Category: Philosophy
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.
Sentences to ponder
Medical professionals were in effect told that their ethical mantra “first do no harm” did not apply, because they were not treating people who were ill.
That concerns doctor involvement in the U.S. torture of prisoners. The pointer is from Ted Gioia.
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.
The Ideological Migration of the Economics Laureates
That work fills up the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch.
This issue of Econ Journal Watch (download, .pdf) is given over to a special project that considers such changes as may have occurred among the 71 individuals who, through 2012, won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
Ideological profiles of all 71 laureates make up the bulk of the issue. The 71 profiles are bundled in a single large document that is equipped with handy links for internal navigation.
Ideological change is interpreted in terms of either growing more classical liberal or growing less classical liberal. Daniel Klein leads the project. In his overview essay he explains the investigation, its many limitations, and the findings.
…David Colander served as overseeing referee, and he reports on the project.
Twelve of the laureates replied to a questionnaire requesting that they discuss their ideological outlooks at different times in their lives. The twelve who replied are Kenneth Arrow, Ronald Coase, Peter Diamond, Eric Maskin, James Mirrlees, Roger Myerson, Edward Prescott, Thomas Schelling, William Sharpe, Vernon Smith, Robert Solow, and Michael Spence. Their responses are included in their profiles, and they are also collected in a standalone appendix.
This is path-breaking work in intellectual history, the best contribution to the history of modern economics in recent memory, fascinating as intellectual biography and autobiography, and it should be snapped up immediately by some enterprising publisher.
Behavioral biases in charitable giving, installment #1637
People pay more attention to the number of people killed in a natural disaster than to the number of survivors when deciding how much money to donate to disaster relief efforts, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
…Their model estimated that about $9,300 was donated per person killed in a given disaster. The number of people affected in the disasters, on the other hand, appeared to have no influence on the amount donated to relief efforts.
The summary article is here, and the gated published version is here. I do not see an ungated copy. Here is a related paper (pdf) on how disasters drive aid decisions.
For the pointer I thank Bill Benzon.
Russian shot in quarrel over Kant’s philosophy
An argument in southern Russia over philosopher Immanuel Kant, the author of “Critique of Pure Reason,” devolved into pure mayhem when one debater shot the other.
A police spokeswoman in Rostov-on Don, Viktoria Safarova, said two men in their 20s were discussing Kant as they stood in line to buy beer at a small store on Sunday. The discussion deteriorated into a fistfight and one participant pulled out a small nonlethal pistol and fired repeatedly.
The victim was hospitalized with injuries that were not life-threatening. Neither person was identified.
It was not clear which of Kant’s ideas may have triggered the violence.
The link is here, and for the pointer I thank Michael Rosenwald.
The etymology of “serendipity”
The first noted use of “serendipity” in the English language was by Horace Walpole (1717–1797). In a letter to Horace Mann (dated 28 January 1754) he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. The name stems from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon), from Arabic Sarandib. Parts of Sri Lanka were under the rule of South Indian kings for extended periods of time in history. Kings of Kerala, India (Cheranadu)were called Chera Kings and dheep means island, the island belonging to Chera King was called Cherandeep, hence called Sarandib by Arab traders.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Vivian.
I am sorry, but this is absurd
Charles Manski, a well-known professor of economics at Northwestern, writes:
The anti-tax rhetoric evident in much lay discussion of public policy draws considerable support from the prevalent negative language of professional economic discourse. Economists regularly write about the ‘inefficiency’, ‘deadweight loss’, and ‘distortion’ of income taxation.
In fact he wishes to abolish those concepts for their anti-governmental implications and work only with social welfare functions directly.
That’s one easy way to limit deadweight loss from policies, namely take it out of your analytical framework. The reality is that it is still the simplest and best way to explain why very high rates of taxation — as noted say by George Harrison or Bjorn Borg — are not such a good idea.
Manski also ignores that a belief in deadweight loss is fully compatible with the view that government spending may bring economic benefits. In fact you often cannot understand the benefits of (some) government spending without first grasping the deadweight loss concept.
And even if you think Arrow’s theorem is overrated in its importance, as I do, working with social welfare functions isn’t exactly a recipe for wringing normative preconceptions out of your economics. And any plausible social welfare function is going to pick up some concept of deadweight loss and stick it back into the calculations. How about a social welfare function which says “minimize deadweight loss”, which is what you often find in Mirrlees?
It’s called microeconomics. Yet Manski complains that “…prominent applied public economists continue to take the theory quite seriously.” You’ll even find the notion of deadweight loss in some Principles books, believe it or not. Must we derive a new social welfare function every time we wish to do partial equilibrium analysis, say of a tax on a single (small) commodity?
And get this example of mood affiliation:
The Feldstein article and similar research on deadweight loss appear predestined to make income taxation look bad. The research aims to measure the social cost of the income tax relative to the utterly implausible alternative of a lump-sum tax. It focuses attention entirely on the social cost of financing government spending, with no regard to the potential social benefits.
Contra Manski, I say it is fine to study the tax side of the equation while leaving the benefits (and costs) of expenditures to other researchers. (By the way, Manski’s supposed culprit, Martin Feldstein, first made his name studying how to measure the benefits of public expenditure.) All his point really boils down to is to note that in a second best comparison, optimum deadweight loss generally will be positive, as noted by Lipsey and Lancaster long ago in their 1955-56 ReStud piece, not to mention Frank Ramsey.
Manski wishes to cite the work of James Mirrlees for inspiration, but in fact Mirrlees has been a firm believer in the deadweight loss of taxation concept, and in comparing economies to hypothetical first best situations, as illustrated by for instance by these pieces.
I can thank Manski for reminding me that Tyrone, my evil twin, has been begging me for a chance to blog again at Marginal Revolution…
Is Emile Simpson the new Clausewitz?
The new (November 2012) book is War From the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics, and yes it is an important work. It is also difficult to excerpt. Nonetheless I especially liked these two sentences about Afghanistan:
This kind of situation, where sides argue tooth and nail over the meaning of every point or action, is typical of unstable interpretative environments, and those environments are in turn produced when people are insecure about who they are, and what they are about. Returning to the analogy of sixteenth-century England, we find that a parallel situation would be the debate over the interpretation of the English translation of the Bible in the 1520s and 1530s.
It is in general extremely insightful on the conflict in Afghanistan, where the author has had three tours of duty. The chapter on the British military campaign in Borneo in the mid-1960s (an oddly neglected historical episode) is also especially good.
Here is FT lunch with Emile Simpson, possibly gated for you. Excerpt:
In Simpson’s view, one of the biggest mistakes the US has made has been to talk about a “global war on terror”, a phrase he describes as silly because it raises expectations that can never be met. “If you elevate this to a global concept, to the level of grand strategy, that is profoundly dangerous,” he says. “If you want stability in the world you have to have clear strategic boundaries that seek to compartmentalise conflicts, and not aggregate them. The reason is that if you don’t box in your conflicts with clear strategic boundaries, chronological, conceptual, geographical, legal, then you experience a proliferation of violence.”
Here is a very positive TLS review of Simpson’s book., where it is described as one of the half dozen essential works on military strategy since World War II.
Dense reading, but definitely recommended.
*Securities Against Misrule*, the new Jon Elster book
The subtitle is Juries, Assemblies, Elections and the book focuses on the very Nordic concern of how to make better political decisions within a democratic framework. Elster thinks that social choice theory presents insoluble dilemmas with ranking outcomes, so we should focus on improving how political decisions are made. It’s all about “preventing the prevention of intelligence.” He promotes secret voting, public deliberations, incorporation of diverse opinions, waiting until passions have subsided, and various methods of running better jury trials. The influence of Bentham here is paramount, albeit a lesser-known Bentham, that of his own tract Securities Against Misrule, among other writings.
I found this one of the most stimulating social science books so far this year, and it has Elster’s impressive intelligence, breadth and clarity. But I see many points quite differently, so I will pass along a few issues that come to mind:
1. I worry about the standard philosopher’s comeback to Elster’s proceduralism. If we cannot very well judge or compare outcomes, how ultimately are we supposed to evaluate procedural changes? Furthermore the theory of the second best suggests that procedures which “sound good” may not in fact lead to better outcomes. We get stuck rather quickly.
2. I don’t myself find aggregation problems to be insuperable. We all know that Norway is a great place, and cardinal information will get us over the usual Arrow problems , a’la Sen (1984). A lot of the rest is what I call details. Without intending any bias against explicit norms of rational discourse, the more fundamental question is how a country can enjoy the luxury position of debating such matters peacefully in the first place. Ask Egypt.
3. If I think about the historical decisions which I consider wise and important, they very often are based on a certain amount of Machiavellianism, rather than on the standards for an ideal speech community. The ratification of the U.S. Constitution is one obvious example. Might Elster’s proceduralism work best at the micro level, when embedded in a broader realpolitik framework that already gives some Machiavellian control to “the good guys”?
4. Elster never considers markets or betting (apologies to Carow Hall) as mechanisms for preference revelation, though at one point he evinces skepticism about vote trading.
5. The idea of giving more influence to smarter people also is not on the table (see p.85 for a brief discussion, and also the bottom of p.5).
6. There is occasional talk of the private sector, such as the stipulation that Norwegian corporate boards appoint 40% women. Yet there is no systematic discussion of how private companies or private non-profits run meetings, conduct elections, obtain board consensus, or otherwise reach decisions. This point is not unrelated to #5. I’m not suggesting government can be “run like a business” but it is odd to write as if private sector experience with decision-making is irrelevant. It is those procedures which have to pass some kind of market test. So more Hayek, less Habermas.
7. At the end of the day, the losers in these dialogues will suffer under coercion and the winners will exercise power. This limits what kind of upfront discourse is possible. I wished for this topic to receive more attention.
Elster has been writing excellent books for over thirty years, and you can buy this book here.
The culture that is Japan markets in everything Newcomb’s paradox edition
In Japan, where palm reading remains one of the most popular means of fortune-telling, some people have figured out a way to change their fate. It’s a simple idea: change your palm, change the reading, and change your future. All you need is a competent plastic surgeon with an electric scalpel who has a basic knowledge of palmistry. Or you can draw the lines on your hand with a marker and let him work the magic you want.
The story is here, hat tip goes to Robert Martinez. There are some other interesting points in the article, but I shall not reproduce them here.
Very good sentences
It is perhaps no accident that the ardour for liberty is no longer expressed through political channels. Its main outlets are morally ambiguous figures such as Mr Snowden and Bradley Manning, the US soldier who gave classified documents to WikiLeaks. Technology will pose new challenges for all states. We are not in a world of John le Carré’s spies but one resembling CIA TV series Person of Interest, where states claim power over us ostensibly to prevent us coming to harm. But we cannot navigate this terrain by reinstating a form of moral hegemony where the rights of Americans count more; and the rest of the world be damned.
That is from Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the FT, the whole thing is excellent but the first two sentences cited above are the most striking of them all.
John Rawls was a Platonist on baseball
On most Saturdays, the shy, private Rawls would spend hours typing letters recalling past events in astounding detail. One such letter, republished by Boston Review, recalled a conversation he had some twenty years earlier—you probably had conversations with sentient beings today who have lived shorter than that—about why baseball is the best sport. In the letter, Rawls credits his interlocutor, Harry Kalven, for coming up with six reasons why baseball is “the best of all games.”
That is from Aaron Gordon (via BookForum), who also dissects the fallacies of Rawls on baseball.