Category: Philosophy

Conscious introspection leads to more self-deception?

by  Tyler Cowen in

It seems, then, that we need another signal that can add precision to our introspection. And that signal is as follows: we are more likely to be lying to ourselves when we are engaging in internal monologue.

An internal monologue is the experience of having concrete, “narration-style” thoughts as opposed to passive experiences. This argument maybe doesn’t apply to people with a constant internal monologue, or those who have none. But it seems like most people’s internal lives are some combination of subconscious thought and active monologue: most of our day-to-day moments are spent instinctively receiving and reacting to external stimuli, but in certain moments — e.g. when faced with difficult choices that require serious deliberation — our thoughts morph into something that resembles language as we try to articulate our feelings and ask ourselves questions.

This is more likely to happen when there’s a divergence between your actual feelings and what you want your feelings to be.

Here is more from Elizabeth Li, via Tejas.

Repugnant Economics

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I spoke on a panel at AEI with Nobelist Al Roth about his new book, Moral Economics, which covers “repugnant markets,” from prostitution to surrogacy to kidney exchange. A fun book!

My case study was acting. Acting was considered repugnant for over 2,000 years. In Rome, actors could not vote, hold office, or be trusted to give an oath in legal proceedings. So why don’t we find acting repugnant today?

One lesson: weighing costs and benefits is not enough. Roth discusses empirical research showing that legalizing prostitution cut STDs and sexual assaults—against prostitutes and others. But evidence alone won’t shift a repugnance norm. You also have to reframe the activity. Acting, for example was reframed from body rental to a skill requiring intelligence, training and ability. So I went out of my way to say that I am a fan of Aella—though not her only fan—and that I see no reason why escorting should not be considered a skill, requiring intelligence, training, and ability. I can think of few better ways of raising social welfare than making sex 10% better!

I also spoke on human challenge trials. Roth and I agree: challenge trials could have sped up COVID vaccines and saved tens of thousands of lives. We should be angry this didn’t happen. Why didn’t it? Even though most people think human challenge trials are a good idea, there was a repugnance bottleneck because the minority who did find human challenge trials repugnant were in charge. I discuss how to change this.

Al leads the discussion. My comments start at 25:15.

Revealing Life Preferences Through LLMs

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is some Weberian verstehen (or is it?), but from unexpected quarters:

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on a prodigious corpus of human writing and may reveal human preferences over characteristics of life courses, such as income, longevity, and working conditions. We present OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and a broadly representative sample of Americans with pairs of life stories and ask them to choose the life they would prefer for themselves. A person’s choice is better predicted by the LLM’s choice than by another person’s choice over the same stories, and LLM valuations of several life attributes are similar to those derived from human responses. Our results suggest that LLM responses offer a scalable and cost-effective complement to existing methods for studying human preferences.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Omar Abdel Haq, Amitabh Chandra, Tomáš Jagelka, Erzo F.P. Luttmer & Joshua Schwartzstein.

Philosophical Ideas Behind Their Time

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Justin Weinberg at Daily Nous riffs off my post, Ideas Behind Their Time, to ask for philosophical examples. He nominates Gettier problems–i.e. counterexamples to the idea that knowledge is simply “justified true belief” as a possibility. The classic Gettier paper is from 1963. Wikipedia notes that the Indian philosopher Dharmottara has some clear examples c770 AD but as an element within the Western tradition the idea does seem behind its time.

I would nominate the following as philosophical ideas behind their time:

  • Hume’s is/ought distinction: the idea that you cannot derive a normative conclusion from factual premises.
  • Hume’s problem of induction: past regularities do not rationally guarantee future regularities.
  • Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance: the principles of justice should be derived without knowing one’s own particularities of class, race, gender and so forth. Seems obvious as an idea.
  • The Trolley Problem: similar ideas can be found earlier but the clean distinction between killing and let die or more generally omission and commission could have come much earlier. One might also think of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in this category of ideas or constructs that cleanly isolate an otherwise present but opaque idea.
  • The analytic/synthetic truths distinction: some things are true by definition, others are empirical. Obvious and it can be found before say Kant, yet a clear earlier statement would have resolved many issues and seems well within say Aristotle’s capability.
  • Aumann’s Agreement Theorem, technically, this requires Bayesian machinery and is difficult to formulate with precision, so I would not say the actual theorem was behind its time. But the underlying idea—that disagreement itself, not merely the arguments offered, should cause one to question and refine one’s own beliefs—could have been developed in Athens.
  • I’d also nominate a package of ideas like abolitionism, equal rights for women, and religious toleration–each of these is tendentious as examples yet the basic package seems fairly obvious as a category and yet late. (Perhaps if the veil of ignorance had been thought of earlier so would these ideas!) Note, that I am not arguing that abolitionism or equal rights for women could have happened much earlier only that these ideas were behind their time–the ideas were morally obvious even if not institutionally feasible.

Note also that I am not arguing that these ideas are all correct, only that they were philosophical ideas behind their time. More examples?

Xavier, Nick, and Tristan podcast with me

by  Tyler Cowen in

All three are from Queens College, I thought they did a great job, and mostly fresh material.  They describe the episode as such:

Xavier, Tristan, and Nick talk about everything interesting under the sun, including aesthetic convergence, the probability that Tyler lives for many centuries, if Spain was the most culinarily optimal culture to colonize Mexico in the 16th century, if Tyler would have joined the fellowship of the ring, why we don’t yet have a GMU lunch podcast, and much more. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had recording it!

Recommended, this is a good argument for sometimes doing podcasts with semi-random people, though choose them wisely.

Is psychotherapy underdiscussed these days? (from my email)

by  Tyler Cowen in

I listened to your recent conversation with Arthur C. Brooks and found myself struggling with his core premise. His framing of happiness seems to reduce it to something like a biological or behavioural optimisation problem, which feels quite far from how psychotherapy traditionally and historically understands it.

I tried to find where he engages with psychotherapy as a discipline. The only reference I could locate was a passing mention of mindfulness-based CBT in a Free Press piece. But approaches like MCBT, while valuable, sit within a narrower, symptom-focused, behavioural tradition. They are not really representative of the broader psychotherapeutic field, which is less about “happiness” and more about understanding conflict, ambivalence, and the structure of the self.

That omission seems important. Sigmund Freud’s answer to the “happiness problem” is almost a rugpull: human beings are fundamentally conflicted, and any attempt to engineer sustained happiness runs up against unconscious forces, compromise formations, and the reality principle. Indeed, the goal of therapy to Freud, is to turn misery into “ordinary unhappiness”.

Later clinicians have developed this further. Jonathan Shedler, for example, has written compellingly about how psychodynamic therapy aims not at happiness per se, but at increasing the capacity to feel a full range of emotions without defensive distortion. I’m sure you’ve come across him – he’s absolutely brilliant.

It made me wonder whether there’s something slightly neurotic, even Bryan Johnson-esque, in trying to treat happiness as if it were a macronutrient to be optimised. That framing risks flattening the very thing it’s trying to measure.

PS. I liked that you asked him about the price of his book – and I respected his response too!

That is from Adam Goott.

What makes art great?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the title of the new and very stimulating essay by Nabeel Qureshi.  It is difficult to summarize, but here is one excerpt:

2. Great art contains multiple overlapping layers of echoes.

This is often harder to spot in verbal artifacts, but it is this feature that I think distinguishes really good works of art from merely ‘ok’ ones.

Most of us are familiar with the surface level ways of doing this: rhyme, for example, knits together different lines of a poem in a semantically irrelevant way that nevertheless makes it feel like part of a unifying whole. Same with assonance and other such effects most of us are familiar with from English class. It is echoes, for example, that make so many verses from the King James Bible so pleasing and beautiful to listen to:

“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” (Isaiah 60:1)

Note the echoing vowel sounds throughout in ‘arise’, ‘shine’, ‘light’, and ‘thy’. Rhyme and assonance are verbal echoes.

In music, the most famous example perhaps is Beethoven’s Fifth, with its famous “ba-ba-ba-BUM“ theme; the short-short-short-long statement in the beginning then echoes through that movement in thousands of ways, sometimes stretched, sometimes slowed down, so that the whole movement feels like an organic thing that has grown from that single seed.

Good art layers these, one on top of another, to build up artifacts of stunning complexity. These are the text equivalents of Gothic cathedrals. Each layer alludes to other layers, too, adding more and more constraints, until you get an artifact where changing any one word does violence to the whole.

To see this density in action, let’s look at Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15…

Do read the whole thing.  And here are some comments from Henry Oliver.

The Happiness Crash of 2020

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the still-active Sam Peltzman:

I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half-the married adults-remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy. I also show that across a number of aspects of personal and social capital post-Covid deterioration is the norm, including a collapse of belief in the fairness of others and of trust in the US Supreme Court.

Here is the paper, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

My very interesting Conversation with Arthur C. Brooks

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you’ll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that’s not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI’s effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he’s reading Josef Pieper, how he’ll face death, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: What do you think of the view that books on happiness or the meaning of life, they’re a kind of placebo? They don’t help directly, but you feel you’ve done something to become happier, and the placebo is somewhat effective.

BROOKS: I think that there’s probably something to that, although there’s some pretty interesting new research that shows that the placebo effect is actually not real. Have you seen some of that new research?

COWEN: Yes, but I don’t believe it. Nocebos also seem to work in many situations.

BROOKS: I know. I take your broader point. I take your broader point. I think that the reason for that is that when people read most of the self-improvement literature, not just happiness literature, what happens is that they get a flush of epiphany, a new way of thinking. That feels really good. That feels really inspirational. The problem is it doesn’t take root.

It’s like the seeds that are thrown on a path in the biblical parable. They don’t go through the algorithm that I just talked about, and so not all of these things can be compared. I would not have gotten into this line of research and this line of teaching if I thought that it was just going to add another book to a long line of self-improvement books that make people feel good but don’t ultimately change their lives.

COWEN: Say a person reads a new and different book on happiness once a year at the beginning of the year. Now, under the placebo view, that’s a fine thing to do. It’ll get you a bit happier each year. Under your view, it seems there’s something wrong. Isn’t the placebo view doing a bit better there? You should read a book on happiness every year, a different one. It’ll revitalize you a bit. Whether or not it’s new only matters a little.

BROOKS: Yes. It might remind you of some things that you knew to be the truth that you had fallen away from. One of the things that I like to do is I like to read a good book by one of the church fathers, for example. They’re more or less saying the same thing. It reminds me of something that I learned as a boy and that I’ve forgotten as an adult. It might actually remind me to come back to many of these practices and many of these views.

I think that there are real insights. There’s real value that can come from science-based knowledge about how to live a better life. I think that you and I are both dedicated to science in the public interest and also science in the private interest as well. I think there is some good to be gotten through many of these ideas. Not all. Once again, not all happiness literature is created equal.

And:

COWEN: Why not cram all that contemplation of death into your last three months rather than your last 18 months? Do intertemporal substitution, right? Accelerate it. Ben Sasse probably is facing a pretty short timeline, but he’s done a remarkable job, even publicly, of coming to terms with what’s happening. Isn’t that better than two years of the same?

And:

COWEN: I think it’s fair to say what we call the right wing in America, it’s become much, much more Trumpy. Does this shift you to the left or make you question what the right wing was to begin with, or do you just feel lost and confused, or do you say, that’s great, I’m more Trumpy, too? How have you dealt with that emotionally and intellectually?

BROOKS: Yes. I’ll answer, but you’re going to have to answer after me, will you?

COWEN: Sure.

Interesting throughout.

Social Security Should Be a Forced Savings Program Not a Welfare Program

by  Alex Tabarrok in

There is a growing movement to eliminate the wage cap on Social Security taxes while capping benefits. The argument, often from the center-right, is that Social Security is insolvent and that “tough” choices are needed to save it. But this moves the system in exactly the wrong direction.

One of the better features of Social Security is that it has never been purely redistributive. It has also functioned, in part, as a forced-savings program. The Social Security Administration itself emphasizes that benefits depend on earnings history: earn more, retire with more. Why do some people receive large Social Security checks? Because they paid a lot more into the system.

Eliminating the wage cap while capping benefits weakens, and in the limit destroys, that connection. It turns Social Security away from forced saving and toward retirement welfare financed by a broader tax on earnings. That is a bad idea.

The problem is not just that this creates another welfare program. It also worsens marginal incentives. A tax that buys you a claim on future benefits is not the same as a pure tax. Suppose 10 percent of your salary goes into a 401(k). That reduces current consumption, but it is not simply money lost to the state. You receive an asset in return. It is closer to a purchase than to a tax–a reason to work more not a reason to work less.

Social Security is not a personal retirement account, but it does contain that logic. There is a connection between taxes paid and benefits received. To the extent that workers understand that connection, the payroll tax is less distortionary than an ordinary tax of the same size. Part of what workers pay is offset by the expectation of future benefits.

Gut that connection, however, and the tax becomes more distortionary even if total taxes paid and total benefits received stay the same. The averages can remain unchanged while the marginal incentives deteriorate. Once additional taxes no longer generate additional benefits, the system looks much more like a straight tax on work.

A much better reform would move in the opposite direction: strengthen the link between contributions and benefits. Make Social Security more like what many people already think it is—an individual account that accumulates benefits over time. The stronger that link, the lower the effective tax wedge.

This would also improve the politics of the system. A welfare program invites zero-sum conflict: my benefit comes at your expense. A claim-based system is less divisive. It ties benefits more clearly to contributions and makes rising prosperity good for everyone. In that kind of system, we can all become richer—including low-wage immigrants—without treating retirement policy as a fight over who gets to pick whose pocket.

Addendum: James Buchanan first made these points here. John Cochrane gets the economics right, of course.