The Little Mermaid and Sen's Paradox

A live-action remake of The Little Mermaid is due for release in May 2023, starring Halle Bailey in the title role. An official trailer was released earlier this month:

When the casting of Bailey as Ariel was announced in 2019, the response was predictably polarized:

The news was met with a flood of praise from celebrities including Mariah Carey, Halle Berry and Chrissy Teigen, as well as many fans. However, it also prompted protests from some who were upset by the deviation from the animated character’s image, launching hashtags such as #NotMyAriel and #NotMyMermaid.

The release of the trailer set in motion the same dynamic. The dislike counter on YouTube was disabled after a million and a half downvotes had been registered, though commenters continued to find cryptic and oblique ways to express their disapproval.

As Adam Serwer put it on twitter (in response to outrage over a different business decision): “I just don't know how you respond to people who feel oppressed by the existence of consumer choices for people who are not them.”

A casting decision by Disney may seem like a trivial matter, but it has brought thrill and joy to a lot of young children. Furthermore, the same impulse that leads people to take offense at the range of choices available to others has sustained the criminalization of blasphemy, sodomy, adultery, contraception, miscegenation, same-sex intimacy, and alcohol consumption at various times and places. In its most extreme forms, it has led to terrible violence.

The principle that people should have autonomy in the making of certain decisions that do not materially affect others is associated with (small-l) liberalism. In a society where this principle is not universally accepted—where some people do indeed feel oppressed by the range of choices available to others—it can come into direct conflict with a different principle that is applied routinely in economics. This is the (weak) Pareto principle, which states that if all individuals prefer a social arrangement A to an alternative B, then society should prefer that A is implemented.

Both principles seem reasonable, and mutually consistent. If I want to plant roses in my front yard while my neighbor prefers to see tulips, then roses should be planted (liberalism). But if my neighbor and I both want tulips, then tulips should be planted (Pareto principle). There is no conflict here—the preference of my neighbor comes into play only if I am perfectly happy to accommodate it.

But in a paper with a wonderful title—The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal—Amartya Sen established that as long as preferences are unrestricted (allowing for arbitrary forms of nosiness) there can arise situations in which the two principles yield different recommendations. Sen illustrated his theorem with a the following example:

There is one copy of a certain book, say Lady Chatterly's Lover, which is viewed differently by 1 and 2. The three alternatives are: that individual 1 reads it, that individual 2 reads it, and that no one reads it. Person 1, who is a prude, prefers most that no one reads it, but given the choice between either of the two reading it, he would prefer that he read it himself rather than exposing gullible Mr. 2 to the influences of Lawrence… Person 2, however, prefers that either of them should read it rather than neither. Furthermore, he takes delight in the thought that prudish Mr. 1 may have to read Lawrence, and his first preference is that person 1 should read it, next best that he himself should read it, and worst that neither should.

Here the two principles are in clear conflict. Person 2 would like to read the book and Person 1 would not. The liberal principle thus dictates that the book should be handed over to Person 2, who would gladly read it. But both individuals consider this outcome to be inferior to the alternative where Person 1 is compelled to read the book. By the Pareto principle, then, this is the outcome that society should favor.

Sen’s goal here is not to suggest that illiberal choices ought sometimes to be favored, but rather that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Pareto principle:

What is the moral? It is that in a very basic sense liberal values conflict with the Pareto principle. If someone takes the Pareto principle seriously, as economists seem to do, then he has to face problems of consistency in cherishing liberal values, even very mild ones. Or, to look at it in another way, if someone does have certain liberal values, then he may have to eschew his adherence to Pareto optimality. While the Pareto criterion has been thought to be an expression of individual liberty, it appears that in choices involving more than two alternatives it can have consequences that are, in fact, deeply illiberal.

This is a remarkable lesson that has yet to be fully absorbed by the profession. In most economic research and pedagogy, the reasonableness of the Pareto principle continues to be treated as self-evident.

There is another remark in Sen’s paper that is worth contemplating:

The ultimate guarantee for individual liberty may rest not on rules for social choice but on developing individual values that respect each other’s personal choices.

This was once a heretical view in economics, which tended to treat tastes as exogenously given, stable, and beyond dispute. This started to change about a generation ago, and the evolution of norms and preferences is now an active area of research.

But this work has focused largely on preferences over resource allocations, and on interpersonal interactions involving reciprocity and trust. What is missing is an examination of the kinds of policies and institutions that would result in “individual values that respect each other’s personal choices.” Much good could come from a better understanding of such issues, and from the wider prevalence of a propensity to live and let live.