Observations on the heritability of intelligence
The reason I think polygenicity is important in this case is that it means there is a huge mutational target that natural selection has to keep an eye on. The constant production of new mutations in sperm and egg cells, the fact that so many of them could affect intelligence, and the fact that they will tend to do so negatively, should, in my opinion, make it harder to push intelligence consistently upwards, when new mutations will constantly be pulling it back down.
Again, I would argue this is a different situation to many other traits. For any trait, new mutations are likely to degrade, rather than improve, the developmental program and biological pathways underlying it. But for some traits, the “goal” of that program is to hit a species-optimal set point. Mutations affecting that program could mean you miss high or miss low – there’s no reason to expect to go one way or the other, really (as far as I can see).
For intelligence, following my argument above, the goal is to hit the maximal level possible. New mutations will thus not just replenish genetic variation affecting the trait (in either direction, as in standard models of stabilising selection); they will tend to push it downwards.
Now, maybe someone will tell me why that actually doesn’t matter, but it seems to me that this will tend to oppose any efforts of directional selection to push intelligence upwards in any given population. Whether that is true or not (or the size of the effect it could have) may depend on how much the trait is dominated by the effects of rare mutations. Various lines of evidence suggest that the collective influence of such mutations on intelligence is very substantial.
That is from Kevin Mitchell. I do not feel qualified to judge his claims, but nonetheless found the discussion of interest.
Tuesday assorted links
My Conversation with Bryan Caplan
Bryan was in top form, I can’t recall hearing him being more interesting or persuasive. Here is the audio and text. We talked about whether any single paper is good enough, the autodidact’s curse, the philosopher who most influenced Bryan, the case against education, the Straussian reading of Bryan, effective altruism, Socrates, Larry David, where to live in 527 A.D., the charm of Richard Wagner, and much more. Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: You love Tolstoy, right?
CAPLAN: Yeah. You love Tolstoy because here’s a guy who not only has this encyclopedic knowledge of human beings — you say he knows human nature. Tolstoy knows human natures. He realizes that there are hundreds of kinds of people, and like an entomologist, he has the patience to study each kind on its own terms.
Tolstoy, you read it: “There are 17 kinds of little old ladies. This was the 13th kind. This was the kind that’s very interested in what you’re eating but doesn’t wish to hear about your romance, which will be contrasted with the seventh kind which has exactly the opposite preferences.” That’s what’s to me so great about Tolstoy.
Here is one of my questions:
What’s the fundamental feature in Bryan Caplan–think that has made you, unlike most other nerds, so much more interested in Stalin than science fiction?
Here is another exchange:
COWEN: You think, in our society in general, this action bias infests everything? Or is there some reason why it’s drawn like a magnet to education?
CAPLAN: Action bias primarily drives government. For individuals, I think even there there’s some action bias. But nevertheless, for the individual, there is the cost of just going and trying something that’s not very likely to succeed, and the connection with the failure and disappointment, and a lot of things don’t work out.
There’s a lot of people who would like to start their own business, but they don’t try because they have some sense that it’s really hard.
What I see in government is, there isn’t the same kind of filter, which is a big part of my work in general in politics. You don’t have the same kind of personal disincentives against doing things that sound good but actually don’t work out very well in practice.
Probably even bigger than action bias is actually what psychologists call social desirability bias: just doing things that sound good whether or not they actually work very well and not really asking hard questions about whether things that sound good will work out very well in practice.
I also present what I think are the three strongest arguments against Bryan’s “education is mostly signaling” argument — decide for yourself how good his answers are.
And:
COWEN: …Parenting and schooling in your take don’t matter so much. Something is changing these [norms] that is mostly not parenting and not schooling. And they are changing quite a bit, right?
CAPLAN: Yes.
COWEN: Is it like all technology? Is the secret reading of Bryan Caplan that you’re a technological determinist?
CAPLAN: I don’t think so. In general, not a determinist of any kind.
COWEN: I was teasing about that.
And last but not least:
CAPLAN: …When someone gets angry at Robin, this is what actually outrages me. I just want to say, “Look, to get angry at Robin is like getting angry at baby Jesus.” He’s just a symbol and embodiment of innocence and decency. For someone to get angry at someone who just wants to learn . . .
COWEN: And when they get mad at me?
CAPLAN: Eh, I understand that.
Hail Bryan Caplan! Again here is the link, and of course you should buy his book The Case Against Education.
Does aversion to change predict support for Donald Trump?
Donald Trump won the American presidency in 2016 by overperforming expectations in upper Midwest states, surprising even Republican political elites. We argue that attitudes toward social change were an underappreciated dividing line between supporters of Trump and Hillary Clinton as well as between Republicans at the mass and elite levels. We introduce a concept and measure of aversion to (or acceptance of) social diversification and value change, assess the prevalence of these attitudes in the mass public and among political elites, and demonstrate its effects on support for Trump. Our research uses paired surveys of Michigan’s adult population and community of political elites in the Fall of 2016. Aversion to social change is strongly predictive of support for Trump at the mass level, even among racial minorities. But attitudes are far more accepting of social change among elites than the public and aversion to social change is not a factor explaining elite Trump support. If elites were as averse to social change as the electorate—and if that attitude mattered to their vote choice—they might have been as supportive of Trump. Views of social change were not as strongly related to congressional voting choices.
That is from Matt Grossman and Daniel Thaler.
Will monetary tightening halt the labor market recovery?
My latest Bloomberg column is on that topic, here is one bit:
…these days more and more economists, especially those with Keynesian sympathies, are insisting that higher legal minimum wages don’t lower employment much, if at all. If higher real wages don’t much hurt employment, we shouldn’t expect lower real wages to much boost employment. This “new wisdom” on minimum wages contradicts Keynesian labor economics and implies inflation won’t much boost employment, if at all.
And:
One thing we do know about inflation is that voters hate it. Economists sometimes treat this belief as irrational, assuming that workers in aggregate will get raises to compensate for the higher prices. This is true for many top performers, whose income growth would exceed inflation regardless. But a lot of other workers are concentrated in somewhat bureaucratic service-sector jobs, they have weak bargaining power, and their pay is not indexed to inflation. If the rate of price inflation is 4 percent rather than 2 percent, for many people that means their take-home pay is worth 2 percentage points less than it would have been under modest inflation.
And this:
Most discussions about monetary policy aren’t about economic theory (properly understood) at all. Rather they are about blaming the system, as people feel a sense of outrage that somehow someone isn’t trying hard enough to fix basic problems. Most of the claims out there, when put under the microscope of reason, dissolve into a beautiful, brilliant agnosticism.
Here is the full column. Note that Bloomberg now has a paywall, with I believe ten free articles per month. Here is information on subscription offers, I urge you all to increase the velocity of money.
Germany fact of the day
Germany recorded an almost 10 per cent drop in crime last year to its lowest level since the early 1990s despite perceptions that the arrival of more than a million asylum seekers would lead to a rise in offences.
…Overall, violent crime was down by 1.7 per cent last year, the Interior Ministry said, although refugees and asylum seekers were proportionately over-represented in sexual assault cases.
Here is the (gated) Times of London piece. Ahem…
For the pointer I thank a loyal MR reader.
Tuesday assorted links
1. NIMBYism comes to Boise, Idaho.
2. Sarah Silverman almost became a Star Trek regular.
3. David Henderson on Leland B. Yeager.
4. Claims about manufacturing (and computers).
5. David Brooks on Stewart Brand (NYT).
6. The renegades of the intellectual dark web (NYT). Not the ideal title from my point of view, but an interesting piece.
When was it possible to institute social democracy?
Notably, almost all the foreign programs that American social democrats envy were enacted during Europe’s long post-war economic and demographic boom. That meant that the initial cost of these systems was fairly low — young people don’t need much in the way of health care or pensions, and economies at full employment don’t spend a lot on unemployment insurance or job retraining. As incomes soared, it was comparatively easy for government to skim some of the surplus for their new social insurance schemes, because even as their taxes went up, workers still got to take more money home every week. Governments ran into problems when the boom stopped, of course, but by then, political sentiment had cemented those programs in place.
What was easy in 1960 looks herculean as 2020 approaches. Economic growth has slowed, and populations are aging, which raises the cost of any proposed program and requires you to fund heavy losses on someone to fund it, either workers in those industries, or taxpayers. As psychologists tell us, people are “loss averse” — they care much more about losing something they have than about equivalent potential gains. Given the mammoth cost of socializing the U.S. economy now, and the huge number of people who face substantial losses, I’d argue that we should probably change “herculean” to “impossible.”
What is the “Poet Voice” signaling?
By comparing Poets and Talkers along these lines, the researchers were able to draw two overall conclusions. First, when compared to the Talkers, the poets tended to speak more slowly and stay within a narrower pitch range. Second, very few Talkers indulged in long pauses, but plenty of poets—33 percent—had no trouble leaving their listeners hanging for two seconds or more…
This is also, perhaps, why it can seem grating or detached: “In a more natural conversational intonation pattern, you vary your pitch for emphasis depending on how you feel about something,” says MacArthur. “In this style of poetry reading, those idiosyncrasies … get subordinated to this repetitive cadence. It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, you just say it in the same way.” Overall, the researchers write, “from this small sample, we would conclude that perhaps when some listeners hear poets read with one or more of these characteristics—slow pitch speed, slow pitch acceleration, narrow pitch range, low rhythmic complexity, and/or slow speaking rate—they hear Poet Voice.”
What to make of Robert Aumann’s “agreement theorem”?
Here is my 2004 paper with Robin, if you need the background, or try this recent Scott Aaronson post. Recently I was sent a question somewhat along these lines:
If someone blithely continues to disagree with their (apparent) epistemic peers, how much should we downgrade the rationality and/or intelligence and/or integrity of that person. My answer was:
We can take a dimmer view of them, and should, but also have to take a dimmer view of ourselves, I think. I don’t think the “they” get downgraded relative to “us.”
…let’s say we agree with it [Aumann’s construction] completely. Then it would be true and non-operationalizable, keeping in mind that the smartest people I know — by whatever metric — do not themselves internalize the argument. There is some kind of semi-rational back and forth estimation process, where in part you judge [peer] expertise by the actual views people hold, and iterate accordingly. There is probably no fixed point theorem here, and no single obviously best way to proceed. Maybe we should downgrade those who do not know that. But I don’t know by how much. Maybe not by a lot, since knowing all those complications doesn’t improve one’s own rationality by a whole lot, as far as I can tell.
With a bit more thought, I have come up with a further and more specific answer.
Let’s say you are staying at a hotel, and everyone agrees that the hotel offers room service. There is also a very good restaurant one hour away, but people strongly disagree on how to find the place. Half of the people think the restaurant is to the West, and you strongly agree with this group; the other half strongly believe the restaurant is to the East. If you choose the wrong direction, you will have wasted two hours driving and will have to settle for the room service in any case.
If you buy into Aumann, you should be more likely to start with the room service, even though you strongly believe the restaurant is to the West.
You will note that is a purely self-regarding choice only. For choices in that category, accepting Aumann means you should be more willing to focus on what everyone agrees is good, possible, beneficial, etc. — you might call this common sense morality.
Alternatively, let’s say it is a choice for all of society, and many other people are pitching in their efforts to some kind of common enterprise — let’s call it politics.
You then have to ask what kind of stupidity you are most likely to expect from the contributing others. If the relevant bias is excess conformism, I see no special case to take greater care to converge upon what others think is best. In fact, there might be external benefits from doubling down on your own stubbornness. You might be wrong a lot of the time, but still it will be truly rare when lots of people are really quite right, and it is important that your voice shine through and be heard in those cases.
So in a nutshell, the implications of Aumann are “common sense morality for yourself, but political orneriness remains on the table.”
Monday assorted links
1. The polity that is Alexandria, Virginia this is the real America this will bore you.
2. “Ian McEwan, the award-winning author, has admitted feeling “a little dubious” about people being compelled to study his books, after helping his son with an essay about his own novel and receiving a C.” Link here.
3. Meet the wonderful Tim Kane, occasional GMU lunch partner. The NYT runs a feature article on him, titled “Meet the Pro-Trade, Pro-Immigration Economist Running for Congress. As a Republican. In Ohio.” And this:
On the campaign trail, Mr. Kane adapts a refrain from Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run, saying that he is “from the Republican wing of the Republican Party.”
4. “Great Britain’s need for guns, war supplies drove 18th-century industrialism, Stanford scholar says.” That is Priya Satia.
5. “A single academic paper, published by three Australian researchers in 2007, has been cited by Wikipedia editors over 2.8 million times—the next most popular work only shows up a little more than 21,000.” Link here.
How economists became so timid
From Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl, that was then:
Self-styled American and European radicals, for example, helped end monarchy and expand the franchise. The free-labor ideology of European radicals and American Radical Republicans helped abolish serfdom and slavery and establish a new basis for industrial labor relations. The late 18th and 19th centuries also witnessed the liberal reformism of Jeremy Bentham, Smith, James and John Stuart Mill, and the Marquis de Condorcet; the socialist revolutionary ideologies of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Marx; the labor unionism of Beatrice and Sydney Webb; and, influential at the time but now mostly forgotten, the competitive common ownership ideology of Henry George and Léon Walras. This ideology shaped the Progressive movement in the United States, the “New Liberalism” of David Lloyd George in Britain, the radicalism of Georges Clemenceau in France, even the agenda of the Nationalist Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat-Sen. The Keynesian and welfare-state reforms of the early 20th century set the stage for the longest and most broadly shared period of growth in human history.
And this is now:
So where are the heirs of the political economists? Political economy has fragmented into a series of disparate fields, none of which has the breadth, creativity, or courage to support the reformist visions that were crucial to navigating past crises.
…Yet even as economists retreated from visionary social theory, the power they wielded over detailed policy decisions grew. A notable feature of this policy guidance was that it shared the narrowness of economists’ research methods. Policy reforms advocated by mainstream economists were almost always what we call “liberal technocratic” — either center-left or center-right. Economists suggested a bit higher or lower minimum wage or interest rate, a bit more or less regulation, depending on their external political orientation and evidence from their research. But they almost never proposed the sort of sweeping, creative transformations that had characterized 19th-century political economy.
How to explain this timidity? As with many professions endowed with power (like the military), economics developed strict codes of internal discipline and conformity to ensure that this power was wielded consistent with community standards…
The upshot is that economics has played virtually no role in all the major political movements of the past half-century, including civil rights, feminism, anticolonialism, the rights of sexual minorities, gun rights, antiabortion politics, and “family values” debates.
There is much more at the link. I am not sure I have a single endorsement or criticism in response, other than to say that I view MR as, among other things, a fifteen-year running commentary on the economics profession and its ups and downs. In any case, beware complacency!
And do not forget about the authors’ new and stimulating book Radical Markets.
Hat tip goes to Bonnie Kavoussi.
Why aren’t all tall buildings in the same neighborhood the same height?
Let’s say there is a 40-story building and a 60-story building. You would think the different builders face more or less the same costs for their height decisions. If you want to own 60 stories, it is still the case that everyone can build the cheapest-height building, and you can buy the stories you want from a variety of sellers.
If you had lots of companies that needed 60 stories, and you didn’t want to split up those firms across locations, and lots of companies that needed only 40 stories, the differential building heights could be explained rather easily. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Most tall buildings house a variety of tenants, and those tenants don’t “need the whole height” or anything close to it.
This puzzle is from Steve Landsburg, who says “color me stumped” in his new and forthcoming book Can You Outsmart An Economist? 100+ Puzzles to Train Your Brain.
Anthony Downs on race and urbanism, that was then this is now
It always surprises me that the name of Anthony Downs is not mentioned more often in conjunction with the Nobel Prize in economics. His An Economic Theory of Democracy is one of the best and most important books on public choice economics, and it is the major source for the median voter theorem. Yet now a new paperback copy of the book is not to be had for less than $100. Downs also had major contributions to transportation economics (traffic expands to fill capacity) and housing and urban economics and the theory of bureaucracy.
Yesterday I learned that Downs was a major White House consultant on race and urban affairs in 1967, working with James Tobin and Kermit Gordon and other luminaries on the National Commission on Urban Problems. What they produced fed into what was described as “The Most Courageous Government Report in the Last Decade,” namely the Kerner Commission report. Here are some details:
1. Downs did much of the work of the commission and much of the actual writing, including of the Kerner Report, including the section on housing policy and the ghetto.
2. He was very concerned with “white flight” and thought a more radical approach to urban poverty was needed. He thought Great Society programs had not been tried on a large enough scale.
3. In the view of Downs, major progress already had been made, but he worried that aspirations were rising faster than living standards.
4. He spelt out a “status quo approach,” a “ghetto-improvement strategy,” and a “dispersal strategy” based on integration. He considered the latter the most ambitious and perhaps the most unikely. He focused on outlining these alternatives, and their benefits and costs, rather than recommending any one of them.
5. Among the specific proposals considered were a Neighborhood Youth Corps, increasing the minimum wage, job training, public service programs, and a federally enforced fair employment-practices bill. The draft also encouraged policymakers to think about educational vouchers, decentralizing urban school systems, and educational innovation. There were arguments as to whether teachers’ unions should be held at fault and weakened.
It is striking how little these debates have progressed since more than fifty years ago.
p.s. Many on the right were critical of the report.
This is all from Steven M. Gillon, Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism.