ceteris paribus abstractions of the standard equilibrium model of supply and demand. The name given to this set of abstractions by those who mistake them for a description of reality is "economics." When "economists" commit this vulgar error it is regarded by Worstall & Co. as an infallible maxim.

Now, it is conceivable that some of those accused of committing the lump-of-labor fallacy may indeed assume the proverbial "fixed amount of work to be done" or whatever. There can be bad arguments for a good cause. But, as A.C. Pigou pointed out in his refutation of the ubiquitous fallacy claim, "If it were a good ground for rejecting an opinion that many persons entertain it for bad reasons, there would, alas, be few current beliefs left standing!"

Siphoning Off the Increment to Pay for More Excrement

Paul Krugman rightly excoriates the "carbonized Keynesianism" of the Republican rationale for the Keystone XL pipeline. As I replied to Barkley a few days ago, however, calling it "Keynesianism" is a misnomer. Kalecki had another name for it. I would prefer "Keyserlingering."

Sandwichman has been connecting the dots between Keystone pipe dreams, dynamic scoring of tax cuts and the genesis of pseudo-Keynesian multiplier aberrations in the top secret Cold War doctrine of NSC-68.

1950 was a watershed year for the alchemy of "transmuting excrement into increment." Academic economists, Paul Samuelson and John Maurice Clark said it couldn't (or shouldn't) be done. But the chairman of President Truman's Council of Economic Advisers, Leon Keyserling, had other ideas:

...if a dynamic expansion of the economy were achieved, the necessary build-up could be accomplished without a decrease in the national standard of living because the required resources could be obtained by siphoning off a part of the annual increment in the gross national product.

In his article on "Evaluation of Real National Income" Samuelson had explained that including "such wasteful output as war goods" in the calculation of national income served only to indicate the potential for producing "useful things... in better times." NSC-68 contrived counting wasteful output as a direct contribution to maintaining the standard of living. This is the logic the Republicans employ when they extol the job-creating magic of Keystone. But, more subtly, it is also the logic William Nordhaus employs when discounting the net present value of the future costs and benefits of climate regulation.

Exorcising the weaponized, carbonized, dynamically-scored Republican pipe dreams will take more than pointing out the meagerness and hypocrisy of their job-creation claims. It requires a ruthless critique of the lingering Cold War growthmanship that is deeply embedded in the economic conventional wisdom across the political spectrum.

Any N-person Game Whether Zero-sum or Not

In Chapter XII, "Coalitions,"  of Fights, Games and Debates, Anatol Rapoport wrote:

Any N-person game whether zero-sum or not can always be pictured as a zero-sum game by adding a fictitious (N + 1)-th player, whose winnings (or losses) equal the summed losses (or winnings) of all the others. Since the (N + 1)-th player makes no moves, his inclusion makes no difference in the original game’s strategic structure; but it is advantageous to include him, because his presence lets us treat every game as a zero-sum game. Zero-sum games are easier to treat from a unified point of view than non-zero-sum games. 

Here it may occur to ask why the difficulties of the non zero-sum game were at all emphasized if they can be circumvented by adding another player. Note, however, that adding a player to a two-person game turns it into a three-person game, which is complicated by the possibility of forming coalitions. ...

To be fair, when Paul Samuelson, Thomas Friedman, Alicia Munnell, George Shultz or other mouthpieces cut-and-paste "zero-sum game" words into their lump-of-labor boilerplate, they don't intend to refer to actual game theory but only use game-theoryish sounding terms to impress and intimidate the rubes.