Should you be a maximizer?
Five hundred and forty-eight graduating students from 11 universities were categorised as maximisers or satisficers based on their answers to questions like “When I am in the car listening to the radio, I often check other stations to see if something better is playing, even if I am relatively satisfied with what I’m listening to”.
When questioned again the following summer, the maximisers had found jobs that paid 20 per cent more on average than the satisficers’ jobs, but they were less satisfied with the outcome of their job search, and were more pessimistic, stressed, tired, anxious, worried, overwhelmed and depressed.
“We suggest that maximisers may be less satisfied than satisficers and experience greater negative affect with the jobs they obtain because their pursuit of the elusive ‘best’ induces them to consider a large number of possibilities, thereby increasing their potential for regret or anticipated regret, engendering unrealistically high expectations”, the researchers said. Indeed, the researchers found that maximisers were more likely to report fantasising about jobs they hadn’t applied for and wishing they had pursued even more jobs than they did.
Here is the link, and by now you know the usual caveats for such research. Number one is whether the survey evidence measures true commitment to maximization, or whether it simply picks up grumps who are fussy and determined to portray a fussy image to the world. Number two is whether they properly adjust for IQ, which may be causing both superior results and greater returns to search behavior.
Rwandan killers, again
There were two kinds of rapists. Some took the girls and used them as wives until the end, even on the flight to Congo; they took advantage of the situation to sleep with prettified Tutsis and in exchange showed them a little bit of consideration. Others caught them just to fool around with, for having sex and drinking; they raped for a little while and then handed them over to be killed right afterward. There were no orders from the authorities. The two kinds were free to do as they pleased.
Of course a great number didn’t do that, had no taste for it or respect for such misbehaving. Most said it was not proper, to mix together fooling around and killing.
That is from Jean Hatzfeld’s Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak. Here is my previous post about the book.
Virginia Postrel > Larry David
Our tissues turned out to be unusually compatible for nonrelatives and,
when her Internet donor dropped out, I moved from backup to actual
donor. We have our surgeries tomorrow morning.
Here is more, and here on LD. Here is Virginia’s new job for Atlantic Monthly.
An epistolary romance
Dear Sir or Madam:
You may love to see me smile, but I, however, love to see me eat.
Please send me coupons for free McDonald’s product, so that I may
continue to eat (and smile).
Thank you well in advance,
Tom Locke, eating enthusiast
CVS got this:
Dear Sir or Madam:
I am a health and wellness addict. Please send me a random product
which you think I would enjoy. It doesn’t have to be something big,
just something nice! I like surprises.
Thank you in advance,
Tom Locke, health enthusiast
What would happen if you sent one hundred letters like that to the leading consumer product corporations in the United States? Read here. You also could call this post "How to spend $39," "How to measure industrial concentration," "How to find corporate addresses," "Experimental economics, for real," or (how many of you get this one?) "Hoping for a durable goods monopolist."
Here is part (but not all) of the upshot:
Wrigley’s (#6) basically told me to buy my own gum – as well as exactly where to buy it.
I guess they figured since they’re nice enough to keep making it, I should be nice enough to keep
buying it. And I probably will. It’s interesting to note that Wrigley’s letter starts out,
"Thank you for visiting Wrigley.com". I didn’t visit Wrigley.com. I visited the post office.Smuckers
(#40) basically just said no. Nothing fancy or elaborate. Just no. And
a cute little Smuckers logo on their letterhead to top it off. Well…
the joke’s on Smuckers. I plan to run that letter through my juicer
and make my own jellies and jams. Boom!
Thanks to Cynical-C blog for the pointer.
NBA coaches are like college professors
Malcolm Gladwell offers up two interviews on sports, management, rational inference, and why he hates Las Vegas and Isiah Thomas as Knick’s GM. The second one is even better than the first. Thanks to kottke.org for the pointer.
Cooperative game theory vs. sexual selection
Roughgarden said that pairings are often better explained by creating a viable team than by finding the highest quality genes. Couples are usually genetically similar, she said, and their differences are often complementary: Both members provide the team with the strengths the other lacks.
"To make an analogy with humans, the number of children a couple can raise to adulthood is more influenced by the income of the family rather than the genetic makeup," Akcay said. "We think that in most species, this is what is going on: Males and females choose each other for ecological benefits rather than superior genetic makeups."
Read more here, including criticisms, hat tip to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.
Lessons in hedonic happiness
Spread your wife’s birthday gifts out over the day, rather than giving them all at once.
Do people like happy endings?
Forty-one per cent [of respondents] are overwhelmingly in favour of books with a happy ending, as against 2.2% who like it sad. Women were 13% more likely than men to say they want it all to end happily. Almost one fifth of men expressed a preference for books with ambiguous endings…
Young people were most likely to prefer books with a sad ending – 8.6% of under 16s. Those aged 41-65, however, a group with more personal experience of sadness, dislike sad endings, with only 1.1% preferring books that end this way.
Here is more information. You must know by now, of course, that I prefer most of my endings tragic, or ambiguous, with a few happy tales thrown in to make the tragedies a surprise when they come. (Is it the dirty little secret of elite culture that we would be bored if in fact we had everything our way?) In fact all of you unwashed-masses-happy-endings-loving viewers subsidize me. You support so much feel-good slop that when something meaty does come along, I am genuinely shocked and delighted. If it is bad, I just put down the book or leave the theater. Thank you all, once again.
Addendum: Right now Typepad is "holding" all your comments. They should appear sooner or later, our apologies…Further update: The problem appears to be corrected.
Octavia Butler, the Outsider Who Changed Science Fiction
Here is my Slate.com piece from today. Excerpt:
…her work went far beyond simply mourning the victim. She showed us why repulsion cannot be avoided, why we often resemble what we hate, and why it is sometimes our best qualities that prevent us from accepting the differences of others. Her ability to both understand the outsider perspective better than others and then to invert it, places Butler above her science-fiction-writing peers. She is a disturbing and important writer who transcends the usual genre categories.
Do we need occupational licensing?
Alan Krueger writes:
In a new book, "Licensing Occupations: Ensuring Quality or Restricting
Competition?" (Upjohn Institute, 2006), Morris M. Kleiner, an economist
at the University of Minnesota, questions whether occupational
licensing has gone too far. He provides much evidence that the balance
of occupational licensing has shifted away from protecting consumers
and toward limiting the supply of workers in various professions. A
result is that services provided by licensed workers are more expensive
than necessary and that quality is not noticeably affected.
Read more here. I can’t yet find this listed on Amazon.com, any pointers? Here is a pdf of part of the book. Here is a home page for the book.
Rwandan killers speak
During that killing season we rose earlier than usual to eat lots of meat, and we went up to the soccer field at around nine or ten o’clock. The leaders would grumble about latecomers, and we would go off on the attack. Rule number one was to kill. There was no rule number two. It was an organization without complications.
That is from Jean Hatzfeld’s Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak. I will post more about this remarkable book soon. Here is one good review of the book.
Interview with Tyler Cowen
From the Richmond Fed, here it is, on the path of my career, how macro has changed, avian flu, blogging, the arts, and of course cuisine, among other topics. Excerpt:
My prediction is that, in general, welfare states will increase in size in most places around the world. We can expect most areas of the world to become wealthier because of globalization as well as other reasons. And if you look at countries that are wealthy, they tend to have very generous welfare states. Also, I believe that the human desire for security is extremely strong, even when it is not efficient or rational. So as long as we experience economic growth, I think we can expect welfare states to grow.
The best sentence I read today
And – expected utility theory notwithstanding – people adapt more
easily to 100% certain bad events than to 95% certain bad events.
Here is more.
Further thoughts: I can see how the possibility of fertility treatments might make a couple worse off, if those treatments don’t work. But is it better to feel "I will never have sex again," or would you rather hold on to the five percent chance? What exactly makes these two cases different?
Baltimore pit beef barbecue
Baltimore, of all places, has its own barbecue tradition, called "pit beef." Imagine slow cooking directed toward the end of a perfect thinly-sliced roast beef sandwich. It is an artisanal version of Roy Rogers, with excellent french fries to boot. It is best served rare with [sic] horseradish. ("Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.") Chaps is one place to try; Big Al’s is another. Both are first-rate for people-watching. Did I mention that the entire tradition appears to have started on a dilapidated industrial highway, set among whorehouses and sex shops? The style can be traced by to 1987, and it has spread to Camden Yards as well.
Poll of the greatest 20th century economists
Given the source, expect a left-wing, anti-neoclassical perspective. Here are the tallies, with a much longer list at the link:
1. John Maynard Keynes 3,253
2. Joseph Alois Schumpeter 1,080
3. John Kenneth Galbraith 904
4. Amartya Sen 708
5. Joan Robinson 607
6. Thorstein Veblen 591
7. Michal Kalecki 481
8. Friedrich Hayek 469
9. Karl Polanyi 456
10. Piero Sraffa 383
11. Joseph Stiglitz 333
12. Kenneth Arrow 320
13. Milton Friedman 319
13. Paul Samuelson 319
15. Paul Sweezy 268
16. Herman Daly 267
17. Herbert Simon 250
18. Ronald Coase 246
19. Gunnar Myrdal 216
20. Alfred Marshall 211
At least Milton Friedman beat out Herman Daly. Poor John Hicks. And further down the list, does Pierangelo Garegnani, an obscure neo-Ricardian obsessed with commodity own-rates of return, deserve to place ahead of Franco Modigliani?
Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.