Category: Philosophy
Uncertainty increases the reliance on affect in decisions
That is a new paper by Ali Faraji-Rad and Michel Tuan Pham, here is the abstract:
Uncertainty is an unavoidable part of human life. How do states of uncertainty influence the way people make decisions? We advance the proposition that states of uncertainty increase the reliance on affective inputs in judgments and decisions. In accord with this proposition, results from six studies show that the priming of uncertainty (vs. certainty) consistently increases the effects of a variety of affective inputs on consumers’ judgments and decisions. Primed uncertainty is shown to amplify the effects of the pleasantness of a musical soundtrack (study 1), the attractiveness of a picture (study 2), the appeal of affective attributes (studies 3 and 4), incidental mood states (study 6), and even incidental states of disgust (study 5). Moreover, both negative and positive uncertainty increase the influence of affect in decisions (study 4). The results additionally show that the increased reliance on affective inputs under uncertainty does not necessarily come at the expense of a reliance on descriptive attribute information (studies 2 and 5), and that the increased reliance on affect under uncertainty is distinct from a general reliance on heuristic or peripheral cues (study 6).
The pointer is from Cass Sunstein on Twitter. File under “The culture that is Iowa”?
*The Moral Economy*
The author is Sam Bowles and the subtitle is Why Good Incentives are No Substitute for Good Citizens.
Due out in May.
A new issue of Econ Journal Watch
The link is here, the contents include:
A Unit Root in Postwar U.S. Real GDP Still Cannot Be Rejected, and Yes, It Matters: David Cushman examines whether shocks are transitory, permanent, or some of each.
The political ideology of Industrial Relations: Using three metrics, Mitchell Langbert shows the left orientation of the field.
Eli Heckscher’s Ideological Migration Toward Market Liberalism: Benny Carlson explores the intellectual evolution of a great Swedish economist.
Glimpses of Adam Smith: Excerpts from the biography by Ian Simpson Ross.
Symposium:
Classical Liberalism in Econ, by Country: Authors from around the world tell us about their country’s culture of political economy, in particular the vitality of liberalism in the original political sense, historically and currently, with special attention to professional economics as practiced in academia, think tanks, and intellectual networks.
New contributions:
Young Back Choi and Yong Yoon:
Liberalism in KoreaPavel Kuchař:
Liberalism in Mexican Economic Thought, Past and Present(All of the papers from this symposium, which has carried across multiple issues of EJW, are collected at this page.)
EJW Audio
*Illiberal Reformers*, on Progressives and eugenics
The subtitle of Thomas Leonard’s new and excellent book is the apt Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era.
I take it you all know by now this is quite an ugly story, namely that both early progressives and late 19th century American economists were often quite appalling racists and eugenicists, and that such racism was built into the professional structure of economics in a fairly fundamental way, including but not restricted to the American Economics Association.
Kevin Drum had an interesting point in response (and do read his full post, there is more to it than this quick excerpt):
Early 20th century progressives supported eugenics out of a belief that it would improve society. Contemporary liberals support abortion rights and right-to-die laws out of a belief in individual rights that flowered in the 60s.
Most of all Drum is saying that the earlier history is not very illustrative of anything for today.
I view it this way. Go back to Millian liberalism of the mid-19th century. Had American or for that matter British Progressivism been infused with more of this philosophy, the eugenics debacle never would have happened. For instance if you look at the British Parliamentary debates of 1912 over the Mental Deficiency Bill, the anti-eugenics forces drew heavily upon Mill for their inspiration. This was standard stuff, but the Progressives of the time didn’t see much of a pro-liberty reason for being pushed into a Millian position, quite the contrary.
The claim is not that current Progressives are evil or racist, but rather they still don’t have nearly enough Mill in their thought, and not nearly enough emphasis on individual liberty. Their continuing choice of label seems to indicate they are not much bothered by that, or maybe not even fully aware of that. They probably admire Mill’s more practical reform progressivism quite strongly, or would if they gave it more thought, but they don’t seem to relate to the broader philosophy of individual liberty as it surfaced in the philosophy of Mill and others. That’s a big, big drawback and the longer history of Progressivism and eugenics is perhaps the simplest and most vivid way to illuminate the point. This is one reason why the commitment of the current Left to free speech just isn’t very strong.
I don’t mean to pick on Kevin, who is one of my favorite bloggers, but I disagree (and find indicative) another one of his claims, namely:
…eugenics died an unmourned death nearly a century ago.
To give one (not the only) example to the contrary, Swedish “progressive” sterilization persisted through the 1970s, as was true for Canada as well. Eugenicist views toward autistic people, among others, remain common across the political spectrum (no special brickbat for Progressives here, but they are guilty too), and with CRISPR a lot of eugenicist debates are already making a comeback.
Do we really want to identify with a general philosophy which embraced eugenics for so many decades, when so many pro-liberty and also social democratic thinkers were in opposition? I think Mill himself would say no.
*The Age of Em*, by Robin Hanson
That is the title of the new and forthcoming Robin Hanson book, due out in May. I was asked to supply a blurb, and offered two possibilities. One was:
“Robin Hanson is one of our most original and important thinkers. This is his book.”
The ostensible premise of the book is that people have become computer uploads, and we have an entirely new society to think about: how it works, what problems it has, and how it evolves. One key point about this new world is individuals can be copied. But this is more than just a nerdy tech book, it is also:
- Straussian commentary on the world we actually live in. We are already something-or-other, uploaded into humans,and very often Robin is describing our world in cloaked fashion, albeit with some slight tweaks to parameters for the purpose of moral illumination.
- A reminder of how strange everything is, and how we use self-deception to come to terms with that strangeness. It’s a mock of all those who believe in individual free will.
- An attempt to construct a fully rational theology, proving by various deductions that God is not fully benevolent in the traditional sense.
- An extended essay on the impossibility of avoiding theology, given the imposition of competitive constraints on a world where production and copying are possible. And ultimately it is a theodicy, though it will not feel that way to Westerners, Jews, Christians, or Muslims. It hearkens back to medieval theology, Descartes, and the idea of living in God’s possibly terrifying simulation.
- A satire on the rest of social science, and how we try to explain and predict the future.
- A meta-level growth model in which energy alone matters and the “fixed factor” assumptions of other models are relativized. Copying is taken seriously, besides how special are you anyway? In the meantime, we learn just how much of the world we know depends upon the presence of various fixed factors. But surely that is temporary!
- A challenge to our notions of wherein the true value of a life resides.
I hope enough readers pick up on some of this. And yes, there is a chapter on sex, love, and affairs.
It is hard to excerpt from this book, but here is one short bit:
Compared with humans, ems fear much less the death of the particular copy that they now are. Ems instead fear “mind theft,” that is, the theft of a copy of their mental state. Such a theft is both a threat to the economic order, and a plausible route to personal destitution or torture. While a few ems offer themselves as open source and free to copy, most ems work hard to prevent mind theft. Most long-distance physical travel is “beam me up” electronic travel, but done carefully to prevent mind theft.
I am wildly enthusiastic about everything the Robin upload does, and some of his copies are better yet. Here is the book’s home page.
Addendum: Here is Robin Hanson’s response.
Conversation with Kareem tomorrow is relocated
Robert Parrish could not much push him away from his preferred spots on the floor, but due to snow we are altering the venue:
New venue:
Westin Arlington Gateway, F. Scott Fitzgerald Ballroom (2nd floor), 801 North Glebe Road Arlington, VA
Tuesday, January 26, 2016, 3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
At the event, you can participate in the conversation by tweeting your questions and comments using the hashtag #CowenKareem.
You can watch the event online at mercatus.org/live
A question about deep reading
Brad asks:
Prof. Cowen – I’m a longtime MR reader, but just came across an old post on your prolific reading. In the post, you mention:
“But it is not like the old days when I would set aside two months to work through The Inferno, Aeneid, and the like, with multiple secondary sources and multiple translations at hand. I no longer have the time or the mood, and I miss this.”
I am intrigued by this process of deep reading the canonical classics – have you detailed your method/routine for this anytime on MR?
Thanks!
Here is my preferred method:
1. Read a classic work straight through, noting key problems and ambiguities, but not letting them hold you back. Plow through as needed, and make finishing a priority.
1b. Mark up the book with bars and questions marks, but don’t bother writing out your still-crummy thoughts. That will slow you down.
2. After finishing the classic, read a good deal of the secondary literature, keeping in mind that you now are looking for answers to some particular questions. That will structure and improve your investigation. But do not read the secondary literature first. You won’t know what questions will be guiding you, plus it may spoil or bias your impressions of the classic, which is likely richer and deeper than the commentaries on it.
3. Go back and reread said classic, taking as much time as you may need. If you don’t finish this part of the program, at least you have read the book once and grappled with some of its problems, and taken in some of its commentators. If you can get through the reread, you’ll then have achieved something.
4. I am an advocate of the “close in time” reread, not the “several years later” reread. The several years later reread works best when it has been preceded by a close in time reread, otherwise you tend to forget lots, or never to have learned it to begin with, and the later reread may be more akin to starting a new book altogether.
5. If you want to find new things in books you already know and love, opt for new editions, new translations, and new typesettings where you will encounter it as a very different visual and conceptual field.
How ideological are economists?
From Ryan Avent:
Anthony Randazzo of the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think-tank, and Jonathan Haidt of New York University recently asked a group of academic economists both moral questions (is it fairer to divide resources equally, or according to effort?) and questions about economics. They found a high correlation between the economists’ views on ethics and on economics. The correlation was not limited to matters of debate—how much governments should intervene to reduce inequality, say—but also encompassed more empirical questions, such as how fiscal austerity affects economies on the ropes. Another study found that, in supposedly empirical research, right-leaning economists discerned more economically damaging effects from increases in taxes than left-leaning ones.
There is considerably more at the link. The Randazzo and Haidt study is from Econ Journal Watch.
How to seem telepathic
This is probably one of the most useful things you will learn from MR all year. It is from Maria Konnikova’s new book The Confidence Game:
In 2010, Nicholas Epley and Tal Eyal of Ben-Gurion University published the results of a series of experiments aimed at improving our person and mind perception skills. The title of their paper: “How to Seem Telepathic.” Many of our errors, the researchers found, stem from a basic mismatch between how we analyze ourselves and how we analyze others. When it comes to ourselves, we employ a fine-grained, highly contextualized level of detail. When we think about others, however, we operate at a much higher, more generalized and abstract level. For instance, when answering the same question about ourselves or others — how attractive are you? — we use very different cues. For our own appearance, we think about how our hair is looking that morning, whether we got enough sleep, how well that shirt matches our complexion. For that of others, we form a surface judgment based on overall gist. So, there are two mismatches: we aren’t quite sure how others are seeing us, and we are incorrectly judging how they see themselves.
If, however, we can adjust our level of analysis, we suddenly appear much more intuitive and accurate. In one study, people became more accurate at discerning how others see them when they thought their photograph was going to be evaluated a few months later, as opposed to the same day, while in another, the same accuracy shift happened if they thought a recording they’d made describing themselves would be heard a few months later [TC: recall Robin Hanson’s near vs. far mode]. Suddenly, they were using the same abstract lens that others are likely to use naturally…
Upon reading this passage I realized I have been thinking in these terms for years, without quite realizing it so explicitly.
One implication: if you feel bad one morning, don’t let it get you down and lower your confidence. Other people probably won’t notice your problems.
Another implication: you’ll understand yourself better if, in a given moment, you can pretend to distance yourself from some of your immediate impressions of your day, and treat yourself like a piece of your writing which you set aside for a week so you could look at it fresh.
A third implication is this: you can read other people’s moods better by ignoring some of your overall impressions of them, and by focusing on what they might perceive to be small changes in their situation, appearance, or stress levels.
The original research is here, worth a read (pdf). And here are various reviews of the Konnikova book.
The intellectual origins of Ted Cruz?
When Cruz was thirteen his father brought him to Rolland Storey, a kindly and charismatic septuagenarian who ran a conservative foundation aimed at teaching youth about economics and government. Storey educated his pupils about the brightest minds of free market economics: they pored over Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and marveled at Frederic Bastiat’s denunciations of socialism as legal plunder. A veteran of vaudeville, Storey liked to re-create constitutional conventions and assign students to play delegates in mock debates. Many of his students were gifted, but none could keep up with Cruz in terms of passion and inherent ability. Thrust into some of the momentous scenes from world history, the thirteen-year-old was perfectly at home.
That anecdote is from McKay Coppins, The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party’s Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House, a fun read with lots of background information I did not know.
I will never forget the time Gregory Rehmke took me to meet Rolland Storey in Houston. But that is a story for another place and time…
*The Hateful Eight* (no spoilers)
I don’t like most Tarantino movies, except for Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill, vol.I.; I usually find his style too mannered and self-conscious. And I read so many negative or lukewarm reviews in the American press. But more positive evaluations started to trickle in, as the British Guardian, Telegraph, and FT all gave it five stars, and some of my friends seemed to like it. One of my canonical views is that when critics have split views on a talented director, you should go see the movie. I am very glad I did.
Think of the film as a retelling of John Locke’s social compact story, except the individuals are not tabula rasa in terms of history, but rather they bring ineradicable racial and historical backgrounds to the table, epistemically uncertain backgrounds as well. The game-theoretic solution concepts unfold accordingly. The setting and details of the story are then set up to spoof Agatha Christie and the British haunted house tradition, except with snow, guns, and the American West as props.
Recommended, even for skeptics, Straussian throughout.
Do you get grumpy when it is warmer than seventy degrees Fahrenheit?
I don’t think climate change is the right framing for this effect, nonetheless this is an interesting result, with the subtitle “Evidence from a billion tweets.” Here is the abstract:
What is the welfare cost of environmental stress? The change in amenity values resulting from temperature increases may be a substantial unaccounted-for cost of climate change. Because there is no explicit market for climate, prior work has relied on cross-sectional variation or survey data to identify this cost. This paper presents an alternative method of estimating preferences over nonmarket goods which accounts for unobserved cross-sectional and temporal variation and allows for precise estimates of nonlinear effects. Specifically, I create a rich dataset on hedonic state: a geographically and temporally dense collection of updates from the social media platform Twitter, scored using a set of both human- and machine-trained sentiment analysis algorithms. Using this dataset, I find limited evidence of temperature effects on hedonic state in low temperatures and strong evidence of a sharp decline in hedonic state above 70◦F. This finding is robust across all measures of hedonic state and to a variety of specifications.
That is the job market paper (pdf) by Patrick Baylis, a job candidate from UC Berkeley.
And here is a new result that Canadians are more polite on Twitter, I wonder what happens if you control for temperature…
For the pointer I thank Samir Varma.
*Norwegian Wood*, the book
The author is Lars Mytting, and the subtitle is Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way. If only every book could be this good and to the point! Here is your Norway fact of the day:
Even in oil-rich Norway, as astonishing 25 percent of the energy used to heat private homes comes from wood, and half of that is wood chopped by private individuals.
In per capita terms, however, Bhutan is number one for wood chopping. Yet in the 1960s, the government of Norway had its own advisory body for the burning of wood chips.
I enjoyed this segue:
Although it may seem strange today, chain saws were regarded with suspicion at that time and there was much resistance to their use…
There were quite a few colorful players in the early days of the chain-saw industry in the 1950s. The competition was hard and the business attracted people with a fiery temperament. One legendary character was John Svensson (alias Chain Saw Svensson), who imported saws made by the Canadian firm Beaver. He had been arrested and tortured during the war and for the rest of his life suffered pains in his arms and joints; when demonstrating the Beaver saws he always made a point of stressing how the vibrations that passed up through the handle brought a welcome relief to his aching joints.
Svensson was not a man to take professional disappointments lying down. On one occasion he was so annoyed when a visiting government delegation refused to let him demonstrate his chain saw to them that he felled five trees across the road to stop them from leaving.
The interest of a Norwegian man in his firewood often rises sharply in his sixties. Perhaps this sentence from the book says it all:
It took a while, but that didn’t bother them, as long as it turned out the way they wanted.
You can order the book here, recommended.
2016 Law and Literature reading list
The New English Bible, Oxford Study Edition
Guantanamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation
Janet Malcolm, The Crime of Sheila McGough
Njal’s Saga (on-line version is fine)
Glaspell’s Trifles, available on-line
Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, used or Kindle edition is recommended
The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka, edited and translated by Joachim Neugroschel
In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott
Sherlock Holmes, The Complete Novels and Stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, volume 1, also on-line
I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
Moby Dick, by Hermann Melville, excerpts, chapters 89 and 90, available on-line
Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman
The Pledge, Friedrich Durrenmatt
Ian McEwan, The Children Act
We also will see some films and cover some very short on-line readings, as I will distribute at the appropriate times; your papers may draw on these as well.
Spite
This is from Eliana Zeballos, who is on the job market this year from UC Davis and appears to be a very interesting candidate. Here is part of the abstract of her job market paper (pdf):
The experimental games were conducted in Bolivia among285 dairy farmers. Results show that when participants were presented with their ranking and the earnings of others in their group, those below the group mean increased their effort whereas those above the group mean decreased their effort. When destructive actions were allowed, 55 percent of the participants were willing to forego own-consumption in order to burn others’ output; 58 percent were victims of destructive actions and lost, on average, a third of their earnings. There is an asymmetry in the direction of destruction: almost all of the highest earners suffered some destruction while only a quarter of the lowest earners were victims of destructive actions. Finally, the threat of destructive actions reduced the highest earning participants’ effort by 5.8 percent.
For the pointer I thank Ben Southwood.