Month: April 2015
Assorted links
1. Russ Roberts interviews David Skarbek on prison gangs.
2. Who caused the flash crash?
3. More Daniel Davies on Greece.
4. What happens to people when they think they are invisible?
5. AIG in hindsight.
6. “In fact, though the parents may not realise it, many interviewers watch the parents more closely than the child, Jenny suggests…And if parents bring in a portfolio listing the playgroups and classes their toddler has attended, and the places they have been on holiday – as some do – she doesn’t look at it.” And David Brooks on parental love.
Heath Responds to Tabarrok
Joseph Heath has written an interesting and thoughtful comment on my review of his excellent book Enlightenment 2.0 (fyi, we have never communicated but it turns out that Heath is a long time reader of MR.). Samuel Hammond concisely summarized on twitter part of Heath’s response:
In reply to @ATabarrok, Joseph Heath shares the dire Straussian reading of his own book: The US is Rome burning
Quite accurate but I want to focus on a different point.
Finally, Tabarrok suggests that I am “too sanguine about the role of politics.” I thought I was being fairly pessimistic about politics. I think the nub of the disagreement between Tabarrok and myself on this point – and certainly the basis of our major differences of political ideology – is that I am much more sanguine about the role of the state than he is. This is not the same as being sanguine about democratic politics. For example, he points out that:
In a large electorate, no individual’s vote is likely to change the outcome of an election. As a result, it doesn’t pay to be informed about politics nor to think about politics in objective and rational terms. Consider an individual who spends time and effort to be informed about politics. What does this individual receive in return for their investment? The same thing as the uninformed individual. Since better information doesn’t lead to better consequences, it doesn’t pay an individual to be informed.
I couldn’t agree more….Indeed, the sort of considerations that motivate Tabarrok’s enthusiasm for making decisions through betting markets are, I would guess, quite similar to the ones that motivate my own enthusiasm for cost-benefit analysis. The key difference is that Tabarrok (and Bryan Caplan) tend to assume that democracy gives “the people” much greater control over the behaviour of the state than it actually does. In the background there is, I suspect, a somewhat public-choicy picture of legislation as a complex process of preference-aggregation. By contrast, I follow Ian Shapiro in thinking that we need to get past these sorts of “general will” theories of democracy.
There is one point in the last chapter where I say what I really think, but again, it might easily be overlooked. So let me just say, for the record, that I was also dead serious when I wrote the following paragraph (and that it comes closest to summarizing my considered view):
It is important to recognize that modern democratic political systems involve a delicate compromise between, on the one hand, the desire for public control of decision-making and, on the other hand, the need for rational, coherent policy. Democracies need to be democratic, but they also need to work, in the sense that they need to produce a state that effectively discharges its responsibilities. Thus they have a variety of institutional features that allow them to function even when the democratic public sphere is completely degraded. They do so largely by shifting power and control away from elected representatives toward experts. Even in the United States, where this is difficult to do, one can find examples all over. The most obvious example is the enormous role that the Supreme Court has played in making decisions that, in most other democracies, would be left to the legislature. But one can see it in other areas as well, such as the amount of autonomy that government agencies have or the increased use of cost-benefit analysis in public decision-making (338).
So if you want to know what I really think, it’s that we are not going to be able to fix the problem of increased irrationalism in politics — at best we will be able to limit its most toxic effects. As a consequence, the legislature will increasingly become a sideshow, with the two other branches of the state assuming more and more of the responsibility for actually governing.
Heath has hit on an important similarity and difference in our views. We are both skeptical about democracy as a way of making rational, coherent policy. But in response to the defects of democracy I want to devolve more decisions to the individual and the market while Heath wants to centralize more decisions to the state and expert bureaucracies.
One of the reasons that I oppose the extension of democratic politics into every aspect of modern life is precisely that in trying to do too much, democracy delivers incoherence, gridlock and frustration, forces that eventually undermine its own legitimacy. I worry about democratic legitimacy because I see democracy as a check and balance on Leviathan (while Heath sees it as a check on government by experts).
The legislature has become a sideshow. But I worry, because the more Congress is held in contempt the greater the support for a bold executive that takes charge, makes decisions and gets things done. Under these pressures, executive power has grown not just in the United States but also in Canada and Great Britain (on this theme see F.H. Buckley’s The Once and Future King.) But for all its faults, the legislature and the rule of law are more conducive to liberty than the executive and the administrative state. Legislators are satisfied with reelection and a bit of pork but executives hunger for greatness and in so doing they promote the real dangers, idolatry, the centralization of power and war.
In short, I worry that the pathologies of democracy drive the demand not for rational, technocratic government but for Caesarism.
What professions are oversaturated?
Chad writes me:
What jobs (particularly ones we think of as being inherently beneficial to society) might America have too many of? Political journalism comes to mind this particular month, since we apparently have enough to carefully monitor the Chipotle orders of presidential candidates 19 months before the election. Writers might be another, particularly in a world of self-publishing.
One can imagine lots of reasons for a greater-than-optimal number of people in a particular profession, from government subsidies to cultural biases, but I’m curious if you have a gut feeling about any professions in particular.
A good question, in my view the answer is not so simple. Writers and artists are indeed a possible nomination, but some of the demand for these professions is likely for consumption, which makes the overinvestment difficult to judge. And what about lawyers? Relative to the number of laws and regulations (too many in my view, but take them as given), it is not obvious to me that we have too many lawyers. Someone has to tell companies when it is safe to proceed, or not.
How about too many people selling medical devices and other high margin items? Too many people making alcohol? Too many people raising and selling animal meat? Those would be my picks.
The finance sector is another obvious culprit, but as a fraction of wealth I do not think it is larger than in the past. Admittedly people in the finance sector may be engaging in the wrong activities, but I am not sure the case for fewer employees per se is so obvious. Still, it is another candidate, if only because it (often) involves people selling high-margin items.
Claims about embryos
A pressing question, said Rudolf Jaenisch, an M.I.T. biology professor, is why anyone would want to edit the genes of human embryos in order to prevent disease. Even in the most severe cases, involving diseases like Huntington’s in which a single copy of a mutated gene inherited from either parent is enough to cause the disease with 100 percent certainty, editing poses ethical problems. Because of the way genes are distributed in embryos, when one parent has the gene, only half of the parent’s embryos will inherit it. With gene editing, the cutting and pasting has to start immediately, in a fertilized egg, before it is possible to know if an embryo has the Huntington’s gene. That means half the embryos that were edited would have been normal — their DNA would have been forever altered for no reason. “It is unacceptable to mutate normal embryos,” Dr. Jaenisch said. “For me, that means there is no application.”
If I were grading an undergraduate philosophy class, I am not sure Dr. Jaenisch would exceed a C minus with that answer (the source article is here). Besides I have never known a normal embryo. Then there is the all too obvious question as to why it should be acceptable to abort embryos, but not to modify or mutate them. Oops.
The better arguments are surely the slippery slope worries that embryo tinkering will change the nature and future of humanity in dangerous ways, perhaps producing too much conformity, too much zero-sum competition (“buy the Harvard splice”), too much discrimination against various “types,” too much induced family loyalty, legal discouragement of rebellious genes, excess advantages for elites, too many decisions which too explicitly lower the social status of some groups of people, and perhaps ultimately too much drift from the world we know (and love?).
Those are my worries. Whether or not they are valid, they would seem to merit at least a C+. But many commentators wish to ensure these issues are not actually argued. Will this prove the new face of anti-scientific, anti-philosophical thinking? Check out the closing quotation from Professor Daley at Harvard, and his use of the word “deranged.”
A lot of parents will strongly desire some future version of this product, and I believe a number of countries are going to be willing to proceed with such innovations, if and when they become possible. They’ll also be willing to live with the costs of the failures in the meantime. So I don’t think the strategy of shutting down debate is going to fare so well in this case.
Abolish the National Raisin Reserve
I had not known such a thing exists:
There are raisins stored in California warehouses as part of the U.S. government’s National Raisin Reserve — but the program may shrivel in the face of a Supreme Court challenge.
The National Raisin Reserve — which is overseen by the Fresno-based Raisin Administrative Committee — is part of post-World War II-era program that forces raisin producers to give part of their annual crop to the government to prevent an oversupply of the dried fruit. Controversially, the program seizes the raisins from the farmers without paying them, and that has created friction, lawbreaking farmers, and a Supreme Court case. One scofflaw farmer, Marvin Horne, has refused to surrender his raisins to the government and owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and over 1 million pounds of the sweet dried fruit to Uncle Sam.
The controversial raisin-seizing program could soon be, however, a relic of history.
Several Supreme Court justices expressed doubts Wednesday that federal officials can legally take raisins away from farmers without full payment even if the goal is to help boost overall market prices.
The article is here, via Jeffrey Lessard. Here is commentary from Ilya Somin, here is an IJ video on the case.
Robert E. Hall on secular stagnation
Do read the whole thing. Excerpt:
There has been no sign of a reversal of the decline in labour’s share of total income and no body of research that supports the idea that it will. Productivity growth is definitely under way, at rates similar to those in the 1970s and 1980s, but well below the rates of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1990s. In particular, there is no sign that a burst of productivity growth will make up for the complete stall in productivity growth around the crisis, as Figure 3 shows.
Most importantly, there is no sign suggesting a departure from the decline in labour-force participation shown in Figure 6. Some commentators have declared a turnaround in participation based on recent monthly data, but Figure 9 suggests this is wishful thinking. Participation has declined along a straight line during the period of improving conditions in the labour market, suggesting a complete disconnect between participation and the state of the labour market.
Excellent throughout.
Assorted links
There is no great penal stagnation, a drone and cell phone twofer
…the warden of the Lee Correctional Institute, Cecilia Reynolds, said that in recent weeks her officers found 17 phones in one inmate’s cell. She said she suspected that the phones continue to come in on drones.
There is more here, interesting throughout. How about this bit?:
Prison officials, echoing Ms. Reynolds, say that convicts and their families and friends are willing to pay more than $1,000 to get a device – like an iPhone — into a prison. Smartphones are so desirable because unlike pay phones at prisons, they are not recorded or monitored, enabling gang leaders to freely run their criminal activities from behind bars. The phones also allow them to watch pornography and communicate surreptitiously with fellow prisoners.
The phones are essential for coordinating with smugglers using drones, because the prisoners need to know where to find the deliveries in the yard. Most important for the smugglers, the prisoners can then use the phones to quickly pay them.
How about blocking cell phone signals inside the jail? Elsewhere, a possibly radioactive drone was found on the roof of the office of Prime Minister Abe. As I’ve said already on Twitter, the drone wars have begun…
Are eSports real sports, a money pump, or both?
What are non-e sports for that matter? Via Liam Boluk, I read this from Prashob Menon:
Last year’s League of Legends championship, for example, drew nearly 30 million viewers, putting it in line with the combined viewership of the 2014 MLB and NBA finals, or the series finales of Breaking Bad and Two and a Half Men, plus the Season 4 finale of Game of Thrones. As with most sports, competitive gaming is now firmly entrenched in the US college system, with the country’s largest collegiate league counting more than 10,000 active players, some of whom are on full athletic scholarships. Eager to capitalize on growing interest in the sport, Major League Gaming (MLG) opened the first dedicated domestic eSports arena in October 2014, and major brands such as Ford, American Express and Coke have begun forming partnerships with game developers, teams, players, event organizers and video distributors. The US Department of State has been issuing athlete visas to competitive gamers since 2013.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to say eSports aren’t “real” sports, but the bigger question is whether it even matters. The media business is about eyeballs, and audiences are turning up in droves for the likes of Defense of the Ancients and League of Legends.
The economics indeed do not look so bad:
Moreover, eSports fans, unlike linear TV viewers, are highly engaged in the content. Major League Gaming, for instance, consistently beats the industry average on key digital ad metrics such as completion rates (90% vs. 72%), click-through rates (4% vs. 2%), and ad viewability (99% vs. 44%).
Here is Wikipedia on eSports. I believe I have timed my birth at more or less the right time, so I will die of old age just when such institutions are taking over the world and pushing out baseball’s eight-team American League, as it ruled in 1968.
Chinese scientists genetically modify human embryos
David Cyranoski and Sarah Reardon report:
In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published1 in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted—rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month about the ethical implications of such work.
In the paper, researchers led by Junjiu Huang, a gene-function researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, tried to head off such concerns by using ‘non-viable’ embryos, which cannot result in a live birth, that were obtained from local fertility clinics. The team attempted to modify the gene responsible for β-thalassaemia, a potentially fatal blood disorder, using a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9. The researchers say that their results reveal serious obstacles to using the method in medical applications.
“I believe this is the first report of CRISPR/Cas9 applied to human pre-implantation embryos and as such the study is a landmark, as well as a cautionary tale,” says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “Their study should be a stern warning to any practitioner who thinks the technology is ready for testing to eradicate disease genes.”
There were too many off-target mutations, but the Chinese attitude seems to be if at first you don’t succeed…
…there are reports that other groups in China are also experimenting on human embryos.
The article is interesting throughout, for instance:
Huang says that the paper was rejected by Nature and Science, in part because of ethical objections; both journals declined to comment on the claim (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its research editorial team.)
There is more here. And Carl Zimmer wrote an explainer on it.
Which of your priors need updating now?
The oldest stone tools on record may spell the end for the theory that complex toolmaking began with the genus Homo, to which humans belong. The 3.3-million-year-old artefacts, revealed at a conference in California last week, predate the first members of Homo, and suggest that more-ancient hominin ancestors had the intelligence and dexterity to craft sophisticated tools.
“This is a landmark discovery pertaining to one of the key evolutionary milestones,” says Zeresenay Alemseged, a palaeoanthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco…
The article is here, and the pointer, not surprisingly, is from Robin Hanson. I say this should make us more pessimistic about dysgenics, and more pessimistic about the likely prospects for civilization in the future. Ideally we would like to think that once brains reached a critical threshold, all sorts of good things started happening. That scenario now seems yet further away from the truth, and the notion of civilizational dead ends, if only for long stretches of time, now seems more likely. Your views?
Wednesday assorted link
1. John Key.
How can faster productivity growth *not* raise middle class incomes?
Jared Bernstein worries that it won’t. But how can it not?
Let’s say an entrepreneur introduces a new product, call it the iPhone. At first the relatively wealthy are the main buyers and at first a lot of the gains accrue to the IP holders. Over time, however, the IP rents erode, smart phones become more popular, even with stupid patent laws smart phone innovations trickle down into cheaper models, and so on. The middle class ends up better off.
Of course not all productivity gains are innovations.
Let’s say Ford can suddenly make cars — a known product — more cheaply. Even in a world with market power, this expands output and lowers car prices, thereby raising real wages. You might think labor won’t “get its fair share,” but still it should raise real wages, and that’s ignoring the possibility that wages in the auto plant might be bid up a bit.
So when some economists argue that faster productivity won’t raise middle class incomes, which model do they have in mind?
Even if you think income is shifting from capital to labor, how does the productivity gain worsen this shift? (That is, real wages still ought to go up.) Inquiring minds wish to know.
I am, by the way, familiar with a variety of diagrams showing a disconnect between productivity and real wages. I’ll be happier with those when a) I know they are using common deflators, and b) they take adequate account of the possibly dysfunctional productivity in our hard to measure sectors of health, education, and government consumption.
Addendum: Read Scott Winship.
Does the internet make you overconfident? (this post may offend some bloggers)
Dan Klein (from Abigail D.) directs my attention to an interesting paper by Fisher, Goddu, and Keil (pdf):
As the Internet has become a nearly ubiquitous resource for acquiring knowledge about the world, questions have arisen about its potential effects on cognition. Here we show that searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information. Evidence from 9 experiments shows that searching for information online leads to an increase in self-assessed knowledge as people mistakenly think they have more knowledge “in the head,” even seeing their own brains as more active as depicted by functional MRI (fMRI) images.
Having done some further search on this topic, using Google, I can assure you that I now have a much better grasp on whether this hypothesis is true or not…
Why I like trigger warnings
At a growing number of campuses, professors now attach “trigger warnings” to texts that may upset students, and there is a campaign to eradicate “microaggressions,” or small social slights that might cause searing trauma. These newly fashionable terms merely repackage a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses.
Read his whole discussion, but he more or less disapproves. I’ve long wanted to disagree with Chait “from the left,” and it seems this is my chance, I had better grab it while I can.
While teaching Law and Literature this year, I attached very gentle, low key “trigger warnings” to a number of items on the syllabus, namely those dealing with extreme violence, rape, and some other very unpleasant situations. I am glad I did this. I told students that if they preferred to do a substitute assignment, I could arrange that. Is that so unreasonable? There were no takers, but I don’t see it did anyone harm or limited free speech in the classroom (or outside of it) to make this offer. If anything, it may have eased speech a slight amount by noting it is OK to feel uncomfortable with some topics, or at least serving up that possibility into the realm of common knowledge. That struck me as better and wiser than simply pretending we were studying the successful operation of the Coase theorem the whole time.
I don’t doubt that trigger warnings may be misused in some situations by some professors, but overall they seem to me like another small step to a better world. I do agree we need to liberate trigger warnings from the strictures of the PC movement, no argument there.
Addendum: I am pleased to see that GMU was moved into the highest category for university free speech, according to FIRE.