Category: Philosophy
What caught my attention in 2015
This was the year when it became clear that much of Eastern Europe probably won’t end up as free societies. It’s not just semi-fascism in Hungary. Poland and Slovakia, arguably the two most successful economies and societies in Eastern Europe, took big steps backward toward illiberal governance. How can one be optimistic about the Balkans? I imagine a future where African and North African refugees are bottled up there, and Balkan politics becomes slowly worse. As for Ukraine, a mix of Russia and an “own goal” has made the place ungovernable. Where is the bright spot in this part of the world?
Nothing good happened in China’s economy, although more fingers have been inserted into more dikes. I am not hopeful on the cyclical side, though longer term I remain optimistic, due to their investments in human capital and the growing importance of scale.
I have grown accustomed to the idea that Asian mega-cities represent the future of the world — have you?
Syria won’t recover.
This was the year of the rise of Ted Cruz.
It was an awful year for movies, decent but unpredictable for books. The idea that Facebook and social media rob the rest of our culture of its centrality, or its ability to find traction, is the default status quo. Not even that idea has gained much traction. Cable TV started to receive its financial comeuppance. Yet on the aesthetic side, television is at an all-time peak, with lots of experimentation and independent content provision, all for the better. I suspect this is one reason why movies are worse, namely brain drain, but I am hoping for longer-run elasticities of adjustment into the broader talent pool.
Against all odds, Homeland was excellent in its fifth season.
I became even more afraid to move my cursor around a web page, and in terms of content, more MSM sites became worse than better. Banning photos would solve twenty percent of this problem.
Stephen Curry and Magnus Carlsen were the two (public) individuals I thought about the most and followed the most closely. Each has a unique talent which no one had come close to before. For Curry it is three point shooting at great range and with little warning; for Carlsen it is a deep understanding of the endgame as the true tactical phase of chess, and how to use the middlegame as prep to get there. It wasn’t long ago Curry’s weapons were “trick” shots, perhaps suitable for the Harlem Globetrotters; similarly, players such as Aronian thought Carlsen’s “grind ’em down” style could not succeed at a top five level. Everyone was wrong.
But here’s what I am wondering. Standard theory claims that with a thicker market, the #2 talents, or for that matter the #5s, will move ever closer to the #1s. That is not what we are seeing in basketball or chess. So what feature of the problem is the standard model missing? And how general is this phenomenon of a truly special #1 who breaks some of the old rules? Does Mark Zuckerberg count too?
I realized Western China is the best part of the world to visit right now. The food trends where I live were Filipino and Yemeni, which I found welcome. Virginia now has a Uighur restaurant in Crystal City, and the aging San Antonio Spurs continue to defy all expectations. Kobe Bryant, who “ranks among the league’s top 5 percent of shot-takers and its bottom 5 percent of shot-makers,” has redefined the retirement announcement, among other things.
Top curling teams say they won’t use high-tech brooms. Just wait.
When should we feel guilt and collective guilt?
Dustin P. writes to me:
I would enjoy a blog post discussing under what circumstances you feel guilt, and how you respond. I am especially interested in instances where you feel a portion of some collective guilt – family actions, neighborhood failures, national politics.
I’ll focus on the social, collective, and intellectual sides of this problem, rather than my own (numerous) personal failings.
I feel the most guilt when eating the meat of intelligent animals raised under poor or tortured conditions. I am not opposed to all meat-eating per se, but most meat-eating in today’s America does not meet satisfactory moral standards. I still do it because I am not that good a person, at least not in this regard. I am struck by the title of the forthcoming book by Frans de Waal: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
I don’t feel so much collective guilt about the course of history. None from my Irish or Irish-American backgrounds, in part because I know very little about my ancestors. I also don’t feel personal guilt for earlier history, such as the genocide against Native Americans. I don’t feel responsible for it. Perhaps irrationally, I do feel some guilt for Americans being such world bullies, even when that is necessary or beneficial for the broader fate of civilization. I feel that indirectly I partake in that, if only by representing what are broadly American points of view in global settings, including on this blog.
I feel guilt for not giving more money to poor people, even though a) I probably give more than average to poor people, typically in Mexico, and b) I don’t hold an extreme Singerian view about our obligations in that regard. I still feel I am failing at the margin.
Overall it is possible that I treat guilt as many voters treat gasoline prices. I am perhaps overly bothered by fairly visible, repeated small transactions of a rather obvious salience.
So now, as a result of thinking about this blog post, I feel guilt about my guilt.
But only to a point. Furthermore guilt is often a substitute for action, rather than a spur to action, which gives me further reason to feel guilt about my guilt, though not in the right action-inducing way.
Is Migration a Basic Human Right?
The latest Freakonomics radio podcast grapples with the question Is Migration a Basic Human Right? (itunes) As usual, Stephen Dubner and his team have put together a compelling story with multiple-angles and perspectives. I provide the jumping off point:
There are fundamental human rights. There are rights which accrue to everyone, no matter who they are, no matter where they are on the globe. Those rights include the right to free expression. They include the right to freedom of religion. And I believe they should also include the right to move about the Earth.
but many other voices are also heard including Madeleine Albright, the great Michael Clemens, Casey Mulligan, refugee Basel Esa and others.
By the way, a new book on global justice is of interest, Justice at a Distance, by philosopher Loren Lomasky and legal scholar Fernando Teson.
Can intelligence explain the overrepresentation of liberals and leftists in American academia?
How is that for a provocative, comment-inducing article title? That’s a new piece in Intelligence by Noah Carl, the abstract is this:
It is well known that individuals with so-called liberal or leftist views are overrepresented in American academia. By bringing together data on American academics, the general population and a high-IQ population, the present study investigates how much of this overrepresentation can be explained by intelligence. It finds that intelligence can account for most of the disparity between academics and the general population on the issues of abortion, homosexuality and traditional gender roles. By contrast, it finds that intelligence cannot account for any of the disparity between academics and the general population on the issue of income inequality. But for methodological reasons, this finding is tentative. Furthermore, the paper finds that intelligence may account for less than half of the disparity on liberal versus conservative ideology, and much less than half the disparity on Democrat versus Republican identity. Following the analysis, eight alternative explanations for liberal and leftist overrepresentation are reviewed.
Do please note that the “intelligent” point of view need not be the correct one, it is simply the view held by individuals who measure as intelligent.
Most of all, modern America has a not-very-self-aware academic culture, which is far more insular than it likes to believe. A good deal of what American academics believe springs from their culture, not from their intelligence per se.
For the pointer I thank Daniel B. Klein.
Very good sentences, very true sentences
This is not a libertarian moment. Still, I think that libertarians have a lot to contribute to the public debate. What we should do is remind others that (a) the political process almost never adopts an ideal policy or executes a policy well and (b) policies that seem good today can have unintended consequences tomorrow.
Those are from Arnold Kling. In the meantime, Arnold asks you: where would you put your chips?
How martial a country should the United States be? #guncontrol
Chris Blattman cites a recent estimate that Americans own 42% of the civilian guns in the world.
You’ll also see estimates that America accounts for about half of the world’s defense spending. I believe those numbers are a misuse of purchasing power parity comparisons, but with proper adjustments it is not implausible to believe that America accounts for…about 42% of the defense spending. Or thereabouts.
I see those two numbers, and their rough similarity, as the most neglected fact in current debates about gun control.
I see many people who want to lower or perhaps raise those numbers, but I don’t see enough people analyzing the two as an integrated whole.
I don’t myself so often ask “should Americans have fewer guns?”, as that begs the question of how one might ever get there, which indeed has proven daunting by all accounts. But I do often ask myself “should America be a less martial country in in its ideological orientation?”
Note that the parts of the country with the most guns, namely the South, are especially prominent in the military and support for the military.
More importantly, if America is going to be the world’s policeman, on some scale or another, that has to be backed by a supportive culture among the citizenry. And that culture is not going to be “Hans Morgenthau’s foreign policy realism,” or “George Kennan’s Letter X,” or even Clausewitz’s treatise On War. Believe it or not, those are too intellectual for the American public. And so it must be backed by…a fairly martial culture amongst the American citizenry. And that probably will mean a fairly high level of gun ownership and a fairly high degree of skepticism about gun control.
If you think America can sustain its foreign policy interventionism, or threat of such, without a fairly martial culture at home, by all means make your case. But I am skeptical. I think it is far more likely that if you brought about gun control, and the cultural preconditions for successful gun control, America’s world role would fundamentally change and America’s would no longer play a global policeman role, for better or worse.
So who’s in this debate?
1. There are the anti-gun modern Democrats, who want Americans to own many fewer firearms, and who maybe favor slight cuts in defense spending, in order to spend more on redistribution. They don’t come to terms with the reality that their vision for America’s international state requires a fairly martial supporting culture at home, including strong attachments to gun ownership.
By the way, citations of the Australian gun control experience are a good indicator of this position and its partial naivete; Australian pacifism can to some extent free ride upon American martial interest. Another “warning sign” is if someone is incredulous that the San Bernardino attack is strengthening America’s attachment to a relatively martial internal culture, rather than leading to gun control. That person is out of touch, even if he or she is right about the substance of the issue.
2. There is the radical, anti-war, anti-military-industrial complex, semi-pacifist, anti-gun Left. Their positions on these issues are quite consistent, though this branch of the Left has disappeared almost entirely.
3. There are the libertarians, who hate martial culture on the international scene, but who wish to allow it or maybe even encourage it (personally, not through the government) at home, through the medium of guns. They are inconsistent, and they should consider being more pro-gun control than is currently the case. But I don’t expect them to budge: they will see this issue only through the lens of liberty, rather than through the lens of culture as well. They end up getting a lot of the gun liberties they wish to keep, but losing the broader cultural battle and somehow are perpetually surprised by this mix of outcomes.
I except non-American libertarians from these charges, and indeed many of them, albeit under the table, in fact support gun control as a libertarian and indeed pro-peace position.
4. There are the “right-wing conservatives.” They support a martial ethic, they support America’s active foreign policy abroad, and they are anti-gun control for the most part. And they find their greatest strength in the relatively martial American South. Like the old anti-war Left, their positions are consistent, and their positions are rooted in a cultural understanding of the issue. They see the gun control movement as a war on America’s greatness, America’s martial culture and the material embodiments of said culture. They don’t understand why “the world’s greatest nation” should give up its superpower role, and its supporting internal martial culture, all for the sake of limiting the number of suicides and maybe stopping a few shootings too. To them it’s not close to being worth it.
OK, now look at who is winning this debate in terms of actual policy changes. It is the conservatives, for the most part. No matter how much you may disagree with them, they have the most coherent cultural and intellectual position, apart from the old anti-war Left. And in a fight between the right-wing conservatives, and the old anti-war Left, for the hearts and minds of the American people, we already know that, for better or worse, the conservatives usually will win.
I find that pro-gun control Democrats, and libertarians, are incapable of understanding the issue in these cultural terms. But if you read something by a “really stupid conservative” on gun control, the more emotive and manipulative the text the better, it is often pretty close to the mark on the actual substance of what is at stake here.
Here is my earlier post, The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol.
The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work
Here is a new and interesting paper by Philip Rogaway at UC Davis (pdf), here is the abstract:
Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to ask if our inability to effectively address mass surveillance constitutes a failure of our field. I believe that it does. I call for a community-wide effort to develop more effective means to resist mass surveillance. I plea for a reinvention of our disciplinary culture to attend not only to puzzles and math, but, also, to the societal implications of our work.
Recommended, the paper has a good deal of substance, via Vitorino Ramos and Will Wilkinson.
Is it worse if foreigners kill us?
I see many comparisons floating around, here are a few:
Muslim refugees become terrorists at a lower rate than Americans become murderers. And here is Alex on jellybeans.
This article suggests you are more likely to be killed by falling furniture than by a terrorist.
Somewhere in my Twitter feed I saw a claim that an American is more likely to be shot by a toddler than by a terrorist.
By a variety of metrics, European terror attacks were worse in the 1970s and 1980s than today.
Matt Yglesias argues American society is pretty robust to a bunch of people getting shot.
Nonetheless many American (and European) citizens seem to think that a murder by a foreign terrorist is much worse than a murder by a domestic nutcase, and that murder by a foreign terrorist is a major deal, these days at least. What might be the reasons for that view?
1. A murder by a foreign terrorist occasions more fear of future murders. Yet if anything this seems to be the opposite of the case. “Entry” into foreign terrorism in the United States is tightly controlled, and with each murder security procedures are tightened.
2. Foreign terrorists kill us in more painful ways. Seems unlikely, they want to get the job over with.
3. Allowing foreign terrorists to kill us signals to our foreign enemies that we are weak, and worsens our standing in international relations. Our alliances and our deterrents become weaker, to the detriment of global peace.
4. The successes of foreign terrorists increase existential risk, so even a “simple murder” by one of them is fraught with high negative expected value. But note here the difference between inference and causality. A foreign terrorist murder may indicate that a WMD attack is more likely, but does it cause the likelihood of a WMD attack to up? In fact, might it not cause that chance to go down, given tighter security precautions?
#3 and #4 at least possibly make sense. But what’s the actual evidence? Why don’t we spend our time debating #3 and #4? Couldn’t we do event studies on those? Are we willing to reject these hypotheses if the event studies turn up nothing?
And if there is something to #3 and 34, what is the MRS for “death by domestic” vs. “death from a foreign terrorist”? 10 to 1? 100 to 1? Inquiring minds wish to know. In other words, it really may be worse if we are killed by foreigners, but don’t we need to set some parameters on that judgment?
By the way, there is also #5: Due to our heritage as African primates, we are programmed to fear violent attacks by outsiders more than we actually need to today.
The Michael Jensen to Werner Erhard connection
Enter the Harvard economist Michael Jensen. Dr. Jensen, who is famous in financial circles for championing the concepts of shareholder value and executive stock options, had taken a Landmark course in Boston at the suggestion of his daughter, who mended a rocky relationship with Dr. Jensen after taking the course herself.
“I became convinced we should work to get this kind of transformational material into the academies,” he said, adding that he considers Mr. Erhard “one of the great intellectuals of the century.”
In 2004, with the help of a Landmark official, Dr. Jensen developed an experiential course on integrity in leadership at the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester. The class was offered there for five years, with Mr. Erhard signing on as an instructor during its third year. It has since been taught at several universities around the world as well as at the United States Air Force Academy.
As far as its philosophical underpinnings go, Mr. Erhard struggled a bit to describe the course without resorting to its Delphic phraseology (“ontological pedagogy,” “action as a correlate of the occurring”).
Sitting in front of a bank of computers in his hotel room, he read excerpts from the 1,000-page textbook he is working on, such as: “As linguistic abstractions, leader and leadership create leader and leadership as realms of possibility in which, when you are being a leader, all possible ways of being are available to you.”
The full NYT story, mostly about Erhard, with bits on Heidegger too, is here. Here is more on Jensen and Erhard.
Incentives change how we think
That is the paper’s subtitle, the title is “An Offer You Can’t Refuse,” and that is the job market paper (pdf) of Sandro Ambuehl of Stanford University. I found this to be the most interesting job market paper of the year, noting that “most interesting” and “best” are not synonymous, that said I found the quality to be very high too. The main point is that having commercial economic incentives in place causes us to perceive new information in more positive-sum terms than otherwise would be the case, or at least that is how I interpret his results.
Here is the abstract:
Around the world there are laws that severely restrict incentives for many transactions, such as living kidney donation, even though altruistic participation is applauded. Proponents of such legislation fear that undue inducements would be coercive; opponents maintain that it merely prevents mutually beneficial transactions. Despite the substantial economic consequences of such laws, empirical evidence on the proponents’ argument is scarce. I present a simple model of costly information acquisition in which incentives skew information demand and thus expectations about the consequences of participation. In a laboratory experiment, I test whether monetary incentives can alter subjects’ expectations about a highly visceral aversive experience (eating whole insects). Indeed, higher incentives make subjects more willing to participate in this experience at any price. A second experiment explicitly shows in a more stylized setting that incentives cause subjects to perceive the same information differently. They make subjects systematically more optimistic about the consequences of the transaction in a way that is inconsistent with Bayesian rationality. Broadly, I show that important concerns by proponents of the current legislation can be understood using the toolkit of economics, and thus can be included in cost-benefit analysis. My work helps bridge a gap between economists on the one hand, and policy makers and ethicists on the other.
Of course it also can be said that incentives make individuals less Bayesian in their orientation. I say who needs Bayesians anyway? Society is built on a certain faith we all have in the benefits from cooperating with others. When you know you might be paid to eat an insect, you sample more “yum-pro-insect” propaganda, and you interpret it more favorably. Furthermore subjects do not in advance predict these self-persuasion effects. So “bait and switch” marketing techniques may succeed in warming individuals up to ideas, even if the promised prize is eventually yanked.
In any case, how can you not love a paper which has, on p.4, the following sentence: “In the first experiment I use cash to induce subjects to eat whole insects, including silkworm pupae, mealworms, and various species of crickets.”
With or without chili sauce? The future of commercial society may depend on it.
I enjoyed this sentence too, from p.18:
Participants cannot be forced to ingest insects.
Here is Sandro writing with Muriel Niederle and Al Roth in the AER on the moral plausibility of strong incentives.
What can be named after whom?
There is an ongoing controversy at Princeton over whether it should still be called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy. Wilson was a notorious racist and segregationist, bad even by the standards of his time, plus he was a terrible President to boot. At Yale there are murmurings about a house named after John Calhoun.
Of course there is a slippery slope. There are plenty of American institutions named after slaveholders, and for that matter was Amerigo Vespucci such a great guy? For one thing, he helped Columbus commit genocide by provisioning one of his voyages.
Should George Washington stay on the dollar bill? If you’ve decided that no university or other positive-sum institution should be named “School of Simon LeGree Satan,” it seems hard to draw a line in a meaningful, non-arbitrary manner. Most famous people, especially in politics, have some pretty significant blemishes. Yet we cannot open every can of worms in this regard, or so it seems.
No one seems to mind that the Nazi Party is called…the Nazi Party. No one says “we can’t call the party that, those Nazis were the people who killed the Jews. Can’t name anything after them. Not even their own party.” In fact calling them Nazis is designed to remind people of what they did, appropriately I would add.
I don’t mind if an institution names itself after a person of mixed moral quality, or allows such a name to persist, provided the institution, in both its framing of the name and its pursuit of its broader mission, is self-conscious about that person’s drawbacks and invests resources toward that self-consciousness beyond the usual rhetorical statements. That said, others may mind more than I do, so it would be nice if we had a graceful way out of a slightly complicated situation.
I also would not be disturbed if they had kept the city names at Leningrad and Stalingrad. Lenin and Stalin were evil guys, but it seems appropriate to remind people what a big role they played in the histories of those cities. (At least for another hundred years, probably not forever.) Of course if the citizens of the cities don’t want those names, I would not force the matter.
Perhaps in the longer run everything, including the Woodrow Wilson School, will be named after donors.
Why do we name things after people at all?
When I look at countries which are periodically renaming buildings, cities, and institutions, I get a little uncomfortable. The renaming probably isn’t causing their bad or unstable qualities, but pushing for a world of constant renaming does not strike me as a useful goal. It is not governed by a desirable feedback process, too much voice and not enough exit and competitive constraints.
There should be some kind of intermediate process where institutions can indicate that they take very seriously the moral failings of their namesakes, and publicize that message. And then over time they can try to raise enough money so as to have a convenient excuse to rename the Wilson School after a wealthy donor, taking constructive action but not ending up in an endless game of renaming.
A simple concrete step would be to cut the price of the naming rights on the Wilson School by fifty percent.
That also could prove an efficient form of price discrimination, by selling the naming rights to one school for less, yet with a special circumstance so donors do not feel that every naming right now should sell for less.
Leadership sentences to ponder
This sounds like a combination of a David Brooks column and a Robin Hanson blog post, and what could be better than that?:
Surprisingly, the most effective leaders did not have the highest level of self-awareness. Indeed, the more they underrated themselves, the more highly they were perceived as leaders. We assume this is caused by a combination of humility, high personal standards, and a continual striving to be better.
That is from Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, via the excellent Samir Varma.
My conversation with Cliff Asness
Here is the full transcript, video, and podcast of the chat. Cliff was great from beginning to end. The first thirty minutes or so were an overview of “momentum” and “value” trading strategies, and to what extent they violate an efficient markets hypothesis. Much of the rest covered:
…disagreeing with Eugene Fama, Marvel vs. DC, the inscrutability of risk, high frequency trading, the economics of Ayn Rand, bubble logic, and why never to share a gym with Cirque du Soleil.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I think of you as doing a kind of metaphysics of human nature. On one side, there’s behavioral economics. They put people in the lab, one-off situations, untrained people. But here it’s repeated data, it’s over long periods of time, it’s out of sample. There’s real money on the line, and this still seems to work.
When you back out, what’s the actual vision of human nature? What’s the underlying human imperfection that allows it to be the case, that trading on momentum across say a 3 to 12 month time window, sorry, investing on momentum, will work? What’s with us as people? What’s the core human imperfection?
ASNESS: This is going to be embarrassing because we don’t have a problem of no explanation. We have a problem with too many explanations. Of course, we can observe the data. The explanations you have to fight over and argue over. I will give you the two most prominent explanations for the efficacy of momentum.
The first is called underreaction. Simple idea that comes from behavioral psychology, the phenomenon there called anchoring and adjustment. News comes out. Price moves but not all the way. People update their priors but not fully efficiently. Therefore, just observing the price move is not going to move the same amount again but there’s some statistical tendency to continue.
Take a wild guess what our second best, in my opinion, explanation for momentum’s efficacy is? It’s called overreaction. When your two best explanations are over- and underreaction, you have somewhat of an issue, I admit. Overreaction is much more of a positive feedback. It works over time because people in fact do chase prices. So if you do it somewhat systematically and before them you make some money.
One of the hard things you find out in many fields but I found out in empirical finance is those might be the right explanations but they’re not mutually exclusive.
And here is from the overrated/underrated part of the chat:
COWEN: …In science fiction, the author Robert Heinlein.
ASNESS: Early stuff, underrated. Later stuff, overrated.
COWEN: What’s your favorite?
ASNESS: That is a really — Methuselah’s Children.
COWEN: Ah, good pick.
ASNESS: I could have gone with the obvious. I’m a bit of a libertarian. I could have gone with, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. It’s his most famously libertarian book.
COWEN: But it doesn’t age so well.
ASNESS: No, no. I like Methuselah’s Children.
This was the funniest segment:
ASNESS: I live in Greenwich, Connecticut. In some parts of the world, if you said, “my daddy runs a hedge fund,” I’d say, “what’s a hedge fund?” In Greenwich, Connecticut, the kids say, “what kind of hedge fund is your daddy running? Is he event arbitrage? Trend following? What does dad do?”
Interesting throughout, as they are known to say…
Can we determine how honesty varies across countries?
The paper is by David Hugh-Jones, and this is from the research summary:
The study examined whether people from different countries were more or less honest and how this related to a country’s economic development. More than 1500 participants from 15 countries took part in an online survey involving two incentivised experiments, designed to measure honest behaviour.
Firstly, they were asked to flip a coin and state whether it landed on ‘heads’ or ‘tails’. They knew if they reported that it landed on heads, they would be rewarded with $3 or $5. If the proportion reporting heads was more than 50 per cent in a given country, this indicated that people were being dishonest…
The countries studied – Brazil, China, Greece, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, the United States, Argentina, Denmark, the United Kingdom, India, Portugal, South Africa, and South Korea – were chosen to provide a mix of regions, levels of development and levels of social trust.
The study’s author Dr David Hugh-Jones, of UEA’s School of Economics, found evidence for dishonesty in all the countries, but that levels varied significantly across them. For example, estimated dishonesty in the coin flip ranged from 3.4 per cent in the UK to 70 per cent in China. In the quiz, respondents in Japan were the most honest, followed by the UK, while those in Turkey were the least truthful. Participants were also asked to predict the average honesty of those from other countries by guessing how many respondents out of 100 from a particular country would report heads in the coin flip test. However, participants’ beliefs about other countries’ honesty did not reflect reality.
This is interesting:
“Differences in honesty were found between countries, but this did not necessarily correspond to what people expected,” he said. “Beliefs about honesty seem to be driven by psychological features, such as self-projection. Surprisingly, people were more pessimistic about the honesty of people in their own country than of people in other countries.
And consider this from Hugh Jones:
“I suggest that the relationship between honesty and economic growth has been weaker over the past 60 years and there is little evidence for a link between current growth and honesty,” said Dr Hugh-Jones. “One explanation is that when institutions and technology are underdeveloped, honesty is important as a substitute for formal contract enforcement. Countries that develop cultures putting a high value on honesty are able to reap economic gains. Later, this economic growth itself improves institutions and technology, making contracts easier to monitor and enforce, so that a culture of honesty is no longer necessary for further growth.”
The research paper is here, and for the pointers I thank Charles Klingman and Samir Varma.
Jones, by the way, makes it clear there are a variety of kinds of honesty, and inferences from any single test should be limited. For Japan in particular the measured level of honesty depends critically on which test is applied. The real lesson of the study may simply be that most groups are dishonest, and people are not even honest with themselves about their views of the dishonesty of others. Honesty depends a good deal on context too. On some of these questions, see some skeptical comments from Kevin Drum.
If you are looking for simple correlations: “…at individual level, there is no evidence that religious adherence is associated with honesty.” How about having a Ph.d.?
The 39 steps to being a gentleman?
I am afraid I rather severely failed this test, as proposed by the British magazine Country Life. I cannot “train a rose,” nor did I even know what that meant. I also don’t own a tweed suit, nor do I tip my “gamekeeper in the shooting field.” “Sings lustily in church” is yet another fail, though I am punctual and do not own a chihuahua, nor would I, as is stipulated.
I was puzzled by a response to this quiz in a recent David Tang FT column. He answered:
32. Would not go to Puerto Rico
Been there once already — ghastly.
I am pleased to have gone twice, from which I can only conclude that at least one of us does not know what a gentleman is. I might have defined the concept as someone who is kind, tolerant, strong as required, and respectful of social mores when appropriate.