The best sentence I read last night

by  Tyler Cowen in

Expressed loosely, being smart makes women patient and makes men take more risks.

That is Shane Frederick, in the Fall 2005 issue of Journal of Economic Perspectives.  Here is an on-line version of the paper.  Here is Frederick’s home page.  Here is his fascinating doctoral thesis, an exploration of discounting and personal identity over time.

Frederick dares the economist to judge some people as irrational rather than ascribing all differences to preferences or risk-aversion.  Remember all those tests of expected utility theory?  If subjects with high cognitive abilities tend to choose a certain way, should we not consider that the rational choice?  For instance your ability to get simple numerical problems right is correlated with having a low rate of time preference.  Also check out Frederick’s data on which schools have students with the highest cognitive abilities…poor Toledo University…

Comments

DK

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I wonder if this effect is largely due to the fact that most of the people he sampled are college students, from some clearly expensive universities, and some from public ones (see the by-location table).

By definition, if you are attending MIT or Princeton, you are patient, and you are willing to invest a lot of money today for the uncertain possibility of future gains tomorrow. If you are equally smart and capable of attending MIT or Princeton, but you have instead chosen to attend U Michigan, that is pretty strong evidence that you have a different time preference and/or risk profile than the typical MIT/Princeton student.

Thus, I would be more impressed with this paper if they could show that the smartness vs. risk/time results apply at single universities, not just in cross-university studies. (I think their result would still hold, but, I'd like to see data).

Note: I am not claiming that U Michigan is not as good or as future-income producing as MIT or Princeton, just that it is cheaper, which reduces both the direct cost and the risk of dropping out, taking time off, etc.
Note 2: You are still "investing" money even if it comes from loans or your parents (reducing your inheritance).

odograph

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That is a great paper. Being a forty-something though, I'm interested (and a little frightened) by what they'd learn in a study of my cohort. We gain experience, but become somewhat fixed in our decision making patterns.

Dave

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The table of cognitive ability by university was entertaining, but remember that the results are reflective of gender differences -- men do a lot better on the CRT, which probably explains some of MIT's big advantage (not that I don't think they're all brilliant).

scott cunningham

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Eric - rational choice is tautological at that point, though.

Peter Shaw

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"Expressed loosely, being smart makes women patient and makes men take more
risks."

Perhaps we could look at this from a biological standpoint.
It makes sense for men to take more risks as a reproductive strategy.
Smart men realise this (at least instinctively) and take (calculated) risks.

Admiral

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We had a discussion here at UF Law about the rationality of the looters in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A former Prosecutor and Democrat said that looters of any stripe or circumstances were obviously irrational and flaunting their disregard for authority.

I raised my hand and asked him what the law was exactly doing for them? Why *would* they regard it? What in either long-term or short-term horizons bade them to not get an air conditioner that, even though they can't use it now, they could use later to recoup some costs of the disaster?

He had no answer, so I continued.

It seems as though when people commit crimes, their decisions are rational GIVEN short-term horizons, GIVEN extreme emotional imbalance (rationality indeed!), and so on. Surely there is room for compromise on both models-- and I think this paper hits it right on the head.

But beware thinking you can wash economics away like only so much dirt, of course. Economics is the broader, more effective discipline for looking at these things.

BillWallace

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The MIT classes trending towards 50/50 represents a gender bias AGAINST men, not the elimantion of the opposite.

Eric H

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The point I was trying to make, and the problem of extrapolating from this, is encapsulated in "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments" by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, found here:

http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf

(Sorry I couldn't find the link, fortunately my DW now has it del.icio.us-ed!).

I have no problem with the advice, "Tyler Cowen should take more risks," but I do with the advice that results from saying risk-taking is the rational choice for everyone because smart people do it. It may result in some misapplication by people in general, or by people who *believe* themselves to be intelligent. Smart people actually know that they don't know everything and can account for that better than someone who doesn't know that they don't know everything. That has to be important, otherwise it wouldn't be called "risk".

On a side note, I remember reading that (1) smoking is negatively correlated with education (a proxy for intelligence?), and (2) that smokers generally *over*-estimate their risk for lung cancer (they believe the odds are higher than they actually are), but (3) choose to smoke anyhow (I think this was a citation of a Viscusi study in either Bennett & DiLorenzo's _Cancerscam_ or Jacob Sullum's _For Your Own Good_). Can this square with Shane's results?

DF

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This study shows that men do better on famous brainteasers than women. SF interprets this as men are smarter than women, but an alternative explanation is that men are more familiar with old, famous brainteasers. The study was published in Journal of Economic Perspectives, presumably because no psychology journal would publish a study witih such an obvious confound.
http://debfrisch.com/archives/2006/01/boyz_r_smarter_1.html

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