Category: Philosophy

The politics of science fiction

Science fiction is an inherently political genre, in that any future or alternate history it imagines is a wish about How Things Should Be (even if it’s reflected darkly in a warning about how they might turn out). And How Things Should Be is the central question and struggle of politics. It is also, I’d argue, an inherently liberal genre (its many conservative practitioners notwithstanding), in that it sees the status quo as contingent, a historical accident, whereas conservatism holds it to be inevitable, natural, and therefore just. The meta-premise of all science fiction is that nothing can be taken for granted. That it’s still anybody’s ballgame.

That is from Tim Kreider, who praises the political visions and fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson.  Kreider also longs for a more political literature, devoted to such ideas as common stewardship of land and water, and also “small co-ops” instead of “vast, hierarchical, exploitative corporations.”  Among other changes.  He then writes:

My own bet would be that either your grandchildren are going to be living by some of these precepts, or else they won’t be living at all.

What is a good response to that?  Let’s look at the article itself, and we can see sentence which is smarter than Kreider himself seems to realize:

If historians or critics fifty years from now were to read most of our contemporary literary fiction, they might well infer that our main societal problems were issues with our parents, bad relationships, and death.

I would myself note that the politics of science fiction, on average (with exceptions), encourage us to think about “breaking a few eggs,” and not for the better.  The reality is that when it comes to the future, we can “see around the corner” only to a limited degree.  The upshot is that the rights of the individual — when applicable — should remain paramount, and no I don’t mean Caplanian libertarian rights.  You can only rarely be sure you will get such a great gain from violating rights, so why not do the right thing instead?  Science fiction inhabits the realm of fiction precisely because the building of grand scenarios is denied to us, for the most part.

To again use Kreider’s own words, societies where “nothing can be taken for granted” are exactly the ones I would never wish to visit, much less live in.  I know the radical anarcho-capitalist strand, but is there a Burke-Oakeshott-Hayek science fiction, in the traditionalist and conservative sense of that combination?  Or must we resort to the “fantasy” genre to capture such a vision?  What would a science fiction account of a macro-level spontaneous order look like?  Iain Banks?  Frank Herbert?

Does Ramadan make you happy? Harm output growth?

Filipe Campante and David Yanagizawa-Drott have a new paper (pdf), here is the abstract:

We study the economic effects of religious practices in the context of the observance of Ramadan fasting, one of the central tenets of Islam. To establish causality, we exploit variation in the length of the fasting period due to the rotating Islamic calendar. We report two key, quantitatively meaningful results: 1) longer Ramadan  fasting has a negative effect on output growth in Muslim countries, and 2) it increases subjective well-being among Muslims. We then examine labor market outcomes, and find that these results cannot be primarily explained by a direct reduction in labor productivity due to fasting. Instead, the evidence indicates that Ramadan affects Muslims’ relative preferences regarding work and religiosity, suggesting that the mechanism operates at least partly by changing beliefs and values that influence labor supply and occupational choices beyond the month of Ramadan itself. Together, our results indicate that religious practices can affect labor supply choices in ways that have negative implications for economic performance, but that nevertheless increase subjective well-being among followers.
An earlier discussion on ultra-Orthodox Jews and happiness is here, many excellent comments were offered.

The ultra-Orthodox as (happy) threshold earners

Asher Meir writes to me:

I enjoyed your post today especially since it is one that actually interfaces with my research and not just my teaching of basic micro/macro.

Israeli Ultra-Orthodox are threshold earners in both the positive sense (they don’t on the whole strive to earn more than some basic level) and also the normative sense (they are really more interested in other things.)  

Here is an interesting demonstration, you can easily do it yourself using the Israeli CBS “Social Survey Table Generator”. (surveys.cbs.gov.il/Survey/surveyE.htm)

One thing you can easily verify is that the Haredim (you can find them using Topic = Religion and Religiosity, Variable = Religiosity Jews and value is “Ultra Religious/ Haredi) have a reported life satisfaction that is through the roof. It is hugely higher than that of any other sector. (Get there from: Topic = Satisfaction – general; Variable = Satisfied with life.)

But you might say that could be because even though their economic situation is admittedly dire, they care more about other things. Now check out “Satisfaction economic situation”. They still come out way on top. They are not only happiest despite their economic situation, they are happiest with their economic situation. (I am aware that reported happiness and reported life satisfaction are different, I am just expressing myself briefly.) I’m attaching the spreadsheet.

Now here is the real threshold earner criterion: For each group, figure out the average life satisfaction for each earnings level. Then calculate the correlation between life satisfaction and earnings. For every population group it is positive, except for the Ultra-Orthodox. Their coefficient is not significantly different from zero. (J27 is the coefficient, J28 the standard error.)

I’m attaching an Excel spreadsheet that does this for 2012 but I’ve done it a number of times. I do not include the regressions for other sectors but you can easily do so and verify that the income coefficient is positive.

I calculated life satisfaction using a linear weighting, zero for Not so satisfied, one for Satisfied and two for Very satisfied. (Note that the “Not satisfied at all” column is empty. No ultra-orthodox gave this answer.) I used the middle of the income range for income. But in my experience it doesn’t matter much how you do this.

I played around with this once using the WVS to see if I could find some other group in the world for whom life satisfaction was totally uncorrelated with income. I didn’t find any but I imagine that Hal Varian would find it easy to do so.

Those are intriguing results.  One possibility is that (some?) religions make people pretty happy.  Another is that lack of money does not make you unhappy, provided that a) you can cite a good reason for having a lower income, b) you have peer and family support for your situation/decision, and c) there is no negative selection into the other lower income individuals you will end up hanging around.  Bryan Caplan might cite the large number of children as a source of life satisfaction.

If one was looking for grounds to be skeptical, perhaps extremely religious groups use the concepts of happiness and life satisfaction in different ways.  For instance complaining about your life satisfaction might be considering a signal of impiety and thus the extremely religious might put a better gloss on things than their actually happiness would warrant.  Of course “pretending to be happy” may itself be a possible source of happiness.

Sentences to ponder…

Notably, easy-to-reach women are happier than easy-to-reach men, but hard-to-reach men are happier than hard-to-reach women, and conclusions of a survey could reverse with more attempted calls.

That is Ori Heffetz and Matthew Rabin, in the new AER.  An ungated version is here.  Understandably, the authors are worried about potential subject selection biases in studies of self-reported happiness.

The happiness of economists

There is a new paper by Lars P. Feld, Sarah Necker, and Bruno S. Frey, and here is the abstract:

This study investigates the determinants of economists’ life satisfaction. The analysis is based on a survey of professional, mostly academic economists from European countries and beyond. We find that certain features of economists’ professional situation influence their well-being. Happiness is increased by having more research time while the lack of a tenured position decreases satisfaction in particular if the contract expires in the near future or cannot be extended. Surprisingly, publication success has no effect on satisfaction. While the perceived level of external pressure also has no impact, the perceived change of pressure in recent years has. Economists may have accepted a high level of pressure when entering academia but do not seem to be willing to cope with the increase observed in recent years.

You will note that “Economists tend to report a high level of life satisfaction.”  Furthermore this does not vary by gender.  Here are the nationality effects:

Compared to German economists, Italian, French and researchers from Eastern European countries have a statistically significantly lower probability to report being “highly satisfied” (significant at least at the 5%-level).  A similar effect is observed for economists from Spain, Portugal, and Austria; the effects are, however, at most significant at the 10%-level. Researchers from Switzerland, North America and Scandinavian countries tend to be more happy.

For the pointer I thank Viktor Brech.

Academic boycotts of Israel

One of them is gathering steam (and more detail here):

The National Council of the American Studies Association announced Wednesday that it has unanimously endorsed a boycott of Israeli universities and other Israeli institutions — and urged its members to vote to make the boycott official policy of the association.

The move by the council, even if awaiting approval by the membership, is seen as a major victory for the movement for an academic boycott of Israel.

And yet I have a better idea.  If one is going to boycott institutions of Israel, should one not also boycott strong, powerful nations which have supported much of what Israel has done, especially strong, powerful nations which stole a lot of land from the original inhabitants, refuse to give it back, and have recently practiced torture, aggressive military intervention, and the murder of innocent civilians, and which spy upon much of the world, mostly without apology?

That’s right, they might consider boycotting the United States, starting with their very own name, which now would read “Council of the Studies Association.”  Cynical advocates of “self-deportation” (I am not one of them) might suggest a more general boycott of the nation as it relates to their choices of residence and employment, but I will settle for the group boycotting academic conferences in America.

I am in in Tel Aviv — albeit briefly — and happy to be here.  I am reminded of David Brooks’s recent column on the creeping politicization of life.  That is one trend we all ought to oppose.

Addendum: Here is a good dissent from the boycott.

Why I didn’t do 23andMe

I had a free voucher from the summer, but decided not to go ahead with a saliva test.  Here are my reasons:

1. I thought there is option value and I can always do a test later, for a better and more accurate service.  (I hadn’t thought of the FDA shutting the whole thing down, but still I expect the service will return in some manner, if only under another corporate banner or from overseas.)

2. I thought the “worry cost” of negative information would exceed the benefit of whatever specific preventive measures I might take.  Most useful ex ante preventive measures, such as diet and exercise, are fairly general in their application and I didn’t think there was likely much to be learned about specific measures for specific potential maladies.  And here is an interesting short piece on the likelihood of false negatives.

3. One might take more preventive measures with one’s ex ante and more uncertain knowledge than with one’s ex post and more certain knowledge.  For instance an absence of negative information might have encouraged me to slack on exercise, to the detriment of my eventual health outcomes.

4. I wouldn’t describe privacy concerns as my major worry, but at the margin still they counted for something.  I felt eventually this service would prove equivalent to making my genome public information, via something called GenomeLeaks or the like.  Why do that without having a better sense of its longer-run implications?

I’m glad I didn’t do it, glad I had the choice to decline to do it, and I am still feeling no temptation to do it in the future.  I do feel a slight amount of guilt for not contributing to a future “Big Data” project, but so be it.  I also am glad I am not contributing to some of the inevitably unethical uses to which eugenics will be put, and that is more than a counterbalance, given that I expect no practical benefit from reading my own test results.

But is he on time for low status people?

Being 50 minutes late for his first meeting with Pope Francis was nothing unusual for Russian President Vladimir Putin. That’s just the way he is — a character trait that provides some insight into his attitude toward power.

When Putin arrived on time to an audience with Pope John Paul II in 2003, the punctuality was considered a newsworthy aberration: “The President Was Not Even a Second Late,” read the headline in the newspaper Izvestia. He had been 15 minutes late for a similar audience in 2000.

The waits other leaders have had to endure in order to see Putin range from 14 minutes for the Queen of England to three hours for Yulia Tymoshenko, the former Ukrainian prime minister. Few people are as important in terms of protocol as the queen or the pope, and there is no country Putin likes to humiliate as much as Ukraine.

The typical delay seems to be about 30 minutes. Half an hour is enough in some cultures to make people mad. Koreans saw Putin’s 30-minute lateness for a meeting with their President Park Geun Hye as a sign of disrespect.

Everybody endures the wait, though.

There is more here, hat tip to Elizabeth Dickinson.

The culture that was Singapore (Haw Par Villa)

It has its gruesome side, as illustrated by this look at a traditional site for visits, Haw Par Villa:

Thousands used to throng the park, and it once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with attractions like Singapore Zoo and Jurong Bird Park. “Every Singaporean over the age of 35 probably has a picture of themselves at Haw Par,” said Desmond Sim, a local playwright. Those pictures would probably include the following statues, each made from plastered cement paste and wire mesh: a human head on the body of a crab, a frog in a baseball cap riding an ostrich, and a grandmother suckling at the breast of another woman.

But the highlight of this bizarre park are the Ten Courts. A tableau of severe disciplines are shown in painstaking detail, along with a placard stating the sin that warranted it. Tax dodgers are pounded by a stone mallet, spikes driven into a skeletal chest cavity like a bloodthirsty pestle in mortar. Spot the tiny tongue as it is pulled out of a screaming man, watch the demon flinging a young girl into a hill of knives. Ungratefulness results in a blunt metal rod cutting a very large, fleshly heart out of a woman. Perhaps the most gruesome depiction is an executioner pulling tiny intestines out from a man tied to a pole. The colons were visible and brown. The crime? Cheating during exams.

The park may be closing down, with few remaining attendees, though from the article it seems you still can go.  Hurry up.

You can read TripAdvisor reviews of the park here.  Here is Wikipedia on the park.  Here are Flickr images.  There are further sources here.

Are these the cultural preconditions of capitalism and good governance?  I know which of my colleagues will be most happy to read about this.

Cosmos and Taxis

Cosmos and Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization is a new journal that looks to be of interest.  The editor, David Emanuel Andersson, writes in the introduction:

It is our belief that Hayek and Polanyi’s contributions constitute the foundation for a new research program in the social sciences. Spontaneous-order theory has the potential for clearing up a great deal of confusion about the workings of market, democracies and the global scientific community….But spontaneous orders are only a subset of a wider class of emergent orders. As diZerega explains, emergent orders are unplanned and exhibit orderly development trajectories, but only some of them are spontaneous orders in the sense of providing easily interpreted feedback to order participants. Examples of emergent orders that are not spontaneous in the sense of Hayek or Polanyi are civil society, the ecosystem, and human cultures. Thus emergent orders in this more general sense are relevant not only to [economics, political science and the philosophy of science] but also to sociology and biology. It is our intent that Cosmos+Taxis will become an arena for multidisciplinary conversations that engage scholars across all five disciplines.

The first issue can be found here (pdf) and it contains the following pieces:

  1. Introduction – David Emanuel Andersson
  2. Outlining a New Paradigm – Gus diZerega
  3. Spontaneous Orders and the Emergence of Economically Powerful Cities – Johanna Palmberg
  4. Rules of Spontaneous Order – Jason Potts
  5. Computable Cosmos – Eric M. Scheffel
  6. Comments on Palmberg, Potts, and Scheffel – Gus diZerega

IBM’s Watson will be made available in a more powerful form on the internet

Companies, academics and individual software developers will be able to use it at a small fraction of the previous cost, drawing on IBM’s specialists in fields like computational linguistics to build machines that can interpret complex data and better interact with humans.

That is a big deal, obviously.  The story is here.

A modern list of things to do before you are 30

From the desk of Eva Vivalt, who is not yet 30, here is part of the list:

1. Code

2. Be unemployed (unless you do 1)

3. Have a meme go viral

4. Try an app relating to “the quantified self”. (Whether to track spending, sleep, etc.)

5. Make a mistake publicly on the internet where it will live on forever

Travel is prominent as well.  These two items remind me of Ben Casnocha:

8. Learn about behavioural economics and the mistakes you might make, such as how you may be affected by projection bias. You can easily waste a lot of time being upset about things that won’t matter in time or going the wrong direction because of mistaken beliefs

9. Remember that xkcd comic strip about the value of becoming more efficient at a task? When you’re young, you stand to benefit for a lot longer from any positive improvements you can make. So figure out how to eat well, what kind of things make you happy, etc. Invest a lot of time in learning, not necessarily formally

She sums it up like this:

 I feel that with increasing inequality, using your youth well is all the more important, something I bet Tyler Cowen would agree with.

What would you add to the list?

Hayek’s liberaltarian essay “”Free” Enterprise and Competitive Order”

I’ve been preparing a class on Hayek for MRUniversity.com, and I was struck by my reread of this essay, which was presented at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting of 1947 (it was later published in Individualism and Economic Order, pdf of the book here).

In this piece Hayek argues the following:

1. It is not enough for classical liberals to seek to limit the state, they also must outline what governments could and should do better.

2. Monetary policy should be used to limit unemployment, albeit in a rules-based framework.

3. Eminent domain is an essential function of government, especially in urban cities, and it needs to be thought through more carefully.

4. Many of the biggest dangers of monopoly stem from patent law and intellectual property protection, rather than from monopoly of the traditional “sole seller” sort.  On this issue Hayek sounds like Alex or Larry Lessig.

5. It is not enough to defend “freedom of contract” in the abstract, rather the details of the law really matter.

6. Hayek questions whether limited liability for corporations is always the right way to proceed.

7. Finally, although inheritance taxes have in the past sometimes been abused, “…inheritance taxes could, of course, be made an instrument toward greater social mobility and greater dispersion of property and, consequently, may have to be regarded as important tools of a truly liberal policy…”

You will recall that in other settings Hayek endorsed the idea of a social welfare state and also the taxation of pollution.

What is the most philosophical thing that you have ever heard a child under the age of 5 say?

That is a new Reddit thread (apologies, I have forgotten who directed my attention to it).  My favorite answer was this Stigler-Becker approach to the matter:

My little sister handed me a juice box as I was packing to move out and said “No one is really a grown up. They just act old because they have to”

The full thread is here.