Category: Religion

The Army of Economists

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In a wide-ranging and interesting conversation Daniel Dennett reflects on hypocrisy and whether it may sometimes be optimal:

Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here’s two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves. I’ll call them the Gold Army and the Silver Army; same numbers, same training, same weaponry. They’re all armored and armed as well as we can do. The difference is that the Gold Army has been convinced that God is on their side and this is the cause of righteousness, and it’s as simple as that. The Silver Army is entirely composed of economists. They’re all making side insurance bets and calculating the odds of everything.

Which army do you want on the front lines? It’s very hard to say you want the economists, but think of what that means. What you’re saying is we’ll just have to hoodwink all these young people into some false beliefs for their own protection and for ours. It’s extremely hypocritical. It is a message that I recoil from, the idea that we should indoctrinate our soldiers. In the same way that we inoculate them against diseases, we should inoculate them against the economists’—or philosophers’—sort of thinking, since it might lead to them to think: am I so sure this cause is just? Am I really prepared to risk my life to protect? Do I have enough faith in my commanders that they’re doing the right thing? What if I’m clever enough and thoughtful enough to figure out a better battle plan, and I realize that this is futile? Am I still going to throw myself into the trenches? It’s a dilemma that I don’t know what to do about, although I think we should confront it at least.

It would be astounding if there were never a situation in which a lie was effective in producing a good result, i.e. a noble lie. But is a rule of noble lies effective? In a long sequence of calls to war, how many have been just and wise and how many have been driven by vainglorious leaders and foolish pride–so which army do you want? I prefer the silver.

Note also that Dennett mixes narrow self interest and rationality in his description of “economists.” But one can be fully rational without being narrowly self-interested. Dennett, for example, cheats a bit with his puzzle. The premise is some “horrific, terrible enemy” but then later the economists ask “am I so sure this cause is just”, to which the answer should be, given the premise, yes. In which case fighting is a rational response.

Hat tip: Brian Donohue.

Markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Instead of long beards and robes, they wear track suits and T-shirts. Their tablets are electronic, not hewn of stone, and they hold smartphones, not staffs. They may not look the part, but this ragtag group of Israelis is training to become the next generation of prophets.

For just 200 shekels, about $53, and in only 40 short classes, the Cain and Abel School for Prophets says it will certify anyone as a modern-day Jewish soothsayer.

The school, which launched classes this month, has baffled critics, many of whom have dismissed it as a blasphemy or a fraud.

Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Asher Meir.  By the way, I found this to be an especially odd and ineffective response:

“There is no way to teach prophecy,” said Rachel Elior, a professor of Jewish thought at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “It’s like opening a school for becoming Einstein or Mozart.”

I wonder what Bryan Caplan will think of this line:

Hapartzy can’t guarantee his course will give his students a direct line to God. But, he says, the syllabus provides the essential tools to bring out the prophet in anyone.

Here is another oddly incorrect statement:

 Roie Greenvald, a 27-year-old tennis instructor attending the classes, also showed some skepticism. While he expressed interest in the spiritual development the course offers, one crucial detail stands in the way of his religious elevation.

“I’m not going to become a prophet,” he said. “I don’t think it pays very well.”

The school takes on all comers and it is run by a Russian immigrant and software engineer.

Why would you write a bum check to God? (model this)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Maybe you are hoping that God will make the check a good one?  From the Western Wall in Jerusalem:

Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, who oversees Jerusalem’s Western Wall, said a worshipper found an envelope at the site Wednesday with 507 checks in the amount of about $1 million each. They were not addressed to anyone, and it’s doubtful they can be cashed.

Rabinovitch said most are Nigerian. Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said some were from the United States, Europe and Asia.

The story is here and for the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.

On the implied theology of Indian hotel butlers

by  Tyler Cowen in

As the eldest of the three-man team, Mr. Guha. 29, said, he is fluent in 22 subjects related to five-star doting, which include in-room dining, knowledge of international customs and, of course, complaint handling. His skills also extend to fixing the remote, getting spots off the carpet and something called “power dressing.” Mr. Guha says that his primary role, however, is to act as a super-efficient liaison between the guest and the hotel staff — part fixer, part personal assistant, and all yes-man.

“I would never consider a request to be bizarre; we always say it’s challenging,” Mr. Guha said. “I have always been taught that guest is god, and god cannot have a bizarre request.”

Of course I interpret this last quotation in entirely Straussian fashion (furthermore he doesn’t say it’s true, only that he has been taught as such, a classic Straussian move).  Here is more, interesting throughout, and for the pointer I thank Apoorv Trivedi.

Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection: An Experimental Study

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is a new paper by Dan M. Kahan, at Yale Law School, and it has to do with what I call “mood affiliation”:

Social psychologists have identified various plausible sources of ideological polarization over climate change, gun violence, national security, and like societal risks. This paper reports a study of three of them: the predominance of heuristic-driven information processing by members of the public; ideologically motivated cognition; and personality-trait correlates of political conservativism. The results of the study suggest reason to doubt two common surmises about how these dynamics interact. First, the study presents both observational and experimental data inconsistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism is distinctively associated with closed-mindedness: conservatives did no better or worse than liberals on an objective measure of cognitive reflection; and more importantly, both demonstrated the same unconscious tendency to fit assessments of empirical evidence to their ideological predispositions. Second, the study suggests that this form of bias is not a consequence of overreliance on heuristic or intuitive forms of reasoning; on the contrary, subjects who scored highest in cognitive reflection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognition. These findings corroborated the hypotheses of a third theory, which identifies motivated cognition as a form of information processing that rationally promotes individuals’ interests in forming and maintaining beliefs that signify their loyalty to important affinity groups. The paper discusses the normative significance of these findings, including the need to develop science communication strategies that shield policy-relevant facts from the influences that turn them into divisive symbols of identity.

To put that in Cowenspeak, both sides are guilty, the smart are guiltiest of them all, and the desire for group loyalty is partially at fault.  Is it possible you have seen these propensities in the economics blogosphere?

Here is a related blog post by Kahan, here is another on how independents do somewhat better than you might think, here is Kahan’s blog.

I would stress the distinction between epistemic process and being more right about the issues at a given point in time.  Even if various groups of individuals are epistemically similar in terms of how they process information, at some point in time some groups still will be more right than others, just as some sports fans, every now and then, are indeed backing the winning teams.  It’s less a sign of virtue than you might think.

For the pointer I thank Jonas Kathage.

Simon Blackburn suffers from mood affiliation

by  Tyler Cowen in

Via Ross Douthat, here is the close of Blackburn’s review of the new Thomas Nagel book:

There is charm to reading a philosopher who confesses to finding things bewildering. But I regret the appearance of this book. It will only bring comfort to creationists and fans of “intelligent design”, who will not be too bothered about the difference between their divine architect and Nagel’s natural providence. It will give ammunition to those triumphalist scientists who pronounce that philosophy is best pensioned off. If there were a philosophical Vatican, the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.

The Nagel book continues to go up in my eyes.

Political sorting in social dating relationships

by  Tyler Cowen in

Gregory Huber and Neil Malhotra have a new research paper Political Sorting in Social Relationships: Evidence from an Online Dating Community (pdf).  Here is one useful bit:

Relative to the average standard deviation by respondent for each outcome…shared ideology increases interest in responding by 12% of that amount, interest in long-term dating by 16%, and assessments of shared values by 20%.  By the same comparison, shared lack of political interest increases assessments of likelihood of responding by a statistically significant 18%, but has more modest…effects on interest in long-term dating and assessments of shared values, respectively.

There is much more data in this paper, including a discussion of which issues matter to people the most.  Here is one upshot:

…online dating pairings where communication takes place display greater political homogeneity than the population as a whole.

Can you raise your kid as a conservative or liberal?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a new study (caveat emptor all the way):

This new study, by a team led by psychologist R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, begins with new mothers describing their intentions and approach in 1991, and ends with a survey of their children 18 years later. In between, it features an assessment of the child’s temperament at age 4.

…“Parents who endorsed more authoritarian parenting attitudes when their children were one month old were more likely to have children who were conservative in their ideologies at age 18,” the researchers report. “Parents who endorsed more egalitarian parenting attitudes were more likely to have children who were liberal.”

Obviously genes are an alternative channel of influence.  And this is a stunner:

Also, the Illinois researchers did not gauge the parents’ political beliefs.

So I don’t believe the interpretations at all.  Still, it is interesting to see the extent of attitudinal persistence, and furthermore “…our results also showed that early childhood temperament predicted variation in conservative versus liberal ideologies.”  I suspect, however, that politics would turn out to be less susceptible to parental shaping than, say, religion or general temperamental approach to religion.

I consider this study radically incomplete, but still it is interesting to see the question tackled with a twenty-year time window and some ex ante planning.

For the pointer I thank www.artsjournal.com.

Where oh where are they?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Bringing the search for another Earth about as close as it will ever get, a team of European astronomers was scheduled to announce on Wednesday that it had found a planet the same mass as Earth’s in Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that is the Sun’s closest neighbor, only 4.4 light-years away.

Here is more.  Planets, planets everywhere…

Emails I receive (the consumer surplus of the internet)

by  Tyler Cowen in

…the origins of your name, off by a letter.

RL

> Put the following text into google: freemason Cowan Tyler What is the result?

Interesting. “Tyler” is the title of an officer in the Masonic hierarchy, while a “cowan” is a stonemason who is not a member of the Freemasons guild. This from “Freemasonry for Dummies”:

The Tyler’s job is to keep off all “cowans and eavesdroppers” (for more on the Tyler, see Chapter 5). The term cowan is unusual and its origin is probably from a very old Anglo-Saxon word meaning “dog.” Cowan came to be a Scottish word used as a putdown to describe stonemasons who did not join the Freemasons guild, while the English used it to describe Masons who built rough stone walls without mortar and did not know the true secrets of Freemasonry.

A cultural guide for Afghanis

by  Tyler Cowen in

After eleven years, we are trying a new approach:

“Please do not get offended if you see a NATO member blowing his/her nose in front of you,” the guide instructs.

“When Coalition members get excited, they may show their excitement by patting one another on the back or the behind,” it explains. “They may even do this to you if they are proud of the job you’ve done. Once again, they don’t mean to offend you.”

This is news to me, though I would like to see it confirmed:

Fifty-one coalition troops have been killed this year by their Afghan counterparts. While some insider attacks have been attributed to Taliban infiltrators, military officials say the majority stem from personal disputes and misunderstandings.

Finally:

NATO’s coalition is described as a “work of art.”

For my house, I might rather have a Suzani.

Catholic markets in everything not all magazines are folding

by  Tyler Cowen in

With exorcism booming in Poland, Roman Catholic priests have joined forces with a publisher to launch what they claim is the world’s first monthly magazine focused exclusively on chasing out the devil.

“The rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland is telling,” Father Aleksander Posacki, a professor of philosophy, theology and leading demonologist and exorcist told reporters in Warsaw at the Monday launch of the Egzorcysta monthly.

Ironically, he attributed the rise in demonic possessions in what remains one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic nations partly to the switch from atheist communism to free market capitalism in 1989.

“It’s indirectly due to changes in the system: capitalism creates more opportunities to do business in the area of occultism. Fortune telling has even been categorised as employment for taxation,” Posacki told AFP.

Here is more, via Bookslut.

Economists who are clergy

by  Tyler Cowen in
Your post on economist/artists got me thinking about economists/clergy.
Obviously the most famous is Reverend Malthus. A Google search for “Economist Catholic priest” didn’t turn up much. “Economist rabbi” discloses that Israel Kirzner is the rabbi of a congregation in Brooklyn. “Economist clergyman” turned up Richard Jones but I’ve never heard of him. Economist/Jesuit turned up a number of names, all of them obscure to me.
Asher Meir also writes to me:

My favored explanation is that “clergy” is an artificially higher bar than “artist”. Probably a large number of economists are and were devout people with learned and creative views on religion without having been ordained. E.g. Karl Homann is a first-rate theologian but not a priest. Robert Aumann is a first-rate Talmud scholar but not a rabbi. If the bar for “clergy” were parallel to that for “artist” these fellows would certainly make it.

Who else comes to mind?  The School of Salamanca, and going back many medieval theologians wrote on economic issues.  Paul Heyne.  Heinrich Pesch.  Galiani was an Abbey.  Philip Wicksteed was a Unitarian theologian.  The still underrated Richard Whately was the Archbishop of Dublin.  Bishop George Berkeley wrote on monetary theory, as did Reverend Jonathan Swift.

The 18th century clergyman John Witherspoon wrote on monetary economics.  Thomas Chalmers, who wrote on the Poor Laws and theories of underconsumption in the early 19th century, was ordained in the Church of Scotland.

Did all these 19th century figures really want to be economists, really want to be clergy, or both?

I thank Maria Pia Paganelli for a useful discussion of this point.