Category: Philosophy

Max wants to know what to do

Max has me stumped.  I promised him an answer months ago, but I’ve come up with nothing of value, other than perhaps citing Adam Smith on alienation and the division of labor.  I’ve felt guilty ever since and I suppose today is the day I fess up to having no good response at all.  Here is his initial email:

1) As a fairly recent graduate of an Ivy League institution (with a bachelor’s degree), most of my classmates seemed to have some idea that career and life path choice should be driven by a “passion” such that the right choice is self-evident to the chooser. What does this belief mean to you as a social scientist?…

For question two, then, you may sense where this is going…

2) Assume I have no such passion. Furthermore, I am a fairly well-qualified young generalist.* What paths should most appeal to me if my goal is to maximize doing “interesting” work? Doing meaningful work? Achieving social status? (Which of these goals should be primary?) Need I try to develop a passion before selecting a life path/career, and if so how do I do it?

All the best,
Max

*Two years out with a BA from an Ivy League school. Top 10% of the class but not an academic rock star. A record of primarily reading/writing-intensive courses, as well as basic to intermediate economics, calculus, statistics, a proofs course. Time spent abroad in study and travel, though no foreign language fluency. Two years in the private sector with a decent amount of analytic and management experience, but without a big name behind it.

Max is hardly doomed.  Still, reading emails such as Max’s makes me more of a determinist.  He seems to have a meta-preference for more career passion, but no way of getting there.  I would tell Max to at least consider the world of consulting (and here is Robin Hanson on same).  I also would tell him that meta-preferences are overrated, as there is no reason per se to side with the meta-preference over the preference.  Passion isn’t a value in and of itself.

What other advice can you all give?

What if we all died at forty?

Akka emails me:

I think one of the things that make planning (and living) life so hard is the combination of the facts  that

  1. Its end date is uncertain
  2. It is rather highly likely that one’s faculties will be duller towards the end.

If it was certain that when we sleep on our 40th birthday, we wouldn’t wake up, how different would the world be? Economically? Culturally? Will it be more peaceful? More left leaning?

One question is how child-bearing norms will evolve.  There will be considerable pressure to have kids at age eighteen or so.  (It might be considered unethical to have a child at age thirty-five, although if the fertility rate falls enough the economy might shift heavily into orphanages and this could be considered virtuous nonetheless.)  I predict many people would become much stricter in their morals and more religious, and they will have children quite early.

Other people would attempt to maintain a collegiate lifestyle through their death at age forty.  There would be a polarization of outcomes and approaches to life.  Old age as an equalizer, and as an enforcer of responsible savings behavior, would be gone.

The likelihood of warfare would rise, if only because the sage elderly won’t be around and male hormones will run rampant.

Credit would be harder to come by and the rate of home ownership would fall.  The rate of voting turnout will go down, as would the degree of wealth inequality and the amount of innovation.  Federal discretionary spending, as a percentage of the budget, would rise.

We can look at data from Huntington’s Disease, for instance see the Oster, Shoulson, and Dorsey paper.  Only five to ten percent of potential carriers choose to learn whether they will have the disease, even though the cost of the test is low.  That suggests knowledge of a finite horizon is itself costly and a source of discomfort.  Those who learn they will encounter bad fates from the disease are more likely to divorce, more likely to get pregnant, and much more likely to report significant financial changes and changes in recreational activities.  Of course these are solo individuals embedded in societies with normal life expectancies; if everyone were to meet an early untimely end I believe the (partial and polarized) shift toward conservative and religious norms would be much stronger.

“Could this euro have been made out of ice?”

It is becoming increasingly clear that moves out of the euro will be done furtively, sometimes gradually, and most of all non-transparently.  At some point we’ll start arguing over whether “the euro” is a “rigid designator.”

First Cyprus has capital controls and now Portugal may be making a different kind of plunge:

The Portuguese government is considering a plan to pay public workers and pensioners one month of their salary in treasury bills rather than cash after a high court ruled out wage cuts…

Of course these “treasury bills” (is that a rigid designator?) will have a floating price with respect to the euro, with respect to the “euro trapped in a Portuguese bank” (eventually), and other Portuguese treasury securities for that matter.  Which will be the real money of Portugal?

If indeed this happens (one government spokesperson has denied the report) and perhaps then continues, at what point do we conclude that the Portuguese have opted for a dual currency?

Would the new scrip currency push out the euro or vice versa or can they coexist?  One central question is at what rate the government would accept the new scrip for payments and taxes or otherwise offer to redeem or convert it.

Another question is banking confidence.  If the new scrip goes badly, that may lower confidence in the Portuguese banking system.  If the new scrip goes well…that may also lower confidence in the Portuguese banking system.  The government will issue more of it and it will come closer to a dual currency.  Bank accounts denominated in euros may become less credible in terms of their underlying protection.  Once a new alternative currency is up and running, Portugal can leave the euro much more easily, converting bank deposits into the new currency along the way to ease their fiscal crunch.  After the Cyprus episode, they are probably counting less on help from others.

Ideally the Portuguese government would like to be in a position of promising that the new script will be retired/repurchased within a month or some other very short time frame.

That’s not usually how it ends up working.

Garett Jones offers related comment.  Here are a few remarks on lecterns made of ice.

Australia to Compensate Organ Donors

Australia once again proves that it is a world leader in innovative public policy with an experimental plan to compensate (living) organ donors.

Workers who want to donate a kidney will be offered up to six weeks’ paid leave under a federal government plan to reduce the waiting list for life-saving organs.

Health Minister Tanya Plibersek and parliamentary secretary for health and ageing Shanye Neumann say the government will put up $1.3 million over two year for a trial that will be reviewed in 2015.

Ms Plibersek says living donors will be paid six weeks on minimum wage, totalling up to $3600, to help take the financial pressure off before and after the major surgery.

…the scheme is one step towards bridging the gap between the number of kidney donors and recipients.

The proposed experiment does, however, contains a peculiar restriction which is worth highlighting because it illustrates a tension between economics and ethics, at least ethics as conventionally understood (e,g, Michael Sandel). The compensation “will only be available to donors who have a job.”

The idea, I believe, is to avoid any hint of “exploitation” or “pecuniary coercion.” The problem is that another word for pecuniary coercion is incentive. Thus, the goal is to increase the supply of organs without creating an incentive to supply organs, at least not a strong incentive. To help navigate this invisible line the amount paid is low and the only people who can receive compensation are the ones who don’t need the money. In short, the plan discriminates against the unemployed so that no one can accuse the government of exploiting the unemployed by giving them too much money.

Nevertheless, although the amount is small and restricted, Australia’s willingness to experiment with the idea of compensation in order to save lives is laudable and potentially groundbreaking.

Hat tip: Andrew Leigh.

Addendum: For other innovative approaches to the worldwide shortage of transplant organs see my articles here and here.

Edward Luce has lunch with Michael Sandel

I ask Sandel whether he does anything in his own life to make the world less money-minded. He begins a couple of answers but peters out. I suggest that he makes all his lectures free online. “Yes, that’s one thing,” he agrees. After our lunch I see that Sandel is listed on Royce Carlton, a speaker’s agency, as one of its big names (without apparent irony, a posting by the agency last year said Sandel was available to lecture “at a reduced fee in conjunction with his new book, What Money Can’t Buy”).

The rest of the meal is presented here, possibly behind an FT gate; Sandel opted for Legal Seafood and Luce ordered fish and chips.

Does anyone give money to charity efficiently?

Scott Alexander meets up with Robin Hanson and reports from the front:

Then Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias got up and just started Robin Hansonning at everybody.

…One of his claims that generated the most controversy was that instead of donating money to charity, you should invest the money at compound interest, then donate it to charity later after your investment has paid off – preferably just before you die, since donating money after death is legally complicated. His argument, nice and simple, was that the real rate of return on investment has been higher than the growth rate for 3000 years and this pattern shows no signs of changing. If you donate the money today, your donation grows with the growth rate, but if you invest it, it grows with the interest rate. He gave his classic example of Benjamin Franklin, who put his relatively meager earnings into a trust fund to be paid out two hundred years later; when they did, the money had grown to $7 million. He said that the reason people didn’t do this was that they wanted the social benefits of having given money away, which are unavailable if you wait until just before you die to do so.

…Then he started talking about how you should only ever donate to one charity – the most effective. I’d heard this one before and even written essays speaking in favor of it, but it’s always been very hard for me and I’ve always chickened out. What Robin added was, once again, a psychological argument – that the reason this is so hard is that if charity is showing that you care, you want to show that you care about a lot of different things. Only donating to one charity robs you of opportunities to feel good when the many targets of your largesse come up and burdens you with scope insensitivity (my guess is that most people would feel more positive affect about someone who saved a thousand dogs and one cat than someone who saved two thousand dogs. The first person saved two things, the second person only saved one.) In retrospect this is absolutely true and my gibbering recoil at this problem isn’t just Yet Another Cognitive Bias but just good old self-interest.

The post is interesting throughout, and the hat tip goes to Geoffrey Miller, @MatingMind.

The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol

I receive many emails asking me what is my attitude toward guns and gun control.  I would say I wish it worked better than it does (a key point), I don’t think it works very well, I am happy to make those changes which seem to work somewhat, but overall I see an America with lots of guns and a falling crime and murder rate, so let’s focus on what is working, whatever that may be.

I would be happier if advocates of stronger gun control would state up front what percentage of the variation in the murder rate they thought they would be controlling.  I see them as likely to make some dent in the suicide rate, most of all.

I would gladly see a cultural shift toward the view that gun ownership is dangerous and undesirable, much as the cultural attitudes toward smoking have shifted since the 1960s.

I am, however, consistent.  I also think we should have a cultural shift toward the view that alcohol — and yes I mean all alcohol — is at least as dangerous and undesirable.  I favor a kind of voluntary prohibition on alcohol.  It is obvious to me that alcohol is one of the great social evils and when I read the writings of the prohibitionists, while I don’t agree with their legal remedies, their arguments make sense to me.  It remains one of the great undervalued social movements.  For mostly cultural reasons, it is now a largely forgotten remnant of progressivism and it probably will stay that way, given that “the educated left” mostly joined with America’s shift to being “a wine nation” in the 1970s.

Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner.  In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.

In part our guns problem is an alcohol problem.  According to Mark Kleiman, half the people in prison were drinking when they did whatever they did.  (Admittedly the direction of causality is murky but theory points in some rather obvious directions.)  Our car crash problem – which kills many thousands of Americans each year — is also in significant part an alcohol problem.  There are connections between alcohol and wife-beating and numerous other social ills, including health issues of course.

It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem.  Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant.  I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences.  Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.

The people who get this right — it seems to me — are the Mormons.  Compassion, most of all for the poor, means that we should raise the social status of Mormons on this issue.

I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on ideas

What is the scholar, what is the man for, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time?  Have you leisure, power, property, friends? you shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every unproven opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of good will and honest seeking.  All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the highest compliment, man ever receives from heaven, is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels.

That is from Introductory Lecture on the Times.

Eleven weird solutions to the Fermi paradox?

In my group at least half of these don’t count as weird at all.  Yet I had never thought of this one, “They’re All Hanging Out At the Edge of the Galaxy”:

This interesting solution to the Fermi Paradox was posited by Milan M. Ćirković and Robert Bradbury.

“We suggest that the outer regions of the Galactic disk are the most likely locations for advanced SETI targets,” they wrote. The reason for this is that sophisticated intelligent communities will tend to migrate outward through the Galaxy as their capacities of information-processing increase. Why? Because machine-based civilizations, with their massive supercomputers, will have huge problems managing their heat waste. They’ll have to set up camp where it’s super cool. And the outer rim of the Galaxy is exactly that.

Subsequently, there may be a different galactic habitable zone for post-Singularity ETIs than for meat-based life. By consequence, advanced ETIs have no interest in exploring the bio-friendly habitable zone. Which means we’re looking for ET in the wrong place. Interestingly, Stephen Wolfram once told me that heat-free computing will someday be possible, so he doesn’t think this is a plausible solution to the Fermi Paradox.

Once again, air conditioning really does influence location, at least if this is true (which I doubt).  The other ten are here, and the pointer is from George Dvorsky.

Why a coach should be ambiguous

From Jeff:

Remember how Mr. Miyagi taught The Karate Kid how to fight?  Wax on/Wax off. Paint the fence. Don’t forget to breathe. A coach is the coach because he knows what the student needs to do to advance. A big problem for coaches is that the most precocious students also (naturally) think they know what they need to learn.

If Mr. Miyagi told Daniel that he needed endless repetition of certain specific hand movements to learn karate, Daniel would have rebelled and demanded to learn more and advance more quickly. Mr. Miyagi used ambiguity to evade conflict.

An artist with natural gift for expression needs to learn convention. But she may disagree with the teacher about how much time should be spent learning convention. If the teacher simply gives her exercises to do without explanation her decision to comply will be on the basis of an overall judgment of whether this teacher, on average, knows best. To instead say “You must learn conventions, here are some exercises for that” runs the risk that the student moderates the exercises in line with her own judgment about the importance of convention.

The cosmopolitan and civil libertarian core of economics

Here is my latest New York Times column, more philosophical than usual, excerpt:

Economic analysis is itself value-free, but in practice it encourages a cosmopolitan interest in natural equality. Many economic models, of course, assume that all individuals are motivated by rational self-interest or some variant thereof; even the so-called behavioral theories tweak only the fringes of a basically common, rational understanding of people. The crucial implication is this: If you treat all individuals as fundamentally the same in your theoretical constructs, it would be odd to insist that the law should suddenly start treating them differently.

At least since the 19th century, the interest of economists in personal liberty can be easily documented. In 1829, all 15 economists who held seats in the British Parliament voted to allow Roman Catholics as members. In 1858, the 13 economists in Parliament voted unanimously to extend full civil rights to Jews. (While both measures were approved, they were controversial among many non-economist members.) For many years leading up to the various abolitions of slavery, economists were generally critics of slavery and advocates of people’s natural equality, as documented by David M. Levy, professor of economics at George Mason University, and Sandra J. Peart, dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, in “The ‘Vanity of the Philosopher’: From Equality to Hierarchy in Post-Classical Economics.”

Professors Levy and Peart coined the phrase “analytical egalitarianism” to describe the underpinnings of this tradition. For example, Adam Smith cited birth and fortune, as opposed to intrinsically different capabilities, as the primary reasons for differences in social rank. And the classical economists Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill promoted equal legal and institutional rights for women long before such views were fashionable. Their utilitarian moral theories placed individuals on a par in the social calculus by asking about the greatest good for the greatest number.

There is more at the link of course, such as:

Often, economists spend their energies squabbling with one another, but arguably the more important contrast is between our broadly liberal economic worldview and the various alternatives — common around the globe — that postulate natural hierarchies of religion, ethnicity, caste and gender, often enforced by law and strict custom. Economists too often forget that we are part of this broader battle of ideas, and that we are winning some enduring victories.

I did not have the space to cover some additional questions of interest.  These include:

1. Will the move away from rational choice models, and toward a broader and larger empirical social science, including behavioral and neuro elements, nudge economics away from this heritage?

2. How much of the civil libertarian core, common among many economists, stems from the socioeconomic background of (many) current economists rather than from the economic method?

3. How do Indian economists poll on the caste system, relative to their socioeconomic peers?

4. How much will the extreme influx of non-Westerners into American and British graduate programs in economics affect the discipline in the years to come?

J. Coetzee writes to Paul Auster

From a letter:

Finally, a remark by Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: that one goes to bed with a woman in order to be able to talk to her.  Implication: that turning a woman into a mistress is only a first step; the second step, turning her into a friend, is the one that matters; but being friends with a woman you haven’t slept with is in practice impossible because there is too much unspoken in the air.

That is from Here and Now Letters 2008-2011, by Auster and Coetzee.  That excerpt is from the first letter, and I will keep reading.

Questions that are rarely asked

So, my libertarian devotees of evolutionary psychology, you can’t have it both ways.  If feminism is wrong to think we can and/or should resist the dispositions that evolution has given us, then why is it wrong for defenders of the classical liberal order to think we can and/or should resist those dispositions when it comes to our evolved instincts toward the morality of socialism?  Or put the other way around:  if resisting our evolved moral instincts and obeying the rules of just conduct work to generate a civilized, cooperative economic order, why should gender issues be any different?

That is from Steve Horwitz.