Category: Education
What is the ultimate left-wing novel?
Isaac L. writes to me:
I am hoping you and your readers can help settle an issue. I am a left-leaning voter. A conservative friend and I recently discussed Atlas Shrugged, which he said was the ultimate right-wing novel. He challenged me to point him towards a left-wing novel that does for that side of politics what Rand does for the right. I think the book needs to do two things: justify the welfare state and argue the limitations of the invisible hand. While I can think of lots of non-fiction texts, I am drawing blank on fictional offerings.
Do you or your readers have any suggestions? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
What jumps to mind is Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, but if you read the request carefully it does not qualify. Here is a list of thirty famous left-wing novels, heavy on the mid- to late nineteenth century. There is Bronte, Dickens, Hugo, Sinclair, Zola, Gorky, Jack London, and Edward Bellamy. None of these books is as analytically or philosophically comprehensive as the novels of Ayn Rand.
I would say that the story per se is usually left-wing, in both good and bad ways. It elevates the seen over the unseen, can easily portray a struggle for justice, focuses on the anecdote, and encourages us to judge social institutions by the intentions of the people who work in them, rather than looking at their deeper and longer-term outcomes. Precisely because the story is itself so left-wing, there won't be a definitive example of the left-wing novel. Story-telling encourages context-dependent thinking, although not necessarily in an accurate manner. One notable feature of Atlas Shrugged is how frequently the story-telling stops for a long speech or an extended dialogue, in order to explain some first principles to the reader.
The quality of fiction vs. the quality of non-fiction
Marcos Jazzan, a loyal MR reader, requests:
The quality of fiction seems to be decreasing relative to the quality of non-fiction, or am I just biased against active fiction writers vs. dead ones?
I agree with this assessment, and I see a few mechanisms at work:
1. A lot of good non-fiction is based on current affairs, which are always changing, or progress in science or social science, or biographies of previous uncovered subjects. Fiction doesn't have a comparable source of new material, at least not since the modernist revolutions.
2. The internet makes it easier for people to be interested in a "culture of facts." It doesn't help long narratives in the same manner.
3. For a given level of IQ, people are more likely to agree on what is a good non-fiction book than what is a good fiction book. Internet reviews therefore make non-fiction purchases more reliable to a greater degree than they do for fiction.
4. Arguably literary fiction peaked in the 1920s, with Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Mann, and other important writers. Could it be that fiction took a bruising from the rise of radio and film at that time? Even if we compare the 1960s to today, fiction seemed to be more culturally central then.
What mechanisms am I missing?
How to make better decisions?
I never thought of this method:
What should you do when you really, REALLY have to “go”? Make important life decisions, maybe. Controlling your bladder makes you better at controlling yourself when making decisions about your future, too, according to a study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
Sexual excitement, hunger, thirst–psychological scientists have found that activation of just one of these bodily desires can actually make people want other, seemingly unrelated, rewards more. Take, for example, a man who finds himself searching for a bag of potato chips after looking at sexy photos of women. If this man were able to suppress his sexual desire in this situation, would his hunger also subside? This is the sort of question Mirjam Tuk, of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, sought to answer in the laboratory.
Tuk came up with the idea for the study while attending a long lecture. In an effort to stay alert, she drank several cups of coffee. By the end of the talk, she says, “All the coffee had reached my bladder. And that raised the question: What happens when people experience higher levels of bladder control?” With her colleagues, Debra Trampe of the University of Groningen and Luk Warlop of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Tuk designed experiments to test whether self-control over one bodily desire can generalize to other domains as well.
In one experiment, participants either drank five cups of water (about 750 milliliters), or took small sips of water from five separate cups. Then, after about 40 minutes–the amount of time it takes for water to reach the bladder–the researchers assessed participants’ self-control. Participants were asked to make eight choices; each was between receiving a small, but immediate, reward and a larger, but delayed, reward. For example, they could choose to receive either $16 tomorrow or $30 in 35 days.
The researchers found that the people with full bladders were better at holding out for the larger reward later. Other experiments reinforced this link; for example, in one, just thinking about words related to urination triggered the same effect.
“You seem to make better decisions when you have a full bladder,” Tuk says. So maybe you should drink a bottle of water before making a decision about your stock portfolio, for example. Or perhaps stores that count on impulse buys should keep a bathroom available to customers, since they might be more willing to go for the television with a bigger screen when they have an empty bladder.
The pointer is from Michelle Dawson, although I do not take her to be necessarily endorsing (or rejecting) the results. There is related work here and here (pdf).
I wrote this post with an empty bladder.
Sentences to ponder
My guess is that if you want to improve health outcomes in the United States, ignore health insurance and focus on literacy.
That is from Arnold Kling.
Endogenous parenting and twin adoption studies
I'm not sure how convincing I find this piece, by Alessandro Lizzeri and Marciano Siniscalchi, but it's worth a read if you've been following the debates over twin adoption studies. In the model, parents both expose their children to learning and protect them. Parents also judge a successful child by how much that child has their abilities, so in equilibrium the more a child differs from a parent, the more the parent intervenes to direct the path of the child's development.
Again, in the model children of "better" parents have better outcomes on average, above and beyond genetic transmission as a mechanism. When it comes to adopted children, parents intervene more and parents also bring more similar interventions to bear on identical twins than on fraternal twins.
In twin adoption studies it will appear that parenting does not matter when in fact it does. Here is a neat passage from the paper:
Thus, differential sheltering by biological and adoptive parents provides a countervailing force to common rearing…We can also reinterpret this countervailing force…Differential sheltering by biological and adoptive parents implies that, despite being reared apart, adopted twins are in fact subject to a shared environmental influence–namely, adoption itself. This intuitively leads to greater phenotypic correlation by compensating for the lack of the direct commonrearing effect.
The piece ended up being published in the QJE 2008.
For the pointer I thank a loyal MR writer.
Who will still be famous in 10,000 years?
Sam Hammond, a loyal MR reader, asks me:
Who do you think will still be famous in 10,000 years? People from history or now. Shakespeare? Socrates? Hawking?
This requires a theory of 10,000 years from now, but let's say we're a lot richer, not computer uploads (if so, I know the answer to the question), and not in a collapsed dystopia. We still look like human beings and inhabit physical space. If you wish, postulate that not all of those 10,000 years involved strongly positive economic growth.
In that case, I'll go with the major religious leaders (Jesus, Buddha, etc.), Einstein, Turing, Watson and Crick, Hitler, the major classical music composers, Adam Smith, and Neil Armstrong. (Addendum: Oops! I forgot Darwin and Euclid.)
My thinking is this. The major religions last for a long time and leave a real mark on history. Path-dependence is critical in that area.
Otherwise, an individual, to stay famous, will have to securely symbolize an entire area, and an area "with legs" at that. The theory of relativity still will be true and it may well become more important. The computer and DNA will not be irrelevant. Hitler will remain a stand-in symbol for pure evil; if he is topped we may not have a future at all. Beethoven and Mozart still will be splendid, but Shakespeare and other wordsmiths will require translation and thus will fade somewhat. The propensity to truck and barter will remain and Smith will keep his role as the symbol of economics. Keynesian economics may someday be less true, as superior biofeedback, combined with markets in self-improvement, ushers in an era of flexible wages, while market-based expected nominal gdp targeting prevents a downward deflationary spiral.
The fame of those individuals will not perish, in part, because the more distant future will produce fewer lasting mega-famous people. Achievement will be more decentralized and more connected to teams. The dominance of Edison and Tesla, in their breakthroughs, will not be repeated. There won't be a mega-Einstein eighty years from now, to make everyone forget the current Einstein, even if (especially if) science goes very well.
Western intellectuals and Gadhafi
Robert Putnam was once called to a meeting with Gadhafi. Here is an excerpt from his account:
Students of Western political philosophy would categorize Col. Gadhafi as a quintessential student of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: He made clear that he deeply distrusted any political group that might stand between individual citizens and the "General Will" as interpreted by the Legislator (i.e., Col. Gadhafi himself). When I argued that freedom of association could enhance democratic stability, he vehemently dismissed the idea. That might be so in the West, he insisted, but in Libya it would simply strengthen tribalism, and he would not stand for disunity.
Throughout, he styled our meeting as a conversation between two profound political thinkers, a trope that approached the absurd when he observed that there were international organizations for many professions nowadays, but none for philosopher-kings. "Why don't we make that happen?" he proposed with a straight face. I smiled, at a loss for words. Col. Gadhafi was a tyrant and a megalomaniac, not a philosopher-king, but our visit left me convinced that he was not a simple man.
Was this a serious conversation or an elaborate farce? Naturally, I came away thinking–hoping–that I had managed to sway Col. Gadhafi in some small way, but my wife was skeptical. Two months later I was invited back to a public roundtable in Libya, but by then I had concluded that the whole exercise was a public-relations stunt, and I declined.
Hat tip goes to Monkey Cage and ultimately, the fabled Daniel Lippman. But that's not all — Benjamin Barber also had some visits to meet with the Libyan leader, here is his account:
Written off not long ago as an implacable despot, Gaddafi is a complex and adaptive thinker as well as an efficient, if laid-back, autocrat. Unlike almost any other Arab ruler, he has exhibited an extraordinary capacity to rethink his country's role in a changed and changing world.
And:
Surprisingly flexible and pragmatic, Gaddafi was once an ardent socialist who now acknowledges private property and capital as sometimes appropriate elements in developing societies. Once an opponent of representative central government, he is wrestling with the need to delegate substantial authority to competent public officials if Libya is to join the global system. Once fearful of outside media, he has permitted satellite dishes throughout his country, and he himself surfs the Internet.
Libya under Gaddafi has embarked on a journey that could make it the first Arab state to transition peacefully and without overt Western intervention to a stable, non-autocratic government and, in time, to an indigenous mixed constitution favoring direct democracy locally and efficient government centrally.
Here is Barber's piece on Libya from 2011. It starts like this:
I offer my views about Libya here not just as a democratic theorist and HuffPost regular, but as a member of the International Board of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation until this morning, when I resigned.
The historical roots of yoga
The reality is that postural yoga, as we know it in the 21st century, is neither eternal nor synonymous with the Vedas or Yoga Sutras. On the contrary, modern yoga was born in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. It is a child of the Hindu Renaissance and Indian nationalism, in which Western ideas about science, evolution, eugenics, health and physical fitness played as crucial a role as the ‘mother tradition’. In the massive, multi-level hybridisation that took place during this period, the spiritual aspects of yoga and tantra were rationalised, largely along the theosophical ideas of ‘spiritual science,’ introduced to India by the US-origin, India-based Theosophical Society, and internalised by Swami Vivekananda, who led the yoga renaissance.
In turn, the physical aspects of yoga were hybridised with drills, gymnastics and body-building techniques borrowed from Sweden, Denmark, England, the United States and other Western countries. These innovations were creatively grafted on the Yoga Sutras–which has been correctly described by Agehananda Bharati, the Austria-born Hindu monk-mystic, as ‘the yoga canon for people who have accepted Brahmin theology’–to create an impression of 5,000 years worth of continuity where none really exists. The HAF’s current insistence is thus part of a false advertising campaign about yoga’s ancient Brahminical lineage.
The full story is here, and hat tip goes to The Browser.
School Report Cards Work
Simon Burgess, Deborah Wilson and Jack Worth look at what happened after school report card were abolished in Wales.
We test the hypothesis that the publication of school performance tables raises school effectiveness. Our data allow us to implement a classic difference-in-difference analysis comparing outcomes in England and Wales, before and after the abolition of the tables in Wales. We find significant and robust evidence that this reform markedly reduced school effectiveness in Wales. There is significant heterogeneity across schools: schools in the top quartile of the league tables show no effect. We also test whether the reform reduced school segregation in Wales, and find no systematic significant impact on either sorting by ability or by socioeconomic status.
Hat tip: Economic Logician who also notes this study on report cards in the Netherlands.
Eleven things you can learn from the very best economics papers
An excellent post. By the way:
The 20 best papers in the AER's history average about 1.3 numbered equations per page.
The Lucas critique and twin adoption studies
It is odd to cite a twin adoption study, and its results, as a response to a methodological critique of…a twin adoption study. Nonetheless, the paper Alex cites, and the associated graph, show very readily the problems in interpreting such studies.
If you check out the graph, for a variable such as "religious importance" it shows family transmissibility of about thirty percent, with varying estimates of transmissibility for other religious variables. That is the result from a data set involving a) parents who try hard to transmit religion with some idea of what to do, b) parents who don't try very hard, and c) parents who try hard and have no idea of what is an effective technique, as they might be advised by a well-informed social scientist.
Here's the key point. The original "control" question we were debating was about a) alone, yet in response Alex is putting forth a measure of the marginal efficacy for a-c, namely including the families who aren't trying to transmit. Obviously the marginal product of the informed, trying families should be higher than the average marginal product for the group as a whole. At the very least we can take thirty percent as the lower bound here, not the best estimate of the effect we are trying to measure.
The Korean-American Protestant study finds transmissibility of religious fervor, through family influence, of two-thirds. That paper does not control for genetics, and of course because of genetic similarity family influence will run especially easily and this figure is an overestimate of the net family effect. You can think of two-thirds as the upper bound here. If we had commensurable studies (not the case), we would have lower and upper bounds for trying-to-transmit families.
One way to think about the Korean study is to recognize that out of 100 Protestant children, parental inculcation "worked" for 66 of them. The correct marginal product question is: without that inculcation, how many of those 66 kids would have found their way to a comparably observant religion? Of course we don't know, but that's the right question to focus upon.
Twin studies encourage you to think in terms of a different question about marginal products: if you had those Protestant families adopt 100 kids, and try to inculcate the same religion, would 66 of them have ended up observant? Very likely not. Of course the two thought experiments are quite different, and they give you different measures of marginal product, most of all because there are non-linear interactions between parenting, peers, and genes. Since most children are not adopted, it is the first thought experiment which gives the more accurate measure of marginal product of parental inculcation of religion.
What about the religious variables which don't seem very transmissible at all? Alex cites "born agains," drawing on the same paper. But this interpretation again mirrors a major drawback of many interpretations of twin adoption studies, namely that they don't reconcile the cross-sectional and the time series comparisons. Alex is walking a simple pitfall here, as does the paper he cites.
What does this mean in practice? Born agains (or arguably, their revival) are a relatively recent phenomenon in the United States, dating from the 1970s. (There is a similar revival in biblical literalism, although perhaps less extreme.) The study takes adults from the mid-1990s. That means you will have lots of "born again" descendents who had strongly below average prospects of having had "born again" parents. The correlation will appear very weak, but this doesn't show the variable is not transmissible going forward. We simply don't know, at least not from this data set.
To put this final point another way, the father of Abraham was not a Muslim, and so back then the correlation was zero, but this does not show the family cannot transmit Islam in later periods of time.
I'd like to stress again that when it comes to Bryan's book, I agree with most of his points. But on religion in particular I don't think Alex is making sound claims.
The Pippi Longstocking essay and gay adoption in Sweden
Thanks to Jayme Lemke, it has fallen into my clutches; the previous summary reference was here. The essay by Henrik Berggren and Lars TrägÃ¥rdh, is interesting throughout. It has useful insights on Sweden, statism, how collectivism and individualism interact, what architecture reflects, and why many things are not always as they seem. Here is one good passage with a different slant than what I already covered:
While it is obviously true that gay marriage remains a highly controversial issue in the US, what is often over-looked is that adoption of children by gays is not prohibited but indeed rather common. In Sweden the opposite is true: gay marriage or partnership is today relatively uncontroversial (although an opposition of course exists there as well), where the adoption of children by single or couples gays remains a problematic issue.
One way of understanding this difference is to see that while in the US marriage is a highly public matter, and the family a sacred institution, children are by and large seen as a kind of private property, or something to which every adult individual has a right. In Sweden, on the other hand, the family is a private matter, while it is the child who is the public matter.
Can Swede readers attest to this? This short BBC bit seems to confirm. Gay adoption was legalized in Sweden in 2002, but in 2000 16 children were put up for adoption in Sweden. As in the Netherlands, it seems that Swedish gays are not always encouraged to adopt abroad, given that the source countries often object. There is now a Swedish film comedy about gay adoption.
You can find the essay in this unorthodox and stimulating book.
Response to Alex on parenting and religion, and a bunch of other points on twin studies
Alex is right on one point, that Bryan's book is very important and everyone should read it. Otherwise, his discusson of Yana indicates that both genes and upbringing matter, which is my point — that both matter. He mistakenly cites that example against me, rather than against Bryan, who claimed upbringing and inculcation do not matter for language.
Orthodox Jews are clearly a case where parenting matters for the religion and religiosity of the kids, not just the abstract fact of having the parent or the possible genetic transmission of general religious fervor. Orthodox Jewish parents are effective, in part, because they inculcate the religion in their children. Or look at the data on Korean Protestants. I could spend a whole day finding credible studies on this question and they are not restricted to a few extreme points (though they also don't cover everyone, and probably strict inculcation of Unitarianism won't work). There is overwhelming evidence that parenting often does transmit religious observance and if twin adoption studies do not show that it is a sign of their limitations.
In the comments, Cournot (not Augustin) nails it:
Tyler is not rejecting the studies. He's rejecting Caplan's interpretation.
Imagine this were a drug and the trials showed that the drug clearly reduced fever in a stat sig group.
However a number of non-statistically significant side effects were observed. Some patients died, got rashes, or became crippled. We also have anecdotal evidence and even some good theory that there may be weird interactions with some subpopulations, but to date no good studies showing these effects have been conducted.
Should I assume that it's safe to take these drugs? I think not.
Indeed, doctors often warn us of side effects even though most of the side effects don't show up as statistically significant in clinical trials.
Tyler is just saying some of the side effects of parenting on kids may well be significant and until clearly proven otherwise, it is unsound to ignore non-statistical anecdotal evidence [TC: there is plenty of statistical evidence also] just because the major studies don't show any effects.
And here is Richard A.:
The Body-Mass Index of Twins Who Have Been Reared Apart
We conclude that genetic influences on body-mass index are substantial, whereas the childhood environment has little or no influence. These findings corroborate and extend the results of earlier studies of twins and adoptees. (N Engl J Med 1990; 322:1483–7.)
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199005243222102
IOWs, the reason why white kids of today are much fatter than white kids of the 50s and 60s is due to genetic influences and environment has little or no influence
This shows that the twin studies are flawed.
If that doesn't convince you, ponder the Zoroastrians, an extreme minority in most of the places they have lived. Parents inculcated religious observance for centuries, yet now that pattern of replication seems to be falling apart and the religion and way of life is in danger. In other words, now we are viewing the time series evidence (as does Richard A. in the case of body weight). Parental inculcation can matter a lot, or not so much at all, depending on circumstances. The very size of that variation suggests two points: a) cross-sectional evidence alone won't pin down the proper genetic component, for instance studying this group today, rather than across time, would overestimate the genetic influence, and b) if the transmissibility can change so quickly we are pushed away from genetic explanations, though of course without abandoning them altogether. Genes are still very, very important.
In contrast, what do you expect for the heritability of IQ over the generations? Lead poisoning and the like aside, I expect estimates of that heritability don't change much over time at all. That is more closely tied to genetics, and the time series evidence confirms it.
Parenting: Anecdotes and Data
Tyler's post, What Can Parents Influence (below), uses anecdotes from his own family to try to rebut some findings from behavioural genetics. I don't think the rebuttal is successful. Moreover, Tyler's anecdotes are selective. A fuller description suggests a more balanced accounting of nurture and nature.
Yes, Yana speaks Russian which she learned from her mother. Yana also speaks French, German, Spanish and I believe several other languages. Tyler tells me that Yana has a gift for languages. Tyler also does not mention that his wonderful wife, Natasha, doesn't simply speak Russian she is an accomplished translator. Perhaps the gift runs in families?
But enough of anecdotes. On religion, I don't think Tyler has fully confronted the evidence from genetic studies. Of course, a child born to Orthodox parents is more likely to practice and be Orthodox. EVERYONE agrees with this. So how can Bryan say parents "have little long-run effect on intrinsic religiosity or observance"? Parents with blue eyes often have children with blue eyes but parents don't have much influence on whether their children have blue eyes.
More fundamentally, what Bryan is asking is how much does parenting influence religiosity? To answer this question we have to distinguish parenting from parents. How do we do this? Adoption and separated twin studies. What adoption and separated twin studies show is that once you have controlled for parents, parenting has very little influence on adult religiosity. These studies could be wrong but, contra Tyler, stamping your feet is not good enough on this issue because what we naturally observe (primarily parents raising their biological children) is not what we need to know to answer the fundamental question.
I could say more but instead let me say this, buy Bryan Caplan's book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. It's a remarkable book. I place it alongside Guns, Germs, Steel and The Selfish Gene as one of those books that, whether one agrees with the conclusions or not, everyone owes it to themselves to read in order to be informed, educated, and part of the conversation.
What can parents influence?
I had been meaning to pen a longer response to Bryan Caplan (he is the one with "a theory of everything" in this area, not I, his theory just happens to have few variables), but I'll focus on two of his claims, as they are indicative of the larger disagreement:
Parents strongly affect what you say your religion is, but have little long-run effect on your intrinsic religiosity or observance. I don't discuss language, but it's pretty clear how a twin or adoption study would play out: You can make your kid semi-fluent in another language with a lot of effort.
Both claims are false, at least at many commonly available margins.
Take Jews. If a group of children are born to Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or liberal parents, their later religious observance will be predicted by both peers and parental upbringing. (Perhaps genes are a factor too.) An Orthodox Jewish boy, with Orthodox parents, growing up in an otherwise non-Orthodox Jewish community of peers, is more likely to stay Orthodox than a Reform Jew from the same community is likely to become Orthodox. And that of course correlates with levels of observance. I have no formal study to cite, but can I just stamp my feet and scream this is true? Because it is. You can imagine numerous variants on this tale, even if it isn't true for all religious denominations.
Bryan has a tendency to concede environmental factors by noting something like "Of course parents can lock a kid in the closet and affect him that way." He is less likely to admit that a lot of less extreme influences can matter too and that those influences are missed by twin adoption studies, for whatever reason.
Or take language. Yana speaks Russian. She learned Russian from Natasha (her mother, and it wasn't hard for her to speak Russian at home), and note that Yana left Moscow before she was two years old. This is again a common pattern. The parents matter, even though in most American families you won't see enough cross-sectional variation (most people speak English at home) to always pick this up. Travel around India for more examples of this phenomenon.
Presumably the twin studies have in their data sets Jews and possibly some Russian immigrants as well. And yet the twin studies, with their ultimately macro orientation, miss micro mechanisms such as these. Parents can matter more than the studies suggest.
By treating those studies as an epistemic trump card, Bryan is led to make claims which are indefensible on the face of it. I stick by my earlier points. The evidence Bryan is citing for twin adoption studies is simply…the studies themselves. Where is consilience when you need it?